For one thing, apart from some experiments in Lambeth with
face recognition software, cameras need
monitoring, and this tends to be labour
intensive. In fact, there's such a deluge of data
at present that the most extreme surveillancenightmares are going to remain just that (nightmares) for a long time to come. (Try calculating the bandwidth needed to carry ten million real time video feeds, 24x7, if you don't
believe me!)
For another thing, cameras work as a deterrent
to certain types of crime -- vandalism and car
theft are the classic examples, shoplifting (in
shops with in-store CCTV) is another. However,
some types of crime (most assault, for example)
are committed on impulse, without regard to whether humans (or cameras) are watching.
So: why not install cameras, keep rolling six
hour tape loops, and simply yank them for use as evidence if a crime is reported during that period? Well, this happens -- but some recent
and rather worrying studies show that camera
images tend to be of such poor quality that
something like 40% of the time people trying to
identify a suspect from videotape get it wrong. Cameras are no substitute for careful police work, as the police have been learning (painfully).
The Orwellian nightmare of cameras on every
street corner with face recognition software that
tracks every citizen as they go about their daily
life isn't technologically possible yet, and I
suspect before it happens there'll be fairly strong legal restrictions on how the information
can be used -- remember there's now an explicit legal
right to privacy in UK law, and sooner or later
someone will sue a police force (and win) to stop
them tracking them without a surveillance
warrant of some kind. (Although the control-freak
tendencies of Home Secretary Jack Straw do not fill me with optimism on this front.)
There's only one area in the UK where cameras have
made an unequivocal, positive, contribution to loaw enforcement: that's GATSO cameras for photographing and fining drivers who speed,
run red lights, and otherwise endanger other
road users.
Back in 1982, the British government
privatised the telephone system (as British
Telecom) and began phasing out their monopoly.
A competing company -- Mercury Telecom -- decided
to get into the game by providing high bandwidth
trunk connections through London. Their problem
was that BT owned all the main cable ducts and
weren't going to cooperate willingly.
However, someone at Mercury got smart. They
remembered an ancient power distribution system:
back in the late 1880's some factories ran on
compressed air, pressurized to hundreds of PSI,
and distributed through cast-iron pipes from
central steam-powered compressor stations. Long
since obsolete (shut down in the 1910's), the
pipes were still in the ground!
So Mercury engineers built small robot pigs and
used them to lay fibre-optic cables right through
the heart of the capital city without digging up
any roads -- using the pipe network that time
forgot.
Now we hear about New York using the same system -- but of course, nobody remembers where it came from!
If I remember my reading of
Drexler
correctly, this puts us about five to ten years ahead of his most optimistic projections for when molecular nanotechnology based assemblers should be emerging. Yes, there's a way to go yet before this becomes a useable technology rather than a lab curiosity, but it's still earth-shaking in its implications.
If you haven't read the book linked to above (or
one like it), go read it now. Otherwise you're not
going to understand what happens to us over the
next decade.
(As a bonus question, students may want to prepare a paper on how open source methodologies
can be used to circumvent the Grey Goop problem,
in place of the top-down regulation that Drexler
seems to be advocating:)
Firstly, the Russians know exactly how to
run a railroad through conditions prevalent
in Alaska -- what do you think the trans-Siberian
railroad runs through, tropical rain forest?
Even if they've patented self-virtualisation (not
the same as emulation; it means an OS that provides an execution environment that looks like
the underlying hardware, so that it can run as an
application under itself -- sort of recursively)
they're about thirty years too late.
My decade-plus old copy of Tannenbaum (Operating
Systems: Principles and Pracice -- old enough to
describe the PDP11 and System 370) describes this
in some detail, and it sounds a bit like what
they're trying to patent.
I've owned and used Psion machines since 1993, including a current Series 5MX.
EPOC/32 is decidedly not an alternative to PalmOS (although the Quartz demo -- EPOC/32 on a colour handwriting-type PDA a la Palm -- might well be if/when they ship it).
EPOC/32 is a great OS, handicapped by the fact that Psion Software (note: not the same company, but part of the same group -- Psion's internal corporate structure is confusing to outsiders) seem congenitally incapable of comprehending the idea that people might want to use it in conjunction with any OS other than Windows. For example, the Psion Word import/export filters are built into the PsiWin app that runs under Win95/98/NT, and there is no native import/export. They don't even publish file formats; the EPOC/32 apps are based on an OO stream-store system implemented in C++ and accessible only via an API available using their Windows development toolchain.
EPOC/32 basically ties Psion to Microsoft's apron strings -- a really foolish place for Psion to be, and only partially mitigated by their Symbian scheme. There are signs of them wising up about the need for EPOC/32 to be a general-purpose OS, but right now it's an obligate peripheral to a Windows box, just like CE.
(Finally, EPOC/32 does too take whole seconds to boot! And I've had crashes. But maybe it's just sensing my innate hostility to anything so Microsoft-friendly;-)
The Star Fraction is actually volume #1 of a loosely-linked trilogy with four volumes (the last two being alternative endings that exist in different universes); the second book is "The Stone Canal", followed by either "The Cassini Division" or "The Sky Road".
Oddly, Tor Books, his US publisher, decided to start with "The Cassini Division" (arguably the weakest book) then follow up with "The Stone Canal".
According to Patrick Neilsen-Hayden of Tor (posting on rec.arts.sf.written), "The Star Fraction" will be published in the USA, but after the other books. If you really can't wait, you can probably find it at Waterstones (large UK bookseller with e-tailer outlet).
(Personally, I rate Ken as one of the two most important Scottish SF writers currently working -- the other being Iain Banks. Highly recommended!)
In 1940, Churchill faced a problem. The UK was simply not strong enough to defeat Hitler single-handedly. Preventing a German invasion was easy enough, but all he could hope to do without aid was fight the Reich to a cease-fire on terms favourable to Hitler.
According to the history books, Churchill came up with an answer: get help -- American help -- by any means necessary. That's pretty much what happened, modulo Hitler's suicidal stupidity in violating both of Liddel-Hart's two rules of warfare ("never start a war on two fronts" and "never start a land war in asia"). But Roosevelt charged a heavy price, one that most Americans today don't even understand:
He demanded -- and got -- the dismantling of the British empire.
