With W2K, we're talking of more than 10 millions line of code or so. Even after slashing the bloat, using this code is mostly untractable. It just useful for going around this or that bug of this or that API, once in a while.
I'd rather prefer MSFT to really document its APIs, its file formats (including.doc,.xls, etc.) and its protocols, and to make them open source or public domain. That would introduce a healthy yet controllable dose competition for MSFT and clean them of their monopolistic sins, but it would also place MSFT in the role of the Great Arbitrer of De Facto Standards and bring them a lot of long lost good will.
In a domain where planned obsolescence is the rule of the Game, setting the standards (and giving them away) is a very desirable place where to stand and it's nearly as efficient as close formats to maintain a quasi-monopoly. Just look at IBM, Cisco or Intel. MSFT would also sit as a benevolent dictator rather than a ruthless tyran.
Tristrata was a company that came around 2 years ago with broad claims to have invented a new type of cryptographic protocols as strong as one time pad with all sorts of new nifty super duper algorithms. Gobs and gobs of money were dumped onto the company. And when the "revolutionary" system was opened to public scrutiny, it was immediately exposed as just a big heap of obfuscation over run-of-the-mill cryptography. Tristrata went under in early 2001, if I remember well...
This article (and company) smells very strongly of Tristrata-ism. A comment about the one time pad algorithm is revealing:
The complexity of each random page in the "book" makes it nearly impossible to crack the code. And even if someone intercepts the message, there's no pattern to it that might help them decode the entire transmission.
Duh! The randomness of a one-time pad is not complex, it's random. It's not "nearly impossible to crack". A one-time pad is impossible to crack by interception of the cypher text. Period.
Another one is fairly good too:
The client generates a series of random numbers to use as an encryption key. This is number is exchanged with the server through a secure process known only to Prescient,[...]
Yeah, right, whatever. And what's this "secure process known only to Prescient", please, pretty please ? A courrier running around with floppy disks, may be?
I'm not going to bash those guys any longer. I can't exclude they have a few good ideas here and there. I don't know. But the article itself is pure puffery. A new one-time-padish cypher without a one-time pad is about as likely as perpetual motion.
Sig: You can't see my $0.02. They're one-time pad encrypted.
Please fullt read my post and the CARP proposal. The fee is 0.02 cent, not $0.02. So, ok, granted, the math is indeed correct. It's the initial hypothesis which is not.
Thanks a lot for the mirror. The IDA site is f**cked up and it's not just a matter of javascript enabled. Now, I gonna read this report and may be I'll have some comments tomorrow.
If I may utter a suggestion. It could be a good idea that./ posts this kind of stories but delays the comments for one or two days so people can actually read the documents.
My $0.02 for today (and filling for bankruptcy tomorrow at 9:00AM)
Yes, there's a lot of speculation going on mass scale retaliations and all that. Way to early to discuss it.
Clearly, would a foreign nation be involved in this, they're pretty much cooked. Actually, they would be so cooked that it seems completly improbable any dictator would touch this kind of operation with a 11 feet pole. If anything, dictators tend to care a lot for their own survival.
And there are so many sides such a horror could come from. Bin Laden and similar "Islamic" crackpots are a possibility indeed. But there are also a lot of well financed domestic groups who could do that too, apocalyptic sects, etc. There are, alas, precedents of complex terrorists operations which had nothing to do with state-sponsored terrorism. Just remember what Aum Shirinkyo did in Japan in the past decade.
So in the mean time, chill down. Anyway, revenge is sweeter when eaten cold.
Never forget those damn bloody French ! Devious guys, those French if any and up to the hilt on clandestine biological warfare with all those smelly cheeses.
This year, I heard that a band called "Destiny's Child" won a bunch of awards. From the TV blub, they look kind of cute, and seem to
be a band that sings shopworn 3-part harmonies over shopworn hip-hop beats. At the time, it occurred to me that I have not heard
more than a 20-second blip from any of their songs. So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen
divas and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?
Answer : NO.
I killed my TV 8 years go, and I mostly listen to classical music or stuff that's not coming from big labels anyway. All in all, I'm feeling OK.
My $0.02 that I won't give to Britney Spear, no way !
Indeed you're screwed and, for once, your favorite telco is honest about it. The problem is that your phone's copper pair doesn't reach the central office but a small box somewhere in your neighborhood, probably on the curb of your block. And in this box, there's a satellite exchange, which digitizes your phone line and connects it (along with many other POT lines) to the main exchange in the CO over optical fiber.
So what ? Can't they place the DSL termination (DSLAM) in the curb box ? Well, the answer is flatly no. It's a tiny box crammed with electronic and directly exposed to the sun, wind, heat, cold, etc. So 1) there's no room for a DSLAM in this kind of box, and 2) the equipment sitting there has be specially designed to resist the environmental conditions of this box: at least -40C to +85C (-40F to +185F) and 0% to 100% humidity. DSLAMs are already expensive in the CO, I let you imagine what would cost a hardened compacted DSLAM.
Very good summary of the main stream legislative process up there in DC. As Senator McCain put it, campaign financing has evolved lately from the good ol' bribery and corruption thing to plain bare-naked extortion. "Gimme money or I'll push a law that gonna be a pain in your rear end". Geee...
The funny thing is that this evolution sometimes benefits to fairly honest people such as McCain who never had a problem to raise money from the IT industry since he got the chairmanship of the commerce committee. Everybody's a donor because they know that no one will be able to buy him. So, if they got screwed, at least, they know it will be equal opportunity screwing and not selectively based on insufficient campaign contributions;-)
Still, it's sad that power in DC has become exclusively a nuisance power. When one thinks this nation walked on the Moon 30 years ago.
PS: Yeah, I have a bias for McCain even if his opinions on abortion are plain stupid.
Arrrrhh, good question. And nop, it's a very ordinary PS2. I just use my and its 21" desktop display : S-Video -> video capture -> 30 fr/s + stretch at 1600x1200. Works quite well.
Do as I do : don't have a TV. All of a sudden, you will find yourself with a lot of free time on your hands to play with your favorite PS2, code a bit there and ther, surf the web, read books (ya know those weird thingies with a lot of paper inside), meet with friends, learn cooking, have sex and assorted fun, listen to music, you name it.
