I personally think this is analoguous to the records help of land estate. If you own a piece of land, there's a public record of it somewhere that's accessible by everyone. Most of the time these records aren't available online but this essentially doesn't change the fact anyone can get their hands on the data very easily.
Why should domain names be any different? If these were made private, you'd probably have to have a court order in order to get to know who owns a domain you might be interested in buying or even worse, who to contact in SPAM related issues.
Looking at the actual speed of the CPU in benchmarks, you should be comparing to a 1 GHz Pentium III. According real world test, the 500 MHz G4 should be compared to a much higher MHz PC counterparts.
I wonder. I went to http://members.aol.com/mystsequel7/m3d/ yesterday and they had a lot more shots and information available. Seems like someone didn't like the information being available.:(
I recall the page said the game publisher's going to be Mattel. Is this good/bad?
In my knowledge, a contract binding consumers to corporations for extended periods of time are illegal in Finland. For example, mobile phone companies cannot create contracts that bind people for two years - legally we have to be able to opt out at any time. This has proven out to be very good for competition, with costs for using mobile phones going down all the time and new interesting services being launched continually.
I wonder how Sega will arrange contracts like this in here. Looking at how many foreign companies handle situations like this, we probably just won't get the online option here at all.:(
FW is really nice technology if everything falls in line - several meters at 200Mbps wireless, 400Mbps in long range cables and 800Mbps in "short" cabling. Cool..:)
Quoting the article: "In the meantime, the patent office is moving to address more immediate questions about the review process. One concern is whether the government has accepted some patents that were too general, and given protection to technology ideas that weren't new or exclusive."
Does this mean extisting patents that weren't reality checked are going to change? How radical changes would it require to the legislation? I'm pretty much under the impression that this just can't happen (based on earlier conversations on the subject).:(
Unpack and set up hardware Set power-on password Install Windows NT Restart Windows NT as Administrator Verify video driver Install Printer and Tape Drivers Install Service Pack 6a Install C2 Update (KB Q244599, Q243405, Q243404, and Q241041) Enable hardware boot protection Remove the NetBIOS Interface service Disable unnecessary devices Disable unnecessary services Disable Guest account Remove OS/2 and POSIX subsystems Secure base objects Secure additional base named objects Protect kernel object attributes Protect files and directories Protect the registry Restrict access to public Local Security Authority (LSA) information Restrict null session access over named pipes Restrict untrusted users' ability to plant Trojan horse programs Disable caching of logon information Allow only Administrators to create shares Disable direct draw Restrict printer driver installation to Administrators and Power Users only Set the paging file to be cleared at system shutdown Restrict floppy disk drive and CD-ROM drive access to the interactive user only Enable NetBT to open TCP and UDP ports exclusively Modify user rights memberships Set auditing (if enabled) for base objects and for backup and restore Disable blank passwords Restrict system shutdown to logged-on users only Set security log behavior Restart the computer Update the Emergency Repair Disk
No POSIX, eh? I can understand most of the mods, but to me it seems like the machine pretty much becomes a dumb terminal after all of this.
This isn't about data security, it's about ease of use.
The 1-Click "technology" is very simple and logical construction that's fairly obvious to anyone creating ecommerce sites professionally. On the sites I've been working on, we're using similar techniques to ease the use of the site. So, IMHO, this shouldn't have received a patent at all as it's nothing unique and similar things have been constructed in the past for certain.
Now, the reason this being bad is that if other web developers want to give their users similar ease of use, they can't. As a user, you suffer. Amazon's patented a user interface contruction and thus making it harder for others to provide easy to use web services. And since Amazon is getting away with it, others will come behing. Is that really what you want?
I'm still waiting for _any_ of these cracking clients (or preferably SETI) to start to support the G4's Velocity Engine. Sure, I'm running things pretty fast as they are, but still wouldn't mind an optimized client...
