The link to the Perlmonks article includes two cgi parameters. You do not need the lastnode_id parameter, it will just use up more cpu and take longer for people to see the page.
It works fine if you just use the latter node_id parameter, as here
It would be nice to see more links to PerlMonks, and Perl articles in general. As far as I know CPAN is probably the biggest group of modules built by a single programming community which actively mixes and matches them. While there isn't one brain to it, PM is the best place I think to talk about them.
Thanx
I built one but it is very free-form and may not be what you want.
My objective was to do a quick keyword search on a list of 100,000 records from several different sources. Generally I have one line per book, and while some of the indices provide more information that is all I use.
I didn't want to spend the time to do a real database job and I wanted to use Perl regular expressions to do a quick keyword search within author and title text. So I keep recent indices next to the search program compressed variously with zip, gzip, or bzip2. I can direct the system to make a single text file which contains the unpacked text all appended together and compressed again. It will also list stats for each file.
Its main function is to wait for a keyword to be typed in, and it will immediately (PIII/450MHz Linux Inspiron 7.5K) display a numbered list of matching books, in alphabetical order grouped by indice. You can then select certain numbers from the list, or reduce the number of records by adding more keywords. This is sufficent for me and has helped me discover unknown titles and new authors because of its way of narrowing down on information. Perhaps if I had more structured files I would have used Perl's BoulderIO which has solved huger problems of library science in merging genome data files, see bio.perl.org.
At first I thought wuh? But of course I was in Mozilla, so I didn't see the problem. IE executed it exploit right away.
Free Software ought to get better press from this, as it underscores a major truism.
In Free Software, new versions are generally made and released due to added functionality or fixed bugs. Anything else is a waste of time for the programmers, right?
With the exception of a very huge vulnerability that was finally fixed with IE SP2 (though who knows what else that contained), new software versions from Microsoft seem due to an entirely different set of reasons, like:
- breaking more fledgling standards - making news - embracing/extending - press releases - etc
The cover of a Windows magazine here last issue says in HUGE letters, DON'T RUN WINDOWS XP WITH OUT-OF THE BOX SETTINGS.. It is an issue devoted to the new edition of Windows and they say how it totally screws up your computer and does all this bad stuff unless you mess with it first. The consensus in Tokyo seems to be, use Windows 2000 in-house if you can (or older OS's if already installed), DON'T use XP, and WinMe crashes a lot (but so does XP). Win2K seems to be pretty good.
Section 3.2 says M$ is giving away the technology for free with the stipulation that it cannot be freely redistributed. The reasoning is that M$ is limiting the scope of intellectual property rights being granted so that no free implementation of their spec can exist. It would seem that an implementation for $0.01 or less might be okay.
This shit is legal?
If it is, why not just ruin their market?
A client which on installation calls a 3rd party server anonymously, to indicate a sale. The dealer donates all the money to the dolphins or maybe the FSF. No money is collected, he just donates on behalf of all the users.
Scenario two: The software is only sold in 1000,000-packs, price is 1 cent. What constitutes a sale? What constitutes prior restraint on business? Microsoft does not make money directly from this license it would seem. Is it possible for them legally to force a licensee to take a profit?
This could sprout a new anti-anti-GPL: Just like BSD but the FSF or somebody else puts up 1 cent for enough copies to cover the world population. We can have a $10 fund to cover any number of M$ products which use this until the sun explodes. Perhaps we should use a dead currency that will give us better compression..
Software piracy is the only force which *enables* Microsoft Office to be ubiquitous on the corporate desktop (at least in Japan which I know). Of course the OS comes with the machine, but some pirated/reused copies of the OS are also needed to build new machines etc.
If everyone had to actually pay for this stuff and see it as a line item they might consider using free software. Perhaps the Fink button could be installed on all government workstations by law?
Someone should give these assholes the address of that kid in Malaysia. A virus or two written by the BSA, M$ and the RIAA might have more effect (sheesh).
A game is okay but here's a better idea,
why not provide information (HTML, text or something animated) about Linux so they get used to learning about it. You could provide a user's guide, or maybe HOWTOs for advanced users.
Maybe some articles on Linux in the enterprise, or writeups of Linux games. How about having O'Reilly provide an online book that is only available during the install process eh?? (they already provide a free chapter online anyway).
You could introduce people to new powerful/interesting/fun things and do something useful with the attention span. Even, you could have a content service that comes up when any installer runs and you can pick up where you left off.
You might even be able to sponsor the software you are installing with some paid-for information maybe.
"Game sales are crucial because they are highly profitable, unlike the Xbox hardware, which Microsoft sells below cost in order to keep consumer prices down."
I would enjoy the irony running Linux on one of these, at least until I got tired of its lack of power/ethernet/etc. I think I'll wait till they drop in price a couple hundred bucks.
What do you want to bet Sony's going to let M$ throw a lot of money down the tube for a while and then destroy them for Christmas with their next-generation machine.
I played the street fighter type game for X-Box in Japan in a demo on the street and the graphics were spectacular. But um, I saw same or better (I think much better) rendering of the same game in a demo on HDTV, playing on an Akihabara which is the biggest electronics downtown street in Tokyo. This was 1-2 YEARS ago. (Just get enough rendering time on the Onyx..) Of course it was totally stunning but we'll all have that in a couple years. Please tell me how Microsoft is going to win a war by dumping tons of cash to stay just ahead of the polygon crunching stats war? Hint: They're pretty soon going to need a fuckload and buy everyone better TVs if that's their claim to fame.
Oh, I forgot, they also make windows. Guess what Sony's next target will be..
There is a 1997 book on Amazon called Yoga Inside & Out: Exploring Your Chakras with Batsheva here.
Yoga Inside has been active since 1999 based on work done in 1995 by Mark Stephens in LA juvenile detention camps with six Tibetan monks sent by the Dalai Lama. here
That book has a website, www.yoga-insideout.com, here
"Inside and Out" is a popular way of describing holistic health, and the phrase "yoga inside" is commonly used to describe the experience, like the site here.
There is a travel company called Inside India which works with several Yoga therapy centers for health tours, here.
