Slightly off-topic, but for a point of reference, a complete list of what got cut from The Simpsons on the trip from first-run to syndication is available here. I for one agree that this would be a great technology to integrate into Tivo -- I already watch 30-minute shows in 20 minutes, and a lot of shows could be shaved down by a couple more minutes without significant loss.
This is a great organization that contributes funds to open source development. Best of all, you can get a cobranded credit card that gives proceeds to them, and it has a swanky penguin logo that gets lots of nice comments when you use it.:-)
I'd love to see what some of the CSound hackers to do with this. CSound is basically a programming language for sound and music, where you define the sound of the instruments as well as what they play programmatically. Take a lisp program to analyze these results and write csound scripts in real time, and you've got a recipe for fun!
On what planet does it make sense to integrate a calendar into a web browser? A web browser is by nature a real-time program -- you decide you want to view a page, you view the page, you walk away happy. A calendar application, while useful in general, adds no value to Mozilla.
Why doesn't this company donate the source for this calendar to something with more reach like a windowing environment? I'd *love* to have a calendar nicely integrated with the whole computer, not just the web browser. It'd also do a lot to convince more novice users that Linux is a friendly environment.
This just in: Terrorist Osama bin Laden has been spotted near the Pakistan border by a team of U.S. snipers. They are currently in the process of forming a committee to decide where they should shoot the bullet to assinate Mr. bin Laden, in an operation being called "Shot of Freedom v1.0". Sgt. Mark Hawthorne, who is quickly emerging as the lead of this committee, added "we need to make sure we do this right -- we only get one shot at him, and we need to make sure we do it the best we can. Plus, we want to make sure we get the reward for killing him; there's another troop in the area with bigger and better guns, and we can't let them get to him first!" They estimate this operation will be completed somewhere around Q4 in 2002, although this assumes that the target will stay relatively still.
The Gemeni table handler is produced by NuSphere, which has become demonized for not (properly) GPLing the table type as is required by the MySQL license. There is a FAQ from the MySQL folks about the dispute.
Of course it counts. Some employers actually care about what an employee knows, not what a piece of paper says they know. There are plenty of people out there who are motivated to continue their education after they've entered the real world, but who don't have the (time|money) to devote to a school like MIT. As one who spends many hours at Barnes & Noble reading tons of computer books in my spare time, I certainly welcome the opportunity to get more free education!
The very idea of doing this is ridiculous not just from the standpoint of the loss of privacy, but because the technology for strong encryption is already all over the place. This isn't a situation where a law is passed and suddenly every existing crypto program self-destructs to make way for the new system. No terrorist in his/her right mind would use the system with the backdoor. They have people who are willing to commit a suicide bombing. Surely they wouldn't have a problem with bending the law and using an old unprotected crypto program.
By this logic, we should also outlaw guns. They might be used for terrorist operations. We all know that passing a law against the use of guns will cause every one of the millions of guns in this country to vanish as well.
We need to set up a Beowulf Cluster of these! Imagine the possibilities of hundreds of fake 18-month old children -- IRC would suddenly become a much more enriching experience!
It'd be great to find some software that's able to work on these problems during my spare CPU cycles. Who knows the scoop on this? It's worth a shot, I'm sure the odds are at least slightly better than winning the lottery! ---
Josh Woodward
It's a shame that what was once one of the most respected net services has sold out and become what amounts to little more than a joke. 10 years down the road, when we think of Napster, it won't be for the great run it had in its heyday, it'll be for the washed out shell of what it's become -- a whore to the major labels.
I truly wish Napster would have admitted defeat and died gracefully as a martyr. They remind me of Full House in its 29th season -- just go away already. ---
Josh Woodward
Smaller sites are never going to get the ear of the biggest ISPs that hold the real dollars. It's the bigger sites that you may see trying this in the future. It's a lot like the cable TV industry -- you provide the premium channel, the cable TV network pays you to carry it, and the cable TV network charges the consumer for the service. It's an interesting idea. ---
Josh Woodward
I run a community site for fans of the band Moxy Fruvous called Fruhead.Com. The site is very popular, getting around a half a million hits a month, almost all of them dynamic pages. After bouncing back and forth getting screwed by various web hosting companies ("sorry, your site is just too busy, buhbye!"), I managed to find a generous user with a very fast DSL connection who offered to host the site from his apartment. It's been quite reliable, although not as much as a dedicated connection. But so what? It's a free site, and if it goes down for a couple hours it's not like I'm losing money or customers.
