Wireless access to the Internet via a cellphone was a stupid idea to begin with. I tried it with one of the first Sprint 'Wireless Web' phones and found it to be almost useless (despite the extra $20 in access charges it added).
Almost all the reviews I have read of any such device are entirely negative.
Who thought of this? Who decided we wanted it? And why? This technology, along with WAP, will soon die the quick death it deserves.
I think with the limitation of a 2D display with less than 100 dpi, we have approached the limit of what can reasonable be done with a modern GUI. The original GUIs came about as the result of cheaper raster based video hardware becoming available and supplanting the previous character based hardware.
The attempts at 3D GUIs don't do anything for me, when the display really isn't 3D, and that icon in the distance is illegible because my screen's resolution sucks. We need better and radically different hardware before any major advances in user interface design can occur.
We in the US are doing a terrible job of educating our children, and rather than think long and hard about why that is, and how to fix it, educators and politicians have gone on a mad spending spree and thrown technology at the problem.
The problems with computers in the school are too numerous to mention here, and I think have been thoroughly covered in the media, but I think it is sufficient to say that computers in the schools have been an utter failure any way you look at them. Has anyone bothered to do an ROI analysis?
On a recent plane flight, I sat next to a middle school student from a very affluent suburb of Chicago. This school is very well funded and probably has more computers than students. He confided in me that all the kids used computers for was personal web surfing and playing games. One friend of his had even learned how steal passwords.
Wonderful - our tax dollars at work folks.
Think about it, if noone knew how to use a blackboard as an effective tool for teaching children, would we be demanding more and more of them in every classroom?
I don't get it. Can someone explain to be why photons rushing down waveguides on a chip would be orders of magnitude faster than electrons rushing down wires on a chip?
I can see that it would be somewhat faster, as you don't have to contend with electrical resistances and so forth, and the information carrier is travelling at the speed of light (by definition) - but electrons also travel at a sizable fraction of the speed of light.
What characteristics of photonic computing am I missing that would make is oh so much faster than what we have now?
-josh
Re:Will you fanboys drop it already?
on
Frankenstein Time
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, was not 'following the crowd' or trying to be 'clever'. I happen to think it is a very good movie, and relevant. Unfortunately is was very highly stylized movie, and not a lot of people cared for the retro-austerity the Director was in to.
This isn't just a knee-jerk response "DNA->Gattaca" - a fully sequenced human genome is required for the movies' premise. And I think the movie accurately explores some of the possible implications of the success of the Human Genome Project.
Besides, if you'd bothered to read the rest of my post, it had little to do with Gattaca.
The completion of the Human genome project makes this version of the future a technical possibility, though I think it socially it is highly unlikely.
I find it amazing how Katz can spin almost anything into his alientated Geek gestalt. So now corporations are going to use genetic engineering to eridacate geeks? Lovely.
Somehow I doubt a culture that still idolizes Einstein (one of the more unique individuals of this century) is going to put all of its faith in human control and homogenization of all aspects of reproduction.
The benefit is from having all of your data in one place. You might not have ever felt the allure of such benefits working at such small companies.
Currently I am working at a growing telecom company that is still using all the little apps it wrote when it was tiny. There are major planning system written entire in MSAccess, even Excel. And there are literally hundreds of such systems.
ERP is supposed to come along and clean all that up. Get all your data in one place, and provide uniform reporting and access to that data.
The reality of it all is that hardly anyone actually uses one vendor for all it's data. Having my HR data in the same database with my supply chain data doesn't really buy me much. Usually companies pick 'best of breed' vendors in specific areas - manufacturing/supply chain, financials, etc...
First, corporations don't buy an ERP software package so much as they buy a vendor.
I have been working with a major ERP vendor's product for the last few years - PeopleSoft. What companies want is support, stellar support, that returns answers within hours.
As a corporation, if my union payroll run crashes, or my month end financial processing bombs I want someone to fix it, NOW. I don't want to post a question on Usenet and wait four days. Union employees won't wait that long for a paycheck.
So free ERP packages would have a very limited market. Most corps can afford to pay, because they have the money, and believe it or not, properly implemented ERP packages can actually _save_ money for a coporation.