When Microsoft denounces open source as a hurdle on innovation, it somehow has a point Open source is very good at incremental evolution but no one in the community really has the power to rebuild a full OS from scratch and ram it through the throat of the installed base as Microsoft can. With its monopoly, Microsoft has more opportunities to implement a serious technologic shake-up (and a serious shake-down for the end-user at the same time:-). And as for the matter of standardization, what Microsoft does often ends up as a de-facto-standard. So yeah, Microsoft is "innovative" and helped to "create standards".
And when you think about it, GNU/Linux or BSD are indeed old technology grown from the 70s, still stuck with unsexy monolithic kernels, etc. The support for desktop is still unconvincing. They lack productivity applications. All things considered, Microsoft did a fairly good job at creating and enforcing some software consistency on this nightmarish hardware piece of crap which is the PC.
In Microsoft's eyes, open source OSs just have one little tiny annoying inconvenience. They work. Day after day, they faithfully fulfil all the obscure brutish jobs they're being asked, lost in some remote corners of the sever farm, toiling endlessly, alone amid their peers, all those other servers also toiling endlessly on their own obscure brutish jobs. They're no good for the end-users but ask them to do one specific thing over a network, tweak them a little bit if necessary - hey, you have the code ! - and they'll do it, no question asked, going, going, keep going. Who cares which software is running as long as it runs. Software is a commodity.
.And Microsoft is scared to death with that. Why ?
They lost a battle and an important one in the most ignominious way. With its monopoly on the desktop market, Microsoft was supposed to leverage its proprietary protocols to pry open the server market and force and cash in its solutions in the machine room. But in retrospect, it becomes evident they made an ugly mistake with the all-in-one NT, the same software on servers and desktops alike. By cumulating the worst of both worlds, it took more than 5 years to turn NT in something close to a decent platform. On the server side, they should have started from an existing proven platform like BSD and extend it as closed source to support the proprietary desktop protocols. It would have been there much faster. The desktop side could have then had a life of its own without slowing the server side. A nasty case of NIH syndrome. And they lost those 5 precious years that allowed Linux, Apache and Samba to grow up and make NT irrelevant in the server room.
But that's not really the most frightening for Microsoft. They not only lost the battle in the server room but, missing their window of opportunity to become the One, the war has shifted to a new battlefield. The fastest growing segments in IT are wireless, PDAs, SAN/NAS and internet-based applications such as database Web access over intranets or ASPs (when they don't die...). And coming on the horizon are residential broadband and internet-based appliances. Microsoft has no serious edges on any of those markets, a bit there, a tad here. It's just another competitor and has strictly not a chance of building a new monopoly as it did out of the original IBM PC. IT is not a niche anymore, the market is huge, the array of technologies to dominate is beyond the grasp of any company, and so much funding is now available that even Microsoft and its $25B in cash at the bank is just one player among others.
The IT market is slowly shifting from the all-purpose PC to a patchwork of heterogeneous specialized devices, both for the end-user and for the infrastructure. With the PC, consistency is in great demand and Microsoft had a global solution, good or bad but a solution. With specialized devices, OS and applications are just tools to adapt, tweak and slap together for such or such tasks. Open source is the evident solution. There's no point for anymore great innovation on the tool side. Like metalwork machine-tools, they simply exist. They are there and they are a commodity. The problem is now to use them.
Microsoft has every good reason to shriek like a swine in the slaughterhouse. Open source killed its only leverage, on the building blocks. After nearing world domination, it's seeing its death, slowly fading in irrelevancy, its edge blunted, becoming just another company in a mature market.
Any internal combustion engines indeed produce NOx and O3 but it fairly easy to reduce or eliminate them with a catalytic converter in the exhaust pipe. Actually, hydrogen is way better than the usual hydrocarbon fuel for catalytic converters as burning H2 in our everyday air (N2 and O2) doesn't send half-burned hydrocarbons or carbon particles (diesel engine) in the converter. I'm no chemistry expert but AFAIK, those 2 kinds of compounds tend to "poison" the catalytic converter over time and are a big pain in the bottom end if you want produce converters which are cheap AND efficient AND reliable over time. Burning H2 = cheaper better converters.
Also the beauty of using a classical internal combustion engine vs. fuel cells is that those engines are light, cheap, fairly efficient, and, best of all, they can work with normal gasoline, which is kind of a good idea until H2 refueling stations become common thing. Also, your good ol' car engine is available today which is way more than one can say about fuel cells...
I'm really impressed with BMW. Their tank design is really great news. I've always been told that H2 storage was a complete sore. H2 has all sort of funny properties when you try to trap it in a container. For instance, if you let H2 in an perfectly seal metal can, it leaks anyway by loosing its electron to the metal and then its tiny nucleus (a mere proton, you can't get anything smaller:) can migrate through the metal and recombine on the other with an electron. H2 is used for semiconductor processes and I think they always use double skin pipes, high pressure H2 in the center tube and a constant flux of inert gas on the outside to collect the leaking H2.
Nop, this is not a troll but a very sound comment.
History is not black and white in a good vs evil Hollywood manner. And if only people were to accept that, life would be much much much simpler. Scientific or technologic prowess is alas not an indicator of politic or philosophic acumen. More generally, suppressing truth, good or bad, from "official" history is stupid and counter-productive and professing this kind of censorship is abhorrent.
Take people as they are and make your own opinion. But yes, that means you have to think by yourself and not just sheepishly profess undying devotion for a few supposedly immaculate heroes. Perfect heroes were a constant of Nazi and Communist propaganda, but there's no need for them if you have one bit of a brain.
And for a few more examples of controversial figureheads:
Von Braun was not even a Nazi apologist. He was a zealous Nazi, plain and simple, and a direct witness and profiteer of forced labor in concentration camps. He was also the guy who sent America to the Moon. The repulsion that any sane person should have for his behavior during WWII doesn't diminish the admiration due for its pivotal contribution to the Apollo program.
Robert Brasillach is probably one of the most remarkable French writers of the late 30s. He was also a prominent hate-spewing anti-Semite propagandist in occupied France and was very rightfully sent to the firing squad in 1945. Does it mean we should not read his novels?
