I was able to have a tour of the bridge of another Incat ferry (builder of this boat) which uses similar technology - they did have paper charts for backup (mandated by law actually) on that boat, as well as some more standard equipment, as well as the computerised bridge.
It's pretty cool how they steer this boat - it can move any direction as it powered by steerable water jets. The wheel on the bridge is 10cm across, which just seems weird compared to traditional bridges. One of the big selling points of the Incat ferries is that they dock quickly and in a small area, because they can come in sideways.
I can tell you from personal experience that they are pretty damned unpleasant in even 3m swells... At least half of the passengers (including myself) quite sick.
This boat is an Incat fast ferry, built in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Incat have made about 40% of the large fast catermaran ferries around the world.
They used to run an Incat ferry across Bass Strait from Tasmania to mainland Australia. It would get from Devonport (Tasmania) to Melbourne in about 6 hours - the traditional ferries took 14 hours. Quite a difference, and it's really neat being on a boat that size when it starts moving. However, Bass Strait has some pretty impressively bad weather (try looking for Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race to get an idea)... The Incat ferries were just not suited to it (for the general public, anyway).
They can still move quickly if you don't mind lots of extremely sick people on board (soldiers are supposed to be tough, right?). Incat have won (and currently hold) the trans-Atlantic Blue Riband (Hales Trophy) (and have actually won it three times - usually while delivering their ferries!) - with an average speed of 38.8 knots (about 72km/h)
It also looks like Apple is only supporting Windows 2000 and XP.
Now that's the best news I've heard for a long time. There are a lot of people out there stuck on the glorious Win9x/Me... if they could be encouraged to upgrade (and let's face it, Microsoft hasn't been able to do this), we may be able to say goodbye to a truly painful era in operating system support just a little bit sooner than expected.
IMR already had 2 computer support people working in Goroka -- one of them completely self trained -- so I thought that we could probably use Linux at least for the backend and save ourselves a lot of money. However I quickly found that although the techs were quite familiar with Windows, a year was not going to be anywhere near long enough to bring them to a point where they would be able to correct issues with Linux. There was just too much of a curve. I doubt that we would have been able to get to the point of patching and recompiling the kernel (or an application). For all the recent criticism of Windows Update, it usually works a whole lot more simply for users (and our techs here).
When I arrived, they had a basic Lantastic network that the techs would use for backing up data from individual PCs. There was just one computer with email and Internet access (and a single email address for the whole organisation) -- people would queue to use it. It had never been patched at all. We would open up computers just 3 weeks old and not be able to distinguish any features inside due to the dust.
We did some basic training for Linux, and the techs went through that with no problem, but they started to communicate to me their concern with administering it. They had a heavy workload and didn't feel confident that they would be able to get to the point they needed to with Linux before my time with them was up.
In the end I went with an all-Microsoft solution. Windows, Exchange 2000, Terminal Server, etc. We are now at a point where client machines don't matter any more -- data is stored on the server -- it used to use up all their time just keeping the client machines running. Now, if a client machine goes down, they fix the hardware issue, press F12 and it rebuilds the machine automatically... And in the meantime the user can continue working on another machine.
There is some Linux expertise in the country, nearly all of it in the capital; I would expect some of the missionary organisations here also have Linux setups. However, there is no real support for Linux, whereas there are plenty of MCSE qualified people and companies that provide resources for Microsoft setups. If the whole thing went up in flames and the techs weren't confident of their ability to resurrect the system, I'm sure that they could hire someone from the capital to correct the problem. With Linux, they'd have to bring in someone from Australia...
Some of the more interesting issues we have to deal with include: we recently managed to organise a permanent connection - 64kbit (compressed to roughly 100kbit on average), shared with 4 other large organisations in town. It's actually cheaper than dialup. However, this permanent connection will be unavailable for roughly 40-50 hours per month as the telecommunications out of the city go down (batteries not charging at a repeater apparently). We still pay almost US$1 per megabyte over our monthly 1GB download quota... MS service packs take up much of that, but in my experience with Linux I have had to download a whole lot more... Remote administration is an interesting issue. I sometimes ssh to a server in Australia, but typing with a lag of roughly 2 seconds is not much fun. Going the other way requires dialup -- safer than opening ports on the firewall.
Interestingly, power has not been much of an issue. Although there are blackouts, we have both UPS and genset backups. Our old UPS (about 20 years old) died recently, and we have just had a new one installed... I have only seen a power cut at IMR once -- when the genset was being maintained at the time of a blackout. Power line filtering in front of
That's ridiculous. You don't have to read someone's autobiography to know something about them. The vast majority of people have not read Mein Kampf, and yet they know who Hitler was, and more importantly, why what he did was wrong. That's something you'll never find in his own writings.
I live in Australia. Last year I needed to get 4 phone lines installed. Telstra took over 1 1/2 months to do it. But in Australia, we have these telecommunications service obligations that all telcos (and probably isps soon as well) have to meet. As Telstra didn't meet the minimum, they had to pay me about $40 for every day that they didn't get my phone lines in.
