> stop beating up all americans. beat up the media > moguls who dont have the balls or the will to tell > everyone about this stuff. i am an american. i want > my country to "play fair".
I don't think it has anything to do with balls. "The Media" is entirely corporate. You don't hear about protectionism and the hypocrisy of "free trade" rhetoric on television, in the newspapers or in magazines because those media are owned by large corporations that have the same interests as the companies that protectionism and "free trade" protect. If you want to learn about how powerful and corrupt corporate America and corporate politics are you're going to have to turn off the TV, because the people who own TV are never, ever going to tell you that stuff.
Looks like a nifty device. Gotta love having a keyboard. All it needs now to be the all purpose on-the-go geek tool is an SSH client. Of course if it ran EPOC (the O/S developed and used in Psion PDAs) it would already have that plus an Inform interpreter (for all the adventure games addicts out there) a bunch of games and databases, a macro programming language and all sorts of other good stuff. But it's not based on EPOC *or* on PalmOS so it doesn't. Too bad. When is someone going to come out with a small IP wireless device with a long battery life, a keyboard and an open API? Come on Handspring, you can do it.
Re:Why no Compact Flash /Microdrive MP3 Players?
on
New MP3 Portables
·
· Score: 1
The Frontier Labs Nex II is awesome. Rumour has it that they are wokring on OGG for the next version.
Frankly whether it has USB 2 or Firewire is really an uninteresting question -- who really cares? Whichever it has, that's the interface you use. If you don't have that interface, you buy one. Done deal. The interesting questions are: 1) Is the user interface usable? 2) How long is the battery life? 3) How big is it? 4) When will it support Ogg Vorbis format? 5) Is the user interface usable?
What is the set of information items that you'll want to access wherever you go and from whatever device you're using? Obvious candidates would be
bookmarks, contacts list (emails, phone #'s), calendar and a passwords list. Essentially the things that you'd probably want to store on a PDA. Of course the exact set of items on this list might vary from person to person. Different people will have different ideas about what information is indispensable. For example one could easily extend this list with: a notepad, email archive, documents (current & archived), spreadsheets, various databases and so forth.
To embrace all of these functions one needs at the minimum an all purpose file server. The manifesto for such a service would be something like this:
accessible from anywhere
using any device
by only the user (+ the sysadmins perhaps)
access secured with strong encryption
reliable service (backup systems available)
data available using standard protocols
all information readable and writeable and searchable
information indexed in a way that makes sense to the user
Much of the information stored might be considered 'work-related' but there's also plenty here that should be considered 'personal'. Would one require several roles or personalities - one for work, one for home, indeed one complete set of data for each hat that you wear? It seems that whilst that would provide a certain level of useful separation, for example by allowing you to keep work contacts separate from personal contacts, it would also lead to troublesome fragmentation. You probably want to know for example when your home and work calendars conflict.
There are a couple of ways to solve that problem. One would be to have a single repository for all your information, with some type of tagging to say which info belongs to which role. This has the advantage that all your information is accessible from one place. The other approach would be to have multiple information stores, but to allow the client device (PC, phone, PDA whatever) to access several different data stores and combine the information retrieved from each. Whilst this approach invloves a greater level of client complexity, and reduced reliability due to dependence on multiple services it has the advantage of allowing diversity in the server strategies of different organizations providing service to one individual.
The question of who would be trusted to run such a system is one not of technology but of policy. It seems likely that no institution with an interest in the contents of my personal information should be trusted with it. Clearly this includes my employer, the government, or a private corporation constrained by profit interests.
What is needed is an impartial institution. This suggests a potential solution - a legal structure similar to the 'common-carrier' status of telephone companies. Phone companies don't care what you talk about on the phone. They're legally required not to care. What is needed is a 'common-storage' status. That status could be given to private companies who are regulated as digital storage providers. Those companies would be legally constrained not to misue the stored information, for example not to reveal it to third parties, or to use the information in ways not explicitly granted by the end users.
Under the category of utopian novels, I nominate Pacific Edge, the third of the Three California's trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Each of the three books tells an alternative future of Orange County California. The first is post-apocalyptic, the second is dystopian, and the third is eco-utopian. In Pacific Edge he tells a story of the struggles of a 2065 community fifty years after the US collectively decided to abandon heavy industry, outlaw large corporations, and replace concrete metropolis cities with small sustainable interconnected communities. Without preaching, Robinson draws the reader into the story of his characters' lives in this naturally beautiful could-be world. Another gem from the author of the Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy.
