Shift was apparently a Canadian version of Wired. I couldn't tell from their website, of course, because it was already slashdotted, but the article about the failure and the comments so far seem to point in that direction.
Of course, Wired's been a huge money sink for most of it's existence - and that's with the much larger US market to work with and bigger circulation numbers. Shift never seems to have made any real run south of the border, never was profitable, and appealed to a small segment of a small market in a small country.
I think it's amazing they survived this long, quite frankly. It's been tough enough for media companies to thrive anyway, especially one as limited as they seem to have been. There's a number of Canadian magazines that I'm aware of - some I even read occasionally. I never heard of Shift, though. That may say a little something about what their chances were right there. But at 10 years, they predated the dotcom boom and bust alike. Not many other media properties would have been allowed to lose money that long.
Its interesting to note that the certification effort was made for the more proprietary (and costlier) Red Hat Advanced Server and not the basic Red Hat distribution
Why is this even worth noting? Certification efforts aren't especially cheap. If you're going to expend time and resources getting a version of your product certified, why not put the effort into the version that is likeliest to generate enough revenue as a result of the certification to pay for the effort.
After all, while RedHat is in relatively good financial condition, it's not like they have around $40 billion in the bank (unlike some operating system companies). Certifying Advanced Server is a good use of limited resources.
That said, any government security certification is a Good Thing in the commercial marketplace, too - it helps when the engineers need to make a positive case to their PHB's, and gives one more "checklist item" that can get marked in their favor when comparing RH to other vendors.
The traditional ruling on sales taxes has been this:
If a business has a "locus" in a state (basically a substantial business presence), then they are obligated to collect sales taxes in that state.
So your traditional brick and mortar company charges tax wherever they have a store or an office. Mail-order companies meet the same test. Here's a couple of examples.
I live in Massachusetts. When I buy goods from Amazon, I am not charged sales taxes, because Amazon has no direct business presence in my state. However, if I lived in Washington (the state they're headquartered in), or one of the states where they had a warehouse, I would have to pay sales tax on my order.
Related to that, Apple has 2 (soon to be 3) stores here in Massachusetts. So if I buy from Apple.com online, I pay sales tax. However, I had to pay sales tax even before they opened the brick-and-mortar stores here, because Apple has had a sales office in the Boston area for well over 20 years.
What some of these companies were doing to try and get around the tax laws was create "separate companies" that were supposedly independent subsidiaries of the parent company and therefore didn't share all the locii with the brick-and-mortar stores. Ergo, no sales tax was being charged. That was a tax dodge, plain and simple, and in many cases (like Barnes & Noble) it's already been nuked by the courts.
Now theoretically, in states with sales taxes you're supposed to declare your purchases from out-of-state, and pay "use taxes" equivalent to the amount of sales tax you avoided. But in the real world that doesn't happen, except at some of the businesses who can't legally afford to screw the taxman. Individuals never pay it, needless to say - perhaps that just might help explain why so many malls and stores exist just over the New Hampshire state line (NH has no sales tax).
Basically, "Internet sales taxes" are a crock - but the same rules that apply to traditional mail order should apply to Internet-based sales.
You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules. For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width.
really doesn't hold water. Here's why. Between the two examples Valenti cited (the cell phone industry and railroads), the only government-set standard is the frequencies available for cell phones to operate on, and who gets the license for each band in each region. That's because radio frequencies, at least in theory, are a scarce public resource. Therefore the government is the arbiter who conveys rights to users.
However, the marketplace has set all the other standards. Today, you're free to buy a phone that uses CDMA, TDMA, GSM, iDEN, or AMPS. There's no mandate - winning and losing technologies are strictly determined in the market.
It's really the same thing in rairoads. Standardization happened without government intervention - it just made more financial sense for railroads to be able to interoperate. Even now, though, there are a few rail lines that are at odd gauges, and light rail vehicles can't travel on standard rail tracks.
But of course Valenti doesn't know that, and it wouldn't do us a damn bit of good if it was carefully and slowly explained to him. He'd still deny it.
At least far enough to be an "adventurous" trip. Given the month, it would be a nice thing to find a room at an inn somewhere in ski country - preferably with a fireplace and hot tub or jacuzzi. Plan a couple of nice dinners ahead of time for when you're there.
Don't tell her beforehand - just plan it out, and tell her Friday afternoon to pack a bag. The element of surprise is always nice.
And don't bring your geek toys. If you must have your cell, leave it in the car and just check your voicemail if you can't resist the urge. Just wait until she's in a store shopping or something.
For Boston-area geeks, upstate New Hampshire and the Stowe area in Vermont have ample places that meet the description I just gave above.
I would say there are (at least) three kinds of heroes:
People who knowingly risk their lives in order to either try and save the lives of others or to try and help advance humanity as a whole.
Or people who put themselves in harm's way on the spur of the moment in order to protect or rescue others.
Finally, people who dedicate themselves to helping others or performing a valuable service to society (whether or not they risk their own lives) are heroes too, I think.
So no, a person who gets hit by a bus may not necessarily be a hero, but when that person sacrifices their own safety to push other people out of the path of that bus, they could be called a hero.
And if that person who was hit by the bus had been an astronaut, then I think given the nature of what they do and the risks they take, that a hero was hit by that bus - even if dying in a bus crash isn't itself a "heroic act".
