Found at http://members.ispwest.com/richardhurn/Evaluate%20Wi-Fi%20Promotions.htm
I just love the photos of LJ under test turned into a new "Rapid Deployment" market segment.
Richard, btw, is looking for a job in Portland, OR.
Jim on 03.30.05 @ 04:10 PM PST [link]
Sushi USB drives.
Jim on 03.28.05 @ 08:59 PM PST [link]
Spokane, the city that charges for day-old newspaper articles is now charging for otherwise free and open spectrum.
The company that serves up the free connection for Spokane’s downtown Wi-Fi “HotZone” has begun charging for extended use of the service.
The thinking person will recognize that a nearly infinite number of MAC addresses are to be had. Use one every two hours. That oughta give them fits.
Skidmore said the company has added safeguards that keep users from “spoofing,” or creating bogus accounts or user identifications each time they use up two hours of time.
I guarantee this is either ineffective, or pure bullshit, unless they're using 802.1x or WPA. I also guarantee that the 10 users/day cited in the article will drop like a stone.
Jim on 03.28.05 @ 06:41 PM PST [link]
Spokane's fish are polluted
SPOKANE, Wash. -- A state Department of Ecology study has found that fish in the Spokane River have the highest concentrations of toxic flame retardants of any freshwater fish in Washington state.
PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers, are chemicals used in electronics, plastics, building materials and textiles that build up in fish tissue and in the human body, including the breast milk of nursing mothers. They can cause neurological damage in babies.
"Fish from the Spokane River have the highest values of PBDEs found in Washington state to date," according to a September 2004 report from Ecology's toxics monitoring program.
Worst of all, The Health Department has not yet decided whether a public warning is warranted.
Don't eat the fish... even on Friday.
Nevermind that the Spokane river claims Washinton's highest levels of PCBs. Or the other (and sometimes quite litteral) shit (#2 ingredient in Spokane's water? sewage) floating in Spokane's water supply.
Wow. California went on a tear and outlawed PBDEs after fish were found with PBDE levels of 62 ppb in wet flesh. The fish caught in Spokane had PBDE levels of 1,250 ppb, some 20 times as high!
"Its the water... and a lot more!"
The Spokane-Coeur d'Alene region uses more water per person than just about any other region in the United States. All of it comes from the Spokane river, or its aquifer.
Jim on 03.28.05 @ 06:17 PM PST [link]
When a government is benign, interfering little with its citizens, and is just and is seen to do justice, then its citizens are likely to trust it. They won't mind letting it know many things about themselves.
When a government is irrational and intrusive, when corruption goes unpunished, when it accuses others of evil while doing those same evils itself, when civil rights disappear without warning, then its citizens should be more circumspect, at least if they want to stay alive and free.
It's easier to administer a police state if you have complete and up-to-date records about every person; it may be impossible to administer one in the absence of such records. The mere act of creating such records makes it likely that corrupt people would be drawn to positions of power, where they could use those records to gain even more power.
John Gilmore (as quoted on Interesting People)
Jim on 03.28.05 @ 05:31 PM PST [link]
Something is fishy.
Gary Sbona is one of Silicon Valley's highest paid executives. Number 59 on the list, actually, pulling down over 4.6 million dollars last year in cash and stock. What would a guy like that be doing with a failed dot.com?
And whats up with the connection to Mike Pliner? For those not in the know, Pliner used to be on Vivato's BoD, and Pliner and Biba were both part of Sytek way back when 802.11 started. Stalter pushed Pliner off the BoD. I guess Pliner had a score to settle.
Tom Sowa (a business reporter for the Spokane Paper) wrote in to say that he has confirmed that Sbona is the new CEO, and that he "started last week". Nothing new there, other than the simple fact that the company has now admitted the QB substitution to someone outside the company. Sowa also reports that Donald Stalter will stay with the company "until April" (now one week away), and is "leaving to pursue a start-up". I see this as a fancied-up version of the "left to pursue other interests" excuse that we so often get in these forced resignations.
