Something the article doesn't touch on is that although chess grandmasters were caught off guard by the strength of chess computer's in the mid-90's, since then we have learned a tremendous amount about the computer's weak spots. The computer for example is very poor at playing in tight positions like some lines in the Caro-Kann and French defenses. Also many of the so-called hypermodern openings.
I imagine the new breed of young GM's like Ponmariov, Grischuk and Malakhov probably find the prospect of beating stock Fritz/Junior/Hiarcs rather boring. A few extra CPU's isn't going to make a big difference in terms of playing power. Much more effective is to spend time tuning the engine's opening book and that takes traditional GM's with novelties.
Kasparov should win this easily, though he did miss a trivial 2 move combination in a tournament recently so you never know...
A pointless endeavour... Gee, that's constructive criticism.
If it can't run existing X windows applications it's useless. Bzzt. Wrong. It's not this STUDENT'S job to anticipate and meet each and every need of a leech like yourself. If he hadn't released it open source you would have been crying the loudest and the longest though, wouldn't you have?
Sorry, but this guy's just an undergraduate student, no offense but I find it highly unlikely he can come up with something superior to X, QT and GTK (all of which this system supposedly replaces) in a year of work. I've supervised undergraduate students who write final year research prototypes that are better quality than 95% of the crap I've seen in the commercial world.
Seriously, your head has a use other than for a place to put your hat on it.
The article cleary states that HP did not license Linux from SCO. Yes, they did not license Linux. They licensed UNIX. SCO has one anonymous licensee. Guess who it is. HP is canny enough to realize they will lose goodwill if they are seen to be paying off SCO. So they made that deal a month or two ago and now that everyone's forgot about it they have come out with this offer.
Reportedly, it might be against your 'of dubious legality' shrinkwarp Windows license to do so. However, it's doubtful any reasonable court would judge against you as long as you had bought the same number of licenses as thin clients that you were planning to use. Before any jackass makes a comparison to the GPL, remember that Microsoft's EULA is a license on usage while the GPL is a license on distribution. Huge difference. Read this comment for more information. It would be rather simple to point out to the court that Windows is an utterly insecure operating system and you are simply taking reasonable and precautionary measures to protect the sensitive data of your clients. You can point to the long list of Windows advisories for backup. Hell even the NSA was planning on using VMWARE as a way of managing the Windows risk.
It would make alot of sense for some company to fund work to finish qemu, bochs or plex86 for just this reason. The reason this probably hasn't happened yet is few PHB's know about the value these projects could potentially play for improving their organisations IT management and reducing their organisations security risks. It's a hell of alot easier to patch a single disk image then it is to patch 1000.
It's unusual for founders to leave like this. This is probably over a major senior management disagreement. A dispute about the best way for Sun to haul it's ass out of the fire. What other subject would they have time to talk about at Sun HQ? McNealy is schitzophrenic, one day he's wearing a penguin suit the next day he's funding SCO's fud campaign against Linux to slow down SUN's haemorraging bottom line. I guess Bill was on the losing side. The last few things I have read in the trade press (mostly from some ponytailed hippie VP named Johnathan Schwartz) sounded like Sun still hasn't got that they need to take bold risks to stay relevent in today's computing world. So by virtue of having stayed silent I think Bill Joy has more of a clue about company direction then these other clowns. Sun (like the town of Gotham) needs an enema. If I was in McNealy's shoes I would hire somebody like Tim O'Reilly to come in and give the company a wake up call on corporate strategy.
I remember after everyone analysed the SCOForum code prominent people saying things like that (eg. Open Source coders violated SCO's license because they didn't include the BSD attribution statement) and I knew right away they made a huge mistake. I'm sorry to see it's been confirmed. Anyone who purports to speak for this community should realise the stakes involved and wise up. In the efforts of Messrs Perens and Raymond to be balanced and reasonable they have given the enemy (Daryl McBeezlebub) significant ammunition. Quoting people out of context is part of lawsuit public relations 101. SCO will hammer away and keep repeating this like an autistic child and unfortunately some weak minded people will be swayed by this argument. If you ever watch television talk shows this is the most common technique for winning arguments. I think Linux is still winning the public relations war but really, please don't accept collective guilt unless you personally fucked up. Because for all we know SGI has legitimate rights to that code.
