I listened to this record over and over and over again when i was a kid (maybe 9 years old?). We also had Well Tempered Synthesizer and a strange Moog country music album that Carlos did. I still hear Bach melodies as sythesizer tones, not as string instruments.
mahlen
There are three secrets that my mother told me: Be a maid in the living room,
a cook in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom. And I figure, so long as I
have a maid and a cook, I'll do the rest myself. You can only do so much in
one day.
--Jerry Hall
Well, the company i work for (Excite@Home) has more than 1.25 million cable modem subscribers. I have DSL at home, as do another half million people or so (roughly, current numbers aren't in front of me). I'd wager that most people who share the use of a T1 or higher at work or school are happier than they would be at 28.8. And I can assure you that they aren't all using the speed just for porn, music, and warez.
Since my company's motto is "The Leader in Broadband", i can think of some darned useful and/or enjoyable uss for broadband:
1. Almost all pages load much faster. 2. Online radio/video becomes reasonable/listenable. 3. Downloading demo/free software becomes much more reasonable. 4. Online gaming quality improves dramatically. 5. Friends who send you large email attachments remain your friends. 6. Working from home becomes much more enjoyable, since you don't spend eons waiting for the source code to move between machines. 7. And so on...
I'm glad that you surf happily at 28.8, but you're incorrect to suggest that faster is not useful. Indeed, it changes ones entire relationship to the web. At slower speeds, you're not sure whether you really want to click that link, cause who knows what kind of wait you're in for. Faster means you're threshold of pain is dramatically lower.
The uptake of mobile phones with limited bandwidth is proof of the value of mobile connectivity, not the superior desirability of low bandwidth.
[PLUG] See home.excite.com for more ideas about what broadband is good for [/PLUG]
mahlen
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity. --Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
Other books Stephen King has released (not for free) in electronic form:
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Hearts in Atlantis Bag of Bones
mahlen
Napoleon: What shall we do with this soldier, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong. Giuseppe: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right. --George Bernard Shaw
No more publishers and what about the archivists?
on
King's New eBook
·
· Score: 1
"And here's a chilling thought for you: If this idea takes off, then why should authors ever need to deal with book stores (or publishers) at all? He could just sell directly to his end customers. With electronic media, the only infrastructure and retail store you need, is The Internet and a server."
Indeed. Facilitating this seems to be the mandate of fatbrain's eMatter service, where authors post material, write the copy, and set the price. All Fatbrain does is provide the encryption and transaction processing and the central place to buy them.
Of course, this isn't really the end of publishing as we know it. After all, there's the concept of brand (I make different assumptions about an O'Reilly title vs. a "Bla bla bla Unleashed" book), both for publisher and author. The information you have about a book purchase is incomplete, after all, and in such cases, reputation matters. Reputations can be bought via advertising, and are earned through reviews.
It's a giant trust network. I trust most of the reviews i see in the New York Times, and one of their reviewers trusted publisher X enough to read a book by author Y, who publisher X trusts by reputation, sales, or actually having read the text. Thus i feel like a review in the NYT tells me enough to know whether or not i'd like the book. This is where Amazon's reviews fall down; there's such a variety of reviewers (the public at large), that i can't really trust the positive reviews (although they seem to be addressing that with pages of reviews by the same person now).
As for this story, I'll be reading it on my Rocket eBook, a portable reader. Very nice.
When a team of marketing minions from Sears paid a visit to the company's production facilities, Bushnell made a lasting impression by riding around the factory floor on a conveyor belt, in a box. Elsewhere in the organization, happy employees tried to drive an executive mad by gradually adding lead weights to his telephone receiver. --ATARI, 1974
I think that another reason that the Bay Area has prospered with high tech for so many years is that it has a long history of being accepting of people far from the norm. Geeks and our ilk tend not to hold too much with societal norms (be it clothes, sexual practices, exotic food, etc.), and there are relatively few places where such a life can be experienced freely. Even when the local economy was in a high-tech recession in the late '80s (uh, yes, that does happen, you know), i knew there was nowhere else i'd want to live (well, maybe Amsterdam...). Fortunately, i was born here, so i didn't have to move:) The Web boom picked up a huge pool of creative, educated people who were working retail; they lived here because they liked the freedom and creativity of the place. Which is being destroyed by the current prosperity, i fear.
People have been moving to California in droves for several decades (i just heard a state prediction of 60 Million people by 2040) for many of the reason people have mentioned. The boom is only making it faster (and ruining my chances of buying a house in San Francisco).
mahlen
I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back. --Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Bob Zmuda's book on Kaufman (Andy Kaufman Revealed!: Best Friend Tells All) is brilliant. While i haven't yet seen the film (and i am looking forward to it), the book goes into detail about the fact that Kaufman's most astonishing performances were performed for people who didn't know they were watching one. Things he did in restaurants, on the street. It's a great book, very funny. His point was that he didn't have to be funny, just interesting.