In 1945, Britain was within one week of going bankrupt. It would have been easy to drain the resources of India, Australia, and other countries to support the devastated Imperial hub... but instead, they quietly and without much fuss shut down the largest empire the world has ever seen (at one point it covered 24.6% of the planet).
Giving Marshall Aid to Britain would have undermined the US State Department's leverage over a British government that wasn't really sure it wanted to definitively relinquish its place as a superpower (which is what the UK was, prior to 1914).
Many years ago (1994? 1993?) I wrote a web spider. (Crap back end, though, so I dropped it. The bones are on my website.)
Some time later, it occured to me to try and monitor the efficiency of web indexing tools using a spider trap.
The methodology is like this:
Write a perl module (or equivalent) that generates realistic-looking text using Markov chaining based off a database. Text generated should be deterministic when seeded with a URL.
Write a CGI program that uses PATH_INFO to encode additional metainformation. Have it eat the output from the text generator and insert URLs that point back to itself, with additional pathname components appended.
If the spider follows a link it will be presented with another page generated by the CGI script, containing text generated by it in response to a hit that differs in a repeatable manner from the text in the original page.
Child pages should contain links that point inside the web site; you could do this by making the CGI program the root of your "document tree". Better yet, run multiple virtual servers and include URLs bouncing between the domains -- all of which are mapped onto the same script.
Stick this thing up on the web and wait for the crawlers to come. They will see a tree of realistic-looking HTML with internal links, digest, and index it.
You can now analyse your logs and monitor the robot's behaviour (e.g. by changing the type, frequency, and destination of links your text includes). You can also search the search engines for references back into your document tree and work up some metrics to measure just how accurately it's been indexed (e.g. by re-generating the text of a page and feeding it to the search engine and seeing what comes back -- which words are indexed and which are ignored).
Anyone done this? I'm particularly interested in knowing how spiders handle large websites -- have been ever since I was doing a contract job on Hampshire County Council's Hantsweb site a few years ago and caught AltaVista's spider scanning through a 250,000 document web that at the time had only a 64K connection to the outside world. (Do the math!:)
Nit-picking by numbers ...
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 2
Caterpilars... pass. I live in the UK but I haven't heard about this particular experiment. Cites, please?
A GE experiment in Australia went disasterously wrong, when a whole load of plague-carrying rabbits escaped to the mainland, from the place they were kept. Aside from utterly wiping out the rabbit population in the area, Australia was very lucky and no other casualties occured.
Not true. The rabbit incident was simply a repeat of the use of myxamatosis (in the 1950's) to control Australia's rabbit epidemic, using a different but entirely natural disease organism. The rabbits "got loose" mostly because farmers suffering from an extreme rabbit infestation took matters into their own hands and removed some infected cadavers from the island where the bug was being tested.
The genes have not yet been completely mapped in anything other than VERY primitive organisms, and even there, as much as 1/3 are not understood and an unknown amount is "junk" (read: they don't even know if they don't understand it).
The first human chromosome to be completely mapped was announced a week or two ago; the rest are partially mapped, and should be nailed down within five years. Several single-celled organisms have been mapped, too, and there's also the Canine Genome Project in progress -- expect GP's for all major domesticated (and experimental) animals within the next year or two.
As for junk DNA, why does this surprise you? Genetic algorithms produce messy code. If some junk sequence doesn't actively impair the reproductive fitness of the organism the genome expresses, there is no selection pressure to remove it from the genome. What's interesting isn't how much of the genome is junk, but how well-understood bits of it are already.
And the real Hard Question in biochemistry, the tertiary/quarternary protein conformation question, is due to come under attack for real in another few years when IBM's Blue Gene comes on line. (Now there is a topic for Katz to rant about!)
IIRC, the DPA covers all databases, whether or not they're about people.
Run a database? Register it or go to prison. (That's the principle.) The original DPA draft dates back to before the government knew you could store data on anything smaller than a mainframe (early to mid eighties).
There are exemptions for non-profit clubs, and private address books. That's about it. The DPA actually had to clarify a couple of years ago that usenet spools and private email folders weren't considered databases within the meaning of the law -- but structured data repositories (like this sort of thing) are subject to the act.
I am not a lawyer, but it looks to me as if grounds exist for a criminal prosecution of this company in the UK.
What laws are they breaking?
For starters, there's the Data Protection Act (amended 1998). This requires all databases to be registered, along with a list of their structure, so that people upon whom information is held can serve a data disclosure notice on the database owners and find out what is being said about them. I believe there's also a requirement to notify the subjects that information about them is being stored.
(Violation: up to two years in prison and a honking great fine, although it's very rare for infractions to get as far as a prosecution.)
Next: Computer Misuse Act (1994). This act has teeth -- it was introduced as an anti-hacking measure and it would seem that if they're tampering with or using a computer in the UK for any purpose without the consent of the owner they could be liable for five years as a guest in one of Her Majesty's hotels. It is a criminal offense to run software on a computer without the owner's permission, or to cause software to be run (ditto), or indeed to do anything with a computer without permission from its owner. Oh, and you can be guilty even if you're not in the UK (but meddling with a UK-based computer), or if the computer's not in the UK (but you are).
Finally there's the EU declaration of human rights which, implemented in law, has an explicit right of privacy. The EU recently disseminated some directives on data security -- specifically banning the export of personal information from jurisdictions with strict privacy laws to other jurisdictions with weaker protection -- that means this company is violating the law, right across the EU.
Linux already runs on the Series 5 and Geofox 1 (EPOC/32) palmtops. You can find out about it at Calcaria, home of the Linux-7110 project (for Linux on the ARM 7110). Note that Linux-7110 uses 2.2 series kernels, rather than the 2.0 kernel (mentioned by the originator of this thread at his project web page (which was incorrectly referenced in the original article).
A project that is worth pursuing without reinventing the wheel would be to fix the ARLO boot loader so that it works on the OS5 release of EPOC/32 used in the Series 5MX, Series 7, Revo, and NetBook computers. Because of substantial device driver changes in this release, ARLO doesn't work any more and some porting work is required.
Corel have based their Linux distribution on Debian. However, they've made some additions of their own, notably on the side of turnkey installation and user interface improvements to KDE.
To what extent are you seeing Corel feeding back these changes to the Debian community? How good for Debian has Corel been, so far?
