I have to admit, I do love my hi-res razer diamondback mouse that I can adjust the sensitivity of on the fly. So much more expressive range of movement than trying to aim precisely on those tiny little thumbsticks.
As far as tilt controllers go... I already do use them, gyration mice. I regularly use one on my mythbox at home, and another at work to go with our electronic whiteboards+projector. Being able to move the mouse away from the screen is quite handy, and being able to do it without a desk is even more useful.
I still prefer my conventional mouse when I'm sitting at a desk, but I can easily see myself on my sofa, elbows on knees, using the nintendo controller just like I use the gyro mouse. People already move and tilt existing controllers; just watch someone playing halo in a tight spot, or a sports game - they move their body and arms in the direction of the characters movement.
There will need to be good games that take advantage of the style of movement, not the same old games that try to map joysticks (or worse - buttons!) onto the gyro movement. If anyone can pull it off, it's nintendo. I honestly don't know if they will though, but it sounds interesting.
I'm afraid 'le stick' was before my time; I didn't get into computing until the venerable rubber-keyed spectrum 48k. Still, looking at the age of it, it's possible technology has moved on a little to be a bit more responsive, and the console horsepower is a bit higher too. Maybe gyro's mass-market time has come; maybe not. Given nintendo's hugely successful track record in introducing controller innovation, I'm prepared to give em a chance.
Others have already tackled the vast amount of radioactive crap that coal stations already pump into the air. The UK, and the rest of northern europe are renowned for their lack of sunny weather, so solar's out as a major form of power - if we could find a way to generate power from rain though, we'd be set for life:) Don't forget the environmental production costs for solar cells either, doped silicon produces a lot of nasty toxic waste.
Wind and wave power are being investigated and used, but for anything other than remote areas, they're too big and too inefficient to generate anything other than minor amounts of power at the moment.
Natural gas of course produces CO2, as does coal, but we're running out of natural gas anyway, so need to find an alternative for both reasons.
Nuclear is a far more attractive prospect than coal, our current other big ticket energy method, simply because the amount of waste is much smaller and easier to control. Countries like the UK vitrify (encase in glass) their waste. Methods to dump it into dead deep sea stable zone are one option; dumping it into subduction zones so it gets sucked back down below the mantle are another possibility.
I'm all for truly clean alternative energy sources, but right now, nuclear power looks like the only affordable and least polluting short term solution.
It's the fine detail aiming with the mouse, combined with the movement and weapon selection on the keyboard. It only works because you have both of them on a desk, so you don't have to have something light enough or wieldy enough to hold in your hands.
With consoles, you need a small controller you can hold in mid-air, so for example aiming and button use has to be done with your thumbs, rather than most of your fingers. I've played Halo on the PC and XBox, and the PC version is unquestionably better in my mind.
That said, the next generation nintendo with it's gyro controllers will actually use the mid-air movement of the controller(s), so FPS games on it may well end up equal or superior to the PC experience. We'll see.
-- the current system is broken because one country controls other countries fate for no reason other than historical inertia -- most people who use the current system are happy with the current system, because they don't live in a country that the US government doesn't like -- everyone wants a working DNS system, and would rather not break it on a technical level if they don't have to. -- the UN has run things like the WHO, the world food program, and the ITU competently and quietly for decades, so could also run the DNS at a pinch.
I suspect we're talking past each other here. I think who gets to assign country DNS registrars shouldn't be in the hands of one US government department, or a handful of ISPs, but be the free choice of the government in question.
The fact that so much effort is being devoted to this is just another great example of how irretrievably useless a body the UN is.
The effort isn't coming from the UN, it's coming from the EU and some big countries like brazil, russia and china, with smaller countries adding in their opinion. A UN agency has been mooted as one possible candidate to run the DNS root in some of the suggested plans, but it's a lot more than Iran who are unhappy with the current setup of the root.
The discussion of incompetant DNS administrators is besides the point. Anyone who wants out of the ICANN root can get out today. Anyone who doesn't want out (because either they like the current system, don't care, or don't know any better) is irrelevant to this debate.
Actually, they're key to the debate. Most people don't know about the root, and DNS (and the internet) works despite that. Any change to DNS that's going to work needs to factor that in. That means the control of ICANN is much more relevant and important than just setting up an alt-root or two - without changing ICANN, effectively nothing changes on a global scale because most people won't switch because of ignorance or inertia. Things not changing pisses off many of the governments of the 95% of the world that doesn't live in the US. That leads to more radical options, like a split root and mandatory assignment to a new one by governments, which would be extremely messy for all concerned.
You may not give a stuff about other countries or their economic security, but you know what? They do. And the US government should as well, or what do you think would happen to the US economy if asia stops buying american dollars in exchange for goods? The willingness of china and other countries to support the huge US trade debt depends on *them* having strong economies, and expecting that one day they'll be able to spend all those dollars on something useful. A root split could easily cripple the internet for business, and that would have a big knock on effect on the world economy. You might think billions of dollars of electronic trade is irrelevent, but DNS is key to much of it. ccTLD's matter.
Just telling everyone that's not happy that they can go use an alt-root fixes nothing. In fact, it's attitudes like that, that nothing needs fixing and the DNS system is perfect just as it is, that's causing the crisis in the first place.
And if you think the EU, UN, US DoC or any other government bureacracy is any more or less likely to fuck things up, then you haven't been paying attention for very long.
