It's not about rights and liberties, it's about fear. It's about the expectation of the worst overshadowing the fact that people are inherently not evil. Bear with me...
... snip!...
And how does this pertain to the article subject matter? Well, as long as the government insists on making us feel insecure in our own country, with Commies, and Iraqi terrorists, and biological weapons around every corner, we will keep suspecting each other of cruel intentions. As long as we keep being afraid, the government will keep trying to protect us from each other. As long as the government keeps trying to keep us safe, we will feel our rights erode, and we will be even more paranoid.
You miss the point. We (at least I, and I suspect, a lot of people on this board) are not afraid of each other or of individuals in general. The whole discussion is not about threats you face on the streets. I have not heard a single person (as opposed to a governent official or a politician) demand more stringent national security because he was afraid of Iraqi terrorists. Fear and suspicion of fellow people is a completely different topic.
What we are talking about here is government powers and the abuse thereof. I am suspicious of governments and I believe I have good reasons to be. History, and in particular, XX century history, should teach everybody (who is capable of learning, that is) that governments have huge appetite for power and if they get this power, Very Bad Things (tm) tend to happen. It doesn't really matter if the original goals were good/idealistic -- power corrupts and does it quickly and effectively.
I trust people -- but I definitely don't trust governments.
Communism is a completely different thing. Communism is ONLY an economic system. It is not a philosophy of massive oppression and/or censorship on the people.
Whaaaat? [boggle]
Communism is not an economic system at all. It is a political repression system, where one of the major ways to make the people completely dependent on the government is to prohibit private property (other than personal one).
You could, maybe, argue that marxism is an economic system, although there are major problems here as well. But communism?? Communism cannot exist without massive oppression and censorship.
You mean Reno, don't you? Madeleine Albright is the Secretary of State, Janet Reno is the Director of the FBI and the author of this letter (which is way out of bounds for the FBI)
Oops. My bad. However, Janet Reno is the Attorney General of the USA and is not the Director of FBI.
Firstly, when the head of a branch of a government sends an official letter to the head of a branch of a different government, it is never "no more than her opinion".
A-ah, so is this the official position of the US government? No? I didn't think so. Basically I think she was testing the waters. And there is nothing special about Germany, is there? Last time I looked I could download stuff just as easily from Holland, Israel, Russia, a bunch of country domains that I don't even know what they stand for, etc. etc.
it is part of a coordinated effort by the FBI to make strong encryption unavailable.
Again, you are probably thinking of the whole US law enforcement apparatus more than of FBI, but this is essentially correct. However his has been correct and widely known for a very long time.
I don't know if Reno wears panties
I dare not guess the sources of your information, but our friend Janet never struck me as a sexually adventurous type. Going pantiless around White House -- oh, my!
We've been seeing a lot of "I'm scared, take away my rights so I feel safer" lately, particularly in the US.
And we also saw a very strong backlash against attempts to do just that. Recall the Pentium ID fiasco, and that was quite a tame issue.
The Bill of Rights has nothing to do with this letter, which was to put pressure on a German minister to do things in Germany.
It is fairly obvious that doing things in Germany and only in Germany is pretty pointless. This can work only if possession is criminalized, or if all the nations in the world agree.
It's also a hard battle to get the Bill of Rights to have something to do with this in the US. The courts are not consistant when they rule whether or not source code is protected speech. Binaries have never been protected by the Bill of Rights.
You miss the point. It's not my encryption software that is protected by the Bill of Rights, but rather my right to encrypt documents. IANAL but I think it falls under the searches and seizures amendment. Besides, encryption is a fairly vague term. If I write something in Klingon, is it encrypted? And you don't necessarily need computers -- a pencil, some paper, and a one-time pad work perfectly well. The court may order you to surrender your key, but there has never been any talk of outlawing encryption as such.
No way. Albright was basically saying "wouldn't it be nice if encryption wasn't available to non-government entities". This is no more than her opinion. Granted, her opinion carries some weight, but it's a faaaaaar way from actually enacting coordinated legislation that would prohibit private encryption.
So don't get your panties all bunched up. This is not going to happen for a very large set of reasons, starting with political climate and ending with the Bill of Rights (at least for Americans).
[not crashing] Actually this is important for a casual user. They want a box that, to borrow a quote, "just works". They don't want to have to deal with the fallout from crashes all the time. Even if they don't depend on it, they simply don't want to have to wonder if it's crashed after having been left alone and untouched for a week.
First, a casual user's understanding of "just works" mostly means "it does what I mean" and doesn't have much to do with crashes. Again, it's a question of the appropriate GUI and considerable underlying program intelligence which has to guess correctly what did the user mean. And anyway, crashes can be made relatively painless (fast reboot + session management) as I pointed out.
Besides casual users do not leave their computers running for a week and they don't care if it crashed while sitting untouched -- it's not like they are going to access their machine remotely...
Again, they will care because of one thing: they don't care to tinker, but the guy who set it up for them does.
You miss the point completely. The whole idea of those Easy-PCs is that nobody has to set them up. You bring it home, plug it into the outlet and the phone jack, and it works. That's it. Nothing to cofigure, nothing to select, nothing to tweak. I am not sure the actual machine will pull it off, but that is clearly the goal.
Really. Just because Windows isn't ready for the PC-as-the-Internet-appliance thingy doesn't mean that Linux is ready to jump into the fray.
