What're you're talking about is not a new concept, it just turns out to be really hard to build in a useful way. The most comprehensive discussion of the problems involved can be found at the Microsoft Research project Farsite.
The short version of the problem is that the level of service you can expect from each system is incredibly variable, so it's hard to offer a meaningful QoS for the system as a whole. It's not quite as bad as the distributed-hash-table problem (a.k.a. P2P file storage), but it's still bad. (Zooko once told me that MojoNation saw an average 50% turnover in nodes in a 24 hour period.) But it's also not as easy as having all your distributed nodes dedicated to just storage, and even that's a really hard problem to solve. (I should know; my company is one of the few vendors doing it.)
Someone else suggested OpenAFS. OpenAFS is fantastic, but not for unreliable server environments. I really don't think there's a complete solution out there, but not for lack of asking.
It definitely works. I went from having a -10 diopter prescription (which, if you're not familiar with such numbers, is really nearsighted, to the point I couldn't read a clock 2 feet away) to having perfect 20/20 vision.
But, it's not without risks. For example, my night vision is somewhat degraded because uncorrected light on the edges of the cornea (when I had the surgery done the current technology only corrected out to about 8mm) creates 'starbursts'. I'm still happy with the procedure, but it's not always perfect. There are chances (low, but statistics don't mean anything when you're only talking about one set of eyes) that much worse things can happen.
Any good doctor will clearly present your options and risks. Ask around for a referral from friends as to who to see... and don't just take the lowest cost vendor!
I rather think it's just starting to live...
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
·
· Score: 1
It's been a long time coming, but I think that Bluetooth is now just starting to live. Like any new technology, the problem is that people won't buy in until enough stuff supports it. Calling Bluetooth dead is like calling USB dead 4 years ago.
Right now, I will never buy another cell phone that doesn't support bluetooth. I just got a 15" G4 PowerBook with integrated bluetooth, and I know that it will Just Work(tm) with any of the bluetooth phones that I've used (Ericsson T68, SonyEricsson P800.) I can sync my phone, my palm (Tungsten T), and use the phone for dialup, all without having to take the phone out of my pocket or attach a special dongle.
Similarly, I have an assortment of wireless headsets that I can use, that won't require extra dongles. And the Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse will just work without dongles like the Logitech devices require.
I think Bluetooth is just starting to reach critical mass. They're positioning it to be the "wireless USB", and just now they're finally starting to get there.
Fitness of use for open-source software that is commercially sold is a perfectly reasonable proposition, and it is duplicitous and disingenuous of the "open source community" to oppose it.
If sensibly implemented, this would put the burden of responsibility on commercial distributors of open source software. If I download an open source product from some coder's website, there's no transaction, there's no contract, and no liability. However, if I pay $100 to RedHat to purchase the same software, that should be treated the same as if I paid Microsoft for the same, and they should bear the burden of responsibility.
I would even go so far as to say that such a law would be good for open source developers, if not the open source "community" which is full of many leeches. Many of the companies that sell open source software these days are playing the "something for nothing" model; they take open source software that someone else has written, put it in a box, and charge for it, without undertaking development themselves. (See, for example, the controversy over OpenOSX.com.)
This is, of course, a much better business model than conventional software development... they get all of the money for none of the work. These are the people who would be most hurt by product liability laws... and forcing people who profit from the open source community to be responsible for it as well doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me.
The Framingham Premium Cinema is great, but for topic relevance, that isn't the theater that has the digital projector. The one equipped for digital is the first on the left in the right wing of the theatre. (Don't remember the number offhand.)
Ask your boss what the project is going to do, and what it really needs out of a development environment, instead of just giving you a long list of buzzwords.
The list of requirements he's given you reads like a job description that's been through the HR department. The first thing you do when responding to a job ad stating "Position requires at least 5 years C/C++, Java, Perl, and SQL experience on multiple platforms," is ask "What do you really want?" The same applies here.
I love how the entertainment industry believes that it is the court system's obligation to protect their revenue streams against new technology.
"If a ReplayTV customer can simply type 'The X-Files' or 'James Bond' and have every episode of 'The X-Files' and every James Bond film recorded in perfect digital form and organized, compiled and stored on the hard drive of his or her ReplayTV 4000 device, it will cause substantial harm to the market for prerecorded DVD, videocassette and other copies of those episodes and films," the lawsuit states.
