March 8, 2006 - 5:10 p.m. to 4 a.m. March 9, 2006
Crews closed the bridge after on-site inspectors heard unusual noises. Those noises prompted a closer look inside the mechanical parts of the draw pontoons. They found one bolt sheared off, several loose bolts, and flaking paint which is an indication of weakening steel. They immediately closed the bridge to conduct the safety check and make repairs.
Feb. 4, 2006 - 9a.m. to 2 p.m., Feb. 5
Emergency closure due to wind gusts of up to 67 mph. Crews repaired three drawspan hooks that were torn off during the storm. Bridge crews performed a preliminary ultrasonic test during the closure and detected a small crack in the mechanical equipment for the drawspan. The last time the bridge was closed for high winds was March 1999.Recent SR 520 Bridge Closures
He's the archetypical protector. The dramatic tension comes from wondering whether he can do his job as a protector. His survival is not important to the narrative.
There are also the inherent temptations in possessing such unlimited powers.
Why is gold? I can't eat it. Can't drink it. Can't hunt with it. Can't heal with it. Can't fuck it. It has some use in electronics, but there's better materials. The only reason to think it has value is because it did historically. If we actually entered a post-apocalyptic world where the dollar was useless, you'd quickly find gold to be equally useless
Gold is rare and challenging to extract.
In your post apocalyptic world, the chance that the supply will dramatically increase in your lifetime - or that of your grandchildren, or great-grandchildren - is negligible.
Gold endures.
Excavation of the Varna Necropolis retrieved gold jewelry from 4600 BC.
Gold's appeal to the artist and craftsman is universal. The gold cup can be worth more than its value in bullion.
Gold is dense.
The counterfeit coin is easy to detect.
The standard gold bar weighs about thirty pounds. That's a significant problem for a thief.
It is possible to define the value of products and services in other ways than just "what people are willing to pay for them". An example of this would be a hypothetical economy where the value of products and services is determined by the resources (labor, energy and and raw materials) required for providing said products and services.
If there is no buyer, there is no production.
Even the goods you produce for yourself come at a price. You can grow your own tomatoes. But you will have to tend the garden.
1: I try to research previous patents, they're almost unreadable..... I have no money to hire a patent lawyer(barrier to entry one)... so I can't be certain if my idea has already been patented.
Then what you need to do is to join [or form] a co-op with other independent developers.
Build an organization that will have the resources to do the necessary research, provide legal assistance and technical support - and - gasp! wheeze! - lobby effectively for your interests.
Which may not always be the same as the more ideologically oriented FSF.
Why not just buy h.264 outright? What's the market cap for the company that owns it? It's got to be a drop in the bucket compared to licencing fees down the road, plus what they paid (1 billion dollars) for YouTube
The following is an abridged list of licensors of patents included in the AVC patent pool:
Apple Bosch Columbia University DAEWOO Dolby Laboratories France Télécom Fraunhofer Fujitsu Hitachi Philips LG Microsoft Mitsubishi Electric Nippon Telegraph and Telephone [NTT] Panasonic Samsung Siemans Toshiba
Many hardware devices already have H.264 decoding built into the chip, ranging from set-top boxes to the iPhone.
There are 762 corporate licensees for AVC/H.264 Licensees is 762 - and the list just keeps on growing.
Canonical is here. Apple. Google. Microsoft.
The big names in OEM manufacturing. In networking [Cisco].
In brand-name consumer electronics. [LG and Samsung] In military hardware [Lockheed Martin]. In cable, broadcast and satellite television - most visibly those based in China and Japan.
The company selling the software used by a Pennsylvania school district to allegedly spy on its students blasted what it called laptop theft-recovery "vigilantism" today.
Absolute Software said it dissuades users of theft-recovery software from acting on their own. "We discourage any customer from taking theft recovery into their own hands," said Stephen Midgley, the company's head of marketing, in an interview Monday. "That's best left in the hands of professionals."
Midgley confirmed that Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa. was running Absolute Manage, formerly known as LANRev, which Absolute Software acquired last December. The suburban Philadelphia school district purchased and deployed LANRev prior to Absolute's acquisition, he said, noting that most school districts buy the software for power management features that let IT staff remotely power down systems.
Calling LANRev a "legacy" product, Midgley also said that Absolute would ship an update in the next several weeks that will permanently disable Theft Track, the name of the feature that lets administrators switch on a laptop's camera to take photographs of a potential thief after the computer is reported stolen. "It really doesn't serve any purpose," said Midgley of Theft Track.
