I was seeking the same thing before. I did some research and found some really cool and small products. The problem of being cool is it carries a high price tag.
I endup ordered a mini-itx box from idotpc. No hassle, super fast delivery. Cost me around $350 for a 512MB ram 80GB HD system (w/0 CDROM). It ran a small website link above. The best part, my power bill dropped by $10 a month after I turned off the AMD box!!! Now I can brat about helping out in the California energy crisis.
Eventually something should make a webserver the size of iPod. How about $200 for a 40GB version?
EBay bought 25% stake in Craigslist, as founder Craig commented in his blog. This is not your usual "community effort sold out to big corporation" story. It begins when craigslist first established as company, Craig made a gift of some equity to a guy who was working with him at the time. He reasons that the equity really had more symbolic than actual dollar value. Given the success of craigslist, this is probably self-deprecation. Indeed, this person latter left the company and decided to sold his stake to eBay. The irony is this person is going to make all the monetary gain while Craig would likely to shoulder all the criticism.
Being a for-profit company or owned by big corporation is not necessary a bad thing. People need to make a living and an office need money to run. Even slashdot.org a fervently independent outlet is now owned by VA Software. But craigslist has made a name of itself by strongly resist to commercialize. The web design is basic and text only, entirely free from advertisement. All services are free with the exception of job posting as its sole income. Had it decided to brought in venture capital, craigslist has every potential to be a contender to eBay, a 50 billion dollars corporate giant. But it choose to stay this way, running like a struggling non-profit, forgoing the dream of uncountable wealth.
While it might look a mistake now that he gave away equity to a person who later sell to big corporation and profited, I believe he acted in the interest of the organization at that time. He understand the website that bears his name is more than himself. By making some form of employee ownership he could make it a better and more accountable organization.
I can only hope the ownership change will strengthen craigslist's service without straying it from its mission. No matter what it is going to be, craigslist has already made its name as an antidote to the dot-com frenzy
That's a false sense of comfort. These scripting languages often provide features via a wrapper to an underlying C library, libpng is an plausible example, either because the library is more available in C or because of performance reason.
The possiblity of buffer overflow would be greatly reduced it the application is written purely in those language. But still the interpreter themselves are often written in C and still pose a potential problem.
I have no business with power technology. But maybe for more knowledgeable folks could find out if there is any thing exciting coming from the portable power conference.
For me google is an undeniable champion in as a knowledge base. It is interesting to see it compare against traditional methods. Exactly who wins is not important. Few years ago only few people would have these extraordinary connections and great library category skill. Today any average dude with some google skill can do as good or better. This race just shown how far people have gone today.
It is also a good reminder that google is not everything. There is still a lot of information not published online and having a knowledgeable friend still counts.
Slashdot should probably be enhanced to do a automatic search before an article is submitted. Is there good algorithm to extract keywords from subject and passage?
I don't think sweatshops activists actually demand US companies to pay US minimum wage. Every country has different standard. Minimum wage in US is much higher than what graduates get in many places. It would be unrealistic to make such demand. What they want is a "livable wage", presumably higher than the sweatshop wages but does not tie to US minimum wage.
It is calling itself personal server. Does it do anything besides backup?
If the Linux on the server is open to user and with respectable processing power I would be insterest to put my web & email server on it. I'm happy to trade my big noisy box with something more energy efficient.
Something like Intel's Personal Server http://www.intel.com/labs/features/rs08031 .htm would be super cool.
Internet has definitely become the primary knowledge channel for me.
News
Most TV or printed news has web outlet. Often updated instantaneously and allows user feedback. e.g.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.sfgate.com/
Books
I still read and buy books. But instead of wandering in huge bookstore, I rely heavily on recommendation from the web. I often check out reviews on amazon.com before I made a decision.
Information
Weather, movie schedule, stock price, personal finance, business directory, I get up to the minute information online. Who wants staled information?
Maps
Mostly I use http://maps.yahoo.com/ for street map. Though I still like to collect maps it is not important for navigation anymore.
Travel
Most of time Travelocity and Orbitz would give the best deal. For lodging even small hotels & B&B would have a web site and gives you information and pictures (e.g. http://www.vrbo.com/). Nowadays I know lot more about the destination before I go. I still love Lonely Planet but the truth is I am getting more detail information online.
General Knowledge
Obviously Google is master directory of the world.
Everything from legal, health, shopping, you'll learn something from the web. But it is more than search and click. The important thing is finding quality information in the right context. Google pagerank works very well. You should also check on the author of information. Is it from authority or reputable publisher? Many times there are also very knowledgable individual sharing what they know on the web. On the other hand you have to weed out pointless ranting, vendors just touting their products, etc. More difficult is to find a balanced view and don't get over influenced by passionated zealots. Nevertheless the web provides a tremedeous depth of knowledge. You just have to lean to use it effectively.
