Not only that, did this make the "bad guys" to be the people who died in the accident? Yeah. They got what was coming to them, trying to hurt the career of a US military pilot. Bastards.
That brings up the problem with courtroom simulation (whether based on satillite data or otherwise): they're simulations. They leave out facts. Facts that could be important to the case (like the fact that the pilot's altimeter told him he wasn't climbing). A little bit of technical gee-whiz can cover up a whole lot of truth.
What's particularly galling in this case is that the simulation was necessary because the pilot destroyed the cockpit videotape that would have shown the jury what he saw. In particular, it would have shown clearly that while the mountain was apparently receding, the HUD display would have told him he was too low.
And, at $25,000 a pop for the defense, who do you think will really benefit from the technology? Think big bucks. Think OJ. It won't benefit your average defendant.
I wonder if, ultimately, taxes paid for the defense of the pilot. That would add insult to injury.
Win 95 *does* run fine under low-end systems. I've run it on a 66Mhz 486 with 16MB of RAM, which is pretty low-end these days. It was plenty unhappy with only 8 meg, though, resulting in a lot of hard drive thrashing. It didn't, however, crash... just slow as molasses.
Linux, in my experience, does run better on the lowest of the low (16Mhz 386sx... 6MB of RAM, had a BogoMIPs score of 8 or something like that). Granted, however, that was running without a GUI. I don't think Win95 would run well on that system, but then it can't really do without a GUI, unless you're just talking about running DOS (which is no match power-wise for Linux).
Generally, it's not the OS that kills your system, it's the apps. Linux runs OK on my 33Mhz 486sx laptop. Finding things to run on it, though, is a challenge. Netscape will thrash the drive for about a minute before it comes up. StarOffice probably wouldn't run at all. Older versions of Siag office ran OK (haven't tried it recently) and at least let me use it for light-duty word processing.
What was probably crashing your machine was some sort of misconfiguration, not a lack of processing power or memory. Lack of either just means the thing is slower, not crash-prone. Now, the fact that Windows got into a crash-prone state is something you can rightly hold against it.
What about better security?
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CNN On IPv6
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· Score: 1
Does IPV6 do anything about better authentication/security? Having more addresses is nice an all, so I can have my toaster on the Internet, but the last thing I want is to get a call about my toaster having cracked the Bank of America's system 'cause a script kiddie pulled it's IP out of a hat.
It seems to be there some sort of sane routing rules could be put into place with a new IP system, so a router could spot spoofed packets (then again, in some cases this could be done now, and I sort of doubt anyone does, probably based on the overhead).
Also, when they defined this sort of thing, did they give any consideration to the various attack methods that would be possible via IPv6? I suspect some of the issues we've seen in the past (i.e. Ping of Death) were caused because the protocol didn't suggest what to do in cases where the packet was malformed, or intentionally busted.
You know we don't live in a comic-book world...
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Project Grizzly
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· Score: 2
because if we did, this guy would be patrolling the streets at night, in his mighty suit of armor, protecting innocent civilians against the evils of... er... whatever supervillians happened to be around. Or something.
Of course, without a super-reactive neural-linked set of motors in that armor to give him super-strength, he'd be reduced to standing there chortling in a super-hero manner as they wasted all of their ammunition/strength on him. Then he'd end up vainly yelling at them to stop as they beat a hasty retreat.
>clunk!clunk!whew!CRASH!
And we'd call him "The Indestructable (but not wholly effective) Man!"
Reminds me of my experience moving from 6502 assembly hacking to a VAX 11/780. Gobs of registers. Multiply in the instruction set! Floating point multiply in the instruction set! String operations in the instruction set!
Heh. I aced that class, too. Pity I flunked the majority of the rest of them, though, else I'd be making way more bucks than I do now. Ahhh... mis-spent youth.
To keep this semi-on topic, I had actually thought, early today, about what Zilog was up to. I was thinking about my Osborne Executive, and how I'd better go and back up the OS disks for the thing, now that they are 15 years old... Weird that they are still making Z80's. For that matter, it's weird that they are still making 6502's (unless the gameboys switched to some other processor without me noticing). Funny how many of the intermediate processors aren't being fabbed anymore. Anyone still making 8086s (acutally, probably) 286s? 386s? 486s?
Man, how fast would a 6502 or Z80 go if you made it with 15 micron technology and a copper base?
