This is actually good news in a certain way. It is yet stronger proof that Microsoft considers the open source community a very viable and threatening competitor.
Most likely they hoped that if they could squash open-source compatibility with windows networks, they could hurt some of the interoperability that is neccesary during the middle phases of migrating a company away from Microsoft (like the recent Merrill Lynch stuff).
The tides are still very very slowly turning, and barring the government helping them too much (and I do believe SSSCA-type bills are a boon for Microsoft if they pass), they will eventually lose.
Basic USB 1.x is 12 Mb/s I'm pretty sure, so it sizes up nicely. USB 2.x is more in the neighboorhood of hundreds of megabits (480 I think?). More tech info is at usb.org.
1 - As stated in the linked article, if the device isn't tamper-proof, it doesn't work.
But also...
2 - There's no reason you can't just convince the device it's at a different location by shielding out the real GPS signals and transmitting your own fake ones from nearby. I'm sure a good RF/GPS hacker could build a box to contain your geo-encryption device that allows you to select a fake longitude and latitude.
The whole idea is just silly. There's no mathematical or scientific principle behind this geo-encryption that makes it work, just a supposedly tamper-proof box that relies on GPS airwaves to determine when it shoudl say "Yes, allow this data to be seen".
As briefly noted in the Post article, the DNS infrastructure, like most essential net technology, pretty much doesn't have any single points of failure. It's immune to local physical attacks or natural disasters. The article is just a sensationalist trip into a modern high security datacenter full of Ooh-ing and Aah-ing, and doesn't have much relevance at all to the security or stability of the 'net.
Jeez guys, talk about racking up the dork points. The basic idea of the original funny post is true regardless... if Bing Bang is true, then our constituent particles were probably once part of some stellar object. The further down this tree you go arguing the point, your arguments are becoming more solidly based in less-reliable theories.
Is there any scientific use for knowing the color of the universe? I can't imagine one. Who paid for this? (probably my grossly overtaxed self in some indirect way).
DevelopMentor - Seems to be about.NET, VB and the other crap MS calls development.
His Books - about COM, which is a Windows thing.
And yeah, he does work at Microsoft. All in all, I'd say these thigns put him in the Microsoft camp, and yeah, that does make him pure evil.
It's one level of evil to have Microsoft try to dominate the world with horribly ill-designed software and protocols. It's an even more dangerous evil when the designs have a small amount of merit, because then they're more likely to succeed in shutting out the rest of the world.
You might want to check out this link when deciding the character of the guy stating these opinions. Apparently Bernstein doesn't think very highly of him...
First off, good programming practices will resolve 99% of these problems. They aren't unavoidable, they're just the result of being careless. Of the few that any good programmer will let slip through once in a while, most could probably caught with an advanced lint-like tool that checks for things in the source code, or for that matter just a little bit of peer code review. I can't see much in the way of difficult-to-avoid problems that require runtime support to adequately detect in plain old C.
In any case, a programmer's failure to be able to adequately program in C is no excuse for moving to a whole new language, compilers, runtime, libraries, standards, etc. The cost associated with migrating to the new language is excessive. It's like buying $10,000 gold-plated titanium training wheels for your sportsbike to solve your initial problem of being unable to ride the thing without falling over.
Recently yes, but back in the day, the Wiltel component of Williams was sold off to Worldcom, with a non-compete agreement from Williams for a few years. Once those few years were up, Williams basically started up Wiltel again, which is the new version you're talking about. Don't ask me why, that whole cycle seemed kinda pointless.
Another thing is that when/if we establish fully functional mining colonies on the moon, the next stage will be to create the industrial resources there on the moon to construct and launch spacecraft. There's some startup costs getting materials there for the first few spacecraft... but construction and launches should both be much more efficient in a low gravity environment. Those first ships can then hopefully lead to cheaper mining elsewhere (Mars?) for raw materials to build more in space, leading to progressively less and less launches from Earth.
Take it with a grain of salt then, but don't be rude. My account of the events is quite truthful. Ask around and talk to the former MCI employees (pre Worldcom takeover), Current EDS employees (who used to be Worldcom employees and were essentially sold to EDS like property), Former Wiltel employees, Former UUnet, etc.... every time Worldcom buys something out, they generally do what they can to put a sugarcoated railspike up the *** of the employees.
