What is more efficient (speed/energy), a boat or a sub? I suppose that a hydroplaning boat would be, but I am not sure of the fluid physics involved. How much less efficient is a boat than a car in terms of energy expended compared to the speed it travels? How could boats be made more efficient, or could they?
Organization like this spent their time and money lobbying for actions that make their life easier and their pocketbooks fuller. That's nothing to do with directly asking governments for the powers of coercion, it just them going to individual people in government and convincing them this is better for everyone (whether it is or not).
Think of it this way...if there are people making music, some enterprising young soul will find a way to make money off of it. They might just be a chain of "public listening booths" where you can download music for download to your mobile player, or just to sample what is out there. Maybe music reviews will become the next big thing and millions will be made showing them to people. Definitely they will have their hands into concerts and promotion.
One way or the other though, as long as there is money to be made, corporations will be involved.
Unless we advance some form of public ownership, and tear down the structure of corporate business, we will always have corporations. As long as we have corporate record companies, they will seek an organization where they can band together for self-protection.
While it may not always be CALLED the RIAA, it will always BE the RIAA.
PNG has been accepted as far as browser support, but is relatively (in comparison to JPG and GIF) unused. Unless this image format has vastly improved abilities over the conventional method, this is a non-starter.
It's hell out there, at least in Vancouver Canada, where I am, for tech workers. There's no work, or the work that IS available is deskside support for non-technology firms (if you are lucky, with a smattering of sysadminning thrown in).
Oursourcing is all fine and dandy, but are they outsourcing to small tech firms, individuals, or just to the big and expensive tech companies that are laying off people by the thousands and working their leftover staff half to death? My take on what I've seen is the latter.
*sigh* All in the name of artificially keeping up the stock price for the shareholders - what people really gotta realize is that slumps happen. Sometimes the market will dip, sometimes it will surge. In the end it doesn't matter if your stock dips a little if in the long-term the company is viable and had good people working for it.
But imagine this...instead of having one connection into your home, you have two (split the bandwidth on your cable line), which connects you in a mesh topology with other cable internet users. Do this on a grand scale, with the millions (billions?) of people who will one day be on the net. When you connect to somewhere, rather than absolutely HAVING to go through a central point to a bit pipe, you enter a cloud and get your data across it.
Now I realize this pretty much requires last-mile fiber, but it would be a hell of a lot more decentralized and less prone to failure than the current internet.
The internet is horribly vulnerable as it is. It's not so much a problem of pure decentralization as it is one of too many people/requests to handle through too tight a pipe if the other pipe goes down.
As an example...if one day some serious news happened that caused everyone to get on the net at once (Kyoto Earthquake, OJ Simpson on the freeway, Iraq drops a nuclear bomb), and this coincided with a failure of some large piece of hardware along the western coast (under extreme load), the remaining paths for much of this area would be so bogged down as to be useless. Effectively the internet would break under the pressure.
What needs to happen to avoid the problem here is have many more paths for the data to flow, which requires better hardware and further decentralization (would love to see everyone's cable modem be a small internet router for people's data to travel through). Barring that, with the increased worldwide participation on the net expect that some days you just won't be able to use it.
No it wouldn't. If, for example, any new account required a credit card account (or other billing method), then the ISP could create end-of-month tallies. A spammer would run up a $100,000 bill, but no regular user would.
I'd like it if we all paid $0.01 per email sent (worldwide). The money could be used for internet hardware and research as well as giving ISPs a much needed boost in revenues with a percentage. The average user would pay less than $1 per month. Spammers however would be shut down quickly. SMTP relays could monitor emails passing through to make sure the charges were accurate. Hotmail and other free email providers would start charging customers, which would require billing info, making spammers using 'free' services trackable.
A pipe dream, unfortunately. Though I think any intelligent techie would be up for this.
I fail to see how the problem of spam could be much worse. Out of necessity an alias to my email is out on the net and I get 20-30 spam per day, most of the the incest/rape/animals varieties.
What would be worse? 100 spam a day would take no more effort to delete (thanks to spamassassin), and I fail to see worse topics showing up in my mailbox.
Kickstart
Re:Are you insane? What a crock of crap!
on
User Friendly 1.0
·
· Score: 1
Didn't happen on UF...but I DO seem to remember it happening on Slashdot, yes.
I'm the head mod over at the UF Community boards, so I figured I'd better respond to this (well, I could have ignored it, but that would be no fun at all).
