Didn't notice that. Every plane I've flown into Logan has been on that flight path, so I think most of them do that. One of the planes looks a little different than the others, so I don't think they're all the same. Whether they were all in those positions at the same time is anyone's guess, as this might be stitched together.
I'm impressed. I like the fact that it works like the map component, and the copyright notifications are not too bothersome (you can see them if you look closely).
Here's a plane coming in for a landing at Boston's Logan airport, cruising over the Harbor Islands:
Interesting. My post assumed they're not just scam artists, but it looks like that's exactly what they are. So now I'm not hoping for the company to come around and build a better business model - I'd like to see them go down in flames. This could be almost as fun as SCO.
I just don't get it - who is advising Maui X-Stream? Why would the company be so dumb as to do this? Complying wouldn't hurt them at all - in fact, it could help them, and save them money as well.
Consider: they could easily go the Apple route and built a proprietary GUI for Pear PC, while releasing their modified PearPC under the GPL and contributing their changes upstream to the original project. All this would require would be for them to post the source code for their modified PearPC on their site. Apple took this development approach with OS X (FreeBSD) and Safari (Konqueror). Probably as many people would buy CherryOS - no sales lost. But the PearPC developers would be pleased instead of litigious because they'd get development support from a company. And the company would be on friendly terms with the project, so they'd be able to work together to get the features they need for CherryOS implemented in the core project. Those features would be carried on in future versions of PearPC, ensuring that everyone has the same updates - in other words, it would be as if Maui X-Stream has more developers, without having to pay them. Money saved. Everyone happy.
Whoever told the PearPC folks to "speak with an Attorney" should be given his or her pink slip. The company is throwing out an opportunity to save money on development, and at the same time it is steering toward a long lawsuit they'll likely lose. Where do I sign up to be their strategic consultant? I never would have thought it, but I guess I'm qualified.
Computers work best for people who are willing to learn how to use them. If you're not willing to learn because you're too lazy or busy, or if you just can't retain information very well, you'll probably have to call someone to help you.
And no, there's no grand unified certification system for those people who can help you. Nor should there be: "computers" is too broad a term to be encompassed by a certification. The author is right - it's not like hiring an auto mechanic. In fact, despite the frequency with which computers are compared to cars, the analogy is terrible. Auto mechanics don't have to deal with spyware infecting cars, and don't have to perrform security patches. Computers are a much wider discipline; imagine if a car you bought three years ago were now doing entirely different things than were possible when you bought it. Different fuel, different controls, different color, different vulnerabilities. This would be the only way to make a car analogous to a computer. Computers are multi-function, and new functions arise all the time. There is simply no way to be "certified" for all of the problems you're likely to encounter on someone's home computer. You just have to stay informed, and be smart about how you use your system. If you fail, or just throw up your hands in defeat, you have to hire someone like me to be smart for you. Or stop using computers.
Another interesting auto-mechanic-analogy observation: yes, computer techs may not be certified, but you also don't have to have a computer user's license. And you can "drive" a computer at any age. (The analogy keeps getting worse.)
I'm not so sure the character development was as interesting as you say, except maybe Anakin. I really wish Obi-Wan had been more of a bad-ass, perhaps more like Han Solo than Alec Guinness. It would be neat to see him develop into a more stately Jedi. Instead he started out much as he ends. And Palpatine, though interesting, would have been far more interesting if he had started out as a more major, central character. Not just a stuffy politician in the background, but someone you really like - one of the "good guys." Watching him become emperor would have been like watching Princess Leia become Emperor - as impossible to accept as finding out Vader is Luke's father. Lucas could have done much more interesting things with these characters.
Still, I'll be near the front of the line on May 19th. Here's hoping for another Empire.
It's been pointed out that this toolbar works fine on Linux; of course it does, since it's written for the browser. People are asking why Yahoo! didn't acknowledge this on their download page, and the answer (probably an accurate asessment of Yahoo!'s thinking) is that there may be bugs and they don't want to get a flood of complaints. I don't buy this.
For too long companies have had the power to provide information for unsupported users (read: Linux) but have avoided this for fear that it might be construed as rendering them liable for problems. Why? Why not just include a disclaimer like "We are told that our toolbar works on Linux, and you are welcome to try it, however Yahoo! has only actively tested the toolbar on Windows and cannot guarrantee its functionality on other operating systems. If you use the Windows toolbar on Firefox for Linux and have a complaint for our Yahoo! toolbar developers, go impale yourself on something and leave us the hell alone." Who would read such a disclaimer and then complain to them about bugs? It's about time companies start volunteering information, drivers and other helpfulness. With disclaimers in place there's no reason why they should continue to be exclusive.
