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If he were Martha Stewart, he would have gotten a slap on the wrist (and would have still appealed). As it is, I bet he was on some FBI shit list.

By the way, this same sort of thing happened recently with the IEEE and other professional organizations with respect to embargoed axis of evil (TM) countries. They reasoned that if you edit a paper submitted from Iran, you are providing a service to that country. A couple professional societies gave the Treasury Department the finger. In April they finally recently fixed that part of the law so that the organizations are in the clear again.

Government shouldn't block chess or science... Or crypto while I'm at it. :)

You sound oh so very high minded about standards and integrity, but you reveal your trollish prejudices.

For the purposes of our discussion, the only Unix standard that matters is POSIX compliance. Hmmmm, can you think of any POSIX compliant OSes that don't have the Unix (TM) on them?

'POSIX' is also a registered trademark, and must also be certified by and licensed from IEEE/TOG. Moreover, the IEEE charge for the POSIX standards, where as TOG freely distributed the Single UNIX Specification. This is one reason the SUS has largely superceded POSIX, especially for open-source developers.

In any case, I doubt Mac OS X is certified as POSIX compliant either. Apple don't seem to be very keen on certifying their systems with TOG.

TOG's problem is that Apple is only one of many who might want to challenge the Unix trademark's viability in court. So the trademark might not fall this year, as you say, but there's always next time.

That isn't true. Apple call their system 'UNIX', but more ethical firms, e.g. Linux firms like Red Hat, SuSE/Novell, etc., don't make that claim, and the commercial UNIXes (e.g. Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, IBM Z/OS, HP Tru64, HP-UX) have been duly certified.

The only system besides OS X I know of that has used 'UNIX' without certification is FreeBSD. However, the FreeBSD website was changed recently, and no longer claims FreeBSD is 'an advanced UNIX operating system', but claims instead it is simply 'an advanced operating system'. Moreover, the FreeBSD organisation have been working with TOG to achieve verifiable compliance with POSIX (with UNIX certification a likely follow-on). Just last month, the FreeBSD organisation received approval from IEEE/TOG to use material from the IEEE/TOG POSIX/Base standards. This is the sort of thing Apple would be doing if they really cared about standards and UNIX.

I'm not sure why you paint me as being cynical just because I have an inkling of how things work.

It's very simple, really. Apple want to claim their OS is UNIX (even using a UNIX logo similar to the TOG UNIX logo), but won't run the tests and pay the small licensing fee (US$100k) to ensure it's compatible with UNIX. They clearly don't give a toss about standards, unlike, for example, IBM, Sun and HP.

The idea that destroying standards for trivial sums of money and minor convenience is just 'the way things work' is an attitude that I consider quite cynical. I still have hope that Apple will come round (by choice or by the force of the law) and submit OS X for certification. If Apple destroy UNIX, they will be despised by many (including me).

Or maybe you do know how things work, but you astroturf for SCO/MS.

This is actually one reason I'm carrying on with this thread. A lot of people who despise SCO (with good reason) seem to think TOG and the UNIX trademark have something to do with SCO.

The reality is the UNIX trademark and The Open Group have absolutely nothing to do with SCO or SCO's legal claims, and never have. SCO claim to own copyrights to a particular set of source code called UnixWare, which they purchased from Novell, who in turn purchased it from AT&T. (SCO also claim their code is in Linux, but comparisons have shown this is extremely unlikely.)

Like all systems that have been certified to comply with the UNIX standard, SCO UnixWare (originally called UNIX System V) can be called 'UNIX', but it has no special position with respect to the UNIX trademark, which is solely owned by The Open Group. Moreover, SCO's licensed use of the 'UNIX' name would be revoked if UnixWare ceased to comply with the standard (the same applies to any UNIX vendor).

Microsoft have nothing to do with The Open Group either, and in fact their UNIX subsystem (Interix) for the NT kernel was certified by Softway Systems in 1988, before it (Interix) was acquired by Microsoft.

Not taking sides in the discussion whether we have good enough ground-based telescopes or not, an interesting telescope exists, having adaptive optics to compensate for air tremor. More in this article from IEEE spectrum.
Z

Unfortunately 802.11i isn't listed here yet, but here is a link to the full text of the other 802.11 standards. (Free, no registration required)

bzzz

802.11a running at 5.7 GHz is not compatible with either b or g, as they run at 2.4 GHz.

802.11b runs at 11 megabits per second, whereas both 802.11a and 802.11g both run at 54 megabits per second. since 802.11b, and 802.11g both run at the same frequency, they are mostly compatible, but once you get an 802.11b node on a g network, everything slows down to (near) 802.11b speeds for all the g nodes.

802.11a never really took off because it didn't work with existing infrastructure, but since b and g can interoperate, 802.11g is the future as 802.11b quickly becomes an also-ran.

