Not strictly true. There's a 1 in 2^2048 chance that you'll 'get lucky' and guess the correct key. Next to no chance, I guess.
Not true, if you were going to do it by brute force the factors are only half the length of the modulus so the chance of guessing it would be 1 in 2^1024.
But that isn't how you do factoring, there are more efficient algorithms than brute force. The problem is you can't do 1/100th of the work and have a 1 in 100 change of getting the right number. It is more like you would have a 1 in 10,000 chance of getting the right number, thats if you could adapt the method to give you part credit for part work at all..
RSA is a public key algorithm and so there are faster attacks than brute force. The difficulty of breaking an n+1 bit key is not twice the difficulty of breaking an n bit key.
The difficulty of breaking RSA keys depends on the assumptions you build into the model. Unlike DES cracking factoring does not neatly decompose with trivial parallelism. There are parallel algorithms but there is a tradeoff between the part you do on a loosely coupled parallel box and the part that requires a tightly coupled processor.
The rough equation that is generally used is 512 bits RSA is roughly equivalent to a 56 bit symmetric cipher. 1024 bit RSA is roughly equivalent to a 76 to 80 bit symmetric cipher and 2048 bit RSA is roughly equivalent to a 112 to 128 bit symmetric cipher.
This is on the basis that the breaks of 56 bit DES and 512 bit RSA came at arround the same time and used roughly equivalent amounts of processing. In fact there is a slight discontinuity since only half of the RSA calculation could be farmed out. The farming stage results in a heck of a big matrix that you have to invert which was done on a CM5 I seem to recall.
Unlike the DES challenge there is no chance that you just 'get lucky' after a very small number of trials.
If users are happily running Windows 2K Pro on thier laptops and currently connect to Windows 2K servers, what do they care if they are swapped out for Linux servers with Samba?
Samba is not going to work for the calendaring functions in Outlook which is why I chose the example. If you want to have the Outlook calendaring functions work you need to have either Exchange or a pretty damn good copy running on the server.
While there are clones of Exchange there is not a good open source one yet that is a 100% direct substitute.
Come to that Samba is not a substitute for a document management system.
This returns to my original argument about functionality. Don't be suprised if I don't want to move if my existing system supports function X which I use and the system you are claiming will be a substitute does not.
The approach you appear to be taking is to try to argue with me that I don't need function X, I am a fool for wanting function X and anyone who did want function X should be fired. Now can you see why I might be less than happy with your attitude and why my reaction is most likely to tell the CEO that you should be invited to consider new career opportunities as soon as possible before you can do some more damage?
Um, hello? What planet are you from where you can confuse people with things that you don't even need to tell them about? This is exactly the kind of passion-fired stupidity that we really don't need.
Why do you have to call people stupid when you fail to understand their point? Wouldn't the most likely position be that they did not explain it fully rather than start off accusing them of being stupid?
They find out about them when they pay $$ thinking they bought X and find out that they really bought Y.
The result is that people will become confused when they try to buy something, they simply don't know what basis the product is being sold. Classic example of this is the Disney DVDs which are loaded with adverts that are locked so they can't be bypassed. Now when you go to buy a disney DVD you don't know what you will get for your money. I know several people who won't buy Disney movies because instead of quieting the kids they get 10 minutes of screaming from a brat that does not understand why they have to wait before they can watch Tarzan. And no I don't necessarily approve of that mode of parenting, however anything has to be better than corrupting them with hate shows like the 700 club.
The problem with the MPAA is that they can't understand that maximizing revenue is not consistent with making your customers the enemy.
The biggest problem with all these DRM schemes is that the restrictions are pointlessly complex so the consumer can't understand them. The other closely connected problem is not telling the customer about them.
It will be interesting to see whether stopping people from recording pay per view increases viewership or as I expect causes people not to pay the already exhorbitant fees.
Re:Baseless argument.
on
Linux Is Cheaper
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Your statement that changing a mail/calendar/etc program will never be transparent says more about your skills and tools than anything else. I can change a web based app from Cold Fusion to PHP and my users will never know the difference.
A Web app is useless for users with laptops who are travelling. The fact you would propose it as a solution says more about your utter cluelessness than my skills which are in any case irrelevant since I am a research principal and not a Web monkey.
You're mind-stuck with what Windows
No, you are mind stuck with the idea that there is always a better open source solution and anyone who says different myst be ignorant or lacking in skills, yack yack yack, chunner chunner, Microsoft eeeevvvillll, die die die.
Cost of ownership is a lot less imp9ortant than functionality. Most enterprises would consider having email and calendering that meet their needs the first consideraton.
OK so you will have someone leaping in the air shouting that Thnidnifv3.14 offers comparable calendaring to Outlook and Exchange and is just as easy to use, provided of course your users are not complete loser morons and know how to handle a punch card interface with a command set in Hierattic.
The issue for most enterprises is not the cost of their system, it is the cost of switching. Compared to the costs of mainframe software of the past Microsoft's offerings are dirt cheap.
The part missed out of the equation here is the users. I don't care what slashdot readers consider the greatest software to be, the users at my company mostly disagree. If an IT support person comes out and announces he is moving their systems to Linux whether they like it or not he is going to be fired before the end of the week.
People complain when they are forced to use Microsoft products. They should understand that others will complain if forced to use Linux or a Mac.
I could not see anything in the presentation that told me anything I did not know already. Microsoft has told everyone that they do not like the viral clauses in the GPL.
The same information is available on the Microsoft Web site. So forget the cloak and dagger stuff folks, the presentation may well have been made outside Microsoft. Looks to me as if the JPGs are simply scans of a leave behind.
