2. Translation: Someone has discovered that our entire business is based on publicly available information that anyone with enough time and resources could obtain and organize.
You should look at Lexis/Nexis. They are most well known for their legal search and citation tools which use a custom indexing format to number and cite legal documents. IANAL, but from what I understand, Lexis/Nexis is the de facto standard for legal citations and that they used to charge a bloody fortune for access (it appears that their prices have dropped recently, though). (Legal folks; any comments?)
From what I understand, they've keep a stranglehold on the industry and have quickly killed off all competitors, even though logic would suggest that the US government should provide the same service for free ("What, I have to pay a 3rd party to search documents made by the US courts?!?")
The advantage of LOS technology is that there is no shared spectrum, and therefore no legitimate need to regulate.
A guy I know named Cooper Lee used to run a company where this little fact was the sole reason for their profit margin.
The company that he and his grandfather put together, called Tmex, run telecommunications services between the US and Mexico over ATM using Astroterra's (now known as OpticalAccess) LOS products. The beauty of their solution is that by doing this they can hop the border between the US and Mexico without having to pay costly interconnect charges to Telmex (the Mexican telephone monopoly) and whatever US carrier their client is using.
Rather, they just tie in to the local lines in the US and Mexico. They also skirt all the pesky regulations of having to obtain the same frequency spectrum in two countries at one (as would be the case with microwave and other RF technologies).
All this with just a box on top of a Howard Johnson's hotel in the US, and a tower in Mexico 5 miles apart.
As far as I'm aware, the restriction still stands, as shady as it is.
What I wonder is if there is a way to get around it. Most consumer PC manufacturers have custom installs with all sorts of strange stuff on them such as "tech support tools" and whatnot (Toshiba and Compaq spring to mind).
Since they (Toshiba et al) can sell machines with customized Windows installs as OEM copies (and thus pay a lower rate for each license), I imagine that an OEM copy needn't be "stock" Windows.
What, then, is to stop a company from working with a small distributor and dictating the configuration of the "OEM install" such that it mirrors the company's default install. That way there is no need to deinstall the OEM copy and then install the custom config (after paying for 2nd copy of Windows). I'd imagine any small shop would love the extra business (there may be a small "service fee" involved but it would be nowhere near the cost of new licenses) and the company would save money. Essentially, the "OEM Copy" is your custom install, with the cost savings of the OEM license.
While a Cisco Aironet would be nice, $1400 is a bit steep.
The issue is, with all these current 802.11b security issues and the probable introduction of new security features, what are good products to use and steps take? It's one thing to point out the flaws in the system; another entirely to show how to fix (or at least avoid) them.
Google's applications are unique, requiring far more extensive load-balancing, computing, and input-output bandwidth than other enterprise applications.
The question that should be asked here is if they are sharing the results of their word. I bet that they're probably lifting some of their techniques hot and fresh off of research papers and they may be the first to actually use them in a enterprise environment.
Note that I personally believe that closed source is not necessarily a bad thing. But if Google has made radical changes to these enterprise-grade tools, it would be nice to see them trickle down into the mainstream distros. While we as home users would probably never need them, it would certainly put to rest some of the pro-Microsoft arguments against Linux as a server-grade OS.
Of course, for all I know, they could be actively working with Cox et al to incorporate their findings into the kernel and related tools.
I trust that you, like myself, have given money to the EFF and the ACLU (to name a few worthy organizations). (Note that I find it somewhat ironic that the ACLU once gave Hillary Rosen an award, but I digress...)
If you haven't then everything you say is nothing more than posturing. It it very easy to talk big and to tell these people to stand up for themselves, but not so easy to do so when faced with the RIAA's thundering herd of lawyers.
A legal battle against a major corporation is almost guaranteed to be very costly, and while paying US$50k to a team of lawers may be a pittance to BigCorp (especially when protecting a business interest), most private citizens do not have anywhere near that kind of capital to spend on a lawsuit that they have nothing to gain from (financially).
Groups like the EFF and the ACLU help to level the playing field by leveraging the social goodwill (and their associated dollars) of millions. They help provide for the defense of those who otherwise would have to go without. But there is no guarantee that they can help you (or even that you'll win) and you're still spending time dealing with the case (the lawyers get paid for every hour they're in there but you, as the defendant, probably don't). So even fighting may not get you anywhere...
