I think that it is unlikely that German intelligence triggered this. The purges were too general and started at the beginning of the thirties before the Germans were capable of launching such operations.
Stalin was already unhappy with the "aristocrats" as he regarded the officers and even in earlier times, he regarded them as dangerous. Many senior officers had even served the czar, even though they had come over voluntarily during the revolution, they were regarded as extemely suspect.
You are absolutely correct, but Stalin in the thirties was already feeling insecure and taking desparate measures to keep the USSR from fragmenting and the resistance to his land reform program (which caused the death of millions from starvation). He was less concerned about western influences after the twenties as it was already difficult to enter the USSR uninvited or to travel outside. Krawtchouk being a nationalist Ukrainian, was extremly lucky not to be immediately shot. In any case, Stalin disliked intellectuals, hence the Doctor's "plot" in 1953, and killing off the officer corps which almost led to the defeat of the Russian Army in the Winter War against Finland.
Churchill's famous speech referred to the effective extension of Soviet borders to that of the European countries under their influence after the war.
An earlier Difference Engine....
on
Krawtchouk's Mind
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· Score: 5, Informative
was the one devised by Charles Babbage around 1832. It was started but never completed. However, part of the calculating section was produced in 1832. Babbage revised his design to simplify it but the second version was not produced. The Difference Engine No. 2 was produced from Babbage's plans by the Science Museum in Britain to verify that it would work. The team building it restricted themselves to manufacturing accuracies attainable 150 years ago. It worked after the correction of some small errors, which were felt to be deliberate (the Victorians feared espionage and frequently introduced a few deliberate mistakes into technical drawings.
The printer was completed in 2000. It featured variable spacing and line wrapping. Not bad for something that is 100% mechanical.
It should be noted that as with the machine talked about here, this was a machine for solving simple differential equations (tides) as well as more standard types of maths (i.e., logs, sines and so on) for the production of tables. It was not a general purpose computer, that term was reserved for his Analytical Engine - which was designed but never produced. However Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace wrote some programs for it, converting equations into algorithms and generating register settings which could be punched on the Jacquard cards (Babbage pinched this idea from the manufacturers of automatic-looms, a long time before Hollerith).
If Babbage had completed the Analytical engine, we could have been in a very different world. One version would have been hypothesized in William Gibson's "The Difference Engine".
Probably the invention can be dated back to Babbage's analytical engine (1834). Although it wasn't completed, the designs and principles were good for a general purpose programmable calculating device. It was reckoned that the main problem preventing completion was the inability to mass produce parts of the required tolerance.
If DSL is working so fast in NZ, why don't they ease up a little on the b/w restrictions or at least qualify it so that offshore bytes count but local bytes don't?
In any case, isn't there fibre between you and Oz? Unless the sheep get cable, I can't see that link getting filled too quickly.
VMS came with an architecture (probably because it came from a relatively small cohesive group of people). They released and documented libraries that helped you program with the architecture, so it was easy to write commands that parsed the VMS way. This made the system easier to learn.
Unix is less cohesive. On the other hand, it is easy to reengineer and come up with something better. It is relatively easy to take a kernel and to build different environments around it.
NT/2K/2K3 tries to be cohesive, but unfortunately the old architecture was discarded last week and somebody forgot to properly document the new one for the users. The open Unixes (Linux/*BSD) have the power because it doesn't matter if the API is poorly documented, because you always have the source. WIth VMS you have some of the best documentation in the business, but they stopped giving out source listings on microfiche after about 4.5 or so, and yes, you ocassionally did have to hit the fiche for info.
VMS also came with a good file system that supported various access methods including Btrees. This made sure that programs could work together. The file system worked well across CPUs and clusters and still does. Yes, we have clusters on Unix and NT now, but the file system isn't clustered transparently. Clustered resource management (distributed locks) tend to suck compared with VMS. I know some people are trying to get VMS style locking onto Linux. That would be nice.
This sounds a little too like a troll to promote PlayStation alternatives like the X-box. Sony would be monumentally stupid to try this one. The main point is that a distributed client must go online from time to time. For a lot of reasons, people don't like it when their boxes starting connecting all by themselves.
and Chris Date. Both were presenting at a conference about distributed databases a loonng time ago. Codd & Date are essentially reponsible for the theory behind much of what we are using on a daily basis.
I don't see planting a bunch of gnomes in the computer room at MIT of any significance at all. Vaguely amussing on a slow news day, that is all. Of course I know about gnomes and Gnome, but wtf is this doing here. Good tech hacks like CCC's blinkenlights yes, but otherwise, sorry no!!!!
