Depending on WiFi for a net connection is like carrying around a 900 MHz cordless phone and expecting to be able to make long distance calls from wherever you happen to be.
The future is "wireless broadband" (somewhat tied to "3G"), available since October in Washington, DC and San Diego with speeds advertised as up to 2mbps, 300-500kbps typical.
WiFi's not going away, of course -- people will still want to connect their homes that were built before 2002. It could also serve as a tool to building a separate Internet away from excessive corporate/government control, though it seems to me it would be too easy to jam -- laser would probably be better.
All this hype about WiFi reminds me of 1997, when 1.5mbps DSL was available in limited areas around Washington, DC, and the rest of the country was harping on how to boost modem speeds from 40kpbs to a "full" 56kpbs.
According to the Highway Research Center (tfhrc.gov) map, that "McLean intersection" is really a federal facility next door to the "George Bush Center for Intelligence (CIA)".
"Intelligent highways" kill two birds with one stone -- surveillance of the public plus assauging the public the roads are safe despite the 42,000 annual U.S. fatalities.
If so-called victimless crimes are legalized, do you want to see bordellos in shopping centers next to Hair Cuttery? More importantly, do you -- as a result of making it part of the U.S. Constitution -- wish to prohibit U.S. states from regulating such behavior? Isn't that just putting more control into Washington, and isn't that tyranny of a different sort? See my blog article from two days ago, Fed has assumed so much power, Virginia to now make pretend laws.
Remember when CDs were in their own tornado in the mid 1980's and artists sued the labels saying the labels didn't have the right to republish? Artists of past recordings had to be bought off, and new contracts were... less ambiguous. I expect the same thing to happen with the online book searching.
All the Tablet PCs I've seen are just 1024x768. Ideally, a Tablet PC should be a replacement for a writing tablet or book, meaning it should have as high a resolution as possible. LCD technology is up to at least 1600x1200, and I don't understand why there are no models (as far as I know) available with such screens.
It seems the article could be boiled down to the lack of a 64-bit OS from Microsoft. But do games really need a 64-bit OS yet? Can't they already take advantage of 64-bit registers and instructions in current Windows OS's? If so, then the only thing a 64-bit OS would be needed for is to break the supposed 2GB memory barrier. But IA32 is already up to 64GB, and could go up to 281TB if all 48 bits of 16-bit segment plus 32-bit offset were used. If and when games breach the 2GB or 64GB barrier, Microsoft may chose to unleash a 64-bit windows, which it has been talking about for at least five years.
The biggest role I see for Linux helping out games from a technological point of view -- and even this is a stretch -- is if games need more RAM than Windows can provide and Microsoft has not released a 64-bit Windows. In that case, Linux would serve as a stop-gap measure much as DOS4GW did between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
Except Google bans political/issue advertising
on
Does Google = God?
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· Score: 1
Google does not allow sites to use their Google Adwords to advertise themselves if the topic suggests "anti-" anything (e.g. the public school system) in the slightest way. See my twostories on it, as well as one from another site experiencing the same problem.
Looking at the photos of the planets mounted in their locations such as "Percy's Auto Sales" and the "Budget Traveler Motor Inn (0.7 mile from Sun)", all I could think about was Cadillac Ranch and other roadside attractions.
...one that perhaps conveys custom copyright permissions, such as the promise to make it free after, say, 20 years. At a minimum it should convey that the media has no copy protection.
Up until early March, my blog had top search rankings at Google for some rather common searches. Then all of a sudden, my search rankings plummeted to the point where only extremely specific searches would turn up my blog articles at all. And ever since then, my new blog articles get top search results while the old ones still do not.
It's as if Google did a one-time slapdown of my blog.
I'd rather have had medium-level search results for all my articles, as a lot of my best material is early material.
The short of it is that we are seeing the limitation of Google's claim to fame: the idea that number of incoming links should heavily influence search ranking. As the original Register article stated, this notion is not as valid in the new world of blogs. What Google needs now is along the lines of what many have suggested, but I'm going to take it a step further:
Google needs to allow users to specify types of sources:
blogs
newspapers
references
corporations
mag azines
organizations
etc.
Google could perhaps use its directory/DMOZ to help automatically categorize.