I live in Scotland. First of all, it's worth pointing out that these laws apply to England and Wales -- Scotland has a different legal system and its own parliament with control over domestic affairs. Whether similar measures will be introduced up here remains to be seen, but the fact that the Labour government has no outright majority and depends on the Liberal Democrats for support -- and the LDP has effectively got a veto over this sort of legislation -- suggests that they won't.
Secondly, all these measures were originally mooted by the last (conservative) government. New Labour is not so much attempting to turn England into a police state as it is continuing policies established by Thatcher and her successors.
Why they're doing this is a strange question. It seems to me that the whole of English culture is in the grip of a wave of security-related hysteria that has nothing to do with terrorism (we put up with the IRA for thirty years, after all) and everything to do with accelerating social change. People feel insecure and worried, and respond by looking for some group to blame. New age travellers, gun owners, paedophiles -- they're all identifiable targets who stand out from the herd and give the herd reason to dislike (or hate) them. So it's no surprise that they come in for attack.
What's new and frightening is the introduction of "zero tolerance" measures in law, in a country that doesn't have a strong constitutional foundation. (There's a bill of rights, and there is an unwritten constitution, but it's hard to attack bad laws on the grounds that they violate constitutional rights.) Add half a million CCTV cameras in public places and a willingness to install another sixty thousand cameras a month and you can see why the UK is now the nation to visit if you want to buy neural-network based face-recognition software. Big Brother is alive and well and living in London.
Digging a bit deeper, we may also be seeing a once-in-a-century re-alignment of British politics. Traditionally, the Westminster parliament has been a two-and-a-half party system. Until 1923, it was Conservative/Liberal with a minor Labour presence. Labour replaced the Liberals, ushering in a period of Conservative dominance -- the Tories ran the UK for 40 out of the 60 years leading up to 1996 and Tony Blair's historic landslide victory. But they blew it, the same way the Liberals blew it in the 1920's; corruption scandals cost them the election and are still haunting them, while the Liberal presence in parliament is the highest it's been since the 1920's. Meanwhile, New Labour has lurched so far in the direction of the authoritarian right that they're staking out a claim to be the true right-wing party in British politics!
There's a general consensus in UK politics about the need for broadly free-market economics, but the traditional proponents of the market in the UK are strongly associated with the authoritarian right. The Liberal Democrats are beginning to reassert liberal values -- civil libertarianism mixed with moderate economics -- and may be staking out a claim to be the new party of the left in the UK, but for now neither of the main parties has any truck with civil liberties.Worse, the current right-wing authoritarian party of government is dominated by ex-Trotskyites. If there's one thing more zealously conservative than a hard-core Tory, it's an ex-Trot who has repented, seen the light, and bought an Armani suit and a BMW. (They're born control-freaks with no sense of humour, and you can't trust 'em either -- they know they've gone over to the Dark Side, and they just don't are about anything other than Power any more.)
Me, I'm just glad that after the last Conservative election victory I resolved to move to another country! (I made good on that promise -- and came to Scotland.)
The EU declaration on human rights -- a document about as fundamental to EU law as the US constitution -- explicitly enumerates a right to individual privacy.
No such right exists under US law, although a right to privacy has been inferred on the basis of, for example, the fourth amendment. One consequence of this is that Americans take for granted a degree of corporate -- as opposed to governmental -- intrusion in their private affairs that would cause outrage in most of Europe. (And the European position is that at least the government is democratically accountable...)
A lot of US companies act in a manner that would be flat-out illegal in other parts of the world, in much the same way that it would be illegal for a European company to try to do business in the US in a manner that, for example, was calculated to blow away the first amendment rights of their customers.
Over the past year, the EU member states have been trying to tighten up on the observation of the right to privacy, making it illegal to export personal data to countries with weaker protection (among other things). This would appear to be a rather dumb attempt to clamp down on what are seen as technologies of privacy invasion. (I say "rather dumb" because of course no equivalent attempt is being made to clamp down on sales of eeevil ethernet boards with embedded 48-bit ID's!)
While I think this action is misdirected, I happen (as a European) to think that privact is valuable. In particular, there should be no invasion of privacy without accountability. Intel is just the latest company (remember RealNetworks, last week?) to get their fingers burned by dismissing privacy as an issue. It isn't a matter of personal preference; it's a fundamental right.
Until 1995, 90% of the net was American. By 2005, more than 50% of the net will be Non-American. I make the changeover point sometime around 2002; Europe is about 12 months behind the USA and has 20% greater population, and the rest of the world (notably the Pacific Rim) is in there too.
The real action to keep your eyes on is not the speechifying in Congress, but what happens at the G8 summits and in the various low-key trade treaty meetings that happen from time to time. International treaties are effectively law -- once ratified they are binding, and they're a lot harder to make an end-run around than local ordinances. To this end, you really want to watch out for what is happening in the European Commission offices -- a market for national bureaucrats to talk shop -- and eye up what they agree with the US government about. Once the EU and the USA work out a common subset of ground rules, those rules will almost certainly stick.
Moreover, what the EU member states want and what the USA wants are very different. Take Germany's recent willingness to undermine the Wassenaar Agreement by providing public funds for GPG. Or France's current turmoil over a move to a maximum 35-hour working week (the leisure society coming home to roost as a way to abolish high structural unemployment). Or the EU-wide interest in privacy law, so totally alien to the US political process, but counter-balanced by a more overt US commitment to freedom of speech (at least in theory).
There will be interesting times ahead as a cross- border consensus gets thrashed out. And because the net knows no frontiers, you Americans can expect some European values to come home to you.
There are two Computer Shoppers; the Ziff-Davis title sold in the USA, and the Dennis Publishing title sold in the UK.
The UK title is the highest circulation monthly computer mag in the UK. Part of the reason for this is that it's actually two magazines in one cover.
One chunk of Shopper is the adverts and introductory hand-holding articles. These are what a large chunk of the readership buy it for -- how to choose and buy a PC. According to Jeremy Spencer, editor and hovercraft racer in chief, something like 70% of these readers will never install any software on their machines beyond that which comes with it.
But the other side of the UK Computer Shopper is the geek-oriented editorial content. There's the Mac column. The Programming column. (How many magazines can you think of that have run introductions to machine code programming in the past year?) The Linux column -- that's my baby. (I've been writing about Linux in Shopper since 1994, and writing the Linux column since late '98.) There's even an Acorn Archimedes column. In other words, a bit of something for everyone, with the enthusiasts firmly in the editorial sights.
