MS creates the 'presses' that print the newspapers. Tell me that's not a position of power? All they have to do to anyone is to withhold their presses, to not sell them, or to put in backdoors.
Except for the bottom line that this is genuinely antithetical to Microsoft's culture--yes, this is unethical even to them. Can you even concieve of a remotely relevant time they've been anything but content neutral? Hell, the worst I've heard of them doing is being a bit slaverish on the Bill Gates section of Expedia. But that's to be expected--for crying out loud, the man is worshipped at Microsoft, and you'd expect the same stuff towards Larry Ellison at Oracle or (especially) Steve Jobs at Apple.
(Then again, even I, former Apple IIgs geek, have to begrudgingly respect Apple for its come back from the dead recovery, seemingly at the hands of Jobs.)
This isn't Microsoft's Motif. They don't care what you print on the presses, as long as the presses are theirs. That's it.
To claim that a laissez-faire attitude towards Broadband doesn't in fact create fundamental shifts in the regulatory structure of network access is ludicrous.
One of the prime factors of the Internet's ascent over the past few years has been the tens of thousands of people who chose to start up their own small businesses(guess what--not everything's a startup!) and provide Internet service to people.
While AOL was falling over itself just to pick up the phone, those thousands of people gave personal, real, one on one service to people all across the country--the world, for that matter.
Those of us in the open source world would do well to remember not all development comes from college students--ISPs fund development of critical infrastructure that's used today on an every day basis to keep things running.
I don't know what kind of delusion the FCC is under that AT&T will give up and divest itself of its broadband operations if it is forced to provide copper services to other ISPs. I do know that thousands of ISPs going out of business because the FCC believed the threats of the country's most powerful phone company(of course, being chased heavily by that UUNet/PsiNet/WorldCom/MCI/Sprint behemoth; who needs trusts when you have mergers?) smacks of injustice.
Nobody wants to regulate the net, meanwhile the entire concept behind failing to regulate the net is that self-regulation will occur. Self-regulation is presumed mainly in competitive environments where the failure of one party to "play by the rules" leads to a loss in market share to the gain of a competitor. ADSL and Cable companies are similar enough in corporate structure that both are likely to violate the same concepts that self regulation would be likely to solve.
Thus, the war on self regulation takes its shape as a demand for freedom. Whose freedom, of course, has been muddled substatially.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
The most interesting thing I remember about MS's corporate culture is how, even when a member of the press got a manager to go "off the record", "in the clear", etc., they still spouted the company line.
Even when the statements were profoundly ludicrous, they'd still believe whatever came from up top, because to work for the company is to subscribe to an entire worldview.
(Sidenote: It's different in the Valley, where you can jump from between a hundred major tech jobs. Up there, it's MS or Bust. That has an isolationist effect, and (among other things) is one of the reasons why MS's turnover rate isn't ridiculously high. SAP also chooses to run a major development house in the middle of Bumfuck Germany for this same psychoisolationist effect.)
Where was I...ah yes. Microsoft employee's slavish devotion to the company line--remember when Ballmer slammed MS stock as overrated? Recall how all the stockholders were furious? Ballmer had to do what he did--he had to inform the flock that it was OK and acceptable not to have infinite faith in the value of their stock; that diversifying one's portfolio was an acceptable maneuver. That way, instead of all the MS employees being wiped out if/when there's a crash, at least some will have heeded the New Allowable Thought and gotten some financial advice.
If you think about it, I mean really, you know that's why he said what he did.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
On the day Windows 95 was launched, MS payed News International (owned by one Rupert Murdoch, and my current employer) to sponsor The Times, one of the UK's most respected papers, for a day -- basically the paper was free for that one day. Coincidentally, The Times chose to run a hefty pullout section that day about Windows 95, in which it claimed Bill Gates was globally accepted as being the most brilliant programmer of his generation.
All the more reason for Gates to know that Murdoch is willing to sell opinions for dollars:-)
OK, I'll grant that Gates uses a bit of perception-shaping around himself, but c'mon, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates can't come within ten feet of eachother, lest their mutual Reality Distortion Fields shred the molecular framework of the universe.;-)
In all honesty though, almost all of Microsoft's PR is directed at the Computer world...you never really know what Murdoch is trying to get you to believe, or who has paid for what opinion.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
I'd say we're about three weeks away from conspiracy theorists deciding that Magnetoresistative technology was Alien Derived.
IBM is pretty much owning price/performance and raw storage curves--it's insane how fast storage expectancies have dropped. $10/GB is the magic number now, and I'm pretty sure we have IBM to thank for that.
64MB of RAM now costs more than a 12GB IDE drive. The mind boggles.
I believe this is the same technology jump, incidentally, that means 2GB on a one inch Microdrive platter. Personally, I'd prefer a third party reverse engineering of MiniDisc, but a 2GB swappable drive would also work fine.
I must say, I'm enjoying the storage (r?)evolution. The media server we're building into our stereo cabinet will store more music than we'll know what to do with...;-) And yes, the code will be nice and GPL.
Here's to mindless abuse of technology...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
People get angry at Bill for the rather nasty tactics his company uses...like, say, cancelling Compaq's license to sell Windows because they were trying to remove the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop. Or pulling some Soviet Revisionism on that Linux Netshow Player which disappeared off the face of the microsoft.com planet. Or removing critical Knowledge Base entries regarding Samba compatibility.
Check out any of the Halloween papers. Is he a geek? Yup. There's a definite sense of betrayal and violent tendancies, though, that's accumulated through years of abuses against the industry as a whole.
The company's behavior gets projected on him, which may or may not be fair.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Gates claims that his business is "not like owning a newspaper".
He adds: "Someone who owns a newspaper can pick up the phone to the editor and say 'run headlines I like'.
"What we do is create tools like a word processor that lets people express their ideas and we're not at all involved in how they choose to use it.
He's right, to some degree.
Outside of the computer press(this includes computer sections of mainstream press), MS exerts almost zero influence.
