Five or six FreeBSD committers work for Yahoo!,
including core team member Peter Wemm.
You won't see Yahoo!'s name on these folk's
contributions, but they're substantial.
Yahoo! has helped FreeBSD in many other ways
as well, but for various reasons chooses to keep
quiet about it.
If this is true, why do companies like IBM hold
so many patents?
In fact, IBM gets about a third of its revenue
from patent royalties!
And they're hardly alone at this game -- just the
most successful.
Although patents can protect the little
guy, that's not the way it usually happens.
They just help the big get bigger, and give them
a tool to pry inventions away from the little
guys.
If you don't like the way the
editors run the site, start your own. If you can
do it better than the Slashdot folks, maybe people
will switch to using your site instead.
You'll get "Slashdotted" to oblivion in a minute
if you even tried; Slashdot
puts serious iron behind their site, well beyond
the reach of an upstart competitor.
Part of the reason is Slashcode itself --
dynamically generating each page in PERL from
database queries may be flexible, but it chews
CPU for breakfast.
Although there are some PHP messageboards
around that do better, you'll still need a lot
of grunt for the database server.
And that's not even considering the bandwidth
required (expensive!) to put up a busy
message board, especially one constantly
hit by first-post robots and the like.
And then there are all the half-brained
DoS attacks that
board kiddies will throw at you.
In brief, someone would need a corporate
parent like Shashdot has to have even a chance
at competing.
No hobbyist on a cable modem has a chance.
Not even a smalltime entrepreneur with a
few servers in a colo has much of a chance
unless they can come up with a much more
efficient way of generating the pages while
preserving the features Slashcode provides.
(And they'd need a very tolerant, well-connected
ISP, besides.)
No, Slashdot can continue its decline for a long
time before a real competitor emerges.
That competitor probably
already exists, in relative obscurity.
With luck it will have grown to the point that
it can take the load when it starts getting
popular,
and will have achieved some of the credibility
and community that Slashdot had and is
slowly squandering.
I, too, am a Yahoo-acquired GeoCities engineer;
though I wasn't part of the original Webring
acquisition, once I got to Yahoo it was easy to
see that they had absolutely no use for Webring.
The role that GeoCities bought Webring
for--tying together user's sites by topic
rather than loosely-defined "neighborhoods"--
was accomplished much better through the Yahoo
directory, it was felt.
In the Bubble days Yahoo could afford to
support projects that had only loose connections
to the central site, and so Webring wasn't axed
after the Geo acquisition (as it no doubt would
be in today's climate).
It, too, was to get tied into the directory
somehow (yes, the descendant of David & Jerry's
original "List" was still central to Yahoo,
and is to this day in various guises).
I've no idea how anyone would have got the
idea that adding links back to Yahoo's directory
constituted interstitial ads--that's either a
gross misunderstanding or a false rumor spread
by PO'd ringmasters.
Back then, Yahoo had no need to create more
ad slots--just getting folks to visit the
central site was considered to be of value.
(The old "eyeball"game.)
There is a tragedy here, but no crime.
Webring was a speck on GeoCities' balance
sheet, much less on Yahoo's. Geo might have
done something better with Webring if it (Geo) had
remained independent. But Yahoo's acquisition
of GeoCities left it with no real place.
I'm glad they finally let it go.
As the Jargon file alludes to, pre-Bourne Unix
shells (such as the Edition 6 shell) used a
subprocess called "glob" to perform
wildcard expansion.
This made the shell itself considerably
lighter-weight.
How lightweight?
A couple of KB -- but when you recall that
Unix ran on PDP-11's with as little as 24KB
of memory, keeping the shell small was
important.
IIRC, "glob" was larger than the shell itself
(and when run in a large directory, like/bin,
would grow even larger).
There were suggestions to rename "glob" to
"yolk", but it never happened.
Sure, redundancy is nice.
That's entirely orthogonal to the issue here,
however.
