It'll be interesting to compare Etch to ICE, which is a GPL'd open-source, cross-language RPC toolkit (you can buy commerical licenses too). It's quite widely used by banks and is generally reckoned to be speedy.
Because they're not fixing an imperfection in an existing limb/organ without altering how it fundamentally works; they're replacing limbs and fundamentally changing how they work in a way that is not available to able-bodied people.
If the technology that powers this guy's legs was that good, the people with bad legs (or the military) would be falling all over themselves to get them "installed".
The truth is these blades aren't a good replacement for good human legs. It's a lot of work for this guy to even start running using these. The fact that he can do so well using what essentially is something inferior to human legs is a testament to the human spirit -- something the Olympics is fundamentally about, something which a lot of posters here forget.
> I think you are intentionally being a troll, here.
Sigh. Welcome to 21st century America, where everyone who disagrees with your point is a troll, shill or worse.
Anyway --
> This sets a precedent.
That is a good thing. Brown v Board of Education set a precedent too, as did Roe v Wade. I wouldn't want people who medically need technology to survive relegated to some "special" zone. They should be able to take part in every part of life that non-handicapped people can. That includes sport, if they are good enough to qualify.
> That being, artifical replacements to human body parts does not disqualify one from competing in the Olympics.
Again: so we should ban athletes who wear glasses? Or (less likely now, but still) pacemakers? I find your insistence on the purity of the human body in sport somewhat troubling.
> The problem comes 10-20 years from now, when you have athletes willfully lopping their limbs off to get cybernetic implants all to win the gold.
That is a straw man. The regulations could clearly state that any modifications have to pass rigorous medical scrutiny -- including why they were required in the first place.
And oh, you're essentially telling a guy born without legs that he can't be a part of normal society because of what unscrupulous athletes might do 30 years in the future? Way to go.
Replace "handicapped" with "black" above and you'll get a better perspective of what my views are.
In the 50s, whites couldn't and wouldn't go to black schools. Black children COULDN'T (but would if they could) go to white schools, because that's where the best schools were.
> In fact, if you're saying that a competition doesn't really count unless it involves able-bodied people
I am not saying that at all. What I am saying is that competitions like the Olympics should be open to all humans, as long as they have not flouted the rules to get an unfair advantage.
As an aside, events like the Paralympics, or under-14s sports competitions, are not universal competitions, they are special events designed to highlight the abilities of certain groups of people. In fact the Olympics keeps this distinction for men and women, because *usually* women tend to be disadvantaged in terms of muscle mass, etc. It's not perfect, but it's a darn sight better than the old Olympic custom of not letting women participate at all. Anyway, while it's nice that handicapped folk have the option of competing in special events, wouldn't it be infinitely better to (assuming they qualified) let them compete in the actual mainstream event?
Especially since -- athletes have been using technology to improve their performance since, well, forever. Would you disqualify an archer for wearing glasses (Archery is IIRC an Olympic event)? Would you disqualify an athlete for wearing a pacemaker implant (assuming he got it for sound medical reasons and he's fit enough to perform?) If not, what's wrong with allowing a guy born without legs to wear blades?
All I see here is the old fear that somehow a guy with technology on his body is somehow "equal, but separate". And that's sad. It'll go away with time as people get comfortable with the technology in question (people with glasses face very little discrimination these days) but until then someone has to speak up for the rights of people for whom technological aids are a medical necessity.
The thing is, this man is quite exceptional -- he was born without fibulas in both legs, which is why his legs were amputated when he was 11 months old.
By any standard of fairness, he has not sought out his 'blades' as a performance-enhancement alternative to perfectly good legs. What this decision means is that he will no longer be 'ghettoized' and forced to participate in only the Paralympics.
Far from being a can of worms in terms of technology creeping into the games, this is a landmark for those who care about the rights of the handicapped -- they are no longer "separate but equal" like pre-Civil Rights African Americans, but that they really can join the mainstream of athletic society.
Exactly. And apart from tape/paper storage companies, most midsize+ offices have cleaners who often work for minimum wage. If corporate espionage was a major concern, I'd be very concerned about these cleaners.
The bigger point which the GP misses is that most small businesses aren't doing anything to rock Google's boat. Google would have little to gain and everything to lose by snooping around. In actual fact, they have fairly good regulations governing who can look at private data.
I've worked in companies using Domino in the past, and yes, it is cheaper because IBM is fairly aggressive about prices. Microsoft is aggressive about Exchange pricing but giving Outlook CALs to everyone who needs email is too darn expensive (I'm guessing they have web-only Exchange CALs now so this isn't necessary).
