Two points, too right. I would mod you up if I had the priviledege.
Half of me wants to do exactly what Actis is doing for my own nefarious purposes; the other half is scared by the fact that the people who have no business with the information are the ones who will, in the end, be the only ones with access to it.
as the guy who started sunsite^Wmetalab^Wibiblio, I should pipe up. the project which preceded sunsite was an internet bulletin board server called laUNChpad.
If you worked on laUNChpad, I just want drop you a word of thanks -- and all the others at UNC who made that system work. laUNChpad was the first internet account I had. That system was a big help to many of us at more primitive schools.
Unbiased? Who started that rumor? There's no reason for the web to fall into the idiotic trap that destroyed the credibility of mainstream media No website is unbiased. Why should they be? Websites are platforms for opinions, usually reflecting the views of the owners and/or users.
There's plenty of places on the web you can get contrasting opinions. You might try www.microsoft.com, www.redhat.com, or maybe www.sex.com if you're looking for a bias that favors some other POV... the web has something for (almost) everyone.
Keep an open mind and someone will come along a dump a bunch garbage in it. 0x0000
I sympathize. I love linux (and unix in general), but I consider the Gnome desktop to be mostly a nusiance (and something of an embarassment) when I'm trying to get work done. All the gtk stuff seems very heavy. Users w/o experience with Unix/Linux/X, though seem to find it comforting.
IIRC (it's been awhile since I had to deal with the Gnome RH installed by default), isn't there an option on the Gnome menu to change the window manager? Just changing it to fvwm or fvwm2 would clean up the desktop a lot, I think. Also, I found the fvwm config stuff a lot easier to figure out.
I do find it odd that RH would give a default Gnome install to a bunch of engineering students. Seems more appropriate to admins and word processor / spreadsheet types.
Okay, seriously, in order for MS to sell.NET as a serious alternative to locally
installed apps they also need stuff like a half decent drawing and painting programs. MS's own attempts at such programs haven't exactly been well received (understatement) - so who do they turn to?
To put a fine point on it: In order for.NET to sell, the standalone version of the major Windoze apps will have to be orphanned/killed off.
If a customer is using Corel products, and Corel doesn't choose to support.NET, that customer may well ignore.NET and try to survive with a standalone software model. M$ cannot allow that to happen, so they have a vested interest in making sure the standalone software providers are either assimilated or removed...
There is another reason that M$ needs Corel: Did anyone else see the Corel office suite beta written in Java back around 1995? If M$ can get them to port it to C#, they have a ready made.NET application that probably already works better than anything they will be able to produce for the next 3 to 5 years...
Don't the Slashdot maintainers have employers, or someone else responsible for what goes on with its administration? Isn't Slashdot concerned with what anyone would do to them for the constant defamation, inflammatory, and incorrect postings? Who are these guys accountable to? We need a posting moderation system, and more stories!
RoTFL! That's a good one. Here's anther one that follows directly:
Who would read/. if the type of corporate/governmental thinking you outline above were applied?
Heh. I'm sure there are a lot of corp types who think they have been wounded by/. who are asking the same types of questions, thinking to themselves "These *&$%!! slashdotters need to be brought to heel, made to toe the line! Who do they think they are?"
Heh. I hope they get ulcers and high blood pressure...
Really,/. is personal responsibility in action -- the up and the down side. That's what the internet used to be, btw...
I dont want some dodgy recording from a persons bedroom in the future.
Better dodgy than stodgy.
While I can understand your aversion to bedrooms, I would be personally interested in any recordings from the future. Furthermore, I think the simple fact that the artist had access to a bedroom in the future would make their work worth giving a listen, since most artists seem incapable of recording in bedrooms anywhere except in the past or present...
...an obvious attempt at covering up what the Carnivore system really is.
Heh. The FBI clearly states on their web site that CARNIVORE is a "diagnostic tool".
How much longer is it going to take for all the self proclaimed hackers out there to realize that soon they will need an internet of their own?
*sigh* Who is John Galt?
It's interesting, I just had this conversation with someone the other day. They thought it was quite humourous that certain hacker types were so vehement about the misuse of the net and infringement of freedoms on the net.
"[they'll] just go build another one!"
I was told. Does anybody else recognize that as a line from Atlas Shrugged?
