Amazingly perceptive for the FCC considering some of the stuff they've done of late (media consolidation rules for one).
Actually, Powell has been entirely consistent and frequently misunderstood. His policies and decisions come from his underlying belief in minimal regulation. This was first evident in the modifications to the FCC consolidation regulations (as an aside, many legal experts believe that the former regulations would never have stood up to court challenge and the revised version championed by Powell was likely the most restrictive that could). Since then, he has repeatedly sided against big media by opposing additional restrictions on issues such as VoIP regulation, fees for internet radio stations, the use of FM frequencies by neighborhood radio stations, etc. Overall, I think the media consolidation ruling will be the least significant of these. Every week, I get less and less content from major providers and more and more from independent sources on the web.
Whether you side with him or not, it is not appropriate to dismiss Powell as a 'tool for big media'. He seems to act with integrity.
It's puzzling to me to see so much animosity toward Powell from the Slashdot crowd.
I agree. Not only is control tedious without a mouse and keyboard, they have to crank down the rate you can turn to make the game controllable, which means they generally have to add some auto-aiming features. It's a completely different experience. On top of that, you have lower resolution, no console to enter commands (want fov 120? sorry) and you miss out on all the mods, which can be half the fun of iD games.
Console versions of FPS are barely shadows of the real thing.
I have the NEC 2500 that can be firmware-upgraded to the 2510 dual-layer model. People have been reporting that the new firmware works fine, but no one on any of the message boards has yet verified that dual-layer DVDs burned with the new firmware will play on standard DVD players. I'd be curious about the same issue with Lite-On models until there is more testing.
Also, dual-layer media is still very expensive. A DL disc costs much more than twice as much as a single-layer.
now that adblock handles flash and other embeds, it has become capable of filtering just about everything. I no longer need FlashBlock. Since adblock can handle regex filtering, I find myself becoming obsessed with trying to filter that last 0.1% of ads that get through while keeping a short filter list.
Also, the article calls Mozilla 'stripped down', which is absurd. It has tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking by default, putting it light years ahead of the market leader.
I like SA, and find it is very good for identifying around 95% of my incoming spam. However, I also have around 0.1% false positive rate, which means at some point I have to look through all the filtered spam messages and make sure none of them were legit.
I need a better tool for handling mail SA has identified as spam, either server-side or client-side. I'd like to delete anything with a score > 15, simply store anything with a score > 5, and send an auto-reply for scores between 5 and 10 indicating that the message was marked as spam and I'll probably never look at it.
A good set of procmail and formail rules will accomplish this, but my hosting company has a weird procmail setup and I'd prefer something easier to implement.
When DNC went into effect, the change was dramatic and immediate. We went from four calls a night to zero.
We've had problems with two companies that have repeatedly called after being told to take us off their lists, and I have filed complaints against them both: AT&T and the Credit Foundation of America. I hope they get slammed with fines.
spreadsheet software separately and it was not uncommon to use products from two different vendors as standards - for example, WordPerfect and Lotus 123 were common standards.
True. My favorite was WP5.1 and Quattro Pro 4.0. WP could even embed QP spreadsheets, which was impressive given that they were both DOS programs. I bought a shrink-wrapped copy of WP5.1 off eBay for nostalgic reasons, but haven't had time to install it on my computer. Once I do, I may find that I use it for most word processing tasks.
"I have a huge presentation to make and I can't print my slides!"
This raises a bigger issue. How about people who use laptops, often in places with no internet connection? The sales force isn't going to ask potential clients to jack into their LAN. If you want to work from a hotel without broadband, most coffee shops or a home with a slow internet connection, sounds like you'd be out of luck. Is it expected that MS Office will be purchased for all these folks?
Gmail seems ideal to me; however, I need to keep my email address that is associated with my domain name. If they add the ability to handle an mx record for an outside domain, I'd be willing to pay a nominal fee to use the service. It's unlikely to happen, but with Google, all things seem possible.
I still think the best language to learn to program for kids (starting around 7) is Logo. Instant gratification, cool animation, you can make impressive patterns quickly and it teaches the basic control structures.
Then, they can graduate to StarLogo, an object-oriented version of logo which is easy to learn, but very powerful. A number of labs are using it for research simulation.
Go with the turtle.
parsec: A unit of astronomical length based on the distance from Earth at which stellar parallax is one second of arc and equal to 3.258 light-years, 3.086 x 1013 kilometers, or 1.918 x 1013 miles.
It would be nice to see how this would look for percentage of http traffic rather than percentage of domains. I'm not sure who would be favored, but it seems like a better metric.
This is certainly a significant technical hurdle, but it does not merit discounting the proposal.