In to build Ogg Vorbis support into hardware players a decoder implementation that uses integer math is required. The current Xiph implementation uses floating point math, which most hardware decoders do not have. The main impediment to writing an integer math version of the decoder was, until recently, the lack of a good Vorbis specification. See Rob Leslie's complaint from April 2002 (commented here ).
Since the specification is now available, building an integer implementation should now be feasible and hardware implementations may be forthcoming. Is anyone working on this?
I bought a Nex II for my girlfriend to go jogging. She was running pretty hard and found that even a MiniDisc player with a large skip protection memory wasn't sufficient -- it would skip at least once a minute. The MiniDisc just can't handle tracking whilst being shaken up and down rigorously and consistently. Based on that experience, an mp3 CD player clearly wasn't the answer, and a hard drive player seemed highly inadvisable -- aren't head crashes usually fatal to a hard drive? Maybe laptop drives are better protected, but that seems like a big investment to risk.
The Nex II being solid state of course has none of these problems. It's very robust. Runs off of AA batteries, which is a huge plus, because they're so cheap. And of course you can use rechargeables if you want.
I got a 256MB compact flash card to go with it for ~$100. That stores about 6 CDs worth at 128Mbit/s. Thet seems really important to me -- get as much memory as possible. 64 or 128MB would be quite limiting, I think.
The Nex II looks cool. It plays well. Good quality audio IMO. The headphones that come with are the variety that attach behind your head and over your ears. They seemed a little weird at first glance, but I found them surprisingly comfortable.
You can organize songs into sub-directories. It can play files in order or shuffled. I think it also has playlists, but I couldn't figure out how to make that work.
My only gripe is that when you turn it off it doesn't start up where you left off. I'd give it a 4 star recommendation (out of 5).
What's the power of the Slashdot effect? Can we make s significant impact by raising the money to make this fabulous software available for free? It would set a high bar for the quality of all 3d software. Blender would be the base measure -- if you've got 3d software you wanna sell, it's gotta be better than Blender, 'cos that's free.
This is a great opportunity for Slashdot to show what it can do. I just made my $50 donation. Let's make it happen.
Looks like the three files for the database were created by Norton... backup? I just downloaded the freeware version of Backup Key key recovery program which claims to have found a Norton backup password in the file. Of course it won't tell you what the password actually is unless you pay for the program.
Last time I was at Heathrow (not Swanick) there was an NT Blue Screen of Death on one of the arrival/departure monitors. There's reliable computing for you.
The only way to have a reliable anything is to make sure that you have a backup setup and ready to go. In the case of connectivity, if your main link is DSL you should have a backup dial-up connection. Preferably it should be with a different ISP, and would be even better with a different backbone provider. Test the dial-out. If you have two phone lines, make sure that you can dial-out on the non-DSL line, in case your first phone line gets disconnected. Make sure you can still get your email, and get to the servers using the dial-up.
DSL is still a relatively unreliable technology. People who need reliable remote connectivity still often use ISDN for that reason -- it may be be a bitch to set up, but once it's working it doesn't tend to flake out on you like DSL. Dial up may not be as nice as DSL, but its a heck of a lot better than nothing.
A response to the 9/11/2001 World Trade center and Pentagon crashes
This morning the Pentagon and World Trade Center towers were bombed by hijacked planes. How will the United States react to this attack? How will the people of this country come to understand these events, and what will be done as a result?
The citizens and residents of this country have the responsibility to guide our leaders in how we respond. The tendency amongst our politicians and media will be knee-jerk retalitation. Please let us resist the temptation to cause more harm than has already been done. Those who took these actions are now all dead along with the victims. Others may also be found to be responsible and they should be bought to justice through the process of international law.
This, like all acts of terrorism, is abhorrent. But whenever discussing terrorism it is important to note that the majority of terrorist actions are carried out by nation states, although they are not labeled as such by the corporate media. These actions far outweigh the private, individual actions of terror that we are all assuming today's attack to be. This attack did not occur in a vacuum.
As of yet we have no idea who is responsible. We believe it to be a case of 'blowback'. Why? The pentagon is a symbol of military power. The trade center is a symbol of economic power. These institutions stand for and act to perpetuate U.S. global dominance. An attack on either of these institutions individually could be variously interpreted. The combined attack on both suggests a target of US global hegemony.
As Chalmers Johnson writes in his book Blowback (publ. 2000, Henry Holt): 'The term "blowback", which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of "terrorists" or "drug lords" or "rogue states" or "illegal arms merchants" often turn out to be the blowback from earlier American operations.'