If I have a farm of redundant servers, and one
of them cooks its power supply, with a journaled
file system I can be reasonably sure that the
system will come back up without some
unfortunate sysadmin pulling an all-nighter to
reload after the spare PS is installed.
Redundancy might make it less likely that a
failure will inconvenience my customers/users,
but it also makes it more worthwhile for me to
reduce my per-server admin costs -- and journaling
does that.
You can't equate down-time to a slightly
slower response time.
Having a reboot time of tens of seconds vs.
tens of minutes for (e.g.) a large source
repository or a critical web server
is well worth a minor performance hit.
Reboot time is dead time for all who need
access to the server.
If your file server is running so close to
capacity that a 5% decrease in maximum
filesystem throughput represents a 5% slowdown
in actual throughput, your server is
dangerously overloaded already.
In general, journaling affects write
performance, not read performance.
If your server performs mostly reads,
the overall overhead of journaling may amount to
much less than your 5% figure.
Most (though not all) applications for
file servers are read-intensive with incidental
writes apart from the initial "load" of the
server.
Fast fsck's aren't the main reason for
journaled filesystems.
Rather, its the improvement in filesystem
integrity that is the main attraction -- an
improvement that incidently allows for fast
fsck's.
APL was a lot more common than you might think.
It was the first language to treat matrices
as first-class entities, and so was popular for
a time among the mathematics set.
It was amazingly fast, in part due to its
innovative use of lazy evaluation
(e.g. if you only wanted a single column of
a large matrix, it wouldn't bother computing
the rest of it).
A bit of APL lore: Back in the late 1970's,
Ken Thompson (one of Unix's creators) spent
a summer at UC Berkeley (an event that was
rather influential in BSD's development).
Just for fun, he wrote an entire APL
interpreter -- in one weekend.
It was a real pain to work with since it used
two-letter codes instead of the APL character
set, but other than some of the quad functions
(various OS primitives and so on) it was
complete.
It's one of the more spectacular feats of
programming I've ever heard of.
Yahoo use FreeBSD as the OS and
iPlanet (which is another name for Netscape
Enterprise Server afaicr) as their web server.
Complete and utter nonsense.
Most of Yahoo's servers either run Yahoo's
own server software or a certain popular free
software server which shares a name with a Native
American tribe.
But as I said, there are literally hundreds
of services supported by Yahoo, each running
on the plateform that supports it best.
If you poke around enough, you'll even find
some IIS servers -- or NES.
Yahoo has several hundreds services that utilize
everything from Solaris to Windows 2000,
including Linux, but most servers and most
backend machines run FreeBSD, including the
gateway machines to Google.
What Google runs is their business...
Oh - and regarding Yahoo - you might want to update yourself - they're using iPlant for a very long time now.
I work in Yahoo's infrastructure group, and I've
never even heard of iPlant.
However,
I do know that we use FreeBSD boxes
by the thousands, and I don't see that changing
any time soon.
More FreeBSD boxes are put into production
almost every day.
Regardless, you completely miss the point of
what a free OS is, and how it lives and grows.
Mindshare in corporate boardrooms is
irrelevent.
As any Linux fan will tell you, Linux != RedHat
(or any other commercial distro).
You're making the exact same mistake here.
There are several hundreds developers around
the world working on FreeBSD.
Only a small number of these are paid
to do that development (and, in fact, most
of those laid off from WRS were being paid to
do other things and not just work on FreeBSD).
It's just like Linux was before RedHat, IBM, and
others -- and Linux did just fine (some would
say better) before it had paid workers.
People work on FreeBSD because they want
to, and that's hardly changing.
It's the developer community that makes a free OS
live.
From a money prespective, FreeBSD has always
gotten along on a shoestring -- and it will
continue to do so.
And others who appreciate its goodness will
continue to use it.
(The percentage may be small, but you
neglected to report the fact that it's
growing -- maybe not as fast as
Linux at the moment, but time will tell.)
