Despite the proprietary nature of this beast, the concept has not been patented (as far as I could determine in US or Europe). Hopefully, this concept will be expanded to general platforms in short order. The possibilities of load balancing low-level operations is quite interesting.
There is something missing here...
on
High-Speed Greed
·
· Score: 2
What is missing is this: ability.
Quite frankly, the way this article is written, it sounds like AT&T wants to charge all on-line merchants for each sale made to AT&T broadband customers. This cannot be the case.
First point: I, as an on-line retailer do not use any of AT&T's services. As long as I do not push anything onto their network, I have no accountability to them. If their customer wants to pull something from my servers onto AT&T's network, the bill belongs to and stays with their customer.
Second point: AT&T, while it can monitor traffic to individual sites, has no means of determining just how much I have sold to their customer. Packet-wise (especially SSL-based communication), all transactions look the same and AT&T has no and should have no means of peeking into those transactions.
Third point: The internet exists where AT&T doesn't. If I want to run an e-commerce site from HavenCo's Sealand fortress, there exists no juristiction under which AT&T can pursue any claims of unfair bandwidth usage.
With this in mind, let's re-examine the article. It sounds like AT&T is planning on setting up a basic, ad-supported service, whereby customers can use the broadband in exchange for viewing ads placed by sponsors. In this model, AT&T takes a percentage of the revenue generated by this placement. Thus we have three consenting parties in the transaction (you-consumer, me-merchant, AT&T).
Thank God! Someone on/. who remembers their European History 101!
It is quite obvious that Jon Katz has gotten his history lessons from listening to the Internet Town Hall rather than by actually looking up his facts in <*GASP*> a book!
Since the e-mail was sent to you, that is evidence enough that the sender intended for you to read it. Using software that can understand the format cannot be construed
as an attempt to violate the copyright.
I'm a bit dubious as to your take on this. Since Sony Pictures is selling and marketing their films to me, isn't that evidence that they want me to watch their movies? Well, yes. Then using software which can understand the format movies are encoded in cannot (by your statement) be construed as an attempt to violate the copyright.
While I can agree with some of your points, I think you misrepresent the U of C's policy. The (sometimes) benevolent IT dictator...er...provost at the U of C stated that the University is not and can not be in a position to determine what is personal use and what is educational use. Examples include a CS major using Napster to research peer-to-peer networking or a music major finding obscure songs for a music theory class or even a sociology major looking into Napster as the first real networking program to make it out of the relatively introverted CS fishbowl. The list could continue.
The real dispute at the U of C was over the use of personal network connections as servers. This being expressly forbidden without prior approval. In other words, the U of C has no problem with leeching off the Napster network, it is giving back to the community as it were that is their reason for blocking Napster IPs.
IANAL, but I have a friend who works for a law firm (That must lend me credence, right?)
In any event, all of her e-mail which leaves the office has a tag attached to it, identifying it as the sole property, expression and views of the writer. The same sort of disclaimer should be applicable in your case.
This man is patenting a method for a constant determination of price in a market with rapidly fluxuating relative costs. This is both novel and non-obvious
I especially appreciated the comment from an obviously informed reader about this fellow's office being in a pre-fab building. As if every low-budget startup should have office space in downtown D.C.! This guy has sold off almost everything he owns to start his business. He has a legitimate idea and should be allowed to profit from it.
That being said...I would challenge anyone in the Slashdot population to come up with a method to guarantee prices for foreign goods given fluctuating currency rates. It is a non-trivial problem.
You think you're a power user with only one meter of computer? Not a chance. My computer takes up three rooms and uses vacumn tubes.
It is therefore obviously more powerful than your mere shadow of a computer.
Bah! Give me a powerful, quiet cube any day of the week.
Re:OKAY: QT can be used for commercial apps
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
Sun could use qt-free for Star Office but only because Star Office is free and open source. According to Troll Tech, if you develop an application using QT which is not free or not open source, you (the developer) must pay Troll Tech a couple thousand dollars per developer working on the project.
This is not software for garage-based start-ups. This is software trying to capitalize on the increasing commercialization of Linux.
