Also some grammar checking by the editors would be nice. Still, I would assume that this article was submitted by a student at IIT-Kanpur, and English isn't their first language.
All that being said, it sounds like a really interesting project, not to mention really cheap. The article also says that they plan on making it into a four legged beast for stability, which sounds more reasonable than a two-legger. Bots are still getting the hang of walking on two pegs here in 1G, so designing one that will walk upright on the moon must be tougher.
Censorship is a government telling someone what they cannot read, hear, see, or think.
What this IS (IMHO) is very bad management decisions.
Digg is a privately owned entity, which does not answer to a government, and - even though you'd like it to - doesn't answer to its users. It answers to the people that pay to keep it running.
Apparently, the people that keep it running didn't want HD DVD keys posted on the site. So Digg honored their wishes.
And they did it poorly.
Only time will tell how poorly, and how it will affect their user base.
But to discuss this article, it's nice to see that WIred I first read all those years ago is dead now. To call Clarus or Tux or Hexley or Mozilla "lame", considering what they mean - the history and creativity behind the characters - is completely non-geek, non-tech... tired, as they would say.
I put my number on the national list as soon as it came out, and we get ZERO calls now, and haven't for at least a year. The few that called before the list got widely distributed were politely told to put me on their list. I've had no problems, no dinner time calls, nothing. It really does work.
Back in grade school, we used to get our swings as high as they could go, and then jump off at the apex. I saw guys doing windmills and spins 10, 12 feet in the air, in front of the principal. They didn't always land gracefully. My school never banned swings.
Back in the good old days, when it used to snow, the plows would pile the snow from the parking lot right up against the edge of the playground. We played king of the hill on hills 8, 10 feet tall. My school never banned king of the hill.
I have a very vivid memory of participating in a soccer game, and the kid with the ball took a full-power kick to the shin from someone trying to steal the ball... snapped his leg in two, right in fron of me. He won an ambulance ride to the hospital and everything. My school never banned soccer games.
You CANNOT protect kids from hurting themselves by playing games. It is an unavoidable fact of nature. In fact, some of my best life lessons were learned due to injuries (either my own, or someone else's). What you CAN do is teach kids how to play properly, and safely, and put some effort in to WATCHING the kids. Banning them from having fun only teaches them distrust and resentment and laziness.
"Most home users have firewalls now, if only in the form of a hardware router from their ISP..."
No, they don't.
I can attest that the three Windows users I know have no such protections. One plugs directly into her cable modem, and the other two still use dialup. No firewall on any of them, and no router.
Routers and firewalls are still high-end "geek" things, because, after all, my ISP will protect me! That's why I have all this nifty anti-virus software! (Note that my sister's anti-virus software had been expired for over a year before I got to her machine.)
Half of the folks in the US that use the Internet still use dialup - no routers there. And with dialup, they don't have the time or patience to learn about that kind of stuff.
I noticed the same problem when I had Comcast for Internet access. Any sort of torrent traffic on the line, and my upload speed would go through the floor. I was actually seeing single digit upload speeds during testing.
Also, it didn't have to be MY torrent traffic - cable Internet being a shared resource, after all. Trial and error / testing led me to the conclusion that it was torrent traffic. So, I finally ditched cable after the local phone service got upgraded and I could finally get something faster than 144 IDSL...
leaving me in the capable hands of AT&T, which is a whole other story.
I've been signed up with them for several years, and they continue to email me ads from their sponsors. If I take the time to click their provided link, I check out the full ad, and I get a few points credited toward my account. Were I more diligent participant, I could have made out a lot better. As it is, I've gotten $40 worth of restaurant gift certificates for basically taking a few minutes out of my time every few weeks to check out some ads. I've even bought a few things from the ads, amazingly enough.
I'd post my mypoints referral link here, but that wouldn't be kosher - got enough stuff here already. You can always email me if you want the link:)
The problem is not with the lack of nonverbal cues, but with people who are easily offended.
Or intentionally offended...
