On the lighter side there was a story about a Telecom company in Texas named them selves idontcare. That way when you started service and were asked "Who would you like for your long distance provider?" people that said "I Don't care" got assigned to this company.
Another fun grab: The predecessor to AT&T's 1-800-CALL-ATT was a short-lived 1-800-OPERATOR (who cares if it's too long, right?). Soon afterwards, MCI, in a bid to get some of that action, grabbed 1-800-OPERATER.
All the yokels who couldn't spell OPERATOR were charged by MCI instead of AT&T.
Unfortunately, it caught on big, and people started doing this with domain names too.
Sometime between 1984 and 1988, a week-long strip of "Bloom County" comics by Berkeley Breathed, involved prior art for this disputed 'one interaction shopping'.
I've not been able to find this strip. Please, if anyone is a Bloom County fan, and has the older anthologies, search for them.
The plot: Opus the Penguin has gotten addicted to Virtual Reality Home Shopping. An unwieldy helmet and computer hookup gives Opus a VR shopping experience. Opus' friends try to dissuade him before he goes bankrupt.
The key strip: Opus explains that they have his credit card on file, and the VR system takes simple gestures to make purchases. The punchline was, as Opus gestures blindly with a pointing finger, "Oops, I think I just bought a forklift."
If we can show any example of a concept that includes networked, shopping, single gesture and completed purchase, we can nip this stupid Amazon/OpenTV patent dispute in the bud.
Recall, patents for the common waterbed were denied because Robert A. Heinlein gave a description of them in at least one of his popular novels.
We see in 2D, for the most part. So for scene reproduction, it's can't be much better than 2D. And I think the user-interface aspect of 3D displays is _worse_ than 2D.
Yes, our eyes see in 2D with little depth perception (our eyes are too close together for much triangulation at focal distances).
However, our HEAD is built for 3D. If you move your body one inch, your brain KNOWS how the scene should rotate or translate. And more importantly, vice versa: you rotate or translate the scene, it has the environmental context of the real world around the display, allowing you to judge angles and distances.
Secondly, a static scene appearing in 3D would have no device-introduced latency between "I want to see it from another angle", and "I see it from another angle". This is one of the major reasons for spatial disorientation with 2D display systems: latency between command and result.
The UI question, I don't think we've played around with enough. The "flying" UIs of virtual reality were just one step of an eventual flood of experimentation in 3-space user interfaces.
"Chairman, this is the CEO of Finkelstien Widgets. I'd love to attend that $100,000 per plate fundraiser you're holding, but you see, I'm a bit concerned with that patent thing. It's only through Finkelstien Widgets' innovations that I am in the position to attend such a gala, you understand..."
Companies who wanted to farm TLDs would just spin off many microcompanies. It's cheap to be a microcompany.
What definition of a 'company' would you use? SEC "C-Corporation"? LLC? Aunt Gertrude's Bead Jewelry Enterprises? How about international definitions of companies?
They need to hire a few tech people to review tech patents.
Actually, they need to get support from Congress, who has consistently picked the PTO's review budgets clean for other appropriations.
Actually, they need to revamp the system so that the abstract of the patent is announced and posted publicly, while the specifics remain in seclusion, for the two years it takes to process the patent application.
Having the abstract posted publically would allow the "open patent" watchdogs help the PTO find prior art, without giving away specific competitive advantage, which the patent was designed to offer.
So, you're saying that there's no financial or social reason why inner city youth aren't booting Linux?
If you've climbed up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs far enough to have shelter, and your daily bread, then you're already far better off than many. If you've got a stable family or social structure around you, you're better off still.
It's only once you have stopped scraping for shelter, food, love and self-esteem that you can begin to look at cognitive development.
Only those relative few who have any access to computers can grow a serious interest in computers. Those who haven't had consistent, constructive access to computers will probably find more application in a portable CD player, than in a Linux distribution on a discarded 486.
Elitism in the 'digital divide' doesn't necessarily mean "small top minority." It just means "not the small bottom minority."
As usual, the writeup "above the fold" shown on the front page is vague beyond usefulness, or potentially misleading in a way to spark controversy.
The first thought is "Hey, community exists wherever people go to hang out!" Don't flip that bozo bit yet.