In the meantime, Vivato's management team page is badly out of date. Stalter, DeMarche, and Matthew are all MIA, though Vivato has yet to admit that DeMarche and Matthew are gone. Matthew left in October 2004. Rasputin is Stalter's boy, so he won't last, and Smidl, as the VP of Sales in a company where sales aren't happening, has to be facing the prospect of execution by guilotine. He's also a Stalter plant, loyal to the recently departed tsar and his court.
This leaves Kolb as last man standing. Congratulations, Bradley.
Jim on 03.24.05 @ 08:10 AM PST [link]
Zoidberg (a.k.a. zoid) provides a modular Perl shell written, configured, and operated entirely in Perl. It aspires to be a fully operational login shell with all the features one normally expects. But it also gives direct access to Perl objects and data structures from the command line, and allows you to run Perl code within the scope of your command line.
Don't get me started about what a waste of time and resources this could be...
Jim on 03.24.05 @ 07:56 AM PST [link]
I was back in Spokane last Sunday evening and most of Monday. One of our former scumbags sued the (now defunct) corporation, with the assistance of a set of incompetent, unethical, mouth breathers who pretend to work for "justice".
I went back to kick some ass.
For the first time in forever, I stayed downtown (Oh, I used to live downtown, but I owed that wreck.) in the Hotel Lusso. Very nice place, if you have to go to Spokane. Moreover, they offer free WiFi in the lobby, and, staying on the second floor, looking at the Davenport out my window, I found that I could see and connecto to either the free WiFi in the lobby of Hotel Lusso, or the free WiFi at the Davenport, at my whim.
But Spokane's renowed "metro WiFi" network never did tickle my laptop. Spokane calls its "100 city block" network the "Spokane HotZone", and has gone so far as to spraypaint 
on the sidewalk in several places, all spotted while on my way to O'Doherty's on Sunday night. Unlike the picture you see here, the spraypainted version is all in red. I was immediately reminded of the spraypainted logo from 12 Monkeys. 
The monkey's arms resemble an 'S', the whole thing is red, and there is a circle. Dude, thats just so.. obvious! The sign set me thinking, "HotZone"? Isn't a "Hot Zone" someplace to AVOID?
In the movie, a convict, sent back in time to stop a devastating plague, is sent too far back and is hospitalized as insane. The catastrophic plague is intentionally released by the Army of the 12 Monkeys to depopulate the world, leaving it to the animals. In short, biological terrorism at its most extreme. Humankind survives by litterally "going underground".
In the book, monkeys are the carrier for Ebola and Marburg. Outbreaks of these two filoviri continue to this day, though mostly confined to the African continent.
So there we have it. Spokane, clearly an insane assylum of its own making, marking its sidewalks with dire warnings of pathogenic plague.
Spokane, this is what happens when your city is a Hot Zone. The whole term "Hot Zone", is like a departing gift from our good friend, Donald Stalter. Read this little press release for details. Or this one. It really was his bright idea.
But the diseased monkey has left town, and Spokane is left holding the bag. Again.
"You people don't exist. You're not real. You can't travel back in time... whoop! whoop! uh-uh. I am insane, and you are my insanity."
Jim on 03.24.05 @ 04:08 AM PST [link]
Don Stalter is no longer at Vivato, he "resigned" and has been replaced by Gary J. Sbona.
From what I'm hearing, Sbona has a heavy reputation … while I do not have direct confirmation, indirect information is that he would not be brought in for a bankruptcy or sale, but only for a longer term investment. The rumormill says it is possible that Stalter had to go to get the (now critical) financing done.
By the looks of it, Sbona has relationship with USVP. Verity is his big success story.
Jim on 03.20.05 @ 05:44 PM PST [link]
Just ran across this via some random Lisp-site. Its Olin Shivers, one of the big Scheme/T proponents/nutjobs, (still at it too, see: this Read:Scheme entry and be sure to read both "History of T", and Rees's rebuttal) responding to Jordan K. Hubbard, then moderator of rec.guns, though he now manages the Unix group at Apple, after passing through the FreeBSD project for a number of years.
