Peer to peer networks need security. They need encryption, access control.
Both http and it's cousin gnutella do GET "name of song.mp3". How much easier could you have it to scan for song exhanges? Good encryption gets rid of that.
Access control might be based on volume. The more songs you trade and somehow you could link a key exchange to it. There would be a limit and the system should be designed to divide people into cells. That way, if one section of the network is compromised, the rest can continue exchanging documents.
I just think its funny that Europeans don't have double jeopardy. That's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read in my life. You guys don't have any civil rights at all.
I always wanted an Alpha but could never afford one. Instead, I'll have to hope that Apple does the smart thing and puts a 64 bit PowerPC 970 into a next generation of desktop Macs. 64 bits is something every consumer would want.
It is time for us to put to bed the famous "my Word Perfect 5.1 shipped on a handful of disks", once and for all.
Word Perfect 5.1 did not have a WSYWIG editor. You had a blue TEXT screen with coloured control characters and you had a graphic preview. The modern notion of "fonts" is something that was alien to Word Perfect, whose model was more printer centric than screen centric.
The document you prepared on screen bore little resemblance to that which printed. A modern word processor will effectively ask the printer for the sizes of fonts and such, and then use that information to accurately space the letters.
Support for graphics in Word Perfect 5.1 was aweful, and I never liked its cut and paste. Speaking of which, you could only open a handful of concurrent documents in Word Perfect 5.1, and certainly today's mindlessly easy cut / paste between them didn't exist.
Even opening a document was a pain in the neck.
Application interoperability was non-existent. This was because the platform, DOS, only really allowed one app to run at any given time, and because there were no standards for data exchange between running apps. If your favorite other application happened to be Lotus 1-2-3, and you wanted to take some of that stuff and put it into Word Perfect 5.1, then you were S.O.L.
I don't miss Word Perfect, and I don't miss Lotus 1-2-3.
Yeah, the moment that a programmer's union forms, you can kiss away those fat salaries and in fact, our jobs, as they move overseas. We get paid more because we work harder. If we do not work harder, we will lose. That's the way it is.
How about a bill for living in the US instead?
on
The PS2 Experience
·
· Score: 1
The lot of African Americans in the United States may not be perfect, but the fact of the matter is that African Americans are still Americans and as such they enjoy a standard of living that most of the people on this planet can never even dream of achieving let alone enjoy.
If you want white people to give you money because some, I mean, SOME, white people kept slaves, then I propose that black people pay white people for the difference in standard of living enjoyed by blacks today in the US versus blacks today in Africa. I propose further that every descendent of every white union soldier that fought in the civil war should get a special bonus.
First off, the big dirty secret is that databases are completely different. Even if you have a portable application, it doesn't matter because you still have to port all of your database stuff.
In an ideal world, you should be able to evaluate one database, then switch to another, just like swapping in and out parts pretty easily. You could then compare databases on the basis of performance.
I dissent:-)
Sex makes babies. Not all of the time, but enough to be a major social issue. Violence, on the other hand, makes black eyes, which go away. In terms of safety, more people get herpes than get shot, and more people die from sex (HIV), then die from wars.
If we could all learn to make war, not love, the world would be a much safer place.
Is there any possibility that someone in the US/UK sigint community has proved that P=NP and is using that to crack RSA? Is it possible that public key algorithms are actually as wide open as Enigma was in WWII??
Scientists did not comment on Russian findings that the newly discovered moon is in fact the shape of black rectangular slab, and that chimpanzees in an space physics laboratory began to jump up and down at its discovery, ultimately bashing each other to pieces with their feed trays.
Let's see, 100 years ago most of us worked on the farm, moving rocks with our bare hands and a horse, shovelling and digging and breaking our backs. Now, we sit in air conditioned offices playing with what amounts to a really smart television and make mountains of money to do it. Why are even complaining?
Maybe you want to go back to digging ditches for a living, but I sure don't.
I work for a power company, so I of course have no bias.
