In April of 1984, I got my first 128K Mac with 400K floppy for $2495, $500 for an external 400K drive, and $500 for an Imagewrite.
I loved it. For the next 5 years I was a Mac zealot and had to endure PC users give me the excuses about how GUIs are for WIMPs (Windows Icons Mouse PulldownMenus). They said there's nothing more productive than being able to keep your hands on the keyboard and blast away at your work and that having a stupid GUI get between you and your work was a horrible waste of computing resources.
Now it's 2000 and I'm a UNIX zealot and I now hear from PC bigots about how UNIX boxen are hard to use cause you have to memorize commands, how much better a GUI is to use, how X sucks cause the widgets are not as refined as in Windows, etc, etc...
It takes more than just ALT tags to make a site readable to someone using a screen reader. If you doubt that, just fire up trusty old lynx and try to navigate most sites, even if they have ALT tags.
Web site tools (like Front Page) are HORRIBLE at producing pages that can be read by these special browsers and screen readers. I tend to code all of my pages by hand just to make them usable. It's possible to have a visually appealing site and still make it usable in text-only mode without having to have an entirely separate "text only" track through the site.
I think this is "a good thing" personally. Force people to think about what HTML is really for, structuring the document, move style to stylesheets where they belong, and stop just making up a page and if it looks good in IE, publish it...
The "Green card lawyers, spamming the globe" shirt?
I have one of those, originally purchased from Joel Furr in 1994 along with a "THE INTERNET IS FULL! GO AWAY!" shirts that were popular in 1994. I have both of them in really good condition that I only wear on "special" occasions. I wore my internet is full shirt to H2K conference in NYC last month.
Canter and Seigal (sp?), sometime in the '92-94 era.
It was April of 1994. There was spam before they hit, and the term was coined before that. Just no one did it as big as they did and were so blatant about it. Then they got a deal to write a book about it to tell others how to do it, and we all KNEW that usenet would never be the same again.
The book bombed, but others noticed and improved upon the entire idea, much to the chagrin of intelligent netizens everywhere...
A lot of you are too young to remember the 80s. IBM was the player in the PC market, making a then-successful move from mainframe dominance to personal computers.
No, one, I mean NO ONE would predict that they would just be a bit-player in the PC world 10 years later. OS/2? When released in 1987, everyone predicted it would replace DOS and Windows within a few short years. It couldn't fail, IBM was behind it. When PS/2s came out, everyone jumped and tried to catch up.
Microsoft blew that out of the water, as we all know now. Brought down the biggest computer company in the world and made IBM listen to THEM.
So I've been telling people not to expect Microsoft to be nothing more than yet another software vendor 10 years from now, and everyone thinks I am nuts.
I'm sure this subject will erupt in another OS flame war, but I still see it happening.
Will it be a good thing? I don't really know. At least when IBM was "in control" standards existed and they could change them. Almost over-night, 3.5" floppies replaced 5.25" floppies. To this day, we're stuck with the same 3.5" drives and a plethora of competing removable disk standards that don't have the backing of any major hardware vendor, so none of them become standard.
Will the software market fragment too? Will nothing go forward because no dominant player makes the standard?
Then again, the fact that Word.doc files are the defacto standard in document sharing now is a horrible travesty. XML as a standard at data representation is very exciting.
I just think Microsoft now is just too big and stuborn to adapt quick enough. Then again, they didn't think the Internet would be that big a deal (witness first version of Windows 95 and the hoops you had to go through to get it onto the Internet. The then-non-Internet MSN was the way to go...). Microsoft certainly moved quick enough to embrace, extend, and capture much of THAT world...
I still think they are in trouble. If I had any of their stock, I'd be selling it...
Liberal is a dirty word. The Republicans have done a good job of taking a word that describes someone who is forward thinking and open minded and tried to turn it into a dirty word.
And it's working. Chances are, the Republicans will sweep in November and control the white house AND both houses of Congress.
The Republicans have always sided with big business, who we are supposed to trust.
And Democrats are doing their best to be more like Republicans every day.:-(
A friend of mine summed up the two parties quite well. The democrats what to legislate what you do, and the Republicans want to legislate what you think.
So what am I saying here. Don't bitch, vote in November. Find out which of the two-sided liars will do the least damage to our freedoms and vote for that person. Don't listen to the rhetoric and for all of our sake, never ever let the Democrats or Republicans control everything. The best government is one that is deadlocked and can't get anything done. They do less damage that way.
Only 25% of young people eligible to vote actually do so. Please tell politicians how you feel, and what will influence your vote and then go ahead and make an informed decision and do it.
Wasn't it the other way around? I remember reading that the trend towards "casual Fridays" started from a survey conducted by Levi's.
Maybe it's because I live in the banking and corporate capital of the country (Delaware). The local media here has been running stories about how casual days are getting out of hand, along with tips about what is casual (and casual definetly does not mean jeans, sneakers and/or t-shirts, according to the them). The most casual you can apparently get is something like Dockers and a dress shirt. Gee, to me, that's dressing up!:)
My work takes me to two different locations, about 10 miles apart. I have office space at both locations. One has a real office, with real walls and a door. The other is a cube sharing a room with three others. I usually spend an entire day at one location or another.
