[RFID tags] are a direct scan sort of thing, rather than a "scan from black helicopter" sort of thing.
Sure, that's what they want you to think.;-) It says here that some RFID tags can be read up to 300 feet away. (Alien Technology says its RFID tags can be read up to 15 feet away, but it would not be difficult to build a beefier transmitter and a more sensitive receiver that would make the range far greater.) <PARANOIA MODE=ON>The tags can supposedly be easily destroyed via a reader, but it's pretty easy to design an RC-timer circuit that would just deactivate it for a period of time.</PARANOIA>
Bzzt! Your answer is misleading. It doesn't much matter that WinNT64 really ran in 32-bit mode, what matters most is that it supported 64-bit apps, which it apparently did. Your statement is like saying that an OS doesn't support floating point because it doesn't use floating point. All that the OS needs to do is save and restore the registers correctly and support any 64-bit APIs that are defined. Windows has 64-bit 64-Bit VLM APIs to support Very Large Memory addressing since at least 1997. (I will concede that things would run faster if the 64-bit APIs were implemented using 64-bit instructions, but that's just an implementation detail. )
MS also developed at least one app to make use of 64-bit mode. In April, 1999, PC Magazine had this to say: Microsoft still expects to ship Windows 2000 by the end of this year. In the 2000 to 2001 time frame, Microsoft will be delivering a 64-bit version of Windows 2000, which is being developed now in tandem with 32-bit Windows 2000 (the 32-bit version and the 64-bit version share the same source code but are compiled differently). The 64-bit version of Windows 2000 was demonstrated at WinHEC for the first time. Ballmer and some Microsoft employees showed a Compaq Alpha system running SQL Server database benchmarks with a 64-bit SQL Server module. (Microsoft's BackOffice and Visual Studio products will be delivered in 64-bit versions to coincide with 64-bit Windows 2000.)
Another problem lies in the software. Windows software is designed to run on 32-bit systems. Transforming it to a 64-bit level will require an intense amount of work that few, right now, seem willing to tackle, Rattner said.
It seems to me that Microsoft has been working of the 64-bit version of Windows since 1996. A quick check of Googleconfirms this. And now this guy says that no one has done any work towards writting software for it? This does not compute. I think that MS is losing the 64-bit market, and doesn't even realize it.
I've seen several postings asking, "So what is GNUradio good for?" Here's why I'd want one.
I've got a PVR; I leave it on all the time so when I walk into the room and I'm interested in what's on, I can rewind and watch it from the beginning. Unfortunately, that only works for the one channel that the PVR is tuned to. If I change the channel and see something interesting, I can't rewind it. What I want is is PVR that records the last hour or two of every channel that I get.
GNUradio is the receiver for that PVR. The PVR records the unfiltered signal from the antenna. That gives you all the channels at once. When you want to watch a show, the GNUradio software reads the raw data and filters out the channel you want. If a show looks interesting, you can rewind and watch it from the beginning. Even if there are two or more interesting shows on at the same time, you can filter them both in parallel and re-record one or more while watching another.
It looks to me like Phoenix and Intel are doing the same thing here, only Phoenix (being "the BIOS company") wants to call it an expanded BIOS while Intel (being "the CPU company") wants to call something else. Both want to add a TCP/IP stack, graphics and other fun things to what is essentially a bootstrap loaded.
OpenBoot/OpenFirmware has had similar abilities for some time. Your CPU boots up a Forth interpreter, which then goes looking for programs to run. Expansion cards are one place to look, so that video and network adaptors can be used before the OS loads.
This is important, so pay close attention. The interpreter will run Forth code found on an expansion card. This means that you can use the same card in a computer whose CPU is from Intel, MIPS, Alpha, etc. The initial code will define Forth subroutines that allow the bootstrap loader to use the card. For example, a video card will define subroutines for CURSES-like functions, the boot loader will then call those routines to interact with the user. It's written in an interpreted language, so it'll be slow, but the OS won't have to use those routines, it will use drivers loaded from disk. On the other hand, the OS can use the Forth routines if it can't find a driver, allowing cards to be useful before you install the correct drivers.
It's a great idea whose time came over a decade ago. Too bad Intel and Phoenix never got on the bandwagon.
