Good post. I had all but forgotten that there was a time where I didn't have to pay to watch TV. It actually came through the air for free!
Anyway, my question is: will any of this change once Congress makes up its mind about when to make the switch to all-digital broadcasts? What will happen to this "free" type of broadcast... will it just go away?
Well, that's one way to go, I guess. It's probably safe to assume that the author is in a Microsoft environment and it is probably also safe to say that Linux wouldn't have the spyware problems that the author describes. However, in a 2000 user environment, it is likely that replacing an investment of thousands of dollars might not be easy to pass by the bosses.
That said, in our Microsoft-centric environment, we have solved a majority of our spyware and virus problems by only allowing our users to log into their workstations as non-priveleged users. No one can install programs or alter system configurations except our administrative staff. Even ActiveX controls cannot be installed by our employees. They have to call the IT department to get anything installed, configured, or changed on their system.
You might think that our setup would cause a lot of grief for our helpdesk since users call them to change things and install programs, but when we considered the alternative there isn't any going back. I don't know how long it has been since I got a call like, "...um, yeah. I just keep getting all of these popup ads when I'm in MS Word..." I tell you what, if I never got another one, it would be too soon.
We are looking at purchasing a new phone system for our 100+ employee company. All of the systems that we have seen a demo for can support VoIP, but you obviously don't have to purchase that capability.
Whats more, most of the systems have something generally called "Unified Messaging" that will allow you to listen to your voicemail from your email without any VoIP functionality. It also allows emails and chat sessions to be put into Automated Call Distribution Queues (ACD). All of this without the use of VoIP.
The only senario we could come up with for using VoIP was that if our branch office in another city wanted their people to be seemlessly integrated with our phone system. You would just get two of these fancy phone systems, network them together and you could be at either office and it would be as if you were sitting in the same building as the person 800 miles away. Even under these circumstances, though, I don't think we would have to use VoIP.
Asside from cheap (and poor quality) long distance, we have not come across a good use for the technology.
... of something a computer science professor once told me. It went something like, "You can write the best code in the world; design the best user interface and implement the strictest error catching, but you still can't keep the end user from being stupid."
This story interested me because nearly half of our users have come to us requesting pop-up blocking within the company. We use IpCop as our proxy/firewall for over 100 users. I'm sure someone could rig Dan's Guardian or some content filter out there to do the job, but we have had very good success with Goggle's latest toolbar for IE. The users can keep using the browser of their choice, the toolbar lets them search quickly, and the toolbar blocks popups. We have also blocked the spyware sites that we are aware of by using IPCop's hosts file and have run AdAware on the workstations religiously.
I'll admit that it is a pain to install the toolbar on 100 machines, but I would like to think that it has saved us the time and agony of making our poor little firewall try to do something it wasn't designed to do in the first place.
I also realize our corporate user group is not the same as your ISP's user group. You have less control over the machines that access your services. However, you have to remember the KISS principle: Keep It Simple Stupid. If there is software that a user can install to block popups, that puts the choice in their hands. You can recommend the software and even provide an instruction set for doing it. Heck, you could even advertise that, "We will help you stay popup free."
Anyway, I highly recommend the latest google toolbar. You can download it here.
I'm not sure if slashdot covered this one or not, but I'm sure aching for one.
The Kiss DP500 plays anything you can throw at it via ethernet connection or cd. They have regular firmware upgrades that allow the box to use new codecs. On top of that, how cool would it be to have a server full of high quality DivX (Xvid, MPEG4, etc., etc.) accessible via your TV!
The box in the article doesn't sound like it does all of that right now. Mega props, though for the SDK for "home users." Just look at where the hacker community has taken the Tivo!
My name is Steve Jobs. I got a private demo of this product and let me tell you, it is so mind blowing that I am sure we are going to have to re-think the way we design cities!
My grandparents have a hybrid... one of the first made by Honda, actually. They have been very happy with it and its performance. The only gripe they might have is that they have to search high and low to find a mechanic that is certified to work on the car. I guess the dealerships won't let just anybody touch the little buggers.
The gas mileage is very good compared to gas-only cars in the same class and it will knock the socks off of any suv out there.
Acceleration is good (not like a V-8 sports car). Moving slowly around a parking lot or coming to a stop shuts the gas engine off so that it runs on electric only. The same goes for the first stage of a take-off. You can't even hear the car role up next to you!