Every once in a while someone comes in and says something akin to: "WTF? Why are you losers talking about shiat other than the strip?". The inevitable response is: The Comment Board is NOT for talking about the strip! Sure, you can talk about the strip if you want to, no one is going to tell you otherwise, but there is NO REQUIREMENT to do so. The Comment Board is just a place where people can interact with other members of the community in a place that is -for the community-.
This simple idea evades the people who arrive there and expect hundreds of responses saying, "Illiad, nice job!" or "Illiad, you suck!". Can you possibly imagine how boring and stupid that would be?
As for the 'support' posts...it's a community. There are people on there who've been talking for years, who've met in real life, and a few who have dated or even married after communicating on the UF board. If someone in this community wants to talk about something or get a little encouragement from other people who want to give that encouragement, then what the heck is wrong with that? It's not for you, and you don't have to respond. You don't even have to read it.
If you don't find something you want on the UF board...that's a shame, but it's not the end of the world. Certainly there are enough places among the terabytes of internet bulletin boards for you to find one that suits your temperament. I personally hope you find one. You can even go ahead and slag the UF board there if you want. The people who make the UF board what it is will continue to do what they enjoy - namely, what they've been doing all along.
2 - 1/4" slices of ham 1 stick hot pepperoni (the thin, dry kind) 1 large onion 1 bell pepper (red or green or 1/2 each) 1 tsp garlic 4 ribs celery 2-3 small cans tomato paste 8 cups chicken broth 1 tsp cayenne 1 tsp fresh ground black pepper 1/2 tsp oregano 4 cups white rice
Make the rice with the chicken broth instead of water. You want this rice to not be sticky or overcooked.
Dice: ham, onion, bell pepper, garlic Slice: pepperoni, celery Fry all above in a light oil, gradually mixing in spices until bell pepper and celery are very slightly soft, but before onion carmelizes. Add tomato paste, mix, and increase heat and stir for a few minutes to coat everything well. Mix with rice and serve. Makes a lot! Good for parties.
Has anyone had a chance to really compare this release of Gnome 2.0 to Ximian Gnome? Has the core Gnome team sought to add the features and functionality that Ximian provided?
Note the 'U'...that means I just saw something in the sky that I couldn't recognize. I didn't automatically assume it was little green men coming to molest our livestock and rednecks.
It was about June in 1987 and my father and I were out working on the ranch I grew up on. I looked to the sky and saw a small silver dot to the north of us about 60 degrees above the horizon. As I watched it it moved rapidly to the west about 5 degrees then a little more slowly to the east over the mountain next to us. It was really small, so I couldn't see anything other than it was reflecting a lot of light from the sun (this happened mid-afternoon).
I didn't bother to report it because I suspect there is some normal explanation for it (but weather balloons don't move that fast I think), but I still do wonder what that rational explanation is.
Basically, what it comes down to is that I don't like being typed by my location. I typed in 'www.google.com' instead of 'www.google.ca' because I wanted the standard interface.
Now...I have to say that Google doesn't appear to specifically target me with 'ads for Canadians', but there is nothing to stop them from doing so, and no way to tell if that is indeed what they are doing at some point in the future. Even further, how can I be sure that the actual search results I get from Google aren't tainted by my location? If the Canadian gov't cracks down on some form of cryptography, will I be unable to do searches in Google for it because of my location? It's a slippery slope.
As far as speed...there is no difference that I have found. But that brings up another issue...what if the www.google.ca server starts dying? Will I be forced to go to a server that is incapable of handling my request?
For a long while Lycos claimed to have knowledge of the most pages as well. There are many different ways of saying who is 'king'. I don't disagree that Google beats the heck out of everything else currently available though.
Now...if Google wants to stay on top with me, I'd like to see the following:
'regexp.google.com', so that we have a little more control over how and what we search
If not regexp, then at least wilcards for words. I would like to search for something like "word1 * word3" and have the search engine return all the instances where word1 and word3 have any number of word2' between them.
Dropping country specific google sites. I absolutely hate the fact that when I type in 'www.google.com' it autoforwards me to 'www.google.ca' with Canadian content enabled. I've spoke to them about it, and there are workarounds, but they refuse to make it easy to not be categorized by country.
I'd like to see the last time a returned link was indexed by Google, to know how up-to-date a link is. This especially becomes vital for technical issues, where a returned link on a specific piece of software is no longer useful because of version changes.
I can come up with a lot of things saying 'how to make search engines more useful'. Now if only someone would listen.
Yesterday I used the Wayback Machine for one of the lawyers at the law firm I work at to prove that a company at one point had an office in a certain location. The company in question was trying to duck out of a contracted agreement by saying they were not the people who signed the contract.
