Slashback: SmoothWall, Gopher, Be

Slashback tonight on the slipping of Be through the fingers of Palm, further squashing of ZeoSync, the age of gophers, the invention of everyone's favorite electric-powered pronoun, and more -- just read on.

But can you backtrack through a google cache? pointym5 writes "Checked out the ZeoSync web site lately? Remember all those PhDs on the scientific staff? Well, like I'm sure others did, I sent e-mail to a few of them expressing interest in more technical details. All that I contacted responded with absolute disclaimers of any relationship whatsoever with ZeoSync. This morning I note that most names are gone from the 'org chart' and the scientific team list. There are only five left, including Dr. Piotr Blass, 'developer of one of the world's first web sites.' Wow!"

How smooth is smooth? juct writes: "I appreciate it, that Slashdot gave the SmoothWall Team an opportunity to answer to the concerns in my review of their firewall. But it is full of errors and might leave a wrong feeling of security. So I invite everybody to my Tour on SmoothWall where you can judge for yourself."

Whispered words of wisdom, 'Let it be.' Sander van Dragt writes: "Many BeOS news lately. Not all so good for the BeOS community though. BeUnited, the organization which tried to license BeOS from Palm, has received today a final answer from Palm: '...we have made a firm decision NOT to license any part of this technology other than that which we incorporate into the Palm OS.' It is already known that the new 32-bit PalmOS will feature some elements of the Be technology, but that OS is built for PDAs, not for the desktop."

You can read that letter and the rest of the article on OS news.

And take this as you will -- An Anonymous Coward writes: "osnews.com is reporting that there is a new version of BeOS on the way... A German company called 'yellowTab' is said to be ready to ship a new version of BeOS (Just when everyone thought it was dead, and the final shovel full of dirt laid on top), get the full article here ... Hrm, I sure liked BeOS, I hope this one works out."

Dig, my brethren -- the Gopher Palace is almost complete! SuperguyA1 writes "Lwn is reporting that the gopher team has done it again with a 3.0 release marking Gopher's 10th anniversary. Happy birthday gopher. Thanks for helping me find all the muds I wasted so much time in college on:)"

"Bad connection, say again, you invented WHAT?" mi writes: "Yahoo! reports a potential problem, the Segway Scooter may have in Japan -- a Japanese robotics professor seems to have a patent on something very very similar since 1996. On the other hand, the USPTO knew about, when granting the patent to Segway's Dean Kamen, but still found Mr. Kamen's invention worthy of a patent in 1999. My favorite is the Kazuo Yamafuji's words: 'I would hand over my patent for one dollar if Mr. Kamen admitted that we were first.' Indeed, he just sat on the invention for 15 years."

Comments

BeOS as Embedded OS

[cliffy2000]

BeOS makes quite a capable OS for embedded systems. It seems completely logical that a portable computing company would want an interest in them. It's one of the most efficient OSes (on a operation/cycle) level and it's compatible with many different boards (x86, PPC, 68k, etc). It's really a waste that Palm's letting it go... in some ways, it's the wave of the future, but I guess (to Palm) it's also a relic of the past.

Gopher

[Syre]

back before I had SLIP (or PPP), the choice was Gopher or WWW via Lynx. Of the two, I found Gopher much easier to use.

If asked, I would have said that WWW was going to be a flash in the pan, and that Gopher was the future.

Oh well...

Segway: Chicken or Egg?

[john82]

The Yahoo article says that the Segway patent mentions Yamafuji's patent. It does not make clear whether the note was made by the USPTO or Kamen. i.e., did Kamen come up with the same idea independently or based on advances over Yamafuji's work? There's also an aside in the article that casts further aspersions on Kamen's stair-climbing wheelchair. That too is patented in the US.

SmoothWall

[Corvidae]

Not trying to be a karma whore here (well, not REALLY trying), but this site really is worth a look if you're thinking about using Smoothwall. IMO, the REAL security concern with it is not the package itself, but the developers in charge of it. I, for one, refuse to support a product led by a group of developers with their heads that far up their ass when it comes to dealing with potential customers. Especially when they beg as loudly as they do for donations...

Re:ZeoSync's Claims

[Azog]

You are correct, they should look up the Pigeonhole principle.