For better of for worse, society has assigned a value to the work performed in space by astronauts who were trained to go there and assume those risks. Ergo, astronauts are heroes. The bus driver may have been a decorated military veteran. Or not. It doesn't matter for these purposes. Ordinary people die doing heroic actions, and ordinary people also rise to the occasion, do something heroic, and live to tell the tale. Heroes also die peacefully in their sleep at a ripe old age - heroism and martyrdom are not automatically related.
Which is good, otherwise all our heroes would be dead ones.
(as the old quote goes, "...a statesman is a dead politician. Lord knows we need more statesmen!")
AirPort is 802.11b (WiFi), and uses a modified PC Card form factor that attaches to the ATA bus on Macs with AirPort support built-in. Macs that lack AirPort support (older PowerBooks), can still live on AirPort networks using off-the-shelf WiFi cards with Mac drivers.
AirPort Extreme is the new, pre-standard 802.11g (not accepted yet but supposedly finalized) - it's backwards-compatible with 802.11b, and also supports 54 MBps operation when talking to 802.11g devices. Unlike 802.11a, it works in the 2.4 Gb range.
AirPort Extreme uses a new, mini-PCI form factor and the two card types are not interchangable. New Mac models introduced since January have the new AirPort Extreme card type, older ones still support AirPort-only. However, AirPort Extreme Macs can live on AirPort networks (albeit at the lower signal rate) and vice-versa.
Right now, Macs that support AirPort Extreme are: PowerMac (all OS-X-only models) 12" and 17" Powerbooks (AlBooks) iMac 17"
Macs with AirPort-only support are: eMac iMac G3 iMac 15" iBook (all models) PowerBook 15" (the TiBook) MacOS 9-capable PowerMacs
The other thing is that all the AirPort Extreme-capable Macs also support built-in Bluetooth.
The only model that was actually _updated_ was the 17" iMac, with a new DDR-based logic board, 1 GHz processor, built-in Bluetooth support, and AirPort Extreme support. The 15" iMac is just a price reduction on the previous Combo drive model (no new features, still SDRAM-based, same speed), and the eMac models were also reduced in price with no new features. That's all.
Of course, had my story submission about 10 hours ago been taken, the correct info would be up for this story already... (grumble)
I'm guessing that the new 17" iMac is based on the same logic board/chipset in the new PowerBooks. I wonder if they're using regular form factor DIMMs now for the user-installable slot or if they're still using SO-DIMMs. It'll make a big difference in memory upgrade prices between one and the other.
When I have to travel on business, I generally book through either Travelocity or directly through the airline's website - whichever's cheaper. When I took my last business trip, though, I flew Southwest (Manchester, NH to Chicago Midway), and I was sufficiently impressed that I'll now seek them out whenever possible.
For personal travel, I use those two, plus I've used Expedia. I won't use Orbitz because I hate their ads too much. Between them and X10, I blame them both for the proliferation of pop-ups and pop-unders.
Hotels I usually book directly through the chain - we have a friend who runs a Marriott hotel in the area, so that contact usually helps out. If you're a AAA member (or any one of dozens of organizations), there's usually discount rates available at most major chains.
However, this is your honeymoon. There's no margin for error here, so I'd use an agent to book it for you. When self-booking, there's a lot more chances to screw up. You only get one chance at a honeymoon per marriage.
1: Keep selling ancient version of software that used to be cutting edge, but now is only used to run ATM's and on a handful of PC's that mostly access 3270 sessions all day. 2: React defensively when folks compare your OS to Amiga. 3: ??? 4: Profit!
My friend owns one of these robots
on
Robot Pharmacists
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I have a good friend who owns a large independent pharmacy in New England (I won't be more specific, because I'm not sure if he'd want it mentioned here - though his store and system have been profiled in both trade and general newspapers). He loves it - it handles his top 200 medications, and in his own paraphrased words:
"It lets the pharmacists (of which he is one) spend more time with the patients, and less time counting pills."
He is able to keep a couple fewer pharmacy techs on hand then he used to need for his volume, but it gives the pharmacists a nice assist. He worries less about mistakes - the sanity checks these machines have are a lot more reliable than a human's would be. He's told me he sleeps better at night, knowing the likelihood of a potentially fatal mistake is far lower because of the robot. He sees the role of a pharmacist as being to advise and dispense - with a strong emphasis on the first job.
Here's a true anecdotal story supporting robot usage: I take a Priloec every day. One time I went to my local CVS to get a refill - when I got home and opened the bottle I found Prozac instead (the prescription label was correct - they just filled it with the wrong drug). They took care of the problem immediately, but imagine if I wasn't bright enough to realize that those pills weren't mine (I joke that I'd still have had stomach trouble, but I'd have been happy about it). Fortunately, taking a Prozac per day wouldn't have killed me, but what if it had been something that could have?
That's where I can see robots helping the typical pharmacist. It'll prevent those sort of mistakes from happening, and ensure that the drug ordered is the drug given.
What they mean by "potential" is that there will be live webcasts - until the Slashdot community gets a hold of them and beats them to death.
Think about it - we can track the new year by watching the slashdot effect track its way around the globe in real-time. This is an unprecedented opportunity to see how the backbones hold up br region...
Borland used to have (in the Turbo days) what I thought was the best license ever for commercial software, the "just like a book" license. You could do essentially whatever you wanted with the product, so long as only one person could use it at a time.
Of course, years later we have this. Granted, we're not talking about Turbo Pascal anymore - the tools are far pricier (so maybe they're a little more worried about "lost" revenue), but the restrictions they put on usage nowadays are just silly.