The simpler-than-the-toaser-PC must, absolutely must have a user interface that's comfortable for people who are not able to find their ass with both hands and have problems dealing with their coffeemaker. These people do not really care about the stability of the OS: if there is a large clearly labeled button that will reboot the machine in 5-10 seconds with session management (reconnect to the 'net, open same documents, etc.), then these users will not have any problem with crashes.
Linux has two strengths:
(1) It crashes very rarely: important for people who depend on their computers (NOT casual users)
(2) It's a tinkerer's dream -- if you don't like something, go and change it! Again, the casual users couldn't care less.
The Easy-PC battle is going to be over user interface and nothing but user interface. This is not a strong point of Linux (though not a glaring weakness, either) and I don't see Linux developers going out of their way to develop a GUI for idiots -- and that's what's going to be needed. I am not even touching upon the scarcity of good user interface designers...
Easy-PC is pure point-and-drool -- not a good market for Linux.
Let's say you go and visit www.hyperreal.org -- a site that contains, among other things, information about psychoactive substances, some of which happen to be illegal in the US. Now, of course, only drug pushers would be interested in information on such a filthy topic, right? So you wouldn't be surprised to see some cops on your doorstep with a search warrant, the probable cause being visiting the site? And don't bother applying for a government or a government-contractor job: "We see you engaged in some patterns of behaviour that could point to illegal activity on your part. Be thankful we don't prosecute you. Next, please..."
This is fiction right now, but it could easily become reality.
Just use strong encryption for everything. I don't see the problem.
Use of encryption necessitates that both parties do it. In the example above how would encryption have helped me (other than using Freedom.net or some equivalent of it)?
I know it is illegal to export it from the USA, but is it also illegal to use it?
"When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn?t deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn?t own a gun. Now they?ve taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it."
It might interest people to know where this came from. The original quote belongs to Pastor Martin Niemoller who had the misfortune to live in Nazi Germany in the 30s:
"First, they came for the labor unions but I wasn't a labor unionist, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Communists but I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Jews; but I wasn't a Jew, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Catholics, but I wasn't a Catholic, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak up."
Well, on the one hand there is nothing really new in this. NSA has been monitoring the 'net for ages, and now FBI wants to have a peek, too. On the other hand the government agencies are not exactly known for cluefulness, so the idea of yet another bunch of idio^H^H^H^Hgovernment servants watching the net does not appeal to me at all. They are very likely to see something they do not understand and do Very Stupid Things (tm) as a result.
Yet, on the third hand, this could be the necessary push to get strong encryption in wide use over the net. Generally it's too much of a bother but now that everybody and his lawyer will be compiling a database of IP traffic I just might try persuading my friends to use strong crypto in email.
Kaa
Looks like electronic checks to me
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Beaming Money
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· Score: 2
As far as I can see this is just electronic checks. Instead of writing out a paper check and handing it to the counterparty, you beam an electronic check from your PalmPilot to his PalmPilot. Just as with checks, no money transfer actually takes place at this time -- money flows from your accont to his account later when the transaction information is uploaded to the bank. Same with e-mail: instead of snail-mailing the paper check to somebody, you e-mail an electronic check to him.
Will this work? Probably yes. Electronic fund transfer is not going to go away. Will this work in this particular incarnation? It depends (on the company cluefulness, marketing, govt regulation, etc. etc.) Do I like the scheme? Not very much: there is no anonymity whatsoever.
Also consider the usefulness of the idea: how often do you write out paper checks and give them to other people (as opposed to, say, utility companies)? I do this maybe two-three times a year. For the rest of the time cash, credit card, and online bill payment are quite sufficient for me, thank you very much.
As far as I am concerned, I own my entries in that database.
Well, that may be fine as far as you are concerned, but this doesn't fly in the real world. Ownership is a legal concept and there is a whole bunch of laws dealing with ownership of information. Hate to disappoint you, but if you compile a database, you own it, not the people who submitted info to you in the first place.
There is a lot of discussion about whether a collection of information (database) is legally different from the same pieces of information separately, but that's not what we are talking about. You don't own anything at all in the NSI database. If you feel that they did something wrong with your entry, you can sue them, but the suit will be under tort law (injuries/damages) and not under ownership law.
In the article they talk about all of the multimedia capabilities of the new Amiga. They show DVD, TV in/out, AC3 decode, and MPEG-2 live stream capture among other things. I hope I can sit this next to my TV, play a movie, play Tribes, hear it all in Dolby Digital, and compile some code while drinking beer. Now there's a technology I want!
What's the big deal? Buy a PC right now, spend some money on cards/peripherals and you can have all you listed here and now. And, by the way, you don't really want to use your TV as a computer monitor -- that really sucks.
Is that supposed to be an advantage? And didn't Be go that way already with known results?
If the target market is geeks/tinkerers, PCs are better because of open architecture and very rapid innovation. If the target market is teens/housewives for Internet surfing, email and games, then any number of contenders will kick Amiga's ass (Dreamcast and other coming consoles, very cheap PCs, cheap Macs, etc.)
We _know_ that some girls are starving themselves, period... This IS A PROBLEM.
Sure, some guys probably work so hard that it's definately not healthy for them... this is also A PROBLEM.
First, no, this is not a PROBLEM. This is a [small font] problem [/small font]. PROBLEMs are things like post-AIDS demographic situation in Africa and handling of nuclear weapons in Russia.