1) I wonder if Hawkins & Co. didn't have some sort of card of their sleeve for this. Maybe, as a price for parting amicably, they got a license for the OS. It seems obvious now why Hawkins and Dubinsky bolted... they had a vision for the Palm that included expansion and driving the units down lower in the market. Palm itself seemed happy to be making expensive nerd toys. They probably had a good grip on the arms they needed to twist in order to get what they wanted. And, on the surface, licensing the OS doesn't seem like a dumb thing to do... expand the platform's acceptence, yaddah yaddah. It's only when Handspring proves they can make a better Palm than you for less money do you smakc yourself in the forhead and yell "d'oh!"
2) I dunno. I sort of doubt that Dubinsky and Hawkins would have been dumb enough to walk onto a plank that someone could snatch out from underneath them, though. They didn't make the Palm #1 by being dumb.
3) 'Cause it's neat? Cause you could link a whole lot of them together and get a Beowolf cluster less powerful than a standard desktop? The nerd's urge to do inappropriate things with inappropriate hardware just is. You shouldn't question it, because sometimes the results are useful. Like the personal computer, for example.
The Wall Street Journal (and for the record, no, I'm not a subscriber... but that was all there was to read in the lunch room the other day... ) had an interesting take... Palm may be spun off to be able to get more and better employees.
The idea works like this: If you're a nerd living in Silicon Valley, you're going to go to a company that offers the best stock incentives. 3Com's stock now is, shall we say, not the best incentive there is. However, stock in a company that the soley Palm would be hotter, giving them better recruiting clout.
Interesting. I doubt this was the basis for the whole deal, but it may have played a part.
...with Lily Tomlin as a spokeswoman for the phone company:
"We'll sell your personal information if we feel like it. We'll privitize public information. We'll set up an e-mail account for you, without even asking, and make the password obvious. If you complain, we won't care. We don't have to. We're NSI."
Scary thing is, back then it was comedy. Now, it's the truth.
There's a plot for a neat thriller in this;) The guy who could overhear secret communications...
I wonder what other sort of bizarre communication techniques are being used. Perhaps there's some huge rigs someplace in the world thumping out morse code for a spy with a stethescope or seizmograph.
I don't know if I can hear the humming, the voices in my head tend to drown anything else out.
Sony and its licensees shall have the exclusive right, throughout the world, and shall have the exclusive right to authorize other persons, to create, maintain, and host any and all Web sites relating to the artist and to register and use the name '[artist name].com' and any variations thereof which embody the artist's name as Uniform Resource Locators (or 'URLs'), addresses, or domain names for each Web site created by Sony in respect of the artist... All such Web sites and all rights thereto and derived therefrom shall be Sony's property throughout the territory and in perpetuity."
That means that an artist cannot have any website of their own, even if they are quits with Sony. Forever. Whee. Makes software licensing terms look like a bargain, eh? If the future is what a lot of people think, music will primarily be distributed over the net. No webpage means no income.
I do doubt how enforceable it would be in reality. After all, clauses in employment contracts that require people not to work for a potential competitor for a year or so after leaving the company seldom seem to hold up. Even so, though, the threat of having to fight a major lawsuit before you can even start publishing your music again seems so daunting that it would keep artists in line. Which is really what Sony wants.
Anyone know how much investment there has been in Transmeta? The article only mentioned $20 mil, which has got to be just a small amount of what has been invested. Software startups eat that much in a year or so. God knows how much more overhead there is with a hardware startup, especially one that is 4 years old and located in the high-rent Silicon Valley.
I guess with the #3 $$$ guy on your side, funding is less of an issue. If they had to turn to investment bankers more, they would definitly have to give some details of what they are doing, and that increases the risk of something slipping out somehow.
Even so, after 4 years, it's probably getting towards the put-up-or-shutup (or shutdown) stage there.
The owner of veronica.org, in particular, had a claim on the domain because it was the name of her daughter. The ".org" deisgnation meant that the site was a non-profit entity (i.e. a baby, which, for the most part, is a non-profit venture). Therefore, the owners of Archie comics could not claim that the website was masquerading as their trademarked Veronica character. Ajax is the name of a figure in Greek mythology, and likewise, a ".org" site is not claiming to be a company with the trademark Ajax(tm). Were either of these sites a parody or made allusion to the trademarked materials (i.e. a pron cartoon site that featured a Veronica character similar to the one in Archie comics) then you might understand the lawsuit. This wasn't the case in either of these two.
gumby.org is more questionable, since that's the name specifically created by someone for a fictional character. If the owner of the web site were using it in a way that "lessened the brand identity" of Gumby (whatever that may mean) then the action might be considered slightly more reasonable.
