Sure, the tech is cheap and relatively disposable, but is moving every feature but the kitchen sink into the cellphone really the way to do it?
I've got a co-worker, our Oracle admin, who's blind. As things stand, with most cell phones he can't do anything except dial out and answer calls. He can't use the built-in address book to place calls for example, because all of the info is in text on a tiny screen. With text-to-speech software on the phone, he'd be able to use the address book just like sighted folks, read text messages he received earlier even when he's in an area with no coverage just like sighted folks, and so on. This is a good idea.
You can already do this. You can trace email. You can block email from those you don't know. And this system won't work to block email worms because usually they come from people who you know.
Actually, it's almost certainly the case that these things get started by a very small number of anonymous messages. So an option to refuse to open attachments from folks not in your address book, coupled with the default for that option being to have it turned on, might actually do a significant bit of good.
Better yet, rather than having an obfuscated Pascal contest, why not have an APL clarity contest. Give prizes to the folks best able to make a clear, maintainable, understandable program in APL. Modern APL varients that use a readable character set will not be permitted (it's not APL if you don't have the domino and triangle in your character set).
Check out the history of the first subway system in NYC.
The folks who built it wanted to build a subway. But, they couldn't get permission. So, they instead got permission to build a pneumatic tube network (commonly used to exchange documents and such).
Once they'd gotten it, they slowly made it wider and bigger until it could carry subway cars. Then they sprung a pneumatic subway on the city, and the folks who denied permission for the original subway couldn't really do anything but sit there sputtering.
That was a *great* hack, technologically and of the legal system!
(I got the info from a documentary on the History channel, btw.)
Wow, that's really cool! And the pictures are good enough that I was able to decipher the elvish script, and I remember the ring inscription phonetically, so I can tell you they actually got it right! I may have to get the silver one.
Actually, you didn't cover the big reason *I* use Netscape on Windows.
Roaming access profiles.
I can sit down at different Windows boxes, a Linux box, a Macintosh, or even the same machine when it reboots between Win98 and WinNT, and use the same user profile (it's stored on a server). This is a must-have feature for me now, since I work at home and at the office, and at the office I switch between machines a *lot*.
One of the things I remember back from my days when I was tinkering with SunOS 3.4 and Ultrix and IBM's AOS (not AIX) was that many BSDish Unixes would write what were basically kernel "core dumps" to the swap partition when they died (I may be getting details wrong -- might not have been swap file, might not have been all those OSes, etc.). Sophisticated gurus could then fix things. (Back in those days I was not enough of a guru to do this myself, but I lived and worked with people who were.)
I think it's *wonderful* that a facility like this is coming to Linux. It makes me much more enthusiastic about taking on kernel hacking myself.
But out of fairness I do have to ask... don't the BSDoid operating systems already have this?
And it's a little embarassing to point out that NT has something like this as well.
I like to pick off-the-wall name schemes that result in individual names that aren't neccesarily that odd.
The name scheme I use for my domain (aisb.org) is "characters from fiction who were false gods within that fiction".
My main web server is "Zardoz" (from the Sean Connery movie of the same name; in the movie, a false god chose it as a name in reference to the "wiZARD of OZ").
I have a machine at home that dual-boots between Linux and NT, and has a different address based on what it's running (so my other systems don't look for services that aren't there when it's lobotomized). It alternates between "Valen" (Linux) and "Sinclair" (NT).
I have a laptop, and it's really light, so I named it after the false Budda from Zelazny's "Lord of Light". It's Mahasamatman, or "sam" for short.
I once set up Linux on an SE/30 to work as a router. I named it "Legba" -- not after the real Legba, but after the AI from the Gibson cyberpunk novels.
At the office, our naming scheme is "people who died rich and insane". We're very flexible about this. For example, after Steve Jobs killed the NeXT machine, the Newton, and Mac clones, we decided "he's dead to us", so our NeXT print server was named "steve". Our SPARC is named Tesla (he liked to throw sparks), our main print server is named Theresa (Mother Theresa was certainly rich in life experience, at least, and seemed to live to serve others)...