Well, yes, yes it would. Boo-fucking-hoo.
Just one sign of a deeper problem.
on
Morals and Layoffs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I believe that this is just one aspect of a very frightening shift of accountability and responsibility in the United States that has occured over the past 120 years. Abraham Lincoln once said that this "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth." Well, we've proven him wrong. The US is a government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation.
Look, for example, at the Anti-Terrorism Act that would make hacking a terrorist act, punishable by life in prison and subject to RICO statutes. I'm not going to claim any support for hacking, but there is something fundamentally wrong with a nation where financial crimes against a corporation are considered far more serious that violent crime against an individual, yet corporations cannot be held criminally responsible for their actions. If you break in and deface Union Carbide's web site, you could have all of your possessions seized just on suspicion, and spend the rest of your life in prison if convincted. When they killed thousands of people in Bhopal, they got a slap on the wrist.
This situation is nobody's fault, and yet everybody's failing. Our governent is based on popular support, and the will of the people. The way our politicians gauge such support is based on who they hear from, and what they hear. They hear from individuals, and lobbying groups that represent individuals. And under modern US law, corporations are very large and very powerful people, capable of shouting far louder than anyone else.
Abraham Lincoln also said, "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." -- President Abraham Lincoln, letter to William F. Elkins, Nov 21, 1864 (from The Lincoln Encyclopedia [MacMillan, 1950]) (Quote reference thanks to Hank Kalet)
The reason that they give for withdrawing Broadcast 2000 is certainly plausible, but after reading through the documentation and following the links to other sites, I have to wonder if this is just an excuse to re-release the product under a different license.
What is their relationship with Linux Media Labs and Linux Media Arts? Linux Media Labs offers for $599.00 Broadcast for LINUX, "a fully supported LINUX video edit[or]", which looks exactly like Broadcast 2000 to me.
Now, this could very well just be a case of a company taking GPLed software and selling support for it. It's somewhat surprising that they don't mention Heroine Virtual at all, but they're not required to do so. (Last week, a story here about Linux office suites linked to a company that was clearly just selling KOffice... they hadn't even bothered to change the names of the applications in the screenshots!) Cygnus had a profitable and very reputable business doing similar, before being consumed by RedHat.
All you people going on about what a great design the Cube was... do you have one? Have you played with one? I have. It sucks.
The Cube is cute, but has a *big* external power supply. It's rectangular, but not at all stackable because of the cables, power supplies, power button, and CD/DVD drive access.
Sitting on a desk, with the power supply and cable converters, it's pretty ugly. It's useless to put under a desk because of the size, power, and drive position, unlike the G4 towers.
Exactly what is *so* great about the design besides "thinking different"? If it was a perfect sphere that kept rolling off your desk, would you still be lamenting its death?
The best way to break into any programming field is to have a good understanding of programming practices and methodologies, in addition to being a good coder. This is the most important thing that formal CS training (i.e. a college degree) should provide you.
I've seen many awesome coders who can knock your socks off with projects they've done, but have no formal CS training. And I wouldn't hire most of them. They understand how to write code, but they don't understand why it's necessary to design before implementation, extensively document code, have a process for source review, use a revision control system, implement a unit test strategy, and the like. All of these things are necessary when working on a large project with multiple engineers.
Most games are a huge undertaking. I last worked for a games company, Turbine Entertainment Software, that had dozens of people working on a single project. In addition to the fact that they were all really smart people, if they hadn't followed good programming methodologies nothing would have ever been shipped.
Today, I'm Director of Software Development for a storage software company, and implementing good policies is key to keeping on track. All code is required to be reviewed by another team member before it may be checked into the repository. All modules must have unit test cases. No code may be written until design of the module and its interfaces are complete. This might sound draconian, but it means that we know what we're writing before we start coding it, we know it works when we're done, and we know what it does when we look at it again 3 months from now. Fewer bugs, fewer unexpected surprises, and fewer late nights trying to fix something that has to have been done last month.
Games companies are often hiring; they tend to not pay as much as other computer industry jobs but can also be a lot of fun. If you want to break into the games industry, send a resume to some companies you find interesting. Show that you can write good code, show that you have the creativity to design an interesting game, and show that you understand what's necessary to actually complete a team project.
The word "unbreakable" is overused. This is not "unbreakable" in the sense that a traditional OTP is unbreakable, however it is clever, and has some interesting properties.