Yes, I am aware of the West Coast predilection for 9mm pistolry. When I was
an undergraduate, I spent one summer doing AI hacking at the MIT AI Lab. We'd
hired this west coast guy to do Lisp hacking, and I can clearly remember being
a little stranged out by his attitudes. He just wouldn't shut up about
Interlisp and Browning Hi-Power's. Every time I tried to explain to him the
way our project did things, he'd interrupt with "the right way,"
i.e. the West Coast Way, to do it. He just couldn't get it through his head that I didn't
want to hear about Interlisp, and I damn sure didn't want to hear about
9-fucking-millimeter automatics; we were a Zetalisp/.223 project. I finally
gave up on him; that was the first time I'd ever personally encountered the
east coast/west coast split in Lisp style and weapons choice.
And I swear-to-God-its-true, while I was typing this, (at 4:20am in a hotel room in San Diego), iTunes shuffled up Steely Dan's "Third World Man":
Johnny's playroom
Is a bunker filled with sand
He's become a third world man
Smoky Sunday
He's been mobilized since dawn
Now he's crouching on the lawn
He's a third world man
Jim on 03.17.05 @ 04:31 AM PST [link]
1. When computing, whatever happens, behave as though you meant it to happen.
2. When you get to the point where you really understand your computer, it's probably obsolete.
3. The first place to look for information is in the section of the manual where you least expect to find it.
4. When the going gets tough, upgrade.
5. For every action, there is an equal and opposite malfunction.
6. To err is human . . . to blame your computer for your mistakes is even more human, it is downright natural.
7. He who laughs last probably made a back-up.
8. If at first you do not succeed, blame your computer.
9. A complex system that does not work is invariably found to have evolved from a simpler system that worked just fine.
10. The number one cause of computer problems is computer solutions.
11. A computer program will always do what you tell it to do, but rarely what you want to do.
link
Jim on 03.15.05 @ 10:24 PM PST [link]
While some people complain about driving, I flew for nearly 8 hours to get to San Diego. The trip was smooth until Marriott decided that I couldn't stay at the Courtyard Downtown, and shuttled me over to the Coronado Island Marriott Resort, despite the fact that I've held reservations for six weeks.
Yes yes, the room is very nice, but its throwing my schedule off, every trip is a taxi ride, and I've had four today, all in San Diego, three more than I anticipated. Feh.
Still, I managed to check-in, and then grab the 3rd taxi to attend Michael Mee's BOF on "Community Wireless Internet". I even got there before Mr. Mee, whom I've finally met face-to-face. A good thing, since I'm speaking to SoCalFreeNet tomororw night. (Sex, Drugs and Wireless, heh.) The PowerG8 was also shown in-public for the first time, along with a couple WRAP-based products.
After the BOF, Danny O'Brien, of Need To Know fame, threw a little party at Emerging Loft where too many people showed up, including me.
On the walk over, I chatted with a couple people, the "Kailua, Hawaii" on my nametag typically opens the door. "What do you do there?" "I moved to Hawaii so I wouldn't ever have to deal with VCs again."
One guy jumped at that, "VCs and bankers are ruining my company. They want me to outsource everything to India!" We discussed this for a couple blocks, and I offered my advice that the only way to succeed with Indian (or other) contractors was to have someone you trust on the ground at the remote site.
Someone should write an update the business book, "Who Moved My Cheese To India?"
Saw Cory, spoke to a local (San Diego) FBI agent, sniffed around about FPGA hacking; the secrets of ZigBee; and the social structure of 90s warez networks. Drank three large cups of Sky and pineapple juice on ice, and in-general felt way older than most of the crowd. Toward the end I saw three folks hold up the wall, so I wandered over to accuse them of same. Turns out the were Wendy Seltzer, Annalee Newitz (who didn't say five words before running away (is it the haircut?)) and Jason Schultz, whom I also finally got to meet face-to-face. Jason heads up the efforts on the Acacia/Lodgenet patent front for EFF. Wendy, btw, was polite, or at least tollerant, engaging me in repertoire until Jason was off the phone.