All its theft-recovery software relies on a different model than the former LANRev, said Midgley. "We give no theft recovery tools to our [LoJack and Computrace] customers," he said. "The only truly proven model is a managed service model."
To kick off the recovery of a stolen or lost laptop, customers first must file a police report -- not a requirement of LANRev -- and only then contact Absolute, which in turn tracks the location of the missing machine via its IP address when the system goes online. Absolute employs a team of former law enforcement professionals who reach out to local police, provide them with the location information and then get out of the way. Software maker blasts 'vigilantism' in Pa. school spying case
M$ Internet Exploder, M$ Windoze, and all M$ products. M$ should be taken apart by the governments of the world, piece by piece. Afterwards the pieces of M$ should be given to the free software movements. Friends don't help friends install M$ junk. Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in committing suicide.
None of this plays well to anyone in management - or to anyone over the age of consent.
I find it interesting that people think that old people are going to have the most trouble with technology.
It is, however, useful for the geek to remember that elderly can have thirty years experience with MS-DOS and Windows. Thirty years of experience with apps that have matured as they have matured.
I agree. Novell turned evil when it sided with Microsoft against all linux distros other than SUSE. Novell must die, and SUSE supports need to understand they are playing with the Devil.
In choosing OSX or Windows you are spared recruitment into the geek's holy wars - and that is something worth thinking about.
If someone like that asks you for a certain software ("I need Photoshop, cause my cousin's neighbour's Aunt said it was great to resize pictures"), you can easily log in via ssh and install the foss equivalent
If there is a FOSS equivalent.
You have to understand your users very well if you plan on making choices for them and installing apps by remote control.
The clueless user who "spends 99% of the time in MSN, Skype or on facebook, and who watches vids on youtube" is a geek stereotype. The user can surprise you.
Your family doctor doesn't take family members as patients. It is stressful and corrupting.
You motives are suspect. It is hard to be objective. It is even more difficult for the family member to speak up, to fight back - to resist being taken in a direction he does not want to go.
To put it bluntly, the Linux Desktop missed the entire mass adoption of Personal Computers at home. Most of the desktop learning environment was done in the 90's and they have passed that skill on down to their children
It goes deeper than that.
Applications have been passed down from father to son, mother to daughter.
Microsoft Word 5.5 DOS [Patched For W2K] is a free download of a program first released in 1983. 27 years ago. Word for Windows took hold in 1990-1993.
And since all software is free, you essentially have a nice "app store"-like interface, where you can install everything (out of currently over 13,000 packages here on Gentoo) you like
not quite everything written for Linux is free and not quite everything will be in every repository.
or in the same state in every repository.
and while Windows doesn't have a universal repository - there are many mega-mall Windows "app stores" like Download.com.
We all know Vista is crap, so if they're using that, switching to anything would be a reasonable upgrade.
There is often a difference between what the geek "knows" and what he "believes."
Case in point - the crap Win 7 stories that have been making their way to the front page of Slashdot.
they care about what they can do rather than who makes their OS, and their are reasonable alternatives to XP and Vista.
Pretty much everything of interest in Linux [FOSS] is ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app.
That is not true the other way around - and it matters.
The gold standard for the Windows user is the OEM system bundle of hardware and software. The system works as advertised or it is returned for service or replacement under warranty.
The platform has strength and visibility as a consumer product. It has the attractive mass market price - and better specs than the bottom feeders.
The Win 7 PC in store or at WalMart.com comes in essentially two flavors:
Win SE for the Atom netbook. 64 Bit Windows Home Premium for everything else. 150 or so systems in all, with a bare handful priced over $1000. The laptop will be dual core with 4 GB RAM. The desktop quad core with 6 to 9 GB of RAM.
The only concrete fact that the two parties agree on is that the laptops have tracking software.
They agree that the tracking software was not disclosed to the students or their families.
They agree that the use of the webcam by the tracking software was not disclosed to the students or their families.
I believe they agree that the software also send screen captures - which opens another can of worms.
The school - after some un-gentle prodding - admitted that the logs show about 40 uses of the cameras.
It is not so clear who authorized [or could authorize] their use, who could access the cameras, authorized or not, and whether the system was as secure as it needed to be to prevent abuse.
The software used has not been disclosed.
That, I think will, in the end, prove to have been another mistake.
I've seen both commercial and open source webcam enabled anti-theft software advertised for personal use: Prey
I don't know the software well enough to know how it is designed and marketed for business/institutional use. How many of these programs can capture full or stop-motion video.
This strikes me as a minefield for both the developer and his clients.
If I can't download the thing through FTP, HTTP or bittorrent, I'm not interested, period.
