Well, the phrasing stops just short of saying that Fortune 50 companies are actually using the platform in all these application areas. I'm curious whether these companies are using g-speak for critical work or just trying it out in pilot/research deployments.
I think that we're not giving these guys an entirely fair hearing, in that most posters seem to be tying all their claims to the interface, when the platform that they are hyping has networking and interop components. I'm hoping that their "large datasets" claim is pointed in this direction, as the zoomable spacial visualizations that they show in the demo are 1) pretty easy replicated in a traditional desktop environment and 2) not really efficient ways to interact with complex datasets.
I think that the user interface is, as many have said, of limited use. For most tasks, including most spatial tasks like CAD work, freespace manipulation seems very slow compared to current methods, not to mention more demanding of precision motor control. Looking closely at the demo, it appears that not much actual freespace manipulation is going on anyway. The tasks displayed mostly composed of pointing (albeit multi-surface pointing) and a gestural command language.
I think it would probably be most effective for collaborative use, which is one area where today's dominant metaphors are least effective. I also think that without some kind of haptic feedback, it will never be transformative, even for the tasks that it is suited for.
Some if their key premises, such as "Gestural input is measurably more efficient at performing complex navigation, sorting and selection tasks." seem untested. I'm interested to see what the empirical human computer interaction community thinks about this system.
In an amusing coincidence, a few hours after seeing #79 on this list, I saw a big picture of the exact model under the top front-page headline of our local paper for today. Here is the article:
Maybe I'm a stickler for such things, but it seems a little weird that this post doesn't make it clear that it is just a paraphrase of this article on Wired News. On the face of it, it would look like Iphtashu Fitz was posting info he drew from several sources, rather than lifting them all from a single work by someone else.
I'll grant, if you follow the links the truth will be obvious, but I imagine the author of the Wired News piece wouldn't mind getting a bit more explicit credit.
The sheer size of this book is pretty much undermining many opportunities for useful review. The prospective reader is expected to make a pretty substantial time commitment just to evaluate the work. If after a hundred pages or so the book doesn't have the ring of truth or any signs of rigor, many of us are loathe to commit to digesting the rest of it. If Wolfram had released this in a long series of journal articles like a normal scientist, he would get a lot more reasoned feedback, and his early results, if they survived the analysis of his peers, might have actually found fruitful application by now.
Which is not to excuse dismissing the text without reading it. I merely think that that the format of this book will make it much less likely to be taken seriously any time soon.
OK, I just read about my fifth article about how Apple revolutionized the world by offering music downloads for $0.99 a track, and I can't figure out why this is getting by. When iTunes started doing this, I was a Pressplay member, and they were selling tracks for $0.99 and advertising it all over. You even got a discount for buying at a higher volume. Real's music service was advertising the same thing all over the place. So how does the press not at least mention this in passing? They continue to write articles that imply that even now iTunes is the only service doing this. And Jobs is playing into the claim, talking about how they offer so much better a service by selling tracks individually, and you have to know he knows that they weren't the first. Last night I bought a few tracks off Napster2(rebranded Pressplay) that I never saw myself getting on CD and it worked out pretty well. They have a much larger catalog of songs than Apple, although I can't vouch for the "quality" of the selection, except to say that they have many things that I'd buy. But they will probably go out of business because the media continues to assert that they aren't really in business.
To be fair to Tivo, they have never really tried to stop people from making backups of the images from Tivo that they do own. I don't think it can really be said that they're trying to stop people from repairing or upgrading.
I think I could understand a company not wanting the software that makes their business viable distributed for free without permission. The only reason this is coming up at all is that Tivo has been suuportive of the hack community in the past.
Maybe you're just trolling, and I should leave this be, but hey, the obvious sometimes needs to be said.
What you've said above applies to the desktop market, although you still overstate the case a bit.
On the server-side, however, Microsoft faces many challenges. If you don't believe me, head on over to netcraft and check out IIS's marketshare. In the machine room, Microsoft has lost a massive number of customers, many of them to Linux, others to Solaris and other Unices.
Considering how much money Microsoft has put into trying to win back this category I'd say they feel challenged. The fact that they fail to take back ground is an even better indicator.
In the engineering workstation and visualization sectors, Sun still has a pretty damn good foothold. These are not so much customers that Microsoft lost as ones it never had.