Remember all those blue, brown, beige boxes that used to float around the net? When I was a kid myself and a friend teamed up to build the pandora's box we found on the net. It was a hacker tool to annoy people. Not that we needed much help though. IIRC it consisted of a variable capacitator, 555 timer, and a directional speaker. What you would do was tune the device until it was just the tiniest bit past the perceptible human sound range. Then you would walk around and point it at people and see how stressed you could make them. It worked pretty good. People would get irritated very easily without knowing precisely why. Those who were very susceptible would start to sweat. It clearly induced stress. Seems like it might be useful for haunted houses too...
Google Fan Boys
on
Google Turns 5
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I think google's great, but just to counter the usual fan boy posts here is a link to some people who don't think so:google-watch
Send Phoenix abusive email. Tell them you will never buy their products EVER AGAIN. Intuit recently deployed DRM and their customers screamed so loud that the CEO nearly shit himself and the company backpedalled like mad. If this happens enough times, DRM will die in the ass as it should. If there is one thing I have always admired about the U.S. it's that people speak their mind. Complacency now by those of you who are too pathetic and lazy to complain will cause great suffering later for you later. So be smart because now is the time to get ANGRY. Not later.
The great danger though is if DRM ends up being widely deployed enough that only or two major PC makers isn't using it. Then all of a sudden the idea of legislating DRM-only PCs is a plausible prospect. Something the media cartels would dearly love. They would probably lose the first time but there would inevitably be some comprimise. Then they would try again in the typical relentless fashion and more rights would go away. Stallman's prescience is amazing.
Does this mean Tim Berners Lee can now approach Opera software and ask them to license use of his world wide web network? What a joke.
Companies have every right to continually upgrade their software in a never ending arms race to fend off competition. That is a healthy marketplace.
What is not healthy is the idiotic notion that you can declare a protocol on an interconnected mesh network to be exclusively yours is bogus to the extreme.
To the posters in this thread who thought this was a 'good idea', please wake up and get a clue.
This is a great invention by a cool guy. It does have it's engineering flaws though. To work it must rely on friction that may not always be available. I doubt that it has a rocket and parachute ejector system in case the balance system fails. I am sure that Dean did his best to mitigate the risks though. I sincerely hope that in 20 years (or sooner) the disabled will be driving around in Dr. Xavier like chairs made by Harrier corporation and we will look back at this workhorse technology as a temporary solution that served us well but was quickly obsoleted.
The speculation as to whether or not it holds up in court is IMHO a moot issue. The GPL as written is a type of clever legal kung-fu that only a true hacker like RMS could come up with.
Here is a key passage:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
If the GPL was struck down, it would be the equivalent of striking down _ALL_ software licenses. In that case you could expect to see Microsoft's lawyers filing an amicus brief supporting the FSF.
The speculation that you can circumvent the GPL by writing "intermediate software" is a notion that only an engineer could have.
An analog is like claiming that you can build a robot, send the robot to break into someone's home, and get away with it because "The robot did it."
Regular people (like judges) find this sort of argument very irritating. Instead they tend to focus on the intent of what a law/contract might achieve rather then the exact wording.
In criminal cases it's called mens rea. If I send Paulie Walnuts to break Artie Bucco's legs because he hasn't paid me money, can I get away with it because I used Paulie's intermediate 'wetware'?
In most situations you would be laughed out of court with this argument. Look at Napster.
Dear Real Networks, Please go away and rethink your business model and come back when you are ready to release something of value. If you wish to win the hearts and minds of open source developers you need to do more than your current offer which smacks of "Here is 75K, code & licenses of questionable value, please go do our coding for us". Instead you might want to check out a _profitable_ business model like that used by TrollTech, SleepyCat Software, ZeroC and others. The scheme is this: Release your codecs as a GPL library that allows open source (GPL) code to link against it. Proprietary software is required to purchase a seperate license to use the library. Sell a high quality proprietary multimedia production app that uses these codecs. Remember, business is about taking measured risks, and it's time for Real "realize" this. Otherwise Real risks fading into obscurity. The sentiment here [in my office] is that this has already happened. The time for bold action has arrived.
A social contract is the foundation of a democracy. One of the problems we are faced with now is that new social contracts are hard to come by. If a group of people wants to get up and create their own country it's generally discouraged even by western 'democratic' countries. This is why space travel is so appealing to our hearts and minds. The idea that we can one day go terraform Mars; or live a Cpt. Kirk-esque life of exploration, battle and the shagging of hot alien babes.
