ThThere is another story about this event
here and also here. It looks to me like it was a lot of fun! Clearyly the event is lighthearted and has a sense of humor, especially regarding some of the prizes:
"Fifi" won the Best Bribes Award when two of her crew serenaded the judges on bended knee.
"The Valking Viscar Boot" was awarded the Worst Honorable Mention, for "half-baked theoretical 'engineering' which did not deter its Pilot from the challenge of the race"
"The Rat" won the Next-To-Last Award for coming in right near the end of the race.
I wish I'd known in advance, I only live about 45 minutes away and it would have been fun to watch.
SCO is really scrambling now to amend their suits, claims, and counterclaims and they are looking sillier and sillier. Still, there are enough "nervous nellies" in the I.T. world to allow SCO to continue to bluster and bully there way to a few more "license" bucks before the courts finally put an end to this nonsense. It's good to see the retailers to tell SCO to put it where the sun don't shine.
This is a very cool technology. This antenna essentially "disappears" when it is not being used, making it fairly "stealthy". And, while a traditional metal rod or dish antenna is "cut" to a specific or very narrow range of frequencies, it would appear that the gas plasma antenna can essentially reconfigure itself to rapidly change frequencies. As a ham radio operator, I can really appreciate how useful that could be.
I wish the article had indicated how secure the area was where the cards were stolen. Was it a matter of walking into a room and pulling the cards or did the vandals have to go to a great deal of trouble? I hope it wasn't easy...I'd hate to think that this could be done on a widespread basis with relative ease.
This quote sort of caught me off-guard as I imagine some customers might disagree:
Fleckenstein said that the outage was "not major," and not large enough to require a report to the Federal Communications Commission.
The beginning of the article states:
A handful of corporate customers were left without e-mail and Internet access Monday after the theft of networking equipment from a New York City office late Sunday.
So, I would guess that the "handful" of corporate customers who lost service probably felt it was major to them. I understand the notion that it was not major in the sense of being more widespread, I just think his comment could have been worded better.
Originally expected as long as a year ago, the technology--internally code-named Janus--has been seen as a potential way to let subscription music services such as Napster and RealNetworks' Rhapsody move to portable MP3 players. Those services, which allow subscribers to listen to unlimited amounts of music in return for a single monthly fee, are typically tied to PCs today.
But the new digital rights management tools also include features that would protect content that is streamed around a home network, or even block data pathways potentially deemed "unsafe," such as the traditional analog outputs on a high-definition TV set. That's a feature that has been sought by movie studios in advance of the move to digital television.
"This release of technology really enables all kinds of new scenarios that are emerging now," said Jason Reindorp, a group manager in Microsoft's Windows digital media unit. "We're taking quite a holistic view."
The software giant said that companies including AOL, Dell, Disney, Napster and Freescale, a subsidiary of Motorola, have agreed to adopt the new technology.
Microsoft is betting that the steady release of new content protection technology will help its audio and video formats become standard ways of distributing digital music and films, in turn, keeping people purchasing and using the Windows operating system and associated products.
The company has spent considerable time and money wooing record labels and movie studios over the past several years, hoping to see more content released online in its formats. To date, the majority of mainstream label- or Hollywood studio-authorized online services do use Microsoft's formats.
Nevertheless, Apple Computer's iTunes music store, which distributes music in its own rival proprietary copy-protected format, remains far more popular than any of the Microsoft-based services, controlling about 70 percent of paid music downloads.
Apple has wholly eschewed the monthly subscription model for its music store. But others services have looked to the predictable income as a better revenue source. They believe that ultimately consumers will prefer to fill their hard drives completely in return for a low monthly payment, instead of purchasing each song one by one.
Not yet in tune with consumers
However, even some of the most sympathetic subscription-model backers predict it will take a long time before consumers warm to subscriptions on their MP3 players.