I'm hoping to move to a dedicated server someday, but not until prices come down. It'd be really nice to find a hosting company to host non-profit websites without the unreal markups they give to commercial sites. Any takers?
I use FreeBSD as my server and desktop platform at work, and I use Linux at home. The primary thing I've found about FreeBSD that keeps me from switching at home is the lack of supported software for the platform. A huge number of tarball distrobutions simply don't compile under FreeBSD. As an operating system I've found it to be amazingly robust -- we had a heavily-used server that was put up, and for a year and a half after the first boot, it never went down again. As a desktop environment, it's just as rock solid. It only needs a reboot when the rolling blackouts hit. *grins*
My suggestion for FreeBSD users is to help out. When you encounter a compile problem, fix it and submit a patch. There are very high profile projects that do not compile under FreeBSD without tweaking. If more software would compile, it'd be an amazing desktop environment.
Who needs their system? Yahoo! Messenger is just as good (I'd say much better), and it has official clients for Linux and FreeBSD (as well as a Java client for people who don't want to install anything). Even MSN Messenger, ICQ and Jabber are better alternatives to AIM. Get people to leave AIM and the world will be a better place.;-) ---
Josh Woodward
I graduated from the CS program at Bowling Green State University in May of '99. I can only speak for the strengths and weeknesses of this particular school, but I suspect they're similar for other non-technical universities.
The focus of the department was very centered around C++ application development. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, however, they focused on small projects in all but a couple classes. Even in the classes that focused on large projects, they were do-it-yourself. When I graduated and jumped into a hardcore real-world internet job, I felt woefully inadequate for awhile. I eventually learned more in my job in a single month than I had the entire time at school.
What would have made it better, you ask? I propose two classes that should be in every CS program across the country. The first class, there's a single assignment for the whole class. Everyone works together to produce a large piece of open-source software from scratch. Some students
may elect to coordinate a part of the project,
while others do the coding. This teaches students how to work on big teams in real-world situations to produce something meaningful.
The second class would be the continuation of the first, except you don't get the same project. You take a "completed" project and maintain it. Add features, fix bugs, learn how to take code you've never seen and take ownership of it. We all know fun maintenance is..:-)
This could be a very big help for the open-source movement, as well. A website filled with project ideas from the Internet could help determine the demand for programs. Plus, it exposes everyone to open source, which means there may be fewer Microsofties in the future. *grins* Just my thoughts, anyone want to lobby the big universities to start this?:-) ---
Josh Woodward
Based on what I'm reading in this article, it seems like they're going to do something to the mp3s that makes it impossible for traditional CD creation programs and MP3->WAV converters to do their job. This would have to involve a file format change. I'm guessing this:
You will need to upgrade your Napster client when this goes out. When someone requests a file from you that you've ripped from your own CDs, it will take this standard formatted MP3, add its own meta-info to the file, and send it to the other user. What results is an MP3 file in a non-standard format which is not playable by standard players, but is only playable with their nifty new inline player (which coincidently blasts ads from the major record labels at you while you use it).
This may not be as bad as it seems. Most importantly, there *will* be programs out within days that will convert their "protected" files to standard MP3s. However, it will probably be easier to find full albums on MP3 (which is hard right now). Of all of the proposals I've heard of how to make Napster more acceptable to the major labels, this is one of the only ones I might still use afterwards. ---
Josh Woodward
It just struck me that RMS' views mirror a lot of what annoys me about the recording industry, especially his obsession with the GNU/Linux thing. Part of his argument is that Linux is the kernel, but not the operating system -- we will all agree with this. However, to say (or at least imply) that GNU forms the rest of what is popularly known as "Linux" is absurd. There are plenty of utilities considered standard on the platform that aren't derived from anything Mr. Stallman and his cohorts have developed.