Someone's really given thought on this one and still fails to understand that the misusers haven't and still won't do anything by the regulations nor tell of the use to third parties. The repositories will probably end up with a ton of keys from people who never have anything to say that'd require cryptography in the first place.:)
As I speculated in another article, the reason might be the fact that now that the US has all other countries tied up with the Wassenaar contract, they have less competition in the marketplace. Without the restrictions they couldn't have passed the contract. Now with the contract in place, they can free up their own export regulations and let the US companies really grab the market.
So, it's all just marketting tactics done by politicians. Money talks.
Will they rise the bar by a couple bits or do we get to 128? Any restrictions on the kinds of software?
Also, how does this go with the Wassenaar contract? Is it that now that Wassenaar went through, US can happily rely on other countries living with no exporting due to the contract. So, in essence, does this mean the White House is saying the contract doesn't apply to US anymore? Looking at the past where everyone else could export and US companies couldn't, the situation has now been completely reversed. Smart tactics from the US government.
The specs are pretty tight in what hardware you're using, too. For a system to pass any of the tests NT has been certified to, you can't for example have a floppy drive in the machine.
Power is the parent, PPC is the child. Or in other words, the PPC series were started by taking the Power architecture and simplifying it a lot.
The first PowerPC chip to ever come out, the PPC 601, actually had a larger instruction set than what the more recent PPC chips have. The compilers of the time were optimized for the larget instruction set of the Power architecture and the first Mac PPC programs couldn't be used on the 604 and 603 as they weren't 100% binary compatible.
Alltheweb is distributed (see http://www.fast.no/company/press/twbs02081999.html ), Hotbot is distributed and I guess most of the others are distributed too.
I even read somewhere some of the engines even use multiple Linux machines with applications written in Perl for indexing.
Designing User Interfaces, be it graphical or not, is not easy, and certainly not technical. The design process itself should not involve technical problem setting at all, which is what most people designing for the various OSS projects are doing. The UI implementation phase is different, but that should come only after designing the UI.
UI design is a world of it own, comprising of processes and thinking models that most people are not very familiar with. Good UI designers are good with people socially, as they're good at figuring out the way people process information in their heads. Some people can't ever become good UI designers because they are too closed to various sources for ideas!
One of the problems I see in the GUI projects related to Linux is that in order to design a good UI novadays, you have to look at Windows users to figure out behaviour patters that people have established and design those in mind, as most people do use Windows. Anything they're not familiar with, ie, not Windows-alike, will make using the UI harder for them. This doesn't mean everything should look like Windows, but you can't go too far from it without losing usability either.
So anybody who absolutely hates Windows (or a Mac) to the point of not being able see it as a viable platform for UI design ideas is never going to be able to make a very good UI. I hope people will relax in this sense a little more in the future..
Apple is currently in process of creating a unix for the masses, called "Mac OS X consumer". Why not use that as a benchmark of the ease of use the Linux for Masses ought to target?
Saying the CLI should be dead in a easy to use system is stupid. The Mac way of doing things has been, for a long time, to hide the details for most users but give the possibility to expose more functionality once you've learned how to use what you were given at first.
The point of having just one GUI with one consistent behaviour across different hardware platforms is a good one. I'm extremely agitated by the fact that I have to use different keyboard shortcuts on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. On Linux I even have to use different keys on different programs!
What I'd love would be a crossover UI consisting of the best Win 98 and Mac OS features that I could use on one machine that ran all the software I need, be it that I was doing prepress or developing a dynamic website. Linux has a long way to this, but I hope we'll make it some day.
Which is why I said I agree it makes sense to larger corporations (who quite often mostly do B to B).
I guess I didn't make it clear enough I was criticizing the "business going to the web" hype in a broader sense; if you read the article, you probably noticed it does hint at all business going to the net at some point.
For large businesses that sell high-interest products such as computers or cellphones, I can pretty much agree with the article. But most of the money in the world is still in common household supplies. In food. In drinks. Gas. Toilet paper.
It will take a long time before that stuff converts to Internet for business. I find it very hard to believe I'd use the net for everything I buy. I mean, most of the time I don't know when I'm home for someone to deliver whatever I've ordered.
