If so, tell me please, where exactly Linux is so eager to use FP?
The GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) software will stress the FPU and main memory bus. It was very carefully coded in assembler by George Woltman to run at high speed on a Intel CPU. It is an excellent stress/reliability test. If anything is flakey/marginal on your system, you will usually find out about it very quickly.
I suspect that any widespread use of encryption, even "weak" 40-bit encryption, would cause severe problems for Echelon. The amount of work required to decrypt and scan the traffic would be enormous.
If the NSA or other TLA is seriously interested in what you are doing, PGP is not going to help. Not because they have cracked PGP, but because there are many other easier ways to get the information.
The Windows emulation in OS/2 is based on Microsoft's source code. IBM has the right to use the Windows 3.1 source code, although they have to pay royalties for each copy of OS/2 that ships with the Windows subsystem. Microsoft designed Windows 95 to be very difficult to run under a foreign operating system. Microsoft has done everything they could to sabotage OS/2. That is part of the reason that they have been pushing Win32 and deprecating Win16. Microsoft wants total control over Windows.
Years ago, there was a company that was working on a cheap vector computer (crayette) based on CMOS chips cooled with liquid Nitrogen. They said that the CMOS chips ran substantially faster when cooled to cryogenic temperatures. Does anyone know what happened to that project?
Internet access at super high speeds through a 100 megabit-per-second interface (actual speeds available to customers during the trial will be limited to tariffed BellSouth consumer high-speed data offerings)
Looks like they will provide Internet access at ADSL prices and rates, not at 100 MBPS.
I found an interesting paper on telecommunications policy here. It's rather depressing.
While communications technology improves at an amazing rate, the Bell companies are stuck in the 19th century. Their primary goals appear to be increased profits through elimination of skilled union jobs, investment in anything but their core business, and maintenance of the status quo in services and pricing.
How difficult would it be to bypass them? I'm thinking of something like the Ricochet radio modems, except at much higher data rates.
Why should the phone companies give you something for free that costs them money by the minute???
The interesting thing about the telephone business is that their costs have nothing to do with how many minutes you stay on the phone.
Variable costs for the telephone company are determined by peak usage. They have to buy enough switch capacity and interoffice trunk lines to provide a specified quality of service during peak usage periods. Off-peak usage of the telephone system doesn't add to the cost of providing service.
If you read the histories of the Apollo missions, you will find that a lot of hardware was intentially crashed into the Moon for research purposes.
The astronauts installed seismometers on the moon as part of the ALSEP project. The seismometers detected the seismic waves produced when lunar modules and Saturn upper stages hit the Moon. This produced data on the structure and composition of the Moon. Scientists on Earth have done similar work using the seismic waves produced by earthquakes and nuclear weapons tests.
The USA and USSR have landed/crashed a large number of probes on the Moon. Here is a list of the missions.
The value of the time that I have wasted reinstalling various IBM and Microsoft operating system products is far in excess of their retail price. Buggy compilers are another huge time sink.
I would like to see a law that eliminated the bogus license agreements that disclaim all warranties and responsibilities. Unfortunately, the trend in the proposed revision to the U.C.C. (Uniform Commercial Code) is in the opposite direction.
The current economic/legal system rewards companies that release a buggy POS now instead of reliable software later. This has to change.
Software reliability can be measured and improved. It takes time, money and training. Here is a quick overview of Software Reliability Engineering by John Musa, who is one of the pioneers in the field.
The way I always understood it, the 'k' simply ment kilo, bytes or bits were not implied. You don't say, "i'm going to drive 56 k" and expect everyone to know you are talking about kilometers.
Bits are a lowercase 'b' and bytes are uppercase 'B'. The 'k' is supposed to be lowercase, but people use it in uppercase because 'kB' looks sorta funny.
Some people use that convention but it isn't universal. I've been working with modems and data links for over 20 years. The standard terminology has always been BPS (bits per second), KBPS (kilobits (10^3) per second), MBPS (megabits (10^6) per second). The size of a byte is not always 8 bits. That is why many telecommunications standards refer to octets instead of bytes.
IBM was never broken up. It was investigated for anti-trust behavior, and I think it even had government monitors installed into the document chain, but it wasn't broken up like AT&T.
I believe they were forced to divest their service business, unbundle software, document external interfaces, stop preannouncing products, sell spare parts and some over things that I can't remember. They were being sued by the Department of Justice and a number of computer companies.
It seems to me that the main reason we've had these recent murders is simply that guns are too easily available -- kids have been amoral monsters for millenia. It's just that it's hard for a child to kill someone with a 50lb. battleaxe -- but it's easy to pull a trigger.
