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For all the tooting of their own horn about how incredibly powerful and robust their backend services are, do you really want to work with a company half of whose pages can't even load because their server can't handle the traffic? These are the LAST guys I would go to for a publishing gig. As for providing a community system, why not use Zope - a system that has been pretty thoroughly embraced by the community?
The S80 has some pretty phat specs. According to the Official Homepage it's got 53 PCI slots (yipes!), 48 drive bays, and can fit up to 64Gb of memory. Cost for the "base configuration?" (That's 9.1Gb HDD, 6 450Mhz RS64 III's, and 2Gb of memory) $294,096.00. Whew. Hate to think what the pimped out version costs...
How do you wire this puppy to the Net? There are very cheap USB Ethernet interfaces. Here's one at Buy.com. $36 to hook this baby up to the Net is not too bad methinks. =)
HELL-OOO portable server! =) Just plug 'er into the wall and the 'Net and you're good to go. If something goes wrong, plug it into the TV and pop the keyboard on. (Wiggling with excitement) AWESOME!
Funny, Yahoo is happy to make an entry for and index the homepage of anyone who asks. So is the Open Directory Project. Google, Altavista, Excite, and HotBot are all also happy to index my page and list it in their search results. It's not egotistical: I expect my homepage to be treated no more specially than anyone else's homepage of the same size/traffic level. Failing to even acknowledge my requests is bad customer service. Even a short form letter saying "I'm sorry, but we cannot service requests to index individual homepages" would have at least let me know that all mails to their customer center aren't being redirected to/dev/null. Ignoring email is unprofessional.
As for my (admittedly generalist) claims about their customer service, if repeated emails don't even get a cursory acknowledgement (I asked them in the last one to please at least acknowledge that someone had actually read the email), how can you claim to have anything resembling decent customer support? Amazon, Yahoo, and most all of the other successful sites have cheerful and intelligent people on the other end of the line. My experience to date says that this is something that Ask Jeeves lacks...I'm guessing from the quality of their search results that others have run into similar problems getting questions pertaining to them properly answered.
Your mileage may vary; alternate opinions / experiences accepted.
It's true: it almost never finds what I really want. I use Encylopaedia Britannica Online (search.eb.com and britannica.com) and Google to find just about anything I want. As a simple example, asking "Who Is David Weekly?" I'm referred to the Amy Chow Fan Page, the resume of a certain David Bosley, The Greatful Dead Hour, and American folklore, among other things. I've asked them repeatedly to answer this question with my home page, but they seem to believe that Amy Chow's Fan page is more likely what people were looking for. They haven't responded to any of the three politely worded emails I sent to them.
It's not so much that I'm whining about them not specifically indexing my homepage as that it is that I feel that the attitude (and relevance) of my treatment is endemic to how they treat everyone. Namely, that they give ridiculously erroneous answers and seem to have no interest in changing that.
Remember last week's post on IEEE 802.11 antennas to give you AirPort access from miles away? =) Hello, beach! =) You could literally live on the beach while working. Gives a whole new sense to telecommuting. (Ooh, and add a waterproof casing and you could be telecommuting *underwater*!)
Vertical Horizons has the only portable MP3-CD player on the market for ~$120. (Pine has announced one for a while, but as far as I know it is only vaporware). You can read more about the player on their site. MP3.com also did a review of the player, at CES 2000 -- I cite the relevant section below.
New Horizon
One of the most anticipated products in the MP3.com Editorial camp went from vapor to reality as it made its debut at CES 2000.
Garden Grove, Calif.-based hardware outfit Vertical Horizon finally put the CD in portable MP3 audio with a line of portable MP3 CD players.
The two models displayed at CES play MP3 CDs and standard red book audio discs, and both are about the size of standard portable CD players.
Of course, thanks to MP3 compression technology, these players can play discs that contain more than 10 hours of music, rather than the 70-minute standard audio CD.
The larger of the two models includes a port for SmartMedia cards, giving it added value for those who utilize other non-CD portable MP3 players like the Rio and Nomad.
Sound quality on both players was excellent, and both incorporate all of the standard CD player features, including EQ and multiple playback options. Each has an LCD screen displaying track numbers, times and mode icons. There's no ID3 tag display yet, but the Vertical Horizon staff assured us that it will be incorporated soon.
Each unit also includes 20 seconds of digital anti-shock protection to prevent CD skipping, and an infrared port for the possible future addition of a wireless remote control.
The real music to our ears was the pricing on these units, with the CD-only device expected to retail at around $120 U.S. and the SmartMedia-enabled device priced at about $150 U.S., not much more than many standard CD players on the market today.
