Look, cheap cameras are a fact of life.
The net is a fact of life. People hooking up
their cameras to the net and forming
a surveillance network of public places
is now a fact of life. Get used to it.
Would you be opposed to streetlights, because
they can help identify you on the street at night?
Are you against licencse plates on cars?
I think people should have whatever privacy they want in their houses. But in public places,
there should be no assumption of privacy. If
people cannot behave within the limits of the law in public places, they should be accountable. That
means they must be identified.
People can do whatever they want in cyberspace,
but we all share the physical world, and it is
our obligation to behave socially. This means
physical accountability of some kind.
If the concern is that the goverment will use
surveillance to harrass people? Then lets
come up with some laws and procedures, some
checks and balances, just like we did for
the US constitution. The founding fathers didn't
just give up and say "the government will always
crush our liberties, let's outlaw goverment". They
came up with a workable system of negative feedback to keep the concentrations of power from
being unstable.
BTW, the
anti-abortion nuts have a web site already
listing names and addresses of doctors who
perform abortions. The scum bags are already
using networked surveillance. Why can't the
rest of us?
We should be very clear in defining the difference between standards and proprietary intellectual property as the above question seems to arbitrarily mix the two. When it comes to implementing standards-based software, we respect the standard and expect that our software will fully interoperate with other products that have also implemented the standard. We also develop software that is not based on an established standard - either no standard exists or the standard that exists does not meet our customer requirements. Should we be required to publish the source code or underlying designs of all our software so that anyone can copy it? I would hope not - much the same that companies in other industries have the right to build products and retain the intellectual property rights associated with those products.
That was his response to the question about
how the SAMBA authors got the bums rush from
Microsoft. He is such a weasel here. The question was specifically about interoperation of standards. What he is saying is that Microsoft's
network filesystem is specifically and intentionally not going to be interoperable. Microsoft wants to keep it proprietary. It's theirs, ok, fine.
But we're talking about the
the network and use of the filesystem. That's
so basic to modern networked computer use. If Microsoft wants to claim that they can make their network
filesystem proprietary and yet still claim to
have great open interoperation with other systems, then they are just huge hypocrites.
Mr. Miller is such a weasel here, he equates
Microsoft giving away its source code with
producing an open spec of the filesystem protocol so
others can do independent implementations.
ABout BSD, I can give you an example of why
it didn't catch on so fast. A number of years
ago, when the BSD386 versions came out, I had a small software and web hosting company.
I bought BSDI licenses. Sure you could get the
source, but they had very restrictive licenses
on their code. I was not encouraged to make
changes and give them away, in fact I was
prevented from doing so. We switched over to linux as it became more stable. Simple as that.
It didn't matter that BSDI had top notch support
and customer service. What mattered was that we
were constrained from sharing improvements to the
system with others.
We fully support data, directory and system interop with UNIX, Linux, Novell, Mac, IBM mainframes through our base OS protocol support as well as through products like Services for UNIX, Interix, Services for NetWare, MetaDirectory and Host Integration Server.
Let's see, SAMBA lets your unix box talk to
Microsoft's filesystem. And the authors had
to reverse engineer the whole thing, because
Microsoft did not want to let anyone
know the technical details of their network
filesystem.
This guy is simply a liar. Microsoft historically only
allows interoperation with other systems when
their backs are pressed to the wall hard.
Assholes.
other 2d bar codes are hideously ugly. Notice that
the use of 45 degree bars gives a uniform
grayscale look, regardless of runs of zeros and ones in the next.
I have no idea what book you read, but you are
way confused.
I read Franklin's autobiography. He was not
landed gentry. He worked his way up from
apprentice to having a successful printing
business. He invented and implemented more innovations in more
areas of human endeavor than you probably even
are aware exist.
I think that even more than Network Solutions'
land grab of the DNS, the SSL certificate game
is the biggest rip-off being run on the net.
I believe many more people would like the encryption features of SSL, and do not care
much about authentication. By making you buy
both at the same time, the browser companies and
certificate companies are colluding to force
people to buy services they do not need.
I want security on my web site, but I don't care
if I am authenticated by Verisign. It is easy
enough to get a fake certificate from them; they
care much much more about getting their hands on your dollars than on dong anything more than
a rubber stamp check of your authenticity.