Actually, I'd like to see the code that PalmInfoCenter uses to implement the "Welcome Slashdot vistor" message. I've thought about doing something similar for another site, and while I understand how to parse the Referer header, I'd just as soon borrow someone's tried-and-true code as develop it myself.
Heck, this functionality should be built into anything using mod-perl, PHP, ASP, etc. to redirect visitors to a static mirror of a page.
Jeez, I just spent all my moderator points this morning, then I saw your posts. Let me see if I can explain this in words small enough for you to understand.
First, does your brian get starved of nutrients when you exercise? No, because at any given moment you have more oxygen and glucose in your bloodstream than you can use. You don't have one circulatory system for your brain and another for the rest of your body. Your brain takes what it needs, which is a fixed amount, your muscles take what they need, which is a variable amount. But there's enough buffering in the system that you don't start experiencing shortages until you go several days with out food or water. (Your muscles get tired when you exercise because they can't extract oxygen from the bloodstream fast enough, not because your blood starts to run out of oxygen.)
The "crap" would go back into your blood, just like the "crap" from your muscles when you use them. Again, there's enough excess capacity in the system to buffer normal fluctuations in the production of waste material.
Finally, unless you're consuming antibiotics, you already have benign bacteria living in your body, although they don't often cross the brain-blood barrier and enter the cerebellum.
There were no Mars launches in 1966-68. Mariner 5 was originally built as a backup to Mariner 4, launched in 1964. When Mariner 4 completed its mission successfully, the backup was reoutfitted for a flyby of Venus.
Launch: June 14, 1967 Flyby: October 19, 1967 Mass: 245 kilograms (540 pounds) Science instruments: Ultraviolet photometer, cosmic dust, solar plasma, trapped radiation, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, radio occultation
Meganet <http://www.meganet.com/> has a beauty on their Web site: "The base of VME is a Virtual Matrix, a matrix of binary values which is infinity in size in theory and therefore have no redundant value. The data to be encrypted is compared to the data in the Virtual Matrix. Once a match is found, a set of pointers that indicate how to navigate inside the Virtual Matrix is created. That set of pointers (which is worthless unless pointing to the right Virtual Matrix) is then further encrypted in dozens other algorithms in different stages to create an avalanche effect. The result is an encrypted file that even if decrypted is completely meaningless since the decrypted data is not the actual data but rather a set of pointers. Considering that each session of VME has a unique different Virtual Matrix and that the data pattern within the Virtual Matrix is completely random and non-redundant, there is no way to derive the data out of the pointer set." This makes no sense, even to an expert.
From http://members.iglou.com/jtmajor/RollStns.htm
And speaking of fur-covered grapefruit . . . Fifteen years after all the problems of writing this book, Heinlein got an autographed screenplay of an episode of Star Trek. The episode dealt with a problem of a parthenogenetic creature that "expands, multiplies to the full extend of a food supply" that turned out to be needed, and to have pernicious additives. As David Gerrold, author of that script, recounts the story in his "The Trouble With Tribbles" [p. 250-4], he was profoundly disturbed. "Coincidence or influence, there is no great honor in repeating another writer's ideas, no matter how well you do them." [op. cit., p. 254]
Fortunately for Gerrold's self-esteem, Heinlein felt that his scene wasn't entirely original. In a letter not reprinted in Grumbles from the Grave he kindly explained: "Let me add that I felt that the analogy to my flat cats was mild enough to be of no importance and we both owe something to Ellis Parker Butler . . . and possibly to Noah." {"The Trouble With Tribbles", p. 253]
Heinlein was thinking of Ellis Parker Butler's story "Pigs Is Pigs", about the delivery of two guinea pigs that was aborted because the freight agent considered them to be livestock, charged at a higher rate. (10 more each!) The guinea pigs were a pair, and so, when the agent is finally ordered to deliver them at the pet rate, after a long correspondence with the home office, and the original consignees have fled town, he shovels thousands of guinea pigs into a box car for return to sender, moaning about how he will now charge for every kind of animal at the non-livestock rate.
(Incidentally, Gerrold got his math right. See "The Trouble With Tribbles" pp. 65-6, 78, 116-7, and 228 [Act 4; Scene 70] where the population of the tribbles is predicated on intermediate generation surviving and all members reproducing.)
