Sex, Drugs & Unix

little joke in the Google S-1

The "proposed maximum aggregate offering price" is $2,718,281,828 - e times
a billion.


Jim on 04.30.04 @ 02:36 PM PST [link]

HTML O' the day

Take one for the country.


While the girls roam the bars, there are also sacrifices on the home front.


An ancient sport is reborn.


Get ready for lightning to strike again.


FC Barcelona's top-selling jersey.


A statement from officials read: "After having studied the whole
unsavoury incident on 43 occasions, including slow motion replays,
we have decided against implementing a rule that spectators should
remain clothed at all times."


Beer.


"Oh, yeah. I also got three marriage proposals. Yes, you read
it right - three marriage proposals. I feel like one of those
mass murderers on death row. I never understood how the hell
they got more chicks than I did. Now I know. They sold crap
on eBay."


"We will set sail in April," he said. "I am not yet sure which April."


You buy your music by the megabyte, at the rate of 500 MB for $US5.
Jim on 04.29.04 @ 09:55 AM PST [link]

Jewish Haiku

After the warm rain
the sweet smell of camellias.
Did you wipe your feet?

*

Her lips near my ear,
Aunt Sadie whispers the name
of her friend's disease.

*

Today I am a man.
Tomorrow I will return
to the seventh grade.

*

Testing the warm milk
on her wrist, she sighs softly.
But her son is 25.

*

The sparkling blue sea
reminds me to wait an hour
after my sandwich.

*

Lacking fins or tail
the gefilte fish swims with
great difficulty.

*

Like a bonsai tree,
your terrible posture
at my dinner table.

*

Beyond Valium,
the peace of knowing one's child
is an internist.

*

Jews on safari-
map, compass, elephant gun,
hard sucking candies.

*

The same kimono
the top geishas are wearing:
I got it at Loehmann's.

*

The shivah visit:
so sorry about your loss.
Now back to my problems.

*

Mom, please! There is no
need to put that dinner roll
in your pocketbook.

*

Seven-foot Jews in
the NBA slam-dunking!
My alarm clock rings.

*

Sorry I'm not home
to take your call. At the tone
please state your bad news.

*

Is one Nobel Prize
so much to ask from a child
after all I've done?

*

Today, mild shvitzing.
Tomorrow, so hot you'll plotz.
Five-day forecast: feh

*

Passover
Left the door open
for the Prophet Elijah.
Now our cat is gone.

*

Yenta. Shmeer. Gevalt.
Shlemiel. Shlimazl. Meshuganah
Oy! To be fluent!

*

Quietly murmured
at Saturday services,
Yanks 5, Red Sox 3.

*

A lovely nose ring,
excuse me while I put my
head in the oven.



Hard to tell under the lights.
White Yarmulke or
male-pattern baldness.

Jim on 04.29.04 @ 09:34 AM PST [link]

4 charged under "can spam"

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8543317.htm
At one point, investigators said, packages were sometimes
delivered to a restaurant, where a greeter accepted them and
passed them along to one defendant.

Jim on 04.29.04 @ 09:11 AM PST [link]

aiding and abbeting?

So this article was an interesting read, if only because my former employer seems to have off-shored its entire software development effort to India at the behest of one of the VCs, and Intel, as a major investor, has a place on the board.

Question: if Intel is really concerned, why aren't they influencing via their investments?

Incidentally, Lip Bu is an investor in the company that got the outsourcing gig for all the software engineering. He also brought the new CEO into Vivato from another Walden-funded, but failing startup, also the source of Vivato's new VP of Marketing.

This "VC swirl" thing has always bothered me. VCs expect that the money they put in will come back to them, not just as a straight ROI, but also as a little micro-economy involving their investments, not unlike the old company town of yore.

Jim
Jim on 04.26.04 @ 11:53 AM PST [link]

HTML O' the day

music: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
mood: its 4:30am... what do you think?


Great Paint Job!


Tales of different lives, #1.

Tales of different lives, #2.


Glad we cleared that up.


A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided.


More junk mail from Bob.


Decrease your Erdos number!


See what happens when you don't set the gopher traps?


Truth Alert


If you want to save money, you've come to the right place.


