...then at least kept in encrypted files as per FIPS-180. (Yes, that's a Federal standard, but damnit, States should abide by SOME standards. Well, given the VA fiasco, it would be nice if the Federal Government did as well...)
First off, you are right that direct access is Bad. Very Bad. In fact, internal systems should ideally be going through proxies and a firewall to prevent random applications (such as viruses) from setting up their own connections. For what is presumably a fairly low-bandwidth facility, they could probably even use layer 7 filtering and block unauthorized applications even if they did have all the correct passwords/tokens and port numbers.
Secondly, you are also correct that the data should not have been kept on a computer with such access. Normally, you'd have a private intranet that cannot access the outside world at all for sensitive data. There is no excuse for keeping data like that on a high-risk machine that may well be portscanned and attacked every few minutes anyway.
Then, there's the problem with the fact that the data was presumably in plain-text. If it was encrypted to any reasonable standard, there wouldn't have been any fuss made. Furthermore, since the trojan was presumably not designed with Oregon taxes in mind, it would have necessarily been your normal harvester looking in normal files. My suspicion is that the most likely place for the data to have been harvested would have been in e-mail. Anything else would require a disk search and that would have been amazingly obvious, even to the most idiotic. If (and I emphasise the if) I am correct and the data was indeed in an e-mail, then why the hell were they e-mailing plain-text files containing this kind of data? Particularly as it's so easy to e-mail the wrong person, using modern e-mail clients that guess at addresses.
I would very much like to see a requirement that ALL sensitive and personal data that is even potentially exposed to the Internet be encrypted using strong algorithms and strong keys, and that unnecessary risks with other peoples personal data be strongly penalized. (By my way of thinking, since the flaws in the VA office had been known for many years and never addressed by the Federal government even though the GAO had been sending up the red flags, rockets and flying saucers, those whose data was taken should be entitled to compensation at least equal to the cost they will have to endure to salvage and protect what they can.)
There is no excuse for insecure practices. There are far too many solutions, including free ones, that are easy enough, fast enough and secure enough to excuse delinquency on the part of any agency or (in e-commerce data theft cases) any corporation that puts laziness as a higher priority than standards.
I don't believe in a free market, because "free markets" invariably transfer control from a (largely) unrepresentative ogliarchy of politicians to a (totally) unrepresentative ogliarchy of corporations. Yeah, I know, vote Cthulhu - why go for the lesser of two evils? The "free market", as implemented, needs so many constraints and so much oversight in order to prevent it from degenerating totally that it's not meaningfully free anyway. It's better than a lot of alternatives, but that's only because the alternatives would make a satanist green with envy.
Really, there is almost no real way of supporting an artist. There are way too many hands dipping into their pockets. That's possibly why labels were so keen on artists getting high on drugs in the 60s and 70s - easier to steal from, if they're not concious. Even adding a token of appreciation in fan mail would be unlikely to get through. Whoever has been hired to answer the mail would be more than able to lift it without anybody being any the wiser.
If there's a workable solution, then it will require some major restructuring of how things are done. The existing mechanisms don't cut it and cannot be patched to cut it.
I've installed a Wiki at work for collaboration. Most ignore it (and bitch about the lack of collaboration tools), but a few use it. Ideally, you'd want to tie in a filter for MS Office documents, so that people could upload Word or Excel files and have them rendered (much the same way Yahoo's e-mail can - well, some of the time). There are a LOT of wiki systems out there (MediaWiki, IkeWiki, etc) which are good at different things. If this sounds like a good approach, then I'd suggest doing a little research to see which wiki system best lines up with what people would use it for.
Databases for storing just plain data are good, and both Postgres and MySQL have Windows binaries. In general, Access has a slightly better user interface (the others really only have engines and people are supposed to develop their own engines) but interfaces that are very usable do exist and may be quite adequate for basic office usage.
Seriously, you are correct. People don't buy music in order to benefit the labels. The labels have a right to make money, I have no problem with that, but I DO have a problem with them guilt-tripping the customers and then (to add insult to injury) ripping off the artists as well.
iTunes takes way too big a slice, but let's be fair on them - look at their role models! Theft is bad - I think we can all agree on that - but that applies to all parties concerned, not just students (and they usually buy the product later anyway, which doesn't kill the claim of theft but does bruise it somewhat). And, of course, it's not just labels. More than a few agents and managers have been sued over unpaid royalties, sometimes in the order of a few tens of millions.
I have nothing but respect for those who want to instill a culture of paying artists a fair day's wage for a fair day's work. It's about time. I've nothing but contempt for those who claim that as a pretext whilst robbing the artists (and customers) blind.
The full description of the speeds and characteristics of the lines can be found on any number of technical websites. I cribbed the speeds from Made IT. CompTech have a nice intro/overview as well.
I was thinking more in the same way roofnets had destroyed the cell phone industry in the year 2000, due to unlinited free VoIP. You didn't hear about that?