We have an 802.11b connection for Aus $600/month (equipment) + about $200 (data). We can get a good 500KB/sec over 7km range (over water -- that decreases bandwidth substantially) with less than 4 ms latency.
Admittedly, if you live in Australia, you'll pay through the nose for your data (Aus 20c/mb for mere mortals).
It's not so hard to install an antenna. If you have good roof access, expect it to take a professional an hour or two -- a couple of hundred dollars. At my place, it took half an hour.
Why do you need to hire a consultant to run a server among a bunch of geeks? As the original poster said, surely you can rotate the support? And if the router/equipment goes down, it's not the end of the world, either. Just go and fix it.
It is possible to setup an affordable connection: but if you do, try going with a local provider, even if that puts you a few hops off the backbone. You'll get far better support and you'll be able to talk directly to the admins; if you have a problem with your connection, they'll be far more likely to sit down and help you figure it out.
I'd second that -- I've now had almost 14000 attacks on my server in the last 7 days. Apart from blowing out all the logs, it has cost me about $40 in bandwidth as well. Where can I send the bill?
There are a lot of misguided or uninformed comments about Unicode here.
Just FYI, the Unicode mailing list have already read and dismissed the claims of this document -- the document has a lot of factual errors. For instance, Unicode 3.1 supports 1,000,000+ characters, not ~90,000.
The first thing to remember is that The Unicode Standard itself is really just a list of characters associated with codepoints.
Not all the Unicode codepoints have been allocated yet -- some of them never will be. Space has been left with most alphabets to encode other characters discovered or new characters.
In raw form, these code points run from 0x0001 to 0x10FFFF, in 17 planes of ~65536 code points each. A few of these characters are reserved, such as 0xFFFF. That makes over 1,000,000 characters, which should be enough for anyone.(Although 640K may come to mind for some...)
All the UTF-* encoding forms are just ways of representing these characters. ALL of them support the full range of Unicode codepoints.
UTF-32 represents the codepoints exactly in 4 octets.
UTF-16 represents the codepoints in 2 octets for plane 0 (0x0001-0xFFFF), and in 4 octets for the remaining planes, using 'surrogate pairs'. Surrogate pairs are two UTF-16 codes, the first from the range D800-DBFF, the second from DC00-DFFF, encoding code points (UCP) in planes 1-16 as follows: UCP = (surr1-0xD800)*0x0400 + (surr2-0xDC00) + 0x10000.
UTF-8 is very clever. It manages to encode European codepoints in an average of 1.1 bytes. If the top bit of the octet is 0, it represents a standard ASCII character. Go read the Unicode website (http://www.unicode.org/) if you want to know more about it.
There's also UTF-7 for the truly insane. And UTF-8s as used by Oracle and so on...
The Unicode Standard is not perfect -- what is? -- but it is definitely the only standard out there that even comes close to approaching the goal of supporting all the world's characters.
I have a 802.11b radio link from my ISP, which is 6km away from my house, over about 3km of water.
It works beautifully, with far better stability than my old ISDN 128K connection, with a few caveats:
Total install cost was about Australian $6000 (US$3000). This included two dishes, two wireless LAN cards, cabling and professional installation in both locations and a Cabletron wireless gateway in my house. You could get away with cheaper equipment, but I chose this setup because it was tried and tested by my ISP already.
There is a significant loss of bandwidth due to reflections from the water (I tend to get about 5MBit out of a theoretical 11MBit connection. But, hey, I'm not complaining.)
And this means I have escaped the telco charges -- total costs are approx Aus$55/month plus bandwidth charges (the phenomenal 19c/meg, incoming data only, that Australians still have to pay*).
* For those Aussies on fixed-price cable or ADSL contracts, those on per-meg contracts are subsidising you. Apparently these costs should be coming down significantly in the near future.
In Canberra, people are using the old Galaxy pay TV aerials, with minor modifications, to create a wireless CAN.
The problem with Marxism-Leninism, and equally the problem with the solutions proposed by many economists today is what their ideologies cover.
Marxism-Leninism puts everything under the power of the government -- this is obviously bad. However, the reasoning you give puts everything in the control of those who must make money -- the capitalists. I would say this is equally bad.
Why can't there be a happy medium? Some functions of government belong in the government, and not in the private sector. For instance, policing, defense, justice are obvious candidates (I won't explore reasons here). I would say that utilities -- power, water, gas, mail all belong in the government.
Yes, this means that these organisations may be inefficient, bureaucratic or even corrupt to some degree. But more importantly, it also means equitable access for all, and we have much more of a say in how these sectors are run.
Here in Australia, the privatisation of Telstra (Australia's telecommunications giant) has had good and bad ramifications. It has made the organisation more efficient (cut the number of jobs by thousands [query: is this a good thing?]) and opened up the market to competition -- lower prices, etc. But: rural Australia lost out. And so do those on lower incomes, as they do not qualify for many of the schemes (such as combining mobile and home phone bills for large discounts). Telstra's service record has also declined, and the government has had to place many new restrictions and requirements on the commercial Telstra so that it will even service rural and low-income areas (who are *loss making*).
