OK - in general the Gov't has the right to stop anything that is explicitly illegal, which in this case is access to certain websites. (Of course, you can argue about what should/shouldn't be illegal, but that's a different battle.)
So in principal I am for this type of censorship. But of course the two main issues with this are:
Effectiveness: Of course there will be ways around any blocking system used. However, just because something isn't 100% effective doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile - if it means less people get to the banned sites then it's working. But if you publish the list, then more people will know about the sites, and so more people will get through.
Trust: Is it only being used for what is was meant for? Clearly this is easier to decide if you can see the list. However, even without the list, you'll still know if a site is blocked (you can't access it!); this is something I would assume the EFA is monitoring.
If you publish the list, then you get the trust, but lose any effectiveness (actually making it easier for people to access these sites). So then it's a question of ensuring a reasonable level of trust without publishing the list. One way of doing this is to let an independent body (e.g. the EFA) review the list - but that would have to be done under condition of secrecy.
However, the EFA demanded access under a freedom of information law - if they'd won, then any Tom, Dick or Bruce could demand the list, thus removing all secrecy.
So, while I can understand arguments against any censorship (effectiveness & trust) this decision seems to be clearly right.
10 facts about Gentoo
on
Gentoo Linux 1.2
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua) breed on subantarctic islands and on the Antarctic Peninsula in small to large colonies. Larger populations of gentoo penguins are found at South Georgia, the Falkland Islands and the Iles Kerguelen.
Gentoo penguins are the least abundant of the penguins found on the subantarctic islands, with a total breeding population of approximately 314 000 pairs.
Unlike other penguin species, gentoo penguins may breed as early as two years of age.
The gentoo penguin is a medium sized penguin, standing 75-90cm tall and the females are smaller than the male birds.
Given that the penguin has a latin name, should the full name of this distro be: Connochaetes taurinus/Pygoscelis papua Linus ?
I initially thought this was a bit of flamebait from Michael, but check this out from their FAQ:
Q: Which key enabling technologies are the priorities in the Open Mobile Alliance?
A: The companies involved in the alliance will decide the key enabling technologies jointly. However, it is evident that Multimedia Messaging (MMS), Java and WAP 2.0/XHTML browsing are among the most relevant ones. Some other technologies driving the mobile services market include service enablers such as Digital Rights Management (DRM), authentication, location and presence identification and device management.
The Open Mobile Alliance has been formed by merging two existing initiatives:
The WAP Forum: Every knows and loves WAP. Nowadays, the WAP Forum has (thankfully) moved away from the invent everything here mentality, and are trying to see how they can adopt all the existing Web/IM/Java stuff that's out there.
The Open Mobile Architecture initiative was announced in November as an attempt to standardise what sort of standards your 2.5G/3G phone should support.
Although all mobile phone companies love standards bodies, they eventually realised that these two bodies were made up of exactly the same companies, and trying to do pretty much the same thing. So they've merged the two efforts into one, and unsurprisingly dropped the 'WAP' name.
The objectives are sort of what you'd expect... taken from their FAQ:
The principles of the Open Mobile Alliance are:
Products and services are based on open, global standards, protocols and interfaces and are not locked to proprietary technologies
The applications layer is bearer agnostic (examples: GSM, GPRS, EDGE, CDMA, UMTS)
The architecture framework and service enablers are independent of Operating Systems (OS)
Applications and platforms are interoperable, providing seamless geographic and inter-generational roaming
Note the explicit 'independent of OS' bit in there... in the original open mobile archictecture, they didn't mention this (and even explicitly stated that SymbianOS would be an important component), but now MS has joined the happy family, the emphasis has changed.
The technical info about the Seals is available here. To quote:
The study will be split into two phases. In phase one, simple mobile phone tags will regularly send text messages from grey seal pups to computers at the University, allowing scientists to examine which factors affect their survival through their first year. In phase two, GPS (Global Positioning System) and depth sensors will be added, allowing, through GPRS, (General Packet Radio Service) massive volumes of detailed track and dive behaviour to be sent ashore.
However, the Geese are actually using a satellite tracking system (as described in not much detail here). The text message bit is just an advertising thing that the WWT will send you an SMS when they get data - which is nothing new technically.
