Monday, December 31

 
Laptop Composing If there’s one thing the Internet has taught us, it’s that new technology rarely destroys old ways of doing business. Similarly, the rise of virtual studios probably won’t mean the end of big-name producers who put together songs on two-inch tape using mixing boards the size of pool tables. And while more singers and rappers might be tempted to try producing their own tracks, Chad Hugo doesn’t recommend it. ‘‘Most artists should just worry about what they do best – the vocals,’’ he says. But even if the virtual studio doesn’t turn every recording artist into a producer, it has already turned at least one group of producers into recording artists. The globetrotting Neptunes recently used Pro Tools to add live instruments to some of the keyboard tracks they’d been working on, and the group’s debut album is due out early next year.

Saturday, December 22

 
NSC Statistics - What are the Odds of Dying Odds of Death Due to Injury, United States, 1998

 
O'Reilly Network: 2002: The Carpetbaggers Go Home [Dec. 21, 2001] Engineers understand that the difference between 95 percent and 96 percent reliability is often infinite. Some problems are tractable within a certain tolerance, and asymptotic to infinity above that tolerance. The Internet is full of best-effort algorithms, timeout mechanisms, asynchronous communication, and stateless clients. This is the fault-tolerant realpolitik of a public network composed of uncoordinated actors with conflicting agendas

Friday, December 21

 
O'Reilly Network: I Remember USENET [Dec. 21, 2001] I made many friends and came to know many others, though 99 percent of them I had not met in the flesh. Indeed, there were people at my university whom I interacted with on the Net but rarely in the physical world. We all discovered quickly how easy it was to depersonalize people when communicating purely by writing. Perfectly reasonable people would get quickly involved in "flame wars" and use invectives they would never say to a person's face.
As these archives return to the world, I have to admit some trepidation. Reading my old words I am sometimes painfully informed of how naive, and sometimes plain wrong, the younger me could be.

 
Unknown News - www.UnknownNews.net - The news you need, whether you know it or not. My love for America is not that cheap and easy. I'm not that kind of girl.

 
Patenting the alphabet:

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (Reuters) - Palm Inc. (news/quote) (PALM.O), the No. 1
handheld computer maker, on Friday said it would appeal a court ruling in
favor of Xerox Corp. (news/quote) (XRX.N) in a case over a patent for
handwriting recognition software.
``We assert that the Graffiti handwriting technology does not infringe the
Xerox patent and that Palm has strong arguments to support its defense,''
Eric Benhamou, Palm's chairman and chief executive said in a statement.
Xerox said on Thursday that it had won a patent infringement suit against
3Com Corp. (news/quote) (COMS.O) and Palm over the Graffiti product.
Xerox had sued U.S. Robotics, which was later acquired by 3Com, in April
1997, claiming that the handwriting recognition technology marketed as
Graffiti and used on Palm handheld devices infringed a patent Xerox
received in 1997.
Xerox said the technology was invented at its Palo Alto Research Center,
known as PARC.
``Palm will defend itself vigorously and does not intend for this
litigation to affect its business strategy or business model nor that of
its licensees,'' the Palm statement said.


Thursday, December 20

 
jmdl.com ARTICLES: The Rolling Stone Interview: Rolling Stone, July 26, 1979 There was a time when you and Laura Nyro were considered to be the two purveyors of female singer/songwriting. Now it's all but taken for granted that Laura Nyro wasn't "tough enough" to survive in the business. Do you think that your own survival has meant a certain toughness?
Gee, I don't know if that's the case. Inspiration can run out, you know. Laura Nyro made a choice that has tempted me on many occasions. And that was to lead an ordinary life. She married a carpenter, as I understand, and turned her back on it all. Which is brave and tough in its own way. Many, many times as a writer, I've come to a day where I say, "None of this has any meaning." If you maintain that point of view, if you hold onto it and possess it, that's it for you. There's a possibility that you can come firmly to that conclusion, as Rimbaud did, and give it up. I've always managed to move out of those pockets.

