Slashdot Mirror

Here's a Valentine's Day gift to you all (smooch!), my shortest column ever: As the Internet enters its second era, it appears to be evolving into a series of distinctly separate, different continents and sub-continents. (Continued below)

Here are my names for the nine continents of the Internet Planet. They speak for themselves:

• The Corporate Internet (the dot.coms, portals, big ISPs, e-traders)
• The Undernet (subterranean but thriving mailing lists, Usenet groups, messaging systems, Weblogs)
• TechNet (geeks, nerds, scientists and researchers, sites like this one, c.net
• X-Net (sex and dark and forbidden pleasures)
• InfoNet (news and information)
• BuyNet (auctions, products, retailing services)
• CultureNet (salon.com, movies, TV, pop culture, MP3s, DVDs)
• GameNet (the rich, complex and rapidly growing world of gaming)
• GodNet (the much overlooked but vast hive of spiritual and religous sites and lists)

Please feel free to add your own.

Discuss among yourselves:

twdorris asks: "I've been playing around with SCSI under Linux for a while now and I keep running into issues with things not working *quite* right (scanner not responding sometimes, having to retry operations for what appears to be no good reason, etc.). The SCSI subsystem under Linux is supposedly sub-par and is considered by those in the know to be a major hack, to put it nicely. See this little note from the cdrecord author for an example." (More)

"His arguments seem to make sense to me and he certainly seems to know what he's talking about. So I'm curious how others in the know feel about the state of the Linux SCSI subsystem. If people tend to agree it's not in the best of shape, I'm curious what's being done about it? SCSI is an important interface to support and support *well* in a business environment, so I'm hoping someone smarter than I am already has plans to incorporate necessary changes to Linux to make it more enterprise friendly in this regard."

Geek-from-parallel-Universe writes "In the HEP preprints database a preprint ">appeared in which the authors propose that a world is a brane folded many times in extra sub-millimiter spatial dimensions. We see other folds only through gravity as a dark matter because light must go around the folds. If this is true then I am waiting for Star Trek-like devices: 'portable submillimeter wormhole generator' and 'personal parallel universe transmitter' to appear on the market. :-)"

ecampbel writes "This patent should scare many, many different sites. Their specific invention is that they store the live data used to fill in their site?s templates in shared memory that the sub-processes that actually generate the page have access to. This method cuts down on the time it takes to generate their page since quering another server or process isn't necessary. What does Slashdot and the readers of Slashdot think of this new patent?" Thats it! Nobody is allowed to cache data in shared memory space any more! Slashdot actually runs really close to this, although I cache the custom Slashboxes in httpd child memory space, not in shared memory owned by the parent Apache (hey, is there a shared memory module for perl? :) The abstract is attached below, anyone have any opinions on this one?

Here is the abstract of their patent: United States Patent 5,983,227 (Nov. 9, 1999)

Dynamic page generator

Abstract

A custom page server is provided with user preferences organized into templates stored in compact data structures and the live data used to fill the templates stored local to the page server which is handing user requests for custom pages. One process is executed on the page server for every request. The process is provided a user template for the user making the request, where the user template is either generated from user preferences or retrieved from a cache of recently used user templates. Each user process is provided access to a large region of shared memory which contains all of the live data needed to fill any user template. Typically, the pages served are news pages, giving the user a custom selection of stock quotes, news headlines, sports scores, weather, and the like. With the live data stored in a local, shared memory, any custom page can be built within the page server, eliminating the need to make requests from other servers for portions of the live data. While the shared memory might include RAM (random access memory) and disk storage, in many computer systems, it is faster to store all the live data in RAM.

With the posting of it's first Press Release, the new Apache XML Project is officially launched. Also, the website itself is open to the public. The project itself contains 4 sub-projects:

• Xerces - XML parsers in Java, C++, and Perl
• Xalan - XSLT stylesheet processors, in Java and C++
• Cocoon - XML-based web publishing, in Java
• FOP - XSL formatting objects, in Java

We now have some meat to talk about :)

Attack Pirate writes "Colorado based Space Imaging will release their first 1-meter resolution pictures from space in a press release here. The images are from their brand new Ikonos spacecraft and they'll be available for purchase. I've had a peek at some sub-sampled stuff and am very impressed with the quality. You can see ... well, just wait until 11:30 PM Mountain time and see for yourself. Backup sites are newswire.spaceimaging.com and www.businesswire.com (click on "Today's Photo Wire"). " I'm going to be tracking a lot of people's movements with this now.