The article that follows the Read More link isn't about 'virtual community' the way that eBay and slashdot and EverQuest and MUDs are about 'virtual community'. Those are virtual communities, and they each have their own intrapolitical issues to deal with, but have tenuous relationship to the world as a whole.
The article also isn't about such hybrid political 'virtual communities' like Napster, where the politics inside the community are widely debated as politics outside the community.
What the author is hitting on is the effect of online communications on the non-virtual community, i.e., the net's promises of Jeffersonian (enlightend) democracy.
I don't think this is even talking about virtual community. It's talking about community via the net. It's not discussing the formation of subcultures or other communities, it's discussing how the net affects existing community, either as various states, or nations, or as the human race.
In short, if I read "virtual communities are a myth," I'd scoff. If I considered whether the Internet has really affected the way the world works politically, I'd give pause to think about it. The answer isn't necessarily so cut and dried.
If they want "Windows everywhere," and they will get called upon to support desktop applications on WINE, they could want to ensure that WINE is in fact able to run.
This is embrace, extend and extinguish: if Office 2002 runs out-of-the-box on Linux+WINE, trouble free, and your company has sold its soul to Office subscriptions anyway, why fight the headaches of StarOffice or other half-compatible solutions?
I didn't say 'two different keywords' here. I said, 'two different words'. As in, since there's no THAN keyword in any of those languages, the geeks forget that English spells THAN differently from THEN.
The founders may have started this site as a personal pure lark, but they've turned it into a commercial venture. That means, technically, he's a professional. As a professional, they should strive to improve their product and service, and illiteracy should never be the goal of a technology-minded professional, especially when their product IS based on the written word.
However, you may note that I never mentioned CmdrTaco, nor Hemos. I generalized to all geeks, slashdot or not, as this particular error seems rampant amongst all geekdom in my experience. And I never said geeks were morons for making the flub: I just noted a possible theory on the phenomenon.
MySQL is the backend for slash, scoop and many other really innovative weblog/moderation systems. I've wanted to try using these for several months now for nonprofit experiments, but the only machines I have are Win32 (Win2K) machines which I use in my employer's work.
MySQL is 'free as in beer' for any Linux taker, but they charge money if you want to use it on a Win32 system. Without flaming anyone in particular, to me this smacks of the same elitist crap that Linux bigots accuse Wintel-bound developers of.
If there was no MySQL for Win32, I wouldn't gripe. There is, but only at a premium. Apache and gcc and other quality OSS are offered on both platforms at the same price.
Before someone goes and marks me -1, Retard or offers the ever-so-helpful advice of "just set up a Linux box on the side or dual-boot," the point is, I don't have budget to have another machine around, and it's kinda hard to run a webservice from one boot partition while getting my employer's work done on another boot partition.
So, back on topic: fair platform-agnostic pricing for MySQL. Think of it as a stocking-stuffer.
Me: "I don't recall." --Ronald Wilson Reagan, Iran-Contra hearings
AC: Don't forget: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
The "I don't recall" ushered in a new era of courtroom defense. Reagan showed that there was a perfectly viable defense that was neither "No" nor "I plead the Fifth". It's always been there, but this case opened the floodgates to use that tactic.
The AC's quote was a pure fabrication; Clinton decided to redefine 'sexual relations' instead of owning up to the fact that he did. In short, he lied, and that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.
All the posts about "I need a towel" and "they should sell tickets just to touch it" are gonna look funny when this is just another slag heap of unusable parts.
"Why, when I was yer age, miboy, we had to put up with using a computer. That's a complicated physically connected brick of processing components. We thought a mere 2^5 processors was worth drooling over. Yes, miboy, I know your cochlear implant has more than that. You're missing the point. This thing was tremendous! It took up a whole rack: four times the size of a grown man! And all of its memory circuits were in the same cabinet, requiring massive cooling apparatus, unlike the distributed memory crystals that people embed in their jewelry."
Anyone still drooling over 2^5 address space on ferrite core memory? Anyone still drooling over 2^5 address lines? Or data lines?
While I get ill thinking about all the unrelated riders that are allowed to be attached to a bill, I don't see this as the worst example.
This is an immigration issue. Many may see a big difference between H1-B tech workers and retroactive hispanic sanctuary. I'd agree, they're two different situations, but let's look at some similarities.
