I remember voting for Berman in the 1980s when I was living in LA. He's a liberal, in a liberal district, and he always won by outrageous margins. He ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
Sun made a series of blunders the effects of which are still felt today. Illuminata's Eunice ticks off what he dubs "significant" tech glitches that were revealed once the bubble had burst, including memory problems with Sun's top-selling server that were aggravated by the company's insistence that customers sign a nondisclosure agreement if they wanted a patch.
Wait a minute, I thought we were talking about Sun, not SCO.
Not only that, but in theory, even if a court ordered you to disclose the "Confidential Information" you would not be allowed to do so under this agreement.
I have seen hundreds of NDAs in my career, and practically every one of them that I have seen has an exception allowing you to make disclosures if ordered to do so by a court. This is very important; if you don't follow a court order, you could go to jail.
And if this happened and you did follow the order, then you'd screwed under this agreement. Talk about putting yourself between a rock and a hard place...
You're right of course. That's why we'll have to nuke their moon base into oblivion before they can get it up and running. At least, that's what we'll do if Cheney and Rumsfeld are still in charge by the time this is relevant.
By the way, do we have nukes capable of taking out bases on the moon? I would think so... or at least that it wouldn't be so hard to create that capability.
Actually, I don't always blame the corporations. But in this case, they're apparently lobbying to prevent municipalities from doing FTTH. That's the downside of profit maximizing. Rather than creating "stuff" for the public good, they are spending money to control politics.
There have been some interesting economic studies of this phenomenon. To summarize, when companies start spending profits to secure more profits, rather than create new goods, the economy starts to go downhill.
The article is kind of long and boring, but here's the key paragraph:
FTTH [fiber to the home] networks are a good case in point. At present, cable can make more money selling relatively modest cable modem services over their Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) networks, and telephone companies can make more money selling DSL over their copper-based networks, than they can make by investing huge sums in FTTH networks that would allow them to offer substantially more robust broadband services. To wring every last dollar out of their existing systems, the cable and telephone companies are also working hard to persuade Congress, state legislatures and the FCC to allow them to close their systems to Internet Service Providers, CLECs and other potential competitors. Until these conditions change, the cable and telephone companies will simply not invest in FTTH networks. Instead, they will continue to try to convince us that we really don't need more bandwidth than they're offering. At the same time, they will try to block municipalities from building FTTH systems that could disprove these claims.
So it's the usual story. Corporations looking out for their bottom line. Using money and power to prevent competition from organizations that might act in the public interest (and thereby cut into corporate profits).
It almost hurts to see an ad company not get the medium so profoundly. The Internet is not TV and they should stop trying to emulate TV ads on a web browser.
My guess is that the ad company fully gets the medium. But the marketing droids that they're selling to certainly do not. They're sitting around thinking "help me, help me, what can I do about this horrible Internet that people are using instead of watching TV like good consumers. I need them to see my ads, but those stupid little boxes just aren't working."
So here comes the ad company with the supposed answer to this problem. If enough clueless marketing droids buy it, they make lots of $$. So what if this pollution eventually kills the Net. That's somebody else's problem.
So Mosaic is 10 years old today. I wonder whether in 10 years anyone will be looking back at today and saying, yeah, I remember such and such came out and I thought it was bullshit, but look at where we are now!
"I'm not sure why we need it, as 30 some odd percent of the customers in this country switch carriers every year without this grand and glorious number portability opportunity," said Richard Lynch, Verizon Wireless chief technology officer.
Gee, maybe it's because your service sucks so badly, that people are willing to change *despite* the horrible inconvenience?
Serious question: where are y'all getting your info on the war? I'm talking in depth stuff like tactics, maps. Not just the CNN bs, but real stuff like great terrain maps and discussions of the weaponry.
The Open Source Threshold Escrow Program would create goodwill for software vendors trying to sell products to government agencies and large companies afraid of proprietary vendor lock-in, said Tony Stanco, creator of the program, known as O-STEP.
