If I had a DSL I would connect as many computers as I'd like (no reselling though) and no telecom company should complain about that, because I am not playing out of the rules; they give me a line with an allocated bandwidth, as long as I stay within the bandwidth I am playing correctly. If they want to charge me a flat-rate instead of charging for bytes, it is their problem. Can you imagine an insurance company rejecting some long-time customers because they get more sick than average recently? This is the same, flat-rate for everybody (makes a nice ad) and then if you use too much bandwidth compared to the rest, your line is cut.
Could someone please post a link or an explanation on how the system works?
I have read the NYT article and cannot get the point unless this is nothing more than a one-time pad.
But if it is a one-time pad, then it is not big news, one-time pads have been around for quite a while. But the problem with one-time pads is that you have to store the key some place, since afterall a cryptosystem that is useful must be able to recover the unencrypted message from the encrypted version (oh, really?) and to do that you need the key, I can't see how can "The key vanish" in a cryptosystem and still be possible to recover the message again.
I don't understand this "novel approach" at all. Will somebody help me understand?
What is your opinion about Microsoft and the other main players in the computer industry? Note the question is quite open, just select who you think are the main players.
In fact the UN has an Office for Outer Space Affairs and there is a bit of International Space Law.
One of the treaties says that outer space is not subject to national appropation by claims of sovereignity, interesting.
Check http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/SpaceLaw/spacelaw.htm for more info.
Amazing! I had never thought about it, about this *sucks.com, but just after reading this article I started trying:
www.boeingsucks.com
www.airbussucks.com
www.intelsucks.com
www.amdsucks.com
www.microsoftsucks.com
All of them are registered, altought none of the above have any content at all.
I was happy to see that even a www.linuxsucks.com exists!
Disclaimer to the moderators: I am not saying that Linux sucks, I like Linux, only that I am happy to see that a linuxsucks.com exists because it means that to someone it is important enough to start battling against it; I hope you get my point.
All what you are talking about is because most of the people is taking MS products as the de facto standard when there should be something else.
I am saying that there should be standarization in things like spreadsheet files, formatted text documents, and all that is related to computing so as everyone can talk to each other.
But this is impossible to enforce because of the monopolistic situation in which MS stands: if there was an standard set on spreadsheet files, maybe Linux would use it but no way MS would do the same, simply because the de facto standard is already.xls and belongs to MS. We must wait until the situation is unstable enough and people realises that MS is setting too many of the important standards themselves.
I go for standards set by specific bodies formed by people comming from different directions: it proved to work in JPEG or in MPEG, and fortunatelly we can share pictures via email, no matter who is on the other end. But once an standard is set, like in the case of.doc or.xls, it is difficult to evolve to a non proprietary standard.
There's a flat 200 meters from where I live, direct line of sight, it has a window and I see light when it's dark, about 12 the light is turned off, almost everyday. Thinking about it, I got to the conclussion that there's some kind of intelligent life there (how clever!)
The point is that, I know someone lives there, but I will never be able to communicate with that someone because he/she is not aware of my presence, and we are 200 meters apart, too much.
Just think how impossible is to establish some kind of communication with an alien, living millions of light-years (or is it years-light?) away from us, so talking to an alien is impossible given the universe we live in, the limited speed of light is a big constrain.
Anyway, I have a SETI client installed; the fact that I know I have a neighbour living 200 meters away doesn't change anything, but it certainly would change things if I had the confirmation that there is intelligent life somewhere (oh! wait! there is intelligent life on the earth!).
Java is not a replacement for C or ASM, but imho it has a brilliant future in server-side programming and specially in small devices like this "telephone".
For the gaming on phones topic, there are some companies that have been working on that for a while, check www.picofun.com .
It's not my case, but...
just imagine that someone has been working for MS (or any other company by that matter) and has signed a non-competing agreement.
Then she decides to quit the company, start working on an unrelated thing (a restaurant) and be actively involved in an open source project (like Gnome) in the free time. Would that be allowed in this kind of non-competing agreements?
I have never read the book, but probably I will enjoy the film.
It happens all the time that people gets disappointed when seeing a film based on a book that they have read before, I bet most of you big fans of Tolkien will find the movie not as good as the book, and there will be a lot of important things missing.
But, you should not judge the movie comparing it to the book, different things.
Sometimes knowing the book helps you understand better the film; I just remember reading "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" after watching Blade Runner, and understanding it much better afterwards.
Something is wrong in this article, I love Linux and I love Java, and that is absolutely true, I can assure you.
