Re:Dissappointed to hear it is biased.
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Republic.Com
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People frequently forget that the word Nazi is short for National Socialist.
Meaning nothing, the socialist block was the only group to vote against the enabling act that gave Hitler supreme power. The communists would have done had Hitler not had all their deputies elected.
The claim that Hitler's "philosophy" bore any coherent resemblance to any mainstream political movement. However the principal planks of Mein Kampf were a Eugenic program based on genocide of Gypsies, Jews and Homosexuals and the invasion of Eastern Europe to create a 'Liebensraum'. Neither of those objectives has ever been associated with mainstream European Socialism.
The Nationalization of industry did not actually take place, that is in part because the industrialists were the main backers of Hitler. With the exception of Winston Churchil most of the European right at the time was enthusiastically supporting Hitler's command economy program for restoring Germany's economy.
The fact is that the right was far more tolerant of Hitler than the left, just as the left were far more tolerant of Stalin than the right. Both sets of appeasers were utterly wrong and it was the standouts on both sides who were right - most notably Winston Churchil on the 'right' (although his changes of party means that he is not easily characterized) and George Orwell (Eric Blair) on the left.
Re:Dissappointed to hear it is biased.
on
Republic.Com
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· Score: 2
the resurgance of the Conservatives in Britain, and the collapse of the left acrsoss the entire globe since 1989
Fact Every major European country has had a left wing government for a majority of the time since 1989.
Fact 'Social Democrats' currently form the government in all but two major European states.
Fact The notoriously right wing Murdoch press has even written off the Conservatives as a credible opposition force let alone a government.
Fact No party that believes it will win an election calls for a delay as the British conservatives have been doing.
Fact A majority of the US electorate voted for Gore, hardly a sign that the election can be taken as demonstrating Republican hegenemony. With a drawn presidential election, hung senate and narrowed lead in the house few expect the GOP trifecta to last long.
Delusion is not confined to sad Trotskyites. Nor for that matter is the evil of mindless ideology. Karl Popper had it right when he identified ideological extremism as the 'enemy of the open society'. The idea that the end justifies the means comes from a belief in absolute ideological truth.
Twenty years ago it was the ideological left that was trying to change society and the pragmatic right that spent most of the time in government. Today those positions are reversed and it is the right that is ideological and the left that has become the natural party of government in most of the democratic world.
Well, I for one didn't buy an expensive stereo so I could listen to degraded versions of the music that I enjoy. I'm kinda glad that downloaded music hasn't taken over the market. Thanks, but I like quality music, and I am willing to pay the artist for it.
Napster samples are not representative. A good compression algorithm introduces much less noise than the discrete linear quantization used on a CD.
That said, MP3 is not a very good compression algorithm. It is not even the compression algorithm used on DVDs as many people eroneously believe. Most DVDs are encoded using Dolby Digital (AC3). MP3 is also proprietary.
Want to copyright something? Then you have to pay a fee. The fee starts at one dollar and triples each year, for as long as you continue to pay. This is fair to the small inventor and limits the megacorps from eternally copyrighting things. Oh yeah, make this copyright rule retroactive to all currently copyrighted items. All current (C) holders now owe $1 for the next year of copyright, payable by 1/1/2002.
This is similar to how it works, the time schedule is not so steep and cheques have to be made payable to 'The Committee to Re-elect Orin Hatch Ltd.'.
Frankly, Napster is a necessary challenge to their cartel, and I sort of wish that they could find a way to filter out RIAA songs,
Napster is a bunch of venture capitalist crooks that are at least as bad as the RIAA. What they want to do is to kill their competition peddling WAreZ, then when they are the only game in town they can jack up the fees.
The Internet existed before Napster, it will exist after Shawn Fanning and the opportunists he is fronting for have gone bankrupt, and so will Internet music.
I am sure that some commie type said something about letting capitalist exploiters of the workers kill each other but I can't remember the exact quote.
What would make the scene real perfect is if somehow they could dredge up enough dirt on Orin in the process to have him imdicted for something career ending.
How many thousands of/. posts have said that people would pay for legal Napster? It's precisely this threat to their distribution system that the major labels are so afraid of.
Exactly, only if you pay for the content there is no need to put up with the crappy peer to peer distribution, the content can be distributed from the content provider via the likes of Akamai.
The danger for the RIAA is that the key players in such a scheme would most likely be the broadcast media companies - the AOLs, CBS, Disney and the like. The fact that the many of record labels have distribution arms only adds to the concern. Sony and Philips are paranoid that CBS will scoop the pool. CBS Records are paranoid that CBS Networks will absorb them.
Napster is the greatest gift for the RIAA it allows them to divert attention from their own rapacious greed and gives them a lever to fend off the forces of change. It will be a short lived strategy however. Hopefully once Napster is trash the real realignment can start.
If the RIAA and the labels are cut out the cost of music can drop to about 45 cents a single track or 1.50 for a CD full. At that price the incentive to piracy goes down and also the number of CDs bought goes up.
If I could download CDs in ripped form from Amazon I would probably end up buying stuff I own already to save the bother of doing it myself.
Chris Ambler: In this regard Mr. Garrin may be interpreted as acting as a capitalist and NOT a Socialist or Communist
Right, Ambler is just calling names. In fact Ambler tried to do exactly the same sort of thing with no success so far so I guess he is a communist too by his logic.
You will find that Communism is NOT about oppression and control - but freedom from the Ruling Class and true democratic principles.
Those 'true democratic principles' not including elections which are merely 'borgeois devices' according to Lenin. One can argue that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao et. al. all failled to implement 'real communism'. However the dictatorial line is pretty clear in Karl Marx. If you want to throw out Marx you haven't got a communist movement.
