Very early versions of the tkwww browser supported full-scale applets: tk widgets and tcl scripts embedded in HTML. The feature was removed later due to the obvious security concerns, but nobody else had a real security model at the time, either (sigh, it's always the obvious and easy part that somebody patents). Unfortunately I was unable to contact the original author or locate a sufficiently old tarball of tkwww; but perhaps someone else succeeded in doing so. This was definitely available early enough, '93 or early '94.
A few days ago ronebofh
handed me an invite to Orkut, Google's new Friendster clone. I played with this for about 48 hours, adding and inviting various friends to my network and reading the messages that percolated through the network -- probably the only feature of Orkut I'll get much use out of. I'm a married person, not looking for a date, and not living in the Bay Area.
The topic of every message: Orkut itself. According to one message, any random friendless person can conveniently post a message that reaches thousands of users via their friend "networks." In other words, insanely convenient spammage. Another poster replied that this sort of endless nitpicking is sure to turn Orkut into yet another "hippie echo chamber." I think they opened for the Flaming Lips last week at the Trocadero.
Tonight Orkut has been shut down to "implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users." In their defense, the Google staff point out that Orkut is in beta and they did warn us this sort of thing could happen. Ticked off, I decided to check out Friendster, which I somehow skipped up until now.
When I got to Friendster's site, I was surprised to see that Friendster also describes itself as a "beta" version. And that gave me some sympathy for the Orkut administrators, who are only trying to use the word "beta" to mean what "beta" is supposed to mean:
Beta means "outsiders are welcome to play with this, but don't trust it with your life."
Beta means "we have run out of ways to break it ourselves and really need some outside input now."
Beta means "if something breaks, that's good; give us specific and detailed feedback, and don't whine."
This is a pretty accurate description of what Orkut is doing. Is this really an accurate description of what Friendster is doing, after three years? Or are they just afraid to call it a finished product and invite the level of criticism that is appropriate for a finished product? No wonder people don't understand that Google's staff are acting appropriately when they take the beta version of Orkut down for a while to fix the important problems users have pointed out.
But "beta" is not the most offensive phrase on the Friendster home page. "Patent pending" is much worse. A patent on online social networking? I'd laugh if it wasn't so... no, wait, I am laughing. Give me a break, here. Surely this is nonsense no one takes seriously. Right?
Wrong, wrong, wrong, according to this news.com story. sixdegrees patented online "social networking" sites in 2001. Two Friendster-like sites have acquired the patent. Now everyone in the field is furiously writing patent applications.
I'd like to invite you all over for a beer, but I can't afford the intellectual property fees.
Star Trek hasn't been interesting for a long time now. There have been good episodes in several of the series, but they were generally good in spite of the Star Trek universe, not because of it. People are obviously interested in space at the moment, so maybe this will be an opening for something more inventive. I do give Enterprise some credit for trying to avoid the "Superman problem" by setting things at a time when the Federation was a bit less "nigh-omnipotent," but so far most episodes have an awful "I think I played this D&D module once" feeling to them.
I'd like to see something that melds the cyberpunk thing and the strange-new-worlds thing... with a better budget than Earth II, hopefully.
Wrong? "Wrong" is a strong word to apply to what an artist decides to do to his own work. Dumb, I'll go along with. "Very dumb," even. Possibly even "approaching idiotic."
It's not a biochemistry text. If you read it on that level you're going to be disappointed, I guess. It is a very good layman-friendly introduction to the topic. Regarding DNA, he suggests that RNA evolved first because it doesn't require the simultaneous evolution of supporting proteins, or something to that effect, and this created an environment in which DNA was one step away -- but if you really want to know what he said, so you can critique it in detail, read the book.
Re:We know other life exists
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sure, but is there "other life" worth talking to that we have any likelihood of talking to in our lifetimes? That's very, very far from certain.