Gerrold describes how he had been thinking about the expansion of rabbits into Australia, where an introduction of exotic fauna into an environment without predators had resulted in a drastic population explosion ["The Trouble With Tribbles", p. 251]. (Or, why the Tasmanian Devil is cheered there whenever he tries to eat Bugs Bunny.) These works, in their several ways, display in a comprehensible manner, because in part of its humor, the problems of overpopulation and ecological balance. But then, Heinlein had discussed ecology in Farmer In the Sky (1950), and Gerrold, like every good fan, had read the juveniles.
Try WU Archive. Before the web took off, they had more stuff archived than anyone else, including lots of line-printer art. I was poking around a few years ago, and it was still there. I'd guess that it's still there somewhere, but a quick search didn't turn up anything. You might have more luck using FTP. Here's their blurb:
Wuarchive was established in 1988 through a variety of grants and donations. During the era of Good Times, before the World Wide Web was anything but a pipe dream of the common spider, before the dot-com explosion and subsequent implosion, and some time after man first set foot on the moon, there was Wuarchive. Rumor has it that a year or two after its creation, Wuarchive was involved in 15% of worldwide Internet traffic. To the relief of those who pay our bandwidth bills, this is no longer true, but Wuarchive remains a useful resource for both the Washington University community and the public at large.
The difference is that this is running mingwin as a cross-compiler. Yes, we've been able to produce win32 executables using mingw and gcc for years now, but that's by running everything on a Windows-based system. Now we can run the same suite of tools on a Unix-based system.
Huh? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here, so allow me to paraphrase:
Placing a.EXE file on a Linux server helps spread virii, because the Linux server won't check to see if the file is infected with a Windows-based virus. This is bad because if the file becomes infected, the infection will be missed.
I'm making the generous assumption that you aren't saying that the Linus system will create an infected executable. Even so, there seem to be some unwritten assumptions here.
First, you assume that there is an infected Windows system. Just about every commercial environment that I'm aware of runs some form of anti-virus software on every Windows-based server and desktop. This means that there is little chance of infection by a known virus. I will readily conceed that unknown infections, such as Slammer, can still be a problem, but that leads to your second assumption.
You seem to think that any Windows-based system with read-access to the file also has write-access to it. This runs counter to the best-practices adopted at most sites. A fundimental rule of security is to provide no more access than is needed to get the job done. File servers generally restrict the average user from modifying static resources. In this case, I would include anyone with a Windows-based system as an average user. Since they aren't running a developement environment, there is no need for them to write to the directories where the software is stored.
So, did I miss something, or did you post of subtle troll?
I'll admit that I could have used a different source, but there aren't many links to be found on the subject. I did choose one of the first ones that I found (using slighly different search criteria) that didn't try to debunk the claims. Here's another quote from someone you may find more belivable:
Did the Challenger astronauts die instantly and what was the cause of death?
We still do not know precisely. The crew cabin did make it through the explosion intact. Because of this, combined with the facts that the force of the explosion was not enough to cause death in and of itself and there may have been some oxygen consumption, some have speculated that the Challenger crew may have survived the immediate explosion. In addition, there is some evidence that copilot Smith's air pack was turned on by another astronaut. But even if the astronauts did not lose consciousness with the explosion, they would have died two minutes and 45 seconds later, when the crew cabin hit the sea at a speed of 204 miles per hour, a force of 200 g (200 times the normal force of gravity). Source: report by Dr. Joseph Kerwin, director of Life Sciences at the Johnson Space Center.
At the risk of running OT, I highly doubt this is the end of project prometheus, although it is an excellent argument against it: just doesn't seem safe to fire up rockets full of nukes anymore.
I don't mean to sound callous, but this morning's event seems more an argument against returning rockets full of nukes to earth.
Recall that in the Challenger explosion, the crew cabin survived pretty much intact. In fact it has long been rumored that some members of the crew survived the initial explosion and were only killed when the cabin hit the water. A similar accident during the launch of any nuclear powered device would result in a difficult recovery, but very little or no release of radioactive material. A disintegration during re-entry, on the other hand, would be a far more effective "shredder" of objects, increasing the danger of radionuclide release.
The solution is obvious: don't allow any nuclear material launched into space to ever return.
