Sapere Aude
Month: January 2002
Quite a few people are losing interest in the real world, and settle for virtual ones like Everquest. A new study calculated the theoretical GNP, and it’s at 77th place. So far, dealing with real cash has been discouraged. If Project Entropia has their way, this will change.
the ultimate goal of the project is a worldwide network monopoly in virtual reality 3D commerce, replacing all existing internet browsers and web interfaces with a single virtual world of millions of users.
joshua allen argues that a lot of the common china bashing is ill-informed
on human rights:
China has 300k in prison and a population of 1.2b, while America has 3m people in prison and a population of 300m.
on tibet:
Even more disturbing is the way that this short document The declaration of the “Tibetan Government in Exile” spends so much time dwelling on the subject of “ethnic purity”. They bemoan the fact that people of other ethnic groups are moving into Tibet and diluting the purity of their race. Freedom of movement seems to be a hallmark of any democracy, so one wonders what kind of democracy these people are hoping to install? Maybe a democracy that doesn’t allow people of various “undesirable” ethnic groups to live there? Maybe an “apartheid” system where only people who were members of the Lama’s religion get to vote?
wow. location-based services. i had always thought that the notion of m-commerce was rather silly, as in getting spammed with sms when you walk by a store. however, attaching metadata (so to speak) to any gps coordinates is really powerful. talk about blurring the lines between meatspace and cyberspace.
the revolution in personal transportation systems continues. after segway made travel by foot convenient, flight is next in line. they claim the biggest issue is stabilization during flight, something the segway guys have apparently a good handle on.
Security is the new number 1 concern for Microsoft. The repercussions of this are still some time off, but the Windows is insecure jokers will have to look elsewhere for amusement. Security has so far been the domain of anal-retentive folks, and was not exactly hot. Maybe we can finally move away from crappy pointer-based languages? Yeah, one can hope.
2003-08-23: Very interesting perspective on the security of DCOM after last week’s worms:
Microsoft has made some pretty strong claims about the improved security of our products as a result of these changes. And then the DCOM issues come to light. Unfortunately, it’s still going to be a long time before all our code is as clean as it needs to be.
Some of the code we reviewed in the DCOM stack had comments about DGROUP consolidation (remember that precious 64KB segment prior to 32-bit flat mode?) and OS/2 2.0 changes. Some of these source files contain comments from the 80s. I thought that Win95 was ancient!
2004-02-17: You’ve got to hand it to these guys that they have sense of humor.
2004-06-24: Turns out Microsoft really means it this time. I had an older SQL Server 2000 running that stopped working after the update. Turns out XP detected the missing service packs for MSSQL and disabled TCP access on the default MSSQL port. Commendable, although the error message could have been displayed more prominently (maybe as part of the new security center)
2007-11-30: Microsoft continues its old lies about security. Why do they bother? Their products have become better, why piss into their own well?
Do people in charge of security strategy at Microsoft really believe that aggressively concealing the count of fixes that do make it out makes a product more secure? Shouldn’t they be trying to fix more bugs, rather than writing reports that would “punish” them for actively improving the security of their users rather than hoping that defects aren’t found by someone who they can’t keep quiet?
uh oh. Gnutella will not scale anywhere near the desired number of users.
On a slow day, a GnutellaNet would have to move 2.4 GB per second in order to support numbers of users comparable to Napster. On a heavy day, 8 GB per second.
but there’s more. apparently Gnutella is insecure as well. and they continue to tell us how hot P2P is going to be. my ass.
a recent article made me feel guilty about hyping up XML. ed dumbill goes after all of them with
HyTime Award for Specifications with Secret Hidden Powers
Dave Winer’s OPML
Most Technically Deficient Initiative Kept Alive by Marketing $
UDDI
Lazarus Award for Seemingly Doomed Yet Surprisingly Persistent Initiative
XLink
Gregor J. Rothfuss 