I think the "white flag" model is workable, but access should not be limited to those sites on the list. A good example of this would be to provide (caution, buzzword alert) a portal for library users. Have it easily link up with community news and information and educational sites. Make it a compelling place for people to start exploring the web and allow them to jump off to sites of their own choosing if they want to.
The San Francisco public library has a system somewhat like this. They have a bunch of text-only terminals in the branches that can be used to access library information, look up books, etc. However, they also run Lynx so you can browse the web, telnet into your favorite host, look at a news feed, etc. if you are interested and know how to work with basic URLs.
A library's purpose is to help in the dissemination of information, without regard to age or content. That's why a child's library card can check out any book in the library, not just in the children's room.
I worked as a librarian for years, and kids would sometimes come up wanting to check out Tropic of Cancer or Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex but were Afraid to Ask. I would ask the kids about the book and tell them that it dealt with mature subjects, but I never once refused a book to a reader. I think most librarians are the same way.
Well, I don't think anyone will be building systems based on CHRP, but IBM has updated that design and released it as the PowerPC Open Architecture (POP). Based on the rumors I have been hearing, you will start to see cheap boxen coming up based on this design.
Also, Woz never actually left Apple. If you look at his web site (http://www.woz.org) he says that he has always remained on the Apple payroll. At his insistance, he is (and always plans to be) the lowest paid engineer at Apple.
Whenever the issue of Macs and floppy drives comes up, I just kind of shake my head and sigh. I think the reason they got rid of floppies is much simpler than people suspect: money.
From the very beginning, Apple used a 3.5" floppy drive with an eject motor. Floppies were ejected in software, by dragging the icon to the trash can or choosing to "put away" the floppy from a menu.
Back in 1984 this was pretty big stuff. Sony was the only company making the 3.5" drive at that point and they were happy to modify the design to include an eject motor since Apple was going to use them in every machine they built.
Fast forward a few years, and the situation had changed. PCs had abandoned the 5.25" floppy in favor of a 3.5" drive with an eject button. The price difference between the two units was staggering. Go to your local Fred's PC Hut and buy a bare floppy drive, and it's probably about $20. A replacement floppy drive for a Mac is about $200. Because the UI was so tied to a graphical way of representing mounted and unmounted filesystems, there was no good way to switch to a floppy drive with an eject button.
So, for many years, Mac loyalists held their noses, and ponied up 10x more for a floppy drive. At least we got to brag that a Mac never got an abort, retry, fail error.
When Steve Jobs was working on the iMac, the focus was on delivering a consumer machine. I suspect they did some polling and a lot of focus groups and came up with a magic number for the maximum price. The goal was to make the iMac affordable as an impulse purchase like a new TV or home appliance, not as a major capital outlay.
Bringing the original iMac to market for $1500 was hard enough already. The floppy drive alone would have been 13.3% of the total price of the computer! Compare that to a $20 PC floppy drive being 1% of the cost of a $2,000 PC.
Clearly, if they were going to meet the price target, the floppy drive had to go. Once it was out for financial reasons, it was possible to flaunt its absence. It became a design statement, and prompted a lot of chest thumping about forward looking technology.
All of that may or may not be true, but the reason it was a non starter in the iMac was because of cost, not ideology.
Once the decision was made, extending it across the prodict line was natural. In the powerbooks, floppy drives added weight, complexity, and mechanical parts that were likely to break. In the Pro models, how useful is a 1.44MB storage medium to someone who produces huge illustrations or digital photos? These people have used much higher capacity removable media since the days of the 44MB Syquest cartridge.
Of course, it helps tremendously that all standard CD players have a software eject feature so that Apple can use drives from any manufacturer, and users can replace broken ones with the same cheap drives that go in a PC.
You are probably thinking of second declension masculine masculine Latin nounds (there are lots of them). The nominative singular ending for these nouns is -us. The nominative plural is -i (note just one i, not two (or i not ii in Roman numerals)).
There are other declensions that use -us in the nominative singular and something different in the plural. For example, third declension nouns of any gender may end in -us in the nominative singular, while the nominative plural ending for masculine nouns is -es.
I realize that I may be one of the only Slashdot geeks to have majored in Classical Languages instead of Computer Science, and no pedantry was intended in this post.
The AC's point was that the waste should be put into a *subduction* zone on the seabed. This is an area where two tectonic plates meet and one is forced under the other. Anything you put here will get drawn under the Earth's crust.
