Yeah, there should be a big button, right on the release announcement page, labeled "Download" for the OS/Architecture of the browser you're currently running. But the download's not that far off. For those to tired or lazy to look, the link to the download page is right under the link for "Release Notes". (This might be a case of deliberate obfuscation, since this is a beta that you don't want to mistake for a supported official release.)
I kind of like BTW the sci-fi theme of the page background, where you got this team of people fixing or unloading things off their hovercars.
The headline is a bit deceptive. I think the good professor was arrested for showing the videos to other people. (Although it's still possible the people he showed it to were arrested, too.)
Being at home above the equator, I'm confused by the article's reference to "material relating to confidential commercial information". Supposedly, such information could and should be protected from disclosure.
But why does the government need to have trade secrets along with the usual military and diplomatic embargo on information? Dictators and their cronies might think it's okay to run a government for profit, but my understanding of democratic government is that, at best, it shouldn't lose money ("balanced budget"). Fees are charged for paperwork and the like so the government can pay its employees or buy the raw materials it needs to render its services.
It seems more like a contest for the design school crowd, not hardcore engineers. I find the Google moon rover contest far more interesting from an engineering perspective.
Park one or more of these puppies in orbit, next to the ISS.
Attach them to the ISS, to be sure they don't float away and add to the space junk. But I like the idea of keeping the shuttles up in space after their last flight. Since money has already been burnt on the launch, why not keep the shuttles up as, say, extra storage for non-critical radiation-tolerant supplies.
Only problem is how to get the shuttle astronauts back to Earth. The Soyuz is perhaps the only other human-rated spacecraft that can serve as a return vehicle for the ISS.
Iran's government is perfectly designed to weather this kind of thing. First off, the Islamic council aren't dumb, not in the slightest. The protests in mid last year were met mainly with subterfuge and false flag operations (sound familiar). Secondly they've isolated the military and police in this. They use the Republican Guard which are primarily non-Iranian Arabs (Iran is mostly Persian in ethnicity) who are loyal to the government and not attached to the people. Thirdly the power structure is not centred around a single person (president mahmoud whatisname) he's just a puppet, a front man to keep the real rulers (Islamic Council) safe.
This reminds me of the political situation in China, where the president is the face of what is effectively a collective presidency, the politburo of the Chinese Communist party.
The Iranian government isn't a brutal dictator like Gadafi or an incompetent embezzling oaf like Mubarak. They are cold and calculating, much like the Soviets.
The Soviets weren't as cold and calculating as the Chinese government is now. Or else how explain the monumental collapse of the Soviet Union after the Party decided to launch a coup d'etat against itself in the early 1990's?
What China and Iran have in common is the realization that you can't have somebody sitting as president-for-life when you want the Party (or whatever you call the ruling class in Iran) to reign for eternity. Whether through rigged elections or party machinations, the titular change of leadership in the two countries fulfills the same function (for the general population) as general elections in the US or UK, and none of the possibility of electing narcissistic whackos. One downside to "free" elections is that a really determined media-savvy newcomer has a shot at leapfrogging to the top without getting vetted (or purged) at the lower levels of the party. Hitler, after all, was a democratically elected leader of pre-World War 2 Germany.
to molecular printing and the Star Trek economy (without the warp drive, tractor beam, and transporter).
I remember seeing a BBC (?) video somewhere about some research lab printing some human organ prototypes. The prototypes weren't functional in themselves but supposedly will be used as scaffolding for embedded heart/lung/etc sells to grow on, thus requiring the success of another technology, stem cell manipulation.
I think the era of humans living in space (exploring space is a mere idle pastime if all you're going to do is to snap blurred photos or vicariously poke some pebble in some distant landscape) will turn out pretty much like the fabled Year of Linux on the Desktop. There won't be a year of Linux on the desktop. We're just going to find out one day we are using Linux on the desktop. Or we won't (because by that time we'll all be using wallpaper or holographically projected computers).
