I had the misfortune of being employed by IBM for about 15 months. I had to sign this contract by which I effectively sold my intellectual property rights to IBM, even a few years after the termination of my contract. And I found out how ideas are developed at IBM. I was just a 19 then. I didn't know better. But I would never make that mistake again.
The process goes something like this. You are young and innovative. You come up with a brillian idea. IBM takes it from you. IBM gives it to a different department. You are never ever to have anything to do with your idea ever again. Your name is not even mentioned when the final product is released. You get absolutely no credit.
I can well believe that IBM tricked Kildall. I wonder how long it would be before IBM tricks the open source community.
If certain people built their OSs more securely, then we wouldn't be having all these pesky viruses to begin with. The internet is not a safe place anymore because of all the compromised Zombie machines that could be exploited to carry out very large scale DDoS attacks. I am willing to be my last $ that 99.99% of them run the same operating system.
So what's the solution? Simple. The people that sell Swiss-cheese OSs should try to get their act together and build more bullet proof systems. This will drastically cut down the number of zombie PCs.
Your software ain't that great if a teenage script kiddie can commandeer it to bring down your own website.
There's another digital distress signal too.
The 406 MHz distress beacon emits both an analogue 121.5 MHz signal and a digital 406 MHz signal. The digital signal carries a code which identifies the beacon while the analogue signal is to enable aircraft to home on location. That digital code can be cross referenced with a database of registered 406 MHz beacon owners held at AMSA which identifies who is in trouble and what type of situation they are in. This enables the search and rescue authorities to tailor a response to the emergency situation.
There is no doubt that the singers and other supporting personnel do need to make money from their talents. For this to happen, people have to buy their music. But when people share music collections on P2P services, the artistes are, without doubt, robbed of their fruits of labour.
However, at the same time, it must be noted that more c90% of proceedings from CD sales go to the record labels. P2P sharing hits more the big record labels than the actual artistes.
A P2P system where the artistes get paid per song downloaded would be an ideal solution.
Canadian Idol winner Ryan Malcolm expressed skepticism, and suggested the Canadian music biz find a way to live with file-sharers.
"Whether people download or not, as long as they're listening to music," he said.
"I think it's a challenge for the industry, to try and find a new way to survive."
The vast majority of artistes vehemently support electronic means of music distribution over the CD method. They have been ripped off by record labels for too long. Sadly, the United States of America, has now become United Corporations of America, and all laws dealing with P2P file sharing has been enacted according to the dictates of the rich record labels and their lobby groups. The wishes of the artistes are hardly ever taken into consideration. It'll be a sad day indeed if the much more socially progressive nation of Canada follows in the footsteps of her corporacratic Southern Neighbour.
Bart:Dad! dad! Our voice-over guys are on strike!
Homer: Damn voice-over guys! Why those little....
Lisa:But dad!, they have their rights too. You can't expect them to work so hard and get paid only $125,000 per episode.
Marge:She's right honey. These people have hungry mouths to feed, and it's not easy nowadays with $125,000
Maggie:gpbtd gpbtd
Who's going to decide whose good and whose bad? What is the criteria? And what about the due process of the law? What about someone being innocent until provent guilty?
This 1984, only 20 years later, but much more real, and much more sinister. In terms of protection of civil liberties, the world is heading south so far, it won't be long before it emerges back from north.
And there are other issues too. What if this falls into the hands of the "Bad Guys" they seek to destroy. What if it malicious crackers exploit a hole in the security and hold millions of PC users to hostage?
>Being an avid handheld user (T3) I think that Linux on the handheld is a largely untapped medium.
Pray, do explain why you think it is a largely untapped medium. Don't you think that if there was commercial potential, it would've been tapped a long time ago?
>I think that the power and flexibility of Linux on something as small and effecient as a handheld is an excellent combinaiton.
Why do you think that? Do you do the same things you do on a PDA that you do on a PC? Do you need all the raw power and flexibility of Linux on a handheld? Wouldn't it be fair to say you have to use a different paradigm when it come working with a handheld?
>I also think that the open nature of Linux would work to the handheld's advantage.
How? Elaborate please. Provide us with concrete examples.
>There are numerous times I wish I could tweak settings or applicaions on my handheld but I am not able to do so.
Do you really need Linux for that?
>I hope this is the beginning of a long-term shift in the handheld market.
