This thing about national keyboards is completely bogus. The "standard" was really about 7 bit ASCII, which ignores all of the other languages of the world. There is a keyboard layout for KDE. called US-International, that allows most western European languages to be entered without changing layouts. That is trivially easy. It would be great to have a single keyboard for the world, with a couple of modes, and characters from all the major character sets on the keyboard.
So one could go to an Internet Cafe in Japan or Egypt and see the same layout, and be able to function, with it, ie. touch type. All you need are enough keys to support text entry in any language, plus a few for navigating language maps, and storing them into a few keys, and an input system that is universal, maybe the controller hardware could spit out straight Unicode. A nice touch would be LCD's on the keys, to change the display as the mappings change. otoh, that's way too complicated, let's just have everyone type in English:-)
The British did it right (japanese and aussie's at least followed.) with.co.uk,.ac.uk (yes there is an entire second level domain for anonymous cowards.)
It would be great if, local companies would use:.com.us ,.edu.us, etc...
And transitioned.com and other TLD's to purely inter/multi-national usage.
SPAM is NOT a technical problem.
I guess one could consider missles a technical problem for commercial airliners, or burglars to be a technical problem for homeowners. I am sure enterprising technical solutions could address these technical promblems, but:
How much is an anti-missile system on every airliner going to cost ? (or an anti-spam engine on every mail server.)
Should not activity which is actively destructive to (electronic) society at least be illegal?
If someone came up to your children and walked along beside them on the way home from school, showing them dirty pictures, and inviting them to come play, they would be arrested in a heartbeat. Why is the same behaviour not illegal on the internet?
That they do not know who they are mailing to only makes the problem worse.
The measures Mr. Gleick proposes are rational ones. All they do is make it easier to figure out who is sending the mail. Legitimate businesses will not mind being found. For those companies that insist on this business model, a simple filter on a single header will solve the problem for the 99.9999% of the population who do not answer in any event. Once the response rates start to drop because of those two measures, SPAM itself is very likely to decline.
I'm not sure what "large" is. We use Spam Assasing to evaluate incoming mail for an (government) organization with about 4500 employees. We implemented it before there were any real commercial alternatives. It is working well, The interesting problem is people's understanding of what SPAM is.
We had many, many, many requests to add this or that to our black or white lists. Thing is... what to do is often not obvious... hmm... an HTML marketing newsletter from a random PC games web site... looks like spam to me, what? whitelist it? um... We have had some people asking us to blacklist a site, and other asking to white list it. I've been looking at the Bayesian stuff for a while with envy. It may solve that problem.
Yes, it depends what the person is trying to do. If your users travel with a laptop, then the VPN software will be there. In the next few years, everyone will have wireless ethernet, and just bring their laptops to the nearest open access point.
I wear tinfoil undies & yarmulka to protect from WiFi traffic. Everything should have ethernet and a web, or
better yet, telnet cli interface. DB-9 and kermit are a close second choice. I wear tinfoil undies & yarmulka to protect from WiFi traffic.
Seriously, my favourite interface would be an API that I can access from perl, and someone out there(tm) would surely create four GUIs for it. There is no way to squeeze a decent interface into these things, It should all be standardized and done remotely from a computer.
The sooner home appliances adopt ethernet (say next to the power plug), the better. First on my list: sntp broadcast clients for TVs, VCRs, Microwaves, Ovens, and even (Ghasp!) alarm clocks.)
You know, bits that code for the liver are Monsanto's Fool around with kidney's and you will have to talk to Archer Daniels Midlands. Don't touch that follicle code, It's MIT's and their MEAN!
four colors like a normal map. Have banner ads for biotech companies that work around patents, near the juiciest bits.
OK.. use rdesktop (www.rdesktop.org) as a port forward over an ssh tunnel, and Windows Terminal Services. Their Outlook will be the identical local and remote. on 56 K lines the screen painting will be a bit slow. but it's quite nice on DSL (I can't tell the difference between home & work.)
People who believe in privacy are living in the past. The logical corrollary of people swapping MP3's of proprietary music without the RIAA's permission is that nasty organizations will swap people's information without their consent.
There is no point trying to prevent government creation of databases. It makes as much sense as the DMCA.
The only thing we can try to do is put them under a magnifying glass, so we know, that they know, what we know...
The best possible outcome (I'm not saying this is a good one) is a citizens' data base where each access is justified and scrupulously logged. Each person can check their own information, there will be a clear correction process, and citizens will be able to know who has asked to see "their" information.
