The most annoying thing about the cue cat was that it didn't work on my Mac. A few years later, I got a Windows to be compatible with something or the other and one of the first things I did was install my Cue Cat, and it didn't work. By then, Forbes was no longer publishing the bar codes, but I had heard that you could scan your groceries and get info from the manufactureres, so I was hoping to get into a corporate website, but apparently, whatever was necessary to get it to work was no longer working.
I heard the thing on NPR and it sounded like the reporter was a bit confused. I don't see why there should be a link between the increasing popularity of vinyl and USB turntables. A USB turntable is great, unless you are lazy and cheap like me and just run a cable from the audio system I already own to the Macintosh I already own. I bought the cable from Radio Shack a few years ago. The USB turntables I've seen aren't as nice as my old setup. Too bad I don't own a McIntosh, that would make for a cool setup.
When I was in the middle east, I was told that it referred to all people who write from right to left. Yes, the countries on the western edge of asia are also part of the orient. Ever hear the about the 1001 nights? I just checked wikipedia and they say orient started out meaning the middle east and was extended to mean most of southern and eastern asia.
Around here (GA-USA) you have two containers, one for garbage and one for recyclables. The garbage company collects both, usually in separate trucks. Some have automated sorters, some have minimum wage employees, and the ones owned by cities sometimes have retarded people and other people who work as volunteers.
Denmark should do wha Florida does. South Florida is natually completely flat, but all around Miami, there are mountains with golf courses and other amenities on top. Guess why? My state hides its landfills between real mountains, but Florida doesn't have any.
No, Yellow Book is something else. I get it too. It seems Ma Bell didn't trademark either the walking fingers or the color yellow for use in a phone directory. The local phone company here now calls their version The Real Yellow Pages for this very reason. I get a couple of others, too. Then I take them all to a dumpster near my house marked Phone Books only. I think they all quaify.
The real problems are that BoA relies on the internet and there website is so SLOW and the pretty picture apparently is programmed to load last, long after the box where I enter my pin.
The BoA website is beautiful and quite fast when I use the public terminal in the bank branch. But, at home, it is the ugliest slowest most poorly designed piece of crap I have ever accessed more than once. Like many corporate sites, I strongly suspect that the design was designed by some young geeks who have never accessed the internet with less bandwith than a T1 line and approved by some elderly manager who understands pretty pictures and nothing else about technology and if he ever accesses the interent from home, he uses something a lot fancier (and less secure) than a dialup modem, and has no idea what's going on behind the curtain.
Okay, I'm middlea ged. At home and at work I was using regular phone lines and sometimes T1 lines to transfer all kinds of stuff to other locations since the 70's. All I had to do was get my modem to call their modem and that was it, we were just as secure as the phone line. By the 80's, we even had Caller ID to help us know whether we knew the party who was trying to call us. The main problem is that everyone we connected to had a slilghtly different dance we had to jump through to login and we usually had to have a simultaneous voice connection. But, this problem was a form of security. If we had someone we did a lot of business with, we simply bought a T1 line and forgot about it. If it broke, the phone company fixed it.
I'm also cheap. I almost always use dial up. It is plenty fast enough for what I do, I have the phone line anyway for my fax machine. I switch to wifi only when I want to watch youtube, which is only when it has a video that gets a lot of attention on slashdot or bbc. In other words, only during an election compaign. I don't download music, etc, etc, etc. iow, I'm an old fogey, and I don't have any incentive to upgrade to a faster, but less secure internet connection. Except for this silly BoA website.
I love banking with my computer, but I have to restrain myself for the picture verification site to load completely. I will not bank by cable modem or wife because neither are private. But, I have never seen the bank try to discourage anyone else from doing so. As someone who used iffers and sniffers before most techies knew what they wre, I can't trust anything that is broadcast freely into a common cloud. With something as big as the internet, it doesn't take many corrupt smart people to cause significant security breach. The main reason that most people are so comfortable is that corrupt smart people don't normally pubicize their activities.