Without ANY doubt, I'm dramatically more productive at the location where I can shut the door and get some uninterrupted work done.
So that's rule #1, a real office. Rule #2 is access. Ability to get to it and your work site whenever you need to. You know, sometimes you are just on a roll and being forced to go home cause everyone else is just sucks. But rule #2 also requires a boss that understands rule #2. If I work until after midnight and then roll in the next day around lunch time, I don't want some lame 9-5er making smart-ass remarks about how lazy I am. If that smart-ass happens to be your boss, much much worse.
Rule #3, not office related, but office politic related. Dress code. I think clothing manufactures are convincing media to run stories saying that people are far more productive and feel better about themselves when they are dressed professionally. Yeah, right. Sometimes I have to wear a shirt and tie and worse, occasionally a real suit, to work. On those days, I don't do jack. All I can think about is getting home early to get out of the thing and into something more comfortable. When I'm comfortable, I can work longer hours, take less breaks, and manage stress better. Jeans and T-shirts are the way to go.
And finally rule #4. Access to a secretary. You know, those under-appreciated and now considered un-needed employees. IT people are getting damn expensive and being interrupted by the phone constantly is a killer. I also need someone to keep my life organized. Someone who knows to find out when someone says their CD-ROM drive is failed, whether they just use it to listen to music, or need it for a critical part of their job.
(How many of you get those damn phone calls that start out "Hello, this is ____ from xyzzy research, and we are conducting a survey. This is NOT a sales call and will only take 5 minutes." Yeah, sure, I was getting two of those a day and each took like 20-25 minutes, until I got a secretary to run interferance. Once upon a time, ZDnet would at least give you a free year's subscription to PC Week and a host of other of their mags, but after a while they stopped, so I said "flock("em") all...)
An ideal work environment is worth making 10-20 grand a year less, maybe more. I spend most of my life at work, I'd like it to be pleasant and rewarding. Yeah, for the right pay, I might put up with a cube farm, dressing up, and not getting much real work done. For the right pay, I'd spend my days dreaming and waiting until the quitting bell rings so I can run home, escape, and spend some of that extra dough...
It really amazes me how employers tend to focus on things that make their people less productive and eager to leave the work site asap... They'll spend several million on cute architectural features in the lobby and common areas of the building, then when it comes to housing the employees that exist to make them a profit, they skimp, make a huge cube farm and then often circle the outside of each floor with real offices for "important" people so they can have windows and to prevent the working staff from looking outside.
IIRC they did, but the Judge shot them down right away, claiming that antitrust laws don't apply here. Which is total bullshit, excuse my French.
Not quite. He said that any areas that the DMCA might overlap and contradict, the DMCA would take precedence because it came later.
So, please moderate the original question down so it doesn't end up in the pool. The issue was addressed in the trial. Read the transcripts (I did, every single word!)
We all consider cooling to be of vital importance in our silicon based machines, don't we? What kind of new cooling device are they going to create/use that will keep the DNA from degrading or just plain denaturing?
Plasma baby!:-)
"Humanoid detected.....
slashdot.org needs plasma badly...
Come here fat boy, time to feed me."
Does it include the free personal web server?
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Mozilla M17 Is Out
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I certainly don't want to bother unless I get the neat feature that Netscape 4 has where you run a java app and it covertly turns your entire hard drive into a docroot for a hidden web server.
I took a look at Camp Sussex and other than the name of the camp itself, which you think would also cause problems for 1000's of British sites...
Two years ago I gave a talk to a bunch of two-year college marketing folks (NCMPR) and one of them asked me how to get their site unblocked from these services.
Their college's name? Middlesex Community College
I had a hard time believing (at the time) that they could have been blocked just cause the word "sex" is in their name. I figured there had to be something else (like a student's home page or something) doing this.
Now I have to worry about my own college, because we have a campus located in Sussex County, Delaware. Heaven's forbid if we put up a page that describes the location of the campus...
What I don't understand is the amount of people who get upset and threaten to sue about being on the
RBL list, a list that every site is manually dealt with and has instructions for how to get off of it, yet there are no cries from both near and far about this censorware crap.
I read every line of that trial, my prediction....
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NYT On DeCSS Case
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· Score: 4
FWIW, I read the entire transcription of the trail. I have a new respect for Judge Kaplan. Lawyers on both sides were inarticulate and the judge often had to stop them and ask the questions for them (he has more freedoms to do so since it isn't a jury trial). He also has an interesting sense of humor and he often explains this as analogies, and they are usually pretty good.
With that in mind, his job is to uphold the law and the new law is DMCA, like it or not. He even mention that, if the DMCA conflicts with prior laws, like anti-trust laws, then the DMCA must take precedence in those areas since it is newer.