With the exception of a few rather ridiculous and amateurish attempts at influencing public opinion through falsified Letters To The Editor(as well as the recent exposing of a sponsored advertisement so a good number of economists could publically agree with Microsoft's position in court), MS doesn't haven't nearly the kind of overarching mindshare gravitational suction that seems to permeate most other extremely large corporations.
It's a dichotomy worth studying--outside of self-defense or self-aggrandization within the rather limited context of computer technologies, Microsoft(unlike Sun, apparently) is actually surprisingly freedom minded. They do bundle MP3 encoding and decoding code, they're slapping Priceline down where they belong, and in general seem to have a general slant towards getting as much functionality as possible to the user.
That they use totalitarian and underhanded tactics in their quest to spread computating freedom is...interesting. They want people to be free, but damnit, they're going to be the one's to do it, whatever the cost.
Honestly, I think that's how they keep the company together. "Where do you want to go today...because we're going to be the one's to take you there; we're not letting you out." The coders take pride in the freedom, the suits take pride in the fact that they're preventing the Evil Outsiders from perverting the mission.
In that context, Gates' comments make perfect sense. He feels Murdoch works to pollute and shape the minds of his readers. Should the Murdoch's of the world release the software, he thinks, he'll use it to shape people's minds.
I'm kinda curious--when was the last time a major media outlet criticized(or at least reported negatively) about a parent company? MSNBC has delivered significant praise to Linux, and I believe has at least truthfully reported on the DoJ lawsuit. I wonder how often this could be said about the media world.
There's an interesting psychology at Microsoft; it deserves further research.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Last year, I was walking through Benson Memorial Center(read: The Place That Shoves Surprisingly Decent Slop Down Our Throats), and I saw a sign inviting us to go check out the Picosatellite.
Unfortunately, I saw the sign a few days too late. I had missed a major golden geek opportunity.
Santa Clara actually does have a damn cool engineering program--I know, I go there. My kudos to these very ambitious students, and those faculty who (I assume) helped them get their project into orbit.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
The concept that matter spacetime can be represented as "rotating" in four dimensions isn't all that farfetched--as an object devotes more of its being to change in spatial position, its internal processes appear to "slow", reflecting a rotation out of time.
Now, I'm bullshitting out of my ass here, but it's a convenient way to think about time dilation.
Anyway, my main argument against a timeless universe is that it makes some tremendous assumptions about the information storage content of the universe. If anything can travel "backwards" in time, all particle states would have to be remembered in one form or another. One would be able to store an infinite amount of data on a single floppy by merely constantly rewriting the disk and using timeseeks to access previous disk states.
However, there is no conceptual problem with particles, structures, or even objects moving forward in time but with all subatomic processes moving backwards--we can watch, in forward time, video playing back in reverse and yet not suffer a time paradox. Reactions are simply occuring backwards. There is evidence that reactions occur backwards, but saying that they're reactions from the future moving back to the past requires far too many presumptions about the structure of the universe.
Enough from me for now.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
You'll excuse me if I fail to see the inherent contradiction the granting of patents upon technologies that would otherwise remain secret and the granting upon technologies that are blatantly obvious bridgings of the old paradigms applied to newer technological environments. You cannot deny the corruption, the false taxation, and the raw abuse of the patent system by its present controllers, no matter what your view on patents as a whole. Yours Truly, Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
My lawyers have advised me to inform you that we at DoxPara Research have entered into a cross-licensing agreement with Arrow Films and Actress Linda Lovelace, which grants us relicensing rights to Patent #12346969, "Business Model for Extremely Low Level Tracheal Stimulation."
Your request for a sublicense assignment to yourself has been granted. You may proceed exercising all the technologies contained within the patent forthwith upon us immediately.
As to the possible violations of ancillary sarcasm patents, we possess Patent #000001, "High Dual Clue Particle Accelerator Device", and thus put little stock in your chances in a court of law.
We at DoxPara Research thank you for allowing us to address our concerns. Please, feel free to respond in any manner you see fit.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
The idea is that the net's been perverted by a corrupt system into a get rich quick welfare scheme for patent attorneys and self-aggrandizing government administrators. Whatever basis patents had, the fallout "Its Net So Its New" proves we need reform, and soon.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
I've been thinking alot about patents and the USPTO as of late, and I've begun to realize a much more politically effective and valid way to make the non-technical understand just how corrupt the US Patent system really is.
Covert taxation backing a none-too-subtle amount of graft.
What, did you think those patents are free?
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has taken to delusions of grandeur. It is not illegal or questionable for a government body to charge for its services--a bill from the USPTO does not a tax make. Taxes achieve their special nature by the fact that they're enforced charges--if you meet conditions x, y, and z, then you pay the tax or face government enforced penalties.
There's obviously a charge element to patents--last I checked, patents cost thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to file. Every time a patent is rejected for having some trivial grammatical error, that's more money for the USPTO--more cash per patent, more charge per service rendered. The enforcement is, however, where things get hairy. Since everybody else has accepted the concept of attempting to patent any idea, obvious or not, anyone who refuses to pay for patent "protection"(we've heard this word before) is placed at the mercy of their protected competitors. And good luck to any company who crosses a competitor so armed--all profits can disappear with the signing of a court mandate. These same courts, of course, have been muzzled from attacking the USPTO's decisions, so those facing kangeroo justice aren't going to find much support from those who came before. Even genuinely invalid patents cost in the ranges of half a million dollars to address, so even if you win, you lose.
Even the (now kinder and gentler) IRS isn't/wasn't this nightmarish. Imagine if Cisco and 3Com could sue eachother for taking excessive deductions, and thus competing unfairly. The USPTO doesn't need to lift a finger to enforce its taxation--those who have paid to join their little club will be more than happy to emasculate their competitors.
Of course, such emasculation requires nice and expensive patent attorneys, and thus comes the graft. By assigning as many patents as they can get away with, patent attorneys(who, I'm sure, have quite a bit of pull at the USPTO) have more material to wield when hired to attack competing companies, more material to defend with when a company is attacked, greater stakes on either side from which to calculate an hourly rate, and much less predictability and guaranteed freedom for the clients--this translates directly into a greater need for highly trained patent attorneys to be on retainer, as well as longer time spent in court jousting-for-millions. (Look mah, longer hours!)
