So I follow the link to the article. And see Intel's website - doesn't even attempt to scale to my browser (looks like it's about 320x200), and has the article chopped up into little javascript bitlets with a fake "next page" icon that doesn't alter the URL so you can't link to it.
And these guys want to participate in a web standard?
Since when will your Aunt Ginny be using a command-line interface? Keep her in a nice GUI where she belongs, and when she opens her documents there'll be a nice list of them that she can click on to get the right one. Likewise when she saves she'll just use "File->Save" and it'll preserve the name.
"It's 800 miles to St. Louis. We got a full tank of gas, five laptops, fourteen operating systems, 802.11 and a cellphone, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses."
Neverwinter Nights is now available for the Windows platform. However as Tux Games is a Linux company we will not be shipping until the Linux client is available.
If you cannot wait, please send an email to sales@tuxgames.com and we will send just the Windows CD to you.
So, that's betting the whole damn house except the garage, huh?
There's only so much you can do. As well as the normal participating in petitions and voting for governmental candidates who seem to support freedom, promoting competitive software etc., I do my best to avoid these systems of automatic detection.
I don't carry a credit card, or store cards. If I want to buy something over the 'net, I'll phone the shop and post them a cheque, or send cash by registered post. I have a debit card, but normally use it just to take out cash at the same ATM. If I'm leaving town, I'll get enough cash to cover my ticket and my expenses (I tend to try and regulate my withdrawals to the same amount a week regardless of what I'm doing).
I walk the long way home to avoid CCTV cameras. Only five minutes out of my way, and much prettier. I try to buy from smaller, local stores to support local business.
Sure, there are small inconveniences, but on the whole I'm happy.
Jesus, if you weren't watching the film, don't try complaining about plot holes that don't exist! Yes, Spawn was dead, sent to Hell where he was recruited as one of Hell's warriors, put back on earth to serve Satan. Then he changed his mind and wanted to bat for the good guys. He might be dead, but he has a limited amount of power, which he needs to heal himself every time he gets an arm blown off or whatever. When that power's gone, he will return to Hell. Where they're a bit pissed with him.
Because the DCMA would prevent them from doing so as Open Source software, license or no license, and that's not a good route to go down when it's in somebody else's interest, not yours.
Still doesn't change the fact that IE kicked the crap out of every other browser. Then again, IMHO, it still does. I know I'm gonna get flamed to hell for this, but having tried Mozilla, IE, Konqueror and Opera, IE is tops for me in terms of ease of use and stability. Then again, I prefer w3m for reading/.
The perl community have been working on this - check out Symbol::Approx::Sub for starters... there was an RFC submitted to the committee about having approximate names for subroutines, variables and keywords turned on by default to avoid discriminating against dyslexics.
Even if you encrypt everything, they can still do traffic analysis
Hmm, I'm about to colocate a box at an ISP, and I'm hoping to set up a system whereby I can tunnel all my traffic from my local box, encrypted, to that machine. Get a few dozen friends doing it, and who can tell who's doing what, especially if half the traffic coming out the other end is also encrypted? Sadly, I won't have the bandwidth to get a few hundred / thousand, but I can probably get some random traffic from other boxen.
However, if the US government gets into the act, they may try to fashion legislation forcing web pages to include some meta tag indicating their content
As has been pointed out, US Government involvement is futile given the international nature of the Internet. However, if someone were to make a serious recommendation to the W3C, we could see some tag like "<rating>" appearing in a new HTML format.
Then it would be trivial to program web browsers which support the new [X]HTML standard to alter their behaviour depending on the rating of the page, or lack of any rating.
I think that self-regulation is the best way to control this, combined with individual countries passing legislation against faking the information - I'm sure that it's illegal in meatspace to put a teen magazine-style cover on your porn mag, for example.
Why were the old 8-bit computers such a hive of creativity? The things people did with them back then seem to be much more way-out than the thing people do today - it must be the challenge of owning such a limited machine.
Personally, I'd say it's the challenge of coding for such a limited machine. It's often a lot more fun coding for smaller, more restricted machines. I remember my old graphic calculator - it was the fx9000 model. Enough RAM to code on, enough screen to get a reasonable response, but still a pig to code for in the language provided.