BoA is bigger than most ISP's. I've wondered for years why they didn't set up their own modem farm with caller id verification for online banking. They already do this for credit card verification. If I call for customer service, they will ask me for more personal verification information if I am not calling from my home phone. My insurance company has similar phone technology, when I call them, before the online agent even says hello, he or she has my full file on the computer screen. It was creepy at first, but now, it is damn convenient to be able to do business without the idle chit chat while my file is being accessed. If they can do it for voice phones, they can do it for modems. They don't even have to own and maintain the modem farm. They can hire earthlink to set up a separate pool.
Imagine if the phone book company put an ad for your competitor on top of your phone listing if you didn't buy an ad from them.
You just described the Yellow Pages which will sell ad space to anyone who pays them to have an ad in a directory organized by keywords of the purchaser's choosing. If your competitor pays and you don't, then anyone looking for you will find your competitor and not you. That is why so many businesses buy these sorts of ads. it is a normal cost of doing business. The internet didn't change this, it simply moved an existing situation (problem for some) to the directory business on the internet.
Or maybe a White Pages analogy would be approprate. Businesses must pay to be included there, too. But, since entries are organized by name, if your competitor wants to appear before you, they simply adopt a name similar to yours, but will alphabetize ahead of you. I believe a company can register as many DBA's as they'd like. These tricks are as old as the directory business, and can't be outlawed without outlawing legitimate uses of "keywords" in "advertising".
what if you ran a small grocery store that delivers online in your neighborhood and Walmart moved in and bought up all of the searches Does Walmart do such a thing? Maybe they do, but I would suspect that trademark owners would be much more concerned with online sites where consumers, disgruntled employees, and lawyers who organize class action suits discuss their issues. These sites are much more likely to attract visitors if they use the focus of their attention as a keyword as opposed to a quasipseudonym such as Sprawlmart or Voldemart, to name a couple I've heard. If you don't already know the pseudonym, you aren't likely to look for it with your search engine. If you try to restrict keyword searches to owners and nonprofit consumer groups, you run into problems of who exactly qualifies. If you use the IRS definitions, every individual is a taxable entity unless they register for special treatment. This is much too restrictive for many informal groups who may maintain a web page devoted to their grievances.
And the microcell would talk to what? the 30+towers on the round? it's the repeater system on the ground that is complicated, not the phones on the plane. Unless your microcell uses some sort of laser beam to connect with a special laser beam repeater on the ground, it isn't going to solve the problem. Okay, it doesn't have to be a laser, but it will need to be spectrum other than that used by cellular, or it will need a different protocol or it will be exactly the same problem. And whatever connection you establish will need to exist for every plane in the sky, which can be quite a few in the flight circles over any major city. This is a significant alteration in the operation of cellular networks.
Designing a repeater system that can deal with airborne phones is doable, but the technical problems are on the ground, not in the plane. Unfortunately, the tendency is for the ignorant to focus on the nonexistant interference on the plane rather than the interference on the ground.
I agree with the article that the real problems are human and it is easier and cheaper to blame technology than to blame humans.
Yes, it does seem simple, but you have the whole problem defined exactly backwards. The problem is not how many towers the phones detect, but how many towers detect the phones. The more towers detect each phone, the more handoff negotiations are in progress. Can you imagine 30 towers negotiating pairwise simultaneously for one phone call? It is silly and stupid, can probably be fixed with programming, and more stuff on the control channel, but certainly an expensive bother. Honestly, some of you software geeks just don't understand how real things work.
This doesn't mesh well with the personal flying cars we will all be flying in the future. The Jetsons and Futurama never had to deal with these flying windmill contraptions.
The land was already "assembled" and zoned for inexpensive housing. that's a big project in itself. Normally, higher priced housing is more profitable to build and much easier to get approved since most communities don't want to invite poor people into their communities. And even if it was easy to get the zoning, the markup is greater on expensive housing, assuming there are buyers.
