Speaking as someone who, yes, has actually worked with the big iron...
The machine I worked on in the early 90s is still in the top 100 of the supercomputer charts (or would be if the compilers knew about it).
While a desktop Cray-1 can now be had at commodity prices the machine is now two decades old. The obsolescence rate is nowhere near as giddy as some would claim.
The really big iron tends to have a lifespan of about five years and is typically retired because the power consumption and maintenance costs favor a move to newer hardware. True supercomputers rarely fall victim to Moore's law. Even the KLAC machine discussed only barely qualifies as a supercomputer, 64 processors is at the low end of the scale. People have Web servers with that number of CPUs. True big iron starts with a few hundred processors and goes up to the tens of thousand.
If by working on the big iron you merely mean you used to use IBM 3090 class machines, then the joke is on you, those machines were often obsolete before they were manufactured. When I worked at one lab I had a desktop machine (first production run Alpha) that was considerably more powerful than the CPUs of the just-installed campus mainframe.
Fact is that many of the people buying 'big iron' in the 1980s and 1990s were incompetent. They bought machines that ran the O/S they knew, which often meant they bought obsolete IBM mainframes for applications where a ntwork of IBM PCs would have served far better. I spent quite a bit of time in institutions where wrestling control of the computing budget from an incompetent IT dept was a major issue. In fact the World Wide Web began at CERN in part as a result of such a struggle. Tim, bless him wanted the physicists to switch from the IBM mainframe CERN VM to use NeXTStep machines. One of the schemes that the CERN CN division had cooked up to force people to use the mainframe was to only make information such as the address book available on the IBM mainframe. Attempts to make it more widely available were treated much the same way that Napster was treated by the RIAA. The Web took off at CERN initially because you could access the address book from a workstation or from the VAX.
Very few mainframes were actually designed to provide fast processing. The IBM 3090 series was actually designed to perform transaction processing for banks. As a scientific CPU it offered tepid performance at a price arround 100 to 500 times the price of a high power workstation.
There are certain applications in which CPU cycles are still the limiting factor. Admittedly they are much smaller as a proportion of the whole than they were 10 years ago.
Quite, the problem with measuring super-computer performance is that every single machine in the class is highly optimised to a particular niche. That is the main rason they are so expensive compared to the components - large machines sell in the tens rather than the tens of thousands.
Anyone can build a machine with a really high processing performance. Just by a few thousand X boxes and plug them into the same ethernet cable. The real issue is how much communications bandwidth you have between the CPUs. Some problems require almost none - the 'trivial parallelism' problems like DEScrack and the mandelbrot set. In the 1980s we had a machine that had 1000 20MHz processors that could bang out mandelbrot sets like anything (using the goofy algorithm, not the modern optimizations). But is wasn't much use for anything else.
The problem with competitions for supercomputers is that they rarely measure the communication bandwidth because (a) its hard to do and (b) the effect on performance is highly algorithm dependent.
As for the KLAT's ingenious topology, I once did some research in the area myself when it was the fashion. I tried using minimum diameter graphs which should in theory have been better than a plain taurus. However as with Bill Dally at Cal Tech I concluded that the additional cost of exotic topology (more than double the price) was not really justified by the performance advantage (about 10-30% on a good day).
Certainly the many companies that set up to build transputer based processing clusters with high performance switches inside did not seem to go anywhere much.
Using a high performance router at the core of a processing cluster might be interesting. They are pretty cheap these days and are headed cheaper.
Obviously you have not been watching the shows carefully enough. Wear a red shirt and you were certain to get zapped by whatever the beastie of the week happened to be.
At $5 an episode there was no way they could afford to risk wearing the red shirts
The second, more general point, is that an e-commerce company must have the fleixibility to change clearing back-ends without impacting the customer. Using the gateway/bank's public key to encrypt card numbers prior to storage would lock us in to this one provider.
Who said anything about choosing the bank? The whole point of the Signio Payflow scheme (now VeriSign payment gateway) is you can connect up to any acquirer bank in north america. Most customers then use the fact to negotiate lower rates because lowering the switching costs to close to zero means that they now have pricing power.
Under the old frame relay schemes you soon became captive to a particular bank or acquirer because none of them used the same implementation of the alleged standard.
If you can't choose your gateway you should perhaps tell your management that you don't have the necessary control to fulfill your job. We are talking about the region of $400/yr flat fee here for the basic connect.
The situation you describe suggests that you are already largely locked in to a particular back end.
This is conceptually a simple problem, but one that can get a little complex to build. One issue that many posters don not appear to have considered is that many merchants interchange agreements specificallly prohibit billing regular charges without specific authorizations. So first check that you have the right language in your contract.
The way the good payment gateways work is they give the merchant a client that encrypts the CC# under their public key at the merchant server so only they can decrypt it on the other end. Decryption is done in a specially partitioned area, usually with substantial physical security etc.
The reason you are using a payment gateway is (in part) because they provide that physical security for you so you want to avoid anything that requires you to effectively set up a secure area yourself. Simple though this may seem to the average slashdotter it is quite hard if you are using a co-location center. And no a firewall is not sufficient.
What you need to do is to see if your merchant gateway provides an API to the payment module. I beleive that surepay is moving over to use the VeriSign payment system. If so the module that encrypts the CC# in the payload did at one stage allow for offline preparation similar to that you suggest. Whether that is currently supported is another matter that would require a little reasearch.
The description ot the PC of 2004 sounded pretty flat. A laptop with 256Mb of memory that is an inch thick and costs $2000.
A mid range Sony Vaio can be had today with those specs for $1500, including the docking station. Admittedly the processor is 1GHz rather than 2, but batter life is the principle reason for that. And most people who have the choice today go for smaller machines that are lighter than huge brick like desktop replacements.
What I think will happen is that the laptop phenomena will start to merge with the PDA line. Most people don't actually need or want a laptop, they want a PDA that can read email and do powerpoint presentations.