I wrote a text adventure for it, a football management simulator, and even a simple AI Space Invaders (I couldn't be bothered to learn the serious hacks needed to get real-time user input). All these, sadly, were lost during my A-levels when I had to wipe all the data on the machine. But I used to spend hours coding in Math lessons, lunch-breaks, etc.
Coding for restricted machines and environments is a lot more interesting and challenging than something that you know you can do if you throw enough C / Perl / COBOL / whatever at the problem. A friend has written an IRC client in shell scripts, for example.
These days, coding is just too easy for most projects - we've got the processing power, the RAM, the compilers and everything. All a coder needs is enough time and inspiration to achieve the task at hand. Limited coding is a lot more fun.
Your proposal is reminiscent of the situation in the UK - Nominet (my employers) run the name servers for *.uk. They do also offer direct registration services, at £70 a time.
However, they encourage people to buy through domain re-sellers (who pay Nominet an annual fee to buy domains for £5 each), and let them take the hassle. Nominet also act as ajudicators in domain disputes etc., but have no legal powers.
I frequently hear Nominet being used as an example of how a domain registrar shouldwork. I assume that means letting the employees read/. from the office;-)
Gaming companies are going to force 100% of their customers to reboot their machines every time they want to run a game
Hmm, but what if this were combined with user mode Linux under Windoze, and vice-versa? This would allow game developers to use their own kernels, and have total control over the environment in which their games are run.
The universe seems to have suddenly ceased to exist, and has been replaced by something even more inexplicable.
Hmm, I don't feel the urge for caffeine, and I've just read on the BBC that the RIAA are planning on implementing a distributed music system where the majority of proceeds go to the artist.
Wearable computers have existed in different forms for quite a while now, and they make a fun DIY hardware hacking project. I'm too skint for it myself, but a friend has dissected an old laptop (with a broken LCD screen), combined it with the viewfinder from a camcorder, and got stuff up and running.
FWIW, my dream wearcomp (which I'm researching on the off-chance that a rich and previously unknown relative dies <g>) would have an transparent screen over *each* eye, with one camera for each eye to do nifty image processing and add effects to the world.
It'd have a built in GSM phone and GPS receiver. When the phone rang, an icon would blink in the corner of my vision. I'd look at the icon and blink to recieve the call using the earphones and throat-mic, which could also be used with voice-rec and speech-synths to allow me to read and dictate e-mail on the move.
It'd be networked (probably using Bluetooth) so I could walk into my house and be connected to my LAN, and would share some peer-to-peer protocol with other wearcomps, so when a wearer approached me, a bounding box would appear around him with his name attached (think the System Shock 2 interface).
Best of all, it would allow me to stream video from my cameras to the world at large - the ultimate in personal webcams. It's the closest thing we could get to films like Strange Days. Imagine having sex with your girlfriend (strange concept for many/. readers, I'm sure) but seeing everything through *her* eyes...
I think Hawkins may be off by an order of magnitude or two or five on this time scale
What do you expect from a theoretical physicist? "Oh, it's a few orders of magnitude out, but that's probably just experimental error. Let's go grab a few more dollars of research grants! First round's on me!"
But just in case, let's make sure that IPv6 has lots of addresses set aside for other planets =-]
I don't think that's such a great idea - assuming that we colonize Mars before Earth is destroyed, even with a high-bandwidth satellite link (with relays for when Earth and Mars are on either side of the Sun), you're still going to get a crappy game of Quake.
Still, it's not as bad as the 4-year lag getting documents from your Intranet server on Alpha Centauri over the space-bound Virtual Private LAN...
But then again if we assume for a moment that it is really only the Evil People (TM) above who are using archival strength (>= 2048 bit) encryption, surely the encryption alone will be drawing the attention of the relevant law enforcement agencies.
This demonstrates, again, the need for high-bitrate encryption for *any* message, however trivial. An old boss would use 1024-bit plus encryption for office e-mail, so that when he sent something *important*, it would be indistinguishable.
However, until programs like Outlook Express come with serious crypto included by default, and being *used* by default, it's unlikely to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
So I follow the link to the article. And see Intel's website - doesn't even attempt to scale to my browser (looks like it's about 320x200), and has the article chopped up into little javascript bitlets with a fake "next page" icon that doesn't alter the URL so you can't link to it.