Of course there are concerns about what would happen to the stuff before it gets recycled into the magma, but the point of the post was not to just dump it somewhere out of sight.
The AC's point was that the waste should be put into a *subduction* zone one the seabed. This is an area where two tectonic plates meet and one is forced under the other. Anything you put here will get drawn under the Earth's crust.
Of course there are concerns about what would happen to the stuff before it gets recycled into the magma, but the point of the post was not to just dump it somewhere out of sight.
The first SRL show I saw was at New Langton Arts (a small gallery in San Francisco) about 12 years sgo. To get in you had to sign a waiver and wear ear plugs, goggles, and a face shield.
Inside they had a big mechanical dinosaur thing that was controlled by an Atari 800, two wrecking balls smashing into each other, and all sorts of destructive fun.
Going through the exhibit, I climbed up on a catwalk thing that was hydraulically controlled to lurch around and try to dump you off. They also had a carbide cannon just like the one I played with as a kid, except this one was over ten feet long and three feet in diameter! Just as I was getting ready to climb down from the catwalk, the cannon swung around and went off right in my face.
The blast knocked me on my butt and blew off the face shield and the goggles. Meanwhile, the dinosaur head thing was bashing a hole in the wall into the building next door.
"Wow," I thought, "Full contact art!"
Mark Pauline, the founder of SRL, built his own robotic hand after he blew his own hand off when some military fuel exploded in something he was working on. They are the toughest bunch of geeks I've ever seen.
Re:This merger is good... how?
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AOL Nation
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· Score: 1
Well, here's one point I have not heard discussed about the merger:
Time/Warner has had some pretty spectacular failures trying to get their content online. Pathfinder was one of the early large commercial content sites, but it never took off. No matter how T/W tried to structure it or reorganize it, they just did not capture much interest on the Internet.
This was not a hostile takeover. Time/Warner wanted this just as much as AOL did. I think it is interesting that one of the largest, oldest old-media companies decided that it needed to sell the company to an online content provider in order to survive.
What this signals to me is that Time/Warner sees that the media distribution of the future will be on the Internet more than print, film, or television. It's kind of a backhanded compliment, but still it shows that large companies are taking the Internet very seriously and that they must see online content displacing television at some point in the future.
I don't want to sound like I'm getting all gushy about the merger. I like plenty of choice and I am concerned that the merged company may try to create their own segregated area of the Internet. Still, if they are able to deliver video on demand and some of the other services that we have heard about for ages, I think there will be a huge number of consumers who will flock to the service. These will likely be the kind of people who don't know that usenet and irc even exist, and with AOL Time/Warner they may never get the chance to find out.
http://www.rds.org.uk/rds98/mainpublications.htm This links to the publications of the RDS standard. After all, it is an open standard. Anyone who wants to can read and find out how they are doing this.
You are right, this is an ethical question. The other side of the issue is that many people feel that Microsoft has been taking money from consumers like candy from so many babies.
I don't run any MS operating systems, but I know many people who paid retail for several versions of DOS, Win 3.0, Win 3.1, Win 95, Win 98, and on and on. On top of that are the upgrade fees for versions of MS apps that are forced on users because Microsoft chooses to change the file format to break backwards compatability.
Maybe it is just primitive vengeance, but I can understand the viewpoint that many people have that, since they feel MS has been taking money from them over the years, they are entitled to take something back.
For me, the funniest part of this whole thing is that it is a failed license agreement. After all, Microsoft has spent years coming up with one of the most restrictive EULAs in the industry, then they leave a loophole in this one that you could drive a Best Buy delivery truck through! And all of this was due to a misundestanding of California consumer law.
From the article, it sounds like this may cost Microsoft tens of thousands of dollars, or maybe much more. I wonder what will happen to the lawyers who came up with these documents?
I used to be a very harsh critic of NASA back when the shuttle was the only thing they had flying. Most people don't realize that the reason there are six crewmembers on a shuttle mission is that until the mid-90s, all of the computer instructions were stored on punched paper tape! The "mission specialists" had the job of feeding the paper tape into the vintage 1970 computer while the Flying Winnebago did laps around the Earth for a week.
Each shuttle mission costs more than the $165MM we paid for the lost Mars lander. The way I look at it, compared to what NASA has spent in the past we should think of the Mars landers as being disposable. For about the cost of a jar of Tang and a few of those toothpaste tubes full of dehydrated ice cream, we can now send a probe to another planet. If it blows up, send another one, or two, or ten.
