I know, all of these things can happen with data stored locally, but with local data, you are answerable to yourself, and you know exactly what is done to your data, and you are in charge of how well protected it is.
Hmmm... seems like you should go join the survivalists who don't trust anything they don't make or kill themselves. You depend on a remarkably intracate web of services as it is.
To answer your 'slashdot' critique, there will be QOS guarantees for critical apps, and apps will be distributed. Sure crappy providers might skimp on server hardware or oversell their service, but this is no different than any other service you rely on today.
Try using your local computers if the power company screws up with billing and deactivates your 'account'.
I am not talking about today, I am talking about the future. Things will presumedly by much more reliable in the technological realm.
Remember how hard it used to be to get on the Internet? Now any idiot with an AOL CD can be spreading email virii within minutes of sticking the CD in the slot.
However the ISP will have to buy the hardware to support that, along with the broadband connections, and the connections to the users's homes. In addition the ISP will have to keep upgrading to keep in line with the times (just imagine when a new game comes out that requires a lot of resources) and find a way to administer and manage all of these resources.
Anyway, I think this is going to cause a large amount of pain with end-users (especially when they get those monthly bills) and administrators alike, and will take a long time to be implemented, if ever.
Granted, but the technology is in it's infancy. Think of what a PC is capable of now compared to ten years ago. Way back when I could run only one app at a time. There were hacks (DesqView) that could multi-task - kinda, task switchers, but it was complicated and there was a lot of manual intervention/tuning required.
Now with Linux we think nothing of running hundreds of concurrent processes and it requires almost no user/admin intervention. Why?, because CPU cycles have become so cheap the software can do a heck of a lot more for us.
Yes right now managing a SAN or keeping millions of broadband connections at 99.999% uptime might seem an impossible administrative chore but smart hardware will do most of it for us in the future.
Look at the evolution in dialup ISP technology. The first ISPs were guys with an expensive, flaky T1 who crammed 16 modems onto a unix box and signed people up.
Now we have network manageable, hot swappable remote upgradable modem pools. I have had dialup connections last for almost a week. Unthinkable even 2 years ago.
1) Privacy: I don't want to store my data and programs somewhere that I don't have ultimate control over.
You don't have privacy now. The police can kick down your door and take everything, eavesdrop on your phone calls, etc... Encryption is the answer. And it keeps getting better/easier to use. It will make sure that your data can only be read by you whether or not it is stored locally.
2) Accessibility: I want to be able to get at my data even when the network (say, to my ISP) goes down. Same for processing.
When the power goes off you can't do anything with your computer. The Internet will eventually approach the reliability of the power-grid. If you are really fanatic about it store a local copy of the really important things.
3) Flexibility: Look how difficult it is to perform non-mainstream operations with proprietary software now. Now think about how much more difficult it will be when you don't even have your own copy of the software; you'll have to rely on your "Processing Provider" supporting 3D rendering or whatever.
No, you will be able to buy the capability from anyone that provides it, not just your ISP, and it won't cost you the huge upfront capital expenditures that come with high-end software these days. Renting apps provides much more flexibility than buying/installing/maintaining code for ever single computer based function you perform.
It really all boils down to autonomy. I want to do my thing, my way. And so do a lot of other people.
The scenario I offer presents no barriers to your autonomy. True, with current technology this scenario cannot be realized in any practical sense today. But given 20 or 30 years, we will be there.
Furthermore, there's no pressure for me to join the collective. If I need more storage or processing power, I can build a beowulf cluster out of all the PCs discarded by the lemmings.
And the rest of us will be renting beowolf clusters for pennies a mega-MIP while you chase around ethernet cable faults.
Intelligence will eventually become distributed among the currently 'dumb' devices that we use each day. Hardware innovation will continue to drive down the price and size of devices while upping the performance, making sitting at a 'workstation' to do computer work seem quite anachronistic in the decades to come.
The people that say "you will pry my PC out of my cold dead fingers" I think lack imagination.
What do you need a PC for now?
-Games - Dedicated 3D rendering hardware is so cheap it can be embedded in $100 consoles - why not in TVs, VCRs, etc.