If you're a corporation, you might buy a T1, T3 or even a T4 line. (No sane person buys T2, as fractional T3 is usually going to be cheaper.) You might even buy a service plan that "guarantees" you a certain AVERAGE bit-rate (except that there are so many get-out clauses that the guarantee isn't worth the paper it is written on), but you NEVER pay per packet, and CERTAINLY NEVER pay per bit.
(The closest I've ever seen to a pay-per-packet scheme was the old Packet Switch Stream service from British Telecom, which charged per connection to the X.25 exchange AND per minute of connection AND per K of data sent AND per unit of time you spent on the phone line to use their bloody server in the first place. Sure, there's a per-K in there, but it was so small as to be a negliagible fraction of the total cost. And that WAS to end-users, so even there the claim is incorrect.)
Peer-to-Peer backbone routing is usually at a nominal cost, as the whole idea of peering is that each network accesses the other networks equally in all directions with no bias or preference. Of course, if the preferential service system goes into effect, the entire backbone will collapse. It's impossible to have preferential service in a totally peer-based network.
Well, if you stopped sitting on the pocketbook, it wouldn't hurt so much.
Translation #1: If we're addicted to oil, then the price of oil is immaterial. R&D doesn't happen by magic, it requires funding and it requires time. Lots of funding and LOTS of time. Getting alternative energy sources to the point where they will be viable alternatives - not just in cost per joule of energy, but in terms of how much you can produce - is going to take decades if not centuries at the current snail's pace. We don't have centuries and we might not have decades.)
Translation #2: Europeans, especially the British, have been paying $6-$8 per gallon for many years. They also have a 17.5% sales tax, and a far higher income tax than Americans. Strangely, their poverty levels are vastly LOWER than those in the US, as are their homelessness levels. America gets 60% of kids through high school, Britain gets over 60% through University. Sometimes, giving can produce a vastly superior return.
Translation #3: Industry is notoriously inefficient when it comes to energy. If they can be coerced into reducing CO2 emissions by improving their efficiency levels, then it will not only lead to greater profits for them, it will ALSO lead to cheaper goods for you. And this is somehow supposed to hurt you?
Translation #4: A very big source of CO2 is car exhaust. Trust me on this, you do NOT need an SUV to do the weekly shopping, especially if the shop is just at the end of the driveway. I've seen people drive their car to pick up the mail at their front gate! In South Carolina, Charleston and Mount Pleasent refused Federal funds to build a light rail between the two cities. Because it wouldn't be used? No, it was popular. Because it would cost them? No, it was going to be paid for Federally. Then why? Because they bickered for so long as to who got to control it, the program finished before they could get past their own egos.
I have absolutely bugger all sympathy for those who dread a reduction in CO2, because it is so blatantly obvious that it would benefit everyone. Not just in the long term (by not frying the planet) but in the short term as well (by boosting industry, reducing costs and improving technology). Yes, REDUCING carbon dioxide emissions will actually INCREASE employment and BOOST the economy. Why do you think that the MORE efficient a country is, the BETTER the economy is? If the reverse were true, why isn't East Germany thrasing the US? After all, it generates vastly more pollution which must surely mean they're doing things more cheaply, right?
I don't know how many times it needs to be spelled out, but one-off costs such as improving production techniques will ALWAYS by trumped by the boost in productivity that results. There is an assinine assumption that reducing emissions means doing less, but the only thing that holds true for is politics and cynics. And in those cases, the world would surely benefit anyway. Reducing emissions, in a competitive, evolving market will ALWAYS produce MORE productivity, simply because the only way to survive is to do things better.
The vendor is clearly in the wrong. The EU, for example, has made it clear that interfaces are not copyrightable and that reverse-engineering interfaces is legit. Furthermore, interfaces are generally NOT protected by NDAs, no matter what Hifn claims. I was able to download data sheets, APIs and bleep knows what else from Motorola's old chip unit (I think it's now called Freescale) without signing anything, without answering any questions and without agreeing to a damn thing. If NDAs were normal, you'd think a company like Motorola would have heard about it by now.
I do agree with Theo that if the information is not free, then vendors should not expect OS writers to bend their principles to include it. On the flip-side, I don't want OpenBSD (or any other free OS) to be impacted by stupidity on the part of vendors if there's anything I can do to help.
My only question of Theo and the OpenBSD folks is: Is there anything that those of us who reject Hifn's arguments as absurd and contrary to accepted practices can do to help? (Well, besides not supporting Hifn in any way.)
This is clearly a case where differences in any other opinion should be irrelevent. Theo deserves support on this. Open Source in general deserves support on this.
A house divided against itself cannot stand. No more so, then, should you expect a country whose populace and government are so divided. And I say unto you, love thine enemy, and if he should strike you on the left cheek, turn the right to him also. And, verily, those without sin may cast the first stone. If you are not without sin, by whose right may you castigate your political opponent, or deny those who call upon him to speak for them their right to have voice?