I also met a woman who shall remain nameless (for now) who claimed to work for Intel, making sure that Intel shows up in the news, for the benefit of Intel employees. Thats right folks, she's a PR flack who's audience is her fellow employees. Talkk about scratching your own back. I asked her if she'd read Cluetrain. Nope. Had she heard of Doc or Chris? Nope. "Markets as Conversations"? Nope.
I briefly described the good Doctor's start,
In 1995, I ended up in IBM's Internet division. A ranking PR guy from corporate headquarters ran into me one day and said he'd heard I had a lot of contacts in the financial press. He suggested we get together for lunch and talk about it. I took this as a good sign, maybe an opening to do what I liked best. But when we met several weeks later he said something like, "All those journalists you know? Never talk to them again."
He said I should refer all such conversations to him instead. That way, he said, the company's messaging would be consistent. Or words to that effect. But I knew they wouldn't be real conversations — they would be "key message" pitches, and I wasn't about to subject people I knew and liked to that sort of targeting. I kept my contacts to myself.
I was devastated. It was bad enough that I'd been explicitly forbidden to speak with journalists, many of whom had become good friends, but where was I going to write? If I published anything, I'd get busted for not asking permission — there was that word again — and if I wrote sleazy PR for IBM, I'd have to kill myself to blot out the karmic stain.
I offered to introduce her. Blank stare in the return direction from otherwise perfect blue irises so perfect that they could have been Carl Zeiss tinted contact lenses. I made a last-mintue grab, "Doc is an editor at Linux Review". This, and only this, she had heard of, even though Cluetrain is a mere six years old. Imagine, Chris Locke had just started at IBM ten years ago.
We briefly discussed what she'd done before Intel. Web applications on a framework I probably hadn't heard of.. "Yes, I know about Zope." She was surprised. I countered that Lisp was something to watch, since it was likely due for a return. One of the standers-by asked, "Why Lisp?"
"Continuations", I countered. And explained. Maintaining state across web sessions has long been an issue that web application designers have struggled with. Continuation based web servers provide a convenient mechanism for maintaining state across requests.
When programming for the web, it's annoying that there is no persistence. Yet, because users can use the Back button, open links in new windows, make bookmarks and generally move all over the place, ordinary persistence is a bit of a mess.
A continuation is a programming concept which is a bit like a save-point in a game. If you're before three doors, you might save; if it turns out there's an ogre behind door #1, you can just return to the savepoint - but you're allowed to keep the knowledge!
You can have several save-points, saved under different names, and switch between them - so you can go on with the game, and at the same time work on some side-puzzle.
It's a complete save. In a continuation, you have all the variables (global and local) and the full stack - a full restore, so the program can go on exactly where it left off.
Now, it seems to me that the model of the web corresponds pretty well to continuations. The program runs up to the point where interaction with the user is required. At that point, it encodes the continuation into the links given to the user, and quits.
When the user clicks one of those links, the URL contains a continuation and whatever response the user gave. Decode the continuation, resume it, and voila! - it all works.
Done properly, it'd be mostly invisible to the programmer. Just call a function to display the web page, and get back an answer. No sessions or any of that stuff.
The user can use the back button, have several windows open, bookmark a page and come back to it weeks later - everything works.
Meanwhile the programmer is back to the logic flow of the web app.
I tell ya... Lisp is the answer.
Now, what was the question again?
Jim on 03.15.05 @ 12:00 AM PST [link]
According to the Spokane Journal of Business, Spokane is looking to expand its WiFi coverage.
The city of Spokane, in cooperation with others, is working on plans to enlarge a broadband wireless-communication network that currently covers just a 100-block area of downtown.
The goal is to provide a greatly expanded grid for the fast-growing technology known as wireless fidelity, or “Wi-Fi,” which uses unlicensed radio spectrum to enable high-speed data transmission to portable computers.
Although such technology is seen as a potential catalyst for economic development here, this part of the planned network expansion is “municipal only” and is being designed specifically for use by public-safety agencies, says Joel Hobson, the city’s network services manager.
and concludes with
The creation of the downtown “hot zone” amounted to the first phase of the wireless network strategy being spearheaded by the city. In the second phase, Wi-Fi switches are to be installed atop towers near the North Division “Y,” on the West Plains, and near the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office substation in the east 12700 block of Sprague Avenue.
