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Note to PKD fans: this site contains a slightly disconcerting article about the latest book to movie Paycheck, featuring Uma Thurman and Ben Affleck (or something).

NTT and other companies have already been offering 100Mbs fiberoptic lines to homes in Japan for quite awhile now.

The best part is it's cheap,
They usually cost a little more than $40 a month.

Of course, it's still twice the price of 12Mbs ADSL lines in Japan like Yahoo BB who offers 12Mbs speed for $21/month. Most people don't know what to do with 100Mbs anyways.

DIY for Mac, as an example

Otherwise, there are commercial choices from Philips, HP, Sony, Kenwood, Hauppauge ($100) and Turtle Beach ($300).

...read this for more...

some are already working to build it for military use, though.

robofly

#Too bad Japanese would use this thing just for entertainment.

... these /. mac fags should go get their own site and leave real enthusiasts/nerds alone.

Okay. I'll bite. Dear Mister Troll sir...as to us having a site of our own...we do. In fact we have several from which to choose. And, pray tell, what in your tiny little troll-like mind leads you to believe that Mac users are all of a particular sexual orientation of any kind at all? Or that mac users don't qualify as nerds? And by some strange twisting path of logic that we don't in some way belong here?Newsfalsh! The mac now not only sports a command line environment, but you can set your environment to your shell of choice!

I know, I know, please don't feel the trolls. Move along. Move along...

I think it's about time we all got this guy's fingerprints and started making thousands of simultaneous purchases worldwide.

He acquired his 15 seconds of internet fame by duplicating and sharing his frequent shopper's card via his personal web site. I can only imagine the junk mail he receives on account of that profile.

...of a story over 2 months ago, about the same company. That one was on Wired and had more information.

has been around for a little while . . .

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshare .html

Man its been a long time since I trolled, lets try that link again
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/photo.asp?secti on=SearchResults&photoId=464028&q=portman

I think we all need to stop worring about spam and just put some hot grits down our pants and look at Portman's petrified tities. There, doesn't that make you feel better?

It got really out of control though. Just look at this article!

article!

Having to finish school in a mental hospital shows how much he suffered for this.

You just pick and choose what parts of the RIAA's statements you're going to believe based on what best suits your purpose, don't you? Maybe the RIAA just looks in people's shared folders, and assumes that's all downloaded for marketing purposes. Maybe they just do a poll of 10 people, take the average, and multiply it by 100 billion. I don't know. I'm certainly not going to take their statement that there are X downloads as evidence that they know how many downloads there are.

Don't take the RIAA at it's word. Presumably, you've heard of Big Champagne?

No. Obviously they didn't get exactly the top 261 out of millions. But from the very limited information I have about the situation, my guess is that that family was using Kazaa a lot. It wouldn't make sense for the RIAA to randomly pick IP addresses. It wouldn't make sense for them to randomly pick Kazaa users. If they're going to sue people, my guess is that they're going to make an attempt to sue people who are the largest infringers. That is in their best interests.

Obviously, you have more faith in their methods than I do. They may have made an effort to target (in their words) the heaviest downloaders. And in a few cases, they screwed it up. With the minimal legal oversight this has taken, we may never know just how badly.

"The machine is the first supercomputer based on Macs; it is one of the few supercomputers built entirely from off-the-shelf components and it cost a bargain-bucket price -- only $5.2 million. By comparison, most of the top 10 supercomputers cost about $40 million and up. The Earth Simulator cost $350 million."

"The $200 million (US$) computer is the fifth in the DOE's nuclear weapons simulation program, called Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), which allows the U.S. to keep its nuclear stockpile while complying with the nuclear test-ban treaty. Named "ASCI Q," the newest supercomputer will be capable of performing 30 trillion calculations per second.*"

As a guy who part-times at bike shops as a wrench, and who plans on getting out of IT and opening his own shop in the near future, I feel the need to reply to this. (You can also refer to my letter from Wired 8.06, if you want the short version.

Bicycle technology has remained largely the same because it works and works well. The bike, in its current form, is one of the best most effecient devices for turning human work into motion. Bicycle racing has been a professional sport for over a century, and in that time, we've seen a wide range of experimental drivetrains, wheels, frames -- hell, you name the component, someone's tried to build a better one.

The point is, very few of these things manage to exceed the quality/performance of the items they're trying to replace. In fact, the only thing I can think of in the last ten years that's been a "radical departure" from the norm, is paired-spoke wheels, and even those are not a "radical departure", as someone just looked at the lacing/drilling pattern of the spokes and how they go from the hub to the rim.

