Yes, you could encrypt all voice traffic. This would work well and the feds would indeed not be able to decrypt it. As far as Verisign having the key, they would not unless you used key escrow, but then there would be no point. If Verisign merely signs your certificate, then they have your public key, like everybody else, but not the private key. They will also collect some personal information about you during enrollment, such as your name, address, and your credit card number for payment of the service of issuing the certificate. But they never get your private key, so they cannot decrypt the traffic. The most they can do is tell the feds the information they collected when issuing you the cert.
However, keep in mind that decrypting the traffic is not necessarily the most critical part of wiretapping. Just being able to trace who talked to who (which is visible in a packet trace, even of an SSL session with client auth, by looking at client and server certificates), will usually provide a lot of information. Think of it like this : suspect X made a call to suspect Y at date Z. The content of the conversation is not necessarily critical and sometimes just the fact that the call was made is sufficient, just like the caller id records of phone companies might be.
I know that storage costs have dropped, but I still have my doubts that phone companies have the capacity to record and keep all phone calls ever made on their lines, just to keep them available for government inspection later on... If they did it would indeed be urgent to switch to secure telephony.
I haven't been able to read SACDs in my computer DVD-ROM. I tried to rip physical tracks with cdrecord and cdrdao on OS/2, but that did not work. On the other hand I never tried doing that on actual DVD disks either, I would have to go back and check.
As far as your other issues, there is no region coding or CSS on SACDs.
The only SACD decks currently are for homes, and are either CD/SACD or CD/SACD/DVDs.
I bought an SCD-CE775 in March for $350.. This is a 5 SACD changer from Sony. I'm very happy with it.
You can get one from http://www.jandr.com/JRProductPage.process?Merchan t_Id=1&Section_Id=939&Product_Id=1761099&showcase= t for $179.88 . I can't believe it's dropped that low. I think I'm just going to order a second one of these for my upstairs stereo. I can't wait for a car and portable SACD player to come out.
It is indeed not easy to hear the difference between standard red book 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo CD and stereo SACD on a low-end speaker system.
But it is not impossible as you claim. If you own a decent set of hifi speakers and amp, then you will be able to hear the difference. It is not a huge one, but after listening for a few months now I can tell it easily - and I do own several discs of the same recording in both formats.
You can try for yourself and buy a hybrid CD/SACD disc even if you don't have an SACD player. You will be able to play it on your regular CD player. Then you could go to a store and do a double-blind test. Ask the dealer not to tell you which track is playing, CD or SACD. This is what I did, and I was convinced.
Actually dual-layer (non-hybrid) SACDs have exactly the same capacity as DVDs. I believe they are the same physical technology. Only the hybrid SACDs differ physically from DVDs, since one layer is high-density DVD-like and the other layer is audio CD.
For the most part, music is not constrained by CD capacity, but that's not always true. I own many classical pieces that run longer than the roughly 80 minutes that a single CD provides. For example the slowest versions of the Goldberg variations I own run 90 minutes, and require 2 CDs, eg Rosalyn Tureck's 1999 recording. It's fine with me when I listen to it at home on my changer. In the car it's painful to change discs while driving. And yes sometimes I'm in the car for longer than 80 minutes, bay area traffic can be very painful even in these recession times...
As far as being able to burn my own discs to solve the problem, I don't really find that a good solution. The time I would spend doing my own disc is worth a lot more than the $20 I would pay for a single-disc SACD version of the recording. I would rather buy one already made. But I respect your right to be able to do that if you have time to kill, and I don't think they should enforce DRMs with SACD discs, the way they are currently doing by issuing some SACD-only (non-hybrid) discs that are only playable in SACD players.
Also I do not like compressed MP3 audio, it has a very bad and noticeable effect on classical music that reduces dynamic range, which I can tell instantly. Call me an audiophile...
The main difference between DVD and SACD in how the high capacity is used on the SACD disc.
1) SACD does not have video, unlike DVD or DVD-audio. It only has audio. Many DVD-audios have a video menu and are thus not very fit for playing in portable or car players, but SACDs are (except for the lack of existence of any such player yet...) 2) audio is never compressed on SACD, just like on CDs or on DVDs PCM tracks . But it is better than on DVD Dolby Digital or DTS tracks which are compressed 3) audio is not in 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo PCM format on SACD, but rather in DSD format. This is actually 2.8 MHz 1-bit on 2 or 6 channels.
Overall I think SACD is a very good idea, but Sony has not been pushing it at all, surprisingly. They could do so by issuing all their new discs as hybrid CD/SACDs, but they have not at this point...
I don't know if I can hear audio at 100 kHz, but I can tell the difference between the same recording that I own on stereo CD and stereo SACD. The SACD version is smoother, more detailed. Most SACD discs are stereo, not 6 channels. SACD is excellent for stereo and does not require 6 channels. You can enjoy stereo music a lot better with stereo SACDs and two good speakers than with stereo CDs and the same good speakers, if you are lucky enough to find your favorite music on SACD medium - which luckily for me has been the case , I have found many good classical SACD titles.
