I've heard and read of enough problems with restoring complex transactional data structures that I can imagine this situation is far more complex than many believe.
What I'd love to see is a full post-mortem, a lesser version of that the NTSB does for airplane crashes.
Google's been doing some of this for their (too frequent) outages, but they've very high level -- typically something about a system reconfig overloading a router. The Cloud user base needs a far greater level of error exposure.
It took openness and in depth analysis to make air travel safe.
The Cloud won't be safe until we learn the same kind of lessons, and apply what we learn in new and improved systems.
For our younger children, we read everything. So far they haven't gotten much traffic.
We have a google apps family domain, all incoming messages are forwarded to my wife's email for review in addition to being available for IMAP.
The children don't know the google apps email password, they access their email through OS X Mail.app running on the family workstation.
All sent messages also go through the google apps gmail account, so we can log in and review all email traffic there.
As they get older we'll look at other options. Some of our children are special needs and thus vulnerable, they may have monitored email for a much longer time.
We fund special education for several reasons, one of which is to minimize adult economic dependency and disability. That is a clear social good. A secondary motivation is compassion for people who've been very significantly disadvantaged. This funding includes high IQ persons with disabilities such as Asperger's, autism, etc.
I'm not aware of any data showing that a significant number of "geniuses" (a fuzzy concept, I've met only a few true geniuses, and that group included Richard Feynman) are economically dependent. I'm even more skeptical that a significant number of people with IQs over 140, in the absence of qualifying conditions (ADD, autism, etc) are disadvantaged. Let's not use MENSA as a guide, I don't think that's a representative body.
I would even wager that we could eliminate 25% of the school day for high IQ students and have minimal impact on any kind of outcomes. I happen to know a fair number of high IQ adults, and I have not seen any correlation between the "quality" of their early education and their outcomes. The greater impact, by far, is the wealth of their parents -- and that primarily manifests not as economic rather than absolute relative outcomes. For example: family physician vs. partner in prestigious law firm.
If it supports a redirect or forwarding then the lock-in is less onerous. You shouldn't rely on a school email address anyway, it typically goes away when you graduate, transfer, leave, etc. Gmail is quite excellent; my mother uses it with OS X Mail.app and has no idea that a web interface to her mail exists.
The bigger problem is that Microsoft will then move more and more of their infrastructure into this environment, locking out other alternatives. I suspect the next big lock-in would be their music and video infrastructure. That's what I'd do if I were them. Sooner or later they'll seize the college music scene, and then squeeze Apple to the margins.
I don't see anything to do about it. Microsoft's monopoly and revenues is an almost irresistible force. You can thank George Bush for that... (the least of his sins).
Ahh, yes. I recall those days well. Microsoft had strong-FUD then, and the market turned from Palm. They panicked even as they were distracted by dotCom dreams. Quality went down the tubes. They never revised a multi-user desktop environment built for Win98 when a true multi-user OS (XP) came out. Indeed, multi-user support was miserable with conflicting conduits. Heaven forbid one family member should have a CLIE! Worst of all were the deep and irreconcialable data model conflicts with Exchange server -- once Exchange destroyed all competition Palm was out in the cold. I trace my hair loss directly to Palm synchronization issues with Exchange server.
Then there are little things, like categories in appointments. Fixed yes, but far too late. Or the disastrous shift from Grafitti One to G2 after the initial loss to Xerox.
I very much need/want a pocketable computer, which still means stylus and pen driven. Alas, I am a market of One. I'll have to make do with whatever is provided for the mass market, but I've a feeling I won't like it much.
Bravo! I know some very smart people, and I think I can spot 'em. Cringely is very, very smart. I read him religiously. Sure he gets a little whacky (retinal painting VR headset to be delivered in Nov 2005?) but I find that entertaining. Creative, smart people do that sort of thing.
Slashdot's noise/value ratio is really deteriorating. Maybe we need an experimental filtering method that would take a different approach to attaching ratings to comments. We could then decide if we wanted to filter on the current system or the new system. How about only old people (30+) could rate articles?
In the new system my ratings would be very important:-).
