I may have posted this link some time ago, but I think it's worth a repost. "Underground" by Suelette Dreyfus is, to me, a very interesting book looking at the hacking/cracking culture of the mid 1980's.
It follows the stories of several hackers/crackers in Australia, Germany, and the United States. To me, it really reads more like an ethnographic anthropological study, than about hacks per se. But I found it very interesting. And best of all, the entire book is available for free:
I think the word is still out on whether or not SETI will find anything interesting. What I think is fundamentally important about SETI is that is has become a proof in concept for the power of distributed computing.
SETI, to my knowledge, was the first large scale, public domain, distributed computing effort to do something interesting in the name of science. The fact that it's looking for alien communications worked great with the "geek" community, a large number of which happen to like computers as well. It became the genesis for all distributed computing projects to follow.
Had the very first distributed computing project involve folding proteins, it would have never, ever attracted the same level of attention/effort that a search for alien communications did. However, because it has attracted this level of attention and effort, and because of its success as model for how distributed computing can work, we now see a whole slew of distributed computing projects coming up and companys developing distributed computing apps as a business model.
Generally speaking, I think only good things are going to come of these efforts, and at a much faster pace than they might otherwise have.
just my.02 jeff
Re:Lord of the Rings has nothing to do with Nerds
on
We Are All Nerds Now
·
· Score: 1
I totally agree in principle and spirit, but I work with plenty of people who have never seen FOTR or TT because, "it's for people who play games." That is honest to god what someone just said to me the other day. Despite the critical acclaim, academy award nods, accolades as it being the best trilogy ever produced, etc... It makes zero sense to me, but it is what it is.
Box office totals tells us otherwise, but there is still this association between fantasy (which the Tolkien books are certainly considered) and nerdom that plenty of people can't seem to bridge because it's "beneath" them
while the MMPI may no *longer* have credibility, as someone has already pointed out, the MMPI-II has tremendous volumes of research validating its clinical scales.
However, unlike a previous poster suggested, the MMPI-II in no way suggests a probability that a mental illness is present or not. The MMPI-II very simply looked at the response patterns of different groups of patients, and looks at the degree to which your response patterns matched theirs.
So for example, a question like "I like mechanics magazines" does not in and of itself, having anything to do with a psychotic disorder. However, if 85% of schizophrenic patients endorsed this item as "True" and 10% of Depressed patients report "True", then an endorsement of "true" puts you closer to the Schizophrenic camp and further from the Depression camp. But that is just *1* item. The MMPI-II has hundreds of items, so it's a very good identifier of pathology. Not perfect, but very good.
Over the years, there has been tons of psychometric research trying to further figure out what items can help discriminate one group of clinical patients from another, or distinguish clinical patients from "normal" persons.
hth, and yes IAALP (I am a licensed psychologist);-)
If memory serves me, After Sept 11, one of Sim Racing's big contributors (Zen Joltis) died from complicating injuries he sustained in one of the trade towers. A memorial race was held on a track he designed and the money raised was donated to his family. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the exact link to this race because the Team-Lightspeed forums (who sponsored the race a while back) have been shut down. So I can't provide confirming evidence. But it did take place.
But what I can point out is:
http://vjg.bdrmotorsports.com/press.html
Kyle Petty is building a camp (Victory Junction)for kids with terminal illness, and again the sim racing community is getting together to raise money for the camp.
So not to take away anything from PA's efforts, but this stuff has been going on for a little while anyway, just under the radar.
They're terrific for the grandmas of the family. Relatively cheap, and anyone you give permission to can upload pictures. Essentially, the thing calls home at a frequency you set, and downloads whatever pictures have recently been uploaded. So family from all over the world can upload pics via the web, and then the thing just automagically calls home at night (to a local number you pick), and the next morning the person sees all the brand new pictures appearing in the frame.
The only problem I ran into with the one I bought my brother is that around the Holidays, as many of these things are given as gifts, the call in number is busy for awhile, so it doesn't update every day. But once the holidays passed, the frame called home relgiously and grabbed all the new pics for my brother.
