a reason you don't see it on your local PBS affiliate any more. It's too damned expensive. And the price never went back down even though Dr. Who's existence on US TV is nearly nonexistant.
The BBC now has its own TV channel in the US - BBC America. When ATT called me up to try to get me to switch to digital cable they led their pitch with BBC America. Of course I have had Dish TV for that purpose for years (with PVR).
Dr Who has appeared on BBC America in the past and given the number of episodes they have and the time to fill it is likely to appear again. The price that PBS was paying was ludicrously low, in many cases $50 an episode, the BBC can make a much better return by marketting its product itself.
The other reason that the prices of BBC programs have been going up is that the actors have renegotiated their deal on repeat fees to include foreign markets. The BBC persuaded Equity that it will eventually turn BBC America into a 'must carry' cable channel which would give it a revenue equivalent to that of CNN. So Equity was prepared to take a lower up front pay raise in return for repeat fees on the US network.
Well, I agree that it's annoying, but as much as I hate to admit it I can sort of see the logic for Region encoding for films . I still don't like it, but I see the logic.
The purpose of region encoding, from start to finish was to support differential pricing. The story about movie releases is a smokescreen. If the industry execs. stated that the purpose of zone encoding was to allow them to maintain DVD prices in Europe that were double those in the US they would end up in jail.
In fact they may still end up with a huge fine. The EU commission is investigating the DVD zone encoding scam and unlike the US regulators they are not easily bought off with Enron sized campaign contributions.
There is no "authoratative" version of the story. Douglas Adams kept making small changes to it every time it was published in a new medium. Even different BBC radio broadcasts were slightly different. I remember reading somewhere that he did this deliberately just to mess with the fans' heads, but I can't locate the reference
When he spoke at Oxford he said it was because he got bored writing the same story over again.
One change in the radio series was the change of the name of the worst poet from Niel Milne-Johnson (Adam's ex-roommate who wrote poetry) to Alice Jennings. His friend thought that being known for writing poetry worse than Vogon would be bad for his career.
Do you know how many Americans live in gutters and under bridges, while our president has already taken two months of vacation in his first year in office?
The more time Govenor Bush spends on holiday and the less time he spends in the Whitehouse the better.
The less time he spends working out new schemes to give his cronies corporate welfare and tax breaks the better. His idea of a stimulus bill is giving $254 million tax breaks to Enron and its ilk, even though they haven't paid tax for 4 out of the past 5 years.
Marxism evolved into communism on the one hand, and socialism on the other hand. Communism has not been a great success, partly
Socialism existed long before Karl Marx. The main influence on Socialism was Robert Owen who was the first capitalist mill owner to realise that making people work 14 hours a day for a pittance might be sub-optimal.
Marx's influence on 'Marxism' is probably less than his influence on capitalism. Lenin reinvented Marxism to the extent that their names were hyphenated together 'Marxist-Leninism', which is to say he the influence of Marx on the USSR was similar to that of Christ on the Catholic church under the Borgias.
Marx's influence on capitalism was profound. In the first place he scared victorian society into social reforms by conving them that the alternative was revolution on the French model. Secondly, Marx provided one of the earliest explanations of how capitalism works. It is not unusual to hear some loony right wing Conservative senator unwittingly repeat a Marxist theory.
Che left Cuba was because he felt that the principle "no man shoudl have two coats until..." wasnt really being followed
Che left Cuba because he was a meglomaniac nutcase who was unsatisfied with being revolutionary number two and would prefer to rule south and central America (at least).
Che did not have the opportunity to demnostrate how many overcoats he would wear because the US knew his plans in advance and were waiting for him with a bunch of Marines and some local troops there to take the credit. It is most likely that Castro himself tipped of the US because Che alive was a liability, Che dead could be made a martyr. All the local troops involved in the operation were subsequently assasinated.
If there was fault for the attack it was because the FBI Director spent too much time and effort trying to ram crypto laws through congress and too little monitoring terrorists. The anti-terrorism budget trippled under Clinton, in large part in response to the first WTC attack, the Cole and Embassy bombings.
The administration might have had a better chance of getting the crypto policy they wanted but for the history of Hoover's abuse of office. The FBI has never come to terms with the fact that the concerns that the FBI might abuse the intercept powers they demanded were legitimate. Hoover's diservice to democracy was two-fold. First he attacked democracy directly by attacking democratic values, using the power of his office to persecute his political opponents, he even had Charlie Chaplin exiled for the 'crime' of satirizing him. Second Hoover attacked democracy indirectly, by abusing the powers of the state he made it necessary to curtail them. Having abused those powers in the past, the state cannot use them now that they might be necessary to defend democracy.
Win2K uses DES, which is notoriously vulnerable to today's raw CPU power and dedicated, custom-built machines. [eff.org]
DES is not 'notoriously vulnerable', it can be broken by a well financed and tecnically adept adversary, but it is not a negligible degree of protection. The weakened 40 bit crypto used in SSL can be cracked with readilly available resources however.
The point that everyone appears to be missing is that export of W2K to Taleban controlled Afghanistan was illegal. If the Taleban can get hold of illegal copies of W2K they can get hold of illegal crypto upgrades.
Al-Quaeda/Bin Laden operatives are not the crime geniuses the US government say they are. As a matter of fact, they appear as pretty incompetent to me.
