Yeah. It was sadly underutilized at the time I was there. The possibilities truly should have been endless.
The system was very simply but elegantly designed, though. There was a single "head end" with the various pieces of source equipment for the different channels, and the main amplifiers, which fed down to distribution amplifiers in the buildings.
What was cool -- and I don't know if this exists in most cable systems or was just something exotic -- was that the amplifiers scattered through the system amplified most channels in the normal way, pushing them downstream. Except for a few channels, which weren't normally viewable on a TV -- I think they were called A1, A2 and A3. I think they were below CATV Channel 1, but I'm not sure. On those particular frequencies, the amplifiers would pass the signal back up the chain, towards the headend. At the headend was a receiver tuned to that frequency, which turned around and rebroadcast it out on a normal channel. (So if you injected into A1, it would come out on TV6, A2 on TV7, etc.)
So basically, you could go anywhere in the system with a special RF modulator, plug in a video and audio source, and start feeding video in, and it would be simulcast all over campus.
I really never had nearly as much fun with that as I should have.
IIRC, all the equipment in the system was made by Blonder-Tongue.
If those became common it would be trivial to write a program that would interpret them. For example, there are a limited number of 'quantity' or 'counting' words. All I'd have to do was look for the word {first,second,third,fourth,...} and then from the second word group, where word groups are delimited by {;,:,.,...}, and count that many words in and insert it. Even if the machine was only right 50% of the time, that would still be acceptable for a botnet that can do it every few seconds.
True text-based CAPCHAS would require something more complicated. Basically, a reading-comprehension test that's beyond the known ability of natural-language processing AIs. For example (and I'm just assuming that an AI couldn't do this, I'm not involved in AI research), something like this. Note that you'd really have to do the whole test on that page, too; you can't just do one multiple-choice test, because then you'd have a 20% false-pass rate, when an attacker could choose randomly and get it right. (For a 1% false-pass, you need to have at least 3, 5-option multiple choice questions, and you can't allow any retries.) If you used that page's test, you'd have 7 4-option questions, giving you a (if I did my math right) 0.000061% chance of passing using random answers.
There are definitely possibilities there, but you'd probably get people complaining that it discriminates against people who don't have the linguistic or cultural background to pass the test, although they're human. That might be fine in an online forum (where knocking out people that don't speak English isn't really a big loss to them or you), but for a government website it would probably not pass muster. At least not unless it was in a country that had a single official language.
In fact, all the modern Web 2.0 / CSS / Flash stuff is basically lost on people using Braille terminals or screen readers (I think at this point, screen reading software is more popular for blind people than Braille terms are). And in some cases it makes pages nearly impossible to use or navigate.
I think every web designer should be forced to navigate his or her site at least once, by using Lynx with a window height of one line. That's probably the closest easy approximation to using a Braille terminal that you can get.
I used to know a guy (sighted, actually) who had a Braille terminal and showed me how it works. They're fairly neat devices; I can imagine that one would be a big fan of the CLI with one.
The killer app of flickr for me is, quite simply, that flickr does not use a "storage space" concept. They only use an "upload limit". The $25/year 6gig Picasa may sound like a lot, but if you upload your 2 gigs a month on your $25/year flickr account, you've filled an entire Picasa in three months.
For snapshot moms, 6 gigs of temporary storage is a pittance. I can shoot 6 gigs in a day, easily, and even if I only keep one percent, that's still going to run up against the Picasa storage limit eventually. (With flickr, I may have to throttle the uploads or send them up in slightly reduced form, but I don't hit a brick wall.)
This is true. Picasa/Google's hard storage limit, in a word, sucks. However, I suspect that if you took the total capacity of Flickr's storage farm, and divided it by the number of users, they have way less than 6GB per user, even if you only counted Pro users. Most people just don't shoot that much, which is why Flickr can get away with its 'unlimited' service.
Actually, when I first saw Flickr, I was astounded that it wasn't a Google product. I always thought that they seriously missed the boat in letting Yahoo scoop it up. It's just very... Google-like. Particularly since the lack of an upload limit seems like they're applying the same sort of logic that Gmail did for email, to photos. But I digress.
Flickr, generally speaking, is the superior service in all but a few ways, but those few ways -- mainly security/control of who can view one's own photos -- are pretty important to a lot of average 'family photographers.' I wouldn't be comfortable, for instance, putting photos from a family gathering on Flickr, particularly if they contained shots of other people's children; Google's service makes sharing a set of photos with a limited group of people trivial.
Either Flickr is going to add better privacy controls and invitation-only capacities, thereby closing the gap with Google, or Google is going to remove the upload limit and generally spruce things up to make it more appealing to serious photographers. Right now, you have Google appealing more to casual/family shooters, and Flickr a much better choice for hobbyist/prosumer volume photographers.
I guess the real question is whether the two will converge, or diverge completely in order to capture different markets.
There's plenty of colleges that only have their internal phone lines the the rooms and are delivering internet connections via DSL technology from their closets. Schools with 2000 students on campus and sometimes in buildings on the historic registry. They REALLY want to be able to use that existing infrastructure to deliver a high speed connection.
