The folks at Transmeta have already done this. They even apparently implemented a version of Doom, with the main loop in picoJava code (Sun's Java processor core) and the rest in x86 code. The Transmeta chip "morphed" both instruction sets into its native VLIW instructions, and seamlessly executed both.
This was demo'd at the Crusoe launch, but was not intended as a product. I don't know the current status of any Transmeta products related Java - does anyone else?
The phrase is "just deserts". Perhaps Katz should invest in a Dictionary of English Usage?
Katz could also get the info for free, e.g. from this page :
Just deserts: This use of the plural of desert, a word that means "reward or recompense for behavior, either good or evil," is seldom seen except in this context. It is also often misspelled; I have always pronounced and spelled deserts as if it were desserts and mistakenly assumed it carried the sense of "conclusion," like the dessert at the conclusion of a meal. The OED places the accent on the first syllable, but its most recent citation for the phrase is in a 1508 religious tract: "a just desert for such impiety."
But the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, (AHD), cites the current usage, "He certainly received his just deserts," with the second syllable accented so that it is pronounced like desserts, though spelled like the noun deserts. Thus, the often-seen misspelling.
Re:Not funny to everyone
on
Review: Zoolander
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I haven't seen the movie, but apparently you haven't either. Is it possible Ebert is being oversensitive and missing the point? (Answer: yes!) After all, the movie is apparently making fun of the fashion industry, and the assassination plot idea is somewhat amusing - and certainly not intended to be serious - despite Ebert's heavy-handed attempt to turn it around. Ebert hasn't actually asked any Malaysians what they think.
Please, feel free to boycott this movie because you don't like dumb American comedies (defined as almost anything involving an ex-cast member of SNL), but don't boycott it because it's politically insensitive. Don't confuse Ebert's inappropriate hand-wringing with political sensitivity.
It's not a question of what you, as an individual, are worried about, or how interesting you are to the government. There are other people who are more interesting to the government, who still have a right to privacy and to not be monitored or harrassed without probable cause. Just because you consider your values so in line with those of your government doesn't mean that anyone who isn't so lucky is a criminal deserving of monitoring.
One important reason that privacy and anonymous communication is important, is the effect on a society when normal mechanisms for societal functioning are suppressed. Anonymous communication is certainly a normal mechanism: "don't tell anyone I told you this, but..."
Your faith in your government and/or your country is admirable. However, you didn't mention Sen. McCarthy, for example, or the abuse of the RICO laws, or racial profiling, or any of the other ways in which freedoms and rights have been abused over the past few decades. Perhaps these things haven't affected you personally, but they've affected other people.
The US is to be admired for having survived these things with values relatively intact, but one big reason it does so is because the freedoms it provides its citizens allows those citizens to function without fear of reprisal for things they say or do, within reason. Once again, anonymous communication is an important part of that.
To put it in the terms you used, privacy and anonymous communications are an integral part of the values which you say add traction to the slippery slope. Take them away, and the slope becomes that much more slippery.
Don't join in the tyranny of the masses in calling for our rights to be taken away in the name of security - you're playing directly into the hands of those who would like to see the U.S. fall, allowing fear to dictate your actions, turning the country against itself, and making it weaker.
When did I see in the Constitution that I had a right to make illegal copies of other peoples' work?
Fair use rights are well-enshrined in copyright law, and the word "right" is used explicitly. The DMCA doesn't take these rights away directly, but by allowing content providers to protect their work technically in any way they see fit, and making it illegal to circumvent such restrictions, fair use rights are in effect eliminated when copy protection is involved.
The fact that many people engage in "unfair use" doesn't change the fact that fair use has been dealt what may become a death blow. Certainly fair use can be, and has been, abused, apparently more so since the advent of digital technology, but again, does that justify the effective elimination of the concept? I don't think so.
Stuff like this, or URLs containing Unicode characters or known-bad sequences like::$DATA, would be easy to filter out. In fact, Microsoft has a program designed to install on IIS servers to do just that, called something like URLCheck, I forget exactly. This job could just as easily be done by a separate dedicated box, with a config page to allow the level of paranoia to be specified, or new URL blocking templates to be installed.
my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
Yeah, it is amazing how Win2K can keep on functioning even when it is simultaneously infected with Code Red, Sadmind, and Nimda! The data rates produced by virus-generated GET requests are most impressive, and only exceeded by the rate at which IIS with ASP leaks memory. Microsoft and its "professional full fledged development team" have truly reached a pinnacle of performance and stability!