The third phase will involve installing equipment that creates a hot zone encompassing the Spokane County Courthouse, at 1116 W. Broadway, the adjoining public-safety building, and nearby city and county garages, he says. Fourth-phase work will provide “fill-in” coverage, at locations yet to be determined, along major transportation corridors.
The total cost of the second through fourth phases is expected to be roughly $200,000 to $300,000, and the projects are being paid for with grant money, Hobson says.
First, I recall lots of (super-expensive, and well-patroled) parking around the Spokane County Courthouse. Yep, says here that,
Spokane County provides parking to employees, vendors, and customers of the County through the use of 14 parking lots around the campus. Parking is very limited with only 519 spaces available for lease to County employees. The program uses a zone-parking program, which allows the over-sell of spaces to get the most utilization of the available area.
Four lots contain 230-metered spaces with two and six hour parking. There are 18 disabled spaces located in various lots with wheel chair access. Metered spaces are required payment by coin between the hours of 8 am and 5 pm. Lots are patrolled on a daily basis with tickets issued to those in violation of the posted parking.
If a 10 x 10 block area costs $75,000, (except that it costs $125,000 according to Vivato), how much coverage will they get out of their next $300,000 dollars?
Maybe Vivato is having a "fire sale" on all those left-over outdoor switches, in addition to the significant price drop on the indoor variant. Times must be getting tough at Vivato, the money's about out, and there is no announcement of the badly-needed funding event. Selling off the first-generation crap (for it is crap, Bob!) at 50% of cost is one way to score some cash in the short-term.
I'll be back in Spokane soon. Gotta go check out those new locations.
Jim on 03.11.05 @ 10:45 AM PST [link]
Spokane has ascended to its lofty former perch as Washington's second-largest city, crushing poor Tacoma like a stink bug under a steamroller. ..."
“I think this is an act of desperation by Spokane", said (Tacoma) City Councilman Tom Stenger. Stenger, a history buff, claimed Spokane originally got in front of Tacoma by cheating on the 1910 Census. Their ploy became apparent when the 1920 Census count came around and the city showed no growth.
“They’re just desperate now,” Stenger said. “I’m sorry for them.”
Population estimate released in June 2004, by the Washington Office of Financial Management:
Spokane: 197,400
Tacoma: 196,800
Population estimate for 2003, according to the U.S. Census Bureau:
Tacoma: 196,790
Spokane: 196,624
Spokane officials on Monday appeared more eager about increasing the city's tax revenue than staying ahead of Tacoma. The new city territory holds an assessed property valuation of $55.7 million, which would yield another $400,000 a year in property taxes to the city, officials said.
Jim on 03.09.05 @ 08:14 PM PST [link]
Doc links to an opinion piece by Jon Friedman, Media Editor for the public radio show MarketWatch.
Friedman writes,
Newspapers and magazines have long had teams of news editors, copy editors and proofreaders to catch mistakes and make sure a writer is capturing an appropriate tone.
Meanwhile, the Seattle Times plans 90 to 110 layoffs, The Detroit FreePress plans to cut 60 (for the first time in its 174 year history), Tribune Review Publishing Company is undergoing massive restructuring, and... aw hell, just track it here, will ya?
Spokane is not immune.
With the continued contraction of the media, big-J Journalists are receiving less of what makes them different from random people with web sites.
Hey Tom, its time to board the Cluetrain.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
Jim on 03.09.05 @ 07:32 PM PST [link]
New from Paul Graham: “How to Start a Startup”
You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.
Jim on 03.09.05 @ 07:12 PM PST [link]
A Spokane woman has filed a bankruptcy court claim alleging that a Catholic priest in Spokane leveraged his influence as counselor and spiritual advisor into a sexual relationship that ended about 20 years ago.
[...]
Healy-Hartill said her relationship with the Rev. Joachim Hien, who is currently a priest at St. Anthony’s Church, began in the early 1980s as a friendship that turned into sexual encounters.
