I would love to know what 'excuse' Archive.org gave for removing such essential internet history information.
Anyone have the Internet Archive URL involved?
Most likely, though, is that the site added a restrictive "robots.txt" file. The Archive obeys the "robots.txt" file retroactively. If you put one up, the Archive will disallow access to all the files that would have been blocked in the past according to the "robots.txt" file.
The data isn't gone from the Archive, though. Access has just been disallowed. You can ask that it be re-allowed given the legal justification that the information is a public record.
Let;'s hear some patent numbers from Microsoft. Nobody will pay attention until Microsoft comes up with some specific claims. The SCO case has made that clear.
can anyone shed light on why we have wanted this in the first place
It was a Bill Joy thing in 4.2BSD. The idea was that UNIX systems could trust each other, but not their users. The old "rcp" protocol reflected this approach. The Berkeley guys were thinking of big multi-user time-sharing systems under central administration, not single user systems.
Early BSD team thinking was that it was good enough if BSD could talk to BSD. Interoperability with other TCP/IP systems had to be pounded into that crowd. BSD's TCP/IP networking didn't really interoperate properly until well into the 4.3BSD life cycle.
Dogme wasn't very successful. Among other things, shooting 35mm handheld with live sound is tough. Most 35mm movie cameras are either too noisy for sound or too heavy to lift.
Yes, there's the Arricam LT, which costs about $150,000. You can rent one for about $1400 per day.
ILM/Lucasfilm and Pixar are union shops, represented by the IATSE Animation Guild. EA is not.
Some IATSE contract terms:
"All hours worked in excess of 8 hours per day shall be paid at one and one half times the employee's hourly rate".
"All hours worked in excess of 14 hours per day, including meal periods, from the time of reporting to work shall be Golden Hours and shall be paid at two times the applicable hourly rate".
"Time worked on the employee's sixth day of the workweek shall be paid at one and one half times..."
"Time worked on the employee's seventh day of the workweek shall be paid at two times..."
"Double time shall be paid for work done on holidays".
Those multiply, too; if seven days of work runs through a holiday, you're up to 4x the base rate.
This encourages management to avoid unnecessary "crunches".
The movie business sometimes runs long hours during crunches, but directors, producers, and studio management try to avoid them, since their labor costs go through the roof. That's the way it should be.
There's a long history of cryogenic computing in the crypto area. IBM and NSA put millions into this back in the 1960s and 1970s ("I want a thousand megacycle computer. I'll get you the money" - NSA director in the 1960s), and there were some actual successes. Liquid nitrogen tank trucks pulled up to Fort Meade in the 1960s. The problem was that the computing element they were using could be made fast, but not small or cheap; it involved a coil and a magnetic field, so it was a discrite component, like a memory core. CMOS ICs won out.
Then there was the Josephson junction effort of the 1980s. Those worked, but again, CMOS ICs won out. Cheaper to build, easier to shrink. It's hard to beat the mainstream IC technology that everyone is working on.
Apple's "iPhone" is really an old-style content delivery device. The new frontier is social networking. Check out Helio. Helio integrates Myspace, GPS, and mapping. BuddyBeacon shows where your friends are, on Yahoo maps. Apple has nothing like that.
Helio is a 3G device, too. Music, videos, fast web browsing, and more. Plus stereo Bluetooth - no more dweebish white wires.
I've been trying to buy a Linux laptop. Unsuccessfully. I'm looking for a low-end system, just enough to give presentations and access systems remotely. My main systems are desktops. I don't need to be able to play movies. I don't need dual boot. I don't need much compute power or a big screen. I do need WiFi capability to public access points, and VGA output to projectors. One would think this would be easy.
So first I try Fry's, which used to have Linux machines on sale. No more. Everything is Windows or Mac. I try Best Buy. No joy, even after a talk with the Geek Squad guy.