There's a reason for this split-personality persisting for so long in a high-circulation magazine. Back around 1990 Jeremy -- an old-school computer magazine editor -- realised that the market for enthusiast-driven magazines was shrinking; to keep one running he'd need to have another selling point. The result was a combination recipe; the sort of editorial content you used to see in BYTE or PCW, combined with the huge wadge of advertising and infomercials you see in a typical ZD title today.
Voracious eclecticism and a willingness to embrace the next revolution does make for a successful computer magazine. Shopper (in the UK) is already into Open Source. And hopefully it'll be keeping Jeremy in hovercraft for years to come...
Back when I was at SCO, SCO acquired IXI. One of IXI's products did exactly that -- effectively turned a windows app into an X client displaying on an X server running on a UNIX box. I saw this thing running (and dammit, I can't remember the product name) in 1993 or 1994 on SCO Open Desktop.
Moreover, it might be worth digging up an old copy of DesqView/X to see if that could be cited as prior art. (Runs an application on a PC that displays remotely on an X server? Check. 1992? Check.)
Just about any fusion reaction we're likely to produce without really exotic techniques is going to spit out neutrons. Neutrons that will be absorbed by anything in the vicinity of the reactor. Stuff that will then contain neutron-activated radioisotopes.
Ergo, fusion reactors will still produce radioactive waste -- just not the fission products we're used to.
Speaking as a European, I can't wait to file for my new patent -- on the business practice of moving your entire IT department out of the USA in order to evade stupid US patent lawsuits that would be unenforcable anywhere else in the world!
I like Caldera OpenLinux; as a lightweight workstation system it's less confusing than Redhat, less obnoxiously invasive than SuSE, and easier to install than Debian. But it does have some fairly extreme limitations.
For example, don't try installing it on a laptop and expect it to work out of the box. The default kernel with COL 2.3 lacks APM support (confirmed by Caldera support), and I have my doubts about its PCMCIA support, too: if you want COL on a laptop you'll need to do a kernel rebuild, to say nothing of figuring out how their cutesy boot-time display works.
As laptops aren't exactly rare these days, I'd have expected Caldera to put a bit more effort into supporting them...
This isn't a unique move; it's part of a larger picture, which is the use of surveillance technology to enforce the law.
Which wouldn't be so bad, except that there are a lot of bad laws out there.
Part of the problem is that we pay legislators to legislate. It's easier for a lawmaker to pass a new law than strike an old one off the books, and they need to be seen to be active to justify our votes. So they're always seeking new causes to legislate on.
Another part of the problem is that we're living through an era of rapid social and technological change. Most non-geeks don't like change; it disturbs and worries them. In times of change, societies are prone to waves of mass hysteria: and the hysteria usually focusses on some "out" group who can be blamed (conveniently) for society's ills. "If only they'd go away/behave/conform everything would be alright!"
(Do I need to explain this point in more depth?)
The mixture of surveillance technology with a public witch hunt driven by a moral panic is terrifying and without precedent. Over here -- in the UK -- it's being manifested in the shape of half a million surveillance cameras a year going up in public places, in police authorities installing camera systems with neural network based face-recognition software (to spot suspected offenders whenever they go out in public), in a Home Office obsessed with the idea of eliminating, not minimizing, obstacles to obtaining speedy convictions through the court process (such as jury trials, double jeopardy, the right to silence, and so on).
Targeted advertising isn't the real problem with data mining; it's other organisations trying to automate the process of "knowing their customers".
Example: you visit an AIDS awareness web site, then hop over to Amazon.com and buy a book about living with HIV. You do this because your kid sister has a friend who is HIV positive and wants to know more about it and asked you to do her a favour.
Years later, you put in an application for life assurance to cover your endowment mortgage... and the life assurance company turns you down. Seems their data mining brought up a warning flag: "buys material about living with AIDS, visits AIDS awareness websites". Ergo, their expert system deduces that you may have HIV (a very bad life insurance risk!).
Admittedly, this sort of abuse shouldn't be possible if proper privacy laws are in place. But in the USA, there are no effective consumer privacy laws (hence the current fracas with the EU, which is bringing in reasonable ones). Nothing stops your insurance company from buying the DoubleClick net's database to check against health risks; it's not information subject to medical confidentiality, is it?
This is a relatively mild example of how data mining can go wrong. Much, much worse things can happen to you -- comp.risks is full of examples of people being arrested and dragged off to prison because they share the same name and birthday as a wanted felon, or similar cases of public officials putting their trust blindly in a database that has had information indiscriminately shovelled into it.
If we bring political or governmental issues into it, it gets even worse -- imagine, for example, if your local police force starts looking for people who have looked at web sites with details of how to pick locks and who are not registered locksmiths. Sound outrageous? Of course it is -- until it happens.
Privacy is a fundamental human right; and one that is barely protected by law here in the EU, and utterly inadequately protected in the US.
I had reason to install Caldera 2.3 yesterday (on a new laptop I'd just bought). This wasn't my first laptop install, or my first linux install; I've been running it as my main OS since 1994.
The laptop, a Sony Vaio 304, came with Windows 98 pre-installed. Stick the Caldera 2.3 CD in under windows and you get treated to the usual multimedia presentation -- with a rather business- oriented spin; it's quite obvious that Caldera are going for the newbie business market rather than the experienced or technical market.
(It's noteworthy, howver, that their pitch seems to be moving away from the corporate end of things and towards the guerilla networking idea; "how can I infiltrate linux into my corporation?" was the main theme, far as I could tell.)
Anyway. Partition Magic did its job, and very well; my main quibble is that it offers some fixed partition size options, none of which exactly corresponded to what I wanted: a "custom" option (specify Mb of disk space to provide for linux) would have been handy.
Following the inevitable reboot into Caldera's installer, things ran smoothly. It didn't detect my NeoMagic audio chipset, but then, that particular chipset isn't supported by anyone -- OSS claim they'll have a driver in a month or so. Nor did it detect the new power management system the Vaio uses (not APM, far as I can tell). And of course there's no support for FireWire yet (one of the Vaio's features). On the other hand, it got the NeoMagic video drivers right first time, and left me at the end of the installation with a minimally usable GUI-based linux installation.