There are a lot of people right now busily tearing down internet freedoms and functionality who sleep soundly at night because they are certain that the 'hackers', the people who built the net and make it continue to function, cannot do otherwise; the powers that be are quite certain that if they fsck it all up, you will just go build another one, and when you do, they will take that one from you, too.
i'm fairly willing to bet that if you went in and left a cash deposit for the car you were renting, you could take it off the lot without leaving a credit card.
This is a common misconception, and is not true.
Don't take my word for it, call some rental companies... They require that the person renting the car have 'a major credit card' and a valid drivers license. If you find a find an auto rental company that does not follow this policy, please post.
They get around the "all debts public and private" arguement by requiring that you have the card before they will rent you the car; they allege that you can use cash to pay the debt once you have the car and have used it, but you won't get it off the lot without they see your credit card. Has to be in the drivers name, too. No third party cards. Don't know how they handle that for corporate...
Fwiw, I know 1st-hand this policy was not in place a few years ago, but it is now. Note that I cannot speak for regional or local rental companies...
US Cash - always good, always accepted, almost always works in soda machines.
One instance where cash (US or otherwise) is worthless: Automobile rentail. 'A major credit card' is a requirement... They like to get rude about it, too. 0x0000
The main uses they hypothesized were as an easier approach to discerning genetic abnormalities and as a chemical detector.
Yes. And the M-DNA still functions only as a sensor, apparently. No facility for interconnections of 'components' was mentioned in the article.
I think the title was deceptive, too, since it sounds to me like they were describing a semi-conductor device, as opposed to a 'conductor'. More like a resistive element than a 'wire'...
As far as the conductive aspect is concerned, the best bet IMHO would be in nanobots.
I think they are still quite a long way from being able to build a nanobot from the M-DNA described in the article. They seem to be still at the level of getting DNA strands to work as resistive sensors.
If you treat the 'contaminants' that they are sensing as a control input, they are one step closer to building a logic gate out of a DNA strand. Seems terribly wasteful to use an entire strand as such a simple circuit component, but I guess it's better than having to use an entire transistor for a switch, then having to combine them into gates.
Anyone have an size comparison info on transistor density on silicon compared to DNA strands? How many molecules of silicon does it take to make one transistor now?
Injection of the control elements into the solution would be a limiting fact on computation speed, too, seems to me. I don't know, maybe there's something more to it than what was in the article.
I think reconfigurable systems are more useful that systems that could "change it's physical wiring" because such systems would 1) Give nasty glitches when they are in the act of rewiring,...
This is not necesarily true. Systems that can run a program to flash e.g. an EEPROM that is part of the system, without glitching the running code, are fairly common.
Software does this kind of thing too. Load it into RAM, alter the binary on disk, load the new binary image into RAM, jump to the start of the new image. You can do it without altering the disk, too; lot's of ways. It's damn near trivial.
I've seen code that changes the next instruction to be executed based on the program state, then executes it. Worked fine, was small and fast.
It's a matter of design. If it's designed to be self-modifying, it won't necesarily misbehave during the mods. In fact, if the purpose of the code (gate array) is to recode (rewire) itself, it almost certainly won't glitch up while doing so.
2) Be VERY hard to analyze and test.
Your second point here is gospel. That's why self-replicating, self-modifying code is frowned upon. Not because it's necesarily hostile, but because it is a bear to debug, test, and maintain.... I stop short of using the word 'impossible', but certainly difficult and expensive.
...since 'DNA computers' are going to have four states for each bit instead of two...
But where do you get that DNA machines will have 4 states? The selective bonds are connexions, but I haven't seen where anyone has even gotten as far as definining how many 'blocks' will be required to represent any particular piece of information (e.g. a 'bit').
Furthermore, a lot of modern digital ('binary') electronics use 'tri-state' logic - i.e. hi, lo, hi-Z. These are still used in a binary manner.
Even if we presume that a DNA 'block' is analogous to a 'bit', you may need the other two states for control circuits or something when you start building up devices out of them...
In fact, I haven't seen anything that makes me believe that DNA computers will even be digital. The article makes it sound as though the M-DNA will act like an analog device -- i.e. the current flow thru the strand varies based on the bindings. Sounds like a variable resistor, to me -- or a transistor (amplifier).
If you use M-DNA in that way, it would mean that a single strand would represent a 'bit'; in other words, if the bonded strand acts like a transistor, you could set it up to 'operate' in 'switching mode', the same way you can a transistor. Electronic digital logic is based on transistors operating in (binary) switching mode, iirc. So, if you have a DNA strand acting like a transistor, you could connect several of them in circuits, an build a device. Such a device could be either digital or analogue in nature, or could have some yet-to-be-determined number of discrete states (e.g. 4), depending on the properties of the strands used.