Ivo writes "Apple just announced a new iMac. The base model starts at $999, and the $1499 model has built-in firewire and DVD. More at Apple's website " Three different models (no fan, better graphics and sub-woofer), and the commercials are online.

Chris O'Byrne writes "Psion have announced the Series 7 laptop computer. It's sub-notebook sized, around $1,000 (though only initially available in the U.K.), with 8.5 hours battery life, 640x480 colour LCD touch-screen display, instant-on, and all the usual connectivity and other extras from a Psion computer. The O.S. is Symbian EPOC 32. Looks like an expanded and beefed-up Series 5mx. "

An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us that "Sound&Vision has tested three different "codecs" and compared the sound quality to a normal CD. The three are MP3 system, Lucent's EPAC, and Microsoft's Windows Media Audio V2. None could give full cd quality but MP3 was the over all winner."

Branden Robinson writes "The Open Group has created a new sub-organization, X.Org, to hold stewardship of the X Window System. X.Org will be a membership organization similar to the old I2O group, with open membership but voting restricted to paying members, and rules for expulsion of members. Check out their site and this NewsAlert story for more. "

One of our ever loquacious AC's sent an interesting story over our way. A Researcher at Johns Hopkins has created an artifical eye chip that "has image sensing and object tracking" capabilites. This has been demonstrated in other systems, the key difference here: speed. One chip, rather then different chip sub-systems.

wtpooh writes "Wired has an article about a company developing a wind-up power source for computers. Apple is reportedly interested. " The company is also talking about its use in things like sub-notebooks. Man, if they made this (solar panels will probably be included), and if I got Iridium, I could go outside and still post. Seriously though, for people working the field, and less developed nations, things like this could really help the spread of computers.

Increasingly, on this and other websites, people ask for the banning of Anonymous Cowards and others who flame behind pseuds. This would be a mistake. AC's are a unique sub-species of the Net and the Web, like hackers or cypherpunks. They are part of what makes the Net free, especially in comparison to other media. And they keep information moving, especially from corporations and government agencies, whose employees might not be so free to post messages. AC's the price we pay, the tradeoff. They may mostly be testosterone-crazed adolescent dirtballs, but they're our dirtballs.

In recent weeks, chronicles here of my stumbling (and yes, still ongoing) attempts to grasp the intricacies of Linux have sparked both praise and hostility. As usual, the praise tends to come mostly in e-mail, the hostility in public postings, the most assertive of which have come from anonymous contributors calling me various names, as in "This guy is a moron.." On Slashdot, these posters are given the pseudonym "Anonymous Coward."

First-time visitors and many e-mailers, largely friendly, intelligent and generous people, are appalled by this name-calling - lamenting and even apologizing for the flamers. "We really should stop anonymous posting," wrote Greg. "It's just a vehicle for teenagers to jerk off."

But, singed though I sometimes am, I disagree. Anonymous postings are one of the things that makes the Net and the Web so distinct from TV, magazines and newspapers.

Anonymous flamers, like cypherpunks students of mnemetics or crypto-geeks, are one of the many fascinating sub-species on the Web. People wonder at their almost indefatigable hostility. No other medium permits their equivalent, and a whole language and sensibility has formed around them. There's even a term - "flamebait" the producers and editors of Slashdot use for writings and writers (not just me by any means) likely to draw the small but angry hordes.

Flamers are so familiar to me they're almost comforting. I've written for a number of websites, from Hotwired to Newstolls to The Freedom Forum and Slashdot, and in almost every writing, I've been flamed in public postings, whether I'm writing about the Web, politics, media, geeks, movies, Buffy or OSS.

Anyone willing to venture a strong idea or opinion online should expect to be flamed; he will be. It's as intrinsic to Web writing as a keyboard. I've come to value it, in an odd way; maybe out of self-delusion, I equate flaming with being interesting. Every writer knows, whether or not he admits it, that there's rarely such a thing as bad controversy.