If you are not looking for a sports car to go cruising in or vehicle that will haul you and six of your buddies around town, I would recommend a hybrid. My grandparents would, too.
My employer is bringing in a Hypno-therapist to do a seminar on the advantages of hypnosis and self-hypnosis. They are suppose to help you quit smoking, loose weight, or whatever your problem may be. So far, one person has signed up. I suppose this is a little different than meditation, but it is all tied together somehow, I guess.
We have all of our servers named after evil or "gone crazy" computers. They all have names like WOPR (War Games), HAL9000, Johnny5 (Short Circuit), Lore (ST Next Gen.), etc.
I guess we could name our server room something like "Bit Hell" - where all of the bad computers go when they die.
Oh yeah, and they all run NT, so the nomenclature is even more fitting.
I totally agree. Homesite is the best web authoring tool I have found for Windoze. It has good-intuitive shortcuts, bookmarks, syntax highlighting, great online help for html, and good css help.
Unfortunately, I also have to agree with the statement about *nix lacking a program that even comes close to Homesite. Though, I do have to give props to the author of Bluefish for a good attempt that keeps getting better. Someday, I hope I can use Bluefish instead of paying my US$50 for Homesite.
I agree that you should avoid those cheep FM transmitter thingy's. You'll actually be lucky if they work most of the time, and when they do you don't want to annoy other drivers with your FM transmitter.
I would suggest an FM Modulator that plugs directly into your antenna line. You will get much better quality and reliability from them than your average $25 transmitter.
Of course, if you don't mind spending money, just get a head unit with an aux line-in and use that.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln cs department has been using something like this for a few years now. They call theirs handin and it handles all programming submitions and checks them for cheating patterns. Big deal...
Let me start by saying that I have, in the past, always been pleased with Pay Pal's service. My only complaint, up until 4 or 5 months ago, was that it took a lot of time to get the money from my PP account to my real bank account. However, this is always the case when you are doing e-transfers through a real world bank.
I tried to put my credit card number into the PP system at a time when their servers were down. It could not authorize my number several times because of "internal server errors." After so many times, I was told that my card number would be flagged in the PP system and that it was no longer valid on the entire PP system ever again!
I tried customer support and explained the problem, but got no response and have not been able to use my card on PP since.
Though my experience is probably not typical, I am without paypal service on my only credit card.
My favorite place for risers is Barada In Canada. The seem to have a fairly large selection of pci and isa risers. However, I didn't see any ISA risers under 2.4 inches tall, but some of the PCI risers (even old Pentium boards should support these) are very small.
Of course, if your case doesn't like side-ways cards, you will need to take your Dremel to it or come up with some other way to hack it together.
All of this is assuming that you are going to need the video output from your low profile setup. If you don't need a direct monitor feed from the box, I would highly recommend The Weasel and an extra serial port on another machine. If you read Japanese and have a currency converter handy, you can check out the product page on their distributor's site.
Perhaps you could share your design with use (the case in particular) so that we don't have to guess at your setup?
There's no sensible reason to enforce a certain browser.
That is not entirely true. The company I work for uses an Intranet application that makes use of a LOT of ActiveX type things that IE has built into it. Unfortunately, the html and javascript code in the pages are also tuned to IE and that makes the page look like goat crap in Netscape.
Perhaps someone that is better versed in thermodynamics can answer this:
Wouldn't these things be cold to the touch all the time since they are, in essense, based on an endothermic reaction?
We recently had to purchase some software that went along with a special printer here at work. The software came with a simple "smart card" reader and one of the memory cards pictured with the mouse pad you're talking about. In effect, the software simply uses the reader as a fancy dongle. That is, you have to have the reader plugged in and the card inserted to be able to use the software. This is one of the dumbest ideas I have heard of for this technology.
I can't tell you any specifics on the reader that comes with the mouse pad, but the card doesn't look like it has a CPU, as someone mentioned above. It looks like it is a flash memory card only.
I tried the theme on my windows machine here at work, and it is not much to talk about. Mostly it consists of replacing the recycle bin, my computer, and network neighborhood icons with units from the game.
The colors that it uses are pretty unoriginal and typical to windows in addition to clashing with eachother. (I'm speaking mostly of making the windows menus neon green and yellow.)
Anyway, I'm sure all you dedicated *nix users don't care, but if you are stuck with windows at work like I am, you may be looking for a good theme or two to make your life interesting. However, This group of themes is not what your looking for.
Ha-Frick'n-larious... I especially like the part about teaching someone to activate the screen saver.
