Re:Fax a Regressive Step
on
Email Turns Thirty
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Need something signed--just fax it to me! For that reason, I don't think e-mail will ever completely displace the fax.
Yeah, it's really funny. I remember back, well, I guess it is about ten years, I would get some money from my mother, and the way we did this, was that she sent a fax, signed, to her bank, and asked them to transfer a certain amount of money to my account.
No, she didn't.
In reality, she just gave me her oral approval. The fax itself was sent by me, using the home computer, the signature was something I had scanned and attached to the fax when it was submitted.
Well, we were all happy about it, because as I could do it, it saved my mother some work (of course I did it with her approval).
But, the funny thing is, if on a rare occasion I forgot to attach the signature, the fax would be returned, and the transaction would not be committed. But why did they insist on having the signature, the signature was real, OK, but it did not authenticate the origin of the fax. From that perspective, the signature was fake.
People need to realize that the good old signature doesn't mean anything, especially when digitized and transmitted through a fax machine.
When that is realized, then we might go over to using digital signatures.
Re:Galactic vs. extragalactic microlensing
on
"Dark Matter" Observed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Well, the term isn't really in use. Most probably, most people would think about Einstein's speculations around gravitational lensing. Einstein considered gravitational lensing, but only deflection by stellar masses, and concluded therefore that the phenomenon would most probably remain unobserved. Since "galactic microlensing" refers to unresolved images of an object lensed by things in our galaxy, one could argue "galactic macrolensing" should refer to resolved images of objects lensed by things in our galaxy, but no such object has been seen, and Einstein was probably right in that we won't see it for a long time.
"Macrolensing", by itself, usually refers many different situations, but characterized by that several images of the object is resolved. There are a few known objects. This database includes only multiply imaged quasars, mostly lensed by a single galaxy, but you can have lensing by galaxy clusters as well.
Actually, the question arised some controversy here among my fellow students as to whether what is known as "weak lensing" should be considered a part of macrolensing, but after consulting The Book, we figured it probably shouldn't.
Galactic vs. extragalactic microlensing
on
"Dark Matter" Observed
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yep, these are really interesting observations! Galactic microlensing, which is discussed in this article, is a field which is growing rapidly and has attracted a lot of interest. I look forward to seeing the lightcurves of this event.
It was indeed Bohdan Paczynski who wrote the first paper about that specific phenomenon, if I recall correctly, the paper was titled "Microlensing on small optical depths". And indeed, he was the one who invented the term "microlensing".
However, I'm more concerned with "extragalactic" microlensing. The funny thing is that stars in remote galaxy can cause microlensing of even more remote quasars. This was first discussed by Chang and Refsdal in an article in Nature, December 6 1979.
The great thing about this is that in galactic microlensing, there are very few MACHOs between us and the stars, so you would have to watch a lot of stars (millions), whereas in extragalactic microlensing, there will be lots of stars, so microlensing events happen all the time. You only need to separate it from the intrinsic variations of quasar...
Now, galactic microlensing has been a so much bigger field of study than extragalctic microlensing, we haven't really got that much attention. In part, it can be becuase galactic microlensing gives so much more solid results, but then, it is just addressing what's going on in our backyard, while the extragalactic microlensing really deals with the universe...:-)
3: Recognize the role of antivirus firms such as McAfee and Symantec in protecting users. They should be unrestricted in their efforts to make and sell software that can protect computer users from harmful files, regardless of the source.
Huh? From my POW, I could be totally wrong about this, what anti-virus-software makers do, is make a pile of cash from telling people not to use reasonably safe software, but rather install software to detect random attacks exploiting well-known security holes, that should be fixed so that a determined attacker can't exploit them... It doesn't seem like a useful service to me...:-)
While I agree with your basic point, that crypto should be available to anyone, I'm skeptical about making it too newbie-friendly. Crypto needs
to be understood to be good.
You can tell people to use a 2K bit key to sign everything they send you, but if they are fooled by a trojan displaying a popup saying "Sorry, I forgot your passphrase, could you please repeat it", then it is not going to give you any improved security. People have to be willing to gain understanding. As long as you tell them "you don't need to understand anything to use this", there is no security.