Second, aren't you telling people what their value system should be? Let's assume that for me being thin is more important than eating a lot. I made a choice and decided on the trade-offs. Yes, I will not pig out at all-you-can-eat buffets, but my body will not look like a mound of jello. That choice is for me to decide. Sure it may be medically unhealthy, but so is living in a large city, eating cookies, not exercising each day, etc. etc. Your point that I should not want to be this thin, but who are you to tell me what I should want and what I should not want?
People make choices and take the consequences. They have a right to make the choices they want even if other people think them silly, medically unsound or politically incorrect.
Like it or not, quite a large portion of society feels this way. I know many feminists who rant on and on about how they despise models because they set "an impossible standard" against which all women unconsciously compare themselves. The feminists are certainly not the only ones who feel this is true, either.
So? There is a very old joke about an Englishman and a Frenchman watching a guy go by them in a Rolls-Royce. The Englishman says: "I dream of the day when I also would be able to drive around in a Rolls-Royce like that man". The Frenchman says: "I dream of the day when I will be able to get that man out of his Rolls-Royce and force him to walk on the sidewalk like I'm doing!".
Feminists ranting about models implicitly take a position that "if I cannot be as beautiful as that model, then that model has no right to be beautiful at all, or at the very least she should hide her beauty and not annoy me by reminding me of my imperfections". I agree that a lot of people feel that way (though most of them probably do not express it that explicitly), but that does not make them right, or make their position defensible.
Certainly quite a number of American women are obsessed with weight. I know a number of fairly intelligent women who work desperately to acquire or maintain a medically unhealthy weight. They feel they are "too fat", no matter what medical science tells them.
Certainly quite a number of American men are obsessed with money. I know a number of fairly intelligent men who work desperately to acquire an unreasonable amount of money. They feel they are "not rich enough", no matter that they are sacrificing their life in the process.
I know there are plenty of Women who bemoan the fact that they "don't look like the models do". How are they going to feel when the models are computer generated and may have anatomical configurations not even possible in real life? In the computer they can tweak everything, muscle tone, body fat, hell they can even tweak gravity if they feel like it.
Women will deal with it exactly like they deal with the rest of real life. Are you telling us that extra-beautiful is bad because it may make some people have lower self-esteem? So what? If they have a problem with that, they should go to a shrink and sort out the insides of their heads. Not to mention that too-beautiful-to-be-real women have been around for ages. Should women have fits because they don't have the eyes of Boticelli's Venus? or the smile of da Vinci's Mona Lisa? or the body of Goya's Maja? What about the Vargas girls (Playboy 1960-70s)?
To continue this line of reasoning shouldn't Arnold Schwarzenegger be prohibited from public appearances because 99.99% of male population has nothing like his physique? Shouldn't we prohibit Ferrari and Lamborgini to make cars because the same 99.99% of population cannot afford it? Should we ban the TV show "The lifestyles of rich and famous"? (actually, the answer to the last question is 'yes', but for different reasons).
Nobody is perfect. If seeing perfection gives you psychological problems, it's your problem -- fix your head.
A lot of people pointed out that weather can and will mess up an outdoor laser-based network. Given that, I assume that most of the uses for this will be indoors. Think manufacturing plants (Boeing, Ford), conference/concert halls, trading floors, etc. It makes a lot of sense if you want a high-bandwidth rapid-deployment network inside a building with appropriate lines-of-sight. Much easier to install/uninstall than draping cable over or under everything, especially if you need this network for only a few days/weeks.
Merced family is heavily dependent for performance on paralellizing compilers. I suspect that making the silicon will be the easy part (I'm a software guy, hardware guys may disagree with that), but making good compilers to take advantage of the chip will be a bitch.
It seems that we are entering an era when the performance of your application is going to depend on the quality of your compiler/interpreter as much as on the actual hardware inside the machine. This is both good and scary. Good if the free compilers (like egcs) will be able to compete with and outperform commercial compilers -- that will be a great boost to free software. But there is also the scary part: if the free compilers fail to keep pace with commercial offerings, they will die. Think about it: if a kernel compiled under, say, Sun compiler will run twice as fast as one compiled under gcc, what will happen to gcc?
Kaa
MS premier alert service costs...
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BO2K cracked
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· Score: 2
Emacs is just an editor. All it does is accept input from the user. Well, that and run Lisp programs.
Don't all programs just accept input from the user? To tell you the truth, I've never seen "just an editor" applied to Emacs. Usually it's the "kitchen sink" that comes to mind.
But anyway, speaking about bloat. I just started a new XEmacs process on a Solaris Sun box with 196Mb of RAM. Did a 'ps' which in my case evaluates to 'ps -e -o user,pid,pcpu,pmem,vsz,tty,comm | sort -r -k 3,3 | more' and lo and behold: my new XEmacs process (no files open except for scratch) takes 4.3% of my memory (pmem: that's the resident set and is equal to 0.043*196 = 8.4Mb) or 10072Kb (vsz: allocated space). I don't know about you, but from my point of view these are pretty high numbers for "just an editor".
Note that I am not complaining -- I have enough memory and XEmacs is one of the more useful things I've run across -- but it is not lean-and-mean by any count.
Also, the initial point was to contrast the one-program-does-all philosophy and the many-small-tools approach. Emacs does use other programs, sure, but the design goal of Emacs was that you never have to leave its environment -- shell, mail, compile, etc. are all available from within Emacs. Contrast this to the design of Unix: for example the 'ps' alias above uses three Unix programs to achieve the result I want.
