My computer blue screens more often under XP than it ever did under 98. I run a network of 2000 machines, and let me tell you, our old friend BSOD still visits on a regular basis.
Your experience is not typical. Sounds to me as if you have a duff hardware driver. What I said was that the reliability argument has been supplanted by the security argument for good reason, Windows is no longer chronicaly unreliable.
UNIX went through the same phases, fifteen years ago keeping a UNIX box alive for a few weeks was a major achievement. Eventually they fixed that and the argument became security.
Netscape did not invent the Web, nor did Marc Andressen. So why should Microsoft be barred from adding a feature to Windows that was invented in Europe as open source, public domain software with the express intention that it be avaiable for free?
Microsoft discussed writing a Web browser with us long before Netscape was started. They bought a commercial use license from Spyglass for Mosaic, then they rewrote the thing from scratch.
Tim Berners-Lee proposed deeply embedding the browser into the operating system in his keynote speech at the Boston Web Conference, if Netscape had bothered to show up they would have heard about it. However at the time their PR flacks were too busy claiming that Marc was the genius who invented the Web and Tim was merely a befuddled academic who did not understand anything.
Read the books that Netscape had written. "Architects of the Web" does not mention Tim, Dave Raggett, Ari Luotenen, or anyone who had much to do with the real design. "Netscape Time" mentions Tim three times and each mention is derrogatory.
Netscape got everything that was comming to them, fair and square. The point of getting the DoJ to launch the suit was simply their way of giving themselves cover for their own incompetent management. Easier to blame Microsoft for being the bad guys than admit that you were full of it, that Netscape was never more than another clueless dotcom and that you missed the main chance.
Re:Been there, done that.
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Another innovation from MS, their going to recreat Emacs
Which one? RMS didn't write the first emacs, that was Gosling.
The slashblather today is pretty much of the form 'Microsoft is doing nothing new because it never does', followed by 'Microsoft is going to change the hardware'.
Microsoft does not have a reputation for security, but they do employ some of the top people in the business. Assuming that all those people become imbeciles the minute they move to Redmond is just a self serving slashdot dellusion.
Not so long ago the standard repost to any Microsoft post was the time a system stayed up before the blue screen of death. Funny thing, you don't hear that half so often since Windows 2000 and XP hit the stores.
Not so long ago UNIX had a lousy reputation for security. That took about five years to change as people started to deploy Kerberos and ssh to patch up some of the more eggregious holes.
Basically there are two routes the open source community can take. Route one you sit arround and congratulate each other while Microsoft goes out and eats your lunch, or you could start to look at ways to extend the security model of Linux to be competative. The execs at Apple, Wordperfect and Lotus took the first approach so you would be in good company.
The appeals court already smacked that one down by throwing out only the penalty phase. Microsoft will have to pull something out of its rear end to convince the USSC that the appeals court was in the wrong.
Bullshit. The appeals court rulling was incoherent. They decided that Jackson had been fair up to the penalty phase and so biased after the penalty phase that the judgement had to be set asside.
The appeals court rulling only makes sense as a means of sending the parties back to the table to negotiate a settlement.
Jackson showed plenty of bias before the penalty phase. Trying to recruit Lessig a second time after the Appeals court had told him not to was ridiculous. Attempting to write 'findings of fact' which were clearly opinion in an attempt to circumvent the Appeals court was ridiculous. Conspiring with the DoJ to get the appeal sent straight to the Supreme Court so as to get the matter settled before a possible change of administration was stupid.
The partial dismissal by the Appeals court was strictly political. To go further would have brought into question the fairness of Jackson in other cases and opened up a whole rack of possible appeals.
And if you don't believe that the courts can act politically go read the Florida judgement,.
Somehow I don't see the Appeals court which has been far more pro Microsoft than the lower courts deciding to overturn a judgement that the Federal govt and the majority of the states have agreed to.
Regardless of the merits of the case I don't see the Appeals court overturning a settlement. One of the major problems with the case was that attempts at settlement were made impossible by the states who were determined to hold out for electoral reasons.
As for the case itself, it was blown once that nitwit Jackson got involved. It is one thing to be a judge with opinions, if you discuss them with the press during the trial those opinions are very likely to be considered bias. Once the appeals court threw out the penalty phase of the trial there was no prospect of a final judgement against Microsoft for a decade. Microsoft could reasonably expect the Supreme court to be sympathetic to the argument that having found the judge to have been biased they were entitled to a completely new trial.
