Another example of great reporting is how the article asserts that these "techie fight clubs" are springing up all over the place, but the only evidence we see is a single example of a handful of guys fighting periodically in someone's garage. Excellent.
In my work for a college IT department, we've seen MANY student machines that are heavily loaded with all sorts of malware. We recommend AVG Free as part of a solution for these students, and we've had very good luck with its ability to clean things up.
Currently mice use a mechanical wheel to allow scrolling of menus, browser windows, whatever. Logitech is replacing this with touchpad technology to allow you to scroll by merely moving your finger.
This is exactly what Apple did with the touchpad interface to their iPods. Yes, the layout and actual use of it is likely somewhat different. That's not the point. As an interface concept it's very similar to what Apple has done with the iPods.
This sounds remarkably like the interface that Apple has devised to allow scrolling through menus, volume control, etc. on their iPod line of products. This isn't surprising, because the interface works extremely well and is very intuitive.
Why will the traditional media be going anywhere? Blogs serve an interesting and occasionally useful purpose, but will probably always lack the relative objectivity of good news sources such as NPR. For that reason, traditional reporting and news will continue to serve an important role. Claiming that blogs will replace and/or obviate traditional media is, it seems to me, overstating their importance.
Yes, that article was a little short on good details. Here's a better overview from an article on Reporters Without Borders' website. This quote below, from this article, explains that Cisco not only sold the Chinese government the routers to make this possible but also provided the know-how and engineers to program them to alow for pervasive surveillance.
The architecture of the Chinese Internet was designed from the outset to allow information control. There are just five backbones or hubs through which all traffic must pass. No matter what ISP is chosen by Internet users, their e-mails and the files they download and send must pass through one of these hubs.
China then acquired state-of-the-art technology and equipment from US companies. Cisco Systems has sold China several thousand routers at more that 16,000 euros each for use in building the regime's surveillance infrastructure. This equipment was programmed with the help of Cisco engineers. It allows the authorities to read data transmitted on the Internet and to spot "subversive" key words. The police are able to identify who visits banned sites and who sends "dangerous" e-mail messages.
The point is, this wasn't just an equipment sale for Cisco. It was a contract in which they actively engineered and set up a nationwide internet spying system.
This article from news.com.com details an Amnesty International report about the Western corporations who have been happy to help China set up its massive surveillance system. Those of us responsible for buying networking hardware for our companies may want to consider where we want our money to go. I would suggest supporting businesses who don't so blatantly assist in massively squashing basic human rights.
Requiring consumers to recycle electronic garbage is a restriction of your personal freedom? I guess in an absolute sense, it would be taking away your "right" to be environmentally irresponsible.
But from the perspective of community and civic responsibility, your argument makes no sense. Do you also consider legislation such as the Clean Air Act to be trampling your personal "right" to drive cars without catalytic converters? Does legislation regarding corporate drinking water pollution crush your company's "right" to dump carcinogens in our rivers?
I think the most effective option would probably be what a lot of communities and/or cities are already doing with conventional recycling. These towns have set up city-wide recycling programs that are "free" (that is, tax-funded) to residents and mandatory. These programs are effective because they're easily available and don't cost anything beyond what the consumer has to pay in taxes anyway.
Such a system for tech junk would help avoid the finger-pointing of asking "who's fault is it" and instead provide a community-wide means for recycling.
My guess is that CRTs will eventually become sort of like dot matrix printers are now. They haven't disappeared, but they're only used in very specialized applications.
In the short term, as long as CRTs are significantly cheaper than LCDs, they won't go away. Until then, there will continue to be a budget market for them.
Plus, if 3.5 inch floppy drives are any indication, CRTs will be around for a long, long time.
We already have a culture that puts the elderly away into nursing homes or retirement communities rather than having families take care of them. This is in sharp contrast to the way elderly members of most cultures have traditionally been cared for. A few generations back in the U.S., most elderly lived with their families as they aged.
Now we're in the process of developing technology so that we won't even need to use precious human labor in taking care of the aged among us. This sounds like a sad development to me.
Sattelite radio on the iPod would indeed be cool, but I'd much rather see FM radio first. Lots of competing products have it, and it's a pretty nifty feature that is free to use, unlike satellite radio. And Apple wouldn't have to worry about splitting profits with anyone else.
Despite your unwarranted pottymouth, I think I can see where you're coming from.
You seem to be approaching this article from a background of hearing lots of naysayers badmouthing the Mac/PPC or claiming that AMD/Intel is loads better, and from that point of view, I can certainly see your point: this news does demonstrate that the PPC is a very good processor. You're absolutely right about that.
