I don't think the belief in a God will ever go away, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. You can see it in the present day in the way different groups reconcile them with scientific knowledge that apparently refutes the bible:
Fundamentalists: The world was created in 7 days a few thousand years ago. Fossil records and other evidence that points otherwise was planted by Satan to lead man away from Belief in God.
Most others: Genesis didn't happen as such, but God was the prime mover of creation. The big bang may have happened but God was there to pop the proverbial balloon.
Scientific Athiests: Belief that only God could enable life the universe and everything is contradictory. If this is so, who created this God that would need to be infinitely more complex than zero point energy or other mechanisms for spontaneous creation.
As long as something is unexplainable a God will be put in place to explain it by the majority of people. The unexplicable is the Unknown, people fear the Unknown. The ability to attribute the Unknown to God changes it into faith which people can deal with.
As long as you're not violating trademark law or extorting somebody domain names should be first come first serve. If an individual registers their surname as a domain name first its theirs, if a company registers their trademark as a domain name first its theirs. If somebody (a corporation, an individual or whatever) registers a domain name which is somebodies trademark and uses it to compete against them then the registrants rights to the domain name should be terminable.
Basically the way it should work comes down to a simple concept: Play fair. The way it presently works is also a simple concept: Carry the biggest stick.
I wasn't talking about Solaris taking over NT's market, I was talking about some form of UNIX in general doing so.
Five years ago (approximately) was when you first started getting the warning signs that Microsoft was going to take UNIX's market share. A number of things contributed to this: Desktop PC's started getting real power, at least order of magnitude similar to a workstation at an order of magnitude less cost. The internet started exploding which created a need for a lot of servers. Microsoft essentially conquered the desktop so if they stayed in that market they could only grow as fast as that market grew. To continue to grow explosively they needed a new market. Network servers was ready and so were they.
If Sun, HP and SGI had decided to they could've co-operated and the face of computing would be entirely different now. Co-develop a common OS that runs on cheap hardware. The OS doesn't have to be open source but the product should be inexpensive and robust. Sun, HP and SGI share the development cost of this new UNIX and make sure that any hardware necessary is supported. The three companies go ahead and build servers that are is above the typical offerings of Dell, Compaq or Gateway. Leave them with the low end hardware while they work on the mid range and high end x86 hardware.
The codes the internet runs on would only need a minor porting effort compared to a port to NT. Plus, UN*X was there already, it was the native tongue spoken by the pioneers. The single variant of UN*X would've made it a lot easier for development to continue.
Solaris has its place. I still wouldn't run mission critical ECAD software on Linux but I would consider arming engineers with Linux boxes to log into the N processor Sun server running Solaris.
If Sun were to release Solaris under the GPL or BSD license tomorrow I think for the most part it would generate a big yawn in the community. Consider it this way: right now Solaris more or less is made for workstations running on SPARC processors. Intel processor support, at least the last time I looked, was just a best effort basis. A lot of the interesting features aren't even supported on Intel. The community would have to port these features into Solaris X86. Not everybody runs on Intel like processors though, some of us use DEC Alpha's, or PowerPC and so on.
The most economical thing to do, and the thing that would be most accepted in this community, would be to pillage the Solaris code base for its industrial strength features and roll them into Linux.
I think there was a golden opportunity to totally dominate the market about 5 years ago or so if all of the commercial UNIX vendors would've been willing to bury their collective hatchets in Microsoft's back. That opportunity was to improve Linux to support their best large system features and concentrating on designing hardware that best exploits those features. Of course any time I mentioned this to anybody from Sun at the time they basically laughed. Linux was and always will be a toy OS that hackers occasionaly boot into.
I think this move would've totally killed Windows NT and a lot of Microsofts credibility as well. SGI is realizing this now and so they're trying to go down this path now. Sun isn't in as precarious a position as SGI is and so they don't need to go down that path (yet)
Actually, while this was a sarcastic response, its almost the criteria that patents like these should be held against. Prior to the approval of the patent has the technology 'invented itself' without reference to any of the inventors technology? So in this case, despite nobody planting spies in Harald Ohrn's office online sales was invented, therefore, there was nothing patentable. Really this is synonymous with the clause that states that inventions shouldn't be obvious to other experts in the field but its rephrased so maybe even patent office employees can understand it.
