I don't agree. The mobility provided by a cellphone is a great value in itself. You can now access your computers from wherever you are.
Building intelligence into the client, but making data-input difficult, and not using standard protocols - seems a huge waste of money and bandwidth
I would say that SSH is a standard protocol. And having that kind of intelligence in a mobile client is extremely useful when you are communicating over an insecure network. SSH provides much better authentication and encryption than you could ever achieve with a VT100. And by using the compression feature in SSH, you save bandwith too.
I agree that a proper keyboard and 80x25 characters would be useful though.
On my old PDA (Psion Revo) I use the IRDA port to connect to my GSM phone. This allows the PDA to control the phone (phonebook, ring signals, logos, SMS, etc). But the nicest feature is that it allows the PDA to phone ordinary modems, giving me internet access anywhere in the world.
It's only 9600 baud, but that is OK for E-mail and short telnet sessions.
I am responsible for installing, configuring, updating the email client on every machine in the company. This would be a nightmare if I had to keep track of everyone's favorite email client. Don't!;-) I guess this depends on the nature of the organization. Where I have worked, the IT department provided a solution and said "this works". That was what they supported. If I and my friends then installed, say, Eudora, it was OK but we had to support it ourselves. And for browsing, why would mandating a special browser be necessary? That's only needed for internal web applications which goes way beyond W3C standards, which should be avoided anyway IMHO.
Where I work, people use what they want to use. Many browse with IE, some use netcape or Opera, others use Konqueror or Mozilla.
For E-mail, most use Eudora, some use Outlook, pine or Kmail.
None that I know of use their web browser for E-mail.
Why do most organizations think they need to standardize on products rather than protocols or document standards? OK, the "IT department" thinks they need to provide support, but in many cases you could loosen up a bit... Use widely adopted protocols. Avoid proprietary protocols and formats that lock you in with a specific product.
I don't understand the conflict here: they have a GPL license and a proprietary one.
I don't know if this is a problem in practice here, but dual licensing only works if you own the entire copyright of all the source.
One benefit of the GPL licenese is that it allows the community to contribute code. However this contributed code is copyrighted by the individual author but you can use it under the GPL. But Trolltech cannot automatically use that contributed code under their other licenses. One of three things may happen:
The GPL-based code will fork.
Trolltech will violate the GPL and provide the contributed code under other licenses.
Trolltech does a nice job and strike deals with all contributors so they can legally distribute the code under other licenses.
Does anyone know whether this is a real problem, and how Trolltech have handled this?
An extra glass in front of the screen. Some sand in the bottom, almost covering the taskbar panel. And ants crawling over the windows, chasing the mouse pointer.
Agreed! What I really want to have is a waterproof tablet PC. It would be perfect to use for surfing in the bath!
I need a nice LCD touch screen. Battery operated with a couple of hours worth of life time (I don't need more in the bath; my skin gets wrinkles after a while.) WiFi so I can stream from my media servers. I don't really need a local disk since I could boot Linux remotely. It should float of course. No fans. It could be water-cooled if needed!;-) And keep my bath water warm!
If you think about it, it wouldn't be very difficult to make. There are no controls or ports needed so the waterproofing should be easy. Inductive recharging of batteries? And not expensive either.
Hmmm... Maybe I should make one myself? I wonder if Mini-ITX good for mobile use?
This would be the ultimate geek bath toy! I know you want one too.
Interesting stats web page! It is full of political bias. To win gold, you have to have more public schools and less private, less rich people, more unions, health care should be public, no social private spending, etc.
So what do the stats measure? The political preferences of the Canadian Council on Social Development?
DEC wasn't in the x86 market to start with so FX!32 extended their market by making NT/Alpha more attractive.
The only software emulation I can think of that was successful was Apple's 68k emulation for PPC
Actually, one of the top priorities for the Alpha design was to replace the VAX computer. Since much of VMS is written in VAX assembly, an Alpha compiler was developed for VAX assembly code. (Just treat VAX assembly as another high level language, compile it and optimize it.)
To make the transition for customers easier, another tool was developed (VEST) that translated linked binary programs from VAX to Alpha. (Basically, the program disassembled the user application to assembly source, and then recompiled that source to a new Alpha program.)
