Um, "Nutscrape", ever hear the phrase "Don't try and teach your Granny to suck eggs"?
Well, on/. mis-use phrases that have specific meanings, no matter how erudite they sound.
I owned an IBM PC-AT. It replaced my IBM-XT (mine was the 498th manufactured). The "T" stood for "Advanced Technology", which to IBM meant a '286 CPU, to everyone else it meant a '286 and a copy of the IBM bus & daughterboard layout. However the cloners wanted to stop referring to IBM when selling their IBM knock-offs (or in Compaq's case their ahead-of-IBM designs) and so the euphemism "Industry Standard Architecture" or ISA was adopted and later formalized.
Oh, and when I was manager at the Computer Museum I had a (then) nifty cutting-edge ISA box on my desk to play with, heady stuff back then!
However none of those phrases are in current use to describe PC or Mac designs.
The ISA bus was superseded by IBM's attempted lock-in "MicroChannel" or MCA (man that made my life miserable with it's wonky drivers), 'the industry' responded with "Extended-ISA" or EISA. "VESA Local Bus" or VLB had a short run for video cards (fond memories of making boxes with those for architects in South America) then Intel sorted the whole mess out with their "Peripheral Component Interconnect" or PCI bus which the PC market standardized on, mostly 'cause Intel became the dominant motherboard supplier and those that didn't use their boards used their reference designs & chipsets or copied 'em with 3rd party implementations.
Apple used, it seemed, as many bus designs as they had models (and for a while that was a ridiculous number!) However the early Macs are best known for using "NuBus" then later "NuBus90". However by the mid-90's Apple had started their long march towards using commodity components and was heading all PCI, albeit with their own chipsets and firmware.
However nobody calls anyone's architecture "IBM PC-AT" or "ISA" unless they actually mean those obsolete standards. Nor does anyone use the names of the various 'official standards' that IEEE and others have formalized around the ones the industry came up with at-need and internally. Instead most folks, and this is as true inside Apple as it is in Dell, simply refer to "PC architecture" or, if doing a PowerPoint/KeyNote presentation "PC Platform" (ooooh!). And yes, although Macs have been and are "Personal Computers" everyone calls x86 consumer boxes "PCs" and Macintoshes "Macs".
Back to the state of Mac design, Apple has always had to spend a lot of money & time re-inventing the wheel with their motherboard designs. They did use pretty much the same layout as everyone else, PCI, North Bridge, South Bridge, later AGP & PCI Express etc. and of course the support circuitry was nearly always out-of-the-catalog (little "Woz-magic" there.) But with their limited budget, smaller and shorter production runs, and competing internal priorities Apple has never been a leader in terms of motherboards.
Adopting USB was a huge improvement (and it was easy for them, heck they even used their old drivers with a shim), and FireWire/1394/iLink coulda been dominant 'til Int
... the new iMac is deliciously fast when it's running Intel-ready software.
How complicated an article is it to understand? Do you see anywhere references to CPU speed? No, it's all "How does the new Mac feel running different types of applications".
It's not a Tom's Hardware chip-head review, it's a general audience article on Apple's transition to the new platform and how successful it is; it's marveling that the horse sings at all.
Indeed, I think the/. crowd at least would understand that Apple's biggest boost in speed on these machines is likely not from the Intel CPU but from the improved boot process, the faster bus, the more modern bridge chips, etc. That folks are getting their panties in a twist over CPU cycles is just inane. The biggest tuning is unlikely to be from clock cycles of x86 instructions but as much from the Intel motherboard and chipset that really outclass the traditionally anemic Apple offerings.
Indeed, there is where I think the big untold story of this whole transition is: What has happened to Apple's in-house hardware design teams? Apple used to come up with their own firmware, their own bridge chips, their own bus implementations, all of that from their own staff. Now these first two models are 99% off-the-shelf Intel OEM designs folded to fit into Mac formfactors.
So did Apple lay off their motherboard & chipset design teams? Are there teams of ex-Apple hardware folks now looking for employment? Will the next generation of Intel-Mac motherboards continue to be 99% off-the-shelf Intel or will we soon see some Apple-originated hardware on the motherboard ?
Anyway, no, "Intel-ready" refers to the new Intel-icized MacOS running Universal Binary applications (& drivers), Rosetta-based interpreted applications (& drivers), and the abandonment of Classic applications. It's not gauging the CPU but in daily use how this new generation of Macs stack up performance and software availability wise.
Claiming Pogue is making a direct gauge of CPU performance based on web page loading times is something that just isn't in the article, and it's disingenuous to make an argument based on that absent claim.
But still, the amount of time it takes for to pop up has little to do with an increase in processor power. If you want to give comparisons like that to lay-persons, thats fine. Its just that this one in particular doesn't prove anything one way or the other, and the fact that he even cites it proves his lack of any real technical prowess (therefore killing any authority he has in the first place).
The comment would be legitiately "Insightful" if Pogue were using web pages as a measure of processor power. However for those who bother to read the article will discover, he doesn't. In fact engagebot's argument is a straw man.
What you'll discover is that the new iMac is deliciously fast when it's running Intel-ready software. Just turning the machine on is a joy, because starting up now takes 20 seconds instead of 60, like the previous model; you'll want to do it again and again. Programs open up a lot faster, too: GarageBand, for example, is ready for your musical inspiration in only 9 seconds, rather than 20. Web pages appear startlingly quickly: nytimes.com pops open in about 1 second (versus 2), Amazon is ready in 2 seconds (versus 4) and MSN appears in 6 seconds (versus 8).
Pogue is clearly describing how fast the new Intel-Macs feel doing things the the old Power-Macs do, but with the new Intel-based universal applications. No reference to the CPU here, none to megafoofoos-per-second, bajillions-of-fakestones, or other like esoterica. Not even the Intel processor makes these faster. Just that this new Intel Mac boots fast and runs these Intel-compiled apps just as well or better then the older Macs.
In case anyone was too obtuse to clearly understand this the next paragraph makes this absolutely clear by spelling it out:
In other words, if your computer world is complete with programs for e-mail, the Web, word processing, graphics viewing, music playing and editing of photos, movies, basic Web sites and music tracks, then choosing the IntelliMac over the regular iMac is a no-brainer. The computer comes preloaded with all the software you need, all Intel-ready. You get a heck of a lot more speed for the same price.
"Speed". Not CPU speed, just speed. Indeed later in the article he takes care to point out all of the places where things run slower, and why, and how some won't run at all.
So, the only one "therefore killing any authority he has in the first place" is engagebot for setting up a completely false argument then using it to grind his own axe. And whoever so carelessly moderated his posting as "Insightful".
I would never say that David Pogue is an impartial source when it comes to reviewing Macintosh hardware or software.
Actually I find him to be quite accurate, if not impartial.
Is he knowledgeable? Yes. Hugely. Author of several very popular and very well respected Mac books. Knows the technologies, their histories, the players, knows how to write, and knows what folks are interested in reading.
