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With respect to our dwindling rate of innovation (which I will attempt to confirm), you can read all about it in a facinating book called "The End of Science".

But just to take a historical approach, all innovation has come in 'spurts'. Use of tools, and then the transition from using various sorts of metals for those tools were all intersperced with fairly significant gaps of time betwixt those innovations.

ICs, while developed 'after' the 50 years in questions, depended on scientific innovations made before 1950. See: History of the Transistor. Lasers were conceptualized before that. As for the gent who asked 'where would we be without the IC or the laser', I can answer only with: still in cars, still with telephones, still with television. NOT with the internet, NOT with an extra 10 or so years of life expentancy (under which the assumption that medical advances do indeed represent benificial innovation is arguable, as a beating heart seems to be more important that healthy and happy emotions in today's value system), and not with video games, chat boards, an online world community (which really only includes those with access to computers). While the technology world has improved, tweaked, and unarguably changed our social existance over the past 50 years, our quality of life, and almost anything you do that doesn't involve a computer relys on scientific principals that were theorized long before 1950 rolled around. Note that it took Einstein, centuries later, to come up with something better than Newtonian psysics.

Also note the 60s/70s views that we'd all be living on the moon by now. Clearly, optimism was high regarding the continuation of technological innovation, but what people forgot to take into account was that the research currently on the bleeding edge is so complex to maintain and manage that we may in fact come to a point where we are simply incapable of comprehending the scope of a given application or technology, and whereby a group of people large enough to work on it will die before they are able to complete their work; ie, innovations that are so complex that we simply are unable to attain them.
If something has never been said/seen/heard before, best stop to think about why that is.

Video phones were around a bit before you heard of them in the 80's. They were demonstrated in 1964 and service began in 1970. Big and expensive then.

Perhaps those of you who don't get it should look at what you have for an imagination and what you have for an attention span. This is a thinking person's movie, not a movie that will whack you over the head with "get it, moron!". Further, until you've made a movie and dealt with all the problems that come with one, ponder what you say. This was a spectacular thing that we're still talking about 32 years later.

The Technology. My bigger bitch is with the people here that bitch about the technology. Perhaps you've been standing behind the door, but it is you and I that make the technology happen. If we want video phones then we should get off our collective asses and code the damn things up.

And, if we want the things this movie guessed would happen, they're not beyond the edge of our technology. All it takes is a political will to do these things and it will happen. What happened to the US space program, post Apollo 11, can only be considered a travesty. There was a viable team of very smart, can-do people that attained a spectacular goal. What did we did to the team? We laid most of them off and said, 'thanks guys'. That NASA was capable of all sorts of cool things but instead the press and hence the country looked at Vietnam instead.

So if you want the BIG technology this vision of the future offers, argue for it with your government critters. They will listen if you will take the time to clearly state the case. They're actually there to do the right thing, if only they can figure out what that is.

--Multics

P.S. don't whine at me about the Space Shuttle either. They went from an Apollo command module (think row-boat) to a reusable space truck (think modern cargo ship) in one step. They're allowed to have made (and continue to make) some blunders along the way -- after all this is rocket science.

In general Stroustrup feels that a lot of the trouble people have with C++ is that it's not taught very well and he's making an effort to address that. One concern he has is that a common teaching approach is to teach C first and then "move up" to C++.

But this is a huge problem because you really don't want to do things the same way in C and C++ - for example, you learn char-array based strings in C and then have to forget them to use the string template in C++ - and often instructors don't bother to teach the different styles or worse don't know them themselves.

He discusses this in his paper Learning C++ as a New Language (PDF format) which you'll find on his papers page.

I didn't have too high a regard for C++ until I read the abovementioned slashdot Q&A but I decided then that it would be really worth my while to devote some serious effort to studying it. I did, mostly last spring and summer and the results immediately paid off, in terms of writing cleaner code, more efficient code, having fewer bugs and architecting things that I couldn't have hoped to have done before I'd put that effort into study.

I discuss that in Study Fundamentals Not APIs, Tools or OSes.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

In general Stroustrup feels that a lot of the trouble people have with C++ is that it's not taught very well and he's making an effort to address that. One concern he has is that a common teaching approach is to teach C first and then "move up" to C++.

