Could anyone tell me why Slashdot has seemingly dozens of these ipod-killer stories every month, but has done just one front page item on podcasting?
The last few months have given birth to a brand new form of media, and the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" site is still just pimping products with years-old technology.
I'm here every day, and will continue to come every day but that doesn't mean I'm happy. Perhaps the ThinkGeek influence is stronger than I previously believed and Slashdot is slowly becoming a PCMagazine clone.
Hey - got the Verizon FiOS mailer on Friday and caught my wife at the trash can in a supremely geeky moment "don't throw that away!". They are coming to do an install next Wed. I live in Arlington, VA close to the East Falls Church metro stop.
Some notes from my call with the very helpful "Mr. Shell" (he must have made that name up)
- i'm getting 5 down/2 up for 39.95
- i'm paying a bit extra for a router with 802.11g - I asked and they said it is a d-link DI624 (does anyone have experience with this one?)
- he said the point of entry for the fiber box includes about 6 hrs battery backup for voice only service in the case of a power outage, to make up for the fact that power won't come over copper like with POTS
- the guy I ordered with got some details about the router over IM with his supervisor while talking to me. I love when companies embrace simple obvious tech like this, and was somewhat surprised given Verizon's notorious Luddite ways (resisting bluetooth forever, etc.)
- I forgot to ask about static IPs. Doh!
I'm cautiously optimistic for now, but as I have one dedicated server in the US and a co-lo box in Canada you bet your ass I'll be evaluating the service carefully.
Perhaps I'll find a new home for hosting dodgeit.com. I'll try to post my experience to the blog there after a week or two.
>Remember we are all going to be downloading movies onto our TIVO boxes courtesy of Netflix
Bingo. There is no doubt in my mind that Tivo/Netflix will be the first in this race. Quite simply, if Tivo and Netflix can't succeed here they will go out of business. I'm guessing that is a pretty good motivator:-)
Oh yeah, who has stats on market penetration of tivo series 2 vs Windows Media Center? (both are platforms that could deliver VOD with minimal hacking) I'm guessing tivos lead by 10 to 1 or more.
> Downloading a stolen copy of the OS is just plain wrong
Well, yes and no. Posting on Slashdot doesn't seem to have any sway over getting Apple to port to x86. But perhaps if Jobs took a look at Suprnova.org and saw thousands of people downloading his beautiful OS at the same time a little light would go on: hey there's a market here! So pirating the software is probably the best way a tiny individual like you or me can "cast a vote."
I would gladly pay full retail for an Apple-sanctioned OSX on PC release. I would even do so if they had huge disclaimers: Won't work on all types of hardware! Easy Mac things like burning dvds might not work at all on PCs! and so on.
Maybe that is the answer--Apple should pick one and only one x86 desktop, video card, cd/dvd burner, and monitor combo and call it "OSX approved". I would buy such a machine the day it was released. With success they could maybe expand things a bit to more supported platforms. Isn't that kind of what Microsoft is doing with the Media Center PC?
But I'm not going to buy a mac any time soon.
Re:another engadget paid placement
on
How to Podcast
·
· Score: 1
Phillip,
Since the parent of this thread indulged in some bashing (later retracted, of course), I just wanted to give a shout out to what you are doing over at flashenabled.com. Reading about the kind of stuff you are doing is exactly the reason I visit Slashdot every day.
Keep up the good work! And if you are able to pull down a little cash from Engadget or whoever while doing your cool projects--more power to you!
I think a lot of Slashdot users would kill for a chance to do what they love for money. I'm guessing that is what you are pulling off right now.
You really should take a look at basecamp. It is great for organizing messaging and calendars for a far-flung team. Password protected with multiple logins. Free to try for a single project so there is really no reason not to try it out. Export everything as XML if you move to something else.
GREAT interface. One of the best web apps I have ever used.
There are cute little hacks that allow you to display fun things like caller id and weather on your tivo. Why not hack up the scripts (tcl, I think) to display whatever it is you are looking for. Then you can just broadcast/record from the tivo's video out ports.
I signed up and created my neighborhood since it wasn't in there yet. I could see this being useful. Simple example: our local gas station doesn't plow snow off their sidewalk in the winter. This leads people to walk in the street and increases the chance of getting killed. This bugs me but I do nothing about it. Now maybe some fellow neighbors will agree and we could boycot them or something if they don't listen to our request. I could see things like this site making it easier to fight the Man.