Is he a rah-rah Mac fanboy? No.
He, like Walt Mossberg, has been quite good about calling out Apple on their failures. Any number of times he's pointed out when the emperor has no clothes, that a great-leap-forward ain't necessarily so, that Apple hasn't gotten something right.
Does he claim not to like the Mac platform? No. Does he present himself as some sort of unopinioniated ideal, absolutely agnostic on the subjects he writes about? Not at all. He is completely clear about his appreciation for the Mac and then goes ahead and reports about it rather fairly and honestly.
So, partial or not, he's a damn good source of news and reviews about the Mac platform and certainly a heck of a lot better then either the fanboys and the not-without-a-2-button-mouse cranks.
Read the review, then judge it by it's content, decide for yourself if Pogue's fondness for Macs makes him unsuitable to report on 'em.
First off the player GUI isn't the important thing, it's the underlying architecture.
MacOS pioneered a ubiquitous universal media layer with QT and making the MS codecs part of that is just plain shu-weet. Most real users aren't all that concerned about how pretty or not the default player is, the big concern is getting the material in and out of any/all applications.
Now everything, from Pages to Word to whatever, will be able to embed, play, link almost every format.
Yeah, almost. Nope, not talking Real (is anyone?), rather the latest codecs from MS. I'm told by my video geekin' buddies that Flip4Mac, nifty as it is, is last year's code and can't handle the latest 'n greatest WMP 10 codes from MS. Anyone know the truth on this, done any testing?
However, more importantly, in spite of MS's promise at MacWorld last week of another 5 years of Mac Office (all of which is good profit) word is the black spot is on Mac projects and folks are being reassigned, contractors not being extended, the MacBU folks off in Sili Valley are finding their req's from the Redmond mothership are taking longer and loonggeerrrr to fill.
If so then there really is a sea change and the gentleman's agreement between MS & Apple seems to be coming to an end. Sure MS is gonna keep the Office stuff, heck most of it started on the Mac, makes money, and is a check-off item on procurement sheets requiring cross-platform.
But media, where Apple has traditionally been strong, where the iPod reigns, where his Steveness rules both a computer company and a production studio, where cross-platform for everyone has always been the rule, may be where the real break starts to happen. Apple has always been lazy about QT under Windows (heck QT Player still doesn't make use of Overlay, making it often a pain to work with) is MS now returning the favor and poisoning their own well?
Will next year the response to "I can't get this to play on my Mac" be "Install Windows Vista on it"?
I honestly think that, after 20 years of PKI "about-to-take-off" that the tipping point isn't going to come from corporations: It's is going to come from customers, most likely of Paypal or Ebay or CitiBank or Bank of America or Walmart or CVS or Postal Service or whomever (RadioShack?).
What will drive this will be developing and promoting a decent public PKI system. "Stop by the Customer Service Counter with enough ID and someone (with a bit of training) will certify you for a "Trusted Customer Card & Code" today!"
Then all of the good things that folks promise about PKI can be told/sold to J. Random Customer, and it'll be cheaper then a toaster and as valuable as their customer affinity card.
As a marketing tool it'll be high profile, moderately high contact, and likely with enormous retention. Sure there's an educational aspect but the press can handle that, every article will just bring that much more brand-awareness. Wanna verify my online whatever? I use Brand A!
Roll out a free plugin for the top 5 email clients and the lead will be impressive. It's techie, it's "smart", it'll be like recycling without having to deal with material objects.
Sorry, I know it all seems implausable, but when public PKI gets going I think it'll be bigger then "search" & "portals" and a lot "stickier".
Use IMAP to transfer your email - think of it as the universal format. Yes it means uploading your email them downloading it again, so do it in batches if need be.
(Someone really needs to come up with a bare-bones IMAP-for-Windows craplet specifically for this purpose; forget reading PSTs just wrap a simple IMAP server, no transport backend, with mbox or maildir storage.)
BTW, about those PSTs, around and above 2 GB most versions of Outlook get really squirrely, start lopping off portions, self-corrupt, etc. So if yours is getting above 1.5 GB in size consider trimming it, creating a 2nd one, "compacting" 'em (a simple process that reclaims space used by deleted emails & other objects).
Finally, if a significant portion of your archived emails are spam take a look at the free SpamBayes for Outlook, it does a fantastic job of seperating the wheat from a chaffe, saves me at least an hour a day. Do check it's "Spam" & "Unsure" (I set 'em as "Spam" & "Spammish") folders every week or so to correct any mistakes but even after a few dozen mails you'll find it being remarkably accurate.
Oh, and it supports IMAP4 clients fine, even MS Outlook. It's what I use for alternative email contact address in case my own servers are down. It's stable, mostly relaible, accessable, and offers lots of plus features. Indeed this weekend I'm going to see about moving my photo RSS stream to it.
Their basic account is US$99.95 per year (often cheaper bought through Amazon.com), has over a million subscribers, company in business 30 years with a US$72 billion market cap, the basic account offers 1 GB storage, upgradable to 4 GB, with 10 GB transfer a month.
Email
1GB of combined email and Disk Storage
Enjoy up to five aliases for fun or to protect against unwanted mail
Access mail from your email program or web browser
Send and receive email from any Internet-connected Mac or PC
Fix typos with integrated spell-checker
Create text and photo signatures
Set an auto-reply to handle incoming email when you're on away
Read email from other POP3 & IMAP4 accounts
WebDAV
Use storage space on secure servers
View files and folders on your desktop
Drag files to your Public folder
Invite colleagues to download your documents
Access WebDAV from a Mac or a PC
Protect your Public folder with a password
Store up to 1GB; upgradeable to 4GB
Webserving
Create beautiful pages with professionially-designed templates
Publish your websites with a single click--no configuration necessary
Post blogs and podcasts without the confusion of creating RSS feeds
Add stunning online slideshows to your photo albums automatically
Set a password to keep sites private
Groups
Create a private password-protected website for group image, message board, announcements, calendar, member list, offsite links
Make a group email alias with automatic spam filtering
Manage your group with legendary ease of use
Share photos and movies on a Public web page
Let members access the Group WebDAV
Create any number of groups (each requires 100MB from your WebDAV allotment)
The Milky Way is b-i-g. The warping is not happening on a scale we'd see in our lifetimes. Indeed it likely started when the Earth was still a rock with scum problem. It'll continue long past the date the Earth is a rock with a dust problem.
Don't panic.
While dark matter (& energy), galactic distortions, and giant black holes are interesting cosmologically (and further our understanding of the universe) there's no need to start digging a hole in the back yard and buying space/time-warp-b-gone merchandise from the back of magazines.
OpenDocument is a published set of standards for office-type documents.
This differs from the Microsoft Office formats in that they're fully documented, legally unencumbered, and reasonably easy to make use of (something the MS Office formats are, in spite of repeated claims of being "open", have never actually been in any substantive way.)