And it's hardly fair to say that Andy flirted with meditation; he was a dedicated TM'er for his entire adult life, meditating every day.
Of course, i'd be remiss not to mention Andy Lives.
mahlen
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. --Robert Frost
The logo reflects the fact that Shephard Fairey, who masterminds the Obey the Giant (nee Andre the Giant) campaign is also the person who designed the Mozilla site. He clearly has a fascination with Soviet imagery and iconography, as his wonderful series of Giant posters demonstrates. Also see BLKMRKT the agency he works for, for more examples of his work.
I'm amazed at the differences in price and service level that exist across the country. For the record, i'm paying $49/month for 1.5MBit/128K service here in San Francisco. Only once since March have i had a service interruption, and PacBell's automated trouble line indicated they already knew about it; it was fixed within two hours of my noticing it.
Cable modems aren't available here, so i can't compare to them. But such variables as price, ISP quality, download and upload speed, and so forth seem to be highly regional, so being partisan about Cable vs. xDSL seems pointless, since the particulars vary so much from place to place.
And what's this jazz the article mentions about "microfilters" on all the phones? I never got those that i know of, but haven't noticed any noise on my phone line. Hmmm...
But i do love having broadband service, and the article is quite correct in how such service changes the way you use the resources of the Web. The computer becomes much more of an information appliance. Plus, being a LPB (Low Ping Bastard) when playing Team Fortress Classic online is a joy to behold. Plus web radio suddenly sounds better than AM radio.
mahlen (TFC name "SpeldRong")
Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him. --John Barrymore's dying words
Re:Stephenson books are great
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 1
Heh. Heh heh. Infinite Jest is so great. It explains everything going on, but not in any sort of order that you would expect. It's even less linear than most William Burroughs.
Patience, grasshoppper. Remember everything you read in the book (especially the footnotes; don't skip them!), and the actual sequence of events will slowly start to assemble in your head. Don't watch that tape with the happy face on it, and beware the squeak!
I've read discussion elsewhere that the reason it's in Florida is that Kennedy needed to get a number of Southern votes from Congress in order to get the space program started. Note that Houston is where the Command/Control center is. The most logical place to put it is in Southern California, where there is rarely anything like weather; you'll note that this is where the Space Shuttle lands. But political necessity intervened, so Florida it is.
mahlen
Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long. --Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
While it's true that the self-publisher's lot is fraught is risk, there are some amazing success stories (http://www.bookmarket.com/selfpublish.html). Everyone from Tim O'Reilly to Richard Nixon.
mahlen
Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. --Vladimir Nabokov
As someone who's owned a Rocket eBook since last December, i can say that I certainly thought that moving bits, not atoms, would be cheaper. As have a lot of other people. However, there have been some long discussions among people in the current publishing industry and the eBook world (see eBookNet, for example), and the conclusion seems to be that books are priced like CPU's; that is, you pay based on how much you want it, not on how much it cost to make (which for books, is not that much, maybe a buck). If you want that Pentium III 600MHz chip RIGHT NOW then you will pay a much higher price for it than if you wait six months. Likewise, buying a hardback book when it first comes out will cost you more than waiting until the paperback or cheap used editions become available. So, the fact that most eBooks are the same price as the current print edition makes some twisted sense, in that light.
The publishers are the ones setting prices. The only explanation i can see for the fact that some eBooks cost more than hardbacks is that publishers figure that they can screw the early adapters.
The other thing keeping eBook prices high is the small size of the market. The non-zero conversion costs must be amortized over a very small number of people, and with not many titles available, there's not much competitive price pressure yet.
That said, i love my Rocket eBook. It's a sweet chunk of hardware, and it's wonderful for reading long web pages or Project Gutenberg texts away from the computer. I'm reading "Open Sources" on it right now.
See the Rocket Library for gobs of free text. They can even be read on an onscreen Windows simulator of the eBook, called the eRocket.
mahlen
During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. --Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist"
I'm not clear what Chris is saying here. You mean Sun shouldn't make the product better? I'm sure they weren't very happy with AWT 1.0, so i think it's kind of a lot to ask of the developers at Sun to say, "Well, a lot of the last release sucked wind, but there's now an industry built around fixing that, so we can't change a thing, no matter how many great ideas you have."
As a developer, i appreciate the opportunity to learn from my mistakes/oversights/running out of time, and then have a chance to redeem myself (and make my customers happier) by fixing them. Plus, if i had to write Java code but not know which patches/fixes/3rd party packages they have installed, i'd be wondering what the point of cross-platform code is.