"There's a lot of hype and talk about subscription downloads" for portables, said Sean Ryan, vice president of music services for RealNetworks, which operates the Rhapsody subscription service. "Our views on this are that it will be important in the long term, but it won't be in 2004."
RealNetworks uses Microsoft's audio format for the Rhapsody service, and so could theoretically take advantage of Janus. The company has not said it plans to license the technology, however.
The technology itself will likely take many more months to work through the often difficult process of being integrated into actual devices and chips. A long list of manufacturers, including Dell, Archos, Creative, Rio and iRiver have said they will support it.
But the services themselves may take just as long to emerge. The record industry is far from certain how to treat a service that allows consumers to fill up their 40-gigabyte MP3 players with music in one digital gulp. Labels worry that the model might simply siphon off the most active CD buyers.
"It would be very attractive if it expanded the market," one top record label executive said in a recent interview. "Anything that cannibalizes the market isn't as attractive. No one knows yet."
As a result, licensing negotiations are ongoing, executives said.
Along with chipmakers, device makers and music services, America Online and Disney both have indicated their support for the new digital rights management technology, further evidence that Microsoft's strategic alliances with both companies may be bearing fruit. Neither gave details on how they planned to use the new release, however.
After a hard day of handling Dell's support calls or writing code for a Fortune 500 firm, the ever- intrepid worker from India troops home to click on overseas (read:American) ads for just a few more bucks before heading off to bed...
The fact that he has done this before (probably not him so much as whomever gets delegated these tasks) shows that he either doesn't care or he considers the fines a reasonable cost of doing business. When you get your ownership up to 10% of a company you have to report it - that's not exactly an obscure requirement. But, Bill and Company got slapped for that as well a few years back according to the article:
The Federal Trade Commission said it had warned Gates about a similar reporting infraction when his personal investment trust bought shares of Republic Services Corp. (RSG: Research, Estimates) in November 2001. The acquisition brought his stake to more than 10 percent of the outstanding shares of the waste-hauling company.
Antitrust rules require that entities must file with the government when their holdings exceed 10 percent of a company's stock.
.
Anyway, when you are worth $40 billion you can afford these "luxuries."
I'm a single dad of two boys, aged 10 and 13. I pay for all of their Windows,PS2, and XBox games. I think that the titles cost way too much and I wonder if they really need to cost that much to recover R&D. Maybe they do. I don't know. I have thought about pirating some of the software that they want but I haven't done it yet. Hell, I haven't even backed up the $50 CDs that the damned games come on but I probably should even though I am told on the licensing agreement that I may not do so. I guess the bottom line is this, at some point I will have spent enough and I might just pirate some games - or not. I have this incredible ambient level of guilt (thanks to my Catholicism maybe?) that keeps me from doing it thus far. But, I digress - I think a lot of pirating is directly related to price.
Happy Trails!
Erick
Credit and collections
on
Robosaurus
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Imagine this thing showing up at your home to inquire about that overdue balance on your Visa card that we have been trying to contact you about.....
I don't quite understand how they are going to do that - it seems like a massive undertaking. Are they going to go through a tape library and only delete messages that the user deleted or are they going to delete archived messages periodically anyway. It seems like a massive task to selectively delete messages (from possibly billions?) from a massive tape library. Anyway, I think their intent is to make sure that messages are not saved forever:
Is it possible to delete messages, or does everything continue to reside in AllMail?
Oh, no, no, that was just poor wording on our part. It's just that we make a variety of backups, and we can't guarantee instantaneous deletion. Stuff that's on tapes, and those are offline--we eventually delete it, but we can't guarantee an instantaneous deletion.
The question would be whether or not somebody could feel confident that if they wanted to delete something that it would eventually be deleted.
I think Day Traders (I do some) will have a ball with a Google stock. Like a lot of IPO's it will most likely skyrocket making it an almost ideal "short play" as it will either have to correct or it will simply come back down because it overshoots what most people will be willing to pay. Then, you can buy it and hold it for a few minutes or an hour while it corrects slightly back up.