Occam is like that, where all sizes are known in advance. There's an excellent native Occam compiler (KROC) which will work on a number of CPUs these days. (That's important to note, as Occam was originally written with the Transputer in mind. Which was a damn good processor for the time.)
Answering the speed of Java question seems easy enough - just compile the code with GCJ to get the native version, run the same code under a JIT engine, and then run it a third time as pure bytecode. My guess is that the code will run faster when natively compiled, and that the difference will increase as the complexity of code increases.
The other thing to bear in mind is that CPUs are designed around procedural code, NOT functional design and certainly not object-oriented principles. Code written in a non-native paradigm is essentially cross-compiled to the native paradigm and there must surely be some loss of efficiency there. I suspect that if you were to build a CPU where the design and instruction set was modelled after Smalltalk, then compiled C would probably run slower than interpreted Smalltalk, as the interpreter would be a very thin layer over the CPU whereas the compiler would need to add an enormous wedge of compatibility code, adding overhead.
Is this possible? Well, as I mentioned earlier, the Transputer and the Occam language were built in tandem as a combined product. There was therefore a lot of benefit in writing in Occam, even though you could have used C and a cross-compiler. Occam was going to be faster, even though it could be a bear to program in at times. Clearly, high-level CPUs are indeed possible, although they are not trivial to design and seem to have proved very hard to maintain.
High-level CPUs were largely abandoned, as people moved to a hybrid RISC/CISC architecture. I think that CPU design is now sufficiently complex that higher levels of operation might be worth reconsidering. There, the difference between compiled and interpreted would collapse, as the instructions in the code would match the instructions on the CPU. At that point, compiled code would be pulled by the CPU and interpreted code pushed to the CPU, but what was executed and how would be identical.
This is NOT the case on existing CPUs, so this scenario is irrelevent. Code is far more complex than the assembly, which means optimizing compilers will always be faster than interpreters on such an architecture, and potentially so much faster that you might as well not bother with the difference.
It's tough to get more alternatives when the bar to entry is so impractically high as to essentially form a protected duopoly. Even Britain, where the bar is much lower, is struggling to form a third party with any significant influence. The Liberal Democrats - even when both Conservatives and Labour are discredited - actually LOST seats in the recent(ish) local byelections.
I have no idea how you could have a genuinely open, fair, multi-party system. It would presumably need to borrow some ideas from proportional representation, as that seems to be the only method of reliably getting multiple parties into politics. Italy, however, shows the risks of the opposite extreme - having too many parties. There, the former Prime Minister is actively working to bring down the current Government in an effort to pull off a coup and seize power. There very nearly wasn't a current Government, as he'd refused to step down even after losing the election.
My best guess at this time would be for the top two or three candidates to represent the constituancy in direct proportion to the percent of vote they received. So, a person getting 50% of the vote would have 50% of the voting block. This avoids the whole problem of what to do in a tie, as you'd simply have more than one person with the same voting strength.
I also think that the system needs a third, unelected house, where members are selected from the jury pool and who can place bills on trial, as per any other trial. The idea would be to have a group of anonymous people that lobbyists could not identify to corrupt, and who would retain any influence for such a short time that power itself could not corrupt them.
What I do not know is how you could implement either of these ideas within the framework of the US Constitution, or how they could be adapted to fit within the expectations of having a clear line of responsibility, or how they could be debugged on the basis of how political systems actually work in practice.
I guess that information, if anyone did have it, would be covered by this new IP treaty and could not, therefore, be divulged except at a great price.
I call it a possibility because, unless more books survived the destruction of the Great Alexandrian Library and other attempts to obliterate Classical civilization, we will never know for certain what the Greeks had managed to deduce from their knowledge. Our knowledge of ancient Greek civilization is fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. For example, there is evidence of the Greeks frowning on experimental science, preferring the purity of the abstract. This is one reason their steam engine never got anywhere. It never occured to them to see what it could actually do. However, Archimedes was unquestionably an experimental scientist and there is ample evidence of many others.
Our records of the work done are also sketchy. The recent recovery of a lost work of Archimedes being an example. There are many, many other works that have been lost and may never be recovered. Those works might easily have demonstrated a radically different Greece than the one supposed by historians. At present, the bounds of uncertainty exceed the limits of our knowledge, making any assumption on Greek knowledge hazardous at best.
"But, if they knew X and Y, they surely would have concluded Z!" There are too many exceptions even in modern times. From the late discovery of the blindingly obvious to the many disasters that have befallen every nation in the world, there are simply too many examples of people simply ignoring all evidence in front of them for their own reasons. We cannot assume that the Greeks were immune to this. But we should equally well not conclude that they failed to see what was right in front of them.
The tendancy of historians and archaeologists is to assume that anyone not from the here-and-now was ignorant and superstitious - except when they assume that those people were hyperintelligent megabeings. I think it reasonable to believe that no humans that have ever lived were really in either extreme. The more we learn, the better able we are to understand exactly where cultures were in the distant past, but we will never get more than tiny snippets from tiny fragments of those cultures. The best we can do is guess the most likely scenario, but that is still only a possibility, not a certainty.