In the end, is paying less money for something, or making more money, the most important thing in the world? Will this really make people's lives better?
Bronte Park, TAS, Australia 22 Nov 1999 Some experts predict that various genetically engineered crops will become lethal to humans on Jan 1, 2000. This is due to a date-dependent gene sequence inserted into members of the legume family. To prevent this disaster concerned citizens should stockpile organically farmed beans and peanuts. Melbourne Zoo elephant keeper Joe Bloggs has expressed concern about this heretofore unmentioned aspect of the Y2K bug. "We go through about 300,000 peanuts a day and we simply can't afford to buy organic peanuts any more, not to mention the peanuts that zoo visitors bring to feed elephants," he said. So please, for your own safety, stay away from peanuts and beans on Jan 1st, 2000.
There have been a lot of comments about metal detectors, makeshift weapons (e.g. screwdrivers) and profiling systems (Mosaic-2000). Most people agreed that these were bandaid solutions. And a lot of people felt threatened or restricted by these solutions.
Now the question I want to ask you is why do we need these solutions? Why do people need to worry about violence? All the solutions that have been presented so far attack the symptoms, not the cause of this problem.
I can liken this to an HIV/AIDS victim. The doctors treat all the symptoms, the common colds, the flus, and whatever other diseases that can attack as a result of the HIV infection, but they don't actually attack the root cause of the problem, which is the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus. This virus, of course, basically causes the human immune system to fail. So the patient can live for a while, but eventually they'll die from complications of some sort. If and when AIDS is curable, it'll be curable by treating the source of the problem: the HIV virus itself, not any of the subsequent diseases.
So, to fix this problem in the schools, and society as well, we really need to look at the origin of the problem. I ask you, what's the problem?
Jon Katz, you have, as usual, written an article that clearly falls under the category of FUD. This article does not describe Mosaic-2000, but instead seeks only to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about this program.
Why can't you, before you write this, give some factual data about your subject matter? How many real facts have you given us about Mosaic-2000? How will it be used? What are the motivations behind Mosaic-2000? What is its primary use? It turns out that its primary use is to profile those who have made threats, not those who are "different."
How is this article any different to the Microsoft Linux Myths page?
I would also like to know where your research comes from, Jon. Quoting unreferenced statistics is not quality journalism.
"Even though violence -- and fear of violence -- among the young has been declining sharply for years, media and political ignorance of kids, technology and culture has only deepened."
Where does this data come from? It doesn't reflect any of the following references (try searching for +youth +"violent crime" +statistics" in AltaVista):
"While the rate of property crime among youths decreased by seven per cent between 1986 and 1993 (3,470 versus 3,216 incidents per 100,000 youths), the rate of youth-perpetrated violent crime more than doubled. In 1993, police charged 921 youths per 100,000 persons aged 12 to 17 with committing a violent offence, up from 408 in 1986. Between 1986 and 1993, the average annual increase in the violent crime rate was over 12 per cent for youths." (emphasis added)
I'd also suggest that your reliance on teens for quotable material is not necessarily good. As someone else pointed out, many (if not most) teens have an "us versus them" view of the government, schools and parents. This would especially hold true for your "different" group of teens.
Now, I'm not saying that I like the idea of Mosaic-2000, but after all, it is just an expert system to assist those who are already doing this job (which most of them probably don't enjoy in the slightest, despite what the teenagers under their responsibility think).
Jon, research your articles! Don't just write to get a reaction.
A quick selection of judicious whoises and nslookups gives us some juicy conspiracy fodder. I employed Sam Gumshoe, my friendly local net detective to hunt down the elusive meaning of TransMeta.
--SAM GUMSHOE SPEAKING--
Why does this company have a T1? (transmeta-T1-gw.mv.best.net)
And why do they host a large number of linux sites? (linux.kernel.org, www.linuxbase.org, www.li18nux.org) Could this be to enlist the forces of Open Source?
Why does nic.os.org have the following in its home page?
<!-- This web page has no relation to www.transmeta.com -->
What does dmz-net-1.transmeta.com mean?
De-Militarized Zone??? Those alien theories are starting to sound more and more likely.
Who else knows polaris.transmeta.com?
A quick search on AltaVista for +polaris +transmeta gives us a curious link to
Avant! - The Very Deep Submicron Technology Leader -- but visiting the page gives us an inexplicable 404 Error. Why has this page been hurriedly removed?
How does neosilicon.transmeta.com come into the equation?
New Silicon. But who, how, why, when and where?
After this search there are more questions than ever. Clearly Transmeta have something to hide, and I, the tireless Sam Gumshoe, am not going to rest until I have hunted down the elusive meaning of TransMeta.
Actually, I'm perfectly well aware that X is not the GUI, but I was using the term X to describe the underling X layer + the assorted window managers out there. Perhaps that wasn't clear from my message, and I could have made it clearer.