So once they start running Linux, everything will be A-okay?
Microsoft Corp. announced today that it feared the Tom's Hardware Guide (THG) article on switching to Linux will prompt a mass migration of Windows users to Linux. The clearly and simply written article, even thought to be understandable to US President George W. Bush promises a the users who take the plunge a life without crashes, viruses and headaches.
"This is a serious problem. We expect at least 80% of all windows users to move to Linux", said Steve Balmer, the CEO of Microsoft, at a hastily convened press conference. "This will be the beginning of the end of Windows"
When asked how Microsoft plans to respond to the situation, Mr Balmber replied: "We have our methods".
Meanwhile, Darl McBride, the C.E.O. of SCO today announced that the copyright tp the choosing a Linux distribution algorith belonged to them, and they would sue THG and any other users who followed THG advice over IP violation issues.
If you see that spam is taking over cyberspace too quickly, you should look again, and look up. The immediate 'space' around earth is full of little bits and pieces of objects we have sent up there. There are more than 2,000 decommissioned satellites.
And just as junk emails cause a threat to network connectivity, space junk can potentially damage future space missions. NASA constantly keeps its eye on the movements of these bits of space trash.
space.com has a comprehensive list of space junk items, and who put them there.
Zip2 - print-media-to-web software, clients included KnightRidder, etc,
sold for $300,000,000 in cash to Compaq
PayPal - started as idea for one web site for all a person's financial
needs. Email-money-to-someone feature was a quicky add-on feature, took
one day of initial development, "classic viral marketting", 1 million
customers at start of 2nd year of operations, went public in
2002, sold in june to Ebay for 4.5 billion in stocks, now worth
3billion.
Was doing background space research in '01-02, why did we stumble after
Apollo? Computing analogy, mainframes filling rooms in 1970s, etc.
The idea he settled into would generate public interest, advance both
science and engineering and be privately funded. It was a $10-20million
Mars lander. The lander would carry seeds and nutrients, a miniature
greenhouse, it would attempt to grow plants, the furthest life would
have travelled. Went to Moscow looking for rockets, "We don't buy
Russian cars, kitchen appliances or computers. Why can the Russians
build such reliable, low cost launch vehicles?"
friends with group of aero-engineers from Mercury onward, put
together a feasibility study. This happened at the same time he
was selling PayPal, at this point he settled on "doing space" as
his next business enterprise.
Space now - US govt. spaceflight in bad shape, quick recap of Shuttle
status, losses, expenses, dangerous.
Slide - problems of Shuttle - kind of standard complaints.
Slide - OSP/Orbital Space Plane - "Pretty Darn Expensive" -
$300-400million/flight, Delta-IV Heavy is $200mil alone.
Between NASA and the industrial partners, things have traditionally not
been under budget and under time.
Soyuz has a good (safety) record, and only costs about $60mil/flight.
Russian economy is size of Belgian economy.
China's program is only current effort that could spur any new
government space programs, be it NASA, ESA, etc
Slide - dawn of a new era of space exploration like DARPA, NASA
could support entrepreneurs. Burt Rutan, Scaled, Jeff Bezos,
SpaceX could all benefit from NASA as enabling customer.
Slide - Armadillo Aerospace
Slide - Bezos' Blue Origin
Slide - SpaceX -
Falcon is a 2-stage orbital rocket, initial target is satelite
launch business small commsats- revenue base long-term aim
is human spaceflight super-heavy lift, Apollo-class rocket for
Moon, Mars, SpaceX "Holy Grail"
Video - Merlin main engine test
Video - Upper stage engine test
First flight will be from SpaceX's pad at Vandenburg AFB, aiming for
March 2004, a Navy satelite
QA -
comparison of Zip2, PayPal
PP had 30 fulltime engineers, both were made of small teams,
software-based products flat hierarchy, best idea wins, everyone in
each company was an equity stakeholder on development, pick a path, do
it instead of vacilating on design decisions both companies were very
product focused.
q- biggest stumbling blocks for space entrepreneurs?
a - stifling regulation, jumping through regulator's hoops. Rockets are
still munitions, lack of regulations on software encouraged
development, Silicon Valley as "Libertarian Paradise"
Falcon has been the fastest development time ever for an orbital
vehicle.