Unfortunately, this doesn't really work in a criminal or espionage investigation. But for things like Income Tax, Drivers licenses, medical records, Biometics, etc... It needs to happen.
If a database is not created with the above controls, it will be created without them,
probably by private companies that have no worries about being voted out of office, and who will have a long list of customers.
Hello!? Every other country on Earth is standardizing on DAB [worlddab.org], and Americans a futzing about with XM, Sirius and (please let it die) IBOC...
and the article from the ex-Qualcomm guy has it wrong... The US will not deploy quicker because the futzed with other techs'. They might deploy quicker because the tech they have (ie. not GSM) sucks, so the market for the next-gen gear will be bigger.
Ford never had any major patents relating to the invention of the automobile. Most of the patents were held by Europeans (Otto, Benz, De Dion, etc...) He made his
money by lowering costs of production (no he did
not invent the assembly line either.)
In fact, he had a 30 year running battle against
patent lawyers...
"
The Selden Patent
This patent played a singular role in the history of the motor car in the United States. It was filed in 1879 by George Selden, and granted in 1895, and covered, modestly, the entire design, down to the smallest detail of carriages with internal-combustion engines.
The Electric Company, having bought the patent from Selden some years previously, sought to recoup its losses by demanding that all the companies established in the meantime for the manufacture of carriages with internal-combustion engines, cease, or pay royalties.
"
then later
"1911
After the first round was won by the patent holders the inevitable outcome of the 'patent war' was the founding of a rival organisation the American Motor Car Manufacturers Association which under the leadership of Henry Ford went into battle against the Selden patent.
Henry Ford finally won in 1911. However this menace had hung over the infant American automobile industry for thirty five years.
"
Another example would be aviation, where innovations were closely guarded patented items, until the advent of the US' entry into WWI caused the Wrights, and their competitors such as Curtiss to share/cross license patents to make all aircraft safer.
The purpose of IP, from society's point of view, is to help ideas get out there so that they can be improved upon,
and better products can show up in the market sooner,
to benefit everyone.
It really depends on how close Batasuna is to
the ETA. Much was made in the US of muslim
charities who fund groups such as Hamas and Al Qaida. The assets of those groups have had their accounts frozen in the US, without any sort of trial. Very few people object to that in the US. If the Batasuna is overtly peaceful group which aides and abets a terrorist group, why should they be treated differently ?
There are other parties which are nationalist. They are far more popular than Batasuna.
While these results may be out of date, look at the '94 election
Here
The winner is the "Basque Nationalist Party", with 30% of the vote. The second, the "Basque Socialist party" with 20%. It is hard to figure
out which of the remaining ones is left, but you're in the 10% and lower region...
The Basques do have a voice and they do use it to disavow the ETA.
I did say, the ETA, not the basques. While the Basque problem is complicated and difficult, the ETA planting bombs everywhere is the most simplistic "solution" imaginable.
Trying to knock them off the internet is just dumb. It will make the Spaniards look dumb. Instead, they should get the group onto the US' terrorost organization list, so that they can no longer do business in any western country. A little hint about the proper use of US bases in Spain should do the trick.
Spain is right to ban anybody with links to the ETA.
The IRA stopped when it became clear that a peace process and negotiations were possible.
The basques have been granted an autonomous government (in 1979), with their own legislature.
They live and participate fully in a normal western democracy, with full rights and freedoms. but the
ETA is still planting bombs.
The ETA is still planting bombs all over Spain, in spite of the massive public demonstrations all over the country,
and especially inside the Basque region itself which have said "Stop Bombing!" See
CBS News, and The Guardian
They are still bombing in spite of being a party which is close to single digits in most polls, and in spite of the fact
that the regional government is (peacefully) nationalist.
The ETA has more in common with Al Qaida than the IRA,
where anyone who is not as violently radical is branded a traitor to the cause.
It's pretty cool. All the nastiness about holleriths, no structured types or object oriented constructs is gone. Pointers or at least C_PTR can now be useful. and the FORTRAN C interface is now standardized. These were all things were people had to go outside the standard before in order to get real work done. People will not have to do that anymore. Let's just hope it stays as optimizable as it is currently.
It looks to me like the committee did everything right, and that FORTRAN is coming along quite nicely.
Say P&G had patented C. When would anyone have found out that C was useful, and when would a product have been brought to market? P&G was not looking, and if C was patented, who else would?
P&G may have "lost" billions, but, as a member of society, I do not care. I care about treatments and cures being brought to market as quickly as possible.
