Absolutely, I think that in 10 or 20 years we'll see the backlash against storing all our data in a space that can't be controlled by ourselves.
I'm a kid of the Personal Computer and I can't imagine to rely on shared assets like the cloud for all the stuff. While it is a theoretically scalable, the issue is the money you need to pay for it. A computer and its storage is a sunk cost, cloud services are a monthly expense.
I'm not a physicist, but a computer scientist. So I'd really stay away from the programming language specific teaching.
I'd recommend to at least make sure a physics student understands the limitations of computational math (rounding errors, error propagation, etc.) and the algorithmic computational theory (O-notation, etc.).
Of practical value should also be to understand parallel computing and how to split large problems into smaller one's that can be computed separately (in parallel).
Another important aspect for any science student should be data bases and SQL, may be even some OLAP design. And also here a hint of performance implications.
Sorry, but I disagree:
2. ITEM_01 triggers portal between ROOM_B and ROOM_C. It can now be definitively said that ITEM_01 was originally in ROOM_A, was moved to ROOM_B, and now resides in ROOM B or ROOM_C.
If only the RFID antennas would do you the favor of behaving like this. I have a good deal of experience with passive RFID.
First of all they are directional, and have all sorts of shapes. There is two kinds of signals that you can get from the antennas, the raw data, which is rather crude and may contain phantom reads (lots of phantom reads).
Second, they tell you they see the tag, they don't, then they see it again, so lots of oscillating data. Or you get the smoothed data feed, which basically determines an item to be in the field of the antenna if it is detected long enough to be for real. But then you loose the accuracy on the time line that you need for your directional detection.
I know of one company that approaches the issue of location in a similar way. It really has lots of antennas in all kinds of places and does read the raw feeds with all the jitters and misreads and reads due to field reflection, etc. Then it takes a global approach of to approximate the location of an item by triangulation (seen in the field of N antennae for a length of time) and movements by changes in these. But for that you really need exact architectural modeling of the antennae and rooms that are in their field.
Sorry the naive approach does not work very well, except in marketing brochures.
To get there, simply commit a serious crime, like robbery. Go directly to the police and confess. Bingo, you are in prison where every possession of your is tracked carefully.
Hi there,
having implemented RFID goods tracking mostly at warehouse gates, I can tell you that it is not easy.
The approach of a few sensors and triangulation does not work well, because a professional (expensive) antenna, does hardly read across the room.
The approach to track on critical points, like doorways is complex, because you can't determine if something traveled in or out of the room. Unless you use its position as in the room, and determine it must have gone out. But what if the kid only went near the door or turned around in the doorway. At least you can say it has been last seen upstairs, so it is unlikely downstairs.
I'd opt for a simpler system to educate/train the children that these are items not to leave the room. Simply create a buzzer that sounds if someone passes the item through the door. That way you teach your children the right behavior, not to remove an item from the room/place.
By the way, even if you build such system, by the time you have it really working, your kids will be through the phase that they move your stuff around.
Very correct, ISPs have no business filtering SPAM on my behalf. What is your SPAM might be my treasure and an ISP can't decide that.
The proposed technique relies on large numbers of users under the control of a single server. That means it can only be implemented at an ISP. Definitely failure!
The root cause for SPAM is that one can falsify the sender information. What is needed is a form of identifying the sender, as a basis for filtering. My proposal PGP signed E-Mail.
If the Senate debates this, call your senator and make yoru point clear. This is how democracy works. While you are at it, call or e-mail your favorite candidate as well and also include the one of the other party that you think might have a chance. Ask them to take a clear position on this issue (of Net Neutrality).
Also, talk to your local elected people in town. Ultimately, the town has to contract with any service running wires through town and they can attach the conditions to it they want. Right now towns focus on money for local TV access and community (administrative) networks. Bring up the topic and make them aware how important it is to get real Internet access and not filtered, blocked, throttled, shaped, capped, tampered with service. Which by the way includes spam filtering, port blocking, asymetric line characteristics for non copper wires, forced e-mail relaying, and more. Raise awareness at the local level, what the Internet really could be if we the people demand it. And also make it clear what the competition in that market really is. A monopoly or a duopoly is not real market competition. The market is what I as an individual consumer can access, not the aggregate of all consumers in the state, country, or world. In my town, I have more choices in Nail Salons, Dog groomers, Liquor stores, Men's Barbers or Car Washes than I have in Broadband Internet access.