-Surfing the Net - Your HDTV purhcased for $1000 in the year 2005 will have this built in.
-Local storage (I gotta lotta stuff and I don't trust it on the internet) - So you buy a storage unit for your local wireless network. The minute you plug it in it announces its presence to all networked devices and voila, your VCR has a place to store movies, your TV a place to archive web pages, etc...
But why do you need local storage if your ISP can offer terabytes of movies/audio/programs all over a broadband connection?
-Word processing, DTP, graphic design (general purpose applications) - broad band will most likely make it possible to rent the usage of such apps from your ISP and run them using a thin client. Might sound expensive now, but hardware and bandwidth prices keep falling. Do you want to buy photoshop with x plugins for $1000, or rent it at 50 cents an hour?
Thin clients run nicely on near notebook-like (as in a paper notebook) tablets now. Wait a couple years and you will have a notebook thin 'thin client' with screen resolution approaching that of the printed page.
Finally corporate drones will stop printing their email and schedules and just be able to carry their damned computer everywhere they go.
-Compiling, rendering, other processor intensive tasks - Two words: server farms. Access to high speed/distributed hardware will be commodotized to the point where you can cheaply lease time on hardware with astounding capabilities.
Some of this stuff is 30 years off, but it will eventually come. Some dork will always want a tremendously expensive box that does it all, but it will become less and less economically justified when most of the common devices in your home do 90% of your silicon based processing already, and the other 10% can be cheaply bought on demand.
-josh
Drop the Space station, fund this kind of stuff
on
NASA and AI Testing
·
· Score: 1
This is the sort of thing that we should be putting the majority of our space exploration budget into.
Massive PR exploits like the space station, or a manned missions to Mars will never have the same ROI as unmanned exploration craft.
It just makes me want to cry when I think about all the good science that could be conducted by probes like these with the money that is being wasted on the space station.
Oh great, now the cat is out of the bag. Soon they will discover that the entire source of Linux is actually a heavily encrypted MPEG featuring bill Clinton in compromising positions with various Little Rock secretaries.
Instead of each project having to setup their own central servers, recruit people, work out authentication, stats etc... Why not create a generic client program that downloads plugins? You could have a SETI plugin, a primes plugin, RC5 plugin, and so on.
The generic client would install and validate each plugin and handle/encrypt the data traffic to a central server.
There would be a server component to this also, handling the web interface for stats and validating/receiving completed work from the clients.
Projects that wanted access to the distributed super computer would register with someone who had setup a server and distributed generic clients already. The project team would provide a plugin written to a specific API. The plugin actually does the work, it gets new work and transmits completed work through the API.
The generic client could notify you when new projects have been registered and give you the choice to download and prioritize the new project's plugin. (this way you could contribute effectively to multiple projects concurrently)
An extension of this would be to take it commercial as a way of selling your spare CPU cycles. The maker of a generic (commercial) distributed client could sell access to all the computers that run their client. Then you would get web goodies, points, discounts, etc based on how many total CPU cycles your machine(s) had contributed.
Why call it "Hazards of the Internet" when that is not the topic? Call it "The Hazards of developing the Internet", or "Growing pains in the developing online world", etc...
You title certainly will catch some attention from the teacher in light of recent news events, but after they read the paper and find the title has nothing to do with the content I think they will be less impressed.
No, I was talking Pintos not Pickups. Exploding Pintos were a fiasco of a long way back - poorly designed gas tanks, Ford knew about it, did nothing, class action law suit, etc...
To the best of my knowledge these laws already exist. If a company purposefully and knowingly misrepresents the capabilities of a product to a prospective buyer, the company can be held legally liable no matter what contract was signed or implicitly agreed to (in the case of EULAs).
Fraud on the part of the seller invalidates the contract. This applies to exploding Ford Pintos and the software industry equally.
If you want to get into legislating penalties for anything other than fraud or gross negligence I think you will be entering a legal quagmire that will stifle creative and innovation.
As someone else suggested an external testing/verification lab similar to the UL would be a welcome innovation. We have this now to a certain extent in the form of trade mag reviews and test labs - but it would be nice to have that stamp of approval BEFORE the product is released.