My prediction: He'll rule that 2600 violated no laws by posting the code under freedom of the press and speech, but that any use of code that gets around CSS is a violation of the law, therefore any use of DeCSS is actionable, including putting chunks of it in any LIVID software.
He'll then sternly warn the MPAA that they better make licenses available for LIVID if they intend that the appelate courts take them seriously.
The one thing I didn't see that was missing was any testimony about the importance of "free" (speech) software. Those of you who hate the FSF better stand up and notice. Binary-only DVD players may end up being available for our fave free *NIX distros, and they may even be free (beer), but they won't be free (speech) and there won't be any free (speech) DVD players available, at least in the U.S., without breaking the law -- and that issue didn't come up in the trial.
Then we'll all be further split into factions and have further arguments about whether DVD players should be in any *NIX distro, why Debian is anal, and on and on. Then we'll see even more binary-only releases or even more "open source" with restrictive redistribution agreements due to license agreements to comply with patents and DMCA issues.
Speaking of 2600, anyone know what's up with their website? It's been down all weekend and according to a poster on alt.2600, it's been down for about six days now.
Someone speculated that Bell Atlantic's shitty DSL service is to blame, since apparently that's how they are hooked into the net.
If deja just got rid of older alt archives then they'd have cleared up a ton of space.
My news server has just the big 8 and only the alt groups that users request. With a 15 gig news spool, I only have to expire articles after two months.
Doesn't take a math wiz to extrapolate that to see how mucn disk space a years worth of REAL usenet newsgroups would hold.
They should have never trashed 1995-99 without notice. 95 was when the net started to explode and removing that removed history that can never be recreated.
(Then again, I'm glad some of my old posts finally went away. x-no-archive works, but since everyone these days just quotes entire articles when replying with one line at the top, x-no-archive was a bit useless anyway...)
The last language designed by committee was COBOL. I knew one of the persons on that commitee in the 50s. Greg Dillon from DuPont, died a few years ago a very old man. He said meetings about it were constantly buried in controversy and disagreements. (He also swore he wasn't on the sub-committee that did the "DATA DIVISION"!)
My point? Perl 6 won't please everyone. If it tries, it's going to turn into a giant hunk of bat guano. If you don't like Perl 6, stick to 5. If you hate Perl, use something else.
FYI, The Matrix, after being run through DeCSS and stored on disk, is 6.3 GB. This includes all chapters and intro movies (including the menus that you might not even think were movies, but they are).
Please tell us that you purchased The Matrix, else the goons in the DeCSS trial that are being asked if they personally know of a case where someone copied a DVD that they didn't purchase may point to you...:(
Beneath the control units is a pack of 120 NiMH D cells (shown separately in the right hand picture)
Is this really THE D-cell? My biggest fear of getting one of these cars was the cost to replace the battery plant. Using commodity cells just seems too good to be true. I wonder how long the cheapie Radio Shack D-Cells will work? Remember the Radio Shack free battery club? Since there is a federal law* that there must be a Radio Shack in every shopping center and Mall, running around to 120 of them is not a difficult task!:)
If they are worried about someone stealing their "tech" then their best course of action is to slap the GPL on it and make it truly free (as in free beer) so if some other company uses it in their driver products THEY have to release their modifications as well. Just releasing the source itself would permit a competitor to steal the tech and hide it in their next product without obligation.
The other advantage is that the free software community will most likely improve it as well and the company itself will benefit as well.
I also have another suggestion. If you want to keep an edge on tech over the competition, then move more of the low-level logic stuff needed for the drivers into the hardware itself (e.g., ROM) and then the free-source drivers only need to send params into the hardware via some sort of documented interface. This makes porting and supporting various platforms a bit easier through a higher layer of abstraction and makes it more difficult for a competitor to reverse engineer anyway.
This also would seem to get the difficult blessing of the FSF as long as it isn't flash upgradable. I heard a talk by Richard Stahlman Sunday at H2K in NYC and asked him about PC BIOSes. Seems he thinks BIOSes should be free since they are programmable, but not needed if they are not flashable. Spliting hairs a bit on that one, but I don't see him advocating that Intel release the microcode for their processors, for example.
Now this last bit I tend to disagree with since a non-upgradable card BIOS means any bugs in it need a hardware swap, but it's better than non-free drivers.
Some say free-source purists are anal but think of it. You spend your bucks on some top-of-the-line vid card yet you can't use it on the OS of your choice, or your support is limited. So why is a non-free driver acceptable to many Linux people when the "driver" for the processor (the OS itself) *must* be free (as in freedom) or it's evil (like NT)?
If consumers of free software want better support for hardware, they need to speak with their wallets and purchase hardware with free-source drivers, even if it may be a notch or two below the top-of-the-line. Since companies have an obligation to make money, only then will they notice and feel pressure to release the source to their stuff.
A complete OS is far more than just the kernel. Linux is free and the tools and utilities that make it work are free. If Microsoft released a new OS based on the Linux kernel but everything on top of it was non-free, would that be fine with you? If it's OK for Office Suites to be closed-source, then why the heck does the command "cat" also have to be free then?