Uses Palm OS, too, how cool. Guis have sort of forced large screens and track pads onto any laptop that wants to be taken seriously, but this thing that processes text, numbers, and minimal graphics can be useful, especially for people who create text and don't just read and look at pretty pictures. Do you have any idea how popular it is?
all the internets in the world aren't going to feed somebody that is starving. Forget about sending them pron and email. Think of all the food and water we could shove through those pipes.
My friend in college in the early 80's had a 100. He used it for taking notes in class. I still covet that machine. Does anyone nowadays make a small computer with a decent sized keyboard and without a big flippy screen? It seems you can get a small screen with a small keyboard (PDA, smartphone) or a big keyboard with a big screen, laptop, but if you want to only glance occassionaly at a few lines of notes as you are touchtyping them, you gotta use a PDA with some sort of addon keyboard.
While they may have figured out how to market and distribute to the governments that are their primary customers, they may not want to deal with the private market for some reason. Smaller purchase quantities comes to mind. But, you'd think they could hire someone else to market and distribute.
Like you suggest, it might be that the product wouldn't hold up too well under the scrutiny of knowledgeable customers in a competitive marketplace. The original product is intended for people who know nothing about compuerts and don't know anyone else who knows anything about computers.
Security, as is much of IT, is a cost center. It's hard to get authorization for hiring enough employees and equipment to do a proper job and continue to do a proper job unless you have an expensive embarrassing incident. And then, to save face, cover ass (what's the difference), management brings in an expensive outside security consultant to do a little magic and save the day. The underequipped, understaffed fulltimers will be lucky to keep their jobs.
Remember; just because you're not stupid, doesn't mean the rest of the world isn't. Not a bumper sticker, think what it would do to traffic. But, it would make a nice sig.
In general, I don't think being a rock star makes one an expert on anythiing else. But, this is one area where their opinions might matter. Just because you've made it doesn't make it impossible to empathize with musicians who haven't. REM and some of the others were not created by the record labels. They already existed, were "discovered" bye the recording industry and promoted. But, they already existed. If the little guys had to do their own lobbying without help from the bands who have made it, they might not be heard. The general public can't be expected to be unbiased or for the little artists either. Politicians can sum us up wth just a few words, "we want value for free". That isn't right either, but anything the general public says will be see in that light.
That's just it. They'd be our lawyers, we would pay them. Get enough people together and you could have quite a defense fund. Not just the victims and their parents, but anyone who wants to stop this lovely RIAA business model.
Yes, only those with the finances to have their opinions televised should be allowed to express opinions or influence people. Such financial issues wouldn't matter if there were actually an informed voting populace. The problem is the majority of people rely solely on 15 second soundbites from TV to make their decision, rather than actual research. Discussions among citizens is a great way to become an informed populace. There is no reason why the populace should merely be an audience for the paid shills.
Slashdot Mirror
We've had this at least twice before.
The most annoying thing about the cue cat was that it didn't work on my Mac. A few years later, I got a Windows to be compatible with something or the other and one of the first things I did was install my Cue Cat, and it didn't work. By then, Forbes was no longer publishing the bar codes, but I had heard that you could scan your groceries and get info from the manufactureres, so I was hoping to get into a corporate website, but apparently, whatever was necessary to get it to work was no longer working.
I heard the thing on NPR and it sounded like the reporter was a bit confused. I don't see why there should be a link between the increasing popularity of vinyl and USB turntables. A USB turntable is great, unless you are lazy and cheap like me and just run a cable from the audio system I already own to the Macintosh I already own. I bought the cable from Radio Shack a few years ago. The USB turntables I've seen aren't as nice as my old setup. Too bad I don't own a McIntosh, that would make for a cool setup.
When I was in the middle east, I was told that it referred to all people who write from right to left. Yes, the countries on the western edge of asia are also part of the orient. Ever hear the about the 1001 nights? I just checked wikipedia and they say orient started out meaning the middle east and was extended to mean most of southern and eastern asia.
Around here (GA-USA) you have two containers, one for garbage and one for recyclables. The garbage company collects both, usually in separate trucks. Some have automated sorters, some have minimum wage employees, and the ones owned by cities sometimes have retarded people and other people who work as volunteers.