If the underlying assumption is true, this system provides perfect forward secrecy: the compromise of my 'key exchange' key at any point in the future does not reveal my previous messages, as the OTP material is long gone by that point.
The security hinges on the fact that by the time an attacker could decrypt my 'start here' instructions, so much of the public OTP stream will have gone by that he couldn't feasibly store it all and thus can never recover the OTP.
This 'never' is a dangerous word. The OTP stream is public, and thus an attacker does have access to the OTP I used, if he can determine my 'start' point.
A brute-force attack on this system
would seem to be linear in space which a huge constant dependent on your bitrate, bounded by an attack on your key exchange mechanism. In a system providing any sort of 'interactive' performance, the search space is limited greatly. Admittedly, for short messages the search space in the stream could rapidly exceed the an exhaustive search.
It's a clever idea. I'm not exactly sure how to evaluate the security of the system, and any implementation seems that it would be prone to an array of interesting attacks, but I like it.
"text is a very poor notation system for the concepts of a high-level language"
I agree; text is a horrible mechanism for representing semantic concepts. Look at English, for example, I can't remember the last time I saw anything that conveyed high-level ideas in English. oh wait... I forgot about that whole 'literature' thing....
I agree this is silly and annoying. Being on the other side right now, though, I understand why this needs to happen.
I am currently involved with a new startup. We have several talented and irreplaceable people, we have other assets, but a lot of what we are is our ideas. A important part of what we are is having these ideas months before anyone else.
The danger with interviewing someone is that we don't want to just gauge their skills...we wouldn't be interviewing them at all if we didn't think they were talented. It's a 'buyers market' out there right now, and the point of the interview is to get them excited about what it is we're doing. So, we want to be able to provide confidential information. If we don't ask the interviewee to sign an NDA, there's the very real danger of losing a strategic advantage, our ideas.
On the other hand, I admit that being asked to sign an NDA is annoying. It's like a shink-wrap license...you're agreeing to something, and you're not quite sure what until after you've agreed to it. Additionally, it creates a perceived lack of trust...we try to avoid that by intentionally making it a routine matter. If everyone does it all the time, there's less reason to feel insulted.
I'm actively involved in hiring people. Sometimes they object to the NDA, in which case we try to say as much as we can, and then give them another opportunity to sign if they're very interested. If it's someone that we know and respect, we'll often let them give us their word to protect what we feel is proprietary information. I wish I could do that for everyone, but modern American society puts very little value on honor and integrity.
My advice: Don't take it personally. The people on the other side probably don't like it either. And when you're in a position to do something different, do what you can to change the situation.
If you look at their press release, you'll see that they claim to have used their software to identify likely genes in the HGP data, and they'll make this available through their web 'portal'.
Personally, I'm a bit dubious. I checked out their genome portal about two months ago when they announced it. It had very few useful features, and the ones that were actually there didn't work.
The Supreme Court did not rule on this case, they rejected it without comment. There is a significant difference...they have not offered their opinion of the case at all. They get far too many cases each year to consider and rule on all of them.
The DLL is a derivative work. As such, it must be distributed under the same terms as the original code base, the GPL.
BUT, the MaPlay authors, if they choose to do so, could reissue a portion of the code under the LGPL. This would require the consent of all the authors.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, yadda yadda.)
The reason that this is not getting more attention is because this is a company that nobody has heard of before, with no known exployees, that is making extraordinary claims, yet has never publicly demonstrated any working technology. This is complete vaporware. I'd like to see more press once these people actually do something. In the mean time, I have incredible new processor technology in the works that will increase performance 1000-fold while only consuming 1 watt and maintaining x86 compatibility! Really!
The Human User Interface (or Who cares?)
on
Virtual Newscaster
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· Score: 1
Instead of reading the headlines at the relatively fast rate that I can read text, instead I can have a pretty CGI puppet read it to me at a painfully slow rate. You have no idea how much this idea excites me.
The point of computer UIs is *NOT* to exactly model the real world around us. (Look at Apple's QT4 Player to see how dumb this can be.) The point is to design interfaces that provide the best flow of information through our relatively limited and unmutable human senses.
When designing a system, always design with the human user in mind. I can read news a hell of a lot faster than I can listen to it. Your average 30 minute TV newscast has less content than a single newspaper page.
