Did you read the article? They're not talking about just asking a fee for their content. They're discussing attempting to change the fundamental building blocks of content delivery on the Internet. They have no clue technically how to do it, but they sure as hell know how to get laws passed, companies shut down, and move public opinion. These are companies that are used to getting their own way, and they think transforming the modern Internet architecture into something closer to television & cable is a modest goal.
The United States is fully capable of shooting off its own leg to save a toenail. There are men with real power in the country who would happily pull the plug on the entire Internet tomorrow if it would save their margins on Marley & Me 2.
So you're saying when they mouse over the link a pop up with display all the cryptic servers that will be pinged when they click? Yeah right.
2. Speed up the retrieval of the true destination (instead of waiting for some redirect page to respond, if it responds at all)
This is complete nonsense. Translation of what you just said: "It takes a lot of infrastructure to spy on user behavior. By having the client assist with the spying, this work is completed faster. The sooner the spying is out of the way, the sooner the user is able to access the content they want." I reject the entire premise behind this, and want my client to do whatever it can to make spying not happen at all, much less go faster.
3. Put control in the user's hands as to whether they're tracked or not.
This is also nonsense. As I'm sure you've already said on another account in this thread, advertisers are already fully capable of spying on users without this. Turning this setting on or off will not improve that situation at all. You know this. The only result of turning it off is that the advertiser is forced to fall back to the more expensive process of notification by proxy and cookies.
Anonymous Coward, why not identify yourself? State clearly why you as a web browser user would actually want your browser to do this. Is "it makes web browsing faster by accelerating spying" really the end user sales pitch?
The whole reason I started using Firefox, and pushed everyone I know to use it, was its unwavering focus on the user and their experience of the web. Enabling pop up blocking by default is a good example of this. It hurts advertisers, but too bad. Firefox doesn't exist to cater to advertisers. The Browser for the People, and all that.
The ONLY purpose for this ping feature is to make it easier to spy on user behavior. There is no benefit to the user. In fact, this results in pushing the load (bandwidth costs) that used to be on the server to ping advertising partners off on the client. The main benefit is in simplifying the server side infrastructure required to spy on user movement through the web.
We know from history that yet another way of redirecting the client to talk to 3rd parties unknown to them can only result in lower security.
P.S. I've never seen a Slashdot discussion thread with so much active PR management in it. Any critical comment is met with tons of highly moderated rebuttals that are very misleading: "No privacy impact! Javascript already does it, so what can it hurt! There will be a mod that lets you turn it off!" I wish these people would identify their own interests in the outcome of the debate. Mine is: I'm a user who does not want to be spied on, or support software that actively helps others spy on me.
I was just in China and Tibet last week and used cybercafes several times during my visit, and I can tell you that at least in the ones I used the unique ID rules are not enforced. In the bigger cybercafes, as you enter they gesture you to a paper notebook as if expecting you to write down a username, but if you just ignore it and hand them the money they just grab a new unique ID card for you each time you visit. They have stacks of plastic ID cards with long user ID and password numbers printed on them, and I assume you're supposed to keep it and bring it back with you later, but since I ignored it they never gave it to me. However, it could be that this was because I was a westerner, and a local would not be allowed to do this. In the smaller cafes there is no structure at all that I could see. You just sit down and start using the computer.
China from my observations is a very dynamic (or chaotic) place, and I'd be amazed if they managed to widely impose strict rules without them being ignored or subverted right away.
No no no. DO NOT bounce mail that doesn't pass though spam filter after you accepted it for delivery. You are only spamming someone else.
Maybe I'm not following you, but even if you reject at the MTA level won't the exploited mail relay bounce the message to the forged originator anyway? The only difference is who is doing the bouncing. Either way, the rejected message is bounced, assuming that a 3rd party relay (and not custom spam software) is doing the sending.
I agree that rejecting at the MTA level is great, but I don't think the reason for this is that bounces will not result. The benefit is that your server is not having to do this wasteful work, and the exploited relay is, possibly leading it its eventual discovery. Either way the owner of the forged From address loses.
Montavista's approach just involves patching the standard kernel to try to improve its behavior. This gets you soft real-time, but getting provable hard real-time is tough via this route due to the complexity of the kernel.
RT-Linux (and RTAI which is roughly based on RT-Linux but offers a different API) is very different. It runs as a hard real-time micro-kernel which takes over your system and then runs all of Linux as a thread. When you run your hard real-time code it runs in that micro-kernel space rather than Linux user or kernel space. All of Linux gets preempted by your software.
Here is a great article covering this subject in more detail with tons of links.
The parent is confusing Montavista's patches with RTLinux from FSMLabs which has nothing at all to do with this. Montavista is just patching the standard kernel. It does not involve running Linux as a user process. Do not moderate it insightful please.
