The housing market is basically a cold war which escalates every year.
Good point, and I should have mentioned that. One of the most striking long-term trends in the US is that fifty years ago, housing consumed about a quarter of income. Today it's approaching half of income.
That article sounds like something from the Industry Standard in 1998, during the run-up to the dot-com boom. Been there, done that.
Some real trends worth following:
Too cheap to bill More things are becoming too cheap to bill for. Or, more specifically, the costs of accounting, marketing, billing, and support functions exceed the cost of the delivered product or service. This happened to the Internet some time back. It happened to long distance calls a decade ago. It's happening to telephony, much to the pain of the telecom industry.
This isn't a new phenomenon. There are many tangible products where the manufacturing cost is a tiny fraction of the retail price. Soft drinks, for example. Bottled water. Jeans. Batteries. Printer ink. There are successful business strategies for pushing the price up, ranging from heavy brand promotion to lock-in. Just because it could be cheap doesn't mean it will be.
We're starting to see these strategies applied to the Internet. "SBC Yahoo DSL", and "AOL for Broadband" are examples.
Unstable markets Some markets are unstable.
Electric power. North Atlantic airline tickets.
Some commodities.
This annoys free-market fanatics no end, but is unsurprising to anyone who understands feedback control system instability. Just because there's an equilibrium point doesn't guarantee the system will settle there. Nor does improving information or reducing delays necessarily improve stability.
Electric power is a striking example of an unstable market. There's no inventory. Demand is relatively inelastic. Producers have high fixed costs. The result is prices that change by three orders of magnitude within a single day. This huge volatility can be exploited by traders, which makes things worse.
There's much economic theology around this issue, and not enough theory with predictive power.
This area needs more simulation and less pontification.
The attention shortage
There's a major shortage of attention to advertising messages. Advertising people call this "clutter". Advertising has become a near zero sum game, where vast efforts are made to be more visible than competitors. Advertising cost per unit of product climbs until the product is barely affordable. Neither the buyer nor the seller profits from this; it's a pure cost of competition.
The futility of education
Education can be viewed as a way to increase one's value relative to others. As a larger fraction of the population is educated, the relative value of education declines. It may decline to a level below the price of the education. This has already happened with much "job retraining" and computer-related "certifications", and is happening for many fields of higher education.
This calls into question the basic concept that higher education is a social good.
The race for the bottom You know this one. Work moves to very low cost areas. Eventually, those areas do become wealthier, and in theory, everybody wins. But that takes decades. Moving work to low-cost areas now takes only months. This speedup has produced the offshoring movement.
Now these are the real issues in postmodern capitalism. Not peer to peer networking.
GeoTrust.
No warranty. Certificate worthless. Reject.
Entrust
Disclaims all warranties. Certificate worthless. Reject.
Pttrust
This one is very funny. There are some notes at the bottom about links that need to be fixed up.
But generally follows Verisign's approach, with warranties. Probably OK.
DigiSign.
Certificate quality varies. Some are validated, some aren't. Probably best to reject.
Thawte
Certificate quality varies. Only High Assurance certificates should be accepted.
This sort of thing needs to be automated, with some organization like the EFF, EPIC, or Consumer's Union rating the certificate issuers.
We need a scheme where you can't enter a credit card number into a site unless the page is signed by somebody who stands behind the site's identity.
It would be useful to have a feature in browsers which looked for forms into which you were entering something that looked like a credit card number. This is tough, because it has to work with hostile websites. Web sites might put text in images, or even set up a form in Flash. That has to be detected.
When the browser detects a credit card number going in, it checks the page. It must be a secure page, it must be signed, and the certificate must be one with a Relying Party Agreement that financially guarantees the identity of the site owner. (This means something like a Verisign
SecureSite certificate. Those "certifies nothing" $29.95 certificates aren't good enough.)
Yes, some low-end e-commerce sites will be locked out. Did you really want to buy from them anyway?
This new motion is IBM's second motion for partial summary judgement. The first one, asking for dismissal of the copyright claims, was supposed to be decided this month, but that's been put off until September 15th.
If the copyright claims are dismissed, it's over for everybody but IBM. That's the one we all care about.
The new motion is about IBM/SCO contract issues. That doesn't directly affect anybody else. Only the copyright claims matter to unaffiliated third parties.
That has to be a bug.
Check that your MD5 implementation gets the right answers. If you still think it's not a bug, save a "clash" and post the data to sci.crypt.
What this really means is that we need to think harder about what privileges an application should have, and how the OS should support this. Microsoft is at least doing some rational things.
The Linux world needs to be thinking along similar lines.
The list of programs that are blocked fall into two categories - trusted remote access programs, and peer to peer games. These need different handling.