Another thing to think about is that with 802.11b and the like it is not necessarily the case that you need a powerfull machine in your hand. We may well start to see the portable display tablet becomming detached from the desktop processor.
Cheap SMP. I'll take my dual 550 over a single 1 GHz any day of the week. How about 8x500 MHz on the desktop, instead of 1x4GHz which is still crippled by 1 CPU hogging app?
Since the main limitation on the speed of the system is the bandwidth of the memory bus putting eight processors on one backplane ends up a pretty expensive proposition.
For any given technology the practical limit on the number of SMP processors that it is usefull to put in a box is four. Note that manufacturers have always soild eight and sixteen processor boxes, it is not unusual for these to be slower than boxes with far fewer processors when running realistic processing tasks rather than cooked up benchmarks.
A good eight way box will typically cost four timnes as much per CPU as a two way box. The answer is to write programs in a manner that does not require shared memory. Then you can go to 1000 processors without hitting the backplane limit. Unfortunately the costs of recoding apps is high and none of the new languages is designed to support MIMD well.
Strange as it may seem, this is not likely to be an optimum business strategy. The reason is that the value of a domain is also dependent on the amount of use it gets. Domains with few registrations attract less interest than those with many.
If the.au people cherrypicked the best 100 domains they might have an optimal plan. However the chances are that they will get far too greedy and take 10,000 or 100,000.
What it comes down to is the same economics as baseball cards. The scheme does not work if the card companies cherry pick all the best cards before they sell them.
I don't see how the internet could exist without links. If we had to manually type in url's for every website, I don't think anybody would get very far.
In the early days of the Web all the links were embedded and you had to go to a menu bar option to enter a link by hand. It all worked fine.
The ability to enter a URL into the menu bar appeared in one of the later versions of Mosaic after folk pointed out that it was confusing to have the URL presented in one place and changeable in another.
The Web would work and be pretty successful if we were all using raw IP addresses. However the likes of Alta-Vista and Yahoo would have become much more important than they have.
The real problem would be managing the Internet, links would be hardcoded to particular ISP providers. The effect would probably have been to introduce something like DNS and call it the URN system, as opposed to what we actually did and develop something on top of the DNS system we call the URN system... hey ho...
I suspect I am not the only person finding the comparison to the civil rights protests disgusting. There is a big difference between getting arrested for drinking at a colored water fountain and getting arresting for ripping off the latest U2 or Dire Straits tracks.
If you want to listen to music then pay for the damn stuff.
If someone set up a site whose sole purpose was to facilitate trading of WareZ for profit nobody would be leaping to defend them. OK Elton John and Bono probably get paid more than the average slashdotter, but the average slashdotter gets paid a heck of a lot more than the average third tier band with a major label recording contract. In 1999 the number of slashdotters with eight figure bank accounts probably outnumbered the number of musicians with one (no longer though, thanks GWB!)
What I really have no time for are the various venture capital funded attempts to make money out of ripping off music. Napster was such a shitty concept. They build up a big user base by giving away other people's property for free then they turn round and 'monetise' the base - spamvertising, pop up ads, spyware and of course screwing up your DNS to point to the Idealab! creation of the week. So the deal is Napster gives away $10 worth of someone else's property then tries to buy them off with a 5% share of the 20 cents they make back off advertising - great business model.
Of course it must be said that the MPAA and the RIAA are hardly deserving of sympathy for their predicament. Perhaps if the MPAA had not introduced the DVD zone system so they can charge twice as much for DVDs in Europe as they do in the states I would have some sympathy. I might even have some respect for them ifd they did not insist on peddling their pathetic lie that the Zone system is there to enforce different release dates in different zones - if that is the excuse then why are back-catalogue releases zone encoded.
And don't get me started on the cluelessness of the RIAA and their SDMI scheme. In the DMCA the RIAA effectively stole the returned rights of many recording artists by bribing Congress to declare the recordings 'works for hire' and thus exempt from the returned rights provision. It was only when the whistle was blown that a hasty ammendment was introduced to another bill repeal the section of the previous act. Fortunately the computer industry can afford to buy far more congressmen than the RIAA can by a factor of ten so I don't worry too much about the Hollings proposal.
The KaZaa case is not being heard in a US court so the relevance of the Libertarian party and the NRA mentioned by another poster is not immediately apparent. Incidentally the Netherlands has pretty liberal IP laws compared to the US, we managed to get Karin Spaink and co. off when the $cientologists went after them.
The real issue is the extent to which KaZaa can exercise control over their network and the extent to which they have deliberately placed it beyond control. Funny thing about courts is that they are not too sympathetic when you tell them you cannot do something because you anticipated a legitimate legal action and deliberately acted to make it impossible for you to comply. In the case of KaZaa there are a fistfull of shell companies set up with the sole purpose of frustrating court action.
The offense of 'contempt of court' is not simply failling to obey a court order, it is challenging the authority of the courts. So KaZaa may be considered to have been in contempt by launching their scheme in the first place.
There's nothing quite as innovative as an operating system with the sole goal of reimplementing APIs from other operating systems until it can run their binaries.:)
Let's see, first the guy founds MP3.com despite the fact he had nothing at all to do with the definition of the MP3 spec. Then they get into an amazin mess after they launch their BeamIT! service despite the obvious legal problems. Then they agree to a multi-million dollar settlement only to realize that they paid off the worng people, the ones who own the mechanical rights and not the performance performance rights...
This is not the type of person I would exactly want to tie my colours to...
Microsoft appear to me to have a very good case. The point is that they were the first company to come up with an Operating System called Windows. X11 is not an O/S. Lindows is trying to trade on the reputation that Microsoft has built up.
Beyond that however the guy is attempting to trade on the Open Source concept while developing something that will be closed source.