This is important to the Commonwealth (= State) of Massachusetts as it recognizes it will need to be able to read it's digital files for decades, indeed centuries, into the future.
MS Office and like applications have proven to be unable to read documents written by versions only a few years old.
However it is hoped that by adopting a non-commercially-controlled standard files will be able to be read by applications yet undeveloped, from any vendor or source, without legal complexity.
The other advantage is this also "levels the playing field" for all other applications by breaking the MS Office Format lock, and will thus enable government entities and those they interact with with stop paying the "Microsoft Tax".
Microsoft has complained that this format excludes their products. It doesn't, they can develop a converter the same they have for all of the other competing formats their products read & (sometimes) write to.
Microsoft has also taken steps to get their formats also set as a standard. Whether whatever ECMA eventually publishes is actually useful is an open question but has been clearly driven by this situation.
Microsoft has also employed their PR & lobbying arms, having front organizations distribute disinformation about OpenDocument, it's effects, goals, etc.
The most visible supporter of Massachusetts adopting OpenDocument was a civil servant, Peter Quinn.
He was recently investigated for possible misuse of funds. This story received unusually prominent coverage by the leading local newspaper, on their front page.
The without-cause finding received little coverage but the employee decided he wasn't interested working under this level of personal attack and has left civil service.
The State Governor is about to run for US President and has a history of w^Hh^Ho^Hr^Hi^Hn^Hg accepting campaign contributions from interested parties, then making dubious appointments and policies.
It was widely suspected the Governor would be announce a convenient policy change after Peter Quinn left (costs to run for President!)
This story is that the policy won't change. Or at least, that is the story today. How aggresively the policy is implemented is another question, or if this policy will even stand once general attention to it has waned.
The other good news is that many other levels and jurisdictions of governements have identical concerns about using MS's formats and are themselves considering alternatives, open formats, etc.
WOW, what a GREAT IDEA! Do *EXACTLY* WHAT THEY'RE DOING!
Oh wait, you didn't bother to actually watch or look up any of this before posting, huh?
'Cause if you did you'd know that they're actually pretty attractive little boxes. Their 'unattractiveness' will be in the sense of "You're using a device my community paid for, you're not a kid, not a school-teacher, what kind of jerk are you and have you met the business end of my hoe?!" unattractive.
Regarding capitalism, yes Quantas, Nortel, Intel, Redhat, etc. are all in this entirely for altruism... NOT.
Quentas gets to sell the design commercially (they guesstimate that model will cost around US$200.) Nortel gets real-world experience in mesh networking. Redhat gets their name and OS out on hundreds of millions of devices. Intel gets to expand their market with all of those Intel-friendly applications and follow-on laptop versions.
If that's not "taking advantage of capitalism" then I dunno what is.
Y'know, if you;d actually bothered to find out what you're talking about first your post would've been legitimately insightful, instead it's just hopelessly offbase.
These are crayon & water proof.
These don't require a $150 LiOn battery, they use a hand-crank.
They're not just intended to be dumb reader devices but links to the larger world. Online encyclopedias, newspapers, updated textbooks, communicate with other kids in their native languages (IM shorthand in Urdu), get their assignments from the regional school, etc.
Lots of kids schools aren't like your wealthy western ones. They're shorter days, breaks for plantings & harvests, don't have libraries, indeed lots of these kids don't have electricity in their homes (why these laptops are often the brightest thing at night in their houses.) They have to be able to take them home, use them at night, etc.
Govt's like China allocate the equivalent of US$20/year for each kid's printed school books. With these laptops they can offer those gov't text supplied texts, a coupla thousand others, the latest news, access to encyclopedias, etc. all for negligible cost over the laptops.
Oh, and media? With a standard cheap platform lots of that can be developed quickly, by interested individuals, by non-profits, by governments, by the communities themselves. Once the 1st batches are out there the next set will find a set of tools to build further on, etc.
But, you'd know all this if you watched the videos or read any of the articles on this before rushing to post your under-informed argument against what you (incorrectly) assumed it was...
That sounds a lot like thin client hardware to me. I think the idea is to create a meshnet between the laptops and some sort of central server and then push info to the kids. That and let them look things up online at the same time.
It only sounds like that because you couldn't be bothered to do a bit more research before rushing off to post.
These are NOT thin clients, they are fully stand-alone devices. The mesh part only comes into play for communications, not for operations. There is no central server, no must-be-in-range-to-work, etc.
Think about it, the goal is these kids can sit with these after dinner and be the first first in their family able to read a story, in their local language, to their siblings before bed, to do their homework, to learn about the world beyond their village. Do you really think that a thin client that only works within 100 meters of the district school is something folks who actually do put time & energy into these ideas would go for?
C'mon, for the time it took you to post you could've answered your (wrong) guess for yourself.
Since most of the posters seem woefully under-informed (you DID watch the video before posting?) here are responses to a few of the silly comments that have already come up:
Q: Why stop these US$100 laptops from being sold?
A: They're not. Quantas, their manufacturer, is free to sell the same item to anyone. However those commercial versions cost will be closer to US$200.
Q: Why is this only for 3rd World places?
A: It's not, the State of Massachusetts and others are already committed to large purchases. Why not get your community involved?
Q: Why insist on targeted distribution?
A: Because all the research shows that 'seeding' 1 per 5 kids or whatever doesn't have the same network effect (figuratively & literally) that ubiquitous use in an area does.
Q: Why do these kids need laptops? Why not food/water/medicine?
A: They need all of those, and those are vital things to see they get. But once those immediate needs are met the long term goal of providing an education is what will help these kids and their communities be self-sufficient, indeed able to assist other neighboring communities.
Q: Where's the software for this?
A: It's Redhat Linux, this is/., are you serious? OK, less inflammatory answer: With a standard cheap platform out there individuals, organizations, governments, and the communities receiving these will be able to develop what they can take advantage of.
Q: So what's to keep unscrupulous folks from buying these out the back door of warehouses?
A: First the local communities will likely look down on this theft of their resources pretty intensely. Second the goal is to make any trade in these universally unsavory. Will it be 100% effective? No. But this is an easy issue to rally behind and the $100 models will be distinctive from their commercial kin.
Turning emails into text files, all graphics attachments into PNGs, etc. isn't the issue.
How all of this stuff is connected, who it came from, when it was sent, all of that is something Historians (or Special Prosecutors) will need to know. Email from "aa204@whitehouse.gov" to "mikhail@kremvax.su" subject "Plans for Wall" isn't particularly useful if we don't have any way of tracking who aa204 was or knowing it was composed on Nov. 9, 1989 but not actually sent until Nov.10, 1989.
Face it, most email systems are complex special-purpose systems made up of huge webs of interdependencies; from their hardware to their OS to their various applications. Imagine trying to pull emails, address books, mailing lists, undelivereds, calendars, attachments, cc's, bcc's, forwarded-forwarded-forwarded records etc. from a mass of DEC All-In-1 systems, IBM Profs, MS Exchange v.anything, and a the/.-popular mbox/maildir/postfix/cyrus/exim/sendmail/dovecot/l dap/etc. environments...