The FX!32 tool was developed later from this technology. (FX!32 does not emulate; it recompiles like VEST, on the fly, as needed)
So I would say that the VAX to Alpha transition is an example of a successful architecture transition that predates 68K->PPC.
By the way, VMS is now being ported to Itanium. Of course there will be a binary translator that translates binary applications from Alpha to Itanium.
they *have* introduced some real innovations. Cheap, shared-SCSI-bus clustering comes to mind
I don't know everything about what Windows is offering in the clustering department. But the real king of shared disk clusters is VMS. Windows is certainly nowhere near the clustering capabilities of what VMS had ten years ago.
Considering that the NT architect Dave Cutler used to work with VMS, I can suspect that some VMS clustering technologies have been cloned into Windows. Shared SCSI-based clustering is likely one such technology.
And I don't think "cheap" is a Microsoft innovation. That should be attributed to the compatitive hardware industry at large.
By downloading music you don't own you break the law
Wrong. You can legally download music from www.mp3.com for example. But you don't own the copyright of what you download.
Actually, almost everything you download (or look at with your browser) is created by someone and is protected by the copyright laws (unless the writer explicitly gives up his copyrights and place his work in the public domain).
However, it is illegal to distribute or upload work that you don't own the copyright on. Big difference.
This is why the music industry doesn't need any new DMCA laws. The existing copyright laws already gives them the right to sue the uploaders.
We use a license that restricts how your code is used, yet you want no restrictions on how the creations of others is used?
Bad analogy. Please read paragraph 5 of the link you are referring to. The GPL does not restrict how your code is used. It gives you extra rights above what the copyright law provides when dealing with code that was written by other people.
DRM on the other hand attempts to restrict the rights you have under the copyright law.
In my mind, DRM is not needed and the copyright law is just fine. The plain old copyright law (without DMCA or DRM) allows copyright holders to go after and sue people that are illegally distributing their work. The big question is: So why does not RIAA/MPAA just do that; sue uploaders? It is like they want to appear more helpless than they actually are just to have more laws passed that allow them to have more control over how the stuff they sell is used.
I am looking forward to the Unicode version of whitespace. This would truly demonstrate the expressfullness of Unicode as it has several whitespace characters.
From the article: If Steinhardt were to upgrade to a device with global-positioning capabilities, investigators might even track his whereabouts.
Mr. Steinhart is being tracked right now; he doesn't have to upgrade anything.
While your mobile phone is active it will connect with the nearest base station. As you move, it will change base stations. By tracking the base stations you use, you can get a quite nice plot of how you move around. This can be done using todays tech and you don't have to use the phone; just leave it on.
Today the resolution is somewhat lacking, but there are technologies that help. The mobile tech of tomorrow will use smaller cells, providing a finer tracking resolution.
I'm interested as to why someone who has "nothing to hide" should be worried about mass surveillance by their government? Because you are not an US citizen, and the government surveilling you is not your government.
Because you are an US citizen, and has realized that maybe other governments have technology that can do surveillance.
Doesn't anyone else remember those horrible Packard Bell and Wang (haha) computers that soldered most of their parts to the motherboard? It was not something good, and we all hated it.
Here is what you CAN upgrade:
Memory. There are one or two slots depending on model. Is 1GB enough?
There is a PCI slot. Two if you buy a riser card.
You have 4 IDE connectors for disks, CDrom, etc
And finally you've got USB
Considering this is not meant to be a replacement for a full-fledged workstation, I think the upgrade possibilities are quite OK.
How exactly does traffic analysis help them have any idea what I am talking about on my phone. I think encryption is an excellent idea.
Maybe they don't, but it can be interesting anyway. And when they find interesting stuff, they can direct other types of surveillance on you. And in the end, break the crypto using knuckle-breaking;-)
How does encryption protect you with this example:
Re:What would they do if..
on
Snooping on VOIP
·
· Score: 3, Informative
...people used ssh to tunnel their calls (assuming it's possible), or made calls over VPNs?
They would use traffic analysis. This allows you chart how the criminal networks are organized. There have been several convictions in Sweden where criminals used mobile phones during their crimes and traffic analysis provided the needed evidence. Traffic analysis has several benefits; it is very easy to automate it in computers (compared to having computers that actually analyze the spoken content), it is cheap (very little data is produced), and it doesn't matter if the content is encrypted or if you can't break the encryption.