Clone the clone, then clone that clone, then clone that clone, etc...
If it stops working at some point we are missing a key element. If it doesn't stop working then we know that something about the enviroment of the host egg is resetting the genetic component of the aging process.
By the way, the Tolomere theory is just one theory of aging. The fact that Dolly's tolomeres were shorter than average for a sheep her physical age does not neccessary lead to the conclusion that she is in some way prematurely aged.
This just goes to show the inefficacy of computers in the classroom. Schools are given the computers because of course we have to have computers in the classroom, the president says so. Then the schools have to figure out what to do with them.
They could install all the latest whizzbang software at $500 a seat, or spend nothing and get the same end result. Guess what happens?
Computers don't teach kids. Teachers do. I am not convinced that a computer as a teaching tool is any more effective than a good teacher showing a videotape. The computer is a media tool, just like TV/VCR or an antiquated 'film-strip'.
I had a teacher once who did not know how to teach so he would sit us all down with a film strip, ignore us, and grade papers. We learned nothing. The same thing can happen with a bad teacher and classroom full of pentiums with an 'Explore the rain forests' CD-ROM - its just a hell of a lot more expensive.
Stop wasting money on computers/Internet in the school. Spend the money on paying teachers a respectable salary instead.
Hot on the heels of a recent announcement that that human brain has rudimentary task switching capabilities, a local Linux advocacy group has created an initiative to port Linux to the Human brain.
Says the founder of the iniative, Niels Bohrman: "We feel this discover is a real breakthrough for Linux. The human brain has an installed base of over 5 billion. This could blow Windows out of the water."
The group feels that there are some technical challenges ahead of them but are positive and upbeat, steadfastly attempting to recruit from the most talented Kernel hackers the net has to offer. Says Borhman, "We feel that if we can get the right people working on this it will not be a problem. The basic science shows that the task switching abilties are there in the human brain, it should be an easy port."
When questioned about actual applications for the port the group was vague and evasive. "Don't ask a geek why" said one member defensively. Another member, who asked not have has his name revealed, expressed an unfullfilled wish to download porn directly to his brain.
The group has no timeframe for the Linux port to the Human brain but hopes to have a beta up on the net by the end of the year.
Attempts to reach Linus, the legendary creator of Linux, for comment on the iniativive were unsuccessful.
Alan Cox, a prominent Linux kernel hacker responded to news of the iniative with a short email saying that: "There might be some problems with virtual memory and a port to the Human brain, I'll have a patch out by the end of the week".
Further information can be obtained at the Human brain Linux port web site www.humanlinux.com
I am running 4.03 under linux and it seems to be quite solid. It crashes relatively infrequently, It is certainly much more stable than the 4.5 version I downloaded.
It also renders most everything I throw at it perfectly. What's the need for the later versions?
Here in Chicago, me and two friends set out to purchase something like 30 tickets for multiple showings and got all we wanted.
The web site was a bust, but the Moviefone phone system yielded to persistent speed dialing. Each of us got on at least twice and were able to order up to our max of 6 tickets.
I am now the proud owner of twelve tickets - shhh don't tell Lucas.
Those poor saps that waited days in line...
-josh
No household needs more than one IP address
on
IP Address Shortage
·
· Score: 1
Each househould needs only one routeable IP address. All internal devices needs only non-routable IP addresses handled by IP Masq or something similar.
A number of people have pointed out that this is not satisfactory as the outside world cannot address the devices behind the firewall individually.
Sure they can, through a server. You are going to have to have some sort of a organizing server that registers devices and their capabilities as they are installed on the local network anyway. Something similar to Sun's jini.
Did you imagine that each device, in addition to having its own IP stack, would have all the brains to present its own individual interface to the outside world?
No, these devices will broadcast their capabilities to a server and let the server worry about presenting an interface to the outside world.
In this scenario instead of sending an IP phone call directly to phone1.myhouse.org I send an IP call to myhouse.org and undergo a discovery protocol with the server. The server tells me all the devices it has registered internally that can speak my language, and then I converse with whichever device I chose THROUGH the server.