Here's how O-STEP would work: A vendor puts a piece of software in escrow with Stanco's Center of Open Source and Government, based at George Washington University. The company determines a sales threshold that it wants to reach before the software is released under an open source license. After it hits that threshold, the software is released as an open source product.
Great, so I want to get on the good side of the government and big companies by signing up for this license. I think I'll just set my target for $10 billion so I don't have to worry about it ever actually going open source, god forbid.
It basically says that network congestion is like congestion on highways. If everybody is trying to change lanes all the time, they might save a bit of time for themselves, but on the whole they will slow down traffic for everybody.
In theory, this may slow down the internet by something like 50-60% at most. Nobody really knows how well the Internet conforms to the mathematical model, however. Any benefit from trying to fix the problem might be outweighed by the cost of implementing a solution.
Diplomacy is now being played via email by thousands of people all over the world. It's a great way to play the game, especially if you don't have six other friends who have six+ hours to spend playing a board game. For more info, check out The Diplomatic Pouch
You know what, there's room for something in between.
I am a fairly advanced end-user. I've used Macs and a variety of different Windows machines in my life. On one of my boxes, I even used Partition Magic to create a dual-boot system with Windows XP and Windows 98. I kinda know what I'm doing, but not really.
On the other hand, I don't have a lot of time or patience to sink into mastering Linux. About a year ago, I attempted to install Mandrake 7 on my dual-boot machine. I got pretty far. I was able to get it up and running and make it work. I couldn't get the Internet to work, however. I spent a couple of hours at it, doing research, reading manuals, etc. But I failed. And I gave up. The Linux partition has just sat there for the last year, unused. No internet, no point.
I'm getting a new computer (arrives Thursday!), and I'm going to take the old dual-boot box and wipe it clean, and attempt to install the latest version of Redhat. I'm hopeful that I can get it to work this time. If it does, the next step is to network it with my new Windows box. I hear Samba's a bitch, but I'm going to give it a try.
If I can get it to work, then maybe it will prove that there is a group of users out there that are somewhere between Joe Longneck and Linus. I'll bet we're a significant percentage of the population, and if there's a Linux distro that can make us happy, then maybe Linux can start to see some real penetration.
Bring enough of us early-adpoters along, and maybe someday even the late-adopters will be able to join the ride.
I gotta say, did you ever think that no one buys your CD's because - well - its not really that good music?
Sure, that's one possibility. Another possibility is that we're serving too small of a niche audience -- we're certainly not going for a mainstream sound.
Probably a bit of both.
Most people are not as selective as you are, however. I own over 500 CDs. Not all of them are the best I've ever heard.
The alternative explanation for the persistence of this noise material is that users are extremely inattentive, and that's difficult to believe.
It's pretty easy for me to believe.
I use P2P primarily to check out new bands. Often I will just download the song that most people have available, hoping it will be a representative tune.
As often as not, however, the most widely available tune has some problem, like being misnamed for example.
This can't be caused by intentional poisoning. Rather, people are lazy and just leave the crappy files sitting in their download folders.
I'm probably too late into this discussion to make a difference, but I'd like to draw your attention to two programs at Columbia University. The Executive IT Management Program (aka EITM) is designed for people who have a significant amount of technical experience, and that are looking to bolster their managerial skills. It's a one-year program, and it's relatively cheap (about $10k in total). All classes are at night. I don't have any personal experience with this program, but I know the person who runs it, and he is an extraordinarily talented professor.
The Computer Technology and Applications Program (aka the CTA Program) is probably not advanced enough for you. However, persons in the New York area who are looking to learn about computer technologies from more of a beginner's perspective should check this out. It's a four semester program, so it takes about a year and three months to complete. The total cost is about $12,500.
My brother is a CTA grad. He stuided C, C++ and Java. And, just one year after graduating, he's now making $85k as a Software Engineer at a finance-related high tech company in New York. Prior to the CTA Program, his only "technical" experience was as a Technical Writer. Now, keep in mind that my brother is very smart and very dedicated, and most people are not going to do as well as he is. But the program is excellent, but it does teach the skills and open some doors.
