I can see it now, spam email going out saying "due to the recent theft of Social Security numbers, please check here to see if your number was stolen. Just input your number here, and we'll tell you if yours was part of the theft...have a nice day..."
Sadly, this has already been done. I particularly like the FAQs about why it's safe.
every day, technology brings us a little bit closer to being able to make our younger siblings think that they've gone insane:D
Actually, this is in fact one of the uses the technology has. I'm surprised this story wasn't included in the article...
The researchers working on this project have offices on the top floor of the Media Lab's building, right next to the central atrium open to the floor five stories below. Apparently they would enjoy leaning over the railing and pointing the Audio Spotlight at unsuspecting people down below, then playing the sounds of breaking glass. The hapless victims would then undoubtedly find themselves quite confused as they looked around to make sure they hadn't stepped on and broke something...
I know from experience how irksome it can be to have to regularly monitor and maintain pool chemistry, so I thought this could be interesting.
I don't meant to belittle this effort, but it's important to notice that this system specifically doesn't (yet) monitor chlorine or other chemical levels. That's a shame, since it seems to me like this could be the most powerful aspect: a continuous feedback system that could, say, adjust the chlorine level when it gets too high or low.
It's hard to fault him for that, since it seems like it would be impractical to do actual monitoring, as the article says: The technology required to sense these chemical parameters requires a delicate probe be inserted into the plumbing, with an amplifier and analog-to-digital converter interface to the computer. These probes are rather expensive at about $100/each, require calibration every month or so, and wear out in about a year. Without some less-expensive, improvised alternative, these costs seem to exceed the possible savings in reduced chemical demand or manual dosing.
But the net result here seems to be not much more than an elaborate scheduling and electrical system -- a glorified timer-box that happens to be running Linux, if you will. It does have a few advantages: more complex configuration possiblities, and the capability to determine daylight hours. But I still have to question whether it would ultimately be less costly -- in terms of time as well as money -- to implement this using more mundane hardware.
(I do note that this page has a lot of detail about the chlorination system, which looks to be well written. The liquid chlorine pump setup sounds like an impressive achievement -- but the Linux part is not quite as special as it's made to appear here.)
Re:Inevitably underwhelming thanks to the hype
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 1
My experience with the Mac world is very limited, but all the stories about it I've read on slashdot have given me the impression that these `mac rumor sites' are always completely and utterly wrong in their predictions.
On the whole, you're right. Occasionally they do come up with something vaguely accurate, but that's usually purely by chance, given the large amounts of just-plain-wrong stuff they predict. I usually don't follow them, but I understand that many have been expecting LCD iMacs for months -- but I don't know of anyone who predicted the form factor we ended up with.
Are they really that awful? Do they sometimes get something right? Do they have a reason for existance?
Of course they have a reason to exist: to provide us with amusement. They are, after all, some of the best humor sites on the net, even if that's totally unintentional. I can't find it anymore, but my favorite was the rumor that Apple would announce a G5 Dodecahedron to take the G4 Cube's place.
Are they gonna update OSX so the display could be easily rotated 90 deg. for long web pages and the like?
That would be pretty cool indeed. I seem to recall a monitor from long ago that would do that, the Radius Pivot. It could detect when the monitor was physically rotated and change its orientation from landscape to portrait. Of course, this was during the days when most Macs had built-in monitors and needed a (expensive) video card to use an external monitor, so its use wasn't all that widespread.
Speaking of vertical orientation, I wonder if the iMac could be rotated and mounted vertically on a wall. That seems like it would make for a really space-efficient workspace, especially if the monitor could be moved out of the way when it's not in use.
I don't know if this would be possible. I imagine it's not physically possible out of the box, but maybe with some additional mounting hardware. The only question is whether the iMac could survive such an orientation -- I would think it could, but it might be a problem for the hard drive or DVD/CD. Also, the monitor may not be able to swivel or reach far enough to position itself in a useful configuration with the base mounted on the wall.
Still, it sounds interesting, even if purely for the coolness factor.
Inevitably underwhelming thanks to the hype
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The new iMacs do look pretty cool, but I can't help but think that the keynote was bound to be disappointing in light of the amount of hype it received.
After all, the Mac community is filled with sites tracking the latest Apple rumors. Even at a 'normal' MacWorld, the community-generated hype leads to people expecting Apple to announce something that's totally revolutionary, and whatever actually does get announced pales by comparison.