I've tried a large number of the X window managers out there, and still none of them measure up to Windows in both performance and useability. However, I'm not saying that I won't use KDE or Gnome in the future; they are only in their early years, and will be polished, whereas MS have had close to 15 years to polish Windows. I just hope that the KDE/Gnome/whatever developers focus on useability over glitz, because in the end, glitz only sells screenshots.
So I haven't given up on either KDE or Gnome, but at this stage, they're not quite useable enough for my liking (remember, I virtually never touch the mouse).
Rob, I like the changes, but for one thing... the maximum comment length is a little short. A good number of the quality posts out there are getting truncated, so if you could make this comment length 50% or even 25% longer, that'd be great!
The big three GUIs out there all differ significantly in their end user audiences. MacOS has always been easier to use for novices; but MS Windows, at least since Win95, has been the OS of choice for businesses, due to the range of applications and MS Office, primarily (see my point on consistency for a reason for this). X has been the GUI for client/server computing and, more recently, the geek world.
I've coded for all three, and none of them win any prizes for coding ease. MacOS doesn't implement enough in the OS, Win32 implements *FAR* too much (in an inconsistent manner), and X, well X, has just too many different toolkits and window managers.
In response to Jordy's points,
3) The software is extremely dated with over a decade of backwards compatibility which no one even uses any more bloating the code base.
3. Unfortunately, this is the case with *every* currently-useable GUI out there. Have you taken a look at Win32 recently? Backward compatability is always going to be a problem.
4) C... Object Oriented environment.. please. I'm sure a lot of people will bash this, but writing GUI programs in an OO language is simply easier. And before you start on the OO toolkits out there, read the next point.
4. Yes OO design for GUIs is easier and cleaner, but it is important that non-OO languages are supported, even if it has to be through a compatability layer of some sort. Everyday tasks are easily done with a scripting language, and usually it is overkill to write simple scripts in an OO manner.
6) Sluggish. I have AccelX and I have to admit the entire experience is still very slow. Netscape flickers gray every time I scroll up and down, windows take ages to redraw when switching between them, etc. I multiboot to Windows and don't have any of these problems, everything is quite snappy... even if it crashes every 8 hours:)
6. Agreed. X simply does not redraw as quickly as MS Windows. This is primarily because video cards have been optimised for use with MS Windows and the support for X is less prevalent. Also compare MS Windows vs Mac OS. Although, I can usually use NT for more like 1-2 days, and 95 for about 4 hours...
7) Inconsistant. With all the toolkits out there, it is so very hard to get a nice consistant desktop. I wouldn't even claim that Windows is consistant, but it is pretty close. MacOS is better.. but at least both environments are intuitive.
7. A lot of other people have been claiming that consistency is a BAD THING. However, I disagree. Sure, from the development point of view, aiming for consistency limits freedom of design, but the average end user isn't at all interested in that. The average user NEEDS to be able to use the same keystrokes and see the same menu items from one application to the next. That's why office suites became popular after all.
In my opinion, the inconsistency of X is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that Linux is going to face in its introduction to the rest of the world.
And now, my pet gripe about all GUI's: Why is it so difficult to use the keyboard? The developers of Windows 3.1 had the great design goal that all functionality had to be accessible using only the keyboard (the only real exception to this was in imaging/drawing applications).
The CUA design 'standard' gave application developers the ability to standardise on the keystrokes used in their applications. This meant that I could pick up a new app in Windows and start using it without having to hunt for menu functions or learn new keystrokes.
Now MacOS also has keyboard shortcuts for many things, but a lack of standardisation and a large number of possible keystrokes makes this less useful. Arguably the biggest advantage that Windows has in this area is its use of the Alt key to activate menus and shortcuts. MS have gone backwards to some extent in Office 97; no one is going to use or remember the vast number of key combinations that are enabled by default.
I challenge anyone to complete basic tasks (such as switching applications, accessing menus, etc) faster in X than an experienced user can in Windows; any time a user has to reach for the mouse, there is a significant time wastage.
So to sum up, from my point of view, much as I dislike the bloatedness and proprietariness of Windows, I use it as my work OS, and will continue to until someone comes up with a more useable alternative. I will occasionally use X, although I prefer to Bash and vim through my Linux boxen, and I'll avoid MacOS as much as possible.
Unfortunately, AllTheWeb does seem to ignore ROBOTS.TXT. It has indexed every page on my site (www.tavultesoft.com), including all those that have been disallowed by ROBOTS.TXT, where no other search engines have. I don't know if that's because it has bugs in its ROBOTS.TXT analysis or because it just ignores it. Either way, it's not good.
Has anyone else noticed this?
Australian censorship/American corporate control
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 1
I just wonder which of these is worse?
The government having the power to censor web sites that it deems unacceptable, or
American corporates controlling the web through financial or legal means.
In the end it'll boil down to the same thing: a loss of power to the individual. And my feeling is I'd rather have the government blocking porn and the occasional good or useful site than have American companies controlling the web.
I realise that the story wasn't quite about control of the web, but this law is a distinct step in that direction.