"Purchase the Microsoft distribution of Linux. We've removed all of those unreliable GPLed utilities in it, stripped the C compiler and X out, and added typical Microsoft-quality tools on top of it along with mesh (Microsoft-enhanced shell), which DOS users will find very familiar. By the way, if you give a copy of anything but the kernel to a friend, you will go to jail. Of course, in the spirit of the open source community, our modifications to the linux kernel are available, just don't expect anything else to be."
They state that there are 20 million napster users, as if to drive home the point about how this is not isolated, and it's a widespread problem.
Congress critters tend to jump up and notice numbers this big for different reasons, and it was even mentioned in the article. Piss off several million Napster users, you may not get re-elected.
First rule of government is self-survival. Doing the "right thing" ranks around n-1 on their list.
So, let your voice be heard, fire up your copy of Napster today and be counted. Never before has it been so easy to become part of a political movement!:-)
Honestly, though: it's evil of Red Hat and the other commercial Linux distro-makers to take advantage of all these stupid people. Imagine what we could accomplish if more effort was actually made to educate these people instead of defund them.
Count me one of those "stupid" people.
As a pointy-haired manager, I have to allocate resources as best I can. The most expensive resource I have to manage is labor, not machines or software. Worse, labor is not a situation where I can get all the labor I want at a given price.
I have a support staff of about 25 people, most of which are involved in end-user support. I have four full-time systems people with two vacancies I've been trying to fill for several months. To fill the gap, we had to hire an on site contractor from a consulting firm for $42/hour (dirt cheap actually) to do some of the chump work for the systems people so they could do more high-end stuff.
Now, with that in mind, and with the fact that we have several projects that are behind in, including purchase and deployment of a new SAN, roll out of Windows 2000, AutoCAD 2000, etc, etc, let me think.
If I need to deploy a Linux cluster, do I blow two grand to save time? Remember, two grand is not much more than a week of tech time on staff. Tech time that I can't afford to give up. So, $2K is really nothing.
Now, let me play the other end. To attract and keep the best talent, I have to keep them involved in what interests them. In this case, I'd ask my systems people if they want to do this on their own or to go the quick route. If they want to get down and dirty configuring it themselves, I'd actually prefer it, because that's the best way to truly understand a product. So in that case, something else has to give elsewhere, so I have to find out how to cover that.
(This is why I have the outside contractor help doing low-end stuff. If I hired an outside firm to do our higher-end stuff and stuck my loyal employees on mundane every-day shit, they'd all quit...)
There are so many variables to consider when making decisions on how to best manage resources. I certainly appreciate that Red Hat gives pointy-haired (actually, my hair is 3/4 down my back!) bosses like me choices like this, and they get to make money at it too!
I'm ready to buy a decent higher end box, but am trying not to go much over $2,500 (the price I paid for my first computer, a Mac 128K in 1984 -- tradition!)
Comparing similar boxes based on i815 and i820, I can get an i815 based box with 256 megs RAM for cheaper than a 128 meg i820 box, and if I even wanted to go to 256 on an i820, it'd cost me an extra $500 or so. And -- you have to be really careful. Dell has apparently been shipping PC600 or PC700 with many of their units, to keep costs down. And PC600 RDRAM should *really* be called PC534 but it's been rounded up. If it doesn't say PC800 in the "configurator," be suspicious.
Bottom line, screw minor benchmark differences, when it comes down to it, RDRAM cost is prohibitive and if you compare boxes of the same cost with the SDRAM based box loaded up with extra RAM, you'll be better off with SDRAM.
Why WAP is good for right now...
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WAP Under Fire
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Face it, until we can mount something on our heads to project virtual screens into our eye balls, for quick info needs on the go, WAP phones are good. I don't want to carry around a Cassiopea Pocket PC just to get some info on the go.
And what good is it? Well, as an example, I am hacking together some HDML (since my market in this area uses the UP.Browser) for the web site I maintain at dartfirststate.com. It's a transit system and I'm doing it mainly for my own benefit, although I hope others can benefit from it.
Basically, all I want to be able to do is to be able to punch in a bus route number and direction, pick from a list of stops it serves, and find times for the next few buses scheduled to arrive.
And since DART is looking into deploying nextbus technology, it'll will also be able to predict how many real minutes it will before the bus arrives. This kind of stuff is a cool application for a net-enabled phone.
The problem with WAP (besides the patent crap) is that people are trying to just port existing web sites to it. People don't want to buy books from their damn phone. There are specific applications that are good for it, but most of the existing web content SUCKS for it. For example, who the heck would bother going to stileproject.com from a cell phone? A site like that is best experienced in a dark closed room with a large monitor!
btw, I was surprised when I went to slashdot.org on my motorola 7868W and got a menu of stories. Unfortunately, when going to a story, I got an invalid content-type error...:(
It shouldn't matter HOW a child learns, as long as they learn. Discussions twenty years ago focussed on how TV was a developemental destructive force. Yet somehow we and our parent grew up and went to have normal lives.