That said, I am not really a firm believer in Linux on the desktop. It is a powerful system for servers and more advanced computing, but I think it has a few thousand too many moving parts to make it as a general purpose, mom-and-pop desktop. I don't think Sun's offering will change this. I would much prefer to see the community build an OS with the consumer in mind from day one.
Having followed this situation as it unfolded, I think the effect of it has been overstated. Whatever factors are working behind the scenes, it appears that there are more independant or small press books on the shelves in "mainstream" comic stores than I remember being there before the whole distributer consolidation. I can only really speak for the comic stores I frequent, of course, but I do see things inproving.
Another fun Marvel strategy seems worth mentioning: the whole "no reorders" policy. It seems like sort of a ploy to restart speculative comic buying. If nothing else, it has helped them get some spectacular first-day sales.
Since I gotten my Tivo, I've noticed the rise of one trick that I see as a Tivo busting strategy. About a year ago, I noticed they started moving movie advertisements to the front of blocks of commercials a lot. The idea being, I think, that Tivo users are more likely to go back and watch a movie trailer, and once they are one commercial in, they'll probably just let the rest of the break play out. It worked on me for a little while. I'm curious if this is intentional, or if it is just movie advertising paying big money for preffered placement.
I think maybe the point should not be "they made a Palm that fits on your wrist" so much as "they made a wristwatch you can easily write software for." I think most Palm software will be useless on this thing, but there are probably a lot of form-factor specific applications that could be written for it. I must say I was amused to see it has the same screen resolution as the Zire. But really, to make it useful, you just need to double your adherence to the PalmOS design criterion mandating that any serious data entry must be done from the companion PC. And while you're at it, quadruple your concern for screen real estate. Given a proper hardware design, however, I think this could be a cool gadget.
As for programs I think would be nice, there are a few. PalmReader might be doable, ditto Avantgo with the hardware navigation features from the 5.0 beta. Anything like a scaled down DateBook5 would make the platform. Think todos with alarms, event templates, and custom schedule views. Of course keeping in mind that almost all data entry will be on the desktop. Memo reader would be dead. Voice memos would be nice, pending appropriate hardware. Calcul-8! would probably be doable. Address Book could more or less work without modification (except for a bigger font), and would probably be one of the most useful things. But I think most of the killer apps are things we wouldn't even think of for the full sized palms
For a proper hardware design, I would have to insist on a few things. Number one, the digitizer must be easy to turn off. Really, it should be off most of the time. Number two, there must be sufficient hardware buttons (figure out a way to fit on a 5-way controller, and the thing will get way more useful). Number three, a super durable digitizer, or at least an indestructable, snap closed screen for when you are not entering data. Number four, a very sharp, high-contrast display. I kind of wish they could have shoehorned wi-fi or bluetooth onto this thing, in which case it would be a great little streaming news and email reading device. Another great thing would be an attachable fresnel lens to boost readability when you need it.
It really seems like the author decided what he wanted to conclude before he started his study. His conclusions are mostly fluff. Sure the out of band PIN exchange is a bit clunky, but this isn't really a vulnerability. Nothing seamless is going to happen without some sort of certificate authority. Anything else is going to require authentication off the wire.
Battery draining denial of service scheme? Seems like this will be an issue for any limited power mobile device that is listening for connections. As for no defense against it, leaving your device "undiscoverable" and only talking to trusted devices is a good start.
The mention of a divide-and-conquer attack that cannot in fact be used probably doesn't belong in the conclusions.
PINs are, I believe, alphanumeric in most user interfaces, giving us more like 1.7 million keys for a four-digit key length. Still not that great a key space, but that's why you're allowed 16 octets.
It seems like the remainder of the conculsions make the assumption of bad application-level choices of keys and key types. I will acknowledge that this can derail pretty much any encryption scheme.
Personally, I sort of wonder why more standard algorithms were not used, such as RC*, Diffie-Hellman, etc. Also, this seems like it could really use a certificate of PGP-like "web of trust" to support it.
>Point is: I haven't got the PDA/Smartphone to play >with, and would like to hear about peoples' >experiences fiddling with the language support of their >gadgets before dropping a few hundred bucks on >something that may not even work very well at all.
As far as this goes, you can play with any of the Palm solutions without buying a machine by using the Palm OS Emulator or the Palm OS Simulator for os 5.0 support. I believe if you join their developer program you can play with ROMs for non-English languages.