I spent 15 years at one Fortune 500 company, enough to get a genuine pension when I retire. (Sure, it's only a tenth of what I make right now, but it's better than nothing!) Then I jumped to consulting, where I've been for six years total. Along the way, I sat out a one-year non-compete as the sysadmin for a mixed Windows-Solaris shop. And on the side, I've earned an annual amount roughly equal to my eventual pension writing Palm OS software in my spare time.
I started out in Cobol, moved to Fortran and PL/I, and then Turbo Pascal and GW Basic. When I became a consultant, I had to learn C, csh, Borne shell, C++, Java, Perl, JavaScript, SQL, PHP, and VBscript. I've done some stuff that sounds pretty interesting in retrospect, although it didn't always seem that way at the time. (Imagine programing on a PC/AT at midnight in the middle of winter in Wyoming in a building where the sole source of heat is your PC and a single 100 watt light blub overhead!)
(A) EMC provided support to Steven Spielberg's Shoah project, preserving recordings of Holocast survivors, so we'd probably be interested in this. Biggest question is how much EMC could afford, since they were as hard hit as anyone when the market collapsed.
(B)Regarding preserving your own voices and/or self-images, check out this and this.
I'm curious about how the files are organized. EMC has an interesting product supporting "Content Addressed Storage" (not to be confused with content addressable memory, for you CS geeks). The idea is that you store so-called static content (image, audio, video, etc) and you get back a ticket, which is a cryptographic signature. To retreive the content, you present the ticket. You can then re-compute the signature yourself to ensure that no one's changed the file when you weren't looking. (For example, another poster inquired about editing cat-calls from presidential speeches. This would make it obvious if that were to happen.)
(disclaimer: I work for EMC. In spite of that, I would love to see an open-source implementation of the APIs, as it would encourage greater adoption of the technology, and I feel that my employer could do quite well providing high-performance solutions for high-end users. Here is a review of the technology.)
We've got Apache, and the company using it feels that it is failing them. The performace is just not good enough for them. They have the options to either rewrite, and this will take some quite considerable time, not to mention testing the server, writing plug-ins, etc. If they are not quite big they can't afford one, two, three developers working on this fulltime with no income for them. Developers don't come cheap, not by a longshot.
The other option is to buy/switch to another server. It might be a free alternative (written in the most buzzwordy language of the day) or it might be ISS 6 coupled with Windows Server 2003. Either way it is much cheaper than a rewrite. Rewrites are very expensive.
You're making some assumptions there. First, that the costs of converting your existing codebase is less than the cost of finding and fixing the problem. If you're using a plug-in that isn't as well supported on the new server, then you could be trading one expensive rewrite for another (rewrite part of your server vs conveting all of your.PHP as.ASP). Second, that there are faster servers. Whether you're using Apache or IIS, you should first go to the appropriate news group and look for help. Taking the example of performance problems with Apache, you might find out that you should have multiple servers, some optimized for static content (i.e. images) and others for dynamic content.
Open source tends to have better support via news groups because that's the only means of support. Yes, there are news groups for everything that MS makes, but many of the people buying those products tend to first go to published books and then consultants if/when they have a problem. The length of the publishing process guarantees that books will have incomplete or even misleading information, while consultants are frequently only as good as their last assignment is relevant.
The TCPA module in one specific implementation by IBM is mounted on a removable card.
How many other implementations of TCPA are there? The whitepaper itself points out that both of your alternates are feasible, but I'd say that in the absence of competing implementations, then we need to look at what's currently available. If there's a suficiently large install base for which the implementation of TCPA isn't suited for DRM, then it won't be used for that.
It is certainly a lot better to have your computer subverted by the RIAA and MPAA.;-p
But, there's no evidence that the RIAA or the MPAA will trust TCPA enough to use it for DRM, and a lot of reasons why they wouldn't want to. As you point out, the interface to the TCPA subsystem is via a relatively slow serial port. Also, TCPA is a passive system, unable to snoop your PC's bus. This means that, unlike Palladium, it would be fairly straighforward to "fool" any software trying to use TCPA as a base for Palladium functionality. Due to the limitations of the hardware, any "trusted" boot loader or OS will have to perform the raw calcuations required to check any digital signatures. All that you need is a copy of the trusted executables and use those to derive the signatures, not your own code. The TCPA won't (and can't) know where the bytes are coming from.