It is a pain in the ass, but if you work with a good accountant to build a system you can run, it's not quite so horrible. It's tempting to operate as self-employed for simplicity, but you overpay taxes that way; set up an S-corporation. Not that any of this matters if you're not making any money.
Yeah, I've been thinking about this idea too for a while. My original idea contained cool excuses for me to get to run a brand new domain name registry and make $$$, but it would never have taken off that way and some dumb plans like that have already been tried. So I started thinking about saner, thoroughly open approaches involving, as you say, transparent personal proxies.
Which could be simpler than one might think:
Before satisfying a request for the URL "http://www.mysite.com/a/b/foo.jpg" the "hard way" by fetching it directly, the transparent proxy tries asking for:
These will be torrent files pointing at jar files (*) containing actual content files. The transparent proxy fetches the jar file(s) via bittorrent at this point. Paths in the jar file(s) are then interpreted relative to the directory the proxytorrent.info file was actually found in. The transparent proxy caches the jar file to instantly satisfy future matching requests, and hands over the original requested object to the browser or fetches it in the normal fashion if it was not found in the jar.
Note that the transparent proxy must keep fetching the jar files for enclosing directories until it finds one that actually contains the desired object. In this way content common to the entire site can be jarred in the root directory.
(*) Jar files are of course a simple variation on zip files, with the addition of a manifest file. We'll need to review the jar spec and make sure it allows for content-type information rather than file extensions only; if not we'd need to define our own simple jar-like standard, which again would just be "a zip file with a different extension and a manifest file inside with a specific name and simple plaintext format."
Um, no, not unless "multiplayer" means "two at the same desk" only. Unless I'm the one on crack. But I just went over the UQM site looking for any sign of this feature, and I'm pretty sure it's you, not me.
In response to all the various comments since my original: yeah, Dillo is very promising. No, it doesn't touch IE 5.5 in terms of implementing what People Expect A Browser To Do -- yet. But I was surprised and pleased to check in on Dillo recently and discover that rather than burning out, as it seemed to have done back when I built the machine in question, Dillo has moved on and is in danger of being a practical choice soon.
I gave a little mini-talk at a Philly Linux Users' Group meeting recently on lightweight web browsers. It was based on my experiences converting my wife's old laptop to Linux when she decided, for political reasons, that she was not willing to upgrade to another Windows product when Windows 95 finally became unstable and unusable on the machine.
Her machine had 32 megs of RAM and a P166 MMX processor.
As it turned out, Windows 95 plus Internet Explorer ran blazing rings around Debian Linux plus Mozilla, which was almost unusable, even after I switched her over to icewm and rxvt rather than the much heavier KDE environment. Eventually I found Skipstone, which made her machine usable again, but only barely. To be quite honest, there is no Linux/browser combination that compares with the performance Windows 95/Internet Explorer can offer on that class of hardware, and there's no good reason to throw away a perfectly nice older laptop.
Eventually, though, she upgraded to a Dell Latitude XPi which runs Linux much more comfortably -- although I still switched her to icewm and streamlined her startup drastically to get a reasonable boot time.
I have worked at home for most of the last ten years.
Starting in 1993, shortly after moving to Seattle, I more-or-less-consulted for a previous employer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the time I lived alone, and I did find it hard to get motivated in the morning. Telecommuting via transcontinental telnet over a 14.4kbps modem was a hassle. The time difference from my employer was also a problem; starting work when they did (5am my time...) was not an option. Fortunately I lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, which is very pedestrian-oriented, and I discovered that walking to Espresso Vivace every morning for a latte allowed me to "come to work" afterwards in a psychologically helpful way. Yes, I invented a commute for myself, but it was a very pleasant one!
In 1994 I took a job with Progressive Networks (later renamed RealNetworks. That took me out of my studio apartment and back into the workplace for a year. It wasn't a bad place to work during my time there, especially by mid-nineties tech company standards, but I felt I'd done most of my best work during the early months when I was the only programmer on staff. Back then I was a lot better at innovation than at maintenance, and I wasn't crazy about taking direction or meeting the often perfectly reasonable demands of my supervisor, either. I decided it was time to strike out on my own.
