As a 5 year old, I remember the excitement of the first landing. We're all geeks here, so we care about this sort of thing, but the sad fact is that the vast majority didn't give a damn beyond the initial novelty. How long is it since we went back ? Jo Sixpack doesn't care, and certainly won't want to fund any attempt to return.
Commercial space is about geosynchronous DBS and low orbit constellations. Interesting exogeology is already looking past the moon. Our most likely chance of returning to the moon is if George Lucas decides he wants it for a location shoot - no-one else is going to pay.
PS - A quick "I'm not worthy" to the illustrious creator of KA9Q. Thanks for my connectivity during a large part of the early '90s 8-)
I'm saying that LinuxCare was a stupid idea, by a bad company, poorly executed.
I know nothing beyond the article, and I'm no Linux geek. Would it be fair to say that it was a bad company and poorly executed, but not a bad idea ?
Does the collapse of boo.com mean that clothes retailing is a bad idea (even though it seems so contagious that the stock markets have caught a cold over it) ? We all knew there were some bad implementations and flakey companies out there, but it doesn't mean that the concepts are inherently broken. The dot.com bubble is much more like the American 1929 bubble over radio stocks, than the South Sea or Tulipomania, simply because there is a basic product under all that hype, and it's a product worth having. Radio recovered in the '30s, tulips didn't.
Who uses these stupid "knowledge bases", anyways?
I would.
I know the Win32 / Web platforms, but I don't know Linux. Right now I have a bucket o'cash to spend on someone who will tell me how to do (secret server-based web-thing) over *nix, and it's better than M$oft's product. I don't want to spend my time on this, I just want to spend my commercial budget on keeping my commercial timescale on track. Answering my need here is a good and reasonably long-term business to be in.
As I said, I know nothing of Linuxcare, but it sounds an awful lot like major pointy hair and yet another dot.com cash bonfire. Nothing new there....
Like most geeks, I'd love an Enigma machine. Is this Nazi memorabilia ? Eagle, swastika, military service history, the lot, but is it Nazi ? Would Goering's trainset be Nazi memorabilia ? No obvious military connotations...
I think most of us would have no problem in answering "No" and "Yes" to those examples, but could we defend that in court ? If eBay do take an editorial line here on what's acceptable, then they're into a very difficult area. Their ToS quoted above seems a very fair attempt, but I'm glad it's their problem to deal with and not mine.
In France, just as in Canada, England and Germany, racism is against the law.
It's very doubtful that "racism" is against the law in England. We have a law on the books against "incitement to racial hatred", but that refers to incitement. Being a racist is perfectly legal yourself, so long as you don't encourage others to join in -- even if you're one of a large racist mob, it's a legal defence that you were all there independently, not because one incited the others.
As to the practice of racism and the law, then we still have a police service that's racist, and seen as extremely so. Make a complaint of being racially attacked, and find yourself arrested for it ? The Stephen Lawrence case, and the on-going harrassment of Lawrence's friends and witnesses ? Our police have an awfully long way to go to gain some credibility.
At present we can see the unedifying spectacle of leading politicians; chiefly the thuggish Hague and and Anne Widdecombe, although the Labour party aren't above it either, falling over each other in a bid to win political favour by casting any foreign refugee as thieving scroungers and "bogus asylum seekers". It's like watching "Bill and Ted's Kristallnacht Adventure".
we let them [USSR] have the Eastern part of Europe (as well as Berlin - which we were in first)
Why is it that the contemporary USA, with a genuine WW2 record to be proud of, still has to claim credit for "saving the Limey's Asses", giving Berlin to the Soviets etc. ? Even now Hollywood can't make a U-boat movie without changing the story from the British to the Americans.
Yes, America (and mainly the 8th Air Force) was a huge help to the Allies in WW2. OTOH, if America had kept out of it entirely, Stalin would have turned up in Paris by about 1950 and I (a Brit) would probably be living in the offshore Edward VIII theme park and home for retired Nazis.
America "gave" Berlin to the Soviets ? Maybe geography is different on your planet.
which is better; waiting for a standard to be finalised or releasing before the standard is finalised and then finding out it's changed already?
No contest.
