Well, maybe you'd like to gauge thier interest in what they'll actually be doing. I known companies that will take a slightly less qualified candidate over a more qualified one based on the fact that the less qualified one expresses a lot more interest in what they'll actually be doing.
besides that, I wouldnt' wanto to work for a company unless I knew in detail what my responsibilities and work environment would be. If that means signing an NDA, fine by me.
NDA's are very specific. You're probably thinking of a non-compete agreement, and even in the worst case, those generally expire after a year, and only prevent you from working with direct competitors doing the same job. You couldn't be product manager of company A and turn around and quit only to become prodcut manager of company B which produces clones of company A's products. You could, generally, become CTO or get an HR related position, though, since the experience you had at your previous position would have little relevance...
Well, the past is the past, free has turned into the norm. Their only competition on any other OS, aside from Opera and QuickTime Pro, is free as in beer software.
And remember, Netscape started it. That's how they catapolted themselves into the 80%+ marketshare they once had. And don't go into poor Opera stories:
I'm sure iPlanet could sell more product if IIS and Apache weren't free.
And CDE could sell more if not for KDE and Gnome.
Solaris wouldn't have to be $75 if not for Linux and FreeBSD.
Except for one thing: The app company could look at the linux community and see their rage and anger towards them and their products and determine that there really wouldn't be much of a market for their products. They could also look and see that their only competition is free, and decide that it'd be awefully hard to compete with free (witness IE vs. Netscape) and decide that it'd be best to save their resources for other things, like maybe.NET or some other StarPortal type knock-off.
For a short time they'ed be safe. But after a successful migration, management might go "hey, you know we're saving millions of dollars per year now that we're on Linux and don't have to pay to deploy our OSes. And you know, this Linux seems pretty good, we don't hear many complaints. Why don't we check out staroffice or koffice and see if those would pose acceptable substitutes for MS Office? It'd save us another fortune, you know?"
With no MS OSes or MS suites deployed, companies wouldn't need MS development tools, and more dramatically, they wouldn't need MS BackOffice or Win2000 servers.
Ouch.
No. Microsoft is in no way going to encourage people to check out other operating systems, because then those people might go "overboard" and check out other office suites, development suites, RDBMS, groupware products, etc...
Best to keep the all locked into Windows where Microsofts products run better than the rest...
MS has already ported IE. They've talked about porting MediaPlayer. Both are yet more examples of anticompetitive "dumping" practices.
What? One of the main spectres in the anti-trust case was that Microsoft intended to lock it's customers in to their platform. Now, when they actually have ported some of their apps to other platforms, it's anti-competitive dumping?
HUH?
Anyways, what's really entertaining is that, okay the mac version of IE is a completely separate app, built from a completely different source code base, but here's IE for Solaris and HP-UX. Built from the Windows version of IE. Which microsoft said was so deeply integreated into the operating system it was impossible to figure out where IE ends and Windows begins. Yet, somehow, they manage to draw the line pretty distinctly, despite the "impossibility" of the task.
Funny, yes. Anticompetitive dumping? No. Not when all their competition is free (Netscape, Real, Quicktime). It's not like Sun will ever sign a deal with Microsoft to exclusively distribute their products.
How do you figure that? Montery was an experiment. It failed. AIX, (unrelated) like Solaris, currently scales far and above anything that Linux can hope to achieve.
You need to understand. For linux to have a chance (of corporate acceptance, since that's what you seem to be insinuating here) in the long term, it needs (and that means the developers, distributors and users) to realize that Unix is on it's side. A "win" for Linux by taking something that AIX or SCO had means nothing. You need to stop being concerned with other Unixes and go after the big cheese that you *REALLY* want to target. Windows. Because no matter how you stack things, ANY other unix beats the pant's off of Linux, depending on the situation...
It really is true, isn't it? That *BSD is the real operating system and that Linux is just for the anyone but microsoft crowd, eh?
Really, why should anyone be rooting the demise of an operating system? It could have been promising, being that it was based on such (finer than Linux) other operating systems. It's nt like you said "too bad, we could have learned a lot afrom them" but "whoop, whoop, whoop".
Even in Linus' interview where he freely admits that linux has faults, even when compared to Windows xxxx. If you want linux to thrive you need to work on it, not just gloat about another OS's shortcomings.
