Depends on whether you're talking established shop or new outfit.
Depends on whether or not the established shop is financially strapped and trying to cut costs on new hardware.
If I were in either category, versed in the business, I would at least consider whether commodity hardware/software was up to the job, yet. Many times that answer would be/has been "No," but consider the invasion of Linux into render farms over the past few years. At some point, for some number (probably a growing number) of applications the answer will be, "Yes," over the next few years.
So examine three questions: 1: Can the hardware do the science/engineering 3D graphics job? Increasingly, commodity hardware can. 2: Can the software on the commodity hardware platform do the job? IMHO, same answer as above. It's very possible that Windows scores better than Linux on this one. 3: Can we move our business to the commodity platform cheaply and with minimal disruption? IMHO, this is the key. It's also the strong point for Linux, since "legacy" is most likely SGI/OpenGL/Unix, as you say. It would be easier to move to Commodity/OpenGL/Linux than it would to Commodity/Direct3D/Windows, assuming capabilities are sufficient.
That's the key, "assuming capabilities are sufficient."
Re:Porn in space - cure the funding shortage
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Redirecting NASA
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It's called, "The Uranus Experiment," and it was filmed on a Vomit Comet.
Haven't seen it, though I'm curious. I read about it in Penn's (of Penn & Teller) journal of his Vomit Comet flight, which took place around the same time.
Not quite the same as on-orbit, but most films are shot in 30-second (or less) segments and edit together, anyway.
This is a late post, but everything else I've seen is games-focused. But don't forget, games are not the beginning and end of graphics, no matter how dominant a subset they may be.
There are things other than games that involve graphics, even 3D graphics.
This is waaaaay more important then what games are developed, where. This amounts to the tail wagging the dog. We potentially have games making platform decisions for serious simulation, physics, and engineering CAD.
I thought so too, before last Tuesday. Now I'm not so sure, and I'm more than a bit scared. In particular, last Tuesday seems to be taken for a mandate for more Supply Side Economics (tax cuts) when our real problem is a demand-strapped economy.
If the economy were to *really* go into the toilet over this, Bush would go down in history as the second president to lead the nation into a Great Depression. But he would never miss a meal, or a host of other mundane worries. Chances are my family would learn about much of it, first hand.
IMHO, getting old is better than dying young, all else equal.
As for "not so bad because he was old and lived a good life," there is a kernel of truth to that. I certainly hope for my kids to bury me, and would be devastated at the converse. Eventually, we're all supposed to make room for our descendents. (metaphorically as well as physically)
Getting cancer is no good, no matter how you slice it. But how you approach your end will have an effect on your loved ones after your gone. I don't think that's quite "not so bad because he was positive."
Getting old may be overrated, but failing to get old is clearly worse.
Timothy Leary took an interesting viewpoint toward his mortality in his last months. Don't know if it was "healthy" or not, don't know if I could take it as philosophically as he did, either.
There's something to be said for trying to leave your loved ones as prepared as you can, and that means emotionally as well as financially.
(I have a co-worker who is probably terminal, so these thoughts have been close, lately.)
Can't really argue about what you say, and I have no problem admitting that I wish to protect my own posterity. Not to be vain, but to me (probably not to you) the world would be a much more boring place without my family, friends and me in it.
As for watching over the ecosystem, it's really more a matter of watching over our own conduct and how it affects the ecosystem. Aren't we really talking about the behavior we try to teach our children, only apply it on a species/planetary scale?
On the other side of the coin, we can do some really bad damage to the Earth's ecosystem. There are short-term damages and long-term damages. Look at it this way, genetic diversity is the resource pool nature uses to recover from a disaster. In this light, our biggest "crime" is the rampant extinctions that are happening as we make room for more people. It'll take longer to fill all of the niches when there's less to start with. But then again, if it's nuclear war, the mutation rate will pick up and help solve that problem.
I looked enough to see that it begins and ends in the middle of a sentence. Beyond that, it's largely hearsay and the number of obscure references to it.
My next seriously planned reading might be "Finnegan's Wake". I tried to check it out of the library, but they don't have it. They do however have "Ulysses", so whether I try that is a matter of timing. Prior to that I think I'm going to reread "Dragonflight", only this time with my daughter.