And this time Apple gave themselves even higher expectations to live up to by creating their own hype too. For the first time anyone can recall, they publicized the expo, with new slogans on their website every night: 'a backstage pass to the future', 'way beyond the rumors sites', 'to boldly go where no PC has gone before', etc. Surely Apple must have realized that new iMac, iPhoto, and larger iBooks, while impressive, couldn't live up to people's expectations with that much hype?
(And claiming that they were going to announce something 'way beyond the rumors sites' was surely a mistake. These are the same rumors sites, after all, that were expecting LCD iMacs many months ago. This expo's predictions included the iWalk PDA, much faster pro-line desktop machines, and even a G5 Dodecahedron or two.)
It seems to be the case that people will always be somewhat disappointed with whatever Apple releases. But Apple doesn't need to make it worse by claiming that they've created something revolutionary and amazing; this new iMac just can't live up to that standard.
How common is it for big universities to get involved in lawsuits like this?
Well, I don't know that I would necessarily say that large lawsuits like this one are common, but most research universities frequently patent their findings, and selling the licensing rights to corporations can be a not-insignificant source of revenue for them. So they've got a pretty serious incentive to enforce these patents.
Offhand, I can think of one instance of this happening. You may recall that back in August MIT filed a lawsuit against Sony for infringing on patents related to digital TV. It was also covered on slashdot, too.
That's the only other specific case that comes to mind at the moment, but I certainly have heard of others. Of course, I'm sure there are many other examples on a much smaller scale that don't get widely reported. And there are undoubtedly many cases that lead to a quiet settlement in which the corporations in question just pay the licensing fees -- which is, after all, presumably what the universities are after in the first place.
Though it's common practice for universities to patent their research, there's plenty of controversy involved, even neglecting the question of whether IP is a valid concept in general. For example, the students involved in actually doing the research usually don't wind up with more than a small fraction of the patent rights, if any at all. And then there's the issue of what kind of rights corporate sponsors get to the research; if the research is funded through government grants, then one also has to ask the question of whether the research then belongs to the taxpayers who are funding it. I see that other posts above have discussed these issues, and they've been discussed extensively here before, too.
Lawsuits like this may be rarely seen with such magnitude and scope -- though I'm sure the $100 million figure the article mentions is just inflated legal hyperbole -- but it's hardly something totally new and unexpected.
I can't resist the urge to tell an anecdote from my experience at this point...
For the past few years, I've been involved in a program that distributes food to the homeless: each week we make a few hundred sandwiches, then pass them out in San Francisco.
One week we happened to be transporting the sandwiches in spare iMac boxes. This led one of the homeless fellows in line to comment "oh, wow, did you bring me an iMac?"
A fellow volunteer replied "yes, but do you have a place to plug it in?"
I was completely unprepared for the homeless individual's response: "oh... no, damn it... but I do have a T1 line".
As a unemployed student-type, I've given some thought to getting a few business cards printed up with the following job title:
O2 / CO2 Conversion Specialist.
Of course, depending on just how productive your job is, this may or may not be the right title for you...
2) Metric system. All of our cars (that last more than 3 years) are built using this system of measurement. Our cars have
kilometers per hour below miles per hour. Our drugs are measured in this system. It is a much easier system to remember,
and is much better organized than the crazy crap we use.
I'm finding myself unable to resist the temptation to note that drug sales have succeeded where the public educational system has failed in teaching our youth the metric system...
As a Mac and Linux user, I'm quite interested indeed in OS X. I haven't yet had the chance to look at the public beta release, but I look forward to doing so.
Making something that's derived from a unix-like OS easy to use certainly seems no easy task. Apple seems to be addressing this issue by trying to completely hide the BSD layer from the user. From a user-interface standpoint, I can understand this, but I wonder if it's going to create lots of problems with system maintainance. Wilfredo Sanchez's USENIX paper gives a few examples of problematic differences between the Mac and BSD systems. For example, since the pathname delimiter is a colon in MacOS and a slash in BSD, filenames have to be translated, and different programs will see the same file in different ways; likewise, Mac programs will often expect a file to have a resource fork, and BSD programs won't normally be aware of the resource fork. Apple seems to have addressed these issues, but their solutions still strike me as somewhat ugly hacks to intertwine two drastically different systems; it seems like this could cause problems in certain cases.