More taxes for the Agency, and more cash for the agencies apparent constituents. Disguised behind claims of being understaffed and underpaid are patent office employees intentionally overworked and paid to accept, not reject. The lower ranks are mismanaged such that the upper ranks will be richer for it. "It's Net So It's New" has become the mantra for a thoroughly corrupted government body with delusions of being superior to the Judicial Branch, the IRS, the United States Congress, and the American People.
Such oppression is out of place for the otherwise free and democratic ideals the Net so powerfully engenders, and particularly out of line with regards to the separation of powers between the governmental structures.
We need reform. Complaining about patents on a technical level is effective, but needs to be prefaced by an explanation of not only how such patents are ludicrous and valueless, but why.
Your livelyhood could be next. Call your congressman.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Microsoft purchased the rights to republish Spyglass's web browser *way* back in the day. Anyone who played around with Internet Explorer 2(didn't even support *frames*) will remember that, while somewhat fast, the browser was broken beyond belief.
IE3 was the first build that actually impressed me, and stands to this day as one of the fastest and slickest products to leave Microsoft.
I can't imagine, after seeing the quality level of IE3, how Microsoft could have so little faith in the skills of their coders that they had to lie, cheat, and steal their browser into dominance.
Everybody says Microsoft can't code...I find it almost tragic that Microsoft agrees.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
First, I do not villify you. I do not consider you a "Great Satan" of the world, nor do I plot your downfall or anything of the sort. However, there are people out there who have some extremely negative reactions to your success, and the perception that you've gotten where you are through legal chicanery, false advertising, and outright bullying not only appears to be a common sentiment but also one justified in a disturbingly large amount of evidence. My questions to you are as follows:
First, if you had the power to do so, what would be three things that you would go back and change about the ways in which your company has done business over the years? Or, so as to not put too many words in your mouth, are there three things over the past twenty or so years of Microsoft's "ascent to stardom" that you regret on a personal level, an ethical level, or a simple bottom line profitability calculation?
My second question to you is more subtle, and probably won't engender me too popular with my Slashdot brethren. Your programming team which composed Internet Explorer 5 did an outstanding job creating a browser that, while not perfect, easily can stand on its own as a significant advance in any number of web technologies. Unfortunately, their work was marred by relatively horrific enforcement of your company's mandate to eliminate Netscape at all costs--one incident led to Compaq recieving official termination of its licensing agreement for all Windows operating systems; another led to Gateway 2000 practically thanking Microsoft for the right to allow Netscape to be a customer choice in an extremely limited circumstance. As a leader and perhaps a role model to the engineers of Microsoft, how do you justify the apparent denegration and distrust in the quality of their work, even when they create products of excellent quality?
That's what I'd like to know. Knowing a few of you here on Slashdot, you probably think I was paid off by Microsoft, or am really some 35 mid forties PR schmuck hired to defend The Man.
Nope. Email me or check my web page, and don't even try to get all geekier-than-thou with me:-)
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
A quick observation regarding quantum encryption
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 3
I'm not an expert in this subject, and I don't even play one on TV, but a number of the concepts underlying quantum encryption appear to be...well, somewhat sketchy, to say the least.
While I accept that interception of a data stream is likely to cause modification to the underlying signal, so too should the natural chaos underlying any physical-realm transport. Any system even attempting to make quantum encryption a reality would have to be engineered to allow unplanned, non-predicted breaks in the link. Such expected breaks would be perfect opportunities for so-named "man in the middle" attacks, where the attacking agent would only need to compute expected replies.
It appears that the actual synthesis of the quantum-tuned keysystems is where the real "magic" goes on, and I agree, it's a seductive concept to have the literal photons in a stream be intrinsically keyed to their destination. But in order for such a system to be perfect, excessive order and stability(the same order and stability that would be presumed to be missing in case of an attack) is required.
In the meantime, the sheer inconvenience of this system still keeps pure mathematical cryptography in high demand. Even the best laser can not adjust for the curvature of the earth, and fiber isn't particuarly difficult to server *backhoe fade*. I can't really imagine quantum properties on radio signals, but then I'm not qualified to make that call. I do know back at Wireless '97, there were innumerable companies selling RF Fingerprinting technologies to combat cell phone cloning, but I'm rather sure the technology did not exploit quantum mechanics.;-)
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
With all the fuss at the recent Linux* conferences, it's good to see FreeBSD pulling into its own.
I've mentioned this before, but I've become a definite admirer of the various BSD's. The fact that many of the critical network analysis tools I use on a regular basis(and continually have to add to my fresh Linux boxen) are packaged into the installer of FreeBSD.
I'm very interested in stopping by the BSD convention for a day or two, to learn more about who's doing what and so on. Can one attend the exhibits for free, like most(read: almost all) computer conventions? I understand the need for the organizers to make their money back, and respect it, but I would like to make a showing(which would already cost me time off work) to see what the exhibitors have to offer, but don't want to make the drive up there only to be turned away.
So what's the scoop?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Wearable computers will take off when you don't look like a hardcore geek using one.
Before you jump on me, keep in mind I am a hardcore geek, so I'm allowed to say stuff like that.
You can't ask most people to have some kind of crazy display contraption(and watch--they'll call it almost exactly that) over their eye. They'll run in fear. The display form factor that the market will adopt en masse(there's some serious pent-up demand for this) are Sunglass Displays. When Ray-Ban can sell you a monitor, believe me, the marketing machines will go into their own peculiar form of orgiastic frenzy faster than you can ask what kind of coca-leaf derived substance the Patent Office was respirating at the time it gave Xybernaut its rather interesting portfolio.
In the mean time--and here's where I expect the CIA-derived organization to eventually move towards--we're almost assured to see some form of wristwatch display come into popularity. At first, it'll be rather clunky, but with the assistance of engineers from one of the design/engineering fusion multinationals(er, Sony) some very intriguing designs should come through. The combination of a small microphone/bone-amplified miniature speaker that clips behind one's ear and displays that integrate with whatever modality you're presently in(a watch for on foot, your car's HUD when driving along, etc.) will bring wearable computing into its place as one of the Next Big Things of the 21st Century.