Vertical Horizon expects to have the units in full production in the first half of this year. To keep up on this hot new product, visit VH's web site at http://www.evhi.com.
Radio broadcasters have been very lucky folks for a long time now: they managed to avoid a recording royalty in public performance for the last 50-odd years, which is somewhat mind-boggling, when you consider that an artist who performs a song that they did not compose does not get a blessed penny no matter how popular her song is on the radio. Only composers get compensated for public performance.
Then this odd thing happened with the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) -- for the first time ever, a public performance right in audio recordings (versus just the composition) was granted to record labels for webcasts. A number of members of NAB were, IMHO, quite happy, because this is going to make it considerably more difficult for webcasters to survive. (The royalty rate has yet to be decided, but last I checked, the RIAA proposed a figure of 45% of gross sales as the appropriate figure to be paid.)
It wasn't until they realized that this would really affect them too that they got up in arms. So now we have the bizarre case of them trying to claim exemption from any Internet stream that is also broadcasted over the air: punish them, not us! All of the sudden they want to be special, without realizing that they've stumbled headlong into the RIAA's trap to reclaim those royalties they've been lusting after (perhaps with good cause) for the last five-odd decades.
Of course this brings up some interesting issues is the exception is accepted: what if I'm broadcasting music over cellular? Does that count? What if I'm using a satellite downlink? If my customers are using micro-FM broadcasting units? Methinks the law is going to get particularly hairy with regards to these technologies (a general truism, perhaps!).
Now, the way gravity works (in graviton language) is that gravitons can be emitted or absorbed by anything with a nonvanishing stress tensor. (The bigger the stress tensor, the more easily this happens) So say two massive objects are moving along; Alice (having a nonzero stress) emits a graviton, and recoils by conservation of momentum. Bob (also having a nonzero stress) absorbs this graviton, and also recoils. So effectively both Alice and Bob have changed their momentum, i.e. exerted a force on one another.
I'm hoping that someone can clarify this for me: I'm certainly not a Physics major, but if two particles come near each other and recoil from each other as a result of a graviton exchange, wouldn't that be a bit backwards from what actually happens? Namely, gravity is attractive (I think we all can agree on that!) and so it would seem that the absorption of a graviton would cause a particle to accelerate towards whence the graviton came.
Now, in my silly little physics-naive head, the only way to make this work with Conservation of Momentum would be to postulate that gravitons have negative mass. Is this so? Just curious. Last I heard the existance of the graviton proper hadn't yet been affirmed by observation and in fact this whole bit about integrating quantum mechanics and gravity was still causing some fair number of very intelligent people to bang their head against very solid objects.
I'd appreciate it if someone could screw my head on straight with regards to this: how does a graviton work? Might gravity actually not exhibit wave/particle duality? Please shake a clue stick in my direction.
The lucky guy who you see flying it was actually an American intern at the company; his whole job for a summer was to learn how to fly the thing and to demo it. Damned if that wouldn't be a great job experience! He has a bunch more pictures of the device on his website. Fun!
A very simple question: when and where can I get this hard drive? IBM has actually been announcing its existance for some time now, but you'll notice that neither IBM nor its associates are actually selling the thing. Apparently, making interesting press releases about not-yet-released products is good enough to get us excited. (Which is true; I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.)
All the same, it would be nice if they actually said when and where we could buy these and how much they will cost. I mean, if it's going to be $1000 for a 75Gb HDD, and they're going to be on sale in Korea in five months, then it's not such an exciting announcment, neh? On the other hand if they're on sale later today at Fry's, Egghead, and Buy.com for $150 each, this is one of the most kickass revolutions in storage history. I'm guessing that the truth is somewhere inbetween those two extremes; I'd just like to know where.
I just talked on the phone with those guys. WHOA are they weird. Apparently it has parrafin (candle wax) and silver alkane in it, which is easily damaged by heat. Their experiments with putting the chip into desktops haven't done well since the chip gets damaged when the ambient temperature tops 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Perhaps it might be happier with a Transmeta chip? Tests of "small" 8Gb versions with low-temperature laptops have apparently been successful...but MAN they claim that their underlying technology comes from 1940's documents supplied to them by the Government, who likely (their words, not mine) got it from aliens.
How many serious companies do you know claim that their base technologies came from aliens?
They also claim that the fabrication plants are refusing to manufacture their chips or couch for their technology because it would make their other clients obsolete! Smells a bit fishy to me, really...