I had a sig that was a quote from a co-worker about me: "You're a Mac user... you're left-handed... you eat Miracle Whip... *and* you're Polish? You're not from this planet!" One day some middle-manager type woman came up to me and informed me that my sig was offensive to her, as "eating Miracle Whip" was an offensive and suggestive comment in certain places, and that I had to change it, or she'd report me.
Having only been there a few weeks, I changed it.
Oddly enough, she failed to complain about my next sig, which was two quotes:
"It's the Information Age... everything gets saved except the human soul" - Usenet posting and "And as we drift along, I never fail to be astounded by the things we'll do for promises... and a song" - "All The Fools Sailed Away", Dio
...the first BIG Virus/Trojan/Worm for OS X to hit and hit hard.
Personally, I'd love to see it, strictly from a geek perspective. Actually getting a virus to work in OSX that's not a social engineering hack (having the end user physically enter their admin password) would be very interesting.
I haven't had a virus on any of my Macs since the early 90s. I haven't bothered with anti-virus software since the mid-90s. I kinda hope that a virus *does* hit, so the guy that wrote Disinfectant feels the need to come out of retirement:)
Funny, my experience is just the opposite. Most of the Windows users that I know couldn't find their way around a system that's not theirs if their life depended on it. And I don't mean an OSX or Linux system, I mean another machine running the SAME OS they use, just configured differently.
Meanwhile, most of the Mac users I know are administrators of non-Mac sites, or do support for non-Macs. I know a Mac guy that's a Solaris admin, and another that manages several school buildings full of XP laptops and desktops. I'm the family's computer support (as I'm sure most of you are as well), and I'm forever troubleshooting my sister's Windows machine from the comfort of my OSX environment. I really need to get around to having her install VNC so I can work directly on her machine, rather than trusting her to understand my instructions, since my Windows machine looks different than hers.
My very first thought when I saw this article was to mention the palladium debacle. Glad to see someone beat me to it. I think it's very on-topic, considering this is a "state of the industry" article, and you'd get mod points for it if I had them.
I was inspired to write my congresscritters and other elected officials about a news report yesterday about Mr. Gonzales and his latest push against kiddie pr0n. I sent the following:
--- CNN has posted an article on their web site this evening (http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/04/20/gonzales.porn/i ndex.html) stating that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is "sending to Congress a legislative package that includes greater penalties and improved cooperation from Internet service providers".
The United States Department of Justice has already clearly spelled out that trafficking in child pornography on the Internet is a Federal offense (http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/citizensguide_ porn.html). Shouldn't Attorney General Gonzales be making his best effort to ensure that the laws that are already on the books are being enforced, as opposed to attempting to enact new laws that will - as has been seen and documented with the PATRIOT Act, and the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) - surely be twisted beyond their originally declared scope to further weaken our civil liberties and rights as free citizens?
In light of recent news reports that AT&T has willingly supported the NSA in efforts to *illegally* monitor telephone and Internet traffic of it's customer base (http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_04.php#0045 38), in addition to the uproar over the President's use of illegal wiretaps (http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/17/bush.nsa/i ndex.html) the last thing that is needed is further opportunities to allow excessive monitoring of our civilian activities by government officials, especially under the transparent disguise of "thinking of the children".
I'm no fan of kiddie porn or it's consumers, but there's no need for this new legislation. There are already laws on the books, laws that have been tested and proven to be effective against criminals, as well as secure from abuse by those who would seek to limit our freedoms. Use THOSE laws. Keep the LAW-BREAKERS in fear, not the honest citizens. ---
I just signed up with them for DSL after waiting for years for it to become available, just to get away from the Comcast monopoly. Time to find me a traffic anonymizer while I clear from the Comcast "old users" list.
I've been using commercial ISPs for at least eight years now (since my free school-provided dialup went away), and I have never used any of my ISP's mail services. Heck, with the last two, I never even bothered to activate my email account with them. I don't want their fluff, I don't want their "added services", I just want their pipe. So now I see that was a good decision:)
Thanks for the link to the vote tally. I was going to look it up myself, but you saved me a bit of legwork:)
So there was one yea and one nay from my home state senators:
Michigan: Levin (D-MI), Nay Stabenow (D-MI), Yea
Appropriate emails have gone out to both of them, and since I have actually gotten replies from both of them in the past, I will be eagerly awaiting their responses to this latest email.