Chalmers catalogues a number of American policies that have given cause to a variety of peoples to resent America. Among those peoples that we have antognized over the past 50 years he sites (in no particular order) Libyans, Chinese, Japanese, Saudis, Kurds, Koreans (both north and south). To that we could add peoples of Serbia, Iraq, Indonesia, Vietnam, as well as nearly every country in africa and the americas.
From Johnson again: 'Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the invulnerable. The innocent of the twenty-first century are going to harvest unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent decades. Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep price--individually and collectively--for their nation's continued efforts to dominate the global scene.'
As we move forward from today's disaster, lets beware of nationalist responses of revenge which serve to continue the cycle of violence. Let us introduce the concept of 'blowback' to contextualize acts of international terrorism, even as we argue against them. Let us take this opportunity to rethink the global effects of our behavior and how they impact our future security.
Joseph Maurer (josephmaurer@hotmail.com)
Oliver Crow (ocrow@skymind.com)
I've owned Psion handhelds since 1992. I first had a Series 3, then a 3a, a 3c and most recently a Revo. Psion has had the best software and the best hardware for handhelds for the last ten years. I've tried others, WinCE, Palm, and at one point Newton and none of them compared. The original Series 3 had a preemptive multitasking operating system. I remember they days when I was running multi-tasking apps on my Psion and Windows 3.1 on my PC. Hah!
To my mind having a keyboard has always been a huge advantage for the Psion over the Palm. Taking notes, even writing letters and documents on my Psion has never been a problem. Psions have always had crazy long battery lives and running out of memory has never been a problem because their data file formats are so compact. These are really important issues for a handheld, I think.
The Revo was in a lot of ways a big improvement over previous models. It was small and sleek (unlike the Series 5), had a touch sensitive screen, and a Palm like docking and charging cradle. However in other ways it was a step backwards. The keyboard shortcuts weren't as good as on the Series 3 machines, which meant that you had to use the stylus (or your thumb on the screen). That's not as fast as using they keyboard. Also they messed up the calculator app, trying to make it look like a pocket calculator. The 3 version was much more powerful, and easy to use -- a viewable, scrollable, editable back log of previous calculations *and* results. Plus user importable programmable functions. Really nice. Other complaints about the Revo/EPOC32 apps - the Contacts database doesn't let you define your own arbitrary fields, and doesn't automatically search the full content of all fields. Those were really nice features of the 3 series that they needn't have abandonned.
Finally the killer app for Psion was always... the Infocom text adventure interpreter. I've loved being able to play infocom games on the machine in my pocket. How cool is that!
Just like Acorn before it Psion fucked up the US market and failed because of it. And weirdly enough they did it in basically the same way. There's really only 2 things you need to understand to succeed in selling technology in the US, and yet somehow no British company has yet been able to crack them, even though both Acorn and Psion had ample opportunity. Those two things are: (1) market presence (ie distribution & advertizing) and (2) price. You've got to be cheaper than the competition. That sounds basic, but somehow its hard to grasp. I think part of the problem is that in Britain you can get away with selling a better product at a higher price. So British companies export to America, which increases the price further, and then wonder why no one's buying. Well, the answer is because Americans buy the thing that works at the cheapest price. And if you're not the cheapest you won't succeed.
So there it is. Psion got creamed by Palm, even though for many people the Psions were better products, and even though (for a good time) Psion's were far more popular than Palms in the UK.
So what's left? Well I for one still want to own the best handheld computer. And my spec's are prety close to the Revo -- a small clamshell, with a great screen and keyboard (backlighting would be good, color not necessary, more responsive keys than the Revo, please), long, long battery life, reliable. Good software apps, including a real nice calculator & strong encryption. The most important interfaces are for tasks and to-do list management (a hierarchical to-do list would be great), agenda and contact management.
The killer app? Unmetered metropolitain area wireless internet. Of course.
(Most/all?) cisco routers do most of the work of moving packets from one interface to another entirely in hardware. The packet never hits the CPU at all. The CPU is there mostly to maintain the routing tables. It doesn't DO the routing at all.
On a (PC) linux box, not only must every packet be routed explicitly by the CPU, but all traffic must go across the PCI bus, twice. A PC is just not the right architecture for a high traffic router.
It seems to me that it is rather hard to pin down exactly what a renewable or sustainable power source consists of. There are plenty of power generation sources that look renewable when used on a small scale, but turn out to not be renewable when used on a large scale.