My in-laws are in town to visit my wife, myself, and mainly the new (7 month-old) baby. They're staying at a nearby hotel - came in Sunday afternoon and they're leaving Friday.
Today, we picked them up around 11 and went to brunch at the big hotel here in town. Dressed nice, took pictures. We've spent the afternoon relaxing, opening gifts (mostly for the baby - we really don't need anything ourselves), and playing with the little guy. In about 15 minutes, we're going out for a nice, traditional Chinese food dinner.
And then, afterwards, we'll drop them off at the hotel, come home, and hope that next year is the year that the whole world finally stops treating each other so crappy. Even though babies tend to generate optimism, I'm not holding out much hope on that one, unfortunately.
It'll be back to work tomorrow, with a decent amount of stuff to do before year-end.
In fact, that's one of the best ways that media companies are responding to the fragmentation threat. They're buying existing channels, and they're starting their own narrowcast channels, too. Not only does that help the networks stay afloat, but it also, in the long run, increases viewership overall - it's just more fragmented than it was in the days when the whole nation watched the last episone of M*A*S*H.
Discovery is another good example - it's pretty much a company owned by three big media conglomerates (Liberty, Cox, and Advance/Newhouse). But it was started and exists to exploit several niche markets, and does so effectively. They have 8 channels here in the US, a chain of retail stores, a merchandising/licensing operation, and a business producing content for other companies. They don't have one single monolithic channel that the whole nation turns to. They're exploiting the market niches that they fit best into. Generally speaking, that's the strategy that best fits the market nowadays.
ESPN is an interesting case. First, they were founded as the "original" cable niche player, though Getty Oil was a huge investor. Then ABC (when they were an independent company) jumped on-board, and ESPN got more and more assimilated as ABC got bought by Cap Cities and then Disney. Now ESPN is a conglomerate unto itself, with restaurants, multiple channels, a magazine, and a distinctive ESPN "brand". Meanwhile, the ESPN concept kicked off the explosion in sports networks, with channels now like the Fox Sports Net national and regionals, NESN, YES, MSG, and a host of others all over the country (like Sunshine, Outdoor, the Golf Channel, and more). But ESPN was there first.
I just submitted this via the ECFS system - the docket number for this comment request is 02-230 for those interested in filing their own comments. They have to be in by today.
Today, Americans have the unhindered ability to view their programming of choice. Whether viewed over-the-air, through a analog or digital cable system, or through a satellite receiver, they can watch what they want, transfer it to a recordable medium (be it VCR, DVD, or the newer PVR systems like TiVo), and archive it. They can use this recording for purposes of time-shifting, or for viewing repeatedly at a later date, or they could even (if they use recordable media) share the recording with a friend.
Existing copyright law prohibits the commercial use of these recordings, and payment mechanisms are in place already for the legitimate commercial use of recorded media.
My point here is that there _is_ no "analog hole", nor is there a significant threat inherent to the conversion to digital broadcast streams from the current analog system. All I, as a consumer, am looking for is the exact same ability to archive and time-shift broadcast media that I have today. No more, no less. It is merely a benefit that media will become digital in nature - it makes it easier for me to exercise my rights as a citizen and a consumer.
Media companies, with their emphasis on copy prevention, are trying to create a problem that doesn't really exist in the mainstream today. Today, in the analog world, it is already trivially simple to pirate movies or television for non-legitimate commercial use. Yet that ability has not materially harmed the broadcast industry or it's revenues. Instead, the threat to broadcast companies has come from the fragmentation of traditional media into hundreds of specialty broadcasters, each of which now appeals to a smaller, more specialized audience. Until ESPN, for instance, all viewers had to get their sports coverage from the networks. As ESPN has thrived, networks have scaled back on their sports coverage, and multiple other sports networks have emerged, on both the national and regional scope.
This same principle applies to almost any special interest today (the Golf Channel, HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Discovery, to name just a handful). This fragmentation is seen by most to be a good thing for the consumer and for the industry as a whole. Yet it's the biggest single threat to the largest broadcasters. However, we don't see any legislative or rule-making effort targeted at trying to eliminate the diverse competition. Digital television is exactly the same. Restricting usage and recording rights will only slow the adoption of digital TV by the American consumer, and circumvention (legal or otherwise) systems will rapidly appear. The industry's proposals will only have the effect of making the normal, expected behavior of nearly 300 million television viewers illegal. That's just wrong.
I've been collecting for a little over 20 years (since I was a teen). I used to buy primarily from actual stores, now I buy mainly from Federation Comics - they used to have a retail store but now they're just a cyber-only shop. For fills and back issues I mainly go to Harrison's Comics in Salem MA (I don't think he has a website), it's convenient to me and a pretty good shop.
I also really like New England Comics (the company that brought us The Tick), but all their stores are fairly far away from my home - I used to go to their Norwood store regularly when I worked there. Million-Year Picnic in Harvard Square is good, too - assuming they're still around (rents there got pretty nutty since the last time I went there).
I'm not so sure on selling. I virtually never do - I even built a storage room for my collection when we were doing some house renovations this year. I like to fantasize that my collection will pay for our dream vacation house some day, but it's likelier that our six-month-old will just find them and chew on them instead.
Actually, it's a big cost-saving measure. Yeah, that's it. By making all the TW magazines AOL subscription-access only, they'll be able to cut their bills for bandwidth and server equipment drastically.
Because NOBODY'S GOING TO FSCKING READ THEM ANYMORE!!!
