What it really needs is some sort of world-wide wireless access ala Palm VII. When I can ssh into a server at home or work, then, and only then will I need one of these. Tunneling some X apps off of my home server would also be nice.
That's what I was hoping companies would do with Transmetas. Make something about the size of an Etch-a-sketch, but world wide wireless and preferrabley running unix or linux.
Umm, actually, the article said that both parties must agree to be tried in the court, so if you don't like it, just decline.
However, this makes me question the viability of it all. In many cases, its to one parties favor to stall (i.e., Microsoft antitrust to name an easy one). Sueees generally aren't to eager to pay up if they loose.
I built a scale one in high school for a science project. It was just a simple glass tube with 5 hand rolled wire coils along it with one end connected to the neg. pole of a battery and the other ends connected to a series of copper plates. I then connected a nail to the positive terminal and could launch BBs by running the nail over the plates.
A fun little experiment for any high schoolers out there.
If several people got together and each submitted part of the DeCSS code (and they actually included it), then we could ensure that the DVD Copy Associations lawyers stay in business for another 50001 years. Imagine, they deorbit the satellite, and pop, get slammed with an injunction.;)
Dearth of technical accuracy
on
WinDSL Coming?
·
· Score: 1
Okay everyone, repeat after me. There IS NO SUCH THING AS A DSL "MODEM". The "D" in DSL is for digital. Modem stands for MODulate/dEModulate. Modems are used for converting digital data to analog sound frequencies. DSL uses codecs. Codecs convert one form of digital data data to another form. The external ones are bridges or routers incompassing the codec, the internal ones are straight codecs. Yes, I've got my metaphorical panties in a bucnch, but this is a technical forum, we could at least attempt to be techinical. BTW, give me a bridge or, better yet, router any day over some cheesy machine bound device.
The problem is not on the IPv6 side but the IPv4 side. If I remember correctly there is a v4 to v6 conversion standard. But the catch is when you use your v6 address to connect to a v4 server. It's got 4 bytes allocated to store your address in. Unless someone NAT's it first (which kills the benefits gained from the address expansion), you'll overflow the servers SRC IP buffer, either crashing it (in crappy implementations), or more likely, causing it to ignore your request. There's a bit field in the IP header (it's the first 4 bits in each IP packet) that lists the version. The stack'll see a version > 4 and drop the packet. So you may be the first kid on your block to get an v6 addr, but you can't talk to no one except for yourself. Sucks, don't it?
If someone running Solaris 7.0 (aka SunOS 5.7) or greater could run these with truss -f and sotruss, we can see all system calls and shared library calls which would go a long ways to determining if these appear suspicious or not. Post the results and we'll see what's up.
I wrote a paper on this way back in college, so this is coming mostly from memory (mine, not holographic), but here's some of the hightlights that excited me:
1) Massive increases in storable data. I believe the example given was the contents of the entire library of congress on a 10 cm/side cube of data.
2) Near ram access times. I believe the actual figure is something like 100 and some odd nanoseconds.
3) AI like ability to perform similarity matches. Not only can you shine a reference beam in and get the data, you can also project the data in and get an echo of similar data elements reference beams. Hence, you could shine in a bitmap, and get back the indices (echos of reference beams actually) of the closest matching chuncks of data in storage. The closest matches produce the strongest echos. I believe the U.S. Army was investigating using this to spot tanks via video cameras. The applications are endless. You've forgotten the name of a song, merely hum a couple of bars into a mic, convert it to wave, submit it and find out that it's similar to a chunck of "Stairway to Heaven".
4) Potentially cheap once all the manufacturing is worked out.
While I have a fair amount of leanings towards civil libritarianism, everyone overlooks the one truly beneficial advantage to being profiled. When companies have a good profile of me and media from the T.V. to the web can adapt accordingly, I'll stop getting ads that are completely inappropriate to me. I'm a single male geek, I don't care about tampon commercials, Cadillacs, geriatrics, or a host of other annoying commericals. Instead, lay those Porsche (okay fine, I won't get those ads until my income goes up another $10K, but I'm getting there), Man Show, tech and other commericials at me and I might actually be entertained. Heck, I might even buy something, THROUGH MY OWN FREE WILL.