There's a few other factors involved, too -- 1.) price -- cycling is a painfully expensive sport (ask me about the $6500 bike I want to build this year) and these new attempts at technology have to come cheap, or no one will buy them. This is why you don't see a lot of bikes with automatic transmissions on them -- the Bianchi AutoMilano is one of these, but it costs $300 more than a Milano with grip-shifters. And has fewer gears. Where's the price benefit in that?

2.) Can the home mechanic work on it easily? No hardcore cyclist will buy a bike that's a total pain in the ass to work on. I want to be able to come home from my ride, throw my bike up in the workstand and tweak the shifting across my range of gears without having to use more than a phillips-head screwdriver. A gearing system inside the bottom bracket (what they're describing) doesn't allow for that. And it's right out.

3.) The shop factor. No bike shop wants to invest in unproven or "fringe" technologies because of the inventory issue. A local shop a few years ago invested heavily in Softride bikes, which are popular in the triathalon circuit, and had a few converts on mountain bikes -- mostly people who had bad backs or couldn't afford a true rear-suspension bike. He bought tons of these things, starting in 1996. That shop closed up recently and had a huge closeout sale. Tons of Softride bikes, some as old as 1996.

We're not Luddites in the bike world, though. My current bike (1999-2000) is nothing like my bike of 1989 -- the primary changes have been materials science changes. And my bike of 2009 will nothing like my bike of 1999.

patent all possible future DRM techniques

Wired always has higher res pics of the same.

http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/photo.asp?secti on=SearchResults&photoId=464028&q=portman

It is also the technology that will be the foundation of the next generation of gaming consoles from Nintendo Co. and Sony Corp., which IBM is working on, he said.

So is Sony & Nintendo's usage of this chip the reason why Microsoft is switching away from Intel? With such vast speed improvements and the portability of Linux, could we see a paradigm shift in computer hardware soon?

As long as the rate at which the virus reproduces and the level of devastation it causes is not too fast or too irreversible.

Consider the effects of some natural virus and other life forms that have been unleased.

A fungus from the Eastern hemisphere pretty well wiped out the American chestnut tree in short order.

Russian thistle, introduced to North America in the 19th century has likewise become endemic, to the point where tumbleweeds are considered an essential ingredient in any Western film set.

Rabbits in Australia, etc., provide some indication of how rapidly reproducing organisms can spread and how much change they can cause.

Do we trust our knowledge of virus mechanics enough to believe that an inadvertent release of "grey goo" can be undone?

To put it another way:

Even if I'm extremely knowledgeable about cars, have built them from scratch, repaired them, etc., is that sufficient assurance I will be able to stop a speeding car running straight at me in time?

Just to make a simple but reasonblly respectable* site would need two years of university education if you never done it before.

Poppycock.

When desktop publishing was new, everyone rushed to make the most complicated newsletters possible. Soon it seemed like you needed years of experience to generate a simple newsletter.

But it was all a farce. If you looked at the professional work, it had never gotten gaudy. Well, okay, some did, but the old respectable sources kept with the simple and elegant. That simple elegance has proven timeless.

The same goes for web sites. If you just use some bare bones formatting you'll end up with simple elegance. By way of example, check out a random article from useit.com. It looks good to me. 99% basic HTML. In fact the simplicity reinforces the seriousness of the page.

Well, I don't know about finest, but according to Wired magazine it is the biggest, and its success help start a collaboration revolution even outside software.

Well, I don't know about finest, but according to Wired magazine it is the biggest, and its success help start a collaboration revolution even outside software.

Favorite line from the article: "It is much harder to fool people with a website." If only that were true.

Don't listen to music with nasty wordsthough,[..]

Personally the paranoid part of me thinks they just wanted the excuse to key my license number into their database. Doesn't explain why I've gotten away with buying booze there and not being carded thou."

That doesn't surprise me. I got carded at Wal-Mart for buying paint (not industrial size, little jars so I could paint a plastic table) when I was 22. PAINT! I've also been carded there for buying white-out. That is why I'll never go back to Wal-Mart. Apparently, wal-mart shoppers have a problem with inhaling said products and killing brain cells. They'll card you for buying office supplies, or home improvement supplies, but here! Have a gun! Don't listen to music with nasty words though, it might make you want to use that gun in a bad way. Oh, and don't look at magazine covers while you're in line, that's immoral. The sooner that place goes away the better off this country is as far as our rights and freedoms go.

This will work just fine with MP3's, but won't work with Apple's DRM'ed files. For those, you need to actually authorize the computer so it can play the AAC file.