A few things: 1) Unless you sign an IP agreement (usually for an industry funded research project) you can GPL it. 2) The dirty little secret the mainstream security industry doesn't want you to know is that all the useful & good tools security tools are open source. In general, you risk losing credibility among your peers if your software is NOT open source. 3) If your project has to do with wireless (in)security it's likely not going to be very novel. Just about all the wireless encryption standards (GSM A/51, W/TLS, WEP) are all broken with implementations to verify this. 4) Security researchers long ago realised that full disclosure is the only way to fix security vulnerabilities. Besides as another poster pointed out kiddiez will not understand your paper, only serious security researchers. And in general, they probably already know whatever it is your paper is going to be about.
Was how do the Doj's lawyers feel about putting people in jail for trying to educate themselves? This area of law is under intense academic debate with solutions such as compulsory licensing being discussed. Enforcing a law to bring down a for-profit cd-stamping ring is one thing, it's completely another to throw a security researcher in jail for circumventing an ebook ROT-13 encryption scheme or make university students serve time for trading files.
The author just hasn't realized it yet. He thinks he is talking about robots but what he is really talking about is _technology_. This is clearly obvious when you consider his first anecdote about an ordering kiosk at McDonald's. This is clearly not a Lost in Space "Danger Will Robinson, Danger" robot at all. It's a peice of technology. Right now if I want to make a million copies of the bible, it will take me about 2 minutes effort with:
i=1; while [ "$i" -le 1000000 ]; do echo cp bible.txt bible-$i; i=`expr $i + 1`; done
In ancient times (not long ago really) only well-funded organisations like the catholic church could afford to have bibles hand copied by an educated person would could read AND write. Similiarly if I wanted to make a bowl, I needed someone to go carve me one - only a mere 200 years ago. Now a plastic injection moulding machine can spit them out faster then you can shake a stick at. Although a few activities like carving might have some visceral enjoyment as a hobby this type of thoughtless labour contributes nothing to our society. As someone who has worked in a large automotive company I can testify to the fact that the elimination of these repetive soul destroying jobs can only be a good thing for everyone involved. If a stupid machine can perform the same task as a human, it should. The problem comes when we depend on these machines without planning how to deal with the situation when the machine stops functioning, is obsoleted, breaks, goes on a killing spree; whatever.
It must be a slow news day because I submitted this story 2 months ago and it was rejected. So I wrote a comment about it here. The most interesting thing recently in this case is the Daryl McBride approaching CELF consortium, who haven't even distributed any code yet. I wonder how long this pr blitz will last until Microsoft is required to license another ancient unix patent.
This would make my blood boil if I was an American taxpayer. 500 million dollars could hire or retrain 20000 junior sysadmins at $25,000/yr or 5000 for 4 years! And this is only their software purchase budget, who knows if the army already has money earmarked for labour as well. By downloading a copy of RH 9.0 and creative use of wine and/or vmware you could easily enhance service and security for a huge part of the military and cut costs. It just goes to show that indiscriminate military spending is just as bad as indiscriminate social spending.
Dennis Ritchie has put up some of the court papers from the previous SCO (nee USL) vs University of California lawsuit that tried to destory BSD. One of the documents is an affidavit from Kirk McKusick stating that a source code audit found only 65 "infringing lines" out of around 250 000 in NET2. It makes the Copyright statement from the terminfo file that ESR maintains seem oddly prescient. The statement is accessible on my RH8 system with
head -255/etc/termcap | tail -19
(2nd line, last paragraph). What's next? I predict Microsoft will sue Sun for Copyright infringement of/bin/clear on Solaris.:)
This makes sense for a few reasons. (1) If the Matrix producers had been stupid enough to have published a real address, that site would be copping a distributed "slashdot nmapping" right now. I was at a security conference where George Kurtz (Foundstone) was giving a presentation and kept using "target.com" to describe the host getting attacked. After the presentation, a representative from Target (the chainstore) came up and told him to knock it off and start using example.[org|net|com] in his presentations. RFC2606 was written to promote example.org for exactly that purpose. (2)Some of the previously reserved real internet address space (I forget which exactly) has now become "unreserved". But the unlucky who have been allocated this space have big problems because many old/unmaintained firewalls explicitly disallow traffic to/from those networks. So it's conceivable that the 10.x.x.x address space was opened up in Neo's time. (3) Even without the two above scenarios, Trinity could easily already have compromised a gateway router/packet filter to an internal network. Maybe we didn't see that bit.