I'd be interested in the battery requirements for both of them though - I've got this image in my head of a seal trying to wind up a charger...
So now, all you need to do is connect the phone up to the webserver to provide the network connection, and you have a fully mobile, fully human powered solution.
One of my personal annoyances, and something I don't entirely understand, is that China, Taiwan and Japan all had multibyte character since at least 1980, but none of them really tried to be multilingal;
I think the reason for this is the same reason that ASCII doesn't cover the French/German/Scandiwegian extra characters despite it being easy to do. Any country is only going to standardise on their own character set until there's a reason to be multilingual. That reason is the internet: You don't see other languages until the internet takes off, by which time you've already standardised on the protocols it uses (DNS,HTTP,SMTP et al) - and it's too late!
So whatever language the internet was developed in, it would need internationalisation after it has become successful.
if the Internet had started in China (which would have been absolutely bizarre)
What's so bizzare about the idea? It's an alternate history idea, and there will of course be different events (I'd make the divergence China a republic sometime in the 50 years before 1930 . ..)
Well of course the Republic of China was formed in 1912, so that fits in with your timescale:-). So perhaps your divergence is that the communist revolution failed.
But if the internet had been Chinese based, then the character set would have been multi-byte based, and so would almost certainly have included Latin characters along with the Chinese characters, and Chinese phonetic characters. Thus it would have been much easier for a Westerner to use, as they just use the Latin subset and ignore the rest. The development of something akin to unicode would have been fundamental, not an afterthought.
What we're doing now, trying to expand from a small (1-byte) set of characters is much more complicated...
I'm trying not to sound like a lingual elite-ist by any means, but can anyone really say that we shouldn't standardize on English/ASCII?
Yes. It's ridiculous to ask people to learn (admitedly a small part of) a new language to use a computer. Just because English is taught in a lot (not all) of schools around the world, it doesn't mean that everyone is comfortable using it. A truely usable computer should be one which allows you to interact with it 100% in your own langauge.
The internet has shrunk the barrier to exchange information, which has made diverse languages even more significant of a barrier.
The main barrier to computer usage in a large part of the world is that it is still an elitist medium - only useable (and affordable) by the well-educated. If you are actually interested in making it easier for everyone to communicate, then the main technical issue to be solved is how to make the internet useable by anyone from any background.
If we use UNICODE and just let accept that everyone wants to use their own language, then the internet will end up as a group of national islands of information. Each group will surf their set of native language web sites.
This already happens. Of course people surf websites in their own language! Because you (and I) only surf the English-speaking fraction of the web, you don't see it. All that international domain names adds is that a Russian accessing a Russian website can do so via a Russian URL. What could be more sensible or obvious than that?
If no standard is agreed upon, proprietory standards will pop up all over the place, and it'll be a huge mess. In fact this is already happening - although he's the current anti-Christ of Slashdot, the big selling point of RealNames was for non-English languages, and if you believe Keith Teare's account, he was shafted by Microsoft because they wanted to control (via their browser) the translation of non-ASCII names to ASCII URLs.
One way to control this would be to restrict the valid characters based on the TLD.
So for example '.uk'/'.au'/'.us' etc. can ONLY have ASCII 2nd level domains. '.de' Can only have German characters, '.fr' only French, and so on...
Then for completely different character sets, you have new Unicode TLDs (Arabic, Greek, Chinese), which can only have their relevant characters.
I guess you leave.com/.org./.net as ASCII, although they are meant to be global they are based on the Latin character set.
Of course, this adds complexity - but you can do all the testing for validity when the domain is registered (i.e. a web client can request any URL, but dodgy mixed character set domain names cannot be registered).
But are international domain names even necessary? Kuhn, who is German, doesn't think so: "Familiarity with the ASCII repertoire and basic proficiency in entering these ASCII characters on any keyboard are the very first steps in computer literacy worldwide."
That's like saying basic numeracy is the first step for computer literacy worldwide, so we should go back to using IP addresses!
Currently email addresses and URLs are the only reason a native Chinese speaker needs to use ASCII. For someone from Germany, ASCII is pretty easy to handle, but for a lot of languages, Unicode URLs & email addresses are very necessary...
Odd timing, given that Debian 3.0 (Woody) is due to be released (fingers crossed) on the 1st May.