This ought place him square on your enemies' list. He's also been in support of the SCO as his son whores, excuse me, works for them.

He also has been in support of the RIAA, the MPAA, and pretty much everyone else we'd call evil around here.

Orrin Hatch (R UTAH) is a very bad man. Plus, he's a jackass.

Computers are dangerous -- people lost their jobs because of a DDOS.

Maybe if MIT would spend less time developing the egos of its students and more time on real engineering topics like control systems then they might actually turn out some useful engineers instead of self-serving, thin-skinned, xenophobic geeks incapable of working with management or peers.

Maybe we should give them a break since this is the AI Lab, and therefore a bunch of "computer scientists"--as distinct from engineers--so they probably have never solved any differential equations in their lives.

Founders of AI fundamentals like Norbert Wiener and Herbert Simon, were they alive today, would be sad to see that their brilliant initial insights have been reduced to the commercialization of substandard "robot" vacuum cleaners--that is, if their contributions were even part of the MIT AI curriculum, which they clearly are not when the department consists of mathematically-challenged, system-engineering-free computer scientists. But then, neither Wiener nor Simon were graduates of the over-hyped Institute...

And where's my Dick Tracy watch?

No, it's not! Even Bill Gates had to admit that people needed 640k...

Sorry, had to say it. Though the "quote" borders on urban legend...

No, that's not a Snopes link. This is.

I bet it's those damn Jets! They're always trying to stick it to the Sharks.

Apple *still* has less than 4% market share

Yeah, but it's the coolest 4%.

Incidentally, what kind of market share does say, Dell have? Or Gateway?

Me thinks a number of "/.-ers" could use a good ass-raping...The humor in it escapes me...

Especially since the anal rape story is another lie perpetrated by the Pentagon. Her Walter Reed doctors are using her for propaganda again and she doesn't even know it.
Here's the scoop from the NZ Herald and from Wired.

You've explained quite clearly that you think the rest of us should have to put up with spam until we beg the spammers to stop. Each spammer, individually. That's the current situation, and it's what you want.

I'm not aware of a Do Not Fax _LIST_.

My mistake. Should have said "do not fax laws", and I'm sure you knew what I meant. You've claimed that the do not fax law has been found unconstitutional. Tell it to fax.com and the California AG.

I don't love spam.

But you're damn sure opposed to getting rid of it. You deny that it shifts the costs. You believe spammers have a right to spam until we beg them to stop. You lie about legal issues while claiming to be months short of graduation with a legal degree.

Do you think that criminal defense attorneys love, or even like their clients?

No, I think they love money enough that as long as they get paid well, they'll do anything to get it. Including helping a murderer or rapist go free to do it again.

A sincere committment to free speech requires that one be willing to try to protect speech REGARDLESS of whether or not one like that particular speech.

True, as far as it goes. However, having the right to say something, and having the right to force a million people to listen to it, with them funding the bill, isn't related to free speech. I think you are a liar and an asshole. I can post that here. I can't spray paint it on the side of your house. The fact that I'm not allowed to do that doesn't infringe on my right to free speech, any more than telling spammers to STAY THE HELL OUT OF MY MAILBOX infringes on theirs.

>Votes must not be able to be forged.
Cash withdrawals must not be able to be forged

>There must be an audit trail of every vote cast
There must be an audit trail of every withdrawal

>Yet voting must be 100% anonymous.
Nobody else should be able to access my bank account.

>it is still a nontrivial problem.
Agreed, but not unsolvable. Didn't Australia develop a system that seems to work for something like $125,000?

>It MUST be available to public scrutiny...Open source is the only way.
Well, here are some other alternatives:

Random spotchecks. There should be a considerable number of these, at least 1% of the votes should be manually counted and compared with the machine totals. This implies a voter-verified paper trail produced by the machines.

Specify that there must be machines from more than one manufacturer used in each voting region to prevent one company from being dominant.

A sincere amount of third party testing before the elections. This seems to be severely lacking at the moment.

Trained officials from each interested party overseeing the whole setup and usage of the machine, from the time it is delivered, to the time the election is completely over (this one is also true of open source), to make sure the right code you is actually what is on the machines.

I was so used to cooking breakfast on the top surface of my Apple Cube. I'll miss this if the energy gets recylcled elsewhere, and I'll likely have to go buy a Foreman grill to make up for the loss of this nifty cooking appliance.

it did NOT fit inside a udp packed, the command to retrieve the virus fit in the udp packet..

try learning about what you talk about....

if a virus is not written in assembler, it's from a poeser wannabe.