One of my biggest, "Pleeze make a movie of this!" wishes is "Way Station". IMHO it resonates with our times, and would be reasonable to produce.
A while back I went on a bit of an AE van Vogh collecting spree, so I have "Space Beagle" and started it, but haven't gone further because it looked too formulaic.
I've read Nova, by Delany, and started on Triton, but it reminded me of Nova, and I wasn't that fond of the style, at least at the time. In that vein I passed on Dhalgren.
I read a different series by Moorcock, and his rampant espousal of socialism and condemnation of capitalism turned me off to his works. HG Wells was much more subtle about it, and therefore tolerable.
Isaac Asimov was well-known to be Jewish, and made no attempts to hide it. In fact, he once wrote and got published a book of Jewish science fiction, largely to prove it could be done. I don't remember the title of the collection any more, but one of the stories in it was, "The Mazel Tav Revolution". (I'm not sure of the spelling on "Tav", it might have been "Tof".)
Of course now Dr. A put his religion to the Ultimate Test some years ago.
Much of Frank Herbert Sr's work was religiously steeped, as was Phillip Jose Farmer's. I've never actually read any of it, but I get the impression that in contrast, L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction is strictly secular. (Let's not go further on this one, please.)
Assume for a moment that: 1: All power usage on Earth is converted to electricity. 2: The historic growth trend continues. 3: All of this growing electrical generation need comes from tidal energy.
What would the effect on the Moon's orbit be?
I know all three assumptions can be flawed, but they constitute something of a worst case. I'm not comfortable with the simple assumption that, "We can't possibly break this because it's too big." If this scenario still gives answers in the millions-of-years range I'd be comfortable. If the answer starts creeping down into the thousands-of-years range I'd be a little concerned. Nor do I propose at the moment a "criterion for failure", just that no large-scale shifts be taken on the "It's too big" assumption without some sort of test.
For the most part, we have only ourselves to blame for this cruft problem. Alternatives have already been brought to market and died. Maybe we were short-sighted consumers?
Example 1: Single-level store Actually this one survived in the market - sort of. It was part of the old IBM Future Systems effort, and made it out the door as the System/38, with followons in the AS/400 and iSeries. Single level store says you get rid of that silly distinction between RAM and disk - everything is memory. What we quaintly call main-memory is merely another level of caching to the disk, which is the real memory. Then you make the big thing a database instead of just a filesystem, and it can readily solve pretty much all of his numbered problems in one fell swoop. Was this perhaps something like Longhorn, only about 20 years ago?
The System/38 and descendents has met with success, largely as the closest thing to 'just plug it in and run' that has made it to market. At another level it hasn't been that successful, largely because of its unconventional and rather opaque system model.
As an interesting aside, IBM's first entry into the workstation arena, the Romp microprocessor, also had single-level store capability. (actually expressed in inverted page tables) Then in order to make it more Unix-familiar they mapped a conventional filesystem on top of that. I don't know if Rios and PowerPC followons retained that capability or went to more conventional paging architectures.
Double aside: Romp/Rios/PowerPC are yet another fallout of the Future Systems effort. Any big project has a backup plan, and one of the backup plans for FS was the 801 minicomputer, the original RISC.
Example 2: The OS/2 Workplace Shell Just a bunch of UI glue, but what a bunch of it! It directly solved the broken link problems, and had a more consistent, if different set of mouse semantics. It also has a group feature that kind of got around his 'quit' problems.
But I disagree with overusing the inode the way he suggests. The inode is an internal structure and isn't meant to have a UI-level life. He really wants access to Data, not to Filename or Inode. Does he really want a database-type filesystem?
My own fantasy is a semi-conventional filesystem, but instead of a conventional directory structure use a semantic network. The role of directory navigation is taken on by relationships. It's an incomplete idea at the moment, though.
My point was that DDNS can be securely authenticated, according to some stuff on the ISC website. I was suggesting that there may be a way to piggyback DHCP security on top of the DDNS security. I don't know how practical this is, but I suspect it can be patched in.
On my DHCP server at home, I mostly give out fixed IPs based on MAC, but I also have a small dynamic IP range, in case a visitor brings a laptop. I could just as easily deconfigure the dynamic IP range, and have MAC-based security. I agree that MAC-based security isn't worth spit, but it says that I can sort of piggyback a security policy on top of DHCP.