That is not unusual, in fact it is the rule. Terrorist movements are founded by fruitcakes for fruitcakes. Bin Laden had the somewhat bizare idea that restaging Pearl Harbor would cause them to withdraw from Saudi Arabia and let him conduct a coup. There were at least six major Al Qaeda operations planned during the Clinton Presidency that were foiled.
Incidentally it is somewhat hard to credit GOP claims that the military has been decimated under Clinton when that same military was able to conquer Afghanistan in a matter of weeks with only a fraction of its strength. The last time Afghanistan was conquered it was Ghangis Khan doing the conquering.
How can the parent post be modded down as redundant when it is the 2nd post made? That just makes no sense.
Perhaps because the question is so obvious it hardly needs to be stated.
The IDE controller/emulator in the CF card is almost certainly many times faster and more powerful than the Apple II.
Still I can see a reason for building a device like that. The Apple ][ disk drives were 5 1/4" and sloooooow. Maintaining them is tricky and the media is rapidly reaching its sell by date. The interface would be worth it simply to be able to take a library of Apple ][ floppies and read them onto a modern media.
The apple II might be somewhat defunct, but there are still important bits of data stored on Apple II disks, like experimental results, audit reports and the like. The kind of information that you simply don't want to lose. Unless perhaps your accountants are you know who and your tax strategy consists of forming 861 shell companies and making large campaign contributions...
I thought that the Kerberos embrace-and-extend attack was protected as trade secret distributed with a non-disclosure EULA [as part of an open-source-developer-contaimination strategy]. No patents involved.
There is a clickwrap agreement on the document that states that the mechanism is IP of Microsoft. I asked one of the engineers why they didn't use a patent, they said they had and did I want to license it.
Apple did not STEAL anything from Parc. They PURCHASED the rights to Parc's ideas to augment their existing GUI. Parc made money on the deal. Of course it was nothing compared to what it was worth, but...
However they got it the fact remains Apple had no right to claim control over the use of the technology by others. Nor for that matter did Xerox since they never took out the patents.
The whole Apple IP strategy was FUD from the start, using copyright rather than a patent to attempt to protect a design. But they managed to scare off the software houses from supporting the Atari machine.
Read http://www.seasip.demon.co.uk/Gem/History/gem1.htm l. It outlines why Apple sued Atari over GEM/1. Basically, they just copied many interface features from the original Mac: disks on the desktop, trash on the desktop, even down to how icons and the toolbar were shaded.
Bullcrap on your bullshit.
Apple stole the basic ideas from Parc. The GEM lawsuit was pure intimidation. Apple calculated that they could monoplolize the GUI market with aggressive lawsuits. Apple sued Microsoft over Windows even though it looks nothing like MAC.
In the end the lawsuit strategy ended up almost destroying Apple. The management got so fat lazy and complacent that they thought they had the GUI market in perpetuity. They invested research dollars in practically anything other than their core O/S, Dylan, Newton you name it, but not multi tasking or memory protection or a decent TCP/IP stack. They did not believe it was necessary
I have read the report. The BBC article is very misleading.
It certainly does not claim that Microsoft is responsible for most security issues. If it had I would have expected Butler Lampson to have resigned from the board. It is not usual for NAS reports to target particular companies. It is not likely that David Clark would attack Butler in that way given that they are both LCS computing profs.
The statement about Microsoft is actually introduced from other sources but in such a way that the casual reader assumes it was a recomendation from the report. The only occurrence of the string 'Microsoft' in the text is Butler's accreditation.
Likewise I find it hard to find any recomendations. The majority of the report is simply a post 9-11 rehash of three previous reports by the same board. The nearest the report comes to suggesting legislation is:
Consider legislative responses to the failure of existing incentives to cause the market to respond adequately to the security challenge. Possible options include steps that would increase the exposure of software and system vendors and system operators to liability for system breaches and mandated reporting of security breaches that could threaten critical societal functions
That is quite a way from endorsing legislation, which is hardly surprising given the makeup of the panel.
It doesn't matter who "governs" OpenGL. All Microsoft has to do to kill it now is refuse to license their 3D patents to any hardware vendor who chooses to make OpenGL drivers instead of DirectX.
Microsoft does not have a history of using software patents to block rivals. Unlike Apple for example who used a copyright theory to block other companies attempts to use the Xerox-Parc GUI interface. Apple failed to intimidate Microsoft, but they broke Atari whose GEM O/S had a far better user interface as well as multi-tasking.
Using blocking patents is not a logical strategy for Microsoft. In the first place it might well involve an anti-trust violation, particularly now that the courts have rulled that Microsoft is a monopoly. Most companies can refuse to grant patent licenses on whatever grounds they like, monopolies are considerably more restricted.
The main strategic reason not to use patents as blocking tactics is that there is little point when you have 95% of a market.
The only patent I can think of offhand that MSFT uses in a blocking fashion is the Kerberos extension patent. They make sure that people know that the technology is patented however.
I can see Microsoft using the patents in several ways. One would be simply to stop someone else buying them and launching a suit. Patent suits are cheap to file and expensive to defend. Another reason is simply to have ammo to fire back if they were sued by a competitor.