As a 41-year old fart, I can relate a parallel. In the late 60s early 70s, educational TV was a big thing. Schools were "wired" with coax and educational TV programs were shown in the classrooms. We the students generally loved this time because the room was darkened, we got to kick back, and sleep or doodle. The only memorable thing I can remember from those programs was watching the movie "Flowers for Algernon." I don't know what it taught me, but it stuck in my mind.
As for us "leading normal lives," perhaps young people don't see it, but the baby boomers are a bunch of really fucked-up emotional cripples who are seeking happiness through how much they can aquire, yet are too wrapped up in themselves to spend time with their kids or spouses. Compared to people I know in their 60s and 70s, yeah, I think a lifetime of TV *has* had a negative effect on my generation. It's taught us to be greedy little selfish assholes.
(As you can see, I'm disturbed in slightly different ways!:)
If your close enough to your CO to get decent speeds over 33.6K, you can usually qualify for DSL. The poor bastards that are 18,000+ feet from their CO can't get DSL and they can't get more than about 28.8K either because of all the bridge taps, repeaters, whatever, that the telco throws into the loop when you are that far out. So the ones who "need" it the most can't benefit at all from V.90, let alone V.92...
And I'm one of them. Around here (northern Delaware), all of the COs are in run down urban areas. Bell Atlantic hasn't built a CO in Delaware for over 40 years. And guess where the cable company is offering cable modem access? Yup, only in the urban areas, the same damn areas that can get DSL. Poor bastards in the 'burbs around here can't get DSL *or* cable modem....
In '96 our cable system was TCI and they began test deployments of cable modems in downtown Wilmington (the people who can least afford it). When they were ready to expand deployment, they got bought by Suburban Cable (of Phila). When I called them in '98 they said that all cable modem rollouts were delayed due to the sale of the cable system. So last year my area was scheduled for cable modem capability "in six months." So what happens, Comcast Cable buys out the system and what do you know, they now tell me that cable modem expansions are "on hold" for at least six months due to change of ownership.
Sigh... No DSL, no cable, and V.92 won't help me out in the least....
Slashdot Mirror
I loved it. For the next 5 years I was a Mac zealot and had to endure PC users give me the excuses about how GUIs are for WIMPs (Windows Icons Mouse PulldownMenus). They said there's nothing more productive than being able to keep your hands on the keyboard and blast away at your work and that having a stupid GUI get between you and your work was a horrible waste of computing resources.
Now it's 2000 and I'm a UNIX zealot and I now hear from PC bigots about how UNIX boxen are hard to use cause you have to memorize commands, how much better a GUI is to use, how X sucks cause the widgets are not as refined as in Windows, etc, etc...
Whatever....
Web site tools (like Front Page) are HORRIBLE at producing pages that can be read by these special browsers and screen readers. I tend to code all of my pages by hand just to make them usable. It's possible to have a visually appealing site and still make it usable in text-only mode without having to have an entirely separate "text only" track through the site.
I think this is "a good thing" personally. Force people to think about what HTML is really for, structuring the document, move style to stylesheets where they belong, and stop just making up a page and if it looks good in IE, publish it...
The "Green card lawyers, spamming the globe" shirt?
I have one of those, originally purchased from Joel Furr in 1994 along with a "THE INTERNET IS FULL! GO AWAY!" shirts that were popular in 1994. I have both of them in really good condition that I only wear on "special" occasions. I wore my internet is full shirt to H2K conference in NYC last month.
One day, I'll sell 'em on e-bay! :)
It was April of 1994. There was spam before they hit, and the term was coined before that. Just no one did it as big as they did and were so blatant about it. Then they got a deal to write a book about it to tell others how to do it, and we all KNEW that usenet would never be the same again.
The book bombed, but others noticed and improved upon the entire idea, much to the chagrin of intelligent netizens everywhere...
No, one, I mean NO ONE would predict that they would just be a bit-player in the PC world 10 years later. OS/2? When released in 1987, everyone predicted it would replace DOS and Windows within a few short years. It couldn't fail, IBM was behind it. When PS/2s came out, everyone jumped and tried to catch up.
Microsoft blew that out of the water, as we all know now. Brought down the biggest computer company in the world and made IBM listen to THEM.
So I've been telling people not to expect Microsoft to be nothing more than yet another software vendor 10 years from now, and everyone thinks I am nuts.
I'm sure this subject will erupt in another OS flame war, but I still see it happening.
Will it be a good thing? I don't really know. At least when IBM was "in control" standards existed and they could change them. Almost over-night, 3.5" floppies replaced 5.25" floppies. To this day, we're stuck with the same 3.5" drives and a plethora of competing removable disk standards that don't have the backing of any major hardware vendor, so none of them become standard.
Will the software market fragment too? Will nothing go forward because no dominant player makes the standard?
Then again, the fact that Word .doc files are the defacto standard in document sharing now is a horrible travesty. XML as a standard at data representation is very exciting.