To do what I suggest, it would be necessary to patch DHCP so that it would look for some sort of return code from invoking DDNS. Then if DDNS didn't like the client, DHCP would refuse to grant an IP. I don't believe this is the current behavior, but I suspect it could be patched.
In any case, I also stated that even this wouldn't stop someone from sniffing DHCP packets and guessing a decent static IP. Further steps are necessary.
First we should start by questioning the assumption that loss of liberty even will buy us safety.
This needs to be done, on a point-by-point basis for each and every liberty that is being compromised. In engineering decisions there's always 'nice to have' and 'must have'. There are also times when the customer is asking for the wrong thing, and you can give a different solution that satisifes him even better than what he'd asked for. As far as I can see, current liberty/security tradeoffs appear to be a shopping list, without effectiveness review or modifications.
My cable provider (Adelphia) offers TV in bundles with Broadcast, ($11/mo) Basic, (+$20/mo) and then premium stuff, whose price I don't know. They also offer Internet.
I don't know if they will offer Internet without at least Broadcast cable TV. But they add a surcharge to the cable Internet if you don't have at least Basic, so you may as well get Basic.
Pricing for Internet wasn't mentioned, but now this makes me wonder if this practice is legal.
I don't blame Microsoft for the failure of Newton.
I do blame them for the failure of Go! (If that was their name) Back at the time, I was in the OS/2 crowd, and the failure of Go! was a well-talked-about 'example' of the Microsoft way of competing. Basically, they were working to bring a pen-based product to market. Microsoft preemptively announced, "Pen for Windows" and Go! lost their funding as a result. Maybe they would have failed inthe market, but they never got the chance.
As for "Microsoft is not the technological super-being..." Back in the 90's when Venture Capital was flowing, the key question for software startups was, "What is your Microsoft strategy?" There were companies started with the goal of eventually being bought out by Microsoft. (This information was from business/trade/news magazines at the time.) So maybe they're not the super-being, but they do have paranormal market powers that may not always be beneficial.
Maybe he is being very idealistic. Maybe he is being unrealistic. Maybe this thing will flop and fall into the bunghole of history.
But it's still good that he's doing it.
Someone has to question how things can be made better. Perhaps the worst thing about Microsoft is that the Windows desktop has pretty much stopped that questioning. This works in two ways, by Microsoft deliberately squashing competition and by people getting too comfortable inside the MS box. (including GNOME and KDE)
Nor is it an adequate argument that the Windows interface (even as embodied by GNOME and KDE alternatives) is "good enough" just like the steering wheels and clutch/brake/gas pedals of a car.
Back in the early-mid 90's there was a company trying to introduce Pen Computing - flat screens operated by a stylus. (I think the company may have been Go, but I'm not sure.) They were put under by a piece of vaporware called, "Pen for Windows" that never materialized, at least not until that Microsoft Innovation in the past month of Tablet-XP. (or whatever it was reported as on/.) Microsoft squashed a concept for almost a decade. Maybe the hardware wasn't advanced enough yet, maybe it would have been a Newton. But maybe it would have been a Palm. Now we'll never know. What other innovations are we missing until Microsoft deems it 'time'?
As others have mentioned, DHCP has no authentication other than MAC, and MAC is not reliable.
But take a look at the ISC web site, and there has been a lot of work to integrate DHCP with DDNS. In perticular, there is some bleeding-edge work to crytographically secure the DDNS authentication with either symmetric or asymmetric keys. Neither is ready to deploy, though the symmetric key work requires less patching. In your situation, it may be possible for DHCP to only serve DDNS-approved addresses, all others would fail.
Though not ready it may help set a direction for the future.
But even this wouldn't stop a rogue from sniffing your network for others' DHCP packets, and using that information to guess a static IP, and run that way. As much as people dislike PPPoE-type solutions, some form of encapsulation like that or DOCSIS is the only safe way. Another option might be to have everyone run VPN software. Then route the other side of the VPN, and none of the untrusted network. Just another method of encapsulation.
I'll make no arguments whatsoever in favor of such governments, other than current US expediency.