A corporation that learns from it's mistakes is not a bad thing.
I'm the installer wrangler for my company, and I'm fairly impressed with InstallAnywhere, by ZeroG Software. It provides many of the features you describe. I use it to install on both Windows and Solaris; it's been fairly hitch-free, and their tech support (for the questions i did have) was responsive.
mahlen
Envy is the beginning of all true greatness. --The Master, "Doctor Who: Logopolis"
Just found this link to an interesting Word Magazine article about the history of suburbs, the automobile, and how they got that way. It's called "why You Drive Where You Live"; worth reading.
mahlen
We are on an irreversible road towards freedom and democracy, but that could change. --Dan Quayle
I agree that not everyone wants to live in the city. The problem that the New Urbanists are tackling is that not everyone wants to live in the suburbs either, but current zoning laws make it difficult to avoid them.
Regarding the fact that the prices of Celebration homes are higher than in the surrounding areas: This strikes me as a sign of how spot-on the New Urbanism is. After all, if the idea of living this way didn't appeal to these people, they wouldn't be paying more for the priviledge, right? The appeal of living this way is also apparent in the rapidly rising housing prices in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc...if a large number of people with money didn't like city living, they wouldn't be paying a premium to live there.
You speak of New Urbanism as a "top-down" approach to planning, but neglect to note that the rush to suburbia was also a "top-down" decision. In the late '40s, with a huge influx of returning war veterans and fears of a return to the depression, the need to bulk up demand for goods was quite apparent. Thus, the zoning laws were created that made mixed-use residential impossible to make. Thus was created the notion of single-use areas; residential here, commercial there, industrial over there, with people driving like crazy between them. This was a new thing then (as was the notion of everyone having a little slice of green, instead of sharing it), and it was very much dictated from above.
The past 50 years have shown us how vastly inefficient this way of thinking is, and that inefficiency is manifested in longer commute times, loss of suburban air quality, and severely strained water/electirical/sewage systems, not to mention social effects. I think the New Urbanism, or some variant of that, is a welcome change from the current state of affairs.
On a personal note, i grew up in the affluent suburbs of San Francisco (Orinda, just over the Berkeley Hills), and i couldn't wait to get out, for many of these reasons. When you can't drive (like when you're a kid), suburbs are basically home-based prisons. Just this weekend i celebrated living 10 years in San Francisco, a city i love to my core, "My Cool, Grey City of Love" (George Sterling)
mahlen
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. --Samuel Butler
I've owned an Rocket eBook for six months, and can answer some of the questions here.
1. Well, the value of money is relative to how much money you have. But the list price is $350, and the discounters are pricing it below $300.
2. All the electronic texts are saved to the hard drive, just like the Palm texts are, and likewise, you choose which books are currently present on the device. In fact, encrypted texts are also saved for you on Nuvomedia's site, so even if your hard drive turns to dust, you can still retrieve the books you've bought.
Plus, Nuvomedia gives away tools to scan web pages into eBook texts. Great for those long stories on a single page, or for books that are posted online.
3. The Nuvomedia FAQ claims that they can deal with you losing the eBook device without any loss of texts. They've got a good rep for being responsive to users.
4. In my opinion, the biggest problem facing the eBook industry is the lack of current texts. But Rocket is far ahead of Peanut Press or Softbook, with over a thousand texts, and the conversion rate seems to be accelerating.
The screen is a LOT better than the Palm, i agree, and the backlight and rechargable battery life are sweet. Again, it's a matter of how important that qualitative difference is to you.
mahlen
"I hope some animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs in my brain, because later you might think you're having a good idea but it's just eggs hatching." --"Deep Thoughts", by "Jack Handy"
While i haven't seen Blair Witch Project, the shooting style (put actors in situation, improvise dialog and, to lesser degree, plot) reminds me of director Rob Nilsson's "Direct Action Cinema" technique. When done by people who are good at it, this can produce amazing results. I'd especially recommend his 1987 film, "Heat and Sunlight", a searing look at the last twelve hours of a relationship.
I'm not that big a fan of horror films, but the film that scared the socks of me was "Dead Calm".
One thing to note is that many of these services listed are services that, in large cities, are provided by neighborhood businesses. The Valley is mostly consists of sprawling "office parks", which are usually near nothing but other office parks. Thus, these services are unavailable unless you drive somewhere, which certainly makes them less convenient and more distracting.
In areas of cities where there's lots of mixed-use zoning, dry-cleaners, gift shops, and many other things are already around (or are attracted to large clumps of companies), so companies don't need to build them; they're shared between numerous companies. Hence the popularity of putting businesses in city centers, where many such services are widely available, and have been for some time.