Sojurner was a huge success. That mission cost about $150MM. This one was a bust at $165MM. You take your chances with these things.
I think we have a much better chance of getting important science done by sending more and more of the cheaper landers. Think of them as probe droids, drop them by the dozens.
The problem is that the public's imagination is captured by manned space flight. Sending robots just doesn't do it for people the way a test pilot or scientist risking his/her life does. The sad fact is that humans are exceptionally well adapted for life on Earth and we suck at being space creatures. Our spines deteriorate, we lose muscle mass, our circadian rhythms get all fouled up. The way I see it, the only reason for manned space flight going at all right now is to give the Congress something they can relate to in hopes of keeping the budget from being slashed.
On the contrary, for those so inclined, this presents on opportunity to bash Microsoft financially.
Just gather up your family, friends and neighbors, and all go shopping at one of the participating stores. Pick out $400 worth of merchandise and get the instant rebate. Make sure to cancel right away.
Is there any limitation on how often one can participate? If not: lather, rinse, repeat.
You might be able to get $400 worth of stuff courtesy of Microsoft every day if you wanted to.
For all those who were not able to get a rebate for an unused copy of Windows, here's an opportunity to get an in kind refund.
We bought a copy of the Deluxe edition here at work to play around with. It comes in a surprisingly heavy box. Printed manuals are a good thing, I was very glad to see the dead trees in the box. It also comes with a rubber toy Tux. Kinda cute.
We installed it on a Dell PIII 550. The installer went flawlessly and found all the hardware. It has been running nicely for a couple of days now.
Reading through the comments, I see something that worries me about the distro, though. Most of the people who have reported problems have been using the downloaded version. The retail box comes with the install CD, the source CD, and a freely distributable CD. It seems like some of the goodies are only included in the retail version. If they are crippling the free/downloadable version, that would be a Bad Thing. I have not read the license carefully, but the inclusion of the freely distributable CD makes me wonder if the retail version is licensed per machine?
This is mostly just aimless speculation on my part, has anyone looked into this to provide more factual information?
I do watch the show with my kids and they (we) have some of the cards, mostly I'm interested in the game.
It's actually a decent Adventure/RPG type of thing. I don't have a Gameboy, so it's an excuse for one more emulator.
You're right about it being kind of a Rosetta Stone for talking to kids. They are amazed to find an adult who knows anything about pokemon. This is the first fad that my son has been into. I have learned about it because I want to know what he's into. It kind of gives me the creeps that there are all these parents out there who have no idea what their 4-6 year olds are talking about. I mean, if my kids develop an interest in something, I want to know what it is so I can share it with them, but also to make sure it's something I approve of. Just think, what if it was sumliminally urging them to buy Microsoft products or something?
Don't forget that there are also pokemon called Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee that are martial arts experts.
Do you think Marcel Marceau could sue over the pokemon called Mr. Mime?
Also, Alakazam is the third evolution of the pokemon. The earlier forms are called Abra and Kadabra in English, I wonder what their Japanese names are and if they have anything to do with other con artists.
I only know about pokemon because I have a four year old!
Well, for one thing applying the patch does protect you against the DoS. Remember that this attact is something like a combination of a Smurf and a Ping of Death attack. The ICMP response that the Mac OS 9 machine generates is 1499 bytes of payload. Add any sort of headers and this thing is bigger than the MTU of a standard ethernet frame.
So if you wanted to use this to really cramp the style of someone with a spiffy new G4, you would send the request packet and forge the source address to be the victim's own address. Even better, set the source address to be the broadcast address on the victim's LAN.
I suspect this could cause some serious havoc in a lab full of iMacs. Even worse, the new iBooks now ship with Mac OS 9. I hate to think what this kind of DoS could do to a large wireless LAN.
Just download the patch. Think of it as just one more extension in a bloated system folder. And just think, with OS X client, you won't have to fool around with extensions anymore.
While I am not privy to the L0pht's plans, it is not too hard to imagine a scenario that would take down the Internet. Think of an exploitable bug in BGP4 that would allow you to poison the routing table or a self-propagating virus for Cisco IOS. If you take out all the Cisco gear, or find a way to more or less break BGP4, the Internet would pretty much go poof.
I did not see either program, but I did read the summaries. When they said that the members of the L0pht have the ability to break into systems, what they somehow neglected to mention was that they get *PAID* to do this as part of a security audit! There has never been any indication that members of the L0pht go around randomly cracking machines.