As someone who actually bought shares in 3DFX I know personally how competitive this industry can be. It seems like no one company has been able to stay on top of the video card/3D accelerator market for too long.
nVidia is there right now. Who will it be in the future?
This pattern also seems to be followed in other PC peripheral markets as well. Hayes went out of business after falling from the top of the modem market. Sound card hardware has been commoditized to the point where I doubt anyone is making much money in that market, accept for nich, high end hardware.
The moral of the story, if you are the owner of a high flying PC peripheral company, sell out sooner, rather than later.
A closed source video driver. So what? As long as the driver works, I don't care. If it doesn't work, don't buy the damned card, buy another one from a different vendor that does work, or is open source, whatever your priorities are. No manufacturer has an obligation to live up to the ideological dictates of the open source movement. Perhaps they may eventually be disadvantaged in the marketplace if they do not, but I'll let the market place sort that out.
I am sure that NVidia has been made sufficiently aware of the arguments for and against open sourcing their drivers. They have chosen (for the most part) not to. Quitcherfrigginbitchin and live with it.
Much of the problem here may be the the looseness and immaturity of the driver interface for XFree86. NVidia has a constantly shifting target, and I am sure Linux is not their highest priority. Thus the quality of their drivers is going to lag a bit.
Don't like it? Buy another card. Or sign an NDA, get the source code, and create and distribute (maybe even sell) your own binary only driver. (Has anyone ever done this, if not, why not? Aren't MetroX and OSS exampes?)
-josh
Nanomedicine already exists
on
Nanomedicine
·
· Score: 3
Why the attempts to fabricate from scratch little machines that can manipulate the material and biochemistry of our bodies?
We have a ready made toolkit for doing just this. It is the finely tuned result of billions of years of evolution - the genes of the virus and bacterium.
Biotech is the future of medicine - custom engineered viruses that attack cancer cells, or bacteria that eat arterial plaque. These things are designed to live in us already - a few tweaks can make them do some extremely useful things.
My experience with Sprint PCS and the 'Wireless Web':
It costs a lot (at least when I used it) about 35 cents a minute, with a minute minimum. I would logon, schlep through the crappy four line text menus only to get to a 'this feature coming soon' message. 35 cents down the drain.
It is almost unusable. Do you want to order a book from Amazon after going 19 levels deep in a text menu, typing your credit card number and address on a numeric keypad? gimme a break.
The features you would want just aren't there. How about a user customizable 'home page'. Quick shortcuts to stock quotes, weather, news briefs, sports scores - nope, have to navigate the menu system to get anywhere. Usability testing - anyone, anyone?
Spring PCS service just sucks period. At least in Chicago. My phone dropped nearly half the calls I made, and failed to ring on incoming calls more times than I care to count.
Just avoid Sprint period. My terrible experience with them just makes me laugh at the irony of their TV adds. 'Crystal Clear'? Can't they be sued for outright lies?
As for the blocked Latin page, Courville speculated that the software's language-translation capabilities may have found something in the Latin text that qualified it under the pornographic categorization.
Haselton guessed that something may have been the high frequency of the Latin word "cum."
>I recently gave up on a Linux desktop. Got sick >of having to upgrade 5 libraries every time I wanted to install a new app. I also gave up on >win98, it just gets flakier with the age of the installation, until one day it does not boot and >you have to reinstall.
Uh, you realize, do you not, that these two fascts are related? The reason (well, one reason, but a big one) that Linux doesn't bitrot is that (a) there are mechanisms in the operating system to keep you from running programs with mismatched version numbers (sonames and so on), and (b) most distributions make sure that you have the correct libraries for your programs. Windows has essentially no such safeguards, which leads to a lot of the chronic problems that you see with it; the phrase, I believe, is "DLL Hell".
Well, NT has no such protections either, and it manages to be rock solid, even with nasty windows installations overwriting DLLs. I don't have any problem with having new Linux programs requiring new libraries, but I do not enjoy having to hunt them down on some random website, only to find yet deeper dependancies that require further updates.
If you get an application install in Linux it should be entirely self-contained, out of the box. This is my largest gripe with Linux apps.