"Whoever thought selling a 'media center' machine without digital audio should have been sacked."
Well, that would be... nobody, since nobody at Apple that i know of has advertised this as a media center machines.
"Still way overpriced though. Yes it is tiny, but laptops face the same issues and you can buy a laptop with similar specs just about anywhere for the same prices Apple is getting for a mini. Seriously, go price a laptop with 1.5Ghz Mobile Pentium (about the same as the 'Core Solo') a puny (for a media center) 60G laptop hard drive..."
I haven't had to replace my turntable, cassette player, or CD player to listen to my previously purchased music. All of those songs on all of those medias play just fine on the appropriate devices (well, the tapes aren't all so hot - least reliable media, indeed).
No format is "obsolete" as long as you have a device to use it on, or have an adapter... or in the case of digital music files, have a converter. You know, like the converter that's built into iTunes, the one that turns AAC files into MP3 files?
Mypoints.com *still* offers awards to folks that read their advertising emails. If I would just get off my butt more often and slog through what they send me, I could already have my fourth $10 restaurant gift certificate.
Slashdot Mirror
Also some grammar checking by the editors would be nice. Still, I would assume that this article was submitted by a student at IIT-Kanpur, and English isn't their first language.
All that being said, it sounds like a really interesting project, not to mention really cheap. The article also says that they plan on making it into a four legged beast for stability, which sounds more reasonable than a two-legger. Bots are still getting the hang of walking on two pegs here in 1G, so designing one that will walk upright on the moon must be tougher.
This is NOT censorship.
Censorship is a government telling someone what they cannot read, hear, see, or think.
What this IS (IMHO) is very bad management decisions.
Digg is a privately owned entity, which does not answer to a government, and - even though you'd like it to - doesn't answer to its users. It answers to the people that pay to keep it running.
Apparently, the people that keep it running didn't want HD DVD keys posted on the site. So Digg honored their wishes.
And they did it poorly.
Only time will tell how poorly, and how it will affect their user base.
As noted by my url :)
But to discuss this article, it's nice to see that WIred I first read all those years ago is dead now. To call Clarus or Tux or Hexley or Mozilla "lame", considering what they mean - the history and creativity behind the characters - is completely non-geek, non-tech... tired, as they would say.
Do.
Not.
Call.
List.
I put my number on the national list as soon as it came out, and we get ZERO calls now, and haven't for at least a year. The few that called before the list got widely distributed were politely told to put me on their list. I've had no problems, no dinner time calls, nothing. It really does work.
Back in grade school, we used to get our swings as high as they could go, and then jump off at the apex. I saw guys doing windmills and spins 10, 12 feet in the air, in front of the principal. They didn't always land gracefully. My school never banned swings.
Back in the good old days, when it used to snow, the plows would pile the snow from the parking lot right up against the edge of the playground. We played king of the hill on hills 8, 10 feet tall. My school never banned king of the hill.
I have a very vivid memory of participating in a soccer game, and the kid with the ball took a full-power kick to the shin from someone trying to steal the ball... snapped his leg in two, right in fron of me. He won an ambulance ride to the hospital and everything. My school never banned soccer games.
You CANNOT protect kids from hurting themselves by playing games. It is an unavoidable fact of nature. In fact, some of my best life lessons were learned due to injuries (either my own, or someone else's). What you CAN do is teach kids how to play properly, and safely, and put some effort in to WATCHING the kids. Banning them from having fun only teaches them distrust and resentment and laziness.
"Most home users have firewalls now, if only in the form of a hardware router from their ISP..."
No, they don't.
I can attest that the three Windows users I know have no such protections. One plugs directly into her cable modem, and the other two still use dialup. No firewall on any of them, and no router.
Routers and firewalls are still high-end "geek" things, because, after all, my ISP will protect me! That's why I have all this nifty anti-virus software! (Note that my sister's anti-virus software had been expired for over a year before I got to her machine.)