Might give blogspot.com blogs unfair advantage
on
Google buys Pyra Labs
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· Score: 1
Although Google now spiders my blog daily, that wasn't the case for the first month or two. Worse, Google rejected my pay($) Google textads as being "anti-establishmentarianism" and "anti-media." See my twostories about it.
If Google spiders blogspot.com blogs from day one, that gives them an unfair advantage.
According to a Nov. 21, 2002 Seattle Times article:
...at the Comdex technology trade show this week,... a mundane product quietly unveiled at Microsoft's booth may have more of an impact on the average computer user.
On display was an electronic stamp the U.S. Postal Service plans to sell to certify authenticity and delivery time of e-mail.
[...] The plan is to have e-mail-postage software available in the next 30 to 45 days At first, it would be an add-on to Microsoft's popular Outlook e-mail-management software.
Later, it would be bundled into the new version of Microsoft's Office suite, due around summer. When loaded, it would appear as several buttons on the Outlook control panel.
Users would pay the Postal Service anywhere from a penny to $2, depending on the volume of use, to add an official stamp of authenticity. The stamp would be applied with a click, not a lick.
[...] Several attempts by companies to charge per e-mail for authentication services have failed, noted analysts at IDC, a research company in Framingham, Mass.
[...] A key reason is people still don't trust the technology enough, IDC's research shows.
[AuthentiDate Chief Executive Rob] Van Naarden said electronic postmarks will succeed because they have federal authority. He said the stamps would provide legal force to electronic documents, and the Postal Service can prosecute people who circumvent the system.
So now it becomes clear why the Bush administration has gone easy on Microsoft -- it planned to become its business partner.
Newspaper rehash of well-known "Worse is Better"
on
Why VHS Was Better
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The article is just a newspaper rehash of what should be well-known to Slashdot readers, but perhaps isn't since I didn't see mention of it before I hit "Reply."
Just as sidewalks are dying and giving way to privately-controlled suburbia, so is the free realm of UseNet giving way to privately controlled fora. Even UseNet is being privatized (see my May 27, 2001 Slashdot article Google Owns Your UseNet Post (and my clarifying followup comment) about how Google Groups is gradually becoming the only gateway into the Internet Commons.
Going back to meatspace, for any of you who have actually tried to get a candidate or referendum on a ballot, you know how hard it is to get signatures in suburbia. You have to get permission from the proprietor. In the case of churches, it's illegal thanks to LBJ lest they lose their non-profit status. Sidewalks in suburbia, when they exist, are pointless as everyone is whizzing around in private automobiles.
In urban planning, there is frequently a distinction made between the "public realm" and "private space". (And then there are shades of gray in between, such as office lobbies). In meatspace, the public realm is dying thanks to the automobile (and the war on Iraq -- had to throw that in on this Jan. 18 day of protest). In cyberspace, the public realm of UseNet is dying thanks to fora such as Slashdot, newspapers, blogs, and even pest control companies. Yes, I'm contributing to the problem by continuing to post to Slashdot and even running my own blog -- mostly because traffic on UseNet is way down.
Going back to the case at hand, yes the Pest Control Forum is the private realm. If that isn't the private realm in cyberspace, I don't know what is. The issue gets stickier when it comes to news sites. Should a newspaper site be able to ban trolls? How about a special-interest newspaper?
Ubiquitous widely used P2P fora voter-moderated fora would be the best solution to resurrecting the dying public realm in cyberspace. Unfortunately, copyright violators have given P2P a bad name, and corporate entities such as Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, newspapers, and Slashdot have captured the marketshare and mind share of cyberspace public discourse.
It is universally agreed that privacy and security are in conflict with each other and must be balanced. But this is a case where a warrant was sought for an individual based on a reasonable suspicion. Contrast this with Carnivore and Total Information Awareness, which are warrantless fishing expeditions of entire populations. I'm a staunch privacy advocate, yet advocate reasonable searches of a very small number of suspected terrorists.
You say that the FBI was "too cautious" -- do you have any evidence that that was the motive?
I see no irony in being a privacy advocate while decrying FBI supervisors for denying the request to search Moussaoui's e-mail.