What the marketer of ideas most fears isn't that people will criticize his ideas, but that people won't respond at all. This is especially true online, where it's so easy to measure feedback, in public postings, column hits and e-mail messages. For the writer, a column that sparks 400 posts is a home run; a column that generates 20, even if they're nice ones, is a dud.

I don't write to be agreed with, though praise is always welcome; I write to offer ideas, pass on information and observations, start conversations, challenge thought, and then become the beneficiary of lots of feedback. I rarely assume I'm right. So the flamer is, in a curious way, my best cheerleader, a sign of vitality.

Besides that, anonymous postings do valuable things:

They permit people in corporations, government agencies and other risky environments to post news, messages and opinions we would not otherwise see. Living in the age of the megacorporation - Disney, Microsoft - and the era of impulses like the "Halloween document," that's crucial.

They give shy or phobic lurkers the chance to post messages they might not post under their own names and ID's.

They're a curb on the pomposity, authority and arrogance of people at the top of media chains, from newspaper owners to software companies to columnists. The hallmark of mainstream journalism - on display all year in the Monica Lewinsky trial - is the notion that truth and conventional wisdom is the province of journalism, to be passed down to the ill-informed. Thus journalists have felt free to ignore public opinion all year, since the public has no way to express itself beyond polls and surveys, and since the public is presumed to be too ignorant, greedy and immoral to make rational decisions. Anonymous posters make that kind of top-down manipulation impossible online.

Anonymous posters correct mistakes and challenge opinions. Before the Net, people unhappy with the facts, writing style and opinions expressed in the press had - have - few effective ways to reach opinion-givers and information distributors. That's no longer so. When people like me make mistakes, from factual errors to poor grammar to faulty logic, they are corrected instantly and continuously. The writer is not abused by the process, but improved. He or she can become smarter, better informed.

Even though people often reassure the flamee that the flamers aren't representative, or are simply sensitive about certain subjects, the truth is that flaming is almost never personal. That's what e-mail is for. The open display of hostility is attitudinal, a posture, always having more to do with the fact that's it's public than personal.

That's why I almost never get flamed via e-mail.

And Anonymous Cowards keep sites from getting boring or complacent.

The most difficult issue raised by anonymous posting is the personal abuse by flamers, most of whom are young males acting out one or another form of adolescent hostility. But seen in context, they cause little real harm. Besides, anonymous posting may be a healthy outlet compared to slugging peers or running cars into trees.

Like airport noise or graffiti, they are part of life. People who call other people names anonymously have little real influence. Since they offer no rational criticism, they don't have to be taken seriously and have no influence. The kid who says "You're a jerk, go away" almost can't, by definition be someone who must be listened to. Intelligent and thoughtful criticisms are much more disturbing, because they are harder to ignore or dismiss.

The real damage anonymous posters do is drive away people who have important or interesting things to say but don't want to participate in the digital equivalent of dodgem. Many women, older posters, people with demanding work and newbies in particular are disinterested in or frightened off by tostosterone-charged flamers. This is a real loss, judging from their e-mail, since many intelligent, thoughtful and useful observations are never seen. Some Websites suspend the posting privileges of people who engage in repeated personal attacks, while others provide moderators to steer conversations in more rational, civil directions.

But the understandable impulse to chase these people off ought to be resisted. The right of Anonymous Cowards to sound off under a pseudonym is important, part of the online chemical mix. Their existence, like many things online, represents a tradeoff. They're a symbol of the freedom available online, but increasingly rare off-line. More than the mastery of software, they are a much better test for any writer of whether or not he belongs online. And whether or not he ultimately has anything to say.

You can e-mail me at jonkatz@slashdot.org

JammerJJ sent in this update to our recent story about PCQuest. The May issue dedicated to Linux has come out, and hopefully it will continue to spread Linux to the Indian sub-continent. It's always nice to wake-up to good press.

