Err, Sony is a media corporation, they have a vested interest in pretending to fight piracy wrt. shareholders. George Hotz didn't precipitate Sony's actions - I think he's doing a favor by showing that DRM is pointless in the end and only harms consumers. Columbia pictures/film is actively tripping up the tech division, and this is why Sony is in the media race with one leg tied. It's why Apple has taken the lead in so many areas. The fact that the PS3 doesn't even talk Bravia protocol to the Sony flatscreens is beyond any logic. Surprisingly, the X360 hasn't broken through into the living room. It's amazing that in 2010, one has: an MPEG2/4 capable Full HD TV, a supercomputer class gaming console, and neither of them can really function as a dedicated PVR, and you still need a set-top-box of some kind to decode encrypted channels for satellite contents. The markets are segmented, I still have 5 remote controls (PS3, STB, TV, amplifier, squeezebox). The future is not what it used to be.
As pointed out elsewhere, Android just happened to be what the author had in his pocket at the time. Of course, a lot of factors made it possible. What's very inspiring about this is the amount of work that was done, without any prompting or formal coordination from any "official authorities". The people on the ground, together with their friends and colleagues from around the world (Google, http://www.nsrc.org/, http://www.afnic.fr/, http://www.pch.net/, US State Department, etc...) made it happen. To illustrate this, check out how continuity of the.HT ccTLD was ensured while the people running it on a daily basis in Port au Prince were unreachable:
No prior agreement had been made for "disaster recovery" but even so, the right decisions were taken. Of course things would have been much smoother if there had been some sort of contingency planning, but taken into account the circumstances, this was pretty amazing.
I'll second/third/XXth this. It just rocks. Will be buying more stuff from them over the coming year. Not dirt cheap, but not insanely priced either. That and a SUMOH digital amplifier or the Squeezebox Boom, presto!
That Sprint is doing something stupid might be so, but I don't think we have the whole picture.
Cogent customers are being fed the excuse that "it's sprint's fault". That's bull, if they really wanted to help the customers and honor their side of the deal (towards their customers) they could buy transit through someone else to talk to Sprint. Sprint isn't blocking Cogent IPs, it's only dropped peering with them.
"Talk with their senators and local political..."
on
Dealing With Dialup
·
· Score: 1
Dude, you live in a free market economy. Deal with it. No one can be bothered to deploy DSLAMs or upgrade the copper ? Tough luck. Meanwhile, back in Europe...
MySQL does not have tablespaces, only recently support for views, subselects, transactions was added and triggers and stored procedures are still considered alpha. No bitmap indexes... This is by far not the best comparison I've ever seen.
> Well, it's a project principally sponsored by the FSF. Certainly they have a close connection, but they're hardly equivalent.
Ok, we'll have to disagree there. Otherwise point taken, there is no clearly stated agenda, other than Stallman's stance on proprietary software. I'll crawl back to my hole:)
"As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary (18k characters) program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. " "A person should aspire to live an upright life openly with pride, and this means saying ``No'' to proprietary software." "The Free Software Foundation follows the rule that we cannot install any proprietary program on our computers except temporarily for the specific purpose of writing a free replacement for that very program. Aside from that, we feel there is no possible excuse for installing a proprietary program."
The FSF has a clearly stated agenda of eradicating proprietary software, as it's immoral according to them. How is that not going to constitute a biased approach when debating industry topics, where a large number of players have a vested interest in developing, selling and supporting proprietary software. Same goes for a lot of pro-GPL organizations that see proprietary software as the enemy.
American foreign policy is giving _all_ American institutions a bad rep, and this is making it so easy for the UN to back ITU on issues such as Internet Governance, and giving fuel to the criticisms of countries like Iran, China, and other friendly democraciies. ICANN's lack of transparency doesn't help either, and the.xxx case just drove the nail home.
He states: "That obvious restriction: No one but Apple is allowed to make players for iTunes Music Store songs, and no one but Apple can sell you proprietary file-format music that will play on the iPod".
As far as I know, it's the other way around:
"only the iPod can play the proprietary file-format music that you can buy on the iTunes Music Store."
