Actually, no, net neutrality would not eliminate QoS, fair queueing or firewalls. The Telcos wouldn't be able to discriminate between customers, but they could still give interactive and video conferencing packets a higher priority than bulk file transfers.
Basically, net neutrality is what we have now, just codified into law.
Here's what Congressman Boucher, a supporter of net neutrality,
said about QoS:
Consistent with these rules, a broadband provider could prioritize a category of its own bits, such as video, if it also prioritized all video bits traveling over its pipes at no cost to other service providers. Internet providers could also take reasonable and nondiscriminatory steps to manage their networks for technical efficiency, to protect network security, and to prevent illegal activity.
Net neutrality may have lost in the House, but it's not too late to stop this. If you're a US citizen, call your senators. Now.
Here we have a picture of Jeri's "hot-grits smile" being completely ignored by a geek who's more interested in the super cool C-ONE "reconfigurable computer" she invented.
There's this cool new thing called IMAP. Look into it and get with the 90's.
Uh, that's amusing, but wrong. Pine was the first mail program to use IMAP. Both Pine and IMAP were created at the University of Washington.
Handheld PC as a UNIX workstation
on
Low-end Laptops?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Some of the Handheld PCs (which are supposed to run Windows CE) are actually very full featured in terms of hardware. WinCE is nearly useless, but if you install UNIX, you've just got a small laptop for a great price.
I'm quite happy with a NEC MobilePro 800 I have. People come up to me when I'm using it and ask what it is and where they can get such a sweet looking sub-notebook. Most of them are sad when I tell them it won't run Microsoft Windows (it has a MIPS R4000 processor).
However, if you're not shy about installing UNIX and compiling programs from source, you definitely want to check it out. All you'll need is a CompactFlash disk (I recommend the IBM 1GB Microdrive), so that you can fit your OS of choice. (I'm using NetBSD, but I hear Linux works, too. NetBSD has a very nice package management system called pkgsrc.)
Don't get me wrong; a souped-up WinCE device is definitely not ideal for everyone. They're not fast and have miniscule memory, but they should be relatively cheap, even new. (There should be many good deals popping up now that Microsoft is discontinuing its MIPS port of WinCE). I know that Alan Computech has the MobilePro 880 for $490 new. I'm sure you can find much better if you look around.
Here's the specs for the MobilePro 880 (which is slightly faster than the 800 which I have):
168 MHz MIPS processor
9.4" SVGA (64k colors) touch screen
78-key keyboard with a comfortable 17.5mm keypitch
32MB RAM
Type II CF slot
Type II PC Card slot
The skinny: I'm very happy with my "laptop". Everything I want to run is open source, so I'm not tied to the x86 architecture.
Ben
Re:Did Microsoft set any standards? Yes.
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Given Microsoft's propensity to dictate to the rest of the industry, it seems peculiar to bash Microsoft for their lack of standard setting. So, I'll assume your question meant to exclude Microsoft's de facto "standards" (such as the ever popular MS Word file format).
Well, surprisingly enough, the answer is, Yes, Microsoft has set good (that is, open) standards.
Off the top of my head I can think of RTF (Rich Text Format), SMB, and DHCP. That last one's a pretty good example, since even in pure UNIX shops it's all but eradicated bootp.
--b9
This is a Spectator editorial; not science
on
A Map to Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
When I first read the article I was intrigued but a little bit baffled.
The author makes some strong claims (some of which I agree with) but he doesn't give proper scientific evidence. Instead he refers to press releases, articles by journalists, and other soft facts. For example, he describes the implications of the research on science as being brought to light by the Washington Post. Where were the scientists?
Well, after a couple minutes of digging I figured out what was wrong. This is an editorial by Tom Bethell, who is the senior editor of The American Spectator.
The American Spectator is a news magazine with an openly ultra-conservative agenda. My guess is that the intent of this article was to show the profligate spending of the US government. The author, Tom Bethell, is asking, "Why did the US government spend billions on research which (it now turns out) might not have direct medical uses for decades?"
It's a reasonable question. If it was my question to answer, I would say that it is precisely because this research is a long term investment in science that the government should be funding it. If Mr. Bethell is correct that human genome research isn't directly applicable for medical use, then what company would tackle it? Twenty years is a long time for a company to bleed money waiting to become profitable.