One of the scariest things I can see about the Net at present is the inevitability of the American corporate-legal system propogating itself around the world, due both to a lack of regulation and international cooperation, and also just the sheer legal power of these companies. You can see it already through their lawsuits on international websites, patent controls, and similar tactics.
I wouldn't call the CapAlert website funny; as a Christian I agree with a lot of what they say, but I think their emphasis is a bit misguided:
They view portraying anything wrong as unacceptable for movies; this results in movies that are usually pretty shallow. Some of the most challenging and inspiring movies are those that show triumph over evil (e.g. Dead Man Walking).
They don't place enough emphasis on the quality of the movie, but rather use a formula based on the number of swear words, etc. This means that a movie like Willow will receive a better rating than a movie such as Deep Impact or The Trueman Show, which I personally think reflect Christian values better than Willow did.
They go a bit overboard in some of their comments - if they are going to criticise Star Wars Episode One for a child's insubordination, they should really do the same for Mary Poppins (to which, incidentally, they give a perfect score).
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, average speed for their latest win was 41.284 knots (see the Hales Trophy site I mentioned in my previous message). It just gets better...
I was able to have a tour of the bridge of another Incat ferry (builder of this boat) which uses similar technology - they did have paper charts for backup (mandated by law actually) on that boat, as well as some more standard equipment, as well as the computerised bridge.
It's pretty cool how they steer this boat - it can move any direction as it powered by steerable water jets. The wheel on the bridge is 10cm across, which just seems weird compared to traditional bridges. One of the big selling points of the Incat ferries is that they dock quickly and in a small area, because they can come in sideways.
I can tell you from personal experience that they are pretty damned unpleasant in even 3m swells... At least half of the passengers (including myself) quite sick.
This boat is an Incat fast ferry, built in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Incat have made about 40% of the large fast catermaran ferries around the world.
They used to run an Incat ferry across Bass Strait from Tasmania to mainland Australia. It would get from Devonport (Tasmania) to Melbourne in about 6 hours - the traditional ferries took 14 hours. Quite a difference, and it's really neat being on a boat that size when it starts moving. However, Bass Strait has some pretty impressively bad weather (try looking for Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race to get an idea)... The Incat ferries were just not suited to it (for the general public, anyway).
They can still move quickly if you don't mind lots of extremely sick people on board (soldiers are supposed to be tough, right?). Incat have won (and currently hold) the trans-Atlantic Blue Riband (Hales Trophy) (and have actually won it three times - usually while delivering their ferries!) - with an average speed of 38.8 knots (about 72km/h)
Now that's the best news I've heard for a long time. There are a lot of people out there stuck on the glorious Win9x/Me... if they could be encouraged to upgrade (and let's face it, Microsoft hasn't been able to do this), we may be able to say goodbye to a truly painful era in operating system support just a little bit sooner than expected.
IMR already had 2 computer support people working in Goroka -- one of them completely self trained -- so I thought that we could probably use Linux at least for the backend and save ourselves a lot of money. However I quickly found that although the techs were quite familiar with Windows, a year was not going to be anywhere near long enough to bring them to a point where they would be able to correct issues with Linux. There was just too much of a curve. I doubt that we would have been able to get to the point of patching and recompiling the kernel (or an application). For all the recent criticism of Windows Update, it usually works a whole lot more simply for users (and our techs here).
When I arrived, they had a basic Lantastic network that the techs would use for backing up data from individual PCs. There was just one computer with email and Internet access (and a single email address for the whole organisation) -- people would queue to use it. It had never been patched at all. We would open up computers just 3 weeks old and not be able to distinguish any features inside due to the dust.
We did some basic training for Linux, and the techs went through that with no problem, but they started to communicate to me their concern with administering it. They had a heavy workload and didn't feel confident that they would be able to get to the point they needed to with Linux before my time with them was up. In the end I went with an all-Microsoft solution. Windows, Exchange 2000, Terminal Server, etc. We are now at a point where client machines don't matter any more -- data is stored on the server -- it used to use up all their time just keeping the client machines running. Now, if a client machine goes down, they fix the hardware issue, press F12 and it rebuilds the machine automatically... And in the meantime the user can continue working on another machine.
There is some Linux expertise in the country, nearly all of it in the capital; I would expect some of the missionary organisations here also have Linux setups. However, there is no real support for Linux, whereas there are plenty of MCSE qualified people and companies that provide resources for Microsoft setups. If the whole thing went up in flames and the techs weren't confident of their ability to resurrect the system, I'm sure that they could hire someone from the capital to correct the problem. With Linux, they'd have to bring in someone from Australia...
Some of the more interesting issues we have to deal with include: we recently managed to organise a permanent connection - 64kbit (compressed to roughly 100kbit on average), shared with 4 other large organisations in town. It's actually cheaper than dialup. However, this permanent connection will be unavailable for roughly 40-50 hours per month as the telecommunications out of the city go down (batteries not charging at a repeater apparently). We still pay almost US$1 per megabyte over our monthly 1GB download quota... MS service packs take up much of that, but in my experience with Linux I have had to download a whole lot more... Remote administration is an interesting issue. I sometimes ssh to a server in Australia, but typing with a lag of roughly 2 seconds is not much fun. Going the other way requires dialup -- safer than opening ports on the firewall.