I think this situation arose from people's ignorance and fear about security, and Verisign
and the browser companies did *nothing* to explain
to people the difference between encryption and
authentication.
The killer with asynchronous logic may be testing
on
Clockless Computing?
·
· Score: 3
One problem with aynchronous systems is testing.
If you have a chip where some of the units are slower than expected, you might get curious interactions and "race conditions" that are
very hard to test before you put the chip into
service.
Also, designing for asychronous logic has
been difficult - designing clocked and even
pipelined systems is a breeze compared to
dealing with asynchronous design. A lot of the
structured methods that have been developed for
conventional clocked circuits cannot be used,
and so designers have a lot of trouble
building complex systems.
Since I remember he claimed he was such a
genius for inventing the "leap key" for searching on the Canon Cat (a failed standalone
wordprocessor from the 80's). He'd never
heard of emacs or incremental search
I guess. Seems like sort of an arrogant
jerk.
Very neat idea. The nice thing is that the subject matter is already neatly categorized (by geography).
Again, the issue of editing comes up- the public
needs a way to make endorsements and to verify the
integrity of the endorser. Something like at www.photo.net, for example, might be workable. Simply reviewing all the comments or content a given user has posted is a pretty good way to
guage their integrity.
Perhaps the Brittanica company is the one who insisted that their name not be used anywhere.
The Project Gutenberg people generally do include all credits for authors of the works.
BTW, I think they are providing a tremendous service, although it is too bad that they do not have better PR. Realize that there is *no* other place to get this material online. If not for project Gutenberg, the only way to find these
books is to hope that they are in a library someplace or that some publisher has thought it worthwhile to keep them in print.
I am an old woman now, and things are very different to what they
were in my youth. Then we, who travelled, travelled in coaches,
carrying six inside, and making a two days' journey out of what
people now go over in a couple of hours with a whizz and a flash, and
a screaming whistle, enough to deafen one. Then letters came in but
three times a week: indeed, in some places in Scotland where I have
stayed when I was a girl, the post came in but once a month;--but
letters were letters then; and we made great prizes of them, and read
them and studied them like books. Now the post comes rattling in
twice a day, bringing short jerky notes, some without beginning or
end, but just a little sharp sentence, which well-bred folks would
think too abrupt to be spoken. Well, well! they may all be
improvements,--I dare say they are; but you will never meet with a
Lady Ludlow in these days.
Etext of My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell
Whoever writes that column isn't so very bright
on
Digital Frying Pan?
·
· Score: 2
The way he ridiculed the Japanese washlet toilets is an example. There is nothing silly about them. I have been using one in Japan for the last year, and the prospect of going back to a cold non-washing American style toilet is about as attractive as going to use an unheated outhouse in the back yard and wiping my butt with a handful of leaves.
I don't think the author can discriminate between good ideas and bad ideas. He just fears anything new or different.
There's a couple of things that, combined, have made i-Mode Internet access service so successful in Japan. No one of them is rocket science, but together the conditions have made it possible to have a useful and popular service:
The phones are light and small, and have sufficient standby time
For example, (my phone the D209i, weighs 74 g, has a 256 color display, roughly 100x100 pixels, and operates 400 hours (standby receive time) between charging. It will sustain about 120 minutes of talk time on a charge.
Put another way, it weighs as much as a pocket full of loose change, and needs to be recharged a couple of times a month with average use.
Remember, the Japanese usually walk and take the train to work, so they *cannot* lug heavy junk around with them. For example, the average 7 lb US laptop that you can throw in the trunk of your car is like hauling a boat anchor around if you are standing on a crowded train for 90 minutes.
People have time on their hands
Most people take the train to work, so they have plenty of time on their hands where they can play with their phone. The same time spent in a car commuting is dead-time as far as Internet usage goes, because you cannot surf the net and drive at the same time.
The phone company has made Internet access from home obscenely expensive
NTT has, even to this day, charged per minute
for dialup even for local calls. So for most users the clock is always on if they are dialed into the net from home. By comparison, cell phone rates and packet costs are quite reasonable in comparison.
Point of reference: it costs more for me to make a phone call from my house in Tamagawa to Kawasaki (1 km) than it does for me to call Boston (using ATT @phone service from my home).
