SPAM: OPT_IN (1.5 points) BODY: Talks about opting in
Go read the DNSSEC mailing list, there has been a considerable amount of discussion about OPTIN.
Or read any of the privacy mailing lists where the term opt in is used in the exact same context
The big problem with developing a SPAM solution is that nobody wants to hear any solutions, start describing something and they will interrupt your first sentence to tell you their idea. Then when you explain that the idea is not new and has severe drawbacks they assert that it works for them so it should be good enough for anyone.
Come on - is it really your fault if you accidently find yourself "a customer of an ISP harboring a spammer?"
Oh SPEWS and its ilk have gone further than that. Several of the Blacklists have blacklisted whole countries. In particular China and Korea.
I doubt many people blocked due to a single spammer are going to think "oh, well, I may not be able to send e-mail to my most important client - but at least while I'm losing thousands of dollars, I know I'm helping to fight spam!" Most, I'd bet, would just call up the offending receiver and complain that they're getting bounce messages when they try and send e-mail and that the receivers should fix their mail servers as soon as possible.
This happened to us as we are customers of UUNET which SPEWS listed because they don't like some of the content they host. Switching ISPs was never considered, we simply used the backup feed to send out an email to all the mailing lists we host stating that we had been blacklisted, have no intention of changing feeds and people who wanted to participate in those working groups could fix their mail servers pronto.
And this is why the SPEWS blocklist is so effective and so good. If he were on it, then that would mean that he and/or his network fell into one of the following categories:
Or he might be
A customer of UUNet which spews has listed because it disagrees with some of the content they host
NOBODY with a brain is using SPEWS anymore. Listing the largest commercial internet supplier in the US was simply idiotic. And it was done for completely illegitimate reasons.
The whole blacklist concept boils down to vigilante tactics, use threats to keep people in line. The problem being that the people who run the lists tend to turn into self-important little tinpot dictators after a short time.
Content based filtering also is a direct violation of the principles of the US First Amendment right to free speech
Unture, with the exception of Limabaugh whose judgment in Nixon is opinionated nonsense the Federal courts have all rulled that the junk fax laws are constitutional.
In the UK, it's not unusual for people to have Internet connections at home that are just as fast as those at work.
Yeah and they don't take a tea break at 11 o'clock or 3:30.
As the signs in London said "Make Tea, Not War".
I'd also have though that a lot of large organisations (e.g. Fortune 1000 companies) would already have "downloading music/video" policies in place,
Not to mention firewalls that are pretty P2P unfriendly.
But the RIAA are basically playing into the corporate policy game. Basically Big 5 consultancy, sorry Big 4, oops make that 3 firms have a racket in which they charge $50K a pop for an 'Employee Navigator' or some such. These are written by fresh out of college grads billing at $2K a day or more. So any proposal is likely to get thrown in.
This is how we are going to get companies to take noptice of spam problems. Make them scared of fired employees claiming that being bombarded by hard core spam created a hostile workplace.
Re:The cost of Solaris
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The Faded Sun
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Do you actually own a Sun? You should probably open it up and compare it to your uber-clocked Althon-space-heater sometime. Their hardware is very high quality. Their support is as well.
That is what we used to say about Digital.
Digital stuff just worked (well apart from low end crap like the Multia they threw out in their death throws). I never had occasion to find out about their replacement service, the stuff just worked. We had hundreds of boxes from them and it all just worked. You might have a flaky disk from time to time but with disk shaddowing on you could hot swap them.
VMS uptimes were measured in years. If you had a system crash you had a major post-mortem to find out the cause (usually power outage).
Not only did DEC go bust but the company that bought it got bought itself by HP.
As a current employee of Sun Microsystems, I can at least clear up one little factoid in the article that every Sun pundit likes to mention for dramatic impact without either understanding or wanting the reader to understand.
If you are a current employee you would probably be best advised not to comment on financial matters.
The loss this year is not the relevant issue. Every silicon valley company that has had acuisitions has had goodwill writedowns.
The relevant issue is that Sun is being marginalized at the high end. There is no high end as SGI discovered and Symbolics, Cray, etc. etc. before them. IBM almost went broke going after the high end. Today they are really a consulting firm that sells some own label hardware. The mainframe business is not the core of IBM anymore.
Sun's server line is slow. The SPARC is aging and Sun has no resources for a replacement. It won't be long before Sun is charging Ferrari prices for a Honda civic.
Re:I agree; sounds nothing but trollish.
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The Faded Sun
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Just to name a few... Billy Joy? James Gosling? John Gage? Aren't they three of greatest leaders in IT (and science in general) in our generation?
What have they done for the company recently?
Seriously, Gosling has been involved in a lot of visionary technology before Java, but none of it got anywhere. NeWs was squished by X-Windows. Gage did net day, but what has he done for the company recently? Come to that what does Whitt Diffie do for Sun beyond consume cafe latte?
Unfortunately there is a major difference between technological firepower and technological leadership. The problem isn't with the technologists, it is with the management. They have simply failled to construct a business plan or environment that can utilise the firepower they have.
In that sense, Sun invented workstation.