But this is a huge problem because you really don't want to do things the same way in C and C++ - for example, you learn char-array based strings in C and then have to forget them to use the string template in C++ - and often instructors don't bother to teach the different styles or worse don't know them themselves.

He discusses this in his paper Learning C++ as a New Language (PDF format) which you'll find on his papers page.

I didn't have too high a regard for C++ until I read the abovementioned slashdot Q&A but I decided then that it would be really worth my while to devote some serious effort to studying it. I did, mostly last spring and summer and the results immediately paid off, in terms of writing cleaner code, more efficient code, having fewer bugs and architecting things that I couldn't have hoped to have done before I'd put that effort into study.

I discuss that in Study Fundamentals Not APIs, Tools or OSes.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

I won't even have any real confidence in its validity as a language until there are multiple competing, independently developed implementations.

While you can purchase Java implementations from lots of different vendors, almost all of them are derived from Sun's code - the virtual machine is ported, and the source code to the libraries is direct from Sun.

What I'm talking about is commercial quality (whether they're free or not), widely available and supported VM's, and runtime libraries that are written to a spec rather than being from a common codebase.

You might be interested to read what Bjarne Stroustrup has to say about Java - that it is not platform-independent, but rather it is a proprietary platform unto itself.

I think it is completely inappropriate that the college board is requiring the study of a vendor-specific language for an exam. That just galls me.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

Does VNC not count for remote GUI login? You can use an NT/2000 completely remote if you install it as a service. (You can't log in to a Win9x box with VNC, but you can still run it - you're just screwed if it reboots). And it's even under the GPL. Not sure what PC Anywhere does or doesn't do, but I can personally attest to VNC being one awesome little program. There are also X versions, and clients for everything from Palm to Linux to Windows.

I have sensitive ears, and yet work with lots of machines, so I understand your plight. I once had a job where the idiot manager almost forced me to have my "office" in the machine room.

Well, the best solution is to avoid being in the machine room as much as possible. You can usually get by with "remote control software" like VNC or PCAnywhere. If you have to do a lot of pre-boot activity on PC's, a KVM extender might be in order.

Buy high-noise-reduction foam earplugs. You can buy them easily at any drugstore (the foamy ones kinds with NRR of 27 or higher are best). Better yet, by them in bulk-buy them from medical and/or construction supply stores.

Finally, if you expect to be "on the phone" while being in the machine room, a regular noise-cancelling headphone won't help you. You'll get much of the machine room noise fed back to you because telephones have "sidetone" (which feeds back what you say into the mouthpiece back into your earpiece -- it helps to regulate the speech volume of the telephone user). (BTW, if you're at an airport/concert/etc. and have a hard time hearing the other party, just cover your mouthpiece with your hand. It helps a lot.) A telephone with noise-cancelling mic might help. I dunno.

By the way, an active-noise-cancellation headset helps cut out the low-frequency noise, but it doesn't help you much with the high-frequency noise. So, you're still better off avoiding the noise in the first place.

Good luck.

I don't know about ZKS's solution, but I guess it's a mixture of MIX-net ideas and Crowds.

If you haven't time to read the stuff behind the links above, the idea behind MIX-nets is that an encrypted datagram is source-routed through the network. Each hop is encrypted with the key of the next router. The final destination is only visible to the last router of the chain, whereas the source is only visible to the first router. Crowds, on the other hand, is based on you being a part of a 'crowd' of hosts that is sending, say, HTTP requests. The destination only sees that the request originated from the crowd.

I have had the best luck with VNC
It works like a frame buffer and only transmitts the changes within that buffer to the client.

The only disadvantage is that it requires setup on both sides. It is my preference over a slow connection.

I can't believe no one has suggested pricewatch.com. Pricewatch has whole linux systems for $450 to $500. You still need a monitor, but if the machine is going to be headless, or just something you use infrequently, consider using ssh, or even VNC which comes in both Winders and Linux/Unix flavors. It's even GPL'd. You can use it to "PCAnywhere" a system (I.E. remote control it) that has no monitor, keyboard or mouse. It rocks.

Fawking Trolls!

My work's firewall prohibits VNC (or any direct connections) from my home computer to my work computer in the name of security.