Sanchez also writes, "although we use BSD as the core system software, we do not want to require our
users to understand how BSD works. Ideally, the typical Macintosh user does not even know that BSD is there. The
very presence of such folders as 'usr' and 'etc' on disk is therefore awkward, and we hide those directories and
their contents at the application level".
I understand the reasoning for this, and I agree that having cryptically named folders floating around wouldn't help ease of use. At the same time, it's disturbing to me because the 'usr' and 'etc' directories do exist and presumably are critical to the operation of the system, and hiding them from the users is bound to cause problems if for some reason it's necessary to access them. Apple claims that it'll never be necessary to see these directories, but I'm skeptical; perhaps you won't encounter them in normal use, but what if something in them gets corrupted, or something? Hiding parts of the system from users sounds like it'll lead to a maintainability nightmare.
Another point, less significant but still non-trivial: the internals of OS X are massively different from those of any previous OS. This presumably means that expert users are going to have to learn anew how the system works in order to maintain it.
For some reason, the first thought that comes to mind is how tragic it would be if the participants in some of the common geek flamewars were living in the same house.
Imagine the horrors... 'three killed in Emacs/VI battle'... 'two plead guilty to murder spawned by GPL/BSD license debate'...;)
I'm a student at a private school which has a rather heavily censored newspaper. I've toyed around with the idea of creating an unofficial alternative newspaper, though I can't say I've really given it all that much serious thought.
If I were to do so, and the school found its content objectionable, what could they do? I'd assume that, provided that no school resources were used to host it, they couldn't actually remove the site. However, could they take action against the students responsible for it? My first thought would be that they, being a private organization, could essentially do whatever they want, though it'd probably look bad for them if they were to retaliate. (would this be different if it were a public school? I'd think it might, but I'm really just guessing there.) Would the situation be different than if I were to print up such a newspaper on paper and hand out copies?
Though I'd prefer to avoid it if possible, I suppose that doing this anonymously might well be the best thing to do. I imagine that a free web hosting account would work for this, but the thought of all the ads that would impose makes me shudder. Are there any better options for something of the sort?
what? free software on a mac? this is a first... almost anything useful i can find for macos is
usually shareware/crippleware/etc.
As a Mac and Linux user, I've thought a bit about the reasons for the lack of much free/open source software on the Mac.
Certainly, a major impediment is the fact that most Mac users aren't hackers but consumers who don't have much interest or ability in improving their software. I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done about this. I suppose another factor is that most development on the Mac is done using CodeWarrior or another commercial IDE, which further restricts the people who can do anything meaningful with the source to an application; I admit to not being the most knowledgable person in the field of Mac devlopment, but I don't know of any open source/free (speech) compilers on the Mac.
But I suspect that another main reason little free software is developed on the Mac is that people are unaware of it. I had been a Mac user for many years before I had even heard of 'free software' or 'open source', let alone understood why it was a good thing. It wasn't until I started using Linux that I became aware of such things; perhaps with the attention that Linux is receiving in the media, more people may be somewhat more aware of the free software movement, but most probably don't understand it more than superficially.
This is one reason I'm opposed to the Free World license. If we want to make more free software available, restricting it so that it can't be used by users of a non-free operating system won't help. By allowing everyone to use it, more people will be exposed to free software. They may only use it like any other program, which is necessarily a bad thing, but they might well learn more about free software and perhaps be influenced to write free software of their own or switch to a free operating system.
On an unrelated note, I also find it a bit troubling that the Free World license pages tout the fact that they were 'Denounced by Richard Stallman' and 'Rejected by Eric Raymond' as though those were things to be proud of...
I think it would definately be powerful and useful if it were possible to connect all of these various devices together and allow them to communicate with each other. Not necessarily via TCP/IP and Ethernet, though that would certainly have advantages for connecting to computers and LANs. It could instead be some sort of new standard that would be easier for the average user to use, seeing as most people probably don't have their home wired for Ethernet already. Something that worked over existing wiring in the home, such as the phone lines, might be ideal in terms of ease of use if it were possible.
