"Microsoft must not give OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) or users a discount conditional on their obtaining Windows together with WMP (Windows Media Player)...or otherwise, remove or restrict OEMs' or users' freedom to choose the version of Windows without (Media Player),"
That's why. Having MS Windows bundled with WMP offered cheaper than MS Windows alone is considered a discount and such not allowed under the indiction.
No. It was finally the aluminium hull and structure of the Hindenburg, that caught fire. Think it as a long chain: First something catches fire by a lightning streak, thus lighting up the hydrogen. With the hydrogen burning the fire gets so hot that the aluminium structure starts melting and catching fire too. And burning light metals can't be extinguished by throwing water, foam or carbondioxyde on it. They just reduce the water to hydrogen and the carbondioxyde to carbonmonoxyde, which then create an explosive gas if they reach fresh oxygene. The only thing you can extinguish light metal fire with is powder (which consists mainly of a sodium compound which I don't remember the name right now), and I doubt the firemen in Lakehurst had enough powder available (was it even used to extinguish fire in 1937?)
Lets put it like this: The commercial air ship aera did in fact end with LZ129's catastrophic landing. But this was just the last blow to an already endangered concept. The track record of commercial lighter-than-air traffic was abyssmal even before the Lakehurst event. For instance only half of the LZ series ships ever build did NOT end in a catastrophical event. And trans atlantic flights have been proven possible by airplanes already 15 years ago (The "Spirit of St.Louis" being rather one of the last sportive attempts to cross the atlantic which got famous because Charles Lindbergh missed his original destination in Ireland and landed quite remarkably for the press in Paris).
In most of the world a 'liberal' (someone friendly to the idea of liberty) is a free-market person, who thinks that there is no good reason to interfere with ones personal rights, but sadly there are some bad reasons he can't really argue against.
Calling a communist 'liberal' is offensive against both the communist and the liberal in most parts of the world.
Where is the simple solution, that the losing party in a civil suit pays both bills? (Or they share the bills if the suit was partly successful.) So everyone just pays the initial costs and can claim it back if she was right.
I don't have anything against Microsoft selling a core OS to "OS outfitters", which in turn sell "MS Windows OS powered distributions". The problem with MS is a complete other thing: By blurring the line between the OS and the bundled applications they are eating into the application market and make it more and more difficult for a company to sell a fairly generic application to the public.
Look at any application classes that once gave several companies a good revenue stream: They are either integrated into the MS Office packet or integrated in the MS Windows offering: word processors, spread sheets, presentation programs, web browsers, network servers, streaming media players, collaboration suites...
There are a few classes left: enterprise class databases, enterprise resource planning systems, and ironically program suites that try to fight the consequences of incomplete security models within MS software. With the upcoming Longhorn version of MS Windows the database server will be part of at least the larger server offerings, the database kernel may even be also in the home and workstation versions. So the database business may be at its end. Microsoft recently bought several ERP developers (Navision for instance), so expect ERP systems showing up in MS Office. And virus scan is already planned for the futural MS Windows versions.
Basicly Microsoft's tactic is to look which market will emerge and warrant good revenue from a large customer base, and if the market yields mature products and steady revenue streams, Microsoft integrates similar offerings "for free" in either MS Windows or MS Office, thus drying up the market and forcing the companies out of business. And the argument is always the same: "Hey, most people are using this on their computers anyway. So they expect it to be in the basic offering, and thus we are including it." And if the MS offering bundled with either MS Windows or MS Office is just good enough for most people they don't look for alternatives.
Microsoft is outsourcing the risk for new software business models to other software companies. No company in a competitive environment could do this. You have to have a monopoly somewhere warranting you a steady revenue stream to play the game this way. Normaly Antitrust law was designed to hinder such tactics, but Microsoft is trying to get away by calling standalone applications part of the operating system or integration functions for MS Office.
So using correct terms for the things Microsoft is offering is a necessity. MS Windows is not just an operating system. It is a bundle of an operating system with lots of applications of general interest, similar to a Linux distribution. As I said in my former posting: Most people don't buy a computer and an operating system just to have a managed hardware somewhere. They have a purpose for the computer, which requires applications on top of the operating system. And I don't see why we shouldn't call it that way.
It doesn't have to be a fully grown Hardware Abstraction Layer. But in general MS-DOS is not considered an operating system. (Quoting my CS 101 teacher, when he was writing names of operating systems on the blackboard, back then in 1989: VMS, VM/CMS, BS2000. "You never heard of BS2000? It's from SIEMENS, and B probably stands for 'Betriebssystem' (german for operating system), and S for SIEMENS, and 2000 for the year the first stable version will be shipped. Of cause there are rumours about a successor, called BS3000..." Then he wrote down MS-DOS, erased it again: "No, this is not an operating system.")
But an operating system's task is to separate the different processes running on a computer by managing the ressources (processors, memory, I/O...) and sharing it between the processes. You can do that by introducing a HAL (as IBM did it with VM/CMS, and Windows NT did it for x86 hardware), but you don't need to. Having a HAL has other advantages, by providing a uniform interface independent from the actual hardware layout, thus making software more portable, so OS designers love HALs.
There is another more theoretical aspect to HALs: Every program running on a computer changes the actual machine to another machine with a different set of functions. This refers a little to the embedded system argument brought up in this thread. So every program is a Hardware Abstraction Layer in a way that it changes the behaviour of and the interface to the underlying system, which in itself could consists of another program running on top of an underlying system etc.pp.
