It's short on details, but presumably they weren't running a P2P network.
If it is short on details, who is Slashdot to make these presumptions? This is a little bit like unabashed Slashdot-style Microsoft-bashing, when not enough is known and the editors take their potshots at Microsoft anyway, driven by personal biases.
Some bastions of capitalism are getting into the open-source spirit -- not only using the software, but contributing code fixes and other mods, according to an article in today's Computerworld.
Anyone who has used the code licensed under 'viral' (read GPL) open-source licenses cannot close their source code. If they can't close it and it is useful to them, they might as well distribute it and contribute to the open-source movement. By posting a story like this, and putting it in such a newsworthy fashion as indicated above seems to imply that open-source is the domain of pinko-Commie bastards, into which bastions of capitalism are finally entering. Don't forget, capitalism and open-source are independent concepts. Business models of software companies can be plotted on a two-dimensional plane with 'code freedom' and 'price' as the two axes.
The last couple of stories are obviously April Fool's stories, but there is no indication from Slashdot's side that they are. How about making a new April Fool's icon for each category, which is slightly different from the original in a spoofy kind of way (cf. Google)? I know it's a lot of work for one day of the year, but it doesn't seem like the slashdot maintainers do much else anyway:)
Or for that matter, how about including normal icons in the 'Slashdot tape' to the right of the Slashdot logo but using the 'Laugh. It's funny' humor icons in the main body of the front page?
I mean, some stupid CIO could easily be fed these stories as facts. I know it's their fault for buying stupid shit, but hey, let's be a little more considerate, please?
OTOH, Mozilla's performance is abysmal on Windows. It takes long to start up and responds slowly to mouse clicks. This is the case not only with my computer but also that of my friends. I get instant response and rendering from IE. It could well be that Windows somehow hampers Mozilla's functioning. Or it could just be that the XUL/JS combination in Mozilla's UI needs to be speeded up. I wish I could use Mozilla with the same speed and for the same purposes that I use it on Linux, but I have no idea why performance is such an issue.
I would like to have success stories similar to yours above. I have asked my ('doze-using) friends to use Mozilla, but they say that Netscape 6/7, which is based on the same code, works faster and has the same perks (such as popup blocking), so they have no incentive to switch. Does anyone here have similar experiences with Netscape 6/7 performing better than Mozilla on a Windows machine?
What would you think are the biggest incentives to use Mozilla vs. newer Netscapes for ordinary end-users (i.e. not open-source zealots)?
If you think of ICANN as Institute for CANNibals, the title "Why ICANN Needs Fresh Blood" suddenly makes a lot of sense, but in a totally different way!
AI is sci-fi at the moment. After the promising start to AI in the 50's no one knows what went wrong when. People are floundering to find a solution and making domain-specific but fairly stupid robots to use up their research funds. A couple of my AI professors at MIT have said that they watched films like AI as a 'professional responsibility', because way too many people ask them about it.
Remember, artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
Apparently, pictures of the latest Columbia shuttle disaster were taken by an Israeli satellite. An email about this was doing the rounds on the net, but the whole story turned out to be an urban legend. But, do check out the pictures - they are kinda cool! Apparently, they are adapted from Armageddon.
As an Indian who studies at MIT, I would like to reply to this. The famous Indian engineering school in question is the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). In terms of prestige, yes, they do have a much higher prestige than a lot of major US universities put together. However, my experience and that of my friends who are ex-IITians is that the system does not ingrain principles into you in a systemic fashion. As a result, you can also find a large number of unbelievably dumb people who have studied there. I don't mean to bad-mouth IITs, but by and large, the exposure to a wide range of technologies that IIT undergrads get is much less than their counterparts at MIT or other technology powerhouses. Partly, this is also a result of a slightly obsolete and slow-changing curriculum. However, the fact remains that IIT undergrads go through an extremely competitive process to get in and are equipped with a wide range of skills, which get particularly suited to the US context, when supplemented by a US graduate degree.