I have no problem considering "cracked" to mean "obtained inapropriate access to". So, it would work for both unprotecting software and modifying someone's web site.
Well, I've always heard that Microsoft never gets any product right until version 3. Maybe for Windows CE 3.0, making it Open Source is part of getting it right.
If so, it might be worth it for some folks, just for development and testing of 64-bit Sparc ports. You don't need speed for this -- that's why I'm happy with my Multia even though it's a snail when compared to other Alphas.
If I have to spend $10k to support 64-bit Sparc, I won't. If I only have to spend $2k, I might.
Any time, IMHO, something is exploited based on a known, corrected bug, then its the fault of the person driving, not the car (so to speak); if GM issues a recall, and you don't go get your car fixed and then the next day you get in a wreck and something bad happens as a result of the defect, ITS YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT (unless it happened on the way to the dealership, I guess) and not the fault of the car.
It is not that simple.
If a software vendor knows about a problem, and there's an obscure web page that documents it, and most peoples' attention is not drawn to that web page, it is the vendor's fault. I'm not saying things are this bad in this case, but I am saying the mere existence of knowledge about a bug and the mere availability of a fix are not sufficient.
There ought to be an "update wizard" that, at the end of the install process once the network has been brought up, checks a central repository for security updates and downloads them. It would probably be good if there were a cron job that re-ran this utility from time to time and sent mail to root when uninstalled updates were available. Then any such failures would clearly be the fault of the folks doing the install.
Who really cares how long it takes, just make it simple...
Remember, most Windows installs require you to sit there and hit "OK" over and over. Given that, the duration sure does matter...
Re:Diamond Age, Van Eck, locus
on
Smart Dust
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· Score: 1
Having the motes only communicate with peers will also not work. Just use a Faraday cage or RF jammer or something, and they're blown away. Which makes me think it's only useful for spying on *civilians*.
Now, if the things didn't communicate at *all*, but could store information and then physically travel to a "drop point" to deliver that information, without using RF at all, that would be something.
As I understand it, Alaska is the only state with a state constitution that values privacy. The federal constitution does not.
So, the only privacy laws in most places are from the legislature, and they can thus be overruled by constitutional concerns, international treaties, and further legislature.
Keep in mind that their patent doesn't cover every GIF. It only covers images that use LZW compression. Not every GIF does.
In particular, a 1-pixel GIF can't have its pixelmap or color table be compressed (each has exactly one entry -- can't compress that). So, it looks like no 1-pixel GIF actually uses LZW compression, so there should be no danger.
This is a really great development. We've already had PostgreSQL as a really free database. But, it's tuned for a particular type of application. It has full transactional support, it's object-relational, and so on. It's got all these features, and as a result, it can't be as fast as a database that doesn't have them. Now we've got MySQL as a really free database. It's tuned for a completely distinct type of application. If you don't need the transactional properties of complex multi-table operations, but you do need a blazingly fast lightweight database, you now have a choice. I plan on using both. It may even be time to look at combining them for some applications. For an example of a mixture that might make sense, consider a shopping cart system that used PostgreSQL for stuff like inventory and customer records (lots of requirements but not updated as often), but which used MySQL to contain current live shopping cart content data (simpler contents but potentially updated on almost every web page hit). And now both databases are free. Cool!
Bandwidth to Pluto isn't neccesarily going to be all that bad. Latency is what's going to suck. If it takes you 30 seconds to get a packet from point A to point B... that tells you nothing at all about the bandwidth. This is nonintuitive to some people. A common saying back when usenet was done via UUCP instead of TCP/IP was "it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag tapes". A station wagon full of media has a *tremendous* bandwidth, but really poor latency and a huge "packet size". UUCP is actually more suited to interplanetary communications than TCP/IP is. Luckily, we've got some great tools for getting UUCP networks and TCP/IP networks to play together nicely -- mail and news will work without a hitch over UUCP, even today. And MX records mean never having to say "I hate bang paths".
