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Well the executive branch may feel ok about easing up on the stupid crypto-export policies this particular week, but the IRS doesn't want 'em to now.
http://www.wired.com/news/p olitics/0,1283,37573,00.html

Each time one branch of the US govt wants to loosen up on the crypto regs, another branch starts complaining. Last time it was Janet Reno, and then Louis Freeh. Now the IRS.

> Microsoft.NET is looking more and more like a dystopian corporate-controlled world

Heavy on the "dystopian" part.

Ballmer apparently had his .NET demo blow up in his face at COMDEX last week. The news aren't saying much about it, though this Wired article mentions that it "was plagued with performance glitches", and quotes him lamely terminating it before he was done.

MS has a pretty bad track record with high-profile demos. Are they that clueless? Is it that they don't care, knowing that hype will carry the field where technology fails? Is it that they really believe that their stuff works reliably outside the lab? Is it that their employees are so afraid of management that they won't say that a technology isn't ready for prime time?

You'd think these semi-annual doses of reality would make some heads roll down in QA. (Assuming they even have a QA department.)

--

I'm not sure if it's been posted yet but this is a great article I read a while back in Wired.

Dawn of the Hydrogen Age
http://www.wired.com/wired/ar chive/5.10/hydrogen.html

Hybrid cars don't have to be slow. Chrysler developed a race car called the Patriot that used a high-output alternator and a carbon-fiber flywheel, spun up by a turbine to drive a 600hp electric motor which transmited power via a manual 6spd transmission. The car reclaimed braking energy, putting it back into the flywheel, and had a terminal velocity of over 200mph. It also had a range of over 1500miles. Wired had an article on the car early in the mag's run.. just searched and found this: Patriot

Another reason for the lack of acceptance of alt fuel cars is that you just don't see these cars as high-performance machines. A lot of people like quick acceleration and driving really fast (like myself). AFAIK, fuel cells, electric, etc. right now aren't capable of the 0-60 or quarter-mile times you can get in a gas-powered car. I'm not a big fan of our gas dependance but I think I'll wait until I see an alt fuel car that can do 0-60 in 4-6 seconds.

We also have been used (using loads and loads of Linux machines, I might add) to solve some extremely massive optimzation problems (using over 1000 non-dedicated -- i.e. desktop -- machines at one time.) The problem in question has been around for 32 years, and was solved using Condor in 7 days!

So anyway, on all of those platforms we support checkpointing (restarting a job on another machine) and remote procedure calls (having a job on a remote machine think its on your machine).

Plus you can download Condor right away and get it up and running! Its cool stuff, but then again I might be biased :)

People need to stop looking at the d.net/Seti@home problems as the only model for Internet computing. They're not that hard of problems. What makes them neat is that they've got lots of CPU's. (SETI is cool because it's space and aliens and everything, but RC5-64 is just plain stupid - they're proving that 64 bit RC5 is 256 times harder to crack than 56bit RC5. Yawn.)

Numerical accuracy is a concern. Latency is a concern - but not for a a huge set of problems. You don't need a T3E for Monte Carlo simulations, and you shouldn't try and put your finite-element simulations all around the world. Networks are getting faster and faster, so code size is really not an issue today for anyone on a real network (ie vBNS.) Data size can be a problem, but again, networks are getting faster, and you can prestage a lot of the data. If your code is too sensitive to risk distributing, then no amount of technological progress is going to change it. User security is not that difficult of a problem - it's not too hard to sandbox an application on a decent OS. And as for FORTRAN, I don't see what the problem is. Processors don't run C or FORTRAN or Pascal, and the FORTRAN compilers still produce some pretty tight code.

The Internet makes great sense for high-performance computing, for the right problems.

My company, Popular Power, has had commercial distributed computing software out since April. We just put out a Linux version in response to a Freshmeat Petition, check it out!

Our system is pretty neat; we're doing real work (researching flu vaccines), and our client is truly general purpose in that we can switch the kinds of work we're doing on the fly with no re-install. We're lining up customers now; we'll switch over to paying work as time goes on. We're also planning an open source release of the client software.

I truly think this kind of computing, along with other distributed systems like Gnutella, is the future of the Internet. For a good overview of this field, check out Howard Rheingold's article in the new August Wired, or this Wired news article.

According to this Jan 2, 2000 Reuter's article, crackers have broken into Lloyd's in the past. I could just imagine the sales pitch, "never mind that I just crashed my car, let me sell you some auto insurance..."