Bingo. I remember that my college had coax strung all over the place, mostly installed in the 70s and 80s, when CATV was still considered cool. (Actually, they had enough hardware to play at being their own cable TV company; in addition to giving you broadcast stations, there were even some "campus TV" stations with original programming, a scrolling bulletin-board, and campus radio-over-TV channel. They even had upstream-broadcasting amplifiers, so you could plug into any outlet with a special converter and broadcast live to the entire campus. *sigh* That was cool.) Since it was being installed at a time when much new construction was going on, there are a lot of places where coax goes and more recent computer network cables don't. Pulling new cable is an expensive proposition, and I think there could be a sizable niche market for any technology that allowed reasonably fast computer networking over existing cable TV coax.
Actually, systems like the Japanese one are really the sort of alternatives I was proposing to the wheel-reinvention of simply making "another GPS."
From an an article on Japan's system, "although the QZSS is seen primarily as an augmentation to GPS, without requirements or plans for it to work in standalone mode, QZSS can provide limited accuracy positioning on its own." That seems like a good approach, which the Europeans might want to consider. Rather than simply pretending GPS doesn't exist, it augments it when available, providing an enhanced level of service and enabling new applications. (*cough* self-driving cars... *cough*) However it could also fall back and provide actual positioning in the absence of GPS if really necessary. (Although the Japanese don't seem particularly concerned in that regard, it shows that such a system would be capable of it.)
If that's the kind of system that China is building, then more power to them; I think the Europeans would be smart to follow the same path. Although actually, what would be best, is if the various national governments making their incompatible national GPS-augmentation systems, agreed on a univeral standard (or at least standard frequency band, so the receivers could be physically the same). Probably wishful thinking there, but a system like that would probably lengthen the life of the current-generation GPS system while providing the kind of accuracy that won't be available worldwide without a huge investment in new satellites (GPSIII).
Anyone think that $700 is an awful lot of money to spend? Particularly on something that's almost certainly going to decline in value precipitously? Whatever they're putting in this bundle, I'll wager that in six months, you'd be able to buy all of it for $350 or less.
I'm not sure how rich I'd have to be, to not be able to wait until the "oooh shiney" premium is gone, but apparently it's a lot richer than I am.
I just hope the people that are buying this feel like they're getting their money's worth. And that they have their real expenses (you know, like food, shelter, education, debt) covered first.
Yeah, and you can become a particle physicist in your spare time too.
Well actually you can, it's just rather unlikely that anyone would hire you, without the backing of some sort of accredited school saying that you know it. In terms of knowledge, you could know the exact same things, you'd just lack a piece of paper vouching for you.
There's nothing magic about going to school; colleges these days aren't repositories of secret information, released only once you've sworn an oath of allegiance to the guild lords; you can find out most of what's being taught in any college class by buying the book. (In graduate classes or more participatory classes, it could be harder; but I'm thinking about bachelors-degree physics and mathematics.) In large universities, many classes aren't even taught by professors anyway; just by TA's (slightly more advanced students) reading from someone else's notes or from the book.
The reason the un-degreed student isn't worth anything, is because most people don't have the attention span or discipline to actually learn that way. Therefore, if you said that you'd spent a few years months sitting in your room, studying particle physics, and done all the experiments with equipment you built yourself in your basement, and now knew as much as someone who'd learned it while studying for a degree, I'd probably not believe you. It's not that it's not possible, it's just not likely.
Degrees exist because they're a way of verifying that somebody probably knows something, without actually testing them. The more esoteric the subject, the more important the diploma becomes, because it's harder and harder to verify that someone actually knows their stuff.
Here's the issue I take with that argument. As more and more critical systems begin to depend on GPS, suddenly pulling the rug out from under someone by denying service wouldn't be an invitation to war, it would be an act of war in itself.
The U.S. is not going to start a nuclear war with anyone; it has more to lose than anybody else. It's just not going to happen. And before people bring up Iraq as some sort of evidence of U.S. instability, realize that on the scale of things, attacking Iraq was like kicking a mangy dog in an alley; basically an act of frustration against a vastly inferior enemy. The U.S. body politic is not stupid, and far too covetous of its creature comforts, to engage in real war voluntarily.
The countries that are capable of launching their own navigation systems, are also the ones that the U.S. (or anyone else) isn't going to really go to war with -- because they also happen to be nuclear powers. No war between any two countries with satellite navigation systems -- the kind of war that would cause them to do something as provocative and disastrous as disabling the other's navigation capabilities -- would last more than twenty minutes. Once you establish that denial of navigation service would be nuclear-strike worthy, it just disappears off of the menu of available options.
And ballistic missiles, by the way, do not use GPS to find their targets.
Interesting, I didn't even know those settings were there. I'll have to go into the web interface and poke around to see what they've added new in there.
You don't lose a whole lot in moving from the web interface to a local mailreader; Google's spam headers that it uses for handing still come through in your downloaded messages, so you can set your local spamfilters to take advantage of them. (Though you might want to use with some care; I have servers that email me logs at night, and Gmail has always perceived these as 'spammy' because of the lack of DNS MX records for the originating domains.)
All in all, being able to check email through the web interface yet still have it all download and sync up with my local mailreader (I use Apple Mail) works pretty well for me. There is some stuff that could definitely be improved with Gmail, but in general I don't have too many complaints. They really raised the bar for free email, and I think everyone (even if you use one of the other services) has benefited from that in some way.
Seriously, how many different navigation systems do we need?