Absolutely correct,
your town does give access permission to the network and most of the time requires for example that channels of the TV capacity are reserved for local access and often enough even local TV programming efforts being paid for.
On that token, the contracts need to stipulate that IP traffic needs to be neutral and that no interference other for random volume shaping is permittet. By the way extend that to e-mail store and forward services and port blocking as well. An ISP will never be able to decide for you what is SPAM and what not. Therefore it shoudl stay out of that business unless specifically directed to do so by its user.
Hey there, not withstanding the legality of interfering with data connections that are non of their business.
I wonder if the ability to even tell the two end points independendly that their connectiosn are terminated by the other side, is actually a security flaw of the protocol? Isn't that what is called a man in the middle attack? How could that happen at all?
Question, would a simple SSL tunnel stop that effectively?
Cool, looks like a step into the right direction for low volume info.
But I doubt it is the right base to run a database against or even to preserve my logs beyond death of the isntance. I'd liek to see comparitive performance before I'd commit my app to this.
In my mind it is a band-aid, albeit a good one for now. The Xen instances should be configurable so that I can have access to the data for some time after the instance dies. Lets even say, I'll get some automatic back up of portions of the file system (onto S3 if you like) and I get a guarantee that if the instance dies this backup is still performed a last time. Then I can back up my database logs and content and recover from this with a new instance as needed.
Not sure if I miss the point. Which Joe Blow has knowledge of hwo to build an efficient multi server app with an unusual largely unknown storage back end S2?
My point is that the vast majority of entrepreneurs are seeking a standard like environment. Why are mySQL and postgres so popular? Why are WAMP/LAMP, Ruby on Rails and cakePHP the basis for so many apps? Because 99,9% of Joe Blows get it and can handle its complexities. But a database is not feasable on an Amazon cloud. Because when the slice dies, you do have lost its content (database/file system) and you don't even have the ability to look at the logs, what might have caused the death of it. so anything dynamic, like Wiki, Blog, E-Commerce, needs special very calculated measures to backup this kind of information. I argue this kind of knowledge is not so wide spread and might lure folks into trying something and then loosing everything in the event of their system going down.
Also, the lack of a static IP is an issue, for reasons from the need of dynDNS or similar to search engines frwoning on an IP address changing from time to time.
I agree that cloud computing has promisses in terms of cheap, on demand computing that can scale hardware resources quickly without sinking money into advanced purchases. However, this requires a lot of architectural planning on the part of the software design. In my experience, when you need scaling of an app, the hardware costs are the least of the burden. The rearchitecture of the application software is the bottleneck.
Before we all dream up our cloud nine apps, consider the current shortfalls.
* No persistent storage, other than S3. That means all permanent storage has to be re-acrchitected to an S3 key/value interface. Any file/database on the virtual hard drive (160 GB) is gone, when the instance crashes, or you need an external DB server (latency) and lots of cache to make that hopefully perform.
* IP address is static as long as the instance runs. When it crashes, the replacement instance gets a new IP. That means you need to run dynamic DNS front ends and do your load balancing somehere else.
These two issues make it not as simple as starting a server and installing your Wordpress, bbPHP, etc.
While more powerful instance types are nice, what really is needed to make this a simple to use offering is to have instance types with, identified regular file system storage (somewhere on the SAN?) and with assigned static IP addresses.
For really powerful distributed content delivery, I'd also like to determine where on the globe an instance will be started, so the transport to the client can be optimized.
Just my analysis of where we are.
While not necessarily applicable to the bunch of Linux kernel hackers, there is a great need to overcome the barriers of todays documentation.
Your typical end-user complains:
I can't find what I'm looking for in the documentation!
Why is documentation always written in a jargon, almost a foreign language?
And those complains are real. Software applications have inherently their specific jargon and that bleeds through to the documentation. You got to give everything a name, the fields, messages, dialogs, windows, logical objects, etc. And you want to use them consistently, hence the foreign language.
However, when the unsuspecting user comes along she doesn't now this language. So an attempt to query the full text index of this documentation does not lead to much results, because the query is formulated not in this 'foreign' language. Hence the search end sin failure and frustration.
