Censorship is such a disgusting concept that it ought to be banned on the net....
The big difference is the alternatives you have for getting access to the banned material. If the blue-nosed thugs ban a movie, and you know they've banned it and want to see it, you *might* be able to buy a copy by mail from Amazon.com that arrives in a brown paper wrapper, you politically incorrect pervert, but you won't be able to go to a theater in Oz and see it, so they've still protected the morals of otherwise-innocent Ozzies.
By contrast, if they list the banned web pages, you can just nip over to anonymizer.com or The Wayback Machine or Google or some other cache or anti-censorship relay site and view it anyway, plus they've publicized a whole bunch of sites you otherwise wouldn't have thought to look at. That's especially important for political censorship (drawing attention to "Aus.Gov't did *this latest* stupid thing" as opposed to burying it), but also important for basic prudish censorship, because there are all sorts of nasty kinky immoral things that average upstanding moral Australians simply wouldn't have thought of if the Government hadn't told them "Here's the stuff we don't want you looking at! Especially *this stuff*".
More seriously, though, somebody else made the comment that the censorship is actually very minimal, and it's a facade that's designed to tell a few noisy right-wingers "yes, we've done what you want, so you can be happy and stop bugging us", and if you actually made the list public it would be obvious want a small fraction of the stuff *some* people might want banned is actually on there - so if the anti-censorship people don't complain loudly about it, you'll actually get a lot less censorship because we can leave it quietly buried in some bureaucratic back room keeping a couple of blue-noses off the streets hunting for pr0n on the internet instead of bothering politicians. It's not the ideal social position for a free and open society, but pragmatically it's possibly better for everybody, and maybe we can task some of the censors to go fight that Other Deadly Sin, Greed, by adding spammers's sites to the blacklists.
Before the Justice Department Anti-Trust goons beat up Microsoft, Alan Greenspan raised interest rates a lot because the economy was "overheated", and the market crashed, there were really three business plans out there
Go public and become Mozillionaires
Sell out to Microsoft if you make software or web services
Sell out to Cisco if you make hardware
Going public was fun if you could get investors to go for it (and if you could keep the stock price high until your six-months-can't-sell window was over). Selling out to MS (popularized by Hotmail's $400M or so deal) stopped being fun when the DoJ was threatening to rip MS apart into three companies, none of which were sure they'd want to buy you, so lots of small companies went bust. Selling out to Cisco still looked like fun, because Cisco shares were like cash, only better. Sigh.... the still-mostly-good-old-days.
AT&T's network has been using the Avici TSR routers to handle their OC192 trunks.
"Terabit", when describing routers, currently refers to the total capacity of the box, not to actually having terabit connections:-) OC192 is 10 Gbits, and is starting to become a mature technology. OC768 is 40 Gbits; I'm not sure if anybody's routing at that speed yet (probably), but it's not close enough to mature to be practical for anything more than the marketing value of *your* network having the biggest fastest pipe in existence, even if it's only going from San Francisco to San Jose.
Red Hat already insists on using two CDs, and AOL wants one of their own. They may not be totally full, but the combination will probably include some bloatware, and an entertaining combination would also include StarOffice or a couple of CDs of Koffice, FooOffice, and BarOffice, and probably Quake or whatever the Killer Game Of The Month is by the time they ship.
Any chance they'll be able to do a smaller distribution and a smart enough installer to deal with underpowered hardware like many AOLers use? (e.g. 2GB disks, 32MB RAM, the machine you gave your kids when you upgraded, or the machine your Mom uses to IM her sister and send online greeting cards?) At least picking only one of KDE and Gnome, and getting a basic office package that works with it, and maybe doing a version that can mainly RUN from the CDROM, with a FAT file system for storage? That way, you replace your blue-triangle "AOL" icon with a blue-triangle "LILO" icon wearing a red hat....
What are you trying to teach? What size classes?
on
Mobile IT Education?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What you need depends a lot on what you're trying to do and what your audience will be. Are you trying to show people how to use popular PC user interfaces? Word processing? Spreadsheets? Web browsing? Accounting? Finding stuff on the Internet? Assembling PCs hardware? Data collection from rainfall/soil-moisture/temperature telemetry widgets? Bidding on futures markets? CAD/CAM programs for building or machinery? At least in the US, farmers are often heavily involved with computers, because farms are businesses, with accounting to run, and because selling farm commodities is a complex processes, especially if you're trying to risk-manage on the futures markets, plus some of them use high-tech field machinery, and everybody uses weather forecasts.