* H1-B workers are brought in to take care of "short/limited term" tech jobs that aren't paying what local talent would accept. Mexican migrant workers are brought in to take care of "short/limited term" harvest jobs that aren't paying what local talent would accept.
* H1-B workers are forced to leave and have unusually draconian limitations on becoming naturalized citizens; they often slip off the radar to stay in the USA with newformed families beyond their officially sanctioned stay. Mexican migrant workers are forced to leave and have unusually draconian limitations on becoming naturalized citizens; they often slip off the radar to stay in the USA with newformed families beyond their officially sanctioned stay.
This isn't quite like the attempts to attach language like "illegal to make hyperlinks" to methamphetamine-related legislation, as a rider on a banking omnibus bill, which, coincidentally, allows for stealthy search and seizure.
Architecture itself is a public domain artform. The property owner is not able to control the taking of images, nor of their use. All they can really do is to escort you from the property if they don't like you and your camera.
When Pan Am sold its famous building in New York City (Manhattan), the new owners were not allowed to alter the "Pan Am" sign on the building, as it was deemed a historic landmark. People know the building as the Pan Am building, even though the company didn't quite reach the stellar fortunes as seen in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I have a Garmin GPS III (not sure if the III+ acts identically), and I have held it to the window of an airliner. It nicely registers 525mph landspeed, along with a realtime map showing ground landmarks. Software copyright is 1997.
Civilian GPS units are not shielded from producing antenna echo, so turn it off when the nice crewmembers tell you to turn it off. In brief, receiving-only units like GPS need to amplify the weak incoming signals, and in non-aircraft units, some of the amplified signal leaks back out the antenna, which can interfere with other nearby sensitive devices like the airplane avionics.
Question: The industry claims that H-1Bs are paid the fair ``prevailing
wage.'' Is this true?
No, it is not true.
In October 1999, Susan deFife, CEO of womenConnect.com of McLean, VA,
testified to the Senate in support of higher H-1B quotas. She gave the
example of a new graduate she had hired in 1998 as a system
administrator, a Mexican national who had just graduated from a U.S.
school. Ms. deFife emphasized that she found this worker only after
months of exhaustive searching. Yet a subsequent inquiry under the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by Robert Sanchez showed that deFife
was only paying this person $35,000 per year-when the national
average for new graduates was $45,000.
Similarly, John Harrison, CEO of Ecutel in Alexandria, Virginia,
testified to the House in March 1999 in support of an H-1B increase.
He issued a press release which said,
Something is wrong when you put an ad in the Washington Post for a
software engineer and the only qualified applicants you receive are
from non-U.S. Citizens, said John Harrison, CEO and co-founder of
Ecutel, one of the nation's most promising high-tech companies.
Sanchez's FOIA request later revealed that Ecutel had hired several H-1B
programmers at a salary of $35,000, again far below average for new
graduates (and these workers may not have even been new graduates).
and...
Question: Rather than H-1Bs being a source of cheap labor, the industry
claims that legal fees make the H-1Bs actually more expensive than
American workers. Is that true?
The legal paperwork needed to sponsor an H-1B costs only about $1,000.
It does cost more to sponsor a worker for a green card, around $10,000,
but often the employers have the foreign employees pay the legal fees
for green cards themselves. And even when employers foot the bill, the
cost is usually less than they save in salary, accumulated over the five
years or more it now takes to get the green card.
Furthermore, if an H-1B is sponsored for a green card, he/she is in a
de facto sense in a state of ``indentured servitude'' for that
five-year period, so the employer knows that the worker will be
``loyal,'' not suddenly leaving a project in the lurch by going to
another firm. (An organization of H-1Bs from India, the Immigrant
Support Network, www.isn.org, has arisen to lobby Congress to remedy the
H-1Bs de facto indentured status.) This is of tremendous value
to employers.
Note also that an employer who rents an H-1B from an agency avoids the
fee a recruiter would charge in a regular hire, which is considerably
more than $10,000.
The article is long, and just about every screenful is just as enlightening. It's not just about H1B's, but about age discrimination (at age 35!), race targetting, and common HR tactics to weed out the overexperienced.
Sobering.
