Heres something a guy that I work with gave a talk on:
Davis, J. A., Fagg, A. H., Levine, B. N. (2001), Wearable Computers as Packet Transport Mechanisms in Highly-Partitioned Ad-Hoc Networks, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computing, Zurich, Switzerland, October 2001
...a couple scenarios and approaches to various traffic patterns and how figure out where to send a packet so that it takes the fastest route to its destination in a pure (dynamic) ad-hoc net.
To avoid the trap of bitching and moaning without offering any solutions, I'll try to mention a couple positive things we should work towards:
1. The primary reason my household switched from cablemodem to dsl was that the cablemodem service sucked balls. A secondary reason is that our provider blocked port 80 requests to all customers, and the upload bandwidth was severely throttled (1/3 i think of the download)-- obviously they don't think web publishing is something its customers want or need to do. Of course getting the DSL installed was a serious pain in the ass, but it works pretty well.
We need more competing home-broadband providers. Local area (community area) wireless providers may be the answer, I think. Like reverse-TV stations-- if they can retain independence and competition and not be bought up by AT&T/Comsat and AOL/TW, and swallowed up by mergers, the way TV is/has.
2. smaller, competing web hosting companies (like the one i use) are an excellent thing for the web, but they need protection against criminal suits pertaining to copyright and freedom of speech for their customers. This is unfortunately a problem that may not be resolved soon.
Lessig brings up an essential aspect of the Internet that is so often overlooked-- the ownership of the infrastructure. He uses the term "end-to-end" to describe the free flow of information from host to host over common carrier lines.
Now that small ISPs are all but extinct, crushed by AOL and "Broadband" providers (cable, DSL), and those broadband providers (mainly cable providers) are not regulated as common carriers, the most important feature of the Web, and the Internet in general, is going to die: the ability to publish, with a minimum of outside control. "New Media Convergence" is the convergence of your TV and a shopping mall, and this is NOT the world I want for future generations. I want individuals, not consumers, to actively contribute to, and build cyberspace, not be merely entertained and sold.
Free expression requires basic *material* infrastructure, plus the "immaterial" structures of the net (free protocols and software, basically) as well as copyright *freedom* rather than copyright restriction. The law will affect all of these things in some way or another -- Lessig is right, we need to do more to protect cyberspace, and not give up.
Why is the "publications" page blank? Is my browser broken, or has nothing been published yet about WearSAT. Sounds pretty vaporous to me.
The only info in the BBC article was that they're putting computers in space suits with small eye displays. I could do that in a week -- what really matters is the software. The display mock-up looks interesting, but not much in depth info here-- can't wait to see what kind of environment they come up with.
This whole sorry saga remains so ridiculous. What does BT possibly hope to gain from this? The patent is so incredibly vague, and obviously closely related to so many other vague computer concepts both before and after the patent, as to be, IMO, not worth anyone's time or money.
Others have mentioned Englebart (the father of modern software concepts in so many ways) and Ted Nelson, who really started the whole hypertext thing rolling in the late sixties. And anyone writing about hypertext has to acknowledge the grandfather hypertext system, Vannevar Bush's "memex".
How that stuff holds up in court against this particular patent, I don't know.
But in the grand scheme of things, it's stupid.
I guess they just hope to get a few thousand bucks out of Prodigy in court? If thats they're only aim (and it seems like it is), it's pathetic. My esteem of the corporate tech world has sunk to incredible new lows!
I have used wxWindows for simple cross-platform GUI stuff, and it works pretty well. wx is basically an abstract GUI toolkit, which wraps around various native toolkits like GTK, Windows, Mac, (even Motif).
It's pretty cool, though QT might have some more advanced features or be faster.
Funny.... but completely true! What a great idea-- -client side content editing! This would be great for all kinds of presentations, lectures and new art experiments requiring a cut-up compilation of scenes from a DVD... and less time consuming than 'editing' it by hand onto VHS.
Um, it's easy. Don't use their mail service.
