Gore popularized the phrase, but never claimed to invent it either--that's just been attribution by sloppy amateur historians. Ralph Lee Smith actually used it first, in his book The Wired Society. He coined the phrase in the 1960s to discuss cable television and the promise that it could be used to deliver interactive content, electronic community participation, remote access to libraries, and make everyone a publisher on what would be an "electronic highway".
[Interesting to note that until the web browser, the cable companies really only wanted to deliver 500 channels of nothing to watch and push-button pizza delivery].
One other tidbit... Newt Gingrich chimed in his usual helpful self in the early 1990s saying that we should instead have an "information superrailroad" -- i.e. that it shouldn't be built by the government (a la highway) but by private enterprise... never mind the whole history of railroad gauges that didn't match, schedules that didn't coordinate, and the small little issue of collusion and monopoly that led to the Sherman Anti-trust act.
Gore may have added the "super" part, and i'm sure that it resonated with him just because his dad had been a key participant in launching the Eisenhower Interstate system when he was a senator.
Yes! Let the UN general assembly do it! No, wait, maybe it should be the ITU! No, wait, maybe it should be the ISO! Hmm... maybe the International electrotechnical commission?
Oh, wait... the US doesn't like standards-setting bodies. OR international organizations, for that matter.
Part of the issue is that reporters, journalists and so on, in trying to appear hip or with-it start using tech jargon in mainstream consumer reporting without nary a meaningful explanation.
I think that if local news reporter Trisha Takanawa spent less time trying to sound in-the-know by reporting about 'phishing', '419 chains', 'spyware' and 'trojans' and instead talked about 'email financial scams' and 'online snooping' people would be more likely to get it. She might not get the points with the kewl kids, but at least she'd be doing a public service rather than some self service.
Well, that's changing. As a result of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiations, Costa Rica finally, after being asked to leave the room because they weren't playing ball and "this room is only for serious negotiations" (funny thing, a friend of mine was involved in the negotiations and had some choice things to say regarding that), finally came to and agreed to privatize, over time, two of its big national industries: insurance and telecom. [http://www.ustr.gov/assets/Document_Library/Repor ts_Publications/2004/2004_National_Trade_Estimate/ 2004_NTE_Report/asset_upload_file462_4745.pdf]
To get internet access in Costa Rica, unless you were a scientific institution, you still have to go through the ICE, the state entity. They charge higher-than-US dialup prices for nowhere close to US-quality service (monthly access fees PLUS minutes of usage on your phone line). To get a cell phone you often must wait months and can only get it through them. Costa Rica's basic argument is that telecommunications is a right of people, that both the airwaves and the land through which phone lines travel are Costa Rican property and that they should be driven by social need rather than profit. Great in theory: in practice, apalling.
Interestingly, this new proposed regulation can't really be very long-lived UNLESS they say that because they agreed to open up their network, internet and wireless lines (nothing said of Plain-ole-telephone service), they may be saying that this will compete with a public national service and undermine the goal of the state.
It's actually usually a bit worse than your average corporate office--at least in average corporate office you usually have one IT group making decisions and aren't bound by lowest bid contract rules for services. Did some consulting work for a USSS app in a previous life and have plenty of friends who do the federal job thing--i hear these stories often.
USS IT program managers are just like program managers anywhere else. Some of them understand technology in depth. Others can recite buzzwords on command without a sense as to what they mean. Add to that the complication that in the federal government, depending on the agency, different kinds of telecoms services are bought and supported by different groups. Add to that the sales processes of many telcos, which sell "the security story" of their stuff without necessarily providing all the instructions as to how to use them once sold, and there you go: a USSS unencrypted communication on a mobile device.
Say USSS IT PM wants to give his folks blackberries. USSSITPM calls friendly T-mobile account manager. FTAM says "sure, BlackBerry is y our thing, you have as highly secure, end-to-end, FIPS 140-2 certified triple-DES encrypted" [non-fed-speak;it's good by your own security standards]. So USSS IT PM says "No prob, give me 300". [Good call too--it's actually somewhat comforting that these devices are used as widely in fed. gov't, since they do have a very strong security infrastructure for a widely available commercial device].