Probably the best reason for Microsoft to buy the patents however is simply for advertising, to project itself as a market leader in the 3D space as the successor to SGI. Another reason might be to enhance future XBOX versions (although chances are that Microsoft Sony and Nintendo will come to some reciprocal licensing deal).
Incidentally if SGI is selling the patent portfolio I doubt that a sale of their other assets can be far behind. It is pretty much their crown jewels.
The restrictions that MSFT might well make on open source use of technology they own the patents to would be requiring reciprocal licenses and prohibiting what they call viral licenses. The reciprocal license issue is necessary simply to maintain the 'defensive' aspect of the patent. RMS will get real tweaked about prohibiting viral licenses, but so what?
The point that folk seem to miss is that the root name server IP addresses are hard coded into the infrastructure. To change the root servers you have to either wait for everyone to redeploy BIND or get an address reassigned somehow. There is a hard limit of 13 servers that is set by the length of an ethernet packet, the size of the records and the need to guarantee that the packets don't fragment.
Reassigning a root server address is hard because the operator likely has other machines in the address block whose numbers would also have to change.
The EU concern is not irrational, it is pretty wierd that the root zone is essentially a volunteer effort given that the costs are not negligible and the responsibility immense.
Against this however there is a major political issue at stake. The root operators are in effect the arbiters of the DNS. If ICANN gets too big for its boots they are a check on it.
The other issue is that there are very few companies that could credibly manage the root zone on a contractual basis. It is one thing to run a server on a volunteer basis, quite another to provide a service guarantee.
One thing that is in the pipe that may well change some of the concerns, in particular anycast addressing which allows multiple servers to sit on the same IP address. The packets are routed to the 'nearest' machine. That will allow the deploment of additional root servers. It will also address some of the denial of service concerns.
And I also think that DNS should have the ability to have a PORT record so when doing a DNS lookup the person looking me up can be directed to service ports within my IP so www.foo.com can live on port 8090 for instance because cable modem companies sometimes block port 80.
Been there, done that. It is called the SRV record and it works in the same way as the email MX record.
Not supported inany of the browsers yet, but is used extensively in W2K for other purposes.
Thats ~3150 queries per second. I imagine a good chunk of that 8 gigs is ram used to create sockets and threads that do the lookups - I also suspect that is's a heavy SMP machine, each processor with it's own ram. If there were, say, 32 processors, each with 256 megs of ram, and each processor ran (X) threads to handle requests...
Err no, none of the memory is used for sockets and none for threads.
DNS is a UDP protocol and there is no good reason to talk TCP to a root name server so those requests would be firewalled off to a different node.
As a UDP protocol DNS is stateless and there is not a good reason to use threads. Ungranted requests can be cached in the network interface drivers. At least that is the way the servers running BIND function. I have not read the Nominet code but I doubt it is different.
I don't know why Paul would have so much RAM on his box. The dotcom zone is many gigabytes but the root zone only has 200 records.
If you push the reinstall rate back from 1 per node per year to one per node per 3 years (or even less with something like Debian) you save about $120 per node per annum in admin time alone, to say nothing of the value of user's time.
If in the process the user is unable to use their favorite word processor any longer they are unlikely to consider the saving worthwhile.
Having installed Linux a few times I am quite amazed that people would make anything as ridiculous as a lower admin cost for it. Unless you take the precaution of aging the machine six months or so the chances are you end up using buggy as heck device drivers or writing your own.
First of all, last year my city updated all of the computers at the intermediate and high schools to Windows 2000. There are roughly 75-125 computers in the highschool alone. About 75-90 in the intermediate school. And then they added Office 2000 to those computers. Visual Studio 6.0 was later purchased for the roughly 40 computers in the Highschool computer lab.
All at heavily subsidized education pricing, the student price for Office is $125, volume pricing would cut that further. So you are talking $7.5K per school in a computer lab that probably cost $1K per machine - $75K total.
On top of that, the adult education system (this is state level, but it's still somewhat relevant) recently spent close to $3 million dollars to have a new database system developed
My point exactly, commodity software is rarely a major cost in an enterprise budget. A single bespoke or semi-custom application eats up budget at an amazing rate.
And that's just the school system. Pretty soon they're going to be upgraded to Windows XP since they want to use the OS that will be most likely featured on new computers. Now add to that the cost of upgrading the computers used by government jobs and you can see that things are really adding up. For a much larger city I would imagine the costs to be astronomical.
These costs only seem large by comparison to personal finances. A town of 40,000 with a property tax of $500 a head has a budget of $20,000,000 at its disposal.
The cost savings of open source only appear great because the old trick of only counting one side of the ledger is used while multiplying across a large number of users.
In fact the cost of switching software is enormous. Try telling a Mac user that they have to use Windows and listen to the whines. Don't believe the slashdot ideology that claims that people are just itching to be rid of microsoft. Fact is that the vast majority of those users are just as happy with their O/S as Mac users are.
Try to force what they are likely to see as crappy open source alternatives on those users and you will have a revolt. The UNIX command line may be regarded as the work of divine providence by slashdot readers, but face it, it is an ugly kludge.
By the way, did I tell you that I am a former BIG 6 (now 5) CPA?
No, I gathered that from the unspeakable air of smug self satisfaction.
My business is computer security and I have been an adviser to several American Bar Association working groups in the area. The question of document archiving, recovery etc. is something I am very familiar with. In particular the situation in which a document shredding policy may be legal or illegal.