The South of Market (aka SoMa) part of San Francisco is also becoming wildly infested with tech companies, and the local business mix is adjusting accordingly. Far fewer clothing outlet stores and antique shops, more restaurants and dry cleaners.
mahlen
Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. --Vladimir Nabokov
I agree with the notion that once you're known as good at something, it's hard to move on to something new. I had to leave my last company in order to get on with my career. They would have gladly let me keep doing C++ forever, when i wanted to see what was happening in Java and XML (and boy am i glad i did). On the one hand, the company has a large body of C++ code that was running well, so they are reluctant to give it up. On the other hand, the people who stay are in serious danger of getting stuck in a rut. So the only reasonable approach for ambitious employees is to switch companies every few years, sadly.
Favoring young people over older ones has been happening in many industries for quite some time. Young people demand less money, and money is at the root of all decisions in most corporations (as demanded by their shareholders).
mahlen
Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life. --Sandra Carey
Hear, hear. This is a corporate policy, which libertarians hold dear.
While i admire Jon for sticking his neck out for his principles, (and posing as a pastor was truly inspired), i have to say i'm not sure why he bothered. I mean, not being able to see certain films until you get a bit older is hardly the jack-boot of oppression shoved in your face. I don't think kids are really missing out by not seeing R or NC-17 films, and if they really want to see them, they can write the titles down, and rent them when they turn 18. Not such a big deal. I know that immediate gratification is the ideal in this country, but maybe "Give me convienience or give me death!" isn't a notion we should stick with. Patience, my friends...
I worked in an independant movie theatre from 1980 -83 (the "Orinda", in suburban Orinda, California), and we were fairly rigorous about enforcing age limits then, mostly because an annoyingly high percentage of teenagers were disrupting shows for others. Not all of them, to be sure, but enough that enforcing rules we already had imposed on us just made sense.
I know i'm sounding a bit curmudgeon-like here, but there are much greater evils in the world than not being able to see a movie on the big screen.
mahlen
A man who cannot carry his own weight cannot carry a Volkswagen. --Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
This is actually something that waxes and wanes with time. Back in 1982 i was trying to get into the CS department at Berkeley; it was tremendously full; people with B+ averages weren't getting in, about one person in five would actually get into classes they requested, the department advised everyone to have back-up majors in mind. This was, you'll recall, when the first PC revolution was really coming down, Atari and Apple were high-flying companies, and people who were looking for big money careers looked to CS. I even met someone who was getting a CS degree, but really wanted to do sales.
But then the bottom dropped out of the small computer market, and Wall Street traders became the instant-wealth spotlight (on borrowed money, but that's another matter). All the greedy people became Business Administration majors, and by the time i graduated (1989), the CS department was welcoming people with open arms.
It's sad that the pendulum has swung back, mainly because i don't think that one can be a good programmer/engineer without loving the field. Of course, the job market is so overheated right now that you don't have to be that good. But still, people who persue CS for the money will hate the work, i'd guess.
mahlen
Cthulhu for President Don't settle for the lesser evil! --Chaosium Inc., 1992
As Stephenson points out in his foreward to the paperback Snow Crash, unbeknownst to him when he wrote it, Apple (i think) had written VR software using what they also called 'avatars'. The idea was in the ether, and many people discussing the notion of multi-person VR's independantly used the term, meaning 'the manifestation of a Hindu deity (especially Vishnu) in human or superhuman or animal form; "the Buddha is considered an avatar of the god Vishnu"'.
No one, so far as i know, predicted that Quake would be the first popular instantiation of it.
mahlen
Remember: the average is as close to the bottom as it is to the top. --anonymous
I believe the concern was that the tremendous heat could bring atmospheric nitrogen to it's burning point. Since the atmosphere is only 25% oxygen, a nitrogen fire could consume all oxygen fairly quickly. However, i don't know if burning nitrogen produces enough heat to keep the reaction going, which may explain why it hasn't happened.
But hey, if it did, would it make nitrous oxide? We'd all die laughing our fool heads off.
I just read "On the Beach", which is about how people face the extinction of the species, in an event that is still far more likely to occur (an atmosphere full of radioactive dust after full-on nuclear war). In this book, i think Albania starts the last war, and the Chinese and the Russians both used Cobalt bombs.
mahlen
If God had not given us sticky tape, it would have been necessary to invent it.