Most distributions have roughly the same footprint. Even if you compile your own kernel, deselect almost everything, take everything out of/etc/rc3.d (or equivalent) and do hdparm tweaks, etc. I once tried to do something similiar on a '96 DX4-75mhz 16M ram Thinkpad. All I wanted was a graphical Linux environment. Windows 95 (one of the nicer builds) ran much smoother then even the leanest distro's of the time. The problem was X. It was/is a resource hog. I think your best bet is to try one of the things floating around that do not require an X server. Try directvnc. No X server required.
I don't know how much it costs, but the Polycom system works pretty well. The biggest issue I have is that often in larger meetings, the remote camera is so zoomed out to get everyone in the shot that it's like looking through a telescope. I think there is a way to control the remote camera, but it's almost never done, especially if you have more then 2 parties videoconferenced in. (Who gets to control the camera?) Ideally you want to spend money on having extra cameras (a zoomed out one for everyone, and another one for single-person shots that can rove around as people speak. We have another video-conferencing system built entirely on free software. It basically does this. Unfortunately, it's in another building and I don't use it often so I can't give you the details. It shouldn't be hard to hack together if you do the research. Try gnomemeeting to start with.
Currently there are three ways to partition the available spectrum:
FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access): The standard technique of TX/RX on different frequencies (or colors if you read the analogy on Slashdot a few days ago). Ho-hum, it's the first thing I would have tried too. Our predominate and most wasteful technique.
CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access): A set of spread-spectrum techniques that use a sort of RF kung-fu to manipulate previously considered undesirable properties of radio waves to advantage. On the coolness factor the engineers that designed these technologies should be in the nonexistant Engineering Hall of Fame. The scuttlebut is that some of this technology was invented by Qualcomm as early as WWII but was highly classified until recently, so Qualcomm still holds most of the patents to this today.
TDMA (Time division multiple access): This involves standard unix-like time splicing, except using radio signals. GSM works like this by partitioning groups of eight consecutive time slots to form a TDMA frame with a duration of 4.615 ms. Each transmitter (cell-phone) in the area gets one burst period (a slot) of duration 15/26 ms (approx. 0.577 ms) to use the channel. This is an immensely powerful technique, and one that is infinitely scalable. It's only limitation is the speed of our electronics, which can and should maintain it's exponential speed curve. This is why the spectrum is underutilized.
Slashdot Mirror
Something the article doesn't touch on is that although chess grandmasters were caught off guard by the strength of chess computer's in the mid-90's, since then we have learned a tremendous amount about the computer's weak spots. The computer for example is very poor at playing in tight positions like some lines in the Caro-Kann and French defenses. Also many of the so-called hypermodern openings.
I imagine the new breed of young GM's like Ponmariov, Grischuk and Malakhov probably find the prospect of beating stock Fritz/Junior/Hiarcs rather boring. A few extra CPU's isn't going to make a big difference in terms of playing power. Much more effective is to spend time tuning the engine's opening book and that takes traditional GM's with novelties.
Kasparov should win this easily, though he did miss a trivial 2 move combination in a tournament recently so you never know...
Hello McFly? Anybody Home McModerators?
A pointless endeavour...
Gee, that's constructive criticism.
If it can't run existing X windows applications it's useless.
Bzzt. Wrong. It's not this STUDENT'S job to anticipate and meet each and every need of a leech like yourself. If he hadn't released it open source you would have been crying the loudest and the longest though, wouldn't you have?
Sorry, but this guy's just an undergraduate student, no offense but I find it highly unlikely he can come up with something superior to X, QT and GTK (all of which this system supposedly replaces) in a year of work.
I've supervised undergraduate students who write final year research prototypes that are better quality than 95% of the crap I've seen in the commercial world.
Seriously, your head has a use other than for a place to put your hat on it.
The article cleary states that HP did not license Linux from SCO.
Yes, they did not license Linux. They licensed UNIX. SCO has one anonymous licensee. Guess who it is. HP is canny enough to realize they will lose goodwill if they are seen to be paying off SCO. So they made that deal a month or two ago and now that everyone's forgot about it they have come out with this offer.
Reportedly, it might be against your 'of dubious legality' shrinkwarp Windows license to do so. However, it's doubtful any reasonable court would judge against you as long as you had bought the same number of licenses as thin clients that you were planning to use.