The position the lawyers have consistently advanced is that companies should have a written document retention and destruction policy and stick to it. Otherwise they are at risk of being accused of destroying evidence in precisely this situation.
If a document is destroyed in accordance with a specific policy then it is rarely going to be considered destruction of evidence. Situations in which $86 billion companies fold overnight after accounting irregularities are discovered are the type of rare occurrence that is likely to result in an exception. If it emerges that the person who ordered the destruction had knowledge of or reason to expect an SEC or other investigation the amount of doo-doo they are in is very great.
By the way, they did confiscate all of the laptops used on the audit but if AA is smart they use a good shredder and nothing incriminating will be found.
I find it fascinating that you assume that AA were involved in crookery and that the best thing to do was destroy the evidence.
In fact if we look at US Political scandals the most common thing someone is convicted of is destroying evidence or lying to an investigator. Nixon, Ollie North, Meese, even Clinton.
What is amazing is that they don't seem to learn. If Bush gets into hot water over the Enron affair it is unlikely because he took $550,000 in campaign bribes and pushed through energy policies at the behest of Enron's management, for example allowing them to manipulate prices in the California electricity market. Instead Bush will have problems because the administration tried to use executive privillege to cover up the Enron/Cheney discussions, Bush tried to claim that Enron supported Richardson against him in the Texas governors race (Enron gave money to both candidates, Bush recieved far more), and Fliecher has difficulty keeping the number of contacts between Enron and the Administration straght (3 or 14?). It is unlikely in the extreeme that Bush would have any knowledge of or participation in the events that caused the collapse of Enron, but should the press smell a cover up they will treat him in the same way they treated Clinton.
The US polity loves nothing better than the investigation of a coverup. Whether or not you think the charges have merit depends on whether you are a Dem or a Repub. But it is hard for anyone to claim that an 86 billion dollar company can collapse within 3 weeks and there is nobody at fault.
What AA has suddenly discovered is that they can be held accountable to the public for the audit work they do as Chartered PUBLIC Accountants. They will be the focus of the investigation until such time as the GWB pol numbers descend from the stratosphere.
Agreed. I personally believe that the cost of re-education will be lower than the amount saved by switching to free software.
That is very unlikely since the chances are that the city already has bought much of its software.
I think the guy has no clue as to the relevance of open software to a town council or the amount of influence a junior councilor is likely to have.
The division of responsibilities between city and state vary. Even so it is unlikely that a town of 40K would have more than 200 odd administrators. sure they may have a lot of police, teachers etc, but people in that type of job are unlikely to use very much software and that they do use is likely to be chosen for compatibility with county, state or federal systems.
The running of the executive office is typically the responsibility of the mayor or an appointed chief executive. Either way that individual is not going to allow you to dictate their IT policy. If that person says that the cost is $1000 per employee to retrain them or that the open software option does not meet their needs it will be near impossible to persuade the rest of the council to override them, and if they did their motive is unlikely to be commitment to open source.
More likely however is that the decision on which software to buy is made on an individual basis. If a secretary knows how to use word they get her a copy of word.
However, you'd better be prepared to back that up with a good plan and some hard figures.
A good place to start would be finding out how much the town spends each year on software and how much of that is on applications that have open source alternatives.
The overwhelming probability is that most of the spending dollars on software go on low volume niche type software that would only be relevant to councils. Public sector accounting packages, pupil progress monitoring packages, police evidence management systems, court clerk management systems. The council that size might buy a hundred copies of Office a year for $40K but an accounting package might easily cost $100K plus the same again for installation, customization etc.
While 40K might seem a lot to you it is not a major item in a city budget. If the only plank in your platform is that you can save the city 40K you should probably be directed to the suggestions box rather than the council chamber.
The guy appears to share the somewhat arrogant assumption of many voters that the state is granting people a great favor by allowing them to work for considerably less than the going rate in industry. The choice of software has the greatest effect on the employees work environment. Why should some open source monomaniac decide that they have to use something different because their current software offends his religion?
If open source has any validity it is about choice, not compulsion. The cost of software is irrelevant compared to the cost of employing the person who uses it.
If you actually want to save the council money a much better approach is to look into opportunities to cut costs by outsourcing IT functions. Most companies outsource their payroll because it is cheaper to let ADT work out all the fiddly tax laws than have someone build that experience in house. Many companies outsource management of their email systems, it is cheaper for a company like USA.net to have 50 admins working 24x365 managing 500 companies email than it is for any of those companies to have a half time admin during business hours only.
The problem for small enterprises (city governments being typical) is that they are simply too small to realise the savings of scale that large companies can.
The cost of software is really not where the pain is. The Total Cost of Ownership and Return On Investment are the metrics used.
It will never happen. The type of stuff they are destroying are superceded workpapers, review notes from managers, etc. If Congress says that can't destroy them then they would be stockpiling so much crap as to make the storage costs twice the costs of the audit itself
These are electronic documents. The audit process creates far less paper than a drug application and document management systems already exist for that. The entire Enron audit would fit on a single hard drive even if you store every version of every document without compression.
As for, destroying things in anticipation of a subpoena is so ridiculous that I had people laughing here. What's the purpose of a subpoena if you are supposed to comply before it is even issued?