Complaining about the association between Communism and Stalin's police state is a bit like trying to separate Facism and Hitler. OK so Mussolini invented Facism and not Hitler and Mussolini's political murders were in the low tens of thousands rather than the millions. The Italian Facist party tries to do this today but it is still a murderous creed.
Given the times of 1848 when the Communist manifesto was written Marx and Engels were relatively liberal for the time, most continental European countries were authoritarian dictatorships, Britain was at best a qualified democracy - only those with wealth got the vote. The US was not a major power and was largely identified with slave plantations rather than the rights of man. The idea that a doctrine of resistance to the miserable political and ecconomic conditions of that time is the all encompassing solution to the problems of our own is somewhat wierd.
European socialism on the other hand is completely different. At present all but one of the European democracies has a left wing government that started as a socialist movement. Socialists have long known the dangers of communists - Lenin gained power in Russia by overturning a democratic socialist regime and having most of the delegates shot. Communism is to socialism what Facism is to conservatism. The European socialist movement is essentially what the US calls Liberals and was the political movement that gained universal sufferage, female suffrage, free trades unions, the welfare state etc.
The 'Capitalism' that Marx talks about is a concentration of capital in the hands of the very few. The 'Capitalism' we have today is much more broadly distributed. Capital is no longer the means of control it was in 1850. Marx might not approve but he certainly would not make the same argument against it.
Fees from new registrations plummeted, Garrin says, from as much as $3000 a day to barely $100. "ICANN killed our business," he says.
Not a bad rate of pay eh?
So ICANN killed the business by refusing to give the guy 115 root level domains. And so in time honored US fashion he goes crying his eyes out to a senator or two to ask for a handout.
The quote from Ambler is somewhat amusing, he is the guy who has been trying to sell.web names for a few years now.
The Internet's is the first revolution whose pioneers believed they could create a better world while making themselves rich.
Absolutely nobody got into the Internet in the early years thinking they would get rich. Even MarcA didn't work out that he could make a lot of money claiming credit for other's work until 1995 or so. And to be brutally honest most dotcom millionaires got rich persuading the great american public to invest their retirement savings in companies that will never show a profit rather than building companies that were intended to last. And the folk doing that tended to be opportunists rather than 'Internet Pioneers'.
The only value to a domain name is if anyone anywhere can use it to send you an email. Vanity domain names are just that if you can't use them reliably. If you have the email address master@timelord.galifrey, that is real cool but if only 1% of the world recognise it, much less usefull than 48129@ieorhw.net.
There is a commercial advantage to having a generic business name, however if only 10% of the buying public can see a particular name the interest in marketing it is likely to be small. Why spend $2 million on a superbowl advert for a domain name that only 10% of the population can go to? Why deal with lost business because people can't find the site?
The domain name system is only fought over because it is massively usefull, it only has that utility because it is a single coherent system. Balkanize the root and you remove the incentive for people to bid up the prices of domain names.
Now both Replay and Tivo are hungry for money. Both companies are losing money. Accordign to Freeedgar, Tivo lost over 200 million dollars, last quarter losing 89 million dollars
Does not surprise me, they are both part of the dotcom, build it, be first and you will inherit the earth. Only the basic business model was never as simple as make a great bit of hardware and sell it for a profit. Oh no, they wanted to get into the TV listings service business - well Tivo's CEO boasted as much.
It is a cute idea but the implemenation sucketh, I should be able to plug in as many firewire boxes into the device as I like to boost capacity. I should be able to tape radio and manage my CD library (ripped to MP3 or similar).
I would rather pay $1500 for a box that does what I want and need it to than $400 for a premature attempt to go mass market.
Why do so many slashdotters drool over a closed box like Tivo?
That school saved a large amount of money through using Linux. That school is saving money everyday because of reduced maintenance costs.
The article discusses using clapped out 486 boxes as X-Terminals connecting up to centrally administered services to save cash. It is essenially the same idea as dotNET, put the complexity in servers. Sure you can save money running desktop software that way, you can buy Citrix or us WinNT terminal services. But the end result is the same, the performance sucks for any GUI based application.
Enterprise software is an entirely different type of software. And guess what, there isn't any poor sad git who has ever or will ever sit down and write an ERP system or a payroll management package or an accounts receivables package gratis for use by F500 size companies.
That is the market dotNET is designed to serve, where software services are the strategy to persue.
My guess is you are a brainwashed MS troll/moron.
My guess is that you simply have no understanding of the market in question.
The more serious flaw is the belief that the difference between a wireless network and a wired one is the lack of privacy. In fact the most important difference is the fact that the network is no longer protected by physical security measures
There are two problems with WEP, first the implementation of the protocol is flawed, second the risk model of the protocol is entirely wrong. Unfortunately the WEP group show very little interest in remediation.
The basic protocol flaw is that a stream cipher is used with an insufficiently large initialization vector. If a block cipher had been specified the protocol would actually be reasonably secure. The reason a stream cipher is problematic is that the ciphertext consists of the plaintext xored with the cipher stream. This makes all sorts of integrity attacks possible and means that the security of the system depends on the initialization vectors never being re-used.
The more serious flaw is the belief that the difference between a wireless network and a wired one is that the network is no longer protected by physical security measures. Ethernet may be insecure, but in most cases access to an ethernet requires physical access to the building in question. With a wireless card a sacked employee can be surfing the intranet from the car park.
The most serious security risk of wireless then is the lack of authentication, in an ethernet network there is an implicit authentication that is obtained by having got through the front door. WEP makes no attempt to duplicate this, nor do the remediated versions of WEP. All the 802.11b users in a network share the same access key
There are plenty of ways to make this secure, unfortunately that is not on the agenda. Patching up the privacy so as to make the cards sellable is all that is likely to happen in the short run. Bodge 'em and flog 'em. The purpose of WEP is not to give users security it is to overcome the customer's legitimate security concerns so as to make a sale.