P.S. In another related story, the FBI supervisor who thwarted Rowley's investigation recently got a big cash bonus.
(Recall that Massaoui was already in jail before Sep. 11. These pre-Sep. 11 e-mail search requests were rebuffed, according to FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley.)
Community theatre is usually free, or at very most the price of a movie ticket. But what is much, much better is to participate in community theater. It's a great way to meet women -- or if you already have a wife/girlfriend, it's a great bonding experience. Acting, singing, and dancing isn't even required; a lot of geeks start out in lighting and stage props and then move onto the stage.
Isn't the Internet supposed to be about P2P? Why not take that concept into meatspace? Why sit around and consume, consume, consume from the large corporations? Why not create, share, and interact with your friends, family, and neighbors?
OK, except... this movie was intended to be good
on
The Business of Star Trek
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
I thought it was halfway decent -- better than all the odd-numbered movies and not as good as the even-numbered movies. The biggest problem I had with Nemesis is that it was a little too haughty -- it stepped on too many sacred cows:
It incorporated the theme from the TOS movies. While the original TV theme is a requirement, the TOS movie theme is the domain of the TOS cast, in my opinion, and shouldn't have been used in a TNG movie.
The Star Trek logo was changed in a way just for this movie. While it might have been appropriate to change the Star Trek logo for a genre of movies, such as all TNG movies, or a trilogy of TNG movies at the smallest subset, changing it for just one movie is just too haughty.
Brent Spiner obviously put his heart and soul into this movie. But he wasn't humble about it, for the above reasons, and because he went through the whole movie with that p***ed off look. I can't believe I haven't read the comment on Slashdot yet, "Why was Data constipated the whole movie?"
Every appearance of this movie was not that it wasn't intended to be just another movie in the franchise (as suggested by this article, being published at the time of the movie release), as Insurrection was (it was just a TNG episode, not an epic). This was intended to be a good movie, and I might have even thought it better than ST8 if it hadn't been for the haughtiness.
It's called "remedy" for monopolization
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 3, Insightful
And why should MS pay the distribution costs of other companies anyway?
To fix ("remedy") the problem of monopoly. Capitalist free markets converge toward monopolies. The current mechanism to fix it is anti-trust law.
How about forcing Ford to ship cars without seats, to stop them muscling into the upholstery market?
First, Ford has competition (even though an oligopoly is little better than a monopoly). Second, seats are integral to cars. However, if Ford were a monopoly and if Ford were giving away "Ford auto club" memberships, then AAA would have good reason to complain.
Of course MS want to increase market share and broaden their markets. That in itself doesn't make them the Evil Empire, it just shows that they have got to page 4 in any basic text on running a business.
Capitalism naturally rewards Evil Empires. That's why unbridled captialism is bad, why there are anti-trust laws, and why there are such things as IMF/world-bank protests. Capitalism is good, but globalization and unbridled capitalism are bad.
Anti-monopoly != Open source advocate
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 2
...Providing the open source community has a product that does what Aunt Mildred wants as easily as Windows does it. Which, I fear, is going to be the problem.
Breaking Microsoft's monopoly doesn't necessarily mean looking to the open source community to provide an alternate OS. It could be as simple as courts forcing Microsoft to open up the Windows source, and forcing ccommecial competing products (such as browsers, media players, and e-mail clients) to ship on Windows CDs. Unfortunately, that never happened, and so alternatives such as Netscape Navigator in the past and Opera in the present have small market share.
By your own admission, the open source community will not likely prevail against Microsoft. But the reason is because Microsoft uses whatever market it is in to enter new markets -- the very definition of monopoly. First it was from OS to Browser. Now it is from OS to DRM entertainment, and from Browser/free e-mail to pay/tracked e-mail.
If market forces worked, there'd be no anti-trust
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 2
It's only an operating system guys
Why not kill people -- they're only "ugly bags of water."
Why get so concerned about the Constitution -- it's only a piece of paper.
The fear is that with everyone running MS-Windows and MS-Office for backward compatibility, every action, surf, and communication will be logged by the cooperating partners in power and control, multi-national corporations (such as Microsoft) and government.