Those layers of programs each changing the way the machine interacts with its environment are called virtual machines. And virtualization is just another term for abstraction, because you don't work directly on the hardware anymore, but on a virtual machine hiding some aspects of the actual hardware.
A virtual machine is called an operating system, if it virtualizes the underlying hardware in a way that the programs running on it can't interfere anymore with each other without calling a predefined set of functions called Inter Process Communications. It doesn't have to hide the actual hardware functions or unify different hardware to a common set of functions to interact with it, as a complete HAL does. It just has to make sure that two task don't get in each others way.
That's what I did when I said: "[Applications] may be part of a distribtion around a core OS.". Blurring those lines leads to those confusions we like to laugh about: "We are using Windows and XP" or "I am using Windows to write documentations". I've heard those all the time, and when I tried to explain to someone why something is called an application and something else is part of the (Windows) operating system, I wished, I had a criterium my confused users could understand.
Defining "Operating system is, whatever your vendor calls it, for whatever reason" doesn't really help. Saying, that the operating system is the software that talks to the devices, and an application talks to you to help you to get your tasks done, is a concept most users grasp very easily.
If you don't like this definition, then provide one please, that fits your purposes and makes it possible to draw a line between an application and the operating system. What's your criterium to determine if a certain binary is a part of the OS or a part of an application?
You mention Microsoft's definition of an OS. Microsoft failed to convince the judge in the DOJ's anti trust case that a webbrowser is an integral part of the OS. So calling a webbrowser an integral part failes not only the technical test (technically it is an application), it also failes the juristical test (it can't be called an integral part of the OS). It only serves as a marketing vehicle.
Microsoft surely likes to blur the line between the OS and the applications, because then they can bundle applications to their OS offer (which they are restricted to do as a factual monopolist) and call it an OS innovation (which isn't a juristical term, so they feel they are not restricted to do it).
Please note: It is not in general a crime to bundle several parts to a bundle offering. It is not allowed though, if the offerer has an overwhelming market share for one offer and uses this to increase the market share also for the other offerings by not letting customers have a choice.
Microsoft would never have been convicted for misusing a monopoly (having one is perfectly legal), if they didn't ship Windows only with Internet Explorer bundled. If a customer had the choice to get Windows without Internet Explorer, everything would have been fine. It may not have been the wisest choice though for the customer to go without, but this doesn't matter in this case.
They tried to weasle out of the situation by calling Internet Explorer an integral part of the OS and not a application bundled with the OS, but they failed.
Monopoly or no monopoly, a modern OS requires an internet browser and a video player.
Monopoly or not: Applications are not part of any OS. They may be part of a distribtion around a core OS.
What you are talking about is an allpurpose computer. Not an OS. A computer needs an OS, because the OS by definition is the supervisor of the computer's ressources (you actually don't need an OS if you are running only single task programs. That's why old home computers and early PCs came with a program loader instead of an operating system and had the programs manage the ressources themselves).
A computer normally gets bought for a reason, and the reason is mostly not "Having computer ressources managed by an OS", so you need applications to run on the computer. If you want to reach a large target group with your offering, you should add as much applications as possible (because with the current pricing for computer ressources, storage space is not an issue).
But those are, what they are: Applications. They should not be part of the OS. If a company is having a monopoly on the OS, then allowing the company to choose the applications bundled with the OS kills the application market. There are people which don't like the market to be killed.
Imagine a company coming out with an application suite which gets so popular that MS Office falls behind. And then Microsoft sees that the Office Division doesn't create a profit anymore. So why not include the Office suite "for free" in the OS? You could argue that no "modern OS" should come without an office suite anyway. And Microsoft could get the money back by selling more OS upgrade licensing programs anyway, because they control the OS market and can thus set arbitrary prices. It just kills off the competition.
It looks as if you don't grasp the concept here. No one requires the knocking sequence to be static. Only the knockd as a proof-of-concept implementation uses a static sequence to keep the program simple and point out what Knocking adds to the normal server concepts. Authentifying yourself against a server with a nonstatic sequence is not a new concept in this context, so it was not focussed on during knockd's implementation.
No one will stop you to implement an adv_knockd which requires the knocking sequence to be the current time in GMT, signed with your private key. Then your adv_knockd checks your signature with your public key and verifies the timestamp.
This makes your adv_knockd invulnerable against replay attacks, if you declare an sequence already sent to be invalid for the next hour (you have to allow for a grace period in the timestamp, because of network delays and asynchronous clocks, so a replay of an already sent sequence within a few seconds would still come through).
The knockd is explicitly called a proof-of-concept. Using it directly as part of your security policy is strongly disencouraged:)
No, it is not. At least not literally. Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit is, David Boies will get the same: A fixed amount of money and a fixed amount of shares. What will be different is the value of the compensation David Boies is entitled to. We'll agree, that the value of the shares is quite directly connected to the outcome of the lawsuit. The value of the money David Boies gets is determined by such factors like inflation and interest rates, so it is not fixed either. But there is no contractual "success fee" included into David Boies compensation.
Re:The Long Answer
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Death by Coffee?