Half of the folks in the US that use the Internet still use dialup - no routers there. And with dialup, they don't have the time or patience to learn about that kind of stuff.
And you're an experienced user who knows what a router is and what to do with a firewall.
The vast majority of the computer using public isn't you.
The vast majority just plugs directly into their connection.
50% of the Internet using public still uses DIALUP.
It sounds so easy from your end, but it sounds like Klingon from their end.
I noticed the same problem when I had Comcast for Internet access. Any sort of torrent traffic on the line, and my upload speed would go through the floor. I was actually seeing single digit upload speeds during testing.
Also, it didn't have to be MY torrent traffic - cable Internet being a shared resource, after all. Trial and error / testing led me to the conclusion that it was torrent traffic. So, I finally ditched cable after the local phone service got upgraded and I could finally get something faster than 144 IDSL...
leaving me in the capable hands of AT&T, which is a whole other story.
The scene in question with the KDE stuff involves a hot chick getting naked online.
:)
And you notice the windowing system and applications on her laptop.
Slashdot, you never cease to amaze me
So I hit the link...
...
...
Hrm, Terminal.app isn't totally ANSI-friendly, have to find another app...
[entry@OWHQ] login: Zaren
Searching recruit list
You must enter both your first and last names!
Oh yeah, gotta do both...
Recruit Name: Zaren En- crap, damn typos...
Hrmm, Delete key doesn't work... ctrl-H? Woo, still works! 15 year old muscle memory comes back...
Ah, the kids need to get to bed, I'll have to lok at this later...
-- : *
Return to REALITY? Y
Back to Reality...
Yes. MyPoints.
:)
I've been signed up with them for several years, and they continue to email me ads from their sponsors. If I take the time to click their provided link, I check out the full ad, and I get a few points credited toward my account. Were I more diligent participant, I could have made out a lot better. As it is, I've gotten $40 worth of restaurant gift certificates for basically taking a few minutes out of my time every few weeks to check out some ads. I've even bought a few things from the ads, amazingly enough.
I'd post my mypoints referral link here, but that wouldn't be kosher - got enough stuff here already. You can always email me if you want the link
Didn't even RTFpost, did ya?
Pope John Paul II made the sugggestion, not Pope Benedict.
The problem is not with the lack of nonverbal cues, but with people who are easily offended.
Or intentionally offended...
I had a sig that was a quote from a co-worker about me: "You're a Mac user... you're left-handed... you eat Miracle Whip... *and* you're Polish? You're not from this planet!" One day some middle-manager type woman came up to me and informed me that my sig was offensive to her, as "eating Miracle Whip" was an offensive and suggestive comment in certain places, and that I had to change it, or she'd report me.
Having only been there a few weeks, I changed it.
Oddly enough, she failed to complain about my next sig, which was two quotes:
"It's the Information Age... everything gets saved except the human soul" - Usenet posting
and
"And as we drift along, I never fail to be astounded by the things we'll do for promises... and a song" - "All The Fools Sailed Away", Dio
:p
...the first BIG Virus/Trojan/Worm for OS X to hit and hit hard.
:)
Personally, I'd love to see it, strictly from a geek perspective. Actually getting a virus to work in OSX that's not a social engineering hack (having the end user physically enter their admin password) would be very interesting.
I haven't had a virus on any of my Macs since the early 90s. I haven't bothered with anti-virus software since the mid-90s. I kinda hope that a virus *does* hit, so the guy that wrote Disinfectant feels the need to come out of retirement
Funny, my experience is just the opposite. Most of the Windows users that I know couldn't find their way around a system that's not theirs if their life depended on it. And I don't mean an OSX or Linux system, I mean another machine running the SAME OS they use, just configured differently.
Meanwhile, most of the Mac users I know are administrators of non-Mac sites, or do support for non-Macs. I know a Mac guy that's a Solaris admin, and another that manages several school buildings full of XP laptops and desktops. I'm the family's computer support (as I'm sure most of you are as well), and I'm forever troubleshooting my sister's Windows machine from the comfort of my OSX environment. I really need to get around to having her install VNC so I can work directly on her machine, rather than trusting her to understand my instructions, since my Windows machine looks different than hers.