(basic rocket/space questions)
Rocket development, "What makes space expensive?" - Low launch rates,
2/% of rocket's mass to orbit low cost launch suffers from
chicken-and-egg problem, need cheaper flights to get a bigger volume of
flights, need volume for cheaper flights. (he doesn't say this, but
Internet entrepreneurs like him
have the resources to solve the chicken-egg problem)
Compares Falcon to Pegasus, costs of $6 vs $25 million/flight
Q - XPrize - will it succeed in brining CATS, How did SpaceX get Navy
contract?
A- likes the XPrize, compares Carmac, etc, a very good thing. Mentions
that
Froogle, however, is purely search engine. Just like the Google Web search, you'll be in their database if you happen to sell something, your site has a dollar tag on it next to the product, and you're not hiding your products behind some obscure interface that search engine has no access to.
You have made a very valid point. On other sites are, for all intents adn purposes, surchable advertisement database, where as froogle is truly a price seeking search engine.
Any price searching system, where the seller has to pay to get in, is not a fair one for the consumer. It is often the case that the difference in price, and actual worth, of a product is more advertising than profit. And if vendors have to pay more to get their products advertised on price comparisions search enginers, then, that cost is passed on to the consumer. And some sellers might not just want to, or might not have the budget to pay for such services. In those circumstances, the consumer loses out by not being shown the cheapest seller on the market.
From strictly "consumer is the king" standpoint, Froogle is the only true price comparison search engine of the ones you mentioned. But as a business model, froogle might not be the most successful. Time will only tell.
Re:Where have we heard this before
on
ICANN Meets Annan
·
· Score: 1
As explained here :
The ISO symbol for the United Kingdom is GB. Both the Ukraine and the United Kingdom wanted the two-letter code UK, so the ISO solved the problem by giving the Ukraine UA and the United Kingdom GB.
That is probably why the Sterling Pound is written as GBP, and not UKP. And the official reasons given by ISO are:
Dear Mr xxxxx,
Thanks for your query concerning the ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 code.
In the start-up phase of the Internet IANA created a ccTLD.uk. This was done before Jon Postel of IANA wrote RFC 1591 and decided to use our ISO codes.
More on the Internet and ISO 3166-1: http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/inter net.html
The reasons for the ISO 3166-1 code GB for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are the following:
In 1974 when ISO 3166-1 was first published the code element GB was chosen to represent the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland because it conicides with the "distinguishing sign for road vehicles in international traffic" for the country. These are the oval stickers on cars.
Another reason why the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is coded GB in ISO 3166-1 is that code elements in ISO 3166-1 should not reflect country name components giving information on the political status of a country e. g. "Republic", "Kingdom", "United", "Democratic", "Socialist" etc.
By not using such name components a change of the official name of a country which reflects a change in e. g. constitutional status does not affect the code element and thus allows stability in the code list. A good example for this is Poland. This country renamed itself from "Polish People's Republic" to "Republic of Poland" but no need for a new ISO 3166-1 code element arose since it reflected only the core part of the name i. e. "Poland" resp. "Polish" (PL).
We are well aware that many people would like to use UK rather than GB and the reasons for this choice - one being that one might be promoted to think that Northern Ireland isn't included - are familiar to us. The decision to chose GB was taken in cooperation with the Britisch Standards Institution BSI and, through them, with her Majesty's Government.
If you need more information on this issue please let me know.
Best regards
Cord Wischhofer for the Secretariat of the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency Tel.: +49 (30) 26 01 28 61 Fax: +49 (30) 26 01 12 31 E-Mail: cord.wischhoefer@din.de URL: www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/
Great Britain, "snatched" up the disputed UK two letter code before Ukraine could. It wouldn't be at all cool if these two countries go to war over this, though, as Ukraine probably has more nuclear weapons than even Britain.
Slashdot Mirror
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So what's the solution? Simple. The people that sell Swiss-cheese OSs should try to get their act together and build more bullet proof systems. This will drastically cut down the number of zombie PCs.
Your software ain't that great if a teenage script kiddie can commandeer it to bring down your own website.
Thank you.
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Aaaargh ./ed.
Google Cache here
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Because you can't hold your breath for 30 seconds, perhaps?
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There is no doubt that the singers and other supporting personnel do need to make money from their talents. For this to happen, people have to buy their music. But when people share music collections on P2P services, the artistes are, without doubt, robbed of their fruits of labour.