[...]
Hien is considered a priest in good standing with the diocese, according to a statement from Vicar General Steve Dublinski.
[...]
Hien’s actions and the bishop’s response have been considered twice by diocesan review boards — once in 1999 when Healy-Hartill initially made her accusation and again in January 2005.
She said she believes the diocese has not taken her case seriously and remains upset that Hien continues in the priesthood.
link link
When you have reached the age
History has turned the page
The mini-skirt's the current thing
Teeny bopper is our new born king
La-dee-da-dee-dee
La-dee-da-dee-da
And the beat goes on...
Jim on 03.09.05 @ 02:28 PM PST [link]
Tom Sowa writes in again.
From:
Subject: Really bad blogging
What's it called when bloggers throw up crap and no one notices?
I don't know either, but you'll probably find a word for it, Jim.
Two points you might want to consider:
a. the parking meter test going on in Spokane is a trial, 90 days, and is one of three different companies coming through. It's not a done deal that any of the three will be purchased.
b. the "tech writer" you somehow found who went on about Vivato is not a staff writer. Not even a columnist. Just some community hack who gets to produce copy on an occasional basis. Kind of like a blogger, so the credibility there is not at a high level...
Cheers...
Hope all is well..
Tom must be referring to my post of two weeks ago, though its not immediately apparent to me what he's referring to in '(b)'.
Readers who wish to study a decade worth of Spokane's Parking Garage corruption, the involvement of the Spokesman-Review, and its publisher need look no farther than Camas Magazine. Readers who wish to view a "Fair and Balanced" viewpoint, may wish to consider this Spokesman-Review story, or this one from last week.
As for blogging versus "Real Journalism" (tm), being involved in a newsroom setting with an actual editor in command is the major factor distinguishing the journalist from the blogger. Historically, journalists have been charged with informing the democracy, and journalists relished the role. Now their future depends not on only how well they inform but how well they encourage and enable conversations with the citizenry. Journalism's new challenge is how to participate in the conversation, where before they were the only "credible" source of both viewpoint and "fact".
Democratized media challenges the notion of the institutional press as the exclusive, privileged, trusted, informed intermediary of the news. We the People are now We the Journalists, and the establishment journalists such as Mr. Sowa don't like it. We need look no farther than Tom's skewering of his fellow Spokesman-Review hack who gets to produce copy on an occasional basis, or last night's Nightline episode. Bloggers have been taking out mainstream journalism left, right and center of late. Rather is only the most well-known case. Journalism, and indeed, the entire "Fourth Estate" are kicking that their power base has been usurped by millions who have found a way to get their version of the truth published. It doesn't help that Journalism keeps kicking itself in the crotch
For the Journalist to succeed in the face of a new democracy of media, new skills and attitudes will be required. Journalists and their Editors will need to be motivated to collaborate with colleagues, strangers, sources and readers. After years of working their way up the professional ladder, some reporters will undoubtedly need to discover a newfound respect for their readers. Arrogance and aloofness are deadly qualities in a collaborative environment. The Spokesman-Review, as the most visible arm of the Cowles empire, has yet to find its way out of the past.
Its well-known that the Spokesman-Review has all but silenced its online producer, Ryan Pitts on his external blog. Spokesman-Review reporters Rebecca Nappi and Carla Johnson blog, but from inside the editor's reach. Tom is MIA.
On the other hand, Clay Shirky believes that mass media are dead. In his essay "RIP the Consumer 1900-1999," he suggests that mass media depend on two important characteristics of the audience: size and silence.
To profit from its symbiotic relationship with advertisers, the mass media required two things from its consumers - size and silence. Size allowed the media to address groups while ignoring the individual -- a single viewer makes up less than 1% of 1% of 1% of Frasier's 10-million-strong audience. In this system, the individual matters not at all: the standard unit for measuring television audiences is a
million households at a time. Silence, meanwhile, allowed the media's message to pass unchallenged by the viewers themselves.