Meanwhile there was a lot of interest in the Mapedit imagemap editor, a web statistics package called Wusage, the old WWW FAQ list, and the GD library. But neither Mapedit nor Wusage was set up as a proper revenue-earning product, and I didn't have enough time to work on GD or the FAQ, either. I wanted to start my own company and make an independent living at it, but I didn't want to starve in the process. In 1995 I landed a deal for a book on CGI programming with Addison-Wesley, which provided me with an advance to live on, and I went back to working at home.
I set Boutell.Com up in partnership with my wife Michele. Another person in the living room/office was a helpful motivator to get a reasonable amount of work done. During those first nine months or so I completed the book, wrote a version of Mapedit that (a) was easy to use and (b) expired unapologetically when not registered after 30 days, and created the first commercial version of Wusage.
Fortunately, just as my checking account was scraping the bottom of the book advance, the software started to sell. Shortly after I was able to rescue my sister from temping for Microsoft and put her to work as my office manager. Filling the room with sensible women helps keep a guy on track.
In 1997 or so, my sister moved to Oakland with my soon-to-be brother-in-law, and we needed a new office manager. Michele and I hired Chris, an old friend from college. These were the fattest years for the company, and I was also able to employ Stephen, another old friend. Unfortunately I didn't provide Stephen with much guidance and support; one of his projects should have been recognized as too late in the gaming marketplace he wanted to enter, and the other needed more timely help from me or possibly outside investment to make it as a web-based calendaring solution. These days I can admit that his second project would have been better off with a larger company.
But back to what my workday looked like: make that agonizing commute all the way up the stairs, start the coffee, go out and fetch bagels, come back and sit down... and some weeks I worked hard, others I played way too much Quake. I was still getting the hang of maintaining a good thing if that's what is profitable for you; I kept pushing out new projects that were
For what it's worth, the links after the spoof don't really push the vegetarian thing, at least not very directly -- they seem to be pushing free-range meat. Which, by the way, is a perfectly viable option for you. Yes, it costs more.
I'm down with most of this, but I should point out that the Chinese government was very cautious about launch coverage, even scrubbing any live broadcast of the launch. I don't agree that their government is any more comfortable with the idea of losing a mission than we are. The Soviets did their
best to completely suppress knowledge of
Bondarenko's
similar O2-rich atmosphere buring death. The news of the Apollo launch pad fire did reach the press, and yet the Apollo program got "back on the horse" and went forward. I don't think Americans are really so incapable of accepting astronaut deaths. It's a bit of a red herring.
We're simply incapable of getting interested in a winged taxi service which can only reach low earth orbit -- the "lost wrenches may rip through you at 30,000 miles per hour at any time" zone -- where robots could just as easily do the work. American astronauts should be preparing to play a role in the exploration, industrial exploitation and settlement of the Moon and Mars, not getting whacked by debris while en route to a useless space station in a dumb orbit.
I have a 486 DX2/50 laptop downstairs with a
pocket ethernet adapter and SSH for DOS on it.
It's the fastest computer in the house:
less than 20 seconds from power-on to the
% prompt of my shell account. Gotta love it.
I also have a Timex Sinclair 1000 that still
works, with the 16K RAM module and the printer.
My wife bought it (for a song, of course)
at a yard sale in 1995 or so.
My wife is an aspiring filmmaker who started
out in a Seattle "school" of filmmaking that
holds that you should work with real honest-to-god film, whatever format you can afford. She
works in Super 8. Super 8 projectors are a
dime a dozen... and all of them are broken in
some way, or break not long after you get
them home. The moving parts were never meant
to survive 30 years. Even if the machine was
never used, the plastic is dangerously
brittle by now. Fortunately, super 8 movie
cameras are much simpler and have held up
much better over the years, and she has found
an excellent film lab that does video
conversions so good you can see the film grain.