Making all devices _globally_ individually adressable would be a nightmare. What do you want to do, telnet to each lightbulb in your house and tell each to shutdown (after having barely remembered the DNS names - was that lght1 or light1, or lightbulb1?) - or go to your house's web page, authenticate, and select each bulb from a list that the server dynamically generated based on all the devices which had the requested capability?
If we use them intelligently I think we should have more than enough IP addresses for quite some time to come.
If we could only get those corporation to give back the routeable IP addresses that they are using only internally.
The web has, until now, lacked many of the editorial mechanism that we have in all other forms of mass media.
This 'shutup' software provides an editorial mechanism, but does the traditional methods one better. I can decide what my own editorial policy will be.
This is somehow a bad thing? Yes fewer radical viewpoints will get heard. But this is a function of the fact that the vast majority of people simply don't want to hear radical viewpoints.
I am doing the same thing, only under win98 (DVD support ya know) - I picked up a keyboard called 'VersaPoint' from InterLink Electronics. It is a bit pricey, but uses what they call "Broadband IR" - whatever it is it works great. You can aim the keyboard at the floor, ceiling, or a wall 20 feet away and the receiver still catches every keystroke.
The keyboard has a builtin touchpad (ick) but the model I got came bundled with a "RemotePoint" remote mouse which works great.
Both work flawlessly with Linux, no special drivers are required. The IR receiver just has a mouse and keyboard plug.
Only problem is the keyboard is a bit squished into a smallish form factor - but for surfing it's fine. I wouldn't write a novel on the thing.
Slashdot Mirror
There are three ports on their space suits, labelled:
H2O, O2 (two's subscripted)
and
P2 (two superscripted)
Water, Oxygen, and pee-pee. I figured this out in the middle of another gag and just about lost it.
-josh
I know, all of these things can happen with data stored locally, but with local data, you are answerable to yourself, and you know exactly what is done to your data, and you are in charge of how well protected it is.
Hmmm... seems like you should go join the survivalists who don't trust anything they don't make or kill themselves. You depend on a remarkably intracate web of services as it is.
To answer your 'slashdot' critique, there will be QOS guarantees for critical apps, and apps will be distributed. Sure crappy providers might skimp on server hardware or oversell their service, but this is no different than any other service you rely on today.
-josh
Try using your local computers if the power company screws up with billing and deactivates your 'account'.
I am not talking about today, I am talking about the future. Things will presumedly by much more reliable in the technological realm.
Remember how hard it used to be to get on the Internet? Now any idiot with an AOL CD can be spreading email virii within minutes of sticking the CD in the slot.
-josh
However the ISP will have to buy the hardware to support that, along with the broadband connections, and the connections to the users's homes. In addition the ISP will have to keep upgrading to keep in line with the times (just imagine when a new game comes out that requires a lot of resources) and find a way to administer and manage all of these resources.
Anyway, I think this is going to cause a large amount of pain with end-users (especially when they get those monthly bills) and administrators alike, and will take a long time to be implemented, if ever.
Granted, but the technology is in it's infancy. Think of what a PC is capable of now compared to ten years ago. Way back when I could run only one app at a time. There were hacks (DesqView) that could multi-task - kinda, task switchers, but it was complicated and there was a lot of manual intervention/tuning required.
Now with Linux we think nothing of running hundreds of concurrent processes and it requires almost no user/admin intervention. Why?, because CPU cycles have become so cheap the software can do a heck of a lot more for us.
Yes right now managing a SAN or keeping millions of broadband connections at 99.999% uptime might seem an impossible administrative chore but smart hardware will do most of it for us in the future.
Look at the evolution in dialup ISP technology. The first ISPs were guys with an expensive, flaky T1 who crammed 16 modems onto a unix box and signed people up.
Now we have network manageable, hot swappable remote upgradable modem pools. I have had dialup connections last for almost a week. Unthinkable even 2 years ago.
-josh
1) Privacy: I don't want to store my data and programs somewhere that I don't have ultimate control over.