In this case, these people have trademarked the word Linux presumably (we're not sure) to force others to pay for the right to call something Linux. Linux is not a common German term, so its obvious that the individuals have intentionally trademarked a term that they knew was being used to describe a particular software product. If their aims are to extort money, then it's pretty obvious that they are in the wrong.
In cases where a company has previously trademarked a term (or has trademarked a term in good faith, not knowing that another is currently using it) then you might excuse them if they try to enforce their trademark. I believe something of this sort happened with the WindowMaker window manager, where the original name of the project was actually a trademark of a software firm. As I recall, that firm didn't really try to enforce the trademark, but rather the author of WindowMaker decided to change the name of the project.
I suspect color would be difficult to pull off for Handspring, since they are just a liscensee of the Palm OS. I'm not sure if they have the source code (or the permission) to do the hacking that color support would require.
Also, would a dragonball processor be able to handle a color screen? I was under the impression that LCD control is tightly coupled to the dragonball.
I agree that good wireless would be a killer feature. And an improved screen (better resolution) would also help. I'll probably stick with my good old Palm 1000 (which has undergone three upgrades) for some time. Good to know, though, that there is a cheap alternative if my Pilot meets an untimely demise.
One thing that might help...
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Linux Lite?
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I think that the author's concerns could be addressed with probably a bit more work on Red Hat or Debian's part. With tools such as Linuxconfig, the ability to enable and disable demons is a mouse-click away. What naive users need is more information on just what they might need. I could see, for example, a naive user wanting a web server, but not an ftp site or a telnet server. A wizard-like interface that 1) explains what the capabilities of the software is 2) when you'd want to use it, and 3) what vulnerabilities it has would address the naive Linux user.
The thing that I'd really like to see is some sort of automated security updates. What this would entail is a demon that hits the distribution's web site (using secure channels and authentication) to see if there are any "emergency" updates to packages. If there are, the system can go ahead and automatically upgrade, or prompt the user to upgrade, or whatnot. The user would, obviously, choose at setup time whether the demon runs, and whether they will accept the automatic upgrades.
I know Mandrake has an update system that is invoked manually (I haven't tried it yet). A bit of an extension to the system could let you do these emergency security updates. Of course, sometimes upgrading a package is not fool-proof...
With DSL and cable modems, I think more people are going to end up running not just workstations, but also servers. I don't consider myself a sysadmin by any stretch, but when I get my cable modem, I do plan on having a PC on the net 24x7 to act as a personal web server, maybe an FTP server, perhaps a MUD, etc. While I know enough not to run demons I won't be using, I also don't want to live in fear that a security hole will be found and a script kiddie with exploit it on my system when I've got my back turned (say, when I'm on vacation). An automatic update system would be helpful.
Also, a security evaluation system would be handy, to determine if you have screwed up. The distros could encourage people to run these sorts of things on their PC's after they have set them up, to catch any of the obvious mistakes.
Computer experts have just determined that, after extensive testing, that the date 5/23/2001 will only occur once. "No computers have ever encountered such a date before," a noted computer expert said. "Who knows if they will work when they encounter it."
Already, several major firms have been created to certify systems an 5-23-01 ready. "People are urged to ensure that their banks, hospitals, and every other business they deal with are ready for this unprecidented event."
Basically, the game companies sell the consoles at cost, or close to it, in order to make money off of the games. An open console would mean they wouldn't make money on the hardware, and quite possibly would not make money on the software. Try selling that to your shareholders...
Companies that want to make games and don't want to pony up $$$ for an officially blessed console development system can still develop games for the PC. Of course, they then have the headache that their hardware platform is not standardized, but that's life.
I'm thinking that labeling a moderation "fair" or "unfair" is sort of nebulous. Is labeling a post "insightful" that you would have labeled as "funny" fair or unfair?
I guess I'm also not seeing the problem that meta moderation is supposed to fix. I guess what I have seen has been the troll floods that suck up moderation points, as demonstrated by the fair number of "first post!" or "XXX sux, you luzers!" posts lying around after several someones have made a moderation pass through.
Perhaps moderation points should be allocated on a per story basis, basd on the number of posts under the story? That way, moderators who come into a story that got troll flooded would have more points to moderate down the trolls and still have some to lift the gems above the waves. More posts, more points.
