Slashdot Mirror

I gotta say, when I clicked through on this story, I was mostly expecting comments along positive lines. This seemed to me as well to be an interesting story of how the old and the new can coexist in new models. I really didn't expect all this player-hating. Weird. I didn't realize we had so many technological absolutists here.

For an interesting story with a similar theme, I suggest this Wired article from '99.

Guitarist edge says: "iPod and iTunes look like the future to me and it's good for everybody involved in music."

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9991#mainContent (MacWorld UK)

When Apple released iTunes for Windows, Bono joined the stage via iChat video conference and said said the new service was a "really, really cool thing." "That's why I'm here to kiss the corporate ass," said Bono, drawing a huge laugh and applause from the crowd. "I don't do that for everyone."

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2003/10/60851 (Wired)

"The debate isn't security versus privacy. It's liberty versus control."

Might the Department of Defense's recent effort and research to develop a feasible, mobile solar power source be related? The idea was to beam solar light from space using satellites and focus it onto a solar grid of some sort.

I remember it being (potentially) 10 megawatts, which isn't quite enough to power these devices, but with enough R&D...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/14/2129233 http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/06/post.html And there's always nuclear etc... I'm pretty sure they have a conceived way to power it if they've already gone this far with the plan. :) (heh.. heh..)

Pepsi is launching a promotion during the super bowl where you will be able to win free mp3 downloads from amazon's mp3 download service from bottle caps, lids, containers, etc. Too bad I don't drink any Pepsi products.

Pepsi To Launch Massive Giveaway of MP3s and Other Prizes

Pepsi Stuff web site

AmazonMP3.com

Actually, cramming more content was originally one of the highly-hailed features about High Def Content. I was really just throwing it out there as a possible advantage beyond HD.

Even if this guy had no close conspirators, which isn't known at this point, it's been reported previously that there were a lot of participants that got riled up by some of the maybe more influential people. This article says that there were a bunch of script kiddies who took their cues from more experienced attackers. Dmitri Galushkevich probably did not mastermind all of that stuff. It's still unclear what exacly went on, as far as I can see.

"Uncertainty" according to whose standard?

It's pretty easy when you look at the vote tallies for your county and see that the candidate you voted for is showing zero votes. That makes it obvious that the original count is wrong. It's difficult to spot shifting vote numbers once the numbers get higher, which is why we need UN election oversight. This is a measure we insist on in other countries but yet refuse in our own. Uncertainty is when you vote is being counted by black box machines made by a company that employs know felons in key management areas. Strangely the people put in power by this voting system, don't want the system to change, funny that. True election reform which would break us out of our dysfunctional two party system, such as approval voting or instant runoff voting will never pass through a legislature put in power by a strong two party system. Uncertainty is when 56% of the population doesn't even show up to vote, because they do not feel represented by either of the two available choices.

You weren't paying attention. Many cities have already placed a network of microphones that can detect gunfire. Through triangulation police are able to determine where the shots came from.

Here's one link of many you can find through Google. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/11/65802

Security on the iPhone is SO bad, you may as well just give up all your privacy anyway.

It can be turned into a microphone which records everything said about it, someone can look at all your contacts and information, and good luck if you store any financial info on it, or have visited a banking website. You'd just be screwed.

But hey, when you have to whip something in in four weeks for a pointy-haired boss, that kind of stuff happens.

Well, execpt that The Estonian "Cyber War" was really internal-to-Estonia script kiddiez.

I am sure Hans Reiser would agree.

You can see the article you're talking about on Wired News. --The FNP

By God, down here in the benighted South, we do privacy right. First off, it's a Czar, not a Commissioner, because it sounds cooler.

In 2003, we appointed Nuala O'Connor Kelly, formerly of Doubleclick fame, as Chief Privacy Officer of DHS, which is pretty close to Czarina as it gets.

And she then appointed, two years later, J. Reed Freeman to the DHS Privacy Committee, in honor of his heroic efforts to get Gator's spyware on every PC in Am... ummm, I mean the value he added through his work at a opt-in marketing services provider called Claria...

PRIVACY? THREAT DOWN!

"... Bad software costs us 180 billion dollars a year? That would be about $600 per person in the US. Per year. I call bullshit."

I disagree. Add up all the time spent re-installing windows, cleaning PC's, deleting or countering spam, etc, etc. I think they are right on target, spam, spyware, buffer over-runs, worrying about your popular website being hacked and extorted by crime.