Let's see, the U.S. has GPS. And the Europeans don't trust Americans, so they want Galileo. And the Russians don't want to admit that the Europeans could be better than them at anything, so they're keeping GLONASS around. The Chinese don't trust anybody, and nobody trusts the Chinese, so they have Beidou. The only thing we're missing is one by India (to compete with the Chinese), or maybe one just by France that's purposely incompatible with the rest of Europe's (is "SENAV" taken?).
How soon until the satellites start running into each other? (Yes, I know they won't really; it'll probably be radio spectrum that we run out of first.)
At least as it looks right now, the only system that's even going to be an improvement over GPS is Galileo, and even then it won't be by much. Seems like it would be a whole lot more productive to build systems that augment the signal already available from GPS, and then can call back to providing position itself if GPS goes out; then you'd be able to get higher precision. With higher precision signals, a whole lot of interesting things become possible: you can have automatic self-driving farm equipment (like John Deere's ground-based StarFire augmentation system), lower-cost aircraft navigation, all sorts of cool remote-sensing applications. If you thought that GPS in itself was cool, there are far more opportunities to use it, when you start talking about inch-accurate systems.
The duplication of effort seems mostly like a penis-length contest, and while I think competition in all things is generally good, I'm not sure that this is really happening for any rational reason. There are better uses that the investment and satellite space could be put towards, than simply overlapping each other's navigation systems.
Actually, when I read this, I think it's aimed at Flickr.
Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa Web Albums are basically similar services. Flickr is a much bigger and more mature service, but Google's has more features and offers more control -- in particular, it implements some features that folks on Flickr have been begging for, literally for years in some cases.
(For example, Web Albums lets you upload photos to an "unlisted" album, which you can then send out special invitation emails out from; only people with the special URL in the email can access the photos. Flickr provides no such method of control; either your photos are public and open to the world, or they're open only to specific Flickr members you designate as 'friends' or 'family.' Basically, if you want to share photos only with your family, Flickr wants you to sign them all up for Yahoo IDs and Flickr memberships. Yeah, right.)
But once you have a few hundred photos up on Flickr, it's difficult to migrate off of. If you have them all carefully organized in iPhoto or something, then maybe you can do it, but if you've uploaded a few photos from here, a few from there, scattered across a dozen computers or emailed from mobile phones, there's no easy way to extract everything and migrate it to a different service. You're basically stuck with Yahoo, and the longer you stay with them, the more photos you upload... you can see where it goes. (Although, maybe there's some way you could come up with a shell script that would parse Flickr's URLs and download the full-resolution photos, and file them according to photosets and other information.)
If the data was more easily transferable, then people could migrate from one service to the next. As adoption of Google's Web Albums is hobbled directly by the difficulty of moving off of Flickr, I saw this as one possible interpretation of the article's meaning.
You could always connect via POP and download your GMail to a traditional mail system of your choice periodically.
I'm not sure what happens the first time you connect, because it's been a while that I've been using it, but if I read my email via the web interface (say at work, or at a friend's house) those same messages will still be downloaded via POP the next time I connect it. Even if I've already read/responded/archived those messages (actually it downloads sent messages, too). So this results in me having two copies of every message, one in my local mailfile on my computer, and another in Gmail's repository.
You might have to do something the first time around if you want it to download ALL your stored mail (I don't think it will automatically transfer all your messages the first time or anything), but once you get it working, it's not a bad system. If Google went out of business tomorrow, I wouldn't lose all my hundreds of megabytes of old mail, and if my house got swept away by a tidal wave into the sea, I wouldn't lose it either. (Of course, if Google went out of business AND my house got swept out to sea, then I'd be fucked. But hey, what's life without risk?)
The POP connection is still a little disappointing after being used to IMAP mail (please, Google, please!), but it's better than any other service that I've played with. It beats the hell out of ISP-provided email, and I'd rather have a gmail.com address than a yahoo.com or (gag) hotmail.com one. Gmail doesn't really have any tech cachet to it anymore, but at least it doesn't say "internet ghetto" like Hotmail does.
By buying a puppy from a pet store (which is where, I suspect, most of the "christmas gift" animals come from, because most shelters are more careful than that) you create a vacancy which can be replaced with a new one from the puppy mill. So effectively you fund an inhumane and degrading system, and in all likelihood, later put the dog into the shelter, where it costs money and diverts resources from other animals, until eventually it's killed.
There's no good being done there. There are a whole lot of people making money on the flow of animals from factory breeding farms, through pet stores, to homes where they're not wanted, to animal shelters, and finally into incinerators; that's the cycle 'gift animals' are funding, in large part.
If you think somebody wants a pet, then get them some sort of physical good that they're going to need once they get it. Food, a pet bed / scratching post, leash, whatever. Having a pet is a bit of an expensive proposition, I'm sure they'd be happy to get something that helps them. And then offer to take them down to a shelter or and pay for the adoption or vaccination fees, if you really want to "get them" the animal. (Perhaps animal shelters should sell 'future pet certificates', that you could give as a gift, that would cover the cost of an adoption later on; thus allowing people to give a gift that people could exercise when they're ready.)
I own pets (well, I live with cats; they choose to stay because the food is good, I suppose) and agree with you about all the benefits and satisfaction of living with animals. However, I would never push that on anyone; it's a decision and realization that people need to come to themselves.
Even though I might agree with his feelings on Microsoft, that layout is the sort of thing that makes me want to stab the author.