I've got one for you: The Hunt for Red October. Clancy's novel was interesting, but long and winding, with characters less well-defined than in the film and a lot of technobabble (OK, so it was probably REAL technobabble, but it was tiresome nevertheless). The movie was a great improvement - an intelligent action/adventure that kept the audience guessing about Captain Ramius's intentions. In fct I found all of the first three Clancy movies to be general improvements.
Hey, this was a huge help - thanks! The problem was that I had been using KNOPPIX 3.7, and being on the cutting edge I had booted using the 2.6 kernel (still an option on KNOPPIX). This was probably the problem, as 2.6 is apparently too smart for its own good and second-guesses the BIOS in its disk geometry reporting. So I booted KNOPPIX with 2.4 and ran QTparted to resized my NTFS partition and add some new partitions, and like magic Windows still boots. You know, for those unlikely scenarios in which I might need it.:)
Dual-booting their Thinkpads? I've been trying to set this up on my shiny new T42p, but I've been having problems with the IBM predesktop feature. Basically it seems designed to prevent me from dual-booting - I tried to set it up, and killed XP, but then couldn't reinstall it. I called IBM and had them send me a set of CDs (which should have come with the laptop in the first place, IMHO) so I could rebuild. But I've been having trouble resizing XP's partition. How do you guys do it?
The fine print on the product page is interesting:
PC: Pentium® III 800 MHz or higher, Windows 98 SE (with driver downloaded from ARCHOS web-site), ME, 2000 or XP. 64 MB RAM (128 MB recommended) with USB port and CD-ROM drive Mac: 9.2 or X (10.2.4) USB Manager version 1.2 or higher with USB port and CD-ROM drive
So no sneaky using your new Linux gadget with Linux. Of course I'd imagine you could make it connect to the storage just fine, especially if it does USB Mass Storage.
We have reviewed your recent post on getting Rolex e-mails, and it qualifies you for a m.or tg ag,e. You could get $300,000 for as little as $600 a month! Bad credit is no problem, you can pull cash out or refinance.
There is something strange about President Bush these days, especially since the election. It's disquieting the way he has had the Secret Service don red robes whenever they follow him around. Personally I think he takes himself too seriously - probably a result of the Senate voting to give him emergency powers in 2002. Last week I was remarking on how Senator Jarjar from Texas really shouldn't have taken us in that direction, but then I looked it up last week, and it turns out that the "senator" actually held no political office at all, and was really just an assistant to the real senator, who was absent during that session. And I don't think it's any coincidence that he was from the same state as the president.
What I really want to know is this: the clone troopers in Iraq have proven to be invaluable to us, but no one is asking who placed the original order for them, years before we actually needed them.
The good news in all of this is that if Kerry had won, he would have been blamed for just about everything that goes wrong after January 19th. Problems in Iraq, soaring deficit, social security crisis. And there are investigations that had been pending the election that could be very uncomfortable for Bush. Personally, I think the mistakes he has made are impeachable, but you can't impeach him if he's out of office.
Of course Congress could let him get away with anything, but only time will tell.
"We were surprised that people weren't doing more complex searches," Spink said. "If you put a couple of words into the web, you're going to get hundreds of thousands of results. I think people aren't trained very well to use the search engines."
Don't be surprised - people seem to need training for everything, even rather simple tasks like search. Let's face it, using quotes and expected words in your search narrows down your results substantially, and it is extremely easy to do. But while it's hard for this crowd (or Wired's) to understand, most users need to take Search 101 rather than figure it out themselves.
Search is just the tip of the iceberg. When some (maybe even most) people sit in front of a computer they lose access to about half their brain cells for some still unexplained reason. This is why we have spyware, unpatched machines running mail trojans for spammers, and e-mails with Word document attachments containing the text that should have been in the e-mail. Welcome to the Internet. Do try to avoid the braindead during your stay.
Actually, Bush and Kerry dealt with this in the debates. Bush's attitude toward the Patriot Act is discouraging: he takes the "all or nothing" approach that you either like the entire act, or hate the entire act.