Andrei Sakharov literally gave the thermonuclear bomb to Stalin. And he was one of the first USSR scientists to stand against mindless use of nuclear energy as soon as 1957 and to openly denounce USSR totalitarianism since the early 60s. And doing that from within USSR took guts.
Way more guts than whining against a long-dead guy on a weblog in 2001, BTW.
There's no reason to give a subsidy to Internet retail. This tax ban also has a bad side effect by encouraging an artificial split between "brick and mortar" retail and on-line retail. As long you don't have a physical presence in a state, you don't have to collect the taxes for this state. The end result is that on-line retailers refuse to team up with local retail and offer a better service to customers such as ordering on-line and picking the order at the nearest shop.
Suppressing the ban is also going to be a great opportunity to clean up the local tax mess so the tax collection can automated.
Now, whether or not there should sales taxes is another matter to be dealt with your local pols.
In short, my answer is no, no and no. No animosity meant, yet;-)
No rev 1 - The fact that IPv4 headers are messy does not matter when they are extracted in hardware. Picking a bit out of a stream is just wiring a register to the right bit lane. It doesn't matter if overall, the bit mapping is straight through or involve a lot of SHIFT 5 and ROT 13 and double forward scratch spin with loop jump. The hardware is there anyway. At worst, the control FSM is a bit messier. It's not the same for a CPU that must process dword by dword and where the fields' layout matters. IPv6 headers are simply big and variable, which means that a lot of data has to go back forth between the switch fabric and the routing processor, and that it screws up the pipeline. You can't say anymore 1 header = 1 clock cycle. Also it doesn't mix well with existing headers processing and ramps up the cost of Ethernet or IPv4 switching just to accommodate a few IPv6 packets there and there. It's a big issue for the cost of equipment used during the IPv4 / IPv6 transition.
No rev 2- You assume that software switching is still used at the edge of the network, and here we're go with MPLS tagging from there. That's not true anymore. I'm currently working on a family of L2-L4 wiring cabinet switches that routing at up to 80Gb/s cross-section and 150 Mpkt/s. It's an edge router, PCs and workstations directly attach to it, and it's 100% hardware routing. The previous family is already doing that. When you have a 100Mb/s connection to each terminal devices, software routing is not an option. So, at first all IPv6 routing will be handled as a software exception, and latter there will be a dedicated routing processor with its own data path., but even then it won't have the performance of IPv4.
No rev 3 - MPLS is not the solution. Or you end up with something that is not an IP router but an MPLS switch. That's not just hairsplitting. All a MPLS switch does is to shove packets from an interface to another based on the tag with strictly no idea of what's inside. By many aspects, MPLS is the terminal stage of virtual circuit networking from X25 with Frame Relay and ATM as the intermediate stages. What's lost with MPLS is the fine visibility on things like QoS, traffic segregation or packet ordering on multi-link load balancing in the core network. I don't know MPLS well enough to be definitive and I imagine it's possible to assign multiple tags to a single path to discriminate between different classes of traffic. So, is full IP routing at every node needed anyway? Frankly, I think so but I won't bet my head on that. So far, it has not mattered and doing that on the edge of a MPLS blob has been enough. So if ISPs think that MPLS is good enough, long life to MPLS. I'm just not convinced that this solution meant for bulk data transfers will work well for mixed traffic of bulk data and real-time stuff , VoIP and video, (although I'm pretty much sure some VoIP operators must use it, but on networks that only carry VoIP and that makes a serious difference).
I rate this one at $0.20. Inflation lurks! Where's Greenspan?
I don't see IPv6 taking off any time. IPv6 problem is not just a deadlock between ISPs and router manufacturers. The big roadblock on the way towards TWGD (i.e. total worldwide global domination, let's see if this one sticks;-) is that IPv6 doesn't fit well in hardware acceleration. IPv6 has huge and variable headers, which are a pain in the bottom end to process in hardware.
IPv4 is much nicer. Only the first few hundreds bits in the packets really matter. Sure, an IPv4 header can be much bigger with options. It's just that nobody expects those options to be implemented. With IPv6, ignoring options is not... an option. Even core routers must completely walk the header chain of each packet.
The reason is that the IPv6 effort was started in the early 90s at a time when IP routers where basically a bunch of interfaces and DMA engines around a shared packet buffer with a CPU in the middle chopping and tweaking the headers to route the packets. All the decisions were made by software, and, sometime in low cost routers, the CPU even performed the data transfers with the interfaces, no DMA. The IPv6 was built with this architecture in mind and requires the routers to do a lot of smart gee whiz things on the headers. That clean architectural model is alas obsolete.
Nowadays, routers' CPUs nearly never see a packet. All the routing is completely done in hardware. The CPUs just do housekeeping, maintaining the routing tables, collecting and processing statistics, that kind of stuff. The only packets they ever see are those for network maintenance, SNMP, etc, and routing protocols, OSPF, IGRP, BGP, you name it.
In serious routers, the real stuff happens between the switch fabric and the routing processors. The switch fabric, centralized or distributed, handles the bulk of the data transfers, receiving and sending packets between the interfaces and the packet buffers. Here, the unit is the gigabit per seconds (a few tens or hundreds of Gb/s or even Tb/s). When the switch fabric receives a packet, it stores it in a buffer and at the same time extract a few hundred bits of the header and forwards that to routing processors, a huge pipeline of table lookups and processing, 100% hard-coded in silicon.
After a while, the routing processors spit an answer to the switch fabric to flush or forward the packet with updated data for the variable fields (the TTL for instance, or even the whole header on NAT or multicast), or to create new packets. For instance, ISMP packets on TTL timeout can be completely generated in hardware! The unit there is the 100s of millions of packets per second. Go do that with CPUs... Worst of all, the IPv6 headers are highly variable and that completely screws up pipeline design where it's much better to handle bounded amount of data.
So, on current routers, IPv6 is supported... as an exception, using the CPUs. The performances are merely catastrophic. IPv6 is not really practical with current router architecture. May be an IPv7 will come, one day when IPv4 is really breaking at the seams.