If you happen to listen to music in your living room and you have a home theater which has >2 speakers, you can also enjoy the 5.1 SACD recordings. But I agree with you that most of your money should be spent on getting good main speakers. I would especially note that it's worth it for music to have those main speakers provide good bass. Sure, you can configure the SACD player to direct the bass to a subwoofer if you own one, but I have found that this just doesn't work well at all for music. It is only good for effects in DVD movies. So spend your money on good main speakers if you buy an SACD player. The other speakers are just extra and will only be used for the minority of SACD recordings that are on >2 channels, and as you say, there are practical limits to the number of speakers, and room size plays a big role in how useful those speakers are even if you can fit them.
To be fair, there are no decoders that will accept DSD from a digital input. So even if your SACD player would output the DSD stream through its digital output, you would have no way of playing it at this time. I agree that it would be a very nice feature to have though, but perhaps future SACD players will have it once external DSD decoders become available.
I recently bought an SACD player, in March, and I'm very pleased with the quality. I listen to a lot of classical music and there is quite a bit of difference between CDs and SACDs, even for old recordings. For example I owned Gould's 1981 Goldberg variations on CD, and I bought the SACD version. The SACD sounds a whole lot better, in the same player. I'm using a mid-end audio system though, about $2500 speakers (Energy Veritas 2.3 main) and Yamaha 995 audio amp.
My main grief with SACD is that Sony only publishes either CD or SACD discs in its catalog - by far the biggest library of SACDs right now, but no hybrid CD/SACD discs so far. The Sony SACD discs will only play in SACD players. So I can't play them in my car, unless I also buy the regular CD version... That starts to run a little expensive. Unfortunately there is no car SACD player that I know of at this time, and the additional quality of an SACD recording would not be perceivable in a car in motion anyway (but when my Toyota Prius goes into very quiet electric mode, it might be, with better speakers...). I think Sony can fix this easily enough by starting to issue all their new discs as hybrid CD/SACDs instead of having separate catalogs of CDs and non-hybrid SACDs.
However, other publishers of SACD discs such as Delos always put out hybrid SACD discs. This is the best since they will play everywhere, but will just sound a lot better in an SACD player, and offer up to 6 channels of audio on the SACD track, which is a big bonus over standard stereo. And unlike DTS or Dolby Digital (or stereo MP3), the 6-channel DSD track is not compressed, so the quality is not compromised.
With a Public Key Infrastructure, there is no longer a need for passwords to authenticate to servers.
This makes any password cracking programs irrelevant, because if you try to attack the server, you are up against strong crypto. The 30% of passwords cracked would drop to 0% of strong keys cracked.
Of course, locally, each user most likely will still have a password that will protect their certificate. This is still vulnerable to password-cracking if the certificate is stored in a software device on a hard disk. Still, each user's machine would have to be hacked into, and then each certificate database individually.
However if it is stored in a smartcard, the smartcard would have to be physically stolen and then the password cracked in order for it to be used. But by that time the physical theft would likely have been noticed and therefore the certificate would be marked revoked in a certificate validation system, and services would not accept it anymore, making the theft useless.
Signing authentication password responses is not very efficient. It requires the user both to have a password and a certificate to sign with.
There is no need for a user password at all. You can just sign any random piece of data and have the user verify the signed message. The server knows it comes from you because the signature verifies.
In fact in this PKI model there is no such thing as a password file on the server to track.
The server just needs to have access to a CRL (certificate revocation list) in order to know which certs are no longer good (those that were compromised or obsoleted - eg, an employee quit, since the signature does not automatically become invalidated).
See http://www.avocent.com/Cybex/PublicW2.nsf/668308c7 e3b7e07f86256a3f0055a73b/7eefd056906bbb0f86256a460 050d9e6?OpenDocument
I just got myself one of these and I'm extremely happy with it. I'm not running Linux on any of my machines, but it would work just fine. The switch is a 4-port switch made especially for running multiple platforms.
You can attach any PC using USB, PS/2 or AT keyboard, and USB, PS/2 or serial mouse.
You can attach any USB-based Mac with a VGA port.
You can attach any Sun box.
As far as the actual I/O devices you can attach to the switch:
- you can use a serial, PS/2 or Sun mouse - you can use a PS/2 or Sun keyboard
You can't actually attach USB devices to the switch, even though you can have computers that use USB.
The monitor has to be a 15-pin VGA type - but there are adapters available for the old Sun type monitors.
I am currently using this switch with two PCs (both using PS/2 mouse and PS/2 keyboard plugs) running OS/2, and a Sun Ultrasparc 5. Together with the 3 cable sets (2 PC sets and 1 Sun) and shipping, it cost me $399 . I plan to use the 4th port on the switch for a USB-based Mac when I buy a Mac.