 
Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" LESTER BANGS
That's because we are uncool! And
while women will always be a problem for
guys like us, most of the great art in
the world is about that very problem.
Good-looking people have no spine!
Their art never lasts! They get the
girls, but we're smarter.

 
Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" DENNIS HOPE (cont'd)
Because if you think Mick Jagger will
still be out there trying to be a rock
star at age fifty, you're sadly sadly
mistaken.

 
Partygoers Mocked By Catering Staff "Whenever people are forced to serve others, resentment and derision are inevitable," said Dr. Henry Janssen, a University of Georgia anthropologist. "This tradition dates back to Ancient Greece, where servants at grand Athenian feasts would sneak into the kitchen to put on short plays lampooning the foibles of their wealthy, gluttonous guests. As long as there are people who stuff their faces with mini-meatballs while wearing bad ties, there will be servers there to make fun of them."

 
'Rings' Plan: Grab Geeks So Masses Will Follow "We reverse-marketed," Paddison said. "We had to get the fans first. They are our evangelists." He attended Comicon, the annual comic-book convention. He e-mailed Tolkien webmasters at 3 a.m., because that's when they're up trolling the Internet. He met with some. "I had a dialogue with a couple of vampires — at least, they thought they were," Paddison said. "We did not have dinner."

 
sfbg.com "My instinct says not to give this information to the FBI," Rucker Jr. muses. "Thinking that Big Brother is right all the time is bad for our country, it's bad for people's rights, it's bad for people who want to live in little hellholes like this running their own computer companies."

 
Lurkers One day I'll round up all my lurkers
we'll have a newsgroup of our own
without all this flak from you morons
my lurkers will post round my throne.

Wednesday, December 19

 
RRE 2001/06: [RRE]Machine Dreams It is always a dicey proposition to assert that one is living in an
historical epoch when one conceptual system is drawing to a close
and another rising to take its place; after all, even dish soaps are
frequently retailed as new and revolutionary.

 
From my little brother:


TUESDAY "sixty-eight" ,"Disapear"

Sunny day real estate - "pheurton skeurto" "In Circles" "the prophet"

Alkaline Trio "Exploding Boy"

Dashboard Confessionals "Screaming Infidelitys"

some others band that are great

Ani Defranco "pick your knose"

Me First and the Gimme Gimmes they do punk covers

Flogging Molly there this irish folk band with a upbeat tempo

Modest Mouse :"Never ending Math equation"

other Emo bands: Hey mercedes, Hot rod Circuit,

thanks enjoy maybe youll find some bands youll like


 
isen.com: Amara's Law -- SMART Letter #63 How Networking Advances Screwed Up the Economy
by Roxane Googin

[For the last two years Roxane Googin and I have
participated in a small early-September telecom conference.
In 2000 I wish I had listened to her with my wallet (in
addition to my ears). In 2001, her warnings extended to
the larger economy. I convinced publicity-shy Googin that
her message needed to reach beyond her community of
portfolio managers, that it needed to reach policy makers,
corporate strategists and other decision makers if we're to
avoid a Japan-style permacession and get the communications
revolution -- and economic growth -- back on track. Below
is what Googin said early last September -- David I]

Tuesday, December 18

 
Zinn
It is time that we scholars began to earn our keep in this world. Thanks to a gullible public, we have been honored, flattered, even paid, for producing the largest number of inconsequential studies in the history of civilization: tens of thousands of articles, books, monographs, millions of term papers; enough lectures to deafen the gods. Like politicians we have thrived on public innocence, with this difference: the politicians are paid
[end of page 499]
for caring, when they really don't; we are paid for not caring, when we really do.

 
Abu-Jamal Death Sentence Thrown Out Abu-Jamal exhausted the state appeals process two years ago, but a petition filed in September he argued that the defense had new evidence to clear him, including a confession by a man named Arnold Beverly. A judge ruled in November that she did not have jurisdiction, scuttling his hopes for another round of state court appeals.
In a 1999 affidavit, Beverly claimed he was hired by the mob to kill Faulkner because the officer had interfered with mob payoffs to police.