This isn't really too suprising given the nature of the project. Fetchmail is a thing, its an entity in itself. The number of coders who would contribute it would be some fraction of the number of coders interested in such a project and who have the necessary expertise. This is actually the first I had heard of it for instance, its not something I was ever looking for.
For exponential growth I think a couple of things are needed. It needs to be a project that will explode in use by word of mouth and it needs to be the type of project that allows a wide variety of backgrounds to be involved.
Linux as a whole is more similar to this, of witch Fetchmail can be seen as a component. The kernel itself has a number of systems. If your expertise lies mostly in networking stacks there's a place for you. If the in and outs of tuning memory architecture for SMP is your forte' then there's a place of you. If you're not so good at coding but can write good succinct documents there's a place for you. If the kernel itself has no interest to you other than as an enabling technology there are other things you can choose to work on: X11 or other graphics interfaces, themes, productivity tools, games etc.
The interest in Linux can spread exponentially, at least for a while. When you've got 5% or 10% market share you can grow exponentially for a while. When you've got 98% market share then you can't grow exponentially unless you conquer new markets. The number of potential places a person can work and the variety of interests it matches means that the number of developers can grow as some fraction of the exponential curve.
Now that I've heard about Fetchmail I do have some interest in it, I probably won't become a developer. That's just not where my talents lie.
Actually, that is what I use (thats who I work for), its still not enough though. Anything that isn't about twice the effective height of a letter in a typical text book looks thin and spindly. It's alright for the occasional bit of text, but prolonged reading is painful.
This is why computers are in cases and are tested to be compliant with FCC regulations (as long as they're still in the case, the case hasn't been modified etc). We've passed through similar bandwidth sharing episodes before, such as when CPU's first hit the 100 MHz domain. Thats FM radio.
The problem is the lack of resolution. IEEE has a comendable online presense, I can download the last N years of articles for any periodicals I subscribe to. I do this frequently, they're Adobe PDF files which are pretty portable. The only problem is that they're fairly illegible even on the 21" monitor before me, so I end up printing them out.
You could zoom in and read that way but the charts are typically scattered and you end up zooming in and out for cross referencing and is generally just a pain.
There's just not enough dpi to legibly display a full page of text at the font sizes periodicals are published in.
For schematics and stuff I never print them out unless I'm going to go over something with somebody, it's nice to be able to mark things up on the fly.
Almost as soon as they cry "The Russian menace is dead, the cold war is over!" the government and military find a new threat in small countries that they couldn't bother worrying about before. Some of it might be real and I for one wouldn't argue that the defense budget should be cut to zero (or even to the level of NASA's budget) but I can't help think that much of the indicated threat is made up. I expected to see much of the piece wrapped in subliminal fnords to help generate a low grade panic in the populace.
India has the bomb, their most likely target would be Pakistan. The same goes for most of the other countries they listed. When you're at war with near neighbours other potential conflicts take the back seat. Well, except that we're pointing things at them and saying "they're benign if you don't bother us", which ensures that they're going to point something at us.
The biggest threat is probably terrorist attack. Why bother with biological tipped warheads when you can deploy the biological agents on US soil? That would strike much more fear and paranoia into the general public than a missile attack. Missiles are tangible. Warnings about seeing 'suspicious persons' at public events isn't. You could generate a lot of terror among certain segments of the population just by waiting for the next especially dangerous flu and claiming responsibility for it.
It sounds like the Brazilian airlines are using peoples need for electronics to drum up more of the cost effective first class sales. In general electronic equipment is banned during take off and landings. Electronic devices wouldn't be a problem, not even if everybody carried a cornocopia of them, but segments of the airplane itself act as wave guides. Most airplanes were designed 20 or 30 years ago when a 4 transistor radio was the latest high tech portable device. Some of the channels conduct energy to places you really don't want a lot of interference during takeoff and landing.
