But some students are upset they were involved in the study without their consent or knowledge. Senior Rebecca Shakespeare did not even know she had been used as a sender until her friend notified her.
"I was frustrated that I was hearing from a friend that my e-mail account was sending her things," Shakespeare said. "I had no idea where it was coming from. I was irritated because I was concerned that my home system was being abused."
Shakespeare called University Information Technology Services, which said it could have been a virus and to not click on the link.
"I've spent a lot of time keeping my (computer) secured," Shakespeare said. "I feel kind of used that it was the University that was making my friends think I had opened up my system to viruses."
If that's really why they're concerned, well, maybe they'd be interested in knowing that the vast majority of virus/malware type things that send email in this fashion still don't originate from the computer of the person in question anyway...therefore, this whole rationale for worry is BS, since spoofed email can come from *anywhere*, and it's most often NOT your own computer.
And - make no mistake, I really do see their point - but the IT resources belong to the university, and neither the university nor the researchers uses the person's account or any password or other credentials belonging to the person. It was simply a spoofed "from" address; nothing more. And if it's strictly "legal" for any random person to spoof a from address, it's just as legal for the purposes of research, whose findings may provide some level of insight on *protecting* people from malicious phishing.
Now, I personally don't know whether any of this justifies doing the study in the way they did. That's a judgment call. If the university's IT organization proper is doing it, that's one thing, and I could see people being uncomfortable with the motivations. But grad students? I don't see any problem with that at all. In fact, they don't need anyone's permission to do what they did. However, in good faith, they did get the approval of the Human Subjects Committee.
But that's the thing: companies like Accuweather would love to launch their own private commercial satellites and provide the data themselves, for a fee. The net result would be a focus on profitable ventures, an attentiveness to urban and densely populated areas (i.e., those who will pay), and complete ignorance of rural areas and major swaths of the country (except where profitable for, e.g., commercial food growers).
Sure weather providers may get some data from government-operated satellites now. They just want to legislatively cripple the agencies that administer them, and their data, so that they control it all themselves. A few hundred million dollars to launch some satellites is nothing if they're guaranteed a corner on the market for crucial information.
Barry Myers, AccuWeather's executive vice president, said the bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector.
Ed Johnson, the weather service's director of strategic planning and policy, said:
"If someone claims that our core mission is just warning the public of hazardous conditions, that's really impossible unless we forecast the weather all the time. You don't just plug in your clock when you want to know what time it is." And then this gem from Accuweather:
Myers argued that nearly all consumers get their weather information for free through commercial providers, including the news media, so there's little reason for the federal agency to duplicate their efforts.
"Do you really need that from the NOAA Web site?" he asked.
Um, gee, if everyone already doesn't get their weather information from the National Weather Service, then what the fuck are they so worried about? Incidentally, the stated mission of the National Weather Service is:
The National Weather Service (NWS) provides weather, hydrologic, and climate forecasts and warnings for the United States, its territories, adjacent waters and ocean areas, for the protection of life and property and the enhancement of the national economy. NWS data and products form a national information database and infrastructure which can be used by other governmental agencies, the private sector, the public, and the global community.
Clear, timely, comprehensive, accurate - and now open - weather forecasts are critical for many, many sectors of public and private society. The new, open formats of weather data also make its integration into myriad other services and tools trivial. It's only good for the public. I don't think Sen. Santorum realizes how critical the NWS's weather, climate, and marine data is to so many sectors of US society.
The National Weather Service is funded for this mission, among others, by the taxpayers of the United States.
I hope Rick Santorum realizes that in a world where this bill passes, there should also be a corresponding reduction of funding to the NWS, in addition to a wholesale change of its mission. In fact, what would its mission be?
The best part of all of this is that in order for the NWS to effectively be able to gather the necessary data to still predict and warn against life- and property-threatening dangers, it still has to do almost all of the continuing data collection it does now. Removing the public access to this does absolutely nothing for anyone.
Except for-profit weather forecasting providers like Accuweather, of course.
For now, at least, Johnson of the NWS notes his agency is expanding its online offerings to serve the public.
Remember, too, that a "bill" is just that. Time to remind your electedofficials of what you think...
...how the countless "shared folders" containing "prerelase copyrighted works" on untold numbers of compromised Windows boxes on university campuses will be handled...
We get semi-automated C&D orders from content owners routinely as it is; will they now begin to insist on the involvement of university police or other agencies?
Yeah, there are computer security issues to work out, but on a fundamentally open public research campus with tens of thousands of computers, not all of them will be perfectly protected.