Microsoft is scared of open source the same way the US is frightened of an imminent invasion by Cuba. Cuba may have embarrassed the US in the past and the US may spend a ridiculous amount of time and effort railing aginst Cuba but that does not mean they are frightened of Cuba. All it really means is that the US is understandably concerned when a bunch of crazys are getting drunk on their self inflated rhetoric.
On the freedom side I find the discussion frankly appauling. The chopped logic sounds very similar to the propaganda the Communists used to put out. Once people claim the right to define freedom for you you can tell that they are really about ramming some ideologically driven bullshit down your throat.
We've discussed this one before. He's not just doing it to be cute, he's trying to avoid--perhaps ineffectively since this is a modified copy not a derivitive work--copyright violation.
This makes no sense at all. The annotation is not going to stop Microsoft filing a suit, it might provide a defense but it certainly isn't going get the case thrown out.
Microsoft is not going to file a case like that for damages, if they did file the case it would be to shut the squirt up. The fact they have choosen not to do this indicates that either they don't care or they realise that that type of tactic is likely to give more to feed ESR's ego.
What it comes down to is that the comments are just another way that ESR uses the documents to feed his ego.
...or would everyone have preferred a version without ESR's comments and opinion, so that we could form our own?
If you ignore the idiotic comments the memos say very little and certainly not what Eric's paranoid little rants claim.
Case in point: {Translation: We don't think enough of our big customers know that we consider Linux a major competitive threat, so we're going to send Mike Nash on a press tour to introduce it to them.}
Microsoft makes no secret of the fact that they think that Marketting Warfare is the best book on marketting written. The book starts off 'choose an enemy', it does not matter what the enemy is, and if you don't have one then you invent one.
Basically Erics little rants are all about stroking his own ego.
I'm guessing you don't really know what "relational" means anyway. Lots of people don't seem to.
I'm guessing you are an idiot who calls someone stupid because you don't immediately understand their point. I know what a relational model is thank you.
My point was that the semantic gap between the data model used in databases and the data model used in all modern programming languages - C#, Java etc. is completely unnecessary.
There is no reason I should need to encode my data in tables just to get atomic transactions. I should be able to create a class and get atomicity simply by declaring that the methods on that class are atomic.
There is a whole field of 'persistent' programming methodologies you appear to be ignorant of, so don't go arround telling people they are stupid.
The problem we have is that there are many types of database. Applications typically use only a limited subset of the capabilities of a database. All the programmer is usually interested in is making transactions atomic and persistent.
If you want to analyse a large amount of data manually you need a different set of features. You want a tool that provides you with an interactive and flexible view of the data. It is most likely that if you are dealling with data manually you are going to be using a snapshot of the data.
I agree that a form of JOIN is useful in the second case. However if you are providing a persistence store for applications, which is what a file system level database would be targeted as that level of power is completely undesirable.
I think the problem has a lot more to do with the US government making themselves the policeman of the world, toppling governments in every corner of the world, killing others because of an interest in oil or control over a region
When people say things like this there is always some idiot jumping up and down shouting 'anti-american'. The idea never seems to enter these people's empty heads that being globocop might be a bad thing for America.
Rudyard Kippling wrote 'The White Man's Burden' about the US invasion of the Philapeans. Despite Kippling's reputation as an imperialist poet it is actually anti-imperialist 'go bind your son's in exile'.
The failure in the Whitehouse made similar statements during his election campaign, he said America must be humble, meaning that it should not be throwing its weight arround. He was against 'nation building' and against international engagement. The problem being that they are only against negotiations and engagement when they fail to get what they want. As soon as that happens the first resort is unilateral demands.
To address the point of the thread, this administration does not want scientific research. It is completely interested in any information that does not support their pre-determined agenda. They have suppressed all the information on the Federal agency web sites that call administration policy into question and they are busy stacking research panels to make sure none come out with the 'wrong views'.
I have a simple rule for evaluating people, look at how often they listen and who they listen to. We know that this administration listened only to its campaign contributors, in particular big oil when it wrote its energy policy. The Siera club was called in for one meeting that lasted less than two hours, half of which was taken up by introductions.
The problem with this administration playing globocop is that they treat every single issue in terms of the narrowest electoral advantage. It is driven by the Cubanistas in Miami, the Zionists in Broklyn and the Messianistic Christian Right in the Bible belt.
I doubt that Castro would still be in power but for the US embargo giving an excuse for his failed economic policies. So do most in Congress but they don't want to loose the vote in Florida.
The problem with US policy on Israel is that the US keeps trying to play the neutral intermediary while providing the military and economic support that allows Israel to continue to occupy the Palestinian territories and continue to attempt colonisation with settlements.
The administrations declaration that from now on it intends to act unilateraly can only have one effect. Every country is going to have to build nuclear weapons since they have been empirically demonstrated to be the one thing that the neo-imperialist right respect.
This is why we should all be very affraid of the attempts to build SDI. The risk is that sometime in the future another weak president trying to look tough may be tempted to call someone's nuclear bluff in the mistaken beleif the system works.
What we really need is a really relational, full DBMS (with sane defaults) as the fundamental storage component of an OS.
That was done pre-UNIX with PICK. The whole O/S was a database.
Microsoft has been working on an Object File System for years and it is rumored that it might finaly ship in Yukon.
A database baked file system is a great idea for an O/S. But the relational model is long overdue for the garbage pail. Modern programming languages since C have used pointers or object references. If JOIN and messing arround with tables is so good why don't we all use COBOL?