Reading the documentation is hard, because you have to learn th foreign language. Casual browsing of single help topics does not lead to much insight. The tell tail answer of our fellow unsuspecting user "I have to try those five steps before I can say it is what I'm looking for." Try three times before you find something that might be the answer to you question and you see frustration mounting."
Here is my answer, a Plan-B for OpenOffice.org demonstrating a more visual approach based on short videos (screencast) and a smarter search engine.
Sorry had to shamelessly self-promote. I had to throw that out there to see if the wolfs of Slashdot have some good critic for it. Come on agree or disagree, but don't ignore.
If eBay does reduce it's pointless ads, that do not represent even a remote product available, that can only be a good thing for Google and AdWords as a program.
If eBay also would stop spamming the search results with auctions that are outdated or search results that are, again, not resulting in any available product at the time (Http Expire header any one?) it would be a good thing for Google as well as for the searching public.
Third, if all the front ends for Google would not cloak the Google search results and advertisements it would be an improvement as well.
So let eBay go its merry way. The public ill be thankful.
As soon as you do that three trouble some things happen: - The page starts complaining about a DVD drive not supported by Vista - It complains about not enough dual channel memory for Vista - It fills your back menu with all Dell-Shop links so you can never go back.
And they try to convince me to buy one of those machines?
Sorry, your proposal is complicated and impossible to implement: * first it is not backward compatible and nothing that isn't has so far reached any acceptance, so I guess we will have to build this in. We need something that does not require everybody to implement it before it is effective. * In your proposal ISP's (and their filters) decide what is spam and what not. This is never acceptable, because your spam (trash) might be my ham (treasure). Just think of all the people that decide the mail form that list they signed up for is now spam to them. At what point does an ISP decide to stop that list? What is the harm to the users who want to receive it still?
But I think you are not that far off. Digital signing is the solution. Why does not everybody (every single end user) implement digital sining with PGP in his or her e-mail client. Then all we need is a spamassassin that can classify the e-mail by our trust level for each signature.
With all (or just a significant portion of) e-mails signed I can reliably filter on the sender. I now know who the sender of a signed e-mail is. I (the recipient, that is the only one who should decide what gets filtered as spam) can then filter: * everyone that bothers me and does not stop sending me into trash * everyone I know and have cleared by signing his or her signature (locally or publicly) into my Inbox * everyone that has a signature that is signed by someone that I trust into where ever I want to deal with * every e-mail that is not signed into the queue that reflects its priority to me
Optionally, list servers can sign the messages going through their means, just to make it easier or they can sign publicly all signatures that have legally registered with the list (giving them a trust level I can determine).
This solutions uses existing technology and is backward compatible. It even can migrate with everybody that wants. It delivers already benefits if I can safely filter my trusted correspondents (friends, family, teachers, clients, customers, etc.). It also does not assign control and economic power to any agency that controls the master keys. Everyone can create signatures and have them authenticated by everyone else. It is up to the recipient to decide with trust authorities she trusts. Off course commercial entities can provide keys and trust services just as with SSL if there is demand for this.
I'm still hoping for a spam assassin module to emerge that checks for signatures and the assigned trust level in my keyring. The only problem I see is that spam assassin needs the pass phrase to access my keyring, but I think that could be solved somehow as well (Shadow keyring with only external keys?)
Another problem could be to teach non geeks to handle keys correctly. Because understanding what key signing means and how trust should be handled and when to revoke a key needs is not trivial. But this could be then a commercial service. And I believe it is in many cases a UI design question (wizards, etc.)
If anybody knows of such an implementation, please let me know.
I believe that the local permitting process is the best level in government to demand a Net Neutrality clause. What do you think?
Could a Net Neutrality debate on the local level make sense? More sense then federally in Congress? I think it is really there where communities ca assert their rights and Interests.
You say your programming seemed to be a bit theoretical. That might have been the best that happened to you.
I always have fun in interviewing situations, when someone asks how many or which programming languages I have experience in. My standard answer is "Any, just give me two weeks time". The stare in disbelieve I counter with the explanation, that my computer science study taught me (mandatory) how to design a programming language to a given problem space, its syntax and semantics and how to write the parser/compiler to translate it into machine language. If I can't learn a new programming language in two weeks, I'm not worth my degree. After that point I always got an offer.