If these devices could be interconnected easily, there would be lots of interesting possibilities for home automation and the like. Already one can use systems like X-10 to control devices, but this could be taken to the next level. For example, it would be useful to have a stereo that could pull MP3s from a centralized server, took audio and video from various sources (including, perhaps, a TiVo-like device, or streaming video from the internet) and distributed them to various locations around the house, and had an easy interface for controlling these features. These sort of things are indeed possible now, but they require complex enough setup and wiring that these are out of reach of the average consumer.
I'm envisioning a unified interface for connecting these various devices. It'd need both a physical means of communication - Ethernet is a possibility, and the bandwidth available with the faster variants is appealing; perhaps a wireless system would be more effective for the majority of people who don't have their homes wired for Ethernet. There would also be a need for a standardized, extensible, secure set of protocols for these devices to interact. This is a lot to hope for; perhaps I'm dreaming a bit too unrealistically - it's getting later and I'm running out of caffeine.:)
It looks as though Eazel, like many other interfaces, makes use of a single-window file browser. Personally, I prefer a multi-window browser such as the current Mac Finder, in which opening a folder normally causes a new window to appear with the folder's contents in it rather than displaying the contents in the same window.
This design seems to be common in other interfaces, including Apple's new Finder in OS X, and it does seem to have its advantages - reducing screen clutter, for one. However, I find multi-window interfaces more useful to me; for example, when working with groups of files in different directories, or moving files around into different folders, it seems easier when opening a folder creates a new window.
It's worth noting that I've been a Mac user for years, and my opinion may be derived at least in part from my growing accustomed to this way of working. I'm open to the idea that a single-window browser may be a more effective interface, though I'm not especially fond of it at the moment.
The only Linux box I use regularly is a relatively slow system used primarily for server-type functions; I don't run X often, so I'm far from an expert on graphical interfaces to Linux. However, I'm curious as to whether there are any interfaces that use the same sort of multi-window design that the Mac Finder does, and why the single-window file browser seems to be more common these days.
I support the idea of protecting the environment as much as anyone else, but I've always heard that solar power is a very costly alternative to other power sources. That's bound to be a factor here, since these costs would presumably end up being passed down to their customers. I'm far from an expert on prices for hosting, but these prices do seem higher than some others I've encountered.
Will people be willing to pay a premium to have their websites hosted in a solar-powered facility? It seems to me that if an individual or business wanted to be more environmentally-friendly, there would be many more effective steps to take than using solar power for their websites. It may sound impressive to switch to this hosting company, but I'd think that, for example, a program to reduce power consumption in a home or office would probably end up helping the environment more.
As far as I can tell after reading the article and the proposal, this doesn't seem to have any significant effect on anonymity for the most part.
A quick summary of the proposal as I understand it: Routers that supported this feature would after sending a data packet, randomly also send an itrace packet to the destination, containing the previous and next hop. The TTL in the packet would always start at 255, so it would be possible to determine how far back along the path the router that sent the itrace message was. Additionally, there would be an authentication system to ensure the veracity of the itrace packets. The IETF proposal suggests that the chance of a router sending this packet would be about 1/20000.
This doesn't affect anonymity. It isn't possible to determine anything more with this system than you would be able to normally, unless the IP address is spoofed. With a spoofed IP address, you might have a chance of determining the real originating host; with a valid source IP address, such a traceback would likely be available with a simple traceroute. Additionally, the packets are only sent randomly and occasionally, so the chances of a packet being sent are pretty low unless you're sending a lot of packets.
What I'm not sure about, however, is how effective this will be. If the chance of an itrace packet being sent is only one in twenty thousand, how many data packets would need to be sent in order for the destination to receive a complete trace back to the source. Obviously, in most typical DoS attacks, lots of packets are sent. Would this be enough, or would itrace only be effective for the largest DoS attacks?
I recall a friend who, about two years ago, noticed that a great many Olympic-related domain names were unregistered, and tried to register one. I don't recall which domain it was specifically, but he then received an email from NSI informing him that they couldn't allow him to register that domain because of that Congress-granted special status of the term 'Olympic'.
There are obviously now registered domains containing the term 'Olympic'. When did this policy change?
(Or am I mistaken as to the scope of this former ban?)
This seems to fit my experiences with computing in education, sadly. The emphasis seems to be on buying computers merely for the sake of buying computers and hoping that they'll somehow magically educate the students without any further effort. That's not to say that computers aren't a valuable resource in schools - certainly, they can be put to good use, but unless the school makes a point of integrating them into their curriculum and finding ways to use them educationally, it won't be very effective.