Right now all we have is a token presence in space. Maybe in a decade, there will be another "international" space station where another half a dozen people will live for weeks at a time. Then maybe in another decade down the line, there will be hundreds of people living in half a dozen stations independent of any national space agency. By then maybe we'll have a moonbase or two (one for the international community and the other for some lone wolf space superpower). Like the first humans out of Africa, the trickle to space continues until one day we cross the threshold (a 1000 or 10 x 1000?) when we can say humanity is truly a space faring species.
Then again, maybe, like the explosion of the tablet computer (2010?) or Android phones (2011?), there will be one breakout Year that future historians will point back as the true start of the Space Age, when even mere millionaires can hop on a junket to low Earth orbit.
IMHE(xperience), Chrome loads pages slower than Firefox with NoScript. Here's why. FF can load partial pages better. By this, I mean FF can load pages with missing or incomplete elements better. While FF will, for example, happily show me a page that is badly formatted because the style sheet hasn't been fully loaded, all that Chrome will show me is a big blank page until it can place the elements correctly on the page. To be sure, FF will dynamically reformat the badly formatted page as the page requisites are loaded, but I can always click the "X" icon to force it to stop loading the page.
Chrome is also slow to load pages that reference elements from addresses that cannot be accessed. It would take Chrome longer to load a page containing picture X from domain xxx.xxx if I've configured my router to block all access for xxx.xxx.
If the news reports are any accurate, the main reason for the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt is economic. Libya is a wealthier if not economically more equal country than either. So maybe the scale of discontent is lower in Libya, and killing the Internet just "might" be the straw that will break the back of the protests.
But if this move fails and there's another regime change (for better or worse), then the leaders of a certain economic superpower should be worried. On the other hand, that country may have just the antivirus for popular discontent: high growth rates and a more or less regular change of faces at the top, where the Great Leader isn't Papa's favorite but selected by an inner circle in what works out as a form of extremely hierarchical representative democracy.
The fine story links to a blog. If all you want are the details about the competing teams, you can go direct to:
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/teams
As mentioned in the story, 29 teams are competing out of an initial field of 33. The names of the team range from the obvious, Moon Express; to the bold, Next Giant Leap and Independence-X; to the patriotic, Teams Italia, Indus (India) and Puli (Hungary); down to the irreverent, Part-Time Scientists and the cryptically named Mystery Team: Mystical Moon.
One of the four teams that withdrew is one called Micro Space. Maybe they failed to secure funding from a certain very rich philanthropist.
I think originally the prefix cyber- was related to the sci-fi notion of a cyborg, basically a human fused with a machine, until it was hijacked by a certain cyberpunk writer and converted into cyberspace, an emptiness vaster than interstellar space. For "most people", cyber- is synonymous with anything that can be done with an Internet connection. Ergo, cyber-sex, cyber-war, cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking, etc (with or without the hyphen). Sadly, a cybernaut is someone who explores cyberspace rather than a bionic astronaut.
I was rather amazed to find out, thanks to some casual Googling, that Nokia still manufactures (some of) its own devices. Nokia still has factories! However, following the general trend of US information technology companies, Microsoft would likely acquire that manufacturing capability only to sell it off to the highest bidder.
Under a loose definition of manufacturer, Microsoft is already a manufacturer of devices like the Xbox and the iPod-wannabee known as the Zune.
I think the word "designer" would be more appropriate when refering to products marketed by companies like Apple, which outsource the actual production to other companies. I'd reserve the word "manufacturer" for companies with significant manufacturing capability like Intel. Many Japanese electronics companies can still be considered manufacturers under this stricter definition, even if their factories are located in another country, since they operate those factories under sole management or joint venture agreements.
As for Oracle, it's more like an elephant than a gorilla. When it moves stay away.
Now this is the sort of good PR you'd love to hear from a major company. Not legal threats (even if it's a mere cease-and-desist) against people trying to squeeze more juice from a device which they presumably own.
I don't know whether to mod you funny or insightful. I just hope these "brute force" attacks aren't true, and that worst thing the authorities there are doing is short-term detention (which is not to say that's the right thing to do with unarmed protesters).
That's TFA's answer to the question posed by the title. Smart phones seem to be getting smaller. A few more years, and we'd probably get to the expendable part. But simple? Somehow I get the feeling that "smart" is the antithesis of "simple".