Some of your decisions will be pretty obvious - basic flat-screens have come down in price enough that you're far better off using them than CRTs, because you're trading off the cost of the equipment vs. the cost of a bigger bus and more electricity. But if you're trying to show things to a larger group of people, you'll have to find something that fits your budget but still works, though that may be "display the same slides on N screens at once." And of course you'll want a couple of CD-R-burners for giving away software, as well as stacks of blank CDs and floppies.
Will you be showing off how to build hardware? Letting people know what the basic guts of a PC are like is valuable, so you'll probably want some basic PCs, card tables, and screwdrivers for people to play with, and spare parts to make up for the ones you'll lose or break. But if you're also doing telemetry, you'll need whatever flavors of hardware that uses, whether it's simple RS-232 stuff like X-10 or fancier data bus things, and you'll need a few sample things to telemeter.
When you get to the airport, they want to see your Larry-Ellison-approved National ID Card, or at least several forms of ID, take off your hat, jacket, shoes, belt, cellphone, beeper, PDA, and steel hip joint, and then decide whether to let you ride on the airplane you bought a ticket for. But when Larry Ellison gets to the airport, he gets on his own plane. Does he have to go through the security gate where they check his National ID card and say "Sorry, Mr. Ellison, you've gotten 15 tickets for violating quiet hours at San Jose Airport by landing after midnight, so we're not going to take the Big Orange Boot off your airplane wheel unless you show us a flight plan that gets you in by 11pm?" Not bloody likely.
Perhaps not *every*, but most, and I'm in a dull boring telecomm company. You can get a low-end model for $100; you can spend that much on a high-end DayTimer. Some of the geekier types have the higher-end fancier organizers, with cameras or music players or whatever, but everybody's got one.
One reason is because the Palm software does an excellent job of syncing with the MSOutlook Calendar, and if you or your organization uses Outlook as your calendar tool, you get the convenience of a pocketsized calendar while still syncing up with the scheduling requests you get by email. Without good sync software, it would probably not have caught on as fast.
And the software on PalmOS, while limited in functionality, programmer-hostile, and oriented towards a small lamer screen (unlike the Psion I used before my Palm), is designed to be extremely friendly for many common tasks. The most annoying limit is document size - early limited-memory hardware meant they designed lots of applications to limit themselves to 4KB notes, which is even more annoying than the 32KB-64KB that most small-model Intel programs used to have.
My wife uses a small palmtop made of dead trees, which has a palm-style cover and pen-holder....
Yeah, we also were strongly pressured into using the One True Indentation/Punctuation Style in the first couple of undergrad courses.
Sometimes the formats are the same because people use automated tools, like indent. Somebody else mentioned EMACS automatically formatting code.
And if you develop your code in traditional newbie style - write some code that doesn't work, hack on it for a while until it actually does work, and send it in - then you probably should run it through indent or your favorite language's equivalent reformatter anyway.
Collaboration/Teamwork/Group Projects are critical for undergrad CS majors and for anybody in other fields who are going to do computer-based projects in their own fields once they're in the real world - and they're especially criticial for "nerds" who may lack effective people skills.
Sure, CS100 classes and maybe the second or third programming classes a student takes don't need collaboration, though many students will need help (i.e. teaching, even if it's not done by a professor) in understanding what's going on with their programs, why they're not working, learning to use the cardpunch (:-) or editor or whatever local facilities you have. But by the third or fourth programming class you're taking, you should be doing things that are large enough to require group work, whether it's writing a small operating system or writing a simulation of some complex activity, because most real projects are too big for one person to do.
How do you develop requirements jointly?
How do you define interfaces between modules in a program?
How do you make sure the program is modular enough that each person can write their own sections and have the code work together?
What parts of the program structure are global or semi-global and what parts are strictly local?
How do you resolve conflicts over modularization, or style, or documentation quality, or EGO, or work speeds?
How do you make sure some arrogant super-programmer doesn't force the entire team to do things *his* way (not only so other students get to learn something, but also because real projects often do require collaboration, or have parts that you can't change.)
How do you adapt to changing requirements?
How do team members work together on discovering the real requirements, or when finding out that they're not the original requirements, or that the system doesn't actually work because of hardware limits you hadn't known?
How do you split up work when the combined project has a speed/performance constraint?