The "Layman Process" explaination of their technology is worth a read just for the amusement value. They claim that it is not a compression technology, but that it works by "sending more data across less bandwidth while saving time", and that it "stores massive amounts of data compared to standard binary compression". Well, that sounds like compression to me. You might think that maybe they're referring to a different encoding method, but no, they also say that the data is able to "move rapidly on a fixed set of binary carriers through existing digital transmission devices".

So: They take binary data, do something magical to it, and then it can go across a digital, binary network, faster than any standard binary compression. OK, so what kind of magic is this?

Moving on to the "Technical Process", they have some astonishingly blatant smokescreen to their impossible claims.

First of all, they talk about the "solution to the Pidgeonhole Principle". Well, that's not something you solve, it just is. That's like saying you've learned to fly by "solving" gravity.

And then they "define" the pidgeonhole principle:

Given a number of pidgeons within a sealed room that has a single hole, and which allows only one pigeon at a time to escape the room, how many unique markers are required to individuall mark all of the pigeons as each escapes, one pigeon at a time? After some time a person will reasonably conclude that: "One unique marker is required for each pigeon that flies throught the hole, if there are one hundred pigeons in the group then the answer is one hundred markers".

Well, that's not what the pigeonhole principle is. The pigeonhole principle is simply: If you have more pigeons than holes, then there must be more than one pidgeon in at least one hole. Conversely, if you have less pidgeons than holes, then there must be at least one hole with no pidgeon.

Getting this basic theory wrong proves that they are either hopelessly ignorant or total frauds.

Furthermore, the reason the pidgeonhole principle disproves ridiculous compression claims is there are exponentially more long bitstrings than short bitstrings. So if you claim to be able to represent every long bitstring (the pidgeons) as a short bitstring, (the holes) then there must be at least two long bitstreams represented by one short bitstream. (Two pidgeons in one hole). But that means you can't tell which long bitstream was represented by the short bitstream, and you don't have a real compression algorithm - at least not a lossless one.

And then, Zeosync's alleged "technical explanation" veers off into the most amazing bullsh*t I've read in a long time:

In higher, multi-dimensional projective theory, it is possible to create string nodes that describe significant components of simultaneously identically yet different mathematical entities."

Simultaneously identical yet different. Sure. Uh-huh. Giggle.

But wait! Reading further, I see that they use the word "lossy". The surrounding context simply doesn't make sense, but if you're talking about lossy compression, the pidgeonhole principle is irrelevant, because it's OK to not know exactly which long bitstream a shorter bitstream encodes - that's the whole point of lossy compression - you loose some detail. But then why discuss the pidgeonhole principle at all?

I hope someone sues these hucksters into a smoking crater. I hate it when people lie about fundamental mathematics.

Re:ZeoSync's Claims

[Azog]

Digging around I found some more interesting stuff. First of all, if you get the PDF org chart, the information on that essentially contradicts the Flash propaganda - the technical staff seems to be divided into two teams, one "Advanced Compression Technologies Team" and one "Singular Bit Varience [sic] Encoder Team".

The org chart also mentions Wavelets, Fractals, and Sub-band compression... So much for the website that claims their technology isn't actually compression...

Maybe, just maybe, the scientists actually do have some sort of interesting compression technology, but the marketing / business people have spun and hyped it up, totally out of control and totally out of touch with reality. But I don't think so - marketing people alone wouldn't be able to come up with the pseudo-scientific drivel on that website.

Moving on, you see that Dr. Burko Fuhrt and Dr. Piotr Blass are from Florida Atlantic University. Sure enough, doing a search of the university website turns up a few computer science classes... but that's interesting... All of Fuhrt's classes for Fall 2001 were cancelled, and they don't seem to be teaching anything in Spring 2002... Blass is an Instructor, apparently not a tenured professor, while Furht is a professor. They don't seem to have home pages so it's hard to know much about them.

Dr. Steve Smale of Berkely, on the other hand, looks like the real thing - a serious mathemetician. Someone should contact him and find out if he knows he's on the Zeosync org chart, and if so, what he thinks of their web site... I'd hate to see a genuine researcher inadvertently associated with something phony.

The Zeosync website claims that John Post of the University of Arkansas is on the Zeosync team, but a search of that University's directory turns up no hits for that name, and he doesn't have a home page there.

Very strange indeed.