The devices I'm using are: - an AZERTY keyboard (yes, I'm French). This worked fine with PCs. To get it recognized as French by the Sun, it took more work. The Sun tries to autodetect the keyboard's language. This only works with Sun keyboards, not with PC keyboards like mine. So it was recognized as US QWERTY. Fortunately, the SwitchView has a special command mode you can use to set parameters. You type the command on the keyboard, and it gets saved into the SwitchViewp. After I entered CTRL CTRL SUN=23 ENTER, shut down my Sun, and restarted it, it automatically detected my keyboard as AZERTY, emulating a French Sun keyboard ! Joy. - a Kensington Expert Mouse 4-button trackball . This is one of the explicitly supported trackballs. The firmware of the SwitchView MP specifically knows about this trackball model and a few others. Otherwise it always works as just a 2-button mouse through other switches, both mechanical and electronic. But the SwitchView lets all 4 buttons and acceleration work. Joy !!! This is the best switch I have seen. Make sure your trackball is explicitly supported in the list though, if you want the special features. Also note the newer Expert Mouse / Pro (which I also have) isn't supported yet. It acts as a 2 -button mouse. It probably takes a KVM switch firmware upgrade for it to work. But I'm happy with the old trackball for now. - as far as monitor, I'm using a 5.5-year old Viewsonic P815 21" monitor. Works great. My OS/2 PCs are running at 1600x1200x16M at 80 Hz, with a Matrox G450 video card. This is the maximum video resolution/rate the switch is rated for. There is a very tiny amount of ghosting, but nothing that bothers me, and I have returned many switches before because the video quality was inadequate. If I increase the refresh rate to 90 Hz, ghosting becomes more noticeable, this is why I reduced it to 80 Hz.
In short, this is the best switch I have ever seen. I cannot recommend it enough. Very much worth the money. And if you know how much real estate costs in Silicon Valley, you understand that the space savings of having only one monitor/keyboard/mouse pays for itself many many times.
>The last time the PC world saw such a >tremendous shift in the capabilities of the >base operating system was August 1995, when >Windows 95 was released. After that, it's >been incremenetal upgrades to the OS.
I would make that March of 1992, when IBM released OS/2 2.0, a 32-bit pre-emptive multi-tasking, multi-threading operating system with memory protection for the PC. It's been roughly 10 years that I have been using it as I write this under OS/2. While most of the PC world didn't go with OS/2, OS/2 had some market share in the 3.5 years period during which the only other available OS from Microsoft was the laughable DOS+Windows 3.1 combination.
Thanks for the clarification on the secret service. They did tell him they could have arrested him, but he protested about free speech and they did not.
You missed my point though.
If you make a verbal threat at an airport, you know who is listening - the people who are present and can hear you.
When my friend made his comment, which was a joke, it was intended for the people in the chat room, not for the secret service, or I don't believe he would have made that joke. I have no reason to believe that there was anything prior to this event that would have specifically attracted the attention of such agency as the secret service on him.
There are only two ways I can think of that attracted the secret service attention on him :
1) someone in the chat room reported him to AOL, which then forwarded the information to the secret service . This is certainly a plausible explanation, since it happened after 9/11 . Someone in the room might not have liked the joke.
2) the secret service or some other agency is monitoring everything that goes on the wire of my cable's friend and/or AOL . We have all heard of carnivore. I'm afraid unfortunately it's not just rumors...
Unfortunately my pessimistic nature makes me believe the second theory is closer to the truth .
Conversation I had with my ex-boyfriend a few weeks ago. And no I'm not making this up !
Him: "What is the secret service ?"
Me: "Basically they are spies that work for the government . Why do you ask ?"
Him : "Well, these two guys in black suits came to my parents' house on thursday [note: that was 2 days before the conversation]. They said they were from the secret service and they had a card to prove it. They asked for me by name."
Me: "What did they want ?"
Him: "They wanted to talk to me about some comments I made in an AOL chat room back in October. I was bashing Bush and the government. At one point I said in the room "Someone should mail Bush some anthrax". They told me that was a threat and they were investigating.
Me: "So what did you say ?"
Him : "I said I was just joking of course, which was the truth. Whatever happened to freedom of speech in this country ?"
We had to show them a few times how to do it, but they don't have any problem with the command line now. They are not completely non-technical people obviously, since they write docs for technical products !
The import/export filters in Staroffice have been working well and I can send people XLS or DOS files created with Staroffice without any problems. I read the ones they send me too using Staroffice.
