No Surprises that Sun staff use macs. Sun don't make a laptop product themselves, and if you are after a unix laptop it's hard to go past a TitaniumG4. They are sexy as hell, fast as the clappers and run the coolest flavour of unix around.
I am about to retire (with extreme prejudice) the last windoze laptop we have here, making yet another linux server, but the damn thing weighs almost twice what my TitG4 weighs, has a terrible trackpad and two mouse buttons - who ever thought of such a stupid idea as more than one button on a mouse. It's got loads of ram tho and a 700mhz pentiumIII 'Inside' but it'll never be more than a server that sits up in the bookshelf because it's a) ugly, b) heavy, and c) fragile. Can't drop a dell like you can drop a mac. Certainly can't spill a full glass of vodka and ice thru the dell's keyboard without damaging it. whereas my mac was a-okay after a night on the heater.
Another reason I'll never ever buy a Dell product again is since buying their stupid laptop, i have been unable to unsubscribe myself from the oceans of spam they send me.
Installed the new palm desktop into my TitG4 just fine. hooray.
Went to synch my palmVx, previously only backed up via PalmCopy - thankyou palmCopy. Started the HotSynch and it found my Palm via IR and recognsied me as user. So far this is better than the beta.
I went off to make some tea, came back at distress sound from my palm. The synch connection broke while trying to install some new OS upgrade.
annoyed, I surfed about on/. and Mac/ to see if others had experienced the same probs. they had and advocated trashing the OS3.5.3 folder from the OS updates folder.
I moved the offending system update and tried my synch again. No luck, the synch jammed up on trying to identify the user.
so, having experienced this before with the beta I logged out and in again, then performed a synch. - voila, it worked and for the first time in almost a year the contact list on my mac is in synch with my palm - now if only I could simpyl synch palm desktop, address.app, ipod and palmVx in one go...
not content, I updated some of the contact info via palm desktop and then went to resynch. - no luck as now it can't identify the user.
so once again logged out, logged in and tried to resynch. same result - can't identify the user.
so full reboot - try again - no luck.
fiddle about, reboot, try again - no luck.
give up in disgust and look for someone at palm to flame - no luck. the last person i spoke to at palm emphaticalyl told me that th emac was not supported and certainly not hotsynching via IR - idiots
Does this accord with any other's experiences?
Here's what I want.
To synch my palm with my address books and ipod
A freeware OS independent shared calendar that works like an instant messenger that I can synch my palm with.
I have to agree. I only saw fan-tome menace on a pirate video dubbed into russian with chinese subtitles on a 14 inch tv - i'm waiting for the full set dvd box to come out 2020. the other night i watched ben hur on dvd on my new widescreen tv and woah i thought, that chariot race is cool. looks a bit like the pod race from fan-tome menace. nice to know i was right, again.
Do you seriously think the world would be a better place if Stalin or Hitler had conquered Europe?
Um, Stalin won the war against Hitler. Sure he was a crazy totalitarian much like Hitler and many others but give him credit where due. Russia, under the control of Stalin won WWII for us all. America came in and cleaned up at the end, britian gave their best shot but only by fooling the US did it manage to drag their sorry asses into the wayr at all, pretty much everyone else capitulated. Stalin won the war for us. Never forget that.
and now europe is united under one currency, almost like germany wanted in the first place.
A franchise is a pretty simple business structure held together by common image and business processes. Normally a franchise owner pays a tithe to the franchiser in exchange to access to IP and in some cases a place to operate. Franchises are all geographically focused. That's why you can have lots of them and they all pay their dues to the slush fund at the top that grants them their right to exist.
The view from the top is pretty good. The franchiser gets to burn the advertising bucks and get to snort the coke off the stripper's tits and carry on like a mega corp exec., or whatever.
i have been trying to imagine an open sourced franchise. say for example a really cool team with some really cool software and really cool ways of developing software and tools etc decided that they'd provide the overall branding and infrastructure, and for no fee, but enforced compliance, people could adopt your franchise and your cool tools, processes, etc and your billing systems etc, and make good money or not as they choose, but rather than contribute money upstream, innovations and enhancements are fed through to all memebers of the franchise network.
a client would know that when they hire one franchise team they are getting a whole network of teams that work in very very similar ways, but with local enhancements that if generally accepted as beneficial, get accepted by the network of teams.
tools such as CVS and then sourceforge allowed open source projects to flourish. similarly tools such as p2p project management tools and billing systems, as well as automated unit testing ala JUnit, and a host of other eXtreme Programming widgets will allow teams to gather around a brand for the accelerating benefit of all.