NTT has literally choked the life out of Internet
growth here for the last five years.
People are used to paying money for crap that they would never pay for in the US
CNN charges 300 yen a month to let you read CNN online on your i-mode phone. US users would laugh at the concept of paying to read CNN on a tiny screen. But in Japan, consumers are less accustomed to telling the producers what they want and what they will pay (see previous point about NTT phone rates).
Billing is more fair
The recipient of a phone cell phone call does not pay airtime charges.
More web sites, easier to build them cHTML (compact HTML) used for i-Mode is easier to write than WAP. It's just basically a subset of HTML 2.0. So developers don't have to make a big investment in new tools or time to make a useful i-Mode site quickly from existing
web technology.
Email is still the killer app
Most people make use of the email feature on their phone to one degree or another. Teenagers
are legendary for rapid high volume communication, essentially using it for chat applications.
Many people do not have regular internet access from work or home
For various historic reasons (NTT high prices, keyboard problems, incompatible PCs, lack of space in small apartments, lack of access from workplace) PC's are not so common
as they are in the US. Thus, using the i-Mode phone for some internet access tasks is a reasonable alternative to buying a PC. This makes a positive feedback loop to encourage more services accessible via i-Mode.
I can't believe how short a memory or how clueless people on this board are.
Remember, guys, RedHat bought Cygnus. Does that ring a bell?
Cygnus made plenty of money supporting custom ports of GCC and other tools for big computer vendors, especially embedded processors (intel960 anyone?).
The money from developing custom ports of the tools to new systems can be quite respectable. And Redhat having bought Cygnus gives them about
half of all the developers of the core GNU toolkit.
So I think people are just out to lunch when they say that RedHat is just a packager of Linux
distros. They are in fact an extremely high powered software development and consulting house.
I have thought for a long time that Framemaker format would be a good web language. You could
have precise pixel level positioning where you want it, as well as flowed page layout and higher level tagging like HTML. If you want to lay out
an HTML document, just make it a single flowed frame.
In practice, useful NP hard problems can be solved
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 2
Take graph isomorphism, for example. It is provably NP hard, however there is a linear
time algorithm which works well in practice. This is used, for example, in a CAD system where you are comparing the electrical circuit network of
your schematic or procedural description with an extracted network from the VLSI mask, to verify that your physical layout implements the same circuit as your higher level description.
In practice, a hashing algorithm will give you
the answer in linear time, with almost any degree of certainty. There is a small probability of a false positive, however.
It seems like in many cases a probablistic algorithm like this gives practically certain
results. I don't know about factoring numbers, but I sometimes think that a probabilistic algorithm such as the graph isomorphism one could be applied to the factoring problem.
This is brilliant! With your mouse-over patent,
you could claim Amazon was infringing every time someone moved their mouse over the "add to my shopping cart" button.
As a logical conclusion to making shopping
completely effort free, how about patenting No Shopping at All Shopping; The consumer justs sits at home watching television in a comfortable chair and waits to die. The e-commerce company just deducts money straight from their bank account. No user interface required.
Sony memory sticks are proprietary. There
is no advantage to them whatsoever - if you buy
products that use them, you are just fucking
yourself over. The costs of memory sticks will
always be higher because there is no competition
in manufacturing them. We don't need another
incompatible flash memory format!
It's like ZIP disks -- they patented the
mechanism for identifying them, and ZIP media
costs ten times what it should, and the cost
has never gone down.
I thought the dialog in the WWII era sections of
Cryptonomicon were just fine. The geek explanations could easily have been left out though, making the book about 1/3 smaller.
If you check with the cable companies first (Tokyu Cable, Tokyo Metallic, soon Microsoft too:-( ) you can move into an apartment or house with cable modem access in Tokyo. Service is comparable to that in the US ( approc $50 month, 400-800 kbits service). If you don't live in a building serviced by cable modem (and there are only about 15-20k subscribers in Tokyo, I understand this year), you are really screwed. No flat rate telephone service, ISDN is expensive (for ISP access). So it's really binary here, either get cable or get screwed.
From the description of the experiment in the article, it is completely unclear whether they mean 300 * c (speed of light in vacuuo) vs 300 * (speed of light in the medium). I am almost certain they mean the latter.