I've been in many of these "CEO wants a bad thing" scenarios, and I have come to belive the best solutions is this:
Clearly explain why you think this is the wrong thing to do. Then do it anyway. There will always be another lackey to do their will. Once you've done you best to persuade them, the ball is back in their court, ethically speaking. And you won't get fired, although they will start thinking of you as "difficult," a fate I have long since accepted.
The all-important last step is to start looking for a job where you are valued and respected as a free-willed entity. If they'll fire you for having scruples, they are not worth the sweat of your brow.
precision screwdrivers -- for some reason the smaller sizes tend to get a lot of use by me. I use a kit whose upper end is about right for HD mounting screws and whose lower end is good for palm pilots, glasses, and various small devices not meant to be user maintainable.
cryptographic keys and commonly used crypto software on a business card CDR-- being able to work securely from almost anywhere on the net comes in handy.
small, powerful flashlight-- the one I'm using uses a set of three of the newish super-bright LEDs. It puts out a lot of light, and lasts hundreds of hours on some AAs, so I never have to worry about it being sapped of power when I need it.
my Palm-- it has about a billion field uses. In particular, with the right set of adapters, it can be a good emergency console terminal for headless servers.
cell phone
Linuxcar boot toolkit on a business card CDR-- I really should roll my own, but this thing has most of the good stuff on it. There are times when "dd" is the perfect tool. If I rolled my own, I would probably add the Coroner's toolkit.
I have no real reason to believe that 3G will be much of a success, but I expect that an unregulated, bottom-up mesh network would not do well, certainly not if it were based on existing 802.11 technology.
Networks like the GSM digital phone networks function because of their cellular organization scheme. There is a certain set of channel frequencies. Each "cell" uses a subset of this, and the the cells are organized in such a way that cells using the same channels can never overlap. In any system, such as 802.11, with a constrained set of data channels, there must be discipline to make sure that there is no overlap. Also, there is an absolute upper limit on how many access points can occupy a given area. The long ranges that the article mentions only make this harder to arrange. I can see a scheme where the hardware does its best to minimize the possibility of overlap, but in high density living areas, wireless network frequency doesn't strech very far.
I'd like to know where he gets the idea that performance increases with the number of stations. Just as with a traditional LAN, performance increases only with the number of switches/access points for local traffic or the number of uplinks, for internet traffic. Additional client systems do downgrade performance.
The GPL doesn't work without copyrights getting involved. It relies upon them. What happens is that the original code author retains the copyright (or signs it over to GNU) and release the code with the GNU Public License. The authors copyright is what makes the enforcement of the GPL thoeretically possible. If there was no copyright (i.e. the code was in the public domain) it would probably be impossible for any licensing terms to be enforced on it. Corporations could release the software but withhold the source code, among other things.
The same thing should work with patents: you patent the technology, then publish the details with a license with term similar to the GPL. It would probably be harder to enforce some aspects. It is, for example, much easier to show that one piece of source code is a modification of another than to show that one technology is a modification of another. But this sort of thing has been done in the past for things like algorithm patents.
Something along the lines of click-wrap can make a fair bit of sense, in that it elevates the license to the same sort of formal agreement as a contract. The sort of license we have now, where most users agree implicitly to terms that they have never seen, is pretty ideologically shakey. Many users can use the software for years without knowing they agreed to any terms whatsoever. They get told what they have is free software, so they don't go hunting for a license that in fact obligates them to certain things. It isn't 100% certain in the law, however, that a person can obligate themselves to much of anything without making a conscious choice to. In short, I think it is a good thing to put the license in front of the user to make sure they actually agree to it, rather than using it as a mystical legal machine to regulate their behavior without them knowing it exists.
Click-wrap licenses are mainly a problem because companies use them to force terms that are a little shakey within licensing laws. Active user agreement legitimizes these shady terms. But I think a fair license with click-wrap is a lot fairer and safer from misunderstanding than one without it. A bad license is probably a little worse when buried where the user can't see it.
Consider an example. Company A decides to open-source a piece of software. Novice user B downloads the latest build of it, and uses it to run his business. After a year, a software bug ends up costing B a few hundred man hours to recover from. Incensed, he takes A to court. A says, "Hey, our license indicated no warranty and that we would be held immune from damages." B says that 1) he never read the license, and thus never agreed to it, and 2) A did not make adequate efforts to make the user aquainted with the license restrictions. A says, "If you didn't agree to the license, you're not a legal user. Don't blame us."