Good point. It had never really occurred to me that there was a difference - after all, email is just another channel - albeit a fairly inefficient one - as demonstrated by various protocols which piggyback on SMTP. But certainly, this distinction may be stronger in the minds of the public and lawmakers.
But of course as soon as two people can ssh into the same box and talk to each other, the banning of any other uses of encryption starts to look pretty irrelevant.
And of course, this is happening already. Without any effort on our part, beyond the initial setup of a VPN-style system, all email I exchange with colleagues is encrypted during transmission, because we all connect over a secure link to the same mail server.
Encrypted email wasn't our intent; all we cared about is that our network wouldn't be compromised by script kiddies with a sniffer at an ISP. But the net effect is that Carnivore won't help the government if they want to read our email: they would have to get a subpoena for our private mail server, or secretly install keyloggers, etc.
As far as I'm concerned, the war "against" encryption was lost a long time ago, and it's now just a matter of waiting for reality to catch up with the politicians. That's often a slow business, though.
To really drive the point home about how hard it is to factor these big numbers, check out the prize list for The RSA Factoring Challenge. If anyone doesn't believe that it's difficult, well, there's a total of about $635,000 waiting for the person who can prove that it's not!
If they manage to make strong crypto illegal ( or non-escrowed crypto ), than they don't even need to bother with key escrow, just scan for instances of non-escrowed crypto and start laying charges.
Except that all you need to do is doubly-encrypt your messages - first with strong crypto, then with government-approved crypto. This can't be detected without going through the legal process of obtaining a key, so widespread scanning for non-approved crypto will only turn up the conscientious objectors and a few really dumb folk. Then again, some people say stupidity should be a crime...
Where they find encrypted data they can't characterise it any further; so they hit a brick wall. But its not common right now, so they can make a file. However, if everyone on the internet routinely uses uncrackable encryption they can't build a file on everyone.
If I understand you correctly and you're saying that crypto isn't common right now, that's not true. Salespeople around the US have been selling Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to companies for a few years now, and these encrypt all traffic between a company's sites. While there almost certainly is still much more unencrypted traffic on the net than encrypted traffic, encrypted traffic is far too common for the government to be building a file on every instance they encounter.
Many lawyers use encrypted email because of legal precedent which makes email less legally "privileged" than say a phone conversation.
Then there are all the/. nerds using SSH to talk to their servers. Do you think the FBI or NSA has a file on Shoeboy?
Everyday use of encryption is a lot more common than you might imagine.
Perhaps the logical faculties of a Masturbating Vulcan are impaired, so I'll explain it to you:
1. You criticized someone for misrepresenting the DMCA.
2. You misrepresented the DMCA yourself.
3. I simply pointed out this inconsistency
You're correct in noting that this has nothing to do with the original poster's topic, so there's hope for your logical faculties yet. However, that doesn't negate your error. You are still guilty of doing what you were criticizing someone else for doing, in the very same message.
The DMCA is a revision to copyright law that prohibits trafficking in circumvention devices.
The DMCA also deals with fair use of digital materials; service provider liability and the takedown clause that allows copyright holders to shut down web sites that they believe violate their copyright, without trial or prior review; protection of copyright management information; digital "performances"; allowing copying related to maintenance and repair of computers; and more. The DMCA consists of five separate "Titles" each dealing with a different area, of which anti-circumvention is only one. See this summary, for example.
Obfuscating the purpose of the DMCA lessens the logicical correctness of our argument against it and in so doing weakens our cause. In the future, please be more vigilant.
Did you actually read the Bruce Schneier article, or even the/. article? The quoted 99.99% rate is a theoretical one, used to illustrate the base rate fallacy under near-ideal circumstances. The illustrated problem is hugely amplified by the real-life recognition statistics.
For some statistics based on a real system, try Face recognition useless for crowd surveillance, from which I quote: "to detect 90 per cent of terrorists we'd need to raise an alarm for one in every three people passing through the airport. It's absolutely inconceivable that any security system could be built around this kind of performance."