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· Score: 3, Informative
As far as I know (I am not a physician [yet]), higher blood pressure is caused by contracting of the arteries or by a high level of electrolytes or by an increase of the heart frequency. Nicotine for instance causes a higher heart frequency by having the coronar (heart) arteries contracting, thus signalling a lower level of nutrition to the heart muscle, which in turn increases its frequency to compensate. Caffeine is a stimulant to the nervous system and increases the blood pressure by causing the injection of adrenaline, which in turn increases breath and heart frequency, thus bettering the nutrition of the body and making you feel awake and alert. But caffeine is not the single ingredient of coffee. Coffee contains about 700-2500 different ingredients (The different sources give different numbers). Many of them are created during the roasting process, and the way the coffee beans are roasted thus strongly influences the later taste of the coffee. Many of those ingredients are solulable in water, thus increasing the electrolyte side of the balance.
Re:The Long Answer
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Death by Coffee?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Coffee contains electrolytes, and far too much. By drinking coffee you actually dehydrate your body, because the coffee has a higher electrolyte concentration than your body. This is one of the reasons behind the tradition to be served with a glass of water together with an espresso in an italian restaurant.
The situation was a little more complicated. The president of Hungary, Medgyessy, offered airspace to the U.S. (and signed the open letter of 10 heads of european states supporting the Iraq war), but the contract was later refused by the hungarian parliament. In the end Hungary allowed the U.S. to use the Paszar airfield and agreed to train iraqian people there.
But I didn't elect the U.S. gouvernment. But I have to live with its rulings. The hungarian parliament explicitely forbid the use of hungarian airspace for the Iraq war. The U.S. ignored it. Technically the U.S. is at war with Hungary at the moment. Austria forbid the use of its airspace too, and U.S. didn't stop to ignore it until Austria said it would shot down the next american airplane entering its airspace. Austria has a paragraph in its constitution demanding neutrality in any war in which it wasn't attacked. The paragraph was put into the constitution after WW II on demand of the U.S.
U.S. soldiers were commiting crimes in Hungary and Austria (entering the airspace with a bomb airplain is a crime in most countries). But there is no chance to ever prosecute those crimes. U.S. military personnel have effectively hindred the prosecution of other alleged crimes (killing 26 people in Italy by cutting the wires of an aerial ropeway, several alleged rapes committed by military personell in Japan). I know why the U.S. don't want those things to be prosecuted. It would shed a bad light on the military. But hindering prosecution sheds more bad light on the military. Because now everyone can accuse the U.S. military of any crime. Because it will never be revised by a court, there will also never be a clearance.
120 countries have signed the treaty to install the International Court. It was meant to go after people who committed crimes during a war or while being in power and who didn't have to fear prosecution because of the situation in the countries they committed the crime. I don't see anything inherently bad about it. If you go abroad and do something wrong, you shall be subject to the local laws. If you know the laws will turn out bad for you, don't go there. This applies to everyone. Even if they are U.S. citizens.
It's definitely lacking in "press coverage in the U.S.";)
Re:largest IT fair in Europe....
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Cebit 2004 Coverage
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· Score: 3, Informative
It is the largest IT fair of the world, if you count the numbers of the exhibitors, the number of the visitors, the area of the fair and the gross yearly revenue of all participating entities.
In other countries there are also additional ballots to vote on. It's not specific to the U.S. At the last Landtag (state council) elections I took part we had also additional ballots about a change in the constitution of the state.
Maybe it's easier to organise several elections and votes for different issues?
There is one thing at which "tick the box on a paper ballot" can't be beaten so easily. It's nearly impossible to commit fraud without someone noticing. In all elections I ever took part EVERYONE has the right to watch EVERY part of the voting. From printing ballots to sealing the votingbox, see how the people come to the voting room, put their ballot in the voting box, see how the (volunteer) voting council counts the votes and even travel with the resealed voting box to the central voting office. Because everthing is done by hand, everyone can watch it and determine if it was fraudulent or correct. You don't need specialists to browse through the source code of a strange system. Nearly everyone knows how to mark a ballot with pencil, and nearly everyone knows how to interpret the marked ballot later (yes... it's also possible to interpret it as 'invalidly casted vote').
Everything that speeds up the voting process makes it more difficult to watch the process, thus opening more opportunities to commit fraud. If you have to trust a box to do a process you could do yourself, then this box becomes an uncontrollable element for you. If you can't watch the bits going along the wire to the central voting office, then there is a covert channel you can't analyse.
It's not alone that the possibility exists to recount, if there are doubts. It's more important, that you have a chance to even notice a possible rigging. It's difficult to detect rigged mechanical systems. It gets nearly impossible with electronic black boxes. Everything that hides a process before you or speeds it up too much for your senses, has the potential to abuse.
Voting is about power. This power should be examined as closely as possible to avoid misuse. That's no paranoia. That's just common sense.
Or is it, because there are lots of work already done in C, and adapting the code to.NET seems more feasable than porting it to C#? Or because the algorithms are given in C, and it makes no sense to reinvent them in C#, because they don't make any usage of an object oriented design? (Think about huge numerical packages.)
It's quite easy. You go to a table which serves your voting precinct, and the pollster at the table checks your identity with the voter's list. If she doesn't find you, she sends you to the right table. And because the table with your name on the voter's list has the right ballots, you can't mess up. In countries with paper ballot voting this concept seems to work.
Lets say for example that the local party is run by your local mafia.