Now figure out some reasonably stable format to save 'em all in where they can be referenced, cross-referenced, timelines produced, who-knew-what-when deduced, identities tracked, policy propagation studied, etc. That's not the territory of thousands of text files, or PNGs, it's a data-miner's nightmare and what the Nat'l Archives are facing.
So please, stop being quick-to-the-keyboards "Well d'uh"/-trollers and assume that some reasonably clever and knowledgeable folks have already considered the problem and are appalled at it's complexity. Yes, there are possibly some even more clever & knowledgeable folks who read/. but the text-&-png crowd is just so much wasted bits.
At least the big-database folks are probably closer to what is going to be required, and anyone who is starting to think that mebbe proprietary undocumented databases cost us all more in the long-term then they're worth are even more (IMHO) on the right track...
This could as easily imply that, in order to succeed, these folks had to get out of Carnegie Mellon AI and go to Stanford .
I've no inside knowledge, but from the article it appears CMU was locked into the-same-just-more/bigger/faster strategy and the team that decamped to Stanford came up with some innovative real-time confidence-based sensor interpretation systems. It may well be that at CMU they wouldn't have been supported in this whereas at Stamford, without the established regime at CMU, they were free to do so...
Quinn was a good civil servant
on
Peter Quinn Resigns
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The Boston Globe article implying Peter Quinn acted improperly, and Governor Romney's investigation into such, was a blatantly paid-for political hatchet job. The parties involved, including Mitt Romney and Boston Globe staff reporter Stephen Kurkjian, should be held responsable for this loss of valuable employee.
Sharing their disgrace should be Fox News reporter James Prendergast for reprinting alarmist, baseless, claims by Microsoft front organization "Americans for Technology Leadership" about OpenDocument, further speading disinformation on the whole topic.
What Peter Quinn and others in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of Information Technology was trying to do was set a sane long-term document strategy for a state government whose records include the oldest constitution in the world (predates the US Constitution.)
If we can't read documents that were generated by proprietary formats only a few years old how can we manage laws, deeds, and other material looking forward decades and centuries? At least with OpenDocument there will be a published freely re-implementable file format that can be widely used as time goes on.
As to MS claiming their formats are "open" they've sung that song over and over yet each time it has proven to be untrue as critical portions of their formats are consistently undocumented or legally encumbered. Heck they can't even reliably read back their own material from products a generation or two prior.
MS's real fear is that by breaking the cycle of locked-in file formats they'll have to compete on a level playing field with alternative products. The truth is it would take them a few days to come up with an OpenDocument converter, the same as they've done for dozens of competing formats.
Whoever hires Peter Quinn will be getting a fellow with considerable professional integrity. Whether his replacement shows the same level of honesty and dedication is a serious concern, particularly considering Governor (& future Presidential candidate) Mitt Romney's willingness to whore out critical appointments in return for special-interest campaign contributions.
I wonder how MS will be funneling the money this time? Will they be washing it through Republican stronghold Staples Corporation or through some other ersatz 'grass roots' astro-turfing front like Americans for Technology Leadership?
Folks (and particularly this/. blurb) are conflating two different topics: ISPs offering higher advertised speeds & ISPs offering unadvertised traffic-shaping, preferential prioritization, port blocking, and even intentionally degraded transport for competing services.
The first, higher speed, is "a good thing": A faster connection is always nicer though as many have pointed out the limits are often at the server-end, not the client end. Also the entire ISP model is asynchronous, assuming that we'll all be good little consumers and never be transmitting anything but the occs'l email and requests for more packets, not having our own servers or sending our own audio or video streams.
This is pretty much not what Tim Berners-Lee was thinking when he first developed his World Wide Web, and what he and others have been trying to rectify ever since. Indeed it is contrary to much of the intrinsic nature of the internet architecture where all peers are inherently considered equal and it is all superficially one big dumb network with the clever bits innovating at the edges. Unfortunately this is also pretty much contrary to what ISPs and media companies would very much like everything to be; just another variation of the centralized broadcast model where they plug in a pipe and you get to choose ABC or Disney (oh, they're the same!)
The second topic, monkeying about with what, where, and how packets get transported, is a creeping phenomena that is indeed slowly taking hold. A good early example is the TOS for many of the 'unlimited' wireless digital data services from cellphone companies:
Verizon EDO Terms-of-Service
Unlimited NationalAccess/BroadbandAccess services cannot be used (1) for uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games, (2) with server devices or with host computer applications, including, but not limited to, Web camera posts or broadcasts, automatic data feeds, Voice over IP (VoIP), automated machine-to-machine connections, or peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, or (3) as a substitute or backup for private lines or dedicated data connections.
"Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'unlimited' that I wasn't previously aware of."
Already many ISP's block ports, typically port 25 to either stop email spamming or prevent customers from using 3rd party email servers. Also port 139 is often blocked, so Windows users don't accidentally share the contents of their hard drives to the online world. However many go on to block (or significantly degrade traffic on) ports for unambiguously self-interested reasons, such as p2p, or increasingly vendors with whom they compete. One well known example is Telus in Canada who black-holed traffic to a union website (and several thousand other websites unfortunate enough to be co-hosted with it) during a strike. Another is Rogers, also in Canada, who are apparently currently messing about with traffic to/from Apple's iTunes websites.
VOIP is the big target these days. Already several rural US ISPs have had their hands slapped for trying to block it. The ISPs were extensions of the local rural phone companies, heavily Federally subsidized, who'd gone into the data business (also often Federally subsidized). However when their customers stopped making analog calls and started making cheaper VOIP ones they tried to put a stop to this loss of revenue / increase in traffic. Ultimately they were denied this but the issue is one larger and larger ISP's are taking up. BellSouth's chairman and others have increasingly been making their own noises along these lines, and this could indeed be the big flash-point w
I think the point is because its about fashion this leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy
So Gartner pronouncing:
"This will be the year of Tablet Windows!".
means we all went out and bought Tablet PCs last year?
Um, raise your hands... both of you...
No dear, the point is that they're codifying what is already pretty much the popular wisdom amongst their clients. THAT was the point of my post.
Could they make Raspberry more popular next year? Yes. Could they decree Avacado is back? Sure they could, but only the foolish Tablet PC developers would listen to that prediction.
Just to clarify the hyperbole, CAUS is a private consultancy providing color popularity forecasting. They have a panel of folks from different parts of the color industry (clothing, paints, dyes, advertising, etc.) who are all expected to be 'in tune' with current trends. That panel generates a series of reports that interested parties subscribe to to help guide their planning.
Thus they're no different from Gartner pronouncing "Small Form Factor PC's will be hot next year!" or "This will be the year of Tablet Windows!".
Nothing Orwellian, no Central Planning, just the same sort of forecasting that happens in every trade & industry.