802.11i is the new security protocol that is implemented ontop of 802.11g and presumably a and b. sadly, i'm not familiar with 802.11x so i can't comment on it.

[more info]

This PDF http://www.wi-fi.org/opensection/pdf/whitepaper_wi -fi_security4-29-03.pdf from the WIFI alliance talks about WPA2 near the very end of the document. According to this, WPA2 will use the same 802.1x authentication current used by WPA in enterprise deployments or the PSK mode currently used in home deployments of WPA.

This PDF http://jcbserver.uwaterloo.ca/cs436/handouts/misce llaneous/Intel_Wireless_3.pdf has some interesting technical details about how the AES encryption in 802.11i works.

Unfortunately, it looks like the actual 802.11i specification isn't publically available yet. According to this page http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/ IEEE 802 drafts are publicly available 6 months after they are first published in PDF. I'm assuming this means that the 802.11i standard will be publicly available in 6 months?

But it's really common for an industry standard to contain patented technologies. For example, many emerging communications standards are employing Turbo codes. Now these were invented quite recently, by some French researchers, and they perform incredibly well. But in order to implement these standards, you (or your supplier, or their supplier) have to pay royalties.

The POSIX environment is far better suited to the server market than Windows, and Linux seems to be the popular choice their.

I don't want to invalidate your point, but you have a complete misunderstanding of POSIX. Windows (from 2000 onwards) is in fact POSIX certified, whilst Linux is NOT. Check here: Microsoft compatibility. Linux is POSIX compatible yes, but AFAIK has not been POSIX certified except for a few small realtime Linuxes, like Linux-ft
Go to IEEE for more info on POSIX.

Sony is also developing ultra-flat screen TVs based on carbon nanotube technology that are supposed to be thinner (3/4 inch) and substantially cheaper than (3-inch thick) plasma flat screen TVs. These will be in the 50-inch range. I can't imagine wanting a bigger television in a house, let alone a projector hanging from the ceiling. But apparently Sony thinks there's a home market for humongous projector systems too.

Is this the end of moores law, at least in the form of CPU speeds doubling every 18 months? There are essentially two CPUs, I doubt each of them will get 2x faster the next 1.5 years :)

There have been quite a few posts pointing out that Moore's law actually refers to exponential growth in transistor density rather than speed.

The posters are technically correct, but the term Moore's law has come to encompass any processor-related metric that changes at an exponential pace, including processor performance, clock rate, and power consumption. Of course, these metrics are directly related to transistor size and density, so it makes sense that they have changed exponentially.

For those with access to IEEE articles, Gordon Moore (Intel founder, who Moore's law is named after) wrote an interesting paper called No exponential is forever: but "Forever" can be delayed!.

Check out this article from the Feb 2004 IEEE Spectrum.

Sadly, Nigeria has had a direct link to a huge amount of bandwidth since 2001 that is pretty much completely unused, thanks to the rampant corruption in the area.

And here is direct link to the pretty map of the optical cable ringing Africa.

Check out this article from the Feb 2004 IEEE Spectrum.

Sadly, Nigeria has had a direct link to a huge amount of bandwidth since 2001 that is pretty much completely unused, thanks to the rampant corruption in the area.

And here is direct link to the pretty map of the optical cable ringing Africa.

See previous slashdot discussions of "Open Source Biology And Its Impact on Industry" (slashdot discussion) from 2001, and for how fast costs are falling and skills are spreading "The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies" (slashdot discussion) from 2003.

I am, by the way, posting this from the Synthetic Biology 1.0 Meeting at MIT. Open source is under discussion, as are the risks.

Whittaker has a charismatic, take-no-prisoners style

Jean Kumagai has a nice article (with pictures) on the 2004 race in this month's IEEE Spectrum Magazine

Remember, the only reason the public Internet exists is because the FCC, over the *strenuous* objections of the Bell System, overrode restrictions on "sharing" of leased lines.

Backed by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, AT&T did not allow users to attach devices to connect their telephones to two-way radios or computers and it did its best to block competition into the long-distance telephone market.

The Phd: an exercise in self-aggrandizing behavior with little application to the real world.

In the event you actually research or do something worthwhile your expertise is basically a very tiny narrow slice of the pie in your discipline in which you possess astonishing depth, and you are likely no more knowledgeable about the rest of your field than a masters candidate.

I've worked with a number of Phd candidates in computer science, chemical engineering, history, and life sciences, and then EXPECT (yes, I said expect) one of two things to happen when they graduate:

1. A company offers them quite a bit of money to do the research that *they* love
2. *poof* Tenure track faculty position

in reality now, its usually

1. Teach as an adjunct
2. Try to convince private industry that you're okay taking that 60k a year position as a chemical engineer.. I'm not overqualified, HONEST!