Palm and digi-cam users have dealt with this for over a decade. Go to Radio Shack or a camera shop or somewhere that sells PDAs and buy a package of clear tough mildly adherent cover material. Cut to fit screen. Apply. Renew every few months.
Problem resolved.
By next Friday there will vendors selling them packaged and elegantly cut for the Nano display.
When I teach about data interfaces in healthcare systems, and the complexity of integration, I compare Palm original representation of a 'contact' with Outlook/Exchange server's representation. The complexity (non-computable complexity in some areas) of synchronizing between these two was a huge problem for Palm. I'm not sure when they figured out how much trouble they were in, but once Microsoft took over the enterprise with Exchange server Palm's fate was pretty much sealed.
In later versions of the OS they tried to better match Outlook's data models, but they botched the software layer that provided some backwards compatibility (arguably they should have given up on the backwards compatibility, they ended up with the worst of two options).
Linux on the Palm is not as important, really, as matching the Exchange server data model.
Synchronization is a problem that's been grossly underestimated in many quarters. It often requires a fuzzy non-deterministic reconciliation of semantic models; the same challenge that Berners-Lee addresses in the context of the semantic web. This issue is a major part (along with some perverse economics) of why healthcare IT projects are so difficult.
I hope Palm now understands these issues, I fear that much of their intellectual capital may have moved on.
PS. The above aside, I do agree Palm completely lost track of issues like reliability, simplicity (though that can be illusory -- per above), and pocketability. Stylist revisions to the stylus slot to maximize stylus revenue was a classic foolish decision representative of many business errors.
Back in the 1980s I wrote a letter to Scientific American complaining about their spelling of Caltech.
They wrote back and told me I was wrong -- the official abbreviation is Cal Tech. Sigh. At least as of 1980 they were right and I was wrong.
I doubt that's changed.
We all used Caltech (t-shirts, stationery, etc) -- but technically it's probably still Cal Tech.
In the 80s we did use CIT on occasion.
As to the MIT/Caltech comparisons, I think most people who know both would agree that the 'top 120 SAT scorers' in an MIT class are very comparable in personality and academic inclinations to a Caltech class (used to be about 120). MIT, however, has another pool of students that's more diverse and not as physics-focused as the Caltech students. I do think we were (still are based on the single visit I've made back there in 25 years) the geekiest student body that ever lived. (When I was a member of the Caltech Y I championed a "Nerd Pride" event. If you can't beat it...)
Oh lord, how I hope you are wrong. My opinion is no guide to the market, but I'll venture it as an opinion of one.
Caveat: Faughnan's Law says that if I have a defined need, marketers should run screaming in the opposite direction. I am representative of a less than tiny sliver of the market. So I'm not exactly contradicting Danielrm. On the other hand, if a vendor produces a clone of Word, we might as well stick with Word.
So a better solution than Word, even if the market is only 1% of the total world of computer users, might still be more successful than a Word clone -- esp. if the measure of success is the ability to sell a very end-user friendly low cost OS X hardware/software bundle.
Oh, there are good things to Microsoft Word. It's a great grammar and spelling checker. It handles fonts well. The tables could be worse. Overall, though, it really is an awful piece of software. The collision between the inline formatting and object-oriented formatting models is a horrid mess. I think Word is tolerated primarily because most people use it as a slightly fancier version of TextEdit/WordPad -- and because only a few of us are old enough to remember MORE 3.1, FullWrite, AmiPro, even WordPerfect/DOS. (Frankly, in some ways WordPad is a better wordprocessor than Word.)
Word wasn't always bad. Until 1995 (97?) it really was excellent. Around that time though, it ran into the Product Manager from heck. That person is probably fairly senior at Microsoft now -- they ought to be pelted with something smelly.
I read (Joel on Software) that Microsoft, disgusted with Word's bleeding mess of a code base, once tried a full rewrite. That effort failed.
My biggest complaint with OpenOffice is that it's TOO MUCH like Word. Of course that may make sense from a marketing perspective, but I don't like it.