The fact that lots of servers will need to be sold to meet the need of all those wireless wearable clients will mean shockingly high levels of hype from companies like Sun. But to go out on a limb here, VA Linux may end up making the biggest killing--anyone listening to Linus lately knows he's fallen head over heels for the embedded environment. The amount of press that millions of Linux/Transmeta wearables will create should generate significant corporate interest in Linux servers to match.
You can thank(or blame) this one on Microsoft for their "Windows Clients means you should have Windows Servers" marketing point.
Comments?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
There seems to be some misunderstanding as to the purpose behind the recent administration decision to reduce barriers to the export of encryption software.
While government is ostensibly concerned with the rights of citizens, its primary goal is self-preservation. (Do you want to lose your job? Neither do they.) The furor over encryption technologies was threatening to move voting blocs and critical endorsements; very well endowed companies and individuals were losing money due to certain governmental policies.
Something had to be done.
Meanwhile, those same guys who cruise Silicon Valley harassing company after company, working tirelessly to put an ear in every wall, are skillfully scaremongering those same politicians with the kind of information you just don't get from a Freedom of Information Act request. These guys inspire terror in more than a few silicon valley techies; you don't think they know how to play the fear game with a few PR-conscious congresspeople and secretaries?
Something had to be done for them too.
So, the general concept was this: Remove the heavy artillery from the open-encryption campaign by placating the highly-funded(and thus dangerous in the PR department) companies seeking to make millions off of encryption sales. Do this by offering a slightly increased acceptable keylength, as well as a "one stop shop" for an intelligence community OK to speed acceptance.
Meanwhile, do absolutely nothing for open source code, and in fact have Janet Reno talking with Germany about ways of suppressing critical infrastructure tools such as ssh and SSLeay. (No need to worry, there are many businesses that would be happy to sell you a closed source product that's only been peer reviewed by the intelligence community.)
Everybody's happy, no? Oh, yeah. The public. Those are the guys who a) finance the system and b) think the system is taking care of their finances.
I'm not so sure.
The real problem that the government's continual threat-making is exasperating is that tremendous quantities of very private information is travelling in virtual plaintext. Go find out how many large companies make the rather ridiculous assumption that "Phone Company = Private Connection". There's no small amount of irony in the fact that a Virtual Private Network is in fact significantly more secure than Telco-Mediated Point to Point links. VPN design specs accept the fact that they're traveling over insecure lines. Legacy Private Networks presume that there's nobody able to listen in. This is a rather ridiculous assumption, particularly with the recent actions of the US Government against alternative phone service providers who were failing to provide wiretap/geoposition trace capabilities.
Is there a Telco engineer around who hasn't accidentally(or intentionally) listened in on a circuit to "make sure it's working"? Have we not been paying attention to the recent exposures regarding the Echelon system?
It is simply undeniable that Telco links, be they voice or Frame Relay, are insecure. The arguably misnamed "Virtual Private Network" is far less virtual than its predecessors, and the government knows it.
Then again, if the public is having its data tossed around in a forced-sniffable form, so too with the company's data which is being tossing around right along side it. Maybe Corporate Rights are being trampled on after all.
Comments?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Well, since at least this doesn't seem to have much to do with the Internet, the Patent Office's "It's Net So It's New" psychosis shouldn't apply.
Of course, they did give 3DFX a patent on Multitexturing, which while more unique than ATI's Full Frame nonsense, is still essentially pretty obvious--and not just after the fact.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Splitting full frame rendering among multiple processors...this is patent pending?
Are you kidding?
It's at least arguably unique to split even and odd lines among two cards(like Voodoo 2 SLI), or to split the image into horizontal strips(Metabyte's PGC), or to evenly split the texel reprocessing load among multiple texel processors(Voodoo 2 core design), but to attempt to patent the process of merely having one complete frame go to one processor while having the next complete frame go to the next processor?
The general reason one doesn't want to use a full frame architecture is simple: Per frame times don't budge. Either you have to build a higher latency into your rendering chain, since the chipcluster has to know the next x frames you intend to render, or you get *no* speed boost.
Don't even get me started on out of order frame rendering on a realtime rendering solution.
Each of the previously mentioned solutions(SLI/PGC/Texel x 2), incidentally, lowers per-frame latency.
Granted, there's probably some degree of multi-frame latency built into most drivers, particularly for games. But the concept of patenting the most basic parallelization solution strikes me as absolutely hilarious. It's very likely most 3D rendered movies use the technique ATI is trying to patent. "I'm done finishing this frame, send me a new one."
It's very likely most WORKPLACES work the same way too. "I'm done with this job, assign me a new one."
That being said, I'm looking forward to trying out ATI's new cards. Ever since I noticed their 128's were supported by Metabyte'sexcellent Eyescream system, I've been much more interested in them.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
No. The 4K implementation of the first level of Descent--replete with MPU-401 music and all textures was OH MY GOD. This isn't nearly as impressive as most of the iterated landscape jobs I've seen bandied around, although the Earth's Landscape dataset IS cool.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Programmers ought to be paid to create new stuff, or generate new modifications of existing code.
The concept that it's a good thing to have millions of programmers redoing millions of lines of code is rather ludicrous; Open Source makes for the ultimate Code Reuse system.
I wasn't aware I wasn't allowed to be impressed by something I've seen.
Were you referring to this specific post(which I just shot off, not being a nano-geek but now officially being much more fascinated with it), or my posts in general? A bit more content would be...uh...useful.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
I was sitting here with my laptop, jaw comfortably attached to my skull, then this strange web page popped up with a black and white picture of a guitar.
Then I saw how large the guitar was(two microns), and there went the jaw.
The IBM-Written-In-Atoms was cool. The fact that this guitar is That Small, That Accurate, and That *PLAYABLE* is mind boggling. I've never seen a more visceral sign that Nanotech is real than this.
Wow. Just...wow.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Slashdot Mirror
MS creates the 'presses' that print the newspapers. Tell me that's not a position of power? All they have to do to anyone is to withhold their presses, to not sell them, or to put in backdoors.