I think the so called open company manifesto, an amateur regurgitation of the main tennents of the ClueTrain Manifesto, missed the point entirely. The Open Cola experiment is a sham and a marketing gimmick. I quote "An important note: this is *not* the recipe for "OpenCola" -- that is, the canned beverage from OpenCola that you may have received at a trade show, or other venue or outlet. Making canned cola requires millions of dollars in abstruse gear and manufacturing gizmos. It's easier to make nerve gas than manufacture cola. This is a kitchen-sink recipe that you can make all on your own. It is *our* kitchen-sink recipe. We figured it out somewhere between coding the COLA SDK and debugging the Linux build of the clerver." [from their recipe].
But there is no reason why the philosophies surrounding the open source movement cannot have direct impact on the way a multinational runs, as well as the legal system, education, health care, prisons, terrorist networks, and even the military. an open sourced army? be the first on your block.:-)
What's with all the Sun bashing going on here? What problem has Larry got with Sun? Sure Solaris is as dead as the dodo save for sun hardware, much like osx is only going to thrive on mac hardware. solaris for intel has always been a joke.
but really what love does anyone have for larry? i mean Oracle, excuse me? If it wasn't for the fact he hates Bill gates as much as/. does most of you gentle readers would dismiss him as another steve jobs only vastly more crass.
sun are to servers as apple is to the desktop. they both make great hardware, are beloved by their owners, and were founded by pot-smoking-soap-dodging-duck-squeezing-hippies.
but larry's just a jock and everyone knows it. bill's a gug, scott's some sort of spooky intellectual surrounded by his braniac hippie mates. steve's morphed into a gap-ad-proto-beatnik but it's been so gradual that no-one noticed. i challenge you now, go find old photos of yourself. 10 to 1 you can find photos where you are still wearing the same sort of clothes as you do now. with steve this is more like 99:100
but i digress.
so the best news for me out of all this is that oracle runnign on linux means oracle running on osx isn't far behind. larry will want oracle on some fuck off big unix box, and he's still on apple's board. steve will give in to pressure and release a proper rack mountable OSX server bundled with a full oracle developer suite.
but sun will do something new and cool and unexcpected. steve doesn't own the franchise on innovation. in the last few years sun have been innovating hard. java is a triumph, jini and javaspaces are pure genius, who knows, maybe sun will move into consumer electronics? they'd be damn good at it.
The thing in love about my iPod is that when i bought it, i took it out of the box, sat down with it and my TitG4 in the nearest laksa shop and plugged the two things together. 5 mts later my iPod was synched with the 4.6 gigs of MP3 on my mac and it had charged enough that i could have a play with it. Try charging your RIO through that USB port mate. By the time i'd finished my lunch the iPod was charged well enough that i could listen to it all the way home.
also, the iPod's user interface is the simplest i have encountered. the RIO's would have to be pretty damn simple to beat it. My 3 year old niece had no difficulty figuring out how to work my iPod after about a minute of fiddling with it. add to that the iPod is so sturdy I had no fear whatsoever letting my niece have a play with it - yes she did have a chew at the edge:-)
all in all the rio looks cool for a home bound rack but for portability, usability and all round coolness the iPod wins hands down.
also i have found plenty of occasions already where having a 5 gb firewire drive in your pocket is a really handy thing to have. and the coolest iPod feature - hold down the little middle button for 5 seconds while in the 'about' screen and the classic game 'brickles' starts up. nice easter egg.
there is of course robocam on rundle street in adelaide. it's on the same building as the australian federal police but is the only camera in public control, not private or state control. anyone can go to the robocam website and have a play if they have netscape. it doesn't work with IE i tried.