The subpoena requires you to deliver the documents. Destruction of evidence is a criminal act in itself if done for the purpose of obstructing a likely investigation.
X10 has solutions to rebroadcast TV now, and the world seems to keep spinning
Not quite the same thing. With X10 you can watch the same channel as your neighbor. Not exactly a major threat. With a media jukebox sitting on the other end everyone in the street can access your video on demand service.
i thought we were past the "What will the neighbors think?!?" 1950's mentality. come on people, everyone watches porn anyway. why get embarassed if the neighbors find out?
I don't know about you but I am always embarrased when people see me acting in films.
Here in Cambridge MA porn is no biggie, if however your neighbors were to catch you watching the 700 club it would be social death unless you somehow persuaded them you were monitoring it to record eggregious instances of homophobia, racism or other bigotry.
What people don't realize is that it is common practice to destroy everything associated with an audit except for the final workpapers. That is unless, of course, they have been already under subpoena.
That particular practice is likely to undergo revision in the near future as the Enron scandal progresses. Andersson is in deep doo-doo after sending out a memo to shred all files related to Enron.
The problem in the Enron case is that prosecutors may decide that the memo was sent out in anticipation of a subpoena. That would be obstruction of justice.
I suspect that the response from Congress will be to require all company auditors to archive all information related to an audit for at least 7 years (the normal span for tax issues).
In the short term it is very likely that most of the files will actually be recovered. I am surprised that so few people missed out on the significance of the original article. The point is that you can delete the files in one place and still have copies cached in email and on backup tapes. That is how Ollie North got caught.
The best method of ensuring that material is deleted is to use a cryptographic file system which uses a per-file session key. Using that mechanism a file is irretrievably deleted once the per-file session key is overwritten.
If the cryptographic file system is properly configured it will be set to automatically overwrite the relevant disk blocks as part of the delete process. Preferably a multiple overwrite is used (all zeros, all ones, 1010, 0101) to make sure that the data cannot be read using an electron microscope, looking at the edges to the track boundary.
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC now has its own TV channel in the US - BBC America. When ATT called me up to try to get me to switch to digital cable they led their pitch with BBC America. Of course I have had Dish TV for that purpose for years (with PVR).
Dr Who has appeared on BBC America in the past and given the number of episodes they have and the time to fill it is likely to appear again. The price that PBS was paying was ludicrously low, in many cases $50 an episode, the BBC can make a much better return by marketting its product itself.
The other reason that the prices of BBC programs have been going up is that the actors have renegotiated their deal on repeat fees to include foreign markets. The BBC persuaded Equity that it will eventually turn BBC America into a 'must carry' cable channel which would give it a revenue equivalent to that of CNN. So Equity was prepared to take a lower up front pay raise in return for repeat fees on the US network.
The purpose of region encoding, from start to finish was to support differential pricing. The story about movie releases is a smokescreen. If the industry execs. stated that the purpose of zone encoding was to allow them to maintain DVD prices in Europe that were double those in the US they would end up in jail.
In fact they may still end up with a huge fine. The EU commission is investigating the DVD zone encoding scam and unlike the US regulators they are not easily bought off with Enron sized campaign contributions.
When he spoke at Oxford he said it was because he got bored writing the same story over again.
One change in the radio series was the change of the name of the worst poet from Niel Milne-Johnson (Adam's ex-roommate who wrote poetry) to Alice Jennings. His friend thought that being known for writing poetry worse than Vogon would be bad for his career.
The more time Govenor Bush spends on holiday and the less time he spends in the Whitehouse the better.
The less time he spends working out new schemes to give his cronies corporate welfare and tax breaks the better. His idea of a stimulus bill is giving $254 million tax breaks to Enron and its ilk, even though they haven't paid tax for 4 out of the past 5 years.
Socialism existed long before Karl Marx. The main influence on Socialism was Robert Owen who was the first capitalist mill owner to realise that making people work 14 hours a day for a pittance might be sub-optimal.
Marx's influence on 'Marxism' is probably less than his influence on capitalism. Lenin reinvented Marxism to the extent that their names were hyphenated together 'Marxist-Leninism', which is to say he the influence of Marx on the USSR was similar to that of Christ on the Catholic church under the Borgias.
Marx's influence on capitalism was profound. In the first place he scared victorian society into social reforms by conving them that the alternative was revolution on the French model. Secondly, Marx provided one of the earliest explanations of how capitalism works. It is not unusual to hear some loony right wing Conservative senator unwittingly repeat a Marxist theory.
Che left Cuba because he was a meglomaniac nutcase who was unsatisfied with being revolutionary number two and would prefer to rule south and central America (at least).
Che did not have the opportunity to demnostrate how many overcoats he would wear because the US knew his plans in advance and were waiting for him with a bunch of Marines and some local troops there to take the credit. It is most likely that Castro himself tipped of the US because Che alive was a liability, Che dead could be made a martyr. All the local troops involved in the operation were subsequently assasinated.
The administration might have had a better chance of getting the crypto policy they wanted but for the history of Hoover's abuse of office. The FBI has never come to terms with the fact that the concerns that the FBI might abuse the intercept powers they demanded were legitimate. Hoover's diservice to democracy was two-fold. First he attacked democracy directly by attacking democratic values, using the power of his office to persecute his political opponents, he even had Charlie Chaplin exiled for the 'crime' of satirizing him. Second Hoover attacked democracy indirectly, by abusing the powers of the state he made it necessary to curtail them. Having abused those powers in the past, the state cannot use them now that they might be necessary to defend democracy.