I also thing that the DoJ could have put up a much better case if they had concentrated on the contractual issues where there were real problems and not getting side tracked into the Web browser issue. Netscape failed for a simple reason, the business model was to sell Web server software and that rapidly became a commodity item, particularly once Apache started to gain traction. There were 10 free Web browsers before Marc had heard of the Web, the idea that Web browsers would be a paid application was wierd. Netscape would not have had the market share it did if it had been really charging for the browser.
If they work really well, huge. If they only sorta work, almost none.
It is exactly the sort of situation where Microsoft has been able to clean up by making a previously obscure technology mainstream.
Case in point was powerpoint. I used electronic slides back in the early days when you printed them out onto acetate one a $9000 printer. After Microsoft bundled Powerpoint into Office manufacturers started to make decent LCD projector displays (not the tatty things you stuck on to of an overhead projector).
The idea of tablet PC is not new, but until now nobody has been able to make it mainstream.
I strongly suspect that the problems of tablet resolution will be quickly sorted out. They may also be the catalyst for higher resolution displays - resolution as in dots per inch, not dots per screen. There are very few screens with 100dpi resolution, to make handwriting look good you need about 200dpi minimum.
I suspect that the killer app for these PCs is to have something you can surf the web on while watching tv. After that, taking notes in a meeting.
I have also seen them used in a presentation, they are pretty impressive used this way, you can draw on the slides to direct attention to one part or another.
It should not take that much to get Linux up on one of the devices, but making the result work well is likely to be a lot of work.
Another issue that is somewhat odd is that there does not appear to be an IBM tablet PC yet. Somewhat odd when you consider that IBM has been plugging this idea as assiduously as Gates.
Precast concrete pipe is not the way to go. If it's big enough for a useful room, it's too big to move via road.
No, but you could cast the sections on site in place easily enough, that would allow for much more flexibility. Precast sections are a very expensive option.
You could also save a lot of money by adding in steel beams etc at strategic points.
Like you can build a wooden house youself and it is likely to stay up. But if you want to do anything fancy you are likely to save a lot of money by going to a specialist architect. If you want to build stuff under ground you should see a civil engineer.
While I admire donations, I say this to Salon: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em (merge with another company) or go home (auction away your assets and hope to not lose everything).
I am less worried about Salon per se as I am the fact that the US media is ridiculously biased towards the right. Case in point right wing pundits get hours of airtime to discuss their 'liberal media' fantasies while liberal complaints of bias are never reported outside the few liberal outlets.
The conservatives have an entire network and 24 hour news station. Can anyone honestly claim that there is a liberal network that treats conservatives the way Fox treats liberals?
I suspect that Salon will stay in business, but most likely because some liberal billionaire will fund it. But then again this is exactly how Cato, Heritage Institute and racks of conservative publications stay afloat.
It would be much better if publications could operate with reader support rather than handouts from billionaires, left or right. Before the right gets too happy with Murdoch and Fox they should probably look abroad and note that he regularly switches sides according to his commercial interests. The UK Conservatives thought that they had him in their pocket, how wrong they were!
The one bright spot is Google news which has for me replaced the 6 or 7 news spots I generally read as a portal. With Google I can see instantly what the world press is saying about a topic - not just the insular US media view. I suspect that in time Google will challenge the power of the Washington Post and New York Times to set the agenda. So next election we might just hear as much about Bush's draft dodging, AWOL and DUI incidents as imagined 'lies' about visiting Texas fires with the head of FEMA rather than the deputy head. We might even hear someone state that the smirking chimp has not only broken his campaign promises on practically every issue of substance except those at the top of the list for the extreeme right but that he never had the slightest intention to keep his commitments on the environment, health or balancing the budget.
There are parts of London where the ground rents are still priced in pepper corns.
At one time pepper being a valuable spice worth more than its weight in gold was used as currency. So a peppercorn is still legal tender in the UK and other common law countries.
As such a peppercorn is commonly used as a rent in cases where land is essentially being gifted but for various reasons cannot be given or sold. For example Christ Church College Oxford is build on land owned by Christ Church, given to them under a covenant that prevents sale. So the land is actually leased to CCC on a 499 year lease with a rent (due to expire soon!). I don't know the amount in the CCC case but in similar transactions a peppercorn per year is used.
At any rate, it sure seems like access to a critical top level DNS should be filtered to a big white list of mirror machines, which could then handle general purpose inquiries.
