The language is horrible for all it lacks. I have read the Crockford book because I am writing larger and larger pieces of code in Javascript and found myself drifting.
I want to code things in a structured fashion and to do this I have a constant need to hack my own solutions.
OO in Javascript is a terrible hack. No ability to check if an object decents from a specific class. (yes, you can hack your own) No native ability to include other source files (yes, you can fake it -- but it forces me to build my loader) Rubbish exception handling....
Frameworks for Javascript (as in: for use in client only applications) are all at very early stages. You need to constantly reinvent the wheel. So yes, we are going back 20 years.
Its possible and if you write more than just a few pages you should use it.
The only way to learn how to write Chinese is to write it out for years on end, from kindergarten until university. It ain't much fun.
Since I am a bit older than this and like to write at least basic chinese in this lifetime I am just letting the computer pick the characters for me when I type.
My brain then tells me which of the offered characters feels "right" ; but it does that by looking at the overall shape, not the individual strokes.
European GSM operators routinely sell customer locations to third parties. Real-Time traffic jam warnings used by car navigation software makes extensive use of this.
The mobile phone data is also much more accurate than Apple's application layer reporting -- as the mobile phone is always broadcasting its location.
And no, it still doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy about apple.
The Chinese offer beat out bids by four other firms that were considered finalists. They include Strikeforce -- part of Russia's Basic Element Group, the London-based Kazakhmys Consortium, Hunter Dickinson of Canada, and the U.S. copper-mining firm Phelps Dodge.
This article is 2007.
And although the mine is in a relatively secure part of Afghanistan, the railroad and electric power lines would be difficult to defend around the clock from guerrilla attacks by Taliban militants.
1) We cannot (easily) install SSL certificates on the server as most sites are hosted, and this 'feature' costs $$$$ 2) Webbrowsers actively discourage the use of non-signed certificates by showing flashy warning banners
The solution is to turn the current encryption / certification system upside down.
Instead of the web server providing the initial security , it should be the user requesting this.
1) A firefox / chrome plugin that generates an private/public key and advertises this through a HTTP header and provides encrypt/decryption of all information received. 2) A Apache/IIS module or even simple PHP library of that recognizes the HTTP header and completes the handshake.
A small PHP library would allow for very quick installation on Bulletin Boards, Wordpress etc.
The key is easy deployment.
This would provide security initially for a small group who cares -- and maybe an RFC standard later on.
It would still require a substantial investment in equipment to proxy all the internet connections of all citizens and not slow down things down to a crawl.
The first goal should be to make this kind of "dragnet" approach to scanning the whole internet as expensive as possible.
I am not saying that HTTPS is the end of all our problems.
Tracking an internet that is by default encrypted is much harder than an internet that is pure text. They would know which server farm the website terminated at -- but most hosting providers run 200+ websites at the same server.
So that gives at least some plausible deniability ; and very limited access to what is being communicated.
Besides browser warnings for user signed certificates there also is the problem that we currently require a unique IP address per HTTPS server.
In my limited understanding that is to stop man-in-the-middle attacks as the browser caches & verifies the certificate/ip combination.
For a "low level default" encryption setting this also overkill.
Web browsers should handle this by not trusting a certificates identity -- continue to use paid for / certified certificates for this. (So your average internet scam artist cannot claim to be "Citibank Ltd")
The web browser should however accept the security offered by the encryption keys of a user signed certificate -- and show it as a normal connection, not scare people away by showing flashing warning signs.
When do we finally make the move to a fully encrypted internet? An unencrypted internet made sense in the days that CPU power was expensive and there were no good encryption libraries. Both these problems were solved a decade ago.
The block seems to be the current idiotically expensive SSL certificate business.
The first step would be for the web browsers to add a "low default security" level : user signed certificates are accepted as "normal" connections without throwing up big errors and don't give much of an additional indication.
Expensive SSL certificates can continue to give the "feel good" level of indication by showing the name of the verified company.
I don't think any (print) newspaper can survive off internet advertising income alone.
The world will simply become more extreme.
You will have free newspapers, with basic stories, handed out to commuters paid for by advertising
You will have paid for newspapers, like the financial times, that contain news worth paying a premium for, which they won't publish online.
You will have local newspapers, capable of raising money from local advertisers to support their existence covering local news stories.
And of course...
You could have national newspapers, but with local advertising. But since this is expensive to do (so many different print versions to distribute) they need to automate this.
Note that only 1 business model can survive mostly without advertisers -- the newspapers offering quality information for a high price to a specific subset of readers.
So they might just as well cut themselves off the net and take their chances with their readers. Swim or sink.
So here we are at Economy 1.1 , on the way to Economy 2.0. But not quite there yet.