Before any jackass makes a comparison to the GPL, remember that Microsoft's EULA is a license on usage while the GPL is a license on distribution. Huge difference. Read this comment for more information.
It would be rather simple to point out to the court that Windows is an utterly insecure operating system and you are simply taking reasonable and precautionary measures to protect the sensitive data of your clients. You can point to the long list of Windows advisories for backup. Hell even the NSA was planning on using VMWARE as a way of managing the Windows risk.
It would make alot of sense for some company to fund work to finish qemu, bochs or plex86 for just this reason. The reason this probably hasn't happened yet is few PHB's know about the value these projects could potentially play for improving their organisations IT management and reducing their organisations security risks. It's a hell of alot easier to patch a single disk image then it is to patch 1000.
It's unusual for founders to leave like this.
This is probably over a major senior management disagreement. A dispute about the best way for Sun to haul it's ass out of the fire. What other subject would they have time to talk about at Sun HQ? McNealy is schitzophrenic, one day he's wearing a penguin suit the next day he's funding SCO's fud campaign against Linux to slow down SUN's haemorraging bottom line.
I guess Bill was on the losing side. The last few things I have read in the trade press (mostly from some ponytailed hippie VP named Johnathan Schwartz) sounded like Sun still hasn't got that they need to take bold risks to stay relevent in today's computing world.
So by virtue of having stayed silent I think Bill Joy has more of a clue about company direction then these other clowns.
Sun (like the town of Gotham) needs an enema. If I was in McNealy's shoes I would hire somebody like Tim O'Reilly to come in and give the company a wake up call on corporate strategy.
I remember after everyone analysed the SCOForum code prominent people saying things like that (eg. Open Source coders violated SCO's license because they didn't include the BSD attribution statement) and I knew right away they made a huge mistake. I'm sorry to see it's been confirmed.
Anyone who purports to speak for this community should realise the stakes involved and wise up.
In the efforts of Messrs Perens and Raymond to be balanced and reasonable they have given the enemy (Daryl McBeezlebub) significant ammunition. Quoting people out of context is part of lawsuit public relations 101. SCO will hammer away and keep repeating this like an autistic child and unfortunately some weak minded people will be swayed by this argument. If you ever watch television talk shows this is the most common technique for winning arguments.
I think Linux is still winning the public relations war but really, please don't accept collective guilt unless you personally fucked up. Because for all we know SGI has legitimate rights to that code.
Remember all those blue, brown, beige boxes that used to float around the net? When I was a kid myself and a friend teamed up to build the pandora's box we found on the net. It was a hacker tool to annoy people. Not that we needed much help though.
IIRC it consisted of a variable capacitator, 555 timer, and a directional speaker. What you would do was tune the device until it was just the tiniest bit past the perceptible human sound range. Then you would walk around and point it at people and see how stressed you could make them. It worked pretty good. People would get irritated very easily without knowing precisely why. Those who were very susceptible would start to sweat. It clearly induced stress.
Seems like it might be useful for haunted houses too...
I think google's great, but just to counter the usual fan boy posts here is a link to some people who don't think so:google-watch
Send Phoenix abusive email. Tell them you will never buy their products EVER AGAIN. Intuit recently deployed DRM and their customers screamed so loud that the CEO nearly shit himself and the company backpedalled like mad.
If this happens enough times, DRM will die in the ass as it should.
If there is one thing I have always admired about the U.S. it's that people speak their mind.
Complacency now by those of you who are too pathetic and lazy to complain will cause great suffering later for you later. So be smart because now is the time to get ANGRY. Not later.
The great danger though is if DRM ends up being widely deployed enough that only or two major PC makers isn't using it. Then all of a sudden the idea of legislating DRM-only PCs is a plausible prospect. Something the media cartels would dearly love. They would probably lose the first time but there would inevitably be some comprimise. Then they would try again in the typical relentless fashion and more rights would go away. Stallman's prescience is amazing.
Does this mean Tim Berners Lee can now approach Opera software and ask them to license use of his world wide web network? What a joke.
Companies have every right to continually upgrade their software in a never ending arms race to fend off competition. That is a healthy marketplace.
What is not healthy is the idiotic notion that you can declare a protocol on an interconnected mesh network to be exclusively yours is bogus to the extreme.
To the posters in this thread who thought this was a 'good idea', please wake up and get a clue.