Does not actually help at all. Basically there is no value to the dot unless the TLDs under it are also up. If someone can take out the root they can take out dotCOM, dotNET and probably anything else they choose.
The major TLDs are replicated many times with very sophisticated and comprehensive setups that are considerably more robust than the various ad hoc proposals being made to replace them. Bernstein's suggestion of using USENET being a particularly clueless example. In the first place USENET is not even reachable as a general purpose infrastructure, secondly the architecture is exceptionally vulnerable to DoS. One compromised node could bring down the whole USENET. The only reason that people don't attack it is that it simply isn't important enough, use it to distrivbute the root zone and you make it a target.
What we should really do is can ICANN and simply open up the root zone for registrations at a reasonable rate (i.e. $500, not $50,000). The dotCOM infrastructure can easily be scaled to handle the load. The registration fee would allow for up front verification of trademark claims. There could be a rational complaints procedure based on prior review, registrations in the TLD would be subject to a 12 month public comment & objection period before being activated. Failure to complain during that comment period would result in a strong presumption in favor of the registrant. Registration of a TLD would automatically block further registrations in the other TLD zones at the option of the cc operators.
Microsoft hasn't been all that good at innovating. [vcnet.com]
And Linux would be what? a trully innovative implementation of a 30 year old operating system using the same coding techniques.
The whole industry is the same. Lotus didn't invent the spreadsheet, Oracle didn't invent SQL, Apple didn't invent the windows and mouse GUI, Linus didn't invent UNIX. Most of the ideas in UNIX are taken from Multics.
My friend, that "crappy plaintext" built the internet.
Actually we wrote the specs for the Web originally in HTML, the RFC looked like crap in comparison.
If the standard for HTTP was not so hard to read more people might have taken some notice of it.
Bit mapped displays have been standard for 10 years. Getting the 'plaintext' RFC format to print right is a nightmare, some of them have form feeds in at the end of the page, many do not. Kinda shitty for people who don't have a printer with US letter size paper.
Office 11 will have an XML format available, but the default will still be.doc.
My understanding is that Office 11 will have the ability to edit XML documents with XML markup. That is somewhat different from merely being able to save.doc files in a different syntax.
So for example I could define a DTD for IETF RFCs (or use the one defined by Marshall Rose), use Word to edit the document then put the result through a set of filters to generate HTML, pdf and the crappy plaintext (really nroff) format the IESG insists on.
Or I could use the same approach to edit my chapter of a book I am currently contributing to, the publishers have a 'word template' to produce the type of double spaced output that the reviewers like but the end result will be a properly typeset book. Clearly XML document management would be a better approach.
So actually the XML document format is not that interesting to me. The market is about to move beyond that point.
Glad you asked. Some people might look at the fact that Linux doesn't have a XYZ 'certification' as a indication of that it is not secure enough to get it.
In reality, such certifications cost a lot of money and small companies like RedHat simply can't affort it (They don't make enough money of release X.Y during it's market-life, to justify such a operation)
No, Linux would fail evaluation because it does not meet many of the important security requirements. In particular there is no system security guide that describes how to securely configure the O/S in a single place.
Documentation is a large part of the C2 criteria. Linux simply fails that test. You cannot get certification for a third party guide for good reason, the document has not been reviewed by the engineers who wrote the code.
It is interesting to note how the Fox News style bias of slashdot on the security topic gets more hysterical by the month. Could it be because analyst firms like Aberdeen are predicting that Linux will become the poster chid for security, and no they don't think it is more secure.
So Microsoft get a security evaluation, the slashdot response is to publish the story three times to date, each time claiming that it is further proof that Microsoft's products are insecure. At what point do people ask whether the Slashdot editorial style has more to do with the commercial interests of their employer than an interest in honest journalism?
I had no idea about the VMS emulation plans in the NT kernel. Excellent post, thanks.
It isn't emulation, the next version of VMS is Windows NT. Basically VMS will become a WNT service in the same way POSIX and Windows are currently layered.
No idea how much this will cost, most likely quite a bit more than WNT. However VMS is available for non commercial use effectively for free. You just have to join DECUS user group - the US version is expensive but there are foreign chapters that are free.
Look Zigfried...it's a joke. See, it's supposed to be all about security, yet the password is stored in plain text in the "sample". Didn't you like the part about "display" being a bunch of *'s?
It might be funny if there weren't so many people on slashdot who might actually think that way,.