I look at the price of some of the systems out there, and I can only assume that without 30-day Office 2010 trial editions and all the other crap they'd probably be in the hole.
Maybe it's because of their bloated marketing budget. Where I live, no-name systems are still cheaper by half. The systems have zero marketing by definition. So maybe that's where the price difference comes in. The dudes at the marketing department of Branded System X have to eat somehow.
On the other hand, it might be due to the cheapo parts in the no-name system. However, I doubt there would be that much of a difference since (at least as far as budget PCs are concerned) the main components like RAM and HDs are manufactured by only a handful of large companies (OEMs). If anything the Branded manufacturer is likely to benefit from higher discounts from presumably buying more units per component than the neighborhood PC assembler (who is more likely to source his purchases from a second tier distributor).
Back before the internet, many early computer hobbyists networked on Fidonet, a simple peer-to-peer network and now digital activists propose reviving such ideas with mesh networking over Wi-Fi networks that could connect inhabitants of an entire city without anyone having an internet service provider.
Maybe here's where the First World can learn (or relearn) from the Third World about low-cost information transfer. If the goal is simply to "communicate" to the masses, then why go through the hassles of setting up mesh networking? Why not just do what the "pirates" and drug dealers do? A quick exchange of goods in some back alley or, with the proper incentive, even right under the noses of the non-secret police.
I can imagine some activist walking up to such impromptu information kiosk (who could be merely a person standing in a corner) and for a modest fee getting a thumb drive or mini DVD-R of the day's news in glorious cellphone cam and RTF files of the next day's protest schedule. Alternatively, smaller late-breaking bits of information could be done via Bluetooth or similar personal area networks. Multiply by thousands of more discreet exchanges between friends and acquaintances and you have one massive jam-tolerant (if not altogether jam-proof) sneakernet.
I'm too lazy to dig up the links right now. But I remember watching a number of science documentaries that credit the moon for the persistence of life on Earth. The reasons range from the gravitational effects of the moon, triggering the tides while ironically stabilizing the Earth's axis of rotation, to its role as a shield or maybe more like an imperfect filter against celestial heavy bombardment (after the Earth's initial impact with the Mars size object that gave birth to the Moon). That the Earth and Moon make up what is in fact a double planet system would be the more obvious planetary feature to an alien space probe before spectral analysis revealed the difference between Earth's and Venus's atmospheres.
Yes. Try RFC 1149, otherwise known as IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC). You might need to substitute a more common discrete winged media though, say, bat or bumblebees. Just make sure you train them well (or use some strong pheromones), or you'll be getting massive packet loss.
(The RFC actually describes the sending of datagrams written on slips of paper strapped to the leg of the carrier pigeon. A more practical method would be to load the carrier with a flash drive containing gigabytes rather than bits of data.)
Hmm, the full test requires some browser holes (intentional). It doesn't work under Chromium 9 (dev version), even if I have JavaScript enabled (by default).
OTOH I get 2/3 white-on-green check marks on the simple version of the test for methods "IPv4" and "IPv4 or IPv6". I get a broken (no) image for the third method, pure "IPv6".
Hi, I'm General Tutan Khamun. As commander of the Royal Camel Battalion, I was in charge of the valuable ancient artifacts of the Arab Republic of Egypt. However because of ongoing chaos in the country, numerous treasures have been lost. For a small fee, you can help me recover these artifacts and return them to their rightful owners. Please send me your contact detail$$$ and I will call you back.
Letting in the UN or any other country or group of countries into Egypt should be a cure of last resort, radical surgery when there's Khmer Rouge-style genocide already taking place. That point has not been reached. This is a matter for the Egyptians to settle among themselves.
Or how would you feel if the UN intervened in the LA riots? The chaos in Iraq is partly the product of misplaced good intentions (never mind the possible economic "motives"), a war supposedly to topple a dictator without a clear plan on what to do after the downfall of the regime.