So USSS IT PM is happy with Blackberries, now he wants to put wireless WAN cards on laptops for those who already are on the field a lot of the time and can't get a BB because working with large docs yadda yadda. Sure, FTAM say, we can put GPRS cards on your laptops. How about security? USSSITPM asks. Ah, GPRS is seucre, FTAM says, "we encrypt all over the air transactions, so it never goes out in the clear over the air" and USSSITPM says "ok, give me five". Never mind that it goes out in the clear inside carrier's network and to mail server.
Put on USSS Agent Bagodonuts' laptop. Bagodonuts has a degree in criminology, a law degree, and has gone through USSS boot camp--but doesn't understand technology well. Bagodonuts writes his memo in Word, uses tabs to indent paragraphs and spaces to create columns, doesn't know how to turn off Clippy. He's out in Dubuque and needs to send it back to DC from the airport, can't get the VPN thing working because the GPRS card dohickey uses some kind of compression which breaks VPN. Sends it straight from Outlook express through to SMTP server (one of his office buddies taught set it up for him).
There you go. Sensitive file sent out in the clear. The infrastructure was there, the rules were there, but the services didn't match the expectations.
My guess is that it had to do with vibrations. Any noise caused vibrations, and the music with the heaviest bass and more vibration caused more growth than the music with more sedate vibration, which in turn caused more growth than the absolute silence which had no effect whatsoever.
Ah yes, I almost drove off NJ Turnpike listening to the Most Unwanted Song. People surveyed hate holiday tunes, children singing, and jingles--what better way to give the people what they don't want than mingling it all together?
Hey everybody, it's Ramadan! Ramadan! Ramadan! Lots of praying with no breakfast. Ramadan! So much fun! Do all your shopping, at Walmart!
To get an MS Blog, you have to sign up for it. To sign up for it, you have to get Passport. To get passport, you have to agree to their EULA. Their EULA says: "All content and software (if any) that is made available to view and/or download from the Web pages that are part of the.NET Passport Services ("Software") is owned by and is the copyrighted work of Microsoft and/or its suppliers. "
So, in essence, they could claim that as a virtue of creating content on their blog site, part of.NET Passport Services, you grant them copyright over it... that is, they'd have to explicitly recognize you as one of Microsoft's suppliers, no?
Let's talk about the wireless/mobile industry, since I know that a lot of lone programmers are trying to see that as the next place to make their name, usully in games or personal apps.
The lone developer still can exist there--I've met some, (work with some as part of current work in managing developer relations for a carrier), and they can succeed--but in all honesty someone working in a garage, by his or her lonesome, will have a very difficult time getting to the point of actually making any money on software or services. The ones who succeed are the exception and often do it as a function of procedural flukes/grandfathering or the very rare killer-like application that gets word of mouth.
Setting aside patents and trademark searches for new applications, which are on their own fairly expensive and time consuming processes, a lone wolf building a game, for example, has the following additional barriers:
companies that serve as sole or primary distribution points (i.e. carriers in many models, publishers and software aggregators in others) are looking for blow-your-mind software quality, and not just in onesies and twosies but in catalogs. It doesn't matter how talented a coder is, graphics also have to be phenomenal, audio has to be original and of the highest quality the phone can provide, use 3D if it can, network services if it can... there are very few lone wolves who are talented enough to manage all those things independently. All of these are technical and development concerns--none really there about patents or CYA.
lone wolves often require a fair amount of assistance and handholding in order to get through such bureacratic needs as contract negotiations, distribution agreements, integration with billing systems, provide customer service in case applications fail at multi-thousand-call volumes, etc.... companies are not going to justify spending the equivalent of $50k+ of staff time to get an application out that is unlikely to sell more than just a couple copies.
testing is expensive. For a mobile game to succeed, it has to work on a range of devices, and no matter what language you're coding in, you have to test on all around. Some testing programs (Java Verified, Microsoft Mobile-to-Market, Symbian Certified) try to make that easier by sourcing that out to companies who'll do it for you for a fee, but there again, you're paing per test, per device, and if you have to retest multiple times you'll pay again and again.
Visibility: even if you get past all of that, you still have to get people to buy your stuff. Experience shows that name recognition and brand names of somewhat dull applications sell more readily than stunning applications that just don't get recognized. And those last ones are rare--usually the lone developer who tries to work with a carrier is trying to sell TheNextBestSolitaire or MineSleeper...