I have seen a half-dozen questionable or blatantly wrong stories from the Sunday Times in the past month. It's quite clear that they're a tabloid, not a newspaper. Slashdot should stop picking up stories from them...it's like if we were getting tech news from the Weekly World News!
"Three Headed Baby Hacks Government Computer System! CIA Stunned!"
I got my OmniSky today, I'm using it right now and it's great! Between AvantGo and ProxiWeb I can view most web pages...AvantGo is better overall but can't handle frames, refresh, or large pages. One annoyance....web sites that tell me to download either Netscape or IE to view their site. Bozos!
Slashdot Mirror
What're you're talking about is not a new concept, it just turns out to be really hard to build in a useful way. The most comprehensive discussion of the problems involved can be found at the Microsoft Research project Farsite.
The short version of the problem is that the level of service you can expect from each system is incredibly variable, so it's hard to offer a meaningful QoS for the system as a whole. It's not quite as bad as the distributed-hash-table problem (a.k.a. P2P file storage), but it's still bad. (Zooko once told me that MojoNation saw an average 50% turnover in nodes in a 24 hour period.) But it's also not as easy as having all your distributed nodes dedicated to just storage, and even that's a really hard problem to solve. (I should know; my company is one of the few vendors doing it.)
Someone else suggested OpenAFS. OpenAFS is fantastic, but not for unreliable server environments. I really don't think there's a complete solution out there, but not for lack of asking.
It definitely works. I went from having a -10 diopter prescription (which, if you're not familiar with such numbers, is really nearsighted, to the point I couldn't read a clock 2 feet away) to having perfect 20/20 vision.
But, it's not without risks. For example, my night vision is somewhat degraded because uncorrected light on the edges of the cornea (when I had the surgery done the current technology only corrected out to about 8mm) creates 'starbursts'. I'm still happy with the procedure, but it's not always perfect. There are chances (low, but statistics don't mean anything when you're only talking about one set of eyes) that much worse things can happen.
Any good doctor will clearly present your options and risks. Ask around for a referral from friends as to who to see... and don't just take the lowest cost vendor!
It's been a long time coming, but I think that Bluetooth is now just starting to live. Like any new technology, the problem is that people won't buy in until enough stuff supports it. Calling Bluetooth dead is like calling USB dead 4 years ago.
Right now, I will never buy another cell phone that doesn't support bluetooth. I just got a 15" G4 PowerBook with integrated bluetooth, and I know that it will Just Work(tm) with any of the bluetooth phones that I've used (Ericsson T68, SonyEricsson P800.) I can sync my phone, my palm (Tungsten T), and use the phone for dialup, all without having to take the phone out of my pocket or attach a special dongle.
Similarly, I have an assortment of wireless headsets that I can use, that won't require extra dongles. And the Apple Bluetooth keyboard and mouse will just work without dongles like the Logitech devices require.
I think Bluetooth is just starting to reach critical mass. They're positioning it to be the "wireless USB", and just now they're finally starting to get there.
The American flag has 13 stripes, one for each of the original colonies. What conspiracy has led Slashdot to have a 12-striped flag as a story icon?
Uhm; I don't think that's what the 'Sticky Keys' control panel option is for. HTH.
You can get the AAA battery clip for $13 as an accessory; you don't need to buy the Pro mouse.
--Jered
There's real information on the e-Reader at Nintendo's official e-Reader site.
If sensibly implemented, this would put the burden of responsibility on commercial distributors of open source software. If I download an open source product from some coder's website, there's no transaction, there's no contract, and no liability. However, if I pay $100 to RedHat to purchase the same software, that should be treated the same as if I paid Microsoft for the same, and they should bear the burden of responsibility.
I would even go so far as to say that such a law would be good for open source developers, if not the open source "community" which is full of many leeches. Many of the companies that sell open source software these days are playing the "something for nothing" model; they take open source software that someone else has written, put it in a box, and charge for it, without undertaking development themselves. (See, for example, the controversy over OpenOSX.com.)
This is, of course, a much better business model than conventional software development... they get all of the money for none of the work. These are the people who would be most hurt by product liability laws... and forcing people who profit from the open source community to be responsible for it as well doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me.
The Framingham Premium Cinema is great, but for topic relevance, that isn't the theater that has the digital projector. The one equipped for digital is the first on the left in the right wing of the theatre. (Don't remember the number offhand.)
Ask your boss what the project is going to do, and what it really needs out of a development environment, instead of just giving you a long list of buzzwords.