Send mail directly from your workstation (or through firewall), and either have your mail relayed from somwhere else, or just accept mail for your domain. (but make damn sure you haven't got an open relay running!)
Or hack fetchmail to pretend it's one of those MS agents.
I happily give voluntary micropayments ("tip jar") to sites I enjoy and think deserve and need it, to help ensure they don't disappear. Put an Amazon and PayPal buttons on your site, and ask nicely. I'll hapily give you a couple bucks every once and a while.
We also feel more comfortable giving these voluntary payments to our peers. That is, real people like us, as opposed to large companies striving after profit. Just something to keep in mind.
I also am also perfectly willing to (for example) shell out the five bucks for that Dr Dobbs article that I really need.
Not everyone on the net is completely opposed to a reasonable information marketplace... But in most cases, if its not voluntary or really essential, most people will skip it and move on to something else.
It's a matter of demand. People don't want to make 3D web spaces yet. HTML is still being developed with intensity, web-based business is growing (with pains, natch).
VRML and other web-based 3D technologies are newer than HTML, which is still pretty darned new. VRML is harder to code than HTML, you have to think in 3D and numbers, so the number of web 3d amateurs is much smaller than web 2d amateurs. Shoot-em-up 3D games make money, that's whats big now, but soon enough, the major enabling technologies for really exciting internet 3D communication will be pretty widespread: cheap powerhouse video cards (driven by the game industry) and broadband.
To become widespread, a internet 3D technology will need:
1. to be general, and useful AND exciting to many
2. fairly easy to build, either through simple languages (like HTML) or free, intuitive dev tools.
3. powerful enough to approach levels of (visual) quality now achieved regularly by desktop gaming industry.
While we're at it, I say we go for open standards, extensibility, and pioneer some interesting aspects of multimedia and HCI.
Wait a minute, they patented the query method? Isn't it just a little CGI? The patent office needs to have someone at a desk shredding applications for trivial, non-original patents.. wait aren't they supposed to be doing that?
Well, freedb will live on, because of its openness. It is mirrored, and any word of it shutting down, I'll fscking mirror it:)
and if it can be made easy enough for people to update their network settings to do so (on the order of "lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh" for example, or maybe just "click here and then select OK when Windows asks if you want to update your settings") then there will be a mass movement to alternate DNS
And if you're not a DNS server, and you just want to be able to access alternative domains, you can simply add name.space's DNS servers to/etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 209.48.2.11
nameserver 206.86.247.30
http://namespace.org/switch/unix.html?
here are instructions for other operating systems:
http://namespace.org/switch/
the crusoe is 86 compatible... x86 is the most common chip, this provides greatest compatablilty, largest user & developer bases... makes perfect sense.
oh boy, what a trigger for slashdot arguing.
anyway, while i am probably hold the same opinion as most slashdot readers, i will say anyway that i cannot agree with caleb carr that information is inherently dangerous and must be regulated. the only solution to problems of disinformation and destrunctive control is to provide people with the tools to contribute to national and global media, and the only solution to what some seem to view as dangerous information (pornography, how to grow pot, how to make a molotov cocktail) is *education* and prosecution of destructive acts only if and when they actually occur.
A co-worker was just telling me how much he disliked the plurality of languges, and shell syntaxes pretending to be languages, involved in modern Unix. He said he liked the elegance of Lisp machines, if perhaps not the day-to-day practicality, and the fact that all software was just part of one big Lisp program. So, he said, why isn't there a real C-shell, that used (at least a subset) of actual C syntax?
I thought for a moment, did a bunch of net searches, and said "yeah, why not??" I don't think it would be terribly difficult...
It was not a failure of their vision. It was a failure of a group of people, with many ideas, to finish and release a product from within a secretive business enviroment.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Remco Treeffkorn's GPSD to read data off of GPS devices in my tracking library (libtracking-- see interreality.org)
http://russnelson.com/gpsd/
I'm sorry, but every day is Fools day on Slashdot.
Could /. please stop providing free PR to random companies? Thanks.
I moderate this story -1, Troll.
