I can see where te line-of-sight restriction might not be a problem in office enviroments or industrial warehouses where the hubs would be mounted on the ceiling, in a single large enclosed space, but unless your home is some geodesic dome out of the '60s (or something) then I doubt it would work well for the home, besides the standard RF 802.11 stuff is now priced nicely for home use and has range sufficient for most homes. perhaps you'd need two or three base stations at most. Seems to me that the line-oof site limitation of optical wireless will preclude it's adoption for home use. It's not priced right for home use anyway...
The previous poster sounds as though he'd like nothing more than moving back to the gold standard for currency. Almost no established country depends on the gold standard. It makes management of funds, particularly difficult, and eliminates a whole class of wealth buildin business enterprises. Perhaps that is good, but it'd certainly negitively impact a significant portion of the population at this point in the history of the financial markets.
The gold standard does buy you some financial security, but the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. It you want to deal exclusively in a gold standard currency, you can use any one of a number of proposed internet currencies but good luck finding merchants that will accept it.
I'm distressed that I have to agree that use of the 'Killistrator' name is probably indefensable, from a trademark perspective. I wish it were. There doesn't seem to be an approach to this case that would provide protection for it's use in relation to a graphics program.
On the otherhand, if we were to create a first person shooter in that name, let Adobe try and fight that. Perhaps in this came you blast the heads off little pissant corporate lawyers. Sounds fun doesn't it?
OK, so I can understand trafic monitoring cameras, and such things; I'm actually quite impressed with the trafic monitoring systems around New York City that flash trafic information about congenstion around upcoming exits, on bilboards for motorists.
The problem with that technology, of course, is it was the slippery slope that paved the way for this garbage. Here's the next great idea in internet Kiosks:
See if you look like a criminal... Only $2 With a little camera and some facial recognition software, you could make a fortune. Find out if it's safe to walk the streets without risk of being picked up for looking like a criminal, and at a vary affordable price too...
Now, in all seriousness: The question becomes, how did we ever let it get to this point? You can't blame politions for this. Blame the public. There clearly wasn't enough of a public outcry to force the removal of cameras after the superbowl story came to light. By-the-way, were there ever numbers released as to the arrests made as a result of video footage made at the superbowl?
Realistically, if you're a anted criminal you probably don't ant to go to such a high profile event regardless of weather there are caeras there snapping pictures of everyone. This is of course the justification that such video comperisons are acceptable.
When arguing against such invasions of provacy, and other issues such as the right to free speech (semi-unrelated) organizations who are politically active in this way, can't draw a line. They have to argue in favor of all degrees of privacy, and all forms of speech. This is where opposing lobyists get their fodder for retaliation, saying such chings as 'The Electronic Frontiers Foundation supports pornography' and thinds of this nature. The claim on it's face may be true, but it's only because if you get in the business of drawing lines in the sand (especially in this area where the terrain changes so rapidly) you will spend all your time re-drawing these lines - time we can't afford to waste on things other than the central issue.
This is our own fault, for not fighting back more vigorously when we started down this slippery slope.
I'm not sure what the sources for the BBC article were but as I recall, Google has a 4000 node Linux cluster running it, not "three large servers" as the BBC article satates.
It's nice to see a good company with an excelant reputation braving the Equity Markets. Good luck to them.
Back in the mid 1980s Nintendo entered the arcade game insustry by packaging their (original) console product with a library of games and installing it inside the base of a standard looking arcade game. It seemed to me that was a pretty good idea. A method to bridge the Console Gaming and Arcade Gaming indistries. I never saw a second generation of that technology. Did they pursue this any further?
What comes to mind is, it might have angered game manufacturers who were developing for the Nintendo Console as a second platform, in addition to releasing their games in arcade chasis, with their own hardware, although I presume there are standard arcade video game platforms at this point, produced by third parties, thus allowing the gaming companies to concentrate their efforts of the software content of the game. Can anyone comment on how this aspect of the arcade video game industry works?
One of the most interesting hacks was Mac Murrett's Apple Turnover. This hack will invert the screen, and begin to rotate it as you work. System performance is not heavily taxed at all, as the hack takes advantage of AltiVec to manipulate the screen buffer.