Some things did go wrong. First and most noticable was LILO; it didn't set me up to dual-boot automatically. This took me ten seconds to fix, but was most irritating and would be a hurdle for a real beginner to cope with -- one that might induce panic when they realised that they couldn't get at Windows at all. A second problem was with swap space;/etc/fstab didn't get an entry for the swap partition it had created. (This problem also cropped up in an earlier insteall of COL 2.2 on my desktop machine.)
Installation of the commercial packages is fairly easy, aided by a web-based installer page; they've obviously been paying attention.
The upshot of all this is that I would normally have spent a day doing this job: repartition, install Linux distro, install X server, add StarOffice and Netscape, get it smoothly dual-booting. The Caldera install to that point took only about two hours (including subsequent fixing of minor niggles); a vast improvement. If I can get the APM and sound issues solved, then get my ethernet/modem PCMCIA combo-card working (haven't tried that yet -- it's in another laptop at present), I'll be completely happy with this distro. It's not as annoyingly non-standard and managerially intrusive as SuSE ("ve haff ways of administering your system wether you like it or not!!"), and a bit smoother than Red Hat (I'm having real, er, fun with a 6.0 install right now).
If I have one issue with COL, it's that it leaves things out in the interests of providing a consistent experience. Consistency is important for new users; the toolbox mindset that can cope with, say, bits of different MTAs on the same distribution, is not widespread among the people Caldera are trying to sell this product to. On the other hand, things like Pine not being part of the default packages that are installed is annoying. I'd like to see a custom install option, that is at least as flexible as Red Hat's outline-based pick-an-rpm system. Just out of selfishness, you understand.
Petreley is mostly right; Caldera OpenLinux is very slick, and with something like WINE or a commercial Windows app-emulator added in, it is a genuine killer for corporate types who want to use a Linux system without losing access to Windows or having to teach themselves lots of new stuff. For the rest of us? I want a solid, reliable workhorse of a laptop, which is why I put Caldera on it. (For bleeding- edge stuff I have a test machine.) It's really a distro for people who have a job to do: and whether you love it or hate it depends on your reasons for running it.
Slashdot Mirror
For one thing, apart from some experiments in Lambeth with face recognition software, cameras need monitoring, and this tends to be labour intensive. In fact, there's such a deluge of data at present that the most extreme surveillancenightmares are going to remain just that (nightmares) for a long time to come. (Try calculating the bandwidth needed to carry ten million real time video feeds, 24x7, if you don't believe me!)
For another thing, cameras work as a deterrent to certain types of crime -- vandalism and car theft are the classic examples, shoplifting (in shops with in-store CCTV) is another. However, some types of crime (most assault, for example) are committed on impulse, without regard to whether humans (or cameras) are watching.
So: why not install cameras, keep rolling six hour tape loops, and simply yank them for use as evidence if a crime is reported during that period? Well, this happens -- but some recent and rather worrying studies show that camera images tend to be of such poor quality that something like 40% of the time people trying to identify a suspect from videotape get it wrong. Cameras are no substitute for careful police work, as the police have been learning (painfully).
The Orwellian nightmare of cameras on every street corner with face recognition software that tracks every citizen as they go about their daily life isn't technologically possible yet, and I suspect before it happens there'll be fairly strong legal restrictions on how the information can be used -- remember there's now an explicit legal right to privacy in UK law, and sooner or later someone will sue a police force (and win) to stop them tracking them without a surveillance warrant of some kind. (Although the control-freak tendencies of Home Secretary Jack Straw do not fill me with optimism on this front.)
There's only one area in the UK where cameras have made an unequivocal, positive, contribution to loaw enforcement: that's GATSO cameras for photographing and fining drivers who speed, run red lights, and otherwise endanger other road users.
However, someone at Mercury got smart. They remembered an ancient power distribution system: back in the late 1880's some factories ran on compressed air, pressurized to hundreds of PSI, and distributed through cast-iron pipes from central steam-powered compressor stations. Long since obsolete (shut down in the 1910's), the pipes were still in the ground!
So Mercury engineers built small robot pigs and used them to lay fibre-optic cables right through the heart of the capital city without digging up any roads -- using the pipe network that time forgot.
Now we hear about New York using the same system -- but of course, nobody remembers where it came from!
If you haven't read the book linked to above (or one like it), go read it now. Otherwise you're not going to understand what happens to us over the next decade.
(As a bonus question, students may want to prepare a paper on how open source methodologies can be used to circumvent the Grey Goop problem, in place of the top-down regulation that Drexler seems to be advocating :)
Firstly, the Russians know exactly how to run a railroad through conditions prevalent in Alaska -- what do you think the trans-Siberian railroad runs through, tropical rain forest?
Secondly, this isn't about trying to link Alaska and Siberia; it's about trying to link Europe and the continental USA© Think railfreight© Think huge locomotives hauling gigantic payloads© Think alternatives to shipping by sea©
Thirdly, it's about the world as it will be in 2020, not 2001© It'll be 2020 before this is built, and 2030 or onwards before it's profitable© By that point, even the more optimistic projections show the price of oil rising as new reserves become harder to tap© That makes rail transport ¥which is the cheapest form of land transport, in terms of energy per ton moved per mile look increasingly promising©
Fourthly, does the name "Tennessee Valley Authority" ring any bells? Think of this as a TVA for Siberia and you won't be far wrong©
Fifthly, it will be interesting to see how the environmentalists cope with the KGB ;-
My decade-plus old copy of Tannenbaum (Operating Systems: Principles and Pracice -- old enough to describe the PDP11 and System 370) describes this in some detail, and it sounds a bit like what they're trying to patent.
Patent office screw-up: film at eleven ...
EPOC/32 is decidedly not an alternative to PalmOS (although the Quartz demo -- EPOC/32 on a colour handwriting-type PDA a la Palm -- might well be if/when they ship it).
EPOC/32 is a great OS, handicapped by the fact that Psion Software (note: not the same company, but part of the same group -- Psion's internal corporate structure is confusing to outsiders) seem congenitally incapable of comprehending the idea that people might want to use it in conjunction with any OS other than Windows. For example, the Psion Word import/export filters are built into the PsiWin app that runs under Win95/98/NT, and there is no native import/export. They don't even publish file formats; the EPOC/32 apps are based on an OO stream-store system implemented in C++ and accessible only via an API available using their Windows development toolchain.