My DEC Alpha was far superior to anything sun had to offer. Come to that SGI provided better firepower and a slicker integration package. Sun invented the cheap engineering workstation, mainly for the education market. Real engineers used VAXen. Now VMS didn't survive too well but it was the DEC/MIT X-Windows system that defined the workstation interface in the end.
As the author claims, Sun might be gone; on the other hand, Sun might be ruling the world by then.
I doubt it. IBM is rulling the commercial java space and OSS is rulling the freeware space. There is not much of a gap between the two.
The apple/Sun issue is key here. Apple is very well positioned to take huge bites out of Sun's core server market. They simply don't need Sun technology at this point. All they need is a hot processor - which sun notably lacks.
For Sun to survive it has to start focussing on its business, not Microsoft. Meetings with Sun engineers are painful, you get a 45 minute whinge about Microsoft. Which is pretty sad when they know you are one of Microsoft's closest allies in the industry. Even if Sun makes a billion in the lawsuit they will lose big, the suit is costing them far more than that in lost business and lost opportunities.
The first step to save Sun is to sack McNealy. Unfortunately Sun does not have a Steve Jobs figure waiting in the wings.
How about developing a standard for TV remote controls instead, and a standard way of connecting a set top box to a tv so that they can actually work together competently?
I have a $200 sony all in one remote that tries to provide a single interface to all my stuff. Problem is that it does not quite cut it, the Onkyo receiver does not quite do what it should.
Result is that only I can get the home theatre to work properly so I leave it turned off most of the time because I don;t want to spend all my time being sysop for the home entertainment system. Wish the wife would buy a Mac, then I could tell her she is absolutely on her own for service calls as I don't do Macs.
All I want is for a bunch of high end but still mainstream stuff to work together - we are not talking about obscure audiophile $25,000 turntables here. But there is no reason that a $2,000 TV and a $500 satelite receiver and $1,000 home theater box should not talk to each other either. We are not talking about big ticket changes, just an RFC822 or maybe a USB port.
Interactive TV leaves me cold, the stuff is real weak when you try the canned demos with oodles of thought gone into the interactive parts. Run of the mill content that will be seen mostly on non-interactive tv sets will be a bust.
There is no middle ground worth exploring between TV and videogames. Tombraider and such are lightyears beyond what iTV could hope to be. Why fight it trying to do interactive lite?
The control theory you refer to is for linear systems with feedback. Routing is a highly nonlinear system and the analysis is much harder. However the basic concept of high gain leading to oscillation is the roughly the same. Multicommodity flow theory researchers have been working on flow allocation and stability for years. Recently this work has caught the attention of the MPLS crowd in IETF.
Actually it is even easier to send the system into oscillation if you have a non-linear system. But explaining the ins and outs in a slashdot post...
The frustrating thing is that an organization led by academics has so little academic input. The only academic habit they observe is lethargy.
You are right about IETF inertia though. I have given up on any bold progressive thinking in IETF for now with their attitudes such as "If it basically works, why fix it?"
The IETF attitude is to resist ideas as long as they can, then when someone loses patience and goes ahead without them complain about commercial interests having no respect for the standards process. In fact there is plenty of respect for standards processes, but not much for the specific IETF process.
You can tell how backward the institution is simply by looking at an RFC, they look like a Nigerian letter asking for assistance with a money transfer.
The whole NOMCOM system is a sick joke. The obvious purpose of the mechanism is to make sure that the IAB and IESG are accountable to no-one. A cabal of 15 people meeting in secret with no basic accountability is much less likely to upset the status quo with a dramatic move than a democratic system of elections. Democratic elections would mean a real risk of a change of power. The NOMCOM system means that bad ADs and ADs who have blatantly abused their power can continue to be reappointed, there is no way for the membership as a whole to reject them.
If the IETF had balls they would have pushed through a program for completion of the IPSEC, DNSEC and IPV6 protocols five years ago and then moved ahead with a strategy for deployment. Today they would be aggressively considering how to address the problem of Spam. As it is DNSSEC is undeployable in the large zones, the IESG has been content to let the WG chair filibuster fixes. IPSEC is a mess, the ISAKMP/IKE scheme is a dogs breakfast, a scheme to negotiate the scheme for negotiation. The only thing that has happened to IPv6 is that we are closer to running out of address space and everyone is moving to NAT regardless of the IETF opinion of them.
At the same time groups like OASIS have been completing standards in 18 months...
Here's a quote from the original 1968 paper that used the term
Perhaps if you had read the article you would know the phrase comes from William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852).
The tragedy of the Commons was used as a political weapon in the class warfare of the Victorian era. Those with Scottish ancestry might know this as 'the clearances', in England they were the enclosures.
Basically the aristocracy transferred the common land from public ownership to private ownership. Since they wrote the acts of parliament they gave themselves the best deal. The result being a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
The deck was stacked so that the aristocracy quickly got control of the small proportion of the land that went to the peasants. It was similar to the land grab that made Bush rich. They bought a sports team then started building a bigger stadium using the pliant local council to confiscate large amounts of land at below market rates which were then used for development and sold for a vast profit.
