Because people don't buy OLD computers to run new operating systems, they buy NEW ones. And NEW computers are not $150. So not only do you have to shell out another $200 for a bloated OS, you have to spend 2000 bucks for a system that'll run it.
Last year you could get a new machine (sans monitor) for $450 at Micro Center. This year you can get name brand, 1.2 GHz plus machines for less than $1000. The system requirements for Windows XP are easily met by all the machines currently on the market. The only possible exception being some of the year old models being sold by the discount outlets.
PCs are disposable equipment, they are not durable goods by any stretch of the imagination. Users want a fat O/S distribution.
Even if you have an older PC you can now get 256Mb SIMMS for $30 and huge disks for $100. It is not at all unreasonable for XP to expect a high performance machine.
Of course if your idea of computing is to use a Dec Vt100 attached to the serial port of your 386 box, then go ahead. Just don't expect the rest of us to adapt because you choose to use a museum piece.
So I happily install XP Professional because it has the ability to use encrypted file stores. This would be just the thing to carry files from one machine to another on a 128Mb Compact flash or so.
Bzztt... wrong...
Turns out that NTFS cannot be used on removable disks, even though the NTFS semantics are better suited (think what happens when a disk is unmounted unexpectedly.
The main reason I use an encrypted disk is that I have a lot of client sensitive info on my machine, including high level strategic plans for a Nasdaq 100 company.
Encrypted disks should be used as a matter of course on machines used by lawyers, doctors, accountants, anyone with a professional confidentiality duty. Laptops get stolen, machines get sold with confidential information still on the drives.
I am more skeptical about the need for encrypting file systems for geeks, after all most sysops would do better to keep less secrets rather than more.
...refuse to accept money fro Windows XP based ATMs...
The embedded devices market is not all about small and fast. And even where the issue is small and fast, the XP kernel may well prove to have more to offer than many UNIX designs.
There is a wide range of embedded devices, from washing machines to cars, to industrial process machinery. Until recently only a small fraction of those systems had anything as sophisticated as an operating system.
If on the other hand you want to build a next generation audio system you are likely to find that you need an O/S, you need some sort of file system to store your MP3s, you have an ethernet and possibly a WiFi interface to support, you may even support PCMCIA or compactflash. XP has major advantages in that space since you are guaranteed to have a driver available.
The bloatware charge is and always has been bogus. People don't seem to understand that the value of a 3 year old PC is $150 and so there is no particular reason why Microsoft should limit a $100/$200 O/S so that it can run under the constraints of that machine. 512Mb SIMMs are on sale these days for the price of 16Mb SIMMs a couple of years back, nobody actually makes 20Gb 3.5" disks any more, they are too small to bother with.
RAM and disk space are not constrained resources on the PC, so don't expect companies in that space to constrain them in their products. The O/S kernel is kept small because the performance of the machine depends on large parts of it being in primary or secondary cache most of the time.
The features of XP that will be much more relevant to the embedded systems space are its multi-tasking and scheduling control. I don't expect any traditional UNIX kernel to do well there, the UNIX architecture was never designed for and is simply not up to RT tasks. Thats why the RT Linux varieties have major mods to the internals to support features such as guaranteed scheduling etc.
The FC attack is not the only attack against an anonymous online user where a lawsuit appears to have been used in an attempt to discover someone's identity so that extra-judicial harassment may be applied. There are a growing number of cases in which profitless (and on occasion revenueless) dotcoms have been trying to silence critics using spurious lawsuits.
My favorite amongst these is the ZixIt/Visa lawsuit. The CEO of ZixIt said in a con call that 'shareholders should sell if there are no ZixCharge partners by the end of the year'. So the end of the year comes and no partners, coincidentally ZixIt filled a suit against Visa claiming that anonymous posts on the Yahoo message board by a Visa employee had somehow interferred with the business relationships of the company.
The lawsuit is still in progress, only Visa are now subpoenaing the records of the discussion board from Yahoo. The only explanation for this would be if they suspected that ZixIt employees were posting to the board. ZixIt is no longer revenueless, they sold 9,500 seats at something like $25 a seat last quarter, the ZixCharge product has never launched, although this may in part be due to the ZixIt payment site having been hacked a few months back. Kinda hard to promote a secure payments scheme after that eh?
During the arguments over the Paula Jones lawsuit the one that I thought was least good was that the President should not have to spend time answering vexatious lawsuits. While I think that the lawsuit was cooked up by the GOP from start to finis, I don't buy that argument. The Congress and President should have to face the same risks of bogus lawsuits as the rest of us, that might encourage them to do something about the situation.
It is NOT only "a matter of time". If Linux programmers will ever get the idea to make Linux login as root by default, to write email clients that allow scripts to be executed without user's permission, to ship their OS without a firewall mechanism in place and to make the whole system a sitting duck to any running script via a conveniently accessible registry file, THEN you will start seeing viruses for Linux. But by then us security conscious people will have long since moved on to another more decent OS.
Don't be so sure. We have had UNIX worms and even VMS worms. Unlike the designers of UNIX, VMS started with a security architecture and actually recieved B2 certification rather than describing itself as 'B2 equivalent'.
At the other end of the scale the security architecture of MAC O/S has until a few months ago been stuck at the MSDOS level, lacking even protected memory, yet MAC viruses are none too common these days.
The significant factor is the proportion of the network population that uses a particular O/S. As with a biological infection there are definite inflection points that determine whether a virus spreads fast enough to cause an epidemic or a pandemic.
When the Wang Worm hit it could propagate because close to 100% of the computers on HEPNET were VMS systems. Equally the Moriss worm took out the Internet when the vast majority of nodes were UNIX boxes running sendmail.
The proportion of UNIX machines on the Internet today is probably close to critical mass for allowing a viral epidemic. The saving factor is not the design of the O/S, it is the variation between the O/S implementations. Anyone who thinks that sendmail is a lesser security risk than Outlook should read a few CERT advisories.
