These loons can make nutty policy like this because they'll never be in a position to implement it anyhow. They get to rant a lot, saps like us give them media exposure, and their deluded constituency get to feel good about it.
The last batch of net censorship only went in because the dude pushing itt had a deciding vote on privatising our telco, by the time it was "applied", it was completely watered down and ineffective.
You could look at doing something like affiliating with a local club or university union, and being covered by their insurance. Our Amiga user group ran from a local trades club and the $5 memebrship fee was well worth it for the excellent venue, and the club appreciated the extra memebrships we bought in.
I am somewhat surprised that virus writers do not use virus ecology/biology more.
In real Life, the really nasty, viruses are the ones that have a comparitively low lehatlity. This allows the infected hosts to continue spreading for a long time. And/Or the (early) symptoms are pretty mild, so hosts will often ignore them.
Hmmm... sounds like most mail relay trojans. I know a few people who *continued* to use thus infected machines, because the inconvenience of cleaning it up is more work for them than having a slower connection now and then. They did not care that they were hosting a trojan.
LiveJournal has turned out to be a really interesting online community, and it appears to have scaled up quite well too. A neighbourhood would be easy to add as an "interest".
Geocoding data is easy, searching on geocoding is also easy. Getting that integreated into tools that have been set up to do text is a bit more difficult. How do you let people freely define geometries, yet still have some way of searching and retrieving via text? C-Squares sounds cool, as it seems to give enough detail for most purposes, but as it's got a pretty distinct namespace, they use Google to do their search and retrieval: C-Squares
Get calendars in there too (as a 4th dimension) ("show me people with an interest, in a place, at a time"), and the picture gets even more crazy. "Notify me when Bon Jovi is in my city".
If this is all they do, yeah, great. But can you really see insurance companies resisting the urge progressively lower the bar and use this as an excuse to avoid paying out?
"
2005 "I'm sorry, the black box says you were doing 60 in a 55 zone"
2006 I'm sorry, the black box says you violated the TandC that said you would not drive for more than 2.5 hours without a 30 minute rest break"
2007 "I'm sorry, the black-box says you were doing 55.0001 in a 55 zone. Haha!"
Viz, "acceptable" behaviour would be socially engineered.
A relative of mine was telling me that in his industry (auto related), the nationals will open stores near independants and cheerfully run them at a loss for over 10 years to close them. We used to look to government for this kind of foreward thinking. MS is cashed up enough to cut off anyone else's oxygen.
many people that I know have avoided losing too much because their houses/dorms/rooms were such a mess. My GF had hundreds of dollars on her table left alone because the thief didn't have time to sort through underwear, clothes, CDs and other chick stuff. Leave CDs and cheap but appealling items such as Playstations, (loose) CDs and broken laptops strewn around so that a prospective thief can't just slide your consumer electronics off one shelf/desk into a bag. Decorate your laptop with stickers and/or with a designs etched with a soldering iron to diminish its resale value (hey, it's not going to be worth much in 2 years anyhow).
Xix.
Mobile phone with Bluetooth and MMC
on
Portable Storage?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Since work paid for it, it's kind of nice to have up to 512 Mb always on me and be able to speak to just about any Mac laptop you can buy. Pity my PC needs a Bluetooth dongle.
From my following of the coronial inquiry into the blast:
The contractor found that the structural columns were not as described on the blueprints, but in fact contained a lot more steel. The cuting charges required for this type of steel were not available in the country and would need to be specially imported (you can't just stick HE on a ship or airplane). Since the contractor was working to a contract that included fairly strong late penalties, he improvised something that was quite a bit faster than the proper cutting charges. Unfortunately the sandbags that were placed around the charges did not prevent large chunks of shrapnel from being launched. A young girl (12 or so) was struck by a piece and killed.
I went to watch the blast, but from a much longer distance than most other folk (and I made sure there was a large hill between me and the base of the hospital). I was surprised at how close people were, and I was also surprised that more people were not injured.
A friend of mine was fiddling behind the desk and managed to plug the printer's power supply into an AT keyboard socket (which brainiac at HP thought, "cool, let's use an AT connector for power!". Busted the IO chip clean in half and completely fscked the mobo.
Another friend of mine bolted plates over the SCSI ports of their lab Macs as people kept hot plugging parallel devices.
How is this any different from sticking your own barcodes on products? At my local store, the video screen flashes a picture of every product scanned, so that even the most bored, drug addled check-out chick will notice.
Reminds me of my plan to stick condom barcodes on boxes of oatmeal.
ArcGIS 9 can actually be called a real GIS again, 8 lacked a bunch of stuff. I'm not expecting to see a OSS contender any time soon, the pool of likely users is not comparable to something like OOffice or GIMP.
On the web-end OTOH, GIS is a commodity (i.e. WFS, WMS) and the OSS alternatives to things like ArcIMS are very capable, and in many instances much more stable/reliable.