How do you fix it if it's too slow?
How do you learn to communicate with other programmers, who may be working with your simultaneously, or may be the person who was working on it before you got here, or who will work on it after you're gone?
Ok, in some places it's also cable modems, but as much as I like it, that's also a luxury. Folks, we're not talking about something that's an essential utility like electricity or water which requires a large expensive infrastructure that's (according to all the economists the monopolies hired to tell us why we need them) not efficient to operate competitively. This is TELEVISION. If you don't like it, go rent a video tape, or get Gamez, or go read a book, or listen to the radio, or if you don't think the TV channels your cable service carries are worth the extra $50, use an ANTENNA and complain about the lack of diversity that the 1930s FCC nationalization of the airwaves has brought us. If you don't like the radio's limited content, start your own community station (the FCC's harassment of Free Radio Berkeley notwithstanding). If you don't like the news, go make some of your own.
If all you're looking for is popular material, it's easy to get by with queries going to small numbers of people. Surely somebody else at foo.edu or somebody else in New Zealand has that Metallica album - no sense in going far away for it. But if you want something that's not common, you'll have to look more places to find it; if you want something that *nobody* has, you'll have to look everywhere:-)
Or if you're looking for something more complex, you'll get better results by checking more places. For instance, I once searched Napster for every recording of a given Irish folk song - the versions done by the Chieftans got lots of responses, but some of the other bands who'd recorded it only got one or two, and they were performed entirely differently. Or if you're looking for live Grateful Dead performances, used in the paper's example partly because sharing them is legal, you'll probably find most of the albums on one music-sharing net or another, and the few hundred or a thousand best (or best-taped) shows they did, but you may be looking for that random show you attended in 1971 to compare how they played Dark Star with how they played it a few years later and to see how much of your memories were affected by the mood you were in (ok, or the drugs you'd been taking:-)
In addition to reducing the growth from exponential to sqrt or logarithmic or whatever, the other big advantage of supernodes in a Gnutella-like network is that you can limit supernodes to systems with fast network connections, while regular peers can be on slower network connections, which is a serious bottleneck in a network that needs to send all queries to all peers to be successsful.
Of course, building an indexing system that scales arbitrarily is difficult, and building an indexing system that recognizes local topologies is also critical. A typical problem universities had with Napster was that if N people at the school wanted a given tune, most of them would be likely to fetch it across the school's limited outside bandwidth instead of most people fetching it from other sites on the fast LAN after the first one or two had downloaded it across the limited part. Napster was able to reduce this problem, at least at some schools, because having a centralized indexing service means that they can enforce more locality by making it easiest for people to find nearby peers. A decentralized system *may* be able to accomplish this, but it's a lot harder.
brings back the butt-ugly problem, and looks like it's really difficult to add anything inside,
though I suppose that's mainly a job for firewire and USB.
I've seen that in Dell tower models. Once you figure out what's going on (:-), it's very easy to just slide out the card cage, install cards, and slide it back in, making sure to seat the big honking connector correctly. Beats banging up your fingers trying to work in a small space.
Over a decade and a half ago, the domainists tried to talk everybody into giving up the decentralized name system the UUCP network used and going to a centrally-coordinated hierarchical name system. "Foo" said some of us "Nobody'll give up the ability to go naming their computers whatever they feel like, or at least the 17 people who already named well-known machines 'frodo' or 'mozart' won't want to fight over who gets to keep the name, and besides, ihnp4!allegra!houxa!wcs is a fine naming convention, and Peter Honeyman's 'pathalias' tool is and excellent automated tool for finding paths if you don't already know them from reading email or Usenet messages."
Several states have spam-labeling laws, which requires Subject: line tags like "ADV:" on any spam sent to or by residents of their states, and require spammers to maintain "Don't Send Me More Spam" lists and not send more spam to complainers. Yeah, right, like that's cut down on the spam I've received by 1%.
The only thing that it's accomplished was a brief round of spammers adding tag lines that said "This message isn't spam because I've complied with the labeling laws. The proposed Senate Bill S.1618 was a more popular excuse for that, so it was a useful pattern to feed spam filters in mail messages.
They've also popularized remove-me lists which confirm your address's validity: "We're happy to remove you from our 'Get Rich Starting January 1' mailing list and hope our 'Get Rich Starting January 2' and 'Get Viagra Starting January 3' lists will serve you better!".