One of the things that appeared in VMS a while back that was pretty cool (and pretty easy to do on a log based file system) was transactions at the file level. You could take any set of file I/O operations and wrap a transaction arround them. This meant that you could have atomic updates to any file base resource without having to suffer the pain of SQL.
It would be pretty easy to implement this on a Linux log based file system (or windows for that matter). All you do is extend the log structure so you can group operations together and implement some sort of commit flag.
You could then build an object oriented filestore database using XML flat files. OK so maybe the system is not going to be up to storing millions of records without more infrsastructure. However most programming tasks use configuration files that are unlikely to be more than a few tens of Kb and are routinely managed as in memory structures anyway.
We could have, and should have, dumped the current NTSC signal when color came along. But "thousands" of people had bought these expensive TVs so the gubmint decreed that any of this new fangled color stuff must be viewable on the good ol black and white TVs.
Not quite. The issue was that the broadcasters wanted to ditch the existing broadcast equipment and develop a completely parallel set of infrastructure just for color. The government probably wouldn't have given them the bandwidth but the real issue infrastructure. The broadcasters were not going to deploy two sets of everything - including studio cameras!
The NTSC color system is like the color system in every other country, an afterthought. But it is also the worst of the bunch. The BBC was the first broadcaster to demonstrate a color system but did not deploy color until ten years after the US. This allowed them to develop the PAL system which is designed so that phase errors cancel out so they result in a saturation error rather than the chrominance error you get with NTSC. With PAL a yellow might end up brighter, with NTSC it may turn out orange or green.
Although the US was first with a color system the color format didn't take off in the US until the same time as everywhere else. It was the release of Bonanza! the first major US color drama that drove the market. Even then most of the programs were made in B&W for years, color was the exception.
I don't argue with the majority of you post. However I do think that people who have got used to PVRs and VCRs are simply not going to buy any HDTV system if they won't work with it. I don't care how great the picture quality the device can show if it is showing the wrong picture.
well, there goes any credibility you might have had. There isn't *any* "imperialism" in either party's foreign policy.
You don't know what imperialism is.
The British Empire worked in two parts, the formal and the informal empire. The formal empire, the parts of the map colored red were under the direct administration of Britain. That was not the preferred solutions.
Far better was informal empire, the country concerned accepted the protection of the British navy and opened its markets to british trade. In other words Britain received all the material benefits it was after without having to go to the bother of occupation which was costly and inefficient.
Bush's adventurism in Iraq is about cheap oil, control of the gulf and national prestige. It is classic imperialist adventuring justified in classical fashion. We've got the men, we've got the arms, we've got the money too.
It is most likely to come apart for the same reason the Vietnam adventure did. The US people don't support imperialism and they will rapidly withdraw support for a war if they even suspect it may be be being fought for the wrong reasons.
$1500 for a nice living room TV? Dude! I got my nice 37 inch TV for maybe $300 if that. If you think I am going to spend more for a TV than I do for a computer, just so I can watch hi-def crap...
There aren't many people who watch my Sony Wega and don't comment on how good the picture is.
Compared to the cost of the house renovations the cost of the TV is lost in the noise.
Of course I am not exactly a price sensistive buyer - I almost bought a plasma TV. But most slashdot readers probably have loptops that cost more and will be lucky to get 24 months use out of them before they deteriorate into a mess of patching tape.
Of course you only really get the benefit if you have a digital source. For me thats DVD or Satelite.
HDTV will be big but not I suspect in the way that the FCC has been expecting.
First off HDTV will fail completely if you can't record the signal for personal use. Equally it will fail if you can't use a PVR. I don't care how great the picture looks, it looks shite as far as I am concerned if I have to watch the commercials.
Secondly the killer apps for HDTV are probably DVD and satelite signals. I very much doubt that the cable industry can upgrade in time to be relevant. Broadcast HDTV is utterly irrelevant, the specifications don't work. The only reason the FTC keeps banging on on the broadcast HDTV is that without broadcast the rationale for such a high degree of FTC involvement goes away. Also the politicians are wondering how they get their ads out if everyone is watching satelite and the Web where the ads are national and not local.
Thirdly the FTC mandate for large TVs to have HDTV tuners will fail. Those TVs will simply become 'computer monitors', the broadcast tuner will be an optional extra which most consumers don't need or if they do need it it will be possible to turn it on using a secret code which the store assistant will tell you.
Fourthly convergence between the computer and the TV will drive the large scale adoption of HDTV. This is already being seen, look at a plasma TV and the chances are better than even it is actually hooked up to a computer not a TV. HDTVs will be bought for video games entertainment rather than passive TV watching.
Finaly until there is a DVD standard that distributes HDTV content the only benefit the average user will get is seeing the films in American widescreen format (16:9) rather than academy ratio (4:3) since the poor user won't have any HD content to view.
Because DirecTV is so difficult to receive and often so expensive to have installed, NFL Sunday Ticket is restricted to a lucky few -- and is something of a rich man's toy.
I pay less for my 150 channels of DishTV than the local cable costs.
You can get free installation if you sign up for 1 year of service at $22.50 or above.
For an extra $50 you can get a PVR (Tivo type thingie).
Of course you still can't get NFL sunday ticket, but heck who wants to bother with football anyway? The game is boring and unwatchable unless you have a PVR and can record the game in advance and scan forward over the commercials.
I meant environment in the biological sense - we all breath the same air, eat food grown in the same soil, etc.
I think that most evolutionary biologists would define the environment widely to include the social factors you state. Certainly Gould did.