I'm also interested to see where ArcSDE goes, it's chief advntage over things like Oracle Spatial is the tight integration with their other products.
Unlike broadcast, anyone could set up a radio on the 'net and reach all over the world. I could tune into a number of stations that played exactly the kind of music I like, and more importantly, hear music I'd not have heard otherwise. As large as my jukebox is, it's still only got music I own (or not, depending on RIAA's PoV) in it.
Nowadays, I look at play-lists from clubs and look at what's being played and try find samples of artists who get mixed in with stuff that I like. The only radio I listen to is the local community radio (when DJs I like are on). As well as play-lists, I follow links pages from the web pages of artists I do like, and now have bought more CDs online than I have from stores. The web offers many ways of letting people discover the music they like, and for musicians to find people who like their kind of music. I'd even say it's more discerning and efficient than the broadcast model. We need to make such discovery tools easier to find and use.
To use market-speak, everything between the artist and the "consumer" is an overhead and an inefficiency.
My guess is that InfoWorld is dynamically generating the RSS for each request. A simple host-side cache of the generated XML, so hits just talk to the HTTP server and not the app server, would probably make this a non-issue.
This seems to be the case. I went to a talk by James Robrtson (aka Bottomfeeder RSS client) last night and his opinion was that this was their problem, and they were not understanding the issue. Cache it as static content, use mod_gzip and let Apache handle it.
We were using the old version of GD that did GIFs, but had to re-write some stuff when they dropped it. I'm not going to bother bringing GIF support back since PNG does everything GIF that does.
Cool, everyone can watch their favourite TV show on a computer monitor via a crappy TV tuner card because chlidren/parents are using the huge plasma screen TV and surround sound system in the lounge room to play EverCrack...
As well as the physical environment, we need to consider the game designs as well. I was over at a friend's house the other week, and watching them play Harvest Moon as a group was far more entertaining than watching someone lost to EQ.
Spake Bill:
"These things can scratch or simply get lost."
Already, we don't really "own" the movies we buy. A move to purely digital distrihbution would be accompanied by a massive push towards rental/pay-per-view models. I really cannot see the studios resisting the urge, and the gleeful adoption of iTunes suggests most consmers won't care (at least until their hard drive dies). I'd also start taking a sweeps on how long before revisionist editorial policy started affecting the available catalogue ("I'm sorry, that film is not available in China, your party representative has been informed").
To counter Mr Bill's quote, if it was simple and legal to back-up the movies and music I have purchased, I wouldn't need to be losing little silver discs, or need a Kafka-esque DRM micro-policing system. Leave me the hell alone!
So this must be the promised sequel to Battle Royale. Participating children will be monitored, and must engage each other in mortal combat if they encounter each other. If they do not battle, the RFID collars will explode. The project will continue until only one child survives....
ArcGIS 8 was a ground-up re-write as COM/DCOM and is unlikely to ever run under unices. ArcINFO is more or less a "legacy" app and is bundled with ArcGIS, and it runs under just about any command line (except Linux), it is *nothing* like ArcGIS. ArcGIS 9 adds a bunch of missing capability (like a sane macro language) and goes a long way towards making it a "real" GIS, for example, the default macro language is Python, and you can script in whatever language you want, they have also fixed a bunch of other bits that have kept me from using ArcINFO (instead of ArcGIS) for serious projects (topology anyone?).
ESRI seem to be tinkering with making ArcGIS a bunch of components and also with Java, I hope that they continue with that direction and ditch COM. This is a good thing, because I (at this stage) doubt that there will ever bee enough of a user community to support a fully featured open source desktop GIS (unless maybe one is eventually built from the libraries being built for other OS GIS, things like GDAL, Proj4 and PostGIS).
If this guy has trouble finding accommodations, maybe he can share rooms with all the agents that will be tailing him.
The press release sounds as likely to be a resounding "Fuck You" to the NZ authorities. Maybe he is intending that they spend more money on surveilling him than it would have cost to keep him safely at home where he could play under careful supervision. Is this his opening bid?
Sod that, I'll just walk past your cube farm with my new phone and leech all your s3kr3tz onto my phone and use its camera to take pictures.
I know of defense establishments where staff surrender ALL personal electronics at reception when they arrive at work in the morning. It's a question of how sensitive the data is.
You missed the point. Napster, Atari and Commodore are all companies that failed and then had their assets bought by other companies who now use the name purely for marketing purposes. They are not the companies they are pretending to be, although they do have the legal right to use the name. Apple doesn't fit that category.
Add to that list using the name "SCO" for litigation purposes...
McIntyre explained in a May 24 letter that the computer system - operated in the counterespionage section of the Justice Department's criminal division - "was not designed for mass export of all stored images" and said the system experiences "substantial problems."