europe has gone open source crypto mad. the germans are keen, the eu has just busted eschelon wide open and their conclusion is that everyone in the eu should be using oscrypto. you can bet your ass that everyone will use the strongest cheapest crypto they can - and that will be open, free and so tough you'll need a quantum computer to crack it.
still, thinking about it, quantum computers are so small they'll probably be spray on everywhere things . - so perhaps all this talk is already redundant. software based encryption is already redundant.
you amerikans may be comfortable with your government looking up your skirts, but there is no way in hell that your US Government, (note not the government of the world) should be allowed to monitor the communications of citizens of other nations. of course it does in the name of national security and we must all accept that some form of spying will always go on. but it has been shown time and again that the US Govt is all about protecting its corporate interests - industrial espionage is what its all about these days.
all the more important now that amerika is sliding into the technological stone age. (finland makes the coolest phones, japan and taiwan almost everything else. - the USA is just there to have its technology ripped off by sweat shop workers and sold cheaply out of the backs of trucks in eastern europe.)
I've woked in plently of small startups, as well as huge one's like poo.cow, (em, boo.com), and have tried both strategies. Early up I stayed because I really did think that I could save the day.
But I couldn't.
The Invisible Hand was not helping me, but hindering not just me but my entire sector. I stuck it out and earned almost nothing for it. Boo.com on the other hand paid well and I was carefull enough to be able to exit gracefully before it went tits up.
Plenty of people who lost their jobs when it finally did shut down walked right into new, better jobs. And that's the rub. You may think you are doing your fiends, this company,and your karma a favour by slogging through the hard times to finally make it, but you are letting visions of rocky, hold back your own, and your fiend's careers.
There's nore novelty in the future than there has been in the past, because the univese of possibilities is open ended.
I spend a fair amount of time in Moscow and St Petersburgh where, as a Non-Russian, I must carry my passport and duly authorised visa with me at all times. Armed soldiers with machine guns slung at their waist, smoking and extoring free fucks from the prostitutes that work in the parked cars below, outside your bedroom window are taken absolutely for granted. Still, on the occasions I have been pulled over by them, they have saluted, asked me for my papers please, i've handed them over and they've glanced at them, seen the kangaroo on the cover and handed them straight back. They salute again and wish you success and prosperity. That's pretty much the same as the american cops. they ar epolite with you but only because they are all trained that McWay. The american cops don't salute you though, and say have a nice day.
In russia they have SORM. It's philisophically a bit like Carnivour, or the RIP software or basically privatised bits of Ecshelon. SORM is a black box that sits at the ISP and stores, indexes and analyses packets. It basically legalises what the FSB (former KGB) were doing already. It also decentralises the work which means it's easier. The guy who told me that works for a former part of the KGB that was split off and privatised with partly US venture capital. Their team is all pretty young, all pretty bright, and all prett keen on real time decryption of 56 key decryption of the voice channel on gsm cellphone traffic. keen distributed computer guys who do their jobs cos they love the intellectual challenge of it. And they are not alone.
So the idea of data privacy is a joke. IBM can number crunch uncrunchable primes using quantum computer make of 5 fullerine atoms. That was months ago. A network of specialised computing devices on that sort of scale makes for some pretty interesting chips. A quantum ray tracer would be faster than light. A quantum based encryption/decryption race will yield incredible bounty for those of us whose privacy needs are minimal anyway.
Let the NSA and the FSB and the banks and cartels and the triads and mafia and NATO and WTO and every damn sovereign nation on this earth spend as much of their budgets as they dare to out encrypt/decrypt each other. You can't have anything without securing it, but you can't secure it anymore. But then again, you never really could anyway.
In Russia in Soviet times everyone could have been an informer. In the modern world everything will be. The 100,000+ cameras in every london street are a more insidious presence than anything the russins have done though. The footage from those cameras can be stored for future analysis and indexing. The indexing that can be done today is not bad to tell the truth. They are taged with GPS locations, the new lingua franca of where things are, as well as orientation data, such that their fields of view can be combined, like a smarter version of Canoma. That's spooky.