Differences in nutrition were certainly major factors in Victorian times and a significant factor until after WWII. These days you could still make a claim wrt health care being a significant non-social factor but the major environmental factors affecting test score performance would be social.
We'll see...everyone called Reagan stupid and ignorant and heaped invective on him for his Evil Empire comments -
And we later discovered he had been suffering from Altzheimers.
Bush's feeble attempts to ape Reagan don't count because they are just that, an attempt to gain credibility for his hollow schemes on the basis of a rhetorical appeal to the past.
The Soviet union fell apart because the system had died under Krushchev and just took 20 years more to finally fall apart. You have the mechanism partly right, the US spent the USSR into the ground, only the war was won by Kennedy, not Reagan. There is nothing that the rest of the world could do however that would match the problems the communists created for themselves.
Also, about your comments about "alleged" bomb building
I didn't comment on alleged bomb building. We know that North Korea is building a bomb, have done sisnce last July. We have yet to see evidence that Iraq is building a bomb and the state department is busy telling people that they don't expect the inspectors to find anything.
The GOP has been on the wrong side of history time and time again. They installed murderous dictators such as Pinochet and coddled dictators like Suharto and yes Saddam. The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is simply the legacy of failed Republican imperialism of the past.
Bush formed a coalition of countries (that naysayers said would never happen) and dismantled the Taliban. Bush made his Axis of Evil speech...which was *incredibly* decisive. I know liberals *hate* this sort of thing, but it's necessary. Reagan said the same thing of the Soviet Union, and we all saw the results.
Bush has managed to alienate every US ally with the exception of the UK and Israel. The axis of evil speach was devisive, not decisive.
The North Koreans appear to be making the only logical response to Bush's stupid phrase, they are building a nuclear weapon. The only logical interpretation of Bush's stupid phrase is that after launching its attack on Iraq they will attack North Korea and Iran, so those countries had better make sure they get the bomb before Bush has finished in Iraq.
Before his inadequacy made his stupid speech the modernisers in Iran were doing pretty well. In the aftermath of September 11th the unelected hardline theocrats were on the defensive and the democratically elected modernisers were gaining real power. Bush's idiotic phrase completely cut the legs from under the pro-US groups and allowed the hardliners to reassert the power that they had lost post 9/11.
So as a result of his stupid posturing we now have two problems, North Korea and Iran that are measurably worse than would have been the case had he kept his big ignorant mouth closed.
No, Al Gore would not have done what Bush has done. He would probably would not have spent 9/11 flying arround on his private jet and we would not have had William Safire telling fantasy tales about threats of nuclear attack to cover up the presidents cowardice. We certainly would not have had to wait almost a week before a credible speech to the nation.
We certainly would have invaded Afghanistan, if you have any doubts on that score you are a complete fool. The one major difference that might have happed would have been co-opting Iran as an aly instead of or in addition to Pakistan whose military dictator had been the principal backer of the Taleban. Musharaf deposed the democratic government in Pakistan after the legitimate government sacked him for refusing to stop support for Islamic terrorism in Kashmir which had almost lead to a war with India.
We certainly would not be looking to start a war with Iraq at this point. The US military would still be focused on eliminating Al Qaeda and the Taleban. It would still have the support of Europe, Russia and China.
So no, Gore would not have handled the crisis in the stupid and incompetent manner of Bush. He would not have created unnecessary crises and he would be focused on the real enemy, Al Qaeda.
One other thing, if Gore was pushing for a war with Iraq because of an alleged attempt to build a bomb it would be possible to believe Gore. The problem with Bush is that he has zero credibility, he has proven time and time again that he will make any lie to justify his agenda.
There is (significantly) less than 1% of a genetic difference between you and anyone else on this planet. And what you would call "environment" is largely constructed from the status quo. There is very little difference, environmentally speaking, between the richest and the poorest Amercians experience.
The statement you make on environment does not match your conclusions and is in and case demonstrably false. Rich kids sent to pressure cooker type crammers are likely to do far better than poor kids left to fend for themselves in schools where the roof leaks and there are metal detectors at the entrances to keep the number of guns brought to school down to a few dozen a week.
One of the big problems with the SAT tests as originally designed is they are meant to test 'aptitude' not achievement. The ideology that accompanied the tests is that practice is not meant to affect your scores. Nobody really believes that of course, selling tuition is a big business. Only when it comes to justifying the entrance procedure is the ideology asserted.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support the 'aptitude' claims and a mountain of evidence that disproves it. See Stephen Gould's 'Mismeasure of Man'.
OK so there is now a fixup, there are SAT tests in individual subjects. The problem here is that they are adjuncts to the school curriculum so they become just yet another stupid test US kids have to do. The contradicition at the heart of the US education system is that the kids are tested endlessly, more often than in any other school system. At the end of that process however they end up without any nationally recognized credential.
Can I prove to you that some spook lab buried ten miles beneath Ft. Meade, MD hasn't done this, and isn't buying computers thrown out by French businesses and reading every old secret? No, I can't, I don't work for the government and don't plan to start. But last I checked, it wasn't considered good logic to require absolute proof of a negation, when no proof has been shown of the posited statement.
That is why you will stay on the recovery side while most people who want real security will go to people who think like I do and cover cases that are at the edge of the possible.
In fact the data wipe programs are pretty useless but for a completely different reason, the wipe procedure can't work unless it is used before the disk is scrapped. The only reliable way to secure data is to use encryption. It is quite practical to completely wipe crypto keys from memory.
This include ONE type of entity: sovereign governments. Are you selling your disk wiping utilities to governments, or to businesses and consumers?