Note that some transistors are more useful in one or the other of the modes (switching or amplifying), and that 'switching' is a special case of amplification.
Do you know of any online source for realistic detail designs of digital devices based on DNA?
What we need to do now is harness DNA's ability to reproduce itself. Imagine, a circuit that can actually change it's physical wiring to handle new conditions and/or optimize itself...
Isn't that what's called a 'virus'? Isn't that why self-modifying computer code is called 'viral'?..... were you being facetious?
Hate to say it, but as we expect more and more from our packaging mechanisms, we have to lean more towards a central repository, or "registry" if you can stand it.
Interesting. I thought that the Windoze registry itself was an attempt to mimic the functionality of the *nix/etc and.../X11/app-defaults directories.
The structure is already there, we just need to be using it.
On the subject of config files: I have found unix config files be quite uniform. I think what's really needed for config files is a set of meta-data that describes the relationship between packages. I don't know if XML would fill that bill, or not. Definitely we don't need to screw with application level config files (which are beautiful in their simplicity:)...
Fwiw, I should think a good a good litmus test for a 'package manager' would be its ability to seamlessly and transparently upgrade the X server without losing config data....
Okay, I understand that watching DVDs would make me a criminal, but what about making DVDs. If I produce a DVD recorder, and my own software to do the CSS encryption, is that illegal? I didn't distribute any DeCSS code to do it, and I didn't watch any of the crap MPAA tries to pass off as entertainment... I didn't decrypt anything, I didn't subvert their copyrights.
Where do I stand legally? Opinions? Is the encryption algorithm copyrighted, patented, or whatever? If I produce workalike firmware that creates a DVD compatible disk, what legal grounds do they have to prevent it from being marketed?
Wouldn't that be a lot more damaging to the MPAA's efforts than having some number of disaffected DVD buyers decrypting lame Hollywood films? And think of the possiblities for independant film producers.
Post the code on non-US servers. AFAIK US law still doesn't apply outside the US. Preferably choose countries where there is lots of anti-US feelings.
This sounds like a good idea until you realize that the rot that has infested and destroyed amerikan life does not stop at national borders.
Iirc, the recent high profile arrests made in Norway (DeCSS) and the Phillipines (some virus case) were made under amerikan law, not the laws of the country where the arrests were made. In fact, in the Filipino case, the arrest was said to have been made by amerikan federal law enforcement, since the Filipino police either would not, or could not make an arrest for something that wasn't against the law....
Wouldn't it be fun if, say China or Iraq started to demand that the major hollywood sites must be shut down?
Would be really neat if some country which remains less tainted by the consumerist bullshit that passes for laws and morality in amerika (is there any such country left?) would open its doors to techno-refugees. There are billions to be made and power to be gained by any nation that can find a way to subvert the repressive regime that now controls technology and inforation services in the US.
A recent novel I ran across suggested that this might be accomplished by, say, China, declaring all western copyrighted material to be in the public domain. Now that would be hilarious, Watching the corporate Powers That Be(tm) busily trying to block amerikan web access to China, much the way they now claim China is trying to block web access to the west...
Lie down with (amerikan running) dogs, get up with (legalistic and moralistic) fleas. 0x0000
Of course I am. As are you. As are the republlicrats. As are the protestors. I don't need some young
whipper-snapper to tell me that.
I'll go you one better: You (and I, and so on) are entitled, within certain parameters, to act on our opinions.
Under the law it's called "the pursuit of happiness", but some of us aren't always that formal...
As you probably realize (I hope), the constraints on your right to the pursuit of happiness mostly derive from
the rights of others. Now, when someone violates your rights, your pursuit of happiness may come to involve
making damned certain that the individual who violated your rights in the first place never, but never is able
to do so again.
That's what the protests are about. The politicos, the republicrats, the demopublicans, whatever you choose
to call them, have been trampling rights that some of our ancestors died to tryinng to secure for us and
themselves.
I personally think the protestors are not extreme enough, but I remain in the minority. Nevertheless, I think it's
pretty pitiful to pick and faultfind with the guy just for testing the boundaries of his freedom. It is within his right
to the pursuit of happiness. Sure, he could have avoided arrest, but by the same token, he could have blown
up a building. Get a perspective. I think all you naysayers here are just jealous...
I am not am member of the political caste, police, or military.
So you admit there is a caste system. Well, that's a good start....