Sometimes (when I'm feeling paranoid) I think there is a grand conspiracy from FBI, NSA, etc. They talk about encryption, make half-hearted attempts to ban it, etc. So that people in general think they are secure once they encrypt their communication. And then they can use traffic analysis to watch over the general public.;-)
Will the Americans snuff the brutal dictator Saddam? Likely.
Will the Americans win the love of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, or the arab people in general? Don't think so.
Considering Saddam did not have anything to do with 9/11, but the general Arab hate of Americans did, exactly what is the USA "winning" in Iraq just now?
"Just give me the damned content (if you have any) in plain HTML.
Umm, if you were blind, you wouldn't be saying that.
Umm, look at the following web site that talks about designing sites for blind people. Look at what they say about flash for example (near the bottom).
You want an example of a good use for Flash? Well, I don't have the site handy, but somebody used Flash to create an interface for blind people. It was all black, but when you moved your mouse around you recieved audio clues on where to click. That was damn cool.
Great! a web site that works for blind people. But now it does not work for the deaf!
Argh!!! God what I hate "cool" web sites. Just give me the damned content (if you have any) in plain HTML. I may be old fashioned, but I rather like a web that provides information than a platform for web "developers" to show off how cool they are.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree. The mobility provided by a cellphone is a great value in itself. You can now access your computers from wherever you are.
Building intelligence into the client, but making data-input difficult, and not using standard protocols - seems a huge waste of money and bandwidth
I would say that SSH is a standard protocol. And having that kind of intelligence in a mobile client is extremely useful when you are communicating over an insecure network. SSH provides much better authentication and encryption than you could ever achieve with a VT100. And by using the compression feature in SSH, you save bandwith too.
I agree that a proper keyboard and 80x25 characters would be useful though.
IRDA is also not really good for anything
On my old PDA (Psion Revo) I use the IRDA port to connect to my GSM phone. This allows the PDA to control the phone (phonebook, ring signals, logos, SMS, etc). But the nicest feature is that it allows the PDA to phone ordinary modems, giving me internet access anywhere in the world.
It's only 9600 baud, but that is OK for E-mail and short telnet sessions.
I am responsible for installing, configuring, updating the email client on every machine in the company. This would be a nightmare if I had to keep track of everyone's favorite email client. ;-)
Don't!
I guess this depends on the nature of the organization. Where I have worked, the IT department provided a solution and said "this works". That was what they supported. If I and my friends then installed, say, Eudora, it was OK but we had to support it ourselves. And for browsing, why would mandating a special browser be necessary? That's only needed for internal web applications which goes way beyond W3C standards, which should be avoided anyway IMHO.
Where I work, people use what they want to use. Many browse with IE, some use netcape or Opera, others use Konqueror or Mozilla.
For E-mail, most use Eudora, some use Outlook, pine or Kmail.
None that I know of use their web browser for E-mail.
Why do most organizations think they need to standardize on products rather than protocols or document standards? OK, the "IT department" thinks they need to provide support, but in many cases you could loosen up a bit... Use widely adopted protocols. Avoid proprietary protocols and formats that lock you in with a specific product.
I don't know if this is a problem in practice here, but dual licensing only works if you own the entire copyright of all the source.
One benefit of the GPL licenese is that it allows the community to contribute code. However this contributed code is copyrighted by the individual author but you can use it under the GPL. But Trolltech cannot automatically use that contributed code under their other licenses. One of three things may happen:
The GPL-based code will fork.
Trolltech will violate the GPL and provide the contributed code under other licenses.
Trolltech does a nice job and strike deals with all contributors so they can legally distribute the code under other licenses.
Does anyone know whether this is a real problem, and how Trolltech have handled this?
I would like a screen mod with an ant farm!
An extra glass in front of the screen. Some sand in the bottom, almost covering the taskbar panel. And ants crawling over the windows, chasing the mouse pointer.
Creepy!
Well, karma whoring becomes easy when you can just copy someone else's
;-)
funny post from an earlier discussion!
Hopefully, some other moderators will correct this
The only place I miss this is the shower.
;-) And keep my bath water warm!
Agreed!
What I really want to have is a waterproof tablet PC. It would be perfect to use for surfing in the bath!