Denmark should do wha Florida does. South Florida is natually completely flat, but all around Miami, there are mountains with golf courses and other amenities on top. Guess why? My state hides its landfills between real mountains, but Florida doesn't have any.
No, Yellow Book is something else. I get it too. It seems Ma Bell didn't trademark either the walking fingers or the color yellow for use in a phone directory. The local phone company here now calls their version The Real Yellow Pages for this very reason. I get a couple of others, too. Then I take them all to a dumpster near my house marked Phone Books only. I think they all quaify.
The real problems are that BoA relies on the internet and there website is so SLOW and the pretty picture apparently is programmed to load last, long after the box where I enter my pin.
The BoA website is beautiful and quite fast when I use the public terminal in the bank branch. But, at home, it is the ugliest slowest most poorly designed piece of crap I have ever accessed more than once. Like many corporate sites, I strongly suspect that the design was designed by some young geeks who have never accessed the internet with less bandwith than a T1 line and approved by some elderly manager who understands pretty pictures and nothing else about technology and if he ever accesses the interent from home, he uses something a lot fancier (and less secure) than a dialup modem, and has no idea what's going on behind the curtain.
Okay, I'm middlea ged. At home and at work I was using regular phone lines and sometimes T1 lines to transfer all kinds of stuff to other locations since the 70's. All I had to do was get my modem to call their modem and that was it, we were just as secure as the phone line. By the 80's, we even had Caller ID to help us know whether we knew the party who was trying to call us. The main problem is that everyone we connected to had a slilghtly different dance we had to jump through to login and we usually had to have a simultaneous voice connection. But, this problem was a form of security. If we had someone we did a lot of business with, we simply bought a T1 line and forgot about it. If it broke, the phone company fixed it.
I'm also cheap. I almost always use dial up. It is plenty fast enough for what I do, I have the phone line anyway for my fax machine. I switch to wifi only when I want to watch youtube, which is only when it has a video that gets a lot of attention on slashdot or bbc. In other words, only during an election compaign. I don't download music, etc, etc, etc. iow, I'm an old fogey, and I don't have any incentive to upgrade to a faster, but less secure internet connection. Except for this silly BoA website.
I love banking with my computer, but I have to restrain myself for the picture verification site to load completely. I will not bank by cable modem or wife because neither are private. But, I have never seen the bank try to discourage anyone else from doing so. As someone who used iffers and sniffers before most techies knew what they wre, I can't trust anything that is broadcast freely into a common cloud. With something as big as the internet, it doesn't take many corrupt smart people to cause significant security breach. The main reason that most people are so comfortable is that corrupt smart people don't normally pubicize their activities.
BoA is bigger than most ISP's. I've wondered for years why they didn't set up their own modem farm with caller id verification for online banking. They already do this for credit card verification. If I call for customer service, they will ask me for more personal verification information if I am not calling from my home phone. My insurance company has similar phone technology, when I call them, before the online agent even says hello, he or she has my full file on the computer screen. It was creepy at first, but now, it is damn convenient to be able to do business without the idle chit chat while my file is being accessed. If they can do it for voice phones, they can do it for modems. They don't even have to own and maintain the modem farm. They can hire earthlink to set up a separate pool.
Has Nancy Sinatra gained weight?
I apoligize in advance for the stupid mistake. Only the first line of my post is a quote.
You just described the Yellow Pages which will sell ad space to anyone who pays them to have an ad in a directory organized by keywords of the purchaser's choosing. If your competitor pays and you don't, then anyone looking for you will find your competitor and not you. That is why so many businesses buy these sorts of ads. it is a normal cost of doing business. The internet didn't change this, it simply moved an existing situation (problem for some) to the directory business on the internet.
Or maybe a White Pages analogy would be approprate. Businesses must pay to be included there, too. But, since entries are organized by name, if your competitor wants to appear before you, they simply adopt a name similar to yours, but will alphabetize ahead of you. I believe a company can register as many DBA's as they'd like. These tricks are as old as the directory business, and can't be outlawed without outlawing legitimate uses of "keywords" in "advertising".