Facial recognition cameras will take an additional burden off of our already overworked police departments, while at the same time, making the streets safer for our children. How can anyone NOT like the idea?
Darn! I musta bin trolled. You had me going there...
Well, Gartner didn't mention Apache. There are other Windows-based web servers, or Java-based web/application servers, that could replace IIS. I'd say that was a weak point in the Gartner report, but I'd guess they have non-gratis reports that cover that topic.
Did you read the Gartner report carefully? It said "enterprises hit by both Code Red and Nimda" should investigate alternatives. This implies that enterprises not hit by both worms don't need to switch.
If a company wasn't hit by both, presumably their security policies and procedures are either already up to scratch, or capable of being improved sufficiently. But if a company was hit by both, their procedures are probably beyond repair, and they'd be better off with a server that's more secure by default.
So I think Gartner was absolutely correct. Not only that, but people who didn't pick up that subtlety from the Gartner report are also more likely to need to switch servers, so the report works either way!:P
that if Exodus starts selling some of their real estate, my living-in-a-colo dream will come true! Screw that living in a wired warehouse crap. I want my building to be ON the backbone and protected from the strongest earthquakes and bomb attacks, et al. Yeah! I'll be l33t!
You realize you've just given either Neal Stephenson or William Gibson the framework for their next novel.
I can see it now, Hiro Protagonist will move from his U-Stor-It to the nearest Exodus IDC...
On the serious side, can anyone tell me how these places manage to lose so much money? Is it the labor, site or networking costs? It seems like web hosting should be an industry that, once you climb to the scale of Exodus, is really really profitable.
They lose money because they spent huge amounts of money to "build capacity" during the dot-com boom. That included buying up other hosting providers. Now many of their customers are gone, they have enormous excess capacity, and they can't service their debt load.
The fact that while money was easy, they wasted it horribly also doesn't help. The businesses that succeed are the ones that plan for the downturn, even as they are building capacity, rather than spending as if there's no tomorrow.
During the dot-com boom, the conventional wisdom (which, as is often the case, was actually foolishness) was that you had to spend big to gain market share to survive the coming shakeout. That's a little different from planning for a downturn: it's planning to be the biggest when the downturn comes.
It's like a game of chicken, where companies compete on how ludicrously they can overspend. In this environment, it's easy to lose sight of why you're spending the money, and get carried away. Strategic thinking is replaced by keeping-up-with-the-Amazons.
How else could the Aeron chair fad be explained???:)
Yeah I know this, but automation really depends on what the corporate controller says you can use as a desktop standard. [...] It really depends on where you work I guess. If you work for a company where IT isn't looked upon as a gigantic black hole where money goes and never returns, then yes, everything you outlined would be true. Believe me though, companies like the one you work for are a minority.
I'm a consultant, and getting clients to improve the way they run their IT operation is something I'm often involved with. It's often easier to initiate changes from the outside than from the inside, though.
If they look at IT as a giant black hole, then you could perhaps have some impact and get things working more the way you want by pointing out ways they can save money, and get more done for less, by streamlining the operation. If there are things they'd like IT to do that aren't getting done, point out to the appropriate person that you would have more time to spend on other things if, for example, they standardized on workstation hardware, or fixed some of your other pet peeves.
In cases where the wrong people are in charge (like the dev team), it can help to try to get support from outside IT. Again, this can be difficult as an non-managerial employee. At one company I worked with, I made a breakthrough when I managed to talk to one of the top sales managers, who had plenty of grievances about IT and was very willing to listen to ideas and pass them on higher up the chain, which got the CEO involved. Of course, if you're going to get into this sort of stuff as an employee, you'll need to tread very carefully!:)
>>Besides, you ought to have a clue about this: the slander that allegedly led you to lose your job could just as easily land you in jail in future, with laws like these. Be careful what you wish for.
I'm glad I actually took the time to read that, I almost mistook it for a flame but you're right! I must concede on that point alone.
Yeah, the problem with draconian laws is that they're usually designed to respond to a specific situation, with little thought to how they will be abused later on. I suspect we're going to see a fair amount of that in the coming months.
If I spraypainted, "I love Crystal" on your house wouldn't that be enough for you to want my ass in a sling?