So the tragedy of the commons is not a politically neutral term. Also the real tragedy for the peasants came when the aristocracy used it as an excuse for exploitation. Its a bit like the plans for privatising social security, there is a problem there but it is being used as an excuse for a political agenda, not as something that is to be addressed for its own sake.
When tragedy of the commons is used in relation to the Internet it is usually to justify some form of corporate or governmental control.
Frankly, I'm surprised this is considered news; I learned it in a networking course on my way to a CS degree. I can only assume that the author is trying to push a new algorithm for congestion control and is using "selfish routing" as a marketing scheme.
Yep, if you have three available routes A, B, C with bandwidths 10, 4 and 1 the selfish router would send all trafic through route A in every case. An altruistic router would make a random choice between A, B, C such that A was chosen 2/3rds of the time and B, C were chosen in proportion 4:1 the rest of the time.
You can then tweak further by using traffic information. If the system is unloaded then use A all the time.
The same observation applies to the problem where traffic alternates between two routes rather than dividing itself evenly. That is elementary control theory. The problem is that the response has too high a gain factor, in effect the gain factor is infinite so instead of being shared across the routes the system is going into oscillation.
There is an obvious solution to that problem, you measure the change in the traffic statistics and moderate your response to changes.
This is the sort of thing the IETF should be doing. Unfortunately the IETF has been out to lunch for many years now. They have failled to respond with any urgency to most of the issues facing the net. Most of the participants seem to use it as a substitute social life rather than as a place to get things done.
At least this one ( 6,368,227 ) has a Commissioner Ordered Re-examination pending.
That is really big news. The Patent office almost always sticks with the patent holder, no matter how ridiculous the patent is.
Externally requested reviews are not uncommon, the catch with an external review is that if the patent survives the review the presumption that it is valid is increased, even though the USPTO will apply its usual standards of sloppy and incoherent review and do everything it can to avoid admitting a mistake.
Commissioner requested reviews are very rare and tend to only happen when the USPTO knows that if it does not request a review itself it is likely to end up looking very stupid.
Basically the USPTO behaves exactly the way you would expect an agency to behave if its decisions can be challenged in court by one side but not the other.
The new one i've run into recently is they use some kinda script so that the reply-to address in my address....which makes fintering really easy becuase how often do I send mail from my account TO the same account
More often than you might think. This is how a lot of mail systems support people like me who like to keep a copy of everything they have sent.
I do wish that more of the spam filtering people would take notice of these tactics however. Quite a few of the more clueless ones have all sorts of hack-back features that can end up slamming innocent people.
The only unusual thing in this case is that it was porn. The porn senders tend to be rather more discrete than most since they know that if there is an FBI type investigation they are sure to make examples of porno senders first. This tactic tends to be more common amongst the con-artists that the FBI are completely uninterested in prosecuting.
One of the big problems is that there is no agency that has an analogous operation to the mail-inspectors role in the post office. In theory this is wire fraud but the wire fraud investigators tend to be busy dealing with cases with a few really big transactions. They are much less interested in a case where the amounts are $30 or so, even though the totals might be millions.
One little difference between.name going under and.tv going under..tv was a country TLD co-opted by capitalists. How much control does Tuvalu have over.tv now? They seemed to have sold their soul to the devil.
I don't think you can equate a CC domain name with a soul. Selling the rights to the.tv name is considerably less likely to constrain the future development of the country than selling their satelite orbits which fetched considerably less.
The Tuvaluans got $50 million from.TV plus a share in the ongoing royalties from the CGMI deal which is a sizable chunk of change for each inhabitant. If they do decide they want a.tv name they can still buy one at the same cost as a.com.
This was considerably more than they got for selling the bird shit that used to make up most of their island resulting in an ecological disaster.
You mean I won't get any more.name spam??? Good, let it die!.name was a lame idea anyway.
The problem is the spam. Very few people want to have their cyber identity tied to their email address in such a direct fashion.
The.name zone has about 10,000 Web pages in it. So you can work out the number of domains they have probably sold.
The big problem that the new registries face is that they thought that starting a new domain was a license to print money for doing nothing. They simply did not expect that there might be some actual work involved.
$35 sounds a lot by geek consumer standards, but you need a minimum of 2,000 names to cover the cost of hiring one person at that price - including salary, overhead, benefits etc. You need a minimum of 5 people to provide round the clock support.
The business models of the new domains expected people to buy millions of them in the first year. They did not understand that maybe it might take five years to build a critical mass.
It is always easier to look at someone elses business, particularly a successful one and decide that it is essentialy easy to run and cost free than to have your own idea. Look at all the folk who blundered into etail thinking that the economics of that space would somehow be different to the economics of mail order, a business notorious for its low margins and high infrastructure costs. Or look at the folk who blundered into home delivery of groceries, an even lower margin business, building $30 million distribution centers to serve markets that could not possibly support the interest payments, let alone register a profit.
Folk who have.name domains should not be too worried however. The same thing happened to.tv which spent through its initial VC funding at record pace and was bought out for about a tenth of the amount spent on building the brand. Someone will buy.name, although bidding is not likely to be brisk.
Yes, yes, mod me down, I'm offtopic, but it almost causes me physical pain to see someone get credit for a joke that was already made.
