The Russian medical labels worry me. Hopefully their Sharpie (tm) marker and a talk with ground crew got them outta that one.
The plugs not being standardized, that just confuses me. But that isn't unlike real life, so what's a spaceman to do?;-)
Why don't they speak Russian? Do the Russians speak English? It's supposed to be the International Space Station.
The funny thing is that, freelance authors, eager for more money from online distribution of their work, may have just destroyed that very source of income.
Don't be absurd. We generally don't get any more money from Internet distribution contracts.
In my time as a writer I have signed contracts that forbid me to publish my work on Mars (all Earth territories and beyond I think was the phrase): did they pay me extra for my lost Martian readership? Nah...
I haven't got a penny extra, for any variation or extension in an IP contract. Why? I'm not Tom Wolfe, at a guess. I write reviews and features for computer magazines, which is the kind of thing the vast majority of these affected freelances do. It's low paid transient work (although it does have its benefits - working college student hours is one of the more obvious ones)
Beautiful Irony, that.:)
Just as an aside: Does anyone have any theories as to why the 'gift culture' model doesnt seem to apply at all to the arts world? You'd think freelancers would appreciate the online exposure (it's basically free advertising, which can lead to further work for the print rags, but no one seems to see it that way).
Yeah. It doesn't lead to more work. Danny O'Brien at NTK made a living by parlaying his webzine experience into features and columns for real magazines but he's the only example I can think of, and I know he didn't make as much money as he could have as NTK was so much work. (Plus which, Danny is a good writer and would have probably got that work without NTK).
We spend our copious free time as freelancers ringing people up begging for more work, invoicing and doing accounts. You know, work stuff.
There may be a statute of limitations question on items written before 1994. If it was posted in 1994, the time may have run. It may a publsher company from now posting their pre-1994 pieces, if they have not done so already. Keep in mind, there is one appeals court that said that a photo could not be taken down, but it had to be paid for -- since it had already been published in violation.
Yes, there is a statute of limitations. It's called copyright, which runs between 50 and 75 years depending on territory.
After that, do what thou wilt with the content.
Re:The Solstice is a little too New Agey for me
on
Total Solar Eclipse
·
· Score: 2
Of course there's no scientific basis for the solstice...
Solstice n. 2. POINT ON THE ECLIPTIC either of the two points on the ecliptic when the sun reachest its northernmost or southernmost point relative to the celestial equator.
That's only celestial mechanics...no science at all...
WAP was built to work around phones with low bandwidth, slow CPUs and low memory. The transfer protocol was compact, the markup language got compressed, etc. In the time it was taking for WAP to be accepted, all of these limitations (except bandwidth) have gone away.
Yes and no: running a big fat processor in a phone kills battery life, and no-one wants to go back to charging their phone every few hours. Palms and Wince machines achieve good battery life, but they don't have to generate RF.
Fragmentation. Practically speaking, if you have one vendor's browser in your phone, your mobile provider must have that vendor's WAP gateway running in their network. On top of that, different browsers rendered things differently, making it a real pain to develop WAP content. Fragmentation is normal with an emerging market, but it never seemed to settle out with WAP.
Aw come on: the biggest problem is the little angle brackets the phone.com browser users and the lack of tables in the early nokias. Ever try making a Web site look exactly the same on all browsers from version 3 upwards?
Phones don't really support packet data yet. Who wants to surf the net at $.10/min?
You probably don't want a Motorola Timeport 260 then.
Hard to use/small display. I think positioning WAP as the "wireless Internet" was foolish. I surf the net with at least a 14" monitor, 1024x768 resolution and a mouse. Anything less sucks.
For web browsing, yeah. That's why it's a different standard with a different mark up language.
No need for a special protocol like WAP, instead Webmasters will key off of USER_AGENT and render differently for phones. Its that simple.