Win2K uses DES, which is notoriously vulnerable to today's raw CPU power and dedicated, custom-built machines. [eff.org]
DES is not 'notoriously vulnerable', it can be broken by a well financed and tecnically adept adversary, but it is not a negligible degree of protection. The weakened 40 bit crypto used in SSL can be cracked with readilly available resources however.
The point that everyone appears to be missing is that export of W2K to Taleban controlled Afghanistan was illegal. If the Taleban can get hold of illegal copies of W2K they can get hold of illegal crypto upgrades.
Al-Quaeda/Bin Laden operatives are not the crime geniuses the US government say they are. As a matter of fact, they appear as pretty incompetent to me.
That is not unusual, in fact it is the rule. Terrorist movements are founded by fruitcakes for fruitcakes. Bin Laden had the somewhat bizare idea that restaging Pearl Harbor would cause them to withdraw from Saudi Arabia and let him conduct a coup. There were at least six major Al Qaeda operations planned during the Clinton Presidency that were foiled.
Incidentally it is somewhat hard to credit GOP claims that the military has been decimated under Clinton when that same military was able to conquer Afghanistan in a matter of weeks with only a fraction of its strength. The last time Afghanistan was conquered it was Ghangis Khan doing the conquering.
Perhaps because the question is so obvious it hardly needs to be stated.
The IDE controller/emulator in the CF card is almost certainly many times faster and more powerful than the Apple II.
Still I can see a reason for building a device like that. The Apple ][ disk drives were 5 1/4" and sloooooow. Maintaining them is tricky and the media is rapidly reaching its sell by date. The interface would be worth it simply to be able to take a library of Apple ][ floppies and read them onto a modern media.
The apple II might be somewhat defunct, but there are still important bits of data stored on Apple II disks, like experimental results, audit reports and the like. The kind of information that you simply don't want to lose. Unless perhaps your accountants are you know who and your tax strategy consists of forming 861 shell companies and making large campaign contributions...
There is a clickwrap agreement on the document that states that the mechanism is IP of Microsoft. I asked one of the engineers why they didn't use a patent, they said they had and did I want to license it.
However they got it the fact remains Apple had no right to claim control over the use of the technology by others. Nor for that matter did Xerox since they never took out the patents.
The whole Apple IP strategy was FUD from the start, using copyright rather than a patent to attempt to protect a design. But they managed to scare off the software houses from supporting the Atari machine.
Bullcrap on your bullshit.
Apple stole the basic ideas from Parc. The GEM lawsuit was pure intimidation. Apple calculated that they could monoplolize the GUI market with aggressive lawsuits. Apple sued Microsoft over Windows even though it looks nothing like MAC.
In the end the lawsuit strategy ended up almost destroying Apple. The management got so fat lazy and complacent that they thought they had the GUI market in perpetuity. They invested research dollars in practically anything other than their core O/S, Dylan, Newton you name it, but not multi tasking or memory protection or a decent TCP/IP stack. They did not believe it was necessary
It certainly does not claim that Microsoft is responsible for most security issues. If it had I would have expected Butler Lampson to have resigned from the board. It is not usual for NAS reports to target particular companies. It is not likely that David Clark would attack Butler in that way given that they are both LCS computing profs.
The statement about Microsoft is actually introduced from other sources but in such a way that the casual reader assumes it was a recomendation from the report. The only occurrence of the string 'Microsoft' in the text is Butler's accreditation.
Likewise I find it hard to find any recomendations. The majority of the report is simply a post 9-11 rehash of three previous reports by the same board. The nearest the report comes to suggesting legislation is:
Consider legislative responses to the failure of existing incentives to cause the market to respond adequately to the security challenge. Possible options include steps that would increase the exposure of software and system vendors and system operators to liability for system breaches and mandated reporting of security breaches that could threaten critical societal functions
That is quite a way from endorsing legislation, which is hardly surprising given the makeup of the panel.
Microsoft does not have a history of using software patents to block rivals. Unlike Apple for example who used a copyright theory to block other companies attempts to use the Xerox-Parc GUI interface. Apple failed to intimidate Microsoft, but they broke Atari whose GEM O/S had a far better user interface as well as multi-tasking.
Using blocking patents is not a logical strategy for Microsoft. In the first place it might well involve an anti-trust violation, particularly now that the courts have rulled that Microsoft is a monopoly. Most companies can refuse to grant patent licenses on whatever grounds they like, monopolies are considerably more restricted. The main strategic reason not to use patents as blocking tactics is that there is little point when you have 95% of a market.
The only patent I can think of offhand that MSFT uses in a blocking fashion is the Kerberos extension patent. They make sure that people know that the technology is patented however.
I can see Microsoft using the patents in several ways. One would be simply to stop someone else buying them and launching a suit. Patent suits are cheap to file and expensive to defend. Another reason is simply to have ammo to fire back if they were sued by a competitor.
Probably the best reason for Microsoft to buy the patents however is simply for advertising, to project itself as a market leader in the 3D space as the successor to SGI. Another reason might be to enhance future XBOX versions (although chances are that Microsoft Sony and Nintendo will come to some reciprocal licensing deal).
