While it's true that this patent relates to distributed computing, that's not what this is about. What they've really got here is a patent on a method of stealing subscribers CPU cycles. Better check out the ToS when you sign up with an ISP cause, guess what? If this idea comes to be, you might just be required to do some of the processing for your ISP. Another quote to illustrate exactly what they're looking to process:
If a ISP did that you could launch some very nasty attacks against their network by sending them back bad data. Depending on exactly what the parallel processing does you could cripple an ISP. You would have to check the acuracy of all of the data sent back from your customers. That would take up lots of cpu time. Probably more time then you would gain. It just isn't practical unless you can trust your customers. I don't think many ISP's do.
From the sounds of it the way KDE is integrating Konqueror with the web isn't much different then the way Windows includes IE. If Konqueror got good enough new users might never download Netscape or Mozilla. Just like many Windows users never bother to get Netscape. The only difference is Microsoft used quite a few nasty tactics to promote IE.
Why must the support costs be higher ? Is there any evidence to back up this assertion ? Perhaps it is offset by not paying major $$$s for the NT licenses...
From what I understood in the artical Oracle wasn't just providing technical support for Oracle on Linux but providing technical support for both Oracle and Linux it'self. That can't come cheap.
Having never bought Oracle I don't know much about the WinNT tech support. Depending on how bad the problems with WinNT are and the support agreements it could be much cheaper or much more expensive to support WinNT. Cheaper if WinNT isn't that bad and they don't support WinNT it'self. More expensive if WinNT is bad and causes lots of problems.
It's one thing to make a port to Linux, it's another thing to encourage your customers to move to Linux. This is quite a breakthough...
You have to wonder how did Oracle ever convince themselves that converting customers to Linux would be cost effective. The costs of providing the technical support for Linux must be high, higher then the costs of providing WinNT support. This isn't good news for WinNT.
Untill intelligent computers have rights I think the owners of the patents will get to be the owners of the computer. If someone gains great help in creating their invention by their toolset the toolset isn't going to be the owner of the patent no matter how good it is. Likewise the computer will never be the owner of the patent no matter how good it is. Computers don't yet have any rights so they therefor can't own anything or own any patents.
As for liability as far as I know the liability rests with the person manufacturing the product. Not even the patent owner. Let alone the tool that made it.
A modern PC is much more complex and expensive to manufacture then a VCR or microwave.
Building modern CPU's is a hard thing to do. Some of the chips in your VCR might run at 0.1mhz. They don't need cooling. They are small and easy to handle. The rest of those chips are simple little things that cost very little and have very few abilities.
Compare this to a computer. The raw CPU speed is much higher. This forces manufactures add forced air cooling. It forces them to be very carefull about radio interference. The basic design is far more complex.
It is possible to sell really cheap computers. Sub-$100 is doable. But you'll never get all of the nifty features %99 of the computing public want, although maybe not really need. You get these cheap computers but cutting out functionality. A modem will cost you about $20 if you're talking about a WinModem. The CPU can be bought for another $20, the motherboard $15 etc. But the computer you get is a old-n-mouldy 486-class. Sure it'l surf the internet a bit but not many people want it.
Are we talking cartel here, or is the demand so much greater than supply that prices bump around just under the ceiling rather than just above the floor?
Not at all. The competition in the PC market is incredible. In the CPU market you get AMD and Intel battling away for control for starters. Intel may have more market share but they have to keep prices as low as possible to maintain the market share. Do you really think Intel and AMD would be a cartel with the way they are acting?
The same applies for every other segment of the computer hardware industry. There are many different harddrive manufactures around. Many different video manufactures. The list goes on and on.
The only thing keeping the average new computer price around $1000 is the fact that no consumers want anything less with the current technology. Most people could easily get by with less. But they are afraid they'll get a slow out-of-date computer.
At work I'd love to be able to buy older but reliable computers from reputable manufactures. But you can't. So we settle for $1000 computers when the only reason we're replacing our $200 ones is because they are becoming unreliable due to age. And the fact that before I started advising on what hardware to buy they bought a bunch of bad Cyrix machines that were made out of unreliable parts. Oh well...
As far as I can see there are very few differences between the GPL and NCL. There are no "hidden" details that would give Novell any rights to your work. Like the GPL dirivitive works get put under the NCL.