I think jd actually has a point in there somewhere. If a library has printed material that I don't want to see, it's relatively easy for me to pass it by while looking for the things that I am interested in seeing.
With a shared computer, the situation is a little different. If the campus library has an exclusive contract with a large software company that I don't like, it will be more difficult to get away from that company's software while using the shared computer.
In the battle of all or nothing censorship, I think slashdot itself shows a workable third way. We all have a lot of choice in the way we view Slashdot (comment mode, include/exclude topics, authors, etc). I don't see why this couldn't be done on a larger scale for browser preferences.
For example, is there a censorware product available that allows individual users to configure the amount of filtering an individual wants? In the case of a campus library, it could go against an LDAP server to store each individual's preferences for what they would want to have filtered. For a public library, as long as there is a "wide open" option, I would not object to this kind of censorware.
In the long term, I think something like this is the only way to satisfy the greatest number of people. I don't like what I have seen in the current round of censorware products, and in general I do not appreciate companies trying to decide what is or is not suitable for me or my children. When I joined the local Blockbuster Video, I signed the release giving my 4 year old son permission to rent videos that are normally limited to viewers 18 and older because I want to make the decision about what movies he watches, not a corporation.
I actually use a product like this from time to time. One of the projects I am working on requires me to get reasonably accurate estimates of the population within a radius of an arbitrary point in the US.
I scratched my head for a while trying to come up with a way to do this, and then decided to spend $99 on a commercial program that does just that.
The census bureau in the US publishes a table which breaks down the population of the US by zip code. The people who made this program just cross referenced that table with the list of zip codes with lat/long coordinates and wrote a simple interface for it. It's just what I was planning on doing, but it this case it was faster and cheaper to buy it than for me to spend a couple of days writing it.
The company that sells the software also collects additional population info and puts out monthly updates of the database.
No, I'm not a spammer or a dead tree bulk mailer, but lots of businesses want to know if there is a large enough population base in a particular area to support opening a new location.
I think it has already been decided, in another context, that the IP rights for lectures are owned by the professor and not by the university.
On my bookshelf I have a well thumbed copy of "Nabokov's Lectures on Literature" which consists of lectures delivered at Cornell in the 1950s. The copyright notice says that they are the property of VN, not of the Cornell regents.
Aren't these collections of lectures pretty common? I think there are even audio books and video tapes you can buy of famous professors lecturing (the Richard Feynman audio tapes on physics are an example). I don't remember ever hearing that any of these were licensed from or were the property of the university
As far as the notes go, I think they would fall under fair use. After all, taking notes to write a book review or synopsis is not infringing on anyone's copyright.
Re:No Practical Application - Don't be so sure
on
Linux on Palm
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· Score: 1
I thought that was the whole idea behind the Handspring Visor? It is a PalmOS based machine with a slot that will (eventually) take an 802.11 card. We have one unit here at work for evaluation and so far it seems pretty cool. Getting it on the LAN full time will change it from a toy into a must-have.
As much as I enjoy all the Jetsons-style ideas about robotic houses, I don't think this is where connected appliances are headed (at least initially).
I think that appliance manufacturers will be interested in having simplex communications from the device back to the factory. For example, no one I know ever changes the water softener in their dishwasher even though it is just a block of salt, it only lasts a year, and it makes a real difference in the performance of the appliance.
I imagine that Whirlpool or whoever would love to sell you a subscription service to monitor the status of your applicances and open a proactive ticket when they detect a mechanical failure.
Right now, I have a home warranty system. If anything breaks in any part of my house, I call one number and they will fix it, no matter what it is, for a $100 deductible. I would be getting a much better deal if they could monitor the status of my house rather than waiting for me to discover that something needs to be fixed.
Security would not be a problem since the communication would be one way only. If some script kiddie intercepts the transmission and discovers that lint is accumulating in my dryer, I can probably deal with that.
Also, sometimes these home automation projects have unexpected side benefits. The Richet radio modem was originally meant to be a way to read utility meters remotely. Selling Internet access was only an afterthought.
This seems to be the worst of Old Media. A traditionally print magazine goes to the web and publishes a story summarizing the discussion on/. for those too lame or busy to read for themselves.
I thought web journalism was going to get people *closer* to the sources, not install another layer of filters.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the "white flag" model is workable, but access should not be limited to those sites on the list. A good example of this would be to provide (caution, buzzword alert) a portal for library users. Have it easily link up with community news and information and educational sites. Make it a compelling place for people to start exploring the web and allow them to jump off to sites of their own choosing if they want to.