They already charge for the archives on-line, which isn't a bad way to go. Do they really think that people are going to use AOL just to get to Time Magazine (or SI, or one of their others)? I suspect most would-be subscribers will, at most, subscribe to one of the print mags. Better that than a $23/month (or half that for the BYO plan) AOL subscription.
For the monthly price of AOL, I could subscribe to most of TW's print mags, including the truly useless ones like Business 2.0 - and get my Internet via the DSL account that I'm already happily using. I really can't see anyone switching to AOL, of all services, just to read the current issue of TW mags online.
But hey, ideas like this prove that crack is still affordable to the masses, because they're obviously using lots of it at AOLTW!
That's handy. Not that I'd advocating it, of course, but wouldn't that be a ideal fake address to use if you had to use one registering for a pr0n site?
I used to use PDA's for note-taking. I've had lots of them, starting with an old Zaurus OZ-7000 (the old one with pen support for ink and a keyboard), and moving through the original Newton, a couple of Palms (a Professional, a III, and now a Vx), and assorted other devices (I have a Zaurus 5500 now, and I just recently sold a iPaq that I'd been tinkering with). They all have had different strengths and weaknesses - but none of them turned out to be great note-takers. So now I look at them more as organizers, and I have dealt with them accordingly.
Nowadays,, I just use them as extensions of my brain - to hold things like documentation I need to refer to often, as a password vault, and for appointments/phone numbers. These are all the functions I can't readily remember off-hand, and PDA's are good for that. I'd ditch the Palm, but it has two strengths for me - it's tiny and it's the only thing I own that can sync with both my Windows PC at work and with my Windows and Mac systems at home. The Zaurus I use because there are things you can do with it that make it a very handy network admin's troubleshooting tool.
But ultimately, the two devices I get the most handheld use out of are just two simple devices that are nearly read-only:
My iPod (which I dump the vCards out of Entourage and onto, keeping my phone list up-to-date).
And my new Sony T68i phone. Bluetooth rocks for easy sync with my Mac, and although I can edit info on it (theoretically), it's a lot easier to just download it all periodically. The phone is small, and it's always with me - so why not keep my contacts list on it?
The thing is, I'm using my devices for purposes that would easily be solved by a cheap pocket calendar/address book - except if I did that I'd only have my data in one place with no backup, ever. And I know I'd lose it quickly. The ideal device hasn't been invented yet, but when it is it'll be a small, inexpensive, Bluetooth-connected organizer that can sync with any PIM on any platform, automatically. Before Palm decided that they were going to chase Microsoft into the expandable enterprise device market (with the high prices that go along with it), it looked like they were heading there. Now I'm not so sure. But I don't think that PDA's are the be-all, end-all that they're made out to be, even though I'm such a big user of them.
Of course, during the Gulf War we had a big Reserves call-up to get to the 900,000 figure (so demobilizing them shrunk the military back down to normal).
Come to think of it, permanently adding more people to the military would have the inadverdent effect of shrinking the pool of workers competing for jobs out here in the rest of the economy... But more people are normally interested in the military as a career option in bad economic times.
But hey, why compare military staffing fairly between successive administrations when you can use skewed numbers from a war, compare them to peacetime figures, and have another opportunity to Clinton-bash?
I have an old 3-bedroom house, but with 200 amp electrical service. Which is good, because 1 bedroom is for my wife and I, one is for our baby, and the third is my geekroom. I used to put photos of it on my website, but they're really out-of-date. Guests to our house either get a fold-out sofa or go to a hotel nearby that a friend of ours manages - they get a real cheap rate. We used to have a guest room but that's where the baby lives now.
The geekroom has two desks, two bookcases (tech stuff only - other bookcases in the house handle "real" books), and a big old metal shelving unit that holds a 16-port switch, three UPS units, a monitor, my Epson Stylus Photo, my current server (a little FlexATX box running e-Smith), a monitor, and a second PC that runs Mandrake and usually sits open because I'm always swapping stuff in and out of it. There's also a third PC on the rack that I just got - a Mini-ITX box that I'm going to run my server on because it's even smaller and quieter than the existing server. They're all on a 4-port KVM switch.
Then on the first desk, next to the rack, I keep my PowerBook G4, along with all it's gadgets (Palm cradle, Griffin powerMate, CF/Smartmedia reader, Keyspan serial port, iPod). I've got a Newton 2100 on the desk, too - I'm turning it into a web server soon and when I do it goes on the rack. My HP laser is on a stand next to the desk.
The next desk over holds my P4 system - I run XP on it and use it for gaming. I built this one over the summer. Wedged between the two desks are about 200 CD's that contain either software or backups of some sort or another.
In the corner of the room is an Athlon 700 that's currently semi-disassembled (I had to grab a couple of parts out of it for the P4), but used to be my gaming rig. Finally, the geekroom has some space allocated for short-term comic book storage. My workbench is in the cellar, along with virtually all my tools and the bulk of my comics (I built a moisture-controlled storage closet down there).
Geeky, but non-tech items in the geekroom include all my photo gear and slides, a small collection of stuffed toys, a 30-year-old (but still working) shortwave receiver, and a bass guitar.
Currently out on loan to my office is my Athlon 650 that I run Solaris X86 on. I'm testing some stuff for work on it, and it was handy to grab. We also have two other computers in the house - my wife has an iMac widescreen that she keeps on a small desk in our bedroom, and I have a hacked iOpener that we keep in the basement. Also in the basement are the DSL modem and my router.