EPOC/32 basically ties Psion to Microsoft's apron strings -- a really foolish place for Psion to be, and only partially mitigated by their Symbian scheme. There are signs of them wising up about the need for EPOC/32 to be a general-purpose OS, but right now it's an obligate peripheral to a Windows box, just like CE.
(Finally, EPOC/32 does too take whole seconds to boot! And I've had crashes. But maybe it's just sensing my innate hostility to anything so Microsoft-friendly ;-)
Oddly, Tor Books, his US publisher, decided to start with "The Cassini Division" (arguably the weakest book) then follow up with "The Stone Canal".
According to Patrick Neilsen-Hayden of Tor (posting on rec.arts.sf.written), "The Star Fraction" will be published in the USA, but after the other books. If you really can't wait, you can probably find it at Waterstones (large UK bookseller with e-tailer outlet).
(Personally, I rate Ken as one of the two most important Scottish SF writers currently working -- the other being Iain Banks. Highly recommended!)
According to the history books, Churchill came up with an answer: get help -- American help -- by any means necessary. That's pretty much what happened, modulo Hitler's suicidal stupidity in violating both of Liddel-Hart's two rules of warfare ("never start a war on two fronts" and "never start a land war in asia"). But Roosevelt charged a heavy price, one that most Americans today don't even understand:
He demanded -- and got -- the dismantling of the British empire.
In 1945, Britain was within one week of going bankrupt. It would have been easy to drain the resources of India, Australia, and other countries to support the devastated Imperial hub ... but instead, they quietly and without much fuss shut down the largest empire the world has ever seen (at one point it covered 24.6% of the planet).
Giving Marshall Aid to Britain would have undermined the US State Department's leverage over a British government that wasn't really sure it wanted to definitively relinquish its place as a superpower (which is what the UK was, prior to 1914).
Some time later, it occured to me to try and monitor the efficiency of web indexing tools using a spider trap.
The methodology is like this:
Anyone done this? I'm particularly interested in knowing how spiders handle large websites -- have been ever since I was doing a contract job on Hampshire County Council's Hantsweb site a few years ago and caught AltaVista's spider scanning through a 250,000 document web that at the time had only a 64K connection to the outside world. (Do the math! :)
Caterpilars ... pass. I live in the UK but I haven't heard about this particular experiment. Cites, please?
A GE experiment in Australia went disasterously wrong, when a whole load of plague-carrying rabbits escaped to the mainland, from the place they were kept. Aside from utterly wiping out the rabbit population in the area, Australia was very lucky and no other casualties occured.
Not true. The rabbit incident was simply a repeat of the use of myxamatosis (in the 1950's) to control Australia's rabbit epidemic, using a different but entirely natural disease organism. The rabbits "got loose" mostly because farmers suffering from an extreme rabbit infestation took matters into their own hands and removed some infected cadavers from the island where the bug was being tested.
The genes have not yet been completely mapped in anything other than VERY primitive organisms, and even there, as much as 1/3 are not understood and an unknown amount is "junk" (read: they don't even know if they don't understand it).
The first human chromosome to be completely mapped was announced a week or two ago; the rest are partially mapped, and should be nailed down within five years. Several single-celled organisms have been mapped, too, and there's also the Canine Genome Project in progress -- expect GP's for all major domesticated (and experimental) animals within the next year or two.
As for junk DNA, why does this surprise you? Genetic algorithms produce messy code. If some junk sequence doesn't actively impair the reproductive fitness of the organism the genome expresses, there is no selection pressure to remove it from the genome. What's interesting isn't how much of the genome is junk, but how well-understood bits of it are already.
And the real Hard Question in biochemistry, the tertiary/quarternary protein conformation question, is due to come under attack for real in another few years when IBM's Blue Gene comes on line. (Now there is a topic for Katz to rant about!)
Run a database? Register it or go to prison. (That's the principle.) The original DPA draft dates back to before the government knew you could store data on anything smaller than a mainframe (early to mid eighties).
There are exemptions for non-profit clubs, and private address books. That's about it. The DPA actually had to clarify a couple of years ago that usenet spools and private email folders weren't considered databases within the meaning of the law -- but structured data repositories (like this sort of thing) are subject to the act.
What laws are they breaking?
For starters, there's the Data Protection Act (amended 1998). This requires all databases to be registered, along with a list of their structure, so that people upon whom information is held can serve a data disclosure notice on the database owners and find out what is being said about them. I believe there's also a requirement to notify the subjects that information about them is being stored.
(Violation: up to two years in prison and a honking great fine, although it's very rare for infractions to get as far as a prosecution.)
Next: Computer Misuse Act (1994). This act has teeth -- it was introduced as an anti-hacking measure and it would seem that if they're tampering with or using a computer in the UK for any purpose without the consent of the owner they could be liable for five years as a guest in one of Her Majesty's hotels. It is a criminal offense to run software on a computer without the owner's permission, or to cause software to be run (ditto), or indeed to do anything with a computer without permission from its owner. Oh, and you can be guilty even if you're not in the UK (but meddling with a UK-based computer), or if the computer's not in the UK (but you are).
Finally there's the EU declaration of human rights which, implemented in law, has an explicit right of privacy. The EU recently disseminated some directives on data security -- specifically banning the export of personal information from jurisdictions with strict privacy laws to other jurisdictions with weaker protection -- that means this company is violating the law, right across the EU.
Class action lawsuit, anybody?
A project that is worth pursuing without reinventing the wheel would be to fix the ARLO boot loader so that it works on the OS5 release of EPOC/32 used in the Series 5MX, Series 7, Revo, and NetBook computers. Because of substantial device driver changes in this release, ARLO doesn't work any more and some porting work is required.
To what extent are you seeing Corel feeding back these changes to the Debian community? How good for Debian has Corel been, so far?
Secondly, all these measures were originally mooted by the last (conservative) government. New Labour is not so much attempting to turn England into a police state as it is continuing policies established by Thatcher and her successors.
Why they're doing this is a strange question. It seems to me that the whole of English culture is in the grip of a wave of security-related hysteria that has nothing to do with terrorism (we put up with the IRA for thirty years, after all) and everything to do with accelerating social change. People feel insecure and worried, and respond by looking for some group to blame. New age travellers, gun owners, paedophiles -- they're all identifiable targets who stand out from the herd and give the herd reason to dislike (or hate) them. So it's no surprise that they come in for attack.
