Uhm. yes.. a smart-card might do it or USB keychain. Assuming the computers you work with have a way of reading those things... In most cybercafe's your not allowed to attach a device to their systems. Nor has everyone a smartcard reader. Not everyone is tech savy..
Yes... if that is the only computer you work with. But i have my personal systems at home, a system at work, when i'm visiting relatives i use their computer same when i visit friends. When i am on vacation i use a system in a cybercafe etc. etc. etc.
It would be nice if i could use the info on a centralized system. Mind you, i'm just talking about the info. Not about data accumulated from online buying etc.
This is where this system comes in, it allows to store information about a person on a central place while allowing online shops to hold on to their own info. MS Passport tries to gather all the info in one place, prefferably on their own servers.
All of the arguments given in the article is well known by many of the audience targeted by this article. However, most of them allready discarded the idea. A company isn't interested in someone improving on their products. They want to be the only one owning all rights to that device or software because that's how they make their money. They aren't concerned with cultural or social implications. That's not their issue. They want to secure as much marketshare as possible before some new technology becomes available that could replace their product.
What would be an issue though is that increasingly, corporations seek out the help of their paid representatives to get their agenda legalised. And that's where law should stop. It should not be a responsibility of lawmakers to protect large corporations. They should invent or create other ways, within legal boundaries of course, to protect their income. Laws should be made to protect the individual as much as possible against not only other individuals as well as against organisations who are just planning to seperate ones money from ones wallet.
It is not just the US who has these issues at hand. The European Union as well, is facing these same problems. Lots of/. people who aren't US based believe these issues are only a problem in the US. Well.. it's not. The EU has shown time after time they are very capable of making the same mistakes as the US government does. Wether it is because they so fondly want to shape another worldpower or that they are too lazy to come up with decent laws and rules i'll leave in the eye of the beholder.
Fact is we must react quickly on these kind of issues before even that right has been removed from us. Not just in the US but in the entire world.
Nevertheless, Orbital Recovery is upbeat about the prospects. It thinks it can save satellite operators money because the cost to launch a small tugboat would only be a fraction of a large, new satellite.
Reading the article gives you alot of information...
You can buy them in pairs and give the other device to someone you frequently call. Girlfriend or Grandma or so...
So this isn't as stupid as it seems. However, given the quality of the phonelines this should probably only be interesting if an ISDN line is used.
When i ordered ISDN in 1996 one of it's selling points was the possible use for video conferencing. I've yet to see specialised equipment for it that is priced under $500 dollars. If there's still a market for it, it would be better if the telco's would considering ISDN as it's base service instead of current PSTN lines. But given the installed base of PSTN this would probably never happen..
We had a similar thing almost 10 years ago in the Netherlands. No-one bought anything from the machine. Within 6 months the damn thing was gone. There were all kinds of issues with it, vandalism, malfunctioning equipment, products passed vending date etc.
I can see the convenience of such a machine but i can't say i like them. Aside from no human interaction there are more things about it that doesn't appeal to me. First of all is that the product range is limited, for some reason alot of products are more expensive then normal store offered ones. And you can't easily get a refund if some product isn't good or past it's vending date.
Here in the Netherlands these kind of test are still running but haven't come up with anything yet. Too much problems as it seems. Similar tests in Germany came up zilch as well.
One of the things is, as mentioned in another post, that there is way too much interference from badly constructed appliances and household electrical goofups like badly connected power outlets.
I think an individual has the right to disobey to a law that he thinks it's not only useless, but also damaging to the community.
Hmm.... i think the laws regarding killing my obnoxious neighbours is totally useless and certainly damaging our community. So does this mean i can go out and shoot them?
Off course you should have the right to challenge laws but you do not have the right to disregard them just because you feel like it's too restricting or useless. You still have to obey the law in general. Civil disobedience does have it's limits. Certainly where it comes to crimes against humanity. So, in this case it has it's use but do not proclaim it for using it in general..
I can only agree with you about.NET being well thought out etc. However, it is the company behind it which causes the problems. And understandably so. MircroSoft has a history of shutting out competitors on the same market as they are in. Now tell me, would you like to be owned by MicroSoft? Every little piece of software coming from MicroSoft and locking you in to prevent you from switching platforms? Because that's what this is all about. If you have invested thousands of hours and dollars into a project you will most likely not switch the platform. Making you a milk cow for MicroSoft to pay even more dollars to them.