I just think Microsoft now is just too big and stuborn to adapt quick enough. Then again, they didn't think the Internet would be that big a deal (witness first version of Windows 95 and the hoops you had to go through to get it onto the Internet. The then-non-Internet MSN was the way to go...). Microsoft certainly moved quick enough to embrace, extend, and capture much of THAT world...
I still think they are in trouble. If I had any of their stock, I'd be selling it...
And it's working. Chances are, the Republicans will sweep in November and control the white house AND both houses of Congress.
The Republicans have always sided with big business, who we are supposed to trust.
And Democrats are doing their best to be more like Republicans every day. :-(
A friend of mine summed up the two parties quite well. The democrats what to legislate what you do, and the Republicans want to legislate what you think.
So what am I saying here. Don't bitch, vote in November. Find out which of the two-sided liars will do the least damage to our freedoms and vote for that person. Don't listen to the rhetoric and for all of our sake, never ever let the Democrats or Republicans control everything. The best government is one that is deadlocked and can't get anything done. They do less damage that way.
Only 25% of young people eligible to vote actually do so. Please tell politicians how you feel, and what will influence your vote and then go ahead and make an informed decision and do it.
Maybe it's because I live in the banking and corporate capital of the country (Delaware). The local media here has been running stories about how casual days are getting out of hand, along with tips about what is casual (and casual definetly does not mean jeans, sneakers and/or t-shirts, according to the them). The most casual you can apparently get is something like Dockers and a dress shirt. Gee, to me, that's dressing up! :)
Without ANY doubt, I'm dramatically more productive at the location where I can shut the door and get some uninterrupted work done.
So that's rule #1, a real office. Rule #2 is access. Ability to get to it and your work site whenever you need to. You know, sometimes you are just on a roll and being forced to go home cause everyone else is just sucks. But rule #2 also requires a boss that understands rule #2. If I work until after midnight and then roll in the next day around lunch time, I don't want some lame 9-5er making smart-ass remarks about how lazy I am. If that smart-ass happens to be your boss, much much worse.
Rule #3, not office related, but office politic related. Dress code. I think clothing manufactures are convincing media to run stories saying that people are far more productive and feel better about themselves when they are dressed professionally. Yeah, right. Sometimes I have to wear a shirt and tie and worse, occasionally a real suit, to work. On those days, I don't do jack. All I can think about is getting home early to get out of the thing and into something more comfortable. When I'm comfortable, I can work longer hours, take less breaks, and manage stress better. Jeans and T-shirts are the way to go.
And finally rule #4. Access to a secretary. You know, those under-appreciated and now considered un-needed employees. IT people are getting damn expensive and being interrupted by the phone constantly is a killer. I also need someone to keep my life organized. Someone who knows to find out when someone says their CD-ROM drive is failed, whether they just use it to listen to music, or need it for a critical part of their job.
(How many of you get those damn phone calls that start out "Hello, this is ____ from xyzzy research, and we are conducting a survey. This is NOT a sales call and will only take 5 minutes." Yeah, sure, I was getting two of those a day and each took like 20-25 minutes, until I got a secretary to run interferance. Once upon a time, ZDnet would at least give you a free year's subscription to PC Week and a host of other of their mags, but after a while they stopped, so I said "flock("em") all...)
An ideal work environment is worth making 10-20 grand a year less, maybe more. I spend most of my life at work, I'd like it to be pleasant and rewarding. Yeah, for the right pay, I might put up with a cube farm, dressing up, and not getting much real work done. For the right pay, I'd spend my days dreaming and waiting until the quitting bell rings so I can run home, escape, and spend some of that extra dough...
It really amazes me how employers tend to focus on things that make their people less productive and eager to leave the work site asap... They'll spend several million on cute architectural features in the lobby and common areas of the building, then when it comes to housing the employees that exist to make them a profit, they skimp, make a huge cube farm and then often circle the outside of each floor with real offices for "important" people so they can have windows and to prevent the working staff from looking outside.
Not quite. He said that any areas that the DMCA might overlap and contradict, the DMCA would take precedence because it came later.
So, please moderate the original question down so it doesn't end up in the pool. The issue was addressed in the trial. Read the transcripts (I did, every single word!)
Plasma baby! :-)
"Humanoid detected.....
slashdot.org needs plasma badly...
Come here fat boy, time to feed me."
Two years ago I gave a talk to a bunch of two-year college marketing folks (NCMPR) and one of them asked me how to get their site unblocked from these services.
Their college's name? Middlesex Community College
I had a hard time believing (at the time) that they could have been blocked just cause the word "sex" is in their name. I figured there had to be something else (like a student's home page or something) doing this.
Now I have to worry about my own college, because we have a campus located in Sussex County, Delaware. Heaven's forbid if we put up a page that describes the location of the campus...
What I don't understand is the amount of people who get upset and threaten to sue about being on the RBL list, a list that every site is manually dealt with and has instructions for how to get off of it, yet there are no cries from both near and far about this censorware crap.
With that in mind, his job is to uphold the law and the new law is DMCA, like it or not. He even mention that, if the DMCA conflicts with prior laws, like anti-trust laws, then the DMCA must take precedence in those areas since it is newer.
