Because (i think) the web client tries to dns lookup "slashdot" first. Otherwise, how would new TLDs (.name,.xxx etc) work?
More importantly though, whats the point? As you said, most clients will do a search and most clients will try appending ".com" if it looks like an address, ie "www.slashdot" would get you to "www.slashdot.com", and given that most companies do advertise the www, they could easily just use this form. Of course, things like mail clients dont try google or appending.com, but it would still be a bad idea to use this companies system for mail because people would only be able to send them mail if their ISP supports it (not counting companies which run their own name servers).
I dont know, it cant be worse than the current British method: "Hello sir, I can't be bothered to learn your language, so would you mind learning mine?"
You would talk to bloggers about these subjects? Granted, i havent done any research into chinese bloggers, but if its anything like most blogs you wouldnt get anything more from them than you would with a quick "whats your single paragraph say on this subject?" type interview they tend to ask random people on a high street. Just like any problem, if they were interviewing people about government corruption, pollution or industrialization they would go for people in the know - university professors, heads of companies and government officials. Sure, its good to get a public view on the subject too (especially if the blogger tends to focus on such issues), but if they are doing a full interview with these bloggers, they want to know their thoughts on things they know more about - blogging and free speech.
Unfortunatly, they get away with this because it isnt a pain in the arse for average customers. Most users are happy if it works, and it *does*. They can download music via itunes, play it and run off cds so are happy. They can (in a years time) use these MCE cable cards and aslong as it does record the shows as promised they will be happy, and they wont ever notice its wrapped in DRM. I mean, the most they will probably want is to watch it on other tvs (which ms will no doubt cater for with some extenders) and possibly on their pc (which if the posts about Vista MCE being the requirement for this drm, the desktop Vista will hopefully support).
Of course this doesnt help people like you, the exception, who want to do things the DRM deems unacceptable, such as reencode for the PSP. And if this DRM is as good as they say, you could be stuck.
But hey, at least you have the option. Here in the UK, there is no cablecard.
I doubt they would have separate.com zones in each region. The way i see it, all that was needed was to set up some new root servers which know the non-us ccTLDs. With a long transition period, ISPs and operating systems can be updated to check both sets of root servers (US and non-US), and at a set time the US could remove the non-US entries from their root servers. That way both sides are happy, we each have control over what we want. There would need to be some way to stop both sides creating the same zone to protect against the parents point, but im sure we could agree to something. Similarly, some zones could be shared (e.g. both sides could vote on who to delegate.name to, and both could agree to say host the record for it on the US server, with a zone transfer to non-US).
Sure, there are a few hurdles there that would need to be solved, but no doubt a bit of negotiation could handle that. It just seems fairly simple and doesnt really go against the US governments demands to control the internet, as they wouldnt be giving up control of any american zones. I just dont quite understand why it grew to a big battle over taking control of the internet - and seems totally unreasonable to expect the US to just hand over the system they built and funded mostly themselves. I would consider it our own fault for allowing this US dependance to occur instead of coming up with a fairer system earlier on.
Its worth noting, i dont have a problem with the USs control at the moment, it just seems like a good idea to plan forward and do a safe transition as above now, instead of when the US decides to drop a nation off the web when it would take weeks to fix. (Im not saying the US would, but its only fair we are allowed to have the same doubts of US control as the US does with world control.)
Gatso is the current yellow-back speed cameras, which uses the
These new speed cameras (called SPECS) are already deployed on some parts of motorways and a few A roads (they look like yellow CCTV cameras), which have two cameras spaced about a mile apart and they calculate your average speed.
Either way, i think these new systems are generally a good idea. Speeding is a problem, and the current speed cameras can in some areas cause more accidents than they save. I think all we need now are more dynamic speed limits, so A roads could become national when its quiet, but drop to 50 when its busy - kind of like they currrently drop some speed limits when the weather is bad.