No, it's always been that way in the Workplace shell since OS/2 2.0 in 1992. The changes in Warp 3 and 4 are cosmetic, mostly the color schemes, wallpapers and prettier icons to make it attractive, but it's basically been the same UI for 9 years. The right mouse button also lets you drag objects, if you hold it down and move the pointer. But its primary function is for context options. Whereas the left button is for clicking/opening/selecting. It does take some getting used to if you come from another GUI. I went straight from DOS to OS/2 and had seldom used GUIs before the Workplace Shell - I tried Windows 3.0 but it was never of any use to me because it was too unstable. So perhaps because I didn't have any other habits from other GUIs, I found the OS/2 shell very easy to learn. I miss its ease of use and functionality a lot in the other GUIs I use today - the NT shell and CDE under X primarily. I wonder how long it will be before somebody comes up with a UI as useful as the OS/2 one on the other platforms.
I think your comments on the UI aren't fair. Personally, I find the Workplace Shell to be the most powerful UI so far of about a dozen OSes I have used. There is nothing unintuitive about the right mouse button, it's just the OS/2 way, not the same as everybody else, but not inherently any less intuitive. Personally I find it more powerful since you get more functionality out of it. The right mouse button in the object-oriented Workplace shell of OS/2 means "show me the list of all possible actions on this object". It's very logical and simple to understand and use IMHO.
I still use OS/2 at home but I miss some of the apps that are available on other platforms. I'd like to have something as reliable as Solaris with as many desktop applications as Linux has today, and an OS/2 UI. Then I would be really happy.
I'm afraid it's not going to happen so I'll stick with OS/2 for some more time.
OS/2 does not run Win9x 32-bit windows applications. There were both technical and legal reasons for that. IBM had a source code license for Windows 3.x, and basically recompiled it as Win-OS/2 as a subsystem. They did not have the same license for Windows9x and would have needed to reverse engineer things to run those apps. An independent group of people are doing that, it's called Project odin. See http://odin.netlabs.org . I would not call it reliable though and wouldn't use it for anything production. But there are a few apps that run under it.
Personally, I love Staroffice for OS/2 very much. In fact even on NT at work I prefer to use Staroffice over MS Office...
It's too bad Sun killed the OS/2 support for Staroffice but it's hard to blame them given IBM has dropped the ball on the OS.
Re:This is why I drive a 4 door 4 cylinder family
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Hi-Tech Repo Man
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I bought a home in 1997 in Silicon valley - the only debt I've ever had in my life. I didn't drive, I had a bicycle and also used the bus. My boyfriend was driving me around when needed.
My place does have a 2-car garage though because I planned ahead.
Earlier this year I started taking driving lessons and got my driver's license monday. I'm driving a new car - but I paid cash for it, and it's an economy Toyota Prius hybrid. Small 4 cylinder engine (70hp) plus an electronic motor providing an additional 44hp. It gets about 45 to 50mpg average. It's a great car and it wasn't all that expensive. It's pretty high tech, with an LCD color touch screen in the middle showing the consumption and for some controls like the stereo. What I like the most is that it's so quiet, especially at low speed, when only the electric motor is running !
Re:a repo man who knows the stock price of cisco?
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Hi-Tech Repo Man
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Actually it doesn't surprise me at all. Everyone in Silicon valley follows stock. For the past few years, I took the bus to work because I didn't have a driver's license. The bus driver was sometimes talking about the market with the passengers !
Monday I finally got a driver's license because I couldn't bear the bus' slow schedule anymore. I'm driving a new car (Toyota Prius hybrid) but there will be no reposession for me - I didn't take a loan for it and paid cash;)
There is no comparison between Eazel and OS/2 in the article. The only mention is of Team OS/2, a group of OS/2 enthusiasts who did not ask for money.
Since Eazel has a desktop UI product for Linux, I would have expected to find some comparison between Eazel's Nautilus and the OS/2 Workplace Shell - which is the greatest UI I have used on any OS so far. But there was none of that.
As for the importance of Eazel compared to OS/2, I wonder what Cmdrtaco is smoking. OS/2 is commercial software, but it is an OS which at one point had 10 million users, and will certainly be in the computer history books decades from now. Much has already been written about the IBM/Microsoft rivalry WRT OS/2. Technically, the OS/2 kernel, development tools, and user interface, even though IBM does not update them very often anymore, are still way ahead of anything open-source I have seen so far - and that includes Linux, for which I'm forced to develop in the course of my day job and curse against every day in the hope our marketing people finally decide to drop support for this piece of crap. Linux users are too close minded to use our commercial server software anyway, even if it blows away Apache.
Somehow, I don't think Eazel will be remembered by many after they inevitably go bankrupt, the way OS/2 will be when people stop using it around 2010 . That's assuming something better will be out by that time - but I have been waiting for 9 years for something better, and I'm still using OS/2.
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Yes, you could encrypt all voice traffic. This would work well and the feds would indeed not be able to decrypt it. As far as Verisign having the key, they would not unless you used key escrow, but then there would be no point. If Verisign merely signs your certificate, then they have your public key, like everybody else, but not the private key. They will also collect some personal information about you during enrollment, such as your name, address, and your credit card number for payment of the service of issuing the certificate.