This is a stock that will not only have some intrinsinc value, it will have huge psychological value and will be a very "sexy" stock initially. A ton of money will be made and lost the first week that this stock goes on the market (if it does, of course). The day traders will probably have a blast playing the see-saw movements. People who buy the first day and hold for the long term are likely, *in my opinion*, lose money.
I love the idea of the eBlocks - not only for the applications shown within the website, but also as a teaching tool. I learned basic electronics as I worked my way up the ladder of Amateur Radio licenses. I would love to use something like the eBlocks to teach my two young sons electronics. I have bought just about every "learning/educational" electronics kit on the market but none of them are quite like the eBlocks. I sent off an email to the folks doing this work to see how they plan to develop this further - sell/market/distribute, etc. I think this is a great project and I hope it is successful. The web site does a great job explaining the concepts and there are some excellent pictures embedded here and there. The simulator is pretty good as well.
What can you say about adware infestations other than they can be prevented by using products such as AdAware, SpyBot, AdWatch (always running but it's not free), and other products that are free or at a nominal cost. I do disagree with this statement (sidebar in article) as I have seen PC's brought to a crawl by the adware that was using up most of their available RAM:
While most spyware is adware-related and relatively benign, it's disturbing that over 300,000 of the more serious system monitors and Trojans were uncovered
I don't think most adware is benign since it eats into available RAM. Some adware also affects application performance, or, worse yet, prevents applications from running.
Anyway, I am, again, preaching to the choir.....
..it's the only sport I followed and it was my favorite sport as a child. It's true that it is a sport that creates a statistic for every possible activity. I think that it gives the announcers something to talk about between pitches, which can be interminable in some games. It also makes for great baseball card collecting. For a game that seems to move only in fits and starts there is an amazing amount of strategy. I love watching someone who doesn't know much about the game watch a manager purposely load the bases so that there can be an "out" at any plate. It seems crazy to folks who don't follow the game. Or, how about the "infield fly rule?" What other sport could have a rule as seemingly convoluted as that?
I am not so surprised that a virus writer would go after P2P networks. There are so many viruses there anyway...why not just go after the whole enchilada? And, of course, spreading a virus must be easy with so many unprotected machines out there.
Anyway, I know this sounds painfully obvious, but why don't folks take the simple step of running an antivirus program? I have McAfee VirusScan and I also have AdWatch running full time. Between the two, I feel fairly well protected from viruses and adware/spyware.
And then you have folks that click on just about any attachment - from the article:
The experts advised people not to click on strange attachments in e-mail, which can activate the worm, and to update their antivirus software frequently to ward off new threats.
I have an agreement with family and friends to embedd a codeword in any document that contains a file attachment. It is usually a fairly esoteric work not likely to come up in casual conversation. However, I have damn near been fooled by a few emails because they seemd very legitimate. Oh, well.
Anyway, I am preaching to the choir....and ranting a bit.
They are pretty nice looking cases. However, the range in price from $250 to $600 so they are quite pricey. You can buy them from them via eBay,Here's the inexpensive one, or via online retailers. I don't think they are so nice that I would pay that much, though. But, if you wanted your computer to match the decor in your oh-so-very-expensive-and-professionally-decorated office, then it might be worthwhile.
This is mostly about consolidating control of not only the data center but the desktop within corporations. LINUX is making a lot of headway - probably faster than Sun & Microsoft ever imagined. Even retailers such as Sams Club has rolled out desktops with LINUX in order to provide low-priced pc's. I think this part of the article sums it up:
When Mr Ballmer gives Mr McNealy a hug and says that "we do both believe in intellectual property", this is a not-so-veiled jab at the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic. Microsoft and Sun happen to be the only major backers (in the form of licence payments) of Linux's gadfly, a firm called SCO, which is trying to obtain money from Linux users with threats of litigation.