I also did the CTA program, but I was in a softer program that emphasized application design and project management. I would not recommend this track.
The database track is excellent, however, and it gives you significant hands-on experience with Oracle.
There is also a Networking track. I don't know that much about this track, but my understanding is that it is less well regarded than the programming and database tracks.
If anyone wants more information about this program, you can email me at: mossmania (NO SPAM PLEASE) at yahoo dot com.
You are correct. It is unfortunate that the selection of judges is often the most important determinant of whether or not justice is done.
However, you should consider that's it's not completely black and white.
For example, if a set of three bad judges on the 9th Circuit makes a bad and/or important mistake, there are two ways for this to be reversed. First, the entire Ninth Circuit can meet in a procedure called "en banc" and overrule the three judge decision. Second, the US Supreme Court can choose to hear an appeal.
Now it happens to be the case (right now at least) that do to the composition of the 9th Circuit and the US Supreme Court, you may actually be *less* likely to see justice if either of these bodies is making the final decsion. But at least there is a system of checks and balances in place, even if it doesn't work perfectly.
Then, of course, there is the factor that judicial appointments in the United States are ultimately subject to the political process. If the people want to see different types of justices, then they can elect different types of people to Congress or the White House.
Unfortunately, this can take a long, long time, since federal judges receive lifetime appointments.
Anyway, this reply is getting to be too long, but the US Federal Court system is actually quite complex and interesting. In the short run, the decsions can be erroneous and political. In the long run, though, the system really isn't *that* bad, at least compared with the alternatives. (Think China, where the judge and the prosecutor is the same person).
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I remember voting for Berman in the 1980s when I was living in LA. He's a liberal, in a liberal district, and he always won by outrageous margins. He ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
Sigh, I used to like him.
Sun made a series of blunders the effects of which are still felt today. Illuminata's Eunice ticks off what he dubs "significant" tech glitches that were revealed once the bubble had burst, including memory problems with Sun's top-selling server that were aggravated by the company's insistence that customers sign a nondisclosure agreement if they wanted a patch.
Wait a minute, I thought we were talking about Sun, not SCO.
Better living through technology, eh?
Indeed. Better living for the publisher, who's now driving a Lexus instead of a Camry with his extra profits.
Not only that, but in theory, even if a court ordered you to disclose the "Confidential Information" you would not be allowed to do so under this agreement.
...
I have seen hundreds of NDAs in my career, and practically every one of them that I have seen has an exception allowing you to make disclosures if ordered to do so by a court. This is very important; if you don't follow a court order, you could go to jail.
And if this happened and you did follow the order, then you'd screwed under this agreement. Talk about putting yourself between a rock and a hard place
Actually, this is more like a press release than a leak. Remember that MSNBC is owned by M$FT.
You're right of course. That's why we'll have to nuke their moon base into oblivion before they can get it up and running. At least, that's what we'll do if Cheney and Rumsfeld are still in charge by the time this is relevant.
... or at least that it wouldn't be so hard to create that capability.
By the way, do we have nukes capable of taking out bases on the moon? I would think so
Actually, I don't always blame the corporations. But in this case, they're apparently lobbying to prevent municipalities from doing FTTH. That's the downside of profit maximizing. Rather than creating "stuff" for the public good, they are spending money to control politics.
There have been some interesting economic studies of this phenomenon. To summarize, when companies start spending profits to secure more profits, rather than create new goods, the economy starts to go downhill.
The article is kind of long and boring, but here's the key paragraph:
FTTH [fiber to the home] networks are a good case in point. At present, cable can make more money selling relatively modest cable modem services over their Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) networks, and telephone companies can make more money selling DSL over their copper-based networks, than they can make by investing huge sums in FTTH networks that would allow them to offer substantially more robust broadband services. To wring every last dollar out of their existing systems, the cable and telephone companies are also working hard to persuade Congress, state legislatures and the FCC to allow them to close their systems to Internet Service Providers, CLECs and other potential competitors. Until these conditions change, the cable and telephone companies will simply not invest in FTTH networks. Instead, they will continue to try to convince us that we really don't need more bandwidth than they're offering. At the same time, they will try to block municipalities from building FTTH systems that could disprove these claims.
