The unix software will have no problem dealing with multiple cradles. The popular pilot-link software will allow you to specify the serial port you wish to use on the command line. pilot-link will run on Linux, Solaris, and other Unix platforms.
These books are not the "book" equivalent of "open source software". They are mearly texts whose copyright have expired. "Open Source" works are by definition still covered by copyright.
Gutenberg is quite cool, but it only contains OLD books. For "new" work authors need to use something like the GNU's free content license or the Open Content license.
We are all in serious danger of having our right to free speech being taken away, not by governments, but by corporations. It is plain and simple speech piracy... we open our mouths and they immediately grab everything we have to say and declare that it belongs to them.
If you've used Windows CE you probably already know that it can scarcely compete with PalmOS. Versions of CE are radically different and incompatible from each other, its slow, takes a lot of RAM (which lowers battery life), and on my Sharp Tripad it crashes constantly.
CE will always have a niche market because they are are always coming out with gimmicks in CE devices (MP3 players, color, cameras etc). These gimmicks are not bad ideas, but they are gimmicks, there is no promise of consistant or long term support for them.
PalmOS works today, it worked yesterday, and it will work tommorow. None of these things are true of Windows CE.
I'd rather see the answers to those 10 questions from every Slashdotter than Mr. Cringley's. Talking heads will always find an interesting way to say something, it is shere coincidence when they say something that is also actually interesting.
The people at Yahoo had once aspired to at some ontological smarts to their search engine. There was an article some years back in wired that talked about how Yahoo had hired some of the people from Cyc Corp. to help them develope an ontology. I remember that one of them was the co-author of BLKBS ("building large knowledge based systems").
This seemed like exciting news to me at the time but Yahoo was then, and remains now, more of a "dewie decimal system" than an ontology.
You can't view Profusion with the Linux version of Netscape (V4.74). Well, you can VIEW it but you can't do anything after that because it messes up the browser (Linux Netscape users are used to this on sites with amateurish HTML). I'll be intrigued when they take pride in their work and hire authors that can write browser-nonspecific HTML. For now I'll just yawn and use the ever more annoying google.
I like using Oingo. Honestly the hits it turns up are not always great and it is tricky to use but it is not a "stupid" search engine. It attempts some level of ontologizing (ontologization?)... and its about time someone tried that. There are many times when I can't get a decent hit via one of the old fashioned search engines like google or AV but Oingo will find plenty, mostly for searches that require more than just "keywords"... where I'm searching for a related concept or idea and not just a "token".
Isaac Asimov wrote a delightful essay, about his time as an undergraduate, that explains why all mathematicians are mystics. I won't bother to repeat the entire story, only the punchline. Mathematicians are mystics because they believe in the unreal and the imaginary. They conduct entire branches of their science around the notion that the square root of -1 exists and is real yet is also imaginary.
The phrase information wants to be free. is not just an evocotive figurative statement, it is simple truth about information. It takes effort to prevent information from being freely exchanged. One can also argue that it takes effort to vigorously communicate it, however the fact remains that it is hard to keep a secret.
This is true not just figuratively but physically. A source of light can be seen unless blocked, and sound is heard unless absorbed. If you say something, you have to whisper if you want no one to hear it (and yell if you want everyone to hear it).
There is a strong ethical dilemna to be considered in keeping any secret (for instance a given secret might diminish the community while benefiting an individual and thus ethically good for the indivdual and bad for the community).
I think it is about time we tossed out DNS when it comes to URLs. It is ridiculuous that so many millions of non-technical users are expected to use DNS. The further absurdity of the DNS systems application to URLs is realized by the endless "property" claims made by rich litigious corporations.
Why not use some kind of distributed, non-exclusive labeling system that lets IBM have the name "IBM". Maybe something LDAP based?
We are not going to get anywhere by patching up the DNS system a problem at a time. We need to engineer a new solution. I'm all for evolution but I don't want to wait for it to come up with something that works
Yup, TrustE is going to come down hard on another privacy violator. Yup, there going to issue a press release explaining why there was really no violation of trust, how any violation of trust was outside of their license agreement, and how it is very important to let the violator go so they will be encouraged to correct and improve their privacy practices.
TrustE is an organization that protects those companies that dimish our privacy. Check out EPIC instead.
