"Vote against the recall! Only I, not any of my would-be replacements, have the courage to ban spam in California. Also, if you promise not to vote me out, free lollipops and fluffy bunnies for the kids come Christmastime."
Thank god at least someone still cares about trying to come up with a better interface for a cell phone keypad. I was beginning to get worried that everything was going to converge on the standard, kludgey keypad ("Hit 7 three times for R")... while it looks like some people in this thread have gotten used to it, I can't stand it. Think about it... the interface is 40 years old (first touch tone telephone, 1963) and was never intended for text entry. The engineered inefficiency and its overwhelming rate of adoption is a creepy repeat of how QWERTY still dominates over Dvorak.
(Not that QWERTY is all bad, it still is much faster than a numeric keypad. I can type 15 words per minute on my Treo using just two thumbs... Of course, 15 years of Nintendo served as excellent training:-)
I own a Treo 300 and use the PDA while talking all the time... the Treo has a nice, loud, built-in speakerphone. Because the cell radio runs separately from the PDA, this lets you do a primitive form of "multitasking"... If the person you're talking to needs you to write something down, put them on speaker, go into Palm Notepad, and punch in what they're saying. Not quite "killer app" functionality but enough to make me want to stick with this type of integrated device going forward.
Does this make Sense?
on
SCO Roundup
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"SCO Stock Goes Up After SCOForum Code Revealed as Baloney... Does This Make Sense?"
No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
No need for a new Linux distro - most of the ham interfaces work fine with all distros and are available as RPMs, DEBs, etc. You will find slightly higher percentages of hams using SuSE (because of a tradition of working on ham apps) and Slackware (just for its "tinkerability") distros than in the regular Linux user population, IMHO.
In fact, I bet that's the main reason the price of shares is falling (oversupply), and not because people are beginning to doubt SCO's FUD. Look on the bright side, having those shares back out in the exchange might mean more people able to open up short positions than previously. Better do it fast, though, before they release their quarterly numbers Thursday.
Good to see that people continue to breathe life into Nethack. And I thought the graphical variants for the game had topped out with Falcon 's Eye. Well, time to download the alpha before the site gets/.'ed.
I was an "early adopter" and bought the Jag for $250 when it was rolled out, and on the strength of one game, Tempest 2000. (Kind of like people buying the Xbox just for Halo.) But aside from a couple more good games (AvP, Doom, and the system's last gasp, Defender 2000) all the other games I got for the Jag were awful... two particularly bad ones were Cybermorph and TrevorMcFur. There were too many bad games and not enough 3rd party support for this console, even though it was the most powerful piece of pre-PlayStation hardware out there. I wonder if maybe Atari had cloned about a dozen John Mathiesons and Jeff "Llama" Minters that the story would have turned out differently.
We Metal Gear fans have long known that stealth camo and nanomachines became standard equipment for FoxHound operatives in 1995. "Find... Big Boss! Destroy... Outer Heaven!"
Altavista used to be my search engine of choice, but I gradually abandoned it around 3-4 years ago - shortly after it was spun off from DEC I noticed a general decline in quality.
The one thing I've noticed about these "flaws" in Google "exposed" on./ today is that they are being done in an organized fashion by intelligent (and somewhat witty) people. I agree that there is significant potential for Google-bombing to be exploited for commercial gain in the coming years. But I don't think it can nearly as bad as some of the awful stuff that's done with meta tags. I'm sticking with Google (for now) because it is still lightning fast and doesn't put a bunch of crap up on my screen.
Wow, it's shocking! "Intellectual property" violations have been going on for many years...
1859: Ciba steals aniline dye process from the British
Well, then not much has changed: 1984: Compaq duplicates IBM BIOS and clones the PC
And I'm sure you could come up with even more compelling examples since then. The whole concept and exploitation of "intellectual property" is just a rational concept that companies employ to increase profit. Can you imagine the bonuses that get passed around when a pharmaceutical company wins a big patent decision?
Computers and biology have already merged
on
Digital Biology
·
· Score: 1
IIRC it happened a year ago, upon the implementation of RFC 1149.
I was in college in '96-'97 and yeah, I was into warez a little. Especially Photoshop and MS Office. But I didn't know about Linux then, either, I thought this was the only way to do it. I wonder how aware college students are of free apps like the Gimp and K-office and if using them has reduced the rate of piracy. I know Linux only has a 1% market share for home use but it has to be somewhat higher at colleges, right? And tech-savvy college kids are the ones most into warez.