...but probably not the first to think it. Microsoft's alliances have an interesting history, the most recent being cooperation with anti-virus corporations, followed by the sudden acquisition of one, followed by "accidently" including competing anti-virus products in the virus signature file. Microsoft's work with IBM on OS/2 (which led to Microsoft taking all the code for themselves and mangling Windows 3.11 to break OS/2's compatibility layer) was another example.
Sure, anyone can turn over a new leaf. That's always possible. But that won't stop the incidental music from Psycho from playing in my mind whenever I hear of Microsoft working with others. There are some areas where I think it might be safe. There's been no work on Linux' IBCS module for a long time. This would benefit Microsoft, as they could then run Linux software natively. That wouldn't hurt Linux too much, as many Unixes have been able to do this for a while, and the code is out there anyway. However, it would benefit Linux, precisely because other OS' can run Linux binaries but Linux can't run theirs without IBCS being brought up-to-date.
MPLS for Linux is another dead project that would be highly valuable to revive, and equally valuable to Microsoft to have for Windows. MOSIX and OpenMOSIX development has been at snail's pace over recent months - boo! - and Microsoft's clustering technology would certainly benefit from a comparable system, making a joint venture into improving this technology a definite plus for all sides.
If such ventures don't work out, Linux doesn't suffer because the level of work in these areas is small anyway. You can't lose by not getting what you wouldn't have had anyway. On the other hand, if they did work out, it would be an opportunity to develop extremely valuable technology with resources that would be extremely hard to muster by any other means.
To those who are contemplating any kind of alliance with Microsoft, however, just remember that the Computer is your friend. It says so. And if you don't agree, it may use you as reactor shielding.
If it were the only example, I'd agree with you. The Greeks had working steam power (not surpassed until the Industrial Revolution), an idea the solar system was centered on the sun, the beginnings of a theory of robotics, high-ranking female scientists, possibly a printing system (the Phaios Disk is printed, not written or carved) and maybe any number of discoveries we don't even know they had. The "dark ages" were not truly barbaric - art flourished then as it had never done before or ever since - but the total collapse of science and the loss of knowledge was a terrible tragedy. Not only did it put humanity 2,000 years behind on technology, but the re-learning devastated the environment and it is entirely possible that human civilization will not be capable of undoing the damage fast enough.
The Greeks collected knowledge from any and every civilization they could find, and anyone they didn't regard as civilized as well. The Greeks were also astonishingly good at geometry. It is therefore possible (not likely, just possible) that they collected enough information on ancient monuments (some of which were ancient even back then, as old to them as as the Mechanism is to us) to deduce cycles and patterns that were universal - ie: that would be seen, no matter where you were on the planet.
Another possibility is that they are totally distinct - the Greeks already knew the world was round, at least some had deduced that the solar system was centered on the sun, and there was a basic understanding that the planets were closer than the stars, but that they were all a gigantic distance away. Again, based on their superb understanding of geometry, it shouldn't have been too hard to produce a basic solar system simulator from their basic knowledge. Although I said that this was distinct from the fixed calendars of other civilizations, I think it reasonable to deduce that the opposite might well have become true - that as Greeks exported technology, other civilizations would have eventually produced similar Mechanisms of their own.
I should add that I do not believe that many of the supposed star maps represent the stars at all. The pyramids are incorrectly placed for the stars they are supposed to represent, for example, Stonehenge is a circle, although the sun could never appear to the north of it, and Avebury is almost three quarters of a mile across, but the stones are only six feet high, making any kind of astronomical observation impossible. I believe they served a sophisticated purpose, that the stones are not randomly placed but very deliberately positioned, but the explanations I have heard sound way too hollow. They're as absurd to me as the archaeologists forever claiming every object they found was a religious icon. I swear, in the year 3000, they'll find dish cloths and decide there was a water cult. Sophistication does NOT mean our idea of sophistication, but ancient does NOT mean ignorant or superstitious either. There are alternatives.
...do I have this image of white mice, very hot cups of tea and brownian motion vector plotters...
Ah! I know what it is. If you take Hactor's bomb which links all suns in the Universe together in hyperspace and link that to Earth, then use an infinite improbability drive so that Earth passes through every point in the Universe simultaneously, you would be able to create an infinite number of overlapped virtual computers.
It makes sense to ban installing Earth on Earth, as this would cause serious problems.
Just looked at the World Wind Mt. St. Helens. It is quite obvious from this image that Washington State has done a timeslip and fallen back four billion years.
Tri-gate electronics do, in fact, exist. They predate the transistor by several decades. Thermionic valves were capable of this very early on. I'm assuming that the problem is related to the fact that the medium used is not inherently 3D, making it hard to stack the gates in the way illustrated in the article, but the article itself doesn't say.