Barbara Kallir directed an instructional video guide to tantric yoga, "Inside Westside". Recommended for the Lawyers after those free courses, here.
Couldn't find a link between the Dalai Lama and Intel, unless you count that both are successful exiles. Although Apple struck the Dalai Lama from their Asian billboards so maybe..nah.
The fourth most popular use of the word conjunction "yoga inside" on the web, after the prison project, the video, and general discussions of yoga and health experiences, is Intel's suit. How many hundreds of millions of dollars of PR is this costing Intel I wonder?
Maybe the defendant should get the video publisher to join in, seems like they are making lots of money with their domain name.
It's been done, just not on sale in N. America or anywhere outside Japan, yet.
GPS integrated into ordinary cellphones (well ordinary for Japan means color, Java, midi, etc) is in stores now. One model has a good digital compass; a few programmer friends were salivating recently). This model actually doesn't have Java but does have 65K color, 16 voice midi, automatic time setting (?), an advanced email client, and support for a plugin camera.
Check it out here, the latest model (notice the compass in the upper left corner). The page is in Japanese, but it notes that this model is a step ahead of other GPS phones. It has a "heading up" feature that tells when you turn and it rotates the map 90 degrees so that it is pointing the way you are walking. The heading says, "The GPS mobile phone that comes yet closer to a car navigation system".
I found the main page from Panasonic about it here which is much more detailed. Some pages want Flash but if you follow the links you will see a lot more about the different functions. Hmmm maybe I better pick one up..
Just read the PDF (again Japanese sorry) and it has yet more info.. the email client has 3d animated characters that make faces at you depending on the mail, and it plays games like soccer and there is a fishing game which lets you find a school of fish with the GPS at fishing holes all around Japan and then try to catch them. 102 grams, 132x176 pixels. Scared how much it's going to cost.
As a high-level Monex employee once acknowledged to me, it is obviously physically impossible to guarantee anything about hardware, basically anything that can be hacked will be hacked. So they have a system I was told that assumes cards are periodically updated.
If hardware is faulty Hong Kong will have to replace every card physically, ignore the problem, or try to do an online fix.
I think it is a pretty good bet that those readers, possibly when provided a suitable crypto key over the network, will be able to update the smart card software to the extent possible.
Also, if someone trashes a card they are going to be able to get a new one. Presumably they will have to show up at a government office in person with fingers attached if their card stops working.. Plenty of room to work the system at plenty of points it would seem.
Sports Illustrated and others have used Palm's Web Clipping applications (WCA, alias PQA - Palm Query Application).
I've developed for them and you can actually surf web sites and view CGI output in the clipper browser built into the OS (English v.4 or with mobile lib). Palm's gateway will reduce image sizes for you for free too.
This is quite intentional and not a laughing matter.
"Embrace and Extend" means Microsoft has an imperative from way up high to subvert anything it perceives as dangerous. This includes weakening de facto standards (made a lot of people code for MS Java) or somehow take over the very concepts we use to think about our environment.
This is very dangerous when the environment is based on agreement by a lot of people as to virtual standards. Ultimately a Microsoft brand name would be planned in such a calculation to completely replace common features of the landscape. Or did you think they would allow "http://" to remain in the Address bar forever?
This is a seedy corporate tactic and unless we refuse to feed our brains with Microsoft drivel we have only ourselves to blame. They've still got plenty of acronyms to go..
Your "ethical directives" Re:IAAL
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Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2
Nice to have an adult join us kids. Which ethical directive urges you to illustrate your Bio as "Imagine a Beowulf cluster fuck..."?
You may be right with regard to morally bankrupt fights over legal terminology, and I am neither a lawyer nor overly vocal about the GPL (which is great, but unfortunately seems to bankrupt programmers rather quickly).
But just as a man is allowed to defend himself in a court of law, it is certainly legal to write a contract which is understandable by people without a law degree? I for one would like to hear which holes you think are there so that these geeks can wrap their heads about it and stop companies from abusing their work.
I'd imagine golf cleats, soccer shoes, or strap-on crampons would be effective. So would a few ropes.
Aside from the sheer fright of such military weaponry being beta-tested on our citizens, I'm a little concerned about second order effects. Asphixiating bubbles? Does it melt or what happens if you are breathing this stuff at the bottom of a football-style pileup? Instant freezing on cold sidewalks? Heart attacks? Could people slide into traffic or babies fall into sewers? etc.
Also this could be a nasty transport mechanism for gel-capsules of other substances maybe irritants. Is there any chance this could be used frm a height like poorman's napalm?
This sickening line of thought launched by wondering what the protesters might do if they had some with them. It might be very nasty with a Moltov thrown on it, or mixed with gasoline or acetone. You couldn't just drop and roll, you can't run away, and it could be aspirated. A terrifying catastrophe waiting to happen.
There are many other things you could do. Slashdot for the most part has completely stagnated and any technical work you have been doing has not been visible, it just makes things work the way they should.
Here are some concrete ideas for generating revenue. They require you to make some visible effort and leverage the (unbeatable, global, altruistic,...) brainpower of your combined readership. Maybe trolls will come in useful too in this endeavor!
- Put all the information about the calculations you are making out in the public and give us all something to chew on. You aren't sitting out on the moon somewhere you know.
- Page the site starting tomorrow and see how it goes. This thread surfed at 5 still gives me 66 comments, or *60* screens for one little ad at the top. I spend a lot of time on Slashdot and your advertisers should be made to pay you for it without making the site unuseable.
I definitely try to escape sites with big ads, or ignore the big ad and find a printer friendly version.
- Maintain incentive for serious posters and make trolls pay. Ad size should be inverse to karma. Karma whoring a problem? Fix your voting system, -4 karma whoring.
- Slashdot readers are often reading to learn. Text and voting gets into their heads better than images. I'd recommend letting people pick theme boxes which include one or more ads guaranteed to be a small image with some descriptive text and a vote meter users vote on. Themed means I already want to know about the product. Votes over a given threshold make the border change color or move it to the top. The ads could remain on page within a 1-2 inch wide margin.