Funnily enough that's exactly how I render for WAP devices: the gateway passes the UA string through for you. Remember, on this side of the gateway, everything is TCP/IP and HTTP. The WAP-specfic bits are between the wireless ISP and the phone. Who gives a shit what language they speak?
This is just what countries like Iraq have been waiting for: standardized, general-purpose computing on cheap, reasonably powerful hardware that isn't embargoed or considered a munition.
in which case they can buy them anyway, no?
(btw, don't know how far they'll get through those the thermonuclear babymunching calculations - the PS1 has 2Mb of RAM)
...because that way we need to hire more sysadmins.
How many times have I seen a standard response to a hack story on Slashdot that goes something on the lines of: it's easy to a secure a box you spend all day reading bugtraq and then all night reading through the source for insecure constructs.
That's not to single out Linux (even the *BSDs are only secure if you set thm up right).
The Open Source model provides a much better response to exploits that closed source - once an exploit is found there's usually a patch in short order. But that rarely stops the original intrusion and relies on the aforementioned Bugtraq watching.
I hand over cash at a till, and get a key in return that allows me to buy online without having to use a credit card.
The D-T system actually ensures privacy. The best the government (if you're horribly paranoid - as you appear to be) can work out is that this card was sold at that service station and that good bought with it were delivered to this address. Or with soft goods this IP address.
And that's not to say that the card in question hasn't changed hands a number of times in between.
Should boost porn usage if nothing else.;-)
Re:Linux Replaces Tom Cruise!
on
Linux and Shrek
·
· Score: 1
But doon't forget James Cameron's wisesaying about this:
"People don't pay to see actors - they pay to see stars"
The Xbox/Media Terminal comparison is deeply incorrect.
This is first and foremost a Cable/Broadband access device (look at the supplied libraries - lots of HAVI, lots of MHB stuff, but little gaming-related stuff. Look at the Nokia Pirates and Parrots game)
Yes, it will play games. So do the OpenTV and cable set-top boxes - but they aren't terribly good because that is not the prime function of the system.
It's optimised for streaming video and web access. This is a sounder straegy than the reverse (build a games box, make it a web access platform later as the deceased Dreamcast, PSX2 and Xbox teams plan(ned)). High-end consoles tend to end up in otaku household who already have those things.
This will end up in houses where people don't want a computer: it allows Nokia to own a portion of the market that isn't online. As such its an evolution upwards from set-top boxes of the past - the open sourcing of it also makes sense in this context. The closed set-top boxes are usually very good at decoding MPEG streams but useless for any rich services - open sourcing means a million developers working out neat home automation and video gadgets (and yes, games, but not of a Quake level. Stones might work).
Given a million eyeballs all business problems are trivial.
Somewhere in that massive Wired article on the anti-trust trial, Gates (I believe) says that "the moment we start worrying about anti-trust we become IBM."
Obviously the transformation is complete. This reads exactly like an IBM FUD (a term Big Blue is supposed to have invented) white paper from the last days of mainframes.
Microsoft's fear is baffling: they have so much more to worry about from Sun than Linux. Sun is a direct rival to Microsoft from servers to mobile phones.
I know they attack Sun as vigorously, but this current open source obsession is intriguing. Did someone read the 2.4 source and realise it's actually quite good?
Actually you're not entirely right, but Shirky is wronger. The IMG tag was entirely Marc Andreessen's invention. There's a sweet little exchange on the W3C list from about 1992 arguing whether the best solution for inline images was OBJECT, IMG or some other alternatives. Andreessen just rode over it all and announced IMG in Mosaic...pretty much his MO for the following five years. (No matter how much you bitch about IE, remember who started screwing with standards first)
That said, an image doth not a GUI make, and Clay should know better.
Given that people will click on anything that arrives in their Outlook inbox, engineer a Melissa variant that promises a picture of, say, a hot babe like David Siegel going mano-a-mano with a splash page. Once opened the mail deletes your "primitive' browser and opens up an ftp connection to a standards-compliant browser like IE5.5 (the notion that IE5.5 is standards compliant caused some hilarity here - okay the HTML and CSS is better but try doing something in XSL...) and downloads it.