That said, I'm glad I'm not using Notes any more. Sure, it's a fantastic workflow system -- except it lacked a decent mail client when I used it (Notes R5). Outlook is far better (IMHO!) and Gmail beats them both hands down.
If I were a small business owner I'd consider Google Apps very seriously. With a decent backup plan (you can use IMAP/POP to create a local store of your email and iCal feeds to back up your calendar data) Google Apps would do the trick for most small businesses for $0.00.
Note - I am not a car fanatic. I like cars that take me from A to B reliably, and with decent handling. The problem is, I bought a car so that I'd not have to worry about the distance between A and B.
For work, I drive about 20 minutes - less than 20 miles. But the thing is, I'd like to use the same car for longer drives. The notion of having a commute-only car and a separate car for everything else is not very appealing to me. As for the EV1, I'd love to see a ROI analysis of the costs of putting up the fuel infrastructure for a car that only urban and suburban Americans could use 4 days a week (because they could be driving out/in on Fridays/Mondays).
That said, you should look at the Tesla -- it's supposed to do 220 miles on a single charge. And if they can get their transmission issues sorted out, it's going to make electric cars not just eco-friendly, but *desirable*.
Uh, no, the challenges to a *feasible* electric car are mostly technological. And no, boil-the-ocean schemes along the lines of "if only the government will mandate electric refill stations along the freeway" are not a political barrier, except in the minds of some activists. Any solution that requires massive up-front investments is a poor engineering solution.
The real problem with an electric car is that *storing* electricity is a hard problem. And unless your electric car runs on rails, you will need to store electricity.
Incidentally, cars aren't the only ones with this problems -- laptops and mobile phones have exactly the same problem.
Now, recent advances in nanotech will help batteries improve, and we may even see practical capacitor-type storage devices. And when we get to that point, the electric car will be a reality.
I am waiting for my mini laser powered home cinema projector that I can get for £100 (or $200 if you like), never have to change a £300 bulb on a £300 projector, never have a loud whirry fan and huge amounts of excess heat, generates a good HD image with a respectable amount of lumens and can be tastefully hidden in a wall of books with a drop down projector screen on the over side of the room.
> The Daily Show may be a fake news show but much of the > damning parts are simply juxtaposed video clips of the > same person saying two completely opposite things. That's > what keeps me watching, is the memory the show seems to > have about public record.
I love the Daily Show, but juxtaposing clips of persons saying completely different things isn't news because in the real world, situations change and it's often useful to behave inconsistently (cue Emerson's "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" quote). Further, the Daily Show's juxtapositions are not always valid -- I've seen quite a few old quotes taken out of context, but that's okay because it's not real news.
Also, I'd rather get my news without editorializing from the reporter or anchor (but of course a news channel could editorialize in opinion and interview shows).
> So many "journalists" seem happy simply to be talking to > their subjects or about their subjects that they don't > call them on obvious bullshit.
Because it's hard to ask good questions in a crowded press conference (people who deal with journalists have gotten really good at deflecting questions). And when they get better access, often the price they pay for that is a positive tilt on their stories. e.g., Time's man-of-the-year piece on Vladimir Putin or what CNN did in Iraq pre-1991. One programme that's historically had a bit more spine is the BBC's "HardTalk", but I don't think it airs on BBC America.
Btw, I think the FTA is spot-on when it talks about how network news considers content secondary to the size of audience -- this is what IMO led to the dumbing down of news to appeal to the largest possible set.
I think the only way TV news will improve is when TV execs realize that appealing to the lowest common denominator will just turn smarter viewers off, and those smarter (and affluent!) viewers are the ones their advertisers really want.
Except for the newer bits, like most of Places and the cosmetics of new Super-autocomplete dropdown (which feels... unrefined; functionality-wise it's doing a great job).
It's interesting to see the new animated-ish tab movement on the tab bar (when you scroll the mousewheel over it) and the animation when things like 'Remember this password?' appear. They look pretty, but are slow on some crappy video cards -- would anyone know how these 'animation' effects can be disabled?
And, kudos to the Firefox team -- I've been using v3 Beta1 for some time, and the browser does feel snappier. Of course, I haven't loaded up my 4-5 'must-have' extensions (Adblock, TabMixPlus, SwitchProxy, DownloadThemAll mainly, sometimes YSlow) so it'll be interesting to see how v3 does in "real"-use scenarios.