- Ask Slashdot (it's *not* too late) about ideas for increasing community involvement. We *do* provide critical feedback to manufacturers featured on Slashdot.
- I am well acquainted with a system called CARMA that is used by many PR agencies to prepare valuable reports on news about a specific issue or product. Humans grade articles from around the world (in this case just Slashdot, or you can further analyze your own demographics) according to many items on a scoresheet, and the company can find out what the main issues are, how favorable news is, which writers or news outlets are most favorable, etc. You could work out your own system, or if you like I would be interested in helping. Anyway, you charge AMD, the RIAA, Disney, or Microsoft for professional (hire one) analysis. You might want to have a separate firm do this so you are not caught between hoping Microsoft remains the bad boy (good for linux!) and teaching them how to tweak techies and open sourcerers. Micro$oft has the dollar sign in their name for a reason you know!
- If you really want to have a pay medium, consider getting more help understanding how to provide additional professional value to your readers. They can pay, they just don't want to pay for what they are giving you it seems. You will need to pay writers and editors, and innovate. Though you may have done so, the readers haven't seen it yet.
- Consider adding meta-functionality to Slashdot. I've suggested it in the past, but you might want to consider an integrated function akin to a BBS or Wiki which would assist in boiling down the brainpower of your readers. Perhaps it is a moderator who is tallying things, or maybe it is a way for people to stay in touch with threads over more than a few days. Currently Slashdot is in one ear and out the other, with little sense of its own history. This is childish management considering the immense value of the resource at hand. I suggest you add to the Ask Slashdot help at people mentioning things that are of value to someone regarding the site. Some can be made for pay for some people.
- Look at Perlmonks.org again. I at least put much more work into it than Slashdot. But there is a chat, a sense of community, altruism, and a vibe of rulership by intelligence. There is an offering plate. It is aimed more at tech people and you have to type in HTML. You can edit your posts and people do, especially to Update your postlater with new info. There are some great search facilities. There are heroes, gods, self-proclaimed writers of tutorials and other sections, different levels of editing crews, etc. You know all about it, just look again and analyze it. Maybe post a question in SOPW (Seekers of Perl Wisdom) from Taco or Hemos with a question about recommendations for Slashdot.org. You can't be embarassed, the culture doesn't allow it. Really. People get kicked out for personal attacks and bad trolls are deleted. You probably know we ask people "Is this a homework question". So look at Perlmonks, not for a revenue model but to see why Slashdot looks like it's in the 80's still. There is room for imagination.
- Offer money for creative patches to Slashdot which will do something neat with user/points/article/access stats. Nothing too deleterious to privacy. Slashdot takes itself way too seriously considering hardly anyone there is writing the articles. Most readers, sorry to say, are probably ignoring in disgust many of the "editors'" comments that are spliced to the submission.
- Analyze what the most popular threads have been, and if possible what threads have generated thank you emails to Slashdot about how this really helped. I'd guess info for public organizations setting up linux-based networks to save money is a big one. You could write up a real report based on actually following up on all the information provided in the posts (which in case you forgot are already editted for you for free) and get some professionals to vet it. Get some real world stats and maybe some advice from readers in return for sexy hardware or something cool they'd like. Maybe you make them special associate gurus or somehow help them in a geeky or other way. Then sell the report. The posts belong to posters (I guess?) but you can summarize the information and publish it as a Slashdot Report. Ask O'Reilly, or maybe some private consultants in different countries, for help. One example I can provide is Internet Magazine in Japan. It provides articles of course, but also the most detailed comparisons of providers, and also a separate booklet inside on a certain Internet technical subject.
- Consider New York Times. I am amazed at how many posts are made to Slashdot regarding their site and I wonder how many people sign up. They have Times Fax, which is now a gorgeous PDF (10 pages). Consider an online magazine mailed or web-accessible to paying customers, in HTML or PDF format. Did you know by the way that an immense number of magazines in Japan are selling mainly translated versions of data from the U.S.? Sell it to them or their readers pretranslated over the web! Have you guys got any professionals in the publishing business or what?
- Reconsider the launch of VA Software and what you can use it for. Recently VA Japan held an Open Source Database Conference and it was really beat I thought. There were so many more things that could have been done. Instead of a fairly insipid seminar for quiet suits you could have rented out a huge conference center. The only fun thing was drinking with Mysql's Atmark and the Mysql mailing list members. But businesswise, what a total waste!
- and while we're on international, slashdot japan which I had dismissed as miniscule and irrelevant a while ago, now seems to have interesting articles and weblogs not available on slashdot usa. How about translating some of it back to English? Many Japanese people have trouble reading tons of English you know.. Slashdot could be more relevant. Let's see, top four stories right now are the crash of KDDI's mobile phone network (not receiving more subscriptions), possible sale of Niftyserve from Fujitsu to Sony, a lawsuit being brought by the Japanese RIAA and main music copyright holder JASRAC against File Rogue, and stolen goods on Yahoo Auctions Japan (which had actually gotten a boost when eBay pulled *out* of Japan last week). Number 6 (Broadband Watch) is how DSL just beat out CATV for broadband connections. As of last september, they had half a million each and now they are growing exponentially. Gee, how can you guys drool over 3G and Clies when you don't show the least interest in how the next generation digital economy really works? While the U.S. gets itself bound in sticky tape other countries have reached higher density. - Tell us about the deal with apple (or did you do it for free?..) and let us put our heads together for you. If you really are worried about going out of business then put the pedal to the metal and get some use out of the brainpower here. But don't just make a 2-day thread. Make it an initial test of the Slashdot Problemsolver or whatever this would be called. Email me if you want, I've worked on the idea a while myself.
- That's it for now. I think you have criminally wasted the resource in front of you and that's why you are where you have gotten. You are providing one of the the best marketing resources in the world for the IT industry for no money whatsoever. Duh! Let's fix the problem and make you guys a bundle of cash!
For the record I'm also 34 and have run my own independent software company for 8 years. I've hired away their top U.S. webmaster, ported a major Japanese printing industry product to Windows, planned a next generation search engine for them (MSJP), and recently provided technology used in scanning their error logs (MSJP).