Are you bold? [Possibly offensive: AC]

Jim on 04.26.04 @ 04:46 AM PST [link]

time to short SCOX?

BayStar Capital is getting out.
Jim on 04.16.04 @ 12:58 PM PST [link]

I am the anti-Atkins

Carbs...

If you believe Dr. Atkins, they'll be the death of you.

I'm not sure who's reading this, if anyone (sound of knuckles on the glass (polycarbonate?) on your screen), and I'm not sure I care, either.

Not many people know it, but I am the anti-Atkins.

Three mornings a week, I wake up around 3 a.m. and bake nearly 100 croissants and Danish, to be delivered to, as one friend put it, "the local hoitey-toitey whole-foods".link

The other four mornings a week, I get up at 6 a.m. to deliver them, when Tim bakes them.

This is a fairly new thing for me. After 20 years in the computer field, having my fill of various Veep and CxO positions, I end up buying a white elephant of a house and in the process, ended up baking. Its been 6 months now since I started (and it was a fairly rough start), and I think I'm ruined.

The coissants you get at your local supermarket are, in a word, crap. They're lifeless, almost unedible. A real artisan bread, hand-made by craftsmen rather than machines, takes hours of skilled care and pride. Making the dough is itself a 3-day process, most of this time the dough ferments for 36 hours to develop lots of flavor, with 4 'turns' where the layers that give croissants their flakyness are formed.

All bread starts with the same raw ingredients -- water, flour, salt and some form of leavening -- and by fermentation, draw out the natural sweetness from the wheat.

At some point, I became aware that the dough is, quite litterally, alive.

It has its negatives. The hours suck, and dealing with the original pastry chef here, showed me exactly what people have oft complained about in reference to working with me in the tech industry. Michael was an asshole, but invaluable, since he was my sensei.

Now that he's gone, Tim and I have the freedom to be creative. We're currently attempting to re-create Michael's orange rolls, pictured here

Its been a great period of recovery for me.
Jim on 04.16.04 @ 11:59 AM PST [link]

Overread

Doc posted something I'd sent him via email:

I e-mailed, I think the FCC is using all this indecency crap to kill broadcast television & radio. I think they want the spectrum back.

And Doc responded (online), I think they're dealing with huge political pressure. Remember that the House voted overwhelmingly, for the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act. It's insane.

I do think that if the pressure by the FCC continues, it will serve to kneecap broadcast TV. The cable / sat channels can serve up what they damned well please, and the American appetite for salacious "content" is increasing.

Put another way, there is a vast, growing market for exactly the viewing that the FCC/Congress/Ashcroft is attempting to squash, and the existing suppliers (the broadcasters) are going to be constrained to not participate in this (not so) new market. Thus, the buyers will move to markets where they can get what they seek; digital cable, DSS, and the Internet.

Quoth Chairman Powell (link):

In addition, the competitive pressures from other media sources continue to dramatically fragment audiences. Competition continues to grow stronger from cable and satellite, but we are also seeing the use of advanced technology to create many other platforms that folks turn to for entertainment, information and news. The rise of satellite radio, the Internet, video gaming and, of course, TiVo with its ever-so-popular 30-second skip feature all have combined to present sharp threats to traditional broadcasting. Indeed, I am of the view that competitive pressures much more than consolidation are what account for more programming that tests the limits of indecency and violence. As audience continues to fragment and the number of choices multiplies, it is harder and harder to grab and hold a viewer or listener.

[...]

Given the free over the air nature of the medium, consumers do not express any prior consent to receive certain sounds and images—at least not to the extent they do with cable or rented videos, for example.

The First Amendment is cherished, but it bends only for you among media services. The Supreme Court and countless legal decisions create a special exception that allows government to demand more from broadcasting, right or wrongly.

Additionally, free spectrum has always been premised on your industry acting as a public trustee. People feel they have a right to demand higher standards from the industry and have different expectations about what they will see, as compared with the movie theater, a comedy club, HBO, or the Internet.