I am an average working person two years out of college.
That's an oxymoron. The average working american doesn't have any college.
I have worked to try to help change things that are bad in my view.
And yet you would criticize others for doing the same? You are part of the problem, I think, not part of the
solution.
Unlike some people, I will work for it though.
You're implying that the writer of the article doesn't work? What? That is such a typically elitist remark. I'm
sure the republicrats will make sure your sheeplike existence continues without undo perterbations.
You are perfectly entitled to your opinion.
Of course I am. As are you. As are the republlicrats. As are the protestors. I don't need some young
whipper-snapper to tell me that.
I'll go you one better: You (and I, and so on) are entitled, within certain parameters, to act on our opinions.
Under the law it's called "the pursuit of happiness", but some of us aren't always that formal...
As you probably realize (I hope), the constraints on your right to the pursuit of happiness mostly derive from
the rights of others. Now, when someone violates your rights, your pursuit of happiness may come to involve
making damned certain that the individual who violated your rights in the first place never, but never is able
to do so again.
That's what the protests are about. The politicos, the republicrats, the demopublicans, whatever you choose
to call them, have been trampling rights that some of our ancestors died to tryinng to secure for us and
themselves.
I personally think the protestors are not extreme enough, but I remain in the minority. Nevertheless, I think it's
pretty pitiful to pick and faultfind with the guy just for testing the boundaries of his freedom. It is within his right
to the pursuit of happiness. Sure, he could have avoided arrest, but by the same token, he could have blown
up a building. Get a perspective. I think all you naysayers here are just jealous...
I am not am member of the political caste, police, or military.
So you admit there is a caste system. Well, that's a good start....
I am an average working person two years out of college.
That's an oxymoron. The average working american doesn't have any college.
I have worked to try to help change things that are bad in my view.
And yet you would criticize others for doing the same? You are part of the problem, I think, not part of the
solution.
Unlike some people, I will work for it though.
You're implying that the writer of the article doesn't work? What? That is such a typically elitist remark. I'm
sure the republicrats will make sure your sheeplike existence continues without undo perterbations.
Mainsoft seems to be a profesional "quick port" company that basicly slips the software into a Windows emulation for pacaging into Unix platforms.
This appears fairly accurate, with the exception of the fact that this article states in part
"Through strategic agreements with Microsoft, Mainsoft has access to
Windows NT and Windows 2000 source code. Mainsoft has incorporated several million lines of original
Windows source code into MainWin."
To my mind, the fact that M$ has seen fit to give this MainSoft outfit access to the source (the same source which they are resisting giving out even under US court order, I might add) is significant. It shows an unprecedented (I think; anybody?) level of support for a 3rd party developer by M$.
I mean, you just have to wonder why the WINE developers can't get this kind of cooperation... The kneejerk reaction is to say "money", but I think there's more to it than that...
[running M$ products on unix under emulation] This will produce less than effective results on Unix and generally drag Unix systems down.
Yes, yes, and yes. Think about that last statement. It will "...generally drag unix systems down". Sounds like a winning scenario for M$, doesn't it? And yes, the MainWin(r) product does sound a lot like an emulator, although it sounds like it's not as transparent as WINE, since MainWin(r) requires recompilation of the apps. That supports the idea that the M$ goal is to produce less-than-adequate unix versions...
You should talk with your IT manager about the dangers of using emulated pacages. Ask him if he'd run Windows software under emulation on the servers or workstations? Point out that it's no diffrent if the emulation is part of the pacage.
Heh. They must make IT managers with higher levels of competence in your part of the universe... but yeah, that's a big part of the point. Corporate IT is M$'s cash cow. They need to prevent the introduction of a widely applicable, cross-platoform office suite solution that is not M$-proprietary. In fact, they need to stop it so badly they will probably die trying...
Disassemble windoze, hand optimize the assembly code, and re-assemble. Now that's an emulator.... 0x0000
Anyone can put together a distribution. MS sure as heck could spare a few score people to pull together MSLinux.
...and I remain personally amazed that they don't seem to have done so! I mean, how many hundreds of times have I heard that tired old saw about how 'M$'s real genius is business.' Yeah right.
Of course, it's possible they already own one the distros.... didn't I hear something about a major M$ investment in RedHat a few months ago?
Their strategy seems to be to use an "Office for Linux" as a bridge to Windows, similar to Mac Office."
Can anybody expand on what exactly that means?