Shipping when it's workable, not waiting for the standards to settle. This is Internet Time - I barely have enough hours in the day to drink my coffee, let alone wait for the W3C. You should see the amount of Real Cash Money I've earned writing IE5 XSL product that I wouldn't have earned if I'd been waiting around, or taking the moral high ground that because IE5 wasn't compatible, then I was going to do it all server-side with XT.
Client-side XML is a big enough benefit that whilst I may not sell my own soul to get it, I'll happily lease out that of some poor support minion in a few month's time.
Does Mozilla handle client-side XML yet ? And NO I don't mean the piss-poor CSS implementation that the earlier builds had.
I hate the Redmond behemoth as much as the next/.'er, but they've given me client-side XML in IE5, with an XSL that is weird, but usable. Until I get the same from Mozilla, I won't be switching my own desktop's browser. I'm even starting to not worry about writing IE-only code on public client sites (oh, the sweet temptation of this heresy, for which I shall certainly burn in the volcanic fires of monster island)
Lately, I have mainly been running IE 5.5 (with a SMIL). Mozilla is getting a long way behind.
Take a look at the colour Palm IIIc and colour Palm OS. 3Com (wisely) stayed away from colour until they could do it without compromising battery life too much, but the colour support in the OS is good, stable and not hard to re-engineer onto existing apps.
Nearly anything that can serve HTML can serve up WML
Serving up WML is easy (as you say). WAP needs some extra stuff doing though, mainly to deal with handling session state in an entirely different way to the traditional HTTP (and thus the cookies are different too).
Think about it. Phones have fixed IDs (from the telco network), but nowhere big enough to store client-side cookies.
By creating content as XML, you can now create XSLT scripts to transform [...] XML content into XHTML or into WAP.
Dream on 8-(
Like everyone and their dog (well, everyone who's dog is an XML/XSL geek), I too thought this was the way to go. Bitter experience shows that although it's technically possible, the sheer broken-ness of WML makes it almost useless. There are two big problems you need to work around; neither of which is conducive to an easy solution in XSL alone.
The WML deck size limit. WML is pared down to fit onto phones, where 'phones' are devices so small that they're barely comparable to PDAs. WML simply doesn't have the 'grunt' to deliver useful content volumes to something even as small as a Palm.
The clunkiness of WML navigation. You can't make a usable WML nav interface by simply taking the graphics off the same old menubar that works your desktop web pages. The transformation needs to be at a much deeper level, one that's beyond simple mechanical XSL.
What this means in practice is that your presentation-free XML content needs to be heavily marked up with "WML deck - Cut here" markers, so that when you slice it into decks, then you break it across somewhat functional boundaries. Break it in the middle of (e.g.) a news story and the phone has to go and deal with both decks, just as the user scrolls to read it. More traffic, more delay as the phone leaps around from deck to deck, generally a pretty nasty way of mis-using WAP.
For interface building, I managed to make it work with XSL transforms of my common XML. It still sucked - what I'd built turned out to be a standard interface hard-coded in XSL, with a bit of templating based on the content of the XML. For the one example I was looking at (a newsfeed service, to re-invent the cliche), this worked OK, but my XSL was entirely dependent on the purpose of this content. There's no way I could even have re-used it for a weather forecast or traffic service, without entirely re-coding the XSL.
The more I see of WAP, the less I like it. I now see the point of 4K Associates and their "WAP considered harmful" piece of last year. XHTML-Basic is a much better thought out protocol, and it doesn't have this problem of being squeezed so thin that it's no longer big enough to support palmtops.
I'm not convinced of the commercial future of WAP. Wireless wil be mega-, mega-huge, but I don't think it's going to be built out of WAP. You still have sourcing difficulties for handsets (in the UK) and if the handsets aren't out there, then there's not the same drive to build content. Any new tech in this market only gets one short slot at the championship, and I think WAP might miss it in favour of the Next New Thing.
Port Outlook (and the brain-dead fondness for executing anything executable) to *nix and you'd still have as much of a problem.
Sure, Win'9* security is broken, but it's not bad security that's the problem here. I want Outlook to do anything I personally have the rights to do. I want Outlook to have a scripting language, and to offer mail services to other scripting languages (this is useful). The only thing I don't want Outlook to keep doing is executing code from anywhere that I haven't told it absolutely explicitly to do so. I don't want signing - what am I going to do ? Sue them ? I can't even email my lawyers, as they've just eaten my address book.