And these guys want to participate in a web standard?
Since when will your Aunt Ginny be using a command-line interface? Keep her in a nice GUI where she belongs, and when she opens her documents there'll be a nice list of them that she can click on to get the right one. Likewise when she saves she'll just use "File->Save" and it'll preserve the name.
"It's 800 miles to St. Louis. We got a full tank of gas, five laptops, fourteen operating systems, 802.11 and a cellphone, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses."
"Hit it"
From the Tux Games homepage:
So, that's betting the whole damn house except the garage, huh?
Lose the serial port??? But what do you boot off when everything goes horribly wrong? ;)
There's only so much you can do. As well as the normal participating in petitions and voting for governmental candidates who seem to support freedom, promoting competitive software etc., I do my best to avoid these systems of automatic detection.
I don't carry a credit card, or store cards. If I want to buy something over the 'net, I'll phone the shop and post them a cheque, or send cash by registered post. I have a debit card, but normally use it just to take out cash at the same ATM. If I'm leaving town, I'll get enough cash to cover my ticket and my expenses (I tend to try and regulate my withdrawals to the same amount a week regardless of what I'm doing).
I walk the long way home to avoid CCTV cameras. Only five minutes out of my way, and much prettier. I try to buy from smaller, local stores to support local business.
Sure, there are small inconveniences, but on the whole I'm happy.
Jesus, if you weren't watching the film, don't try complaining about plot holes that don't exist! Yes, Spawn was dead, sent to Hell where he was recruited as one of Hell's warriors, put back on earth to serve Satan. Then he changed his mind and wanted to bat for the good guys. He might be dead, but he has a limited amount of power, which he needs to heal himself every time he gets an arm blown off or whatever. When that power's gone, he will return to Hell. Where they're a bit pissed with him.
Because the DCMA would prevent them from doing so as Open Source software, license or no license, and that's not a good route to go down when it's in somebody else's interest, not yours.
Eminem is the new Liberace?
Still doesn't change the fact that IE kicked the crap out of every other browser. Then again, IMHO, it still does. I know I'm gonna get flamed to hell for this, but having tried Mozilla, IE, Konqueror and Opera, IE is tops for me in terms of ease of use and stability. Then again, I prefer w3m for reading /.
Beta-testing a 0.1a release? Man, Microsoft don't even sort out their damn version numbering properly ;)
The perl community have been working on this - check out Symbol::Approx::Sub for starters... there was an RFC submitted to the committee about having approximate names for subroutines, variables and keywords turned on by default to avoid discriminating against dyslexics.
First Post!
Even if you encrypt everything, they can still do traffic analysis
Hmm, I'm about to colocate a box at an ISP, and I'm hoping to set up a system whereby I can tunnel all my traffic from my local box, encrypted, to that machine. Get a few dozen friends doing it, and who can tell who's doing what, especially if half the traffic coming out the other end is also encrypted? Sadly, I won't have the bandwidth to get a few hundred / thousand, but I can probably get some random traffic from other boxen.
Alex
However, if the US government gets into the act, they may try to fashion legislation forcing web pages to include some meta tag indicating their content
As has been pointed out, US Government involvement is futile given the international nature of the Internet. However, if someone were to make a serious recommendation to the W3C, we could see some tag like "<rating>" appearing in a new HTML format.
Then it would be trivial to program web browsers which support the new [X]HTML standard to alter their behaviour depending on the rating of the page, or lack of any rating.
I think that self-regulation is the best way to control this, combined with individual countries passing legislation against faking the information - I'm sure that it's illegal in meatspace to put a teen magazine-style cover on your porn mag, for example.
Alex
Everyone knows that you need to ^D to get out of a Linux program!
Alex
Why were the old 8-bit computers such a hive of creativity? The things people did with them back then seem to be much more way-out than the thing people do today - it must be the challenge of owning such a limited machine.
Personally, I'd say it's the challenge of coding for such a limited machine. It's often a lot more fun coding for smaller, more restricted machines. I remember my old graphic calculator - it was the fx9000 model. Enough RAM to code on, enough screen to get a reasonable response, but still a pig to code for in the language provided.