The frustrating part is that the major record labels have the same attitude regarding Napster. This whole attitude of "collect money from your users and give it to us, the recording industry" has been central to the debate for some time, but they always neglect to mention the smaller labels that have chosen not to participate in the RIAA. The majority isn't always all that matters, and when RMS ignores the important contributions other programmers not associated with GNU have made to Linux, it's a slap in their face. ---
Josh Woodward
Hmm.. interesting idea, but I somehow doubt the content this person is after is accessible through lynx. Hmmm.. but given that jpg => text image translator I saw recently, let's see one of those "porn image recognition" software packages detect that! ---
Josh Woodward
I operate a very successful online community, Fruhead.com. The site is an interactive account-oriented online BBS that "borrows" more than a few ideas from the old dial-in BBSes. The difference is that it doesn't try to be another "everyone and their uncle come here and chat -- we have 5 million users!". It focuses on a very specific set of people (fans of the band Moxy Fruvous). The effect is that it retains the community closeness and size of the old local BBSes, but it does it by focusing on an interest instead of a location. IMHO, this is the way online communities will need to adapt to avoid the trolls and the lack of "closeness" that is often associated with the new communities. ---
Josh Woodward
Flash immediately destroys the accessibility of the site to a large portion of your audience, and frustrates many of the rest of them. Not only do users need the Flash plugin (which some have and many don't), it kills the usability of many of the features of a browser (try bookmarking, copy/pasting, using the Find command, etc). I've never seen a site done in Flash that couldn't be done in HTML -- if you're trying to make a site easier to use, there are better ways to do it rather than giving your users a whole new set of controls to learn. Please, stick to basics!
Jakob Nielsen has a great article covering this, see http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html. ---
Josh Woodward
One thing I don't think anyone's mentioned is the importance of importing and exporting your calendars from other applications. There are already tons of apps out there that do a similar task. One way to stand out would be to offer import/export capabilities from tons of these. Not just Exchange, etc.., but apps like Yahoo! Calendar. I use the latter to make the sharing of my calendar easier on the Internet, but it would be quite sweet to have a nice frontend to edit it. ---
Josh Woodward
Great idea, if it'd work. I'm inclined to think that it wouldn't, since if I remember correctly 127.0.0.* is an IP block set aside for private networks, and thus are not valid Internet IPs. It'd also be trivial for the bad guys to nslookup the hosts and gather lists of bad domains. And it all boils down to one simple fact: they don't care. They're not using their own resources, and they get paid by the address. ---
Josh Woodward
Slashdot Mirror
Slightly off-topic, but for a point of reference, a complete list of what got cut from The Simpsons on the trip from first-run to syndication is available here. I for one agree that this would be a great technology to integrate into Tivo -- I already watch 30-minute shows in 20 minutes, and a lot of shows could be shaved down by a couple more minutes without significant loss.
http://www.linuxfund.org
:-)
This is a great organization that contributes funds to open source development. Best of all, you can get a cobranded credit card that gives proceeds to them, and it has a swanky penguin logo that gets lots of nice comments when you use it.
I'd love to see what some of the CSound hackers to do with this. CSound is basically a programming language for sound and music, where you define the sound of the instruments as well as what they play programmatically. Take a lisp program to analyze these results and write csound scripts in real time, and you've got a recipe for fun!
On what planet does it make sense to integrate a calendar into a web browser? A web browser is by nature a real-time program -- you decide you want to view a page, you view the page, you walk away happy. A calendar application, while useful in general, adds no value to Mozilla.
Why doesn't this company donate the source for this calendar to something with more reach like a windowing environment? I'd *love* to have a calendar nicely integrated with the whole computer, not just the web browser. It'd also do a lot to convince more novice users that Linux is a friendly environment.
This just in: Terrorist Osama bin Laden has been spotted near the Pakistan border by a team of U.S. snipers. They are currently in the process of forming a committee to decide where they should shoot the bullet to assinate Mr. bin Laden, in an operation being called "Shot of Freedom v1.0". Sgt. Mark Hawthorne, who is quickly emerging as the lead of this committee, added "we need to make sure we do this right -- we only get one shot at him, and we need to make sure we do it the best we can. Plus, we want to make sure we get the reward for killing him; there's another troop in the area with bigger and better guns, and we can't let them get to him first!" They estimate this operation will be completed somewhere around Q4 in 2002, although this assumes that the target will stay relatively still.
The Gemeni table handler is produced by NuSphere, which has become demonized for not (properly) GPLing the table type as is required by the MySQL license. There is a FAQ from the MySQL folks about the dispute.