It all sounds so much like MP3, the business model is entirely clueless. Who do they expect to pay money for a sad copy of a Windows clone? It will always be at least one release behind the Microsoft article. Nobody is going to test software on an O/S with 0.1% market share or less. Windows is not just a set of APIs, it is also a kernel that has completely different semantics to the Linux kernel. The best you can hope for is something that works as well as the Windows NT POSIX mode - which is to say not well at all really.
It also sounds like MP3 in that the idea is to somehow make money by lowering a hook loaded with bait into a trendy scene where the basic premise is not to pay for anything. I suspect that the markets are not as happy with companies whose 'business plan' is less important to them than their 'exit strategy'.
I guess my 'subtle' commented didn't get noticed. This guy, who's username is "gayrod" has a post at +5 simply because he claimed to be a lawyer and inserted a fake URL in his sig.
Nah, the guy is actually just shilling for new.net. He owns a bunch of new.net names and has been campaiging in all trhe cyberlaw forums to have ICANN forced to enter all the new.net domains into their root so his names suddenly become worth $$$$$$$.
So it is not a fake URL for the folk who have the misfortune to have loaded new.net ware onto their system - just wait to see what happens to them when new.net goes the way of all companies Idealab!...
There was work on handwriting recognition that was taking place at Southampton university in the early 1980s that appears to me to invalidate the broader aspects of the claim.
However the case may not have been settled on the broad independent claim, it may have been on of the dependent claims such as restricting the alphabet to make the recognition technique possible.
I would not be particularly upset to see the loss of Graphiti. What folk do not seem to realize is that Graphiti is the QWERTY of the handheld. It is deliberately crippling the user interface to reduce it to a level that the technology of the day can cope with.
Incidentaly before manic followers of the cult of Ayn Rand mention it I have read the the Lieberwitz and Margolis 'debunking' of the 'QWERTY myth' and find it to not be credible. Neither the paper nor the book actually make the advertised claim. They actually discredit the evidence that that a rival system was better. The fact that QWERTY was designed crippled is not actually refuted. Nor should anyone be surprised when an ideological faction start yelping that they have 'debunked' facts that discredit their notion of absolute truth, or pay much attention when they do so.
Graphiti is actually designed to allow a puny 20 MHz processor to do handwritting recognition. The principal reason you keep having to lift the stylus off the pad is so that the handwriting recognizer can catch up.
As such the Xerox patent may turn out to be a patent of the type Phill Hallam-Baker proposed filling in a recent IETF meeting. The reasoning goes thus, patents are bad because they effectively stop the use of the ideas they describe in open standards. So in order to make the patent system useful we should stop patenting the good ideas and start patenting really bad ones to discourage their use. This has the secondary advantage that prior art is much less likely to be found.
56 bits is not secure enough for jack squat besides leading you into a false sense of security (there is a rule in crypto that says that low secuirity is actually worse than no secuirity).
That is not true, low level encryption does introduce a significant barrier to the ambitions of a Hoover or Ashcroft intent on monitoring every communication.
56 bit DES is known to be broken, the DES cracker can derrive a key from a known plaintext/ciphertext pair. The machine is not capable (by design) in its current form of breaking a random ciphertext pair.
Despite its problems (read my other articles in the WEP thread), RC4 is a better cipher that allows a 128 bit key to be used with lower CPU overhead than DES. AES on the other hand requires slightly more CPU than the best DES implementations, this may change as people continue to tweak AES code.
If people are not going to hire a competent cryptographer to write their protcol they are probably better off using DES than RC4 because it is much harder to screw up with a block cipher than with a stream cipher.
Despite its flaws DES is better than no crypto at all. If someone wants to find out what is stored on my systems they can break down a door or window more easily than breaking a DES key. Security is about risk control, not risk elimination
Reading the article it is pretty obvious that the 'experts' are Mac users with little to no knowledge of other systems. They are the type of people who only look at other machines to remember why their system is so superior.
The GUI did not start at Apple, nor is Apple the only company to improve on Xerox Parc. I have always found Windows easier to use, for the same reason incidentaly that UNIX users prefer a command line, I find that the nanny O/S gets in the way more often than it helps. The difference between the Apple and Windows is the difference between AOL and the Internet, you can do anything with either system, but Apple and AOL will take every opportunity it can to patronize you. Some people like that, some people need it. Others understand what is going on and find that the 'easy to use' features prevent them from building up a mental picture of what is going on.
This explains the reason why Apple users want a Hard disk icon, it is a major landmark in their mental model. Take it away and they are all at sea.
There are major problems with the hierarchical directory concept. These arise because there is more than one good way to arrange information. Hierarchical directories force you to pick just one.
There have been plenty of systems that supported alternative schemes, the Symbolics mail system (which I won't discuss because if you have used it you already know the point), the RAND mh mail handler. mh allows you to filter mail into folders (don't they all), unlike other schemes however, mh allows you to use soft links to file a mail in multiple directories. So a mail that is sent to you directly and to a mailing list appears in BOTH folders. Unfortunately the version I used did not know how to then keep track of the fact that a mail had been read in a different folder.
A better scheme would be to support 'standing searches' so that instead of separating your mail, files whatever into separate folders everything went in one big folder that you could view through multiple filters. So when the mail arrives you have some filter that processes the mail and adds keywords to it, allowing rapid searches when you need them, which can be saved for leater re-use.
There are the beginnings of such a system in Windows XP and W2K. Unfortunately it does not really go far enough (yet). It is at least possible to view the title, author, keywords etc of documents in the Explorer window. The standing search capability is not implemented but could be added.
It would be quite easy to add similar functionality into GNOME or whatever.
I don't find any value in discussing such concepts through confused descriptions of 'desktops' and 'multiple desktops'. The desktop is a cretinous metaphor. I have a screen, it displays a collection of applications, I can switch to a different screen showing other applications. My single physical display can show multiple virtual screens, big deal.
Now, is the 24-bit space limitation what RSA means by, "similarity of the packet keys", or are they referring to the fact that most boards start the IV at 0 and simply increment for each packet (the end result being numerous IV collisions)?