Programming languages will always change, so do APIs, OS, etc. But understanding computational theory, language in the abstract and how people tick that are not programmers (also called clients, users or managers) will always be the stepping stones to your success.
I'd disagree, isn't a contract something where two or more parties freely agree upon. As they say a meeting of the mind.
"even though they were aware of the terms and willingly agreed to them (by publishing the music) before."
In copyright there is no way to agree upon. The "Contract between society and an artist" (or anybody else publishing something) is a metaphor not a factual description.
What's an artist going to do if she does not like the copyright provisions? Can she renegotiate them? Can she set the default terms of expiration? At best she can set them shorter.
And not publishing is no real alternative. It is not only the livelihood of an artist to publish his or her work, it is also a large part of who he or she is. So writing a book and only showing it to friends and family or only those that sign a contract to not copy the work is not a very good solution, because they are not practically enforceable.
Beware, I'm not saying that copyright should be extended and extended, practically indefinitely. I'm just saying that arguing it is a contract an artist willingly entered into is as wrong as arguing you became willingly (by birth) a citizen of your state or country.
Re:On the right track - id should be portable.
on
The Case for OpenID
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for a good analysis of what IDs are and some of the features they carry. However, I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. OpenID really is the framework, the set of protocols required to enable just this. For example PayPal (EBay) could offer for pay or free to use your already established identity and offer an OpenID server that you can use. The same for Amazon or Google (new payment service) or Mastercard, American Express, etc. So it is up to them to set up such services. I'd think it id best for you to petition to the organizations that you would like to manage such services for you. For commercial organizations it might be a good idea to make a business case for them.
OpenID is exactly the kind of open framework that allows all to work with w/o centralizing the data like MS Passport did. In contrast , MS Passport requires everything to be ID'd through them and they control the intellectual property behind the system.
And yes, it could be a government agency that provides the ID services, in case things like birthday need to be verified. Or it could be simply a non profit organization that does it for the public benefits. But it could also be a merchant or a bank as well. They can use already established trust measures and convey them to the requester of ID. And this framework does not restrict you to use different ID's from different sources for different purposes.
This sounds to me like an article based on poor understanding of the subject.
Patents are something different than copyright infringement. Patents do cover an invention, that has to be documented publicly in order to receive patent protection. This means that a patent is not covering a particular source code implementation, like a copyright does. It rather covers a way of doing things. For software only so called business process patents are relevant. It also means who ever implements something in violation of a patent had the chance to examine the patent first.
To clarify, you can't patent a mathematical formula or a specific piece of source code. However you can patent a chemical compound and the way to produce it or you can patent a protocol of computer communication. Amazon even patented the "one click purchase" as a given business process.
So IBM's grant of licenses to 500 of its patents did not bring any new discovery if Linux violated any patent that IBM held or not. The same way no one needs to look at the MS source code in order to determine if one of MS's patents is violated. However, if MS has patented the way their NTFS file system can be accessed remotely (the protocol), or any particular aspect of it, and if an open source project uses these series of messages then it could violate the patent.
Just my understanding of patents and I'm not a lawyer.
Many here ask why this is more than robots.txt. For one it offers to add URLs that are driven by databases and parameters. Thing that the SEs do not index too well. It also adds last updated stamps and priority for re-visit.
Why is that important? So if I have one page where I always post the latest news, I can have the spider revisit every hour, so it get indexed ASAP. However the spider can go easy on the rest of my site otherwise. I also can train that spider for a burst, if I have for example an ongoing live event and post results ASAP.
Google was on to this already for a while. however Yahoo's facilities where not so comprehensive and MSN was missing altogether. Now we get a chance to create one single format and have all (big) SEs read it and may be the secondary spiders will catch on too.
I find it only said that they did not incorporate the ROR Resources of Resources RDF framework. I'm also missing a discovery mechanism, such as an extension to the robots.txt or a meta tag (or link rel="...") in the home page of a site.
Another use of this would be to download a full site, as you now know where is starts and what belongs to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely,
I think that in 10 or 20 years we'll see the backlash against storing all our data in a space that can't be controlled by ourselves.
I'm a kid of the Personal Computer and I can't imagine to rely on shared assets like the cloud for all the stuff. While it is a theoretically scalable, the issue is the money you need to pay for it. A computer and its storage is a sunk cost, cloud services are a monthly expense.