Interestingly, power has not been much of an issue. Although there are blackouts, we have both UPS and genset backups. Our old UPS (about 20 years old) died recently, and we have just had a new one installed... I have only seen a power cut at IMR once -- when the genset was being maintained at the time of a blackout. Power line filtering in front of
That's ridiculous. You don't have to read someone's autobiography to know something about them. The vast majority of people have not read Mein Kampf, and yet they know who Hitler was, and more importantly, why what he did was wrong. That's something you'll never find in his own writings.
I live in Australia. Last year I needed to get 4 phone lines installed. Telstra took over 1 1/2 months to do it. But in Australia, we have these telecommunications service obligations that all telcos (and probably isps soon as well) have to meet. As Telstra didn't meet the minimum, they had to pay me about $40 for every day that they didn't get my phone lines in.
I got almost $1000 from them...
We have an 802.11b connection for Aus $600/month (equipment) + about $200 (data). We can get a good 500KB/sec over 7km range (over water -- that decreases bandwidth substantially) with less than 4 ms latency.
Admittedly, if you live in Australia, you'll pay through the nose for your data (Aus 20c/mb for mere mortals).
It's not so hard to install an antenna. If you have good roof access, expect it to take a professional an hour or two -- a couple of hundred dollars. At my place, it took half an hour.
Why do you need to hire a consultant to run a server among a bunch of geeks? As the original poster said, surely you can rotate the support? And if the router/equipment goes down, it's not the end of the world, either. Just go and fix it.
It is possible to setup an affordable connection: but if you do, try going with a local provider, even if that puts you a few hops off the backbone. You'll get far better support and you'll be able to talk directly to the admins; if you have a problem with your connection, they'll be far more likely to sit down and help you figure it out.
I'd second that -- I've now had almost 14000 attacks on my server in the last 7 days. Apart from blowing out all the logs, it has cost me about $40 in bandwidth as well. Where can I send the bill?
Have a read of her answer at:
http://sonata.durdin.net/essays/chnsbks.html.
There are a lot of misguided or uninformed comments about Unicode here.
Just FYI, the Unicode mailing list have already read and dismissed the claims of this document -- the document has a lot of factual errors. For instance, Unicode 3.1 supports 1,000,000+ characters, not ~90,000.
The first thing to remember is that The Unicode Standard itself is really just a list of characters associated with codepoints.
Not all the Unicode codepoints have been allocated yet -- some of them never will be. Space has been left with most alphabets to encode other characters discovered or new characters.
In raw form, these code points run from 0x0001 to 0x10FFFF, in 17 planes of ~65536 code points each. A few of these characters are reserved, such as 0xFFFF. That makes over 1,000,000 characters, which should be enough for anyone.(Although 640K may come to mind for some...)
All the UTF-* encoding forms are just ways of representing these characters. ALL of them support the full range of Unicode codepoints.
UTF-32 represents the codepoints exactly in 4 octets.
UTF-16 represents the codepoints in 2 octets for plane 0 (0x0001-0xFFFF), and in 4 octets for the remaining planes, using 'surrogate pairs'. Surrogate pairs are two UTF-16 codes, the first from the range D800-DBFF, the second from DC00-DFFF, encoding code points (UCP) in planes 1-16 as follows: UCP = (surr1-0xD800)*0x0400 + (surr2-0xDC00) + 0x10000.
UTF-8 is very clever. It manages to encode European codepoints in an average of 1.1 bytes. If the top bit of the octet is 0, it represents a standard ASCII character. Go read the Unicode website (http://www.unicode.org/) if you want to know more about it.
There's also UTF-7 for the truly insane. And UTF-8s as used by Oracle and so on...
The Unicode Standard is not perfect -- what is? -- but it is definitely the only standard out there that even comes close to approaching the goal of supporting all the world's characters.
It works beautifully, with far better stability than my old ISDN 128K connection, with a few caveats:
- Total install cost was about Australian $6000 (US$3000). This included two dishes, two wireless LAN cards, cabling and professional installation in both locations and a Cabletron wireless gateway in my house. You could get away with cheaper equipment, but I chose this setup because it was tried and tested by my ISP already.
- There is a significant loss of bandwidth due to reflections from the water (I tend to get about 5MBit out of a theoretical 11MBit connection. But, hey, I'm not complaining.)
And this means I have escaped the telco charges -- total costs are approx Aus$55/month plus bandwidth charges (the phenomenal 19c/meg, incoming data only, that Australians still have to pay*).* For those Aussies on fixed-price cable or ADSL contracts, those on per-meg contracts are subsidising you. Apparently these costs should be coming down significantly in the near future.
In Canberra, people are using the old Galaxy pay TV aerials, with minor modifications, to create a wireless CAN.