Of course, the Internet can also be used to provide training and skills...

Remember 1994? Monica Lewinski was just another intern. peecees were still 16 Bit. Linux was 1.0 and a guy named Jim Clarke started Netscape Comunications.
___

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

disks, tape, cds... they all have a relatively short lifespan. picture storing data in mice, just feed them and keep them warm. ev en if th e parents die the children will have the artificial chromosomes... (that is unless they recombine, in which case all of your documents or whatever are worthless....)

disks, tape, cds... they all have a relatively short lifespan. picture storing data in mice, just feed them and keep them warm. ev en if th e parents die the children will have the artificial chromosomes... (that is unless they recombine, in which case all of your documents or whatever are worthless....)

It's not like splicing is anything new - hell we've been making corn that poisons butterflys for a while now - it's not new. Why is this news? What is the nature of the chromosome, is that what makes it so special? What does it do? Anything?

It's not like splicing is anything new - hell we've been making corn that poisons butterflys for a while now - it's not new. Why is this news? What is the nature of the chromosome, is that what makes it so special? What does it do? Anything?

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

Wired Magazine did a piece on this several years ago: click here

My God! even WIRED got it wrong. What is this world coming to? The Hackers' existence in literature and such preceded the popularization of the term in the wrong context by 20 years, yet we still see this bullshit.

I propose that we begin to use the word "reporter" to mean a spreader of unfounded gossip and lies, and "astronaut" to describe porn stars. Maybe a little of their own medicine will help them learn proper reporting.

Man... I need to pay more attention to AlertBox. Nielsen's abridged version is much easier to read than mucking through the Poynter page.

Wired also has a good article on the study.

In the Wired article it states, "The number of surfers who click on ad banners has already dwindled to an average of about two-tenths of 1 percent. If readers don't even look at graphics on a Web site, that number might not go up anytime soon."

If this is true, maybe we'll see a decrease in the use of banners.

I just read an article in this month's Wired (pg. 94) in which Jim Mason (the guy in charge of the project) said the goal is a 10000 year disk but the current nickel one only lasts for 2000 years. Is someone wrong somewhere or did I misread something? Go to this link for an older article (last month!) that says it only lasts for 1000+ years with no guarenteed 10000 life span. http://www.wired.com/wir ed/archive/6.06/newmedia.html?pg=4

Just as a side note, women were in fact the first electronic computer programmers. Note the Wired story on the six women who first programmed the ENIAC. Women Proto-Programmers Get Their Just Reward

The CNET version was the AP story. Wired has Reuters coverage of this.

What indeed? Let him be caught surfing for pr0n by all means ;)

That doesn't work.

1. Some people are required to take users' privacy into account. "Let skript kiddiez read his mail, he's just an ignorant user" doesn't work with responsible sysadmins, and neither should intrusive tracking.

2. When Doubleclick gets big enough, it can buy Congress and get ad filtering banned, (It worked for the MPAA.)

wired mag predicted this 2 years ago in an article entitled "Tomorrow Today". Not bad. they predicted solar cell artificial retinas in y2k.

The current issue of Wired has a list of the 40 biggest tech cities in the world (this is the issue that has Sealand as its cover story). They rated the cities by the VC coming in to the cities, the start-ups in the cities, the established tech companies in the cities, and industry ties with local colleges and universities. This doesn't quite tell you what cities will be geek friendly but it will give you a good idea of where your skills will be most wanted and a lot of the time if companies are looking for a lot of geeks they will try and make the people in the city geek friendly, especially if its a city where one of these companies employs many of the city residents.

(It's what World War III was about in TOS, and came up again in DS9)

To nitpick for a moment, in Star Trek, WW3 was not about genitc engineering. The "Eugenics Wars" were. These were supposed to end in 1998 (or '96, I don't have my trusty Star Trek Timeline book with me). To explain away why we haven't had the Eugenics Wars yet, and why in one particular episode of Voyager why they beamed down in 1996 and everything was normal, they just say that Kirk's prior medling with the timeline changed the date (with good reason, nobody's established a new date). Keep in mind that the 90's date for the war was estabilished in the orginal series, and genitic engineering by this time seemed plausable enough for Star Trek. Perhaps they were only off by a few years.