Yep. My guess is that maybe three people in
the whole world ever used that card with Linux.
Unfortunately, the places I checked for the EigerLabs card didn't have it any more, so
unless there are a lot of NetBSD folks who
have the card already or have better luck
than I did finding it, this driver won't get
much more use than that.
Still, this announcement gives me hope that PCMCIA
sound will become feasible on free Unices
sometime soon.
I'd love to be able to do field recordings
with a laptop... without an MS OS.
The guy was only exploiting a system that pays
money based on "impressions" or "exposures."
He set up traps that generated as many ad
exposures as possible, but it made no difference
to him whether the ads made a possitive impression
on anyone.
This is why most of the ads were for porn, since
he needed advertisers who didn't check what
the presentation of their ads would look like or
the nature of the site itself.
Outside of porn, few advertisers are that lax
any more.
I'm sure that, given a choice, even porn
advertisers would want a "friendlier"
presentation than this guy gave them.
But they don't care enough to even check.
In the mean time, this guy was raking in
a hundred or more ad exposures per victim.
The EigerLabs PCMCIA Audio Adapter has been
discontinued.
Also, the claim that this is the first non-MS
OS to support PCMCIA sound is incorrect; there
is a Linux driver for the CAC Bullet II, which
is a PCMCIA DSP/sound card (an impractically
expensive one at about $700 unless you really need its DSP) -- although it may well be
discontinued also.
(I'm a BSD fan, but I believe in giving credit where it's due.)
EigerLabs' decision to discontinue their sound
card is unfortunate, but I'm sure that now that
a PCMCIA sound driver exists, it will be extended
to work with other cards.
There's a need for such things; even though
almost all laptops have onboard sound, and
many do a passible job of sound output, most
are far too (electrically) noisy for useful
sound input other than speech -- if they
support input at all.
The Sklyarov case hasn't even gone to trial.
Whether he is convicted or not won't establish
any legal precedence.
The ACLU typically doesn't get involved at
this phase.
However, should he be convicted the ACLU
is likely to get heavily involved in any appeal.
It is then, and not at trial, that any
constitutional challege can be mounted.
On the other hand, these cases have been appealed
on several levels, and have finally reached the
court of last appeal in the US -- the Supreme
Court.
It is at this level that the ACLU works hardest
and is most visible.
The ACLU
will sometimes get involved in trials, but
they usually don't get involved to any major
extent until a case gets to the appellate level.
Note that sometimes legal rulings will be
appealed before trial, and if they might be
precedence-setting, the ACLU may get involved
(as has happened with the 2600/DeCSS case).
But it has limited resources, and contrary
to what some people might think, it's a civil
liberties organization focused on constitutional
law, not a social welfare organization giving
legal aid to individuals in need.
-Ed
Re:Ravages of the new economy
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 2
Look up just about any tech company and
you'll see similar news.
IBM, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Sun, Dell -- the list is
almost endless.
Even Microsoft faces uncertain times.
You're looking a bit too superficially at this.
Neither company deserves to be branded a loser
yet.
Each of the two companies has its strong and weak
divisions -- without much overlap.
So the end result is that people get laid
off en mass, the strong divisions are
kept, and the stock price goes
up since they can quickly report a
pro forma
profit by jetisoning unprofitable
businesses.
And if they do it right, they might just continue
to show profits.
If it is so difficult to distinguish the pulse signal from ambient noise, how would one device be able to hear the other device?
The same way spread-spectrum "hides" itself.
Unless you know the sequence used in modulating
it, you'll have trouble even detecting that
there is a signal (and not just noise) much
less decoding it.
Assume for the sake of discussion that pulse-position modulation is being used.
Typical pulses are around 200ps (picoseconds)
in duration.
If we have an average pulse repetition rate of
200ns, that's a.2ns pulse followed by, say, 10ns
to 390ns of silence.
