Seems like that, no matter how good the encryption they provide is (and it probably will be pretty lame anyway), people will just do what they're doing now with DVDs. Take a perfectly legal playback, then do a high-res screen capture and then re-encode it using a better codec than the original. Then, they can join their 3l33t friends on #pr0n-m0vieZ-wAreZ-fbi-go-home and trade tiny ASF files that are at least as good as VHS.
I'm still a believer in the "drug dealers don't sell aspirin" argument, I just think that Miramax is going to really have to make the pay-per-view fee really small...
Yeah, I see your point. Ideally, it should return a list of responses, which could be marked "commerical but user friendly" or "very technical" as appropriate. Let users make their own choices about what type of information they receive.
Re:AskGneeves (no joke) -found the original RFC
on
AskJeeves Interview
·
· Score: 4
On my way home today, I had a brainstorm that I want to share with the/. community. It's an idea for an open-source web project similar to the Open Directory Project. The idea would be to provide search functionality similar to that offered by "Ask Jeeves" - users input english-language questions and then get back a list of potential resources that they could use to find the answer.
The problems with Ask Jeeves are two-fold:
1) They only have a few paid editors who try and compile the list of questions and answers 2) They in general only provide a single link to a question that they already know the answer to. Big companies provide big money to make sure that their resource is listed first/exclusively and these big sites are not always the best sources of information. For instance the questions "Where can I buy an Ethernet cable" should take you to a site like Pricewatch and not to CompUSA in order to get the best deal.
The Open-source community can solve this problem easily. We allow anyone who wants to to submit question-and-answer pairs, and then we allow end-users to vote (or should we call it moderate?) on which answers are best suited to each question. Thus, the system grows as a result of its users activity, and is not really subject to editorial control. Even less editorial control that Slashdot, believe it or not.
So, here's my question. I am currently too busy with other projects (although one of them such as enzyme.sourceforge.net, the engine that backs Catalyst Recruiting has a lot of related code) to really speahead and maintain this project. I have, however, purchased the domain names that will be necessary to make it work: askgneeves.com (this time the N is silent). Anyone out there interested in working on it? Anyone think it's even a good idea? Is someone already doing this? I think that pretty soon we could have an open-source product that would be useful to 90% of the clueless users out there.
I posted a somewhat lengthy related piece to AskSlashdot (which has yet to be either accepted OR rejected) about an idea i had called "Ask Gneeves" which would be an open-source alternative to Ask Jeeves. Unfortunately, I have lost the text, so that the copy lingering in the/. limbo is the only one that exists.
But here's the long and short of it. Using software that I developed for my current project (Catalyst Recruiting, see my sig), I thought it would be pretty easy to beat Ask Jeeves by creating a user-friendly but 100% open source alternative to Ask Jeeves. The idea would be to borrow a/.-like moderation system along with some kind of open-source language parser AND the resources of the Open Directory Project to create the ultimate user-friendly search engine.
I'll try and find the original text. In the interim I have thrown together a very preliminary sketch of code that I is available at http://www.gneeves.org
Let me know if there is interest in pursuing this...
For my site, we use content "templates" in PHP. Ours is a bit more complicated because we are database-backed, but the concept is the same. I just teach our designers to use a syntax like this:
<? $this->show( "foo" ) ?>
which gets include()ed in the context of an object that holds data associated with "foo."
For your application, if you don't want to go with an OO design (which you should, IMHO), you could just do this. Define a variable like $lang which can be one of "en", "de", "fr" and then every time you have language-dependant content, just do:
<? include( "foo-$lang.ihtml" ) ?>
Just make sure every PHP file shares a common header that sets $lang appropriately. To do this the even easier way, just make that part of your auto-prepend setting in php3.ini.
(If anyone is interested, we're thinking of open-sourcing the code for our site, which would make this OOD template system available for all db-backed sites. Let me know if this is something that there is an actual need for in the PHP world.)
Plenty of people are complaining about people distributing this kind of stuff via email. I agree, it sucks. but what is a better grassroots, universally accessible kind of way to share? Something like ICQ is pretty good, but not everyone uses it. Web has the problem that 1) not everyone has/can use a web page and 2) servers get overloaded (like when they get/.ed).
Our web site is targeted to a "general" audience, namely college students and recent grads looking for jobs. Although we don't target men over women, we have found that roughly 75% of our users are male. Anyone have suggestions for evening this out? If it's true that 60% of web users are women, where are they?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Nullsoft's SHOUTcast accomplish this? I even think the source is available, but this may be over now that they are owned by AOL. At the very least, I know that there are UN*X versions out there.