Finally information on the web is built by human. Internet is a very effect tool to improve, but not replace human connections.
Why do we care about his opinion? Did he build any large scale scalable web application? Was he involved in maintaining and supporting any commerical projects? Did he make any critical insight of the strength and weakness of these development tools? Sounds like he draw his conclusion mostly from some student project. In that case I would say Microsoft wins hands down. Microsoft is very good at making and packaging complete development tools and is relative easy for novice to learn and use. Does it make VB the best programming language over other alternatives? I won't make that conclusion.
Funny that he claim a project done in Java would be harder to maintain that PHP or Perl. Some example of his opinion with little fact to support.
The article suggest that there are many websites infringing on copyright by providing illegal music down. And the magnitude is at least comparable to P2P file sharing. The author is surprised that RIAA would tolerate such websites.
Where are those websites? I find a lot of site with MIDI clip. But I hardly come across any with illegal MP3 download. If they exist they must be in such small number or is really obscure. Seems like the author is commenting on something of false premises.
I'm not an expert in anything now, though. There are too many things to know, and it gets easier to forget as one gets older.
He is also very humble to admit that he is not an expert in anything now. Think of how much anxiety today's geeks have when encountered with new things they don't understand.
In general I find Linux has taken great care of internationalization. I can use my Redhat to display both traditional and simplified Chinese. What else does Midori offers? Maybe it actually translate all messages into Chinese?
We are only talking about the product plan of a commerical company in Hong Kong! What the hell does it have to do with Tibet or People's Liberation Army!!! Next time when Intel or AMD develop a new CPU, does we have to discuss about everything from Ku Klux Klan to Hiroshima to the peril of Palestinian to the bloodshed in Iraq? Why do we have all these reflexive responses about Tibet whenever China is mentioned?
Take your political discussion to the appropiate forum. As far as this article is concerned, this is OFFTOPIC.
Microsoft is not going to fall because because of this patent. If InterTrust wins, it only means MS have to pay license fee. This is a huge windfall for InterTrust but it will only make a dent to MS's profit.
If they accuse Linux of infringing patent that's another story.
One challenge to the security through obscurity theory is the Slammer worm. How many PC are running SQL Server? The number is probably no more than Macs. (SQL Server is not a freeware!) And yet the Slammer worm manage to ravage the world. Despite the small number of installations compare to all PCs, crackers are able to exploit any vulnerability.
"Forget Wi-Fi. The real wireless revolution is being driven by the cell phone -- and is already creating rich opportunities for huge players and small startups alike. "
This article is wildly optimistic about 3G. The truth is data connection today is slow and unreliable and comes with high fee. The article boost 1.2 billion cell phones in use today. But how many of them would find 3G justify the cost? Maybe a small niche of users who really need constant connection (which is not very well serve by today's 2.5G). The rest of people are happy enough with just talking and SMS.
Meanwhile the financial situations of cell companies are not pretty. Competitions are fierce are profit margin keep declining. The cost to build 3G network is huge but pay back is uncertain. Survival is probably more of their concern.
WiFi is not mean to be a perfect replacement of 3G. As many people has noted it has a short range. They will be installed at airports, transits, offices, city centers, warehouses, etc. Pretty much all places that people meet and work. There are also where data connection really matters. Its true it doesn't cover moving cars or suburban areas. This is where 3G's ubiquity excels. But could they sustain on this coverage gap alone?
Mac users still have IE 6. If Microsoft still continue to provide security and performance updates, maybe that's all they need in the next couple of years. IE doesn't made a lot of progress recently anyway. Mean while I hope alternative browsers have time to catch up to challenge the IE dominated web.
Anyway Microsoft made lame excuses in killing IE. They said customers were better served by using Apple's browser? Never heard them admit defeat so soon when Safari does not even have an official release yet. Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system? Safari is open source. I don't know how can they claim competitive disadvantage.
An settlement with AOL settlement that included a seven-year free license for IE? If IE is going to be an integral part of Windows does AOL still need any licensing?
The study is base on statistics of several thousand people. While your perception is based on your personal experience and some of your colleagues. It is necessary subjective.
Anyway, I am just trying to make a rational arguement (I guess that's what slashdot is about). I have full sympathy with you and your colleagues. Health is really the most important.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked (2004-10-15 12:27 PST) it ranks 37 in amazon.com!!!
So I went out to verify the sales rank for other books. They result looks quite sane.