Gee. As I recall Amiga have had some of the greatest screen hacks of all time, since the beginning of time. Remember that red and white checkerboard sphere... Let's see, they had screens that bounced, disolved, snowed, ran away from the mouse pointer, all sorts of great stuff. I miss the Amiga (I still have an Amiga 1000 in the basement 4MB memory, no internal HD, and a UI that rivaled the MAC any day). I think the Amiga is still the superior platform for screen hacks - unfortunately, there just isn't enough software out there for it anymore to make it a useful platform for much else.
the military was told it should focus research: "self-replicating systems for wound healing,"
Soldier to army medic: "Sir, My wound healed fine, this new Biotech is great!!! But now I have this giant melignant cancer where the wound was..." Army Medic: "Yah. It's a self-replicating system. It's still in the testing phase, but since we suddenly found ourselves at war, we had to avail ourselves of every advantage. Sorry."
If you can heal a soldier that would have died, temporarily so he can kill 5 more of the enemy, before dying a more excruciating death than the otherwise would have, do you do that?
I think this is the big question of biotech medicines in military applications...
There are several interesting theories on how this was achieved, although I still enjoy the theory that they were built by aliens as landing sites for spacecraft. It may not be accurate, or have any foundation in science, or evidence to back it up, but, hey - It's entertaining...
Te article isn't vary telling with regard to the factors contributing to the inconsistant decision with regard to the domain ownership. This is a cop out really:
"The respondent registered the domain name with the intention to link it to a free-speech site," the ruling said.
SO does this mean that if I have a message board on my website to discuss how ABC sucks, on my website ABCsucks.com. That's simple. There has to be more to this. I didn't see anything in the domain dispute resolution policy with regard to disclosure of statements by the dispute resolution pannel specifically. Is there more complete documentation with regard to what swayed the pannel. It really can't be as simple as the quote suggests.
The critical element here is stated quite clearly:
most transactions in cyberspace still involve national currencies, fraught with risk of fluctuating exchange rates
although you still need to worry about the valuation of gold. It is important though, to bave a new currency be bullion based at lest until it becomes universally accepted.
I also liked the comment by the providers of this currency:
For their part, the digital currency entrepreneurs say they seek legitimate customers who wish to make large, low-fee online international transactions.
Translation: We welcome money launderers, those looking to hide funds from their spouse, and just about anyone else who wants to enguage in any sort of even halfway shady dealings.
There is one other application of this sort of independant international currency. That is, when someone (aparently not Hilton 1, 2, 3) get around to building a hotel or other touristdestination in space, or some other location beyond the jurisdiction of any one country, such as a deep sea hotel. Currently, there is only one player remaining in this arena as far as I know, but they'll need a currency, and in order to avoid national ties, this type of cyber-currency would be perfect.
Although I'll believe it when I see it, at least it doesn't rely on old technology. People complain about the reliability and deployment schedules of DSL. Well one has nothing to do with the other. Any change like this requires large amounts of infastructure, which is what spurred the development of DSL as a stop-gap technology. Rather than repeat all the discussion about DSL, I'll simply suggest doing a search on DSL on/., but annyway, as the author says, it's great to see someone taking the bull by the horns and deploying a real solution.
The WSJ article cites a Microsoft employee who says:
Many of the company's Web sites went down much of a day in January, and this person said FreeBSD was judged to be better than Windows at helping to prevent a recurrence of the problem.
Stating that Microsoft still uses FreeBSD for DNS service.
I'm not sure that the two are related. True BSD is more reliable than windows, but wasn't the Microsoft DNS outage related to a routing problem?
As I recall, some stupid network architect put all their DNS servers on the same subnet. I'm not a big microsoft fan, but to be fair, we all know FreeBSD is better than windows at TCP/IP operations but that wasn't the cause of their DNS outage and shouldn't have been cited as evidence of WIndows' inferiority in the WSJ article. In fact, the DNS outage is evidence only of the fact that Nicrosoft should have hired a smarter network architect.
Microsoft is a behemoth. I wonder how many corporate lawyers got fired for this massive foobar...
Here's hoping those dumbass corporate lawyers get to join all the homeless dot bomb'ers not a few of which Microsoft - through the help of these lawyers - put there.