While there is something to be said for KDE, there is a major problem. If you're not non-commercial, licensing QT is very, very pricey. Well beyond my reach for a simple widget library.
For those of you who remember, Episode VI had a multitude of titles. Lucas went so far as to have posters printed with the title "Revenge of the Jedi". Needless to say, he managed to keep his secret until its release in theaters. The official line about why the title was "Return of the Jedi" rather than Revenge: A Jedi would never seek revenge.
Apple actively encourages the development of third party upgrade solutions. It is one of the great benefits of a swapable chip board which Apple implemented 6 years ago when PCs were still gloating over ZIF sockets.
I am very intrigued that there is still someone out there who takes pleasure in beating a dead horse, shouting Apple is dying!
Instead, I would recommend giving hearty thanks to the inovators who have single-handedly put both USB and FireWire on the development map. Today you and I both have better, faster and more interesting computers thanks to Apple.
Take a look at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/l icense.html. It looks like this software is being distributed under the GPL (look down at the bottom) but with a sort of wrapper that allows Lucent to change the license in the future.
Contrary to some of the previous assertions, this software is available for commercial as well as non-commercial use. In fact, the license states that users can modify and sell the software so long as the source is included.
Why is this "news" for slashdot? I have had this setup on my Linux box (PMac) for months now since there was a decent port of AA. Is Slashdot now going to start posting every Linux newbie-config page that gets submitted? Of course not. This is News for Nerds! Timothy should re-check his audience.
The actual hearing is discussing how small labels and indie groups can gain wider audiences via the internet. The summary can be found at SBC's website
Interesting to note that the hearing will also be streamed using Quicktime.
While I would not go so far as to accuse CmdrTaco of a conspiracy (at least on this issue), there may actually be a story here which could impact a large chunk of us.
No one disputes that there are many technology stocks which are over-valued for their revenue. Fund managers have been forced into adopting a scheme of investing ahead of reason in order to maintain a competitive edge. Now the bottom has dropped out of a lot of these stocks and Linux is not immune.
Think of the benefits that you personally have received from the large amounts of money invested in tech stocks. Since open-source-based companies give their products away, if they have more money for more developers (full-time) then if you use their products, you have benefited. I do not dispute that even without money, Linux development will continue and continue to accelerate. The extra cash that these companies had on hand was just glycerine on the fire./.ers should be prepared, however, for the coming mergers and cost-cutting measures by just about every tech company out there.
I TA'd an OS class for professional-level students last year called Operating Systems. We used the Tannenbaum & Woodhull text "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation." Students were asked to use Linux for their programming OS and I used RH for my examples. The main programming assignments for this course were:
Write a pipe program to redirect output from one program to input for another. (i.e. pipe program1 \| program2)
Write a program to share a memory page between two processes created with the fork() system call.
This was a 10 week course. Most of the programming was used merely to augument the topics covered in the reading and lectures. Additionally, each student was required to turn in a final project consisting of either a functional program which added value to the operating system (and was released under GPL) or a final paper describing the functionality of one of the 5 main parts of an OS.
I particularly liked the part where it said that the Microsoft Research Dept. contributed "more than 15 innovations to Windows 2000." Does this mean that anything else that changed was contributed by the Microsoft Copy-other-Ideas Dept.?
In this article, Mr. Sinai purports to set down minimum requirements for a terrorist organization to acquire the capability to perpetrate wide-spread, disrupting cyberterrorism. We should first make a distinction that Mr. Sinai neglects: physical vs. non.