Once again, we get some great satire from a great bunch of people over at SatireWire.
I have next to no experience with modern LCD's, but I do know that they have not used crystals that can move fast enough to keep up with video/games/animation. Though, the quality now days is, likely, not bad, I would guess that if you sat a good CRT next to an LCD and played a game on both, the CRT would win in the bluriness factor.
Something I like to do is go into a Radio Shack, Best Buy, or your local computer shop and test drive a system with an LCD on it. The shop will probably have some sort of demo movie running on the machine that will give a pretty good idea of what the screen will look like during a game.
All that aside, I would still love to get a good LCD at work (I don't game there). Staring at a CRT for 8+ hours daily gets to you after a while.
I'm currently trying Nescape 6 and my main complaint is that it is slow. I haven't downloaded 0.8 yet. Can you tell me if Mozilla is (for sure) faster than NS 6? Since the two browsers only split from each other two minor versions ago, my concern is that mozilla code is just as dirty as NS 6 code.
If you run NS 6 from an xterm, you can even see some diagnostic/debugging printf commands like, "We are now in the SuchAndSuch function!" This is lame... Does Mozilla do a better job of getting rid of these little programmer bookmarks and bulk code?
I know these are all dumb questions, but I can't bring myself to spend the time to download/install another bulky browser to my poor machine if it is not going to be better than what I have.
In my medium sized town, Lincoln, Nebraska, we have one choice for DSL line service. Alltel, our telephone company, in a word, sucks.
I ordered DSL two weeks ago from a third party ISP and was told to pick the router up from the telephone compnay at the end of the week so they could program it, etc. I called the telephone company in the middle of the week to see if they had my order on hand and make sure everything was going to go as planned.
I had ordered the router with a special deal that stated I could buy the router for $99 and they would wave the $100 line installation charge if I signed up for a year. I was told by Alltel that they would not have my router for nearly a month because they were, "having problems with our hardware supplier." I guess they don't have the brains to order enough of these things when they run a special like that.
In short, I won't get my router for another two weeks and who knows when they will get around to flipping the switch on my line so I have service.
Bitter? Who? Me? No...
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer, Melrose Place in Space because it rhymes. :)
Good post. I had all but forgotten that there was a time where I didn't have to pay to watch TV. It actually came through the air for free!
Anyway, my question is: will any of this change once Congress makes up its mind about when to make the switch to all-digital broadcasts? What will happen to this "free" type of broadcast... will it just go away?
Well, that's one way to go, I guess. It's probably safe to assume that the author is in a Microsoft environment and it is probably also safe to say that Linux wouldn't have the spyware problems that the author describes. However, in a 2000 user environment, it is likely that replacing an investment of thousands of dollars might not be easy to pass by the bosses.
That said, in our Microsoft-centric environment, we have solved a majority of our spyware and virus problems by only allowing our users to log into their workstations as non-priveleged users. No one can install programs or alter system configurations except our administrative staff. Even ActiveX controls cannot be installed by our employees. They have to call the IT department to get anything installed, configured, or changed on their system.
You might think that our setup would cause a lot of grief for our helpdesk since users call them to change things and install programs, but when we considered the alternative there isn't any going back. I don't know how long it has been since I got a call like, "...um, yeah. I just keep getting all of these popup ads when I'm in MS Word..." I tell you what, if I never got another one, it would be too soon.
Anyway, good luck to the author.
We are looking at purchasing a new phone system for our 100+ employee company. All of the systems that we have seen a demo for can support VoIP, but you obviously don't have to purchase that capability.
Whats more, most of the systems have something generally called "Unified Messaging" that will allow you to listen to your voicemail from your email without any VoIP functionality. It also allows emails and chat sessions to be put into Automated Call Distribution Queues (ACD). All of this without the use of VoIP.
The only senario we could come up with for using VoIP was that if our branch office in another city wanted their people to be seemlessly integrated with our phone system. You would just get two of these fancy phone systems, network them together and you could be at either office and it would be as if you were sitting in the same building as the person 800 miles away. Even under these circumstances, though, I don't think we would have to use VoIP.
Asside from cheap (and poor quality) long distance, we have not come across a good use for the technology.
... of something a computer science professor once told me. It went something like, "You can write the best code in the world; design the best user interface and implement the strictest error catching, but you still can't keep the end user from being stupid."