The separation of administrative privs is not actually significant when it comes to the propagation of email viruses. If that was the case Windows XP would solve the virus problem completely (it won't). The problem is that the boundary between code and data has been blurred. For some reason the people who felt they had to foist Java and Javascript winky-blinky features on the world had no clue when it came to security. (Don't get me started about the Java sandbox model, the code does not match the marketing hype, the implementation does not correspond to what I would regard as a sandbox design)
The other reason that UNIX boxes tend to be more secure is that the use of winky-blinky features is nowehere near as widespread. The proportion of terminally clueless users in the Windows world is (acording to my studies) approximately 92.931%, in the Linux world that figure is only 23.428%. So not only is the userbase smaller, the propability that a user sent the virus will execute the program and cause it to replicate is much smaller.
Again, look at biological models of propagation. x^n is a very big number if x > 1, it is a very small number if x
Therefore the day that AOL ships AOL for Linux will be the day that Linux will start to get virus problems. It will have the active code to support winky-blinky features and thus be vulnerable to attack, it will introduce the terminally clueless into the Linux user base.
The article preens itself over the use of multithreaded code over the multiprocess model of Apache. This is potentially a big win since the multiprocess model involves a lot of expensive process context swoitching and process to process communication which is expensive as opposed to thread switching.
When I discussed this issue with Thau (or to be precise, he did most of the talking) he gave the reason for using processes over threads as the awful state of the then pthreads packages. If Apache was to be portable it could not use threads. He even spent some time writing a threads package of his own.
I am tempted to suggest that rather than abandon apache for some java server (yeah lets compile all our code to an obsolete byte code and then try to JIT compile it for another architecture), it should not be a major task to replace the Apache hunt group of processes with a thread loop.
The other reason Thau gave for using processes was that the scheduler on UNIX sux and using lots of threads was a good way to get more resources, err quite.
Now that we have Linux I don't see why the design of applications like apache should be compromised to support obsolete and crippled legacy O/S. If someone wants to run on a BSD Vaxen then they can write their own Web server. One of the liabilities of open source is that once a platform is supported it can end up with the application supporting the platform long after the O/S vendor has ceased to. In the 1980s I had an unpleasant experience with a bunch of physicists attempting to use an old MVS machine, despite the fact that the vendor had obviously ceased giving meaningfull support for at least a decade. In particular they insisted that all function calls in the fortran programs be limited to 6 characters since they were still waiting for the new linker (when it came it turned out that for functions over 8 characters long it took the first four characters and the last four characters to build the linker label... lame, lame, lame)
This is a money grab. AT&T had negotiated a selling price with @Home though this didn't mean much since @Home went bankrupt. The bondholders of @Home's debt want more money for this asset. The bondholders "turning off" the network is an attempt to raise the selling price, though if they keep everyone off the network for too long then their asset loses all its value
It is a high stakes game of chicken but the problem for the bondholders is that AT&T probably win. The fact is that the @Home network is unlikely to be worth even what AT&T are offering for it. Depreciation of Internet hardware is pretty devastating and at the moment there is a massive glut of fibre capacity.
It might well cost AT&T double to replace the @home network but the system they would build would be a completely modern network with growing room, not a three year old network that was at the limit. If the @home network was so great they would not be in bankrupcy, they could simply sit on their existing sunk cost investment and send whatever return they could to the bond holders. Their problem is that they need to invest a massive slice of additional cash just to keep going.
I doubt that the outcome will be catastrophic for customers. There are plenty of Internet backbone providers and connecting up is not a massive issue. AT&T probably owns the lines into the backbone provider data centers in any case.
A packet coming from port 80 on $PRIVATE_IP gets remapped so that it appears as some oddball port number on $PUBLIC_IP. If they see lots of activity involving strange port numbers, they might conclude that $PUBLIC_IP is assigned to a router or a firewall.
Bzztt.. wrong. Packets do not come from port 80 unless you happen to be running an HTTP server which the cable cos probably block anyway.
The source port is always randomly assigned in the non-reserved portion of the port space (above 1024)
Maybe they can check the number of hops a packet has made.
No, the TTL field records the number of hops the pacet is allowed to make from then on. If the cable cos did start using the field it would be easy to fix in any case.
Something similar to the "OS identification" function in nmap ought to fairly easily tell the firewall appliances from Linksys and such apart from a computer.
Nahh, way, way beyond what is practical. The signatures change too frequently.
I am finding it absolutely amazing that when I chime in political discussions w/ any opinion that is contrary to American-Group-Think(TM) it gets modded down as flaim or troll.
Ah but if you write a good one you can still get more up mods than down mods.
The point is that the US view of itself at home is not shared abroad. The rest of the world does not consider the US to be the unique, the sole repository of freedom, liberty etc. etc. as US politicians are so fond of bleating.
Rather the rest of the world look at the dishonest liars that you elect as politicians and mae pretty much the same judgement of them as people in the US do. It is odd that the same people who demand that foreigners trust your government are the same ones who demand the right to carry guns because they can't trust the US government... The US does not have an unblemished record of keeping its word in international agreements.
The suggestion to build a duplicate GPS system is not bizare or in any way unexpected. The French have the same view of their 'culture' as the US does of theirs, only more so because they are French. Just as the US had to build a $15 billion experiment to duplicate the LHC in Geneva to have their flag on the damn thing, the French would love the rest of the EU to subsidize the launch of a rival GPS system on their Arianne rockets.
It is all tin pot nationalism which is why it looks so silly, particularly when people have to prove that they are tin pot nationalists by clucking in such excited circles. Ooohhh he said something naaaasty about our country, you must be eeeevil, quick, set up a GWB tribunal and execute him.
US commentors should note that the only reason that the Clinton Admin turned of the degraded signal is to head off the threat of a rival EU system. The military had the ability to use selective availability from the very start, but as is always the case with their toys they were demanding a quid pro quo for letting others use it.