I managed to breeze through the Valars, but for me the dreariest part of the Silmarillon was when it got into the family squabbles (and the looong family trees) of the Elves in the middle, upto the tale of Beren and Luthien. If you think soap operas are bad, soap operas about ultra-longlived creatures are worse.
How is excellence orthogonal to making money? It seems the only way you define 'excellence' is -- works on hardware that's underpowered compared to the industry baseline. By that criterion, QNX -- which is for-profit -- won the efficiency sweepstakes long ago, when they bundled a GUI onto a 3.5 inch floppy. Or Adobe (for-profit too, even though Flash player is free), which fits a very rich runtime (including HD video in the betas) into a 1MB download.
Open source projects are often free to make their own decisions regarding hardware support, and often they can support older hardware because they have no commercial pressure (working as they are for 'free', i.e., being subsidised by some other entity, perhaps their employer or university or even parents). But every software project, including open source ones, makes decisions about tradeoffs like hw support and programmer productivity. The fact that KDE's devs saw it fit to not submit to bloat tells me that they figured that they found that they traded off efficiency for productivity, probably because they felt their user base values it more. To conflate engineering tradeoffs with your ideas of 'excellence' is very misguided thinking.
On the desktop (excluding OSX since I've not used Java much on it), I agree with you. But phones with good, fast Java support (and good Java apps, some of them from Google) do exist. And if the phone starts the JVM at startup (if it can be done without impacting battery life, of course), then you won't even notice the 'hit' as the JVM starts.
I know you're just joking, but, just in case, consider this: how much manipulation is facilitated by the fact that those doing it can cherry-pick what they translate, and rely on a mass of sheep who don't know the other language and can't be arsed to check?
Plenty, and much of it is done in the Arab world. Listen to some of Yasser Arafat's English and Arabic speeches, it's really quite astonishing. Or watch translated Arabic TV sometime, for example at MEMRI.
> Linux users are WAY WAY more savvy than a windows user.
The fact that Linux desktop users run Compiz is not a reflection of their "savvy"; it is a reflection of the fact that they are time-rich.
As for folk who run servers -- there are plenty of very clueful admins running large and complex networks. They don't come from your local MCSE shop, but they do exist and are very smart indeed. So you might want to cut down on your juvenile "WAY WAY more savvy" cheerleading.
As it happens, the Unix approach of minimal hand-holding is probably good because it gets in an admin's way less, but this incident goes to show the limitations of Debian's security/volatile approach. The problem here seems to be that because 'volatile' isn't pulled by default, most users won't get this update.
This does NOT only affect those in NZ, anyone interested in the correct time in NZ could have this problem. Worse, many people outside NZ won't even know that they have to pull in this update. This results in the classic engineering snafu: the Debian developers are right, and they are wrong because their update logic missed the bigger picture of keeping the computer in sync with the physical environment it's embedded in. This happens rarely (the last big one I can think of is the introduction of the Euro symbol into character maps) but changing time zone definitions seems to be pretty common these days as legislators try them out as a quick-fix energy savings approach.
Here's hoping future Debian releases pull an 'operating-environment' line of updates by default, to deal with non-security-related operating environment issues.
I look forward to trying it out, but my first look at the website wasn't encouraging.
Have you seen the minimum system requirements for the beta? 1GB RAM minimum (the same, IIRC, as Lotus Notes 8 -- probably because they use some of the same UI framework.) This is when I can run MS Office 2007 on a 256MB RAM machine (and it runs well too as long as I don't run other apps).
Boing Boing says they will open up their archives. "...But the Times has also upheld the principle of public access to the public domain, and is opening its archives from 1851-1922, all of which are in the public domain. Archives 1987-present, though copyrighted, will also be freely accessible."
This comes right on the heels of the TOR arrest in Germany. Man, they told me freedom of speech wouldn't count for much if Bush was re-elected. And they were right!
They're a bunch of different tools, all it's doing is providing a common installer+update. You can still get each piece singly. That's not bad. Of course, they *could* go down the AOL route and make it an all-or-nothing choice, but no one does that these days.
> Simple things like the same M$ "live' cookie being used all over M$ web services.
Hate to break it to you, but doing that doesn't require "combining bits" or shipping a bunch of software. Every large web provider does it.
And oh, if you're worrying about cookies, you won't be pleased to know that most serious web analytics folk do IP address block/URL visit correlation as well. It works really well at drilling down into different people using the same machine, but it also works really well on folk avoiding cookies. And this analysis can be done by anyone with a proxy between you and the site you're visiting.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll be interesting to compare Etch to ICE, which is a GPL'd open-source, cross-language RPC toolkit (you can buy commerical licenses too). It's quite widely used by banks and is generally reckoned to be speedy.