The person who pointed out that the folks
handing out applications were probably getting
a commission are probably right on the money.
The other day a bank teller VERY enthusiastically
tried to talk me into seeing a demo of their
online banking service. I declined. She reacted as if I'd refused her a favor. Yesterday I got a phone call: "now that you have seen a demonstration of our online banking service..." I have no doubt she marked me down and got XYZ dollars.
www.httpd.net seems to be slashdotted at this moment. So much for serious investments!
irc or other realtime channel for linux discussion
on
IRC in the Dog House?
·
· Score: 1
Speaking of which, is there still a viable place to chat in realtime about Linux? I've tried to get into efnet a few times recently and found nothing but split-off servers with two people in #linux.
Priced out the electricity lately? It doesn't
take long for a thousand watts of "cheap"
cluster to start looking like a bad
investment compared to a single faster box.
Things are bad enough now that I went with a
cheap linksys router rather than a Linux router
based on the $80 a year or so in electricity
that the latter would burn, compared to
maybe $10 for the former.
Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple, today denied claims that he is the result of a genetic engineering experiment gone horribly awry. "Just because of my last name, people think I'm the miracle test-tube love child of the founders of Apple Computer," said Joswiak. "All of their creations suffer from unfair criticism! Nobody believes claims about my performance either! Beep boop!"
I'm looking into it. The problem is that the GIF patent may apparently still be in effect in some countries for one more year. There is also apparently an IBM patent that may be relevant, although IBM has shown no indications of and has no motive to cause grief for open source projects -- indeed, quite the opposite.
I do recognize that GIF support would still be a useful thing to have for a lot of people out there and I'll bring it back if I can do that without putting my company in front of the firing squad, legally speaking.
If I am able to bring it back, I'll no doubt throw in some
support for animation, as that's probably the best reason
to use GIF at this point. There are neat alternatives
though; check out the Ming library, which creates
valid Flash animations that the vast majority of
browsers can view. (Ming is not Ming32; two very
different tools.)
This is exactly why I'm moving into a new cohousing community in late April. Cohousing provides a small-village environment in the midst of the larger city and/or society. Privacy and public life are balanced carefully, instead of randomly smashed together or, in the case of suburban homes, pulled back too far in a reactionary response.
Disclaimer: if you haven't gone to http://www.cohousing.org and read about what cohousing actually is, as opposed to your tired old notions about idealistic communes from 30 years ago, DON'T follow up. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Very early versions of the tkwww browser supported full-scale applets: tk widgets and tcl scripts embedded in HTML. The feature was removed later due to the obvious security concerns, but nobody else had a real security model at the time, either (sigh, it's always the obvious and easy part that somebody patents). Unfortunately I was unable to contact the original author or locate a sufficiently old tarball of tkwww; but perhaps someone else succeeded in doing so. This was definitely available early enough, '93 or early '94.
Friendster and Orkut
A few days ago ronebofh handed me an invite to Orkut, Google's new Friendster clone. I played with this for about 48 hours, adding and inviting various friends to my network and reading the messages that percolated through the network -- probably the only feature of Orkut I'll get much use out of. I'm a married person, not looking for a date, and not living in the Bay Area.
The topic of every message: Orkut itself. According to one message, any random friendless person can conveniently post a message that reaches thousands of users via their friend "networks." In other words, insanely convenient spammage. Another poster replied that this sort of endless nitpicking is sure to turn Orkut into yet another "hippie echo chamber." I think they opened for the Flaming Lips last week at the Trocadero.
Tonight Orkut has been shut down to "implement some improvements and upgrades suggested by users." In their defense, the Google staff point out that Orkut is in beta and they did warn us this sort of thing could happen. Ticked off, I decided to check out Friendster, which I somehow skipped up until now.