Then, "why linux lovers don't like Java" doesn't make any sense.
Really, it is not good to speak for such a large group as if all of us were the same.
Linux is attracting more and more people, some of us end up loving Linux but my reasons for loving Linux are different than yours. Even though we are together with Linux, we don't agree in many other things.
For good or bad, Linux is no more for a handful of computer enthusiasts, Linux users are now larger and diverse, and even you that were here from the begining should accept the facts, don't speak for the community at large, it doesn't make any sense.
Here you can find the press release from Bertelsmann announcing the strategic alliance with Napster: http://www.bertelsmann.c om/ press/press_item.cfm?id=2461
Just an excerpt: Napster and Bertelsmann will seek support from others in the music industry to establish Napster as a widely accepted membership based service and invite them to participate actively in this process.
I am tired of seeing people making MP3s tests comparing the initial signal and the resulting encoded one in terms of how similar are they.
This is useless. MP3 is perceptual coding, and the only way by now, to decide what is better is to listen and decide. If you can't hear it, why do you need to encode it? That's the idea of MP3.
Don't try to see if the encoded signal looks the same than the original in terms of spectral content, try to see if it sounds the same!
Personally, I live in a "computing intensive environment" beeing student in an engineering school, meaning that I use computers everyday in various places and need to exchange files all the time and be able to access them all the time.
About two years ago I realized that floppy disks were not useful anymore, so I never use diskettes anymore, I don't even have any of them.
I store files at my home computer or at my account in the school, if I need to transfer from place to place or share with somebody I use either email or FTP. For really big files I use CD-RW.
Another possible solution would be that LS-120 floppys (120 Mb).
By the way, I would like to know if slashdotters use diskettes or do just like me.
In the IT University , part of KTH (Royal Technical University) in Stockholm, Sweden, students pay a low motnhly fee for their laptops that they use all over the university buildings with their integrated wireless LANs. Of course, like most universities in Europe, this is a public university, meaning that you don't need to pay for the courses. To be accurate, in some EU countries students pay a little annual fee for their studies in public universities (ex. Spain: about 500 $ a year), but in Sweden that is completely free. In fact, the Swedish government pays the students about 250 $/month for beeing students.
Maybe they have realised that Corel could become a tough competitor in the future because of their totally different strategy, that eventually could become succesful.
So... decided long time ago that it is better to buy the competitors rather than to fight them, and since they have enough money that's what they are doing.
And they wonder why some call it monopoly...
So much talking about the freedom on Internet, about beeing able to do anything, about no regulations at all... Internet, where everyone can speak freely, anonymously, where everything is permitted... And at the end, it seems that Internet will be the most regulated zone to exist ever: no links, don't use that one-click patented technology, don't put metallica on your song titles, don't use that file format or you'll be sued, try to post extremely accurate or you will be in a difamation issue... I think I will return to the real life for awhile, where I can give detailed references of publications in my writings, where I can cry as loud as I want. Where everything is not so insane.
Nowadays we live with lots of networks around us: we have the phone network, we have the TV-signal network, we have the data-banking network, we have Internet... All these networks are already connected by some gateways, so now I am reaching the Internet network through my phone network: my ISP acts as the gateway. In the future all the networks will be more interconnected and indistinguishable and we will call Internet (or simply the net, or any other name) to all the underalying structure that carry information; everything digital, and it won't matter if bits are for video, for voice, for data or for whatever. That will be Internet, and we will be able to access that net through many ways using many different electronic devices that will be connected to the net; that doesn't mean that our refrigerator will be able to play MP3s off the net, maybe it will only retrieve temperature adjustements, but it will use the net as its way to reach their data. Not all the connected devices (including computers) will be able to make use of all the information on the net, the key idea is that the net will be the transport system for a welth of data travelling from device to device, only devices using same protocols will understand each other.
Regarding technology: that net will be a fully optical network, and we the end-users will reach that network through a physical (copper, fiber) broadband cable if our requirements are really high but we will use mainly wireless connections in a matter of about 10 years, even when using our desktop computer in a fixed location; the devolopments in 3rd Generation Mobile Systems are extremly fast, and UMTS is almost ready for launch.
After some research on My Own Company Ltd. (DAQDAQ: MOCL), these are the best solutions we have found depending on the security grade you prefer (higher number, higher security):
1. Delete Outlook Express 2. Don't use email at all 3. Destroy your Internet connections, and your whole LAN if desired 4. Destroy your computer and all your electronic equipment 5. Destroy all your belongings and spend the rest of your life in the Sahara dessert, living alone
This has proven succesful in our labs in a controlled environment, so we can almost assure you that following the points above will solve your computer viruses problem, including those that spread by email, forever.