What's the problem there if there are several parties to choose from? In fact especially in the towns there are so called "free electors" (Freie Waehler) active, which are an heavy counterweight to the parties. Those are just people coming together to put up alternative lists for elections, thus avoiding the swamp you would have if everything happening locally is determined by an inner circle in the parties somewhere at their headquartes. Germany doesn't have an essentially two party system like the U.S. Sure, there are the two largest parties which together get about 75 percent of the vote in federal elections (actually about 78 percent in the last federal elections), but at the local elections you get quite different outcomes and thus quite different people at the levers of the power. And never ever in the history of the German Federal Republic a party alone was able to determine the politics. They always had to compromise and form coalitions with smaller parties.
There is a counter example to the feasably of standard 8 1/2" by 11" ballots. In some states of Germany the elections to the local administrations (towns, counties, villages) use the so called "non genuine town part election" (unechte Teilortswahl). After reorganizing towns and villages and regrouping them to larger communities in the early 70ies the former villages got a fixed number of seats in the new town's councils. So the votes are counted in every former village separately to determine which candidates get sent to the town council. On the other hand the complete town council should represent the votes cast proportionally, so if one party wins more seats in the town council per winning them in the town parts than their quote is in the popular vote, then the other parties get a proportional number of seats in the now enlarged town council (those seats are called "Ueberhangmandate", roughly translated to surplus seats). (To make it more easy, groups that get less than 5% of the popular vote are ignored, except if they manage to get more than three direct seats).
On the other hand the voters have so many votes as the orinigal town council has seats. The voter is allowed to put the votes freely on the ballots to whatever candidate she thinks they should go without respect to the party membership of the candidates. If she thinks a candidate should definitely get some votes, she can even cummulate more than one vote (mostly up to three) to a candidate (but then she has less votes left for other candidates). If she thinks that's too complicated she can also cast a single vote to a 'list', a group of candidates for a single party or political group. A list basicly consists of the nominates of a single party for all the seats in the town council.
If she agrees with none of the candidates, she can also write the names of her own candidates in a free list.
Because the parties and groups have to nominate candidates for every seat to allow this list voting, the ballots can get extremly large. There once was an election for a town council in Southwest Germany where the ballots were about 4ft by 3ft (DIN A0), because about 20 groups had sent in lists for the 40 seats of the council.
After calculation all the proportions and giving underrepresented groups and lists the surplus seats the town council grew to 132 seats.
Normally such a complicated way of voting would call for an electronic voting system. But nothing beats the opportunity for the electorate to come to the voting booths after the booths have closed for voting, and watch the voting staff crew to open the sealed boxes and count the votes manually. This is controlling the democratic process at its finest. The local voting result will be announced to the autitorium before the votes get sealed again in a box and sent to the central election offices. The so called preliminary voting result (vorlaeufiges amtliches Endergebnis) is determined by adding the local results, and then the central election offices open the sealed boxes and again count the votes while the electorate has the chance to watch.
This is my greatest issue with electronic voting: You can't watch the count. From my experience nothing beats watching the count. In the former GDR (East Germany) the population knew the elections were rigged because enough people showed up at the election offices and watched the officials counting. Even though the people then only knew the local result, they could easily see the difference between the local result and the officially anounced one. If the official result announced for instance a 98,85 percent result for the ruling party in a town of 10,000 people, and you knew that your local office had counted at least 120 votes cast against them, then you saw the result being rigged. This showing up during the counting and collecting the results was done throughout the whole GDR in the last communal elections on May 6 1989, and the public uproar after the officially anounced result was contradicting the results the people were calculating themselves triggered the inner tensions the GDR didn't survived but for another half year.
My lessons are: However you vote, whenever you vote: Make sure you are able to watch the count!
It's done so that in states with closed primaries you can only vote in the primary of the party that you are registered for.
This reminds me of relatives of mine from the U.S. who couldn't understand the european concept of party membership. In a way it is comparable to the registered voter status, but a party member actually pays a membership fee to the party (and this money is one of the main ways for parties to finance themselves). I tried to explain to them that my brother is member of a party, but the other family members are not, but I failed.
I don't know of any european country that knows about the concept of primary elections. In Europe the parties don't have a canonical way to determine their candidates for office. It's mostly done during a vote on a party convention, and the people going to those conventions are determined by the local party groups of members by whatever method the single local party group thinks is fitting (Even if it is "who has the time to go to that convention?"). In no country I know of there is a general election day for primaries, every party takes the date it thinks it fits to call for the party convention.
Sometimes the parties have "base polls", which determine the outcome of an innerpartial debate, without settling the dispute at a party convention. But never are the countries' Election Offices in any way involved in those innerpartial things.
Yes and now. My father worked for an east german audio company, and I got a Commodore 64 in the mid 80ies as a present. Unluckily no datasette tape recorder, so I couldn't store my programs or load programs from somewhere else. My father then took a 2.5mm connector, cut out the one pin that may have short circuited the socket (after 12 pins a 2.5mm connector is halfway off an 0.1" connector: 12*2.5mm = 30mm, and 12*0.1" = 1,2" = 30,48mm) and build a home made clone of the Commodore datasette out of a stock tape recorder.
At the office my father's colleagues were doing all the same for their children, moulding connector clones out of Silicon, building joysticks from raw plastic and microswitches (I had a "joy plate", basicly a plastic plate sitting on a spring with four microswitches, each at one side, and you operated it by putting the whole hand on it. Unbeatable at sport games;) )
The same improvisation was at work nearly everywhere in the Eastern Block. What didn't fit was made fitting without too much consideration about security issues or similar.