This is a great invention by a cool guy. It does have it's engineering flaws though. To work it must rely on friction that may not always be available. I doubt that it has a rocket and parachute ejector system in case the balance system fails. I am sure that Dean did his best to mitigate the risks though.
I sincerely hope that in 20 years (or sooner) the disabled will be driving around in Dr. Xavier like chairs made by Harrier corporation and we will look back at this workhorse technology as a temporary solution that served us well but was quickly obsoleted.
The speculation as to whether or not it holds up in court is IMHO a moot issue.
The GPL as written is a type of clever legal kung-fu that only a true hacker like RMS could come up with.
Here is a key passage:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
If the GPL was struck down, it would be the equivalent of striking down _ALL_ software licenses. In that case you could expect to see Microsoft's lawyers filing an amicus brief supporting the FSF.
The speculation that you can circumvent the GPL by writing "intermediate software" is a notion that only an engineer could have.
An analog is like claiming that you can build a robot, send the robot to break into someone's home, and get away with it because "The robot did it."
Regular people (like judges) find this sort of argument very irritating. Instead they tend to focus on the intent of what a law/contract might achieve rather then the exact wording.
In criminal cases it's called mens rea. If I send Paulie Walnuts to break Artie Bucco's legs because he hasn't paid me money, can I get away with it because I used Paulie's intermediate 'wetware'?
In most situations you would be laughed out of court with this argument. Look at Napster.
Dear Real Networks,
Please go away and rethink your business model and come back when you are ready to release something of value.
If you wish to win the hearts and minds of open source developers you need to do more than your current offer which smacks of "Here is 75K, code & licenses of questionable value, please go do our coding for us".
Instead you might want to check out a _profitable_ business model like that used by TrollTech, SleepyCat Software, ZeroC and others. The scheme is this: Release your codecs as a GPL library that allows open source (GPL) code to link against it. Proprietary software is required to purchase a seperate license to use the library. Sell a high quality proprietary multimedia production app that uses these codecs.
Remember, business is about taking measured risks, and it's time for Real "realize" this.
Otherwise Real risks fading into obscurity. The sentiment here [in my office] is that this has already happened. The time for bold action has arrived.
A social contract is the foundation of a democracy. One of the problems we are faced with now is that new social contracts are hard to come by.
If a group of people wants to get up and create their own country it's generally discouraged even by western 'democratic' countries. This is why space travel is so appealing to our hearts and minds.
The idea that we can one day go terraform Mars; or live a Cpt. Kirk-esque life of exploration, battle and the shagging of hot alien babes.
A few things:
1) Unless you sign an IP agreement (usually for an industry funded research project) you can GPL it.
2) The dirty little secret the mainstream security industry doesn't want you to know is that all the useful & good tools security tools are open source. In general, you risk losing credibility among your peers if your software is NOT open source.
3) If your project has to do with wireless (in)security it's likely not going to be very novel. Just about all the wireless encryption standards (GSM A/51, W/TLS, WEP) are all broken with implementations to verify this.
4) Security researchers long ago realised that full disclosure is the only way to fix security vulnerabilities. Besides as another poster pointed out kiddiez will not understand your paper, only serious security researchers. And in general, they probably already know whatever it is your paper is going to be about.
Was how do the Doj's lawyers feel about putting people in jail for trying to educate themselves? This area of law is under intense academic debate with solutions such as compulsory licensing being discussed. Enforcing a law to bring down a for-profit cd-stamping ring is one thing, it's completely another to throw a security researcher in jail for circumventing an ebook ROT-13 encryption scheme or make university students serve time for trading files.
This is clearly obvious when you consider his first anecdote about an ordering kiosk at McDonald's. This is clearly not a Lost in Space "Danger Will Robinson, Danger" robot at all. It's a peice of technology. Right now if I want to make a million copies of the bible, it will take me about 2 minutes effort with:In ancient times (not long ago really) only well-funded organisations like the catholic church could afford to have bibles hand copied by an educated person would could read AND write.
Similiarly if I wanted to make a bowl, I needed someone to go carve me one - only a mere 200 years ago. Now a plastic injection moulding machine can spit them out faster then you can shake a stick at.
Although a few activities like carving might have some visceral enjoyment as a hobby this type of thoughtless labour contributes nothing to our society. As someone who has worked in a large automotive company I can testify to the fact that the elimination of these repetive soul destroying jobs can only be a good thing for everyone involved.