Anyway Emacs is just a front end to other programs.
No. Shell can be thought of as a front-end to other programs, but I don't see it as useful to think of Emacs in these terms. If all you want to do is to call other programs, use shell scripts -- no need for a Lisp interpreter to be involved.
Well, not always -- he does talk about the elegance of Windows [shudder] -- but his basic point is valid: people like to have features not necessarily to use them. IMHO bloat is caused by:
(1) One-program-does-it-all philosophy, which by, the way, is a valid design viewpoint. Emacs belongs to this school of thought, while Unix takes the opposite extreme (plenty of small interacting programs).
(2) Monolithic design, which is NOT a feature. MS Word has features targeted at lawyers (and useless for everybody else), at accountants, at writers, etc., etc. You don't need most of them, but get all of them anyway. Pluggable modules would have been a much cleaner solution (you are a lawyer? plug in the "Lawyer" module...)
(3) Feature competition between programs, which is driven by users: "What, your program cannot do a mail-merge to an index which includes animated GIFs and print out each third line?? It sucks, mine can do it!".
(4) The need for backward compatibilitly. This is less visible in application programs and more visible in system tools which often must be bug-for-bug compatible with everything going back ten years or more.
(5) The need to support all hardware under the sun. And the number of cool devices that you can plug into a computer grows and grows and grows and...
(6) In the trade-off between a clean/tight code and speed of development, speed almost always wins. In the current business environment projects that are 50% over budget and on time are much much better than projects that are on budget but 50% late. Basically, the slogan is: "who cares whether it is optimized, if it works, ship it!" (in case of MS or games it is often "who cares if it works properly, ship it anyway!")
So I don't believe it is the malice of Microsoft or the incompetence of programmers that gives us bloated programs. Basically the definition of a bloat is "this program demands more resources than I expected it to". Having more resources available is a (not necessarily the) solution. Yes, Office 2000 needs ~200Mb of disk space to install. So what? I recently bought myself another hard drive -- it cost under $200 and is 10Gb in size. Do I care that much about allocating 2% of it to MS Office? Guess.
Bloat is bad in that it adds complexity which is the enemy. Insofar it consumes computer resources it is tolerable.
1 and 2. If game programmers didn't care about quality, then most of the titles that ship wouldn't have the level of polish that they do.
*Most* titles do NOT have a decent level of polish. Besides, what is usually referred to as 'polish' is nothing but good user interface and pretty graphics. The first comes from good design and the second comes from artists -- neither has much to do with programming.
When you buy a game off the shelf at best buy, take it home, and play it, you usually don't have to worry about whether you have the correct libraries or fear that it will crash.
I don't know why the correct libraries should be a problem anywhere -- if you are shipping a precompiled binary, either link statically or include the libraries on the CD. Nothing magical about it. Commercial games, though, play an entertaining game called "the latest driver". If you have problems, the first thing you'll be told to do is to get the latest drivers for your hardware (graphics card, sound, etc.). That may or may not help, which brings us to the point of crashing. Hate to disappoint you, but off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped, commercial games do crash. A lot. Especially in the first couple of weeks after the release (before the patches). Some games crash rarely, and some are effectively unplayable until the patches come out, but they do crash.
Also, if game programmers produce such low quality code, why is 3d engine licensing so prevalant?
'Cause it works and 'cause it's cheaper/faster to license than to develop in-house.
There are plenty of titles out there with bad art that are still a lot of fun to play....... Programmers are just as important if not more because they implement, rather than simply adding spice.
There are exceptions to the rule, sure, but a game with bad graphics will turn off a large part of its intended audience. It may be so much fun that the bad graphics will be forgiven, but that's a rarity. As to the programmers being more important, you seem to think that games are made by programmers and artists. That's not true. There is also the all-important game designer position. Generally a game is fun to play not because it has been programmed effectively, but because it has been designed very well. Often game designers do program, but that's just one person wearing two hats. Game design is a special skill, quite separate from programming (and from creating art, as well).
Finally, I don't see how such a money driven industry can profit from open source. RAD and other companies like it make all of there money licensing game engine utilities, and would have no source of income if they opensourced their products.
Replace 'game' with 'software' and your statement will not change in any significant way. Yet, open source exists and is quite successful.
It's not like people don't use encryption because it is too slow. People don't use encryption because
(1) Both parties must use encryption. If you'd like your e-mail to be encrypted, but your grandma/girlfriend/business partner think you are silly, what do you do? You use plain-text e-mail.
(2) It's a hassle to set up and use
(3) People underestimate how easy it is to read other people's e-mail and tend to forget basic stuff such as the fact that your employer *owns* all e-mail on your office computer and has (or could easily have) a log of all the sites on the Web you've visited.
(4) People do believe in security through obscurity: "There is nothing in my e-mail/browsing/ftping that is of interest to anybody".
I can go on and on... Really, I don't think that increasing the speed of encryption will help any of the current problems crypto is having. And I don't know why they picked DES to implement into the ASIC -- nowadays DES is pretty useless.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about rights and liberties, it's about fear. It's about the expectation of the worst overshadowing the fact that people are inherently not evil. Bear with me...
...
... snip!
And how does this pertain to the article subject matter? Well, as long as the government insists on making us feel insecure in our own country, with Commies, and Iraqi terrorists, and biological weapons around every corner, we will keep suspecting each other of cruel intentions. As long as we keep being afraid, the government will keep trying to protect us from each other. As long as the government keeps trying to keep us safe, we will feel our rights erode, and we will be even more paranoid.