 
TeeVee - Home of The Vidiots
Steve Lutz makes his existence in San Diego. Steve Lutz has written 4 TeeVee articles and 1 station break. Steve Lutz works with computers an average of 600 hours a week. Steve Lutz can no longer relate to humans on any level. Steve Lutz hates himself and others. Please kill Steve Lutz

 
The Coldest Warrior (washingtonpost.com)
The revulsion felt at secret American schemes of assassination has given way to the fervent hope of some that our assassins will be more successful this time. A recent national poll revealed that one in three Americans is ready to sanction torture in the interrogation of terrorism suspects. Once again, the good we do and the evil we are capable of glide within the same tight orbit.

 
The Coldest Warrior (washingtonpost.com) Gottlieb had destroyed the MK-ULTRA files just before retiring. The records might be 'misunderstood,' he had said.

 
The Coldest Warrior (washingtonpost.com)
The two got into Devlin's Peugeot 403 and drove to a safe house. Devlin turned up the volume on a radio while Gottlieb delivered his instructions. What Gottlieb said left Devlin dumbfounded: Devlin was to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, a charismatic leftist leader. 'Jesus Christ!' Devlin thought. He had long worried about Soviet efforts to gain a foothold in the Congo and had lobbied to get rid of Lumumba. But this was not what he had in mind.

Monday, December 17

 
Small wireless ISPs turn profits
For wireless ISPs, small is beautiful - Tech News - CNET.com "The other guys look at my stuff and all they see is that one of my radios is covered in bird crap," Schafer said. "But I'm making money--they're not."

 
The Access Guides and the Contradictions of Design The other day I picked up the 2001 edition of San Francisco Access and was shocked to discover that Richard Saul Wurman's original vision of the once-excellent Access Guides had been dramatically watered down. I find this symptomatic as well as tragic, so I want to explain the problem in depth. First I'll explain the Access Guides for those who haven't seen them, then I'll explain the new edition and what's wrong with it, and then I'll explain what I see as the big picture.

 

About 15 yars ago I was deeply involved in some control software running on a PDP-11. It was a safety system for railroads, and the work was so intense I started dreaming about it. One recurring dream I still remember to this day: I was working on my own brain, and I'd messed up the device driver for my eyelids. I couldn't open them. And of course that meant I couldn't fix the software because I couldn't open my eyes to see it.

-- 

Rev. Peter da Silva, ULC. "Cave cuniculos lagana ferentes"



Saturday, December 15

 
List Features

 
List News

Very cool palm database. Free.

 
Open Source and C&W The following is an exploration of the open source movement. It is not intended to convince those who are advocates of intellectual property to embrace open source principles. Rather it is targeted at those of like mind who might be willing to accept statements such as the following by Richard Stallman, the author of the GNU General Public License:
Publishers don't have 'an unquestionable natural right to own' and control software ... we have a right to question the type of society that copyright of software creates ... good software can be created under a different production model than one which involves corporate ownership and control (54).

Friday, December 14

 
Terrorist poetry!


UBL: We were at a camp of one of the brother¹s guards in Qandahar.
>This brother belonged to the majority of the group. He came close and told
>me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America, and in the same
>dream he saw Mukhtar teaching them
> how to play karate. At that point, I was worried that maybe the
>secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream. So I
>closed the subject. I told him if he sees another dream, not to tell
>anybody, because people will be upset with him. (Another person¹s voice can
>be heard recounting his dream about two planes hitting a big building).
> UBL: They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building, so I
>said to them: be patient.
> UBL: The difference between the first and the second plane hitting
>the towers was twenty minutes. And the difference between the first plane
>and the plane that hit the Pentagon was one hour.
> Shaykh: They (the Americans) were terrified thinking there was a
>coup.
> [Note: Ayman Al-Zawahri says first he commended UBL¹s awareness of
>what the media is saying. Then he says it was the first time for them
>(Americans) to feel danger coming at them.]
> UBL (reciting a poem):I witness that against the sharp blade
> They always faced difficulties and stood together...
> When the darkness comes upon us and we are bit by a
> Sharp tooth, I say...
> ³Our homes are flooded with blood and the tyrant
> Is freely wandering in our homes²...
> And from the battlefield vanished
> The brightness of swords and the horses...
> And over weeping sounds now
> We hear the beats of drums and rhythmŠ
> They are storming his forts
> And shouting: ³We will not stop our raids
> Until you free our lands²...