In general you should take anything you read in the The American Spectator with a grain of salt. The current issue includes articles that make even moderate conservatives queasy such as More Money in Politics, Now! that ends with the following mind bender:
Twenty years ago, when Sen. Moynihan accused the Reagan administration of deliberately lofting the deficit to push down spending, it occurred to many Reaganites that he had a heck of an idea. It is time for the creative faction in American society, otherwise known as the top one percent, to reach a similar conclusion about the charge that unlimited citizen donations would allow them to buy elections. It's a heck of an idea.
Another good one is an article where they try to recycle the old "Cigarettes Don't Cause Cancer Because Scientists Haven't Proven It (Yet)" argument and apply it to (of all things) DDT.
A "virus" is a fragment of code which inserts itself in to the code of a legitimate program in order to propagate. The Pro/Linux "Virus" does not do that.
If it helps, think of it like a biological virus which must take over a cell's DNA to create new copies of itself.
In contrast a "worm" is a complete program which does not need to alter another program to run.
A "trojan horse" is simply a program which pretends to be innocuous when it is not.
They have wireless networking, speech recognition, and a thingie that brings up information based on context -- so when the guy is talking about a subject it will bring up information on what he is talking about.
Hi, I'm the grad student at Georgia Tech doing the "just-in-time information retrieval" based on speech.
I feel that I should give credit where it's due. While the work mentioned above is fun because I rigged it up to do speech recognition (yes, in an Emacs shell buffer), it's actually using Brad Rhodes's Remembrance Agent which has been around almost as long as wearable computers.
Take a look here to see some of the more current work going on in the Contextual Computing Group at Georgia Tech. (The page has only recently been put up so please forgive any dead links you find; they'll be fixed before the weekend).
Hawking fears that the atmosphere will become hotter and contain more and more acid
like the atmosphere of the planet Venus, so that men can no longer live on earth.
But women can? I guess that does make it a lot like Venus...
Hi, I'm a GA Tech grad student so I know that one of the most wired houses in the world can be found in Atlanta. It's called the "Aware Home". You can check it out here:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ahri/
It's not actually supposed to be a "Geek House" but I bet they've got geeks lining up for blocks to be the "researchers" who get to live in it.
If you read the actual NASA press release, the goal for the launch is around 2010 but it will take fifteen years (after that) to go 23 billion miles past our solar system. (They hint that the destination is Alpha Centauri).
--Ben
Slashdot is the modern day equivalent of the "telephone game".
Fred Brooks may be a great writer and visionary but he didn't forsee the enormous scaling potentials in Free Software. In particular not he, nor anyone else, considered debugging to be a massively parallelizable task. (That is, until Linux made it big and everyone and their pet monkey wrote ZDnet articles about it).
As is often quoted here, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
Back when PPP accounts were expensive GA Tech signed some ridiculous contract with a service provider (MCI, I think) such that PPP would be provided to students for a small fee + per minute charges over some fixed amount of time.
That doesn't sound so bad until you get to 1999 where the price of an unlimited access PPP account is lower than the base fee with that ISP. The problem is that you can't just get by with any old ISP's account since there are a lot of servers and databases here which lock out users based on IP address.(Lexis/Nexis in particular).
SLiRP to the rescue! Although the contract prevents GA Tech from setting up a competing PPP dialin service, it's perfectly fine for them to provide a free TTY dialin line, which they've done. Now, thanks to the magic of SLiRP, I not only have unlimited PPP access from within the gatech.edu domain, but I don't even have to pay the slimy ISP's per minute fees.
The web-server IBM used was Apache (with their own name stamped on it). I believe IBM is releasing their improvements back to the community (but Apache's not GPL'd so they don't have to if they don't want to).
At first I thought you were some sort of Microsoft plant attempting to sow dissension through yet another BSD vs. Linux flame war. It wasn't until I got to the bit at the end of your flame that said, "Constructive criticicm is welcome, flames are not," that I figured out you were joking.
Maybe you should put more smilicons® in your message next time.:-)
xauth et al. are a pain; no one is ever going to accidently discover X is network transparent.
As you may or may not have heard, when you ssh to another box it automatically forwards (and encrypts) your X connections so applications "just work". I use it all the time to log in to my work computers from home over the modem and run my favorite mail client (Emacs).
I think the Unix Haters Handbook is getting a bit out of date.
I think he said "pretty much" because he didn't want to bother going in to the whole silly scenario of what would happen if Microsoft did appropriate some GPL'd code in to one of their products.
If they insisted on shipping the product Microsoft would be legally obligated to release the entire source code of that product under the GPL. This is, as the previous poster said, silly. (It'd also be pretty nifty for us hackers---I'd love to fix some of the annoyances I have with Word).