You don't have privacy now. The police can kick down your door and take everything, eavesdrop on your phone calls, etc... Encryption is the answer. And it keeps getting better/easier to use. It will make sure that your data can only be read by you whether or not it is stored locally.
2) Accessibility: I want to be able to get at my data even when the network (say, to my ISP) goes down. Same for processing.
When the power goes off you can't do anything with your computer. The Internet will eventually approach the reliability of the power-grid. If you are really fanatic about it store a local copy of the really important things.
3) Flexibility: Look how difficult it is to perform non-mainstream operations with proprietary software now. Now think about how much more difficult it will be when you don't even have your own copy of the software; you'll have to rely on your "Processing Provider" supporting 3D rendering or whatever.
No, you will be able to buy the capability from anyone that provides it, not just your ISP, and it won't cost you the huge upfront capital expenditures that come with high-end software these days. Renting apps provides much more flexibility than buying/installing/maintaining code for ever single computer based function you perform.
It really all boils down to autonomy. I want to do my thing, my way. And so do a lot of other people.
The scenario I offer presents no barriers to your autonomy. True, with current technology this scenario cannot be realized in any practical sense today. But given 20 or 30 years, we will be there.
Furthermore, there's no pressure for me to join the collective. If I need more storage or processing power, I can build a beowulf cluster out of all the PCs discarded by the lemmings.
And the rest of us will be renting beowolf clusters for pennies a mega-MIP while you chase around ethernet cable faults.
-josh
Intelligence will eventually become distributed among the currently 'dumb' devices that we use each day. Hardware innovation will continue to drive down the price and size of devices while upping the performance, making sitting at a 'workstation' to do computer work seem quite anachronistic in the decades to come.
The people that say "you will pry my PC out of my cold dead fingers" I think lack imagination.
What do you need a PC for now?
-Games - Dedicated 3D rendering hardware is so cheap it can be embedded in $100 consoles - why not in TVs, VCRs, etc.
-Surfing the Net - Your HDTV purhcased for $1000 in the year 2005 will have this built in.
-Local storage (I gotta lotta stuff and I don't trust it on the internet) - So you buy a storage unit for your local wireless network. The minute you plug it in it announces its presence to all networked devices and voila, your VCR has a place to store movies, your TV a place to archive web pages, etc...
But why do you need local storage if your ISP can offer terabytes of movies/audio/programs all over a broadband connection?
-Word processing, DTP, graphic design
(general purpose applications) - broad band will most likely make it possible to rent the usage of such apps from your ISP and run them using a thin client. Might sound expensive now, but hardware and bandwidth prices keep falling. Do you want to buy photoshop with x plugins for $1000, or rent it at 50 cents an hour?
Thin clients run nicely on near notebook-like (as in a paper notebook) tablets now. Wait a couple years and you will have a notebook thin 'thin client' with screen resolution approaching that of the printed page.
Finally corporate drones will stop printing their email and schedules and just be able to carry their damned computer everywhere they go.
-Compiling, rendering, other processor intensive tasks - Two words: server farms. Access to high speed/distributed hardware will be commodotized to the point where you can cheaply lease time on hardware with astounding capabilities.
Some of this stuff is 30 years off, but it will eventually come. Some dork will always want a tremendously expensive box that does it all, but it will become less and less economically justified when most of the common devices in your home do 90% of your silicon based processing already, and the other 10% can be cheaply bought on demand.
-josh
This is the sort of thing that we should be putting the majority of our space exploration budget into.
Massive PR exploits like the space station, or a manned missions to Mars will never have the same ROI as unmanned exploration craft.
It just makes me want to cry when I think about all the good science that could be conducted by probes like these with the money that is being wasted on the space station.
Oh great, now the cat is out of the bag. Soon they will discover that the entire source of Linux is actually a heavily encrypted MPEG featuring bill Clinton in compromising positions with various Little Rock secretaries.
-josh
Instead of each project having to setup their own central servers, recruit people, work out authentication, stats etc... Why not create a generic client program that downloads plugins? You could have a SETI plugin, a primes plugin, RC5 plugin, and so on.
The generic client would install and validate each plugin and handle/encrypt the data traffic to a central server.