Tunnels sound very interesting. Leakage presumably has many causes, but would boil down to electrons leaving the desired path and going elsewhere. There MAY be ways of replacing the interconnects (which are usually just regular conductors) with superconductors, as superconductors should leak a lot less. (Resistance is a function of leakage, and superconductors have zero resistance.) This won't fix links on the silicon itself, but any improvement would be a good thing.
I do believe that this is the correct direction and that OpenCores has a lot of very useful material. There are programs for hardware analysis and design, but you are correct that there's a LOT more to hardware than just that. Even with high-end commercial applications, it is not easy - the software can easily fail to calculate the power loads, for example, leading to both over-hot regions and under-powered sections.
But calculating these values isn't enough if you're designing anything of high complexity. You then really need CFD software to model how the heat will flow around your design. It's easy to build something that is quite incapable of remaining within temperature limits.
When building network interfaces, other problems creep in. You have no control over whatever you connect your device to (wirelessly or wired) and so must provide suitable tolerences. You also have potential problems from interference generated from within the device itself. A wireless network card that jams itself is of very little use.
I'm not saying this is impossible - the University of Manchester uses Open Source tools for designing async microprocessors which are suitable for cell phones, so obviously it's possible. It has been done. The problem is in moving from "possible" to "practical". That is an area that looks interesting and - as programmable computable devices become more powerful - more open to experimentation.
One of the problems with commodity hardware is that the only reason it is cheap and useful as a commodity is that it is ultra-generalized and therefore inefficient at any given task. As such, it should be very easy to design things which are more specialized and more efficient, even without a multi-billion dollar budget. Most of that budget is going to be in cramming all possible features onto as little silicon as possible without causing a meltdown. Microcomputers were buildable because no individual user really needed the full power of a mainframe. I could easily see the next stage being people designing components and cards that aren't perhaps equal to AMD's or Intel's latest mega-product but which are perfectly good for a special-purpose embedded device.
Is this likely? I don't see why not. The 65I02 is a popular microcontroller. Yes, that is a more modern 6502 processor, and 6502s are NOT rocket-science. Open Cores is already well past the simple design of a 6502, and probably more than capable of designing fairly decent control systems with Open Source tools alone. Once you get a cottage industry going with Open Source hardware, then more advanced tools will inevitably follow.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, you are right that direct access is Bad. Very Bad. In fact, internal systems should ideally be going through proxies and a firewall to prevent random applications (such as viruses) from setting up their own connections. For what is presumably a fairly low-bandwidth facility, they could probably even use layer 7 filtering and block unauthorized applications even if they did have all the correct passwords/tokens and port numbers.
Secondly, you are also correct that the data should not have been kept on a computer with such access. Normally, you'd have a private intranet that cannot access the outside world at all for sensitive data. There is no excuse for keeping data like that on a high-risk machine that may well be portscanned and attacked every few minutes anyway.
Then, there's the problem with the fact that the data was presumably in plain-text. If it was encrypted to any reasonable standard, there wouldn't have been any fuss made. Furthermore, since the trojan was presumably not designed with Oregon taxes in mind, it would have necessarily been your normal harvester looking in normal files. My suspicion is that the most likely place for the data to have been harvested would have been in e-mail. Anything else would require a disk search and that would have been amazingly obvious, even to the most idiotic. If (and I emphasise the if) I am correct and the data was indeed in an e-mail, then why the hell were they e-mailing plain-text files containing this kind of data? Particularly as it's so easy to e-mail the wrong person, using modern e-mail clients that guess at addresses.
I would very much like to see a requirement that ALL sensitive and personal data that is even potentially exposed to the Internet be encrypted using strong algorithms and strong keys, and that unnecessary risks with other peoples personal data be strongly penalized. (By my way of thinking, since the flaws in the VA office had been known for many years and never addressed by the Federal government even though the GAO had been sending up the red flags, rockets and flying saucers, those whose data was taken should be entitled to compensation at least equal to the cost they will have to endure to salvage and protect what they can.)
There is no excuse for insecure practices. There are far too many solutions, including free ones, that are easy enough, fast enough and secure enough to excuse delinquency on the part of any agency or (in e-commerce data theft cases) any corporation that puts laziness as a higher priority than standards.
No wonder my taxes this year were so high. Hey, guys, I can't pay for Trimet on my own!
Really, there is almost no real way of supporting an artist. There are way too many hands dipping into their pockets. That's possibly why labels were so keen on artists getting high on drugs in the 60s and 70s - easier to steal from, if they're not concious. Even adding a token of appreciation in fan mail would be unlikely to get through. Whoever has been hired to answer the mail would be more than able to lift it without anybody being any the wiser.
If there's a workable solution, then it will require some major restructuring of how things are done. The existing mechanisms don't cut it and cannot be patched to cut it.
Databases for storing just plain data are good, and both Postgres and MySQL have Windows binaries. In general, Access has a slightly better user interface (the others really only have engines and people are supposed to develop their own engines) but interfaces that are very usable do exist and may be quite adequate for basic office usage.