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft must not give OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) or users a discount conditional on their obtaining Windows together with WMP (Windows Media Player)...or otherwise, remove or restrict OEMs' or users' freedom to choose the version of Windows without (Media Player),"
That's why. Having MS Windows bundled with WMP offered cheaper than MS Windows alone is considered a discount and such not allowed under the indiction.
No. It was finally the aluminium hull and structure of the Hindenburg, that caught fire. Think it as a long chain: First something catches fire by a lightning streak, thus lighting up the hydrogen. With the hydrogen burning the fire gets so hot that the aluminium structure starts melting and catching fire too. And burning light metals can't be extinguished by throwing water, foam or carbondioxyde on it. They just reduce the water to hydrogen and the carbondioxyde to carbonmonoxyde, which then create an explosive gas if they reach fresh oxygene. The only thing you can extinguish light metal fire with is powder (which consists mainly of a sodium compound which I don't remember the name right now), and I doubt the firemen in Lakehurst had enough powder available (was it even used to extinguish fire in 1937?)
Lets put it like this: The commercial air ship aera did in fact end with LZ129's catastrophic landing. But this was just the last blow to an already endangered concept. The track record of commercial lighter-than-air traffic was abyssmal even before the Lakehurst event. For instance only half of the LZ series ships ever build did NOT end in a catastrophical event. And trans atlantic flights have been proven possible by airplanes already 15 years ago (The "Spirit of St.Louis" being rather one of the last sportive attempts to cross the atlantic which got famous because Charles Lindbergh missed his original destination in Ireland and landed quite remarkably for the press in Paris).
In most of the world a 'liberal' (someone friendly to the idea of liberty) is a free-market person, who thinks that there is no good reason to interfere with ones personal rights, but sadly there are some bad reasons he can't really argue against.
Calling a communist 'liberal' is offensive against both the communist and the liberal in most parts of the world.
Where is the simple solution, that the losing party in a civil suit pays both bills? (Or they share the bills if the suit was partly successful.) So everyone just pays the initial costs and can claim it back if she was right.
I don't have anything against Microsoft selling a core OS to "OS outfitters", which in turn sell "MS Windows OS powered distributions". The problem with MS is a complete other thing: By blurring the line between the OS and the bundled applications they are eating into the application market and make it more and more difficult for a company to sell a fairly generic application to the public.
Look at any application classes that once gave several companies a good revenue stream: They are either integrated into the MS Office packet or integrated in the MS Windows offering: word processors, spread sheets, presentation programs, web browsers, network servers, streaming media players, collaboration suites...
There are a few classes left: enterprise class databases, enterprise resource planning systems, and ironically program suites that try to fight the consequences of incomplete security models within MS software. With the upcoming Longhorn version of MS Windows the database server will be part of at least the larger server offerings, the database kernel may even be also in the home and workstation versions. So the database business may be at its end. Microsoft recently bought several ERP developers (Navision for instance), so expect ERP systems showing up in MS Office. And virus scan is already planned for the futural MS Windows versions.
Basicly Microsoft's tactic is to look which market will emerge and warrant good revenue from a large customer base, and if the market yields mature products and steady revenue streams, Microsoft integrates similar offerings "for free" in either MS Windows or MS Office, thus drying up the market and forcing the companies out of business. And the argument is always the same: "Hey, most people are using this on their computers anyway. So they expect it to be in the basic offering, and thus we are including it." And if the MS offering bundled with either MS Windows or MS Office is just good enough for most people they don't look for alternatives.
Microsoft is outsourcing the risk for new software business models to other software companies. No company in a competitive environment could do this. You have to have a monopoly somewhere warranting you a steady revenue stream to play the game this way. Normaly Antitrust law was designed to hinder such tactics, but Microsoft is trying to get away by calling standalone applications part of the operating system or integration functions for MS Office.
So using correct terms for the things Microsoft is offering is a necessity. MS Windows is not just an operating system. It is a bundle of an operating system with lots of applications of general interest, similar to a Linux distribution. As I said in my former posting: Most people don't buy a computer and an operating system just to have a managed hardware somewhere. They have a purpose for the computer, which requires applications on top of the operating system. And I don't see why we shouldn't call it that way.
It doesn't have to be a fully grown Hardware Abstraction Layer. But in general MS-DOS is not considered an operating system. (Quoting my CS 101 teacher, when he was writing names of operating systems on the blackboard, back then in 1989: VMS, VM/CMS, BS2000. "You never heard of BS2000? It's from SIEMENS, and B probably stands for 'Betriebssystem' (german for operating system), and S for SIEMENS, and 2000 for the year the first stable version will be shipped. Of cause there are rumours about a successor, called BS3000..." Then he wrote down MS-DOS, erased it again: "No, this is not an operating system.")
But an operating system's task is to separate the different processes running on a computer by managing the ressources (processors, memory, I/O...) and sharing it between the processes. You can do that by introducing a HAL (as IBM did it with VM/CMS, and Windows NT did it for x86 hardware), but you don't need to. Having a HAL has other advantages, by providing a uniform interface independent from the actual hardware layout, thus making software more portable, so OS designers love HALs.
There is another more theoretical aspect to HALs: Every program running on a computer changes the actual machine to another machine with a different set of functions. This refers a little to the embedded system argument brought up in this thread. So every program is a Hardware Abstraction Layer in a way that it changes the behaviour of and the interface to the underlying system, which in itself could consists of another program running on top of an underlying system etc.pp.