Mellel has a very closed and very proprietary file format. I won't risk it. In the OS X world Nisus Writer Express is the most promising option -- it uses an RTF derived file format. If Apple does release iWorks Pages I'll compare it to Nisus Writer Express. I may end up with both, as I would not be at all surprised if iWorks Pages is a resource hog.
No, this will really work. It enables differential filtering based on the managed reputation of the sending service. (faughnan.com/spam.html).
I advocated this many years ago, but it doesn't need advocacy -- it will simply happen.
Unsigned email gets filtered very aggressively. Some will get lost of course -- aggressive filters err to false positives. People who want their mail to be read will move to authenticated sending services.
Signed email from domains with bad reputations will be deleted in the pre-filter. Reputation services will manage domain reputations.
Email from an authenticated sending service with a good reputation gets lightweight filtering. If the domain doesn't manage their members the domain reputation suffers -- and filtering gets more aggressive. Domain members head for the exits.
BTW, the same policy of managed reputation of sending services has a 'real world' equivalent. In the future world of high security, privacy may yet exist within communities that manage their reputations.
From IBM's site on supported platforms: [http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/ cloudscape/r equirements.html]
Mac OS 10.3.3: JDK 1.4.2 Mac OS X Server 10.2.8: JDK 1.4.2 Power Mac G4 Apple xServe
So this might be a nice positive for the OS X platform, where there's been a smaller set of supported databases than for Wintel.
They may also have improved blogger indexing
on
Google Updates Its Face
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They've done more than a facelift. My Blogger (now owned by Google) archives were being intermittently indexed over the past few months. At times I could retrieve items via Google, at other times I could not.
Today I can search them. I wonder if they've done a major maintenance cycle on their indices? That would fit with the speedup reports.
BTW, I do enjoy using the new "define" feature. Try "define: glycoprotein" for example.
Ok, I'm impressed. After reading through about a dozen of the highest rated explanations of this theorem yours was the most satisfying. (I can't judge correctness of course, I'm clueless here).
Since you did so well, here's another challenge:-).
The theorem is said to have played a role in futhering understanding of particle physics. What was that role? What theoretic physical systems are mappable to this theorem?
And then for the extra-credit problem...
What is the connection between the vast complexity of non-trivial (in the Godelian sense) systems of self-consistent mathematics and the set of all possible universes?
I do agree that Apple seems to have lost focus on its desktop lines. Some of that may be simply very tough luck; I think a G5 neo-cube could be a big seller (note how well the PC mini-boxen are doing), but an energy efficient G5 mb is still not available. I suspect a lot of folks, like me, are waiting for a lower cost, more efficient, G5 solution.
I'd love to see Apple be daring. It feels like they have the technology in place to implement a home and SOHO thin client solution with a media server and a range of clients running remote-Quartz (Linux clients, Apple clients, PC clients, etc) remote sessions. This is what many of us thought Microsoft would do with XP and their remote desktop technology, but it didn't happen.
I think that would be a potentially disruptive move. I think Microsoft will succeed (no-one dislikes this more than me) in making XP/NET/IE6+ a mandatory part of everyone's life -- so we'll all have to have at least one of those boxen in our homes. Being able to use it to primarily run Apple software in thin client mode would be some nice ju-jitsu.
Apple has never been in a "safe place". They've made some horribly dumb moves, but their survival indicates they haven't done everything wrong all the time. Here's hoping they can pull off some more miracles!
700 million years ago that event pumped out a lot of x-rays. I wondered what that "felt like" out in the periphery. The NASA press release actually answered my question:
"The odds stellar tidal disruption will happen in a typical galaxy are low, about one in 10,000 annually. If it happened at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, 25,000 light-years from Earth, the resulting X-ray outburst would be about 50,000 times brighter than the brightest X-ray source in our galaxy, beside the sun, but it would not pose a threat to Earth."
Excellent post. The consensus on Apple's Discussion boards is that the iPod should not be used as an external drive because of the heat output. In particular, the LiON battery is easily damaged by heat. The drive and electronics may survive, but battery life will suffer greatly. Did your LiON battery survive?
In my experience my iPod became very hot during extended r/w usage -- it was lying metal side down on an insulating surface. Others have described video distortion due to the heat output.