Actually I have and also know the joy of building it without package management. I did some mods to the business objects definitions (C) and have been playing a little with the reporting (Guile). My current own project is to improve the year-end processing (prob. Guile).
I have been a customer of QB for a long time. It did the job relatively well, but has gotten extremely slow since they hacked the IE based front-end. Also, it wasn't fantastically well documented for a commercial product and it couldn't deal with currencies. As a small business I couldn't justify going to the next level of software, and in many cases the multicountry, multicurrency stuff would be difficult without buying some 'enterprise level' extras.
GnuCash is far from perfect, I have been able to use it since 1.7 and the stable version is pretty good.
Another thing that I like is the use of XML for data storage. Verbose, but dead easy to hand edit to correct things. If you want to, the file format is easily interfaced to so you can write extras in whatever language you want.
I agree that most financial institutions wouldn't know what ISO 9000 is, but if we are talking about financial transactions like securities trading, the compliance regs are quite strict. You must have available about 7 to 10 years of full records. They don't always have to be on electronic media but they have to be accessible.
Another thing that isn't always mentioned is that conversations between traders as well as brokers and clients are taped by law in the US, UK and many other countries. The 'tapes' are HDs, but the systems shuffle the audio tracks off onto DAT tapes in digital form.
I've had a few problems with Quickbooks in recent times so I have moved over to GnuCash. It isn't perfect, but I have the source code and the price is right and it can be easily tailored.
I don't object to a product that costs money, but it should, at least, work!!!
The fact that the German Parliament recommended the CCC shows they are, in a way, considered as respected public representatives in the area of computer security. A long way from the early days when is was more famed for cracking.
I heard a representative from the German Parliament's infrastructure committee talking about their recent policy on open software. One of the grounds that the parliament had against Microsft was the privacy concerns. Microsoft were anxious not to lose an important customer so they invited the parliamentary comittee responsible for infrastructure to send reprentatives for a code inspection of Win 2K/XP.
The German Parliament stated that they have no expertise on this and proposed a member of the BSI (a sort of NCSC type organisation) and from the Chaos Computer Club. MS were unhappy with this. To be fair it would have been a problem for the CCC member too because of the problem of intellectual contamination with open source projects.
Yes, this is why you really can't do much more than system management via VNC.
I know that Citrix has the sources, which is how they swing it. I understand that it really isn't that difficult, it is just a matter of getting in the right hooks. The VNC/TightVNC crowd would like to get in deeper, but that probably gets into territory that MS wouldn't like (i.e., lawyer's letters time).
Do you run TightVNC? The compression helps. Updating still isn't wonderful, so running MS Office just isn't on. Running standard tools like MMC seems to work though (although it depends upon the snap-in).
If it can work from the command line, then tools like Cygwin's bash and perl make life a lot easier. Certainly there are perl scripts around for adding windows users and all sorts.
I have no problems managing my 2K boxes. I just run ssh via Cygwin and TightVNC for the stuff that insists on windows like MMC.
Oh, and I do the server management from a Linux system.
Cygwin handles drive letters very nicely (/cygdrive/C/Windows). Regrettably some of the shortcomings of the underlying platform can't be so easily overcome, but opensource can make W2K (and probably Win2K3) almost useable and manageable.
Maybe the purists will still hate the idea of 2K underneath, but this is essentially encirclement, demonstrating to management the benefits of Open Source before they make the big leap. Perl and Bash certainly beat WindowsScriptingHell.
So the reporters running geiger counters over the entry points of DU ammunition were clicking with their mouths?. U238 is an Alpha emitter. Alpha particles can be stopped with paper. Certainly, plating the metal is often used and this reduce the emission to almost zero.
Finely divided particles resulting from impact are easily inhaled. In the lung, the close proximity of the source to tissue is a major risk factor.
There are also some issues raised about the use of DU weights onboard aircraft. Perfectly safe in the air, but it may be problematic after a crash which results in a fire.
Tritium is used in very small quantities as an illuminator. Hre we are talking about larger quantities and after impact in powder form for optimal ingestion. It certainly seems radioactive enough to be more than an annoyance. Nobody hanging around one of the wrecks would would want to breathe to much of that dust.
DU as a metal is relatively harmless but only in big lumps, and then it is significantly above background levels of radiation (Unless you are in the vicinity of Chernobyll) - but this isn't a major issue. As a dust, no thanks.
On a 747, you can not climb out on a wing whilst it is flight. On a shuttle you can once you are out of the atmosphere. A 747 is very well understood and flies well within its envelope.
When the shuttle was built, repair was not a possibility. SInce then, materials tech has improved and there are a number of materials which could have significantly increased survivability.