I would assume that you were a misguided child or teenager, and I would want you parents to talk to you. But jail? Isn't that just a little extreme???
Most coders don't even give a second thought to how LONG it takes to prepare a PC for a user.
There are any number of ways to automate preparing a PC for a user, ranging from automated install scripts (we do this on both Linux and NT) to copying disk images, e.g. using Ghost. So if you're spending huge amounts of time preparing PCs for a user, perhaps you should take a closer look at what you're doing. Working harder instead of smarter may not cut it any more.
Just because a sysadmin wants someone's ass in a sling doesn't mean that's what should happen. There's fault on both sides. If you're employed professionally to prevent things like this from happening - e.g. to prevent children from defacing a company's website - and it happens anyway, well guess what - you didn't prioritize correctly, or slipped up some other way.
Intent plays a huge part in all of this, and it's unfortunately all too easy for the law to overlook, looking at the actions rather than the intent behind them.
Besides, you ought to have a clue about this: the slander that allegedly led you to lose your job could just as easily land you in jail in future, with laws like these. Be careful what you wish for.
What, if anything, are you doing to bridge this gap?
I don't think it's Phil Zimmerman's personal responsibility to address a very large problem that's not easily solved. Phil has already done more than most individuals ever do to promote freedom and liberty on a global scale. So rather ask the question "What, if anything, can be done to bridge this gap?"
So the obvious conclusion is, stop paying NASA to do stuff! Things clearly work better when they're retasking existing equipment to do something else, preferably involving a crash landing. From now on, we should forbid NASA to build anything other than Earth-orbit satellites.
But once the satellites are in orbit, heck, anything goes! Put people on 'em and send 'em to Mars! Or maybe skim the solar atmosphere! How about sending them to the nearest star at 0.9c? Or why not the galactic nucleus? There may be no limits to the potential of this new "non-funding" technology!!
Slashdot Mirror
This was demo'd at the Crusoe launch, but was not intended as a product. I don't know the current status of any Transmeta products related Java - does anyone else?
Katz could also get the info for free, e.g. from this page :
Please, feel free to boycott this movie because you don't like dumb American comedies (defined as almost anything involving an ex-cast member of SNL), but don't boycott it because it's politically insensitive. Don't confuse Ebert's inappropriate hand-wringing with political sensitivity.
Hey, ever heard of "automatic garbage collection"? Apparently Microsoft hasn't either...
One important reason that privacy and anonymous communication is important, is the effect on a society when normal mechanisms for societal functioning are suppressed. Anonymous communication is certainly a normal mechanism: "don't tell anyone I told you this, but..."
Your faith in your government and/or your country is admirable. However, you didn't mention Sen. McCarthy, for example, or the abuse of the RICO laws, or racial profiling, or any of the other ways in which freedoms and rights have been abused over the past few decades. Perhaps these things haven't affected you personally, but they've affected other people.
The US is to be admired for having survived these things with values relatively intact, but one big reason it does so is because the freedoms it provides its citizens allows those citizens to function without fear of reprisal for things they say or do, within reason. Once again, anonymous communication is an important part of that.
To put it in the terms you used, privacy and anonymous communications are an integral part of the values which you say add traction to the slippery slope. Take them away, and the slope becomes that much more slippery.
Don't join in the tyranny of the masses in calling for our rights to be taken away in the name of security - you're playing directly into the hands of those who would like to see the U.S. fall, allowing fear to dictate your actions, turning the country against itself, and making it weaker.
Fair use rights are well-enshrined in copyright law, and the word "right" is used explicitly. The DMCA doesn't take these rights away directly, but by allowing content providers to protect their work technically in any way they see fit, and making it illegal to circumvent such restrictions, fair use rights are in effect eliminated when copy protection is involved.
The fact that many people engage in "unfair use" doesn't change the fact that fair use has been dealt what may become a death blow. Certainly fair use can be, and has been, abused, apparently more so since the advent of digital technology, but again, does that justify the effective elimination of the concept? I don't think so.