I take it to mean that the *nix versions won't be fully functional, thereby trying to lure users to Windoze for 'full functionality'. May or may not work, but it's a good bet that it'll go that way, since M$ programmers (or those hired by M$) are probably not good enough programmers to implement the full office feature set under X... hell, they can't even make it work right on their own OS, most of the time...
MS wants to introduce new audiences to its software, so it ports Office to the Mac or Linux, thinking those users will migrate to Windows?
Doubtful that they're targetting new users. In fact that market is probably very close to saturation. Furthermore, I'd guess it's a good bet that pretty much 99% of Mac and Linux users have already fought the battle of Windoze, and know exactly why they have left the M$ platform. This may not be quite as true when it comes to other unices, but M$ has already had a go at (some of) them with IE. Evidently it didn't go quite they way they wanted, or they would be porting IE to Linux before Office... at least that seems to make business sense.
I think (one of) the other thing(s) M$ is trying to accomplish with this move is to shore up the lifespan of their proprietary data formats. The targets are coorporations who have licensed Office. One of the main things that seems to slow the move off of Windoze at a corporate level is the tremendous investment in M$ Office and legacy data that is already in the Office formats.
The Office data formats are, after all, the key to
keeping their current captive customer base captive. The office applications themselves simply aren't good enough on their own to do that.
A *nix Office suite is a way to keep those formats alive, which is important to M$, since if the formats are dropped in favor or, say, an open standard, then there is really no incentive for corporate customers to stay with M$.
M$, I believe, fears that as work goes forward to make format conversions easier, it will be more cost effective for a corp to invest in data conversion and move off of the Windoze platform than it will be to keep putting up with (paying for) the spew of M$ corp.
Other office suite software vendors are targetting the office data formats and application functionality. If one of those outfits gets there (usable in a corp environment) first, M$ would be left with their collective asses uncovered. So, for M$ to produce a Linux Office suite is also a CYA strategy...
it seems that the only way that becomes a good plan is when you make inferior ports of the product that are just good enough to make people want them (I understand that many MS ports to the Mac are pretty sub-standard), and boom, you give them some incentive to migrate. But it seems awfully disingenuous. Am I misinterpreting that, or is it more of a speculated, rather than overt, strategy?
Heh. Disingenuous is M$'s middle name. Their contempt for users -- and everybody else, for that matter -- is huge. They really, really don't expect anyone to figure it out, and when someone does, they apply spin. I don't think you misunderstand.
Also, note that this effort is going to be incorporated into the spin machine. 'See, we develop apps for Linux, too!' It's a good PR move for M$, since they will co-opt a certain percentage of *nix advocates with this move. Since Linux advocates in particular seem to be the most vocal and persuasive of the M$ detractors (often because they are former M$ users, I think), anything M$ can do to cut down on their number is a plus.
Got it in one. Last I checked (Dec 1999), it (@work) was significantly more than twice as much, especially for the 'installation'.
And the TOS at that time already prohibited using the cablemodem to provide access to a LAN. There wasn't much they could do about it, but if you were known to be in violation, they could definitely terminate your service. They won't provide (or allow) routing to a domain on their network, either, since that implies that you are running your own servers. That was the prohibition, iirc: 'you may not run a server [...on your IP]' or language to that effect.
That's the reason I'm still on DSL; @home is not an option (legally), and for what @work would cost, I could upgrade the DSL bandwidth.
Any way you slice it, @home is a poor value...
Maybe one of these days one of the broadband providors will figure out that overpriced, functionally limited connections is not the future of the internet, and start providing something we can actually use for something besides surfing, chatting, and napstering....
How about that broadband satellite uplink service, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Half of me wants to do exactly what Actis is doing for my own nefarious purposes; the other half is scared by the fact that the people who have no business with the information are the ones who will, in the end, be the only ones with access to it.
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There's plenty of places on the web you can get contrasting opinions. You might try www.microsoft.com, www.redhat.com, or maybe www.sex.com if you're looking for a bias that favors some other POV... the web has something for (almost) everyone.
Keep an open mind and someone will come along a dump a bunch garbage in it.
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IIRC (it's been awhile since I had to deal with the Gnome RH installed by default), isn't there an option on the Gnome menu to change the window manager? Just changing it to fvwm or fvwm2 would clean up the desktop a lot, I think. Also, I found the fvwm config stuff a lot easier to figure out.
I do find it odd that RH would give a default Gnome install to a bunch of engineering students. Seems more appropriate to admins and word processor / spreadsheet types.