There would be a server component to this also, handling the web interface for stats and validating/receiving completed work from the clients.
Projects that wanted access to the distributed super computer would register with someone who had setup a server and distributed generic clients already. The project team would provide a plugin written to a specific API. The plugin actually does the work, it gets new work and transmits completed work through the API.
The generic client could notify you when new projects have been registered and give you the choice to download and prioritize the new project's plugin. (this way you could contribute effectively to multiple projects concurrently)
An extension of this would be to take it commercial as a way of selling your spare CPU cycles. The maker of a generic (commercial) distributed client could sell access to all the computers that run their client. Then you would get web goodies, points, discounts, etc based on how many total CPU cycles your machine(s) had contributed.
-josh
Why call it "Hazards of the Internet" when that is not the topic? Call it "The Hazards of developing the Internet", or "Growing pains in the developing online world", etc...
You title certainly will catch some attention from the teacher in light of recent news events, but after they read the paper and find the title has nothing to do with the content I think they will be less impressed.
-josh
Reach around behind your PC. Locate and identify all of the following:
Keyboard/mouse/trackball/touchpad connector cords
Printer connector cord
Speaker/video out/input cords
Monitor connector cord
Power cords
SCSI connector cords
And unplug everything else.
-josh
No, I was talking Pintos not Pickups. Exploding Pintos were a fiasco of a long way back - poorly designed gas tanks, Ford knew about it, did nothing, class action law suit, etc...
-josh
To the best of my knowledge these laws already exist. If a company purposefully and knowingly misrepresents the capabilities of a product to a prospective buyer, the company can be held legally liable no matter what contract was signed or implicitly agreed to (in the case of EULAs).
Fraud on the part of the seller invalidates the contract. This applies to exploding Ford Pintos and the software industry equally.
If you want to get into legislating penalties for anything other than fraud or gross negligence I think you will be entering a legal quagmire that will stifle creative and innovation.
As someone else suggested an external testing/verification lab similar to the UL would be a welcome innovation. We have this now to a certain extent in the form of trade mag reviews and test labs - but it would be nice to have that stamp of approval BEFORE the product is released.
-josh
Clone the clone, then clone that clone, then clone that clone, etc...
If it stops working at some point we are missing a key element. If it doesn't stop working then we know that something about the enviroment of the host egg is resetting the genetic component of the aging process.
By the way, the Tolomere theory is just one theory of aging. The fact that Dolly's tolomeres were shorter than average for a sheep her physical age does not neccessary lead to the conclusion that she is in some way prematurely aged.
-josh
This just goes to show the inefficacy of computers in the classroom. Schools are given the computers because of course we have to have computers in the classroom, the president says so. Then the schools have to figure out what to do with them.
They could install all the latest whizzbang software at $500 a seat, or spend nothing and get the same end result. Guess what happens?
Computers don't teach kids. Teachers do. I am not convinced that a computer as a teaching tool is any more effective than a good teacher showing a videotape. The computer is a media tool, just like TV/VCR or an antiquated 'film-strip'.
I had a teacher once who did not know how to teach so he would sit us all down with a film strip, ignore us, and grade papers. We learned nothing. The same thing can happen with a bad teacher and classroom full of pentiums with an 'Explore the rain forests' CD-ROM - its just a hell of a lot more expensive.
Stop wasting money on computers/Internet in the school. Spend the money on paying teachers a respectable salary instead.
-josh
Maybe one of these could have survived my Dell laptop's recent experience with Orange Juice.
Needless to say the Dell faired poorly.
-josh
Beaverton, OR
May 15, 1999
Hot on the heels of a recent announcement that that human brain has rudimentary task switching capabilities, a local Linux advocacy group has created an initiative to port Linux to the Human brain.
Says the founder of the iniative, Niels Bohrman: "We feel this discover is a real breakthrough for Linux. The human brain has an installed base of over 5 billion. This could blow Windows out of the water."
The group feels that there are some technical challenges ahead of them but are positive and upbeat, steadfastly attempting to recruit from the most talented Kernel hackers the net has to offer. Says Borhman, "We feel that if we can get the right people working on this it will not be a problem. The basic science shows that the task switching abilties are there in the human brain, it should be an easy port."