I need a nice LCD touch screen. Battery operated with a couple of hours worth of life time (I don't need more in the bath; my skin gets wrinkles after a while.) WiFi so I can stream from my media servers. I don't really need a local disk since I could boot Linux remotely. It should float of course. No fans. It could be water-cooled if needed!
If you think about it, it wouldn't be very difficult to make. There are no controls or ports needed so the waterproofing should be easy. Inductive recharging of batteries? And not expensive either.
Hmmm... Maybe I should make one myself? I wonder if Mini-ITX good for mobile use?
This would be the ultimate geek bath toy! I know you want one too.
Interesting stats web page! It is full of political bias. To win gold, you have to have more public schools and less private, less rich people, more unions, health care should be public, no social private spending, etc.
So what do the stats measure? The political preferences of the Canadian Council on Social Development?
DEC wasn't in the x86 market to start with so FX!32 extended their market by making NT/Alpha more attractive.
The only software emulation I can think of that was successful was Apple's 68k emulation for PPC
Actually, one of the top priorities for the Alpha design was to replace the VAX computer. Since much of VMS is written in VAX assembly, an Alpha compiler was developed for VAX assembly code. (Just treat VAX assembly as another high level language, compile it and optimize it.)
To make the transition for customers easier, another tool was developed (VEST) that translated linked binary programs from VAX to Alpha. (Basically, the program disassembled the user application to assembly source, and then recompiled that source to a new Alpha program.)
The FX!32 tool was developed later from this technology. (FX!32 does not emulate; it recompiles like VEST, on the fly, as needed)
So I would say that the VAX to Alpha transition is an example of a successful architecture transition that predates 68K->PPC.
By the way, VMS is now being ported to Itanium. Of course there will be a binary translator that translates binary applications from Alpha to Itanium.
they *have* introduced some real innovations. Cheap, shared-SCSI-bus clustering comes to mind
I don't know everything about what Windows is offering in the clustering department. But the real king of shared disk clusters is VMS. Windows is certainly nowhere near the clustering capabilities of what VMS had ten years ago.
Considering that the NT architect Dave Cutler used to work with VMS, I can suspect that some VMS clustering technologies have been cloned into Windows. Shared SCSI-based clustering is likely one such technology.
And I don't think "cheap" is a Microsoft innovation. That should be attributed to the compatitive hardware industry at large.
By downloading music you don't own you break the law
Wrong. You can legally download music from www.mp3.com for example. But you don't own the copyright of what you download.
Actually, almost everything you download (or look at with your browser) is created by someone and is protected by the copyright laws (unless the writer explicitly gives up his copyrights and place his work in the public domain).
However, it is illegal to distribute or upload work that you don't own the copyright on. Big difference.
This is why the music industry doesn't need any new DMCA laws. The existing copyright laws already gives them the right to sue the uploaders.
RTFM 1d10t, y0ur a 1user, and 1m 37337
It's spelled 31337, 100z3r!
We use a license that restricts how your code is used, yet you want no restrictions on how the creations of others is used?
Bad analogy. Please read paragraph 5 of the link you are referring to. The GPL does not restrict how your code is used. It gives you extra rights above what the copyright law provides when dealing with code that was written by other people.
DRM on the other hand attempts to restrict the rights you have under the copyright law.
In my mind, DRM is not needed and the copyright law is just fine. The plain old copyright law (without DMCA or DRM) allows copyright holders to go after and sue people that are illegally distributing their work. The big question is: So why does not RIAA/MPAA just do that; sue uploaders? It is like they want to appear more helpless than they actually are just to have more laws passed that allow them to have more control over how the stuff they sell is used.
I am looking forward to the Unicode version of whitespace. This would truly demonstrate the expressfullness of Unicode as it has several whitespace characters.