RTLinux vs RT Linux confusion
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RT Linux Patches
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· Score: 3, Informative
I wish they'd use a different name for this. The product "RTLinux" already exists, and it's not related at all to what Montevista is doing. It's the microkernel based "run Linux as a thread" approach taken by Victor Yodaiken at FSMLabs. According to this article it was first released in 1995, predating the existence RTAI and Montavista by many years.
Re:Medical and aviation already using Linux
on
RT Linux Patches
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· Score: 1
I suspect your Windows RT provider is in violation of the RT Linux patent.
FSMLabs, Inc owns the RT Linux patent. Timesys has unrelated technology based on patching the stock kernel, similar to what Montevista does but not as good.
You're too used to desktop PCs pz. When you build a Linux system from scratch it's easy to get it to boot quickly especially if the BIOS gets its job done fast. 30 seconds is plenty of time for this task for Linux. WinCE could do it as well.
No, that's why I said savings occur "over time". Of course DOS was the right choice for his particular application.
I just wanted to mention the DOS power management issue since I think most people are not aware of it. It's kind of intuitive to assume that DOS being a small simple OS would naturally draw much less power than big ugly Linux or Windows, but this is not the case.
I doubt the board surface temperature actually made it down to -85C. The powered circuitry itself acts as a kind of heater, so as long as it's in a box and powered on all the time it probably kept itself much warmer than this. "Extended Temperature" support in PC/104 boards usually means -40C to +85C.
The only downside to MS-DOS for power consumption sensitive applications is lack of power management support. For modern CPUs with advanced power management and ACPI support this can make a big difference in idle power consumption over time. A idle CPU running DOS will often be noticibly hotter to the touch than one running Linux or Windows.
The CPU is called the VIA C3 and the chipset is the VIA Eden. The "Athena" in your post refers to a Diamond Systems product name for the board which uses this CPU, not the name VIA calls their own CPU.
The "Mach86" you're thinking of is the ZFMicro ZFx86 chip. They are battling National Semiconductor, who produced these CPUs under contract for ZFMicro until ZFMicro was no longer able to pay their bills. Intel is not involved at all.
The other big PC/104 CPU vendors are Transmeta, STMicro (STPC), and AMD (Geode). Recently the Pentium 4-M have been popular for boards which don't need to support extended temperature.
PC/104 rocks for applications like this. Disclaimer: I work for a PC/104 company.;-)
The greatest science-fiction film ever is La Jetee (1964) by French director Chris Marker.
You were bored by 2001, but were on the edge of your seat through a movie composed (almost) entirely of black and white photographic stills with French naration? Sorry, but as someone who has seen and very much enjoyed this film (saw it as a double header with Sans Soleil no less) I'm going to have to say "No." I have the feeling you thought nobody else on Slashdot had seen this film?
While a very beautiful work of art (I still get chills thinking back to the single bit of motion where she opens her eyes) the story is essentially time travel with a cliched twist ending, and there is no science to speak of. What is extraordinary about the film is the style in which it was told, and the the power with which it evoked the tension of that moment. But I really would not rank it against Blade Runner, 2001, etc as science fiction cinema. It deserves its own category.
You obviously aren't a subscriber or a regular visitor to their website. The Economist is simply the best weekly news print magazine in the world. For example, it's the only news magazine which never makes me cringe when they cover technical subjects I know well like Linux or computing. Same with their culture section, world news, etc. They've been doing this since 1843 and they are bad ass. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to read just one print magazine a week to learn about world news.
The game can be played in a window (rather than maximized) and many players take advantage of this fact to keep some browser tabs open to the incredibly detailed websites and wikis out there that cover all these subjects. These websites are easy to find from the www.atitd2.com Links page.
Also, the Linux client runs great! I just started playing this game two days ago and I'm hooked for sure.
Re:Embed Linux? It's not an ideal choice.
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How to Embed Linux
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· Score: 3, Informative
Two words: Interrupt latency.
Tried RTLinux? All the fun of Linux, with all the benefits of a hard real-time microkernel. I just finished about 3 weeks of development with it, and it performed as advertised. It was very cool to have a scope hooked up watching interrupt line latency and see no change in ISR performance as I ran a kernel compile and copied huge files around in the background while my hard real-time task continued marching along.
Yes, but that's what's nice about an offline dictionary attack. They just kick back and let the server farm run through the list. As addresses are revealed, they sell them.
The idea of a do not e-mail list is idiotic. I'm very happy common sense has won out.
Employees at companies write things down. It's important that companies organize what employees write down so that other people can access those things, and so managers can control who can change what document and look at document history. Does this sound important to you? That's document control and information management.
Pretend you are Intel. What do you do with the schematic for the CPU you spent $1B designing? The procedure document for how to test it? The list of components? The source code of the firmware and test software? Documentation of its features? Would this software be worth a lot of money to you? Yeah. Pretend you work for the IT department at the CIA. Or you manage MSDN for Microsoft. I mean, all these things are obvious, and they're all million dollar if not billion dollar problems. Did you really have to write Slashdot to figure this out?