Perhaps if you did not spend your life in front of a computer screen eating soggy potato chips and warm cans of coke and had actually sung the song and danced around instead you might not write posts like Oscar The Grouch.
To play Blues News you have to find a bug
Stick it in your notebook and describe the hole you've dug
Find another pawprint, thats the second bug
Stick it in your notebook and go catch the cyber-thug
Find the last pawprint, thats the third bug
Stick it in your notebook, get your coffee mug
Sit down in the thinking chair and think, think think.
Cos when we use our minds take a step at a time you can dooo anything, and on billable hours too.
This scheme looks very similar to a scheme that Ron Rivest sent to me called Power One Time pad about eight years ago.
Ron had had a fax from the inventors claiming that the scheme had been endorsed by several well known names in the crypto world who I won't mention for reasons that will become apparent including one of my collegues on a Web standards board.
There wasn't enough information in the press release to determine whether the scheme was bogus so I did the obvious thing and called up one of the people who was alledged to endorse it. Turned out that he did nothing of the sort, he thought it was snake oil but had been asked a different question, who should he talk to to get it adopted as a standard. The snake oil peddlers had then approached Ron saying that 'S. recommended that he talk to them', cleraly implying that S. recommended the scheme.
This matrix scheme looks very much like Power One Time Pad, it has the same million bit key. According to the patent application the scheme appears to be a variant of the playfair cipher which was cracked in WWI.
The competition means absolutely nothing. Any scheme can be made uncrackable if it uses a key length that is greater or equal to the amount of data encrypted. The point is that such schemes are almost completely useless.
The claimed $1 million prize is not convincing experience has shown that companies that make such offers rarely pay them out even if the scheme is broken. In short the actual value of the prize is:
Amount x Probability of Payment x Probability of cracking - cost of time.
The challenge is in any case over. I can't find out how long the challenge was offered for.
As I said before, I can set the rules for a competition so that the competition is unwinnable even though the cipher is broken.
For example consider creating a cipher using the declaration of independence which for the sake of argument we will consider to be perfectly random (it is not). The cipher consists of choosing a random starting point in the declaration and then XORing the plaintext with the declaration to create the ciphertext. I can generate one unbreakable ciphertext simply by making the plaintext shorter than the declaration.
I note that the current challenge text is distributed in a 53Kb Zip file, that would be 424,000 bits or so, considerably less than the alleged million bit key. Give me a few hundred Mb of ciphertext however and we might have a contest.
The wierd thing is the claim to have a contract with the department of Labor to supply an encryption scheme that is not endorsed by NIST. That would appear to breach several procurement guidlines. Also I can't find any record of any contract of that type on the Department of Labor site.
Google's approach is good for google. If Google would want to make good use of significantly faster CPUs, they would also need significantly more RAM in their machines (a CPU faster by a factor of 10 can't yield a speed-up factor of ten, if the network can't deliver the data fast enough).
I think you have the right idea, slightly mistated. The crux for Google is that their problem is actually creating a huge associative memory, many terabytes of RAM. The speed of the processors is not that important, the speed of the RAM is the bottleneck. Pipelining etc have little or no effect on data lookups since practically every lookup is going to be outside the cache.
That does not support the idea that Moore's law is dead. It merely means that google is more interested in bigger and faster RAM chips rather than bigger and faster processors.
Long ago when I built this type of machine the key question was the cost of memory. You wanted to have fast processors because you could reduce the total system cost if you had fewer and faster processors with the same amout of RAM. Today however RAM cost is not a big issue, the faster processors tend to require faster RAM so you can make savings by having 10 CPUS running at half the speed rather than 5 really fast processors at three times the cost.
Um, if they did this, I think Sun could safely claim prior art.
You are working from a false premise. dotNET is not a carbon copy of Java, it improves on the java model in a large number of significant ways. In particular the CLI versus VM approach.
It will be possible to do pretty much everything that dotNET does in java. However it will not be possible for Sun to take dotNET and do the same to it, taking the best ideas and fixing the bad ones.
As Microsoft has being making quite plain however, they are very keen to take good ideas from anyone else.
Suit ain't empty. Get used to it, the popular president we elected is in it
Yet another GOP fib, first off the President lost the popular vote, secondly he was the one who went to court to steal the election by stopping the votes being counted. The man is a fraud, deal with it.
As for the opinion polls the failure in the Whitehouse claims not to govern by, Clinton was actually more popular at this point in his term, despite the Lewinsky scandal. Bush I was phenominaly popular and look where it got him.
He's been quite forthcoming and honest about the Harkin thing, which is why it is ancient history, gone over and dismissed during the Texas years
He has refused to answer all questions on the Harken scandal. Every question has been referred back to the SEC 'investigation' run by his Dad's appointees.
And the reason we are going back to Harken is that Bush made his money at Harken through precisely the same fraudulent stock and accounting tricks used at Kenny-boy Lay's Enron.
Bush served his country during the Vietnam War. Like a huge number of people, he served stateside
His commanding officer states that he did not report for duty, there are no records of him serving anywhere else. That is called being AWOL.
