Looking at the age of the supporting documents, this patent application dates back to the days when client side apps were thought to have a role in the browser. I'm thinking of things like Realnames, and various push client mechanisms that had client side authentication. Then again, someone at Amazon must see a value in it if they have persisted in getting the patent.
This does seem to be the case. About ten years ago I was involved with the development of an authentication server product. Not unreasonably, one of our customers requested integration with SAM, the NT authentication protocol. They were willing to pay for it, so we approached Microsoft with a request for the SAM API. They told us that it was company confidential and would not be released. The workaround that we invented was to dump the internal database into an Oracle database and authenticate from there. At the time it seemed puzzling that MS wouldn't publish a native method of authentication for their server platform, but now it makes perfect sense. That 'New Technology' was probably nicely written but never documented therefore there wasn't an API. I think some of it was published later, and it can be used with IIS for example, but just not when we wanted it.
I used to have a rack-mount AMD server running Fedora but it was way too noisy and I wasn't doing anything useful with it. When the Intel Mac Minis came out I scored a PowerPC model for £199 from my local PCWorld, and finally managed to repurpose it over Christmas by installing Debian 4 (about the only Linux that is distributed and supported for PowerPC at the moment). I added a 250Gb external Seagate drive for my music and video, built Firefly media server for music (supports daapd for iTunes), and VLC for video, added netatalk and avahi for OS X support (most of my machines are Macs) and I will be adding authentication, DHCP and DNS caching when I next have time. Next capital job is to set up a power over ethernet network and to get a Neuros OSD to serve video, as video isn't quite up to it. Moreover, it's completely silent and only uses about 85 watts against the average PC's 350 or so. A PowerPC MacMini can be had from eBay for £150 - £200.
What's this site full of T2000s that I'm working on then?
Sun probably won't have any datacentres of their own, but they have been moving away from that for a very long time. In the UK they rent space from AT&T for small projects, and the capital projects where they partner with BT are hosted in BT-owned centres. In the meantime their offices like the UK HQ are empty.
Virtualisation and utility computing are buzzwords in the business, and a lot of companies are going for the virtualisation aspect, which means that Sun sell some more T2000s and 5120s but they're a way from getting any utility sites working, at least in Europe, as yet.
Darwin should compile on any processor that will run FreeBSD and already exists for ARM. The proprietary aspects of OS X probably need tweaking but that is just porting work.
The issue with Linux would be that merging those proprietary aspects (particularly Aqua) could potentially expose them to the requirements of the GPL, a requirement that isn't present in the BSD licence.
Personally I think there's an underlying programme somewhere in Cupertino to make OS X run on anything - it should run on UltraSPARC for example, and by advancement on Niagara I and II...
I was just thinking that myself. I bought a 770 when they were being dumped earlier this year and they must be a good candidate for getting the platform onto - it's ARM based, and if it's been done on the Zaurus it shouldn't be too hard as the architecture is very similar. Hmm, there's something to while away the long winter nights...
You're not a kid in a developing country who might have never used a computer before. The machine has to be tactile, simple and responsive. Minimal eye candy to confuse, minimum text to aid understanding in as many languages as possible. You've seen it all, Jorge in Uruguay hasn't.
Unlikely. They were InterNIC once. They're probably not even putting a complete record in DNS, just a TXT line that makes it look as if the domain is registered.
This misses the point a little. I don't use Word, but I do use NeoOffice, but having now discovered Scrivener would happily abandon it for all but the simplest docs, because OpenOffice/NeoOffice takes a lot of the problems with MSOffice and recreates them perfectly, to paraphrase Peter Cook. Word processors create linear documents and the writing process is often far from linear, unless you're Jack Kerouac with his roll of lining paper. I've been constructing a novel in my head for two or three years but have never been able to write it down using a word processor. Scrivener has allowed to me to put down those pieces as fragments and start to arrange them in some kind of order.
Paul Allen is behind a number of businesses of his own but I doubt that it would surprise anyone if he won the auction and Microsoft became involved in whatever he intended to do with the spectrum. However, there is the potential for it not just to be MS, as an exclusive deal with them probably wouldn't be acceptable to the FCC.
Not always true. Many companies bought theirs outright, but had them hosted and maintained by IBM on an IBM site. It's still the case today - I worked for a company who bought a zSeries outright, their third, but it lived in IBM's mainframe hall in Warwick. In the end it's whatever suits the balance sheet better.
Very much a proof of concept but Corel/Caldera ported WordPerfect to Java and had it running in a web browser ten years ago. It was predictably incredibly slow but it worked. At the time I couldn't help thinking that they should have ported the DOS WP 5.1 code instead of the Windows WP 6 code.