Yes, it should be the best tool for the job. But think of future implications as well. When you create an enterprise wide application which is consisiting of thousands of lines of code. Would you be willing to rewrite them? Maybe someday MS will stop support for your version of the framework forcing you to buy a new, and more expensive one. Just to prevent you from switching platforms they make sure their code isn't portable. Which is pretty easy to do as their history of embrace and extend has shown allready. These implications should be considered as well before choosing a platform like this. If you don't mind coughing up all those dollars each year for MS related material while other (perhaps less thought out but functioning nevertheless) tools are easy to come by and cheap to boot then hey, it's your personal choice.
Mono will by the way always be lagging behind as SAMBA does. A fact allready known by alot of developers. If you need the greatest and the latest of those implementations you better stick to MS. And just that is what most people resent.... having no choice (as waiting for the rest to play catchup isn't an option..)
If Mono fails on Linux, Linux is dead. Be aware of that.
Hmmm... where have i heard this one before...
Linux won't die because of MONO not succeeding. It would have been dead allready if that's the case. MS wouldn't even think twice to sink the MONO effort if this would hold any thruth in it.
There will always be an alternative which does support Linux. So stop pretending MS is the only player in the IT field.. their not, and never will be..
Problem lies perhaps in the fact that AT&T is a big corporation. People are numbers and numbers can be forged/stolen easily without too much trouble. What if an AT&T employee that just got sacked took a list with him with the information and just threw it on the internet.
I know that these kind of security precautions exist in every big corporation (i work for a top financial corp). I also know that they NEVER work. No-one knows you by the face, only a name or a number is known, and these are easy too come by.
Besides, most system breaches are done from the inside anyway. I know that our company had more internal issues then external.
Child Pornography isn't just offensive but it's a crime against innocent children who are all too often abused or murdered. Whereas blasphemie isn't a crime against humanity, kiddie porn is.
This is another example of blatant arrogance of governments and religious entities. When are they gonna learn that the internet belongs to everyone, everywhere? What would the internet look like if every organisation, religous or otherwise, can block internet sites just because it offend's them?
BTW, I'm not religious in any way, i'm agnostic.
I don't have any problem with "blasphemous" or sexually explicit material because it's all in the eye of the beholder. If there are websites which offend someone then don't go to those sites, if they are visiting them, then they probably want to see the information or images.
I have some problems with for instance rotten.com. Hoewever i don't run around shouting that this site should not be allowed or such. If someone likes these kind of sites then hey, it's their personal business. Who am i to disagree with it..
I'm most certainly not in favor of censorship or any kind of control. The only exception is child pornography. Those kind of things can't be enough censored or condemned.
It's been bought by AOL/Time-Warner. Which resulted in an almost sudden death because AOL like their IM integrated in their junk... hence AIM. Poorly designed software (and they knew it) combined with ICQ's technology.
UM will never reach a point of co-operation as it is too much of importance. How can you create a loyal userbase? Not by giving them options to be able to communicate with people who use different IM software. If your friends use MSN or ICQ or other software you most likely choose the one that is the most used within your circle of friends. Especially when the software of a competitor cannot communicate with their clients.
So, 3rd party software playing translator to the different kind of clients is one of the possible solutions.
This is a joke right? It's a she-male.. and ugly to booth isn't it? Please say it is so.. otherwise i will have nightmares for the rest of my life...... please..?
Is see so many people react to this as if this has something to do with human rights. Claiming that the chinese government is probably trying to close down all the illegal internet cafe's to prevent uncensored surfing.
HELLO! REALITY CHECK!!! If they can close down all those Internet cafe's now they probably allready know where they are and they did not bother them until now. They HAVE TO close down all the cafe's to check if they aren't possible deathtraps as this one was. The city's mayor is held responsible for things like this. Too many people died just because the place was vitually locked on all doors and windows making it impossible to flee the place. It wasn't the government that locked these doors, it was the owner of the place who is responsible for all this.
Furthermore, why cry for this to be a HUMAN RIGHTS issue? In the states things are far more worse than you can imagine. Not only government trying to govern the Internet (think about the webfilters in library's and at schools or even about Carnivore) but also companies try to do this. Think about MSN and AOL.
