On the one hand, I believe he's saying that the ISP should not make the choice for its customers as to what mail it accepts and what mail it doesn't accept. I have to agree with this, it's a slippery slope and easily abused. However I believe a lot of customers are happy to have their ISP try to reduce the amount of spam they receive.
Yes. I don't know of anyone offering unfiltered mail as an added value service.
There will always be people who still buy computers that price in the thousands. These are people who need and want more powerful PCs. I doubt most gamers would care for the $350 PC.
What is the X-box if not that? I know you mean high-end gamers who sneer at PS2 & friends. But actually the games market is slowing down, if anything. The last game I bought only required a 166MHz PC (OK it was cheap) but ones I bought years earlier needed a 133MHz. The price point for the typical game seems to be slipping down the range.
and what ever happened to the ipv6 mac address privacy fiasco? It was always (mostly) a non-issue. With IPv4 you could:
1) Use manually assigned addresses. Fiddly and error prone.
2) Use server assigned (DHCP). Flexible but can be overkill.
With IPv6 you have a third option: (roughly) just use your MAC address the host part of the address. Instant simple, unique address. This was always an additional option on what you had already.You could always set your address manually or by DHCP.
Decnet-V had exactly this scheme, and nobody said anything about it. And GUIDs were fairly uncontroversial. It's only recently folks have worried more about their online privacy.
Anyway, a lot of people made a fuss, and the IPv6 folks said 'Oh yeah we'll think about that'. And some wrote Internet drafts and others bitched on/.
Finally, the drafts became an RFC (3041) and some read it and said "verily this standard will safeguard our privacy, let us go forth and implement it". And others looked upon it saying "yeah, this is not news".
If you pay X at purchase or if you pay X at recycle time you still pay the same amount!
Yes, I realise that. What I meant was that, having bought it, the easiest way of disposing of it is likely to recycle it. As opposed to requiring a fee to dispose of it, which rewards anti-social behaviour.
It would be useful to have a system that encourages manufacturers to develop equipment easier/cheaper to dispose of. Then they would have an competitive advantage to develop such equipment.
Charging a recycling fee is only going to make people throw their computers (and worse monitors) into the trash (or worse the river) instead of properly disposing of them.
That's why you charge the fee at purchase time. Hopefully this makes recycling it a low cost option.
Just tested ECMAScript on Mozilla 0.9.8. I got 25 failures and 63 errors out of 290 runs! It is not very good, isn't it? IE6 gives 18 failures and 10 errors. Really sad...
Well that's one way of looking at it. Support for the DOM in IE has been pretty good for a while; it's just that they didn't draw attention to it by dropping their proprietary DOM. CSS on the other hand...
However, if IE/Mozilla/Opera/etc. are competing to get these errors down then everyone wins. It's a virtuous circle; I'm mildly optimistic about the web when I see vendors compete to improve support for standard features.
Yes, it's slightly sad for Mozilla that it lags in these tests. However, it's good for everyone in the long run if there are independent tests published and people care about the results.
It's not a zero sum game. Better standard support in IE makes it easier for developers to write corss-platform code.
How do they get a warrant without proof that you're using pirated software? What's the level of probable cause needed
"Your honour, we believe this company is using pirated software. Here is a sworn statement from Mr. Pissed Off ex-employee to that effect, and a letter from the company declining our request to co-operate with a voluntary audit."
Hey. I would take the chance to bust ass for three or four years for permanent financial stability.
Well maybe. If you were locked in a cupboard somwhere. However, you have to get on with your boss and co-workers. Most great feats of hacking are done for the love of it: I don't believe that most people could carry it off once they lost faith in what they were doing.
Its a shame, as I think this has gravity for the rest of the world. Guess the best we 'UKians' (thats an evil word, apologise;-) can do is keep informing the rest of the population of our Isles that they _do_ have a choice, and it is theirs to make.
To be honest, I am more than happy not to have any redress through the American courts. Yes, any ruling made in the US will affect us here. And sometimes decisions made by the EU affect America.
That's almost inevitable in a global economy: however, I don't find it particularly desirable because it's essentially undemocratic to move power to people who are unaccountable (or at least only accountable to a different electorate).
It's pretty easy to tell good laws from bad ones, using objective standards:...
Yes, but essentially arbitrary ones. However, they are uninteresting cases; the interesting ones are where the good of the whole conflicts with individual freedoms.
Lots of laws need to set dividing lines: for example, how drunk or short-sighted can I be and still be allowed to drive? If I proposed a law changing the current values either way by a factor of 10 it's pretty clearly bad law. But the principle of the law is unchanged, thus applying your 'objective' test would surely fail to distinguish between them.
I must say I am distinctly unimpressed with the idea that human laws have a certainty that doesn't even exist in the world of mathematics (Church-Turing and all that). It seems to me just another form of political correctness, with its implication that there are provably bad and good laws, and that people with other viewpoints are in some way irrational.
