Al Hoang

Seems that public hotspots are becoming a good place for those not so
nice in the IT world to unleash viruses, sniff sensitive information out
of the ether, etc etc.

This article
mentions some of things that are happening as well as some methods to
combatting attacks.

In general:

• Have a firewall on your own machine up
• If you’re not using the network, turn it off
• Encrypt your communications as much as you can

Read more yourself

The things you expect to bargain for are houses, cars, consumer electronics,
clothing, food… If possible, you will haggle for just about anything.
Haggling is to prevent you from being cheated or ripped off.

Check how Chinese you are

It seems Guy Steele’s latest effort is on a programming language
called Fortress:

Fortress focuses on the needs of programmers who work in mathematical
disciplines and disciplines such as physics and chemistry that rely
extensively on mathematics.

If the language works out that would be great. While C is a great tool
for programming efficient implementations of Math stuff. it certainly
isn’t a very pretty mapping.

Read the article

Haven’t tried it out myself, however having some variety besides
cygwin SSH,
Putty and
TeraTerm Pro
isn’t a bad thing. Amusing that most of the nice SSH clients are written
by Japanese.

Link to Poderosa

Google’s Gmail system is quite
handy however one major flaw if your native language is Japanese is that
the Japanese support was pretty barren (aka none outside of reading).

Seems Google has quietly fixed that.
Here
is the article (Note article is in Japanese).
Another way to find out is just to check out the Options settings if
you have a Gmail account.

Go look at it yourself

L’année suivante le premier micro-ordinateur au monde voyait le
jour: dès 1973, le Micral N fut construit en série autour du
processeur Intel 8008 cadencé à 500 Khz (environ 50.000
instructions par secondes) avec une mémoire de 16 koctets du type
MOS (metal oxyde semiconductor).

For all of you who forgot your high school French, the big thing to pull
out of that blob of French text is the year 1973. In 1973 a quiet French
guy of Vietnamese origin helped pave the way to the microcomputer revolution.

However, sadly, I don’t thinks news really hit the shores of America so
the birth of the micro-computer is mostly thought to have originated in the
U.S. The power of advertising and belief is not something to be underestimated.

If you build it, they might come. But not in the direction you think they will.

Read a little more on André Truong

Seems that MIT is trying to make a Laptop for the poor for $100. More
info here. Call me a skeptic
however after reading news about the
Simputer not winning the hearts
(and more importantly the wallets) of India’s poorer population I’m
not sure offering a bumped down machine will be a viable solution unless
it can withstand the current heavy economic competition to reduce
computer prices. Here’s a choice quote from iWon News regarding
the Simputer:

Picopeta has sold fewer than 2,000 units in the past 12 months, far below the target of 50,000. Worse, only 10 percent of those Simputers were bought for rural use.

Here are some issues that I think will need to be dealt with:

• Do the poor even have $100? There needs to be some way for them to
  save up for it.
• When you’re worrying about starving, does worrying about the Digital Gap
  really matter?
• Building a special design machine has continuously lost to commodity
  general purpose computers in almost any story I’ve ever read. Unless the
  folks at MIT can inspire MANY manufacturers to take on this challenge then
  Dell probably has an answer.
• Following on the above point, you need to sell millions and millions to
  make the manufacturing/processing costs cheap over time
• If you knew enough about computers and had a choice between getting a ‘real’
  machine and this ’subsidized’ machine. Which would you choose?
• There’s piles of old machines being tossed out by richer countries that
  already come close to the specs needed. How about arrange for a way
  for these machines to go to poorer countries. Might be good for them to
  learn how to fix them. (Okay that sounds like dumping a problem off to
  a bunch of poorer people, but frankly what happens to most of this stuff
  that gets tossed?)

The iWon Simputer article

Slashdot’s story

Need I say more?

Tell me more, tell me more

Ouch… well hopefully the solar industry can get on the right tracks.

To the article