"National boundaries are just speedbumps on the information superhighway." US State boundaries are even more so - unlike US telephone numbers, which give a somewhat strong hint about where a recipient's fax or voice phone is, or snail mail addresses, there's usually no way to determine where the recipient lives, so no way to determine whether any anti-spam or anti-birth-control-information or anti-religious-content or anti-political-incorrectness laws apply to the recipient (or their email server), so US senders of spam can argue lack of scienter in any legal cases. But spammers can just move offshore. Or they can pretend to move offshore (either buy service outside the US, or abuse open relays offshore) and be hard to trace, or they can set up corporations in a large number of non-US jurisdictions, and have the corporation be responsible for the spam, or for that matter set up cheap disposable US corporations that are sending the spam that can go bankrupt in case anybody successfully catches and busts them.
They're scum, but we need to find other ways to stop them. (And unfortunately, anti-spam and anti-cracking laws do make it tough to mailbomb the suckers or eliminate them directly....)
Over the years we've had to have laptops sent through the Xray machines in our bags, taken out of our bags and sent through on the conveyor by themselves, back in the bags but vertical so they don't mask other things, taken out and turned on, taken out and explained that this model doesn't use batteries so you can only turn it on if you can plug it in, and to do that you'll need to unplug their X-Ray machine because there aren't any outlets nearby, and they're making you take off your hats, coats, pagers, cellphones, radios, palmpilots, shoes, eyeglasses, belts, piercings, bluejeans with copper rivets in them, artificial hip joints, metal-braced lingerie, car keys, buttons with comments about government harassment, and shiny things in general.
I've had people at San Jose Airport ask me if my bag had a laptop in it - like DUUHHHH - this is San Jose, is there anybody here carrying a bag that *doesn't* have a laptop in it? If they want to ask if I've got an interesting laptop, fine:-) They don't seem to have figured out laser pointers yet... But if they even HEAR about exploding microprocessors, it won't be possible to travel at all.
At least I didn't have a laptop with me the time I was bringing my nephews a KG of Silly Putty in clear baggies with 500g each:-)
I have a lab at work that includes a few interesting boxes, a bunch of routers and switches and network connections to test and demonstrate and teach the stuff we sell, and a bunch of helper boxes whose job is to answer pings, display tcpdumps, run web and ftp servers with exciting files like "1MBjunk.txt" and "100MBjunk.txt", run MRTG and other network collectors, etc. Because AT&T was once a computer company (:-), we have a bunch of boxes that the IT People (Mordac the Preventer and his bean-counting kin) have forgotten about, with cute little death star logos on them and then-fast P66 processors, but usually disk drives that are 1GB or less.
RED HAT REALLY CHOKES BADLY AUTOPARTITIONING SMALL DISKS. It likes to keep things proportional and make sure there's lots of room in/home and/var and/tmp, and picks how much space/usr and I think/usr/local get, and if you try to install GNOME or KDE, even after ditching enough other stuff to make the "total" space requirements fit, it wants to put more stuff in/usr than it has room for and doesn't adapt well. And of course now, it can't even do an install from one CDROM (on the web server, since my P66s didn't have CDs), and insists that all the files it downloads from FTP need to be in the same directory, so even my FTP server's once-huge 4GB drive doesn't have enough space to install 1.3GB of CDROM on the hard drive, whereas before it could serve any netbooters from the CDROM in the CDROM drive (not blazingly fast, but I don't need that.) Sigh.
Pike gave a talk at some Usenix a decade or so ago(I think Nashville?) on Plan 9's window system named 8 1/2, and on his "acme" user interface on it. One remark I remember was that "Ken Thompson and I spent a decade learning about things that window systems shouldn't do, and wrote one that doesn't do them." It's extremely lean and mean - I think he said the source code was about 64KB (could have been 64K lines?) and compiles in ten seconds on the Plan 9 CPU cluster (which was a then-blazingly-fast multiprocessor SGI, probably a couple hundred bogomips.) What impressed me was watching him start the window system from a shell prompt - he typed "81/2", hit return, and in about the time I'd have expected to get a $ prompt back, there was a running windowsystem on the screen - certainly under a second on a NeXt 680x0 box.