But when I say there are Arab governments poised to fall, they're poised to fall to Islamic fundamentalism. So take what you deplore in northern Nigeria and spread it around to more places.
Sometimes you get really tough choices: Would you rather have a corrupt secular government or a radical Islamist one? Honestly, the hope I see is in Iran. There appears to be a strong segment trying to emerge from the far side of Islamist fundamentalism, with some success. I really wish we would constructively engage that element of their country rather than label the whole place, "Axis of Evil."
I'd been thinking this for a while, wishing I'd come up with it as a bumper sticker - then the other day I saw one already printed up, on a car in a parking lot.
It distresses me greatly to see the US acting in many ways like its own definition of a Rogue State. Anyway, this morning on the way to work I did what I could - I voted.
Tidbit about War with Iraq... IMHO the side-effects are worse than the original problem. Maybe Iraq will develop a nuke in a year, maybe not. Maybe weapons inspectors will do their jobs. If Iraq does develop a nuke, maybe they will use it, maybe not.
But if we go to war with Iraq, there is a not-too-short list of Arab states which we call allies that may fall to internal Islamic revolutions. One of these is Pakistan, posesser of 15-50 nukes, original home to the Taliban.
I'll chime in a 'mee, too' about so about so many key events all happening so long ago, in such a short time.
But I'll add that this seems to be in part a Kevin J Anderson thing. Don't know if Herbert Jr. fought it, went along with it, or encouraged it. But my son is a big Star Wars fan, and reads the novels, including the KJA ones. These types of historical coincidence happen all the time in the Star Wars universe.
Maybe that's why I read only one or two for the 'good father' value, along with only one or two Redwall books a few years earlier.
Fan fiction tends to be that way.
At least in the later Dune (God Emperor of Dune+) novels by Herbert Sr. he had the good sense to allow some drift. Arrakis became Rakis, and other things got a little blurred over 3000 years. Yet we have 10,000 years of greater turmoil (probably leading to poorer bookkeeping) Atriedes, Harkonnen, Butler and the like come through with no corruption, and not even a giant worm to remember the correct spelling and pronunciation.
Always kind of annoyed me when Star Trek shows stars passing by the windows. Aside from any optic effects during Warp, (Niven/Pournelle Blind Spot, anyone?) let's allow 1 star every 4 LY to be "standard spacing." At C, it would take 4 years to see the second star, so at 365C it would take 4 days. At about 1500C we're finally up to a star a day.
By the old Kirk formula, speed=Warp^3, so to see a star a day you'd have to be going Warp 11.4. STNG has a new Warp formula, but I don't think it's *that* much faster. We're still about a factor of 1e5 from passing a star a second.
Even allowing stars to get much closer in other neighborhoods, you're still not going to see stars flying past the ship in seconds.
I was glued to the TV all day Sunday when they landed on the moon, 13 at the time. For that matter, I was annoyed half to death when they mistakenly pointed the camera at the Sun on Apollo 14, and I watched the first televised takeoff on Apollo 17.
Yet when the "L5 in 95" movement started I'd accumulated enough skepticism to not invest any belief in it. Not that I'd have minded if they'd succeeded, of course. One of those times in life when I'd love to be proven wrong. Perhaps part of it was also a line in another sci-fi story by the director of the L4 colony. He felt that his colony had gotten the better view of the Moon.
Unfortunately you're right calling Lx colonies "flying cars".
Where's my space colony? Where's my commercial shuttle? Where's my cislunar shuttle? Where's Clavius Base? Where's Discovery enroute to Jupitor or Saturn? Where's HAL-9000? Heck, where's the silly NewsPad? (Well, maybe that's the "Windows XP Tablet Edition"???)
I find Zubrin's proposal for Mars Direct much more realistic. I'm more than a bit put off by his refusal to allow it to have anything at all to do with the Space Station, though. IMHO the Space Station could be a logical place to gather parts while waiting for the launch window, and it doesn't have to turn into the boondoggle he fears. I'll accept that the Space Station has a poor orbit for utility purposes, but his argument against it seems more political than orbit/utility-based. Enough of that, for now.
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Depends on whether you're talking established shop or new outfit.
Depends on whether or not the established shop is financially strapped and trying to cut costs on new hardware.