Slashdot Mirror
I listened to this record over and over and over again when i was a kid (maybe 9 years old?). We also had Well Tempered Synthesizer and a strange Moog country music album that Carlos did. I still hear Bach melodies as sythesizer tones, not as string instruments.
mahlen
There are three secrets that my mother told me: Be a maid in the living room,
a cook in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom. And I figure, so long as I
have a maid and a cook, I'll do the rest myself. You can only do so much in
one day.
--Jerry Hall
Well, the company i work for (Excite@Home) has more than 1.25 million cable modem subscribers. I have DSL at home, as do another half million people or so (roughly, current numbers aren't in front of me). I'd wager that most people who share the use of a T1 or higher at work or school are happier than they would be at 28.8. And I can assure you that they aren't all using the speed just for porn, music, and warez.
Since my company's motto is "The Leader in Broadband", i can think of some darned useful and/or enjoyable uss for broadband:
1. Almost all pages load much faster.
2. Online radio/video becomes reasonable/listenable.
3. Downloading demo/free software becomes much more reasonable.
4. Online gaming quality improves dramatically.
5. Friends who send you large email attachments remain your friends.
6. Working from home becomes much more enjoyable, since you don't spend eons waiting for the source code to move between machines.
7. And so on...
I'm glad that you surf happily at 28.8, but you're incorrect to suggest that faster is not useful. Indeed, it changes ones entire relationship to the web. At slower speeds, you're not sure whether you really want to click that link, cause who knows what kind of wait you're in for. Faster means you're threshold of pain is dramatically lower.
The uptake of mobile phones with limited bandwidth is proof of the value of mobile connectivity, not the superior desirability of low bandwidth.
[PLUG] See home.excite.com for more ideas about what broadband is good for [/PLUG]
mahlen
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies
solely in my tenacity.
--Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
Other books Stephen King has released (not for free) in electronic form:
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Hearts in Atlantis
Bag of Bones
mahlen
Napoleon: What shall we do with this soldier, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong.
Giuseppe: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.
--George Bernard Shaw
"And here's a chilling thought for you: If this idea takes off, then why should authors ever need to deal with book stores (or publishers) at all? He could just sell directly to his end customers. With electronic media, the only infrastructure and retail store you need, is The Internet and a server."
Indeed. Facilitating this seems to be the mandate of fatbrain's eMatter service, where authors post material, write the copy, and set the price. All Fatbrain does is provide the encryption and transaction processing and the central place to buy them.
Of course, this isn't really the end of publishing as we know it. After all, there's the concept of brand (I make different assumptions about an O'Reilly title vs. a "Bla bla bla Unleashed" book), both for publisher and author. The information you have about a book purchase is incomplete, after all, and in such cases, reputation matters. Reputations can be bought via advertising, and are earned through reviews.
It's a giant trust network. I trust most of the reviews i see in the New York Times, and one of their reviewers trusted publisher X enough to read a book by author Y, who publisher X trusts by reputation, sales, or actually having read the text. Thus i feel like a review in the NYT tells me enough to know whether or not i'd like the book. This is where Amazon's reviews fall down; there's such a variety of reviewers (the public at large), that i can't really trust the positive reviews (although they seem to be addressing that with pages of reviews by the same person now).
As for this story, I'll be reading it on my Rocket eBook, a portable reader. Very nice.
At the beginning of the article R.I.P mentions the dearth of great writing on video games; I'd like to place here a plug for J.C. Herz's Joystick Nation : How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds, and even more so Herz's New York Times Column Game Theory. Reading Game Theory is the highlight of my Thursday.
mahlen
When a team of marketing minions from Sears paid a visit to the company's production facilities, Bushnell made a lasting impression by riding around the factory floor on a conveyor belt, in a box. Elsewhere in the organization, happy employees tried to drive an executive mad by gradually adding lead weights to his telephone receiver.
--ATARI, 1974
I think that another reason that the Bay Area has prospered with high tech for so many years is that it has a long history of being accepting of people far from the norm. Geeks and our ilk tend not to hold too much with societal norms (be it clothes, sexual practices, exotic food, etc.), and there are relatively few places where such a life can be experienced freely. Even when the local economy was in a high-tech recession in the late '80s (uh, yes, that does happen, you know), i knew there was nowhere else i'd want to live (well, maybe Amsterdam...). Fortunately, i was born here, so i didn't have to move :) The Web boom picked up a huge pool of creative, educated people who were working retail; they lived here because they liked the freedom and creativity of the place. Which is being destroyed by the current prosperity, i fear.
People have been moving to California in droves for several decades (i just heard a state prediction of 60 Million people by 2040) for many of the reason people have mentioned. The boom is only making it faster (and ruining my chances of buying a house in San Francisco).
mahlen
I'm a slow walker, but I never walk back.
--Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Bob Zmuda's book on Kaufman (Andy Kaufman Revealed!: Best Friend Tells All) is brilliant. While i haven't yet seen the film (and i am looking forward to it), the book goes into detail about the fact that Kaufman's most astonishing performances were performed for people who didn't know they were watching one. Things he did in restaurants, on the street. It's a great book, very funny. His point was that he didn't have to be funny, just interesting.
And it's hardly fair to say that Andy flirted with meditation; he was a dedicated TM'er for his entire adult life, meditating every day.
Of course, i'd be remiss not to mention Andy Lives.
mahlen
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
--Robert Frost
The logo reflects the fact that Shephard Fairey, who masterminds the Obey the Giant (nee Andre the Giant) campaign is also the person who designed the Mozilla site. He clearly has a fascination with Soviet imagery and iconography, as his wonderful series of Giant posters demonstrates. Also see BLKMRKT the agency he works for, for more examples of his work.
I'm amazed at the differences in price and service level that exist across the country. For the record, i'm paying $49/month for 1.5MBit/128K service here in San Francisco. Only once since March have i had a service interruption, and PacBell's automated trouble line indicated they already knew about it; it was fixed within two hours of my noticing it.
Cable modems aren't available here, so i can't compare to them. But such variables as price, ISP quality, download and upload speed, and so forth seem to be highly regional, so being partisan about Cable vs. xDSL seems pointless, since the particulars vary so much from place to place.
And what's this jazz the article mentions about "microfilters" on all the phones? I never got those that i know of, but haven't noticed any noise on my phone line. Hmmm...
But i do love having broadband service, and the article is quite correct in how such service changes the way you use the resources of the Web. The computer becomes much more of an information appliance. Plus, being a LPB (Low Ping Bastard) when playing Team Fortress Classic online is a joy to behold. Plus web radio suddenly sounds better than AM radio.
mahlen (TFC name "SpeldRong")
Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.
--John Barrymore's dying words
Heh. Heh heh. Infinite Jest is so great. It explains everything going on, but not in any sort of order that you would expect. It's even less linear than most William Burroughs.
Patience, grasshoppper. Remember everything you read in the book (especially the footnotes; don't skip them!), and the actual sequence of events will slowly start to assemble in your head. Don't watch that tape with the happy face on it, and beware the squeak!
mahlen
Decisions terminate panic.
--Chinese fortune cookie
"Why is the Space Center in Florida again?"
I've read discussion elsewhere that the reason it's in Florida is that Kennedy needed to get a number of Southern votes from Congress in order to get the space program started. Note that Houston is where the Command/Control center is. The most logical place to put it is in Southern California, where there is rarely anything like weather; you'll note that this is where the Space Shuttle lands. But political necessity intervened, so Florida it is.
mahlen
Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too long.
--Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
While it's true that the self-publisher's lot is fraught is risk, there are some amazing success stories (http://www.bookmarket.com/selfpublish.html). Everyone from Tim O'Reilly to Richard Nixon.
mahlen
Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
--Vladimir Nabokov
As someone who's owned a Rocket eBook since last December, i can say that I certainly thought that moving bits, not atoms, would be cheaper. As have a lot of other people. However, there have been some long discussions among people in the current publishing industry and the eBook world (see eBookNet, for example), and the conclusion seems to be that books are priced like CPU's; that is, you pay based on how much you want it, not on how much it cost to make (which for books, is not that much, maybe a buck). If you want that Pentium III 600MHz chip RIGHT NOW then you will pay a much higher price for it than if you wait six months. Likewise, buying a hardback book when it first comes out will cost you more than waiting until the paperback or cheap used editions become available. So, the fact that most eBooks are the same price as the current print edition makes some twisted sense, in that light.
The publishers are the ones setting prices. The only explanation i can see for the fact that some eBooks cost more than hardbacks is that publishers figure that they can screw the early adapters.
The other thing keeping eBook prices high is the small size of the market. The non-zero conversion costs must be amortized over a very small number of people, and with not many titles available, there's not much competitive price pressure yet.
That said, i love my Rocket eBook. It's a sweet chunk of hardware, and it's wonderful for reading long web pages or Project Gutenberg texts away from the computer. I'm reading "Open Sources" on it right now.
See the Rocket Library for gobs of free text. They can even be read on an onscreen Windows simulator of the eBook, called the eRocket.
mahlen
During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished.
--Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist"
I'm not clear what Chris is saying here. You mean Sun shouldn't make the product better? I'm sure they weren't very happy with AWT 1.0, so i think it's kind of a lot to ask of the developers at Sun to say, "Well, a lot of the last release sucked wind, but there's now an industry built around fixing that, so we can't change a thing, no matter how many great ideas you have."
