The idea of a no-hands free bathroom phone for the bathtub only is a good one. Visions of Doris Day dance through my mind when I think of a web cam... maybe bubbles will come back into fashion. But I'd like the Home of Tomorrow to realize I am not available when I'm in the toilet area. The phone shouldn't even ring, it should just bounce to voice mail, and notify me after I'm done.
My stove already stores recipes. It's a microwave. Why is this good? It would be nice if it had a scale to measure quantities though.
I think a music playing toaster is cool. I want it to have a 70s-style mod screen saver and play Swing Music, with any NPR stories that aren't boring. As in, stuff I already heard.
Actually, even with these restrictions, which merely require providers to identify who is hosting at their site (and is not yet law, but just passed first reading)...
French people have way more rights to privacy than we do in the USA. You can access your records kept by a website, they can't distribute them without your express permission, and they can't sell your profile without your consent.
Donnez-moi la liberte, pas le mort! Mais l'amour serrait plus preferable, je dit.
Must point out that at least per capita, the US is not the most connected country. Sweden surpasses all other countries both in percentage connected to the internet, and in number of wireless appliances.
I think Finland's catching up in the WAP metrics to Sweden, as is Norway.
But in terms of bandwidth, the US eats Sweden for lunch. When you add up the growth in DSL and Cable Modems and the number of sites located here, Sweden doesn't even show up on the map. Some of the nearby growth, such as Mexico, is so that spammers and sex sites can get around US restrictions, and thus is more due to the US market than anything else.
OK, so you're saying that we could have Gnomish WinCE devices. But could they run gnome-pilot in that case? In which case, I could Palm my WinCE, and just go with the Gnome.
While this article, like most by Jon, is too long, it's quite readable, suggesting that Jon's starting to grok the Net and the fact that a lead story must be segmented differently. Congrats!
The DMCA suggests that corporate pressure can reverse the way lawmaking ought to work: the law seems to have come before the discussion, as is clear from messages like this one from Brad Zimmerman:
"This week I've 'pirated' 1GB of MP3's via my 512K ADSL line. What I also know is that wholly because of MP3's I've bought three Aphex Twin CD's, a Apoptygma Berzerk CD, a Cleen CD, several Beastie Boys CDs, a Juno Reactor CD, etc. Later this month, I'll be buying a bunch of CDs (six, online) and they will mostly be stuff I've heard of via MP3s. What I do is still illegal, though. I know it. I do it anyway. I highly doubt I will ever be caught because I honestly believe there is no money in prosecuting me -- and the music industry, though blisteringly short-sighted, knows what makes money and what will lose money."
I too am in this category. I have ripped CDs that I bought at WOMAD, so I could push them to my MP3 player and listen to them at the Seattle International Film Festival while waiting in line. I have downloaded techno and rave and ethereal space music, listened to it, and then if I really like more than three songs by the artist, I buy the CD. As a result I now have CDs from England, from Argentina, from France, from Brazil. The record companies don't want me to buy this stuff. By buying these CDs I support artists that I want to hear. Plus, I can check out some of the local bands, before getting trapped in a smoky bar listening to garbage. If I like them, I catch the live show, then I buy the CD.
This is the future. Soon, music nomads will roam the globe, visiting the spots where they have the most downloads, booking a gig over the Net with the clubs in the area, pointing out how popular they are in that area. Musicians make more money, clubs play what people like, we are no longer straight-jacketed into some record executive's idea of what the kids want to hear.
Well, we're not installing Win2K and we've got thousands of PCs and Servers in Seattle. We'd rather stick with Win95, which we paid for, and we install WinNT when we have to. Our DBMS live on SunOS machines, and we use Sybase and DB2 for that, which ties in with our mainframe. And we're making test servers with Linux running DB2 and Sybase.
We figure MSFT will force us to upgrade from Win95 to Win98 sometime, but we really don't get thrilled at shelling out more cash for something we really don't need.