"it's about taking away the ability to censor"
on
Freenet 0.3 Released
·
· Score: 2
Freenet, it seems to me, is not about giving people the right to see what they wish; it's about taking away the ability to censor.
And there lies the rub. If you're a FreeNet host, you have lost the right to control your own computer. You will be forced to traffic information you do not agree with. You will be complicitous against your will.
Slashdot Mirror
On the lighter side there was a story about a Telecom company in Texas named them selves idontcare. That way when you started service and were asked "Who would you like for your long distance provider?" people that said "I Don't care" got assigned to this company.
Another fun grab: The predecessor to AT&T's 1-800-CALL-ATT was a short-lived 1-800-OPERATOR (who cares if it's too long, right?). Soon afterwards, MCI, in a bid to get some of that action, grabbed 1-800-OPERATER.
All the yokels who couldn't spell OPERATOR were charged by MCI instead of AT&T.
Unfortunately, it caught on big, and people started doing this with domain names too.
*muttering something about wire brushes*
A designer in the UK makes reproductions of orreries and other devices, as well as this working replica of the Antikythera Device.
http://www.orreries.freeserve.co.uk/
An orrery is a model of the solar system, and his prices range from affordable to... dare I say it... astronomical. Beautiful pieces.
A photo of the original lumps of sea-bed rock, with the bronze Antikythera device embedded, available through a link or two.
(No, this is NOT offtopic.)
Sometime between 1984 and 1988, a week-long strip of "Bloom County" comics by Berkeley Breathed, involved prior art for this disputed 'one interaction shopping'.
I've not been able to find this strip. Please, if anyone is a Bloom County fan, and has the older anthologies, search for them.
The plot: Opus the Penguin has gotten addicted to Virtual Reality Home Shopping. An unwieldy helmet and computer hookup gives Opus a VR shopping experience. Opus' friends try to dissuade him before he goes bankrupt.
The key strip: Opus explains that they have his credit card on file, and the VR system takes simple gestures to make purchases. The punchline was, as Opus gestures blindly with a pointing finger, "Oops, I think I just bought a forklift."
If we can show any example of a concept that includes networked, shopping, single gesture and completed purchase, we can nip this stupid Amazon/OpenTV patent dispute in the bud.
Recall, patents for the common waterbed were denied because Robert A. Heinlein gave a description of them in at least one of his popular novels.
We see in 2D, for the most part. So for scene reproduction, it's can't be much better than 2D. And I think the user-interface aspect of 3D displays is _worse_ than 2D.
Yes, our eyes see in 2D with little depth perception (our eyes are too close together for much triangulation at focal distances).
However, our HEAD is built for 3D. If you move your body one inch, your brain KNOWS how the scene should rotate or translate. And more importantly, vice versa: you rotate or translate the scene, it has the environmental context of the real world around the display, allowing you to judge angles and distances.
Secondly, a static scene appearing in 3D would have no device-introduced latency between "I want to see it from another angle", and "I see it from another angle". This is one of the major reasons for spatial disorientation with 2D display systems: latency between command and result.
The UI question, I don't think we've played around with enough. The "flying" UIs of virtual reality were just one step of an eventual flood of experimentation in 3-space user interfaces.
"Chairman, this is the CEO of Finkelstien Widgets. I'd love to attend that $100,000 per plate fundraiser you're holding, but you see, I'm a bit concerned with that patent thing. It's only through Finkelstien Widgets' innovations that I am in the position to attend such a gala, you understand..."
Companies who wanted to farm TLDs would just spin off many microcompanies. It's cheap to be a microcompany.
What definition of a 'company' would you use? SEC "C-Corporation"? LLC? Aunt Gertrude's Bead Jewelry Enterprises? How about international definitions of companies?
They need to hire a few tech people to review tech patents.
Actually, they need to get support from Congress, who has consistently picked the PTO's review budgets clean for other appropriations.
Actually, they need to revamp the system so that the abstract of the patent is announced and posted publicly, while the specifics remain in seclusion, for the two years it takes to process the patent application.
Having the abstract posted publically would allow the "open patent" watchdogs help the PTO find prior art, without giving away specific competitive advantage, which the patent was designed to offer.
So, you're saying that there's no financial or social reason why inner city youth aren't booting Linux?