Call this off-topic if you must, but I've seen gazillions of posts in this and many other threads about forensics and data recovery that are terribly misinformed about the realities of the field. Here's the two cents of a real, live forensic examiner:
One reason why security software is overdesigned is that it has to deal with improvements in technology. To take your point about older low density drives, any drive more than five years old falls into that category.
The other reason is that forensics rarely deals with information that is deliberately concealled and the fact that information that may become available in 10 or 20 years time is rarely relevant. This is not the case with intelligence where the activities of ten or even twenty years ago might be of major interest.
The folks that put the child pornographers, embezzlers, script kiddies, and the rest of the computer criminals in jail generally know much, much less than you about computers, Slashdotters. They also don't give a rat's ass about Linux, Windows, Bill Gates, RMS, or any of it.
Probably right there, but they are not the main customer for the technology we provide and even if they do buy it, it is not that likely to do them a major amount of good. The main customers for computer security are commercial interests, banks and major corporations. There are many documented instances of national security organizations being used for commercial espionage, the French openly boast about it. The people who commit major wire fraud are typically well funded and backed by significant organized crime, at the moment the Russian mafia are the main players.
There arn't that many investigations into that type of crime because it is amazingly rare. But the level of attack is very sophisticated and very real.
Sure you can. But to be able to do it with something like MD5, you need to factor some very large prime numbers. Hence the security.
Sorry, not even close.
MD5 has been compromised in a paper by Hans Dobbertin of the German Ministry of Information. The compromise is less than a total break but it is also now 8 years old.
MD5 uses only operations on 32 bit integers, addition, rotation and booleans. It does not use large integers of prime numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true, if you were going to do it by brute force the factors are only half the length of the modulus so the chance of guessing it would be 1 in 2^1024.
But that isn't how you do factoring, there are more efficient algorithms than brute force. The problem is you can't do 1/100th of the work and have a 1 in 100 change of getting the right number. It is more like you would have a 1 in 10,000 chance of getting the right number, thats if you could adapt the method to give you part credit for part work at all..
The difficulty of breaking RSA keys depends on the assumptions you build into the model. Unlike DES cracking factoring does not neatly decompose with trivial parallelism. There are parallel algorithms but there is a tradeoff between the part you do on a loosely coupled parallel box and the part that requires a tightly coupled processor.
The rough equation that is generally used is 512 bits RSA is roughly equivalent to a 56 bit symmetric cipher. 1024 bit RSA is roughly equivalent to a 76 to 80 bit symmetric cipher and 2048 bit RSA is roughly equivalent to a 112 to 128 bit symmetric cipher.
This is on the basis that the breaks of 56 bit DES and 512 bit RSA came at arround the same time and used roughly equivalent amounts of processing. In fact there is a slight discontinuity since only half of the RSA calculation could be farmed out. The farming stage results in a heck of a big matrix that you have to invert which was done on a CM5 I seem to recall.
Unlike the DES challenge there is no chance that you just 'get lucky' after a very small number of trials.
Samba is not going to work for the calendaring functions in Outlook which is why I chose the example. If you want to have the Outlook calendaring functions work you need to have either Exchange or a pretty damn good copy running on the server.
While there are clones of Exchange there is not a good open source one yet that is a 100% direct substitute.
Come to that Samba is not a substitute for a document management system.
This returns to my original argument about functionality. Don't be suprised if I don't want to move if my existing system supports function X which I use and the system you are claiming will be a substitute does not.
The approach you appear to be taking is to try to argue with me that I don't need function X, I am a fool for wanting function X and anyone who did want function X should be fired. Now can you see why I might be less than happy with your attitude and why my reaction is most likely to tell the CEO that you should be invited to consider new career opportunities as soon as possible before you can do some more damage?
Why do you have to call people stupid when you fail to understand their point? Wouldn't the most likely position be that they did not explain it fully rather than start off accusing them of being stupid?
They find out about them when they pay $$ thinking they bought X and find out that they really bought Y.
The result is that people will become confused when they try to buy something, they simply don't know what basis the product is being sold. Classic example of this is the Disney DVDs which are loaded with adverts that are locked so they can't be bypassed. Now when you go to buy a disney DVD you don't know what you will get for your money. I know several people who won't buy Disney movies because instead of quieting the kids they get 10 minutes of screaming from a brat that does not understand why they have to wait before they can watch Tarzan. And no I don't necessarily approve of that mode of parenting, however anything has to be better than corrupting them with hate shows like the 700 club.
The biggest problem with all these DRM schemes is that the restrictions are pointlessly complex so the consumer can't understand them. The other closely connected problem is not telling the customer about them.
It will be interesting to see whether stopping people from recording pay per view increases viewership or as I expect causes people not to pay the already exhorbitant fees.
A Web app is useless for users with laptops who are travelling. The fact you would propose it as a solution says more about your utter cluelessness than my skills which are in any case irrelevant since I am a research principal and not a Web monkey.
You're mind-stuck with what Windows
No, you are mind stuck with the idea that there is always a better open source solution and anyone who says different myst be ignorant or lacking in skills, yack yack yack, chunner chunner, Microsoft eeeevvvillll, die die die.
OK so you will have someone leaping in the air shouting that Thnidnifv3.14 offers comparable calendaring to Outlook and Exchange and is just as easy to use, provided of course your users are not complete loser morons and know how to handle a punch card interface with a command set in Hierattic.
The issue for most enterprises is not the cost of their system, it is the cost of switching. Compared to the costs of mainframe software of the past Microsoft's offerings are dirt cheap.
