It will be interesting to me how they imagine and portray the scope of the Ringworld. All the great science-fiction that inspired me let me "see" things I'd never seen before. To see thousand-mile high walls, oceans the size of planets and the curve of the Ringworld in the sky would have to be mesmerizing.
There are many problems with this policy, not the least of which is the good ole' "doesn't fix the perceived problem".
This policy does however, provide an excellent solution to the problem of "politicians in charge need to appear to act decisive to gain re-election". Particularly when the government is running breathtaking budget deficits -- whats a few more billion to implement this?
An all-you-can-eat subscription plan for $10/month is perfect for the mass-marketed bland tripe that passes for most major record label product. Only music meant to be listened to a few times and then discarded by kids with unsophisticated tastes would be a rental bargain. The music you want to keep for a lifetime gets bought.
I purchase a lot of ITMS music tracks, and yes I play them on my iPod. But I also play them on my Squeezebox, my linux PCs, my PowerBook and my Empeg car stereo by immediately burning CDs after purchase, re-encoding to MP3 and filing the CD-R for my permanent library. Rentals don't fit into that picture at all.
It;s "internet" (little 'i') not "Internet" (big 'i'), and an internet is the conglomerate of two or more networks, so it wouldn't apply unless there were two guys with this rig floating in the same crowd.
I can see several exciting uses for this:
1. Spread a half-dozen of these floating rigs through a mass-demonstation/concert/march/fair, and let people find each other. 2. Same idea, but walk around a college campus and propagate a proximity-based contest, political viewpoint or research project (statistics based on respondents.) 3. Spider 100 major websites and then re-propagate the content to others, on subway and commuter trains. 4. How small can you make these things? Can you shrink wifi access point and itsy-bitsy webserver, antenna and power supply into something the size of a cigarette box? Take several hundred of these and drop over a moderately large area for propaganda, marketing or just to see what happens.
It would be better not to participate then to purposely corrupt the data stream. The potential is for these loyalty card programs to have a real effect on what is offered to you, and what information is sold to others about you. If I have to be in a database, I would rather the information was accurate so the machine logic doesn't draw incorrect inferences and cause me further problems.
The sales blurb for the "Michaels MX8" says "Now with 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 Surround sound at 180dB!"
The circa 1950's Chrysler civil defense siren, the world's loudest, peaks at 138dB. It can be heard piercingly at five miles distance. 180dB would be on the order of a small earthquake.
You will never make a computer easy enough for them to use. Never.
This should be the goal though. A computer is a tool to be used. If something isn't so intuitive that the user can't figure it out almost immediately then the programmers haven't done a good enough job.
I've worked with my brother as well as other family members over the course of my managed services business, and the most important thing I found was to make clear who was the boss and who had the final word on important decisions. I love my brother but we almost came to blows over some strategy and purchasing decisions. Being family, those kind of problems inevitably spill over when you go home. Once we worked out authority issues things got much easier.
According to the Tri-City Hearld article, the original seller asked for $300K in 1999, and it is unspecified how much Mr. Hotchkiss actually paid. Depending on how much money he pumped into the site, other tan the incredible luck of obtaining the site in the first place, it might not have taken much money to purchase it. Whether he can get $3.5M for it now is an unanswered question.
I like to remember that astrophysics is almost entirely *not* random (Heisenberg, et.al., aside.) Those rocks out there are moving in predictable orbits and the problem is not probability but our lack of a complete database. Ergo, chances of getting hit by an asteroid go something like this:
Year 1 - 0.0000001% Year 2 - 0.0000001%... Year 2346 - 100.00% Cockroach Year 1 - 0.0000001% Cockroach Year 2 - 0.0000002%...
I don't know the details of this $30K car purchase, but based on the information provided by the poster, that kind of ripoff to the end-buyer is self-correcting. Once the news gets out that this used car dealer will sell a stolen car and leave you hanging in the wind, no reasonable person will buy another car from them without a written guarantee that the dealer will be responsible for replacing cars found to be stolen after the sale. It's not really fair to the dealer, of course, but they also have a lot to lose with car purchasers having faith/trust in buying from them. Just like the EB store, buyers have to trust what they are getting or the business' sales suffer.