What's new and frightening is the introduction of "zero tolerance" measures in law, in a country that doesn't have a strong constitutional foundation. (There's a bill of rights, and there is an unwritten constitution, but it's hard to attack bad laws on the grounds that they violate constitutional rights.) Add half a million CCTV cameras in public places and a willingness to install another sixty thousand cameras a month and you can see why the UK is now the nation to visit if you want to buy neural-network based face-recognition software. Big Brother is alive and well and living in London.
Digging a bit deeper, we may also be seeing a once-in-a-century re-alignment of British politics. Traditionally, the Westminster parliament has been a two-and-a-half party system. Until 1923, it was Conservative/Liberal with a minor Labour presence. Labour replaced the Liberals, ushering in a period of Conservative dominance -- the Tories ran the UK for 40 out of the 60 years leading up to 1996 and Tony Blair's historic landslide victory. But they blew it, the same way the Liberals blew it in the 1920's; corruption scandals cost them the election and are still haunting them, while the Liberal presence in parliament is the highest it's been since the 1920's. Meanwhile, New Labour has lurched so far in the direction of the authoritarian right that they're staking out a claim to be the true right-wing party in British politics!
There's a general consensus in UK politics about the need for broadly free-market economics, but the traditional proponents of the market in the UK are strongly associated with the authoritarian right. The Liberal Democrats are beginning to reassert liberal values -- civil libertarianism mixed with moderate economics -- and may be staking out a claim to be the new party of the left in the UK, but for now neither of the main parties has any truck with civil liberties.Worse, the current right-wing authoritarian party of government is dominated by ex-Trotskyites. If there's one thing more zealously conservative than a hard-core Tory, it's an ex-Trot who has repented, seen the light, and bought an Armani suit and a BMW. (They're born control-freaks with no sense of humour, and you can't trust 'em either -- they know they've gone over to the Dark Side, and they just don't are about anything other than Power any more.)
Me, I'm just glad that after the last Conservative election victory I resolved to move to another country! (I made good on that promise -- and came to Scotland.)
No such right exists under US law, although a right to privacy has been inferred on the basis of, for example, the fourth amendment. One consequence of this is that Americans take for granted a degree of corporate -- as opposed to governmental -- intrusion in their private affairs that would cause outrage in most of Europe. (And the European position is that at least the government is democratically accountable ...)
A lot of US companies act in a manner that would be flat-out illegal in other parts of the world, in much the same way that it would be illegal for a European company to try to do business in the US in a manner that, for example, was calculated to blow away the first amendment rights of their customers.
Over the past year, the EU member states have been trying to tighten up on the observation of the right to privacy, making it illegal to export personal data to countries with weaker protection (among other things). This would appear to be a rather dumb attempt to clamp down on what are seen as technologies of privacy invasion. (I say "rather dumb" because of course no equivalent attempt is being made to clamp down on sales of eeevil ethernet boards with embedded 48-bit ID's!)
While I think this action is misdirected, I happen (as a European) to think that privact is valuable. In particular, there should be no invasion of privacy without accountability. Intel is just the latest company (remember RealNetworks, last week?) to get their fingers burned by dismissing privacy as an issue. It isn't a matter of personal preference; it's a fundamental right.
Until 1995, 90% of the net was American. By 2005, more than 50% of the net will be Non-American. I make the changeover point sometime around 2002; Europe is about 12 months behind the USA and has 20% greater population, and the rest of the world (notably the Pacific Rim) is in there too.
The real action to keep your eyes on is not the speechifying in Congress, but what happens at the G8 summits and in the various low-key trade treaty meetings that happen from time to time. International treaties are effectively law -- once ratified they are binding, and they're a lot harder to make an end-run around than local ordinances. To this end, you really want to watch out for what is happening in the European Commission offices -- a market for national bureaucrats to talk shop -- and eye up what they agree with the US government about. Once the EU and the USA work out a common subset of ground rules, those rules will almost certainly stick.
Moreover, what the EU member states want and what the USA wants are very different. Take Germany's recent willingness to undermine the Wassenaar Agreement by providing public funds for GPG. Or France's current turmoil over a move to a maximum 35-hour working week (the leisure society coming home to roost as a way to abolish high structural unemployment). Or the EU-wide interest in privacy law, so totally alien to the US political process, but counter-balanced by a more overt US commitment to freedom of speech (at least in theory).
There will be interesting times ahead as a cross- border consensus gets thrashed out. And because the net knows no frontiers, you Americans can expect some European values to come home to you.
The UK title is the highest circulation monthly computer mag in the UK. Part of the reason for this is that it's actually two magazines in one cover.
One chunk of Shopper is the adverts and introductory hand-holding articles. These are what a large chunk of the readership buy it for -- how to choose and buy a PC. According to Jeremy Spencer, editor and hovercraft racer in chief, something like 70% of these readers will never install any software on their machines beyond that which comes with it.
But the other side of the UK Computer Shopper is the geek-oriented editorial content. There's the Mac column. The Programming column. (How many magazines can you think of that have run introductions to machine code programming in the past year?) The Linux column -- that's my baby. (I've been writing about Linux in Shopper since 1994, and writing the Linux column since late '98.) There's even an Acorn Archimedes column. In other words, a bit of something for everyone, with the enthusiasts firmly in the editorial sights.
There's a reason for this split-personality persisting for so long in a high-circulation magazine. Back around 1990 Jeremy -- an old-school computer magazine editor -- realised that the market for enthusiast-driven magazines was shrinking; to keep one running he'd need to have another selling point. The result was a combination recipe; the sort of editorial content you used to see in BYTE or PCW, combined with the huge wadge of advertising and infomercials you see in a typical ZD title today.
Voracious eclecticism and a willingness to embrace the next revolution does make for a successful computer magazine. Shopper (in the UK) is already into Open Source. And hopefully it'll be keeping Jeremy in hovercraft for years to come ...
Moreover, it might be worth digging up an old copy of DesqView/X to see if that could be cited as prior art. (Runs an application on a PC that displays remotely on an X server? Check. 1992? Check.)
Just about any fusion reaction we're likely to produce without really exotic techniques is going to spit out neutrons. Neutrons that will be absorbed by anything in the vicinity of the reactor. Stuff that will then contain neutron-activated radioisotopes.
Ergo, fusion reactors will still produce radioactive waste -- just not the fission products we're used to.