The San Francisco public library has a system somewhat like this. They have a bunch of text-only terminals in the branches that can be used to access library information, look up books, etc. However, they also run Lynx so you can browse the web, telnet into your favorite host, look at a news feed, etc. if you are interested and know how to work with basic URLs.
A library's purpose is to help in the dissemination of information, without regard to age or content. That's why a child's library card can check out any book in the library, not just in the children's room.
I worked as a librarian for years, and kids would sometimes come up wanting to check out Tropic of Cancer or Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex but were Afraid to Ask. I would ask the kids about the book and tell them that it dealt with mature subjects, but I never once refused a book to a reader. I think most librarians are the same way.
Well, I don't think anyone will be building systems based on CHRP, but IBM has updated that design and released it as the PowerPC Open Architecture (POP). Based on the rumors I have been hearing, you will start to see cheap boxen coming up based on this design.
Also, Woz never actually left Apple. If you look at his web site (http://www.woz.org) he says that he has always remained on the Apple payroll. At his insistance, he is (and always plans to be) the lowest paid engineer at Apple.
Whenever the issue of Macs and floppy drives comes up, I just kind of shake my head and sigh. I think the reason they got rid of floppies is much simpler than people suspect: money.
From the very beginning, Apple used a 3.5" floppy drive with an eject motor. Floppies were ejected in software, by dragging the icon to the trash can or choosing to "put away" the floppy from a menu.
Back in 1984 this was pretty big stuff. Sony was the only company making the 3.5" drive at that point and they were happy to modify the design to include an eject motor since Apple was going to use them in every machine they built.
Fast forward a few years, and the situation had changed. PCs had abandoned the 5.25" floppy in favor of a 3.5" drive with an eject button. The price difference between the two units was staggering. Go to your local Fred's PC Hut and buy a bare floppy drive, and it's probably about $20. A replacement floppy drive for a Mac is about $200. Because the UI was so tied to a graphical way of representing mounted and unmounted filesystems, there was no good way to switch to a floppy drive with an eject button.
So, for many years, Mac loyalists held their noses, and ponied up 10x more for a floppy drive. At least we got to brag that a Mac never got an abort, retry, fail error.
When Steve Jobs was working on the iMac, the focus was on delivering a consumer machine. I suspect they did some polling and a lot of focus groups and came up with a magic number for the maximum price. The goal was to make the iMac affordable as an impulse purchase like a new TV or home appliance, not as a major capital outlay.
Bringing the original iMac to market for $1500 was hard enough already. The floppy drive alone would have been 13.3% of the total price of the computer! Compare that to a $20 PC floppy drive being 1% of the cost of a $2,000 PC.
Clearly, if they were going to meet the price target, the floppy drive had to go. Once it was out for financial reasons, it was possible to flaunt its absence. It became a design statement, and prompted a lot of chest thumping about forward looking technology.
All of that may or may not be true, but the reason it was a non starter in the iMac was because of cost, not ideology.
Once the decision was made, extending it across the prodict line was natural. In the powerbooks, floppy drives added weight, complexity, and mechanical parts that were likely to break. In the Pro models, how useful is a 1.44MB storage medium to someone who produces huge illustrations or digital photos? These people have used much higher capacity removable media since the days of the 44MB Syquest cartridge.
Of course, it helps tremendously that all standard CD players have a software eject feature so that Apple can use drives from any manufacturer, and users can replace broken ones with the same cheap drives that go in a PC.
Well, no, it was never that way.
You are probably thinking of second declension masculine masculine Latin nounds (there are lots of them). The nominative singular ending for these nouns is -us. The nominative plural is -i (note just one i, not two (or i not ii in Roman numerals)).
There are other declensions that use -us in the nominative singular and something different in the plural. For example, third declension nouns of any gender may end in -us in the nominative singular, while the nominative plural ending for masculine nouns is -es.
I realize that I may be one of the only Slashdot geeks to have majored in Classical Languages instead of Computer Science, and no pedantry was intended in this post.
The AC's point was that the waste should be put into a *subduction* zone on the seabed. This is an area where two tectonic plates meet and one is forced under the other. Anything you put here will get drawn under the Earth's crust.
Of course there are concerns about what would happen to the stuff before it gets recycled into the magma, but the point of the post was not to just dump it somewhere out of sight.