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If a customer is using Corel products, and Corel doesn't choose to support .NET, that customer may well ignore .NET and try to survive with a standalone software model. M$ cannot allow that to happen, so they have a vested interest in making sure the standalone software providers are either assimilated or removed...
There is another reason that M$ needs Corel: Did anyone else see the Corel office suite beta written in Java back around 1995? If M$ can get them to port it to C#, they have a ready made .NET application that probably already works better than anything they will be able to produce for the next 3 to 5 years...
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Who would read /. if the type of corporate/governmental thinking you outline above were applied?
Heh. I'm sure there are a lot of corp types who think they have been wounded by /. who are asking the same types of questions, thinking to themselves "These *&$%!! slashdotters need to be brought to heel, made to toe the line! Who do they think they are?"
Heh. I hope they get ulcers and high blood pressure...
Really, /. is personal responsibility in action -- the up and the down side. That's what the internet used to be, btw...
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Better dodgy than stodgy.
While I can understand your aversion to bedrooms, I would be personally interested in any recordings from the future. Furthermore, I think the simple fact that the artist had access to a bedroom in the future would make their work worth giving a listen, since most artists seem incapable of recording in bedrooms anywhere except in the past or present...
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It's interesting, I just had this conversation with someone the other day. They thought it was quite humourous that certain hacker types were so vehement about the misuse of the net and infringement of freedoms on the net.
"[they'll] just go build another one!" I was told. Does anybody else recognize that as a line from Atlas Shrugged?
There are a lot of people right now busily tearing down internet freedoms and functionality who sleep soundly at night because they are certain that the 'hackers', the people who built the net and make it continue to function, cannot do otherwise; the powers that be are quite certain that if they fsck it all up, you will just go build another one, and when you do, they will take that one from you, too.
Now THAT is an intellectual property issue.
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They get around the "all debts public and private" arguement by requiring that you have the card before they will rent you the car; they allege that you can use cash to pay the debt once you have the car and have used it, but you won't get it off the lot without they see your credit card. Has to be in the drivers name, too. No third party cards. Don't know how they handle that for corporate...
Fwiw, I know 1st-hand this policy was not in place a few years ago, but it is now. Note that I cannot speak for regional or local rental companies...
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I think the title was deceptive, too, since it sounds to me like they were describing a semi-conductor device, as opposed to a 'conductor'. More like a resistive element than a 'wire'...
I think they are still quite a long way from being able to build a nanobot from the M-DNA described in the article. They seem to be still at the level of getting DNA strands to work as resistive sensors.If you treat the 'contaminants' that they are sensing as a control input, they are one step closer to building a logic gate out of a DNA strand. Seems terribly wasteful to use an entire strand as such a simple circuit component, but I guess it's better than having to use an entire transistor for a switch, then having to combine them into gates.
Anyone have an size comparison info on transistor density on silicon compared to DNA strands? How many molecules of silicon does it take to make one transistor now?
Injection of the control elements into the solution would be a limiting fact on computation speed, too, seems to me. I don't know, maybe there's something more to it than what was in the article.
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Software does this kind of thing too. Load it into RAM, alter the binary on disk, load the new binary image into RAM, jump to the start of the new image. You can do it without altering the disk, too; lot's of ways. It's damn near trivial.
I've seen code that changes the next instruction to be executed based on the program state, then executes it. Worked fine, was small and fast.
It's a matter of design. If it's designed to be self-modifying, it won't necesarily misbehave during the mods. In fact, if the purpose of the code (gate array) is to recode (rewire) itself, it almost certainly won't glitch up while doing so.
Your second point here is gospel. That's why self-replicating, self-modifying code is frowned upon. Not because it's necesarily hostile, but because it is a bear to debug, test, and maintain0x0000
Furthermore, a lot of modern digital ('binary') electronics use 'tri-state' logic - i.e. hi, lo, hi-Z. These are still used in a binary manner.
Even if we presume that a DNA 'block' is analogous to a 'bit', you may need the other two states for control circuits or something when you start building up devices out of them...
In fact, I haven't seen anything that makes me believe that DNA computers will even be digital. The article makes it sound as though the M-DNA will act like an analog device -- i.e. the current flow thru the strand varies based on the bindings. Sounds like a variable resistor, to me -- or a transistor (amplifier).
