"A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do.... Only they who go to soirees and legistlative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not?... I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes... If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.... Otherwise, we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind."
I looked through most of the posts, and didn't notice anyone pointing out the Christmas has much older roots - it's been taken from the pagans, who themselves simply observed the passage of the sun in the sky. The original celebration is on the solstice (dec 21).
Personally, I celebrate the solstice - it's the beginning of longer days, and clearly marks another full circuit of our fragile planet around the sun. It's a good thing to joyful about, a much older tradition, and need not be religious or commercial.
I also think it's fair to point out that Jesus would be highly unlikely to be pleased with what we call christmas in America - often unwanted family gatherings, cutting down millions of trees, burning gigawatts of power on tacky lights, while we bomb the shit out of the Afghan people (mmmm. want some hypocrasy with your turkey?) - need I go on?
Personally, I chose long ago to ignore "Christmas," and instead I try to be generous with my time and take care of people's needs where and when I can, not around Dec 25th.
So yeah, I was working - setting up a new web server. It's so peaceful and quiet, a nice day to accomplish something, which seems more in keeping with the time of year anyway.
Well, I for one am impressed both with covad, and with speakeasy. I ordered DSL 3 weeks ago, and here it is (the service man left 10 minutes ago)! No hassles or problems, delivery on time, I'm very pleased.
My understanding of Covad's strategy, which seems good, is this: they buy only business lines from Ameritech, making them a priority customer, and getting correspondingly great response from Ameritech. But, because of the magic of bulk buying, Speakeasy ultimately is providing me with residential service and pricing. Essentially, buying a premium service at a discount, then recategorizing and re-pricing for the home market. It's working well enough that Ameritech bailed out Covad by making them responsible (pre-buying) for Ameritech's business DSL lines. I mean Verizon. OR is it SBC? Anyway, hooray for Covad.
...literally. one of the other comments centered on how difficult it is to build laptops, which is true - that's why they cost more.
but what is a laptop, after all? it's a portable computing device. You can buy really tiny computers, such as tiqit or pocket pc (many slashdot articles on these) :
and you've got a really small computer. There are also a couple articles I've seen on building a "laptop" into a small stainless steel or brushed aluminum brief case.
Obviously, designing a motherboard and integrating everthing into a nifty case would be nice, but that's where the cost comes in. Buying really small parts isn't cheap, but building your own thang never is. But you *can* build a really small, portable computer, pretty much tailored to your needs.
You might also consider (if you really want to go for the gusto) the new technology that lets you output circuits via a printer (which thus far has been used to create cell phones and batteries):
but I see no reason you couln't print custom PC's! In short, although it may not be cheaper, it is I think possible to build something small, light, portable, and tailored to your design. And if you do, could you send me one?
Most of the "science" in the article referenced was anything but (as one poster noticed, flicker comes partly from the interference between screen and electric lighting). However, as the article's editor pointed out at the very bottom, it has been demonstrated that the human eye can register an image displayed for less than 1/200 of a second.
stock options are a promise by a company to share the wealth, if there ever is any.
you really need to know four things:
do you trust the sharers?
stock options are a form of IOU. I have started more than one company, and I personally have committed to the people who I work with, work for, and who work for me, that I will make good on my promises. If I have to sell everything I own to make good on my debts, I would do that. Not many people are really willing to make that kind of committment to you. As a result, stock options are worth nothing, because you cannot spend them, trade them or sell them. They are, as someone above said, a form of lottery ticket, and their worth is exactly as high as the value you personally place on them.
do you believe in the service?
There is no such thing as a product -- all software, all hardware, all web sites are tools that facilitate the users' experience -- they are a way for people to do things they need to.
Is what the company doing a valuable service, oriented towards helping the most people do this particular thing the most effectively? If you believe in what you the company are collectively trying to accomplish, the then service has value, and the options probably will too someday. If you are as a company trying to take something from the market, instead of give something to it, you will probably not succeed. Unless, like the Microsofts of the world, you already have.
enjoy the job
You may be rich someday, but you should be worried about what your life will be like on a day to day basis, because that is how you spend your time. Can your work with these people? Do you like and trust them? Are you certain you will enjoy what you are doing? Can you live comfortably on what they will pay you?
