The net, as originally designed by the government, was supposed to be extremely fault tolerant. Packets going from point A to point B would travel by any number of paths, and were reassembled at the other end. That was the dream, and for a while, that's exactly how it was.
Too bad we woke up.
Nowadays, as I'm certain every person reading this has experienced, if a single router goes down somewhere in the path, you are completely cut off from that machine. It doesn't matter that your ISP has a dozen peering arrangements, because the routing tables on the machines are static. They say "The shortest path to machine x.x.x.x is by gateway y.y.y.y, and I don't care if no packets are getting through on that path, that's the path you take."
It may be that you could get through if you used your ricochet or (worse yet) telnetted to another machine to force a new path around the problem, but until someone manually updated the routing table of an upstream machine, or the router is fixed, you're screwed.
This problem is doubled by the fact that the 'chosen' path from machine x to machine y can easily be very different than the path back from y to x, doubling the single points of failure.
When darpa-net was designed, it was with the intention of providing a system that would still be effective even if 80% of the nodes were knocked out or otherwise severed in a nuclear attack.
Now a doink with a backhoe can knock out a million users.
If I buy a domain, build a brand, and years later someone else comes along, gets VC funding, build a bigger brand (or say, Nike launches the 'Fury' sub-brand of shoe and pours millions into marketing) then is my name forfeit because they got more popular faster?
I realize this isn't the issue in the Sting case because Sting predated the web, but where is the line drawn?
People shouldn't confuse these things with trademark disputes. the trademark namespace allows for identical trademarks in non-competing industries. To say that Sting should have sting.com because of a trademark issue is saying that Sting in an Internet Company, and has a trademark related to that internet company.
for example, I could market a brand of skateboards called Trix, but I couldn't market a cereal called Trix, because that would conflict. Similarly, it isn't right to say that marketing a web site called sting.com is conflicting with an artist called Sting.
Back in November of '93 Apple actually had workingprototype units of 'tabletized' Powerbook Duos. They got to the hardware seed phase, but pulled back when the press was having a field day with Newton's handwriting recognition.
The recognition actually imporved a great deal with NewtonOS 2.0, not that the world cared or took the time to notice. Now that other PDAs have failed similarly in 'off the shelf' recognition, and rely on letter-by-letter (Graffiti) or keyboard entry, the average consumer accepts that handwriting recognition isn't effortless and is prepared to learn a little to make it work better.
I'm just sad that it took so long to get to this point. I wonder if they'll bring back the Newton in another 5 years...
After all, someone's already registered www.gordonsumner.com specifically for the artist currently known as Sting. All he has to do is ask for it. (And, considering the bathtub pic on the sites' splash page, I'd suggest he do it now.)
Okay, I don't usually post "This is really cool" replies, but thisis really cool.
Basically, the camera itself adheres to the memory stick spec, and the camera itself has a Memory Stick Duo slot, for removable image storage. So you can stick the Duo mem card into the camera, and the camera into your sony pilot, and the pony pilot on the cradle, hooked to your PC, hooked to the net.
I'll wait for the Duo camera, that'll use microdots for image storage...
'Sting' isn't even his given name. It's a nickname he picked up as a young upstart musician. It'd hardly be fair (as if anything in the WIPO is fair) for them to take away one person's domain because it's the same as a word someone else decided to call themselves.
Next you'd have people changing their legal names just so they could get coveted domain names. Maybe that was Yahoo Serious's plan all along!
Almost two years ago, when the RIAA sued to keep Diamond from releasing the Rio, the RIAA was granted a temporary injunction preventing Diamond from selling Rios while the trial was on, with the caveat that if the court should find in Diamond's favor, the RIAA would have to compensate Diamond for lost sales during that period.
Well, the RIAA did lose, and had to pay $2 million for postponing the Rio's release by three weeks.
Does anyone know if a similar arrangement is in place here? I'd be curious to know what Napster makes in a month...