In a company I used to work for a while ago, we had a fairly open FTP server, so any client could drop files when we asked them for feedback on a bug report, that kind of stuff. The policy was read/write for everybody but no delete/overwrite. Fairly liberal policy but who cares ? Nothing critical on this server
One day, clients started to complain that the server was damn slow and failed to receive their files. The depository directory was apparently clean. And then looking at the logs (for the first time in 2 years;-), bingo : it was a squatter who was stuffing innate mounds of data in/out a hidden directory. Solution : erase everything and set up a id/password setup for each client who needs this access. But, even if the loss of ressources is small, it just sucks to have to do that.
Open directories on the Web are a bit like mail boxes. It's wide open and its very easy to stuff shit in there, but it's just plain discourteous and stupid. Now, the difference is that for your mailbox, you just have to deal with the neighbours' kids. On the Web, you have 100.000.000 neighbours
Get over it, there's necessarily at least one mean asshole in the bunch.
I don't know how you call that but to me, what RAMBUS did is plain and dull patent fraud. When you take somebody else ideas and secretly amend your pending applications to cover those ideas, you actually wrongly pretend anteriority and knowingly lie to the US PTO.
Now that's specific to the US or, more exactly, it was until the reform of patent laws last year to comply with international standards. Up to last year, the US had a very special status for anteriority where it was when the idea was first formulated which mattered, and not when it was first filled with the patent office. Hence, the importance of escrowed lab logs where engineers had to write down and time-stamp every idea that flied through their mind.
As far as I know, those RAMBUS patents were granted before the reform and thus covered by the old status.
Don't know about you but this article just give the creeps. It's so "yada yada yap yap what a bright future with this Gyricon thing... greatest idea since paperback" etc. Ok, it pays the customary socially conscious non-committal carefully balanced side note. 2 sentences of it to be precise:
Digital technology and books, magazines and newspapers are certainly going to collide, just as
Wolff said. And, as he also said, the results will have an enormous social and cultural impact.
And then nothing on the real problem behind e-books. Yeah sure : enormous social and cultural impact. You name it, dude! What so great with books is not that you own them like you own your car or your house. The object doesn't need to attractive or up to the latest hype. Nop.
As many posters already noticed, the good ol' paper book is completely self sufficient, durable, always on, outside the reach of any external control on whether or not you have the legal right, the appropriate license to read it, the proper kowtowing to copyright holders and authorities. Once you have it in your hands, buy, borrow, copy or steal, it's yours, inalienable, always there for you until the end of times. Barring the suit or police thug being literally over your shoulder, nobody can get in the way between you and a book.
With e-books will come software and control, no matter what. Closed DMCA protected software, of course, so publishers can entrust their precious holdings to e-books. Combine that with always-on ubiquitous wireless for permanent license checking and you and up a Brave New World that strongly smells of Big Brother and Kafka combined. You haven't paid your annual license fee : sorry but no reading tonight. A controversial author dies and his heirs want to suppress "inadequate" writings : just globally revoke the license. A court deems a book libelous : broadcast the court order and zap the book out the universe so no one can make its own opinion. Someone is indicted for "anti-social" behavior, prohibit him to access "dangerous" reading, for his own good of course. You want to lend your e-book to a friend:.no way, he must buy his own copy. Otherwise, that would be theft!
The potential for control is just enormous, limitless should I say. Oh sure, it won't happen overnight and will probably take a full generation, the time necessary to slowly erode what is today considered as granted right as there won't a damn politico courageous enough to explicitly constraint copyright to its lowest evil. Sorry to be such an anally retentive neo-ludite Cassandra, but every time I hear the word "e-book", I can't help but think it's actually this wacko RMS who's right about the whole thing.
Those e-books just scare me. The latter this nightmare comes true, the better.
Sig . I just love nuclear bombs, gas warheads and the scent of napalm in the morning. They make people understand that technology can go wrong.
Tss, tss, tss. It smells of gross prejudice and flamebait. A few more years of occidental-like mass-consumerism in China and you'll have a hard time to find any "automaton" left there. I'm not having any wild-eyed illusion in the progress of democracy in China. But human nature is same everywhere : people care much more about cleaning one's car on Sunday morning and thinking about this cool HDTV DVD-R one's saw last week at the mall, than waging hi-tech or lo-tech war on its neighbors every now and then.
Bourgeoisie is nothing glorious but, at least, it's a peaceful state of mind and a very contagious one. That also applies to the Chinese (and by the way, they're humans too).
You also dismiss the essential fact that all wars are fought for, first and foremost, economic reasons, WWI and WWII included. Wars are not fought for "freedom" or "principles" but as matters of power. The good news are: economic powers are now transnational (and China is stepping in WTO right about now) and don't have much leverage or interest to push nations at war. The bad news are: economic powers are now transnational and don't give a shit about nations, especially third-world nations. See the situation in Democratic Congo (formerly Zaire) and US mining interest there.
I don't see, long term, the US and China going at each other throat because it doesn't make any economic sense, except if the US start panicking at a growing Chinese economic power, strong enough to say "fuck you" on trade matters or so. The only serious wars I can foresee are between nations and corporate conglomerates. Ooopps ! Wait a minute. Would that means that the US are actually becoming the #1 global danger ???? :-)
Second:
And Nuclear weapons are dying. States are now so used to Nuclear weapons, that it is taken as read they will never be used. Every state has become rational and technological in this regard by definition - otherwise they would be unable to develop Nuclear weapons at all.
Not everyone has a few thousand vectors, ready to go, stashed somewhere in its attic. It defeats any conceivable defense system. And, me thinka that the argument "I blast your ass in gaseous by-products down to the last leaf of grass on your territory the next you piss me off" is still and will remain a fairly strong and convincing argument in the face of many wannabe uber-rulers. I therefore see a continued bright future for having vast quantities of mass-destruction weapons.
I'm not happy at all with the alleged return of conventional warfare. I'd rather have conventional disarmament than nuclear disarmament. To see the US taking the conventional road IS the scary thing. It makes (limited) war actually possible.
I therefore respectfully dissent and state that your argument is moronic and anally retentive.
Slashdot Mirror
With W2K, we're talking of more than 10 millions line of code or so. Even after slashing the bloat, using this code is mostly untractable. It just useful for going around this or that bug of this or that API, once in a while.
.doc, .xls, etc.) and its protocols, and to make them open source or public domain. That would introduce a healthy yet controllable dose competition for MSFT and clean them of their monopolistic sins, but it would also place MSFT in the role of the Great Arbitrer of De Facto Standards and bring them a lot of long lost good will.
