However, in 1967, when James Ellis (of the secret British agency, GCHQ) first came up with the idea of public key cryptography, his theory was buried......Ellis's breakthrough was simply too pretty
to be trusted and as a result, it lay locked away until 1997
This reads as if PK cryptography wasn't public knowledge until '97. This isn't the case, of course, as those of us who followed Phil Zimmerman's excellent work from '91 (first PGP release, IIRC) onwards.
Can someone please explain what this scientology is all about?
Have a look at xenu.net. Basically, a 'religion' started by a nutter SF author, L Ron Hubbard which involves giving away scads of money to be let into the secret that we're all covered in little dead aliens which... oh heck, just read it. They're well crazy and well dangerous. Extremely litigious and scourge of usenet (the scientologists were probably the first to systematically abuse newsgroups to supress dissent and criticism).
Re:A flaw in the book? Or the review?
on
Rebel Code
·
· Score: 1
The book starts with linux? Open source, under whatever name it had, has been around since long before the first linux kernel was
released. Linux did not touch off the revolution, if it is one. It might even be considered a counter-revolution since, in the beginning,
open source was the norm.
Must a book begin at the beginning? Moody does know the history of "open source" software and explains it in the book. Most people don't have a problem with achronological narratives.
I remember a project in Sinclair User or similar almost 20 years ago which used alpha wave levels (picked up by a modified towelling headband... well, it was the 80s) to steer a little blob (give it a break, it *was* a ZX81) over horizontally-scrolling 'jumps'. You learnt to concentrate to guide the blob safely through the course.
Assuming about half on the
space in the library is given to walkways between the shelves (a guess based on paper libraries)
Bzzt. Wrong. Archival Libraries (like the British Library, Library of Congress, or the institution in which I work) use sliding shelves, which waste less than 10% of the storage space for shelf access walkways - each stack of shelves has only one walkway which can 'move' (you actually move the shelves) to between any two shelves.
No mention, then, of the demands of the citizen
for privicy in that balancing act.
Boateng's quite a worry - in all the interviews I've seen with him he doesn't seem to get the concept of personal freedom, something he shares with a lot of New Labour (Jack Straw, anyone?). They're come a long way from the viewpoint of the Labour movement born 100 years ago this year.
From the Observer story (the main headline in the printed version today) this reads like a wishlist by the NCIS (National Criminal Intelligence Service - a catch-all agency that ties together the other spooks - MI5, GCHQ, Customs, MoD, Benefits Agency...) They'd obviously like to have such a log of every communication, but they'd also like a videocam in every room in the UK, Crim-Stop® microchips in every brain and to imprison everyone over the age of 8 to eliminate the possibility of them growing up to be criminals.
The article states that the Home Office "admitted that it was giving the plan serious consideration", but nothing in the article suggests that NCIS has seriously costed the proposal - the figures given are £3m setup (since when has *any* government initiative come in that cheap?) and £9m a year to run. ISPs & Telcos won't stand for it - business doesn't particularly like the spooks - and who's going to tie their logs to the new system? I doubt that they've all conveniently standardised on syslog().
The 2100 is "cool but expensive"?? At 270UKP,
it's a steal. I appreciate that it would be cheaper to hook up a 30-quid video camera to a frame grabber in an old box, but for those of us with massive investment in structured cabling, it's way cheaper than hooking up dedicated surveillance cameras, and they're very easy to move around.
Of more interest is the 2120 (about 850UKP), which has built-in motion detection, 25fps (PAL) and it's weatherproof (I think. I read it somewhere but now I can't see it in the spec). Check out the live feed of 45 and 5th and stress test one of these beauties.
I still don't see where
whomever posted the/. note got 640mb, because the math simply doesn't add up.
I think we're all puzzling about that one. You're right that neither storage solution looks particularly fly - the Exadrive will need some serious controllers on the backplane to cope with the dumbness of the IDE drives. Note also Exadrive's RAID options - 0, 1 and 1+0. Raid O I can't see working too well with those IDE drives, ATA66 or not (there's a lot more i/o requests involved there, and IDE isn't your man for that) - RAID 1 is great if you can afford to halve your disk capacity for redundancy. RAID 10 (1+0) combines both of these glorious cons in one great product!
Save your pennies and get a proper SCSI RAID controller & backplane.
