This was a C compiler for the 8080/Z-80 running CP/M and was written by Leor Zolman. It was unbelievably fast and useful. It was the first microcomputer C compiler that many people used. It was inexpensive, reliable and beautifully designed. It was a perfect match to the hardware of the day.
This was an IBM 360/67 operating system that supported multiple guest operating systems running on virtual IBM 360s. It was the predecessor of VM/370. Users could run multiple versions of different operating systems and develop/debug new operating systems on a single machine. Tom Van Vleck wrote The IBM 360/67 and CP/CMS, a short history of the system.
I fear the corporations will do more damage to the Internet than the U.S. government. Corporations view us as "consumers" not as citizens or customers.
Broadband service providers are encouraging this with "features" such as NAT'd IP addresses, prohibitions on servers, asymmetrical bandwidth, service specific bandwidth restrictions, and customer hardware/software restrictions.
My nightmare is a broadband network interface that is essentially a Cable TV decoder box with bells and whistles. You will only have high-speed access to the service provider's corporate partners. Your upstream bandwidth will be limited to what is needed to support selecting a channel and pressing the buy button. Any speech that is annoying or offensive to the service provider will result in immediate service termination. The service provider will mandate the use of client software provided by one of its corporate partners (guess who).
The basic tenent of their faith which they wont tell you untill you have paid at least $100k is that 7 million years ago intergallactic tyrant Xenu shipped billions of people to earth, tied them to the top of volcanos and nuked them.
Even if copyright is not a natural right, it can be socially beneficial for society to grant copyright as a privilege. Intellectual property still exists, but only as a matter of social policy, not as a natural right of the creator. The same ends (promotion of the arts and sciences) could be achieved by other means.
The current version (Windows NT 4.0) of NTFS journals metadata, not file data. This ensures that the file structures on the disk are consistent in the event of a system failure due to BSOD or loss of power. It does not protect the contents of files from corruption or loss. Metadata journaling allows for a system restart without a time consuming disk consistency (fsck or chkdsk) check.
I am worried that many small businesses will discover that their accounting software isn't Y2K compliant and go bankrupt due to cash flow problems before they can fix their systems.
There are a lot of software packages installed over the past 20 years that are tailored for specific types of businesses and were sold and installed by consultants/companies who may not be around anymore.
These small businesses do not have a technical staff and probably do not have the source code for their applications.
What do they do when they try to generate the invoices for 2000-01 and the system croaks? I've heard of complete databases being lost due to Y2K problems and the inability to extract and migrate the data to a Y2K compliant database.
The IETF is not adding wiretapping capabilities to Internet protocols. The discussion has been centered on the following:
1. Is there a legal requirement to support wiretapping (CALEA in USA)?
2. If wiretapping capabilities must be added to certain types of equipment (VOIP), in certain countries, should this be standardized?
3. Should the IETF tailor its protocols to the legal requirements of specific countries?
4. Is wiretapping good or bad?
Some people are confusing the discussion of these issues with a particular position on the issues. Do we start burning people as witches because they discuss the morality of witchcraft?
Many members of the IETF are engineers, some are probably spooks. Protocol design and engineering are performed in an environment that interacts with political and economic factors. You can't make them go away by clicking your heels together three times.
"should the IETF develop new protocols or modify existing protocols to support mechanisms whose primary purpose is to support wiretapping or other law enforcement activities"
"what should the IETF's position be on informational documents that explain how to perform message or data-stream interception without protocol modifications"
Would hard-to-find resolutions/refresh (Eg. 1600x1200/120 Hz) make it harder to intercept ?
No. All the analyst needs to do is to look at the analog waveform and measure the number/rate of horizontal and vertical sync pulses. This could be automated without much difficulty.
I would use a good directional antenna with switchable polarization and a receiver designed to lock on a repetitive video signal (frequency and phase lock).
I can put "Coca-Cola's Secret Formula" on a web page without violating their trademark. I can't sell a soft drink called Coke or Coca-Cola because that would violate their trademark. A trademark does not mean that nobody can use the name or mark without permission, it prevents others from using the trademark in commerce.
Hmmm...I'm pretty sure the NSA does have field agents. Some of them have been killed in the line of duty (as evidenced by their "They Served In Silence" memorial).
The NSA is assisted in the field by uniformed members of the various branches of the armed services. They are not NSA employees, but they support the intelligence collection mission of the NSA.
These are the people who sometimes get killed when things go wrong.
