I know someone who worked for Kingston Communications when they rolled out their TV on demand service in Hull back in the mid-90s. The STBs had a 4Mb IP feed to them, but only 256k - 2Mb could be accessed by the customer depending on how much they paid. Kcom staff had access to the whole 4Mb. I would guess that that is the model that most providers will take. Time to dust off the CV...
I don't think there really is a way apart from having verifiable restorable backups of every system prior to patching. I was having a conversation along these lines this morning and the agreed solution was to have an identical test platform and install on that first, allow it to run long enough for any problems to arise and only then implement on a production system. That's the ultra-conservative approach but many years in financial services have shown that that's the only way of being certain.
Lots of people thought that this was going to play games, and so was aimed at the PSP market. If they do it right, with a decent graphics card, it probably will, but only PC games, so the Xbox is safe. Lots of people thought it was going to be a media device, and with Windows Media Player, and a decent bus, it probably will be, but it has no removable storage, just a big disk for its size, and dumping a DVD on that big disc is contrary to principles of DRM. It has potential as a portable communicator, but my PDA does that all ready. A built in camera would allow it to extend its messaging capabilities, and hey, why not a 3G or UTMS connection while you're at it, but they're probably not in the hardware spec. So what is it? I'm sure it will include Office or a UMPC version of it, so you will be able to capture those moments of inspiration on the train, but you can do that with laptop for not much difference in price. It will play music and movies but so does my (insert small format mp3 player here). It's got a nice big screen for reading ebooks, and it's stolen a march on the Sony Reader. But it's too big for that and has the same battery life as a laptop. The Sony Reader ain't all that either. Microsoft find it difficult to think beyond the PC platform, and as the PC platform increasingly means the office they find it hard to think beyond office apps. Maybe we should leave them to their devices (heh), and grit our teeth at work (or persuade our bosses that Linux/OpenOffice is cheaper and more stable), while enjoying convergence in the comfort of our living rooms, and maybe expecting to see UMPCs for cheap in surplus stores in a couple of years time.
Netscape is the corporate skin of Mozilla. There are still sites (as in places of work, not web) out there that have rejected IE but aren't ready for Firefox.
It sounds and looks awfully familiar. And that was 15 years ago. And more or less blown out of the water by the Newton and Windows 3.1 Pen Computing API. It's too big. What I would pay for right now is a Blue Angel Pocket PC with an iPod mini/nano small hard or flash drive in. Running MacOS or Linux Tablet Edition. I'd never go in the office again.
It's a very good documentary, although the 7/7 attacks in London did blow out one part of the argument in one way, but reinforced it in another. It is almost certain that while everything done in the name of al Quaida (terrible sp) is not endorsed by some shadowy central committee it is often claimed as part of the 'struggle'. As such it is probably impossible to stop every attempted outrage, but in the sake of the middle management culture of 'things being seen to be done' that is pervasive in the British, US and other governments, it has become seen as necessary to take action which has previously been regarded as intrusive and restrictive. It is often hard to see where such initiatives come from as they span governments, but the beneficiaries are more often the corporations who implement and manage them than the people who are managed. Welcome to the information regime.
Easy win for Cisco, nice windfall for SyPixx
on
Cisco Aquires SyPixx
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Having worked for a company who were taken over by Cisco, I can confirm that it's not a bad company to be bought into. The good thing is that they are buying a) to expand their portfolio with an existing product and b) that they're pretty happy with the product so apart from some integration, which may be rebadging (or not). Downside is that while development teams will be maintained and either plugged into Cisco's net or brought into the local office (even turned into a local office), support often seems to get integrated into Cisco's helpdesks with the result that backup staff are the ones to go. I had a good employer who shared in the dividend, even when he didn't need to, but after a few months, our product was put into Cisco support and I was out of job. Had a good time though.
Hmm, I seem to have missed a whole line there. It was about the general lack of compatibility with anything but, er, IBM machines. I can remember an IBM guy trying for two days to get a network connection on a generic PC at the ISP that I worked at at the time.