Online, we have LinuxCertified. No obvious business address on the web site, always a bad sign, and a criminal offense in California. Low-grade domain-only SSL cert. Phone number not answered during working hours. Not looking good.
There's an article about a $498 Linux laptop from WalMart, but it's been discontinued. WalMart no longer seems to have any Linux laptops.
There's EmperorLinux, but their laptops start at $1145 and go up to $6000. Their $1145 machine is a Dell 520, which Dell sells for $599. $400 extra for Linux?
So now we're down to the blogger/enthusiast sites. One guy has a list of Linux laptop vendors.
Going down the list, it doesn't look good. The HP link is dead. The Dell link leads to Dell's French site, and even that's selling only Windows laptops.
But some of the links aren't dead.
MGE PC Online will actually sell a Linux laptop. It's a bit overpriced; $805 for the cheapest Celeron machine. But you get Red Hat Fedora preloaded. ShopRCubed has Linux laptops that start at $840. Their advertising is deceptive; they advertise a model with "Intel Dual Core Technology" for $799, but in fact that's the price with an Intel Celeron. Adding WiFi and a Ubuntu install brings you up to $840.
There's American Computer, or ACC PC, or CompAmerica, or whatever. Very low base prices, but they don't install Linux; they just sell you a bare machine and claim "Also Certified to run the Linux Operating System."
Let's try Google's "Froogle" system. There we get some Linux laptops. There's a discontinued Acer model that's out of stock. There's a Pentium II laptop on eBay for $80. ("Boots Linux; some keys don't work") Nothing useful there.
Face it. There are no major commercial vendors of Linux laptops any more. There are a few resellers buying machines, adding Linux, and increasing the price. That's it.
It's time for ICANN to invoke paragraph 3.2.3 of the Registrar Agreement. The Registrar then has ten days to provide a data dump of all their registrations, allowing bulk transfer of a failing registrar's data to another registrar.
What you're looking for is a Motorola i560.
"The i560 meets rigorous US Mil Specs for dust, shock, vibration, high and low temperature, low pressure and solar radiation." There's a "Maximum Capacity Battery" option with 5 hours of talk time or 130 hours of standby.
For about a year, I had an Eaton VORAD radar pointed out my window at an intersection. This is usually used as an anti-collision device for heavy trucks, and we had one on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. So, for debugging, I had one pointed at the street, hooked up to a PC running QNX.
A VORAD is a real phased-array radar; you get bearing, range, and range rate, separately for multiple targets. The software took this in and produced a track on screen. I could watch cars making turns. With all that info, I could see speeding and dumb driving in any direction. Never did much with the data, though, other than use it for debugging the robot software.
The VORAD only has a 15 degree scan width, and a very narrow beam vertically. So it couldn't cover the whole intersection. The VORAD is ten year old technology. A more modern unit would be more interesting.
Certainly that's the way it worked here, but that could just be a fluke.
It's inherent in the physics. If anyone can generate enough concentrated energy to boost over interstellar distances, there's going to be some way to use it destructively.
What"s with this "slave the user's machine to the mothership" mentality? "The system allows countries to optionally establish a "license" period for the laptops, such as 21 days. Laptops which are not renewed within the timeframe will lock." Get too far from the local wireless node and your machine dies? And they want to deploy this in third world countries?
That makes life easier for terrorists. The Taliban, which is coming back in Afghanistan, is going to exploit this. Destroy the local school (standard Taliban operating procedure) and its wireless node, and all the kids' computers die. Today at least the parents and kids can hide some books. With OLPC, it's easier for Islamic fundamentalists to destroy knowledge.
The depressing version: any civilization that develops energy sources big enough to power interstellar travel also has the ability to blow itself up. Over time, the odds of some nut getting hold of the capability to do so is high.
We're really lucky that enriching uranium is a big, expensive operation. We're unlucky in that it's getting much cheaper.
Alarm systems used to use a separate solid copper connection between the premises and the alarm service. The better systems sent a continuous psuedorandom code sequence, constantly reporting "OK here"; anything that interrupted the connection raised an alarm.