Yes, if I had real Unicode I could have written the "1/2" as a single character like Pike does
Some of their data has sufficiently persistent identity to it that it may retain value over time, but lots of it is subject to rapid bit rot. Not only do cookies get dumped, as aka-ed said in a companion posting, but people change ISPs, and ISPs reconfigure dialup systems, so already-dynamic IP addresses don't provide much beyond very-short-term information (e.g. tell you what fraction of Slashdot readers are probably also reading CNN or Freshmeat or Stock quote sites or music download sites or hardware sales sites so that companies know whether to advertise on Slashdot or not.)
The availability of free email accounts has mixed effects on advertising - you may know that disposable1234@free-lamer-mail.com also reads sports sites, but next month that mail system will have bit the dust and the same person will be disposable4567@dotgone.to, while simultaneously using gamez-freak-31337@yahoo.com to read the gamer egroups and no-canned-meat@yahoo.com to comment on political egroups. On the other hand, Hotmail pretty much invented the advertising-funded free email business model, so the Doubleclicks and Linkexchanges and similar businesses certainly have the incentive and ability to correlate between many of the user IDs, so they can sell that information to advertisers.
Slashdot Mirror
The big difference is the alternatives you have for getting access to the banned material. If the blue-nosed thugs ban a movie, and you know they've banned it and want to see it, you *might* be able to buy a copy by mail from Amazon.com that arrives in a brown paper wrapper, you politically incorrect pervert, but you won't be able to go to a theater in Oz and see it, so they've still protected the morals of otherwise-innocent Ozzies.
By contrast, if they list the banned web pages, you can just nip over to anonymizer.com or The Wayback Machine or Google or some other cache or anti-censorship relay site and view it anyway, plus they've publicized a whole bunch of sites you otherwise wouldn't have thought to look at. That's especially important for political censorship (drawing attention to "Aus.Gov't did *this latest* stupid thing" as opposed to burying it), but also important for basic prudish censorship, because there are all sorts of nasty kinky immoral things that average upstanding moral Australians simply wouldn't have thought of if the Government hadn't told them "Here's the stuff we don't want you looking at! Especially *this stuff*".
More seriously, though, somebody else made the comment that the censorship is actually very minimal, and it's a facade that's designed to tell a few noisy right-wingers "yes, we've done what you want, so you can be happy and stop bugging us", and if you actually made the list public it would be obvious want a small fraction of the stuff *some* people might want banned is actually on there - so if the anti-censorship people don't complain loudly about it, you'll actually get a lot less censorship because we can leave it quietly buried in some bureaucratic back room keeping a couple of blue-noses off the streets hunting for pr0n on the internet instead of bothering politicians. It's not the ideal social position for a free and open society, but pragmatically it's possibly better for everybody, and maybe we can task some of the censors to go fight that Other Deadly Sin, Greed, by adding spammers's sites to the blacklists.
Wait - are they saying you can resume downloading now? Or are they saying you can download their resumes if you're interested in hiring them? :-)
Some pages say one, some pages say the other.
Going public was fun if you could get investors to go for it (and if you could keep the stock price high until your six-months-can't-sell window was over). Selling out to MS (popularized by Hotmail's $400M or so deal) stopped being fun when the DoJ was threatening to rip MS apart into three companies, none of which were sure they'd want to buy you, so lots of small companies went bust. Selling out to Cisco still looked like fun, because Cisco shares were like cash, only better. Sigh.... the still-mostly-good-old-days.
"Terabit", when describing routers, currently refers to the total capacity of the box, not to actually having terabit connections :-) OC192 is 10 Gbits, and is starting to become a mature technology. OC768 is 40 Gbits; I'm not sure if anybody's routing at that speed yet (probably), but it's not close enough to mature to be practical for anything more than the marketing value of *your* network having the biggest fastest pipe in existence, even if it's only going from San Francisco to San Jose.
Tech: Sure, you start by uninstalling GCC 2.9.7 and reinstalling GCC 2.7, and be sure to get the right RPMs to support your sound card.
Any chance they'll be able to do a smaller distribution and a smart enough installer to deal with underpowered hardware like many AOLers use? (e.g. 2GB disks, 32MB RAM, the machine you gave your kids when you upgraded, or the machine your Mom uses to IM her sister and send online greeting cards?) At least picking only one of KDE and Gnome, and getting a basic office package that works with it, and maybe doing a version that can mainly RUN from the CDROM, with a FAT file system for storage? That way, you replace your blue-triangle "AOL" icon with a blue-triangle "LILO" icon wearing a red hat....