One would think that the GOP would have at least given you instructions on how to sign up instead of having to be an AC all the time. As it is it looks like I might be having this argument with myself as a way of bringing to people's notice the corruption, cowardice and incompetence of the failure in the Whitehouse.
Microsoft have applied for a patent, but who knows ---- in 10 years it may still not be either granted or rejected, so let's continue with Linux + MONO right now and get things moving.
It is most likely that Microsoft are applying for the patent for purely defensive reasons. I have had many patent shits apply for patents on the work I have done, often many years after it became public knowledge. Getting the patent in first is always a good idea.
Microsoft might possibly go after Linux, but it is much more likely to go after Sun and Java. Their real beef is that Sun has been playing silly buggers with lawyers. That may not be such a hot move when Microsoft have the engineering power to out patent Sun.
While the broader claims of the patent are likely going to be rejected it is almost certain that some claims will be allowed. If so expect Microsoft to make the terms for Sun every bit as unreasonable as Sun's terms for Microsoft.
There is no reason to beat up Linux though, Microsoft does not want to get 100% of the market, they want more like 85% so they don't keep getting slammed for anti-trust issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Go read the DNSSEC mailing list, there has been a considerable amount of discussion about OPTIN.
Or read any of the privacy mailing lists where the term opt in is used in the exact same context
The big problem with developing a SPAM solution is that nobody wants to hear any solutions, start describing something and they will interrupt your first sentence to tell you their idea. Then when you explain that the idea is not new and has severe drawbacks they assert that it works for them so it should be good enough for anyone.
Oh SPEWS and its ilk have gone further than that. Several of the Blacklists have blacklisted whole countries. In particular China and Korea.
I doubt many people blocked due to a single spammer are going to think "oh, well, I may not be able to send e-mail to my most important client - but at least while I'm losing thousands of dollars, I know I'm helping to fight spam!" Most, I'd bet, would just call up the offending receiver and complain that they're getting bounce messages when they try and send e-mail and that the receivers should fix their mail servers as soon as possible.
This happened to us as we are customers of UUNET which SPEWS listed because they don't like some of the content they host. Switching ISPs was never considered, we simply used the backup feed to send out an email to all the mailing lists we host stating that we had been blacklisted, have no intention of changing feeds and people who wanted to participate in those working groups could fix their mail servers pronto.
Or he might be
A customer of UUNet which spews has listed because it disagrees with some of the content they host
NOBODY with a brain is using SPEWS anymore. Listing the largest commercial internet supplier in the US was simply idiotic. And it was done for completely illegitimate reasons.
The whole blacklist concept boils down to vigilante tactics, use threats to keep people in line. The problem being that the people who run the lists tend to turn into self-important little tinpot dictators after a short time.
Content based filtering also is a direct violation of the principles of the US First Amendment right to free speech
Unture, with the exception of Limabaugh whose judgment in Nixon is opinionated nonsense the Federal courts have all rulled that the junk fax laws are constitutional.
So I just code all incoming files with embedded HTML as spam.
And how exactly would you know? After all if I send you HTML mail you will never see it.
About 50% of my non-spam personal email is HTML. Of course the statistics might be off as I did help write HTML.
Yeah and they don't take a tea break at 11 o'clock or 3:30.
As the signs in London said "Make Tea, Not War".
I'd also have though that a lot of large organisations (e.g. Fortune 1000 companies) would already have "downloading music/video" policies in place,
Not to mention firewalls that are pretty P2P unfriendly.
But the RIAA are basically playing into the corporate policy game. Basically Big 5 consultancy, sorry Big 4, oops make that 3 firms have a racket in which they charge $50K a pop for an 'Employee Navigator' or some such. These are written by fresh out of college grads billing at $2K a day or more. So any proposal is likely to get thrown in.
This is how we are going to get companies to take noptice of spam problems. Make them scared of fired employees claiming that being bombarded by hard core spam created a hostile workplace.
That is what we used to say about Digital.
Digital stuff just worked (well apart from low end crap like the Multia they threw out in their death throws). I never had occasion to find out about their replacement service, the stuff just worked. We had hundreds of boxes from them and it all just worked. You might have a flaky disk from time to time but with disk shaddowing on you could hot swap them.
VMS uptimes were measured in years. If you had a system crash you had a major post-mortem to find out the cause (usually power outage).
Not only did DEC go bust but the company that bought it got bought itself by HP.
If you are a current employee you would probably be best advised not to comment on financial matters.
The loss this year is not the relevant issue. Every silicon valley company that has had acuisitions has had goodwill writedowns.
The relevant issue is that Sun is being marginalized at the high end. There is no high end as SGI discovered and Symbolics, Cray, etc. etc. before them. IBM almost went broke going after the high end. Today they are really a consulting firm that sells some own label hardware. The mainframe business is not the core of IBM anymore.
Sun's server line is slow. The SPARC is aging and Sun has no resources for a replacement. It won't be long before Sun is charging Ferrari prices for a Honda civic.
What have they done for the company recently?
Seriously, Gosling has been involved in a lot of visionary technology before Java, but none of it got anywhere. NeWs was squished by X-Windows. Gage did net day, but what has he done for the company recently? Come to that what does Whitt Diffie do for Sun beyond consume cafe latte?
