] A Japanese company by the unfortunate name of tmsuk has
] just announced the world's largest robot capable of
] carrying a person - the 3.5m tall, 5 ton T52 Enryu
] HyperRescueRobot.

Check out the pic!

Slashdot | Your Own Mecha

] Check the year-end reports from the various sectors of
] the entertainment industry, and it's clear that DVD
] stands alone as an unqualified sensation. It's such a
] success that it might even be eclipsing - and
] cutting into - other leisure pursuits.
]
] Each DVD amounts to a consumer devoting money and time to
] watching a movie at home, sometimes in lieu of going to a
] theater or watching TV or listening to a CD.

Are you listening to this RIAA? Its *NOT* only peer2peer trading that is responsible for your sagging sales. There are a number of factors, and probably the biggest is that other entertainment avenues are taking a larger slice of the pie.

If you'd listen, you'd hear consumers voting (with their cash) that other entertainment avenues currently represent a better value for the money then a mediocre CD with 2 good tracks.

LB

DVD's success steals the show

This is fun to watch, and doesn't take up *too* much bandwidth.

NASA TV used to be piped into the cable system at GaTech. Its a little boring most of the time (there isn't enough programming, and its mostly oriented toward elementary school students), but I rarely watched TV, so I left it on often. Everyone once in a while you'd look over and see live views of the Earth from Space. I'm sure there will be lots of interesting programming over the next two months.

Live stream from NASA TV

Desperate solutions range from abandoning email to requiring a license to log on. Halt, fools! The Internet's problems stem from the same virtues that make it great: open architecture, the free flow of information, peer-to-peer cooperation, and a bias for linking strangers, not disconnecting them. Take those away and the Net might cease to infuriate us - but it will also cease to amaze us.

Lightweight, but fun. A good read to kick in the new year.

101 Ways to Save the Internet

Microsoft is a company that got its start writing software for personal computers. The personal computer revolution was a wonderous thing and no one provided a better platform for personal computer software then Microsoft did. But this is almost 2004, and not 1988, and Microsoft is still making software for personal computers, but people are using personal computers in new ways. People are doing things with their personal computers that used to be the exclusive domain of servers, an entirely different class of computers that used to run an entirely different kind of software. People are building infrastructure with their personal computers, and in that light Microsoft isn't looking as good as they used to.

You see, there are really two classes of people who use personal computers. Producers, and consumers; Developers, and Users. Microsoft has built its entire software platform to suit these two classes of users, and this makes sense as these are the people who have traditionally purchased Microsoft products. However, as Microsoft makes the move into the world of infrastructure; into the world of servers; they are entering an area where there are three classes of people who use their products: Developers, Users, and Systems Administrators.

Infrastructures are made of systems of systems that interact in very complex ways, and there is an entire class of professionals who make their living making infrastructures work. Microsoft's platform doesn't anticipate the existence of this class of professionals, and doesn't provide them with tools that are well suited to their jobs, because Microsoft's platform is designed for personal computers, and personal computers do not have Systems Administrators.

For the past decade or so Microsoft has been pushing their platform, designed for Developers and Users, into a world populated by Systems Administrators. They have tried to jam their personal computer software into the world of infrastructure the way you hammer a square peg into a round hole. They've met with constant resistance over the years and yet they have kept hammering away. Every once in a while they've changed something due to the complaints of Systems Administrators. For example, I no longer have to reboot when I change my IP address. But for the most part, they've attempted to route around the entire profession of Systems Administrators through every business and marketing trick in the book, including leveraging proprietary technology. (Of course TCO for a NBT file server IS cheaper with XP then with UNIX; Microsoft controls the protocol!)

The fact is that this strategy is doomed to failure. The fact is that Microsoft doesn't get it. Infrastructure must be reliable. Software systems are complex. Software has bugs, and will always have bugs. Systems Administrators will always be needed to reliably operate infrastructure which interacts in complex ways in spite of software bugs. There is absolutely no getting around this... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

] Friends say the roots of his success lie in his lateral
] thinking - finding the true appeal of an object, often
] ignoring the traditional approach to design. Inspiration
] comes from almost anywhere. The original candy-coloured
] iMac had its roots in gumdrops. The popular transparent
] Apple mouse came from thinking about how drops of water
] sit on a flat surface. An angle-poise desk lamp helped
] inspire the new iMac. The see-through outer casing of
] recent iBooks came from the look that food has when
] wrapped in clingfilm. The iPod is like a cigarette pack
] for those addicted to music instead of tobacco.

Jonathan Ive is a bad ass.

Who is Jonathan Ive and what kind of car does he drive

] Matt Adams has a different idea. He's the co-founder of Blast
] Theory, a digital-arts group based in the United Kingdom
] that creates mobile multiplayer games that fuse wireless
] virtual space with real space.

Worth a look if you're interested in how people might use location based services.

Wired News: On Your Mark, Get Set, Unwire!

This was linked from the Slashdot discussion about that RSS feed. Its worth a look. Some interesting discussion in here about how practical the bit-torrent model is when people have asymetric connections.

konspire2b: a revolution in mass-scale content distribution

Reading this article gave me a fucking headache. If I have to hear someone say the word disruptive, or "win-win" one more time my head will explode. Please, journalists, when asking the technical community to write software for you, please try to refrain from using baby talk. The reason the systems you propose don't exist yet isn't because no one has thought of them, but because no one has time to build them.

Having said that, I'm recommending this article because these are fairly reasonable ideas. Yes your RSS aggregator should be signing up to receive a message anytime something new pops up, instead of going around to 1000 machines and asking every few minutes. As for using bit-torrent as an RSS feed distribution mechanism, yes, but no. Bit-torrent shouldn't know anything about RSS or vice-versa. My take is that bit-torrent should be pushed down below the applications, and it ought to cache any web page you hit if the owner marks it as cachable. Any url you try to pull should get pulled from bit-torrent first, if available.

This would take an apache plugin and something that looks like a driver to windows which sits between the ethernet and tcpip stacks MITMing http connections...

I thought about this two years ago. Why doesn't it exist? Cause no one pays people to write software like that.

Yahoo! News - BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution

This story describes a technology for passing around small XML(?) files that contain a URL from which you can obtain a DRMed music track. Not very exciting from a technological standpoint, but its interesting from a business standpoint.

URLs for music