If I were in either category, versed in the business, I would at least consider whether commodity hardware/software was up to the job, yet. Many times that answer would be/has been "No," but consider the invasion of Linux into render farms over the past few years. At some point, for some number (probably a growing number) of applications the answer will be, "Yes," over the next few years.
So examine three questions:
1: Can the hardware do the science/engineering 3D graphics job?
Increasingly, commodity hardware can.
2: Can the software on the commodity hardware platform do the job?
IMHO, same answer as above. It's very possible that Windows scores better than Linux on this one.
3: Can we move our business to the commodity platform cheaply and with minimal disruption?
IMHO, this is the key. It's also the strong point for Linux, since "legacy" is most likely SGI/OpenGL/Unix, as you say. It would be easier to move to Commodity/OpenGL/Linux than it would to Commodity/Direct3D/Windows, assuming capabilities are sufficient.
That's the key, "assuming capabilities are sufficient."
It's called, "The Uranus Experiment," and it was filmed on a Vomit Comet.
Haven't seen it, though I'm curious. I read about it in Penn's (of Penn & Teller) journal of his Vomit Comet flight, which took place around the same time.
Not quite the same as on-orbit, but most films are shot in 30-second (or less) segments and edit together, anyway.
This is a late post, but everything else I've seen is games-focused. But don't forget, games are not the beginning and end of graphics, no matter how dominant a subset they may be.
There are things other than games that involve graphics, even 3D graphics.
This is waaaaay more important then what games are developed, where. This amounts to the tail wagging the dog. We potentially have games making platform decisions for serious simulation, physics, and engineering CAD.
Then clearly the execs are incompetent and should be fired!
If they can't make a profit, then there's no way they're worth their multimillion dollar salaries.
I thought so too, before last Tuesday. Now I'm not so sure, and I'm more than a bit scared. In particular, last Tuesday seems to be taken for a mandate for more Supply Side Economics (tax cuts) when our real problem is a demand-strapped economy.
If the economy were to *really* go into the toilet over this, Bush would go down in history as the second president to lead the nation into a Great Depression. But he would never miss a meal, or a host of other mundane worries. Chances are my family would learn about much of it, first hand.
You'd better finish securing it, then.
Cut the power cord and fill the closet with cement.
Two separate issues entirely.
IMHO, getting old is better than dying young, all else equal.
As for "not so bad because he was old and lived a good life," there is a kernel of truth to that. I certainly hope for my kids to bury me, and would be devastated at the converse. Eventually, we're all supposed to make room for our descendents. (metaphorically as well as physically)
Getting cancer is no good, no matter how you slice it. But how you approach your end will have an effect on your loved ones after your gone. I don't think that's quite "not so bad because he was positive."
Getting old may be overrated, but failing to get old is clearly worse.
Timothy Leary took an interesting viewpoint toward his mortality in his last months. Don't know if it was "healthy" or not, don't know if I could take it as philosophically as he did, either.
There's something to be said for trying to leave your loved ones as prepared as you can, and that means emotionally as well as financially.
(I have a co-worker who is probably terminal, so these thoughts have been close, lately.)
Can't really argue about what you say, and I have no problem admitting that I wish to protect my own posterity. Not to be vain, but to me (probably not to you) the world would be a much more boring place without my family, friends and me in it.
As for watching over the ecosystem, it's really more a matter of watching over our own conduct and how it affects the ecosystem. Aren't we really talking about the behavior we try to teach our children, only apply it on a species/planetary scale?
On the other side of the coin, we can do some really bad damage to the Earth's ecosystem. There are short-term damages and long-term damages. Look at it this way, genetic diversity is the resource pool nature uses to recover from a disaster. In this light, our biggest "crime" is the rampant extinctions that are happening as we make room for more people. It'll take longer to fill all of the niches when there's less to start with. But then again, if it's nuclear war, the mutation rate will pick up and help solve that problem.
I looked enough to see that it begins and ends in the middle of a sentence. Beyond that, it's largely hearsay and the number of obscure references to it.
OK, I've already read all but 39 of them.
My next seriously planned reading might be "Finnegan's Wake". I tried to check it out of the library, but they don't have it. They do however have "Ulysses", so whether I try that is a matter of timing. Prior to that I think I'm going to reread "Dragonflight", only this time with my daughter.