The obvious security solution is to bind a private key into each card, just as is happening with newer cable modems. The public key certificate fingerprint for the card is printed on the case. To enable a new card for access to the network the admin adds the fingerprint to the 'authorized users' list.
Sure there are some remaining risks - extracting the private key from the device for e.g. but it is unlikely to be possible to extract a private key without the authorized device holder knowing (particularly if we all read Paul Kocher's articles on timing and power analysis attacks).
In summary, the WEP protocol should be discontinued in its present form. Early deployers would be well advised to ignore the layer 2 security on the card and wrap VPN security arround it, such as IPSEC or PTPP etc. That gives security but the crypto processing is now being done on the processor and not on the 802.11b co-processor where it belongs.
The other piece missing from 802.11b deployments is that at the moment security is a binary switch. I would quite like visitors to the company to have Internet access from our conference rooms but not Intranet access. It should be possible to configure the base station to allow any PC to connect to the outside Internet without requiring an authentication key ahile requiring an authentication key for access to the local area network. Same goes in a large enterprise where employees from another division may be allowed access to the Internet (and their own LAN) but not the division they are visiting.
Until one of these professors (or more likely their grad students) actually writes the necessary decryption code and does it, we still don't know exactly how easy or difficult the crack is
So do you have to wait for the first satelite to orbit it to believe that there is another side to the moon?
Actually when I spoke to Ian Goldberg about this they had written plenty of code, guess what though they don't think it is necessary to make the code available to make the point. The only reason to have the code would be to do something malicious with it.
But that is irrelevant, the demand for absolute proof is ridiculous, the burden of proof lies on the IEEE group to prove that WEP is secure
Most of us would prefer to know well in advance of a system being broken that it is vulnerable. Measuring the degree of security even if it cannot be broken is still an important thing to do.
As for actually reifying the break as code, I don't have to see that done to have it proved to me. I know how RC4 works, I know how WEP performs keying. I can calculate that someone can break the scheme with a few weeks of effort and a moderately fast machine.
Lucent et. al. are charging premium prices for 128 bit encryption what they are delivering is only worth 24 bits that is misleading advertising at the very least - particularly since they knew about the flaw for over a year.
They could lay off 5,000 people, OR quit shelling out that much in MS licenses and pay salaries!
The overarching falacy here is that it is a case of either or, if a company believes it has 5,000 surplus employees it will get rid of them in a recession no matter what 'alternative' cost savings it can find. Any 'alternative' cost savings will be considered additional.
Let us see an office license is $400, average cost of a hi tech employee including admin and benefits $80K. So it takes 200 licenses to save one job, so to save 5,000 jobs you would have to be considering purchase of a million software licenses. The figures don't add up, in fact they are barmy
Let alone the fact that retraining, deployment and support costs for any desktop software chage are considerable. Marginal cost of continuing to use existing Office software is zero, cost of moving to 'free' software would be several hundred dollars per seat.
Recession will cause a squeeze on software purchases and it is possible that companies will delay upgrades to OfficeXP. But the big ticket software costs are for enterprise software, ERP systems, the type of product made by Oracle, Entrust, Ariba, Peoplesoft etc. Microsoft's dotNet strategy is to rent this class of software as a service instead of sell it. This is already done by VeriSign in the PKI space.
The advantage of the services model to the provider is obvious, they only have one version of the software to maintain (no need to support versions six years old) and there is only one platform to support. In addition there is a guaranteed stable revenue stream. The service provider has support costs to bear but these are amortized over hundreds or thousands of customers.
The advantages to the customer include much lower startup costs and the majority of the admin costs are covered by the service fees. In addition upgrades will be provided automatically, in many cases without any need for the customer to do anything. Over the lifetime of the contract the supplier will recieve more revenues, but the supplier will also have done much more for the customer whose total cost of ownership will be less as a result.
dotNET has very little to do with the Office product line, renting desktop software is not such a great idea - partticularly in the dotNET model since most people would want to use their copy of Word on an airplane.. What dotNET is really about is breaking into the ERP and Enterprise class software market so that Microsoft can grow the business into new markets and wipe the smug grin off Larry Ellison's face.
It makes a lot of sense both for Microsoft and its partners. There are plenty of opportunities to add value.
You're confusing patent protection with copyright. Disclosure is part of the patent bargain but it is not part of the copyright bargain. There is no reason for it to be.
No I am not. The original English copyright act on which the US one is based established four copyright libraries to which publishers had to send a copy of each work. The US followed the same model and that is why the library of Congress is so large.
Copyright covers only the embodiment of an idea, not the idea itself, but the bargain element is still there. There is a social interest in maintaining a repository of all published knowledge.
When the scientologists got kicked out of court in the Netherlands in their case against Karin Spaink it was because they had failed to register the work. The court decided that sending the first and last pages alone did not meet the requirements of Dutch law.
.cx still belongs to ICANN. As do all the other country code TLDs. Sure they're renewed regularly, but if ICANN should choose not to, I see no way anyone could force them too. ICANN owns the final ".", the one no one writes in all FQDNs.
No, the CC TLDs are only owned by ICANN in its imagination. ICANN may own the dot (whatever that is) but if they try to close down country codes they will find the ISPs switching to another root very quickly.
In fact ICANN does not own the dot, the Department of Commerce does, ICANN has temporary control of the dot - for details see Michael Froomkin's icannwatch.org.
This situation is known to the ICANN board which is why it is not going to do anything really stupid. In fact I doubt that the.org proposal is going to go anywhere. Checking for 'non-profit status' would increase the cost of registration significantly.
I can't see where the law has failed here. The idea of copyright registration is in part to simplify copyright disputes making it easier for the courts to make the right rulling.