... If they did it would indeed be urgent to switch to secure telephony.
But they never get your private key, so they cannot decrypt the traffic. The most they can do is tell the feds the information they collected when issuing you the cert.
However, keep in mind that decrypting the traffic is not necessarily the most critical part of wiretapping. Just being able to trace who talked to who (which is visible in a packet trace, even of an SSL session with client auth, by looking at client and server certificates), will usually provide a lot of information. Think of it like this : suspect X made a call to suspect Y at date Z. The content of the conversation is not necessarily critical and sometimes just the fact that the call was made is sufficient, just like the caller id records of phone companies might be.
I know that storage costs have dropped, but I still have my doubts that phone companies have the capacity to record and keep all phone calls ever made on their lines, just to keep them available for government inspection later on
I haven't been able to read SACDs in my computer DVD-ROM. I tried to rip physical tracks with cdrecord and cdrdao on OS/2, but that did not work. On the other hand I never tried doing that on actual DVD disks either, I would have to go back and check.
As far as your other issues, there is no region coding or CSS on SACDs.
The only SACD decks currently are for homes, and are either CD/SACD or CD/SACD/DVDs.
.. This is a 5 SACD changer from Sony. I'm very happy with it.
n t_Id=1&Section_Id=939&Product_Id=1761099&showcase= t for $179.88 . I can't believe it's dropped that low. I think I'm just going to order a second one of these for my upstairs stereo. I can't wait for a car and portable SACD player to come out.
I bought an SCD-CE775 in March for $350
You can get one from http://www.jandr.com/JRProductPage.process?Mercha
It is indeed not easy to hear the difference between standard red book 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo CD and stereo SACD on a low-end speaker system.
But it is not impossible as you claim. If you own a decent set of hifi speakers and amp, then you will be able to hear the difference. It is not a huge one, but after listening for a few months now I can tell it easily - and I do own several discs of the same recording in both formats.
You can try for yourself and buy a hybrid CD/SACD disc even if you don't have an SACD player. You will be able to play it on your regular CD player. Then you could go to a store and do a double-blind test. Ask the dealer not to tell you which track is playing, CD or SACD. This is what I did, and I was convinced.
Actually dual-layer (non-hybrid) SACDs have exactly the same capacity as DVDs. I believe they are the same physical technology. Only the hybrid SACDs differ physically from DVDs, since one layer is high-density DVD-like and the other layer is audio CD.
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For the most part, music is not constrained by CD capacity, but that's not always true. I own many classical pieces that run longer than the roughly 80 minutes that a single CD provides. For example the slowest versions of the Goldberg variations I own run 90 minutes, and require 2 CDs, eg Rosalyn Tureck's 1999 recording. It's fine with me when I listen to it at home on my changer. In the car it's painful to change discs while driving. And yes sometimes I'm in the car for longer than 80 minutes, bay area traffic can be very painful even in these recession times
As far as being able to burn my own discs to solve the problem, I don't really find that a good solution. The time I would spend doing my own disc is worth a lot more than the $20 I would pay for a single-disc SACD version of the recording. I would rather buy one already made. But I respect your right to be able to do that if you have time to kill, and I don't think they should enforce DRMs with SACD discs, the way they are currently doing by issuing some SACD-only (non-hybrid) discs that are only playable in SACD players.
Also I do not like compressed MP3 audio, it has a very bad and noticeable effect on classical music that reduces dynamic range, which I can tell instantly. Call me an audiophile
The main difference between DVD and SACD in how the high capacity is used on the SACD disc.
1) SACD does not have video, unlike DVD or DVD-audio. It only has audio. Many DVD-audios have a video menu and are thus not very fit for playing in portable or car players, but SACDs are (except for the lack of existence of any such player yet
2) audio is never compressed on SACD, just like on CDs or on DVDs PCM tracks . But it is better than on DVD Dolby Digital or DTS tracks which are compressed
3) audio is not in 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo PCM format on SACD, but rather in DSD format. This is actually 2.8 MHz 1-bit on 2 or 6 channels.
Overall I think SACD is a very good idea, but Sony has not been pushing it at all, surprisingly. They could do so by issuing all their new discs as hybrid CD/SACDs, but they have not at this point...
I don't know if I can hear audio at 100 kHz, but I can tell the difference between the same recording that I own on stereo CD and stereo SACD. The SACD version is smoother, more detailed.
Most SACD discs are stereo, not 6 channels. SACD is excellent for stereo and does not require 6 channels. You can enjoy stereo music a lot better with stereo SACDs and two good speakers than with stereo CDs and the same good speakers, if you are lucky enough to find your favorite music on SACD medium - which luckily for me has been the case , I have found many good classical SACD titles.