The article also points out that LINUX hurts Sun more than Microsoft:
Linux, however, is hurting Sun far more than Microsoft. Solaris is similar to Linux, which makes it very easy for customers to switch from one to the other. Migrating from Windows to Linux is a much more fiddly process.
I think Microsoft is particularly wiley here. They make nice with Sun knowing that Sun will probably become marginalized as a result of the growth of LINUX and not end up being much of a competitor at all. I am not faulting Microsoft for this, but, you gotta believe that they believe, in their heart-of-hearts (do they have those?) that they will eventually own the whole pie. This sure is fun to watch.....
This is a very exciting project to watch. Clearly Rutan and company are not entirely doing this for the money as they have easily spent more than the $10M prize already. They must be pretty serious as they have applied for DOT/FAA permits, according to the article:
Just yesterday, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced it had issued the world's first license for a sub-orbital manned rocket flight.
The license was issued April 1 by the DOT's Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to Scaled Composites. This federal paperwork green-lighted a sequence of sub-orbital flights by Scaled Composites for a one-year period.
The license to Scaled Composites is the first to authorize piloted flight on a sub-orbital trajectory, the DOT statement noted.
I hope we are able to witness this "...piloted flight on a sub-orbital trajector.."this year!
I think that P2P probably has had an effect on sales though not as great an effect as the price of CD's. Before P2P I bought music, I copied friend's music, and I recorded music broadcast over FM radio stations. I still buy music (I belong to one of the music clubs and even with shipping, I still only pay about $8 or so per CD), I also copy music from Kazaa. I copy some music that I have owned and I copy some music I do not own. Recently, after "pirating" a bunch of Norah Jones songs, I bought her CD. I think that happens a lot - people download music and then buy. There has always been a way to pirate music though it was usually borrowing music and re-recording it. I still wonder if a lower price for CD's would increase sales enuf that the artists and recording labels would be profitable because the decreased price would be more than made up for in increased sales.Is it also possible that the quality of music is not as great as in the past or that a lot of music is "more of the same?"
We have tried LINUX here at home with our wireless network and it has been a giant on-again/off-again struggle. Considering the rapid growth of wireless networks, I hope LINUX addresses this soon.
Taxpayers only have to pay the minimum tax with which they can get away. At the same time, the IRS and other taxing agencies are trying to find those who are illegally paying too little or not at all. That seems fair, I suppose. This part of the article sorts of sums it up:
"We're asking people to pay their taxes that are legitimately due," he said. "And if we don't have people pay the taxes that are due, then we have to ask the people that are stepping forward to pay more. And that's not fair."
On the other hand, I think these data repositories and the data mining technology that fill these massive databases are obviously digging up unrelated but interesting data and *that* can lead to abuse and I think it will lead to abuse.
At some point the government and the populace has to determine the risk/reward values of filling the tax coffers against the potentially huge violation of peoples rights to privacy. For now, I think the gov't is moving ahead with initiatives with which I do not think the majority of the population would endorse.
I like the idea of a car that can intervene to prevent an accident. The lane changing technology mentioned in the article sounds great. I wonder, though, if you are already doing an emergency maneuver that makes it look like you are unsafely changing lanes, would the car put you back into the lane? Possibly in harms way? Perhaps there is a way to override some of these systems. In terms of fully automatic driving, the world is such a complex place and a lot of decisions seem like they would exceed what software can (at leastly currently) provide. However, in terms of safety, I can see where this technology can save lives.
Slashdot Mirror
"Fifi" won the Best Bribes Award when two of her crew serenaded the judges on bended knee.
"The Valking Viscar Boot" was awarded the Worst Honorable Mention, for "half-baked theoretical 'engineering' which did not deter its Pilot from the challenge of the race"
"The Rat" won the Next-To-Last Award for coming in right near the end of the race.
I wish I'd known in advance, I only live about 45 minutes away and it would have been fun to watch.
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
This quote sort of caught me off-guard as I imagine some customers might disagree:
Fleckenstein said that the outage was "not major," and not large enough to require a report to the Federal Communications Commission.
