I've done some analysis, and I think I know what is happening.
He started at 1400 GMT (0600 PDT) on the International Date Line, and is moving east to west. He should circumnavigate the globe in exactly 24 hours, reaching the IDL again at 1400 GMT tomorrow.
He's travelling incrementally in 5 degree bands of longitude, traversing alternately up and down the bands, hitting a city every 10 seconds and dropping a present. 10 secs in 24 hours is 8,640 places, and it seems like each of them is one of the 8,640 most populous cities on earth. The KMZ file keeps track of the last 50 he visited. If it seems a little jumpy, it's because the order he hits cities in have been ranked by population and latitude.
(Additionally, each of those cities is pre-populated with up to 20 of the nearest most populous cities.)
Just my guess, though.
Anyone have any ideas on how this could be improved?
If you even glance at UN/CEFACT's Mandate, it reads like a mission statement for GNU/Linux. Words like "inclusive", "help", and "free" (as in trade) won't inspire confidence up in Redmond.
So many stories, so little time...
on
The Zenith Angle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...But if Charlie Stross makes the time to write a review for us (and if Cory Doctorow takes the time to chip in) I think it's deserving of a little less cynicism on our behalf. (While Stross (and Doctorow, perhaps) *might* have received some kind of reimbursment for writing the dustjacket blurb, I think it's safe to assume he is/they are not working on a sales commission...)
The comparison being made between Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson are interesting to me.
I agree with those who don't rate The Difference Engine very highly. It's clear to me that both Stephenson and Sterling are deeply interested in the social history of technology, but their partnership on this novel didn't work (for me) because while the book was bulging with details and ideas, there was no story. A lot of detail, a lot of people and places, but nothing resembling a plot, character development, thesis, or anything else that keeps me turning the pages until the end. In my imagined reality I see the two of them furiously exhanging emails and drafts, the signal inexorably swamped by the noise of two people who have a lot to say, but who can't agree on a way to say it.
I don't agree with those who follow the "if you like X you'll love Y" formula with Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson. But... if I could assemble an author with Sterling's understanding of our world, Stephenson's interest in how we got here, and Gibson's talent for metaphor and wordplay, *then* we'd have a novelist who would either change the world or cause it to implode.
It's ironic that the usual opt-out clause for American universities who don't want to participate in morally bankrupt government research is that they wish to protect their academic staff's right to publish freely. (Which is intself an important concern, but still... they're shutting themselves out from multi-million dollar contracts on the basis of ethics, which should be applauded.)
Berkeley, for instance, maintains very strict standards about the kind of research it will and won't get involved in.
How odd to see so many posts from the/. community railing against what is clearly a prototype technology.
Yes, ebooks are sucky. Yes, the nicest fonts on the most optically undemanding monitors are still no substitute for the feel of the dead-tree edition in our hands. But isn't this just a thinly disguised cousin to the decades-old analogue/digital debate? Am I the only one who is sick of vinyl die-hards and their "CDs have no warmth" rhetoric?
The current problems with ebooks, as Cory Doctorow says, is the ever-present spectre of DRM.
"I believe that the electronic publishing models that have been tried -- especially those that rely on restricting readers' freedom with "Digital Rights Management" software -- are dead ends. There are lots of ways that electronic texts are inferior to paper (every discussion of "e-books" has to involve at least one paen to the smell of old books and another to the wonder of reading a book in the tub), but there are also lots of ways in which they are superior. You can carry a lot of them around in a small device. You can back them up. You can email them to friends. You can convert them to your favorite file-formats, you can search them, you can copy-and-paste them. When we turn to use-restriction technology, we foreclose the possibilities that make electronic text superior to printed text." (source)
Ebooks, once sites like this one go the way of napster et alia, will become as common as MP3.
"Demand for e-books has been growing quickly, but remains relatively tiny. According to the Open eBook Forum, a trade organization, e-book sales totaled about $5 million in the first half of 2003, compared to $3.8 million in the first half of 2002.
"One bookseller dropping out will have no impact on Random House's commitment to e-books," said Random House Inc. spokesman Stuart Appelbaum.