Excel is great now? No it isn't! The computer arithmetic is so severly flawed you can't use it for anything serious. They clearly haven't read chapter 2 of "Numerical mathematics and computing", and most certainly have never passed a class in CS. Do for example mod(3.1, 9.3) (or something like that...) and see what you get. The correct answer is 0.
Well, anyway, while this guy might not know a lot about making good software, he might know a few things about making software stick in the marketplace. Those things usually have nothing to do with each other.
Yeah, and it reminds me of one of Carl Barks' most monumental works, "The Golden Helmet", in which Donald eventually rises to almost become the emperor of America. Donald wants to charge for every breath people takes. It becomes immediately obvious that there are some things that you cannot make money from.
Well, IMNSHO, 90 % of corporate websites suck, mostly because they are not following the most basic tips.
So, there are lots of people out there who are making piles of cash not taking common sense into account. A book might help a few, or if it is a PHB somewhere who is remotely interested in the quality of product he buys, it might also help...
Actually, the best color on a computer screen for your eyes is blue, according to many studies. I have one study on dead trees somewhere, that my father showed me, he is (was) in that business. My own background is #2233D0. Dad said that was a really well suited color.
However, I think Nielsen has a point with the links, so I'm not sure I'm going to use it when I redesign some stuff.
You have a important point about changing all colors. However, that makes a problem, because instead of insisting on that the links should be blue, I think that the important point there is that you shouldn't change the user's default (which will, in most cases, indeed be blue). But what the heck, does the visuall design really matter that much...:-)
I think the important thing here is not what license you use for the code that you write yourself. The important thing is what you do to the specification: It should be in the public domain. This makes it possible for anybody, whatever purpose they implement for, to make an implementation of the codec, even if they find the conditions you set for the software that you write unacceptable.
It is my opinion that the protocols that we use to communicate must be in the public domain.
Yeah, and this is what the Ogg project does. Their code is released under a BSD license, but the spec is in the public domain (though they reserve the right to say which systems conform to the spec, which is a very vice decision).
Then, what license you use for the your own software is of minor importance. But since the Ogg project made a decision to go BSD after thinking about it long and well, and your situation seems to be very similar to theirs, I guess it is a good choice.
Well the problem with this approach is that those who join your project, submitting patches, working on the codec, etc., they need some predictability. To work on a project, you need to know that the leader of the project, the copyright holder, isn't going to run off doing something weird.
Therefore, I would encourage the use of soem well-known license.
It is therefore extremely important that those of us who understand what is going on, do not buy any hardware from manufacturers producing UHT. I'm compiling a boycott list, it now includes BSA members, those who voted yes to CPRM, those who use firmware that doesn't allow zonefreeing of DVDs, etc.
Yeah, and this is the reason why I didn't buy a DVD player at all for my new computer. That the firmware can be upgraded and zone-checking can be removed is all fine, but I'm not going to buy a player unless the manufacturer gets the point: I'm not going to buy UHT.
This is the message we have to send, and we have to make it clear that whoever sells UHT is loosing customers. That's the only language they will understand.
Yeah, "democracy" is pretty buzzy, but in the UN context, it has a pretty clear definition. After WWII, professor Arne Næss, whom I've met several times, lead a committee appointed by the UN to define exactly what was meant by democracy. They presented a huge report, but the definition hasn't stuck, because none of the superpowers liked it a lot....
OK, I'm pretty much a newbie here. I have been on UNIX for a few years, but only a few weeks ago got a root password to my own box. I've been following Linux for some time, though, because I'm a free software idealist.
Now, I've got Red Hat 7.2 on my machine, running the 2.4.7-10 kernel that came with the distro.
All my partitions are ext3, and that's why I need a pretty recent kernel. Since ext3 was accepted by Linus in his tree, I figured I should upgrade, and indeed, I rushed to upgrade to 2.5.0 (cool, eh!) the minute it was released. Well, I got my file systems down apparently undamaged.
So, when you're saying
It's time to admit that most people don't need the newest kernel, and should just run whatever their favorite distro has properly tested.
