I agree with this thread - one of the first things we got asked for when we got Writely running was word upload and download (and OpenOffice too).
BTW - now you can upload the file into us and send the recalcitrant user a link instead of a word file, if you like. That's why we wrote Writely the way we did, so that the "I can't use it, I can't install software" excuse doesn't work.
There was indeed, and I'm one of the two authors of it. Thanks for remembering!
It's funny, over the years there have been a number of clones of Spectre, including the flags, some of the features, etc. There was an arcade game a while ago, etc.
One of the favorite user features in the original game was displaying the other person's name in the targets. Quite popular in offices!
I have a similar situation (in Silicon Valley, no less). The best I can get with DSL is 144Kbps, Sprint Broadband Direct has a 2Mbps connection for $50/mo. Of course, they bought a small company called WavePath that went out of business trying to sell it first...
I have experience with this, I've been using it in the SF bay area for about 18 months now. Sprint just bought the company that was supplying it (bummer, I hate Sprint). Other than that, it's great.
It's a 2.4GHz microwave antenna and router, point-to-point, to a local tower. Sprint is charging $50/mo for 1 IP addr, at 1.5M/256K speed. My service with the old company has been great - the link is always there, very solid, no performance loss in fog, etc. Much better than land-line DSL.
The bad news is that Sprint is in the process of rolling this out, it may not be available where you are. Also, you have to be able to see the tower.
I've had great success with register.com. Very easy to deal with, cheap, they let you change things like the MX records, and set up DNS aliases. They're cool. Much much better than NSI.
Sorry to post this to the group - there's no email address here. I know someone considering working for replay - I'd love to get your feedback for them.
You're right about cargo-cult UI design, but you're wrong about the generation: this is second generation cargo-cult UI design. A badly copied version of windows, which is a badly copied version of the Mac.
BTW - my wife works at apple. I've seen OSX server running. It totally kicks ass as a UI on top of a *nix. Better and faster than anything I've seen.
I don't know...I wouldn't underestimate these guys. The meme package may be badly adapted right now, but it may always mutate (Hubbard went to extremes to try to make the thing un-mutatable, but it's really not possible to build a meme system that solid. The transcription mechanism (i.e. humans) is just too flaky).
If it does mutate, and it manages to create a variant that is better adapted to the current environs, well, we all know what happens then.
I'll give you an example...suppose they come up with a meme that says "at certain points during his life, Hubbard was possesed by enemy aliens, and wrote deliberately wrong things". Now they have justifications to change operations to suit the new situation (plus great tools for a holy war).
The best way to kill these guys is to dilute and damage the meme pool, by injecting memes like the one above that disrupt the organization.
So you don't think that, eventually, a computer the size of, say a cantaloupe could perform as well as a human? Well, what did you use to make that determination?
A computer about the size of a cantaloupe!
(You are walking proof that relatively small computers can do amazing things. Why don't you think the really big ones we will build in a century or so won't do even more amazing things?)
There has been a lot of IPO activity lately. Read the RedHerring if you want to know more about this. They did a big article giving some of the numbers lately.
A big part of what's going on right now is that the venture community has figured out that they can make the public markets (i.e. people who buy stock) take a lot of the risk of a company, by doing an early IPO. This is worth worring about - retail investors are taking venture-level risks, but getting equity-level returns. At some point there will be some big disasters, and this game will stop.
Also, many companies do IPOs to freeze out competitors - on the theory that the ones with the biggest "war chests" in an area will dominate it, and cause competitors to not be able to get funding.
But as for worrying about it - no way! It means that it's easier to get things funded these days, good and bad, which means more things are being developed. Finances are a tool, like anything else. Every engineer should understand that.
>Oh, and convicted pedophiles deserve all that they get. I can't comment on the FBI procedures as they seem the only way to track down this kind of crime. I wouldn't like my privacy violated in this kind of way but... No. Heinous crime is heinous crime.
This is a *very* dangerous attitude. I agree with your moral judgement about these people, but you must *never* allow the authorities to have this kind of exceptional power for any crime. That's how we got all these horrible anti-crypto bills: "terrorism is a special, horrible crime, so we need to trample rights to kill it".