It is like Ronald Reagan making a 'joke' about bombing Russia, it wasn't funny because lots of people really did think he was a senile fool who might do something like that.
I actually watched Stallman speak in Montreal recently. One interesting tidbit was that he still seems dumbfounded about the fact that the Linux kernel beat them into production even though one of the advantages of microkernel is supposed to be ease of design and the fact that mach had half of the work done already.
I have to think that the Hurd is a case of following the fashion rather than evaluating the microkernel technology on its merits.
There are lots of folk out there who will blather on at great length about the merits of kernel design for absolutely no other reason than they think it makes them look clever.
I have not done anything at the O/S level since writing one ten years ago (unless you count the Web as an O/S). At that time Mach was flavor of the month because OSF and Next had used it as the basis of their operating system and Cutler had used a lot of the concepts of Mach to design his follow on operating system to VMS. Then Rashid joined Cutler at Microsoft in a very high profile move.
So yes microkernels were flavor of the month ten years ago. However the reason why they were flavor of the month had more to do with the politics and problems at the time.
OSF was trying to build a kernel quickly to compete with System V. Microsoft was building Windows NT to get to market as fast as possible. Microkernels were touted as the equivalent of RISC in CPUs, a design that allowed for shorter development time and hence faster to market.
Microsoft had another issue, they wanted to be able to emulate other O/S. In particular Posix so they could sell in the federal market. They also wanted to be able to migrate VMS to run on WNT at a later date as a subsystem. This is actually in the works now and will take place when HP transitions from Alpha to Itanium on the high end server line. One of the reasons Microsoft was keen to do this is that Cutler and his principal staff had left Dec after Dec cancelled the Prism project, Cutler's objective stated at the time was to make Dec have to pay for the O/S they could have had for free. At the time Dec was bigger than Microsoft.
There are advantages to microkernels, but the NT design has not been pure microkernel for some time. In order to get acceptable performance on early hardware they had to allow the display drivers to run in kernel mode.
The problem that I think will prevent HURD ever working is that to build a real O/S you have to really understand the reasons behind the principles you follow and break them when necessary. RMS is unfortunately a prisoner of many dogmatic beliefs which once fixed he simply will not abandon regardless of the evidence.
Linus may or may not have known what he was doing when he had the argument with Andy Tannenbaum, but he made the right decision. Andy has written a lot of good books that are widely used as text books, I don't know if people like Cutler, Rashid, Hoare and Co would rate him as being in the front rank. It is the same situation in most fields, everyone has heard of Bruce Schneier, fewer have heard of Ron Rivest and only people in the field tend to know names like Paul Kocher (SSL 3.0, the one that works), Butler Lampson (ACLS, lotsa stuff), Clark (end to end principle), Bellovin (firewalls), Schiller (IETF Security Area director).
Oftopic: Mark Goldston, CEO of United Online (Juno/blue light) is a clueless dweeb, he just tried to tell Mark Haynes on CNBC that cable modem router boxes are not a threat to his business as few people can afford them... Not only are WiFi cable routers $100 at frys they will be built into the cable modems soon. So either he is uninformed (unlikely) or another lying CEO.
Usually, I scribble on a napkin or whatever, but this isn't all too coherent. It's usually only useful to me when I make it a bit more coherent, and usually typed
Yes George, we know. Just get back to the ball game and don't try running the country, thats what Cheney and Rummy are for.
It is also called "dot" and used to be a healthy Sun box. So they really were the "dot" in.com in a sense and that's what made it so funny. That box was replaced with an IBM box and now IBM could say they are the "dot" in.com.
Actually the change happened mid way through the Sun marketing campaign. Didn't seem to stop Sun however...
Most folk would think that the folk who run the.com Registry are the dot in dot com.
However its a bit worrying that a spec whos entire reason for existing is cross-authentication between two or more different sets of Web Services does not make encryption part of its core.
Not at all. I was working on the WS-Security specification with Microsoft and IBM at the same time as I was editing SAML. The SAML group anticipated that WS-Security would be proposed as soon as the SOAP 1.2 specification started to stabilize.
Nah, it was actually broken and the PR flacks of Certicom claimed it was brute forced.
There is no collection of computing power anywhere on this planet that comes close to breaking a 109 bit key of any algorithm by brute force.
The EC attack requires a considerable amount of computing power but that does not mean the search is 'brute force'. Brute force is a very specical term that means that every single possible key is tried in turn. The expected time taken to break a 110 bit key with brute force attack is thus exactly double the time for a 109 bit attack.