Now imagine you're the average judge or jury. Will you conclude:
The company who wrote the buggy software is in the right because B agreed to a license he had never seen or heard of.
The user presented with materials indicating that the software was "free" assumed in good faith that he was allowed to use it without restriction. He is not in particular bound by a license he never agreed to.
In closing, imagine property leases were handled in the same implicit manner as open software licenses. Imagine the havoc that landlords could wreak, above and beyond what they already do.
The blog format is just another potential tool for the literary process. It is thus important to consider the properties of this tool to decide how to use it.
What new capabilites does the blog bring to the table? What new stories does it allow you to tell? What new writer-reader dynamics does it allow? Fiction in the form of journal entries is not a new thing. Done well, it can create a sense of intimacy between the writer and the reader. Long running web comic strips such as Sluggy Freelenace show that you can get away with a long running plot in little daily chunks on the web.
At the same time, you have to consider the bad properties of such a tool. As with many serial novels, people may be unlikely to start in the middle, or backtrack years to catch up. Many people tend to find it tiresome or slightly painful to read novel length stretches of text off of a computer screen.
I'd say, if you have a story to tell that fits the form, go ahead. I don't tend to see it as such a breakthrough for literature, just another slight variation in the art of storytelling.
Well, the author certainly chose a fairly questionable interface for his article. Two column , side-by-side text, while it pleasurably evokes that old newpaper feeling, is a bad idea in a browser window. At 1280x1024, I had to scroll up and down. The little link was a cute touch, but I only tried it out after finishing the article. All-in-all, very awkward. I hope we can do better for linux.
One of the easiest ways is to yank a CD out of the drive that it was expecting to be in there for a little while yet. I think this is mainly an issue when running DirectX games and such. It is a recoverable BSOD, but useful if you do want to see one.
I haven't read this story as of yet, but I thought I'd throw my experience with ALICE on the table. I was excited to hear that someone had finally made the ELIZA trick work well enough to fool competition judges into thinking it was a human. I decided to drop by and see how this thing performed.
IMO, it did terribly. I was doing my best to write as I would speak. I may be a a little over-loquacious, but I was definitely no trying to trip the beast up. Neither was I trying to talk like a robot myself. I was trying to make small talk. Or rather, as time went on, trying to make small talk to a crazed beatnik who reponded in constant non-sequiters. I went on to try to simplify what I said to it quite a bit, but it was still fairly bad. About 75% of the time it produced grammatically appropriate responses, but only content-appropriate about 20% of the time. Even then, it was nothing like talking to another human being who was paying attention.
My main beef is that the system seems to hold no state data about previous exchanges. All interaction with the machine seems to be broken up into isolated two sentence volleys, after which it has no memory of the conversation. Hence even fairly simple and common contextual remarks fly right over ALICE's head. I was deepy unimpressed, and somewhat confused at why people were making such a fuss. I suggest to you all to try this thing out for yourselves.
I've looked a little closer into the references I could find on the web about decreased MTBF on drives in a RAID scenario. It appears that the way most people are viewing this is as as statistical phenomenon. If you have 6 drives with a fixed probability of failure, the whole set has a higher probability than the individual drives. I could not find any references, in the last 15 minutes, to increased loading, so perhaps that part was a phantom of memory. Either way, with low reliability drives, dividing the MTBF by two is not the best idea.
I'm not entirely sure of the full rationale, only that I've come across quite a few references to increased disk loading in raid systems, in addition to plain old working experience. I think the particular stripesize/cylinder size ratio, stripe layout, etc. have a lot to do with how much effect this has. A striped drive tends to end up doing a lot more short reads as compared to long sequential reads. Depending on how well the drive heads are managed (easier to do well in hardware, IMHO) the increased seek activity can generate a lot of wear and tear. This is not as big a deal when using the RAID with large files and a small set of data consumers. Again, this is my non-hardware expert interpretation, but there is a lot of reference in the literature to the shortened life of RAID drives.
I'm not sure this is a good idea. Laptop drives, even the recent IBM enhanced models, are rated for a much lighter activity cycle than desktop drives. That is, push them as hard and as long as full-size drives , they are likely to fail on you. IBM is trying to fix this to make their 2.5 in drives suitable to blade servers. Still, RAID historically pushes drives hard enough to decrease the time between failures quite a bit. Combine this with drives designed for low load, and you're asking for trouble. I think the recommendation of a firewire external drive was a good one.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the phrasing stops just short of saying that Fortune 50 companies are actually using the platform in all these application areas. I'm curious whether these companies are using g-speak for critical work or just trying it out in pilot/research deployments.