Not only is it fair but maybe its important to note. Too many people, including security authorities within many companies, fail to recognize how rigorous you have to be to maintain security. You can apply every patch against every line of code on your system and still be insecure. What's worse is that because so many people rely on specialized tools, such as SATAN, to audit security they become trusting and complacent. They're a good first step but they shouldn't be the only step for mission critical equipment.
Suppose the white hat community is fully caught up with the black hat community, or maybe even a few steps ahead. Any standard script attacks against the infrastructure of your network will fail but there's still a glaring problem.
What about user software? Users like to run software. Some of the software interacts over the internet at large, such as games. Most of it is not designed by people overly concerned with security. People run poorly written CGI scripts. All of this provides the ability to get into whatever account the application was running from. Smart intruders will remain very quiet (dumb ones will post things like "Y3R 0WN3D") and bide their time. Eventually with enough patience and/or intelligence the sytem can be compromised further.
There's a lot of things that are secured dumbly. People are smart enough not to run web servers as root anymore. They run them as 'nobody', which is fine, but they leave 'nobody' with a valid shell which is dumb.
The only truly secure system is one that is turned off, encased in concrete and sunk in the deepest trenches in the ocean. Unfortunately that isn't terribly useful, but you can increase security by conducting 'what if' thought experiments.
An EMP would be an effective one-time off switch, but considering you went out of your way to get something implanted that might be overkill. I mean you probably do want to access your ATM again.
Assuming there's no convenient way to temporarily turn it off you could carry a device that either uses signal processing techniques to nullify the signal or generates a spurious signal. Most detectors operate to detect and lock onto the strongest signal. If you can generate a signal that looks right to the detector but is slightly more powerful you may be able to fool it. The results of the detector detecting a spurious signal would be up to the owner of the detector though. ATM's might call up the local cops for instance.
This would only work till they design a better detector. It'd be a bit like radar guns, radar detectors and radar detector detectors.
Yeah, it is a shame. I just bought a shiny new PIII 450 system with 128 M memory for running Linux. I didn't get a board with SCSI built in. I'm amazed at how sucky the performance is once the drive starts seeing heavy usage. My PowerMac 9500/150 with 96 M memory outperformed it under those circumstances. The only thing that I can see explaining that is the built in fast SCSI bus (not even ultra scsi or ultra2 scsi, just fast 10 MB/s) In theory that UMA IDE drive was a speed demon compared to the ancient 4 gig on the PowerMac as was the bus it ran on.
Fortunately the new Linux box is only a placeholder till I can get my hands on an Athlon board with AGP 4X (and hopefully there are boards with built in Ultra2 SCSI)
I understand why the change to IDE was made. For years the general Mac population had been screaming for a more generic board similar to what most Wintel boards are: no IDE, no built in graphics, industry standard slots. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the one weak spot on the Apple motherboard design: 3 PCI slots.
It's mostly a case of the low end winning. Customers kept pointing at how cheap IDE drives were compared to SCSI, which is true, but neglected performance. Apple listened and now ships with IDE drives. You can still purchase SCSI as an option though:
What part don't they get? All open source parts are being released as open source. That's all they owe.
Your examples don't even go farther than that. Sure, you're free to make a cola, the general formula for 'a cola' is out there. Go nuts. The specific formula for 'Coca-Cola' or 'Pepsi-Cola' are not out there though. The specifics of the formula are how those two companies differentiate.
The open source portion of the Corel distribution is the formula for 'a cola', the codes they hold secret are what differentiates it. It would be nice if they released that portion of it publicly but there is no onus on their part to do it. It would also be nice if every person who did a linux install would contribute every piece of code they write under GPL. I don't see that happening somehow.
I don't even know what you were referring to, it sounds like your post would be more appropriate to the original news item where source code and redistribution were being restricted.
Security is a problem. When I first installed LinuxPPC on my PowerMac I noticed an awful lot of failed FTP attempts. This was within minutes of me booting up, I didn't have a chance to install patches or anything at this point. I also didn't have anything important on the machine yet. This was probably happening under MacOS as well, but since I didn't have FTP enabled I never saw it.
I sat up and watched the carnage and kept dumping the logs to a safe place. Most attempts would quickly cease but a few kept returning and I noticed them checking out other services that by default were installed. Eventually somebody took down the web server and managed to get in.