For many reasons, non-physical, cyber attacks on an IT infastructure are likely to fail or fall far short of causing chaos or damage. First, such an attack would need to exploit a security hole prevalent throughout the network or located in a key area such as a router. For this, information acquired over the internet, because it is common knowledge to the manufacturer of the intended target as well as to the terrorist becomes useless. The cyberterrorist would need to discover the security hole themselves and exploit it quickly and correctly before the manufacturer has a chance to close the hole. Judging by the industry response to such attacks as the 'ping-of-death,' potential terrorists would have approximately 24-48 from the time they initiated their attack to bring down their target before a patch is released that would subvert their efforts. Second, in the world today, large security holes (the ones that would allow you to damage a network) are hard to find. Most holes are exposed by accident (i.e. the internet 'worm') or are found and fixed by the manufacturer before a product is shipped. This means that even with the smartest people in the industry working as cyberterrorists, their chances of success are minimal when pitted against the combined power of an entire industry. The physical attacks on IT infrastructure are much more likely. This would include things like destroying routers, cutting backbones, etc. The cheapest, most effective way for a cyberterrorist to inflict chaos on the US internet would be to use 2-3 conventional bombs is Chicago, St. Louis and Austin, taking out MCI and SprintLink hubs, causing a massive re-routing of information over inferior lines and thereby effectively killing the network through overload. Or perhaps save the bombs to take out the satellite communication relay centers and simply use a backhoe to clip the backbones which crisscross the US. The other mistake that Mr. Sinai makes is in setting the requirements for an attack by cyberterrorists. The external hurdles mentioned include: "acquisition of the necessary technologies, cooperation by foreign suppliers, creation of a logistics network for acquisition and deployment, obtaining state sponsorship, and also detection, penetration, and deterrence by foreign intelligence and counter terrorism agencies." In the non-physical realm, very little other than time is required. Computers can be purchased by anyone for a petty sum of money. Internet connections are not hard to come by. All told, a cyberterrorist could, for a few thousand dollars, set up a complete base from which to work from within the US in little under a week. A physical attack, while requiring more planning, is just as easy to carry out again without a large capital outlay. Small bombs can be created by almost anyone and renting a backhoe does not require proof of citizenship or intent. All that is required is the information about the location of the targets. This can be easily obtained from county planners' offices, gas companies, electric companies, anyone who digs will know where the off-limits lines lie. For none of the above attacks is state sponsorship a requirement. It could be perpetrated by a single individual with a few thousand dollars. Moreover, this type of terrorism is not succeptible to conventional counter terrorism efforts. Terrorists can operate in a closed environment, testing their methods on their own dummy network before releasing it upon the general population. In addition, there is nothing to say that a computer could not be set to run a script itself, giving human perpetrators plenty of time to distance themselves from a crime scene. Due to the conventional nature of physical terrorist attacks, I would dispute Mr. Sinai's conclusion that through correlation of factors and hurdles, one could predict which group would embark on cyberterrorism. Without doubt, it will be a non-technically oriented group which reads an article saying that Internet traffic was cut accidentally for half the nation by a farmer digging a new ditch.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the proprietary nature of this beast, the concept has not been patented (as far as I could determine in US or Europe). Hopefully, this concept will be expanded to general platforms in short order. The possibilities of load balancing low-level operations is quite interesting.
Quite frankly, the way this article is written, it sounds like AT&T wants to charge all on-line merchants for each sale made to AT&T broadband customers. This cannot be the case.
First point: I, as an on-line retailer do not use any of AT&T's services. As long as I do not push anything onto their network, I have no accountability to them. If their customer wants to pull something from my servers onto AT&T's network, the bill belongs to and stays with their customer.
Second point: AT&T, while it can monitor traffic to individual sites, has no means of determining just how much I have sold to their customer. Packet-wise (especially SSL-based communication), all transactions look the same and AT&T has no and should have no means of peeking into those transactions.
Third point: The internet exists where AT&T doesn't. If I want to run an e-commerce site from HavenCo's Sealand fortress, there exists no juristiction under which AT&T can pursue any claims of unfair bandwidth usage.
With this in mind, let's re-examine the article. It sounds like AT&T is planning on setting up a basic, ad-supported service, whereby customers can use the broadband in exchange for viewing ads placed by sponsors. In this model, AT&T takes a percentage of the revenue generated by this placement. Thus we have three consenting parties in the transaction (you-consumer, me-merchant, AT&T).
It is quite obvious that Jon Katz has gotten his history lessons from listening to the Internet Town Hall rather than by actually looking up his facts in <*GASP*> a book!