It get's better than that. First, keep track of the variations in your name, for examle, use an alphabetic code as your middle name, storing information on which code corresponds to which company signup. Then include (when dealing with snailmail) a form letter requiring the company not to disclose your contact information to 3rd parties, then, sit back and wait for the junkmail, then start sending collection letters to the companies that failed to comply with the disclosure you included with each signup. This technique and others are detailed on a really nifty website JunkBusters.com. Particularly amisung is their Anti-Telemarketing Script.
Thankfully, I have more important things to do with my time than pursue these endevours, but There are people who do these sorts of things (for a living maybe...).
It's great to see these books returning to print. They inspired a whole generation of geeks. They don't qualify as great literature, but still... It's nice to see them back. I wonder if they'll influence a whole new generation of geeks this time around...?
I'm not sure that any of this is really news - at least it's not new. Microsoft has been battling to get a foothold for their music transport format for quite some time now. That they have a relationship with AOL is CERTAINLY NOT NEWS. That they behave as if their windows desktop space is a comodity to be bargained with shouldn't be news to anyone at all. There have been a number of articles on this subject.
In fact, Microsoft - through implementation of HailStorm - is looking to find more virtual realestate to sell off or rent out, since windows desktops have physical dimensions. The solution here will partially be implemented with OfficeXP and will be firther implemented with WindowsXP. By moving services off the desktop and onto servers, microsoft is then only limited by the size of the enviromentally controlled warehouses they use for their server farms.
Back to the main issue of media formats for a moment: I wouldn't be suprised to see a move by Microsoft to implement 'streaming only' restrictions into media recordings. This idea has been played with by several companies and recording industry organizations including the RIAA. This is discussed in a vary good posting on/. which describes the RIAA's version of a Streaming-only service.
I agree that this move by microsoft is yet another anti-competitive behavior, but I have ceased being suprised by Lord Bill's moves, a long time ago
--CTH
---
The best part about Andromeda
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 3
The series has not disappointed me too much. I has weaknesses, but I'll still watch it. One of the great weaknesses of Star Trek was the infalibility of the federation and the perfection of the technology (to the point where they had to dream up inplausable problems to fause failures in unbelievable technology...). The ST:DS9 series sort adressed the political infalibility of the federation, but Andromeda, has a highly falible set of characters, political climate, and technology. It makes for much greater potential for good storylines, which raises the question, Why fall back on the Rodenbury standby of Time Travel?
Having said that, by far the best part of the Andromeda series is Lexa Doig. What can I say? she's really cute.
--CTH
---
accuracy of content on ExtremeTech.com
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 5
A couple of days ago there was an article here on/. discussing the nature of content the ExtremeTech.com website. Some comments on that article at the time (including mine) made the mistake of assuming that the site was being run by ZD Net, which is a subsidiary of C|Net, which most readers here look down upon, however, aparently that information was in error. The tite is in fact managed by ZD Media which is a new division of Ziff Davis Publishing.
The earlier/. article is defintely worth a read though, when evaluating content from the Extreme Tech website.
Having said that, and regardless of the earlier postings here indicating inacuracies in the ExtremeTech hardware review being discussed here, I have to say the site look quite well put together and editorially fair.
I've found that there are two distinct styles or approaches used when teaching computer skills.
First, the most common method is to teach by example and promote task oriented proficiency, such as is done if the classic for dummies books. This methos is by far the preferred method when doing introductory training, and is probably most appropriate for senior citizens who don't nesecerily have a concept of the overall capabilities of computers or technology as a whole.
The second method, which is far less common, but which I prefer and feel would be much more effective for inquisitive indeviduals (those who chose to become computer literate, bot because they felt the need to, but rather, because they wished to). That is, to provide a conceptual framework around which the student can develop experience and gain task oriented proficiency, rather than teach in a task oriented fashion.
It comes down to the old saying: Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he will eat for a long time to come... or however it goes
I would think the former strategy would be a better teaching method for senior citizens though. This is what I've found in my short time as an adult education instructor.