They don't claim they can compress TRUE random data only 'practically random' data. Now the digits of Pi are a good source of 'practically random' data for some definition of the phrase 'practically random'.
Software companies from just about day one, have been doing this.
Call it what you want, a "sunset clause", a "bomb", etc. Basically the software expires and you must pay up for another.
If I buy a limited period licence, that's one thing. If the manufacturer puts them in without saying anything it's immoral; I personally would be asking for a full refund of the purchase price, and the courts would likely support me. YMMV.
I had no cause to view the website prior to this. The site has been fixed on my advice.
Reporting security holes is a dangerous business: check this thread.
Incidentally, under EU protection laws, failing to take reasonable steps to secure personal data may be an imprisonable offence.
Privatisation isn't the problem, the problem is that Brish law (as well as Aussie and Kiwi law) don't allow for oversight groups like the US public utility commisssions.
That isn't so - we've got loads of regulators for utility companies. The relevant one here is Oftel. It's just that they are reluctant to bitchslap the utils.
there is still no fucking formal explanation, Mr. Man.
Well no. It will be looked into by 'committees' - reading between the lines, some sort of board of inquiry will be set up. When you decide to do a formal investigation, you don't preannounce the results even if you have a damn good idea what happened. You make sure your investigation process is transparent and fair to anyone whose career might suffer. These things take time to do properly.
Scientific journals are a backwater. Mostly libraries buy them. No one is getting rich.
This isn't true. Maxwell made his first millions at Pergammon by realising that libraries would continue to buy the journals, almost regardless of price. It's a textbook example of what happens when demand is insensitive to pricing.
Also, web based journals often have even worse restrictions than the RIAA: instead of your $1000 getting this year's edition, you get access for a year to the whole catalog. If you stop paying, you're left with nothing.
This is a very welcome development. It combines the added value of peer review, the backup of print, and the accessibility of the web.
Steganography is supposed to hide messages as well as possible. That's the whole point. So wouldn't a study just find the use of bad steganography, that is, stego that is easy to detect?
Yes but it seems reasonable to infer that if you can't find anyone doing it badly, it's fairly rarely used. It's human nature that for every guru there are 10-100 novices.
Got me there, I wouldnt know of any other commerical OS that would let you hotswap processors or anything...
I believe you can on high-end Sun boxes now, and high-end Alphas soonish. Powering off and replacing failed redundant units, without halting operation, has been around for years on fault tolerant systems.
Remember the equation: one foot equals one nanosecond, or one metre equals three nanoseconds, so one clock tick even from a 333 MHz machine can only travel one metre before the next tick starts out.
Generally speaking the bulk data is transferred in synchronous mode i.e. with a window like TCP. I doubt a few nanoseconds delay would make much difference.
The limit for SE SCSI went down to 1.5m. Add 0.5m internal wiring in each box and you could effectively only add one external peripheral a max of 0.5m away!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. I don't know of anyone offering unfiltered mail as an added value service.
Every site needs a post hamster; it's the little guy that chews up the unwanted mail.
computers that price in the thousands. These are
people who need and want more powerful PCs.
I doubt most gamers would care for the $350 PC.
What is the X-box if not that? I know you mean high-end gamers who sneer at PS2 & friends. But actually the games market is slowing down, if anything. The last game I bought only required a 166MHz PC (OK it was cheap) but ones I bought years earlier needed a 133MHz. The price point for the typical game seems to be slipping down the range.
and what ever happened to the ipv6 mac address privacy fiasco?
/.
It was always (mostly) a non-issue. With IPv4 you could:
1) Use manually assigned addresses. Fiddly and error prone.
2) Use server assigned (DHCP). Flexible but can be overkill.
With IPv6 you have a third option: (roughly) just use your MAC address the host part of the address. Instant simple, unique address. This was always an additional option on what you had already.You could always set your address manually or by DHCP.
Decnet-V had exactly this scheme, and nobody said anything about it. And GUIDs were fairly uncontroversial. It's only recently folks have worried more about their online privacy.
Anyway, a lot of people made a fuss, and the IPv6 folks said 'Oh yeah we'll think about that'. And some wrote Internet drafts and others bitched on
Finally, the drafts became an RFC (3041) and some read it and said "verily this standard will safeguard our privacy, let us go forth and implement it". And others looked upon it saying "yeah, this is not news".
Yes. What the internet needs is an implementation of RFC3093 ;)
Yes, I realise that. What I meant was that, having bought it, the easiest way of disposing of it is likely to recycle it. As opposed to requiring a fee to dispose of it, which rewards anti-social behaviour.
It would be useful to have a system that encourages manufacturers to develop equipment easier/cheaper to dispose of. Then they would have an competitive advantage to develop such equipment.
That's why you charge the fee at purchase time. Hopefully this makes recycling it a low cost option.