Some would say "well, that's what the various shareware, freeware sites are out for, for people to make a name and just get name recognition". Yes, but... carriers are in a position as a distribution waystation, a controller of access if you will, and are very unlikely to give that up just because LoneWolf developer in his college dorm room just wrote the next best solitaire and wants to post it on a distro site.
The era of sitting alone in a basement or dorm room avoiding sunlight, falling in love with your compiler because it understands you better than humans, and basking in the pipe dreams of being the next Alexey Pajitnov is almost over.
The next era might still be open to the teams of Mavericks who Know Their Stuff-- sound, graphics, rendering engines, coding, packaging, sales pitches -- and work as a small team. I've seen that work in this space. Small companies have a better shot at it.
Over-the-air and cable broadcasters do have a social responsibility as journalists to do so. They may not have an economic incentive to do so.
We grant broadcasters the use of our public airwaves, and cable companies the use of our public rights of way, so that they can to broadcast reruns of Fantasy Island and Gilmore Girls in exchange for the obligation to deliver local news, public access television, and minimum services. The expectation is that they would fulfil their responsibility to report on timely and relevant news items in a fair and objective fashion.
Sure, the FCC has under republican watch made a mockery of many of these expectations, but in principle they are still there.
The fact that news outlets may choose to focus on the latest killer product under your sink instead of about civic education or local unemployment or whatever other actually relevant issues there may be doesn't excuse them from the expectation that they should be doing it.
Separate responsibility from desire or economic incentive. Believe there are such things as social responsibilities that corporations undertake in exchange for the protections we provide them as a society. DOn't let people fool you into believing that just because they don't fulfill their obligations they never had them.
Agreed. If The Royal We could lobby Endnote's creators to either include native support for OO.o or for its file format in Document Scan, it would be a huge coup. as it is, the bibliography tool within OO.o seems to do some basics, but nothing quite like the pain-reducing citation management that EndNote handles.
Wrote my Master's thesis using OO.o - successfully
on
OpenOffice.org Is 4 Today
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I had to negotiate dealing with MS Word tracked changes and inline comments created by my thesis advisor while wanting to keep my Mac as a Microsoft-free zone. Ended up trying AppleWorks [not quite an office package as an OfficeSpace package... why hasn't this dog died yet?], TextEdit, TeX (no patience for that critter), AbiWord, ThinkFree Office (slower than your average Republican president) until I learned there was an X11 port of OpenOffice for Mac OS X.
Have to say that it tackled the job superbly for what was about as complicated as a document gets--a book-length work. Tracked changes worked almost seamlessly, even when these changes were made in MS Word versions of the docs. Export and import to/from MS word caused no noticeable difficulties, not even when dealing with paragraph formats, TOCs, styles, graphics, tables, charts and the like.
In all, I was very impressed with its robustness and more than pleased by the price.
My only beefs: - one somewhat minor problem dealing with section formatting and heading numbering when you use a master document with subsection documents--well known apparently in the OO.o discussion forums - no native support in EndNote for the OO.o format--made dealing with citations and bibliography a bit tricky (had to save from that format to RTF to run through doc scan to export as RTF and then re-format citations in OO.o document to make us of Bibliography). Then again, that's an issue not with OO.o per-se but with the folks who make EndNote having their heads up their Microsofted tuchases. - occasional crashiness/quirkiness when dealing with tracked changes--sometimes the UI would jump forward many pages and bail out when trying to return. I found that there were mouse and keyboard sequences I should just avoid when navigating that UI.
All around though, the final product turned out very well from a pure text formatting perspective. Contentwise? you be the judge.
Considering that what these repeaters would do is basically create a hotzone within the airplane, the actual phone wouldn't be moving in relation to the tower, so you wouldn't really experience the doppler effect in the communication between phone and aircraft cell site. Brings to mind images of Alice and Bob throwing baseballs at each other on a train while Charlie watches from the side of the tracks...
There would be other technical quirks with getting iDEN service on a plane, though... Nextel already does some of this in buildings, putting up combined wifi/iden hotspots to provide in-building coverage--the require custom hardware since even though iDEN is based on TDMA at the lowest level, it still needs the higher level digital processing piece in place at the cell site.
I do have some level of admiration for someone who can code assembly in her sleep, but I'd rather focus on what the software does, and how it does it, than what it is written with.