You miss the point. We (at least I, and I suspect, a lot of people on this board) are not afraid of each other or of individuals in general. The whole discussion is not about threats you face on the streets. I have not heard a single person (as opposed to a governent official or a politician) demand more stringent national security because he was afraid of Iraqi terrorists. Fear and suspicion of fellow people is a completely different topic.
What we are talking about here is government powers and the abuse thereof. I am suspicious of governments and I believe I have good reasons to be. History, and in particular, XX century history, should teach everybody (who is capable of learning, that is) that governments have huge appetite for power and if they get this power, Very Bad Things (tm) tend to happen. It doesn't really matter if the original goals were good/idealistic -- power corrupts and does it quickly and effectively.
I trust people -- but I definitely don't trust governments.
Kaa
Communism is a completely different thing. Communism is ONLY an economic system. It is not a philosophy of massive oppression and/or censorship on the people.
Whaaaat? [boggle]
Communism is not an economic system at all. It is a political repression system, where one of the major ways to make the people completely dependent on the government is to prohibit private property (other than personal one).
You could, maybe, argue that marxism is an economic system, although there are major problems here as well. But communism?? Communism cannot exist without massive oppression and censorship.
And yes, I know what I am talking about.
Kaa
You mean Reno, don't you? Madeleine Albright is the Secretary of State, Janet Reno is the Director of the FBI and the author of this letter (which is way out of bounds for the FBI)
Oops. My bad. However, Janet Reno is the Attorney General of the USA and is not the Director of FBI.
Firstly, when the head of a branch of a government sends an official letter to the head of a branch of a different government, it is never "no more than her opinion".
A-ah, so is this the official position of the US government? No? I didn't think so. Basically I think she was testing the waters. And there is nothing special about Germany, is there? Last time I looked I could download stuff just as easily from Holland, Israel, Russia, a bunch of country domains that I don't even know what they stand for, etc. etc.
it is part of a coordinated effort by the FBI to make strong encryption unavailable.
Again, you are probably thinking of the whole US law enforcement apparatus more than of FBI, but this is essentially correct. However his has been correct and widely known for a very long time.
I don't know if Reno wears panties
I dare not guess the sources of your information, but our friend Janet never struck me as a sexually adventurous type. Going pantiless around White House -- oh, my!
We've been seeing a lot of "I'm scared, take away my rights so I feel safer" lately, particularly in the US.
And we also saw a very strong backlash against attempts to do just that. Recall the Pentium ID fiasco, and that was quite a tame issue.
The Bill of Rights has nothing to do with this letter, which was to put pressure on a German minister to do things in Germany.
It is fairly obvious that doing things in Germany and only in Germany is pretty pointless. This can work only if possession is criminalized, or if all the nations in the world agree.
It's also a hard battle to get the Bill of Rights to have something to do with this in the US. The courts are not consistant when they rule whether or not source code is protected speech. Binaries have never been protected by the Bill of Rights.
You miss the point. It's not my encryption software that is protected by the Bill of Rights, but rather my right to encrypt documents. IANAL but I think it falls under the searches and seizures amendment. Besides, encryption is a fairly vague term. If I write something in Klingon, is it encrypted? And you don't necessarily need computers -- a pencil, some paper, and a one-time pad work perfectly well. The court may order you to surrender your key, but there has never been any talk of outlawing encryption as such.
Kaa
No way. Albright was basically saying "wouldn't it be nice if encryption wasn't available to non-government entities". This is no more than her opinion. Granted, her opinion carries some weight, but it's a faaaaaar way from actually enacting coordinated legislation that would prohibit private encryption.
So don't get your panties all bunched up. This is not going to happen for a very large set of reasons, starting with political climate and ending with the Bill of Rights (at least for Americans).
Kaa
[not crashing] Actually this is important for a casual user. They want a box that, to borrow a quote, "just works". They don't want to have to deal with the fallout from crashes all the time. Even if they don't depend on it, they simply don't want to have to wonder if it's crashed after having been left alone and untouched for a week.
First, a casual user's understanding of "just works" mostly means "it does what I mean" and doesn't have much to do with crashes. Again, it's a question of the appropriate GUI and considerable underlying program intelligence which has to guess correctly what did the user mean. And anyway, crashes can be made relatively painless (fast reboot + session management) as I pointed out.
Besides casual users do not leave their computers running for a week and they don't care if it crashed while sitting untouched -- it's not like they are going to access their machine remotely...
Again, they will care because of one thing: they don't care to tinker, but the guy who set it up for them does.
You miss the point completely. The whole idea of those Easy-PCs is that nobody has to set them up. You bring it home, plug it into the outlet and the phone jack, and it works. That's it. Nothing to cofigure, nothing to select, nothing to tweak. I am not sure the actual machine will pull it off, but that is clearly the goal.
Kaa
Really. Just because Windows isn't ready for the PC-as-the-Internet-appliance thingy doesn't mean that Linux is ready to jump into the fray.
The simpler-than-the-toaser-PC must, absolutely must have a user interface that's comfortable for people who are not able to find their ass with both hands and have problems dealing with their coffeemaker. These people do not really care about the stability of the OS: if there is a large clearly labeled button that will reboot the machine in 5-10 seconds with session management (reconnect to the 'net, open same documents, etc.), then these users will not have any problem with crashes.