RC4 has a specific design flaw whereby the cipherstream for k has similarities to the cipher stream for k+1. These allow an attacker with cipher text for k and k+1 to recover the plaintext of the messages and the key.
One fix is to throw away the first 256 bytes or so of the cipherstream. Another solution is to make the probability of a collision very small which is what the fast keying scheme is doing.
The main constraint on the solution is that it has to be deployable on cards that have already been manufactured and those are not particularly powerful CPU wise.
The Berkely attack is certainly a concern, 24 bit encryption is not acceptably secure. But that is not the weakness being exploited by AirSnort. There are a bunch of mixing functions defined in the presentation I have seen but there is insufficient info to know if it does indeed do the right thing.
Again, I am somewhat anoyed when cryptographic protocols are puffed in the press prematurely. I am not a member of the 802.11b group, however I will be reviewing their work product when they announce it is ready. I am not aware that this is currently the case. I would like something more than a powerpoint presentation to evaluate the protocol by.
What about the other 12 'key contributors'?
on
WEP Gets A Bit Stronger
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· Score: 5, Informative
From the RSA press release:
Fast Packet Keying," a new technology based on the RC4® algorithm, is designed to help organizations securely fix the WEP encryption standard. This new WEP solution, developed by RSA Security, Hifn and other members of the 802.11 committee, is designed to generate a unique RC4 key for each data packet sent over the wireless LAN.
The fix to WEP was developed by a working group in which RSA was far from being the sole contributor. It is a bit off for RSA to try to claim the glory for the fix when a significant part of the WEP problem is due to a weakness in the keying scheme of RC4.
The presentation lists as 'key contributors' Jessie Walker of Intel,
Bob Beach and Clint Chaplin from Symbol,
Ron Brockman of Intersil
Nancy Cam-Winget of Atheros
Greg Chesson, Atheros
Niels Ferguson, MacFergus BV
Marty Lefkowitz, TI
Bob O'Hara, Blackstorm Networks
Dorothy Stanley, Agere
Doug Smith, Cisco
Albert Young, 3COM
So when RSA wants to get votes it has a dozen 'key contributors'. But when they want to take the credit there are two.
The original algorithm was botched, in part it is claimed (by an informed source) because the original IEEE working group left the crypto to an NSA advisor. Failing to understand the specific weakness of using a stream cipher in general and the specific weaknesses of the RC4 key scheme are the major reasons for the failure of the WEP design.
One could rightly blame the original working group for failing to read up on the litterature and avoid the known flaws of RC4, only RC4 was until recently a proprietary and secret algorithm of RSA. The key scheme flaws were only publicised after RC4 was reverse engineered without RSA approval, and resulted in considerable protest by RSA.
This type of publicity grab is not good for open standards development. It encourages people to release their proposals to the press rather than to the working group.
Ugh. These guys have set network computing back 30 years by being the first ones out the gate with inferior solutions.
Bzzzt...
Ted Nelson came up with hypertext in the 70s. So much for being 'first out of the gate'.
Until Tim came along the field had got precisely nowhere with fifty plans for broken hypertext schemes backed by database systems that didn't scale.
The hypertext community deserved what they got, they failed to deliver, Tim did.
There are plenty of failed hypertext wonks who will explain why their system was better than the Web, just as there are network architects that will tell you how great OSI networking is, and folk who will explain how they would have caught the 40 yard pass if they were playing in the superbowl.
If you think Xanadu is better than the Web then maybe you should wait a couple of centuries while Ted finishes it. The rest of us realise that having an 80% solution today is better than waiting forever for a 100% solution.
Well first off it was never a W3C policy, it was a proposal from a working group. Under W3C rules a group of members can make any assinine proposal they care to.
The issue was rather more complex than presented on slashdot. In particular as Microsoft pointed out the Royalty Free policy was broken as it was written. The usual scheme in the IETF is that you grant an RF license to any user, provided that they don't exercise a patent against the spec themselves. So that bit needs to be re-written.
It may well be the case that the W3C cannot do any work on Voice-XML under an RF policy. This is the same dilema that faced the IETF with the RSA encryption patent. But it turns out that the patent holders are probably not going to offer even RAND terms so the point is likely moot.
So the likely outcome is going to be that the W3C patent policy will end up looking like the IETF one - which is hardly a great suprise. The W3C is the group that wrote PNG to circumvent the UNISYS GIF patent after all.
Apart from perhaps the w3c members themselves, there are no 'independent' members of any kind. No-one, for example, from the EFF or Commercial Linux/BSD vendors (are there commercial BSD vendors?)
That is a somewhat bizare idea, it is a technical group, not a policy group. Danny Weitzner is the policy wonk at W3C, having come from CDT.
I am not aware of a significant degree of participation in W3C from the Linux vendor community so it is not surprising they are not represented. There is a big difference between writing code and architecture.
What is somewhat disappointing is the lack of any security architect and the preponderance of XML designers. This is not surprising since Roy was practically the only HTTP person nominated.
The "CRT radiation" snooping that the was referred to is commonly called "TEMPEST".
TEMPEST is actually the hardening regime used to protect against RF emmission attacks. If I could remember how to spell it I would have used the term 'Van Eyke radiation'.
In addition to the noise generated by the display the display driver circuitry and the CPU itself generate noise. It is even possible to do some monitoring via the power supply - see Paul Kocher's power analysis attacks.
The principle risk to an investigator using a probe like Magic Lantern is that it is more likely to tip off the target that they are under investigation than to provide useful intelligence.
Viruses spread because each time a user is infected they spread the infection to an average of more than one user. Most viruses die very quickly. Of the thousands launched each day only a handfull infect more than a few hundred sites. The probability of infecting a particular machine is actually quite low. It is going to take rather more effort to spread the trojan payload than the FBI expect.