My experience is that guns were more available to kids in the past. Most of my cousins had their own rifles and shotguns. Nobody thought it was a big deal if a kid in a rural or semi-rural area was carrying a gun. It was assumed that you were out hunting or plinking. Today, somebody would probably freak out and call the police. Kids would get in fights, but with their fists, not with guns or knives.
What's different today? Television is a much stronger influence on today's kids. Divorce, single parent households and households where both parents have full-time jobs are more common. Family sizes are smaller and people are less likely to have relatives living nearby. I'm not saying that these are the causes of violence, just that they are some obvious changes in the society.
What is new here is the rather dubious assertion that US submarines are "tapping" undersea cables. Think about the technical difficulties for a moment.
I've read published reports that inductive pickups have been attached to submarine cables. That seems plausible for the old-style copper cables. Tapping into a fiber optic cable would be much more difficult. I can't think of a non-invasive way to tap into a fiber optic line.
I've worked in sigint, myself. And I find it hard to believe that a system set up to detect key words and phrases in common internet traffic can be useful enough to justify its cost. Nations and security agencies *know* that internet communications can be intercepted, and so they send messages encrypted or not at all. Corporations are beginning to understand this, also. The only messages that Echelon could usefully intercept are personal communication and the rare 'slip-up' of a corporation or agency.
There is a huge amount of traffic that is not encrypted. At least in the U.S. government, the installation of encryption equipment is usually only done when it is absolutely necessary, such as when handling classified information. It is very expensive to provide the people and infrastructure needed to support NSA approved encryption devices. Most managers have a long list of things that they would rather spend the money on.
Corporations aren't much better, although VPNs and SSL web servers seem to be getting more popular. I've been told that many banks do not use encryption, even on the lines to ATM machines. The thinking is that the probability and cost of a security breach isn't high enough to justify the expense of securing their communications. A security breach that costs the customer's money isn't a problem, it doesn't count if someone else pays for it.
Grampa jew owning a shotgun would not have helped them, if anything it would have made that family's suffering worse. Even some sort of united militia would not have lasted 10 days against an army that conquered Poland/Belgium/Holland in a matter of weeks (they are on a map, go look it up).
You obviously have never heard of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Jews with guns killed over 5,000 Aryan supermen.
I'm a Jew and a gun-owner. Uncle Sam taught me how to kill people and break things. I don't turn the other cheek.
I don't see how a hypertext link to material on another web site can be illegal, even if that material violates a copyright. A hypertext link is a fact, not a creative work.
What if I printed and distributed a flyer that listed the names and addresses of the best places to buy illegal drugs, child pornography and nuclear weapons?
Is Nintendo going to demand that I stick my head in a wood chipper because I looked at images from a copyrighted video game, thus producing an illegal copy of the images in the neurons of my brain?
When 3COM first started making Ethernet boards, they tried putting the protocol processing software on a smart Ethernet board. It never worked too well. Unless you had a slow system, with a brain dead operating system or small address space. The processors on the "smart" boards were cheap and slow. The on-board software tended to be buggy, limited and out-of-date. The cards were expensive. You still had to have some sort of light weight protocol for communication between the operating system and the card, adding another layer of software. With well written software, a 25 MHz 68020 host, could run TCP/IP at wire speed on a "dumb" 10 MBPS Ethernet card. The "smart" cards quickly disappeared.
Putting the protocol processing in Silicon will burn you when you need new features and algorithms in your networking stack. What happens if you need large windows, SACK, IPV6, IPSEC, QOS?
The right solution is to use an operating system that doesn't suffer from MBD and use decently designed network cards on a fast bus. 100 MBPS shouldn't be a problem for a decent system. 1 GBPS is where current hardware and operating systems fall down and need improvement.
Do any of these companies offer basic IP connectivity? I don't want their news server, mail server, proxy server, DHCP server or silly policies on what software and services that can run on my computer. Just give me a static IP address, a high speed line and route the packets.
I did a bit of research and found that software prices in India are very high, especially in comparison to the per capita income. A legal copy of Windows NT Workstation sells for 16,200 rupees, about 378 U.S. dollars. This is greater than the annual per capita income, according to figures from the Indian embassy. I assume that the owner of a computer in India would have a higher income, but it still seems outrageously expensive.
How much of the revenue from software sales stays in the Indian economy, vs. going into Bill Gate's pocket?
I generally disapprove of software piracy, but I have a hard time criticizing piracy when the relative price of software is far higher than in the United States. What if someone told you that it would only cost $20,000 to buy a copy of the software needed to read and create Microsoft Office files? What if you had to have this software to do business with other companies?