If we look at similar projects, such as building the atomic bomb in WWII, or the Apollo program launched by Kennedy, equally, if not greater, technical challenges had to be solved under intense scheduling goals.
The question is not whether we can accomplish a mission to Mars in the next decade. The question is whether we are willing to expend the resources to make it happen.
No one make a decent calculator anymore. People are hoarding 10 year old HPs off eBay. I'm using the 48SX I've had since 1990.
My requirements aren't too severe:
a large set of functions available through a configurable interface
RPN
a flexible programming language
a decent-sized graphical display, but it doesn't need to be so large to make the calculator a mini-laptop. I need to use it in the field
tactile buttons that always register and are sufficiently durable to last a couple decades
a large 'enter' key prominently placed near the center of the keypad
a tough case made of thick plastic that doesn't creak when squeezed, can be dropped a few times without damage and isn't painted with some shiny paint that flakes off. Actually, which isn't painted at all except for the silk-screened indicators over the buttons
HP stopped making an attempt at the last three some time ago. If I have to put up with a cruddy interface, eventually I'll take the speed hit and use a PDA with stylus. Until then, I'm hoarding old calculators off eBay. The 38SII, while not graphical, is probably the best professional scientific calculator for everyday use, but even they're getting expensive. I'd stick to old 48s/g for graphing.
Of course, in five years you'll likely be able to buy a better TV for $500, meaning few of the bulbs will be replaced.
If this works out to $200 a year for a pretty decent thin high-def TV ($1000 for the set with an expected lifetime of 5 years), many will find it a good deal.
The magnitude of risk doesn't seem to be the criteria being used these days, however. They're confiscating nail clippers for pete's sake. Can we really expect that they'll allow cannisters of a combustible fluid on board?
In Illinois, toll booths have cameras that photograph the license plates of vehicles that go through a toll lane without paying. OCR software deciphers the plate number and a ticket can be issued without human review.
A simple software change can expand the system to issue speeding tickets.
Obstinately insisting on stopping and using coins is probably just a meaningless gesture.
In the articles I've read, I haven't seen mention of how the UN expects to have its claimed governance of the internet acknowledged by current authorities.
If the UN claimed governance of the airwaves, wouldn't the FCC simply laugh? I realize that the FCC is a national body and ICANN is international, but unless the UN plans to set up its own root servers and coerce everyone to use them, how will this be enforced?
Of course, I already HAVE shorted SCOX, so I might just buy-to-cover immediately. In fact, I have a buy-to-cover stop order already in place which might get triggered by the erroneously reported price drop.
This makes me wonder how many of these trades were automated without any actual human intervention.
I don't know if they still do, but for years, Cincinnati Microwave made both radar guns and radar detectors. They generated a technology war with better and better radar guns and more sensitive detectors. They seemed to have been very successful with this strategy.
I agree with you. Even though it takes more effort to throw out a credit card offer than delete an email, the fact that they had to pay around $0.30 to send it in paper and bulk mailing costs makes me not mind. Bulk email, which approaches free, has entirely different economics which makes it much more insidious by my perspective.
However, I don't feel the same about telephone solicitations. They've always outraged me, even though there is a cost involved. Before DNC was implemented, I encouraged everyone to keep phone solicitors on the line as long as possible without purchasing anything. I hoped that the ratio of per call cost to hit rate could be increased sufficiently to make the process no longer worthwhile. Others advocated this also, but it never seemed to catch on.
It seems this is becoming pretty much standard practice. There are two ways many websites refuse to respect users' opt-out wishes:
The settings mysteriously get reset periodically. For some sites it seems to be once a year, for others, once a quarter.
New mailing lists, which are simply modified or more specialized versions of existing mailing lists are created and everyone is opted in by default
The two worst cases for me are Canon, which sends me new product notifications once a month and has an opt-out link on the bottom of every email which seems to do nothing and ACDSee, which makes nice software but pretty much has ignored all my opt-outs.
I have my own domain and create a new address for every vendor so it's easy enough to turn off messages from sites that fail to follow their own privacy guidelines. If you don't respect my wishes, all of your emails are ignored.
Much more of an issue is the size of the chess playbook. For that, systems which have cartridges - and since SD and so forth are common these days, that does include PDAs - have a big win. This means that the low end Palms are sort of the shitstick, and the problem is, that's where competition with the gameboy ends.
You seem to be agreeing with me. The extra memory available with most PDAs give them an edge. I never claimed that 3 year old Palms are ideal for chess, merely that they could handle the graphics. As far as computing strength, more important to me than raw ELO is how 'human' the program can become. Few programs on PC make much headway in this category, much less PDA and even less so on the gameboy.