Those layers of programs each changing the way the machine interacts with its environment are called virtual machines. And virtualization is just another term for abstraction, because you don't work directly on the hardware anymore, but on a virtual machine hiding some aspects of the actual hardware.
A virtual machine is called an operating system, if it virtualizes the underlying hardware in a way that the programs running on it can't interfere anymore with each other without calling a predefined set of functions called Inter Process Communications. It doesn't have to hide the actual hardware functions or unify different hardware to a common set of functions to interact with it, as a complete HAL does. It just has to make sure that two task don't get in each others way.
That's what I did when I said: "[Applications] may be part of a distribtion around a core OS.". Blurring those lines leads to those confusions we like to laugh about: "We are using Windows and XP" or "I am using Windows to write documentations". I've heard those all the time, and when I tried to explain to someone why something is called an application and something else is part of the (Windows) operating system, I wished, I had a criterium my confused users could understand.
Defining "Operating system is, whatever your vendor calls it, for whatever reason" doesn't really help. Saying, that the operating system is the software that talks to the devices, and an application talks to you to help you to get your tasks done, is a concept most users grasp very easily.
If you don't like this definition, then provide one please, that fits your purposes and makes it possible to draw a line between an application and the operating system. What's your criterium to determine if a certain binary is a part of the OS or a part of an application?
You mention Microsoft's definition of an OS. Microsoft failed to convince the judge in the DOJ's anti trust case that a webbrowser is an integral part of the OS. So calling a webbrowser an integral part failes not only the technical test (technically it is an application), it also failes the juristical test (it can't be called an integral part of the OS). It only serves as a marketing vehicle.
Microsoft surely likes to blur the line between the OS and the applications, because then they can bundle applications to their OS offer (which they are restricted to do as a factual monopolist) and call it an OS innovation (which isn't a juristical term, so they feel they are not restricted to do it).
Please note: It is not in general a crime to bundle several parts to a bundle offering. It is not allowed though, if the offerer has an overwhelming market share for one offer and uses this to increase the market share also for the other offerings by not letting customers have a choice.
Microsoft would never have been convicted for misusing a monopoly (having one is perfectly legal), if they didn't ship Windows only with Internet Explorer bundled. If a customer had the choice to get Windows without Internet Explorer, everything would have been fine. It may not have been the wisest choice though for the customer to go without, but this doesn't matter in this case.
They tried to weasle out of the situation by calling Internet Explorer an integral part of the OS and not a application bundled with the OS, but they failed.
Monopoly or no monopoly, a modern OS requires an internet browser and a video player.
Monopoly or not: Applications are not part of any OS. They may be part of a distribtion around a core OS.
What you are talking about is an allpurpose computer. Not an OS. A computer needs an OS, because the OS by definition is the supervisor of the computer's ressources (you actually don't need an OS if you are running only single task programs. That's why old home computers and early PCs came with a program loader instead of an operating system and had the programs manage the ressources themselves).
A computer normally gets bought for a reason, and the reason is mostly not "Having computer ressources managed by an OS", so you need applications to run on the computer. If you want to reach a large target group with your offering, you should add as much applications as possible (because with the current pricing for computer ressources, storage space is not an issue).
But those are, what they are: Applications. They should not be part of the OS. If a company is having a monopoly on the OS, then allowing the company to choose the applications bundled with the OS kills the application market. There are people which don't like the market to be killed.
Imagine a company coming out with an application suite which gets so popular that MS Office falls behind. And then Microsoft sees that the Office Division doesn't create a profit anymore. So why not include the Office suite "for free" in the OS? You could argue that no "modern OS" should come without an office suite anyway. And Microsoft could get the money back by selling more OS upgrade licensing programs anyway, because they control the OS market and can thus set arbitrary prices. It just kills off the competition.
It looks as if you don't grasp the concept here. No one requires the knocking sequence to be static. Only the knockd as a proof-of-concept implementation uses a static sequence to keep the program simple and point out what Knocking adds to the normal server concepts. Authentifying yourself against a server with a nonstatic sequence is not a new concept in this context, so it was not focussed on during knockd's implementation.
:)
No one will stop you to implement an adv_knockd which requires the knocking sequence to be the current time in GMT, signed with your private key. Then your adv_knockd checks your signature with your public key and verifies the timestamp.
This makes your adv_knockd invulnerable against replay attacks, if you declare an sequence already sent to be invalid for the next hour (you have to allow for a grace period in the timestamp, because of network delays and asynchronous clocks, so a replay of an already sent sequence within a few seconds would still come through).
The knockd is explicitly called a proof-of-concept. Using it directly as part of your security policy is strongly disencouraged
No, it is not. At least not literally. Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit is, David Boies will get the same: A fixed amount of money and a fixed amount of shares. What will be different is the value of the compensation David Boies is entitled to.
We'll agree, that the value of the shares is quite directly connected to the outcome of the lawsuit. The value of the money David Boies gets is determined by such factors like inflation and interest rates, so it is not fixed either.
But there is no contractual "success fee" included into David Boies compensation.
As far as I know (I am not a physician [yet]), higher blood pressure is caused by contracting of the arteries or by a high level of electrolytes or by an increase of the heart frequency. Nicotine for instance causes a higher heart frequency by having the coronar (heart) arteries contracting, thus signalling a lower level of nutrition to the heart muscle, which in turn increases its frequency to compensate.