I'm a bit dubious as to your take on this. Since Sony Pictures is selling and marketing their films to me, isn't that evidence that they want me to watch their movies? Well, yes. Then using software which can understand the format movies are encoded in cannot (by your statement) be construed as an attempt to violate the copyright.
We wish.
The real dispute at the U of C was over the use of personal network connections as servers. This being expressly forbidden without prior approval. In other words, the U of C has no problem with leeching off the Napster network, it is giving back to the community as it were that is their reason for blocking Napster IPs.
Incidentally, OpenNap IPs are all still intact.
In any event, all of her e-mail which leaves the office has a tag attached to it, identifying it as the sole property, expression and views of the writer. The same sort of disclaimer should be applicable in your case.
This man is patenting a method for a constant determination of price in a market with rapidly fluxuating relative costs. This is both novel and non-obvious
I especially appreciated the comment from an obviously informed reader about this fellow's office being in a pre-fab building. As if every low-budget startup should have office space in downtown D.C.! This guy has sold off almost everything he owns to start his business. He has a legitimate idea and should be allowed to profit from it.
That being said...I would challenge anyone in the Slashdot population to come up with a method to guarantee prices for foreign goods given fluctuating currency rates. It is a non-trivial problem.
Bah! Give me a powerful, quiet cube any day of the week.
Now how do we get it out again?
This is not software for garage-based start-ups. This is software trying to capitalize on the increasing commercialization of Linux.
While there is something to be said for KDE, there is a major problem. If you're not non-commercial, licensing QT is very, very pricey. Well beyond my reach for a simple widget library.
It seems perfectly cromulent to me.
For those of you who remember, Episode VI had a multitude of titles. Lucas went so far as to have posters printed with the title "Revenge of the Jedi". Needless to say, he managed to keep his secret until its release in theaters. The official line about why the title was "Return of the Jedi" rather than Revenge: A Jedi would never seek revenge.
Apple actively encourages the development of third party upgrade solutions. It is one of the great benefits of a swapable chip board which Apple implemented 6 years ago when PCs were still gloating over ZIF sockets.
I am very intrigued that there is still someone out there who takes pleasure in beating a dead horse, shouting Apple is dying!
Instead, I would recommend giving hearty thanks to the inovators who have single-handedly put both USB and FireWire on the development map. Today you and I both have better, faster and more interesting computers thanks to Apple.
My guess is that they are no longer writing this in HyperTalk, venerable language that it is.
Anyone know what they are coding in?
Take a look at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/l icense.html. It looks like this software is being distributed under the GPL (look down at the bottom) but with a sort of wrapper that allows Lucent to change the license in the future.
Contrary to some of the previous assertions, this software is available for commercial as well as non-commercial use. In fact, the license states that users can modify and sell the software so long as the source is included.
Sweet!
Why is this "news" for slashdot? I have had this setup on my Linux box (PMac) for months now since there was a decent port of AA.
Is Slashdot now going to start posting every Linux newbie-config page that gets submitted? Of course not. This is News for Nerds! Timothy should re-check his audience.
All programmers have to learn "normal" languages at some point or another. Why toss your kids into mediocrity so soon?
Start them right with a good, functional language. May I suggest Haskell or ML?
Or real OOP with Dylan.
Also, be sure to let them know that they aren't allowed outside to play until they turn in at least 1k of real code (no comments) per day.
The actual hearing is discussing how small labels and indie groups can gain wider audiences via the internet. The summary can be found at SBC's website
Interesting to note that the hearing will also be streamed using Quicktime.
That is a wonderful way of saying 'collude.'
While I would not go so far as to accuse CmdrTaco of a conspiracy (at least on this issue), there may actually be a story here which could impact a large chunk of us.
/.ers should be prepared, however, for the coming mergers and cost-cutting measures by just about every tech company out there.
No one disputes that there are many technology stocks which are over-valued for their revenue. Fund managers have been forced into adopting a scheme of investing ahead of reason in order to maintain a competitive edge. Now the bottom has dropped out of a lot of these stocks and Linux is not immune.