I was merely suggesting that, outside of the above observation, the development is not in and of itself that big of a deal. One company simply decided that a competitor's product is better for a certain task than anything developed in-house. This is actually a very savvy (and common) business decision.
I agree that the "Apple might use Intel" rumor was way overblown. So what if Apple uses an Intel chip? I would say, "big deal." Apple is always free to use any hardware platform it finds most useful, as is Microsoft.
Yes! Finally we have conclusive proof that the Mac is superior in all ways to anything that Microsoft or Intel can offer!
Or not. If Microsoft has chosen the PowerPC architecture as the best CPU for running the new XBox, then why would they bother with developing, from scratch, an OS/development environment to run on it when one is already cheaply available (OSX)? As the original article on CNet states, "very specific hardware components of the G5 allow developers to emulate some of the technology behind future Xbox products and services".
In the race to get a new game console to market, why would Microsoft have chosen not to do it this way? I guess that's why we haven't seen more of this in the news -- it's not really very shocking or news-worthy.
There is a root account on any OS X install by default, you simply can't access it until you run sudo passwd from an account with administrative privileges.
Which brings up a second issue. Macs, like most purchased Windows PCs, set up the default account that is created when you first power on the machine to have full administrative access to the box. This is a major blunder. Even though there are far more exploits available for PCs, Apple is making the same stupid security mistake that most PC vendors are making.
A slight correction to the original post: Dome A is not the highest point on the Antarctic continent. The highest point is Vinson Massif at 4,897 meters. Vinson Massif has already been climbed by humans.
If you read the article more carefully, you'll realize that this technique has nothing to do with cracking existing email accounts. It's a technique for signing up for new accounts for spammers to use. However, I agree with another poster -- the article sounds like BS to me.
I think it has become increasingly clear that SCO is attacking much more than IBM's alleged breach of contract. SCO sees the growing success of linux as a primary threat to their business. As linux becomes ever more widespread, SCO's ability to leverage and profit from their system V code will continue to diminish.
Thus, it seems to me that the attack on IBM was merely the starting point for a much larger effort to squash GNU/linux's comercial viability as a whole. In this context, going after Torvalds, novell, transmeta, and others makes some sense from SCO's point of view. I'd say they simply want to try to hit GNU/linux however and wherever they can.
Yes, 10.2 is older than 10.3, but that is not justification for no longer offering security patches for it. And this goes way beyond the server market. Offering security patches for recent, active operating systems is one of the most basic responsibilities an OS manufacturer has to its customers. Of course, one could dispute exactly what qualifies an OS as recent and active, but I'd say any major software product released a year ago is still very much alive. Apple seems to be truly short-changing its customers on this one.
Oh, and MS isn't completely dropping support of Windows NT until 2005 -- ten years after its introduction. The comparison to 10.2 is not very valid.
Slashdot Mirror
Another example of great reporting is how the article asserts that these "techie fight clubs" are springing up all over the place, but the only evidence we see is a single example of a handful of guys fighting periodically in someone's garage. Excellent.
In my work for a college IT department, we've seen MANY student machines that are heavily loaded with all sorts of malware. We recommend AVG Free as part of a solution for these students, and we've had very good luck with its ability to clean things up.
Currently mice use a mechanical wheel to allow scrolling of menus, browser windows, whatever. Logitech is replacing this with touchpad technology to allow you to scroll by merely moving your finger.
This is exactly what Apple did with the touchpad interface to their iPods. Yes, the layout and actual use of it is likely somewhat different. That's not the point. As an interface concept it's very similar to what Apple has done with the iPods.
This sounds remarkably like the interface that Apple has devised to allow scrolling through menus, volume control, etc. on their iPod line of products. This isn't surprising, because the interface works extremely well and is very intuitive.
Why will the traditional media be going anywhere? Blogs serve an interesting and occasionally useful purpose, but will probably always lack the relative objectivity of good news sources such as NPR. For that reason, traditional reporting and news will continue to serve an important role. Claiming that blogs will replace and/or obviate traditional media is, it seems to me, overstating their importance.
This article from news.com.com details an Amnesty International report about the Western corporations who have been happy to help China set up its massive surveillance system. Those of us responsible for buying networking hardware for our companies may want to consider where we want our money to go. I would suggest supporting businesses who don't so blatantly assist in massively squashing basic human rights.
Requiring consumers to recycle electronic garbage is a restriction of your personal freedom? I guess in an absolute sense, it would be taking away your "right" to be environmentally irresponsible.
But from the perspective of community and civic responsibility, your argument makes no sense. Do you also consider legislation such as the Clean Air Act to be trampling your personal "right" to drive cars without catalytic converters? Does legislation regarding corporate drinking water pollution crush your company's "right" to dump carcinogens in our rivers?