As it happens a good friend and one of the best Java programmers in the country just went to work for Microsoft, the reason being that only they could pay. I wonder why Microsoft is so rich now?
There is such a thing as pushing it though, and this is one of those milestones. I would be quite surprised if any sane Microsoft employee would be able to defend the indefensible with a straight face.
What total a**holes. Next time someone tells you they work for Microsoft, ask them incredulously why they haven't quit yet!
Everyone knows that just as with mathematics, you can do anything in software. The point is, only the mentally damaged and egomaniacal build this kind of bloated, smirking, F***ED by Redmond again supercookie loggers into the monopoly operating system.
Yes, the recipient is paying for all this spam I believe. Of course young people seem to get most of the spam. Probably more people have email through these phones in Tokyo than other types of accounts. But apparently you cannot set the account to automatically forward the email to some procmail equipped account on a different server.
This seems dumb and limiting the development of a new market, but then again who knows how much the phone company is making off the literally billions of spams going out.. I'm hoping this may change as the client-side opens up more.
Re:Windows out of Sapphire ? I WANT ONE!
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Transparent Aluminium
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Just buy a space shuttle. They all come with them included.
You can actually buy sapphire windows at least up to 15cm square some places I found on the net.. supermarket scanners also sometimes have sapphire windows apparently.
The watchglass of my Rolex is a sapphire crystal. Looks cool, doesn't scratch. This page has info about synthetic sapphire watchglasses. It says Seiko coats mineral glass with synthetic sapphire (sapphlex they call it) to make it hard.
Don't know how big phone spam is in the West, but in Japan it is so bad, the government is trying to make a law against it.
You see, mobile phones ring or vibrate when they get spammed. It's worse than ordinary spam because email addresses are usually the same as your phone number, giving an easy target to spam programs.
My friend has two phones registered with slightly different names, and they ring within
10 seconds of each other, about once an hour or so. His FOMA (3G, streaming video) phone is real special. It does a pirouette on his desk because it is vibrating so strongly.
Imagine it. Everyone who has these phones (millions) gets this ringing all the time, even in the middle of the night. DoCoMo recently offered custom mail addresses to combat it but still..
Thank you for your polite salutation. But I have to disagree through agreement.
First, the nonexistence of sentient life would not affect my conclusion that creating a sustainable ecology and genome independent of the only independent one we have (Earth) would increase species survivability.
I also never suggested statistics equal proof. Straw man. However I defend my inclusion of the consideration of other species because when survival of the species is the topic, you *do* consider likely possibilities. So, I refuse to allow your demand that I prove the existence of advanced exterrestrial civilizations before freely considering the future of the human race. You talk like a banker (not meant as a personal attack), but please understand the whole point of this thread is expanded horizons.
Your statement "*we* are not going to kill ourselves off" is completely indefensible and is also unlikely. And I hope nobody who really is in a position to decide about this sort of thing just takes you at your word. We already appear to be able to make our world uninhabitable, and we have historically never failed to find and apply destructively higher destructive energies. The next 50 years seem quite likely (yes, statistics I know) to see truly horrific technologies pass into a broad number of hands. It would seem that the unification of our cultures might be the only thing standing between a paradise and hell. Or don't you wonder what happens when Saddam Hussein's grandchild figures out nanotechnological weapons? Some people have always believed in doomsday.
But hey, it could just be an accident. My reference to "a soon-coming scientific development" was not meant to cover a belligerent attack. Most scientists are not trying to create Star Trek technology, but we do need to find a very high energy reaction to open the stars to exploration. I'd rather it was found (if at all) far from Earth.
Other scientific developments I considered as part of the above catch-all were the gray goo problem of nanotech, irreversible pollution of the ecology or genome through a biotech mishap, and the takeover by robotic minds forseen by some of our foremost AI researchers. The point is not to be a doomsayer but to demand serious thought to be put into these potential problems, as Bill Joy attempted to do.
The main problem you see, is that experimental science is gradually advancing to the point that our physical bodies and biome are very fragile in comparison. Scaling back chemical and nuclear weapons stores is one thing, but now we have got an acclerator which can probably create microscopic black holes. While contemporary science states that they will evaporate right away harmlessly, this is a cognitive dissonance. You see, at the same time we as a race (and individually for sci-fi fans) want or need to find something unknown, to fuel our future. This is what science is all about anyway. The only problem is that while science is often made through accidents, we cannot really afford too many breakthroughs anymore.
As far as aliens goes, well if we find them the odds are pretty high they are going to be way ahead of us, considering the length of our history compared to the time the galaxy has been around.
As Broccolist (good name!) mentions below, cosmic phenomena are one statistic which says we probably won't make ourselves extinct through particle physics. Although we ourselves are the biggest beneficiaries of a supernova already (it made the elements in our bodies). So as far as physics goes, I do hope that the key to the next level of power is a relatively subtle interaction which is easily controlled and not very noisy. This would also begin to explain why the sky is so quiet.
The most important reason to get off the planet is to improve survivability of the race, including redundancy against disasters and acquisition of resources and research facilities.
Some obvious planetary disasters might include racial stagnation, meteor strike, sudden climactic change, intentional NBC warfare, unintentional destruction of the planet through scientific experimentation that goes wrong, and destruction by the Vogons.
The scariest thing about all this is, we should have been visited already if it was that easy to spread to the stars. So I hope we get as far from Earth as possible quickly, just in case the reason for the quiet is that a soon-coming scientific development tends to wipe out races when they are real young.
Put it this way, we are going to eventually move out, or we are going to stick where we are. SETI types grade a civilization by how much energy it can use, and you have to be off the planet to just get in the front door. But considering how long communications would take, it seems much more likely that we will succeed at making other planets in our system habitable before we get to the stars.
Obviously nanotech is going to be the major tool.
My hope is that we can develop it soon enough and safely enough that we can get off-planet cheaply. About the same time or sooner we ought to have telescopes large enough to tell us if there is anywhere interesting nearby.