You aren't the market. The non technical end user is the market. The user who isn't even aware that his PC has an FTP client - and won't install one short of being forced to do so at gun point. The geek lost this battle along about AOL 3.0 for Windows.
I seem to remember the same argument with Region Codes and DIVX. People voted with the wallet last time, why would this time be any different?
The 6 ft. HDMI 1.4 cable costs less than $10.
HDMI 1.4 supports Ethernet over HDMI. 4Kx2K video, 3D over HDMI, Audio Return and more. HDMI M/M Cable Version 1.4
The geek can keep his rat's nest of cables. Everyone else will go HDMI.
There are only three Blu-Ray regional codes. But the geek needs to be realistic. Regional codes were vexing only to the video enthusiast with special interests or those living on the regional borders.
Netflix support is built into your home video devices - and bundled with other free and subscription services. It makes for a very easy to use and attractive package.
The Blu-Ray video with 100 GB of content is about two or three days away by post from Amazon.com. Star Trek or The Dark Knight $15-$20. The geek won't want to hear this - but nursing the P2P download is becoming a waste of time.
I think the path were headed on is rental or purchase of optical media for the full theater experience and on-demand streaming for everything else. Nursing the P2P download of an amateur's H.264 rip isn't going to be worth the trouble.
You can get a free netbook or lowish spec laptop for that, which will come with Windows and will run Ubuntu quite happily
The problem is that the Windows laptop will happily run pretty much every FOSS app that is out there is well. The GIMP is there. Inkscape and the rest. But so are Photoshop, Paint Shop and Paint.NET.
That freedom of choice makes Windows a very appealing platform.
Slashdot Mirror
The 520 is the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. across Lake Washington - a pontoon bridge.
March 8, 2006 - 5:10 p.m. to 4 a.m. March 9, 2006 Crews closed the bridge after on-site inspectors heard unusual noises. Those noises prompted a closer look inside the mechanical parts of the draw pontoons. They found one bolt sheared off, several loose bolts, and flaking paint which is an indication of weakening steel. They immediately closed the bridge to conduct the safety check and make repairs.
Feb. 4, 2006 - 9a.m. to 2 p.m., Feb. 5 Emergency closure due to wind gusts of up to 67 mph. Crews repaired three drawspan hooks that were torn off during the storm. Bridge crews performed a preliminary ultrasonic test during the closure and detected a small crack in the mechanical equipment for the drawspan. The last time the bridge was closed for high winds was March 1999. Recent SR 520 Bridge Closures
He's the archetypical protector. The dramatic tension comes from wondering whether he can do his job as a protector. His survival is not important to the narrative.
There are also the inherent temptations in possessing such unlimited powers.
Why is gold? I can't eat it. Can't drink it. Can't hunt with it. Can't heal with it. Can't fuck it. It has some use in electronics, but there's better materials. The only reason to think it has value is because it did historically. If we actually entered a post-apocalyptic world where the dollar was useless, you'd quickly find gold to be equally useless
Gold is rare and challenging to extract.
In your post apocalyptic world, the chance that the supply will dramatically increase in your lifetime - or that of your grandchildren, or great-grandchildren - is negligible.
Gold endures.
Excavation of the Varna Necropolis retrieved gold jewelry from 4600 BC.
Gold's appeal to the artist and craftsman is universal. The gold cup can be worth more than its value in bullion.
Gold is dense.
The counterfeit coin is easy to detect.
The standard gold bar weighs about thirty pounds. That's a significant problem for a thief.
It is possible to define the value of products and services in other ways than just "what people are willing to pay for them". An example of this would be a hypothetical economy where the value of products and services is determined by the resources (labor, energy and and raw materials) required for providing said products and services.
If there is no buyer, there is no production.
Even the goods you produce for yourself come at a price. You can grow your own tomatoes. But you will have to tend the garden.
..for certain definitions of "the software industry" which exclude the International Business Machines Corporation.
How many patents are cross-licensed between IBM and Microsoft? I am betting the number is greater than zero.
1: I try to research previous patents, they're almost unreadable..... I have no money to hire a patent lawyer(barrier to entry one)... so I can't be certain if my idea has already been patented.
Then what you need to do is to join [or form] a co-op with other independent developers.
Build an organization that will have the resources to do the necessary research, provide legal assistance and technical support - and - gasp! wheeze! - lobby effectively for your interests.
Which may not always be the same as the more ideologically oriented FSF.