If you happen to listen to music in your living room and you have a home theater which has >2 speakers, you can also enjoy the 5.1 SACD recordings. But I agree with you that most of your money should be spent on getting good main speakers. I would especially note that it's worth it for music to have those main speakers provide good bass. Sure, you can configure the SACD player to direct the bass to a subwoofer if you own one, but I have found that this just doesn't work well at all for music. It is only good for effects in DVD movies. So spend your money on good main speakers if you buy an SACD player. The other speakers are just extra and will only be used for the minority of SACD recordings that are on >2 channels, and as you say, there are practical limits to the number of speakers, and room size plays a big role in how useful those speakers are even if you can fit them.
To be fair, there are no decoders that will accept DSD from a digital input. So even if your SACD player would output the DSD stream through its digital output, you would have no way of playing it at this time. I agree that it would be a very nice feature to have though, but perhaps future SACD players will have it once external DSD decoders become available.
... That starts to run a little expensive. Unfortunately there is no car SACD player that I know of at this time, and the additional quality of an SACD recording would not be perceivable in a car in motion anyway (but when my Toyota Prius goes into very quiet electric mode, it might be, with better speakers ...). I think Sony can fix this easily enough by starting to issue all their new discs as hybrid CD/SACDs instead of having separate catalogs of CDs and non-hybrid SACDs.
I recently bought an SACD player, in March, and I'm very pleased with the quality. I listen to a lot of classical music and there is quite a bit of difference between CDs and SACDs, even for old recordings. For example I owned Gould's 1981 Goldberg variations on CD, and I bought the SACD version. The SACD sounds a whole lot better, in the same player. I'm using a mid-end audio system though, about $2500 speakers (Energy Veritas 2.3 main) and Yamaha 995 audio amp.
My main grief with SACD is that Sony only publishes either CD or SACD discs in its catalog - by far the biggest library of SACDs right now, but no hybrid CD/SACD discs so far. The Sony SACD discs will only play in SACD players. So I can't play them in my car, unless I also buy the regular CD version
However, other publishers of SACD discs such as Delos always put out hybrid SACD discs. This is the best since they will play everywhere, but will just sound a lot better in an SACD player, and offer up to 6 channels of audio on the SACD track, which is a big bonus over standard stereo. And unlike DTS or Dolby Digital (or stereo MP3), the 6-channel DSD track is not compressed, so the quality is not compromised.
With a Public Key Infrastructure, there is no longer a need for passwords to authenticate to servers.
This makes any password cracking programs irrelevant, because if you try to attack the server, you are up against strong crypto. The 30% of passwords cracked would drop to 0% of strong keys cracked.
Of course, locally, each user most likely will still have a password that will protect their certificate. This is still vulnerable to password-cracking if the certificate is stored in a software device on a hard disk. Still, each user's machine would have to be hacked into, and then each certificate database individually.
However if it is stored in a smartcard, the smartcard would have to be physically stolen and then the password cracked in order for it to be used. But by that time the physical theft would likely have been noticed and therefore the certificate would be marked revoked in a certificate validation system, and services would not accept it anymore, making the theft useless.
Signing authentication password responses is not very efficient. It requires the user both to have a password and a certificate to sign with.
There is no need for a user password at all. You can just sign any random piece of data and have the user verify the signed message. The server knows it comes from you because the signature verifies.
In fact in this PKI model there is no such thing as a password file on the server to track.
The server just needs to have access to a CRL (certificate revocation list) in order to know which certs are no longer good (those that were compromised or obsoleted - eg, an employee quit, since the signature does not automatically become invalidated).
See http://www.avocent.com/Cybex/PublicW2.nsf/668308c7 e3b7e07f86256a3f0055a73b/7eefd056906bbb0f86256a460 050d9e6?OpenDocument
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I just got myself one of these and I'm extremely happy with it. I'm not running Linux on any of my machines, but it would work just fine.
The switch is a 4-port switch made especially for running multiple platforms.
You can attach any PC using USB, PS/2 or AT keyboard, and USB, PS/2 or serial mouse.
You can attach any USB-based Mac with a VGA port.
You can attach any Sun box.
As far as the actual I/O devices you can attach to the switch
- you can use a serial, PS/2 or Sun mouse
- you can use a PS/2 or Sun keyboard
You can't actually attach USB devices to the switch, even though you can have computers that use USB.
The monitor has to be a 15-pin VGA type - but there are adapters available for the old Sun type monitors.
I am currently using this switch with two PCs (both using PS/2 mouse and PS/2 keyboard plugs) running OS/2, and a Sun Ultrasparc 5. Together with the 3 cable sets (2 PC sets and 1 Sun) and shipping, it cost me $399 . I plan to use the 4th port on the switch for a USB-based Mac when I buy a Mac.
The devices I'm using are
- an AZERTY keyboard (yes, I'm French). This worked fine with PCs. To get it recognized as French by the Sun, it took more work. The Sun tries to autodetect the keyboard's language. This only works with Sun keyboards, not with PC keyboards like mine. So it was recognized as US QWERTY. Fortunately, the SwitchView has a special command mode you can use to set parameters. You type the command on the keyboard, and it gets saved into the SwitchViewp.