The best part of the original memo is when the veep appluads a random salesperson for convincing Broward County, FL to use M$ instead of Redhat for their 40+ webservers, including a quote of a joke something like ~"If Broward County is all about progress, then why would they use Linux?" hahaha.
Remember who fscked up the elections, folks? Yeah, they're all about progress, and they just made another stellar decision.:)
But honestly, I've had lots of jobs in the past, and if they were still all going great obviously I would still be at all of them... that said Worldcom is the only past employer I've had that I would feel the need to publicly bash. They really are rats in the level of how good they try to sound when you're there and how bad they stomp you when it suits them.
I would highly suggest not working for Worldcom. They like a nice PR imagine (see Generation D commercials and whatnot), but on the inside they treat high level technical employees like dirt. I worked there for roughly 4.5 years. During that time, every time they acquired a new company's technical staff, they inevitably found a way to cheat them out of as much benefits as possible before laying them all off at the best time they could find stock-price wise (so that incentive options or profit sharing shares weren't valuable when they were forced to be redeemed). I was an original Worldcom employee, and eventually I suffered the same fate. When the big industry layoffs started they laid off my whole building and forced a short time to excercise then-worthless options which should have been good another 10 years. They did this with no warning to a very advanced research group that was making more progress than 99% of the company, and actually putting out widely-used internal software and showing real numbers for the company. What was preached as a bright and long-term future with the company, and what appeared to be 100's of k worth of stock options turned out to be a quick kick out on the street at their accountant's slightest uninformed whim with just the shirt on your back left.
Unfortunately, the other 95% of voters in the states tend to identify with a party and go straight ticket, even if the ticket conflicts with ideals. Like I and others have said, political parties are akin to organized religion : it's equivalent of mass mind control. People want the easy way to success, whether in this life or the next, and to completely identity with one of a few alternative choices out there is much easier than
having to decide for yourself how to vote or to think.
I agree, well said
However, I don't believe we have a choice. The political power structures in this country are very well established, and I don't believe the grass-roots parties will ever overtake them. That in mind, I pick the best of the two for my ideology, hoping to get them in better power, since they would be easier swayed in my direction.
It bothers me that the Free Software Hacker world is so incredibly anti-Repbulican. I understand the reasons stated in the article, and certainly both political parties make a lot of mistakes in our eyes, but let me remind you of what my political ideals are, and why that makes me vote republican, even though I'm a slashdot-reading, FSF-supporting, Kernel-modifying fool:
To me, one of the metrics of political ideology in a America (and perhaps the most important one) is the Left/Right one. Of the many issues that seperate the two, one large, overriding issue is how power and morality are controlled.
Overall, the Left moves in the direction of a lot of personal Liberty in the areas of Morality, but a lot of centralized power/money in the government. The Right, of course, moves in the direction of a lot of centralized control of the nation's Morality in the government, and a lot of personal freedom/liberty/power, thus reducing that of the government. Please don't argue this with me unless you are sure you know what you're talking about, I've researched extensively without listnening to anyone's propoganda.
My personal political ideology of choice is Libertarian. The gist of that view is that this country is founded upon the rights of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" so long as you don't infringe on the same rights of another person. I feel that the Constitution was designed to protect these ideals. I feel that in respect to our current state, the Libertarian view would want us to reduce laws against drugs, gun ownership, crypto use, and many others - as wells get rid of the IRS and try to find some sane way for the reduced government to get the money it needs.
However, the Libertarian Party hs never produced a candidate I would call anything but ridiculuous, and the Republican party is far closer to my ideals than the Democrats, so I vote for them (in general... I will always vote against a complete loser, regardless of party).
I feel that it is vitally important that if we want our Hacker ways to get out to the world, we have to stop the concentration of power and money in the government. We also need to stop the execessive restrictions on our freedoms.