I'm a high school student who's been fortunate enough to go to private schools that have the funding to maintain relatively large networks of computers. My current school has several labs of computers, assorted computers in classrooms, laptops for all the teachers, and is contemplating a program involving requiring all students to buy laptops and bring them to class. This seems silly to me, because it's likely that they won't be put to any meaningful use. Most of the teachers have just left their new laptops on their desks and ignored them, and it's much the same with the students, most of whom only use computers to type papers. There doesn't seem to be much of an effort to use computers to aid in learning, nor any real motivation for the students to use the computers. These computers could be used to aid teaching in classes, but they really haven't been; they would be invaluable in computer science classes, but such classes aren't even offered.
Increased accessibility to computers in schools is a commendable goal, but the computers themselves are merely tools that can serve little good unless used properly. And it certainly appears to me that some of our schools have problems that need to be given a higher priority than lack of computers.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, this has already been done. I particularly like the FAQs about why it's safe.
Actually, this is in fact one of the uses the technology has. I'm surprised this story wasn't included in the article...
The researchers working on this project have offices on the top floor of the Media Lab's building, right next to the central atrium open to the floor five stories below. Apparently they would enjoy leaning over the railing and pointing the Audio Spotlight at unsuspecting people down below, then playing the sounds of breaking glass. The hapless victims would then undoubtedly find themselves quite confused as they looked around to make sure they hadn't stepped on and broke something...
I don't meant to belittle this effort, but it's important to notice that this system specifically doesn't (yet) monitor chlorine or other chemical levels. That's a shame, since it seems to me like this could be the most powerful aspect: a continuous feedback system that could, say, adjust the chlorine level when it gets too high or low.
It's hard to fault him for that, since it seems like it would be impractical to do actual monitoring, as the article says: The technology required to sense these chemical parameters requires a delicate probe be inserted into the plumbing, with an amplifier and analog-to-digital converter interface to the computer. These probes are rather expensive at about $100/each, require calibration every month or so, and wear out in about a year. Without some less-expensive, improvised alternative, these costs seem to exceed the possible savings in reduced chemical demand or manual dosing.
But the net result here seems to be not much more than an elaborate scheduling and electrical system -- a glorified timer-box that happens to be running Linux, if you will. It does have a few advantages: more complex configuration possiblities, and the capability to determine daylight hours. But I still have to question whether it would ultimately be less costly -- in terms of time as well as money -- to implement this using more mundane hardware.
(I do note that this page has a lot of detail about the chlorination system, which looks to be well written. The liquid chlorine pump setup sounds like an impressive achievement -- but the Linux part is not quite as special as it's made to appear here.)
On the whole, you're right. Occasionally they do come up with something vaguely accurate, but that's usually purely by chance, given the large amounts of just-plain-wrong stuff they predict. I usually don't follow them, but I understand that many have been expecting LCD iMacs for months -- but I don't know of anyone who predicted the form factor we ended up with.
Are they really that awful? Do they sometimes get something right? Do they have a reason for existance?
Of course they have a reason to exist: to provide us with amusement. They are, after all, some of the best humor sites on the net, even if that's totally unintentional. I can't find it anymore, but my favorite was the rumor that Apple would announce a G5 Dodecahedron to take the G4 Cube's place.
That would be pretty cool indeed. I seem to recall a monitor from long ago that would do that, the Radius Pivot. It could detect when the monitor was physically rotated and change its orientation from landscape to portrait. Of course, this was during the days when most Macs had built-in monitors and needed a (expensive) video card to use an external monitor, so its use wasn't all that widespread.
Speaking of vertical orientation, I wonder if the iMac could be rotated and mounted vertically on a wall. That seems like it would make for a really space-efficient workspace, especially if the monitor could be moved out of the way when it's not in use.
I don't know if this would be possible. I imagine it's not physically possible out of the box, but maybe with some additional mounting hardware. The only question is whether the iMac could survive such an orientation -- I would think it could, but it might be a problem for the hard drive or DVD/CD. Also, the monitor may not be able to swivel or reach far enough to position itself in a useful configuration with the base mounted on the wall.
Still, it sounds interesting, even if purely for the coolness factor.
After all, the Mac community is filled with sites tracking the latest Apple rumors. Even at a 'normal' MacWorld, the community-generated hype leads to people expecting Apple to announce something that's totally revolutionary, and whatever actually does get announced pales by comparison.