What information technology is giving us, in the means of email, cellphones, pagers and estores is freedom of movement. We don't need to arrange things anymore in advance as much as we used to. Which has made us even more dependant on people and businesses who do plan, such as the local store that nicely holds it doors open long in the evening so that I buy bread if I come home late.
From a cafe or shopping in a small store that specializes in something I want to touch before I buy. Something I wouldn't dream of getting from an estore.
Ok, so if I count in the "ext2 with b-trees" as one future option for a file system, I now have XFS, Reiserfs and b-ext2 as an option.
Could someone clearly give a nonbiased look at what the good and bad points of these are?
I know I'm using a machine with a b-tree based file system right now and occasionally when it crashes, things can get very hairy. I'd take redundancy over speed any day, so I guess I'm for XFS?
I wonder when they'll offer the stuff to Europeans, too. I'd sure enjoy toying with one of those units and might even buy some add-ons from them later. Too bad they're not giving me the chance to get hooked.
And going to rant mode, this isn't even too rare. Seems to me most US companies have forgotten non-US customers totally.:(
I'm actually starting to wonder whether SGI's true purpose with their new line has been to use Linux as the operating system as opposed to using NT for a longer period of time...
If the IRIX-Linux convergence runs really well, I guess we can expect to see some of the high-end animation software getting ported over to Linux. And boy would I like that!
Looking at my friends smoke outside the window, I'm wondering what the propability of getting cancer from RF is close to a 100th of the chance of getting one from smoking... I bet quite a few people might still think using cellphones is more dangerous than smoking.
Shame there's no conclusive information of either available.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I personally think this is analoguous to the records help of land estate. If you own a piece of land, there's a public record of it somewhere that's accessible by everyone. Most of the time these records aren't available online but this essentially doesn't change the fact anyone can get their hands on the data very easily.
Why should domain names be any different? If these were made private, you'd probably have to have a court order in order to get to know who owns a domain you might be interested in buying or even worse, who to contact in SPAM related issues.
Public it is and public it should be.
Looking at the actual speed of the CPU in benchmarks, you should be comparing to a 1 GHz Pentium III. According real world test, the 500 MHz G4 should be compared to a much higher MHz PC counterparts.
Intel Pentium III 1 GHz, $750 http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/2448-1.htm
AMD Athlon 1 GHz, $445 http://www.pricewatch.com/1/3/2219-1.htm
I wonder. I went to http://members.aol.com/mystsequel7/m3d/ yesterday and they had a lot more shots and information available. Seems like someone didn't like the information being available. :(
I recall the page said the game publisher's going to be Mattel. Is this good/bad?
sulka
In my knowledge, a contract binding consumers to corporations for extended periods of time are illegal in Finland. For example, mobile phone companies cannot create contracts that bind people for two years - legally we have to be able to opt out at any time. This has proven out to be very good for competition, with costs for using mobile phones going down all the time and new interesting services being launched continually.
:(
I wonder how Sega will arrange contracts like this in here. Looking at how many foreign companies handle situations like this, we probably just won't get the online option here at all.
sulka
I found the news of wireless firewire a lot more interesting.
:)
FW is really nice technology if everything falls in line - several meters at 200Mbps wireless, 400Mbps in long range cables and 800Mbps in "short" cabling. Cool..
sulka
Quoting the article: "In the meantime, the patent office is moving to address more immediate questions about the review process. One concern is whether the government has accepted some patents that were too general, and given protection to technology ideas that weren't new or exclusive."
:(
Does this mean extisting patents that weren't reality checked are going to change? How radical changes would it require to the legislation? I'm pretty much under the impression that this just can't happen (based on earlier conversations on the subject).
VHS may have been cheaper or had more widespread support. But ask the professional production studios and TV stations why they still use Beta...