If you can answer yes to these questions, you will be far happier than if you are merely wealthy.
beware the flip
When you work for someone else you are being used. And, you are using them. Your goals are probably not theirs, and vice versa. This is not a "be paranoid trust no one" speech. This is a "know what you want and make certain you're being helped in achieving that" strategy.
I have a friend who got "bought out" with a half a million in options. It turns out that company was "buying him" to add to their package (their company) that they were in the process of selling. He got caught in the shuffle, and he decided at one point to forego that money (and he could have used it) because the job he was going to get wasn't going to make him happy.
He also got stuck because he took the equity based on the assumption that it had immediate value, and found out that what he really had to do to get the money involved a lot of time and hard work he ultimately did not want to invest.
My advice is find a way to do what you want to do, and if you happen to cash in on the process, so much the better. If you focus on the latter, you will ruin the former, and in the end, you will wind up with nothing of real value.
$.02
neil verplank
works on my thinkpad, and I have an idea
on
IBM banks on Linux
·
· Score: 1
Although a computer user for longer than I care to admit, I'm relatively new to linux. I had a Toshiba Tecra 550CDT, and unsuccessfully installed Caldera, and equally unsuccessfully installed Redhat (5.2). Repeatedly.
I am happy to report that I did successfully install and create a dual boot system (Win98 and Redhat 6.1) on my fabulous new Thinkpad 570. I'm thrilled to pieces. No, of course the modem doesn't work. But since I needed an ethernet card anyway, I bought the 3com 10/100 Lan 56K (3CCFEM556B) - works great!
I also have a Zip drive with an Iomega (probably Adaptec) SCSI PCMCIA card, which I thus far cannot get to work. Of course, my scanner, hanging off my Zip, is still in lala land.
Of course, getting linux installed is not nearly the same as IBM offering support, but it does work.
Hey IBM! If you can't give the specs to the open source community, why don't you hire some enterprising folks from/. to build the drivers your machine needs? Money where your mouth is? I freely admit that I would even consent to buying the binaries - yes, yes I know this goes against the grain, but consider this: although there are many reasons to use Linux, one of the driving motivations I've seen is that linux is a cost effective alternative. In other words, Linux users are (collectively and statistically now), um, economically disincentivized? Let's face it, your average linux user is not running off and buying a top of the line $4000 laptop.
But for those of us who do, shelling out $25 (or whatever) to IBM to get a fully supported OS that I want on my machine is not a big deal. It's not about free, it's about useful. I site Larry Wall:
"In particular, we really needed to have a commercially packaged version of Perl for the Windows folks, because many of them were (and still are) clueless about open source. It's almost like we're doing Windows users a favor by charging them money for something they could get for free, because they get confused otherwise." --
Larry Wall
I don't care how IBM figures out how to support laptop linux, I just want them to bust a move and make it happen.
First off, it is NOT voice-related technology - it's a method of finding documents that relate to a particular topic (read the patent). Second, there is good evidence that the NSA cannot (still) filter voice conversations on a a wide scale.
In general, this report, prepared by and for the European Parliment, is an excellent summary of what the NSA is up to. The NSA has about 27 patents, all relating to what we like to call Echelon, which is basically a giant search engine. It's entirely automated, and it looks for things that might be of interest to security. No one is reading your mail however, or listening to your phone (as if anyone wants to know how many times you ordered pizza last week).
Why patent? Two reasons - 1) there is a big industry devoted to equipment and software explicity used by security agencies, and since the G funded the research, well, by golly, why *shouldn't* they make money on the technology? And 2) although it seems counter-intuitive, patenting is a way of securing the NSA's claim of ownership on the technology, and thus its dissemination.
If you're not a terrorist, then the only real complaint is that we live in a hyper-paranoid country that spends billions (probably trillions) protecting itself, when in fact a more generous, humanitarian foreign policy (connected with the yet more hypothetical willingness of the US population to care) might be a better use of our time and money. If we stopped pissing off all the other countries, maybe we wouldn't have to worry about terrorists. In fact, there has been a groundswell of political complaint that in fact there is little evidence that all this money is justified in the absence of any concrete threat.