No one is forced to buy music from iTMS -- the iPod plays MP3s fine.
He throws a bunch of acronyms for encryption and compression algorithms in the mail (coming from SecurityFocus, nonetheless!), then hopes that it will solve all problems -- see below.
The main problem is that NO ONE wants to replace email with something closed, that will necessarily require putting power in the hands of either governments (X.509 certificates need to be associated to identities, meaning passport / ID card validation, etc...) or private companies (I'm sure verisign would love to do this. Or Microsoft with Passport, etc...). Secondly it's hell: managing large trust hierarchies (PKIs for example) are difficult and cumbersome: they are administrative burdens that will need to be regulated. Otherwise, yes, it's easy to start from scratch. Everyone will have to go to their local town hall / post office / verisign representant / Microsoft Identity Office, present a valid passport, and voila, you've got a certificate (valid 1 year!) allowing you to send mail. Email systems won't receive anything else than known senders (validated through a hierarchical directory system -- maybe LDAP if we're lucky, or the DNS), and only if the signature on your cert. says you've agreed to the terms and conditions of using the Great World Email system (you wish, there will never be that level of cooperation).
So yes, it will be a process run by the private sector. And we all know that spammers will never be able to buy valid certificates, right ?
BULLSHIT.
From the article:
The only solution is to start from scratch. Develop a new email system
and make it secure. Use existing, proven technologies and a few new and
novel ideas ? starting with the latest encoding mechanisms, a reliable
hashing algorithm, fast compression, strong encryption and signatures.
Build an electronic identity. Encode, hash, encrypt, compress, sign, and
provide a novel way to share keys when needed, for example. I don't know
how this will all turn out, but perhaps yEnc, MD5, AES, H.264, and GPG
are some potential technologies that could be used together
Very slick in fact. Attack a country with low-tech means, and let the country overregulate itself, destroy its civil liberties, and generally make itself a bigger nuisance to its own citizens -- and its economy -- than what unsophisticated, guerilla-style terrorist groups could hope to achieve.
The first thing you want to as yourself is: is this to gain academic knowledge, or practical knowledge that will make you worth something on the job market ?
The second question is WHAT part of the IT landscape interests you ?
You say programming, but I'll pointedly misinterpret your question and focus on "IT".
Learning about IT is like saying, "I want to become a doctor". Are you interested in programming ? What kind ? Systems or UI or something else ? What environments ? Traditional (UNIX, Windows) or embedded platforms ? High or low level stuff ? Or would you rather learn about networking ? In general, or do you want to get a CCIE ? How about systems administration ? Or DBA ?
Third, see if there's not some introductory evening courses you can take in some of the subjects that interest you. A lot of IT courses will be great to quickly discover a technology, a concept: there are lots of advantages to being walked through a topic by a competent person, etc... It will open up your horizon to different things, show you some of the possibilities you might miss when trying things by yourself -- but in the end, you have to burn for it. If you don't, in my opinion no amount of courses or training will make you more competent than personal motivation to do a good job.
Last, you want to find out if a CS college course is what you are looking for. Don't get me wrong, lots of good people are self-taught l33t d00ds with k1ill4h k0d3r sk1llz, but there's a lot of good underlying theory to be had in formal programming courses, algorithm design, systems architecture. There's many different areas of specialization in IT, and some of them you can learn in college, others not: for instance systems administration is something you'll have to learn hands on, it's a combination of skills from different areas of the IT world.
Anyway, here's a few biased tips -- I'm not a programmer:)
1. Don't assume Linux/UNIX and TCP/IP is the only thing out there. Windows either for that matter. They are very close to each other in terms of concepts and implementation.
2. Now, you said that programming is what interests you. Write code. Try different languages. Learn C -- you want to get close to the system to understand how it works. Even in the world of Java and C#, it's still a very good idea to grok the underlying platform, and why it works the way it does. It doesn't mean you need to learn assembly:)
There's too many people out there programming and making the lifes of systems administrators and DBAs miserable, because they don't understand the implications their code has on the underlying system (hell, if you're programming for a personal computer, then you can allow yourself to write on the product box "requires 4 GB of RAM, two Opteron 242 processors and 500 GB of available diskspace"), because they've been told "Java is a virtual machine, you don't need to know anything about the underlying OS".