But I didn't use my real name. You think I'm nuts?
damn it this pisses me off! I'm sure this process works in Safari, since it *is* Apple and they must test this with at least their own browser, right?
Now let's take the Windows users who are the most likely to switch to Apple in the next 5 yrs. I'd guess a sizable percentage of them are using Firefox today.
So short-sighted and stupid when companies ignore web standards without good cause and alienate potential customers.
OK, rant over, and yes, I did fire up IE and submit the damn application anyway!
One very cool application for changeable housing colors would be to convey information, like the Ambient Orb does. (Available at Thinkgeek for a probably exorbitant markup:-)
I could see a sysadmin type writing a tiny bit of code make their case glow red when getting slashdotted, predicting the weather like the Ambient beacon (link above), etc. I think Ambient is a very cool company and I'd like to see their design principles ripple outward into other companies' products.
(please mod down parent, I accidently submitted before finishing editing)
I bought a nostromo n52 a couple of months ago. I definitely wouldn't consider it a candidate for a "one-handed keyboard" but it is a good complement to your existing keyboard. Don't let the goofy Slashdot editor limit the potential of this device. The software that comes with it is already quite good. You can assign any macro you want to any of the 14 keys (and with the "shift" key that lights up 3 different LEDs, you can basically multiply that 14 by 4). It also has a scroll wheel, thumbpad, and button. All can be set up to do whatever you want, launch programs, type snippets of text, etc.
If you shop around a bit for keyboards with a large number of programmable keys, you will find that most are quite expensive. In fact, there is a thriving market over on eBay for the Gateway Anykey keyboard with 124 programmable keys, which I don't believe is even manufactured anymore.
In reality, I don't actually use the nostromo all that much, as I rely more often on the terrific Winkey to set up most of my macros. But I'm happy with my purchase of the $25 Nostromo and do use it from time to time.
I bought a nostromo n52 a couple of months ago. I definitely wouldn't consider it a candidate for a "one-handed keyboard" but it is a good complement to your existing keyboard. Don't let the goofy Slashdot editor limit the potential of this device. The software that comes with it is already quite good. You can assign any macro you want to any of the 14 keys (and with the "shift" key that lights up 3 different LEDs, you can basically multiply that 14 by 4). It also has a scroll wheel, thumbpad, and button. All can be
If you shop around a bit for keyboards with a large number of programmable keys, you will find that most are quite expensive. In fact, there is a thriving market over on eBay for the Gateway Anykey keyboard with 124 programmable keys, which I don't believe is even manufactured anymore.
In reality, I don't actually use the nostromo all that much, as I rely more often on the terrific strickland
The stock market rewards scalability. It is cheaper for Microsoft to add customer number n+1 than it is for IBM. Microsoft enjoys higher margins.
Don't get me wrong, I think IBM has a great business too, as does Apple for that matter. But if IBM wanted to buy MSFT they would be out of luck. If Microsoft wanted to buy IBM it would be possible. That is maybe the best way to measure who is biggest.
You will probably never see this as the standards folks will mod me into oblivion, but here goes: if you use the time-tested combination of good old ugly tables and single pixel gifs, your site will look good in almost every browser imaginable. A quick test in Firefox and the latest IE should be all you need to do.
One exception is to use CSS for the font formatting stuff.
Standards are a great concept, but with web design you need to deal with harsh reality: browsers suck. Look at the source code at the front page of google.com or yahoo.com if you want to see what the big boys are doing.
Wait until Firefox has 95% of the market, then move to standards:-)
rss2email is my favorite. It may seem counterintuitive to send rss to your email client but you'd be surprised how useful it is to use a single interface for managing email and newsfeeds. I use rss2email with a combination of Eudora / Squirrelmail / gmail for my personal mail.
I have no idea if basecamp has anything to do with the Getting Things Done method, but basecamp is an amazing productivity tool for a team or an individual. It is basically a web-based project management tool that creates an intranet.
I have used it to organize my plans and set milestones for some of the websites I work on and have been very pleased with the results. Free trails are available, so there is no reason not to try this if you want to be more productive.