Now I have this really fast connection which has no value for telecommuting: remote control, file transfer, telnet, etc. Great! Maybe this can be fixed by a VPN, but that's just some other thing that I have to figure out rather than getting real work done.

> you obviously don't know C!
Whoa there Nelly! That's incorrectly inferring A LOT from just ONE post !

> integer has no fixed size.
True. Only a RELATIVE and MINIMUM number of bits is specified. This is guaranteed by ANSI:
i.e.
sizeof( long ) >= sizeof( long )
sizeof( double ) >= sizeof( float )
and
sizeof( char ) >= 1 byte
sizeof( short ) >= 2 bytes
sizeof( int ) >= 2 bytes
sizeof( long ) >= 4 bytes

See the ARM 3.6.1 and 3.2c Numerical Limits which states "This section defines the minimum numerical limits that a C++ implementation consistent with the ANSI C standard will provide in the header file <limits.h> and <float.h>

You might think that's because he's the creator of C++ after all, but I doubt it - Bjarne has used languages you've likely never heard of, and he understands the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Stroustrup finds much of Java advertising insulting and offensive to other programmers. I do too.

Java, as a language, has some merits. But what I'd like to see is an ISO standard that is not controlled by Sun (note that although Stroustrup participated in the ISO standardization process for C++, AT&T certainly didn't try to control the process as Sun insists on doing with Java), and I'd also like to see one able to compile Java programs to native executable code so they can run directly without a VM; this is possible with gcc but I believe it's not yet ready for production use.

I certainly won't believe that Java is even valid as a language unless multiple independently written implementations can all pass compliance test suites; most of the Java VM's out there don't count because they're just ports of Sun's VM. That's one reason I'd like to see Kaffe succeed.

Meanwhile, for an alternative to Java - writing a single set of C++ sources and compiling to native executable binaries on Mac OS, Windows, BeOS and POSIX platforms with XWindows (such as Linux) see the ZooLib cross-platform application framework.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

from At&T themselves...
More Info

This article states that AT&T will actually deploy GSM overlaying the existing Network "IS-136", since both technologies use TDMA..it is possible to "upgrade" the existing network to the GSM interface...

Also, for those of you claiming that UTMS will support IS-95(Qualcomms version of CDMA Heavily supported in the US by Sprint, Verizon, the US government etc), There's is no confirmation that UTMS will support IS-95 period...it will However use a more broad version of CDMA...called Wideband CDMA..which supports Spread spectrum technology, but at a far faster rate..and then you'll see some real multimedia, far better than what WAP or I-mode have to offer..

As for Qualcomm's quest for world domination i.e. charging Licensing fees just for use IS-95 a.k.a "cdma" interface is over..They lost major deals in China that could have helped them a lot. GSM won big over there. Qualcomm dropped the ball and Both factions of the so called 3G have yet to agree on a a true universal standard putting Qualcomm's closed,"proudly made in the U.S of A " proprietary interface...to bleak and dark future..

However, don't give up hope yet.. Some of the finest US centric Congressmen and Senators...have a large stake in Qualcomm and are lobbied heavily...since IS-95 was actually developed by the U.S. Military...It's in the US "interest" to support a US centric technology for world Domination. Why is the Duetch Telekom buy out of voicestream being heavily opposed by the countries' finest?? Is it because of Germany's near 50% stake in the company? No, Germany has proposed to sell ALL of it's stake in the company. So then what are the real US "interest" that these congressmen are fighting for? They're ASSets ..it's all about the Benjamins baby!!

Anyhow the rest of the world isn't buying into it...and wants to support a true universal standard .. and that is GSM, and later UMTS. Congratulations, AT&T for just now realizing this...It's about time.

Peace..

I'm surprised noone has mentioned VNC.

Connect to the desktop of as many machines as you like... WAY better than crappy KVM switches! Free, and I believe Open Source as well.

We have a load of NT and UNIX machines here, and I use VNC all the time, I highly recommend it.

From their web page: ... DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") ...

Looks like the illiterate are right for once.

-Matthead

It was developed at AT&T, but not at the former Olivetti/Oracle lab. The developers are Yann LeCun and his team at AT&T Labs in New Jersey. For technical details on the algorithms, see the papers available from Yann's bibliography page

The commercialization of DjVu is handled by Seattle-based LizardTech Inc. in partnership with AT&T Labs. DjVu is an open standard. The file format specification, as well as an open source implementations of the decoder (and part of the encoder) are available.