3. Read some books of course. On OS design, "Design and implementation of the FreeBSD operating system" (McKusick, Neville-Neil) is a good book, though maybe a bit steep for starters.
For networking, Tannenbaum's, "Computer Networks" is a very good, thorough work on networking technology, from signalling theory to cabling to transport and protocols. For IP itself, read Richard Stevens', TCP/IP Illustrated.
In the end, it will still be up to you to ask yourself: do I really like this ? Do us a favor, don't become one of those career programmers who decided to learn Java or C# because the pay is good and there are lots of chicks. Wait, forget that last one. Good luck.
Both the slashdot headline and article (sorry, opinion piece) are pure speculation. There is nothing new here, this has been the state of things for a while, no official announcement from Apple on this, and therefore no need to post such a piece with the sensationalist headline, as if this had just happened. So please check your facts before posting them as truth...
That is what matters: that they do the work they're paid to do it. If they spend their time surfing, and don't do the assigned tasks, then it's symptomatic of another problem. Looking at websurfing as a quality indicator is a sign that management doesn't know what its employees are doing.
Funnily enough, this comes from the US, which I seem to remember prides itself on being result-oriented (i.e.: looking at how the person and the company performs, not so much on how it's done) rather than process oriented (i.e.: as so-called old-fashioned Europe supposedly does).
Or maybe it's just that management is afraid of litigation from the employees because they might see (OMG!) breasts! Or... NAKED PEOPLE!
Slashdot Mirror
Err, Sony is a media corporation, they have a vested interest in pretending to fight piracy wrt. shareholders. George Hotz didn't precipitate Sony's actions - I think he's doing a favor by showing that DRM is pointless in the end and only harms consumers. Columbia pictures/film is actively tripping up the tech division, and this is why Sony is in the media race with one leg tied. It's why Apple has taken the lead in so many areas. The fact that the PS3 doesn't even talk Bravia protocol to the Sony flatscreens is beyond any logic. Surprisingly, the X360 hasn't broken through into the living room. It's amazing that in 2010, one has: an MPEG2/4 capable Full HD TV, a supercomputer class gaming console, and neither of them can really function as a dedicated PVR, and you still need a set-top-box of some kind to decode encrypted channels for satellite contents. The markets are segmented, I still have 5 remote controls (PS3, STB, TV, amplifier, squeezebox). The future is not what it used to be.
As pointed out elsewhere, Android just happened to be what the author had in his pocket at the time. Of course, a lot of factors made it possible. What's very inspiring about this is the amount of work that was done, without any prompting or formal coordination from any "official authorities". The people on the ground, together with their friends and colleagues from around the world (Google, http://www.nsrc.org/, http://www.afnic.fr/, http://www.pch.net/, US State Department, etc...) made it happen. To illustrate this, check out how continuity of the .HT ccTLD was ensured while the people running it on a daily basis in Port au Prince were unreachable:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bortzmeyer.org%2Fdns-haiti.html&sl=fr&tl=en
No prior agreement had been made for "disaster recovery" but even so, the right decisions were taken. Of course things would have been much smoother if there had been some sort of contingency planning, but taken into account the circumstances, this was pretty amazing.
Phil
I'll second/third/XXth this. It just rocks. Will be buying more stuff from them over the coming year. Not dirt cheap, but not insanely priced either. That and a SUMOH digital amplifier or the Squeezebox Boom, presto!
Reminds me a lot of Architecture for Humanity. Also check Cameron Sinclair's (founder of AfH) talk at TED in 2006.
That Sprint is doing something stupid might be so, but I don't think we have the whole picture.
Cogent customers are being fed the excuse that "it's sprint's fault". That's bull, if they really wanted to help the customers and honor their side of the deal (towards their customers) they could buy transit through someone else to talk to Sprint. Sprint isn't blocking Cogent IPs, it's only dropped peering with them.
Dude, you live in a free market economy. Deal with it. No one can be bothered to deploy DSLAMs or upgrade the copper ? Tough luck. Meanwhile, back in Europe...