Re:IBM's Processor -- They have more than one line
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 1
Power4 is 64 bit. the AIX line uses it. The chip in the article is meant to be a replacement for the 32 bit powerPC line, which is a much lower end thing they use in Mac's.
Current Power4's have 4 64-bit processors in a multi-chip package... see a review @ http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ibmpower4/
They put eight of those into a frame to make 32-way SMP's.
Faar too lazy to implement this myself, but if anyone is asking... My wishlist:
Comprehensive, language neutral scripting would be a great thing. There's pyKDE (for python) but that is for writing KDE apps in python, not programming existing apps. KSpread has it's own language KOScript, but it is not used anywhere else. It would be cool to have an over-arching scripting interface.
GUI-less support: I want my computer to log onto the net @ 4am, get some data, and then work on it, and have it ready for breakfast. So I make a cron job to bring the Internet up with kppp, and then use kio to get the file and do the natural (according to the file associations thing with it.) Thing is, I am not logged in, so there isn't any environment running, and no X. What about an alarm clock that works when I'm not logged in.
It would be nice to not make people learn a w hole other set of non-kde apps before they can use the power of UNIX style boxes.
Oh, and I'd like one of the scripting languages supported to be Visual basic. Life is kind of boring without viruses.
It's in La mancha, I saw it, maybe 15 years ago. I remember being impressed with the way they built it. They build the first section, jack it up, then build the next section under it jack the two up, etc... all the way up. no-one ever has to go high, and the guy wires are there from the start.
Does any story where the hero loses count? If so, this one is great, was a movie in the a few decades ago ("Charlie")
It is all the more depressing because, it's clear that if we get close to those technologies, there will inevitably be people like him.
I was going to add Clockwork Orange but somebody beat me to it. Thing is, different editions apparently have different endings (ie. one based on the movie.) In the original, he is unreformed at the end.
The problem with the site is that time is not arbitrary
as units of volume, distance etc... are. They are based
on very obvious things like people wanting the sun to
rise at a similar or at least smoothly changing time
every morning (hence the duration of a day being fixed
to match the rotation of the Earth), and seasons to start
on the same days every year (to avoid the things like
Muslim ramadan traipsing across the solar calendar because it is lunar based, so that muslims sometimes have to fast for very long times when they are high latitudes and it falls during the summer.)
Both the day, and the year are unavoidable units of time,
so we are utterly stuck with the fixed 1:365.2xx ratio, no matter
what time system you care to apply. If you pick one, you
will not have a nice multiplier to get the other. If there is a unit you ought to pick, it would be seconds. But even then,
the IERS is inserting leap seconds about every two years or so.
Calculate everything in seconds and use precise multiplier
constants for conversion to the Earth-Arbitrary units: days and years.
That would be the thing to do that would be closest to the SI philosophy (which is to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler! -- Einstein?)
Slashdot Mirror
This thing about national keyboards is completely bogus. The "standard" was really about 7 bit ASCII, which ignores all of the other languages of the world. There is a keyboard layout for KDE. called US-International, that allows most western European languages to be entered without changing layouts. That is trivially easy. It would be great to have a single keyboard for the world, with a couple of modes, and characters from all the major character sets on the keyboard.
:-)
So one could go to an Internet Cafe in Japan or Egypt and see the same layout, and be able to function, with it, ie. touch type. All you need are enough keys to support text entry in any language, plus a few for navigating language maps, and storing them into a few keys, and an input system that is universal, maybe the controller hardware could spit out straight Unicode. A nice touch would be LCD's on the keys, to change the display as the mappings change. otoh, that's way too complicated, let's just have everyone type in English
The British did it right (japanese and aussie's at least followed.) with .co.uk, .ac.uk (yes there is an entire second level domain for anonymous cowards.)
.com.us , .edu.us, etc...
.com and other TLD's to purely inter/multi-national usage.
It would be great if, local companies would use:
And transitioned
- How much is an anti-missile system on every airliner going to cost ? (or an anti-spam engine on every mail server.)
- Should not activity which is actively destructive to (electronic) society at least be illegal?
- If someone came up to your children and walked along beside them on the way home from school, showing them dirty pictures, and inviting them to come play, they would be arrested in a heartbeat. Why is the same behaviour not illegal on the internet?
The measures Mr. Gleick proposes are rational ones. All they do is make it easier to figure out who is sending the mail. Legitimate businesses will not mind being found. For those companies that insist on this business model, a simple filter on a single header will solve the problem for the 99.9999% of the population who do not answer in any event. Once the response rates start to drop because of those two measures, SPAM itself is very likely to decline.That they do not know who they are mailing to only makes the problem worse.