And the microcell would talk to what? the 30+towers on the round? it's the repeater system on the ground that is complicated, not the phones on the plane. Unless your microcell uses some sort of laser beam to connect with a special laser beam repeater on the ground, it isn't going to solve the problem. Okay, it doesn't have to be a laser, but it will need to be spectrum other than that used by cellular, or it will need a different protocol or it will be exactly the same problem. And whatever connection you establish will need to exist for every plane in the sky, which can be quite a few in the flight circles over any major city. This is a significant alteration in the operation of cellular networks.
Designing a repeater system that can deal with airborne phones is doable, but the technical problems are on the ground, not in the plane. Unfortunately, the tendency is for the ignorant to focus on the nonexistant interference on the plane rather than the interference on the ground.
I agree with the article that the real problems are human and it is easier and cheaper to blame technology than to blame humans.
Yes, it does seem simple, but you have the whole problem defined exactly backwards. The problem is not how many towers the phones detect, but how many towers detect the phones. The more towers detect each phone, the more handoff negotiations are in progress. Can you imagine 30 towers negotiating pairwise simultaneously for one phone call? It is silly and stupid, can probably be fixed with programming, and more stuff on the control channel, but certainly an expensive bother. Honestly, some of you software geeks just don't understand how real things work.
This doesn't mesh well with the personal flying cars we will all be flying in the future. The Jetsons and Futurama never had to deal with these flying windmill contraptions.
The land was already "assembled" and zoned for inexpensive housing. that's a big project in itself. Normally, higher priced housing is more profitable to build and much easier to get approved since most communities don't want to invite poor people into their communities. And even if it was easy to get the zoning, the markup is greater on expensive housing, assuming there are buyers.
Uses Palm OS, too, how cool. Guis have sort of forced large screens and track pads onto any laptop that wants to be taken seriously, but this thing that processes text, numbers, and minimal graphics can be useful, especially for people who create text and don't just read and look at pretty pictures. Do you have any idea how popular it is?
My friend in college in the early 80's had a 100. He used it for taking notes in class. I still covet that machine. Does anyone nowadays make a small computer with a decent sized keyboard and without a big flippy screen? It seems you can get a small screen with a small keyboard (PDA, smartphone) or a big keyboard with a big screen, laptop, but if you want to only glance occassionaly at a few lines of notes as you are touchtyping them, you gotta use a PDA with some sort of addon keyboard.
Marketing costs, distribution costs, etc.
While they may have figured out how to market and distribute to the governments that are their primary customers, they may not want to deal with the private market for some reason. Smaller purchase quantities comes to mind. But, you'd think they could hire someone else to market and distribute.
Like you suggest, it might be that the product wouldn't hold up too well under the scrutiny of knowledgeable customers in a competitive marketplace. The original product is intended for people who know nothing about compuerts and don't know anyone else who knows anything about computers.
Security, as is much of IT, is a cost center. It's hard to get authorization for hiring enough employees and equipment to do a proper job and continue to do a proper job unless you have an expensive embarrassing incident. And then, to save face, cover ass (what's the difference), management brings in an expensive outside security consultant to do a little magic and save the day. The underequipped, understaffed fulltimers will be lucky to keep their jobs.
In general, I don't think being a rock star makes one an expert on anythiing else. But, this is one area where their opinions might matter. Just because you've made it doesn't make it impossible to empathize with musicians who haven't. REM and some of the others were not created by the record labels. They already existed, were "discovered" bye the recording industry and promoted. But, they already existed. If the little guys had to do their own lobbying without help from the bands who have made it, they might not be heard. The general public can't be expected to be unbiased or for the little artists either. Politicians can sum us up wth just a few words, "we want value for free". That isn't right either, but anything the general public says will be see in that light.
That's just it. They'd be our lawyers, we would pay them. Get enough people together and you could have quite a defense fund. Not just the victims and their parents, but anyone who wants to stop this lovely RIAA business model.