My prediction: He'll rule that 2600 violated no laws by posting the code under freedom of the press and speech, but that any use of code that gets around CSS is a violation of the law, therefore any use of DeCSS is actionable, including putting chunks of it in any LIVID software.
He'll then sternly warn the MPAA that they better make licenses available for LIVID if they intend that the appelate courts take them seriously.
The one thing I didn't see that was missing was any testimony about the importance of "free" (speech) software. Those of you who hate the FSF better stand up and notice. Binary-only DVD players may end up being available for our fave free *NIX distros, and they may even be free (beer), but they won't be free (speech) and there won't be any free (speech) DVD players available, at least in the U.S., without breaking the law -- and that issue didn't come up in the trial.
Then we'll all be further split into factions and have further arguments about whether DVD players should be in any *NIX distro, why Debian is anal, and on and on. Then we'll see even more binary-only releases or even more "open source" with restrictive redistribution agreements due to license agreements to comply with patents and DMCA issues.
Then again, I could be wrong! :)
Someone speculated that Bell Atlantic's shitty DSL service is to blame, since apparently that's how they are hooked into the net.
My news server has just the big 8 and only the alt groups that users request. With a 15 gig news spool, I only have to expire articles after two months.
Doesn't take a math wiz to extrapolate that to see how mucn disk space a years worth of REAL usenet newsgroups would hold.
They should have never trashed 1995-99 without notice. 95 was when the net started to explode and removing that removed history that can never be recreated.
(Then again, I'm glad some of my old posts finally went away. x-no-archive works, but since everyone these days just quotes entire articles when replying with one line at the top, x-no-archive was a bit useless anyway...)
My point? Perl 6 won't please everyone. If it tries, it's going to turn into a giant hunk of bat guano. If you don't like Perl 6, stick to 5. If you hate Perl, use something else.
Please tell us that you purchased The Matrix, else the goons in the DeCSS trial that are being asked if they personally know of a case where someone copied a DVD that they didn't purchase may point to you... :(
Is this really THE D-cell? My biggest fear of getting one of these cars was the cost to replace the battery plant. Using commodity cells just seems too good to be true. I wonder how long the cheapie Radio Shack D-Cells will work? Remember the Radio Shack free battery club? Since there is a federal law* that there must be a Radio Shack in every shopping center and Mall, running around to 120 of them is not a difficult task! :)
* Hint: Uh, that's a joke...
The other advantage is that the free software community will most likely improve it as well and the company itself will benefit as well.
I also have another suggestion. If you want to keep an edge on tech over the competition, then move more of the low-level logic stuff needed for the drivers into the hardware itself (e.g., ROM) and then the free-source drivers only need to send params into the hardware via some sort of documented interface. This makes porting and supporting various platforms a bit easier through a higher layer of abstraction and makes it more difficult for a competitor to reverse engineer anyway.
This also would seem to get the difficult blessing of the FSF as long as it isn't flash upgradable. I heard a talk by Richard Stahlman Sunday at H2K in NYC and asked him about PC BIOSes. Seems he thinks BIOSes should be free since they are programmable, but not needed if they are not flashable. Spliting hairs a bit on that one, but I don't see him advocating that Intel release the microcode for their processors, for example.
Now this last bit I tend to disagree with since a non-upgradable card BIOS means any bugs in it need a hardware swap, but it's better than non-free drivers.
Some say free-source purists are anal but think of it. You spend your bucks on some top-of-the-line vid card yet you can't use it on the OS of your choice, or your support is limited. So why is a non-free driver acceptable to many Linux people when the "driver" for the processor (the OS itself) *must* be free (as in freedom) or it's evil (like NT)?
If consumers of free software want better support for hardware, they need to speak with their wallets and purchase hardware with free-source drivers, even if it may be a notch or two below the top-of-the-line. Since companies have an obligation to make money, only then will they notice and feel pressure to release the source to their stuff.
A complete OS is far more than just the kernel. Linux is free and the tools and utilities that make it work are free. If Microsoft released a new OS based on the Linux kernel but everything on top of it was non-free, would that be fine with you? If it's OK for Office Suites to be closed-source, then why the heck does the command "cat" also have to be free then?
"Purchase the Microsoft distribution of Linux. We've removed all of those unreliable GPLed utilities in it, stripped the C compiler and X out, and added typical Microsoft-quality tools on top of it along with mesh (Microsoft-enhanced shell), which DOS users will find very familiar. By the way, if you give a copy of anything but the kernel to a friend, you will go to jail. Of course, in the spirit of the open source community, our modifications to the linux kernel are available, just don't expect anything else to be."
Congress critters tend to jump up and notice numbers this big for different reasons, and it was even mentioned in the article. Piss off several million Napster users, you may not get re-elected.
First rule of government is self-survival. Doing the "right thing" ranks around n-1 on their list.
So, let your voice be heard, fire up your copy of Napster today and be counted. Never before has it been so easy to become part of a political movement! :-)
Count me one of those "stupid" people.