I'm not sure what "large" is.
We use Spam Assasing to evaluate incoming
mail for an (government) organization with about 4500 employees.
We implemented it before there were any real commercial alternatives. It is working well,
The interesting problem is people's understanding of what SPAM is.
We had many, many, many requests to add this or that to our black or white lists. Thing is... what to do is often not obvious... hmm... an HTML marketing newsletter from a random PC games web site... looks like spam to me, what? whitelist it? um... We have had some people asking us to blacklist a site, and other asking to white list it.
I've been looking at the Bayesian stuff for a while with envy. It may solve that problem.
Yes, it depends what the person is trying to do. If your users travel with a laptop, then the VPN software will be there. In the next few years, everyone will have wireless ethernet, and just bring their laptops to the nearest open access point.
What is web mail for? If it is for your own employees, then perhaps VPN for remote access is a more general answer to the question.
linux oriented solution would be to tunnel the necessary mail ports over an ssh. MS Win* solution would be a VPN client, like Nortel Extranet.
I wear tinfoil undies & yarmulka to protect from WiFi traffic. Everything should have ethernet and a web, or better yet, telnet cli interface. DB-9 and kermit are a close second choice. I wear tinfoil undies & yarmulka to protect from WiFi traffic.
Seriously, my favourite interface would be an API that I can access from perl, and someone out there(tm) would surely create four GUIs for it. There is no way to squeeze a decent interface into these things, It should all be standardized and done remotely from a computer.
The sooner home appliances adopt ethernet (say next to the power plug), the better. First on my list: sntp broadcast clients for TVs, VCRs, Microwaves, Ovens, and even (Ghasp!) alarm clocks.)
nuff said.
You know, bits that code for the liver are Monsanto's
Fool around with kidney's and you will have to
talk to Archer Daniels Midlands. Don't touch that follicle code, It's MIT's and their MEAN!
four colors like a normal map. Have banner ads for
biotech companies that work around patents, near the juiciest bits.
OK.. use rdesktop (www.rdesktop.org) as a port forward
over an ssh tunnel, and Windows Terminal Services.
Their Outlook will be the identical local and remote.
on 56 K lines the screen painting will be a bit slow.
but it's quite nice on DSL (I can't tell the difference
between home & work.)
That's what Al-Qaeda probably does..
The only thing we can try to do is put them under a magnifying glass, so we know, that they know, what we know... The best possible outcome (I'm not saying this is a good one) is a citizens' data base where each access is justified and scrupulously logged. Each person can check their own information, there will be a clear correction process, and citizens will be able to know who has asked to see "their" information. Unfortunately, this doesn't really work in a criminal or espionage investigation. But for things like Income Tax, Drivers licenses, medical records, Biometics, etc... It needs to happen.
If a database is not created with the above controls, it will be created without them, probably by private companies that have no worries about being voted out of office, and who will have a long list of customers.
The solution is more information, not less
Hello!? Every other country on Earth is standardizing on DAB [worlddab.org], and Americans a futzing about with XM, Sirius and (please let it die) IBOC...
and the article from the ex-Qualcomm guy has it wrong... The US will not deploy quicker because the futzed with other techs'. They might deploy quicker because the tech they have (ie. not GSM) sucks, so the market for the next-gen gear will be bigger.
Hypothesis: disparaging US incites replies.
Ford never had any major patents relating to the invention of the automobile. Most of the patents were held by Europeans (Otto, Benz, De Dion, etc...) He made his money by lowering costs of production (no he did not invent the assembly line either.)
In fact, he had a 30 year running battle against patent lawyers...
http://www.autocluster.com/sa_history/id9.htm%20 says:
- "
The Selden Patent
This patent played a singular role in the history of the motor car in the United States. It was filed in 1879 by George Selden, and granted in 1895, and covered, modestly, the entire design, down to the smallest detail of carriages with internal-combustion engines.
then laterThe Electric Company, having bought the patent from Selden some years previously, sought to recoup its losses by demanding that all the companies established in the meantime for the manufacture of carriages with internal-combustion engines, cease, or pay royalties. "
"1911 After the first round was won by the patent holders the inevitable outcome of the 'patent war' was the founding of a rival organisation the American Motor Car Manufacturers Association which under the leadership of Henry Ford went into battle against the Selden patent.