George W Bush wants to put missiles in orbit to keep the peace. So do the Chinese - all of 'em apparently. The CIA just released a report saying the world is going to shit and needs more guns, nanotechnology is looming. run to the hills.
Still even though I am subliminally aware that my every move is being watched and recorded, i work in a room fullof machines with permanent net connections, cameras, microphones, proprietory operating systems an software etc that could make a person paranoid; life is not a movie and much of my life is not that riveting.
If the They know that at 3am on the morning on 13th january i was watching the x-men on dvd and catching up on some email - mostly rants to friends, and jargon laden banter to workmates and associates, and work, mostly writing stuff that will end up online anyway, good luck to 'em. By the same token i hope the guy out there with the dungeon full of kiddies and the global napster style swap club get's busted badly, and i hope the girl and her brother, refugies from some shithole get to a webterminal somewhere, email someone, anyone and even though it bounces, an analysys system recognises an anolamy and passes in on for further analys. and as a result two kids are retreved from otherwise certain suffering.
Be sure they will be an age of all encompasing cradle to grave to indexed archive surveillence. in such an age the conspirators messing with Will Smith's life in enema of the state wouldn't have had a chance.
In amsterdam people live with huge open windows that face the street. you can see into people's houses easily, especially as you wander around of an evening and people are eating their dinner. It's weird. Their red light district is a reflection of this, with the women in neon lit up amluminum sided glass boxes. Like the Tescos of Soho. But the dutch flaunt their disregard for privacy on a social level you'd never see in england or australia (outside of queensland).
We are lucky that for the most of us, the system seems to tolerate us. As I write this my housemate has just walked in, she is opening a box of freeby makeup and saying "Look what I got for free... all i had to do is put my name and address is a website. This is hairspray!" I gotta go...
first up a smart house should be able to adapt to various climate conditions, keeping the living areas at an optimal temperature according to what it learns from the way people adjust their central heating/cooling, but optimising for energy consumption.
a smart house would be able to adjust reflectivity levels off windows, the colour of walls, turn off lights which are not needed, flood the house with music or not according to who is home. a smart house would know who lives there and who's a guest and be able to stop guests from drinking th elast of the vodka, eating the last of the caviar, but let them eat as much breakfast cerial as they like.
a smart house would analyse your piss and shit and adjust if you are unhealthy. a smart house would know if you are having a business meeting in your lounge, or trying to woo a new lover, but would let you set the the music yourself. a smart house would have speech recognition.
a smart house would be able to reduce the music such that you don't get the EPA on your doorstep at 5am with a court order.
a smart house would be full of smart appliances.
it would know if it's just been sold, or if it's on the market, and adjust the cleaning routines accordingly. It would play with the aibo when no-one else is home.
Lenin is actually not in the Kremlin per se but is on display in a mausoleam in Red Square, adjacent to the Kremlin. The room is only open for brief periods each weekday and they restict the number of people who can go in there simultaniously so as to stop Lenin from falling to bits. Stalin was never in there.
In Australia, where the robosoccer games were played, Football refers to Aussie Rules, a very different game to either Soccer or American Rules Football (also known as Grid i believe???)
My guess is that the people who are currently deploying stuff using Jini are so damn excitied by the faster development times that it offers that they don't want others cutting into their lead. Jini is not just about your printer talking to your toaster, it's a fantastic set of patterns for building almost anything. We are using Jini and JavaSpaces particularly and the rewards have been amazing. When the first Jini storage machines and printers come out, connecting our backend code to them will automagic. Until that time, we still get the advantages of our backend system being faster to replicate, deploy and scale than any other system I have ever worked with.
How come the FBI get all the fun? How about an open source version of carnivore for the rest of us? then we can all keep spying on each other in a renewed spirit of openness.
This technology should be turned around into a search engine for porn. then with some crafty open source hacking some bright sparks could make a kind of napster but for porno sites. someone could even set up a porno equivalent to the cd database such that people could tag their images, thus simplifying searches. it sure would a) get al that filth off the web where adults can find it, b) force the porn industry to look elsewhere for their money and c) turn the whole world into one massive searchable distributed porn exchange. a seti at home for porn!