This wouldn't be your first reaction to viewing wired.com, would it?

in a wired article they suggest they will use their recently aquired Connectix product "Virtual PC" to provide backwards compatibilty.
I'm not quite sure if this is possible... Does Virtual PC emulate a processor? Or is it like VMware, and emulate a BIOS...

It's not that they did it. It's that they did it RIGHT. It's an elegant solution which people actually enjoy throwing money at.

And that helps how? It doesn't matter if the spam is for an actual, otherwise legitmate company, it's still spam. It's still filling my inbox. It's still wasting bandwidth. It's still cost shifted advertising. It's still wasting my time. It already happens. I get spam advertising for mortgages, toy cars, Victoria's Secret, software, weight loss programs - all what you would call legitimate products. Even porno websites could easily argue that they are legitimate - they do have a website, and they do want to sell you what they offered. I don't care if it's for IBM or Coca-Cola or some other big company. I don't care if it's a guy in Miami selling "funny T-shirts". That doesn't matter - it's still unwanted.

The DMA wants exactly what you want. Get rid of the fraud, and tell "legitimate" businesses that they can spam the world until the world begs out. That theory has people fed up with telemarketing, and people don't want the spam either.

The argument you use leads to a question of allowing some spam while disallowing other spam. It doesn't solve the problem, it just brings up questions similar to those the DNC list has - some calls are allowed, others aren't. Get rid of all the crap, says I. Spam is about consent, not content.

I just don't believe that there is any substantial cost shifting occuring

Studies show that spam is costing businesses (not counting the costs to individuals) somewhere in the 10 Billion a year range, and you claim there is no cost shifting. That's why it's hard to have a reasonable discussion with you - facts have no bearing on what you believe.

Remember, to a certain extent, cost shifting is NOT sufficient grounds for regulation:

And to prove your point, you post a quote from Bolger v Youngs Drugs which has nothing to do with cost shifting. The term doesn't even come up in that case. That's a brilliant legal manuever, no doubt. Your professors must be proud.

Spam, I suspect, is no more burdensome than junk mail.

I rarely get more than 10 junk mails in a week. I get 300+ spams every day. Guess which one is more of a burden?

There haven't been many junk fax cases, and some have gone that way, and others have held the junk fax statute unconstitutional.

I've heard of rulings that the junk fax law was unconstitutional. I've also, in every case, heard that those rulings were overturned by higher courts. If that law had actually been found unconstitutional, as you claim, then junk faxes would not be illegal. And yet they are.

A recent story on the subject can be found on Wired magazine. Once again, your claims and reality have little in common.

Nah. That's because of this (MIT kids who count cards and ruin the fun for the rest of us).

No, Bill did not actually say that.
Wired

Some semi-recent articles in Psychology Today and Wired.

Personally, I think the technique of reading EEGs off the scalp is going to be more popular, at least in the short term. It isn't invasive and it is much less expensive. Disclaimer: My masters thesis is on EEG classification for BCI, so I might be biased :)

(I hope those links are OK...Preview isn't working for some reason.)

"MRAM is up to six times faster than today's static RAM," said IBM spokesman Richard Butner. "It also has the potential to be extremely dense, packing more information into a smaller space."
"Researchers have been trying for years to find a 'universal' RAM replacement, a device that is non-volatile, inexpensive, fast and low-power," Way said. "DRAM (dynamic RAM), flash and SRAM (static RAM) all have one or two of these characteristics, but MRAM appears to offer the best hope of an overall solution."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.08/assist.htm l

Anybody heard whether there has been any progress on getting LEPs from Cambridge Display Technologies into mass production?

Some do, including Ralph Nader.

Hmm, compared to, say, Oracle Media Objects, MTropolis, Hypercard, Supercard, Asymmetrix Toolbook, and all the other Director competitors that died around 1998? Or compared to all the other lightweight animation formats for the Web that died around 2000?

Microsoft has its own set of subpar abandoned animation alternatives for the Web that utterly failed:

• LiquidMotion (discussed in other replies here)
• Chrome (3-D presentation/animation), exactly like Longhorn except for XAML
• Microsoft animation controls in MSIE4, a bunch of ActiveX controls for timelines, sprites, animation paths, etc. (These are probably still present in the Windows MSIE code!)

Many many companies have been there before, the difference is MS has untold billions to spend trying, re-trying, and re-trying the market.

I'm completely certain that the Leader of the Free World is can recognize IIS, although he personally prefers apache (or even khttpd).