US telcos stopped offering solid copper connections because people were ordering those and using them for high-speed digital connections.
There used to be "data under voice" services, which provided a very low bitrate channel in a narrow band below audio. These were used for alarm systems. But data under voice can be incompatible with DSL (which is "data over voice", in a higher band), and has mostly been phased out. Actually, there's no fundamental reason you couldn't have data under voice, analog voice, and DSL on the same line, but all three services have to have the right filters to prevent interference.
Then there was ISDN, but that was botched in the US. In many European countries, ISDN voice is common, and the premises equipment is powered via the ISDN connection. So alarm signals could be sent over the D channel. In the US, ISDN was priced higher than analog voice, and powered from the premises end. So it never went anywhere.
Alarms over analog dialup lines are common, but not really very secure, since they're not in continuous communication with the security monitoring center. But at least they don't require AC power at the premises.
There's an installed base of alarm gear that operates over cellular phone services, but much of that is AMPS, the older FM analog cellular system, which, in the US, sunsets next year.
We hadn't planned to announce this quite yet, but this is a good opportunity.
We have a new answer to search - SiteTruth. It's working, but not yet open to the public.
Other search engines rate businesses based on some measure of popularity - incoming links or user ratings.
SiteTruth rates businesses for legitimacy.
What determines legitimacy? The sources anti-fraud investigators tell you to check, but nobody ever does. Corporate registrations. Business licenses. Better Business Bureau reports. The contents of SSL certificates. Business addresses. Business credit ratings. Credit card processors.
All that information is available. It's a data-mining problem, and we've solved it. The process is entirely automated.
Most of the phony web sites, doorway pages, and other junk on the web have no identifiable business behind them. Try to find out who really owns them, and you can't. When we can't, we downgrade their ranking. With SiteTruth, you can create all the phony web sites you want, but they'll be nowhere the beginning of any search result.
Creating a phony company, or stealing the identity of another company, is possible, but it's difficult, expensive and involves committing felonies. Thus, SiteTruth cannot be "gamed" without committing a felony. This weeds out most of the phonies.
SiteTruth only rates "commercial" sites. If you're not selling anything or advertising anything, SiteTruth gives you a neutral or blank rating. If you're engaged in commerce, you can't be anonymous. In many jurisdictions, it's a criminal offense to run a business without disclosing who's behind it. That's the key to SiteTruth.
Our tag line: "SiteTruth - Know who you're dealing with."
The site will open to the public in a few months. Meanwhile, we're starting outreach to the search engine optimization community to get them ready for SiteTruth. We want all legitimate sites to get the highest rating to which they're entitled. An expired corporate registration or seal of trust hurts your SiteTruth ranking, so we want to remind people to get their paperwork up to date.
Rating by asking random users has been tried. At IBM. See United States Patent 7,080,064, Sundaresan July 18, 2006,
"System and method for integrating on-line user ratings of businesses with search engines". Sundaresan has several patents related to schemes for asking users for ratings and using that info to adjust search rankings.
The basic trouble with this approach is that, if you ask random users to rate random sites, they don't have enough time, energy, or effort to do a good job of it. If you ask self-selected users of the sites, the system can be gamed.
This sort of thing only works where the set of things to rate is small compared to the interested user population. So it's great for movies, marginal for restaurants, and poor for websites generally.
Wikipedia didn't blow away Encyclopedia Brittanica. Encarta did. As Bill Gates once pointed out to Brittanica, the Brittanica sales force of door to door sales reps added negative value to the product once it could be put on CD-ROM. Brittanica's problem was a high cost per sale.
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to know what 'excuse' Archive.org gave for removing such essential internet history information.
Anyone have the Internet Archive URL involved?
Most likely, though, is that the site added a restrictive "robots.txt" file. The Archive obeys the "robots.txt" file retroactively. If you put one up, the Archive will disallow access to all the files that would have been blocked in the past according to the "robots.txt" file.