Kerry is a flip-flopper (i.e., he is intelligent), so he likes some parts of the act and questions others. Given the size of the Partiot Act, this is not really hard to grasp - in fact I'd be wary of anyone who had one opinion on an entire act like this one, for or against. Personally I don't mind if the FBI can use the same wire-tap warrant for two phones belonging to the same person (the involvement of the courts is the same either way, but the pointless red tape is eliminated), but I do mind that my library activity can be monitored by Big Brother. It's a big act, with a few good bits here and there, so I like that Kerry wants to keep it but excise the bad bits.
And I think you've hit upon one of the most interesting things about Knoppix: it's useful to Windows sysadmins. I work on a multi-platform network, and I've used this distro many times on both Windows and Linux machines. The NTFS driver works great, and recently helped me restore a DLL that a user had "accidentally deleted." Of course it's also a Samba client, so you can drag and drop their files from the damaged machine to the file server for safe keeping.
It's all shown me how good a job Microsoft could do if they actually cared. Knoppix really is better than Microsoft's own recovery console, and makes me wonder why (a) Windows doesn't simply restore missing DLLs on its own when they turn up missing (copies are in the i386 folder, and sometimes other places, so what the heck?), and (b) why there isn't a bootable Windows CD for recovery (maybe because it would be the most pirated CD ever?).
These experiences left me unsurprised when Google released a desktop search tool that renders Longhorn's WinFS obsolete... two years before the release of Longhorn. Is Bill asleep at the wheel?
Transript. It is indeed revealing for people who might not have been paying attention:
Vader: What is thy bidding, my master?
Palpatine:There is a great disturbance in the Force. We have a new enemy: Luke Skywalker.
V: Of course. As you know, he is my son, and I am now in disguise after that incident on the lava planet.
P: Yes, of course. And as I'm sure you remember, my friend, I became Emperor after using a clone army to initiate a faux civil war built on beurocratic pretences, which allowed me to rise in power without the Jedi becoming aware. I'm sure you remember Darth Tyranus, whom you destroyed.
V: I remember, my master. And while we're on this subject, it was that series of events that allowed me to also crush the Jedi, which I was bound to do after the death of my mother.
P: Enough of the recap. Back to young Skywalker. If he could be turned, he could be a great asset...
And it goes on. Lucas's writing is definitely going downhill as he revises these films.
I thought this looked familiar. Look at the article's date: September 24, 2004. I read this weeks ago. Took me a few paragraphs to realize it. Anyone read anything new lately?
I have some suggestions for Mr. Kerner on how he could substantially improve his FAQ. I'll be crafting a FAQ later this afternoon - check here this evening for the URL.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't notice that. Every plane I've flown into Logan has been on that flight path, so I think most of them do that. One of the planes looks a little different than the others, so I don't think they're all the same. Whether they were all in those positions at the same time is anyone's guess, as this might be stitched together.
I'm impressed. I like the fact that it works like the map component, and the copyright notifications are not too bothersome (you can see them if you look closely).
Here's a plane coming in for a landing at Boston's Logan airport, cruising over the Harbor Islands:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.329153,-70.95713 1&spn=0.008894,0.012832&t=k&hl=en
Interesting. My post assumed they're not just scam artists, but it looks like that's exactly what they are. So now I'm not hoping for the company to come around and build a better business model - I'd like to see them go down in flames. This could be almost as fun as SCO.
I just don't get it - who is advising Maui X-Stream? Why would the company be so dumb as to do this? Complying wouldn't hurt them at all - in fact, it could help them, and save them money as well.
Consider: they could easily go the Apple route and built a proprietary GUI for Pear PC, while releasing their modified PearPC under the GPL and contributing their changes upstream to the original project. All this would require would be for them to post the source code for their modified PearPC on their site. Apple took this development approach with OS X (FreeBSD) and Safari (Konqueror). Probably as many people would buy CherryOS - no sales lost. But the PearPC developers would be pleased instead of litigious because they'd get development support from a company. And the company would be on friendly terms with the project, so they'd be able to work together to get the features they need for CherryOS implemented in the core project. Those features would be carried on in future versions of PearPC, ensuring that everyone has the same updates - in other words, it would be as if Maui X-Stream has more developers, without having to pay them. Money saved. Everyone happy.
Whoever told the PearPC folks to "speak with an Attorney" should be given his or her pink slip. The company is throwing out an opportunity to save money on development, and at the same time it is steering toward a long lawsuit they'll likely lose. Where do I sign up to be their strategic consultant? I never would have thought it, but I guess I'm qualified.