Unfortunately there is a major difference between technological firepower and technological leadership. The problem isn't with the technologists, it is with the management. They have simply failled to construct a business plan or environment that can utilise the firepower they have.
In that sense, Sun invented workstation.
My DEC Alpha was far superior to anything sun had to offer. Come to that SGI provided better firepower and a slicker integration package. Sun invented the cheap engineering workstation, mainly for the education market. Real engineers used VAXen. Now VMS didn't survive too well but it was the DEC/MIT X-Windows system that defined the workstation interface in the end.
As the author claims, Sun might be gone; on the other hand, Sun might be ruling the world by then.
I doubt it. IBM is rulling the commercial java space and OSS is rulling the freeware space. There is not much of a gap between the two.
The apple/Sun issue is key here. Apple is very well positioned to take huge bites out of Sun's core server market. They simply don't need Sun technology at this point. All they need is a hot processor - which sun notably lacks.
For Sun to survive it has to start focussing on its business, not Microsoft. Meetings with Sun engineers are painful, you get a 45 minute whinge about Microsoft. Which is pretty sad when they know you are one of Microsoft's closest allies in the industry. Even if Sun makes a billion in the lawsuit they will lose big, the suit is costing them far more than that in lost business and lost opportunities.
The first step to save Sun is to sack McNealy. Unfortunately Sun does not have a Steve Jobs figure waiting in the wings.
I have a $200 sony all in one remote that tries to provide a single interface to all my stuff. Problem is that it does not quite cut it, the Onkyo receiver does not quite do what it should.
Result is that only I can get the home theatre to work properly so I leave it turned off most of the time because I don;t want to spend all my time being sysop for the home entertainment system. Wish the wife would buy a Mac, then I could tell her she is absolutely on her own for service calls as I don't do Macs.
All I want is for a bunch of high end but still mainstream stuff to work together - we are not talking about obscure audiophile $25,000 turntables here. But there is no reason that a $2,000 TV and a $500 satelite receiver and $1,000 home theater box should not talk to each other either. We are not talking about big ticket changes, just an RFC822 or maybe a USB port.
Interactive TV leaves me cold, the stuff is real weak when you try the canned demos with oodles of thought gone into the interactive parts. Run of the mill content that will be seen mostly on non-interactive tv sets will be a bust.
There is no middle ground worth exploring between TV and videogames. Tombraider and such are lightyears beyond what iTV could hope to be. Why fight it trying to do interactive lite?
Actually it is even easier to send the system into oscillation if you have a non-linear system. But explaining the ins and outs in a slashdot post...
The frustrating thing is that an organization led by academics has so little academic input. The only academic habit they observe is lethargy.
You are right about IETF inertia though. I have given up on any bold progressive thinking in IETF for now with their attitudes such as "If it basically works, why fix it?"
The IETF attitude is to resist ideas as long as they can, then when someone loses patience and goes ahead without them complain about commercial interests having no respect for the standards process. In fact there is plenty of respect for standards processes, but not much for the specific IETF process.
You can tell how backward the institution is simply by looking at an RFC, they look like a Nigerian letter asking for assistance with a money transfer.
The whole NOMCOM system is a sick joke. The obvious purpose of the mechanism is to make sure that the IAB and IESG are accountable to no-one. A cabal of 15 people meeting in secret with no basic accountability is much less likely to upset the status quo with a dramatic move than a democratic system of elections. Democratic elections would mean a real risk of a change of power. The NOMCOM system means that bad ADs and ADs who have blatantly abused their power can continue to be reappointed, there is no way for the membership as a whole to reject them.
If the IETF had balls they would have pushed through a program for completion of the IPSEC, DNSEC and IPV6 protocols five years ago and then moved ahead with a strategy for deployment. Today they would be aggressively considering how to address the problem of Spam. As it is DNSSEC is undeployable in the large zones, the IESG has been content to let the WG chair filibuster fixes. IPSEC is a mess, the ISAKMP/IKE scheme is a dogs breakfast, a scheme to negotiate the scheme for negotiation. The only thing that has happened to IPv6 is that we are closer to running out of address space and everyone is moving to NAT regardless of the IETF opinion of them.
At the same time groups like OASIS have been completing standards in 18 months...
Perhaps if you had read the article you would know the phrase comes from William Forster Lloyd (1794-1852).
The tragedy of the Commons was used as a political weapon in the class warfare of the Victorian era. Those with Scottish ancestry might know this as 'the clearances', in England they were the enclosures.
Basically the aristocracy transferred the common land from public ownership to private ownership. Since they wrote the acts of parliament they gave themselves the best deal. The result being a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
The deck was stacked so that the aristocracy quickly got control of the small proportion of the land that went to the peasants. It was similar to the land grab that made Bush rich. They bought a sports team then started building a bigger stadium using the pliant local council to confiscate large amounts of land at below market rates which were then used for development and sold for a vast profit.
So the tragedy of the commons is not a politically neutral term. Also the real tragedy for the peasants came when the aristocracy used it as an excuse for exploitation. Its a bit like the plans for privatising social security, there is a problem there but it is being used as an excuse for a political agenda, not as something that is to be addressed for its own sake.