So it's the usual story. Corporations looking out for their bottom line. Using money and power to prevent competition from organizations that might act in the public interest (and thereby cut into corporate profits).
It almost hurts to see an ad company not get the medium so profoundly. The Internet is not TV and they should stop trying to emulate TV ads on a web browser.
My guess is that the ad company fully gets the medium. But the marketing droids that they're selling to certainly do not. They're sitting around thinking "help me, help me, what can I do about this horrible Internet that people are using instead of watching TV like good consumers. I need them to see my ads, but those stupid little boxes just aren't working."
So here comes the ad company with the supposed answer to this problem. If enough clueless marketing droids buy it, they make lots of $$. So what if this pollution eventually kills the Net. That's somebody else's problem.
So Mosaic is 10 years old today. I wonder whether in 10 years anyone will be looking back at today and saying, yeah, I remember such and such came out and I thought it was bullshit, but look at where we are now!
If so, what is it?
"I'm not sure why we need it, as 30 some odd percent of the customers in this country switch carriers every year without this grand and glorious number portability opportunity," said Richard Lynch, Verizon Wireless chief technology officer.
Gee, maybe it's because your service sucks so badly, that people are willing to change *despite* the horrible inconvenience?
Serious question: where are y'all getting your info on the war? I'm talking in depth stuff like tactics, maps. Not just the CNN bs, but real stuff like great terrain maps and discussions of the weaponry.
The Open Source Threshold Escrow Program would create goodwill for software vendors trying to sell products to government agencies and large companies afraid of proprietary vendor lock-in, said Tony Stanco, creator of the program, known as O-STEP.
Here's how O-STEP would work: A vendor puts a piece of software in escrow with Stanco's Center of Open Source and Government, based at George Washington University. The company determines a sales threshold that it wants to reach before the software is released under an open source license. After it hits that threshold, the software is released as an open source product.
Great, so I want to get on the good side of the government and big companies by signing up for this license. I think I'll just set my target for $10 billion so I don't have to worry about it ever actually going open source, god forbid.
10 seconds! Make it 3 and you've got a deal.
So pretend that your week starts on Sunday instead of Monday. Now you can watch your Simpsons all week, whenever you want.
But of course you already know that since you have a Tivo.
Personally, I watched The Simpsons last night (Sunday) around 10:30, right after watching Six Feet Under, using Tivo.
It basically says that network congestion is like congestion on highways. If everybody is trying to change lanes all the time, they might save a bit of time for themselves, but on the whole they will slow down traffic for everybody.
In theory, this may slow down the internet by something like 50-60% at most. Nobody really knows how well the Internet conforms to the mathematical model, however. Any benefit from trying to fix the problem might be outweighed by the cost of implementing a solution.
Whoa, I thought that the Dark Lord is in Redmond.
Diplomacy is now being played via email by thousands of people all over the world. It's a great way to play the game, especially if you don't have six other friends who have six+ hours to spend playing a board game. For more info, check out The Diplomatic Pouch
You know what, there's room for something in between.
I am a fairly advanced end-user. I've used Macs and a variety of different Windows machines in my life. On one of my boxes, I even used Partition Magic to create a dual-boot system with Windows XP and Windows 98. I kinda know what I'm doing, but not really.
On the other hand, I don't have a lot of time or patience to sink into mastering Linux. About a year ago, I attempted to install Mandrake 7 on my dual-boot machine. I got pretty far. I was able to get it up and running and make it work. I couldn't get the Internet to work, however. I spent a couple of hours at it, doing research, reading manuals, etc. But I failed. And I gave up. The Linux partition has just sat there for the last year, unused. No internet, no point.
I'm getting a new computer (arrives Thursday!), and I'm going to take the old dual-boot box and wipe it clean, and attempt to install the latest version of Redhat. I'm hopeful that I can get it to work this time. If it does, the next step is to network it with my new Windows box. I hear Samba's a bitch, but I'm going to give it a try.