;)
The Beta formats used by studios have as much to do with VHS as the Beta that was sold to the home. So, in effect, no, they don't use Beta as such.
sulka
Procedure for C2 NT installation, from the doc:
Unpack and set up hardware
Set power-on password
Install Windows NT
Restart Windows NT as Administrator
Verify video driver
Install Printer and Tape Drivers
Install Service Pack 6a
Install C2 Update (KB Q244599, Q243405, Q243404, and Q241041)
Enable hardware boot protection
Remove the NetBIOS Interface service
Disable unnecessary devices
Disable unnecessary services
Disable Guest account
Remove OS/2 and POSIX subsystems
Secure base objects
Secure additional base named objects
Protect kernel object attributes
Protect files and directories
Protect the registry
Restrict access to public Local Security Authority (LSA) information
Restrict null session access over named pipes
Restrict untrusted users' ability to plant Trojan horse programs
Disable caching of logon information
Allow only Administrators to create shares
Disable direct draw
Restrict printer driver installation to Administrators and Power Users only
Set the paging file to be cleared at system shutdown
Restrict floppy disk drive and CD-ROM drive access to the interactive user only
Enable NetBT to open TCP and UDP ports exclusively
Modify user rights memberships
Set auditing (if enabled) for base objects and for backup and restore
Disable blank passwords
Restrict system shutdown to logged-on users only
Set security log behavior
Restart the computer
Update the Emergency Repair Disk
No POSIX, eh? I can understand most of the mods, but to me it seems like the machine pretty much becomes a dumb terminal after all of this.
sulka
This isn't about data security, it's about ease of use.
The 1-Click "technology" is very simple and logical construction that's fairly obvious to anyone creating ecommerce sites professionally. On the sites I've been working on, we're using similar techniques to ease the use of the site. So, IMHO, this shouldn't have received a patent at all as it's nothing unique and similar things have been constructed in the past for certain.
Now, the reason this being bad is that if other web developers want to give their users similar ease of use, they can't. As a user, you suffer. Amazon's patented a user interface contruction and thus making it harder for others to provide easy to use web services. And since Amazon is getting away with it, others will come behing. Is that really what you want?
sulka
I'm still waiting for _any_ of these cracking clients (or preferably SETI) to start to support the G4's Velocity Engine. Sure, I'm running things pretty fast as they are, but still wouldn't mind an optimized client...
Now that's an interesting idea. :)
:)
Someone's really given thought on this one and still fails to understand that the misusers haven't and still won't do anything by the regulations nor tell of the use to third parties. The repositories will probably end up with a ton of keys from people who never have anything to say that'd require cryptography in the first place.
As I speculated in another article, the reason might be the fact that now that the US has all other countries tied up with the Wassenaar contract, they have less competition in the marketplace. Without the restrictions they couldn't have passed the contract. Now with the contract in place, they can free up their own export regulations and let the US companies really grab the market.
So, it's all just marketting tactics done by politicians. Money talks.
None of the articles said what this really means.
Will they rise the bar by a couple bits or do we get to 128? Any restrictions on the kinds of software?
Also, how does this go with the Wassenaar contract? Is it that now that Wassenaar went through, US can happily rely on other countries living with no exporting due to the contract. So, in essence, does this mean the White House is saying the contract doesn't apply to US anymore? Looking at the past where everyone else could export and US companies couldn't, the situation has now been completely reversed. Smart tactics from the US government.
The specs are pretty tight in what hardware you're using, too. For a system to pass any of the tests NT has been certified to, you can't for example have a floppy drive in the machine.
:(
I haven't seen this advertised anywhere by MS.
Power is the parent, PPC is the child. Or in other words, the PPC series were started by taking the Power architecture and simplifying it a lot.
The first PowerPC chip to ever come out, the PPC 601, actually had a larger instruction set than what the more recent PPC chips have. The compilers of the time were optimized for the larget instruction set of the Power architecture and the first Mac PPC programs couldn't be used on the 604 and 603 as they weren't 100% binary compatible.
--sulka
Alltheweb is distributed (see http://www.fast.no/company/press/twbs02081999.html ), Hotbot is distributed and I guess most of the others are distributed too.
I even read somewhere some of the engines even use multiple Linux machines with applications written in Perl for indexing.
sulka
Designing User Interfaces, be it graphical or not, is not easy, and certainly not technical. The design process itself should not involve technical problem setting at all, which is what most people designing for the various OSS projects are doing. The UI implementation phase is different, but that should come only after designing the UI.