That's probably one of the first pages I've read (since they got rid of the BLINK tag, anyway) that's actually easier to read if you just open up the source, rather than looking at the actual rendered page.
Please. You speak as though the Geneva Convention is holy writ. The uncomfortable truth about it is that signatories are not required to abide by its principles if they decide their enemy is not conducting warfare according to the Convention. See, they really are no rules to warfare. The Geneva Convention is little more than a few of the more organized nations getting together and saying "in the future, let's agree to not to escalate the fighting in such a way that makes the loser of the next war look really bad, because you never know who that'll be." It's gilded with altruism and compassion, it's just political ass-covering. War is never altruistic nor compassionate. It's just killin' folks and breakin' things.
Pity you probably won't be modded up, but that's probably the best concise summary of the reality of the Geneva Convention that I've ever read.
USA is a 1st world economy but a 3rd world society. The new Banana Republic!
Indeed; or, as my father used to say: "America, the world's fastest-growing third-world country."
I guess we haven't really hit rock-bottom yet though, since it still seems like a whole lot of people from actual third-world countries want to come here. When I start seeing Californians swimming south across the Rio Grande, then I'll know we've arrived.
This is a pretty classic example, actually; comment's like Ballmer's (yesterday), which hinted that people who used a non-Novell Linux would be sued, are its hallmarks. They're not tangible threats, and thus they're not things that can easily be defended against or refuted. They just serve to make the people in decision-making positions uneasy, and thus lead them down the path of least resistance. It's basically an attempt to make a smaller competitor look like an 'unknown quantity' in comparison to a well-known offering by a big-name company.
Many people consider the first instance of "FUD" in the IT world to have been by IBM against Amdahl during the mainframe wars (this is mentioned in the WP article above), but as a business tactic I'm sure you could find lots more historical examples. (Things that come to mind -- early automotive manufacturers prior to the resolution of the Selden patent, various 19th century 'railroad wars'.)
Is there any site around which details which companies will either sell you a 'bare metal' laptop, or which will refund you the cost of Windows if you don't want it, and tell you how to go about getting the refund?
I've been thinking about getting a laptop to run Linux on, but I'm not going to do it if it means buying a copy of Windows. The idea of wasting money on that piece of crap software that I'll never use just irks me.
There seems to be anecdotal evidence of people getting Windows refunds; it would be nice if someone gathered the information on how they did it together, so that people who wanted to follow in their path could do it more easily.
I wonder whether the URL could be sniffed in some way, by monitoring what Quicken does. I assume that the connection itself is encrypted, but I'm not sure if that includes encrypting the URL as the file is requested or not...
I was under the impression that the Quicken protocol was proprietary from end to end, and that it was something more complicated than an HTTP download of a QIF file.
The only reason I use Quicken is because it lets me avoid my bank's absolutely horrific website, so anything that requires manually downloading the files is a non-starter. But if the URL could be sniffed, I might have to reconsider GNUCash.
Do the GNUCash people maintain their own database of bank's OFX URLs? Seems like there would be a good demand for a web site that collected them (preferably located in some jurisdiction comfortably removed from Quicken's lawyers), or perhaps which produced configuration files that you could load into GNUCash or other free banking programs to ease the process.
You guys don't have water meters? That's... interesting. So if I use 3x as much water as you, we both pay the same amount at the end of the month?
Seems like you don't have to be Adam Smith to figure out the way that's going to work. It's the "splitting the tab" phenomenon (when you go to a restaurant for lunch and agree to split the check evenly... it encourages people to order more expensive stuff than each other and thus screw everyone else).
I generally don't have a whole lot good to say about my municipality, but I can't complain too much about the way they bill water and sewer service. They meter the incoming fresh water, and use that as the basis for charging (on a per-quantity basis) for water and sewer. They start off on the assumption that most people's incoming water ends up going down the sewer anyway, so you can approximate those quantities as being equal to each other. If you have an irrigation system, or other large water-user that doesn't go into the sewer, you can get a separate meter installed for that and they'll charge you only for the water and not for the sewer. (No idea what the meter costs or if you can only get it on new construction, but I know people whose outdoor taps are billed at a different rate.)
It's been a while since I've really studied the bill, but I think there's probably some base rate for 'service' (essentially to cover the fixed cost of the infrastructure) and then they add the consumption charges onto that. I do recall though, that the cost for sewer disposal was more, per gallon, than the cost of fresh water, which I found interesting (but not totally surprising; those sewage treatment plants don't look cheap).
To cut down on the expense of meter-reading, they bill on a 3-month cycle, and you have the option to choose predictive billing (where they average out your consumption for a year and break it up into equal monthly payments, plus some surcharge) if you want the same amount every month. The same invoice also has municipal garbage collection and recycling on it.
Perhaps the way to encourage adoption of water meters would be to sell them to people as an optional service, for those who don't consume a lot of water and want to save money? So if you base your "flat rate" on a family of 4 and their average consumption, it would make sense for any person/household that didn't consume that much water, to get a meter and switch to consumption-billing. Rather than burying the meters in the sidewalk or street, as is frequently done here (the infrastructure is mostly 50+ years old) you could use meters inside houses or apartments that sent back telemetry via RF in the metal pipes, or some other method. That would keep you from having to dig, and from having to send out meter-readers. Most of the billing could be automated.