I suspect if one keeps it metal side down on a conducting surface (a tile counter for example) it will do fine. In the cradle is probably okay, especially if one is not overly concerned about battery life.
When mine was very hot, I've been known to rest it on a sealed freezer "ice" pack until it was comfortable to the touch; obviously "cold" to the touch would be a bad idea.
Handspring/Palm has a preview of the new 600 series [1]. Since I'm very "PalmCentric", this is the kind of direction I want to go -- a PalmOS device that's a good phone and lets me drop one device (and its travel charger, cradle, etc etc). It also has a built in camera for pinhole pictures.
Problem is, I doubt it's really wearable. I need something that clips on my belt. If they dumped the keyboard from this one and used a Tungsten T like slider to extend the device for use I think they could make it wearable.
In other words, I want a slightly skinnier cross between the Treo 600 and the Tungsten T, with a well designed cradle that will attach firmly to be my belt.
Is that too much to ask:-)?
I suspect that I won't get it until late next year, more's the shame.
I can imaging that post-human entities might have good reasons not to run such simulations, and I think post-human entities are more likely to be descendants of our machines than ourselves; both of which suggest we are not simulations (Bostrom considers these possibilities.). On the other hand, a simulation of human existence might be one way to nurture and grow a post-singularity human-like "child". The simulation scenario might also explain the Fermi Paradox -- we are alone in the universe because the existence of a non-human civilization does not serve the purposes of the simulation.
I follow a similar practice of using google's usenet environment to post fragmetns of knowledge, though I use a less structured format. I also use Google to find fragments, including, at times, my own.
The problem, of course, is that this means that while we are contributing to usenet, we are not answering specific questions. It is becoming more like a knowledge repository and much less like a conversation.
One thing I do that you might consider is I have a "meta" section at the end of my post. This "meta" section contains a unique identifier (so I can search on that UI and retrieve all my posts), a date string (YYMMDD) so I can retrieve by date, and common keywords and synonyms including variant spellings to facilitate Google indexing.
It's been about two years since I started receiving spam from "myself", or rather some spammer spoofing me. I still get several a day, but mostly they get hung up in my postini filters. I also get several bounce messages a day. For some reason the spammers often use an ancient address in one of my domains that is no longer used.
Curiously, I almost never get anyone writing to me complaining about the spam. That used to happen, but I think most folks have figured out not to reply. I also don't seem to have been blacklisted anywhere (faughnan.com); the blacklist maintainers are apparently smart enough not to be fooled by spoofed fields.
Why did they pick me? I think they like to take addresses that are present in the registrar databases. Or maybe they picked me because I complained about spam and write about ways to stop it (not that hard really, we just need to authenticate the sending service rather than the harder task of authenticating the sender).
In any event, sadly this is old news. Good to know it's starting to make its way into the public consciousness though.
iPhoto Library Manager is a freeware utility authored by Brian Webster that has been popular among iPhoto 1.x users. iPhoto 1.x had performance issues with > 1000 or so photos, which is not a very large collection. iPhoto Library Manager allows one to partition a large collection into smaller swappable "libraries" with better performance.
iPhoto 2 uses a different storage format than iPhoto 1.x used.
As of 1/31/03 Brian is testing iPhoto Library Manager for compatibility with iPhoto 2. He recommends LM users delay installing iPhoto 2 until he reports on his test results in a "few days".
I am sure we will soon hear if iPhoto 2 has cured iPhoto 1.x's performance and scaling problems. Since iPhoto 2 does allow mini-album exports, better performance would remove the need for iPhoto Library Manager. Consolidating those disparate libraries may be interesting, however.
(I'd love to hear why iPhoto 1.x scales so very poorly. I do know that a bug that causes iPhoto to "forget" to use the more efficient library outline/roll view doesn't help.)
john
Re:BS - but matches my experience
on
Broken .Mac?
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· Score: 3, Informative
My experience has been very consistent with the original poster. Using Goliath instead of the Finder WebDav helped some, but I had webdav access only about 70% of the times I tried. I spent months with.Mac webdav, seeing if it would finally work. Performance was dismal compared to other WebDav service providers I've used (mydocsonline for example).
