Most people in the US have ABC,CBS, NBC, PBS, FOX and maybe one or two other stations (say 5 to 7 total) for Broadcast (over the air) channels. The hundreds of channels we "always" talk about are the cable and satelite channels. So basically we have the same setup when you look at the broadcast channels. However, except for PBS, every other channel has several flaws (1) relentless advertising (2) sensationalizing news (I've seen it during Y2K time and now they are doing it again with the fear of terrorism) (3) crappy, short-lived shows (focusing on the flavor of the season) (4) lots of repeats (5) try to make users stay on the program as long as possible (e.g. some TV shows about real events will drag on and on till they milk their advertisement dollars and then "reveal" the climax.
There are bigger issues such as the media having to appear "patriotic" and so parrot the government line. Supressing news items due to pressure from sponsors.
The best tagline I saw on one of the channels is "News when you want, and news that YOU WANT TO HEAR".
Let's assume you buy pr0n from a shop. Your license plate is visible to all who care to look, but again, -no one cares-. Now add a "911 cam" with a tape recorder, and, at a later date or with the use of more computers, the names of every person who ever visited the store can be retrieved. There goes your political career. Since when did going to a porn store destroy one's political career? It would be a sad state if this were true.
It hasn't changed to $25 for the premium plan till today. They still say $29 on their web site. Even $4 is a waste of money for me because most of my calls are local/regional, and most of the long distance calls are on the cell phone.
I'd save whatever money they drop on the intermediate plan. The main difference between that and the premium plan is the "allowed minutes".
I have a plan with vonage that was 25 bucks when the premium plan was 35. The premium plan fell from 35 to 30 to now 25, but my plan has stayed at the same level at 25 bucks. It is an unlimited local plus 500 national minutes free. The remaining option is a basic 500 minutes, which was at 15, and still is at 15.
For some reason, Vonage doesn't want to cut the price on the basic and intermediate plans:(
S
Re:All I know is...
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You are correct in that the economy was failing even before Bush took office. Gillette laid off thousands just after the election but before Bush took office
Here is another view point. Suppose a corporation wants to lay off workers and cut pay. What is a good time to do it? A union friendly government, or a corporate friendly government? May be, and it's just a wild idea, that corporations feel more powerful under Bush administration, so we see more layoffs.
Honest, when my mind goes blank, and no reasonable outcome seems nearby... I get more easily swayed by distractions. Probably the dumbest thing to do...
I believe it is definitely not a reflection on Google's attitude towards non U.S. persons. It is most likely some requirement for IPOs for stocks trading on the Nasdaq.
As for me, I don't have gmail, and I think vivisimo will be attractive in about 2 to 3 years. Yahoo and MSN will be biggest challengers to google in the coming years.
I think tex/latex has the capability. We have the some documents (20 years old), and they compile fine and look prefect. If anything, improvements made it easier to "enhance" the document without messing with anything.
If it is expensive to publish, then most publications would become "an organizational property" -- if you look at patents, the CEO puts his/her name even though he/she is not involved in it, and the patent will anyway be the property of the company.
It is like someone patenting the process of "harassing people". I don't know whether to cheer for it because it makes harassing more expensive, or to feel sad about the overall state of affairs at the USPTO.
I am sure there is plenty of prior art for this. DDOS, bogus uploads to P2P (e.g. people try to become the "supreme being" on kazaa by putting dummy files named after the latest hits). If the only difference is the "intent" and "amount" of the junk sent to P2P networks, granting a patent looks ridiculous.
However, if it there is a lawsuit between these guys and the MPAA/RIAA, I will cheer for the patent.
They have excellent natural resources. That has become the curse. Nigeria, for example, has large oil/natural gas supplies, but the local people cannot afford oil.
The tale of natural resources in poor countries is similar to the tales of evil kings... In those tales, the parents with beautiful children suffer (the children suffer too) because the local king takes fancy to them and makes them concubines.
Things will not be very different if the economies develop "intellectual property" too. Property is easily stolen and can be restricted (for example, the patenting of turmeric and basmati rice). A well educated population with diverse skill set is a way forward because then the local people themselves are the assets, and multinational corporations have a vested interest in aiding peace in such regions. If it's just a matter of resources, multinational companies benefit more if there is poverty and bloodshed -- if the local people kill themselves, the corporation can just keep the resources to themselves!