I'd be curious if any users here have tried both GTD and basecamp and do they prefer one over the other, or are they complementary, etc.
People get very emotional about tools that help them get things done. Read some of the posts here or the feedback on the basecamp website and you'll see what I mean:-)
Not sure why, but this thread reminded me of the old "paddles" that we had with my old Apple II plus. These were basically hand-held wheels that spun 360% before coming to a stop.
My brother and I spent hours playing an old game called "Olympic Decathalon" that would make the XBox generation cringe. One event, the shot-put, required a complex simultaneous twist of both paddle controllers.
My brother never got the hang of this event and I would repeatedly crush him. Thanks for the memory...
I have a server I co-locate up in Canada. I live in Northern Virginia, I've never seen their facility, just shipped off my shiny Dell one day and waited for my IP address to arrive.
I think I'll use that box to do all my bittorrent downloads from here on out. Not sure if the privacy laws in the great white north will protect an expat like myself, but I figure my odds are somewhat better to NOT get sued up there.
OK, it is actually just an alias, but I can never remember that you use the cryptic 'tar xzvf' to untar a gzipped archive.
so, the first thing I do when I get my hands on a new linux machine is add the following to/etc/bashrc: #alias alias l='ls -la' alias untar='tar xzvf' alias scr='screen -D -R'
>I use sendmail, and I know that the "default" prevents unauthorized relaying. The latest version of Postfix or Exchange will almost certainly do the same.
Be careful of the default setting for relaying in Postfix. The default is to trust other machines on the local subnet, and as I was using a co-lo facility, I was used as a spam relay by one of the boxes on my subnet. This was not a pleasant experience.
The applicable one-liner change to Postfix's main.cf that ended this: mynetworks_style = host
Don't let me scare you, Postfix is fabulous. Just read the docs through a few times.
Slashdot Mirror
Could anyone tell me why Slashdot has seemingly dozens of these ipod-killer stories every month, but has done just one front page item on podcasting?
The last few months have given birth to a brand new form of media, and the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" site is still just pimping products with years-old technology.
I'm here every day, and will continue to come every day but that doesn't mean I'm happy. Perhaps the ThinkGeek influence is stronger than I previously believed and Slashdot is slowly becoming a PCMagazine clone.
Here you go:
CowboyNeal for President
And if you are too cheap to buy the shirt, you can just make your own with my PNG:
http://dodgeit.com/temp/cn.png
Feel free to do whatever you like with my "design"
Hey - got the Verizon FiOS mailer on Friday and caught my wife at the trash can in a supremely geeky moment "don't throw that away!". They are coming to do an install next Wed. I live in Arlington, VA close to the East Falls Church metro stop.
/2 up for 39.95
Some notes from my call with the very helpful "Mr. Shell" (he must have made that name up)
- i'm getting 5 down
- i'm paying a bit extra for a router with 802.11g - I asked and they said it is a d-link DI624 (does anyone have experience with this one?)
- he said the point of entry for the fiber box includes about 6 hrs battery backup for voice only service in the case of a power outage, to make up for the fact that power won't come over copper like with POTS
- the guy I ordered with got some details about the router over IM with his supervisor while talking to me. I love when companies embrace simple obvious tech like this, and was somewhat surprised given Verizon's notorious Luddite ways (resisting bluetooth forever, etc.)
- I forgot to ask about static IPs. Doh!
I'm cautiously optimistic for now, but as I have one dedicated server in the US and a co-lo box in Canada you bet your ass I'll be evaluating the service carefully.
Perhaps I'll find a new home for hosting dodgeit.com. I'll try to post my experience to the blog there after a week or two.
>Remember we are all going to be downloading movies onto our TIVO boxes courtesy of Netflix
:-)
Bingo. There is no doubt in my mind that Tivo/Netflix will be the first in this race. Quite simply, if Tivo and Netflix can't succeed here they will go out of business. I'm guessing that is a pretty good motivator
Oh yeah, who has stats on market penetration of tivo series 2 vs Windows Media Center? (both are platforms that could deliver VOD with minimal hacking) I'm guessing tivos lead by 10 to 1 or more.