I have long given up on slashdot reporting the whole truth and nothing but the truth...

-Chris

The commercialization of DjVu is handled by Seattle-based LizardTech Inc. in partnership with AT&T Labs. DjVu is an open standard. The file format specification, as well as an open source implementations of the decoder (and part of the encoder) are available.

I have long given up on slashdot reporting the whole truth and nothing but the truth...

-Chris

...unlike the original story commentary above stated. It's on AT&Ts site Right Here and you can download and tinker with it. But read the AT&T Source Code License first; you can only distribute patches to the distribution if you change anything. Also, they don't give you all the encoding code, omitting the background/foreground image seperation and the lossy JB2 wavelet encoder that handles bitonal images (some of their best examples of compression!). They actually suggest someone should make a GIMP plug-in for all this. And because they give you the rest of the JB2 back-end, they're practically begging for someone who's read the literature to bridge that gap.

That was real nice of them.

Disclaimer: I used to work at AT&T Labs as an outside contractor in their library.

Not only is there a Linux x86 binary available, the source code is also online here.

It's an old technology developed at AT&T a few years ago. See : What is DjVu.
YMMV but it seems to work quite well.

See DjVu "non-commercial" site.

--Daniel

802.11 wireless and X? Grab your favorite Palm computer... locate the existing wireless solution for your hardware. Download VNC if you have a Windows Ce. If you don't have CE, than go get PalmVNC and wirelessly compute! Geez, what kind of geek ARE you if you couldn't figure that out?!

Currently I am using AT&T phone plan. And although it has not been without its problems, it has been the lesser of evils to date, especially if you need to go more than 5 miles out of any city, heaven forbid Hairball, MT [watch out for the wandering moose].

all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut

I'm one of the core developers of 3Dwm, and I've watched with horrid fascination as the webserver was nearly toppled by the tremendous /.-onslaught just recently (have a look at the logs). Now, browsing the comments, I thought I should post and clear up some points.

First of all, yes, 3Dwm is misnamed. 3Dwm is NOT an X11 window manager, it is a user environment (the beginnings of the 3D-equivalent of X11). However, the name has stuck with us since our first appearance on Slashdot, so we don't want to change it.

Secondly, the main platform for 3Dwm is not normal desktop computers (though it does run on desktop systems), but Virtual Reality devices (like this one). In Virtual Reality, you have some amazing 3D interaction possibilities that few existing applications exploit.

As for VNC support, 3Dwm has VNC client (not server) functionality, just as one observant slashdotter pointed out. This allows us, in a network-transparent fashion that is in keeping with the distributed nature of the rest of 3Dwm, to display graphical desktops of any major windowing system (including Windows, X11, and MacOS) in 3D.

There's always skeptics who wonder what you would use a system like this for when 2D is perfectly fine. To that I can only answer that there are, in fact, areas where 3D could help a great deal, mainly in the fields of design, modelling, and information visualization. Why, take a look at this (and this and this) screenshot for a prototype 3D web browser.

Btw, today marks the one-year anniversary of our last slashdotting (I wrote up a short summary of the comments we got last time). Cool, eh? :)

Or is there some other "VNC" acronym in play here?

I contacted AT&T regarding this story. Let's see if they respond.

ORIGINAL LETTER

I am writing concerning an online news story posted to slashdot.org that appears to contain a contract AT&T entered into with NevadaHosting.com. The contract appears to state that AT&T is knowingly hosting sites operated by NevadaHosting.com which are advertised by spam. I would not think a host like AT&T would host sites that may be engaged in illegal activity (spamming usually involves improper use of open mail relays, i.e. unauthorized use of computer equipment).

The Story May Be Viewed Here:
http://slashdot.org/article. pl? sid=00/11/02/1213252

The Contract May Be Viewed Here:
http://spamhaus.org/rokso/nevadahost ing .jpg

I'm hoping this story is simply inaccurate. Please respond.

Regards,
John

Some day I hope to have a .plan.

The hell it isn't a fork of C++. The syntax is IDENTICAL. They took namespaces and called them "packages", removed pointers and called it a new langauge. Oh, and made it compile to bytecode so it would be slow as shit due to JVM overhead.