I'm curious to know what you mean by "the wrong way". I think using mod_rewrite is a good idea too. Managing 50,000 subdomains would certainly be interesting. An with mod_rewrite, depending on how you architect the system you could get away with far fewer rewrite rules. But these difference in complexity seem simple. Is there any other reason to avoid the subdomain solution?
The most straight foward way is to avoid the use of fileserver entirely. The problem your having is your assuming your going to use URLs of the form http://www.sitename.edu/path-to-userdir/. If you instead give everyone their own subdomain this is quite easy.
Setup 10 apache/linux-or-bsd servers with 3000 users each. Setup a single DNS server that manages the subdomain "users.sitename.edu". Then give each user a subdomain of "username.users.sitename.edu". Map each subdomain to the IP of the appropriate server. You can manually configure apache or you can use one of the dynamic boot-time configuration schemes.
Of course this could be a problem if your client has a policy about DNS subdomain allocation. And 50MB * 3000 users per server is still big... you might want to buy a big big disk array and plug all the linux servers into it.
For that matter a rack full of Sun Netra T1s and a fibre channel disk array should be cheap enough and supported by Sun to boot. Netra's are dream to manage.
WebCT isn't free but it is really really cheap for schools. If your looking for someone to host your WebCT system or want to integrate something else with it email me. WebCT can do so much more when it is properly integrated with a current version of the Apache webserver.
I think that it isn't sound to argue that we should continue to use telnet and ftp simply becaues they were useful in the past. Furthermore having a system with both telnet and ssh is like having a system with just telnet; it is equivalent to building a private room (your login sessions) with a steal door (ssh) and glass walls through which everything inside can be seen(telnet).
What exactly do you trust OpenBSD to do correctly?
If you can't formally describe what it is supposed to do, then you can't trust it to do that. There is difference between the work trust as used by your mother to describe the safe predictability of the behavior of her family and the word trust used by computing scientists who make no assumptions.
Your greatest enemy was never the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union served the same function in corporate media as China and (moreso) the Middle East does now. Immediate and short-lived political events abroad distract you from much slower changes that have greater impact. The invention and recent enforcement of intellectual property laws, the separation of society into consumers (>90%) and owners (
WIPO's description of itself is misleading and euphemistic. WIPO represents the interests of large commercial entities. Its members are governments of many nations however the members are not democratically elected by the citizens of those member nations.
The emphasis of WIPO is on protecting the interests of already powerful entities who have defined something labeled as "intellectual property". Unless you consider Microsoft, Disney, or Nike to be governments then WIPO is not an intergovernmental organization. Sadly through organizations such as WIPO companies manage to weild as much or more power over the world's citizens as governments.
Don't worry about fancy copy protection mechanism. Don't limit your consumer base by only releasing in a format like PDF that can only be read on a desktop PC.
Sell subscriptions to your book. Release a chapter every week, or every month. Release the first chapter or two for free. The free chapters give people a chance to decide if they really want to read this or not and hopefully gets them hooked.
If you charged $5 for the subscription and released a chapter per month I'm sure plenty of people would sign up. I would!
I like to read books on my PDAs and my laptop. I'll never buy an on-line book in an proprietary file format. I need to be able to convert it to any format, perhaps obscure, that is appropriate for me. I also need to know that in 10 years I'll still be able to read the file. Some brain dead format like PDF or e-book might not be around in 10 years and the software from today may not run on computing platforms available in the future. Plain text, xml, or HTML are nice.
I've bought ever CD-ROM that O'Reilly has put out. They got it right the first time. Just put the books in HTML (doesn't cost a lot in technology investment for them) and the readers will convert it to whatever format they need.
My understanding is that this sort of law is standard in most of Europe. I recall that some American politician recently try to pressure Germany into dropping its privacy protection legislation (it was reported here at/. too). I'm hoping that the Candian Bill C6 takes Canada in the same direction as Europe and not down the slippery slope the USA fell down.
Big Brother (the government watching our every move) is certainly a dangerous thing. Big Stranger (corporations watching our every move) is sinister and shouldn't be tolerated.
Credit agencies are also obliged to give you access to your credit history. Your medical records, legal history, and most other "important information" are all to be made known to you if you request it.
While this is true it is also misleading to most people. The credit agencies have to give you access to the raw information they collect. However they are under no obligation to tell you your "credit rating" or any other interpretation they make of your data. In fact it is these interpreted facts that are the most important to know. If an individual was talking "behind your back" saying, "that guy is a dead-beat" you'd want to know about it.