Linux has two strengths:
(1) It crashes very rarely: important for people who depend on their computers (NOT casual users)
(2) It's a tinkerer's dream -- if you don't like something, go and change it! Again, the casual users couldn't care less.
The Easy-PC battle is going to be over user interface and nothing but user interface. This is not a strong point of Linux (though not a glaring weakness, either) and I don't see Linux developers going out of their way to develop a GUI for idiots -- and that's what's going to be needed. I am not even touching upon the scarcity of good user interface designers...
Easy-PC is pure point-and-drool -- not a good market for Linux.
Kaa
Encryption + anonymity.
Hey, guys, accelerate your beta, we need this thing now!
Kaa
I mean, does it really matter all that much if someone knows what websites you're going to?
;)
You must lead a very boring life
Yes, it does really matter. See the post below for an instructive example.
Kaa
Let's say you go and visit www.hyperreal.org -- a site that contains, among other things, information about psychoactive substances, some of which happen to be illegal in the US. Now, of course, only drug pushers would be interested in information on such a filthy topic, right? So you wouldn't be surprised to see some cops on your doorstep with a search warrant, the probable cause being visiting the site? And don't bother applying for a government or a government-contractor job: "We see you engaged in some patterns of behaviour that could point to illegal activity on your part. Be thankful we don't prosecute you. Next, please..."
This is fiction right now, but it could easily become reality.
Just use strong encryption for everything. I don't see the problem.
Use of encryption necessitates that both parties do it. In the example above how would encryption have helped me (other than using Freedom.net or some equivalent of it)?
I know it is illegal to export it from the USA, but is it also illegal to use it?
It is legal to use. For the time being, that is.
Kaa
"When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn?t deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn?t own a gun. Now they?ve taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it."
It might interest people to know where this came from. The original quote belongs to Pastor Martin Niemoller who had the misfortune to live in Nazi Germany in the 30s:
"First, they came for the labor unions but I wasn't a labor unionist, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Communists but I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Jews; but I wasn't a Jew, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Catholics, but I wasn't a Catholic, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak up."
You might want to keep this in mind.
Kaa
Well, on the one hand there is nothing really new in this. NSA has been monitoring the 'net for ages, and now FBI wants to have a peek, too. On the other hand the government agencies are not exactly known for cluefulness, so the idea of yet another bunch of idio^H^H^H^Hgovernment servants watching the net does not appeal to me at all. They are very likely to see something they do not understand and do Very Stupid Things (tm) as a result.
Yet, on the third hand, this could be the necessary push to get strong encryption in wide use over the net. Generally it's too much of a bother but now that everybody and his lawyer will be compiling a database of IP traffic I just might try persuading my friends to use strong crypto in email.
Kaa
As far as I can see this is just electronic checks. Instead of writing out a paper check and handing it to the counterparty, you beam an electronic check from your PalmPilot to his PalmPilot. Just as with checks, no money transfer actually takes place at this time -- money flows from your accont to his account later when the transaction information is uploaded to the bank. Same with e-mail: instead of snail-mailing the paper check to somebody, you e-mail an electronic check to him.
Will this work? Probably yes. Electronic fund transfer is not going to go away. Will this work in this particular incarnation? It depends (on the company cluefulness, marketing, govt regulation, etc. etc.) Do I like the scheme? Not very much: there is no anonymity whatsoever.
Also consider the usefulness of the idea: how often do you write out paper checks and give them to other people (as opposed to, say, utility companies)? I do this maybe two-three times a year. For the rest of the time cash, credit card, and online bill payment are quite sufficient for me, thank you very much.
Kaa
As far as I am concerned, I own my entries in that database.
Well, that may be fine as far as you are concerned, but this doesn't fly in the real world. Ownership is a legal concept and there is a whole bunch of laws dealing with ownership of information. Hate to disappoint you, but if you compile a database, you own it, not the people who submitted info to you in the first place.
There is a lot of discussion about whether a collection of information (database) is legally different from the same pieces of information separately, but that's not what we are talking about. You don't own anything at all in the NSI database. If you feel that they did something wrong with your entry, you can sue them, but the suit will be under tort law (injuries/damages) and not under ownership law.
Kaa
In the article they talk about all of the multimedia capabilities of the new Amiga. They show DVD, TV in/out, AC3 decode, and MPEG-2 live stream capture among other things. I hope I can sit this next to my TV, play a movie, play Tribes, hear it all in Dolby Digital, and compile some code while drinking beer. Now there's a technology I want!
What's the big deal? Buy a PC right now, spend some money on cards/peripherals and you can have all you listed here and now. And, by the way, you don't really want to use your TV as a computer monitor -- that really sucks.
Kaa
gaming console.
It's really cheap, and it's not a PC.
Is that supposed to be an advantage? And didn't Be go that way already with known results?
If the target market is geeks/tinkerers, PCs are better because of open architecture and very rapid innovation. If the target market is teens/housewives for Internet surfing, email and games, then any number of contenders will kick Amiga's ass (Dreamcast and other coming consoles, very cheap PCs, cheap Macs, etc.)
Kaa
We _know_ that some girls are starving themselves, period... This IS A PROBLEM.
Sure, some guys probably work so hard that it's definately not healthy for them... this is also A PROBLEM.