Check out Dave Phillips' excellent book on the subject, Linux Music and Sound. There is a chapter dedicated to what you're wanting to do.
4 4/ qid=1003254837/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_7_1/103-5443063-182 7000
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/18864113
Of course it counts. Some employers actually care about what an employee knows, not what a piece of paper says they know. There are plenty of people out there who are motivated to continue their education after they've entered the real world, but who don't have the (time|money) to devote to a school like MIT. As one who spends many hours at Barnes & Noble reading tons of computer books in my spare time, I certainly welcome the opportunity to get more free education!
The very idea of doing this is ridiculous not just from the standpoint of the loss of privacy, but because the technology for strong encryption is already all over the place. This isn't a situation where a law is passed and suddenly every existing crypto program self-destructs to make way for the new system. No terrorist in his/her right mind would use the system with the backdoor. They have people who are willing to commit a suicide bombing. Surely they wouldn't have a problem with bending the law and using an old unprotected crypto program.
By this logic, we should also outlaw guns. They might be used for terrorist operations. We all know that passing a law against the use of guns will cause every one of the millions of guns in this country to vanish as well.
The camp david story is false -- no planes have crashed into it.
We need to set up a Beowulf Cluster of these! Imagine the possibilities of hundreds of fake 18-month old children -- IRC would suddenly become a much more enriching experience!
It'd be great to find some software that's able to work on these problems during my spare CPU cycles. Who knows the scoop on this? It's worth a shot, I'm sure the odds are at least slightly better than winning the lottery!
---
Josh Woodward
It's a shame that what was once one of the most respected net services has sold out and become what amounts to little more than a joke. 10 years down the road, when we think of Napster, it won't be for the great run it had in its heyday, it'll be for the washed out shell of what it's become -- a whore to the major labels.
I truly wish Napster would have admitted defeat and died gracefully as a martyr. They remind me of Full House in its 29th season -- just go away already.
---
Josh Woodward
Smaller sites are never going to get the ear of the biggest ISPs that hold the real dollars. It's the bigger sites that you may see trying this in the future. It's a lot like the cable TV industry -- you provide the premium channel, the cable TV network pays you to carry it, and the cable TV network charges the consumer for the service. It's an interesting idea.
---
Josh Woodward
I run a community site for fans of the band Moxy Fruvous called Fruhead.Com. The site is very popular, getting around a half a million hits a month, almost all of them dynamic pages. After bouncing back and forth getting screwed by various web hosting companies ("sorry, your site is just too busy, buhbye!"), I managed to find a generous user with a very fast DSL connection who offered to host the site from his apartment. It's been quite reliable, although not as much as a dedicated connection. But so what? It's a free site, and if it goes down for a couple hours it's not like I'm losing money or customers.
I'm hoping to move to a dedicated server someday, but not until prices come down. It'd be really nice to find a hosting company to host non-profit websites without the unreal markups they give to commercial sites. Any takers?
---
Josh Woodward
I use FreeBSD as my server and desktop platform at work, and I use Linux at home. The primary thing I've found about FreeBSD that keeps me from switching at home is the lack of supported software for the platform. A huge number of tarball distrobutions simply don't compile under FreeBSD. As an operating system I've found it to be amazingly robust -- we had a heavily-used server that was put up, and for a year and a half after the first boot, it never went down again. As a desktop environment, it's just as rock solid. It only needs a reboot when the rolling blackouts hit. *grins*
My suggestion for FreeBSD users is to help out. When you encounter a compile problem, fix it and submit a patch. There are very high profile projects that do not compile under FreeBSD without tweaking. If more software would compile, it'd be an amazing desktop environment.
---
Josh Woodward
Who needs their system? Yahoo! Messenger is just as good (I'd say much better), and it has official clients for Linux and FreeBSD (as well as a Java client for people who don't want to install anything). Even MSN Messenger, ICQ and Jabber are better alternatives to AIM. Get people to leave AIM and the world will be a better place. ;-)
---
Josh Woodward
I graduated from the CS program at Bowling Green State University in May of '99. I can only speak for the strengths and weeknesses of this particular school, but I suspect they're similar for other non-technical universities.
:-)
:-)
The focus of the department was very centered around C++ application development. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, however, they focused on small projects in all but a couple classes. Even in the classes that focused on large projects, they were do-it-yourself. When I graduated and jumped into a hardcore real-world internet job, I felt woefully inadequate for awhile. I eventually learned more in my job in a single month than I had the entire time at school.