1. The user does not have to organize the contents. At all.
2. Almost all metadata, except the one example you picked, requires no user action or intervention. Things like the contents of a textual document (text files, word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, email messages, bookmarks, etc.) Things like the properties of a file (larger or smaller than a given size, created before, after, or during a time, etc.) Things like the properties of image files (all CMYK files of type X with resolution Y, etc.)
The ONLY thing you have to add keyword metadata to manually is pictures.
They have many categories of direct retrofit for things like stoplights, streetlights, automotive, and just about every place you'd find an incandescent bulb of any type. All of their products have detailed industrial specifications.
They even have an incandescent to LED cross reference that will take any incandescent Bulb Number (or base, bulb type, or voltage) and list compatible LED offerings.
High on the list of features are security enhancements
...
Ok, so, to bring Longhorn anywhere near the fundamental security that Mac OS X already intrinsically has?
To say nothing of the irony of this statement..."security enhancements"? Over what? Microsoft's previous already-dismal general track record in this area?
Perhaps this line from the article says it all on this topic:
"In both look and form, the search mechanism is similar to the Spotlight feature in Apple Computer's Mac OS X Tiger, which goes on sale later this month."
and better methods for laptops to roam from one network to another.
...that I can already seamlessly do with Mac OS X's automatic detection of saved wireless network settings, rolling prioritized detection of available network interfaces, and quick switching of locations?
And it goes on like this, mostly as justifications for how Longhorn is really different from Tiger. (No. Really.) The most relevant excerpt is likely "[Longhorn] bears plenty of similarities to Tiger [...]"
Except that one is, you know, shipping this month.
To say nothing of the full-fledged UNIX and X11 environment I have with Mac OS X.
When Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs walked into the suites of top record label executives in 2002, iTunes software in hand, he was welcomed as a trailblazer to a digital music future.
Now, nearly two years after Apple's iTunes launch, record executives have become worried that they have inadvertently ceded too much power over their industry to this charismatic computer executive.
Frustrated at what they see as Jobs' intransigence on song pricing and other issues, some record executives are now turning their hopes toward other partners, particularly mobile phone carriers eager to get into the business of selling music. They see this new focus as a way to broaden the digital music business, and lessen Apple's dominance over their market in the process.
[...]
For example, Apple wants to sell all its songs for 99 cents each, a single price point that's easy for consumers to understand. But the record labels have pressed for the ability to vary prices to maximize their own sales. They want to sell older titles at a discount--like the $9.99 CDs available in most record stores--and charge more for popular songs to take advantage of market demand.
And since announcing its Longhorn desktop search intentions, Microsoft's worst fears were realized. Other companies began copying the Microsoft desktop search strategy, knowing that the never-ending Longhorn delays would help them get to market sooner and appear to be nimbler and even more innovative, though it's sort of astonishing how transparent that latter claim is. Chief among these competitors are Apple and Google.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced in June 2004 that the next version of Mac OS X, due sometime in 2005, will include a desktop search feature called Spotlight. The Spotlight feature set is a rough subset of the desktop search features Gates discussed in late 2003, but presented to the user with Apple's standard graphical excellence. Spotlight, according to Apple, is a "radically new and lightning fast way to find anything saved on your personal computer. Email messages, contacts and calendars, along with files and folders, all show up in Spotlight results." Spotlight's biggest claims to fame, presumably, are its near-instant search results and support for document meta data, both of which are, again, planned features of Longhorn. But no matter. While Apple has been busy copping Windows features since Jobs returned to Apple in late 1996, the company's tiny market share ensures that very few people will benefit from Spotlight, despite Apple claims that it will deliver on desktop search a year before Microsoft ships Longhorn....in December 2004.
Apple decided to adopt a similar approach in various places throughout OS X Tiger--including the Finder, Mail 2, and elsewhere--providing Mac OS X users, for the first time, with true instant search functionality. Similar in execution to the instant desktop search feature Microsoft plans to ship in Longhorn next year, and to third party Windows products like MSN Toolbar Suite and Google Desktop Search, Spotlight works as advertised. It delivers near-instantaneous search results from the places you'd most often need to find files or other information.
[...]
Now, this kind of functionality is exceeding cool, because it's the first step toward divorcing ourselves from worrying about the hard-coded locations of files and other data stored on the computer's file system. If you think about it, it's kind of silly that we have to even worry about such a thing, and though recent file system niceties like the My Documents folder in Windows (simply called Documents in OS X) try to simplify matters, the truth is, computers should be good at finding the information we need. We shouldn't have to do all the work.