Have they burnt their own (nearly)3.0 or gone back to the old 2.2?
Of course the neat thing about Debian is that it is possible to create your own pre-3.0 CD, and then it's a one-liner to upgrade to the full release when it appears. However I suspect they've 'played safe' and gone with the old (released in 2000) version.
OK. If the problem is that some users are hogging all the bandwidth, what about this for a solution:
You monitor the total bandwidth usage over the month for each user. Then you adapt the priority of each connection dependent on the usage: User A has only used 2MB bandwidth this month, so you give their requests priority over User B who has already downloaded 200MBs.
In prinicipal, this is easy and seems a fair solution - the more data you download the slower your connection becomes. I'm sure this has been thought of/implemented already - so why aren't ISPs using something like this?
"Microsoft contacted 12 Nov 2001, additional information given 25 Mar 2002."
Well that links in well with the memo Bill Gates sent on January 15th. What was it he said?
"We have done a great job of having teams work around the clock to deliver security fixes for any problems that arise. Our responsiveness has been unmatched..." Hmm - that was before the new emphasis on security... "If we discover a risk that a feature could compromise someone's privacy, that problem gets solved first."
Given those comments, how can they not have done anything about this? Doesn't sound like a fundamental problem that would take a massive effort to fix.
Ah! The acid test for KDE - can it make vi usable for non unix-gurus?
Given that there is now a version of Vim for both Gnome & KDE, does it make sense for (X)Emacs to make the jump too? I know the origins of Xemacs are as much political as technical - but does it not make sense to try to branch off 2 versions of emacs into the 2 guis?
I started out making a joke post, but the more I think of it, the cooler i think Kemacs would be...
Will it work indoors? Yes. The Personal Location System incorporates enhanced GPS technology, which enables it to obtain location information indoors as well as outdoors.
Either I've missed out on some pretty impressive new developments with GPS, or this company are talking out of their a***. My experience with the GPS device I bought less than 6 months ago is that the only time it works indoors is when you happen to be leaning out the window and there aren't any tall buildings across the street.
But the reality is that internet radio stations have the worst of both worlds - all of the problems of radio and of internet startups.
I'm not sure I agree with that. The main problem that internet startups have is how to make money. Commercial radio stations have a well established model for this (advertising) which should be the same for internet radio. Also, they have the ease of startup that an internet company has.
So, internet radio stations are less available than AM/FM ones.
Granted, it's easier to turn on a radio, than it is to turn on, log-in and access an internet radio site. However, the potential coverage of internet radio is the whole planet, not just your local city. (e.g. I'm a Brit living in Taiwan - there's only 1 way I can listen to UK music stations...)
However, what CARP is doing is slapping a huge fee on internet radio stations that isn't imposed on traditional radio stations. This changes a sensible business model into a big loss-maker. Note that because the fee is per listener, I would imagine it would shut down small & large radio stations alike.
From the article: The law of gravity is one of science's most sacrosanct principles; any breaching of its walls would represent a major threat to the current theoretical framework.
Really? One of the few things I can remember from my Physics courses at school is that noone understands why gravitation mass is the same as intertial mass. The closest anyone's got to an explanation is Einstein with his Equivalence Principle, but even this seems a bit woolly (only works in a uniform gravitational field). So there are still aspects of mass (and so gravity) that are not fully understood.
Of course, this experiment sounds rather dodgy, and it's unclear from the article what they're measuring. Got me wondering though...
Re:Gotta represent (er, maintain)
on
More Marcelo Tosatti
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Does it strike anyone else as strange that the Linux kernel is still run by a small monarchy?
More a meritocracy than monarchy (i.e. if you prove you're good enough you get the power) - in this case Marcello proved that he was technically competent and so was given the responsibility of maintaining the kernel.
Of course the difficulty with any meritocracy is who decides your "merit". Unsurprisingly in this case (as in most cases) it's the ones in power (i.e. Linus & Alan). Thus whether it is a true meritocracy or not depends on the abilities of those leaders to pick out the best contributors...
Still, it seems to me that this leads to a lack of internal competition in a very important area of overall systems development, which can't be a Good Thing (tm); consider how much KDE and GNOME
Surely you're arguing for external competition? In which case, that nice Mr. Gates seems to putting up a decent fight. And internally there are several branches of the kernel floating around, and the major Linux companies often seem to bundle their own version of the kernel.