S
Re:The sociological implications are stunning...
on
Perfect Digital Skin
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Come on... A lot of feelings of inadequacy are due to the traditional media brianwash and advertisement. If you are 5lb+, you are over weight, if you are 5lb-, you are underweight. If you are dark skinned, you need to "revitalize", it you are fair skinned, you need to "get deep texture". Even things like news (especially the war coverage) are very polished, glamorized and very unreal.
Things have gone down the drain quite long ago before the "internet craze took off".
I believe many people know the difference between real world and virtual world (internet, tv, movies, stories, etc.) Some that don't know the difference do not need any special technology to get a glossy image of the world -- existing technology does it already:)
1) Intelligent popup blocking by mozilla (do not open any unrequested popups -- there is also enough customization). 2) "Block images from this server" -- blanket nuking.
These are the "extensions" to mozilla and firefox that are very powerful
3) Adblock -- block images based on a URL pattern. Very powerful and easy to specify what to block. 4) Flash block -- block flash elements (even something like flash click to view) 5) Nuke Anything -- if something comes up on your screen, you can remove it "after the fact". For example, if you want to read an interesting article on some celebrity with a stupid image, you can remove the image very easily using this.
At the end of the day, the end user should be able to see what he/she wants to read and view. If the sites persist in doing annoying things or refuse to serve some pages to people that have an advanced browser, I believe it is better to avoid those pages.
The middle east will continue to be a battle ground until the terrorists are wiped out.
I agree with the person that responded to the above statement -- that the way to deal with terrorism is to find the causes and fix the situation...
Mass scale killing of people on the pretext of them being terrorists will result in the killers becoming terrorists. It is often the case that people hate something so much that they themselves become what they hate. It is probably much easier to attain social/political solutions to many current problems than military ones.
I am tilting the scale the other way... My spam is more like 10 spam 1 normal mail. I guess I don't send so much email -- quite a bit of IM, phone, and the age old, walk to the person:)
Let me play the devil's advocate... I feel strongly about the opensource philosophy that someone would be able to label me a "zealot."
However, I think there are some things that are still not "there yet" with linux. Here is something that happenned to me yesterday. I added a new disk on my dell optiplex, moved the primary IDE cable to secondary (long set of wrong experimentation to get the bios to recognize the disk). The windows (xp) side booted off fine and said new devices were added, blah blah...
The linux partition made me go crazy. It decided that the original hda is now hde (the disk was a SATA disk, so the ide cabling change shouldn't have messed the configuration badly). Anyway, the system "paniced" and the only way to get it back was to use a linux boot disk, run rescue, mount the partitions, edit/etc/fstab, change all hda's to hde's, chroot to that partition, run lilo, and reboot. This would be a nightmare for someone that is not familiar with the details of linux.
It is not just a question of "are windows users ready". It is a question of, "do things fail gracefully"? Or, "do simple things get reconfigured automatically in a decent manner?"
Same thing with CD/DVD burning. The options are a bit un-intuitive, and I couldn't get a DVD burned on linux to mount on any other system (though it is an ISO9660 -- may be a problem with the options I provided, but as a person that dragged a bunch of files and burned onto the DVD, I would expect that the program defaults are going to be decent).
Anyway, the system I have is Mandrake 9.2, and 10.0 beta. DVD issues were with 9.2 version.
Some sort of AI based network of vehicles that are available on demand (the nearest parked car will come to you -- or to the nearest "junction"). No one needs to "own" a vehicle. They will all be safe too.
Oh, that, and cities rising vertically instead of horizontally via suburban sprawl, leading to afforable housing for all.
I wrote my entire thesis in a single latex file. Why? Because, with the outline/folding modes in xemacs, I was able to collapse the tree and focus on the area that I needed to edit. Sometimes, I split documents into multiple files (e.g. a collaborative report). A lot depends on the situation.
