I tried a Zaurus at LinuxWorld and really wanted to buy it. It was on sale for $299, and my wife was standing next to me. My wife said, "Buy it if you want it." But I just couldn't.
After ten minutes of futzing, I couldn't type on it. I have small hands, and I use a Motorola T900, which has a tiny keyboard too, but there's a big difference in usability between them, and even though it was clear that day that the Zaurus would have a superior wireless solution, better apps, and the coolness factor of opening up an xterm (qtterm?), I just couldn't buy it.
My fingers even actually hurt from trying to reach the number keys, which are sandwiched about 2 millimeters away from the edge and almost impossible to press. The keys themselves are oddly peg-shaped, uncomforably to press, and reminded me of the Commodore PET and the TI 99/4 chiclets.
Sharp, please benchmark against the T900 and Blackberry and try to make the keyboard more usable on the next version.
I wonder if it's really legal to have votes counted by a machine that has secret software inside that voters are not allowed to examine?
Chris Riggall, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office, attributed the problems to errors by poll workers, a glitch in the Windows operating system that runs the machines...
Shouldn't voters in Georgia be able to file an FOI request to find out what's happening to their votes?
Yeah, I once had an NTFS partition go south because of a disk driver/chipset problem. NT refused to touch it (refused to mount it because it had errors; various utilities gave up). So I took the disk out and stuck it in a RedHat system, but I had to recompile the kernel to turn on NTFS reading. It worked great -- I was able to recover various important files. Of course, I had to reboot a lot, because once I touched a bad part, it would hang.
A long time ago I worked at a small software company that sold eductional software to schools, for the Apple ][ and similar computers. Schools classified computers as A/V, which meant they went in the library, which meant the librarian cataloged software, which meant that we got back a lot of 5" floppies with library cards stapled to them.
How did they assemble the bases? Not with tiny tweezers. They use chemicals called "reagents" that are complex, and to my understanding biologically derived.
I can understand that the virus was created from scratch in the sense they it didn't come from mammalian cell infected by another polio virus, but my guess is that it is not from scratch in the sense of making a biological thing out of stuff from a chemistry set, because the "reagents" used in the process almost certainly had biological origin in their manufacturing.
Can someone familiar with the process comment on the source of the reagents?
I'm saying that people use the well-known stratum 1 servers in the.gov and.ca domains because they're easy to find and it's hard to find more local ones, and the infrastructure isn't as well populated as it is for popular services. In other words, I'm focused on the public policy issue.
You're saying that I've been rude to my ISP (Megapath, by the way, similar in level of technical and customer support to your current ISP, speakeasy), and that I don't understand what "asking means." Fair enough -- I used my recent experience as an example. But I myself am not the point -- the point is the 23 million other high-speed Internet users in the US and more in other countries. There's no clear support for them, even though there is simple support for time servers in all recent versions of Windows, MacOS, and Linux. If my case upsets you, you can send mail to Megapath for me. But please do it for 23 million other people as well.
That's exactly my point. ISPs adverise their SMTP and POP3 servers, and contract out for NNTP often. But they don't offer time services as a matter of course, so people are left to scrounge.
If ISPs offered time services, would Windows XP and Mac OS X default to pointing at Microsoft and Apple's time servers, respectively?
And yes, I've run ntptrace on my ISP, which is very technically savvy, and there are no time servers in the routing chain. Sure, they have some somewhere, but they're not advertising them to their customers.
It does appear, though, that cable modem folks are better, since the router one up gave stratum 2 time!
Except that ISPs rarely provide time servers and the stratum 2 servers all have "Don't use us without permission" disclaimers. The delegation system is broken; there's no incentive to provide new stratum 2 servers and no incentive for end users not to use stratum 1 since they're readily accessible and well-known. Try reading the UDEL howto; it gives a list of stratum 2 servers and almost all of them have dire warnings about not using them without prior notification.
Anybody remember who finally fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who was investigating Nixon?
Turns out, it was a 25-year-old named...Robert Bork, who was famously rejected for supreme court in 1987 and hired by Netscape in 1998 to lobby their case!