Kind of off topic I know, but sounds like something your grandmother would like.
i think it was Disney that had the first efficient, operational mag train:
"When a new PeopleMover was built at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, the rubber wheels were replaced by a series of pollution-free linear induction motors embedded in the track. This system creates a magnetic field that pushes the five three-car trains along
7,200 ft of track at up to 15 miles per hour. The main advantage of the system is its lack of gear belts or other mechanical devices. The wheels and doors are the only moving points in the entire PeopleMover. In actual operation at Walt Disney World the WEDway People Mover (now the Tomorrowland Transit Authority) has performed at 99.8% per cent efficiency. Energy conservation is another feature of the system. Sensors along the People Mover route ensure that power is applied only to linear induction motors, which are directly under a train."
I found this here:
http://www.ggdc.org/mp-100transport.htm
It looks like it opened as a "ride in 1975"
http://members.aol.com/surfdancec/wdwcollegeprog ra m.htm
I remember riding this in 1977, but it went so slow i never really understand what was supposed to be so neat about it;-)
I checked out the site, and while funny, the letters where he gets no replies don't compare to the book "Letters from a Nut" by Ted Nancy. You can find it at Amazon (or other online seller's I'm sure), including some page previews with the letters he writes and the responses he gets.
I know it's not spam, but Ted Nancy's letters are *far* more clever than the spam responses this guy is writing. Funny, yes. But without the dialogue with the spammer, they really lose a lot. Check out the above book. *Very* funny stuff.
While it's true it's a shell game to some degree, and the wealth is "paper" wealth, if it increases Novell's market cap they have that much more leverage in the market place to borrow and acquire. So while their cash coffers don't necessarily grow, their power in the market place certainly does.
And assumming they have plans for SUSE besides liquidating the company, it was a great bargain.
but perhaps on a much smaller scale. My dissertation was a constant collaboration between myself, my advisor, and the two research assistants who helped with the project. We used the "Track Changes" component of MS Word which worked pretty well, but was nevertheless kind of clunky.
And we used the same MS Word "Track Changes" when we put together a couple substantial ($1,000,000+) grant proposals that involved contributions from a variety of researchers that would later go on to form the research team.
There is no question that in both cases above, the group product was vastly superior to what the key individual could do on their own. "Track Changes" was an adequate solution for our needs, but I would have been/always am happy to try new collaborative tools like this.
And I'm no expert on CA or Wolfram, but i believe he contends that you can't predict what patterns will be generated at all from theses simple rule sets. That was the whole point.
There is a good intro article about Wolfram in this months's "Skeptic" magazine
http://www.skeptic.com/
And I believe it was Wolfram who started Mathematica, the same program this guys used to solve these worms. Pretty cool i think.
There are always posts about where can linux break out and really take over market share (i.e. desktop, server, etc...), and when i first read the story, I didn't really see the point to this. But then:
From the article:
"The fact that America's Army is available in 64-bit on the GameStorm CD allows gamers to get a taste of the next generation of gaming just by inserting a CD and powering up the computer," said Major Bret Wilson, Operations Officer for America's Army.
This really does make sense to me. P.C.s in my mind are just better for the serious gamer, and hardware issues aside, if they can actually get to a point of porting single CD games like this, it could really create an exciting new breed of "console games." I'd love to just pop in a disk of Baldur's Gate, Nascar, Halflife, etc... and get the best of both worlds. Quick access to the game w/o the hassle of an install and all the advantages of the superior AI seen on the p.c. platform as compared to the console platform.
Add in the capability to save games and "ini" info to a CDR or Floppy and you are good to go.
but it is an interesting point. I have no idea who the card carrying members of the RIAA are, but it could very well be the case that publishers are. And through recording contracts with artists, they allow for the RIAA to be the spokesperson for the protection of their property. Ergo, the RIAA can speak on behalf of all artists who are currently under contract with the publishers who themselves are associate members of RIAA.
Granted, you can do this with any audio source, but since my rx-320 is already connected to my computer, I'll use it as an example.