I think that we're not giving these guys an entirely fair hearing, in that most posters seem to be tying all their claims to the interface, when the platform that they are hyping has networking and interop components. I'm hoping that their "large datasets" claim is pointed in this direction, as the zoomable spacial visualizations that they show in the demo are 1) pretty easy replicated in a traditional desktop environment and 2) not really efficient ways to interact with complex datasets.
I think that the user interface is, as many have said, of limited use. For most tasks, including most spatial tasks like CAD work, freespace manipulation seems very slow compared to current methods, not to mention more demanding of precision motor control. Looking closely at the demo, it appears that not much actual freespace manipulation is going on anyway. The tasks displayed mostly composed of pointing (albeit multi-surface pointing) and a gestural command language.
I think it would probably be most effective for collaborative use, which is one area where today's dominant metaphors are least effective. I also think that without some kind of haptic feedback, it will never be transformative, even for the tasks that it is suited for.
Some if their key premises, such as "Gestural input is measurably more efficient at performing complex navigation, sorting and selection tasks." seem untested. I'm interested to see what the empirical human computer interaction community thinks about this system.
In an amusing coincidence, a few hours after seeing #79 on this list, I saw a big picture of the exact model under the top front-page headline of our local paper for today. Here is the article:
Death from stun gun shocks C-U
Maybe I'm a stickler for such things, but it seems a little weird that this post doesn't make it clear that it is just a paraphrase of this article on Wired News. On the face of it, it would look like Iphtashu Fitz was posting info he drew from several sources, rather than lifting them all from a single work by someone else.
I'll grant, if you follow the links the truth will be obvious, but I imagine the author of the Wired
News piece wouldn't mind getting a bit more explicit credit.
The sheer size of this book is pretty much undermining many opportunities for useful review. The prospective reader is expected to make a pretty substantial time commitment just to evaluate the work. If after a hundred pages or so the book doesn't have the ring of truth or any signs of rigor, many of us are loathe to commit to digesting the rest of it. If Wolfram had released this in a long series of journal articles like a normal scientist, he would get a lot more reasoned feedback, and his early results, if they survived the analysis of his peers, might have actually found fruitful application by now.
Which is not to excuse dismissing the text without reading it. I merely think that that the format of this book will make it much less likely to be taken seriously any time soon.
Wouldn't that be one million cents, aka $10,000?
OK, I just read about my fifth article about how Apple revolutionized the world by offering music downloads for $0.99 a track, and I can't figure out why this is getting by. When iTunes started doing this, I was a Pressplay member, and they were selling tracks for $0.99 and advertising it all over. You even got a discount for buying at a higher volume. Real's music service was advertising the same thing all over the place. So how does the press not at least mention this in passing? They continue to write articles that imply that even now iTunes is the only service doing this. And Jobs is playing into the claim, talking about how they offer so much better a service by selling tracks individually, and you have to know he knows that they weren't the first. Last night I bought a few tracks off Napster2(rebranded Pressplay) that I never saw myself getting on CD and it worked out pretty well. They have a much larger catalog of songs than Apple, although I can't vouch for the "quality" of the selection, except to say that they have many things that I'd buy. But they will probably go out of business because the media continues to assert that they aren't really in business.
</previously written rant>
To be fair to Tivo, they have never really tried to stop people from making backups of the images from Tivo that they do own. I don't think it can really be said that they're trying to stop people from repairing or upgrading.
I think I could understand a company not wanting the software that makes their business viable distributed for free without permission. The only reason this is coming up at all is that Tivo has been suuportive of the hack community in the past.
Maybe you're just trolling, and I should leave this be, but hey, the obvious sometimes needs to be said.
What you've said above applies to the desktop market, although you still overstate the case a bit.
On the server-side, however, Microsoft faces many challenges. If you don't believe me, head on over to netcraft and check out IIS's marketshare. In the machine room, Microsoft has lost a massive number of customers, many of them to Linux, others to Solaris and other Unices.
Considering how much money Microsoft has put into trying to win back this category I'd say they feel challenged. The fact that they fail to take back ground is an even better indicator.