The submission mentions CD-ROM, but the article talks about Compact Disc Digital Audio...
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1101
I use it everyday...
/sbin/mount_ntfs
# which mount_ntfs
MySQL does not have tablespaces, only recently support for views, subselects, transactions was added and triggers and stored procedures are still considered alpha. No bitmap indexes... This is by far not the best comparison I've ever seen.
> Well, it's a project principally sponsored by the FSF. Certainly they have a close connection, but they're hardly equivalent.
:)
Ok, we'll have to disagree there. Otherwise point taken, there is no clearly stated agenda, other than Stallman's stance on proprietary software. I'll crawl back to my hole
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
(yes, GNU is a project of the FSF)
Including: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html
Quote: " I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better."
or http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html
"As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary (18k characters) program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. "
"A person should aspire to live an upright life openly with pride, and this means saying ``No'' to proprietary software."
"The Free Software Foundation follows the rule that we cannot install any proprietary program on our computers except temporarily for the specific purpose of writing a free replacement for that very program. Aside from that, we feel there is no possible excuse for installing a proprietary program."
etc...
The FSF has a clearly stated agenda of eradicating proprietary software, as it's immoral according to them. How is that not going to constitute a biased approach when debating industry topics, where a large number of players have a vested interest in developing, selling and supporting proprietary software. Same goes for a lot of pro-GPL organizations that see proprietary software as the enemy.
"Nightmare come true". What sensationalism. This is just STUN, which SIP communication devices can also use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN
American foreign policy is giving _all_ American institutions a bad rep, and this is making it so easy for the UN to back ITU on issues such as Internet Governance, and giving fuel to the criticisms of countries like Iran, China, and other friendly democraciies. ICANN's lack of transparency doesn't help either, and the .xxx case just drove the nail home.
Take a look at -- http://www.rfc1149.net/blog/2006/08/23/wiping-unus ed-space-in-a-file-system/
Think twice before lending your USB drive to someone even for a short while. And check what
they put on _your_ key.
Is the man kidding ? My God, has he forgotten 10 years of Linux bashing and on-stage mouth foaming from Ballmer. Please.
He states: "That obvious restriction: No one but Apple is allowed to make players for iTunes Music Store songs, and no one but Apple can sell you proprietary file-format music that will play on the iPod".
As far as I know, it's the other way around:
"only the iPod can play the proprietary file-format music that you can buy on the iTunes Music Store."
No one is forced to buy music from iTMS -- the iPod plays MP3s fine.
... we wrote it.
http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/PHP
The reason that nobody has come up with a viable solution to SPAM (and on a derivative, viruses) is well summed up here: http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.htm l
The main problem is that NO ONE wants to replace email with something closed, that will necessarily require putting power in the hands of either governments (X.509 certificates need to be associated to identities, meaning passport / ID card validation, etc...) or private companies (I'm sure verisign would love to do this. Or Microsoft with Passport, etc...). Secondly it's hell: managing large trust hierarchies (PKIs for example) are difficult and cumbersome: they are administrative burdens that will need to be regulated. Otherwise, yes, it's easy to start from scratch. Everyone will have to go to their local town hall / post office / verisign representant / Microsoft Identity Office, present a valid passport, and voila, you've got a certificate (valid 1 year!) allowing you to send mail. Email systems won't receive anything else than known senders (validated through a hierarchical directory system -- maybe LDAP if we're lucky, or the DNS), and only if the signature on your cert. says you've agreed to the terms and conditions of using the Great World Email system (you wish, there will never be that level of cooperation).
So yes, it will be a process run by the private sector. And we all know that spammers will never be able to buy valid certificates, right ?
BULLSHIT.
From the article:
The only solution is to start from scratch. Develop a new email system and make it secure. Use existing, proven technologies and a few new and novel ideas ? starting with the latest encoding mechanisms, a reliable hashing algorithm, fast compression, strong encryption and signatures. Build an electronic identity. Encode, hash, encrypt, compress, sign, and provide a novel way to share keys when needed, for example. I don't know how this will all turn out, but perhaps yEnc, MD5, AES, H.264, and GPG are some potential technologies that could be used together
Very slick in fact. Attack a country with low-tech means, and let the country overregulate itself, destroy its civil liberties, and generally make itself a bigger nuisance to its own citizens -- and its economy -- than what unsophisticated, guerilla-style terrorist groups could hope to achieve.