Well, share them with your friends. Heck, even rip them and email mp3's to them. No one's stopping you from doing that, unless you're going to try to argue that the entire world is your friend.
Software providers are in no way liable. Service providers are. Napster's service/entire business plan is based on aiding and abetting the sharing/copying/theft of other people creations.
What makes developers so sacred in your eyes? Copyright law are built around the concept of preventing other people from creating. If you create something, you copyright it, and therefore prevent other people from creating that as well...
And yes, if users do switch en masse to Gnutella or FreeNet (doubtful they'll get the same size crowds as Napster did, though) the government and corps won't be able to stopt that. However, the point will have been made that if anyone's going to earn a profit from a given creation, it's going to be the owner or no one.
Hopefully no one else in the future will be so foolhardy as to start a business based on the idea of selling property that they have no right to be distributing i the first place...
It's funny how so many napster supporters gripe about how the RIAA and even the US gov't are antiquated beasts that need to be pulled into the 21st century, yet they point ardantly to events 100-500 years ago as a means of justifying their arguments.
"sheet music was pirated, and that was good"
"in the Rennecianse (sp?), people just created for the sake of creating"
"Up until this century, artists mainly flourished on the patronage of their most wealthy fans and created for the rest of the world to enjoy".
This is the 21st century. The only way this is going to end amicably is if techologists (you) and the industry meet and device a 21st century solution that keeps everyone's best interests in mind. Musicians want to be paid. Labels want to be paid. You want to download music from the internet. Those are the arguments, aren't they?
How come no one out there is working feverishly on a new micropayment system, since none of the others were ever adopted? Or has Napster already spoiled it, by allowing people to download their music for free, will it increasingly be an expectation of consumers that whatever they want to download from the internet should always be free?
Ummmm... Netscape is equally bad on all platforms, unfortunatly. I'm not enough of a Linux guru to say which version i was running. either i downloaded it from Netscape, or else if was on the Redhat 6 CD.
Doesn't matter. It's just as bad on Windows and the Mac.
A stable OS doesn't subsitute for aweful code.
No matter. I figured that Linux is a server OS, and if i'm going to use a Unix based server OS it might as well be OpenBSD or Solaris, because at least they each do one thing great. OpenBSD: Provide a stable environemnet. Solaris: Scale, scale, scale, and did i mention it SCALES?
Yeah, other OSes scale, but no other ones let you start on a commodity platform before making you migrate to proprietary hardware.
IE 5.5 seems much more stable than anything that's come from Netscape or Mozilla recently. Mozilla may be alpha or beta, yes, but Netscape 4.73 is a shipping product, yet locks up all the time.
IE's security issues rest mainly on the fact that it runs on Windows. The Mac version has suffered from none of the flaws of the Windows version.
IE5 conforms a lot closer to the W3C standards then Netscape could ever hope to. Mozilla and Opera are completely standards based, yes, but again, Mozilla's not shipable, and Opera seems basically non-existant in the market.
Microsoft may be Microsoft, but one thing I know is that when they want to, they can write the best applications around - witness Office 98 for the Mac, IE for the mac, basically anything they've shipped for the Mac have far and away been the best apps they've ever shipped, even including anything for their own OS...
And your error message complaint. At least IE tells you something went wrong, as opposed to the Netscape and Mozilla route of asking you what you just did wrong so it can send in a bug report...
It gets no protection. If you have no right to release something, then the license is null and void. RMS touches on that in the GPL itself.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Don't go looking to the GPL as being a shield. It's not. It's not meant to be. It's only meant to insure that software distributed under it's terms will always remain under those terms. To try to warp it to do otherwise is just wrong.
Your only hope for "protection" is to base the developement of it in another juristicion that doesn't have any agreements with the US about patent, trademark, copyright, or related IP laws. The software will still be developed. You can still download it. It just won't ever appear in a shrink wrapped package.
Who's to know? But looking at the Wintel market, where Altivec and 128 bit register are unheard off, Speech Recognition software is much further ahead of anything available on the Mac. And it's not like Altivec has been with the Mac for a long time or anything, it just arrived with the G4, so it's not like there are too many applications that are entirely dependant on it.
Given the choices: 500 MHz G4 vs. 750 MHz 1 GHz G5 with a roadmap that reaches 2 GHz, it seems that it's in everyone's, except Motorolla's, best interest to ditch the G4 and continue onwards.
Besides that, IBM has experience and expertise developing high performance chips as well as incentive to do so thanks to the RS and AS series computers. They put their money where their mouth is, where as Motorolla seems more content to develope the PowerPC into a DSP competitor/low power chip for cell phones, PDA's and the like.
I rambled. I just think that intitially, losing altivec could entail a small hit, but in the long term, being able to acheive higher clock speeds more than compensates for the loss.
Because Motorolla seems to be incapable of obeying Moore's law, so far as processing speeds go. In the past year since their introduction (has it been that long? maybe not. 9 months?) Motorolla has increased the maximum clock speed of G4's from 450 MHz to 500 MHz. Witness the Pentiums climbing from 450 MHz to 750 and beyond in the same period. Witness Athlongs doing the same.
Apple must be PISSED OFF at motorolla about now... And IBM has decided that Altivec adds needless complexity to the chip, and think they can get better gains just by pumping up the clockspeed. Some apps might take a small hit (things like Seti or Photoshop), but overall performance of the machines should benefit by actually being able to up the clock speed again.
I believe that MSFT still has "model" licensing deals, where if an OEM specifies that they'll only ship a given model of a computer with a Windows OS, they qualify for discounts. Which would make it why you don't see an ad in PC Magazine advertising a Dell Optiplex for $xxx (subtract $25 if you'd like Linux).
Not just that, but a hardware manufacturer has to make a case to Microsoft to show that two separate models are indeed separate models (for instance, they need to have different specs (aside from the OS)) and be promoted differently.
This is all just me regurgitating something I read (probably either at the Register or a John C Dvorak (I can sense the flames already!) column from a year or two back...
Yes, the DOJ did stop Microsoft from being able to charge OEMs for licenses they didn't sell, but they were able to devise an even more restrictive term in the end...
Right. I wasn't meaning to imply that a 64 bit CPU would be implicitly faster than a 32 bit one. Just that a 64 bit proc can access a whole lot more memory than a 32 bit one, which therefore implies huge performance leaps for things like databases and such. Of course, all of the mainstream databases already run on 64 bit platforms, so Sledgehamemr in effect only gives vendors and customers another CPU choice... (Sparc, MIPS, Power, Alpha, Itanium, PA-RISC, the list goes on and on...)
I think i do get it: A quantum computer is only useful against cryptosystems whose key sizes fit into (however it's measured) it's qubits, or what not.
Just as a 5 qubit quantum computer is useless for attacking 40 bit keys, a 500 qubit computer would be useless against 4000 bit keys, etc, etc, etc...
I maybe wrong, of course. Where's Bruce Schneier when we need him?:)
But how many years after the 386 was introduced did 32 bits become the norm? Not until Windows 95, even though the Win32 DLL's were available for quite some time before then... Not just that, but adoption also waited two generations (til the pentiums came upon the scene).
Not just that, but for all their technical superiority, Intel is still king of the hill as far as x86 processors goes... ANd AMD is just stumbling into this position by sheer luck, since Intel's finally decided to pump resources into an architecture besides x86. It'll be interesting to see how many vendors look blindly away from AMD and follow Intel onto the "next great thing".
there could be a great chance, though, if AMD doesn't keep it in the high-end niche. If every chip, Duron or Athlon, they sell is 64 bit, it'd do great for market penetration...
I wouldn't expect this 1st generation chip to change much... after it's gone through a few iterations and there's quite a few million of them deployed, we'll be able to expect to see a plethora of 64 bit apps. But not for a few years...
One other thing is how will this stand up to Itanium? performance wise? Since performance is really the only incentive for people to move to 64 bit chips?
Off topic, but when will we ever see dual processor Athlon motherboards, anyhow?
That's absolutely useless for us, though... The only people it protects are people with either line of site or connected directly by fiber optic cabling...
Even your 4096 bit keys won't be worth anything if this technology scales...
Well then, i guess we'll just have to start generating 40960 bit long keys in order to stay ahead of "them".
So a 4000 bit key will not take 4 times as long to decrypt as a 1000 bit key, but many many times as long!
I may be wrong, but I THINK I read that the only part of encryption that's significantly affected by using larger keys is that of key generation. Once you've got your key, it takes the same amount of time to encrypt a message with 40 bit as opposed to 128 bit encryption... Some article I read, probably in the cryptogram newsletter said something along the lines of "there is no excuse to use anything but the strongest encryption available" because of that. Of course, maybe that was just for symetric cryptosystesm.
I imagine however, that this will be quite difficult and that our keys should be safe for the near future:)
Another common theme I've read in all to the cryptography websites is that the NSA tends to be 10-15 years ahead of civilians... So, would it be possible that they've already been experimenting with quantum computing since the mid-eighties? If that was the case, I wonder what their progress is... remember, IBM wants to announce their research, as a showboat kind of thing, where as the NSA most definetly does not want to announce thiers, so that their opponents don't know what they're up agaisnt.
All in all, I'd guess we're safe, though... conspiracy theories aside, this is just a 5-bit machine. And there's no upper boundry to the size of a public key, except for limitations in the software we use... Just wait til a future version of PGP allows unlimited keysize (or limited only by your patience in taking the time to create them:)
The government isn't taking away any of your rights. They can't. People and companies can, though. That's the difference. The us gov't is not saying "your'e not allowed to publish benchmark data". Individual (companies) are. That's the difference.
And to be honest, it's fair. Those things are SO hard to properly set up and optimize, if anyone who bought the software could publish benchmarks, there'd be a wave of confusion as people with the exact same systems came up with different scores. Not just that, but due to the complication factor, it'd also be incredibly easy to "accidentally" misconfigure a given system in order to hobble it and call it's competitor the victor in a given benchmark.
Hence the reason they don't want results published. When they are being done to be published, generally, they'll ship a system and/or a few techs to configure the benchmarkers' systems in order to make sure that they get shown in the best possible light.
I drifted a little.. all i meant to say was that the government is the only person according to the constitution that can't take away your free speech. And they're not supressing speech in this case. Stop pointing fingers at them...
Regardless of how they actually work or how you phrase it, to the end user, it appears that they connect to Napster, type in a song, and download that track. They've cloaked everything else, to the point that for all intents and purposes, they're just as liable for violating copyrights as this company might be...
Unless grad students are required to sign away their rights either period or to a third party as part of publishing their thesis... I dunno about that, though, since it's foreign territory for me...
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Well, maybe you'd like to gauge thier interest in what they'll actually be doing. I known companies that will take a slightly less qualified candidate over a more qualified one based on the fact that the less qualified one expresses a lot more interest in what they'll actually be doing.
besides that, I wouldnt' wanto to work for a company unless I knew in detail what my responsibilities and work environment would be. If that means signing an NDA, fine by me.
NDA's are very specific. You're probably thinking of a non-compete agreement, and even in the worst case, those generally expire after a year, and only prevent you from working with direct competitors doing the same job. You couldn't be product manager of company A and turn around and quit only to become prodcut manager of company B which produces clones of company A's products. You could, generally, become CTO or get an HR related position, though, since the experience you had at your previous position would have little relevance...
Well, the past is the past, free has turned into the norm. Their only competition on any other OS, aside from Opera and QuickTime Pro, is free as in beer software.
And remember, Netscape started it. That's how they catapolted themselves into the 80%+ marketshare they once had. And don't go into poor Opera stories:
I'm sure iPlanet could sell more product if IIS and Apache weren't free.
And CDE could sell more if not for KDE and Gnome.
Solaris wouldn't have to be $75 if not for Linux and FreeBSD.
Except for one thing: The app company could look at the linux community and see their rage and anger towards them and their products and determine that there really wouldn't be much of a market for their products. They could also look and see that their only competition is free, and decide that it'd be awefully hard to compete with free (witness IE vs. Netscape) and decide that it'd be best to save their resources for other things, like maybe .NET or some other StarPortal type knock-off.
For a short time they'ed be safe. But after a successful migration, management might go "hey, you know we're saving millions of dollars per year now that we're on Linux and don't have to pay to deploy our OSes. And you know, this Linux seems pretty good, we don't hear many complaints. Why don't we check out staroffice or koffice and see if those would pose acceptable substitutes for MS Office? It'd save us another fortune, you know?"
With no MS OSes or MS suites deployed, companies wouldn't need MS development tools, and more dramatically, they wouldn't need MS BackOffice or Win2000 servers.
Ouch.
No. Microsoft is in no way going to encourage people to check out other operating systems, because then those people might go "overboard" and check out other office suites, development suites, RDBMS, groupware products, etc...
Best to keep the all locked into Windows where Microsofts products run better than the rest...
MS has already ported IE. They've talked about porting MediaPlayer. Both are yet more examples of anticompetitive "dumping" practices.
What? One of the main spectres in the anti-trust case was that Microsoft intended to lock it's customers in to their platform. Now, when they actually have ported some of their apps to other platforms, it's anti-competitive dumping?
HUH?
Anyways, what's really entertaining is that, okay the mac version of IE is a completely separate app, built from a completely different source code base, but here's IE for Solaris and HP-UX. Built from the Windows version of IE. Which microsoft said was so deeply integreated into the operating system it was impossible to figure out where IE ends and Windows begins. Yet, somehow, they manage to draw the line pretty distinctly, despite the "impossibility" of the task.
Funny, yes. Anticompetitive dumping? No. Not when all their competition is free (Netscape, Real, Quicktime). It's not like Sun will ever sign a deal with Microsoft to exclusively distribute their products.
How do you figure that? Montery was an experiment. It failed. AIX, (unrelated) like Solaris, currently scales far and above anything that Linux can hope to achieve.
You need to understand. For linux to have a chance (of corporate acceptance, since that's what you seem to be insinuating here) in the long term, it needs (and that means the developers, distributors and users) to realize that Unix is on it's side. A "win" for Linux by taking something that AIX or SCO had means nothing. You need to stop being concerned with other Unixes and go after the big cheese that you *REALLY* want to target. Windows. Because no matter how you stack things, ANY other unix beats the pant's off of Linux, depending on the situation...
It really is true, isn't it? That *BSD is the real operating system and that Linux is just for the anyone but microsoft crowd, eh?
Really, why should anyone be rooting the demise of an operating system? It could have been promising, being that it was based on such (finer than Linux) other operating systems. It's nt like you said "too bad, we could have learned a lot afrom them" but "whoop, whoop, whoop".
Even in Linus' interview where he freely admits that linux has faults, even when compared to Windows xxxx. If you want linux to thrive you need to work on it, not just gloat about another OS's shortcomings.
Well, share them with your friends. Heck, even rip them and email mp3's to them. No one's stopping you from doing that, unless you're going to try to argue that the entire world is your friend.
Software providers are in no way liable. Service providers are. Napster's service/entire business plan is based on aiding and abetting the sharing/copying/theft of other people creations.
What makes developers so sacred in your eyes? Copyright law are built around the concept of preventing other people from creating. If you create something, you copyright it, and therefore prevent other people from creating that as well...
And yes, if users do switch en masse to Gnutella or FreeNet (doubtful they'll get the same size crowds as Napster did, though) the government and corps won't be able to stopt that. However, the point will have been made that if anyone's going to earn a profit from a given creation, it's going to be the owner or no one.
Hopefully no one else in the future will be so foolhardy as to start a business based on the idea of selling property that they have no right to be distributing i the first place...
It's funny how so many napster supporters gripe about how the RIAA and even the US gov't are antiquated beasts that need to be pulled into the 21st century, yet they point ardantly to events 100-500 years ago as a means of justifying their arguments.
"sheet music was pirated, and that was good"
"in the Rennecianse (sp?), people just created for the sake of creating"
"Up until this century, artists mainly flourished on the patronage of their most wealthy fans and created for the rest of the world to enjoy".
This is the 21st century. The only way this is going to end amicably is if techologists (you) and the industry meet and device a 21st century solution that keeps everyone's best interests in mind. Musicians want to be paid. Labels want to be paid. You want to download music from the internet. Those are the arguments, aren't they?
How come no one out there is working feverishly on a new micropayment system, since none of the others were ever adopted? Or has Napster already spoiled it, by allowing people to download their music for free, will it increasingly be an expectation of consumers that whatever they want to download from the internet should always be free?
oops. Meant to say "secure" not stable....
Ummmm... Netscape is equally bad on all platforms, unfortunatly. I'm not enough of a Linux guru to say which version i was running. either i downloaded it from Netscape, or else if was on the Redhat 6 CD.
Doesn't matter. It's just as bad on Windows and the Mac.
A stable OS doesn't subsitute for aweful code.
No matter. I figured that Linux is a server OS, and if i'm going to use a Unix based server OS it might as well be OpenBSD or Solaris, because at least they each do one thing great. OpenBSD: Provide a stable environemnet. Solaris: Scale, scale, scale, and did i mention it SCALES?
Yeah, other OSes scale, but no other ones let you start on a commodity platform before making you migrate to proprietary hardware.
IE 5.5 seems much more stable than anything that's come from Netscape or Mozilla recently. Mozilla may be alpha or beta, yes, but Netscape 4.73 is a shipping product, yet locks up all the time.
IE's security issues rest mainly on the fact that it runs on Windows. The Mac version has suffered from none of the flaws of the Windows version.
IE5 conforms a lot closer to the W3C standards then Netscape could ever hope to. Mozilla and Opera are completely standards based, yes, but again, Mozilla's not shipable, and Opera seems basically non-existant in the market.
Microsoft may be Microsoft, but one thing I know is that when they want to, they can write the best applications around - witness Office 98 for the Mac, IE for the mac, basically anything they've shipped for the Mac have far and away been the best apps they've ever shipped, even including anything for their own OS...
And your error message complaint. At least IE tells you something went wrong, as opposed to the Netscape and Mozilla route of asking you what you just did wrong so it can send in a bug report...
It gets no protection. If you have no right to release something, then the license is null and void. RMS touches on that in the GPL itself.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Don't go looking to the GPL as being a shield. It's not. It's not meant to be. It's only meant to insure that software distributed under it's terms will always remain under those terms. To try to warp it to do otherwise is just wrong.
Your only hope for "protection" is to base the developement of it in another juristicion that doesn't have any agreements with the US about patent, trademark, copyright, or related IP laws. The software will still be developed. You can still download it. It just won't ever appear in a shrink wrapped package.
Who's to know? But looking at the Wintel market, where Altivec and 128 bit register are unheard off, Speech Recognition software is much further ahead of anything available on the Mac. And it's not like Altivec has been with the Mac for a long time or anything, it just arrived with the G4, so it's not like there are too many applications that are entirely dependant on it.
Given the choices: 500 MHz G4 vs. 750 MHz 1 GHz G5 with a roadmap that reaches 2 GHz, it seems that it's in everyone's, except Motorolla's, best interest to ditch the G4 and continue onwards.
Besides that, IBM has experience and expertise developing high performance chips as well as incentive to do so thanks to the RS and AS series computers. They put their money where their mouth is, where as Motorolla seems more content to develope the PowerPC into a DSP competitor/low power chip for cell phones, PDA's and the like.
I rambled. I just think that intitially, losing altivec could entail a small hit, but in the long term, being able to acheive higher clock speeds more than compensates for the loss.
Because Motorolla seems to be incapable of obeying Moore's law, so far as processing speeds go. In the past year since their introduction (has it been that long? maybe not. 9 months?) Motorolla has increased the maximum clock speed of G4's from 450 MHz to 500 MHz. Witness the Pentiums climbing from 450 MHz to 750 and beyond in the same period. Witness Athlongs doing the same.
Apple must be PISSED OFF at motorolla about now... And IBM has decided that Altivec adds needless complexity to the chip, and think they can get better gains just by pumping up the clockspeed. Some apps might take a small hit (things like Seti or Photoshop), but overall performance of the machines should benefit by actually being able to up the clock speed again.
I believe that MSFT still has "model" licensing deals, where if an OEM specifies that they'll only ship a given model of a computer with a Windows OS, they qualify for discounts. Which would make it why you don't see an ad in PC Magazine advertising a Dell Optiplex for $xxx (subtract $25 if you'd like Linux).
Not just that, but a hardware manufacturer has to make a case to Microsoft to show that two separate models are indeed separate models (for instance, they need to have different specs (aside from the OS)) and be promoted differently.
This is all just me regurgitating something I read (probably either at the Register or a John C Dvorak (I can sense the flames already!) column from a year or two back...
Yes, the DOJ did stop Microsoft from being able to charge OEMs for licenses they didn't sell, but they were able to devise an even more restrictive term in the end...
Right. I wasn't meaning to imply that a 64 bit CPU would be implicitly faster than a 32 bit one. Just that a 64 bit proc can access a whole lot more memory than a 32 bit one, which therefore implies huge performance leaps for things like databases and such. Of course, all of the mainstream databases already run on 64 bit platforms, so Sledgehamemr in effect only gives vendors and customers another CPU choice... (Sparc, MIPS, Power, Alpha, Itanium, PA-RISC, the list goes on and on...)
I think i do get it: A quantum computer is only useful against cryptosystems whose key sizes fit into (however it's measured) it's qubits, or what not.
:)
Just as a 5 qubit quantum computer is useless for attacking 40 bit keys, a 500 qubit computer would be useless against 4000 bit keys, etc, etc, etc...
I maybe wrong, of course. Where's Bruce Schneier when we need him?
But how many years after the 386 was introduced did 32 bits become the norm? Not until Windows 95, even though the Win32 DLL's were available for quite some time before then... Not just that, but adoption also waited two generations (til the pentiums came upon the scene).
Not just that, but for all their technical superiority, Intel is still king of the hill as far as x86 processors goes... ANd AMD is just stumbling into this position by sheer luck, since Intel's finally decided to pump resources into an architecture besides x86. It'll be interesting to see how many vendors look blindly away from AMD and follow Intel onto the "next great thing".
there could be a great chance, though, if AMD doesn't keep it in the high-end niche. If every chip, Duron or Athlon, they sell is 64 bit, it'd do great for market penetration...
I wouldn't expect this 1st generation chip to change much... after it's gone through a few iterations and there's quite a few million of them deployed, we'll be able to expect to see a plethora of 64 bit apps. But not for a few years...
One other thing is how will this stand up to Itanium? performance wise? Since performance is really the only incentive for people to move to 64 bit chips?
Off topic, but when will we ever see dual processor Athlon motherboards, anyhow?
That's absolutely useless for us, though... The only people it protects are people with either line of site or connected directly by fiber optic cabling...
Even your 4096 bit keys won't be worth anything if this technology scales...
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Well then, i guess we'll just have to start generating 40960 bit long keys in order to stay ahead of "them".
So a 4000 bit key will not take 4 times as long to decrypt as a 1000 bit key, but many many times as long!
I may be wrong, but I THINK I read that the only part of encryption that's significantly affected by using larger keys is that of key generation. Once you've got your key, it takes the same amount of time to encrypt a message with 40 bit as opposed to 128 bit encryption... Some article I read, probably in the cryptogram newsletter said something along the lines of "there is no excuse to use anything but the strongest encryption available" because of that. Of course, maybe that was just for symetric cryptosystesm.
I imagine however, that this will be quite difficult and that our keys should be safe for the near future
Another common theme I've read in all to the cryptography websites is that the NSA tends to be 10-15 years ahead of civilians... So, would it be possible that they've already been experimenting with quantum computing since the mid-eighties? If that was the case, I wonder what their progress is... remember, IBM wants to announce their research, as a showboat kind of thing, where as the NSA most definetly does not want to announce thiers, so that their opponents don't know what they're up agaisnt.
All in all, I'd guess we're safe, though... conspiracy theories aside, this is just a 5-bit machine. And there's no upper boundry to the size of a public key, except for limitations in the software we use... Just wait til a future version of PGP allows unlimited keysize (or limited only by your patience in taking the time to create them
The government isn't taking away any of your rights. They can't. People and companies can, though. That's the difference. The us gov't is not saying "your'e not allowed to publish benchmark data". Individual (companies) are. That's the difference.
And to be honest, it's fair. Those things are SO hard to properly set up and optimize, if anyone who bought the software could publish benchmarks, there'd be a wave of confusion as people with the exact same systems came up with different scores. Not just that, but due to the complication factor, it'd also be incredibly easy to "accidentally" misconfigure a given system in order to hobble it and call it's competitor the victor in a given benchmark.
Hence the reason they don't want results published. When they are being done to be published, generally, they'll ship a system and/or a few techs to configure the benchmarkers' systems in order to make sure that they get shown in the best possible light.
I drifted a little.. all i meant to say was that the government is the only person according to the constitution that can't take away your free speech. And they're not supressing speech in this case. Stop pointing fingers at them...
Regardless of how they actually work or how you phrase it, to the end user, it appears that they connect to Napster, type in a song, and download that track. They've cloaked everything else, to the point that for all intents and purposes, they're just as liable for violating copyrights as this company might be...
Unless grad students are required to sign away their rights either period or to a third party as part of publishing their thesis... I dunno about that, though, since it's foreign territory for me...