Except for the bottom line that this is genuinely antithetical to Microsoft's culture--yes, this is unethical even to them. Can you even concieve of a remotely relevant time they've been anything but content neutral? Hell, the worst I've heard of them doing is being a bit slaverish on the Bill Gates section of Expedia. But that's to be expected--for crying out loud, the man is worshipped at Microsoft, and you'd expect the same stuff towards Larry Ellison at Oracle or (especially) Steve Jobs at Apple.
(Then again, even I, former Apple IIgs geek, have to begrudgingly respect Apple for its come back from the dead recovery, seemingly at the hands of Jobs.)
This isn't Microsoft's Motif. They don't care what you print on the presses, as long as the presses are theirs. That's it.
To claim that a laissez-faire attitude towards Broadband doesn't in fact create fundamental shifts in the regulatory structure of network access is ludicrous.
One of the prime factors of the Internet's ascent over the past few years has been the tens of thousands of people who chose to start up their own small businesses(guess what--not everything's a startup!) and provide Internet service to people.
While AOL was falling over itself just to pick up the phone, those thousands of people gave personal, real, one on one service to people all across the country--the world, for that matter.
Those of us in the open source world would do well to remember not all development comes from college students--ISPs fund development of critical infrastructure that's used today on an every day basis to keep things running.
I don't know what kind of delusion the FCC is under that AT&T will give up and divest itself of its broadband operations if it is forced to provide copper services to other ISPs. I do know that thousands of ISPs going out of business because the FCC believed the threats of the country's most powerful phone company(of course, being chased heavily by that UUNet/PsiNet/WorldCom/MCI/Sprint behemoth; who needs trusts when you have mergers?) smacks of injustice.
Nobody wants to regulate the net, meanwhile the entire concept behind failing to regulate the net is that self-regulation will occur. Self-regulation is presumed mainly in competitive environments where the failure of one party to "play by the rules" leads to a loss in market share to the gain of a competitor. ADSL and Cable companies are similar enough in corporate structure that both are likely to violate the same concepts that self regulation would be likely to solve.
Thus, the war on self regulation takes its shape as a demand for freedom. Whose freedom, of course, has been muddled substatially.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
The most interesting thing I remember about MS's corporate culture is how, even when a member of the press got a manager to go "off the record", "in the clear", etc., they still spouted the company line.
Even when the statements were profoundly ludicrous, they'd still believe whatever came from up top, because to work for the company is to subscribe to an entire worldview.
(Sidenote: It's different in the Valley, where you can jump from between a hundred major tech jobs. Up there, it's MS or Bust. That has an isolationist effect, and (among other things) is one of the reasons why MS's turnover rate isn't ridiculously high. SAP also chooses to run a major development house in the middle of Bumfuck Germany for this same psychoisolationist effect.)
Where was I...ah yes. Microsoft employee's slavish devotion to the company line--remember when Ballmer slammed MS stock as overrated? Recall how all the stockholders were furious? Ballmer had to do what he did--he had to inform the flock that it was OK and acceptable not to have infinite faith in the value of their stock; that diversifying one's portfolio was an acceptable maneuver. That way, instead of all the MS employees being wiped out if/when there's a crash, at least some will have heeded the New Allowable Thought and gotten some financial advice.
If you think about it, I mean really, you know that's why he said what he did.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
On the day Windows 95 was launched, MS payed News International (owned by one Rupert Murdoch, and my current employer) to sponsor The Times, one of the UK's most respected papers, for a day -- basically the paper was free for that one day. Coincidentally, The Times chose to run a hefty pullout section that day about Windows 95, in which it claimed Bill Gates was globally accepted as being the most brilliant programmer of his generation.
:-)
;-)
All the more reason for Gates to know that Murdoch is willing to sell opinions for dollars
OK, I'll grant that Gates uses a bit of perception-shaping around himself, but c'mon, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates can't come within ten feet of eachother, lest their mutual Reality Distortion Fields shred the molecular framework of the universe.
In all honesty though, almost all of Microsoft's PR is directed at the Computer world...you never really know what Murdoch is trying to get you to believe, or who has paid for what opinion.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I'd say we're about three weeks away from conspiracy theorists deciding that Magnetoresistative technology was Alien Derived.
IBM is pretty much owning price/performance and raw storage curves--it's insane how fast storage expectancies have dropped. $10/GB is the magic number now, and I'm pretty sure we have IBM to thank for that.
64MB of RAM now costs more than a 12GB IDE drive. The mind boggles.
I believe this is the same technology jump, incidentally, that means 2GB on a one inch Microdrive platter. Personally, I'd prefer a third party reverse engineering of MiniDisc, but a 2GB swappable drive would also work fine.
I must say, I'm enjoying the storage (r?)evolution. The media server we're building into our stereo cabinet will store more music than we'll know what to do with...;-) And yes, the code will be nice and GPL.
Here's to mindless abuse of technology...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
People get angry at Bill for the rather nasty tactics his company uses...like, say, cancelling Compaq's license to sell Windows because they were trying to remove the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop. Or pulling some Soviet Revisionism on that Linux Netshow Player which disappeared off the face of the microsoft.com planet. Or removing critical Knowledge Base entries regarding Samba compatibility.
Check out any of the Halloween papers. Is he a geek? Yup. There's a definite sense of betrayal and violent tendancies, though, that's accumulated through years of abuses against the industry as a whole.
The company's behavior gets projected on him, which may or may not be fair.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Gates claims that his business is "not like owning a newspaper".
He adds: "Someone who owns a newspaper can pick up the phone to the editor and say 'run headlines I like'.
"What we do is create tools like a word processor that lets people express their ideas and we're not at all involved in how they choose to use it.
He's right, to some degree.
Outside of the computer press(this includes computer sections of mainstream press), MS exerts almost zero influence.
With the exception of a few rather ridiculous and amateurish attempts at influencing public opinion through falsified Letters To The Editor(as well as the recent exposing of a sponsored advertisement so a good number of economists could publically agree with Microsoft's position in court), MS doesn't haven't nearly the kind of overarching mindshare gravitational suction that seems to permeate most other extremely large corporations.