Open eBook Forum executive director Nick Bogaty said he has no individual corporate statistics, but believes Barnes & Noble.com had just a small percentage of sales. Palm Digital Media, OverDrive, Inc., and Amazon.com are among the leading e-book competitors, Bogaty says.
Barnes & Noble.com had been quite active in the market, even starting its own digital imprint in 2001 and releasing an original work by Dean Koontz.
"We all believe there is a future for e-books," Goldman said. "It's just not here yet."
It is ironic that the top echelon of recording artists could not exist without an industry to support them. Strip away the managers and agents, stylists and coaches, from someone like Justin Timberlake and ask is it possible that he could still make a living from music? Probably not. Ani di Franco, on the other hand, has been making a comfortable income for years without the support of the business she's supposed to be in.
As Douglas Adams pointed out, many companies aren't in the business you think they're in. Fox News is, despite a million conspiracy theories to the contrary, simply in the business of delivering an audience to its advertisers. The ethics and actions of the "Big 5" corporations who control 90% of record sales make rather more sense if they are viewed, not as separate companies, but as one distributed bank.
As anyone with any experience of dealing with banks will know, they are monolithically slow to react to changes in the environment, and are populated with highly intelligent, but narrow-minded, solipsists. They're doing now what every one of us was warning them that they should be doing the instant MP3 was rolled out.
By way of related tangent, here is an article by Steve Albini about his experiences with one of the majors, and his advice to anyone thinking of getting involved. At the bottom of the page is a detailed breakdown of a typical deal in which the "industry" made $973,000 and each of the four band members made $4,031.25.
When the entire system is that fucked, the price of a CD is moot.
Slashdot Mirror
24 hours * 60 minutes = 1400 per hour
1400 * 6 = 8640 per 10 sec interval
I've done some analysis, and I think I know what is happening.
He started at 1400 GMT (0600 PDT) on the International Date Line, and is moving east to west. He should circumnavigate the globe in exactly 24 hours, reaching the IDL again at 1400 GMT tomorrow.
He's travelling incrementally in 5 degree bands of longitude, traversing alternately up and down the bands, hitting a city every 10 seconds and dropping a present. 10 secs in 24 hours is 8,640 places, and it seems like each of them is one of the 8,640 most populous cities on earth. The KMZ file keeps track of the last 50 he visited. If it seems a little jumpy, it's because the order he hits cities in have been ranked by population and latitude.
(Additionally, each of those cities is pre-populated with up to 20 of the nearest most populous cities.)
Just my guess, though.
Anyone have any ideas on how this could be improved?
We're working on it.
No, Google Earth is not in competition with MSN Virtual Earth. That's the dumbest thing I've heard for a while.
MSN VE is clearly positioned to be a compeititor with Google Maps. A blind man on a galloping horse can see that.
While they're putting out the fire in whatever server they were running, you can read this,a 27-page Wired article from 1995.
Also check this, that, and the other.
So if they have all those UNIX servers, why aren't we getting ogg vorbis streams of their content?
Because they're working on this.
+5 insightful, surely. He called me "fart knocking", fer crissakes.
Bad form to reply to my own post, but some more useful links here:
Windows torrent and executable.
Linux torrents for installer and tarball.
This *has* to be some kind of record.
If you even glance at UN/CEFACT's Mandate, it reads like a mission statement for GNU/Linux. Words like "inclusive", "help", and "free" (as in trade) won't inspire confidence up in Redmond.
...But if Charlie Stross makes the time to write a review for us (and if Cory Doctorow takes the time to chip in) I think it's deserving of a little less cynicism on our behalf. (While Stross (and Doctorow, perhaps) *might* have received some kind of reimbursment for writing the dustjacket blurb, I think it's safe to assume he is/they are not working on a sales commission...)
The comparison being made between Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson are interesting to me.
I agree with those who don't rate The Difference Engine very highly. It's clear to me that both Stephenson and Sterling are deeply interested in the social history of technology, but their partnership on this novel didn't work (for me) because while the book was bulging with details and ideas, there was no story. A lot of detail, a lot of people and places, but nothing resembling a plot, character development, thesis, or anything else that keeps me turning the pages until the end. In my imagined reality I see the two of them furiously exhanging emails and drafts, the signal inexorably swamped by the noise of two people who have a lot to say, but who can't agree on a way to say it.