This guy failed to register the copyright and is now complaining that he can't afford to take the case to court - tough.
If the guy had registered the copyright the risk of statutory damages would have forced the infringer to negotiate a settlement.
Don't forget that one half of the copyright bargain is disclosure, in return for giving the library of Congress a copy of the work to archive the copyright owner gets enhanced legal redress. No disclosure, well sort the mess out yourself.
Turns out that slashdot has returned back to Linux after their BSD experiment. The following is from the activities log
10:02PM OK, thats it the slashcode is now running on an eight way CMP machine under FreeBSD
10:23PM Started the synchronization process to sync the new system's disks to the old, this will take a while time for the copy to complete, time for dunkin doughnuts
11:13PM Got paged on the RIM halfway through a double chocholate Kruler, system problem. Left the doughnut shop so fast the assistant now thinks we are undercover cops.
11:45PM The console on the FreeBSD system is reading 'Kernel Panic', system is still up and running and the copy process is continuing
12:34PM Cmdr Taco just discovered that although the system is still running it now reports only six processors, what happened to the other two? Should we take the system down?
01:23AM This is wierd, according to the system console all eight processors are running, only two of them are now running OpenBSD.
02:30AM Two more processors have defected, one has joined the OpenBSD cluster, the other is running a variant called SafeBSD.
02:45AM Things are getting worse, the four renegade processors are demanding equal rights in the decision making process and an equal share of the X-Windows output server.
03:44AM Two more processors have defected, one from the FreeBSD camp to OpenBSD, this is partly compensated for by another processor leaving the OpenBSD camp and moving to an earlier FreeBSD release.
04:23AM Another defection, this time the CPU in question is demanding a byte-order change operation.
05:23AM Civil war has broken out. The rival O/S factions are placing locks on the various system resources
except that light has different "primary" colors. (Red, green, and blue, as opposed to red, yellow, and blue in pigments).
You men cyan magenta and yellow
The incidence of four color vision is actually relatively high, a few percent of females but practically zero in males.
When I worked in the chemical industry we had several females whose job was blending the various dyestuffs, most had four color vision, they could detect variations in shade better than any existing colorimeter. The room in which they worked had five different sets of lighting. These corresponded to the flourescent tubes used in the major clothing retail stores.
No ordinary RGB monitor can show the 'fourth color' but then again the color gamut of an RGB monitor is not the same as the eye in any case. Read the documents for Adobe Photoshop and you will find them going on forever about different color gamuts for various displays - CRT, LCD and various printing technologies.
There are a very few CRT based monitors that have a 'true color' capability, these are ultra specialist and probably can't be purchased from a catalog. They are the sort of thing the media lab would have.
There is not that much written on four color vision in any of my neurology texts, I suspect because the ability is rare. only expressed in females and is of limited use. My guess is that just as a person without red cones can't tell the difference betwen Red and Green the effect of four color vision would be to be able to differentiate between different mixtures of pigments that we would see as the same color.
It would be interesting to know if people with four color vision were seing the same additional wavelength. Also to know the weighting the additional color had in the vision matrix, I would suspect it would be lower than blue (13%).
Being bullied by SGI is nowhere nears as scary as it could be. After all the company has been in decline for more than five years, most of its buildings have been taken over by other companies. It is seriously open to doubt that they can afford to spend time and money harassing the open source community.
One of the problems of trademark law is that failure to police a trademark can lead to it becomming 'generic' and thus lose the trademark altogether. As a result most large companies hire specialist law firms that do nothing but search for possible violations and crank out nastygrams.
I suspect that what it means is that whoever is in charge of winding up operations at SGI has concluded that the graphics libraries and branding thereon may be one of the companies biggest assets.
I think folk are missing the point here. The Microsoft announcement is all about endorsement of a technology, it has nothing to do with support for a technology or ability to use it.
People will be able to use bluetooth devices with Windows regardless of the level of Microsoft support. What Microsoft has declined to do however is to positively endorse Bluetooth and encourage people to buy Bluetooth devices. That is important because it will make it harder for Bluetooth to gain mind share and hence critical mass.
Regardless of how many slashdotters bleat that the two don't compete, the fact is they do. There is absolutely nothing Bluetooth can do that WiFi/802.11b cannot. Bluetooth's advantages of a marginal cost reduction and lower power have yet to be demonstrated.
The biggest problem with Bluetooth is that it isn't ready for prime time yet. The warring camps have not come together on a common interoperable standard. They are currenlty planning to launch two incompatible variants.
The next biggest problem is that nobody can make out a coherent case for the technology. There is absolutely no reason for my laptop to talk to my cellphone (apart from downloding the address book which already works via Ird). If my laptop wants to talk to the Internet I will get it a GPRS modem. As the glut of cellular bandwidth hits the US as it hit Europe the same type of calling plans will be available - allowing pooling of subscriptions across several phones.
Same goes for my PDA which won't be talking to my cellphone because it will be my cellphone. I would much prefer a slim calculator shaped form factor for the single handheld device I carry with me. I almost always use the headset in any case.
Having redundant technologies killed off is a good thing. There is nothing worse than having a Betamax/VHS type standoff causing companies to hedge their bets, wait to deploy etc. What Microsoft has done is a good thing, they have in effect declared that they consider one technology the winner. Rather than waiting for Bluetooth to mature to the point of actually working the market is likely to focus on using 802.11b to solve their problems.
I don't want Bluetooth to continue to die a lingering death. It is time for someone to announce that they have failed, have no reasonable prospect of success and that the situation is unlikely to change in the future. Microsoft has done this, we should hope that more companies follow their lead.
Bluetooth is good because it can be implemented in 1 or 2 chips, with the antennae and transmitter in the chips..... so it is *cheap* to wirelessly enable a device.