See a Dr. Dobbs Journal reprint from 1998 for geek-friendly history.
I run a photography website (actually, one of the first photography websites), Graflex.org.
Lucas used a Graflex flashgun to make the light sabre prop, and as a result photographers and camera collectors have seen prices rise absurdly, now to hundreds of dollars for old flashbulb equipment that used to be available for $5-$15.
And furthermore, some of the folks who buy them are belligerent and abusive. I guess if they think you can become a millionaire, I understand now.
The Active Badges themselves were made by Olivetti, I believe. They operated on an IR-based system, so if you didn't want someone to know where you were, you could just put in your pocket and point the LED towards your leg, or something similar.
Here is a pretty map of the US. The dots are phone company offices (CO's), green ones with DSL equiment and red ones without DSL equipment.
The dots are 1 pixel, and the map is 1000 pixels wide. The US is about 3000 miles wide; therefore the dots are about 3 miles, which is coincidentally the same as the region of service for DSL around the dot.
So in order to get DSL -- now or sometime in the future -- you have to actually live on one of the colored dots on the map.
If you live on a green dot, you can get DSL.
If you live on a red dot, you can't get DSL today, but could if they installed the equipment.
If you don't live on one of the dots, you cannot get DSL ever, unless the phone company builds a new building or puts in a repeater.
Here is DSL Reports (scant) commentary on the image.
When I was a kid, I had a set of encyclopedias of the sort that were parodied in Science Made Stupid a wonderful book if you don't have it.
Anyway, one illustration that stuck with me was a drawing of a man at home at a desk, reading a book. In the background are baseboard radiators with little squiggly lines coming out of them. The caption reads "In the future we will save energy in home heating by using microwave radiation to heat, people but not the furniture." This article on microwave lighting reminds me a little of that picture.
I have a Motorola T900 which uses Motorola ReFlex, which is a reliable, economical service.
The T900 is way cheaper than a Blackberry (~$49 vs. ~$399) and cheaper service (~$19 vs ~$39). It has a keyboard and a 4-line display and is about the size of the smaller Blackberry, but thicker as it folds. Plus it comes in colors other than black.
It works great. There are some dead areas in town, but it picks up the messages when you come back into service because it polls for messages, so it works quite reliably. Based on the polling response, it lets you know on the display whether it can receive messages, send messages as well, or has no service. It calls the latter situation "Storing Messgaes", and in fact, I went on vacation and when I got back to the US, it buzzed me with messages when I got off the plane!
I think TigerDirect has them for $49, or maybe Radio Shack. There are a variety of services plans: Arch Wireless, Verizon. I use a WebLink Wireless plan which was my only option when I bought the T900 from Motorola (who directed me to Positive.com. It's $19.95/mo for 100K bytes.)
The CPIA driver works fine with it for Linux, for viewing. Unfortunately, the code to turn the lights off and on has been commented out of the driver due to a buffer overflow.
I've got it running with the RedHat 7.3. I had to merge the driver from http://webcam.sourceforge.net with the drivers in the kernel source and recompile. I tried compiling the driver outside the tree but got bit by a bug in USB link ordering. Once you apply the updates you'll be able to use simple command-line statements to turn the lights off and on.
If you're going to try these patches on RedHat 7.2 or on some other Linux distribution, you'll have to merge the driver on http://webcam.sourceforge.net with your distributions's driver yourself.
Of course, the best thing would be for the webcam.sourceforge.net people and the kernel people to resolve their differences and get the write code for/proc/cpia enabled. Until then, turning the lights on under Linux will be a DIY project.
Black computers are new and hip; black pagers not
on
Black Is The New Beige
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When George Fisher, the outgoing president of Motorola went to Kodak to help lead their "digital revolution," he was asked by the press what lesson he was taking. He said roughly, "For a technologist it was humbling to realize that you could triple the sales of a pager just by offering it colors other than black."
Under the upcoming regulation only one electric device will be authorized for wear on the uniform in the performance of official duties. The device may be either a cell phone or pager -- not both. The device must be black and may not exceed 4 x 2 x 1 inches.