Some of your decisions will be pretty obvious - basic flat-screens have come down in price enough that you're far better off using them than CRTs, because you're trading off the cost of the equipment vs. the cost of a bigger bus and more electricity. But if you're trying to show things to a larger group of people, you'll have to find something that fits your budget but still works, though that may be "display the same slides on N screens at once." And of course you'll want a couple of CD-R-burners for giving away software, as well as stacks of blank CDs and floppies.
Will you be showing off how to build hardware? Letting people know what the basic guts of a PC are like is valuable, so you'll probably want some basic PCs, card tables, and screwdrivers for people to play with, and spare parts to make up for the ones you'll lose or break. But if you're also doing telemetry, you'll need whatever flavors of hardware that uses, whether it's simple RS-232 stuff like X-10 or fancier data bus things, and you'll need a few sample things to telemeter.
When you get to the airport, they want to see your Larry-Ellison-approved National ID Card, or at least several forms of ID, take off your hat, jacket, shoes, belt, cellphone, beeper, PDA, and steel hip joint, and then decide whether to let you ride on the airplane you bought a ticket for. But when Larry Ellison gets to the airport, he gets on his own plane. Does he have to go through the security gate where they check his National ID card and say "Sorry, Mr. Ellison, you've gotten 15 tickets for violating quiet hours at San Jose Airport by landing after midnight, so we're not going to take the Big Orange Boot off your airplane wheel unless you show us a flight plan that gets you in by 11pm?" Not bloody likely.
One reason is because the Palm software does an excellent job of syncing with the MSOutlook Calendar, and if you or your organization uses Outlook as your calendar tool, you get the convenience of a pocketsized calendar while still syncing up with the scheduling requests you get by email. Without good sync software, it would probably not have caught on as fast.
And the software on PalmOS, while limited in functionality, programmer-hostile, and oriented towards a small lamer screen (unlike the Psion I used before my Palm), is designed to be extremely friendly for many common tasks. The most annoying limit is document size - early limited-memory hardware meant they designed lots of applications to limit themselves to 4KB notes, which is even more annoying than the 32KB-64KB that most small-model Intel programs used to have.
My wife uses a small palmtop made of dead trees, which has a palm-style cover and pen-holder....
Sometimes the formats are the same because people use automated tools, like indent. Somebody else mentioned EMACS automatically formatting code.
And if you develop your code in traditional newbie style - write some code that doesn't work, hack on it for a while until it actually does work, and send it in - then you probably should run it through indent or your favorite language's equivalent reformatter anyway.
Dumb cheater like that deserves to have you take his money and give him an Obfuscated C Code program that
prints out "you fool, I AM the TA".
Sure, CS100 classes and maybe the second or third programming classes a student takes don't need collaboration, though many students will need help (i.e. teaching, even if it's not done by a professor) in understanding what's going on with their programs, why they're not working, learning to use the cardpunch (:-) or editor or whatever local facilities you have. But by the third or fourth programming class you're taking, you should be doing things that are large enough to require group work, whether it's writing a small operating system or writing a simulation of some complex activity, because most real projects are too big for one person to do.
Ok, in some places it's also cable modems, but as much as I like it, that's also a luxury. Folks, we're not talking about something that's an essential utility like electricity or water which requires a large expensive infrastructure that's (according to all the economists the monopolies hired to tell us why we need them) not efficient to operate competitively. This is TELEVISION. If you don't like it, go rent a video tape, or get Gamez, or go read a book, or listen to the radio, or if you don't think the TV channels your cable service carries are worth the extra $50, use an ANTENNA and complain about the lack of diversity that the 1930s FCC nationalization of the airwaves has brought us. If you don't like the radio's limited content, start your own community station (the FCC's harassment of Free Radio Berkeley notwithstanding). If you don't like the news, go make some of your own.
Or if you're looking for something more complex, you'll get better results by checking more places. For instance, I once searched Napster for every recording of a given Irish folk song - the versions done by the Chieftans got lots of responses, but some of the other bands who'd recorded it only got one or two, and they were performed entirely differently. Or if you're looking for live Grateful Dead performances, used in the paper's example partly because sharing them is legal, you'll probably find most of the albums on one music-sharing net or another, and the few hundred or a thousand best (or best-taped) shows they did, but you may be looking for that random show you attended in 1971 to compare how they played Dark Star with how they played it a few years later and to see how much of your memories were affected by the mood you were in (ok, or the drugs you'd been taking :-)
Of course, building an indexing system that scales arbitrarily is difficult, and building an indexing system that recognizes local topologies is also critical. A typical problem universities had with Napster was that if N people at the school wanted a given tune, most of them would be likely to fetch it across the school's limited outside bandwidth instead of most people fetching it from other sites on the fast LAN after the first one or two had downloaded it across the limited part. Napster was able to reduce this problem, at least at some schools, because having a centralized indexing service means that they can enforce more locality by making it easiest for people to find nearby peers. A decentralized system *may* be able to accomplish this, but it's a lot harder.