Java Network Programming, 2nd Edition (Java (O'Reilly)) by Elliotte Rusty Harold
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 81,978
Core PHP Programming, Third Edition by Leon Atkinson, Zeev Suraski
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 38,910
My Life by Bill Clinton
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 129
Is Amazon broken to rank this #37!
Sounds like this would be very useful for flights landing in the San Francisco airport, which is so often plagued by fog.
I was seeking the same thing before. I did some research and found some really cool and small products. The problem of being cool is it carries a high price tag.
I endup ordered a mini-itx box from idotpc. No hassle, super fast delivery. Cost me around $350 for a 512MB ram 80GB HD system (w/0 CDROM). It ran a small website link above. The best part, my power bill dropped by $10 a month after I turned off the AMD box!!! Now I can brat about helping out in the California energy crisis.
Eventually something should make a webserver the size of iPod. How about $200 for a 40GB version?
EBay bought 25% stake in Craigslist, as founder Craig commented in his blog. This is not your usual "community effort sold out to big corporation" story. It begins when craigslist first established as company, Craig made a gift of some equity to a guy who was working with him at the time. He reasons that the equity really had more symbolic than actual dollar value. Given the success of craigslist, this is probably self-deprecation. Indeed, this person latter left the company and decided to sold his stake to eBay. The irony is this person is going to make all the monetary gain while Craig would likely to shoulder all the criticism.
Being a for-profit company or owned by big corporation is not necessary a bad thing. People need to make a living and an office need money to run. Even slashdot.org a fervently independent outlet is now owned by VA Software. But craigslist has made a name of itself by strongly resist to commercialize. The web design is basic and text only, entirely free from advertisement. All services are free with the exception of job posting as its sole income. Had it decided to brought in venture capital, craigslist has every potential to be a contender to eBay, a 50 billion dollars corporate giant. But it choose to stay this way, running like a struggling non-profit, forgoing the dream of uncountable wealth.
While it might look a mistake now that he gave away equity to a person who later sell to big corporation and profited, I believe he acted in the interest of the organization at that time. He understand the website that bears his name is more than himself. By making some form of employee ownership he could make it a better and more accountable organization.
I can only hope the ownership change will strengthen craigslist's service without straying it from its mission. No matter what it is going to be, craigslist has already made its name as an antidote to the dot-com frenzy
(Comment replicated from my blog)
That's a false sense of comfort. These scripting languages often provide features via a wrapper to an underlying C library, libpng is an plausible example, either because the library is more available in C or because of performance reason. The possiblity of buffer overflow would be greatly reduced it the application is written purely in those language. But still the interpreter themselves are often written in C and still pose a potential problem.
I have no business with power technology. But maybe for more knowledgeable folks could find out if there is any thing exciting coming from the portable power conference.
For me google is an undeniable champion in as a knowledge base. It is interesting to see it compare against traditional methods. Exactly who wins is not important. Few years ago only few people would have these extraordinary connections and great library category skill. Today any average dude with some google skill can do as good or better. This race just shown how far people have gone today.
It is also a good reminder that google is not everything. There is still a lot of information not published online and having a knowledgeable friend still counts.
Where is Google's "new web API"? Following the link to the release notes, it shows a date of 2002 2002-08-30: Bug fix release for beta2.
The article is a discussion on progamming and the Java language. It never say anything about producing bug-less software.
Slashdot should probably be enhanced to do a automatic search before an article is submitted. Is there good algorithm to extract keywords from subject and passage?
I don't think sweatshops activists actually demand US companies to pay US minimum wage. Every country has different standard. Minimum wage in US is much higher than what graduates get in many places. It would be unrealistic to make such demand. What they want is a "livable wage", presumably higher than the sweatshop wages but does not tie to US minimum wage.
It is calling itself personal server. Does it do anything besides backup?
1 .htm would be super cool.
If the Linux on the server is open to user and with respectable processing power I would be insterest to put my web & email server on it. I'm happy to trade my big noisy box with something more energy efficient.
Something like Intel's Personal Server
http://www.intel.com/labs/features/rs0803
News Most TV or printed news has web outlet. Often updated instantaneously and allows user feedback. e.g.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.sfgate.com/
Books I still read and buy books. But instead of wandering in huge bookstore, I rely heavily on recommendation from the web. I often check out reviews on amazon.com before I made a decision.
Information Weather, movie schedule, stock price, personal finance, business directory, I get up to the minute information online. Who wants staled information?
Maps Mostly I use http://maps.yahoo.com/ for street map. Though I still like to collect maps it is not important for navigation anymore.