I came out of math grad school a decade ago. I basically decided that too many people who were better than me at math were having too much trouble getting jobs, and I liked programming better.
At the time, I was part of a 'trend' being lamented the same way this one was - all the good math people were leaving for better pay to CS, woe was us.
Doesn't look that much different to me now. Just something for the press to chew on when things are a little slow. Also a nice back to school story.
It's funny, this is exactly how I felt about all the Great Books, Social Science and History I had to take in school - I didn't care, the prof didn't want to be there, and the whole thing was a joke. Just depends on your mindset.
I also taught a class of remedial calc students when I was a grad student. I'll tell you, the profs may be partly to blame, but it is really hard to try to get people to care about hard things, even if you're not burned out.
I've heard (from knowledgable sources) that the reason for this bundling is that they are having trouble with the yields, and so they want to make sure they have enough so they can sell a nice, whole, high-end system, rather than just selling out all the monitors at once.
It's pretty unobtrusive, a 2 foot square, about 4 inches thick, on whatever tower you need to see the antenna. Yes I don't know about that level, but at my level, it never seems to slow down. They claim weather is irrelevant. I think I am about 10-15 miles out. I don't think range has much of an effect. I asked them this. The (big) tower can handle something like a 6 GB a second, by the numbers they gave me. It's virtual point to point. No one else is on it, you have a private (I think) channel to the tower. You are on your own private net.
See my previous comment. There is something like this in the bay area. Answers to your questions:
Yes Static 6 No, but there is a 2.4Gb a month limit, which I haven't hit. I think you can pay for more. I don't know. Ditto Unix. FreeBSD, I think Harsh I don't know Harsh, but I think fair They give you a cable modem. I run mine on a 100BaseT net that has Mac, LinuxPPC and NT boxen on it.
DNAI and WavePath do this in the SF bay area. I live in an area that doesn't have cable modems or land line DSL. I've had something a lot like this for about 8 months now.
They came out and installed a directional 2.4GHz antenna on my roof, connected to an ethernet-based cable modem. This cost $1K. I have 384Kbps symmetric, but you can go up to 1.5/512 if you want. That's about $450 a month, mine is $150.
There are apparently two receiving towers in the area, one in the north and one in the south. You have to be line of sight to one of them.
It's been really great. The service is very reliable, though they have been having a bit of trouble with someone else in the (crowded) area using their frequencies occaisionally.
It's fixed IP, they gave me 6 addresses. Other than being wireless, it's just a nice, clean normal net link. The dnai web site is here
There's another approach to this - digitally watermark each copy distributed to each user, so you can prosecute users who give away their copies. A D to A pass would fix this, of course, at the cost of some fidelity.
There is a good analogy to copy protection of programs here, of course. The same sorts of schemes (like encrypted code segments) have been tried for protecting games with the same sorts of attacks (reading the unencrypted data as it is being executed) defeating them.
In that case, the final answer (as is likely here) was that you just make it cheap and easy to buy the game legally (or music), a hassle to defeat any copy protection (like, you just need to type a serial number in, but it's a pain for most people to defeat that), and settle with a 90% solution. I think that's what will happen in this market.
As has been mentioned, natural selection is somewhat difficult to observe in action.
This isn't really true. Selective systems are very easy to observe and experiment with. There just happens to be one particular selective system, the biosphere, that's hard to observe over relevant time periods.
I think this is an important distinction that often gets lost - there is some really rigorous math behind the theory of selective systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with this thread - one of the first things we got asked for when we got Writely running was word upload and download (and OpenOffice too).
BTW - now you can upload the file into us and send the recalcitrant user a link instead of a word file, if you like. That's why we wrote Writely the way we did, so that the "I can't use it, I can't install software" excuse doesn't work.
Where'd you get that URL? (I'm one of the Writely gang). Just a broken link.
There was indeed, and I'm one of the two authors of it. Thanks for remembering!