If you show me a home generator that can produce electricity for less than 10 cents a killowatt/hour, then you'll make a believer out of me. In fact, if you can show me a home energy ANYTHING that can produce electricity for less than 10 cents a killowatt / hour, you'll make a believer out of me. Otherwise, do some basic math and check some basic facts.
Your electric utility is inherently more efficient than that of having home generation. Your electricity utility, for a coal fired plant, gets its fuel by rail - the overwhelming most efficient way to transport stuff overland. It uses all sorts of technology to recover the heat produced by burning coal, technologies that aren't available to consumers in cars. In even simple thermodynamic terms, what's the heat dissipation from a car engine as a percentage of energy produced, versus that of a giant steam boiler? More importantly, the power plants at a utility do not have to expend the energy to move themselves around. Your car engine has to expend energy to move itself and its own weight. A coal furnace at a power plant only has to boil water. About $75 a month is enough to get most people energy delivered from sometimes a hundred or more miles away, and power a house for a month. A car cannot come close to achieving that.
In the case of gas fired furnaces, electric plants use natural gas, which is pretty darn clean burning stuff. That powers a turbine that is not too terribly different from a big jet engine.
If it were more efficient to have a million little generators than a few really massive ones, then everyone's houses would have their own generators. But, people's houses don't. Wires to homes are far cheaper than generators - and fuel - in the basement. Smaller motors waste more stuff than big ones. It is a simple fact of life. Otherwise, why would they not have 1000 tiny rockets on the shuttle, or 1000 tiny engines on an aircraft carrier. Size matters.
The only reason electric cars are not everywhere is because batteries suck. Personal internal combustion engines are a host of inefficiencies offset by one good thing: Gasoline stores energy more effectively than a chemical battery, so pound for pound, gas is better as a transportable fuel source than electric batteries.
In the next major release of Windows 2000, call it Windows 2003, for sake of argument and realism, Microsoft is going to completely revamp GDI into something they call GDI+. GDI+ seems to mean not only GDI, but the USER stuff gets redone as COM objects as well.
This is LONG overdue, and quite frankly I think it should have shipped with Win2k.
GDI and the entire Windows message plumbing is really, seriously starting to show its age and it definately needs a rewrite. While WindowProc(hWnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam) may have been sufficient 10 years ago, or even 5, it is arguable now at this point that the whole messaging system of Windows gets very much in the way of where Microsoft seems to want to go with a completely COM based system.
Questions (assuming GDI+ actually every shows up):
Will developers actually write for a total GDI rewrite? I mean, what NEW projects for Windows are actually on the drawing board? If not, then compatibility with the current GDI is all that is necessary, but, if so, does making the current GDI, USER, etc, by successfully emulating it via Wine run the risk of everyone expanding a code base that we all know has to change?
I admit I'm pretty disappointed in C#, as I was expecting templates.
But, to dismiss C#'s enhancements as syntactical sugar is I think something of a pain. Everyone in Perl country knows that syntactical sugar can often translate into real productivity gains, more concise code, etc.
In all seriousness. What they are going to do is make a language that does what Java does... has a virtual machine. Then they will rewrite all of Office to it and it will run on anything. Gates and company are going to let Windows go. They won't admit it publicly are going to take the big plunge, and leverage their office suite to promote their virtual machine. It's a huge risk and if that's the case, then cutting could be little more than a motivational kick in the ass delivered by Reno and company, motivating a pretty lack and uninnovative giant into doing some technologically interesting for a change. This could turn out to be either a disasterous or humourous thing. These MS guys are as gruesomely admirable as the Borg or Mandreds drones. If all Microsoft had was notepad and file manager, Gates and Ballmer would try and leverage that somehow against someone. One wonders though Gates calculating relentless will give way to a more Ballmerian Buffonnery...as feared as that of Monty Python's Black Night. Old Steve might be jumping around on leg saying... "You cut off Windows! It's just a flesh wound! Have at you...!"