...you're saying that I shouldn't pick up the latest version to get Linus tree, but run the 2.4.7-10 kernel that came with RH7.2? It does pretty much everything I need, I must admit. USB support isn't compiled in by default, nor is frame-buffer-devices (?), but then, I have 4 USB ports but no USB gadgets, and I'm just writing a thesis on this box right now, so I don't need any fancy graphics.
I think you have completely lost the whole point. There is absolutely nothing wrong with selling software, and there are a bunch of people doing it, even profitably, e.g. Red Hat. But there are limits for what kind of restrictions you can impose on the software you write.
There is only ONE Google, while there are many many bands that don't have marketing.
OK, that is a good argument.
You don't know, you probably don't have the patience to find out, and you probably don't have the connections to hear all of them.
But you have Google!:-) Seriously, you can find out, with good databases, good metadata, artists indicating sources of inspiration, and so on. There are lots and lots of possibilities there that aren't explored.
There are examples to the contrary. For one thing, Google never spent anything on marketing. I would pay to use Google. From music: Of the things I like to listen to the most, it is only Pink Floyd and Dire Straits who have had a very high profile, and both have songs with very strong critisism against the music industry ("Have a cigar" and "In the gallery" respectively). All the others, I have bought because of friends, and because of old.au's.
So, it needn't be, if oen thinks about new systems instead of just adopting old dogma.
Hey! I spent a lot of time compiling that kernel! You don't know how hard it is being a newbie getting Linux for first time, trying to live up to the social pressure!;-)
Well, these numbers are all well and fine and everything. But the author lost the major point:
That distributing music is expensive is exactly why we need to sit down and think about other ways to do it. And when somebody comes up with an idea, the last thing we need is for labels to rush forward to destroy it.
Jihaaaaa! It worked, thanks a lot!:-) I compiled in netlink, on the advice of my hacker friends, but they didn't think I would need routing messages. When I enabled that too, it worked!
Thank you! Exactly the point. I wasn't suggesting a simple solution, I was fully aware of the problems with warriors interfering with aid workers. It's always been that way. However, AFAIK, these workers were captured in or close to Kabul. That you can't start there was exactly my point, you have to take be more careful, plan better and understand more of the country you're getting into.
As for expecting poor, starving civilians to change the policies of armed governments or pseudo-militia that is as ridiculous as Bin Laden thinking that terrorist attacks against the US would turn the American populace against the US government and make them change their foreign policy instead of uniting them in hatred against a common enemy
Well, yeah, the latter situation is ridiculous, but not the former.
Feed them!
The situation in Afghanistan is that while some parts are under some kind of centralized control, large parts of the country are not. They are ruled by the villagers themselves, and because they are so incredibly remote, nobody really cares what they do.
Yet, rumours spread. There was this expedition on Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, where one of the expeditionists was a doctor. Rumours spread, and the doctor never left basecamp, he got his hands ful with people that were very ill. People even walked, carrying their children for days from Afghanistan. After returning home after the expedition, he didn't stay at home for very long, but returned, as he felt that he was more needed there.
He could really save lives, and though he was a single man, he was reputed over a huge area for being a really good man. He changed a lot of peoples lives.
Where is this leading?
If you start with places like this, you feed them, and give them medical attention, your work will never be interfered by Taliban or Northern Alliance or any warrior. You will win the hearts and the minds of a large of a great part of the population by just being good.
When these people spread the word, that there is a better world that the warriors cannot provide, then, weapons can kill many of them yes, but there aren't few strongly armed regimes that have fallen relatively peacefully. Weapons are no good when there is no reason to fight.
While Afghanistan has a particulary favourable topography (and demographics) for such an approach, it is not that unlikely that such a plan may be implemented successfully in most places, with a bit of cleverness.
Just think about the money you spend, $40 billion! $40 billion is far more than the GDP of most of these countries. $40 billion is spend on destruction. A lot could be done if they were spend constructively instead.
Yeah, and BTW, the alternative is indeed a totalitarian police state.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's really funny. I remember back, well, I guess it is about ten years, I would get some money from my mother, and the way we did this, was that she sent a fax, signed, to her bank, and asked them to transfer a certain amount of money to my account.