That is the propaganda. However an integrated antenna is useless if the antenna is on the inside of a Faraday cage - which many if not most microprocessor based devices need to pass FCC interference tests.
The cost difference is likely to be a temporary issue. I can't see any reason that 802.11b should be vastly more expensive to produce. Ultimately the marginal cost of manufacture for both are a certain amount of processed silicon.
A PDA that only speaks BlueTooth will be useless to me, I have 802.11b in the house.
What Bluetooth propaganda comes down to is that I will buy a Bluetooth basestation for several hundred dollars to duplicate my 802.11b basestation just so I can save $5 on buying a PDA that does less and has lower range.
802.11B is an incumbent technology, Bluetooth is attempting to displace it from one sector of the market on the basis of a marginal cost advantage. I don't see that happening.
i'm all for open standards, but don't you think that 802.11b needs a catchy name to have the hype that bluetooth had?
That name is WiFi. The idea being that in addition to supporting 802.11b all WiFi products should interoperate. It is a bit like the rechristening of Firewire as iLink after it turned out that many Video cameras with alledged Firewire did not work with most firewire PC boards.
It is perfectly ok to spread FUD, to embrace and extend one's competitors, because that is what one's competitors would do to you.
The complaints tend to be about embracing and extending your business partners.
Mind you it is amazing how many folk can get themselves whipped up into an indignant lather about the evil empire snuffing out some startup outfit by buying it up for several hundred million.
I met the ex-CEO of one such company, he said that the decision to sell had been one of the hardest he had been forced to make that day (the hardest being the choice of the Jaguar XK8 available immediately or waiting 6 to 12 months for the supercharged XKR version, he bought both).
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Meaning nothing, the socialist block was the only group to vote against the enabling act that gave Hitler supreme power. The communists would have done had Hitler not had all their deputies elected.
The claim that Hitler's "philosophy" bore any coherent resemblance to any mainstream political movement. However the principal planks of Mein Kampf were a Eugenic program based on genocide of Gypsies, Jews and Homosexuals and the invasion of Eastern Europe to create a 'Liebensraum'. Neither of those objectives has ever been associated with mainstream European Socialism.
The Nationalization of industry did not actually take place, that is in part because the industrialists were the main backers of Hitler. With the exception of Winston Churchil most of the European right at the time was enthusiastically supporting Hitler's command economy program for restoring Germany's economy.
The fact is that the right was far more tolerant of Hitler than the left, just as the left were far more tolerant of Stalin than the right. Both sets of appeasers were utterly wrong and it was the standouts on both sides who were right - most notably Winston Churchil on the 'right' (although his changes of party means that he is not easily characterized) and George Orwell (Eric Blair) on the left.
Fact Every major European country has had a left wing government for a majority of the time since 1989.
Fact 'Social Democrats' currently form the government in all but two major European states.
Fact The notoriously right wing Murdoch press has even written off the Conservatives as a credible opposition force let alone a government.
Fact No party that believes it will win an election calls for a delay as the British conservatives have been doing.
Fact A majority of the US electorate voted for Gore, hardly a sign that the election can be taken as demonstrating Republican hegenemony. With a drawn presidential election, hung senate and narrowed lead in the house few expect the GOP trifecta to last long.
Delusion is not confined to sad Trotskyites. Nor for that matter is the evil of mindless ideology. Karl Popper had it right when he identified ideological extremism as the 'enemy of the open society'. The idea that the end justifies the means comes from a belief in absolute ideological truth.
Twenty years ago it was the ideological left that was trying to change society and the pragmatic right that spent most of the time in government. Today those positions are reversed and it is the right that is ideological and the left that has become the natural party of government in most of the democratic world.
Napster samples are not representative. A good compression algorithm introduces much less noise than the discrete linear quantization used on a CD.
That said, MP3 is not a very good compression algorithm. It is not even the compression algorithm used on DVDs as many people eroneously believe. Most DVDs are encoded using Dolby Digital (AC3). MP3 is also proprietary.
This is similar to how it works, the time schedule is not so steep and cheques have to be made payable to 'The Committee to Re-elect Orin Hatch Ltd.'.
Napster is a bunch of venture capitalist crooks that are at least as bad as the RIAA. What they want to do is to kill their competition peddling WAreZ, then when they are the only game in town they can jack up the fees.
The Internet existed before Napster, it will exist after Shawn Fanning and the opportunists he is fronting for have gone bankrupt, and so will Internet music.
I am sure that some commie type said something about letting capitalist exploiters of the workers kill each other but I can't remember the exact quote.
What would make the scene real perfect is if somehow they could dredge up enough dirt on Orin in the process to have him imdicted for something career ending.
Exactly, only if you pay for the content there is no need to put up with the crappy peer to peer distribution, the content can be distributed from the content provider via the likes of Akamai.
The danger for the RIAA is that the key players in such a scheme would most likely be the broadcast media companies - the AOLs, CBS, Disney and the like. The fact that the many of record labels have distribution arms only adds to the concern. Sony and Philips are paranoid that CBS will scoop the pool. CBS Records are paranoid that CBS Networks will absorb them.
Napster is the greatest gift for the RIAA it allows them to divert attention from their own rapacious greed and gives them a lever to fend off the forces of change. It will be a short lived strategy however. Hopefully once Napster is trash the real realignment can start.
If the RIAA and the labels are cut out the cost of music can drop to about 45 cents a single track or 1.50 for a CD full. At that price the incentive to piracy goes down and also the number of CDs bought goes up.
If I could download CDs in ripped form from Amazon I would probably end up buying stuff I own already to save the bother of doing it myself.
Right, Ambler is just calling names. In fact Ambler tried to do exactly the same sort of thing with no success so far so I guess he is a communist too by his logic.