Simply sending out random spam and hoping the target opens an executable that installs the trojan is not likely to work. A more likely means of succeeding is to attach the trojan to a downloaded executable.
A much easier solution with lower downside risk is simply to install a good old fashioned room mike or to use CRT radiation to snoop on the screen.
The patent drove the cost of DDR RAM up so much relative to competing technologies that the tech died
Correction, the patent did not put up the price of the memory, it is impossible to make any IC without a fist full of patent licenses.
It was the insane greed of the RAMBUS management that has killed RDRAM, they thought they had a monopoly and demanded usurous royalties. It has taken a while to prove that they do not have a monopoly.
I wanted to illustrate the similarities between this and Sony's patent related to Beta videocasette tapes
Sony never attempted to make Betamax a standard. They did not realise that the VCR would be used to show rented tapes. If the VCR had been used only for time shifting the Sony strategy was a rational one. Nobody cares that Tivo and Replay TV use incompatible file formats because the machines are not used for exchange of content. Once people demanded the ability to play pre-recorded tapes the Sony strategy failled.
As for why a person would continue to pay $6 month after month, I can't say.
It is a standard model. I can pay $6 for a magazine on a news-stand or $30 for a subscription to the same magazine for a year.
I have never subscribed to a magazine without buying several full price copies - or reading them in libraries etc.
The different charge rates are justified by the overhead of cc charges chargebacks, gateway etc. - about 75 cents on a $6 charge, $1 on $30, so you save Salon $8 by going for the annual subscription.
$6 is pretty much a disposable amount, I do not much bother if I buy a magazine at that price and find out afterwards it is not much good. $30 is not a disposable amount.
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The machine I worked on in the early 90s is still in the top 100 of the supercomputer charts (or would be if the compilers knew about it).
While a desktop Cray-1 can now be had at commodity prices the machine is now two decades old. The obsolescence rate is nowhere near as giddy as some would claim.
The really big iron tends to have a lifespan of about five years and is typically retired because the power consumption and maintenance costs favor a move to newer hardware. True supercomputers rarely fall victim to Moore's law. Even the KLAC machine discussed only barely qualifies as a supercomputer, 64 processors is at the low end of the scale. People have Web servers with that number of CPUs. True big iron starts with a few hundred processors and goes up to the tens of thousand.
If by working on the big iron you merely mean you used to use IBM 3090 class machines, then the joke is on you, those machines were often obsolete before they were manufactured. When I worked at one lab I had a desktop machine (first production run Alpha) that was considerably more powerful than the CPUs of the just-installed campus mainframe.
Fact is that many of the people buying 'big iron' in the 1980s and 1990s were incompetent. They bought machines that ran the O/S they knew, which often meant they bought obsolete IBM mainframes for applications where a ntwork of IBM PCs would have served far better. I spent quite a bit of time in institutions where wrestling control of the computing budget from an incompetent IT dept was a major issue. In fact the World Wide Web began at CERN in part as a result of such a struggle. Tim, bless him wanted the physicists to switch from the IBM mainframe CERN VM to use NeXTStep machines. One of the schemes that the CERN CN division had cooked up to force people to use the mainframe was to only make information such as the address book available on the IBM mainframe. Attempts to make it more widely available were treated much the same way that Napster was treated by the RIAA. The Web took off at CERN initially because you could access the address book from a workstation or from the VAX.
Very few mainframes were actually designed to provide fast processing. The IBM 3090 series was actually designed to perform transaction processing for banks. As a scientific CPU it offered tepid performance at a price arround 100 to 500 times the price of a high power workstation.
There are certain applications in which CPU cycles are still the limiting factor. Admittedly they are much smaller as a proportion of the whole than they were 10 years ago.
Anyone can build a machine with a really high processing performance. Just by a few thousand X boxes and plug them into the same ethernet cable. The real issue is how much communications bandwidth you have between the CPUs. Some problems require almost none - the 'trivial parallelism' problems like DEScrack and the mandelbrot set. In the 1980s we had a machine that had 1000 20MHz processors that could bang out mandelbrot sets like anything (using the goofy algorithm, not the modern optimizations). But is wasn't much use for anything else.
The problem with competitions for supercomputers is that they rarely measure the communication bandwidth because (a) its hard to do and (b) the effect on performance is highly algorithm dependent.
As for the KLAT's ingenious topology, I once did some research in the area myself when it was the fashion. I tried using minimum diameter graphs which should in theory have been better than a plain taurus. However as with Bill Dally at Cal Tech I concluded that the additional cost of exotic topology (more than double the price) was not really justified by the performance advantage (about 10-30% on a good day).
Certainly the many companies that set up to build transputer based processing clusters with high performance switches inside did not seem to go anywhere much.
Using a high performance router at the core of a processing cluster might be interesting. They are pretty cheap these days and are headed cheaper.
Obviously you have not been watching the shows carefully enough. Wear a red shirt and you were certain to get zapped by whatever the beastie of the week happened to be.
At $5 an episode there was no way they could afford to risk wearing the red shirts
Who said anything about choosing the bank? The whole point of the Signio Payflow scheme (now VeriSign payment gateway) is you can connect up to any acquirer bank in north america. Most customers then use the fact to negotiate lower rates because lowering the switching costs to close to zero means that they now have pricing power.
Under the old frame relay schemes you soon became captive to a particular bank or acquirer because none of them used the same implementation of the alleged standard.
If you can't choose your gateway you should perhaps tell your management that you don't have the necessary control to fulfill your job. We are talking about the region of $400/yr flat fee here for the basic connect.
The situation you describe suggests that you are already largely locked in to a particular back end.
The way the good payment gateways work is they give the merchant a client that encrypts the CC# under their public key at the merchant server so only they can decrypt it on the other end. Decryption is done in a specially partitioned area, usually with substantial physical security etc.
The reason you are using a payment gateway is (in part) because they provide that physical security for you so you want to avoid anything that requires you to effectively set up a secure area yourself. Simple though this may seem to the average slashdotter it is quite hard if you are using a co-location center. And no a firewall is not sufficient.