Unlike the GPL the NCL doesn't specificly mention what would happen in the event of a patent dispute or other restrictions such as export laws.
The NCL has one last interesting feature. By agreeing to it you also agree to how any breaches of the agreement will be handled. In paragraph 5 the NCL specificly states how any breaches shall be handled. And it states that the costs incured in any legal battle will be payed by the "losing" side. Interesting...
Tom's Hardware did a Athlon vs Coppermine benchmark on Oct 23. Here are the results:
First of all the i830 chipset wasn't available at the time so Tom used a Apollo Pro 133+ mb.
The results of the first benchmark, SYSMark98 under Win98SE, showed that the Athlon had %4 better performence then the Coppermine at all clock speeds.
The results of the second benchmark, SYSMark98 under WinNT4 showed about equal performence.
Under 3DStudioMax under WinNT SP5 showed that the Athlong was %30 faster then the Coppermine.
Under Quake 3 Arena under Win98SE the Athlon was about %6 slower.
Under Descent3 under Win98SE using OpenGL both chips were about equal in speed.
With Descent3 on DirectX the Athlon was about %3 slower.
In all the Athlon almost always did a bit better then the Coppermine. With the exception of the 3DStudioMax benchmark where the Athlon badly beat the Coppermine.
The Department of Defense is considering banning all JavaScript and other mobile code from military Web sites because the tools could pose a security risk to its computer systems.
If they want to keep security tight they should disable ActiveX and JavaScript on the workstations used to access at the DoD. Banning scripting on their web pages will do nothing. After all if a hacker breaks into a site the hacker can easily add a script to the site.
"Your sites will end up being less competitive overnight," Plummer said, adding that a complete ban on all mobile script capabilities could lead to a Web presence that does not permit online chats or the filling out and sending of online forms.
This is totally wrong. You don't need client-side scripting to make chat rooms or fill out forms. Server-side scripting (CGI for example) is adiquate. Sure you can't make a stupid little bear dance across the screen but who cares?
To give an example the tripod chat at chat.tripod.com even works with Lynx. So much for needing JavaScript or ActiveX.
In any case if you want to protect security disable ActiveX first. It basically allows anything to happen to your computer without your knowledge. Disable Java and JavaScript later. Some code might exploit a security hole in Java and might be able to cause some damage.
At work we found that one of the computers was a Cyrix 166 (actual mhz speed) that was running at 200mhz. We noticed the problem when the computer started to crash very often. I put my hand on the CPU and got burnt by it! The poor thing was totally fried, I now have it as a paperweight.
Another batch of systems from the same vendor had power supplies that fried the motherboard and memory. The 5 volt line was putting out 6 volts!
We now exclusivly use Dell systems. They are well built and good quality IMO.
Actually I'm quite happy that our scientists found something that lined up on it's own like that. It sounds like a usefull proccess. Heck, I'd go send those scientists some congradulations on their discovery.
A few pillars lining up is harmless and probably usefull. The type of danger I'm warning about is completely different in nature. And something that is very far down the road.
I should have been more clear in my first post.
In case you're wondering I support nuclear power, genetic engineering and the research of artificial intelligence.
As has been mentioned before, there are problems with the gray goo scenario. You said: "We must make sure we stop before our nanomachines can reproduce themselves in anything but highly exotic enviornments." What does that mean? I require a highly exotic environment to reproduce: enormous inputs of raw materials, some way to get rid of waste products, a certain temperature range, etc. etc.; it seems extremely unlikely that nanomachines could reproduce out of control, simply because they'd eventually run out of some limiting reagent. I suppose some things are readily available in large supply, but you can't make much from just seawater or just silicon (two very abundant substances, here on Earth).
In exotic I mean anything that you don't find very often. This could mean a place with lots of honest politicians for all I care.:-) The point is if nanomachines can reproduce in any enviornment there is a possibility of that enviornment being completely taken over untill no resources are left. Ouch!
Remember what happened to rabbits in Austrailia? They ate everything in sight at first untill they starved themselves. That virus that was released into the wild has kept them in check. But they still caused huge amounts of damage. Just imagine what havoc something that could "ate" carbon could cause... It would kill it'self eventually, but it would cause havoc in the proccess.
Besides, how are all those nanites going to power themselves?
Most likly by some sort of chemical reaction. Just like your average bacteria does. And bacteria sure do thrive don't they...