I dunno if the number of moderators are seleteced basedon the number of posts that currently exist, but it seems that we need some sort of mechanism to either draft more moderators or give the existing moderators more firepower. I know that sometimes, when I do get the heady call to be a moderator, I blow all my points on taking out trolls.
If sucky moderation needs to be fought, why not have a system whereby "counter moderation" affects the karma of a moderator? For example, suppose I moderate down a thoughtful, intelligent post that happens to point out a case where Microsoft doesn't quite suck as much as the average Linux proponent would like. Later, two other moderators come by, see I dinged the post not because it was a troll or off topic, but rather because I wanted to censor the opinion of the poster, and moderate the post back up. When the dust clears, the moderation system might note that two moderators thought I made a bad decision, and will therefore be less likely to make me a moderator.
Sure, it's not foolproof, but I think on the whole it would work a bit better than uber moderation. I mean, where does that end? Who will moderate the uber moderators? And who will moderate them? And so on... I'd day, just have a system where things, on the whole, work out so that good moderation is supported and bad moderation is discouraged.
Some form of alien Perrier that crashed to earth. I'm sure they are covering up the Truth! The horrible fact is... space *is* full of water, but it's all controlled by an evil race of yuppie pandering capitalists!
Heh... the top book bought by apple employees is Apple Confidential, the Real Story of Apple Computer, Inc. One would have expected them to already know the "Real Story" by virtute of them working there...
This, and the prevelence of Bill G's book in Microsoft's list, and the reported big sales of Pentium books at Intel, makes me think that these numbers are skewed by corporate purchases. It seems likely that Microsoft, Apple, and Intel would buy books about themselves/their products to hand out to people... I have to imagine that at a lot of Microsoft events, they'd be handing out the gospel according to Bill. Although, come to think of it, they'd probably have a better way to get it (i.e. straight from the publisher) than from Amazon. Hm.
Oh, and let me add the olbigatory: Ha ha... I shop at a non-chain bookstore which isn't going to divulge the Secret Plans of my company by letting you we're buying tons of quantum mechanic textbooks and books on breadbaking. Man if the competition found that out they'd realize we're... D'oh!
Re:64 processor shirt
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Wearable PCs
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Hmmm... not the sort of thing I'd want to wear in the summer. It's hot enough, without having 64 CPUs warming you up. What's the heat dissipation of the thing. Do you need to wear heatsink backpack?
Speaking of which, I hope it's waterproof. Hate to have a little sweat taking out the system.
Reminds me of the wicked with of the west... splah her with water and she'll scream "help me! I'm shorting! Shorting! aaaaaaauuuuug!"
Unlike WebTV, Embrowser Allows OEMs to Own the User Experience and Create Customized Embedded Solutions that Connect Users to the Internet via Enhanced Television Devices
Excuse me... "own the user experience"!? How about letting the user own his or her "user experience"? Makes it sound like some demented browser that you can craft to only browse what you want it to browse... Probably the stupid idea of some marketing droid.
FWIW, I believe I heard this on NPR... Someone was talking about approachable technologies, or something. I forget the gist of it, other than the fact that car companies for some reason didn't like the home mechanic. As I recall, it was more about the fact that technologies are supposed to be further out of the control of everyday people.
The guy could have been full of it. He made it sound like every technology today was beyond the grasp of anyone except the professional, although he did allow that maybe computers might be an exception. He seemed unaware of Linux, homebrew computers (both of the 70's build-it-chip-by-chip variety, and of the overclockers buy-a-board-and-tweak variety) etc.
I guess I chould check NPR's web site. I think it was a month or two ago.
Like I said, whatever is going to happen with the.18 is already determined. But do you know for sure that the.18 die does, in fact, connect up the pin needed for SMP?
I'm not sure what the turnaround time is on redesigns, and I'm not sure when the public caught wind of the SMP ability of Celerons. So, maybe Intel didn't have enough time to change the.18 dies if they were only made aware of the "problem" by harware hackers setting up SMP Celerons. There's still the possibility that they figured it out internally, and decided to kill the SMP ability without making any sort of announcement.
Intel is even now redesigning the Celeron line to take advantage of the new die size (.18?) and copper technology. I saw a story about how they are redesigning the leads from the chip to "shorten the electrical signal path" and so on. Since they are already futzing with those parts of the chip, it'll be simple for them to not connect the pin that allows SMP.