Targeting ads at me doesn't force me to buy some. I and I alone am responsible for my purchase habits, not some mega-database. People need to take personal responsibility for their lives instead of blaming everything on the nearest mega-corp.
In fact, this may even make our world more efficient as advertisers only have to pay for ads that have relavance to their viewers. In turn, they'll keep some of the cash, but some will filter down through decreased prices as competition will doubtless force. And what they keep I can still partake in through salary (if I work for one of the mega-corps operating thusly) or stock dividends if I choose to invest.
Granted, I'm not that happy having the government have that type of information, but that's a whole different rant.
I still maintain that even when people are restrained by The Man(TM), their support or lack thereof comes through, even if not through conscious manipulation (which they must keep subtle), then through their presentation. Reporters write better when they're passionate.
My main objection was to the whole implication that merging content and delivery is new. --Jason
While I am slightly concerned (altough mostly neutral), those complaining about coupling content and delivery are using an arguement that historically doesn't hold up. If they want to use this argument, they may be able to claim that the Internet changes things, but all Old-Media (tm) companies have usually historically been both content and conduit.
For instance, newspapers (like Time) usually own and control their own presses. Even when they outsource the actual printing, they still control the content. TV stations, radio stations, and the ilk all operate similarly.
And empires in media is not a new trend either. While this takes it to new heights, the media had already essentially completed its transistion to megacorp long ago. And while most sell their souls, their perspectives, and their opinions, the actual reporters are still people and occasionally do stand up for their beliefs.
The fact of the matter is, if they become too useless people just drop out. Look at newspaper readership in GenXers. Almost none of read the old pulp. I think television news listenership will eventually decline also. Radio may be sustained by commuters, desiring some local info, but as our society globalizes via the Internet, we're losing our local focus.
Why? Because locally we can't find enough similarity of interests. There is not slashdotesque TV station in St. Louis, so I hit the news. Its what I care about, not local schools (I probably should, but I'm single, so I don't).
Things morph, but we're still people. Even megacorps have people (like us) that, in the words of Paul (in the Bible), "fight the good fight".
A see a lot of incredularity (plus some remaining "Hey, that's not fair) on other posts, and while I'm in general, a cynic, I have to agree with this. Sure, there's some bald-faced lies in here (i.e. the claim that they've always responded to the community), but that's to be expected from managment. As a techie that's worked in a couple of suit-type financial businesses, I'll attempt to suggest a probable dialog: admin in charge of way too much to management: Hey, we keep getting complaints about our usenet setup. I'm swamped and not a usenet expert. I either need some time dedicated to reading "Managing Usenet News" and someone to take over some of my work, or better yet, you should hire someone just for that. manager: Use.net? What's site's that? Why should we manage it? I don't have the headcount. Skip it. Admin to boss: Hey, I read on slashdot yesterday that we're getting UDP'd (since you haven't given me the duty to actually keep up on the admin news groups as I should, I didn't even see the post). Also about a bijillion torked off users are calling and emailing us. manager: What's udp? techie: manager: They can't do that! techie: manager: techie: We need to promise to crackdown and actually plug the holes, they'll almost certainly go for the promise, but they'll continue to watch us like hawks. Once they've gone this far, it's not that hard to reinstate the sentence if we lapse. manager : Do it. Write up a reponse and I'll couch it in appropriate language (which he completely bumbles, due to lack of understanding of his audience, but that's to be expected) Result? The cluestick approach will probably work once again. You just need a big enough stick, and on the net, short of an IDP, and arguable the RBL, the UDP is the biggest stick around. --Jason
As a former Usenet administrator and current user, I thoroughly (sp?) applaud the decision. The entire point of a UDP (as you would glean had you actually read the sentencing) is that admins around the world have tried to work with @home's administration for an extended period of time and had all their efforts ignored. A UDP is never taken lightly or until all other options have been exhausted. It's the usenet equivilent of air bursting a 25 megaton nuke over someone's capital. While it does stir the blood, it's not to be undertaken lightly. Historically, whenever the offending site shows the least tendency to reopen communications, apologize and even talk about cleaning up their act, the UDP is lifted. Sometimes it turns out that they're blowing wind and it has to go back (correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this happened to uunet, who used to be notorious), but the benefit of the doubt always goes to the targeted site. Admins realize they have innocent victims, but just as innocents must occasionally die in war-time bombing to stop a greater evil (i.e. see WWII German cities), the greater world must be looked out for. Good job usenet! --Jason
I agree wholeheartedly. I grew up on a corn/cattle family farm and from dad's estimates, most farmers have actually lost money by planting the last two years. The freaking stuff costs more to produce than they can sell it for (and dad is a pretty good farm manager). Luckily cattle are a bit better than row crops right now, but it's still insane. How many of you would care to work 60 - 100 hour weeks for about $25 K a year? And farming requires a hefty skillset. Manager, chemical certifications, welder, mechanic, construction worker, basic vetrenarian, animal husbandry, knowledge of crops and current trends, some computer skills are becoming useful, and manual laborer. My hat's off to farmers.