If you use M-DNA in that way, it would mean that a single strand would represent a 'bit'; in other words, if the bonded strand acts like a transistor, you could set it up to 'operate' in 'switching mode', the same way you can a transistor. Electronic digital logic is based on transistors operating in (binary) switching mode, iirc. So, if you have a DNA strand acting like a transistor, you could connect several of them in circuits, an build a device. Such a device could be either digital or analogue in nature, or could have some yet-to-be-determined number of discrete states (e.g. 4), depending on the properties of the strands used.
Note that some transistors are more useful in one or the other of the modes (switching or amplifying), and that 'switching' is a special case of amplification.
Do you know of any online source for realistic detail designs of digital devices based on DNA?
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The structure is already there, we just need to be using it.
On the subject of config files: I have found unix config files be quite uniform. I think what's really needed for config files is a set of meta-data that describes the relationship between packages. I don't know if XML would fill that bill, or not. Definitely we don't need to screw with application level config files (which are beautiful in their simplicity:)...
Fwiw, I should think a good a good litmus test for a 'package manager' would be its ability to seamlessly and transparently upgrade the X server without losing config data....
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Where do I stand legally? Opinions? Is the encryption algorithm copyrighted, patented, or whatever? If I produce workalike firmware that creates a DVD compatible disk, what legal grounds do they have to prevent it from being marketed?
Wouldn't that be a lot more damaging to the MPAA's efforts than having some number of disaffected DVD buyers decrypting lame Hollywood films? And think of the possiblities for independant film producers.
$.02
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Iirc, the recent high profile arrests made in Norway (DeCSS) and the Phillipines (some virus case) were made under amerikan law, not the laws of the country where the arrests were made. In fact, in the Filipino case, the arrest was said to have been made by amerikan federal law enforcement, since the Filipino police either would not, or could not make an arrest for something that wasn't against the law....
Would be really neat if some country which remains less tainted by the consumerist bullshit that passes for laws and morality in amerika (is there any such country left?) would open its doors to techno-refugees. There are billions to be made and power to be gained by any nation that can find a way to subvert the repressive regime that now controls technology and inforation services in the US.A recent novel I ran across suggested that this might be accomplished by, say, China, declaring all western copyrighted material to be in the public domain. Now that would be hilarious, Watching the corporate Powers That Be(tm) busily trying to block amerikan web access to China, much the way they now claim China is trying to block web access to the west...
Lie down with (amerikan running) dogs, get up with (legalistic and moralistic) fleas.
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Of course I am. As are you. As are the republlicrats. As are the protestors. I don't need some young whipper-snapper to tell me that.
I'll go you one better: You (and I, and so on) are entitled, within certain parameters, to act on our opinions. Under the law it's called "the pursuit of happiness", but some of us aren't always that formal...
As you probably realize (I hope), the constraints on your right to the pursuit of happiness mostly derive from the rights of others. Now, when someone violates your rights, your pursuit of happiness may come to involve making damned certain that the individual who violated your rights in the first place never, but never is able to do so again.
That's what the protests are about. The politicos, the republicrats, the demopublicans, whatever you choose to call them, have been trampling rights that some of our ancestors died to tryinng to secure for us and themselves.
I personally think the protestors are not extreme enough, but I remain in the minority. Nevertheless, I think it's pretty pitiful to pick and faultfind with the guy just for testing the boundaries of his freedom. It is within his right to the pursuit of happiness. Sure, he could have avoided arrest, but by the same token, he could have blown up a building. Get a perspective. I think all you naysayers here are just jealous...
I am not am member of the political caste, police, or military.
So you admit there is a caste system. Well, that's a good start....
I am an average working person two years out of college.
That's an oxymoron. The average working american doesn't have any college.
I have worked to try to help change things that are bad in my view.
And yet you would criticize others for doing the same? You are part of the problem, I think, not part of the solution.
Unlike some people, I will work for it though.
You're implying that the writer of the article doesn't work? What? That is such a typically elitist remark. I'm sure the republicrats will make sure your sheeplike existence continues without undo perterbations.