If you've climbed up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs far enough to have shelter, and your daily bread, then you're already far better off than many. If you've got a stable family or social structure around you, you're better off still.
It's only once you have stopped scraping for shelter, food, love and self-esteem that you can begin to look at cognitive development.
Only those relative few who have any access to computers can grow a serious interest in computers. Those who haven't had consistent, constructive access to computers will probably find more application in a portable CD player, than in a Linux distribution on a discarded 486.
Elitism in the 'digital divide' doesn't necessarily mean "small top minority." It just means "not the small bottom minority."
As usual, the writeup "above the fold" shown on the front page is vague beyond usefulness, or potentially misleading in a way to spark controversy.
The first thought is "Hey, community exists wherever people go to hang out!" Don't flip that bozo bit yet.
The article that follows the Read More link isn't about 'virtual community' the way that eBay and slashdot and EverQuest and MUDs are about 'virtual community'. Those are virtual communities, and they each have their own intrapolitical issues to deal with, but have tenuous relationship to the world as a whole.
The article also isn't about such hybrid political 'virtual communities' like Napster, where the politics inside the community are widely debated as politics outside the community.
What the author is hitting on is the effect of online communications on the non-virtual community, i.e., the net's promises of Jeffersonian (enlightend) democracy.
I don't think this is even talking about virtual community. It's talking about community via the net . It's not discussing the formation of subcultures or other communities, it's discussing how the net affects existing community, either as various states, or nations, or as the human race.
In short, if I read "virtual communities are a myth," I'd scoff. If I considered whether the Internet has really affected the way the world works politically, I'd give pause to think about it. The answer isn't necessarily so cut and dried.
If they want "Windows everywhere," and they will get called upon to support desktop applications on WINE, they could want to ensure that WINE is in fact able to run.
This is embrace, extend and extinguish: if Office 2002 runs out-of-the-box on Linux+WINE, trouble free, and your company has sold its soul to Office subscriptions anyway, why fight the headaches of StarOffice or other half-compatible solutions?
Oh frabjous day!
Thanks for the update. Christmas comes early this year. :)
I didn't say 'two different keywords' here. I said, 'two different words'. As in, since there's no THAN keyword in any of those languages, the geeks forget that English spells THAN differently from THEN.
The founders may have started this site as a personal pure lark, but they've turned it into a commercial venture. That means, technically, he's a professional. As a professional, they should strive to improve their product and service, and illiteracy should never be the goal of a technology-minded professional, especially when their product IS based on the written word.
However, you may note that I never mentioned CmdrTaco, nor Hemos. I generalized to all geeks, slashdot or not, as this particular error seems rampant amongst all geekdom in my experience. And I never said geeks were morons for making the flub: I just noted a possible theory on the phenomenon.
MySQL is the backend for slash, scoop and many other really innovative weblog/moderation systems. I've wanted to try using these for several months now for nonprofit experiments, but the only machines I have are Win32 (Win2K) machines which I use in my employer's work.
MySQL is 'free as in beer' for any Linux taker, but they charge money if you want to use it on a Win32 system. Without flaming anyone in particular, to me this smacks of the same elitist crap that Linux bigots accuse Wintel-bound developers of.
If there was no MySQL for Win32, I wouldn't gripe. There is, but only at a premium. Apache and gcc and other quality OSS are offered on both platforms at the same price.
Before someone goes and marks me -1, Retard or offers the ever-so-helpful advice of "just set up a Linux box on the side or dual-boot," the point is, I don't have budget to have another machine around, and it's kinda hard to run a webservice from one boot partition while getting my employer's work done on another boot partition.
So, back on topic: fair platform-agnostic pricing for MySQL. Think of it as a stocking-stuffer.
Seems like anyone who learned BASIC in Jr. High School (or Pascal, or Java, etc.) has forgotten that there's two different words here.
IF situation, THEN consequences.
argument LESS THAN argument [or GREATER THAN, or SLOWER THAN, etc.]
Is that a suitable geek-format HOWTO? :)
Me: "I don't recall." --Ronald Wilson Reagan, Iran-Contra hearings
AC: Don't forget: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
The "I don't recall" ushered in a new era of courtroom defense. Reagan showed that there was a perfectly viable defense that was neither "No" nor "I plead the Fifth". It's always been there, but this case opened the floodgates to use that tactic.