I'm not a physicist, but a computer scientist. So I'd really stay away from the programming language specific teaching.
I'd recommend to at least make sure a physics student understands the limitations of computational math (rounding errors, error propagation, etc.) and the algorithmic computational theory (O-notation, etc.).
Of practical value should also be to understand parallel computing and how to split large problems into smaller one's that can be computed separately (in parallel).
Another important aspect for any science student should be data bases and SQL, may be even some OLAP design. And also here a hint of performance implications.
Sorry, but I disagree:
2. ITEM_01 triggers portal between ROOM_B and ROOM_C. It can now be definitively said that ITEM_01 was originally in ROOM_A, was moved to ROOM_B, and now resides in ROOM B or ROOM_C.
If only the RFID antennas would do you the favor of behaving like this. I have a good deal of experience with passive RFID.
First of all they are directional, and have all sorts of shapes. There is two kinds of signals that you can get from the antennas, the raw data, which is rather crude and may contain phantom reads (lots of phantom reads).
Second, they tell you they see the tag, they don't, then they see it again, so lots of oscillating data. Or you get the smoothed data feed, which basically determines an item to be in the field of the antenna if it is detected long enough to be for real. But then you loose the accuracy on the time line that you need for your directional detection.
I know of one company that approaches the issue of location in a similar way. It really has lots of antennas in all kinds of places and does read the raw feeds with all the jitters and misreads and reads due to field reflection, etc. Then it takes a global approach of to approximate the location of an item by triangulation (seen in the field of N antennae for a length of time) and movements by changes in these. But for that you really need exact architectural modeling of the antennae and rooms that are in their field.
Sorry the naive approach does not work very well, except in marketing brochures.
That is an assumption you can't make. Because you have little glue in which direction it passed or if it simply got near and turned around.
The best you can say if you saw it at this door last, it must be in either spaces in or out that door.
To get there, simply commit a serious crime, like robbery. Go directly to the police and confess. Bingo, you are in prison where every possession of your is tracked carefully.
Hi there,
having implemented RFID goods tracking mostly at warehouse gates, I can tell you that it is not easy.
The approach of a few sensors and triangulation does not work well, because a professional (expensive) antenna, does hardly read across the room.
The approach to track on critical points, like doorways is complex, because you can't determine if something traveled in or out of the room. Unless you use its position as in the room, and determine it must have gone out. But what if the kid only went near the door or turned around in the doorway. At least you can say it has been last seen upstairs, so it is unlikely downstairs.
I'd opt for a simpler system to educate/train the children that these are items not to leave the room. Simply create a buzzer that sounds if someone passes the item through the door. That way you teach your children the right behavior, not to remove an item from the room/place.
By the way, even if you build such system, by the time you have it really working, your kids will be through the phase that they move your stuff around.
Just my two cents.
Very correct, ISPs have no business filtering SPAM on my behalf. What is your SPAM might be my treasure and an ISP can't decide that.
The proposed technique relies on large numbers of users under the control of a single server. That means it can only be implemented at an ISP. Definitely failure!
The root cause for SPAM is that one can falsify the sender information. What is needed is a form of identifying the sender, as a basis for filtering. My proposal PGP signed E-Mail.
If the Senate debates this, call your senator and make yoru point clear. This is how democracy works. While you are at it, call or e-mail your favorite candidate as well and also include the one of the other party that you think might have a chance. Ask them to take a clear position on this issue (of Net Neutrality).
Also, talk to your local elected people in town. Ultimately, the town has to contract with any service running wires through town and they can attach the conditions to it they want. Right now towns focus on money for local TV access and community (administrative) networks. Bring up the topic and make them aware how important it is to get real Internet access and not filtered, blocked, throttled, shaped, capped, tampered with service. Which by the way includes spam filtering, port blocking, asymetric line characteristics for non copper wires, forced e-mail relaying, and more. Raise awareness at the local level, what the Internet really could be if we the people demand it. And also make it clear what the competition in that market really is. A monopoly or a duopoly is not real market competition. The market is what I as an individual consumer can access, not the aggregate of all consumers in the state, country, or world. In my town, I have more choices in Nail Salons, Dog groomers, Liquor stores, Men's Barbers or Car Washes than I have in Broadband Internet access.