I think the most effective option would probably be what a lot of communities and/or cities are already doing with conventional recycling. These towns have set up city-wide recycling programs that are "free" (that is, tax-funded) to residents and mandatory. These programs are effective because they're easily available and don't cost anything beyond what the consumer has to pay in taxes anyway. Such a system for tech junk would help avoid the finger-pointing of asking "who's fault is it" and instead provide a community-wide means for recycling.
My guess is that CRTs will eventually become sort of like dot matrix printers are now. They haven't disappeared, but they're only used in very specialized applications.
In the short term, as long as CRTs are significantly cheaper than LCDs, they won't go away. Until then, there will continue to be a budget market for them.
Plus, if 3.5 inch floppy drives are any indication, CRTs will be around for a long, long time.
We already have a culture that puts the elderly away into nursing homes or retirement communities rather than having families take care of them. This is in sharp contrast to the way elderly members of most cultures have traditionally been cared for. A few generations back in the U.S., most elderly lived with their families as they aged.
Now we're in the process of developing technology so that we won't even need to use precious human labor in taking care of the aged among us. This sounds like a sad development to me.
Can anyone give a quick explanation of what exactly skype is?
Sattelite radio on the iPod would indeed be cool, but I'd much rather see FM radio first. Lots of competing products have it, and it's a pretty nifty feature that is free to use, unlike satellite radio. And Apple wouldn't have to worry about splitting profits with anyone else.
Despite your unwarranted pottymouth, I think I can see where you're coming from.
You seem to be approaching this article from a background of hearing lots of naysayers badmouthing the Mac/PPC or claiming that AMD/Intel is loads better, and from that point of view, I can certainly see your point: this news does demonstrate that the PPC is a very good processor. You're absolutely right about that.
I was merely suggesting that, outside of the above observation, the development is not in and of itself that big of a deal. One company simply decided that a competitor's product is better for a certain task than anything developed in-house. This is actually a very savvy (and common) business decision.
I agree that the "Apple might use Intel" rumor was way overblown. So what if Apple uses an Intel chip? I would say, "big deal." Apple is always free to use any hardware platform it finds most useful, as is Microsoft.
Yes! Finally we have conclusive proof that the Mac is superior in all ways to anything that Microsoft or Intel can offer!
Or not. If Microsoft has chosen the PowerPC architecture as the best CPU for running the new XBox, then why would they bother with developing, from scratch, an OS/development environment to run on it when one is already cheaply available (OSX)? As the original article on CNet states, "very specific hardware components of the G5 allow developers to emulate some of the technology behind future Xbox products and services".
In the race to get a new game console to market, why would Microsoft have chosen not to do it this way? I guess that's why we haven't seen more of this in the news -- it's not really very shocking or news-worthy.
There is a root account on any OS X install by default, you simply can't access it until you run sudo passwd from an account with administrative privileges.
Which brings up a second issue. Macs, like most purchased Windows PCs, set up the default account that is created when you first power on the machine to have full administrative access to the box. This is a major blunder. Even though there are far more exploits available for PCs, Apple is making the same stupid security mistake that most PC vendors are making.
A slight correction to the original post: Dome A is not the highest point on the Antarctic continent. The highest point is Vinson Massif at 4,897 meters. Vinson Massif has already been climbed by humans.
Yes, but is it necessary for slashdot to repeat itself?
If you read the article more carefully, you'll realize that this technique has nothing to do with cracking existing email accounts. It's a technique for signing up for new accounts for spammers to use. However, I agree with another poster -- the article sounds like BS to me.
I think it has become increasingly clear that SCO is attacking much more than IBM's alleged breach of contract. SCO sees the growing success of linux as a primary threat to their business. As linux becomes ever more widespread, SCO's ability to leverage and profit from their system V code will continue to diminish.
Thus, it seems to me that the attack on IBM was merely the starting point for a much larger effort to squash GNU/linux's comercial viability as a whole. In this context, going after Torvalds, novell, transmeta, and others makes some sense from SCO's point of view. I'd say they simply want to try to hit GNU/linux however and wherever they can.
Yes, 10.2 is older than 10.3, but that is not justification for no longer offering security patches for it. And this goes way beyond the server market. Offering security patches for recent, active operating systems is one of the most basic responsibilities an OS manufacturer has to its customers. Of course, one could dispute exactly what qualifies an OS as recent and active, but I'd say any major software product released a year ago is still very much alive. Apple seems to be truly short-changing its customers on this one. Oh, and MS isn't completely dropping support of Windows NT until 2005 -- ten years after its introduction. The comparison to 10.2 is not very valid.