I've often considered that it would be really nifty for the people with large (partially empty) hard drives and fast network connections to band together to create a community version of "@Backup" -- for every two bytes that you're willing to store on the network, you get to store one byte of yours in two places. Your data is encrypted and sent to two locations known to have a reasonable uptime. Other locations store their encrypted data on your drive in exchange. If at any point one of the two servers you put your data on goes down, you make another copy of those bytes to another machine.
There are, of course, a number of issues that would need to be worked out. A lot of people might try and cheat the system, for instance, so we'd have to figure out a way to implement some sort of trust/verification network. But all-in-all I think that this would make for a fabulously useful product for all of mankind. Most people end up losing their data because frankly off-site backups are quite difficult and/or expensive. We should make the process easy for folks.
There might exist the possibility of combining this technology with a project like Freenet...distributed storage and distributed serving of information aren't that far off from each other in the grand scheme of things...
Of course, you do know that they have the right to note that you've requested your FBI file. My guess is that there's at least a mild correlation between people who request their FBI files and people who are wondering if they're being noticed for doing something that is illegal (i.e., they're wondering if they've gotten away with something). Because of this statistical note, asking for your FBI file might end up becoming a hasty way to get yourself more noticed. If I were working for the FBI, I'd certainly look to check a little more closely into those who actually bother writing the agency, getting a notarized signature, etc. (i.e., it's difficult enough that a person probably wouldn't do it without a reason.)
This is unless, of course, everyone on slashdot requests their FBI file, in which case you throw their data way off. But just to warn you.
When the RIAA took Diamond to task in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the resulting decision stated that consumers have a right to space-shift, in a similar way to the decision in the mid-70's (w/r/t VCRs being able to tape TV shows) that consumers have a right to time-shift their content. That is to say, consumers can make copies for their own personal use (giving it to 40,000 friends on your website doesn't count: I know, I did it 3 years ago and was shut down) and even modify the content (i.e., encode it into MP3!) -- it even looks like it's kosher to have others store this copy for you (i.e., myplay.com)...but this one hasn't been haggled out in court yet.
So the short of it is yes, you're allowed to make tape copies, CD-R burns, MP3 uploads into private lockers, copies from your CD to your hard drive, etc. -- just make sure that it doesn't get passed around too much. (Too much being defined as more than ~$1000 worth of goods in a year as per the Net Copy Act.)
Most relevantly, the RIAA has made public statements that they are not going to after individual consumers who copy their own music for personal use. So regardless of what you think about its actual legality, you will not get in trouble for it.
IANAL, but I have been in this industry for 3 years.
BTW, my "vanity website" exists for the purpose of A) having a permanent home on the web and B) disseminating information. I think everyone has got something interesting to share; not just me. I regularly encourage my friends to make their own websites with their own unique contributions.
I'm not a hacker hotshot, either. Do I not state explicitly that others have done a better job?Neither did I claim myself as such a hotshot. Where do you get this from? Or did you already make up your mind about me without even considering who I really am?
Finally, I'm not running from anyone. The very first thing that I did when I completed the analysis was to notify Napster. My actions are here for all to see, judge them as you may.
I don't think that you realize that you're talking about a person, namely me. You could talk to me and become my friend, or you could blithely post personal attacks anonymously on slashdot. I'm not some illegal computer hacker. I'm friends with the guy who shut down my Stanford MP3 site in 1997 and now regularly engage him in conversation about new media. I'm amused by the media more than thirsting for their attention; I never sent out this information to the media, but I was genuinely concerned that there would be an effort to make this sort of thing illegal. (I still have that concern!) Is this not fair?
Why do you attack me? Why do you show hate? When I do something simple, I call it for what it is. If I am distressed, I call for help. If I am confused, I discuss something. What in those clauses makes me the evil person you describe me to be? Call me.
Agreed, the above linked documentation is better than mine. I say so at the top of my page in no uncertain terms. =) Mine's a pretty sloppy 4-hour hack job, never touted to be anything different. Why the fuss about mine? Beats the hell outta me.
I explain MP3 to people. The media, friends, etc. No, I don't represent MPEG, but I just thought it would be a cute tag-on to let people know (it's one of my hobbies; I'm actually writing a book about MP3s now!)...and I mean "hacker" in the "works with computers" sense more than 1 4m 4 w4r3z d00D!"
Yes, the protocol is already very well documented by other people. No, this is not a publicity stunt of mine. Yes, my documentation is pretty poor. No, it's not very revolutionary. It's me learning how to reverse-engineer a network application. Please don't get pissed off at me; I'm not really trying to prove much of anything with this release other than I have the very beginnings of how the protocol works.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the anti-proton (having a charge of -1) and the proton (having a charge of +1) would be violently attracted to each other, smash into each other and explode. No? While electrons do have opposite charge from protons and yet manage to orbit a proton without running into it, I thought this had more to do with strong & weak force interactions and was possible because of the electron's relatively light mass.