So, while black may be the cool new color for computers, it's long since passe for pagers and cell phones, and in fact has become military-conservative.
The insidious thing about this bug is that it breaks your security model. When you press back, the page you go back to is run in the security zone of the page you go back from. So, even if block "everything" in the "Internet Zone" site, if the next page you visit is in your trusted zone and you press the back button, it will run ActiveX controls or pop up or whatever bells and whistles are allowed on the page you came from.
Furthermore, note that Internet Explorer error pages (such a 404 Page Not Found) are automatically in the trusted zone. So, for you to be safe with your current policy, you need to do the following as well:
Avoid the back button from trusted pages
Don't click on broken links or anything else that gets an error page
I could write this description myself but I found it at the conference notes on Web History Day:
Pioneering Software and sites. It gives a flavor of System 33, which I used at PARC in 1989 and was in development before that. It also talks about other pre-WWW technologies such as Brewster Kahle's WAIS, etc. It's good to get some sense of this recent history.
Larry Masinter
Xerox PARC
The Web Before the Web: System 33
In the late 80s Mark Weiser, Steve Putz, and others at Xerox PARC developed System 33, which foreshadowed some of the Web's multiple document format capabilities. This document sharing system let users interactively exchange documents of different sorts over a network, with format conversion on the fly. Tim Berners-Lee visited PARC in 1992, and incorporated some of System 33's ideas into later Web specifications. A 23-minute videotape about System 33 and its format capabilities will be shown.
As René Magritte alluded in "The Betrayal of Images," emulations blur the boundaries between hardware and software.
My box is a PDP-11 because all it needs to operate is a co-processor that provides power and I/O (display and keyboard) via the ubiquitous 4-pin USB connector.
My PDP-11 will boot and keep its state in its file system and run the same on any Mac, Windows PC or Linux PC.
My PDP-11 is similar to those who claim that their TRS-80 or PIC is a web server -- the near ubiquity of other computers with RS232 on one siade and connectivity to the Internet on the other is what makes those feats possible.
My PDP-11 just requires a little more of its co-processor, but requiring a co-processor for operation is not new (DEC's PDP-10 systems usually had a PDP-11 front-end providing keyboard and display functions).
Given that simh will run on just about any modern computer with a USB port, in some deep sense my PDP-11 is in fact not dependent on the co-processor for its identity or functionality.
And yes, there is a disk pack there, but it's inside the PDP-11. And there's even a RL driver for it, written in 11 code.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried a Zaurus at LinuxWorld and really wanted to buy it. It was on sale for $299, and my wife was standing next to me.
My wife said, "Buy it if you want it." But I just couldn't.
After ten minutes of futzing, I couldn't type on it. I have small hands, and I use a Motorola T900, which has a tiny keyboard too, but there's a big difference in usability between them, and even though it was clear that day that the Zaurus would have a superior wireless solution, better apps, and the coolness factor of opening up an xterm (qtterm?), I just couldn't buy it.
My fingers even actually hurt from trying to reach the number keys, which are sandwiched about 2 millimeters away from the edge and almost impossible to press. The keys themselves are oddly peg-shaped, uncomforably to press, and reminded me of the Commodore PET and the TI 99/4 chiclets.
Sharp, please benchmark against the T900 and Blackberry and try to make the keyboard more usable on the next version.
I wonder if it's really legal to have votes counted by a machine that has secret software inside that voters are not allowed to examine?
Shouldn't voters in Georgia be able to file an FOI request to find out what's happening to their votes?
I know because aletheiometer never lies. See p.69, The Subtle Knife.
Yeah, I once had an NTFS partition go south because of a disk driver/chipset problem. NT refused to touch it (refused to mount it because it had errors; various utilities gave up). So I took the disk out and stuck it in a RedHat system, but I had to recompile the kernel to turn on NTFS reading. It worked great -- I was able to recover various important files. Of course, I had to reboot a lot, because once I touched a bad part, it would hang.
Actually, there are some PIC 18 series microcontrollers with 128KB Flash now.
A long time ago I worked at a small software company that sold eductional software to schools, for the Apple ][ and similar computers. Schools classified computers as A/V, which meant they went in the library, which meant the librarian cataloged software, which meant that we got back a lot of 5" floppies with library cards stapled to them.