Could someone who knows way more than me explain what the difference between "dry" copper and the existing structure of a line between me and the phone company. What exactly makes the line between me, and say, my friend's house unsuitable for DSL?
Sorry for the basic question, but I have DSL in my house and still don't quite get it... Is this similar to the various "home network over your existing phone line" offerings?
Didn't see this anywhere, but any news on support for PPPoE. Lot's of crummy DSL providers are rushing to support this without giving it much thought. I know there are open-source projects working on it. Any word on kernel integration?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
your mission, should you choose to accept it...
on
Gnutella v.56 Out?
·
· Score: 1
Is to continue development of this 3l33t program. The source will self-destruct in five seconds.
Reminds me of an experience I had with RoleMaster a few years back. I was an admin for a MUD called "Darkpowers" which was based on the RoleMaster system. It was quite elaborate, written by a lot of player-coders like myself. I called up RM to ask if they were interested in sponsoring us officially - their response was to send us a threatening note about lawyers, licenses, etc.
My experience as a student is that there is the same crazy competitive market at the very high end for the (perceived) best students. However, there are a huge number of students, both IT and otherwise, who feel a bit left out of the cold by the whole process.
It's not really clear to me what's new with this OGL business. One of the great things about the old RPG games (of course D&D but did anyone else get a kick out of Rifts?) was that you were essentially free to modify them to your heart's content. This wasn't like Magic the Gathering where the company could just release a new +232 Sword of Crushing card and you'd have to run out and buy it lest you start losing every game. RPGs are fueled by imaginitive interpretations of the rules by a group of friends.
One thing I think is a similarity, though, is that RPGs are another situation where people don't _have_ to follow the rules and support the companies in question, but they do. Technically, you could just photocopy your friend's PHB, but who does that? Technically you could just make up 100% of your own rules and not buy any books at all, but most people don't. Just like OSS, people support the company because they like the product, not because some wacky EULA says they have to.
Anyway, anyone actually get what's new about the OGL?
Using open-source products is good government. In fact, I think it helps to mollify one of the real problems of most modern states.
usually, when the government spends money on a project, only one group in the population benefits. Although this is often a large group, there are almost always some people who are left out.
But with OSS, when the government works on a special program designed for one group, the whole community benefits, because the whole community gets free source. And more, since in the course of the project it's highly likely that the government-employed programmers will contribute patches, code, ideas, etc. to other projects.
So, not only is OSS good for government, it also constitutes good government.
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
finding a job at Linux (or other) startup
on
Finding a Linux Job
·
· Score: 3
I've deliberately waited before posting this message for fear that a lot of people might consider it spam. I get enough hassle for having a commercial tagline that if you are likely to be offended, just skip the message, ok?
Two summers ago, I tried to find a job at a startup company. My resume is pretty good, at the time I had done a lot of work on Java, had been published in books on Java, etc etc. I had worked at Microsoft. I figured my chances were pretty good.
But, to my tremendous surprise, none of the resources that I had at my disposal resulted in any really strong leads. I emailed my resume around, I posted on HotJobs, Monster, etc. all the big sites. I did a lot of searches for open job postings. And although I got a few offers, it was an awful lot of work.
So, a friend of mine and I started our own company, which we called Catalyst Recruiting. It's designed to help students and recent graduates who are smart and have a high skill level get connected with startup companies. We've been in business since last August, and have a web site built 100% from free and open-source components. I designed most of the technology, and I think it's pretty revolutionary relative to what's out there for recruiting today. We even plan to open-source the software (check out enzyme.sourceforge.net)
But enough about me. I think that we are a great resource for/. folks to check out and maybe land a great job. Of particular interest is that we just signed up Transmeta to use our service. Thought maybe that would be useful.
Anyway, that's my spiel, hope you didn't read it if you're not interested. If you are interested, there's a link in my sig. We don't spend a lot of money on advertising (except for our sponsorship of The Onion), so I try and get the word out any time I have a chance and a sympathetic audience.
Thanks,
Eric
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
hey, that's cool. do you find that you are able to input information faster or at least as fast as you can with a keyboard, or does the write-look-correct cycle take longer on Newton?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
An Internet old-timer (he was in his *gasp* 50s) once told me that computer industry trade shows were good for only one thing: forcing companies to release products on time. Given the OSS idea of releasing early and often, do Linux trade shows serve this same purpose?