The problem with the 'just trust us' approach is that it is difficult to place great trust in a democratic country that no longer bothers to count the votes and is planing to do away with trials, replacing them by tribunals. Meanwhile the Bush admin. has declared that it will unilaterally withdraw from any agreements it finds to be inconvenient - including biggies like the ABM treaty.
The cost is not a major issue, $1Bn is not a huge amount in the EU budget, however it is not a negligible issue. The Brits would certainly not get bothered enough about the risks of a US monopoly, the French on the other hand can be relied upon to get into a galic stew over the issue.
The concern for the EU would be that a future US president might use the GPS selective availability system as a bargaining chip in future trade negotiations. The US has from time to time gone through protectionist cycles and a President Buchannan might well have tried to get his way through various types of blackmail. Or imagine Senator Jessie Helms putting a ridder on an appropriations bill ordering the Admin. to turn off GPS service to any country that does not toe the line on whatever idea the supporter of segregation happened to have that week.
Given the vagaries of the US political process it is not surprising that the dependence on the GPS system is being raised as an issue. It is very unlikely that the EU will go ahead and build a rival system, however it is very likely that the US will respond to the proposals with a set of diplomatic assurances over the use made of selective availabilty. And just as GWB has discovered that the ABM treaty matters after all a future president Buchanan would find that diplomatic assurances are kind of harder to renege on than US unilateralists tend to believe.
Indeed. I own a Voodoo5 5500, and the FSAA on it kicks some serious ass. My only problem with it is that there's no official XP drivers. I have to rely on flaky 'hacked' drivers.
I abandoned my Voodoo 3 because I couldn't get drivers for XP and Tombraider Chronicles kept crashing the machine whenever I turned on the haredware acceleration and was slow as molasses without (this on a twin Pentium 3 machine with 512Mb Ram).
I just picked up a GeForce 3 500 Ti and suddenly the machine works fine. Not only does TRC run fine but the machine is now stable, I haven't had a crash since. I am even wondering whether to bother with the Windows XP upgrade at all.
The machine has no problem at all doing 30fps at the max resolution of my monitor (1024x1280). It even runs OK at 1200x1600 but the output looks crappy because the LCD display is aliasing like mad.
BTW I bought the Voodoo 3 with the machine because I wanted to get a PCI bus card and leave the AGP slot open for when the Voodoo 5 came available. It is a pity that the 5/6000 never appeared since it gave the term 'gratuitous' a whole new meaning. Hopefully the new NVidia will fill the same role.
As a practical matter however I found that people are far more impressed by the size of the case than the capability of the machine. For my last machine I bought a $300 'server style' case. This is about the same height as a small ATX case but twice the width. The idea was to avoid the type of overheating problems some of my earlier machines had had. It worked pretty well, no heating problems at all and the top is wide enough for the printer to sit on it nicely.
RMS has a particular view of the world. As much as many on Slashdot try, I don't think a single person here shares it.
Absolutism is very easy to defend, you simply refuse to accept any exception to your principals. The Pope has a very easy time in ethical debates on birth control and human cloning because he refuses to abandon the absolute.
RMS does not argue for free software on utlitiarian grounds, it is axiomatic that software should be free - according to his definition.
I don't think RMS is likely to contribute much to the GNOME board that they will consider to be of value. He will lecture them on his theological obsessions, but he will do that anyway. He won't persuade many people because it has to be all or nothing.
My problem with RMS standing is that his priority is his free software theology, not the good of the GNOME group. If he is successful he will polarize the GNOME group into two rival camps, pro and anti-RMS. There will be witch hunts and faction fighting and ultimately one camp will drive the other out. I don't think that type of activity helps anything. Certainly I would be very upset if I was a GNOME contributor and suddenly found RMS imposed on top of me by some slashdot cabal. Its like the folk living in Peshawar who were sending money to the Taleban to impose islamic orthodoxy on the Afghanis, theological purity is kinda easier to live with if someone else is going to live with the consequences.
This is not a classified network, it is not a military network, it is a network for the civilian infrastructure managed by the government. The military are not about to share their classified networks.
The main idea is to protect against denial of service attacks, hacking is less of a concern than a bomb planted at MAE West.
As such there are two ways to address the problem, one cheap but pointless and one expensive and equally pointless,
The cheap way is to patch together a private network using leased lines, the old private network approach. The problem here is that it does not actually add any security, it simply means that you are vulnerable to attack at the SS7 level rather than the IP level. 'fixed' lines are these days routable, albeit using different technology etc. to IP.
So pointless approach number 2 is you go and dig your own trenches, fill them with wire etc. This would cost of the order of a billion dollars and would actually increase the vulnerability of the network since the private net would never be as dense and redundant as the public network.
All in all this is an indication that the administration don't understand what they are doing. They are recapitulating the pre-Internet mindset, they are not moving beyond it.
My mind boggles at the last paragraph of yours; ANYTHING you can represent in a text file, you can also represent in RDBMS, and usually easier..
Personally I don't find writing $2.5 million+ checks to Oracle easy. However that is what one engineer's plan would have required. We wrote a custom db with limited schema support for $0.5 mil and blew $0.3 mil on RAM chips.
Something that Oracle shareholders should recognize. The principal IP of Oracle is all to do with optimizing the movement of r/w heads over disk platters. That knowledge is effectively obsolete since RAM is approaching the cost of disk (todays RAM price is what disk prices were 4 years ago). RAM is in any case much cheaper than Oracle licenses.
The WTO is only going on the basis of copyright: it's not basing its claim on passing off or trademark laws.
What I said is that the WTO would have a good case according to three causes of action.
I read the same statement, and took it as a straightforward parody
I don't think that the Holocaust is a legitimate subject for that type of treatment. In effect it is accusing IBM of being complicit in Genocide. I don't find that type of accusation amusing.