Today we may have harmless, no, make that highly benificial, self-construction pillars. But in a few hundred years or so we may have not so harmless gray goo that can reproduce it'self in most substances. Such a substance could have the potential to turn our world into a big mass of gray goo.
We must make sure we stop before our nanomachines can reproduce themselves in anything but highly exotic enviornments.
You know us sysadmins don't have unlimited time... Fixing security holes on a handfull of servers is one thing. But these desktop security holes force you to upgrade whole offices of Windows desktops. I don't have time for that.
At work there is a good chance we'll be switching to Netscape now because of this and many other holes in IE and Outlook.
MS seems to be the only people who have such security holes in their products. Thats their fault. If crackers take advantage of those holes then MS shouldn't have left them in the first place.
Don't know about cancer but if you need to be able to use the monitors with textmode SVGATextMode can help you. It lets you set the scan rates while running text mode. And gives you much better text mode too.
As for cables... Many old monitors used RGB cables. Here is the pinouts for your standard SVGA connector:
Pin Function Direction
1 Red Video Out
2 Green Video Out
3 Blue Video Out
4 Monitor ID 2 In
5 TTLGround (monitor self test) -
6 Red Analog Ground -
7 Green Analog Ground -
8 Blue Analog Ground -
9 Key (Plugged Hole) -
10 Sync Ground -
11 Monitor ID 0 In
12 Monitor ID 1 In
13 Horizontal Sync Out
14 Virtical Sync Out
15 Monitor ID 3 In
You probably want to connect the red, green and blue cables to the red video, green video and blue video. The inside pin will be the video. The outside "shield" is the ground. Connect the ground to the analog grounds. The monitor ID pins are unused. The sync pins shouldn't be needed for a fixed frequency monitor.
If this works good! Otherwise don't sue me, I've never tried this before.
Cool. If we start walking now, how long will it take us to get there?
Very very long... The distances in the universe are just incredible. When you look in the night sky most of the points of light you see aren't stars, they're complete galaxies. The universe is huge. Trillions or stars are in it. It'd take quite a few billion lifetimes to even get to the closest stars by walking.... Just a lifetime going at the speed of life. Although the relitivistic effects would make it seem like a few days.
As far as I can tell with normal fission we go and ruin some of the planet every few years when some stupid idiot(s) does something completely against the rulebook and causes a accident.
With this new fusion we go and distroy a whole bunch of trashcan lids every second.
I'll take the trashcan lids thank you very much.:-)
Nobody buys stuff when its displayed as an unsolicited irritation. SPAM from either the acutal mail or E-Mail drives customers away from the spammers products. You are wasting your time. I have never met a person who bought something from a SPAM E-Mail, and I'm sure I never will.
That is completely true. Except one out of a million will buy your product if you advertise with spam. That one out of a million is enough for the scum (porn and financial fraud mainly) that uses spam advertising.
1.Block all access to other peoples SMTP ports. Force your customers to go through YOUR mailer. Red flag any account that tries to access somebody else's SMTP port.
Not a good idea. There are some legitimit reasons to try to access other peoples SMTP ports. For instance I have setup qmail to directly mail anything since the @Home mail keeps on acting up on me.
2.Limit your customers to 100 mails a day. Red flag any account that hits its limit, and look into it in more detail.
Not a bad idea. Although a limit of 1000 might be more in line with what you would get from a spammer. And if possible monitor how many different hosts all customers try to access through SMTP. If that number gets to be more then say 1000 red-flag the account.
1.Don't install sendmail by default! Ideally, installing sendmail should require the sysadmin to go through a detailed setup on sendmail.
Not a good idea. sendmail is used for more then just relaying spam. Many things need it to send any email at all. However disabling SMTP access on sendmail would be a good way to do that.
2.Install a good set of firewall rules by default. This helps secure people's systems and prevent h4x0z and script-kiddies from hijacking the systems.
I think we can all agree on this one... I've yet to see a distribution that comes with a firewall.