Instead of making yet another object oriented language, modelled on Smalltalk or C++ or Modula 2, I propose, that for the domain space of solving practical problems of billing, that we implement a language to do just that. Imagine a world where instead of stupid things like "objects" talk to each other, where you could actually query billing server hosts, and download and extract the billing information that you need. I write billing engines for a living, and most that I have written I've screwed up in one way or another, but on the same token I'd be willing to work with whoever to make a language that can bill. I'm infinitately better at Windows than I am at Unix C/C++, but, I would prefer a completely open implementation. If I publicized an open source billing engine, targetted initially at energy providers, but extensible enough to deal with telecom, manufacturing, the whole nine yards... would there be anyone else out there willing to help with it, in an FSF sort of way? Or all you all just a bunch of pussies content to do the same damn thing over and over again in your language of choice?
Word is a COM object and uses COM extensively. OLE was at the roots of COM but these days OLE is just another set of COM objects that one either implements or uses. So.. from the get go, one needs to implement COM, and also IStorage/IStream, on Linux, to get at Word. This would be ok if COM were an open standard, but it ain't. Where in MSDN is the VTABLE format for COM? It isn't there.
Strike 1 against Microsoft. By strike I mean that they are doing the usual evil empire thing by not opening up COM.
Philosophically, IStorage / IStream are a set of COM objects (read Libraries), for divving up a file into its own directory mechanism. The rationale for doing this is that end users want to copy documents as entire entities, and not deal with 200 or even 2000 subdirectories or small files that might comprise a total document. In Microsoft speak, a document must be a moveable entity, and in that regard, COM library based documents are entirely defensible. However, what goes into each of those subdirectory entries, or streams, is free to remain largely undocumented. It is the design intent of COM to ensure interopability between closed interfaces. At this, COM does stunningly well. You can script against COM in any language... but the medium for interchange is an application that you must always have in order to view the document.
Strike 2 against Microsoft. COM IS an excellent piece of software engineering, but it is engineered to do the hypocritical thing. The easiest way to make things interoperable is to post the source...
Much ado has been about Word changing file formats. The critiques of Word say that it is unnecessary to change file formats between releases. This is non-sensical hogwash. New features mean new data requirements, and new data requirements mean new file formats. Every other application on the planet has versions of formats and downward compatibility problems. Have you tried looking at a style sheet page in Netscape 2.0? That Word changes file formats is reasonable.
Hit: Microsoft.
Some criticism has been made about how a Word document changes appearance based on the display or print device. This is in keeping with the philosophy of Windows - which is to enable software features only if the hardware is present to support them. This is radically different from Unix, but this hardware-centric approach of Windows IS defensible on many merits.
Hit: Microsoft.
Word has, in effect, an autoexec scripting mechanism with no sandbox and no security besides that which the user security context of the OS offers. Since Windows 98 effectively runs everyone as root, the vast majority of Windows Word users are flying blind into a cliff.
Strike Three: Microsoft.
The bottom line is this. The.doc format and the entire idea of files within files has a lot of merit, as does the concept of only dealing with content supported by ones hardware. However, given the lack of openness by Word file formats, by COM, and the lack of security, Microsoft strikes out.
The bottom line is this:
If Microsoft had opened the Word file format, then Word files would have been the defact web page of the Internet, not HTML. That we are doing HTML and HTML rendering engines is testimony to how badly Microsoft missed a golden opportunity with Word. To protect their Word Processing IP, they made sure a non-Word file format (HTML), would become the lingua fraca of the Internet. That by itself is a compelling argument in favor of open file formats.
I mean, a pre-employment screening that assesses whether or not they think you are a thief? If there was any doubt I would have thought they would have not hired you?
I think the relevant duty in your case is to reveal what company has such a gestapo for its human resource department.
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Peer to peer networks need security. They need encryption, access control.
Both http and it's cousin gnutella do GET "name of song.mp3". How much easier could you have it to scan for song exhanges? Good encryption gets rid of that.
Access control might be based on volume. The more songs you trade and somehow you could link a key exchange to it. There would be a limit and the system should be designed to divide people into cells. That way, if one section of the network is compromised, the rest can continue exchanging documents.
I just think its funny that Europeans don't have double jeopardy. That's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read in my life. You guys don't have any civil rights at all.