It is one thing to make that type of accusation under your own name, quite a different thing to make it under the pretense of being someone else. People have the right to make themselves look stupid. It is quite a different thing to put words into someone else's mouth to make them look stupid.
Relational databases didn't come to dominate the database market because they pushed aside equally valid alternatives, they dominate the market because relational databases implement relational calculus.
That's rubbish. Back in in the 1960s when the first relational databases emerged nobody had a formal specification for a relational calculus. Today we can create a formal calculus for any data model, the Entity relational model is no different in that regard.
SQL is a very 1960s / COBOL way of looking at a data structure. Most of the people using it simply do not have the breadth of experience of other data models to know its strengths or weaknesses. Most of the posts in the thread are as empty as those in an editor choice flamewar.
The entity relationship model has been discarded by the programming language community in favor of typed set theory. Java and C# both have representations of sets, lists, etc., the only reason to use an entity relational model is to get persistence for the data structure.
So you get this impedance mismatch and a pile of code whose sole purpose is to rewrite the data structures used in the program so that they match the data structures used in the persistence store.
What we need is a persistence store with a data model that matches our programming language data model. Unfortunately most of the attempts to do this are half baked. All it should take is to add transaction statements into the language so that you declare a procedure to be transactional, it will be all or nothing.
Unfortunately Sun made a pact with Oracle over Java and so they have remained stuck in the obsolete SQL world. C# looks to me to be a much better opportunity, Microsoft has little to lose from unifying the data model of the language with that of the persistence store and everything to gain.
Java, LDAP and XML were created to solve particular problems - at which they have succeeded quite well. SOAP and.NET were created purely to try and grab market share away from the previous technologies
That is a crock. XML was developed explicitly to fix the problems in SGML. LDAP was developed to fix the problems in X.500. In both cases it was the poor design of the predecessor that was being fixed.
Henrick F-N was working on SOAP like ideas long before he joined Microsoft. Again all SOAP does is to fix known incompetence in CORBA. Gates devised.NET to solve two problems, first how to get a foothold in the enterprise space, second how to improve on C++ without the proprietary lock that Sun had imposed on Java.
What's also not going to help the developing world is allowing U.S. corporations to exploit third world workers for cheap labor that is prevented by their own poverty and lack of political influence in their own country from unionizing.
Trade is not inevitably exploitation. You sound like the trotskyites used to.
I get the feeling that people want to have opinions on this subject that are simple, easy and comforting. Their real demands have nothing to do with trade, they are demanding that life be as simplistic as their ideology.
I find it interesting that both the posts I have made so far have been moderated up as 'Insightful', then down as 'flamebait' and 'offtopic'. The topic is the gatt.org site so the person who modded me offtopic is simply disagreeing. As for flamebait, it seems that these people don't like hearing any disagreements.
That could explain why they have to create their own WTO site.
And I suppose the people that founded the USA never told a lie (the cherry tree legend not withstanding). Why is lying not a legitimate form of protest? It seems to be a legitimate form of political organisations like the WTO.
Why should anyone believe someone who is obviously telling lies? How do you know the truth from the lies?
One of the reasons I have no time for the anti-WTO protestors is that they appear to have no idea what they are protesting about. They completely fail to set out a coherent set of political goals or a strategy to achieve them.
For example amongst the protestors are people complaining that the third world is paid too little for the goods they export to the US and others who are complaining about the loss of US jobs. Denying access to the US markets is not going to help the developing world.
I don't see many of the anti-WTO protestors at the conferences trying to do something positive for the third world. Equally it is a bit odd being lectured on the evils of global capitalism by some teenager wearing a $150 pair of Nike trainers.
This scheme makes use of the fact that if you trash the error correction bits on your CD, a digital device won't understand it. Your audio CD player doesn't care
Oh so I get it an audio CD player is analog but a CDROM is digital... Bzzzt.
The point is that the CDROM drivers should not just crap out when they get an error. They should report the fact that there were errors in the data and continue to read the next block.
This should be in the drivers in any case so that they can read scratched CDs. In most cases a single bit error can be handled transparently by simply substituting the average of the samples on either side.
The scope for fixing data on a digital CDROM should be much greater, the PC can do error recovery tricks no CD could ever do, like a Fourier transform on the good data and interpolating for the bad.
The World Trade Organization is not an ordinary corporation; it's an international UN organization.
That does not significantly change the remedies available to the WTO. It appears to me that the WTO would have a good case to make.
The gatt.org site is not a 'parody' site, it is deliberately passing itself off as the official WTO site. It is intentionally deceiving the readers. As a result the WTO would appear to have many remedies available, the copyright on its logos, 'passing off' and libel.
These guys deserve everything that is comming to them. Deceit and lies are not legitimate means of protest. I don't see why we should be leaping to protect these idiots. Its like getting excited when people who go to demonstrations to get arrested get arrested and go to jail. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
Amongst the statements on the site are:
Much has been made lately of IBM's participation in the Holocaust. Indeed, IBM proactively and creatively helped the Nazis identify all of Germany's Jews, which in turn made possible the biggest slaughter of all time.
Freedom of speech is not the freedom to impersonate others. The gatt.org site is a censorship site, not a freedom of speech site, its explicit intention is to deny the WTO the right to speak for themselves by putting words into their mouth.
A lawyer would cost a hell of alot more then a new pair of speakers or even a speaker/stereo combination.
Not in the UK, there is legal aid available in civil suits. Also the RIAA has to pay the costs of both sides if it looses, so the incentive to litigate consumers into submission evaporates
All this is going to do is to force the manufacturers of CDROMs to fix the broken drivers. The 'copy protection' schemes do nothing more than exploit bugs in the sloppy error handling of the standard Windows CDROM driver.
Another idea would be to use the Reverse Dimitry Sklarof tactic. Find out who is writing the Catus Data Shield and see what they can be prosecuted for.