Seriously, you are correct. People don't buy music in order to benefit the labels. The labels have a right to make money, I have no problem with that, but I DO have a problem with them guilt-tripping the customers and then (to add insult to injury) ripping off the artists as well.
iTunes takes way too big a slice, but let's be fair on them - look at their role models! Theft is bad - I think we can all agree on that - but that applies to all parties concerned, not just students (and they usually buy the product later anyway, which doesn't kill the claim of theft but does bruise it somewhat). And, of course, it's not just labels. More than a few agents and managers have been sued over unpaid royalties, sometimes in the order of a few tens of millions.
I have nothing but respect for those who want to instill a culture of paying artists a fair day's wage for a fair day's work. It's about time. I've nothing but contempt for those who claim that as a pretext whilst robbing the artists (and customers) blind.
The full description of the speeds and characteristics of the lines can be found on any number of technical websites. I cribbed the speeds from Made IT. CompTech have a nice intro/overview as well.
I was thinking more in the same way roofnets had destroyed the cell phone industry in the year 2000, due to unlinited free VoIP. You didn't hear about that?
(The closest I've ever seen to a pay-per-packet scheme was the old Packet Switch Stream service from British Telecom, which charged per connection to the X.25 exchange AND per minute of connection AND per K of data sent AND per unit of time you spent on the phone line to use their bloody server in the first place. Sure, there's a per-K in there, but it was so small as to be a negliagible fraction of the total cost. And that WAS to end-users, so even there the claim is incorrect.)
Peer-to-Peer backbone routing is usually at a nominal cost, as the whole idea of peering is that each network accesses the other networks equally in all directions with no bias or preference. Of course, if the preferential service system goes into effect, the entire backbone will collapse. It's impossible to have preferential service in a totally peer-based network.
Translation #1: If we're addicted to oil, then the price of oil is immaterial. R&D doesn't happen by magic, it requires funding and it requires time. Lots of funding and LOTS of time. Getting alternative energy sources to the point where they will be viable alternatives - not just in cost per joule of energy, but in terms of how much you can produce - is going to take decades if not centuries at the current snail's pace. We don't have centuries and we might not have decades.)
Translation #2: Europeans, especially the British, have been paying $6-$8 per gallon for many years. They also have a 17.5% sales tax, and a far higher income tax than Americans. Strangely, their poverty levels are vastly LOWER than those in the US, as are their homelessness levels. America gets 60% of kids through high school, Britain gets over 60% through University. Sometimes, giving can produce a vastly superior return.
Translation #3: Industry is notoriously inefficient when it comes to energy. If they can be coerced into reducing CO2 emissions by improving their efficiency levels, then it will not only lead to greater profits for them, it will ALSO lead to cheaper goods for you. And this is somehow supposed to hurt you?
Translation #4: A very big source of CO2 is car exhaust. Trust me on this, you do NOT need an SUV to do the weekly shopping, especially if the shop is just at the end of the driveway. I've seen people drive their car to pick up the mail at their front gate! In South Carolina, Charleston and Mount Pleasent refused Federal funds to build a light rail between the two cities. Because it wouldn't be used? No, it was popular. Because it would cost them? No, it was going to be paid for Federally. Then why? Because they bickered for so long as to who got to control it, the program finished before they could get past their own egos.
I have absolutely bugger all sympathy for those who dread a reduction in CO2, because it is so blatantly obvious that it would benefit everyone. Not just in the long term (by not frying the planet) but in the short term as well (by boosting industry, reducing costs and improving technology). Yes, REDUCING carbon dioxide emissions will actually INCREASE employment and BOOST the economy. Why do you think that the MORE efficient a country is, the BETTER the economy is? If the reverse were true, why isn't East Germany thrasing the US? After all, it generates vastly more pollution which must surely mean they're doing things more cheaply, right?
I don't know how many times it needs to be spelled out, but one-off costs such as improving production techniques will ALWAYS by trumped by the boost in productivity that results. There is an assinine assumption that reducing emissions means doing less, but the only thing that holds true for is politics and cynics. And in those cases, the world would surely benefit anyway. Reducing emissions, in a competitive, evolving market will ALWAYS produce MORE productivity, simply because the only way to survive is to do things better.
Peer reviewed? I though you said beer reviewed!
I do agree with Theo that if the information is not free, then vendors should not expect OS writers to bend their principles to include it. On the flip-side, I don't want OpenBSD (or any other free OS) to be impacted by stupidity on the part of vendors if there's anything I can do to help.
My only question of Theo and the OpenBSD folks is: Is there anything that those of us who reject Hifn's arguments as absurd and contrary to accepted practices can do to help? (Well, besides not supporting Hifn in any way.)
This is clearly a case where differences in any other opinion should be irrelevent. Theo deserves support on this. Open Source in general deserves support on this.
They wrote some, IBM wrote some. Microsoft claiming it all is not OK, and then using what they obtained to block IBM is DEFINITELY not OK.
Not just cursed - palindromicly cursed!