As much as i support them though, you are left thinking this is starting to give the government a bit too much control - as these systems dont just record you when you speed or have no tax, they record you all the time. I mean, if all you want to do is catch tax evaders, just stick them on a few key junctions. If you want to catch speeders, just put them on key accident sites. More complete deployments though gives them an easy way to monitor people. You can just imagine them changing the taxes so you are taxed more the more you drive. And heck, eventually they could do more advanced monitoring, say checking the type and colour of the vehicle, or even looking inside to see who is in the car. Maybe even detect drunk drivers. Once the network is there its only a small jump.
So, who is up for making a number plate shaped LCD? Sounds like a good job for e-ink type displays! Granted, they might notice if your number plate changes at each camera (especially if you are always between the same two cars infront and behind).
Well, Fedora is very capable (i suspect when they say "operating system supplied by Red Hat" they mean its based on fedora, not red hat itself) and being a fairly closed environment (specific system components, limited range of software) there should be few problems anyway. Personally, my favourite operating system is Mac OS X, but I have used linux (and freebsd - which amounts to the same thing anyway as it uses the same GUIs) on the desktop too and had a very positive experience.
I think the biggest problem you would find is Job's terms probably only granted the OS free for so many years (or maybe just this model - im just guessing here). He could be very decent and keep granting it free indefinatly, even if its just this current 10.4 version. But do you really want the chance that in 5 years, Jobs could make it non-free (except on Apples supercheapBook) and when you announce you are switching over to linux, 100 million students in developing countries cry out "but our songs are all on itunes and documents in Pages"? It would essentially be the same struggle Linux is having now against Windows.
Of course, you could just limit it to open source apps on Mac OS X, but whats the point when you have a decent open operating system already available?
And *that* is what is special about this woofer. Here and here explain it all. Basically, its very hard to move much air at such low frequencies with cone subwoofers (as you saw), so they instead the fan pushes the air with the angle of the blades being adjusted to produce the frequencies.
I dont really feel like this is directly competing with anything google has atm. The Google personalized portal thing is (as many people have already said) basically the same as start.com, both of which bring your internet to one page - frequent sites, news, mail etc. This new windows live seems more like its going to bring together your local pc and your internet life. Granted, it doesnt do much of this at the moment, but the ideas page mentions pc files. Make it easy enough to use, and slap an icon on the windows start menu they could easily make this the way people do basically anything with their pc. (Want to work on a word document? Fire up the Windows Live page!)
Given how limited it is at the moment though, google still has enough chance to make up something that similarly makes you think Google whenever you have a task/problem.
Personally though, i dont really care who wins, aslong as its not just one company. Whatever google (and yahoo and everyone else) comes up with doesnt need to be a Microsoft killer, it just needs to be something Microsoft cant kill. Otherwise in ten years, microsoft will be going bust and we will all be complaining google has a monopoly over our internet browser office suites with few companies able to use an alternative because of the big discounts google is giving them and the new propriety format meaning it doesnt always look the same. Still, we can always hope one state will demand all departments use Suns version because it uses an open format. And of course, microsoft will start to turn around when they release a new portable device (with a web store) thats more expensive than the current unpopular ones, but it looks soo good... And its ok that they build a monopoly on this device, because they are the good guys and google is the evil empire.
The Honda HES doesnt actually burn natural gas to produce the electricity: it extracts hydrogen from the natural gas, uses fuel cells to produce the electricity for the home and uses the waste heat from these processes to heat the house. Also note, they didnt say it was uber efficient, but would lower the total cost of electricity, gas and car fuel. I suspect savings on petrol play a big part there, but if natural gas is cheap enough, it could work out cheaper for the home to generate electricity from that, even if the process is less efficient than a power station. Some details here.
Open source is not automatically better than closed source. If Apple released a free version of OS X for intel, do you really think people would care if it is open or not? Sure, there is a good few people who try to use open source wherever possible, but most of the public (and companies) dont really care about open or closed, they care about price and if it does the job. The latter is why MS wont release office for Linux, because currently full compatability with office is one of the last few things stopping companies switching all their pcs over.
Dictatorships may get the same ability to vote in the UN, but thats what happens in a democracy. You should know..