In the wireless space, I've seen a lot of really excellent software--things that link position sensors and GPS and cameras and remote controls and other people. I've also seen a lot of crap. It didn't matter if it was written in J2ME or BREW or flavor-of-.NET or C++ ; what mattered was what the coder could do with the tools.
It's like any other field where talent matters. I'm sure Norm Abrams could build a set of Adirondack deck chairs using only a Dremel and a butter knife if he had to...
That's not how NDAs work. You sign an NDA saying that you acknowledge that you'll hear stuff that's private and that you agree not to disclose it outside of the circle of people who are bound by the agreement. Anyone who wrote an NDA with the specifics of what is not to be discussed would be a fool.
I run a developer program for a US carrier. We make it fairly difficult for everyday users to install applications on their phones that have not been blessed/sanctified, particularly to avoid widespread dissemination of things like this.
We're frequently lambasted on public forums and through nastygrams from folks (mostly developer types) who keep on insisting that these restrictions are unconscionable, that information wants to be free and that they bought the phone and they should be able to do whatever they want to it.
You can imagine the reception I get whenever I explain that the restrictions are there, in great part, to protect customers from unwittingly loading malware on their phones that would cause them to get ridiculously huge phone bills.
Mild pleasure to be taken from vindication, I guess.
Taking two years of courses and having certification in WebSphere and Microsoft stuff does not make you a computer scientist--it just makes you a programmer.
There's a difference.
From working with developers of all sorts as part of what I do, I can tell you that there's a clear difference between someone who simply learned to code from reading a book on EJB development and someone who took enough courses in networking protocols, systems design and compilers to know that using HTTP to send 4 bytes of data from point to point is a bad idea.
It takes more than simple practical knowhow to actually be thoroughly trained in a field. A two-year certification program is just that...
True, I've rarely gotten more than 45 mpg on a full tank of gas on my new Prius. BUT, I also know a few things:
- I bought my car in January, and it's very apparent that battery performance is lower when it's cold, causing more fuel consumption. Other Prius owners confirm that... we had a full two month period in Jan/Feb in the DC area where we rarely had temperatures over 37 degrees.
- When I'm on the highway, I see average performance of ~50 mpg if I'm near speed limits. When I'm moving in rush hour traffic, I see average performance of ~60 mpg. What gets the mileage low is that on uphill stretches mileage goes down to ~20mpg or less, and on acceleration, if you speed up too quickly, mileage will go down as well... if you gradually speed up, the electric motor will go just a tad longer and the engine will kick in just a little bit later, when you have more momentum--at that point mileage is somewhat better (~30 mpg).
So I've interpreted the EPA ratings as "if you were only driving on a highway for a full tank of gas, at highway speeds moving all the time, you'd get ~55 mpg; if you were only driving in city traffic, moving most of the time at city speeds, you'd get ~60 mpg... if you're in stop-and-go commuter traffic that shifts between highway and city, with hills and such, YMMV."
Still, on my old Mazda 626, I'd only ever get anything close to 32mpg when I was on road trips on highways with steady speeds... other than that, i'd be averaging high 20s on a full tank of gas.
I hear BBC Films and I can't help but think of campy foam-rubber creatures and sets that look like they're lit with a votive.
It's as if there's only one, lonely lightbulb that the BBC shares amongst all its productions--anyone see the Chronicles of Narnia that they glopped out?
Let's hope that rather than character acting under poor conditions we get crunchy gravel, faces you can see and no visible strings.
Alternative scientific truths as a concept are less absurd than you think. Otherwise, why would we currently be still stuck in debating whether or not global warming is actually happening? Different scientists claim to have the scientific truth about it ("it's happening", "it's not happening", "we don't know if it's happening", "based on what we can see and observe it's happening", "we can never say if it's happening"). At that point, scientific truth becomes much less an item of what is objectively true and known and more linked to which scientists are believed for what reasons (political, economic, philosophical). Claiming that science is wholly empirical and that it deals only with observed reality assumes that there are no disputes over what observations mean or don't mean.
It was taken as a scientific truth that gravitational force was communicated instantly across space once Newton's formulas were accepted. Then along came Einstein and threw it all into turmoil by showing that this was impossible. Then came the quantum mechanics people and showed that gravity is not even a meaningful force when you're talking about subatomic
Those of us with accent marks on our last names appreciate the Alt-Graph key. No such appreciation extended to programmers who pretend there's nothing beyond the 128 characters of basic ASCII.