I contacted the ISP's of some of the frequent offenders just for kicks. It turns out that the most frequent one was mp3search.lycos.com (they weren't the ones who got in) trying to search through my non-existant cache of mp3s (mp3search.lycos.com searched from some other site, I ended up corresponding with the principle engineer) Somebody had posted their leased address to mp3search.lycos.com, which resulted in lots of disgruntled people not able to download mp3s and eventually a script kiddy got into my machine.
Had I cared I'd have rebooted with all services disabled and quicky patched, I was just watching for education/entertainment purposes. I never did receive a response from owner of the ISP I was hacked in from.
"You've got mail" shouldn't be a registered trademark though. I was biffed by that every time I logged in to my university account on my unix cluster which predates AOL (not by much, but biff itself does).
This sounds too far reaching. If distribution is illegal then what happens to valid research? Somebody needs to write anti-virus software. What about accidental distribution? If I accidently infect some computers in my workplace and have a troglodyte for a boss could he accuse me of breaking the law and have me carted away? Sure, when it comes to court I'd probably be exonerated but in the mean time my reputation will have been damaged.
Virus distribution should be illegal in the same way vandalism is. You can carry around rocks and bricks without breaking the law, use those rocks and bricks for vandalism and you do break the law.
I really feel a bit strange about this. I think anybody who writes a virus for the purposes of infecting anybody should be locked up, but from an intellectual point of view they're very interesting.
Sometimes that would work, but a lot of times it won't. Dealing out too much information prior to having a product out can be self defeating. You've payed a handful of principle scientists hundreds of thousands per year each to solve problems faced by the whole industry in order to give you a jump start on the competition. Now you're publishing it.
The competition may not be able to directly make use of the technique or principle but can probably get away with altering it. Look at all the circuit designs that build on previous circuit designs in the IEEE Journal of Circuits and Systems for instance. You can of course make incremental improvements to a patent as well but its more convoluted to do since your invention won't be publicly available for 12 to 24 months (the length of time it takes to push through a patent application).
Patents are used a bit like cards in a poker game in the technology field. This goes for both hardware and software patents. The company I work for (I do hardware) encourages patent applications with perks. A patent itself is usually a worthless thing to have but they offer protection against lawsuits. A lot of patent related law suits are resolved outside of the courtroom. Company A takes legal action against company B for patent infringement. There may or may not be actual patent infringement (its sometimes hard to tell without going into microscopic details into the particular producs). Company B takes a look at Company A's product line and looks for any relavent patents it holds. If it finds some they play their hand, or packet of patents, against Company A. Often this results in a cross licensing agreement or a settlement outside of court.
Whenever you see a company suing somebody then do an about face and reach a cross licensing agreement remember the above. There's a good chance that was what happened.
Some patents are valuable: those that represent improvements over the state of the art that get around an otherwise (apparently) insurmountable problem. Almost all of the 'bad' software patents don't fall into that category though, they are just ways of doing things.
Certain Japanese companies were attempting to flood the market with their vector processors by selling them in the US at below cost. This prompted a number of companies to feel that the Japanese presented a better solution. They were taken to court over it and lost, resulting on a 400% or so tarrif on their vector processing supercomputers. I'm wondering if this Alaska case was one such case and what the end result was?
h2gt is Douglas Adams' baby. He was behind the sites creation (search slashdot, it was posted here). You're thinking of the PGG or Project Galactic Guide.
From what I've seen on h2g2 entries are supposed to be real accounts of real things. Don't bother submitting reviews of the Venusian love godesses until you've a) been to Venus and b) sampled the Venusian love godesses; they won't be approved. That doesn't mean humour is outlawed but the humour should be about earthly things.
The PGG is a fan driven implementation of the guide. Entries are ranked on a scale from real to unreal so reviews of Venusian love godesses are welcome as long as they're well written.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
Being so far from the Sun - three thousand billion miles - it
would take almost six million years to orbit it.
"This would explain why it has not been found," explained Dr
Murray to BBC News Online. "It would be faint and moving very
slowly."