Unless you know where the next pulse is to
appear, you won't be able to distinguish a
real pulse from noise that looks like a pulse.
In other words, a synchronized receiver can be
1000 times more sensitive.
If you only transmit at a few times the
necessary power, an attacker will be unable
to distinguish your signal from background
noise (unless he has managed to place his
receiver much closer and thus receive hundreds
of times more power than the desired receiver).
He'll see dozens or hundreds of noise pulses
for every signal pulse; he'll have no way to sync up with your signal.
Now, you might object that a pulse doesn't look
like noise at the same amplitude, and this is
indeed the case.
But any advantage an attacker might gain by
"knowing what to look for" in terms of the
pulse spectrum can also be used to make the
intended receiver more sensitive.
In fact, this adds another way to add
security -- an attacker who doesn't know the
exact pulse shape he's looking for is put at
further disadvantage.
In addition, timing accuracy much smaller
than the 200ps pulse width -- perhaps 10ps
or less -- can be required to detect a pulse
by its shape, allowing many more possible positions
for the pulse, which in turn can be made so weak that
it cannot be detected unless its shape and
timing are known to that accuracy.
Thus the receiver might have another 10 or 100
to one advantage, perhaps 100,000 to one overall.
Of course, the same techniques that are used in
cryptography (which this is really an extention of) can be used to brute-force (or perhaps
crack more intelligently) the encoding
sequence -- the attacher can just try one
sequence after another, varying the timing,
until one "matches" and a stream of recognizable
pulses emerge.
But becuase of the time element, this can be much
harder than straight cryptography .
And cryptographic techniques can be used to
strengthen it.
This is all a bit of a simplification, and the
numbers are there for the sake of example.
But you should be able to see some of the basic
issues involved, here (including why you might
want to be very careful how you place your
transmitting antenna if an attacker may be
in the area).
This guy is in on things,
and he's displaying this level of snobbery
towards new developers.
Don't take it too seriously -- as a regular reader
of freebsd-current, I can say that he
sometimes displays the same level of snobbery to
old developers, too.
FreeBSD doesn't vet its developers on the basis
of their personalities, but rather on their
ability to contribute.
Truth to tell, Feldman isn't the only one who
sometimes takes a condescending attitude,
but most of the FreeBSD folks I've encountered
take a considerably more helpful attitude than
what Feldman's post displays.
He most assuredly doesn't speak for FreeBSD;
he's not in the core group, and even core
generally lets Jordan Hubbard be the only one
who speaks for FreeBSD.
I might also mention that a few days spent
reading the Linux Kernel Mailing List will
turn up similar attitudes; they don't vet
developers on the basis of personality, either.
Even the Great Penguin Himself
takes an attitude now and then.
As other posters have pointed out, reports of
extreme difficulty in writing FreeBSD drivers
are greatly exaggerated.
But like most open-source projects, you are
generally going to have to "show them the code"
to have your questions on writing drivers
taken credibly.
If you aren't able to hunt down the docs that
are part of the system (they aren't hidden),
model your efforts after existing drivers,
and at least have the framework built before
asking questions,
you aren't going to get much of a response.
Once again, this is true in the Linux world
as well, though by the law of large numbers
you have a greater chance of getting lucky
and finding a competent mentor if you don't
know how to get started.
But don't expect it.
You can rev a linux kernel for $0 plus
a few hours of time. How much
would it have cost this company to rev NT?
How much $ and time to deploy AD and all the other upgrades Microsoft required?
For them, NT4 and NT5 were very, very different,
whether they were called the same thing
or not.
Because the output amplifiers are neither fully on nor fully off, they're running in linear mode.
This isn't true, at least for horizontal deflection (which requires the most energy).
The output amplifier is basically running in
switching mode; the sawtooth is generated by the energy stored in and released from the yoke's inductance. The dI/dt energy released can be stored elsewhere for the next cycle (in another inductor or in a capacitor) or just dissipated -- but not in the amplifier.