Actually, a time traveller would be breaking the insider trading rules. If you have foreknowledge that isn't commonly available, then you would be comitting fraud. Having next week's Wall-Street Journal would certainly be considered fraud. This is why a listed company uses an official disclosure servic to ensure that price relevant information is disclosed equally across the market. If you had next week's WSJ, then you should disclose it through such a service and only then make money on it (if you still could).
In another life I have advised people about insider trading laws (how to make them and how to comply). Yes, it is possible not to be detected, but you would have to trade slowly using multiple aliases and deliberately making mistakes.
Frank Abgnale did a lot of social engineering during his criminal years, same for Mitnick. Yes, Frank used technical means as well (forgery), but getting someone to accept a badly forged check takes social engineering.
Mitnick upset a lot of people but he hasn't stolen money or hurt anyone. I wouldn't want to employ him, but I certainly think he has a lot to offer as an external consultant on security. A lot of what he has to teach isn't even technical, but it is stool useful for all levels in the company, especially at places like reception and help desks.
Re:Printers == copyright circumvention device?
on
DMCA, Auf Deutsch
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· Score: 1
I had not heard that printers/copiers were attracting special taxes. If they were, then professional users would probably be able to escape them and I have seen no such arrangements other than the usual Mwst recovery.
To an extent, I can understand taxes on writeable CDs/DVDs but it is too expensive and takes too long to copy more than a part of a document for copying of entire books to be widespread. The only exception would be those reports and standards which may have a massive cost per page.
The other major point is the taxation of media publishing equipment and media whilst making fair use easy to exclude. This is a little like making all car owners pay a speeding fine with their car tax because at some point their car may exceed the speed limit.
The problem is that this new law implements the EU copyright directive which in turn implements the new IP laws being agreed to by the WTO (which in turn comes from Hollywood, USA).
Re:Printers == copyright circumvention device?
on
DMCA, Auf Deutsch
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· Score: 1
They are talking about 20Euros for a printer (about 10% for a low end one) and 38 for a 'multifunction device' (printer/scanner/copier). The CD thing I can sort of understand but I really can't understand this.
This is not a lot but very, very, stupid. Unless the rest of the EU does the same, it is easy to pop over a border for a purchase.
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Stalin was already unhappy with the "aristocrats" as he regarded the officers and even in earlier times, he regarded them as dangerous. Many senior officers had even served the czar, even though they had come over voluntarily during the revolution, they were regarded as extemely suspect.
Churchill's famous speech referred to the effective extension of Soviet borders to that of the European countries under their influence after the war.
The printer was completed in 2000. It featured variable spacing and line wrapping. Not bad for something that is 100% mechanical.
It should be noted that as with the machine talked about here, this was a machine for solving simple differential equations (tides) as well as more standard types of maths (i.e., logs, sines and so on) for the production of tables. It was not a general purpose computer, that term was reserved for his Analytical Engine - which was designed but never produced. However Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace wrote some programs for it, converting equations into algorithms and generating register settings which could be punched on the Jacquard cards (Babbage pinched this idea from the manufacturers of automatic-looms, a long time before Hollerith).
If Babbage had completed the Analytical engine, we could have been in a very different world. One version would have been hypothesized in William Gibson's "The Difference Engine".
Probably the invention can be dated back to Babbage's analytical engine (1834). Although it wasn't completed, the designs and principles were good for a general purpose programmable calculating device. It was reckoned that the main problem preventing completion was the inability to mass produce parts of the required tolerance.
In any case, isn't there fibre between you and Oz? Unless the sheep get cable, I can't see that link getting filled too quickly.
Unix is less cohesive. On the other hand, it is easy to reengineer and come up with something better. It is relatively easy to take a kernel and to build different environments around it.
NT/2K/2K3 tries to be cohesive, but unfortunately the old architecture was discarded last week and somebody forgot to properly document the new one for the users. The open Unixes (Linux/*BSD) have the power because it doesn't matter if the API is poorly documented, because you always have the source. WIth VMS you have some of the best documentation in the business, but they stopped giving out source listings on microfiche after about 4.5 or so, and yes, you ocassionally did have to hit the fiche for info.
VMS also came with a good file system that supported various access methods including Btrees. This made sure that programs could work together. The file system worked well across CPUs and clusters and still does. Yes, we have clusters on Unix and NT now, but the file system isn't clustered transparently. Clustered resource management (distributed locks) tend to suck compared with VMS. I know some people are trying to get VMS style locking onto Linux. That would be nice.
Um, that won't stay that way for long. The word is that there is a high genetic variance between the various strains of SARS.