Using Winamp and the Shoutcast plugin, I can stream AM broadcast programming over shoutcast and the internet. This is very nice for my sister and her boyfriend who are big area sports fans (Big City USA), but obviously can't listen to the games on radio (as they live in germany). I simply setup the radio during a game, and they can listen to their heart's content. Like i said, I know you can do this with any audio source, but the ten-tec is a nice solution, and another example of the fun you can have with a radio attached to a p.c.
And yes i know all about the "illegal to rebroadcast or retransmit..." stuff they announce before a broadcast. I limit the connected users to "1", disguise the channel as something irrelevant, and assume the liklihood of it being picked up by anyone other than my sis to be pretty small.
Pointless? Internet radio is gonna take over shortwave? I don't think so. Not for a long time. Thought about using some mod points to mod this parent as a troll. But then figured i could simply point out that, as soon as you can get computers to the entire third world, then you can start talking about the death of shortwave as a source of news and programming.
No doubt other technologies are developing rapidly. Actually, internet radio is just one. But shortwave is still the only way for people to have ready access to information in the third world (which is a *large* part of the world).
The amount of good shortwave programming is less than it once was (BBC no longer directs a sw broadcast to the states, DW is stopping its broadcast to the US sometime soon), but it still is quite strong.
Head over to usenet and check out the sw groups. Considerable numbers of posts everyday from new users wanting to know what radio to take when they head somewhere out of their country of origin. My sister lives in Berlin. I got her a cheap sw radio so she can readily listen to BBC, VOA, and AFR. Gives her more option of english language programming besides CNN that she might not otherwise get. Pick up a copy of "Passport to Worldband Radio" and you'll see all the programming that is out there, not accessible via internet radio.
Anyway, I could go on and on and on. The point is that the medium is hardly dead. Not what it once was to be sure, but a very viable (and vibrant) broadcast community still exists, and will exist for some time to come. Its a good way to get a variety of opinions, from a variety of broadcast outlets, not to mention the *high* geek factor that is involved in the hobby.
I see this *so* often that i do my best to correct it when I see it. There is a giant difference between calling someone "asocial" and calling someone "antisocial."
"Antisocial" is a clinical, psychiatric diagnosis. It's considered a personality disorder, and in fact is one of the personality disorders that essentially relies on contacts with others (although in an exploitive fashion), for the diagnosis to be made. It is also often confused with "sociopathic." While a sociopath always carrys a dx of Antisocial Personality Disorder, it's not always true that an antisocial personality disordered person is a sociopath.
Nelson on the Simpsons, "Cigarette man" on the X-Files, Gordon Gecko from "Wall Street," and "Animal" on the Muppets would be considered "Antisocial."
"Asocial," which is what everyone usually means when they say "antisocial", is an indifference to social relationships. It's alot harder to think of good asocial examples, cause they don't lend themselves to good storytelling;-).
While I admittedly didnt read the article, with regard to your comments about freedom of speech protections in the commercial world there was recently a discussion on Odyssey (npr.org) that you can find here:
http://www.wbez.org/frames.asp?HeaderURL=../sche du le/hd_sched_light.htm&BodyURL=/schedule/odyssey/od yssey_v2.htm
which discussed this very issue. The discussion didn't talk about spam per se, but they did address telemarketers. And per the panelists, this issue is far from clear in terms of what kind of protections, if any, apply to commercial speech.
and methods, i can say with regard to, "if human interactions could be mathematically modeled" the answer would be, not very well in this context.
I'm part of a major NIH grant ($2.5 mil) that uses a method based on Gottman's work, coding couples interactions in an attempt to quantify their communication styles. This is one part of the project, and as far as I'm concerned the weakest. It's remarkably cumbersome (coding every few secs the topic, the affect, behavioral responses, etc..) by trained observers, difficult to analyze, and unfortunately in our study, telling us nothing.
No question mathematical modeling is a great direction to go with regard to understanding human behavior, and we have very elegant mathematical solutions to the inherent measurement error in behavioral research. Its just that scientific psychology is so young, our ability to quantify human behavior in any reliable, valid way is in its infancy. And our statistical models allow us to learn something. But it truly is a garbage in, garbage out hill we climb.