What you need to do is to see if your merchant gateway provides an API to the payment module. I beleive that surepay is moving over to use the VeriSign payment system. If so the module that encrypts the CC# in the payload did at one stage allow for offline preparation similar to that you suggest. Whether that is currently supported is another matter that would require a little reasearch.
A mid range Sony Vaio can be had today with those specs for $1500, including the docking station. Admittedly the processor is 1GHz rather than 2, but batter life is the principle reason for that. And most people who have the choice today go for smaller machines that are lighter than huge brick like desktop replacements.
What I think will happen is that the laptop phenomena will start to merge with the PDA line. Most people don't actually need or want a laptop, they want a PDA that can read email and do powerpoint presentations.
Another thing to think about is that with 802.11b and the like it is not necessarily the case that you need a powerfull machine in your hand. We may well start to see the portable display tablet becomming detached from the desktop processor.
Since the main limitation on the speed of the system is the bandwidth of the memory bus putting eight processors on one backplane ends up a pretty expensive proposition.
For any given technology the practical limit on the number of SMP processors that it is usefull to put in a box is four. Note that manufacturers have always soild eight and sixteen processor boxes, it is not unusual for these to be slower than boxes with far fewer processors when running realistic processing tasks rather than cooked up benchmarks.
A good eight way box will typically cost four timnes as much per CPU as a two way box. The answer is to write programs in a manner that does not require shared memory. Then you can go to 1000 processors without hitting the backplane limit. Unfortunately the costs of recoding apps is high and none of the new languages is designed to support MIMD well.
If the .au people cherrypicked the best 100 domains they might have an optimal plan. However the chances are that they will get far too greedy and take 10,000 or 100,000.
What it comes down to is the same economics as baseball cards. The scheme does not work if the card companies cherry pick all the best cards before they sell them.
In the early days of the Web all the links were embedded and you had to go to a menu bar option to enter a link by hand. It all worked fine.
The ability to enter a URL into the menu bar appeared in one of the later versions of Mosaic after folk pointed out that it was confusing to have the URL presented in one place and changeable in another.
The Web would work and be pretty successful if we were all using raw IP addresses. However the likes of Alta-Vista and Yahoo would have become much more important than they have.
The real problem would be managing the Internet, links would be hardcoded to particular ISP providers. The effect would probably have been to introduce something like DNS and call it the URN system, as opposed to what we actually did and develop something on top of the DNS system we call the URN system... hey ho...
If you want to listen to music then pay for the damn stuff.
If someone set up a site whose sole purpose was to facilitate trading of WareZ for profit nobody would be leaping to defend them. OK Elton John and Bono probably get paid more than the average slashdotter, but the average slashdotter gets paid a heck of a lot more than the average third tier band with a major label recording contract. In 1999 the number of slashdotters with eight figure bank accounts probably outnumbered the number of musicians with one (no longer though, thanks GWB!)
What I really have no time for are the various venture capital funded attempts to make money out of ripping off music. Napster was such a shitty concept. They build up a big user base by giving away other people's property for free then they turn round and 'monetise' the base - spamvertising, pop up ads, spyware and of course screwing up your DNS to point to the Idealab! creation of the week. So the deal is Napster gives away $10 worth of someone else's property then tries to buy them off with a 5% share of the 20 cents they make back off advertising - great business model.
Of course it must be said that the MPAA and the RIAA are hardly deserving of sympathy for their predicament. Perhaps if the MPAA had not introduced the DVD zone system so they can charge twice as much for DVDs in Europe as they do in the states I would have some sympathy. I might even have some respect for them ifd they did not insist on peddling their pathetic lie that the Zone system is there to enforce different release dates in different zones - if that is the excuse then why are back-catalogue releases zone encoded.
And don't get me started on the cluelessness of the RIAA and their SDMI scheme. In the DMCA the RIAA effectively stole the returned rights of many recording artists by bribing Congress to declare the recordings 'works for hire' and thus exempt from the returned rights provision. It was only when the whistle was blown that a hasty ammendment was introduced to another bill repeal the section of the previous act. Fortunately the computer industry can afford to buy far more congressmen than the RIAA can by a factor of ten so I don't worry too much about the Hollings proposal.
The KaZaa case is not being heard in a US court so the relevance of the Libertarian party and the NRA mentioned by another poster is not immediately apparent. Incidentally the Netherlands has pretty liberal IP laws compared to the US, we managed to get Karin Spaink and co. off when the $cientologists went after them.
The real issue is the extent to which KaZaa can exercise control over their network and the extent to which they have deliberately placed it beyond control. Funny thing about courts is that they are not too sympathetic when you tell them you cannot do something because you anticipated a legitimate legal action and deliberately acted to make it impossible for you to comply. In the case of KaZaa there are a fistfull of shell companies set up with the sole purpose of frustrating court action.
The offense of 'contempt of court' is not simply failling to obey a court order, it is challenging the authority of the courts. So KaZaa may be considered to have been in contempt by launching their scheme in the first place.
Let's see, first the guy founds MP3.com despite the fact he had nothing at all to do with the definition of the MP3 spec. Then they get into an amazin mess after they launch their BeamIT! service despite the obvious legal problems. Then they agree to a multi-million dollar settlement only to realize that they paid off the worng people, the ones who own the mechanical rights and not the performance performance rights...
This is not the type of person I would exactly want to tie my colours to...
Microsoft appear to me to have a very good case. The point is that they were the first company to come up with an Operating System called Windows. X11 is not an O/S. Lindows is trying to trade on the reputation that Microsoft has built up.
Beyond that however the guy is attempting to trade on the Open Source concept while developing something that will be closed source.