As a developer, i appreciate the opportunity to learn from my mistakes/oversights/running out of time, and then have a chance to redeem myself (and make my customers happier) by fixing them. Plus, if i had to write Java code but not know which patches/fixes/3rd party packages they have installed, i'd be wondering what the point of cross-platform code is.
A corporation that learns from it's mistakes is not a bad thing.
mahlen
You have to panic--I'm thinking.
I'm the installer wrangler for my company, and I'm fairly impressed with InstallAnywhere, by ZeroG Software. It provides many of the features you describe. I use it to install on both Windows and Solaris; it's been fairly hitch-free, and their tech support (for the questions i did have) was responsive.
mahlen
Envy is the beginning of all true greatness.
--The Master, "Doctor Who: Logopolis"
Just found this link to an interesting Word Magazine article about the history of suburbs, the automobile, and how they got that way. It's called "why You Drive Where You Live"; worth reading.
mahlen
We are on an irreversible road towards freedom and democracy, but that could change.
--Dan Quayle
I agree that not everyone wants to live in the city. The problem that the New Urbanists are tackling is that not everyone wants to live in the suburbs either, but current zoning laws make it difficult to avoid them.
Regarding the fact that the prices of Celebration homes are higher than in the surrounding areas: This strikes me as a sign of how spot-on the New Urbanism is. After all, if the idea of living this way didn't appeal to these people, they wouldn't be paying more for the priviledge, right? The appeal of living this way is also apparent in the rapidly rising housing prices in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc...if a large number of people with money didn't like city living, they wouldn't be paying a premium to live there.
You speak of New Urbanism as a "top-down" approach to planning, but neglect to note that the rush to suburbia was also a "top-down" decision. In the late '40s, with a huge influx of returning war veterans and fears of a return to the depression, the need to bulk up demand for goods was quite apparent. Thus, the zoning laws were created that made mixed-use residential impossible to make. Thus was created the notion of single-use areas; residential here, commercial there, industrial over there, with people driving like crazy between them. This was a new thing then (as was the notion of everyone having a little slice of green, instead of sharing it), and it was very much dictated from above.
The past 50 years have shown us how vastly inefficient this way of thinking is, and that inefficiency is manifested in longer commute times, loss of suburban air quality, and severely strained water/electirical/sewage systems, not to mention social effects. I think the New Urbanism, or some variant of that, is a welcome change from the current state of affairs.
On a personal note, i grew up in the affluent suburbs of San Francisco (Orinda, just over the Berkeley Hills), and i couldn't wait to get out, for many of these reasons. When you can't drive (like when you're a kid), suburbs are basically home-based prisons. Just this weekend i celebrated living 10 years in San Francisco, a city i love to my core, "My Cool, Grey City of Love" (George Sterling)
mahlen
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
--Samuel Butler
I've owned an Rocket eBook for six months, and can answer some of the questions here.
1. Well, the value of money is relative to how much money you have. But the list price is $350, and the discounters are pricing it below $300.
2. All the electronic texts are saved to the hard drive, just like the Palm texts are, and likewise, you choose which books are currently present on the device. In fact, encrypted texts are also saved for you on Nuvomedia's site, so even if your hard drive turns to dust, you can still retrieve the books you've bought.
Plus, Nuvomedia gives away tools to scan web pages into eBook texts. Great for those long stories on a single page, or for books that are posted online.
3. The Nuvomedia FAQ claims that they can deal with you losing the eBook device without any loss of texts. They've got a good rep for being responsive to users.
4. In my opinion, the biggest problem facing the eBook industry is the lack of current texts. But Rocket is far ahead of Peanut Press or Softbook, with over a thousand texts, and the conversion rate seems to be accelerating.
The screen is a LOT better than the Palm, i agree, and the backlight and rechargable battery life are sweet. Again, it's a matter of how important that qualitative difference is to you.
mahlen
"I hope some animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs in my brain, because later you might think you're having a good idea but it's just eggs hatching."
--"Deep Thoughts", by "Jack Handy"
While i haven't seen Blair Witch Project, the shooting style (put actors in situation, improvise dialog and, to lesser degree, plot) reminds me of director Rob Nilsson's "Direct Action Cinema" technique. When done by people who are good at it, this can produce amazing results. I'd especially recommend his 1987 film, "Heat and Sunlight", a searing look at the last twelve hours of a relationship.
I'm not that big a fan of horror films, but the film that scared the socks of me was "Dead Calm".
mahlen
One thing to note is that many of these services listed are services that, in large cities, are provided by neighborhood businesses. The Valley is mostly consists of sprawling "office parks", which are usually near nothing but other office parks. Thus, these services are unavailable unless you drive somewhere, which certainly makes them less convenient and more distracting.