The part about 'MIT being a backup school' is a reference to Infosys's chairman saying that his son did not get into IIT for Computer Science and instead had to go to Cornell. That does not make MIT or Cornell strictly *worse* than the IITs, even though that is what it seems like. It's just that IITs are insanely hard to get into. Remember that you are in the world's 2nd most populous country, where 100-150 people fighting for a seat at the IITs is nothing extraordinary.
There have actually been real instances when non-conventional techniques have been used for office delivery. For instance, the Mayo clinic in Rochester, MN uses a sophisticated network of pneumatic tubes for instant office delivery. Remember Winston from Orwell's 1984? He used something like that too. For more info on this technology: a Wired article
A friend and I had an idea one night that the best way to seek revenge on someone is to post their personal information on the internet, for everyone in the world to see, and let everyone seek revenge on that person for us. Thus, The Dox Depot was created. If you want to get revenge on someone and ruin their life, post their personal information on our page. Put their phone number so they get thousands of calls. Click here to get revenge
http://www.doxdepot.com/
To be removed from our mailing list please send an email to us admin@doxdepot.com
In the newly opened subway/metro in New Delhi, India, you don't need to swipe or hold up anything. The system deducts money from a falling-balance account as you walk into the subway station because of a card that you carry in your pocket. I don't believe these devices are RF-emitting, but they do get detected each time someone carrying them passes by a machine. Provided your card is not linked to your SSN, your medical record and so on, there need not be Big Brother implications. But at the rate things are going here, Oracle might link such devices into their national database;)
Much work has been done at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science under a pervasive computing project called Project Oxygen (it's plentiful, it's free and you can't live without it - get it?)
One of the components of an Oxygen network is the anyonymous handheld device, which is essentially a generic device that can turn into any device one wants. When one picks up a handheld, it recognizes one's face and turns into 'their' handheld by downloading their contacts, their schedule and so on. The handhelds also use voice recognition technology to do various useful things, e.g. "Call home..." Upon getting this voice command, the handheld morphs into a cellphone and begins to dial the line to the entitiy called "Home" in your address book. Clearly - lots of interesting issues here, including all the nifty recognition technology as well as general enough hardware to support devices simulating each other. All this and more info and videos at Project Oxygen
I agree that no one is forcing the whiners to use all the extra functionality in a cellphone. We are moving more towards an age where people carry one device to do everything and not a cellphone, PDA and a pager.
GooCookin' -- Throw some ingredients in the query form and see what Google spits back at you! For giggles, set the recipe type on general and search for "spam." (Coconut Beer Batter Spam with Raspberry Horse, anyone?)
Eww... that sounds like some strange goo cooking all right! Better think twice before you cook Sunday dinner with this tool.
I think it is much more important for science journalism to be responsible, rather than provide entertainment value. (Note that I am not saying that science journalism should not be entertaining - I am only saying responsibility should be valued higher).
In particular, journalism should enable people to separate science from pseudoscience. I get very irritated when I see TV programs that show unexplained phenomena for sensationalistic reasons and simply leave them unexplained, leaving the audience to construct their own scientific explanations.
It is absolutely ridiculous to believe that in this day and age, there are still people who believe that the earth was created in seven days. (Contrast a similar culture, Europe, where such an idea would be laughed out of existence!) What's even more disturbing is the dangerous hubris of 'scientific' explanations using the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. There should be TV programs that carefully decontstruct these pseudo-scientific explanations and shoot them down.
In the larger scheme of things though, why do people even subscribe to notions of parapsychological phenomena, the occult and the like? I have heard various explanations ranging from disillusionment with the scientific community to the search for Something Deeper (tm). I think it is because the scientific community might not be doing enough to dispel such crap out of common social discourse. Why should one only look to the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet for science? Why don't mainstream generic-content channels devote time away from ultimately pointless pop culture crap to debunking popular myths and misconceptions?
Stanbury and Fishelman will not sue Microsoft, because Microsoft Windows XP Product Activation is a well-known procedure, whose details are publicized to a certain extent. If you Google for XP product activation you will find the nitty-gritty details about it.