I'm Canadian and I don't like the idea of the Government keeping that much detail on me. A few years ago they started making the mandatory census surveys very detailed (mandatory = jail term if you don't send them in or caught falsifying them). I don't like it one bit.
But...
I'm much less concerned about the Government having this information than Corporations having this information.
In Canada we have the FOIP [Freedom of Information and Privacy Act]. That is why we have a Privacy Commisioner. Well he may or may not be effective in getting the Goverment to responsibly deal with the security of its citizen database the FOIP isn't all bad legislation.
Recently in Canada we also got a law called Bill C6 which forces Companies to disclose what information they are collecting, why the are collecting, it and who they share it with. In the USA there is nothing like this. Companies are "encouraged" to publish privacy policies on-line but in other realms of commerce their is nothing.
I'm really glad the Commisioner has put this out in the open. I really hope Bill C6 has some teeth!
I received two unsolicited emails from Microsoft today. Both to "decoy" email addresses. On two previous occaisions, in order to download critical Windows 95 updates (one of the the Y2K update!) I had to provide an email address to them. I never gave my permission to send me any kind of email (certainly not advertisements).
What is worse is that they instructions for unsubscribing are difficult to follow.
It find it funny they'd send me an ad for WinCE. I already own a WinCE device (A sharp tripad), and a Palm Pilot (IIIx). I use the Palm Pilot everday. I use my tripad every day too... guess which one crashes every half hour?
What I care about is whether ICANN works, and it's shown little sign of it, so far.
What is your basis for saying ICANN isn't working? Are you just assuming it isn't working because you've read a few headlines stating it isn't working?
I'd like to hear a fully stated case supporting the statement "ICANN isn't working" including a defintion of what ICANN's goals and working procedures are.
Without supporting what I'm saying I could just as easily say that ICANN is doing a competent job considering the hostile and agressive activities of those opposed to ICANN. A fundemental lack of cooperation and active "monkey wrenching" by other parties is slowing down ICANN progress, but ICANN itself is not to blaim.
As with all things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Slashdot Mirror
The unix software will have no problem dealing with multiple cradles. The popular pilot-link software will allow you to specify the serial port you wish to use on the command line. pilot-link will run on Linux, Solaris, and other Unix platforms.
These books are not the "book" equivalent of "open source software". They are mearly texts whose copyright have expired. "Open Source" works are by definition still covered by copyright.
Gutenberg is quite cool, but it only contains OLD books. For "new" work authors need to use something like the GNU's free content license or the Open Content license.
We are all in serious danger of having our right to free speech being taken away, not by governments, but by corporations. It is plain and simple speech piracy... we open our mouths and they immediately grab everything we have to say and declare that it belongs to them.
If you've used Windows CE you probably already know that it can scarcely compete with PalmOS. Versions of CE are radically different and incompatible from each other, its slow, takes a lot of RAM (which lowers battery life), and on my Sharp Tripad it crashes constantly.
CE will always have a niche market because they are are always coming out with gimmicks in CE devices (MP3 players, color, cameras etc). These gimmicks are not bad ideas, but they are gimmicks, there is no promise of consistant or long term support for them.
PalmOS works today, it worked yesterday, and it will work tommorow. None of these things are true of Windows CE.
I'd rather see the answers to those 10 questions from every Slashdotter than Mr. Cringley's. Talking heads will always find an interesting way to say something, it is shere coincidence when they say something that is also actually interesting.
The people at Yahoo had once aspired to at some ontological smarts to their search engine. There was an article some years back in wired that talked about how Yahoo had hired some of the people from Cyc Corp. to help them develope an ontology. I remember that one of them was the co-author of BLKBS ("building large knowledge based systems").
This seemed like exciting news to me at the time but Yahoo was then, and remains now, more of a "dewie decimal system" than an ontology.
You can't view Profusion with the Linux version of Netscape (V4.74). Well, you can VIEW it but you can't do anything after that because it messes up the browser (Linux Netscape users are used to this on sites with amateurish HTML). I'll be intrigued when they take pride in their work and hire authors that can write browser-nonspecific HTML. For now I'll just yawn and use the ever more annoying google.