Thursday, December 13

 
I, Cringely | The Pulpit
Present Vision has lots of laws -- acres of rules and principles for getting from here to the answer. Sitting in their tiny apartments, the Russians had figured out that getting from here to there required passing through a number of steps that could be characterized -- a pedagogy. Rules can't be skipped or taken out of order, but by following them in the right order, important conclusions can be drawn. Present Vision is a navigation tool for organizational creativity.

Wednesday, December 12

 
GROSSE POINTE BLANK Martin draws a nasty little PPK pistol from his waist, and levels it at Grocer under the table-- but Grocer is already drawing his pistol down there, and there is an instant Mexican breakfast stand-off.

 
GROSSE POINTE BLANK PAUL
Ten years. What happened!?

MARTIN
I freaked out, joined the Army, worked for the government, and went into business for myself.... I'm a professional killer.

PAUL
Thank you.

 
GROSSE POINTE BLANK Remember no matter how impossible your problems feel. I've known people without a chance in the world. And all of a sudden, they have lives. Time allows miracles. Let yourself breathe, son.

 
GROSSE POINTE BLANK DR. OATMAN
I think what you fear Martin is domesticity. It's the greatest fear that men have who belong to Western Culture. It's centuries old. Like King Phillip, in the 11th or 12th century who decided one day that he was so bored with his dreary life at home with his wife he thought, "Well, wouldn't it be great if we hit the road and fought... oh... the Saracens." So he put the word out and was amazed when a million men signed up and all of them wanted to go and fight in distant lands and do terrible things to people rather than stay at home with their families.

 
Search Results Minnesota SU, Mankato
English, 230 Armstrong Hall, Mankato, MN 56001
http://www.english.mnsu.edu
saveAssistant Professor of English
Assistant Professor, tenure-track, in English: Rhetoric and Composition starting August 19, 2002. Responsibilities include: teaching composition theory, pedagogy and related courses to MA/MFA students, introductory and advanced undergraduate writing courses, writing-intensive courses, and other courses in the candidate's specialty consistent with program needs. Applicant should be interested in and qualified to eventually assume training and mentoring roles with teaching assistants in a large undergraduate writing program. Load: 12 cr/semester (3 courses). Continuing research, advising and committee work expected. Required: doctorate in composition theory, completed by date of appointment; training and experience in college-level teaching of composition and in using technology for writing instruction. For full position description, see http://www.english.mnsu.edu. Send application letter, CV, and dossier (including transcripts and three letters of reference) to Harry Solo, Search Chair, 230 Armstrong Hall, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Mankato, MN 56001 by January 7, 2002 (postmark deadline). AA/EOE. [R]

 
Guardian Unlimited Books | Special Reports | 'I still have overwhelming doubt about my ability'
Chris Ware lists all the things he can't do. He can't articulate off the cuff; he can't organise his thoughts into grammatical format; he can't transcend self-doubt. He can't do interviews and he can't understand why he is becoming a success. If he had to describe himself in one word, it would be "farce".

 
Gosh, my email drafts folder is generally chock full of things that I
started and stopped. I return to some few of them, but some will stay
there without ever becoming something more or something else. If
students *really* got to treat their drafts that way--not as things that
must be always be pummeled into final form, but as potentially useful
though sometimes happily abandoned explorations--maybe the whole
"drafting" thing would make more sense to them, and serve them better.