When tragedy of the commons is used in relation to the Internet it is usually to justify some form of corporate or governmental control.
Yep, if you have three available routes A, B, C with bandwidths 10, 4 and 1 the selfish router would send all trafic through route A in every case. An altruistic router would make a random choice between A, B, C such that A was chosen 2/3rds of the time and B, C were chosen in proportion 4:1 the rest of the time.
You can then tweak further by using traffic information. If the system is unloaded then use A all the time.
The same observation applies to the problem where traffic alternates between two routes rather than dividing itself evenly. That is elementary control theory. The problem is that the response has too high a gain factor, in effect the gain factor is infinite so instead of being shared across the routes the system is going into oscillation.
There is an obvious solution to that problem, you measure the change in the traffic statistics and moderate your response to changes.
This is the sort of thing the IETF should be doing. Unfortunately the IETF has been out to lunch for many years now. They have failled to respond with any urgency to most of the issues facing the net. Most of the participants seem to use it as a substitute social life rather than as a place to get things done.
That is really big news. The Patent office almost always sticks with the patent holder, no matter how ridiculous the patent is.
Externally requested reviews are not uncommon, the catch with an external review is that if the patent survives the review the presumption that it is valid is increased, even though the USPTO will apply its usual standards of sloppy and incoherent review and do everything it can to avoid admitting a mistake.
Commissioner requested reviews are very rare and tend to only happen when the USPTO knows that if it does not request a review itself it is likely to end up looking very stupid.
Basically the USPTO behaves exactly the way you would expect an agency to behave if its decisions can be challenged in court by one side but not the other.
The whole thing is an extortion racket.
More often than you might think. This is how a lot of mail systems support people like me who like to keep a copy of everything they have sent.
I do wish that more of the spam filtering people would take notice of these tactics however. Quite a few of the more clueless ones have all sorts of hack-back features that can end up slamming innocent people.
The only unusual thing in this case is that it was porn. The porn senders tend to be rather more discrete than most since they know that if there is an FBI type investigation they are sure to make examples of porno senders first. This tactic tends to be more common amongst the con-artists that the FBI are completely uninterested in prosecuting.
One of the big problems is that there is no agency that has an analogous operation to the mail-inspectors role in the post office. In theory this is wire fraud but the wire fraud investigators tend to be busy dealing with cases with a few really big transactions. They are much less interested in a case where the amounts are $30 or so, even though the totals might be millions.
I don't think you can equate a CC domain name with a soul. Selling the rights to the .tv name is considerably less likely to constrain the future development of the country than selling their satelite orbits which fetched considerably less.
The Tuvaluans got $50 million from .TV plus a share in the ongoing royalties from the CGMI deal which is a sizable chunk of change for each inhabitant. If they do decide they want a .tv name they can still buy one at the same cost as a .com.
This was considerably more than they got for selling the bird shit that used to make up most of their island resulting in an ecological disaster.
No, I am following the example of the Bush Whitehouse, telling people to act as I say, not as I do.
I'm half tempted to try to post something that points out that your name is sort of like "Seinfeld"....
Oh I get it, smoketoomuch, so you better cut down a bit.
Anyway, have to go, my two year old is having problems with his Linux partition. I think he might have just deleted vmunix from the root directory.
The problem is the spam. Very few people want to have their cyber identity tied to their email address in such a direct fashion.
The .name zone has about 10,000 Web pages in it. So you can work out the number of domains they have probably sold.
The big problem that the new registries face is that they thought that starting a new domain was a license to print money for doing nothing. They simply did not expect that there might be some actual work involved.
$35 sounds a lot by geek consumer standards, but you need a minimum of 2,000 names to cover the cost of hiring one person at that price - including salary, overhead, benefits etc. You need a minimum of 5 people to provide round the clock support.
The business models of the new domains expected people to buy millions of them in the first year. They did not understand that maybe it might take five years to build a critical mass.
It is always easier to look at someone elses business, particularly a successful one and decide that it is essentialy easy to run and cost free than to have your own idea. Look at all the folk who blundered into etail thinking that the economics of that space would somehow be different to the economics of mail order, a business notorious for its low margins and high infrastructure costs. Or look at the folk who blundered into home delivery of groceries, an even lower margin business, building $30 million distribution centers to serve markets that could not possibly support the interest payments, let alone register a profit.
Folk who have .name domains should not be too worried however. The same thing happened to .tv which spent through its initial VC funding at record pace and was bought out for about a tenth of the amount spent on building the brand. Someone will buy .name, although bidding is not likely to be brisk.
It was original geek humor.
Blues Clues is written for my two year old. My version of the song was somewhat different.
Perhaps if you did not spend your life in front of a computer screen eating soggy potato chips and warm cans of coke and had actually sung the song and danced around instead you might not write posts like Oscar The Grouch.
I heard of Blues Clues, but Blue's news?
To play Blues News you have to find a bug
Stick it in your notebook and describe the hole you've dug
Find another pawprint, thats the second bug
Stick it in your notebook and go catch the cyber-thug
Find the last pawprint, thats the third bug
Stick it in your notebook, get your coffee mug
Sit down in the thinking chair and think, think think.
