If the secrecy surprises you, you haven't been keeping up with your/. reading. Several people have been working on a Linux port to Mercer under NDA including Cygnus, VA Research and IBM. Once the chip is released, the source code can and will be released.
"Do you admit that you sold these products to businesses that were crucial to the infrastructure of America, and yet did nothing to enforce or even implement the basest security of Macros, Mr. Gates?"
Oh, but our lawyers assured me that our EULA means that we can't be held responsible no matter what our software does.
Dave Cutler joined Microsoft from Digital before it became obvious that MS was the Evil Empire. At that time (pre-1987, I realize that's prehistoric to many/. readers) IBM was the Emperor to fear. Subsequent to the 1987 announcement of PS/2 systems with MCA and OS/2 the users eventually realized that the Emperor had no clothes.
Microsoft only came out from under IBM's shadow after the market success of Windown 3 when MS broke off development of OS/2 with IBM in favor of developing NT.
Frankly, I've never run Shockwave. I have a strict policy of not running Active X components on the systems that I use. I don't feel that my web experience is lacking by not having used it. Then again, I often use lynx. I use the web to get information (or what passes for information on the web) and, with all due respect for your site, dancing baloney just dosn't cut it for me.
But I see your point that there are users who want it. In that sense it is good to have it available.
Good link, thanks. There was one line I liked particularly: So when I met Jake Lloyd and realized that Ender might be played by a child actor who would not culkinize the character, I was able to rethink the entire project. [emphasis added]
as for the celerons; they were designed to be a "stripped down" version of p2 (and with the new one, p3). thus the celeron shouldn't support things like smp. and imho, shouldn't support the simd extensions. by all means, use the.18 fab because it allows higher clock speeds and lower heat, but adding features that should only belong to the QUOTE High Performance/QUOTE processors.
IBM invented "functional pricing" in the 50s. At that time they had two similar models of printers that differed in the number of pages per minute printed. The faster model printed twice as many and leased for twice as much per month. If you wanted to upgrade from the slower to that faster model, IBM would send out a tech to do a "field upgrade". In this case, the field upgrade consisted of replacing one of the wheels in the drive train with one half as large and replacing the plate with the model number. They tried to do the same thing with Lexmark laser printers some years ago. The only thing different between the high performance and low performance models of one printer was that one had a ROM that wasted half of the processor's cycles in idle loops.
when a monopolist can protect their margins and price structure with type of predatory pricing, it's usually called "unfair competition". In the case of the Celeron, the chip is functionally capable of SMP operations. Intel only disables it to protect the higher prices on the "High Performance" line.
AOL absolutely has the right to keep their protocol proprietary, and in fact I think that MS's use of AOL's servers via OSCAR is tantamount to theft of services.
I agree that AOL has a right to keep its protocol proprietary. I also have a right not to use it. This is exactly why I don't use AOL IM.
Productivity is not profits. Productivity is output divided by labor used to produce it. There are several measures of productivity in use. One is GDP divided by size of the labor force. Output for manufacturing is generally easy to calculate. It is the value of product produced. The problem is the definition of output for service industries. It is generally taken to be the cost of the inputs. Spending more in a service industry to get more value per worker actually decreases productivity as we currently measure it. Here's a link to a paper on the problems with interpreting Productivity Stastistics and a short quote.
Zvi Griliches (1994) presented some evidence on the plausibility of the mismeasurement view. He classified output into sectors that were relatively "measurable," such as manufacturing, and "unmeasurable," such as finance. He then noted that the fraction of output in measurable sectors had declined over time.
Exactly. Economists don't know how to measure productivity in the service economy. In manufacturing, productivity is easy to measure -- how much product can you make with one employee's time. If you can make more product with the same number of employees or the same amount of product with fewer, your productivity has gone up. As our economy moves more into the service sector, our productivity statistics become more and more meaningless.
Granted, some of our productivity increase from automation is eaten up in increased requirements. In my own field (Life insurance) processes and analyses that was beyond the available technology 15 years ago is now commonplace. (Run 1,500 interest rate scenarios and calculate the present value of cash flows under each by next Wednesday.) A lot of my new found productivity goes into satisfying new regulatory requirements.
Idiot. Turing extended Godel's work in non-obvious ways. Almost all of mathematics is an extension of someone else's work. After Godel's Incompleteness Theory was published, there was hope that mathematics could at least prove all of the provable theories i.e. that decidability could replace completeness. Turing's very original work demonstrated that decidability was as elusive as incompleteness. To prove this he came up with the very original idea of a state machine that performed calculations, i.e. a Turing Machine. He proved that decidability was equivalent to proving that a given TM program stopped and then proved that you can not prove that a given TM program will stop.