So you think the two languages are essentially the same because of the syntax? Allow me to introduce someone who believes the contrary. His name is Bjarne Stroustrup.

If people insist on comparing C++ and Java - as they seem to do - I suggest they read The Design and Evolution of C++ (D&E) to see why C++ is the way it is, and consider both languages in the light of the design criteria I set for C++. Those criteria will obviously differ from the criteria of Sun's Java team. Despite the syntactic similarities, C++ and Java are very different languages. In many ways, Java seems closer to Smalltalk than to C++.
- from Bjarne Stroustrup's personal FAQ

Of course, Stroustrup doesn't really like Java all that much, so you might infer that his claim might be biased by a desire not to be associated with it. In any case, I'd say this pretty neatly blows a hole in your theory that Java is a fork of C++ because the syntax looks the same.

The hell it isn't a fork of C++. The syntax is IDENTICAL. They took namespaces and called them "packages", removed pointers and called it a new langauge. Oh, and made it compile to bytecode so it would be slow as shit due to JVM overhead.

So you think the two languages are essentially the same because of the syntax? Allow me to introduce someone who believes the contrary. His name is Bjarne Stroustrup.

If people insist on comparing C++ and Java - as they seem to do - I suggest they read The Design and Evolution of C++ (D&E) to see why C++ is the way it is, and consider both languages in the light of the design criteria I set for C++. Those criteria will obviously differ from the criteria of Sun's Java team. Despite the syntactic similarities, C++ and Java are very different languages. In many ways, Java seems closer to Smalltalk than to C++.
- from Bjarne Stroustrup's personal FAQ

Of course, Stroustrup doesn't really like Java all that much, so you might infer that his claim might be biased by a desire not to be associated with it. In any case, I'd say this pretty neatly blows a hole in your theory that Java is a fork of C++ because the syntax looks the same.

The result is that it is very difficult for the developer to bring the product out on a competing platform, and it discourages users from moving to a different OS when they feel the vendor isn't serving their needs (because they can't get the solutions to their problems).

If the developer doesn't want to deal with the OS vendor anymore, he's really got a problem - either suffer under the vendor's thumb, or make a great deal of personal sacrifice to move to a different operating system.

I was sick of Apple so I wrote I'm worried about my future. That's why I'm a Be developer.

And in fact I shipped (and still do support) on of the first commercial applications for the BeOS, Spellswell from Working Software.

Nothing Be ever did made any sense, and while there are individuals at the company that I regard highly, on the whole I felt the company to be uniquely unresponsive and incompetent.

And just when they were showing some promise of shipping enough BeOS installations that I had some hope of making more than the measly couple hundred bucks I'd earned in royalties in the three years I'd been working on Spellswell, they announced a "change in focus" and said they weren't going to support the desktop anymore, except for the extent necessary to use it as a development platform for their new Strategy Du Jour, Internet Appliances.

After I posted on BeDevTalk that Some of Us Work for a Living, the moderator told me he was fed up with a developer who was trying to discuss business issues of concern to Be's third-party developers on Be's third-party developer mailing list. That was my last message to bedevtalk - he unsubscribed me.

I've been working on a really challenging C++ application for a few months, and after reading C++ Answers with Bjarne Stoustrup I got excited about really digging into the basics of programming - but from the perspective of a developer with 13 years of work experience and a lot of shipping products.

I bought a few books, mostly on C++ and also hit some websites and newsgroups, and I became a much better programmer as a result. And I really felt that I did better to spend my time on core architectural and language issues rather than dealing with OS-specific nits or tool issues. And so I wrote Study Fundamentals, Not APIs, Tools or OSes.

So this brings me back to being used by operating systems vendors to serve their material needs at my expense and the cost of much personal pain. If you become a better programmer by learning the basics better, to can fluidly go from OS to OS without much of a learning curve.

But there's the problem that you have to use some API to code your application to, and while Java claims to be "platform-independent" it is really a proprietary platform in itself - just try making use of platform-specific code in a Java application, yes you can do it with the Java Native Interface but it is difficult and an assault on the Java developer's senses to write a dll in C or C++ to load into the runtime.