It's funny, over the years there have been a number of clones of Spectre, including the flags, some of the features, etc. There was an arcade game a while ago, etc.
One of the favorite user features in the original game was displaying the other person's name in the targets. Quite popular in offices!
http://bbspot.com/News/2000/7/ellison_grad.html
Good Advice!
I have a similar situation (in Silicon Valley, no less). The best I can get with DSL is 144Kbps, Sprint Broadband Direct has a 2Mbps connection for $50/mo. Of course, they bought a small company called WavePath that went out of business trying to sell it first...
I have experience with this, I've been using it in the SF bay area for about 18 months now. Sprint just bought the company that was supplying it (bummer, I hate Sprint). Other than that, it's great.
It's a 2.4GHz microwave antenna and router, point-to-point, to a local tower. Sprint is charging $50/mo for 1 IP addr, at 1.5M/256K speed. My service with the old company has been great - the link is always there, very solid, no performance loss in fog, etc. Much better than land-line DSL.
The bad news is that Sprint is in the process of rolling this out, it may not be available where you are. Also, you have to be able to see the tower.
I've had great success with register.com. Very easy to deal with, cheap, they let you change things like the MX records, and set up DNS aliases. They're cool. Much much better than NSI.
Sorry to post this to the group - there's no email address here. I know someone considering working for replay - I'd love to get your feedback for them.
ramparte@hotmail.com
> "cindy crawford's taking off her robe..!!!" ---if you can identify where this came from, give yourself a cookie.
I thought that was the Paula Abdul episode, not the Cindy Crawford one (Aoooga!)
The new series was really funny in parts, it is too bad they didn't give it a chance to thrive.
Get the quote right in your sig. It's Gandi:
Q: What do you think of British Civilization?
A: I think it would be a good idea.
You're right about cargo-cult UI design, but you're wrong about the generation: this is second generation cargo-cult UI design. A badly copied version of windows, which is a badly copied version of the Mac.
BTW - my wife works at apple. I've seen OSX server running. It totally kicks ass as a UI on top of a *nix. Better and faster than anything I've seen.
Maybe there's a reason they haven't released it...maybe it's all a fraud, and they're really a M$ shop, they just don't want us to know.
"As somebody put it: the dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program."
Somebody? Arthur C Clarke, man! Nobody knows the classics any more.
I don't know...I wouldn't underestimate these guys. The meme package may be badly adapted right now, but it may always mutate (Hubbard went to extremes to try to make the thing un-mutatable, but it's really not possible to build a meme system that solid. The transcription mechanism (i.e. humans) is just too flaky).
If it does mutate, and it manages to create a variant that is better adapted to the current environs, well, we all know what happens then.
I'll give you an example...suppose they come up with a meme that says "at certain points during his life, Hubbard was possesed by enemy aliens, and wrote deliberately wrong things". Now they have justifications to change operations to suit the new situation (plus great tools for a holy war).
The best way to kill these guys is to dilute and damage the meme pool, by injecting memes like the one above that disrupt the organization.
So you don't think that, eventually, a computer the size of, say a cantaloupe could perform as well as a human? Well, what did you use to make that determination?
A computer about the size of a cantaloupe!
(You are walking proof that relatively small computers can do amazing things. Why don't you think the really big ones we will build in a century or so won't do even more amazing things?)
There has been a lot of IPO activity lately. Read the RedHerring if you want to know more about this. They did a big article giving some of the numbers lately.
A big part of what's going on right now is that the venture community has figured out that they can make the public markets (i.e. people who buy stock) take a lot of the risk of a company, by doing an early IPO. This is worth worring about - retail investors are taking venture-level risks, but getting equity-level returns. At some point there will be some big disasters, and this game will stop.
Also, many companies do IPOs to freeze out competitors - on the theory that the ones with the biggest "war chests" in an area will dominate it, and cause competitors to not be able to get funding.
But as for worrying about it - no way! It means that it's easier to get things funded these days, good and bad, which means more things are being developed. Finances are a tool, like anything else. Every engineer should understand that.