I have never been to one, so I'm a bit curious...
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
"For example the upper left corner of the trackpad could be linked to a menu in an open application, allowing for easier navigation, while the right corner could for be used to launch a Script. "
Not sure if this is just the writer speculating, but I've already got this feature on my Dell laptop. Not only does it have hot spots, but you can use the sides of the trackpad to scroll windows. Hope Apple has more grandiose plans than that...
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
I spent a summer working on the Newton way back when that was still a real platform. The group I was working with at SAIC had a little challenge, which was to get the device to recognize the handwritten phrase "Four score and seven years ago." After about 2 months of "Flour snakes bend kevlar coors" I finally got it to work.
I'm sure they've done a lot of work on the handwriting heuristic, but it was the generally clunky nature of having to wait for the device to process each word that eventually led to the development of Graffiti, which of course is now so popular on PalmOS.
Unless they've had a really dramatic breakthrough, this technology is not really good for data entry, period. However, I think that it's _real_ utility could be in applications like digital signature recognition. Imagine that instead of having to remember you secret PGP key you just sign on your trackpad.... That would be cool.
Anyone know what kinds of apps they've got planned?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like that, no matter how good the encryption they provide is (and it probably will be pretty lame anyway), people will just do what they're doing now with DVDs. Take a perfectly legal playback, then do a high-res screen capture and then re-encode it using a better codec than the original. Then, they can join their 3l33t friends on #pr0n-m0vieZ-wAreZ-fbi-go-home and trade tiny ASF files that are at least as good as VHS.
I'm still a believer in the "drug dealers don't sell aspirin" argument, I just think that Miramax is going to really have to make the pay-per-view fee really small...
Any new wiz-bang features released here? Any more huge packages lumped on?
Yeah, I see your point. Ideally, it should return a list of responses, which could be marked "commerical but user friendly" or "very technical" as appropriate. Let users make their own choices about what type of information they receive.
The problems with Ask Jeeves are two-fold:
1) They only have a few paid editors who try and compile the list of questions and answers
2) They in general only provide a single link to a question that they already know the answer to. Big companies provide big money to make sure that their resource is listed first/exclusively and these big sites are not always the best sources of information. For instance the questions "Where can I buy an Ethernet cable" should take you to a site like Pricewatch and not to CompUSA in order to get the best deal.
The Open-source community can solve this problem easily. We allow anyone who wants to to submit question-and-answer pairs, and then we allow end-users to vote (or should we call it moderate?) on which answers are best suited to each question. Thus, the system grows as a result of its users activity, and is not really subject to editorial control. Even less editorial control that Slashdot, believe it or not.
So, here's my question. I am currently too busy with other projects (although one of them such as enzyme.sourceforge.net, the engine that backs Catalyst Recruiting has a lot of related code) to really speahead and maintain this project. I have, however, purchased the domain names that will be necessary to make it work: askgneeves.com (this time the N is silent). Anyone out there interested in working on it? Anyone think it's even a good idea? Is someone already doing this? I think that pretty soon we could have an open-source product that would be useful to 90% of the clueless users out there.
I posted a somewhat lengthy related piece to AskSlashdot (which has yet to be either accepted OR rejected) about an idea i had called "Ask Gneeves" which would be an open-source alternative to Ask Jeeves. Unfortunately, I have lost the text, so that the copy lingering in the /. limbo is the only one that exists.
/.-like moderation system along with some kind of open-source language parser AND the resources of the Open Directory Project to create the ultimate user-friendly search engine.
But here's the long and short of it. Using software that I developed for my current project (Catalyst Recruiting, see my sig), I thought it would be pretty easy to beat Ask Jeeves by creating a user-friendly but 100% open source alternative to Ask Jeeves. The idea would be to borrow a
I'll try and find the original text. In the interim I have thrown together a very preliminary sketch of code that I is available at http://www.gneeves.org
Let me know if there is interest in pursuing this...
Eric
A lot of internet companies are basically doing this already - paying customers to look at ads. My personal favorite is jackpot.com.