Of course, for $70 (or $95 backlit) you could have a color 240x160 screen, a good sound card, and a machine which happens to have an otherwise very strong game library.
You also have another clunky gadget to carry around and most adults feel kind of stupid puttering around with a gameboy in public. Modern PDAs exceed the screen resolution of the GBA and the types of games I'm talking about don't require strong animation engines and sound generation.
I stand by the statement that PDAs serve this market very well. There are a lot of Joe Salesman out there who will kill time with their PDA but won't carry around a gameboy. To this day, the most played video game of all time is Solitaire. GBA is overkill for this market.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Powell has been entirely consistent and frequently misunderstood. His policies and decisions come from his underlying belief in minimal regulation. This was first evident in the modifications to the FCC consolidation regulations (as an aside, many legal experts believe that the former regulations would never have stood up to court challenge and the revised version championed by Powell was likely the most restrictive that could). Since then, he has repeatedly sided against big media by opposing additional restrictions on issues such as VoIP regulation, fees for internet radio stations, the use of FM frequencies by neighborhood radio stations, etc. Overall, I think the media consolidation ruling will be the least significant of these. Every week, I get less and less content from major providers and more and more from independent sources on the web.
Whether you side with him or not, it is not appropriate to dismiss Powell as a 'tool for big media'. He seems to act with integrity.
It's puzzling to me to see so much animosity toward Powell from the Slashdot crowd.
I agree. Not only is control tedious without a mouse and keyboard, they have to crank down the rate you can turn to make the game controllable, which means they generally have to add some auto-aiming features. It's a completely different experience. On top of that, you have lower resolution, no console to enter commands (want fov 120? sorry) and you miss out on all the mods, which can be half the fun of iD games.
Console versions of FPS are barely shadows of the real thing.
I have the NEC 2500 that can be firmware-upgraded to the 2510 dual-layer model. People have been reporting that the new firmware works fine, but no one on any of the message boards has yet verified that dual-layer DVDs burned with the new firmware will play on standard DVD players. I'd be curious about the same issue with Lite-On models until there is more testing.
Also, dual-layer media is still very expensive. A DL disc costs much more than twice as much as a single-layer.
yep. me too.
now that adblock handles flash and other embeds, it has become capable of filtering just about everything. I no longer need FlashBlock. Since adblock can handle regex filtering, I find myself becoming obsessed with trying to filter that last 0.1% of ads that get through while keeping a short filter list.
Also, the article calls Mozilla 'stripped down', which is absurd. It has tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking by default, putting it light years ahead of the market leader.
What do you do with mail SA has flagged?
I like SA, and find it is very good for identifying around 95% of my incoming spam. However, I also have around 0.1% false positive rate, which means at some point I have to look through all the filtered spam messages and make sure none of them were legit.
I need a better tool for handling mail SA has identified as spam, either server-side or client-side. I'd like to delete anything with a score > 15, simply store anything with a score > 5, and send an auto-reply for scores between 5 and 10 indicating that the message was marked as spam and I'll probably never look at it.
A good set of procmail and formail rules will accomplish this, but my hosting company has a weird procmail setup and I'd prefer something easier to implement.
Any ideas?
When DNC went into effect, the change was dramatic and immediate. We went from four calls a night to zero.
We've had problems with two companies that have repeatedly called after being told to take us off their lists, and I have filed complaints against them both: AT&T and the Credit Foundation of America. I hope they get slammed with fines.
True. My favorite was WP5.1 and Quattro Pro 4.0. WP could even embed QP spreadsheets, which was impressive given that they were both DOS programs. I bought a shrink-wrapped copy of WP5.1 off eBay for nostalgic reasons, but haven't had time to install it on my computer. Once I do, I may find that I use it for most word processing tasks.
"I have a huge presentation to make and I can't print my slides!"
This raises a bigger issue. How about people who use laptops, often in places with no internet connection? The sales force isn't going to ask potential clients to jack into their LAN. If you want to work from a hotel without broadband, most coffee shops or a home with a slow internet connection, sounds like you'd be out of luck. Is it expected that MS Office will be purchased for all these folks?
Gmail seems ideal to me; however, I need to keep my email address that is associated with my domain name. If they add the ability to handle an mx record for an outside domain, I'd be willing to pay a nominal fee to use the service. It's unlikely to happen, but with Google, all things seem possible.
I still think the best language to learn to program for kids (starting around 7) is Logo. Instant gratification, cool animation, you can make impressive patterns quickly and it teaches the basic control structures.