We have difficulty measuring with great accuracy whether or not a person is "depressed." We're in the prehistoric period attempting to quantify and model something as complicated as social interaction on a psychological level. *Maybe* we'll get their someday, but I doubt in my lifetime.
Back in 94, I had heard about Mosaic and Netscape, but had no idea what they were or what they did, let alone what the World Wide Web was. I had just scratched the surface of Gopher, but that was the extent of my online experience.
Anyway, had just gotten a job as a sys admin for a small academic department and got a binary of netscape to run on our sun sparc classic. Like everyone else, I thought it was remarkably cool, but there was so little content i never really understood its utility. Long story short... One thing that was cool was something called "Edgar" (i think), that had real time stock quotes on it. When i showed it to our department chair, he could not get past the fact it was free, and insisted that I immediately shut the server down for fear that our department would get billed for the information that was appearing across the screen.
I do appreciate the impact that heavy discounters have on the local game store. But I think there can be a happy medium. I think you can buy product from both online resources and the local game store.
I used to be heavy into Magic: The Gathering. No way I would have gotten so heavily into it had I not been able to purchase booster boxes online. It was *so* much cheaper. But I did frequent local game shops to hang out, play in tournaments, etc... and of course would always buy something on impulse. It was just inevitable. Plus, our local shops that put their effort into organized tournament play made money there as well. For example, Saturdays might be "sealed deck,"but you had to buy your packs there. Or maybe it was "ype II", but it was a $5.00 entry fee.
So I do understand how online discounts can hit a local game shop hard. But I also think the local game shop can be creative in its approach, and still survive, and thrive.
This is one of the most colossally stupid business decisions I have ever heard of. Miniature gaming is an *extremely* niche market with alot of competition. Cutting off any market share at all just makes no sense whatsoever. Yes I understand that you can still get it online through their website, but it's still remarkably limiting.
I can't imagine where other game companies, like Mayfair, WOC, etc... would be if they forced you to buy from brick and mortar stores. I live in Chicago, and finding the exact game product you might be looking for at the time isn't always easy. To restrict access to your product (a product that only a few 1000 people may be purchasing at any one time) is just plain dumb.
I've had a Canon Bubblejet 200e sitting on my desk since 1993. It's printed 10,000s of pages, been through 4 moves, four operating systems (win311,win95, win98, and linux), and it keeps plugging away with no problems at all. Cartridges are a bit pricey at $15.00-20.00 each, but I wouldn't give it up for anything. I think I paid 189.00 for it, and its been worth that, no doubt.
I can tell you that:
"I noticed that Red Hat's stock price jumped up a
bit"
is meaningless in terms of attributing it to "Redhat in the News." Redhat stock goes up and down like a rubber ball in a game of jacks. For every shift in price that seems attributable to some news, there are 20 days a month where it shifts based on the vagaries of the market.
Be careful of attributing changes in price reflecting news about a company with a low priced stock like this. Its all over the map and wil be for some time I'm afraid.
just my.02
jeff
I agree that Ellison is a major showman, and thrives on the media and exposure. You don't get that rich sitting around. Controversy, media exposure, grand visionary statements are all good for him and his company.
With that said, i still think it's a good thing when huge players in the tech industry bring up linux. No one who *really* matters is redifining how we think about IS and Microsoft based on slashdot articles/postings (unless of course it was an interview with Larry Ellison on Slashdot;-) ).
If there is any chance whatsoever that Linux and open source are going to fundamentally alter the way Microsoft does business and the products they create, Linux needs to be in the public eye, every day, all day. IS operations people can run all the linux servers they want behind the scenes and out of the watchful eye of IT managers, but it does nothing to really put the screws to Microsoft. For that to happen, major players in the industry need to be constantly extolling its virtues.
Is that Ellison's goal? Not likely. Like you point out, his platitudes are publicity driven and come from his desire to be wealthier than Gates. But regardless of his motives, I think its good nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
I may have posted this link some time ago, but I think it's worth a repost. "Underground" by Suelette Dreyfus is, to me, a very interesting book looking at the hacking/cracking culture of the mid 1980's.