OK, your party of six characters (the Jedi, the Wookiee, the Smuggler, the Princess, the Yappy Droid, and the Short Droid) walks into a 10" x 10" room.
How on Earth (or Alderran) would six characters fit into a 10" by 10" room? The thing's less than a cubic foot!
Then again, I guess it makes sense if the game is being played on (in?) a G4 cube (or a Cobalt qube, if they port it to linux).
Suddenly my mind is full of analogies from the G4 cube to the Borg cube to the death star to... a perfectly spherical desktop computer, with a divot on one side for stability?
Surviving in a hard vacuum and radiation is one thing, but surviving a re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere is quite another.
Not to mention the state the artifact must have been in when it was ejected from Mars in the first place. As I understand it, the theory is that significant meteor strikes on Mars can propel martian fragments outside of its gravity well. From all I've read about meteor strikes on Earth, any 'shrapnel' from a blast that large is molten rock when it ejects.
So the real question is: Can microbial life survive a molten host environment, then frozen, irradiated, and exposed to a hard vacuum (the microbes on the exterior, that is), then heated to near-molten levels again when it reenters the atmosphere? If so, we'd better not go to Io!
Let me warn you right now: stereoscopic vision is not the future.
Uh, oh. I guess I'd better pluck one of my eyes out then! We (most of us, anyhow) do have two eyes, and used in conjunction, that is stereoscopic vision.
As for making it work well, any raver can tell you that, done correctly, stereophonic sound can actually disorient and make you dizzy, and we only get 10% of our sensory information from our ears. Naturally, goggles simply have to be made better.
There's a huge difference between stereo goggles and a stereoscopic display. The goggles have to make sure that the horizon and field of vision changes in realtime with the movement of your head. A 3D monitor or movie takes care of that automatically: You tilt your head, the image tilts. Not so with goggles, where you 'take the image with you.'
So while with current technology goggles may be disorienting, it's only a matter of time before the precision is there to 'fool' the senses into playing along. As for non-immersive displays, well, there's no problem.
A big part of the problem is that the country with the most internet usage, the United States, doesn't have a country domain that works like others do. Arguments about registering in your own country are fine in theory, but while you can get corinthian.com.br or corinthian.co.uk or corinthian.co.ca, you can't get corinthian.com.us. You'd have to all the way down to the city level and get corinthian.desmoines.ia.us, which negates the brandbuilding value for companies that operate nationwide.
com, net, edu and the like used to imply US, so that the.us domain followed a geographic model. Now that that doesn't hold true and international companies and individuals are eschewing their local country domains for a TLD, companies and individuals in the US are at a disadvantage.
Just because Apple Garamond is available doesn't mean they used it in the picture. The point I raised was that they used Adobe Garamond in the pic. The fact that Apple Garamond is available just means they did an even shoddier job than they could have.
The Gap, which used to imply 'the generation gap' now plays of the 'sociological gap.' Folks in hicksville flock to the Gap because they think it's what all the cool urbanites wear. Cityfolk like the gap because (aside from the 'tech-vest debacle') in general it typifies a laid-back, more rural feel.
Coca-Cola gets its brand recognition by reaching into every crevice (figurativly) and not letting any child in an impoverished nation grow to the age of 6 without recognizing the logo. What's more, since we first-worlders are so saturated by the logo, Coca-Cola resorts to showing us impoverished third-world children experiencing Coke for the first time, so that we can get that otherwise unattainable vicarious thrill of our first Coke.
I wonder if Microsoft will adopt this strategy. A hotmail linkup in every village, a 'newbie of the week' using one of Hotmail's many security holes to let users read a Laotian girl's first emails to the world-at-large? Will they have the audacity to brand MicrosoftOps as the "choice of a new generation"?
It can't be long until the commercial where we see the Berber family in their adobe room touch a button, hear the chime of Win2K booting and sigh, for they can feel all their troubles slip away, for now they have a night light...
Looking at the cube picture, it appears that there are two ridges on the top to facilitate stacking. This presents two problems:
First, how can you get DVDs in or out of a stacked cube? This of course is assuming there's a DVD slot tucked near one of those plastic ridges.