As I know, there exist no recorder at all that is able to produce Video DVDs that will play on legacy or standard DVDs. It seems Philips has announced they will release a Video DVD recorder that will produce DVDs playable with almost any existing DVD player, all this using the so-called DVD+RW format, that is not included in the DVD specs though; expect something for the end of this year, or maybe early in 2001.
First of all, this is really old news, according to the press release linked in the article, the recorder should be out for some months now (December 1999).
There are critical technologies that other countries need and they just don't want to rely neither on the US nor in any other countries to provide them. GPS is not a civilian technology, it was designed by the militars and it was seen that it could have a civilian use afterward, but even now with the SA open we, outside the US, cannot rely on GPS to do some tasks, as it is as easy to start using encrypted codes again. I agree with you in that this has been done to stop others from building its own competitive GPS networks, but as it happens with encryption, it won't stop nothing, because the main issue is that no one wants to rely on third countries on this kind of technologies, even on civilian applications: you have heard of UMTS, the third-generation mobile system, it will use CDMA modulation where time accuracy is critical, the system needed a precise global clock accesible to all the mobile phones, GPS was proposed as it is in fact an extremely good global clock, but it was rejected and UMTS will use it's own time singal. Why? because UMTS will become worldwide in a matter of years, and do you imagine the whole world (except the US) without UMTS communications because the GPS networks is purposely down? Again, the key issue is that no one wants to be dependant on others, even friend, alliate countries.
As I have read, it seems that those people at Princeton have found that humans are able to interact with physical objects or processes without using any know physical interaction. And this can be used as a way to transmit information, in a way that has not yet been developed. I have had to read the articles on their website twice, but yes, it is what they claim. What surprises me in this story, is the fact that it comes from Princeton so it deserves credibility, I mean, this is not that boy around the corner always telling mad stories... But in fact, this is not news, Darth Vader has had the ability to interact with objects by mind for many time now...
Slashdot Mirror
If I had a DSL I would connect as many computers as I'd like (no reselling though) and no telecom company should complain about that, because I am not playing out of the rules; they give me a line with an allocated bandwidth, as long as I stay within the bandwidth I am playing correctly. If they want to charge me a flat-rate instead of charging for bytes, it is their problem.
Can you imagine an insurance company rejecting some long-time customers because they get more sick than average recently?
This is the same, flat-rate for everybody (makes a nice ad) and then if you use too much bandwidth compared to the rest, your line is cut.
Could someone please post a link or an explanation on how the system works?
I have read the NYT article and cannot get the point unless this is nothing more than a one-time pad.
But if it is a one-time pad, then it is not big news, one-time pads have been around for quite a while.
But the problem with one-time pads is that you have to store the key some place, since afterall a cryptosystem that is useful must be able to recover the unencrypted message from the encrypted version (oh, really?) and to do that you need the key, I can't see how can "The key vanish" in a cryptosystem and still be possible to recover the message again.
I don't understand this "novel approach" at all. Will somebody help me understand?
What is your opinion about Microsoft and the other main players in the computer industry?
Note the question is quite open, just select who you think are the main players.
I am sending my Rubik's cube. I am tired of trying.
In fact the UN has an Office for Outer Space Affairs and there is a bit of International Space Law.m for more info.
One of the treaties says that outer space is not subject to national appropation by claims of sovereignity, interesting.
Check http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/SpaceLaw/spacelaw.ht
Amazing! I had never thought about it, about this *sucks.com, but just after reading this article I started trying:
www.boeingsucks.com
www.airbussucks.com
www.intelsucks.com
www.amdsucks.com
www.microsoftsucks.com
All of them are registered, altought none of the above have any content at all.
I was happy to see that even a www.linuxsucks.com exists!
Disclaimer to the moderators: I am not saying that Linux sucks, I like Linux, only that I am happy to see that a linuxsucks.com exists because it means that to someone it is important enough to start battling against it; I hope you get my point.
All what you are talking about is because most of the people is taking MS products as the de facto standard when there should be something else. .xls and belongs to MS. We must wait until the situation is unstable enough and people realises that MS is setting too many of the important standards themselves. .doc or .xls, it is difficult to evolve to a non proprietary standard.
I am saying that there should be standarization in things like spreadsheet files, formatted text documents, and all that is related to computing so as everyone can talk to each other.