As to the 64K bugs - if the GUI doesn't work, that's a bug for Windows, which is a GUI. You can call it an enhancement, a feature, but the users call it a bug.
I've been using W2k at work on my personal machine (Compaq 380 mhz - 128 megs) and it does dual duty as the companies intranet server...
Of course it works, MSFT tests on Compaq.
And, strange as it might sound, I recommended Win2K for corporate laptops just yesterday.
But I didn't recommend it for systems that our Client/Server Developers will be using... we're going with dual-boot WinNT/Win95 machines with removable drives, mostly to save license fees on the higher cost OS licenses.
And we're running DB2 on Linux servers for test. We've disconnected the Server OS and Client OS platform OS choice - so long as it runs our flavor of DBMS and Corba, we really don't care to waste the bucks on Win2K server licenses, especially for test machines, considering that we push to SunOS boxes for production.
Yes, it is the same thing. Just with a different method of access.
Maybe the next Bond movie will be about 007 hacking his way into some foreign army's attempt at world domination. And subverting it with misdirection and false orders via signals.
I've seen stuff on remote jeeps too, massively armored little boxes with cameras for scouting.
Yeah, those are wierd dohickeys. Now we're talking... maybe you could hack that baby, and run over some guys in their rucks or at least move at high speed into an ammo dump. Probably more effective to use it for the camera intel though.
Totally Skynet if they wire some attack capable vehicle though...
Why, if the Army really thinks this could happen, would they advertise it?
Maybe they realize that the real security experts don't work for them. Or maybe they've clued in that it's cheaper to have/. do the security threat analysis and brainstorming for them, at no cost to the taxpayer.
Or, it could just be that they got a batch of bad circuit boards for some mil hardware forced on them by some Senator from New Jersey that they can't replace, and they're trying to innocculate themselves against the inevitable failure during combat when the weapons fire against friendlies.
You wouldn't even need any artillery if you could have your enemy's 'smart' weapons chase them home..
Well, some minor problems with this. First, the purpose of artillery is to sow disruption amongst the enemy and make it difficult for them to mass together for both attacks and defences. 'Smart' weapons could be retargeted to attack the CQs and HQs from the side they came from, but they're not as effective as a nice rolling barrage at instilling terror amongst the soldiers. Perhaps in paralyzing the command and control structures and perhaps pinning down the air forces.
The other problem is one caused by everyone playing all these nice computer and video games. You keep forgetting that it's not a level playing field. In any given conflict between the US or NATO vs someone else, we are the ones with the 'smart' weapons, or (let's hope) the JATO-assisted dumb bombs (way cheaper). So almost any hack is going to be used against us, not against them.
..but since when to are tanks, planes and warships unmanned?
Actually, those cool drone planes are unmanned. No payload, but a nice camera and all that.
I guess you could intentionally crash it into another plane or do a top-down crash into a tank. But it's probably better used for taking on a joyride to a fuel dump.
OK, so the example they give is faking the incoming navigation data for a ship. For vessels which depend on downloads of info (such as GPS locators), this might prove useful in that:
A. one could induce systems creep in a MBT so that the tank thinks it's a few hundred feet away from where it is, especially while on the move. "Charlie, I thought you said we were going 70kph, how come we're 20km closer than we should be?"
B. one could give false image info for targets beyond local range (e.g. fake data from an AWACS).
C. one could trick the Friend Or Foe signal data so that friendlies appear to be hostiles.
None of these sound very promising. And none of them "take control" of the system. Now if someone knows of any buffer overflow exploits with these systems, maybe we're talking a nifty hack; but otherwise, it's just smoke and mirrors.
Babelfish said that it means that the German Federal offices can use Open Source products. Not you, just the office workers. Which jibes with my rusty German understanding of the document.
So, if you work for the German Federal government, you can go ahead and use Open Source software now.
Not just a/. effect - if you act like you're mainstream, and privacy rights sure as heck is mainstream (something like 70+ % of the population agree with geeks on this), then you are treated as if you are mainstream.