However, I agree with your central point that Linux does still rely heavily on one man. What happens when he stops running the show is an interesting question...
In an attempt to answer all the 'why not just use Linux?' questions, have a look at the man's explanation of it.
Basically, Linux wasn't around when Hurd was started, and they believe it is different enough to complete/compete despite the grand rise of Linux. (Remarkably honest & non-political notes by RMS)
Good luck to them - i hope it succeeds (we can't have Linux becoming a monopoly...:-)
The first & most concrete recommendation in this report is:
1. Make Open Standards a non-negotiable base for ICT in the Public Sector.
This is interesting, because it stops tie-in to one company - without having to mandate open source. So, no use of MS Word for publishing documents...
However, if you're proposing to use an open standard for e.g. word processing, what do you choose? HTML is fine for publishing, RTF is too basic for complex documents. Is there actually an open, widely accepted WP standard which you could use? Or are they only mandating open standards for publication and not for internal use (given that the report was written in Word this is possible)?
Surely, if you're considering a grant Larry is going to be the first name on the list!
It seems a bit like a Linux foundation (is there one?) giving money to Alan Cox & Marcelo Tosatti and then as an afterthought letting Linus Torvalds in on the party...
Slashdot Mirror
So in principal I am for this type of censorship. But of course the two main issues with this are:
If you publish the list, then you get the trust, but lose any effectiveness (actually making it easier for people to access these sites). So then it's a question of ensuring a reasonable level of trust without publishing the list. One way of doing this is to let an independent body (e.g. the EFA) review the list - but that would have to be done under condition of secrecy.
However, the EFA demanded access under a freedom of information law - if they'd won, then any Tom, Dick or Bruce could demand the list, thus removing all secrecy.
So, while I can understand arguments against any censorship (effectiveness & trust) this decision seems to be clearly right.
Given that the penguin has a latin name, should the full name of this distro be:
Connochaetes taurinus/Pygoscelis papua Linus ?
I initially thought this was a bit of flamebait from Michael, but check this out from their FAQ:
Although all mobile phone companies love standards bodies, they eventually realised that these two bodies were made up of exactly the same companies, and trying to do pretty much the same thing. So they've merged the two efforts into one, and unsurprisingly dropped the 'WAP' name.
The objectives are sort of what you'd expect
Note the explicit 'independent of OS' bit in there
However, the Geese are actually using a satellite tracking system (as described in not much detail here). The text message bit is just an advertising thing that the WWT will send you an SMS when they get data - which is nothing new technically.
I'd be interested in the battery requirements for both of them though - I've got this image in my head of a seal trying to wind up a charger
This reminded me of the the windup Linux Webserver.
So now, all you need to do is connect the phone up to the webserver to provide the network connection, and you have a fully mobile, fully human powered solution.
What does it stand for?
Gnu is Not Unitedlinux
One of my personal annoyances, and something I don't entirely understand, is that China, Taiwan and Japan all had multibyte character since at least 1980, but none of them really tried to be multilingal;
I think the reason for this is the same reason that ASCII doesn't cover the French/German/Scandiwegian extra characters despite it being easy to do. Any country is only going to standardise on their own character set until there's a reason to be multilingual. That reason is the internet: You don't see other languages until the internet takes off, by which time you've already standardised on the protocols it uses (DNS,HTTP,SMTP et al) - and it's too late!
So whatever language the internet was developed in, it would need internationalisation after it has become successful.
Well of course the Republic of China was formed in 1912, so that fits in with your timescale
But if the internet had been Chinese based, then the character set would have been multi-byte based, and so would almost certainly have included Latin characters along with the Chinese characters, and Chinese phonetic characters. Thus it would have been much easier for a Westerner to use, as they just use the Latin subset and ignore the rest. The development of something akin to unicode would have been fundamental, not an afterthought.
What we're doing now, trying to expand from a small (1-byte) set of characters is much more complicated
I'm trying not to sound like a lingual elite-ist by any means, but can anyone really say that we shouldn't standardize on English/ASCII?
Yes. It's ridiculous to ask people to learn (admitedly a small part of) a new language to use a computer. Just because English is taught in a lot (not all) of schools around the world, it doesn't mean that everyone is comfortable using it. A truely usable computer should be one which allows you to interact with it 100% in your own langauge.