Sails are already understood to be a great tool in doing all this stuff, and we can have it soon. We would send robotic explorers first obviously, but in our first human wave I could totally see travelers kept in a crystalline stasis as nano-stabilized solids which would require little energy to maintain. Conceivably the explorers might not even age so much if relativity comes into play.
However it happens, as soon as we expand our reach beyond planet Earth we are going to start thinking in terms of much larger distances and lengths of time. It will be interesting to see if we can hold something resembling our society together as we develop autonomous off-planet settlements.
Slashdot Mirror
It works fine if you just use the latter node_id parameter, as here
It would be nice to see more links to PerlMonks, and Perl articles in general. As far as I know CPAN is probably the biggest group of modules built by a single programming community which actively mixes and matches them. While there isn't one brain to it, PM is the best place I think to talk about them. Thanx
mattr
I built one but it is very free-form and may not be what you want.
My objective was to do a quick keyword search on a list of 100,000 records from several different sources. Generally I have one line per book, and while some of the indices provide more information that is all I use.
I didn't want to spend the time to do a real database job and I wanted to use Perl regular expressions to do a quick keyword search within author and title text. So I keep recent indices next to the search program compressed variously with zip, gzip, or bzip2. I can direct the system to make a single text file which contains the unpacked text all appended together and compressed again. It will also list stats for each file.
Its main function is to wait for a keyword to be typed in, and it will immediately (PIII/450MHz Linux Inspiron 7.5K) display a numbered list of matching books, in alphabetical order grouped by indice. You can then select certain numbers from the list, or reduce the number of records by adding more keywords. This is sufficent for me and has helped me discover unknown titles and new authors because of its way of narrowing down on information. Perhaps if I had more structured files I would have used Perl's BoulderIO which has solved huger problems of library science in merging genome data files, see bio.perl.org.
At first I thought wuh? But of course I was in Mozilla, so I didn't see the problem. IE executed it exploit right away.
Free Software ought to get better press from this, as it underscores a major truism.
In Free Software, new versions are generally made and released due to added functionality or fixed bugs. Anything else is a waste of time for the programmers, right?
With the exception of a very huge vulnerability that was finally fixed with IE SP2 (though who knows what else that contained), new software versions from Microsoft seem due to an entirely different set of reasons, like:
- breaking more fledgling standards
- making news
- embracing/extending
- press releases
- etc
Not true with my copy (Win2K Japanese, IE5.50)if same url.
i / omepage/ari_homepage.jsp
Redirects to http://arizona.diamondbacks.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/ar
The cover of a Windows magazine here last issue says in HUGE letters, DON'T RUN WINDOWS XP WITH OUT-OF THE BOX SETTINGS.. It is an issue devoted to the new edition of Windows and they say how it totally screws up your computer and does all this bad stuff unless you mess with it first. The consensus in Tokyo seems to be, use Windows 2000 in-house if you can (or older OS's if already installed), DON'T use XP, and WinMe crashes a lot (but so does XP). Win2K seems to be pretty good.
This shit is legal?
If it is, why not just ruin their market? A client which on installation calls a 3rd party server anonymously, to indicate a sale. The dealer donates all the money to the dolphins or maybe the FSF. No money is collected, he just donates on behalf of all the users.
Scenario two: The software is only sold in 1000,000-packs, price is 1 cent. What constitutes a sale? What constitutes prior restraint on business? Microsoft does not make money directly from this license it would seem. Is it possible for them legally to force a licensee to take a profit?
This could sprout a new anti-anti-GPL: Just like BSD but the FSF or somebody else puts up 1 cent for enough copies to cover the world population. We can have a $10 fund to cover any number of M$ products which use this until the sun explodes. Perhaps we should use a dead currency that will give us better compression..
Software piracy is the only force which *enables* Microsoft Office to be ubiquitous on the corporate desktop (at least in Japan which I know). Of course the OS comes with the machine, but some pirated/reused copies of the OS are also needed to build new machines etc.
If everyone had to actually pay for this stuff and see it as a line item they might consider using free software. Perhaps the Fink button could be installed on all government workstations by law?
Someone should give these assholes the address of that kid in Malaysia. A virus or two written by the BSA, M$ and the RIAA might have more effect (sheesh).
Maybe some articles on Linux in the enterprise, or writeups of Linux games. How about having O'Reilly provide an online book that is only available during the install process eh?? (they already provide a free chapter online anyway).
You could introduce people to new powerful/interesting/fun things and do something useful with the attention span. Even, you could have a content service that comes up when any installer runs and you can pick up where you left off.
You might even be able to sponsor the software you are installing with some paid-for information maybe.
"Game sales are crucial because they are highly profitable, unlike the Xbox hardware, which Microsoft sells below cost in order to keep consumer prices down."
I would enjoy the irony running Linux on one of these, at least until I got tired of its lack of power/ethernet/etc. I think I'll wait till they drop in price a couple hundred bucks.
What do you want to bet Sony's going to let M$ throw a lot of money down the tube for a while and then destroy them for Christmas with their next-generation machine.
I played the street fighter type game for X-Box in Japan in a demo on the street and the graphics were spectacular. But um, I saw same or better (I think much better) rendering of the same game in a demo on HDTV, playing on an Akihabara which is the biggest electronics downtown street in Tokyo. This was 1-2 YEARS ago. (Just get enough rendering time on the Onyx..) Of course it was totally stunning but we'll all have that in a couple years. Please tell me how Microsoft is going to win a war by dumping tons of cash to stay just ahead of the polygon crunching stats war? Hint: They're pretty soon going to need a fuckload and buy everyone better TVs if that's their claim to fame.
Oh, I forgot, they also make windows. Guess what Sony's next target will be..
is a-okay at Slashdot. How much did it cost?
Yoga Inside has been active since 1999 based on work done in 1995 by Mark Stephens in LA juvenile detention camps with six Tibetan monks sent by the Dalai Lama. here
That book has a website, www.yoga-insideout.com, here
"Inside and Out" is a popular way of describing holistic health, and the phrase "yoga inside" is commonly used to describe the experience, like the site here.
There is a travel company called Inside India which works with several Yoga therapy centers for health tours, here.