Computers work best for people who are willing to learn how to use them. If you're not willing to learn because you're too lazy or busy, or if you just can't retain information very well, you'll probably have to call someone to help you.
And no, there's no grand unified certification system for those people who can help you. Nor should there be: "computers" is too broad a term to be encompassed by a certification. The author is right - it's not like hiring an auto mechanic. In fact, despite the frequency with which computers are compared to cars, the analogy is terrible. Auto mechanics don't have to deal with spyware infecting cars, and don't have to perrform security patches. Computers are a much wider discipline; imagine if a car you bought three years ago were now doing entirely different things than were possible when you bought it. Different fuel, different controls, different color, different vulnerabilities. This would be the only way to make a car analogous to a computer. Computers are multi-function, and new functions arise all the time. There is simply no way to be "certified" for all of the problems you're likely to encounter on someone's home computer. You just have to stay informed, and be smart about how you use your system. If you fail, or just throw up your hands in defeat, you have to hire someone like me to be smart for you. Or stop using computers.
Another interesting auto-mechanic-analogy observation: yes, computer techs may not be certified, but you also don't have to have a computer user's license. And you can "drive" a computer at any age. (The analogy keeps getting worse.)
Those responsible for saying that the person who was sacked was fired, have been sacked...
I think I know what the problem was. Was Slashdot available on these student computers? That would do it.
I'm not so sure the character development was as interesting as you say, except maybe Anakin. I really wish Obi-Wan had been more of a bad-ass, perhaps more like Han Solo than Alec Guinness. It would be neat to see him develop into a more stately Jedi. Instead he started out much as he ends. And Palpatine, though interesting, would have been far more interesting if he had started out as a more major, central character. Not just a stuffy politician in the background, but someone you really like - one of the "good guys." Watching him become emperor would have been like watching Princess Leia become Emperor - as impossible to accept as finding out Vader is Luke's father. Lucas could have done much more interesting things with these characters.
Still, I'll be near the front of the line on May 19th. Here's hoping for another Empire.
It's been pointed out that this toolbar works fine on Linux; of course it does, since it's written for the browser. People are asking why Yahoo! didn't acknowledge this on their download page, and the answer (probably an accurate asessment of Yahoo!'s thinking) is that there may be bugs and they don't want to get a flood of complaints. I don't buy this.
For too long companies have had the power to provide information for unsupported users (read: Linux) but have avoided this for fear that it might be construed as rendering them liable for problems. Why? Why not just include a disclaimer like "We are told that our toolbar works on Linux, and you are welcome to try it, however Yahoo! has only actively tested the toolbar on Windows and cannot guarrantee its functionality on other operating systems. If you use the Windows toolbar on Firefox for Linux and have a complaint for our Yahoo! toolbar developers, go impale yourself on something and leave us the hell alone." Who would read such a disclaimer and then complain to them about bugs? It's about time companies start volunteering information, drivers and other helpfulness. With disclaimers in place there's no reason why they should continue to be exclusive.
I've got one for you: The Hunt for Red October. Clancy's novel was interesting, but long and winding, with characters less well-defined than in the film and a lot of technobabble (OK, so it was probably REAL technobabble, but it was tiresome nevertheless). The movie was a great improvement - an intelligent action/adventure that kept the audience guessing about Captain Ramius's intentions. In fct I found all of the first three Clancy movies to be general improvements.
Hey, this was a huge help - thanks! The problem was that I had been using KNOPPIX 3.7, and being on the cutting edge I had booted using the 2.6 kernel (still an option on KNOPPIX). This was probably the problem, as 2.6 is apparently too smart for its own good and second-guesses the BIOS in its disk geometry reporting. So I booted KNOPPIX with 2.4 and ran QTparted to resized my NTFS partition and add some new partitions, and like magic Windows still boots. You know, for those unlikely scenarios in which I might need it. :)
Dual-booting their Thinkpads? I've been trying to set this up on my shiny new T42p, but I've been having problems with the IBM predesktop feature. Basically it seems designed to prevent me from dual-booting - I tried to set it up, and killed XP, but then couldn't reinstall it. I called IBM and had them send me a set of CDs (which should have come with the laptop in the first place, IMHO) so I could rebuild. But I've been having trouble resizing XP's partition. How do you guys do it?