I enjoyed the Simpsons first season. They may not have hit their stride until later seasons, but at that time they were competing with such hilarious shows as In Living Color (Jim carey, and Jennifer lopez got their start), on FOX and so the show was a bit more raunchy than it is now - not that that makes a show better or funnier or anything...
Not sure it's worth $40 though. Maybe get the James Bond Boxed Set instead...
Some Film studio executive actually considers this entertainment (or expects to con enough people into paying $8.50, to make money on these wastes of celuloid) ---
It seems that we already knew this. Promotion has become more important than quality. OK, well the study does tell us (me anyway) that this has been a long term trend, rather than my previous (unsupported ) feeling that it has only ocurred over the past decade, it appears to have extended over the past two deades, and perhaps a bit further back.
As for te rest of the findings, I'm sure many of us had a gut feeling that such things were true, but it's nice to see them quantified
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't we try this 30 years ago? Did it work then?
--
I can see where te line-of-sight restriction might not be a problem in office enviroments or industrial warehouses where the hubs would be mounted on the ceiling, in a single large enclosed space, but unless your home is some geodesic dome out of the '60s (or something) then I doubt it would work well for the home, besides the standard RF 802.11 stuff is now priced nicely for home use and has range sufficient for most homes. perhaps you'd need two or three base stations at most. Seems to me that the line-oof site limitation of optical wireless will preclude it's adoption for home use. It's not priced right for home use anyway...
--CTH
--
The previous poster sounds as though he'd like nothing more than moving back to the gold standard for currency. Almost no established country depends on the gold standard. It makes management of funds, particularly difficult, and eliminates a whole class of wealth buildin business enterprises. Perhaps that is good, but it'd certainly negitively impact a significant portion of the population at this point in the history of the financial markets.
The gold standard does buy you some financial security, but the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. It you want to deal exclusively in a gold standard currency, you can use any one of a number of proposed internet currencies but good luck finding merchants that will accept it.
--CTH
--
I'm distressed that I have to agree that use of the 'Killistrator' name is probably indefensable, from a trademark perspective. I wish it were. There doesn't seem to be an approach to this case that would provide protection for it's use in relation to a graphics program.
On the otherhand, if we were to create a first person shooter in that name, let Adobe try and fight that. Perhaps in this came you blast the heads off little pissant corporate lawyers. Sounds fun doesn't it?
--CTH
--
OK, so I can understand trafic monitoring cameras, and such things; I'm actually quite impressed with the trafic monitoring systems around New York City that flash trafic information about congenstion around upcoming exits, on bilboards for motorists.
The problem with that technology, of course, is it was the slippery slope that paved the way for this garbage. Here's the next great idea in internet Kiosks:
See if you look like a criminal... Only $2
With a little camera and some facial recognition software, you could make a fortune. Find out if it's safe to walk the streets without risk of being picked up for looking like a criminal, and at a vary affordable price too...
Now, in all seriousness: The question becomes, how did we ever let it get to this point? You can't blame politions for this. Blame the public. There clearly wasn't enough of a public outcry to force the removal of cameras after the superbowl story came to light. By-the-way, were there ever numbers released as to the arrests made as a result of video footage made at the superbowl?
Realistically, if you're a anted criminal you probably don't ant to go to such a high profile event regardless of weather there are caeras there snapping pictures of everyone. This is of course the justification that such video comperisons are acceptable.
When arguing against such invasions of provacy, and other issues such as the right to free speech (semi-unrelated) organizations who are politically active in this way, can't draw a line. They have to argue in favor of all degrees of privacy, and all forms of speech. This is where opposing lobyists get their fodder for retaliation, saying such chings as 'The Electronic Frontiers Foundation supports pornography' and thinds of this nature. The claim on it's face may be true, but it's only because if you get in the business of drawing lines in the sand (especially in this area where the terrain changes so rapidly) you will spend all your time re-drawing these lines - time we can't afford to waste on things other than the central issue.
This is our own fault, for not fighting back more vigorously when we started down this slippery slope.
--CTH
--
I'm not sure what the sources for the BBC article were but as I recall, Google has a 4000 node Linux cluster running it, not "three large servers" as the BBC article satates.
It's nice to see a good company with an excelant reputation braving the Equity Markets. Good luck to them.