Which probably also means that this petition is moot, one way or the other. The 600 Mhz copper-based Celerons are supposedly due in a month or two. The deed is done.
SMP is probably safe in the older chips, though. It would cost them to break the current production runs to disable SMP. THey probably aren't going to go that far out of their way to disable it, but they probably will snip it, if they can do so during the regular course of chip production.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, did this make the "bad guys" to be the people who died in the accident? Yeah. They got what was coming to them, trying to hurt the career of a US military pilot. Bastards.
That brings up the problem with courtroom simulation (whether based on satillite data or otherwise): they're simulations. They leave out facts. Facts that could be important to the case (like the fact that the pilot's altimeter told him he wasn't climbing). A little bit of technical gee-whiz can cover up a whole lot of truth.
What's particularly galling in this case is that the simulation was necessary because the pilot destroyed the cockpit videotape that would have shown the jury what he saw. In particular, it would have shown clearly that while the mountain was apparently receding, the HUD display would have told him he was too low.
And, at $25,000 a pop for the defense, who do you think will really benefit from the technology? Think big bucks. Think OJ. It won't benefit your average defendant.
I wonder if, ultimately, taxes paid for the defense of the pilot. That would add insult to injury.
Win 95 *does* run fine under low-end systems. I've run it on a 66Mhz 486 with 16MB of RAM, which is pretty low-end these days. It was plenty unhappy with only 8 meg, though, resulting in a lot of hard drive thrashing. It didn't, however, crash... just slow as molasses.
Linux, in my experience, does run better on the lowest of the low (16Mhz 386sx... 6MB of RAM, had a BogoMIPs score of 8 or something like that). Granted, however, that was running without a GUI. I don't think Win95 would run well on that system, but then it can't really do without a GUI, unless you're just talking about running DOS (which is no match power-wise for Linux).
Generally, it's not the OS that kills your system, it's the apps. Linux runs OK on my 33Mhz 486sx laptop. Finding things to run on it, though, is a challenge. Netscape will thrash the drive for about a minute before it comes up. StarOffice probably wouldn't run at all. Older versions of Siag office ran OK (haven't tried it recently) and at least let me use it for light-duty word processing.
What was probably crashing your machine was some sort of misconfiguration, not a lack of processing power or memory. Lack of either just means the thing is slower, not crash-prone. Now, the fact that Windows got into a crash-prone state is something you can rightly hold against it.
Does IPV6 do anything about better authentication/security? Having more addresses is nice an all, so I can have my toaster on the Internet, but the last thing I want is to get a call about my toaster having cracked the Bank of America's system 'cause a script kiddie pulled it's IP out of a hat.
It seems to be there some sort of sane routing rules could be put into place with a new IP system, so a router could spot spoofed packets (then again, in some cases this could be done now, and I sort of doubt anyone does, probably based on the overhead).
Also, when they defined this sort of thing, did they give any consideration to the various attack methods that would be possible via IPv6? I suspect some of the issues we've seen in the past (i.e. Ping of Death) were caused because the protocol didn't suggest what to do in cases where the packet was malformed, or intentionally busted.
because if we did, this guy would be patrolling the streets at night, in his mighty suit of armor, protecting innocent civilians against the evils of... er... whatever supervillians happened to be around. Or something.
Of course, without a super-reactive neural-linked set of motors in that armor to give him super-strength, he'd be reduced to standing there chortling in a super-hero manner as they wasted all of their ammunition/strength on him. Then he'd end up vainly yelling at them to stop as they beat a hasty retreat.
>clunk!clunk!whew!CRASH!
And we'd call him "The Indestructable (but not wholly effective) Man!"
Reminds me of my experience moving from 6502 assembly hacking to a VAX 11/780. Gobs of registers. Multiply in the instruction set! Floating point multiply in the instruction set! String operations in the instruction set!
Heh. I aced that class, too. Pity I flunked the majority of the rest of them, though, else I'd be making way more bucks than I do now. Ahhh... mis-spent youth.
To keep this semi-on topic, I had actually thought, early today, about what Zilog was up to. I was thinking about my Osborne Executive, and how I'd better go and back up the OS disks for the thing, now that they are 15 years old... Weird that they are still making Z80's. For that matter, it's weird that they are still making 6502's (unless the gameboys switched to some other processor without me noticing). Funny how many of the intermediate processors aren't being fabbed anymore. Anyone still making 8086s (acutally, probably) 286s? 386s? 486s?