For example, after having built a few small hydro-electric plants, you notice that you can get loads of electricity out of them for almost no ongoing costs, and you don't end up with horribly polluted cities like you did when you were burning coal. So you say, "Great! Let's go build hydro-dams", and you set off round the country looking for good spots on large rivers to start erecting dams.
Fast forward a few decades. Suddenly hydro isn't looking so exciting. You've dammed up all your large rivers at massive public cost -- it turns out building dams is really difficult. Most of the dams you've built came in over-budget and aren't generating as much electricity as they were supposed to. The eco-systems down river of the dams are trashed because they aren't getting enough water. The eco-systems up river are trashed because they're flooded. When the dam was closed you flooded a bunch of great farm land, and now all the vegetation on that land is rotting under water and releasing tons of greenhouse gasses. But you've still got lots of electricity for the future, right? Wrong. It turns out all your dams are filling up with sediment, and are going to be useless in a few years anyway.
That's when you turn to nuclear... same deal. Supposed to be cheap, clean and renewable. Turns out to be expensive, dangerous and polluting. The people who told us to pay them to build nuclear plants and who said they'd be safe and cheap don't seem to be home when the plants need to be decomissioned, or when it comes to being legally liable for meltdown risk.
So what above wave power? Well it sounds like there's a pretty good chance that it's going to be a lot less damaging than coal, nuclear or hydro, and we should certainly start using it in wider deployments. We sure could use better alternatives to what we're doing now. But lets not just assume that building wave barriers entirely around every coastal country isn't going to have some environmental impact -- to figure that out you'll need ecologists paid by industry independent organizations, whose opinions will be listened to and not just swept under the carpet (as in the case of Nuclear or Hydro).
Final point -- the real win optimizations here are to decrease our needs for energy by looking for less energy intensive technologies and by reducing the uses that we do have. Anyone still using incandescent light bulbs? And what the hell happened to Green PCs? Those high power PIII and Athlon processors burning up more juice than ever before. What do you think those fans and heat sinks are for?
The incentive for invention of better low-power technologies will be commercial. That means that electricity costs should reflect actual production costs, and that means we have to stop subsidising (non-renewable) electricity generation with taxes.
My only interaction with PKI has been in buying certificates for SSL web servers. But even in such a limited domain I have several complaints, which I imagine are probably shared by other admins:
Getting a certificate is slow (may take several weeks) and expensive (~$100/year), making it prohbitive to small organizations and individuals. Only capital rich organizations should have encryption is the moral of that story!
The technology is too complicated. Installing a cert is a pain, and riddled with unneccessarily complex encryption jargon. All I want is a secure web server, but to get it I have to learn about a variety of different certificate and key formats.
The browser makers (who distribute the top-level certs) operate a functional cartel with the certificate companies (Verisign, Thawte etc), to prevent real competition for certficate producers. You need to be in the club to get your certs distributed, and hence recognized by browsers.
The certificate companies have no interest in providing certificate granting authority certificates. For example, suppose I'm a large organization such as a University, and I want the right to grant certificates for departments, units and individuals within my organization (on the grounds that I, the bureaucracy have the tools to authenticate their identities). Even though the technology permits this -- I could have a certificate granting certificate, issued by one of the cert. companies. It won't happen. The reason being that the cert companies have no incentive to give away their primary business asset -- the right to create certs.
So my response is this: Lets push for PGP as the new infrastructure. It is inherently devolved, because if you have a PGP key you automatically have the right to sign someone elses key -- everyone can be a certificate authority. PGP could be bundled with web browsers and email software, along with a few central PGP keys (such as verisign and thawte). Then we could really start building that web of trust.
Polyserve Understudy will let you cluster any combination of FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris and NT for loadsharing and failover. You used to be able to get prices on the web site, but I can't find them there now.
Yeah, Acorn's RiscOS screen font system was perhaps the best so far. It's all in the details. I remember Acorn documentation that made a big deal about the advanced hinting that they used. That meant that each font file included hints -- vertical and horizontal guidelines for each character which show where the important features of the character are. That way you could be consistent in allocating the same number of pixels to similar features in different chracters in the font. Evidently that improves the readability substantially.
Does anyone know to what extent modern font formats (TrueType and Adobe type 1) allow for hints in the font files? Do on screen rendering systems follow those hints?
Also does anyone else think that Microsoft's anti-aliasing policy is daft? Windows will automatically NOT anti-alias fonts smaller than 14 points. That seems ridiculous to me. Anti-aliasing is a technique that uses color depth as a substitute for resolution. Surely it is specifically at small font sizes, when you have a lower available resolution relative to the chracter height, that you most want anti-aliasing. In my experience this theory is born out in practice too -- small sized fonts are (IMHO) much more readable when anti-aliased. It's one of the main reasons that anti-aliasing is useful/important.