My friend, sounds like you're using a mighty old phone--I get about two days of standby on my i95 with some heavy usage, and the heaviest phone Nextel sells nowadays (the i58sr) weighs in at 6.7 ounces, and that's the ruggedized, run-a-truck-over-it beast-a-phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Gore popularized the phrase, but never claimed to invent it either--that's just been attribution by sloppy amateur historians. Ralph Lee Smith actually used it first, in his book The Wired Society. He coined the phrase in the 1960s to discuss cable television and the promise that it could be used to deliver interactive content, electronic community participation, remote access to libraries, and make everyone a publisher on what would be an "electronic highway".
[Interesting to note that until the web browser, the cable companies really only wanted to deliver 500 channels of nothing to watch and push-button pizza delivery].
One other tidbit... Newt Gingrich chimed in his usual helpful self in the early 1990s saying that we should instead have an "information superrailroad" -- i.e. that it shouldn't be built by the government (a la highway) but by private enterprise... never mind the whole history of railroad gauges that didn't match, schedules that didn't coordinate, and the small little issue of collusion and monopoly that led to the Sherman Anti-trust act.
Gore may have added the "super" part, and i'm sure that it resonated with him just because his dad had been a key participant in launching the Eisenhower Interstate system when he was a senator.
Yes!
Let the UN general assembly do it!
No, wait, maybe it should be the ITU!
No, wait, maybe it should be the ISO!
Hmm... maybe the International electrotechnical commission?
Oh, wait... the US doesn't like standards-setting bodies. OR international organizations, for that matter.
It's better to have a hodgepodge of cell phone technologies that don't talk to each other, a silly measurement system based on bodyparts and british wheat, a TV broadcast system that never twice gives you the same color, never mind a digital TV standard that the rest of the world won't use.
I'm sure Bolton will take care of it once he's in the UN as our ambassador. Yeah, that's the ticket...
Part of the issue is that reporters, journalists and so on, in trying to appear hip or with-it start using tech jargon in mainstream consumer reporting without nary a meaningful explanation.
I think that if local news reporter Trisha Takanawa spent less time trying to sound in-the-know by reporting about 'phishing', '419 chains', 'spyware' and 'trojans' and instead talked about 'email financial scams' and 'online snooping' people would be more likely to get it. She might not get the points with the kewl kids, but at least she'd be doing a public service rather than some self service.
Well, that's changing. As a result of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiations, Costa Rica finally, after being asked to leave the room because they weren't playing ball and "this room is only for serious negotiations" (funny thing, a friend of mine was involved in the negotiations and had some choice things to say regarding that), finally came to and agreed to privatize, over time, two of its big national industries: insurance and telecom. [http://www.ustr.gov/assets/Document_Library/Repor ts_Publications/2004/2004_National_Trade_Estimate/ 2004_NTE_Report/asset_upload_file462_4745.pdf]
To get internet access in Costa Rica, unless you were a scientific institution, you still have to go through the ICE, the state entity. They charge higher-than-US dialup prices for nowhere close to US-quality service (monthly access fees PLUS minutes of usage on your phone line). To get a cell phone you often must wait months and can only get it through them. Costa Rica's basic argument is that telecommunications is a right of people, that both the airwaves and the land through which phone lines travel are Costa Rican property and that they should be driven by social need rather than profit. Great in theory: in practice, apalling.
Interestingly, this new proposed regulation can't really be very long-lived UNLESS they say that because they agreed to open up their network, internet and wireless lines (nothing said of Plain-ole-telephone service), they may be saying that this will compete with a public national service and undermine the goal of the state.
I don't buy it.
You're calling it Earth--are you sure you don't mean Teegeeack?.
It's actually usually a bit worse than your average corporate office--at least in average corporate office you usually have one IT group making decisions and aren't bound by lowest bid contract rules for services. Did some consulting work for a USSS app in a previous life and have plenty of friends who do the federal job thing--i hear these stories often.
USS IT program managers are just like program managers anywhere else. Some of them understand technology in depth. Others can recite buzzwords on command without a sense as to what they mean.