A few points:

1. Organized crime takes advantage and exploits / extorts companies (the kid who made the milliondollarhomepage was threatened with extortion).
2. The capacity for economic espionage is quite large.
3. Then there is 'just for kicks' aspect of causing havoc.
4. Bad people who don't like us attack our networks/software/etc.
5. Orwellian trojans (i.e. governments, criminals, or corporations of the world infecting your computer with rootkits, i.e. we already have one example: Sony).

Also corporations who are criminals such as Mediadefender, which was hacked

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/interview-with.html

Previewing ... now that one doesn't work either but this does.

Previewing ... now that one doesn't work either but this does.

This is the first time I've heard of a handicapped person being discriminated against because they're too good.

I expect it won't be the last. As tech progresses, artificial replacement parts become better at a much faster rate than human biology improves. I would not be surprised if, with-in the next ten years, there will be hearing aids that connect directly to the auditory nerve and are better than human ears. Maybe 20 years until "Geordi LaForge" style replacement eyes. As the science and technology surrounding the interfacing of the nervous system and technology improves so will the potential capabilities of the people with that interface. The is little reason that and artificial limb wouldn't be stronger and more damage resistant than the flesh and blood limb it replaces.

While I thing it's wrong that he is being told he can't compete, the legs he uses to run are not normal "walking legs" that amputees normally have. Wired had a great article about him last spring http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/blade_pr.html and I think I remember it saying that his running legs are not easy to walk on. He has two sets: one for "about the town" as it were and one for sprinting. He *could* run with his walking legs, but his running legs do give him more power.

I for one think he had to overcome far more *not having legs* in order to run and any advantage he has because of these legs is offset by that. However, it's hard to tell where you draw the line with these things, which is unfortunate.

Please, won't someone think of the glow-in-the-dark kitties?

Nope, it's a one way device. The police enter the phrase and this thing speaks it in whatever language it's set to. There are slightly more details in a wired article here.

You could try this blog post in Wired. But I don't know that it's much better.

You could try this blog post in Wired. But I don't know that it's much better.

Dust is going to be a big problem for these designs that's going to require a different idea about airlocks. Aerospace engineers have gotten pretty good at designing equipment that operates in vacuum, extreme temperatures, etc. But they spend a lot of effort to keep them clean. You can try to seal all the systems, probably with good success. But astronauts are going to bring a lot of dust indoors every time they reenter. Apollo astronauts were filthy at the end of missions.

The designs I've seen for this don't really use airlocks . Suits similar to Soviet designs dock with the capsule or buggy. Astronauts climb in from the back and undock to work outside. Samples and equipment go through a smaller lock. Makes for some funky looking craft.http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/09/rvs-in-space-lu.html

"I know everybody wants to immediately jump to the conclusion that the Burton Group is in Microsoft's pocket, etc., etc., but while it is perfectly appropriate to question the methodologies and motivations of analysts' research, in my experience the Burton Group is as much of a "good guy" as an analyst firm gets."

I really don't know about "wanting". I'd have thought one was more-or-less forced to come to that conclusion based on the claims the Burton Group had made. The following, which Ars quotes, is a particularly egregious example.

"Considering the global scrutiny applied to ISO and other standards processes, plus the fact that Microsoft is even more closely scrutinized because of its position as a convicted monopolist, it would be self-defeating for Microsoft to attempt to subvert the standards processes or somehow establish an intellectual property-based advantage for itself in order to thwart other vendors seeking to exploit OOXML," the report says.

What the Burton Group is doing here is trying to convince its readers that Microsoft wouldn't "subvert the standards processes"; but the fact of the matter is that it did. Let's remind ourselves of one example of that--the ballot-stuffing:

In order to get ISO Fast Track approval, OOXML needs to win at least a two-thirds majority vote from the countries involved in the vote. Inexplicably, a number of countries recently upgraded their status to the "P" level, at which point their votes on the OOXML issue becomes the most influential. In August, the number of "P" status countries swelled from 30 to 40, with Cyprus, Turkey, Lebanon, Ecuador, Pakistan, Uruguay, Venezuela and Trinidad-Tobago among those joining the party at the last minute.

This kind of thing should be known by anyone claiming to speak, as the Burton Group is, with authority on these matters. Either the Burton Group is doing something deeply dishonest here, or it is woefully and culpably uniformed on matters it presumes to speak on. Neither option speaks well of it.