"If it aint broken, dont fix it" is all well and good, but what happens when it does break? When the United States decides it doesnt like a new EU trade law, so is going to block their zones until they give in? We would have no warning and would need to put in the same changes we want to do now anyway. At least if we do it now we can have a transition period.
I also want to make sure that China and other such governments have no say over my Internet connection.
Funny, what if China had invented the internet and declared it would retain control of the root servers? Would you be happy to drop your battle for equal control just because the chinese dont want you to have a say with their connections?
And the EU sure seems to be taking the hardball approach to this!
Wouldnt the US take a hardball approach if it was the other way around? Iraq? It was ok for you to feel insecure about WMDs and invade to fix the problem, but we cant?
Its unlikely they would split the internet, more likely would move the ccTLDs to separate root servers maybe? But even if they did simply shift control of the non-us root servers to an international body, effectivly splitting the internet, this would cause the US problems too. (What will you do when all those Hong Kong sellers vanish off ebay?)
I do agree that this isnt a nice solution to the problem, but the US should stop thinking its the solution to everything and realise it would be doing exactly the same as we are if this were reversed. Maybe instead of saying "We wont give up control of the internet" say "We wont give up control of the US portions, but will help create a UN body for all international parts.
You probably could distribute RSS via torrent, but i dont think you would gain much. You still need to fetch the.torrent from the rss webserver, so it is still getting lots of connections. Sure, the.torrent will be smaller than an xml file, but using the apache gzip should make them closer and wouldnt need a tracker or torrent client seeding.
"explores how anyone can contribute to argubly one of the most important Open Source projects."
Not the most important project, but one of them..
I think openoffice is just as important as linux anyway. (This is helped because i dont think of linux as *that* important anyway, being a big bsd fan - but thats a discussion for another time). I think if you want people to switch to an open source operating system you need to take it in steps, making programs like firefox and openoffice (which will run on windows inplace of IE and MS Office) a vital part of the plan. Once you have changed all their apps over to open source versions, you can switch the os and all they will notice is a new look.
I had for a while held the view that most blogs out there are pointless. Some can be insightful and some are basically used as company press releases, but most are people talking about their days activities that few people really care about, and a few of my friends have blogs like these. When I asked one whats the point, she said she just blogs stuff she would normally mention to many people on msn throughout the day. Its not meant to have value to anyone on slashdot, be hugely insightful, or detail some breathtaking new hack, its simply another way for her to talk to friends (that doesnt involve repeating herself).
After so many "Do you need any help? Only with the paying!"'s, the "hilarious quips" are all that stop us attacking customers with the frozen peas...
I havent tried them myself, but a number of customers have tried the self service checkouts at a tesco not far from the one i work, and mostly had positive things to say. But generally, most only found it faster because so few people use it compared to the standard checkouts.
He was a bit off, but it is still impressive. £1 out of every £8 spent in a british shop is at tescos (According to the telegraph its now 1 in every £7.70).
Re:I wish they released a Mac Mini for Intel..
on
New Apples Next Week
·
· Score: 1
Your not actually buying a $1000 intel mac, because you have to return it by december 2006.
My guess is the first intel mac to be released will be the powermac (to allow developers to continue work on intel), and it wont be until mid-to-late 2006 (so they arnt screwing over the people who put down $1000 for the developers box). I wouldnt expect any other intel macs before then.
They probably wont, but im hoping they will release a version of resetta on the powerpc to translate intel binaries, so all current macs would be good for a long while.
I dont remember many details, but a few years back Tomorrows World (cancelled bbc show on new technologies, science etc) showed a combined accelerator/brake pedal. As i recall, you tilted it down to accelerate, and pushed it in to brake. A quick google search has turned up this, which sounds pretty similar.
From the article: Customers can also verify they are indeed at Bank of America's Web site by clicking on a SiteKey button. If they fail to see a secret image and phrase they had chosen earlier, they could be at a fake Web site and the target of a "phishing" scam.
Slashdot Mirror
Most TV's can already handle live TV ;)
Sure your not just playing minesweeper by mistake?