I like using Oingo. Honestly the hits it turns up are not always great and it is tricky to use but it is not a "stupid" search engine. It attempts some level of ontologizing (ontologization?)... and its about time someone tried that. There are many times when I can't get a decent hit via one of the old fashioned search engines like google or AV but Oingo will find plenty, mostly for searches that require more than just "keywords"... where I'm searching for a related concept or idea and not just a "token".
Isaac Asimov wrote a delightful essay, about his time as an undergraduate, that explains why all mathematicians are mystics. I won't bother to repeat the entire story, only the punchline. Mathematicians are mystics because they believe in the unreal and the imaginary. They conduct entire branches of their science around the notion that the square root of -1 exists and is real yet is also imaginary.
The phrase information wants to be free. is not just an evocotive figurative statement, it is simple truth about information. It takes effort to prevent information from being freely exchanged. One can also argue that it takes effort to vigorously communicate it, however the fact remains that it is hard to keep a secret.
This is true not just figuratively but physically. A source of light can be seen unless blocked, and sound is heard unless absorbed. If you say something, you have to whisper if you want no one to hear it (and yell if you want everyone to hear it).
There is a strong ethical dilemna to be considered in keeping any secret (for instance a given secret might diminish the community while benefiting an individual and thus ethically good for the indivdual and bad for the community).
I think it is about time we tossed out DNS when it comes to URLs. It is ridiculuous that so many millions of non-technical users are expected to use DNS. The further absurdity of the DNS systems application to URLs is realized by the endless "property" claims made by rich litigious corporations.
Why not use some kind of distributed, non-exclusive labeling system that lets IBM have the name "IBM". Maybe something LDAP based?
We are not going to get anywhere by patching up the DNS system a problem at a time. We need to engineer a new solution. I'm all for evolution but I don't want to wait for it to come up with something that works
Yup, TrustE is going to come down hard on another privacy violator. Yup, there going to issue a press release explaining why there was really no violation of trust, how any violation of trust was outside of their license agreement, and how it is very important to let the violator go so they will be encouraged to correct and improve their privacy practices.
TrustE is an organization that protects those companies that dimish our privacy. Check out EPIC instead.
I'm curious to know what you mean by "the wrong way". I think using mod_rewrite is a good idea too. Managing 50,000 subdomains would certainly be interesting. An with mod_rewrite, depending on how you architect the system you could get away with far fewer rewrite rules. But these difference in complexity seem simple. Is there any other reason to avoid the subdomain solution?
The most straight foward way is to avoid the use of fileserver entirely. The problem your having is your assuming your going to use URLs of the form http://www.sitename.edu/path-to-userdir/. If you instead give everyone their own subdomain this is quite easy.
Setup 10 apache/linux-or-bsd servers with 3000 users each. Setup a single DNS server that manages the subdomain "users.sitename.edu". Then give each user a subdomain of "username.users.sitename.edu". Map each subdomain to the IP of the appropriate server. You can manually configure apache or you can use one of the dynamic boot-time configuration schemes.
Of course this could be a problem if your client has a policy about DNS subdomain allocation. And 50MB * 3000 users per server is still big... you might want to buy a big big disk array and plug all the linux servers into it.
For that matter a rack full of Sun Netra T1s and a fibre channel disk array should be cheap enough and supported by Sun to boot. Netra's are dream to manage.
WebCT isn't free but it is really really cheap for schools. If your looking for someone to host your WebCT system or want to integrate something else with it email me. WebCT can do so much more when it is properly integrated with a current version of the Apache webserver.
And where is Pine's support for S/MIME? While I think Netscape Communicator is an underpowered MUA it has the minimum features I require:
Is there any other MUA with these three features?
I think that it isn't sound to argue that we should continue to use telnet and ftp simply becaues they were useful in the past. Furthermore having a system with both telnet and ssh is like having a system with just telnet; it is equivalent to building a private room (your login sessions) with a steal door (ssh) and glass walls through which everything inside can be seen(telnet).
What exactly do you trust OpenBSD to do correctly?
If you can't formally describe what it is supposed to do, then you can't trust it to do that. There is difference between the work trust as used by your mother to describe the safe predictability of the behavior of her family and the word trust used by computing scientists who make no assumptions.