Man, how fast would a 6502 or Z80 go if you made it with 15 micron technology and a copper base?
1) I wonder if Hawkins & Co. didn't have some sort of card of their sleeve for this. Maybe, as a price for parting amicably, they got a license for the OS. It seems obvious now why Hawkins and Dubinsky bolted... they had a vision for the Palm that included expansion and driving the units down lower in the market. Palm itself seemed happy to be making expensive nerd toys. They probably had a good grip on the arms they needed to twist in order to get what they wanted. And, on the surface, licensing the OS doesn't seem like a dumb thing to do... expand the platform's acceptence, yaddah yaddah. It's only when Handspring proves they can make a better Palm than you for less money do you smakc yourself in the forhead and yell "d'oh!"
2) I dunno. I sort of doubt that Dubinsky and Hawkins would have been dumb enough to walk onto a plank that someone could snatch out from underneath them, though. They didn't make the Palm #1 by being dumb.
3) 'Cause it's neat? Cause you could link a whole lot of them together and get a Beowolf cluster less powerful than a standard desktop? The nerd's urge to do inappropriate things with inappropriate hardware just is. You shouldn't question it, because sometimes the results are useful. Like the personal computer, for example.
The Wall Street Journal (and for the record, no, I'm not a subscriber... but that was all there was to read in the lunch room the other day... ) had an interesting take... Palm may be spun off to be able to get more and better employees.
The idea works like this: If you're a nerd living in Silicon Valley, you're going to go to a company that offers the best stock incentives. 3Com's stock now is, shall we say, not the best incentive there is. However, stock in a company that the soley Palm would be hotter, giving them better recruiting clout.
Interesting. I doubt this was the basis for the whole deal, but it may have played a part.
...with Lily Tomlin as a spokeswoman for the phone company:
"We'll sell your personal information if we feel like it. We'll privitize public information. We'll set up an e-mail account for you, without even asking, and make the password obvious. If you complain, we won't care. We don't have to. We're NSI."
Scary thing is, back then it was comedy. Now, it's the truth.
Let's see... $12/minute for several hours (say 2) equals... $1440. Sheesh. No wonder the defense budget is so high. Get that guy a cell phone!
There's a plot for a neat thriller in this ;) The guy who could overhear secret communications...
I wonder what other sort of bizarre communication techniques are being used. Perhaps there's some huge rigs someplace in the world thumping out morse code for a spy with a stethescope or seizmograph.
I don't know if I can hear the humming, the voices in my head tend to drown anything else out.
If I read this correctly:
That means that an artist cannot have any website of their own, even if they are quits with Sony. Forever. Whee. Makes software licensing terms look like a bargain, eh? If the future is what a lot of people think, music will primarily be distributed over the net. No webpage means no income.
I do doubt how enforceable it would be in reality. After all, clauses in employment contracts that require people not to work for a potential competitor for a year or so after leaving the company seldom seem to hold up. Even so, though, the threat of having to fight a major lawsuit before you can even start publishing your music again seems so daunting that it would keep artists in line. Which is really what Sony wants.
Anyone know how much investment there has been in Transmeta? The article only mentioned $20 mil, which has got to be just a small amount of what has been invested. Software startups eat that much in a year or so. God knows how much more overhead there is with a hardware startup, especially one that is 4 years old and located in the high-rent Silicon Valley.
I guess with the #3 $$$ guy on your side, funding is less of an issue. If they had to turn to investment bankers more, they would definitly have to give some details of what they are doing, and that increases the risk of something slipping out somehow.
Even so, after 4 years, it's probably getting towards the put-up-or-shutup (or shutdown) stage there.
Well, it's a matter of intention.
The owner of veronica.org, in particular, had a claim on the domain because it was the name of her daughter. The ".org" deisgnation meant that the site was a non-profit entity (i.e. a baby, which, for the most part, is a non-profit venture). Therefore, the owners of Archie comics could not claim that the website was masquerading as their trademarked Veronica character. Ajax is the name of a figure in Greek mythology, and likewise, a ".org" site is not claiming to be a company with the trademark Ajax(tm). Were either of these sites a parody or made allusion to the trademarked materials (i.e. a pron cartoon site that featured a Veronica character similar to the one in Archie comics) then you might understand the lawsuit. This wasn't the case in either of these two.
gumby.org is more questionable, since that's the name specifically created by someone for a fictional character. If the owner of the web site were using it in a way that "lessened the brand identity" of Gumby (whatever that may mean) then the action might be considered slightly more reasonable.