I don't think the belief in a God will ever go away, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. You can see it in the present day in the way different groups reconcile them with scientific knowledge that apparently refutes the bible:
Fundamentalists: The world was created in 7 days a few thousand years ago. Fossil records and other evidence that points otherwise was planted by Satan to lead man away from Belief in God.
Most others: Genesis didn't happen as such, but God was the prime mover of creation. The big bang may have happened but God was there to pop the proverbial balloon.
Scientific Athiests: Belief that only God could enable life the universe and everything is contradictory. If this is so, who created this God that would need to be infinitely more complex than zero point energy or other mechanisms for spontaneous creation.
As long as something is unexplainable a God will be put in place to explain it by the majority of people. The unexplicable is the Unknown, people fear the Unknown. The ability to attribute the Unknown to God changes it into faith which people can deal with.
As long as you're not violating trademark law or extorting somebody domain names should be first come first serve. If an individual registers their surname as a domain name first its theirs, if a company registers their trademark as a domain name first its theirs. If somebody (a corporation, an individual or whatever) registers a domain name which is somebodies trademark and uses it to compete against them then the registrants rights to the domain name should be terminable.
Basically the way it should work comes down to a simple concept: Play fair. The way it presently works is also a simple concept: Carry the biggest stick.
I wasn't talking about Solaris taking over NT's market, I was talking about some form of UNIX in general doing so.
Five years ago (approximately) was when you first started getting the warning signs that Microsoft was going to take UNIX's market share. A number of things contributed to this: Desktop PC's started getting real power, at least order of magnitude similar to a workstation at an order of magnitude less cost. The internet started exploding which created a need for a lot of servers. Microsoft essentially conquered the desktop so if they stayed in that market they could only grow as fast as that market grew. To continue to grow explosively they needed a new market. Network servers was ready and so were they.
If Sun, HP and SGI had decided to they could've co-operated and the face of computing would be entirely different now. Co-develop a common OS that runs on cheap hardware. The OS doesn't have to be open source but the product should be inexpensive and robust. Sun, HP and SGI share the development cost of this new UNIX and make sure that any hardware necessary is supported. The three companies go ahead and build servers that are is above the typical offerings of Dell, Compaq or Gateway. Leave them with the low end hardware while they work on the mid range and high end x86 hardware.
The codes the internet runs on would only need a minor porting effort compared to a port to NT. Plus, UN*X was there already, it was the native tongue spoken by the pioneers. The single variant of UN*X would've made it a lot easier for development to continue.
Solaris has its place. I still wouldn't run mission critical ECAD software on Linux but I would consider arming engineers with Linux boxes to log into the N processor Sun server running Solaris.
If Sun were to release Solaris under the GPL or BSD license tomorrow I think for the most part it would generate a big yawn in the community. Consider it this way: right now Solaris more or less is made for workstations running on SPARC processors. Intel processor support, at least the last time I looked, was just a best effort basis. A lot of the interesting features aren't even supported on Intel. The community would have to port these features into Solaris X86. Not everybody runs on Intel like processors though, some of us use DEC Alpha's, or PowerPC and so on.
The most economical thing to do, and the thing that would be most accepted in this community, would be to pillage the Solaris code base for its industrial strength features and roll them into Linux.
I think there was a golden opportunity to totally dominate the market about 5 years ago or so if all of the commercial UNIX vendors would've been willing to bury their collective hatchets in Microsoft's back. That opportunity was to improve Linux to support their best large system features and concentrating on designing hardware that best exploits those features. Of course any time I mentioned this to anybody from Sun at the time they basically laughed. Linux was and always will be a toy OS that hackers occasionaly boot into.
I think this move would've totally killed Windows NT and a lot of Microsofts credibility as well. SGI is realizing this now and so they're trying to go down this path now. Sun isn't in as precarious a position as SGI is and so they don't need to go down that path (yet)
Actually, while this was a sarcastic response, its almost the criteria that patents like these should be held against. Prior to the approval of the patent has the technology 'invented itself' without reference to any of the inventors technology? So in this case, despite nobody planting spies in Harald Ohrn's office online sales was invented, therefore, there was nothing patentable. Really this is synonymous with the clause that states that inventions shouldn't be obvious to other experts in the field but its rephrased so maybe even patent office employees can understand it.