You're absolutely correct that wider defection angles require more drive energy (for a given beam energy). Unless they've found a way to do more deflection before the beam is fully accelerated (which would reduce deflection energy requirements while making focusing more difficult), these units are going to suck massive amounts of power.
This sort of grade inflation is happening
almost everywhere. One of the things
high-quality teachers such as your friend can
do is devise a grading system that allows students
to know how they are truly doing, but still
maps into the inflated grades parents and
administrators insist on. Sure, unmotivated
students won't care that they only need to make
(say) 60 out of 100 for an "A". But the
motivated ones will compete for the higher
score, and thus will learn more than they
would if the teacher simply dumbed down the
classes and his/her own grading system.
And if they haven't learned the lesson
already, those students will learn the difference
between real learning and accomplishment, and
grades.
A pity that many of them will continue to
focus on the latter.
Actually, there is a way that is both better
for privacy and for safety.
Require a brief test of coordination and
attentiveness before the driver can get
behind the wheel.
If they fail, they get sent home, no
questions asked.
A driver is allowed a small number of failures
over a given number of days/weeks/months before
his/her "employability" is reviewed.
Such tests have been developed, and they
do work -- except that they also detect
drivers who are too tired, or sick, or
emotionally upset, or
whatever, and that ends up losing money (on
sick time, substitutes, etc.) for the company.
So it's generally not done.
Strangely enough, I've had one of my email
addresses in the clear (yes, that's it,
right up there) for over three years on
Slashdot, and I've posted at least a couple
hundred times during that period.
I get relatively little spam to that address.
(Well, a piece or two a day, which is "little"
compared to the dozen or two a day
I get to the address
listed as my domain contact.)
The way I figure, so many folks obscure their
addresses or are aggressively anti-spam
that few spammers even bother
harvesting here.
On the other hand, I usually get a series of
script kiddies knocking at my door every
time I post.
Kind of goes with the neighborhood...
Slashdot Mirror
No. But it will create a new problem: global brightening.
Five or six FreeBSD committers work for Yahoo!, including core team member Peter Wemm. You won't see Yahoo!'s name on these folk's contributions, but they're substantial. Yahoo! has helped FreeBSD in many other ways as well, but for various reasons chooses to keep quiet about it.
1-2 terabytes is the street value.
If this is true, why do companies like IBM hold so many patents? In fact, IBM gets about a third of its revenue from patent royalties! And they're hardly alone at this game -- just the most successful.
Although patents can protect the little guy, that's not the way it usually happens. They just help the big get bigger, and give them a tool to pry inventions away from the little guys.
I, too, am a Yahoo-acquired GeoCities engineer; though I wasn't part of the original Webring acquisition, once I got to Yahoo it was easy to see that they had absolutely no use for Webring. The role that GeoCities bought Webring for--tying together user's sites by topic rather than loosely-defined "neighborhoods"-- was accomplished much better through the Yahoo directory, it was felt.
In the Bubble days Yahoo could afford to support projects that had only loose connections to the central site, and so Webring wasn't axed after the Geo acquisition (as it no doubt would be in today's climate). It, too, was to get tied into the directory somehow (yes, the descendant of David & Jerry's original "List" was still central to Yahoo, and is to this day in various guises). I've no idea how anyone would have got the idea that adding links back to Yahoo's directory constituted interstitial ads--that's either a gross misunderstanding or a false rumor spread by PO'd ringmasters. Back then, Yahoo had no need to create more ad slots--just getting folks to visit the central site was considered to be of value. (The old "eyeball"game.)
There is a tragedy here, but no crime. Webring was a speck on GeoCities' balance sheet, much less on Yahoo's. Geo might have done something better with Webring if it (Geo) had remained independent. But Yahoo's acquisition of GeoCities left it with no real place. I'm glad they finally let it go.