The beginning of the article states:
A handful of corporate customers were left without e-mail and Internet access Monday after the theft of networking equipment from a New York City office late Sunday.
So, I would guess that the "handful" of corporate customers who lost service probably felt it was major to them. I understand the notion that it was not major in the sense of being more widespread, I just think his comment could have been worded better.
Happy Trails!
Erick
Originally expected as long as a year ago, the technology--internally code-named Janus--has been seen as a potential way to let subscription music services such as Napster and RealNetworks' Rhapsody move to portable MP3 players. Those services, which allow subscribers to listen to unlimited amounts of music in return for a single monthly fee, are typically tied to PCs today. But the new digital rights management tools also include features that would protect content that is streamed around a home network, or even block data pathways potentially deemed "unsafe," such as the traditional analog outputs on a high-definition TV set. That's a feature that has been sought by movie studios in advance of the move to digital television. "This release of technology really enables all kinds of new scenarios that are emerging now," said Jason Reindorp, a group manager in Microsoft's Windows digital media unit. "We're taking quite a holistic view." The software giant said that companies including AOL, Dell, Disney, Napster and Freescale, a subsidiary of Motorola, have agreed to adopt the new technology. Microsoft is betting that the steady release of new content protection technology will help its audio and video formats become standard ways of distributing digital music and films, in turn, keeping people purchasing and using the Windows operating system and associated products. The company has spent considerable time and money wooing record labels and movie studios over the past several years, hoping to see more content released online in its formats. To date, the majority of mainstream label- or Hollywood studio-authorized online services do use Microsoft's formats. Nevertheless, Apple Computer's iTunes music store, which distributes music in its own rival proprietary copy-protected format, remains far more popular than any of the Microsoft-based services, controlling about 70 percent of paid music downloads. Apple has wholly eschewed the monthly subscription model for its music store. But others services have looked to the predictable income as a better revenue source. They believe that ultimately consumers will prefer to fill their hard drives completely in return for a low monthly payment, instead of purchasing each song one by one. Not yet in tune with consumers However, even some of the most sympathetic subscription-model backers predict it will take a long time before consumers warm to subscriptions on their MP3 players. "There's a lot of hype and talk about subscription downloads" for portables, said Sean Ryan, vice president of music services for RealNetworks, which operates the Rhapsody subscription service. "Our views on this are that it will be important in the long term, but it won't be in 2004." RealNetworks uses Microsoft's audio format for the Rhapsody service, and so could theoretically take advantage of Janus. The company has not said it plans to license the technology, however. The technology itself will likely take many more months to work through the often difficult process of being integrated into actual devices and chips. A long list of manufacturers, including Dell, Archos, Creative, Rio and iRiver have said they will support it. But the services themselves may take just as long to emerge. The record industry is far from certain how to treat a service that allows consumers to fill up their 40-gigabyte MP3 players with music in one digital gulp. Labels worry that the model might simply siphon off the most active CD buyers. "It would be very attractive if it expanded the market," one top record label executive said in a recent interview. "Anything that cannibalizes the market isn't as attractive. No one knows yet." As a result, licensing negotiations are ongoing, executives said. Along with chipmakers, device makers and music services, America Online and Disney both have indicated their support for the new digital rights management technology, further evidence that Microsoft's strategic alliances with both companies may be bearing fruit. Neither gave details on how they planned to use the new release, however.
Happy Trails!
Erick
The Federal Trade Commission said it had warned Gates about a similar reporting infraction when his personal investment trust bought shares of Republic Services Corp. (RSG: Research, Estimates) in November 2001. The acquisition brought his stake to more than 10 percent of the outstanding shares of the waste-hauling company.
Antitrust rules require that entities must file with the government when their holdings exceed 10 percent of a company's stock.
. Anyway, when you are worth $40 billion you can afford these "luxuries."
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
Is it possible to delete messages, or does everything continue to reside in AllMail?