This sounds worse than it is, though - my one geekroom is a disaster, admittedly, but the rest of the house looks like Martha freaking Stewart had her way with it. It's a good arrangement. I don't interfere with the rest of the house, and I'm allowed my one room to do as I see fit.
Unless, of course, we have another child, in which case my butt is banished to the basement. Good thing we had it finished this past winter...
This doesn't represent a major redesign (neither do the windtunnel G4 towers). The only major changes are faster speed and better video coming from the same basic logic board and chipset.
I'm not expecting Apple to do a lot WRT USB 2.0, really - they're firmly in the FireWire camp. But I do think they'll start integrating Bluetooth when they do their next logic board refresh/redesign. Hopefully they'll add digital out at that point, too.
One of the first things Jobs did on his return was move MacWorld to New York. They were considering coming back here a couple of years ago, and he single-handedly shot it down. He obviously feels strongly about it. Maybe he got thrown out of a bar in Boston once or something - who knows why he hates us here so much, but c'est la vie.
Of course, this kind of hissy fit demonstrated conclusively that he's a pud, but that's kinda besides the point, I guess...
Slashdot Mirror
Shift was apparently a Canadian version of Wired. I couldn't tell from their website, of course, because it was already slashdotted, but the article about the failure and the comments so far seem to point in that direction.
Of course, Wired's been a huge money sink for most of it's existence - and that's with the much larger US market to work with and bigger circulation numbers. Shift never seems to have made any real run south of the border, never was profitable, and appealed to a small segment of a small market in a small country.
I think it's amazing they survived this long, quite frankly. It's been tough enough for media companies to thrive anyway, especially one as limited as they seem to have been. There's a number of Canadian magazines that I'm aware of - some I even read occasionally. I never heard of Shift, though. That may say a little something about what their chances were right there. But at 10 years, they predated the dotcom boom and bust alike. Not many other media properties would have been allowed to lose money that long.
Why is this even worth noting? Certification efforts aren't especially cheap. If you're going to expend time and resources getting a version of your product certified, why not put the effort into the version that is likeliest to generate enough revenue as a result of the certification to pay for the effort.
After all, while RedHat is in relatively good financial condition, it's not like they have around $40 billion in the bank (unlike some operating system companies). Certifying Advanced Server is a good use of limited resources.
That said, any government security certification is a Good Thing in the commercial marketplace, too - it helps when the engineers need to make a positive case to their PHB's, and gives one more "checklist item" that can get marked in their favor when comparing RH to other vendors.
The traditional ruling on sales taxes has been this:
If a business has a "locus" in a state (basically a substantial business presence), then they are obligated to collect sales taxes in that state.
So your traditional brick and mortar company charges tax wherever they have a store or an office. Mail-order companies meet the same test. Here's a couple of examples.
I live in Massachusetts. When I buy goods from Amazon, I am not charged sales taxes, because Amazon has no direct business presence in my state. However, if I lived in Washington (the state they're headquartered in), or one of the states where they had a warehouse, I would have to pay sales tax on my order.
Related to that, Apple has 2 (soon to be 3) stores here in Massachusetts. So if I buy from Apple.com online, I pay sales tax. However, I had to pay sales tax even before they opened the brick-and-mortar stores here, because Apple has had a sales office in the Boston area for well over 20 years.
What some of these companies were doing to try and get around the tax laws was create "separate companies" that were supposedly independent subsidiaries of the parent company and therefore didn't share all the locii with the brick-and-mortar stores. Ergo, no sales tax was being charged. That was a tax dodge, plain and simple, and in many cases (like Barnes & Noble) it's already been nuked by the courts.
Now theoretically, in states with sales taxes you're supposed to declare your purchases from out-of-state, and pay "use taxes" equivalent to the amount of sales tax you avoided. But in the real world that doesn't happen, except at some of the businesses who can't legally afford to screw the taxman. Individuals never pay it, needless to say - perhaps that just might help explain why so many malls and stores exist just over the New Hampshire state line (NH has no sales tax).
Basically, "Internet sales taxes" are a crock - but the same rules that apply to traditional mail order should apply to Internet-based sales.
really doesn't hold water. Here's why. Between the two examples Valenti cited (the cell phone industry and railroads), the only government-set standard is the frequencies available for cell phones to operate on, and who gets the license for each band in each region. That's because radio frequencies, at least in theory, are a scarce public resource. Therefore the government is the arbiter who conveys rights to users.
However, the marketplace has set all the other standards. Today, you're free to buy a phone that uses CDMA, TDMA, GSM, iDEN, or AMPS. There's no mandate - winning and losing technologies are strictly determined in the market.
It's really the same thing in rairoads. Standardization happened without government intervention - it just made more financial sense for railroads to be able to interoperate. Even now, though, there are a few rail lines that are at odd gauges, and light rail vehicles can't travel on standard rail tracks.
But of course Valenti doesn't know that, and it wouldn't do us a damn bit of good if it was carefully and slowly explained to him. He'd still deny it.
At least far enough to be an "adventurous" trip. Given the month, it would be a nice thing to find a room at an inn somewhere in ski country - preferably with a fireplace and hot tub or jacuzzi. Plan a couple of nice dinners ahead of time for when you're there.
Don't tell her beforehand - just plan it out, and tell her Friday afternoon to pack a bag. The element of surprise is always nice.
And don't bring your geek toys. If you must have your cell, leave it in the car and just check your voicemail if you can't resist the urge. Just wait until she's in a store shopping or something.