Win2K has brought its security concepts into the '80s, with Kerberpoodle the 2-headed mutt. We'll see how solid the implementation is, but at least they're making an effort.
I'd agree. It's difficult to measure the out-of-flat anyway, and you'd really need to do this at operating temperature.
My main concern would be the lapping process. I'm a woodworker, so I know a fair bit about accurately lapping metal (for sharpening) and it just isn't easy to make an accurately flat surface. 30 thou inaccuracy is bad for the manufactured Athlon, but I bet that most overclock D00DZ who attack their CPUs with glasspaper actually end up worse off.
Secondly, why should it be flat anyway ? It needs to match the heatsink, rather flatness itself being important, yet they didn't measure the flatness for any heatsinks ! I wouldn't be surprised if a 20 buck heatsink & fan assembly is much worse.
If it were me (and I really cared), I'd be drilling and tapping across the surface to try and squeeze heatsink and spreader plate together
This is quite simply the biggest waste I've ever seen.
Far from the silliest idea. It's a kludge - I doubt anyone would disagree. The current situation is though that there are starting to be reasonable numbers of WAP devices in circulation and there's still little content for them. In that constraint, this is an interesting (and maybe even useful) service.
WAP devices where *NOT BUILT* to browse the web.
Define "Web". Why should the Web be HTML only ? The Web ought to (and will) encompass a range of content formats, serving a range of devices. Of course WAP devices are built to surf the Web (what else are they for ?), and a temporary fix to the WML content shortage isn't going to hurt.
WML is syntax specific for maximum usage on small screens.
Now we're getting into the details. IMHE, WML isn't a bad syntax for placing Slashdot-sized web pages onto devices with smaller screens. What's the real killer is the tiny WAP deck size limit. Now that is really over-optimised for phone-size screens, to the point where the protocol can't even work usefully on a PDA. I have personally been bitten badly by this, enough to make me sink projects and change my career direction for several months.
practical usage? Practically zilch./em>
I think you're too hard on it. It's not perfect, but it's a handy thing until some better WML content comes along.
It's a new and innovative service. People have been sued for less, just on the basis of FUD
The content they're "misappropriating" if any isn't that of the channel, but of the content author. Perhaps the channel and advertisers would be happy for this service to exist, simply because (as you imply) an eyeball is still an eyeball. OTOH, the makers of "The Zippy the Pinhead Show" are paid for the original broadcast by the channel, but not this rebroadcasting - I bet they'll have issues with that.
I think they want to be sued. Get a TV company interested in them, then roll straight over and sell out immediately. Given the state of the stock market these days, that's probably the best path to geek riches.
We are occasionally remended by middle management that this even means private projects, at home, during non-office hours
I'd leave
I'm a UK based contractor. I'm very loyal to companies while I'm there, but I have to recognise that my relationship with any one organisation hasn't extended beyond a couple of years.
To make me sign a contract like that, I estimate the financial loss you'd have to compensate would be at least 20K UK pounds, in terms of the reduced market value I'd suffer over the next 3 years
it seems the U.K. will probably win [a race to see who becomes a police state first]
Our government is doing its best to make the UK the best place in the world to host e-commerce (or so they tell me). Has anyone seen any evidence of this ?
So far I've seen the IR35 tax changes making freelance contractors extinct, or driving us abroad. We have Jack Straw's bill to make us surrender passwords, for the strong crypto they don't want us to have anyway. Now we have a tax on ISPs to not only spy on us, but to make us pay for doing so !
Slashdot Mirror
Apollo went to the moon, so what ?
As a 5 year old, I remember the excitement of the first landing. We're all geeks here, so we care about this sort of thing, but the sad fact is that the vast majority didn't give a damn beyond the initial novelty. How long is it since we went back ? Jo Sixpack doesn't care, and certainly won't want to fund any attempt to return.
Commercial space is about geosynchronous DBS and low orbit constellations. Interesting exogeology is already looking past the moon. Our most likely chance of returning to the moon is if George Lucas decides he wants it for a location shoot - no-one else is going to pay.