Jesus. Cry me a river. You don't have twenty bucks and something sharp?

This macbook air is probably going to be just like opening up a macbook, move two clips to flip away keyboard. Use a jeweler's phillips driver to open up the top plate, and assuming the battery doesn't have soldered leads you'll pluck off some wires, unscrew or unlatch the battery. replace. close up.

For being geeks you bitches sure are afraid of opening cases.

But directly to your point -- yes, you can buy the 2 additional years of applecare for any mac during its first ("free") year of coverage. Of course even that first year's not really free, so don't bother arguing about it, you're paying for that customer-service/phone-support and repair/replacement plan whether you want to or not. Wow it's such a shock businesses include part failure in their pricing!!

Free phone support, free shipping, free repairs. $249 for three years (or "extra 2", however you want to split that hair). It's a good value.

Kinds played this: Sea Battle

And awesome game where you look through a parascope at little metal nazi submarines and you try to hit them with lightbulb torpedoes. Great fun, and the whole thing is made of solid steel, so it felt like you were using a real parascope... come to think of it, it might actually have been a real parascope.

The wired log http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/01/countdown-to-th.html said that the packaging is nickel and dime sized. The packaging includes the heat-spreader and bga (if that's what they're using on this). Which is to say it includes the green stuff on the pic of the processors you linked. Pretty small for a standard CPU.

It'll be interesting to see how hot they get.

More often than you think.

And that's just with a few minutes searching google.

It isn't MySpace's fault that it attracts young teenagers and with them, the predators that prey on them, but this is a real problem. It isn't a technical problem, but a social problem and needs to be treated as such.

Sophia, Bulgaria was the home of the Dark Avenger one of the most notorious virus authors in history. He was quite active during the 80386/80486 time period. Some interesting reading about what is known of him can be found in these links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Avenger http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/Gordon/Avenger.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.11/heartof.html http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_n2_v14/ai_13381563/pg_9

Many reviewers unconnected with the OLPC project would take issue with the notion that any other product has a better cost/value ratio. The review by WIRED contrasting the XO (OLPC's laptop) with the competitor "Intel Classmate" had the headline "One Looks Like a Toy, the Other Acts Like One":

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/04/intel_olpc_smac.html

A few reviews have found the opposite, but a common criterion is self-fulfilling: that running Windows and Office is a killer feature because it instructs the kids in the "software standards" of business. That's relevant for teaching "computers for business" but not relevant for using the computer to teach reading, arithmetic, history, geometry, etc.

Especially for primary-school levels, the target market.

Bottom line: the XO has half the horsepower and Flash drive, the same RAM, comparable screen, except in sunlight where it has the unique, power-saving, read-by-reflection trick that'll be a killer app in some locations. It has a long list of recharge options, for the Classmate only standard power will do. It has a a wider WiFi range and the network-extending "mesh" trick; the sealed-membrane keyboard makes it less typeable but more rugged. And the XO is at least $75 cheaper. And greener, when you're producing a billion of them. Whoops, forgot to mention the youtube video of an 8 and 10-year-old replacing the motherboard using only a screwdriver:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Pus_fA1Tv9w

Particularly for primary grades, the XO has a lot of value-for-money to offer.

And it's the opposition that has the money to hire lobbyists. OLPC is the non-profit, so not much motivation to push them where they don't work or aren't wanted.

China lacks the infrastructure and sheer amount of equipment to "target every American spy satellite." For a good analysis of the first few rounds of a possible space-war with China, read the following:

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/01/inside-the-chin.html

Of course we live in the present, and capabilities are constantly changing. You don't build this sort of infrastructure in a day, though.

There was an interesting peice on wired about just this. http://blog.wired.com/defense/eye_on_china/index.html It seems well informed, puts in perspective the huge challenge of shooting down a satalite, well more accurately, doing it without america knowing you will do it. The US was well aware the chinese were going to launch an ASAT. The amount of missles required to take down all the GPS satalites (besides the fact 1/2 are on the side of the plannet when you attack) means you are going to give you hand away, after the first strike america will have more then enough to destroy all your major launch sites before you can do anything. China might have the worlds largest army, but america is surrounded by one big mofo moat, filled with the worlds most powerful navy :)

Well, according to this series of articles on Wired, you guys will win the space war.