The GPL is strong enough as it stands. Let's not muck with it just to hurt one particular company.
--B
P.S. If the license excludes the "market leader" from using the product what happens when the Red Hat has 51% of the market?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no, net neutrality would not eliminate QoS, fair queueing or firewalls. The Telcos wouldn't be able to discriminate between customers, but they could still give interactive and video conferencing packets a higher priority than bulk file transfers.
Basically, net neutrality is what we have now, just codified into law.
Here's what Congressman Boucher, a supporter of net neutrality, said about QoS:
Net neutrality may have lost in the House, but it's not too late to stop this. If you're a US citizen, call your senators. Now.
--b9
Here we have a picture of Jeri's "hot-grits smile" being completely ignored by a geek who's more interested in the super cool C-ONE "reconfigurable computer" she invented.
Uh, that's amusing, but wrong. Pine was the first mail program to use IMAP. Both Pine and IMAP were created at the University of Washington.
I'm quite happy with a NEC MobilePro 800 I have. People come up to me when I'm using it and ask what it is and where they can get such a sweet looking sub-notebook. Most of them are sad when I tell them it won't run Microsoft Windows (it has a MIPS R4000 processor).
However, if you're not shy about installing UNIX and compiling programs from source, you definitely want to check it out. All you'll need is a CompactFlash disk (I recommend the IBM 1GB Microdrive), so that you can fit your OS of choice. (I'm using NetBSD, but I hear Linux works, too. NetBSD has a very nice package management system called pkgsrc.)
Don't get me wrong; a souped-up WinCE device is definitely not ideal for everyone. They're not fast and have miniscule memory, but they should be relatively cheap, even new. (There should be many good deals popping up now that Microsoft is discontinuing its MIPS port of WinCE). I know that Alan Computech has the MobilePro 880 for $490 new. I'm sure you can find much better if you look around.
Here's the specs for the MobilePro 880 (which is slightly faster than the 800 which I have):
The skinny: I'm very happy with my "laptop". Everything I want to run is open source, so I'm not tied to the x86 architecture.
Ben
Given Microsoft's propensity to dictate to the rest of the industry, it seems peculiar to bash Microsoft for their lack of standard setting. So, I'll assume your question meant to exclude Microsoft's de facto "standards" (such as the ever popular MS Word file format).
Well, surprisingly enough, the answer is, Yes, Microsoft has set good (that is, open) standards.
Off the top of my head I can think of RTF (Rich Text Format), SMB, and DHCP. That last one's a pretty good example, since even in pure UNIX shops it's all but eradicated bootp.
--b9
The author makes some strong claims (some of which I agree with) but he doesn't give proper scientific evidence. Instead he refers to press releases, articles by journalists, and other soft facts. For example, he describes the implications of the research on science as being brought to light by the Washington Post. Where were the scientists?
Well, after a couple minutes of digging I figured out what was wrong. This is an editorial by Tom Bethell, who is the senior editor of The American Spectator.
The American Spectator is a news magazine with an openly ultra-conservative agenda. My guess is that the intent of this article was to show the profligate spending of the US government. The author, Tom Bethell, is asking, "Why did the US government spend billions on research which (it now turns out) might not have direct medical uses for decades?"
It's a reasonable question. If it was my question to answer, I would say that it is precisely because this research is a long term investment in science that the government should be funding it. If Mr. Bethell is correct that human genome research isn't directly applicable for medical use, then what company would tackle it? Twenty years is a long time for a company to bleed money waiting to become profitable.
In general you should take anything you read in the The American Spectator with a grain of salt. The current issue includes articles that make even moderate conservatives queasy such as More Money in Politics, Now! that ends with the following mind bender:
Twenty years ago, when Sen. Moynihan accused the Reagan administration of deliberately lofting the deficit to push down spending, it occurred to many Reaganites that he had a heck of an idea. It is time for the creative faction in American society, otherwise known as the top one percent, to reach a similar conclusion about the charge that unlimited citizen donations would allow them to buy elections. It's a heck of an idea.
Another good one is an article where they try to recycle the old "Cigarettes Don't Cause Cancer Because Scientists Haven't Proven It (Yet)" argument and apply it to (of all things) DDT.
Ben
It is a virus... It alters data
A "virus" is a fragment of code which inserts itself in to the code of a legitimate program in order to propagate. The Pro/Linux "Virus" does not do that.
If it helps, think of it like a biological virus which must take over a cell's DNA to create new copies of itself.