PS - A quick "I'm not worthy" to the illustrious creator of KA9Q. Thanks for my connectivity during a large part of the early '90s 8-)
I'm saying that LinuxCare was a stupid idea, by a bad company, poorly executed.
I know nothing beyond the article, and I'm no Linux geek. Would it be fair to say that it was a bad company and poorly executed, but not a bad idea ?
Does the collapse of boo.com mean that clothes retailing is a bad idea (even though it seems so contagious that the stock markets have caught a cold over it) ? We all knew there were some bad implementations and flakey companies out there, but it doesn't mean that the concepts are inherently broken. The dot.com bubble is much more like the American 1929 bubble over radio stocks, than the South Sea or Tulipomania, simply because there is a basic product under all that hype, and it's a product worth having. Radio recovered in the '30s, tulips didn't.
Who uses these stupid "knowledge bases", anyways?
I would.
I know the Win32 / Web platforms, but I don't know Linux. Right now I have a bucket o'cash to spend on someone who will tell me how to do (secret server-based web-thing) over *nix, and it's better than M$oft's product. I don't want to spend my time on this, I just want to spend my commercial budget on keeping my commercial timescale on track. Answering my need here is a good and reasonably long-term business to be in.
As I said, I know nothing of Linuxcare, but it sounds an awful lot like major pointy hair and yet another dot.com cash bonfire. Nothing new there....
Like most geeks, I'd love an Enigma machine. Is this Nazi memorabilia ? Eagle, swastika, military service history, the lot, but is it Nazi ? Would Goering's trainset be Nazi memorabilia ? No obvious military connotations...
I think most of us would have no problem in answering "No" and "Yes" to those examples, but could we defend that in court ? If eBay do take an editorial line here on what's acceptable, then they're into a very difficult area. Their ToS quoted above seems a very fair attempt, but I'm glad it's their problem to deal with and not mine.
In France, just as in Canada, England and Germany, racism is against the law.
It's very doubtful that "racism" is against the law in England. We have a law on the books against "incitement to racial hatred", but that refers to incitement. Being a racist is perfectly legal yourself, so long as you don't encourage others to join in -- even if you're one of a large racist mob, it's a legal defence that you were all there independently, not because one incited the others.
As to the practice of racism and the law, then we still have a police service that's racist, and seen as extremely so. Make a complaint of being racially attacked, and find yourself arrested for it ? The Stephen Lawrence case, and the on-going harrassment of Lawrence's friends and witnesses ? Our police have an awfully long way to go to gain some credibility.
At present we can see the unedifying spectacle of leading politicians; chiefly the thuggish Hague and and Anne Widdecombe, although the Labour party aren't above it either, falling over each other in a bid to win political favour by casting any foreign refugee as thieving scroungers and "bogus asylum seekers". It's like watching "Bill and Ted's Kristallnacht Adventure".
we let them [USSR] have the Eastern part of Europe (as well as Berlin - which we were in first)
Why is it that the contemporary USA, with a genuine WW2 record to be proud of, still has to claim credit for "saving the Limey's Asses", giving Berlin to the Soviets etc. ? Even now Hollywood can't make a U-boat movie without changing the story from the British to the Americans.
Yes, America (and mainly the 8th Air Force) was a huge help to the Allies in WW2. OTOH, if America had kept out of it entirely, Stalin would have turned up in Paris by about 1950 and I (a Brit) would probably be living in the offshore Edward VIII theme park and home for retired Nazis.
America "gave" Berlin to the Soviets ? Maybe geography is different on your planet.
which is better; waiting for a standard to be finalised or releasing before the standard is finalised and then finding out it's changed already?
No contest.
Shipping when it's workable, not waiting for the standards to settle. This is Internet Time - I barely have enough hours in the day to drink my coffee, let alone wait for the W3C. You should see the amount of Real Cash Money I've earned writing IE5 XSL product that I wouldn't have earned if I'd been waiting around, or taking the moral high ground that because IE5 wasn't compatible, then I was going to do it all server-side with XT.
Client-side XML is a big enough benefit that whilst I may not sell my own soul to get it, I'll happily lease out that of some poor support minion in a few month's time.
Great ! Does this mean that I can be rude about Dr Godfrey on a server somewhere in the USA, and get all trans-atlantic comms revoked ?