Add to that the complication that in the federal government, depending on the agency, different kinds of telecoms services are bought and supported by different groups. Add to that the sales processes of many telcos, which sell "the security story" of their stuff without necessarily providing all the instructions as to how to use them once sold, and there you go: a USSS unencrypted communication on a mobile device.
Say USSS IT PM wants to give his folks blackberries. USSSITPM calls friendly T-mobile account manager. FTAM says "sure, BlackBerry is y our thing, you have as highly secure, end-to-end, FIPS 140-2 certified triple-DES encrypted" [non-fed-speak;it's good by your own security standards].
So USSS IT PM says "No prob, give me 300". [Good call too--it's actually somewhat comforting that these devices are used as widely in fed. gov't, since they do have a very strong security infrastructure for a widely available commercial device].
So USSS IT PM is happy with Blackberries, now he wants to put wireless WAN cards on laptops for those who already are on the field a lot of the time and can't get a BB because working with large docs yadda yadda. Sure, FTAM say, we can put GPRS cards on your laptops. How about security? USSSITPM asks. Ah, GPRS is seucre, FTAM says, "we encrypt all over the air transactions, so it never goes out in the clear over the air" and USSSITPM says "ok, give me five". Never mind that it goes out in the clear inside carrier's network and to mail server.
Put on USSS Agent Bagodonuts' laptop. Bagodonuts has a degree in criminology, a law degree, and has gone through USSS boot camp--but doesn't understand technology well. Bagodonuts writes his memo in Word, uses tabs to indent paragraphs and spaces to create columns, doesn't know how to turn off Clippy. He's out in Dubuque and needs to send it back to DC from the airport, can't get the VPN thing working because the GPRS card dohickey uses some kind of compression which breaks VPN. Sends it straight from Outlook express through to SMTP server (one of his office buddies taught set it up for him).
There you go. Sensitive file sent out in the clear. The infrastructure was there, the rules were there, but the services didn't match the expectations.
Looks like someone forgot to file this down.
The Intelligent Design pushers will have a field day with this one!
My guess is that it had to do with vibrations. Any noise caused vibrations, and the music with the heaviest bass and more vibration caused more growth than the music with more sedate vibration, which in turn caused more growth than the absolute silence which had no effect whatsoever.
Ah yes, I almost drove off NJ Turnpike listening to the Most Unwanted Song. People surveyed hate holiday tunes, children singing, and jingles--what better way to give the people what they don't want than mingling it all together?
Hey everybody, it's Ramadan!
Ramadan! Ramadan! Lots of praying with no breakfast.
Ramadan! So much fun!
Do all your shopping, at Walmart!
To get an MS Blog, you have to sign up for it. .NET Passport Services ("Software") is owned by and is the copyrighted work of Microsoft and/or its suppliers. "
.NET Passport Services, you grant them copyright over it... that is, they'd have to explicitly recognize you as one of Microsoft's suppliers, no?
To sign up for it, you have to get Passport.
To get passport, you have to agree to their EULA.
Their EULA says:
"All content and software (if any) that is made available to view and/or download from the Web pages that are part of the
So, in essence, they could claim that as a virtue of creating content on their blog site, part of
Just a thought.
The lone developer still can exist there--I've met some, (work with some as part of current work in managing developer relations for a carrier), and they can succeed--but in all honesty someone working in a garage, by his or her lonesome, will have a very difficult time getting to the point of actually making any money on software or services. The ones who succeed are the exception and often do it as a function of procedural flukes/grandfathering or the very rare killer-like application that gets word of mouth.
Setting aside patents and trademark searches for new applications, which are on their own fairly expensive and time consuming processes, a lone wolf building a game, for example, has the following additional barriers:
Some would say "well, that's what the various shareware, freeware sites are out for, for people to make a name and just get name recognition". Yes, but... carriers are in a position as a distribution waystation, a controller of access if you will, and are very unlikely to give that up just because LoneWolf developer in his college dorm room just wrote the next best solitaire and wants to post it on a distro site.
The era of sitting alone in a basement or dorm room avoiding sunlight, falling in love with your compiler because it understands you better than humans, and basking in the pipe dreams of being the next Alexey Pajitnov is almost over.
The next era might still be open to the teams of Mavericks who Know Their Stuff-- sound, graphics, rendering engines, coding, packaging, sales pitches -- and work as a small team. I've seen that work in this space. Small companies have a better shot at it.