I grew up in Nebraska on a corn/cattle farm and all professional (i.e. not hobby) farmers plant commercial seed. The only people that harvest seed for use as seed are those that sell the seed to the commercial concerns. And that is a fairly complex setup as they have to plant various varieties intermingeled to get the proper offspring. I.e. They often plant 4 rows of "female" corn which is detassled by high school kids and migrant workers as they go through the fields in the summer cutting the tassles off to prevent pollination. After each 4 female rows, comes two male rows (of a different species) that are allowed to keep their tassles, but aren't harvested in the fall. This situation is used to keep the genetic lines from decomposing over time by reinventing the variety every generation.
I too had an excellent experience registering with them (even though I'd been up so late that I accidentally registered hypercaffeinated.com instead of the hypercaffeinated.org I'd meant to register). And you can get DNS hosting also, it just runs around 7 USD/nameserver. I just wish I could modify the TTL's/reload times, etc since I can't get a static IP for my ISDN router .
Slashdot Mirror
What it really needs is some sort of world-wide wireless access ala Palm VII. When I can ssh into a server at home or work, then, and only then will I need one of these. Tunneling some X apps off of my home server would also be nice. That's what I was hoping companies would do with Transmetas. Make something about the size of an Etch-a-sketch, but world wide wireless and preferrabley running unix or linux.
Umm, actually, the article said that both parties must agree to be tried in the court, so if you don't like it, just decline.
However, this makes me question the viability of it all. In many cases, its to one parties favor to stall (i.e., Microsoft antitrust to name an easy one). Sueees generally aren't to eager to pay up if they loose.
I built a scale one in high school for a science project. It was just a simple glass tube with 5 hand rolled wire coils along it with one end connected to the neg. pole of a battery and the other ends connected to a series of copper plates. I then connected a nail to the positive terminal and could launch BBs by running the nail over the plates. A fun little experiment for any high schoolers out there.
If several people got together and each submitted part of the DeCSS code (and they actually included it), then we could ensure that the DVD Copy Associations lawyers stay in business for another 50001 years. Imagine, they deorbit the satellite, and pop, get slammed with an injunction. ;)
Okay everyone, repeat after me. There IS NO SUCH THING AS A DSL "MODEM". The "D" in DSL is for digital. Modem stands for MODulate/dEModulate. Modems are used for converting digital data to analog sound frequencies. DSL uses codecs. Codecs convert one form of digital data data to another form. The external ones are bridges or routers incompassing the codec, the internal ones are straight codecs. Yes, I've got my metaphorical panties in a bucnch, but this is a technical forum, we could at least attempt to be techinical. BTW, give me a bridge or, better yet, router any day over some cheesy machine bound device.