This isn't really too suprising given the nature of the project. Fetchmail is a thing, its an entity in itself. The number of coders who would contribute it would be some fraction of the number of coders interested in such a project and who have the necessary expertise. This is actually the first I had heard of it for instance, its not something I was ever looking for.
For exponential growth I think a couple of things are needed. It needs to be a project that will explode in use by word of mouth and it needs to be the type of project that allows a wide variety of backgrounds to be involved.
Linux as a whole is more similar to this, of witch Fetchmail can be seen as a component. The kernel itself has a number of systems. If your expertise lies mostly in networking stacks there's a place for you. If the in and outs of tuning memory architecture for SMP is your forte' then there's a place of you. If you're not so good at coding but can write good succinct documents there's a place for you. If the kernel itself has no interest to you other than as an enabling technology there are other things you can choose to work on: X11 or other graphics interfaces, themes, productivity tools, games etc.
The interest in Linux can spread exponentially, at least for a while. When you've got 5% or 10% market share you can grow exponentially for a while. When you've got 98% market share then you can't grow exponentially unless you conquer new markets. The number of potential places a person can work and the variety of interests it matches means that the number of developers can grow as some fraction of the exponential curve.
Now that I've heard about Fetchmail I do have some interest in it, I probably won't become a developer. That's just not where my talents lie.
Actually, that is what I use (thats who I work for), its still not enough though. Anything that isn't about twice the effective height of a letter in a typical text book looks thin and spindly. It's alright for the occasional bit of text, but prolonged reading is painful.
This is why computers are in cases and are tested to be compliant with FCC regulations (as long as they're still in the case, the case hasn't been modified etc). We've passed through similar bandwidth sharing episodes before, such as when CPU's first hit the 100 MHz domain. Thats FM radio.
The problem is the lack of resolution. IEEE has a comendable online presense, I can download the last N years of articles for any periodicals I subscribe to. I do this frequently, they're Adobe PDF files which are pretty portable. The only problem is that they're fairly illegible even on the 21" monitor before me, so I end up printing them out.
You could zoom in and read that way but the charts are typically scattered and you end up zooming in and out for cross referencing and is generally just a pain.
There's just not enough dpi to legibly display a full page of text at the font sizes periodicals are published in.
For schematics and stuff I never print them out unless I'm going to go over something with somebody, it's nice to be able to mark things up on the fly.
Almost as soon as they cry "The Russian menace is dead, the cold war is over!" the government and military find a new threat in small countries that they couldn't bother worrying about before. Some of it might be real and I for one wouldn't argue that the defense budget should be cut to zero (or even to the level of NASA's budget) but I can't help think that much of the indicated threat is made up. I expected to see much of the piece wrapped in subliminal fnords to help generate a low grade panic in the populace.
India has the bomb, their most likely target would be Pakistan. The same goes for most of the other countries they listed. When you're at war with near neighbours other potential conflicts take the back seat. Well, except that we're pointing things at them and saying "they're benign if you don't bother us", which ensures that they're going to point something at us.
The biggest threat is probably terrorist attack. Why bother with biological tipped warheads when you can deploy the biological agents on US soil? That would strike much more fear and paranoia into the general public than a missile attack. Missiles are tangible. Warnings about seeing 'suspicious persons' at public events isn't. You could generate a lot of terror among certain segments of the population just by waiting for the next especially dangerous flu and claiming responsibility for it.
It sounds like the Brazilian airlines are using peoples need for electronics to drum up more of the cost effective first class sales. In general electronic equipment is banned during take off and landings. Electronic devices wouldn't be a problem, not even if everybody carried a cornocopia of them, but segments of the airplane itself act as wave guides. Most airplanes were designed 20 or 30 years ago when a 4 transistor radio was the latest high tech portable device. Some of the channels conduct energy to places you really don't want a lot of interference during takeoff and landing.
Not only is it fair but maybe its important to note. Too many people, including security authorities within many companies, fail to recognize how rigorous you have to be to maintain security. You can apply every patch against every line of code on your system and still be insecure. What's worse is that because so many people rely on specialized tools, such as SATAN, to audit security they become trusting and complacent. They're a good first step but they shouldn't be the only step for mission critical equipment.