One of my biggest, "Pleeze make a movie of this!" wishes is "Way Station". IMHO it resonates with our times, and would be reasonable to produce.
A while back I went on a bit of an AE van Vogh collecting spree, so I have "Space Beagle" and started it, but haven't gone further because it looked too formulaic.
I've read Nova, by Delany, and started on Triton, but it reminded me of Nova, and I wasn't that fond of the style, at least at the time. In that vein I passed on Dhalgren.
I read a different series by Moorcock, and his rampant espousal of socialism and condemnation of capitalism turned me off to his works. HG Wells was much more subtle about it, and therefore tolerable.
Isaac Asimov was well-known to be Jewish, and made no attempts to hide it. In fact, he once wrote and got published a book of Jewish science fiction, largely to prove it could be done. I don't remember the title of the collection any more, but one of the stories in it was, "The Mazel Tav Revolution". (I'm not sure of the spelling on "Tav", it might have been "Tof".)
Of course now Dr. A put his religion to the Ultimate Test some years ago.
Much of Frank Herbert Sr's work was religiously steeped, as was Phillip Jose Farmer's. I've never actually read any of it, but I get the impression that in contrast, L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction is strictly secular. (Let's not go further on this one, please.)
Just for sake of argument...
Assume for a moment that:
1: All power usage on Earth is converted to electricity.
2: The historic growth trend continues.
3: All of this growing electrical generation need comes from tidal energy.
What would the effect on the Moon's orbit be?
I know all three assumptions can be flawed, but they constitute something of a worst case. I'm not comfortable with the simple assumption that, "We can't possibly break this because it's too big." If this scenario still gives answers in the millions-of-years range I'd be comfortable. If the answer starts creeping down into the thousands-of-years range I'd be a little concerned. Nor do I propose at the moment a "criterion for failure", just that no large-scale shifts be taken on the "It's too big" assumption without some sort of test.
For the most part, we have only ourselves to blame for this cruft problem. Alternatives have already been brought to market and died. Maybe we were short-sighted consumers?
Example 1: Single-level store
Actually this one survived in the market - sort of. It was part of the old IBM Future Systems effort, and made it out the door as the System/38, with followons in the AS/400 and iSeries. Single level store says you get rid of that silly distinction between RAM and disk - everything is memory. What we quaintly call main-memory is merely another level of caching to the disk, which is the real memory. Then you make the big thing a database instead of just a filesystem, and it can readily solve pretty much all of his numbered problems in one fell swoop. Was this perhaps something like Longhorn, only about 20 years ago?
The System/38 and descendents has met with success, largely as the closest thing to 'just plug it in and run' that has made it to market. At another level it hasn't been that successful, largely because of its unconventional and rather opaque system model.
As an interesting aside, IBM's first entry into the workstation arena, the Romp microprocessor, also had single-level store capability. (actually expressed in inverted page tables) Then in order to make it more Unix-familiar they mapped a conventional filesystem on top of that. I don't know if Rios and PowerPC followons retained that capability or went to more conventional paging architectures.
Double aside: Romp/Rios/PowerPC are yet another fallout of the Future Systems effort. Any big project has a backup plan, and one of the backup plans for FS was the 801 minicomputer, the original RISC.
Example 2: The OS/2 Workplace Shell
Just a bunch of UI glue, but what a bunch of it! It directly solved the broken link problems, and had a more consistent, if different set of mouse semantics. It also has a group feature that kind of got around his 'quit' problems.
But I disagree with overusing the inode the way he suggests. The inode is an internal structure and isn't meant to have a UI-level life. He really wants access to Data, not to Filename or Inode. Does he really want a database-type filesystem?
My own fantasy is a semi-conventional filesystem, but instead of a conventional directory structure use a semantic network. The role of directory navigation is taken on by relationships. It's an incomplete idea at the moment, though.
My point was that DDNS can be securely authenticated, according to some stuff on the ISC website. I was suggesting that there may be a way to piggyback DHCP security on top of the DDNS security. I don't know how practical this is, but I suspect it can be patched in.