It all sounds so much like MP3, the business model is entirely clueless. Who do they expect to pay money for a sad copy of a Windows clone? It will always be at least one release behind the Microsoft article. Nobody is going to test software on an O/S with 0.1% market share or less. Windows is not just a set of APIs, it is also a kernel that has completely different semantics to the Linux kernel. The best you can hope for is something that works as well as the Windows NT POSIX mode - which is to say not well at all really.
It also sounds like MP3 in that the idea is to somehow make money by lowering a hook loaded with bait into a trendy scene where the basic premise is not to pay for anything. I suspect that the markets are not as happy with companies whose 'business plan' is less important to them than their 'exit strategy'.
Nah, the guy is actually just shilling for new.net. He owns a bunch of new.net names and has been campaiging in all trhe cyberlaw forums to have ICANN forced to enter all the new.net domains into their root so his names suddenly become worth $$$$$$$.
So it is not a fake URL for the folk who have the misfortune to have loaded new.net ware onto their system - just wait to see what happens to them when new.net goes the way of all companies Idealab!...
However the case may not have been settled on the broad independent claim, it may have been on of the dependent claims such as restricting the alphabet to make the recognition technique possible.
I would not be particularly upset to see the loss of Graphiti. What folk do not seem to realize is that Graphiti is the QWERTY of the handheld. It is deliberately crippling the user interface to reduce it to a level that the technology of the day can cope with.
Incidentaly before manic followers of the cult of Ayn Rand mention it I have read the the Lieberwitz and Margolis 'debunking' of the 'QWERTY myth' and find it to not be credible. Neither the paper nor the book actually make the advertised claim. They actually discredit the evidence that that a rival system was better. The fact that QWERTY was designed crippled is not actually refuted. Nor should anyone be surprised when an ideological faction start yelping that they have 'debunked' facts that discredit their notion of absolute truth, or pay much attention when they do so.
Graphiti is actually designed to allow a puny 20 MHz processor to do handwritting recognition. The principal reason you keep having to lift the stylus off the pad is so that the handwriting recognizer can catch up.
As such the Xerox patent may turn out to be a patent of the type Phill Hallam-Baker proposed filling in a recent IETF meeting. The reasoning goes thus, patents are bad because they effectively stop the use of the ideas they describe in open standards. So in order to make the patent system useful we should stop patenting the good ideas and start patenting really bad ones to discourage their use. This has the secondary advantage that prior art is much less likely to be found.
That is not true, low level encryption does introduce a significant barrier to the ambitions of a Hoover or Ashcroft intent on monitoring every communication.
56 bit DES is known to be broken, the DES cracker can derrive a key from a known plaintext/ciphertext pair. The machine is not capable (by design) in its current form of breaking a random ciphertext pair.
Despite its problems (read my other articles in the WEP thread), RC4 is a better cipher that allows a 128 bit key to be used with lower CPU overhead than DES. AES on the other hand requires slightly more CPU than the best DES implementations, this may change as people continue to tweak AES code.
If people are not going to hire a competent cryptographer to write their protcol they are probably better off using DES than RC4 because it is much harder to screw up with a block cipher than with a stream cipher.
Despite its flaws DES is better than no crypto at all. If someone wants to find out what is stored on my systems they can break down a door or window more easily than breaking a DES key. Security is about risk control, not risk elimination
The GUI did not start at Apple, nor is Apple the only company to improve on Xerox Parc. I have always found Windows easier to use, for the same reason incidentaly that UNIX users prefer a command line, I find that the nanny O/S gets in the way more often than it helps. The difference between the Apple and Windows is the difference between AOL and the Internet, you can do anything with either system, but Apple and AOL will take every opportunity it can to patronize you. Some people like that, some people need it. Others understand what is going on and find that the 'easy to use' features prevent them from building up a mental picture of what is going on.
This explains the reason why Apple users want a Hard disk icon, it is a major landmark in their mental model. Take it away and they are all at sea.
There are major problems with the hierarchical directory concept. These arise because there is more than one good way to arrange information. Hierarchical directories force you to pick just one.
There have been plenty of systems that supported alternative schemes, the Symbolics mail system (which I won't discuss because if you have used it you already know the point), the RAND mh mail handler. mh allows you to filter mail into folders (don't they all), unlike other schemes however, mh allows you to use soft links to file a mail in multiple directories. So a mail that is sent to you directly and to a mailing list appears in BOTH folders. Unfortunately the version I used did not know how to then keep track of the fact that a mail had been read in a different folder.
A better scheme would be to support 'standing searches' so that instead of separating your mail, files whatever into separate folders everything went in one big folder that you could view through multiple filters. So when the mail arrives you have some filter that processes the mail and adds keywords to it, allowing rapid searches when you need them, which can be saved for leater re-use.
There are the beginnings of such a system in Windows XP and W2K. Unfortunately it does not really go far enough (yet). It is at least possible to view the title, author, keywords etc of documents in the Explorer window. The standing search capability is not implemented but could be added.
It would be quite easy to add similar functionality into GNOME or whatever.
I don't find any value in discussing such concepts through confused descriptions of 'desktops' and 'multiple desktops'. The desktop is a cretinous metaphor. I have a screen, it displays a collection of applications, I can switch to a different screen showing other applications. My single physical display can show multiple virtual screens, big deal.
RC4 has a specific design flaw whereby the cipherstream for k has similarities to the cipher stream for k+1. These allow an attacker with cipher text for k and k+1 to recover the plaintext of the messages and the key.
One fix is to throw away the first 256 bytes or so of the cipherstream. Another solution is to make the probability of a collision very small which is what the fast keying scheme is doing.
The main constraint on the solution is that it has to be deployable on cards that have already been manufactured and those are not particularly powerful CPU wise.
The Berkely attack is certainly a concern, 24 bit encryption is not acceptably secure. But that is not the weakness being exploited by AirSnort. There are a bunch of mixing functions defined in the presentation I have seen but there is insufficient info to know if it does indeed do the right thing.