This story interested me because nearly half of our users have come to us requesting pop-up blocking within the company. We use IpCop as our proxy/firewall for over 100 users. I'm sure someone could rig Dan's Guardian or some content filter out there to do the job, but we have had very good success with Goggle's latest toolbar for IE. The users can keep using the browser of their choice, the toolbar lets them search quickly, and the toolbar blocks popups. We have also blocked the spyware sites that we are aware of by using IPCop's hosts file and have run AdAware on the workstations religiously.
I'll admit that it is a pain to install the toolbar on 100 machines, but I would like to think that it has saved us the time and agony of making our poor little firewall try to do something it wasn't designed to do in the first place.
I also realize our corporate user group is not the same as your ISP's user group. You have less control over the machines that access your services. However, you have to remember the KISS principle: Keep It Simple Stupid. If there is software that a user can install to block popups, that puts the choice in their hands. You can recommend the software and even provide an instruction set for doing it. Heck, you could even advertise that, "We will help you stay popup free."
Anyway, I highly recommend the latest google toolbar. You can download it here.
I'm not sure if slashdot covered this one or not, but I'm sure aching for one.
The Kiss DP500 plays anything you can throw at it via ethernet connection or cd. They have regular firmware upgrades that allow the box to use new codecs. On top of that, how cool would it be to have a server full of high quality DivX (Xvid, MPEG4, etc., etc.) accessible via your TV!
The box in the article doesn't sound like it does all of that right now. Mega props, though for the SDK for "home users." Just look at where the hacker community has taken the Tivo!
My name is Steve Jobs. I got a private demo of this product and let me tell you, it is so mind blowing that I am sure we are going to have to re-think the way we design cities!
My grandparents have a hybrid... one of the first made by Honda, actually. They have been very happy with it and its performance. The only gripe they might have is that they have to search high and low to find a mechanic that is certified to work on the car. I guess the dealerships won't let just anybody touch the little buggers.
The gas mileage is very good compared to gas-only cars in the same class and it will knock the socks off of any suv out there.
Acceleration is good (not like a V-8 sports car). Moving slowly around a parking lot or coming to a stop shuts the gas engine off so that it runs on electric only. The same goes for the first stage of a take-off. You can't even hear the car role up next to you!
If you are not looking for a sports car to go cruising in or vehicle that will haul you and six of your buddies around town, I would recommend a hybrid. My grandparents would, too.
My employer is bringing in a Hypno-therapist to do a seminar on the advantages of hypnosis and self-hypnosis. They are suppose to help you quit smoking, loose weight, or whatever your problem may be.
So far, one person has signed up. I suppose this is a little different than meditation, but it is all tied together somehow, I guess.
We have all of our servers named after evil or "gone crazy" computers. They all have names like WOPR (War Games), HAL9000, Johnny5 (Short Circuit), Lore (ST Next Gen.), etc.
I guess we could name our server room something like "Bit Hell" - where all of the bad computers go when they die.
Oh yeah, and they all run NT, so the nomenclature is even more fitting.
I totally agree. Homesite is the best web authoring tool I have found for Windoze. It has good-intuitive shortcuts, bookmarks, syntax highlighting, great online help for html, and good css help.
Unfortunately, I also have to agree with the statement about *nix lacking a program that even comes close to Homesite. Though, I do have to give props to the author of Bluefish for a good attempt that keeps getting better. Someday, I hope I can use Bluefish instead of paying my US$50 for Homesite.
I agree that you should avoid those cheep FM transmitter thingy's. You'll actually be lucky if they work most of the time, and when they do you don't want to annoy other drivers with your FM transmitter.
I would suggest an FM Modulator that plugs directly into your antenna line. You will get much better quality and reliability from them than your average $25 transmitter.
Of course, if you don't mind spending money, just get a head unit with an aux line-in and use that.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln cs department has been using something like this for a few years now. They call theirs handin and it handles all programming submitions and checks them for cheating patterns. Big deal...
Let me start by saying that I have, in the past, always been pleased with Pay Pal's service. My only complaint, up until 4 or 5 months ago, was that it took a lot of time to get the money from my PP account to my real bank account. However, this is always the case when you are doing e-transfers through a real world bank.
I tried to put my credit card number into the PP system at a time when their servers were down. It could not authorize my number several times because of "internal server errors." After so many times, I was told that my card number would be flagged in the PP system and that it was no longer valid on the entire PP system ever again!
I tried customer support and explained the problem, but got no response and have not been able to use my card on PP since.