So what you really need is a cross-platform application framework that you can write in with a language such as C++, that comes preconfigured with easy-to-use preprocessor symbols so you can drop into OS-specific code at your whim, and will compile from a single sourcebase to native machine code for multiple operating systems.

Funny that, since December '99 I've been writing a multithreaded special-purpose graphics editor that is also an HTTP client with just such a cross-platform application framework. I can develop on Mac or Windows as the need suits me and switch back and forth at a moments notice (especially now that I've got filesharing between my machines). My client only asked for Mac and Windows versions but I could port to BeOS or Linux in a few days. The framework is called ZooLib.

It was written by my friend Andrew Green of The Electric Magic Company, originally to insulate himself from Apple's API nonsense. (Do you remember when all progress on developer tools at Apple and Symantec stopped while they went off into the sunset to develop Bedrock, itself a cross-platform application framework and an immense investment of time and money - and then abandoned it? If it hadn't been for then-tiny Metrowerks Apple would have gone out of business after shipping the first PowerPC Macs, because there would have been no native PPC compilers.)

He felt that if he could code to his own layer and Apple changed their API, he'd just have to reimplement the OS-specific layer and he'd be working again. But then a little more work and he'd be cross-platform...

If you click that link today you'll just get a placeholder page. But just wait a few days...

(For practical reasons the source itself, mailing lists and so on will be provided at http://zoolib.sourceforge.net/ once it's released.)

While ZooLib is to be newly released to the public it is not new code. It has been in use in commercial products for about five years - and in development in my own since last December. Part of why Andy gave me the code and I've been working with it is to give him meaningful architectural feedback and detailed bug reports so he can prepare it for public release.

I've been urging Andy to release the source as-is for a couple of years but his standards are incredibly high for a programmer. Andy's code doesn't just work, it is correct.

Andy spares no effort or time to fix the smallest problems (this is especially important in multithreaded code - think about reference counted smart pointers that are operated on by different threads, as you can do with Zoolib), and part of why he's been delaying the release is to improve the overall architecture.

For more details, including relevant quotes from Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's Findings of Fact and Final Judgement discussing why Microsoft felt it was more important than anything to suppress cross-platform API's, such as Netscape plug-ins, Java, Intel Native Signal Processing, Lotus Notes, Apple Quicktime (runs on Windows too!) and RealNetworks' multimedia technology, please read my early draft of:

The Cross-Platform Manifesto

Thank you for your attention.

Regards,

If you read the linked article, you'll realize that this is not really a port of XFree86 to MacOS X. This is a port of VNC, which is extremely cool, to MacOS X. For those of you who are unfamiliar with VNC, it is similar to Timbuktu or PCAnywhere in that it lets you access and control a GUI desktop on a remote machine pretty much as if you were sitting in front of the remote machine. VNC does this by implementing an X server to host the X apps on the remote machine, and then shooting the pixel data to the viewing "client" machine. Obviously key presses and mouse gestures are sent from the viewer client to the remote/host machine, too. The best part (or worst, depending on your point of view wrt security, etc.) is that the VNC session stays put even if you quit the client, so your desktop session is maintained as you move around in meatspace.

Click here to visit the VNC homepage

So, to run X apps on MacOS X using this hack requires you to run the X app on top of the VNC server, and then use the VNC viewer/client app to interact with the X app.

Sounds like it'll be pretty sluggish, to me. Still, it is kinda clever, and it does let you run an X app if you really need it now.

He's right. Learning some things will definitely help the way you think about things. The incredibly strong typing of something like pascal will definitely kick your *ss if you've been doing nothing but C for a while, and I think that's actually a Good Thing. Learning Eiffel if you already know smalltalk is a very different experience.

Even something like Algol will probably change your views and get you closer to the hardware in many respects (not that you can get Algol to run on most machines anymore....;-)

What about Ada? Programming by Contract really will teach you something serious about how you actually interact with the rest of your application, and while you'll curse it ("I KNOW what I'm trying to do and it's correct, dammit!") you'll be happier for learning it. Older, but happier.

And as long as the languages keep coming, there'll pretty much never be a chance to really run out.

My list would include:

• C
• C++
• Pascal& lt;/a>
• Lisp (anything but eLisp)
• Python
• Perl
• Smalltalk
• ML
• prolog&l t;/a>
• Eiffel
• Ada
• a RISC Assembler
• Cobol (those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it)
• Java
• BASIC (the non-Visual kind).