The part missed out of the equation here is the users. I don't care what slashdot readers consider the greatest software to be, the users at my company mostly disagree. If an IT support person comes out and announces he is moving their systems to Linux whether they like it or not he is going to be fired before the end of the week.
People complain when they are forced to use Microsoft products. They should understand that others will complain if forced to use Linux or a Mac.
Nah you are confusing them with Bill Frist who has admitted taking cats from shelters in Boston and then using them for vivisection.
I could not see anything in the presentation that told me anything I did not know already. Microsoft has told everyone that they do not like the viral clauses in the GPL.
The same information is available on the Microsoft Web site. So forget the cloak and dagger stuff folks, the presentation may well have been made outside Microsoft. Looks to me as if the JPGs are simply scans of a leave behind.
Microsoft is scared of open source the same way the US is frightened of an imminent invasion by Cuba. Cuba may have embarrassed the US in the past and the US may spend a ridiculous amount of time and effort railing aginst Cuba but that does not mean they are frightened of Cuba. All it really means is that the US is understandably concerned when a bunch of crazys are getting drunk on their self inflated rhetoric.
On the freedom side I find the discussion frankly appauling. The chopped logic sounds very similar to the propaganda the Communists used to put out. Once people claim the right to define freedom for you you can tell that they are really about ramming some ideologically driven bullshit down your throat.
This makes no sense at all. The annotation is not going to stop Microsoft filing a suit, it might provide a defense but it certainly isn't going get the case thrown out.
Microsoft is not going to file a case like that for damages, if they did file the case it would be to shut the squirt up. The fact they have choosen not to do this indicates that either they don't care or they realise that that type of tactic is likely to give more to feed ESR's ego.
What it comes down to is that the comments are just another way that ESR uses the documents to feed his ego.
If you ignore the idiotic comments the memos say very little and certainly not what Eric's paranoid little rants claim.
Case in point: {Translation: We don't think enough of our big customers know that we consider Linux a major competitive threat, so we're going to send Mike Nash on a press tour to introduce it to them.}
Microsoft makes no secret of the fact that they think that Marketting Warfare is the best book on marketting written. The book starts off 'choose an enemy', it does not matter what the enemy is, and if you don't have one then you invent one.
Basically Erics little rants are all about stroking his own ego.
I'm guessing you are an idiot who calls someone stupid because you don't immediately understand their point. I know what a relational model is thank you.
My point was that the semantic gap between the data model used in databases and the data model used in all modern programming languages - C#, Java etc. is completely unnecessary.
There is no reason I should need to encode my data in tables just to get atomic transactions. I should be able to create a class and get atomicity simply by declaring that the methods on that class are atomic.
There is a whole field of 'persistent' programming methodologies you appear to be ignorant of, so don't go arround telling people they are stupid.
The problem we have is that there are many types of database. Applications typically use only a limited subset of the capabilities of a database. All the programmer is usually interested in is making transactions atomic and persistent.
If you want to analyse a large amount of data manually you need a different set of features. You want a tool that provides you with an interactive and flexible view of the data. It is most likely that if you are dealling with data manually you are going to be using a snapshot of the data.
I agree that a form of JOIN is useful in the second case. However if you are providing a persistence store for applications, which is what a file system level database would be targeted as that level of power is completely undesirable.
When people say things like this there is always some idiot jumping up and down shouting 'anti-american'. The idea never seems to enter these people's empty heads that being globocop might be a bad thing for America.
Rudyard Kippling wrote 'The White Man's Burden' about the US invasion of the Philapeans. Despite Kippling's reputation as an imperialist poet it is actually anti-imperialist 'go bind your son's in exile'.
The failure in the Whitehouse made similar statements during his election campaign, he said America must be humble, meaning that it should not be throwing its weight arround. He was against 'nation building' and against international engagement. The problem being that they are only against negotiations and engagement when they fail to get what they want. As soon as that happens the first resort is unilateral demands.
To address the point of the thread, this administration does not want scientific research. It is completely interested in any information that does not support their pre-determined agenda. They have suppressed all the information on the Federal agency web sites that call administration policy into question and they are busy stacking research panels to make sure none come out with the 'wrong views'.
I have a simple rule for evaluating people, look at how often they listen and who they listen to. We know that this administration listened only to its campaign contributors, in particular big oil when it wrote its energy policy. The Siera club was called in for one meeting that lasted less than two hours, half of which was taken up by introductions.
The problem with this administration playing globocop is that they treat every single issue in terms of the narrowest electoral advantage. It is driven by the Cubanistas in Miami, the Zionists in Broklyn and the Messianistic Christian Right in the Bible belt.
I doubt that Castro would still be in power but for the US embargo giving an excuse for his failed economic policies. So do most in Congress but they don't want to loose the vote in Florida.
The problem with US policy on Israel is that the US keeps trying to play the neutral intermediary while providing the military and economic support that allows Israel to continue to occupy the Palestinian territories and continue to attempt colonisation with settlements.
The administrations declaration that from now on it intends to act unilateraly can only have one effect. Every country is going to have to build nuclear weapons since they have been empirically demonstrated to be the one thing that the neo-imperialist right respect.
This is why we should all be very affraid of the attempts to build SDI. The risk is that sometime in the future another weak president trying to look tough may be tempted to call someone's nuclear bluff in the mistaken beleif the system works.
That was done pre-UNIX with PICK. The whole O/S was a database.
Microsoft has been working on an Object File System for years and it is rumored that it might finaly ship in Yukon.