Caffeine is a stimulant to the nervous system and increases the blood pressure by causing the injection of adrenaline, which in turn increases breath and heart frequency, thus bettering the nutrition of the body and making you feel awake and alert.
But caffeine is not the single ingredient of coffee. Coffee contains about 700-2500 different ingredients (The different sources give different numbers). Many of them are created during the roasting process, and the way the coffee beans are roasted thus strongly influences the later taste of the coffee. Many of those ingredients are solulable in water, thus increasing the electrolyte side of the balance.
Coffee contains electrolytes, and far too much. By drinking coffee you actually dehydrate your body, because the coffee has a higher electrolyte concentration than your body. This is one of the reasons behind the tradition to be served with a glass of water together with an espresso in an italian restaurant.
Methan has four threefold symmetry axes.
:)
Fullerene (C60) has 12 sixfold symmetry axes and 48 fivefold ones.
Fullerene wins hands down
The situation was a little more complicated. The president of Hungary, Medgyessy, offered airspace to the U.S. (and signed the open letter of 10 heads of european states supporting the Iraq war), but the contract was later refused by the hungarian parliament. In the end Hungary allowed the U.S. to use the Paszar airfield and agreed to train iraqian people there.
But I didn't elect the U.S. gouvernment. But I have to live with its rulings. The hungarian parliament explicitely forbid the use of hungarian airspace for the Iraq war. The U.S. ignored it. Technically the U.S. is at war with Hungary at the moment. Austria forbid the use of its airspace too, and U.S. didn't stop to ignore it until Austria said it would shot down the next american airplane entering its airspace. Austria has a paragraph in its constitution demanding neutrality in any war in which it wasn't attacked. The paragraph was put into the constitution after WW II on demand of the U.S.
U.S. soldiers were commiting crimes in Hungary and Austria (entering the airspace with a bomb airplain is a crime in most countries). But there is no chance to ever prosecute those crimes. U.S. military personnel have effectively hindred the prosecution of other alleged crimes (killing 26 people in Italy by cutting the wires of an aerial ropeway, several alleged rapes committed by military personell in Japan). I know why the U.S. don't want those things to be prosecuted. It would shed a bad light on the military. But hindering prosecution sheds more bad light on the military. Because now everyone can accuse the U.S. military of any crime. Because it will never be revised by a court, there will also never be a clearance.
120 countries have signed the treaty to install the International Court. It was meant to go after people who committed crimes during a war or while being in power and who didn't have to fear prosecution because of the situation in the countries they committed the crime. I don't see anything inherently bad about it. If you go abroad and do something wrong, you shall be subject to the local laws. If you know the laws will turn out bad for you, don't go there. This applies to everyone. Even if they are U.S. citizens.
It's definitely lacking in "press coverage in the U.S." ;)
It is the largest IT fair of the world, if you count the numbers of the exhibitors, the number of the visitors, the area of the fair and the gross yearly revenue of all participating entities.
In other countries there are also additional ballots to vote on. It's not specific to the U.S. At the last Landtag (state council) elections I took part we had also additional ballots about a change in the constitution of the state.
Maybe it's easier to organise several elections and votes for different issues?
There is one thing at which "tick the box on a paper ballot" can't be beaten so easily. It's nearly impossible to commit fraud without someone noticing. In all elections I ever took part EVERYONE has the right to watch EVERY part of the voting. From printing ballots to sealing the votingbox, see how the people come to the voting room, put their ballot in the voting box, see how the (volunteer) voting council counts the votes and even travel with the resealed voting box to the central voting office. Because everthing is done by hand, everyone can watch it and determine if it was fraudulent or correct. You don't need specialists to browse through the source code of a strange system. Nearly everyone knows how to mark a ballot with pencil, and nearly everyone knows how to interpret the marked ballot later (yes... it's also possible to interpret it as 'invalidly casted vote').
Everything that speeds up the voting process makes it more difficult to watch the process, thus opening more opportunities to commit fraud. If you have to trust a box to do a process you could do yourself, then this box becomes an uncontrollable element for you. If you can't watch the bits going along the wire to the central voting office, then there is a covert channel you can't analyse.
It's not alone that the possibility exists to recount, if there are doubts. It's more important, that you have a chance to even notice a possible rigging. It's difficult to detect rigged mechanical systems. It gets nearly impossible with electronic black boxes. Everything that hides a process before you or speeds it up too much for your senses, has the potential to abuse.
Voting is about power. This power should be examined as closely as possible to avoid misuse. That's no paranoia. That's just common sense.
Or is it, because there are lots of work already done in C, and adapting the code to .NET seems more feasable than porting it to C#? Or because the algorithms are given in C, and it makes no sense to reinvent them in C#, because they don't make any usage of an object oriented design? (Think about huge numerical packages.)
It's quite easy. You go to a table which serves your voting precinct, and the pollster at the table checks your identity with the voter's list. If she doesn't find you, she sends you to the right table. And because the table with your name on the voter's list has the right ballots, you can't mess up. In countries with paper ballot voting this concept seems to work.
Lets say for example that the local party is run by your local mafia.