Because (i think) the web client tries to dns lookup "slashdot" first. Otherwise, how would new TLDs (.name, .xxx etc) work?
.com, but it would still be a bad idea to use this companies system for mail because people would only be able to send them mail if their ISP supports it (not counting companies which run their own name servers).
More importantly though, whats the point? As you said, most clients will do a search and most clients will try appending ".com" if it looks like an address, ie "www.slashdot" would get you to "www.slashdot.com", and given that most companies do advertise the www, they could easily just use this form. Of course, things like mail clients dont try google or appending
I dont know, it cant be worse than the current British method:
"Hello sir, I can't be bothered to learn your language, so would you mind learning mine?"
You would talk to bloggers about these subjects? Granted, i havent done any research into chinese bloggers, but if its anything like most blogs you wouldnt get anything more from them than you would with a quick "whats your single paragraph say on this subject?" type interview they tend to ask random people on a high street. Just like any problem, if they were interviewing people about government corruption, pollution or industrialization they would go for people in the know - university professors, heads of companies and government officials.
Sure, its good to get a public view on the subject too (especially if the blogger tends to focus on such issues), but if they are doing a full interview with these bloggers, they want to know their thoughts on things they know more about - blogging and free speech.
Unfortunatly, they get away with this because it isnt a pain in the arse for average customers. Most users are happy if it works, and it *does*. They can download music via itunes, play it and run off cds so are happy. They can (in a years time) use these MCE cable cards and aslong as it does record the shows as promised they will be happy, and they wont ever notice its wrapped in DRM. I mean, the most they will probably want is to watch it on other tvs (which ms will no doubt cater for with some extenders) and possibly on their pc (which if the posts about Vista MCE being the requirement for this drm, the desktop Vista will hopefully support). Of course this doesnt help people like you, the exception, who want to do things the DRM deems unacceptable, such as reencode for the PSP. And if this DRM is as good as they say, you could be stuck. But hey, at least you have the option. Here in the UK, there is no cablecard.
I doubt they would have separate .com zones in each region. The way i see it, all that was needed was to set up some new root servers which know the non-us ccTLDs. With a long transition period, ISPs and operating systems can be updated to check both sets of root servers (US and non-US), and at a set time the US could remove the non-US entries from their root servers. That way both sides are happy, we each have control over what we want. There would need to be some way to stop both sides creating the same zone to protect against the parents point, but im sure we could agree to something. Similarly, some zones could be shared (e.g. both sides could vote on who to delegate .name to, and both could agree to say host the record for it on the US server, with a zone transfer to non-US).
Sure, there are a few hurdles there that would need to be solved, but no doubt a bit of negotiation could handle that. It just seems fairly simple and doesnt really go against the US governments demands to control the internet, as they wouldnt be giving up control of any american zones. I just dont quite understand why it grew to a big battle over taking control of the internet - and seems totally unreasonable to expect the US to just hand over the system they built and funded mostly themselves. I would consider it our own fault for allowing this US dependance to occur instead of coming up with a fairer system earlier on.
Its worth noting, i dont have a problem with the USs control at the moment, it just seems like a good idea to plan forward and do a safe transition as above now, instead of when the US decides to drop a nation off the web when it would take weeks to fix. (Im not saying the US would, but its only fair we are allowed to have the same doubts of US control as the US does with world control.)
Gatso is the current yellow-back speed cameras, which uses the
These new speed cameras (called SPECS) are already deployed on some parts of motorways and a few A roads (they look like yellow CCTV cameras), which have two cameras spaced about a mile apart and they calculate your average speed.
Either way, i think these new systems are generally a good idea. Speeding is a problem, and the current speed cameras can in some areas cause more accidents than they save. I think all we need now are more dynamic speed limits, so A roads could become national when its quiet, but drop to 50 when its busy - kind of like they currrently drop some speed limits when the weather is bad.