The biography _Alan Turin: The Enigma_ gives a good description of the Enigma machine.
There's a typewriter keyboard with 26 keys and bulbs. When you strike a key a bulb lights up encrypting the letter. Then the machine changes state.
The state of the machine is defined by a series of rotors. Each rotor has 26 contacts and effectively swaps two letters. When the machine changes state, one or more rotors advances one position (out of 26) like an odometer. Typically, one wheel was fixed and three rotated with each letter encrypted.
As an additional complication, there was a plugboard at the back that swapped additional pairs of letters. (stecklered in the Turing paper).
Since the entire mechanism swapped letters, you only had to reproduce the initial state of the other machine and type in the cyphertext to extract the plaintext. Effectively, each letter in the plaintext was encripted with a different substitution cipher. Each substitution cipher was related to the subsequent ones by a complicated transformation.
IIRC, the order of the rotors and plugboard were sent out in codebooks and changed once a day. The initial position of the rotors was given in the first few characters of the ciphertext. At midnight every day, the codebreakers had an entirely new problem to solve -- determine that day's rotor position and plugboard settings. Once that was done, the entire day's communications could be read.
Their efforts were aided by the fact that German communiques often started identically. If you can guess what the first 15 letters of the plaintext are, you can make a lot of progress
The Polish mathematicians made a lot of progress with Enigma before Poland was overrun. They deduced the wiring of the wheels without having access to an actual machine. In a classic example of the failure of Security Through Obscurity, Enigma was thoroughly cracked fairly early in the war and the German command never believed that it had been broken. Late in the war they added additional rotors to the supply that kept the Bletchley group on their toes, but didn't significantly impede their ability to crack Enigma.
There are several requirements for a valid contract. One of these is consideration. What do I get in exchange for giving up all my money? If I get nothing, there's no consideration. In your black box example and similar examples given here about writing on the sidewalk there is no consideration.
Another is called Meeting of the Minds -- everyone has to have all of the terms of the contract available to agree to them. This dosn't mean the terms have to be negotiable. (Contracts where you are offered terms take it or leave it i.e. insurance contracts are called contracts of adhesion and are very much enforcable. Though ambiguous clauses are interpreted against the drafter of the contract.)
This agreement, while perhaps not enforcable on the first lookup, is likely enforceable on subsequent lookups. The agreement itself is really not onerous. Here is some information (that may be valuable to you -- consideration), in exchange for that information you agree to two things: (a) don't spam with it. (b) don't put too big a burden on our servers.
That's quite an improvement over the old agreement.
Others have given the cp -a and tar solutions to copying your files. When I have done this, I created a new entry in/etc/lilo.conf with the label 'new' and made sure I could boot into the new partition before giving up the old partition. After I got it to work, I put a label 'old' in the new/etc/lilo.conf (where the default boot label was new) and kept the old one around for a week to make sure there weren't any issues.
According to this person, (Surprise!) Microsoft insisted on language to the effect that SGI wouldn't support a competing OS environment on the same hardware. SGI's strategy for getting around this is supposed to be to focus their Linux efforts on things that can be branded "servers" until the agreement runs out.
As much as I'd like to believe this, I think that contract provisions such as his would have come up in US vs. Microsoft.
It's ironic how people are advocating server-based solutions to deep linking, yet complain when AOL imposes limitations on MS's use of it's IM servers. How come there are no complaints about the way Ask Jeeves puts its frames around content that it links to?
Hey providers, you make content and services available. You have the right and technical ability to determine who uses your servers and for what purpose. Using lawyers is the wrong way to resolve technical problems.
That said, I think that it is unethical to repackage someone else's content within your frames without explicit permission.
Furthermore, the Bill of Rights states that other, unenumaterated rights exist. The right to privacy which many of us here zealously guard is not enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but rather, was declared by the Supreme Court.
There's probably a dozen reasons why this wouldn't work well in practice. Differences in latency could make it difficult to reassemble packets into a coherent stream. Also you would typically be dealing with a different provider so that routing becomes a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also "alignment". If a poster's comments are consistantly moderated up (or down), his default posting score is increased (or decreased).
Is there something going on that he dosn't want us to see?
If the secrecy surprises you, you haven't been keeping up with your /. reading. Several people have been working on a Linux port to Mercer under NDA including Cygnus, VA Research and IBM. Once the chip is released, the source code can and will be released.