A house divided against itself cannot stand. No more so, then, should you expect a country whose populace and government are so divided. And I say unto you, love thine enemy, and if he should strike you on the left cheek, turn the right to him also. And, verily, those without sin may cast the first stone. If you are not without sin, by whose right may you castigate your political opponent, or deny those who call upon him to speak for them their right to have voice?
Answering the speed of Java question seems easy enough - just compile the code with GCJ to get the native version, run the same code under a JIT engine, and then run it a third time as pure bytecode. My guess is that the code will run faster when natively compiled, and that the difference will increase as the complexity of code increases.
The other thing to bear in mind is that CPUs are designed around procedural code, NOT functional design and certainly not object-oriented principles. Code written in a non-native paradigm is essentially cross-compiled to the native paradigm and there must surely be some loss of efficiency there. I suspect that if you were to build a CPU where the design and instruction set was modelled after Smalltalk, then compiled C would probably run slower than interpreted Smalltalk, as the interpreter would be a very thin layer over the CPU whereas the compiler would need to add an enormous wedge of compatibility code, adding overhead.
Is this possible? Well, as I mentioned earlier, the Transputer and the Occam language were built in tandem as a combined product. There was therefore a lot of benefit in writing in Occam, even though you could have used C and a cross-compiler. Occam was going to be faster, even though it could be a bear to program in at times. Clearly, high-level CPUs are indeed possible, although they are not trivial to design and seem to have proved very hard to maintain.
High-level CPUs were largely abandoned, as people moved to a hybrid RISC/CISC architecture. I think that CPU design is now sufficiently complex that higher levels of operation might be worth reconsidering. There, the difference between compiled and interpreted would collapse, as the instructions in the code would match the instructions on the CPU. At that point, compiled code would be pulled by the CPU and interpreted code pushed to the CPU, but what was executed and how would be identical.
This is NOT the case on existing CPUs, so this scenario is irrelevent. Code is far more complex than the assembly, which means optimizing compilers will always be faster than interpreters on such an architecture, and potentially so much faster that you might as well not bother with the difference.
I have no idea how you could have a genuinely open, fair, multi-party system. It would presumably need to borrow some ideas from proportional representation, as that seems to be the only method of reliably getting multiple parties into politics. Italy, however, shows the risks of the opposite extreme - having too many parties. There, the former Prime Minister is actively working to bring down the current Government in an effort to pull off a coup and seize power. There very nearly wasn't a current Government, as he'd refused to step down even after losing the election.
My best guess at this time would be for the top two or three candidates to represent the constituancy in direct proportion to the percent of vote they received. So, a person getting 50% of the vote would have 50% of the voting block. This avoids the whole problem of what to do in a tie, as you'd simply have more than one person with the same voting strength.
I also think that the system needs a third, unelected house, where members are selected from the jury pool and who can place bills on trial, as per any other trial. The idea would be to have a group of anonymous people that lobbyists could not identify to corrupt, and who would retain any influence for such a short time that power itself could not corrupt them.
What I do not know is how you could implement either of these ideas within the framework of the US Constitution, or how they could be adapted to fit within the expectations of having a clear line of responsibility, or how they could be debugged on the basis of how political systems actually work in practice.
I guess that information, if anyone did have it, would be covered by this new IP treaty and could not, therefore, be divulged except at a great price.
Our records of the work done are also sketchy. The recent recovery of a lost work of Archimedes being an example. There are many, many other works that have been lost and may never be recovered. Those works might easily have demonstrated a radically different Greece than the one supposed by historians. At present, the bounds of uncertainty exceed the limits of our knowledge, making any assumption on Greek knowledge hazardous at best.
"But, if they knew X and Y, they surely would have concluded Z!" There are too many exceptions even in modern times. From the late discovery of the blindingly obvious to the many disasters that have befallen every nation in the world, there are simply too many examples of people simply ignoring all evidence in front of them for their own reasons. We cannot assume that the Greeks were immune to this. But we should equally well not conclude that they failed to see what was right in front of them.
The tendancy of historians and archaeologists is to assume that anyone not from the here-and-now was ignorant and superstitious - except when they assume that those people were hyperintelligent megabeings. I think it reasonable to believe that no humans that have ever lived were really in either extreme. The more we learn, the better able we are to understand exactly where cultures were in the distant past, but we will never get more than tiny snippets from tiny fragments of those cultures. The best we can do is guess the most likely scenario, but that is still only a possibility, not a certainty.
Sure, anyone can turn over a new leaf. That's always possible. But that won't stop the incidental music from Psycho from playing in my mind whenever I hear of Microsoft working with others. There are some areas where I think it might be safe. There's been no work on Linux' IBCS module for a long time. This would benefit Microsoft, as they could then run Linux software natively. That wouldn't hurt Linux too much, as many Unixes have been able to do this for a while, and the code is out there anyway. However, it would benefit Linux, precisely because other OS' can run Linux binaries but Linux can't run theirs without IBCS being brought up-to-date.