For a summary of the legal justification for fair use, see Understanding Your Rights: The Public's Right of Fair Use.
http://www.microsoft.com/scripts/../../winnt/syste m32/cmd.exe?/c+dir
Stuff like this, or URLs containing Unicode characters or known-bad sequences like ::$DATA, would be easy to filter out. In fact, Microsoft has a program designed to install on IIS servers to do just that, called something like URLCheck, I forget exactly. This job could just as easily be done by a separate dedicated box, with a config page to allow the level of paranoia to be specified, or new URL blocking templates to be installed.
Yeah, it is amazing how Win2K can keep on functioning even when it is simultaneously infected with Code Red, Sadmind, and Nimda! The data rates produced by virus-generated GET requests are most impressive, and only exceeded by the rate at which IIS with ASP leaks memory. Microsoft and its "professional full fledged development team" have truly reached a pinnacle of performance and stability!
But of course as soon as two people can ssh into the same box and talk to each other, the banning of any other uses of encryption starts to look pretty irrelevant.
And of course, this is happening already. Without any effort on our part, beyond the initial setup of a VPN-style system, all email I exchange with colleagues is encrypted during transmission, because we all connect over a secure link to the same mail server.
Encrypted email wasn't our intent; all we cared about is that our network wouldn't be compromised by script kiddies with a sniffer at an ISP. But the net effect is that Carnivore won't help the government if they want to read our email: they would have to get a subpoena for our private mail server, or secretly install keyloggers, etc.
As far as I'm concerned, the war "against" encryption was lost a long time ago, and it's now just a matter of waiting for reality to catch up with the politicians. That's often a slow business, though.
To really drive the point home about how hard it is to factor these big numbers, check out the prize list for The RSA Factoring Challenge. If anyone doesn't believe that it's difficult, well, there's a total of about $635,000 waiting for the person who can prove that it's not!
Except that all you need to do is doubly-encrypt your messages - first with strong crypto, then with government-approved crypto. This can't be detected without going through the legal process of obtaining a key, so widespread scanning for non-approved crypto will only turn up the conscientious objectors and a few really dumb folk. Then again, some people say stupidity should be a crime...
If I understand you correctly and you're saying that crypto isn't common right now, that's not true. Salespeople around the US have been selling Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to companies for a few years now, and these encrypt all traffic between a company's sites. While there almost certainly is still much more unencrypted traffic on the net than encrypted traffic, encrypted traffic is far too common for the government to be building a file on every instance they encounter.
Many lawyers use encrypted email because of legal precedent which makes email less legally "privileged" than say a phone conversation.
Then there are all the /. nerds using SSH to talk to their servers. Do you think the FBI or NSA has a file on Shoeboy?
Everyday use of encryption is a lot more common than you might imagine.
Perhaps the logical faculties of a Masturbating Vulcan are impaired, so I'll explain it to you:
1. You criticized someone for misrepresenting the DMCA.
2. You misrepresented the DMCA yourself.
3. I simply pointed out this inconsistency
You're correct in noting that this has nothing to do with the original poster's topic, so there's hope for your logical faculties yet. However, that doesn't negate your error. You are still guilty of doing what you were criticizing someone else for doing, in the very same message.
You have a nice day now.
The DMCA also deals with fair use of digital materials; service provider liability and the takedown clause that allows copyright holders to shut down web sites that they believe violate their copyright, without trial or prior review; protection of copyright management information; digital "performances"; allowing copying related to maintenance and repair of computers; and more. The DMCA consists of five separate "Titles" each dealing with a different area, of which anti-circumvention is only one. See this summary, for example.
Obfuscating the purpose of the DMCA lessens the logicical correctness of our argument against it and in so doing weakens our cause. In the future, please be more vigilant.
Pot, meet kettle!
For some statistics based on a real system, try Face recognition useless for crowd surveillance, from which I quote: "to detect 90 per cent of terrorists we'd need to raise an alarm for one in every three people passing through the airport. It's absolutely inconceivable that any security system could be built around this kind of performance."
Darn! I musta bin trolled. You had me going there...
Well, Gartner didn't mention Apache. There are other Windows-based web servers, or Java-based web/application servers, that could replace IIS. I'd say that was a weak point in the Gartner report, but I'd guess they have non-gratis reports that cover that topic.
If a company wasn't hit by both, presumably their security policies and procedures are either already up to scratch, or capable of being improved sufficiently. But if a company was hit by both, their procedures are probably beyond repair, and they'd be better off with a server that's more secure by default.