Just tested ECMAScript on Mozilla 0.9.8. I got 25 failures and 63 errors out of 290 runs! It is not very good, isn't it? IE6 gives 18 failures and 10 errors. Really sad...
Well that's one way of looking at it. Support for the DOM in IE has been pretty good for a while; it's just that they didn't draw attention to it by dropping their proprietary DOM. CSS on the other hand...
However, if IE/Mozilla/Opera/etc. are competing to get these errors down then everyone wins. It's a virtuous circle; I'm mildly optimistic about the web when I see vendors compete to improve support for standard features.
Yes, it's slightly sad for Mozilla that it lags in these tests. However, it's good for everyone in the long run if there are independent tests published and people care about the results.
It's not a zero sum game. Better standard support in IE makes it easier for developers to write corss-platform code.
"Your honour, we believe this company is using pirated software. Here is a sworn statement from Mr. Pissed Off ex-employee to that effect, and a letter from the company declining our request to co-operate with a voluntary audit."
Well maybe. If you were locked in a cupboard somwhere. However, you have to get on with your boss and co-workers. Most great feats of hacking are done for the love of it: I don't believe that most people could carry it off once they lost faith in what they were doing.
Its a shame, as I think this has gravity for the rest of the world. Guess the best we 'UKians' (thats an evil word, apologise ;-) can do is keep informing the rest of the population of our Isles that they _do_ have a choice, and it is theirs to make.
To be honest, I am more than happy not to have any redress through the American courts. Yes, any ruling made in the US will affect us here. And sometimes decisions made by the EU affect America. That's almost inevitable in a global economy: however, I don't find it particularly desirable because it's essentially undemocratic to move power to people who are unaccountable (or at least only accountable to a different electorate).
Yes, but essentially arbitrary ones. However, they are uninteresting cases; the interesting ones are where the good of the whole conflicts with individual freedoms.
Lots of laws need to set dividing lines: for example, how drunk or short-sighted can I be and still be allowed to drive? If I proposed a law changing the current values either way by a factor of 10 it's pretty clearly bad law. But the principle of the law is unchanged, thus applying your 'objective' test would surely fail to distinguish between them.
I must say I am distinctly unimpressed with the idea that human laws have a certainty that doesn't even exist in the world of mathematics (Church-Turing and all that). It seems to me just another form of political correctness, with its implication that there are provably bad and good laws, and that people with other viewpoints are in some way irrational.
Scratch Tektronix, NCD bought them out.
They don't claim they can compress TRUE random data only 'practically random' data. Now the digits of Pi are a good source of 'practically random' data for some definition of the phrase 'practically random'.
Call it what you want, a "sunset clause", a "bomb", etc. Basically the software expires and you must pay up for another.
If I buy a limited period licence, that's one thing. If the manufacturer puts them in without saying anything it's immoral; I personally would be asking for a full refund of the purchase price, and the courts would likely support me. YMMV.
Reporting security holes is a dangerous business: check this thread. Incidentally, under EU protection laws, failing to take reasonable steps to secure personal data may be an imprisonable offence.
That isn't so - we've got loads of regulators for utility companies. The relevant one here is Oftel. It's just that they are reluctant to bitchslap the utils.
Also in a faraday cage, powered by batteries.
;)
Careful of those batteries now: they are getting too damn smart. I'm waiting for the first battery virus
Well no. It will be looked into by 'committees' - reading between the lines, some sort of board of inquiry will be set up. When you decide to do a formal investigation, you don't preannounce the results even if you have a damn good idea what happened. You make sure your investigation process is transparent and fair to anyone whose career might suffer. These things take time to do properly.
This isn't true. Maxwell made his first millions at Pergammon by realising that libraries would continue to buy the journals, almost regardless of price. It's a textbook example of what happens when demand is insensitive to pricing.
Also, web based journals often have even worse restrictions than the RIAA: instead of your $1000 getting this year's edition, you get access for a year to the whole catalog. If you stop paying, you're left with nothing.
This is a very welcome development. It combines the added value of peer review, the backup of print, and the accessibility of the web.
Yes but it seems reasonable to infer that if you can't find anyone doing it badly, it's fairly rarely used. It's human nature that for every guru there are 10-100 novices.
The canonical reference is: Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality.
Note particularly that Van Jacobson was able to obtain measured TCP throughput of 8Mb/s in the 80's.
There is a good review of the area in the O'Reilly book on Ethernet too.
I believe you can on high-end Sun boxes now, and high-end Alphas soonish. Powering off and replacing failed redundant units, without halting operation, has been around for years on fault tolerant systems.
Generally speaking the bulk data is transferred in synchronous mode i.e. with a window like TCP. I doubt a few nanoseconds delay would make much difference.
The limit for SE SCSI went down to 1.5m. Add 0.5m internal wiring in each box and you could effectively only add one external peripheral a max of 0.5m away!
Assuming you don't use Ultra2 or above. HVD is at most 25m; and doesn't support Ultra160 at all.