You will find that Communism is NOT about oppression and control - but freedom from the Ruling Class and true democratic principles.
Those 'true democratic principles' not including elections which are merely 'borgeois devices' according to Lenin. One can argue that Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao et. al. all failled to implement 'real communism'. However the dictatorial line is pretty clear in Karl Marx. If you want to throw out Marx you haven't got a communist movement.
Complaining about the association between Communism and Stalin's police state is a bit like trying to separate Facism and Hitler. OK so Mussolini invented Facism and not Hitler and Mussolini's political murders were in the low tens of thousands rather than the millions. The Italian Facist party tries to do this today but it is still a murderous creed.
Given the times of 1848 when the Communist manifesto was written Marx and Engels were relatively liberal for the time, most continental European countries were authoritarian dictatorships, Britain was at best a qualified democracy - only those with wealth got the vote. The US was not a major power and was largely identified with slave plantations rather than the rights of man. The idea that a doctrine of resistance to the miserable political and ecconomic conditions of that time is the all encompassing solution to the problems of our own is somewhat wierd.
European socialism on the other hand is completely different. At present all but one of the European democracies has a left wing government that started as a socialist movement. Socialists have long known the dangers of communists - Lenin gained power in Russia by overturning a democratic socialist regime and having most of the delegates shot. Communism is to socialism what Facism is to conservatism. The European socialist movement is essentially what the US calls Liberals and was the political movement that gained universal sufferage, female suffrage, free trades unions, the welfare state etc.
The 'Capitalism' that Marx talks about is a concentration of capital in the hands of the very few. The 'Capitalism' we have today is much more broadly distributed. Capital is no longer the means of control it was in 1850. Marx might not approve but he certainly would not make the same argument against it.
Not a bad rate of pay eh?
So ICANN killed the business by refusing to give the guy 115 root level domains. And so in time honored US fashion he goes crying his eyes out to a senator or two to ask for a handout.
The quote from Ambler is somewhat amusing, he is the guy who has been trying to sell .web names for a few years now.
The Internet's is the first revolution whose pioneers believed they could create a better world while making themselves rich.
Absolutely nobody got into the Internet in the early years thinking they would get rich. Even MarcA didn't work out that he could make a lot of money claiming credit for other's work until 1995 or so. And to be brutally honest most dotcom millionaires got rich persuading the great american public to invest their retirement savings in companies that will never show a profit rather than building companies that were intended to last. And the folk doing that tended to be opportunists rather than 'Internet Pioneers'.
The only value to a domain name is if anyone anywhere can use it to send you an email. Vanity domain names are just that if you can't use them reliably. If you have the email address master@timelord.galifrey, that is real cool but if only 1% of the world recognise it, much less usefull than 48129@ieorhw.net.
There is a commercial advantage to having a generic business name, however if only 10% of the buying public can see a particular name the interest in marketing it is likely to be small. Why spend $2 million on a superbowl advert for a domain name that only 10% of the population can go to? Why deal with lost business because people can't find the site?
The domain name system is only fought over because it is massively usefull, it only has that utility because it is a single coherent system. Balkanize the root and you remove the incentive for people to bid up the prices of domain names.
Does not surprise me, they are both part of the dotcom, build it, be first and you will inherit the earth. Only the basic business model was never as simple as make a great bit of hardware and sell it for a profit. Oh no, they wanted to get into the TV listings service business - well Tivo's CEO boasted as much.
It is a cute idea but the implemenation sucketh, I should be able to plug in as many firewire boxes into the device as I like to boost capacity. I should be able to tape radio and manage my CD library (ripped to MP3 or similar).
I would rather pay $1500 for a box that does what I want and need it to than $400 for a premature attempt to go mass market.
Why do so many slashdotters drool over a closed box like Tivo?
The article discusses using clapped out 486 boxes as X-Terminals connecting up to centrally administered services to save cash. It is essenially the same idea as dotNET, put the complexity in servers. Sure you can save money running desktop software that way, you can buy Citrix or us WinNT terminal services. But the end result is the same, the performance sucks for any GUI based application.
Enterprise software is an entirely different type of software. And guess what, there isn't any poor sad git who has ever or will ever sit down and write an ERP system or a payroll management package or an accounts receivables package gratis for use by F500 size companies.
That is the market dotNET is designed to serve, where software services are the strategy to persue.
My guess is you are a brainwashed MS troll/moron.
My guess is that you simply have no understanding of the market in question.
WEP is encryption, the problem is that it is bad encryption. They used a stream cipher in a way that a stream cipher does not provide security.
The more serious flaw is the belief that the difference between a wireless network and a wired one is the lack of privacy. In fact the most important difference is the fact that the network is no longer protected by physical security measures
The basic protocol flaw is that a stream cipher is used with an insufficiently large initialization vector. If a block cipher had been specified the protocol would actually be reasonably secure. The reason a stream cipher is problematic is that the ciphertext consists of the plaintext xored with the cipher stream. This makes all sorts of integrity attacks possible and means that the security of the system depends on the initialization vectors never being re-used.
The more serious flaw is the belief that the difference between a wireless network and a wired one is that the network is no longer protected by physical security measures. Ethernet may be insecure, but in most cases access to an ethernet requires physical access to the building in question. With a wireless card a sacked employee can be surfing the intranet from the car park.
The most serious security risk of wireless then is the lack of authentication, in an ethernet network there is an implicit authentication that is obtained by having got through the front door. WEP makes no attempt to duplicate this, nor do the remediated versions of WEP. All the 802.11b users in a network share the same access key
There are plenty of ways to make this secure, unfortunately that is not on the agenda. Patching up the privacy so as to make the cards sellable is all that is likely to happen in the short run. Bodge 'em and flog 'em. The purpose of WEP is not to give users security it is to overcome the customer's legitimate security concerns so as to make a sale.