I can't see any reference to DMAPI (Data Manager
API) compliance in the docs. Linux needs a
DMAPI compliant FS to implement HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management). There's a good page on DMAPI here. Is there any HSM development on linux in the pipeline? I'm aware of openxdm who are working on an Open Source DMAPI implementation, and OTG have made noises about porting DiskXtender, but is there anybody working on a Free (libre) implementation? And what happened to Unitree's linux HSM which they claimed "Initially UCFM for Linux will ship on Redhat Software's Linux release 6.0"? RedHat's website seems to know nothing about it.
So, can anybody give me the skinny on any Free (libre) DMAPI/HSM work going on?
Total is a shade under 2100 before VAT. Thats at least 300 cheaper before VAT. Plus I can shop around. Plus, I think 850Mhz PIIIs
are faster than 500Mhz G4's so I can drop a bit on the processors. Plus its a better graphics card (Twin ATI Rage Pro versus one)
and better sound.
And firewire? And a ZIP drive? See - it isn't
that much of a difference.
And I have the -option- to forget 200 quid worth of gigabit ethernet, since neither my home nor work networks
support it, if I choose.
Pah! That's cheating! But unfortunately, we don't
have any gigabit over copper here either. Backbone yes, on copper, no:(
Dont get me wrong. I like Macs. Just dont like the prices, and the replace-as-upgrade syndrom.
I said: The dual 450 (which doesn't have the DVD-RAM, half the memory and no gigabit ethernet) is a much more palatable 1600 pounds or
so.
Where? At Dabs (typical, cheaper-than-most Mac dealer), the Dual 450 is 1600 plus VAT (at 17.5 percent, dont forget), for a
128Mb Model. The dual-500 is 2400 plus VAT, (Thats nearly 3000 altogether, BTW) for a 256Mb model.
Oooh, so sue me for not including the VAT. Guess I do too much purchasing. Yup, mea culpa - we were ordering 1Gb dual 500s, the base is 256Mb. I notice you didn't reply to the gigabit ethernet and DVD-RAM bits. All I'm asking is for you to compare like with like.
Here in the UK, a dual-500Mhz G4 costs around 2400 pounds of our dodgy UK money. In comparison to a dual-Intel system (say dual
800 PIII's, around 1400-1600 UKP max??).
With a DVD-RAM, 1Gb PC133 RAM, 10/100/1000
ethernet? I don't think so. How much would a dual 1GHz PC cost? The dual 450 (which doesn't have the
DVD-RAM, half the memory and no gigabit ethernet) is a much more palatable 1600 pounds or so. OK, Macs are overpriced (IMHO) but not as much as you say.
I think someone mentioned this already, but this is just like Channel One in secondary schools. In exchange for paying for televisions in every
classroom and a closed circuit network, schools have to agree to make the national Channel One newscast (and highly targeted commercials)
part of the mandatory instructional day. The newscast actually wasn't that bad, but the Pepsi commericials and movie previews were
completely mindless drivel.
Is this kind of commercial deal common in the US? Can your children opt out of these "mandatory" ads and newscasts (who selects stories and editorializes them?). Soviet-style "The five year plan again yields record crops for happy farmworkers" news is rightly derided by all - how is this corporate brainwashing any better?
I think the company feelings about this issue are quite valid. Someone should have contacted the company directly before just going
out and doing directly without permission. I am not sure what the legality on this issue is, I am sure it is copyrighted in some manner.
Wow. You really don't understand, do you? You're asking that people shouldn't do things with things they own (which contain no licencable content - this isn't an IP issue, whatever the story says) without the permission of the manufacturer? I can't connect a barcode reader to my serial port, swipe a few codes and work out how to use the little electrical signals that come down the wire?
I've just this day set up a dumb Wyse-50 with a barcode scanning wand to serial login to my dev (RH) box. I work at a Legal Deposit Library and we're paying a company to come and bin some 40 of these. They cost a few *thousand* pounds each back in the 80s (customised character set/language support) and being somewhat of a scavanger, I'm playing with one to see if it's worth saving them. It reads barcodes happily and simply dumps the numerical codes to stdin - I'm going to take one home and link it up to an MP3 jukebox & db so that I can scan barcodes from my ripped CDs and trigger the server to play the album.
Only two itsy complaints: (1) why didn't Apple put more expansion bays in the PMac G4?, and (2) Why is it still 500 MHz? How do
you go about overclocking the dang thing?