And this time Apple gave themselves even higher expectations to live up to by creating their own hype too. For the first time anyone can recall, they publicized the expo, with new slogans on their website every night: 'a backstage pass to the future', 'way beyond the rumors sites', 'to boldly go where no PC has gone before', etc. Surely Apple must have realized that new iMac, iPhoto, and larger iBooks, while impressive, couldn't live up to people's expectations with that much hype?
(And claiming that they were going to announce something 'way beyond the rumors sites' was surely a mistake. These are the same rumors sites, after all, that were expecting LCD iMacs many months ago. This expo's predictions included the iWalk PDA, much faster pro-line desktop machines, and even a G5 Dodecahedron or two.)
It seems to be the case that people will always be somewhat disappointed with whatever Apple releases. But Apple doesn't need to make it worse by claiming that they've created something revolutionary and amazing; this new iMac just can't live up to that standard.
Well, I don't know that I would necessarily say that large lawsuits like this one are common, but most research universities frequently patent their findings, and selling the licensing rights to corporations can be a not-insignificant source of revenue for them. So they've got a pretty serious incentive to enforce these patents.
Offhand, I can think of one instance of this happening. You may recall that back in August MIT filed a lawsuit against Sony for infringing on patents related to digital TV. It was also covered on slashdot, too.
That's the only other specific case that comes to mind at the moment, but I certainly have heard of others. Of course, I'm sure there are many other examples on a much smaller scale that don't get widely reported. And there are undoubtedly many cases that lead to a quiet settlement in which the corporations in question just pay the licensing fees -- which is, after all, presumably what the universities are after in the first place.
Though it's common practice for universities to patent their research, there's plenty of controversy involved, even neglecting the question of whether IP is a valid concept in general. For example, the students involved in actually doing the research usually don't wind up with more than a small fraction of the patent rights, if any at all. And then there's the issue of what kind of rights corporate sponsors get to the research; if the research is funded through government grants, then one also has to ask the question of whether the research then belongs to the taxpayers who are funding it. I see that other posts above have discussed these issues, and they've been discussed extensively here before, too.
Lawsuits like this may be rarely seen with such magnitude and scope -- though I'm sure the $100 million figure the article mentions is just inflated legal hyperbole -- but it's hardly something totally new and unexpected.
For the past few years, I've been involved in a program that distributes food to the homeless: each week we make a few hundred sandwiches, then pass them out in San Francisco.
One week we happened to be transporting the sandwiches in spare iMac boxes. This led one of the homeless fellows in line to comment "oh, wow, did you bring me an iMac?"
A fellow volunteer replied "yes, but do you have a place to plug it in?"
I was completely unprepared for the homeless individual's response: ... but I do have a T1 line".
"oh... no, damn it
Only in San Francisco, I suppose...
O2 / CO2 Conversion Specialist.
Of course, depending on just how productive your job is, this may or may not be the right title for you...
I'm finding myself unable to resist the temptation to note that drug sales have succeeded where the public educational system has failed in teaching our youth the metric system...
Making something that's derived from a unix-like OS easy to use certainly seems no easy task. Apple seems to be addressing this issue by trying to completely hide the BSD layer from the user. From a user-interface standpoint, I can understand this, but I wonder if it's going to create lots of problems with system maintainance. Wilfredo Sanchez's USENIX paper gives a few examples of problematic differences between the Mac and BSD systems. For example, since the pathname delimiter is a colon in MacOS and a slash in BSD, filenames have to be translated, and different programs will see the same file in different ways; likewise, Mac programs will often expect a file to have a resource fork, and BSD programs won't normally be aware of the resource fork. Apple seems to have addressed these issues, but their solutions still strike me as somewhat ugly hacks to intertwine two drastically different systems; it seems like this could cause problems in certain cases.
Sanchez also writes, "although we use BSD as the core system software, we do not want to require our users to understand how BSD works. Ideally, the typical Macintosh user does not even know that BSD is there. The very presence of such folders as 'usr' and 'etc' on disk is therefore awkward, and we hide those directories and their contents at the application level". I understand the reasoning for this, and I agree that having cryptically named folders floating around wouldn't help ease of use. At the same time, it's disturbing to me because the 'usr' and 'etc' directories do exist and presumably are critical to the operation of the system, and hiding them from the users is bound to cause problems if for some reason it's necessary to access them. Apple claims that it'll never be necessary to see these directories, but I'm skeptical; perhaps you won't encounter them in normal use, but what if something in them gets corrupted, or something? Hiding parts of the system from users sounds like it'll lead to a maintainability nightmare.