I'm a former @Home user (I didn't get dumped, I quit the service last spring after moving to a new apartment where @Home wasn't offered)... Verizon just installed a DSLAM at the CO in my suburb a few weeks ago and sent me and my neighbors a bunch of flyers in the mail offering real "cheap" DSL. Some of them signed up but because Verizon is eeeeeeevil I was kind of sitting on the whole issue until one of my coworkers suggested Covad. They still resell through companies like SpeakEasy but they can also serve as your standalone ISP now which is the route I decided to go.
I got the self-install kit and was up & running on Windows in about 45 minutes, on Linux it took me just over an hour (DrakNet plus some/etc/hacks). Sure this is crappy PPPoE with 128k upstream, but because I am only 4000' away from the CO I am always maxing out 1.5 megabits on downloads:) Such an improvement over 56k, and faster than @Home too. But of course YMMV.
Oh yeah, I had to call their tech support quick the other day and a human being actually answered the phone. How can they be bankrupt and still have live humans answering the phone? Anyway regardless of all that here's hoping these guys stay in business for a while to come.
sien says:
"The answers that you propose for the differences in mobile adoption are interesting. I think you leave out one thing that really affects the whole game, regulations."
Thanks for a very well-informed response. I did mention something similar to this in Idea 3 of my original post. But I thought that maybe it was a proliferation of antennae for different providers, not for completely different wireless standards. If this is the case, 3G could take a *long* time to be rolled out here in the States.
Also, one other thing I left out is the issue of spectrum. Do three different standards use 3x the amount of spectrum of a single standard elsewhere? I bet it does. And the US military, God bless 'em, probably uses a lot of spectrum here that is used for commercial applications in less militaristic lands like Japan:)
This is one of those times when I'm glad I'm a programmer and not an electrical engineer.
Well now, good for the Japanese, another wicked cool new wireless implementation for a country that is already lightyears ahead of the rest of the world. I wonder how long before the Europeans get 3G, though - I heard it's been a bit of a boondoggle over there.
But what I really want to know why the US is so far behind when it comes to the wireless world. While I don't labor under any sort of naive notion that the US has to be first in *everything* worldwide, this has perplexed me for some time. I don't think it's the technology, is it? Here are some ideas of mine, but I don't know how well grounded they are:
1.) Settlement in the US is much less dense than Japan or Europe, so there are greater infrastructual expenses involved with new wireless standards
2.) The NIMBY crowd in the US is more vocal than elsewhere and holds up new infrastructure installations
3.) Standards are more tightly controlled in Europe/Japan, meaning instead of three cellphone antennas for three different carriers on top of apartment buildings, perhaps there is one shared by all?
4.) For cultural reasons Americans are not as interested in games, instant messages, internet, and video as Europeans & the Japanese
-Adam in Philly
(who still uses a single band PCS phone made in, like, 1997 or something)
So Congress passes a law that deregulates telecom five years ago. Billions of dollars flow into capital markets to finance competition for phone service and broadband. But the Bells just get in the way and delay, delay, delay, until the startups flame out. I seem to recall reading a/. post a while back that said Verizon was happily paying fines for failing to open local phone circuits so their competition would burn through all their VC money just trying to stay afloat until they could get some revenue.
These lawsuits are nice in a judicial sense, but from a financial and business standpoint I don't think Verizon and the others are shaking in their boots much. This is pretty much just mop-up work to be done now that the competition has been crushed.
"Think about this: if the cumulative value of everything in the world were expressed in measures of gold, which theoretically backs the majority of world currencies, does enough gold physically exist to back the paper money value, or has the paper money itself become valuable?"
There's definitely not enough gold around to back world currencies anymore. Especially since Nixon abandoned the gold standard nearly 30 years ago. In fact, many countries, like Britain for example, are divesting themselves of their gold reserves. However, the Federal Reserve here in the US does have a complex mechanism known as the "reserve system" that, among many other things, keeps the amount of money in circulation at least nominally tied to a -multiple- of the amount of gold held in reserve at places like Fort Knox. I'm not quoting exact figures here, but I'd imagine that dollar bill in your hand is probably backed up with a few pennies' worth of gold at any given time. In any case, the Fed doesn't mess with the money supply nearly as much as it does with interest rates because it's considered a less effective means of steering the economy.