Henry Ford finally won in 1911. However this menace had hung over the infant American automobile industry for thirty five years. "
Another example would be aviation, where innovations were closely guarded patented items, until the advent of the US' entry into WWI caused the Wrights, and their competitors such as Curtiss to share/cross license patents to make all aircraft safer.
http://www.curtisswright.com/history/1907-1908.asp
http://www.apeccp.org.tw/doc/USA/Policy/speech/112 3.htm
The purpose of IP, from society's point of view, is to help ideas get out there so that they can be improved upon, and better products can show up in the market sooner, to benefit everyone.
There are other parties which are nationalist. They are far more popular than Batasuna. While these results may be out of date, look at the '94 election Here The winner is the "Basque Nationalist Party", with 30% of the vote. The second, the "Basque Socialist party" with 20%. It is hard to figure out which of the remaining ones is left, but you're in the 10% and lower region... The Basques do have a voice and they do use it to disavow the ETA.
I did say, the ETA, not the basques. While the Basque problem is complicated and difficult, the ETA planting bombs everywhere is the most simplistic "solution" imaginable.
Trying to knock them off the internet is just dumb.
It will make the Spaniards look dumb. Instead, they should get the group onto the US' terrorost
organization list, so that they can no longer do
business in any western country. A little hint about the
proper use of US bases in Spain should do the trick.
The ETA is still planting bombs all over Spain, in spite of the massive public demonstrations all over the country, and especially inside the Basque region itself which have said "Stop Bombing!" See CBS News, and The Guardian
They are still bombing in spite of being a party which is close to single digits in most polls, and in spite of the fact that the regional government is (peacefully) nationalist.
The ETA has more in common with Al Qaida than the IRA, where anyone who is not as violently radical is branded a traitor to the cause.
It's pretty cool. All the nastiness about holleriths,
no structured types or object oriented constructs
is gone. Pointers or at least C_PTR can now be useful.
and the FORTRAN C interface is now standardized.
These were all things were people had to go outside
the standard before in order to get real work done.
People will not have to do that anymore.
Let's just hope it stays as optimizable as it is currently.
It looks to me like the committee did everything right,
and that FORTRAN is coming along quite nicely.
Say P&G had patented C. When would anyone have found out that C was useful, and when would a product have been brought to market? P&G was not looking, and if C was patented, who else would?
P&G may have "lost" billions, but, as a member of society,
I do not care. I care about treatments and cures being
brought to market as quickly as possible.
Power4 is 64 bit. the AIX line uses it.
The chip in the article is meant to be a replacement for
the 32 bit powerPC line, which is a much lower end thing they use in Mac's.
Current Power4's have 4 64-bit processors in a multi-chip
package... see a review @ http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ibmpower4/
They put eight of those into a frame to make 32-way
SMP's.
Faar too lazy to implement this myself, but
if anyone is asking... My wishlist:
Comprehensive, language neutral scripting would
be a great thing. There's pyKDE (for python)
but that is for writing KDE apps in python, not
programming existing apps. KSpread has it's
own language KOScript, but it is not used anywhere
else. It would be cool to have an over-arching
scripting interface.
GUI-less support: I want my
computer to log onto the net @ 4am, get
some data, and then work on it, and have
it ready for breakfast. So I make a cron
job to bring the Internet up with kppp, and
then use kio to get the file and do the
natural (according to the file associations
thing with it.) Thing is, I am not logged
in, so there isn't any environment running,
and no X. What about an alarm clock that
works when I'm not logged in.
It would be nice to not make people learn a w
hole other set of non-kde apps before they
can use the power of UNIX style boxes.
Oh, and I'd like one of the scripting
languages supported to be Visual basic.
Life is kind of boring without viruses.
It's in La mancha, I saw it, maybe 15 years ago. I remember being impressed with the way they built it. They build the first section, jack it up, then build the next section under it jack the two up, etc... all the way up. no-one ever has to go high, and the guy wires are there from the start.
Does any story where the hero loses count?
If so, this one is great, was a movie in the a few
decades ago ("Charlie")
It is all the more depressing because, it's clear
that if we get close to those technologies, there
will inevitably be people like him.
I was going to add Clockwork Orange but somebody
beat me to it. Thing is, different editions apparently
have different endings (ie. one based on the movie.)
In the original, he is unreformed at the end.
Both the day, and the year are unavoidable units of time, so we are utterly stuck with the fixed 1:365.2xx ratio, no matter what time system you care to apply. If you pick one, you will not have a nice multiplier to get the other. If there is a unit you ought to pick, it would be seconds. But even then, the IERS is inserting leap seconds about every two years or so. Calculate everything in seconds and use precise multiplier constants for conversion to the Earth-Arbitrary units: days and years.
That would be the thing to do that would be closest to the SI philosophy (which is to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler! -- Einstein?)