All assets worth having are traded between computers at ever increasing speeds until one of the has a nervous breakdown (eg. a situation not foreseen in its models) and it loses its shirt and billions.
For the unforeseen situations (eg. random situation generators) we still need humans.
The solution is of course simple -- take out the randomness.
>> I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history.
Sounds a like a do-able community project. How many laws within a particular scope change every day? Don't think all laws at first, start smaller.
Most laws go by for years without change.
If your government is not willing to do this, and it is still not happening then its just the laziness of everyone at large ; so stop complaining if you would like to see this happen.
I expect high street music prices in Dublin to rise with several Euro over the next few months as the music companies try out how much extra income they can generate from the Irish public to be able to figure out if their campaign to charge every penny out of the Europeans will ultimately pay off. For the music companies Irerland will become an experimental area to see how much of a surcharge they can get away with.
I also fully expect the Irish to take advantage of cheap & fast eSATA portable hard drives to just share all popular music ever published by sneaker net. Instead of sharing simple songs, or albums Irish teenagers will be sharing collections of hundreds of albums. Thus completely removing the need to download any music on demand & the potential revenue of advertising forever.
I went to a presentation the other day where the screen of the presenter turned less bright (removing blue hues) at a certain point.
He explained that he had a tool that did this based on the time of day, allowing your eyes to relax later at night. His computer was stuck on Tokyo time hence this happening during the demo.
So far I have been unable to find this utility. It sounds great for those late night scribblings where you don't want to wake your whole brain up.
As usual science fiction is faster than reality -- although by just 2 weeks this time.
Heart surgery was performed in Stargate Universe "Divided" (S0112) on Dr Rush to remove an alien tracking device. The earth surgeon arrived by out-of-body experience while their ship was being bombarded by an alien fleet. ("Welcome to destinty. We are under attack by aliens, shields are holding, for now")
And yes, the connection was lost just before the device was removed leaving the clueless body double to do the actual removal.
Entertainment value - A good game of sim earth is worth a thousand empty moons; especially if you have been cruising this arm of the milky way for a couple of million years and can stand any more re-runs of "I love Lucy". Options are "God Mode" , get the dumb natives to worship you and your shiny technologies. "Cloak and Dagger", play this with another out-of-world entity, try to move your favorite civilization into a position of supremacy, and if you fail try to wipe out the planet.
In China nobody will take this threat serious, at any level, in the street or in the government.
Not until they actually pull out ; and even then most people will assume that Google will come back after a few weeks / months with the begging bowl in their hands desperate to get back in.
This kind of statement is considered "usual" trying to obtain small, for China insignificant favors. From the Chinese point of view -- Western companies & politicians are idiots without morals who will quickly sell down their own family in exchange for a little bit of access to the wonderful world that is China.
It is up to Google to prove them otherwise -- but as said, nobody is holding their breath.
> you have to accept the fact that local competitors can and will eat you alive,
Typically your former (or often even current) business partner will raise a little cash among friends and open another factory in the next town, producing the exactly same product (With a little coloring change, a few misspellings on purpose). Just not paying the "excessive" (their words) license fee.
A lot of US/European companies will also move their production to China to save on costs -- with the intend on exporting back to their home markets. However the Chinese partners will quickly realize that the above produced cheaper versions will sell very well in Asia/China and concentrate their efforts there instead and start building their empire.
This is considered quite normal and socially perfectly acceptable.
'They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,' says Rosen."
Solution (and I am going to patent this as a business method) : the holding pattern interface
If an iGeneration member wants to communicate with an oldGeneration member ; they will receive an instant automated reply, followed by automated "i am working on it" reponses until the oldGeneration member finds time to get around to it.
"Hi [sibling] great to hear from you, busy doing a million things, will talk to you soon"... ".. just let you know that I haven't forgotten about [thing] will talk to you later"
Customizable, 9000 canned responses (including "I am about to land in Hawaii.. waiting for signal") in 99 different languages.
Available sometime in the future at iHoldingPattern.com
Just like real life.
(Any parent knows that children want everything NOW, whereas us "grownups" try to juggle these demands in between the really important things. Like catching some TV)
Seems the next project for the EVE programmers is dynamic reallocation of their solar systems based on number of people in local to a smaller set of high-performance systems.
Either that -- or the server whose load goes up (people in local climbing over treshhold) should start offloading lower priority solar systems it also hosts to other servers to reduce its CPU/Memory usage.
Slashdot Mirror
The language is horrible for all it lacks. I have read the Crockford book because I am writing larger and larger pieces of code in Javascript and found myself drifting.
I want to code things in a structured fashion and to do this I have a constant need to hack my own solutions.
OO in Javascript is a terrible hack. No ability to check if an object decents from a specific class. (yes, you can hack your own) ....
