Company I worked for once was in heavy negotiations to completely redo Koop's site so that it actually would have a chance of making money. It was fun busting their balls in phone negotiations.
One day they said, hold on, we'll have to get back to you next week, something heavy came up. Next thing we know, belly-up.
Koop was a nice guy, but he had zero clue on making money, plus went out of his way to make it next to impossible for the people running the show there to change things so it would.
Yea, I'm firmly in the camp of "I just don't frickin' know", but here's an essay [from the most unlikely source] that made me think twice or thrice on the subject of Intelligent Design (or whatever) --- http://www.fredoneverything.net/EvolutionMonster.s html Extremely incisive analysis of the whole thing.
Excerpt:
Second, evolution seemed more a metaphysics or ideology than a science. The sciences, as I knew them, gave clear answers. Evolution involved intense faith in fuzzy principles. You demonstrated chemistry, but believed evolution. If you have ever debated a Marxist, or a serious liberal or conservative, or a feminist or Christian, you will have noticed that, although they can be exceedingly bright and well informed, they display a maddening imprecision. You never get a straight answer if it is one they do not want to give. Nothing is ever firmly established. Crucial assertions do not tie to observable reality. Invariably the Marxist (or evolutionist) assumes that a detailed knowledge of economic conditions under the reign of Nicholas II or whatever substitutes for being able to answer simple questions, such as why Marxism has never worked: the Fallacy of Irrelevant Knowledge. And of course almost anything can be made believable by considering only favorable evidence and interpreting hard.
Ah, he wrote that? I have a copy somewhere. My favorite part was Okhotsk b'gosh, where they tap into a russian comm cable on the bottom of the sea. How did they find the cable? Cruised the coast (very stealthily) and found the sign that said "Cable buried here! Do not anchor!" Fun stuff.
"Yea, Boss? I won't be in for the next few days. Yea, cancer. Yes, I know the project has to get done right away. Really, should be cleared up by friday. OK? Sorry about that, bye"
I just happen to be in an ANA flight and they happen to have the Connexion service, and it rocks! Getting 28kb/sec on my torrent now. Perhaps the RIAA will sue Boeing?
There's a great open source project that you can use the tiger data with - Mapserver Lots of tutorials there to, but it's a bit of a learning curve. Try it! I knew nothing about mapping, and in two months I had built a web application that could zoom down to the street level with selectable layers for all sorts of data.
I would be astonished if there was any civility at all at this event. Given the level of vitriol any spam story on/. generates, I just don't see it happening. Perhaps the pompous self-righteous guys from Spamhaus will be a good match for the ueberspammer. Just make sure they're tethered or there'll be blood. But that's what we want, hmmm? Can we mark this whole thread flamebait/flamewar?
Office is a great product, but does anyone know why it has such awful problems with unicode? Cutting and pasting text to or from other applications in Chinese or Russian always results in a garbled mess.
The first virus attack my old company weathered was reason enough for me to convince the CEO to convert to Macs for all the sales people. Picture an entire morning of the sales force sitting around on their asses while said viruses are fixed and that's more than enough convincing for the boss.
Yes, people are the same, but culture is what differentiates them. That said, my first hand observations show that the culture of a society directly influences the psychology of a people. And the psychology of a people, for lack of a better term, is who they "are". Here's a really long in-depth article by a man who spent some time in the kingdom mentoring some newspaper reporters. Some very interesting views.
I'm not so sure if maglev will be successful here in China if it stays as just the one stretch from Shanghai to the airport. However, I can tell you, if they build it out to Hangzhou (capital of the neighboring province, about a 2.5 hour car ride away) it will totally rock. The ride would drop to 25 minutes. It would make it feasible for people to commute to Shanghai, and make the transit from airport to places other than Shanghai sooo much easier. Plus, hell, I'd ride it weekends just on a lark to visit Shanghai more often. And I'm not alone in this feeling. I'm psyched.
Absolutely not. I was there about two weeks ago, and stood about 5 meters from it as it whooshed out of the station. About the sound level of a dishwasher running, and the Canon camcorder I was using didn't seem to mind one bit.
Well, it is mostly hype now that Mr Hu has relaxed controls considerably. Up until last feb, most american newspaper sites were unaccessable. now as the poster above mentioned, pratically everything is ok, except for a few selected sites (you can get bbc? weird, I can't, but I'm ethernet/dsl). It's really no inconvenience, and really they are just looking to filter foreign news/opinion sites in chinese. If there is something I REALLY need to access but can't, I just ssh to a box in the States and use lynx/links.
And I think you mean objective instead of subjective when it comes to Google vs bbc;-)
I pay $9/month for DSL access that sometimes gets up to 1.5Mb/sec. Have to put up with the Great Firewall of China though. Still last February, most of the sites they used to block were suddenly accessable.
I met a guy who went to Monterey once. One of the aptitude tests went something like this:
You are put in a classroom with instructor(s) who "only" speak an entirely synthetic language (designed just for this purpose). You have 1 hour to communicate and obtain the following info: location of nearby towns, names of them, where am I, where's a nearby hospital, how are the roads, how long will it take to go somewhere and how far is it.
Pretty challenging, but if you have the knack for languages, you can do it.
I do a lot of business with small factories in China. Most if not all of these factories don't have any sort of connectivity other than fax. It's going to be quite some time before faxes are replaced in such situations.
Plus, with languages like chinese, japanese etc., it's always been easier to write something out by hand and send a fax than fight with a computer. In major metro centers, sure, it's changing, but fax will have a place there for a good long time.
Slashdot Mirror
....transcontinental railroad....