A database baked file system is a great idea for an O/S. But the relational model is long overdue for the garbage pail. Modern programming languages since C have used pointers or object references. If JOIN and messing arround with tables is so good why don't we all use COBOL?
One of the things that appeared in VMS a while back that was pretty cool (and pretty easy to do on a log based file system) was transactions at the file level. You could take any set of file I/O operations and wrap a transaction arround them. This meant that you could have atomic updates to any file base resource without having to suffer the pain of SQL.
It would be pretty easy to implement this on a Linux log based file system (or windows for that matter). All you do is extend the log structure so you can group operations together and implement some sort of commit flag.
You could then build an object oriented filestore database using XML flat files. OK so maybe the system is not going to be up to storing millions of records without more infrsastructure. However most programming tasks use configuration files that are unlikely to be more than a few tens of Kb and are routinely managed as in memory structures anyway.
Not if the MPAA have their way. They are pushing for a broadcast flag to disable recording and disable PVR skip ahead functions.
They are threatening Congress with huge campaign donations to get their way.
Not quite. The issue was that the broadcasters wanted to ditch the existing broadcast equipment and develop a completely parallel set of infrastructure just for color. The government probably wouldn't have given them the bandwidth but the real issue infrastructure. The broadcasters were not going to deploy two sets of everything - including studio cameras!
The NTSC color system is like the color system in every other country, an afterthought. But it is also the worst of the bunch. The BBC was the first broadcaster to demonstrate a color system but did not deploy color until ten years after the US. This allowed them to develop the PAL system which is designed so that phase errors cancel out so they result in a saturation error rather than the chrominance error you get with NTSC. With PAL a yellow might end up brighter, with NTSC it may turn out orange or green.
Although the US was first with a color system the color format didn't take off in the US until the same time as everywhere else. It was the release of Bonanza! the first major US color drama that drove the market. Even then most of the programs were made in B&W for years, color was the exception.
I don't argue with the majority of you post. However I do think that people who have got used to PVRs and VCRs are simply not going to buy any HDTV system if they won't work with it. I don't care how great the picture quality the device can show if it is showing the wrong picture.
You don't know what imperialism is.
The British Empire worked in two parts, the formal and the informal empire. The formal empire, the parts of the map colored red were under the direct administration of Britain. That was not the preferred solutions.
Far better was informal empire, the country concerned accepted the protection of the British navy and opened its markets to british trade. In other words Britain received all the material benefits it was after without having to go to the bother of occupation which was costly and inefficient.
Bush's adventurism in Iraq is about cheap oil, control of the gulf and national prestige. It is classic imperialist adventuring justified in classical fashion. We've got the men, we've got the arms, we've got the money too.
It is most likely to come apart for the same reason the Vietnam adventure did. The US people don't support imperialism and they will rapidly withdraw support for a war if they even suspect it may be be being fought for the wrong reasons.
There aren't many people who watch my Sony Wega and don't comment on how good the picture is.
Compared to the cost of the house renovations the cost of the TV is lost in the noise.
Of course I am not exactly a price sensistive buyer - I almost bought a plasma TV. But most slashdot readers probably have loptops that cost more and will be lucky to get 24 months use out of them before they deteriorate into a mess of patching tape.
Of course you only really get the benefit if you have a digital source. For me thats DVD or Satelite.
HDTV will be big but not I suspect in the way that the FCC has been expecting.
First off HDTV will fail completely if you can't record the signal for personal use. Equally it will fail if you can't use a PVR. I don't care how great the picture looks, it looks shite as far as I am concerned if I have to watch the commercials.
Secondly the killer apps for HDTV are probably DVD and satelite signals. I very much doubt that the cable industry can upgrade in time to be relevant. Broadcast HDTV is utterly irrelevant, the specifications don't work. The only reason the FTC keeps banging on on the broadcast HDTV is that without broadcast the rationale for such a high degree of FTC involvement goes away. Also the politicians are wondering how they get their ads out if everyone is watching satelite and the Web where the ads are national and not local.
Thirdly the FTC mandate for large TVs to have HDTV tuners will fail. Those TVs will simply become 'computer monitors', the broadcast tuner will be an optional extra which most consumers don't need or if they do need it it will be possible to turn it on using a secret code which the store assistant will tell you.
Fourthly convergence between the computer and the TV will drive the large scale adoption of HDTV. This is already being seen, look at a plasma TV and the chances are better than even it is actually hooked up to a computer not a TV. HDTVs will be bought for video games entertainment rather than passive TV watching.
Finaly until there is a DVD standard that distributes HDTV content the only benefit the average user will get is seeing the films in American widescreen format (16:9) rather than academy ratio (4:3) since the poor user won't have any HD content to view.
I pay less for my 150 channels of DishTV than the local cable costs.
You can get free installation if you sign up for 1 year of service at $22.50 or above.
For an extra $50 you can get a PVR (Tivo type thingie).
Of course you still can't get NFL sunday ticket, but heck who wants to bother with football anyway? The game is boring and unwatchable unless you have a PVR and can record the game in advance and scan forward over the commercials.
I think that most evolutionary biologists would define the environment widely to include the social factors you state. Certainly Gould did.
Differences in nutrition were certainly major factors in Victorian times and a significant factor until after WWII. These days you could still make a claim wrt health care being a significant non-social factor but the major environmental factors affecting test score performance would be social.
And we later discovered he had been suffering from Altzheimers.
Bush's feeble attempts to ape Reagan don't count because they are just that, an attempt to gain credibility for his hollow schemes on the basis of a rhetorical appeal to the past.