> Downloading a stolen copy of the OS is just plain wrong
Well, yes and no. Posting on Slashdot doesn't seem to have any sway over getting Apple to port to x86. But perhaps if Jobs took a look at Suprnova.org and saw thousands of people downloading his beautiful OS at the same time a little light would go on: hey there's a market here! So pirating the software is probably the best way a tiny individual like you or me can "cast a vote."
I would gladly pay full retail for an Apple-sanctioned OSX on PC release. I would even do so if they had huge disclaimers: Won't work on all types of hardware! Easy Mac things like burning dvds might not work at all on PCs! and so on.
Maybe that is the answer--Apple should pick one and only one x86 desktop, video card, cd/dvd burner, and monitor combo and call it "OSX approved". I would buy such a machine the day it was released. With success they could maybe expand things a bit to more supported platforms. Isn't that kind of what Microsoft is doing with the Media Center PC?
But I'm not going to buy a mac any time soon.
Phillip,
Since the parent of this thread indulged in some bashing (later retracted, of course), I just wanted to give a shout out to what you are doing over at flashenabled.com. Reading about the kind of stuff you are doing is exactly the reason I visit Slashdot every day.
Keep up the good work! And if you are able to pull down a little cash from Engadget or whoever while doing your cool projects--more power to you!
I think a lot of Slashdot users would kill for a chance to do what they love for money. I'm guessing that is what you are pulling off right now.
You really should take a look at basecamp. It is great for organizing messaging and calendars for a far-flung team. Password protected with multiple logins. Free to try for a single project so there is really no reason not to try it out. Export everything as XML if you move to something else.
GREAT interface. One of the best web apps I have ever used.
Why doesn't some 3rd party company offer one of these devices to secure ALL of your online logins?
One device could then get you in to:
- bofa.com
- aol.com
- etrade.com
- etc etc
Why couldn't this be an optional security measure for purchasing through yahoo shopping, amazon, buy.com, etc?
I would gladly pay $10/mo for such a service. But it would have to be ONE device. I don't need 50 "pager-sized" devices.
Oh yeah, how about an RPM that lets you add this thing to your *nix login as well on any boxes where you have root?
You think it would be hard to get the first big client, like bofa.com? Probably, but once you get one the sell is much easier to the others.
Bravo to AOL for making this technology available to the general public.
For example, this is my current Yahoo messenger avatar:
http://dodgeit.com/temp/avatar.gif
I spend about 9 hrs a day in front of a computer, anything that makes it slightly more enjoyable is more than welcome.
Also, it is fun to get messages like:
Dude, WTF is a horse doing in your office?
One more thing, my wife uses these things too. Any technology that passes "the wife test" is indistinguishable from magic.
There are cute little hacks that allow you to display fun things like caller id and weather on your tivo. Why not hack up the scripts (tcl, I think) to display whatever it is you are looking for. Then you can just broadcast/record from the tivo's video out ports.
Disclaimer: I've never done this.
I signed up and created my neighborhood since it wasn't in there yet. I could see this being useful. Simple example: our local gas station doesn't plow snow off their sidewalk in the winter. This leads people to walk in the street and increases the chance of getting killed. This bugs me but I do nothing about it. Now maybe some fellow neighbors will agree and we could boycot them or something if they don't listen to our request. I could see things like this site making it easier to fight the Man.
But I didn't use my real name. You think I'm nuts?
damn it this pisses me off! I'm sure this process works in Safari, since it *is* Apple and they must test this with at least their own browser, right?
Now let's take the Windows users who are the most likely to switch to Apple in the next 5 yrs. I'd guess a sizable percentage of them are using Firefox today.
So short-sighted and stupid when companies ignore web standards without good cause and alienate potential customers.
OK, rant over, and yes, I did fire up IE and submit the damn application anyway!
I could see a sysadmin type writing a tiny bit of code make their case glow red when getting slashdotted, predicting the weather like the Ambient beacon (link above), etc. I think Ambient is a very cool company and I'd like to see their design principles ripple outward into other companies' products.
(please mod down parent, I accidently submitted before finishing editing)
I bought a nostromo n52 a couple of months ago. I definitely wouldn't consider it a candidate for a "one-handed keyboard" but it is a good complement to your existing keyboard. Don't let the goofy Slashdot editor limit the potential of this device. The software that comes with it is already quite good. You can assign any macro you want to any of the 14 keys (and with the "shift" key that lights up 3 different LEDs, you can basically multiply that 14 by 4). It also has a scroll wheel, thumbpad, and button. All can be set up to do whatever you want, launch programs, type snippets of text, etc.