I hope India will switch to free/open source software and tell Microsoft to buzz off.
Using a trademark in a meta tag should be legitimate if there is text in the visible part of the web page that refers to the trademark. For example, if the text is an article about a Microsoft product, you could use the relevant Microsoft trademarks in the meta tag.
They must have rewritten the beast. I attempted to use the initial release of MASM on the original IBM PC with PC-DOS 1.0. It was the buggiest POS that I have ever encountered. The Microsoft FORTRAN and Pascal compilers were also terrible. My programming group ditched all Microsoft products and switched to the UCSD p-System for our projects.
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The GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) software will stress the FPU and main memory bus. It was very carefully coded in assembler by George Woltman to run at high speed on a Intel CPU. It is an excellent stress/reliability test. If anything is flakey/marginal on your system, you will usually find out about it very quickly.
If the NSA or other TLA is seriously interested in what you are doing, PGP is not going to help. Not because they have cracked PGP, but because there are many other easier ways to get the information.
The Windows emulation in OS/2 is based on Microsoft's source code. IBM has the right to use the Windows 3.1 source code, although they have to pay royalties for each copy of OS/2 that ships with the Windows subsystem. Microsoft designed Windows 95 to be very difficult to run under a foreign operating system. Microsoft has done everything they could to sabotage OS/2. That is part of the reason that they have been pushing Win32 and deprecating Win16. Microsoft wants total control over Windows.
Years ago, there was a company that was working on a cheap vector computer (crayette) based on CMOS chips cooled with liquid Nitrogen. They said that the CMOS chips ran substantially faster when cooled to cryogenic temperatures. Does anyone know what happened to that project?
Internet access at super high speeds through a 100 megabit-per-second interface (actual speeds available to customers during the trial will be limited to tariffed BellSouth consumer high-speed data offerings)
Looks like they will provide Internet access at ADSL prices and rates, not at 100 MBPS.
While communications technology improves at an amazing rate, the Bell companies are stuck in the 19th century. Their primary goals appear to be increased profits through elimination of skilled union jobs, investment in anything but their core business, and maintenance of the status quo in services and pricing.
How difficult would it be to bypass them? I'm thinking of something like the Ricochet radio modems, except at much higher data rates.
The interesting thing about the telephone business is that their costs have nothing to do with how many minutes you stay on the phone.
Variable costs for the telephone company are determined by peak usage. They have to buy enough switch capacity and interoffice trunk lines to provide a specified quality of service during peak usage periods. Off-peak usage of the telephone system doesn't add to the cost of providing service.
The astronauts installed seismometers on the moon as part of the ALSEP project. The seismometers detected the seismic waves produced when lunar modules and Saturn upper stages hit the Moon. This produced data on the structure and composition of the Moon. Scientists on Earth have done similar work using the seismic waves produced by earthquakes and nuclear weapons tests.
The USA and USSR have landed/crashed a large number of probes on the Moon. Here is a list of the missions.
The current situation is pretty bad. There is a lot of poorly designed, shielded and maintained electrical/electronic equipment in use.
I hope the FCC and other spectrum management regulatory agencies are keeping an eye on this.
I would like to see a law that eliminated the bogus license agreements that disclaim all warranties and responsibilities. Unfortunately, the trend in the proposed revision to the U.C.C. (Uniform Commercial Code) is in the opposite direction.
The current economic/legal system rewards companies that release a buggy POS now instead of reliable software later. This has to change.
Software reliability can be measured and improved. It takes time, money and training. Here is a quick overview of Software Reliability Engineering by John Musa, who is one of the pioneers in the field.
Bits are a lowercase 'b' and bytes are uppercase 'B'. The 'k' is supposed to be lowercase, but people use it in uppercase because 'kB' looks sorta funny.
Some people use that convention but it isn't universal. I've been working with modems and data links for over 20 years. The standard terminology has always been BPS (bits per second), KBPS (kilobits (10^3) per second), MBPS (megabits (10^6) per second). The size of a byte is not always 8 bits. That is why many telecommunications standards refer to octets instead of bytes.
A tape can be stored off-site or in a fireproof container.
I believe they were forced to divest their service business, unbundle software, document external interfaces, stop preannouncing products, sell spare parts and some over things that I can't remember. They were being sued by the Department of Justice and a number of computer companies.
My experience is that guns were more available to kids in the past. Most of my cousins had their own rifles and shotguns. Nobody thought it was a big deal if a kid in a rural or semi-rural area was carrying a gun. It was assumed that you were out hunting or plinking. Today, somebody would probably freak out and call the police. Kids would get in fights, but with their fists, not with guns or knives.