Now on to the lesson: The Eugenics Wars were about geniticly enhanced humans coming together to fight off the "imperfect" masses of non-geniticaly engineered humans. The "perfect" humans lost, and boarded a sleeper ship off the planet (which is how they later caught up with Kirk). As a result, humans just thought it too dangerous to have genitic engineering, and the belief in this danger still kept with them to the founding of the Federation. Thus, by that time, laws were passed to ban genitic engineering except in cases of birth defects (apparently, baldness doesn't count :).

In other words, the population became smart enough to weed out the bad stuff about gentic engineering while still gaining its most important benifits. However, they had to have a big nasty war before learning this lesson.

There were cases of illegal genetic engineering going on, though, such as in the case of Dr. Bashir (of DS9). I beleive that in the real world, as long as it is made clear that genetic engineering isn't OK, but we will still accept such people into our society, such people can still have valuable contributions. This will keep the ammount of cases down while still getting a few benifits.

Now the question is, do we have to go through a real Eugenics War before banning the bad parts of genetic engineering? I know the Klingons just plain think that genetic engineering is dishonorable. I doubt the Cardassians would be above it, and the Borg probably do it at will. Wait, the Klingons? Yep, apparently they were far sighted enough to realize that unbridled genetic engineering is a bad idea. Can we be like that? Not likely, and perhaps the future really doesn't need us.

------

If you didn't see the article: Why the Future Doesn't Need us in Wired 8.04 by Sun Cofounder Bill Joy you should. It was profoundly interesting. There was a slashdot discussion here.

I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. On the one hand, I think people are being alarmist. On the other, I think history is littered with the unitended negative consequences of a technology we didn't understand. I don't think, for instance, that any technological device should be capable of self-replication...
---

If you didn't see the article: Why the Future Doesn't Need us in Wired 8.04 by Sun Cofounder Bill Joy you should. It was profoundly interesting. There was a slashdot discussion here.

I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. On the one hand, I think people are being alarmist. On the other, I think history is littered with the unitended negative consequences of a technology we didn't understand. I don't think, for instance, that any technological device should be capable of self-replication...
---

anybody see this wired article. Appearantly people just aren't going to PC EXPO or COMDEX like they used to! Must be the lack of open source. ;)

kick some CAD

Wired online write a few interesting articles about this recently here and here. They seemed to be suggesting that the government was doing the investigating, oops! It's ok Wired, you can go back to talking about push technology and robot dogs now, the offline press have scooped you again :)

...which is completely different from a knowing decision to purposely include definitely illegal materials, and promote that as part of your service.

It's all or nothing. Accept linking or don't.

People like you also make civil debate about guns and abortion impossible.

Gawd, it's like walking on eggshells around here sometimes. All I did was try to point out that this might not be the cut-and-dried litmus test for hyperlinks that the posers at Wired want to hype it as being; and suddenly I'm surrounded by more flaming than at a San Francisco parade.

Settle down. The RIAA is not going to take the Internet away. The sky is not falling. Save the paranoia for John Katz articles.

If linking to "illegal files" becomes illegal, and if British Telecom "owns linking" (Wired: "British Telecom: We Own Linking"), then apparently the RIAA should be suing British Telecom for enabling easy access to information that violates copyright laws, instead of MP3.com. :)

Wired News: RIAA: No Hyperlinking Allowed

Does anyone else think that's ridiculous?

If you ask me, this whole thing sounds like a weak attempt by the people who are pissed at the unlimited rate plan. I read an article a few months ago in Wired about how the volunteers who patrol chatrooms and the such are suing AOL for back wages!! They claimed that since they don't get free hours anymore they should be paid. I guess they forgot what Volunteer means.

Given Celera's previous glitch, will the two Genome maps be combined and compared to give a better idea of overall accuracy, or will one be pandering to the private Sector, the other to the public sector?

• Wearable Computer
• Wearable Computing Intro Page
• Wearable Computing Portal
• Wearable Computing Resource Page
• WearableGear.com
• Wearables Central
• Wearables WebCrawler Search Engine
• Wearables Webring
• WearableTech Corp.
• Wired News: Annotated Reality
• Wired News: Intel Chips In On Future Devices
• Wired News: Waiting For Wearable Wearables
• Wraith Projects
• Xybernaut

Impossible means no one's done it yet.