The data isn't gone from the Archive, though. Access has just been disallowed. You can ask that it be re-allowed given the legal justification that the information is a public record.
Let;'s hear some patent numbers from Microsoft. Nobody will pay attention until Microsoft comes up with some specific claims. The SCO case has made that clear.
can anyone shed light on why we have wanted this in the first place
It was a Bill Joy thing in 4.2BSD. The idea was that UNIX systems could trust each other, but not their users. The old "rcp" protocol reflected this approach. The Berkeley guys were thinking of big multi-user time-sharing systems under central administration, not single user systems.
Early BSD team thinking was that it was good enough if BSD could talk to BSD. Interoperability with other TCP/IP systems had to be pounded into that crowd. BSD's TCP/IP networking didn't really interoperate properly until well into the 4.3BSD life cycle.
Virgin Atlantic flight ... to London a couple of years ago
What, that low-end system with an Nintendo NES emulator and an analog TV tuner, run from an under-the-seat box that cuts into legroom?
If an intrusion detection system has to run as root, it's part of the problem, not the solution.
Biggest single security problem with UNIX and Linux is that way too much stuff runs as "root". Too much trusted code.
Not that Windows is much better, although, in Vista, they're finally trying.
Dogme wasn't very successful. Among other things, shooting 35mm handheld with live sound is tough. Most 35mm movie cameras are either too noisy for sound or too heavy to lift. Yes, there's the Arricam LT, which costs about $150,000. You can rent one for about $1400 per day.
1982 called. They wanted to tell you that some people now have PCs and aren't using the mainframe like they're supposed to.
ILM/Lucasfilm and Pixar are union shops, represented by the IATSE Animation Guild. EA is not.
Some IATSE contract terms:
Those multiply, too; if seven days of work runs through a holiday, you're up to 4x the base rate. This encourages management to avoid unnecessary "crunches".
The movie business sometimes runs long hours during crunches, but directors, producers, and studio management try to avoid them, since their labor costs go through the roof. That's the way it should be.
Unions - the people who brought you the weekend.
There's a long history of cryogenic computing in the crypto area. IBM and NSA put millions into this back in the 1960s and 1970s ("I want a thousand megacycle computer. I'll get you the money" - NSA director in the 1960s), and there were some actual successes. Liquid nitrogen tank trucks pulled up to Fort Meade in the 1960s. The problem was that the computing element they were using could be made fast, but not small or cheap; it involved a coil and a magnetic field, so it was a discrite component, like a memory core. CMOS ICs won out.
Then there was the Josephson junction effort of the 1980s. Those worked, but again, CMOS ICs won out. Cheaper to build, easier to shrink. It's hard to beat the mainstream IC technology that everyone is working on.
No, they don't. Yes, some blogger said they did back in 2005.
Apple's "iPhone" is really an old-style content delivery device. The new frontier is social networking. Check out Helio. Helio integrates Myspace, GPS, and mapping. BuddyBeacon shows where your friends are, on Yahoo maps. Apple has nothing like that.
Helio is a 3G device, too. Music, videos, fast web browsing, and more. Plus stereo Bluetooth - no more dweebish white wires.
I've been trying to buy a Linux laptop. Unsuccessfully. I'm looking for a low-end system, just enough to give presentations and access systems remotely. My main systems are desktops. I don't need to be able to play movies. I don't need dual boot. I don't need much compute power or a big screen. I do need WiFi capability to public access points, and VGA output to projectors. One would think this would be easy.
So first I try Fry's, which used to have Linux machines on sale. No more. Everything is Windows or Mac. I try Best Buy. No joy, even after a talk with the Geek Squad guy.
Online, we have LinuxCertified. No obvious business address on the web site, always a bad sign, and a criminal offense in California. Low-grade domain-only SSL cert. Phone number not answered during working hours. Not looking good.