This has been a good season, so it was nice so see this Slashdot story contradicted by this:
So at least this season will stick around. Of course writing a letter in support of the series can't hurt.
The fine print on the product page is interesting:
So no sneaky using your new Linux gadget with Linux. Of course I'd imagine you could make it connect to the storage just fine, especially if it does USB Mass Storage.
We have reviewed your recent post on getting Rolex e-mails, and it qualifies you for a m.or tg ag,e. You could get $300,000 for as little as $600 a month! Bad credit is no problem, you can pull cash out or refinance.
There is something strange about President Bush these days, especially since the election. It's disquieting the way he has had the Secret Service don red robes whenever they follow him around. Personally I think he takes himself too seriously - probably a result of the Senate voting to give him emergency powers in 2002. Last week I was remarking on how Senator Jarjar from Texas really shouldn't have taken us in that direction, but then I looked it up last week, and it turns out that the "senator" actually held no political office at all, and was really just an assistant to the real senator, who was absent during that session. And I don't think it's any coincidence that he was from the same state as the president.
What I really want to know is this: the clone troopers in Iraq have proven to be invaluable to us, but no one is asking who placed the original order for them, years before we actually needed them.
The good news in all of this is that if Kerry had won, he would have been blamed for just about everything that goes wrong after January 19th. Problems in Iraq, soaring deficit, social security crisis. And there are investigations that had been pending the election that could be very uncomfortable for Bush. Personally, I think the mistakes he has made are impeachable, but you can't impeach him if he's out of office.
Of course Congress could let him get away with anything, but only time will tell.
Don't be surprised - people seem to need training for everything, even rather simple tasks like search. Let's face it, using quotes and expected words in your search narrows down your results substantially, and it is extremely easy to do. But while it's hard for this crowd (or Wired's) to understand, most users need to take Search 101 rather than figure it out themselves.
Search is just the tip of the iceberg. When some (maybe even most) people sit in front of a computer they lose access to about half their brain cells for some still unexplained reason. This is why we have spyware, unpatched machines running mail trojans for spammers, and e-mails with Word document attachments containing the text that should have been in the e-mail. Welcome to the Internet. Do try to avoid the braindead during your stay.
Actually, Bush and Kerry dealt with this in the debates. Bush's attitude toward the Patriot Act is discouraging: he takes the "all or nothing" approach that you either like the entire act, or hate the entire act.
Kerry is a flip-flopper (i.e., he is intelligent), so he likes some parts of the act and questions others. Given the size of the Partiot Act, this is not really hard to grasp - in fact I'd be wary of anyone who had one opinion on an entire act like this one, for or against. Personally I don't mind if the FBI can use the same wire-tap warrant for two phones belonging to the same person (the involvement of the courts is the same either way, but the pointless red tape is eliminated), but I do mind that my library activity can be monitored by Big Brother. It's a big act, with a few good bits here and there, so I like that Kerry wants to keep it but excise the bad bits.
And I think you've hit upon one of the most interesting things about Knoppix: it's useful to Windows sysadmins. I work on a multi-platform network, and I've used this distro many times on both Windows and Linux machines. The NTFS driver works great, and recently helped me restore a DLL that a user had "accidentally deleted." Of course it's also a Samba client, so you can drag and drop their files from the damaged machine to the file server for safe keeping.
It's all shown me how good a job Microsoft could do if they actually cared. Knoppix really is better than Microsoft's own recovery console, and makes me wonder why (a) Windows doesn't simply restore missing DLLs on its own when they turn up missing (copies are in the i386 folder, and sometimes other places, so what the heck?), and (b) why there isn't a bootable Windows CD for recovery (maybe because it would be the most pirated CD ever?).
These experiences left me unsurprised when Google released a desktop search tool that renders Longhorn's WinFS obsolete ... two years before the release of Longhorn. Is Bill asleep at the wheel?
Transript. It is indeed revealing for people who might not have been paying attention:
And it goes on. Lucas's writing is definitely going downhill as he revises these films.
I thought this looked familiar. Look at the article's date: September 24, 2004. I read this weeks ago. Took me a few paragraphs to realize it. Anyone read anything new lately?
What's wrong with patenting LCD displays? I, for one, welcome our new security-conscious overlords.
I have some suggestions for Mr. Kerner on how he could substantially improve his FAQ. I'll be crafting a FAQ later this afternoon - check here this evening for the URL.