For the latest attempt at domination, see the recent story on my blog, "Microsoft and US gov teaming up to monopolize new 'certified e-mail' postmark". Pretty soon, to send an e-mail to your Aunt Mildred, you're going to have to pay Microsoft a dollar whereupon it will possibly also be logged in a government database.
So the full 16 solar panels (not counting those in the science platform that will likely never be added) generate 1/4 Megawatt of continuous power. Now what would three people need with enough power for 200 homes? Recall that the space station was started (see history) in 1985 when Reagan was president.
Essentially, all the science and habitation modules of the space station have been nixed, but all the solar panels have been preserved.
Slashdot Mirror
The future is "wireless broadband" (somewhat tied to "3G"), available since October in Washington, DC and San Diego with speeds advertised as up to 2mbps, 300-500kbps typical.
WiFi's not going away, of course -- people will still want to connect their homes that were built before 2002. It could also serve as a tool to building a separate Internet away from excessive corporate/government control, though it seems to me it would be too easy to jam -- laser would probably be better.
All this hype about WiFi reminds me of 1997, when 1.5mbps DSL was available in limited areas around Washington, DC, and the rest of the country was harping on how to boost modem speeds from 40kpbs to a "full" 56kpbs.
$15 billion / 161 lane-miles / 5280 (feet/mile) * 15 feet (average car length) = $264,680
"Intelligent highways" kill two birds with one stone -- surveillance of the public plus assauging the public the roads are safe despite the 42,000 annual U.S. fatalities.
If so-called victimless crimes are legalized, do you want to see bordellos in shopping centers next to Hair Cuttery? More importantly, do you -- as a result of making it part of the U.S. Constitution -- wish to prohibit U.S. states from regulating such behavior? Isn't that just putting more control into Washington, and isn't that tyranny of a different sort? See my blog article from two days ago, Fed has assumed so much power, Virginia to now make pretend laws.
Remember when CDs were in their own tornado in the mid 1980's and artists sued the labels saying the labels didn't have the right to republish? Artists of past recordings had to be bought off, and new contracts were ... less ambiguous. I expect the same thing to happen with the online book searching.
All the Tablet PCs I've seen are just 1024x768. Ideally, a Tablet PC should be a replacement for a writing tablet or book, meaning it should have as high a resolution as possible. LCD technology is up to at least 1600x1200, and I don't understand why there are no models (as far as I know) available with such screens.
The biggest role I see for Linux helping out games from a technological point of view -- and even this is a stretch -- is if games need more RAM than Windows can provide and Microsoft has not released a 64-bit Windows. In that case, Linux would serve as a stop-gap measure much as DOS4GW did between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
Google does not allow sites to use their Google Adwords to advertise themselves if the topic suggests "anti-" anything (e.g. the public school system) in the slightest way. See my two stories on it, as well as one from another site experiencing the same problem.
Looking at the photos of the planets mounted in their locations such as "Percy's Auto Sales" and the "Budget Traveler Motor Inn (0.7 mile from Sun)", all I could think about was Cadillac Ranch and other roadside attractions.
...one that perhaps conveys custom copyright permissions, such as the promise to make it free after, say, 20 years. At a minimum it should convey that the media has no copy protection.
Some honest leaders remain in Congress, but I have slim hope of this actually passing:
U.S. House Bill to Require All Voting Machines To Produce A Voter-Verified Paper Trail
It's as if Google did a one-time slapdown of my blog.
I'd rather have had medium-level search results for all my articles, as a lot of my best material is early material.
The short of it is that we are seeing the limitation of Google's claim to fame: the idea that number of incoming links should heavily influence search ranking. As the original Register article stated, this notion is not as valid in the new world of blogs. What Google needs now is along the lines of what many have suggested, but I'm going to take it a step further:
Google needs to allow users to specify types of sources:
- blogs
- newspapers
- references
- corporations
- ma
g azines - organizations
- etc.
Google could perhaps use its directory/DMOZ to help automatically categorize.Illegal to say "Rube Goldberg"
If Google spiders blogspot.com blogs from day one, that gives them an unfair advantage.