Cos when we use our minds take a step at a time you can dooo anything, and on billable hours too.
Ron had had a fax from the inventors claiming that the scheme had been endorsed by several well known names in the crypto world who I won't mention for reasons that will become apparent including one of my collegues on a Web standards board.
There wasn't enough information in the press release to determine whether the scheme was bogus so I did the obvious thing and called up one of the people who was alledged to endorse it. Turned out that he did nothing of the sort, he thought it was snake oil but had been asked a different question, who should he talk to to get it adopted as a standard. The snake oil peddlers had then approached Ron saying that 'S. recommended that he talk to them', cleraly implying that S. recommended the scheme.
This matrix scheme looks very much like Power One Time Pad, it has the same million bit key. According to the patent application the scheme appears to be a variant of the playfair cipher which was cracked in WWI.
The competition means absolutely nothing. Any scheme can be made uncrackable if it uses a key length that is greater or equal to the amount of data encrypted. The point is that such schemes are almost completely useless.
The claimed $1 million prize is not convincing experience has shown that companies that make such offers rarely pay them out even if the scheme is broken. In short the actual value of the prize is:
Amount x Probability of Payment x Probability of cracking - cost of time.
The challenge is in any case over. I can't find out how long the challenge was offered for.
As I said before, I can set the rules for a competition so that the competition is unwinnable even though the cipher is broken.
For example consider creating a cipher using the declaration of independence which for the sake of argument we will consider to be perfectly random (it is not). The cipher consists of choosing a random starting point in the declaration and then XORing the plaintext with the declaration to create the ciphertext. I can generate one unbreakable ciphertext simply by making the plaintext shorter than the declaration.
I note that the current challenge text is distributed in a 53Kb Zip file, that would be 424,000 bits or so, considerably less than the alleged million bit key. Give me a few hundred Mb of ciphertext however and we might have a contest.
The wierd thing is the claim to have a contract with the department of Labor to supply an encryption scheme that is not endorsed by NIST. That would appear to breach several procurement guidlines. Also I can't find any record of any contract of that type on the Department of Labor site.
I think you have the right idea, slightly mistated. The crux for Google is that their problem is actually creating a huge associative memory, many terabytes of RAM. The speed of the processors is not that important, the speed of the RAM is the bottleneck. Pipelining etc have little or no effect on data lookups since practically every lookup is going to be outside the cache.
That does not support the idea that Moore's law is dead. It merely means that google is more interested in bigger and faster RAM chips rather than bigger and faster processors.
Long ago when I built this type of machine the key question was the cost of memory. You wanted to have fast processors because you could reduce the total system cost if you had fewer and faster processors with the same amout of RAM. Today however RAM cost is not a big issue, the faster processors tend to require faster RAM so you can make savings by having 10 CPUS running at half the speed rather than 5 really fast processors at three times the cost.
You are working from a false premise. dotNET is not a carbon copy of Java, it improves on the java model in a large number of significant ways. In particular the CLI versus VM approach.
It will be possible to do pretty much everything that dotNET does in java. However it will not be possible for Sun to take dotNET and do the same to it, taking the best ideas and fixing the bad ones.
As Microsoft has being making quite plain however, they are very keen to take good ideas from anyone else.
Yet another GOP fib, first off the President lost the popular vote, secondly he was the one who went to court to steal the election by stopping the votes being counted. The man is a fraud, deal with it.
As for the opinion polls the failure in the Whitehouse claims not to govern by, Clinton was actually more popular at this point in his term, despite the Lewinsky scandal. Bush I was phenominaly popular and look where it got him.
He's been quite forthcoming and honest about the Harkin thing, which is why it is ancient history, gone over and dismissed during the Texas years
He has refused to answer all questions on the Harken scandal. Every question has been referred back to the SEC 'investigation' run by his Dad's appointees.
And the reason we are going back to Harken is that Bush made his money at Harken through precisely the same fraudulent stock and accounting tricks used at Kenny-boy Lay's Enron.
Bush served his country during the Vietnam War. Like a huge number of people, he served stateside
His commanding officer states that he did not report for duty, there are no records of him serving anywhere else. That is called being AWOL.
One would think that the GOP would have at least given you instructions on how to sign up instead of having to be an AC all the time. As it is it looks like I might be having this argument with myself as a way of bringing to people's notice the corruption, cowardice and incompetence of the failure in the Whitehouse.
It is most likely that Microsoft are applying for the patent for purely defensive reasons. I have had many patent shits apply for patents on the work I have done, often many years after it became public knowledge. Getting the patent in first is always a good idea.
Microsoft might possibly go after Linux, but it is much more likely to go after Sun and Java. Their real beef is that Sun has been playing silly buggers with lawyers. That may not be such a hot move when Microsoft have the engineering power to out patent Sun.
While the broader claims of the patent are likely going to be rejected it is almost certain that some claims will be allowed. If so expect Microsoft to make the terms for Sun every bit as unreasonable as Sun's terms for Microsoft.
There is no reason to beat up Linux though, Microsoft does not want to get 100% of the market, they want more like 85% so they don't keep getting slammed for anti-trust issues.