At the rate the Anna trojan was hitting our mailserver on thursday Netscape 4 would be a distant memory in 48 hours. Except, of course for all those weird people on Linux or Mac OS, but they obviously don't really like font embedding so they can just get off the Web.
"Because companies for better or worse have spent *billions* training people on Outlook and other MS applications. It's in the community's best interest to have replacements for common MS apps that will require minimal retraining to help grease the skids for Linux on the desktop. "
And thus ensuring Microsoft's lock in of corporate "standards" such as Outlook.
The key here is the server, not the client. I don't want a clone for Outlook to read my messages in, but I do want to be able to access my company's calendar and contacts database. Tools that extract Exchange information and make it usable to the rest of us are desperately needed.
There's a broader point here: one of the reasons Linux is weak on the desktiop is that there are few people with the ability to see beyond the Windows (capital W, note) paradigm for tools and UI.
KDE is the worst offender (although Gnome is guilty too). It's a stupendous technical achievement, but all the imagination has gone into the code. For a UI, someone just screenshotted Windows 95 and then set about making everything the same, down to one click app and document launching.
Slashdot Mirror
The Russian medical labels worry me. Hopefully their Sharpie (tm) marker and a talk with ground crew got them outta that one. ;-)
The plugs not being standardized, that just confuses me. But that isn't unlike real life, so what's a spaceman to do?
Why don't they speak Russian? Do the Russians speak English? It's supposed to be the International Space Station.
Photoshop and Coke weren't words already, Illustrator was.
coke certainly was: here's why
D'oh
This of course, being what I meant (although i think some of the more obscure forms of copyrights are from the date of creation)
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest ©1997-2001 OSDN.
Course, we could try the ruling out on this...
The funny thing is that, freelance authors, eager for more money from online distribution of their work, may have just destroyed that very source of income.
:)
Don't be absurd. We generally don't get any more money from Internet distribution contracts.
In my time as a writer I have signed contracts that forbid me to publish my work on Mars (all Earth territories and beyond I think was the phrase): did they pay me extra for my lost Martian readership? Nah...
I haven't got a penny extra, for any variation or extension in an IP contract. Why? I'm not Tom Wolfe, at a guess. I write reviews and features for computer magazines, which is the kind of thing the vast majority of these affected freelances do. It's low paid transient work (although it does have its benefits - working college student hours is one of the more obvious ones)
Beautiful Irony, that.
Just as an aside: Does anyone have any theories as to why the 'gift culture' model doesnt seem to apply at all to the arts world? You'd think freelancers would appreciate the online exposure (it's basically free advertising, which can lead to further work for the print rags, but no one seems to see it that way).
Yeah. It doesn't lead to more work. Danny O'Brien at NTK made a living by parlaying his webzine experience into features and columns for real magazines but he's the only example I can think of, and I know he didn't make as much money as he could have as NTK was so much work. (Plus which, Danny is a good writer and would have probably got that work without NTK).
We spend our copious free time as freelancers ringing people up begging for more work, invoicing and doing accounts. You know, work stuff.
There may be a statute of limitations question on items written before 1994. If it was posted in 1994, the time may have run. It may a publsher company from now posting their pre-1994 pieces, if they have not done so already. Keep in mind, there is one appeals court that said that a photo could not be taken down, but it had to be paid for -- since it had already been published in violation.
Yes, there is a statute of limitations. It's called copyright, which runs between 50 and 75 years depending on territory.
After that, do what thou wilt with the content.
Of course there's no scientific basis for the solstice...
Solstice n. 2. POINT ON THE ECLIPTIC either of the two points on the ecliptic when the sun reachest its northernmost or southernmost point relative to the celestial equator.