In the engineering workstation and visualization sectors, Sun still has a pretty damn good foothold. These are not so much customers that Microsoft lost as ones it never had.
Hell, don't even get me started on Tivo vs. UltimateTV.
That said, I am not really a firm believer in Linux on the desktop. It is a powerful system for servers and more advanced computing, but I think it has a few thousand too many moving parts to make it as a general purpose, mom-and-pop desktop. I don't think Sun's offering will change this. I would much prefer to see the community build an OS with the consumer in mind from day one.
Having followed this situation as it unfolded, I think the effect of it has been overstated. Whatever factors are working behind the scenes, it appears that there are more independant or small press books on the shelves in "mainstream" comic stores than I remember being there before the whole distributer consolidation. I can only really speak for the comic stores I frequent, of course, but I do see things inproving.
Another fun Marvel strategy seems worth mentioning: the whole "no reorders" policy. It seems like sort of a ploy to restart speculative comic buying. If nothing else, it has helped them get some spectacular first-day sales.
Since I gotten my Tivo, I've noticed the rise of one trick that I see as a Tivo busting strategy. About a year ago, I noticed they started moving movie advertisements to the front of blocks of commercials a lot. The idea being, I think, that Tivo users are more likely to go back and watch a movie trailer, and once they are one commercial in, they'll probably just let the rest of the break play out. It worked on me for a little while. I'm curious if this is intentional, or if it is just movie advertising paying big money for preffered placement.
I think maybe the point should not be "they made a Palm that fits on your wrist" so much as "they made a wristwatch you can easily write software for." I think most Palm software will be useless on this thing, but there are probably a lot of form-factor specific applications that could be written for it. I must say I was amused to see it has the same screen resolution as the Zire. But really, to make it useful, you just need to double your adherence to the PalmOS design criterion mandating that any serious data entry must be done from the companion PC. And while you're at it, quadruple your concern for screen real estate. Given a proper hardware design, however, I think this could be a cool gadget.
As for programs I think would be nice, there are a few. PalmReader might be doable, ditto Avantgo with the hardware navigation features from the 5.0 beta. Anything like a scaled down DateBook5 would make the platform. Think todos with alarms, event templates, and custom schedule views. Of course keeping in mind that almost all data entry will be on the desktop. Memo reader would be dead. Voice memos would be nice, pending appropriate hardware. Calcul-8! would probably be doable. Address Book could more or less work without modification (except for a bigger font), and would probably be one of the most useful things. But I think most of the killer apps are things we wouldn't even think of for the full sized palms
For a proper hardware design, I would have to insist on a few things. Number one, the digitizer must be easy to turn off. Really, it should be off most of the time. Number two, there must be sufficient hardware buttons (figure out a way to fit on a 5-way controller, and the thing will get way more useful). Number three, a super durable digitizer, or at least an indestructable, snap closed screen for when you are not entering data. Number four, a very sharp, high-contrast display. I kind of wish they could have shoehorned wi-fi or bluetooth onto this thing, in which case it would be a great little streaming news and email reading device. Another great thing would be an attachable fresnel lens to boost readability when you need it.
It really seems like the author decided what he wanted to conclude before he started his study. His conclusions are mostly fluff. Sure the out of band PIN exchange is a bit clunky, but this isn't really a vulnerability. Nothing seamless is going to happen without some sort of certificate authority. Anything else is going to require authentication off the wire.
Battery draining denial of service scheme? Seems like this will be an issue for any limited power mobile device that is listening for connections. As for no defense against it, leaving your device "undiscoverable" and only talking to trusted devices is a good start.
The mention of a divide-and-conquer attack that cannot in fact be used probably doesn't belong in the conclusions.
PINs are, I believe, alphanumeric in most user interfaces, giving us more like 1.7 million keys for a four-digit key length. Still not that great a key space, but that's why you're allowed 16 octets.
It seems like the remainder of the conculsions make the assumption of bad application-level choices of keys and key types. I will acknowledge that this can derail pretty much any encryption scheme.
Personally, I sort of wonder why more standard algorithms were not used, such as RC*, Diffie-Hellman, etc. Also, this seems like it could really use a certificate of PGP-like "web of trust" to support it.
>with, and would like to hear about peoples'
>experiences fiddling with the language support of their
>gadgets before dropping a few hundred bucks on
>something that may not even work very well at all.