First, no, this is not a PROBLEM. This is a [small font] problem [/small font]. PROBLEMs are things like post-AIDS demographic situation in Africa and handling of nuclear weapons in Russia.
Second, aren't you telling people what their value system should be? Let's assume that for me being thin is more important than eating a lot. I made a choice and decided on the trade-offs. Yes, I will not pig out at all-you-can-eat buffets, but my body will not look like a mound of jello. That choice is for me to decide. Sure it may be medically unhealthy, but so is living in a large city, eating cookies, not exercising each day, etc. etc. Your point that I should not want to be this thin, but who are you to tell me what I should want and what I should not want?
People make choices and take the consequences. They have a right to make the choices they want even if other people think them silly, medically unsound or politically incorrect.
Kaa
Like it or not, quite a large portion of society feels this way. I know many feminists who rant on and on about how they despise models because they set "an impossible standard" against which all women unconsciously compare themselves. The feminists are certainly not the only ones who feel this is true, either.
So? There is a very old joke about an Englishman and a Frenchman watching a guy go by them in a Rolls-Royce. The Englishman says: "I dream of the day when I also would be able to drive around in a Rolls-Royce like that man". The Frenchman says: "I dream of the day when I will be able to get that man out of his Rolls-Royce and force him to walk on the sidewalk like I'm doing!".
Feminists ranting about models implicitly take a position that "if I cannot be as beautiful as that model, then that model has no right to be beautiful at all, or at the very least she should hide her beauty and not annoy me by reminding me of my imperfections". I agree that a lot of people feel that way (though most of them probably do not express it that explicitly), but that does not make them right, or make their position defensible.
Certainly quite a number of American women are obsessed with weight. I know a number of fairly intelligent women who work desperately to acquire or maintain a medically unhealthy weight. They feel they are "too fat", no matter what medical science tells them.
Certainly quite a number of American men are obsessed with money. I know a number of fairly intelligent men who work desperately to acquire an unreasonable amount of money. They feel they are "not rich enough", no matter that they are sacrificing their life in the process.
So?
Kaa
I know there are plenty of Women who bemoan the fact that they "don't look like the models do". How are they going to feel when the models are computer generated and may have anatomical configurations not even possible in real life? In the computer they can tweak everything, muscle tone, body fat, hell they can even tweak gravity if they feel like it.
Women will deal with it exactly like they deal with the rest of real life. Are you telling us that extra-beautiful is bad because it may make some people have lower self-esteem? So what? If they have a problem with that, they should go to a shrink and sort out the insides of their heads. Not to mention that too-beautiful-to-be-real women have been around for ages. Should women have fits because they don't have the eyes of Boticelli's Venus? or the smile of da Vinci's Mona Lisa? or the body of Goya's Maja? What about the Vargas girls (Playboy 1960-70s)?
To continue this line of reasoning shouldn't Arnold Schwarzenegger be prohibited from public appearances because 99.99% of male population has nothing like his physique? Shouldn't we prohibit Ferrari and Lamborgini to make cars because the same 99.99% of population cannot afford it? Should we ban the TV show "The lifestyles of rich and famous"? (actually, the answer to the last question is 'yes', but for different reasons).
Nobody is perfect. If seeing perfection gives you psychological problems, it's your problem -- fix your head.
Kaa
A lot of people pointed out that weather can and will mess up an outdoor laser-based network. Given that, I assume that most of the uses for this will be indoors. Think manufacturing plants (Boeing, Ford), conference/concert halls, trading floors, etc. It makes a lot of sense if you want a high-bandwidth rapid-deployment network inside a building with appropriate lines-of-sight. Much easier to install/uninstall than draping cable over or under everything, especially if you need this network for only a few days/weeks.
Kaa
Merced family is heavily dependent for performance on paralellizing compilers. I suspect that making the silicon will be the easy part (I'm a software guy, hardware guys may disagree with that), but making good compilers to take advantage of the chip will be a bitch.
It seems that we are entering an era when the performance of your application is going to depend on the quality of your compiler/interpreter as much as on the actual hardware inside the machine. This is both good and scary. Good if the free compilers (like egcs) will be able to compete with and outperform commercial compilers -- that will be a great boost to free software. But there is also the scary part: if the free compilers fail to keep pace with commercial offerings, they will die. Think about it: if a kernel compiled under, say, Sun compiler will run twice as fast as one compiled under gcc, what will happen to gcc?
Kaa
One bookmark:
k .asp
http://www.microsoft.com/security/bulletins/bo2
Kaa
Emacs is just an editor. All it does is accept input from the user. Well, that and run Lisp programs.
Don't all programs just accept input from the user? To tell you the truth, I've never seen "just an editor" applied to Emacs. Usually it's the "kitchen sink" that comes to mind.
But anyway, speaking about bloat. I just started a new XEmacs process on a Solaris Sun box with 196Mb of RAM. Did a 'ps' which in my case evaluates to 'ps -e -o user,pid,pcpu,pmem,vsz,tty,comm | sort -r -k 3,3 | more' and lo and behold: my new XEmacs process (no files open except for scratch) takes 4.3% of my memory (pmem: that's the resident set and is equal to 0.043*196 = 8.4Mb) or 10072Kb (vsz: allocated space). I don't know about you, but from my point of view these are pretty high numbers for "just an editor".
Note that I am not complaining -- I have enough memory and XEmacs is one of the more useful things I've run across -- but it is not lean-and-mean by any count.