Tolkein is not derrivative, he is refferential. The whole point is that if you know the various legends that he is refferencing the books are more fun.
Furthermore what Tolkein was up to was recreating the mythology that Britain had once had before the Romans and Christianization. The whole point was that the mythology was to be used by others.
It is only plagarism if the ideas are stolen without attribution. Tolkein made it clear where he took his ideas from and so does Rowling. I doubt that the Tolkein estate executors are unhappy with Harry Potter, since he came alone interest in TLOTR has soared, they have finaly made a decent film of it.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
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But not from Nancy Stouffer. Yeah, her books have "muggles," "Larry Potter," and a "Nimbus," but beyond a few names, there's nothing in common at all.
Funny thing is that the books are self published and nobody seems to be able to prove that they existed before the first Harry Potter book came out.
Meanwhile J.K.Rowling was touting her book outline before the Stouffer book was published.
Like the plaintiffs inthe case I don't think it is a coincidence, however I think the explanation is rather different than the one they alledge.
Sounds rather like patent law when someone files a patent after the invention has been published by someone else.
People with too much time on their hands...
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Never heard of it. Unless, of course, you're referring to "Antigone"...
Anti-gone? That would be here?
All this litterary snobbery is ridiculous. If you don't like the prose then don't read books that were written for twelve years olds.
Equally a film aimed at the pre-teen audience is not going to have the action adventure impact of 'die-hard', 'Rambo' or 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'.
I suspect that more than a little of the carping is being organized by the Religious right. They have realised that they look silly attacking Potter as being 'Satanist', so they are organizing people to call into talk shows to dis Potter.
One of the ways you can tell this is going on is that the same phrases keep being used, 'Thin and Hollow' turns up on one of their 'talking points' sheets, I have heard it repeated on three separate chat shows. Then they plug some piece of 'christian' propaganda (which most christians would not recognize as such).
Of course Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell haveto do something with their time after the used the WTC attacks for gay bashing. It would be nice if they had the guts to do this sort of thing in the open rather than using an astro-turf campaign.
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Last year you could get a new machine (sans monitor) for $450 at Micro Center. This year you can get name brand, 1.2 GHz plus machines for less than $1000. The system requirements for Windows XP are easily met by all the machines currently on the market. The only possible exception being some of the year old models being sold by the discount outlets.
PCs are disposable equipment, they are not durable goods by any stretch of the imagination. Users want a fat O/S distribution.
Even if you have an older PC you can now get 256Mb SIMMS for $30 and huge disks for $100. It is not at all unreasonable for XP to expect a high performance machine.
Of course if your idea of computing is to use a Dec Vt100 attached to the serial port of your 386 box, then go ahead. Just don't expect the rest of us to adapt because you choose to use a museum piece.
Bzztt... wrong...
Turns out that NTFS cannot be used on removable disks, even though the NTFS semantics are better suited (think what happens when a disk is unmounted unexpectedly.
The main reason I use an encrypted disk is that I have a lot of client sensitive info on my machine, including high level strategic plans for a Nasdaq 100 company.
Encrypted disks should be used as a matter of course on machines used by lawyers, doctors, accountants, anyone with a professional confidentiality duty. Laptops get stolen, machines get sold with confidential information still on the drives.
I am more skeptical about the need for encrypting file systems for geeks, after all most sysops would do better to keep less secrets rather than more.
The embedded devices market is not all about small and fast. And even where the issue is small and fast, the XP kernel may well prove to have more to offer than many UNIX designs.
There is a wide range of embedded devices, from washing machines to cars, to industrial process machinery. Until recently only a small fraction of those systems had anything as sophisticated as an operating system.
If on the other hand you want to build a next generation audio system you are likely to find that you need an O/S, you need some sort of file system to store your MP3s, you have an ethernet and possibly a WiFi interface to support, you may even support PCMCIA or compactflash. XP has major advantages in that space since you are guaranteed to have a driver available.
The bloatware charge is and always has been bogus. People don't seem to understand that the value of a 3 year old PC is $150 and so there is no particular reason why Microsoft should limit a $100/$200 O/S so that it can run under the constraints of that machine. 512Mb SIMMs are on sale these days for the price of 16Mb SIMMs a couple of years back, nobody actually makes 20Gb 3.5" disks any more, they are too small to bother with.
RAM and disk space are not constrained resources on the PC, so don't expect companies in that space to constrain them in their products. The O/S kernel is kept small because the performance of the machine depends on large parts of it being in primary or secondary cache most of the time.
The features of XP that will be much more relevant to the embedded systems space are its multi-tasking and scheduling control. I don't expect any traditional UNIX kernel to do well there, the UNIX architecture was never designed for and is simply not up to RT tasks. Thats why the RT Linux varieties have major mods to the internals to support features such as guaranteed scheduling etc.
My favorite amongst these is the ZixIt/Visa lawsuit. The CEO of ZixIt said in a con call that 'shareholders should sell if there are no ZixCharge partners by the end of the year'. So the end of the year comes and no partners, coincidentally ZixIt filled a suit against Visa claiming that anonymous posts on the Yahoo message board by a Visa employee had somehow interferred with the business relationships of the company.
The lawsuit is still in progress, only Visa are now subpoenaing the records of the discussion board from Yahoo. The only explanation for this would be if they suspected that ZixIt employees were posting to the board. ZixIt is no longer revenueless, they sold 9,500 seats at something like $25 a seat last quarter, the ZixCharge product has never launched, although this may in part be due to the ZixIt payment site having been hacked a few months back. Kinda hard to promote a secure payments scheme after that eh?
During the arguments over the Paula Jones lawsuit the one that I thought was least good was that the President should not have to spend time answering vexatious lawsuits. While I think that the lawsuit was cooked up by the GOP from start to finis, I don't buy that argument. The Congress and President should have to face the same risks of bogus lawsuits as the rest of us, that might encourage them to do something about the situation.