If the technology that powers this guy's legs was that good, the people with bad legs (or the military) would be falling all over themselves to get them "installed".
The truth is these blades aren't a good replacement for good human legs. It's a lot of work for this guy to even start running using these. The fact that he can do so well using what essentially is something inferior to human legs is a testament to the human spirit -- something the Olympics is fundamentally about, something which a lot of posters here forget.
> I think you are intentionally being a troll, here.
Sigh. Welcome to 21st century America, where everyone who disagrees with your point is a troll, shill or worse.
Anyway --
> This sets a precedent.
That is a good thing. Brown v Board of Education set a precedent too, as did Roe v Wade. I wouldn't want people who medically need technology to survive relegated to some "special" zone. They should be able to take part in every part of life that non-handicapped people can. That includes sport, if they are good enough to qualify.
> That being, artifical replacements to human body parts does not disqualify one from competing in the Olympics.
Again: so we should ban athletes who wear glasses? Or (less likely now, but still) pacemakers? I find your insistence on the purity of the human body in sport somewhat troubling.
> The problem comes 10-20 years from now, when you have athletes willfully lopping their limbs off to get cybernetic implants all to win the gold.
That is a straw man. The regulations could clearly state that any modifications have to pass rigorous medical scrutiny -- including why they were required in the first place.
And oh, you're essentially telling a guy born without legs that he can't be a part of normal society because of what unscrupulous athletes might do 30 years in the future? Way to go.
Replace "handicapped" with "black" above and you'll get a better perspective of what my views are.
In the 50s, whites couldn't and wouldn't go to black schools. Black children COULDN'T (but would if they could) go to white schools, because that's where the best schools were.
> In fact, if you're saying that a competition doesn't really count unless it involves able-bodied people
I am not saying that at all. What I am saying is that competitions like the Olympics should be open to all humans, as long as they have not flouted the rules to get an unfair advantage.
As an aside, events like the Paralympics, or under-14s sports competitions, are not universal competitions, they are special events designed to highlight the abilities of certain groups of people. In fact the Olympics keeps this distinction for men and women, because *usually* women tend to be disadvantaged in terms of muscle mass, etc. It's not perfect, but it's a darn sight better than the old Olympic custom of not letting women participate at all. Anyway, while it's nice that handicapped folk have the option of competing in special events, wouldn't it be infinitely better to (assuming they qualified) let them compete in the actual mainstream event?
Especially since -- athletes have been using technology to improve their performance since, well, forever. Would you disqualify an archer for wearing glasses (Archery is IIRC an Olympic event)? Would you disqualify an athlete for wearing a pacemaker implant (assuming he got it for sound medical reasons and he's fit enough to perform?) If not, what's wrong with allowing a guy born without legs to wear blades?
All I see here is the old fear that somehow a guy with technology on his body is somehow "equal, but separate". And that's sad. It'll go away with time as people get comfortable with the technology in question (people with glasses face very little discrimination these days) but until then someone has to speak up for the rights of people for whom technological aids are a medical necessity.
The thing is, this man is quite exceptional -- he was born without fibulas in both legs, which is why his legs were amputated when he was 11 months old.
By any standard of fairness, he has not sought out his 'blades' as a performance-enhancement alternative to perfectly good legs. What this decision means is that he will no longer be 'ghettoized' and forced to participate in only the Paralympics.
Far from being a can of worms in terms of technology creeping into the games, this is a landmark for those who care about the rights of the handicapped -- they are no longer "separate but equal" like pre-Civil Rights African Americans, but that they really can join the mainstream of athletic society.
Twitter does have its uses though. Being able to blog from your mobile is pretty useful sometimes...
Exactly. And apart from tape/paper storage companies, most midsize+ offices have cleaners who often work for minimum wage. If corporate espionage was a major concern, I'd be very concerned about these cleaners.
The bigger point which the GP misses is that most small businesses aren't doing anything to rock Google's boat. Google would have little to gain and everything to lose by snooping around. In actual fact, they have fairly good regulations governing who can look at private data.
I've worked in companies using Domino in the past, and yes, it is cheaper because IBM is fairly aggressive about prices. Microsoft is aggressive about Exchange pricing but giving Outlook CALs to everyone who needs email is too darn expensive (I'm guessing they have web-only Exchange CALs now so this isn't necessary).