When I got to Friendster's site, I was surprised to see that Friendster also describes itself as a "beta" version. And that gave me some sympathy for the Orkut administrators, who are only trying to use the word "beta" to mean what "beta" is supposed to mean:
- Beta means "outsiders are welcome to play with this, but don't trust it with your life."
- Beta means "we have run out of ways to break it ourselves and really need some outside input now."
- Beta means "if something breaks, that's good; give us specific and detailed feedback, and don't whine."
This is a pretty accurate description of what Orkut is doing. Is this really an accurate description of what Friendster is doing, after three years? Or are they just afraid to call it a finished product and invite the level of criticism that is appropriate for a finished product? No wonder people don't understand that Google's staff are acting appropriately when they take the beta version of Orkut down for a while to fix the important problems users have pointed out.But "beta" is not the most offensive phrase on the Friendster home page. "Patent pending" is much worse. A patent on online social networking? I'd laugh if it wasn't so... no, wait, I am laughing. Give me a break, here. Surely this is nonsense no one takes seriously. Right?
Wrong, wrong, wrong, according to this news.com story. sixdegrees patented online "social networking" sites in 2001. Two Friendster-like sites have acquired the patent. Now everyone in the field is furiously writing patent applications.
I'd like to invite you all over for a beer, but I can't afford the intellectual property fees.
Star Trek hasn't been interesting for a long time now. There have been good episodes in several of the series, but they were generally good in spite of the Star Trek universe, not because of it. People are obviously interested in space at the moment, so maybe this will be an opening for something more inventive. I do give Enterprise some credit for trying to avoid the "Superman problem" by setting things at a time when the Federation was a bit less "nigh-omnipotent," but so far most episodes have an awful "I think I played this D&D module once" feeling to them.
I'd like to see something that melds the cyberpunk thing and the strange-new-worlds thing... with a better budget than Earth II, hopefully.
Wrong? "Wrong" is a strong word to apply to what an artist decides to do to his own work. Dumb, I'll go along with. "Very dumb," even. Possibly even "approaching idiotic."
I see some of the point in this, but what's wrong with:
/* note: address of */
unsigned char *buffer = 0;
b(&buffer);
free(buffer);
It's not a biochemistry text. If you read it on that level you're going to be disappointed, I guess. It is a very good layman-friendly introduction to the topic. Regarding DNA, he suggests that RNA evolved first because it doesn't require the simultaneous evolution of supporting proteins, or something to that effect, and this created an environment in which DNA was one step away -- but if you really want to know what he said, so you can critique it in detail, read the book.
Sure, but is there "other life" worth talking to that we have any likelihood of talking to in our lifetimes? That's very, very far from certain.
It is a pain in the ass, but if you work with a good accountant to build a system you can run, it's not quite so horrible. It's tempting to operate as self-employed for simplicity, but you overpay taxes that way; set up an S-corporation. Not that any of this matters if you're not making any money.
This will do until I get my fabber.
Yeah, I've been thinking about this idea too for a while. My original idea contained cool excuses for me to get to run a brand new domain name registry and make $$$, but it would never have taken off that way and some dumb plans like that have already been tried. So I started thinking about saner, thoroughly open approaches involving, as you say, transparent personal proxies.
t p://www.mysite.com/a/proxytorrent.infow .mysite.com/proxytorrent.info
Which could be simpler than one might think:
Before satisfying a request for the URL "http://www.mysite.com/a/b/foo.jpg" the "hard way" by fetching it directly, the transparent proxy tries asking for:
http://www.mysite.com/a/b/proxytorrent.info
ht
http://ww
These will be torrent files pointing at jar files (*) containing actual content files. The transparent proxy fetches the jar file(s) via bittorrent at this point. Paths in the jar file(s) are then interpreted relative to the directory the proxytorrent.info file was actually found in. The transparent proxy caches the jar file to instantly satisfy future matching requests, and hands over the original requested object to the browser or fetches it in the normal fashion if it was not found in the jar.