Incidentally if SGI is selling the patent portfolio I doubt that a sale of their other assets can be far behind. It is pretty much their crown jewels.
The restrictions that MSFT might well make on open source use of technology they own the patents to would be requiring reciprocal licenses and prohibiting what they call viral licenses. The reciprocal license issue is necessary simply to maintain the 'defensive' aspect of the patent. RMS will get real tweaked about prohibiting viral licenses, but so what?
Reassigning a root server address is hard because the operator likely has other machines in the address block whose numbers would also have to change.
The EU concern is not irrational, it is pretty wierd that the root zone is essentially a volunteer effort given that the costs are not negligible and the responsibility immense.
Against this however there is a major political issue at stake. The root operators are in effect the arbiters of the DNS. If ICANN gets too big for its boots they are a check on it.
The other issue is that there are very few companies that could credibly manage the root zone on a contractual basis. It is one thing to run a server on a volunteer basis, quite another to provide a service guarantee.
One thing that is in the pipe that may well change some of the concerns, in particular anycast addressing which allows multiple servers to sit on the same IP address. The packets are routed to the 'nearest' machine. That will allow the deploment of additional root servers. It will also address some of the denial of service concerns.
Been there, done that. It is called the SRV record and it works in the same way as the email MX record.
Not supported inany of the browsers yet, but is used extensively in W2K for other purposes.
It is very likely that the root node would run a stripped version of BIND. This is certainly done on some of the nodes.
Err no, none of the memory is used for sockets and none for threads.
DNS is a UDP protocol and there is no good reason to talk TCP to a root name server so those requests would be firewalled off to a different node.
As a UDP protocol DNS is stateless and there is not a good reason to use threads. Ungranted requests can be cached in the network interface drivers. At least that is the way the servers running BIND function. I have not read the Nominet code but I doubt it is different.
I don't know why Paul would have so much RAM on his box. The dotcom zone is many gigabytes but the root zone only has 200 records.
If in the process the user is unable to use their favorite word processor any longer they are unlikely to consider the saving worthwhile.
Having installed Linux a few times I am quite amazed that people would make anything as ridiculous as a lower admin cost for it. Unless you take the precaution of aging the machine six months or so the chances are you end up using buggy as heck device drivers or writing your own.
All at heavily subsidized education pricing, the student price for Office is $125, volume pricing would cut that further. So you are talking $7.5K per school in a computer lab that probably cost $1K per machine - $75K total.
On top of that, the adult education system (this is state level, but it's still somewhat relevant) recently spent close to $3 million dollars to have a new database system developed
My point exactly, commodity software is rarely a major cost in an enterprise budget. A single bespoke or semi-custom application eats up budget at an amazing rate.
And that's just the school system. Pretty soon they're going to be upgraded to Windows XP since they want to use the OS that will be most likely featured on new computers. Now add to that the cost of upgrading the computers used by government jobs and you can see that things are really adding up. For a much larger city I would imagine the costs to be astronomical.
These costs only seem large by comparison to personal finances. A town of 40,000 with a property tax of $500 a head has a budget of $20,000,000 at its disposal.
The cost savings of open source only appear great because the old trick of only counting one side of the ledger is used while multiplying across a large number of users.
In fact the cost of switching software is enormous. Try telling a Mac user that they have to use Windows and listen to the whines. Don't believe the slashdot ideology that claims that people are just itching to be rid of microsoft. Fact is that the vast majority of those users are just as happy with their O/S as Mac users are.
Try to force what they are likely to see as crappy open source alternatives on those users and you will have a revolt. The UNIX command line may be regarded as the work of divine providence by slashdot readers, but face it, it is an ugly kludge.
No, I gathered that from the unspeakable air of smug self satisfaction.
My business is computer security and I have been an adviser to several American Bar Association working groups in the area. The question of document archiving, recovery etc. is something I am very familiar with. In particular the situation in which a document shredding policy may be legal or illegal.
The position the lawyers have consistently advanced is that companies should have a written document retention and destruction policy and stick to it. Otherwise they are at risk of being accused of destroying evidence in precisely this situation.
If a document is destroyed in accordance with a specific policy then it is rarely going to be considered destruction of evidence. Situations in which $86 billion companies fold overnight after accounting irregularities are discovered are the type of rare occurrence that is likely to result in an exception. If it emerges that the person who ordered the destruction had knowledge of or reason to expect an SEC or other investigation the amount of doo-doo they are in is very great.
By the way, they did confiscate all of the laptops used on the audit but if AA is smart they use a good shredder and nothing incriminating will be found.
I find it fascinating that you assume that AA were involved in crookery and that the best thing to do was destroy the evidence.
In fact if we look at US Political scandals the most common thing someone is convicted of is destroying evidence or lying to an investigator. Nixon, Ollie North, Meese, even Clinton.
What is amazing is that they don't seem to learn. If Bush gets into hot water over the Enron affair it is unlikely because he took $550,000 in campaign bribes and pushed through energy policies at the behest of Enron's management, for example allowing them to manipulate prices in the California electricity market. Instead Bush will have problems because the administration tried to use executive privillege to cover up the Enron/Cheney discussions, Bush tried to claim that Enron supported Richardson against him in the Texas governors race (Enron gave money to both candidates, Bush recieved far more), and Fliecher has difficulty keeping the number of contacts between Enron and the Administration straght (3 or 14?). It is unlikely in the extreeme that Bush would have any knowledge of or participation in the events that caused the collapse of Enron, but should the press smell a cover up they will treat him in the same way they treated Clinton.