If you organize in ways old-style politicos can measure and react to, they inoculate themselves to your effect. If you go outside the paradigm, and Think Geek, then they can't figure out how you succeed at it.
You said males. My neighbor, a cute 32 yo microsoftie, might object to this.
I know I do. For example, at the latest Tacoma LUG, Scott__ was telling me that 4 out of 20 attendees were young female geeks. They sure didn't look male to him.
Right. Change the rules if you want to inject geek ROI in politics. Caucuses are high reward ratio - many times, just showing up you become a delegate, and can pass motions for your precinct (which you printed out ahead of time and gave copies to other precincts near you). I rode both the None Of The Above and All Of The Above resolutions to the state level myself, although I had a conflict with going to the state convention.
My precinct this year had 3 delegates and 3 people showed up. Just on a whim, when people were confused about what might be a good resolution, I said "You know, like moving that the 60% majority requirement for school bonds be lowered to a simple majority of 50% + 1". This was then altered to all bonds (long story, involving stadiums that geeks and locals hate which passed with 50% votes). And the resolution was passed by probably 40 precincts in both the 36th and 43rd Districts, so now it moves on two Legislative District Caucuses. It was that easy.
Also, do the math - show up at primary endorsements and ask people running for office questions about support of privacy laws and stuff like that. If they answer wrong, write a check for the one who answered right and was believable. Point out how much geek money there is for privacy. And how anti-privacy means no geek money. That scares 'em....
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The idea of a no-hands free bathroom phone for the bathtub only is a good one. Visions of Doris Day dance through my mind when I think of a web cam ... maybe bubbles will come back into fashion. But I'd like the Home of Tomorrow to realize I am not available when I'm in the toilet area. The phone shouldn't even ring, it should just bounce to voice mail, and notify me after I'm done.
My stove already stores recipes. It's a microwave. Why is this good? It would be nice if it had a scale to measure quantities though.
I think a music playing toaster is cool. I want it to have a 70s-style mod screen saver and play Swing Music, with any NPR stories that aren't boring. As in, stuff I already heard.
Man, they should have the sattelites flame out during the burn at Burning Man.
Maybe even see if they can impact a few of them around Black Rock - talk about performance art!
Actually, even with these restrictions, which merely require providers to identify who is hosting at their site (and is not yet law, but just passed first reading) ...
French people have way more rights to privacy than we do in the USA. You can access your records kept by a website, they can't distribute them without your express permission, and they can't sell your profile without your consent.
Donnez-moi la liberte, pas le mort!
Mais l'amour serrait plus preferable, je dit.
Must point out that at least per capita, the US is not the most connected country. Sweden surpasses all other countries both in percentage connected to the internet, and in number of wireless appliances.
I think Finland's catching up in the WAP metrics to Sweden, as is Norway.
But in terms of bandwidth, the US eats Sweden for lunch. When you add up the growth in DSL and Cable Modems and the number of sites located here, Sweden doesn't even show up on the map. Some of the nearby growth, such as Mexico, is so that spammers and sex sites can get around US restrictions, and thus is more due to the US market than anything else.
So do we 'own' democracy the same way we 'own' the internet?
/. owns the Net.
No, I own democracy (TM)(R)(C). I patented it last year. Al Gore owns the Internet.
OK, so you're saying that we could have Gnomish WinCE devices. But could they run gnome-pilot in that case? In which case, I could Palm my WinCE, and just go with the Gnome.
...
I think my head hurts now
Cool. This is a killer app then. Now it all makes sense.
[OT] By the by, I'm in favor of reviving hoopy as a word myself. Good show.
The big question on everyone's minds - does this mean porting the ChiliSoft software so it's not just for Windows?
Also, is this an attempt to diversify so as to have some eggs in the MSFT basket?
someone mentioned porting GNOME to palmtop PDA devices
So, could we run gnome-pilot on our Palm V's then?
While this article, like most by Jon, is too long, it's quite readable, suggesting that Jon's starting to grok the Net and the fact that a lead story must be segmented differently. Congrats!