Again, I am somewhat anoyed when cryptographic protocols are puffed in the press prematurely. I am not a member of the 802.11b group, however I will be reviewing their work product when they announce it is ready. I am not aware that this is currently the case. I would like something more than a powerpoint presentation to evaluate the protocol by.
Fast Packet Keying," a new technology based on the RC4® algorithm, is designed to help organizations securely fix the WEP encryption standard. This new WEP solution, developed by RSA Security, Hifn and other members of the 802.11 committee, is designed to generate a unique RC4 key for each data packet sent over the wireless LAN.
The fix to WEP was developed by a working group in which RSA was far from being the sole contributor. It is a bit off for RSA to try to claim the glory for the fix when a significant part of the WEP problem is due to a weakness in the keying scheme of RC4.
The presentation lists as 'key contributors' Jessie Walker of Intel, Bob Beach and Clint Chaplin from Symbol, Ron Brockman of Intersil Nancy Cam-Winget of Atheros Greg Chesson, Atheros Niels Ferguson, MacFergus BV Marty Lefkowitz, TI Bob O'Hara, Blackstorm Networks Dorothy Stanley, Agere Doug Smith, Cisco Albert Young, 3COM
So when RSA wants to get votes it has a dozen 'key contributors'. But when they want to take the credit there are two.
The original algorithm was botched, in part it is claimed (by an informed source) because the original IEEE working group left the crypto to an NSA advisor. Failing to understand the specific weakness of using a stream cipher in general and the specific weaknesses of the RC4 key scheme are the major reasons for the failure of the WEP design.
One could rightly blame the original working group for failing to read up on the litterature and avoid the known flaws of RC4, only RC4 was until recently a proprietary and secret algorithm of RSA. The key scheme flaws were only publicised after RC4 was reverse engineered without RSA approval, and resulted in considerable protest by RSA.
This type of publicity grab is not good for open standards development. It encourages people to release their proposals to the press rather than to the working group.
Bzzzt...
Ted Nelson came up with hypertext in the 70s. So much for being 'first out of the gate'.
Until Tim came along the field had got precisely nowhere with fifty plans for broken hypertext schemes backed by database systems that didn't scale.
The hypertext community deserved what they got, they failed to deliver, Tim did.
There are plenty of failed hypertext wonks who will explain why their system was better than the Web, just as there are network architects that will tell you how great OSI networking is, and folk who will explain how they would have caught the 40 yard pass if they were playing in the superbowl.
If you think Xanadu is better than the Web then maybe you should wait a couple of centuries while Ted finishes it. The rest of us realise that having an 80% solution today is better than waiting forever for a 100% solution.
Well first off it was never a W3C policy, it was a proposal from a working group. Under W3C rules a group of members can make any assinine proposal they care to.
The issue was rather more complex than presented on slashdot. In particular as Microsoft pointed out the Royalty Free policy was broken as it was written. The usual scheme in the IETF is that you grant an RF license to any user, provided that they don't exercise a patent against the spec themselves. So that bit needs to be re-written.
It may well be the case that the W3C cannot do any work on Voice-XML under an RF policy. This is the same dilema that faced the IETF with the RSA encryption patent. But it turns out that the patent holders are probably not going to offer even RAND terms so the point is likely moot.
So the likely outcome is going to be that the W3C patent policy will end up looking like the IETF one - which is hardly a great suprise. The W3C is the group that wrote PNG to circumvent the UNISYS GIF patent after all.
That is a somewhat bizare idea, it is a technical group, not a policy group. Danny Weitzner is the policy wonk at W3C, having come from CDT.
I am not aware of a significant degree of participation in W3C from the Linux vendor community so it is not surprising they are not represented. There is a big difference between writing code and architecture.
What is somewhat disappointing is the lack of any security architect and the preponderance of XML designers. This is not surprising since Roy was practically the only HTTP person nominated.
TEMPEST is actually the hardening regime used to protect against RF emmission attacks. If I could remember how to spell it I would have used the term 'Van Eyke radiation'.
In addition to the noise generated by the display the display driver circuitry and the CPU itself generate noise. It is even possible to do some monitoring via the power supply - see Paul Kocher's power analysis attacks.
Viruses spread because each time a user is infected they spread the infection to an average of more than one user. Most viruses die very quickly. Of the thousands launched each day only a handfull infect more than a few hundred sites. The probability of infecting a particular machine is actually quite low. It is going to take rather more effort to spread the trojan payload than the FBI expect.
Simply sending out random spam and hoping the target opens an executable that installs the trojan is not likely to work. A more likely means of succeeding is to attach the trojan to a downloaded executable.
A much easier solution with lower downside risk is simply to install a good old fashioned room mike or to use CRT radiation to snoop on the screen.
I wonder if we can force the USPTO to look at the USENET archive?
Correction, the patent did not put up the price of the memory, it is impossible to make any IC without a fist full of patent licenses.
It was the insane greed of the RAMBUS management that has killed RDRAM, they thought they had a monopoly and demanded usurous royalties. It has taken a while to prove that they do not have a monopoly.
I wanted to illustrate the similarities between this and Sony's patent related to Beta videocasette tapes
Sony never attempted to make Betamax a standard. They did not realise that the VCR would be used to show rented tapes. If the VCR had been used only for time shifting the Sony strategy was a rational one. Nobody cares that Tivo and Replay TV use incompatible file formats because the machines are not used for exchange of content. Once people demanded the ability to play pre-recorded tapes the Sony strategy failled.
It is a standard model. I can pay $6 for a magazine on a news-stand or $30 for a subscription to the same magazine for a year.
I have never subscribed to a magazine without buying several full price copies - or reading them in libraries etc.
The different charge rates are justified by the overhead of cc charges chargebacks, gateway etc. - about 75 cents on a $6 charge, $1 on $30, so you save Salon $8 by going for the annual subscription.
$6 is pretty much a disposable amount, I do not much bother if I buy a magazine at that price and find out afterwards it is not much good. $30 is not a disposable amount.