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard and read of enough problems with restoring complex transactional data structures that I can imagine this situation is far more complex than many believe.
What I'd love to see is a full post-mortem, a lesser version of that the NTSB does for airplane crashes.
Google's been doing some of this for their (too frequent) outages, but they've very high level -- typically something about a system reconfig overloading a router. The Cloud user base needs a far greater level of error exposure.
It took openness and in depth analysis to make air travel safe.
The Cloud won't be safe until we learn the same kind of lessons, and apply what we learn in new and improved systems.
Ok, so we're shamelessly off topic, but that was a great rant on the ribbon.
My personal peeve is "paste special" which also bops around between apps.
For our younger children, we read everything. So far they haven't gotten much traffic.
We have a google apps family domain, all incoming messages are forwarded to my wife's email for review in addition to being available for IMAP.
The children don't know the google apps email password, they access their email through OS X Mail.app running on the family workstation.
All sent messages also go through the google apps gmail account, so we can log in and review all email traffic there.
As they get older we'll look at other options. Some of our children are special needs and thus vulnerable, they may have monitored email for a much longer time.
We fund special education for several reasons, one of which is to minimize adult economic dependency and disability. That is a clear social good. A secondary motivation is compassion for people who've been very significantly disadvantaged. This funding includes high IQ persons with disabilities such as Asperger's, autism, etc.
I'm not aware of any data showing that a significant number of "geniuses" (a fuzzy concept, I've met only a few true geniuses, and that group included Richard Feynman) are economically dependent. I'm even more skeptical that a significant number of people with IQs over 140, in the absence of qualifying conditions (ADD, autism, etc) are disadvantaged. Let's not use MENSA as a guide, I don't think that's a representative body.
I would even wager that we could eliminate 25% of the school day for high IQ students and have minimal impact on any kind of outcomes. I happen to know a fair number of high IQ adults, and I have not seen any correlation between the "quality" of their early education and their outcomes. The greater impact, by far, is the wealth of their parents -- and that primarily manifests not as economic rather than absolute relative outcomes. For example: family physician vs. partner in prestigious law firm.
If it supports a redirect or forwarding then the lock-in is less onerous. You shouldn't rely on a school email address anyway, it typically goes away when you graduate, transfer, leave, etc. Gmail is quite excellent; my mother uses it with OS X Mail.app and has no idea that a web interface to her mail exists.
... (the least of his sins).
The bigger problem is that Microsoft will then move more and more of their infrastructure into this environment, locking out other alternatives. I suspect the next big lock-in would be their music and video infrastructure. That's what I'd do if I were them. Sooner or later they'll seize the college music scene, and then squeeze Apple to the margins.
I don't see anything to do about it. Microsoft's monopoly and revenues is an almost irresistible force. You can thank George Bush for that
Ahh, yes. I recall those days well. Microsoft had strong-FUD then, and the market turned from Palm. They panicked even as they were distracted by dotCom dreams. Quality went down the tubes. They never revised a multi-user desktop environment built for Win98 when a true multi-user OS (XP) came out. Indeed, multi-user support was miserable with conflicting conduits. Heaven forbid one family member should have a CLIE! Worst of all were the deep and irreconcialable data model conflicts with Exchange server -- once Exchange destroyed all competition Palm was out in the cold. I trace my hair loss directly to Palm synchronization issues with Exchange server.
Then there are little things, like categories in appointments. Fixed yes, but far too late. Or the disastrous shift from Grafitti One to G2 after the initial loss to Xerox.
I very much need/want a pocketable computer, which still means stylus and pen driven. Alas, I am a market of One. I'll have to make do with whatever is provided for the mass market, but I've a feeling I won't like it much.
Bravo! I know some very smart people, and I think I can spot 'em. Cringely is very, very smart. I read him religiously. Sure he gets a little whacky (retinal painting VR headset to be delivered in Nov 2005?) but I find that entertaining. Creative, smart people do that sort of thing.
:-).