Foreign intervention, no matter how well intentioned, always leaves a bad taste in the mouth. If anything, national pride is hurt, as the citizens now feel they have to be rescued from themselves. It would be more difficult to re-establish a working government, than if the country was invaded after a war between countries of nearly equal military strength (as was the case after the defeat of Japan and Germany in World War II).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, there should be a big button, right on the release announcement page, labeled "Download" for the OS/Architecture of the browser you're currently running. But the download's not that far off. For those to tired or lazy to look, the link to the download page is right under the link for "Release Notes". (This might be a case of deliberate obfuscation, since this is a beta that you don't want to mistake for a supported official release.)
I kind of like BTW the sci-fi theme of the page background, where you got this team of people fixing or unloading things off their hovercars.
The headline is a bit deceptive. I think the good professor was arrested for showing the videos to other people. (Although it's still possible the people he showed it to were arrested, too.)
Being at home above the equator, I'm confused by the article's reference to "material relating to confidential commercial information". Supposedly, such information could and should be protected from disclosure.
But why does the government need to have trade secrets along with the usual military and diplomatic embargo on information? Dictators and their cronies might think it's okay to run a government for profit, but my understanding of democratic government is that, at best, it shouldn't lose money ("balanced budget"). Fees are charged for paperwork and the like so the government can pay its employees or buy the raw materials it needs to render its services.
if the seeds don't grow? I mean, if they're targeting the tree-hugging crowd, shouldn't there be some guarantee the shoes will sprout as advertised?
It seems more like a contest for the design school crowd, not hardcore engineers. I find the Google moon rover contest far more interesting from an engineering perspective.
Attach them to the ISS, to be sure they don't float away and add to the space junk. But I like the idea of keeping the shuttles up in space after their last flight. Since money has already been burnt on the launch, why not keep the shuttles up as, say, extra storage for non-critical radiation-tolerant supplies.
Only problem is how to get the shuttle astronauts back to Earth. The Soyuz is perhaps the only other human-rated spacecraft that can serve as a return vehicle for the ISS.
This reminds me of the political situation in China, where the president is the face of what is effectively a collective presidency, the politburo of the Chinese Communist party.
The Soviets weren't as cold and calculating as the Chinese government is now. Or else how explain the monumental collapse of the Soviet Union after the Party decided to launch a coup d'etat against itself in the early 1990's?
What China and Iran have in common is the realization that you can't have somebody sitting as president-for-life when you want the Party (or whatever you call the ruling class in Iran) to reign for eternity. Whether through rigged elections or party machinations, the titular change of leadership in the two countries fulfills the same function (for the general population) as general elections in the US or UK, and none of the possibility of electing narcissistic whackos. One downside to "free" elections is that a really determined media-savvy newcomer has a shot at leapfrogging to the top without getting vetted (or purged) at the lower levels of the party. Hitler, after all, was a democratically elected leader of pre-World War 2 Germany.
to molecular printing and the Star Trek economy (without the warp drive, tractor beam, and transporter).
I remember seeing a BBC (?) video somewhere about some research lab printing some human organ prototypes. The prototypes weren't functional in themselves but supposedly will be used as scaffolding for embedded heart/lung/etc sells to grow on, thus requiring the success of another technology, stem cell manipulation.
I think the era of humans living in space (exploring space is a mere idle pastime if all you're going to do is to snap blurred photos or vicariously poke some pebble in some distant landscape) will turn out pretty much like the fabled Year of Linux on the Desktop. There won't be a year of Linux on the desktop. We're just going to find out one day we are using Linux on the desktop. Or we won't (because by that time we'll all be using wallpaper or holographically projected computers).
Right now all we have is a token presence in space. Maybe in a decade, there will be another "international" space station where another half a dozen people will live for weeks at a time. Then maybe in another decade down the line, there will be hundreds of people living in half a dozen stations independent of any national space agency. By then maybe we'll have a moonbase or two (one for the international community and the other for some lone wolf space superpower). Like the first humans out of Africa, the trickle to space continues until one day we cross the threshold (a 1000 or 10 x 1000?) when we can say humanity is truly a space faring species.