"Do you admit that you sold these products to businesses that were crucial to the infrastructure of America, and yet did nothing to enforce or even implement the basest security of Macros, Mr. Gates?"
Oh, but our lawyers assured me that our EULA means that we can't be held responsible no matter what our software does.
Except that your lag will make it seem like you're on another planet.
Dave Cutler joined Microsoft from Digital before it became obvious that MS was the Evil Empire. At that time (pre-1987, I realize that's prehistoric to many /. readers) IBM was the Emperor to fear. Subsequent to the 1987 announcement of PS/2 systems with MCA and OS/2 the users eventually realized that the Emperor had no clothes.
Microsoft only came out from under IBM's shadow after the market success of Windown 3 when MS broke off development of OS/2 with IBM in favor of developing NT.
Frankly, I've never run Shockwave. I have a strict policy of not running Active X components on the systems that I use. I don't feel that my web experience is lacking by not having used it. Then again, I often use lynx. I use the web to get information (or what passes for information on the web) and, with all due respect for your site, dancing baloney just dosn't cut it for me.
But I see your point that there are users who want it. In that sense it is good to have it available.
Q. What product do we least want to see ported to Linux, Alex?
Good link, thanks. There was one line I liked particularly: So when I met Jake Lloyd and realized that Ender might be played by a child actor who would not culkinize the character, I was able to rethink the entire project. [emphasis added]
as for the celerons; they were designed to be a "stripped down" version of p2 (and with the new one, p3). thus the celeron shouldn't support things like smp. and imho, shouldn't support the simd extensions. by all means, use the .18 fab because it allows higher clock speeds and lower heat, but adding features that should only belong to the QUOTE High Performance /QUOTE processors.
IBM invented "functional pricing" in the 50s. At that time they had two similar models of printers that differed in the number of pages per minute printed. The faster model printed twice as many and leased for twice as much per month. If you wanted to upgrade from the slower to that faster model, IBM would send out a tech to do a "field upgrade". In this case, the field upgrade consisted of replacing one of the wheels in the drive train with one half as large and replacing the plate with the model number. They tried to do the same thing with Lexmark laser printers some years ago. The only thing different between the high performance and low performance models of one printer was that one had a ROM that wasted half of the processor's cycles in idle loops.
when a monopolist can protect their margins and price structure with type of predatory pricing, it's usually called "unfair competition". In the case of the Celeron, the chip is functionally capable of SMP operations. Intel only disables it to protect the higher prices on the "High Performance" line.
AOL absolutely has the right to keep their protocol proprietary, and in fact I think that MS's use of AOL's servers via OSCAR is tantamount to theft of services.
I agree that AOL has a right to keep its protocol proprietary. I also have a right not to use it. This is exactly why I don't use AOL IM.
Productivity is not profits. Productivity is output divided by labor used to produce it. There are several measures of productivity in use. One is GDP divided by size of the labor force. Output for manufacturing is generally easy to calculate. It is the value of product produced. The problem is the definition of output for service industries. It is generally taken to be the cost of the inputs. Spending more in a service industry to get more value per worker actually decreases productivity as we currently measure it. Here's a link to a paper on the problems with interpreting Productivity Stastistics and a short quote.
Zvi Griliches (1994) presented some evidence on the plausibility of the mismeasurement view. He classified output into sectors that were relatively "measurable," such as manufacturing, and "unmeasurable," such as finance. He then noted that the fraction of output in measurable sectors had declined over time.
Exactly. Economists don't know how to measure productivity in the service economy. In manufacturing, productivity is easy to measure -- how much product can you make with one employee's time. If you can make more product with the same number of employees or the same amount of product with fewer, your productivity has gone up. As our economy moves more into the service sector, our productivity statistics become more and more meaningless.
Granted, some of our productivity increase from automation is eaten up in increased requirements. In my own field (Life insurance) processes and analyses that was beyond the available technology 15 years ago is now commonplace. (Run 1,500 interest rate scenarios and calculate the present value of cash flows under each by next Wednesday.) A lot of my new found productivity goes into satisfying new regulatory requirements.
I know how the machine worked and I had a difficult time following Turing's dense explanation.
Each rotor has 26 contacts and effectively swaps two letters.
That should be: Each rotor has 26 contacts that swaps 13 pairs of letters. (i.e a reversable substitution cipher)
Idiot. Turing extended Godel's work in non-obvious ways. Almost all of mathematics is an extension of someone else's work. After Godel's Incompleteness Theory was published, there was hope that mathematics could at least prove all of the provable theories i.e. that decidability could replace completeness. Turing's very original work demonstrated that decidability was as elusive as incompleteness. To prove this he came up with the very original idea of a state machine that performed calculations, i.e. a Turing Machine. He proved that decidability was equivalent to proving that a given TM program stopped and then proved that you can not prove that a given TM program will stop.