I've wondered for some time why gold is still the precious metal of choice... aside from a very few special applications where its non-corrosiveness comes into play, it's not a terribly useful metal. Silver is much more useful, although its comparative abundance keeps the value low. If you want precious metals with real inherent, utilitarian value, you have to get into some of the more exotic stuff like platinum, palladium, tantalum, rhodium, uranium. Some of these are obviously more suitable for coinage than others:)
The whole debate about the "cashless" society just reflects on where we are as a civilization. It's a burden on the system to have money circulating about freely, it's much more efficient to treat it as an abstraction, bits on a hard disk in a bank mainframe somewhere. It's the most efficient way for capital to flow freely... This transformation is really no different than any other aspect of the industrial/digital age. Cash will play an increasingly diminished role in future years, though it probably won't disappear altogether until the latter half of the century. I'm just imagining Santa standing outside the mall ringing the bell with the Salvation Army bucket alongside. Yet instead of a slot in the bucket for you to insert your coins, there's a card reader inside. I'm not a betting man, but I wonder if someone could quote me an over/under on how long before we see this.
>US weekly deaths attributable to traffic accidents: ~3400
I think you overstate the figure a bit. According to the <A HREF="http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/ncsa/809-100 .pdf">NHTSA</A>, just under 42,000 Americans died last year in traffic accidents, or about 800 a week. Obviously though there's still work to be done in this area.
I was sold on this one after taking a friend's out on a test drive. One of the sleekest yet solidy built machines I've seen in a while. I'm planning to buy one within the next few months. It's not below $1000, though (I think it's more around $1500). I'm pretty optimistic they'll get the issues with OS X worked out so that more applications work properly. I haven't done too much research into loading Linux PPC onto the new iBooks, are there any hardware/driver conflicts out there to watch out for?
The scenarios you suggest are already being played out. My company got caught in a BSA shakedown last year due to licensing oversteps. Management chose option 1, (pay fines & buy licenses). People here are pretty hardcore M$ junkies, though, so I don't think it really changed much. Which is precisely the way the BSA likes it, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
"Vote against the recall! Only I, not any of my would-be replacements, have the courage to ban spam in California. Also, if you promise not to vote me out, free lollipops and fluffy bunnies for the kids come Christmastime."
Thank god at least someone still cares about trying to come up with a better interface for a cell phone keypad. I was beginning to get worried that everything was going to converge on the standard, kludgey keypad ("Hit 7 three times for R")... while it looks like some people in this thread have gotten used to it, I can't stand it. Think about it... the interface is 40 years old (first touch tone telephone, 1963) and was never intended for text entry. The engineered inefficiency and its overwhelming rate of adoption is a creepy repeat of how QWERTY still dominates over Dvorak.
:-)
(Not that QWERTY is all bad, it still is much faster than a numeric keypad. I can type 15 words per minute on my Treo using just two thumbs... Of course, 15 years of Nintendo served as excellent training
I own a Treo 300 and use the PDA while talking all the time... the Treo has a nice, loud, built-in speakerphone. Because the cell radio runs separately from the PDA, this lets you do a primitive form of "multitasking"... If the person you're talking to needs you to write something down, put them on speaker, go into Palm Notepad, and punch in what they're saying. Not quite "killer app" functionality but enough to make me want to stick with this type of integrated device going forward.
"SCO Stock Goes Up After SCOForum Code Revealed as Baloney... Does This Make Sense?"
No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
No need for a new Linux distro - most of the ham interfaces work fine with all distros and are available as RPMs, DEBs, etc. You will find slightly higher percentages of hams using SuSE (because of a tradition of working on ham apps) and Slackware (just for its "tinkerability") distros than in the regular Linux user population, IMHO.
In fact, I bet that's the main reason the price of shares is falling (oversupply), and not because people are beginning to doubt SCO's FUD. Look on the bright side, having those shares back out in the exchange might mean more people able to open up short positions than previously. Better do it fast, though, before they release their quarterly numbers Thursday.
Good to see that people continue to breathe life into Nethack. And I thought the graphical variants for the game had topped out with Falcon 's Eye. Well, time to download the alpha before the site gets /.'ed.