What's the problem there if there are several parties to choose from? In fact especially in the towns there are so called "free electors" (Freie Waehler) active, which are an heavy counterweight to the parties. Those are just people coming together to put up alternative lists for elections, thus avoiding the swamp you would have if everything happening locally is determined by an inner circle in the parties somewhere at their headquartes. Germany doesn't have an essentially two party system like the U.S. Sure, there are the two largest parties which together get about 75 percent of the vote in federal elections (actually about 78 percent in the last federal elections), but at the local elections you get quite different outcomes and thus quite different people at the levers of the power. And never ever in the history of the German Federal Republic a party alone was able to determine the politics. They always had to compromise and form coalitions with smaller parties.
There is a counter example to the feasably of standard 8 1/2" by 11" ballots. In some states of Germany the elections to the local administrations (towns, counties, villages) use the so called "non genuine town part election" (unechte Teilortswahl). After reorganizing towns and villages and regrouping them to larger communities in the early 70ies the former villages got a fixed number of seats in the new town's councils. So the votes are counted in every former village separately to determine which candidates get sent to the town council. On the other hand the complete town council should represent the votes cast proportionally, so if one party wins more seats in the town council per winning them in the town parts than their quote is in the popular vote, then the other parties get a proportional number of seats in the now enlarged town council (those seats are called "Ueberhangmandate", roughly translated to surplus seats). (To make it more easy, groups that get less than 5% of the popular vote are ignored, except if they manage to get more than three direct seats).
On the other hand the voters have so many votes as the orinigal town council has seats. The voter is allowed to put the votes freely on the ballots to whatever candidate she thinks they should go without respect to the party membership of the candidates. If she thinks a candidate should definitely get some votes, she can even cummulate more than one vote (mostly up to three) to a candidate (but then she has less votes left for other candidates). If she thinks that's too complicated she can also cast a single vote to a 'list', a group of candidates for a single party or political group. A list basicly consists of the nominates of a single party for all the seats in the town council.
If she agrees with none of the candidates, she can also write the names of her own candidates in a free list.
Because the parties and groups have to nominate candidates for every seat to allow this list voting, the ballots can get extremly large. There once was an election for a town council in Southwest Germany where the ballots were about 4ft by 3ft (DIN A0), because about 20 groups had sent in lists for the 40 seats of the council.
After calculation all the proportions and giving underrepresented groups and lists the surplus seats the town council grew to 132 seats.
Normally such a complicated way of voting would call for an electronic voting system. But nothing beats the opportunity for the electorate to come to the voting booths after the booths have closed for voting, and watch the voting staff crew to open the sealed boxes and count the votes manually. This is controlling the democratic process at its finest. The local voting result will be announced to the autitorium before the votes get sealed again in a box and sent to the central election offices. The so called preliminary voting result (vorlaeufiges amtliches Endergebnis) is determined by adding the local results, and then the central election offices open the sealed boxes and again count the votes while the electorate has the chance to watch.
This is my greatest issue with electronic voting: You can't watch the count. From my experience nothing beats watching the count. In the former GDR (East Germany) the population knew the elections were rigged because enough people showed up at the election offices and watched the officials counting. Even though the people then only knew the local result, they could easily see the difference between the local result and the officially anounced one. If the official result announced for instance a 98,85 percent result for the ruling party in a town of 10,000 people, and you knew that your local office had counted at least 120 votes cast against them, then you saw the result being rigged. This showing up during the counting and collecting the results was done throughout the whole GDR in the last communal elections on May 6 1989, and the public uproar after the officially anounced result was contradicting the results the people were calculating themselves triggered the inner tensions the GDR didn't survived but for another half year.
My lessons are: However you vote, whenever you vote: Make sure you are able to watch the count!
Why is this done?
It's done so that in states with closed primaries you can only vote in the primary of the party that you are registered for.
This reminds me of relatives of mine from the U.S. who couldn't understand the european concept of party membership. In a way it is comparable to the registered voter status, but a party member actually pays a membership fee to the party (and this money is one of the main ways for parties to finance themselves). I tried to explain to them that my brother is member of a party, but the other family members are not, but I failed.
I don't know of any european country that knows about the concept of primary elections. In Europe the parties don't have a canonical way to determine their candidates for office. It's mostly done during a vote on a party convention, and the people going to those conventions are determined by the local party groups of members by whatever method the single local party group thinks is fitting (Even if it is "who has the time to go to that convention?"). In no country I know of there is a general election day for primaries, every party takes the date it thinks it fits to call for the party convention.
Sometimes the parties have "base polls", which determine the outcome of an innerpartial debate, without settling the dispute at a party convention. But never are the countries' Election Offices in any way involved in those innerpartial things.
Yes and now. My father worked for an east german audio company, and I got a Commodore 64 in the mid 80ies as a present. Unluckily no datasette tape recorder, so I couldn't store my programs or load programs from somewhere else. My father then took a 2.5mm connector, cut out the one pin that may have short circuited the socket (after 12 pins a 2.5mm connector is halfway off an 0.1" connector: 12*2.5mm = 30mm, and 12*0.1" = 1,2" = 30,48mm) and build a home made clone of the Commodore datasette out of a stock tape recorder.
;) )
At the office my father's colleagues were doing all the same for their children, moulding connector clones out of Silicon, building joysticks from raw plastic and microswitches (I had a "joy plate", basicly a plastic plate sitting on a spring with four microswitches, each at one side, and you operated it by putting the whole hand on it. Unbeatable at sport games
The same improvisation was at work nearly everywhere in the Eastern Block. What didn't fit was made fitting without too much consideration about security issues or similar.