So, lets make anti-aliasing at least an option that you can turn on/off -- for example I want anti-aliased fonts always. Someone else could set to anti-alias only fonts larger, or smaller than a certain size.
Slashdot Mirror
> stop beating up all americans. beat up the media
> moguls who dont have the balls or the will to tell
> everyone about this stuff. i am an american. i want
> my country to "play fair".
I don't think it has anything to do with balls. "The Media" is entirely corporate. You don't hear about protectionism and the hypocrisy of "free trade" rhetoric on television, in the newspapers or in magazines because those media are owned by large corporations that have the same interests as the companies that protectionism and "free trade" protect. If you want to learn about how powerful and corrupt corporate America and corporate politics are you're going to have to turn off the TV, because the people who own TV are never, ever going to tell you that stuff.
Looks like a nifty device. Gotta love having a keyboard. All it needs now to be the all purpose on-the-go geek tool is an SSH client. Of course if it ran EPOC (the O/S developed and used in Psion PDAs) it would already have that plus an Inform interpreter (for all the adventure games addicts out there) a bunch of games and databases, a macro programming language and all sorts of other good stuff. But it's not based on EPOC *or* on PalmOS so it doesn't. Too bad. When is someone going to come out with a small IP wireless device with a long battery life, a keyboard and an open API? Come on Handspring, you can do it.
The Frontier Labs Nex II is awesome. Rumour has it that they are wokring on OGG for the next version.
Frankly whether it has USB 2 or Firewire is really an uninteresting question -- who really cares? Whichever it has, that's the interface you use. If you don't have that interface, you buy one. Done deal. The interesting questions are:
1) Is the user interface usable?
2) How long is the battery life?
3) How big is it?
4) When will it support Ogg Vorbis format?
5) Is the user interface usable?
To embrace all of these functions one needs at the minimum an all purpose file server. The manifesto for such a service would be something like this:
- accessible from anywhere
- using any device
- by only the user (+ the sysadmins perhaps)
- access secured with strong encryption
- reliable service (backup systems available)
- data available using standard protocols
- all information readable and writeable and searchable
- information indexed in a way that makes sense to the user
Much of the information stored might be considered 'work-related' but there's also plenty here that should be considered 'personal'. Would one require several roles or personalities - one for work, one for home, indeed one complete set of data for each hat that you wear? It seems that whilst that would provide a certain level of useful separation, for example by allowing you to keep work contacts separate from personal contacts, it would also lead to troublesome fragmentation. You probably want to know for example when your home and work calendars conflict.There are a couple of ways to solve that problem. One would be to have a single repository for all your information, with some type of tagging to say which info belongs to which role. This has the advantage that all your information is accessible from one place. The other approach would be to have multiple information stores, but to allow the client device (PC, phone, PDA whatever) to access several different data stores and combine the information retrieved from each. Whilst this approach invloves a greater level of client complexity, and reduced reliability due to dependence on multiple services it has the advantage of allowing diversity in the server strategies of different organizations providing service to one individual.
The question of who would be trusted to run such a system is one not of technology but of policy. It seems likely that no institution with an interest in the contents of my personal information should be trusted with it. Clearly this includes my employer, the government, or a private corporation constrained by profit interests. What is needed is an impartial institution. This suggests a potential solution - a legal structure similar to the 'common-carrier' status of telephone companies. Phone companies don't care what you talk about on the phone. They're legally required not to care. What is needed is a 'common-storage' status. That status could be given to private companies who are regulated as digital storage providers. Those companies would be legally constrained not to misue the stored information, for example not to reveal it to third parties, or to use the information in ways not explicitly granted by the end users.
Under the category of utopian novels, I nominate Pacific Edge, the third of the Three California's trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Each of the three books tells an alternative future of Orange County California. The first is post-apocalyptic, the second is dystopian, and the third is eco-utopian. In Pacific Edge he tells a story of the struggles of a 2065 community fifty years after the US collectively decided to abandon heavy industry, outlaw large corporations, and replace concrete metropolis cities with small sustainable interconnected communities. Without preaching, Robinson draws the reader into the story of his characters' lives in this naturally beautiful could-be world. Another gem from the author of the Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy.
In to build Ogg Vorbis support into hardware players a decoder implementation that uses integer math is required. The current Xiph implementation uses floating point math, which most hardware decoders do not have. The main impediment to writing an integer math version of the decoder was, until recently, the lack of a good Vorbis specification. See Rob Leslie's complaint from April 2002 (commented here ).