As much as i support them though, you are left thinking this is starting to give the government a bit too much control - as these systems dont just record you when you speed or have no tax, they record you all the time. I mean, if all you want to do is catch tax evaders, just stick them on a few key junctions. If you want to catch speeders, just put them on key accident sites. More complete deployments though gives them an easy way to monitor people. You can just imagine them changing the taxes so you are taxed more the more you drive. And heck, eventually they could do more advanced monitoring, say checking the type and colour of the vehicle, or even looking inside to see who is in the car. Maybe even detect drunk drivers. Once the network is there its only a small jump.
So, who is up for making a number plate shaped LCD? Sounds like a good job for e-ink type displays! Granted, they might notice if your number plate changes at each camera (especially if you are always between the same two cars infront and behind).
Well, Fedora is very capable (i suspect when they say "operating system supplied by Red Hat" they mean its based on fedora, not red hat itself) and being a fairly closed environment (specific system components, limited range of software) there should be few problems anyway. Personally, my favourite operating system is Mac OS X, but I have used linux (and freebsd - which amounts to the same thing anyway as it uses the same GUIs) on the desktop too and had a very positive experience.
I think the biggest problem you would find is Job's terms probably only granted the OS free for so many years (or maybe just this model - im just guessing here). He could be very decent and keep granting it free indefinatly, even if its just this current 10.4 version. But do you really want the chance that in 5 years, Jobs could make it non-free (except on Apples supercheapBook) and when you announce you are switching over to linux, 100 million students in developing countries cry out "but our songs are all on itunes and documents in Pages"? It would essentially be the same struggle Linux is having now against Windows.
Of course, you could just limit it to open source apps on Mac OS X, but whats the point when you have a decent open operating system already available?
And *that* is what is special about this woofer. Here and here explain it all. Basically, its very hard to move much air at such low frequencies with cone subwoofers (as you saw), so they instead the fan pushes the air with the angle of the blades being adjusted to produce the frequencies.
I dont really feel like this is directly competing with anything google has atm. The Google personalized portal thing is (as many people have already said) basically the same as start.com, both of which bring your internet to one page - frequent sites, news, mail etc. This new windows live seems more like its going to bring together your local pc and your internet life. Granted, it doesnt do much of this at the moment, but the ideas page mentions pc files. Make it easy enough to use, and slap an icon on the windows start menu they could easily make this the way people do basically anything with their pc. (Want to work on a word document? Fire up the Windows Live page!)
Given how limited it is at the moment though, google still has enough chance to make up something that similarly makes you think Google whenever you have a task/problem.
Personally though, i dont really care who wins, aslong as its not just one company. Whatever google (and yahoo and everyone else) comes up with doesnt need to be a Microsoft killer, it just needs to be something Microsoft cant kill. Otherwise in ten years, microsoft will be going bust and we will all be complaining google has a monopoly over our internet browser office suites with few companies able to use an alternative because of the big discounts google is giving them and the new propriety format meaning it doesnt always look the same. Still, we can always hope one state will demand all departments use Suns version because it uses an open format. And of course, microsoft will start to turn around when they release a new portable device (with a web store) thats more expensive than the current unpopular ones, but it looks soo good... And its ok that they build a monopoly on this device, because they are the good guys and google is the evil empire.
Dear Sir,
Use Linux.
Regards,
Slashdot
The Honda HES doesnt actually burn natural gas to produce the electricity: it extracts hydrogen from the natural gas, uses fuel cells to produce the electricity for the home and uses the waste heat from these processes to heat the house. Also note, they didnt say it was uber efficient, but would lower the total cost of electricity, gas and car fuel. I suspect savings on petrol play a big part there, but if natural gas is cheap enough, it could work out cheaper for the home to generate electricity from that, even if the process is less efficient than a power station. Some details here.
Open source is not automatically better than closed source. If Apple released a free version of OS X for intel, do you really think people would care if it is open or not? Sure, there is a good few people who try to use open source wherever possible, but most of the public (and companies) dont really care about open or closed, they care about price and if it does the job. The latter is why MS wont release office for Linux, because currently full compatability with office is one of the last few things stopping companies switching all their pcs over.
And now, it never will be.
Currently, the US is not a threat to the internet.. And when we are through, it never will be.