Most of the programs SP2 blocks are remote access programs of one kind or another, intended to allow some program to get something done on some other machine. Those are trusted programs. Those should be blocked, at least until they've somehow been approved for such access. And that access should be more controlled than the current "on/off" option. Programs like that should be
audited and signed. There aren't very many of them, and they require extra scrutiny.
Multiplayer peer to peer games, where each machine has to talk to the others, have a related but not identical problem.
They don't need to be trusted if the OS has the right privilege structure and the game is modified to work within it.
One approach would be to let a program request to jail itself (as in in FreeBSD), in exchange for which it could thereafter open server ports.
This is what most games need. Once they've started and accessed all the game assets, they should have no further need to access anything else locally. So they can then talk to the outside world. If an attacker takes over the game program, they can't do much besides mess up the game. Games can then be peer to peer, but still untrusted.
It's time to tighten things up.
There's no reason that Scrabble 3.0 should be privileged.
As Ted Turner once pointed out, "the great thing about TV is that it's so passive".
All these fancy gadgets make television far more complicated. And they tend to have absolutely terrible user interfaces. The VCR/DVD interface has shaken down into a mass of tiny buttons and stateful on-screen menus, different for each manufacturer.
Overall integration is terrible. You'd think there would be a "Buy" button on TV remotes by now. No way. Just getting all the volume controls to play together is beyond the industry's abilities.
I can't see Microsoft solving this problem. They haven't been able to solve it for the PC. Apple, maybe.
We have a big problem on the energy front. Much of SF assumes that a good new energy source will be developed. Many SF writers assumed one would have been developed by now. We're never going to do much in space on chemical fuels. And on Earth, whether we're running out of fossil fuels or not, demand is increasing faster than supply.
Fifty years after atomic power, there has been very little progress. We can't make fusion work. Fission is too messy. And there's nothing else in the research pipeline.
Don't think solar or wind will help. Here are the actual figures for California for the last twenty years. Solar power hasn't increased over the last decade, and is stuck around 0.03% of consumption. Wind power is at 0.1% of consumption, and the good sites have already been developed.
If the FBI arrested fifty spammers a year, we'd see a big drop in spam.
It's the free market freaks again
on
Spectrum as Property
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
The "everything should be a market" nuts are at it again. Various spectrum ownership schemes have been kicking around for a while. Fox News promotes it now and then, as "deregulation".
Broadcasters only like this idea when it comes with "incumbent protection", i.e. they get the spectrum they're using now for free. They're terrified of the possibility that "their" channels might be put up for bid. The Bush Administration is into "incumbent protection", because they don't want to offend the existing stations.
The previous system, the Emergency Broadcast System, was based on two components - teletype messages to broadcast stations, and secondary broadcast stations monitoring "primary" broadcast stations for an alert tone.
On February 21, 1971, an alert message announcing a nuclear war was sent over the teletype network by accident. Somebody at NORAD loaded the wrong paper tape. Almost no stations broadcast the message. One station in Florida actually did.
After that, NORAD lost their authority to send emergency action messages on their own.
The current system has more input sources than the old one did. There are weather alerts, and now even child abduction alerts. If there's ever a phony message, it will probably come from some "authorized" input source.
You *can* do a XML parser in Perl, it just won't be as fast as in C, because ultimately Perl is interpreted.
The interpreter isn't not the problem. It's that the operations you need, "get next character from string", "look up character class from character", and "fan out on character class", are all painful in Perl. Not for any good reason, either.
"In 1979-80, state-of-the-art optics fabrication still relied on highly skilled opticians using manually controlled tooling and delicate hand polishing techniques. Today, using sophisticated computer numerical control tooling and equipment, such as waterjet cutting and ion figuring processes, Kodak fabricates similar mirrors in just a few weeks. To learn about Kodak's current large optics manufacturing capabilities, see Precision Optics & Systems."
Companies which "cloak" website ownership by filing some nominee as the registrant may find themselves the target of lawsuits. See Pfizer vs. Domains By Proxy. Domains by Proxy was "cloaking" a site selling "generic lipitor", a Pfizer drug. So Domains by Proxy was sued for patent infringement.
So if you can't find the actual business, go after the "cloaking" service. Let them explain to the judge that they're not really the people behind the illegal scheme.
So is it actually possible to liquidate and distribute the cash?
How would that be done?
The voluntary liquidation of a company with assets is rare, but it happens. A common case is where the business is no longer profitable but the company owns something of value, like real estate. The best course may then be to shut down the business operations, sell off the assets, pay off any creditors, issue a dividend equal to the amount of cash left, and dissolve the corporation.
It's downsizing all the way to zero.
SCO can't liquidate without settling the lawsuits first. Remember, this may end with them owing IBM, Novell, and Red Hat money. Of course, they could probably settle all of those out of court without paying any money just by offering to give up.