>Oh, and convicted pedophiles deserve all that they get. I can't comment on the FBI procedures as they seem the only way to track down this kind of crime. I wouldn't like my privacy violated in this kind of way but... No. Heinous crime is heinous crime.
This is a *very* dangerous attitude. I agree with your moral judgement about these people, but you must *never* allow the authorities to have this kind of exceptional power for any crime. That's how we got all these horrible anti-crypto bills: "terrorism is a special, horrible crime, so we need to trample rights to kill it".
This way lies fascism. Literally.
I came out of math grad school a decade ago. I basically decided that too many people who were better than me at math were having too much trouble getting jobs, and I liked programming better.
At the time, I was part of a 'trend' being lamented the same way this one was - all the good math people were leaving for better pay to CS, woe was us.
Doesn't look that much different to me now. Just something for the press to chew on when things are a little slow. Also a nice back to school story.
Yawn
It's funny, this is exactly how I felt about all the Great Books, Social Science and History I had to take in school - I didn't care, the prof didn't want to be there, and the whole thing was a joke. Just depends on your mindset.
I also taught a class of remedial calc students when I was a grad student. I'll tell you, the profs may be partly to blame, but it is really hard to try to get people to care about hard things, even if you're not burned out.
I've heard (from knowledgable sources) that the reason for this bundling is that they are having trouble with the yields, and so they want to make sure they have enough so they can sell a nice, whole, high-end system, rather than just selling out all the monitors at once.
More answers
It's pretty unobtrusive, a 2 foot square, about 4 inches thick, on whatever tower you need to see the antenna.
Yes
I don't know about that level, but at my level, it never seems to slow down. They claim weather is irrelevant.
I think I am about 10-15 miles out. I don't think range has much of an effect.
I asked them this. The (big) tower can handle something like a 6 GB a second, by the numbers they gave me.
It's virtual point to point. No one else is on it, you have a private (I think) channel to the tower. You are on your own private net.
See my previous comment. There is something like this in the bay area. Answers to your questions:
Yes
Static
6
No, but there is a 2.4Gb a month limit, which I haven't hit. I think you can pay for more.
I don't know.
Ditto
Unix. FreeBSD, I think
Harsh
I don't know
Harsh, but I think fair
They give you a cable modem. I run mine on a 100BaseT net that has Mac, LinuxPPC and NT boxen on it.
DNAI and WavePath do this in the SF bay area. I live in an area that doesn't have cable modems or land line DSL. I've had something a lot like this for about 8 months now.
They came out and installed a directional 2.4GHz antenna on my roof, connected to an ethernet-based cable modem. This cost $1K. I have 384Kbps symmetric, but you can go up to 1.5/512 if you want. That's about $450 a month, mine is $150.
There are apparently two receiving towers in the area, one in the north and one in the south. You have to be line of sight to one of them.
It's been really great. The service is very reliable, though they have been having a bit of trouble with someone else in the (crowded) area using their frequencies occaisionally.
It's fixed IP, they gave me 6 addresses. Other than being wireless, it's just a nice, clean normal net link. The dnai web site is here
There's another approach to this - digitally watermark each copy distributed to each user, so you can prosecute users who give away their copies. A D to A pass would fix this, of course, at the cost of some fidelity.
There is a good analogy to copy protection of programs here, of course. The same sorts of schemes (like encrypted code segments) have been tried for protecting games with the same sorts of attacks (reading the unencrypted data as it is being executed) defeating them.
In that case, the final answer (as is likely here) was that you just make it cheap and easy to buy the game legally (or music), a hassle to defeat any copy protection (like, you just need to type a serial number in, but it's a pain for most people to defeat that), and settle with a 90% solution. I think that's what will happen in this market.
Nicely put distinction, but...
As has been mentioned, natural selection is somewhat difficult to observe in action.
This isn't really true. Selective systems are very easy to observe and experiment with. There just happens to be one particular selective system, the biosphere, that's hard to observe over relevant time periods.
I think this is an important distinction that often gets lost - there is some really rigorous math behind the theory of selective systems.