The Wayback Machine proved that they indeed knew of, approved, and granted authorization to this specific office, and the other people had a valid contract. In this specific case, the Wayback Machine prevented an apparently scumbag company from trying to screw some apparently good people over.
Really, what you are trying to do is manage documents I assume. Unless you've got tons and tons of programmers, in which case you're going to want a CVS system of some sort, then basic backing up standard office documents from Word, Excel, etc. is what you want.
I work for a lawfirm, and we make every effort not to allow users to store the documents they need locally. iManage is what we use for this. It integrates with the Microsoft Office suite, so that when the user hits Open, a dialog box for the stored documents server is brought up instead. As well, Save automatically brings up the form to save the document into the document management system. Nothing more complicated than that is usually needed. Users have to go out of their way to save things locally.
Slashdot Mirror
Kickstart
Kickstart
One way or the other though, as long as there is money to be made, corporations will be involved.
Kickstart
Well, I definitely didn't say it was a GOOD thing. I believe very much the opposite. Kickstart
While it may not always be CALLED the RIAA, it will always BE the RIAA.
Kickstart
Kickstart
Geez, get a life. Either this is a personal site or not. If it is, don't expect my money.
Kickstart
It's hell out there, at least in Vancouver Canada, where I am, for tech workers. There's no work, or the work that IS available is deskside support for non-technology firms (if you are lucky, with a smattering of sysadminning thrown in).
Oursourcing is all fine and dandy, but are they outsourcing to small tech firms, individuals, or just to the big and expensive tech companies that are laying off people by the thousands and working their leftover staff half to death? My take on what I've seen is the latter.
*sigh* All in the name of artificially keeping up the stock price for the shareholders - what people really gotta realize is that slumps happen. Sometimes the market will dip, sometimes it will surge. In the end it doesn't matter if your stock dips a little if in the long-term the company is viable and had good people working for it.
Kickstart
By the current way of thinking, yes.
But imagine this...instead of having one connection into your home, you have two (split the bandwidth on your cable line), which connects you in a mesh topology with other cable internet users. Do this on a grand scale, with the millions (billions?) of people who will one day be on the net. When you connect to somewhere, rather than absolutely HAVING to go through a central point to a bit pipe, you enter a cloud and get your data across it.
Now I realize this pretty much requires last-mile fiber, but it would be a hell of a lot more decentralized and less prone to failure than the current internet.
Kickstart
The internet is horribly vulnerable as it is. It's not so much a problem of pure decentralization as it is one of too many people/requests to handle through too tight a pipe if the other pipe goes down.
As an example...if one day some serious news happened that caused everyone to get on the net at once (Kyoto Earthquake, OJ Simpson on the freeway, Iraq drops a nuclear bomb), and this coincided with a failure of some large piece of hardware along the western coast (under extreme load), the remaining paths for much of this area would be so bogged down as to be useless. Effectively the internet would break under the pressure.
What needs to happen to avoid the problem here is have many more paths for the data to flow, which requires better hardware and further decentralization (would love to see everyone's cable modem be a small internet router for people's data to travel through). Barring that, with the increased worldwide participation on the net expect that some days you just won't be able to use it.
Kickstart
No it wouldn't. If, for example, any new account required a credit card account (or other billing method), then the ISP could create end-of-month tallies. A spammer would run up a $100,000 bill, but no regular user would.
Kickstart
I'd like it if we all paid $0.01 per email sent (worldwide). The money could be used for internet hardware and research as well as giving ISPs a much needed boost in revenues with a percentage. The average user would pay less than $1 per month. Spammers however would be shut down quickly. SMTP relays could monitor emails passing through to make sure the charges were accurate. Hotmail and other free email providers would start charging customers, which would require billing info, making spammers using 'free' services trackable.
A pipe dream, unfortunately. Though I think any intelligent techie would be up for this.
Kickstart
I fail to see how the problem of spam could be much worse. Out of necessity an alias to my email is out on the net and I get 20-30 spam per day, most of the the incest/rape/animals varieties.
What would be worse? 100 spam a day would take no more effort to delete (thanks to spamassassin), and I fail to see worse topics showing up in my mailbox.
Kickstart
Didn't happen on UF...but I DO seem to remember it happening on Slashdot, yes.
Kickstart
I'm the head mod over at the UF Community boards, so I figured I'd better respond to this (well, I could have ignored it, but that would be no fun at all).