Without passing judgement on the wisdom of the plan, I believe the idea is to develop a rocket that can be easily manufactured and deployed by any nation. A nation just needs to spend the money and use a common design available to all; the manufactured product would incorporate all the launching and guidance coordination technology. The problem of course, is the tradgedy of the commons -- who would build this even if they have "spare" money available, if they believe the other nations will cover the need.
On the plus side, with so many independent modules, you aren;t placing all your eggs in one basket by worrying whether the one, real expensive solution will work. If some of the MADMEN modules fail, there are many more available to take up the slack.
Don't forget about children. I would lose a king's ransom in DVD retail costs if I had to replace every DVD my children have scratched, jammed, sat on, fed to the dog and shoved between the couch cushions. For my uses, DVD X Copy and its ilk have been lifesavers. Yes, there are free versions available all over the Web. But I don't have loose time to deal with all that; I just want to put the disk in, click copy, and hand it over to the kids when necessary.
According to money.cnn.com, Apple's market cap is about $8.6 billion. With (now) no debt, $4.8 billion in the bank and a relatively thriving and growing niche (plus the music distribution), doesn't this make them an even more attractive takeover target, with their bank account paying for much of the cost of acquisition?
Wouldn't it be smart to build a underwater seabase to test the concepts of a moon/mars base? While there are some differences -- radiation hazard vs pressure hazard, for instance -- at least a sea base is close enough to resupply and build on without having to overcome a gravity well. And we certainly know less about the sea then we should.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to expect the manufacturers, particularly the just-im-time ones like Dell, to ship a machine already patched and with the firewall enabled. They slap a disk image on the drive already preconfigured with their junk anyway. Can't they update the disk image more than once a year?
I'm with this guy -- I use Sterilite bins for all my cables, the multi-drawer units for organizing parts by class, and I use metal door shelf cabinets for holding hard drives, peripherals, etc. (anything that cost a bundle to buy.)
I go one better on the cables though -- every cable (if large/long) or all of a type, like 50 pin micro SCSI cables, go into 1 gallon ziplock bags. Then they go into the Sterilte bins. This way they don't tangle, it's easy to see which cables are in each bag, and I can either dig through the pile or dump the lot out when I'm looking for a particular cable, and they never get tangled. It also insulates them from moisture, etc.
I believe in the rule the less you know - the more you should pay (for better tools). Unskilled home PC users can't really afford to cheap out. So I insist the people I "service" have these tools bought and/or downloaded and available nearby on CD:
(Antivirus) McAfee VirusScan or AVG.
(Backup) Dantz Retrospect Express.
(Disk Recovery Tools) Norton Utilities, Norton Ghost, PowerQuest Partition Magic and Drive Image, etc.
(Office Suite) OpenOffice.
(Music) Winamp
(Browser/Mail) IE and OE latest version. It's too practical a decision, regardless of politics.
(CD Burning) Ahead Nero.
(Utilities) A CD containing the most recent versions of
a. QuickTime
b. RealPlayer
c. Windows XP, IE6, Service Packs.
d. Spybot/AdAware
e. WinZIP trial
f. PuTTY
g. VNC and/or Remote Desktop Client.
h. Adobe Acrobat Reader.
i. AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.
j. DiVX codec.
k. Motherboard Monitor 5
l. WCPUID
m. Java Runtime Environment.
n. MS DirectX 9
o. MS PowerToys incl TweakUI.
p. Palm Desktop Software.
q. TimeRC.
r. SereneScene Acquarium screen saverdemo.
s. Google Toolbar 2.0
t. Weatherbug
u. WS_FTP lite.
v. Macromedia Shockwave Flash.
w. latest verion of PGP.
x. Zone Alarm firewall.
y. Entech Powerstrip.
z. Alcohol 120% to mount virtual CDs.
and another CD with all the current video, audio, LAN, BIOS, printer, modem and wireless drivers, Microsoft and OEM patches and DVD video player software appropriate to the machine. I also provide a Ghost image of the fully configured, pristine machine and I make them run through a backup.