Barbara Kallir directed an instructional video guide to tantric yoga, "Inside Westside". Recommended for the Lawyers after those free courses, here.
Couldn't find a link between the Dalai Lama and Intel, unless you count that both are successful exiles. Although Apple struck the Dalai Lama from their Asian billboards so maybe ..nah.
The fourth most popular use of the word conjunction "yoga inside" on the web, after the prison project, the video, and general discussions of yoga and health experiences, is Intel's suit. How many hundreds of millions of dollars of PR is this costing Intel I wonder? Maybe the defendant should get the video publisher to join in, seems like they are making lots of money with their domain name.
It's been done, just not on sale in N. America
or anywhere outside Japan, yet.
GPS integrated into ordinary cellphones (well ordinary for Japan means color, Java, midi, etc) is in stores now. One model has a good digital compass; a few programmer friends were salivating recently). This model actually doesn't have Java but does have 65K color, 16 voice midi, automatic time setting (?), an advanced email client, and support for a plugin camera.
Check it out here, the latest model (notice the compass in the upper left corner). The page is in Japanese, but it notes that this model is a step ahead of other GPS phones. It has a "heading up" feature that tells when you turn and it rotates the map 90 degrees so that it is pointing the way you are walking. The heading says, "The GPS mobile phone that comes yet closer to a car navigation system".
I found the main page from Panasonic about it here which is much more detailed. Some pages want Flash but if you follow the links you will see a lot more about the different functions. Hmmm maybe I better pick one up..
Just read the PDF (again Japanese sorry) and it has yet more info.. the email client has 3d animated characters that make faces at you depending on the mail, and it plays games like soccer and there is a fishing game which lets you find a school of fish with the GPS at fishing holes all around Japan and then try to catch them. 102 grams, 132x176 pixels. Scared how much it's going to cost.
As a high-level Monex employee once acknowledged to me, it is obviously physically impossible to guarantee anything about hardware, basically anything that can be hacked will be hacked. So they have a system I was told that assumes cards are periodically updated.
If hardware is faulty Hong Kong will have to replace every card physically, ignore the problem, or try to do an online fix.
I think it is a pretty good bet that those readers, possibly when provided a suitable crypto key over the network, will be able to update the smart card software to the extent possible.
Also, if someone trashes a card they are going to be able to get a new one. Presumably they will have to show up at a government office in person with fingers attached if their card stops working.. Plenty of room to work the system at plenty of points it would seem.
Sports Illustrated and others have used Palm's Web Clipping applications (WCA, alias PQA - Palm Query Application).
I've developed for them and you can actually surf web sites and view CGI output in the clipper browser built into the OS (English v.4 or with mobile lib). Palm's gateway will reduce image sizes for you for free too.
This is quite intentional and not a laughing matter.
"Embrace and Extend" means Microsoft has an imperative from way up high to subvert anything it perceives as dangerous. This includes weakening de facto standards (made a lot of people code for MS Java) or somehow take over the very concepts we use to think about our environment.
This is very dangerous when the environment is based on agreement by a lot of people as to virtual standards. Ultimately a Microsoft brand name would be planned in such a calculation to completely replace common features of the landscape. Or did you think they would allow "http://" to remain in the Address bar forever?
This is a seedy corporate tactic and unless we refuse to feed our brains with Microsoft drivel we have only ourselves to blame. They've still got plenty of acronyms to go..
Nice to have an adult join us kids. Which ethical directive urges you to illustrate your Bio as "Imagine a Beowulf cluster fuck..."?
You may be right with regard to morally bankrupt fights over legal terminology, and I am neither a lawyer nor overly vocal about the GPL (which is great, but unfortunately seems to bankrupt programmers rather quickly).
But just as a man is allowed to defend himself in a court of law, it is certainly legal to write a contract which is understandable by people without a law degree? I for one would like to hear which holes you think are there so that these geeks can wrap their heads about it and stop companies from abusing their work.
I'd imagine golf cleats, soccer shoes, or strap-on crampons would be effective. So would a few ropes.
Aside from the sheer fright of such military weaponry being beta-tested on our citizens, I'm a little concerned about second order effects. Asphixiating bubbles? Does it melt or what happens if you are breathing this stuff at the bottom of a football-style pileup? Instant freezing on cold sidewalks? Heart attacks? Could people slide into traffic or babies fall into sewers? etc.
Also this could be a nasty transport mechanism for gel-capsules of other substances maybe irritants. Is there any chance this could be used frm a height like poorman's napalm?
This sickening line of thought launched by wondering what the protesters might do if they had some with them. It might be very nasty with a Moltov thrown on it, or mixed with gasoline or acetone. You couldn't just drop and roll, you can't run away, and it could be aspirated. A terrifying catastrophe waiting to happen.
There are many other things you could do. Slashdot for the most part has completely stagnated and any technical work you have been doing has not been visible, it just makes things work the way they should.
...) brainpower of your combined readership. Maybe trolls will come in useful too in this endeavor!
..) and let us put our heads together for you. If you really are worried about going out of business then put the pedal to the metal and get some use out of the brainpower here. But don't just make a 2-day thread. Make it an initial test of the Slashdot Problemsolver or whatever this would be called. Email me if you want, I've worked on the idea a while myself.
Here are some concrete ideas for generating revenue. They require you to make some visible effort and leverage the (unbeatable, global, altruistic,
- Put all the information about the calculations you are making out in the public and give us all something to chew on. You aren't sitting out on the moon somewhere you know.
- Page the site starting tomorrow and see how it goes. This thread surfed at 5 still gives me 66 comments, or *60* screens for one little ad at the top. I spend a lot of time on Slashdot and your advertisers should be made to pay you for it without making the site unuseable.
I definitely try to escape sites with big ads, or ignore the big ad and find a printer friendly version.
- Maintain incentive for serious posters and make trolls pay. Ad size should be inverse to karma. Karma whoring a problem? Fix your voting system, -4 karma whoring.