That said, I'm glad I'm not using Notes any more. Sure, it's a fantastic workflow system -- except it lacked a decent mail client when I used it (Notes R5). Outlook is far better (IMHO!) and Gmail beats them both hands down.
If I were a small business owner I'd consider Google Apps very seriously. With a decent backup plan (you can use IMAP/POP to create a local store of your email and iCal feeds to back up your calendar data) Google Apps would do the trick for most small businesses for $0.00.
Note - I am not a car fanatic. I like cars that take me from A to B reliably, and with decent handling. The problem is, I bought a car so that I'd not have to worry about the distance between A and B.
For work, I drive about 20 minutes - less than 20 miles. But the thing is, I'd like to use the same car for longer drives. The notion of having a commute-only car and a separate car for everything else is not very appealing to me. As for the EV1, I'd love to see a ROI analysis of the costs of putting up the fuel infrastructure for a car that only urban and suburban Americans could use 4 days a week (because they could be driving out/in on Fridays/Mondays).
That said, you should look at the Tesla -- it's supposed to do 220 miles on a single charge. And if they can get their transmission issues sorted out, it's going to make electric cars not just eco-friendly, but *desirable*.
Uh, no, the challenges to a *feasible* electric car are mostly technological. And no, boil-the-ocean schemes along the lines of "if only the government will mandate electric refill stations along the freeway" are not a political barrier, except in the minds of some activists. Any solution that requires massive up-front investments is a poor engineering solution.
The real problem with an electric car is that *storing* electricity is a hard problem. And unless your electric car runs on rails, you will need to store electricity.
Incidentally, cars aren't the only ones with this problems -- laptops and mobile phones have exactly the same problem.
Now, recent advances in nanotech will help batteries improve, and we may even see practical capacitor-type storage devices. And when we get to that point, the electric car will be a reality.
> Reign it in.
The correct phrase (and the one most suitable for the horseplay) is "Rein it in".
> I'd like to see those slashbots apologize for undermining the US at every turn and being so unpatriotic.
Not all Slashdotters are *from* the US, you insensitive clod! I, for one, am posting from Teheran University and don't see why I should have to
*NO CARRIER*
All it takes os a homebrew EMP device ... but those will be fairly bulky, backpack-sized at least I guess.
I am waiting for my mini laser powered home cinema projector that I can get for £100 (or $200 if you like), never have to change a £300 bulb on a £300 projector, never have a loud whirry fan and huge amounts of excess heat, generates a good HD image with a respectable amount of lumens and can be tastefully hidden in a wall of books with a drop down projector screen on the over side of the room.
This might interest you, then.
> The Daily Show may be a fake news show but much of the
> damning parts are simply juxtaposed video clips of the
> same person saying two completely opposite things. That's
> what keeps me watching, is the memory the show seems to
> have about public record.
I love the Daily Show, but juxtaposing clips of persons saying completely different things isn't news because in the real world, situations change and it's often useful to behave inconsistently (cue Emerson's "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" quote). Further, the Daily Show's juxtapositions are not always valid -- I've seen quite a few old quotes taken out of context, but that's okay because it's not real news.
Also, I'd rather get my news without editorializing from the reporter or anchor (but of course a news channel could editorialize in opinion and interview shows).
> So many "journalists" seem happy simply to be talking to
> their subjects or about their subjects that they don't
> call them on obvious bullshit.
Because it's hard to ask good questions in a crowded press conference (people who deal with journalists have gotten really good at deflecting questions). And when they get better access, often the price they pay for that is a positive tilt on their stories. e.g., Time's man-of-the-year piece on Vladimir Putin or what CNN did in Iraq pre-1991. One programme that's historically had a bit more spine is the BBC's "HardTalk", but I don't think it airs on BBC America.
Btw, I think the FTA is spot-on when it talks about how network news considers content secondary to the size of audience -- this is what IMO led to the dumbing down of news to appeal to the largest possible set.
I think the only way TV news will improve is when TV execs realize that appealing to the lowest common denominator will just turn smarter viewers off, and those smarter (and affluent!) viewers are the ones their advertisers really want.
Except for the newer bits, like most of Places and the cosmetics of new Super-autocomplete dropdown (which feels ... unrefined; functionality-wise it's doing a great job).
It's interesting to see the new animated-ish tab movement on the tab bar (when you scroll the mousewheel over it) and the animation when things like 'Remember this password?' appear. They look pretty, but are slow on some crappy video cards -- would anyone know how these 'animation' effects can be disabled?