That's only celestial mechanics...no science at all...
WAP was built to work around phones with low bandwidth, slow CPUs and low memory. The transfer protocol was compact, the markup language got compressed, etc. In the time it was taking for WAP to be accepted, all of these limitations (except bandwidth) have gone away.
Yes and no: running a big fat processor in a phone kills battery life, and no-one wants to go back to charging their phone every few hours. Palms and Wince machines achieve good battery life, but they don't have to generate RF.
Fragmentation. Practically speaking, if you have one vendor's browser in your phone, your mobile provider must have that vendor's WAP gateway running in their network. On top of that, different browsers rendered things differently, making it a real pain to develop WAP content. Fragmentation is normal with an emerging market, but it never seemed to settle out with WAP.
Aw come on: the biggest problem is the little angle brackets the phone.com browser users and the lack of tables in the early nokias. Ever try making a Web site look exactly the same on all browsers from version 3 upwards?
Phones don't really support packet data yet. Who wants to surf the net at $.10/min?
You probably don't want a Motorola Timeport 260 then.
Hard to use/small display. I think positioning WAP as the "wireless Internet" was foolish. I surf the net with at least a 14" monitor, 1024x768 resolution and a mouse. Anything less sucks.
For web browsing, yeah. That's why it's a different standard with a different mark up language.
No need for a special protocol like WAP, instead Webmasters will key off of USER_AGENT and render differently for phones. Its that simple.
Funnily enough that's exactly how I render for WAP devices: the gateway passes the UA string through for you. Remember, on this side of the gateway, everything is TCP/IP and HTTP. The WAP-specfic bits are between the wireless ISP and the phone. Who gives a shit what language they speak?
GPRS is the network layer: it's nothing to do with WAP.
GPRS bears the same relation to WAP as modem, fibre or Ethernet does to TCP/IP. It's just another way to get the same stuff.
Already in the UK we have WAP delivered over SMS, ISDN, HSCSD and now (in beta) GPRS. Don't let the acronyms fool you. The're different things.
What you're talking about is transcoding, which works fine - and is even available in open source variants.
No the encoding is not simple gzip: WML (the presentation layer of WAP) is bytecode compiled, so that the common tags are not sent as plain text.
...since Bush got elected.
This is just what countries like Iraq have been waiting for: standardized, general-purpose computing on cheap, reasonably powerful hardware that isn't embargoed or considered a munition.
in which case they can buy them anyway, no?
(btw, don't know how far they'll get through those the thermonuclear babymunching calculations - the PS1 has 2Mb of RAM)
...because that way we need to hire more sysadmins.
How many times have I seen a standard response to a hack story on Slashdot that goes something on the lines of: it's easy to a secure a box you spend all day reading bugtraq and then all night reading through the source for insecure constructs.
That's not to single out Linux (even the *BSDs are only secure if you set thm up right).
The Open Source model provides a much better response to exploits that closed source - once an exploit is found there's usually a patch in short order. But that rarely stops the original intrusion and relies on the aforementioned Bugtraq watching.
You're right about everything here...
except how the cards work. sorry these are scratch and sniff cards, not mag strip.
it's how europeans pay for the majority of their mobile phone usage.
I hand over cash at a till, and get a key in return that allows me to buy online without having to use a credit card.
The D-T system actually ensures privacy. The best the government (if you're horribly paranoid - as you appear to be) can work out is that this card was sold at that service station and that good bought with it were delivered to this address. Or with soft goods this IP address.
And that's not to say that the card in question hasn't changed hands a number of times in between.
Should boost porn usage if nothing else. ;-)
But doon't forget James Cameron's wisesaying about this:
"People don't pay to see actors - they pay to see stars"
The Xbox/Media Terminal comparison is deeply incorrect.