Dictatorships may get the same ability to vote in the UN, but thats what happens in a democracy. You should know..
"If it aint broken, dont fix it" is all well and good, but what happens when it does break? When the United States decides it doesnt like a new EU trade law, so is going to block their zones until they give in? We would have no warning and would need to put in the same changes we want to do now anyway. At least if we do it now we can have a transition period.
I also want to make sure that China and other such governments have no say over my Internet connection.
Funny, what if China had invented the internet and declared it would retain control of the root servers? Would you be happy to drop your battle for equal control just because the chinese dont want you to have a say with their connections?
And the EU sure seems to be taking the hardball approach to this!
Wouldnt the US take a hardball approach if it was the other way around? Iraq? It was ok for you to feel insecure about WMDs and invade to fix the problem, but we cant?
Its unlikely they would split the internet, more likely would move the ccTLDs to separate root servers maybe? But even if they did simply shift control of the non-us root servers to an international body, effectivly splitting the internet, this would cause the US problems too. (What will you do when all those Hong Kong sellers vanish off ebay?)
I do agree that this isnt a nice solution to the problem, but the US should stop thinking its the solution to everything and realise it would be doing exactly the same as we are if this were reversed. Maybe instead of saying "We wont give up control of the internet" say "We wont give up control of the US portions, but will help create a UN body for all international parts.
You probably could distribute RSS via torrent, but i dont think you would gain much. You still need to fetch the .torrent from the rss webserver, so it is still getting lots of connections. Sure, the .torrent will be smaller than an xml file, but using the apache gzip should make them closer and wouldnt need a tracker or torrent client seeding.
"explores how anyone can contribute to argubly one of the most important Open Source projects."
Not the most important project, but one of them..
I think openoffice is just as important as linux anyway. (This is helped because i dont think of linux as *that* important anyway, being a big bsd fan - but thats a discussion for another time). I think if you want people to switch to an open source operating system you need to take it in steps, making programs like firefox and openoffice (which will run on windows inplace of IE and MS Office) a vital part of the plan. Once you have changed all their apps over to open source versions, you can switch the os and all they will notice is a new look.
The US is a federal republic.
what percentage of them have any real value
I had for a while held the view that most blogs out there are pointless. Some can be insightful and some are basically used as company press releases, but most are people talking about their days activities that few people really care about, and a few of my friends have blogs like these. When I asked one whats the point, she said she just blogs stuff she would normally mention to many people on msn throughout the day. Its not meant to have value to anyone on slashdot, be hugely insightful, or detail some breathtaking new hack, its simply another way for her to talk to friends (that doesnt involve repeating herself).
After so many "Do you need any help? Only with the paying!"'s, the "hilarious quips" are all that stop us attacking customers with the frozen peas...
I havent tried them myself, but a number of customers have tried the self service checkouts at a tesco not far from the one i work, and mostly had positive things to say. But generally, most only found it faster because so few people use it compared to the standard checkouts.
He was a bit off, but it is still impressive. £1 out of every £8 spent in a british shop is at tescos (According to the telegraph its now 1 in every £7.70).
Your not actually buying a $1000 intel mac, because you have to return it by december 2006.
My guess is the first intel mac to be released will be the powermac (to allow developers to continue work on intel), and it wont be until mid-to-late 2006 (so they arnt screwing over the people who put down $1000 for the developers box). I wouldnt expect any other intel macs before then.
They probably wont, but im hoping they will release a version of resetta on the powerpc to translate intel binaries, so all current macs would be good for a long while.
I dont remember many details, but a few years back Tomorrows World (cancelled bbc show on new technologies, science etc) showed a combined accelerator/brake pedal. As i recall, you tilted it down to accelerate, and pushed it in to brake. A quick google search has turned up this, which sounds pretty similar.
From the article:
Customers can also verify they are indeed at Bank of America's Web site by clicking on a SiteKey button. If they fail to see a secret image and phrase they had chosen earlier, they could be at a fake Web site and the target of a "phishing" scam.
That sounds like quite a good idea to me.