In contrast a "worm" is a complete program which does not need to alter another program to run.
A "trojan horse" is simply a program which pretends to be innocuous when it is not.
--b9
They have wireless networking, speech recognition, and a thingie that brings up information based on context -- so when the guy is talking about a subject it will bring up information on what he is talking about.
Hi, I'm the grad student at Georgia Tech doing the "just-in-time information retrieval" based on speech.
I feel that I should give credit where it's due. While the work mentioned above is fun because I rigged it up to do speech recognition (yes, in an Emacs shell buffer), it's actually using Brad Rhodes's Remembrance Agent which has been around almost as long as wearable computers.
Take a look here to see some of the more current work going on in the Contextual Computing Group at Georgia Tech. (The page has only recently been put up so please forgive any dead links you find; they'll be fixed before the weekend).
--Ben
Hawking fears that the atmosphere will become hotter and contain more and more acid
like the atmosphere of the planet Venus, so that men can no longer live on earth.
But women can? I guess that does make it a lot like Venus...
--Ben
Hi, I'm a GA Tech grad student so I know that one of the most wired houses in the world can be found in Atlanta. It's called the "Aware Home". You can check it out here:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ahri/
It's not actually supposed to be a "Geek House" but I bet they've got geeks lining up for blocks to be the "researchers" who get to live in it.
-Ben
If you read the actual NASA press release, the goal for the launch is around 2010 but it will take fifteen years (after that) to go 23 billion miles past our solar system. (They hint that the destination is Alpha Centauri).
--Ben
Slashdot is the modern day equivalent of the "telephone game".
[Dave Cutler] is developing Win64, the 64-bit Windows 2000 vaporware.
Win64 is not vaporware. It will be released exactly when Microsoft has been saying all along. The year 2064.
--B
Fred Brooks may be a great writer and visionary but he didn't forsee the enormous scaling potentials in Free Software. In particular not he, nor anyone else, considered debugging to be a massively parallelizable task. (That is, until Linux made it big and everyone and their pet monkey wrote ZDnet articles about it).
As is often quoted here, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
--Ben
Back when PPP accounts were expensive GA Tech signed some ridiculous contract with a service provider (MCI, I think) such that PPP would be provided to students for a small fee + per minute charges over some fixed amount of time.
That doesn't sound so bad until you get to 1999 where the price of an unlimited access PPP account is lower than the base fee with that ISP. The problem is that you can't just get by with any old ISP's account since there are a lot of servers and databases here which lock out users based on IP address.(Lexis/Nexis in particular).
SLiRP to the rescue! Although the contract prevents GA Tech from setting up a competing PPP dialin service, it's perfectly fine for them to provide a free TTY dialin line, which they've done. Now, thanks to the magic of SLiRP, I not only have unlimited PPP access from within the gatech.edu domain, but I don't even have to pay the slimy ISP's per minute fees.
--Ben
The web-server IBM used was Apache (with their own name stamped on it). I believe IBM is releasing their improvements back to the community (but Apache's not GPL'd so they don't have to if they don't want to).
--Ben
At first I thought you were some sort of Microsoft plant attempting to sow dissension through yet another BSD vs. Linux flame war. It wasn't until I got to the bit at the end of your flame that said, "Constructive criticicm is welcome, flames are not," that I figured out you were joking.
:-)
Maybe you should put more smilicons® in your message next time.
--Ben
xauth et al. are a pain; no one is ever going to accidently discover X is network transparent.
As you may or may not have heard, when you ssh to another box it automatically forwards (and encrypts) your X connections so applications "just work". I use it all the time to log in to my work computers from home over the modem and run my favorite mail client (Emacs).
I think the Unix Haters Handbook is getting a bit out of date.
I think he said "pretty much" because he didn't want to bother going in to the whole silly scenario of what would happen if Microsoft did appropriate some GPL'd code in to one of their products.
;-)
If they insisted on shipping the product Microsoft would be legally obligated to release the entire source code of that product under the GPL. This is, as the previous poster said, silly. (It'd also be pretty nifty for us hackers---I'd love to fix some of the annoyances I have with Word).
The GPL is strong enough as it stands. Let's not muck with it just to hurt one particular company.
--B
P.S. If the license excludes the "market leader" from using the product what happens when the Red Hat has 51% of the market?
I don't need no stinkin' closed source word processor on my box. I'd rather help AbiSource finish AbiWord and put it under the GPL.
(Dollars to donuts it'll be ready before Microsoft even admits they're considering a Linux port).