The answers here don't suprise me. If you've decided to use a widget set and not a whole complex environment, the odds are you've decided to make things more lightweight. Well, GTK is just plain C under the hood, and Qt is C++ under the hood. I don't think many people would disagree with the assertion that GTK is more lightweight than Qt. If you've decided to use a whole environment, you're more likely to be doing really complicated things in C++. Given that, there's less reason to select GNOME instead of KDE. Also, I can easily believe that there are people interested in using GTK without GNOME, but fewer people interested in using Qt without KDE. So, the results seem perfectly consistent to me.
In order to get a patent, you have to fully disclose the thing being patented. That's the whole point.
Coca-Cola keeps their formula secret. It's a "trade secret". They do *not* have a patent on it. You can't have both patent and trade-secret protection for the same intellectual property.
Transmeta may have some patents. Those patents may be part of a *larger* thing that we don't know about, but the entirety of the processes that're covered by those patents are disclosed fully.
I didn't expect to read an article on "old computers" that discussed 386 systems.
In my house right now I've got a TRS-80 (Z80), a DEC Pro/350 (PDP-11/23), a Sun 2/170 (68010), and an AT&T PC6300 (8086). *Those* are old. I might even agree that my Mac SE/30 (68030, but no 32-bit-clean ROM) is old.
But a 486?
I run my main mail/news/web server (for aisb.org) on a 486 (admittedly with 40M of RAM), and it runs just fine. My laptop is a 25MHz 486SL, and it's usable (with Linux, not with Windows) as well.
(Of course, I'm a geezer at 31, so my perspective on "old" may differ.)
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I've got a co-worker, our Oracle admin, who's blind. As things stand, with most cell phones he can't do anything except dial out and answer calls. He can't use the built-in address book to place calls for example, because all of the info is in text on a tiny screen. With text-to-speech software on the phone, he'd be able to use the address book just like sighted folks, read text messages he received earlier even when he's in an area with no coverage just like sighted folks, and so on. This is a good idea.
Actually, it's almost certainly the case that these things get started by a very small number of anonymous messages. So an option to refuse to open attachments from folks not in your address book, coupled with the default for that option being to have it turned on, might actually do a significant bit of good.
Better yet, rather than having an obfuscated Pascal contest, why not have an APL clarity contest. Give prizes to the folks best able to make a clear, maintainable, understandable program in APL. Modern APL varients that use a readable character set will not be permitted (it's not APL if you don't have the domino and triangle in your character set).
Heck, what I want to know is the impact this is going to have on "Farscape".
Check out the history of the first subway system in NYC.
The folks who built it wanted to build a subway. But, they couldn't get permission. So, they instead got permission to build a pneumatic tube network (commonly used to exchange documents and such).
Once they'd gotten it, they slowly made it wider and bigger until it could carry subway cars. Then they sprung a pneumatic subway on the city, and the folks who denied permission for the original subway couldn't really do anything but sit there sputtering.
That was a *great* hack, technologically and of the legal system!
(I got the info from a documentary on the History channel, btw.)
Wow, that's really cool! And the pictures are good enough that I was able to decipher the elvish script, and I remember the ring inscription phonetically, so I can tell you they actually got it right! I may have to get the silver one.
Linux is much more of a moving target than BeOS. It's probably considerably easier to get this working on BeOS than on Linux.
Remember, BeOS *does* have a POSIX layer which can be used -- and it changes less often than libc/glibc.
Actually, you didn't cover the big reason *I* use Netscape on Windows.
Roaming access profiles.