TCPA really seems to look like just another integrated peripheral that is probably better off being an expansion card.
One of the papers mentions that the TCPA is removable from the system. It is designed such that removing it causes all keys to be erased, but I consider that a feature. It means that no one can remove the TCPA, analyze the keys, and replace the card.
Honestly, how many applications are going to use SSL encryption so often that the CPU is incapable of performing the additional grunt work?
How many applications are going to use more than 640KB of RAM? How many applications are going to use a sound card? How many applications are going to use the Internet? The answer is, if the cost of encryption is low enough, people will find news reasons to use it.
I can't wait until my mainboard dies, and I can't get my keys off the damn chip.
Don't keep all your keys on the chip. Keep the keys that you use to communicate with external entities in a key-ring file, and have it encrypted using keys from several TCPAs that you trust (your home PC, your neighbor's or sibling's PC, maybe work PC).
And what is to stop any processes at all from reading all the keys out and emailing them to a hotmail account?
No process can read the keys. Remember, that was your previous complaint. TCPA is designed to keep anyone from reading the keys, because fundimentally, you can't really trust your PC because you don't know if it's been subverted by some virus or trojan.
That's a great idea. What I want, and couldn't find on the web-site, is a shortcut to record a location. Palm OS already provides a set of shortcuts to record date, time and date-time stamps in any text field. I'd like to record a location as well. This would be useful not only in the Address Book, but also in things like Kodak's PalmPix, so you could note exactly where a picture was taken.
I spend a lot of time outdoors, hiking and such, and I've wanted one of these for years. So let's take your points one at a time, and compare them to a real-world example:
Mapping Software
While I'd still want to carry a paper map as a backup, it's useful to know how much farther it is to your planned lunch-stop or night camp.
GPS
A lot of time, I find something interesting (swimming hole, scenic lookout, etc) thats not on the map and that I'd like to find again someday. This lets you note a location so that you can find it again.
Voice recorder for making memos, quick notes, and messages on the fly.
If I'm walking along a trail, it's easier to record a note than to stop and look at the screen so I can write something. I can transcribe later, after the sun goes down.
Rechargeable internal Lithium-ion battery.
While IC manufacturing isn't very "green", I still see no reason to use and throw away a set of batteries every two or three weeks.
Built-in 32 MB of memory for downloading map data and other Palm OS-compatible software.
Always a good thing. My current Palm OS device only came with 8 MB, and it's about three-quarter's full right now, so I'd probably use the extra room for maps and such.
New ARM processor enhances battery life, screen redraw, graphics, and audio.
Enhanced battery life is good, since I might have to go several days between recharges.
Until now, I'd have to carry a GPS, a PDA, and a voice recorder to duplicate this device's fucntions. When you're on a walkabout, every ounce counts, so I tend to only carry the PDA. This means that I can only record notes when I've stopped, and exact locations have to be figured out from a map and my notes after the trip.
All in all, I'd want to buy one, although the price is a bit steep; it's more than a good pair of hiking boots. If my job took be outdoors a lot (park ranger, for instance), I can see the current price being very easy to justify.
The "three lines on a piece of paper" test reminds me of an old gag. Candid Camera was an early TV show produced by Allen Funt. ("The Jamie Kennedy Experience" is a direct steal.) His favorite episode involves an elevator where the first person goes into the car and faces the front. The next three people, all Candid Camera confederates, get into the elevator and face the rear. By the time the fourth person comes in, the first one feels so uncomfortable that he turns around and also faces the rear.
Look here for info on some of the other classic stunts.
In what way does Outlook's settings have anything to do with IE?