The first thing you want to as yourself is: is this to gain academic
:)
:)
knowledge, or practical knowledge that will make you worth something on
the job market ?
The second question is WHAT part of the IT landscape interests you ?
You say programming, but I'll pointedly misinterpret your question
and focus on "IT".
Learning about IT is like saying, "I want to become a doctor". Are you
interested in programming ? What kind ? Systems or UI or something
else ? What environments ? Traditional (UNIX, Windows) or embedded
platforms ? High or low level stuff ? Or would you rather learn about
networking ? In general, or do you want to get a CCIE ? How about
systems administration ? Or DBA ?
Third, see if there's not some introductory evening courses you can take
in some of the subjects that interest you. A lot of IT courses will be
great to quickly discover a technology, a concept: there are lots of
advantages to being walked through a topic by a competent person, etc...
It will open up your horizon to different things, show you some of the
possibilities you might miss when trying things by yourself -- but in the
end, you have to burn for it. If you don't, in my opinion no amount of
courses or training will make you more competent than personal motivation
to do a good job.
Last, you want to find out if a CS college course is what you are
looking for. Don't get me wrong, lots of good people are self-taught
l33t d00ds with k1ill4h k0d3r sk1llz, but there's a lot of good
underlying theory to be had in formal programming courses, algorithm
design, systems architecture. There's many different areas of
specialization in IT, and some of them you can learn in college, others
not: for instance systems administration is something you'll have to
learn hands on, it's a combination of skills from different areas of the
IT world.
Anyway, here's a few biased tips -- I'm not a programmer
1. Don't assume Linux/UNIX and TCP/IP is the only thing out there. Windows
either for that matter. They are very close to each other in terms of concepts
and implementation.
2. Now, you said that programming is what interests you. Write code. Try
different languages. Learn C -- you want to get close to the system to
understand how it works. Even in the world of Java and C#, it's still a
very good idea to grok the underlying platform, and why it works the way
it does. It doesn't mean you need to learn assembly
There's too many people out there programming and making the lifes of
systems administrators and DBAs miserable, because they don't understand
the implications their code has on the underlying system (hell, if
you're programming for a personal computer, then you can allow yourself
to write on the product box "requires 4 GB of RAM, two Opteron 242
processors and 500 GB of available diskspace"), because they've been
told "Java is a virtual machine, you don't need to know anything about
the underlying OS".
3. Read some books of course. On OS design, "Design and implementation of
the FreeBSD operating system" (McKusick, Neville-Neil) is a good book,
though maybe a bit steep for starters.
For networking, Tannenbaum's, "Computer Networks" is a very good,
thorough work on networking technology, from signalling theory to
cabling to transport and protocols. For IP itself, read Richard
Stevens', TCP/IP Illustrated.
In the end, it will still be up to you to ask yourself: do I really like
this ? Do us a favor, don't become one of those career programmers who
decided to learn Java or C# because the pay is good and there are lots
of chicks. Wait, forget that last one. Good luck.
Both the slashdot headline and article (sorry, opinion piece) are pure speculation.
There is nothing new here, this has been the state of things for a while, no official announcement from Apple on this, and therefore no need to post such a piece with the sensationalist headline, as if this had just happened. So please check your facts before posting them as truth...
That is what matters: that they do the work they're paid to do it. If they spend their time surfing, and don't do the assigned tasks, then it's symptomatic of another problem. Looking at websurfing as a quality indicator is a sign that management doesn't know what its employees are doing.
... NAKED PEOPLE!
Funnily enough, this comes from the US, which I seem to remember prides itself on being result-oriented (i.e.: looking at how the person and the company performs, not so much on how it's done) rather than process oriented (i.e.: as so-called old-fashioned Europe supposedly does).
Or maybe it's just that management is afraid of litigation from the employees because they might see (OMG!) breasts! Or
My 0.02 EUR
Need we say more ?