No, she didn't.
In reality, she just gave me her oral approval. The fax itself was sent by me, using the home computer, the signature was something I had scanned and attached to the fax when it was submitted.
Well, we were all happy about it, because as I could do it, it saved my mother some work (of course I did it with her approval).
But, the funny thing is, if on a rare occasion I forgot to attach the signature, the fax would be returned, and the transaction would not be committed. But why did they insist on having the signature, the signature was real, OK, but it did not authenticate the origin of the fax. From that perspective, the signature was fake.
People need to realize that the good old signature doesn't mean anything, especially when digitized and transmitted through a fax machine. When that is realized, then we might go over to using digital signatures.
"Macrolensing", by itself, usually refers many different situations, but characterized by that several images of the object is resolved. There are a few known objects. This database includes only multiply imaged quasars, mostly lensed by a single galaxy, but you can have lensing by galaxy clusters as well.
Actually, the question arised some controversy here among my fellow students as to whether what is known as "weak lensing" should be considered a part of macrolensing, but after consulting The Book, we figured it probably shouldn't.
It was indeed Bohdan Paczynski who wrote the first paper about that specific phenomenon, if I recall correctly, the paper was titled "Microlensing on small optical depths". And indeed, he was the one who invented the term "microlensing".
However, I'm more concerned with "extragalactic" microlensing. The funny thing is that stars in remote galaxy can cause microlensing of even more remote quasars. This was first discussed by Chang and Refsdal in an article in Nature, December 6 1979.
The great thing about this is that in galactic microlensing, there are very few MACHOs between us and the stars, so you would have to watch a lot of stars (millions), whereas in extragalactic microlensing, there will be lots of stars, so microlensing events happen all the time. You only need to separate it from the intrinsic variations of quasar...
Now, galactic microlensing has been a so much bigger field of study than extragalctic microlensing, we haven't really got that much attention. In part, it can be becuase galactic microlensing gives so much more solid results, but then, it is just addressing what's going on in our backyard, while the extragalactic microlensing really deals with the universe... :-)
Huh? From my POW, I could be totally wrong about this, what anti-virus-software makers do, is make a pile of cash from telling people not to use reasonably safe software, but rather install software to detect random attacks exploiting well-known security holes, that should be fixed so that a determined attacker can't exploit them... It doesn't seem like a useful service to me... :-)
You can tell people to use a 2K bit key to sign everything they send you, but if they are fooled by a trojan displaying a popup saying "Sorry, I forgot your passphrase, could you please repeat it", then it is not going to give you any improved security. People have to be willing to gain understanding. As long as you tell them "you don't need to understand anything to use this", there is no security.
Well, anyway, while this guy might not know a lot about making good software, he might know a few things about making software stick in the marketplace. Those things usually have nothing to do with each other.
Yeah, and it reminds me of one of Carl Barks' most monumental works, "The Golden Helmet", in which Donald eventually rises to almost become the emperor of America. Donald wants to charge for every breath people takes. It becomes immediately obvious that there are some things that you cannot make money from.
UMTS was opened in Oslo, Norway on Saturday. It's just too bad there aren't any gadgets on the market yet, so we're not going to see a lot of it yet.
So, there are lots of people out there who are making piles of cash not taking common sense into account. A book might help a few, or if it is a PHB somewhere who is remotely interested in the quality of product he buys, it might also help...
However, I think Nielsen has a point with the links, so I'm not sure I'm going to use it when I redesign some stuff.
You have a important point about changing all colors. However, that makes a problem, because instead of insisting on that the links should be blue, I think that the important point there is that you shouldn't change the user's default (which will, in most cases, indeed be blue). But what the heck, does the visuall design really matter that much... :-)
Yeah, and this is what the Ogg project does. Their code is released under a BSD license, but the spec is in the public domain (though they reserve the right to say which systems conform to the spec, which is a very vice decision).
Then, what license you use for the your own software is of minor importance. But since the Ogg project made a decision to go BSD after thinking about it long and well, and your situation seems to be very similar to theirs, I guess it is a good choice.