The AC's point was that the waste should be put into a *subduction* zone one the seabed. This is an area where two tectonic plates meet and one is forced under the other. Anything you put here will get drawn under the Earth's crust.
Of course there are concerns about what would happen to the stuff before it gets recycled into the magma, but the point of the post was not to just dump it somewhere out of sight.
The first SRL show I saw was at New Langton Arts (a small gallery in San Francisco) about 12 years sgo. To get in you had to sign a waiver and wear ear plugs, goggles, and a face shield.
Inside they had a big mechanical dinosaur thing that was controlled by an Atari 800, two wrecking balls smashing into each other, and all sorts of destructive fun.
Going through the exhibit, I climbed up on a catwalk thing that was hydraulically controlled to lurch around and try to dump you off. They also had a carbide cannon just like the one I played with as a kid, except this one was over ten feet long and three feet in diameter! Just as I was getting ready to climb down from the catwalk, the cannon swung around and went off right in my face.
The blast knocked me on my butt and blew off the face shield and the goggles. Meanwhile, the dinosaur head thing was bashing a hole in the wall into the building next door.
"Wow," I thought, "Full contact art!"
Mark Pauline, the founder of SRL, built his own robotic hand after he blew his own hand off when some military fuel exploded in something he was working on. They are the toughest bunch of geeks I've ever seen.
Well, here's one point I have not heard discussed about the merger:
Time/Warner has had some pretty spectacular failures trying to get their content online. Pathfinder was one of the early large commercial content sites, but it never took off. No matter how T/W tried to structure it or reorganize it, they just did not capture much interest on the Internet.
This was not a hostile takeover. Time/Warner wanted this just as much as AOL did. I think it is interesting that one of the largest, oldest old-media companies decided that it needed to sell the company to an online content provider in order to survive.
What this signals to me is that Time/Warner sees that the media distribution of the future will be on the Internet more than print, film, or television. It's kind of a backhanded compliment, but still it shows that large companies are taking the Internet very seriously and that they must see online content displacing television at some point in the future.
I don't want to sound like I'm getting all gushy about the merger. I like plenty of choice and I am concerned that the merged company may try to create their own segregated area of the Internet. Still, if they are able to deliver video on demand and some of the other services that we have heard about for ages, I think there will be a huge number of consumers who will flock to the service. These will likely be the kind of people who don't know that usenet and irc even exist, and with AOL Time/Warner they may never get the chance to find out.
http://www.rds.org.uk/rds98/mainpublications.htm This links to the publications of the RDS standard. After all, it is an open standard. Anyone who wants to can read and find out how they are doing this.
You are right, this is an ethical question. The other side of the issue is that many people feel that Microsoft has been taking money from consumers like candy from so many babies.
I don't run any MS operating systems, but I know many people who paid retail for several versions of DOS, Win 3.0, Win 3.1, Win 95, Win 98, and on and on. On top of that are the upgrade fees for versions of MS apps that are forced on users because Microsoft chooses to change the file format to break backwards compatability.
Maybe it is just primitive vengeance, but I can understand the viewpoint that many people have that, since they feel MS has been taking money from them over the years, they are entitled to take something back.
For me, the funniest part of this whole thing is that it is a failed license agreement. After all, Microsoft has spent years coming up with one of the most restrictive EULAs in the industry, then they leave a loophole in this one that you could drive a Best Buy delivery truck through! And all of this was due to a misundestanding of California consumer law.
From the article, it sounds like this may cost Microsoft tens of thousands of dollars, or maybe much more. I wonder what will happen to the lawyers who came up with these documents?
I used to be a very harsh critic of NASA back when the shuttle was the only thing they had flying. Most people don't realize that the reason there are six crewmembers on a shuttle mission is that until the mid-90s, all of the computer instructions were stored on punched paper tape! The "mission specialists" had the job of feeding the paper tape into the vintage 1970 computer while the Flying Winnebago did laps around the Earth for a week.
Each shuttle mission costs more than the $165MM we paid for the lost Mars lander. The way I look at it, compared to what NASA has spent in the past we should think of the Mars landers as being disposable. For about the cost of a jar of Tang and a few of those toothpaste tubes full of dehydrated ice cream, we can now send a probe to another planet. If it blows up, send another one, or two, or ten.
Sojurner was a huge success. That mission cost about $150MM. This one was a bust at $165MM. You take your chances with these things.