Slashdot Mirror
While it's true that this patent relates to distributed computing, that's not what this is about. What they've really got here is a patent on a method of stealing subscribers CPU cycles. Better check out the ToS when you sign up with an ISP cause, guess what? If this idea comes to be, you might just be required to do some of the processing for your ISP. Another quote to illustrate exactly what they're looking to process:
If a ISP did that you could launch some very nasty attacks against their network by sending them back bad data. Depending on exactly what the parallel processing does you could cripple an ISP. You would have to check the acuracy of all of the data sent back from your customers. That would take up lots of cpu time. Probably more time then you would gain. It just isn't practical unless you can trust your customers. I don't think many ISP's do.
Secondly this isn't compatible with Linux. :)
From the sounds of it the way KDE is integrating Konqueror with the web isn't much different then the way Windows includes IE. If Konqueror got good enough new users might never download Netscape or Mozilla. Just like many Windows users never bother to get Netscape. The only difference is Microsoft used quite a few nasty tactics to promote IE.
Why must the support costs be higher ? Is there any evidence to back up this assertion ?
Perhaps it is offset by not paying major $$$s for the NT licenses...
From what I understood in the artical Oracle wasn't just providing technical support for Oracle on Linux but providing technical support for both Oracle and Linux it'self. That can't come cheap.
Having never bought Oracle I don't know much about the WinNT tech support. Depending on how bad the problems with WinNT are and the support agreements it could be much cheaper or much more expensive to support WinNT. Cheaper if WinNT isn't that bad and they don't support WinNT it'self. More expensive if WinNT is bad and causes lots of problems.
Dman! Worked for me a second ago! I think they use some wierd session based search engine. So you can't directly link to the page.
The link about "remotly tap into and alter data" is broken. I think this is the correct link.
It's one thing to make a port to Linux, it's another thing to encourage your customers to move to Linux. This is quite a breakthough...
You have to wonder how did Oracle ever convince themselves that converting customers to Linux would be cost effective. The costs of providing the technical support for Linux must be high, higher then the costs of providing WinNT support. This isn't good news for WinNT.
Untill intelligent computers have rights I think the owners of the patents will get to be the owners of the computer. If someone gains great help in creating their invention by their toolset the toolset isn't going to be the owner of the patent no matter how good it is. Likewise the computer will never be the owner of the patent no matter how good it is. Computers don't yet have any rights so they therefor can't own anything or own any patents.
As for liability as far as I know the liability rests with the person manufacturing the product. Not even the patent owner. Let alone the tool that made it.
A modern PC is much more complex and expensive to manufacture then a VCR or microwave.
Building modern CPU's is a hard thing to do. Some of the chips in your VCR might run at 0.1mhz. They don't need cooling. They are small and easy to handle. The rest of those chips are simple little things that cost very little and have very few abilities.
Compare this to a computer. The raw CPU speed is much higher. This forces manufactures add forced air cooling. It forces them to be very carefull about radio interference. The basic design is far more complex.
It is possible to sell really cheap computers. Sub-$100 is doable. But you'll never get all of the nifty features %99 of the computing public want, although maybe not really need. You get these cheap computers but cutting out functionality. A modem will cost you about $20 if you're talking about a WinModem. The CPU can be bought for another $20, the motherboard $15 etc. But the computer you get is a old-n-mouldy 486-class. Sure it'l surf the internet a bit but not many people want it.
Are we talking cartel here, or is the demand so much greater than supply that prices bump around just under the ceiling rather than just above the floor?
Not at all. The competition in the PC market is incredible. In the CPU market you get AMD and Intel battling away for control for starters. Intel may have more market share but they have to keep prices as low as possible to maintain the market share. Do you really think Intel and AMD would be a cartel with the way they are acting?
The same applies for every other segment of the computer hardware industry. There are many different harddrive manufactures around. Many different video manufactures. The list goes on and on.
The only thing keeping the average new computer price around $1000 is the fact that no consumers want anything less with the current technology. Most people could easily get by with less. But they are afraid they'll get a slow out-of-date computer.
At work I'd love to be able to buy older but reliable computers from reputable manufactures. But you can't. So we settle for $1000 computers when the only reason we're replacing our $200 ones is because they are becoming unreliable due to age. And the fact that before I started advising on what hardware to buy they bought a bunch of bad Cyrix machines that were made out of unreliable parts. Oh well...
As far as I can see there are very few differences between the GPL and NCL. There are no "hidden" details that would give Novell any rights to your work. Like the GPL dirivitive works get put under the NCL.
Unlike the GPL the NCL doesn't specificly mention what would happen in the event of a patent dispute or other restrictions such as export laws.