It follows the stories of several hackers/crackers in Australia, Germany, and the United States. To me, it really reads more like an ethnographic anthropological study, than about hacks per se. But I found it very interesting. And best of all, the entire book is available for free:
http://www.underground-book.com/
in a download version.
jeff
I think the word is still out on whether or not SETI will find anything interesting. What I think is fundamentally important about SETI is that is has become a proof in concept for the power of distributed computing.
.02
SETI, to my knowledge, was the first large scale, public domain, distributed computing effort to do something interesting in the name of science. The fact that it's looking for alien communications worked great with the "geek" community, a large number of which happen to like computers as well. It became the genesis for all distributed computing projects to follow.
Had the very first distributed computing project involve folding proteins, it would have never, ever attracted the same level of attention/effort that a search for alien communications did. However, because it has attracted this level of attention and effort, and because of its success as model for how distributed computing can work, we now see a whole slew of distributed computing projects coming up and companys developing distributed computing apps as a business model.
Generally speaking, I think only good things are going to come of these efforts, and at a much faster pace than they might otherwise have.
just my
jeff
I totally agree in principle and spirit, but I work with plenty of people who have never seen FOTR or TT because, "it's for people who play games." That is honest to god what someone just said to me the other day. Despite the critical acclaim, academy award nods, accolades as it being the best trilogy ever produced, etc... It makes zero sense to me, but it is what it is.
.02
Box office totals tells us otherwise, but there is still this association between fantasy (which the Tolkien books are certainly considered) and nerdom that plenty of people can't seem to bridge because it's "beneath" them
just my
jeff
No,
;-)
while the MMPI may no *longer* have credibility, as someone has already pointed out, the MMPI-II has tremendous volumes of research validating its clinical scales.
However, unlike a previous poster suggested, the MMPI-II in no way suggests a probability that a mental illness is present or not. The MMPI-II very simply looked at the response patterns of different groups of patients, and looks at the degree to which your response patterns matched theirs.
So for example, a question like "I like mechanics magazines" does not in and of itself, having anything to do with a psychotic disorder. However, if 85% of schizophrenic patients endorsed this item as "True" and 10% of Depressed patients report "True", then an endorsement of "true" puts you closer to the Schizophrenic camp and further from the Depression camp. But that is just *1* item. The MMPI-II has hundreds of items, so it's a very good identifier of pathology. Not perfect, but very good.
Over the years, there has been tons of psychometric research trying to further figure out what items can help discriminate one group of clinical patients from another, or distinguish clinical patients from "normal" persons.
hth, and yes IAALP (I am a licensed psychologist)
jeff
If memory serves me, After Sept 11, one of Sim Racing's big contributors (Zen Joltis) died from complicating injuries he sustained in one of the trade towers. A memorial race was held on a track he designed and the money raised was donated to his family. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the exact link to this race because the Team-Lightspeed forums (who sponsored the race a while back) have been shut down. So I can't provide confirming evidence. But it did take place.
But what I can point out is:
http://vjg.bdrmotorsports.com/press.html
Kyle Petty is building a camp (Victory Junction)for kids with terminal illness, and again the sim racing community is getting together to raise money for the camp.
So not to take away anything from PA's efforts, but this stuff has been going on for a little while anyway, just under the radar.
jeff
Have you looked at the Ceiva Frame:
http://www.ceiva.com/
They're terrific for the grandmas of the family. Relatively cheap, and anyone you give permission to can upload pictures. Essentially, the thing calls home at a frequency you set, and downloads whatever pictures have recently been uploaded. So family from all over the world can upload pics via the web, and then the thing just automagically calls home at night (to a local number you pick), and the next morning the person sees all the brand new pictures appearing in the frame.
The only problem I ran into with the one I bought my brother is that around the Holidays, as many of these things are given as gifts, the call in number is busy for awhile, so it doesn't update every day. But once the holidays passed, the frame called home relgiously and grabbed all the new pics for my brother.