So givemoney. If you already have, then I applaud you. If not, then perhaps you should think about the practical implementations of your noble goals.
Of course, if you're too young or broke to give, that I understand as well....
But that further begs the question "what is the card for"? Is it a "mini-playstation" embedded in the developer's PC that can be used to play/debug games under development on without needing a blue playstation?
It seems odd: if you can already do limited development on a stock PC and then play on a black playstation without any specialized PC hardware, then what does the card provide for commercial developers?
> Playstation 1 requires you to buy a $2k PCI
> card for a PC. (Last I heard. It may have come
> down quite a bit)
I'm a little confused about that...
You may or may not recall the Net Yaroze (the "black Playstation"). It was meant for hobbyist Playstation programmer and came with a stripped down set of libraries, special memory card and boot cd, and a serial cable to connect to a PC (and yes, you can use Linux). That's all you needed.
I had seen the blue (developer) Playstation at a friend's company and I was under the impression that it was just like the Yaroze except it had the full libs and could read gold (burned) cds, but apparently the card you speak of is also required. I'm unclear as to what it's for, considering that you can do crippled programming on the Yaroze with just a serial cable.
USB is very useful for low bandwidth devices (mice, keyboards, PDAs etc), but it chugs for even moderate loads. The PCMCIA bus is much more suited for things like HDDs, burners, etc.
As an example, I present USB->Ethernet converters. Your 10/100Mbit converter actually runs at a max of around 12Mbit/sec. Add more devices onto the bus and you throttle it down even further.
Note that I cannot speak for USB 2.0, but I say to hell with USB; give us FireWire instead.
While, I imagine the satisfaction of Cuisinarting bad guys (a la "Reason vs. Pirates" in Snow Crash), your neigbours may be a bit annoyed when the depleted uranium slugs tear through their boats as well.
Bettersolutions that can blow away in the wind...(as long as the neighbors aren't around, everything is ok)
No, you're not being paranoid. Just because cell phone encryption was crippled due to pressue from the NSA does not mean that 802.11 could be similarly compromised. No. Not at all...
Why? Because the FBI would never spy on American citizens without a warrant! Just ask that Mr. Silly Pants J. Edgar Hoover!
I wondering if there is any support for force-feedback devices under *nix. DirectInput is the layer under DirectX that handles communicating with the control devices (including force-feedback signals), but I wonder if SDL (or anything on *nix for that matter) supports anything of the sort...
I'm sorry, but if you can pirate plants, then there is a void that begs to be filled for 0-day s33d agricultural juarez.
I'm sorry if I'm easily amused, but the idea of farmers being lumped in the same category as software pirates seems like such an absurd situation that it brings me to laughter.
I'm confused as to why Donald Becker's (creator of Beowulf and maintainer of a good number of the linux NIC drivers) USB code which was back-ported from 2.3 to 2.2 had not been "forward-ported" to 2.4.
I ask this because one of the USB ethernet devices he supports (the CATC device) is not, as far as I can tell, included in the 2.4 kernel (although the pegasus USB-ethernet device is, but I'm not sure if that's his or not). Does anyone know why there is this split?
I'm sorry, but Microsoft does not consider a patch that closes a remote sploit for allowing malicious users to "take any action on the computer that the user can take" as a critical update.
Thank you, please call again!
I wonder, given the number of days it will take between now and when they finally get off their tuckuses and add it to the update page, how many people will be affected that otherwise could have been protected.
If it takes more than a week, I could imagine the lawyers would be drooling over the negligence of Microsoft, EULA or no.
Note that few contracts are totally rock solid; it depends on how many lawers you can affort to hammer on it. Look at what happened to poor Toshiba...
Ah yes, the safer, more humane warfare of the future.
I was speaking to another military guy about the M-16/AK-47 issue and he said that some guys would actually clip the tips of their rounds so that their ballistics would get all screwed up. The idea was that rather than fly straight, the bullets would "tumble" through the air. Upon impact, rather than "cleanly" blow through a target it would "cuisinart" their innards as it tumbled through them.