I am willing to believe that what Mr Ashcroft says may even be true. I have seen enough to not be suprised that the Govt. commissioned a database that copes with scanned documents being gradually over many years, but chokes utterly when the accumilated data needs to be exported.
There one was a datavault built on compartively unusual hardware which operated post-maintenance for many years, it was an insanity to empty because the vendor did not do Gigabit ethernet for it and the 100 MBit cards were scrounged from the vendor's junk-pile. Sucking terrabytes of data from crappy, second qaulity NICs took months. So negligence rather than conspiracy might be the actual reason.
Slashdot Mirror
These loons can make nutty policy like this because they'll never be in a position to implement it anyhow. They get to rant a lot, saps like us give them media exposure, and their deluded constituency get to feel good about it.
The last batch of net censorship only went in because the dude pushing itt had a deciding vote on privatising our telco, by the time it was "applied", it was completely watered down and ineffective.
Xix.
You could look at doing something like affiliating with a local club or university union, and being covered by their insurance. Our Amiga user group ran from a local trades club and the $5 memebrship fee was well worth it for the excellent venue, and the club appreciated the extra memebrships we bought in.
Xix.
I am somewhat surprised that virus writers do not use virus ecology/biology more.
In real Life, the really nasty, viruses are the ones that have a comparitively low lehatlity. This allows the infected hosts to continue spreading for a long time. And/Or the (early) symptoms are pretty mild, so hosts will often ignore them.
Hmmm... sounds like most mail relay trojans. I know a few people who *continued* to use thus infected machines, because the inconvenience of cleaning it up is more work for them than having a slower connection now and then. They did not care that they were hosting a trojan.
Xix.
LiveJournal has turned out to be a really interesting online community, and it appears to have scaled up quite well too. A neighbourhood would be easy to add as an "interest".
Geocoding data is easy, searching on geocoding is also easy. Getting that integreated into tools that have been set up to do text is a bit more difficult. How do you let people freely define geometries, yet still have some way of searching and retrieving via text? C-Squares sounds cool, as it seems to give enough detail for most purposes, but as it's got a pretty distinct namespace, they use Google to do their search and retrieval:
C-Squares
Get calendars in there too (as a 4th dimension) ("show me people with an interest, in a place, at a time"), and the picture gets even more crazy. "Notify me when Bon Jovi is in my city".
Xix.
" 2005 "I'm sorry, the black box says you were doing 60 in a 55 zone"
2006 I'm sorry, the black box says you violated the TandC that said you would not drive for more than 2.5 hours without a 30 minute rest break"
2007 "I'm sorry, the black-box says you were doing 55.0001 in a 55 zone. Haha!"
Viz, "acceptable" behaviour would be socially engineered.
Xix.
A relative of mine was telling me that in his industry (auto related), the nationals will open stores near independants and cheerfully run them at a loss for over 10 years to close them. We used to look to government for this kind of foreward thinking. MS is cashed up enough to cut off anyone else's oxygen.
Xix.
many people that I know have avoided losing too much because their houses/dorms/rooms were such a mess. My GF had hundreds of dollars on her table left alone because the thief didn't have time to sort through underwear, clothes, CDs and other chick stuff. Leave CDs and cheap but appealling items such as Playstations, (loose) CDs and broken laptops strewn around so that a prospective thief can't just slide your consumer electronics off one shelf/desk into a bag. Decorate your laptop with stickers and/or with a designs etched with a soldering iron to diminish its resale value (hey, it's not going to be worth much in 2 years anyhow).
Xix.
Since work paid for it, it's kind of nice to have up to 512 Mb always on me and be able to speak to just about any Mac laptop you can buy. Pity my PC needs a Bluetooth dongle.
Xix.
From my following of the coronial inquiry into the blast:
The contractor found that the structural columns were not as described on the blueprints, but in fact contained a lot more steel. The cuting charges required for this type of steel were not available in the country and would need to be specially imported (you can't just stick HE on a ship or airplane). Since the contractor was working to a contract that included fairly strong late penalties, he improvised something that was quite a bit faster than the proper cutting charges. Unfortunately the sandbags that were placed around the charges did not prevent large chunks of shrapnel from being launched. A young girl (12 or so) was struck by a piece and killed.
I went to watch the blast, but from a much longer distance than most other folk (and I made sure there was a large hill between me and the base of the hospital). I was surprised at how close people were, and I was also surprised that more people were not injured.
Xix.
A friend of mine was fiddling behind the desk and managed to plug the printer's power supply into an AT keyboard socket (which brainiac at HP thought, "cool, let's use an AT connector for power!". Busted the IO chip clean in half and completely fscked the mobo.
Another friend of mine bolted plates over the SCSI ports of their lab Macs as people kept hot plugging parallel devices.
Xix.