After I entered CTRL CTRL SUN=23 ENTER, shut down my Sun, and restarted it, it automatically detected my keyboard as AZERTY, emulating a French Sun keyboard ! Joy.
- a Kensington Expert Mouse 4-button trackball . This is one of the explicitly supported trackballs. The firmware of the SwitchView MP specifically knows about this trackball model and a few others. Otherwise it always works as just a 2-button mouse through other switches, both mechanical and electronic. But the SwitchView lets all 4 buttons and acceleration work. Joy !!! This is the best switch I have seen. Make sure your trackball is explicitly supported in the list though, if you want the special features. Also note the newer Expert Mouse / Pro (which I also have) isn't supported yet. It acts as a 2 -button mouse. It probably takes a KVM switch firmware upgrade for it to work. But I'm happy with the old trackball for now.
- as far as monitor, I'm using a 5.5-year old Viewsonic P815 21" monitor. Works great. My OS/2 PCs are running at 1600x1200x16M at 80 Hz, with a Matrox G450 video card. This is the maximum video resolution/rate the switch is rated for. There is a very tiny amount of ghosting, but nothing that bothers me, and I have returned many switches before because the video quality was inadequate. If I increase the refresh rate to 90 Hz, ghosting becomes more noticeable, this is why I reduced it to 80 Hz.
In short, this is the best switch I have ever seen. I cannot recommend it enough. Very much worth the money. And if you know how much real estate costs in Silicon Valley, you understand that the space savings of having only one monitor/keyboard/mouse pays for itself many many times.
Then, maybe, we would finally get things like real kernel thread support with true POSIX compliance in the Linux kernel ...
>The last time the PC world saw such a
>tremendous shift in the capabilities of the
>base operating system was August 1995, when
>Windows 95 was released. After that, it's
>been incremenetal upgrades to the OS.
I would make that March of 1992, when IBM released OS/2 2.0, a 32-bit pre-emptive multi-tasking, multi-threading operating system with memory protection for the PC. It's been roughly 10 years that I have been using it as I write this under OS/2. While most of the PC world didn't go with OS/2, OS/2 had some market share in the 3.5 years period during which the only other available OS from Microsoft was the laughable DOS+Windows 3.1 combination.
Thanks for the clarification on the secret service. They did tell him they could have arrested him, but he protested about free speech and they did not.
You missed my point though.
If you make a verbal threat at an airport, you know who is listening - the people who are present and can hear you.
When my friend made his comment, which was a joke, it was intended for the people in the chat room, not for the secret service, or I don't believe he would have made that joke. I have no reason to believe that there was anything prior to this event that would have specifically attracted the attention of such agency as the secret service on him.
There are only two ways I can think of that attracted the secret service attention on him :
1) someone in the chat room reported him to AOL, which then forwarded the information to the secret service . This is certainly a plausible explanation, since it happened after 9/11 . Someone in the room might not have liked the joke.
2) the secret service or some other agency is monitoring everything that goes on the wire of my cable's friend and/or AOL . We have all heard of carnivore. I'm afraid unfortunately it's not just rumors...
Unfortunately my pessimistic nature makes me believe the second theory is closer to the truth .
Conversation I had with my ex-boyfriend a few weeks ago. And no I'm not making this up !
Him: "What is the secret service ?"
Me: "Basically they are spies that work for the government . Why do you ask ?"
Him : "Well, these two guys in black suits came to my parents' house on thursday [note: that was 2 days before the conversation]. They said they were from the secret service and they had a card to prove it. They asked for me by name."
Me: "What did they want ?"
Him: "They wanted to talk to me about some comments I made in an AOL chat room back in October. I was bashing Bush and the government. At one point I said in the room "Someone should mail Bush some anthrax". They told me that was a threat and they were investigating.
Me: "So what did you say ?"
Him : "I said I was just joking of course, which was the truth. Whatever happened to freedom of speech in this country ?"
Me : Sigh.
They aren't just blocking OS'es that have IE available.
Mozilla 0.9.5 for OS/2 is blocked, and there is no I.E. for OS/2.
We had to show them a few times how to do it, but they don't have any problem with the command line now. They are not completely non-technical people obviously, since they write docs for technical products !
The import/export filters in Staroffice have been working well and I can send people XLS or DOS files created with Staroffice without any problems. I read the ones they send me too using Staroffice.
Incredible, isn't it ?