Another point, less significant but still non-trivial: the internals of OS X are massively different from those of any previous OS. This presumably means that expert users are going to have to learn anew how the system works in order to maintain it.
Imagine the horrors... 'three killed in Emacs/VI battle'... 'two plead guilty to murder spawned by GPL/BSD license debate'... ;)
If I were to do so, and the school found its content objectionable, what could they do? I'd assume that, provided that no school resources were used to host it, they couldn't actually remove the site. However, could they take action against the students responsible for it? My first thought would be that they, being a private organization, could essentially do whatever they want, though it'd probably look bad for them if they were to retaliate. (would this be different if it were a public school? I'd think it might, but I'm really just guessing there.) Would the situation be different than if I were to print up such a newspaper on paper and hand out copies?
Though I'd prefer to avoid it if possible, I suppose that doing this anonymously might well be the best thing to do. I imagine that a free web hosting account would work for this, but the thought of all the ads that would impose makes me shudder. Are there any better options for something of the sort?
As a Mac and Linux user, I've thought a bit about the reasons for the lack of much free/open source software on the Mac.
Certainly, a major impediment is the fact that most Mac users aren't hackers but consumers who don't have much interest or ability in improving their software. I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done about this. I suppose another factor is that most development on the Mac is done using CodeWarrior or another commercial IDE, which further restricts the people who can do anything meaningful with the source to an application; I admit to not being the most knowledgable person in the field of Mac devlopment, but I don't know of any open source/free (speech) compilers on the Mac.
But I suspect that another main reason little free software is developed on the Mac is that people are unaware of it. I had been a Mac user for many years before I had even heard of 'free software' or 'open source', let alone understood why it was a good thing. It wasn't until I started using Linux that I became aware of such things; perhaps with the attention that Linux is receiving in the media, more people may be somewhat more aware of the free software movement, but most probably don't understand it more than superficially.
This is one reason I'm opposed to the Free World license. If we want to make more free software available, restricting it so that it can't be used by users of a non-free operating system won't help. By allowing everyone to use it, more people will be exposed to free software. They may only use it like any other program, which is necessarily a bad thing, but they might well learn more about free software and perhaps be influenced to write free software of their own or switch to a free operating system.
On an unrelated note, I also find it a bit troubling that the Free World license pages tout the fact that they were 'Denounced by Richard Stallman' and 'Rejected by Eric Raymond' as though those were things to be proud of...
I think it would definately be powerful and useful if it were possible to connect all of these various devices together and allow them to communicate with each other. Not necessarily via TCP/IP and Ethernet, though that would certainly have advantages for connecting to computers and LANs. It could instead be some sort of new standard that would be easier for the average user to use, seeing as most people probably don't have their home wired for Ethernet already. Something that worked over existing wiring in the home, such as the phone lines, might be ideal in terms of ease of use if it were possible.
:)
If these devices could be interconnected easily, there would be lots of interesting possibilities for home automation and the like. Already one can use systems like X-10 to control devices, but this could be taken to the next level. For example, it would be useful to have a stereo that could pull MP3s from a centralized server, took audio and video from various sources (including, perhaps, a TiVo-like device, or streaming video from the internet) and distributed them to various locations around the house, and had an easy interface for controlling these features. These sort of things are indeed possible now, but they require complex enough setup and wiring that these are out of reach of the average consumer.
I'm envisioning a unified interface for connecting these various devices. It'd need both a physical means of communication - Ethernet is a possibility, and the bandwidth available with the faster variants is appealing; perhaps a wireless system would be more effective for the majority of people who don't have their homes wired for Ethernet. There would also be a need for a standardized, extensible, secure set of protocols for these devices to interact. This is a lot to hope for; perhaps I'm dreaming a bit too unrealistically - it's getting later and I'm running out of caffeine.
It looks as though Eazel, like many other interfaces, makes use of a single-window file browser. Personally, I prefer a multi-window browser such as the current Mac Finder, in which opening a folder normally causes a new window to appear with the folder's contents in it rather than displaying the contents in the same window.