I was an "early adopter" and bought the Jag for $250 when it was rolled out, and on the strength of one game, Tempest 2000. (Kind of like people buying the Xbox just for Halo.) But aside from a couple more good games (AvP, Doom, and the system's last gasp, Defender 2000) all the other games I got for the Jag were awful... two particularly bad ones were Cybermorph and TrevorMcFur. There were too many bad games and not enough 3rd party support for this console, even though it was the most powerful piece of pre-PlayStation hardware out there. I wonder if maybe Atari had cloned about a dozen John Mathiesons and Jeff "Llama" Minters that the story would have turned out differently.
We Metal Gear fans have long known that stealth camo and nanomachines became standard equipment for FoxHound operatives in 1995. "Find... Big Boss! Destroy... Outer Heaven!"
Altavista used to be my search engine of choice, but I gradually abandoned it around 3-4 years ago - shortly after it was spun off from DEC I noticed a general decline in quality.
./ today is that they are being done in an organized fashion by intelligent (and somewhat witty) people. I agree that there is significant potential for Google-bombing to be exploited for commercial gain in the coming years. But I don't think it can nearly as bad as some of the awful stuff that's done with meta tags. I'm sticking with Google (for now) because it is still lightning fast and doesn't put a bunch of crap up on my screen.
The one thing I've noticed about these "flaws" in Google "exposed" on
How long do ./ readers think it will be until the Linux kernel and/or Samba will be able to read OFS shares?
Wow, it's shocking! "Intellectual property" violations have been going on for many years...
1859: Ciba steals aniline dye process from the British
Well, then not much has changed:
1984: Compaq duplicates IBM BIOS and clones the PC
And I'm sure you could come up with even more compelling examples since then. The whole concept and exploitation of "intellectual property" is just a rational concept that companies employ to increase profit. Can you imagine the bonuses that get passed around when a pharmaceutical company wins a big patent decision?
IIRC it happened a year ago, upon the implementation of RFC 1149.
I was in college in '96-'97 and yeah, I was into warez a little. Especially Photoshop and MS Office. But I didn't know about Linux then, either, I thought this was the only way to do it. I wonder how aware college students are of free apps like the Gimp and K-office and if using them has reduced the rate of piracy. I know Linux only has a 1% market share for home use but it has to be somewhat higher at colleges, right? And tech-savvy college kids are the ones most into warez.
I'm a former @Home user (I didn't get dumped, I quit the service last spring after moving to a new apartment where @Home wasn't offered)... Verizon just installed a DSLAM at the CO in my suburb a few weeks ago and sent me and my neighbors a bunch of flyers in the mail offering real "cheap" DSL. Some of them signed up but because Verizon is eeeeeeevil I was kind of sitting on the whole issue until one of my coworkers suggested Covad. They still resell through companies like SpeakEasy but they can also serve as your standalone ISP now which is the route I decided to go.
/etc/hacks). Sure this is crappy PPPoE with 128k upstream, but because I am only 4000' away from the CO I am always maxing out 1.5 megabits on downloads :) Such an improvement over 56k, and faster than @Home too. But of course YMMV.
I got the self-install kit and was up & running on Windows in about 45 minutes, on Linux it took me just over an hour (DrakNet plus some
Oh yeah, I had to call their tech support quick the other day and a human being actually answered the phone. How can they be bankrupt and still have live humans answering the phone? Anyway regardless of all that here's hoping these guys stay in business for a while to come.
-Adam in Philly
sien says:
:)
"The answers that you propose for the differences in mobile adoption are interesting. I think you leave out one thing that really affects the whole game, regulations."
Thanks for a very well-informed response. I did mention something similar to this in Idea 3 of my original post. But I thought that maybe it was a proliferation of antennae for different providers, not for completely different wireless standards. If this is the case, 3G could take a *long* time to be rolled out here in the States.
Also, one other thing I left out is the issue of spectrum. Do three different standards use 3x the amount of spectrum of a single standard elsewhere? I bet it does. And the US military, God bless 'em, probably uses a lot of spectrum here that is used for commercial applications in less militaristic lands like Japan
This is one of those times when I'm glad I'm a programmer and not an electrical engineer.
-Adam in Philly
Well now, good for the Japanese, another wicked cool new wireless implementation for a country that is already lightyears ahead of the rest of the world. I wonder how long before the Europeans get 3G, though - I heard it's been a bit of a boondoggle over there.