However, at the same time, it must be noted that more c90% of proceedings from CD sales go to the record labels. P2P sharing hits more the big record labels than the actual artistes.
A P2P system where the artistes get paid per song downloaded would be an ideal solution.
Canadian Idol winner Ryan Malcolm expressed skepticism, and suggested the Canadian music biz find a way to live with file-sharers.
"Whether people download or not, as long as they're listening to music," he said.
"I think it's a challenge for the industry, to try and find a new way to survive."
The vast majority of artistes vehemently support electronic means of music distribution over the CD method. They have been ripped off by record labels for too long. Sadly, the United States of America, has now become United Corporations of America, and all laws dealing with P2P file sharing has been enacted according to the dictates of the rich record labels and their lobby groups. The wishes of the artistes are hardly ever taken into consideration. It'll be a sad day indeed if the much more socially progressive nation of Canada follows in the footsteps of her corporacratic Southern Neighbour.
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Bart:Dad! dad! Our voice-over guys are on strike!
Homer: Damn voice-over guys! Why those little
Lisa:But dad!, they have their rights too. You can't expect them to work so hard and get paid only $125,000 per episode.
Marge:She's right honey. These people have hungry mouths to feed, and it's not easy nowadays with $125,000
Maggie:gpbtd gpbtd
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55378008 is J4n37.
Br4d is 70011355
;)
+10 Karma to the first person to figure out what that is :)
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This 1984, only 20 years later, but much more real, and much more sinister. In terms of protection of civil liberties, the world is heading south so far, it won't be long before it emerges back from north.
And there are other issues too. What if this falls into the hands of the "Bad Guys" they seek to destroy. What if it malicious crackers exploit a hole in the security and hold millions of PC users to hostage?
And what about the *BOOOOOOOM* *SPLASH*
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>Being an avid handheld user (T3) I think that Linux on the handheld is a largely untapped medium. Pray, do explain why you think it is a largely untapped medium. Don't you think that if there was commercial potential, it would've been tapped a long time ago? >I think that the power and flexibility of Linux on something as small and effecient as a handheld is an excellent combinaiton. Why do you think that? Do you do the same things you do on a PDA that you do on a PC? Do you need all the raw power and flexibility of Linux on a handheld? Wouldn't it be fair to say you have to use a different paradigm when it come working with a handheld? >I also think that the open nature of Linux would work to the handheld's advantage. How? Elaborate please. Provide us with concrete examples. >There are numerous times I wish I could tweak settings or applicaions on my handheld but I am not able to do so. Do you really need Linux for that? >I hope this is the beginning of a long-term shift in the handheld market. So once they start running Linux, everything will be A-okay?
"This is a serious problem. We expect at least 80% of all windows users to move to Linux", said Steve Balmer, the CEO of Microsoft, at a hastily convened press conference. "This will be the beginning of the end of Windows"
When asked how Microsoft plans to respond to the situation, Mr Balmber replied: "We have our methods".
Meanwhile, Darl McBride, the C.E.O. of SCO today announced that the copyright tp the choosing a Linux distribution algorith belonged to them, and they would sue THG and any other users who followed THG advice over IP violation issues.
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And just as junk emails cause a threat to network connectivity, space junk can potentially damage future space missions. NASA constantly keeps its eye on the movements of these bits of space trash.
space.com has a comprehensive list of space junk items, and who put them there.
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I hereby solemnly do declare that the grandparent was nicked off the usenet, and it originally belongs to the author of the parent.
Thank you
BY JENNY BOOTH
from theTimes
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EMERGENCY services, homes and businesses were hit after an underground fire in Manchester city centre cut 130,000 phone lines.
The blaze, in a tunnel by the junction of George Street and Princess Street, destroyed cables connected to the national phone network.
Related News:
No time limit for Manchester phone lines fix
Fire wipes out internet in Manchester
BT tunnel fire cuts off Manchester phone lines
BT fire disrupts emergency services
Businesses hit by BT fire
Phones Out of Action after Fire in Tunnel
Tunnel fire knocks out phone network
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Quick overview of his old companies: Zip2, Paypal
Zip2 - print-media-to-web software, clients included KnightRidder, etc, sold for $300,000,000 in cash to Compaq
PayPal - started as idea for one web site for all a person's financial needs. Email-money-to-someone feature was a quicky add-on feature, took one day of initial development, "classic viral marketting", 1 million customers at start of 2nd year of operations, went public in 2002, sold in june to Ebay for 4.5 billion in stocks, now worth 3billion.