The reason that those in the Right direction of politics has made many bad decisions for the techies of world is because the individual people in power are ignorant of our thoughts. I fully believe that their ideology is the one we can benefit from the most... but they are still stuck in an old world. They'll come around and see what we have in common with them in time. If you leave the Left in power, they _will_ take your freedom to program, they will take your freedom to encrypt, and they will turn us into the world's newest socialist/fascist country if given enough rope to hang us with.
I believe too much of our community has been blinded by a Left that has been in power and infiltrating media organizations. CNN is their lapdog. Even if you are of Left ideology and don't much care, be realistic and realize that fact.
Please don't respond just to flame me, or to start some political science debate. This is my opinion, and I think I'm in the minority enough here that I can make a good one-sided rant without providing the other side's view - it has been expressed enough.
Don't get too happy about having these ~"Godlike IBM software engineers help out with linux, including opening AIX code" to help with scalability and whatnot. There are some good engineers at IBM, and there are some good ideas in AIX.
However, I'm a long time user of both Linux and AIX. Linux from 386's to Beowulf clusters. AIX from tiny F40's up to 30-50 node range SP/2 complexes. I have an overall good view of IBM and their products. Here are the exceptions to that good view, and they are strong:
AIX is horrible. Top to bottom. For some quickie examples: The TCP stack is horribly inefficient, often the bottleneck as opposed to the network interface speed; The text tools (sed, grep, awk) have ridiculous limitations like "no lines longer than 2048 characters"; Most of the crucial system configuration information is stored in a proprietary binary object database (as opposed to textfiles in/etc). The commands for interacting directly with this database are largely hidden and undocumented.
The SP/2 clustering software sucks. For examples: Their redundant failover for control workstations (HACWS) is vastly overcomplicated, and has had a continual chain fatal problems in every release I've ever used; Their monitoring tools often reporting utter lies (spmon and freinds); Their version control and upgrading proceedures for the OS and the clustering software are beyond abysmal, you're better of just re-installing everything for each minor change.
I could go on for days.. but you get my point... don't let that AIX or SP/2 code into the Linux codebase before you check it out _really_ well. I bet a solid 65% of their stuff wouldn't pass muster in the Linux community.
Oh yeah, I must be dumb because I ripped through a single-draft short posting and managed to typo a couple of words. You got me. If only I was as anal retentive as you I would be smarter.
I've learned not to give much of a care to spelling. It's about communication. Everyone got my point, and you wasted some time correcting my spelling in print, something everyone else's brain took care of for them almost unnoticeably.
Ig yoj can'r resd thit sintinc, uv get serous prablems.
First off, I'd second the notion others have proffered here that you must be very careful not to push him too hard, to give him a good social experience, etc..
Second, while he may be prodigal in a sense of what he can learn, despite occaisonal appearances to the contrary, he is still very much a child psychologically. You need to read some very good books on child development and psychology to try to determine what stages he is currently going through. Understanding his current emotional stages will help you a lot in dealing with him properly. Perhaps even an exploratory visit to a child psychologist would help even more to iron these things out, since they're especially hard to determine in children like these.
Third, here's my personal insight. I was a "child prodigy" type that never got pushed much at all. When I was 8-9 years old, I was already making post high school scores on standardized tests. Nobody pushed me into any advanced fields. My parents did a little in the form of tutoring me up to a few grade levels ahead of myself over the summers between school semesters. I also got my first basic interpreter around that time, and then quickly moved (on my own, no pushing) into assembly and later to C.
I feel that my life turned out very well, and that I have nurtured my own curiousity without any extra push. I can also see now in hindsight (not much, I'm still only 24, but whatever) that as much as I believed that I understood things at various ages, there are some things that no amount of raw intelligence can teach you. There are some things that must be learned over time. And these are not sappy things like true love, these are concepts important to creative processes and learning.
I would also note that of great benefit to me was a lot of overseas travel and living as a child. I believe now more than ever that immersing a any child in as wide an array of situations and experiences as you can helps to maximize them in a very natural and gentle way.
It worries me that you're willing to change platforms/languages/etc just to find the right debugger. If you stick to good programming practices, coredumps should happen rarely to begin with, and therefore the tradeoff is there to have a better language/os and a really hard time dealing with corefiles. Also, most good programmers, even when dealing with a serious bug causing a coredump, only use a debugger to get a backtrace... they don't really _use_ the debugger. And in many circumstances, marker statements in the source code are even simpler than using a debugger for a backtrace. In light of all these things, I could never justify changing my whole coding world arounda decision about a better debugger... something else is wrong here.