The Windows compatibility was taken out of v4 and IBM alleged at the the time that there was no Microsoft code left in the core OS. However, it transpired that this didn't apply to code that had been written by MS for version 1 and had been given (or sold) to IBM when MS had dropped out, so releasing it to open source is practically impossible.
There are probably elderly PCs running Dow Jones feed servers in many banks still, probably even running OS/2 1.3 on the command line as it Just Worked, even to the point that there were attempts to port applications to v4/Warp when it was released. It had an amazingly fast boot time even compared to DOS but even when IBM had a burst of zealotry over Warp and tried to promote it as the Internet desktop of the future (I still have a few of those 60 day trial CDs that got everywhere at the end of 1994). It's good to know that it's being kept alive as despite its foibles, it had a potential that neither Linux, Windows or OS X have managed to really live up to, as a light, fast, multithreading application server. Just perhaps not a desktop.
Bonjour is a good implementation of zeroconf and will be one of the ways forward for making networking transparent in the future. However, at this stage in its development it still seems to me to be insecure and experimental in its wide area applications, perhaps more in its undiscovered potential than its current abilities. I suspect that to make it secure it's going to need a whole new level of content based security. I hope someone takes at Apple takes this as a warning. Oh soryy, what am I saying?
The US music industry has never been able to see beyond its next cheque, and has never believed that music is anything more than a tangible product - sheet music, shellac, vinyl or CDs. If you can't hold it in your hand, then it can't be real. It believed that about radio in the 1930s, about home taping in the 1970s and I still can't believe that it's still on the same tack in 2006, when downloading music, both legally and illegally, has been a fact of online life for years. While the dinosaurs of the industry have managed to grudgingly get on various legal download trains, they still don't get the ride, because the bottom line is shown as pennies per track rather than dollars per CD. How long can it be before the RIAA stops reflecting the opinion of the majority of its members, and will it change then?
Oh, Randy definitely has some issues, but they're more issues that Stephenson uses to emphasise his geekiness to a level of OCD that a lot of us who are reading this site already have. Yes. You.
You missed the spaceship chase between two pretty big spaceships inside another spaceship. Mr Banks has always been a man for the big, sorry BIG picture.
At the time of publication, Alan Moore suggested that it should be a 13 part TV series and he wouldn't be wrong - might be able to squeeze into six I suppose. It was such a visually rich comic that it would be wrong to cut almost any of it.
An identity card is exempt under the DPA for a number of reasons that will be open to interpretation and probably tested in the early stages of the implementation. The first time everyone who has registered gets an AOL CD, for example.
There are wired and wireless appliances for the house. Philips have a load like this and you can pick that and this from Dlink up from your local PCWorld. At home I have an Airport Express plugged into my stereo and Airfoil feeding every kind of audio media into it. Even Sky have got into the act with their Skygnome (needs Java, isn't really worth it). The hardware is there, basically.
For that matter there was a perfectly good Windows perl port before ActiveState. ActiveState have added a nice IDE and, because they worked with Microsoft, produced a lot of MS/Windows compatability modules that would either have not existed or would have been based on guesswork. If they can do the same for OS X it will be worth the port. It's more for talking to Excel and Word rather than Windows32 filesystem calls, obviously but it's a viable port IMO.
As slow as it can be, it seems you want something like iDisk so that you can have anything you want available to you anywhere. I think the issue is at the presentation layer rather than the storage layer, although I wonder what it would take to have roving volumes on a distributed SAN...
It all only does that because you let them. Other mail services and search engines are available. And my GPS unit of choice already tells me about the next TravelLodge or petrol station and is going to be more dynamic in future. Unless I get bored with it and sell it to someone who's lost or something.
and switched to Telemessages, which were Telex based with overnight delivery. Business telemessage services are still in the hands of BT Accurate but the personal service was sold off in 2003. What now for Telex though?