Heres something a guy that I work with gave a talk on:
Davis, J. A., Fagg, A. H., Levine, B. N. (2001), Wearable Computers as Packet Transport Mechanisms in Highly-Partitioned Ad-Hoc Networks, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computing, Zurich, Switzerland, October 2001
http://www-anw.cs.umass.edu/~fagg/papers/2001/iswc 01_pednet.ps
To avoid the trap of bitching and moaning without offering any solutions, I'll try to mention a couple positive things we should work towards:
1. The primary reason my household switched from cablemodem to dsl was that the cablemodem service sucked balls. A secondary reason is that our provider blocked port 80 requests to all customers, and the upload bandwidth was severely throttled (1/3 i think of the download)-- obviously they don't think web publishing is something its customers want or need to do. Of course getting the DSL installed was a serious pain in the ass, but it works pretty well.
We need more competing home-broadband providers. Local area (community area) wireless providers may be the answer, I think. Like reverse-TV stations-- if they can retain independence and competition and not be bought up by AT&T/Comsat and AOL/TW, and swallowed up by mergers, the way TV is/has.
2. smaller, competing web hosting companies (like the one i use) are an excellent thing for the web, but they need protection against criminal suits pertaining to copyright and freedom of speech for their customers. This is unfortunately a problem that may not be resolved soon.
Lessig brings up an essential aspect of the Internet that is so often overlooked-- the ownership of the infrastructure. He uses the term "end-to-end" to describe the free flow of information from host to host over common carrier lines.
Now that small ISPs are all but extinct, crushed by AOL and "Broadband" providers (cable, DSL), and those broadband providers (mainly cable providers) are not regulated as common carriers, the most important feature of the Web, and the Internet in general, is going to die: the ability to publish, with a minimum of outside control. "New Media Convergence" is the convergence of your TV and a shopping mall, and this is NOT the world I want for future generations. I want individuals, not consumers, to actively contribute to, and build cyberspace, not be merely entertained and sold.
Free expression requires basic *material* infrastructure, plus the "immaterial" structures of the net (free protocols and software, basically) as well as copyright *freedom* rather than copyright restriction. The law will affect all of these things in some way or another -- Lessig is right, we need to do more to protect cyberspace, and not give up.
For more info (and advocacy) about media ownership, see the Center for Digital Democracy.
Why is the "publications" page blank? Is my browser broken, or has nothing been published yet about WearSAT. Sounds pretty vaporous to me.
The only info in the BBC article was that they're putting computers in space suits with small eye displays. I could do that in a week -- what really matters is the software. The display mock-up looks interesting, but not much in depth info here-- can't wait to see what kind of environment they come up with.
This whole sorry saga remains so ridiculous. What does BT possibly hope to gain from this? The patent is so incredibly vague, and obviously closely related to so many other vague computer concepts both before and after the patent, as to be, IMO, not worth anyone's time or money.
Others have mentioned Englebart (the father of modern software concepts in so many ways) and Ted Nelson, who really started the whole hypertext thing rolling in the late sixties. And anyone writing about hypertext has to acknowledge the grandfather hypertext system, Vannevar Bush's "memex".
How that stuff holds up in court against this particular patent, I don't know.
But in the grand scheme of things, it's stupid.
I guess they just hope to get a few thousand bucks out of Prodigy in court? If thats they're only aim (and it seems like it is), it's pathetic. My esteem of the corporate tech world has sunk to incredible new lows!
I was going to use Common C++ for something, but never got around to it.
here is a link: http://www.gnu.org/software/commonc++/CommonC++.ht ml
here is another: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cplusplus/
I have used wxWindows for simple cross-platform GUI stuff, and it works pretty well. wx is basically an abstract GUI toolkit, which wraps around various native toolkits like GTK, Windows, Mac, (even Motif).
It's pretty cool, though QT might have some more advanced features or be faster.
Funny.... but completely true! What a great idea-- -client side content editing! This would be great for all kinds of presentations, lectures and new art experiments requiring a cut-up compilation of scenes from a DVD... and less time consuming than 'editing' it by hand onto VHS.