And, kudos to the Firefox team -- I've been using v3 Beta1 for some time, and the browser does feel snappier. Of course, I haven't loaded up my 4-5 'must-have' extensions (Adblock, TabMixPlus, SwitchProxy, DownloadThemAll mainly, sometimes YSlow) so it'll be interesting to see how v3 does in "real"-use scenarios.
I managed to breeze through the Valars, but for me the dreariest part of the Silmarillon was when it got into the family squabbles (and the looong family trees) of the Elves in the middle, upto the tale of Beren and Luthien. If you think soap operas are bad, soap operas about ultra-longlived creatures are worse.
How is excellence orthogonal to making money? It seems the only way you define 'excellence' is -- works on hardware that's underpowered compared to the industry baseline. By that criterion, QNX -- which is for-profit -- won the efficiency sweepstakes long ago, when they bundled a GUI onto a 3.5 inch floppy. Or Adobe (for-profit too, even though Flash player is free), which fits a very rich runtime (including HD video in the betas) into a 1MB download.
Open source projects are often free to make their own decisions regarding hardware support, and often they can support older hardware because they have no commercial pressure (working as they are for 'free', i.e., being subsidised by some other entity, perhaps their employer or university or even parents). But every software project, including open source ones, makes decisions about tradeoffs like hw support and programmer productivity. The fact that KDE's devs saw it fit to not submit to bloat tells me that they figured that they found that they traded off efficiency for productivity, probably because they felt their user base values it more. To conflate engineering tradeoffs with your ideas of 'excellence' is very misguided thinking.
On the desktop (excluding OSX since I've not used Java much on it), I agree with you. But phones with good, fast Java support (and good Java apps, some of them from Google) do exist. And if the phone starts the JVM at startup (if it can be done without impacting battery life, of course), then you won't even notice the 'hit' as the JVM starts.
> Linux users are WAY WAY more savvy than a windows user.
The fact that Linux desktop users run Compiz is not a reflection of their "savvy"; it is a reflection of the fact that they are time-rich.
As for folk who run servers -- there are plenty of very clueful admins running large and complex networks. They don't come from your local MCSE shop, but they do exist and are very smart indeed. So you might want to cut down on your juvenile "WAY WAY more savvy" cheerleading.
As it happens, the Unix approach of minimal hand-holding is probably good because it gets in an admin's way less, but this incident goes to show the limitations of Debian's security/volatile approach. The problem here seems to be that because 'volatile' isn't pulled by default, most users won't get this update.
This does NOT only affect those in NZ, anyone interested in the correct time in NZ could have this problem. Worse, many people outside NZ won't even know that they have to pull in this update. This results in the classic engineering snafu: the Debian developers are right, and they are wrong because their update logic missed the bigger picture of keeping the computer in sync with the physical environment it's embedded in. This happens rarely (the last big one I can think of is the introduction of the Euro symbol into character maps) but changing time zone definitions seems to be pretty common these days as legislators try them out as a quick-fix energy savings approach.
Here's hoping future Debian releases pull an 'operating-environment' line of updates by default, to deal with non-security-related operating environment issues.
I look forward to trying it out, but my first look at the website wasn't encouraging.
Have you seen the minimum system requirements for the beta? 1GB RAM minimum (the same, IIRC, as Lotus Notes 8 -- probably because they use some of the same UI framework.) This is when I can run MS Office 2007 on a 256MB RAM machine (and it runs well too as long as I don't run other apps).
Boing Boing says they will open up their archives. "...But the Times has also upheld the principle of public access to the public domain, and is opening its archives from 1851-1922, all of which are in the public domain. Archives 1987-present, though copyrighted, will also be freely accessible."
This comes right on the heels of the TOR arrest in Germany. Man, they told me freedom of speech wouldn't count for much if Bush was re-elected. And they were right!
> combining too many bits together
They're a bunch of different tools, all it's doing is providing a common installer+update. You can still get each piece singly. That's not bad. Of course, they *could* go down the AOL route and make it an all-or-nothing choice, but no one does that these days.
> Simple things like the same M$ "live' cookie being used all over M$ web services.
Hate to break it to you, but doing that doesn't require "combining bits" or shipping a bunch of software. Every large web provider does it.
And oh, if you're worrying about cookies, you won't be pleased to know that most serious web analytics folk do IP address block/URL visit correlation as well. It works really well at drilling down into different people using the same machine, but it also works really well on folk avoiding cookies. And this analysis can be done by anyone with a proxy between you and the site you're visiting.