I use 64-bit processors every day too. I have a reason to do so. I'm glad they exist.
Please, to everyone who read this thread: Did you pay attention to my disclaimer??? I LOVE 64-BIT CPUs! Get it? I'm only arguing that they are a waste of silicon and effort on desktop PCs that run Microsoft Office, mostly not doing any more math than maybe an expense report that deals with 2 decimal places... oooohhh.
I'm not aguing against VLIW.... whole other matter... your argument there makes me feel better about Itanium. I'm just arguing against 64-bit processors for non-engineering/scientific/heavy-visualisation tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
This is actually good news in a certain way. It is yet stronger proof that Microsoft considers the open source community a very viable and threatening competitor.
Most likely they hoped that if they could squash open-source compatibility with windows networks, they could hurt some of the interoperability that is neccesary during the middle phases of migrating a company away from Microsoft (like the recent Merrill Lynch stuff).
The tides are still very very slowly turning, and barring the government helping them too much (and I do believe SSSCA-type bills are a boon for Microsoft if they pass), they will eventually lose.
Basic USB 1.x is 12 Mb/s I'm pretty sure, so it sizes up nicely. USB 2.x is more in the neighboorhood of hundreds of megabits (480 I think?). More tech info is at usb.org.
1 - As stated in the linked article, if the device isn't tamper-proof, it doesn't work.
But also...
2 - There's no reason you can't just convince the device it's at a different location by shielding out the real GPS signals and transmitting your own fake ones from nearby. I'm sure a good RF/GPS hacker could build a box to contain your geo-encryption device that allows you to select a fake longitude and latitude.
The whole idea is just silly. There's no mathematical or scientific principle behind this geo-encryption that makes it work, just a supposedly tamper-proof box that relies on GPS airwaves to determine when it shoudl say "Yes, allow this data to be seen".
As briefly noted in the Post article, the DNS infrastructure, like most essential net technology, pretty much doesn't have any single points of failure. It's immune to local physical attacks or natural disasters. The article is just a sensationalist trip into a modern high security datacenter full of Ooh-ing and Aah-ing, and doesn't have much relevance at all to the security or stability of the 'net.
Jeez guys, talk about racking up the dork points. The basic idea of the original funny post is true regardless... if Bing Bang is true, then our constituent particles were probably once part of some stellar object. The further down this tree you go arguing the point, your arguments are becoming more solidly based in less-reliable theories.
Is there any scientific use for knowing the color of the universe? I can't imagine one. Who paid for this? (probably my grossly overtaxed self in some indirect way).
Real men use vi.
DevelopMentor - Seems to be about
His Books - about COM, which is a Windows thing.
And yeah, he does work at Microsoft. All in all, I'd say these thigns put him in the Microsoft camp, and yeah, that does make him pure evil.
It's one level of evil to have Microsoft try to dominate the world with horribly ill-designed software and protocols. It's an even more dangerous evil when the designs have a small amount of merit, because then they're more likely to succeed in shutting out the rest of the world.
You might want to check out this link when deciding the character of the guy stating these opinions. Apparently Bernstein doesn't think very highly of him...
First off, good programming practices will resolve 99% of these problems. They aren't unavoidable, they're just the result of being careless. Of the few that any good programmer will let slip through once in a while, most could probably caught with an advanced lint-like tool that checks for things in the source code, or for that matter just a little bit of peer code review. I can't see much in the way of difficult-to-avoid problems that require runtime support to adequately detect in plain old C.
In any case, a programmer's failure to be able to adequately program in C is no excuse for moving to a whole new language, compilers, runtime, libraries, standards, etc. The cost associated with migrating to the new language is excessive. It's like buying $10,000 gold-plated titanium training wheels for your sportsbike to solve your initial problem of being unable to ride the thing without falling over.