So, uh. All clear?

No-ones doubting that Apple was first, but for Sony to do this is a big thing indeed.

Enter Napster. Kids are copying music and distributing it over the internet. These corporations are now trying to sell a product that is often easier to get for free online. The iPod becomes the Walkman of the 00's. The labels fear P2P and mp3s and demand copy protection, which Apple offers them in the iTMS. Now they can sell their music online, which makes it easy to find, but control how it's copied and distributed. And it will play on the majority of players. Everything is getting back to normal, but they need more money. So they want to raise prices.

But things have changed. The labels no longer control the distribution channel of their product. Apple does. And Apple refuses to raise prices. The labels have tried other online stores, including creating their own (which is probably still their end goal), with little success because Apple will not license their copy protection, nor support other methods of copy protection on the iPod. While some governments are working to legislate this, the labels can not afford to wait for legislation to solve their problem. They are forced to make a choice.

1. Concede to Apple, sell all songs at a fixed price
2. Sell unprotected, iPod compatible files at other online retailers
3. Lose more market share

At the moment, the labels have opted to sell unprotected files on Amazon.com. If the labels can restore the retail market to at least what it was, then they can more tightly control the "authorized" distribution of their product. And for the unauthorized... While it doesn't accomplish their end goal of complete control of the distribution and retail sale of their music, it's a step closer. Apple loses some of its bargaining power, and the labels can call the shots again.

Option A will reinforce a reasonable business model that will benefit the industry, the artist, and you.

I disagree. While I would rather purchase non-DRM'd music over DRM'd music, simply because I like to play music on a number of devices; I don't believe the lack of DRM benefits artists. It may benefit me in the short term, but then again the labels might just be fattening me up to eat me. I would suggest that a solution that truly respects artist and consumer needs would: decentralize the production, marketing, and distribution chain; acknowledge that technology has lowered the cost of bringing an album to market, and pay artists appropriately; and stop intimidating law abiding citizens.

To accomplish this, we must:

1. Stop purchasing music from labels that support the RIAA
2. Support independent and local musicians. Go to their shows, buy their music.

By doing this, the artists get paid more, you often get DRM-free music, and innocent people

ATMs are routinely hacked. Here's an example: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/09/atm_hack_uncove.html Stealing money from banks doesn't become headline news like voter fraud does.

Have a look at Clean (http://clean.cs.ru.nl/) for a use of pointers (internally) that makes for efficient execution. An interesting read concerning the subject is found here:

http://clean.cs.ru.nl/contents/Addison__Wesley_book/addison__wesley_book.html

Actual benchmarks to show the efficiency can be examined here (note the comparison is with C-versions of the same algorithms compiled on gcc):

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=clean&lang2=gcc

Here's Java 6 (server version) for comparison:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=java&lang2=gcc

You'll notice that differences are mainly in the memory footprint, already known to be attributable to the large number of libraries (classes) loaded into the vm at start-up, something the Clean runtime isn't quite as encumbered with:

(Java) http://java.sun.com/docs/books/performance/1st_edition/html/JPRAMFootprint.fm.html

So, the difference in speed is often-times negligible, and it's been shown that the memory footprint can be reduced to a size where you can run an embedded jvm in a mobile phone (really!), and rumour has it that someone even wrote an operating system in Java, but the memory footprint still seems the biggest culprit:

http://www.jnode.org/node/573

In other words, it's not Java - the language, but Java - the massive OO-framework, and JVM - the specific implementation, that's the problem. Even C++ or C with an OO-framework can be made into a large memory footprint, if you can believe it:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx

Then, of course, memory is cheap:

http://www.simmtester.com/page/memory/memprice.asp

But, the over-use of which, sometimes stays with us as itching bugs for too long:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/11/firefox-3-add-o.html

If memory serves me right (http://www.google.com), there's something to be said of the virtues of garbage-collection applied to systems programming:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/

and the actual (memory and) time efficiency of such an attempt:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/d.php

But I could be wrong. After all, no-one in their right mind would ever attempt to write an operating system in something like, say, Lisp:

http://cbbrowne.com/info/lisposes.html

- let alone design an actual computer around it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

It simply wouldn't run. No, the skills of an engineer depend solely on the language he/she speaks, not on the abstract concepts he/she masters, applied to whatever tool he/she chooses to use/create.