I could probably sell that idea to the Academie Francaise, as a means of stopping American cultural imperialism
Does Mozilla handle client-side XML yet ? And NO I don't mean the piss-poor CSS implementation that the earlier builds had.
I hate the Redmond behemoth as much as the next /.'er, but they've given me client-side XML in IE5, with an XSL that is weird, but usable. Until I get the same from Mozilla, I won't be switching my own desktop's browser. I'm even starting to not worry about writing IE-only code on public client sites (oh, the sweet temptation of this heresy, for which I shall certainly burn in the volcanic fires of monster island)
Lately, I have mainly been running IE 5.5 (with a SMIL). Mozilla is getting a long way behind.
This one is a capacitance sensor. They're foolable.
Can't see the Yakuza taking to it....
So don't store your medical insurance on it !
palm [...] has 2 bit color
Take a look at the colour Palm IIIc and colour Palm OS. 3Com (wisely) stayed away from colour until they could do it without compromising battery life too much, but the colour support in the OS is good, stable and not hard to re-engineer onto existing apps.
Nearly anything that can serve HTML can serve up WML
Serving up WML is easy (as you say). WAP needs some extra stuff doing though, mainly to deal with handling session state in an entirely different way to the traditional HTTP (and thus the cookies are different too).
Think about it. Phones have fixed IDs (from the telco network), but nowhere big enough to store client-side cookies.
By creating content as XML, you can now create XSLT scripts to transform [...] XML content into XHTML or into WAP.
Dream on 8-(
Like everyone and their dog (well, everyone who's dog is an XML/XSL geek), I too thought this was the way to go. Bitter experience shows that although it's technically possible, the sheer broken-ness of WML makes it almost useless. There are two big problems you need to work around; neither of which is conducive to an easy solution in XSL alone.
What this means in practice is that your presentation-free XML content needs to be heavily marked up with "WML deck - Cut here" markers, so that when you slice it into decks, then you break it across somewhat functional boundaries. Break it in the middle of (e.g.) a news story and the phone has to go and deal with both decks, just as the user scrolls to read it. More traffic, more delay as the phone leaps around from deck to deck, generally a pretty nasty way of mis-using WAP.
For interface building, I managed to make it work with XSL transforms of my common XML. It still sucked - what I'd built turned out to be a standard interface hard-coded in XSL, with a bit of templating based on the content of the XML. For the one example I was looking at (a newsfeed service, to re-invent the cliche), this worked OK, but my XSL was entirely dependent on the purpose of this content. There's no way I could even have re-used it for a weather forecast or traffic service, without entirely re-coding the XSL.
The more I see of WAP, the less I like it. I now see the point of 4K Associates and their "WAP considered harmful" piece of last year. XHTML-Basic is a much better thought out protocol, and it doesn't have this problem of being squeezed so thin that it's no longer big enough to support palmtops.
I'm not convinced of the commercial future of WAP. Wireless wil be mega-, mega-huge, but I don't think it's going to be built out of WAP. You still have sourcing difficulties for handsets (in the UK) and if the handsets aren't out there, then there's not the same drive to build content. Any new tech in this market only gets one short slot at the championship, and I think WAP might miss it in favour of the Next New Thing.
Roll on Bluetooth.
Microsoft [...] has made what I feel is the most stable OS [WinCE] in their product line
Yes, and Goering is my favourite Nazi.
Port Outlook (and the brain-dead fondness for executing anything executable) to *nix and you'd still have as much of a problem.
Sure, Win'9* security is broken, but it's not bad security that's the problem here. I want Outlook to do anything I personally have the rights to do. I want Outlook to have a scripting language, and to offer mail services to other scripting languages (this is useful). The only thing I don't want Outlook to keep doing is executing code from anywhere that I haven't told it absolutely explicitly to do so. I don't want signing - what am I going to do ? Sue them ? I can't even email my lawyers, as they've just eaten my address book.
Win2K has brought its security concepts into the '80s, with Kerberpoodle the 2-headed mutt. We'll see how solid the implementation is, but at least they're making an effort.
Lets have a .falco as well.
Then when .coms like boo implode, we just move their registrations over to the .falco TLD.