Why not just buy h.264 outright? What's the market cap for the company that owns it? It's got to be a drop in the bucket compared to licencing fees down the road, plus what they paid (1 billion dollars) for YouTube
The following is an abridged list of licensors of patents included in the AVC patent pool:
Apple
Bosch
Columbia University
DAEWOO
Dolby Laboratories
France Télécom
Fraunhofer
Fujitsu
Hitachi
Philips
LG
Microsoft
Mitsubishi Electric
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone [NTT]
Panasonic
Samsung
Siemans
Toshiba
AVC/H.264 Licensors
Many hardware devices already have H.264 decoding built into the chip, ranging from set-top boxes to the iPhone.
There are 762 corporate licensees for AVC/H.264 Licensees is 762 - and the list just keeps on growing.
Canonical is here. Apple. Google. Microsoft.
The big names in OEM manufacturing. In networking [Cisco].
In brand-name consumer electronics. [LG and Samsung] In military hardware [Lockheed Martin]. In cable, broadcast and satellite television - most visibly those based in China and Japan.
This in from Computerworld:
The company selling the software used by a Pennsylvania school district to allegedly spy on its students blasted what it called laptop theft-recovery "vigilantism" today.
Absolute Software said it dissuades users of theft-recovery software from acting on their own. "We discourage any customer from taking theft recovery into their own hands," said Stephen Midgley, the company's head of marketing, in an interview Monday. "That's best left in the hands of professionals."
Midgley confirmed that Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa. was running Absolute Manage, formerly known as LANRev, which Absolute Software acquired last December. The suburban Philadelphia school district purchased and deployed LANRev prior to Absolute's acquisition, he said, noting that most school districts buy the software for power management features that let IT staff remotely power down systems.
Calling LANRev a "legacy" product, Midgley also said that Absolute would ship an update in the next several weeks that will permanently disable Theft Track, the name of the feature that lets administrators switch on a laptop's camera to take photographs of a potential thief after the computer is reported stolen. "It really doesn't serve any purpose," said Midgley of Theft Track.
All its theft-recovery software relies on a different model than the former LANRev, said Midgley. "We give no theft recovery tools to our [LoJack and Computrace] customers," he said. "The only truly proven model is a managed service model."
To kick off the recovery of a stolen or lost laptop, customers first must file a police report -- not a requirement of LANRev -- and only then contact Absolute, which in turn tracks the location of the missing machine via its IP address when the system goes online. Absolute employs a team of former law enforcement professionals who reach out to local police, provide them with the location information and then get out of the way. Software maker blasts 'vigilantism' in Pa. school spying case
Absolute Manage [LANRev] Automated Client Management for Mac and Windows Computers and Software
LoJack For Laptops
M$ Internet Exploder, M$ Windoze, and all M$ products.
M$ should be taken apart by the governments of the world, piece by piece. Afterwards the pieces of M$ should be given to the free software movements.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk. Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in committing suicide.
None of this plays well to anyone in management - or to anyone over the age of consent.
Exactly - tyre manufacturers no longer cater for customers with iron-tyred wooden-spoked cart wheels, why should anyone cater for IE6 users?
There is a market for the wagon and the wagon wheel - and those who will supply it.
Hansen Wheel and Wagon Shop
Not a kid alive uses technology that wasn't already in heavy use in the 80's.
How much of that new tech - from IM to Napster to iTunes to Netflix - was anchored by the port to Windows or the native Windows app?
The first step is training them to use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and VLC on their Windows machine. After a month or so of smooth sailing....
After a month or so of smooth sailing with FOSS apps running under Windows, why do they need Linux?
I find it interesting that people think that old people are going to have the most trouble with technology.
It is, however, useful for the geek to remember that elderly can have thirty years experience with MS-DOS and Windows. Thirty years of experience with apps that have matured as they have matured.
I agree. Novell turned evil when it sided with Microsoft against all linux distros other than SUSE. Novell must die, and SUSE supports need to understand they are playing with the Devil.
In choosing OSX or Windows you are spared recruitment into the geek's holy wars - and that is something worth thinking about.
If someone like that asks you for a certain software ("I need Photoshop, cause my cousin's neighbour's Aunt said it was great to resize pictures"), you can easily log in via ssh and install the foss equivalent
If there is a FOSS equivalent.
You have to understand your users very well if you plan on making choices for them and installing apps by remote control.
The clueless user who "spends 99% of the time in MSN, Skype or on facebook, and who watches vids on youtube" is a geek stereotype. The user can surprise you.
Your family doctor doesn't take family members as patients. It is stressful and corrupting.
You motives are suspect. It is hard to be objective. It is even more difficult for the family member to speak up, to fight back - to resist being taken in a direction he does not want to go.