Once you get enough people using metered service, it becomes less and less economical to stay on flat-rate billing -- because the people who remain on flat-rate service essentially have to pay for all the water that's used and not metered, including leaks and other line losses, divided up between them. The fewer ways that you 'split the check' the closer you come to having to pay for your own lunch, and the less incentive there is to be a pig. Eventually even high water users might see the advantage in switching to metered service, so as not to be paying for leaks in the lines. (And when you have all-metered service, the water co. has a reason to fix leaks.)
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Yeah. It was sadly underutilized at the time I was there. The possibilities truly should have been endless.
The system was very simply but elegantly designed, though. There was a single "head end" with the various pieces of source equipment for the different channels, and the main amplifiers, which fed down to distribution amplifiers in the buildings.
What was cool -- and I don't know if this exists in most cable systems or was just something exotic -- was that the amplifiers scattered through the system amplified most channels in the normal way, pushing them downstream. Except for a few channels, which weren't normally viewable on a TV -- I think they were called A1, A2 and A3. I think they were below CATV Channel 1, but I'm not sure. On those particular frequencies, the amplifiers would pass the signal back up the chain, towards the headend. At the headend was a receiver tuned to that frequency, which turned around and rebroadcast it out on a normal channel. (So if you injected into A1, it would come out on TV6, A2 on TV7, etc.)
So basically, you could go anywhere in the system with a special RF modulator, plug in a video and audio source, and start feeding video in, and it would be simulcast all over campus.
I really never had nearly as much fun with that as I should have.
IIRC, all the equipment in the system was made by Blonder-Tongue.
If those became common it would be trivial to write a program that would interpret them. For example, there are a limited number of 'quantity' or 'counting' words. All I'd have to do was look for the word {first,second,third,fourth,...} and then from the second word group, where word groups are delimited by {;,:,.,...}, and count that many words in and insert it. Even if the machine was only right 50% of the time, that would still be acceptable for a botnet that can do it every few seconds.
True text-based CAPCHAS would require something more complicated. Basically, a reading-comprehension test that's beyond the known ability of natural-language processing AIs. For example (and I'm just assuming that an AI couldn't do this, I'm not involved in AI research), something like this. Note that you'd really have to do the whole test on that page, too; you can't just do one multiple-choice test, because then you'd have a 20% false-pass rate, when an attacker could choose randomly and get it right. (For a 1% false-pass, you need to have at least 3, 5-option multiple choice questions, and you can't allow any retries.) If you used that page's test, you'd have 7 4-option questions, giving you a (if I did my math right) 0.000061% chance of passing using random answers.
There are definitely possibilities there, but you'd probably get people complaining that it discriminates against people who don't have the linguistic or cultural background to pass the test, although they're human. That might be fine in an online forum (where knocking out people that don't speak English isn't really a big loss to them or you), but for a government website it would probably not pass muster. At least not unless it was in a country that had a single official language.
They don't.
In fact, all the modern Web 2.0 / CSS / Flash stuff is basically lost on people using Braille terminals or screen readers (I think at this point, screen reading software is more popular for blind people than Braille terms are). And in some cases it makes pages nearly impossible to use or navigate.
I think every web designer should be forced to navigate his or her site at least once, by using Lynx with a window height of one line. That's probably the closest easy approximation to using a Braille terminal that you can get.
I used to know a guy (sighted, actually) who had a Braille terminal and showed me how it works. They're fairly neat devices; I can imagine that one would be a big fan of the CLI with one.
Actually, when I first saw Flickr, I was astounded that it wasn't a Google product. I always thought that they seriously missed the boat in letting Yahoo scoop it up. It's just very
Flickr, generally speaking, is the superior service in all but a few ways, but those few ways -- mainly security/control of who can view one's own photos -- are pretty important to a lot of average 'family photographers.' I wouldn't be comfortable, for instance, putting photos from a family gathering on Flickr, particularly if they contained shots of other people's children; Google's service makes sharing a set of photos with a limited group of people trivial.
Either Flickr is going to add better privacy controls and invitation-only capacities, thereby closing the gap with Google, or Google is going to remove the upload limit and generally spruce things up to make it more appealing to serious photographers. Right now, you have Google appealing more to casual/family shooters, and Flickr a much better choice for hobbyist/prosumer volume photographers.
I guess the real question is whether the two will converge, or diverge completely in order to capture different markets.
There's plenty of colleges that only have their internal phone lines the the rooms and are delivering internet connections via DSL technology from their closets. Schools with 2000 students on campus and sometimes in buildings on the historic registry. They REALLY want to be able to use that existing infrastructure to deliver a high speed connection.
Bingo. I remember that my college had coax strung all over the place, mostly installed in the 70s and 80s, when CATV was still considered cool. (Actually, they had enough hardware to play at being their own cable TV company; in addition to giving you broadcast stations, there were even some "campus TV" stations with original programming, a scrolling bulletin-board, and campus radio-over-TV channel. They even had upstream-broadcasting amplifiers, so you could plug into any outlet with a special converter and broadcast live to the entire campus. *sigh* That was cool.) Since it was being installed at a time when much new construction was going on, there are a lot of places where coax goes and more recent computer network cables don't. Pulling new cable is an expensive proposition, and I think there could be a sizable niche market for any technology that allowed reasonably fast computer networking over existing cable TV coax.
That's pretty interesting.