Outlook uses IE to render HTML-encoded internet email, for starters. Also, the "desktop" that Outlook displays when it starts is an HTML file. Outlook and IE are heavily intertwined. Check MSDN for details.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, that's what they want you to think. ;-) It says here that some RFID tags can be read up to 300 feet away. (Alien Technology says its RFID tags can be read up to 15 feet away, but it would not be difficult to build a beefier transmitter and a more sensitive receiver that would make the range far greater.) <PARANOIA MODE=ON>The tags can supposedly be easily destroyed via a reader, but it's pretty easy to design an RC-timer circuit that would just deactivate it for a period of time.</PARANOIA>
MS also developed at least one app to make use of 64-bit mode. In April, 1999, PC Magazine had this to say: Microsoft still expects to ship Windows 2000 by the end of this year. In the 2000 to 2001 time frame, Microsoft will be delivering a 64-bit version of Windows 2000, which is being developed now in tandem with 32-bit Windows 2000 (the 32-bit version and the 64-bit version share the same source code but are compiled differently). The 64-bit version of Windows 2000 was demonstrated at WinHEC for the first time. Ballmer and some Microsoft employees showed a Compaq Alpha system running SQL Server database benchmarks with a 64-bit SQL Server module. (Microsoft's BackOffice and Visual Studio products will be delivered in 64-bit versions to coincide with 64-bit Windows 2000.)
It seems to me that Microsoft has been working of the 64-bit version of Windows since 1996. A quick check of Googleconfirms this. And now this guy says that no one has done any work towards writting software for it? This does not compute. I think that MS is losing the 64-bit market, and doesn't even realize it.
I've got a PVR; I leave it on all the time so when I walk into the room and I'm interested in what's on, I can rewind and watch it from the beginning. Unfortunately, that only works for the one channel that the PVR is tuned to. If I change the channel and see something interesting, I can't rewind it. What I want is is PVR that records the last hour or two of every channel that I get.
GNUradio is the receiver for that PVR. The PVR records the unfiltered signal from the antenna. That gives you all the channels at once. When you want to watch a show, the GNUradio software reads the raw data and filters out the channel you want. If a show looks interesting, you can rewind and watch it from the beginning. Even if there are two or more interesting shows on at the same time, you can filter them both in parallel and re-record one or more while watching another.
OpenBoot/OpenFirmware has had similar abilities for some time. Your CPU boots up a Forth interpreter, which then goes looking for programs to run. Expansion cards are one place to look, so that video and network adaptors can be used before the OS loads.
This is important, so pay close attention. The interpreter will run Forth code found on an expansion card. This means that you can use the same card in a computer whose CPU is from Intel, MIPS, Alpha, etc. The initial code will define Forth subroutines that allow the bootstrap loader to use the card. For example, a video card will define subroutines for CURSES-like functions, the boot loader will then call those routines to interact with the user. It's written in an interpreted language, so it'll be slow, but the OS won't have to use those routines, it will use drivers loaded from disk. On the other hand, the OS can use the Forth routines if it can't find a driver, allowing cards to be useful before you install the correct drivers.
It's a great idea whose time came over a decade ago. Too bad Intel and Phoenix never got on the bandwagon.
Heck, this functionality should be built into anything using mod-perl, PHP, ASP, etc. to redirect visitors to a static mirror of a page.
First, does your brian get starved of nutrients when you exercise? No, because at any given moment you have more oxygen and glucose in your bloodstream than you can use. You don't have one circulatory system for your brain and another for the rest of your body. Your brain takes what it needs, which is a fixed amount, your muscles take what they need, which is a variable amount. But there's enough buffering in the system that you don't start experiencing shortages until you go several days with out food or water. (Your muscles get tired when you exercise because they can't extract oxygen from the bloodstream fast enough, not because your blood starts to run out of oxygen.)
The "crap" would go back into your blood, just like the "crap" from your muscles when you use them. Again, there's enough excess capacity in the system to buffer normal fluctuations in the production of waste material.
Finally, unless you're consuming antibiotics, you already have benign bacteria living in your body, although they don't often cross the brain-blood barrier and enter the cerebellum.
There were no Mars launches in 1966-68. Mariner 5 was originally built as a backup to Mariner 4, launched in 1964. When Mariner 4 completed its mission successfully, the backup was reoutfitted for a flyby of Venus.