The NCL has one last interesting feature. By agreeing to it you also agree to how any breaches of the agreement will be handled. In paragraph 5 the NCL specificly states how any breaches shall be handled. And it states that the costs incured in any legal battle will be payed by the "losing" side. Interesting...
Tom's Hardware did a Athlon vs Coppermine benchmark on Oct 23. Here are the results:
First of all the i830 chipset wasn't available at the time so Tom used a Apollo Pro 133+ mb.
The results of the first benchmark, SYSMark98 under Win98SE, showed that the Athlon had %4 better performence then the Coppermine at all clock speeds.
The results of the second benchmark, SYSMark98 under WinNT4 showed about equal performence.
Under 3DStudioMax under WinNT SP5 showed that the Athlong was %30 faster then the Coppermine.
Under Quake 3 Arena under Win98SE the Athlon was about %6 slower.
Under Descent3 under Win98SE using OpenGL both chips were about equal in speed.
With Descent3 on DirectX the Athlon was about %3 slower.
In all the Athlon almost always did a bit better then the Coppermine. With the exception of the 3DStudioMax benchmark where the Athlon badly beat the Coppermine.
As for pricing the Athlon is about $60 cheaper.
You can see the full benchmarks here.
The Department of Defense is considering banning all JavaScript and other mobile code from
military Web sites because the tools could pose a security risk to its computer systems.
If they want to keep security tight they should disable ActiveX and JavaScript on the workstations used to access at the DoD. Banning scripting on their web pages will do nothing. After all if a hacker breaks into a site the hacker can easily add a script to the site.
"Your sites will end up being less competitive overnight," Plummer said, adding that a
complete ban on all mobile script capabilities could lead to a Web presence that does not
permit online chats or the filling out and sending of online forms.
This is totally wrong. You don't need client-side scripting to make chat rooms or fill out forms. Server-side scripting (CGI for example) is adiquate. Sure you can't make a stupid little bear dance across the screen but who cares?
To give an example the tripod chat at chat.tripod.com even works with Lynx. So much for needing JavaScript or ActiveX.
In any case if you want to protect security disable ActiveX first. It basically allows anything to happen to your computer without your knowledge. Disable Java and JavaScript later. Some code might exploit a security hole in Java and might be able to cause some damage.
At work we found that one of the computers was a Cyrix 166 (actual mhz speed) that was running at 200mhz. We noticed the problem when the computer started to crash very often. I put my hand on the CPU and got burnt by it! The poor thing was totally fried, I now have it as a paperweight.
Another batch of systems from the same vendor had power supplies that fried the motherboard and memory. The 5 volt line was putting out 6 volts!
We now exclusivly use Dell systems. They are well built and good quality IMO.
This has been done on the IBM ESA/390. See the Linux on the IBM ESA/390 Mainframe Architecture project. Unfortunatly it's still in devlopment. So no banks will be using it. :-)
And there is a project looking at the possibility of a AS/400 port. It's not even in development though.
The NetBSD project already has a port to the VAX desktops and some mainframes. See NetBSD/Vax It's not stable though...
It's interesting that IBM would do their own port of Linux.. I wonder what's wrong with their current mainframe OS?
Actually I'm quite happy that our scientists found something that lined up on it's own like that. It sounds like a usefull proccess. Heck, I'd go send those scientists some congradulations on their discovery.
A few pillars lining up is harmless and probably usefull. The type of danger I'm warning about is completely different in nature. And something that is very far down the road.
I should have been more clear in my first post.
In case you're wondering I support nuclear power, genetic engineering and the research of artificial intelligence.
As has been mentioned before, there are problems with the gray goo scenario. You said: "We must make sure we stop before our nanomachines can reproduce themselves in anything but highly exotic enviornments." What does that mean? I require a highly exotic environment to reproduce: enormous inputs of raw materials, some way to get rid of waste products, a certain temperature range, etc. etc.; it seems extremely unlikely that nanomachines could reproduce out of control, simply because they'd eventually run out of some limiting reagent. I suppose some things are readily available in large supply, but you can't make much from just seawater or just silicon (two very abundant substances, here on Earth).
In exotic I mean anything that you don't find very often. This could mean a place with lots of honest politicians for all I care. :-) The point is if nanomachines can reproduce in any enviornment there is a possibility of that enviornment being completely taken over untill no resources are left. Ouch!