Actually, systems like the Japanese one are really the sort of alternatives I was proposing to the wheel-reinvention of simply making "another GPS."
From an an article on Japan's system, "although the QZSS is seen primarily as an augmentation to GPS, without requirements or plans for it to work in standalone mode, QZSS can provide limited accuracy positioning on its own." That seems like a good approach, which the Europeans might want to consider. Rather than simply pretending GPS doesn't exist, it augments it when available, providing an enhanced level of service and enabling new applications. (*cough* self-driving cars... *cough*) However it could also fall back and provide actual positioning in the absence of GPS if really necessary. (Although the Japanese don't seem particularly concerned in that regard, it shows that such a system would be capable of it.)
If that's the kind of system that China is building, then more power to them; I think the Europeans would be smart to follow the same path. Although actually, what would be best, is if the various national governments making their incompatible national GPS-augmentation systems, agreed on a univeral standard (or at least standard frequency band, so the receivers could be physically the same). Probably wishful thinking there, but a system like that would probably lengthen the life of the current-generation GPS system while providing the kind of accuracy that won't be available worldwide without a huge investment in new satellites (GPSIII).
Anyone think that $700 is an awful lot of money to spend? Particularly on something that's almost certainly going to decline in value precipitously? Whatever they're putting in this bundle, I'll wager that in six months, you'd be able to buy all of it for $350 or less.
I'm not sure how rich I'd have to be, to not be able to wait until the "oooh shiney" premium is gone, but apparently it's a lot richer than I am.
I just hope the people that are buying this feel like they're getting their money's worth. And that they have their real expenses (you know, like food, shelter, education, debt) covered first.
Yeah, and you can become a particle physicist in your spare time too.
Well actually you can, it's just rather unlikely that anyone would hire you, without the backing of some sort of accredited school saying that you know it. In terms of knowledge, you could know the exact same things, you'd just lack a piece of paper vouching for you.
There's nothing magic about going to school; colleges these days aren't repositories of secret information, released only once you've sworn an oath of allegiance to the guild lords; you can find out most of what's being taught in any college class by buying the book. (In graduate classes or more participatory classes, it could be harder; but I'm thinking about bachelors-degree physics and mathematics.) In large universities, many classes aren't even taught by professors anyway; just by TA's (slightly more advanced students) reading from someone else's notes or from the book.
The reason the un-degreed student isn't worth anything, is because most people don't have the attention span or discipline to actually learn that way. Therefore, if you said that you'd spent a few years months sitting in your room, studying particle physics, and done all the experiments with equipment you built yourself in your basement, and now knew as much as someone who'd learned it while studying for a degree, I'd probably not believe you. It's not that it's not possible, it's just not likely.
Degrees exist because they're a way of verifying that somebody probably knows something, without actually testing them. The more esoteric the subject, the more important the diploma becomes, because it's harder and harder to verify that someone actually knows their stuff.
Here's the issue I take with that argument. As more and more critical systems begin to depend on GPS, suddenly pulling the rug out from under someone by denying service wouldn't be an invitation to war, it would be an act of war in itself.
The U.S. is not going to start a nuclear war with anyone; it has more to lose than anybody else. It's just not going to happen. And before people bring up Iraq as some sort of evidence of U.S. instability, realize that on the scale of things, attacking Iraq was like kicking a mangy dog in an alley; basically an act of frustration against a vastly inferior enemy. The U.S. body politic is not stupid, and far too covetous of its creature comforts, to engage in real war voluntarily.
The countries that are capable of launching their own navigation systems, are also the ones that the U.S. (or anyone else) isn't going to really go to war with -- because they also happen to be nuclear powers. No war between any two countries with satellite navigation systems -- the kind of war that would cause them to do something as provocative and disastrous as disabling the other's navigation capabilities -- would last more than twenty minutes. Once you establish that denial of navigation service would be nuclear-strike worthy, it just disappears off of the menu of available options.
And ballistic missiles, by the way, do not use GPS to find their targets.
Interesting, I didn't even know those settings were there. I'll have to go into the web interface and poke around to see what they've added new in there.
You don't lose a whole lot in moving from the web interface to a local mailreader; Google's spam headers that it uses for handing still come through in your downloaded messages, so you can set your local spamfilters to take advantage of them. (Though you might want to use with some care; I have servers that email me logs at night, and Gmail has always perceived these as 'spammy' because of the lack of DNS MX records for the originating domains.)
All in all, being able to check email through the web interface yet still have it all download and sync up with my local mailreader (I use Apple Mail) works pretty well for me. There is some stuff that could definitely be improved with Gmail, but in general I don't have too many complaints. They really raised the bar for free email, and I think everyone (even if you use one of the other services) has benefited from that in some way.
What if the government censors it, you might accidently walk off a cliff or something
Cliffs? What cliffs. China doesn't have any cliffs, nor do they engage in censorship!
Right, comrade?
Since when have the Chinese bothered with piddling little things like royalties?
Seriously, how many different navigation systems do we need?
Let's see, the U.S. has GPS. And the Europeans don't trust Americans, so they want Galileo. And the Russians don't want to admit that the Europeans could be better than them at anything, so they're keeping GLONASS around. The Chinese don't trust anybody, and nobody trusts the Chinese, so they have Beidou. The only thing we're missing is one by India (to compete with the Chinese), or maybe one just by France that's purposely incompatible with the rest of Europe's (is "SENAV" taken?).