I'd rather prefer MSFT to really document its APIs, its file formats (including
In a domain where planned obsolescence is the rule of the Game, setting the standards (and giving them away) is a very desirable place where to stand and it's nearly as efficient as close formats to maintain a quasi-monopoly. Just look at IBM, Cisco or Intel. MSFT would also sit as a benevolent dictator rather than a ruthless tyran.
I'm sure there's gonna be some day traders somewhere ready to jump on this one.
CmdTaco, get ready for a visit from the SEC jack-booted men in black at the Compound. They're coming !
Tristrata was a company that came around 2 years ago with broad claims to have invented a new type of cryptographic protocols as strong as one time pad with all sorts of new nifty super duper algorithms. Gobs and gobs of money were dumped onto the company. And when the "revolutionary" system was opened to public scrutiny, it was immediately exposed as just a big heap of obfuscation over run-of-the-mill cryptography. Tristrata went under in early 2001, if I remember well...
:
This article (and company) smells very strongly of Tristrata-ism. A comment about the one time pad algorithm is revealing:
The complexity of each random page in the "book" makes it nearly impossible to crack the code. And even if someone intercepts the message, there's no pattern to it that might help them decode the entire transmission.
Duh! The randomness of a one-time pad is not complex, it's random. It's not "nearly
impossible to crack". A one-time pad is impossible to crack by interception of the cypher text. Period.
Another one is fairly good too
The client generates a series of random numbers to use as an encryption key. This is number is exchanged with the server through a secure process known only to Prescient,[...]
Yeah, right, whatever. And what's this "secure process known only to Prescient", please, pretty please ? A courrier running around with floppy disks, may be?
I'm not going to bash those guys any longer. I can't exclude they have a few good ideas here and there. I don't know. But the article itself is pure puffery. A new one-time-padish cypher without a one-time pad is about as likely as perpetual motion.
Sig: You can't see my $0.02. They're one-time pad encrypted.
Okay, sure it's far-fetched.
No, it's not far-fetched. It's very credible.
Please fullt read my post and the CARP proposal. The fee is 0.02 cent, not $0.02. So, ok, granted, the math is indeed correct. It's the initial hypothesis which is not.
You have your math wrong by 2 orders of magnitude. The proposed rate is 0.02c per performance, not $0.02 (that is 2c). So :
/day.>br>
120 listeners * 18 hrs/day * 12 perfs/hr = 25920 perfs/day. = $5.184
Not so outrageous. It still adds up to nearly $2.000 a year though...
What's really outrageous is the very idea of paying anything to the RIAA mob knowing where's the money actually goes. Beats me...
Do humanity a favor. Eat a RIAA lobbyist for breakfast.
Thanks a lot for the mirror. The IDA site is f**cked up and it's not just a matter of javascript enabled. Now, I gonna read this report and may be I'll have some comments tomorrow.
./ posts this kind of stories but delays the comments for one or two days so people can actually read the documents.
If I may utter a suggestion. It could be a good idea that
My $0.02 for today (and filling for bankruptcy tomorrow at 9:00AM)
Yes, there's a lot of speculation going on mass scale retaliations and all that. Way to early to discuss it.
Clearly, would a foreign nation be involved in this, they're pretty much cooked. Actually, they would be so cooked that it seems completly improbable any dictator would touch this kind of operation with a 11 feet pole. If anything, dictators tend to care a lot for their own survival.
And there are so many sides such a horror could come from. Bin Laden and similar "Islamic" crackpots are a possibility indeed. But there are also a lot of well financed domestic groups who could do that too, apocalyptic sects, etc. There are, alas, precedents of complex terrorists operations which had nothing to do with state-sponsored terrorism. Just remember what Aum Shirinkyo did in Japan in the past decade.
So in the mean time, chill down. Anyway, revenge is sweeter when eaten cold.
Never forget those damn bloody French ! Devious guys, those French if any and up to the hilt on clandestine biological warfare with all those smelly cheeses.
Down with Roquefort !
This year, I heard that a band called "Destiny's Child" won a bunch of awards. From the TV blub, they look kind of cute, and seem to be a band that sings shopworn 3-part harmonies over shopworn hip-hop beats. At the time, it occurred to me that I have not heard more than a 20-second blip from any of their songs. So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen divas and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?
Answer : NO.
I killed my TV 8 years go, and I mostly listen to classical music or stuff that's not coming from big labels anyway. All in all, I'm feeling OK.
My $0.02 that I won't give to Britney Spear, no way !
Indeed you're screwed and, for once, your favorite telco is honest about it. The problem is that your phone's copper pair doesn't reach the central office but a small box somewhere in your neighborhood, probably on the curb of your block. And in this box, there's a satellite exchange, which digitizes your phone line and connects it (along with many other POT lines) to the main exchange in the CO over optical fiber.
So what ? Can't they place the DSL termination (DSLAM) in the curb box ? Well, the answer is flatly no. It's a tiny box crammed with electronic and directly exposed to the sun, wind, heat, cold, etc. So 1) there's no room for a DSLAM in this kind of box, and 2) the equipment sitting there has be specially designed to resist the environmental conditions of this box: at least -40C to +85C (-40F to +185F) and 0% to 100% humidity. DSLAMs are already expensive in the CO, I let you imagine what would cost a hardened compacted DSLAM.
Very good summary of the main stream legislative process up there in DC. As Senator McCain put it, campaign financing has evolved lately from the good ol' bribery and corruption thing to plain bare-naked extortion. "Gimme money or I'll push a law that gonna be a pain in your rear end". Geee...
;-)
The funny thing is that this evolution sometimes benefits to fairly honest people such as McCain who never had a problem to raise money from the IT industry since he got the chairmanship of the commerce committee. Everybody's a donor because they know that no one will be able to buy him. So, if they got screwed, at least, they know it will be equal opportunity screwing and not selectively based on insufficient campaign contributions
Still, it's sad that power in DC has become exclusively a nuisance power. When one thinks this nation walked on the Moon 30 years ago.
PS: Yeah, I have a bias for McCain even if his opinions on abortion are plain stupid.