Whats a Falco ?/a>
plane silly ? 8-)
I'd agree. It's difficult to measure the out-of-flat anyway, and you'd really need to do this at operating temperature.
My main concern would be the lapping process. I'm a woodworker, so I know a fair bit about accurately lapping metal (for sharpening) and it just isn't easy to make an accurately flat surface. 30 thou inaccuracy is bad for the manufactured Athlon, but I bet that most overclock D00DZ who attack their CPUs with glasspaper actually end up worse off.
Secondly, why should it be flat anyway ? It needs to match the heatsink, rather flatness itself being important, yet they didn't measure the flatness for any heatsinks ! I wouldn't be surprised if a 20 buck heatsink & fan assembly is much worse.
If it were me (and I really cared), I'd be drilling and tapping across the surface to try and squeeze heatsink and spreader plate together
4 minutes to post it. Clearly the Force is strong today
This is quite simply the biggest waste I've ever seen.
Far from the silliest idea. It's a kludge - I doubt anyone would disagree. The current situation is though that there are starting to be reasonable numbers of WAP devices in circulation and there's still little content for them. In that constraint, this is an interesting (and maybe even useful) service.
WAP devices where *NOT BUILT* to browse the web.
Define "Web". Why should the Web be HTML only ? The Web ought to (and will) encompass a range of content formats, serving a range of devices. Of course WAP devices are built to surf the Web (what else are they for ?), and a temporary fix to the WML content shortage isn't going to hurt.
WML is syntax specific for maximum usage on small screens.
Now we're getting into the details. IMHE, WML isn't a bad syntax for placing Slashdot-sized web pages onto devices with smaller screens. What's the real killer is the tiny WAP deck size limit. Now that is really over-optimised for phone-size screens, to the point where the protocol can't even work usefully on a PDA. I have personally been bitten badly by this, enough to make me sink projects and change my career direction for several months.
practical usage? Practically zilch./em>
I think you're too hard on it. It's not perfect, but it's a handy thing until some better WML content comes along.
Does this make the service legal?
It's a new and innovative service. People have been sued for less, just on the basis of FUD
The content they're "misappropriating" if any isn't that of the channel, but of the content author. Perhaps the channel and advertisers would be happy for this service to exist, simply because (as you imply) an eyeball is still an eyeball. OTOH, the makers of "The Zippy the Pinhead Show" are paid for the original broadcast by the channel, but not this rebroadcasting - I bet they'll have issues with that.
I think they want to be sued. Get a TV company interested in them, then roll straight over and sell out immediately. Given the state of the stock market these days, that's probably the best path to geek riches.
We are occasionally remended by middle management that this even means private projects, at home, during non-office hours
I'd leave
I'm a UK based contractor. I'm very loyal to companies while I'm there, but I have to recognise that my relationship with any one organisation hasn't extended beyond a couple of years.
To make me sign a contract like that, I estimate the financial loss you'd have to compensate would be at least 20K UK pounds, in terms of the reduced market value I'd suffer over the next 3 years
2. Automobile
Close, but Daimler just crept into the 19th.
4. Water Supply and Distribution
Like many urban Brits, my water supply (and sewerage) still runs through a system built by the 19th century Victorians.
7. Agricultural Mechanization
Eli Whitney ? Jethro Tull ? 10th Century...
Harry Ferguson was 20th, I'll grant you, but they quoted achievements in general, not enhancements.
11. Highways
Apart from motorways, most of the UK's road network is either 19th, or very late 20th
20. High-performance Materials
What about what is still our most common high performance material - cheap carbon steel, a mid-19th invention by Bessemer.
Biggest omission ? Mass production, on the Ford model.
it seems the U.K. will probably win [a race to see who becomes a police state first]
Our government is doing its best to make the UK the best place in the world to host e-commerce (or so they tell me). Has anyone seen any evidence of this ?
So far I've seen the IR35 tax changes making freelance contractors extinct, or driving us abroad. We have Jack Straw's bill to make us surrender passwords, for the strong crypto they don't want us to have anyway. Now we have a tax on ISPs to not only spy on us, but to make us pay for doing so !
Feel like complaining ? Take a look at http://www.stand.org.uk/ and join in
The images are too soft to do "photography" with, but they're OK for making web content.
Eats batteries, but then don't they all.