Not coincidentally, Microsoft is working on similar, if further-reaching, technology for Longhorn. Apple's solution, however, is here right now and it appears to work quite well. Score one for Apple.
Because apparently everything is a blog now, when it's convenient.
For example, we used to call Think Secret and AppleInsider "news web sites" or "mac rumor sites". Apparently they're now "blogs".
And yes, I realize that a "blog" IS a "web site", but my point is, aren't we going a little overboard on calling things "blogs"? Think Secret only started being a blog when people wanted to trumpet the cause of "blogger's rights" and thought it was some huge case about free speech and whether bloggers can be considered "journalists".
Unfortunately, it backfired, because the judge acknowledged that bloggers CAN INDEED be journalists, and they also have the same free speech and press rights as anyone else. But they also can't obtain information in violation of existing statutes.
I know you're just trolling, but for others' benefit:
Intel and AMD didn't "invent" dick in the way of multi-core.
And it's not "Apple" copying anything. IBM makes the PowerPC 970, and IBM has been in the multi core business a hell of a lot longer than Intel or AMD.
"What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record... my actions," Mann said. "Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions."
Does this make sense to anyone?
Taking pictures of cameras taking pictures of you is not keeping a record of your own actions.
Further, unless he's alleging that video will be doctored, the record that is kept of him, privacy issues aside, is just that. How is taking pictures of the devices recording YOU going to prevent them from improperly keeping an accurate photographic record of your own actions. Again, whether they SHOULD be keeping record of your actions is beside the point for this specific question.
All these are - wallets that require someone else to swipe their ID to see your ID, etc. - are just publicity stunts to get people thinking about privacy. Great. People should be thinking about it. But then they jump from the likes of the GAP in a mall to government (???), and apparently liken a lowly employee in the mechanics of either someone who should themselves have to give up personal information for simply asking for identification for whatever purpose (again, the extent that it is appropriate is beside the point).
Seems a little wrongheaded to me.
To say nothing of the fact that almost all malls are private property.
Mann asked the guard why, if the Mont Blanc cameras were recording him, he couldn't, in turn, record the cameras.
Why should a random private mall employee have a philosophical privacy and surveillance discussion with some self-righteous, cynical privacy advocate. Who, by the way, expects exactly what happened, i.e., worthless responses, to happen?
But sure to please and amuse countless slashdotters, I'm sure. (Yeah. Because confusing near-minimum wage mall security is really hard.)
Yeah, and the sad part of it is, I explain this difference to people frequently. I was looking at Think Secret's specs, and saw PCI-X still, and just had that on the brain when I typed PCI-X instead of PCI Express.:-/
...on whether these use the already-known-to-existIBM PowerPC 970MP, a dual core version of the G5. This could mean that we'd have >2.5GHz dual-dual core Power Mac systems.
What could essentially be called "quad G5" systems (including Xserves) are just a matter of time. And with dual >1GHz frontside busses and PC3200 DDR RAM (8GB max in Power Mac, 16GB max (also ECC) in Xserve), these machines are nothing to sneeze at.
What will be interesting to see is when the Power Macs will have PCI-X and Blu-Ray. From the most current round of rumors, it looks like that's still another upgrade away...
At the University of Wisconsin, our new 10Gbps ethernet backbone and all associated equipment in a major network upgrade initiative supports multicast to the desktop. We're operating an IP-based television distribution system exclusively via multicast distribution (using locally scoped addresses, so it's only available internally).
So we can still go to 224.2.231.45, and get a live stream of NASA TV from the University of Oregon.
For the uninitiated, multicast essentially allows any number of clients to "listen" to the same stream: multicast-aware network equipment just handles when a network gets traffic. If a user on the University of Wisconsin campus decides to watch the broadcast from the University of Oregon, one stream's worth of bandwidth will enter our network. If a hundred - or a thousand - people decide to watch it, it's still that same one stream's worth of bandwidth coming in, that everyone else is simply "listening" to. So for each network segment, whether you're looking at an individual subnet or in a whole-internet sense, there is either:
- 0 streams - 1 or more streams, but all with the equivalent network usage of 1 stream
It's really a fantastic way of distributing video. Not only is there no additional load beyond the one stream on the network, but there is also *only the load of one stream* on the server.
If multicast were enabled on the internet-at-large, individual people really could distribute video to the world: all they'd need is essentially enough bandwidth to distribute one stream, and one, or one million, could listen in.