So, VA just wants to do all this for the OSS community for free does it? How does it plan to make money doing this? I am sure that their investors will want to know.
As a hardware vendor it is clear how VA adds value to a free and open platform, Linux and its associated tools. Now they want to help out the developer community. It is nice that they want to help nature open source development, but something in the back of my mind just has to wonder, what's in it for them?
The author of the original article does make a passing reference to the lack of file format compatibility being a huge and largely overlooked weakness - only a passing reference.
What bugged me about the article is that what went unspoken was the huge amount of time this guy must have invested in his setup. Admittedly he has a nice setup, but knowing what it took to get to a similarly nice setup for myself, I could recommend replacing windows with Linux to only the most dedicated geeks. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of perseverence, and it is still not as good.
I recently gave up on a Linux desktop. Got sick of having to upgrade 5 libraries every time I wanted to install a new app. I also gave up on win98, it just gets flakier with the age of the installation, until one day it does not boot and you have to reinstall.
I have migrated to NT, which (for a desktop) gives me the same stability as Linux. I am not upset about having to pay a little bit more money for apps and the OS - I get it back in time not wasted tweaking stuff. And when Window2000 hits the streets I will shell out the $200+ for it, its well worth it.
But Linux will still stay on my file server. Windows2K I fear would bring it to its knees.
This just basically points out a basic security flaw in the entire web programming model. As far as I know exploits that take advantage of the vunerabilities described in the advisor have been around for quite some time.
It is entirely up to the web site to validate the data entry of its users. Unfortunately you cannot trust every web site you use to catch every possible exploit. If you are worried about it, disable JavaScript/VBScript.
To fix this problem would require some enforced CGI-coding standards or certification programs for web sites - "We use only Web-Guard 2.0 certified server side scripting tools to keep you safe from script kiddies!"
This stuff is great - it will lead to the sort of technology we will need to allow autonomous robots to explore other planetary bodies, such as Mars or the Moon, but if it breaks down we can just walk up to it and figure out what broke. We can work out the kinks here where we can fix it.
Maybe Nasa should try to land some probes on the Antartic from Earth orbit, while simulating the kinds of communications delays we have with a distant probe. Seems like it would be a lot cheaper, and we would learn a heck of a lot more even if the mission failed. One of the biggest problems with the recent Mars mission is that we have no idea what went wrong. If we did it might have been worth the $165 million we blew, at least we would not make the same mistake twice.
We need a standard for the long term storage of data. This would consist of a number of mini-standards for media and file formats, call it LTDS (Long term data storage standard) LTDS 1.0 might support the CD-R format as the media, and a flotilla of file formats - say MP3/WAV for Audio, MPEG3 for video, HTML 4 for documents, PDF, and Java for programs, and of course some sort of file system standard (probably the current ISO CD file system standard).
Hardware and software 'readers' would then be certified as LTDS 1.0 compatible, meaning that it can read all the physical media in the standard and all the file formats in the standard.
As time progresses LTDS 2.0 will of course be developed say on DVD-RAM with newer file formats, but LTDS 1.0 would be a subset of the 2.0 standard. Hardware and Software readers would have to be LTDS 1.0 compatible as well as LTDS 2.0 compatible to be certified LTDS 2.0 compatible. You would always be able to read your stuff, no matter how old the format you saved it in.
There is still the problem of physical media decay, but I am sure that the media manufacturers can address this and make some especially long-lived CD-R packaging (or DVD-RAM in the future, or what have you).
Slashdot Mirror
Wireless access to the Internet via a cellphone was a stupid idea to begin with. I tried it with one of the first Sprint 'Wireless Web' phones and found it to be almost useless (despite the extra $20 in access charges it added).
Almost all the reviews I have read of any such device are entirely negative.
Who thought of this? Who decided we wanted it? And why? This technology, along with WAP, will soon die the quick death it deserves.
-josh
Most people in college are adults
I think with the limitation of a 2D display with less than 100 dpi, we have approached the limit of what can reasonable be done with a modern GUI. The original GUIs came about as the result of cheaper raster based video hardware becoming available and supplanting the previous character based hardware.