Recently yes, but back in the day, the Wiltel component of Williams was sold off to Worldcom, with a non-compete agreement from Williams for a few years. Once those few years were up, Williams basically started up Wiltel again, which is the new version you're talking about. Don't ask me why, that whole cycle seemed kinda pointless.
Another thing is that when/if we establish fully functional mining colonies on the moon, the next stage will be to create the industrial resources there on the moon to construct and launch spacecraft. There's some startup costs getting materials there for the first few spacecraft... but construction and launches should both be much more efficient in a low gravity environment. Those first ships can then hopefully lead to cheaper mining elsewhere (Mars?) for raw materials to build more in space, leading to progressively less and less launches from Earth.
SHHHHH
Don't get those embedded linux project guys' thinking, you never know how many months of StrongARM development could be lost to the 4004.
Take it with a grain of salt then, but don't be rude. My account of the events is quite truthful. Ask around and talk to the former MCI employees (pre Worldcom takeover), Current EDS employees (who used to be Worldcom employees and were essentially sold to EDS like property), Former Wiltel employees, Former UUnet, etc.... every time Worldcom buys something out, they generally do what they can to put a sugarcoated railspike up the *** of the employees.
The best part of the original memo is when the veep appluads a random salesperson for convincing Broward County, FL to use M$ instead of Redhat for their 40+ webservers, including a quote of a joke something like ~"If Broward County is all about progress, then why would they use Linux?" hahaha.
Remember who fscked up the elections, folks? Yeah, they're all about progress, and they just made another stellar decision.
Yeah that's pretty much how it will go
But honestly, I've had lots of jobs in the past, and if they were still all going great obviously I would still be at all of them... that said Worldcom is the only past employer I've had that I would feel the need to publicly bash. They really are rats in the level of how good they try to sound when you're there and how bad they stomp you when it suits them.
I would highly suggest not working for Worldcom. They like a nice PR imagine (see Generation D commercials and whatnot), but on the inside they treat high level technical employees like dirt. I worked there for roughly 4.5 years. During that time, every time they acquired a new company's technical staff, they inevitably found a way to cheat them out of as much benefits as possible before laying them all off at the best time they could find stock-price wise (so that incentive options or profit sharing shares weren't valuable when they were forced to be redeemed). I was an original Worldcom employee, and eventually I suffered the same fate. When the big industry layoffs started they laid off my whole building and forced a short time to excercise then-worthless options which should have been good another 10 years. They did this with no warning to a very advanced research group that was making more progress than 99% of the company, and actually putting out widely-used internal software and showing real numbers for the company. What was preached as a bright and long-term future with the company, and what appeared to be 100's of k worth of stock options turned out to be a quick kick out on the street at their accountant's slightest uninformed whim with just the shirt on your back left.
I agree, well said
However, I don't believe we have a choice. The political power structures in this country are very well established, and I don't believe the grass-roots parties will ever overtake them. That in mind, I pick the best of the two for my ideology, hoping to get them in better power, since they would be easier swayed in my direction.
To me, one of the metrics of political ideology in a America (and perhaps the most important one) is the Left/Right one. Of the many issues that seperate the two, one large, overriding issue is how power and morality are controlled.
Overall, the Left moves in the direction of a lot of personal Liberty in the areas of Morality, but a lot of centralized power/money in the government. The Right, of course, moves in the direction of a lot of centralized control of the nation's Morality in the government, and a lot of personal freedom/liberty/power, thus reducing that of the government. Please don't argue this with me unless you are sure you know what you're talking about, I've researched extensively without listnening to anyone's propoganda.
My personal political ideology of choice is Libertarian. The gist of that view is that this country is founded upon the rights of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" so long as you don't infringe on the same rights of another person. I feel that the Constitution was designed to protect these ideals. I feel that in respect to our current state, the Libertarian view would want us to reduce laws against drugs, gun ownership, crypto use, and many others - as wells get rid of the IRS and try to find some sane way for the reduced government to get the money it needs.
However, the Libertarian Party hs never produced a candidate I would call anything but ridiculuous, and the Republican party is far closer to my ideals than the Democrats, so I vote for them (in general... I will always vote against a complete loser, regardless of party).
I feel that it is vitally important that if we want our Hacker ways to get out to the world, we have to stop the concentration of power and money in the government. We also need to stop the execessive restrictions on our freedoms.