BTW, it works quite well yet but for fast games, latency is a problem (about 2 fr, 60ms) ;-)
I don't recommend that solution. Better look for a monitor with a TV input or a projector. That what I'd do now
Arrrrhh, good question. And nop, it's a very ordinary PS2. I just use my and its 21" desktop display : S-Video -> video capture -> 30 fr/s + stretch at 1600x1200. Works quite well.
Do as I do : don't have a TV. All of a sudden, you will find yourself with a lot of free time on your hands to play with your favorite PS2, code a bit there and ther, surf the web, read books (ya know those weird thingies with a lot of paper inside), meet with friends, learn cooking, have sex and assorted fun, listen to music, you name it.
TV is a brain-munching parasite, worst than ESB. With satellite, cable and 100 channels of shit (© the Pink Floyds), it doesn't even have anymore the excuse of being an unifying societal experience as it was 30 years ago, you know, a common something that could bring all sorts of people together, however insignificant was this shared "culture".
Throw this TV away. Have a life.
When Microsoft denounces open source as a hurdle on innovation, it somehow has a point Open source is very good at incremental evolution but no one in the community really has the power to rebuild a full OS from scratch and ram it through the throat of the installed base as Microsoft can. With its monopoly, Microsoft has more opportunities to implement a serious technologic shake-up (and a serious shake-down for the end-user at the same time
And when you think about it, GNU/Linux or BSD are indeed old technology grown from the 70s, still stuck with unsexy monolithic kernels, etc. The support for desktop is still unconvincing. They lack productivity applications. All things considered, Microsoft did a fairly good job at creating and enforcing some software consistency on this nightmarish hardware piece of crap which is the PC.
In Microsoft's eyes, open source OSs just have one little tiny annoying inconvenience. They work. Day after day, they faithfully fulfil all the obscure brutish jobs they're being asked, lost in some remote corners of the sever farm, toiling endlessly, alone amid their peers, all those other servers also toiling endlessly on their own obscure brutish jobs. They're no good for the end-users but ask them to do one specific thing over a network, tweak them a little bit if necessary - hey, you have the code ! - and they'll do it, no question asked, going, going, keep going. Who cares which software is running as long as it runs. Software is a commodity.
They lost a battle and an important one in the most ignominious way. With its monopoly on the desktop market, Microsoft was supposed to leverage its proprietary protocols to pry open the server market and force and cash in its solutions in the machine room. But in retrospect, it becomes evident they made an ugly mistake with the all-in-one NT, the same software on servers and desktops alike. By cumulating the worst of both worlds, it took more than 5 years to turn NT in something close to a decent platform. On the server side, they should have started from an existing proven platform like BSD and extend it as closed source to support the proprietary desktop protocols. It would have been there much faster. The desktop side could have then had a life of its own without slowing the server side. A nasty case of NIH syndrome. And they lost those 5 precious years that allowed Linux, Apache and Samba to grow up and make NT irrelevant in the server room.
But that's not really the most frightening for Microsoft. They not only lost the battle in the server room but, missing their window of opportunity to become the One, the war has shifted to a new battlefield. The fastest growing segments in IT are wireless, PDAs, SAN/NAS and internet-based applications such as database Web access over intranets or ASPs (when they don't die...). And coming on the horizon are residential broadband and internet-based appliances. Microsoft has no serious edges on any of those markets, a bit there, a tad here. It's just another competitor and has strictly not a chance of building a new monopoly as it did out of the original IBM PC. IT is not a niche anymore, the market is huge, the array of technologies to dominate is beyond the grasp of any company, and so much funding is now available that even Microsoft and its $25B in cash at the bank is just one player among others.
The IT market is slowly shifting from the all-purpose PC to a patchwork of heterogeneous specialized devices, both for the end-user and for the infrastructure. With the PC, consistency is in great demand and Microsoft had a global solution, good or bad but a solution. With specialized devices, OS and applications are just tools to adapt, tweak and slap together for such or such tasks. Open source is the evident solution. There's no point for anymore great innovation on the tool side. Like metalwork machine-tools, they simply exist. They are there and they are a commodity. The problem is now to use them.
Microsoft has every good reason to shriek like a swine in the slaughterhouse. Open source killed its only leverage, on the building blocks. After nearing world domination, it's seeing its death, slowly fading in irrelevancy, its edge blunted, becoming just another company in a mature market.
Oh yeah, it won't be fast but it will be painful.
Any internal combustion engines indeed produce NOx and O3 but it fairly easy to reduce or eliminate them with a catalytic converter in the exhaust pipe. Actually, hydrogen is way better than the usual hydrocarbon fuel for catalytic converters as burning H2 in our everyday air (N2 and O2) doesn't send half-burned hydrocarbons or carbon particles (diesel engine) in the converter. I'm no chemistry expert but AFAIK, those 2 kinds of compounds tend to "poison" the catalytic converter over time and are a big pain in the bottom end if you want produce converters which are cheap AND efficient AND reliable over time. Burning H2 = cheaper better converters.
:) can migrate through the metal and recombine on the other with an electron. H2 is used for semiconductor processes and I think they always use double skin pipes, high pressure H2 in the center tube and a constant flux of inert gas on the outside to collect the leaking H2.
Also the beauty of using a classical internal combustion engine vs. fuel cells is that those engines are light, cheap, fairly efficient, and, best of all, they can work with normal gasoline, which is kind of a good idea until H2 refueling stations become common thing. Also, your good ol' car engine is available today which is way more than one can say about fuel cells...
I'm really impressed with BMW. Their tank design is really great news. I've always been told that H2 storage was a complete sore. H2 has all sort of funny properties when you try to trap it in a container. For instance, if you let H2 in an perfectly seal metal can, it leaks anyway by loosing its electron to the metal and then its tiny nucleus (a mere proton, you can't get anything smaller
Nop, this is not a troll but a very sound comment.
History is not black and white in a good vs evil Hollywood manner. And if only people were to accept that, life would be much much much simpler. Scientific or technologic prowess is alas not an indicator of politic or philosophic acumen. More generally, suppressing truth, good or bad, from "official" history is stupid and counter-productive and professing this kind of censorship is abhorrent. Take people as they are and make your own opinion. But yes, that means you have to think by yourself and not just sheepishly profess undying devotion for a few supposedly immaculate heroes. Perfect heroes were a constant of Nazi and Communist propaganda, but there's no need for them if you have one bit of a brain.