The obvious security solution is to bind a private key into each card, just as is happening with newer cable modems. The public key certificate fingerprint for the card is printed on the case. To enable a new card for access to the network the admin adds the fingerprint to the 'authorized users' list.
Sure there are some remaining risks - extracting the private key from the device for e.g. but it is unlikely to be possible to extract a private key without the authorized device holder knowing (particularly if we all read Paul Kocher's articles on timing and power analysis attacks).
In summary, the WEP protocol should be discontinued in its present form. Early deployers would be well advised to ignore the layer 2 security on the card and wrap VPN security arround it, such as IPSEC or PTPP etc. That gives security but the crypto processing is now being done on the processor and not on the 802.11b co-processor where it belongs.
The other piece missing from 802.11b deployments is that at the moment security is a binary switch. I would quite like visitors to the company to have Internet access from our conference rooms but not Intranet access. It should be possible to configure the base station to allow any PC to connect to the outside Internet without requiring an authentication key ahile requiring an authentication key for access to the local area network. Same goes in a large enterprise where employees from another division may be allowed access to the Internet (and their own LAN) but not the division they are visiting.
So do you have to wait for the first satelite to orbit it to believe that there is another side to the moon?
Actually when I spoke to Ian Goldberg about this they had written plenty of code, guess what though they don't think it is necessary to make the code available to make the point. The only reason to have the code would be to do something malicious with it.
But that is irrelevant, the demand for absolute proof is ridiculous, the burden of proof lies on the IEEE group to prove that WEP is secure Most of us would prefer to know well in advance of a system being broken that it is vulnerable. Measuring the degree of security even if it cannot be broken is still an important thing to do.
As for actually reifying the break as code, I don't have to see that done to have it proved to me. I know how RC4 works, I know how WEP performs keying. I can calculate that someone can break the scheme with a few weeks of effort and a moderately fast machine.
Lucent et. al. are charging premium prices for 128 bit encryption what they are delivering is only worth 24 bits that is misleading advertising at the very least - particularly since they knew about the flaw for over a year.
The overarching falacy here is that it is a case of either or, if a company believes it has 5,000 surplus employees it will get rid of them in a recession no matter what 'alternative' cost savings it can find. Any 'alternative' cost savings will be considered additional.
Let us see an office license is $400, average cost of a hi tech employee including admin and benefits $80K. So it takes 200 licenses to save one job, so to save 5,000 jobs you would have to be considering purchase of a million software licenses. The figures don't add up, in fact they are barmy
Let alone the fact that retraining, deployment and support costs for any desktop software chage are considerable. Marginal cost of continuing to use existing Office software is zero, cost of moving to 'free' software would be several hundred dollars per seat.
Recession will cause a squeeze on software purchases and it is possible that companies will delay upgrades to OfficeXP. But the big ticket software costs are for enterprise software, ERP systems, the type of product made by Oracle, Entrust, Ariba, Peoplesoft etc. Microsoft's dotNet strategy is to rent this class of software as a service instead of sell it. This is already done by VeriSign in the PKI space.
The advantage of the services model to the provider is obvious, they only have one version of the software to maintain (no need to support versions six years old) and there is only one platform to support. In addition there is a guaranteed stable revenue stream. The service provider has support costs to bear but these are amortized over hundreds or thousands of customers.
The advantages to the customer include much lower startup costs and the majority of the admin costs are covered by the service fees. In addition upgrades will be provided automatically, in many cases without any need for the customer to do anything. Over the lifetime of the contract the supplier will recieve more revenues, but the supplier will also have done much more for the customer whose total cost of ownership will be less as a result.
dotNET has very little to do with the Office product line, renting desktop software is not such a great idea - partticularly in the dotNET model since most people would want to use their copy of Word on an airplane.. What dotNET is really about is breaking into the ERP and Enterprise class software market so that Microsoft can grow the business into new markets and wipe the smug grin off Larry Ellison's face.
It makes a lot of sense both for Microsoft and its partners. There are plenty of opportunities to add value.
No I am not. The original English copyright act on which the US one is based established four copyright libraries to which publishers had to send a copy of each work. The US followed the same model and that is why the library of Congress is so large.
Copyright covers only the embodiment of an idea, not the idea itself, but the bargain element is still there. There is a social interest in maintaining a repository of all published knowledge.
When the scientologists got kicked out of court in the Netherlands in their case against Karin Spaink it was because they had failed to register the work. The court decided that sending the first and last pages alone did not meet the requirements of Dutch law.
No, the CC TLDs are only owned by ICANN in its imagination. ICANN may own the dot (whatever that is) but if they try to close down country codes they will find the ISPs switching to another root very quickly.
In fact ICANN does not own the dot, the Department of Commerce does, ICANN has temporary control of the dot - for details see Michael Froomkin's icannwatch.org.
This situation is known to the ICANN board which is why it is not going to do anything really stupid. In fact I doubt that the .org proposal is going to go anywhere. Checking for 'non-profit status' would increase the cost of registration significantly.
This guy failed to register the copyright and is now complaining that he can't afford to take the case to court - tough.
If the guy had registered the copyright the risk of statutory damages would have forced the infringer to negotiate a settlement.
Don't forget that one half of the copyright bargain is disclosure, in return for giving the library of Congress a copy of the work to archive the copyright owner gets enhanced legal redress. No disclosure, well sort the mess out yourself.
10:02PM OK, thats it the slashcode is now running on an eight way CMP machine under FreeBSD
10:23PM Started the synchronization process to sync the new system's disks to the old, this will take a while time for the copy to complete, time for dunkin doughnuts
11:13PM Got paged on the RIM halfway through a double chocholate Kruler, system problem. Left the doughnut shop so fast the assistant now thinks we are undercover cops.