The biography _Alan Turin: The Enigma_ gives a good description of the Enigma machine.
There's a typewriter keyboard with 26 keys and bulbs. When you strike a key a bulb lights up encrypting the letter. Then the machine changes state.
The state of the machine is defined by a series of rotors. Each rotor has 26 contacts and effectively swaps two letters. When the machine changes state, one or more rotors advances one position (out of 26) like an odometer. Typically, one wheel was fixed and three rotated with each letter encrypted.
As an additional complication, there was a plugboard at the back that swapped additional pairs of letters. (stecklered in the Turing paper).
Since the entire mechanism swapped letters, you only had to reproduce the initial state of the other machine and type in the cyphertext to extract the plaintext. Effectively, each letter in the plaintext was encripted with a different substitution cipher. Each substitution cipher was related to the subsequent ones by a complicated transformation.
IIRC, the order of the rotors and plugboard were sent out in codebooks and changed once a day. The initial position of the rotors was given in the first few characters of the ciphertext. At midnight every day, the codebreakers had an entirely new problem to solve -- determine that day's rotor position and plugboard settings. Once that was done, the entire day's communications could be read.
Their efforts were aided by the fact that German communiques often started identically. If you can guess what the first 15 letters of the plaintext are, you can make a lot of progress
The Polish mathematicians made a lot of progress with Enigma before Poland was overrun. They deduced the wiring of the wheels without having access to an actual machine. In a classic example of the failure of Security Through Obscurity, Enigma was thoroughly cracked fairly early in the war and the German command never believed that it had been broken. Late in the war they added additional rotors to the supply that kept the Bletchley group on their toes, but didn't significantly impede their ability to crack Enigma.
There are several requirements for a valid contract. One of these is consideration. What do I get in exchange for giving up all my money? If I get nothing, there's no consideration.
In your black box example and similar examples given here about writing on the sidewalk there is no consideration.
Another is called Meeting of the Minds -- everyone has to have all of the terms of the contract available to agree to them. This dosn't mean the terms have to be negotiable. (Contracts where you are offered terms take it or leave it i.e. insurance contracts are called contracts of adhesion and are very much enforcable. Though ambiguous clauses are interpreted against the drafter of the contract.)
This agreement, while perhaps not enforcable on the first lookup, is likely enforceable on subsequent lookups. The agreement itself is really not onerous. Here is some information (that may be valuable to you -- consideration), in exchange for that information you agree to two things:
(a) don't spam with it.
(b) don't put too big a burden on our servers.
That's quite an improvement over the old agreement.
Others have given the cp -a and tar solutions to copying your files. When I have done this, I created a new entry in /etc/lilo.conf with the label 'new' and made sure I could boot into the new partition before giving up the old partition. After I got it to work, I put a label 'old' in the new /etc/lilo.conf (where the default boot label was new) and kept the old one around for a week to make sure there weren't any issues.
Of course, a verdict is nowhere from the end. This'll drag through the appellate courts for another couple of years.
According to this person, (Surprise!) Microsoft insisted on language to the effect that SGI wouldn't support a competing OS environment on the same hardware. SGI's strategy for getting around this is supposed to be to focus their Linux efforts on things that can be branded "servers" until the agreement runs out.
As much as I'd like to believe this, I think that contract provisions such as his would have come up in US vs. Microsoft.
It's ironic how people are advocating server-based solutions to deep linking, yet complain when AOL imposes limitations on MS's use of it's IM servers. How come there are no complaints about the way Ask Jeeves puts its frames around content that it links to?
Hey providers, you make content and services available. You have the right and technical ability to determine who uses your servers and for what purpose. Using lawyers is the wrong way to resolve technical problems.
That said, I think that it is unethical to repackage someone else's content within your frames without explicit permission.
Furthermore, the Bill of Rights states that other, unenumaterated rights exist. The right to privacy which many of us here zealously guard is not enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but rather, was declared by the Supreme Court.
I've seen plenty more brutal movies than The Matrix - in fact, The Matrix kinda trivialised the violence by making such a thing of it.
Frankly, that's the real problem in our society, the trivialization of violence. Violence is never trivial to the victim.
There's probably a dozen reasons why this wouldn't work well in practice. Differences in latency could make it difficult to reassemble packets into a coherent stream. Also you would typically be dealing with a different provider so that routing becomes a problem.