Kathy at C.O.D.

 
gladwell dot com / Smaller The shame of it, though, is that Harmon and Harper have never been properly celebrated for their accomplishment. Victor Mills is the famous one. When he died, he was given a Times obituary, in which he was called "the father of disposable diapers." When Carlyle Harmon died, seven months earlier, he got four hundred words in Utah's Deseret News, stressing his contributions to the Mormon Church. We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs.

 
gladwell dot com / Smaller A typical insult arrives at a rate of seven millilitres a second, and might total seventy millilitres of fluid. The liner can clear that insult in less than twenty seconds. The core can hold three or more of those insults, with a chance of leakage in the single digits. The baby's skin will remain almost perfectly dry, and that is critical, because prolonged contact between the baby and the insult (in particular, ammonium hydroxide, a breakdown product of urine) is what causes diaper rash.

 
As we moved from one babbler group to the next, Zahavi was clearly happiest when he was being provocative. He argued, for instance, that a baby screaming for attention at the nest is actually blackmailing its parents, in effect saying, "Fox, fox, come and eat me. My parents don't care."

Perhaps this is why Joey, our two-year-old, runs out the front door and into the parking lot.

 
A List Apart: A Web Designer's Journey We complain about the WYSIWYG editors, but we write the same kind of code ourselves. When we don't know how to do something, instead of consulting the W3C or ECMA standards, we share hacks on mailing lists or across the cubicle. And when a browser comes out that actually supports standards, we complain about the way it breaks our HTML workarounds and browser-specific "DHTML."
This is a mighty stupid way to work. But it gets worse when we have to redesign. Unless we work with proprietary publishing systems (which have problems of their own), all that old content riddled with FONT tags and stuck inside table cells has to be poured into our new templates by hand—one page, one table cell, at a time.

 
Department of English, University of Louisville Check to see if your Athena account is active
Request a listserv for your class.
Request an Athena account
Common Folder
Download FTP Explorer
Web Research Evaluation Checklist (thanks Stacy

Tuesday, December 11

 
BLOGGER - Discuss

From what I understand, you can solve this by putting www.blogger.com in your list of "trusted servers."

BTW, the bookmarklet version still works.

Theoretically, one could create a right-click version that, instead of calling a URL from the Blogger server, as it does now, calls a local file that basically does what the bookmarklet does with javascript. I'm guessing the local file would be trusted and this wouldn't be a problem.

That's just a thought. I don't have time to do it right now, but if someone wants to hack it together and try it out, lemme know.

(You can change the URL the BlogThis! points to be searching your registry for "blogThis." I'm not going to say how you do that, because if you don't know, you probably shouldn't be in there. ;)
– Evan Williams [10/11/2001 3:14 PM]

 
CBBC Newsround | YOUR REPORTS | Exclusive Bill Gates interview . At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right but fortunately there are plenty that are coming.

Friday, December 7

 
HERE'S TO THE MIDDLE AGES: AFGHANS KEEP IT SIMPLE The tribal system, so detrimental to building an effective multiethnic state, offers tremendous support to people struggling to survive in impossibly difficult times. My translator Jovid's rented adobe-walled box on the outskirts of town here, which would normally house six people, is currently home to 15. Three of them, an old man and his two children, are refugees from neaby Kunduz who walked here after an errant American bomb destroyed their neighborhood. Four more are distant relatives who moved in after four years of drought made farming impossible.
The rest are orphaned children, not even distantly related to Jovid's family. The orphans are from the neighborhood; their mothers starved to death after their fathers died in battle. There are few orphanages in Afghanistan; there's no need for them.
"Someone just takes them in," Jovid replied when I asked him what happens to most orphans. Just to be clear, Jovid's family is desperatly poor. Still, it would never occur to them not to feed a hungry person.

 
Viridian Note 00283: Geeks and Spooks Some time ago my friend and prominent industry journalist Steven Levy wrote this book in my hand here, which is called CRYPTO, and its subtitle is HOW CODE REBELS BEAT THE GOVERNMENT. That's a good snappy subtitle, it makes the ol' product jump right off the shelf. But code rebels did not in fact beat the government, unless you think that the National Bureau of Standards is the government.
The truer and sadder story of crypto was that the spooks and the geeks both beat the hell out of our democratic process, rendering lawyers, consumers, the Congress, the industry, and the Administration totally irrelevant, and leaving crypto as a blasted technical wasteland, in a kind of Afghan-style feud, where every single party was necessarily a crook, or a scofflaw, or a deceiver, or weirdly suspect, and there was no legitimacy, and no common ground, and still, today, no good method to assemble any.