11:45PM The console on the FreeBSD system is reading 'Kernel Panic', system is still up and running and the copy process is continuing
12:34PM Cmdr Taco just discovered that although the system is still running it now reports only six processors, what happened to the other two? Should we take the system down?
01:23AM This is wierd, according to the system console all eight processors are running, only two of them are now running OpenBSD.
02:30AM Two more processors have defected, one has joined the OpenBSD cluster, the other is running a variant called SafeBSD.
02:45AM Things are getting worse, the four renegade processors are demanding equal rights in the decision making process and an equal share of the X-Windows output server.
03:44AM Two more processors have defected, one from the FreeBSD camp to OpenBSD, this is partly compensated for by another processor leaving the OpenBSD camp and moving to an earlier FreeBSD release.
04:23AM Another defection, this time the CPU in question is demanding a byte-order change operation.
05:23AM Civil war has broken out. The rival O/S factions are placing locks on the various system resources
etc.
You men cyan magenta and yellow
The incidence of four color vision is actually relatively high, a few percent of females but practically zero in males.
When I worked in the chemical industry we had several females whose job was blending the various dyestuffs, most had four color vision, they could detect variations in shade better than any existing colorimeter. The room in which they worked had five different sets of lighting. These corresponded to the flourescent tubes used in the major clothing retail stores.
No ordinary RGB monitor can show the 'fourth color' but then again the color gamut of an RGB monitor is not the same as the eye in any case. Read the documents for Adobe Photoshop and you will find them going on forever about different color gamuts for various displays - CRT, LCD and various printing technologies.
There are a very few CRT based monitors that have a 'true color' capability, these are ultra specialist and probably can't be purchased from a catalog. They are the sort of thing the media lab would have.
There is not that much written on four color vision in any of my neurology texts, I suspect because the ability is rare. only expressed in females and is of limited use. My guess is that just as a person without red cones can't tell the difference betwen Red and Green the effect of four color vision would be to be able to differentiate between different mixtures of pigments that we would see as the same color.
It would be interesting to know if people with four color vision were seing the same additional wavelength. Also to know the weighting the additional color had in the vision matrix, I would suspect it would be lower than blue (13%).
One of the problems of trademark law is that failure to police a trademark can lead to it becomming 'generic' and thus lose the trademark altogether. As a result most large companies hire specialist law firms that do nothing but search for possible violations and crank out nastygrams.
I suspect that what it means is that whoever is in charge of winding up operations at SGI has concluded that the graphics libraries and branding thereon may be one of the companies biggest assets.
People will be able to use bluetooth devices with Windows regardless of the level of Microsoft support. What Microsoft has declined to do however is to positively endorse Bluetooth and encourage people to buy Bluetooth devices. That is important because it will make it harder for Bluetooth to gain mind share and hence critical mass.
Regardless of how many slashdotters bleat that the two don't compete, the fact is they do. There is absolutely nothing Bluetooth can do that WiFi/802.11b cannot. Bluetooth's advantages of a marginal cost reduction and lower power have yet to be demonstrated.
The biggest problem with Bluetooth is that it isn't ready for prime time yet. The warring camps have not come together on a common interoperable standard. They are currenlty planning to launch two incompatible variants.
The next biggest problem is that nobody can make out a coherent case for the technology. There is absolutely no reason for my laptop to talk to my cellphone (apart from downloding the address book which already works via Ird). If my laptop wants to talk to the Internet I will get it a GPRS modem. As the glut of cellular bandwidth hits the US as it hit Europe the same type of calling plans will be available - allowing pooling of subscriptions across several phones.
Same goes for my PDA which won't be talking to my cellphone because it will be my cellphone. I would much prefer a slim calculator shaped form factor for the single handheld device I carry with me. I almost always use the headset in any case.
Having redundant technologies killed off is a good thing. There is nothing worse than having a Betamax/VHS type standoff causing companies to hedge their bets, wait to deploy etc. What Microsoft has done is a good thing, they have in effect declared that they consider one technology the winner. Rather than waiting for Bluetooth to mature to the point of actually working the market is likely to focus on using 802.11b to solve their problems.
I don't want Bluetooth to continue to die a lingering death. It is time for someone to announce that they have failed, have no reasonable prospect of success and that the situation is unlikely to change in the future. Microsoft has done this, we should hope that more companies follow their lead.
That is the propaganda. However an integrated antenna is useless if the antenna is on the inside of a Faraday cage - which many if not most microprocessor based devices need to pass FCC interference tests.
The cost difference is likely to be a temporary issue. I can't see any reason that 802.11b should be vastly more expensive to produce. Ultimately the marginal cost of manufacture for both are a certain amount of processed silicon.
A PDA that only speaks BlueTooth will be useless to me, I have 802.11b in the house.
What Bluetooth propaganda comes down to is that I will buy a Bluetooth basestation for several hundred dollars to duplicate my 802.11b basestation just so I can save $5 on buying a PDA that does less and has lower range.
802.11B is an incumbent technology, Bluetooth is attempting to displace it from one sector of the market on the basis of a marginal cost advantage. I don't see that happening.
That name is WiFi. The idea being that in addition to supporting 802.11b all WiFi products should interoperate. It is a bit like the rechristening of Firewire as iLink after it turned out that many Video cameras with alledged Firewire did not work with most firewire PC boards.
The complaints tend to be about embracing and extending your business partners.
Mind you it is amazing how many folk can get themselves whipped up into an indignant lather about the evil empire snuffing out some startup outfit by buying it up for several hundred million.
I met the ex-CEO of one such company, he said that the decision to sell had been one of the hardest he had been forced to make that day (the hardest being the choice of the Jaguar XK8 available immediately or waiting 6 to 12 months for the supercharged XKR version, he bought both).