If I'm not mistaken, the trans-con was built with a "competition" somewhat like the X-Prize.
Perhaps you mean more like Amtrak? Now there's an example of a successful public utility!
Company I worked for once was in heavy negotiations to completely redo Koop's site so that it actually would have a chance of making money. It was fun busting their balls in phone negotiations. One day they said, hold on, we'll have to get back to you next week, something heavy came up. Next thing we know, belly-up.
Funny, considering the week before I had gone to http://drkoop.isbankrupt.com/ as a joke to freak out the boss.
Koop was a nice guy, but he had zero clue on making money, plus went out of his way to make it next to impossible for the people running the show there to change things so it would.
Extremely incisive analysis of the whole thing.
Excerpt:
Ah, he wrote that? I have a copy somewhere. My favorite part was Okhotsk b'gosh, where they tap into a russian comm cable on the bottom of the sea. How did they find the cable? Cruised the coast (very stealthily) and found the sign that said "Cable buried here! Do not anchor!" Fun stuff.
"Yea, Boss? I won't be in for the next few days. Yea, cancer. Yes, I know the project has to get done right away. Really, should be cleared up by friday. OK? Sorry about that, bye"
I just happen to be in an ANA flight and they happen to have the Connexion service, and it rocks! Getting 28kb/sec on my torrent now. Perhaps the RIAA will sue Boeing?
Jeez, it's 2:30 in the morning here, now how the hell am I going to get to sleep? Gah.
I feverishly search the list of included games.... No M.U.L.E.?!?!! Useless!
There's a great open source project that you can use the tiger data with - Mapserver
Lots of tutorials there to, but it's a bit of a learning curve. Try it! I knew nothing about mapping, and in two months I had built a web application that could zoom down to the street level with selectable layers for all sorts of data.
correction: spamcop not spamhaus. even better.
that's what I get for posting from an XDA2 with a stamp-sized screen
I would be astonished if there was any civility at all at this event. Given the level of vitriol any spam story on /. generates, I just don't see it happening. Perhaps the pompous self-righteous guys from Spamhaus will be a good match for the ueberspammer. Just make sure they're tethered or there'll be blood. But that's what we want, hmmm?
Can we mark this whole thread flamebait/flamewar?
Office is a great product, but does anyone know why it has such awful problems with unicode? Cutting and pasting text to or from other applications in Chinese or Russian always results in a garbled mess.
It's kind of ironic that here in China I can't access the main story referenced, being that BBC is blocked. Anyone care to put up a mirror?
The first virus attack my old company weathered was reason enough for me to convince the CEO to convert to Macs for all the sales people. Picture an entire morning of the sales force sitting around on their asses while said viruses are fixed and that's more than enough convincing for the boss.
On my old Mac Plus I used to use:
42 disk swap operations to get Claris Works to load. I counted once. Holy Moley.
Yes, people are the same, but culture is what differentiates them.
That said, my first hand observations show that the culture of a society directly influences the psychology of a people. And the psychology of a people, for lack of a better term, is who they "are".
Here's a really long in-depth article by a man who spent some time in the kingdom mentoring some newspaper reporters. Some very interesting views.
I'm not so sure if maglev will be successful here in China if it stays as just the one stretch from Shanghai to the airport. However, I can tell you, if they build it out to Hangzhou (capital of the neighboring province, about a 2.5 hour car ride away) it will totally rock. The ride would drop to 25 minutes. It would make it feasible for people to commute to Shanghai, and make the transit from airport to places other than Shanghai sooo much easier. Plus, hell, I'd ride it weekends just on a lark to visit Shanghai more often. And I'm not alone in this feeling. I'm psyched.
I did. It's cool here. Plus, you can make a shitload o' cash here in business.
Absolutely not. I was there about two weeks ago, and stood about 5 meters from it as it whooshed out of the station. About the sound level of a dishwasher running, and the Canon camcorder I was using didn't seem to mind one bit.
Well, it is mostly hype now that Mr Hu has relaxed controls considerably. Up until last feb, most american newspaper sites were unaccessable. now as the poster above mentioned, pratically everything is ok, except for a few selected sites (you can get bbc? weird, I can't, but I'm ethernet/dsl). It's really no inconvenience, and really they are just looking to filter foreign news/opinion sites in chinese. If there is something I REALLY need to access but can't, I just ssh to a box in the States and use lynx/links. ;-)
And I think you mean objective instead of subjective when it comes to Google vs bbc
I forgot to mention, it's in Hangzhou, about a two hour drive west of Shanghai.
I pay $9/month for DSL access that sometimes gets up to 1.5Mb/sec. Have to put up with the Great Firewall of China though. Still last February, most of the sites they used to block were suddenly accessable.
Please don't mention NCR! It's been almost 3 years since I quit as a field engineer and I still have nightmares...
I met a guy who went to Monterey once. One of the aptitude tests went something like this:
You are put in a classroom with instructor(s) who "only" speak an entirely synthetic language (designed just for this purpose). You have 1 hour to communicate and obtain the following info: location of nearby towns, names of them, where am I, where's a nearby hospital, how are the roads, how long will it take to go somewhere and how far is it.
Pretty challenging, but if you have the knack for languages, you can do it.
I do a lot of business with small factories in China. Most if not all of these factories don't have any sort of connectivity other than fax. It's going to be quite some time before faxes are replaced in such situations.
Plus, with languages like chinese, japanese etc., it's always been easier to write something out by hand and send a fax than fight with a computer. In major metro centers, sure, it's changing, but fax will have a place there for a good long time.