Now, when LaTeX users split files, they are splitting files based on the content. For example, an input file could be a large table that describes reactions between hundreds of chemicals. That table is split and kept aside because it is a logical entity that one may decide to edit independently. The table can be used where ever the author decides to use... Horror of horrors, it can even be repeated multiple times (hehe, that's how I got to fill the page quota for my thesis:)
Here, the splitting is done in a modular fashion (e.g. different independent entities are in different places -- think of functions in a programming language). In your example, when users split a word document into different chapters, they are just separating "chunks" of final content.
Here's an anology. Think of a person who splits a large file (single function code) into multiple files via modularizing -- LaTeX style. Now, think of a person that cuts the file into multiple chunks (each containing a few hundred lines). For the purpose of generating the original program, the second one is straight forward thing -- well, it even produces the original code as is. However, that approach is surely not the right one...
Especially considering some of this may be applicable to what will happen to our own planet in the future. We currently have seas. Mars used to. It'd be a good idea to figure out why they don't have them anymore.
This was the first thought I had (an infantile one, I must admit) when I read "Mars was once a warm place and is now cold and dry". May be Venus would be the next earth? Could it be due to some sort of cooling happenning in our solar system? Could it be that Sun was more powerful than it is now, and is losing its power? (hmm.. the same statement may be applicable to Sun Microsystems:))
I feel strongly about the universal access of inforamation (at least information of educational value). There will come a time when people in poor countries will have easy access to computers just as they have access to TV now. However, there may not be enough educational information available.
Open source books (where some others can create derived works too) will make the future good for all (in a statistical sense -- there will be a few that benefit from withholding information).
The main concerns are legal threats (e.g. someone like SCO saying, "All partial derivatives are derivative work of SCO"), public perception. The perception that the free material is somehow inferior can be propagated (e.g. in societies that pride on conspicuous consumption, the people that influence decisions can make a statement against free books), and general bitterness when some contributors don't think they are given credit.
I envison a big movement of free educational books, where the educators/scientists provide information, techies volunteer effort to find effective means of publishing/presentation, and end users do QA and feedback.
A physicist will come up with a nice theory, a document designer will design a fancy document, a web kiddie will create fancy animations explaining the concept, and all will fit into a standard form of information exchange (provided a large set of people overcome egos, preconceptions and prejudices).
S
A lot of things will come back to haunt us
on
ICQ Universe
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Usenet posts, for example. Slashdot posts too. However, with so many people being online, unless one plans to run for a major office, things won't be scrutinized much (or, atleast one can hope for that).
I wonder how a race for a public office in 2020 would look like. A multimedia ad sponsored by next generation media cronies will say, "Candidate xyz posted *THIS unpatriotic message* on slashdot in 2003, so don't vote for him" A lot depends on how the people evolve by then -- may be they will wisen up and can think for themselves, or may be they no longer cease to be people and just become sheeple.
I know you are trying to be humorous and all... However, I feel this needs to be said...
With Perl, you can make the script/program/module as beautiful as you want, or as ugly as you want. Just to contrast with Java, Java forces you to be verbose -- very verbose. People claim that it makes them productive and it leads to maintainable code, but too much verbose code can be very confusing. With Perl, you have a choice of coding style, but there is no choice with respect to verbosity in Java.
There are places where clear, concise expression is useful. The tradeoff is that the readers have to have the vocabulary to comprehend what is written. Very few people complain "Gee, that guy writes in complex language, it is unreadable." Likewise, reading well written Perl code requires some familiarity with Perl.
Regarding how things look to unfamiliar people, try to look at a screenful of the most beautiful poetry (just pick a language that you are not familiar with -- may be Chinese, some Indian language), and then look at Perl code:)
I think it does help having multiple distros (at least more than one or two). The reasons are that some distros are conservative (e.g. Redhat does not have ntfs enabled by default, has its own bluecurve, and does not have media player related stuff -- out of these, the ntfs is a biggie for dual boot systems). Likewise, some distros have more support for bleeding edge devices (e.g. SATA support on Mandrake 9.2 RC was available but not on Fedora beta). I will also state the obvious example of Redhat/Fedora stuff.
Where can we draw the line? In my opinion 100/1000 distros is unimaginable. 10 is not that bad a number.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people in the US have ABC,CBS, NBC, PBS, FOX and maybe one or two other stations (say 5 to 7 total) for Broadcast (over the air) channels. The hundreds of channels we "always" talk about are the cable and satelite channels. So basically we have the same setup when you look at the broadcast channels.