The market capitalization is the stock price times the number of shares outstanding.
Most companies have a much higher market capitalization than assets, reflecting the value of an ongoing business. Microsoft, is considered "cash-heavy", but their market cap is 5x their cash.
VA Software (Slashdot's parent) is about 3x. Autodesk, a successful old-line software maker, is about 12x.
SCO is about 1x, and with no debt. That's very unusual. The problem, of course, is that all their legal activity is expected to burn up all that cash.
Oh, for something to program in.
It's not like Python has stiff competition.
Perl is a mess, and Larry Wall likes it that way.
Object-oriented Perl 5 is painful. Perl 6 is getting limited traction. The fact that you can't write an efficient XML/HTML parser in Perl without dropping into C reveals a basic problem.
Java started out OK, but is sinking under a morass of libraries that sort of work. Sun has an annoying tendency to rush a bad API to market half-implemented, maintain it badly, and then dump it. Java 3D comes to mind.
C++ is in deep trouble. The C++ committee has been taken over by template fanatics, who want ever more obscure features added to support
compile-time programming. (Did you know you can misuse the template expander as a recursive rewrite rule engine and do arbitrary computations at compile time in C++? Do you care? Do you want to debug someone else's botched compile-time computation?) The C++ committee is completely unbothered by the lack of safety in C++, and there are no plans to tighten up the language in the next revision.
C is still around, and stable. There's something to be said for that.
C#. Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.
Delphi. Good idea from a loser company.
LISP. Give it up. It's not coming back.
TCL. So awful, it's hard to believe a computer science prof created that.
They have $61 million in cash, no debt, and a market cap of $62 million. Think about that. If they just shut down and paid out their cash, stockholders would be right where they are now. The stock price is so low that it indicates the market assumes management will blow the cash doing something stupid. Given management's behavior over the last year, that's a reasonable assumption.
Now, at long last, hacking tools have caught up with the movie versions. Point and click at last.
The attack even shows up on the attacked PC on screen! With windows opening and mouse movement, even. Watch for this tool showing up in a movie within a year.
Incidentally, note that this isn't a hole in VNC. It's an attack that installs VNC. VNC doesn't have to be present on the target before the attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point, and I should have mentioned that. One of the most striking long-term trends in the US is that fifty years ago, housing consumed about a quarter of income. Today it's approaching half of income.
Some real trends worth following:
This isn't a new phenomenon. There are many tangible products where the manufacturing cost is a tiny fraction of the retail price. Soft drinks, for example. Bottled water. Jeans. Batteries. Printer ink. There are successful business strategies for pushing the price up, ranging from heavy brand promotion to lock-in. Just because it could be cheap doesn't mean it will be.
We're starting to see these strategies applied to the Internet. "SBC Yahoo DSL", and "AOL for Broadband" are examples.
Electric power is a striking example of an unstable market. There's no inventory. Demand is relatively inelastic. Producers have high fixed costs. The result is prices that change by three orders of magnitude within a single day. This huge volatility can be exploited by traders, which makes things worse.
There's much economic theology around this issue, and not enough theory with predictive power. This area needs more simulation and less pontification.
Now these are the real issues in postmodern capitalism. Not peer to peer networking.
-
GeoTrust.
No warranty. Certificate worthless. Reject.
-
Entrust
Disclaims all warranties. Certificate worthless. Reject.
-
Pttrust
This one is very funny. There are some notes at the bottom about links that need to be fixed up.
But generally follows Verisign's approach, with warranties. Probably OK.
-
DigiSign.
Certificate quality varies. Some are validated, some aren't. Probably best to reject.
-
Thawte
Certificate quality varies. Only High Assurance certificates should be accepted.
This sort of thing needs to be automated, with some organization like the EFF, EPIC, or Consumer's Union rating the certificate issuers.It would be useful to have a feature in browsers which looked for forms into which you were entering something that looked like a credit card number. This is tough, because it has to work with hostile websites. Web sites might put text in images, or even set up a form in Flash. That has to be detected.
When the browser detects a credit card number going in, it checks the page. It must be a secure page, it must be signed, and the certificate must be one with a Relying Party Agreement that financially guarantees the identity of the site owner. (This means something like a Verisign SecureSite certificate. Those "certifies nothing" $29.95 certificates aren't good enough.)
Yes, some low-end e-commerce sites will be locked out. Did you really want to buy from them anyway?
The new motion is about IBM/SCO contract issues. That doesn't directly affect anybody else. Only the copyright claims matter to unaffiliated third parties.
That has to be a bug. Check that your MD5 implementation gets the right answers. If you still think it's not a bug, save a "clash" and post the data to sci.crypt.