Since the specification is now available, building an integer implementation should now be feasible and hardware implementations may be forthcoming. Is anyone working on this?
I bought a Nex II for my girlfriend to go jogging. She was running pretty hard and found that even a MiniDisc player with a large skip protection memory wasn't sufficient -- it would skip at least once a minute. The MiniDisc just can't handle tracking whilst being shaken up and down rigorously and consistently. Based on that experience, an mp3 CD player clearly wasn't the answer, and a hard drive player seemed highly inadvisable -- aren't head crashes usually fatal to a hard drive? Maybe laptop drives are better protected, but that seems like a big investment to risk.
The Nex II being solid state of course has none of these problems. It's very robust. Runs off of AA batteries, which is a huge plus, because they're so cheap. And of course you can use rechargeables if you want.
I got a 256MB compact flash card to go with it for ~$100. That stores about 6 CDs worth at 128Mbit/s. Thet seems really important to me -- get as much memory as possible. 64 or 128MB would be quite limiting, I think.
The Nex II looks cool. It plays well. Good quality audio IMO. The headphones that come with are the variety that attach behind your head and over your ears. They seemed a little weird at first glance, but I found them surprisingly comfortable.
You can organize songs into sub-directories. It can play files in order or shuffled. I think it also has playlists, but I couldn't figure out how to make that work.
My only gripe is that when you turn it off it doesn't start up where you left off. I'd give it a 4 star recommendation (out of 5).
What's the power of the Slashdot effect? Can we make s significant impact by raising the money to make this fabulous software available for free? It would set a high bar for the quality of all 3d software. Blender would be the base measure -- if you've got 3d software you wanna sell, it's gotta be better than Blender, 'cos that's free.
This is a great opportunity for Slashdot to show what it can do. I just made my $50 donation. Let's make it happen.
So, what's the story? How did you figure out that that's the password?
Looks like the three files for the database were created by Norton ... backup? I just downloaded the freeware version of Backup Key key recovery program which claims to have found a Norton backup password in the file. Of course it won't tell you what the password actually is unless you pay for the program.
Last time I was at Heathrow (not Swanick) there was an NT Blue Screen of Death on one of the arrival/departure monitors. There's reliable computing for you.
The only way to have a reliable anything is to make sure that you have a backup setup and ready to go. In the case of connectivity, if your main link is DSL you should have a backup dial-up connection. Preferably it should be with a different ISP, and would be even better with a different backbone provider. Test the dial-out. If you have two phone lines, make sure that you can dial-out on the non-DSL line, in case your first phone line gets disconnected. Make sure you can still get your email, and get to the servers using the dial-up.
DSL is still a relatively unreliable technology. People who need reliable remote connectivity still often use ISDN for that reason -- it may be be a bitch to set up, but once it's working it doesn't tend to flake out on you like DSL. Dial up may not be as nice as DSL, but its a heck of a lot better than nothing.
A response to the 9/11/2001 World Trade center and Pentagon crashes
This morning the Pentagon and World Trade Center towers were bombed by hijacked planes. How will the United States react to this attack? How will the people of this country come to understand these events, and what will be done as a result?
The citizens and residents of this country have the responsibility to guide our leaders in how we respond. The tendency amongst our politicians and media will be knee-jerk retalitation. Please let us resist the temptation to cause more harm than has already been done. Those who took these actions are now all dead along with the victims. Others may also be found to be responsible and they should be bought to justice through the process of international law.
This, like all acts of terrorism, is abhorrent. But whenever discussing terrorism it is important to note that the majority of terrorist actions are carried out by nation states, although they are not labeled as such by the corporate media. These actions far outweigh the private, individual actions of terror that we are all assuming today's attack to be. This attack did not occur in a vacuum.
As of yet we have no idea who is responsible. We believe it to be a case of 'blowback'. Why? The pentagon is a symbol of military power. The trade center is a symbol of economic power. These institutions stand for and act to perpetuate U.S. global dominance. An attack on either of these institutions individually could be variously interpreted. The combined attack on both suggests a target of US global hegemony.
As Chalmers Johnson writes in his book Blowback (publ. 2000, Henry Holt): 'The term "blowback", which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of "terrorists" or "drug lords" or "rogue states" or "illegal arms merchants" often turn out to be the blowback from earlier American operations.'