- Slashdot readers are often reading to learn. Text and voting gets into their heads better than images. I'd recommend letting people pick theme boxes which include one or more ads guaranteed to be a small image with some descriptive text and a vote meter users vote on. Themed means I already want to know about the product. Votes over a given threshold make the border change color or move it to the top. The ads could remain on page within a 1-2 inch wide margin.
- Ask Slashdot (it's *not* too late) about ideas for increasing community involvement. We *do* provide critical feedback to manufacturers featured on Slashdot.
- I am well acquainted with a system called CARMA that is used by many PR agencies to prepare valuable reports on news about a specific issue or product. Humans grade articles from around the world (in this case just Slashdot, or you can further analyze your own demographics) according to many items on a scoresheet, and the company can find out what the main issues are, how favorable news is, which writers or news outlets are most favorable, etc. You could work out your own system, or if you like I would be interested in helping. Anyway, you charge AMD, the RIAA, Disney, or Microsoft for professional (hire one) analysis. You might want to have a separate firm do this so you are not caught between hoping Microsoft remains the bad boy (good for linux!) and teaching them how to tweak techies and open sourcerers. Micro$oft has the dollar sign in their name for a reason you know!
- If you really want to have a pay medium, consider getting more help understanding how to provide additional professional value to your readers. They can pay, they just don't want to pay for what they are giving you it seems. You will need to pay writers and editors, and innovate. Though you may have done so, the readers haven't seen it yet.
- Consider adding meta-functionality to Slashdot. I've suggested it in the past, but you might want to consider an integrated function akin to a BBS or Wiki which would assist in boiling down the brainpower of your readers. Perhaps it is a moderator who is tallying things, or maybe it is a way for people to stay in touch with threads over more than a few days. Currently Slashdot is in one ear and out the other, with little sense of its own history. This is childish management considering the immense value of the resource at hand. I suggest you add to the Ask Slashdot help at people mentioning things that are of value to someone regarding the site. Some can be made for pay for some people.
- Look at Perlmonks.org again. I at least put much more work into it than Slashdot. But there is a chat, a sense of community, altruism, and a vibe of rulership by intelligence. There is an offering plate. It is aimed more at tech people and you have to type in HTML. You can edit your posts and people do, especially to Update your postlater with new info. There are some great search facilities. There are heroes, gods, self-proclaimed writers of tutorials and other sections, different levels of editing crews, etc. You know all about it, just look again and analyze it. Maybe post a question in SOPW (Seekers of Perl Wisdom) from Taco or Hemos with a question about recommendations for Slashdot.org. You can't be embarassed, the culture doesn't allow it. Really. People get kicked out for personal attacks and bad trolls are deleted. You probably know we ask people "Is this a homework question". So look at Perlmonks, not for a revenue model but to see why Slashdot looks like it's in the 80's still. There is room for imagination.
- Offer money for creative patches to Slashdot which will do something neat with user/points/article/access stats. Nothing too deleterious to privacy. Slashdot takes itself way too seriously considering hardly anyone there is writing the articles. Most readers, sorry to say, are probably ignoring in disgust many of the "editors'" comments that are spliced to the submission.
- Analyze what the most popular threads have been, and if possible what threads have generated thank you emails to Slashdot about how this really helped. I'd guess info for public organizations setting up linux-based networks to save money is a big one. You could write up a real report based on actually following up on all the information provided in the posts (which in case you forgot are already editted for you for free) and get some professionals to vet it. Get some real world stats and maybe some advice from readers in return for sexy hardware or something cool they'd like. Maybe you make them special associate gurus or somehow help them in a geeky or other way. Then sell the report. The posts belong to posters (I guess?) but you can summarize the information and publish it as a Slashdot Report. Ask O'Reilly, or maybe some private consultants in different countries, for help. One example I can provide is Internet Magazine in Japan. It provides articles of course, but also the most detailed comparisons of providers, and also a separate booklet inside on a certain Internet technical subject.
- Consider New York Times. I am amazed at how many posts are made to Slashdot regarding their site and I wonder how many people sign up. They have Times Fax, which is now a gorgeous PDF (10 pages). Consider an online magazine mailed or web-accessible to paying customers, in HTML or PDF format. Did you know by the way that an immense number of magazines in Japan are selling mainly translated versions of data from the U.S.? Sell it to them or their readers pretranslated over the web! Have you guys got any professionals in the publishing business or what?
- Reconsider the launch of VA Software and what you can use it for. Recently VA Japan held an Open Source Database Conference and it was really beat I thought. There were so many more things that could have been done. Instead of a fairly insipid seminar for quiet suits you could have rented out a huge conference center. The only fun thing was drinking with Mysql's Atmark and the Mysql mailing list members. But businesswise, what a total waste!
- and while we're on international, slashdot japan which I had dismissed as miniscule and irrelevant a while ago, now seems to have interesting articles and weblogs not available on slashdot usa. How about translating some of it back to English? Many Japanese people have trouble reading tons of English you know.. Slashdot could be more relevant. Let's see, top four stories right now are the crash of KDDI's mobile phone network (not receiving more subscriptions), possible sale of Niftyserve from Fujitsu to Sony, a lawsuit being brought by the Japanese RIAA and main music copyright holder JASRAC against File Rogue, and stolen goods on Yahoo Auctions Japan (which had actually gotten a boost when eBay pulled *out* of Japan last week). Number 6 (Broadband Watch) is how DSL just beat out CATV for broadband connections. As of last september, they had half a million each and now they are growing exponentially.
Gee, how can you guys drool over 3G and Clies when you don't show the least interest in how the next generation digital economy really works? While the U.S. gets itself bound in sticky tape other countries have reached higher density.
- Tell us about the deal with apple (or did you do it for free?
- That's it for now. I think you have criminally wasted the resource in front of you and that's why you are where you have gotten. You are providing one of the the best marketing resources in the world for the IT industry for no money whatsoever. Duh! Let's fix the problem and make you guys a bundle of cash!
Mr. Anonymous Coward,
My email is on record. Yours ain't.
For the record I'm also 34 and have run my own independent software company for 8 years. I've hired away their top U.S. webmaster, ported a major Japanese printing industry product to Windows, planned a next generation search engine for them (MSJP), and recently provided technology used in scanning their error logs (MSJP).