Note that the transparent proxy must keep fetching the jar files for enclosing directories until it finds one that actually contains the desired object. In this way content common to the entire site can be jarred in the root directory.
(*) Jar files are of course a simple variation on zip files, with the addition of a manifest file. We'll need to review the jar spec and make sure it allows for content-type information rather than file extensions only; if not we'd need to define our own simple jar-like standard, which again would just be "a zip file with a different extension and a manifest file inside with a specific name and simple plaintext format."
Um, no, not unless "multiplayer" means "two at the same desk" only. Unless I'm the one on crack. But I just went over the UQM site looking for any sign of this feature, and I'm pretty sure it's you, not me.
In response to all the various comments since my original: yeah, Dillo is very promising. No, it doesn't touch IE 5.5 in terms of implementing what People Expect A Browser To Do -- yet. But I was surprised and pleased to check in on Dillo recently and discover that rather than burning out, as it seemed to have done back when I built the machine in question, Dillo has moved on and is in danger of being a practical choice soon.
Her machine had 32 megs of RAM and a P166 MMX processor.
As it turned out, Windows 95 plus Internet Explorer ran blazing rings around Debian Linux plus Mozilla, which was almost unusable, even after I switched her over to icewm and rxvt rather than the much heavier KDE environment. Eventually I found Skipstone, which made her machine usable again, but only barely. To be quite honest, there is no Linux/browser combination that compares with the performance Windows 95/Internet Explorer can offer on that class of hardware, and there's no good reason to throw away a perfectly nice older laptop.
Eventually, though, she upgraded to a Dell Latitude XPi which runs Linux much more comfortably -- although I still switched her to icewm and streamlined her startup drastically to get a reasonable boot time.
Hmm, looks like I can't edit that, so one erratum: Michele's web site is www.sangfroid.com, not .org. Whoops.
Starting in 1993, shortly after moving to Seattle, I more-or-less-consulted for a previous employer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the time I lived alone, and I did find it hard to get motivated in the morning. Telecommuting via transcontinental telnet over a 14.4kbps modem was a hassle. The time difference from my employer was also a problem; starting work when they did (5am my time...) was not an option. Fortunately I lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, which is very pedestrian-oriented, and I discovered that walking to Espresso Vivace every morning for a latte allowed me to "come to work" afterwards in a psychologically helpful way. Yes, I invented a commute for myself, but it was a very pleasant one!
In 1994 I took a job with Progressive Networks (later renamed RealNetworks. That took me out of my studio apartment and back into the workplace for a year. It wasn't a bad place to work during my time there, especially by mid-nineties tech company standards, but I felt I'd done most of my best work during the early months when I was the only programmer on staff. Back then I was a lot better at innovation than at maintenance, and I wasn't crazy about taking direction or meeting the often perfectly reasonable demands of my supervisor, either. I decided it was time to strike out on my own.
Meanwhile there was a lot of interest in the Mapedit imagemap editor, a web statistics package called Wusage, the old WWW FAQ list, and the GD library. But neither Mapedit nor Wusage was set up as a proper revenue-earning product, and I didn't have enough time to work on GD or the FAQ, either. I wanted to start my own company and make an independent living at it, but I didn't want to starve in the process. In 1995 I landed a deal for a book on CGI programming with Addison-Wesley, which provided me with an advance to live on, and I went back to working at home.
I set Boutell.Com up in partnership with my wife Michele. Another person in the living room/office was a helpful motivator to get a reasonable amount of work done. During those first nine months or so I completed the book, wrote a version of Mapedit that (a) was easy to use and (b) expired unapologetically when not registered after 30 days, and created the first commercial version of Wusage.
Fortunately, just as my checking account was scraping the bottom of the book advance, the software started to sell. Shortly after I was able to rescue my sister from temping for Microsoft and put her to work as my office manager. Filling the room with sensible women helps keep a guy on track.