The attempts at 3D GUIs don't do anything for me, when the display really isn't 3D, and that icon in the distance is illegible because my screen's resolution sucks. We need better and radically different hardware before any major advances in user interface design can occur.
-josh
We in the US are doing a terrible job of educating our children, and rather than think long and hard about why that is, and how to fix it, educators and politicians have gone on a mad spending spree and thrown technology at the problem.
The problems with computers in the school are too numerous to mention here, and I think have been thoroughly covered in the media, but I think it is sufficient to say that computers in the schools have been an utter failure any way you look at them. Has anyone bothered to do an ROI analysis?
On a recent plane flight, I sat next to a middle school student from a very affluent suburb of Chicago. This school is very well funded and probably has more computers than students. He confided in me that all the kids used computers for was personal web surfing and playing games. One friend of his had even learned how steal passwords.
Wonderful - our tax dollars at work folks.
Think about it, if noone knew how to use a blackboard as an effective tool for teaching children, would we be demanding more and more of them in every classroom?
-josh
I don't get it. Can someone explain to be why photons rushing down waveguides on a chip would be orders of magnitude faster than electrons rushing down wires on a chip?
I can see that it would be somewhat faster, as you don't have to contend with electrical resistances and so forth, and the information carrier is travelling at the speed of light (by definition) - but electrons also travel at a sizable fraction of the speed of light.
What characteristics of photonic computing am I missing that would make is oh so much faster than what we have now?
-josh
Sorry, was not 'following the crowd' or trying to be 'clever'. I happen to think it is a very good movie, and relevant. Unfortunately is was very highly stylized movie, and not a lot of people cared for the retro-austerity the Director was in to.
This isn't just a knee-jerk response "DNA->Gattaca" - a fully sequenced human genome is required for the movies' premise. And I think the movie accurately explores some of the possible implications of the success of the Human Genome Project.
Besides, if you'd bothered to read the rest of my post, it had little to do with Gattaca.
-josh
If you haven't rented it yet, do so.
The completion of the Human genome project makes this version of the future a technical possibility, though I think it socially it is highly unlikely.
I find it amazing how Katz can spin almost anything into his alientated Geek gestalt. So now corporations are going to use genetic engineering to eridacate geeks? Lovely.
Somehow I doubt a culture that still idolizes Einstein (one of the more unique individuals of this century) is going to put all of its faith in human control and homogenization of all aspects of reproduction.
-josh
The benefit is from having all of your data in one place. You might not have ever felt the allure of such benefits working at such small companies.
Currently I am working at a growing telecom company that is still using all the little apps it wrote when it was tiny. There are major planning system written entire in MSAccess, even Excel. And there are literally hundreds of such systems.
ERP is supposed to come along and clean all that up. Get all your data in one place, and provide uniform reporting and access to that data.
The reality of it all is that hardly anyone actually uses one vendor for all it's data. Having my HR data in the same database with my supply chain data doesn't really buy me much. Usually companies pick 'best of breed' vendors in specific areas - manufacturing/supply chain, financials, etc...
-josh
First, corporations don't buy an ERP software package so much as they buy a vendor.
I have been working with a major ERP vendor's product for the last few years - PeopleSoft. What companies want is support, stellar support, that returns answers within hours.
As a corporation, if my union payroll run crashes, or my month end financial processing bombs I want someone to fix it, NOW. I don't want to post a question on Usenet and wait four days. Union employees won't wait that long for a paycheck.
So free ERP packages would have a very limited market. Most corps can afford to pay, because they have the money, and believe it or not, properly implemented ERP packages can actually _save_ money for a coporation.
-josh
As someone who actually bought shares in 3DFX I know personally how competitive this industry can be. It seems like no one company has been able to stay on top of the video card/3D accelerator market for too long.
nVidia is there right now. Who will it be in the future?
This pattern also seems to be followed in other PC peripheral markets as well. Hayes went out of business after falling from the top of the modem market. Sound card hardware has been commoditized to the point where I doubt anyone is making much money in that market, accept for nich, high end hardware.