I've a number of friends who are subscribers to CAUS's & others reports, they say they're generally pretty on, and are rarely much of a surprise to folks paying attention in their fields. Indeed I was told 2 years ago by a buddy to watch, last year and especially this year look for holiday decorations to have lots of purple and black and raspberry and long skinny legs would be very in; he was right.
Just like in business practices and coding strategies there is a lot of group-think that keeps everyone sorta in sync with each other (beyond everyone knowing that hemlines HAVE to change up or down every few years). Occasionally there are huge shifts caused by outside influences, fluorescent colors in the 60's due to dyes becoming available, now shimmer surfaces because durable ones have become relatively cheap, but even those are fairly well anticipated.
If you're interested enough try writing a dozen or so folks you think are very 'in tune' with an area of interest, then next year see how accurate they were. If you can show a decent track record of getting good predictions then hey, I smell $$ subscriber report...
Oh, and those color predictions: Good to keep in mind when painting the living room, buying furniture or a new car.
Canada's politics are different enough that direct comparison, particularly for something so nuanced as political parties, is problematic at best. The Economist has a good over-view in their Dec. 1st/3rd print edition titled "Canada's wintry election" (available online after viewing an ad, go to Print then Dec. 3rd, it's the cover story.)
Suffice to say that just like the "Democrats" aren't the US's party about Democracy and the "Republicans" aren't all about a Republic the Canadian "Liberal" party isn't necessarily a species of the overly-broad term "Liberal". Indeed the term "Liberal" doesn't even match up terribly well between the two countries, and not with Canada being invariably the more 'liberal' of the two meanings.
My advice is if you're truly interested in getting a non-US view of the US & the world then consider spending a week or so watching the news from any Canadian (or other) network. CBC is quite good, it's peer CTV is also. After a week or two of viewing you'll start to become aware of the subtly different assumptions made, notice the implicit values are different, the sub-texts & code words don't match up to your US ones. It's also tremendously edifying to compare & contrast the same stories from both sides of the border, what leads the news and what doesn't, what points are expounded upon, etc.
I think he is a college professor. Meaning that he will have to teach a couple of classes and sign up for grants for whatever whim he has at the time. I have respect for real Professors who feel teaching Higher Education as a passion and enjoys the topic of their choice. But I don't have much for RMS where he just uses his classes to spit out more dribble and get more mindless followers, and teach a little bit of the topic.
You "think he is a college professor", then go on state declaratively "he just uses his classes to spit out more dribble"?!!
And it's modded Insightful?!
How about acknowledging you don't know jack-all about what RMS does for a living? And instead of an apparently unsupported assumption of what his classroom is like (because, as far as I know, he's never taught a full-term accredited course) just make it clear you have strong views on what you think he is like in person, and that you disagree with his views?
In short: Talk about the ideas & ideals, not your fictional life for the person espousing the ideas & ideals.
(Oh, and public vowel-movements are unseemly; the paragraph is the writers friend!)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, on /. mis-use phrases that have specific meanings, no matter how erudite they sound.
I owned an IBM PC-AT. It replaced my IBM-XT (mine was the 498th manufactured). The "T" stood for "Advanced Technology", which to IBM meant a '286 CPU, to everyone else it meant a '286 and a copy of the IBM bus & daughterboard layout. However the cloners wanted to stop referring to IBM when selling their IBM knock-offs (or in Compaq's case their ahead-of-IBM designs) and so the euphemism "Industry Standard Architecture" or ISA was adopted and later formalized.
Oh, and when I was manager at the Computer Museum I had a (then) nifty cutting-edge ISA box on my desk to play with, heady stuff back then!
However none of those phrases are in current use to describe PC or Mac designs.
The ISA bus was superseded by IBM's attempted lock-in "MicroChannel" or MCA (man that made my life miserable with it's wonky drivers), 'the industry' responded with "Extended-ISA" or EISA. "VESA Local Bus" or VLB had a short run for video cards (fond memories of making boxes with those for architects in South America) then Intel sorted the whole mess out with their "Peripheral Component Interconnect" or PCI bus which the PC market standardized on, mostly 'cause Intel became the dominant motherboard supplier and those that didn't use their boards used their reference designs & chipsets or copied 'em with 3rd party implementations.
Apple used, it seemed, as many bus designs as they had models (and for a while that was a ridiculous number!) However the early Macs are best known for using "NuBus" then later "NuBus90". However by the mid-90's Apple had started their long march towards using commodity components and was heading all PCI, albeit with their own chipsets and firmware.
However nobody calls anyone's architecture "IBM PC-AT" or "ISA" unless they actually mean those obsolete standards. Nor does anyone use the names of the various 'official standards' that IEEE and others have formalized around the ones the industry came up with at-need and internally. Instead most folks, and this is as true inside Apple as it is in Dell, simply refer to "PC architecture" or, if doing a PowerPoint/KeyNote presentation "PC Platform" (ooooh!). And yes, although Macs have been and are "Personal Computers" everyone calls x86 consumer boxes "PCs" and Macintoshes "Macs".
Back to the state of Mac design, Apple has always had to spend a lot of money & time re-inventing the wheel with their motherboard designs. They did use pretty much the same layout as everyone else, PCI, North Bridge, South Bridge, later AGP & PCI Express etc. and of course the support circuitry was nearly always out-of-the-catalog (little "Woz-magic" there.) But with their limited budget, smaller and shorter production runs, and competing internal priorities Apple has never been a leader in terms of motherboards.
Adopting USB was a huge improvement (and it was easy for them, heck they even used their old drivers with a shim), and FireWire/1394/iLink coulda been dominant 'til Int
How complicated an article is it to understand? Do you see anywhere references to CPU speed? No, it's all "How does the new Mac feel running different types of applications".
It's not a Tom's Hardware chip-head review, it's a general audience article on Apple's transition to the new platform and how successful it is; it's marveling that the horse sings at all.
Indeed, I think the /. crowd at least would understand that Apple's biggest boost in speed on these machines is likely not from the Intel CPU but from the improved boot process, the faster bus, the more modern bridge chips, etc. That folks are getting their panties in a twist over CPU cycles is just inane. The biggest tuning is unlikely to be from clock cycles of x86 instructions but as much from the Intel motherboard and chipset that really outclass the traditionally anemic Apple offerings.
Indeed, there is where I think the big untold story of this whole transition is: What has happened to Apple's in-house hardware design teams? Apple used to come up with their own firmware, their own bridge chips, their own bus implementations, all of that from their own staff. Now these first two models are 99% off-the-shelf Intel OEM designs folded to fit into Mac formfactors.
So did Apple lay off their motherboard & chipset design teams? Are there teams of ex-Apple hardware folks now looking for employment? Will the next generation of Intel-Mac motherboards continue to be 99% off-the-shelf Intel or will we soon see some Apple-originated hardware on the motherboard ?