The problem is not on the IPv6 side but the IPv4 side. If I remember correctly there is a v4 to v6 conversion standard. But the catch is when you use your v6 address to connect to a v4 server. It's got 4 bytes allocated to store your address in. Unless someone NAT's it first (which kills the benefits gained from the address expansion), you'll overflow the servers SRC IP buffer, either crashing it (in crappy implementations), or more likely, causing it to ignore your request. There's a bit field in the IP header (it's the first 4 bits in each IP packet) that lists the version. The stack'll see a version > 4 and drop the packet. So you may be the first kid on your block to get an v6 addr, but you can't talk to no one except for yourself. Sucks, don't it?
If someone running Solaris 7.0 (aka SunOS 5.7) or greater could run these with truss -f and sotruss, we can see all system calls and shared library calls which would go a long ways to determining if these appear suspicious or not. Post the results and we'll see what's up.
Anyone see any probs with that?
I wrote a paper on this way back in college, so this is coming mostly from memory (mine, not holographic), but here's some of the hightlights that excited me:
1) Massive increases in storable data. I believe the example given was the contents of the entire library of congress on a 10 cm/side cube of data.
2) Near ram access times. I believe the actual figure is something like 100 and some odd nanoseconds.
3) AI like ability to perform similarity matches. Not only can you shine a reference beam in and get the data, you can also project the data in and get an echo of similar data elements reference beams. Hence, you could shine in a bitmap, and get back the indices (echos of reference beams actually) of the closest matching chuncks of data in storage. The closest matches produce the strongest echos. I believe the U.S. Army was investigating using this to spot tanks via video cameras. The applications are endless. You've forgotten the name of a song, merely hum a couple of bars into a mic, convert it to wave, submit it and find out that it's similar to a chunck of "Stairway to Heaven".
4) Potentially cheap once all the manufacturing is worked out.
While I have a fair amount of leanings towards civil libritarianism, everyone overlooks the one truly beneficial advantage to being profiled. When companies have a good profile of me and media from the T.V. to the web can adapt accordingly, I'll stop getting ads that are completely inappropriate to me. I'm a single male geek, I don't care about tampon commercials, Cadillacs, geriatrics, or a host of other annoying commericals. Instead, lay those Porsche (okay fine, I won't get those ads until my income goes up another $10K, but I'm getting there), Man Show, tech and other commericials at me and I might actually be entertained. Heck, I might even buy something, THROUGH MY OWN FREE WILL.
Targeting ads at me doesn't force me to buy some. I and I alone am responsible for my purchase habits, not some mega-database. People need to take personal responsibility for their lives instead of blaming everything on the nearest mega-corp.
In fact, this may even make our world more efficient as advertisers only have to pay for ads that have relavance to their viewers. In turn, they'll keep some of the cash, but some will filter down through decreased prices as competition will doubtless force. And what they keep I can still partake in through salary (if I work for one of the mega-corps operating thusly) or stock dividends if I choose to invest.
Granted, I'm not that happy having the government have that type of information, but that's a whole different rant.
--Jason
I still maintain that even when people are restrained by The Man(TM), their support or lack thereof comes through, even if not through conscious manipulation (which they must keep subtle), then through their presentation. Reporters write better when they're passionate.
My main objection was to the whole implication that merging content and delivery is new. --Jason
For instance, newspapers (like Time) usually own and control their own presses. Even when they outsource the actual printing, they still control the content. TV stations, radio stations, and the ilk all operate similarly.
And empires in media is not a new trend either. While this takes it to new heights, the media had already essentially completed its transistion to megacorp long ago. And while most sell their souls, their perspectives, and their opinions, the actual reporters are still people and occasionally do stand up for their beliefs.
The fact of the matter is, if they become too useless people just drop out. Look at newspaper readership in GenXers. Almost none of read the old pulp. I think television news listenership will eventually decline also. Radio may be sustained by commuters, desiring some local info, but as our society globalizes via the Internet, we're losing our local focus.
Why? Because locally we can't find enough similarity of interests. There is not slashdotesque TV station in St. Louis, so I hit the news. Its what I care about, not local schools (I probably should, but I'm single, so I don't).
Things morph, but we're still people. Even megacorps have people (like us) that, in the words of Paul (in the Bible), "fight the good fight".