But what I really want to know why the US is so far behind when it comes to the wireless world. While I don't labor under any sort of naive notion that the US has to be first in *everything* worldwide, this has perplexed me for some time. I don't think it's the technology, is it? Here are some ideas of mine, but I don't know how well grounded they are:
1.) Settlement in the US is much less dense than Japan or Europe, so there are greater infrastructual expenses involved with new wireless standards
2.) The NIMBY crowd in the US is more vocal than elsewhere and holds up new infrastructure installations
3.) Standards are more tightly controlled in Europe/Japan, meaning instead of three cellphone antennas for three different carriers on top of apartment buildings, perhaps there is one shared by all?
4.) For cultural reasons Americans are not as interested in games, instant messages, internet, and video as Europeans & the Japanese
-Adam in Philly
(who still uses a single band PCS phone made in, like, 1997 or something)
So Congress passes a law that deregulates telecom five years ago. Billions of dollars flow into capital markets to finance competition for phone service and broadband. But the Bells just get in the way and delay, delay, delay, until the startups flame out. I seem to recall reading a /. post a while back that said Verizon was happily paying fines for failing to open local phone circuits so their competition would burn through all their VC money just trying to stay afloat until they could get some revenue.
These lawsuits are nice in a judicial sense, but from a financial and business standpoint I don't think Verizon and the others are shaking in their boots much. This is pretty much just mop-up work to be done now that the competition has been crushed.
I dunno about the rest of you, but I was just thinking it was high time we had rednecks like Tuckah in space :-) yeeeeehaw!
Hey your error is no worse than mine, I can't even get my HTML tags to work :)
vocaljess asked to begin this topic:
:)
"Think about this: if the cumulative value of everything in the world were expressed in measures of gold, which theoretically backs the majority of world currencies, does enough gold physically exist to back the paper money value, or has the paper money itself become valuable?"
There's definitely not enough gold around to back world currencies anymore. Especially since Nixon abandoned the gold standard nearly 30 years ago. In fact, many countries, like Britain for example, are divesting themselves of their gold reserves. However, the Federal Reserve here in the US does have a complex mechanism known as the "reserve system" that, among many other things, keeps the amount of money in circulation at least nominally tied to a -multiple- of the amount of gold held in reserve at places like Fort Knox. I'm not quoting exact figures here, but I'd imagine that dollar bill in your hand is probably backed up with a few pennies' worth of gold at any given time. In any case, the Fed doesn't mess with the money supply nearly as much as it does with interest rates because it's considered a less effective means of steering the economy.
I've wondered for some time why gold is still the precious metal of choice... aside from a very few special applications where its non-corrosiveness comes into play, it's not a terribly useful metal. Silver is much more useful, although its comparative abundance keeps the value low. If you want precious metals with real inherent, utilitarian value, you have to get into some of the more exotic stuff like platinum, palladium, tantalum, rhodium, uranium. Some of these are obviously more suitable for coinage than others
The whole debate about the "cashless" society just reflects on where we are as a civilization. It's a burden on the system to have money circulating about freely, it's much more efficient to treat it as an abstraction, bits on a hard disk in a bank mainframe somewhere. It's the most efficient way for capital to flow freely... This transformation is really no different than any other aspect of the industrial/digital age. Cash will play an increasingly diminished role in future years, though it probably won't disappear altogether until the latter half of the century. I'm just imagining Santa standing outside the mall ringing the bell with the Salvation Army bucket alongside. Yet instead of a slot in the bucket for you to insert your coins, there's a card reader inside. I'm not a betting man, but I wonder if someone could quote me an over/under on how long before we see this.
>US weekly deaths attributable to traffic accidents: ~3400
0 .pdf">NHTSA</A>, just under 42,000 Americans died last year in traffic accidents, or about 800 a week. Obviously though there's still work to be done in this area.
I think you overstate the figure a bit. According to the <A HREF="http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/ncsa/809-10
I was sold on this one after taking a friend's out on a test drive. One of the sleekest yet solidy built machines I've seen in a while. I'm planning to buy one within the next few months. It's not below $1000, though (I think it's more around $1500). I'm pretty optimistic they'll get the issues with OS X worked out so that more applications work properly. I haven't done too much research into loading Linux PPC onto the new iBooks, are there any hardware/driver conflicts out there to watch out for?
[kb3edk@localhost]$ lynx
The scenarios you suggest are already being played out. My company got caught in a BSA shakedown last year due to licensing oversteps. Management chose option 1, (pay fines & buy licenses). People here are pretty hardcore M$ junkies, though, so I don't think it really changed much. Which is precisely the way the BSA likes it, I think.