It's a dichotomy worth studying--outside of self-defense or self-aggrandization within the rather limited context of computer technologies, Microsoft(unlike Sun, apparently) is actually surprisingly freedom minded. They do bundle MP3 encoding and decoding code, they're slapping Priceline down where they belong, and in general seem to have a general slant towards getting as much functionality as possible to the user.
That they use totalitarian and underhanded tactics in their quest to spread computating freedom is...interesting. They want people to be free, but damnit, they're going to be the one's to do it, whatever the cost.
Honestly, I think that's how they keep the company together. "Where do you want to go today...because we're going to be the one's to take you there; we're not letting you out." The coders take pride in the freedom, the suits take pride in the fact that they're preventing the Evil Outsiders from perverting the mission.
In that context, Gates' comments make perfect sense. He feels Murdoch works to pollute and shape the minds of his readers. Should the Murdoch's of the world release the software, he thinks, he'll use it to shape people's minds.
I'm kinda curious--when was the last time a major media outlet criticized(or at least reported negatively) about a parent company? MSNBC has delivered significant praise to Linux, and I believe has at least truthfully reported on the DoJ lawsuit. I wonder how often this could be said about the media world.
There's an interesting psychology at Microsoft; it deserves further research.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Last year, I was walking through Benson Memorial Center(read: The Place That Shoves Surprisingly Decent Slop Down Our Throats), and I saw a sign inviting us to go check out the Picosatellite.
Unfortunately, I saw the sign a few days too late. I had missed a major golden geek opportunity.
Santa Clara actually does have a damn cool engineering program--I know, I go there. My kudos to these very ambitious students, and those faculty who (I assume) helped them get their project into orbit.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
The concept that matter spacetime can be represented as "rotating" in four dimensions isn't all that farfetched--as an object devotes more of its being to change in spatial position, its internal processes appear to "slow", reflecting a rotation out of time.
Now, I'm bullshitting out of my ass here, but it's a convenient way to think about time dilation.
Anyway, my main argument against a timeless universe is that it makes some tremendous assumptions about the information storage content of the universe. If anything can travel "backwards" in time, all particle states would have to be remembered in one form or another. One would be able to store an infinite amount of data on a single floppy by merely constantly rewriting the disk and using timeseeks to access previous disk states.
However, there is no conceptual problem with particles, structures, or even objects moving forward in time but with all subatomic processes moving backwards--we can watch, in forward time, video playing back in reverse and yet not suffer a time paradox. Reactions are simply occuring backwards. There is evidence that reactions occur backwards, but saying that they're reactions from the future moving back to the past requires far too many presumptions about the structure of the universe.
Enough from me for now.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
You'll excuse me if I fail to see the inherent contradiction the granting of patents upon technologies that would otherwise remain secret and the granting upon technologies that are blatantly obvious bridgings of the old paradigms applied to newer technological environments. You cannot deny the corruption, the false taxation, and the raw abuse of the patent system by its present controllers, no matter what your view on patents as a whole. Yours Truly, Dan Kaminsky DoxPara Research http://www.doxpara.com
Dear Mr. Blackheart:
;-)
My lawyers have advised me to inform you that we at DoxPara Research have entered into a cross-licensing agreement with Arrow Films and Actress Linda Lovelace, which grants us relicensing rights to Patent #12346969, "Business Model for Extremely Low Level Tracheal Stimulation."
Your request for a sublicense assignment to yourself has been granted. You may proceed exercising all the technologies contained within the patent forthwith upon us immediately.
As to the possible violations of ancillary sarcasm patents, we possess Patent #000001, "High Dual Clue Particle Accelerator Device", and thus put little stock in your chances in a court of law.
We at DoxPara Research thank you for allowing us to address our concerns. Please, feel free to respond in any manner you see fit.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
P.S. *LOL* Your response was excellent.
The idea is that the net's been perverted by a corrupt system into a get rich quick welfare scheme for patent attorneys and self-aggrandizing government administrators. Whatever basis patents had, the fallout "Its Net So Its New" proves we need reform, and soon.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I've been thinking alot about patents and the USPTO as of late, and I've begun to realize a much more politically effective and valid way to make the non-technical understand just how corrupt the US Patent system really is.
Covert taxation backing a none-too-subtle amount of graft.
What, did you think those patents are free?
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has taken to delusions of grandeur. It is not illegal or questionable for a government body to charge for its services--a bill from the USPTO does not a tax make. Taxes achieve their special nature by the fact that they're enforced charges--if you meet conditions x, y, and z, then you pay the tax or face government enforced penalties.
There's obviously a charge element to patents--last I checked, patents cost thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to file. Every time a patent is rejected for having some trivial grammatical error, that's more money for the USPTO--more cash per patent, more charge per service rendered. The enforcement is, however, where things get hairy. Since everybody else has accepted the concept of attempting to patent any idea, obvious or not, anyone who refuses to pay for patent "protection"(we've heard this word before) is placed at the mercy of their protected competitors. And good luck to any company who crosses a competitor so armed--all profits can disappear with the signing of a court mandate. These same courts, of course, have been muzzled from attacking the USPTO's decisions, so those facing kangeroo justice aren't going to find much support from those who came before. Even genuinely invalid patents cost in the ranges of half a million dollars to address, so even if you win, you lose.
Even the (now kinder and gentler) IRS isn't/wasn't this nightmarish. Imagine if Cisco and 3Com could sue eachother for taking excessive deductions, and thus competing unfairly. The USPTO doesn't need to lift a finger to enforce its taxation--those who have paid to join their little club will be more than happy to emasculate their competitors.
Of course, such emasculation requires nice and expensive patent attorneys, and thus comes the graft. By assigning as many patents as they can get away with, patent attorneys(who, I'm sure, have quite a bit of pull at the USPTO) have more material to wield when hired to attack competing companies, more material to defend with when a company is attacked, greater stakes on either side from which to calculate an hourly rate, and much less predictability and guaranteed freedom for the clients--this translates directly into a greater need for highly trained patent attorneys to be on retainer, as well as longer time spent in court jousting-for-millions. (Look mah, longer hours!)