Anyway, no, "Intel-ready" refers to the new Intel-icized MacOS running Universal Binary applications (& drivers), Rosetta-based interpreted applications (& drivers), and the abandonment of Classic applications. It's not gauging the CPU but in daily use how this new generation of Macs stack up performance and software availability wise.
Claiming Pogue is making a direct gauge of CPU performance based on web page loading times is something that just isn't in the article, and it's disingenuous to make an argument based on that absent claim.
The comment would be legitiately "Insightful" if Pogue were using web pages as a measure of processor power. However for those who bother to read the article will discover, he doesn't. In fact engagebot's argument is a straw man.
Pogue writes:Pogue is clearly describing how fast the new Intel-Macs feel doing things the the old Power-Macs do, but with the new Intel-based universal applications. No reference to the CPU here, none to megafoofoos-per-second, bajillions-of-fakestones, or other like esoterica. Not even the Intel processor makes these faster. Just that this new Intel Mac boots fast and runs these Intel-compiled apps just as well or better then the older Macs.
In case anyone was too obtuse to clearly understand this the next paragraph makes this absolutely clear by spelling it out:
Pogue writes:"Speed". Not CPU speed, just speed. Indeed later in the article he takes care to point out all of the places where things run slower, and why, and how some won't run at all.
So, the only one "therefore killing any authority he has in the first place" is engagebot for setting up a completely false argument then using it to grind his own axe. And whoever so carelessly moderated his posting as "Insightful".
Is he knowledgeable? Yes. Hugely. Author of several very popular and very well respected Mac books. Knows the technologies, their histories, the players, knows how to write, and knows what folks are interested in reading.
Is he a rah-rah Mac fanboy? No.
He, like Walt Mossberg, has been quite good about calling out Apple on their failures. Any number of times he's pointed out when the emperor has no clothes, that a great-leap-forward ain't necessarily so, that Apple hasn't gotten something right.
Does he claim not to like the Mac platform? No. Does he present himself as some sort of unopinioniated ideal, absolutely agnostic on the subjects he writes about? Not at all. He is completely clear about his appreciation for the Mac and then goes ahead and reports about it rather fairly and honestly.
So, partial or not, he's a damn good source of news and reviews about the Mac platform and certainly a heck of a lot better then either the fanboys and the not-without-a-2-button-mouse cranks.
Read the review, then judge it by it's content, decide for yourself if Pogue's fondness for Macs makes him unsuitable to report on 'em.
I heard that George W Bush is advocating Microsoft open-source WMP for the Mac!
(Like nobody saw that coming!)
Was that a "George job"? Is it against Fed. law?
MacOS pioneered a ubiquitous universal media layer with QT and making the MS codecs part of that is just plain shu-weet. Most real users aren't all that concerned about how pretty or not the default player is, the big concern is getting the material in and out of any/all applications.
Now everything, from Pages to Word to whatever, will be able to embed, play, link almost every format.
Yeah, almost. Nope, not talking Real (is anyone?), rather the latest codecs from MS. I'm told by my video geekin' buddies that Flip4Mac, nifty as it is, is last year's code and can't handle the latest 'n greatest WMP 10 codes from MS. Anyone know the truth on this, done any testing?
However, more importantly, in spite of MS's promise at MacWorld last week of another 5 years of Mac Office (all of which is good profit) word is the black spot is on Mac projects and folks are being reassigned, contractors not being extended, the MacBU folks off in Sili Valley are finding their req's from the Redmond mothership are taking longer and loonggeerrrr to fill.
If so then there really is a sea change and the gentleman's agreement between MS & Apple seems to be coming to an end. Sure MS is gonna keep the Office stuff, heck most of it started on the Mac, makes money, and is a check-off item on procurement sheets requiring cross-platform.
But media, where Apple has traditionally been strong, where the iPod reigns, where his Steveness rules both a computer company and a production studio, where cross-platform for everyone has always been the rule, may be where the real break starts to happen. Apple has always been lazy about QT under Windows (heck QT Player still doesn't make use of Overlay, making it often a pain to work with) is MS now returning the favor and poisoning their own well?
Will next year the response to "I can't get this to play on my Mac" be "Install Windows Vista on it"?
I honestly think that, after 20 years of PKI "about-to-take-off" that the tipping point isn't going to come from corporations: It's is going to come from customers, most likely of Paypal or Ebay or CitiBank or Bank of America or Walmart or CVS or Postal Service or whomever (RadioShack?).
What will drive this will be developing and promoting a decent public PKI system. "Stop by the Customer Service Counter with enough ID and someone (with a bit of training) will certify you for a "Trusted Customer Card & Code" today!"
Then all of the good things that folks promise about PKI can be told/sold to J. Random Customer, and it'll be cheaper then a toaster and as valuable as their customer affinity card.
As a marketing tool it'll be high profile, moderately high contact, and likely with enormous retention. Sure there's an educational aspect but the press can handle that, every article will just bring that much more brand-awareness. Wanna verify my online whatever? I use Brand A!
Roll out a free plugin for the top 5 email clients and the lead will be impressive. It's techie, it's "smart", it'll be like recycling without having to deal with material objects.
Sorry, I know it all seems implausable, but when public PKI gets going I think it'll be bigger then "search" & "portals" and a lot "stickier".
(Someone really needs to come up with a bare-bones IMAP-for-Windows craplet specifically for this purpose; forget reading PSTs just wrap a simple IMAP server, no transport backend, with mbox or maildir storage.)
BTW, about those PSTs, around and above 2 GB most versions of Outlook get really squirrely, start lopping off portions, self-corrupt, etc. So if yours is getting above 1.5 GB in size consider trimming it, creating a 2nd one, "compacting" 'em (a simple process that reclaims space used by deleted emails & other objects).
Finally, if a significant portion of your archived emails are spam take a look at the free SpamBayes for Outlook, it does a fantastic job of seperating the wheat from a chaffe, saves me at least an hour a day. Do check it's "Spam" & "Unsure" (I set 'em as "Spam" & "Spammish") folders every week or so to correct any mistakes but even after a few dozen mails you'll find it being remarkably accurate.
Oh, and it supports IMAP4 clients fine, even MS Outlook. It's what I use for alternative email contact address in case my own servers are down. It's stable, mostly relaible, accessable, and offers lots of plus features. Indeed this weekend I'm going to see about moving my photo RSS stream to it.
Their basic account is US$99.95 per year (often cheaper bought through Amazon.com), has over a million subscribers, company in business 30 years with a US$72 billion market cap, the basic account offers 1 GB storage, upgradable to 4 GB, with 10 GB transfer a month.
Email
WebDAV
Webserving
Groups
Who's it from?
Well, uh.... umm.... Mac.com
The Milky Way is b-i-g. The warping is not happening on a scale we'd see in our lifetimes. Indeed it likely started when the Earth was still a rock with scum problem. It'll continue long past the date the Earth is a rock with a dust problem.
Don't panic.