According to a Nov. 21, 2002 Seattle Times article:
So now it becomes clear why the Bush administration has gone easy on Microsoft -- it planned to become its business partner.Section 2.1 of Richard Gabriel's Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big is called "Worse is Better." Those with shorter attention spans may enjoy his later presentation Models of Software Acceptance: How Winners Win, which explicitly mentions VHS vs. Beta.
P.S. Beta was much better than VHS at keeping vertical lines straight, especially over multiple generations.
Going back to meatspace, for any of you who have actually tried to get a candidate or referendum on a ballot, you know how hard it is to get signatures in suburbia. You have to get permission from the proprietor. In the case of churches, it's illegal thanks to LBJ lest they lose their non-profit status. Sidewalks in suburbia, when they exist, are pointless as everyone is whizzing around in private automobiles.
In urban planning, there is frequently a distinction made between the "public realm" and "private space". (And then there are shades of gray in between, such as office lobbies). In meatspace, the public realm is dying thanks to the automobile (and the war on Iraq -- had to throw that in on this Jan. 18 day of protest). In cyberspace, the public realm of UseNet is dying thanks to fora such as Slashdot, newspapers, blogs, and even pest control companies. Yes, I'm contributing to the problem by continuing to post to Slashdot and even running my own blog -- mostly because traffic on UseNet is way down.
Going back to the case at hand, yes the Pest Control Forum is the private realm. If that isn't the private realm in cyberspace, I don't know what is. The issue gets stickier when it comes to news sites. Should a newspaper site be able to ban trolls? How about a special-interest newspaper?
Ubiquitous widely used P2P fora voter-moderated fora would be the best solution to resurrecting the dying public realm in cyberspace. Unfortunately, copyright violators have given P2P a bad name, and corporate entities such as Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, newspapers, and Slashdot have captured the marketshare and mind share of cyberspace public discourse.
You say that the FBI was "too cautious" -- do you have any evidence that that was the motive?
I see no irony in being a privacy advocate while decrying FBI supervisors for denying the request to search Moussaoui's e-mail.
P.S. In another related story, the FBI supervisor who thwarted Rowley's investigation recently got a big cash bonus.
(Recall that Massaoui was already in jail before Sep. 11. These pre-Sep. 11 e-mail search requests were rebuffed, according to FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley.)
Isn't the Internet supposed to be about P2P? Why not take that concept into meatspace? Why sit around and consume, consume, consume from the large corporations? Why not create, share, and interact with your friends, family, and neighbors?
- It incorporated the theme from the TOS movies. While the original TV theme is a requirement, the TOS movie theme is the domain of the TOS cast, in my opinion, and shouldn't have been used in a TNG movie.
- The Star Trek logo was changed in a way just for this movie. While it might have been appropriate to change the Star Trek logo for a genre of movies, such as all TNG movies, or a trilogy of TNG movies at the smallest subset, changing it for just one movie is just too haughty.
Brent Spiner obviously put his heart and soul into this movie. But he wasn't humble about it, for the above reasons, and because he went through the whole movie with that p***ed off look. I can't believe I haven't read the comment on Slashdot yet, "Why was Data constipated the whole movie?"Every appearance of this movie was not that it wasn't intended to be just another movie in the franchise (as suggested by this article, being published at the time of the movie release), as Insurrection was (it was just a TNG episode, not an epic). This was intended to be a good movie, and I might have even thought it better than ST8 if it hadn't been for the haughtiness.
To understand the difference, see my article "Anti-globalization vs. anti-capitalism."
By your own admission, the open source community will not likely prevail against Microsoft. But the reason is because Microsoft uses whatever market it is in to enter new markets -- the very definition of monopoly. First it was from OS to Browser. Now it is from OS to DRM entertainment, and from Browser/free e-mail to pay/tracked e-mail.
Why get so concerned about the Constitution -- it's only a piece of paper.
The fear is that with everyone running MS-Windows and MS-Office for backward compatibility, every action, surf, and communication will be logged by the cooperating partners in power and control, multi-national corporations (such as Microsoft) and government.
For the latest attempt at domination, see the recent story on my blog, "Microsoft and US gov teaming up to monopolize new 'certified e-mail' postmark". Pretty soon, to send an e-mail to your Aunt Mildred, you're going to have to pay Microsoft a dollar whereupon it will possibly also be logged in a government database.