The list of requirements he's given you reads like a job description that's been through the HR department. The first thing you do when responding to a job ad stating "Position requires at least 5 years C/C++, Java, Perl, and SQL experience on multiple platforms," is ask "What do you really want?" The same applies here.
I believe that this is just one aspect of a very frightening shift of accountability and responsibility in the United States that has occured over the past 120 years. Abraham Lincoln once said that this "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth." Well, we've proven him wrong. The US is a government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation.
Look, for example, at the Anti-Terrorism Act that would make hacking a terrorist act, punishable by life in prison and subject to RICO statutes. I'm not going to claim any support for hacking, but there is something fundamentally wrong with a nation where financial crimes against a corporation are considered far more serious that violent crime against an individual, yet corporations cannot be held criminally responsible for their actions. If you break in and deface Union Carbide's web site, you could have all of your possessions seized just on suspicion, and spend the rest of your life in prison if convincted. When they killed thousands of people in Bhopal, they got a slap on the wrist.
This situation is nobody's fault, and yet everybody's failing. Our governent is based on popular support, and the will of the people. The way our politicians gauge such support is based on who they hear from, and what they hear. They hear from individuals, and lobbying groups that represent individuals. And under modern US law, corporations are very large and very powerful people, capable of shouting far louder than anyone else.
Abraham Lincoln also said, "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." -- President Abraham Lincoln, letter to William F. Elkins, Nov 21, 1864 (from The Lincoln Encyclopedia [MacMillan, 1950]) (Quote reference thanks to Hank Kalet)
Where do you want to go today?
What is their relationship with Linux Media Labs and Linux Media Arts? Linux Media Labs offers for $599.00 Broadcast for LINUX, "a fully supported LINUX video edit[or]", which looks exactly like Broadcast 2000 to me.
Now, this could very well just be a case of a company taking GPLed software and selling support for it. It's somewhat surprising that they don't mention Heroine Virtual at all, but they're not required to do so. (Last week, a story here about Linux office suites linked to a company that was clearly just selling KOffice... they hadn't even bothered to change the names of the applications in the screenshots!) Cygnus had a profitable and very reputable business doing similar, before being consumed by RedHat.
What's the relationship between these companies?
All you people going on about what a great design the Cube was... do you have one? Have you played with one? I have. It sucks.
The Cube is cute, but has a *big* external power supply. It's rectangular, but not at all stackable because of the cables, power supplies, power button, and CD/DVD drive access.
Sitting on a desk, with the power supply and cable converters, it's pretty ugly. It's useless to put under a desk because of the size, power, and drive position, unlike the G4 towers.
Exactly what is *so* great about the design besides "thinking different"? If it was a perfect sphere that kept rolling off your desk, would you still be lamenting its death?
--Jered
I've seen many awesome coders who can knock your socks off with projects they've done, but have no formal CS training. And I wouldn't hire most of them. They understand how to write code, but they don't understand why it's necessary to design before implementation, extensively document code, have a process for source review, use a revision control system, implement a unit test strategy, and the like. All of these things are necessary when working on a large project with multiple engineers.
Most games are a huge undertaking. I last worked for a games company, Turbine Entertainment Software, that had dozens of people working on a single project. In addition to the fact that they were all really smart people, if they hadn't followed good programming methodologies nothing would have ever been shipped.
Today, I'm Director of Software Development for a storage software company, and implementing good policies is key to keeping on track. All code is required to be reviewed by another team member before it may be checked into the repository. All modules must have unit test cases. No code may be written until design of the module and its interfaces are complete. This might sound draconian, but it means that we know what we're writing before we start coding it, we know it works when we're done, and we know what it does when we look at it again 3 months from now. Fewer bugs, fewer unexpected surprises, and fewer late nights trying to fix something that has to have been done last month.
Games companies are often hiring; they tend to not pay as much as other computer industry jobs but can also be a lot of fun. If you want to break into the games industry, send a resume to some companies you find interesting. Show that you can write good code, show that you have the creativity to design an interesting game, and show that you understand what's necessary to actually complete a team project.
--Jered
If the underlying assumption is true, this system provides perfect forward secrecy: the compromise of my 'key exchange' key at any point in the future does not reveal my previous messages, as the OTP material is long gone by that point.