Don't be so sure. We have had UNIX worms and even VMS worms. Unlike the designers of UNIX, VMS started with a security architecture and actually recieved B2 certification rather than describing itself as 'B2 equivalent'.
At the other end of the scale the security architecture of MAC O/S has until a few months ago been stuck at the MSDOS level, lacking even protected memory, yet MAC viruses are none too common these days.
The significant factor is the proportion of the network population that uses a particular O/S. As with a biological infection there are definite inflection points that determine whether a virus spreads fast enough to cause an epidemic or a pandemic.
When the Wang Worm hit it could propagate because close to 100% of the computers on HEPNET were VMS systems. Equally the Moriss worm took out the Internet when the vast majority of nodes were UNIX boxes running sendmail.
The proportion of UNIX machines on the Internet today is probably close to critical mass for allowing a viral epidemic. The saving factor is not the design of the O/S, it is the variation between the O/S implementations. Anyone who thinks that sendmail is a lesser security risk than Outlook should read a few CERT advisories.
The separation of administrative privs is not actually significant when it comes to the propagation of email viruses. If that was the case Windows XP would solve the virus problem completely (it won't). The problem is that the boundary between code and data has been blurred. For some reason the people who felt they had to foist Java and Javascript winky-blinky features on the world had no clue when it came to security. (Don't get me started about the Java sandbox model, the code does not match the marketing hype, the implementation does not correspond to what I would regard as a sandbox design)
The other reason that UNIX boxes tend to be more secure is that the use of winky-blinky features is nowehere near as widespread. The proportion of terminally clueless users in the Windows world is (acording to my studies) approximately 92.931%, in the Linux world that figure is only 23.428%. So not only is the userbase smaller, the propability that a user sent the virus will execute the program and cause it to replicate is much smaller.
Again, look at biological models of propagation. x^n is a very big number if x > 1, it is a very small number if x Therefore the day that AOL ships AOL for Linux will be the day that Linux will start to get virus problems. It will have the active code to support winky-blinky features and thus be vulnerable to attack, it will introduce the terminally clueless into the Linux user base.
When I discussed this issue with Thau (or to be precise, he did most of the talking) he gave the reason for using processes over threads as the awful state of the then pthreads packages. If Apache was to be portable it could not use threads. He even spent some time writing a threads package of his own.
I am tempted to suggest that rather than abandon apache for some java server (yeah lets compile all our code to an obsolete byte code and then try to JIT compile it for another architecture), it should not be a major task to replace the Apache hunt group of processes with a thread loop.
The other reason Thau gave for using processes was that the scheduler on UNIX sux and using lots of threads was a good way to get more resources, err quite.
Now that we have Linux I don't see why the design of applications like apache should be compromised to support obsolete and crippled legacy O/S. If someone wants to run on a BSD Vaxen then they can write their own Web server. One of the liabilities of open source is that once a platform is supported it can end up with the application supporting the platform long after the O/S vendor has ceased to. In the 1980s I had an unpleasant experience with a bunch of physicists attempting to use an old MVS machine, despite the fact that the vendor had obviously ceased giving meaningfull support for at least a decade. In particular they insisted that all function calls in the fortran programs be limited to 6 characters since they were still waiting for the new linker (when it came it turned out that for functions over 8 characters long it took the first four characters and the last four characters to build the linker label... lame, lame, lame)
It is a high stakes game of chicken but the problem for the bondholders is that AT&T probably win. The fact is that the @Home network is unlikely to be worth even what AT&T are offering for it. Depreciation of Internet hardware is pretty devastating and at the moment there is a massive glut of fibre capacity.
It might well cost AT&T double to replace the @home network but the system they would build would be a completely modern network with growing room, not a three year old network that was at the limit. If the @home network was so great they would not be in bankrupcy, they could simply sit on their existing sunk cost investment and send whatever return they could to the bond holders. Their problem is that they need to invest a massive slice of additional cash just to keep going.
I doubt that the outcome will be catastrophic for customers. There are plenty of Internet backbone providers and connecting up is not a massive issue. AT&T probably owns the lines into the backbone provider data centers in any case.
Bzztt.. wrong. Packets do not come from port 80 unless you happen to be running an HTTP server which the cable cos probably block anyway.
The source port is always randomly assigned in the non-reserved portion of the port space (above 1024)
Maybe they can check the number of hops a packet has made.
No, the TTL field records the number of hops the pacet is allowed to make from then on. If the cable cos did start using the field it would be easy to fix in any case.
Something similar to the "OS identification" function in nmap ought to fairly easily tell the firewall appliances from Linksys and such apart from a computer.
Nahh, way, way beyond what is practical. The signatures change too frequently.
Ah but if you write a good one you can still get more up mods than down mods.
The point is that the US view of itself at home is not shared abroad. The rest of the world does not consider the US to be the unique, the sole repository of freedom, liberty etc. etc. as US politicians are so fond of bleating.
Rather the rest of the world look at the dishonest liars that you elect as politicians and mae pretty much the same judgement of them as people in the US do. It is odd that the same people who demand that foreigners trust your government are the same ones who demand the right to carry guns because they can't trust the US government... The US does not have an unblemished record of keeping its word in international agreements.
The suggestion to build a duplicate GPS system is not bizare or in any way unexpected. The French have the same view of their 'culture' as the US does of theirs, only more so because they are French. Just as the US had to build a $15 billion experiment to duplicate the LHC in Geneva to have their flag on the damn thing, the French would love the rest of the EU to subsidize the launch of a rival GPS system on their Arianne rockets.
It is all tin pot nationalism which is why it looks so silly, particularly when people have to prove that they are tin pot nationalists by clucking in such excited circles. Ooohhh he said something naaaasty about our country, you must be eeeevil, quick, set up a GWB tribunal and execute him.