Suppose the white hat community is fully caught up with the black hat community, or maybe even a few steps ahead. Any standard script attacks against the infrastructure of your network will fail but there's still a glaring problem.
What about user software? Users like to run software. Some of the software interacts over the internet at large, such as games. Most of it is not designed by people overly concerned with security. People run poorly written CGI scripts. All of this provides the ability to get into whatever account the application was running from. Smart intruders will remain very quiet (dumb ones will post things like "Y3R 0WN3D") and bide their time. Eventually with enough patience and/or intelligence the sytem can be compromised further.
There's a lot of things that are secured dumbly. People are smart enough not to run web servers as root anymore. They run them as 'nobody', which is fine, but they leave 'nobody' with a valid shell which is dumb.
The only truly secure system is one that is turned off, encased in concrete and sunk in the deepest trenches in the ocean. Unfortunately that isn't terribly useful, but you can increase security by conducting 'what if' thought experiments.
An EMP would be an effective one-time off switch, but considering you went out of your way to get something implanted that might be overkill. I mean you probably do want to access your ATM again.
Assuming there's no convenient way to temporarily turn it off you could carry a device that either uses signal processing techniques to nullify the signal or generates a spurious signal. Most detectors operate to detect and lock onto the strongest signal. If you can generate a signal that looks right to the detector but is slightly more powerful you may be able to fool it. The results of the detector detecting a spurious signal would be up to the owner of the detector though. ATM's might call up the local cops for instance.
This would only work till they design a better detector. It'd be a bit like radar guns, radar detectors and radar detector detectors.
Yeah, it is a shame. I just bought a shiny new PIII 450 system with 128 M memory for running Linux. I didn't get a board with SCSI built in. I'm amazed at how sucky the performance is once the drive starts seeing heavy usage. My PowerMac 9500/150 with 96 M memory outperformed it under those circumstances. The only thing that I can see explaining that is the built in fast SCSI bus (not even ultra scsi or ultra2 scsi, just fast 10 MB/s) In theory that UMA IDE drive was a speed demon compared to the ancient 4 gig on the PowerMac as was the bus it ran on.
Fortunately the new Linux box is only a placeholder till I can get my hands on an Athlon board with AGP 4X (and hopefully there are boards with built in Ultra2 SCSI)
I understand why the change to IDE was made. For years the general Mac population had been screaming for a more generic board similar to what most Wintel boards are: no IDE, no built in graphics, industry standard slots. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the one weak spot on the Apple motherboard design: 3 PCI slots.
It's mostly a case of the low end winning. Customers kept pointing at how cheap IDE drives were compared to SCSI, which is true, but neglected performance. Apple listened and now ships with IDE drives. You can still purchase SCSI as an option though:
450 MHz PowerPC G4 - 1MB L2 cache
128 MB SDRAM - 1 DIMM
18 GB Ultra2 SCSI, 2-channel card
Zip drive
DVD-ROM drive with DVD-video
RAGE 128 AGP card - 16MB SDRAM
$2,899.00
This is all configurable at the online Apple store
What part don't they get? All open source parts are being released as open source. That's all they owe.
Your examples don't even go farther than that. Sure, you're free to make a cola, the general formula for 'a cola' is out there. Go nuts. The specific formula for 'Coca-Cola' or 'Pepsi-Cola' are not out there though. The specifics of the formula are how those two companies differentiate.
The open source portion of the Corel distribution is the formula for 'a cola', the codes they hold secret are what differentiates it. It would be nice if they released that portion of it publicly but there is no onus on their part to do it. It would also be nice if every person who did a linux install would contribute every piece of code they write under GPL. I don't see that happening somehow.
I don't even know what you were referring to, it sounds like your post would be more appropriate to the original news item where source code and redistribution were being restricted.
Security is a problem. When I first installed LinuxPPC on my PowerMac I noticed an awful lot of failed FTP attempts. This was within minutes of me booting up, I didn't have a chance to install patches or anything at this point. I also didn't have anything important on the machine yet. This was probably happening under MacOS as well, but since I didn't have FTP enabled I never saw it.