What's different today? Television is a much stronger influence on today's kids. Divorce, single parent households and households where both parents have full-time jobs are more common. Family sizes are smaller and people are less likely to have relatives living nearby. I'm not saying that these are the causes of violence, just that they are some obvious changes in the society.
I've read published reports that inductive pickups have been attached to submarine cables. That seems plausible for the old-style copper cables. Tapping into a fiber optic cable would be much more difficult. I can't think of a non-invasive way to tap into a fiber optic line.
There is a huge amount of traffic that is not encrypted. At least in the U.S. government, the installation of encryption equipment is usually only done when it is absolutely necessary, such as when handling classified information. It is very expensive to provide the people and infrastructure needed to support NSA approved encryption devices. Most managers have a long list of things that they would rather spend the money on.
Corporations aren't much better, although VPNs and SSL web servers seem to be getting more popular. I've been told that many banks do not use encryption, even on the lines to ATM machines. The thinking is that the probability and cost of a security breach isn't high enough to justify the expense of securing their communications. A security breach that costs the customer's money isn't a problem, it doesn't count if someone else pays for it.
You obviously have never heard of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Jews with guns killed over 5,000 Aryan supermen.
I'm a Jew and a gun-owner. Uncle Sam taught me how to kill people and break things. I don't turn the other cheek.
It was invented by Jan Lukasiewicz, a Polish mathematician and philosopher. A short description can be found here.
I don't see how a hypertext link to material on another web site can be illegal, even if that material violates a copyright. A hypertext link is a fact, not a creative work.
What if I printed and distributed a flyer that listed the names and addresses of the best places to buy illegal drugs, child pornography and nuclear weapons?
Is Nintendo going to demand that I stick my head in a wood chipper because I looked at images from a copyrighted video game, thus producing an illegal copy of the images in the neurons of my brain?
When 3COM first started making Ethernet boards, they tried putting the protocol processing software on a smart Ethernet board. It never worked too well. Unless you had a slow system, with a brain dead operating system or small address space. The processors on the "smart" boards were cheap and slow. The on-board software tended to be buggy, limited and out-of-date. The cards were expensive. You still had to have some sort of light weight protocol for communication between the operating system and the card, adding another layer of software. With well written software, a 25 MHz 68020 host, could run TCP/IP at wire speed on a "dumb" 10 MBPS Ethernet card. The "smart" cards quickly disappeared.
Putting the protocol processing in Silicon will burn you when you need new features and algorithms in your networking stack. What happens if you need large windows, SACK, IPV6, IPSEC, QOS?
The right solution is to use an operating system that doesn't suffer from MBD and use decently designed network cards on a fast bus. 100 MBPS shouldn't be a problem for a decent system. 1 GBPS is where current hardware and operating systems fall down and need improvement.
I'm not sure if I would trust any of the new PK systems until they have been exhaustively analyzed.
My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember there were a large number of PK systems before RSA that were proposed and then cracked in rapid succession.
Do any of these companies offer basic IP connectivity? I don't want their news server, mail server, proxy server, DHCP server or silly policies on what software and services that can run on my computer. Just give me a static IP address, a high speed line and route the packets.
I did a bit of research and found that software prices in India are very high, especially in comparison to the per capita income. A legal copy of Windows NT Workstation sells for 16,200 rupees, about 378 U.S. dollars. This is greater than the annual per capita income, according to figures from the Indian embassy. I assume that the owner of a computer in India would have a higher income, but it still seems outrageously expensive.
How much of the revenue from software sales stays in the Indian economy, vs. going into Bill Gate's pocket?
I generally disapprove of software piracy, but I have a hard time criticizing piracy when the relative price of software is far higher than in the United States. What if someone told you that it would only cost $20,000 to buy a copy of the software needed to read and create Microsoft Office files? What if you had to have this software to do business with other companies?
I hope India will switch to free/open source software and tell Microsoft to buzz off.
Using a trademark in a meta tag should be legitimate if there is text in the visible part of the web page that refers to the trademark. For example, if the text is an article about a Microsoft product, you could use the relevant Microsoft trademarks in the meta tag.
They must have rewritten the beast. I attempted to use the initial release of MASM on the original IBM PC with PC-DOS 1.0. It was the buggiest POS that I have ever encountered. The Microsoft FORTRAN and Pascal compilers were also terrible. My programming group ditched all Microsoft products and switched to the UCSD p-System for our projects.