Every once in a while someone comes in and says something akin to: "WTF? Why are you losers talking about shiat other than the strip?". The inevitable response is: The Comment Board is NOT for talking about the strip! Sure, you can talk about the strip if you want to, no one is going to tell you otherwise, but there is NO REQUIREMENT to do so. The Comment Board is just a place where people can interact with other members of the community in a place that is -for the community-.
This simple idea evades the people who arrive there and expect hundreds of responses saying, "Illiad, nice job!" or "Illiad, you suck!". Can you possibly imagine how boring and stupid that would be?
As for the 'support' posts...it's a community. There are people on there who've been talking for years, who've met in real life, and a few who have dated or even married after communicating on the UF board. If someone in this community wants to talk about something or get a little encouragement from other people who want to give that encouragement, then what the heck is wrong with that? It's not for you, and you don't have to respond. You don't even have to read it.
If you don't find something you want on the UF board...that's a shame, but it's not the end of the world. Certainly there are enough places among the terabytes of internet bulletin boards for you to find one that suits your temperament. I personally hope you find one. You can even go ahead and slag the UF board there if you want. The people who make the UF board what it is will continue to do what they enjoy - namely, what they've been doing all along.
Thanks for dropping by,
Kickstart
2 - 1/4" slices of ham
1 stick hot pepperoni (the thin, dry kind)
1 large onion
1 bell pepper (red or green or 1/2 each)
1 tsp garlic
4 ribs celery
2-3 small cans tomato paste
8 cups chicken broth
1 tsp cayenne
1 tsp fresh ground black pepper
1/2 tsp oregano
4 cups white rice
Make the rice with the chicken broth instead of water. You want this rice to not be sticky or overcooked.
Dice: ham, onion, bell pepper, garlic
Slice: pepperoni, celery
Fry all above in a light oil, gradually mixing in spices until bell pepper and celery are very slightly soft, but before onion carmelizes. Add tomato paste, mix, and increase heat and stir for a few minutes to coat everything well. Mix with rice and serve. Makes a lot! Good for parties.
Oh geez...the owner of somebody@something.com is gonna be pissed!
Kickstart
Has anyone had a chance to really compare this release of Gnome 2.0 to Ximian Gnome? Has the core Gnome team sought to add the features and functionality that Ximian provided?
Thanks,
Kickstart
Note the 'U'...that means I just saw something in the sky that I couldn't recognize. I didn't automatically assume it was little green men coming to molest our livestock and rednecks.
It was about June in 1987 and my father and I were out working on the ranch I grew up on. I looked to the sky and saw a small silver dot to the north of us about 60 degrees above the horizon. As I watched it it moved rapidly to the west about 5 degrees then a little more slowly to the east over the mountain next to us. It was really small, so I couldn't see anything other than it was reflecting a lot of light from the sun (this happened mid-afternoon).
I didn't bother to report it because I suspect there is some normal explanation for it (but weather balloons don't move that fast I think), but I still do wonder what that rational explanation is.
Kickstart
No worse than the standard "Old Geeks Network" which permeates Slashdot.
KS
Now...I have to say that Google doesn't appear to specifically target me with 'ads for Canadians', but there is nothing to stop them from doing so, and no way to tell if that is indeed what they are doing at some point in the future. Even further, how can I be sure that the actual search results I get from Google aren't tainted by my location? If the Canadian gov't cracks down on some form of cryptography, will I be unable to do searches in Google for it because of my location? It's a slippery slope.
As far as speed...there is no difference that I have found. But that brings up another issue...what if the www.google.ca server starts dying? Will I be forced to go to a server that is incapable of handling my request?
Kickstart
Now...if Google wants to stay on top with me, I'd like to see the following:
I can come up with a lot of things saying 'how to make search engines more useful'. Now if only someone would listen.
Kickstart
What's the root password?
:)
Kickstart
Yesterday I used the Wayback Machine for one of the lawyers at the law firm I work at to prove that a company at one point had an office in a certain location. The company in question was trying to duck out of a contracted agreement by saying they were not the people who signed the contract.
The Wayback Machine proved that they indeed knew of, approved, and granted authorization to this specific office, and the other people had a valid contract. In this specific case, the Wayback Machine prevented an apparently scumbag company from trying to screw some apparently good people over.
Kickstart
I work for a lawfirm, and we make every effort not to allow users to store the documents they need locally. iManage is what we use for this. It integrates with the Microsoft Office suite, so that when the user hits Open, a dialog box for the stored documents server is brought up instead. As well, Save automatically brings up the form to save the document into the document management system. Nothing more complicated than that is usually needed. Users have to go out of their way to save things locally.
Kickstart70