Mostly, it sucks that the NSA has the patent on all the cool searching technology out there.
There is an outstanding patent, number 1635894, issued to Michelin in 1927. So long ago, I couldn't find any info online, but it wouldn't surprise in Michenlin already patented the wheel.
Mozilla (and M10) is a really, really big deal
on
Mozilla M10 Released
·
· Score: 4
Netscape once had 100% of the market. Now they don't. They still are the browser of choice for over one third of the internet population, which is what now, 100M?
Now, if you look at your server logs, you'll notice something pretty interesting - users of MIE form a "normal" bell curve - they're distributed from 2.0 to 5.0, with the biggest bump at 4.x. But all the netscape users cluster around the latest distrubition, and virtually all of them are using 4.x. OK, to be fair, "you're" server logs means across the board (I imagine slashdot's server logs break every curve).
So what? So, when Netscape 5.0 is done, and it works great, people will upgrade. 30 million people. This is a major milestone (to my mind) for the open source community - linux is in the purview of a very (dare I say select) few, but Netscape is centered squarely in midstream.
Now, you can argue that Mozilla isn't true open source, but you'd be needling semantics, and missing the big picture: A major company which makes a mainstream product is using public and volunteer help to develop a product that a major percentage of the internet, and indeed the US population are currently using, to say nothing of the rest of the planet....
Linus may have been the prime mover, but Netscape is taking the concept (and the result) to the streets.
First, if you go to the patent office page again, and hit the next button, you'll see that they have a number of patents, the sum total of which is not a processor, but a computer.
There's a somewhat interesting write up on CNN (from the time of the first patent, nov. 98). There seemed to be some posts that missed who transmeta really is - it's owned by Paul Allen, who also owns Interval (another think tank). His whole goal has been to recreate his PARC days, when really smart people could team up and work on just about anything they wanted (the result we all know, since we're using it).
Transmeta's computer does at the processor level what JIT and Java do for software. Java lets you write one program and run it on many OS's. JIT speeds that process by pre-translating java byte codes into native code.
The transmeta box will allow a chip manufacture to make a single chip, that will run any OS, and (by cacheing instruction conversions, as well as memorizing repeated instructions) actually run them all faster than the zillion chips AMD, Intel and the rest are cranking out.
Think about it: Universal hardware, universal applications, and plethora of invisible middleware.
Welcome to the future. You heard it here first. Too bad you can't by stock in Transmeta....
Slashdot Mirror
"A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do.... Only they who go to soirees and legistlative halls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? ... I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes... If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.... Otherwise, we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind."
-- Thoreau
sorry about "testing" (wrong button).
I looked through most of the posts, and didn't notice anyone pointing out the Christmas has much older roots - it's been taken from the pagans, who themselves simply observed the passage of the sun in the sky. The original celebration is on the solstice (dec 21).
Personally, I celebrate the solstice - it's the beginning of longer days, and clearly marks another full circuit of our fragile planet around the sun. It's a good thing to joyful about, a much older tradition, and need not be religious or commercial.
I also think it's fair to point out that Jesus would be highly unlikely to be pleased with what we call christmas in America - often unwanted family gatherings, cutting down millions of trees, burning gigawatts of power on tacky lights, while we bomb the shit out of the Afghan people (mmmm. want some hypocrasy with your turkey?) - need I go on?
Personally, I chose long ago to ignore "Christmas," and instead I try to be generous with my time and take care of people's needs where and when I can, not around Dec 25th.
So yeah, I was working - setting up a new web server. It's so peaceful and quiet, a nice day to accomplish something, which seems more in keeping with the time of year anyway.
cheers,
neil
testing
Well, I for one am impressed both with covad, and with speakeasy. I ordered DSL 3 weeks ago, and here it is (the service man left 10 minutes ago)! No hassles or problems, delivery on time, I'm very pleased.
My understanding of Covad's strategy, which seems good, is this: they buy only business lines from Ameritech, making them a priority customer, and getting correspondingly great response from Ameritech. But, because of the magic of bulk buying, Speakeasy ultimately is providing me with residential service and pricing. Essentially, buying a premium service at a discount, then recategorizing and re-pricing for the home market. It's working well enough that Ameritech bailed out Covad by making them responsible (pre-buying) for Ameritech's business DSL lines. I mean Verizon. OR is it SBC? Anyway, hooray for Covad.