Therefore, I would encourage the use of soem well-known license.
It is therefore extremely important that those of us who understand what is going on, do not buy any hardware from manufacturers producing UHT. I'm compiling a boycott list, it now includes BSA members, those who voted yes to CPRM, those who use firmware that doesn't allow zonefreeing of DVDs, etc.
Yeah, and this is the reason why I didn't buy a DVD player at all for my new computer. That the firmware can be upgraded and zone-checking can be removed is all fine, but I'm not going to buy a player unless the manufacturer gets the point: I'm not going to buy UHT.
This is the message we have to send, and we have to make it clear that whoever sells UHT is loosing customers. That's the only language they will understand.
Yeah, "democracy" is pretty buzzy, but in the UN context, it has a pretty clear definition. After WWII, professor Arne Næss, whom I've met several times, lead a committee appointed by the UN to define exactly what was meant by democracy. They presented a huge report, but the definition hasn't stuck, because none of the superpowers liked it a lot....
Now, I've got Red Hat 7.2 on my machine, running the 2.4.7-10 kernel that came with the distro. All my partitions are ext3, and that's why I need a pretty recent kernel. Since ext3 was accepted by Linus in his tree, I figured I should upgrade, and indeed, I rushed to upgrade to 2.5.0 (cool, eh!) the minute it was released. Well, I got my file systems down apparently undamaged.
So, when you're saying
I'm happy for any advice I can get! :-)
I think you have completely lost the whole point. There is absolutely nothing wrong with selling software, and there are a bunch of people doing it, even profitably, e.g. Red Hat. But there are limits for what kind of restrictions you can impose on the software you write.
The patent expires in 2006, according to the article.
Heh, that is exactly the situation we've had with Telenor here in Norway as well.
OK, that is a good argument.
But you have Google! :-) Seriously, you can find out, with good databases, good metadata, artists indicating sources of inspiration, and so on. There are lots and lots of possibilities there that aren't explored.
So, it needn't be, if oen thinks about new systems instead of just adopting old dogma.
Hey! I spent a lot of time compiling that kernel! You don't know how hard it is being a newbie getting Linux for first time, trying to live up to the social pressure! ;-)
That distributing music is expensive is exactly why we need to sit down and think about other ways to do it. And when somebody comes up with an idea, the last thing we need is for labels to rush forward to destroy it.
Jihaaaaa! It worked, thanks a lot! :-) I compiled in netlink, on the advice of my hacker friends, but they didn't think I would need routing messages. When I enabled that too, it worked!
Somebody mod this AC up! :-)
Well, yeah, the latter situation is ridiculous, but not the former.
Feed them!
The situation in Afghanistan is that while some parts are under some kind of centralized control, large parts of the country are not. They are ruled by the villagers themselves, and because they are so incredibly remote, nobody really cares what they do.
Yet, rumours spread. There was this expedition on Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, where one of the expeditionists was a doctor. Rumours spread, and the doctor never left basecamp, he got his hands ful with people that were very ill. People even walked, carrying their children for days from Afghanistan. After returning home after the expedition, he didn't stay at home for very long, but returned, as he felt that he was more needed there.
He could really save lives, and though he was a single man, he was reputed over a huge area for being a really good man. He changed a lot of peoples lives.
Where is this leading?
If you start with places like this, you feed them, and give them medical attention, your work will never be interfered by Taliban or Northern Alliance or any warrior. You will win the hearts and the minds of a large of a great part of the population by just being good.
When these people spread the word, that there is a better world that the warriors cannot provide, then, weapons can kill many of them yes, but there aren't few strongly armed regimes that have fallen relatively peacefully. Weapons are no good when there is no reason to fight.
While Afghanistan has a particulary favourable topography (and demographics) for such an approach, it is not that unlikely that such a plan may be implemented successfully in most places, with a bit of cleverness.
Just think about the money you spend, $40 billion! $40 billion is far more than the GDP of most of these countries. $40 billion is spend on destruction. A lot could be done if they were spend constructively instead.
Yeah, and BTW, the alternative is indeed a totalitarian police state.