--CTH
---
Back in the mid 1980s Nintendo entered the arcade game insustry by packaging their (original) console product with a library of games and installing it inside the base of a standard looking arcade game. It seemed to me that was a pretty good idea. A method to bridge the Console Gaming and Arcade Gaming indistries. I never saw a second generation of that technology. Did they pursue this any further?
What comes to mind is, it might have angered game manufacturers who were developing for the Nintendo Console as a second platform, in addition to releasing their games in arcade chasis, with their own hardware, although I presume there are standard arcade video game platforms at this point, produced by third parties, thus allowing the gaming companies to concentrate their efforts of the software content of the game. Can anyone comment on how this aspect of the arcade video game industry works?
--CTH
---
--CTH
---
Army Medic: "Yah. It's a self-replicating system. It's still in the testing phase, but since we suddenly found ourselves at war, we had to avail ourselves of every advantage. Sorry."
If you can heal a soldier that would have died, temporarily so he can kill 5 more of the enemy, before dying a more excruciating death than the otherwise would have, do you do that?
I think this is the big question of biotech medicines in military applications...
--CTH
---
There are several interesting theories on how this was achieved, although I still enjoy the theory that they were built by aliens as landing sites for spacecraft. It may not be accurate, or have any foundation in science, or evidence to back it up, but, hey - It's entertaining...
--CTH
---
Here's the publsihed dcision from the Domain Name Dispute Committee, for the MichaelBloomburgSucks.com domain:
The Dispute Resolution Comittee Decicion
--CTH
---
--CTH
---
I also liked the comment by the providers of this currency:Translation:
We welcome money launderers, those looking to hide funds from their spouse, and just about anyone else who wants to enguage in any sort of even halfway shady dealings.
There is one other application of this sort of independant international currency. That is, when someone (aparently not Hilton 1, 2, 3) get around to building a hotel or other tourist destination in space, or some other location beyond the jurisdiction of any one country, such as a deep sea hotel. Currently, there is only one player remaining in this arena as far as I know, but they'll need a currency, and in order to avoid national ties, this type of cyber-currency would be perfect.
--CTH
---
Although I'll believe it when I see it, at least it doesn't rely on old technology. People complain about the reliability and deployment schedules of DSL. Well one has nothing to do with the other. Any change like this requires large amounts of infastructure, which is what spurred the development of DSL as a stop-gap technology. Rather than repeat all the discussion about DSL, I'll simply suggest doing a search on DSL on /., but annyway, as the author says, it's great to see someone taking the bull by the horns and deploying a real solution.
--CTH
---
I'm not sure that the two are related. True BSD is more reliable than windows, but wasn't the Microsoft DNS outage related to a routing problem?
As I recall, some stupid network architect put all their DNS servers on the same subnet. I'm not a big microsoft fan, but to be fair, we all know FreeBSD is better than windows at TCP/IP operations but that wasn't the cause of their DNS outage and shouldn't have been cited as evidence of WIndows' inferiority in the WSJ article. In fact, the DNS outage is evidence only of the fact that Nicrosoft should have hired a smarter network architect.
--CTH
---
Microsoft is a behemoth. I wonder how many corporate lawyers got fired for this massive foobar...
Here's hoping those dumbass corporate lawyers get to join all the homeless dot bomb'ers not a few of which Microsoft - through the help of these lawyers - put there.
--CTH
---
It get's better than that. First, keep track of the variations in your name, for examle, use an alphabetic code as your middle name, storing information on which code corresponds to which company signup. Then include (when dealing with snailmail) a form letter requiring the company not to disclose your contact information to 3rd parties, then, sit back and wait for the junkmail, then start sending collection letters to the companies that failed to comply with the disclosure you included with each signup. This technique and others are detailed on a really nifty website JunkBusters.com. Particularly amisung is their Anti-Telemarketing Script.
Thankfully, I have more important things to do with my time than pursue these endevours, but There are people who do these sorts of things (for a living maybe...).
--CTH
---
It's great to see these books returning to print. They inspired a whole generation of geeks. They don't qualify as great literature, but still... It's nice to see them back. I wonder if they'll influence a whole new generation of geeks this time around...?