In this case, these people have trademarked the word Linux presumably (we're not sure) to force others to pay for the right to call something Linux. Linux is not a common German term, so its obvious that the individuals have intentionally trademarked a term that they knew was being used to describe a particular software product. If their aims are to extort money, then it's pretty obvious that they are in the wrong.
In cases where a company has previously trademarked a term (or has trademarked a term in good faith, not knowing that another is currently using it) then you might excuse them if they try to enforce their trademark. I believe something of this sort happened with the WindowMaker window manager, where the original name of the project was actually a trademark of a software firm. As I recall, that firm didn't really try to enforce the trademark, but rather the author of WindowMaker decided to change the name of the project.
I suspect color would be difficult to pull off for Handspring, since they are just a liscensee of the Palm OS. I'm not sure if they have the source code (or the permission) to do the hacking that color support would require.
Also, would a dragonball processor be able to handle a color screen? I was under the impression that LCD control is tightly coupled to the dragonball.
I agree that good wireless would be a killer feature. And an improved screen (better resolution) would also help. I'll probably stick with my good old Palm 1000 (which has undergone three upgrades) for some time. Good to know, though, that there is a cheap alternative if my Pilot meets an untimely demise.
I think that the author's concerns could be addressed with probably a bit more work on Red Hat or Debian's part. With tools such as Linuxconfig, the ability to enable and disable demons is a mouse-click away. What naive users need is more information on just what they might need. I could see, for example, a naive user wanting a web server, but not an ftp site or a telnet server. A wizard-like interface that 1) explains what the capabilities of the software is 2) when you'd want to use it, and 3) what vulnerabilities it has would address the naive Linux user.
The thing that I'd really like to see is some sort of automated security updates. What this would entail is a demon that hits the distribution's web site (using secure channels and authentication) to see if there are any "emergency" updates to packages. If there are, the system can go ahead and automatically upgrade, or prompt the user to upgrade, or whatnot. The user would, obviously, choose at setup time whether the demon runs, and whether they will accept the automatic upgrades.
I know Mandrake has an update system that is invoked manually (I haven't tried it yet). A bit of an extension to the system could let you do these emergency security updates. Of course, sometimes upgrading a package is not fool-proof...
With DSL and cable modems, I think more people are going to end up running not just workstations, but also servers. I don't consider myself a sysadmin by any stretch, but when I get my cable modem, I do plan on having a PC on the net 24x7 to act as a personal web server, maybe an FTP server, perhaps a MUD, etc. While I know enough not to run demons I won't be using, I also don't want to live in fear that a security hole will be found and a script kiddie with exploit it on my system when I've got my back turned (say, when I'm on vacation). An automatic update system would be helpful.
Also, a security evaluation system would be handy, to determine if you have screwed up. The distros could encourage people to run these sorts of things on their PC's after they have set them up, to catch any of the obvious mistakes.
Computer experts have just determined that, after extensive testing, that the date 5/23/2001 will only occur once. "No computers have ever encountered such a date before," a noted computer expert said. "Who knows if they will work when they encounter it."
Already, several major firms have been created to certify systems an 5-23-01 ready. "People are urged to ensure that their banks, hospitals, and every other business they deal with are ready for this unprecidented event."
Basically, the game companies sell the consoles at cost, or close to it, in order to make money off of the games. An open console would mean they wouldn't make money on the hardware, and quite possibly would not make money on the software. Try selling that to your shareholders...
Companies that want to make games and don't want to pony up $$$ for an officially blessed console development system can still develop games for the PC. Of course, they then have the headache that their hardware platform is not standardized, but that's life.
I'm thinking that labeling a moderation "fair" or "unfair" is sort of nebulous. Is labeling a post "insightful" that you would have labeled as "funny" fair or unfair?
I guess I'm also not seeing the problem that meta moderation is supposed to fix. I guess what I have seen has been the troll floods that suck up moderation points, as demonstrated by the fair number of "first post!" or "XXX sux, you luzers!" posts lying around after several someones have made a moderation pass through.
Perhaps moderation points should be allocated on a per story basis, basd on the number of posts under the story? That way, moderators who come into a story that got troll flooded would have more points to moderate down the trolls and still have some to lift the gems above the waves. More posts, more points.
I dunno if the number of moderators are seleteced basedon the number of posts that currently exist, but it seems that we need some sort of mechanism to either draft more moderators or give the existing moderators more firepower. I know that sometimes, when I do get the heady call to be a moderator, I blow all my points on taking out trolls.