Your greatest enemy was never the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union served the same function in corporate media as China and (moreso) the Middle East does now. Immediate and short-lived political events abroad distract you from much slower changes that have greater impact. The invention and recent enforcement of intellectual property laws, the separation of society into consumers (>90%) and owners (
WIPO's description of itself is misleading and euphemistic. WIPO represents the interests of large commercial entities. Its members are governments of many nations however the members are not democratically elected by the citizens of those member nations.
The emphasis of WIPO is on protecting the interests of already powerful entities who have defined something labeled as "intellectual property". Unless you consider Microsoft, Disney, or Nike to be governments then WIPO is not an intergovernmental organization. Sadly through organizations such as WIPO companies manage to weild as much or more power over the world's citizens as governments.
Don't worry about fancy copy protection mechanism. Don't limit your consumer base by only releasing in a format like PDF that can only be read on a desktop PC.
Sell subscriptions to your book. Release a chapter every week, or every month. Release the first chapter or two for free. The free chapters give people a chance to decide if they really want to read this or not and hopefully gets them hooked.
If you charged $5 for the subscription and released a chapter per month I'm sure plenty of people would sign up. I would!
I like to read books on my PDAs and my laptop. I'll never buy an on-line book in an proprietary file format. I need to be able to convert it to any format, perhaps obscure, that is appropriate for me. I also need to know that in 10 years I'll still be able to read the file. Some brain dead format like PDF or e-book might not be around in 10 years and the software from today may not run on computing platforms available in the future. Plain text, xml, or HTML are nice.
I've bought ever CD-ROM that O'Reilly has put out. They got it right the first time. Just put the books in HTML (doesn't cost a lot in technology investment for them) and the readers will convert it to whatever format they need.
My understanding is that this sort of law is standard in most of Europe. I recall that some American politician recently try to pressure Germany into dropping its privacy protection legislation (it was reported here at /. too). I'm hoping that the Candian Bill C6 takes Canada in the same direction as Europe and not down the slippery slope the USA fell down.
Big Brother (the government watching our every move) is certainly a dangerous thing. Big Stranger (corporations watching our every move) is sinister and shouldn't be tolerated.
Credit agencies are also obliged to give you access to your credit history. Your medical records, legal history, and most other "important information" are all to be made known to you if you request it.
While this is true it is also misleading to most people. The credit agencies have to give you access to the raw information they collect. However they are under no obligation to tell you your "credit rating" or any other interpretation they make of your data. In fact it is these interpreted facts that are the most important to know. If an individual was talking "behind your back" saying, "that guy is a dead-beat" you'd want to know about it.
I'm Canadian and I don't like the idea of the Government keeping that much detail on me. A few years ago they started making the mandatory census surveys very detailed (mandatory = jail term if you don't send them in or caught falsifying them). I don't like it one bit.
But...
I'm much less concerned about the Government having this information than Corporations having this information.
In Canada we have the FOIP [Freedom of Information and Privacy Act]. That is why we have a Privacy Commisioner. Well he may or may not be effective in getting the Goverment to responsibly deal with the security of its citizen database the FOIP isn't all bad legislation.
Recently in Canada we also got a law called Bill C6 which forces Companies to disclose what information they are collecting, why the are collecting, it and who they share it with. In the USA there is nothing like this. Companies are "encouraged" to publish privacy policies on-line but in other realms of commerce their is nothing.
I'm really glad the Commisioner has put this out in the open. I really hope Bill C6 has some teeth!
.I received two unsolicited emails from Microsoft today. Both to "decoy" email addresses. On two previous occaisions, in order to download critical Windows 95 updates (one of the the Y2K update!) I had to provide an email address to them. I never gave my permission to send me any kind of email (certainly not advertisements).
What is worse is that they instructions for unsubscribing are difficult to follow.
It find it funny they'd send me an ad for WinCE. I already own a WinCE device (A sharp tripad), and a Palm Pilot (IIIx). I use the Palm Pilot everday. I use my tripad every day too... guess which one crashes every half hour?
What is your basis for saying ICANN isn't working? Are you just assuming it isn't working because you've read a few headlines stating it isn't working?
I'd like to hear a fully stated case supporting the statement "ICANN isn't working" including a defintion of what ICANN's goals and working procedures are.
Without supporting what I'm saying I could just as easily say that ICANN is doing a competent job considering the hostile and agressive activities of those opposed to ICANN. A fundemental lack of cooperation and active "monkey wrenching" by other parties is slowing down ICANN progress, but ICANN itself is not to blaim.
As with all things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.