How soon until the satellites start running into each other? (Yes, I know they won't really; it'll probably be radio spectrum that we run out of first.)
At least as it looks right now, the only system that's even going to be an improvement over GPS is Galileo, and even then it won't be by much. Seems like it would be a whole lot more productive to build systems that augment the signal already available from GPS, and then can call back to providing position itself if GPS goes out; then you'd be able to get higher precision. With higher precision signals, a whole lot of interesting things become possible: you can have automatic self-driving farm equipment (like John Deere's ground-based StarFire augmentation system), lower-cost aircraft navigation, all sorts of cool remote-sensing applications. If you thought that GPS in itself was cool, there are far more opportunities to use it, when you start talking about inch-accurate systems.
The duplication of effort seems mostly like a penis-length contest, and while I think competition in all things is generally good, I'm not sure that this is really happening for any rational reason. There are better uses that the investment and satellite space could be put towards, than simply overlapping each other's navigation systems.
Actually, when I read this, I think it's aimed at Flickr.
... you can see where it goes. (Although, maybe there's some way you could come up with a shell script that would parse Flickr's URLs and download the full-resolution photos, and file them according to photosets and other information.)
Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa Web Albums are basically similar services. Flickr is a much bigger and more mature service, but Google's has more features and offers more control -- in particular, it implements some features that folks on Flickr have been begging for, literally for years in some cases.
(For example, Web Albums lets you upload photos to an "unlisted" album, which you can then send out special invitation emails out from; only people with the special URL in the email can access the photos. Flickr provides no such method of control; either your photos are public and open to the world, or they're open only to specific Flickr members you designate as 'friends' or 'family.' Basically, if you want to share photos only with your family, Flickr wants you to sign them all up for Yahoo IDs and Flickr memberships. Yeah, right.)
But once you have a few hundred photos up on Flickr, it's difficult to migrate off of. If you have them all carefully organized in iPhoto or something, then maybe you can do it, but if you've uploaded a few photos from here, a few from there, scattered across a dozen computers or emailed from mobile phones, there's no easy way to extract everything and migrate it to a different service. You're basically stuck with Yahoo, and the longer you stay with them, the more photos you upload
If the data was more easily transferable, then people could migrate from one service to the next. As adoption of Google's Web Albums is hobbled directly by the difficulty of moving off of Flickr, I saw this as one possible interpretation of the article's meaning.
You could always connect via POP and download your GMail to a traditional mail system of your choice periodically.
I'm not sure what happens the first time you connect, because it's been a while that I've been using it, but if I read my email via the web interface (say at work, or at a friend's house) those same messages will still be downloaded via POP the next time I connect it. Even if I've already read/responded/archived those messages (actually it downloads sent messages, too). So this results in me having two copies of every message, one in my local mailfile on my computer, and another in Gmail's repository.
You might have to do something the first time around if you want it to download ALL your stored mail (I don't think it will automatically transfer all your messages the first time or anything), but once you get it working, it's not a bad system. If Google went out of business tomorrow, I wouldn't lose all my hundreds of megabytes of old mail, and if my house got swept away by a tidal wave into the sea, I wouldn't lose it either. (Of course, if Google went out of business AND my house got swept out to sea, then I'd be fucked. But hey, what's life without risk?)
The POP connection is still a little disappointing after being used to IMAP mail (please, Google, please!), but it's better than any other service that I've played with. It beats the hell out of ISP-provided email, and I'd rather have a gmail.com address than a yahoo.com or (gag) hotmail.com one. Gmail doesn't really have any tech cachet to it anymore, but at least it doesn't say "internet ghetto" like Hotmail does.
By buying a puppy from a pet store (which is where, I suspect, most of the "christmas gift" animals come from, because most shelters are more careful than that) you create a vacancy which can be replaced with a new one from the puppy mill. So effectively you fund an inhumane and degrading system, and in all likelihood, later put the dog into the shelter, where it costs money and diverts resources from other animals, until eventually it's killed.
There's no good being done there. There are a whole lot of people making money on the flow of animals from factory breeding farms, through pet stores, to homes where they're not wanted, to animal shelters, and finally into incinerators; that's the cycle 'gift animals' are funding, in large part.
If you think somebody wants a pet, then get them some sort of physical good that they're going to need once they get it. Food, a pet bed / scratching post, leash, whatever. Having a pet is a bit of an expensive proposition, I'm sure they'd be happy to get something that helps them. And then offer to take them down to a shelter or and pay for the adoption or vaccination fees, if you really want to "get them" the animal. (Perhaps animal shelters should sell 'future pet certificates', that you could give as a gift, that would cover the cost of an adoption later on; thus allowing people to give a gift that people could exercise when they're ready.)
I own pets (well, I live with cats; they choose to stay because the food is good, I suppose) and agree with you about all the benefits and satisfaction of living with animals. However, I would never push that on anyone; it's a decision and realization that people need to come to themselves.
Even though I might agree with his feelings on Microsoft, that layout is the sort of thing that makes me want to stab the author.
That's probably one of the first pages I've read (since they got rid of the BLINK tag, anyway) that's actually easier to read if you just open up the source, rather than looking at the actual rendered page.
USA is a 1st world economy but a 3rd world society. The new Banana Republic!