The AC's quote was a pure fabrication; Clinton decided to redefine 'sexual relations' instead of owning up to the fact that he did. In short, he lied, and that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.
Jack Valenti is smart. Don't think for a minute that he can't follow your logic or reasoning. He chooses to act dumb.
Top five things "I have no idea what you're talking about," really means:
"I have no reason to answer you truthfully."
"I don't recall." --Ronald Wilson Reagan, Iran-Contra hearings
In your DREAMs, CAn the presS ever forgeT those other guys...
It would be pretty easy to clear up... the merchandise would go to the preregistered One-Click address.
... doesn't mean it can't be done better.
New: ceramic knives! Nah, stone tools have been done before.
New: silver halide photography! Nah, oil paintings by a master are better.
New: cloth rollup keyboard! Nah, thick rubber keyboards rule.
All the posts about "I need a towel" and "they should sell tickets just to touch it" are gonna look funny when this is just another slag heap of unusable parts.
"Why, when I was yer age, miboy, we had to put up with using a computer. That's a complicated physically connected brick of processing components. We thought a mere 2^5 processors was worth drooling over. Yes, miboy, I know your cochlear implant has more than that. You're missing the point. This thing was tremendous! It took up a whole rack: four times the size of a grown man! And all of its memory circuits were in the same cabinet, requiring massive cooling apparatus, unlike the distributed memory crystals that people embed in their jewelry."
Anyone still drooling over 2^5 address space on ferrite core memory? Anyone still drooling over 2^5 address lines? Or data lines?
While I get ill thinking about all the unrelated riders that are allowed to be attached to a bill, I don't see this as the worst example.
This is an immigration issue. Many may see a big difference between H1-B tech workers and retroactive hispanic sanctuary. I'd agree, they're two different situations, but let's look at some similarities.
* H1-B workers are brought in to take care of "short/limited term" tech jobs that aren't paying what local talent would accept. Mexican migrant workers are brought in to take care of "short/limited term" harvest jobs that aren't paying what local talent would accept.
* H1-B workers are forced to leave and have unusually draconian limitations on becoming naturalized citizens; they often slip off the radar to stay in the USA with newformed families beyond their officially sanctioned stay. Mexican migrant workers are forced to leave and have unusually draconian limitations on becoming naturalized citizens; they often slip off the radar to stay in the USA with newformed families beyond their officially sanctioned stay.
This isn't quite like the attempts to attach language like "illegal to make hyperlinks" to methamphetamine-related legislation, as a rider on a banking omnibus bill, which, coincidentally, allows for stealthy search and seizure.
Architecture itself is a public domain artform. The property owner is not able to control the taking of images, nor of their use. All they can really do is to escort you from the property if they don't like you and your camera.
When Pan Am sold its famous building in New York City (Manhattan), the new owners were not allowed to alter the "Pan Am" sign on the building, as it was deemed a historic landmark. People know the building as the Pan Am building, even though the company didn't quite reach the stellar fortunes as seen in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I have a Garmin GPS III (not sure if the III+ acts identically), and I have held it to the window of an airliner. It nicely registers 525mph landspeed, along with a realtime map showing ground landmarks. Software copyright is 1997.
Civilian GPS units are not shielded from producing antenna echo, so turn it off when the nice crewmembers tell you to turn it off. In brief, receiving-only units like GPS need to amplify the weak incoming signals, and in non-aircraft units, some of the amplified signal leaks back out the antenna, which can interfere with other nearby sensitive devices like the airplane avionics.
For some enlightening reading, check out Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage, UCDavis' Dr. Matloff's testimony to the House Judiciary Committee.
Some salient quotes,
and...
The article is long, and just about every screenful is just as enlightening. It's not just about H1B's, but about age discrimination (at age 35!), race targetting, and common HR tactics to weed out the overexperienced.
Sobering.
Freenet, it seems to me, is not about giving people the right to see what they wish; it's about taking away the ability to censor.
And there lies the rub. If you're a FreeNet host, you have lost the right to control your own computer. You will be forced to traffic information you do not agree with. You will be complicitous against your will.
Doesn't sound so free to me.