By its own admission, the Spokesman-Review subscriber base continues to decline. Its decision to erect a costwall is loud demonstration for the simple fact that Spokesman-Review exists to sell ads, not report on truth.
Merrill Ligons, the online business manager of the Spokesman Review in Spokane, Wash., whose 108,000-circulation paper converted its website to subscriptions in September 2004, said the paid content issue is inevitably about changing the culture of an internet generation. “We’ve taught everybody that everything on the internet – news, music – is free,” he said. “So now we need to teach everybody that we need to make money.”
A.J. Liebling once said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
I've got mine.
BTW, who else knew that Spokane has been named "Fraudville"?. What else would you call a hick town where the local rich gal fleeces the city and its citizens out of more than $60 million while leveraging her mouthpiece/paper to misdirect the public?
Who will watch the watchers?
We the People.
Jim on 03.09.05 @ 01:52 PM PST [link]
Last Thursday the price of oil inched above $55 dollar a barrel, which is at least $15 barrel more than it was a year ago. On Friday, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently the price of of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five dollars a barrel in the span of ten days.
On Friday evening, CNN reported that the Dow shot up over one hundred points because of favorable employment numbers issued by the government and also because there were no signs of inflation in government-reported price data. The Dow stands poised to break 11,000. Today, encouraged by the boyancy of the Dow, NASDAQ got within 60 percent of its all time high.
OPEC meets in Iran in less than two weeks and is expected to cut production, as the nation stares into the annual cycle of gasoline prices hikes come Memorial Day.
Stock markets are generally understood to behave on the basis of a consensus among traders about future prospects. Apparently stock traders in America think there is no connection between the price of oil shooting up ten percent in little more than a week, and the price of things that depend on oil for their manufacture or distribution -- which is to say, virtually everything.
As a nation, we are, quite literally, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Jim on 03.07.05 @ 05:33 PM PST [link]
"Your market isn't the special olympics, you don't get credit just for playing." from DrunkenBlog
Jim on 03.07.05 @ 02:35 PM PST [link]
Carly told us we had no business sense, and that every project needed to make a profit within three years or less.
Brenda Starr disses Bush.
Life Just Got Easier! [Click on the video.]
Simulation indicates the human race has no chance.
Run out of Kibble, and one of the kids will go missing.
Ask the question, even if you already know the answer.
"I thought they were going to give me an aspirin."
"Friends help you move, good friends help you move bodies." And here's the machine to which you move them.
"It's finding someone else to do your dirty work," he tells Pelley.
Jim on 03.07.05 @ 01:36 PM PST [link]
Richard Clarke goes overboard in yesterday's NY Times
Real ID's, Real Dangers
By RICHARD A. CLARKE
Have you ever wondered what good it does when they look at your driver's license at the airport? Let me assure you, as a former bureaucrat partly responsible for the 1996 decision to create a photo-ID requirement, it no longer does any good whatsoever. The ID check is not done by federal officers but by the same kind of minimum-wage rent-a-cops who were doing the inspection of carry-on luggage before 9/11. They do nothing to verify that your license is real. For $48 you can buy a phony license on the Internet (ask any 18-year-old) and fool most airport ID checkers. Airport personnel could be equipped with scanners to look for the hidden security features incorporated into most states' driver's licenses, but although some bars use this technology to spot under-age drinkers, airports do not. The photo-ID requirement provides only a false sense of security...
He goes on to endorse a proposed law (which has passed the House) that would make it more difficult for legitimate citizens to get a drivers license. I get more disgusted by the day.
Jim on 03.07.05 @ 01:28 PM PST [link]
While Mr. Lindows attempts to bring MP3.COM back to life, the good folks at SXSW have provided yet another media hack worthy of mention.
Last year my friend Rich at LESSnetworks showed me the hack they'd done to make the entire SXSW 2004 Showcase available over a remote iTunes service. (I was back in Austin for reasons I can't remember.) Essentially, if you were in a LESSnetworks hotspot, running iTunes, you could listen to the entire catalog, or better, use a tool like iLeech to download the entire catalog. I was blown away by Rich's demo, and sent the word out to several friends, via email. I guess I was too new to blogging at the time to think of just blogging it.