My very first thought when I saw this article was to mention the palladium debacle. Glad to see someone beat me to it. I think it's very on-topic, considering this is a "state of the industry" article, and you'd get mod points for it if I had them.
I was inspired to write my congresscritters and other elected officials about a news report yesterday about Mr. Gonzales and his latest push against kiddie pr0n. I sent the following:
i ndex.html) stating that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is "sending to Congress a legislative package that includes greater penalties and improved cooperation from Internet service providers".
_ porn.html). Shouldn't Attorney General Gonzales be making his best effort to ensure that the laws that are already on the books are being enforced, as opposed to attempting to enact new laws that will - as has been seen and documented with the PATRIOT Act, and the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) - surely be twisted beyond their originally declared scope to further weaken our civil liberties and rights as free citizens?
5 38), in addition to the uproar over the President's use of illegal wiretaps (http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/17/bush.nsa/i ndex.html) the last thing that is needed is further opportunities to allow excessive monitoring of our civilian activities by government officials, especially under the transparent disguise of "thinking of the children".
---
CNN has posted an article on their web site this evening (http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/04/20/gonzales.porn/
The United States Department of Justice has already clearly spelled out that trafficking in child pornography on the Internet is a Federal offense (http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/ceos/citizensguide
In light of recent news reports that AT&T has willingly supported the NSA in efforts to *illegally* monitor telephone and Internet traffic of it's customer base (http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_04.php#004
I'm no fan of kiddie porn or it's consumers, but there's no need for this new legislation. There are already laws on the books, laws that have been tested and proven to be effective against criminals, as well as secure from abuse by those who would seek to limit our freedoms. Use THOSE laws. Keep the LAW-BREAKERS in fear, not the honest citizens.
---
I was reading that this is iCal compatible... now to figure out how that gets done, and then figure out how to get the wife and I to use it :)
I just signed up with them for DSL after waiting for years for it to become available, just to get away from the Comcast monopoly. Time to find me a traffic anonymizer while I clear from the Comcast "old users" list.
I've been using commercial ISPs for at least eight years now (since my free school-provided dialup went away), and I have never used any of my ISP's mail services. Heck, with the last two, I never even bothered to activate my email account with them. I don't want their fluff, I don't want their "added services", I just want their pipe. So now I see that was a good decision :)
Thanks for the link to the vote tally. I was going to look it up myself, but you saved me a bit of legwork :)
So there was one yea and one nay from my home state senators:
Michigan: Levin (D-MI), Nay Stabenow (D-MI), Yea
Appropriate emails have gone out to both of them, and since I have actually gotten replies from both of them in the past, I will be eagerly awaiting their responses to this latest email.
"Whoever thought selling a 'media center' machine without digital audio should have been sacked."
Well, that would be... nobody, since nobody at Apple that i know of has advertised this as a media center machines.
"Still way overpriced though. Yes it is tiny, but laptops face the same issues and you can buy a laptop with similar specs just about anywhere for the same prices Apple is getting for a mini. Seriously, go price a laptop with 1.5Ghz Mobile Pentium (about the same as the 'Core Solo') a puny (for a media center) 60G laptop hard drive..."
"Storage:
60GB or 80GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard disk drive; optional 100GB or 120GB drive" --http://www.apple.com/macmini/whatsinside.html
So your $600 laptop comes with a SATA hard drive, gigabit Ethernet, DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, built-in 802.11g, and built-in firewire?
(Well, and crappy video, and no mouse or keyboard...)
I haven't had to replace my turntable, cassette player, or CD player to listen to my previously purchased music. All of those songs on all of those medias play just fine on the appropriate devices (well, the tapes aren't all so hot - least reliable media, indeed).
No format is "obsolete" as long as you have a device to use it on, or have an adapter... or in the case of digital music files, have a converter. You know, like the converter that's built into iTunes, the one that turns AAC files into MP3 files?
Mypoints.com *still* offers awards to folks that read their advertising emails. If I would just get off my butt more often and slog through what they send me, I could already have my fourth $10 restaurant gift certificate.