The US polity loves nothing better than the investigation of a coverup. Whether or not you think the charges have merit depends on whether you are a Dem or a Repub. But it is hard for anyone to claim that an 86 billion dollar company can collapse within 3 weeks and there is nobody at fault.
What AA has suddenly discovered is that they can be held accountable to the public for the audit work they do as Chartered PUBLIC Accountants. They will be the focus of the investigation until such time as the GWB pol numbers descend from the stratosphere.
That is very unlikely since the chances are that the city already has bought much of its software.
I think the guy has no clue as to the relevance of open software to a town council or the amount of influence a junior councilor is likely to have.
The division of responsibilities between city and state vary. Even so it is unlikely that a town of 40K would have more than 200 odd administrators. sure they may have a lot of police, teachers etc, but people in that type of job are unlikely to use very much software and that they do use is likely to be chosen for compatibility with county, state or federal systems.
The running of the executive office is typically the responsibility of the mayor or an appointed chief executive. Either way that individual is not going to allow you to dictate their IT policy. If that person says that the cost is $1000 per employee to retrain them or that the open software option does not meet their needs it will be near impossible to persuade the rest of the council to override them, and if they did their motive is unlikely to be commitment to open source.
More likely however is that the decision on which software to buy is made on an individual basis. If a secretary knows how to use word they get her a copy of word.
However, you'd better be prepared to back that up with a good plan and some hard figures.
A good place to start would be finding out how much the town spends each year on software and how much of that is on applications that have open source alternatives.
The overwhelming probability is that most of the spending dollars on software go on low volume niche type software that would only be relevant to councils. Public sector accounting packages, pupil progress monitoring packages, police evidence management systems, court clerk management systems. The council that size might buy a hundred copies of Office a year for $40K but an accounting package might easily cost $100K plus the same again for installation, customization etc.
While 40K might seem a lot to you it is not a major item in a city budget. If the only plank in your platform is that you can save the city 40K you should probably be directed to the suggestions box rather than the council chamber.
The guy appears to share the somewhat arrogant assumption of many voters that the state is granting people a great favor by allowing them to work for considerably less than the going rate in industry. The choice of software has the greatest effect on the employees work environment. Why should some open source monomaniac decide that they have to use something different because their current software offends his religion?
If open source has any validity it is about choice, not compulsion. The cost of software is irrelevant compared to the cost of employing the person who uses it.
If you actually want to save the council money a much better approach is to look into opportunities to cut costs by outsourcing IT functions. Most companies outsource their payroll because it is cheaper to let ADT work out all the fiddly tax laws than have someone build that experience in house. Many companies outsource management of their email systems, it is cheaper for a company like USA.net to have 50 admins working 24x365 managing 500 companies email than it is for any of those companies to have a half time admin during business hours only.
The problem for small enterprises (city governments being typical) is that they are simply too small to realise the savings of scale that large companies can.
The cost of software is really not where the pain is. The Total Cost of Ownership and Return On Investment are the metrics used.
These are electronic documents. The audit process creates far less paper than a drug application and document management systems already exist for that. The entire Enron audit would fit on a single hard drive even if you store every version of every document without compression.
As for, destroying things in anticipation of a subpoena is so ridiculous that I had people laughing here. What's the purpose of a subpoena if you are supposed to comply before it is even issued?
The subpoena requires you to deliver the documents. Destruction of evidence is a criminal act in itself if done for the purpose of obstructing a likely investigation.
Not quite the same thing. With X10 you can watch the same channel as your neighbor. Not exactly a major threat. With a media jukebox sitting on the other end everyone in the street can access your video on demand service.
I don't know about you but I am always embarrased when people see me acting in films.
Here in Cambridge MA porn is no biggie, if however your neighbors were to catch you watching the 700 club it would be social death unless you somehow persuaded them you were monitoring it to record eggregious instances of homophobia, racism or other bigotry.
That particular practice is likely to undergo revision in the near future as the Enron scandal progresses. Andersson is in deep doo-doo after sending out a memo to shred all files related to Enron.
The problem in the Enron case is that prosecutors may decide that the memo was sent out in anticipation of a subpoena. That would be obstruction of justice.
I suspect that the response from Congress will be to require all company auditors to archive all information related to an audit for at least 7 years (the normal span for tax issues).
In the short term it is very likely that most of the files will actually be recovered. I am surprised that so few people missed out on the significance of the original article. The point is that you can delete the files in one place and still have copies cached in email and on backup tapes. That is how Ollie North got caught.
The best method of ensuring that material is deleted is to use a cryptographic file system which uses a per-file session key. Using that mechanism a file is irretrievably deleted once the per-file session key is overwritten.
If the cryptographic file system is properly configured it will be set to automatically overwrite the relevant disk blocks as part of the delete process. Preferably a multiple overwrite is used (all zeros, all ones, 1010, 0101) to make sure that the data cannot be read using an electron microscope, looking at the edges to the track boundary.