In short, XP product activation sends the product number and two words containing information about your PC's hardware. OTOH, TurboTax surreptitiously writes to your boot sector and does not inform the user about any such DRM efforts. I don't think MS should be sued by these people if only because it is a lot more upfront about its product activation requirement.
If the legal framework allows it, there should be ISPs who offer separately secured hardware and better assurances of privacy protection and non-disclosure to paranoid subscribers who are willing to pay a premium for this purpose. I, for one, would gladly pay up for such assurances. Any other takers?
Presumably, there could be some kind of ISP credit rating to add accountability and prevent consumers from rapidly switching ISPs to circumvent scrutiny. Privacy premium Internet access could be granted based on records of responsible online citizenship and satisfaction on the ISPs part that the subscriber wouldn't do anything illegal and get them into trouble.
Would it be possible to convince ISPs to implement such an 'Iron Curtain' feature or would it qualify as aiding terrorists, like purchasing narcotics does? *sigh*
Slashdot Mirror
If it is short on details, who is Slashdot to make these presumptions? This is a little bit like unabashed Slashdot-style Microsoft-bashing, when not enough is known and the editors take their potshots at Microsoft anyway, driven by personal biases.
Anyone who has used the code licensed under 'viral' (read GPL) open-source licenses cannot close their source code. If they can't close it and it is useful to them, they might as well distribute it and contribute to the open-source movement. By posting a story like this, and putting it in such a newsworthy fashion as indicated above seems to imply that open-source is the domain of pinko-Commie bastards, into which bastions of capitalism are finally entering. Don't forget, capitalism and open-source are independent concepts. Business models of software companies can be plotted on a two-dimensional plane with 'code freedom' and 'price' as the two axes.
Did Watson and Crick wait until April 2, 1953 so that people couldn't dismiss their new-fanged double-helix stuff as an April Fool's joke?
Oh - and a new RFC adds an evil bit to TCP/IP packets to explicitly indicate their evil intent.
Or for that matter, how about including normal icons in the 'Slashdot tape' to the right of the Slashdot logo but using the 'Laugh. It's funny' humor icons in the main body of the front page?
I mean, some stupid CIO could easily be fed these stories as facts. I know it's their fault for buying stupid shit, but hey, let's be a little more considerate, please?
If I made you look up the word 'genteel', mod me up - you learned a new word today!
I would like to have success stories similar to yours above. I have asked my ('doze-using) friends to use Mozilla, but they say that Netscape 6/7, which is based on the same code, works faster and has the same perks (such as popup blocking), so they have no incentive to switch. Does anyone here have similar experiences with Netscape 6/7 performing better than Mozilla on a Windows machine?
What would you think are the biggest incentives to use Mozilla vs. newer Netscapes for ordinary end-users (i.e. not open-source zealots)?
If you think of ICANN as Institute for CANNibals, the title "Why ICANN Needs Fresh Blood" suddenly makes a lot of sense, but in a totally different way!
Optimist: "The glass is half-full."
Engineer: "The glass is twice as big as it needs to be."
Programmer: "Who cares? Just drink the free beer!"
Remember, artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
Apparently, pictures of the latest Columbia shuttle disaster were taken by an Israeli satellite. An email about this was doing the rounds on the net, but the whole story turned out to be an urban legend. But, do check out the pictures - they are kinda cool! Apparently, they are adapted from Armageddon.
The part about 'MIT being a backup school' is a reference to Infosys's chairman saying that his son did not get into IIT for Computer Science and instead had to go to Cornell. That does not make MIT or Cornell strictly *worse* than the IITs, even though that is what it seems like. It's just that IITs are insanely hard to get into. Remember that you are in the world's 2nd most populous country, where 100-150 people fighting for a seat at the IITs is nothing extraordinary.