Speaking as a European, I can't wait to file for my new patent -- on the business practice of moving your entire IT department out of the USA in order to evade stupid US patent lawsuits that would be unenforcable anywhere else in the world!
For example, don't try installing it on a laptop and expect it to work out of the box. The default kernel with COL 2.3 lacks APM support (confirmed by Caldera support), and I have my doubts about its PCMCIA support, too: if you want COL on a laptop you'll need to do a kernel rebuild, to say nothing of figuring out how their cutesy boot-time display works.
As laptops aren't exactly rare these days, I'd have expected Caldera to put a bit more effort into supporting them ...
Which wouldn't be so bad, except that there are a lot of bad laws out there.
Part of the problem is that we pay legislators to legislate. It's easier for a lawmaker to pass a new law than strike an old one off the books, and they need to be seen to be active to justify our votes. So they're always seeking new causes to legislate on.
Another part of the problem is that we're living through an era of rapid social and technological change. Most non-geeks don't like change; it disturbs and worries them. In times of change, societies are prone to waves of mass hysteria: and the hysteria usually focusses on some "out" group who can be blamed (conveniently) for society's ills. "If only they'd go away/behave/conform everything would be alright!"
(Do I need to explain this point in more depth?)
The mixture of surveillance technology with a public witch hunt driven by a moral panic is terrifying and without precedent. Over here -- in the UK -- it's being manifested in the shape of half a million surveillance cameras a year going up in public places, in police authorities installing camera systems with neural network based face-recognition software (to spot suspected offenders whenever they go out in public), in a Home Office obsessed with the idea of eliminating, not minimizing, obstacles to obtaining speedy convictions through the court process (such as jury trials, double jeopardy, the right to silence, and so on).
Sound familiar? It's the same mind set at work ...
Example: you visit an AIDS awareness web site, then hop over to Amazon.com and buy a book about living with HIV. You do this because your kid sister has a friend who is HIV positive and wants to know more about it and asked you to do her a favour.
Years later, you put in an application for life assurance to cover your endowment mortgage ... and the life assurance company turns you down. Seems their data mining brought up a warning flag: "buys material about living with AIDS, visits AIDS awareness websites". Ergo, their expert system deduces that you may have HIV (a very bad life insurance risk!).
Admittedly, this sort of abuse shouldn't be possible if proper privacy laws are in place. But in the USA, there are no effective consumer privacy laws (hence the current fracas with the EU, which is bringing in reasonable ones). Nothing stops your insurance company from buying the DoubleClick net's database to check against health risks; it's not information subject to medical confidentiality, is it?
This is a relatively mild example of how data mining can go wrong. Much, much worse things can happen to you -- comp.risks is full of examples of people being arrested and dragged off to prison because they share the same name and birthday as a wanted felon, or similar cases of public officials putting their trust blindly in a database that has had information indiscriminately shovelled into it.
If we bring political or governmental issues into it, it gets even worse -- imagine, for example, if your local police force starts looking for people who have looked at web sites with details of how to pick locks and who are not registered locksmiths. Sound outrageous? Of course it is -- until it happens.
Privacy is a fundamental human right; and one that is barely protected by law here in the EU, and utterly inadequately protected in the US.
The laptop, a Sony Vaio 304, came with Windows 98 pre-installed. Stick the Caldera 2.3 CD in under windows and you get treated to the usual multimedia presentation -- with a rather business- oriented spin; it's quite obvious that Caldera are going for the newbie business market rather than the experienced or technical market.
(It's noteworthy, howver, that their pitch seems to be moving away from the corporate end of things and towards the guerilla networking idea; "how can I infiltrate linux into my corporation?" was the main theme, far as I could tell.)
Anyway. Partition Magic did its job, and very well; my main quibble is that it offers some fixed partition size options, none of which exactly corresponded to what I wanted: a "custom" option (specify Mb of disk space to provide for linux) would have been handy.
Following the inevitable reboot into Caldera's installer, things ran smoothly. It didn't detect my NeoMagic audio chipset, but then, that particular chipset isn't supported by anyone -- OSS claim they'll have a driver in a month or so. Nor did it detect the new power management system the Vaio uses (not APM, far as I can tell). And of course there's no support for FireWire yet (one of the Vaio's features). On the other hand, it got the NeoMagic video drivers right first time, and left me at the end of the installation with a minimally usable GUI-based linux installation.
Some things did go wrong. First and most noticable was LILO; it didn't set me up to dual-boot automatically. This took me ten seconds to fix, but was most irritating and would be a hurdle for a real beginner to cope with -- one that might induce panic when they realised that they couldn't get at Windows at all. A second problem was with swap space; /etc/fstab didn't get an entry for the swap partition it had created. (This problem also cropped up in an earlier insteall of COL 2.2 on my desktop machine.)
Installation of the commercial packages is fairly easy, aided by a web-based installer page; they've obviously been paying attention.
The upshot of all this is that I would normally have spent a day doing this job: repartition, install Linux distro, install X server, add StarOffice and Netscape, get it smoothly dual-booting. The Caldera install to that point took only about two hours (including subsequent fixing of minor niggles); a vast improvement. If I can get the APM and sound issues solved, then get my ethernet/modem PCMCIA combo-card working (haven't tried that yet -- it's in another laptop at present), I'll be completely happy with this distro. It's not as annoyingly non-standard and managerially intrusive as SuSE ("ve haff ways of administering your system wether you like it or not!!"), and a bit smoother than Red Hat (I'm having real, er, fun with a 6.0 install right now).
If I have one issue with COL, it's that it leaves things out in the interests of providing a consistent experience. Consistency is important for new users; the toolbox mindset that can cope with, say, bits of different MTAs on the same distribution, is not widespread among the people Caldera are trying to sell this product to. On the other hand, things like Pine not being part of the default packages that are installed is annoying. I'd like to see a custom install option, that is at least as flexible as Red Hat's outline-based pick-an-rpm system. Just out of selfishness, you understand.
Petreley is mostly right; Caldera OpenLinux is very slick, and with something like WINE or a commercial Windows app-emulator added in, it is a genuine killer for corporate types who want to use a Linux system without losing access to Windows or having to teach themselves lots of new stuff. For the rest of us? I want a solid, reliable workhorse of a laptop, which is why I put Caldera on it. (For bleeding- edge stuff I have a test machine.) It's really a distro for people who have a job to do: and whether you love it or hate it depends on your reasons for running it.