You are perfectly entitled to your opinion. Of course I am. As are you. As are the republlicrats. As are the protestors. I don't need some young whipper-snapper to tell me that. I'll go you one better: You (and I, and so on) are entitled, within certain parameters, to act on our opinions. Under the law it's called "the pursuit of happiness", but some of us aren't always that formal... As you probably realize (I hope), the constraints on your right to the pursuit of happiness mostly derive from the rights of others. Now, when someone violates your rights, your pursuit of happiness may come to involve making damned certain that the individual who violated your rights in the first place never, but never is able to do so again. That's what the protests are about. The politicos, the republicrats, the demopublicans, whatever you choose to call them, have been trampling rights that some of our ancestors died to tryinng to secure for us and themselves. I personally think the protestors are not extreme enough, but I remain in the minority. Nevertheless, I think it's pretty pitiful to pick and faultfind with the guy just for testing the boundaries of his freedom. It is within his right to the pursuit of happiness. Sure, he could have avoided arrest, but by the same token, he could have blown up a building. Get a perspective. I think all you naysayers here are just jealous... I am not am member of the political caste, police, or military. So you admit there is a caste system. Well, that's a good start.... I am an average working person two years out of college. That's an oxymoron. The average working american doesn't have any college. I have worked to try to help change things that are bad in my view. And yet you would criticize others for doing the same? You are part of the problem, I think, not part of the solution. Unlike some people, I will work for it though. You're implying that the writer of the article doesn't work? What? That is such a typically elitist remark. I'm sure the republicrats will make sure your sheeplike existence continues without undo perterbations.
I mean, you just have to wonder why the WINE developers can't get this kind of cooperation... The kneejerk reaction is to say "money", but I think there's more to it than that...
Yes, yes, and yes. Think about that last statement. It will "...generally drag unix systems down". Sounds like a winning scenario for M$, doesn't it? And yes, the MainWin(r) product does sound a lot like an emulator, although it sounds like it's not as transparent as WINE, since MainWin(r) requires recompilation of the apps. That supports the idea that the M$ goal is to produce less-than-adequate unix versions... Heh. They must make IT managers with higher levels of competence in your part of the universe... but yeah, that's a big part of the point. Corporate IT is M$'s cash cow. They need to prevent the introduction of a widely applicable, cross-platoform office suite solution that is not M$-proprietary. In fact, they need to stop it so badly they will probably die trying...Disassemble windoze, hand optimize the assembly code, and re-assemble. Now that's an emulator....
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Of course, it's possible they already own one the distros .... didn't I hear something about a major M$ investment in RedHat a few months ago?
I think (one of) the other thing(s) M$ is trying to accomplish with this move is to shore up the lifespan of their proprietary data formats. The targets are coorporations who have licensed Office. One of the main things that seems to slow the move off of Windoze at a corporate level is the tremendous investment in M$ Office and legacy data that is already in the Office formats.
The Office data formats are, after all, the key to keeping their current captive customer base captive. The office applications themselves simply aren't good enough on their own to do that. A *nix Office suite is a way to keep those formats alive, which is important to M$, since if the formats are dropped in favor or, say, an open standard, then there is really no incentive for corporate customers to stay with M$.
M$, I believe, fears that as work goes forward to make format conversions easier, it will be more cost effective for a corp to invest in data conversion and move off of the Windoze platform than it will be to keep putting up with (paying for) the spew of M$ corp.
Other office suite software vendors are targetting the office data formats and application functionality. If one of those outfits gets there (usable in a corp environment) first, M$ would be left with their collective asses uncovered. So, for M$ to produce a Linux Office suite is also a CYA strategy...
Heh. Disingenuous is M$'s middle name. Their contempt for users -- and everybody else, for that matter -- is huge. They really, really don't expect anyone to figure it out, and when someone does, they apply spin. I don't think you misunderstand.Also, note that this effort is going to be incorporated into the spin machine. 'See, we develop apps for Linux, too!' It's a good PR move for M$, since they will co-opt a certain percentage of *nix advocates with this move. Since Linux advocates in particular seem to be the most vocal and persuasive of the M$ detractors (often because they are former M$ users, I think), anything M$ can do to cut down on their number is a plus.
All in all, it's about Leverage.
And the TOS at that time already prohibited using the cablemodem to provide access to a LAN. There wasn't much they could do about it, but if you were known to be in violation, they could definitely terminate your service. They won't provide (or allow) routing to a domain on their network, either, since that implies that you are running your own servers. That was the prohibition, iirc: 'you may not run a server [...on your IP]' or language to that effect.
That's the reason I'm still on DSL; @home is not an option (legally), and for what @work would cost, I could upgrade the DSL bandwidth. Any way you slice it, @home is a poor value...
Maybe one of these days one of the broadband providors will figure out that overpriced, functionally limited connections is not the future of the internet, and start providing something we can actually use for something besides surfing, chatting, and napstering....
How about that broadband satellite uplink service, eh?
I guess I'm a little touchy today.