And for a few more examples of controversial figureheads:
Von Braun was not even a Nazi apologist. He was a zealous Nazi, plain and simple, and a direct witness and profiteer of forced labor in concentration camps. He was also the guy who sent America to the Moon. The repulsion that any sane person should have for his behavior during WWII doesn't diminish the admiration due for its pivotal contribution to the Apollo program.
Robert Brasillach is probably one of the most remarkable French writers of the late 30s. He was also a prominent hate-spewing anti-Semite propagandist in occupied France and was very rightfully sent to the firing squad in 1945. Does it mean we should not read his novels?
Andrei Sakharov literally gave the thermonuclear bomb to Stalin. And he was one of the first USSR scientists to stand against mindless use of nuclear energy as soon as 1957 and to openly denounce USSR totalitarianism since the early 60s. And doing that from within USSR took guts.
Way more guts than whining against a long-dead guy on a weblog in 2001, BTW.
Good !
There's no reason to give a subsidy to Internet retail. This tax ban also has a bad side effect by encouraging an artificial split between "brick and mortar" retail and on-line retail. As long you don't have a physical presence in a state, you don't have to collect the taxes for this state. The end result is that on-line retailers refuse to team up with local retail and offer a better service to customers such as ordering on-line and picking the order at the nearest shop. Suppressing the ban is also going to be a great opportunity to clean up the local tax mess so the tax collection can automated.
Now, whether or not there should sales taxes is another matter to be dealt with your local pols.
In one word, vote !
In short, my answer is no, no and no. No animosity meant, yet ;-)
No rev 1 - The fact that IPv4 headers are messy does not matter when they are extracted in hardware. Picking a bit out of a stream is just wiring a register to the right bit lane. It doesn't matter if overall, the bit mapping is straight through or involve a lot of SHIFT 5 and ROT 13 and double forward scratch spin with loop jump. The hardware is there anyway. At worst, the control FSM is a bit messier. It's not the same for a CPU that must process dword by dword and where the fields' layout matters. IPv6 headers are simply big and variable, which means that a lot of data has to go back forth between the switch fabric and the routing processor, and that it screws up the pipeline. You can't say anymore 1 header = 1 clock cycle. Also it doesn't mix well with existing headers processing and ramps up the cost of Ethernet or IPv4 switching just to accommodate a few IPv6 packets there and there. It's a big issue for the cost of equipment used during the IPv4 / IPv6 transition.
No rev 2- You assume that software switching is still used at the edge of the network, and here we're go with MPLS tagging from there. That's not true anymore. I'm currently working on a family of L2-L4 wiring cabinet switches that routing at up to 80Gb/s cross-section and 150 Mpkt/s. It's an edge router, PCs and workstations directly attach to it, and it's 100% hardware routing. The previous family is already doing that. When you have a 100Mb/s connection to each terminal devices, software routing is not an option. So, at first all IPv6 routing will be handled as a software exception, and latter there will be a dedicated routing processor with its own data path., but even then it won't have the performance of IPv4.
No rev 3 - MPLS is not the solution. Or you end up with something that is not an IP router but an MPLS switch. That's not just hairsplitting. All a MPLS switch does is to shove packets from an interface to another based on the tag with strictly no idea of what's inside. By many aspects, MPLS is the terminal stage of virtual circuit networking from X25 with Frame Relay and ATM as the intermediate stages. What's lost with MPLS is the fine visibility on things like QoS, traffic segregation or packet ordering on multi-link load balancing in the core network. I don't know MPLS well enough to be definitive and I imagine it's possible to assign multiple tags to a single path to discriminate between different classes of traffic. So, is full IP routing at every node needed anyway? Frankly, I think so but I won't bet my head on that. So far, it has not mattered and doing that on the edge of a MPLS blob has been enough. So if ISPs think that MPLS is good enough, long life to MPLS. I'm just not convinced that this solution meant for bulk data transfers will work well for mixed traffic of bulk data and real-time stuff , VoIP and video, (although I'm pretty much sure some VoIP operators must use it, but on networks that only carry VoIP and that makes a serious difference).
I rate this one at $0.20. Inflation lurks! Where's Greenspan?
I don't see IPv6 taking off any time. IPv6 problem is not just a deadlock between ISPs and router manufacturers. The big roadblock on the way towards TWGD (i.e. total worldwide global domination, let's see if this one sticks ;-) is that IPv6 doesn't fit well in hardware acceleration. IPv6 has huge and variable headers, which are a pain in the bottom end to process in hardware.
... an option. Even core routers must completely walk the header chain of each packet.
... as an exception, using the CPUs. The performances are merely catastrophic. IPv6 is not really practical with current router architecture. May be an IPv7 will come, one day when IPv4 is really breaking at the seams.
... that just my $0.02 on IPv6 ...
IPv4 is much nicer. Only the first few hundreds bits in the packets really matter. Sure, an IPv4 header can be much bigger with options. It's just that nobody expects those options to be implemented. With IPv6, ignoring options is not
The reason is that the IPv6 effort was started in the early 90s at a time when IP routers where basically a bunch of interfaces and DMA engines around a shared packet buffer with a CPU in the middle chopping and tweaking the headers to route the packets. All the decisions were made by software, and, sometime in low cost routers, the CPU even performed the data transfers with the interfaces, no DMA. The IPv6 was built with this architecture in mind and requires the routers to do a lot of smart gee whiz things on the headers. That clean architectural model is alas obsolete.
Nowadays, routers' CPUs nearly never see a packet. All the routing is completely done in hardware. The CPUs just do housekeeping, maintaining the routing tables, collecting and processing statistics, that kind of stuff. The only packets they ever see are those for network maintenance, SNMP, etc, and routing protocols, OSPF, IGRP, BGP, you name it.
In serious routers, the real stuff happens between the switch fabric and the routing processors. The switch fabric, centralized or distributed, handles the bulk of the data transfers, receiving and sending packets between the interfaces and the packet buffers. Here, the unit is the gigabit per seconds (a few tens or hundreds of Gb/s or even Tb/s). When the switch fabric receives a packet, it stores it in a buffer and at the same time extract a few hundred bits of the header and forwards that to routing processors, a huge pipeline of table lookups and processing, 100% hard-coded in silicon.