No, it's always been that way in the Workplace shell since OS/2 2.0 in 1992. The changes in Warp 3 and 4 are cosmetic, mostly the color schemes, wallpapers and prettier icons to make it attractive, but it's basically been the same UI for 9 years. The right mouse button also lets you drag objects, if you hold it down and move the pointer. But its primary function is for context options. Whereas the left button is for clicking/opening/selecting. It does take some getting used to if you come from another GUI. I went straight from DOS to OS/2 and had seldom used GUIs before the Workplace Shell - I tried Windows 3.0 but it was never of any use to me because it was too unstable. So perhaps because I didn't have any other habits from other GUIs, I found the OS/2 shell very easy to learn. I miss its ease of use and functionality a lot in the other GUIs I use today - the NT shell and CDE under X primarily. I wonder how long it will be before somebody comes up with a UI as useful as the OS/2 one on the other platforms.
I think your comments on the UI aren't fair. Personally, I find the Workplace Shell to be the most powerful UI so far of about a dozen OSes I have used. There is nothing unintuitive about the right mouse button, it's just the OS/2 way, not the same as everybody else, but not inherently any less intuitive. Personally I find it more powerful since you get more functionality out of it. The right mouse button in the object-oriented Workplace shell of OS/2 means "show me the list of all possible actions on this object". It's very logical and simple to understand and use IMHO.
I still use OS/2 at home but I miss some of the apps that are available on other platforms. I'd like to have something as reliable as Solaris with as many desktop applications as Linux has today, and an OS/2 UI. Then I would be really happy.
I'm afraid it's not going to happen so I'll stick with OS/2 for some more time.
OS/2 does not run Win9x 32-bit windows applications. There were both technical and legal reasons for that. IBM had a source code license for Windows 3.x, and basically recompiled it as Win-OS/2 as a subsystem. They did not have the same license for Windows9x and would have needed to reverse engineer things to run those apps. An independent group of people are doing that, it's called Project odin. See http://odin.netlabs.org . I would not call it reliable though and wouldn't use it for anything production. But there are a few apps that run under it.
...
Personally, I love Staroffice for OS/2 very much. In fact even on NT at work I prefer to use Staroffice over MS Office
It's too bad Sun killed the OS/2 support for Staroffice but it's hard to blame them given IBM has dropped the ball on the OS.
I bought a home in 1997 in Silicon valley - the only debt I've ever had in my life. I didn't drive, I had a bicycle and also used the bus. My boyfriend was driving me around when needed.
My place does have a 2-car garage though because I planned ahead.
Earlier this year I started taking driving lessons and got my driver's license monday. I'm driving a new car - but I paid cash for it, and it's an economy Toyota Prius hybrid. Small 4 cylinder engine (70hp) plus an electronic motor providing an additional 44hp. It gets about 45 to 50mpg average. It's a great car and it wasn't all that expensive. It's pretty high tech, with an LCD color touch screen in the middle showing the consumption and for some controls like the stereo. What I like the most is that it's so quiet, especially at low speed, when only the electric motor is running !
Actually it doesn't surprise me at all. Everyone in Silicon valley follows stock. For the past few years, I took the bus to work because I didn't have a driver's license. The bus driver was sometimes talking about the market with the passengers ! Monday I finally got a driver's license because I couldn't bear the bus' slow schedule anymore. I'm driving a new car (Toyota Prius hybrid) but there will be no reposession for me - I didn't take a loan for it and paid cash ;)
There is no comparison between Eazel and OS/2 in the article. The only mention is of Team OS/2, a group of OS/2 enthusiasts who did not ask for money.
Since Eazel has a desktop UI product for Linux, I would have expected to find some comparison between Eazel's Nautilus and the OS/2 Workplace Shell - which is the greatest UI I have used on any OS so far. But there was none of that.
As for the importance of Eazel compared to OS/2, I wonder what Cmdrtaco is smoking. OS/2 is commercial software, but it is an OS which at one point had 10 million users, and will certainly be in the computer history books decades from now. Much has already been written about the IBM/Microsoft rivalry WRT OS/2. Technically, the OS/2 kernel, development tools, and user interface, even though IBM does not update them very often anymore, are still way ahead of anything open-source I have seen so far - and that includes Linux, for which I'm forced to develop in the course of my day job and curse against every day in the hope our marketing people finally decide to drop support for this piece of crap. Linux users are too close minded to use our commercial server software anyway, even if it blows away Apache.
Somehow, I don't think Eazel will be remembered by many after they inevitably go bankrupt, the way OS/2 will be when people stop using it around 2010 . That's assuming something better will be out by that time - but I have been waiting for 9 years for something better, and I'm still using OS/2.
(strange)/u/jpierre{44} uname -a
/usr/sbin/killall [ signal ]
SunOS strange 5.8 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-60
(strange)/u/jpierre{45} man killall
Reformatting page. Please Wait... done
killall(1M)
NAME
killall - kill all active processes
SYNOPSIS
OS/2 has GUI support for overriding the default MAC address on most Ethernet card drivers :-)
This is a function controlled by the NDIS drivers, but almost of all the OS/2 NDIS drivers have it.
Anyone using the MAC address for authentication is at risk.