As it happens a good friend and one of the best Java programmers in the country just went to work for Microsoft, the reason being that only they could pay. I wonder why Microsoft is so rich now?
There is such a thing as pushing it though, and this is one of those milestones. I would be quite surprised if any sane Microsoft employee would be able to defend the indefensible with a straight face.
Awaiting your zealous email.
Matt Rosin
What total a**holes. Next time someone tells you they work for Microsoft, ask them incredulously why they haven't quit yet!
Everyone knows that just as with mathematics, you can do anything in software. The point is, only the mentally damaged and egomaniacal build this kind of bloated, smirking, F***ED by Redmond again supercookie loggers into the monopoly operating system.
CALL TO ARMS!
This seems dumb and limiting the development of a new market, but then again who knows how much the phone company is making off the literally billions of spams going out.. I'm hoping this may change as the client-side opens up more.
Just buy a space shuttle. They all come with them included.
You can actually buy sapphire windows at least up to 15cm square some places I found on the net.. supermarket scanners also sometimes have sapphire windows apparently.
The watchglass of my Rolex is a sapphire crystal. Looks cool, doesn't scratch. This page has info about synthetic sapphire watchglasses. It says Seiko coats mineral glass with synthetic sapphire (sapphlex they call it) to make it hard.
You see, mobile phones ring or vibrate when they get spammed. It's worse than ordinary spam because email addresses are usually the same as your phone number, giving an easy target to spam programs.
My friend has two phones registered with slightly different names, and they ring within 10 seconds of each other, about once an hour or so. His FOMA (3G, streaming video) phone is real special. It does a pirouette on his desk because it is vibrating so strongly.
Imagine it. Everyone who has these phones (millions) gets this ringing all the time, even in the middle of the night. DoCoMo recently offered custom mail addresses to combat it but still..
Thank you for your polite salutation. But I have to disagree through agreement.
First, the nonexistence of sentient life would not affect my conclusion that creating a sustainable ecology and genome independent of the only independent one we have (Earth) would increase species survivability.
I also never suggested statistics equal proof. Straw man. However I defend my inclusion of the consideration of other species because when survival of the species is the topic, you *do* consider likely possibilities. So, I refuse to allow your demand that I prove the existence of advanced exterrestrial civilizations before freely considering the future of the human race. You talk like a banker (not meant as a personal attack), but please understand the whole point of this thread is expanded horizons.
Your statement "*we* are not going to kill ourselves off" is completely indefensible and is also unlikely. And I hope nobody who really is in a position to decide about this sort of thing just takes you at your word. We already appear to be able to make our world uninhabitable, and we have historically never failed to find and apply destructively higher destructive energies. The next 50 years seem quite likely (yes, statistics I know) to see truly horrific technologies pass into a broad number of hands. It would seem that the unification of our cultures might be the only thing standing between a paradise and hell. Or don't you wonder what happens when Saddam Hussein's grandchild figures out nanotechnological weapons? Some people have always believed in doomsday.
But hey, it could just be an accident. My reference to "a soon-coming scientific development" was not meant to cover a belligerent attack. Most scientists are not trying to create Star Trek technology, but we do need to find a very high energy reaction to open the stars to exploration. I'd rather it was found (if at all) far from Earth.
Other scientific developments I considered as part of the above catch-all were the gray goo problem of nanotech, irreversible pollution of the ecology or genome through a biotech mishap, and the takeover by robotic minds forseen by some of our foremost AI researchers. The point is not to be a doomsayer but to demand serious thought to be put into these potential problems, as Bill Joy attempted to do.
The main problem you see, is that experimental science is gradually advancing to the point that our physical bodies and biome are very fragile in comparison. Scaling back chemical and nuclear weapons stores is one thing, but now we have got an acclerator which can probably create microscopic black holes. While contemporary science states that they will evaporate right away harmlessly, this is a cognitive dissonance. You see, at the same time we as a race (and individually for sci-fi fans) want or need to find something unknown, to fuel our future. This is what science is all about anyway. The only problem is that while science is often made through accidents, we cannot really afford too many breakthroughs anymore.
As far as aliens goes, well if we find them the odds are pretty high they are going to be way ahead of us, considering the length of our history compared to the time the galaxy has been around.
As Broccolist (good name!) mentions below, cosmic phenomena are one statistic which says we probably won't make ourselves extinct through particle physics. Although we ourselves are the biggest beneficiaries of a supernova already (it made the elements in our bodies). So as far as physics goes, I do hope that the key to the next level of power is a relatively subtle interaction which is easily controlled and not very noisy. This would also begin to explain why the sky is so quiet.
Some obvious planetary disasters might include racial stagnation, meteor strike, sudden climactic change, intentional NBC warfare, unintentional destruction of the planet through scientific experimentation that goes wrong, and destruction by the Vogons.
The scariest thing about all this is, we should have been visited already if it was that easy to spread to the stars. So I hope we get as far from Earth as possible quickly, just in case the reason for the quiet is that a soon-coming scientific development tends to wipe out races when they are real young.
Put it this way, we are going to eventually move out, or we are going to stick where we are. SETI types grade a civilization by how much energy it can use, and you have to be off the planet to just get in the front door. But considering how long communications would take, it seems much more likely that we will succeed at making other planets in our system habitable before we get to the stars.
Obviously nanotech is going to be the major tool. My hope is that we can develop it soon enough and safely enough that we can get off-planet cheaply. About the same time or sooner we ought to have telescopes large enough to tell us if there is anywhere interesting nearby.
Sails are already understood to be a great tool in doing all this stuff, and we can have it soon. We would send robotic explorers first obviously, but in our first human wave I could totally see travelers kept in a crystalline stasis as nano-stabilized solids which would require little energy to maintain. Conceivably the explorers might not even age so much if relativity comes into play.
However it happens, as soon as we expand our reach beyond planet Earth we are going to start thinking in terms of much larger distances and lengths of time. It will be interesting to see if we can hold something resembling our society together as we develop autonomous off-planet settlements.