In areas of cities where there's lots of mixed-use zoning, dry-cleaners, gift shops, and many other things are already around (or are attracted to large clumps of companies), so companies don't need to build them; they're shared between numerous companies. Hence the popularity of putting businesses in city centers, where many such services are widely available, and have been for some time.
The South of Market (aka SoMa) part of San Francisco is also becoming wildly infested with tech companies, and the local business mix is adjusting accordingly. Far fewer clothing outlet stores and antique shops, more restaurants and dry cleaners.
mahlen
Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
--Vladimir Nabokov
I agree with the notion that once you're known as good at something, it's hard to move on to something new. I had to leave my last company in order to get on with my career. They would have gladly let me keep doing C++ forever, when i wanted to see what was happening in Java and XML (and boy am i glad i did). On the one hand, the company has a large body of C++ code that was running well, so they are reluctant to give it up. On the other hand, the people who stay are in serious danger of getting stuck in a rut. So the only reasonable approach for ambitious employees is to switch companies every few years, sadly.
Favoring young people over older ones has been happening in many industries for quite some time. Young people demand less money, and money is at the root of all decisions in most corporations (as demanded by their shareholders).
mahlen
Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.
--Sandra Carey
Hear, hear. This is a corporate policy, which libertarians hold dear.
While i admire Jon for sticking his neck out for his principles, (and posing as a pastor was truly inspired), i have to say i'm not sure why he bothered. I mean, not being able to see certain films until you get a bit older is hardly the jack-boot of oppression shoved in your face. I don't think kids are really missing out by not seeing R or NC-17 films, and if they really want to see them, they can write the titles down, and rent them when they turn 18. Not such a big deal. I know that immediate gratification is the ideal in this country, but maybe "Give me convienience or give me death!" isn't a notion we should stick with. Patience, my friends...
I worked in an independant movie theatre from 1980 -83 (the "Orinda", in suburban Orinda, California), and we were fairly rigorous about enforcing age limits then, mostly because an annoyingly high percentage of teenagers were disrupting shows for others. Not all of them, to be sure, but enough that enforcing rules we already had imposed on us just made sense.
I know i'm sounding a bit curmudgeon-like here, but there are much greater evils in the world than not being able to see a movie on the big screen.
mahlen
A man who cannot carry his own weight cannot carry a Volkswagen.
--Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
This is actually something that waxes and wanes with time. Back in 1982 i was trying to get into the CS department at Berkeley; it was tremendously full; people with B+ averages weren't getting in, about one person in five would actually get into classes they requested, the department advised everyone to have back-up majors in mind. This was, you'll recall, when the first PC revolution was really coming down, Atari and Apple were high-flying companies, and people who were looking for big money careers looked to CS. I even met someone who was getting a CS degree, but really wanted to do sales.
But then the bottom dropped out of the small computer market, and Wall Street traders became the instant-wealth spotlight (on borrowed money, but that's another matter). All the greedy people became Business Administration majors, and by the time i graduated (1989), the CS department was welcoming people with open arms.
It's sad that the pendulum has swung back, mainly because i don't think that one can be a good programmer/engineer without loving the field. Of course, the job market is so overheated right now that you don't have to be that good. But still, people who persue CS for the money will hate the work, i'd guess.
mahlen
Cthulhu for President
Don't settle for the lesser evil!
--Chaosium Inc., 1992
As Stephenson points out in his foreward to the paperback Snow Crash, unbeknownst to him when he wrote it, Apple (i think) had written VR software using what they also called 'avatars'. The idea was in the ether, and many people discussing the notion of multi-person VR's independantly used the term, meaning 'the manifestation of a Hindu deity (especially Vishnu) in human or superhuman or animal form; "the Buddha is considered an avatar of the god Vishnu"'.
No one, so far as i know, predicted that Quake would be the first popular instantiation of it.
mahlen
Remember: the average is as close to the bottom as it is to the top.
--anonymous
I believe the concern was that the tremendous heat could bring atmospheric nitrogen to it's burning point. Since the atmosphere is only 25% oxygen, a nitrogen fire could consume all oxygen fairly quickly. However, i don't know if burning nitrogen produces enough heat to keep the reaction going, which may explain why it hasn't happened.
But hey, if it did, would it make nitrous oxide? We'd all die laughing our fool heads off.
I just read "On the Beach", which is about how people face the extinction of the species, in an event that is still far more likely to occur (an atmosphere full of radioactive dust after full-on nuclear war). In this book, i think Albania starts the last war, and the Chinese and the Russians both used Cobalt bombs.
mahlen
If God had not given us sticky tape, it would have been necessary to invent it.