Slashdot's noise/value ratio is really deteriorating. Maybe we need an experimental filtering method that would take a different approach to attaching ratings to comments. We could then decide if we wanted to filter on the current system or the new system. How about only old people (30+) could rate articles?
In the new system my ratings would be very important
Palm and digi-cam users have dealt with this for over a decade. Go to Radio Shack or a camera shop or somewhere that sells PDAs and buy a package of clear tough mildly adherent cover material. Cut to fit screen. Apply. Renew every few months.
Problem resolved.
By next Friday there will vendors selling them packaged and elegantly cut for the Nano display.
When I teach about data interfaces in healthcare systems, and the complexity of integration, I compare Palm original representation of a 'contact' with Outlook/Exchange server's representation. The complexity (non-computable complexity in some areas) of synchronizing between these two was a huge problem for Palm. I'm not sure when they figured out how much trouble they were in, but once Microsoft took over the enterprise with Exchange server Palm's fate was pretty much sealed.
In later versions of the OS they tried to better match Outlook's data models, but they botched the software layer that provided some backwards compatibility (arguably they should have given up on the backwards compatibility, they ended up with the worst of two options).
Linux on the Palm is not as important, really, as matching the Exchange server data model.
Synchronization is a problem that's been grossly underestimated in many quarters. It often requires a fuzzy non-deterministic reconciliation of semantic models; the same challenge that Berners-Lee addresses in the context of the semantic web. This issue is a major part (along with some perverse economics) of why healthcare IT projects are so difficult.
I hope Palm now understands these issues, I fear that much of their intellectual capital may have moved on.
PS. The above aside, I do agree Palm completely lost track of issues like reliability, simplicity (though that can be illusory -- per above), and pocketability. Stylist revisions to the stylus slot to maximize stylus revenue was a classic foolish decision representative of many business errors.
Back in the 1980s I wrote a letter to Scientific American complaining about their spelling of Caltech.
...)
They wrote back and told me I was wrong -- the official abbreviation is Cal Tech. Sigh. At least as of 1980 they were right and I was wrong.
I doubt that's changed.
We all used Caltech (t-shirts, stationery, etc) -- but technically it's probably still Cal Tech.
In the 80s we did use CIT on occasion.
As to the MIT/Caltech comparisons, I think most people who know both would agree that the 'top 120 SAT scorers' in an MIT class are very comparable in personality and academic inclinations to a Caltech class (used to be about 120). MIT, however, has another pool of students that's more diverse and not as physics-focused as the Caltech students. I do think we were (still are based on the single visit I've made back there in 25 years) the geekiest student body that ever lived. (When I was a member of the Caltech Y I championed a "Nerd Pride" event. If you can't beat it
Oh lord, how I hope you are wrong. My opinion is no guide to the market, but I'll venture it as an opinion of one.
Caveat: Faughnan's Law says that if I have a defined need, marketers should run screaming in the opposite direction. I am representative of a less than tiny sliver of the market. So I'm not exactly contradicting Danielrm. On the other hand, if a vendor produces a clone of Word, we might as well stick with Word.
So a better solution than Word, even if the market is only 1% of the total world of computer users, might still be more successful than a Word clone -- esp. if the measure of success is the ability to sell a very end-user friendly low cost OS X hardware/software bundle.
That said, I despise Microsoft Word. Here's why.
Oh, there are good things to Microsoft Word. It's a great grammar and spelling checker. It handles fonts well. The tables could be worse. Overall, though, it really is an awful piece of software. The collision between the inline formatting and object-oriented formatting models is a horrid mess. I think Word is tolerated primarily because most people use it as a slightly fancier version of TextEdit/WordPad -- and because only a few of us are old enough to remember MORE 3.1, FullWrite, AmiPro, even WordPerfect/DOS. (Frankly, in some ways WordPad is a better wordprocessor than Word.)
Word wasn't always bad. Until 1995 (97?) it really was excellent. Around that time though, it ran into the Product Manager from heck. That person is probably fairly senior at Microsoft now -- they ought to be pelted with something smelly.