It's not about competency per se. ICANN mostly does a good job on a purely technical basis; but then so do the actual root operators, and ITU in its own field also. The question is political control. Imagine the US president was an elected dictator. Congress, supreme court, state legislatures et al were all subservient to the president, who ruled by fiat. Would you be comfortable with that situation? (assuming you're american) Do you prefer checks and balances on the power of any one man to decide your fate? Most people would, and unsurprisingly non-americans don't like having their economic fate pretty much solely in the hands of a US government department, especially with all the talk of 'axis-of-evil' and the like.
Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Brazil, France, even Canada are all on the US government shit-list to different extents - is it unreasonable that they feel somewhat nervous about what the US government might unilaterally do to their ccTLD domains in the future? With a multi-country overview of the system, no one country could screw up another. That is the real goal, at least from the EU perspective. They want to keep ICANN, but just give more countries than the US influence in who the registrar is for any given domain. China and russia want to replace ICANN altogether with a UN agency, which I think is going too far; but I can see why they feel that way.
Do you mean in clients or servers? The DNS client doesn't know anything about roots, and just queries whatever server it's pointed at. A DNS server (even Windows) can trivially be configured to point at any root. Anyone running a DNS server who doesn't know how to modify root.hints should be banned from the Internet on principle.
I was thinking of both. Purely at the client end, people currently can add alt root hosts to over-ride or suplement their ISP DNS. Most people wouldn't know how, and very few care.
For company DNS servers, I know quite a few windows admins who run DNS for AD, but wouldn't know a cache.dns file if it bit them on the ass. There's plenty of misconfigured DNS servers that go straight to root because they've no upstream DNS caches (forwarders) that demonstrates that. (98% of root queries are unnecessary!) A Windows 2000-based DNS server follows specific steps in its name-resolution process. A DNS server first queries its cache, then it checks its zone records, then it sends requests to forwarders, and finally it tries resolution by using root servers. By default, a Microsoft DNS server connects to the Internet to further process DNS requests with root hints.... Windows uses the standard InterNIC root server. Also, when a Windows 2000-based server queries a root server, it updates itself with the most recent list of root servers. Roots that list ICANN's file are the default, and it takes an admin with a clue to change that. I agree that DNS admins *should* know about how DNS really works, root and all, but from the amount of misconfigured sites I've been to, they're a lot thinner on the ground than we'd like.
ISPs hopefully know what they're doing, but very few implement the alt roots at the moment. China could mandate their own ISPs use an alt root that overrides the defaults, which solves internal DNS; but that doesn't solve the problem for people hosting outside the country, or indeed people trying to find chinese websites elsewhere in the globe if the ICANN approved registrar differs from the chinese internal one.
Of course, we don't want a root split. We don't want different roots that point to different registrars for a given ccTLD or gTLD, with ISPs using a root based on political affiliation. But if the US gov isn't prepared to loosen its control of ICANN a little, that's what may eventually happen, which won't be pretty for anyone.
I'd much rather have a more accountable ICANN, or at worst multiple roots that peer each others files; but that doesn't solve the problem of what happens when they disagree.
It's certainly not the life or death struggle over DNS (OMG! China will censor my blog!) that people have been portraying it, as the ccTLD's and gTLD's will continue to be run entirely by their appropriate registrars.
There is one other big issue than the creation of say, the.xxx gTLD - and that's directions to the ccTLD's. Currently, the US department of commerce can tell ICANN who gets to host ccTLD's. So any country's entire DNS system - for example, the.iq domain for iraq - can be arbitrarily turned off or assigned to a new registrar. And there's nothing that country can do about it. Haiti had to wait 2 years to get its domain assigned to the registrar of its choice, for example.
That's what this big argument is really about - why should the US government, or a fairly unaccountable company like ICANN have the right to determine which registrar, if any, gets to run a country's DNS? So far the US government hasn't abused this power *that* much - but it could.
Nor is ICANN entirely trusted either - remember the fiasco when verisign decided to start domain squatting with it's search engine on all unassigned.com and.net domains, and ICANN did virtually nothing about it?
The problem with the alternative roots is that software makers like microsoft only support the 'official' ICANN system out of the box. With very few people technicially capable of adding alternative roots, and even fewer knowing why they'd need or want to, ICANN and the DoC effective has the rest of the world over a barrel. And they want to get off it.
I'm afraid I've only a little time, but I would point out that to most of the rest of the world, the Democrats is at best a centrist party, arguably even slightly right wing. The Republicans are very strongly right wing compared to most other countries.
Fox and Drudge report may only become centrist because your centre ground is significantly to the right of most other countries. It's all about your point of reference.
If you want a global centrist media organisation, you probably want the BBC, which is pretty left wing by US standards.
First, if I'm only playing mp3's on my 51v, the lifetime is significantly greater, more like 6-8 hours continuous. Same lifespan if I turn the backlight down, the CPU speed down, and the wifi off. That 4 hours is 4 hours constant use with most of the features going at full blast - in actual useage, it easily goes three days between charges, which is longer than my nokia 7210!
Smartphones have smaller screens, less features, smaller backlights and are optimised for longer battery life than PDAs. I draw your attention to the battery life of the latest palm I'm comparing it with - the T|X has a larger stock battery at 1250mAh, and only runs for 3 hours 20 minutes at average use - with half the CPU speed and a significantly smaller screen!
Just because it's a palm, doesn't mean it's magically going to get better battery life any more. That's kinda my point; Palm used to be the best at everything, now they're losing out when you compare like-for-like.
A lower featured PDA will last longer on battery than a higher featured PDA, that is also true. For me, for this role, battery life was not particularly important. It does however excede the lifetime of a brand new palm with lower specs.
PDAs have more horsepower, smartphones have longer lifetime between charges. I needed a grunty PDA, you needed a smartphone. Each of us happy, I think.