The DMCA suggests that corporate pressure can reverse the way lawmaking ought to work: the law seems to have come before the discussion, as is clear from messages like this one from Brad Zimmerman:
"This week I've 'pirated' 1GB of MP3's via my 512K ADSL line. What I also know is that wholly because of MP3's I've bought three Aphex Twin CD's, a Apoptygma Berzerk CD, a Cleen CD, several Beastie Boys CDs, a Juno Reactor CD, etc. Later this month, I'll be buying a bunch of CDs (six, online) and they will mostly be stuff I've heard of via MP3s. What I do is still illegal, though. I know it. I do it anyway. I highly doubt I will ever be caught because I honestly believe there is no money in prosecuting me -- and the music industry, though blisteringly short-sighted, knows what makes money and what will lose money."
I too am in this category. I have ripped CDs that I bought at WOMAD, so I could push them to my MP3 player and listen to them at the Seattle International Film Festival while waiting in line. I have downloaded techno and rave and ethereal space music, listened to it, and then if I really like more than three songs by the artist, I buy the CD. As a result I now have CDs from England, from Argentina, from France, from Brazil. The record companies don't want me to buy this stuff. By buying these CDs I support artists that I want to hear. Plus, I can check out some of the local bands, before getting trapped in a smoky bar listening to garbage. If I like them, I catch the live show, then I buy the CD.
This is the future. Soon, music nomads will roam the globe, visiting the spots where they have the most downloads, booking a gig over the Net with the clubs in the area, pointing out how popular they are in that area. Musicians make more money, clubs play what people like, we are no longer straight-jacketed into some record executive's idea of what the kids want to hear.
How many years has win2k been in development again??
It's been in development for centuries. Or was that millenia?
Well, we're not installing Win2K and we've got thousands of PCs and Servers in Seattle. We'd rather stick with Win95, which we paid for, and we install WinNT when we have to. Our DBMS live on SunOS machines, and we use Sybase and DB2 for that, which ties in with our mainframe. And we're making test servers with Linux running DB2 and Sybase.
We figure MSFT will force us to upgrade from Win95 to Win98 sometime, but we really don't get thrilled at shelling out more cash for something we really don't need.
As to the 64K bugs - if the GUI doesn't work, that's a bug for Windows, which is a GUI. You can call it an enhancement, a feature, but the users call it a bug.
I've been using W2k at work on my personal machine (Compaq 380 mhz - 128 megs) and it does dual duty as the companies intranet server ...
... we're going with dual-boot WinNT/Win95 machines with removable drives, mostly to save license fees on the higher cost OS licenses.
...
Of course it works, MSFT tests on Compaq.
And, strange as it might sound, I recommended Win2K for corporate laptops just yesterday.
But I didn't recommend it for systems that our Client/Server Developers will be using
And we're running DB2 on Linux servers for test. We've disconnected the Server OS and Client OS platform OS choice - so long as it runs our flavor of DBMS and Corba, we really don't care to waste the bucks on Win2K server licenses, especially for test machines, considering that we push to SunOS boxes for production.
Win2K is so last century, dude
Think about it ...
... it's right for the Naughties ... I can see the screaming media ads hosing my 56K connection browser now ...
W2K+1
Yes, it is the same thing. Just with a different method of access.
Maybe the next Bond movie will be about 007 hacking his way into some foreign army's attempt at world domination. And subverting it with misdirection and false orders via signals.
I've seen stuff on remote jeeps too, massively armored little boxes with cameras for scouting.
... maybe you could hack that baby, and run over some guys in their rucks or at least move at high speed into an ammo dump. Probably more effective to use it for the camera intel though.
...
Yeah, those are wierd dohickeys. Now we're talking
Totally Skynet if they wire some attack capable vehicle though
Why, if the Army really thinks this could happen, would they advertise it?
/. do the security threat analysis and brainstorming for them, at no cost to the taxpayer.