No native ability to include other source files (yes, you can fake it -- but it forces me to build my loader)
Rubbish exception handling
Frameworks for Javascript (as in: for use in client only applications) are all at very early stages. You need to constantly reinvent the wheel.
So yes, we are going back 20 years.
Its possible and if you write more than just a few pages you should use it.
Sounds like a great story for an SF movie, too bad it was done before, back in 1987:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093894/
The only way to learn how to write Chinese is to write it out for years on end, from kindergarten until university. It ain't much fun.
Since I am a bit older than this and like to write at least basic chinese in this lifetime I am just letting the computer pick the characters for me when I type.
My brain then tells me which of the offered characters feels "right" ; but it does that by looking at the overall shape, not the individual strokes.
Sorry, what is new about this?
European GSM operators routinely sell customer locations to third parties. Real-Time traffic jam warnings used by car navigation software makes extensive use of this.
The mobile phone data is also much more accurate than Apple's application layer reporting -- as the mobile phone is always broadcasting its location.
And no, it still doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy about apple.
http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1079190.html
The Chinese offer beat out bids by four other firms that were considered finalists. They include Strikeforce -- part of Russia's Basic Element Group, the London-based Kazakhmys Consortium, Hunter Dickinson of Canada, and the U.S. copper-mining firm Phelps Dodge.
This article is 2007.
And although the mine is in a relatively secure part of Afghanistan, the railroad and electric power lines would be difficult to defend around the clock from guerrilla attacks by Taliban militants.
Chinese go for gold. Americans provide security.
The problem is at two points:
1) We cannot (easily) install SSL certificates on the server as most sites are hosted, and this 'feature' costs $$$$
2) Webbrowsers actively discourage the use of non-signed certificates by showing flashy warning banners
The solution is to turn the current encryption / certification system upside down.
Instead of the web server providing the initial security , it should be the user requesting this.
1) A firefox / chrome plugin that generates an private/public key and advertises this through a HTTP header and provides encrypt/decryption of all information received.
2) A Apache/IIS module or even simple PHP library of that recognizes the HTTP header and completes the handshake.
A small PHP library would allow for very quick installation on Bulletin Boards, Wordpress etc.
The key is easy deployment.
This would provide security initially for a small group who cares -- and maybe an RFC standard later on.
Related reading:
* http://www.ohdave.com/rsa/
* http://php.net/manual/en/book.openssl.php
Good point of course.
It would still require a substantial investment in equipment to proxy all the internet connections of all citizens and not slow down things down to a crawl.
The first goal should be to make this kind of "dragnet" approach to scanning the whole internet as expensive as possible.
I am not saying that HTTPS is the end of all our problems.
Tracking an internet that is by default encrypted is much harder than an internet that is pure text. They would know which server farm the website terminated at -- but most hosting providers run 200+ websites at the same server.
So that gives at least some plausible deniability ; and very limited access to what is being communicated.
Besides browser warnings for user signed certificates there also is the problem that we currently require a unique IP address per HTTPS server.
In my limited understanding that is to stop man-in-the-middle attacks as the browser caches & verifies the certificate/ip combination.
For a "low level default" encryption setting this also overkill.
Web browsers should handle this by not trusting a certificates identity -- continue to use paid for / certified certificates for this. (So your average internet scam artist cannot claim to be "Citibank Ltd")
The web browser should however accept the security offered by the encryption keys of a user signed certificate -- and show it as a normal connection, not scare people away by showing flashing warning signs.
When do we finally make the move to a fully encrypted internet? An unencrypted internet made sense in the days that CPU power was expensive and there were no good encryption libraries. Both these problems were solved a decade ago.
The block seems to be the current idiotically expensive SSL certificate business.
The first step would be for the web browsers to add a "low default security" level : user signed certificates are accepted as "normal" connections without throwing up big errors and don't give much of an additional indication.
Expensive SSL certificates can continue to give the "feel good" level of indication by showing the name of the verified company.
I think this is great -- they have learned teamwork from their online adventures.
Bootcamp gave them the social skills.
Combined it became a succesful prison break.
I completely fail to see the benefits of this system -- except as a pointless waste of money.
My daughters are primary school students and have no problem with their library cards.
Our local library has a simple self check out bar-code system that ensures that the library just needs a minimum number of retirement age volunteers.
barcode cards are dirt cheap to produce -- so this whole system doesn't cost the library much money either.
And yes, I do go with them when they visit the library, its a library not a playground.
I don't think any (print) newspaper can survive off internet advertising income alone.
The world will simply become more extreme.
And of course...
You could have national newspapers, but with local advertising. But since this is expensive to do (so many different print versions to distribute) they need to automate this.
Note that only 1 business model can survive mostly without advertisers -- the newspapers offering quality information for a high price to a specific subset of readers.