Launch: June 14, 1967
Flyby: October 19, 1967
Mass: 245 kilograms (540 pounds)
Science instruments: Ultraviolet photometer, cosmic dust, solar plasma, trapped radiation, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, radio occultation
And speaking of fur-covered grapefruit . . . Fifteen years after all the problems of writing this book, Heinlein got an autographed screenplay of an episode of Star Trek. The episode dealt with a problem of a parthenogenetic creature that "expands, multiplies to the full extend of a food supply" that turned out to be needed, and to have pernicious additives. As David Gerrold, author of that script, recounts the story in his "The Trouble With Tribbles" [p. 250-4], he was profoundly disturbed. "Coincidence or influence, there is no great honor in repeating another writer's ideas, no matter how well you do them." [op. cit., p. 254]
Fortunately for Gerrold's self-esteem, Heinlein felt that his scene wasn't entirely original. In a letter not reprinted in Grumbles from the Grave he kindly explained: "Let me add that I felt that the analogy to my flat cats was mild enough to be of no importance and we both owe something to Ellis Parker Butler . . . and possibly to Noah." {"The Trouble With Tribbles", p. 253]
Heinlein was thinking of Ellis Parker Butler's story "Pigs Is Pigs", about the delivery of two guinea pigs that was aborted because the freight agent considered them to be livestock, charged at a higher rate. (10 more each!) The guinea pigs were a pair, and so, when the agent is finally ordered to deliver them at the pet rate, after a long correspondence with the home office, and the original consignees have fled town, he shovels thousands of guinea pigs into a box car for return to sender, moaning about how he will now charge for every kind of animal at the non-livestock rate.
(Incidentally, Gerrold got his math right. See "The Trouble With Tribbles" pp. 65-6, 78, 116-7, and 228 [Act 4; Scene 70] where the population of the tribbles is predicated on intermediate generation surviving and all members reproducing.)
Gerrold describes how he had been thinking about the expansion of rabbits into Australia, where an introduction of exotic fauna into an environment without predators had resulted in a drastic population explosion ["The Trouble With Tribbles", p. 251]. (Or, why the Tasmanian Devil is cheered there whenever he tries to eat Bugs Bunny.) These works, in their several ways, display in a comprehensible manner, because in part of its humor, the problems of overpopulation and ecological balance. But then, Heinlein had discussed ecology in Farmer In the Sky (1950), and Gerrold, like every good fan, had read the juveniles.
The difference is that this is running mingwin as a cross-compiler. Yes, we've been able to produce win32 executables using mingw and gcc for years now, but that's by running everything on a Windows-based system. Now we can run the same suite of tools on a Unix-based system.
Placing a .EXE file on a Linux server helps spread virii, because the Linux server won't check to see if the file is infected with a Windows-based virus. This is bad because if the file becomes infected, the infection will be missed.
I'm making the generous assumption that you aren't saying that the Linus system will create an infected executable. Even so, there seem to be some unwritten assumptions here.
First, you assume that there is an infected Windows system. Just about every commercial environment that I'm aware of runs some form of anti-virus software on every Windows-based server and desktop. This means that there is little chance of infection by a known virus. I will readily conceed that unknown infections, such as Slammer, can still be a problem, but that leads to your second assumption.
You seem to think that any Windows-based system with read-access to the file also has write-access to it. This runs counter to the best-practices adopted at most sites. A fundimental rule of security is to provide no more access than is needed to get the job done. File servers generally restrict the average user from modifying static resources. In this case, I would include anyone with a Windows-based system as an average user. Since they aren't running a developement environment, there is no need for them to write to the directories where the software is stored.
So, did I miss something, or did you post of subtle troll?
The solution is obvious: don't allow any nuclear material launched into space to ever return.
I started out in Cobol, moved to Fortran and PL/I, and then Turbo Pascal and GW Basic. When I became a consultant, I had to learn C, csh, Borne shell, C++, Java, Perl, JavaScript, SQL, PHP, and VBscript. I've done some stuff that sounds pretty interesting in retrospect, although it didn't always seem that way at the time. (Imagine programing on a PC/AT at midnight in the middle of winter in Wyoming in a building where the sole source of heat is your PC and a single 100 watt light blub overhead!)
(B)Regarding preserving your own voices and/or self-images, check out this and this.
(disclaimer: I work for EMC. In spite of that, I would love to see an open-source implementation of the APIs, as it would encourage greater adoption of the technology, and I feel that my employer could do quite well providing high-performance solutions for high-end users. Here is a review of the technology.)
Open source tends to have better support via news groups because that's the only means of support. Yes, there are news groups for everything that MS makes, but many of the people buying those products tend to first go to published books and then consultants if/when they have a problem. The length of the publishing process guarantees that books will have incomplete or even misleading information, while consultants are frequently only as good as their last assignment is relevant.