As far as this goes, you can play with any of the Palm solutions without buying a machine by using the Palm OS Emulator or the Palm OS Simulator for os 5.0 support. I believe if you join their developer program you can play with ROMs for non-English languages.
I've been in many of these "CEO wants a bad thing" scenarios, and I have come to belive the best solutions is this:
Clearly explain why you think this is the wrong thing to do. Then do it anyway. There will always be another lackey to do their will. Once you've done you best to persuade them, the ball is back in their court, ethically speaking. And you won't get fired, although they will start thinking of you as "difficult," a fate I have long since accepted.
The all-important last step is to start looking for a job where you are valued and respected as a free-willed entity. If they'll fire you for having scruples, they are not worth the sweat of your brow.
precision screwdrivers -- for some reason the smaller sizes tend to get a lot of use by me. I use a kit whose upper end is about right for HD mounting screws and whose lower end is good for palm pilots, glasses, and various small devices not meant to be user maintainable.
cryptographic keys and commonly used crypto software on a business card CDR-- being able to work securely from almost anywhere on the net comes in handy.
small, powerful flashlight-- the one I'm using uses a set of three of the newish super-bright LEDs. It puts out a lot of light, and lasts hundreds of hours on some AAs, so I never have to worry about it being sapped of power when I need it.
my Palm-- it has about a billion field uses. In particular, with the right set of adapters, it can be a good emergency console terminal for headless servers.
cell phone
Linuxcar boot toolkit on a business card CDR-- I really should roll my own, but this thing has most of the good stuff on it. There are times when "dd" is the perfect tool. If I rolled my own, I would probably add the Coroner's toolkit.
I have no real reason to believe that 3G will be much of a success, but I expect that an unregulated, bottom-up mesh network would not do well, certainly not if it were based on existing 802.11 technology.
Networks like the GSM digital phone networks function because of their cellular organization scheme. There is a certain set of channel frequencies. Each "cell" uses a subset of this, and the the cells are organized in such a way that cells using the same channels can never overlap. In any system, such as 802.11, with a constrained set of data channels, there must be discipline to make sure that there is no overlap. Also, there is an absolute upper limit on how many access points can occupy a given area. The long ranges that the article mentions only make this harder to arrange. I can see a scheme where the hardware does its best to minimize the possibility of overlap, but in high density living areas, wireless network frequency doesn't strech very far.
I'd like to know where he gets the idea that performance increases with the number of stations. Just as with a traditional LAN, performance increases only with the number of switches/access points for local traffic or the number of uplinks, for internet traffic. Additional client systems do downgrade performance.
The GPL doesn't work without copyrights getting involved. It relies upon them. What happens is that the original code author retains the copyright (or signs it over to GNU) and release the code with the GNU Public License. The authors copyright is what makes the enforcement of the GPL thoeretically possible. If there was no copyright (i.e. the code was in the public domain) it would probably be impossible for any licensing terms to be enforced on it. Corporations could release the software but withhold the source code, among other things.
The same thing should work with patents: you patent the technology, then publish the details with a license with term similar to the GPL. It would probably be harder to enforce some aspects. It is, for example, much easier to show that one piece of source code is a modification of another than to show that one technology is a modification of another. But this sort of thing has been done in the past for things like algorithm patents.
Something along the lines of click-wrap can make a fair bit of sense, in that it elevates the license to the same sort of formal agreement as a contract. The sort of license we have now, where most users agree implicitly to terms that they have never seen, is pretty ideologically shakey. Many users can use the software for years without knowing they agreed to any terms whatsoever. They get told what they have is free software, so they don't go hunting for a license that in fact obligates them to certain things. It isn't 100% certain in the law, however, that a person can obligate themselves to much of anything without making a conscious choice to. In short, I think it is a good thing to put the license in front of the user to make sure they actually agree to it, rather than using it as a mystical legal machine to regulate their behavior without them knowing it exists.
Click-wrap licenses are mainly a problem because companies use them to force terms that are a little shakey within licensing laws. Active user agreement legitimizes these shady terms. But I think a fair license with click-wrap is a lot fairer and safer from misunderstanding than one without it. A bad license is probably a little worse when buried where the user can't see it.
Consider an example. Company A decides to open-source a piece of software. Novice user B downloads the latest build of it, and uses it to run his business. After a year, a software bug ends up costing B a few hundred man hours to recover from. Incensed, he takes A to court. A says, "Hey, our license indicated no warranty and that we would be held immune from damages." B says that 1) he never read the license, and thus never agreed to it, and 2) A did not make adequate efforts to make the user aquainted with the license restrictions. A says, "If you didn't agree to the license, you're not a legal user. Don't blame us."