Then, they can graduate to StarLogo, an object-oriented version of logo which is easy to learn, but very powerful. A number of labs are using it for research simulation. Go with the turtle.
from Dictionary.com:
parsec: A unit of astronomical length based on the distance from Earth at which stellar parallax is one second of arc and equal to 3.258 light-years, 3.086 x 1013 kilometers, or 1.918 x 1013 miles.
It would be nice to see how this would look for percentage of http traffic rather than percentage of domains. I'm not sure who would be favored, but it seems like a better metric.
This is certainly a significant technical hurdle, but it does not merit discounting the proposal.
If we look at similar projects, such as building the atomic bomb in WWII, or the Apollo program launched by Kennedy, equally, if not greater, technical challenges had to be solved under intense scheduling goals.
The question is not whether we can accomplish a mission to Mars in the next decade. The question is whether we are willing to expend the resources to make it happen.
good point
HP stopped making an attempt at the last three some time ago. If I have to put up with a cruddy interface, eventually I'll take the speed hit and use a PDA with stylus. Until then, I'm hoarding old calculators off eBay. The 38SII, while not graphical, is probably the best professional scientific calculator for everyday use, but even they're getting expensive. I'd stick to old 48s/g for graphing.
Of course, in five years you'll likely be able to buy a better TV for $500, meaning few of the bulbs will be replaced.
If this works out to $200 a year for a pretty decent thin high-def TV ($1000 for the set with an expected lifetime of 5 years), many will find it a good deal.
The magnitude of risk doesn't seem to be the criteria being used these days, however. They're confiscating nail clippers for pete's sake. Can we really expect that they'll allow cannisters of a combustible fluid on board?
In Illinois, toll booths have cameras that photograph the license plates of vehicles that go through a toll lane without paying. OCR software deciphers the plate number and a ticket can be issued without human review.
A simple software change can expand the system to issue speeding tickets.
Obstinately insisting on stopping and using coins is probably just a meaningless gesture.
In the articles I've read, I haven't seen mention of how the UN expects to have its claimed governance of the internet acknowledged by current authorities.
If the UN claimed governance of the airwaves, wouldn't the FCC simply laugh? I realize that the FCC is a national body and ICANN is international, but unless the UN plans to set up its own root servers and coerce everyone to use them, how will this be enforced?
Can anyone comment on this?
Of course, I already HAVE shorted SCOX, so I might just buy-to-cover immediately. In fact, I have a buy-to-cover stop order already in place which might get triggered by the erroneously reported price drop.
This makes me wonder how many of these trades were automated without any actual human intervention.
I don't know if they still do, but for years, Cincinnati Microwave made both radar guns and radar detectors. They generated a technology war with better and better radar guns and more sensitive detectors. They seemed to have been very successful with this strategy.
I agree with you. Even though it takes more effort to throw out a credit card offer than delete an email, the fact that they had to pay around $0.30 to send it in paper and bulk mailing costs makes me not mind. Bulk email, which approaches free, has entirely different economics which makes it much more insidious by my perspective.
However, I don't feel the same about telephone solicitations. They've always outraged me, even though there is a cost involved. Before DNC was implemented, I encouraged everyone to keep phone solicitors on the line as long as possible without purchasing anything. I hoped that the ratio of per call cost to hit rate could be increased sufficiently to make the process no longer worthwhile. Others advocated this also, but it never seemed to catch on.
The two worst cases for me are Canon, which sends me new product notifications once a month and has an opt-out link on the bottom of every email which seems to do nothing and ACDSee, which makes nice software but pretty much has ignored all my opt-outs.
I have my own domain and create a new address for every vendor so it's easy enough to turn off messages from sites that fail to follow their own privacy guidelines. If you don't respect my wishes, all of your emails are ignored.
You seem to be agreeing with me. The extra memory available with most PDAs give them an edge. I never claimed that 3 year old Palms are ideal for chess, merely that they could handle the graphics. As far as computing strength, more important to me than raw ELO is how 'human' the program can become. Few programs on PC make much headway in this category, much less PDA and even less so on the gameboy.
Of course, for $70 (or $95 backlit) you could have a color 240x160 screen, a good sound card, and a machine which happens to have an otherwise very strong game library.
You also have another clunky gadget to carry around and most adults feel kind of stupid puttering around with a gameboy in public. Modern PDAs exceed the screen resolution of the GBA and the types of games I'm talking about don't require strong animation engines and sound generation.
I stand by the statement that PDAs serve this market very well. There are a lot of Joe Salesman out there who will kill time with their PDA but won't carry around a gameboy. To this day, the most played video game of all time is Solitaire. GBA is overkill for this market.