--CTH
---
I'm not sure that any of this is really news - at least it's not new. Microsoft has been battling to get a foothold for their music transport format for quite some time now. That they have a relationship with AOL is CERTAINLY NOT NEWS. That they behave as if their windows desktop space is a comodity to be bargained with shouldn't be news to anyone at all. There have been a number of articles on this subject.
/. which describes the RIAA's version of a Streaming-only service.
In fact, Microsoft - through implementation of HailStorm - is looking to find more virtual realestate to sell off or rent out, since windows desktops have physical dimensions. The solution here will partially be implemented with OfficeXP and will be firther implemented with WindowsXP. By moving services off the desktop and onto servers, microsoft is then only limited by the size of the enviromentally controlled warehouses they use for their server farms.
Back to the main issue of media formats for a moment: I wouldn't be suprised to see a move by Microsoft to implement 'streaming only' restrictions into media recordings. This idea has been played with by several companies and recording industry organizations including the RIAA. This is discussed in a vary good posting on
I agree that this move by microsoft is yet another anti-competitive behavior, but I have ceased being suprised by Lord Bill's moves, a long time ago
--CTH
---
The series has not disappointed me too much. I has weaknesses, but I'll still watch it. One of the great weaknesses of Star Trek was the infalibility of the federation and the perfection of the technology (to the point where they had to dream up inplausable problems to fause failures in unbelievable technology...). The ST:DS9 series sort adressed the political infalibility of the federation, but Andromeda, has a highly falible set of characters, political climate, and technology. It makes for much greater potential for good storylines, which raises the question, Why fall back on the Rodenbury standby of Time Travel?
Having said that, by far the best part of the Andromeda series is Lexa Doig. What can I say? she's really cute.
--CTH
---
A couple of days ago there was an article here on /. discussing the nature of content the ExtremeTech.com website. Some comments on that article at the time (including mine) made the mistake of assuming that the site was being run by ZD Net, which is a subsidiary of C|Net, which most readers here look down upon, however, aparently that information was in error. The tite is in fact managed by ZD Media which is a new division of Ziff Davis Publishing.
/. article is defintely worth a read though, when evaluating content from the Extreme Tech website.
The earlier
Having said that, and regardless of the earlier postings here indicating inacuracies in the ExtremeTech hardware review being discussed here, I have to say the site look quite well put together and editorially fair.
--CTH
---
I've found that there are two distinct styles or approaches used when teaching computer skills.
First, the most common method is to teach by example and promote task oriented proficiency, such as is done if the classic for dummies books. This methos is by far the preferred method when doing introductory training, and is probably most appropriate for senior citizens who don't nesecerily have a concept of the overall capabilities of computers or technology as a whole.
The second method, which is far less common, but which I prefer and feel would be much more effective for inquisitive indeviduals (those who chose to become computer literate, bot because they felt the need to, but rather, because they wished to). That is, to provide a conceptual framework around which the student can develop experience and gain task oriented proficiency, rather than teach in a task oriented fashion.
It comes down to the old saying:
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he will eat for a long time to come... or however it goes
I would think the former strategy would be a better teaching method for senior citizens though. This is what I've found in my short time as an adult education instructor.
--CTH
---
I enjoyed the Simpsons first season. They may not have hit their stride until later seasons, but at that time they were competing with such hilarious shows as In Living Color (Jim carey, and Jennifer lopez got their start), on FOX and so the show was a bit more raunchy than it is now - not that that makes a show better or funnier or anything...
Not sure it's worth $40 though. Maybe get the James Bond Boxed Set instead...
--CTH
---
- Pearl Harbor
- The Animal
- A Knight's Tale
Some Film studio executive actually considers this entertainment (or expects to con enough people into paying $8.50, to make money on these wastes of celuloid)---
It seems that we already knew this. Promotion has become more important than quality. OK, well the study does tell us (me anyway) that this has been a long term trend, rather than my previous (unsupported ) feeling that it has only ocurred over the past decade, it appears to have extended over the past two deades, and perhaps a bit further back.
As for te rest of the findings, I'm sure many of us had a gut feeling that such things were true, but it's nice to see them quantified
--CTH
---