I wrote a text adventure for it, a football management simulator, and even a simple AI Space Invaders (I couldn't be bothered to learn the serious hacks needed to get real-time user input). All these, sadly, were lost during my A-levels when I had to wipe all the data on the machine. But I used to spend hours coding in Math lessons, lunch-breaks, etc.
Coding for restricted machines and environments is a lot more interesting and challenging than something that you know you can do if you throw enough C / Perl / COBOL / whatever at the problem. A friend has written an IRC client in shell scripts, for example.
These days, coding is just too easy for most projects - we've got the processing power, the RAM, the compilers and everything. All a coder needs is enough time and inspiration to achieve the task at hand. Limited coding is a lot more fun.
Alex
What I think ICANN should dictate is this
Your proposal is reminiscent of the situation in the UK - Nominet (my employers) run the name servers for *.uk. They do also offer direct registration services, at £70 a time.
However, they encourage people to buy through domain re-sellers (who pay Nominet an annual fee to buy domains for £5 each), and let them take the hassle. Nominet also act as ajudicators in domain disputes etc., but have no legal powers.
I frequently hear Nominet being used as an example of how a domain registrar shouldwork. I assume that means letting the employees read /. from the office ;-)
Alex
Hmm, but what if this were combined with user mode Linux under Windoze, and vice-versa? This would allow game developers to use their own kernels, and have total control over the environment in which their games are run.
Alex
The universe seems to have suddenly ceased to exist, and has been replaced by something even more inexplicable.
Hmm, I don't feel the urge for caffeine, and I've just read on the BBC that the RIAA are planning on implementing a distributed music system where the majority of proceeds go to the artist.
Alex
Wearable computers have existed in different forms for quite a while now, and they make a fun DIY hardware hacking project. I'm too skint for it myself, but a friend has dissected an old laptop (with a broken LCD screen), combined it with the viewfinder from a camcorder, and got stuff up and running.
For more information, look at http://www.wearables.org and the wear-hard mailing list.
FWIW, my dream wearcomp (which I'm researching on the off-chance that a rich and previously unknown relative dies <g>) would have an transparent screen over *each* eye, with one camera for each eye to do nifty image processing and add effects to the world.
It'd have a built in GSM phone and GPS receiver. When the phone rang, an icon would blink in the corner of my vision. I'd look at the icon and blink to recieve the call using the earphones and throat-mic, which could also be used with voice-rec and speech-synths to allow me to read and dictate e-mail on the move.
It'd be networked (probably using Bluetooth) so I could walk into my house and be connected to my LAN, and would share some peer-to-peer protocol with other wearcomps, so when a wearer approached me, a bounding box would appear around him with his name attached (think the System Shock 2 interface).
Best of all, it would allow me to stream video from my cameras to the world at large - the ultimate in personal webcams. It's the closest thing we could get to films like Strange Days. Imagine having sex with your girlfriend (strange concept for many /. readers, I'm sure) but seeing everything through *her* eyes...
Alex
I think Hawkins may be off by an order of magnitude or two or five on this time scale
What do you expect from a theoretical physicist? "Oh, it's a few orders of magnitude out, but that's probably just experimental error. Let's go grab a few more dollars of research grants! First round's on me!"
Alex
But just in case, let's make sure that IPv6 has lots of addresses set aside for other planets =-]
I don't think that's such a great idea - assuming that we colonize Mars before Earth is destroyed, even with a high-bandwidth satellite link (with relays for when Earth and Mars are on either side of the Sun), you're still going to get a crappy game of Quake.
Still, it's not as bad as the 4-year lag getting documents from your Intranet server on Alpha Centauri over the space-bound Virtual Private LAN...
Alex
You forgot:
See the machines that the demo is running on? Imagine a Beowulf cluster of *those*!
Alex
This demonstrates, again, the need for high-bitrate encryption for *any* message, however trivial. An old boss would use 1024-bit plus encryption for office e-mail, so that when he sent something *important*, it would be indistinguishable.
However, until programs like Outlook Express come with serious crypto included by default, and being *used* by default, it's unlikely to happen.
Alex