There have actually been real instances when non-conventional techniques have been used for office delivery. For instance, the Mayo clinic in Rochester, MN uses a sophisticated network of pneumatic tubes for instant office delivery. Remember Winston from Orwell's 1984? He used something like that too. For more info on this technology: a Wired article
Buzzword Bingo: MIT's way of having fun when the 'most technologically savvy politician' visited the Institute for Commencement.
--- BEGIN QUOTE ---
A friend and I had an idea one night that the best way to seek revenge on someone is to post their personal information on the internet, for everyone in the world to see, and let everyone seek revenge on that person for us. Thus, The Dox Depot was created. If you want to get revenge on someone and ruin their life, post their personal information on our page. Put their phone number so they get thousands of calls. Click here to get revenge
http://www.doxdepot.com/
To be removed from our mailing list please send an email to us admin@doxdepot.com
--- END QUOTE ---
If a bolt of lightning hits the oil-immersed wireless node, will it get fried?
In the newly opened subway/metro in New Delhi, India, you don't need to swipe or hold up anything. The system deducts money from a falling-balance account as you walk into the subway station because of a card that you carry in your pocket. I don't believe these devices are RF-emitting, but they do get detected each time someone carrying them passes by a machine. Provided your card is not linked to your SSN, your medical record and so on, there need not be Big Brother implications. But at the rate things are going here, Oracle might link such devices into their national database ;)
How is the sexual life of geeks, crackerz and other members of the Internet underground documented? Check this out. A Wired story about this too!
When will astronomers find Jupiter's G-spot?
One of the components of an Oxygen network is the anyonymous handheld device, which is essentially a generic device that can turn into any device one wants. When one picks up a handheld, it recognizes one's face and turns into 'their' handheld by downloading their contacts, their schedule and so on. The handhelds also use voice recognition technology to do various useful things, e.g. "Call home..." Upon getting this voice command, the handheld morphs into a cellphone and begins to dial the line to the entitiy called "Home" in your address book. Clearly - lots of interesting issues here, including all the nifty recognition technology as well as general enough hardware to support devices simulating each other. All this and more info and videos at Project Oxygen
I agree that no one is forcing the whiners to use all the extra functionality in a cellphone. We are moving more towards an age where people carry one device to do everything and not a cellphone, PDA and a pager.
Eww... that sounds like some strange goo cooking all right! Better think twice before you cook Sunday dinner with this tool.
In particular, journalism should enable people to separate science from pseudoscience. I get very irritated when I see TV programs that show unexplained phenomena for sensationalistic reasons and simply leave them unexplained, leaving the audience to construct their own scientific explanations.
It is absolutely ridiculous to believe that in this day and age, there are still people who believe that the earth was created in seven days. (Contrast a similar culture, Europe, where such an idea would be laughed out of existence!) What's even more disturbing is the dangerous hubris of 'scientific' explanations using the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. There should be TV programs that carefully decontstruct these pseudo-scientific explanations and shoot them down.
In the larger scheme of things though, why do people even subscribe to notions of parapsychological phenomena, the occult and the like? I have heard various explanations ranging from disillusionment with the scientific community to the search for Something Deeper (tm). I think it is because the scientific community might not be doing enough to dispel such crap out of common social discourse. Why should one only look to the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet for science? Why don't mainstream generic-content channels devote time away from ultimately pointless pop culture crap to debunking popular myths and misconceptions?
In short, XP product activation sends the product number and two words containing information about your PC's hardware. OTOH, TurboTax surreptitiously writes to your boot sector and does not inform the user about any such DRM efforts. I don't think MS should be sued by these people if only because it is a lot more upfront about its product activation requirement.
Looks like we have come a long way since this and this.
Presumably, there could be some kind of ISP credit rating to add accountability and prevent consumers from rapidly switching ISPs to circumvent scrutiny. Privacy premium Internet access could be granted based on records of responsible online citizenship and satisfaction on the ISPs part that the subscriber wouldn't do anything illegal and get them into trouble.
Would it be possible to convince ISPs to implement such an 'Iron Curtain' feature or would it qualify as aiding terrorists, like purchasing narcotics does? *sigh*