Here's hoping they stay around!
neil
but what is a laptop, after all? it's a portable computing device. You can buy really tiny computers, such as tiqit or pocket pc (many slashdot articles on these) :
tiqit
pocketPC
add a fold-up keyboard, and a 5G PCMCIA drive
5G pcmcia
And a display device, either a portable screen (there are wireless screens out there) or glasses:
micro glasses
and you've got a really small computer. There are also a couple articles I've seen on building a "laptop" into a small stainless steel or brushed aluminum brief case.
Obviously, designing a motherboard and integrating everthing into a nifty case would be nice, but that's where the cost comes in. Buying really small parts isn't cheap, but building your own thang never is. But you *can* build a really small, portable computer, pretty much tailored to your needs.
You might also consider (if you really want to go for the gusto) the new technology that lets you output circuits via a printer (which thus far has been used to create cell phones and batteries):
but I see no reason you couln't print custom PC's! In short, although it may not be cheaper, it is I think possible to build something small, light, portable, and tailored to your design. And if you do, could you send me one?
cheers,
neil
neil@dove-tail.com
Most of the "science" in the article referenced was anything but (as one poster noticed, flicker comes partly from the interference between screen and electric lighting). However, as the article's editor pointed out at the very bottom, it has been demonstrated that the human eye can register an image displayed for less than 1/200 of a second.
you really need to know four things:
stock options are a form of IOU. I have started more than one company, and I personally have committed to the people who I work with, work for, and who work for me, that I will make good on my promises. If I have to sell everything I own to make good on my debts, I would do that. Not many people are really willing to make that kind of committment to you. As a result, stock options are worth nothing, because you cannot spend them, trade them or sell them. They are, as someone above said, a form of lottery ticket, and their worth is exactly as high as the value you personally place on them.
There is no such thing as a product -- all software, all hardware, all web sites are tools that facilitate the users' experience -- they are a way for people to do things they need to.
Is what the company doing a valuable service, oriented towards helping the most people do this particular thing the most effectively? If you believe in what you the company are collectively trying to accomplish, the then service has value, and the options probably will too someday. If you are as a company trying to take something from the market, instead of give something to it, you will probably not succeed. Unless, like the Microsofts of the world, you already have.
You may be rich someday, but you should be worried about what your life will be like on a day to day basis, because that is how you spend your time. Can your work with these people? Do you like and trust them? Are you certain you will enjoy what you are doing? Can you live comfortably on what they will pay you?
If you can answer yes to these questions, you will be far happier than if you are merely wealthy.
When you work for someone else you are being used. And, you are using them. Your goals are probably not theirs, and vice versa. This is not a "be paranoid trust no one" speech. This is a "know what you want and make certain you're being helped in achieving that" strategy.
I have a friend who got "bought out" with a half a million in options. It turns out that company was "buying him" to add to their package (their company) that they were in the process of selling. He got caught in the shuffle, and he decided at one point to forego that money (and he could have used it) because the job he was going to get wasn't going to make him happy.
He also got stuck because he took the equity based on the assumption that it had immediate value, and found out that what he really had to do to get the money involved a lot of time and hard work he ultimately did not want to invest.
My advice is find a way to do what you want to do, and if you happen to cash in on the process, so much the better. If you focus on the latter, you will ruin the former, and in the end, you will wind up with nothing of real value.
$.02
neil verplank
I am happy to report that I did successfully install and create a dual boot system (Win98 and Redhat 6.1) on my fabulous new Thinkpad 570. I'm thrilled to pieces. No, of course the modem doesn't work. But since I needed an ethernet card anyway, I bought the 3com 10/100 Lan 56K (3CCFEM556B) - works great!
I also have a Zip drive with an Iomega (probably Adaptec) SCSI PCMCIA card, which I thus far cannot get to work. Of course, my scanner, hanging off my Zip, is still in lala land.
Of course, getting linux installed is not nearly the same as IBM offering support, but it does work.