Was doing background space research in '01-02, why did we stumble after Apollo? Computing analogy, mainframes filling rooms in 1970s, etc.
The idea he settled into would generate public interest, advance both science and engineering and be privately funded. It was a $10-20million Mars lander. The lander would carry seeds and nutrients, a miniature greenhouse, it would attempt to grow plants, the furthest life would have travelled. Went to Moscow looking for rockets, "We don't buy Russian cars, kitchen appliances or computers. Why can the Russians build such reliable, low cost launch vehicles?"
friends with group of aero-engineers from Mercury onward, put together a feasibility study. This happened at the same time he was selling PayPal, at this point he settled on "doing space" as his next business enterprise.
Space now - US govt. spaceflight in bad shape, quick recap of Shuttle status, losses, expenses, dangerous.
Slide - problems of Shuttle - kind of standard complaints.
Slide - OSP/Orbital Space Plane - "Pretty Darn Expensive" -
$300-400million/flight, Delta-IV Heavy is $200mil alone.
Between NASA and the industrial partners, things have traditionally not been under budget and under time.
Soyuz has a good (safety) record, and only costs about $60mil/flight.
Russian economy is size of Belgian economy.
China's program is only current effort that could spur any new government space programs, be it NASA, ESA, etc
Slide - dawn of a new era of space exploration like DARPA, NASA could support entrepreneurs. Burt Rutan, Scaled, Jeff Bezos, SpaceX could all benefit from NASA as enabling customer.
Slide - Armadillo Aerospace
Slide - Bezos' Blue Origin
Slide - SpaceX -
Falcon is a 2-stage orbital rocket, initial target is satelite launch business small commsats- revenue base long-term aim is human spaceflight super-heavy lift, Apollo-class rocket for Moon, Mars, SpaceX "Holy Grail"
Video - Merlin main engine test
Video - Upper stage engine test
First flight will be from SpaceX's pad at Vandenburg AFB, aiming for March 2004, a Navy satelite
QA -
comparison of Zip2, PayPal
PP had 30 fulltime engineers, both were made of small teams, software-based products flat hierarchy, best idea wins, everyone in each company was an equity stakeholder on development, pick a path, do it instead of vacilating on design decisions both companies were very product focused.
q- biggest stumbling blocks for space entrepreneurs?
a - stifling regulation, jumping through regulator's hoops. Rockets are still munitions, lack of regulations on software encouraged development, Silicon Valley as "Libertarian Paradise"
Falcon has been the fastest development time ever for an orbital vehicle.
(basic rocket/space questions)
Rocket development, "What makes space expensive?" - Low launch rates, 2/% of rocket's mass to orbit low cost launch suffers from chicken-and-egg problem, need cheaper flights to get a bigger volume of flights, need volume for cheaper flights. (he doesn't say this, but Internet entrepreneurs like him
have the resources to solve the chicken-egg problem)
Compares Falcon to Pegasus, costs of $6 vs $25 million/flight
Q - XPrize - will it succeed in brining CATS, How did SpaceX get Navy contract?
A- likes the XPrize, compares Carmac, etc, a very good thing. Mentions that
That explains a lot.
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You have made a very valid point. On other sites are, for all intents adn purposes, surchable advertisement database, where as froogle is truly a price seeking search engine.
Any price searching system, where the seller has to pay to get in, is not a fair one for the consumer. It is often the case that the difference in price, and actual worth, of a product is more advertising than profit. And if vendors have to pay more to get their products advertised on price comparisions search enginers, then, that cost is passed on to the consumer. And some sellers might not just want to, or might not have the budget to pay for such services. In those circumstances, the consumer loses out by not being shown the cheapest seller on the market.
From strictly "consumer is the king" standpoint, Froogle is the only true price comparison search engine of the ones you mentioned. But as a business model, froogle might not be the most successful. Time will only tell.
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That is probably why the Sterling Pound is written as GBP, and not UKP. And the official reasons given by ISO are:
Great Britain, "snatched" up the disputed UK two letter code before Ukraine could. It wouldn't be at all cool if these two countries go to war over this, though, as Ukraine probably has more nuclear weapons than even Britain.