The moral of the story, if you are the owner of a high flying PC peripheral company, sell out sooner, rather than later.
-josh
This was shortly followed by announcements from the W3C of the 'Angel-Hair', 'Fucilli', and 'Linguini' web theories.
-josh
Me: "p-w-d"
Computer: "slash"
Me: "l-s"
Computer: "slash u-s-r, slash h-o-m-e, slash b-i-n, slash b-o-o-t, slash e-t-c..."
Me: "cd slash e-t-c"
Computer: *silent*
Me: "vi profile"
computer: (reads file contents)
Me: "quit"
computer: "error"
Me: "exit"
computer: "error"
Me: "wq"
computer: "file is read only"
Me: "q!"
That's my kinda computing
-josh
If you don't want people to deep link. Only accept external referers for the home page.
I realize this requires a bit more overhead, but for christ sake, why sue over something that can be stopped with a technical tweak.
-josh
A closed source video driver. So what? As long as the driver works, I don't care. If it doesn't work, don't buy the damned card, buy another one from a different vendor that does work, or is open source, whatever your priorities are. No manufacturer has an obligation to live up to the ideological dictates of the open source movement. Perhaps they may eventually be disadvantaged in the marketplace if they do not, but I'll let the market place sort that out.
I am sure that NVidia has been made sufficiently aware of the arguments for and against open sourcing their drivers. They have chosen (for the most part) not to. Quitcherfrigginbitchin and live with it.
Much of the problem here may be the the looseness and immaturity of the driver interface for XFree86. NVidia has a constantly shifting target, and I am sure Linux is not their highest priority. Thus the quality of their drivers is going to lag a bit.
Don't like it? Buy another card. Or sign an NDA, get the source code, and create and distribute (maybe even sell) your own binary only driver. (Has anyone ever done this, if not, why not? Aren't MetroX and OSS exampes?)
-josh
Why the attempts to fabricate from scratch little machines that can manipulate the material and biochemistry of our bodies?
We have a ready made toolkit for doing just this. It is the finely tuned result of billions of years of evolution - the genes of the virus and bacterium.
Biotech is the future of medicine - custom engineered viruses that attack cancer cells, or bacteria that eat arterial plaque. These things are designed to live in us already - a few tweaks can make them do some extremely useful things.
-josh
My experience with Sprint PCS and the 'Wireless Web':
It costs a lot (at least when I used it) about 35 cents a minute, with a minute minimum. I would logon, schlep through the crappy four line text menus only to get to a 'this feature coming soon' message. 35 cents down the drain.
It is almost unusable. Do you want to order a book from Amazon after going 19 levels deep in a text menu, typing your credit card number and address on a numeric keypad? gimme a break.
The features you would want just aren't there. How about a user customizable 'home page'. Quick shortcuts to stock quotes, weather, news briefs, sports scores - nope, have to navigate the menu system to get anywhere. Usability testing - anyone, anyone?
Spring PCS service just sucks period. At least in Chicago. My phone dropped nearly half the calls I made, and failed to ring on incoming calls more times than I care to count.
Just avoid Sprint period. My terrible experience with them just makes me laugh at the irony of their TV adds. 'Crystal Clear'? Can't they be sued for outright lies?
-josh
As for the blocked Latin page, Courville speculated that the software's language-translation capabilities may have found something in the Latin text that qualified it under the pornographic categorization.
Haselton guessed that something may have been the high frequency of the Latin word "cum."
That's classic.
-josh
slashnot.com,.net,.org are not available, at least according to the netwroksolutions lookup page.
-josh
>I recently gave up on a Linux desktop. Got sick
>of having to upgrade 5 libraries every time I wanted to install a new app. I also gave up on
>win98, it just gets flakier with the age of the installation, until one day it does not boot and
>you have to reinstall.
Uh, you realize, do you not, that these two fascts are related? The reason (well, one reason, but a big one) that Linux doesn't bitrot is that (a) there are mechanisms in the operating system to keep you from running programs with mismatched version numbers (sonames and so on), and (b) most distributions make sure that you have the correct libraries for your programs. Windows has essentially no such safeguards, which leads to a lot of the chronic problems that you see with it; the phrase, I believe, is "DLL Hell".