If a stupid machine can perform the same task as a human, it should. The problem comes when we depend on these machines without planning how to deal with the situation when the machine stops functioning, is obsoleted, breaks, goes on a killing spree; whatever.
Does anyone know the status of Ingo Molnar's Exec shield patch?
It must be a slow news day because I submitted this story 2 months ago and it was rejected. So I wrote a comment about it here.
The most interesting thing recently in this case is the Daryl McBride approaching CELF consortium, who haven't even distributed any code yet. I wonder how long this pr blitz will last until Microsoft is required to license another ancient unix patent.
This would make my blood boil if I was an American taxpayer. 500 million dollars could hire or retrain 20000 junior sysadmins at $25,000/yr or 5000 for 4 years! And this is only their software purchase budget, who knows if the army already has money earmarked for labour as well.
By downloading a copy of RH 9.0 and creative use of wine and/or vmware you could easily enhance service and security for a huge part of the military and cut costs. It just goes to show that indiscriminate military spending is just as bad as indiscriminate social spending.
It makes the Copyright statement from the terminfo file that ESR maintains seem oddly prescient. The statement is accessible on my RH8 system with (2nd line, last paragraph).
What's next? I predict Microsoft will sue Sun for Copyright infringement of
This makes sense for a few reasons.
(1) If the Matrix producers had been stupid enough to have published a real address, that site would be copping a distributed "slashdot nmapping" right now. I was at a security conference where George Kurtz (Foundstone) was giving a presentation and kept using "target.com" to describe the host getting attacked. After the presentation, a representative from Target (the chainstore) came up and told him to knock it off and start using example.[org|net|com] in his presentations. RFC2606
was written to promote example.org for exactly that purpose.
(2)Some of the previously reserved real internet address space (I forget which exactly) has now become "unreserved". But the unlucky who have been allocated this space have big problems because many old/unmaintained firewalls explicitly disallow traffic to/from those networks. So it's conceivable that the 10.x.x.x address space was opened up in Neo's time.
(3) Even without the two above scenarios, Trinity could easily already have compromised a gateway router/packet filter to an internal network. Maybe we didn't see that bit.
Most distributions have roughly the same footprint. Even if you compile your own kernel, deselect almost everything, take everything out of /etc/rc3.d (or equivalent) and do hdparm tweaks, etc.
I once tried to do something similiar on a '96 DX4-75mhz 16M ram Thinkpad. All I wanted was a graphical Linux environment. Windows 95 (one of the nicer builds) ran much smoother then even the leanest distro's of the time. The problem was X. It was/is a resource hog. I think your best bet is to try one of the things floating around that do not require an X server. Try directvnc. No X server required.
I don't know how much it costs, but the Polycom system works pretty well.
The biggest issue I have is that often in larger meetings, the remote camera is so zoomed out to get everyone in the shot that it's like looking through a telescope. I think there is a way to control the remote camera, but it's almost never done, especially if you have more then 2 parties videoconferenced in. (Who gets to control the camera?)
Ideally you want to spend money on having extra cameras (a zoomed out one for everyone, and another one for single-person shots that can rove around as people speak.
We have another video-conferencing system built entirely on free software. It basically does this. Unfortunately, it's in another building and I don't use it often so I can't give you the details. It shouldn't be hard to hack together if you do the research. Try gnomemeeting to start with.
Currently there are three ways to partition the available spectrum:
FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access): The standard technique of TX/RX on different frequencies (or colors if you read the analogy on Slashdot a few days ago). Ho-hum, it's the first thing I would have tried too. Our predominate and most wasteful technique.
CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access): A set of spread-spectrum techniques that use a sort of RF kung-fu to manipulate previously considered undesirable properties of radio waves to advantage. On the coolness factor the engineers that designed these technologies should be in the nonexistant Engineering Hall of Fame. The scuttlebut is that some of this technology was invented by Qualcomm as early as WWII but was highly classified until recently, so Qualcomm still holds most of the patents to this today.
TDMA (Time division multiple access): This involves standard unix-like time splicing, except using radio signals. GSM works like this by partitioning groups of eight consecutive time slots to form a TDMA frame with a duration of 4.615 ms. Each transmitter (cell-phone) in the area gets one burst period (a slot) of duration 15/26 ms (approx. 0.577 ms) to use the channel. This is an immensely powerful technique, and one that is infinitely scalable. It's only limitation is the speed of our electronics, which can and should maintain it's exponential speed curve. This is why the spectrum is underutilized.