brings back the butt-ugly problem, and looks like it's really difficult to add anything inside,
though I suppose that's mainly a job for firewire and USB.
I've seen that in Dell tower models. Once you figure out what's going on (:-), it's very easy to just slide out the card cage, install cards, and slide it back in, making sure to seat the big honking connector correctly. Beats banging up your fingers trying to work in a small space.
Much more eloquent things said Rob Pike and Peter Weinberger.
Also, SDSI by Ron Rivest and Butler Lampson touches on the same territory.
The only thing that it's accomplished was a brief round of spammers adding tag lines that said "This message isn't spam because I've complied with the labeling laws. The proposed Senate Bill S.1618 was a more popular excuse for that, so it was a useful pattern to feed spam filters in mail messages.
They've also popularized remove-me lists which confirm your address's validity: "We're happy to remove you from our 'Get Rich Starting January 1' mailing list and hope our 'Get Rich Starting January 2' and 'Get Viagra Starting January 3' lists will serve you better!".
"National boundaries are just speedbumps on the information superhighway." US State boundaries are even more so - unlike US telephone numbers, which give a somewhat strong hint about where a recipient's fax or voice phone is, or snail mail addresses, there's usually no way to determine where the recipient lives, so no way to determine whether any anti-spam or anti-birth-control-information or anti-religious-content or anti-political-incorrectness laws apply to the recipient (or their email server), so US senders of spam can argue lack of scienter in any legal cases. But spammers can just move offshore. Or they can pretend to move offshore (either buy service outside the US, or abuse open relays offshore) and be hard to trace, or they can set up corporations in a large number of non-US jurisdictions, and have the corporation be responsible for the spam, or for that matter set up cheap disposable US corporations that are sending the spam that can go bankrupt in case anybody successfully catches and busts them.
They're scum, but we need to find other ways to stop them. (And unfortunately, anti-spam and anti-cracking laws do make it tough to mailbomb the suckers or eliminate them directly....)
Over the years we've had to have laptops sent through the Xray machines in our bags, taken out of our bags and sent through on the conveyor by themselves, back in the bags but vertical so they don't mask other things, taken out and turned on, taken out and explained that this model doesn't use batteries so you can only turn it on if you can plug it in, and to do that you'll need to unplug their X-Ray machine because there aren't any outlets nearby, and they're making you take off your hats, coats, pagers, cellphones, radios, palmpilots, shoes, eyeglasses, belts, piercings, bluejeans with copper rivets in them, artificial hip joints, metal-braced lingerie, car keys, buttons with comments about government harassment, and shiny things in general.
I've had people at San Jose Airport ask me if my bag had a laptop in it - like DUUHHHH - this is San Jose, is there anybody here carrying a bag that *doesn't* have a laptop in it? If they want to ask if I've got an interesting laptop, fine :-) They don't seem to have figured out laser pointers yet... But if they even HEAR about exploding microprocessors, it won't be possible to travel at all.
At least I didn't have a laptop with me the time I was bringing my nephews a KG of Silly Putty in clear baggies with 500g each
RED HAT REALLY CHOKES BADLY AUTOPARTITIONING SMALL DISKS. It likes to keep things proportional and make sure there's lots of room in
Yes, if I had real Unicode I could have written the "1/2" as a single character like Pike does
The availability of free email accounts has mixed effects on advertising - you may know that disposable1234@free-lamer-mail.com also reads sports sites, but next month that mail system will have bit the dust and the same person will be disposable4567@dotgone.to, while simultaneously using gamez-freak-31337@yahoo.com to read the gamer egroups and no-canned-meat@yahoo.com to comment on political egroups. On the other hand, Hotmail pretty much invented the advertising-funded free email business model, so the Doubleclicks and Linkexchanges and similar businesses certainly have the incentive and ability to correlate between many of the user IDs, so they can sell that information to advertisers.