The Soviet union fell apart because the system had died under Krushchev and just took 20 years more to finally fall apart. You have the mechanism partly right, the US spent the USSR into the ground, only the war was won by Kennedy, not Reagan. There is nothing that the rest of the world could do however that would match the problems the communists created for themselves.
Also, about your comments about "alleged" bomb building
I didn't comment on alleged bomb building. We know that North Korea is building a bomb, have done sisnce last July. We have yet to see evidence that Iraq is building a bomb and the state department is busy telling people that they don't expect the inspectors to find anything.
The GOP has been on the wrong side of history time and time again. They installed murderous dictators such as Pinochet and coddled dictators like Suharto and yes Saddam. The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is simply the legacy of failed Republican imperialism of the past.
Bush has managed to alienate every US ally with the exception of the UK and Israel. The axis of evil speach was devisive, not decisive.
The North Koreans appear to be making the only logical response to Bush's stupid phrase, they are building a nuclear weapon. The only logical interpretation of Bush's stupid phrase is that after launching its attack on Iraq they will attack North Korea and Iran, so those countries had better make sure they get the bomb before Bush has finished in Iraq.
Before his inadequacy made his stupid speech the modernisers in Iran were doing pretty well. In the aftermath of September 11th the unelected hardline theocrats were on the defensive and the democratically elected modernisers were gaining real power. Bush's idiotic phrase completely cut the legs from under the pro-US groups and allowed the hardliners to reassert the power that they had lost post 9/11.
So as a result of his stupid posturing we now have two problems, North Korea and Iran that are measurably worse than would have been the case had he kept his big ignorant mouth closed.
No, Al Gore would not have done what Bush has done. He would probably would not have spent 9/11 flying arround on his private jet and we would not have had William Safire telling fantasy tales about threats of nuclear attack to cover up the presidents cowardice. We certainly would not have had to wait almost a week before a credible speech to the nation.
We certainly would have invaded Afghanistan, if you have any doubts on that score you are a complete fool. The one major difference that might have happed would have been co-opting Iran as an aly instead of or in addition to Pakistan whose military dictator had been the principal backer of the Taleban. Musharaf deposed the democratic government in Pakistan after the legitimate government sacked him for refusing to stop support for Islamic terrorism in Kashmir which had almost lead to a war with India.
We certainly would not be looking to start a war with Iraq at this point. The US military would still be focused on eliminating Al Qaeda and the Taleban. It would still have the support of Europe, Russia and China.
So no, Gore would not have handled the crisis in the stupid and incompetent manner of Bush. He would not have created unnecessary crises and he would be focused on the real enemy, Al Qaeda.
One other thing, if Gore was pushing for a war with Iraq because of an alleged attempt to build a bomb it would be possible to believe Gore. The problem with Bush is that he has zero credibility, he has proven time and time again that he will make any lie to justify his agenda.
The statement you make on environment does not match your conclusions and is in and case demonstrably false. Rich kids sent to pressure cooker type crammers are likely to do far better than poor kids left to fend for themselves in schools where the roof leaks and there are metal detectors at the entrances to keep the number of guns brought to school down to a few dozen a week.
One of the big problems with the SAT tests as originally designed is they are meant to test 'aptitude' not achievement. The ideology that accompanied the tests is that practice is not meant to affect your scores. Nobody really believes that of course, selling tuition is a big business. Only when it comes to justifying the entrance procedure is the ideology asserted.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support the 'aptitude' claims and a mountain of evidence that disproves it. See Stephen Gould's 'Mismeasure of Man'.
OK so there is now a fixup, there are SAT tests in individual subjects. The problem here is that they are adjuncts to the school curriculum so they become just yet another stupid test US kids have to do. The contradicition at the heart of the US education system is that the kids are tested endlessly, more often than in any other school system. At the end of that process however they end up without any nationally recognized credential.
That is why you will stay on the recovery side while most people who want real security will go to people who think like I do and cover cases that are at the edge of the possible.
In fact the data wipe programs are pretty useless but for a completely different reason, the wipe procedure can't work unless it is used before the disk is scrapped. The only reliable way to secure data is to use encryption. It is quite practical to completely wipe crypto keys from memory.
This include ONE type of entity: sovereign governments. Are you selling your disk wiping utilities to governments, or to businesses and consumers?
Both.
One reason why security software is overdesigned is that it has to deal with improvements in technology. To take your point about older low density drives, any drive more than five years old falls into that category.
The other reason is that forensics rarely deals with information that is deliberately concealled and the fact that information that may become available in 10 or 20 years time is rarely relevant. This is not the case with intelligence where the activities of ten or even twenty years ago might be of major interest.
The folks that put the child pornographers, embezzlers, script kiddies, and the rest of the computer criminals in jail generally know much, much less than you about computers, Slashdotters. They also don't give a rat's ass about Linux, Windows, Bill Gates, RMS, or any of it.
Probably right there, but they are not the main customer for the technology we provide and even if they do buy it, it is not that likely to do them a major amount of good. The main customers for computer security are commercial interests, banks and major corporations. There are many documented instances of national security organizations being used for commercial espionage, the French openly boast about it. The people who commit major wire fraud are typically well funded and backed by significant organized crime, at the moment the Russian mafia are the main players.
There arn't that many investigations into that type of crime because it is amazingly rare. But the level of attack is very sophisticated and very real.
Sorry, not even close.
MD5 has been compromised in a paper by Hans Dobbertin of the German Ministry of Information. The compromise is less than a total break but it is also now 8 years old.
MD5 uses only operations on 32 bit integers, addition, rotation and booleans. It does not use large integers of prime numbers.