The problem with the 'just trust us' approach is that it is difficult to place great trust in a democratic country that no longer bothers to count the votes and is planing to do away with trials, replacing them by tribunals. Meanwhile the Bush admin. has declared that it will unilaterally withdraw from any agreements it finds to be inconvenient - including biggies like the ABM treaty.
The cost is not a major issue, $1Bn is not a huge amount in the EU budget, however it is not a negligible issue. The Brits would certainly not get bothered enough about the risks of a US monopoly, the French on the other hand can be relied upon to get into a galic stew over the issue.
The concern for the EU would be that a future US president might use the GPS selective availability system as a bargaining chip in future trade negotiations. The US has from time to time gone through protectionist cycles and a President Buchannan might well have tried to get his way through various types of blackmail. Or imagine Senator Jessie Helms putting a ridder on an appropriations bill ordering the Admin. to turn off GPS service to any country that does not toe the line on whatever idea the supporter of segregation happened to have that week.
Given the vagaries of the US political process it is not surprising that the dependence on the GPS system is being raised as an issue. It is very unlikely that the EU will go ahead and build a rival system, however it is very likely that the US will respond to the proposals with a set of diplomatic assurances over the use made of selective availabilty. And just as GWB has discovered that the ABM treaty matters after all a future president Buchanan would find that diplomatic assurances are kind of harder to renege on than US unilateralists tend to believe.
I abandoned my Voodoo 3 because I couldn't get drivers for XP and Tombraider Chronicles kept crashing the machine whenever I turned on the haredware acceleration and was slow as molasses without (this on a twin Pentium 3 machine with 512Mb Ram).
I just picked up a GeForce 3 500 Ti and suddenly the machine works fine. Not only does TRC run fine but the machine is now stable, I haven't had a crash since. I am even wondering whether to bother with the Windows XP upgrade at all.
The machine has no problem at all doing 30fps at the max resolution of my monitor (1024x1280). It even runs OK at 1200x1600 but the output looks crappy because the LCD display is aliasing like mad.
BTW I bought the Voodoo 3 with the machine because I wanted to get a PCI bus card and leave the AGP slot open for when the Voodoo 5 came available. It is a pity that the 5/6000 never appeared since it gave the term 'gratuitous' a whole new meaning. Hopefully the new NVidia will fill the same role.
As a practical matter however I found that people are far more impressed by the size of the case than the capability of the machine. For my last machine I bought a $300 'server style' case. This is about the same height as a small ATX case but twice the width. The idea was to avoid the type of overheating problems some of my earlier machines had had. It worked pretty well, no heating problems at all and the top is wide enough for the printer to sit on it nicely.
Absolutism is very easy to defend, you simply refuse to accept any exception to your principals. The Pope has a very easy time in ethical debates on birth control and human cloning because he refuses to abandon the absolute.
RMS does not argue for free software on utlitiarian grounds, it is axiomatic that software should be free - according to his definition.
I don't think RMS is likely to contribute much to the GNOME board that they will consider to be of value. He will lecture them on his theological obsessions, but he will do that anyway. He won't persuade many people because it has to be all or nothing.
My problem with RMS standing is that his priority is his free software theology, not the good of the GNOME group. If he is successful he will polarize the GNOME group into two rival camps, pro and anti-RMS. There will be witch hunts and faction fighting and ultimately one camp will drive the other out. I don't think that type of activity helps anything. Certainly I would be very upset if I was a GNOME contributor and suddenly found RMS imposed on top of me by some slashdot cabal. Its like the folk living in Peshawar who were sending money to the Taleban to impose islamic orthodoxy on the Afghanis, theological purity is kinda easier to live with if someone else is going to live with the consequences.
The main idea is to protect against denial of service attacks, hacking is less of a concern than a bomb planted at MAE West.
As such there are two ways to address the problem, one cheap but pointless and one expensive and equally pointless,
The cheap way is to patch together a private network using leased lines, the old private network approach. The problem here is that it does not actually add any security, it simply means that you are vulnerable to attack at the SS7 level rather than the IP level. 'fixed' lines are these days routable, albeit using different technology etc. to IP.
So pointless approach number 2 is you go and dig your own trenches, fill them with wire etc. This would cost of the order of a billion dollars and would actually increase the vulnerability of the network since the private net would never be as dense and redundant as the public network.
All in all this is an indication that the administration don't understand what they are doing. They are recapitulating the pre-Internet mindset, they are not moving beyond it.
Personally I don't find writing $2.5 million+ checks to Oracle easy. However that is what one engineer's plan would have required. We wrote a custom db with limited schema support for $0.5 mil and blew $0.3 mil on RAM chips.
Something that Oracle shareholders should recognize. The principal IP of Oracle is all to do with optimizing the movement of r/w heads over disk platters. That knowledge is effectively obsolete since RAM is approaching the cost of disk (todays RAM price is what disk prices were 4 years ago). RAM is in any case much cheaper than Oracle licenses.
What I said is that the WTO would have a good case according to three causes of action.
I read the same statement, and took it as a straightforward parody
I don't think that the Holocaust is a legitimate subject for that type of treatment. In effect it is accusing IBM of being complicit in Genocide. I don't find that type of accusation amusing.
It is one thing to make that type of accusation under your own name, quite a different thing to make it under the pretense of being someone else. People have the right to make themselves look stupid. It is quite a different thing to put words into someone else's mouth to make them look stupid.
That's rubbish. Back in in the 1960s when the first relational databases emerged nobody had a formal specification for a relational calculus. Today we can create a formal calculus for any data model, the Entity relational model is no different in that regard.
SQL is a very 1960s / COBOL way of looking at a data structure. Most of the people using it simply do not have the breadth of experience of other data models to know its strengths or weaknesses. Most of the posts in the thread are as empty as those in an editor choice flamewar.
The entity relationship model has been discarded by the programming language community in favor of typed set theory. Java and C# both have representations of sets, lists, etc., the only reason to use an entity relational model is to get persistence for the data structure.