Travel Most of time Travelocity and Orbitz would give the best deal. For lodging even small hotels & B&B would have a web site and gives you information and pictures (e.g. http://www.vrbo.com/). Nowadays I know lot more about the destination before I go. I still love Lonely Planet but the truth is I am getting more detail information online.
General Knowledge Obviously Google is master directory of the world. Everything from legal, health, shopping, you'll learn something from the web. But it is more than search and click. The important thing is finding quality information in the right context. Google pagerank works very well. You should also check on the author of information. Is it from authority or reputable publisher? Many times there are also very knowledgable individual sharing what they know on the web. On the other hand you have to weed out pointless ranting, vendors just touting their products, etc. More difficult is to find a balanced view and don't get over influenced by passionated zealots. Nevertheless the web provides a tremedeous depth of knowledge. You just have to lean to use it effectively.
Finally information on the web is built by human. Internet is a very effect tool to improve, but not replace human connections.
Funny that he claim a project done in Java would be harder to maintain that PHP or Perl. Some example of his opinion with little fact to support.
Isn't GnomeMeeting do the same thing and more? I think it supports NAT too.
The article suggest that there are many websites infringing on copyright by providing illegal music down. And the magnitude is at least comparable to P2P file sharing. The author is surprised that RIAA would tolerate such websites.
Where are those websites? I find a lot of site with MIDI clip. But I hardly come across any with illegal MP3 download. If they exist they must be in such small number or is really obscure. Seems like the author is commenting on something of false premises.
He is also very humble to admit that he is not an expert in anything now. Think of how much anxiety today's geeks have when encountered with new things they don't understand.
In general I find Linux has taken great care of internationalization. I can use my Redhat to display both traditional and simplified Chinese. What else does Midori offers? Maybe it actually translate all messages into Chinese?
We are only talking about the product plan of a commerical company in Hong Kong! What the hell does it have to do with Tibet or People's Liberation Army!!! Next time when Intel or AMD develop a new CPU, does we have to discuss about everything from Ku Klux Klan to Hiroshima to the peril of Palestinian to the bloodshed in Iraq? Why do we have all these reflexive responses about Tibet whenever China is mentioned?
Take your political discussion to the appropiate forum. As far as this article is concerned, this is OFFTOPIC.
Microsoft is not going to fall because because of this patent. If InterTrust wins, it only means MS have to pay license fee. This is a huge windfall for InterTrust but it will only make a dent to MS's profit. If they accuse Linux of infringing patent that's another story.
One challenge to the security through obscurity theory is the Slammer worm. How many PC are running SQL Server? The number is probably no more than Macs. (SQL Server is not a freeware!) And yet the Slammer worm manage to ravage the world. Despite the small number of installations compare to all PCs, crackers are able to exploit any vulnerability.
"Forget Wi-Fi. The real wireless revolution is being driven by the cell phone -- and is already creating rich opportunities for huge players and small startups alike. "
This article is wildly optimistic about 3G. The truth is data connection today is slow and unreliable and comes with high fee. The article boost 1.2 billion cell phones in use today. But how many of them would find 3G justify the cost? Maybe a small niche of users who really need constant connection (which is not very well serve by today's 2.5G). The rest of people are happy enough with just talking and SMS.
Meanwhile the financial situations of cell companies are not pretty. Competitions are fierce are profit margin keep declining. The cost to build 3G network is huge but pay back is uncertain. Survival is probably more of their concern.
WiFi is not mean to be a perfect replacement of 3G. As many people has noted it has a short range. They will be installed at airports, transits, offices, city centers, warehouses, etc. Pretty much all places that people meet and work. There are also where data connection really matters. Its true it doesn't cover moving cars or suburban areas. This is where 3G's ubiquity excels. But could they sustain on this coverage gap alone?
Mac users still have IE 6. If Microsoft still continue to provide security and performance updates, maybe that's all they need in the next couple of years. IE doesn't made a lot of progress recently anyway. Mean while I hope alternative browsers have time to catch up to challenge the IE dominated web.
Anyway Microsoft made lame excuses in killing IE. They said customers were better served by using Apple's browser? Never heard them admit defeat so soon when Safari does not even have an official release yet. Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system? Safari is open source. I don't know how can they claim competitive disadvantage.
An settlement with AOL settlement that included a seven-year free license for IE? If IE is going to be an integral part of Windows does AOL still need any licensing?
The study is base on statistics of several thousand people. While your perception is based on your personal experience and some of your colleagues. It is necessary subjective.
Anyway, I am just trying to make a rational arguement (I guess that's what slashdot is about). I have full sympathy with you and your colleagues. Health is really the most important.