• Wearable Computer
• Wearable Computing Intro Page
• Wearable Computing Portal
• Wearable Computing Resource Page
• WearableGear.com
• Wearables Central
• Wearables WebCrawler Search Engine
• Wearables Webring
• WearableTech Corp.
• Wired News: Annotated Reality
• Wired News: Intel Chips In On Future Devices
• Wired News: Waiting For Wearable Wearables
• Wraith Projects
• Xybernaut

Impossible means no one's done it yet.

• Wearable Computer
• Wearable Computing Intro Page
• Wearable Computing Portal
• Wearable Computing Resource Page
• WearableGear.com
• Wearables Central
• Wearables WebCrawler Search Engine
• Wearables Webring
• WearableTech Corp.
• Wired News: Annotated Reality
• Wired News: Intel Chips In On Future Devices
• Wired News: Waiting For Wearable Wearables
• Wraith Projects
• Xybernaut

Impossible means no one's done it yet.

Here I have a whole bunch of links to further information about wearable computers and "enhanced reality" for anyone interested:

• A Brief History Of Wearable Computing
• Affective Computing
• BBC News: Japan Eyes Wearable PC
• Charmed Technology
• CNET.com: 10 Technologies That Will Take Over - #8
• CNN: Excuse Me, Is That A Monitor On Your Head?
• CNN: MIT 'Cyborgs' Bridge Gap Between Man And Machine
• CNN: Turn On, Jack In, And Geek Out With Wearable PC
• CNN: Wearable Systems May Cut Labor, Save Time
• CNN: Xybernaut Now Has Linux For Wearable PCs
• CNN Poll: Do You Want A Wearable Computer?
• Computer For The 21st Century, The
• ComputerWorld: Wearable Computers - Digitally Attired
• Context-Aware Computing
• CTHEORY: Body Delirium
• DisplayWear Incorporated
• Extreme Computing
• Handykey, Inc. Wearable Computing Page
• Houston Chronicle: Future Phones Home, The
• ICBorg
• Intelligent Information Filters And Enhanced Reality, by Alexander Chislenko
• ISWC- International Symposium on Wearable Computers
• Marvin Elizondo's Wearable Computing Page
• MicroOptical
• MIT-IDEO Wearables Intro
• NetWork Fusion: Armani, Karan, Xybernaut? 02/01/999
• PBS: Scientific American Frontiers Transcripts - Inventing The Future (Aired Fall 1996)
• PC World News: Wearable PC To Debut At Comdex
• PopSci.com Headlines: CyberFashions
• Slashdot Articles: Wearable PCs Under Linux
• Smart Rooms
• TechWearable
• TekGear
• Wearable Computer
• Wearable Computing Intro Page
• Wearable Computing Portal
• Wearable Computing Resource Page
• WearableGear.com
• Wearables Central
• Wearables WebCrawler Search Engine
• Wearables Webring
• WearableTech Corp.
• Wired News: Annotated Reality
• Wired News: Intel Chips In On Future Devices
• Wired News: Waiting For Wearable Wearables
• Wraith Projects
• Xybernaut

Impossible means no one's done it yet.

Here I have a whole bunch of links to further information about wearable computers and "enhanced reality" for anyone interested:

• A Brief History Of Wearable Computing
• Affective Computing
• BBC News: Japan Eyes Wearable PC
• Charmed Technology
• CNET.com: 10 Technologies That Will Take Over - #8
• CNN: Excuse Me, Is That A Monitor On Your Head?
• CNN: MIT 'Cyborgs' Bridge Gap Between Man And Machine
• CNN: Turn On, Jack In, And Geek Out With Wearable PC
• CNN: Wearable Systems May Cut Labor, Save Time
• CNN: Xybernaut Now Has Linux For Wearable PCs
• CNN Poll: Do You Want A Wearable Computer?
• Computer For The 21st Century, The
• ComputerWorld: Wearable Computers - Digitally Attired
• Context-Aware Computing
• CTHEORY: Body Delirium
• DisplayWear Incorporated
• Extreme Computing
• Handykey, Inc. Wearable Computing Page
• Houston Chronicle: Future Phones Home, The
• ICBorg
• Intelligent Information Filters And Enhanced Reality, by Alexander Chislenko
• ISWC- International Symposium on Wearable Computers
• Marvin Elizondo's Wearable Computing Page
• MicroOptical
• MIT-IDEO Wearables Intro
• NetWork Fusion: Armani, Karan, Xybernaut? 02/01/999
• PBS: Scientific American Frontiers Transcripts - Inventing The Future (Aired Fall 1996)
• PC World News: Wearable PC To Debut At Comdex
• PopSci.com Headlines: CyberFashions
• Slashdot Articles: Wearable PCs Under Linux
• Smart Rooms
• TechWearable
• TekGear
• Wearable Computer
• Wearable Computing Intro Page
• Wearable Computing Portal
• Wearable Computing Resource Page
• WearableGear.com
• Wearables Central
• Wearables WebCrawler Search Engine
• Wearables Webring
• WearableTech Corp.
• Wired News: Annotated Reality
• Wired News: Intel Chips In On Future Devices
• Wired News: Waiting For Wearable Wearables
• Wraith Projects
• Xybernaut

Impossible means no one's done it yet.