Oh, no, no, that was just poor wording on our part. It's just that we make a variety of backups, and we can't guarantee instantaneous deletion. Stuff that's on tapes, and those are offline--we eventually delete it, but we can't guarantee an instantaneous deletion.
The question would be whether or not somebody could feel confident that if they wanted to delete something that it would eventually be deleted.
Yes, eventually it will be deleted.
Happy Trails!
Erick
It wasn't the earth that they were obsessed with, it was our cache of WD40.
Happy Trails!
Erick
This is a stock that will not only have some intrinsinc value, it will have huge psychological value and will be a very "sexy" stock initially. A ton of money will be made and lost the first week that this stock goes on the market (if it does, of course). The day traders will probably have a blast playing the see-saw movements. People who buy the first day and hold for the long term are likely, *in my opinion*, lose money.
All in all, it will be fun if it happens.
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
While most spyware is adware-related and relatively benign, it's disturbing that over 300,000 of the more serious system monitors and Trojans were uncovered
I don't think most adware is benign since it eats into available RAM. Some adware also affects application performance, or, worse yet, prevents applications from running. Anyway, I am, again, preaching to the choir.....
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
Anyway, I know this sounds painfully obvious, but why don't folks take the simple step of running an antivirus program? I have McAfee VirusScan and I also have AdWatch running full time. Between the two, I feel fairly well protected from viruses and adware/spyware.
And then you have folks that click on just about any attachment - from the article:
The experts advised people not to click on strange attachments in e-mail, which can activate the worm, and to update their antivirus software frequently to ward off new threats.
I have an agreement with family and friends to embedd a codeword in any document that contains a file attachment. It is usually a fairly esoteric work not likely to come up in casual conversation. However, I have damn near been fooled by a few emails because they seemd very legitimate. Oh, well.
Anyway, I am preaching to the choir....and ranting a bit.
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
When Mr Ballmer gives Mr McNealy a hug and says that "we do both believe in intellectual property", this is a not-so-veiled jab at the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic. Microsoft and Sun happen to be the only major backers (in the form of licence payments) of Linux's gadfly, a firm called SCO, which is trying to obtain money from Linux users with threats of litigation.
The article also points out that LINUX hurts Sun more than Microsoft:
Linux, however, is hurting Sun far more than Microsoft. Solaris is similar to Linux, which makes it very easy for customers to switch from one to the other. Migrating from Windows to Linux is a much more fiddly process.
I think Microsoft is particularly wiley here. They make nice with Sun knowing that Sun will probably become marginalized as a result of the growth of LINUX and not end up being much of a competitor at all. I am not faulting Microsoft for this, but, you gotta believe that they believe, in their heart-of-hearts (do they have those?) that they will eventually own the whole pie. This sure is fun to watch.....
Happy Trails!
Erick
Just yesterday, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) announced it had issued the world's first license for a sub-orbital manned rocket flight.
The license was issued April 1 by the DOT's Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation to Scaled Composites. This federal paperwork green-lighted a sequence of sub-orbital flights by Scaled Composites for a one-year period.
The license to Scaled Composites is the first to authorize piloted flight on a sub-orbital trajectory, the DOT statement noted.
I hope we are able to witness this "...piloted flight on a sub-orbital trajector.."this year!
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick
"We're asking people to pay their taxes that are legitimately due," he said. "And if we don't have people pay the taxes that are due, then we have to ask the people that are stepping forward to pay more. And that's not fair."
On the other hand, I think these data repositories and the data mining technology that fill these massive databases are obviously digging up unrelated but interesting data and *that* can lead to abuse and I think it will lead to abuse.
At some point the government and the populace has to determine the risk/reward values of filling the tax coffers against the potentially huge violation of peoples rights to privacy. For now, I think the gov't is moving ahead with initiatives with which I do not think the majority of the population would endorse.
Happy Trails!
Erick
Happy Trails!
Erick