Before it's ported to Windoze, I'd submit the language spec to the IETF or something and have it declared a Worldwide Open Standard. Then no one can pollute it or de-rail it, without showing that they don't "subscribe to Open Standards". Maybe the authors should have Bjarne Stroustrup take a gander - he might provide a ton of help. I'm sure he would like to see this little beauty take a bite out of Java, and C# as well. Cool.

Uhm. According to these figures at the AT&T Investor relations site, AT&T had assets as of June of $204,356 million and liabilities of $125,215 million. This means(if I am reading this right), that they made a profit of around $75 billion dollars

Scroll down that PDF a little and you get to Owners Equity, which is is not profit. Profit is not a difference between Assets & Liabilities (unless you are Intel selling stock like they did earlier this year and throwing the capital gains in with revenue to manipulate your stock price, but I digress), Profit = Revenue - Expenses.

I direct your attention to AT&T's income statement, ended June 30, 2000. For the 3 months ended June, they had $16,221 billion in Revenue, $12.954 billion in expenses, for a gross income of $3.267 billion. After other expenses and taxes they net a measley $1.767 billion. Even the last 6 months is only $3.508 billion. Not exactly a promising investment, I'm better off putting my paycheck in a 5% savings account.

Now go invest some of your money in taking an accounting class so you can understand the difference.


--
Chief Frog Inspector

Uhm. According to these figures at the AT&T Investor relations site, AT&T had assets as of June of $204,356 million and liabilities of $125,215 million. This means(if I am reading this right), that they made a profit of around $75 billion dollars. This is a company that is grasping at straws to turn a buck?

Please don't mistake this for anything other than it is: corporate greed.

And btw, my interpretation is that they will be charging web merchants that they host on their network for each customer who uses them. I could be wrong though.

--John

There is nothing even remotely close to this on AT&T's press release page

Hold on! They haven't decided yet. And if enough people bitch and moan, they won't do it. So don't start thinking that they are going to do it, but it's probably a good idea to let 'em know your thoughts on the idea!

Write to AT&T and tell em what you think!

• http://www.att.com/true/slam.html
  
• Long Distance Toll Verification: 1-700-555-4141
  
• Slamming Resolution Center: 1-800-538-5345 if AT&T slammed you
  
• AT&T Consumer Services: 1-800-222-0300
  
• FCC Complaint Phone: 1-888-225-5322
  
• Better Business Bureau www.bbb.org
  
• Magic phrase for getting people not to call you back: Please put me on your don't-call list.
  

  
  Disclaimer: I work for AT&T, but my comments here are just my personal comments. You can read AT&T's comments on slamming on their web page.
  AT&T got lots of flack for a while from people being slammed by their subcontractors, and they started putting a lot more control on that, but they still screw up sometimes.
  

  I've never particularly liked the local phone companies' approach to slamming, which is to continue to bill you for the long distance service and have you resolve it. My own preference is to write to the local telco and the slammer telco notifying them that unsolicited services are legally a gift, and you did not request any services from them and will not pay for them, and thank you for freely handling all the calls that you tried to make using your preferred long-distance carrier (in my case, AT&T) and that they can return you back at their leisure but could they fix that little hiss in the background?
  I haven't tried this, and the telcos probably wouldn't like having this used widely because it's an obvious method for fraud, but tough luck, eh?
  

  I haven't had to use AT&T's don't-call lists, though I think one of their telemarketer subcontractors did call me once even though I'm a subscriber:-)
  MCI does a decent job of maintaining don't-call lists - I usually ask them if their employee discount is better than AT&T's and they get the hint. They aren't bright enough to figure out about don't call lists for multiple phone lines at the same address, and they once got lucky and called my modem line between the time I got home and the time I plugged in my laptop, so it's in the list now also...

On our line at the office, I got a call a few months ago from a friendly woman at AT&T, who wanted to know why we left them for our long distance service. I told her that we hadn't changed our long distance, that it was the same as it had always been. Concerned, she offered to switch us back.