As a pointy-haired manager, I have to allocate resources as best I can. The most expensive resource I have to manage is labor, not machines or software. Worse, labor is not a situation where I can get all the labor I want at a given price.
I have a support staff of about 25 people, most of which are involved in end-user support. I have four full-time systems people with two vacancies I've been trying to fill for several months. To fill the gap, we had to hire an on site contractor from a consulting firm for $42/hour (dirt cheap actually) to do some of the chump work for the systems people so they could do more high-end stuff.
Now, with that in mind, and with the fact that we have several projects that are behind in, including purchase and deployment of a new SAN, roll out of Windows 2000, AutoCAD 2000, etc, etc, let me think.
If I need to deploy a Linux cluster, do I blow two grand to save time? Remember, two grand is not much more than a week of tech time on staff. Tech time that I can't afford to give up. So, $2K is really nothing.
Now, let me play the other end. To attract and keep the best talent, I have to keep them involved in what interests them. In this case, I'd ask my systems people if they want to do this on their own or to go the quick route. If they want to get down and dirty configuring it themselves, I'd actually prefer it, because that's the best way to truly understand a product. So in that case, something else has to give elsewhere, so I have to find out how to cover that.
(This is why I have the outside contractor help doing low-end stuff. If I hired an outside firm to do our higher-end stuff and stuck my loyal employees on mundane every-day shit, they'd all quit...)
There are so many variables to consider when making decisions on how to best manage resources. I certainly appreciate that Red Hat gives pointy-haired (actually, my hair is 3/4 down my back!) bosses like me choices like this, and they get to make money at it too!
Capitalism is the best!: )
Comparing similar boxes based on i815 and i820, I can get an i815 based box with 256 megs RAM for cheaper than a 128 meg i820 box, and if I even wanted to go to 256 on an i820, it'd cost me an extra $500 or so. And -- you have to be really careful. Dell has apparently been shipping PC600 or PC700 with many of their units, to keep costs down. And PC600 RDRAM should *really* be called PC534 but it's been rounded up. If it doesn't say PC800 in the "configurator," be suspicious.
Bottom line, screw minor benchmark differences, when it comes down to it, RDRAM cost is prohibitive and if you compare boxes of the same cost with the SDRAM based box loaded up with extra RAM, you'll be better off with SDRAM.
And what good is it? Well, as an example, I am hacking together some HDML (since my market in this area uses the UP.Browser) for the web site I maintain at dartfirststate.com. It's a transit system and I'm doing it mainly for my own benefit, although I hope others can benefit from it.
Basically, all I want to be able to do is to be able to punch in a bus route number and direction, pick from a list of stops it serves, and find times for the next few buses scheduled to arrive.
And since DART is looking into deploying nextbus technology, it'll will also be able to predict how many real minutes it will before the bus arrives. This kind of stuff is a cool application for a net-enabled phone.
The problem with WAP (besides the patent crap) is that people are trying to just port existing web sites to it. People don't want to buy books from their damn phone. There are specific applications that are good for it, but most of the existing web content SUCKS for it. For example, who the heck would bother going to stileproject.com from a cell phone? A site like that is best experienced in a dark closed room with a large monitor!
btw, I was surprised when I went to slashdot.org on my motorola 7868W and got a menu of stories. Unfortunately, when going to a story, I got an invalid content-type error... :(
As a 41-year old fart, I can relate a parallel. In the late 60s early 70s, educational TV was a big thing. Schools were "wired" with coax and educational TV programs were shown in the classrooms. We the students generally loved this time because the room was darkened, we got to kick back, and sleep or doodle. The only memorable thing I can remember from those programs was watching the movie "Flowers for Algernon." I don't know what it taught me, but it stuck in my mind.
As for us "leading normal lives," perhaps young people don't see it, but the baby boomers are a bunch of really fucked-up emotional cripples who are seeking happiness through how much they can aquire, yet are too wrapped up in themselves to spend time with their kids or spouses. Compared to people I know in their 60s and 70s, yeah, I think a lifetime of TV *has* had a negative effect on my generation. It's taught us to be greedy little selfish assholes.
(As you can see, I'm disturbed in slightly different ways! :)
And I'm one of them. Around here (northern Delaware), all of the COs are in run down urban areas. Bell Atlantic hasn't built a CO in Delaware for over 40 years. And guess where the cable company is offering cable modem access? Yup, only in the urban areas, the same damn areas that can get DSL. Poor bastards in the 'burbs around here can't get DSL *or* cable modem....
In '96 our cable system was TCI and they began test deployments of cable modems in downtown Wilmington (the people who can least afford it). When they were ready to expand deployment, they got bought by Suburban Cable (of Phila). When I called them in '98 they said that all cable modem rollouts were delayed due to the sale of the cable system. So last year my area was scheduled for cable modem capability "in six months." So what happens, Comcast Cable buys out the system and what do you know, they now tell me that cable modem expansions are "on hold" for at least six months due to change of ownership.
Sigh... No DSL, no cable, and V.92 won't help me out in the least....