When questioned about actual applications for the port the group was vague and evasive. "Don't ask a geek why" said one member defensively. Another member, who asked not have has his name revealed, expressed an unfullfilled wish to download porn directly to his brain.
The group has no timeframe for the Linux port to the Human brain but hopes to have a beta up on the net by the end of the year.
Attempts to reach Linus, the legendary creator of Linux, for comment on the iniativive were unsuccessful.
Alan Cox, a prominent Linux kernel hacker responded to news of the iniative with a short email saying that: "There might be some problems with virtual memory and a port to the Human brain, I'll have a patch out by the end of the week".
Further information can be obtained at the Human brain Linux port web site www.humanlinux.com
I am running 4.03 under linux and it seems to be quite solid. It crashes relatively infrequently, It is certainly much more stable than the 4.5 version I downloaded.
It also renders most everything I throw at it perfectly. What's the need for the later versions?
-josh
Here in Chicago, me and two friends set out to purchase something like 30 tickets for multiple showings and got all we wanted.
The web site was a bust, but the Moviefone phone system yielded to persistent speed dialing. Each of us got on at least twice and were able to order up to our max of 6 tickets.
I am now the proud owner of twelve tickets - shhh don't tell Lucas.
Those poor saps that waited days in line...
-josh
Each househould needs only one routeable IP address. All internal devices needs only non-routable IP addresses handled by IP Masq or something similar.
A number of people have pointed out that this is not satisfactory as the outside world cannot address the devices behind the firewall individually.
Sure they can, through a server. You are going to have to have some sort of a organizing server that registers devices and their capabilities as they are installed on the local network anyway. Something similar to Sun's jini.
Did you imagine that each device, in addition to having its own IP stack, would have all the brains to present its own individual interface to the outside world?
No, these devices will broadcast their capabilities to a server and let the server worry about presenting an interface to the outside world.
In this scenario instead of sending an IP phone call directly to phone1.myhouse.org I send an IP call to myhouse.org and undergo a discovery protocol with the server. The server tells me all the devices it has registered internally that can speak my language, and then I converse with whichever device I chose THROUGH the server.
Making all devices _globally_ individually adressable would be a nightmare. What do you want to do, telnet to each lightbulb in your house and tell each to shutdown (after having barely remembered the DNS names - was that lght1 or light1, or lightbulb1?) - or go to your house's web page, authenticate, and select each bulb from a list that the server dynamically generated based on all the devices which had the requested capability?
If we use them intelligently I think we should have more than enough IP addresses for quite some time to come.
If we could only get those corporation to give back the routeable IP addresses that they are using only internally.
-josh
I would imagine most Open Source apps out there will compile to a Solaris x86 target. This seems like it targets an extremely small niche.
-josh
The web has, until now, lacked many of the editorial mechanism that we have in all other forms of mass media.
This 'shutup' software provides an editorial mechanism, but does the traditional methods one better. I can decide what my own editorial policy will be.
This is somehow a bad thing? Yes fewer radical viewpoints will get heard. But this is a function of the fact that the vast majority of people simply don't want to hear radical viewpoints.
-josh
The best was the badge number of the cyclops officer alien girl. '1BDI' - say it slowly five times.
All around it was thoroughly entertaining and densely packed with jokes. It will be interesting to see where they take it.
-josh
Keeps one hand free for slappin the salami.
-josh
I am doing the same thing, only under win98 (DVD support ya know) - I picked up a keyboard called 'VersaPoint' from InterLink Electronics. It is a bit pricey, but uses what they call "Broadband IR" - whatever it is it works great. You can aim the keyboard at the floor, ceiling, or a wall 20 feet away and the receiver still catches every keystroke.
The keyboard has a builtin touchpad (ick) but the model I got came bundled with a "RemotePoint" remote mouse which works great.
Both work flawlessly with Linux, no special drivers are required. The IR receiver just has a mouse and keyboard plug.
Only problem is the keyboard is a bit squished into a smallish form factor - but for surfing it's fine. I wouldn't write a novel on the thing.
-josh