This design seems to be common in other interfaces, including Apple's new Finder in OS X, and it does seem to have its advantages - reducing screen clutter, for one. However, I find multi-window interfaces more useful to me; for example, when working with groups of files in different directories, or moving files around into different folders, it seems easier when opening a folder creates a new window.
It's worth noting that I've been a Mac user for years, and my opinion may be derived at least in part from my growing accustomed to this way of working. I'm open to the idea that a single-window browser may be a more effective interface, though I'm not especially fond of it at the moment.
The only Linux box I use regularly is a relatively slow system used primarily for server-type functions; I don't run X often, so I'm far from an expert on graphical interfaces to Linux. However, I'm curious as to whether there are any interfaces that use the same sort of multi-window design that the Mac Finder does, and why the single-window file browser seems to be more common these days.
I support the idea of protecting the environment as much as anyone else, but I've always heard that solar power is a very costly alternative to other power sources. That's bound to be a factor here, since these costs would presumably end up being passed down to their customers. I'm far from an expert on prices for hosting, but these prices do seem higher than some others I've encountered.
Will people be willing to pay a premium to have their websites hosted in a solar-powered facility? It seems to me that if an individual or business wanted to be more environmentally-friendly, there would be many more effective steps to take than using solar power for their websites. It may sound impressive to switch to this hosting company, but I'd think that, for example, a program to reduce power consumption in a home or office would probably end up helping the environment more.
As far as I can tell after reading the article and the proposal, this doesn't seem to have any significant effect on anonymity for the most part.
A quick summary of the proposal as I understand it: Routers that supported this feature would after sending a data packet, randomly also send an itrace packet to the destination, containing the previous and next hop. The TTL in the packet would always start at 255, so it would be possible to determine how far back along the path the router that sent the itrace message was. Additionally, there would be an authentication system to ensure the veracity of the itrace packets. The IETF proposal suggests that the chance of a router sending this packet would be about 1/20000.
This doesn't affect anonymity. It isn't possible to determine anything more with this system than you would be able to normally, unless the IP address is spoofed. With a spoofed IP address, you might have a chance of determining the real originating host; with a valid source IP address, such a traceback would likely be available with a simple traceroute. Additionally, the packets are only sent randomly and occasionally, so the chances of a packet being sent are pretty low unless you're sending a lot of packets.
What I'm not sure about, however, is how effective this will be. If the chance of an itrace packet being sent is only one in twenty thousand, how many data packets would need to be sent in order for the destination to receive a complete trace back to the source. Obviously, in most typical DoS attacks, lots of packets are sent. Would this be enough, or would itrace only be effective for the largest DoS attacks?
I recall a friend who, about two years ago, noticed that a great many Olympic-related domain names were unregistered, and tried to register one. I don't recall which domain it was specifically, but he then received an email from NSI informing him that they couldn't allow him to register that domain because of that Congress-granted special status of the term 'Olympic'.
There are obviously now registered domains containing the term 'Olympic'. When did this policy change?
(Or am I mistaken as to the scope of this former ban?)
This seems to fit my experiences with computing in education, sadly. The emphasis seems to be on buying computers merely for the sake of buying computers and hoping that they'll somehow magically educate the students without any further effort. That's not to say that computers aren't a valuable resource in schools - certainly, they can be put to good use, but unless the school makes a point of integrating them into their curriculum and finding ways to use them educationally, it won't be very effective.
I'm a high school student who's been fortunate enough to go to private schools that have the funding to maintain relatively large networks of computers. My current school has several labs of computers, assorted computers in classrooms, laptops for all the teachers, and is contemplating a program involving requiring all students to buy laptops and bring them to class. This seems silly to me, because it's likely that they won't be put to any meaningful use. Most of the teachers have just left their new laptops on their desks and ignored them, and it's much the same with the students, most of whom only use computers to type papers. There doesn't seem to be much of an effort to use computers to aid in learning, nor any real motivation for the students to use the computers. These computers could be used to aid teaching in classes, but they really haven't been; they would be invaluable in computer science classes, but such classes aren't even offered.
Increased accessibility to computers in schools is a commendable goal, but the computers themselves are merely tools that can serve little good unless used properly. And it certainly appears to me that some of our schools have problems that need to be given a higher priority than lack of computers.