My point still stands though - they've given up the high end already, and are on the way to giving up the mid-end to pocket pcs, and as someone who loved palm for 6 solid years, that saddens me. They made better kit, for a better price, for a long time. Now they've lost that.
I'm sure it depends on the CPU, but my new axim 51v is faster than my old tungsten E at task switching and opening files - and it's having to drive a 640x480 screen as opposed to 320x320. WM5 is also noticeably quicker than the x50v I had a chance to play with before buying the x51v (virtually same hardware, but WM2003 vs WM5). The persistant storage is good too, makes a nice change from my charge-it-or-lose-it tungsten.
Then again, my 51v is twice the price of the the tungsten E, so that probably helps! One thing the axim is also faster at is powering up from standby. It usually only takes a second or so to go from standby to voice-recording when I hit the record button. That's quite a bit more responsive than my tungsten was to button presses.
Between my 1GB SD card, 190MB of usable main storage, and the 4GB microdrive I'm getting soon, space definitely isn't a problem.
PocketPC's used to be much slower and clunkier than palms. That's probably still true for an entry level PDA/smartphone, but pocket pc's have definitely caught up at the middle and high end. And I saw that as a long time disliker of microsoft.
I've been using palms for years, but I've finally jumped ship. I've just replaced my tungsten E with a dell axim X51V. I wanted to stay with palm, but I needed a top-end unit with wifi and a high-res screen for effectively replacing my old department laptop when I'm out of the office.
the 51v is nearly 50% more expensive than this new T|X, but since work is paying, price wasn't really an object. The screen is 480x640; it has 802.11b and bluetooth 1.2 (though the bluetooth seems broken on windows mobile 5 for prety much anything except file transfer and activesync at the moment); a damn sight more software runs on windows mobile rather than palm os (stock PIM software is about the same; pocketplus and pocket breeze rock bigtime); double the storage (256MB vs 128); and a user-replacable battery, so I can buy up to 3300mAh if I'm going to be away from mains for a long time (stock is 1100mAh). The CF + sd slot looks to be really useful too, as I'll get myself a 4GB microdrive as well as several useful addin cards that go in the CF slot; and the processor runs up to 624Mhz. Average lifetime is about 4 hours solid use, and since it's non-volatile storage, it doesn't matter if the battery goes flat. Spanks the best palms available, including this new one easily.
If palm sold a top-end PDA with similar specs, I would have stayed. As it is, I think palm are going to struggle to hold onto anything other than the entry-level PDA and smartphone market. Even in the midrange, existing pocket pc's compare well with this brand new palm.
The problem is, they see the falling sales from a boycott, and just claim it's down to 'pirates' stealing their music instead of buying. Then they just push for ever more harsh and restrictive DRM and legislation to 'prevent their massive losses to those thieving pirates'.
I'm boycotting the major labels, but I'm under no illusions they're using that as a reason to restrict everybodies rights ever further.
One reason for that is because so many others are driving SUVs and light trucks. A car hit by a SUV is at greater risk of having fatalities than if it had been hit by a heavy car. It's the ride height and stiffness that makes SUVs more dangerous, not their weight.
Incidentally, SUVs themselves are held to the lower safety standards of light trucks, not passenger cars. They don't have the same safety standards for their occupants as passenger cars for side impacts, and their bumpers are not as strong. There's also the the significant increased risk of rollovers.
So buying an SUV or light truck not only puts other road-users at greater risk, it also puts the occupants at higher risk than if they'd bought a medium or large sized car.
To be fair, there are uses for light trucks and SUVs, mainly out of cities. In urban areas, a large car does the same job, is safer all round, and gets better fuel efficiency. The tax and safety loopholes that SUVs get should be closed, as they are primarily passenger vehicles, not business light trucks.
How about the IBM linux TV advert I just saw 30 seconds ago? Or maybe Novell is a big enough name. Linux is not about sexy looking but restricted and easily scratched music players. It's about reliable, big scale software that does the job. I still hesitate to recommend linux on the desktop for your average home user, and I've been using it on mine for 6 years - but government and businesses? Linux makes an awful lot of sense for them.
Ouch. I'm not a user of their service, I just googled them and they looked reasonable. I haven't had anything like that from them yet, and I signed up with them earlier just to check for smallprint before I suggested them. Maybe it's because I'm UK based, and they're going to delete my account.
If that's a requirement of their service, it looks like they use the account for spamming and I don't want to recommend that! Thanks for the heads up, and please accept my apologies.
Well, I don't expect IMAP from Gmail; it is a free service after all. It'd just be useful.
Thing is, I have multiple mail domains (work, home, and old account) which is useful to access from several places. My work accounts (several system accounts and my own) I can now access via IMAP, my personal email is currently stored locally at home. I use my gmail account to store useful personal files, emails and the like so I can access them from anywhere (only recently got external IMAP access running at work)
The pain is, I can manage my multiple IMAP accounts easily from one client - except gmail which I have to go into a browser and fire it up to check for new mail, retrieve docs etc. POP access is fine and dandy, but rather defeats the object of using gmail to store things for access on the move!
If gmail had IMAP, I'd probably move my archived personal stuff into it, and just direct my personal domains there (my domainhost only provides pop3, and those that provide IMAP in the UK don't offer large mailboxes, not cheaply anyway).
As it is, I'm going to setup my personal linux box at home to be an IMAP server, and route everything personal to that, especially as kmail can now apply folder filtering on IMAP boxes. With my work and personal email accessible from anywhere via IMAP, what need will I have for a gmail account that I'm not receiving much mail at, that I need to access separately from my other 6 mailboxes?