Of course there are human rights issues in China. No doubt about that, but this is common sense. If you were a mayor of a substantial city what would you do if this happened in your city under your RESPONSIBILITY as you are obliged to safeguard your citizens. My guess is that you would close down as many of these places as you can to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy only to open up those which DO follow fire hazard regulations.
Perhaps just the reason to BE afraid of this. It could be treated as just a small bill which has some credibility so just sign the damn thing and begone with it, move over to the big stuff...
Of course alot of people will be making jokes about punchcard technology. However, this technologie might solve the problems current drive manufacturers are facing. As the article states this might be a technology on the turning point of current mass storage. The similarity between punchcards and this product are only the use of "holes".
Of course privacy is being used against us. It allways has and always will be. Every country has it's examples of this fact.
But would it be worth it to give up our privacy to maintain a false feeling of security? Terrorists will always be able to get their hands on weapons and other stuff to use against us. Whether it is through buying stuff with stolen creditcards or use of a malafide dealer or manufacturer. Weapons and other military stuff are being produced all over the world.
In the light of 9/11 would we have to give up our privacy? For what? The hijackers used frigging hobby knives and some of them weren't even known terrorists. The absense of privacy is not a threath to them. It is to us though...
What's more important is that our governments will not be a totalitarian one and our every move would not be under scrutiny by the government. I like my privacy although i know that my name and other information is going through hundreds of databases each day. I would never like the idea of a government knowing every little thing i say or do though. What's preventing a government of misuse of all that information?
Probably a case of good bussiness...
on
IBM Spins Down
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The harddrive market is not really a lucrative bussness anymore. The costs of developping harddrives with larger capacity is almost outgrowing the earnings of selling drives.
IBM has a good reasearch facility which have come up with new methods for storing data. Probably they want to raise money for the production of some of those methods. It's not that that division was skyrocketing their sales revenue anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
I do.. Long before /. became /. is used to visit Taco's pages. Mostly because of his applets...
Uhm. yes.. a smart-card might do it or USB keychain. Assuming the computers you work with have a way of reading those things... In most cybercafe's your not allowed to attach a device to their systems. Nor has everyone a smartcard reader. Not everyone is tech savy..
Yes... if that is the only computer you work with. But i have my personal systems at home, a system at work, when i'm visiting relatives i use their computer same when i visit friends. When i am on vacation i use a system in a cybercafe etc. etc. etc.
It would be nice if i could use the info on a centralized system. Mind you, i'm just talking about the info. Not about data accumulated from online buying etc.
This is where this system comes in, it allows to store information about a person on a central place while allowing online shops to hold on to their own info. MS Passport tries to gather all the info in one place, prefferably on their own servers.
Hmmm... i couldn't care less about that pascal program and your teacher...
How Logo got you dates with girls is what i would like to know...
All of the arguments given in the article is well known by many of the audience targeted by this article. However, most of them allready discarded the idea. A company isn't interested in someone improving on their products. They want to be the only one owning all rights to that device or software because that's how they make their money. They aren't concerned with cultural or social implications. That's not their issue. They want to secure as much marketshare as possible before some new technology becomes available that could replace their product.
/. people who aren't US based believe these issues are only a problem in the US. Well.. it's not. The EU has shown time after time they are very capable of making the same mistakes as the US government does. Wether it is because they so fondly want to shape another worldpower or that they are too lazy to come up with decent laws and rules i'll leave in the eye of the beholder.
What would be an issue though is that increasingly, corporations seek out the help of their paid representatives to get their agenda legalised. And that's where law should stop. It should not be a responsibility of lawmakers to protect large corporations. They should invent or create other ways, within legal boundaries of course, to protect their income. Laws should be made to protect the individual as much as possible against not only other individuals as well as against organisations who are just planning to seperate ones money from ones wallet.
It is not just the US who has these issues at hand. The European Union as well, is facing these same problems. Lots of
Fact is we must react quickly on these kind of issues before even that right has been removed from us. Not just in the US but in the entire world.
Check the following link: http://www.bynari.nl/
From the article:
Nevertheless, Orbital Recovery is upbeat about the prospects. It thinks it can save satellite operators money because the cost to launch a small tugboat would only be a fraction of a large, new satellite.
Reading the article gives you alot of information...
You can buy them in pairs and give the other device to someone you frequently call. Girlfriend or Grandma or so...