Re question (2) - Blame Can^H^H^H Motorola. The lack of >500MHz G4 chips is what lead to Apple having to release dual proc 450/500 machines instead of a faster version of the single proc.
For one thing, it's a rare Sony Trinitron TV set that doesn't make it to its 20th anniversary.
Really? Have the Trinitron tubes really been out that long? I don't know much about the TVs, but the Trinitron tubes in the monitors certainly don't last as long as a 'standard' CRT before the picture goes fuzzy, and I've seen a lot of them.
For the most part, I agree with your statement - however, at my job, we run several linux boxes sans CRT. Unfortunately, we also run win 9x boxes on our desktops for using excel mainly. Having a nice, easy remote GUI would come in handy.
I've said it before (so have others, in this very discussion) and I'll say it again:
I run headless linux boxen here and access them from my (spit) NT workstation. Stuff I like:
It's stateless, unlike X, so when your desktop machine goes belly-up your headless machines don't even notice.
It's cross-platform. I can access my little penguins from my Palm, if I were inclined.
It's virtual (on linux) - I don't even need a video card in the linux box, and I can run at any res (provided I've the memory for it). Which means that I can have massive desktops on the linux machines and view them on my 21" monitor. How many 21" monitors do you have? How many boxes do you have? Don't you wish all those boxes could have a large monitor? Now they can!
It's Open Source. Dammit, it's GPL'd. Development is active and fast.
It's stable. As a rock.
It's ssh'able.
That's the last time I'm plugging VNC here. If you haven't tried it, it's your own fault.
Gigabit..... sigh, what can I say about it other then I personally have had nothing but problems with it in both NT and Linux. I get a whopping 3600K/sec when I'm on 100mbit and when we switched a few machines to 1000mbit fiber we get 3800K/sec. Great we just spent ungodly amounts of money on a nice Cisco 5300(?) Catalyst router and 450.00 a piece on some network cards. I think the problem is in how the router is set up though. I'm assured by a few people that it really isn't supposed to be that slow;-)
Your problem is probably that your CPUs are spending a lot of time servicing interrupts from broadcasts. Putting a gigabit card in anything but a very high-end machine is probably going to adversely effect your performance, and you're unlikely to see much improvement in network throughput. Aggregating 100Mbs links (and running them duplex) is likely to give better results on SME*-level servers.
If you haven't yet, grab a copy of Hummingbird Exceed 6.1. It's a little pricey, but it's by far the best X server out there. You get the best of both worlds -- Apps under Win2k when you need them, and then a simple flip of the Alt-TAB into Unix. Honestly, I'm so used to it that I barely know that I'm using two computers. It might as well be a combined operating system.
I'm afraid you're wrong. Oxford University (and Cambridge, and Harvard etc.) is unbelivable rich. This is common knowledge in the UK.
That's irrelevant. While the combined wealth of the colleges may be considerable, currently the colleges do not make any contribution to OUCS. OUCS is run entirely by university central funds, with the same budget as any other UK university.
As somebody who used to be network & systems admin at one of the Oxford Colleges (Hi Dave!), the amounts available for IT are really rather pityful, similar to the situation in most British Universities (outside CS depts). Alan Gay (who is a reasonable chap) doesn't have hordes of lawyers at his beck and call, but he does have some serious hackers working at OUCS (Malcolm Beattie, of perl5 fame, for example) who should have been able to tell him enough about DeCSS (real, not the fake one) to enable him to stand up to this sort of legal bullying. There should be plenty of people in Oxford who can and will fight this battle. Leave 'em to it.
The caption on the crest of arms is in Celtic. It appears to mean The Mad Billy Goat in English.
Celtic?? WTF is Celtic? Furrfu! It looks like Irish Gaelic, which is a celtic (for various values of celtic) language, but there's no such language as 'celtic'.
Napster is helping to popularize MP3s. MP3s are a decentralizing, democratizing force in music distribution. They cut out the middle man. The RIAA works for the middle man.
Note that this is not a unique feature of MP3s, nor limited to music distribution, nor even AV media in general. What we are seeing is a (rather obvious, if you think about it) direct consequence of improvements in digital representation and transmission coupled with the democratizing nature of the 'net. The Dinosaurs are screaming and they'll hurt a lot of people before they die or evolve, so I'm pretty happy just to sit back, watch, and not get too close. Genie/bottle, unstoppable march, inexorable advance - choose your favourite cliche about technology, they're all true, and luckily there's not an Association, Cartel nor MegaCorp that can stand up to it.