There's an article about a $498 Linux laptop from WalMart, but it's been discontinued. WalMart no longer seems to have any Linux laptops.
There's EmperorLinux, but their laptops start at $1145 and go up to $6000. Their $1145 machine is a Dell 520, which Dell sells for $599. $400 extra for Linux?
So now we're down to the blogger/enthusiast sites. One guy has a list of Linux laptop vendors. Going down the list, it doesn't look good. The HP link is dead. The Dell link leads to Dell's French site, and even that's selling only Windows laptops.
But some of the links aren't dead. MGE PC Online will actually sell a Linux laptop. It's a bit overpriced; $805 for the cheapest Celeron machine. But you get Red Hat Fedora preloaded. ShopRCubed has Linux laptops that start at $840. Their advertising is deceptive; they advertise a model with "Intel Dual Core Technology" for $799, but in fact that's the price with an Intel Celeron. Adding WiFi and a Ubuntu install brings you up to $840.
There's American Computer, or ACC PC, or CompAmerica, or whatever. Very low base prices, but they don't install Linux; they just sell you a bare machine and claim "Also Certified to run the Linux Operating System."
Let's try Google's "Froogle" system. There we get some Linux laptops. There's a discontinued Acer model that's out of stock. There's a Pentium II laptop on eBay for $80. ("Boots Linux; some keys don't work") Nothing useful there.
Face it. There are no major commercial vendors of Linux laptops any more. There are a few resellers buying machines, adding Linux, and increasing the price. That's it.
It's time for ICANN to invoke paragraph 3.2.3 of the Registrar Agreement. The Registrar then has ten days to provide a data dump of all their registrations, allowing bulk transfer of a failing registrar's data to another registrar.
What you're looking for is a Motorola i560. "The i560 meets rigorous US Mil Specs for dust, shock, vibration, high and low temperature, low pressure and solar radiation." There's a "Maximum Capacity Battery" option with 5 hours of talk time or 130 hours of standby.
It's available for Nextel.
For about a year, I had an Eaton VORAD radar pointed out my window at an intersection. This is usually used as an anti-collision device for heavy trucks, and we had one on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. So, for debugging, I had one pointed at the street, hooked up to a PC running QNX.
A VORAD is a real phased-array radar; you get bearing, range, and range rate, separately for multiple targets. The software took this in and produced a track on screen. I could watch cars making turns. With all that info, I could see speeding and dumb driving in any direction. Never did much with the data, though, other than use it for debugging the robot software.
The VORAD only has a 15 degree scan width, and a very narrow beam vertically. So it couldn't cover the whole intersection. The VORAD is ten year old technology. A more modern unit would be more interesting.
Certainly that's the way it worked here, but that could just be a fluke.
It's inherent in the physics. If anyone can generate enough concentrated energy to boost over interstellar distances, there's going to be some way to use it destructively.
What"s with this "slave the user's machine to the mothership" mentality? "The system allows countries to optionally establish a "license" period for the laptops, such as 21 days. Laptops which are not renewed within the timeframe will lock." Get too far from the local wireless node and your machine dies? And they want to deploy this in third world countries?
That makes life easier for terrorists. The Taliban, which is coming back in Afghanistan, is going to exploit this. Destroy the local school (standard Taliban operating procedure) and its wireless node, and all the kids' computers die. Today at least the parents and kids can hide some books. With OLPC, it's easier for Islamic fundamentalists to destroy knowledge.
The depressing version: any civilization that develops energy sources big enough to power interstellar travel also has the ability to blow itself up. Over time, the odds of some nut getting hold of the capability to do so is high.
We're really lucky that enriching uranium is a big, expensive operation. We're unlucky in that it's getting much cheaper.
Alarm systems used to use a separate solid copper connection between the premises and the alarm service. The better systems sent a continuous psuedorandom code sequence, constantly reporting "OK here"; anything that interrupted the connection raised an alarm. US telcos stopped offering solid copper connections because people were ordering those and using them for high-speed digital connections.