UI design is a world of it own, comprising of processes and thinking models that most people are not very familiar with. Good UI designers are good with people socially, as they're good at figuring out the way people process information in their heads. Some people can't ever become good UI designers because they are too closed to various sources for ideas!
One of the problems I see in the GUI projects related to Linux is that in order to design a good UI novadays, you have to look at Windows users to figure out behaviour patters that people have established and design those in mind, as most people do use Windows. Anything they're not familiar with, ie, not Windows-alike, will make using the UI harder for them. This doesn't mean everything should look like Windows, but you can't go too far from it without losing usability either.
So anybody who absolutely hates Windows (or a Mac) to the point of not being able see it as a viable platform for UI design ideas is never going to be able to make a very good UI. I hope people will relax in this sense a little more in the future..
Apple is currently in process of creating a unix for the masses, called "Mac OS X consumer". Why not use that as a benchmark of the ease of use the Linux for Masses ought to target?
Saying the CLI should be dead in a easy to use system is stupid. The Mac way of doing things has been, for a long time, to hide the details for most users but give the possibility to expose more functionality once you've learned how to use what you were given at first.
The point of having just one GUI with one consistent behaviour across different hardware platforms is a good one. I'm extremely agitated by the fact that I have to use different keyboard shortcuts on Linux, Mac OS and Windows. On Linux I even have to use different keys on different programs!
What I'd love would be a crossover UI consisting of the best Win 98 and Mac OS features that I could use on one machine that ran all the software I need, be it that I was doing prepress or developing a dynamic website. Linux has a long way to this, but I hope we'll make it some day.
Can't wait to see them...
:)
:)
They should go by the theme of the movie and naming the movies "Matrix-1" and "Matrix+1" though.
And what's interesting is that the movie says they've thought about two prequels and two sequels. Now that would be interesting.
Which is why I said I agree it makes sense to larger corporations (who quite often mostly do B to B).
I guess I didn't make it clear enough I was criticizing the "business going to the web" hype in a broader sense; if you read the article, you probably noticed it does hint at all business going to the net at some point.
Bah!
For large businesses that sell high-interest products such as computers or cellphones, I can pretty much agree with the article. But most of the money in the world is still in common household supplies. In food. In drinks. Gas. Toilet paper.
It will take a long time before that stuff converts to Internet for business. I find it very hard to believe I'd use the net for everything I buy. I mean, most of the time I don't know when I'm home for someone to deliver whatever I've ordered.
What information technology is giving us, in the means of email, cellphones, pagers and estores is freedom of movement. We don't need to arrange things anymore in advance as much as we used to. Which has made us even more dependant on people and businesses who do plan, such as the local store that nicely holds it doors open long in the evening so that I buy bread if I come home late.
From a cafe or shopping in a small store that specializes in something I want to touch before I buy. Something I wouldn't dream of getting from an estore.
Ok, so if I count in the "ext2 with b-trees" as one future option for a file system, I now have XFS, Reiserfs and b-ext2 as an option.
Could someone clearly give a nonbiased look at what the good and bad points of these are?
I know I'm using a machine with a b-tree based file system right now and occasionally when it crashes, things can get very hairy. I'd take redundancy over speed any day, so I guess I'm for XFS?
I wonder when they'll offer the stuff to Europeans, too. I'd sure enjoy toying with one of those units and might even buy some add-ons from them later. Too bad they're not giving me the chance to get hooked.
:(
And going to rant mode, this isn't even too rare. Seems to me most US companies have forgotten non-US customers totally.
I'm actually starting to wonder whether SGI's true purpose with their new line has been to use Linux as the operating system as opposed to using NT for a longer period of time...
If the IRIX-Linux convergence runs really well, I guess we can expect to see some of the high-end animation software getting ported over to Linux. And boy would I like that!
Ooo... Maya...
Looking at my friends smoke outside the window, I'm wondering what the propability of getting cancer from RF is close to a 100th of the chance of getting one from smoking... I bet quite a few people might still think using cellphones is more dangerous than smoking.
:)
Shame there's no conclusive information of either available.