Slashdot Mirror
I know someone who worked for Kingston Communications when they rolled out their TV on demand service in Hull back in the mid-90s. The STBs had a 4Mb IP feed to them, but only 256k - 2Mb could be accessed by the customer depending on how much they paid. Kcom staff had access to the whole 4Mb. I would guess that that is the model that most providers will take. Time to dust off the CV...
I don't think there really is a way apart from having verifiable restorable backups of every system prior to patching. I was having a conversation along these lines this morning and the agreed solution was to have an identical test platform and install on that first, allow it to run long enough for any problems to arise and only then implement on a production system. That's the ultra-conservative approach but many years in financial services have shown that that's the only way of being certain.
But what would Google do with the knowledge that people photoshopped their girlfriends' head onto Angelina Jolie's body?
Lots of people thought that this was going to play games, and so was aimed at the PSP market. If they do it right, with a decent graphics card, it probably will, but only PC games, so the Xbox is safe. Lots of people thought it was going to be a media device, and with Windows Media Player, and a decent bus, it probably will be, but it has no removable storage, just a big disk for its size, and dumping a DVD on that big disc is contrary to principles of DRM. It has potential as a portable communicator, but my PDA does that all ready. A built in camera would allow it to extend its messaging capabilities, and hey, why not a 3G or UTMS connection while you're at it, but they're probably not in the hardware spec. So what is it? I'm sure it will include Office or a UMPC version of it, so you will be able to capture those moments of inspiration on the train, but you can do that with laptop for not much difference in price. It will play music and movies but so does my (insert small format mp3 player here). It's got a nice big screen for reading ebooks, and it's stolen a march on the Sony Reader. But it's too big for that and has the same battery life as a laptop. The Sony Reader ain't all that either.
Microsoft find it difficult to think beyond the PC platform, and as the PC platform increasingly means the office they find it hard to think beyond office apps. Maybe we should leave them to their devices (heh), and grit our teeth at work (or persuade our bosses that Linux/OpenOffice is cheaper and more stable), while enjoying convergence in the comfort of our living rooms, and maybe expecting to see UMPCs for cheap in surplus stores in a couple of years time.
Netscape is the corporate skin of Mozilla. There are still sites (as in places of work, not web) out there that have rejected IE but aren't ready for Firefox.
I thought that said human sacrifice design for a moment. *drifts off*
It sounds and looks awfully familiar. And that was 15 years ago. And more or less blown out of the water by the Newton and Windows 3.1 Pen Computing API. It's too big.
What I would pay for right now is a Blue Angel Pocket PC with an iPod mini/nano small hard or flash drive in. Running MacOS or Linux Tablet Edition. I'd never go in the office again.
It's a very good documentary, although the 7/7 attacks in London did blow out one part of the argument in one way, but reinforced it in another. It is almost certain that while everything done in the name of al Quaida (terrible sp) is not endorsed by some shadowy central committee it is often claimed as part of the 'struggle'. As such it is probably impossible to stop every attempted outrage, but in the sake of the middle management culture of 'things being seen to be done' that is pervasive in the British, US and other governments, it has become seen as necessary to take action which has previously been regarded as intrusive and restrictive. It is often hard to see where such initiatives come from as they span governments, but the beneficiaries are more often the corporations who implement and manage them than the people who are managed. Welcome to the information regime.
Having worked for a company who were taken over by Cisco, I can confirm that it's not a bad company to be bought into. The good thing is that they are buying a) to expand their portfolio with an existing product and b) that they're pretty happy with the product so apart from some integration, which may be rebadging (or not). Downside is that while development teams will be maintained and either plugged into Cisco's net or brought into the local office (even turned into a local office), support often seems to get integrated into Cisco's helpdesks with the result that backup staff are the ones to go. I had a good employer who shared in the dividend, even when he didn't need to, but after a few months, our product was put into Cisco support and I was out of job. Had a good time though.
Hmm, I seem to have missed a whole line there. It was about the general lack of compatibility with anything but, er, IBM machines. I can remember an IBM guy trying for two days to get a network connection on a generic PC at the ISP that I worked at at the time.