The whole thing only sounds mysterious if you believe all the approximations that phsysicts make as actually representing reality.
It sounds a lot more to me like one of those little strings of hanging click-clack ball things people set up on their desk. You push a ball at one end, and the ball at the other end seems to move almost instantaneously.
The whole thing about the "peak" of the pulse being somehow qualitatively different than the "tail" or "leading edge" is such crap. Why is everyone acting like they are different things? The peak is just where you have the maximum intensity, it isn't like some magic "information" point. It just sounds like there is a pumped-up medium (like in a laser) and as soon as enough of a photon signal gets absorbed to do stimulated emission, then a chain reaction goes off. I don't know why they have to make this sound so confusing.
Physicists are, in my experience, no smarter than anyone else, they just get away with confusing people more easily.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, cheap cameras are a fact of life.
The net is a fact of life. People hooking up
their cameras to the net and forming
a surveillance network of public places
is now a fact of life. Get used to it.
Would you be opposed to streetlights, because
they can help identify you on the street at night?
Are you against licencse plates on cars?
I think people should have whatever privacy they want in their houses. But in public places,
there should be no assumption of privacy. If
people cannot behave within the limits of the law in public places, they should be accountable. That
means they must be identified.
People can do whatever they want in cyberspace,
but we all share the physical world, and it is
our obligation to behave socially. This means
physical accountability of some kind.
If the concern is that the goverment will use
surveillance to harrass people? Then lets
come up with some laws and procedures, some
checks and balances, just like we did for
the US constitution. The founding fathers didn't
just give up and say "the government will always
crush our liberties, let's outlaw goverment". They
came up with a workable system of negative feedback to keep the concentrations of power from
being unstable.
BTW, the
anti-abortion nuts have a web site already
listing names and addresses of doctors who
perform abortions. The scum bags are already
using networked surveillance. Why can't the
rest of us?
That was his response to the question about
how the SAMBA authors got the bums rush from
Microsoft. He is such a weasel here. The question was specifically about interoperation of standards. What he is saying is that Microsoft's
network filesystem is specifically and intentionally not going to be interoperable. Microsoft wants to keep it proprietary. It's theirs, ok, fine.
But we're talking about the
the network and use of the filesystem. That's
so basic to modern networked computer use. If Microsoft wants to claim that they can make their network
filesystem proprietary and yet still claim to
have great open interoperation with other systems, then they are just huge hypocrites.
Mr. Miller is such a weasel here, he equates
Microsoft giving away its source code with
producing an open spec of the filesystem protocol so
others can do independent implementations.
He and they really are eeevill!
ABout BSD, I can give you an example of why
it didn't catch on so fast. A number of years
ago, when the BSD386 versions came out, I had a small software and web hosting company.
I bought BSDI licenses. Sure you could get the
source, but they had very restrictive licenses
on their code. I was not encouraged to make
changes and give them away, in fact I was
prevented from doing so. We switched over to linux as it became more stable. Simple as that.
It didn't matter that BSDI had top notch support
and customer service. What mattered was that we
were constrained from sharing improvements to the
system with others.
Let's see, SAMBA lets your unix box talk to
Microsoft's filesystem. And the authors had
to reverse engineer the whole thing, because
Microsoft did not want to let anyone
know the technical details of their network
filesystem.
This guy is simply a liar. Microsoft historically only
allows interoperation with other systems when
their backs are pressed to the wall hard.
Assholes.
other 2d bar codes are hideously ugly. Notice that
the use of 45 degree bars gives a uniform
grayscale look, regardless of runs of zeros and ones in the next.
I have no idea what book you read, but you are
way confused.
I read Franklin's autobiography. He was not
landed gentry. He worked his way up from
apprentice to having a successful printing
business. He invented and implemented more innovations in more
areas of human endeavor than you probably even
are aware exist.
You are a cluck.
I think that even more than Network Solutions'
land grab of the DNS, the SSL certificate game
is the biggest rip-off being run on the net.
I believe many more people would like the encryption features of SSL, and do not care
much about authentication. By making you buy
both at the same time, the browser companies and
certificate companies are colluding to force
people to buy services they do not need.