This is first and foremost a Cable/Broadband access device (look at the supplied libraries - lots of HAVI, lots of MHB stuff, but little gaming-related stuff. Look at the Nokia Pirates and Parrots game)
Yes, it will play games. So do the OpenTV and cable set-top boxes - but they aren't terribly good because that is not the prime function of the system.
It's optimised for streaming video and web access. This is a sounder straegy than the reverse (build a games box, make it a web access platform later as the deceased Dreamcast, PSX2 and Xbox teams plan(ned)). High-end consoles tend to end up in otaku household who already have those things.
This will end up in houses where people don't want a computer: it allows Nokia to own a portion of the market that isn't online. As such its an evolution upwards from set-top boxes of the past - the open sourcing of it also makes sense in this context. The closed set-top boxes are usually very good at decoding MPEG streams but useless for any rich services - open sourcing means a million developers working out neat home automation and video gadgets (and yes, games, but not of a Quake level. Stones might work).
Given a million eyeballs all business problems are trivial.
they're really scared aren't they?
Somewhere in that massive Wired article on the anti-trust trial, Gates (I believe) says that "the moment we start worrying about anti-trust we become IBM."
Obviously the transformation is complete. This reads exactly like an IBM FUD (a term Big Blue is supposed to have invented) white paper from the last days of mainframes.
Microsoft's fear is baffling: they have so much more to worry about from Sun than Linux. Sun is a direct rival to Microsoft from servers to mobile phones.
I know they attack Sun as vigorously, but this current open source obsession is intriguing. Did someone read the 2.4 source and realise it's actually quite good?
Actually you're not entirely right, but Shirky is wronger. The IMG tag was entirely Marc Andreessen's invention. There's a sweet little exchange on the W3C list from about 1992 arguing whether the best solution for inline images was OBJECT, IMG or some other alternatives. Andreessen just rode over it all and announced IMG in Mosaic...pretty much his MO for the following five years. (No matter how much you bitch about IE, remember who started screwing with standards first)
That said, an image doth not a GUI make, and Clay should know better.
given that ulaanbaatar is the capital city of mongolia, they must be way lost.
Given that people will click on anything that arrives in their Outlook inbox, engineer a Melissa variant that promises a picture of, say, a hot babe like David Siegel going mano-a-mano with a splash page. Once opened the mail deletes your "primitive' browser and opens up an ftp connection to a standards-compliant browser like IE5.5 (the notion that IE5.5 is standards compliant caused some hilarity here - okay the HTML and CSS is better but try doing something in XSL...) and downloads it.
At the rate the Anna trojan was hitting our mailserver on thursday Netscape 4 would be a distant memory in 48 hours. Except, of course for all those weird people on Linux or Mac OS, but they obviously don't really like font embedding so they can just get off the Web.
Sheesh. No wonder people hate web designers.
And Solaris
That would suit the Russians but might do some odd things to anyone working in one of the less used parts of the station...
"Because companies for better or worse have spent *billions* training people on Outlook and other MS applications. It's in the community's best interest to have replacements for common MS apps that will require minimal retraining to help grease the skids for Linux on the desktop. "
And thus ensuring Microsoft's lock in of corporate "standards" such as Outlook.
The key here is the server, not the client. I don't want a clone for Outlook to read my messages in, but I do want to be able to access my company's calendar and contacts database. Tools that extract Exchange information and make it usable to the rest of us are desperately needed.
There's a broader point here: one of the reasons Linux is weak on the desktiop is that there are few people with the ability to see beyond the Windows (capital W, note) paradigm for tools and UI.
KDE is the worst offender (although Gnome is guilty too). It's a stupendous technical achievement, but all the imagination has gone into the code. For a UI, someone just screenshotted Windows 95 and then set about making everything the same, down to one click app and document launching.
Read this quick summary.
Methinks Clay's been reading the popular science books and jotting down the interesting words again...
Sigh. Yes, but they still use WAP as the underlying protocol.
Please go and read the specs at http://www.wapforum.org before attempting to contribute.