While dark matter (& energy), galactic distortions, and giant black holes are interesting cosmologically (and further our understanding of the universe) there's no need to start digging a hole in the back yard and buying space/time-warp-b-gone merchandise from the back of magazines.
OpenDocument is a published set of standards for office-type documents.
This differs from the Microsoft Office formats in that they're fully documented, legally unencumbered, and reasonably easy to make use of (something the MS Office formats are, in spite of repeated claims of being "open", have never actually been in any substantive way.)
This is important to the Commonwealth (= State) of Massachusetts as it recognizes it will need to be able to read it's digital files for decades, indeed centuries, into the future. MS Office and like applications have proven to be unable to read documents written by versions only a few years old.
However it is hoped that by adopting a non-commercially-controlled standard files will be able to be read by applications yet undeveloped, from any vendor or source, without legal complexity.
The other advantage is this also "levels the playing field" for all other applications by breaking the MS Office Format lock, and will thus enable government entities and those they interact with with stop paying the "Microsoft Tax".
Microsoft has complained that this format excludes their products. It doesn't, they can develop a converter the same they have for all of the other competing formats their products read & (sometimes) write to.
Microsoft has also taken steps to get their formats also set as a standard. Whether whatever ECMA eventually publishes is actually useful is an open question but has been clearly driven by this situation.
Microsoft has also employed their PR & lobbying arms, having front organizations distribute disinformation about OpenDocument, it's effects, goals, etc.
The most visible supporter of Massachusetts adopting OpenDocument was a civil servant, Peter Quinn.
He was recently investigated for possible misuse of funds. This story received unusually prominent coverage by the leading local newspaper, on their front page.
The without-cause finding received little coverage but the employee decided he wasn't interested working under this level of personal attack and has left civil service.
The State Governor is about to run for US President and has a history of w ^H h ^H o ^H r ^H i ^H n ^H g accepting campaign contributions from interested parties, then making dubious appointments and policies.
It was widely suspected the Governor would be announce a convenient policy change after Peter Quinn left (costs to run for President!)
This story is that the policy won't change. Or at least, that is the story today. How aggresively the policy is implemented is another question, or if this policy will even stand once general attention to it has waned.
The other good news is that many other levels and jurisdictions of governements have identical concerns about using MS's formats and are themselves considering alternatives, open formats, etc.
Oh wait, you didn't bother to actually watch or look up any of this before posting, huh?
'Cause if you did you'd know that they're actually pretty attractive little boxes. Their 'unattractiveness' will be in the sense of "You're using a device my community paid for, you're not a kid, not a school-teacher, what kind of jerk are you and have you met the business end of my hoe?!" unattractive.
Regarding capitalism, yes Quantas, Nortel, Intel, Redhat, etc. are all in this entirely for altruism... NOT.
Quentas gets to sell the design commercially (they guesstimate that model will cost around US$200.) Nortel gets real-world experience in mesh networking. Redhat gets their name and OS out on hundreds of millions of devices. Intel gets to expand their market with all of those Intel-friendly applications and follow-on laptop versions.
If that's not "taking advantage of capitalism" then I dunno what is.
These are crayon & water proof.
These don't require a $150 LiOn battery, they use a hand-crank.
They're not just intended to be dumb reader devices but links to the larger world. Online encyclopedias, newspapers, updated textbooks, communicate with other kids in their native languages (IM shorthand in Urdu), get their assignments from the regional school, etc.
Lots of kids schools aren't like your wealthy western ones. They're shorter days, breaks for plantings & harvests, don't have libraries, indeed lots of these kids don't have electricity in their homes (why these laptops are often the brightest thing at night in their houses.) They have to be able to take them home, use them at night, etc.
Govt's like China allocate the equivalent of US$20/year for each kid's printed school books. With these laptops they can offer those gov't text supplied texts, a coupla thousand others, the latest news, access to encyclopedias, etc. all for negligible cost over the laptops.
Oh, and media? With a standard cheap platform lots of that can be developed quickly, by interested individuals, by non-profits, by governments, by the communities themselves. Once the 1st batches are out there the next set will find a set of tools to build further on, etc.
But, you'd know all this if you watched the videos or read any of the articles on this before rushing to post your under-informed argument against what you (incorrectly) assumed it was...
These are NOT thin clients, they are fully stand-alone devices. The mesh part only comes into play for communications, not for operations. There is no central server, no must-be-in-range-to-work, etc.
Think about it, the goal is these kids can sit with these after dinner and be the first first in their family able to read a story, in their local language, to their siblings before bed, to do their homework, to learn about the world beyond their village. Do you really think that a thin client that only works within 100 meters of the district school is something folks who actually do put time & energy into these ideas would go for?
C'mon, for the time it took you to post you could've answered your (wrong) guess for yourself.
A: They're not. Quantas, their manufacturer, is free to sell the same item to anyone. However those commercial versions cost will be closer to US$200.
A: It's not, the State of Massachusetts and others are already committed to large purchases. Why not get your community involved?
A: Because all the research shows that 'seeding' 1 per 5 kids or whatever doesn't have the same network effect (figuratively & literally) that ubiquitous use in an area does.
A: They need all of those, and those are vital things to see they get. But once those immediate needs are met the long term goal of providing an education is what will help these kids and their communities be self-sufficient, indeed able to assist other neighboring communities.
A: It's Redhat Linux, this is
A: First the local communities will likely look down on this theft of their resources pretty intensely. Second the goal is to make any trade in these universally unsavory. Will it be 100% effective? No. But this is an easy issue to rally behind and the $100 models will be distinctive from their commercial kin.
How all of this stuff is connected, who it came from, when it was sent, all of that is something Historians (or Special Prosecutors) will need to know. Email from "aa204@whitehouse.gov" to "mikhail@kremvax.su" subject "Plans for Wall" isn't particularly useful if we don't have any way of tracking who aa204 was or knowing it was composed on Nov. 9, 1989 but not actually sent until Nov.10, 1989.
Face it, most email systems are complex special-purpose systems made up of huge webs of interdependencies; from their hardware to their OS to their various applications. Imagine trying to pull emails, address books, mailing lists, undelivereds, calendars, attachments, cc's, bcc's, forwarded-forwarded-forwarded records etc. from a mass of DEC All-In-1 systems, IBM Profs, MS Exchange v.anything, and a the /.-popular mbox/maildir/postfix/cyrus/exim/sendmail/dovecot/l dap/etc. environments...
Now figure out some reasonably stable format to save 'em all in where they can be referenced, cross-referenced, timelines produced, who-knew-what-when deduced, identities tracked, policy propagation studied, etc. That's not the territory of thousands of text files, or PNGs, it's a data-miner's nightmare and what the Nat'l Archives are facing.
So please, stop being quick-to-the-keyboards "Well d'uh" /-trollers and assume that some reasonably clever and knowledgeable folks have already considered the problem and are appalled at it's complexity. Yes, there are possibly some even more clever & knowledgeable folks who read /. but the text-&-png crowd is just so much wasted bits.