More taxes for the Agency, and more cash for the agencies apparent constituents. Disguised behind claims of being understaffed and underpaid are patent office employees intentionally overworked and paid to accept, not reject. The lower ranks are mismanaged such that the upper ranks will be richer for it. "It's Net So It's New" has become the mantra for a thoroughly corrupted government body with delusions of being superior to the Judicial Branch, the IRS, the United States Congress, and the American People.
Such oppression is out of place for the otherwise free and democratic ideals the Net so powerfully engenders, and particularly out of line with regards to the separation of powers between the governmental structures.
We need reform. Complaining about patents on a technical level is effective, but needs to be prefaced by an explanation of not only how such patents are ludicrous and valueless, but why.
Your livelyhood could be next. Call your congressman.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Microsoft purchased the rights to republish Spyglass's web browser *way* back in the day. Anyone who played around with Internet Explorer 2(didn't even support *frames*) will remember that, while somewhat fast, the browser was broken beyond belief.
IE3 was the first build that actually impressed me, and stands to this day as one of the fastest and slickest products to leave Microsoft.
I can't imagine, after seeing the quality level of IE3, how Microsoft could have so little faith in the skills of their coders that they had to lie, cheat, and steal their browser into dominance.
Everybody says Microsoft can't code...I find it almost tragic that Microsoft agrees.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Mr. Gates:
:-)
Two questions:
First, I do not villify you. I do not consider you a "Great Satan" of the world, nor do I plot your downfall or anything of the sort. However, there are people out there who have some extremely negative reactions to your success, and the perception that you've gotten where you are through legal chicanery, false advertising, and outright bullying not only appears to be a common sentiment but also one justified in a disturbingly large amount of evidence. My questions to you are as follows:
First, if you had the power to do so, what would be three things that you would go back and change about the ways in which your company has done business over the years? Or, so as to not put too many words in your mouth, are there three things over the past twenty or so years of Microsoft's "ascent to stardom" that you regret on a personal level, an ethical level, or a simple bottom line profitability calculation?
My second question to you is more subtle, and probably won't engender me too popular with my Slashdot brethren. Your programming team which composed Internet Explorer 5 did an outstanding job creating a browser that, while not perfect, easily can stand on its own as a significant advance in any number of web technologies. Unfortunately, their work was marred by relatively horrific enforcement of your company's mandate to eliminate Netscape at all costs--one incident led to Compaq recieving official termination of its licensing agreement for all Windows operating systems; another led to Gateway 2000 practically thanking Microsoft for the right to allow Netscape to be a customer choice in an extremely limited circumstance. As a leader and perhaps a role model to the engineers of Microsoft, how do you justify the apparent denegration and distrust in the quality of their work, even when they create products of excellent quality?
That's what I'd like to know. Knowing a few of you here on Slashdot, you probably think I was paid off by Microsoft, or am really some 35 mid forties PR schmuck hired to defend The Man.
Nope. Email me or check my web page, and don't even try to get all geekier-than-thou with me
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I'm not an expert in this subject, and I don't even play one on TV, but a number of the concepts underlying quantum encryption appear to be...well, somewhat sketchy, to say the least.
;-)
While I accept that interception of a data stream is likely to cause modification to the underlying signal, so too should the natural chaos underlying any physical-realm transport. Any system even attempting to make quantum encryption a reality would have to be engineered to allow unplanned, non-predicted breaks in the link. Such expected breaks would be perfect opportunities for so-named "man in the middle" attacks, where the attacking agent would only need to compute expected replies.
It appears that the actual synthesis of the quantum-tuned keysystems is where the real "magic" goes on, and I agree, it's a seductive concept to have the literal photons in a stream be intrinsically keyed to their destination. But in order for such a system to be perfect, excessive order and stability(the same order and stability that would be presumed to be missing in case of an attack) is required.
In the meantime, the sheer inconvenience of this system still keeps pure mathematical cryptography in high demand. Even the best laser can not adjust for the curvature of the earth, and fiber isn't particuarly difficult to server *backhoe fade*. I can't really imagine quantum properties on radio signals, but then I'm not qualified to make that call. I do know back at Wireless '97, there were innumerable companies selling RF Fingerprinting technologies to combat cell phone cloning, but I'm rather sure the technology did not exploit quantum mechanics.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
With all the fuss at the recent Linux* conferences, it's good to see FreeBSD pulling into its own.
I've mentioned this before, but I've become a definite admirer of the various BSD's. The fact that many of the critical network analysis tools I use on a regular basis(and continually have to add to my fresh Linux boxen) are packaged into the installer of FreeBSD.
I'm very interested in stopping by the BSD convention for a day or two, to learn more about who's doing what and so on. Can one attend the exhibits for free, like most(read: almost all) computer conventions? I understand the need for the organizers to make their money back, and respect it, but I would like to make a showing(which would already cost me time off work) to see what the exhibitors have to offer, but don't want to make the drive up there only to be turned away.
So what's the scoop?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Wearable computers will take off when you don't look like a hardcore geek using one.
Before you jump on me, keep in mind I am a hardcore geek , so I'm allowed to say stuff like that.
You can't ask most people to have some kind of crazy display contraption(and watch--they'll call it almost exactly that) over their eye. They'll run in fear. The display form factor that the market will adopt en masse(there's some serious pent-up demand for this) are Sunglass Displays. When Ray-Ban can sell you a monitor, believe me, the marketing machines will go into their own peculiar form of orgiastic frenzy faster than you can ask what kind of coca-leaf derived substance the Patent Office was respirating at the time it gave Xybernaut its rather interesting portfolio.
In the mean time--and here's where I expect the CIA-derived organization to eventually move towards--we're almost assured to see some form of wristwatch display come into popularity. At first, it'll be rather clunky, but with the assistance of engineers from one of the design/engineering fusion multinationals(er, Sony) some very intriguing designs should come through. The combination of a small microphone/bone-amplified miniature speaker that clips behind one's ear and displays that integrate with whatever modality you're presently in(a watch for on foot, your car's HUD when driving along, etc.) will bring wearable computing into its place as one of the Next Big Things of the 21st Century.