So this isn't as stupid as it seems. However, given the quality of the phonelines this should probably only be interesting if an ISDN line is used.
When i ordered ISDN in 1996 one of it's selling points was the possible use for video conferencing.
I've yet to see specialised equipment for it that is priced under $500 dollars. If there's still a market for it, it would be better if the telco's would considering ISDN as it's base service instead of current PSTN lines. But given the installed base of PSTN this would probably never happen..
We had a similar thing almost 10 years ago in the Netherlands. No-one bought anything from the machine. Within 6 months the damn thing was gone. There were all kinds of issues with it, vandalism, malfunctioning equipment, products passed vending date etc.
I can see the convenience of such a machine but i can't say i like them. Aside from no human interaction there are more things about it that doesn't appeal to me. First of all is that the product range is limited, for some reason alot of products are more expensive then normal store offered ones. And you can't easily get a refund if some product isn't good or past it's vending date.
Here in the Netherlands these kind of test are still running but haven't come up with anything yet. Too much problems as it seems. Similar tests in Germany came up zilch as well.
One of the things is, as mentioned in another post, that there is way too much interference from badly constructed appliances and household electrical goofups like badly connected power outlets.
Come to visit /. Nice oss advocacy site, news for nerds stuff that matters etc...
Real nice article about P4.. with the right amount of opiniated comments as usual..
See ad about visual studio.net
Something's not quite as it should.. but what it is?...
I think an individual has the right to disobey to a law that he thinks it's not only useless, but also damaging to the community.
Hmm.... i think the laws regarding killing my obnoxious neighbours is totally useless and certainly damaging our community. So does this mean i can go out and shoot them?
Off course you should have the right to challenge laws but you do not have the right to disregard them just because you feel like it's too restricting or useless. You still have to obey the law in general. Civil disobedience does have it's limits. Certainly where it comes to crimes against humanity. So, in this case it has it's use but do not proclaim it for using it in general..
I can only agree with you about .NET being well thought out etc. However, it is the company behind it which causes the problems. And understandably so. MircroSoft has a history of shutting out competitors on the same market as they are in. Now tell me, would you like to be owned by MicroSoft? Every little piece of software coming from MicroSoft and locking you in to prevent you from switching platforms? Because that's what this is all about. If you have invested thousands of hours and dollars into a project you will most likely not switch the platform. Making you a milk cow for MicroSoft to pay even more dollars to them.
Yes, it should be the best tool for the job. But think of future implications as well. When you create an enterprise wide application which is consisiting of thousands of lines of code. Would you be willing to rewrite them? Maybe someday MS will stop support for your version of the framework forcing you to buy a new, and more expensive one. Just to prevent you from switching platforms they make sure their code isn't portable. Which is pretty easy to do as their history of embrace and extend has shown allready. These implications should be considered as well before choosing a platform like this. If you don't mind coughing up all those dollars each year for MS related material while other (perhaps less thought out but functioning nevertheless) tools are easy to come by and cheap to boot then hey, it's your personal choice.
Mono will by the way always be lagging behind as SAMBA does. A fact allready known by alot of developers. If you need the greatest and the latest of those implementations you better stick to MS. And just that is what most people resent.... having no choice (as waiting for the rest to play catchup isn't an option..)
If Mono fails on Linux, Linux is dead. Be aware of that.
Hmmm... where have i heard this one before...
Linux won't die because of MONO not succeeding. It would have been dead allready if that's the case. MS wouldn't even think twice to sink the MONO effort if this would hold any thruth in it.
There will always be an alternative which does support Linux. So stop pretending MS is the only player in the IT field.. their not, and never will be..
Problem lies perhaps in the fact that AT&T is a big corporation. People are numbers and numbers can be forged/stolen easily without too much trouble. What if an AT&T employee that just got sacked took a list with him with the information and just threw it on the internet.
I know that these kind of security precautions exist in every big corporation (i work for a top financial corp). I also know that they NEVER work. No-one knows you by the face, only a name or a number is known, and these are easy too come by.
Besides, most system breaches are done from the inside anyway. I know that our company had more internal issues then external.
Child Pornography isn't just offensive but it's a crime against innocent children who are all too often abused or murdered. Whereas blasphemie isn't a crime against humanity, kiddie porn is.