Slashdot Mirror
This reads as if PK cryptography wasn't public knowledge until '97. This isn't the case, of course, as those of us who followed Phil Zimmerman's excellent work from '91 (first PGP release, IIRC) onwards.
Have a look at xenu.net. Basically, a 'religion' started by a nutter SF author, L Ron Hubbard which involves giving away scads of money to be let into the secret that we're all covered in little dead aliens which... oh heck, just read it. They're well crazy and well dangerous. Extremely litigious and scourge of usenet (the scientologists were probably the first to systematically abuse newsgroups to supress dissent and criticism).
Must a book begin at the beginning? Moody does know the history of "open source" software and explains it in the book. Most people don't have a problem with achronological narratives.
I remember a project in Sinclair User or similar almost 20 years ago which used alpha wave levels (picked up by a modified towelling headband... well, it was the 80s) to steer a little blob (give it a break, it *was* a ZX81) over horizontally-scrolling 'jumps'. You learnt to concentrate to guide the blob safely through the course.
Bzzt. Wrong. Archival Libraries (like the British Library, Library of Congress, or the institution in which I work) use sliding shelves, which waste less than 10% of the storage space for shelf access walkways - each stack of shelves has only one walkway which can 'move' (you actually move the shelves) to between any two shelves.
Boateng's quite a worry - in all the interviews I've seen with him he doesn't seem to get the concept of personal freedom, something he shares with a lot of New Labour (Jack Straw, anyone?). They're come a long way from the viewpoint of the Labour movement born 100 years ago this year.
The article states that the Home Office "admitted that it was giving the plan serious consideration", but nothing in the article suggests that NCIS has seriously costed the proposal - the figures given are £3m setup (since when has *any* government initiative come in that cheap?) and £9m a year to run. ISPs & Telcos won't stand for it - business doesn't particularly like the spooks - and who's going to tie their logs to the new system? I doubt that they've all conveniently standardised on syslog().
Of more interest is the 2120 (about 850UKP), which has built-in motion detection, 25fps (PAL) and it's weatherproof (I think. I read it somewhere but now I can't see it in the spec). Check out the live feed of 45 and 5th and stress test one of these beauties.
I think we're all puzzling about that one. You're right that neither storage solution looks particularly fly - the Exadrive will need some serious controllers on the backplane to cope with the dumbness of the IDE drives. Note also Exadrive's RAID options - 0, 1 and 1+0. Raid O I can't see working too well with those IDE drives, ATA66 or not (there's a lot more i/o requests involved there, and IDE isn't your man for that) - RAID 1 is great if you can afford to halve your disk capacity for redundancy. RAID 10 (1+0) combines both of these glorious cons in one great product!
Save your pennies and get a proper SCSI RAID controller & backplane.
So, can anybody give me the skinny on any Free (libre) DMAPI/HSM work going on?
Total is a shade under 2100 before VAT. Thats at least 300 cheaper before VAT. Plus I can shop around. Plus, I think 850Mhz PIIIs are faster than 500Mhz G4's so I can drop a bit on the processors. Plus its a better graphics card (Twin ATI Rage Pro versus one) and better sound.
And firewire? And a ZIP drive? See - it isn't that much of a difference.
And I have the -option- to forget 200 quid worth of gigabit ethernet, since neither my home nor work networks support it, if I choose.
Pah! That's cheating! But unfortunately, we don't have any gigabit over copper here either. Backbone yes, on copper, no :(
Dont get me wrong. I like Macs. Just dont like the prices, and the replace-as-upgrade syndrom.
Don't get me wrong. I don't really like Macs... :)
Where? At Dabs (typical, cheaper-than-most Mac dealer), the Dual 450 is 1600 plus VAT (at 17.5 percent, dont forget), for a 128Mb Model. The dual-500 is 2400 plus VAT, (Thats nearly 3000 altogether, BTW) for a 256Mb model.
Oooh, so sue me for not including the VAT. Guess I do too much purchasing. Yup, mea culpa - we were ordering 1Gb dual 500s, the base is 256Mb. I notice you didn't reply to the gigabit ethernet and DVD-RAM bits. All I'm asking is for you to compare like with like.
you been doing magic mushies?
Hardly - the season's a couple of weeks away.