PS: Please be kind to us, after all we did help a little with that small Hitler problem. Thanks.
well it was only a small hitler problem by the time amerika got involved. the russians lost 20 million or simplifying that particular problem for everyone else, while you were heiling adolf as time's man of the year.
I imagine a time soon when we will just shoot up 50ml of net connectivity which will then pour through our bodies like ice 9. Every cell in our bodies, and the cells of almost any other living thing may be networked and able to interco-operate. the already blurry line between human and machine will be long gone. the blurry line between animal and plant will also evaporate as everything becomes digital. Everyone will live in their own personal space, whose fluid permissions will allow space sharing or not at the whim of the owner. My lounge may resemble the alps while your the beach in hawaaii, but when we are together a shared, consensual space with connonly agreed or familiar decor may be better. The future of th enet is beyond machines, beyond money and peyond people. It will be thriving when we as a species are long forgotten. The Future has begun. As Wlliam Gisbon has already made clear, we already live in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
I am about to retire (with extreme prejudice) the last windoze laptop we have here, making yet another linux server, but the damn thing weighs almost twice what my TitG4 weighs, has a terrible trackpad and two mouse buttons - who ever thought of such a stupid idea as more than one button on a mouse. It's got loads of ram tho and a 700mhz pentiumIII 'Inside' but it'll never be more than a server that sits up in the bookshelf because it's a) ugly, b) heavy, and c) fragile. Can't drop a dell like you can drop a mac. Certainly can't spill a full glass of vodka and ice thru the dell's keyboard without damaging it. whereas my mac was a-okay after a night on the heater.
Another reason I'll never ever buy a Dell product again is since buying their stupid laptop, i have been unable to unsubscribe myself from the oceans of spam they send me.
- Installed the new palm desktop into my TitG4 just fine. hooray.
- Went to synch my palmVx, previously only backed up via PalmCopy - thankyou palmCopy. Started the HotSynch and it found my Palm via IR and recognsied me as user. So far this is better than the beta.
- I went off to make some tea, came back at distress sound from my palm. The synch connection broke while trying to install some new OS upgrade.
- annoyed, I surfed about on
/. and Mac/ to see if others had experienced the same probs. they had and advocated trashing the OS3.5.3 folder from the OS updates folder.
- I moved the offending system update and tried my synch again. No luck, the synch jammed up on trying to identify the user.
- so, having experienced this before with the beta I logged out and in again, then performed a synch. - voila, it worked and for the first time in almost a year the contact list on my mac is in synch with my palm - now if only I could simpyl synch palm desktop, address.app, ipod and palmVx in one go...
- not content, I updated some of the contact info via palm desktop and then went to resynch. - no luck as now it can't identify the user.
- so once again logged out, logged in and tried to resynch. same result - can't identify the user.
- so full reboot - try again - no luck.
- fiddle about, reboot, try again - no luck.
- give up in disgust and look for someone at palm to flame - no luck. the last person i spoke to at palm emphaticalyl told me that th emac was not supported and certainly not hotsynching via IR - idiots
Does this accord with any other's experiences?dave
I have to agree. I only saw fan-tome menace on a pirate video dubbed into russian with chinese subtitles on a 14 inch tv - i'm waiting for the full set dvd box to come out 2020. the other night i watched ben hur on dvd on my new widescreen tv and woah i thought, that chariot race is cool. looks a bit like the pod race from fan-tome menace. nice to know i was right, again.
and now europe is united under one currency, almost like germany wanted in the first place.
you said: Not to mention, you'd probably want to hack the OS in some way so that you could kill CPU-hog Aqua.