So I think Gartner was absolutely correct. Not only that, but people who didn't pick up that subtlety from the Gartner report are also more likely to need to switch servers, so the report works either way! :P
You realize you've just given either Neal Stephenson or William Gibson the framework for their next novel.
I can see it now, Hiro Protagonist will move from his U-Stor-It to the nearest Exodus IDC...
They lose money because they spent huge amounts of money to "build capacity" during the dot-com boom. That included buying up other hosting providers. Now many of their customers are gone, they have enormous excess capacity, and they can't service their debt load.
The fact that while money was easy, they wasted it horribly also doesn't help. The businesses that succeed are the ones that plan for the downturn, even as they are building capacity, rather than spending as if there's no tomorrow.
During the dot-com boom, the conventional wisdom (which, as is often the case, was actually foolishness) was that you had to spend big to gain market share to survive the coming shakeout. That's a little different from planning for a downturn: it's planning to be the biggest when the downturn comes.
It's like a game of chicken, where companies compete on how ludicrously they can overspend. In this environment, it's easy to lose sight of why you're spending the money, and get carried away. Strategic thinking is replaced by keeping-up-with-the-Amazons.
How else could the Aeron chair fad be explained??? :)
I'm a consultant, and getting clients to improve the way they run their IT operation is something I'm often involved with. It's often easier to initiate changes from the outside than from the inside, though.
If they look at IT as a giant black hole, then you could perhaps have some impact and get things working more the way you want by pointing out ways they can save money, and get more done for less, by streamlining the operation. If there are things they'd like IT to do that aren't getting done, point out to the appropriate person that you would have more time to spend on other things if, for example, they standardized on workstation hardware, or fixed some of your other pet peeves.
In cases where the wrong people are in charge (like the dev team), it can help to try to get support from outside IT. Again, this can be difficult as an non-managerial employee. At one company I worked with, I made a breakthrough when I managed to talk to one of the top sales managers, who had plenty of grievances about IT and was very willing to listen to ideas and pass them on higher up the chain, which got the CEO involved. Of course, if you're going to get into this sort of stuff as an employee, you'll need to tread very carefully! :)
Yeah, the problem with draconian laws is that they're usually designed to respond to a specific situation, with little thought to how they will be abused later on. I suspect we're going to see a fair amount of that in the coming months.
I would assume that you were a misguided child or teenager, and I would want you parents to talk to you. But jail? Isn't that just a little extreme???
Most coders don't even give a second thought to how LONG it takes to prepare a PC for a user.
There are any number of ways to automate preparing a PC for a user, ranging from automated install scripts (we do this on both Linux and NT) to copying disk images, e.g. using Ghost. So if you're spending huge amounts of time preparing PCs for a user, perhaps you should take a closer look at what you're doing. Working harder instead of smarter may not cut it any more.
Just because a sysadmin wants someone's ass in a sling doesn't mean that's what should happen. There's fault on both sides. If you're employed professionally to prevent things like this from happening - e.g. to prevent children from defacing a company's website - and it happens anyway, well guess what - you didn't prioritize correctly, or slipped up some other way.
Intent plays a huge part in all of this, and it's unfortunately all too easy for the law to overlook, looking at the actions rather than the intent behind them.
Besides, you ought to have a clue about this: the slander that allegedly led you to lose your job could just as easily land you in jail in future, with laws like these. Be careful what you wish for.
I don't think it's Phil Zimmerman's personal responsibility to address a very large problem that's not easily solved. Phil has already done more than most individuals ever do to promote freedom and liberty on a global scale. So rather ask the question "What, if anything, can be done to bridge this gap?"
So the obvious conclusion is, stop paying NASA to do stuff! Things clearly work better when they're retasking existing equipment to do something else, preferably involving a crash landing. From now on, we should forbid NASA to build anything other than Earth-orbit satellites.
But once the satellites are in orbit, heck, anything goes! Put people on 'em and send 'em to Mars! Or maybe skim the solar atmosphere! How about sending them to the nearest star at 0.9c? Or why not the galactic nucleus? There may be no limits to the potential of this new "non-funding" technology!!
I love you too, AC!
Hey, with a bit of work, you might actually get the point!