Then again, maybe, like the explosion of the tablet computer (2010?) or Android phones (2011?), there will be one breakout Year that future historians will point back as the true start of the Space Age, when even mere millionaires can hop on a junket to low Earth orbit.
IMHE(xperience), Chrome loads pages slower than Firefox with NoScript. Here's why. FF can load partial pages better. By this, I mean FF can load pages with missing or incomplete elements better. While FF will, for example, happily show me a page that is badly formatted because the style sheet hasn't been fully loaded, all that Chrome will show me is a big blank page until it can place the elements correctly on the page. To be sure, FF will dynamically reformat the badly formatted page as the page requisites are loaded, but I can always click the "X" icon to force it to stop loading the page.
Chrome is also slow to load pages that reference elements from addresses that cannot be accessed. It would take Chrome longer to load a page containing picture X from domain xxx.xxx if I've configured my router to block all access for xxx.xxx.
If the news reports are any accurate, the main reason for the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt is economic. Libya is a wealthier if not economically more equal country than either. So maybe the scale of discontent is lower in Libya, and killing the Internet just "might" be the straw that will break the back of the protests.
But if this move fails and there's another regime change (for better or worse), then the leaders of a certain economic superpower should be worried. On the other hand, that country may have just the antivirus for popular discontent: high growth rates and a more or less regular change of faces at the top, where the Great Leader isn't Papa's favorite but selected by an inner circle in what works out as a form of extremely hierarchical representative democracy.
Kind of reminds you of a certain site we visit now and then (well, except maybe for the membership part). Or maybe you're talking of something else?
The fine story links to a blog. If all you want are the details about the competing teams, you can go direct to:
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/teams
As mentioned in the story, 29 teams are competing out of an initial field of 33. The names of the team range from the obvious, Moon Express; to the bold, Next Giant Leap and Independence-X; to the patriotic, Teams Italia, Indus (India) and Puli (Hungary); down to the irreverent, Part-Time Scientists and the cryptically named Mystery Team: Mystical Moon.
One of the four teams that withdrew is one called Micro Space. Maybe they failed to secure funding from a certain very rich philanthropist.
I think originally the prefix cyber- was related to the sci-fi notion of a cyborg, basically a human fused with a machine, until it was hijacked by a certain cyberpunk writer and converted into cyberspace, an emptiness vaster than interstellar space. For "most people", cyber- is synonymous with anything that can be done with an Internet connection. Ergo, cyber-sex, cyber-war, cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking, etc (with or without the hyphen). Sadly, a cybernaut is someone who explores cyberspace rather than a bionic astronaut.
I was rather amazed to find out, thanks to some casual Googling, that Nokia still manufactures (some of) its own devices. Nokia still has factories! However, following the general trend of US information technology companies, Microsoft would likely acquire that manufacturing capability only to sell it off to the highest bidder.
Under a loose definition of manufacturer, Microsoft is already a manufacturer of devices like the Xbox and the iPod-wannabee known as the Zune.
I think the word "designer" would be more appropriate when refering to products marketed by companies like Apple, which outsource the actual production to other companies. I'd reserve the word "manufacturer" for companies with significant manufacturing capability like Intel. Many Japanese electronics companies can still be considered manufacturers under this stricter definition, even if their factories are located in another country, since they operate those factories under sole management or joint venture agreements.
As for Oracle, it's more like an elephant than a gorilla. When it moves stay away.
Now this is the sort of good PR you'd love to hear from a major company. Not legal threats (even if it's a mere cease-and-desist) against people trying to squeeze more juice from a device which they presumably own.
I don't know whether to mod you funny or insightful. I just hope these "brute force" attacks aren't true, and that worst thing the authorities there are doing is short-term detention (which is not to say that's the right thing to do with unarmed protesters).
That's TFA's answer to the question posed by the title. Smart phones seem to be getting smaller. A few more years, and we'd probably get to the expendable part. But simple? Somehow I get the feeling that "smart" is the antithesis of "simple".
I look at the price of some of the systems out there, and I can only assume that without 30-day Office 2010 trial editions and all the other crap they'd probably be in the hole.