If I can get it to work, then maybe it will prove that there is a group of users out there that are somewhere between Joe Longneck and Linus. I'll bet we're a significant percentage of the population, and if there's a Linux distro that can make us happy, then maybe Linux can start to see some real penetration.
Bring enough of us early-adpoters along, and maybe someday even the late-adopters will be able to join the ride.
Ah, maybe that explains why I keep getting hacked by some l33t dude called a115tat3.
I gotta say, did you ever think that no one buys your CD's because - well - its not really that good music?
Sure, that's one possibility. Another possibility is that we're serving too small of a niche audience -- we're certainly not going for a mainstream sound.
Probably a bit of both.
Most people are not as selective as you are, however. I own over 500 CDs. Not all of them are the best I've ever heard.
I manage an independent band, and I sell our CD online for $8 including shipping. It's a good CD, but it's a rare month that we get a purchase.
It takes both a low price *and* massive promotion to make sales. The lower the price, the less benefit from promotion, however.
The alternative explanation for the persistence of this noise material is that users are extremely inattentive, and that's difficult to believe.
It's pretty easy for me to believe.
I use P2P primarily to check out new bands. Often I will just download the song that most people have available, hoping it will be a representative tune.
As often as not, however, the most widely available tune has some problem, like being misnamed for example.
This can't be caused by intentional poisoning. Rather, people are lazy and just leave the crappy files sitting in their download folders.
I'm probably too late into this discussion to make a difference, but I'd like to draw your attention to two programs at Columbia University.
The Executive IT Management Program (aka EITM) is designed for people who have a significant amount of technical experience, and that are looking to bolster their managerial skills. It's a one-year program, and it's relatively cheap (about $10k in total). All classes are at night. I don't have any personal experience with this program, but I know the person who runs it, and he is an extraordinarily talented professor.
The Computer Technology and Applications Program (aka the CTA Program) is probably not advanced enough for you. However, persons in the New York area who are looking to learn about computer technologies from more of a beginner's perspective should check this out. It's a four semester program, so it takes about a year and three months to complete. The total cost is about $12,500.
My brother is a CTA grad. He stuided C, C++ and Java. And, just one year after graduating, he's now making $85k as a Software Engineer at a finance-related high tech company in New York. Prior to the CTA Program, his only "technical" experience was as a Technical Writer. Now, keep in mind that my brother is very smart and very dedicated, and most people are not going to do as well as he is. But the program is excellent, but it does teach the skills and open some doors.
I also did the CTA program, but I was in a softer program that emphasized application design and project management. I would not recommend this track.
The database track is excellent, however, and it gives you significant hands-on experience with Oracle.
There is also a Networking track. I don't know that much about this track, but my understanding is that it is less well regarded than the programming and database tracks.
If anyone wants more information about this program, you can email me at: mossmania (NO SPAM PLEASE) at yahoo dot com.
You are correct. It is unfortunate that the selection of judges is often the most important determinant of whether or not justice is done.
However, you should consider that's it's not completely black and white.
For example, if a set of three bad judges on the 9th Circuit makes a bad and/or important mistake, there are two ways for this to be reversed. First, the entire Ninth Circuit can meet in a procedure called "en banc" and overrule the three judge decision. Second, the US Supreme Court can choose to hear an appeal.
Now it happens to be the case (right now at least) that do to the composition of the 9th Circuit and the US Supreme Court, you may actually be *less* likely to see justice if either of these bodies is making the final decsion. But at least there is a system of checks and balances in place, even if it doesn't work perfectly.
Then, of course, there is the factor that judicial appointments in the United States are ultimately subject to the political process. If the people want to see different types of justices, then they can elect different types of people to Congress or the White House.
Unfortunately, this can take a long, long time, since federal judges receive lifetime appointments.
Anyway, this reply is getting to be too long, but the US Federal Court system is actually quite complex and interesting. In the short run, the decsions can be erroneous and political. In the long run, though, the system really isn't *that* bad, at least compared with the alternatives. (Think China, where the judge and the prosecutor is the same person).