On my DHCP server at home, I mostly give out fixed IPs based on MAC, but I also have a small dynamic IP range, in case a visitor brings a laptop. I could just as easily deconfigure the dynamic IP range, and have MAC-based security. I agree that MAC-based security isn't worth spit, but it says that I can sort of piggyback a security policy on top of DHCP.
To do what I suggest, it would be necessary to patch DHCP so that it would look for some sort of return code from invoking DDNS. Then if DDNS didn't like the client, DHCP would refuse to grant an IP. I don't believe this is the current behavior, but I suspect it could be patched.
In any case, I also stated that even this wouldn't stop someone from sniffing DHCP packets and guessing a decent static IP. Further steps are necessary.
First we should start by questioning the assumption that loss of liberty even will buy us safety.
This needs to be done, on a point-by-point basis for each and every liberty that is being compromised. In engineering decisions there's always 'nice to have' and 'must have'. There are also times when the customer is asking for the wrong thing, and you can give a different solution that satisifes him even better than what he'd asked for. As far as I can see, current liberty/security tradeoffs appear to be a shopping list, without effectiveness review or modifications.
My cable provider (Adelphia) offers TV in bundles with Broadcast, ($11/mo) Basic, (+$20/mo) and then premium stuff, whose price I don't know. They also offer Internet.
I don't know if they will offer Internet without at least Broadcast cable TV. But they add a surcharge to the cable Internet if you don't have at least Basic, so you may as well get Basic.
Pricing for Internet wasn't mentioned, but now this makes me wonder if this practice is legal.
I don't blame Microsoft for the failure of Newton.
I do blame them for the failure of Go! (If that was their name) Back at the time, I was in the OS/2 crowd, and the failure of Go! was a well-talked-about 'example' of the Microsoft way of competing. Basically, they were working to bring a pen-based product to market. Microsoft preemptively announced, "Pen for Windows" and Go! lost their funding as a result. Maybe they would have failed inthe market, but they never got the chance.
As for "Microsoft is not the technological super-being..." Back in the 90's when Venture Capital was flowing, the key question for software startups was, "What is your Microsoft strategy?" There were companies started with the goal of eventually being bought out by Microsoft. (This information was from business/trade/news magazines at the time.) So maybe they're not the super-being, but they do have paranormal market powers that may not always be beneficial.
Maybe he is being very idealistic. Maybe he is being unrealistic. Maybe this thing will flop and fall into the bunghole of history.
/.) Microsoft squashed a concept for almost a decade. Maybe the hardware wasn't advanced enough yet, maybe it would have been a Newton. But maybe it would have been a Palm. Now we'll never know. What other innovations are we missing until Microsoft deems it 'time'?
But it's still good that he's doing it.
Someone has to question how things can be made better. Perhaps the worst thing about Microsoft is that the Windows desktop has pretty much stopped that questioning. This works in two ways, by Microsoft deliberately squashing competition and by people getting too comfortable inside the MS box. (including GNOME and KDE)
Nor is it an adequate argument that the Windows interface (even as embodied by GNOME and KDE alternatives) is "good enough" just like the steering wheels and clutch/brake/gas pedals of a car.
Back in the early-mid 90's there was a company trying to introduce Pen Computing - flat screens operated by a stylus. (I think the company may have been Go, but I'm not sure.) They were put under by a piece of vaporware called, "Pen for Windows" that never materialized, at least not until that Microsoft Innovation in the past month of Tablet-XP. (or whatever it was reported as on
As others have mentioned, DHCP has no authentication other than MAC, and MAC is not reliable.
But take a look at the ISC web site, and there has been a lot of work to integrate DHCP with DDNS. In perticular, there is some bleeding-edge work to crytographically secure the DDNS authentication with either symmetric or asymmetric keys. Neither is ready to deploy, though the symmetric key work requires less patching. In your situation, it may be possible for DHCP to only serve DDNS-approved addresses, all others would fail.
Though not ready it may help set a direction for the future.
But even this wouldn't stop a rogue from sniffing your network for others' DHCP packets, and using that information to guess a static IP, and run that way. As much as people dislike PPPoE-type solutions, some form of encapsulation like that or DOCSIS is the only safe way. Another option might be to have everyone run VPN software. Then route the other side of the VPN, and none of the untrusted network. Just another method of encapsulation.
I'll make no arguments whatsoever in favor of such governments, other than current US expediency.