For Boston-area geeks, upstate New Hampshire and the Stowe area in Vermont have ample places that meet the description I just gave above.
I would say there are (at least) three kinds of heroes:
People who knowingly risk their lives in order to either try and save the lives of others or to try and help advance humanity as a whole.
Or people who put themselves in harm's way on the spur of the moment in order to protect or rescue others.
Finally, people who dedicate themselves to helping others or performing a valuable service to society (whether or not they risk their own lives) are heroes too, I think.
So no, a person who gets hit by a bus may not necessarily be a hero, but when that person sacrifices their own safety to push other people out of the path of that bus, they could be called a hero.
And if that person who was hit by the bus had been an astronaut, then I think given the nature of what they do and the risks they take, that a hero was hit by that bus - even if dying in a bus crash isn't itself a "heroic act".
For better of for worse, society has assigned a value to the work performed in space by astronauts who were trained to go there and assume those risks. Ergo, astronauts are heroes. The bus driver may have been a decorated military veteran. Or not. It doesn't matter for these purposes. Ordinary people die doing heroic actions, and ordinary people also rise to the occasion, do something heroic, and live to tell the tale. Heroes also die peacefully in their sleep at a ripe old age - heroism and martyrdom are not automatically related.
Which is good, otherwise all our heroes would be dead ones.
(as the old quote goes, "...a statesman is a dead politician. Lord knows we need more statesmen!")
AirPort is 802.11b (WiFi), and uses a modified PC Card form factor that attaches to the ATA bus on Macs with AirPort support built-in. Macs that lack AirPort support (older PowerBooks), can still live on AirPort networks using off-the-shelf WiFi cards with Mac drivers.
AirPort Extreme is the new, pre-standard 802.11g (not accepted yet but supposedly finalized) - it's backwards-compatible with 802.11b, and also supports 54 MBps operation when talking to 802.11g devices. Unlike 802.11a, it works in the 2.4 Gb range.
AirPort Extreme uses a new, mini-PCI form factor and the two card types are not interchangable. New Mac models introduced since January have the new AirPort Extreme card type, older ones still support AirPort-only. However, AirPort Extreme Macs can live on AirPort networks (albeit at the lower signal rate) and vice-versa.
Right now, Macs that support AirPort Extreme are:
PowerMac (all OS-X-only models)
12" and 17" Powerbooks (AlBooks)
iMac 17"
Macs with AirPort-only support are:
eMac
iMac G3
iMac 15"
iBook (all models)
PowerBook 15" (the TiBook)
MacOS 9-capable PowerMacs
The other thing is that all the AirPort Extreme-capable Macs also support built-in Bluetooth.
Sadly, I have a Series 2 Tivo, otherwise I'd be heading home at lunchtime today and rigging it all up.
I wonder if the newly announced broadband service for Series 2 will be a foot in the door towards doing this sort of operation there, too?
The only model that was actually _updated_ was the 17" iMac, with a new DDR-based logic board, 1 GHz processor, built-in Bluetooth support, and AirPort Extreme support. The 15" iMac is just a price reduction on the previous Combo drive model (no new features, still SDRAM-based, same speed), and the eMac models were also reduced in price with no new features. That's all.
Of course, had my story submission about 10 hours ago been taken, the correct info would be up for this story already... (grumble)
I'm guessing that the new 17" iMac is based on the same logic board/chipset in the new PowerBooks. I wonder if they're using regular form factor DIMMs now for the user-installable slot or if they're still using SO-DIMMs. It'll make a big difference in memory upgrade prices between one and the other.
When I have to travel on business, I generally book through either Travelocity or directly through the airline's website - whichever's cheaper. When I took my last business trip, though, I flew Southwest (Manchester, NH to Chicago Midway), and I was sufficiently impressed that I'll now seek them out whenever possible.
For personal travel, I use those two, plus I've used Expedia. I won't use Orbitz because I hate their ads too much. Between them and X10, I blame them both for the proliferation of pop-ups and pop-unders.
Hotels I usually book directly through the chain - we have a friend who runs a Marriott hotel in the area, so that contact usually helps out. If you're a AAA member (or any one of dozens of organizations), there's usually discount rates available at most major chains.
However, this is your honeymoon. There's no margin for error here, so I'd use an agent to book it for you. When self-booking, there's a lot more chances to screw up. You only get one chance at a honeymoon per marriage.
1: Keep selling ancient version of software that used to be cutting edge, but now is only used to run ATM's and on a handful of PC's that mostly access 3270 sessions all day.
2: React defensively when folks compare your OS to Amiga.
3: ???
4: Profit!
I have a good friend who owns a large independent pharmacy in New England (I won't be more specific, because I'm not sure if he'd want it mentioned here - though his store and system have been profiled in both trade and general newspapers). He loves it - it handles his top 200 medications, and in his own paraphrased words:
"It lets the pharmacists (of which he is one) spend more time with the patients, and less time counting pills."
He is able to keep a couple fewer pharmacy techs on hand then he used to need for his volume, but it gives the pharmacists a nice assist. He worries less about mistakes - the sanity checks these machines have are a lot more reliable than a human's would be. He's told me he sleeps better at night, knowing the likelihood of a potentially fatal mistake is far lower because of the robot. He sees the role of a pharmacist as being to advise and dispense - with a strong emphasis on the first job.