How is this any different from sticking your own barcodes on products? At my local store, the video screen flashes a picture of every product scanned, so that even the most bored, drug addled check-out chick will notice.
Reminds me of my plan to stick condom barcodes on boxes of oatmeal.
Xix.
ArcGIS 9 can actually be called a real GIS again, 8 lacked a bunch of stuff. I'm not expecting to see a OSS contender any time soon, the pool of likely users is not comparable to something like OOffice or GIMP.
On the web-end OTOH, GIS is a commodity (i.e. WFS, WMS) and the OSS alternatives to things like ArcIMS are very capable, and in many instances much more stable/reliable.
I'm also interested to see where ArcSDE goes, it's chief advntage over things like Oracle Spatial is the tight integration with their other products.
Xix.
Oh, and that should be "you're".
Xix.
Unlike broadcast, anyone could set up a radio on the 'net and reach all over the world. I could tune into a number of stations that played exactly the kind of music I like, and more importantly, hear music I'd not have heard otherwise. As large as my jukebox is, it's still only got music I own (or not, depending on RIAA's PoV) in it.
Nowadays, I look at play-lists from clubs and look at what's being played and try find samples of artists who get mixed in with stuff that I like. The only radio I listen to is the local community radio (when DJs I like are on). As well as play-lists, I follow links pages from the web pages of artists I do like, and now have bought more CDs online than I have from stores. The web offers many ways of letting people discover the music they like, and for musicians to find people who like their kind of music. I'd even say it's more discerning and efficient than the broadcast model. We need to make such discovery tools easier to find and use.
To use market-speak, everything between the artist and the "consumer" is an overhead and an inefficiency.
Xix.
This seems to be the case. I went to a talk by James Robrtson (aka Bottomfeeder RSS client) last night and his opinion was that this was their problem, and they were not understanding the issue. Cache it as static content, use mod_gzip and let Apache handle it.
Xix.
We were using the old version of GD that did GIFs, but had to re-write some stuff when they dropped it. I'm not going to bother bringing GIF support back since PNG does everything GIF that does.
Xix.
Cool, everyone can watch their favourite TV show on a computer monitor via a crappy TV tuner card because chlidren/parents are using the huge plasma screen TV and surround sound system in the lounge room to play EverCrack...
As well as the physical environment, we need to consider the game designs as well. I was over at a friend's house the other week, and watching them play Harvest Moon as a group was far more entertaining than watching someone lost to EQ.
Xix.
Spake Bill:
"These things can scratch or simply get lost."
Already, we don't really "own" the movies we buy. A move to purely digital distrihbution would be accompanied by a massive push towards rental/pay-per-view models. I really cannot see the studios resisting the urge, and the gleeful adoption of iTunes suggests most consmers won't care (at least until their hard drive dies). I'd also start taking a sweeps on how long before revisionist editorial policy started affecting the available catalogue ("I'm sorry, that film is not available in China, your party representative has been informed").
To counter Mr Bill's quote, if it was simple and legal to back-up the movies and music I have purchased, I wouldn't need to be losing little silver discs, or need a Kafka-esque DRM micro-policing system. Leave me the hell alone!
Xix.
Battle Royale
Xix.
ArcGIS 8 was a ground-up re-write as COM/DCOM and is unlikely to ever run under unices. ArcINFO is more or less a "legacy" app and is bundled with ArcGIS, and it runs under just about any command line (except Linux), it is *nothing* like ArcGIS. ArcGIS 9 adds a bunch of missing capability (like a sane macro language) and goes a long way towards making it a "real" GIS, for example, the default macro language is Python, and you can script in whatever language you want, they have also fixed a bunch of other bits that have kept me from using ArcINFO (instead of ArcGIS) for serious projects (topology anyone?).
ESRI seem to be tinkering with making ArcGIS a bunch of components and also with Java, I hope that they continue with that direction and ditch COM. This is a good thing, because I (at this stage) doubt that there will ever bee enough of a user community to support a fully featured open source desktop GIS (unless maybe one is eventually built from the libraries being built for other OS GIS, things like GDAL, Proj4 and PostGIS).
Xix.
Xix.
Sod that, I'll just walk past your cube farm with my new phone and leech all your s3kr3tz onto my phone and use its camera to take pictures.
I know of defense establishments where staff surrender ALL personal electronics at reception when they arrive at work in the morning. It's a question of how sensitive the data is.
Xix.
Add to that list using the name "SCO" for litigation purposes...
There one was a datavault built on compartively unusual hardware which operated post-maintenance for many years, it was an insanity to empty because the vendor did not do Gigabit ethernet for it and the 100 MBit cards were scrounged from the vendor's junk-pile. Sucking terrabytes of data from crappy, second qaulity NICs took months. So negligence rather than conspiracy might be the actual reason.
Xix.
That's why you give the person holding the device a bit of cash to have a coffee break while you get the dirt you need.
Xix.