So they might just as well cut themselves off the net and take their chances with their readers. Swim or sink.
Agreed -- this is simply fraud.
Even with millions to spend on computers the traders had an unfair advantage , but front running makes this basic fraud on a large scale.
Just spotted the first communist of the season in the train this morning (and no this is not the US) -- red star & lenin button and all.
This guy might be on to something.
So here we are at Economy 1.1 , on the way to Economy 2.0. But not quite there yet.
All assets worth having are traded between computers at ever increasing speeds until one of the has a nervous breakdown (eg. a situation not foreseen in its models) and it loses its shirt and billions.
For the unforeseen situations (eg. random situation generators) we still need humans.
The solution is of course simple -- take out the randomness.
>> I have one simple requirement: all laws must be written in a Wiki with full history.
Sounds a like a do-able community project. How many laws within a particular scope change every day? Don't think all laws at first, start smaller.
Most laws go by for years without change.
If your government is not willing to do this, and it is still not happening then its just the laziness of everyone at large ; so stop complaining if you would like to see this happen.
Just put into a light sealed box -- bit like a hard disk today.
Oh, that was too simple a solution? I am sure we can think of something more complicated.
I expect high street music prices in Dublin to rise with several Euro over the next few months as the music companies try out how much extra income they can generate from the Irish public to be able to figure out if their campaign to charge every penny out of the Europeans will ultimately pay off. For the music companies Irerland will become an experimental area to see how much of a surcharge they can get away with.
I also fully expect the Irish to take advantage of cheap & fast eSATA portable hard drives to just share all popular music ever published by sneaker net. Instead of sharing simple songs, or albums Irish teenagers will be sharing collections of hundreds of albums. Thus completely removing the need to download any music on demand & the potential revenue of advertising forever.
I went to a presentation the other day where the screen of the presenter turned less bright (removing blue hues) at a certain point.
He explained that he had a tool that did this based on the time of day, allowing your eyes to relax later at night. His computer was stuck on Tokyo time hence this happening during the demo.
So far I have been unable to find this utility. It sounds great for those late night scribblings where you don't want to wake your whole brain up.
As usual science fiction is faster than reality -- although by just 2 weeks this time.
Heart surgery was performed in Stargate Universe "Divided" (S0112) on Dr Rush to remove an alien tracking device. The earth surgeon arrived by out-of-body experience while their ship was being bombarded by an alien fleet. ("Welcome to destinty. We are under attack by aliens, shields are holding, for now")
And yes, the connection was lost just before the device was removed leaving the clueless body double to do the actual removal.
I just showed this to some people -- mad trick to play.
In China nobody will take this threat serious, at any level, in the street or in the government.
Not until they actually pull out ; and even then most people will assume that Google will come back after a few weeks / months with the begging bowl in their hands desperate to get back in.
This kind of statement is considered "usual" trying to obtain small, for China insignificant favors. From the Chinese point of view -- Western companies & politicians are idiots without morals who will quickly sell down their own family in exchange for a little bit of access to the wonderful world that is China.
It is up to Google to prove them otherwise -- but as said, nobody is holding their breath.
> you have to accept the fact that local competitors can and will eat you alive,
Typically your former (or often even current) business partner will raise a little cash among friends and open another factory in the next town, producing the exactly same product (With a little coloring change, a few misspellings on purpose). Just not paying the "excessive" (their words) license fee.
A lot of US/European companies will also move their production to China to save on costs -- with the intend on exporting back to their home markets. However the Chinese partners will quickly realize that the above produced cheaper versions will sell very well in Asia/China and concentrate their efforts there instead and start building their empire.
This is considered quite normal and socially perfectly acceptable.
'They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,' says Rosen."
Solution (and I am going to patent this as a business method) : the holding pattern interface
If an iGeneration member wants to communicate with an oldGeneration member ; they will receive an instant automated reply, followed by automated "i am working on it" reponses until the oldGeneration member finds time to get around to it.
"Hi [sibling] great to hear from you, busy doing a million things, will talk to you soon" ...
".. just let you know that I haven't forgotten about [thing] will talk to you later"
Customizable, 9000 canned responses (including "I am about to land in Hawaii.. waiting for signal") in 99 different languages.
Available sometime in the future at iHoldingPattern.com
Just like real life.
(Any parent knows that children want everything NOW, whereas us "grownups" try to juggle these demands in between the really important things. Like catching some TV)
Seems the next project for the EVE programmers is dynamic reallocation of their solar systems based on number of people in local to a smaller set of high-performance systems.
Either that -- or the server whose load goes up (people in local climbing over treshhold) should start offloading lower priority solar systems it also hosts to other servers to reduce its CPU/Memory usage.