Absolutely correct, your town does give access permission to the network and most of the time requires for example that channels of the TV capacity are reserved for local access and often enough even local TV programming efforts being paid for. On that token, the contracts need to stipulate that IP traffic needs to be neutral and that no interference other for random volume shaping is permittet. By the way extend that to e-mail store and forward services and port blocking as well. An ISP will never be able to decide for you what is SPAM and what not. Therefore it shoudl stay out of that business unless specifically directed to do so by its user.
Hey there,
not withstanding the legality of interfering with data connections that are non of their business.
I wonder if the ability to even tell the two end points independendly that their connectiosn are terminated by the other side, is actually a security flaw of the protocol? Isn't that what is called a man in the middle attack? How could that happen at all?
Question, would a simple SSL tunnel stop that effectively?
K
Cool, looks like a step into the right direction for low volume info. But I doubt it is the right base to run a database against or even to preserve my logs beyond death of the isntance. I'd liek to see comparitive performance before I'd commit my app to this. In my mind it is a band-aid, albeit a good one for now. The Xen instances should be configurable so that I can have access to the data for some time after the instance dies. Lets even say, I'll get some automatic back up of portions of the file system (onto S3 if you like) and I get a guarantee that if the instance dies this backup is still performed a last time. Then I can back up my database logs and content and recover from this with a new instance as needed.
Not sure if I miss the point. Which Joe Blow has knowledge of hwo to build an efficient multi server app with an unusual largely unknown storage back end S2? My point is that the vast majority of entrepreneurs are seeking a standard like environment. Why are mySQL and postgres so popular? Why are WAMP/LAMP, Ruby on Rails and cakePHP the basis for so many apps? Because 99,9% of Joe Blows get it and can handle its complexities. But a database is not feasable on an Amazon cloud. Because when the slice dies, you do have lost its content (database/file system) and you don't even have the ability to look at the logs, what might have caused the death of it. so anything dynamic, like Wiki, Blog, E-Commerce, needs special very calculated measures to backup this kind of information. I argue this kind of knowledge is not so wide spread and might lure folks into trying something and then loosing everything in the event of their system going down. Also, the lack of a static IP is an issue, for reasons from the need of dynDNS or similar to search engines frwoning on an IP address changing from time to time. I agree that cloud computing has promisses in terms of cheap, on demand computing that can scale hardware resources quickly without sinking money into advanced purchases. However, this requires a lot of architectural planning on the part of the software design. In my experience, when you need scaling of an app, the hardware costs are the least of the burden. The rearchitecture of the application software is the bottleneck.
Before we all dream up our cloud nine apps, consider the current shortfalls. * No persistent storage, other than S3. That means all permanent storage has to be re-acrchitected to an S3 key/value interface. Any file/database on the virtual hard drive (160 GB) is gone, when the instance crashes, or you need an external DB server (latency) and lots of cache to make that hopefully perform. * IP address is static as long as the instance runs. When it crashes, the replacement instance gets a new IP. That means you need to run dynamic DNS front ends and do your load balancing somehere else. These two issues make it not as simple as starting a server and installing your Wordpress, bbPHP, etc. While more powerful instance types are nice, what really is needed to make this a simple to use offering is to have instance types with, identified regular file system storage (somewhere on the SAN?) and with assigned static IP addresses. For really powerful distributed content delivery, I'd also like to determine where on the globe an instance will be started, so the transport to the client can be optimized. Just my analysis of where we are.
While not necessarily applicable to the bunch of Linux kernel hackers, there is a great need to overcome the barriers of todays documentation.
Your typical end-user complains:
And those complains are real. Software applications have inherently their specific jargon and that bleeds through to the documentation. You got to give everything a name, the fields, messages, dialogs, windows, logical objects, etc. And you want to use them consistently, hence the foreign language.
However, when the unsuspecting user comes along she doesn't now this language. So an attempt to query the full text index of this documentation does not lead to much results, because the query is formulated not in this 'foreign' language. Hence the search end sin failure and frustration.
Reading the documentation is hard, because you have to learn th foreign language. Casual browsing of single help topics does not lead to much insight. The tell tail answer of our fellow unsuspecting user "I have to try those five steps before I can say it is what I'm looking for." Try three times before you find something that might be the answer to you question and you see frustration mounting."