The Windows compatibility was taken out of v4 and IBM alleged at the the time that there was no Microsoft code left in the core OS. However, it transpired that this didn't apply to code that had been written by MS for version 1 and had been given (or sold) to IBM when MS had dropped out, so releasing it to open source is practically impossible.
There are probably elderly PCs running Dow Jones feed servers in many banks still, probably even running OS/2 1.3 on the command line as it Just Worked, even to the point that there were attempts to port applications to v4/Warp when it was released. It had an amazingly fast boot time even compared to DOS but even when IBM had a burst of zealotry over Warp and tried to promote it as the Internet desktop of the future (I still have a few of those 60 day trial CDs that got everywhere at the end of 1994). It's good to know that it's being kept alive as despite its foibles, it had a potential that neither Linux, Windows or OS X have managed to really live up to, as a light, fast, multithreading application server. Just perhaps not a desktop.
Bonjour is a good implementation of zeroconf and will be one of the ways forward for making networking transparent in the future. However, at this stage in its development it still seems to me to be insecure and experimental in its wide area applications, perhaps more in its undiscovered potential than its current abilities. I suspect that to make it secure it's going to need a whole new level of content based security. I hope someone takes at Apple takes this as a warning. Oh soryy, what am I saying?
The US music industry has never been able to see beyond its next cheque, and has never believed that music is anything more than a tangible product - sheet music, shellac, vinyl or CDs. If you can't hold it in your hand, then it can't be real. It believed that about radio in the 1930s, about home taping in the 1970s and I still can't believe that it's still on the same tack in 2006, when downloading music, both legally and illegally, has been a fact of online life for years. While the dinosaurs of the industry have managed to grudgingly get on various legal download trains, they still don't get the ride, because the bottom line is shown as pennies per track rather than dollars per CD. How long can it be before the RIAA stops reflecting the opinion of the majority of its members, and will it change then?
Emusic.
Oh, Randy definitely has some issues, but they're more issues that Stephenson uses to emphasise his geekiness to a level of OCD that a lot of us who are reading this site already have. Yes. You.
You missed the spaceship chase between two pretty big spaceships inside another spaceship. Mr Banks has always been a man for the big, sorry BIG picture.
At the time of publication, Alan Moore suggested that it should be a 13 part TV series and he wouldn't be wrong - might be able to squeeze into six I suppose. It was such a visually rich comic that it would be wrong to cut almost any of it.
An identity card is exempt under the DPA for a number of reasons that will be open to interpretation and probably tested in the early stages of the implementation. The first time everyone who has registered gets an AOL CD, for example.
There are wired and wireless appliances for the house. Philips have a load like this and you can pick that and this from Dlink up from your local PCWorld. At home I have an Airport Express plugged into my stereo and Airfoil feeding every kind of audio media into it. Even Sky have got into the act with their Skygnome (needs Java, isn't really worth it). The hardware is there, basically.
For that matter there was a perfectly good Windows perl port before ActiveState. ActiveState have added a nice IDE and, because they worked with Microsoft, produced a lot of MS/Windows compatability modules that would either have not existed or would have been based on guesswork. If they can do the same for OS X it will be worth the port. It's more for talking to Excel and Word rather than Windows32 filesystem calls, obviously but it's a viable port IMO.
As slow as it can be, it seems you want something like iDisk so that you can have anything you want available to you anywhere. I think the issue is at the presentation layer rather than the storage layer, although I wonder what it would take to have roving volumes on a distributed SAN...
It all only does that because you let them. Other mail services and search engines are available. And my GPS unit of choice already tells me about the next TravelLodge or petrol station and is going to be more dynamic in future. Unless I get bored with it and sell it to someone who's lost or something.
and switched to Telemessages, which were Telex based with overnight delivery. Business telemessage services are still in the hands of BT Accurate but the personal service was sold off in 2003. What now for Telex though?
They're having trouble with the drivers for the Optimus Keyboard.