Also, please note that most of the prophets of a smaller world are working for extreme right-wing foundations. The slashdot cited article was by the American Enterprise Institute (radical free market types) and the article I cited was by somebody from the Hudson Institute (very conservative think tank)
"extreme right-wing foundations"
"radical free market types"
"very conservative think tank"
Oh my. Somebody better call the FBI and tell them about these subversives.
Governments keep secrets. Get used to it. Most of those are probably only secret because some pointy-haired boss is competing against some other pointy-haired boss on the "who can classify the most documents" departmental sweepstakes.
There are rules and guidelines for the classification of documents. Usually there is a guide that lists types of information and the associated classification.
Classified material is a time and money sink. You have to get clearances for employees, hire security officers and custodians, have secure storage facilities, physical security for the facility, follow special procedures in handling and accounting, etc.
Any PHB with two brain cells can think of a 1,000 things that he/she would rather spend the money on.
Another favorite trick of the feds is to tax it to death. This was done to certain weapons by the National Firearms Act. Something similar was done to marijuana, although I think the crime was not paying the tax.
I've noticed a lot of cheesy synthesizer soundtracks on low/medium budget movies. My impression is that only big budget movies are willing to hire a real composer and real musicians.
A lot of people are assuming that the Phone Company's costs are directly related to the number and duration of the subscriber's phone calls. This is false.
66-75% of the Phone Company's cost of providing local service is the provision and maintenance of the wires between the subscriber and the central office. This is not usage sensitive.
The sizing of the usage sensitive components of the telephone network is based on providing an acceptable level of service during the peak calling hour of the day, which is usually during business hours. Off-peak usage of these components essentially costs nothing since the capacity is going to be there whether or not it is used.
Think of it as a highway/motorway, that is made of some miracle material that can't be damaged by traffic. The highway is designed to be large enough to carry rush-hour traffic at a reasonable speed. You can drive your car around the highway for 16 hours a day without costing the highway owners any money, as long as you stay off the road during rush-hour.
The telephone companies had made a ton of money from the installation of second phone lines for Internet access, far in excess of what little money has been spent on reengineering central offices with congestion problems.
Guess how many phone company executives in the USA have an engineering degree? One. That should tell you something about the business.
The cost of providing service has been declining for years due to advancements in technology and layoffs of skilled labor. The phone companies have invested their monopoly profits in cellular systems, cable systems and foreign ventures, just about everything except their core business. Service quality levels have been declining and the phone companies show little or no interest in providing new services or upgrading their infrastructure.
The Bells should be broken up and forced to compete in the real world.
Line doubling is a kludge built on top of the existing set of kludges called NTSC.
I can live without the high definition part of HDTV. What I really want is digital TV. My over-the-air reception is hopeless and the local cable system delivers a mediocre signal. I've been inside a TV station and seen how nice the signal looks before it gets mangled.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, BDS C ran on 2-4 MHz CPUs with 32-64K (kilobytes, not megabytes) of RAM.
This was a C compiler for the 8080/Z-80 running CP/M and was written by Leor Zolman. It was unbelievably fast and useful. It was the first microcomputer C compiler that many people used. It was inexpensive, reliable and beautifully designed. It was a perfect match to the hardware of the day.
This was an IBM 360/67 operating system that supported multiple guest operating systems running on virtual IBM 360s. It was the predecessor of VM/370. Users could run multiple versions of different operating systems and develop/debug new operating systems on a single machine. Tom Van Vleck wrote The IBM 360/67 and CP/CMS, a short history of the system.
Broadband service providers are encouraging this with "features" such as NAT'd IP addresses, prohibitions on servers, asymmetrical bandwidth, service specific bandwidth restrictions, and customer hardware/software restrictions.
My nightmare is a broadband network interface that is essentially a Cable TV decoder box with bells and whistles. You will only have high-speed access to the service provider's corporate partners. Your upstream bandwidth will be limited to what is needed to support selecting a channel and pressing the buy button. Any speech that is annoying or offensive to the service provider will result in immediate service termination. The service provider will mandate the use of client software provided by one of its corporate partners (guess who).
Sorry, but I was really in a bad mood back then.
UNaltered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED.
Even if copyright is not a natural right, it can be socially beneficial for society to grant copyright as a privilege. Intellectual property still exists, but only as a matter of social policy, not as a natural right of the creator. The same ends (promotion of the arts and sciences) could be achieved by other means.
The current version (Windows NT 4.0) of NTFS journals metadata, not file data. This ensures that the file structures on the disk are consistent in the event of a system failure due to BSOD or loss of power. It does not protect the contents of files from corruption or loss. Metadata journaling allows for a system restart without a time consuming disk consistency (fsck or chkdsk) check.