To put it bluntly, the Linux Desktop missed the entire mass adoption of Personal Computers at home. Most of the desktop learning environment was done in the 90's and they have passed that skill on down to their children
It goes deeper than that.
Applications have been passed down from father to son, mother to daughter.
Microsoft Word 5.5 DOS [Patched For W2K] is a free download of a program first released in 1983. 27 years ago. Word for Windows took hold in 1990-1993.
And since all software is free, you essentially have a nice "app store"-like interface, where you can install everything (out of currently over 13,000 packages here on Gentoo) you like
not quite everything written for Linux is free and not quite everything will be in every repository.
or in the same state in every repository.
and while Windows doesn't have a universal repository - there are many mega-mall Windows "app stores" like Download.com.
We all know Vista is crap, so if they're using that, switching to anything would be a reasonable upgrade.
There is often a difference between what the geek "knows" and what he "believes."
Case in point - the crap Win 7 stories that have been making their way to the front page of Slashdot.
they care about what they can do rather than who makes their OS, and their are reasonable alternatives to XP and Vista.
Pretty much everything of interest in Linux [FOSS] is ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app.
That is not true the other way around - and it matters.
The gold standard for the Windows user is the OEM system bundle of hardware and software. The system works as advertised or it is returned for service or replacement under warranty.
The platform has strength and visibility as a consumer product. It has the attractive mass market price - and better specs than the bottom feeders.
The Win 7 PC in store or at WalMart.com comes in essentially two flavors:
Win SE for the Atom netbook. 64 Bit Windows Home Premium for everything else. 150 or so systems in all, with a bare handful priced over $1000. The laptop will be dual core with 4 GB RAM. The desktop quad core with 6 to 9 GB of RAM.
The only concrete fact that the two parties agree on is that the laptops have tracking software.
They agree that the tracking software was not disclosed to the students or their families.
They agree that the use of the webcam by the tracking software was not disclosed to the students or their families.
I believe they agree that the software also send screen captures - which opens another can of worms.
The school - after some un-gentle prodding - admitted that the logs show about 40 uses of the cameras.
It is not so clear who authorized [or could authorize] their use, who could access the cameras, authorized or not, and whether the system was as secure as it needed to be to prevent abuse.
The software used has not been disclosed.
That, I think will, in the end, prove to have been another mistake.
I've seen both commercial and open source webcam enabled anti-theft software advertised for personal use: Prey
I don't know the software well enough to know how it is designed and marketed for business/institutional use. How many of these programs can capture full or stop-motion video.
This strikes me as a minefield for both the developer and his clients.
If I can't download the thing through FTP, HTTP or bittorrent, I'm not interested, period.
You aren't the market. The non technical end user is the market. The user who isn't even aware that his PC has an FTP client - and won't install one short of being forced to do so at gun point. The geek lost this battle along about AOL 3.0 for Windows.
I seem to remember the same argument with Region Codes and DIVX. People voted with the wallet last time, why would this time be any different?
The 6 ft. HDMI 1.4 cable costs less than $10.
HDMI 1.4 supports Ethernet over HDMI. 4Kx2K video, 3D over HDMI, Audio Return and more. HDMI M/M Cable Version 1.4
The geek can keep his rat's nest of cables. Everyone else will go HDMI.
There are only three Blu-Ray regional codes. But the geek needs to be realistic. Regional codes were vexing only to the video enthusiast with special interests or those living on the regional borders.
Netflix support is built into your home video devices - and bundled with other free and subscription services. It makes for a very easy to use and attractive package.
The Blu-Ray video with 100 GB of content is about two or three days away by post from Amazon.com. Star Trek or The Dark Knight $15-$20. The geek won't want to hear this - but nursing the P2P download is becoming a waste of time.
What we have is a perfect recipe for greed!
HDMI is becoming the single cable solution for everything.
Ethernet. Audio Return. 3D over HDMI. 4Kx2K video support in HDMI 1.4 and so on. The 6' HDMI 1.4 cable isn't $60. It's $8.50. PTC ALL NEW 6 ft Premium GOLD Series Dual tone HDMI 1.4 High Speed HDMI Cable
I think the path were headed on is rental or purchase of optical media for the full theater experience and on-demand streaming for everything else. Nursing the P2P download of an amateur's H.264 rip isn't going to be worth the trouble.
You can get a free netbook or lowish spec laptop for that, which will come with Windows and will run Ubuntu quite happily
The problem is that the Windows laptop will happily run pretty much every FOSS app that is out there is well. The GIMP is there. Inkscape and the rest. But so are Photoshop, Paint Shop and Paint.NET.
That freedom of choice makes Windows a very appealing platform.