A bit of trivia:
As the Jargon file alludes to, pre-Bourne Unix shells (such as the Edition 6 shell) used a subprocess called "glob" to perform wildcard expansion. This made the shell itself considerably lighter-weight. How lightweight? A couple of KB -- but when you recall that Unix ran on PDP-11's with as little as 24KB of memory, keeping the shell small was important. IIRC, "glob" was larger than the shell itself (and when run in a large directory, like /bin,
would grow even larger).
There were suggestions to rename "glob" to "yolk", but it never happened.
Yours in obscurity,
Sure, redundancy is nice. That's entirely orthogonal to the issue here, however. If I have a farm of redundant servers, and one of them cooks its power supply, with a journaled file system I can be reasonably sure that the system will come back up without some unfortunate sysadmin pulling an all-nighter to reload after the spare PS is installed. Redundancy might make it less likely that a failure will inconvenience my customers/users, but it also makes it more worthwhile for me to reduce my per-server admin costs -- and journaling does that.
A few points:
APL was a lot more common than you might think. It was the first language to treat matrices as first-class entities, and so was popular for a time among the mathematics set. It was amazingly fast, in part due to its innovative use of lazy evaluation (e.g. if you only wanted a single column of a large matrix, it wouldn't bother computing the rest of it).
A bit of APL lore: Back in the late 1970's, Ken Thompson (one of Unix's creators) spent a summer at UC Berkeley (an event that was rather influential in BSD's development). Just for fun, he wrote an entire APL interpreter -- in one weekend. It was a real pain to work with since it used two-letter codes instead of the APL character set, but other than some of the quad functions (various OS primitives and so on) it was complete.
It's one of the more spectacular feats of programming I've ever heard of.
Yahoo has several hundreds services that utilize
everything from Solaris to Windows 2000,
including Linux, but most servers and most
backend machines run FreeBSD, including the
gateway machines to Google.
What Google runs is their business...
Regardless, you completely miss the point of what a free OS is, and how it lives and grows. Mindshare in corporate boardrooms is irrelevent. As any Linux fan will tell you, Linux != RedHat (or any other commercial distro). You're making the exact same mistake here.
There are several hundreds developers around the world working on FreeBSD. Only a small number of these are paid to do that development (and, in fact, most of those laid off from WRS were being paid to do other things and not just work on FreeBSD). It's just like Linux was before RedHat, IBM, and others -- and Linux did just fine (some would say better) before it had paid workers. People work on FreeBSD because they want to, and that's hardly changing.
It's the developer community that makes a free OS live. From a money prespective, FreeBSD has always gotten along on a shoestring -- and it will continue to do so. And others who appreciate its goodness will continue to use it. (The percentage may be small, but you neglected to report the fact that it's growing -- maybe not as fast as Linux at the moment, but time will tell.)
Yep. My guess is that maybe three people in the whole world ever used that card with Linux. Unfortunately, the places I checked for the EigerLabs card didn't have it any more, so unless there are a lot of NetBSD folks who have the card already or have better luck than I did finding it, this driver won't get much more use than that.
Still, this announcement gives me hope that PCMCIA sound will become feasible on free Unices sometime soon. I'd love to be able to do field recordings with a laptop... without an MS OS.
The guy was only exploiting a system that pays money based on "impressions" or "exposures." He set up traps that generated as many ad exposures as possible, but it made no difference to him whether the ads made a possitive impression on anyone.
This is why most of the ads were for porn, since he needed advertisers who didn't check what the presentation of their ads would look like or the nature of the site itself. Outside of porn, few advertisers are that lax any more. I'm sure that, given a choice, even porn advertisers would want a "friendlier" presentation than this guy gave them. But they don't care enough to even check. In the mean time, this guy was raking in a hundred or more ad exposures per victim.