Gmail webaccess is fine if that's your only mail account. If you have multiple ones, you want to aggregate them in one client using IMAP, just like I use gaim or trillian to aggregate my multiple IM logins. If Gmail don't want to provide that, all power to them, but they'll be losing my eyeballs. No great loss for either of us, I suspect.
I know it's not as useful as an outlook export function (microsoft probably has patents on their outlook mailstore format) but you can always use IMAP to migrate your email between the local storage of any mail clients you like.
Gmail doesn't allow IMAP yet (primary reason I don't use it much) but it looks like bgxmail offers a free 1 GB mailbox you could use - just setup the IMAP server in both outlook and thunderbird, and copy the emails to IMAP, then into the local folders. Hell, you could just leave your archive email in the IMAP store, and use either program to access them.
Alternatively, you could setup a local IMAP server such as courier-imap or any of the many alternatives and migrate the email that way.
Paper votes are only as good as the people counting them, and the way in which they are created.
In the UK, we had a scandal recently about postal voting trials, where votes where stolen or forged. There's also the problem of party officials going to retirement homes and 'helping' people fill their voting papers out correctly.
Equally, places like Zimbabwe have paper ballots, and there are regular reports of ballot stuffing, i.e. adding fake votes to the ballot boxes, as well as intimidation being used to keep one party's people away from the polls in the first place. Other places that have paper ballots simply bribe the vote counters.
Even if the system and people involved are honest, trustworthy and verified, there's always the problem of miscast or spoiled ballots with paper voting, where the papers are confusingly composed (i.e. similar names) or difficult to correctly mark, if you use runoff/multiple votes at once.
Any system of voting is only as good as the people implementing it and counting it, regardless of the mechanism.
That's exactly the business model that redhat and SuSE (now novell) use. The bit you're wrong about is that fork distributions end up killing the original shrinkwrap.
Yes, your time in putting together the good distro has value to people who don't want to spend that time - and so does support. As the original vendor, you're in a much better position to offer patches, upgrades and aftersales support. Take Redhat enterprise linux for example; there are a couple of rebranded versions like centOS, but people still buy RHEL because they like the idea of guaranteed support and patches. Hell, redhat even provide their own community-supported desktop OS, fedora.
I think you've confused the NO superdome, and the Houston astrodome, which is one place where the people from NO were evacuated to. The people who were evacuated were seeking refuge, and thus are refugees. The radio station was to be setup in the refugee centre, (the houston astrodome) which was undamaged by the hurricane and some distance from NO.
Re:Strangely, contrary to the KDE whiners...
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GNOME 2.12 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't have to change out of Gnome for KDE for them to work in almost every case.
That's because the apps just load the libs they need from kde. Gnome apps do the same in kde, they just load the gnome libs they need. That's how they're supposed to work! Hell, you can use gnome and kde apps in blackbox... They just won't fit in with the 'look' like the rest of your desktop, unless you use the same theme for both DE's, like bluecurve.
Decryption didn't take that long, I remember it being 30 minutes or something like that. Who cares? Also, you do not need an internet connection to play single player-- there is "Offline Mode", read up on SteamPowered.com's FAQs.
Good for you. It took me several hours and meant the time I had to play the game was taken up by installation, and I didn't have the free time till the next day. I was not pleased.
My point about 'offline mode' is that you have to go online before you can go offline.
- how they first required both steam activation AND a dvd check for the store-bought version
Not Valve's fault-- the publisher's fault. You could have just bought the Steam version..
I don't care who's fault it was, it's still a hoop I had to jump through. At least it's been removed. I'm also in the UK, so buying through steam means I would have got pawned on the exchange rate. No thanks.
- that I can't resell my copy of HL2 when I get bored with it
You should do a survey to see how often people really do this, especially with games of this quality-- don't we all still have our Doom and Duke3d boxes? Even Wolf3d?
You might. I sell my old games to buy new ones. I know plenty of people who do, or used to, before steam and it's ilk took away my 'first sale' right to resell.
This gets brought up all the time-- if Valve/Steam went "belly up", I'm sure they would release an official fix, or some bright individual out there will figure one out. Sheesh.
I'm glad you have faith in the goodwill of a corporation. Myself, I would like to be guaranteed to be able to play my purchased games without being reliant upon the goodwill of a company that's already had my money.
Your problems at the LAN probably stemmed from not reading SteamPowered.com's guide on running in offline mode.
It was counterstrike:source, which didn't allow offline mode for LAN play at the time, haven't needed to try since. Plus, there was a mandatory patch just released, so we HAD to get it to play as some computers had it, and some didn't. About half the people had problems, and we had to delay the tourney start a day to cope with it.
This is like the "iTunes" of online games... Good analogy, I don't buy music from them for similar reasons; no resale, limited platforms I can play it on (burning it onto CD then transcoding to an even lower quality version is not acceptable to me to play music I paid for), restrictions on what I can do post-sale etc
-randomly losing my installed game files, forcing me to spend hours downloading and reinstalling the game via steam (happened to me twice now)
Sounds like you've got hardware problems-- check the SteamPowered.com forums for other people having similiar issues, and you might want to fill out a support ticket, that's what they are for.
Oddly enough, every other game I've got works fine, and I'm a network admin/support tech in my day job, so I'm pretty good at fixing recalcitrant windows machines. I'm sticking to blaming steam, thanks.
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I have to admit, I do love my hi-res razer diamondback mouse that I can adjust the sensitivity of on the fly. So much more expressive range of movement than trying to aim precisely on those tiny little thumbsticks.