This sounds a little too like a troll to promote PlayStation alternatives like the X-box. Sony would be monumentally stupid to try this one. The main point is that a distributed client must go online from time to time. For a lot of reasons, people don't like it when their boxes starting connecting all by themselves.
Personally, I would love to see the Ringworld or Iain M. Bank's Orbitals on screen (preferably Imax). Now that would be spectacular!!!!!!
I don't see planting a bunch of gnomes in the computer room at MIT of any significance at all. Vaguely amussing on a slow news day, that is all. Of course I know about gnomes and Gnome, but wtf is this doing here. Good tech hacks like CCC's blinkenlights yes, but otherwise, sorry no!!!!
I have been a customer of QB for a long time. It did the job relatively well, but has gotten extremely slow since they hacked the IE based front-end. Also, it wasn't fantastically well documented for a commercial product and it couldn't deal with currencies. As a small business I couldn't justify going to the next level of software, and in many cases the multicountry, multicurrency stuff would be difficult without buying some 'enterprise level' extras.
GnuCash is far from perfect, I have been able to use it since 1.7 and the stable version is pretty good.
Another thing that I like is the use of XML for data storage. Verbose, but dead easy to hand edit to correct things. If you want to, the file format is easily interfaced to so you can write extras in whatever language you want.
Another thing that isn't always mentioned is that conversations between traders as well as brokers and clients are taped by law in the US, UK and many other countries. The 'tapes' are HDs, but the systems shuffle the audio tracks off onto DAT tapes in digital form.
I don't object to a product that costs money, but it should, at least, work!!!
The fact that the German Parliament recommended the CCC shows they are, in a way, considered as respected public representatives in the area of computer security. A long way from the early days when is was more famed for cracking.
The German Parliament stated that they have no expertise on this and proposed a member of the BSI (a sort of NCSC type organisation) and from the Chaos Computer Club. MS were unhappy with this. To be fair it would have been a problem for the CCC member too because of the problem of intellectual contamination with open source projects.
The fact that the German Parliament
I know that Citrix has the sources, which is how they swing it. I understand that it really isn't that difficult, it is just a matter of getting in the right hooks. The VNC/TightVNC crowd would like to get in deeper, but that probably gets into territory that MS wouldn't like (i.e., lawyer's letters time).
If it can work from the command line, then tools like Cygwin's bash and perl make life a lot easier. Certainly there are perl scripts around for adding windows users and all sorts.
Oh, and I do the server management from a Linux system.
Cygwin handles drive letters very nicely (/cygdrive/C/Windows). Regrettably some of the shortcomings of the underlying platform can't be so easily overcome, but opensource can make W2K (and probably Win2K3) almost useable and manageable.Maybe the purists will still hate the idea of 2K underneath, but this is essentially encirclement, demonstrating to management the benefits of Open Source before they make the big leap. Perl and Bash certainly beat WindowsScriptingHell.
Finely divided particles resulting from impact are easily inhaled. In the lung, the close proximity of the source to tissue is a major risk factor.
There are also some issues raised about the use of DU weights onboard aircraft. Perfectly safe in the air, but it may be problematic after a crash which results in a fire.
DU as a metal is relatively harmless but only in big lumps, and then it is significantly above background levels of radiation (Unless you are in the vicinity of Chernobyll) - but this isn't a major issue. As a dust, no thanks.
When the shuttle was built, repair was not a possibility. SInce then, materials tech has improved and there are a number of materials which could have significantly increased survivability.
In another life I have advised people about insider trading laws (how to make them and how to comply). Yes, it is possible not to be detected, but you would have to trade slowly using multiple aliases and deliberately making mistakes.
Mitnick upset a lot of people but he hasn't stolen money or hurt anyone. I wouldn't want to employ him, but I certainly think he has a lot to offer as an external consultant on security. A lot of what he has to teach isn't even technical, but it is stool useful for all levels in the company, especially at places like reception and help desks.
To an extent, I can understand taxes on writeable CDs/DVDs but it is too expensive and takes too long to copy more than a part of a document for copying of entire books to be widespread. The only exception would be those reports and standards which may have a massive cost per page.
The other major point is the taxation of media publishing equipment and media whilst making fair use easy to exclude. This is a little like making all car owners pay a speeding fine with their car tax because at some point their car may exceed the speed limit.
The problem is that this new law implements the EU copyright directive which in turn implements the new IP laws being agreed to by the WTO (which in turn comes from Hollywood, USA).
This is not a lot but very, very, stupid. Unless the rest of the EU does the same, it is easy to pop over a border for a purchase.