The problem with Marxism-Leninism, and equally the problem with the solutions proposed by many economists today is what their ideologies cover.
Marxism-Leninism puts everything under the power of the government -- this is obviously bad. However, the reasoning you give puts everything in the control of those who must make money -- the capitalists. I would say this is equally bad.
Why can't there be a happy medium? Some functions of government belong in the government, and not in the private sector. For instance, policing, defense, justice are obvious candidates (I won't explore reasons here). I would say that utilities -- power, water, gas, mail all belong in the government.
Yes, this means that these organisations may be inefficient, bureaucratic or even corrupt to some degree. But more importantly, it also means equitable access for all, and we have much more of a say in how these sectors are run.
Here in Australia, the privatisation of Telstra (Australia's telecommunications giant) has had good and bad ramifications. It has made the organisation more efficient (cut the number of jobs by thousands [query: is this a good thing?]) and opened up the market to competition -- lower prices, etc. But: rural Australia lost out. And so do those on lower incomes, as they do not qualify for many of the schemes (such as combining mobile and home phone bills for large discounts). Telstra's service record has also declined, and the government has had to place many new restrictions and requirements on the commercial Telstra so that it will even service rural and low-income areas (who are *loss making*).
In the end, is paying less money for something, or making more money, the most important thing in the world? Will this really make people's lives better?
Bronte Park, TAS, Australia 22 Nov 1999 Some experts predict that various genetically engineered crops will become lethal to humans on Jan 1, 2000. This is due to a date-dependent gene sequence inserted into members of the legume family. To prevent this disaster concerned citizens should stockpile organically farmed beans and peanuts. Melbourne Zoo elephant keeper Joe Bloggs has expressed concern about this heretofore unmentioned aspect of the Y2K bug. "We go through about 300,000 peanuts a day and we simply can't afford to buy organic peanuts any more, not to mention the peanuts that zoo visitors bring to feed elephants," he said. So please, for your own safety, stay away from peanuts and beans on Jan 1st, 2000.
There have been a lot of comments about metal detectors, makeshift weapons (e.g. screwdrivers) and profiling systems (Mosaic-2000). Most people agreed that these were bandaid solutions. And a lot of people felt threatened or restricted by these solutions.
Now the question I want to ask you is why do we need these solutions? Why do people need to worry about violence? All the solutions that have been presented so far attack the symptoms, not the cause of this problem.
I can liken this to an HIV/AIDS victim. The doctors treat all the symptoms, the common colds, the flus, and whatever other diseases that can attack as a result of the HIV infection, but they don't actually attack the root cause of the problem, which is the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus. This virus, of course, basically causes the human immune system to fail. So the patient can live for a while, but eventually they'll die from complications of some sort. If and when AIDS is curable, it'll be curable by treating the source of the problem: the HIV virus itself, not any of the subsequent diseases.
So, to fix this problem in the schools, and society as well, we really need to look at the origin of the problem. I ask you, what's the problem?
Jon Katz, you have, as usual, written an article that clearly falls under the category of FUD. This article does not describe Mosaic-2000, but instead seeks only to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about this program.
Why can't you, before you write this, give some factual data about your subject matter? How many real facts have you given us about Mosaic-2000? How will it be used? What are the motivations behind Mosaic-2000? What is its primary use? It turns out that its primary use is to profile those who have made threats, not those who are "different."
How is this article any different to the Microsoft Linux Myths page?
I would also like to know where your research comes from, Jon. Quoting unreferenced statistics is not quality journalism.
Where does this data come from? It doesn't reflect any of the following references (try searching for +youth +"violent crime" +statistics" in AltaVista):
Youth and Crime - What the Statistics Show
I'd also suggest that your reliance on teens for quotable material is not necessarily good. As someone else pointed out, many (if not most) teens have an "us versus them" view of the government, schools and parents. This would especially hold true for your "different" group of teens.
Now, I'm not saying that I like the idea of Mosaic-2000, but after all, it is just an expert system to assist those who are already doing this job (which most of them probably don't enjoy in the slightest, despite what the teenagers under their responsibility think).
Jon, research your articles! Don't just write to get a reaction.
A quick selection of judicious whoises and nslookups gives us some juicy conspiracy fodder. I employed Sam Gumshoe, my friendly local net detective to hunt down the elusive meaning of TransMeta.
--SAM GUMSHOE SPEAKING--
Why does this company have a T1? (transmeta-T1-gw.mv.best.net) Why does nic.os.org have the following in its home page? What does dmz-net-1.transmeta.com mean? Who else knows polaris.transmeta.com? How does neosilicon.transmeta.com come into the equation? After this search there are more questions than ever. Clearly Transmeta have something to hide, and I, the tireless Sam Gumshoe, am not going to rest until I have hunted down the elusive meaning of TransMeta.Actually, I'm perfectly well aware that X is not the GUI, but I was using the term X to describe the underling X layer + the assorted window managers out there. Perhaps that wasn't clear from my message, and I could have made it clearer.