This is another example of blatant arrogance of governments and religious entities. When are they gonna learn that the internet belongs to everyone, everywhere? What would the internet look like if every organisation, religous or otherwise, can block internet sites just because it offend's them?
BTW, I'm not religious in any way, i'm agnostic.
I don't have any problem with "blasphemous" or sexually explicit material because it's all in the eye of the beholder. If there are websites which offend someone then don't go to those sites, if they are visiting them, then they probably want to see the information or images.
I have some problems with for instance rotten.com. Hoewever i don't run around shouting that this site should not be allowed or such. If someone likes these kind of sites then hey, it's their personal business. Who am i to disagree with it..
I'm most certainly not in favor of censorship or any kind of control. The only exception is child pornography. Those kind of things can't be enough censored or condemned.
It's been bought by AOL/Time-Warner. Which resulted in an almost sudden death because AOL like their IM integrated in their junk... hence AIM. Poorly designed software (and they knew it) combined with ICQ's technology.
3rd party software could be an answer.
UM will never reach a point of co-operation as it is too much of importance. How can you create a loyal userbase? Not by giving them options to be able to communicate with people who use different IM software. If your friends use MSN or ICQ or other software you most likely choose the one that is the most used within your circle of friends. Especially when the software of a competitor cannot communicate with their clients.
So, 3rd party software playing translator to the different kind of clients is one of the possible solutions.
This is a joke right? It's a she-male.. and ugly to booth isn't it? Please say it is so.. otherwise i will have nightmares for the rest of my life...... please..?
Is see so many people react to this as if this has something to do with human rights. Claiming that the chinese government is probably trying to close down all the illegal internet cafe's to prevent uncensored surfing.
HELLO! REALITY CHECK!!! If they can close down all those Internet cafe's now they probably allready know where they are and they did not bother them until now. They HAVE TO close down all the cafe's to check if they aren't possible deathtraps as this one was. The city's mayor is held responsible for things like this. Too many people died just because the place was vitually locked on all doors and windows making it impossible to flee the place. It wasn't the government that locked these doors, it was the owner of the place who is responsible for all this.
Furthermore, why cry for this to be a HUMAN RIGHTS issue? In the states things are far more worse than you can imagine. Not only government trying to govern the Internet (think about the webfilters in library's and at schools or even about Carnivore) but also companies try to do this. Think about MSN and AOL.
Of course there are human rights issues in China. No doubt about that, but this is common sense. If you were a mayor of a substantial city what would you do if this happened in your city under your RESPONSIBILITY as you are obliged to safeguard your citizens. My guess is that you would close down as many of these places as you can to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy only to open up those which DO follow fire hazard regulations.
Perhaps just the reason to BE afraid of this. It could be treated as just a small bill which has some credibility so just sign the damn thing and begone with it, move over to the big stuff...
From the bottem of the article
Part three The Matrix Revolutions is also in production and will be released in December 2000
Sorry to have missed it...
Are easily explained by this tidbit of news.
Of course alot of people will be making jokes about punchcard technology. However, this technologie might solve the problems current drive manufacturers are facing. As the article states this might be a technology on the turning point of current mass storage. The similarity between punchcards and this product are only the use of "holes".
This could be the breakthrough for data storage.
Of course privacy is being used against us. It allways has and always will be. Every country has it's examples of this fact.
But would it be worth it to give up our privacy to maintain a false feeling of security? Terrorists will always be able to get their hands on weapons and other stuff to use against us. Whether it is through buying stuff with stolen creditcards or use of a malafide dealer or manufacturer. Weapons and other military stuff are being produced all over the world.
In the light of 9/11 would we have to give up our privacy? For what? The hijackers used frigging hobby knives and some of them weren't even known terrorists. The absense of privacy is not a threath to them. It is to us though...
What's more important is that our governments will not be a totalitarian one and our every move would not be under scrutiny by the government. I like my privacy although i know that my name and other information is going through hundreds of databases each day. I would never like the idea of a government knowing every little thing i say or do though. What's preventing a government of misuse of all that information?
The harddrive market is not really a lucrative bussness anymore. The costs of developping harddrives with larger capacity is almost outgrowing the earnings of selling drives.
IBM has a good reasearch facility which have come up with new methods for storing data. Probably they want to raise money for the production of some of those methods. It's not that that division was skyrocketing their sales revenue anyway...