Indeed; or, as my father used to say: "America, the world's fastest-growing third-world country."
I guess we haven't really hit rock-bottom yet though, since it still seems like a whole lot of people from actual third-world countries want to come here. When I start seeing Californians swimming south across the Rio Grande, then I'll know we've arrived.
I'm personally hoping that if they fire Rumsfeld from being SecDef, that they'll make him the new White House Press Secretary.
You have to admit, he's entertaining. C-SPAN won't be nearly as interesting to watch without his press conferences.
Is there an example of an industry where this has worked as a strategy.
It's called FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
This is a pretty classic example, actually; comment's like Ballmer's (yesterday), which hinted that people who used a non-Novell Linux would be sued, are its hallmarks. They're not tangible threats, and thus they're not things that can easily be defended against or refuted. They just serve to make the people in decision-making positions uneasy, and thus lead them down the path of least resistance. It's basically an attempt to make a smaller competitor look like an 'unknown quantity' in comparison to a well-known offering by a big-name company.
Many people consider the first instance of "FUD" in the IT world to have been by IBM against Amdahl during the mainframe wars (this is mentioned in the WP article above), but as a business tactic I'm sure you could find lots more historical examples. (Things that come to mind -- early automotive manufacturers prior to the resolution of the Selden patent, various 19th century 'railroad wars'.)
so this is the last comment on slashdot ever,,,,,,, or
You should have ended that with "NO CARRIER".
Is there any site around which details which companies will either sell you a 'bare metal' laptop, or which will refund you the cost of Windows if you don't want it, and tell you how to go about getting the refund?
I've been thinking about getting a laptop to run Linux on, but I'm not going to do it if it means buying a copy of Windows. The idea of wasting money on that piece of crap software that I'll never use just irks me.
There seems to be anecdotal evidence of people getting Windows refunds; it would be nice if someone gathered the information on how they did it together, so that people who wanted to follow in their path could do it more easily.
Interesting.
I wonder whether the URL could be sniffed in some way, by monitoring what Quicken does. I assume that the connection itself is encrypted, but I'm not sure if that includes encrypting the URL as the file is requested or not...
I was under the impression that the Quicken protocol was proprietary from end to end, and that it was something more complicated than an HTTP download of a QIF file.
The only reason I use Quicken is because it lets me avoid my bank's absolutely horrific website, so anything that requires manually downloading the files is a non-starter. But if the URL could be sniffed, I might have to reconsider GNUCash.
Do the GNUCash people maintain their own database of bank's OFX URLs? Seems like there would be a good demand for a web site that collected them (preferably located in some jurisdiction comfortably removed from Quicken's lawyers), or perhaps which produced configuration files that you could load into GNUCash or other free banking programs to ease the process.
You guys don't have water meters? That's ... interesting. So if I use 3x as much water as you, we both pay the same amount at the end of the month?
... it encourages people to order more expensive stuff than each other and thus screw everyone else).
Seems like you don't have to be Adam Smith to figure out the way that's going to work. It's the "splitting the tab" phenomenon (when you go to a restaurant for lunch and agree to split the check evenly
I generally don't have a whole lot good to say about my municipality, but I can't complain too much about the way they bill water and sewer service. They meter the incoming fresh water, and use that as the basis for charging (on a per-quantity basis) for water and sewer. They start off on the assumption that most people's incoming water ends up going down the sewer anyway, so you can approximate those quantities as being equal to each other. If you have an irrigation system, or other large water-user that doesn't go into the sewer, you can get a separate meter installed for that and they'll charge you only for the water and not for the sewer. (No idea what the meter costs or if you can only get it on new construction, but I know people whose outdoor taps are billed at a different rate.)
It's been a while since I've really studied the bill, but I think there's probably some base rate for 'service' (essentially to cover the fixed cost of the infrastructure) and then they add the consumption charges onto that. I do recall though, that the cost for sewer disposal was more, per gallon, than the cost of fresh water, which I found interesting (but not totally surprising; those sewage treatment plants don't look cheap).
To cut down on the expense of meter-reading, they bill on a 3-month cycle, and you have the option to choose predictive billing (where they average out your consumption for a year and break it up into equal monthly payments, plus some surcharge) if you want the same amount every month. The same invoice also has municipal garbage collection and recycling on it.
Perhaps the way to encourage adoption of water meters would be to sell them to people as an optional service, for those who don't consume a lot of water and want to save money? So if you base your "flat rate" on a family of 4 and their average consumption, it would make sense for any person/household that didn't consume that much water, to get a meter and switch to consumption-billing. Rather than burying the meters in the sidewalk or street, as is frequently done here (the infrastructure is mostly 50+ years old) you could use meters inside houses or apartments that sent back telemetry via RF in the metal pipes, or some other method. That would keep you from having to dig, and from having to send out meter-readers. Most of the billing could be automated.
Once you get enough people using metered service, it becomes less and less economical to stay on flat-rate billing -- because the people who remain on flat-rate service essentially have to pay for all the water that's used and not metered, including leaks and other line losses, divided up between them. The fewer ways that you 'split the check' the closer you come to having to pay for your own lunch, and the less incentive there is to be a pig. Eventually even high water users might see the advantage in switching to metered service, so as not to be paying for leaks in the lines. (And when you have all-metered service, the water co. has a reason to fix leaks.)
Seems like a bit of a no-brainer, really.