I don't agree with those who follow the "if you like X you'll love Y" formula with Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson. But... if I could assemble an author with Sterling's understanding of our world, Stephenson's interest in how we got here, and Gibson's talent for metaphor and wordplay, *then* we'd have a novelist who would either change the world or cause it to implode.
It's ironic that the usual opt-out clause for American universities who don't want to participate in morally bankrupt government research is that they wish to protect their academic staff's right to publish freely. (Which is intself an important concern, but still... they're shutting themselves out from multi-million dollar contracts on the basis of ethics, which should be applauded.)
Berkeley, for instance, maintains very strict standards about the kind of research it will and won't get involved in.
How odd to see so many posts from the /. community railing against what is clearly a prototype technology.
Yes, ebooks are sucky. Yes, the nicest fonts on the most optically undemanding monitors are still no substitute for the feel of the dead-tree edition in our hands. But isn't this just a thinly disguised cousin to the decades-old analogue/digital debate? Am I the only one who is sick of vinyl die-hards and their "CDs have no warmth" rhetoric?
The current problems with ebooks, as Cory Doctorow says, is the ever-present spectre of DRM.
"I believe that the electronic publishing models that have been tried -- especially those that rely on restricting readers' freedom with "Digital Rights Management" software -- are dead ends. There are lots of ways that electronic texts are inferior to paper (every discussion of "e-books" has to involve at least one paen to the smell of old books and another to the wonder of reading a book in the tub), but there are also lots of ways in which they are superior. You can carry a lot of them around in a small device. You can back them up. You can email them to friends. You can convert them to your favorite file-formats, you can search them, you can copy-and-paste them. When we turn to use-restriction technology, we foreclose the possibilities that make electronic text superior to printed text." (source)
Ebooks, once sites like this one go the way of napster et alia, will become as common as MP3.Some journalistic follow-ups from this article:
"Demand for e-books has been growing quickly, but remains relatively tiny. According to the Open eBook Forum, a trade organization, e-book sales totaled about $5 million in the first half of 2003, compared to $3.8 million in the first half of 2002.
"One bookseller dropping out will have no impact on Random House's commitment to e-books," said Random House Inc. spokesman Stuart Appelbaum.
Open eBook Forum executive director Nick Bogaty said he has no individual corporate statistics, but believes Barnes & Noble.com had just a small percentage of sales. Palm Digital Media, OverDrive, Inc., and Amazon.com are among the leading e-book competitors, Bogaty says.
Barnes & Noble.com had been quite active in the market, even starting its own digital imprint in 2001 and releasing an original work by Dean Koontz.
"We all believe there is a future for e-books," Goldman said. "It's just not here yet."
It is ironic that the top echelon of recording artists could not exist without an industry to support them. Strip away the managers and agents, stylists and coaches, from someone like Justin Timberlake and ask is it possible that he could still make a living from music? Probably not. Ani di Franco, on the other hand, has been making a comfortable income for years without the support of the business she's supposed to be in.
As Douglas Adams pointed out, many companies aren't in the business you think they're in. Fox News is, despite a million conspiracy theories to the contrary, simply in the business of delivering an audience to its advertisers. The ethics and actions of the "Big 5" corporations who control 90% of record sales make rather more sense if they are viewed, not as separate companies, but as one distributed bank.
As anyone with any experience of dealing with banks will know, they are monolithically slow to react to changes in the environment, and are populated with highly intelligent, but narrow-minded, solipsists. They're doing now what every one of us was warning them that they should be doing the instant MP3 was rolled out.
By way of related tangent, here is an article by Steve Albini about his experiences with one of the majors, and his advice to anyone thinking of getting involved. At the bottom of the page is a detailed breakdown of a typical deal in which the "industry" made $973,000 and each of the four band members made $4,031.25.
When the entire system is that fucked, the price of a CD is moot.