Here I have a whole bunch of links to further information about wearable computers and "enhanced reality" for anyone interested:

• A Brief History Of Wearable Computing
• Affective Computing
• BBC News: Japan Eyes Wearable PC
• Charmed Technology
• CNET.com: 10 Technologies That Will Take Over - #8
• CNN: Excuse Me, Is That A Monitor On Your Head?
• CNN: MIT 'Cyborgs' Bridge Gap Between Man And Machine
• CNN: Turn On, Jack In, And Geek Out With Wearable PC
• CNN: Wearable Systems May Cut Labor, Save Time
• CNN: Xybernaut Now Has Linux For Wearable PCs
• CNN Poll: Do You Want A Wearable Computer?
• Computer For The 21st Century, The
• ComputerWorld: Wearable Computers - Digitally Attired
• Context-Aware Computing
• CTHEORY: Body Delirium
• DisplayWear Incorporated
• Extreme Computing
• Handykey, Inc. Wearable Computing Page
• Houston Chronicle: Future Phones Home, The
• ICBorg
• Intelligent Information Filters And Enhanced Reality, by Alexander Chislenko
• ISWC- International Symposium on Wearable Computers
• Marvin Elizondo's Wearable Computing Page
• MicroOptical
• MIT-IDEO Wearables Intro
• NetWork Fusion: Armani, Karan, Xybernaut? 02/01/999
• PBS: Scientific American Frontiers Transcripts - Inventing The Future (Aired Fall 1996)
• PC World News: Wearable PC To Debut At Comdex
• PopSci.com Headlines: CyberFashions
• Slashdot Articles: Wearable PCs Under Linux
• Smart Rooms
• TechWearable
• TekGear
• Wearable Computer
• Wearable Computing Intro Page
• Wearable Computing Portal
• Wearable Computing Resource Page
• WearableGear.com
• Wearables Central
• Wearables WebCrawler Search Engine
• Wearables Webring
• WearableTech Corp.
• Wired News: Annotated Reality
• Wired News: Intel Chips In On Future Devices
• Wired News: Waiting For Wearable Wearables
• Wraith Projects
• Xybernaut

Impossible means no one's done it yet.

Genome 'Dark Horse' Comes to the Fore (BBC, 8 May 00)
Dot-Comming the Genome Race Wired, 8 May 00

For more, you can see our Biotech page.

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.

According to this Wired article (last paragraph of first page), MS will...

[shift from] storing data in the company's proprietary Office formats to open standards.

... that are based on XML. I certainly hope that's true!

Also check out this Wired article and a href="

You can find the Wired article about the registration of mcdonalds.com here. A quote:

"Are you finding that the Internet is a big thing?" asked Jane Hulbert, a helpful McDonald's media-relations person, with whom I spoke a short while ago. Yes, I told her. In some quarters, the Internet is a very big thing.
--

Regular neural networks still work on digital information only. These things, apparently, do not. That's why it's a big deal.

I do have a problem with this statement in the Wired article though:

The chip -- believed to be the first hybrid digital and analog electronic circuit -- has been hailed as a breakthrough in "neuromorphic" engineering.

Claiming that these guys have pioneered mixed-signal design is just a little bit of a stretch. Do your research, Wired. =)

--

Secondly, he can't "go back to Wired". In spite of his boasting about being inspired to become an "open source" content provider, the truth is that he became a free-lance writer (and then a /. writer) because Wired layed him off. The Wired News web page chose to change their focus to tech business news, and Katz did not fit with their new direction, or so the story goes.

A more scientific version of this was reported a while back - Margaret Fleck and David Forsyth did work at Berkeley and Iowa in about 1996 that finds naked people or horses using descriptions of shapes of bodies. Wired Article.
This slashdot story doesn't appear to be related to it.