But this is impossible to enforce because of the monopolistic situation in which MS stands: if there was an standard set on spreadsheet files, maybe Linux would use it but no way MS would do the same, simply because the de facto standard is already
I go for standards set by specific bodies formed by people comming from different directions: it proved to work in JPEG or in MPEG, and fortunatelly we can share pictures via email, no matter who is on the other end. But once an standard is set, like in the case of
There's a flat 200 meters from where I live, direct line of sight, it has a window and I see light when it's dark, about 12 the light is turned off, almost everyday.
Thinking about it, I got to the conclussion that there's some kind of intelligent life there (how clever!)
The point is that, I know someone lives there, but I will never be able to communicate with that someone because he/she is not aware of my presence, and we are 200 meters apart, too much.
Just think how impossible is to establish some kind of communication with an alien, living millions of light-years (or is it years-light?) away from us, so talking to an alien is impossible given the universe we live in, the limited speed of light is a big constrain.
Anyway, I have a SETI client installed; the fact that I know I have a neighbour living 200 meters away doesn't change anything, but it certainly would change things if I had the confirmation that there is intelligent life somewhere (oh! wait! there is intelligent life on the earth!).
Java is not a replacement for C or ASM, but imho it has a brilliant future in server-side programming and specially in small devices like this "telephone". For the gaming on phones topic, there are some companies that have been working on that for a while, check www.picofun.com .
It's not my case, but...
just imagine that someone has been working for MS (or any other company by that matter) and has signed a non-competing agreement.
Then she decides to quit the company, start working on an unrelated thing (a restaurant) and be actively involved in an open source project (like Gnome) in the free time. Would that be allowed in this kind of non-competing agreements?
I have never read the book, but probably I will enjoy the film.
It happens all the time that people gets disappointed when seeing a film based on a book that they have read before, I bet most of you big fans of Tolkien will find the movie not as good as the book, and there will be a lot of important things missing.
But, you should not judge the movie comparing it to the book, different things.
Sometimes knowing the book helps you understand better the film; I just remember reading "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" after watching Blade Runner, and understanding it much better afterwards.
Something is wrong in this article, I love Linux and I love Java, and that is absolutely true, I can assure you.
Then, "why linux lovers don't like Java" doesn't make any sense.
Really, it is not good to speak for such a large group as if all of us were the same.
Linux is attracting more and more people, some of us end up loving Linux but my reasons for loving Linux are different than yours. Even though we are together with Linux, we don't agree in many other things.
For good or bad, Linux is no more for a handful of computer enthusiasts, Linux users are now larger and diverse, and even you that were here from the begining should accept the facts, don't speak for the community at large, it doesn't make any sense.
Here you can find the press release from Bertelsmann announcing the strategic alliance with Napster: http://www.bertelsmann.c om/ press/press_item.cfm?id=2461
Just an excerpt:
Napster and Bertelsmann will seek support from others in the music industry to establish Napster as a widely accepted membership based service and invite them to participate actively in this process.
I am tired of seeing people making MP3s tests comparing the initial signal and the resulting encoded one in terms of how similar are they.
This is useless. MP3 is perceptual coding, and the only way by now, to decide what is better is to listen and decide. If you can't hear it, why do you need to encode it? That's the idea of MP3.
Don't try to see if the encoded signal looks the same than the original in terms of spectral content, try to see if it sounds the same!
Personally, I live in a "computing intensive environment" beeing student in an engineering school, meaning that I use computers everyday in various places and need to exchange files all the time and be able to access them all the time.
About two years ago I realized that floppy disks were not useful anymore, so I never use diskettes anymore, I don't even have any of them.
I store files at my home computer or at my account in the school, if I need to transfer from place to place or share with somebody I use either email or FTP. For really big files I use CD-RW.
Another possible solution would be that LS-120 floppys (120 Mb).
By the way, I would like to know if slashdotters use diskettes or do just like me.
In the IT University , part of KTH (Royal Technical University) in Stockholm, Sweden, students pay a low motnhly fee for their laptops that they use all over the university buildings with their integrated wireless LANs. Of course, like most universities in Europe, this is a public university, meaning that you don't need to pay for the courses. To be accurate, in some EU countries students pay a little annual fee for their studies in public universities (ex. Spain: about 500 $ a year), but in Sweden that is completely free. In fact, the Swedish government pays the students about 250 $/month for beeing students.
Maybe they have realised that Corel could become a tough competitor in the future because of their totally different strategy, that eventually could become succesful.