However, except for PBS, every other channel has several flaws
(1) relentless advertising
(2) sensationalizing news (I've seen it during Y2K time and now they are doing it again with the fear of terrorism)
(3) crappy, short-lived shows (focusing on the flavor of the season)
(4) lots of repeats
(5) try to make users stay on the program as long as possible (e.g. some TV shows about real events will drag on and on till they milk their advertisement dollars and then "reveal" the climax.
There are bigger issues such as the media having to appear "patriotic" and so parrot the government line. Supressing news items due to pressure from sponsors.
The best tagline I saw on one of the channels is "News when you want, and news that YOU WANT TO HEAR".
S
Let's assume you buy pr0n from a shop. Your license plate is visible to all who care to look, but again, -no one cares-. Now add a "911 cam" with a tape recorder, and, at a later date or with the use of more computers, the names of every person who ever visited the store can be retrieved. There goes your political career.
Since when did going to a porn store destroy one's political career? It would be a sad state if this were true.
S
It hasn't changed to $25 for the premium plan till today. They still say $29 on their web site. Even $4 is a waste of money for me because most of my calls are local/regional, and most of the long distance calls are on the cell phone.
I'd save whatever money they drop on the intermediate plan. The main difference between that and the premium plan is the "allowed minutes".
S
I have a plan with vonage that was 25 bucks when the premium plan was 35. The premium plan fell from 35 to 30 to now 25, but my plan has stayed at the same level at 25 bucks. It is an unlimited local plus 500 national minutes free. The remaining option is a basic 500 minutes, which was at 15, and still is at 15.
:(
For some reason, Vonage doesn't want to cut the price on the basic and intermediate plans
S
You are correct in that the economy was failing even before Bush took office. Gillette laid off thousands just after the election but before Bush took office
Here is another view point. Suppose a corporation wants to lay off workers and cut pay. What is a good time to do it? A union friendly government, or a corporate friendly government? May be, and it's just a wild idea, that corporations feel more powerful under Bush administration, so we see more layoffs.
S
Honest, when my mind goes blank, and no reasonable outcome seems nearby... I get more easily swayed by distractions. Probably the dumbest thing to do...
I believe it is definitely not a reflection on Google's attitude towards non U.S. persons. It is most likely some requirement for IPOs for stocks trading on the Nasdaq.
As for me, I don't have gmail, and I think vivisimo will be attractive in about 2 to 3 years. Yahoo and MSN will be biggest challengers to google in the coming years.
S
Quick googling got these. They may provide you with some leads. If you find more, please post :)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/e2compr/ (Ext2 Compression)
http://squashfs.sourceforge.net/ (Squashed - Read Only, don't know what that means)
S
I think tex/latex has the capability. We have the some documents (20 years old), and they compile fine and look prefect. If anything, improvements made it easier to "enhance" the document without messing with anything.
S
If it is expensive to publish, then most publications would become "an organizational property" -- if you look at patents, the CEO puts his/her name even though he/she is not involved in it, and the patent will anyway be the property of the company.
Same thing will probably happen to publications.
S
It is like someone patenting the process of "harassing people". I don't know whether to cheer for it because it makes harassing more expensive, or to feel sad about the overall state of affairs at the USPTO.
I am sure there is plenty of prior art for this. DDOS, bogus uploads to P2P (e.g. people try to become the "supreme being" on kazaa by putting dummy files named after the latest hits). If the only difference is the "intent" and "amount" of the junk sent to P2P networks, granting a patent looks ridiculous.
However, if it there is a lawsuit between these guys and the MPAA/RIAA, I will cheer for the patent.
S
They have excellent natural resources. That has become the curse. Nigeria, for example, has large oil/natural gas supplies, but the local people cannot afford oil.
The tale of natural resources in poor countries is similar to the tales of evil kings... In those tales, the parents with beautiful children suffer (the children suffer too) because the local king takes fancy to them and makes them concubines.