I've been carving detailed pumpkins old-school style--knife and spoon--for years now. Some of the scariest characters to date:
AshcroftPumpkin
YoursTrulyPumpkin
This year's pumpkin is CheneyPumpkin. Finished it last night, haven't had a chance to post pictures yet.
Over-the-air and cable broadcasters do have a social responsibility as journalists to do so. They may not have an economic incentive to do so.
We grant broadcasters the use of our public airwaves, and cable companies the use of our public rights of way, so that they can to broadcast reruns of Fantasy Island and Gilmore Girls in exchange for the obligation to deliver local news, public access television, and minimum services. The expectation is that they would fulfil their responsibility to report on timely and relevant news items in a fair and objective fashion.
Sure, the FCC has under republican watch made a mockery of many of these expectations, but in principle they are still there.
The fact that news outlets may choose to focus on the latest killer product under your sink instead of about civic education or local unemployment or whatever other actually relevant issues there may be doesn't excuse them from the expectation that they should be doing it.
Separate responsibility from desire or economic incentive. Believe there are such things as social responsibilities that corporations undertake in exchange for the protections we provide them as a society. DOn't let people fool you into believing that just because they don't fulfill their obligations they never had them.
Agreed. If The Royal We could lobby Endnote's creators to either include native support for OO.o or for its file format in Document Scan, it would be a huge coup. as it is, the bibliography tool within OO.o seems to do some basics, but nothing quite like the pain-reducing citation management that EndNote handles.
I had to negotiate dealing with MS Word tracked changes and inline comments created by my thesis advisor while wanting to keep my Mac as a Microsoft-free zone. Ended up trying AppleWorks [not quite an office package as an OfficeSpace package... why hasn't this dog died yet?], TextEdit, TeX (no patience for that critter), AbiWord, ThinkFree Office (slower than your average Republican president) until I learned there was an X11 port of OpenOffice for Mac OS X.
Have to say that it tackled the job superbly for what was about as complicated as a document gets--a book-length work. Tracked changes worked almost seamlessly, even when these changes were made in MS Word versions of the docs. Export and import to/from MS word caused no noticeable difficulties, not even when dealing with paragraph formats, TOCs, styles, graphics, tables, charts and the like.
In all, I was very impressed with its robustness and more than pleased by the price.
My only beefs:
- one somewhat minor problem dealing with section formatting and heading numbering when you use a master document with subsection documents--well known apparently in the OO.o discussion forums
- no native support in EndNote for the OO.o format--made dealing with citations and bibliography a bit tricky (had to save from that format to RTF to run through doc scan to export as RTF and then re-format citations in OO.o document to make us of Bibliography). Then again, that's an issue not with OO.o per-se but with the folks who make EndNote having their heads up their Microsofted tuchases.
- occasional crashiness/quirkiness when dealing with tracked changes--sometimes the UI would jump forward many pages and bail out when trying to return. I found that there were mouse and keyboard sequences I should just avoid when navigating that UI.
All around though, the final product turned out very well from a pure text formatting perspective. Contentwise? you be the judge.
Considering that what these repeaters would do is basically create a hotzone within the airplane, the actual phone wouldn't be moving in relation to the tower, so you wouldn't really experience the doppler effect in the communication between phone and aircraft cell site.
Brings to mind images of Alice and Bob throwing baseballs at each other on a train while Charlie watches from the side of the tracks...
There would be other technical quirks with getting iDEN service on a plane, though... Nextel already does some of this in buildings, putting up combined wifi/iden hotspots to provide in-building coverage--the require custom hardware since even though iDEN is based on TDMA at the lowest level, it still needs the higher level digital processing piece in place at the cell site.
I do have some level of admiration for someone who can code assembly in her sleep, but I'd rather focus on what the software does, and how it does it, than what it is written with.
In the wireless space, I've seen a lot of really excellent software--things that link position sensors and GPS and cameras and remote controls and other people. I've also seen a lot of crap. It didn't matter if it was written in J2ME or BREW or flavor-of-.NET or C++ ; what mattered was what the coder could do with the tools.
It's like any other field where talent matters. I'm sure Norm Abrams could build a set of Adirondack deck chairs using only a Dremel and a butter knife if he had to...