If you're good at what you do, there'll be good jobs for you no matter what path in life you choose. If you're a lazy slackabout, then you're screwed no matter what. There's no "right" or "wrong" answer about whether a PhD is a good choice -- it's about whether it's a good choice for YOU. This is the real reason why people tell you to do something you love -- chances are, you'll be enthusiastic about it and do it well, and success will follow naturally.

The IEEE hasn't even started writing the 802.20 spec, so Nextel can't be using 802.20.

RSA, DH and SHA-1 are not patented (anymore).

For RSA the US patent has expired (Sep 2000). The expiration of the patent was one of the drivers which made RSA appear in more products than ever.

For DH the US patent has expired (Apr 1997).

SHA-1 is not patent-encumbered.

Of course, those were US patents. If anything is not patented in your country, a US patent doesn't really touch you.

Wrong. Good programmers understand how their environment treats numerical values. In Perl(and several other languages) 3 and 3.0 are treated identically. There is nothing wrong with comparing them. Also, based on your comments in this thread it seems clear that you don't know what you are talking about. Go read this, and the other reading material referenced here. If you don't want to, or can't, read and understand that material then please quit spouting off and spreading your misconceptions to others.

1. 36% display
2. 21% digital circuitry (CPU, RAM, etc.)
3. 18% Hard disks
4. 18% Networking
5. 7% Non-critical components

For those exceptionally motivated with IEEE membership, search IEEE Xplore for "predictive shutdown," "dynamic voltage scaling," or "dynamic power management."

Doing a quick search on google I found this

Shows a lot of useful information regarding OLED screens.

may be this would help...

ieee

computing the weather

I find that this technology actually makes a lot of sense in a business environment, specially if coupled with some sort of retina light beam scanning technology. I can envision a meeting where businessmen, while negotiating, could access relevant information about the person they were talking to on the fly, including important corporate information.

There are, however, two major showstoppers. One is the matter of privacy. I may not be interested that everyone I gaze at gets an instant picture of me without my authorization, specially because I'm not all that pretty ;). Second, in societies and cultures where eye contact is just not important or is considered as intrusive an menacing, such as in Japan, the system would just not be functional

But still... great for nerds who can't really tell if a woman is giving them the eye... perhaps with a computer telling them so they'll be more confident ;)

Look at the Task Group's web page and note the security submissions from Certicom. In case you don't know, these are the mob who have extensive patents on elliptic-curve crypto. Guess what they are trying to push into the standard? Yet another standards body corrupted. Hopefully sanity will prevail and someone will force them to include RSA as another option.

Look at the Task Group's web page and note the security submissions from Certicom. In case you don't know, these are the mob who have extensive patents on elliptic-curve crypto. Guess what they are trying to push into the standard? Yet another standards body corrupted. Hopefully sanity will prevail and someone will force them to include RSA as another option.

erm, don't you mean "microtechnology" - i.e. electromechanical devices on the scale of microns? Not sure where nanotechnology is used in a hard drive... correct me if I'm wrong.

I am disgusted by the IEEE position, by the way, and am considering renouncing membership of that organization whose vision I have been aligned with for years.
When you start drawing protective borders you risk much. Where do you draw the border? around a country? Around a state? Around a county? City?

Nope, that's incorrect. A patent, if granted, is valid from the date it is first applied for. This date is called the filing date

He's not incorrect, man. That's how it is now, but until recently the approval date was when they started counting. Read here about previous exploits of this now closed loophole.

If anyone cares and has access to back issues, this appears to be the issue (Sep 1996) I was thinking about.

There was an article in IEEE Spectrum about this a few years ago. I would post the results, but (1) I forget what the article said, and (b) I am lazy.

With d-midi :-)

I found another article in this months IEEE Spectrum to be of more interest. It sounds like science fiction stuff to me, not all what I am used to reading in Spectrum. Anyone ever heard of "electric rainmaking" before?

but what does Gilbert Godfrey have to do with wooden speakers?

He spent so much money on the car that he couldn't afford a laptop with a real NIC:

Here are the results of your search through the public section of the IEEE Standards OUI database report for 0030BD:
00-30-BD (hex) BELKIN COMPONENTS
0030BD (base 16) BELKIN COMPONENTS
501 WEST WALNUT STREET
COMPTON CA 90220
UNITED STATES

Now, my fellow geeks, I ask you: Does this man really deserve our help? I mean seriously -- if he spends more money on his car then his laptop what does that say of his priorities? And what kind of Geek would leave his poor laptop in the car to be stolen?

A real geek would have been driving a Dodge Neon with a laptop that cost so much the value of the car increased by a factor of five when the laptop was being transported. Somehow I doubt his laptop with the cheap Belkin NIC or chipset cost anywhere near this much. Real geeks have Cisco chipsets soldered onto the motherboard of their laptops!