There are a lot of software packages installed over the past 20 years that are tailored for specific types of businesses and were sold and installed by consultants/companies who may not be around anymore.
These small businesses do not have a technical staff and probably do not have the source code for their applications.
What do they do when they try to generate the invoices for 2000-01 and the system croaks? I've heard of complete databases being lost due to Y2K problems and the inability to extract and migrate the data to a Y2K compliant database.
See http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bi n/dict.pl?term=sic.
1. Is there a legal requirement to support wiretapping (CALEA in USA)?
2. If wiretapping capabilities must be added to certain types of equipment (VOIP), in certain countries, should this be standardized?
3. Should the IETF tailor its protocols to the legal requirements of specific countries?
4. Is wiretapping good or bad?
Some people are confusing the discussion of these issues with a particular position on the issues. Do we start burning people as witches because they discuss the morality of witchcraft?
Many members of the IETF are engineers, some are probably spooks. Protocol design and engineering are performed in an environment that interacts with political and economic factors. You can't make them go away by clicking your heels together three times.
"should the IETF develop new protocols or modify existing protocols to support mechanisms whose primary purpose is to support wiretapping or other law enforcement activities"
"what should the IETF's position be on informational documents that explain how to perform message or data-stream interception without protocol modifications"
You boot Windows NT from the CD-ROM and fix the system. CD-ROMs are faster and more durable than floppy disks.
No. All the analyst needs to do is to look at the analog waveform and measure the number/rate of horizontal and vertical sync pulses. This could be automated without much difficulty.
I would use a good directional antenna with switchable polarization and a receiver designed to lock on a repetitive video signal (frequency and phase lock).
I can put "Coca-Cola's Secret Formula" on a web page without violating their trademark. I can't sell a soft drink called Coke or Coca-Cola because that would violate their trademark. A trademark does not mean that nobody can use the name or mark without permission, it prevents others from using the trademark in commerce.
The NSA is assisted in the field by uniformed members of the various branches of the armed services. They are not NSA employees, but they support the intelligence collection mission of the NSA.
These are the people who sometimes get killed when things go wrong.
"extreme right-wing foundations"
"radical free market types"
"very conservative think tank"
Oh my. Somebody better call the FBI and tell them about these subversives.
sigh...
There are rules and guidelines for the classification of documents. Usually there is a guide that lists types of information and the associated classification.
Classified material is a time and money sink. You have to get clearances for employees, hire security officers and custodians, have secure storage facilities, physical security for the facility, follow special procedures in handling and accounting, etc.
Any PHB with two brain cells can think of a 1,000 things that he/she would rather spend the money on.
Another favorite trick of the feds is to tax it to death. This was done to certain weapons by the National Firearms Act. Something similar was done to marijuana, although I think the crime was not paying the tax.
I've noticed a lot of cheesy synthesizer soundtracks on low/medium budget movies. My impression is that only big budget movies are willing to hire a real composer and real musicians.
66-75% of the Phone Company's cost of providing local service is the provision and maintenance of the wires between the subscriber and the central office. This is not usage sensitive.
The sizing of the usage sensitive components of the telephone network is based on providing an acceptable level of service during the peak calling hour of the day, which is usually during business hours. Off-peak usage of these components essentially costs nothing since the capacity is going to be there whether or not it is used.
Think of it as a highway/motorway, that is made of some miracle material that can't be damaged by traffic. The highway is designed to be large enough to carry rush-hour traffic at a reasonable speed. You can drive your car around the highway for 16 hours a day without costing the highway owners any money, as long as you stay off the road during rush-hour.
The telephone companies had made a ton of money from the installation of second phone lines for Internet access, far in excess of what little money has been spent on reengineering central offices with congestion problems.
Guess how many phone company executives in the USA have an engineering degree? One. That should tell you something about the business.
The cost of providing service has been declining for years due to advancements in technology and layoffs of skilled labor. The phone companies have invested their monopoly profits in cellular systems, cable systems and foreign ventures, just about everything except their core business. Service quality levels have been declining and the phone companies show little or no interest in providing new services or upgrading their infrastructure.
The Bells should be broken up and forced to compete in the real world.
I can live without the high definition part of HDTV. What I really want is digital TV. My over-the-air reception is hopeless and the local cable system delivers a mediocre signal. I've been inside a TV station and seen how nice the signal looks before it gets mangled.
Why don't we just shoot newbies on sight. That would stop them from asking all those stupid questions.