After a while, the routing processors spit an answer to the switch fabric to flush or forward the packet with updated data for the variable fields (the TTL for instance, or even the whole header on NAT or multicast), or to create new packets. For instance, ISMP packets on TTL timeout can be completely generated in hardware! The unit there is the 100s of millions of packets per second. Go do that with CPUs... Worst of all, the IPv6 headers are highly variable and that completely screws up pipeline design where it's much better to handle bounded amount of data.
So, on current routers, IPv6 is supported
Oh well
In a company I used to work for a while ago, we had a fairly open FTP server, so any client could drop files when we asked them for feedback on a bug report, that kind of stuff. The policy was read/write for everybody but no delete/overwrite. Fairly liberal policy but who cares ? Nothing critical on this server
;-), bingo : it was a squatter who was stuffing innate mounds of data in/out a hidden directory. Solution : erase everything and set up a id/password setup for each client who needs this access. But, even if the loss of ressources is small, it just sucks to have to do that.
One day, clients started to complain that the server was damn slow and failed to receive their files. The depository directory was apparently clean. And then looking at the logs (for the first time in 2 years
Open directories on the Web are a bit like mail boxes. It's wide open and its very easy to stuff shit in there, but it's just plain discourteous and stupid. Now, the difference is that for your mailbox, you just have to deal with the neighbours' kids. On the Web, you have 100.000.000 neighbours
Get over it, there's necessarily at least one mean asshole in the bunch.
My $0.02
I don't know how you call that but to me, what RAMBUS did is plain and dull patent fraud. When you take somebody else ideas and secretly amend your pending applications to cover those ideas, you actually wrongly pretend anteriority and knowingly lie to the US PTO.
Now that's specific to the US or, more exactly, it was until the reform of patent laws last year to comply with international standards. Up to last year, the US had a very special status for anteriority where it was when the idea was first formulated which mattered, and not when it was first filled with the patent office. Hence, the importance of escrowed lab logs where engineers had to write down and time-stamp every idea that flied through their mind.
As far as I know, those RAMBUS patents were granted before the reform and thus covered by the old status.
My $0.02
Don't know about you but this article just give the creeps. It's so "yada yada yap yap what a bright future with this Gyricon thing
Digital technology and books, magazines and newspapers are certainly going to collide, just as Wolff said. And, as he also said, the results will have an enormous social and cultural impact.
And then nothing on the real problem behind e-books. Yeah sure : enormous social and cultural impact. You name it, dude! What so great with books is not that you own them like you own your car or your house. The object doesn't need to attractive or up to the latest hype. Nop.
As many posters already noticed, the good ol' paper book is completely self sufficient, durable, always on, outside the reach of any external control on whether or not you have the legal right, the appropriate license to read it, the proper kowtowing to copyright holders and authorities. Once you have it in your hands, buy, borrow, copy or steal, it's yours, inalienable, always there for you until the end of times. Barring the suit or police thug being literally over your shoulder, nobody can get in the way between you and a book.
With e-books will come software and control, no matter what. Closed DMCA protected software, of course, so publishers can entrust their precious holdings to e-books. Combine that with always-on ubiquitous wireless for permanent license checking and you and up a Brave New World that strongly smells of Big Brother and Kafka combined. You haven't paid your annual license fee : sorry but no reading tonight. A controversial author dies and his heirs want to suppress "inadequate" writings : just globally revoke the license. A court deems a book libelous : broadcast the court order and zap the book out the universe so no one can make its own opinion. Someone is indicted for "anti-social" behavior, prohibit him to access "dangerous" reading, for his own good of course. You want to lend your e-book to a friend
Those e-books just scare me. The latter this nightmare comes true, the better.
Sig . I just love nuclear bombs, gas warheads and the scent of napalm in the morning. They make people understand that technology can go wrong.
First
Tss, tss, tss. It smells of gross prejudice and flamebait. A few more years of occidental-like mass-consumerism in China and you'll have a hard time to find any "automaton" left there. I'm not having any wild-eyed illusion in the progress of democracy in China. But human nature is same everywhere : people care much more about cleaning one's car on Sunday morning and thinking about this cool HDTV DVD-R one's saw last week at the mall, than waging hi-tech or lo-tech war on its neighbors every now and then.
Bourgeoisie is nothing glorious but, at least, it's a peaceful state of mind and a very contagious one. That also applies to the Chinese (and by the way, they're humans too).
You also dismiss the essential fact that all wars are fought for, first and foremost, economic reasons, WWI and WWII included. Wars are not fought for "freedom" or "principles" but as matters of power. The good news are: economic powers are now transnational (and China is stepping in WTO right about now) and don't have much leverage or interest to push nations at war. The bad news are: economic powers are now transnational and don't give a shit about nations, especially third-world nations. See the situation in Democratic Congo (formerly Zaire) and US mining interest there.
I don't see, long term, the US and China going at each other throat because it doesn't make any economic sense, except if the US start panicking at a growing Chinese economic power, strong enough to say "fuck you" on trade matters or so. The only serious wars I can foresee are between nations and corporate conglomerates. Ooopps ! Wait a minute. Would that means that the US are actually becoming the #1 global danger ????
Second:
And Nuclear weapons are dying. States are now so used to Nuclear weapons, that it is taken as read they will never be used. Every state has become rational and technological in this regard by definition - otherwise they would be unable to develop Nuclear weapons at all.
Not everyone has a few thousand vectors, ready to go, stashed somewhere in its attic. It defeats any conceivable defense system. And, me thinka that the argument "I blast your ass in gaseous by-products down to the last leaf of grass on your territory the next you piss me off" is still and will remain a fairly strong and convincing argument in the face of many wannabe uber-rulers. I therefore see a continued bright future for having vast quantities of mass-destruction weapons.
I'm not happy at all with the alleged return of conventional warfare. I'd rather have conventional disarmament than nuclear disarmament. To see the US taking the conventional road IS the scary thing. It makes (limited) war actually possible.
I therefore respectfully dissent and state that your argument is moronic and anally retentive.
My $0.02.