I sat up and watched the carnage and kept dumping the logs to a safe place. Most attempts would quickly cease but a few kept returning and I noticed them checking out other services that by default were installed. Eventually somebody took down the web server and managed to get in.
I contacted the ISP's of some of the frequent offenders just for kicks. It turns out that the most frequent one was mp3search.lycos.com (they weren't the ones who got in) trying to search through my non-existant cache of mp3s (mp3search.lycos.com searched from some other site, I ended up corresponding with the principle engineer) Somebody had posted their leased address to mp3search.lycos.com, which resulted in lots of disgruntled people not able to download mp3s and eventually a script kiddy got into my machine.
Had I cared I'd have rebooted with all services disabled and quicky patched, I was just watching for education/entertainment purposes. I never did receive a response from owner of the ISP I was hacked in from.
"You've got mail" shouldn't be a registered trademark though. I was biffed by that every time I logged in to my university account on my unix cluster which predates AOL (not by much, but biff itself does).
This sounds too far reaching. If distribution is illegal then what happens to valid research? Somebody needs to write anti-virus software. What about accidental distribution? If I accidently infect some computers in my workplace and have a troglodyte for a boss could he accuse me of breaking the law and have me carted away? Sure, when it comes to court I'd probably be exonerated but in the mean time my reputation will have been damaged.
Virus distribution should be illegal in the same way vandalism is. You can carry around rocks and bricks without breaking the law, use those rocks and bricks for vandalism and you do break the law.
I really feel a bit strange about this. I think anybody who writes a virus for the purposes of infecting anybody should be locked up, but from an intellectual point of view they're very interesting.
Sometimes that would work, but a lot of times it won't. Dealing out too much information prior to having a product out can be self defeating. You've payed a handful of principle scientists hundreds of thousands per year each to solve problems faced by the whole industry in order to give you a jump start on the competition. Now you're publishing it.
The competition may not be able to directly make use of the technique or principle but can probably get away with altering it. Look at all the circuit designs that build on previous circuit designs in the IEEE Journal of Circuits and Systems for instance. You can of course make incremental improvements to a patent as well but its more convoluted to do since your invention won't be publicly available for 12 to 24 months (the length of time it takes to push through a patent application).
Patents are used a bit like cards in a poker game in the technology field. This goes for both hardware and software patents. The company I work for (I do hardware) encourages patent applications with perks. A patent itself is usually a worthless thing to have but they offer protection against lawsuits. A lot of patent related law suits are resolved outside of the courtroom. Company A takes legal action against company B for patent infringement. There may or may not be actual patent infringement (its sometimes hard to tell without going into microscopic details into the particular producs). Company B takes a look at Company A's product line and looks for any relavent patents it holds. If it finds some they play their hand, or packet of patents, against Company A. Often this results in a cross licensing agreement or a settlement outside of court.
Whenever you see a company suing somebody then do an about face and reach a cross licensing agreement remember the above. There's a good chance that was what happened.
Some patents are valuable: those that represent improvements over the state of the art that get around an otherwise (apparently) insurmountable problem. Almost all of the 'bad' software patents don't fall into that category though, they are just ways of doing things.
Certain Japanese companies were attempting to flood the market with their vector processors by selling them in the US at below cost. This prompted a number of companies to feel that the Japanese presented a better solution. They were taken to court over it and lost, resulting on a 400% or so tarrif on their vector processing supercomputers. I'm wondering if this Alaska case was one such case and what the end result was?
No, vector processors are CRAY, ccNUMA is SGI's forte'.
h2gt is Douglas Adams' baby. He was behind the sites creation (search slashdot, it was posted here). You're thinking of the PGG or Project Galactic Guide.
From what I've seen on h2g2 entries are supposed to be real accounts of real things. Don't bother submitting reviews of the Venusian love godesses until you've a) been to Venus and b) sampled the Venusian love godesses; they won't be approved. That doesn't mean humour is outlawed but the humour should be about earthly things.
The PGG is a fan driven implementation of the guide. Entries are ranked on a scale from real to unreal so reviews of Venusian love godesses are welcome as long as they're well written.