Now imagine you're the average judge or jury. Will you conclude:
In closing, imagine property leases were handled in the same implicit manner as open software licenses. Imagine the havoc that landlords could wreak, above and beyond what they already do.
The blog format is just another potential tool for the literary process. It is thus important to consider the properties of this tool to decide how to use it.
What new capabilites does the blog bring to the table? What new stories does it allow you to tell? What new writer-reader dynamics does it allow? Fiction in the form of journal entries is not a new thing. Done well, it can create a sense of intimacy between the writer and the reader. Long running web comic strips such as Sluggy Freelenace show that you can get away with a long running plot in little daily chunks on the web.
At the same time, you have to consider the bad properties of such a tool. As with many serial novels, people may be unlikely to start in the middle, or backtrack years to catch up. Many people tend to find it tiresome or slightly painful to read novel length stretches of text off of a computer screen.
I'd say, if you have a story to tell that fits the form, go ahead. I don't tend to see it as such a breakthrough for literature, just another slight variation in the art of storytelling.
Well, the author certainly chose a fairly questionable interface for his article. Two column , side-by-side text, while it pleasurably evokes that old newpaper feeling, is a bad idea in a browser window. At 1280x1024, I had to scroll up and down. The little link was a cute touch, but I only tried it out after finishing the article. All-in-all, very awkward. I hope we can do better for linux.
One of the easiest ways is to yank a CD out of the drive that it was expecting to be in there for a little while yet. I think this is mainly an issue when running DirectX games and such. It is a recoverable BSOD, but useful if you do want to see one.
I haven't read this story as of yet, but I thought I'd throw my experience with ALICE on the table. I was excited to hear that someone had finally made the ELIZA trick work well enough to fool competition judges into thinking it was a human. I decided to drop by and see how this thing performed.
IMO, it did terribly. I was doing my best to write as I would speak. I may be a a little over-loquacious, but I was definitely no trying to trip the beast up. Neither was I trying to talk like a robot myself. I was trying to make small talk. Or rather, as time went on, trying to make small talk to a crazed beatnik who reponded in constant non-sequiters. I went on to try to simplify what I said to it quite a bit, but it was still fairly bad. About 75% of the time it produced grammatically appropriate responses, but only content-appropriate about 20% of the time. Even then, it was nothing like talking to another human being who was paying attention.
My main beef is that the system seems to hold no state data about previous exchanges. All interaction with the machine seems to be broken up into isolated two sentence volleys, after which it has no memory of the conversation. Hence even fairly simple and common contextual remarks fly right over ALICE's head. I was deepy unimpressed, and somewhat confused at why people were making such a fuss. I suggest to you all to try this thing out for yourselves.
I've looked a little closer into the references I could find on the web about decreased MTBF on drives in a RAID scenario. It appears that the way most people are viewing this is as as statistical phenomenon. If you have 6 drives with a fixed probability of failure, the whole set has a higher probability than the individual drives. I could not find any references, in the last 15 minutes, to increased loading, so perhaps that part was a phantom of memory. Either way, with low reliability drives, dividing the MTBF by two is not the best idea.
I'm not entirely sure of the full rationale, only that I've come across quite a few references to increased disk loading in raid systems, in addition to plain old working experience. I think the particular stripesize/cylinder size ratio, stripe layout, etc. have a lot to do with how much effect this has. A striped drive tends to end up doing a lot more short reads as compared to long sequential reads. Depending on how well the drive heads are managed (easier to do well in hardware, IMHO) the increased seek activity can generate a lot of wear and tear. This is not as big a deal when using the RAID with large files and a small set of data consumers. Again, this is my non-hardware expert interpretation, but there is a lot of reference in the literature to the shortened life of RAID drives.
I'm not sure this is a good idea. Laptop drives, even the recent IBM enhanced models, are rated for a much lighter activity cycle than desktop drives. That is, push them as hard and as long as full-size drives , they are likely to fail on you. IBM is trying to fix this to make their 2.5 in drives suitable to blade servers. Still, RAID historically pushes drives hard enough to decrease the time between failures quite a bit. Combine this with drives designed for low load, and you're asking for trouble. I think the recommendation of a firewire external drive was a good one.