Now, this is an apocryphal story, but it does illustrate the rather signifigant divide between those who make the policies of war and those who implement them.
IANAS (I Am Not A Soldier), but if I recall correctly, this is exactly the principle behind anti-personnel mines. Rather than detonate with enough force to kill, the mines will just take off a foot or leg (hence all the people in third-world countries missing their lower extremeties). Now, rather than there being a corpse (or gibs) left behind, you have a screaming soldier needing transport, a medic to take care him, etc. The overall loss is greater than just killing, and thus "less (damage) is more."
Strangely, though, I remember something comparing the M-16 vs. the AK-47 in Vietnam. The M-16 rounds would pass right through their targets, relying on "hydroshock" to cause the damage, whereas the AK-47 rounds were designed to just rip things up. All the wounding and resource draining that the M-16s did to the Vietnamese troops didn't turn the tide of the war (hint: the US lost), though, so the idea of controlled wounding isn't a guaranteed success.
Never mind that Mr. Allchin's comments are FUD at its finest, a quick response to a point and then a question:
Response- Yes, open source projects may mean less of a focus on R&D. However, if good percentage of R&D work done consists mainly of reinventing the wheel, then what is the loss, except perhaps the "churn" that comes from paying engineers who then pay taxes, buy stuff, and otherwise add momentum to the economy.
As for threatening intellectual property, well, that's Napster's job (\me donning asbestos suit in preparation for flames). While open source may reduce the *volume* of intellectual property out there (as a result of reduced R&D), I don't see how open source is a threat to established IP (unless perhaps he's thinking about wacky GPL license-infection or something, which is a non-issue now).
Of course, we all know that what he's really doing is trolling the open source community. Good job Allchin! (Now how can we mod him down?)
I'm surprised, given the predilection for Beowulf-cluster-posts, that no one has mentioned the possible weirdness that might evolve if the robots were able to act as a single parallel processing cluster.
A core portion of the onboard memory could be used to store the basic OS with new functionality grafting on to the system as new robots are added (bringing with it more processing power and storage).
Now, I don't mean to imply that you would use a bunch of these things to do cryptanalysis, but rather than have a single dedicated controller machine, the OS could exist as a "hive mind", distributed piecemeal (think kernel modules) across multiple little bots.
An example: you've got a mini fleet of bots down at the bottom of the sea and you want to change their programming. Send down one new bot with new code and it will "infect" the system and update all other bots.
Slashdot Mirror
You should look at Lexis/Nexis. They are most well known for their legal search and citation tools which use a custom indexing format to number and cite legal documents. IANAL, but from what I understand, Lexis/Nexis is the de facto standard for legal citations and that they used to charge a bloody fortune for access (it appears that their prices have dropped recently, though). (Legal folks; any comments?)
From what I understand, they've keep a stranglehold on the industry and have quickly killed off all competitors, even though logic would suggest that the US government should provide the same service for free ("What, I have to pay a 3rd party to search documents made by the US courts?!?")
A guy I know named Cooper Lee used to run a company where this little fact was the sole reason for their profit margin.
The company that he and his grandfather put together, called Tmex, run telecommunications services between the US and Mexico over ATM using Astroterra's (now known as OpticalAccess) LOS products. The beauty of their solution is that by doing this they can hop the border between the US and Mexico without having to pay costly interconnect charges to Telmex (the Mexican telephone monopoly) and whatever US carrier their client is using.
Rather, they just tie in to the local lines in the US and Mexico. They also skirt all the pesky regulations of having to obtain the same frequency spectrum in two countries at one (as would be the case with microwave and other RF technologies).
All this with just a box on top of a Howard Johnson's hotel in the US, and a tower in Mexico 5 miles apart.
What I wonder is if there is a way to get around it. Most consumer PC manufacturers have custom installs with all sorts of strange stuff on them such as "tech support tools" and whatnot (Toshiba and Compaq spring to mind).
Since they (Toshiba et al) can sell machines with customized Windows installs as OEM copies (and thus pay a lower rate for each license), I imagine that an OEM copy needn't be "stock" Windows.