With a DVD-RAM, 1Gb PC133 RAM, 10/100/1000 ethernet? I don't think so. How much would a dual 1GHz PC cost? The dual 450 (which doesn't have the DVD-RAM, half the memory and no gigabit ethernet) is a much more palatable 1600 pounds or so. OK, Macs are overpriced (IMHO) but not as much as you say.
Is this kind of commercial deal common in the US? Can your children opt out of these "mandatory" ads and newscasts (who selects stories and editorializes them?). Soviet-style "The five year plan again yields record crops for happy farmworkers" news is rightly derided by all - how is this corporate brainwashing any better?
I thought you guys had the Land of the Free...
To which KFury spurted: Completely untrue. Are you a lawyer? This is a major tenant of trade secrecy law.
Bzzt. It's a tenet [sic] of Trademark law.
Wow. You really don't understand, do you? You're asking that people shouldn't do things with things they own (which contain no licencable content - this isn't an IP issue, whatever the story says) without the permission of the manufacturer? I can't connect a barcode reader to my serial port, swipe a few codes and work out how to use the little electrical signals that come down the wire?
Is that really what you're saying??
I've just this day set up a dumb Wyse-50 with a barcode scanning wand to serial login to my dev (RH) box. I work at a Legal Deposit Library and we're paying a company to come and bin some 40 of these. They cost a few *thousand* pounds each back in the 80s (customised character set/language support) and being somewhat of a scavanger, I'm playing with one to see if it's worth saving them. It reads barcodes happily and simply dumps the numerical codes to stdin - I'm going to take one home and link it up to an MP3 jukebox & db so that I can scan barcodes from my ripped CDs and trigger the server to play the album.
Re question (2) - Blame Can^H^H^H Motorola. The lack of >500MHz G4 chips is what lead to Apple having to release dual proc 450/500 machines instead of a faster version of the single proc.
Really? Have the Trinitron tubes really been out that long? I don't know much about the TVs, but the Trinitron tubes in the monitors certainly don't last as long as a 'standard' CRT before the picture goes fuzzy, and I've seen a lot of them.
I've said it before (so have others, in this very discussion) and I'll say it again:
You need VNC.
I run headless linux boxen here and access them from my (spit) NT workstation. Stuff I like:
That's the last time I'm plugging VNC here. If you haven't tried it, it's your own fault.
Your problem is probably that your CPUs are spending a lot of time servicing interrupts from broadcasts. Putting a gigabit card in anything but a very high-end machine is probably going to adversely effect your performance, and you're unlikely to see much improvement in network throughput. Aggregating 100Mbs links (and running them duplex) is likely to give better results on SME*-level servers.
* - look Ma, a buzzword!
You misspeld "VNC"
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
GPL'd, excellent development, ssl'd, multi-platform, solid, small, fast.
That's irrelevant. While the combined wealth of the colleges may be considerable, currently the colleges do not make any contribution to OUCS. OUCS is run entirely by university central funds, with the same budget as any other UK university.
As somebody who used to be network & systems admin at one of the Oxford Colleges (Hi Dave!), the amounts available for IT are really rather pityful, similar to the situation in most British Universities (outside CS depts). Alan Gay (who is a reasonable chap) doesn't have hordes of lawyers at his beck and call, but he does have some serious hackers working at OUCS (Malcolm Beattie, of perl5 fame, for example) who should have been able to tell him enough about DeCSS (real, not the fake one) to enable him to stand up to this sort of legal bullying. There should be plenty of people in Oxford who can and will fight this battle. Leave 'em to it.
Celtic?? WTF is Celtic? Furrfu! It looks like Irish Gaelic, which is a celtic (for various values of celtic) language, but there's no such language as 'celtic'.
Napster is helping to popularize MP3s. MP3s are a decentralizing, democratizing force in music distribution. They cut out the middle man. The RIAA works for the middle man.
Note that this is not a unique feature of MP3s, nor limited to music distribution, nor even AV media in general. What we are seeing is a (rather obvious, if you think about it) direct consequence of improvements in digital representation and transmission coupled with the democratizing nature of the 'net. The Dinosaurs are screaming and they'll hurt a lot of people before they die or evolve, so I'm pretty happy just to sit back, watch, and not get too close. Genie/bottle, unstoppable march, inexorable advance - choose your favourite cliche about technology, they're all true, and luckily there's not an Association, Cartel nor MegaCorp that can stand up to it.
We live in interesting times.