 
East Timor.

US OK'd Indonesian '75 E.Timor Invasion - Documents ``It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,'' Kissinger told Suharto, according to the document. ``We would be able to influence the reaction in America if whatever happens, happens after we return.''
``We understand your problem and the need to move quickly but I am only saying that it would be better if it were done after we returned'' to Washington, Kissinger said, according to the

Wednesday, December 5

 
mgkimsal:  random thought - 

mgkimsal: why is it that virus writers invariably can't spell or write
worth a dime?
mgkimsal: do they think that by putting in bad spelling/grammar more people
will think it's 'real'?
mgkimsal: I swear, the first time someone puts together a *real* virus -
something that can generically put together random yet coherent and
real sounding email messages - we'll be in for a real treat.
camworld2: i still think a virus that deletes Outlook and installs Eudora
would be great
mgkimsal: no argument here
camworld2: think about it, a PROACTIVE virus that does good
mgkimsal: actually, we were just talking about this here
mgkimsal: one of the things diehard Outlook fans like is the
calendar/appointment thing
mgkimsal: if you wrote a virus that simply moved people's appointments around,
without drawing attention to itself, you'd do more damage than
anyone could imagine
mgkimsal: don't have it replicate 50,000 times per hour
mgkimsal: just now and then
mgkimsal: and silently change Bob's appointment from 1:00pm to 9:30am
mgkimsal: he'll drive somewhere when he shouldn't be, etc.
camworld2: ha ha
mgkimsal: I'm too evil...
camworld2: insert2

 
BLOGGER - How to create a BlogThis! bookmarklet To delete this, you'll need to use regedit. As always, be very careful with registry edits, you can greatly harm your computer's operating system if you do this wrong. In order to enter regedit, go to the start menu and choose "Run...". Type in "regedit" (this will start the registry editor). Expand directories until you've reached

 
BLOGGER - How to create a BlogThis! bookmarklet

Monday, December 3

 
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200112/msg00018.html

Bruce STerling!

 
BBspot - Linux Kernel Delayed by Microsoft's Army of Evil Monkeys Linux Kernel Delayed By Microsoft's Army of Evil Monkeys

 
Why is it your pager never goes off when you're in a really boring meeting? Technology can be cruel.

 
CRN: Cover Story The flat economy, rising software costs, shrinking technology budgets, and Microsoft's licensing and pricing gambles with Windows XP and .Net services have many SMB customers clamoring to solution providers for inexpensive alternatives. Although Linux's corporate inroads have primarily been on the server front and questions remain about the profitability of a Linux-powered desktop, a select few solution providers are already closing deals and reaping rewards from selling Linux-based solutions.

Saturday, December 1

 
thinkingBytes Technology - Products

Synchronize thinkdb with MS access. Cool. Expensive.

 
Wow. I want one of these:

(from Techrhet)

I second CeeJ's choice of the Sony Mavica. At school, we've used the one's

that record to floppy disk with great success (and they are pretty easy to
learn, if you're going to teach others how to use a d. camera). Also, we just
bought the Mavica that burns to mini-disc (instead of the 3.5 floppy). It
takes MPEG movies (with sound), has a focusable lens, zoom, and also does the
requisite still shots in small or large filesizes (up to 2078xsomething, or
close to that). It usually runs around $1000, but i found it online for as
little as $650. And you can get CD-RWs, so you can use the same media over
and over. And those little discs hold a *bunch* of pictures. I've taken as
many as 50 stills and at least 20 minutes of video and have run out of
battery power before I've run out of disk space.

 
El Presidente wants to take Gates to court for XP crash Lawyers?
President: "Yes, I have spoken this evening with 2 legal advisors, who are already putting together the case. If my PC is repaired, ok, but if my archive is destroyed I will start an international court case against Microsoft. In the tribunal we will be able to enjoy ourselves, I'm almost hoping they won't be able to fix it!"

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