Wow.
I always wanted an Alpha but could never afford one. Instead, I'll have to hope that Apple does the smart thing and puts a 64 bit PowerPC 970 into a next generation of desktop Macs. 64 bits is something every consumer would want.
It is time for us to put to bed the famous "my Word Perfect 5.1 shipped on a handful of disks", once and for all.
Word Perfect 5.1 did not have a WSYWIG editor. You had a blue TEXT screen with coloured control characters and you had a graphic preview. The modern notion of "fonts" is something that was alien to Word Perfect, whose model was more printer centric than screen centric.
The document you prepared on screen bore little resemblance to that which printed. A modern word processor will effectively ask the printer for the sizes of fonts and such, and then use that information to accurately space the letters.
Support for graphics in Word Perfect 5.1 was aweful, and I never liked its cut and paste. Speaking of which, you could only open a handful of concurrent documents in Word Perfect 5.1, and certainly today's mindlessly easy cut / paste between them didn't exist.
Even opening a document was a pain in the neck.
Application interoperability was non-existent. This was because the platform, DOS, only really allowed one app to run at any given time, and because there were no standards for data exchange between running apps. If your favorite other application happened to be Lotus 1-2-3, and you wanted to take some of that stuff and put it into Word Perfect 5.1, then you were S.O.L.
I don't miss Word Perfect, and I don't miss Lotus 1-2-3.
I'll bet you a P4 server running Oracle or SQL Server 7 will be much faster than its AMD equivalent at the same clock speed.
Yeah, the moment that a programmer's union forms, you can kiss away those fat salaries and in fact, our jobs, as they move overseas. We get paid more because we work harder. If we do not work harder, we will lose. That's the way it is.
The lot of African Americans in the United States may not be perfect, but the fact of the matter is that African Americans are still Americans and as such they enjoy a standard of living that most of the people on this planet can never even dream of achieving let alone enjoy.
If you want white people to give you money because some, I mean, SOME, white people kept slaves, then I propose that black people pay white people for the difference in standard of living enjoyed by blacks today in the US versus blacks today in Africa. I propose further that every descendent of every white union soldier that fought in the civil war should get a special bonus.
First off, the big dirty secret is that databases are completely different. Even if you have a portable application, it doesn't matter because you still have to port all of your database stuff. In an ideal world, you should be able to evaluate one database, then switch to another, just like swapping in and out parts pretty easily. You could then compare databases on the basis of performance.
I dissent :-)
Sex makes babies. Not all of the time, but enough to be a major social issue. Violence, on the other hand, makes black eyes, which go away. In terms of safety, more people get herpes than get shot, and more people die from sex (HIV), then die from wars.
If we could all learn to make war, not love, the world would be a much safer place.
I think the thing to do would be to infringe. Then, defend partially on the grounds that software patents are unconstitutional.
we might consider taking up a collection to find cases where patents in fact have enough prior art to be bad.
or we could just waste the guy.
I doubt they would answer this, but...
Is there any possibility that someone in the US/UK sigint community has proved that P=NP and is using that to crack RSA? Is it possible that public key algorithms are actually as wide open as Enigma was in WWII??
Scientists did not comment on Russian findings that the newly discovered moon is in fact the shape of black rectangular slab, and that chimpanzees in an space physics laboratory began to jump up and down at its discovery, ultimately bashing each other to pieces with their feed trays.
Wasn't Michael Abrash working at Microsoft before he went to go work on Quake I with Carmack?
I read somewhere that SDRAM can stall if you somehow do something on one bank on the chip while another is doing something.
Are there any performance benefits to possibly trying to tune memory accesses to somehow correspond with bank layouts of SDRAM?
Let's see, 100 years ago most of us worked on the farm, moving rocks with our bare hands and a horse, shovelling and digging and breaking our backs. Now, we sit in air conditioned offices playing with what amounts to a really smart television and make mountains of money to do it. Why are even complaining?
Maybe you want to go back to digging ditches for a living, but I sure don't.
If you get the DIY Plus special, you get 3 miles of copper wire, a trench digger, and right of way from your place of residence to the CO.