--Jason
A see a lot of incredularity (plus some remaining "Hey, that's not fair) on other posts, and while I'm in general, a cynic, I have to agree with this. Sure, there's some bald-faced lies in here (i.e. the claim that they've always responded to the community), but that's to be expected from managment. As a techie that's worked in a couple of suit-type financial businesses, I'll attempt to suggest a probable dialog: admin in charge of way too much to management: Hey, we keep getting complaints about our usenet setup. I'm swamped and not a usenet expert. I either need some time dedicated to reading "Managing Usenet News" and someone to take over some of my work, or better yet, you should hire someone just for that. manager: Use.net? What's site's that? Why should we manage it? I don't have the headcount. Skip it. Admin to boss: Hey, I read on slashdot yesterday that we're getting UDP'd (since you haven't given me the duty to actually keep up on the admin news groups as I should, I didn't even see the post). Also about a bijillion torked off users are calling and emailing us. manager: What's udp? techie: manager: They can't do that! techie: manager: techie: We need to promise to crackdown and actually plug the holes, they'll almost certainly go for the promise, but they'll continue to watch us like hawks. Once they've gone this far, it's not that hard to reinstate the sentence if we lapse. manager : Do it. Write up a reponse and I'll couch it in appropriate language (which he completely bumbles, due to lack of understanding of his audience, but that's to be expected) Result? The cluestick approach will probably work once again. You just need a big enough stick, and on the net, short of an IDP, and arguable the RBL, the UDP is the biggest stick around. --Jason
As a former Usenet administrator and current user, I thoroughly (sp?) applaud the decision. The entire point of a UDP (as you would glean had you actually read the sentencing) is that admins around the world have tried to work with @home's administration for an extended period of time and had all their efforts ignored. A UDP is never taken lightly or until all other options have been exhausted. It's the usenet equivilent of air bursting a 25 megaton nuke over someone's capital. While it does stir the blood, it's not to be undertaken lightly. Historically, whenever the offending site shows the least tendency to reopen communications, apologize and even talk about cleaning up their act, the UDP is lifted. Sometimes it turns out that they're blowing wind and it has to go back (correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this happened to uunet, who used to be notorious), but the benefit of the doubt always goes to the targeted site. Admins realize they have innocent victims, but just as innocents must occasionally die in war-time bombing to stop a greater evil (i.e. see WWII German cities), the greater world must be looked out for. Good job usenet! --Jason
--Albert Einstein.
I agree wholeheartedly. I grew up on a corn/cattle family farm and from dad's estimates, most farmers have actually lost money by planting the last two years. The freaking stuff costs more to produce than they can sell it for (and dad is a pretty good farm manager). Luckily cattle are a bit better than row crops right now, but it's still insane. How many of you would care to work 60 - 100 hour weeks for about $25 K a year? And farming requires a hefty skillset. Manager, chemical certifications, welder, mechanic, construction worker, basic vetrenarian, animal husbandry, knowledge of crops and current trends, some computer skills are becoming useful, and manual laborer. My hat's off to farmers.
I grew up in Nebraska on a corn/cattle farm and all professional (i.e. not hobby) farmers plant commercial seed. The only people that harvest seed for use as seed are those that sell the seed to the commercial concerns. And that is a fairly complex setup as they have to plant various varieties intermingeled to get the proper offspring. I.e. They often plant 4 rows of "female" corn which is detassled by high school kids and migrant workers as they go through the fields in the summer cutting the tassles off to prevent pollination. After each 4 female rows, comes two male rows (of a different species) that are allowed to keep their tassles, but aren't harvested in the fall. This situation is used to keep the genetic lines from decomposing over time by reinventing the variety every generation.
I too had an excellent experience registering with them (even though I'd been up so late that I accidentally registered hypercaffeinated.com instead of the hypercaffeinated.org I'd meant to register). And you can get DNS hosting also, it just runs around 7 USD/nameserver. I just wish I could modify the TTL's/reload times, etc since I can't get a static IP for my ISDN router .