The security hinges on the fact that by the time an attacker could decrypt my 'start here' instructions, so much of the public OTP stream will have gone by that he couldn't feasibly store it all and thus can never recover the OTP. This 'never' is a dangerous word. The OTP stream is public, and thus an attacker does have access to the OTP I used, if he can determine my 'start' point.
A brute-force attack on this system would seem to be linear in space which a huge constant dependent on your bitrate, bounded by an attack on your key exchange mechanism. In a system providing any sort of 'interactive' performance, the search space is limited greatly. Admittedly, for short messages the search space in the stream could rapidly exceed the an exhaustive search.
It's a clever idea. I'm not exactly sure how to evaluate the security of the system, and any implementation seems that it would be prone to an array of interesting attacks, but I like it.
--Jered
I agree; text is a horrible mechanism for representing semantic concepts. Look at English, for example, I can't remember the last time I saw anything that conveyed high-level ideas in English. oh wait... I forgot about that whole 'literature' thing....
--Jered
I agree this is silly and annoying. Being on the other side right now, though, I understand why this needs to happen.
I am currently involved with a new startup. We have several talented and irreplaceable people, we have other assets, but a lot of what we are is our ideas. A important part of what we are is having these ideas months before anyone else.
The danger with interviewing someone is that we don't want to just gauge their skills...we wouldn't be interviewing them at all if we didn't think they were talented. It's a 'buyers market' out there right now, and the point of the interview is to get them excited about what it is we're doing. So, we want to be able to provide confidential information. If we don't ask the interviewee to sign an NDA, there's the very real danger of losing a strategic advantage, our ideas.
On the other hand, I admit that being asked to sign an NDA is annoying. It's like a shink-wrap license...you're agreeing to something, and you're not quite sure what until after you've agreed to it. Additionally, it creates a perceived lack of trust...we try to avoid that by intentionally making it a routine matter. If everyone does it all the time, there's less reason to feel insulted.
I'm actively involved in hiring people. Sometimes they object to the NDA, in which case we try to say as much as we can, and then give them another opportunity to sign if they're very interested. If it's someone that we know and respect, we'll often let them give us their word to protect what we feel is proprietary information. I wish I could do that for everyone, but modern American society puts very little value on honor and integrity.
My advice: Don't take it personally. The people on the other side probably don't like it either. And when you're in a position to do something different, do what you can to change the situation.
--Jered
Personally, I'm a bit dubious. I checked out their genome portal about two months ago when they announced it. It had very few useful features, and the ones that were actually there didn't work.
The Supreme Court did not rule on this case, they rejected it without comment. There is a significant difference...they have not offered their opinion of the case at all. They get far too many cases each year to consider and rule on all of them.
The DLL is a derivative work. As such, it must be distributed under the same terms as the original code base, the GPL.
BUT, the MaPlay authors, if they choose to do so, could reissue a portion of the code under the LGPL. This would require the consent of all the authors.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, yadda yadda.)
--Jered
The reason that this is not getting more attention is because this is a company that nobody has heard of before, with no known exployees, that is making extraordinary claims, yet has never publicly demonstrated any working technology. This is complete vaporware.
I'd like to see more press once these people actually do something. In the mean time, I have incredible new processor technology in the works that will increase performance 1000-fold while only consuming 1 watt and maintaining x86 compatibility! Really!
Instead of reading the headlines at the relatively fast rate that I can read text, instead I can have a pretty CGI puppet read it to me at a painfully slow rate. You have no idea how much this idea excites me.
The point of computer UIs is *NOT* to exactly model the real world around us. (Look at Apple's QT4 Player to see how dumb this can be.) The point is to design interfaces that provide the best flow of information through our relatively limited and unmutable human senses.
When designing a system, always design with the human user in mind. I can read news a hell of a lot faster than I can listen to it. Your average 30 minute TV newscast has less content than a single newspaper page.
I have seen a half-dozen questionable or blatantly wrong stories from the Sunday Times in the past month. It's quite clear that they're a tabloid, not a newspaper. Slashdot should stop picking up stories from them...it's like if we were getting tech news from the Weekly World News!
"Three Headed Baby Hacks Government Computer System! CIA Stunned!"
I got my OmniSky today, I'm using it right now and it's great! Between AvantGo and ProxiWeb I can view most web pages...AvantGo is better overall but can't handle frames, refresh, or large pages. One annoyance....web sites that tell me to download either Netscape or IE to view their site. Bozos!