How many other implementations of TCPA are there? The whitepaper itself points out that both of your alternates are feasible, but I'd say that in the absence of competing implementations, then we need to look at what's currently available. If there's a suficiently large install base for which the implementation of TCPA isn't suited for DRM, then it won't be used for that.
It is certainly a lot better to have your computer subverted by the RIAA and MPAA. ;-p
But, there's no evidence that the RIAA or the MPAA will trust TCPA enough to use it for DRM, and a lot of reasons why they wouldn't want to. As you point out, the interface to the TCPA subsystem is via a relatively slow serial port. Also, TCPA is a passive system, unable to snoop your PC's bus. This means that, unlike Palladium, it would be fairly straighforward to "fool" any software trying to use TCPA as a base for Palladium functionality. Due to the limitations of the hardware, any "trusted" boot loader or OS will have to perform the raw calcuations required to check any digital signatures. All that you need is a copy of the trusted executables and use those to derive the signatures, not your own code. The TCPA won't (and can't) know where the bytes are coming from.
One of the papers mentions that the TCPA is removable from the system. It is designed such that removing it causes all keys to be erased, but I consider that a feature. It means that no one can remove the TCPA, analyze the keys, and replace the card.
Honestly, how many applications are going to use SSL encryption so often that the CPU is incapable of performing the additional grunt work?
How many applications are going to use more than 640KB of RAM? How many applications are going to use a sound card? How many applications are going to use the Internet? The answer is, if the cost of encryption is low enough, people will find news reasons to use it.
I can't wait until my mainboard dies, and I can't get my keys off the damn chip.
Don't keep all your keys on the chip. Keep the keys that you use to communicate with external entities in a key-ring file, and have it encrypted using keys from several TCPAs that you trust (your home PC, your neighbor's or sibling's PC, maybe work PC).
And what is to stop any processes at all from reading all the keys out and emailing them to a hotmail account?
No process can read the keys. Remember, that was your previous complaint. TCPA is designed to keep anyone from reading the keys, because fundimentally, you can't really trust your PC because you don't know if it's been subverted by some virus or trojan.
That's a great idea. What I want, and couldn't find on the web-site, is a shortcut to record a location. Palm OS already provides a set of shortcuts to record date, time and date-time stamps in any text field. I'd like to record a location as well. This would be useful not only in the Address Book, but also in things like Kodak's PalmPix, so you could note exactly where a picture was taken.
- Mapping Software
- GPS
- Voice recorder for making memos, quick notes, and messages on the fly.
- Rechargeable internal Lithium-ion battery.
- Built-in 32 MB of memory for downloading map data and other Palm OS-compatible software.
- New ARM processor enhances battery life, screen redraw, graphics, and audio.
Until now, I'd have to carry a GPS, a PDA, and a voice recorder to duplicate this device's fucntions. When you're on a walkabout, every ounce counts, so I tend to only carry the PDA. This means that I can only record notes when I've stopped, and exact locations have to be figured out from a map and my notes after the trip.While I'd still want to carry a paper map as a backup, it's useful to know how much farther it is to your planned lunch-stop or night camp.
A lot of time, I find something interesting (swimming hole, scenic lookout, etc) thats not on the map and that I'd like to find again someday. This lets you note a location so that you can find it again.
If I'm walking along a trail, it's easier to record a note than to stop and look at the screen so I can write something. I can transcribe later, after the sun goes down.
While IC manufacturing isn't very "green", I still see no reason to use and throw away a set of batteries every two or three weeks.
Always a good thing. My current Palm OS device only came with 8 MB, and it's about three-quarter's full right now, so I'd probably use the extra room for maps and such.
Enhanced battery life is good, since I might have to go several days between recharges.
All in all, I'd want to buy one, although the price is a bit steep; it's more than a good pair of hiking boots. If my job took be outdoors a lot (park ranger, for instance), I can see the current price being very easy to justify.
Look here for info on some of the other classic stunts.
Outlook uses IE to render HTML-encoded internet email, for starters. Also, the "desktop" that Outlook displays when it starts is an HTML file. Outlook and IE are heavily intertwined. Check MSDN for details.