Chalmers catalogues a number of American policies that have given cause to a variety of peoples to resent America. Among those peoples that we have antognized over the past 50 years he sites (in no particular order) Libyans, Chinese, Japanese, Saudis, Kurds, Koreans (both north and south). To that we could add peoples of Serbia, Iraq, Indonesia, Vietnam, as well as nearly every country in africa and the americas.
From Johnson again: 'Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the invulnerable. The innocent of the twenty-first century are going to harvest unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent decades. Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep price--individually and collectively--for their nation's continued efforts to dominate the global scene.'
As we move forward from today's disaster, lets beware of nationalist responses of revenge which serve to continue the cycle of violence. Let us introduce the concept of 'blowback' to contextualize acts of international terrorism, even as we argue against them. Let us take this opportunity to rethink the global effects of our behavior and how they impact our future security.
Joseph Maurer (josephmaurer@hotmail.com)
Oliver Crow (ocrow@skymind.com)
I've owned Psion handhelds since 1992. I first had a Series 3, then a 3a, a 3c and most recently a Revo. Psion has had the best software and the best hardware for handhelds for the last ten years. I've tried others, WinCE, Palm, and at one point Newton and none of them compared. The original Series 3 had a preemptive multitasking operating system. I remember they days when I was running multi-tasking apps on my Psion and Windows 3.1 on my PC. Hah!
... the Infocom text adventure interpreter. I've loved being able to play infocom games on the machine in my pocket. How cool is that!
To my mind having a keyboard has always been a huge advantage for the Psion over the Palm. Taking notes, even writing letters and documents on my Psion has never been a problem. Psions have always had crazy long battery lives and running out of memory has never been a problem because their data file formats are so compact. These are really important issues for a handheld, I think.
The Revo was in a lot of ways a big improvement over previous models. It was small and sleek (unlike the Series 5), had a touch sensitive screen, and a Palm like docking and charging cradle. However in other ways it was a step backwards. The keyboard shortcuts weren't as good as on the Series 3 machines, which meant that you had to use the stylus (or your thumb on the screen). That's not as fast as using they keyboard. Also they messed up the calculator app, trying to make it look like a pocket calculator. The 3 version was much more powerful, and easy to use -- a viewable, scrollable, editable back log of previous calculations *and* results. Plus user importable programmable functions. Really nice. Other complaints about the Revo/EPOC32 apps - the Contacts database doesn't let you define your own arbitrary fields, and doesn't automatically search the full content of all fields. Those were really nice features of the 3 series that they needn't have abandonned.
Finally the killer app for Psion was always
Just like Acorn before it Psion fucked up the US market and failed because of it. And weirdly enough they did it in basically the same way. There's really only 2 things you need to understand to succeed in selling technology in the US, and yet somehow no British company has yet been able to crack them, even though both Acorn and Psion had ample opportunity. Those two things are: (1) market presence (ie distribution & advertizing) and (2) price. You've got to be cheaper than the competition. That sounds basic, but somehow its hard to grasp. I think part of the problem is that in Britain you can get away with selling a better product at a higher price. So British companies export to America, which increases the price further, and then wonder why no one's buying. Well, the answer is because Americans buy the thing that works at the cheapest price. And if you're not the cheapest you won't succeed.
So there it is. Psion got creamed by Palm, even though for many people the Psions were better products, and even though (for a good time) Psion's were far more popular than Palms in the UK.
So what's left? Well I for one still want to own the best handheld computer. And my spec's are prety close to the Revo -- a small clamshell, with a great screen and keyboard (backlighting would be good, color not necessary, more responsive keys than the Revo, please), long, long battery life, reliable. Good software apps, including a real nice calculator & strong encryption. The most important interfaces are for tasks and to-do list management (a hierarchical to-do list would be great), agenda and contact management.
The killer app? Unmetered metropolitain area wireless internet. Of course.
(Most/all?) cisco routers do most of the work of moving packets from one interface to another entirely in hardware. The packet never hits the CPU at all. The CPU is there mostly to maintain the routing tables. It doesn't DO the routing at all. On a (PC) linux box, not only must every packet be routed explicitly by the CPU, but all traffic must go across the PCI bus, twice. A PC is just not the right architecture for a high traffic router.
For example, after having built a few small hydro-electric plants, you notice that you can get loads of electricity out of them for almost no ongoing costs, and you don't end up with horribly polluted cities like you did when you were burning coal. So you say, "Great! Let's go build hydro-dams", and you set off round the country looking for good spots on large rivers to start erecting dams.