If there's room I'll throw some free games and demoes in as well.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be interesting to me how they imagine and portray the scope of the Ringworld. All the great science-fiction that inspired me let me "see" things I'd never seen before. To see thousand-mile high walls, oceans the size of planets and the curve of the Ringworld in the sky would have to be mesmerizing.
There are many problems with this policy, not the least of which is the good ole' "doesn't fix the perceived problem".
This policy does however, provide an excellent solution to the problem of "politicians in charge need to appear to act decisive to gain re-election". Particularly when the government is running breathtaking budget deficits -- whats a few more billion to implement this?
An all-you-can-eat subscription plan for $10/month is perfect for the mass-marketed bland tripe that passes for most major record label product. Only music meant to be listened to a few times and then discarded by kids with unsophisticated tastes would be a rental bargain. The music you want to keep for a lifetime gets bought.
I purchase a lot of ITMS music tracks, and yes I play them on my iPod. But I also play them on my Squeezebox, my linux PCs, my PowerBook and my Empeg car stereo by immediately burning CDs after purchase, re-encoding to MP3 and filing the CD-R for my permanent library. Rentals don't fit into that picture at all.
You have to believe they are going home well satisfied at the end of the day, if they view their primary job as protecting Microsoft.
It;s "internet" (little 'i') not "Internet" (big 'i'), and an internet is the conglomerate of two or more networks, so it wouldn't apply unless there were two guys with this rig floating in the same crowd.
I can see several exciting uses for this:
1. Spread a half-dozen of these floating rigs through a mass-demonstation/concert/march/fair, and let people find each other.
2. Same idea, but walk around a college campus and propagate a proximity-based contest, political viewpoint or research project (statistics based on respondents.)
3. Spider 100 major websites and then re-propagate the content to others, on subway and commuter trains.
4. How small can you make these things? Can you shrink wifi access point and itsy-bitsy webserver, antenna and power supply into something the size of a cigarette box? Take several hundred of these and drop over a moderately large area for propaganda, marketing or just to see what happens.
It would be better not to participate then to purposely corrupt the data stream. The potential is for these loyalty card programs to have a real effect on what is offered to you, and what information is sold to others about you. If I have to be in a database, I would rather the information was accurate so the machine logic doesn't draw incorrect inferences and cause me further problems.
The sales blurb for the "Michaels MX8" says "Now with 5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 Surround sound at 180dB!"
The circa 1950's Chrysler civil defense siren , the world's loudest, peaks at 138dB. It can be heard piercingly at five miles distance. 180dB would be on the order of a small earthquake.
This should be the goal though. A computer is a tool to be used. If something isn't so intuitive that the user can't figure it out almost immediately then the programmers haven't done a good enough job.
I've worked with my brother as well as other family members over the course of my managed services
business, and the most important thing I found was to make clear who was the boss and who had the final
word on important decisions. I love my brother but we almost came to blows over some strategy and
purchasing decisions. Being family, those kind of problems inevitably spill over when you go home.
Once we worked out authority issues things got much easier.
According to the Tri-City Hearld article, the
original seller asked for $300K in 1999, and it
is unspecified how much Mr. Hotchkiss actually
paid. Depending on how much money he pumped into
the site, other tan the incredible luck of
obtaining the site in the first place, it
might not have taken much money to purchase it.
Whether he can get $3.5M for it now is an unanswered
question.
I like to remember that astrophysics is almost
... ...
entirely *not* random (Heisenberg, et.al.,
aside.) Those rocks out there are moving in
predictable orbits and the problem is not
probability but our lack of a complete database.