The list of programs that are blocked fall into two categories - trusted remote access programs, and peer to peer games. These need different handling.
Most of the programs SP2 blocks are remote access programs of one kind or another, intended to allow some program to get something done on some other machine. Those are trusted programs. Those should be blocked, at least until they've somehow been approved for such access. And that access should be more controlled than the current "on/off" option. Programs like that should be audited and signed. There aren't very many of them, and they require extra scrutiny.
Multiplayer peer to peer games, where each machine has to talk to the others, have a related but not identical problem. They don't need to be trusted if the OS has the right privilege structure and the game is modified to work within it.
One approach would be to let a program request to jail itself (as in in FreeBSD), in exchange for which it could thereafter open server ports. This is what most games need. Once they've started and accessed all the game assets, they should have no further need to access anything else locally. So they can then talk to the outside world. If an attacker takes over the game program, they can't do much besides mess up the game. Games can then be peer to peer, but still untrusted.
It's time to tighten things up. There's no reason that Scrabble 3.0 should be privileged.
All these fancy gadgets make television far more complicated. And they tend to have absolutely terrible user interfaces. The VCR/DVD interface has shaken down into a mass of tiny buttons and stateful on-screen menus, different for each manufacturer.
Overall integration is terrible. You'd think there would be a "Buy" button on TV remotes by now. No way. Just getting all the volume controls to play together is beyond the industry's abilities.
I can't see Microsoft solving this problem. They haven't been able to solve it for the PC. Apple, maybe.
Maybe if Slashdot outsourced editorial to Bangalore, things would improve.
Fifty years after atomic power, there has been very little progress. We can't make fusion work. Fission is too messy. And there's nothing else in the research pipeline.
Don't think solar or wind will help. Here are the actual figures for California for the last twenty years. Solar power hasn't increased over the last decade, and is stuck around 0.03% of consumption. Wind power is at 0.1% of consumption, and the good sites have already been developed.
If the FBI arrested fifty spammers a year, we'd see a big drop in spam.
Broadcasters only like this idea when it comes with "incumbent protection", i.e. they get the spectrum they're using now for free. They're terrified of the possibility that "their" channels might be put up for bid. The Bush Administration is into "incumbent protection", because they don't want to offend the existing stations.
On February 21, 1971, an alert message announcing a nuclear war was sent over the teletype network by accident. Somebody at NORAD loaded the wrong paper tape. Almost no stations broadcast the message. One station in Florida actually did. After that, NORAD lost their authority to send emergency action messages on their own.
The current system has more input sources than the old one did. There are weather alerts, and now even child abduction alerts. If there's ever a phony message, it will probably come from some "authorized" input source.
A detailed history is here.
They overdid weight reduction, and the thing was blown sideways into the path of another vehicle. Too much sail area for the vehicle weight.
The interpreter isn't not the problem. It's that the operations you need, "get next character from string", "look up character class from character", and "fan out on character class", are all painful in Perl. Not for any good reason, either.
"In 1979-80, state-of-the-art optics fabrication still relied on highly skilled opticians using manually controlled tooling and delicate hand polishing techniques. Today, using sophisticated computer numerical control tooling and equipment, such as waterjet cutting and ion figuring processes, Kodak fabricates similar mirrors in just a few weeks. To learn about Kodak's current large optics manufacturing capabilities, see Precision Optics & Systems."
They should be using components appropriate to the scale of the vehicle. Motorcycle components, at least.
So if you can't find the actual business, go after the "cloaking" service. Let them explain to the judge that they're not really the people behind the illegal scheme.
I tried to post a Perl example to answer this, but Slashcode thinks Perl has too many junk characters.
How would that be done?
The voluntary liquidation of a company with assets is rare, but it happens. A common case is where the business is no longer profitable but the company owns something of value, like real estate. The best course may then be to shut down the business operations, sell off the assets, pay off any creditors, issue a dividend equal to the amount of cash left, and dissolve the corporation. It's downsizing all the way to zero.
SCO can't liquidate without settling the lawsuits first. Remember, this may end with them owing IBM, Novell, and Red Hat money. Of course, they could probably settle all of those out of court without paying any money just by offering to give up.
SCO is about 1x, and with no debt. That's very unusual. The problem, of course, is that all their legal activity is expected to burn up all that cash.
They have $61 million in cash, no debt, and a market cap of $62 million. Think about that. If they just shut down and paid out their cash, stockholders would be right where they are now. The stock price is so low that it indicates the market assumes management will blow the cash doing something stupid. Given management's behavior over the last year, that's a reasonable assumption.
Incidentally, note that this isn't a hole in VNC. It's an attack that installs VNC. VNC doesn't have to be present on the target before the attack.
Do adware and spyware count?