Second, is this some sort of 'in-series' ventalation? With three stacked macs, the same air would chimney through three machines!
Other points:
The power button (the 'third screw') would never be on the top of a machine.
The font used in the picture is a variant of Adobe Garamond, and is slightly shorter than Apple Garamond.
One of the ideals of the new Apple aesthetic is no hard lines, yet this has hard lines on thp and bottom.
A true Apple product would have the Apple logo on the sides as well.
It looks like a lucite office trash can turned upside down and apple-ified.
I bet there will be an Apple Cube, and I bet it'll be released tomorrow. It's right in line with Fred's comments today that iMac sales are getting flat. I just think it'll look more like the earlier sketches with the contrary handles and front-faced design.
BTW, I have a mirror for this pic and the 17" CRT, which is beautiful and I wish is real, but I fear isn't bulbous enough to be legit.
And why would the senator use his mutant power...he was ashamed of it...plus he gave a death speech to Storm, i dont think it was faked.
Actually, if you get a chance to watch the movie again, the senator's speech said something about Storm not trusting normal humans, but now "there's one less for you to worry about." which could easily go either way. The whole thing, the jellyfish on the beach, Xavier's comment to Storm, "Are you sure about what you saw." the ambiguous death speech, the fact that nobody actually says what the senator's power is, just that we see him squeeze through bars and generally look bloated, seems to be a really big clue-in that all isn't as it seems.
You missed something, didnt you? Well, maybe you wer pissing when the senator melted, but the mutation thing doesnt just mutate people, because their bodies reject it and they die....to death. And the munants aren't affected. All humans dead=peace among mutants. The fatal flaw is in your understanding.
Huh? So you're saying that Magneto planned on convincing the world that Mutants are people too by killing all the world's leaders?
Or are you saying that he planned to kill all 'normal' humans? If that's it, then you're the one who was on a pee-break when they talked about the range of the device, and that Rogue would die from it, so it was a one-shot deal.
Besides, all this is based on the assumptionthat Xavier was right, and the senator is dead. I think it's just his superpower showing through.
If I were a world leader known to be a mutant, I'd still push for the identification and registration of mutants, because after all, everyone knows I'm a mutant already.
I just think that a world leader suddenly given mutant powers would behave like a world leader given a nuclear weapon. Just because he was given one doesn't mean he's suddenly okay with everyone else having one.
1) I didn't get that the x-men knew more about the device's range than Magneto did. how do they have more information on it than he does?
2) Given your point, I didn't see how making all the world leaders into mutants would protect them from persecution. After all, in tyrannical governments, the leader usually has means and power beyond those of the populace, but uses that power to put down others who might threaten him. Giving world leaders superpowers is giving them another weapon to use against their enemies, justifying the public's view that mutants are malicious abusers of power.
3) I don't think the device kills anyone. Senator Kelly turned to water, but I think that was his superpower. Again, the 'good' X-Men are taking one example (Kelly's transformation) and extrapolating it into a certainty (Everyone who is exposed will die). Something tells me Magneto has tested this machine before using it on Kelly...
Before he walked onto the beach there was a kid poking at a jellyfish. When Kelly 'died' he turned to jelly, then water. I think he's just a different kind of mutant, going through the same adjustment process every mutant does when their powers emerge. We thought he was plasticman, but I think he's more like the boy wondertwin. Kevin Fox
What this system needs is a challenge-response system like a smart card.
The computer should send a key to the mouse, the mouse hashes the biometric data, then hashes it again with the key. As long as both hashes are one-way, this would ensure that tapping data between the mouse and cpu would be worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
The net, as originally designed by the government, was supposed to be extremely fault tolerant. Packets going from point A to point B would travel by any number of paths, and were reassembled at the other end. That was the dream, and for a while, that's exactly how it was.
Too bad we woke up.