At first look the model seems to be about.com, which offered information on subjects as presented by named experts, which is pretty much the reverse of how Wikipedia works. As ideas go, it's not a bad one and I can see the potential for the use of trust or reputation to maintain the veracity of information, as I'm sure Google have done. It brings up several other questions of course, such as Google finally becoming a content provider, and how it's going to be managed - even if it is all user maintained the potential for another cabal is always on the horizon.
That was the feature that impressed me the most. My guess is that OLPC has established a bunch of Jabber or IRC servers as part of the product. How cool is it going to be for kids to click on the 'Chat' icon or whatever and suddenly be talking to other kids on the other side of the world? There are obvious potential downsides, but to me that's what the project should be about.
And now, so are you. It isn't for the starving, they have far bigger concerns, as you so rightly say. The first deployments have been in Uruguay and Nigeria, which by any measure, are developing societies of the second world rather than the third, and who, generally speaking, don't need rice, fish or roads as they have them, but could use a bootstrap into the computerised, connected society. We in the northern hemisphere forget that the southern hemisphere isn't all starving brown people who are trying to kill each other, primarily because we hardly see any news from there. However, a quarter of the world's population is in South America, in countries that are as socially and technologically sophisticated as any in the north, but which most people only know about through the occasional coup or political scandal. Africa makes up another fifth, many of whom live in the south of the continent, again in relatively stable countries that are less concerned with the day to day necessities of survival than with ways of moving forward. Google isn't just building a datacentre in Kenya because it's cheap, but because there are educated people there who can do the work that they need. The cliche that is more accurate than 'give a man a fish...' is 'man cannot live by bread alone': once the basic human needs are covered the options are there for people to improve their lives, and the OLPC project provides one way of doing that.
Certainly in the UK, if you make a mistake, you are supposed to return the incorrect ballot paper to the invigilators who will void it and give you another paper. The voided papers are also accounted for in the count.
It doesn't need Genuine Advantage any more. The common installer doesn't check for it. In addition there are badged versions such as Google's that don't either.
It was still free in late 1994/early 1995 when I registered lotech.com but I seem to recall charges came in in about May-June 1995, and a.com was $100 for two years. Being a fledgling sysadmin at an ISP was quite handy back then.
I'm running Leopard on a black Macbook and a top end Mac Mini bought in September and October last year. I've had a variety of frustrations, including a printer (Lexmark X5470) which is supposed to be supported natively but isn't, a network disk that isn't yet supported, and perhaps the most annoying thing, but one that I only discovered this week, the complete removal of MySQL on my Macbook, including databases. OK, I should have backed up, but do you expect an upgrade to trash your user space really? The UI is pretty but superfluous, perhaps more taking its cue from Compiz than Aero, and the add-ons like Spaces work but are less intuitive than the Virtual Desktop apps that they replaced. Time Machine is handy but overblown and I expect third party applications that replace the UI with a less complicated interface Real Soon Now. I couldn't accuse Apple of Vistaisation (ugh) but I think Leopard takes the Just Works principle another step, away from the power user and closer to appliance style operation, and while it might have the effect of pulling in more eyes and ears for the desktop, it might send those of us who want a working unix on our laptops back to Ubuntu. I know I'm thinking about it.
That's one tiny turkey. The last time I did a turkey for Christmas the smallest whole one I could find was about 10lbs so I got a turkey crown and there was still about six months supply left on Boxing Day.
It's obvious that there would be a market for a low cost alternative to, well, almost any ebook reader, so I just went to have a look at eInk's website to see if there is a developer kit. There is, here and even the prototype they have there looks pretty cool. So I went to have a look at the shop... I don't know much about the hardware business but I would say that $3k is way too big an entry cost for a developer kit. OK, they probably haven't got to mass producing the screen yet, but the rest of the hardware is common enough, the OS is Linux and the drivers and applications are open source. So what are we paying for? How much does a production licence cost? I'm all for eInk making an honest profit out of their work, but this looks like a stumbling block for the development of an open alternative.
If either is the case then they deserve every penny of the fine, and should be banned from providing hardware or software to any voting system anywhere. In their business there is no excuse for mistakes or oversight. If something is changed there should be a process of documenting that change, accepting the change and, most importantly in this case, validating that change and getting it certified by the controlling bodies. There should be a procedure for that, all written down and set into motion as soon as one bolt is loosened. If voting isn't that important, let's give up now, and you can let Halliburton or Microsoft or Starbucks directly decide how your taxes are spent without the pretence of having elections.