There used to be "data under voice" services, which provided a very low bitrate channel in a narrow band below audio. These were used for alarm systems. But data under voice can be incompatible with DSL (which is "data over voice", in a higher band), and has mostly been phased out. Actually, there's no fundamental reason you couldn't have data under voice, analog voice, and DSL on the same line, but all three services have to have the right filters to prevent interference.
Then there was ISDN, but that was botched in the US. In many European countries, ISDN voice is common, and the premises equipment is powered via the ISDN connection. So alarm signals could be sent over the D channel. In the US, ISDN was priced higher than analog voice, and powered from the premises end. So it never went anywhere.
Alarms over analog dialup lines are common, but not really very secure, since they're not in continuous communication with the security monitoring center. But at least they don't require AC power at the premises.
There's an installed base of alarm gear that operates over cellular phone services, but much of that is AMPS, the older FM analog cellular system, which, in the US, sunsets next year.
As for the VoIP issue, here's the Central Station Alarm Association's white paper (.DOC format) on the subject.
The crappy front page makes it look like a scam.
To some extent, that page was made to discourage unwanted attention during the early phases. But it's all real.
We hadn't planned to announce this quite yet, but this is a good opportunity.
We have a new answer to search - SiteTruth. It's working, but not yet open to the public.
Other search engines rate businesses based on some measure of popularity - incoming links or user ratings. SiteTruth rates businesses for legitimacy.
What determines legitimacy? The sources anti-fraud investigators tell you to check, but nobody ever does. Corporate registrations. Business licenses. Better Business Bureau reports. The contents of SSL certificates. Business addresses. Business credit ratings. Credit card processors. All that information is available. It's a data-mining problem, and we've solved it. The process is entirely automated.
Most of the phony web sites, doorway pages, and other junk on the web have no identifiable business behind them. Try to find out who really owns them, and you can't. When we can't, we downgrade their ranking. With SiteTruth, you can create all the phony web sites you want, but they'll be nowhere the beginning of any search result.
Creating a phony company, or stealing the identity of another company, is possible, but it's difficult, expensive and involves committing felonies. Thus, SiteTruth cannot be "gamed" without committing a felony. This weeds out most of the phonies.
SiteTruth only rates "commercial" sites. If you're not selling anything or advertising anything, SiteTruth gives you a neutral or blank rating. If you're engaged in commerce, you can't be anonymous. In many jurisdictions, it's a criminal offense to run a business without disclosing who's behind it. That's the key to SiteTruth.
Our tag line: "SiteTruth - Know who you're dealing with."
The site will open to the public in a few months. Meanwhile, we're starting outreach to the search engine optimization community to get them ready for SiteTruth. We want all legitimate sites to get the highest rating to which they're entitled. An expired corporate registration or seal of trust hurts your SiteTruth ranking, so we want to remind people to get their paperwork up to date.
The patent is pending.
Rating by asking random users has been tried. At IBM. See United States Patent 7,080,064, Sundaresan July 18, 2006, "System and method for integrating on-line user ratings of businesses with search engines". Sundaresan has several patents related to schemes for asking users for ratings and using that info to adjust search rankings.
The basic trouble with this approach is that, if you ask random users to rate random sites, they don't have enough time, energy, or effort to do a good job of it. If you ask self-selected users of the sites, the system can be gamed.
This sort of thing only works where the set of things to rate is small compared to the interested user population. So it's great for movies, marginal for restaurants, and poor for websites generally.
Wikipedia didn't blow away Encyclopedia Brittanica. Encarta did. As Bill Gates once pointed out to Brittanica, the Brittanica sales force of door to door sales reps added negative value to the product once it could be put on CD-ROM. Brittanica's problem was a high cost per sale.
The United States has a full spectrum of nut groups. And that's just fine.
They keep each other honest.
That's the sort of grunt work game testers do, forcing every possible case in the game.