In 1997 or so, my sister moved to Oakland with my soon-to-be brother-in-law, and we needed a new office manager. Michele and I hired Chris, an old friend from college. These were the fattest years for the company, and I was also able to employ Stephen, another old friend. Unfortunately I didn't provide Stephen with much guidance and support; one of his projects should have been recognized as too late in the gaming marketplace he wanted to enter, and the other needed more timely help from me or possibly outside investment to make it as a web-based calendaring solution. These days I can admit that his second project would have been better off with a larger company.
But back to what my workday looked like: make that agonizing commute all the way up the stairs, start the coffee, go out and fetch bagels, come back and sit down... and some weeks I worked hard, others I played way too much Quake. I was still getting the hang of maintaining a good thing if that's what is profitable for you; I kept pushing out new projects that were
For what it's worth, the links after the spoof don't really push the vegetarian thing, at least not very directly -- they seem to be pushing free-range meat. Which, by the way, is a perfectly viable option for you. Yes, it costs more.
We're simply incapable of getting interested in a winged taxi service which can only reach low earth orbit -- the "lost wrenches may rip through you at 30,000 miles per hour at any time" zone -- where robots could just as easily do the work. American astronauts should be preparing to play a role in the exploration, industrial exploitation and settlement of the Moon and Mars, not getting whacked by debris while en route to a useless space station in a dumb orbit.
I also have a Timex Sinclair 1000 that still works, with the 16K RAM module and the printer. My wife bought it (for a song, of course) at a yard sale in 1995 or so.
My wife is an aspiring filmmaker who started out in a Seattle "school" of filmmaking that holds that you should work with real honest-to-god film, whatever format you can afford. She works in Super 8. Super 8 projectors are a dime a dozen... and all of them are broken in some way, or break not long after you get them home. The moving parts were never meant to survive 30 years. Even if the machine was never used, the plastic is dangerously brittle by now. Fortunately, super 8 movie cameras are much simpler and have held up much better over the years, and she has found an excellent film lab that does video conversions so good you can see the film grain.
The person who pointed out that the folks handing out applications were probably getting a commission are probably right on the money. The other day a bank teller VERY enthusiastically tried to talk me into seeing a demo of their online banking service. I declined. She reacted as if I'd refused her a favor. Yesterday I got a phone call: "now that you have seen a demonstration of our online banking service..." I have no doubt she marked me down and got XYZ dollars.
www.httpd.net seems to be slashdotted at this moment. So much for serious investments!
Speaking of which, is there still a viable place to chat in realtime about Linux? I've tried to get into efnet a few times recently and found nothing but split-off servers with two people in #linux.
Things are bad enough now that I went with a cheap linksys router rather than a Linux router based on the $80 a year or so in electricity that the latter would burn, compared to maybe $10 for the former.
Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product
marketing at Apple, today denied claims that he
is the result of a genetic engineering experiment
gone horribly awry. "Just because of my last
name, people think I'm the miracle test-tube
love child of the founders of Apple Computer," said Joswiak. "All of their creations suffer
from unfair criticism! Nobody believes
claims about my performance either! Beep boop!"
I do recognize that GIF support would still be a useful thing to have for a lot of people out there and I'll bring it back if I can do that without putting my company in front of the firing squad, legally speaking.
If I am able to bring it back, I'll no doubt throw in some support for animation, as that's probably the best reason to use GIF at this point. There are neat alternatives though; check out the Ming library, which creates valid Flash animations that the vast majority of browsers can view. (Ming is not Ming32; two very different tools.)
This is exactly why I'm moving into a
new cohousing community in late April.
Cohousing provides a small-village
environment in the midst of the larger
city and/or society. Privacy and public
life are balanced carefully, instead of
randomly smashed together or, in the case
of suburban homes, pulled back too far in
a reactionary response.
Disclaimer: if you haven't gone to
http://www.cohousing.org and read about what
cohousing actually is, as opposed to your
tired old notions about idealistic communes
from 30 years ago, DON'T follow up. Thanks.