Nowadays, as I'm certain every person reading this has experienced, if a single router goes down somewhere in the path, you are completely cut off from that machine. It doesn't matter that your ISP has a dozen peering arrangements, because the routing tables on the machines are static. They say "The shortest path to machine x.x.x.x is by gateway y.y.y.y, and I don't care if no packets are getting through on that path, that's the path you take."
It may be that you could get through if you used your ricochet or (worse yet) telnetted to another machine to force a new path around the problem, but until someone manually updated the routing table of an upstream machine, or the router is fixed, you're screwed.
This problem is doubled by the fact that the 'chosen' path from machine x to machine y can easily be very different than the path back from y to x, doubling the single points of failure.
When darpa-net was designed, it was with the intention of providing a system that would still be effective even if 80% of the nodes were knocked out or otherwise severed in a nuclear attack.
Now a doink with a backhoe can knock out a million users.
Kevin Fox
So to play devil's advocate:
If I buy a domain, build a brand, and years later someone else comes along, gets VC funding, build a bigger brand (or say, Nike launches the 'Fury' sub-brand of shoe and pours millions into marketing) then is my name forfeit because they got more popular faster?
I realize this isn't the issue in the Sting case because Sting predated the web, but where is the line drawn?
People shouldn't confuse these things with trademark disputes. the trademark namespace allows for identical trademarks in non-competing industries. To say that Sting should have sting.com because of a trademark issue is saying that Sting in an Internet Company, and has a trademark related to that internet company.
for example, I could market a brand of skateboards called Trix, but I couldn't market a cereal called Trix, because that would conflict. Similarly, it isn't right to say that marketing a web site called sting.com is conflicting with an artist called Sting.
Kevin Fox
Back in November of '93 Apple actually had workingprototype units of 'tabletized' Powerbook Duos. They got to the hardware seed phase, but pulled back when the press was having a field day with Newton's handwriting recognition.
The recognition actually imporved a great deal with NewtonOS 2.0, not that the world cared or took the time to notice. Now that other PDAs have failed similarly in 'off the shelf' recognition, and rely on letter-by-letter (Graffiti) or keyboard entry, the average consumer accepts that handwriting recognition isn't effortless and is prepared to learn a little to make it work better.
I'm just sad that it took so long to get to this point. I wonder if they'll bring back the Newton in another 5 years...
Kevin Fox
After all, someone's already registered www.gordonsumner.com specifically for the artist currently known as Sting. All he has to do is ask for it. (And, considering the bathtub pic on the sites' splash page, I'd suggest he do it now.)
Kevin Fox
Are you implying Yahoo Serious isn't a brand name???
Seriously, considering today's haphazard WIPO rulings, I bet Yahoo would give Mr. Serious 5 million dollars just to go away.
Kevin Fox
Okay, I don't usually post "This is really cool" replies, but thisis really cool.
Basically, the camera itself adheres to the memory stick spec, and the camera itself has a Memory Stick Duo slot, for removable image storage. So you can stick the Duo mem card into the camera, and the camera into your sony pilot, and the pony pilot on the cradle, hooked to your PC, hooked to the net.
I'll wait for the Duo camera, that'll use microdots for image storage...
Kevin Fox
'Sting' isn't even his given name. It's a nickname he picked up as a young upstart musician. It'd hardly be fair (as if anything in the WIPO is fair) for them to take away one person's domain because it's the same as a word someone else decided to call themselves.
Next you'd have people changing their legal names just so they could get coveted domain names. Maybe that was Yahoo Serious's plan all along!
Kevin Fox
Almost two years ago, when the RIAA sued to keep Diamond from releasing the Rio, the RIAA was granted a temporary injunction preventing Diamond from selling Rios while the trial was on, with the caveat that if the court should find in Diamond's favor, the RIAA would have to compensate Diamond for lost sales during that period.
Well, the RIAA did lose, and had to pay $2 million for postponing the Rio's release by three weeks.
Does anyone know if a similar arrangement is in place here? I'd be curious to know what Napster makes in a month...