(And yes, there are ways this can break down, but I'm just trying to give a simplified explanation here.)
Here's the answer: EVERYONE is a private citizen, for at least some portion of the day.
Until you wouldn't mind having your own personal information and home address posted to a blog, it wouldn't seem appropriate to do it to someone else, would it?
Whether a person is a CEO, a politician, a school board member, a church official, or an AC slashdot poster, your home and personal life is just that, and people shouldn't be harassing you and your family in the supposed privacy of your own home.
If you want to protest, protest at the town hall, the corporate headquarters, the local campus, the church.
But not at a person's home.
It doesn't matter if the information is available "publicly" somewhere. When you post it in the spirit of "let's harass the fuck out of this person" or "let's scare this group of people so we can feel big and powerful by having this information" it's a little different from the fact it happens to be in someone's local phone book.
And let's try to focus on reality here, instead of bringing up some fringe example of how a person's home could also be their office.
Just because someone hasn't heard of or visited a "blog" doesn't mean they can't be of the opinion that "home addresses and other personal information about private citizens" shouldn't be posted online, whether it's on a "blog" or what we colloquially call a "web page".
More from the survey:
Fifty-two percent of those surveyed said bloggers should have the same rights as traditional journalists, while 27 percent did not express an opinion.
[...] most respondents classed bloggers in the same category as journalists when it came to free speech [...]
[...] most people used blogs to obtain information about politics or current events.
This isn't about "blogging". The personal information bit was about what usually constitutes harassment, that just happens to come in the form of a blog.
God I love these misleading, scare-tactic titles. "AMERICANS SUPPORT BLOG CENSORSHIP", which of course brings to mind nasty, ignorant, redneck religious right wanting to censor Common Dreams and DailyKos. No, morons. They do not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens. All of a sudden that equates to wholesale BLOG CENSORSHIP? And yes, I realize that any censorship - even of that information - is still censorship, but let's get a freakin' grip, here, before people start talking about the "good little sheeple doing what Monkey Boy Bush tells them" etc., ok?
Now, here's an interesting question: If the failure is really that serious and catastrophic, how do they intend to get the shuttle to the station - or vice versa?
Well, this presumes that the shuttle is still functional enough to get to the ISS.
This is just a typical reactive strategy, e.g., the last shuttle completed its entire mission, but just *couldn't land* because of the foam anomaly. So now they'll look for this one-in-a-who-knows-how-many occurrence, and have a "rescue plan", as all the people who don't realize how complex this is asked about last time. It's just a contingency plan, because is something even remotely similar ever happened again and they didn't plan for it, NASA would be raked over the coals and heads would roll.
So, yeah, if something really bad happened, there's no guarantees the shuttle could get to the ISS at all. They just have to plan for the eventuality that it can.
My question is, why shove everyone into the ISS? Why not just dock with it, and share the life support supplies between the two systems, instead of cramming everyone into the station?"
Because the shuttle is only a supported flight platform for a very narrow range of parameters on a given mission. Yes, even with all the contingencies. We *know* the ISS is a predictable, stable environment, as opposed to a failed shuttle (whatever the failure is) requiring extended docking with the ISS. Therefore, living in cramped quarters for a while and losing/abandoning a shuttle is far desirable to potentially losing a shuttle due to yet-unknown circumstances, *and* the ISS, and all of the occupants of both.
Better cramped and (relatively) safe than comfortable and (perhaps) sorry, no matter how remote the chances of a catastrophic event caused by unknown/unmanageable failures, even on orbit.
Finally - jokes aside - wouldn't you think NASA knows at least marginally what it's doing here?
Slashdot Mirror
But some students are upset they were involved in the study without their consent or knowledge. Senior Rebecca Shakespeare did not even know she had been used as a sender until her friend notified her.
"I was frustrated that I was hearing from a friend that my e-mail account was sending her things," Shakespeare said. "I had no idea where it was coming from. I was irritated because I was concerned that my home system was being abused."
Shakespeare called University Information Technology Services, which said it could have been a virus and to not click on the link.
"I've spent a lot of time keeping my (computer) secured," Shakespeare said. "I feel kind of used that it was the University that was making my friends think I had opened up my system to viruses."
If that's really why they're concerned, well, maybe they'd be interested in knowing that the vast majority of virus/malware type things that send email in this fashion still don't originate from the computer of the person in question anyway...therefore, this whole rationale for worry is BS, since spoofed email can come from *anywhere*, and it's most often NOT your own computer.