That is why I propose we all forget about abstraction all-together, and revert to coding like this:

010101100001111010110101101101111101111...

But wait, that is itself an abstraction - Turing must have suffered from premature abstraculation. No, let's hear it for using copperwires instead of silicon, so we can attach some large, hand-

When Jobs killed the Newton, he promised that having those engineers available for other products would create innovative and break-through portable computing devices --- all I've seen are iPods, admittedly nice (but traditional form-factor clamshell) laptops and the iPhone. From:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_iphone?currentPage=2

>Apple's hardware engineers had spent about a year working on touchscreen technology for a tablet PC

Where is it?

I'd buy an iPhone today if only it allowed one to use a stylus for handwriting recognition and allowed one to draw and annotate documents, but would prefer something a bit larger, but not quite so large as the Axiotron ModBook, http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=modbook and ideally it would have a nice docking station option and media-oriented features allowing it to work as a remote control, portable music player while hidden away in a laptop bag, ebook reader &c.

I'm definitely getting a Wacom Cintiq 12WX for my next machine at home (and a 20WX at work) --- http://www.wacom.com/cintiq/index.cfm --- but I need a replacement for the Fujitsu Stylistic which replaced my Newton (which replaced my NCR-3125).

William

Could it just be that when two geeky parents breed, the geek factor is just over-enforced in the genes of their kids. I think there was a good treatment of this years ago in Wired's article on "The Geek Syndrome: Autism in Silicon Valley".

Nobody here seems to be aware of where this rumour started. The doctor responsible, Wakefield, published an article with cooked results largely on the request of an ambulance-chasing law firm which was suing the drug companies, and for whom Wakefield was making a lucrative career as an expert witness. The motivation was greed, pure and simple. Wakefield's article got picked up by reporters in England and they made an hour documentary about it on TV, and all hell broke loose.

It quickly became obvious to other doctors and researchers that Wakefield cooked his results, but the media fear machine was already in high gear. Wakefield is finished as a doctor for his mind-boggling ethical breaches. The entire thing was a hoax, and yet look at all the people who actually think there is a link... to this day. There never was.

There are, however, hundreds of kids who are now paralyzed because their parents decided not to give them vaccinations. Many of these diseases can infect the spinal cord and damage it. Furthermore, the diseases have now made a comeback, and mutating, and may soon evolve into strains for which there are no vaccines. At that point, there will be thousands of kids dying or paralyzed as a result of the efforts of a lot of cranks who have no medical knowledge beyond "Mercury Bad!" Like people who wince and gag when a wiff of tobacco smoke drifts their way, thinking that a single atom will transform them instantly into a tumour, these idiots forget what even the ancient Greeks knew--that poisons become poisons by the dosage. Your body can handle low dosages of all kinds of toxic shit--it does so all the time.

The reason that autism is rising is that the number of systemetizers in the population, people like programmers, engineers, scientists--basically, nerds--is increasing, and certain job pools, and hobbies, draw nerds together. The biggest boon to nerd socializing was the internet. Now you actually have nerds marrying and having kids. Previously, being generally shy and often lacking social skills, nerds had a hard time finding each other. Autistics are extreme systemetizers. I'm quite certain that if I met and married a girl as nerdy as I am and we had four kids, at least one would be autistic. Look at the Wired article on Ausperger's Syndrome. And if you're a coder, look around at your co-workers. I'm sure you've met at least one textbook case of Auspergers in your career.

There already are artificial processes which make synthetic diamonds that are nearly indistinguishable from natural diamonds (basically the synthetic ones are "too perfect"). If they ever approach mainstream be prepared for ads marketing natural diamonds as somehow "better" just because they were dug up, rather than any distinguishable features of the stone itself. You can read more about it in these articles:

http://www.news.com/2100-11395_3-6159542.html

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html

Or read Wired (here or here ) or worked at Rand.

This is not just your observation, but actually a big trend in the last few years. It's called the Long Tail. People buy a wider variety of music nowadays, and mainstream music just is not that important any more. To me, that's a good thing.

Either that or he fired her

>>> "That's just mind-boogeling amounts of data"

640K, should be enough memory to hold, it. Wouldn't you think.

[Bill Gates claims he never said it incidentally http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484%5D

I wouldn't discount the idea of boeing using some COTS operating system, that always cheaper.
Lest us not forget the USS Yorktown