Better yet, have it be something like:
// do nothing ?> // still do nothing ?>
<?
welcome to my site
<?
since PHP does not require the <? tags, and include()ed files get printed out by default (one of PHP's strongest features, imho)
For my site, we use content "templates" in PHP. Ours is a bit more complicated because we are database-backed, but the concept is the same. I just teach our designers to use a syntax like this:
<? $this->show( "foo" ) ?>
which gets include()ed in the context of an object that holds data associated with "foo."
For your application, if you don't want to go with an OO design (which you should, IMHO), you could just do this. Define a variable like $lang which can be one of "en", "de", "fr" and then every time you have language-dependant content, just do:
<? include( "foo-$lang.ihtml" ) ?>
Just make sure every PHP file shares a common header that sets $lang appropriately. To do this the even easier way, just make that part of your auto-prepend setting in php3.ini.
(If anyone is interested, we're thinking of open-sourcing the code for our site, which would make this OOD template system available for all db-backed sites. Let me know if this is something that there is an actual need for in the PHP world.)
Plenty of people are complaining about people distributing this kind of stuff via email. I agree, it sucks. but what is a better grassroots, universally accessible kind of way to share? Something like ICQ is pretty good, but not everyone uses it. Web has the problem that 1) not everyone has/can use a web page and 2) servers get overloaded (like when they get /.ed).
Any ideas?
Our web site is targeted to a "general" audience, namely college students and recent grads looking for jobs. Although we don't target men over women, we have found that roughly 75% of our users are male. Anyone have suggestions for evening this out? If it's true that 60% of web users are women, where are they?
Want to work at Transmeta? AT&T? - Catalyst Recruiting
Sorry for the basic question, but I have DSL in my house and still don't quite get it... Is this similar to the various "home network over your existing phone line" offerings?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
The Sku11s . Only an 3l33t f3w are invited to join...
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Pretty sad.
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Anyone have similar/different experiences?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
One thing I think is a similarity, though, is that RPGs are another situation where people don't _have_ to follow the rules and support the companies in question, but they do. Technically, you could just photocopy your friend's PHB, but who does that? Technically you could just make up 100% of your own rules and not buy any books at all, but most people don't. Just like OSS, people support the company because they like the product, not because some wacky EULA says they have to.
Anyway, anyone actually get what's new about the OGL?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
usually, when the government spends money on a project, only one group in the population benefits. Although this is often a large group, there are almost always some people who are left out.
But with OSS, when the government works on a special program designed for one group, the whole community benefits, because the whole community gets free source. And more, since in the course of the project it's highly likely that the government-employed programmers will contribute patches, code, ideas, etc. to other projects.
So, not only is OSS good for government, it also constitutes good government.
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Two summers ago, I tried to find a job at a startup company. My resume is pretty good, at the time I had done a lot of work on Java, had been published in books on Java, etc etc. I had worked at Microsoft. I figured my chances were pretty good.
But, to my tremendous surprise, none of the resources that I had at my disposal resulted in any really strong leads. I emailed my resume around, I posted on HotJobs, Monster, etc. all the big sites. I did a lot of searches for open job postings. And although I got a few offers, it was an awful lot of work.
So, a friend of mine and I started our own company, which we called Catalyst Recruiting. It's designed to help students and recent graduates who are smart and have a high skill level get connected with startup companies. We've been in business since last August, and have a web site built 100% from free and open-source components. I designed most of the technology, and I think it's pretty revolutionary relative to what's out there for recruiting today. We even plan to open-source the software (check out enzyme.sourceforge.net)
But enough about me. I think that we are a great resource for
Anyway, that's my spiel, hope you didn't read it if you're not interested. If you are interested, there's a link in my sig. We don't spend a lot of money on advertising (except for our sponsorship of The Onion), so I try and get the word out any time I have a chance and a sympathetic audience.
Thanks,
Eric
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
I have never been to one, so I'm a bit curious...
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
Not sure if this is just the writer speculating, but I've already got this feature on my Dell laptop. Not only does it have hot spots, but you can use the sides of the trackpad to scroll windows. Hope Apple has more grandiose plans than that...
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?
I'm sure they've done a lot of work on the handwriting heuristic, but it was the generally clunky nature of having to wait for the device to process each word that eventually led to the development of Graffiti, which of course is now so popular on PalmOS.
Unless they've had a really dramatic breakthrough, this technology is not really good for data entry, period. However, I think that it's _real_ utility could be in applications like digital signature recognition. Imagine that instead of having to remember you secret PGP key you just sign on your trackpad.... That would be cool.
Anyone know what kinds of apps they've got planned?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? Priceline?