A M SPACE MARK;Zs;0;WS;;;;;N;;;;;
$ grep ";WS;" UnicodeData.txt
000C;;Cc;0;WS;;;;;N;FORM FEED (FF);;;;
0020;SPACE;Zs;0;WS;;;;;N;;;;;
1680;OGH
2000;EN QUAD;Zs;0;WS;2002;;;;N;;;;;
2001;EM QUAD;Zs;0;WS;2003;;;;N;;;;;
2002;EN SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2003;EM SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2004;THREE-PER-EM SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2005;FOUR-PER-EM SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2006;SIX-PER-EM SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2007;FIGURE SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2008;PUNCTUATION SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2009;THIN SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
200A;HAIR SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
2028;LINE SEPARATOR;Zl;0;WS;;;;;N;;;;;
202F;NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
205F;MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
3000;IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE;Zs;0;WS; 0020;;;;N;;;;;
From the article:
If Steinhardt were to upgrade to a device with global-positioning capabilities, investigators might even track his whereabouts.
Mr. Steinhart is being tracked right now; he doesn't have to upgrade anything.
While your mobile phone is active it will connect with the nearest base station. As you move, it will change base stations. By tracking the base stations you use, you can get a quite nice plot of how you move around. This can be done using todays tech and you don't have to use the phone; just leave it on.
Today the resolution is somewhat lacking, but there are technologies that help. The mobile tech of tomorrow will use smaller cells, providing a finer tracking resolution.
I'm interested as to why someone who has "nothing to hide" should be worried about mass surveillance by their government?
Because you are not an US citizen, and the government surveilling you is not your government.
Because you are an US citizen, and has realized that maybe other governments have technology that can do surveillance.
There is a french company (can't recal the link) that makes nice shiny boxes for these things that are basically little cubes
Was it the french company that does OpenBrick? They look nice, but they do not use Mini-ITX.
Here is what you CAN upgrade:
Memory. There are one or two slots depending on model. Is 1GB enough?
There is a PCI slot. Two if you buy a riser card.
You have 4 IDE connectors for disks, CDrom, etc
And finally you've got USB
Considering this is not meant to be a replacement for a full-fledged workstation, I think the upgrade possibilities are quite OK.
How exactly does traffic analysis help them have any idea what I am talking about on my phone. I think encryption is an excellent idea.
;-)
Maybe they don't, but it can be interesting anyway. And when they find interesting stuff, they can direct other types of surveillance on you. And in the end, break the crypto using knuckle-breaking
How does encryption protect you with this example:
From: diablobynight@slashdot.org
To: sales@al-qaida-store.af
djfwkjef kwbvwkev bwiweviwuegfwi eufgwkefb wkjefbwiuev
wejfhk wejhfkwjnv wkeuhgwieufw eofhwl rgjheroi urgeirg
wljehfow euhfiwugbre kgberugberio ugiwheogi whjeglerg
...people used ssh to tunnel their calls (assuming it's possible), or made calls over VPNs?
;-)
They would use traffic analysis. This allows you chart how the criminal networks are organized. There have been several convictions in Sweden where criminals used mobile phones during their crimes and traffic analysis provided the needed evidence. Traffic analysis has several benefits; it is very easy to automate it in computers (compared to having computers that actually analyze the spoken content), it is cheap (very little data is produced), and it doesn't matter if the content is encrypted or if you can't break the encryption.
Sometimes (when I'm feeling paranoid) I think there is a grand conspiracy from FBI, NSA, etc. They talk about encryption, make half-hearted attempts to ban it, etc. So that people in general think they are secure once they encrypt their communication. And then they can use traffic analysis to watch over the general public.
There's no question that we're going to win.
Define "win".
Will the Americans snuff the brutal dictator Saddam? Likely.
Will the Americans win the love of the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, or the arab people in general? Don't think so.
Considering Saddam did not have anything to do with 9/11, but the general Arab hate of Americans did, exactly what is the USA "winning" in Iraq just now?
"Just give me the damned content (if you have any) in plain HTML.
Umm, if you were blind, you wouldn't be saying that.
Umm, look at the following web site that talks about designing sites for blind people. Look at what they say about flash for example (near the bottom).
http://www.rnib.org.uk/digital/hints.htm
You want an example of a good use for Flash? Well, I don't have the site handy, but somebody used Flash to create an interface for blind people. It was all black, but when you moved your mouse around you recieved audio clues on where to click. That was damn cool.
Great! a web site that works for blind people. But now it does not work for the deaf!
Argh!!! God what I hate "cool" web sites. Just give me the damned content (if you have any) in plain HTML. I may be old fashioned, but I rather like a web that provides information than a platform for web "developers" to show off how cool they are.
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