As far as tilt controllers go... I already do use them, gyration mice. I regularly use one on my mythbox at home, and another at work to go with our electronic whiteboards+projector. Being able to move the mouse away from the screen is quite handy, and being able to do it without a desk is even more useful.
I still prefer my conventional mouse when I'm sitting at a desk, but I can easily see myself on my sofa, elbows on knees, using the nintendo controller just like I use the gyro mouse. People already move and tilt existing controllers; just watch someone playing halo in a tight spot, or a sports game - they move their body and arms in the direction of the characters movement.
There will need to be good games that take advantage of the style of movement, not the same old games that try to map joysticks (or worse - buttons!) onto the gyro movement. If anyone can pull it off, it's nintendo. I honestly don't know if they will though, but it sounds interesting.
I'm afraid 'le stick' was before my time; I didn't get into computing until the venerable rubber-keyed spectrum 48k. Still, looking at the age of it, it's possible technology has moved on a little to be a bit more responsive, and the console horsepower is a bit higher too. Maybe gyro's mass-market time has come; maybe not. Given nintendo's hugely successful track record in introducing controller innovation, I'm prepared to give em a chance.
Others have already tackled the vast amount of radioactive crap that coal stations already pump into the air. The UK, and the rest of northern europe are renowned for their lack of sunny weather, so solar's out as a major form of power - if we could find a way to generate power from rain though, we'd be set for life :) Don't forget the environmental production costs for solar cells either, doped silicon produces a lot of nasty toxic waste.
Wind and wave power are being investigated and used, but for anything other than remote areas, they're too big and too inefficient to generate anything other than minor amounts of power at the moment.
Natural gas of course produces CO2, as does coal, but we're running out of natural gas anyway, so need to find an alternative for both reasons.
Nuclear is a far more attractive prospect than coal, our current other big ticket energy method, simply because the amount of waste is much smaller and easier to control. Countries like the UK vitrify (encase in glass) their waste. Methods to dump it into dead deep sea stable zone are one option; dumping it into subduction zones so it gets sucked back down below the mantle are another possibility.
I'm all for truly clean alternative energy sources, but right now, nuclear power looks like the only affordable and least polluting short term solution.
It's the fine detail aiming with the mouse, combined with the movement and weapon selection on the keyboard. It only works because you have both of them on a desk, so you don't have to have something light enough or wieldy enough to hold in your hands.
With consoles, you need a small controller you can hold in mid-air, so for example aiming and button use has to be done with your thumbs, rather than most of your fingers. I've played Halo on the PC and XBox, and the PC version is unquestionably better in my mind.
That said, the next generation nintendo with it's gyro controllers will actually use the mid-air movement of the controller(s), so FPS games on it may well end up equal or superior to the PC experience. We'll see.
Actually, it boils down to:
-- the current system is broken because one country controls other countries fate for no reason other than historical inertia
-- most people who use the current system are happy with the current system, because they don't live in a country that the US government doesn't like
-- everyone wants a working DNS system, and would rather not break it on a technical level if they don't have to.
-- the UN has run things like the WHO, the world food program, and the ITU competently and quietly for decades, so could also run the DNS at a pinch.
I suspect we're talking past each other here. I think who gets to assign country DNS registrars shouldn't be in the hands of one US government department, or a handful of ISPs, but be the free choice of the government in question.
The fact that so much effort is being devoted to this is just another great example of how irretrievably useless a body the UN is.
The effort isn't coming from the UN, it's coming from the EU and some big countries like brazil, russia and china, with smaller countries adding in their opinion. A UN agency has been mooted as one possible candidate to run the DNS root in some of the suggested plans, but it's a lot more than Iran who are unhappy with the current setup of the root.
The discussion of incompetant DNS administrators is besides the point. Anyone who wants out of the ICANN root can get out today. Anyone who doesn't want out (because either they like the current system, don't care, or don't know any better) is irrelevant to this debate.
Actually, they're key to the debate. Most people don't know about the root, and DNS (and the internet) works despite that. Any change to DNS that's going to work needs to factor that in. That means the control of ICANN is much more relevant and important than just setting up an alt-root or two - without changing ICANN, effectively nothing changes on a global scale because most people won't switch because of ignorance or inertia. Things not changing pisses off many of the governments of the 95% of the world that doesn't live in the US. That leads to more radical options, like a split root and mandatory assignment to a new one by governments, which would be extremely messy for all concerned.
You may not give a stuff about other countries or their economic security, but you know what? They do. And the US government should as well, or what do you think would happen to the US economy if asia stops buying american dollars in exchange for goods? The willingness of china and other countries to support the huge US trade debt depends on *them* having strong economies, and expecting that one day they'll be able to spend all those dollars on something useful. A root split could easily cripple the internet for business, and that would have a big knock on effect on the world economy. You might think billions of dollars of electronic trade is irrelevent, but DNS is key to much of it. ccTLD's matter.
Just telling everyone that's not happy that they can go use an alt-root fixes nothing. In fact, it's attitudes like that, that nothing needs fixing and the DNS system is perfect just as it is, that's causing the crisis in the first place.
And if you think the EU, UN, US DoC or any other government bureacracy is any more or less likely to fuck things up, then you haven't been paying attention for very long.
It's not about competency per se. ICANN mostly does a good job on a purely technical basis; but then so do the actual root operators, and ITU in its own field also. The question is political control. Imagine the US president was an elected dictator. Congress, supreme court, state legislatures et al were all subservient to the president, who ruled by fiat. Would you be comfortable with that situation? (assuming you're american) Do you prefer checks and balances on the power of any one man to decide your fate? Most people would, and unsurprisingly non-americans don't like having their economic fate pretty much solely in the hands of a US government department, especially with all the talk of 'axis-of-evil' and the like.
Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Brazil, France, even Canada are all on the US government shit-list to different extents - is it unreasonable that they feel somewhat nervous about what the US government might unilaterally do to their ccTLD domains in the future? With a multi-country overview of the system, no one country could screw up another. That is the real goal, at least from the EU perspective. They want to keep ICANN, but just give more countries than the US influence in who the registrar is for any given domain. China and russia want to replace ICANN altogether with a UN agency, which I think is going too far; but I can see why they feel that way.
Do you mean in clients or servers? The DNS client doesn't know anything about roots, and just queries whatever server it's pointed at. A DNS server (even Windows) can trivially be configured to point at any root. Anyone running a DNS server who doesn't know how to modify root.hints should be banned from the Internet on principle.
I was thinking of both. Purely at the client end, people currently can add alt root hosts to over-ride or suplement their ISP DNS. Most people wouldn't know how, and very few care.
For company DNS servers, I know quite a few windows admins who run DNS for AD, but wouldn't know a cache.dns file if it bit them on the ass. There's plenty of misconfigured DNS servers that go straight to root because they've no upstream DNS caches (forwarders) that demonstrates that. (98% of root queries are unnecessary!) A Windows 2000-based DNS server follows specific steps in its name-resolution process. A DNS server first queries its cache, then it checks its zone records, then it sends requests to forwarders, and finally it tries resolution by using root servers. By default, a Microsoft DNS server connects to the Internet to further process DNS requests with root hints.... Windows uses the standard InterNIC root server. Also, when a Windows 2000-based server queries a root server, it updates itself with the most recent list of root servers. Roots that list ICANN's file are the default, and it takes an admin with a clue to change that. I agree that DNS admins *should* know about how DNS really works, root and all, but from the amount of misconfigured sites I've been to, they're a lot thinner on the ground than we'd like.
ISPs hopefully know what they're doing, but very few implement the alt roots at the moment. China could mandate their own ISPs use an alt root that overrides the defaults, which solves internal DNS; but that doesn't solve the problem for people hosting outside the country, or indeed people trying to find chinese websites elsewhere in the globe if the ICANN approved registrar differs from the chinese internal one.
Of course, we don't want a root split. We don't want different roots that point to different registrars for a given ccTLD or gTLD, with ISPs using a root based on political affiliation. But if the US gov isn't prepared to loosen its control of ICANN a little, that's what may eventually happen, which won't be pretty for anyone.
I'd much rather have a more accountable ICANN, or at worst multiple roots that peer each others files; but that doesn't solve the problem of what happens when they disagree.
It's certainly not the life or death struggle over DNS (OMG! China will censor my blog!) that people have been portraying it, as the ccTLD's and gTLD's will continue to be run entirely by their appropriate registrars.
.xxx gTLD - and that's directions to the ccTLD's. Currently, the US department of commerce can tell ICANN who gets to host ccTLD's. So any country's entire DNS system - for example, the .iq domain for iraq - can be arbitrarily turned off or assigned to a new registrar. And there's nothing that country can do about it. Haiti had to wait 2 years to get its domain assigned to the registrar of its choice, for example.
.com and .net domains, and ICANN did virtually nothing about it?
There is one other big issue than the creation of say, the
That's what this big argument is really about - why should the US government, or a fairly unaccountable company like ICANN have the right to determine which registrar, if any, gets to run a country's DNS? So far the US government hasn't abused this power *that* much - but it could.
Nor is ICANN entirely trusted either - remember the fiasco when verisign decided to start domain squatting with it's search engine on all unassigned
The problem with the alternative roots is that software makers like microsoft only support the 'official' ICANN system out of the box. With very few people technicially capable of adding alternative roots, and even fewer knowing why they'd need or want to, ICANN and the DoC effective has the rest of the world over a barrel. And they want to get off it.
I'm afraid I've only a little time, but I would point out that to most of the rest of the world, the Democrats is at best a centrist party, arguably even slightly right wing. The Republicans are very strongly right wing compared to most other countries.
Fox and Drudge report may only become centrist because your centre ground is significantly to the right of most other countries. It's all about your point of reference.
If you want a global centrist media organisation, you probably want the BBC, which is pretty left wing by US standards.
First, if I'm only playing mp3's on my 51v, the lifetime is significantly greater, more like 6-8 hours continuous. Same lifespan if I turn the backlight down, the CPU speed down, and the wifi off. That 4 hours is 4 hours constant use with most of the features going at full blast - in actual useage, it easily goes three days between charges, which is longer than my nokia 7210!
Smartphones have smaller screens, less features, smaller backlights and are optimised for longer battery life than PDAs. I draw your attention to the battery life of the latest palm I'm comparing it with - the T|X has a larger stock battery at 1250mAh, and only runs for 3 hours 20 minutes at average use - with half the CPU speed and a significantly smaller screen!
Just because it's a palm, doesn't mean it's magically going to get better battery life any more. That's kinda my point; Palm used to be the best at everything, now they're losing out when you compare like-for-like.
A lower featured PDA will last longer on battery than a higher featured PDA, that is also true. For me, for this role, battery life was not particularly important. It does however excede the lifetime of a brand new palm with lower specs.
PDAs have more horsepower, smartphones have longer lifetime between charges. I needed a grunty PDA, you needed a smartphone. Each of us happy, I think.