So you get this impedance mismatch and a pile of code whose sole purpose is to rewrite the data structures used in the program so that they match the data structures used in the persistence store.
What we need is a persistence store with a data model that matches our programming language data model. Unfortunately most of the attempts to do this are half baked. All it should take is to add transaction statements into the language so that you declare a procedure to be transactional, it will be all or nothing.
Unfortunately Sun made a pact with Oracle over Java and so they have remained stuck in the obsolete SQL world. C# looks to me to be a much better opportunity, Microsoft has little to lose from unifying the data model of the language with that of the persistence store and everything to gain.
That is a crock. XML was developed explicitly to fix the problems in SGML. LDAP was developed to fix the problems in X.500. In both cases it was the poor design of the predecessor that was being fixed.
Henrick F-N was working on SOAP like ideas long before he joined Microsoft. Again all SOAP does is to fix known incompetence in CORBA. Gates devised .NET to solve two problems, first how to get a foothold in the enterprise space, second how to improve on C++ without the proprietary lock that Sun had imposed on Java.
Trade is not inevitably exploitation. You sound like the trotskyites used to.
I get the feeling that people want to have opinions on this subject that are simple, easy and comforting. Their real demands have nothing to do with trade, they are demanding that life be as simplistic as their ideology.
I find it interesting that both the posts I have made so far have been moderated up as 'Insightful', then down as 'flamebait' and 'offtopic'. The topic is the gatt.org site so the person who modded me offtopic is simply disagreeing. As for flamebait, it seems that these people don't like hearing any disagreements.
That could explain why they have to create their own WTO site.
Why should anyone believe someone who is obviously telling lies? How do you know the truth from the lies?
One of the reasons I have no time for the anti-WTO protestors is that they appear to have no idea what they are protesting about. They completely fail to set out a coherent set of political goals or a strategy to achieve them.
For example amongst the protestors are people complaining that the third world is paid too little for the goods they export to the US and others who are complaining about the loss of US jobs. Denying access to the US markets is not going to help the developing world.
I don't see many of the anti-WTO protestors at the conferences trying to do something positive for the third world. Equally it is a bit odd being lectured on the evils of global capitalism by some teenager wearing a $150 pair of Nike trainers.
Oh so I get it an audio CD player is analog but a CDROM is digital... Bzzzt.
The point is that the CDROM drivers should not just crap out when they get an error. They should report the fact that there were errors in the data and continue to read the next block.
This should be in the drivers in any case so that they can read scratched CDs. In most cases a single bit error can be handled transparently by simply substituting the average of the samples on either side.
The scope for fixing data on a digital CDROM should be much greater, the PC can do error recovery tricks no CD could ever do, like a Fourier transform on the good data and interpolating for the bad.
That does not significantly change the remedies available to the WTO. It appears to me that the WTO would have a good case to make.
The gatt.org site is not a 'parody' site, it is deliberately passing itself off as the official WTO site. It is intentionally deceiving the readers. As a result the WTO would appear to have many remedies available, the copyright on its logos, 'passing off' and libel.
These guys deserve everything that is comming to them. Deceit and lies are not legitimate means of protest. I don't see why we should be leaping to protect these idiots. Its like getting excited when people who go to demonstrations to get arrested get arrested and go to jail. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
Amongst the statements on the site are:
Much has been made lately of IBM's participation in the Holocaust. Indeed, IBM proactively and creatively helped the Nazis identify all of Germany's Jews, which in turn made possible the biggest slaughter of all time.
Freedom of speech is not the freedom to impersonate others. The gatt.org site is a censorship site, not a freedom of speech site, its explicit intention is to deny the WTO the right to speak for themselves by putting words into their mouth.
Not in the UK, there is legal aid available in civil suits. Also the RIAA has to pay the costs of both sides if it looses, so the incentive to litigate consumers into submission evaporates
All this is going to do is to force the manufacturers of CDROMs to fix the broken drivers. The 'copy protection' schemes do nothing more than exploit bugs in the sloppy error handling of the standard Windows CDROM driver.
Another idea would be to use the Reverse Dimitry Sklarof tactic. Find out who is writing the Catus Data Shield and see what they can be prosecuted for.
Furthermore what Tolkein was up to was recreating the mythology that Britain had once had before the Romans and Christianization. The whole point was that the mythology was to be used by others.
It is only plagarism if the ideas are stolen without attribution. Tolkein made it clear where he took his ideas from and so does Rowling. I doubt that the Tolkein estate executors are unhappy with Harry Potter, since he came alone interest in TLOTR has soared, they have finaly made a decent film of it.
Funny thing is that the books are self published and nobody seems to be able to prove that they existed before the first Harry Potter book came out.
Meanwhile J.K.Rowling was touting her book outline before the Stouffer book was published.
Like the plaintiffs inthe case I don't think it is a coincidence, however I think the explanation is rather different than the one they alledge.
Sounds rather like patent law when someone files a patent after the invention has been published by someone else.
Anti-gone? That would be here?
All this litterary snobbery is ridiculous. If you don't like the prose then don't read books that were written for twelve years olds.
Equally a film aimed at the pre-teen audience is not going to have the action adventure impact of 'die-hard', 'Rambo' or 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'.
I suspect that more than a little of the carping is being organized by the Religious right. They have realised that they look silly attacking Potter as being 'Satanist', so they are organizing people to call into talk shows to dis Potter.
One of the ways you can tell this is going on is that the same phrases keep being used, 'Thin and Hollow' turns up on one of their 'talking points' sheets, I have heard it repeated on three separate chat shows. Then they plug some piece of 'christian' propaganda (which most christians would not recognize as such).
Of course Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell haveto do something with their time after the used the WTC attacks for gay bashing. It would be nice if they had the guts to do this sort of thing in the open rather than using an astro-turf campaign.