Well, NT has no such protections either, and it manages to be rock solid, even with nasty windows installations overwriting DLLs. I don't have any problem with having new Linux programs requiring new libraries, but I do not enjoy having to hunt them down on some random website, only to find yet deeper dependancies that require further updates.
If you get an application install in Linux it should be entirely self-contained, out of the box. This is my largest gripe with Linux apps.
So, VA just wants to do all this for the OSS community for free does it? How does it plan to make money doing this? I am sure that their investors will want to know.
As a hardware vendor it is clear how VA adds value to a free and open platform, Linux and its associated tools. Now they want to help out the developer community. It is nice that they want to help nature open source development, but something in the back of my mind just has to wonder, what's in it for them?
-josh
The author of the original article does make a passing reference to the lack of file format compatibility being a huge and largely overlooked weakness - only a passing reference.
What bugged me about the article is that what went unspoken was the huge amount of time this guy must have invested in his setup. Admittedly he has a nice setup, but knowing what it took to get to a similarly nice setup for myself, I could recommend replacing windows with Linux to only the most dedicated geeks. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of perseverence, and it is still not as good.
I recently gave up on a Linux desktop. Got sick of having to upgrade 5 libraries every time I wanted to install a new app. I also gave up on win98, it just gets flakier with the age of the installation, until one day it does not boot and you have to reinstall.
I have migrated to NT, which (for a desktop) gives me the same stability as Linux. I am not upset about having to pay a little bit more money for apps and the OS - I get it back in time not wasted tweaking stuff. And when Window2000 hits the streets I will shell out the $200+ for it, its well worth it.
But Linux will still stay on my file server. Windows2K I fear would bring it to its knees.
-josh
If someone can come up with a enzymatic encryption algorithm, you could test trillions of keys at once.
The question is - does the time to compute the RNA solution scale with the size of the problem the same way a traditional computational solution does?
-josh
This just basically points out a basic security flaw in the entire web programming model. As far as I know exploits that take advantage of the vunerabilities described in the advisor have been around for quite some time.
It is entirely up to the web site to validate the data entry of its users. Unfortunately you cannot trust every web site you use to catch every possible exploit. If you are worried about it, disable JavaScript/VBScript.
To fix this problem would require some enforced CGI-coding standards or certification programs for web sites - "We use only Web-Guard 2.0 certified server side scripting tools to keep you safe from script kiddies!"
-josh
This stuff is great - it will lead to the sort of technology we will need to allow autonomous robots to explore other planetary bodies, such as Mars or the Moon, but if it breaks down we can just walk up to it and figure out what broke.
We can work out the kinks here where we can fix it.
Maybe Nasa should try to land some probes on the Antartic from Earth orbit, while simulating the kinds of communications delays we have with a distant probe. Seems like it would be a lot cheaper, and we would learn a heck of a lot more even if the mission failed. One of the biggest problems with the recent Mars mission is that we have no idea what went wrong. If we did it might have been worth the $165 million we blew, at least we would not make the same mistake twice.
-josh
We need a standard for the long term storage of data. This would consist of a number of mini-standards for media and file formats, call it LTDS (Long term data storage standard) LTDS 1.0 might support the CD-R format as the media, and a flotilla of file formats - say MP3/WAV for Audio, MPEG3 for video, HTML 4 for documents, PDF, and Java for programs, and of course some sort of file system standard (probably the current ISO CD file system standard).
Hardware and software 'readers' would then be certified as LTDS 1.0 compatible, meaning that it can read all the physical media in the standard and all the file formats in the standard.
As time progresses LTDS 2.0 will of course be developed say on DVD-RAM with newer file formats, but LTDS 1.0 would be a subset of the 2.0 standard. Hardware and Software readers would have to be LTDS 1.0 compatible as well as LTDS 2.0 compatible to be certified LTDS 2.0 compatible. You would always be able to read your stuff, no matter how old the format you saved it in.
There is still the problem of physical media decay, but I am sure that the media manufacturers can address this and make some especially long-lived CD-R packaging (or DVD-RAM in the future, or what have you).
-josh