Then again, if you can show me a reference, I'll take all of this back.
At the Harvard Physics Labs (some 4 years ago now), my job was to write code that would simulate the synthesis of AntiHydrogen in an Open Ended Penning Trap. The trap itself was not very big; about 4 inches tall and a quarter's diameter. The only catch was that the containing magnetic field was required to be so strong (over 5 Tesla, if I remember correctly) that a 2-story Dewar containing an enormous superconducting coil was required to produce the field. (We had fun with screwdrivers that would tug at you and jump out of your hand!)
What amused me about a superconducting magnetic coil was that it didn't require much extra energy to maintain the magnetic field, only to set it up. Theoretically, were a room-temperature superconducting material discovered, you could put the trap in your pocket...wiping every credit card in your presence, making weird patterns on nearby screens, and giving your future children third arms (not really). =)
Quantity is also an issue. In order to be useable and trappable, you need "cold" antimatter (i.e., not moving at 99% of the speed of light!); LEAR used to be the #1 place for this sort of thing, but CERN closed LEAR down, so now we're just left with Fermilab, which apparently isn't very good at generating cold antimatter in quantity (that's just on hearsay). There's speculation of a new, better facility in the works...?
But yes, just to bring things back to reality, my simulations on the computer dealt with a single antiproton being eased through clouds of positrons (anti-electrons) in the hope that some of the positrons would catch onto the antiproton to form AntiHydrogen. I'm not sure that in the 4 years since then they've even managed to get a single confirmed COLD (trapped) atom of AntiHydrogen. I remember that one of the funnier and more intriguing questions was "Which way will it fall under gravity?" (the strong presumtion is DOWN, but nobody knows for sure!).
It's going to be a long time before we have to worry about anti-matter bombs, especially small, portable, undetectable ones. (6 Tesla magnetic fields and the devices that make them are pretty hard to sneak around in a subtle fashion!)
Slashdot Mirror
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
HELL-OOO portable server! =) Just plug 'er into the wall and the 'Net and you're good to go. If something goes wrong, plug it into the TV and pop the keyboard on. (Wiggling with excitement) AWESOME!
David E. Weekly
As for my (admittedly generalist) claims about their customer service, if repeated emails don't even get a cursory acknowledgement (I asked them in the last one to please at least acknowledge that someone had actually read the email), how can you claim to have anything resembling decent customer support? Amazon, Yahoo, and most all of the other successful sites have cheerful and intelligent people on the other end of the line. My experience to date says that this is something that Ask Jeeves lacks...I'm guessing from the quality of their search results that others have run into similar problems getting questions pertaining to them properly answered.
Your mileage may vary; alternate opinions / experiences accepted.
David E. Weekly
It's not so much that I'm whining about them not specifically indexing my homepage as that it is that I feel that the attitude (and relevance) of my treatment is endemic to how they treat everyone. Namely, that they give ridiculously erroneous answers and seem to have no interest in changing that.
Bloody hell, Jeeves. You're fired.
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
Then this odd thing happened with the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) -- for the first time ever, a public performance right in audio recordings (versus just the composition) was granted to record labels for webcasts. A number of members of NAB were, IMHO, quite happy, because this is going to make it considerably more difficult for webcasters to survive. (The royalty rate has yet to be decided, but last I checked, the RIAA proposed a figure of 45% of gross sales as the appropriate figure to be paid.)
It wasn't until they realized that this would really affect them too that they got up in arms. So now we have the bizarre case of them trying to claim exemption from any Internet stream that is also broadcasted over the air: punish them, not us! All of the sudden they want to be special, without realizing that they've stumbled headlong into the RIAA's trap to reclaim those royalties they've been lusting after (perhaps with good cause) for the last five-odd decades.
Of course this brings up some interesting issues is the exception is accepted: what if I'm broadcasting music over cellular? Does that count? What if I'm using a satellite downlink? If my customers are using micro-FM broadcasting units? Methinks the law is going to get particularly hairy with regards to these technologies (a general truism, perhaps!).
David E. Weekly
I'm hoping that someone can clarify this for me: I'm certainly not a Physics major, but if two particles come near each other and recoil from each other as a result of a graviton exchange, wouldn't that be a bit backwards from what actually happens? Namely, gravity is attractive (I think we all can agree on that!) and so it would seem that the absorption of a graviton would cause a particle to accelerate towards whence the graviton came.