I work for a power company, so I of course have no bias.
If you show me a home generator that can produce electricity for less than 10 cents a killowatt/hour, then you'll make a believer out of me. In fact, if you can show me a home energy ANYTHING that can produce electricity for less than 10 cents a killowatt / hour, you'll make a believer out of me. Otherwise, do some basic math and check some basic facts.
Your electric utility is inherently more efficient than that of having home generation. Your electricity utility, for a coal fired plant, gets its fuel by rail - the overwhelming most efficient way to transport stuff overland. It uses all sorts of technology to recover the heat produced by burning coal, technologies that aren't available to consumers in cars. In even simple thermodynamic terms, what's the heat dissipation from a car engine as a percentage of energy produced, versus that of a giant steam boiler? More importantly, the power plants at a utility do not have to expend the energy to move themselves around. Your car engine has to expend energy to move itself and its own weight. A coal furnace at a power plant only has to boil water. About $75 a month is enough to get most people energy delivered from sometimes a hundred or more miles away, and power a house for a month. A car cannot come close to achieving that.
In the case of gas fired furnaces, electric plants use natural gas, which is pretty darn clean burning stuff. That powers a turbine that is not too terribly different from a big jet engine.
If it were more efficient to have a million little generators than a few really massive ones, then everyone's houses would have their own generators. But, people's houses don't. Wires to homes are far cheaper than generators - and fuel - in the basement. Smaller motors waste more stuff than big ones. It is a simple fact of life. Otherwise, why would they not have 1000 tiny rockets on the shuttle, or 1000 tiny engines on an aircraft carrier. Size matters.
The only reason electric cars are not everywhere is because batteries suck. Personal internal combustion engines are a host of inefficiencies offset by one good thing: Gasoline stores energy more effectively than a chemical battery, so pound for pound, gas is better as a transportable fuel source than electric batteries.
In the next major release of Windows 2000, call it Windows 2003, for sake of argument and realism, Microsoft is going to completely revamp GDI into something they call GDI+. GDI+ seems to mean not only GDI, but the USER stuff gets redone as COM objects as well.
This is LONG overdue, and quite frankly I think it should have shipped with Win2k.
GDI and the entire Windows message plumbing is really, seriously starting to show its age and it definately needs a rewrite. While WindowProc(hWnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam) may have been sufficient 10 years ago, or even 5, it is arguable now at this point that the whole messaging system of Windows gets very much in the way of where Microsoft seems to want to go with a completely COM based system.
Questions (assuming GDI+ actually every shows up):
Will developers actually write for a total GDI rewrite? I mean, what NEW projects for Windows are actually on the drawing board? If not, then compatibility with the current GDI is all that is necessary, but, if so, does making the current GDI, USER, etc, by successfully emulating it via Wine run the risk of everyone expanding a code base that we all know has to change?
Next thing you know, Jose will get a major book deal from Giant Worldwide Books Inc, for 7 million dollars, detailing how he battled megacorp.
I admit I'm pretty disappointed in C#, as I was expecting templates.
But, to dismiss C#'s enhancements as syntactical sugar is I think something of a pain. Everyone in Perl country knows that syntactical sugar can often translate into real productivity gains, more concise code, etc.
In all seriousness. What they are going to do is make a language that does what Java does... has a virtual machine. Then they will rewrite all of Office to it and it will run on anything. Gates and company are going to let Windows go. They won't admit it publicly are going to take the big plunge, and leverage their office suite to promote their virtual machine. It's a huge risk and if that's the case, then cutting could be little more than a motivational kick in the ass delivered by Reno and company, motivating a pretty lack and uninnovative giant into doing some technologically interesting for a change. This could turn out to be either a disasterous or humourous thing. These MS guys are as gruesomely admirable as the Borg or Mandreds drones. If all Microsoft had was notepad and file manager, Gates and Ballmer would try and leverage that somehow against someone. One wonders though Gates calculating relentless will give way to a more Ballmerian Buffonnery...as feared as that of Monty Python's Black Night. Old Steve might be jumping around on leg saying... "You cut off Windows! It's just a flesh wound! Have at you...!"