If sucky moderation needs to be fought, why not have a system whereby "counter moderation" affects the karma of a moderator? For example, suppose I moderate down a thoughtful, intelligent post that happens to point out a case where Microsoft doesn't quite suck as much as the average Linux proponent would like. Later, two other moderators come by, see I dinged the post not because it was a troll or off topic, but rather because I wanted to censor the opinion of the poster, and moderate the post back up. When the dust clears, the moderation system might note that two moderators thought I made a bad decision, and will therefore be less likely to make me a moderator.
Sure, it's not foolproof, but I think on the whole it would work a bit better than uber moderation. I mean, where does that end? Who will moderate the uber moderators? And who will moderate them? And so on... I'd day, just have a system where things, on the whole, work out so that good moderation is supported and bad moderation is discouraged.
Some form of alien Perrier that crashed to earth. I'm sure they are covering up the Truth! The horrible fact is... space *is* full of water, but it's all controlled by an evil race of yuppie pandering capitalists!
The truth is out there. And it's carbonated!
Heh... the top book bought by apple employees is Apple Confidential, the Real Story of Apple Computer, Inc. One would have expected them to already know the "Real Story" by virtute of them working there...
This, and the prevelence of Bill G's book in Microsoft's list, and the reported big sales of Pentium books at Intel, makes me think that these numbers are skewed by corporate purchases. It seems likely that Microsoft, Apple, and Intel would buy books about themselves/their products to hand out to people... I have to imagine that at a lot of Microsoft events, they'd be handing out the gospel according to Bill. Although, come to think of it, they'd probably have a better way to get it (i.e. straight from the publisher) than from Amazon. Hm.
Oh, and let me add the olbigatory: Ha ha... I shop at a non-chain bookstore which isn't going to divulge the Secret Plans of my company by letting you we're buying tons of quantum mechanic textbooks and books on breadbaking. Man if the competition found that out they'd realize we're... D'oh!
Hmmm... not the sort of thing I'd want to wear in the summer. It's hot enough, without having 64 CPUs warming you up. What's the heat dissipation of the thing. Do you need to wear heatsink backpack?
Speaking of which, I hope it's waterproof. Hate to have a little sweat taking out the system.
Reminds me of the wicked with of the west... splah her with water and she'll scream "help me! I'm shorting! Shorting! aaaaaaauuuuug!"
From their press release:
Excuse me... "own the user experience"!? How about letting the user own his or her "user experience"? Makes it sound like some demented browser that you can craft to only browse what you want it to browse... Probably the stupid idea of some marketing droid.
Where did you hear this?
FWIW, I believe I heard this on NPR... Someone was talking about approachable technologies, or something. I forget the gist of it, other than the fact that car companies for some reason didn't like the home mechanic. As I recall, it was more about the fact that technologies are supposed to be further out of the control of everyday people.
The guy could have been full of it. He made it sound like every technology today was beyond the grasp of anyone except the professional, although he did allow that maybe computers might be an exception. He seemed unaware of Linux, homebrew computers (both of the 70's build-it-chip-by-chip variety, and of the overclockers buy-a-board-and-tweak variety) etc.
I guess I chould check NPR's web site. I think it was a month or two ago.
Like I said, whatever is going to happen with the .18 is already determined. But do you know for sure that the .18 die does, in fact, connect up the pin needed for SMP?
.18 dies if they were only made aware of the "problem" by harware hackers setting up SMP Celerons. There's still the possibility that they figured it out internally, and decided to kill the SMP ability without making any sort of announcement.
I'm not sure what the turnaround time is on redesigns, and I'm not sure when the public caught wind of the SMP ability of Celerons. So, maybe Intel didn't have enough time to change the
Time will tell.
Intel is even now redesigning the Celeron line to take advantage of the new die size (.18?) and copper technology. I saw a story about how they are redesigning the leads from the chip to "shorten the electrical signal path" and so on. Since they are already futzing with those parts of the chip, it'll be simple for them to not connect the pin that allows SMP.
Which probably also means that this petition is moot, one way or the other. The 600 Mhz copper-based Celerons are supposedly due in a month or two. The deed is done.
SMP is probably safe in the older chips, though. It would cost them to break the current production runs to disable SMP. THey probably aren't going to go that far out of their way to disable it, but they probably will snip it, if they can do so during the regular course of chip production.