I've tried a large number of the X window managers out there, and still none of them measure up to Windows in both performance and useability. However, I'm not saying that I won't use KDE or Gnome in the future; they are only in their early years, and will be polished, whereas MS have had close to 15 years to polish Windows. I just hope that the KDE/Gnome/whatever developers focus on useability over glitz, because in the end, glitz only sells screenshots.
So I haven't given up on either KDE or Gnome, but at this stage, they're not quite useable enough for my liking (remember, I virtually never touch the mouse).
Rob, I like the changes, but for one thing... the maximum comment length is a little short. A good number of the quality posts out there are getting truncated, so if you could make this comment length 50% or even 25% longer, that'd be great!
The big three GUIs out there all differ significantly in their end user audiences. MacOS has always been easier to use for novices; but MS Windows, at least since Win95, has been the OS of choice for businesses, due to the range of applications and MS Office, primarily (see my point on consistency for a reason for this). X has been the GUI for client/server computing and, more recently, the geek world.
I've coded for all three, and none of them win any prizes for coding ease. MacOS doesn't implement enough in the OS, Win32 implements *FAR* too much (in an inconsistent manner), and X, well X, has just too many different toolkits and window managers.
In response to Jordy's points,
3) The software is extremely dated with over a decade of backwards compatibility which no one even uses any more bloating the code base.
3. Unfortunately, this is the case with *every* currently-useable GUI out there. Have you taken a look at Win32 recently? Backward compatability is always going to be a problem.
4) C... Object Oriented environment.. please. I'm sure a lot of people will bash this, but writing GUI programs in an OO language is simply easier. And before you start on the OO toolkits out there, read the next point.
4. Yes OO design for GUIs is easier and cleaner, but it is important that non-OO languages are supported, even if it has to be through a compatability layer of some sort. Everyday tasks are easily done with a scripting language, and usually it is overkill to write simple scripts in an OO manner.
6) Sluggish. I have AccelX and I have to admit the entire experience is still very slow. Netscape flickers gray every time I scroll up and down, windows take ages to redraw when switching between them, etc. I multiboot to Windows and don't have any of these problems, everything is quite snappy... even if it crashes every 8 hours :)
6. Agreed. X simply does not redraw as quickly as MS Windows. This is primarily because video cards have been optimised for use with MS Windows and the support for X is less prevalent. Also compare MS Windows vs Mac OS. Although, I can usually use NT for more like 1-2 days, and 95 for about 4 hours...
7) Inconsistant. With all the toolkits out there, it is so very hard to get a nice consistant desktop. I wouldn't even claim that Windows is consistant, but it is pretty close. MacOS is better.. but at least both environments are intuitive.
7. A lot of other people have been claiming that consistency is a BAD THING. However, I disagree. Sure, from the development point of view, aiming for consistency limits freedom of design, but the average end user isn't at all interested in that. The average user NEEDS to be able to use the same keystrokes and see the same menu items from one application to the next. That's why office suites became popular after all.
In my opinion, the inconsistency of X is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that Linux is going to face in its introduction to the rest of the world.
And now, my pet gripe about all GUI's: Why is it so difficult to use the keyboard? The developers of Windows 3.1 had the great design goal that all functionality had to be accessible using only the keyboard (the only real exception to this was in imaging/drawing applications).
The CUA design 'standard' gave application developers the ability to standardise on the keystrokes used in their applications. This meant that I could pick up a new app in Windows and start using it without having to hunt for menu functions or learn new keystrokes.
Now MacOS also has keyboard shortcuts for many things, but a lack of standardisation and a large number of possible keystrokes makes this less useful. Arguably the biggest advantage that Windows has in this area is its use of the Alt key to activate menus and shortcuts. MS have gone backwards to some extent in Office 97; no one is going to use or remember the vast number of key combinations that are enabled by default.
I challenge anyone to complete basic tasks (such as switching applications, accessing menus, etc) faster in X than an experienced user can in Windows; any time a user has to reach for the mouse, there is a significant time wastage.
So to sum up, from my point of view, much as I dislike the bloatedness and proprietariness of Windows, I use it as my work OS, and will continue to until someone comes up with a more useable alternative. I will occasionally use X, although I prefer to Bash and vim through my Linux boxen, and I'll avoid MacOS as much as possible.
Am I wrong? Why?
Yep, I got an email from FAST telling me that they had a bug in their ROBOTS.TXT handling when they indexed my site, and they've now fixed it.
Has anyone else noticed this?
- The government having the power to censor web sites that it deems unacceptable, or
- American corporates controlling the web through financial or legal means.
In the end it'll boil down to the same thing: a loss of power to the individual. And my feeling is I'd rather have the government blocking porn and the occasional good or useful site than have American companies controlling the web.I realise that the story wasn't quite about control of the web, but this law is a distinct step in that direction.
One of the scariest things I can see about the Net at present is the inevitability of the American corporate-legal system propogating itself around the world, due both to a lack of regulation and international cooperation, and also just the sheer legal power of these companies. You can see it already through their lawsuits on international websites, patent controls, and similar tactics.
And yeah, I'm Australian.