The fact that lots of servers will need to be sold to meet the need of all those wireless wearable clients will mean shockingly high levels of hype from companies like Sun. But to go out on a limb here, VA Linux may end up making the biggest killing--anyone listening to Linus lately knows he's fallen head over heels for the embedded environment. The amount of press that millions of Linux/Transmeta wearables will create should generate significant corporate interest in Linux servers to match.
You can thank(or blame) this one on Microsoft for their "Windows Clients means you should have Windows Servers" marketing point.
Comments?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
There seems to be some misunderstanding as to the purpose behind the recent administration decision to reduce barriers to the export of encryption software.
While government is ostensibly concerned with the rights of citizens, its primary goal is self-preservation. (Do you want to lose your job? Neither do they.) The furor over encryption technologies was threatening to move voting blocs and critical endorsements; very well endowed companies and individuals were losing money due to certain governmental policies.
Something had to be done.
Meanwhile, those same guys who cruise Silicon Valley harassing company after company, working tirelessly to put an ear in every wall, are skillfully scaremongering those same politicians with the kind of information you just don't get from a Freedom of Information Act request. These guys inspire terror in more than a few silicon valley techies; you don't think they know how to play the fear game with a few PR-conscious congresspeople and secretaries?
Something had to be done for them too.
So, the general concept was this: Remove the heavy artillery from the open-encryption campaign by placating the highly-funded(and thus dangerous in the PR department) companies seeking to make millions off of encryption sales. Do this by offering a slightly increased acceptable keylength, as well as a "one stop shop" for an intelligence community OK to speed acceptance.
Meanwhile, do absolutely nothing for open source code, and in fact have Janet Reno talking with Germany about ways of suppressing critical infrastructure tools such as ssh and SSLeay. (No need to worry, there are many businesses that would be happy to sell you a closed source product that's only been peer reviewed by the intelligence community.)
Everybody's happy, no? Oh, yeah. The public. Those are the guys who a) finance the system and b) think the system is taking care of their finances.
I'm not so sure.
The real problem that the government's continual threat-making is exasperating is that tremendous quantities of very private information is travelling in virtual plaintext. Go find out how many large companies make the rather ridiculous assumption that "Phone Company = Private Connection". There's no small amount of irony in the fact that a Virtual Private Network is in fact significantly more secure than Telco-Mediated Point to Point links. VPN design specs accept the fact that they're traveling over insecure lines. Legacy Private Networks presume that there's nobody able to listen in. This is a rather ridiculous assumption, particularly with the recent actions of the US Government against alternative phone service providers who were failing to provide wiretap/geoposition trace capabilities.
Is there a Telco engineer around who hasn't accidentally(or intentionally) listened in on a circuit to "make sure it's working"? Have we not been paying attention to the recent exposures regarding the Echelon system?
It is simply undeniable that Telco links, be they voice or Frame Relay, are insecure. The arguably misnamed "Virtual Private Network" is far less virtual than its predecessors, and the government knows it.
Then again, if the public is having its data tossed around in a forced-sniffable form, so too with the company's data which is being tossing around right along side it. Maybe Corporate Rights are being trampled on after all.
Comments?
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Well, since at least this doesn't seem to have much to do with the Internet, the Patent Office's "It's Net So It's New" psychosis shouldn't apply.
Of course, they did give 3DFX a patent on Multitexturing, which while more unique than ATI's Full Frame nonsense, is still essentially pretty obvious--and not just after the fact.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Splitting full frame rendering among multiple processors...this is patent pending?
Are you kidding?
It's at least arguably unique to split even and odd lines among two cards(like Voodoo 2 SLI), or to split the image into horizontal strips(Metabyte's PGC), or to evenly split the texel reprocessing load among multiple texel processors(Voodoo 2 core design), but to attempt to patent the process of merely having one complete frame go to one processor while having the next complete frame go to the next processor?
The general reason one doesn't want to use a full frame architecture is simple: Per frame times don't budge. Either you have to build a higher latency into your rendering chain, since the chipcluster has to know the next x frames you intend to render, or you get *no* speed boost.
Don't even get me started on out of order frame rendering on a realtime rendering solution.
Each of the previously mentioned solutions(SLI/PGC/Texel x 2), incidentally, lowers per-frame latency.
Granted, there's probably some degree of multi-frame latency built into most drivers, particularly for games. But the concept of patenting the most basic parallelization solution strikes me as absolutely hilarious. It's very likely most 3D rendered movies use the technique ATI is trying to patent. "I'm done finishing this frame, send me a new one."
It's very likely most WORKPLACES work the same way too. "I'm done with this job, assign me a new one."
That being said, I'm looking forward to trying out ATI's new cards. Ever since I noticed their 128's were supported by Metabyte's excellent Eyescream system, I've been much more interested in them.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
No. The 4K implementation of the first level of Descent--replete with MPU-401 music and all textures was OH MY GOD. This isn't nearly as impressive as most of the iterated landscape jobs I've seen bandied around, although the Earth's Landscape dataset IS cool.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Programmers ought to be paid to create new stuff, or generate new modifications of existing code.
The concept that it's a good thing to have millions of programmers redoing millions of lines of code is rather ludicrous; Open Source makes for the ultimate Code Reuse system.
Heh, Anon-guy.
I wasn't aware I wasn't allowed to be impressed by something I've seen.
Were you referring to this specific post(which I just shot off, not being a nano-geek but now officially being much more fascinated with it), or my posts in general? A bit more content would be...uh...useful.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I was sitting here with my laptop, jaw comfortably attached to my skull, then this strange web page popped up with a black and white picture of a guitar.
Then I saw how large the guitar was(two microns), and there went the jaw.
The IBM-Written-In-Atoms was cool. The fact that this guitar is That Small, That Accurate, and That *PLAYABLE* is mind boggling. I've never seen a more visceral sign that Nanotech is real than this.
Wow. Just...wow.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com