Here is my answer, a Plan-B for OpenOffice.org demonstrating a more visual approach based on short videos (screencast) and a smarter search engine.
Sorry had to shamelessly self-promote. I had to throw that out there to see if the wolfs of Slashdot have some good critic for it. Come on agree or disagree, but don't ignore.
Hopefully this are not the same people at Yahoo that tell he world to send 404 instead of 410 return code for deleted pages. K<0>
If eBay does reduce it's pointless ads, that do not represent even a remote product available, that can only be a good thing for Google and AdWords as a program. If eBay also would stop spamming the search results with auctions that are outdated or search results that are, again, not resulting in any available product at the time (Http Expire header any one?) it would be a good thing for Google as well as for the searching public. Third, if all the front ends for Google would not cloak the Google search results and advertisements it would be an improvement as well. So let eBay go its merry way. The public ill be thankful.
My domain DNS hosted through GoDaddy, showed the following symptoms.
park27.secureserver.net and park28.secureserver.net where reachable per ping, but did not respond to DNS requests.
Interestingly the two servers have both the same 4 IP addresses. Looks like a round robin load balancing between four servers (hopefully).
It appears back on line at this time.
K
Has anybody followed the configuration links?
As soon as you do that three trouble some things happen:
- The page starts complaining about a DVD drive not supported by Vista
- It complains about not enough dual channel memory for Vista
- It fills your back menu with all Dell-Shop links so you can never go back.
And they try to convince me to buy one of those machines?
Sorry, your proposal is complicated and impossible to implement:
* first it is not backward compatible and nothing that isn't has so far reached any acceptance, so I guess we will have to build this in. We need something that does not require everybody to implement it before it is effective.
* In your proposal ISP's (and their filters) decide what is spam and what not. This is never acceptable, because your spam (trash) might be my ham (treasure). Just think of all the people that decide the mail form that list they signed up for is now spam to them. At what point does an ISP decide to stop that list? What is the harm to the users who want to receive it still?
But I think you are not that far off. Digital signing is the solution. Why does not everybody (every single end user) implement digital sining with PGP in his or her e-mail client. Then all we need is a spamassassin that can classify the e-mail by our trust level for each signature.
With all (or just a significant portion of) e-mails signed I can reliably filter on the sender. I now know who the sender of a signed e-mail is. I (the recipient, that is the only one who should decide what gets filtered as spam) can then filter:
* everyone that bothers me and does not stop sending me into trash
* everyone I know and have cleared by signing his or her signature (locally or publicly) into my Inbox
* everyone that has a signature that is signed by someone that I trust into where ever I want to deal with
* every e-mail that is not signed into the queue that reflects its priority to me
Optionally, list servers can sign the messages going through their means, just to make it easier or they can sign publicly all signatures that have legally registered with the list (giving them a trust level I can determine).
This solutions uses existing technology and is backward compatible. It even can migrate with everybody that wants. It delivers already benefits if I can safely filter my trusted correspondents (friends, family, teachers, clients, customers, etc.). It also does not assign control and economic power to any agency that controls the master keys. Everyone can create signatures and have them authenticated by everyone else. It is up to the recipient to decide with trust authorities she trusts. Off course commercial entities can provide keys and trust services just as with SSL if there is demand for this.
I'm still hoping for a spam assassin module to emerge that checks for signatures and the assigned trust level in my keyring. The only problem I see is that spam assassin needs the pass phrase to access my keyring, but I think that could be solved somehow as well (Shadow keyring with only external keys?)
Another problem could be to teach non geeks to handle keys correctly. Because understanding what key signing means and how trust should be handled and when to revoke a key needs is not trivial. But this could be then a commercial service. And I believe it is in many cases a UI design question (wizards, etc.)
If anybody knows of such an implementation, please let me know.
K
I believe that the local permitting process is the best level in government to demand a Net Neutrality clause. What do you think?
Could a Net Neutrality debate on the local level make sense? More sense then federally in Congress? I think it is really there where communities ca assert their rights and Interests.
You say your programming seemed to be a bit theoretical. That might have been the best that happened to you.