What, then, is to stop a company from working with a small distributor and dictating the configuration of the "OEM install" such that it mirrors the company's default install. That way there is no need to deinstall the OEM copy and then install the custom config (after paying for 2nd copy of Windows). I'd imagine any small shop would love the extra business (there may be a small "service fee" involved but it would be nowhere near the cost of new licenses) and the company would save money. Essentially, the "OEM Copy" is your custom install, with the cost savings of the OEM license.
While a Cisco Aironet would be nice, $1400 is a bit steep.
The issue is, with all these current 802.11b security issues and the probable introduction of new security features, what are good products to use and steps take? It's one thing to point out the flaws in the system; another entirely to show how to fix (or at least avoid) them.
I detect an "Ask Slashdot" here....
The question that should be asked here is if they are sharing the results of their word. I bet that they're probably lifting some of their techniques hot and fresh off of research papers and they may be the first to actually use them in a enterprise environment.
Note that I personally believe that closed source is not necessarily a bad thing. But if Google has made radical changes to these enterprise-grade tools, it would be nice to see them trickle down into the mainstream distros. While we as home users would probably never need them, it would certainly put to rest some of the pro-Microsoft arguments against Linux as a server-grade OS.
Of course, for all I know, they could be actively working with Cox et al to incorporate their findings into the kernel and related tools.
Either way, a very impressive job done with a operating system that "is simply a fad that has been generated by the media and is destined to fall by the wayside in time."
Note that I use Windows and Linux so I'm no bigot... (some of my best friends as Microsoft Programmers!)
I trust that you, like myself, have given money to the EFF and the ACLU (to name a few worthy organizations). (Note that I find it somewhat ironic that the ACLU once gave Hillary Rosen an award, but I digress...)
If you haven't then everything you say is nothing more than posturing. It it very easy to talk big and to tell these people to stand up for themselves, but not so easy to do so when faced with the RIAA's thundering herd of lawyers.
A legal battle against a major corporation is almost guaranteed to be very costly, and while paying US$50k to a team of lawers may be a pittance to BigCorp (especially when protecting a business interest), most private citizens do not have anywhere near that kind of capital to spend on a lawsuit that they have nothing to gain from (financially).
Groups like the EFF and the ACLU help to level the playing field by leveraging the social goodwill (and their associated dollars) of millions. They help provide for the defense of those who otherwise would have to go without. But there is no guarantee that they can help you (or even that you'll win) and you're still spending time dealing with the case (the lawyers get paid for every hour they're in there but you, as the defendant, probably don't). So even fighting may not get you anywhere...
So give money. If you already have, then I applaud you. If not, then perhaps you should think about the practical implementations of your noble goals.
Of course, if you're too young or broke to give, that I understand as well....
It seems odd: if you can already do limited development on a stock PC and then play on a black playstation without any specialized PC hardware, then what does the card provide for commercial developers?
Seriously, this would be a boon for NASA. Currently, they're pushing the limits of backup technology and it's expected to get worse.
A "cube library" (as opposed to tape) with a little shuttle to move the cubes around would be a godsend even if the laser to read them costs 300k.
Picture one of these; the laser might take up most of it, but the savings would be incredible.
> card for a PC. (Last I heard. It may have come
> down quite a bit)
I'm a little confused about that...
You may or may not recall the Net Yaroze (the "black Playstation"). It was meant for hobbyist Playstation programmer and came with a stripped down set of libraries, special memory card and boot cd, and a serial cable to connect to a PC (and yes, you can use Linux). That's all you needed.
I had seen the blue (developer) Playstation at a friend's company and I was under the impression that it was just like the Yaroze except it had the full libs and could read gold (burned) cds, but apparently the card you speak of is also required. I'm unclear as to what it's for, considering that you can do crippled programming on the Yaroze with just a serial cable.
USB is very useful for low bandwidth devices (mice, keyboards, PDAs etc), but it chugs for even moderate loads. The PCMCIA bus is much more suited for things like HDDs, burners, etc.
As an example, I present USB->Ethernet converters. Your 10/100Mbit converter actually runs at a max of around 12Mbit/sec. Add more devices onto the bus and you throttle it down even further.