I think we have a much better chance of getting important science done by sending more and more of the cheaper landers. Think of them as probe droids, drop them by the dozens.
The problem is that the public's imagination is captured by manned space flight. Sending robots just doesn't do it for people the way a test pilot or scientist risking his/her life does. The sad fact is that humans are exceptionally well adapted for life on Earth and we suck at being space creatures. Our spines deteriorate, we lose muscle mass, our circadian rhythms get all fouled up. The way I see it, the only reason for manned space flight going at all right now is to give the Congress something they can relate to in hopes of keeping the budget from being slashed.
On the contrary, for those so inclined, this presents on opportunity to bash Microsoft financially.
Just gather up your family, friends and neighbors, and all go shopping at one of the participating stores. Pick out $400 worth of merchandise and get the instant rebate. Make sure to cancel right away.
Is there any limitation on how often one can participate? If not: lather, rinse, repeat.
You might be able to get $400 worth of stuff courtesy of Microsoft every day if you wanted to.
For all those who were not able to get a rebate for an unused copy of Windows, here's an opportunity to get an in kind refund.
We bought a copy of the Deluxe edition here at work to play around with. It comes in a surprisingly heavy box. Printed manuals are a good thing, I was very glad to see the dead trees in the box. It also comes with a rubber toy Tux. Kinda cute.
We installed it on a Dell PIII 550. The installer went flawlessly and found all the hardware. It has been running nicely for a couple of days now.
Reading through the comments, I see something that worries me about the distro, though. Most of the people who have reported problems have been using the downloaded version. The retail box comes with the install CD, the source CD, and a freely distributable CD. It seems like some of the goodies are only included in the retail version. If they are crippling the free/downloadable version, that would be a Bad Thing. I have not read the license carefully, but the inclusion of the freely distributable CD makes me wonder if the retail version is licensed per machine?
This is mostly just aimless speculation on my part, has anyone looked into this to provide more factual information?
OK, you caught me!
I do watch the show with my kids and they (we) have some of the cards, mostly I'm interested in the game.
It's actually a decent Adventure/RPG type of thing. I don't have a Gameboy, so it's an excuse for one more emulator.
You're right about it being kind of a Rosetta Stone for talking to kids. They are amazed to find an adult who knows anything about pokemon. This is the first fad that my son has been into. I have learned about it because I want to know what he's into. It kind of gives me the creeps that there are all these parents out there who have no idea what their 4-6 year olds are talking about. I mean, if my kids develop an interest in something, I want to know what it is so I can share it with them, but also to make sure it's something I approve of. Just think, what if it was sumliminally urging them to buy Microsoft products or something?
Don't forget that there are also pokemon called Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee that are martial arts experts.
Do you think Marcel Marceau could sue over the pokemon called Mr. Mime?
Also, Alakazam is the third evolution of the pokemon. The earlier forms are called Abra and Kadabra in English, I wonder what their Japanese names are and if they have anything to do with other con artists.
I only know about pokemon because I have a four year old!
Well, for one thing applying the patch does protect you against the DoS. Remember that this attact is something like a combination of a Smurf and a Ping of Death attack. The ICMP response that the Mac OS 9 machine generates is 1499 bytes of payload. Add any sort of headers and this thing is bigger than the MTU of a standard ethernet frame.
So if you wanted to use this to really cramp the style of someone with a spiffy new G4, you would send the request packet and forge the source address to be the victim's own address. Even better, set the source address to be the broadcast address on the victim's LAN.
I suspect this could cause some serious havoc in a lab full of iMacs. Even worse, the new iBooks now ship with Mac OS 9. I hate to think what this kind of DoS could do to a large wireless LAN.
Just download the patch. Think of it as just one more extension in a bloated system folder. And just think, with OS X client, you won't have to fool around with extensions anymore.
While I am not privy to the L0pht's plans, it is not too hard to imagine a scenario that would take down the Internet. Think of an exploitable bug in BGP4 that would allow you to poison the routing table or a self-propagating virus for Cisco IOS. If you take out all the Cisco gear, or find a way to more or less break BGP4, the Internet would pretty much go poof.
I did not see either program, but I did read the summaries. When they said that the members of the L0pht have the ability to break into systems, what they somehow neglected to mention was that they get *PAID* to do this as part of a security audit! There has never been any indication that members of the L0pht go around randomly cracking machines.
I think jd actually has a point in there somewhere. If a library has printed material that I don't want to see, it's relatively easy for me to pass it by while looking for the things that I am interested in seeing.