What would have made it better, you ask? I propose two classes that should be in every CS program across the country. The first class, there's a single assignment for the whole class. Everyone works together to produce a large piece of open-source software from scratch. Some students
may elect to coordinate a part of the project,
while others do the coding. This teaches students how to work on big teams in real-world situations to produce something meaningful.
The second class would be the continuation of the first, except you don't get the same project. You take a "completed" project and maintain it. Add features, fix bugs, learn how to take code you've never seen and take ownership of it. We all know fun maintenance is..
This could be a very big help for the open-source movement, as well. A website filled with project ideas from the Internet could help determine the demand for programs. Plus, it exposes everyone to open source, which means there may be fewer Microsofties in the future. *grins* Just my thoughts, anyone want to lobby the big universities to start this?
---
Josh Woodward
Based on what I'm reading in this article, it seems like they're going to do something to the mp3s that makes it impossible for traditional CD creation programs and MP3->WAV converters to do their job. This would have to involve a file format change. I'm guessing this:
You will need to upgrade your Napster client when this goes out. When someone requests a file from you that you've ripped from your own CDs, it will take this standard formatted MP3, add its own meta-info to the file, and send it to the other user. What results is an MP3 file in a non-standard format which is not playable by standard players, but is only playable with their nifty new inline player (which coincidently blasts ads from the major record labels at you while you use it).
This may not be as bad as it seems. Most importantly, there *will* be programs out within days that will convert their "protected" files to standard MP3s. However, it will probably be easier to find full albums on MP3 (which is hard right now). Of all of the proposals I've heard of how to make Napster more acceptable to the major labels, this is one of the only ones I might still use afterwards.
---
Josh Woodward
It just struck me that RMS' views mirror a lot of what annoys me about the recording industry, especially his obsession with the GNU/Linux thing. Part of his argument is that Linux is the kernel, but not the operating system -- we will all agree with this. However, to say (or at least imply) that GNU forms the rest of what is popularly known as "Linux" is absurd. There are plenty of utilities considered standard on the platform that aren't derived from anything Mr. Stallman and his cohorts have developed.
The frustrating part is that the major record labels have the same attitude regarding Napster. This whole attitude of "collect money from your users and give it to us, the recording industry" has been central to the debate for some time, but they always neglect to mention the smaller labels that have chosen not to participate in the RIAA. The majority isn't always all that matters, and when RMS ignores the important contributions other programmers not associated with GNU have made to Linux, it's a slap in their face.
---
Josh Woodward
Hmm.. interesting idea, but I somehow doubt the content this person is after is accessible through lynx. Hmmm.. but given that jpg => text image translator I saw recently, let's see one of those "porn image recognition" software packages detect that!
---
Josh Woodward
I operate a very successful online community, Fruhead.com. The site is an interactive account-oriented online BBS that "borrows" more than a few ideas from the old dial-in BBSes. The difference is that it doesn't try to be another "everyone and their uncle come here and chat -- we have 5 million users!". It focuses on a very specific set of people (fans of the band Moxy Fruvous). The effect is that it retains the community closeness and size of the old local BBSes, but it does it by focusing on an interest instead of a location. IMHO, this is the way online communities will need to adapt to avoid the trolls and the lack of "closeness" that is often associated with the new communities.
---
Josh Woodward
Jakob Nielsen has a great article covering this, see http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html .
---
Josh Woodward
One thing I don't think anyone's mentioned is the importance of importing and exporting your calendars from other applications. There are already tons of apps out there that do a similar task. One way to stand out would be to offer import/export capabilities from tons of these. Not just Exchange, etc.., but apps like Yahoo! Calendar. I use the latter to make the sharing of my calendar easier on the Internet, but it would be quite sweet to have a nice frontend to edit it.
---
Josh Woodward
Great idea, if it'd work. I'm inclined to think that it wouldn't, since if I remember correctly 127.0.0.* is an IP block set aside for private networks, and thus are not valid Internet IPs. It'd also be trivial for the bad guys to nslookup the hosts and gather lists of bad domains. And it all boils down to one simple fact: they don't care. They're not using their own resources, and they get paid by the address.
---
Josh Woodward