The internet has shrunk the barrier to exchange information, which has made diverse languages even more significant of a barrier.
The main barrier to computer usage in a large part of the world is that it is still an elitist medium - only useable (and affordable) by the well-educated. If you are actually interested in making it easier for everyone to communicate, then the main technical issue to be solved is how to make the internet useable by anyone from any background.
If we use UNICODE and just let accept that everyone wants to use their own language, then the internet will end up as a group of national islands of information. Each group will surf their set of native language web sites.
This already happens. Of course people surf websites in their own language! Because you (and I) only surf the English-speaking fraction of the web, you don't see it. All that international domain names adds is that a Russian accessing a Russian website can do so via a Russian URL. What could be more sensible or obvious than that?
If no standard is agreed upon, proprietory standards will pop up all over the place, and it'll be a huge mess. In fact this is already happening - although he's the current anti-Christ of Slashdot, the big selling point of RealNames was for non-English languages, and if you believe Keith Teare's account, he was shafted by Microsoft because they wanted to control (via their browser) the translation of non-ASCII names to ASCII URLs.
One way to control this would be to restrict the valid characters based on the TLD.
...
.com/.org./.net as ASCII, although they are meant to be global they are based on the Latin character set.
So for example '.uk'/'.au'/'.us' etc. can ONLY have ASCII 2nd level domains. '.de' Can only have German characters, '.fr' only French, and so on
Then for completely different character sets, you have new Unicode TLDs (Arabic, Greek, Chinese), which can only have their relevant characters.
I guess you leave
Of course, this adds complexity - but you can do all the testing for validity when the domain is registered (i.e. a web client can request any URL, but dodgy mixed character set domain names cannot be registered).
From the article:
...
But are international domain names even necessary? Kuhn, who is German, doesn't think so: "Familiarity with the ASCII repertoire and basic proficiency in entering these ASCII characters on any keyboard are the very first steps in computer literacy worldwide."
That's like saying basic numeracy is the first step for computer literacy worldwide, so we should go back to using IP addresses!
Currently email addresses and URLs are the only reason a native Chinese speaker needs to use ASCII. For someone from Germany, ASCII is pretty easy to handle, but for a lot of languages, Unicode URLs & email addresses are very necessary
Odd timing, given that Debian 3.0 (Woody) is due to be released (fingers crossed) on the 1st May.
Have they burnt their own (nearly)3.0 or gone back to the old 2.2?
Of course the neat thing about Debian is that it is possible to create your own pre-3.0 CD, and then it's a one-liner to upgrade to the full release when it appears. However I suspect they've 'played safe' and gone with the old (released in 2000) version.
OK. If the problem is that some users are hogging all the bandwidth, what about this for a solution:
You monitor the total bandwidth usage over the month for each user. Then you adapt the priority of each connection dependent on the usage:
User A has only used 2MB bandwidth this month, so you give their requests priority over User B who has already downloaded 200MBs.
In prinicipal, this is easy and seems a fair solution - the more data you download the slower your connection becomes. I'm sure this has been thought of/implemented already - so why aren't ISPs using something like this?
"Microsoft contacted 12 Nov 2001, additional information given 25 Mar 2002."
..." ...
Well that links in well with the memo Bill Gates sent on January 15th. What was it he said?
"We have done a great job of having teams work around the clock to deliver security fixes for any problems that arise. Our responsiveness has been unmatched
Hmm - that was before the new emphasis on security
"If we discover a risk that a feature could compromise someone's privacy, that problem gets solved first."
Given those comments, how can they not have done anything about this? Doesn't sound like a fundamental problem that would take a massive effort to fix.
Ah! The acid test for KDE - can it make vi usable for non unix-gurus?
...
Given that there is now a version of Vim for both Gnome & KDE, does it make sense for (X)Emacs to make the jump too? I know the origins of Xemacs are as much political as technical - but does it not make sense to try to branch off 2 versions of emacs into the 2 guis?
I started out making a joke post, but the more I think of it, the cooler i think Kemacs would be
From their FAQ:
Will it work indoors?
Yes. The Personal Location System incorporates enhanced GPS technology, which enables it to obtain location information indoors as well as outdoors.