Think of the benefits that you personally have received from the large amounts of money invested in tech stocks. Since open-source-based companies give their products away, if they have more money for more developers (full-time) then if you use their products, you have benefited. I do not dispute that even without money, Linux development will continue and continue to accelerate. The extra cash that these companies had on hand was just glycerine on the fire.
This was a 10 week course. Most of the programming was used merely to augument the topics covered in the reading and lectures. Additionally, each student was required to turn in a final project consisting of either a functional program which added value to the operating system (and was released under GPL) or a final paper describing the functionality of one of the 5 main parts of an OS.
I particularly liked the part where it said that the Microsoft Research Dept. contributed "more than 15 innovations to Windows 2000."
Does this mean that anything else that changed was contributed by the Microsoft Copy-other-Ideas Dept.?
Any chance that we will see another Commander Keen in the future? Now that was a great game!
In this article, Mr. Sinai purports to set down minimum requirements for a terrorist organization to acquire the capability to perpetrate wide-spread, disrupting cyberterrorism. We should first make a distinction that Mr. Sinai neglects: physical vs. non.
For many reasons, non-physical, cyber attacks on an IT infastructure are likely to fail or fall far short of causing chaos or damage. First, such an attack would need to exploit a security hole prevalent throughout the network or located in a key area such as a router. For this, information acquired over the internet, because it is common knowledge to the manufacturer of the intended target as well as to the terrorist becomes useless. The cyberterrorist would need to discover the security hole themselves and exploit it quickly and correctly before the manufacturer has a chance to close the hole. Judging by the industry response to such attacks as the 'ping-of-death,' potential terrorists would have approximately 24-48 from the time they initiated their attack to bring down their target before a patch is released that would subvert their efforts.
Second, in the world today, large security holes (the ones that would allow you to damage a network) are hard to find. Most holes are exposed by accident (i.e. the internet 'worm') or are found and fixed by the manufacturer before a product is shipped. This means that even with the smartest people in the industry working as cyberterrorists, their chances of success are minimal when pitted against the combined power of an entire industry.
The physical attacks on IT infrastructure are much more likely. This would include things like destroying routers, cutting backbones, etc. The cheapest, most effective way for a cyberterrorist to inflict chaos on the US internet would be to use 2-3 conventional bombs is Chicago, St. Louis and Austin, taking out MCI and SprintLink hubs, causing a massive re-routing of information over inferior lines and thereby effectively killing the network through overload. Or perhaps save the bombs to take out the satellite communication relay centers and simply use a backhoe to clip the backbones which crisscross the US.
The other mistake that Mr. Sinai makes is in setting the requirements for an attack by cyberterrorists. The external hurdles mentioned include: "acquisition of the necessary technologies, cooperation by foreign suppliers, creation of a logistics network for acquisition and deployment, obtaining state sponsorship, and also detection, penetration, and deterrence by foreign intelligence and counter terrorism agencies." In the non-physical realm, very little other than time is required. Computers can be purchased by anyone for a petty sum of money. Internet connections are not hard to come by. All told, a cyberterrorist could, for a few thousand dollars, set up a complete base from which to work from within the US in little under a week. A physical attack, while requiring more planning, is just as easy to carry out again without a large capital outlay. Small bombs can be created by almost anyone and renting a backhoe does not require proof of citizenship or intent. All that is required is the information about the location of the targets. This can be easily obtained from county planners' offices, gas companies, electric companies, anyone who digs will know where the off-limits lines lie.
For none of the above attacks is state sponsorship a requirement. It could be perpetrated by a single individual with a few thousand dollars. Moreover, this type of terrorism is not succeptible to conventional counter terrorism efforts. Terrorists can operate in a closed environment, testing their methods on their own dummy network before releasing it upon the general population. In addition, there is nothing to say that a computer could not be set to run a script itself, giving human perpetrators plenty of time to distance themselves from a crime scene.
Due to the conventional nature of physical terrorist attacks, I would dispute Mr. Sinai's conclusion that through correlation of factors and hurdles, one could predict which group would embark on cyberterrorism. Without doubt, it will be a non-technically oriented group which reads an article saying that Internet traffic was cut accidentally for half the nation by a farmer digging a new ditch.