Kind of off topic I know, but sounds like something your grandmother would like.
jeff
oops,
g ra m.htm
sorry about the malformed address:
http://members.aol.com/surfdancec/wdwcollegepro
There was an extra " " in there.
jeff
actually,
g ra m.htm
;-)
i think it was Disney that had the first efficient, operational mag train:
"When a new PeopleMover was built at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, the rubber wheels were replaced by a series of pollution-free linear induction motors embedded in the track. This system creates a magnetic field that pushes the five three-car trains along
7,200 ft of track at up to 15 miles per hour. The main advantage of the system is its lack of gear belts or other mechanical devices. The wheels and doors are the only moving points in the entire PeopleMover. In actual operation at Walt Disney World the WEDway People Mover (now the Tomorrowland Transit Authority) has performed at 99.8% per cent efficiency. Energy conservation is another feature of the system. Sensors along the People Mover route ensure that power is applied only to linear induction motors, which are directly under a train."
I found this here:
http://www.ggdc.org/mp-100transport.htm
It looks like it opened as a "ride in 1975"
http://members.aol.com/surfdancec/wdwcollegepro
I remember riding this in 1977, but it went so slow i never really understand what was supposed to be so neat about it
jeff
This is slightly off topic, but
I checked out the site, and while funny, the letters where he gets no replies don't compare to the book "Letters from a Nut" by Ted Nancy. You can find it at Amazon (or other online seller's I'm sure), including some page previews with the letters he writes and the responses he gets.
I know it's not spam, but Ted Nancy's letters are *far* more clever than the spam responses this guy is writing. Funny, yes. But without the dialogue with the spammer, they really lose a lot. Check out the above book. *Very* funny stuff.
jeff
While it's true it's a shell game to some degree, and the wealth is "paper" wealth, if it increases Novell's market cap they have that much more leverage in the market place to borrow and acquire. So while their cash coffers don't necessarily grow, their power in the market place certainly does.
.02,
And assumming they have plans for SUSE besides liquidating the company, it was a great bargain.
just my
jeff
Sure,
but perhaps on a much smaller scale. My dissertation was a constant collaboration between myself, my advisor, and the two research assistants who helped with the project. We used the "Track Changes" component of MS Word which worked pretty well, but was nevertheless kind of clunky.
And we used the same MS Word "Track Changes" when we put together a couple substantial ($1,000,000+) grant proposals that involved contributions from a variety of researchers that would later go on to form the research team.
There is no question that in both cases above, the group product was vastly superior to what the key individual could do on their own. "Track Changes" was an adequate solution for our needs, but I would have been/always am happy to try new collaborative tools like this.
jeff
And I'm no expert on CA or Wolfram, but i believe he contends that you can't predict what patterns will be generated at all from theses simple rule sets. That was the whole point.
There is a good intro article about Wolfram in this months's "Skeptic" magazine
http://www.skeptic.com/
And I believe it was Wolfram who started Mathematica, the same program this guys used to solve these worms. Pretty cool i think.
jeff
There are always posts about where can linux break out and really take over market share (i.e. desktop, server, etc...), and when i first read the story, I didn't really see the point to this. But then:
.02.
From the article:
"The fact that America's Army is available in 64-bit on the GameStorm CD allows gamers to get a taste of the next generation of gaming just by inserting a CD and powering up the computer," said Major Bret Wilson, Operations Officer for America's Army.
This really does make sense to me. P.C.s in my mind are just better for the serious gamer, and hardware issues aside, if they can actually get to a point of porting single CD games like this, it could really create an exciting new breed of "console games." I'd love to just pop in a disk of Baldur's Gate, Nascar, Halflife, etc... and get the best of both worlds. Quick access to the game w/o the hassle of an install and all the advantages of the superior AI seen on the p.c. platform as compared to the console platform.
Add in the capability to save games and "ini" info to a CDR or Floppy and you are good to go.
just my
jeff
I don't know,
but it is an interesting point. I have no idea who the card carrying members of the RIAA are, but it could very well be the case that publishers are. And through recording contracts with artists, they allow for the RIAA to be the spokesperson for the protection of their property. Ergo, the RIAA can speak on behalf of all artists who are currently under contract with the publishers who themselves are associate members of RIAA.
just a thought?
jeff
Granted, you can do this with any audio source, but since my rx-320 is already connected to my computer, I'll use it as an example.