I want security on my web site, but I don't care
if I am authenticated by Verisign. It is easy
enough to get a fake certificate from them; they
care much much more about getting their hands on your dollars than on dong anything more than
a rubber stamp check of your authenticity.
I think this situation arose from people's ignorance and fear about security, and Verisign
and the browser companies did *nothing* to explain
to people the difference between encryption and
authentication.
One problem with aynchronous systems is testing.
If you have a chip where some of the units are slower than expected, you might get curious interactions and "race conditions" that are
very hard to test before you put the chip into
service.
Also, designing for asychronous logic has
been difficult - designing clocked and even
pipelined systems is a breeze compared to
dealing with asynchronous design. A lot of the
structured methods that have been developed for
conventional clocked circuits cannot be used,
and so designers have a lot of trouble
building complex systems.
Ok then, I humbly retract my comment!
Since I remember he claimed he was such a
genius for inventing the "leap key" for searching on the Canon Cat (a failed standalone
wordprocessor from the 80's). He'd never
heard of emacs or incremental search
I guess. Seems like sort of an arrogant
jerk.
If you purchased a DIVX player you have until June 30, 2001 before your discs become inactive (that includes 'Silver' upgraded discs).
That in a nutshell is a good example of how the
copyright meisters are fucking you over
coming *and* going.
Very neat idea. The nice thing is that the subject matter is already neatly categorized (by geography).
Again, the issue of editing comes up- the public
needs a way to make endorsements and to verify the
integrity of the endorser. Something like at www.photo.net, for example, might be workable. Simply reviewing all the comments or content a given user has posted is a pretty good way to
guage their integrity.
The way he ridiculed the Japanese washlet toilets is an example. There is nothing silly about them. I have been using one in Japan for the last year, and the prospect of going back to a cold non-washing American style toilet is about as attractive as going to use an unheated outhouse in the back yard and wiping my butt with a handful of leaves.
I don't think the author can discriminate between good ideas and bad ideas. He just fears anything new or different.
seems a wee bit faster and more stable than 0.6. If they can improve it a little more it will be fine.
Actually what is interesting is seeing just what the most erotic image you can make is that fits
in 94x72 pixels with 256 colors.
I haven't actually seen any keitai pornography
yet, but I haven't bothered to look either.
The phones are light and small, and have sufficient standby time
For example, (my phone the D209i, weighs 74 g, has a 256 color display, roughly 100x100 pixels, and operates 400 hours (standby receive time) between charging. It will sustain about 120 minutes of talk time on a charge.
Put another way, it weighs as much as a pocket full of loose change, and needs to be recharged a couple of times a month with average use.
Remember, the Japanese usually walk and take the train to work, so they *cannot* lug heavy junk around with them. For example, the average 7 lb US laptop that you can throw in the trunk of your car is like hauling a boat anchor around if you are standing on a crowded train for 90 minutes.
People have time on their hands
Most people take the train to work, so they have plenty of time on their hands where they can play with their phone. The same time spent in a car commuting is dead-time as far as Internet usage goes, because you cannot surf the net and drive at the same time.
The phone company has made Internet access from home obscenely expensive
NTT has, even to this day, charged per minute for dialup even for local calls. So for most users the clock is always on if they are dialed into the net from home. By comparison, cell phone rates and packet costs are quite reasonable in comparison.
Point of reference: it costs more for me to make a phone call from my house in Tamagawa to Kawasaki (1 km) than it does for me to call Boston (using ATT @phone service from my home). NTT has literally choked the life out of Internet growth here for the last five years.
People are used to paying money for crap that they would never pay for in the US
CNN charges 300 yen a month to let you read CNN online on your i-mode phone. US users would laugh at the concept of paying to read CNN on a tiny screen. But in Japan, consumers are less accustomed to telling the producers what they want and what they will pay (see previous point about NTT phone rates).
Billing is more fair
The recipient of a phone cell phone call does not pay airtime charges.
More web sites, easier to build them
cHTML (compact HTML) used for i-Mode is easier to write than WAP. It's just basically a subset of HTML 2.0. So developers don't have to make a big investment in new tools or time to make a useful i-Mode site quickly from existing web technology.
Email is still the killer app
Most people make use of the email feature on their phone to one degree or another. Teenagers are legendary for rapid high volume communication, essentially using it for chat applications.