Things will not be very different if the economies develop "intellectual property" too. Property is easily stolen and can be restricted (for example, the patenting of turmeric and basmati rice). A well educated population with diverse skill set is a way forward because then the local people themselves are the assets, and multinational corporations have a vested interest in aiding peace in such regions. If it's just a matter of resources, multinational companies benefit more if there is poverty and bloodshed -- if the local people kill themselves, the corporation can just keep the resources to themselves!
S
Come on... A lot of feelings of inadequacy are due to the traditional media brianwash and advertisement. If you are 5lb+, you are over weight, if you are 5lb-, you are underweight. If you are dark skinned, you need to "revitalize", it you are fair skinned, you need to "get deep texture". Even things like news (especially the war coverage) are very polished, glamorized and very unreal.
:)
Things have gone down the drain quite long ago before the "internet craze took off".
I believe many people know the difference between real world and virtual world (internet, tv, movies, stories, etc.) Some that don't know the difference do not need any special technology to get a glossy image of the world -- existing technology does it already
S
1) Intelligent popup blocking by mozilla (do not open any unrequested popups -- there is also enough customization).
2) "Block images from this server" -- blanket nuking.
These are the "extensions" to mozilla and firefox that are very powerful
3) Adblock -- block images based on a URL pattern. Very powerful and easy to specify what to block.
4) Flash block -- block flash elements (even something like flash click to view)
5) Nuke Anything -- if something comes up on your screen, you can remove it "after the fact". For example, if you want to read an interesting article on some celebrity with a stupid image, you can remove the image very easily using this.
At the end of the day, the end user should be able to see what he/she wants to read and view. If the sites persist in doing annoying things or refuse to serve some pages to people that have an advanced browser, I believe it is better to avoid those pages.
S
The middle east will continue to be a battle ground until the terrorists are wiped out.
I agree with the person that responded to the above statement -- that the way to deal with terrorism is to find the causes and fix the situation...
Mass scale killing of people on the pretext of them being terrorists will result in the killers becoming terrorists. It is often the case that people hate something so much that they themselves become what they hate. It is probably much easier to attain social/political solutions to many current problems than military ones.
S
I am tilting the scale the other way... My spam is more like 10 spam 1 normal mail. I guess I don't send so much email -- quite a bit of IM, phone, and the age old, walk to the person :)
S
Thanks a lot for the info...
S
Let me play the devil's advocate... I feel strongly about the opensource philosophy that someone would be able to label me a "zealot."
/etc/fstab, change all hda's to hde's, chroot to that partition, run lilo, and reboot. This would be a nightmare for someone that is not familiar with the details of linux.
However, I think there are some things that are still not "there yet" with linux. Here is something that happenned to me yesterday. I added a new disk on my dell optiplex, moved the primary IDE cable to secondary (long set of wrong experimentation to get the bios to recognize the disk). The windows (xp) side booted off fine and said new devices were added, blah blah...
The linux partition made me go crazy. It decided that the original hda is now hde (the disk was a SATA disk, so the ide cabling change shouldn't have messed the configuration badly). Anyway, the system "paniced" and the only way to get it back was to use a linux boot disk, run rescue, mount the partitions, edit
It is not just a question of "are windows users ready". It is a question of, "do things fail gracefully"? Or, "do simple things get reconfigured automatically in a decent manner?"
Same thing with CD/DVD burning. The options are a bit un-intuitive, and I couldn't get a DVD burned on linux to mount on any other system (though it is an ISO9660 -- may be a problem with the options I provided, but as a person that dragged a bunch of files and burned onto the DVD, I would expect that the program defaults are going to be decent).
Anyway, the system I have is Mandrake 9.2, and 10.0 beta. DVD issues were with 9.2 version.
S
Some sort of AI based network of vehicles that are available on demand (the nearest parked car will come to you -- or to the nearest "junction"). No one needs to "own" a vehicle. They will all be safe too.
Oh, that, and cities rising vertically instead of horizontally via suburban sprawl, leading to afforable housing for all.
S
I wrote my entire thesis in a single latex file. Why? Because, with the outline/folding modes in xemacs, I was able to collapse the tree and focus on the area that I needed to edit. Sometimes, I split documents into multiple files (e.g. a collaborative report). A lot depends on the situation.