Using Winamp and the Shoutcast plugin, I can stream AM broadcast programming over shoutcast and the internet. This is very nice for my sister and her boyfriend who are big area sports fans (Big City USA), but obviously can't listen to the games on radio (as they live in germany). I simply setup the radio during a game, and they can listen to their heart's content. Like i said, I know you can do this with any audio source, but the ten-tec is a nice solution, and another example of the fun you can have with a radio attached to a p.c.
And yes i know all about the "illegal to rebroadcast or retransmit..." stuff they announce before a broadcast. I limit the connected users to "1", disguise the channel as something irrelevant, and assume the liklihood of it being picked up by anyone other than my sis to be pretty small.
Pointless? Internet radio is gonna take over shortwave? I don't think so. Not for a long time. Thought about using some mod points to mod this parent as a troll. But then figured i could simply point out that, as soon as you can get computers to the entire third world, then you can start talking about the death of shortwave as a source of news and programming.
.04
No doubt other technologies are developing rapidly. Actually, internet radio is just one. But shortwave is still the only way for people to have ready access to information in the third world (which is a *large* part of the world).
The amount of good shortwave programming is less than it once was (BBC no longer directs a sw broadcast to the states, DW is stopping its broadcast to the US sometime soon), but it still is quite strong.
Head over to usenet and check out the sw groups. Considerable numbers of posts everyday from new users wanting to know what radio to take when they head somewhere out of their country of origin. My sister lives in Berlin. I got her a cheap sw radio so she can readily listen to BBC, VOA, and AFR. Gives her more option of english language programming besides CNN that she might not otherwise get. Pick up a copy of "Passport to Worldband Radio" and you'll see all the programming that is out there, not accessible via internet radio.
Anyway, I could go on and on and on. The point is that the medium is hardly dead. Not what it once was to be sure, but a very viable (and vibrant) broadcast community still exists, and will exist for some time to come. Its a good way to get a variety of opinions, from a variety of broadcast outlets, not to mention the *high* geek factor that is involved in the hobby.
my
jeff
I see this *so* often that i do my best to correct it when I see it. There is a giant difference between calling someone "asocial" and calling someone "antisocial."
;-).
"Antisocial" is a clinical, psychiatric diagnosis. It's considered a personality disorder, and in fact is one of the personality disorders that essentially relies on contacts with others (although in an exploitive fashion), for the diagnosis to be made. It is also often confused with "sociopathic." While a sociopath always carrys a dx of Antisocial Personality Disorder, it's not always true that an antisocial personality disordered person is a sociopath.
Nelson on the Simpsons, "Cigarette man" on the X-Files, Gordon Gecko from "Wall Street," and "Animal" on the Muppets would be considered "Antisocial."
"Asocial," which is what everyone usually means when they say "antisocial", is an indifference to social relationships. It's alot harder to think of good asocial examples, cause they don't lend themselves to good storytelling
It's that simple.
hth,
jeff
While I admittedly didnt read the article, with regard to your comments about freedom of speech protections in the commercial world there was recently a discussion on Odyssey (npr.org) that you can find here:
e du le/hd_sched_light.htm&BodyURL=/schedule/odyssey/od yssey_v2.htm
http://www.wbez.org/frames.asp?HeaderURL=../sch
which discussed this very issue. The discussion didn't talk about spam per se, but they did address telemarketers. And per the panelists, this issue is far from clear in terms of what kind of protections, if any, apply to commercial speech.
jeff
and methods, i can say with regard to, "if human interactions could be mathematically modeled" the answer would be, not very well in this context.
I'm part of a major NIH grant ($2.5 mil) that uses a method based on Gottman's work, coding couples interactions in an attempt to quantify their communication styles. This is one part of the project, and as far as I'm concerned the weakest. It's remarkably cumbersome (coding every few secs the topic, the affect, behavioral responses, etc..) by trained observers, difficult to analyze, and unfortunately in our study, telling us nothing.
No question mathematical modeling is a great direction to go with regard to understanding human behavior, and we have very elegant mathematical solutions to the inherent measurement error in behavioral research. Its just that scientific psychology is so young, our ability to quantify human behavior in any reliable, valid way is in its infancy. And our statistical models allow us to learn something. But it truly is a garbage in, garbage out hill we climb.