.0% 0:00.13 1 16 16 480K 656K 948K 5.74M
.0% 48:45.56 8 141 224 9.35M 13.0M 14.7M 72.4M
.0% 0:00.46 1 66 75 940K 7.61M 2.74M 57.7M
.0% 0:09.47 3 92 151 4.21M 11.1M 9.98M 65.3M
.0% 1:42.18 5 118 173 7.14M 13.1M 11.8M 120M
.8% 0:54.66 6 123 247 2.65M 9.80M 6.26M 63.1M
.0% 12:15.22 7 124 167 5.78M 12.9M 9.21M 86.3M
.0% 2:59.75 1 64 78 1.18M 6.80M 9.60M 53.9M
.0% 0:00.15 1 46 38 356K 2.79M 956K 30.2M
.0% 3:43.34 3 116 147 2.61M 10.9M 7.42M 60.2M
the proof is in %top
Processes: 46 total, 3 running, 43 sleeping... 189 threads 03:17:24
Load Avg: 0.91, 0.68, 0.51 CPU usage: 7.0% user, 13.9% sys, 79.1% idle
SharedLibs: num = 124, resident = 29.8M code, 2.25M data, 7.20M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 4221, resident = 118M + 8.61M private, 84.9M shared
PhysMem: 64.7M wired, 114M active, 555M inactive, 734M used, 34.5M free
VM: 1.66G + 56.9M 9675(0) pageins, 617(0) pageouts
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
1146 top 10.4% 0:02.80 1 14 14 216K 328K 456K 1.37M
1141 tcsh
1105 Radio User 3.4% 12:38.38 11 107 221 10.9M 15.7M 19.3M 81.5M
959 iTunes
952 SecurityAg
889 JavaBrowse
862 BBEdit 6.5
832 Terminal
807 OmniWeb 0.0% 9:46.23 38 221 996 46.6M 35.4M 72.3M 148M
805 Eudora 5.1
802 netstat 0.0% 0:09.20 1 12 14 60K 336K 264K 1.32M
801 PTHClock
800 iTunesHelp
799 SystemUISe 2.6% 12:30.23 6 157 202 4.51M 7.64M 6.29M 65.8M
798 Dock
my mac right now.
</thinkingoutloud>
tried solaris on intel lately. sux big time. like i said. solaris is dead save for running on sun hardware. still, is there linux for spark or ultra?
but really what love does anyone have for larry? i mean Oracle, excuse me? If it wasn't for the fact he hates Bill gates as much as /. does most of you gentle readers would dismiss him as another steve jobs only vastly more crass.
sun are to servers as apple is to the desktop. they both make great hardware, are beloved by their owners, and were founded by pot-smoking-soap-dodging-duck-squeezing-hippies.
but larry's just a jock and everyone knows it. bill's a gug, scott's some sort of spooky intellectual surrounded by his braniac hippie mates. steve's morphed into a gap-ad-proto-beatnik but it's been so gradual that no-one noticed. i challenge you now, go find old photos of yourself. 10 to 1 you can find photos where you are still wearing the same sort of clothes as you do now. with steve this is more like 99:100
but i digress.
so the best news for me out of all this is that oracle runnign on linux means oracle running on osx isn't far behind. larry will want oracle on some fuck off big unix box, and he's still on apple's board. steve will give in to pressure and release a proper rack mountable OSX server bundled with a full oracle developer suite.
but sun will do something new and cool and unexcpected. steve doesn't own the franchise on innovation. in the last few years sun have been innovating hard. java is a triumph, jini and javaspaces are pure genius, who knows, maybe sun will move into consumer electronics? they'd be damn good at it.
my 2c
dave
i'd love to start my laptop up like a lawn mower, or boat!
also, the iPod's user interface is the simplest i have encountered. the RIO's would have to be pretty damn simple to beat it. My 3 year old niece had no difficulty figuring out how to work my iPod after about a minute of fiddling with it. add to that the iPod is so sturdy I had no fear whatsoever letting my niece have a play with it - yes she did have a chew at the edge :-)
all in all the rio looks cool for a home bound rack but for portability, usability and all round coolness the iPod wins hands down.
also i have found plenty of occasions already where having a 5 gb firewire drive in your pocket is a really handy thing to have. and the coolest iPod feature - hold down the little middle button for 5 seconds while in the 'about' screen and the classic game 'brickles' starts up. nice easter egg.
dave
there is of course robocam on rundle street in adelaide. it's on the same building as the australian federal police but is the only camera in public control, not private or state control. anyone can go to the robocam website and have a play if they have netscape. it doesn't work with IE i tried.
another good reason to use the cryptix library.