How did they assemble the bases? Not with tiny tweezers. They use chemicals called "reagents" that are complex, and to my understanding biologically derived.
I can understand that the virus was created from scratch in the sense they it didn't come from mammalian cell infected by another polio virus, but my guess is that it is not from scratch in the sense of making a biological thing out of stuff from a chemistry set, because the "reagents" used in the process almost certainly had biological origin in their manufacturing.
Can someone familiar with the process comment on the source of the reagents?
I think we're talking past each other.
.gov and .ca domains because they're easy to find and it's hard to find more local ones, and the infrastructure isn't as well populated as it is for popular services. In other words, I'm focused on the public policy issue.
I'm saying that people use the well-known stratum 1 servers in the
You're saying that I've been rude to my ISP (Megapath, by the way, similar in level of technical and customer support to your current ISP, speakeasy), and that I don't understand what "asking means." Fair enough -- I used my recent experience as an example. But I myself am not the point -- the point is the 23 million other high-speed Internet users in the US and more in other countries. There's no clear support for them, even though there is simple support for time servers in all recent versions of Windows, MacOS, and Linux. If my case upsets you, you can send mail to Megapath for me. But please do it for 23 million other people as well.
That's exactly my point. ISPs adverise their SMTP and POP3 servers, and contract out for NNTP often. But they don't offer time services as a matter of course, so people are left to scrounge.
If ISPs offered time services, would Windows XP and Mac OS X default to pointing at Microsoft and Apple's time servers, respectively?
And yes, I've run ntptrace on my ISP, which is very technically savvy, and there are no time servers in the routing chain. Sure, they have some somewhere, but they're not advertising them to their customers.
It does appear, though, that cable modem folks are better, since the router one up gave stratum 2 time!
Except that ISPs rarely provide time servers and the stratum 2 servers all have "Don't use us without permission" disclaimers. The delegation system is broken; there's no incentive to provide new stratum 2 servers and no incentive for end users not to use stratum 1 since they're readily accessible and well-known. Try reading the UDEL howto; it gives a list of stratum 2 servers and almost all of them have dire warnings about not using them without prior notification.
Anybody remember who finally fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who was investigating Nixon?
Turns out, it was a 25-year-old named...Robert Bork, who was famously rejected for supreme court in 1987 and hired by Netscape in 1998 to lobby their case!
See a Dr. Dobbs Journal reprint from 1998 for geek-friendly history.
I run a photography website (actually, one of the first photography websites), Graflex.org.
Lucas used a Graflex flashgun to make the light sabre prop, and as a result photographers and camera collectors have seen prices rise absurdly, now to hundreds of dollars for old flashbulb equipment that used to be available for $5-$15.
And furthermore, some of the folks who buy them are belligerent and abusive. I guess if they think you can become a millionaire, I understand now.
Linux Books on WalMart.com
The Active Badges themselves were made by Olivetti, I believe. They operated on an IR-based system, so if you didn't want someone to know where you were, you could just put in your pocket and point the LED towards your leg, or something similar.
The social aspects were explicitly explored, and left a legacy of awareness at PARC. For example, see "Challenge Five: Social Implications of Aware Home Technologies" in At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges W. Keith Edwards and Rebecca E. Grinter.
Here is a pretty map of the US. The dots are phone company offices (CO's), green ones with DSL equiment and red ones without DSL equipment.
The dots are 1 pixel, and the map is 1000 pixels wide. The US is about 3000 miles wide; therefore the dots are about 3 miles, which is coincidentally the same as the region of service for DSL around the dot.
Here is DSL Reports (scant) commentary on the image.
When I was a kid, I had a set of encyclopedias of the sort that were parodied in Science Made Stupid a wonderful book if you don't have it.
Anyway, one illustration that stuck with me was a drawing of a man at home at a desk, reading a book. In the background are baseboard radiators with little squiggly lines coming out of them. The caption reads "In the future we will save energy in home heating by using microwave radiation to heat, people but not the furniture." This article on microwave lighting reminds me a little of that picture.