So this year, the kids at SXSW have gone full tilt, and have made the entire SXSW 2005 Showcasing Artist MP3 library available via BitTorrent at this link. This is a huge download... 2.6 Gigabytes containing over 750 full-length, 128Kbps MP3s. No DRM, no RIAA lawsuits, no fooling.
There are some gems inside, and if played back to back, you've got nearly 48 hours of cutting edge music that you won't find on the radio.
In other Austin/SXSW news, Bruce Sterling's now-legendary SXSW party (free beer!) is no more. After it got busted up by the cops last year, this should be no suprise. That, and Bruce doesn't actually *live* in Austin these days.
Jim on 03.07.05 @ 12:40 PM PST [link]
Doc says, The main take-aways: 1) Moveable Type is #1; 2) Blogger is "rudimentary", for "novices" and not much of a business; and 3) LiveJournals are not blogs.
The article, and Doc both fail to metion WordPress, which nearly toppled MT's "business model" when MT got greedy. In a single day, MT lost their audience, Joi Ito be damned.
Hell, people. Even the author of the book on MT has switched to Wordpress.
Jim on 03.07.05 @ 12:06 PM PST [more..]
I'm informed that Chris Demarche, Vivato's "Senior Vice President Marketing & Business Development", has left the building.
I am not suprised. I don't know anyone who can work for (or perhaps even with) Vivato's CEO, Don Stalter. The man's poisonous combination of ignorance, arrogance and uncivil manner will grate on the best of personalities. Those less exalted are typically filled with a seething rage where Don is concerned. Stalter is totally unfit for human company, a prototypical Neanderthal asshole with a bad case of short-man's syndrome.
Few can stomach reporting to the man for long. Most don't make it beyond six months, and Demarche lasted no longer than the others.
Vistard (s/a/u/) was a "wireless broadband for business" play that Demarche tried to get funded on the back of Vivato's 1st-generation product. When Vivato failed to deliver on the claims of its founders, (and the VCs subsequently ass-raped the company for that failure), Vistard was shattered, so Chris, and a few of his fellow travelers showed up at Vivato late last September, having been hired to help make the market for wireless broadband happen.
Demarche may finally be aware that the wet-dream of wireless broadband isn't good for more than crusty stains on the front of your pants while basking in the anticipatory stage, and brown streaks inside your pants once the buzz is gone, the babe turns hag, and you finally understand that you'll never compete with a wired infrastructure.
In other news, looks like Vivato is finally trying to dump its inventory of the 1st generation product, pricing it (at retail) for less than 50% of what it cost to manufacture. Meanwhile, the cost of the enclosure has risen to $10,000.
Jim on 03.02.05 @ 08:06 PM PST [link]
music: Knee 1 (Einstein) -- Philip Glass
MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. Many real world tasks are expressible in this model, as shown in the paper.
MapReduce looks straight-forward to re-implement in Lisp, and you could actually just pass lists around.
We have learned several things from this work. First, restricting the programming model makes it easy to parallelize and distribute computations and to make such computations fault-tolerant. Second, network bandwidth is a scarce resource. A number of optimizations in our system are therefore targeted at reducing the amount of data sent across the network: the locality optimization allows us to read data fromlocal disks, and writing a single copy of the intermediate data to local disk saves network bandwidth. Third, redundant execution can be used to reduce the impact of slow machines, and to handle machine failures and data loss.
Jim on 03.01.05 @ 12:48 PM PST [link]
music: Down Rhodesia -- Inner Circle & The Fatman Riddim Section
iPod Linux
"I'd like to thank the rest of the cast. To give a really bad performance like mine you need to have really bad actors."
Science fiction is a felony in Kentucky.
As usual, marketing will be the last to figure it out.
Lord of the Hissy-Fit
Man bites dog.
Bill would ban abortions of 'gay' fetuses.
Wireheads.
Mya Mya virus spreads. According to his relatives, he mopes around the house.
3M believes in their products.
Jim on 03.01.05 @ 12:28 PM PST [link]
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