I got a little suspicious, and got her phone number and extension, and told her that I'd call her right back. Reviewing our bills, I found I was right -- we'd been with Sprint ever since we started the business 14 months previously. Just to check, I called Sprint, and they said that we were still with them, just as we'd always been.

I called the woman back and demanded that she explain herself. She stuttered out a lame excuse: her computer said that I was with AT&T before, and that we're now with Joe's Long Distance, or something like that. I told her that was an absolute lie, and asked to speak with her supervisor. She said that she didn't have one, and hung up.

That is sneaky. BTW, we're now with Cable & Wireless. Our long distance bills have gone from -- really -- $13 / month to $1.25.

-Waldo

You can view Andrew's paper on his website at www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/ net works.html, where you can find several other interesting papers too.

Direct links the the Content is not king paper are: [Abstract] [PostScript] [PDF] [LaTeX]

One interesting quote in the paper was:

Just the spending on phone services is higher than all advertising outlays. So say good-bye to all those plans for financing the Internet through advertising! Yes, advertising can help fund some services, but it will not provide the generous revenue streams that are needed to support a communications infrastructure as large as the phone system.

Straight from the VNC front page under "What makes it different from other systems?":

It is sharable. One desktop can be displayed and used by several viewers at once, allowing CSCW-style applications.

[ CSCW = Computer Supported Cooperative Work ]

Again, use the apps you are familiar with natively when you work cooperatively! Not some stupid, limited application (like "NetMeeting")!

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

I think everyone is look at this issue in the completely incorrect way. Instead of aiming for such a feature limited application like "NetMeeting", why not just share desktops?

Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is what you seek. It runs on everything. On UNIX, it will give you multiple, virtual X-Windows sessions on a single box -- upto 99 by default -- which you can pump to Windows and other clients (even old DOS!) without a X-Server. It's basically pcAnywhere for everything, and then some (like multiple, virtual X-sessions)! I'm still finding more and more ways to use it. [ Heck, someone has even merged VNC with the NT GDI and made NT headless! ]

Run your apps remotely! Not some limited remote application! [ Is everyone in IT a victim of Microsoft marketing and thinks "NetMeeting" is desirable? If you have remote display, like UNIX with VNC, you do NOT need "NetMeeting"! ]

-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith

What's wrong with VNC?

Say what you want about X (a lot of people gripe about it) but I would sorely miss being able to throw the graphical output of my applications to different machines.

Obviously you haven't heard abot VNC which allows doing that on many OSes (including across OSes).

"There are an infinite number of individually addressable states -- the Coulomb potentials -- where quantum bits can be stored," said Bucksbaum.

1) E-mail

Setup a nym account with one or more of various nym servers out there:

nym.alias.net
redneck.gacracker.org

OR, you can get a paid for nym account with ZKS:
ZKS Freedom Net (They are taking applicants to beta test their Linux port now)

This takes care of having an anonymous bi-direction e-mail account that people can contact you through and will be secure from the attacks of a determined foe (be sure to change your reply blocks often though).

2) Publish the code somewhere publicly available, like the web or usenet.

The next problem is distributing your code. What you need is a means to publish the code anonymously.

Web

To contact sites like sourceforge anonymously, which provide you with a nice mechanism for releasing the code and storing it somewhere, you need a web anonymizer or an anonymous routing scheme like ZKS.

Several solutions exist to do this. In order of highest security:

ZKS Freedom Net

CROWDS

Anonymizer

Usenet:

Usenet is means of publishing your code that is even more resistant to censorship attacks than publishing the code on a website:
mail2news gateways. These allow you to post an e-mail message to usenet, preferably after you have anonymized it thru several remailers. Posting to usenet is an EXCELLENT mechanism for getting past the most determined censor. As long as you don't start spamming your distribution, and thereby driving your BI up, you can be pretty sure that your post will not get robo-canceled. If you want to be really fancy, you can encrypt the message, publish the password in another forum, and then post the conventionally encrypted message to aalt.anonymous.messages. This will defeat efforts to automatically find your post on usenet and then issue a third party cancel for it.

Here is a list of known mail2news gateways:
mail2news AT nym.alias.net
mail2news AT zedz.net
mail2news AT mixmaster.shinn.net

Send a message to one of the above e-mail addresses with "help" in the subject for instructions on how to use the gateways.

Python

...another comment from Michael Tandy.