EC is nowhere near that secure, in fact no public key crypto system can be. This attack calls into question the claim that 168 bit certicom keys are as secure as the 1024 bit RSA keys they are commonly compared to.
SAML is specified using XML Schema which in turn is specified in terms of the XML Infoset.
If you want to reduce the size of the XML messages I suggest that you use a more efficient XML encoding rather than a compression algorithm.
A compression algorithm such as LZW takes entire documents and makes them smaller, this is highly efficient in terms of space but computationally intensive. Decompression typically requires the whole message or at least a substantial part of it to be read before decompression can begin.
Finaly, the problem is not that "is complex enough that nobody tends to parse it right." ASN.1 is a classical example of a good idea that was butchered in committee. The most half baked example of which being the DER encoding rules which are simply derranged. There is no 'tends' about it, no two full scale ASN.1 tools I have used can be relied on to interoperate. Some fail to interoperate with themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a direct broadcast satellite in '92, so did over a million people in the UK. Predicting the launch in the US is hardly that impressive.
This years predictions include the Tivo like PVR becomming ubiquitous...
Your experience is not typical. Sounds to me as if you have a duff hardware driver. What I said was that the reliability argument has been supplanted by the security argument for good reason, Windows is no longer chronicaly unreliable.
UNIX went through the same phases, fifteen years ago keeping a UNIX box alive for a few weeks was a major achievement. Eventually they fixed that and the argument became security.
Microsoft discussed writing a Web browser with us long before Netscape was started. They bought a commercial use license from Spyglass for Mosaic, then they rewrote the thing from scratch.
Tim Berners-Lee proposed deeply embedding the browser into the operating system in his keynote speech at the Boston Web Conference, if Netscape had bothered to show up they would have heard about it. However at the time their PR flacks were too busy claiming that Marc was the genius who invented the Web and Tim was merely a befuddled academic who did not understand anything.
Read the books that Netscape had written. "Architects of the Web" does not mention Tim, Dave Raggett, Ari Luotenen, or anyone who had much to do with the real design. "Netscape Time" mentions Tim three times and each mention is derrogatory.
Netscape got everything that was comming to them, fair and square. The point of getting the DoJ to launch the suit was simply their way of giving themselves cover for their own incompetent management. Easier to blame Microsoft for being the bad guys than admit that you were full of it, that Netscape was never more than another clueless dotcom and that you missed the main chance.
Which one? RMS didn't write the first emacs, that was Gosling.
The slashblather today is pretty much of the form 'Microsoft is doing nothing new because it never does', followed by 'Microsoft is going to change the hardware'.
Microsoft does not have a reputation for security, but they do employ some of the top people in the business. Assuming that all those people become imbeciles the minute they move to Redmond is just a self serving slashdot dellusion.
Not so long ago the standard repost to any Microsoft post was the time a system stayed up before the blue screen of death. Funny thing, you don't hear that half so often since Windows 2000 and XP hit the stores.
Not so long ago UNIX had a lousy reputation for security. That took about five years to change as people started to deploy Kerberos and ssh to patch up some of the more eggregious holes.
Basically there are two routes the open source community can take. Route one you sit arround and congratulate each other while Microsoft goes out and eats your lunch, or you could start to look at ways to extend the security model of Linux to be competative. The execs at Apple, Wordperfect and Lotus took the first approach so you would be in good company.
Err, many in Redmond have put it the other way, so entranced was Bill by the program manager that Bob was not killed quietly before launch.
Bob actually lives, he became Clippy and the office assistants.
Bullshit. The appeals court rulling was incoherent. They decided that Jackson had been fair up to the penalty phase and so biased after the penalty phase that the judgement had to be set asside.
The appeals court rulling only makes sense as a means of sending the parties back to the table to negotiate a settlement.
Jackson showed plenty of bias before the penalty phase. Trying to recruit Lessig a second time after the Appeals court had told him not to was ridiculous. Attempting to write 'findings of fact' which were clearly opinion in an attempt to circumvent the Appeals court was ridiculous. Conspiring with the DoJ to get the appeal sent straight to the Supreme Court so as to get the matter settled before a possible change of administration was stupid.
The partial dismissal by the Appeals court was strictly political. To go further would have brought into question the fairness of Jackson in other cases and opened up a whole rack of possible appeals.
And if you don't believe that the courts can act politically go read the Florida judgement,.