Many people do not have regular internet access from work or home
For various historic reasons (NTT high prices, keyboard problems, incompatible PCs, lack of space in small apartments, lack of access from workplace) PC's are not so common as they are in the US. Thus, using the i-Mode phone for some internet access tasks is a reasonable alternative to buying a PC. This makes a positive feedback loop to encourage more services accessible via i-Mode.
I can't believe how short a memory or how clueless people on this board are.
Remember, guys, RedHat bought Cygnus. Does that ring a bell?
Cygnus made plenty of money supporting custom ports of GCC and other tools for big computer vendors, especially embedded processors (intel960 anyone?).
The money from developing custom ports of the tools to new systems can be quite respectable. And Redhat having bought Cygnus gives them about
half of all the developers of the core GNU toolkit.
So I think people are just out to lunch when they say that RedHat is just a packager of Linux
distros. They are in fact an extremely high powered software development and consulting house.
Sheesh. Who do you think maintains GCC?
I have thought for a long time that Framemaker format would be a good web language. You could
have precise pixel level positioning where you want it, as well as flowed page layout and higher level tagging like HTML. If you want to lay out
an HTML document, just make it a single flowed frame.
Take graph isomorphism, for example. It is provably NP hard, however there is a linear
time algorithm which works well in practice. This is used, for example, in a CAD system where you are comparing the electrical circuit network of
your schematic or procedural description with an extracted network from the VLSI mask, to verify that your physical layout implements the same circuit as your higher level description.
In practice, a hashing algorithm will give you
the answer in linear time, with almost any degree of certainty. There is a small probability of a false positive, however.
It seems like in many cases a probablistic algorithm like this gives practically certain
results. I don't know about factoring numbers, but I sometimes think that a probabilistic algorithm such as the graph isomorphism one could be applied to the factoring problem.
This is brilliant! With your mouse-over patent,
you could claim Amazon was infringing every time someone moved their mouse over the "add to my shopping cart" button.
As a logical conclusion to making shopping
completely effort free, how about patenting No Shopping at All Shopping; The consumer justs sits at home watching television in a comfortable chair and waits to die. The e-commerce company just deducts money straight from their bank account. No user interface required.
Sony memory sticks are proprietary. There
is no advantage to them whatsoever - if you buy
products that use them, you are just fucking
yourself over. The costs of memory sticks will
always be higher because there is no competition
in manufacturing them. We don't need another
incompatible flash memory format!
It's like ZIP disks -- they patented the
mechanism for identifying them, and ZIP media
costs ten times what it should, and the cost
has never gone down.
WAKE UP!
I thought the dialog in the WWII era sections of
Cryptonomicon were just fine. The geek explanations could easily have been left out though, making the book about 1/3 smaller.
If you check with the cable companies first (Tokyu Cable, Tokyo Metallic, soon Microsoft too :-( ) you can move into an apartment or house with cable modem access in Tokyo. Service is comparable to that in the US ( approc $50 month, 400-800 kbits service). If you don't live in a building serviced by cable modem (and there are only about 15-20k subscribers in Tokyo, I understand this year), you are really screwed. No flat rate telephone service, ISDN is expensive (for ISP access). So it's really binary here, either get cable or get screwed.
From the description of the experiment in the article, it is completely unclear whether they mean 300 * c (speed of light in vacuuo) vs 300 * (speed of light in the medium). I am almost certain they mean the latter.
The whole thing only sounds mysterious if you believe all the approximations that phsysicts make as actually representing reality.
It sounds a lot more to me like one of those little strings of hanging click-clack ball things people set up on their desk. You push a ball at one end, and the ball at the other end seems to move almost instantaneously.
The whole thing about the "peak" of the pulse being somehow qualitatively different than the "tail" or "leading edge" is such crap. Why is everyone acting like they are different things? The peak is just where you have the maximum intensity, it isn't like some magic "information" point. It just sounds like there is a pumped-up medium (like in a laser) and as soon as enough of a
photon signal gets absorbed to do stimulated emission, then a chain reaction goes off. I don't know why they have to make this sound so confusing.
Physicists are, in my experience, no smarter than anyone else, they just get away with confusing people more easily.