:)
Now, when LaTeX users split files, they are splitting files based on the content. For example, an input file could be a large table that describes reactions between hundreds of chemicals. That table is split and kept aside because it is a logical entity that one may decide to edit independently. The table can be used where ever the author decides to use... Horror of horrors, it can even be repeated multiple times (hehe, that's how I got to fill the page quota for my thesis
Here, the splitting is done in a modular fashion (e.g. different independent entities are in different places -- think of functions in a programming language). In your example, when users split a word document into different chapters, they are just separating "chunks" of final content.
Here's an anology. Think of a person who splits a large file (single function code) into multiple files via modularizing -- LaTeX style. Now, think of a person that cuts the file into multiple chunks (each containing a few hundred lines). For the purpose of generating the original program, the second one is straight forward thing -- well, it even produces the original code as is. However, that approach is surely not the right one...
S
Especially considering some of this may be applicable to what will happen to our own planet in the future. We currently have seas. Mars used to. It'd be a good idea to figure out why they don't have them anymore.
:))
This was the first thought I had (an infantile one, I must admit) when I read "Mars was once a warm place and is now cold and dry". May be Venus would be the next earth? Could it be due to some sort of cooling happenning in our solar system? Could it be that Sun was more powerful than it is now, and is losing its power? (hmm.. the same statement may be applicable to Sun Microsystems
S
I feel strongly about the universal access of inforamation (at least information of educational value). There will come a time when people in poor countries will have easy access to computers just as they have access to TV now. However, there may not be enough educational information available.
Open source books (where some others can create derived works too) will make the future good for all (in a statistical sense -- there will be a few that benefit from withholding information).
The main concerns are legal threats (e.g. someone like SCO saying, "All partial derivatives are derivative work of SCO"), public perception.
The perception that the free material is somehow inferior can be propagated (e.g. in societies that pride on conspicuous consumption, the people that influence decisions can make a statement against free books), and general bitterness when some contributors don't think they are given credit.
I envison a big movement of free educational books, where the educators/scientists provide information, techies volunteer effort to find effective means of publishing/presentation, and end users do QA and feedback.
A physicist will come up with a nice theory, a document designer will design a fancy document, a web kiddie will create fancy animations explaining the concept, and all will fit into a standard form of information exchange (provided a large set of people overcome egos, preconceptions and prejudices).
S
Usenet posts, for example. Slashdot posts too. However, with so many people being online, unless one plans to run for a major office, things won't be scrutinized much (or, atleast one can hope for that).
I wonder how a race for a public office in 2020 would look like. A multimedia ad sponsored by next generation media cronies will say, "Candidate xyz posted *THIS unpatriotic message* on slashdot in 2003, so don't vote for him" A lot depends on how the people evolve by then -- may be they will wisen up and can think for themselves, or may be they no longer cease to be people and just become sheeple.
Definitely, interesting times ahead.
S
I know you are trying to be humorous and all... However, I feel this needs to be said...
:)
With Perl, you can make the script/program/module as beautiful as you want, or as ugly as you want. Just to contrast with Java, Java forces you to be verbose -- very verbose. People claim that it makes them productive and it leads to maintainable code, but too much verbose code can be very confusing. With Perl, you have a choice of coding style, but there is no choice with respect to verbosity in Java.
There are places where clear, concise expression is useful. The tradeoff is that the readers have to have the vocabulary to comprehend what is written. Very few people complain "Gee, that guy writes in complex language, it is unreadable." Likewise, reading well written Perl code requires some familiarity with Perl.
Regarding how things look to unfamiliar people, try to look at a screenful of the most beautiful poetry (just pick a language that you are not familiar with -- may be Chinese, some Indian language), and then look at Perl code
S
I think it does help having multiple distros (at least more than one or two). The reasons are that some distros are conservative (e.g. Redhat does not have ntfs enabled by default, has its own bluecurve, and does not have media player related stuff -- out of these, the ntfs is a biggie for dual boot systems). Likewise, some distros have more support for bleeding edge devices (e.g. SATA support on Mandrake 9.2 RC was available but not on Fedora beta). I will also state the obvious example of Redhat/Fedora stuff.
Where can we draw the line? In my opinion 100/1000 distros is unimaginable. 10 is not that bad a number.
S