Hey IBM! If you can't give the specs to the open source community, why don't you hire some enterprising folks from /. to build the drivers your machine needs? Money where your mouth is? I freely admit that I would even consent to buying the binaries - yes, yes I know this goes against the grain, but consider this: although there are many reasons to use Linux, one of the driving motivations I've seen is that linux is a cost effective alternative. In other words, Linux users are (collectively and statistically now), um, economically disincentivized? Let's face it, your average linux user is not running off and buying a top of the line $4000 laptop.
But for those of us who do, shelling out $25 (or whatever) to IBM to get a fully supported OS that I want on my machine is not a big deal. It's not about free, it's about useful. I site Larry Wall:
I don't care how IBM figures out how to support laptop linux, I just want them to bust a move and make it happen.
$.02
neil
In general, this report, prepared by and for the European Parliment, is an excellent summary of what the NSA is up to. The NSA has about 27 patents, all relating to what we like to call Echelon, which is basically a giant search engine. It's entirely automated, and it looks for things that might be of interest to security. No one is reading your mail however, or listening to your phone (as if anyone wants to know how many times you ordered pizza last week).
Why patent? Two reasons - 1) there is a big industry devoted to equipment and software explicity used by security agencies, and since the G funded the research, well, by golly, why *shouldn't* they make money on the technology? And 2) although it seems counter-intuitive, patenting is a way of securing the NSA's claim of ownership on the technology, and thus its dissemination.
If you're not a terrorist, then the only real complaint is that we live in a hyper-paranoid country that spends billions (probably trillions) protecting itself, when in fact a more generous, humanitarian foreign policy (connected with the yet more hypothetical willingness of the US population to care) might be a better use of our time and money. If we stopped pissing off all the other countries, maybe we wouldn't have to worry about terrorists. In fact, there has been a groundswell of political complaint that in fact there is little evidence that all this money is justified in the absence of any concrete threat.
Mostly, it sucks that the NSA has the patent on all the cool searching technology out there.
There is an outstanding patent, number 1635894, issued to Michelin in 1927. So long ago, I couldn't find any info online, but it wouldn't surprise in Michenlin already patented the wheel.
Now, if you look at your server logs, you'll notice something pretty interesting - users of MIE form a "normal" bell curve - they're distributed from 2.0 to 5.0, with the biggest bump at 4.x. But all the netscape users cluster around the latest distrubition, and virtually all of them are using 4.x. OK, to be fair, "you're" server logs means across the board (I imagine slashdot's server logs break every curve).
So what? So, when Netscape 5.0 is done, and it works great, people will upgrade. 30 million people. This is a major milestone (to my mind) for the open source community - linux is in the purview of a very (dare I say select) few, but Netscape is centered squarely in midstream.
Now, you can argue that Mozilla isn't true open source, but you'd be needling semantics, and missing the big picture: A major company which makes a mainstream product is using public and volunteer help to develop a product that a major percentage of the internet, and indeed the US population are currently using, to say nothing of the rest of the planet....
Linus may have been the prime mover, but Netscape is taking the concept (and the result) to the streets.
I think that's worth crowing about.
neil
yes, hello, duh. I meant, trying to recapture the heady days of PARC by re-hiring many of the originals at transmeta.
There's a somewhat interesting write up on CNN (from the time of the first patent, nov. 98). There seemed to be some posts that missed who transmeta really is - it's owned by Paul Allen, who also owns Interval (another think tank). His whole goal has been to recreate his PARC days, when really smart people could team up and work on just about anything they wanted (the result we all know, since we're using it).
Transmeta's computer does at the processor level what JIT and Java do for software. Java lets you write one program and run it on many OS's. JIT speeds that process by pre-translating java byte codes into native code.
The transmeta box will allow a chip manufacture to make a single chip, that will run any OS, and (by cacheing instruction conversions, as well as memorizing repeated instructions) actually run them all faster than the zillion chips AMD, Intel and the rest are cranking out.
Think about it: Universal hardware, universal applications, and plethora of invisible middleware.
Welcome to the future. You heard it here first. Too bad you can't by stock in Transmeta....
$.02