Though my experience is probably not typical, I am without paypal service on my only credit card.
My favorite place for risers is Barada In Canada. The seem to have a fairly large selection of pci and isa risers. However, I didn't see any ISA risers under 2.4 inches tall, but some of the PCI risers (even old Pentium boards should support these) are very small.
Of course, if your case doesn't like side-ways cards, you will need to take your Dremel to it or come up with some other way to hack it together.
All of this is assuming that you are going to need the video output from your low profile setup. If you don't need a direct monitor feed from the box, I would highly recommend The Weasel and an extra serial port on another machine. If you read Japanese and have a currency converter handy, you can check out the product page on their distributor's site.
Perhaps you could share your design with use (the case in particular) so that we don't have to guess at your setup?
That is not entirely true. The company I work for uses an Intranet application that makes use of a LOT of ActiveX type things that IE has built into it. Unfortunately, the html and javascript code in the pages are also tuned to IE and that makes the page look like goat crap in Netscape.
Perhaps someone that is better versed in thermodynamics can answer this:
Wouldn't these things be cold to the touch all the time since they are, in essense, based on an endothermic reaction?
We recently had to purchase some software that went along with a special printer here at work. The software came with a simple "smart card" reader and one of the memory cards pictured with the mouse pad you're talking about. In effect, the software simply uses the reader as a fancy dongle. That is, you have to have the reader plugged in and the card inserted to be able to use the software. This is one of the dumbest ideas I have heard of for this technology.
I can't tell you any specifics on the reader that comes with the mouse pad, but the card doesn't look like it has a CPU, as someone mentioned above. It looks like it is a flash memory card only.
Why Won't You Pay For Content?
/me grins
'Cause information wants to be free. Hax0r the planet... hax0r the planet!
I tried the theme on my windows machine here at work, and it is not much to talk about. Mostly it consists of replacing the recycle bin, my computer, and network neighborhood icons with units from the game.
The colors that it uses are pretty unoriginal and typical to windows in addition to clashing with eachother. (I'm speaking mostly of making the windows menus neon green and yellow.)
Anyway, I'm sure all you dedicated *nix users don't care, but if you are stuck with windows at work like I am, you may be looking for a good theme or two to make your life interesting. However, This group of themes is not what your looking for.
Ha-Frick'n-larious... I especially like the part about teaching someone to activate the screen saver.
Once again, we get some great satire from a great bunch of people over at SatireWire.
I have next to no experience with modern LCD's, but I do know that they have not used crystals that can move fast enough to keep up with video/games/animation. Though, the quality now days is, likely, not bad, I would guess that if you sat a good CRT next to an LCD and played a game on both, the CRT would win in the bluriness factor.
Something I like to do is go into a Radio Shack, Best Buy, or your local computer shop and test drive a system with an LCD on it. The shop will probably have some sort of demo movie running on the machine that will give a pretty good idea of what the screen will look like during a game.
All that aside, I would still love to get a good LCD at work (I don't game there). Staring at a CRT for 8+ hours daily gets to you after a while.
I'm currently trying Nescape 6 and my main complaint is that it is slow. I haven't downloaded 0.8 yet. Can you tell me if Mozilla is (for sure) faster than NS 6? Since the two browsers only split from each other two minor versions ago, my concern is that mozilla code is just as dirty as NS 6 code.
If you run NS 6 from an xterm, you can even see some diagnostic/debugging printf commands like, "We are now in the SuchAndSuch function!" This is lame... Does Mozilla do a better job of getting rid of these little programmer bookmarks and bulk code?
I know these are all dumb questions, but I can't bring myself to spend the time to download/install another bulky browser to my poor machine if it is not going to be better than what I have.
In my medium sized town, Lincoln, Nebraska, we have one choice for DSL line service. Alltel, our telephone company, in a word, sucks.
I ordered DSL two weeks ago from a third party ISP and was told to pick the router up from the telephone compnay at the end of the week so they could program it, etc. I called the telephone company in the middle of the week to see if they had my order on hand and make sure everything was going to go as planned.
I had ordered the router with a special deal that stated I could buy the router for $99 and they would wave the $100 line installation charge if I signed up for a year. I was told by Alltel that they would not have my router for nearly a month because they were, "having problems with our hardware supplier." I guess they don't have the brains to order enough of these things when they run a special like that.
In short, I won't get my router for another two weeks and who knows when they will get around to flipping the switch on my line so I have service. Bitter? Who? Me? No...