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Looking at the age of the supporting documents, this patent application dates back to the days when client side apps were thought to have a role in the browser. I'm thinking of things like Realnames, and various push client mechanisms that had client side authentication. Then again, someone at Amazon must see a value in it if they have persisted in getting the patent.
If you feed them grits, they'll write Natalie Portman's biography.
This does seem to be the case. About ten years ago I was involved with the development of an authentication server product. Not unreasonably, one of our customers requested integration with SAM, the NT authentication protocol. They were willing to pay for it, so we approached Microsoft with a request for the SAM API. They told us that it was company confidential and would not be released. The workaround that we invented was to dump the internal database into an Oracle database and authenticate from there. At the time it seemed puzzling that MS wouldn't publish a native method of authentication for their server platform, but now it makes perfect sense. That 'New Technology' was probably nicely written but never documented therefore there wasn't an API. I think some of it was published later, and it can be used with IIS for example, but just not when we wanted it.
I used to have a rack-mount AMD server running Fedora but it was way too noisy and I wasn't doing anything useful with it. When the Intel Mac Minis came out I scored a PowerPC model for £199 from my local PCWorld, and finally managed to repurpose it over Christmas by installing Debian 4 (about the only Linux that is distributed and supported for PowerPC at the moment). I added a 250Gb external Seagate drive for my music and video, built Firefly media server for music (supports daapd for iTunes), and VLC for video, added netatalk and avahi for OS X support (most of my machines are Macs) and I will be adding authentication, DHCP and DNS caching when I next have time. Next capital job is to set up a power over ethernet network and to get a Neuros OSD to serve video, as video isn't quite up to it. Moreover, it's completely silent and only uses about 85 watts against the average PC's 350 or so. A PowerPC MacMini can be had from eBay for £150 - £200.
What's this site full of T2000s that I'm working on then?
Sun probably won't have any datacentres of their own, but they have been moving away from that for a very long time. In the UK they rent space from AT&T for small projects, and the capital projects where they partner with BT are hosted in BT-owned centres. In the meantime their offices like the UK HQ are empty.
Virtualisation and utility computing are buzzwords in the business, and a lot of companies are going for the virtualisation aspect, which means that Sun sell some more T2000s and 5120s but they're a way from getting any utility sites working, at least in Europe, as yet.
Darwin should compile on any processor that will run FreeBSD and already exists for ARM. The proprietary aspects of OS X probably need tweaking but that is just porting work.
The issue with Linux would be that merging those proprietary aspects (particularly Aqua) could potentially expose them to the requirements of the GPL, a requirement that isn't present in the BSD licence.
Personally I think there's an underlying programme somewhere in Cupertino to make OS X run on anything - it should run on UltraSPARC for example, and by advancement on Niagara I and II...
I was just thinking that myself. I bought a 770 when they were being dumped earlier this year and they must be a good candidate for getting the platform onto - it's ARM based, and if it's been done on the Zaurus it shouldn't be too hard as the architecture is very similar. Hmm, there's something to while away the long winter nights...
Google has enterprise search engines: the Google Search Appliance.
You're not a kid in a developing country who might have never used a computer before. The machine has to be tactile, simple and responsive. Minimal eye candy to confuse, minimum text to aid understanding in as many languages as possible. You've seen it all, Jorge in Uruguay hasn't.
Unlikely. They were InterNIC once. They're probably not even putting a complete record in DNS, just a TXT line that makes it look as if the domain is registered.
This misses the point a little. I don't use Word, but I do use NeoOffice, but having now discovered Scrivener would happily abandon it for all but the simplest docs, because OpenOffice/NeoOffice takes a lot of the problems with MSOffice and recreates them perfectly, to paraphrase Peter Cook. Word processors create linear documents and the writing process is often far from linear, unless you're Jack Kerouac with his roll of lining paper. I've been constructing a novel in my head for two or three years but have never been able to write it down using a word processor. Scrivener has allowed to me to put down those pieces as fragments and start to arrange them in some kind of order.
Paul Allen is behind a number of businesses of his own but I doubt that it would surprise anyone if he won the auction and Microsoft became involved in whatever he intended to do with the spectrum. However, there is the potential for it not just to be MS, as an exclusive deal with them probably wouldn't be acceptable to the FCC.
Not always true. Many companies bought theirs outright, but had them hosted and maintained by IBM on an IBM site. It's still the case today - I worked for a company who bought a zSeries outright, their third, but it lived in IBM's mainframe hall in Warwick. In the end it's whatever suits the balance sheet better.
Very much a proof of concept but Corel/Caldera ported WordPerfect to Java and had it running in a web browser ten years ago. It was predictably incredibly slow but it worked. At the time I couldn't help thinking that they should have ported the DOS WP 5.1 code instead of the Windows WP 6 code.