I read (Joel on Software) that Microsoft, disgusted with Word's bleeding mess of a code base, once tried a full rewrite. That effort failed.
My biggest complaint with OpenOffice is that it's TOO MUCH like Word. Of course that may make sense from a marketing perspective, but I don't like it.
Mellel has a very closed and very proprietary file format. I won't risk it. In the OS X world Nisus Writer Express is the most promising option -- it uses an RTF derived file format. If Apple does release iWorks Pages I'll compare it to Nisus Writer Express. I may end up with both, as I would not be at all surprised if iWorks Pages is a resource hog.
No, this will really work. It enables differential filtering based on the managed reputation of the sending service. (faughnan.com/spam.html).
I advocated this many years ago, but it doesn't need advocacy -- it will simply happen.
Unsigned email gets filtered very aggressively. Some will get lost of course -- aggressive filters err to false positives. People who want their mail to be read will move to authenticated sending services.
Signed email from domains with bad reputations will be deleted in the pre-filter. Reputation services will manage domain reputations.
Email from an authenticated sending service with a good reputation gets lightweight filtering. If the domain doesn't manage their members the domain reputation suffers -- and filtering gets more aggressive. Domain members head for the exits.
BTW, the same policy of managed reputation of sending services has a 'real world' equivalent. In the future world of high security, privacy may yet exist within communities that manage their reputations.
From IBM's site on supported platforms:/ cloudscape/r equirements.html]
[http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data
Mac OS 10.3.3: JDK 1.4.2
Mac OS X Server 10.2.8: JDK 1.4.2
Power Mac G4
Apple xServe
So this might be a nice positive for the OS X platform, where there's been a smaller set of supported databases than for Wintel.
They've done more than a facelift. My Blogger (now owned by Google) archives were being intermittently indexed over the past few months. At times I could retrieve items via Google, at other times I could not.
Today I can search them. I wonder if they've done a major maintenance cycle on their indices? That would fit with the speedup reports.
BTW, I do enjoy using the new "define" feature. Try "define: glycoprotein" for example.
Ok, I'm impressed. After reading through about a dozen of the highest rated explanations of this theorem yours was the most satisfying. (I can't judge correctness of course, I'm clueless here).
:-).
...
:-).
Since you did so well, here's another challenge
The theorem is said to have played a role in futhering understanding of particle physics. What was that role? What theoretic physical systems are mappable to this theorem?
And then for the extra-credit problem
What is the connection between the vast complexity of non-trivial (in the Godelian sense) systems of self-consistent mathematics and the set of all possible universes?
I'll take that answer offline
I do agree that Apple seems to have lost focus on its desktop lines. Some of that may be simply very tough luck; I think a G5 neo-cube could be a big seller (note how well the PC mini-boxen are doing), but an energy efficient G5 mb is still not available. I suspect a lot of folks, like me, are waiting for a lower cost, more efficient, G5 solution.
I'd love to see Apple be daring. It feels like they have the technology in place to implement a home and SOHO thin client solution with a media server and a range of clients running remote-Quartz (Linux clients, Apple clients, PC clients, etc) remote sessions. This is what many of us thought Microsoft would do with XP and their remote desktop technology, but it didn't happen.
I think that would be a potentially disruptive move. I think Microsoft will succeed (no-one dislikes this more than me) in making XP/NET/IE6+ a mandatory part of everyone's life -- so we'll all have to have at least one of those boxen in our homes. Being able to use it to primarily run Apple software in thin client mode would be some nice ju-jitsu.
Apple has never been in a "safe place". They've made some horribly dumb moves, but their survival indicates they haven't done everything wrong all the time. Here's hoping they can pull off some more miracles!
Differential filtering based on reputation management of authenticated sending services.
You don't need to authenticate the email author (too much overhead, too disruptive). Only the sending service.
Once the sending service is authenticated, you apply differential filtering based on the reputation of the sending service.
Optional: allow authenticated senders to bypass filtering.
Put this in place, then let natural selection work its magic.
I've been writing about this for about 3 years, but I'm sure it's been discussed for many years. I never see it presented though.