Kevin Fox
OK, your party of six characters (the Jedi, the Wookiee, the Smuggler, the Princess, the Yappy Droid, and the Short Droid) walks into a 10" x 10" room.
How on Earth (or Alderran) would six characters fit into a 10" by 10" room? The thing's less than a cubic foot!
Then again, I guess it makes sense if the game is being played on (in?) a G4 cube (or a Cobalt qube, if they port it to linux).
Suddenly my mind is full of analogies from the G4 cube to the Borg cube to the death star to... a perfectly spherical desktop computer, with a divot on one side for stability?
Kevin Fox
Surviving in a hard vacuum and radiation is one thing, but surviving a re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere is quite another.
Not to mention the state the artifact must have been in when it was ejected from Mars in the first place. As I understand it, the theory is that significant meteor strikes on Mars can propel martian fragments outside of its gravity well. From all I've read about meteor strikes on Earth, any 'shrapnel' from a blast that large is molten rock when it ejects.
So the real question is: Can microbial life survive a molten host environment, then frozen, irradiated, and exposed to a hard vacuum (the microbes on the exterior, that is), then heated to near-molten levels again when it reenters the atmosphere? If so, we'd better not go to Io!
Kevin Fox
Let me warn you right now: stereoscopic vision is not the future.
Uh, oh. I guess I'd better pluck one of my eyes out then! We (most of us, anyhow) do have two eyes, and used in conjunction, that is stereoscopic vision.
As for making it work well, any raver can tell you that, done correctly, stereophonic sound can actually disorient and make you dizzy, and we only get 10% of our sensory information from our ears. Naturally, goggles simply have to be made better.
There's a huge difference between stereo goggles and a stereoscopic display. The goggles have to make sure that the horizon and field of vision changes in realtime with the movement of your head. A 3D monitor or movie takes care of that automatically: You tilt your head, the image tilts. Not so with goggles, where you 'take the image with you.'
So while with current technology goggles may be disorienting, it's only a matter of time before the precision is there to 'fool' the senses into playing along. As for non-immersive displays, well, there's no problem.
Kevin Fox
I'm betting that the development of Maya for MacOS X paved the way to doing a full (li|u)n[iu]x port.
Three cheers for convergence!
Kevin Fox
I stand corrected. You're absolutely right. There's no need to make a new tld, just a com.us sld.
Just remember that co.us is Colorado!
Kevin Fox
A big part of the problem is that the country with the most internet usage, the United States, doesn't have a country domain that works like others do. Arguments about registering in your own country are fine in theory, but while you can get corinthian.com.br or corinthian.co.uk or corinthian.co.ca, you can't get corinthian.com.us. You'd have to all the way down to the city level and get corinthian.desmoines.ia.us, which negates the brandbuilding value for companies that operate nationwide.
.us domain followed a geographic model. Now that that doesn't hold true and international companies and individuals are eschewing their local country domains for a TLD, companies and individuals in the US are at a disadvantage.
.usa TLD to try to get it right?
com, net, edu and the like used to imply US, so that the
How about a
It's not an ideal solution, but it's a step.
Kevin Fox
What do you mean? the GAP is Old Navy! and Bananna Republic, et al.
Kevin Fox
huh?
Just because Apple Garamond is available doesn't mean they used it in the picture. The point I raised was that they used Adobe Garamond in the pic. The fact that Apple Garamond is available just means they did an even shoddier job than they could have.
Kevin Fox
The Gap, which used to imply 'the generation gap' now plays of the 'sociological gap.' Folks in hicksville flock to the Gap because they think it's what all the cool urbanites wear. Cityfolk like the gap because (aside from the 'tech-vest debacle') in general it typifies a laid-back, more rural feel.
Coca-Cola gets its brand recognition by reaching into every crevice (figurativly) and not letting any child in an impoverished nation grow to the age of 6 without recognizing the logo. What's more, since we first-worlders are so saturated by the logo, Coca-Cola resorts to showing us impoverished third-world children experiencing Coke for the first time, so that we can get that otherwise unattainable vicarious thrill of our first Coke.