Here's a true anecdotal story supporting robot usage: I take a Priloec every day. One time I went to my local CVS to get a refill - when I got home and opened the bottle I found Prozac instead (the prescription label was correct - they just filled it with the wrong drug). They took care of the problem immediately, but imagine if I wasn't bright enough to realize that those pills weren't mine (I joke that I'd still have had stomach trouble, but I'd have been happy about it). Fortunately, taking a Prozac per day wouldn't have killed me, but what if it had been something that could have?
That's where I can see robots helping the typical pharmacist. It'll prevent those sort of mistakes from happening, and ensure that the drug ordered is the drug given.
What they mean by "potential" is that there will be live webcasts - until the Slashdot community gets a hold of them and beats them to death.
Think about it - we can track the new year by watching the slashdot effect track its way around the globe in real-time. This is an unprecedented opportunity to see how the backbones hold up br region...
Borland used to have (in the Turbo days) what I thought was the best license ever for commercial software, the "just like a book" license. You could do essentially whatever you wanted with the product, so long as only one person could use it at a time.
Of course, years later we have this. Granted, we're not talking about Turbo Pascal anymore - the tools are far pricier (so maybe they're a little more worried about "lost" revenue), but the restrictions they put on usage nowadays are just silly.
My in-laws are in town to visit my wife, myself, and mainly the new (7 month-old) baby. They're staying at a nearby hotel - came in Sunday afternoon and they're leaving Friday.
Today, we picked them up around 11 and went to brunch at the big hotel here in town. Dressed nice, took pictures. We've spent the afternoon relaxing, opening gifts (mostly for the baby - we really don't need anything ourselves), and playing with the little guy. In about 15 minutes, we're going out for a nice, traditional Chinese food dinner.
And then, afterwards, we'll drop them off at the hotel, come home, and hope that next year is the year that the whole world finally stops treating each other so crappy. Even though babies tend to generate optimism, I'm not holding out much hope on that one, unfortunately.
It'll be back to work tomorrow, with a decent amount of stuff to do before year-end.
In fact, that's one of the best ways that media companies are responding to the fragmentation threat. They're buying existing channels, and they're starting their own narrowcast channels, too. Not only does that help the networks stay afloat, but it also, in the long run, increases viewership overall - it's just more fragmented than it was in the days when the whole nation watched the last episone of M*A*S*H.
Discovery is another good example - it's pretty much a company owned by three big media conglomerates (Liberty, Cox, and Advance/Newhouse). But it was started and exists to exploit several niche markets, and does so effectively. They have 8 channels here in the US, a chain of retail stores, a merchandising/licensing operation, and a business producing content for other companies. They don't have one single monolithic channel that the whole nation turns to. They're exploiting the market niches that they fit best into. Generally speaking, that's the strategy that best fits the market nowadays.
ESPN is an interesting case. First, they were founded as the "original" cable niche player, though Getty Oil was a huge investor. Then ABC (when they were an independent company) jumped on-board, and ESPN got more and more assimilated as ABC got bought by Cap Cities and then Disney. Now ESPN is a conglomerate unto itself, with restaurants, multiple channels, a magazine, and a distinctive ESPN "brand". Meanwhile, the ESPN concept kicked off the explosion in sports networks, with channels now like the Fox Sports Net national and regionals, NESN, YES, MSG, and a host of others all over the country (like Sunshine, Outdoor, the Golf Channel, and more). But ESPN was there first.
I've been collecting for a little over 20 years (since I was a teen). I used to buy primarily from actual stores, now I buy mainly from Federation Comics - they used to have a retail store but now they're just a cyber-only shop. For fills and back issues I mainly go to Harrison's Comics in Salem MA (I don't think he has a website), it's convenient to me and a pretty good shop.
I also really like New England Comics (the company that brought us The Tick), but all their stores are fairly far away from my home - I used to go to their Norwood store regularly when I worked there. Million-Year Picnic in Harvard Square is good, too - assuming they're still around (rents there got pretty nutty since the last time I went there).
I'm not so sure on selling. I virtually never do - I even built a storage room for my collection when we were doing some house renovations this year. I like to fantasize that my collection will pay for our dream vacation house some day, but it's likelier that our six-month-old will just find them and chew on them instead.
Actually, it's a big cost-saving measure. Yeah, that's it. By making all the TW magazines AOL subscription-access only, they'll be able to cut their bills for bandwidth and server equipment drastically.
Because NOBODY'S GOING TO FSCKING READ THEM ANYMORE!!!
They already charge for the archives on-line, which isn't a bad way to go. Do they really think that people are going to use AOL just to get to Time Magazine (or SI, or one of their others)? I suspect most would-be subscribers will, at most, subscribe to one of the print mags. Better that than a $23/month (or half that for the BYO plan) AOL subscription.
For the monthly price of AOL, I could subscribe to most of TW's print mags, including the truly useless ones like Business 2.0 - and get my Internet via the DSL account that I'm already happily using. I really can't see anyone switching to AOL, of all services, just to read the current issue of TW mags online.
But hey, ideas like this prove that crack is still affordable to the masses, because they're obviously using lots of it at AOLTW!
That's handy. Not that I'd advocating it, of course, but wouldn't that be a ideal fake address to use if you had to use one registering for a pr0n site?
Just a thought...
I used to use PDA's for note-taking. I've had lots of them, starting with an old Zaurus OZ-7000 (the old one with pen support for ink and a keyboard), and moving through the original Newton, a couple of Palms (a Professional, a III, and now a Vx), and assorted other devices (I have a Zaurus 5500 now, and I just recently sold a iPaq that I'd been tinkering with). They all have had different strengths and weaknesses - but none of them turned out to be great note-takers. So now I look at them more as organizers, and I have dealt with them accordingly.
Nowadays,, I just use them as extensions of my brain - to hold things like documentation I need to refer to often, as a password vault, and for appointments/phone numbers. These are all the functions I can't readily remember off-hand, and PDA's are good for that. I'd ditch the Palm, but it has two strengths for me - it's tiny and it's the only thing I own that can sync with both my Windows PC at work and with my Windows and Mac systems at home. The Zaurus I use because there are things you can do with it that make it a very handy network admin's troubleshooting tool.
But ultimately, the two devices I get the most handheld use out of are just two simple devices that are nearly read-only:
My iPod (which I dump the vCards out of Entourage and onto, keeping my phone list up-to-date).
And my new Sony T68i phone. Bluetooth rocks for easy sync with my Mac, and although I can edit info on it (theoretically), it's a lot easier to just download it all periodically. The phone is small, and it's always with me - so why not keep my contacts list on it?
The thing is, I'm using my devices for purposes that would easily be solved by a cheap pocket calendar/address book - except if I did that I'd only have my data in one place with no backup, ever. And I know I'd lose it quickly. The ideal device hasn't been invented yet, but when it is it'll be a small, inexpensive, Bluetooth-connected organizer that can sync with any PIM on any platform, automatically. Before Palm decided that they were going to chase Microsoft into the expandable enterprise device market (with the high prices that go along with it), it looked like they were heading there. Now I'm not so sure. But I don't think that PDA's are the be-all, end-all that they're made out to be, even though I'm such a big user of them.
Of course, during the Gulf War we had a big Reserves call-up to get to the 900,000 figure (so demobilizing them shrunk the military back down to normal).
Come to think of it, permanently adding more people to the military would have the inadverdent effect of shrinking the pool of workers competing for jobs out here in the rest of the economy... But more people are normally interested in the military as a career option in bad economic times.
But hey, why compare military staffing fairly between successive administrations when you can use skewed numbers from a war, compare them to peacetime figures, and have another opportunity to Clinton-bash?
I have an old 3-bedroom house, but with 200 amp electrical service. Which is good, because 1 bedroom is for my wife and I, one is for our baby, and the third is my geekroom. I used to put photos of it on my website, but they're really out-of-date. Guests to our house either get a fold-out sofa or go to a hotel nearby that a friend of ours manages - they get a real cheap rate. We used to have a guest room but that's where the baby lives now.
The geekroom has two desks, two bookcases (tech stuff only - other bookcases in the house handle "real" books), and a big old metal shelving unit that holds a 16-port switch, three UPS units, a monitor, my Epson Stylus Photo, my current server (a little FlexATX box running e-Smith), a monitor, and a second PC that runs Mandrake and usually sits open because I'm always swapping stuff in and out of it. There's also a third PC on the rack that I just got - a Mini-ITX box that I'm going to run my server on because it's even smaller and quieter than the existing server. They're all on a 4-port KVM switch.
Then on the first desk, next to the rack, I keep my PowerBook G4, along with all it's gadgets (Palm cradle, Griffin powerMate, CF/Smartmedia reader, Keyspan serial port, iPod). I've got a Newton 2100 on the desk, too - I'm turning it into a web server soon and when I do it goes on the rack. My HP laser is on a stand next to the desk.
The next desk over holds my P4 system - I run XP on it and use it for gaming. I built this one over the summer. Wedged between the two desks are about 200 CD's that contain either software or backups of some sort or another.
In the corner of the room is an Athlon 700 that's currently semi-disassembled (I had to grab a couple of parts out of it for the P4), but used to be my gaming rig. Finally, the geekroom has some space allocated for short-term comic book storage. My workbench is in the cellar, along with virtually all my tools and the bulk of my comics (I built a moisture-controlled storage closet down there).
Geeky, but non-tech items in the geekroom include all my photo gear and slides, a small collection of stuffed toys, a 30-year-old (but still working) shortwave receiver, and a bass guitar.
Currently out on loan to my office is my Athlon 650 that I run Solaris X86 on. I'm testing some stuff for work on it, and it was handy to grab. We also have two other computers in the house - my wife has an iMac widescreen that she keeps on a small desk in our bedroom, and I have a hacked iOpener that we keep in the basement. Also in the basement are the DSL modem and my router.
This sounds worse than it is, though - my one geekroom is a disaster, admittedly, but the rest of the house looks like Martha freaking Stewart had her way with it. It's a good arrangement. I don't interfere with the rest of the house, and I'm allowed my one room to do as I see fit.
Unless, of course, we have another child, in which case my butt is banished to the basement. Good thing we had it finished this past winter...
This doesn't represent a major redesign (neither do the windtunnel G4 towers). The only major changes are faster speed and better video coming from the same basic logic board and chipset.
I'm not expecting Apple to do a lot WRT USB 2.0, really - they're firmly in the FireWire camp. But I do think they'll start integrating Bluetooth when they do their next logic board refresh/redesign. Hopefully they'll add digital out at that point, too.
One of the first things Jobs did on his return was move MacWorld to New York. They were considering coming back here a couple of years ago, and he single-handedly shot it down. He obviously feels strongly about it. Maybe he got thrown out of a bar in Boston once or something - who knows why he hates us here so much, but c'est la vie.
Of course, this kind of hissy fit demonstrated conclusively that he's a pud, but that's kinda besides the point, I guess...