Fast forward a few decades. Suddenly hydro isn't looking so exciting. You've dammed up all your large rivers at massive public cost -- it turns out building dams is really difficult. Most of the dams you've built came in over-budget and aren't generating as much electricity as they were supposed to. The eco-systems down river of the dams are trashed because they aren't getting enough water. The eco-systems up river are trashed because they're flooded. When the dam was closed you flooded a bunch of great farm land, and now all the vegetation on that land is rotting under water and releasing tons of greenhouse gasses. But you've still got lots of electricity for the future, right? Wrong. It turns out all your dams are filling up with sediment, and are going to be useless in a few years anyway.
That's when you turn to nuclear ... same deal. Supposed to be cheap, clean and renewable. Turns out to be expensive, dangerous and polluting. The people who told us to pay them to build nuclear plants and who said they'd be safe and cheap don't seem to be home when the plants need to be decomissioned, or when it comes to being legally liable for meltdown risk.
So what above wave power? Well it sounds like there's a pretty good chance that it's going to be a lot less damaging than coal, nuclear or hydro, and we should certainly start using it in wider deployments. We sure could use better alternatives to what we're doing now. But lets not just assume that building wave barriers entirely around every coastal country isn't going to have some environmental impact -- to figure that out you'll need ecologists paid by industry independent organizations, whose opinions will be listened to and not just swept under the carpet (as in the case of Nuclear or Hydro).
Final point -- the real win optimizations here are to decrease our needs for energy by looking for less energy intensive technologies and by reducing the uses that we do have. Anyone still using incandescent light bulbs? And what the hell happened to Green PCs? Those high power PIII and Athlon processors burning up more juice than ever before. What do you think those fans and heat sinks are for?
The incentive for invention of better low-power technologies will be commercial. That means that electricity costs should reflect actual production costs, and that means we have to stop subsidising (non-renewable) electricity generation with taxes.
We also need to stop the growth of world population.
Getting a certificate is slow (may take several weeks) and expensive (~$100/year), making it prohbitive to small organizations and individuals. Only capital rich organizations should have encryption is the moral of that story!
The technology is too complicated. Installing a cert is a pain, and riddled with unneccessarily complex encryption jargon. All I want is a secure web server, but to get it I have to learn about a variety of different certificate and key formats.
The browser makers (who distribute the top-level certs) operate a functional cartel with the certificate companies (Verisign, Thawte etc), to prevent real competition for certficate producers. You need to be in the club to get your certs distributed, and hence recognized by browsers.
The certificate companies have no interest in providing certificate granting authority certificates. For example, suppose I'm a large organization such as a University, and I want the right to grant certificates for departments, units and individuals within my organization (on the grounds that I, the bureaucracy have the tools to authenticate their identities). Even though the technology permits this -- I could have a certificate granting certificate, issued by one of the cert. companies. It won't happen. The reason being that the cert companies have no incentive to give away their primary business asset -- the right to create certs.
So my response is this: Lets push for PGP as the new infrastructure. It is inherently devolved, because if you have a PGP key you automatically have the right to sign someone elses key -- everyone can be a certificate authority. PGP could be bundled with web browsers and email software, along with a few central PGP keys (such as verisign and thawte). Then we could really start building that web of trust.
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Yummy wooden cases to be bought here: Tech-Style
Polyserve Understudy will let you cluster any combination of FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris and NT for loadsharing and failover. You used to be able to get prices on the web site, but I can't find them there now.
Yeah, Acorn's RiscOS screen font system was perhaps the best so far. It's all in the details. I remember Acorn documentation that made a big deal about the advanced hinting that they used. That meant that each font file included hints -- vertical and horizontal guidelines for each character which show where the important features of the character are. That way you could be consistent in allocating the same number of pixels to similar features in different chracters in the font. Evidently that improves the readability substantially. Does anyone know to what extent modern font formats (TrueType and Adobe type 1) allow for hints in the font files? Do on screen rendering systems follow those hints? Also does anyone else think that Microsoft's anti-aliasing policy is daft? Windows will automatically NOT anti-alias fonts smaller than 14 points. That seems ridiculous to me. Anti-aliasing is a technique that uses color depth as a substitute for resolution. Surely it is specifically at small font sizes, when you have a lower available resolution relative to the chracter height, that you most want anti-aliasing. In my experience this theory is born out in practice too -- small sized fonts are (IMHO) much more readable when anti-aliased. It's one of the main reasons that anti-aliasing is useful/important. So, lets make anti-aliasing at least an option that you can turn on/off -- for example I want anti-aliased fonts always. Someone else could set to anti-alias only fonts larger, or smaller than a certain size.