My point still stands though - they've given up the high end already, and are on the way to giving up the mid-end to pocket pcs, and as someone who loved palm for 6 solid years, that saddens me.
They made better kit, for a better price, for a long time. Now they've lost that.
I'm sure it depends on the CPU, but my new axim 51v is faster than my old tungsten E at task switching and opening files - and it's having to drive a 640x480 screen as opposed to 320x320. WM5 is also noticeably quicker than the x50v I had a chance to play with before buying the x51v (virtually same hardware, but WM2003 vs WM5). The persistant storage is good too, makes a nice change from my charge-it-or-lose-it tungsten.
Then again, my 51v is twice the price of the the tungsten E, so that probably helps! One thing the axim is also faster at is powering up from standby. It usually only takes a second or so to go from standby to voice-recording when I hit the record button. That's quite a bit more responsive than my tungsten was to button presses.
Between my 1GB SD card, 190MB of usable main storage, and the 4GB microdrive I'm getting soon, space definitely isn't a problem.
PocketPC's used to be much slower and clunkier than palms. That's probably still true for an entry level PDA/smartphone, but pocket pc's have definitely caught up at the middle and high end. And I saw that as a long time disliker of microsoft.
I've been using palms for years, but I've finally jumped ship. I've just replaced my tungsten E with a dell axim X51V. I wanted to stay with palm, but I needed a top-end unit with wifi and a high-res screen for effectively replacing my old department laptop when I'm out of the office.
the 51v is nearly 50% more expensive than this new T|X, but since work is paying, price wasn't really an object. The screen is 480x640; it has 802.11b and bluetooth 1.2 (though the bluetooth seems broken on windows mobile 5 for prety much anything except file transfer and activesync at the moment); a damn sight more software runs on windows mobile rather than palm os (stock PIM software is about the same; pocketplus and pocket breeze rock bigtime); double the storage (256MB vs 128); and a user-replacable battery, so I can buy up to 3300mAh if I'm going to be away from mains for a long time (stock is 1100mAh). The CF + sd slot looks to be really useful too, as I'll get myself a 4GB microdrive as well as several useful addin cards that go in the CF slot; and the processor runs up to 624Mhz. Average lifetime is about 4 hours solid use, and since it's non-volatile storage, it doesn't matter if the battery goes flat. Spanks the best palms available, including this new one easily.
If palm sold a top-end PDA with similar specs, I would have stayed. As it is, I think palm are going to struggle to hold onto anything other than the entry-level PDA and smartphone market. Even in the midrange, existing pocket pc's compare well with this brand new palm.
The problem is, they see the falling sales from a boycott, and just claim it's down to 'pirates' stealing their music instead of buying. Then they just push for ever more harsh and restrictive DRM and legislation to 'prevent their massive losses to those thieving pirates'.
I'm boycotting the major labels, but I'm under no illusions they're using that as a reason to restrict everybodies rights ever further.
One reason for that is because so many others are driving SUVs and light trucks. A car hit by a SUV is at greater risk of having fatalities than if it had been hit by a heavy car. It's the ride height and stiffness that makes SUVs more dangerous, not their weight.
Incidentally, SUVs themselves are held to the lower safety standards of light trucks, not passenger cars. They don't have the same safety standards for their occupants as passenger cars for side impacts, and their bumpers are not as strong. There's also the the significant increased risk of rollovers.
So buying an SUV or light truck not only puts other road-users at greater risk, it also puts the occupants at higher risk than if they'd bought a medium or large sized car.
To be fair, there are uses for light trucks and SUVs, mainly out of cities. In urban areas, a large car does the same job, is safer all round, and gets better fuel efficiency. The tax and safety loopholes that SUVs get should be closed, as they are primarily passenger vehicles, not business light trucks.
What does Linux have?
How about the IBM linux TV advert I just saw 30 seconds ago? Or maybe Novell is a big enough name. Linux is not about sexy looking but restricted and easily scratched music players. It's about reliable, big scale software that does the job. I still hesitate to recommend linux on the desktop for your average home user, and I've been using it on mine for 6 years - but government and businesses? Linux makes an awful lot of sense for them.
Ouch. I'm not a user of their service, I just googled them and they looked reasonable. I haven't had anything like that from them yet, and I signed up with them earlier just to check for smallprint before I suggested them. Maybe it's because I'm UK based, and they're going to delete my account.
If that's a requirement of their service, it looks like they use the account for spamming and I don't want to recommend that! Thanks for the heads up, and please accept my apologies.
Well, I don't expect IMAP from Gmail; it is a free service after all. It'd just be useful.
Thing is, I have multiple mail domains (work, home, and old account) which is useful to access from several places. My work accounts (several system accounts and my own) I can now access via IMAP, my personal email is currently stored locally at home. I use my gmail account to store useful personal files, emails and the like so I can access them from anywhere (only recently got external IMAP access running at work)
The pain is, I can manage my multiple IMAP accounts easily from one client - except gmail which I have to go into a browser and fire it up to check for new mail, retrieve docs etc. POP access is fine and dandy, but rather defeats the object of using gmail to store things for access on the move!
If gmail had IMAP, I'd probably move my archived personal stuff into it, and just direct my personal domains there (my domainhost only provides pop3, and those that provide IMAP in the UK don't offer large mailboxes, not cheaply anyway).
As it is, I'm going to setup my personal linux box at home to be an IMAP server, and route everything personal to that, especially as kmail can now apply folder filtering on IMAP boxes. With my work and personal email accessible from anywhere via IMAP, what need will I have for a gmail account that I'm not receiving much mail at, that I need to access separately from my other 6 mailboxes?