Ergo, chances of getting hit by an asteroid go
something like this:
Year 1 - 0.0000001%
Year 2 - 0.0000001%
Year 2346 - 100.00%
Cockroach Year 1 - 0.0000001%
Cockroach Year 2 - 0.0000002%
I don't know the details of this $30K car purchase, but based on the information provided by the poster, that kind of ripoff to the end-buyer is self-correcting. Once the news gets out that this used car dealer will sell a stolen car and leave you hanging in the wind, no reasonable person will buy another car from them without a written guarantee that the dealer will be responsible for replacing cars found to be stolen after the sale. It's not really fair to the dealer, of course, but they also have a lot to lose with car purchasers having faith/trust in buying from them. Just like the EB store, buyers have to trust what they are getting or the business' sales suffer.
Since they don't perform any experiments (too busy maintaining the station) they probably didn't notice it missing.
Well, clearly not faster than c, close to the speed of light.
Ask this question in several weeks, when SCO *still* hasn't filed their (now 20) lawsuits...
And by extension to really stop the problem the anti-virus software should run at the source PC...
Oh wait.
Without passing judgement on the wisdom of the plan, I believe the idea is to develop a rocket that can be easily manufactured and deployed by any nation. A nation just needs to spend the money and use a common design available to all; the manufactured product would incorporate all the launching and guidance coordination technology. The problem of course, is the tradgedy of the commons -- who would build this even if they have "spare" money available, if they believe the other nations will cover the need.
On the plus side, with so many independent modules, you aren;t placing all your eggs in one basket by worrying whether the one, real expensive solution will work. If some of the MADMEN modules fail, there are many more available to take up the slack.
Don't forget about children. I would lose a king's ransom in DVD retail costs if I had to replace every DVD my children have scratched, jammed, sat on, fed to the dog and shoved between the couch cushions. For my uses, DVD X Copy and its ilk have been lifesavers. Yes, there are free versions available all over the Web. But I don't have loose time to deal with all that; I just want to put the disk in, click copy, and hand it over to the kids when necessary.
According to money.cnn.com, Apple's market cap is about $8.6 billion. With (now) no debt, $4.8 billion in the bank and a relatively thriving and growing niche (plus the music distribution), doesn't this make them an even more attractive takeover target, with their bank account paying for much of the cost of acquisition?
Wouldn't it be smart to build a underwater seabase to test the concepts of a moon/mars base? While there are some differences -- radiation hazard vs pressure hazard, for instance -- at least a sea base is close enough to resupply and build on without having to overcome a gravity well. And we certainly know less about the sea then we should.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to expect the manufacturers, particularly the just-im-time ones like Dell, to ship a machine already patched and with the firewall enabled. They slap a disk image on the drive already preconfigured with their junk anyway. Can't they update the disk image more than once a year?
There are millions of lines. 65 header files times the number of people using linux kernels. Should be in the billions soon. 8-)
I'm with this guy -- I use Sterilite bins for all my cables, the multi-drawer units for organizing parts by class, and I use metal door shelf cabinets for holding hard drives, peripherals, etc. (anything that cost a bundle to buy.)
I go one better on the cables though -- every cable (if large/long) or all of a type, like 50 pin micro SCSI cables, go into 1 gallon ziplock bags. Then they go into the Sterilte bins. This way they don't tangle, it's easy to see which cables are in each bag, and I can either dig through the pile or dump the lot out when I'm looking for a particular cable, and they never get tangled. It also insulates them from moisture, etc.
iTunes for Windows *does* have a compact mode. Try the middle icon in the menu bar.
I believe in the rule the less you know - the more you should pay (for better tools). Unskilled home PC users can't really afford to cheap out. So I insist the people I "service" have these tools bought and/or downloaded and available nearby on CD:
and another CD with all the current video, audio, LAN, BIOS, printer, modem and wireless drivers, Microsoft and OEM patches and DVD video player software appropriate to the machine. I also provide a Ghost image of the fully configured, pristine machine and I make them run through a backup.
If there's room I'll throw some free games and demoes in as well.