The EigerLabs PCMCIA Audio Adapter has been discontinued. Also, the claim that this is the first non-MS OS to support PCMCIA sound is incorrect; there is a Linux driver for the CAC Bullet II, which is a PCMCIA DSP/sound card (an impractically expensive one at about $700 unless you really need its DSP) -- although it may well be discontinued also. (I'm a BSD fan, but I believe in giving credit where it's due.)
EigerLabs' decision to discontinue their sound card is unfortunate, but I'm sure that now that a PCMCIA sound driver exists, it will be extended to work with other cards. There's a need for such things; even though almost all laptops have onboard sound, and many do a passible job of sound output, most are far too (electrically) noisy for useful sound input other than speech -- if they support input at all.
The Sklyarov case hasn't even gone to trial. Whether he is convicted or not won't establish any legal precedence. The ACLU typically doesn't get involved at this phase. However, should he be convicted the ACLU is likely to get heavily involved in any appeal. It is then, and not at trial, that any constitutional challege can be mounted.
On the other hand, these cases have been appealed on several levels, and have finally reached the court of last appeal in the US -- the Supreme Court. It is at this level that the ACLU works hardest and is most visible.
The ACLU will sometimes get involved in trials, but they usually don't get involved to any major extent until a case gets to the appellate level. Note that sometimes legal rulings will be appealed before trial, and if they might be precedence-setting, the ACLU may get involved (as has happened with the 2600/DeCSS case). But it has limited resources, and contrary to what some people might think, it's a civil liberties organization focused on constitutional law, not a social welfare organization giving legal aid to individuals in need.
Look up just about any tech company and you'll see similar news. IBM, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Sun, Dell -- the list is almost endless. Even Microsoft faces uncertain times.
You're looking a bit too superficially at this. Neither company deserves to be branded a loser yet. Each of the two companies has its strong and weak divisions -- without much overlap. So the end result is that people get laid off en mass, the strong divisions are kept, and the stock price goes up since they can quickly report a pro forma profit by jetisoning unprofitable businesses. And if they do it right, they might just continue to show profits.
The same way spread-spectrum "hides" itself. Unless you know the sequence used in modulating it, you'll have trouble even detecting that there is a signal (and not just noise) much less decoding it.
Assume for the sake of discussion that pulse-position modulation is being used. Typical pulses are around 200ps (picoseconds) in duration. If we have an average pulse repetition rate of 200ns, that's a .2ns pulse followed by, say, 10ns
to 390ns of silence.
Unless you know where the next pulse is to
appear, you won't be able to distinguish a
real pulse from noise that looks like a pulse.
In other words, a synchronized receiver can be
1000 times more sensitive.
If you only transmit at a few times the
necessary power, an attacker will be unable
to distinguish your signal from background
noise (unless he has managed to place his
receiver much closer and thus receive hundreds
of times more power than the desired receiver).
He'll see dozens or hundreds of noise pulses
for every signal pulse; he'll have no way to sync up with your signal.
Now, you might object that a pulse doesn't look like noise at the same amplitude, and this is indeed the case. But any advantage an attacker might gain by "knowing what to look for" in terms of the pulse spectrum can also be used to make the intended receiver more sensitive. In fact, this adds another way to add security -- an attacker who doesn't know the exact pulse shape he's looking for is put at further disadvantage. In addition, timing accuracy much smaller than the 200ps pulse width -- perhaps 10ps or less -- can be required to detect a pulse by its shape, allowing many more possible positions for the pulse, which in turn can be made so weak that it cannot be detected unless its shape and timing are known to that accuracy. Thus the receiver might have another 10 or 100 to one advantage, perhaps 100,000 to one overall.
Of course, the same techniques that are used in cryptography (which this is really an extention of) can be used to brute-force (or perhaps crack more intelligently) the encoding sequence -- the attacher can just try one sequence after another, varying the timing, until one "matches" and a stream of recognizable pulses emerge. But becuase of the time element, this can be much harder than straight cryptography . And cryptographic techniques can be used to strengthen it.