Regardless of the merits of the case I don't see the Appeals court overturning a settlement. One of the major problems with the case was that attempts at settlement were made impossible by the states who were determined to hold out for electoral reasons.
As for the case itself, it was blown once that nitwit Jackson got involved. It is one thing to be a judge with opinions, if you discuss them with the press during the trial those opinions are very likely to be considered bias. Once the appeals court threw out the penalty phase of the trial there was no prospect of a final judgement against Microsoft for a decade. Microsoft could reasonably expect the Supreme court to be sympathetic to the argument that having found the judge to have been biased they were entitled to a completely new trial.
I also thing that the DoJ could have put up a much better case if they had concentrated on the contractual issues where there were real problems and not getting side tracked into the Web browser issue. Netscape failed for a simple reason, the business model was to sell Web server software and that rapidly became a commodity item, particularly once Apache started to gain traction. There were 10 free Web browsers before Marc had heard of the Web, the idea that Web browsers would be a paid application was wierd. Netscape would not have had the market share it did if it had been really charging for the browser.
Except to try to get votes for the AG.
If they work really well, huge. If they only sorta work, almost none.
It is exactly the sort of situation where Microsoft has been able to clean up by making a previously obscure technology mainstream.
Case in point was powerpoint. I used electronic slides back in the early days when you printed them out onto acetate one a $9000 printer. After Microsoft bundled Powerpoint into Office manufacturers started to make decent LCD projector displays (not the tatty things you stuck on to of an overhead projector).
The idea of tablet PC is not new, but until now nobody has been able to make it mainstream.
I strongly suspect that the problems of tablet resolution will be quickly sorted out. They may also be the catalyst for higher resolution displays - resolution as in dots per inch, not dots per screen. There are very few screens with 100dpi resolution, to make handwriting look good you need about 200dpi minimum.
I suspect that the killer app for these PCs is to have something you can surf the web on while watching tv. After that, taking notes in a meeting.
I have also seen them used in a presentation, they are pretty impressive used this way, you can draw on the slides to direct attention to one part or another.
It should not take that much to get Linux up on one of the devices, but making the result work well is likely to be a lot of work.
Another issue that is somewhat odd is that there does not appear to be an IBM tablet PC yet. Somewhat odd when you consider that IBM has been plugging this idea as assiduously as Gates.
No, but you could cast the sections on site in place easily enough, that would allow for much more flexibility. Precast sections are a very expensive option.
You could also save a lot of money by adding in steel beams etc at strategic points.
Like you can build a wooden house youself and it is likely to stay up. But if you want to do anything fancy you are likely to save a lot of money by going to a specialist architect. If you want to build stuff under ground you should see a civil engineer.
I am less worried about Salon per se as I am the fact that the US media is ridiculously biased towards the right. Case in point right wing pundits get hours of airtime to discuss their 'liberal media' fantasies while liberal complaints of bias are never reported outside the few liberal outlets.
The conservatives have an entire network and 24 hour news station. Can anyone honestly claim that there is a liberal network that treats conservatives the way Fox treats liberals?
I suspect that Salon will stay in business, but most likely because some liberal billionaire will fund it. But then again this is exactly how Cato, Heritage Institute and racks of conservative publications stay afloat.
It would be much better if publications could operate with reader support rather than handouts from billionaires, left or right. Before the right gets too happy with Murdoch and Fox they should probably look abroad and note that he regularly switches sides according to his commercial interests. The UK Conservatives thought that they had him in their pocket, how wrong they were!
The one bright spot is Google news which has for me replaced the 6 or 7 news spots I generally read as a portal. With Google I can see instantly what the world press is saying about a topic - not just the insular US media view. I suspect that in time Google will challenge the power of the Washington Post and New York Times to set the agenda. So next election we might just hear as much about Bush's draft dodging, AWOL and DUI incidents as imagined 'lies' about visiting Texas fires with the head of FEMA rather than the deputy head. We might even hear someone state that the smirking chimp has not only broken his campaign promises on practically every issue of substance except those at the top of the list for the extreeme right but that he never had the slightest intention to keep his commitments on the environment, health or balancing the budget.
There are parts of London where the ground rents are still priced in pepper corns.
At one time pepper being a valuable spice worth more than its weight in gold was used as currency. So a peppercorn is still legal tender in the UK and other common law countries.