And - make no mistake, I really do see their point - but the IT resources belong to the university, and neither the university nor the researchers uses the person's account or any password or other credentials belonging to the person. It was simply a spoofed "from" address; nothing more. And if it's strictly "legal" for any random person to spoof a from address, it's just as legal for the purposes of research, whose findings may provide some level of insight on *protecting* people from malicious phishing.
Now, I personally don't know whether any of this justifies doing the study in the way they did. That's a judgment call. If the university's IT organization proper is doing it, that's one thing, and I could see people being uncomfortable with the motivations. But grad students? I don't see any problem with that at all. In fact, they don't need anyone's permission to do what they did. However, in good faith, they did get the approval of the Human Subjects Committee.
No, you're exactly right.
But that's the thing: companies like Accuweather would love to launch their own private commercial satellites and provide the data themselves, for a fee. The net result would be a focus on profitable ventures, an attentiveness to urban and densely populated areas (i.e., those who will pay), and complete ignorance of rural areas and major swaths of the country (except where profitable for, e.g., commercial food growers).
Sure weather providers may get some data from government-operated satellites now. They just want to legislatively cripple the agencies that administer them, and their data, so that they control it all themselves. A few hundred million dollars to launch some satellites is nothing if they're guaranteed a corner on the market for crucial information.
In response to:
Barry Myers, AccuWeather's executive vice president, said the bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector.
Ed Johnson, the weather service's director of strategic planning and policy, said:
"If someone claims that our core mission is just warning the public of hazardous conditions, that's really impossible unless we forecast the weather all the time. You don't just plug in your clock when you want to know what time it is."
And then this gem from Accuweather:
Myers argued that nearly all consumers get their weather information for free through commercial providers, including the news media, so there's little reason for the federal agency to duplicate their efforts.
"Do you really need that from the NOAA Web site?" he asked.
Um, gee, if everyone already doesn't get their weather information from the National Weather Service, then what the fuck are they so worried about? Incidentally, the stated mission of the National Weather Service is:
The National Weather Service (NWS) provides weather, hydrologic, and climate forecasts and warnings for the United States, its territories, adjacent waters and ocean areas, for the protection of life and property and the enhancement of the national economy. NWS data and products form a national information database and infrastructure which can be used by other governmental agencies, the private sector, the public, and the global community.
Clear, timely, comprehensive, accurate - and now open - weather forecasts are critical for many, many sectors of public and private society. The new, open formats of weather data also make its integration into myriad other services and tools trivial. It's only good for the public. I don't think Sen. Santorum realizes how critical the NWS's weather, climate, and marine data is to so many sectors of US society.
The National Weather Service is funded for this mission, among others, by the taxpayers of the United States.
I hope Rick Santorum realizes that in a world where this bill passes, there should also be a corresponding reduction of funding to the NWS, in addition to a wholesale change of its mission. In fact, what would its mission be?
The best part of all of this is that in order for the NWS to effectively be able to gather the necessary data to still predict and warn against life- and property-threatening dangers, it still has to do almost all of the continuing data collection it does now. Removing the public access to this does absolutely nothing for anyone.
Except for-profit weather forecasting providers like Accuweather, of course.
For now, at least, Johnson of the NWS notes his agency is expanding its online offerings to serve the public.
Remember, too, that a "bill" is just that. Time to remind your elected officials of what you think...
By using Mac OS X's interface to CUPS.
:P
...how the countless "shared folders" containing "prerelase copyrighted works" on untold numbers of compromised Windows boxes on university campuses will be handled...
We get semi-automated C&D orders from content owners routinely as it is; will they now begin to insist on the involvement of university police or other agencies?
Yeah, there are computer security issues to work out, but on a fundamentally open public research campus with tens of thousands of computers, not all of them will be perfectly protected.
No, scratch that.
Really wrong.
1. The user does not have to organize the contents. At all.
2. Almost all metadata, except the one example you picked, requires no user action or intervention. Things like the contents of a textual document (text files, word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, email messages, bookmarks, etc.) Things like the properties of a file (larger or smaller than a given size, created before, after, or during a time, etc.) Things like the properties of image files (all CMYK files of type X with resolution Y, etc.)
The ONLY thing you have to add keyword metadata to manually is pictures.
So, in sum, you're completely wrong.
...I'm sure that Apple won't have been doing anything in the meantime.
Like, oh, working on Mac OS X 10.5.