This is all a bit of a simplification, and the numbers are there for the sake of example. But you should be able to see some of the basic issues involved, here (including why you might want to be very careful how you place your transmitting antenna if an attacker may be in the area).
Don't take it too seriously -- as a regular reader of freebsd-current, I can say that he sometimes displays the same level of snobbery to old developers, too.
FreeBSD doesn't vet its developers on the basis of their personalities, but rather on their ability to contribute. Truth to tell, Feldman isn't the only one who sometimes takes a condescending attitude, but most of the FreeBSD folks I've encountered take a considerably more helpful attitude than what Feldman's post displays. He most assuredly doesn't speak for FreeBSD; he's not in the core group, and even core generally lets Jordan Hubbard be the only one who speaks for FreeBSD.
I might also mention that a few days spent reading the Linux Kernel Mailing List will turn up similar attitudes; they don't vet developers on the basis of personality, either. Even the Great Penguin Himself takes an attitude now and then.
As other posters have pointed out, reports of extreme difficulty in writing FreeBSD drivers are greatly exaggerated. But like most open-source projects, you are generally going to have to "show them the code" to have your questions on writing drivers taken credibly. If you aren't able to hunt down the docs that are part of the system (they aren't hidden), model your efforts after existing drivers, and at least have the framework built before asking questions, you aren't going to get much of a response.
Once again, this is true in the Linux world as well, though by the law of large numbers you have a greater chance of getting lucky and finding a competent mentor if you don't know how to get started. But don't expect it.
You can rev a linux kernel for $0 plus a few hours of time. How much would it have cost this company to rev NT? How much $ and time to deploy AD and all the other upgrades Microsoft required?
For them, NT4 and NT5 were very, very different, whether they were called the same thing or not.
This isn't true, at least for horizontal deflection (which requires the most energy). The output amplifier is basically running in switching mode; the sawtooth is generated by the energy stored in and released from the yoke's inductance. The dI/dt energy released can be stored elsewhere for the next cycle (in another inductor or in a capacitor) or just dissipated -- but not in the amplifier.
You're absolutely correct that wider defection angles require more drive energy (for a given beam energy). Unless they've found a way to do more deflection before the beam is fully accelerated (which would reduce deflection energy requirements while making focusing more difficult), these units are going to suck massive amounts of power.
This sort of grade inflation is happening almost everywhere. One of the things high-quality teachers such as your friend can do is devise a grading system that allows students to know how they are truly doing, but still maps into the inflated grades parents and administrators insist on. Sure, unmotivated students won't care that they only need to make (say) 60 out of 100 for an "A". But the motivated ones will compete for the higher score, and thus will learn more than they would if the teacher simply dumbed down the classes and his/her own grading system.
And if they haven't learned the lesson already, those students will learn the difference between real learning and accomplishment, and grades. A pity that many of them will continue to focus on the latter.
Actually, there is a way that is both better for privacy and for safety. Require a brief test of coordination and attentiveness before the driver can get behind the wheel. If they fail, they get sent home, no questions asked. A driver is allowed a small number of failures over a given number of days/weeks/months before his/her "employability" is reviewed.
Such tests have been developed, and they do work -- except that they also detect drivers who are too tired, or sick, or emotionally upset, or whatever, and that ends up losing money (on sick time, substitutes, etc.) for the company. So it's generally not done.
Strangely enough, I've had one of my email addresses in the clear (yes, that's it, right up there) for over three years on Slashdot, and I've posted at least a couple hundred times during that period. I get relatively little spam to that address. (Well, a piece or two a day, which is "little" compared to the dozen or two a day I get to the address listed as my domain contact.)
The way I figure, so many folks obscure their addresses or are aggressively anti-spam that few spammers even bother harvesting here. On the other hand, I usually get a series of script kiddies knocking at my door every time I post. Kind of goes with the neighborhood...