I can sit down at different Windows boxes, a Linux box, a Macintosh, or even the same machine when it reboots between Win98 and WinNT, and use the same user profile (it's stored on a server). This is a must-have feature for me now, since I work at home and at the office, and at the office I switch between machines a *lot*.
One of the things I remember back from my days when I was tinkering with SunOS 3.4 and Ultrix and IBM's AOS (not AIX) was that many BSDish Unixes would write what were basically kernel "core dumps" to the swap partition when they died (I may be getting details wrong -- might not have been swap file, might not have been all those OSes, etc.). Sophisticated gurus could then fix things. (Back in those days I was not enough of a guru to do this myself, but I lived and worked with people who were.)
I think it's *wonderful* that a facility like this is coming to Linux. It makes me much more enthusiastic about taking on kernel hacking myself.
But out of fairness I do have to ask... don't the BSDoid operating systems already have this?
And it's a little embarassing to point out that NT has something like this as well.
I like to pick off-the-wall name schemes that result in individual names that aren't neccesarily that odd.
The name scheme I use for my domain (aisb.org) is "characters from fiction who were false gods within that fiction".
My main web server is "Zardoz" (from the Sean Connery movie of the same name; in the movie, a false god chose it as a name in reference to the "wiZARD of OZ").
I have a machine at home that dual-boots between Linux and NT, and has a different address based on what it's running (so my other systems don't look for services that aren't there when it's lobotomized). It alternates between "Valen" (Linux) and "Sinclair" (NT).
I have a laptop, and it's really light, so I named it after the false Budda from Zelazny's "Lord of Light". It's Mahasamatman, or "sam" for short.
I once set up Linux on an SE/30 to work as a router. I named it "Legba" -- not after the real Legba, but after the AI from the Gibson cyberpunk novels.
At the office, our naming scheme is "people who died rich and insane". We're very flexible about this. For example, after Steve Jobs killed the NeXT machine, the Newton, and Mac clones, we decided "he's dead to us", so our NeXT print server was named "steve". Our SPARC is named Tesla (he liked to throw sparks), our main print server is named Theresa (Mother Theresa was certainly rich in life experience, at least, and seemed to live to serve others)...
I have no problem considering "cracked" to mean "obtained inapropriate access to". So, it would work for both unprotecting software and modifying someone's web site.
Well, I've always heard that Microsoft never gets any product right until version 3. Maybe for Windows CE 3.0, making it Open Source is part of getting it right.
I showed the picture to a friend of mine, who immediately understood that the corkscrew was for celebrating IPOs.
Is this thing a 64-bit Sparc?
If so, it might be worth it for some folks, just for development and testing of 64-bit Sparc ports. You don't need speed for this -- that's why I'm happy with my Multia even though it's a snail when compared to other Alphas.
If I have to spend $10k to support 64-bit Sparc, I won't. If I only have to spend $2k, I might.
Any time, IMHO, something is exploited based on a known, corrected bug, then its the fault of the person driving, not the car (so to speak); if GM issues a recall, and you don't go get your car fixed and then the next day you get in a wreck and something bad happens as a result of the defect, ITS YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT (unless it happened on the way to the dealership, I guess) and not the fault of the car.
It is not that simple.
If a software vendor knows about a problem, and there's an obscure web page that documents it, and most peoples' attention is not drawn to that web page, it is the vendor's fault. I'm not saying things are this bad in this case, but I am saying the mere existence of knowledge about a bug and the mere availability of a fix are not sufficient.
There ought to be an "update wizard" that, at the end of the install process once the network has been brought up, checks a central repository for security updates and downloads them. It would probably be good if there were a cron job that re-ran this utility from time to time and sent mail to root when uninstalled updates were available. Then any such failures would clearly be the fault of the folks doing the install.
I note that the article says that a complete system crash is also called a "blue screen of death".
Does this bug appear under any OS other than NT? Does anyone else thing this sounds more like a bug in NT than in the chip?
Remember, most Windows installs require you to sit there and hit "OK" over and over. Given that, the duration sure does matter...