Now, in my silly little physics-naive head, the only way to make this work with Conservation of Momentum would be to postulate that gravitons have negative mass. Is this so? Just curious. Last I heard the existance of the graviton proper hadn't yet been affirmed by observation and in fact this whole bit about integrating quantum mechanics and gravity was still causing some fair number of very intelligent people to bang their head against very solid objects.
I'd appreciate it if someone could screw my head on straight with regards to this: how does a graviton work? Might gravity actually not exhibit wave/particle duality? Please shake a clue stick in my direction.
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
All the same, it would be nice if they actually said when and where we could buy these and how much they will cost. I mean, if it's going to be $1000 for a 75Gb HDD, and they're going to be on sale in Korea in five months, then it's not such an exciting announcment, neh? On the other hand if they're on sale later today at Fry's, Egghead, and Buy.com for $150 each, this is one of the most kickass revolutions in storage history. I'm guessing that the truth is somewhere inbetween those two extremes; I'd just like to know where.
David E. Weekly
How many serious companies do you know claim that their base technologies came from aliens?
They also claim that the fabrication plants are refusing to manufacture their chips or couch for their technology because it would make their other clients obsolete! Smells a bit fishy to me, really...
David E. Weekly
There are, of course, a number of issues that would need to be worked out. A lot of people might try and cheat the system, for instance, so we'd have to figure out a way to implement some sort of trust/verification network. But all-in-all I think that this would make for a fabulously useful product for all of mankind. Most people end up losing their data because frankly off-site backups are quite difficult and/or expensive. We should make the process easy for folks.
There might exist the possibility of combining this technology with a project like Freenet...distributed storage and distributed serving of information aren't that far off from each other in the grand scheme of things...
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
This is unless, of course, everyone on slashdot requests their FBI file, in which case you throw their data way off. But just to warn you.
David E. Weekly
So the short of it is yes, you're allowed to make tape copies, CD-R burns, MP3 uploads into private lockers, copies from your CD to your hard drive, etc. -- just make sure that it doesn't get passed around too much. (Too much being defined as more than ~$1000 worth of goods in a year as per the Net Copy Act.)
Most relevantly, the RIAA has made public statements that they are not going to after individual consumers who copy their own music for personal use. So regardless of what you think about its actual legality, you will not get in trouble for it.
IANAL, but I have been in this industry for 3 years.
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
I'm not a hacker hotshot, either. Do I not state explicitly that others have done a better job?Neither did I claim myself as such a hotshot. Where do you get this from? Or did you already make up your mind about me without even considering who I really am?
Finally, I'm not running from anyone. The very first thing that I did when I completed the analysis was to notify Napster. My actions are here for all to see, judge them as you may.
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
Why do you attack me? Why do you show hate? When I do something simple, I call it for what it is. If I am distressed, I call for help. If I am confused, I discuss something. What in those clauses makes me the evil person you describe me to be? Call me.
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
Yes, the protocol is already very well documented by other people. No, this is not a publicity stunt of mine. Yes, my documentation is pretty poor. No, it's not very revolutionary. It's me learning how to reverse-engineer a network application. Please don't get pissed off at me; I'm not really trying to prove much of anything with this release other than I have the very beginnings of how the protocol works.
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
Then again, if you can show me a reference, I'll take all of this back.
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
What amused me about a superconducting magnetic coil was that it didn't require much extra energy to maintain the magnetic field, only to set it up. Theoretically, were a room-temperature superconducting material discovered, you could put the trap in your pocket...wiping every credit card in your presence, making weird patterns on nearby screens, and giving your future children third arms (not really). =)
Quantity is also an issue. In order to be useable and trappable, you need "cold" antimatter (i.e., not moving at 99% of the speed of light!); LEAR used to be the #1 place for this sort of thing, but CERN closed LEAR down, so now we're just left with Fermilab, which apparently isn't very good at generating cold antimatter in quantity (that's just on hearsay). There's speculation of a new, better facility in the works...?
But yes, just to bring things back to reality, my simulations on the computer dealt with a single antiproton being eased through clouds of positrons (anti-electrons) in the hope that some of the positrons would catch onto the antiproton to form AntiHydrogen. I'm not sure that in the 4 years since then they've even managed to get a single confirmed COLD (trapped) atom of AntiHydrogen. I remember that one of the funnier and more intriguing questions was "Which way will it fall under gravity?" (the strong presumtion is DOWN, but nobody knows for sure!).
It's going to be a long time before we have to worry about anti-matter bombs, especially small, portable, undetectable ones. (6 Tesla magnetic fields and the devices that make them are pretty hard to sneak around in a subtle fashion!)
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)