With a shared computer, the situation is a little different. If the campus library has an exclusive contract with a large software company that I don't like, it will be more difficult to get away from that company's software while using the shared computer.
In the battle of all or nothing censorship, I think slashdot itself shows a workable third way. We all have a lot of choice in the way we view Slashdot (comment mode, include/exclude topics, authors, etc). I don't see why this couldn't be done on a larger scale for browser preferences.
For example, is there a censorware product available that allows individual users to configure the amount of filtering an individual wants? In the case of a campus library, it could go against an LDAP server to store each individual's preferences for what they would want to have filtered. For a public library, as long as there is a "wide open" option, I would not object to this kind of censorware.
In the long term, I think something like this is the only way to satisfy the greatest number of people. I don't like what I have seen in the current round of censorware products, and in general I do not appreciate companies trying to decide what is or is not suitable for me or my children. When I joined the local Blockbuster Video, I signed the release giving my 4 year old son permission to rent videos that are normally limited to viewers 18 and older because I want to make the decision about what movies he watches, not a corporation.
I actually use a product like this from time to time. One of the projects I am working on requires me to get reasonably accurate estimates of the population within a radius of an arbitrary point in the US.
I scratched my head for a while trying to come up with a way to do this, and then decided to spend $99 on a commercial program that does just that.
The census bureau in the US publishes a table which breaks down the population of the US by zip code. The people who made this program just cross referenced that table with the list of zip codes with lat/long coordinates and wrote a simple interface for it. It's just what I was planning on doing, but it this case it was faster and cheaper to buy it than for me to spend a couple of days writing it.
The company that sells the software also collects additional population info and puts out monthly updates of the database.
No, I'm not a spammer or a dead tree bulk mailer, but lots of businesses want to know if there is a large enough population base in a particular area to support opening a new location.
I think it has already been decided, in another context, that the IP rights for lectures are owned by the professor and not by the university.
On my bookshelf I have a well thumbed copy of "Nabokov's Lectures on Literature" which consists of lectures delivered at Cornell in the 1950s. The copyright notice says that they are the property of VN, not of the Cornell regents.
Aren't these collections of lectures pretty common? I think there are even audio books and video tapes you can buy of famous professors lecturing (the Richard Feynman audio tapes on physics are an example). I don't remember ever hearing that any of these were licensed from or were the property of the university
As far as the notes go, I think they would fall under fair use. After all, taking notes to write a book review or synopsis is not infringing on anyone's copyright.
I thought that was the whole idea behind the Handspring Visor? It is a PalmOS based machine with a slot that will (eventually) take an 802.11 card. We have one unit here at work for evaluation and so far it seems pretty cool. Getting it on the LAN full time will change it from a toy into a must-have.
Not to disagree with your point, but Macs have had for almost 15 years by far the easiest serial port networking I have ever seen.
In any case, read 5 Novels, it's a fantastic introduction to the twisted world of Pinkwater.
Also, here are some links to Pinkwater sites on the web:
The Semi-Official Site
DMP's Chinwag Theater radio show
The Hoboken Chicken Emergencyclopedia Disclaimer: I help run this one.
As much as I enjoy all the Jetsons-style ideas about robotic houses, I don't think this is where connected appliances are headed (at least initially).
I think that appliance manufacturers will be interested in having simplex communications from the device back to the factory. For example, no one I know ever changes the water softener in their dishwasher even though it is just a block of salt, it only lasts a year, and it makes a real difference in the performance of the appliance.
I imagine that Whirlpool or whoever would love to sell you a subscription service to monitor the status of your applicances and open a proactive ticket when they detect a mechanical failure.
Right now, I have a home warranty system. If anything breaks in any part of my house, I call one number and they will fix it, no matter what it is, for a $100 deductible. I would be getting a much better deal if they could monitor the status of my house rather than waiting for me to discover that something needs to be fixed.
Security would not be a problem since the communication would be one way only. If some script kiddie intercepts the transmission and discovers that lint is accumulating in my dryer, I can probably deal with that.
Also, sometimes these home automation projects have unexpected side benefits. The Richet radio modem was originally meant to be a way to read utility meters remotely. Selling Internet access was only an afterthought.
This seems to be the worst of Old Media. A traditionally print magazine goes to the web and publishes a story summarizing the discussion on /. for those too lame or busy to read for themselves.
I thought web journalism was going to get people *closer* to the sources, not install another layer of filters.