It's not that hard.
http://www.faughnan.com/spam.html#CheapFix has roughly what I wrote here, but not much more.
700 million years ago that event pumped out a lot of x-rays. I wondered what that "felt like" out in the periphery. The NASA press release actually answered my question:
"The odds stellar tidal disruption will happen in a typical galaxy are low, about one in 10,000 annually. If it happened at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, 25,000 light-years from Earth, the resulting X-ray outburst would be about 50,000 times brighter than the brightest X-ray source in our galaxy, beside the sun, but it would not pose a threat to Earth."
Excellent post. The consensus on Apple's Discussion boards is that the iPod should not be used as an external drive because of the heat output. In particular, the LiON battery is easily damaged by heat. The drive and electronics may survive, but battery life will suffer greatly. Did your LiON battery survive?
In my experience my iPod became very hot during extended r/w usage -- it was lying metal side down on an insulating surface. Others have described video distortion due to the heat output.
I suspect if one keeps it metal side down on a conducting surface (a tile counter for example) it will do fine. In the cradle is probably okay, especially if one is not overly concerned about battery life.
When mine was very hot, I've been known to rest it on a sealed freezer "ice" pack until it was comfortable to the touch; obviously "cold" to the touch would be a bad idea.
Handspring/Palm has a preview of the new 600 series [1]. Since I'm very "PalmCentric", this is the kind of direction I want to go -- a PalmOS device that's a good phone and lets me drop one device (and its travel charger, cradle, etc etc). It also has a built in camera for pinhole pictures.
:-)?
Problem is, I doubt it's really wearable. I need something that clips on my belt. If they dumped the keyboard from this one and used a Tungsten T like slider to extend the device for use I think they could make it wearable.
In other words, I want a slightly skinnier cross between the Treo 600 and the Tungsten T, with a well designed cradle that will attach firmly to be my belt.
Is that too much to ask
I suspect that I won't get it until late next year, more's the shame.
john
[1]http://www.handspring.com/treo600
I follow a similar practice of using google's usenet environment to post fragmetns of knowledge, though I use a less structured format. I also use Google to find fragments, including, at times, my own.
The problem, of course, is that this means that while we are contributing to usenet, we are not answering specific questions. It is becoming more like a knowledge repository and much less like a conversation.
One thing I do that you might consider is I have a "meta" section at the end of my post. This "meta" section contains a unique identifier (so I can search on that UI and retrieve all my posts), a date string (YYMMDD) so I can retrieve by date, and common keywords and synonyms including variant spellings to facilitate Google indexing.
john
Curiously, I almost never get anyone writing to me complaining about the spam. That used to happen, but I think most folks have figured out not to reply. I also don't seem to have been blacklisted anywhere (faughnan.com); the blacklist maintainers are apparently smart enough not to be fooled by spoofed fields.
Why did they pick me? I think they like to take addresses that are present in the registrar databases. Or maybe they picked me because I complained about spam and write about ways to stop it (not that hard really, we just need to authenticate the sending service rather than the harder task of authenticating the sender).
In any event, sadly this is old news. Good to know it's starting to make its way into the public consciousness though.
iPhoto 2 uses a different storage format than iPhoto 1.x used.
As of 1/31/03 Brian is testing iPhoto Library Manager for compatibility with iPhoto 2. He recommends LM users delay installing iPhoto 2 until he reports on his test results in a "few days".
I am sure we will soon hear if iPhoto 2 has cured iPhoto 1.x's performance and scaling problems. Since iPhoto 2 does allow mini-album exports, better performance would remove the need for iPhoto Library Manager. Consolidating those disparate libraries may be interesting, however.
(I'd love to hear why iPhoto 1.x scales so very poorly. I do know that a bug that causes iPhoto to "forget" to use the more efficient library outline/roll view doesn't help.)
john
My experience has been very consistent with the original poster. Using Goliath instead of the Finder WebDav helped some, but I had webdav access only about 70% of the times I tried. I spent months with .Mac webdav, seeing if it would finally work. Performance was dismal compared to other WebDav service providers I've used (mydocsonline for example).
.Mac.
The web server worked ok, as did email.
I no longer use