Which will, quite literally, probably be shipping around the time Longhorn ships.
they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn
So, OS technology will have improved in 18-24 months?
Amazing!
You may be interested in:
LEDtronics
They make plenty of lamps for existing sockets of almost every type, and they come in 12/14VDC and 120VAC in a variety of color temperatures.
They have many categories of direct retrofit for things like stoplights, streetlights, automotive, and just about every place you'd find an incandescent bulb of any type. All of their products have detailed industrial specifications.
They even have an incandescent to LED cross reference that will take any incandescent Bulb Number (or base, bulb type, or voltage) and list compatible LED offerings.
These guys have been around for years.
High on the list of features are security enhancements
...
Ok, so, to bring Longhorn anywhere near the fundamental security that Mac OS X already intrinsically has?
To say nothing of the irony of this statement..."security enhancements"? Over what? Microsoft's previous already-dismal general track record in this area?
improved desktop searching and organizing
Which Apple is already shipping in Tiger, and even Paul Thurrott acknowledges as "exceedingly cool"?
Perhaps this line from the article says it all on this topic:
"In both look and form, the search mechanism is similar to the Spotlight feature in Apple Computer's Mac OS X Tiger, which goes on sale later this month."
and better methods for laptops to roam from one network to another.
...that I can already seamlessly do with Mac OS X's automatic detection of saved wireless network settings, rolling prioritized detection of available network interfaces, and quick switching of locations?
And it goes on like this, mostly as justifications for how Longhorn is really different from Tiger. (No. Really.) The most relevant excerpt is likely "[Longhorn] bears plenty of similarities to Tiger [...]"
Except that one is, you know, shipping this month.
To say nothing of the full-fledged UNIX and X11 environment I have with Mac OS X.
*Yawn*
...another News.com article on this topic:
Music moguls trumped by Steve Jobs?
When Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs walked into the suites of top record label executives in 2002, iTunes software in hand, he was welcomed as a trailblazer to a digital music future.
Now, nearly two years after Apple's iTunes launch, record executives have become worried that they have inadvertently ceded too much power over their industry to this charismatic computer executive.
Frustrated at what they see as Jobs' intransigence on song pricing and other issues, some record executives are now turning their hopes toward other partners, particularly mobile phone carriers eager to get into the business of selling music. They see this new focus as a way to broaden the digital music business, and lessen Apple's dominance over their market in the process.
[...]
For example, Apple wants to sell all its songs for 99 cents each, a single price point that's easy for consumers to understand. But the record labels have pressed for the ability to vary prices to maximize their own sales. They want to sell older titles at a discount--like the $9.99 CDs available in most record stores--and charge more for popular songs to take advantage of market demand.
Full story
An interesting previous tidbit from Thurrott:
...in December 2004.
And since announcing its Longhorn desktop search intentions, Microsoft's worst fears were realized. Other companies began copying the Microsoft desktop search strategy, knowing that the never-ending Longhorn delays would help them get to market sooner and appear to be nimbler and even more innovative, though it's sort of astonishing how transparent that latter claim is. Chief among these competitors are Apple and Google.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced in June 2004 that the next version of Mac OS X, due sometime in 2005, will include a desktop search feature called Spotlight. The Spotlight feature set is a rough subset of the desktop search features Gates discussed in late 2003, but presented to the user with Apple's standard graphical excellence. Spotlight, according to Apple, is a "radically new and lightning fast way to find anything saved on your personal computer. Email messages, contacts and calendars, along with files and folders, all show up in Spotlight results." Spotlight's biggest claims to fame, presumably, are its near-instant search results and support for document meta data, both of which are, again, planned features of Longhorn. But no matter. While Apple has been busy copping Windows features since Jobs returned to Apple in late 1996, the company's tiny market share ensures that very few people will benefit from Spotlight, despite Apple claims that it will deliver on desktop search a year before Microsoft ships Longhorn.
Then in February 2005, he started to change his tune:
I'd like to highlight some of the features that I feel set MSN Search apart from its competitors, chiefly Google [...]
What happened to Apple?
And in today's review:
Apple decided to adopt a similar approach in various places throughout OS X Tiger--including the Finder, Mail 2, and elsewhere--providing Mac OS X users, for the first time, with true instant search functionality. Similar in execution to the instant desktop search feature Microsoft plans to ship in Longhorn next year, and to third party Windows products like MSN Toolbar Suite and Google Desktop Search, Spotlight works as advertised. It delivers near-instantaneous search results from the places you'd most often need to find files or other information.
[...]