He deserves what he gets!

If you've got ethereal installed, look at file /usr/share/ethereal/manuf and search for the first three bytes of the MAC address:

00:30:BD BelkinComp # BELKIN COMPONENTS

This file is a merging of two sources:

The IEEE public OUI listing:
http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/index.shtml
http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt ...and...

Michael Patton's "Ethernet Codes Master Page":
http://www.cavebear.com/CaveBear/Ethernet/
ftp://ftp.cavebear.com/pub/Ethernet.txt

Hey, my old company is even in that file!

00-30-BD (hex) BELKIN COMPONENTS
0030BD (base 16) BELKIN COMPONENTS
501 WEST WALNUT STREET
COMPTON CA 90220
UNITED STATES

Humans need to get into space simply because Earth is not a closed system. We can't keep all our eggs in this basket at the bottom of a gravity well. The solar system affects us and has more resources than are available on Earth.

Incidentally: " 03/26/04 - SpaceDev Seeks Top Spacecraft Program Managers and Engineers"

Hm. Apple PowerMac G5:

* HyperTransport
* PCI-X / AGP
* DDR SDRAM
* S-ATA
* Gigabit Ethernet
* IEEE 1394b a.k.a. Firewire 800
* USB 2.0

So, tell me, which of these, which will be the only interfaces that you can sanely use, is proprietary?

In the PC world, anything other than an Opteron machine can compare in specs.

quote from "American Pie 2"
milf milf milf milf milf milf.....
In Chile(in developement country) things are picking up as well. in a survey published in Spectrum they rated world internet access and Chile was rated 43(number of computers, broadband acces to the home, education amongst population to acctually use it etc) in the world and the closest i could remember was like 66.
We can get very cheap brodaband from cable, adsl and Wireless, from many companies. Sweeden was number 1 in the world and the US was like 11 or 12.

I RTFLA and the attached pdf . First, let me say that the PDF sums it up, you can avoid the article. Second, I would like to know, according to this pdf, how did the system rate a +8 on a scale of -7 to +7?

Clever AND good looking !

And a Beowulf Cluster?not as stupid either, since Spectrum Magazine Had a report also where some guys put 73 PS2's together and using their graphics processor chip achieved supercomputing proccessor power.

Plans include firing hypervelocity rods from space to targets on the ground

Fuhk 'em rods! Let's throw the entire ISS down!

Just load up Canadarm with Eric Gagne software and WhAm!

Oh wait. That would consist mostly a Canadian weapon with with an international bullet. An American one if we throw Hubbles first.

The rendering software for ROTK is Pixar's Renderman. Ed Catmull, Rob Cook, and Lauren Carpenter received an oscar for it in 2001. According to the site, "Pixar's RenderMan(R) was used in 35 of the last 39 films nominated for a Best Visual Effects Oscar(R) by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences (2004)." An interesting feature article is in the IEEE Spectrum

In the final table, the author chose not to highlight the winning cells if they happened to be for CRT solutions. CRT is a winner in 5 of the 12 catagories: Contrast Ratio, Brightness, Longevity, Burn-In, and Viewing Angle. More than any other solution.

I know that Direct View (and Rear Projection) CRT's days are numbered, but as of today, no other solution provides the same picture quality, at any cost. It will be at least 3 more years before videophiles start making the switch to something better. I'm guessing the winners will be DLP and Carbon Nanotube Field Emission Displays.

Those lists are very suggestive and really depend on the point of view and interest of the writer. Just take a look and you will see that astronaut is both part of the Worst and Best!

Who knows maybe there is some folk out there who really enjoy is job as "Flatus Odor Judge"?

The linked article is actually a story about 9 different people with 9 different jobs, each leading to a separate article.

Actually, like the article says, they really do talk about 10 jobs. They just don't link to the last one in that summary page. Here's the index page:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/contents/index.html

IEEE's the Institute had an article that is definite cotrast to the messages provided b the editors. Salaries for EEs on the Rise, Unemployment Too states that the salary has increased though there are fewer jobs around. The linkd article also states that salary increased for tech types.

The other articles specifically address other aspects of the economy. According to the first article, the increase in salaries has slowed, but is still increasing (keep in mind the charts reflect growth after inflation is removed). The second article talk about low-income earners. People with a college degree or significant technical skills usually are not in that category. The median income in the US for 2002 is $42,409. Notice that of the computer fields, "Information Science" isthe only one with a STARTING salary below the national median (and then it is less than 1% lower).

Not much here... just a troll... move along...

Here is an article about how the Chinese have been blocking content from their citizens. What's interesting is how some American companies, like Yahoo, are cooperating to do business with them.