At first look the model seems to be about.com, which offered information on subjects as presented by named experts, which is pretty much the reverse of how Wikipedia works. As ideas go, it's not a bad one and I can see the potential for the use of trust or reputation to maintain the veracity of information, as I'm sure Google have done. It brings up several other questions of course, such as Google finally becoming a content provider, and how it's going to be managed - even if it is all user maintained the potential for another cabal is always on the horizon.
I guess we know who got the cool in that family.
Actually, that might not be true... good ol' Nick isn't really cool, just not evil.
That was the feature that impressed me the most. My guess is that OLPC has established a bunch of Jabber or IRC servers as part of the product. How cool is it going to be for kids to click on the 'Chat' icon or whatever and suddenly be talking to other kids on the other side of the world? There are obvious potential downsides, but to me that's what the project should be about.
And now, so are you. It isn't for the starving, they have far bigger concerns, as you so rightly say. The first deployments have been in Uruguay and Nigeria, which by any measure, are developing societies of the second world rather than the third, and who, generally speaking, don't need rice, fish or roads as they have them, but could use a bootstrap into the computerised, connected society.
We in the northern hemisphere forget that the southern hemisphere isn't all starving brown people who are trying to kill each other, primarily because we hardly see any news from there. However, a quarter of the world's population is in South America, in countries that are as socially and technologically sophisticated as any in the north, but which most people only know about through the occasional coup or political scandal. Africa makes up another fifth, many of whom live in the south of the continent, again in relatively stable countries that are less concerned with the day to day necessities of survival than with ways of moving forward. Google isn't just building a datacentre in Kenya because it's cheap, but because there are educated people there who can do the work that they need.
The cliche that is more accurate than 'give a man a fish...' is 'man cannot live by bread alone': once the basic human needs are covered the options are there for people to improve their lives, and the OLPC project provides one way of doing that.
Certainly in the UK, if you make a mistake, you are supposed to return the incorrect ballot paper to the invigilators who will void it and give you another paper. The voided papers are also accounted for in the count.
It doesn't need Genuine Advantage any more. The common installer doesn't check for it. In addition there are badged versions such as Google's that don't either.
It was still free in late 1994/early 1995 when I registered lotech.com but I seem to recall charges came in in about May-June 1995, and a .com was $100 for two years. Being a fledgling sysadmin at an ISP was quite handy back then.
I'm running Leopard on a black Macbook and a top end Mac Mini bought in September and October last year. I've had a variety of frustrations, including a printer (Lexmark X5470) which is supposed to be supported natively but isn't, a network disk that isn't yet supported, and perhaps the most annoying thing, but one that I only discovered this week, the complete removal of MySQL on my Macbook, including databases. OK, I should have backed up, but do you expect an upgrade to trash your user space really?
The UI is pretty but superfluous, perhaps more taking its cue from Compiz than Aero, and the add-ons like Spaces work but are less intuitive than the Virtual Desktop apps that they replaced. Time Machine is handy but overblown and I expect third party applications that replace the UI with a less complicated interface Real Soon Now.
I couldn't accuse Apple of Vistaisation (ugh) but I think Leopard takes the Just Works principle another step, away from the power user and closer to appliance style operation, and while it might have the effect of pulling in more eyes and ears for the desktop, it might send those of us who want a working unix on our laptops back to Ubuntu. I know I'm thinking about it.
That's one tiny turkey. The last time I did a turkey for Christmas the smallest whole one I could find was about 10lbs so I got a turkey crown and there was still about six months supply left on Boxing Day.
It's obvious that there would be a market for a low cost alternative to, well, almost any ebook reader, so I just went to have a look at eInk's website to see if there is a developer kit. There is, here and even the prototype they have there looks pretty cool. So I went to have a look at the shop...
I don't know much about the hardware business but I would say that $3k is way too big an entry cost for a developer kit. OK, they probably haven't got to mass producing the screen yet, but the rest of the hardware is common enough, the OS is Linux and the drivers and applications are open source. So what are we paying for? How much does a production licence cost? I'm all for eInk making an honest profit out of their work, but this looks like a stumbling block for the development of an open alternative.
If either is the case then they deserve every penny of the fine, and should be banned from providing hardware or software to any voting system anywhere. In their business there is no excuse for mistakes or oversight. If something is changed there should be a process of documenting that change, accepting the change and, most importantly in this case, validating that change and getting it certified by the controlling bodies. There should be a procedure for that, all written down and set into motion as soon as one bolt is loosened.
If voting isn't that important, let's give up now, and you can let Halliburton or Microsoft or Starbucks directly decide how your taxes are spent without the pretence of having elections.