But when I say there are Arab governments poised to fall, they're poised to fall to Islamic fundamentalism. So take what you deplore in northern Nigeria and spread it around to more places.
Sometimes you get really tough choices: Would you rather have a corrupt secular government or a radical Islamist one? Honestly, the hope I see is in Iran. There appears to be a strong segment trying to emerge from the far side of Islamist fundamentalism, with some success. I really wish we would constructively engage that element of their country rather than label the whole place, "Axis of Evil."
"Regime change begins at home!"
I'd been thinking this for a while, wishing I'd come up with it as a bumper sticker - then the other day I saw one already printed up, on a car in a parking lot.
It distresses me greatly to see the US acting in many ways like its own definition of a Rogue State. Anyway, this morning on the way to work I did what I could - I voted.
Tidbit about War with Iraq... IMHO the side-effects are worse than the original problem. Maybe Iraq will develop a nuke in a year, maybe not. Maybe weapons inspectors will do their jobs. If Iraq does develop a nuke, maybe they will use it, maybe not.
But if we go to war with Iraq, there is a not-too-short list of Arab states which we call allies that may fall to internal Islamic revolutions. One of these is Pakistan, posesser of 15-50 nukes, original home to the Taliban.
I'll chime in a 'mee, too' about so about so many key events all happening so long ago, in such a short time.
But I'll add that this seems to be in part a Kevin J Anderson thing. Don't know if Herbert Jr. fought it, went along with it, or encouraged it. But my son is a big Star Wars fan, and reads the novels, including the KJA ones. These types of historical coincidence happen all the time in the Star Wars universe.
Maybe that's why I read only one or two for the 'good father' value, along with only one or two Redwall books a few years earlier.
Fan fiction tends to be that way.
At least in the later Dune (God Emperor of Dune+) novels by Herbert Sr. he had the good sense to allow some drift. Arrakis became Rakis, and other things got a little blurred over 3000 years. Yet we have 10,000 years of greater turmoil (probably leading to poorer bookkeeping) Atriedes, Harkonnen, Butler and the like come through with no corruption, and not even a giant worm to remember the correct spelling and pronunciation.
Always kind of annoyed me when Star Trek shows stars passing by the windows. Aside from any optic effects during Warp, (Niven/Pournelle Blind Spot, anyone?) let's allow 1 star every 4 LY to be "standard spacing." At C, it would take 4 years to see the second star, so at 365C it would take 4 days. At about 1500C we're finally up to a star a day.
By the old Kirk formula, speed=Warp^3, so to see a star a day you'd have to be going Warp 11.4. STNG has a new Warp formula, but I don't think it's *that* much faster. We're still about a factor of 1e5 from passing a star a second.
Even allowing stars to get much closer in other neighborhoods, you're still not going to see stars flying past the ship in seconds.
Quoth Douglas Adams: "Space is BIG!"
I was glued to the TV all day Sunday when they landed on the moon, 13 at the time. For that matter, I was annoyed half to death when they mistakenly pointed the camera at the Sun on Apollo 14, and I watched the first televised takeoff on Apollo 17.
Yet when the "L5 in 95" movement started I'd accumulated enough skepticism to not invest any belief in it. Not that I'd have minded if they'd succeeded, of course. One of those times in life when I'd love to be proven wrong. Perhaps part of it was also a line in another sci-fi story by the director of the L4 colony. He felt that his colony had gotten the better view of the Moon.
Unfortunately you're right calling Lx colonies "flying cars".
Where's my space colony?
Where's my commercial shuttle?
Where's my cislunar shuttle?
Where's Clavius Base?
Where's Discovery enroute to Jupitor or Saturn?
Where's HAL-9000?
Heck, where's the silly NewsPad? (Well, maybe that's the "Windows XP Tablet Edition"???)
I find Zubrin's proposal for Mars Direct much more realistic. I'm more than a bit put off by his refusal to allow it to have anything at all to do with the Space Station, though. IMHO the Space Station could be a logical place to gather parts while waiting for the launch window, and it doesn't have to turn into the boondoggle he fears. I'll accept that the Space Station has a poor orbit for utility purposes, but his argument against it seems more political than orbit/utility-based. Enough of that, for now.