The reason that those in the Right direction of politics has made many bad decisions for the techies of world is because the individual people in power are ignorant of our thoughts. I fully believe that their ideology is the one we can benefit from the most... but they are still stuck in an old world. They'll come around and see what we have in common with them in time. If you leave the Left in power, they _will_ take your freedom to program, they will take your freedom to encrypt, and they will turn us into the world's newest socialist/fascist country if given enough rope to hang us with.
I believe too much of our community has been blinded by a Left that has been in power and infiltrating media organizations. CNN is their lapdog. Even if you are of Left ideology and don't much care, be realistic and realize that fact.
Please don't respond just to flame me, or to start some political science debate. This is my opinion, and I think I'm in the minority enough here that I can make a good one-sided rant without providing the other side's view - it has been expressed enough.
However, I'm a long time user of both Linux and AIX. Linux from 386's to Beowulf clusters. AIX from tiny F40's up to 30-50 node range SP/2 complexes. I have an overall good view of IBM and their products. Here are the exceptions to that good view, and they are strong:
- AIX is horrible. Top to bottom. For some quickie examples: The TCP stack is horribly inefficient, often the bottleneck as opposed to the network interface speed; The text tools (sed, grep, awk) have ridiculous limitations like "no lines longer than 2048 characters"; Most of the crucial system configuration information is stored in a proprietary binary object database (as opposed to textfiles in
/etc). The commands for interacting directly with this database are largely hidden and undocumented.
- The SP/2 clustering software sucks. For examples: Their redundant failover for control workstations (HACWS) is vastly overcomplicated, and has had a continual chain fatal problems in every release I've ever used; Their monitoring tools often reporting utter lies (spmon and freinds); Their version control and upgrading proceedures for the OS and the clustering software are beyond abysmal, you're better of just re-installing everything for each minor change.
I could go on for days.. but you get my point... don't let that AIX or SP/2 code into the Linux codebase before you check it out _really_ well. I bet a solid 65% of their stuff wouldn't pass muster in the Linux community.I've learned not to give much of a care to spelling. It's about communication. Everyone got my point, and you wasted some time correcting my spelling in print, something everyone else's brain took care of for them almost unnoticeably.
Ig yoj can'r resd thit sintinc, uv get serous prablems.
Second, while he may be prodigal in a sense of what he can learn, despite occaisonal appearances to the contrary, he is still very much a child psychologically. You need to read some very good books on child development and psychology to try to determine what stages he is currently going through. Understanding his current emotional stages will help you a lot in dealing with him properly. Perhaps even an exploratory visit to a child psychologist would help even more to iron these things out, since they're especially hard to determine in children like these.
Third, here's my personal insight. I was a "child prodigy" type that never got pushed much at all. When I was 8-9 years old, I was already making post high school scores on standardized tests. Nobody pushed me into any advanced fields. My parents did a little in the form of tutoring me up to a few grade levels ahead of myself over the summers between school semesters. I also got my first basic interpreter around that time, and then quickly moved (on my own, no pushing) into assembly and later to C.
I feel that my life turned out very well, and that I have nurtured my own curiousity without any extra push. I can also see now in hindsight (not much, I'm still only 24, but whatever) that as much as I believed that I understood things at various ages, there are some things that no amount of raw intelligence can teach you. There are some things that must be learned over time. And these are not sappy things like true love, these are concepts important to creative processes and learning.
I would also note that of great benefit to me was a lot of overseas travel and living as a child. I believe now more than ever that immersing a any child in as wide an array of situations and experiences as you can helps to maximize them in a very natural and gentle way.
Please, to everyone who read this thread: Did you pay attention to my disclaimer??? I LOVE 64-BIT CPUs! Get it? I'm only arguing that they are a waste of silicon and effort on desktop PCs that run Microsoft Office, mostly not doing any more math than maybe an expense report that deals with 2 decimal places... oooohhh.
I'm not aguing against VLIW.... whole other matter... your argument there makes me feel better about Itanium. I'm just arguing against 64-bit processors for non-engineering/scientific/heavy-visualisation tasks.