Gmail webaccess is fine if that's your only mail account. If you have multiple ones, you want to aggregate them in one client using IMAP, just like I use gaim or trillian to aggregate my multiple IM logins. If Gmail don't want to provide that, all power to them, but they'll be losing my eyeballs. No great loss for either of us, I suspect.
I know it's not as useful as an outlook export function (microsoft probably has patents on their outlook mailstore format) but you can always use IMAP to migrate your email between the local storage of any mail clients you like.
Gmail doesn't allow IMAP yet (primary reason I don't use it much) but it looks like bgxmail offers a free 1 GB mailbox you could use - just setup the IMAP server in both outlook and thunderbird, and copy the emails to IMAP, then into the local folders. Hell, you could just leave your archive email in the IMAP store, and use either program to access them.
Alternatively, you could setup a local IMAP server such as courier-imap or any of the many alternatives and migrate the email that way.
Paper votes are only as good as the people counting them, and the way in which they are created.
In the UK, we had a scandal recently about postal voting trials, where votes where stolen or forged. There's also the problem of party officials going to retirement homes and 'helping' people fill their voting papers out correctly.
Equally, places like Zimbabwe have paper ballots, and there are regular reports of ballot stuffing, i.e. adding fake votes to the ballot boxes, as well as intimidation being used to keep one party's people away from the polls in the first place. Other places that have paper ballots simply bribe the vote counters.
Even if the system and people involved are honest, trustworthy and verified, there's always the problem of miscast or spoiled ballots with paper voting, where the papers are confusingly composed (i.e. similar names) or difficult to correctly mark, if you use runoff/multiple votes at once.
Any system of voting is only as good as the people implementing it and counting it, regardless of the mechanism.
Yes, because they're standing on the neck of our rights when they're doing it...
Which ISP? I'm on 1Mb unlimited with pipex for £24 inc, and it's a nice service, but most of the cheaper ones are capped.
That's exactly the business model that redhat and SuSE (now novell) use. The bit you're wrong about is that fork distributions end up killing the original shrinkwrap.
Yes, your time in putting together the good distro has value to people who don't want to spend that time - and so does support. As the original vendor, you're in a much better position to offer patches, upgrades and aftersales support. Take Redhat enterprise linux for example; there are a couple of rebranded versions like centOS, but people still buy RHEL because they like the idea of guaranteed support and patches. Hell, redhat even provide their own community-supported desktop OS, fedora.
Don't give Orrin Hatch any more ideas.
I think you've confused the NO superdome, and the Houston astrodome, which is one place where the people from NO were evacuated to. The people who were evacuated were seeking refuge, and thus are refugees. The radio station was to be setup in the refugee centre, (the houston astrodome) which was undamaged by the hurricane and some distance from NO.
I don't have to change out of Gnome for KDE for them to work in almost every case.
That's because the apps just load the libs they need from kde. Gnome apps do the same in kde, they just load the gnome libs they need. That's how they're supposed to work! Hell, you can use gnome and kde apps in blackbox... They just won't fit in with the 'look' like the rest of your desktop, unless you use the same theme for both DE's, like bluecurve.
Me, I like KDE. You like Gnome. It's all good.
Decryption didn't take that long, I remember it being 30 minutes or something like that. Who cares? Also, you do not need an internet connection to play single player-- there is "Offline Mode", read up on SteamPowered.com's FAQs.
Good for you. It took me several hours and meant the time I had to play the game was taken up by installation, and I didn't have the free time till the next day. I was not pleased.
My point about 'offline mode' is that you have to go online before you can go offline.
- how they first required both steam activation AND a dvd check for the store-bought version
Not Valve's fault-- the publisher's fault. You could have just bought the Steam version..
I don't care who's fault it was, it's still a hoop I had to jump through. At least it's been removed.
I'm also in the UK, so buying through steam means I would have got pawned on the exchange rate. No thanks.
- that I can't resell my copy of HL2 when I get bored with it
You should do a survey to see how often people really do this, especially with games of this quality-- don't we all still have our Doom and Duke3d boxes? Even Wolf3d?
You might. I sell my old games to buy new ones. I know plenty of people who do, or used to, before steam and it's ilk took away my 'first sale' right to resell.
This gets brought up all the time-- if Valve/Steam went "belly up", I'm sure they would release an official fix, or some bright individual out there will figure one out. Sheesh.
I'm glad you have faith in the goodwill of a corporation. Myself, I would like to be guaranteed to be able to play my purchased games without being reliant upon the goodwill of a company that's already had my money.
Your problems at the LAN probably stemmed from not reading SteamPowered.com's guide on running in offline mode.
It was counterstrike:source, which didn't allow offline mode for LAN play at the time, haven't needed to try since. Plus, there was a mandatory patch just released, so we HAD to get it to play as some computers had it, and some didn't. About half the people had problems, and we had to delay the tourney start a day to cope with it.
This is like the "iTunes" of online games...
Good analogy, I don't buy music from them for similar reasons; no resale, limited platforms I can play it on (burning it onto CD then transcoding to an even lower quality version is not acceptable to me to play music I paid for), restrictions on what I can do post-sale etc
-randomly losing my installed game files, forcing me to spend hours downloading and reinstalling the game via steam (happened to me twice now)
Sounds like you've got hardware problems-- check the SteamPowered.com forums for other people having similiar issues, and you might want to fill out a support ticket, that's what they are for.
Oddly enough, every other game I've got works fine, and I'm a network admin/support tech in my day job, so I'm pretty good at fixing recalcitrant
windows machines. I'm sticking to blaming steam, thanks.