T-Mobile today unveiled a new name for its Layer3 TV internet television service -- TVision Home -- with enhanced features, and announced a deal with Amazon to add Prime Video to the service later in 2019. From a report: TVision Home will be available starting April 14 in eight markets (the same areas Layer3 TV has already been available): Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Longmont, Colo. It's not a skinny bundle: TVision Home starts at $90 per month, which includes more than 150 channels, local broadcast stations and regional sports networks, as well as 15,000 VOD titles. Premium TV packages like HBO and Showtime are extra. In addition, TVision Home users must pay a $10 monthly set-top fee per connected TV. (Actually, the regular price of TVision Home for non-T-Mobile wireless customers is $99.99 per month, but the carrier is including a $9.99-per-month discount to all new subs for a limited time.)

Researchers at Google, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of California Santa Barbara has solved one of the biggest limitations with quantum computing: all the control and readout circuits of quantum computer systems must be at room temperature, while their superconducting qubits live in a cryogenic enclosure at less than 1 kelvin. "For today's sub-100-qubit systems, there's enough space for specialized RF cabling to come in and out of the enclosure," reports IEEE Spectrum. "But to scale up to the million-qubit systems needed to do really cool stuff, there just won't be enough room."

At the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco last month, the researchers reported making a key control circuit in CMOS that will work at cryogenic temperatures. They described it as "a high-performance, low-power pulse modulator needed to program the qubits." From the report: "The current approach is OK for now," says Joseph Bardin, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who designed the IC while on sabbatical at Google. "But it's not scalable to a million qubits." For Google's 72-qubit quantum processor there are already 168 coaxial cables going into the refrigerator and connecting to the 10-millikelvin quantum processor. The pulse modulator IC Bardin worked on is used to encode quantum states on a qubit in order to execute a program. Quantum computers get their parallelizing power because qubits don't have to be just 0 or 1, like the bits in an ordinary computer. Instead, they can be a mix of those states. The pulse modulator uses a specific set of RF frequencies to produce that mix.

"The biggest challenge is heat dissipation," explains Bardin. The qubits are at 10 millikelvins, but the control circuits, which necessarily throw off heat, can't be held that low. The researchers aimed for 4 K for the control IC. "However, at 4 K, thermodynamics limits the efficiency of cooling. The best you're going to get is about 1 percent efficiency. In practice it's worse." So the power dissipated by the electronics per qubit had to be only in the milliwatt range. That power constraint had to be balanced with the need for control accuracy, Bardin says. This was complicated by how differently CMOS transistors behave at 4 k, which is a more than 200 degrees below what silicon foundries' simulation models can deal with. Bardin and the Google team managed to design the IC in a way that compensates for these problems and achieves the balance between power consumption and performance. The resulting IC consumed less than 2 mW, yet it was able to put a qubit through its paces in testing.

Ten days ago 66-year-old tech pundit Robert Cringely revealed the first of what may be his final set of annual predictions for the technology industry -- but he's not done yet. Thursday Cringely predicted that "the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) solution based on Open Source using Linux will change the Internet-as-a-Service Cloudscape to VPC-only during 2019" -- and that there'll be an industry-wide shakeout.

Long-time Slashdot reader supremebob, a Connecticut-based sys-admin, writes: He seems to believe that IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud and doomed to fail, and Alibaba will only survive because of its strong Chinese presence. These seem like safe predictions, but his comments on Google Cloud are somewhat controversial...
After AWS, Alibaba, and Microsoft, "All the others will eventually disappear," Cringely writes, adding "Remember you read it first here." Google's largest cloud customer will always be Google and that will inevitably lead to poorer service for outside customers. That's why I think of Google Cloud as half of a player. Feel free to prove me wrong by delighting customers, Google... I don't see the marketing effort to help clients migrate. Lots of handholding is needed that IBM and Microsoft are happy to provide. Google does not understand customers whose IQs are sub-200. As such, Google doesn't have (and likely won't) have a history of winning outside of search advertising.

For IBM, their VPC roll-out is coming in the next month or two, but it's more marketing than an actual product. Big Blue simply has no capital to build out a unique offering. And Oracle? Well the new head of Google Cloud came from Oracle, where not enough was happening.
Cringely also predicts the U.S. government will try to force Amazon to spin-off its near-monopoly cloud business, noting that "the larger customers of AWS (those not operating on a credit card) generally hate Amazon because of its ruthless business behavior."