Note that I cannot speak for USB 2.0, but I say to hell with USB; give us FireWire instead.
While, I imagine the satisfaction of Cuisinarting bad guys (a la "Reason vs. Pirates" in Snow Crash), your neigbours may be a bit annoyed when the depleted uranium slugs tear through their boats as well.
Better solutions that can blow away in the wind...(as long as the neighbors aren't around, everything is ok)
Why? Because the FBI would never spy on American citizens without a warrant! Just ask that Mr. Silly Pants J. Edgar Hoover!
I wondering if there is any support for force-feedback devices under *nix. DirectInput is the layer under DirectX that handles communicating with the control devices (including force-feedback signals), but I wonder if SDL (or anything on *nix for that matter) supports anything of the sort...
I'm sorry if I'm easily amused, but the idea of farmers being lumped in the same category as software pirates seems like such an absurd situation that it brings me to laughter.
I ask this because one of the USB ethernet devices he supports (the CATC device) is not, as far as I can tell, included in the 2.4 kernel (although the pegasus USB-ethernet device is, but I'm not sure if that's his or not). Does anyone know why there is this split?
See above for my obligatory Beowulf reference...
[written on paper]
Translate this hillbilly conversation:
MR Ducks
MR Not
OSAR
CM Wangs
LIB
MR Ducks
What does this say?
The answer is left as an exercise for the reader...
Somehow, this seems rather similar to SMS.
I wonder, given the number of days it will take between now and when they finally get off their tuckuses and add it to the update page, how many people will be affected that otherwise could have been protected.
If it takes more than a week, I could imagine the lawyers would be drooling over the negligence of Microsoft, EULA or no.
Note that few contracts are totally rock solid; it depends on how many lawers you can affort to hammer on it. Look at what happened to poor Toshiba...
2b || !2b
(well, for programmers at least)
The victims will be "mostly-dead".
I was speaking to another military guy about the M-16/AK-47 issue and he said that some guys would actually clip the tips of their rounds so that their ballistics would get all screwed up. The idea was that rather than fly straight, the bullets would "tumble" through the air. Upon impact, rather than "cleanly" blow through a target it would "cuisinart" their innards as it tumbled through them.
Now, this is an apocryphal story, but it does illustrate the rather signifigant divide between those who make the policies of war and those who implement them.
Strangely, though, I remember something comparing the M-16 vs. the AK-47 in Vietnam. The M-16 rounds would pass right through their targets, relying on "hydroshock" to cause the damage, whereas the AK-47 rounds were designed to just rip things up. All the wounding and resource draining that the M-16s did to the Vietnamese troops didn't turn the tide of the war (hint: the US lost), though, so the idea of controlled wounding isn't a guaranteed success.
No.
Text editors, on the other hand, are.
M-x All-hail-Xemacs.
Response- Yes, open source projects may mean less of a focus on R&D. However, if good percentage of R&D work done consists mainly of reinventing the wheel, then what is the loss, except perhaps the "churn" that comes from paying engineers who then pay taxes, buy stuff, and otherwise add momentum to the economy.
As for threatening intellectual property, well, that's Napster's job (\me donning asbestos suit in preparation for flames). While open source may reduce the *volume* of intellectual property out there (as a result of reduced R&D), I don't see how open source is a threat to established IP (unless perhaps he's thinking about wacky GPL license-infection or something, which is a non-issue now).
Of course, we all know that what he's really doing is trolling the open source community. Good job Allchin! (Now how can we mod him down?)
A core portion of the onboard memory could be used to store the basic OS with new functionality grafting on to the system as new robots are added (bringing with it more processing power and storage).
Now, I don't mean to imply that you would use a bunch of these things to do cryptanalysis, but rather than have a single dedicated controller machine, the OS could exist as a "hive mind", distributed piecemeal (think kernel modules) across multiple little bots.
An example: you've got a mini fleet of bots down at the bottom of the sea and you want to change their programming. Send down one new bot with new code and it will "infect" the system and update all other bots.
Just a thought....
Nasa guy: "Our next expedition will be to land a man on the sun"
Reporter: "How can you do that?!? It's too hot!"
Nasa guy: "Oh, don't worry; he'll land at night."