Maybe it's because of their bloated marketing budget. Where I live, no-name systems are still cheaper by half. The systems have zero marketing by definition. So maybe that's where the price difference comes in. The dudes at the marketing department of Branded System X have to eat somehow.
On the other hand, it might be due to the cheapo parts in the no-name system. However, I doubt there would be that much of a difference since (at least as far as budget PCs are concerned) the main components like RAM and HDs are manufactured by only a handful of large companies (OEMs). If anything the Branded manufacturer is likely to benefit from higher discounts from presumably buying more units per component than the neighborhood PC assembler (who is more likely to source his purchases from a second tier distributor).
Back before the internet, many early computer hobbyists networked on Fidonet, a simple peer-to-peer network and now digital activists propose reviving such ideas with mesh networking over Wi-Fi networks that could connect inhabitants of an entire city without anyone having an internet service provider.
Maybe here's where the First World can learn (or relearn) from the Third World about low-cost information transfer. If the goal is simply to "communicate" to the masses, then why go through the hassles of setting up mesh networking? Why not just do what the "pirates" and drug dealers do? A quick exchange of goods in some back alley or, with the proper incentive, even right under the noses of the non-secret police.
I can imagine some activist walking up to such impromptu information kiosk (who could be merely a person standing in a corner) and for a modest fee getting a thumb drive or mini DVD-R of the day's news in glorious cellphone cam and RTF files of the next day's protest schedule. Alternatively, smaller late-breaking bits of information could be done via Bluetooth or similar personal area networks. Multiply by thousands of more discreet exchanges between friends and acquaintances and you have one massive jam-tolerant (if not altogether jam-proof) sneakernet.
I'm too lazy to dig up the links right now. But I remember watching a number of science documentaries that credit the moon for the persistence of life on Earth. The reasons range from the gravitational effects of the moon, triggering the tides while ironically stabilizing the Earth's axis of rotation, to its role as a shield or maybe more like an imperfect filter against celestial heavy bombardment (after the Earth's initial impact with the Mars size object that gave birth to the Moon). That the Earth and Moon make up what is in fact a double planet system would be the more obvious planetary feature to an alien space probe before spectral analysis revealed the difference between Earth's and Venus's atmospheres.
Yes. Try RFC 1149, otherwise known as IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC). You might need to substitute a more common discrete winged media though, say, bat or bumblebees. Just make sure you train them well (or use some strong pheromones), or you'll be getting massive packet loss.
(The RFC actually describes the sending of datagrams written on slips of paper strapped to the leg of the carrier pigeon. A more practical method would be to load the carrier with a flash drive containing gigabytes rather than bits of data.)
Hmm, the full test requires some browser holes (intentional). It doesn't work under Chromium 9 (dev version), even if I have JavaScript enabled (by default).
OTOH I get 2/3 white-on-green check marks on the simple version of the test for methods "IPv4" and "IPv4 or IPv6". I get a broken (no) image for the third method, pure "IPv6".
Hi, I'm General Tutan Khamun. As commander of the Royal Camel Battalion, I was in charge of the valuable ancient artifacts of the Arab Republic of Egypt. However because of ongoing chaos in the country, numerous treasures have been lost. For a small fee, you can help me recover these artifacts and return them to their rightful owners. Please send me your contact detail$$$ and I will call you back.
May Pharaoh be with you!
Letting in the UN or any other country or group of countries into Egypt should be a cure of last resort, radical surgery when there's Khmer Rouge-style genocide already taking place. That point has not been reached. This is a matter for the Egyptians to settle among themselves.
Or how would you feel if the UN intervened in the LA riots? The chaos in Iraq is partly the product of misplaced good intentions (never mind the possible economic "motives"), a war supposedly to topple a dictator without a clear plan on what to do after the downfall of the regime.
Foreign intervention, no matter how well intentioned, always leaves a bad taste in the mouth. If anything, national pride is hurt, as the citizens now feel they have to be rescued from themselves. It would be more difficult to re-establish a working government, than if the country was invaded after a war between countries of nearly equal military strength (as was the case after the defeat of Japan and Germany in World War II).