There is a bunch of good info on open source crypto and how US govt restrictions on crypto will simply mean that the rest of the world has better crypto than they do at cpsr.org.
europe has gone open source crypto mad. the germans are keen, the eu has just busted eschelon wide open and their conclusion is that everyone in the eu should be using oscrypto. you can bet your ass that everyone will use the strongest cheapest crypto they can - and that will be open, free and so tough you'll need a quantum computer to crack it.
still, thinking about it, quantum computers are so small they'll probably be spray on everywhere things . - so perhaps all this talk is already redundant. software based encryption is already redundant.
dave
I don't mean to rain on your parade but Java1.3 is standard kit on MacOSX and it kicks ass too.
all the more important now that amerika is sliding into the technological stone age. (finland makes the coolest phones, japan and taiwan almost everything else. - the USA is just there to have its technology ripped off by sweat shop workers and sold cheaply out of the backs of trucks in eastern europe.)
dave
But I couldn't.
The Invisible Hand was not helping me, but hindering not just me but my entire sector. I stuck it out and earned almost nothing for it. Boo.com on the other hand paid well and I was carefull enough to be able to exit gracefully before it went tits up.
Plenty of people who lost their jobs when it finally did shut down walked right into new, better jobs. And that's the rub. You may think you are doing your fiends, this company,and your karma a favour by slogging through the hard times to finally make it, but you are letting visions of rocky, hold back your own, and your fiend's careers.
There's nore novelty in the future than there has been in the past, because the univese of possibilities is open ended.
Oh and change is as good as a holiday.
In russia they have SORM. It's philisophically a bit like Carnivour, or the RIP software or basically privatised bits of Ecshelon. SORM is a black box that sits at the ISP and stores, indexes and analyses packets. It basically legalises what the FSB (former KGB) were doing already. It also decentralises the work which means it's easier. The guy who told me that works for a former part of the KGB that was split off and privatised with partly US venture capital. Their team is all pretty young, all pretty bright, and all prett keen on real time decryption of 56 key decryption of the voice channel on gsm cellphone traffic. keen distributed computer guys who do their jobs cos they love the intellectual challenge of it. And they are not alone. So the idea of data privacy is a joke. IBM can number crunch uncrunchable primes using quantum computer make of 5 fullerine atoms. That was months ago. A network of specialised computing devices on that sort of scale makes for some pretty interesting chips. A quantum ray tracer would be faster than light. A quantum based encryption/decryption race will yield incredible bounty for those of us whose privacy needs are minimal anyway. Let the NSA and the FSB and the banks and cartels and the triads and mafia and NATO and WTO and every damn sovereign nation on this earth spend as much of their budgets as they dare to out encrypt/decrypt each other. You can't have anything without securing it, but you can't secure it anymore. But then again, you never really could anyway. In Russia in Soviet times everyone could have been an informer. In the modern world everything will be. The 100,000+ cameras in every london street are a more insidious presence than anything the russins have done though. The footage from those cameras can be stored for future analysis and indexing. The indexing that can be done today is not bad to tell the truth. They are taged with GPS locations, the new lingua franca of where things are, as well as orientation data, such that their fields of view can be combined, like a smarter version of Canoma. That's spooky. George W Bush wants to put missiles in orbit to keep the peace. So do the Chinese - all of 'em apparently. The CIA just released a report saying the world is going to shit and needs more guns, nanotechnology is looming. run to the hills. Still even though I am subliminally aware that my every move is being watched and recorded, i work in a room fullof machines with permanent net connections, cameras, microphones, proprietory operating systems an software etc that could make a person paranoid; life is not a movie and much of my life is not that riveting.
If the They know that at 3am on the morning on 13th january i was watching the x-men on dvd and catching up on some email - mostly rants to friends, and jargon laden banter to workmates and associates, and work, mostly writing stuff that will end up online anyway, good luck to 'em. By the same token i hope the guy out there with the dungeon full of kiddies and the global napster style swap club get's busted badly, and i hope the girl and her brother, refugies from some shithole get to a webterminal somewhere, email someone, anyone and even though it bounces, an analysys system recognises an anolamy and passes in on for further analys. and as a result two kids are retreved from otherwise certain suffering.