And then, quoth Chairman Capps (link):
What fueled this mad race to the bottom? I think two things. One is that some chose to push the envelope too far. Particularly in this age of huge media conglomerates, the unforgiving expectations of the marketplace have more influence than they once did in driving media behavior. The other reason—every bit as important—is that the regulatory commission charged with keeping this race from happening abdicated its enforcement responsibilities and thereby created a climate wherein indecency could flourish. If the agency charged with putting the brakes on has no credibility with those who are programming indecency—if it commands no respect on the issue because it runs away from the issue—is it any wonder that the envelope gets pushed farther and farther out?

Its interesting that he blames conglomeration, a process that he not only allowed, but held up as the salvation of on-the-air TV, for the mess. Capps continues:

I hope that as broadcasters—as licensees of the public airwaves—you will also take action. By taking more responsibility for what is broadcast, particularly when children are likely to be watching, you would make a huge contribution to our kids and to our society. From the day I arrived at the Commission, I have been talking about how broadcasters could voluntarily tackle the issues of indecent, profane and violent programming. Many of you remember the old Codes of Broadcaster Conduct. Through enlightened self-regulation, the industry clamped restrictions on the presentations of addiction, even on excessive advertising.

and, interestingly:

Successful resolution of the indecency issues must in the end include cable and satellite. Eighty-five percent of homes get their television signals from cable or satellite. Most viewers, particularly children, don’t recognize the difference as they flip channels between broadcast stations and cable channels. Because cable and satellite are so pervasive, there is a compelling government interest in addressing indecency when children are watching. Indeed, the courts have already applied this to cable. And let’s not forget that cable and DBS make liberal use of the people’s spectrum too and this incurs an obligation to serve the public interest.

Here, Capps simply wants the subscription services to offer a "package" of "safe content". He knows he can't fine or discipline them. He knows nobody will buy it (and it will likely come served on a "premium" platter.)

A twist here is that the FCC is getting increasingly annoyed with the Broadcasters for not moving to the 'new' digital/HDTV spectrum they were *given*. link

Note that the FCC is pushing broadcast radio to be digital as well, and though radio got the favor that they broadcast digitally in-place.

This "drive to digital" isn't about new services, its about control. Its difficult to keep an analog signal from being copied, but a digital receiver can have technology embedded to keep the bits under a DRM scheme.

its about copyright. Basically someone is using the FCC to not only limit the first amendment, but by breaking the 1st, the copyright culture gets stronger in the process.

And yes, the FCC will likely fork-over (sell) the analog TV channels to cell phone carriers.link link

Jim
Jim on 04.16.04 @ 11:35 AM PST [link]

Yet more WiFi bullshit

Says here that WiDeFi claims to be performing the ultimate WiFi parlor trick: simultaneous transmit and receive.

"We can receive and transmit simultaneously. This allows us to support the full rates available to [Wireless LAN]," WiDeFi's CEO James Proctor writes in an email reply to questions. "The way to think of it is as the equivalent of a Hub for time division duplexed wireless systems (802.11 802,16, etc.)."

Now kids, simultaneous rx/tx (on the same channel) is easily a 120dB problem. For the non rfnerds in the audience, 120dB is a 1 followed by 12 zeros. Yes, 1,000,000,000,000:1. A trillion to one isolation problem.

Not in our lifetimes, as the saying goes.

Now, maybe they're not re-transmitting on the same channel. If this is the case, then there isn't much about this that is special. A couple channel filters and two ordinary WiFi cards can do the same thing. If you were going to have a volume play, then you'ld want to put the channel filters in some monolithic IC block in order to reduce costs.

Further, the spec sheet says that not only will the chip only transmit at 10dBm (10mW). Now, most 11b chipsets transmit around 15dBm (32mW). (Some specialized designs transmit 23dBm (200mW) or more.) Even the most lame 802.11g (or 802.11a) card typically transmits at least 10dBm at the top speeds, especially in the proprietary rates higher than 54Mbps.

Further, because the AP can typically afford a slightly more expensive RF section than the clients, (the clients are extremely cost-sensitive) it makes sense to have the AP transmit with a 2-3dBm more power than the typical client card.

So I don't think this "repeater" chip is going to succeed. At least not in its current form.


Jim on 04.10.04 @ 10:19 PM PST [link]