Lots of pressure will come to bear in this case from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, who are all suffering from a very specific database problem competing with AWS. Each of these companies sells their own database (DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle, respectively) that they've rolled into their cloud services. AWS's RDB, in contrast, is based on MySQL and costs Amazon almost nothing to support, giving the biggest cloud player a clear pricing advantage.

AT&T's DirecTV, Dish, and Comcast are all planning to raise their rates again in the new year, "a move that could boost revenue but risks alienating subscribers who have been ditching their traditional TV subscriptions in record numbers," reports Dallas News. From the report: Cable and satellite providers are hoping to squeeze more money from consumers who remain loyal to their packages with hundreds of channels, Philip Cusick, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst, said in a note this week, even though "this strategy could accelerate video sub declines." The latest price increases come as cord-cutting accelerates. In the third quarter, the TV industry saw its largest ever rate of decline, with subscribers shrinking by 3.7 percent, according to MoffettNathanson LLC. Consumers are dropping traditional TV for lower-cost online options like Netflix Inc. and slimmer TV options from Hulu and YouTube.

DirecTV is raising rates on all English-language video packages by $3 to $8 a month while hiking fees for regional sports networks by $1 to $1.90 in most markets. Dish said it's increasing prices for English-language video packages by $3 to $5 a month. Altice USA, the fourth-largest cable operator, recently raised rates by 3 percent on Optimum subscribers. Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company, is raising its fee for regional sports networks by $1.50 on average and its fee for broadcast channels by $2 a month, according to Cusick. Charter Communications Inc., the second-largest U.S. cable provider, recently boosted its monthly fee for a set-top box by about 50 cents and its broadcast channel fee by about $1. Charter operates as Spectrum in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Aston Martin announced this week that it's starting a "Heritage EV" program where owners of classic Aston Martins can have their cars converted to an all-electric powertrain. The British automaker said they are starting this program so that classic cars don't get banned from cities that are moving to shun internal combustion engines in favor of boosting air quality for residents. The Verge reports: Aston Martin says the technology for these conversions will be built on "key components" being used to develop the Rapide E, a super-limited all-electric sports car due late next year. The Rapide E will use an 800-volt, 65kWh battery, offer "over 200 miles" of range, and feature a sub-4-second 0-60 mph time, as well as a top speed of 155 miles per hour. Only 155 of them will be sold, too. So the best way to get a taste of Aston Martin's electric future might actually be one of these EV conversions.

The automaker says the first car it will develop a conversion plan for is the 1970 DB6 MkII Volante. Aston Martin will build Rapide E-inspired "cassettes" that can essentially slide in where the original engine and gearbox used to be, and will even be attached to the same mountings. A new screen will be fitted in the car's interior, but otherwise, little else is changed. This also means that, should an owner change their mind, and also have the money (which, come on, of course they do), they should be able to change it back if they so desire.

Two astronomers have asked a question for the ages: Can moons have moons? The delightful, if theoretical, answer is: Yes -- yes, they can. Sarah Laskow, writing for Atlas Obscura: As Gizmodo reports, this particular scientific inquiry began with a question from Juna Kollmeier's son. Kollemeier, who works at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, recruited Sean Raymond, of the University of Bordeaux, to help her answer the question. In a paper posted on arXiv [PDF], they lay out their case that moons can have moons. The conditions have to be right -- the primary moon has to be big enough and far away enough from the planet it's orbiting for the smaller, secondary moon to survive. But, even given these caveats, they found that moons in our very own solar system could theoretically have their own smaller moons. Two of Saturn's moons and one of Jupiter's are candidates. So is our favorite moon -- the Earth's moon.

[...] One of the great challenges of talking about recursive places is deciding what call them. The prefix "sub-" can do a lot of work here: We can islands within islands "subislands," and in the arXiv paper, Kollmeier and Raymond call a moon's moon a "submoon." But there are other options. New Scientist notes that "moonmoon" has been put forth as a name for a moon's moon. For those of us who are less than fluent in meme culture: This is a reference to Moon Moon, sometimes described as the internet's derpiest wolf. Moon Moon was born in 2013, from a werewolf name generator, and soon started frolicking across Tumblr and all other places memes can be found.