Either I've missed out on some pretty impressive new developments with GPS, or this company are talking out of their a***. My experience with the GPS device I bought less than 6 months ago is that the only time it works indoors is when you happen to be leaning out the window and there aren't any tall buildings across the street.
But the reality is that internet radio stations have the worst of both worlds - all of the problems of radio and of internet startups.
...)
I'm not sure I agree with that. The main problem that internet startups have is how to make money. Commercial radio stations have a well established model for this (advertising) which should be the same for internet radio. Also, they have the ease of startup that an internet company has.
So, internet radio stations are less available than AM/FM ones.
Granted, it's easier to turn on a radio, than it is to turn on, log-in and access an internet radio site. However, the potential coverage of internet radio is the whole planet, not just your local city. (e.g. I'm a Brit living in Taiwan - there's only 1 way I can listen to UK music stations
However, what CARP is doing is slapping a huge fee on internet radio stations that isn't imposed on traditional radio stations. This changes a sensible business model into a big loss-maker. Note that because the fee is per listener, I would imagine it would shut down small & large radio stations alike.
From the article:
...
The law of gravity is one of science's most sacrosanct principles; any breaching of its walls would represent a major threat to the current theoretical framework.
Really? One of the few things I can remember from my Physics courses at school is that noone understands why gravitation mass is the same as intertial mass. The closest anyone's got to an explanation is Einstein with his Equivalence Principle, but even this seems a bit woolly (only works in a uniform gravitational field). So there are still aspects of mass (and so gravity) that are not fully understood.
Of course, this experiment sounds rather dodgy, and it's unclear from the article what they're measuring. Got me wondering though
Does it strike anyone else as strange that the Linux kernel is still run by a small monarchy?
...
...
More a meritocracy than monarchy (i.e. if you prove you're good enough you get the power) - in this case Marcello proved that he was technically competent and so was given the responsibility of maintaining the kernel.
Of course the difficulty with any meritocracy is who decides your "merit". Unsurprisingly in this case (as in most cases) it's the ones in power (i.e. Linus & Alan). Thus whether it is a true meritocracy or not depends on the abilities of those leaders to pick out the best contributors
Still, it seems to me that this leads to a lack of internal competition in a very important area of overall systems development, which can't be a Good Thing (tm); consider how much KDE and GNOME
Surely you're arguing for external competition? In which case, that nice Mr. Gates seems to putting up a decent fight. And internally there are several branches of the kernel floating around, and the major Linux companies often seem to bundle their own version of the kernel.
However, I agree with your central point that Linux does still rely heavily on one man. What happens when he stops running the show is an interesting question
In an attempt to answer all the 'why not just use Linux?' questions, have a look at the man's explanation of it.
... :-)
Basically, Linux wasn't around when Hurd was started, and they believe it is different enough to complete/compete despite the grand rise of Linux. (Remarkably honest & non-political notes by RMS)
Good luck to them - i hope it succeeds (we can't have Linux becoming a monopoly
The first & most concrete recommendation in this report is:
...
1. Make Open Standards a non-negotiable base for ICT in the Public Sector.
This is interesting, because it stops tie-in to one company - without having to mandate open source. So, no use of MS Word for publishing documents
However, if you're proposing to use an open standard for e.g. word processing, what do you choose? HTML is fine for publishing, RTF is too basic for complex documents. Is there actually an open, widely accepted WP standard which you could use? Or are they only mandating open standards for publication and not for internal use (given that the report was written in Word this is possible)?
Is this the only current device using Midori Linux?
It's all gone rather quite since Midori first was announced last year - and the In Use page on their website has only 2 broken links and this device.
It seems a bit odd that they seem to be ignoring the (large) potential PDA & Mobile phone market in favour of webpads.
Incidentally, the Familiar Project is chugging along quite nicely producing a decent Linux PDA OS (for the iPaq only ATM)
Surely, if you're considering a grant Larry is going to be the first name on the list!
...
It seems a bit like a Linux foundation (is there one?) giving money to Alan Cox & Marcelo Tosatti and then as an afterthought letting Linus Torvalds in on the party
... and then goes on to mention the 6 new bugs introduced with this.
Not meant as flamebait, but I think i'll wait for 1.0 all the same.