Having the motes only communicate with peers will also not work. Just use a Faraday cage or RF jammer or something, and they're blown away. Which makes me think it's only useful for spying on *civilians*.
Now, if the things didn't communicate at *all*, but could store information and then physically travel to a "drop point" to deliver that information, without using RF at all, that would be something.
As I understand it, Alaska is the only state with a state constitution that values privacy. The federal constitution does not.
So, the only privacy laws in most places are from the legislature, and they can thus be overruled by constitutional concerns, international treaties, and further legislature.
Keep in mind that their patent doesn't cover every GIF. It only covers images that use LZW compression. Not every GIF does.
In particular, a 1-pixel GIF can't have its pixelmap or color table be compressed (each has exactly one entry -- can't compress that). So, it looks like no 1-pixel GIF actually uses LZW compression, so there should be no danger.
This is a really great development. We've already had PostgreSQL as a really free database. But, it's tuned for a particular type of application. It has full transactional support, it's object-relational, and so on. It's got all these features, and as a result, it can't be as fast as a database that doesn't have them. Now we've got MySQL as a really free database. It's tuned for a completely distinct type of application. If you don't need the transactional properties of complex multi-table operations, but you do need a blazingly fast lightweight database, you now have a choice. I plan on using both. It may even be time to look at combining them for some applications. For an example of a mixture that might make sense, consider a shopping cart system that used PostgreSQL for stuff like inventory and customer records (lots of requirements but not updated as often), but which used MySQL to contain current live shopping cart content data (simpler contents but potentially updated on almost every web page hit). And now both databases are free. Cool!
Bandwidth to Pluto isn't neccesarily going to be all that bad. Latency is what's going to suck. If it takes you 30 seconds to get a packet from point A to point B... that tells you nothing at all about the bandwidth. This is nonintuitive to some people. A common saying back when usenet was done via UUCP instead of TCP/IP was "it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag tapes". A station wagon full of media has a *tremendous* bandwidth, but really poor latency and a huge "packet size". UUCP is actually more suited to interplanetary communications than TCP/IP is. Luckily, we've got some great tools for getting UUCP networks and TCP/IP networks to play together nicely -- mail and news will work without a hitch over UUCP, even today. And MX records mean never having to say "I hate bang paths".
The answers here don't suprise me. If you've decided to use a widget set and not a whole complex environment, the odds are you've decided to make things more lightweight. Well, GTK is just plain C under the hood, and Qt is C++ under the hood. I don't think many people would disagree with the assertion that GTK is more lightweight than Qt. If you've decided to use a whole environment, you're more likely to be doing really complicated things in C++. Given that, there's less reason to select GNOME instead of KDE. Also, I can easily believe that there are people interested in using GTK without GNOME, but fewer people interested in using Qt without KDE. So, the results seem perfectly consistent to me.
In order to get a patent, you have to fully disclose the thing being patented. That's the whole point.
Coca-Cola keeps their formula secret. It's a "trade secret". They do *not* have a patent on it. You can't have both patent and trade-secret protection for the same intellectual property.
Transmeta may have some patents. Those patents may be part of a *larger* thing that we don't know about, but the entirety of the processes that're covered by those patents are disclosed fully.
I didn't expect to read an article on "old computers" that discussed 386 systems.
In my house right now I've got a TRS-80 (Z80), a DEC Pro/350 (PDP-11/23), a Sun 2/170 (68010), and an AT&T PC6300 (8086). *Those* are old. I might even agree that my Mac SE/30 (68030, but no 32-bit-clean ROM) is old.
But a 486?
I run my main mail/news/web server (for aisb.org) on a 486 (admittedly with 40M of RAM), and it runs just fine. My laptop is a 25MHz 486SL, and it's usable (with Linux, not with Windows) as well.
(Of course, I'm a geezer at 31, so my perspective on "old" may differ.)