Instead of making yet another object oriented language, modelled on Smalltalk or C++ or Modula 2, I propose, that for the domain space of solving practical problems of billing, that we implement a language to do just that. Imagine a world where instead of stupid things like "objects" talk to each other, where you could actually query billing server hosts, and download and extract the billing information that you need. I write billing engines for a living, and most that I have written I've screwed up in one way or another, but on the same token I'd be willing to work with whoever to make a language that can bill. I'm infinitately better at Windows than I am at Unix C/C++, but, I would prefer a completely open implementation. If I publicized an open source billing engine, targetted initially at energy providers, but extensible enough to deal with telecom, manufacturing, the whole nine yards... would there be anyone else out there willing to help with it, in an FSF sort of way? Or all you all just a bunch of pussies content to do the same damn thing over and over again in your language of choice?
A bit of background:
.doc format and the entire idea of files within files has a lot of merit, as does the concept of only dealing with content supported by ones hardware. However, given the lack of openness by Word file formats, by COM, and the lack of security, Microsoft strikes out.
Word is a COM object and uses COM extensively. OLE was at the roots of COM but these days OLE is just another set of COM objects that one either implements or uses. So.. from the get go, one needs to implement COM, and also IStorage/IStream, on Linux, to get at Word. This would be ok if COM were an open standard, but it ain't. Where in MSDN is the VTABLE format for COM? It isn't there.
Strike 1 against Microsoft. By strike I mean that they are doing the usual evil empire thing by not opening up COM.
Philosophically, IStorage / IStream are a set of COM objects (read Libraries), for divving up a file into its own directory mechanism. The rationale for doing this is that end users want to copy documents as entire entities, and not deal with 200 or even 2000 subdirectories or small files that might comprise a total document. In Microsoft speak, a document must be a moveable entity, and in that regard, COM library based documents are entirely defensible. However, what goes into each of those subdirectory entries, or streams, is free to remain largely undocumented. It is the design intent of COM to ensure interopability between closed interfaces. At this, COM does stunningly well. You can script against COM in any language... but the medium for interchange is an application that you must always have in order to view the document.
Strike 2 against Microsoft. COM IS an excellent piece of software engineering, but it is engineered to do the hypocritical thing. The easiest way to make things interoperable is to post the source...
Much ado has been about Word changing file formats. The critiques of Word say that it is unnecessary to change file formats between releases. This is non-sensical hogwash. New features mean new data requirements, and new data requirements mean new file formats. Every other application on the planet has versions of formats and downward compatibility problems. Have you tried looking at a style sheet page in Netscape 2.0? That Word changes file formats is reasonable.
Hit: Microsoft.
Some criticism has been made about how a Word document changes appearance based on the display or print device. This is in keeping with the philosophy of Windows - which is to enable software features only if the hardware is present to support them. This is radically different from Unix, but this hardware-centric approach of Windows IS defensible on many merits.
Hit: Microsoft.
Word has, in effect, an autoexec scripting mechanism with no sandbox and no security besides that which the user security context of the OS offers. Since Windows 98 effectively runs everyone as root, the vast majority of Windows Word users are flying blind into a cliff.
Strike Three: Microsoft.
The bottom line is this. The
The bottom line is this:
If Microsoft had opened the Word file format, then Word files would have been the defact web page of the Internet, not HTML. That we are doing HTML and HTML rendering engines is testimony to how badly Microsoft missed a golden opportunity with Word. To protect their Word Processing IP, they made sure a non-Word file format (HTML), would become the lingua fraca of the Internet. That by itself is a compelling argument in favor of open file formats.
I mean, a pre-employment screening that assesses whether or not they think you are a thief? If there was any doubt I would have thought they would have not hired you?
I think the relevant duty in your case is to reveal what company has such a gestapo for its human resource department.
She will dump Anakin Skywalker for Jar Jar Binks in episode two, making an audience sympathetic to Darth Vader's quest to destroy the cruel universe.