That's not how NDAs work. You sign an NDA saying that you acknowledge that you'll hear stuff that's private and that you agree not to disclose it outside of the circle of people who are bound by the agreement. Anyone who wrote an NDA with the specifics of what is not to be discussed would be a fool.
I run a developer program for a US carrier. We make it fairly difficult for everyday users to install applications on their phones that have not been blessed/sanctified, particularly to avoid widespread dissemination of things like this.
We're frequently lambasted on public forums and through nastygrams from folks (mostly developer types) who keep on insisting that these restrictions are unconscionable, that information wants to be free and that they bought the phone and they should be able to do whatever they want to it.
You can imagine the reception I get whenever I explain that the restrictions are there, in great part, to protect customers from unwittingly loading malware on their phones that would cause them to get ridiculously huge phone bills.
Mild pleasure to be taken from vindication, I guess.
Taking two years of courses and having certification in WebSphere and Microsoft stuff does not make you a computer scientist--it just makes you a programmer.
There's a difference.
From working with developers of all sorts as part of what I do, I can tell you that there's a clear difference between someone who simply learned to code from reading a book on EJB development and someone who took enough courses in networking protocols, systems design and compilers to know that using HTTP to send 4 bytes of data from point to point is a bad idea.
It takes more than simple practical knowhow to actually be thoroughly trained in a field. A two-year certification program is just that...
jfr
True, I've rarely gotten more than 45 mpg on a full tank of gas on my new Prius. BUT, I also know a few things:
- I bought my car in January, and it's very apparent that battery performance is lower when it's cold, causing more fuel consumption. Other Prius owners confirm that... we had a full two month period in Jan/Feb in the DC area where we rarely had temperatures over 37 degrees.
- When I'm on the highway, I see average performance of ~50 mpg if I'm near speed limits. When I'm moving in rush hour traffic, I see average performance of ~60 mpg. What gets the mileage low is that on uphill stretches mileage goes down to ~20mpg or less, and on acceleration, if you speed up too quickly, mileage will go down as well... if you gradually speed up, the electric motor will go just a tad longer and the engine will kick in just a little bit later, when you have more momentum--at that point mileage is somewhat better (~30 mpg).
So I've interpreted the EPA ratings as "if you were only driving on a highway for a full tank of gas, at highway speeds moving all the time, you'd get ~55 mpg; if you were only driving in city traffic, moving most of the time at city speeds, you'd get ~60 mpg... if you're in stop-and-go commuter traffic that shifts between highway and city, with hills and such, YMMV."
Still, on my old Mazda 626, I'd only ever get anything close to 32mpg when I was on road trips on highways with steady speeds... other than that, i'd be averaging high 20s on a full tank of gas.
I hear BBC Films and I can't help but think of campy foam-rubber creatures and sets that look like they're lit with a votive.
It's as if there's only one, lonely lightbulb that the BBC shares amongst all its productions--anyone see the Chronicles of Narnia that they glopped out?
Let's hope that rather than character acting under poor conditions we get crunchy gravel, faces you can see and no visible strings.
JFR
Alternative scientific truths as a concept are less absurd than you think. Otherwise, why would we currently be still stuck in debating whether or not global warming is actually happening? Different scientists claim to have the scientific truth about it ("it's happening", "it's not happening", "we don't know if it's happening", "based on what we can see and observe it's happening", "we can never say if it's happening"). At that point, scientific truth becomes much less an item of what is objectively true and known and more linked to which scientists are believed for what reasons (political, economic, philosophical). Claiming that science is wholly empirical and that it deals only with observed reality assumes that there are no disputes over what observations mean or don't mean.
It was taken as a scientific truth that gravitational force was communicated instantly across space once Newton's formulas were accepted. Then along came Einstein and threw it all into turmoil by showing that this was impossible. Then came the quantum mechanics people and showed that gravity is not even a meaningful force when you're talking about subatomic
-jfr
Those of us with accent marks on our last names appreciate the Alt-Graph key.
No such appreciation extended to programmers who pretend there's nothing beyond the 128 characters of basic ASCII.
My friend, sounds like you're using a mighty old phone--I get about two days of standby on my i95 with some heavy usage, and the heaviest phone Nextel sells nowadays (the i58sr) weighs in at 6.7 ounces, and that's the ruggedized, run-a-truck-over-it beast-a-phone.