We have difficulty measuring with great accuracy whether or not a person is "depressed." We're in the prehistoric period attempting to quantify and model something as complicated as social interaction on a psychological level. *Maybe* we'll get their someday, but I doubt in my lifetime.
later,
jeff
Back in 94, I had heard about Mosaic and Netscape, but had no idea what they were or what they did, let alone what the World Wide Web was. I had just scratched the surface of Gopher, but that was the extent of my online experience.
Anyway, had just gotten a job as a sys admin for a small academic department and got a binary of netscape to run on our sun sparc classic. Like everyone else, I thought it was remarkably cool, but there was so little content i never really understood its utility. Long story short... One thing that was cool was something called "Edgar" (i think), that had real time stock quotes on it. When i showed it to our department chair, he could not get past the fact it was free, and insisted that I immediately shut the server down for fear that our department would get billed for the information that was appearing across the screen.
ahh, a reply to my own post ;-)
I do appreciate the impact that heavy discounters have on the local game store. But I think there can be a happy medium. I think you can buy product from both online resources and the local game store.
I used to be heavy into Magic: The Gathering. No way I would have gotten so heavily into it had I not been able to purchase booster boxes online. It was *so* much cheaper. But I did frequent local game shops to hang out, play in tournaments, etc... and of course would always buy something on impulse. It was just inevitable. Plus, our local shops that put their effort into organized tournament play made money there as well. For example, Saturdays might be "sealed deck,"but you had to buy your packs there. Or maybe it was "ype II", but it was a $5.00 entry fee.
So I do understand how online discounts can hit a local game shop hard. But I also think the local game shop can be creative in its approach, and still survive, and thrive.
This is one of the most colossally stupid business decisions I have ever heard of. Miniature gaming is an *extremely* niche market with alot of competition. Cutting off any market share at all just makes no sense whatsoever. Yes I understand that you can still get it online through their website, but it's still remarkably limiting.
.02
I can't imagine where other game companies, like Mayfair, WOC, etc... would be if they forced you to buy from brick and mortar stores. I live in Chicago, and finding the exact game product you might be looking for at the time isn't always easy. To restrict access to your product (a product that only a few 1000 people may be purchasing at any one time) is just plain dumb.
just me
jeff
amen to that brother.
I've had a Canon Bubblejet 200e sitting on my desk since 1993. It's printed 10,000s of pages, been through 4 moves, four operating systems (win311,win95, win98, and linux), and it keeps plugging away with no problems at all. Cartridges are a bit pricey at $15.00-20.00 each, but I wouldn't give it up for anything. I think I paid 189.00 for it, and its been worth that, no doubt.
I can tell you that: "I noticed that Red Hat's stock price jumped up a bit" is meaningless in terms of attributing it to "Redhat in the News." Redhat stock goes up and down like a rubber ball in a game of jacks. For every shift in price that seems attributable to some news, there are 20 days a month where it shifts based on the vagaries of the market. Be careful of attributing changes in price reflecting news about a company with a low priced stock like this. Its all over the map and wil be for some time I'm afraid. just my .02
jeff
I agree that Ellison is a major showman, and thrives on the media and exposure. You don't get that rich sitting around. Controversy, media exposure, grand visionary statements are all good for him and his company.
;-) ).
.02
With that said, i still think it's a good thing when huge players in the tech industry bring up linux. No one who *really* matters is redifining how we think about IS and Microsoft based on slashdot articles/postings (unless of course it was an interview with Larry Ellison on Slashdot
If there is any chance whatsoever that Linux and open source are going to fundamentally alter the way Microsoft does business and the products they create, Linux needs to be in the public eye, every day, all day. IS operations people can run all the linux servers they want behind the scenes and out of the watchful eye of IT managers, but it does nothing to really put the screws to Microsoft. For that to happen, major players in the industry need to be constantly extolling its virtues.
Is that Ellison's goal? Not likely. Like you point out, his platitudes are publicity driven and come from his desire to be wealthier than Gates. But regardless of his motives, I think its good nonetheless.
my
jeff