MPLS for Linux is another dead project that would be highly valuable to revive, and equally valuable to Microsoft to have for Windows. MOSIX and OpenMOSIX development has been at snail's pace over recent months - boo! - and Microsoft's clustering technology would certainly benefit from a comparable system, making a joint venture into improving this technology a definite plus for all sides.
If such ventures don't work out, Linux doesn't suffer because the level of work in these areas is small anyway. You can't lose by not getting what you wouldn't have had anyway. On the other hand, if they did work out, it would be an opportunity to develop extremely valuable technology with resources that would be extremely hard to muster by any other means.
To those who are contemplating any kind of alliance with Microsoft, however, just remember that the Computer is your friend. It says so. And if you don't agree, it may use you as reactor shielding.
If it were the only example, I'd agree with you. The Greeks had working steam power (not surpassed until the Industrial Revolution), an idea the solar system was centered on the sun, the beginnings of a theory of robotics, high-ranking female scientists, possibly a printing system (the Phaios Disk is printed, not written or carved) and maybe any number of discoveries we don't even know they had. The "dark ages" were not truly barbaric - art flourished then as it had never done before or ever since - but the total collapse of science and the loss of knowledge was a terrible tragedy. Not only did it put humanity 2,000 years behind on technology, but the re-learning devastated the environment and it is entirely possible that human civilization will not be capable of undoing the damage fast enough.
Another possibility is that they are totally distinct - the Greeks already knew the world was round, at least some had deduced that the solar system was centered on the sun, and there was a basic understanding that the planets were closer than the stars, but that they were all a gigantic distance away. Again, based on their superb understanding of geometry, it shouldn't have been too hard to produce a basic solar system simulator from their basic knowledge. Although I said that this was distinct from the fixed calendars of other civilizations, I think it reasonable to deduce that the opposite might well have become true - that as Greeks exported technology, other civilizations would have eventually produced similar Mechanisms of their own.
I should add that I do not believe that many of the supposed star maps represent the stars at all. The pyramids are incorrectly placed for the stars they are supposed to represent, for example, Stonehenge is a circle, although the sun could never appear to the north of it, and Avebury is almost three quarters of a mile across, but the stones are only six feet high, making any kind of astronomical observation impossible. I believe they served a sophisticated purpose, that the stones are not randomly placed but very deliberately positioned, but the explanations I have heard sound way too hollow. They're as absurd to me as the archaeologists forever claiming every object they found was a religious icon. I swear, in the year 3000, they'll find dish cloths and decide there was a water cult. Sophistication does NOT mean our idea of sophistication, but ancient does NOT mean ignorant or superstitious either. There are alternatives.
Ah! I know what it is. If you take Hactor's bomb which links all suns in the Universe together in hyperspace and link that to Earth, then use an infinite improbability drive so that Earth passes through every point in the Universe simultaneously, you would be able to create an infinite number of overlapped virtual computers.
It makes sense to ban installing Earth on Earth, as this would cause serious problems.
Just looked at the World Wind Mt. St. Helens. It is quite obvious from this image that Washington State has done a timeslip and fallen back four billion years.
Tunnels sound very interesting. Leakage presumably has many causes, but would boil down to electrons leaving the desired path and going elsewhere. There MAY be ways of replacing the interconnects (which are usually just regular conductors) with superconductors, as superconductors should leak a lot less. (Resistance is a function of leakage, and superconductors have zero resistance.) This won't fix links on the silicon itself, but any improvement would be a good thing.
But calculating these values isn't enough if you're designing anything of high complexity. You then really need CFD software to model how the heat will flow around your design. It's easy to build something that is quite incapable of remaining within temperature limits.
When building network interfaces, other problems creep in. You have no control over whatever you connect your device to (wirelessly or wired) and so must provide suitable tolerences. You also have potential problems from interference generated from within the device itself. A wireless network card that jams itself is of very little use.
I'm not saying this is impossible - the University of Manchester uses Open Source tools for designing async microprocessors which are suitable for cell phones, so obviously it's possible. It has been done. The problem is in moving from "possible" to "practical". That is an area that looks interesting and - as programmable computable devices become more powerful - more open to experimentation.
One of the problems with commodity hardware is that the only reason it is cheap and useful as a commodity is that it is ultra-generalized and therefore inefficient at any given task. As such, it should be very easy to design things which are more specialized and more efficient, even without a multi-billion dollar budget. Most of that budget is going to be in cramming all possible features onto as little silicon as possible without causing a meltdown. Microcomputers were buildable because no individual user really needed the full power of a mainframe. I could easily see the next stage being people designing components and cards that aren't perhaps equal to AMD's or Intel's latest mega-product but which are perfectly good for a special-purpose embedded device.
Is this likely? I don't see why not. The 65I02 is a popular microcontroller. Yes, that is a more modern 6502 processor, and 6502s are NOT rocket-science. Open Cores is already well past the simple design of a 6502, and probably more than capable of designing fairly decent control systems with Open Source tools alone. Once you get a cottage industry going with Open Source hardware, then more advanced tools will inevitably follow.