As such a peppercorn is commonly used as a rent in cases where land is essentially being gifted but for various reasons cannot be given or sold. For example Christ Church College Oxford is build on land owned by Christ Church, given to them under a covenant that prevents sale. So the land is actually leased to CCC on a 499 year lease with a rent (due to expire soon!). I don't know the amount in the CCC case but in similar transactions a peppercorn per year is used.
Does not actually help at all. Basically there is no value to the dot unless the TLDs under it are also up. If someone can take out the root they can take out dotCOM, dotNET and probably anything else they choose.
The major TLDs are replicated many times with very sophisticated and comprehensive setups that are considerably more robust than the various ad hoc proposals being made to replace them. Bernstein's suggestion of using USENET being a particularly clueless example. In the first place USENET is not even reachable as a general purpose infrastructure, secondly the architecture is exceptionally vulnerable to DoS. One compromised node could bring down the whole USENET. The only reason that people don't attack it is that it simply isn't important enough, use it to distrivbute the root zone and you make it a target.
What we should really do is can ICANN and simply open up the root zone for registrations at a reasonable rate (i.e. $500, not $50,000). The dotCOM infrastructure can easily be scaled to handle the load. The registration fee would allow for up front verification of trademark claims. There could be a rational complaints procedure based on prior review, registrations in the TLD would be subject to a 12 month public comment & objection period before being activated. Failure to complain during that comment period would result in a strong presumption in favor of the registrant. Registration of a TLD would automatically block further registrations in the other TLD zones at the option of the cc operators.
And Linux would be what? a trully innovative implementation of a 30 year old operating system using the same coding techniques.
The whole industry is the same. Lotus didn't invent the spreadsheet, Oracle didn't invent SQL, Apple didn't invent the windows and mouse GUI, Linus didn't invent UNIX. Most of the ideas in UNIX are taken from Multics.
Actually we wrote the specs for the Web originally in HTML, the RFC looked like crap in comparison.
If the standard for HTTP was not so hard to read more people might have taken some notice of it.
Bit mapped displays have been standard for 10 years. Getting the 'plaintext' RFC format to print right is a nightmare, some of them have form feeds in at the end of the page, many do not. Kinda shitty for people who don't have a printer with US letter size paper.
My understanding is that Office 11 will have the ability to edit XML documents with XML markup. That is somewhat different from merely being able to save .doc files in a different syntax.
So for example I could define a DTD for IETF RFCs (or use the one defined by Marshall Rose), use Word to edit the document then put the result through a set of filters to generate HTML, pdf and the crappy plaintext (really nroff) format the IESG insists on.
Or I could use the same approach to edit my chapter of a book I am currently contributing to, the publishers have a 'word template' to produce the type of double spaced output that the reviewers like but the end result will be a properly typeset book. Clearly XML document management would be a better approach.
So actually the XML document format is not that interesting to me. The market is about to move beyond that point.
In reality, such certifications cost a lot of money and small companies like RedHat simply can't affort it (They don't make enough money of release X.Y during it's market-life, to justify such a operation)
No, Linux would fail evaluation because it does not meet many of the important security requirements. In particular there is no system security guide that describes how to securely configure the O/S in a single place.
Documentation is a large part of the C2 criteria. Linux simply fails that test. You cannot get certification for a third party guide for good reason, the document has not been reviewed by the engineers who wrote the code.
It is interesting to note how the Fox News style bias of slashdot on the security topic gets more hysterical by the month. Could it be because analyst firms like Aberdeen are predicting that Linux will become the poster chid for security, and no they don't think it is more secure.
So Microsoft get a security evaluation, the slashdot response is to publish the story three times to date, each time claiming that it is further proof that Microsoft's products are insecure. At what point do people ask whether the Slashdot editorial style has more to do with the commercial interests of their employer than an interest in honest journalism?
It isn't emulation, the next version of VMS is Windows NT. Basically VMS will become a WNT service in the same way POSIX and Windows are currently layered.
No idea how much this will cost, most likely quite a bit more than WNT. However VMS is available for non commercial use effectively for free. You just have to join DECUS user group - the US version is expensive but there are foreign chapters that are free.
It might be funny if there weren't so many people on slashdot who might actually think that way,.
It is like Ronald Reagan making a 'joke' about bombing Russia, it wasn't funny because lots of people really did think he was a senile fool who might do something like that.
I have to think that the Hurd is a case of following the fashion rather than evaluating the microkernel technology on its merits.
There are lots of folk out there who will blather on at great length about the merits of kernel design for absolutely no other reason than they think it makes them look clever.