I have a Motorola T900 which uses Motorola ReFlex, which is a reliable, economical service. The T900 is way cheaper than a Blackberry (~$49 vs. ~$399) and cheaper service (~$19 vs ~$39). It has a keyboard and a 4-line display and is about the size of the smaller Blackberry, but thicker as it folds. Plus it comes in colors other than black.
It works great. There are some dead areas in town, but it picks up the messages when you come back into service because it polls for messages, so it works quite reliably. Based on the polling response, it lets you know on the display whether it can receive messages, send messages as well, or has no service. It calls the latter situation "Storing Messgaes", and in fact, I went on vacation and when I got back to the US, it buzzed me with messages when I got off the plane!
I think TigerDirect has them for $49, or maybe Radio Shack. There are a variety of services plans: Arch Wireless, Verizon. I use a WebLink Wireless plan which was my only option when I bought the T900 from Motorola (who directed me to Positive.com. It's $19.95/mo for 100K bytes.)
The CPIA driver works fine with it for Linux, for viewing. Unfortunately, the code to turn the lights off and on has been commented out of the driver due to a buffer overflow.
I've got it running with the RedHat 7.3. I had to merge the driver from http://webcam.sourceforge.net with the drivers in the kernel source and recompile. I tried compiling the driver outside the tree but got bit by a bug in USB link ordering. Once you apply the updates you'll be able to use simple command-line statements to turn the lights off and on.
If you're going to try these patches on RedHat 7.2 or on some other Linux distribution, you'll have to merge the driver on http://webcam.sourceforge.net with your distributions's driver yourself.
For my code and images, see http://graflex.org/klotz/qx3.
Of course, the best thing would be for the webcam.sourceforge.net people and the kernel people to resolve their differences and get the write code for /proc/cpia enabled. Until then, turning the lights on under Linux will be a DIY project.
When George Fisher, the outgoing president of Motorola went to Kodak to help lead their "digital revolution," he was asked by the press what lesson he was taking. He said roughly, "For a technologist it was humbling to realize that you could triple the sales of a pager just by offering it colors other than black."
Unfortunately, the US Military disagrees:
So, while black may be the cool new color for computers, it's long since passe for pagers and cell phones, and in fact has become military-conservative.
Perhaps it's this link (product) instead of this broken link...
Unfortunately, you are vulnerable to this one.
The insidious thing about this bug is that it breaks your security model. When you press back, the page you go back to is run in the security zone of the page you go back from. So, even if block "everything" in the "Internet Zone" site, if the next page you visit is in your trusted zone and you press the back button, it will run ActiveX controls or pop up or whatever bells and whistles are allowed on the page you came from.
Furthermore, note that Internet Explorer error pages (such a 404 Page Not Found) are automatically in the trusted zone. So, for you to be safe with your current policy, you need to do the following as well:
As René Magritte alluded in "The Betrayal of Images," emulations blur the boundaries between hardware and software.
- My box is a PDP-11 because all it needs to operate is a co-processor that provides power and I/O (display and keyboard) via the ubiquitous 4-pin USB connector.
- My PDP-11 will boot and keep its state in its file system and run the same on any Mac, Windows PC or Linux PC.
- My PDP-11 is similar to those who claim that their TRS-80 or PIC is a web server -- the near ubiquity of other computers with RS232 on one siade and connectivity to the Internet on the other is what makes those feats possible.
- My PDP-11 just requires a little more of its co-processor, but requiring a co-processor for operation is not new (DEC's PDP-10 systems usually had a PDP-11 front-end providing keyboard and display functions).
Given that simh will run on just about any modern computer with a USB port, in some deep sense my PDP-11 is in fact not dependent on the co-processor for its identity or functionality.And yes, there is a disk pack there, but it's inside the PDP-11. And there's even a RL driver for it, written in 11 code.
Remember them? I think we're all still using them in our GPS satellites.
The radiation-hardened 1802 was the de facto standard for satellites and other spacecraft for years.
See the House Subcommittee report on Y2K in Orbit: Impact on Satellites and the Global Positioning System which states: