I remember a TV special a while back where Pixar was explaining their choice in computers. It had nothing to do with price/performance, but rather performance/cubic foot... They liked the suns because they were so small they could stack tons and tons of them in a relatively small area and get much more processing power than they could by trying to fit Onyx's or anything else into that area.
I think that shows that there are so many other factors to consider when you're in need of processing power... Yeah alphas are cheap, but whose going to sell you 400 quad alpha systems and ships them standard in low profile enclosures?
anyone involved in the real world can tell you that linux/xeon is the only way to go for rendring and 3d animation/modeling.
You're just crazy! For one, so many studios and/or software companies would need to report their solutions to Linux. For two Xeon is a bum when it comes to the highend... Yeah, it's 25% faster than PIII's, but compared to Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC, it's the bottom of the barrell so far as floating point performance goes... and that's what you need for rendering... lots of it...
Regardless of your aim for humor, I think that #6 is an actual reason that competitor to Linux (ie Microsoft) can point to as a valid issue...
I don't mind learning new CLI's and GUI's, but that's because I have the will to do it in my spare time. No corp want to retrain all their employees simply to save the $50-$90 per machine that windows costs them, and not many employees are going to volunteer to stay late for a couple weeks just so they can learn to do what they already know how to do...
KDE and/or GNOME have to be a better "Windows" than Windows for Linux to catch hold of the desktop... I may be getting a little off topic, so i'll stop here.:)
No, they're not. Apple is not aiming at the server market. The people buying G4's are users of Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, Infini-D, Strata StudioPro, Premiere, Quark, et al.
You only realize how slow your machine is when you're sitting there, watching the progress bar crawl across the screen. And don't blame the MacOS for it. It's simply that the hardware is still trying to catch up with the demands of publishing professionals.
#1 - If you buy a Mac, you get the MacOS. An extremely low percentage of purchasers buy a Mac so they can run Linux on them
#2 - What's wrong with the suggestion that the current Mac OS isn't capable of keeping up with the G4? Mac OS 8.6 (I haven't used 9 yet) is a great OS in terms of usability, but if it were capable of saturating a CPU 100% of the time without crashing, then there'd be no need to wait (and wish) for OS X to arrive...
#3 - You use Macs, I use Macs. It's a fact of life, not all apps are well behaved. You can force quit som "cleanly". Others will take down your machine when they crash. It's a sad fact of life. I just reconcile that by setting all my apps to autosave every 5 minutes. I rarely have to reboot my machine, but when I do, "Oh no! I only lost 5 minutes worth of work...". No matter which OS you use, you need to save your work regularly, because a great OS does not subsitute for poorly written apps.
I hate to sound like a Mac Zealot, but stop with the FUD. Just about every chunk of the MacOS has been re-written, and it shows. Gone are the random memory errors of System 7. The multitasking still isn't preemptive, but most apps are well behaved these day. I get away at work with working in Quark and Photoshop, encoding music to MP3, listening to MacAmp, with Lotus notes open in the background and rarely crash. When I do, it's mainly Note's fault, but I can't remove it becuase that's how the company email works.
The summary is, yeah, the mac was severly lacking 4+ years ago, but the current OS has come a huge way since then. It's unbelievable. You can still crash the thing, but it takes much more effort.
While an Athlon is faster than an equivalatly clocked PIII, i haven't seen any SMP Athlon MB's. What good would buying an Athlon 500 today do when you mix in the premise next year he can get a SMP Athlon board? That's irrelevant.
One day I'll be able to buy a dual 2.2 GHz system for under $2000, but I wouldn't tell someone to postpone their purchase because of that.
Right now, the way I see it, is Athlon's a great gaming machine and office PC, but for workstations and servers, I'd not go out of my way to accomodate it. A dual P-III system will, yes, cost much more than an Athlon, but you'll notice much more drastic performance benefits, IMO.
Well, once the spec is revealed or discovered, couldn't one simply write an app that downloads the message and the key, and simply ignores the expiration request?
This would be useful on closed systems, where you're assured you know the set up of the client and know that they don't have the means to alter their setup, but if they can then it just isn't very useful, in my eyes.
Like I said in a different comment, prior to the 21264, PA-RISC's descimated Alpha's in terms of SPEC perforance per clock cycle... Alpha made up the difference with higher speeds. With the advent of the 21264, which is much faster at a given speed than the 21164 (I don't use Alpha's, am not a chip person, and therefore don't know why - i presume more pipes and a larger cache) the Alpha makes up some ground on the performance per MHz front, but more than makes up the ground due to sheer speed.
HP entered into some form of agreement with either Apple or Carnegie-Mellon in order to gain access to, or share private advances in, the Mach microkernel and/or MkLinux. Since Linux is GPLed, I assume it was for the microkernell, but regardless, if HP's had engineers on Mach for over a year, then at least a variant of MkLinux should run.
I believe either Merced or McKinnely will have NATIVE PA-RISC support, rather than emulated support as is the case of x86... Either way, it's cool that they're progressing...
A while back, I did some calculating of chips based on their SPEC performance, and MHz for MHz, the PA-RISC series is the fastest line of chips. Alpha wins in the end because it uses much higher clocks, and now with the 21264, it's actually accomplishing more per clock, but still, HP's chips clobber all others if they're all at the same clock speed.
Re:Here is what /. should do:
on
The Cat Cam
·
· Score: 1
Sorry for being both off-topic and a little down on slash, but this site doesn't seem stable enough to put the mirrors here... Slashdot is always slashdotted!
I've been interested in trying OpenBSD for quite some time, but haven't because I'm still climbing the Linux learning curve... I think I've read somewhere that *BSD installs are much more difficult than Linux. Is this true?
I mean, with Redhat, I pop the CD in the drive, change my BIOS to book from the CD, format the disk, choose my packages, configure X windows and the network, and (poof!)... about 15 or 20 minutes later I'm all done.
Is there more to it with OpenBSD?
Is it LILO or BootCommander friendly?
What about hardware support?
Or should I just go over to their website and see if they can answer those questions?:)
Linux does not provide support for the broad range of hardware in use today; Windows NT 4.0 currently supports over 39,000 systems and devices on the Hardware Compatibility List. Linux does not support important ease-of-use technologies such as Plug and Play, USB, and Power Management
Aren't those features slated for Win2000, but non-existant in 4.0 to the point where hardware vendors have to write their own power management software for portables?
I guess it really is beginning to show that Linux is a contender when Microsoft has to issue an attack such as that... I hope people that read that take the moment to read between the lines. In case you didn't, what it says is: Oh shit! We're scared!
1 - HUGE monetary fine. take away their monopoly gains
2 - Taking a note from Scott McNealy, make them abandon all investments in other companies (such as AT&T, etc...) and be barred from future purchases for a pre-determined period. Make them actually innovate, rather than just buying companies that create things that they think are useful.
3 - Force them to publish their prices for all products, with the only discounts available being based on voluem. If Dell and Gateway both purchase the same quantity of Windows licenses they should both pay the same amount, regardless of what other software they offer on their systems.
4 - Let OEM's do whatever they please to differentiate their products. If that means uninstalling IE5 (with Felton's utilitiy) so as to offer Netscape or Opera, so be it. Don't OEM's have to provide their own support rather than having their customers call Microsoft when they have problems? Microsoft says that allowing OEM's to do that would fragment the market, but in truth, no OEM would last long shipping a largely incompatible version of windows.
5 - So far as the rest of their business is concerned, I don't think that forcing them to port their apps to other platforms or provide source code is a viable solution. But maybe in some areas they could clone divisions of microsoft and have them be their own companies that would compete against MSFT, such as the Office division. Give them access to all current, past and future (for 5 or 10 years) source code, to alleviate any concerns that MSFT will change file formats to protect themselves, and let them run with it....
There isn't a way that you could impose regulations to prevent Microsoft from doing what it's doing and still let other companies continue to compete the way that they have until this point. Aside from Microsoft, competition has been done wonders for the industry where it exists - AMD vs Intel, Hard Drive manufacturers, Monitor makers, etc...
Microsoft is an exception to this, being that they've become the 90,000 pound gorilla among a playing field of 900 pound gorillas. They should be penalized severely should they be found guilty, but laws should not be enacted to prevent this from happening again.
If a company one day possesses the power that MSFT has over the industry, then the government should act swiftly to rebalance the power of everyone, but until then, largely leave it all alone.
Sweeping regulations would harm the entire industr would equate to punishing the entire school because the bully wouldn't stop beating up little kids.
Since when has Microsoft provided one iota of leadership on any front? They give it lip service, but no more than that. If they see that people are actually using the capabilities of these machines, they'll probably band together with intel and form an initiative for consumer based windows pc with multimedia features that will insist that all pc's conforming to the spec be equipped with USB, Firewire, DVD, no internal expansion, and an integrated monitor.
Guess what? That spec's here... it's the iMac.
Not to sound like a Mac Zealot (TM) or anthing, but it's the truth. Plus, i love these machines, and will probably end up with the graphite model in the next month or two. Yipee!:)
Isn't it relatively easy to port Linux apps to Solaris and vice versa? The main problem would be that relatively few Linux developers have access to a Solaris box to test their creations on. So, Sun's trying to lower the price that one needs to spend on their boxes to accomplish this.
Right now, I'd say that a win for Solaris is a win for Linux and a win for Linux is also a win for Solaris. Sun stands to gain more than almost any other company by Linux's success, because the more people that know Linux is the more that are comfortable using Unix ei Solaris.
At they high end, Linux on x86 and (probably) Linux on SPARC don't stand a chance against Sun's offerings. At the low end and midrange, Linux provides the best bang for the buck, so if users start there, and then climb upwards, it's a win pretty much for everyone involved.
We should have a contest like Dell did, where we do a survey and find out just which regular/. reader uses the most archaic machine as their main "work horse"... The winner (or loser, in this case) would recieve like 100 andover.net shares so they could go get a new machine.:)
I've a lowly P200MMX, 64 Megs RAM, 3 GB Hard Drive,... so i'm probably not a contender, but i'd consider downgrading to a 386 if that's what it takes...
I though I heard it was a trend of company's to register their name or product and sucks as in "xxxsucks.com" if only to not let other people take those sights and do something with them.
-----
By the way, if you moderate me down, you obviously have no sense of self... or humor....
It's probably going to go for $3-5000 a pop. It's not geared at the desktop right now, err when it appears, but at the servers.... YOU don't want a Merced system when it comes out, unless it's for your department. Nor do I... But wait a few years to get the kinks out and for more and more applications to be ported to it. As the apps come, I reckon the price will drop because more and more people will have an actual reason to buy the chip
Intel's not at all hindering true innovators, just cloners who, besides AMD, don't really contribute much aside from competition. That's good, but competition and innovation are two completely different concecpts.
PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, all of them exist and are largely ignored by intel, because they don't really tread on it's ground too much. Alpha did, for a while, but with NT support out of the picture, Intel feels safe to ignore them as well.
What really needs to happen is to have a mainstream platform and OS available for said chips. Linux would fit that bill at the higher end, with Compaq trying to mass produce the Alpha and IBM releasing PowerPC specs...
Intel's hindered only themselves, and that due to customer demand. It'll be really trying when merced arrives as the first CPU that's not compaitable with x86... And then Win2000 will arrive, also incompatible with a slew of legacy apps, and there's a window of opportunity.
If you intellegently code your software, you don't even need hooks. Look at netscape and it's plugin archetecture. Someone can write a plug in that displays 3D images, someone else can write a plug in that supplies 128 bit crypto to users with 40-bit browsers. I bet you could even take Adobe Photoshop and create a filter that actually encrypts your document with 3DES... And there'd be nothing wrong with that, in terms of the shipability of 40 bit Netscape or Photoshop...
If we all started clogging up our networks with bogus data just to give the NSA a hard time...
THEY'RE NOT OUTLAWING CRYPTOGRAPHY!!! They only want to limit it's spread to potential adversaries. The county right now is financially driven. We're a capitalist society, and the new way of doing business is over the internet. If the gov't outlawed strong crypto, just about every business selling goods on the internet would fold relatively quickly.
Amazon and Ebay and Etrade are not crying out about this, which means that this doesn't effect them. If it doesn't affect them, honestly, it doesn't affect us. Unless you live outside the US. If you do, go code your own strong crypto rather than just leeching it from us!:)
There is no conspiracy. The law abiding US citizen is in no way effected by the crypto laws, because they're citizens and hence can use and acquire whatever crypto they want.
Quit whining about the poor software companies that have to write two versions of there product, one for here, one for overseas. There's no cost of materials involved, and all the work they do should be completely reusable, so it's only a minimal amount of effort to field US and for-export versions of software.
This is unfortunately a large world with many different countries. Some are nice, some aren't. Yeah, they can make there own crypto software, and why shouldn't they? We don't give them plans ot make nuclear weapons, they have to do the research or espionage themselves.
The moment the government moves to stop the use of strong crypto within the continental united states is the moment i change my tune, but all that's been done is just an effort to keep up with the times. They've changed. Before if you wire tapped a phone, you knew where the reciever was and could do a trace on the caller. Then cell phones came along, so the FBI requested that there be a way for them to triangulate the calls so again, they could know where everyone is.
The moral of this story is quit whining, quit blowing it so completely out of proportion and be happy that you live in the US, rather than say Zimbabwe, Zaire, Russia, China, Columbia, Iraq, etc...
This is not saying that John Q Public would never have a computer. This is quantum physics here.
It's simply impossible to send protons positioned as such through a switch or router (or twenty a la the internet) and be assured that they arrive at the other end in the same position that they were in when they left.
If you string together two locations with dedicated lines, that's one thing, but John Q. Public CAN NOT benefit from this in the slightest way shape or form, in regards to e-commerce or other internet based transactions. Unless every vendor or potential vendor strings their own cable to their home, it's just not happening.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember a TV special a while back where Pixar was explaining their choice in computers. It had nothing to do with price/performance, but rather performance/cubic foot... They liked the suns because they were so small they could stack tons and tons of them in a relatively small area and get much more processing power than they could by trying to fit Onyx's or anything else into that area.
I think that shows that there are so many other factors to consider when you're in need of processing power... Yeah alphas are cheap, but whose going to sell you 400 quad alpha systems and ships them standard in low profile enclosures?
anyone involved in the real world can tell you that linux/xeon is the only way to go for rendring and 3d animation/modeling.
You're just crazy! For one, so many studios and/or software companies would need to report their solutions to Linux. For two Xeon is a bum when it comes to the highend... Yeah, it's 25% faster than PIII's, but compared to Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC, it's the bottom of the barrell so far as floating point performance goes... and that's what you need for rendering... lots of it...
Regardless of your aim for humor, I think that #6 is an actual reason that competitor to Linux (ie Microsoft) can point to as a valid issue...
:)
I don't mind learning new CLI's and GUI's, but that's because I have the will to do it in my spare time. No corp want to retrain all their employees simply to save the $50-$90 per machine that windows costs them, and not many employees are going to volunteer to stay late for a couple weeks just so they can learn to do what they already know how to do...
KDE and/or GNOME have to be a better "Windows" than Windows for Linux to catch hold of the desktop... I may be getting a little off topic, so i'll stop here.
G4's are usually going to be used as servers
No, they're not. Apple is not aiming at the server market. The people buying G4's are users of Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, Infini-D, Strata StudioPro, Premiere, Quark, et al.
You only realize how slow your machine is when you're sitting there, watching the progress bar crawl across the screen. And don't blame the MacOS for it. It's simply that the hardware is still trying to catch up with the demands of publishing professionals.
#1 - If you buy a Mac, you get the MacOS. An extremely low percentage of purchasers buy a Mac so they can run Linux on them
#2 - What's wrong with the suggestion that the current Mac OS isn't capable of keeping up with the G4? Mac OS 8.6 (I haven't used 9 yet) is a great OS in terms of usability, but if it were capable of saturating a CPU 100% of the time without crashing, then there'd be no need to wait (and wish) for OS X to arrive...
#3 - You use Macs, I use Macs. It's a fact of life, not all apps are well behaved. You can force quit som "cleanly". Others will take down your machine when they crash. It's a sad fact of life. I just reconcile that by setting all my apps to autosave every 5 minutes. I rarely have to reboot my machine, but when I do, "Oh no! I only lost 5 minutes worth of work...". No matter which OS you use, you need to save your work regularly, because a great OS does not subsitute for poorly written apps.
I hate to sound like a Mac Zealot, but stop with the FUD. Just about every chunk of the MacOS has been re-written, and it shows. Gone are the random memory errors of System 7. The multitasking still isn't preemptive, but most apps are well behaved these day. I get away at work with working in Quark and Photoshop, encoding music to MP3, listening to MacAmp, with Lotus notes open in the background and rarely crash. When I do, it's mainly Note's fault, but I can't remove it becuase that's how the company email works.
The summary is, yeah, the mac was severly lacking 4+ years ago, but the current OS has come a huge way since then. It's unbelievable. You can still crash the thing, but it takes much more effort.
While an Athlon is faster than an equivalatly clocked PIII, i haven't seen any SMP Athlon MB's. What good would buying an Athlon 500 today do when you mix in the premise next year he can get a SMP Athlon board? That's irrelevant.
One day I'll be able to buy a dual 2.2 GHz system for under $2000, but I wouldn't tell someone to postpone their purchase because of that.
Right now, the way I see it, is Athlon's a great gaming machine and office PC, but for workstations and servers, I'd not go out of my way to accomodate it. A dual P-III system will, yes, cost much more than an Athlon, but you'll notice much more drastic performance benefits, IMO.
Well, once the spec is revealed or discovered, couldn't one simply write an app that downloads the message and the key, and simply ignores the expiration request?
This would be useful on closed systems, where you're assured you know the set up of the client and know that they don't have the means to alter their setup, but if they can then it just isn't very useful, in my eyes.
Like I said in a different comment, prior to the 21264, PA-RISC's descimated Alpha's in terms of SPEC perforance per clock cycle... Alpha made up the difference with higher speeds. With the advent of the 21264, which is much faster at a given speed than the 21164 (I don't use Alpha's, am not a chip person, and therefore don't know why - i presume more pipes and a larger cache) the Alpha makes up some ground on the performance per MHz front, but more than makes up the ground due to sheer speed.
HP entered into some form of agreement with either Apple or Carnegie-Mellon in order to gain access to, or share private advances in, the Mach microkernel and/or MkLinux. Since Linux is GPLed, I assume it was for the microkernell, but regardless, if HP's had engineers on Mach for over a year, then at least a variant of MkLinux should run.
I believe either Merced or McKinnely will have NATIVE PA-RISC support, rather than emulated support as is the case of x86... Either way, it's cool that they're progressing...
A while back, I did some calculating of chips based on their SPEC performance, and MHz for MHz, the PA-RISC series is the fastest line of chips. Alpha wins in the end because it uses much higher clocks, and now with the 21264, it's actually accomplishing more per clock, but still, HP's chips clobber all others if they're all at the same clock speed.
Sorry for being both off-topic and a little down on slash, but this site doesn't seem stable enough to put the mirrors here... Slashdot is always slashdotted!
I've been interested in trying OpenBSD for quite some time, but haven't because I'm still climbing the Linux learning curve... I think I've read somewhere that *BSD installs are much more difficult than Linux. Is this true?
... about 15 or 20 minutes later I'm all done.
:)
I mean, with Redhat, I pop the CD in the drive, change my BIOS to book from the CD, format the disk, choose my packages, configure X windows and the network, and (poof!)
Is there more to it with OpenBSD?
Is it LILO or BootCommander friendly?
What about hardware support?
Or should I just go over to their website and see if they can answer those questions?
Linux does not provide support for the broad range of hardware in use today; Windows NT 4.0 currently supports over 39,000 systems and devices on the Hardware Compatibility List. Linux does not support important ease-of-use technologies such as Plug and Play, USB, and Power Management
Aren't those features slated for Win2000, but non-existant in 4.0 to the point where hardware vendors have to write their own power management software for portables?
I guess it really is beginning to show that Linux is a contender when Microsoft has to issue an attack such as that... I hope people that read that take the moment to read between the lines. In case you didn't, what it says is: Oh shit! We're scared!
I'd like to see simply the following occur:
1 - HUGE monetary fine. take away their monopoly gains
2 - Taking a note from Scott McNealy, make them abandon all investments in other companies (such as AT&T, etc...) and be barred from future purchases for a pre-determined period. Make them actually innovate, rather than just buying companies that create things that they think are useful.
3 - Force them to publish their prices for all products, with the only discounts available being based on voluem. If Dell and Gateway both purchase the same quantity of Windows licenses they should both pay the same amount, regardless of what other software they offer on their systems.
4 - Let OEM's do whatever they please to differentiate their products. If that means uninstalling IE5 (with Felton's utilitiy) so as to offer Netscape or Opera, so be it. Don't OEM's have to provide their own support rather than having their customers call Microsoft when they have problems? Microsoft says that allowing OEM's to do that would fragment the market, but in truth, no OEM would last long shipping a largely incompatible version of windows.
5 - So far as the rest of their business is concerned, I don't think that forcing them to port their apps to other platforms or provide source code is a viable solution. But maybe in some areas they could clone divisions of microsoft and have them be their own companies that would compete against MSFT, such as the Office division. Give them access to all current, past and future (for 5 or 10 years) source code, to alleviate any concerns that MSFT will change file formats to protect themselves, and let them run with it....
My two cents tims 6... 12 cents in total
There isn't a way that you could impose regulations to prevent Microsoft from doing what it's doing and still let other companies continue to compete the way that they have until this point. Aside from Microsoft, competition has been done wonders for the industry where it exists - AMD vs Intel, Hard Drive manufacturers, Monitor makers, etc...
Microsoft is an exception to this, being that they've become the 90,000 pound gorilla among a playing field of 900 pound gorillas. They should be penalized severely should they be found guilty, but laws should not be enacted to prevent this from happening again.
If a company one day possesses the power that MSFT has over the industry, then the government should act swiftly to rebalance the power of everyone, but until then, largely leave it all alone.
Sweeping regulations would harm the entire industr would equate to punishing the entire school because the bully wouldn't stop beating up little kids.
Since when has Microsoft provided one iota of leadership on any front? They give it lip service, but no more than that. If they see that people are actually using the capabilities of these machines, they'll probably band together with intel and form an initiative for consumer based windows pc with multimedia features that will insist that all pc's conforming to the spec be equipped with USB, Firewire, DVD, no internal expansion, and an integrated monitor.
:)
Guess what? That spec's here... it's the iMac.
Not to sound like a Mac Zealot (TM) or anthing, but it's the truth. Plus, i love these machines, and will probably end up with the graphite model in the next month or two. Yipee!
Isn't it relatively easy to port Linux apps to Solaris and vice versa? The main problem would be that relatively few Linux developers have access to a Solaris box to test their creations on. So, Sun's trying to lower the price that one needs to spend on their boxes to accomplish this.
Right now, I'd say that a win for Solaris is a win for Linux and a win for Linux is also a win for Solaris. Sun stands to gain more than almost any other company by Linux's success, because the more people that know Linux is the more that are comfortable using Unix ei Solaris.
At they high end, Linux on x86 and (probably) Linux on SPARC don't stand a chance against Sun's offerings. At the low end and midrange, Linux provides the best bang for the buck, so if users start there, and then climb upwards, it's a win pretty much for everyone involved.
We should have a contest like Dell did, where we do a survey and find out just which regular /. reader uses the most archaic machine as their main "work horse"... The winner (or loser, in this case) would recieve like 100 andover.net shares so they could go get a new machine. :)
... so i'm probably not a contender, but i'd consider downgrading to a 386 if that's what it takes...
I've a lowly P200MMX, 64 Megs RAM, 3 GB Hard Drive,
intelsucks.net
intelsucks.org
xeonisslow.com
xeonisslow.net
xeonisslow.org
mmxsucks.com
etc...
etc...
I though I heard it was a trend of company's to register their name or product and sucks as in "xxxsucks.com" if only to not let other people take those sights and do something with them.
-----
By the way, if you moderate me down, you obviously have no sense of self... or humor....
It's probably going to go for $3-5000 a pop. It's not geared at the desktop right now, err when it appears, but at the servers.... YOU don't want a Merced system when it comes out, unless it's for your department. Nor do I... But wait a few years to get the kinks out and for more and more applications to be ported to it. As the apps come, I reckon the price will drop because more and more people will have an actual reason to buy the chip
Intel's not at all hindering true innovators, just cloners who, besides AMD, don't really contribute much aside from competition. That's good, but competition and innovation are two completely different concecpts.
PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, all of them exist and are largely ignored by intel, because they don't really tread on it's ground too much. Alpha did, for a while, but with NT support out of the picture, Intel feels safe to ignore them as well.
What really needs to happen is to have a mainstream platform and OS available for said chips. Linux would fit that bill at the higher end, with Compaq trying to mass produce the Alpha and IBM releasing PowerPC specs...
Intel's hindered only themselves, and that due to customer demand. It'll be really trying when merced arrives as the first CPU that's not compaitable with x86... And then Win2000 will arrive, also incompatible with a slew of legacy apps, and there's a window of opportunity.
If you intellegently code your software, you don't even need hooks. Look at netscape and it's plugin archetecture. Someone can write a plug in that displays 3D images, someone else can write a plug in that supplies 128 bit crypto to users with 40-bit browsers. I bet you could even take Adobe Photoshop and create a filter that actually encrypts your document with 3DES... And there'd be nothing wrong with that, in terms of the shipability of 40 bit Netscape or Photoshop...
If we all started clogging up our networks with bogus data just to give the NSA a hard time...
:)
THEY'RE NOT OUTLAWING CRYPTOGRAPHY!!! They only want to limit it's spread to potential adversaries. The county right now is financially driven. We're a capitalist society, and the new way of doing business is over the internet. If the gov't outlawed strong crypto, just about every business selling goods on the internet would fold relatively quickly.
Amazon and Ebay and Etrade are not crying out about this, which means that this doesn't effect them. If it doesn't affect them, honestly, it doesn't affect us. Unless you live outside the US. If you do, go code your own strong crypto rather than just leeching it from us!
There is no conspiracy. The law abiding US citizen is in no way effected by the crypto laws, because they're citizens and hence can use and acquire whatever crypto they want.
Quit whining about the poor software companies that have to write two versions of there product, one for here, one for overseas. There's no cost of materials involved, and all the work they do should be completely reusable, so it's only a minimal amount of effort to field US and for-export versions of software.
This is unfortunately a large world with many different countries. Some are nice, some aren't. Yeah, they can make there own crypto software, and why shouldn't they? We don't give them plans ot make nuclear weapons, they have to do the research or espionage themselves.
The moment the government moves to stop the use of strong crypto within the continental united states is the moment i change my tune, but all that's been done is just an effort to keep up with the times. They've changed. Before if you wire tapped a phone, you knew where the reciever was and could do a trace on the caller. Then cell phones came along, so the FBI requested that there be a way for them to triangulate the calls so again, they could know where everyone is.
The moral of this story is quit whining, quit blowing it so completely out of proportion and be happy that you live in the US, rather than say Zimbabwe, Zaire, Russia, China, Columbia, Iraq, etc...
This is not saying that John Q Public would never have a computer. This is quantum physics here.
It's simply impossible to send protons positioned as such through a switch or router (or twenty a la the internet) and be assured that they arrive at the other end in the same position that they were in when they left.
If you string together two locations with dedicated lines, that's one thing, but John Q. Public CAN NOT benefit from this in the slightest way shape or form, in regards to e-commerce or other internet based transactions. Unless every vendor or potential vendor strings their own cable to their home, it's just not happening.