Be sure they will be an age of all encompasing cradle to grave to indexed archive surveillence. in such an age the conspirators messing with Will Smith's life in enema of the state wouldn't have had a chance.
In amsterdam people live with huge open windows that face the street. you can see into people's houses easily, especially as you wander around of an evening and people are eating their dinner. It's weird. Their red light district is a reflection of this, with the women in neon lit up amluminum sided glass boxes. Like the Tescos of Soho. But the dutch flaunt their disregard for privacy on a social level you'd never see in england or australia (outside of queensland).
We are lucky that for the most of us, the system seems to tolerate us. As I write this my housemate has just walked in, she is opening a box of freeby makeup and saying "Look what I got for free... all i had to do is put my name and address is a website. This is hairspray!" I gotta go...
first up a smart house should be able to adapt to various climate conditions, keeping the living areas at an optimal temperature according to what it learns from the way people adjust their central heating/cooling, but optimising for energy consumption.
a smart house would be able to adjust reflectivity levels off windows, the colour of walls, turn off lights which are not needed, flood the house with music or not according to who is home. a smart house would know who lives there and who's a guest and be able to stop guests from drinking th elast of the vodka, eating the last of the caviar, but let them eat as much breakfast cerial as they like.
a smart house would analyse your piss and shit and adjust if you are unhealthy. a smart house would know if you are having a business meeting in your lounge, or trying to woo a new lover, but would let you set the the music yourself. a smart house would have speech recognition.
a smart house would be able to reduce the music such that you don't get the EPA on your doorstep at 5am with a court order.
a smart house would be full of smart appliances.
it would know if it's just been sold, or if it's on the market, and adjust the cleaning routines accordingly. It would play with the aibo when no-one else is home.
cheers
Lenin is actually not in the Kremlin per se but is on display in a mausoleam in Red Square, adjacent to the Kremlin. The room is only open for brief periods each weekday and they restict the number of people who can go in there simultaniously so as to stop Lenin from falling to bits. Stalin was never in there.
In Australia, where the robosoccer games were played, Football refers to Aussie Rules, a very different game to either Soccer or American Rules Football (also known as Grid i believe???)
My guess is that the people who are currently deploying stuff using Jini are so damn excitied by the faster development times that it offers that they don't want others cutting into their lead. Jini is not just about your printer talking to your toaster, it's a fantastic set of patterns for building almost anything. We are using Jini and JavaSpaces particularly and the rewards have been amazing. When the first Jini storage machines and printers come out, connecting our backend code to them will automagic. Until that time, we still get the advantages of our backend system being faster to replicate, deploy and scale than any other system I have ever worked with.
cheers
dave
How come the FBI get all the fun? How about an open source version of carnivore for the rest of us? then we can all keep spying on each other in a renewed spirit of openness.
Is C# pronounced C - Hash or C-Sharp? C# has been a musical term for quite some time.
This technology should be turned around into a search engine for porn. then with some crafty open source hacking some bright sparks could make a kind of napster but for porno sites. someone could even set up a porno equivalent to the cd database such that people could tag their images, thus simplifying searches. it sure would a) get al that filth off the web where adults can find it, b) force the porn industry to look elsewhere for their money and c) turn the whole world into one massive searchable distributed porn exchange. a seti at home for porn!
well it was only a small hitler problem by the time amerika got involved. the russians lost 20 million or simplifying that particular problem for everyone else, while you were heiling adolf as time's man of the year.
I imagine a time soon when we will just shoot up 50ml of net connectivity which will then pour through our bodies like ice 9. Every cell in our bodies, and the cells of almost any other living thing may be networked and able to interco-operate. the already blurry line between human and machine will be long gone. the blurry line between animal and plant will also evaporate as everything becomes digital. Everyone will live in their own personal space, whose fluid permissions will allow space sharing or not at the whim of the owner. My lounge may resemble the alps while your the beach in hawaaii, but when we are together a shared, consensual space with connonly agreed or familiar decor may be better. The future of th enet is beyond machines, beyond money and peyond people. It will be thriving when we as a species are long forgotten. The Future has begun. As Wlliam Gisbon has already made clear, we already live in the future.