Also, the initial point was to contrast the one-program-does-all philosophy and the many-small-tools approach. Emacs does use other programs, sure, but the design goal of Emacs was that you never have to leave its environment -- shell, mail, compile, etc. are all available from within Emacs. Contrast this to the design of Unix: for example the 'ps' alias above uses three Unix programs to achieve the result I want.
Anyway Emacs is just a front end to other programs.
No. Shell can be thought of as a front-end to other programs, but I don't see it as useful to think of Emacs in these terms. If all you want to do is to call other programs, use shell scripts -- no need for a Lisp interpreter to be involved.
Kaa
Well, not always -- he does talk about the elegance of Windows [shudder] -- but his basic point is valid: people like to have features not necessarily to use them. IMHO bloat is caused by:
...
(1) One-program-does-it-all philosophy, which by, the way, is a valid design viewpoint. Emacs belongs to this school of thought, while Unix takes the opposite extreme (plenty of small interacting programs).
(2) Monolithic design, which is NOT a feature. MS Word has features targeted at lawyers (and useless for everybody else), at accountants, at writers, etc., etc. You don't need most of them, but get all of them anyway. Pluggable modules would have been a much cleaner solution (you are a lawyer? plug in the "Lawyer" module...)
(3) Feature competition between programs, which is driven by users: "What, your program cannot do a mail-merge to an index which includes animated GIFs and print out each third line?? It sucks, mine can do it!".
(4) The need for backward compatibilitly. This is less visible in application programs and more visible in system tools which often must be bug-for-bug compatible with everything going back ten years or more.
(5) The need to support all hardware under the sun. And the number of cool devices that you can plug into a computer grows and grows and grows and
(6) In the trade-off between a clean/tight code and speed of development, speed almost always wins. In the current business environment projects that are 50% over budget and on time are much much better than projects that are on budget but 50% late. Basically, the slogan is: "who cares whether it is optimized, if it works, ship it!" (in case of MS or games it is often "who cares if it works properly, ship it anyway!")
So I don't believe it is the malice of Microsoft or the incompetence of programmers that gives us bloated programs. Basically the definition of a bloat is "this program demands more resources than I expected it to". Having more resources available is a (not necessarily the) solution. Yes, Office 2000 needs ~200Mb of disk space to install. So what? I recently bought myself another hard drive -- it cost under $200 and is 10Gb in size. Do I care that much about allocating 2% of it to MS Office? Guess.
Bloat is bad in that it adds complexity which is the enemy. Insofar it consumes computer resources it is tolerable.
Kaa
1 and 2. If game programmers didn't care about quality, then most of the titles that ship wouldn't have the level of polish that they do.
...... Programmers are just as important if not more because they implement, rather than simply adding spice.
*Most* titles do NOT have a decent level of polish. Besides, what is usually referred to as 'polish' is nothing but good user interface and pretty graphics. The first comes from good design and the second comes from artists -- neither has much to do with programming.
When you buy a game off the shelf at best buy, take it home, and play it, you usually don't have to worry about whether you have the correct libraries or fear that it will crash.
I don't know why the correct libraries should be a problem anywhere -- if you are shipping a precompiled binary, either link statically or include the libraries on the CD. Nothing magical about it. Commercial games, though, play an entertaining game called "the latest driver". If you have problems, the first thing you'll be told to do is to get the latest drivers for your hardware (graphics card, sound, etc.). That may or may not help, which brings us to the point of crashing. Hate to disappoint you, but off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped, commercial games do crash. A lot. Especially in the first couple of weeks after the release (before the patches). Some games crash rarely, and some are effectively unplayable until the patches come out, but they do crash.
Also, if game programmers produce such low quality code, why is 3d engine licensing so prevalant?
'Cause it works and 'cause it's cheaper/faster to license than to develop in-house.
There are plenty of titles out there with bad art that are still a lot of fun to play.
There are exceptions to the rule, sure, but a game with bad graphics will turn off a large part of its intended audience. It may be so much fun that the bad graphics will be forgiven, but that's a rarity. As to the programmers being more important, you seem to think that games are made by programmers and artists. That's not true. There is also the all-important game designer position. Generally a game is fun to play not because it has been programmed effectively, but because it has been designed very well. Often game designers do program, but that's just one person wearing two hats. Game design is a special skill, quite separate from programming (and from creating art, as well).
Finally, I don't see how such a money driven industry can profit from open source. RAD and other companies like it make all of there money licensing game engine utilities, and would have no source of income if they opensourced their products.
Replace 'game' with 'software' and your statement will not change in any significant way. Yet, open source exists and is quite successful.
Kaa
...getting people to use encryption routinely is.
It's not like people don't use encryption because it is too slow. People don't use encryption because
(1) Both parties must use encryption. If you'd like your e-mail to be encrypted, but your grandma/girlfriend/business partner think you are silly, what do you do? You use plain-text e-mail.
(2) It's a hassle to set up and use
(3) People underestimate how easy it is to read other people's e-mail and tend to forget basic stuff such as the fact that your employer *owns* all e-mail on your office computer and has (or could easily have) a log of all the sites on the Web you've visited.
(4) People do believe in security through obscurity: "There is nothing in my e-mail/browsing/ftping that is of interest to anybody".
I can go on and on... Really, I don't think that increasing the speed of encryption will help any of the current problems crypto is having. And I don't know why they picked DES to implement into the ASIC -- nowadays DES is pretty useless.
Kaa