Um, it's easy. Don't use their mail service.
Send mail directly from your workstation (or through firewall), and either have your mail relayed from somwhere else, or just accept mail for your domain. (but make damn sure you haven't got an open relay running!)
Or hack fetchmail to pretend it's one of those MS agents.
Yeah, NASA Ames and VPL have been doing this stuff for years...
I happily give voluntary micropayments ("tip jar") to sites I enjoy and think deserve and need it, to help ensure they don't disappear. Put an Amazon and PayPal buttons on your site, and ask nicely. I'll hapily give you a couple bucks every once and a while.
We also feel more comfortable giving these voluntary payments to our peers. That is, real people like us, as opposed to large companies striving after profit. Just something to keep in mind.
I also am also perfectly willing to (for example) shell out the five bucks for that Dr Dobbs article that I really need.
Not everyone on the net is completely opposed to a reasonable information marketplace... But in most cases, if its not voluntary or really essential, most people will skip it and move on to something else.
It's a matter of demand. People don't want to make 3D web spaces yet. HTML is still being developed with intensity, web-based business is growing (with pains, natch).
VRML and other web-based 3D technologies are newer than HTML, which is still pretty darned new. VRML is harder to code than HTML, you have to think in 3D and numbers, so the number of web 3d amateurs is much smaller than web 2d amateurs. Shoot-em-up 3D games make money, that's whats big now, but soon enough, the major enabling technologies for really exciting internet 3D communication will be pretty widespread: cheap powerhouse video cards (driven by the game industry) and broadband.
To become widespread, a internet 3D technology will need:
1. to be general, and useful AND exciting to many
2. fairly easy to build, either through simple languages (like HTML) or free, intuitive dev tools.
3. powerful enough to approach levels of (visual) quality now achieved regularly by desktop gaming industry.
While we're at it, I say we go for open standards, extensibility, and pioneer some interesting aspects of multimedia and HCI.
agent k
Wait a minute, they patented the query method? Isn't it just a little CGI? The patent office needs to have someone at a desk shredding applications for trivial, non-original patents.. wait aren't they supposed to be doing that?
:)
Well, freedb will live on, because of its openness. It is mirrored, and any word of it shutting down, I'll fscking mirror it
And if you're not a DNS server, and you just want to be able to access alternative domains, you can simply add name.space's DNS servers to /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 209.48.2.11
nameserver 206.86.247.30
http://namespace.org/switch/unix.html?
here are instructions for other operating systems:
http://namespace.org/switch/
the crusoe is 86 compatible... x86 is the most common chip, this provides greatest compatablilty, largest user & developer bases... makes perfect sense.
oh boy, what a trigger for slashdot arguing. anyway, while i am probably hold the same opinion as most slashdot readers, i will say anyway that i cannot agree with caleb carr that information is inherently dangerous and must be regulated. the only solution to problems of disinformation and destrunctive control is to provide people with the tools to contribute to national and global media, and the only solution to what some seem to view as dangerous information (pornography, how to grow pot, how to make a molotov cocktail) is *education* and prosecution of destructive acts only if and when they actually occur.
80% of the userbase of Microsoft Word will be on their knees worshiping whoever replaces their bloated, broken, confusing, "word processor" with LyX.
A co-worker was just telling me how much he disliked the plurality of languges, and shell syntaxes pretending to be languages, involved in modern Unix. He said he liked the elegance of Lisp machines, if perhaps not the day-to-day practicality, and the fact that all software was just part of one big Lisp program. So, he said, why isn't there a real C-shell, that used (at least a subset) of actual C syntax?
I thought for a moment, did a bunch of net searches, and said "yeah, why not??" I don't think it would be terribly difficult...
And who the hell *smokes* heroin to "come down" from speed and coke, anyway?
It was not a failure of their vision. It was a failure of a group of people, with many ideas, to finish and release a product from within a secretive business enviroment.
Why bother to patent hyperlinks, especially when it runs out in '06? Does BT think it can take control of the web in six years?
What's the point? What will they gain?