So... decided long time ago that it is better to buy the competitors rather than to fight them, and since they have enough money that's what they are doing.
And they wonder why some call it monopoly...
So much talking about the freedom on Internet, about beeing able to do anything, about no regulations at all...
Internet, where everyone can speak freely, anonymously, where everything is permitted...
And at the end, it seems that Internet will be the most regulated zone to exist ever: no links, don't use that one-click patented technology, don't put metallica on your song titles, don't use that file format or you'll be sued, try to post extremely accurate or you will be in a difamation issue...
I think I will return to the real life for awhile, where I can give detailed references of publications in my writings, where I can cry as loud as I want. Where everything is not so insane.
Nowadays we live with lots of networks around us: we have the phone network, we have the TV-signal network, we have the data-banking network, we have Internet...
All these networks are already connected by some gateways, so now I am reaching the Internet network through my phone network: my ISP acts as the gateway.
In the future all the networks will be more interconnected and indistinguishable and we will call Internet (or simply the net, or any other name) to all the underalying structure that carry information; everything digital, and it won't matter if bits are for video, for voice, for data or for whatever.
That will be Internet, and we will be able to access that net through many ways using many different electronic devices that will be connected to the net; that doesn't mean that our refrigerator will be able to play MP3s off the net, maybe it will only retrieve temperature adjustements, but it will use the net as its way to reach their data.
Not all the connected devices (including computers) will be able to make use of all the information on the net, the key idea is that the net will be the transport system for a welth of data travelling from device to device, only devices using same protocols will understand each other.
Regarding technology: that net will be a fully optical network, and we the end-users will reach that network through a physical (copper, fiber) broadband cable if our requirements are really high but we will use mainly wireless connections in a matter of about 10 years, even when using our desktop computer in a fixed location; the devolopments in 3rd Generation Mobile Systems are extremly fast, and UMTS is almost ready for launch.
This is a press release.
After some research on My Own Company Ltd. (DAQDAQ: MOCL), these are the best solutions we have found depending on the security grade you prefer (higher number, higher security):
1. Delete Outlook Express
2. Don't use email at all
3. Destroy your Internet connections, and your whole LAN if desired
4. Destroy your computer and all your electronic equipment
5. Destroy all your belongings and spend the rest of your life in the Sahara dessert, living alone
This has proven succesful in our labs in a controlled environment, so we can almost assure you that following the points above will solve your computer viruses problem, including those that spread by email, forever.
As I know, there exist no recorder at all that is able to produce Video DVDs that will play on legacy or standard DVDs.
It seems Philips has announced they will release a Video DVD recorder that will produce DVDs playable with almost any existing DVD player, all this using the so-called DVD+RW format, that is not included in the DVD specs though; expect something for the end of this year, or maybe early in 2001.
First of all, this is really old news, according to the press release linked in the article, the recorder should be out for some months now (December 1999).
More interesting info about recordable DVDs at DVD-FAQ http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#4.3
I'm preparing scrambled eggs, am I on a patent infringement?
There are critical technologies that other countries need and they just don't want to rely neither on the US nor in any other countries to provide them.
GPS is not a civilian technology, it was designed by the militars and it was seen that it could have a civilian use afterward, but even now with the SA open we, outside the US, cannot rely on GPS to do some tasks, as it is as easy to start using encrypted codes again.
I agree with you in that this has been done to stop others from building its own competitive GPS networks, but as it happens with encryption, it won't stop nothing, because the main issue is that no one wants to rely on third countries on this kind of technologies, even on civilian applications: you have heard of UMTS, the third-generation mobile system, it will use CDMA modulation where time accuracy is critical, the system needed a precise global clock accesible to all the mobile phones, GPS was proposed as it is in fact an extremely good global clock, but it was rejected and UMTS will use it's own time singal.
Why? because UMTS will become worldwide in a matter of years, and do you imagine the whole world (except the US) without UMTS communications because the GPS networks is purposely down? Again, the key issue is that no one wants to be dependant on others, even friend, alliate countries.
As I have read, it seems that those people at Princeton have found that humans are able to interact with physical objects or processes without using any know physical interaction.
And this can be used as a way to transmit information, in a way that has not yet been developed.
I have had to read the articles on their website twice, but yes, it is what they claim. What surprises me in this story, is the fact that it comes from Princeton so it deserves credibility, I mean, this is not that boy around the corner always telling mad stories...
But in fact, this is not news, Darth Vader has had the ability to interact with objects by mind for many time now...