I have not done anything at the O/S level since writing one ten years ago (unless you count the Web as an O/S). At that time Mach was flavor of the month because OSF and Next had used it as the basis of their operating system and Cutler had used a lot of the concepts of Mach to design his follow on operating system to VMS. Then Rashid joined Cutler at Microsoft in a very high profile move.
So yes microkernels were flavor of the month ten years ago. However the reason why they were flavor of the month had more to do with the politics and problems at the time.
OSF was trying to build a kernel quickly to compete with System V. Microsoft was building Windows NT to get to market as fast as possible. Microkernels were touted as the equivalent of RISC in CPUs, a design that allowed for shorter development time and hence faster to market.
Microsoft had another issue, they wanted to be able to emulate other O/S. In particular Posix so they could sell in the federal market. They also wanted to be able to migrate VMS to run on WNT at a later date as a subsystem. This is actually in the works now and will take place when HP transitions from Alpha to Itanium on the high end server line. One of the reasons Microsoft was keen to do this is that Cutler and his principal staff had left Dec after Dec cancelled the Prism project, Cutler's objective stated at the time was to make Dec have to pay for the O/S they could have had for free. At the time Dec was bigger than Microsoft.
There are advantages to microkernels, but the NT design has not been pure microkernel for some time. In order to get acceptable performance on early hardware they had to allow the display drivers to run in kernel mode.
The problem that I think will prevent HURD ever working is that to build a real O/S you have to really understand the reasons behind the principles you follow and break them when necessary. RMS is unfortunately a prisoner of many dogmatic beliefs which once fixed he simply will not abandon regardless of the evidence.
Linus may or may not have known what he was doing when he had the argument with Andy Tannenbaum, but he made the right decision. Andy has written a lot of good books that are widely used as text books, I don't know if people like Cutler, Rashid, Hoare and Co would rate him as being in the front rank. It is the same situation in most fields, everyone has heard of Bruce Schneier, fewer have heard of Ron Rivest and only people in the field tend to know names like Paul Kocher (SSL 3.0, the one that works), Butler Lampson (ACLS, lotsa stuff), Clark (end to end principle), Bellovin (firewalls), Schiller (IETF Security Area director).
Oftopic: Mark Goldston, CEO of United Online (Juno/blue light) is a clueless dweeb, he just tried to tell Mark Haynes on CNBC that cable modem router boxes are not a threat to his business as few people can afford them... Not only are WiFi cable routers $100 at frys they will be built into the cable modems soon. So either he is uninformed (unlikely) or another lying CEO.
Yes George, we know. Just get back to the ball game and don't try running the country, thats what Cheney and Rummy are for.
Actually the change happened mid way through the Sun marketing campaign. Didn't seem to stop Sun however...
Most folk would think that the folk who run the .com Registry are the dot in dot com.
Not really, I was the editor.
However its a bit worrying that a spec whos entire reason for existing is cross-authentication between two or more different sets of Web Services does not make encryption part of its core.
Not at all. I was working on the WS-Security specification with Microsoft and IBM at the same time as I was editing SAML. The SAML group anticipated that WS-Security would be proposed as soon as the SOAP 1.2 specification started to stabilize.
Nah, it was actually broken and the PR flacks of Certicom claimed it was brute forced.
There is no collection of computing power anywhere on this planet that comes close to breaking a 109 bit key of any algorithm by brute force.
The EC attack requires a considerable amount of computing power but that does not mean the search is 'brute force'. Brute force is a very specical term that means that every single possible key is tried in turn. The expected time taken to break a 110 bit key with brute force attack is thus exactly double the time for a 109 bit attack.
EC is nowhere near that secure, in fact no public key crypto system can be. This attack calls into question the claim that 168 bit certicom keys are as secure as the 1024 bit RSA keys they are commonly compared to.
If you want to reduce the size of the XML messages I suggest that you use a more efficient XML encoding rather than a compression algorithm.
A compression algorithm such as LZW takes entire documents and makes them smaller, this is highly efficient in terms of space but computationally intensive. Decompression typically requires the whole message or at least a substantial part of it to be read before decompression can begin.
Finaly, the problem is not that "is complex enough that nobody tends to parse it right." ASN.1 is a classical example of a good idea that was butchered in committee. The most half baked example of which being the DER encoding rules which are simply derranged. There is no 'tends' about it, no two full scale ASN.1 tools I have used can be relied on to interoperate. Some fail to interoperate with themselves.