Maybe they realize that the real security experts don't work for them. Or maybe they've clued in that it's cheaper to have
Or, it could just be that they got a batch of bad circuit boards for some mil hardware forced on them by some Senator from New Jersey that they can't replace, and they're trying to innocculate themselves against the inevitable failure during combat when the weapons fire against friendlies.
You wouldn't even need any artillery if you could have your enemy's 'smart' weapons chase them home..
Well, some minor problems with this. First, the purpose of artillery is to sow disruption amongst the enemy and make it difficult for them to mass together for both attacks and defences. 'Smart' weapons could be retargeted to attack the CQs and HQs from the side they came from, but they're not as effective as a nice rolling barrage at instilling terror amongst the soldiers. Perhaps in paralyzing the command and control structures and perhaps pinning down the air forces.
The other problem is one caused by everyone playing all these nice computer and video games. You keep forgetting that it's not a level playing field. In any given conflict between the US or NATO vs someone else, we are the ones with the 'smart' weapons, or (let's hope) the JATO-assisted dumb bombs (way cheaper). So almost any hack is going to be used against us, not against them.
..but since when to are tanks, planes and warships unmanned?
Actually, those cool drone planes are unmanned. No payload, but a nice camera and all that.
I guess you could intentionally crash it into another plane or do a top-down crash into a tank. But it's probably better used for taking on a joyride to a fuel dump.
You mean like the Chinese Embassy bombing in Belgrade?
How do you know that wasn't a hack?
Well ...
OK, so the example they give is faking the incoming navigation data for a ship. For vessels which depend on downloads of info (such as GPS locators), this might prove useful in that:
A. one could induce systems creep in a MBT so that the tank thinks it's a few hundred feet away from where it is, especially while on the move. "Charlie, I thought you said we were going 70kph, how come we're 20km closer than we should be?"
B. one could give false image info for targets beyond local range (e.g. fake data from an AWACS).
C. one could trick the Friend Or Foe signal data so that friendlies appear to be hostiles.
None of these sound very promising. And none of them "take control" of the system. Now if someone knows of any buffer overflow exploits with these systems, maybe we're talking a nifty hack; but otherwise, it's just smoke and mirrors.
Babelfish said that it means that the German Federal offices can use Open Source products. Not you, just the office workers. Which jibes with my rusty German understanding of the document.
So, if you work for the German Federal government, you can go ahead and use Open Source software now.
Not just a /. effect - if you act like you're mainstream, and privacy rights sure as heck is mainstream (something like 70+ % of the population agree with geeks on this), then you are treated as if you are mainstream.
If you organize in ways old-style politicos can measure and react to, they inoculate themselves to your effect. If you go outside the paradigm, and Think Geek, then they can't figure out how you succeed at it.
You said males. My neighbor, a cute 32 yo microsoftie, might object to this.
I know I do. For example, at the latest Tacoma LUG, Scott__ was telling me that 4 out of 20 attendees were young female geeks. They sure didn't look male to him.
Right. Change the rules if you want to inject geek ROI in politics. Caucuses are high reward ratio - many times, just showing up you become a delegate, and can pass motions for your precinct (which you printed out ahead of time and gave copies to other precincts near you). I rode both the None Of The Above and All Of The Above resolutions to the state level myself, although I had a conflict with going to the state convention.
....
My precinct this year had 3 delegates and 3 people showed up. Just on a whim, when people were confused about what might be a good resolution, I said "You know, like moving that the 60% majority requirement for school bonds be lowered to a simple majority of 50% + 1". This was then altered to all bonds (long story, involving stadiums that geeks and locals hate which passed with 50% votes). And the resolution was passed by probably 40 precincts in both the 36th and 43rd Districts, so now it moves on two Legislative District Caucuses. It was that easy.
Also, do the math - show up at primary endorsements and ask people running for office questions about support of privacy laws and stuff like that. If they answer wrong, write a check for the one who answered right and was believable. Point out how much geek money there is for privacy. And how anti-privacy means no geek money. That scares 'em