If you shop around a bit for keyboards with a large number of programmable keys, you will find that most are quite expensive. In fact, there is a thriving market over on eBay for the Gateway Anykey keyboard with 124 programmable keys, which I don't believe is even manufactured anymore.
In reality, I don't actually use the nostromo all that much, as I rely more often on the terrific
Winkey to set up most of my macros. But I'm happy with my purchase of the $25 Nostromo and do use it from time to time.
I bought a nostromo n52 a couple of months ago. I definitely wouldn't consider it a candidate for a "one-handed keyboard" but it is a good complement to your existing keyboard. Don't let the goofy Slashdot editor limit the potential of this device. The software that comes with it is already quite good. You can assign any macro you want to any of the 14 keys (and with the "shift" key that lights up 3 different LEDs, you can basically multiply that 14 by 4). It also has a scroll wheel, thumbpad, and button. All can be If you shop around a bit for keyboards with a large number of programmable keys, you will find that most are quite expensive. In fact, there is a thriving market over on eBay for the Gateway Anykey keyboard with 124 programmable keys, which I don't believe is even manufactured anymore. In reality, I don't actually use the nostromo all that much, as I rely more often on the terrific strickland
The stock market rewards scalability. It is cheaper for Microsoft to add customer number n+1 than it is for IBM. Microsoft enjoys higher margins.
Don't get me wrong, I think IBM has a great business too, as does Apple for that matter. But if IBM wanted to buy MSFT they would be out of luck. If Microsoft wanted to buy IBM it would be possible. That is maybe the best way to measure who is biggest.
You will probably never see this as the standards folks will mod me into oblivion, but here goes: if you use the time-tested combination of good old ugly tables and single pixel gifs, your site will look good in almost every browser imaginable. A quick test in Firefox and the latest IE should be all you need to do.
:-)
One exception is to use CSS for the font formatting stuff.
Standards are a great concept, but with web design you need to deal with harsh reality: browsers suck. Look at the source code at the front page of google.com or yahoo.com if you want to see what the big boys are doing.
Wait until Firefox has 95% of the market, then move to standards
for a mailinator-like service with RSS feeds of each mailbox, try dodgeit.com
I have used it to organize my plans and set milestones for some of the websites I work on and have been very pleased with the results. Free trails are available, so there is no reason not to try this if you want to be more productive.
I'd be curious if any users here have tried both GTD and basecamp and do they prefer one over the other, or are they complementary, etc.
People get very emotional about tools that help them get things done. Read some of the posts here or the feedback on the basecamp website and you'll see what I mean :-)
Not sure why, but this thread reminded me of the old "paddles" that we had with my old Apple II plus. These were basically hand-held wheels that spun 360% before coming to a stop.
My brother and I spent hours playing an old game called "Olympic Decathalon" that would make the XBox generation cringe. One event, the shot-put, required a complex simultaneous twist of both paddle controllers.
My brother never got the hang of this event and I would repeatedly crush him. Thanks for the memory...
I think I'll use that box to do all my bittorrent downloads from here on out. Not sure if the privacy laws in the great white north will protect an expat like myself, but I figure my odds are somewhat better to NOT get sued up there.
OK, it is actually just an alias, but I can never remember that you use the cryptic 'tar xzvf' to untar a gzipped archive.
/etc/bashrc:
so, the first thing I do when I get my hands on a new linux machine is add the following to
#alias
alias l='ls -la'
alias untar='tar xzvf'
alias scr='screen -D -R'
so, what is the first thing you alias?
>I use sendmail, and I know that the "default" prevents unauthorized relaying. The latest version of Postfix or Exchange will almost certainly do the same.
Be careful of the default setting for relaying in Postfix. The default is to trust other machines on the local subnet, and as I was using a co-lo facility, I was used as a spam relay by one of the boxes on my subnet. This was not a pleasant experience.
The applicable one-liner change to Postfix's main.cf that ended this:
mynetworks_style = host
Don't let me scare you, Postfix is fabulous. Just read the docs through a few times.