At least the big-database folks are probably closer to what is going to be required, and anyone who is starting to think that mebbe proprietary undocumented databases cost us all more in the long-term then they're worth are even more (IMHO) on the right track...
I've no inside knowledge, but from the article it appears CMU was locked into the-same-just-more/bigger/faster strategy and the team that decamped to Stanford came up with some innovative real-time confidence-based sensor interpretation systems. It may well be that at CMU they wouldn't have been supported in this whereas at Stamford, without the established regime at CMU, they were free to do so...
Sharing their disgrace should be Fox News reporter James Prendergast for reprinting alarmist, baseless, claims by Microsoft front organization "Americans for Technology Leadership" about OpenDocument, further speading disinformation on the whole topic.
What Peter Quinn and others in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Office of Information Technology was trying to do was set a sane long-term document strategy for a state government whose records include the oldest constitution in the world (predates the US Constitution.)
If we can't read documents that were generated by proprietary formats only a few years old how can we manage laws, deeds, and other material looking forward decades and centuries? At least with OpenDocument there will be a published freely re-implementable file format that can be widely used as time goes on.
As to MS claiming their formats are "open" they've sung that song over and over yet each time it has proven to be untrue as critical portions of their formats are consistently undocumented or legally encumbered. Heck they can't even reliably read back their own material from products a generation or two prior.
MS's real fear is that by breaking the cycle of locked-in file formats they'll have to compete on a level playing field with alternative products. The truth is it would take them a few days to come up with an OpenDocument converter, the same as they've done for dozens of competing formats.
Whoever hires Peter Quinn will be getting a fellow with considerable professional integrity. Whether his replacement shows the same level of honesty and dedication is a serious concern, particularly considering Governor (& future Presidential candidate) Mitt Romney's willingness to whore out critical appointments in return for special-interest campaign contributions.
I wonder how MS will be funneling the money this time? Will they be washing it through Republican stronghold Staples Corporation or through some other ersatz 'grass roots' astro-turfing front like Americans for Technology Leadership?
The first, higher speed, is "a good thing": A faster connection is always nicer though as many have pointed out the limits are often at the server-end, not the client end. Also the entire ISP model is asynchronous, assuming that we'll all be good little consumers and never be transmitting anything but the occs'l email and requests for more packets, not having our own servers or sending our own audio or video streams.
This is pretty much not what Tim Berners-Lee was thinking when he first developed his World Wide Web, and what he and others have been trying to rectify ever since. Indeed it is contrary to much of the intrinsic nature of the internet architecture where all peers are inherently considered equal and it is all superficially one big dumb network with the clever bits innovating at the edges. Unfortunately this is also pretty much contrary to what ISPs and media companies would very much like everything to be; just another variation of the centralized broadcast model where they plug in a pipe and you get to choose ABC or Disney (oh, they're the same!)
The second topic, monkeying about with what, where, and how packets get transported, is a creeping phenomena that is indeed slowly taking hold. A good early example is the TOS for many of the 'unlimited' wireless digital data services from cellphone companies:
To borrow a line from HHGTTG:
Already many ISP's block ports, typically port 25 to either stop email spamming or prevent customers from using 3rd party email servers. Also port 139 is often blocked, so Windows users don't accidentally share the contents of their hard drives to the online world. However many go on to block (or significantly degrade traffic on) ports for unambiguously self-interested reasons, such as p2p, or increasingly vendors with whom they compete. One well known example is Telus in Canada who black-holed traffic to a union website (and several thousand other websites unfortunate enough to be co-hosted with it) during a strike. Another is Rogers, also in Canada, who are apparently currently messing about with traffic to/from Apple's iTunes websites.
VOIP is the big target these days. Already several rural US ISPs have had their hands slapped for trying to block it. The ISPs were extensions of the local rural phone companies, heavily Federally subsidized, who'd gone into the data business (also often Federally subsidized). However when their customers stopped making analog calls and started making cheaper VOIP ones they tried to put a stop to this loss of revenue / increase in traffic. Ultimately they were denied this but the issue is one larger and larger ISP's are taking up. BellSouth's chairman and others have increasingly been making their own noises along these lines, and this could indeed be the big flash-point w
Um, raise your hands... both of you...
No dear, the point is that they're codifying what is already pretty much the popular wisdom amongst their clients. THAT was the point of my post.
Could they make Raspberry more popular next year? Yes. Could they decree Avacado is back? Sure they could, but only the foolish Tablet PC developers would listen to that prediction.
Thus they're no different from Gartner pronouncing "Small Form Factor PC's will be hot next year!" or "This will be the year of Tablet Windows!".
Nothing Orwellian, no Central Planning, just the same sort of forecasting that happens in every trade & industry.
I've a number of friends who are subscribers to CAUS's & others reports, they say they're generally pretty on, and are rarely much of a surprise to folks paying attention in their fields. Indeed I was told 2 years ago by a buddy to watch, last year and especially this year look for holiday decorations to have lots of purple and black and raspberry and long skinny legs would be very in; he was right.
Just like in business practices and coding strategies there is a lot of group-think that keeps everyone sorta in sync with each other (beyond everyone knowing that hemlines HAVE to change up or down every few years). Occasionally there are huge shifts caused by outside influences, fluorescent colors in the 60's due to dyes becoming available, now shimmer surfaces because durable ones have become relatively cheap, but even those are fairly well anticipated.
If you're interested enough try writing a dozen or so folks you think are very 'in tune' with an area of interest, then next year see how accurate they were. If you can show a decent track record of getting good predictions then hey, I smell $$ subscriber report...
Oh, and those color predictions: Good to keep in mind when painting the living room, buying furniture or a new car.
Suffice to say that just like the "Democrats" aren't the US's party about Democracy and the "Republicans" aren't all about a Republic the Canadian "Liberal" party isn't necessarily a species of the overly-broad term "Liberal". Indeed the term "Liberal" doesn't even match up terribly well between the two countries, and not with Canada being invariably the more 'liberal' of the two meanings.
My advice is if you're truly interested in getting a non-US view of the US & the world then consider spending a week or so watching the news from any Canadian (or other) network. CBC is quite good, it's peer CTV is also. After a week or two of viewing you'll start to become aware of the subtly different assumptions made, notice the implicit values are different, the sub-texts & code words don't match up to your US ones. It's also tremendously edifying to compare & contrast the same stories from both sides of the border, what leads the news and what doesn't, what points are expounded upon, etc.
Care to provide a citation of this 'fact'?
And it's modded Insightful?!
How about acknowledging you don't know jack-all about what RMS does for a living? And instead of an apparently unsupported assumption of what his classroom is like (because, as far as I know, he's never taught a full-term accredited course) just make it clear you have strong views on what you think he is like in person, and that you disagree with his views?
In short: Talk about the ideas & ideals, not your fictional life for the person espousing the ideas & ideals.
(Oh, and public vowel-movements are unseemly; the paragraph is the writers friend!)