I always have fun in interviewing situations, when someone asks how many or which programming languages I have experience in. My standard answer is "Any, just give me two weeks time". The stare in disbelieve I counter with the explanation, that my computer science study taught me (mandatory) how to design a programming language to a given problem space, its syntax and semantics and how to write the parser/compiler to translate it into machine language. If I can't learn a new programming language in two weeks, I'm not worth my degree. After that point I always got an offer.
Programming languages will always change, so do APIs, OS, etc. But understanding computational theory, language in the abstract and how people tick that are not programmers (also called clients, users or managers) will always be the stepping stones to your success.
I'd disagree, isn't a contract something where two or more parties freely agree upon. As they say a meeting of the mind.
"even though they were aware of the terms and willingly agreed to them (by publishing the music) before."
In copyright there is no way to agree upon. The "Contract between society and an artist" (or anybody else publishing something) is a metaphor not a factual description.
What's an artist going to do if she does not like the copyright provisions? Can she renegotiate them? Can she set the default terms of expiration? At best she can set them shorter.
And not publishing is no real alternative. It is not only the livelihood of an artist to publish his or her work, it is also a large part of who he or she is. So writing a book and only showing it to friends and family or only those that sign a contract to not copy the work is not a very good solution, because they are not practically enforceable.
Beware, I'm not saying that copyright should be extended and extended, practically indefinitely. I'm just saying that arguing it is a contract an artist willingly entered into is as wrong as arguing you became willingly (by birth) a citizen of your state or country.
Thanks for a good analysis of what IDs are and some of the features they carry.
However, I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. OpenID really is the framework, the set of protocols required to enable just this. For example PayPal (EBay) could offer for pay or free to use your already established identity and offer an OpenID server that you can use. The same for Amazon or Google (new payment service) or Mastercard, American Express, etc. So it is up to them to set up such services. I'd think it id best for you to petition to the organizations that you would like to manage such services for you. For commercial organizations it might be a good idea to make a business case for them.
OpenID is exactly the kind of open framework that allows all to work with w/o centralizing the data like MS Passport did. In contrast , MS Passport requires everything to be ID'd through them and they control the intellectual property behind the system.
And yes, it could be a government agency that provides the ID services, in case things like birthday need to be verified. Or it could be simply a non profit organization that does it for the public benefits. But it could also be a merchant or a bank as well. They can use already established trust measures and convey them to the requester of ID. And this framework does not restrict you to use different ID's from different sources for different purposes.
This sounds to me like an article based on poor understanding of the subject. Patents are something different than copyright infringement. Patents do cover an invention, that has to be documented publicly in order to receive patent protection. This means that a patent is not covering a particular source code implementation, like a copyright does. It rather covers a way of doing things. For software only so called business process patents are relevant. It also means who ever implements something in violation of a patent had the chance to examine the patent first. To clarify, you can't patent a mathematical formula or a specific piece of source code. However you can patent a chemical compound and the way to produce it or you can patent a protocol of computer communication. Amazon even patented the "one click purchase" as a given business process. So IBM's grant of licenses to 500 of its patents did not bring any new discovery if Linux violated any patent that IBM held or not. The same way no one needs to look at the MS source code in order to determine if one of MS's patents is violated. However, if MS has patented the way their NTFS file system can be accessed remotely (the protocol), or any particular aspect of it, and if an open source project uses these series of messages then it could violate the patent. Just my understanding of patents and I'm not a lawyer.
Many here ask why this is more than robots.txt. For one it offers to add URLs that are driven by databases and parameters. Thing that the SEs do not index too well. It also adds last updated stamps and priority for re-visit.
Why is that important? So if I have one page where I always post the latest news, I can have the spider revisit every hour, so it get indexed ASAP. However the spider can go easy on the rest of my site otherwise. I also can train that spider for a burst, if I have for example an ongoing live event and post results ASAP.
Google was on to this already for a while. however Yahoo's facilities where not so comprehensive and MSN was missing altogether. Now we get a chance to create one single format and have all (big) SEs read it and may be the secondary spiders will catch on too.
I find it only said that they did not incorporate the ROR Resources of Resources RDF framework. I'm also missing a discovery mechanism, such as an extension to the robots.txt or a meta tag (or link rel="...") in the home page of a site.
Another use of this would be to download a full site, as you now know where is starts and what belongs to it.
Overall this is a good thing, where I come from.