I wonder if Microsoft will adopt this strategy. A hotmail linkup in every village, a 'newbie of the week' using one of Hotmail's many security holes to let users read a Laotian girl's first emails to the world-at-large? Will they have the audacity to brand MicrosoftOps as the "choice of a new generation"?
It can't be long until the commercial where we see the Berber family in their adobe room touch a button, hear the chime of Win2K booting and sigh, for they can feel all their troubles slip away, for now they have a night light...
Kevin Fox
Other points:
I bet there will be an Apple Cube, and I bet it'll be released tomorrow. It's right in line with Fred's comments today that iMac sales are getting flat. I just think it'll look more like the earlier sketches with the contrary handles and front-faced design.
BTW, I have a mirror for this pic and the 17" CRT, which is beautiful and I wish is real, but I fear isn't bulbous enough to be legit.
Kevin Fox
And why would the senator use his mutant power...he was ashamed of it...plus he gave a death speech to Storm, i dont think it was faked.
Actually, if you get a chance to watch the movie again, the senator's speech said something about Storm not trusting normal humans, but now "there's one less for you to worry about." which could easily go either way. The whole thing, the jellyfish on the beach, Xavier's comment to Storm, "Are you sure about what you saw." the ambiguous death speech, the fact that nobody actually says what the senator's power is, just that we see him squeeze through bars and generally look bloated, seems to be a really big clue-in that all isn't as it seems.
But we'll see...
Kevin Fox
You missed something, didnt you?
Well, maybe you wer pissing when the senator melted, but the mutation thing doesnt just mutate people, because their bodies reject it and they die....to death. And the munants aren't affected.
All humans dead=peace among mutants.
The fatal flaw is in your understanding.
Huh? So you're saying that Magneto planned on convincing the world that Mutants are people too by killing all the world's leaders?
Or are you saying that he planned to kill all 'normal' humans? If that's it, then you're the one who was on a pee-break when they talked about the range of the device, and that Rogue would die from it, so it was a one-shot deal.
Besides, all this is based on the assumptionthat Xavier was right, and the senator is dead. I think it's just his superpower showing through.
Kevin Fox
If I were a world leader known to be a mutant, I'd still push for the identification and registration of mutants, because after all, everyone knows I'm a mutant already.
I just think that a world leader suddenly given mutant powers would behave like a world leader given a nuclear weapon. Just because he was given one doesn't mean he's suddenly okay with everyone else having one.
Kevin Fox
Three things:
1) I didn't get that the x-men knew more about the device's range than Magneto did. how do they have more information on it than he does?
2) Given your point, I didn't see how making all the world leaders into mutants would protect them from persecution. After all, in tyrannical governments, the leader usually has means and power beyond those of the populace, but uses that power to put down others who might threaten him. Giving world leaders superpowers is giving them another weapon to use against their enemies, justifying the public's view that mutants are malicious abusers of power.
3) I don't think the device kills anyone. Senator Kelly turned to water, but I think that was his superpower. Again, the 'good' X-Men are taking one example (Kelly's transformation) and extrapolating it into a certainty (Everyone who is exposed will die). Something tells me Magneto has tested this machine before using it on Kelly...
Kevin Fox
You actually think Senator Kelly is dead?
Before he walked onto the beach there was a kid poking at a jellyfish. When Kelly 'died' he turned to jelly, then water. I think he's just a different kind of mutant, going through the same adjustment process every mutant does when their powers emerge. We thought he was plasticman, but I think he's more like the boy wondertwin.
Kevin Fox
Magneto thinks turning everyone on Manhattan Island into mutants will promote peace and understanding?
Kevin Fox
What this system needs is a challenge-response system like a smart card.
The computer should send a key to the mouse, the mouse hashes the biometric data, then hashes it again with the key. As long as both hashes are one-way, this would ensure that tapping data between the mouse and cpu would be worthless.
Kevin Fox