Now, this kind of functionality is exceeding cool, because it's the first step toward divorcing ourselves from worrying about the hard-coded locations of files and other data stored on the computer's file system. If you think about it, it's kind of silly that we have to even worry about such a thing, and though recent file system niceties like the My Documents folder in Windows (simply called Documents in OS X) try to simplify matters, the truth is, computers should be good at finding the information we need. We shouldn't have to do all the work.
Not coincidentally, Microsoft is working on similar, if further-reaching, technology for Longhorn. Apple's solution, however, is here right now and it appears to work quite well. Score one for Apple.
Why the about face?
Because apparently everything is a blog now, when it's convenient.
For example, we used to call Think Secret and AppleInsider "news web sites" or "mac rumor sites". Apparently they're now "blogs".
And yes, I realize that a "blog" IS a "web site", but my point is, aren't we going a little overboard on calling things "blogs"? Think Secret only started being a blog when people wanted to trumpet the cause of "blogger's rights" and thought it was some huge case about free speech and whether bloggers can be considered "journalists".
Unfortunately, it backfired, because the judge acknowledged that bloggers CAN INDEED be journalists, and they also have the same free speech and press rights as anyone else. But they also can't obtain information in violation of existing statutes.
I know you're just trolling, but for others' benefit:
Intel and AMD didn't "invent" dick in the way of multi-core.
And it's not "Apple" copying anything. IBM makes the PowerPC 970, and IBM has been in the multi core business a hell of a lot longer than Intel or AMD.
Thanks for the troll, though.
"What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record ... my actions," Mann said. "Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions."
Does this make sense to anyone?
Taking pictures of cameras taking pictures of you is not keeping a record of your own actions.
Further, unless he's alleging that video will be doctored, the record that is kept of him, privacy issues aside, is just that. How is taking pictures of the devices recording YOU going to prevent them from improperly keeping an accurate photographic record of your own actions. Again, whether they SHOULD be keeping record of your actions is beside the point for this specific question.
All these are - wallets that require someone else to swipe their ID to see your ID, etc. - are just publicity stunts to get people thinking about privacy. Great. People should be thinking about it. But then they jump from the likes of the GAP in a mall to government (???), and apparently liken a lowly employee in the mechanics of either someone who should themselves have to give up personal information for simply asking for identification for whatever purpose (again, the extent that it is appropriate is beside the point).
Seems a little wrongheaded to me.
To say nothing of the fact that almost all malls are private property.
Mann asked the guard why, if the Mont Blanc cameras were recording him, he couldn't, in turn, record the cameras.
Why should a random private mall employee have a philosophical privacy and surveillance discussion with some self-righteous, cynical privacy advocate. Who, by the way, expects exactly what happened, i.e., worthless responses, to happen?
But sure to please and amuse countless slashdotters, I'm sure. (Yeah. Because confusing near-minimum wage mall security is really hard.)
That may be why serious scientific/computational clusters are Xserves, which have ECC RAM.
But yes, I'd like at least an option for ECC RAM on the desktop systems as well.
Yeah, and the sad part of it is, I explain this difference to people frequently. I was looking at Think Secret's specs, and saw PCI-X still, and just had that on the brain when I typed PCI-X instead of PCI Express. :-/
Doh.
That's what I get for not thinking before I type.
...on whether these use the already-known-to-exist IBM PowerPC 970MP, a dual core version of the G5. This could mean that we'd have >2.5GHz dual-dual core Power Mac systems.
Further, an update to Apple's CHUD tools (subsequently pulled) had clear references to quad processor capability, as well as references to the 970MP, and the single core 970GX.
What could essentially be called "quad G5" systems (including Xserves) are just a matter of time. And with dual >1GHz frontside busses and PC3200 DDR RAM (8GB max in Power Mac, 16GB max (also ECC) in Xserve), these machines are nothing to sneeze at.
What will be interesting to see is when the Power Macs will have PCI-X and Blu-Ray. From the most current round of rumors, it looks like that's still another upgrade away...
Thankfully, as you alluded, mutlicast capability lives on in Internet2:
http://multicast.internet2.edu/
At the University of Wisconsin, our new 10Gbps ethernet backbone and all associated equipment in a major network upgrade initiative supports multicast to the desktop. We're operating an IP-based television distribution system exclusively via multicast distribution (using locally scoped addresses, so it's only available internally).
So we can still go to 224.2.231.45, and get a live stream of NASA TV from the University of Oregon.