Remember what happened to rabbits in Austrailia? They ate everything in sight at first untill they starved themselves. That virus that was released into the wild has kept them in check. But they still caused huge amounts of damage. Just imagine what havoc something that could "ate" carbon could cause... It would kill it'self eventually, but it would cause havoc in the proccess.
Besides, how are all those nanites going to power themselves?
Most likly by some sort of chemical reaction. Just like your average bacteria does. And bacteria sure do thrive don't they...
Today we may have harmless, no, make that highly benificial, self-construction pillars. But in a few hundred years or so we may have not so harmless gray goo that can reproduce it'self in most substances. Such a substance could have the potential to turn our world into a big mass of gray goo.
We must make sure we stop before our nanomachines can reproduce themselves in anything but highly exotic enviornments.
You know us sysadmins don't have unlimited time... Fixing security holes on a handfull of servers is one thing. But these desktop security holes force you to upgrade whole offices of Windows desktops. I don't have time for that.
At work there is a good chance we'll be switching to Netscape now because of this and many other holes in IE and Outlook.
MS seems to be the only people who have such security holes in their products. Thats their fault. If crackers take advantage of those holes then MS shouldn't have left them in the first place.
Don't know about cancer but if you need to be able to use the monitors with textmode SVGATextMode can help you. It lets you set the scan rates while running text mode. And gives you much better text mode too.
As for cables... Many old monitors used RGB cables. Here is the pinouts for your standard SVGA connector:
You probably want to connect the red, green and blue cables to the red video, green video and blue video. The inside pin will be the video. The outside "shield" is the ground. Connect the ground to the analog grounds. The monitor ID pins are unused. The sync pins shouldn't be needed for a fixed frequency monitor.
If this works good! Otherwise don't sue me, I've never tried this before.
As for cancer. Just don't smoke.
Cool. If we start walking now, how long will it take us to get there?
Very very long... The distances in the universe are just incredible. When you look in the night sky most of the points of light you see aren't stars, they're complete galaxies. The universe is huge. Trillions or stars are in it. It'd take quite a few billion lifetimes to even get to the closest stars by walking.... Just a lifetime going at the speed of life. Although the relitivistic effects would make it seem like a few days.
As far as I can tell with normal fission we go and ruin some of the planet every few years when some stupid idiot(s) does something completely against the rulebook and causes a accident.
With this new fusion we go and distroy a whole bunch of trashcan lids every second.
I'll take the trashcan lids thank you very much. :-)
Nobody buys stuff when its displayed as an unsolicited irritation. SPAM from either the acutal mail or E-Mail drives customers away from the spammers products. You are wasting your time. I have never met a person who bought something from a SPAM E-Mail, and I'm sure I never will.
That is completely true. Except one out of a million will buy your product if you advertise with spam. That one out of a million is enough for the scum (porn and financial fraud mainly) that uses spam advertising.
1.Block all access to other peoples SMTP ports. Force your customers to go through YOUR mailer. Red flag any account that tries to access somebody else's SMTP port.
Not a good idea. There are some legitimit reasons to try to access other peoples SMTP ports. For instance I have setup qmail to directly mail anything since the @Home mail keeps on acting up on me.
2.Limit your customers to 100 mails a day. Red flag any account that hits its limit, and look into it in more detail.
Not a bad idea. Although a limit of 1000 might be more in line with what you would get from a spammer. And if possible monitor how many different hosts all customers try to access through SMTP. If that number gets to be more then say 1000 red-flag the account.
1.Don't install sendmail by default! Ideally, installing sendmail should require the sysadmin to go through a detailed setup on sendmail.
Not a good idea. sendmail is used for more then just relaying spam. Many things need it to send any email at all. However disabling SMTP access on sendmail would be a good way to do that.
2.Install a good set of firewall rules by default. This helps secure people's systems and prevent h4x0z and script-kiddies from hijacking the systems.
I think we can all agree on this one... I've yet to see a distribution that comes with a firewall.
The Linux Kernel (2.2.13) has 1,850,281 lines of code as found by a simple:
find -name "*.[ch]" | xargs cat | wc --lines
Note that this includes code for all architectures Linux supports and every single driver in the 2.2.13 kernel.