For the uninitiated, multicast essentially allows any number of clients to "listen" to the same stream: multicast-aware network equipment just handles when a network gets traffic. If a user on the University of Wisconsin campus decides to watch the broadcast from the University of Oregon, one stream's worth of bandwidth will enter our network. If a hundred - or a thousand - people decide to watch it, it's still that same one stream's worth of bandwidth coming in, that everyone else is simply "listening" to. So for each network segment, whether you're looking at an individual subnet or in a whole-internet sense, there is either:
- 0 streams
- 1 or more streams, but all with the equivalent network usage of 1 stream
It's really a fantastic way of distributing video. Not only is there no additional load beyond the one stream on the network, but there is also *only the load of one stream* on the server.
If multicast were enabled on the internet-at-large, individual people really could distribute video to the world: all they'd need is essentially enough bandwidth to distribute one stream, and one, or one million, could listen in.
(And yes, there are ways this can break down, but I'm just trying to give a simplified explanation here.)
Here's the answer: EVERYONE is a private citizen, for at least some portion of the day.
Until you wouldn't mind having your own personal information and home address posted to a blog, it wouldn't seem appropriate to do it to someone else, would it?
Whether a person is a CEO, a politician, a school board member, a church official, or an AC slashdot poster, your home and personal life is just that, and people shouldn't be harassing you and your family in the supposed privacy of your own home.
If you want to protest, protest at the town hall, the corporate headquarters, the local campus, the church.
But not at a person's home.
It doesn't matter if the information is available "publicly" somewhere. When you post it in the spirit of "let's harass the fuck out of this person" or "let's scare this group of people so we can feel big and powerful by having this information" it's a little different from the fact it happens to be in someone's local phone book.
And let's try to focus on reality here, instead of bringing up some fringe example of how a person's home could also be their office.
Just because someone hasn't heard of or visited a "blog" doesn't mean they can't be of the opinion that "home addresses and other personal information about private citizens" shouldn't be posted online, whether it's on a "blog" or what we colloquially call a "web page".
More from the survey:
Fifty-two percent of those surveyed said bloggers should have the same rights as traditional journalists, while 27 percent did not express an opinion.
[...] most respondents classed bloggers in the same category as journalists when it came to free speech [...]
[...] most people used blogs to obtain information about politics or current events.
This isn't about "blogging". The personal information bit was about what usually constitutes harassment, that just happens to come in the form of a blog.
God I love these misleading, scare-tactic titles. "AMERICANS SUPPORT BLOG CENSORSHIP", which of course brings to mind nasty, ignorant, redneck religious right wanting to censor Common Dreams and DailyKos. No, morons. They do not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens. All of a sudden that equates to wholesale BLOG CENSORSHIP? And yes, I realize that any censorship - even of that information - is still censorship, but let's get a freakin' grip, here, before people start talking about the "good little sheeple doing what Monkey Boy Bush tells them" etc., ok?
Now, here's an interesting question: If the failure is really that serious and catastrophic, how do they intend to get the shuttle to the station - or vice versa?
Well, this presumes that the shuttle is still functional enough to get to the ISS.
This is just a typical reactive strategy, e.g., the last shuttle completed its entire mission, but just *couldn't land* because of the foam anomaly. So now they'll look for this one-in-a-who-knows-how-many occurrence, and have a "rescue plan", as all the people who don't realize how complex this is asked about last time. It's just a contingency plan, because is something even remotely similar ever happened again and they didn't plan for it, NASA would be raked over the coals and heads would roll.
So, yeah, if something really bad happened, there's no guarantees the shuttle could get to the ISS at all. They just have to plan for the eventuality that it can.
Still more predictable and stable than having a shuttle with a catastrophic enough failure to require crew rescue attached to it.
Because the shuttle is only a supported flight platform for a very narrow range of parameters on a given mission. Yes, even with all the contingencies. We *know* the ISS is a predictable, stable environment, as opposed to a failed shuttle (whatever the failure is) requiring extended docking with the ISS.
Therefore, living in cramped quarters for a while and losing/abandoning a shuttle is far desirable to potentially losing a shuttle due to yet-unknown circumstances, *and* the ISS, and all of the occupants of both.
Better cramped and (relatively) safe than comfortable and (perhaps) sorry, no matter how remote the chances of a catastrophic event caused by unknown/unmanageable failures, even on orbit.
Finally - jokes aside - wouldn't you think NASA knows at least marginally what it's doing here?
Or maybe they can use...
...the *military shuttle*!! (Hello, WW fans.)