P.S. Pointing to a hit counter on a random home page at Homestead is a pretty stupid way to demonstrate that a concept gets "relatively little" traffic. A Google search for "document control" alone gets 9,360,000 hits.
The Linux driver situation is a disaster right now. The Linux kernel folks are unwilling to do any work to make it easier to load new drivers. Everything must be compiled from source. There is no standard way to figure out where the kernel source is. The process always emits threatening messages about kernel taining, or warnings about SUBDIRs, or other things that scare the hell out of customers. Binary kernel modules are the answer, not because developers are dying to write closed source modules, but because the idea that every single customer must compile these drivers from source is a support disaster!
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read the article? They're not talking about just asking a fee for their content. They're discussing attempting to change the fundamental building blocks of content delivery on the Internet. They have no clue technically how to do it, but they sure as hell know how to get laws passed, companies shut down, and move public opinion. These are companies that are used to getting their own way, and they think transforming the modern Internet architecture into something closer to television & cable is a modest goal.
The United States is fully capable of shooting off its own leg to save a toenail. There are men with real power in the country who would happily pull the plug on the entire Internet tomorrow if it would save their margins on Marley & Me 2.
Anonymous Coward, why not identify yourself? State clearly why you as a web browser user would actually want your browser to do this. Is "it makes web browsing faster by accelerating spying" really the end user sales pitch?
The whole reason I started using Firefox, and pushed everyone I know to use it, was its unwavering focus on the user and their experience of the web. Enabling pop up blocking by default is a good example of this. It hurts advertisers, but too bad. Firefox doesn't exist to cater to advertisers. The Browser for the People, and all that.
The ONLY purpose for this ping feature is to make it easier to spy on user behavior. There is no benefit to the user. In fact, this results in pushing the load (bandwidth costs) that used to be on the server to ping advertising partners off on the client. The main benefit is in simplifying the server side infrastructure required to spy on user movement through the web.
We know from history that yet another way of redirecting the client to talk to 3rd parties unknown to them can only result in lower security.
P.S. I've never seen a Slashdot discussion thread with so much active PR management in it. Any critical comment is met with tons of highly moderated rebuttals that are very misleading: "No privacy impact! Javascript already does it, so what can it hurt! There will be a mod that lets you turn it off!" I wish these people would identify their own interests in the outcome of the debate. Mine is: I'm a user who does not want to be spied on, or support software that actively helps others spy on me.
I was just in China and Tibet last week and used cybercafes several times during my visit, and I can tell you that at least in the ones I used the unique ID rules are not enforced. In the bigger cybercafes, as you enter they gesture you to a paper notebook as if expecting you to write down a username, but if you just ignore it and hand them the money they just grab a new unique ID card for you each time you visit. They have stacks of plastic ID cards with long user ID and password numbers printed on them, and I assume you're supposed to keep it and bring it back with you later, but since I ignored it they never gave it to me. However, it could be that this was because I was a westerner, and a local would not be allowed to do this. In the smaller cafes there is no structure at all that I could see. You just sit down and start using the computer.
China from my observations is a very dynamic (or chaotic) place, and I'd be amazed if they managed to widely impose strict rules without them being ignored or subverted right away.
No no no. DO NOT bounce mail that doesn't pass though spam filter after you accepted it for delivery. You are only spamming someone else.
Maybe I'm not following you, but even if you reject at the MTA level won't the exploited mail relay bounce the message to the forged originator anyway? The only difference is who is doing the bouncing. Either way, the rejected message is bounced, assuming that a 3rd party relay (and not custom spam software) is doing the sending.
I agree that rejecting at the MTA level is great, but I don't think the reason for this is that bounces will not result. The benefit is that your server is not having to do this wasteful work, and the exploited relay is, possibly leading it its eventual discovery. Either way the owner of the forged From address loses.
Care to share your Timesys woes? I'm curious.
Montavista's approach just involves patching the standard kernel to try to improve its behavior. This gets you soft real-time, but getting provable hard real-time is tough via this route due to the complexity of the kernel.
RT-Linux (and RTAI which is roughly based on RT-Linux but offers a different API) is very different. It runs as a hard real-time micro-kernel which takes over your system and then runs all of Linux as a thread. When you run your hard real-time code it runs in that micro-kernel space rather than Linux user or kernel space. All of Linux gets preempted by your software.
Here is a great article covering this subject in more detail with tons of links.
The parent is confusing Montavista's patches with RTLinux from FSMLabs which has nothing at all to do with this. Montavista is just patching the standard kernel. It does not involve running Linux as a user process. Do not moderate it insightful please.
I wish they'd use a different name for this. The product "RTLinux" already exists, and it's not related at all to what Montevista is doing. It's the microkernel based "run Linux as a thread" approach taken by Victor Yodaiken at FSMLabs. According to this article it was first released in 1995, predating the existence RTAI and Montavista by many years.
I suspect your Windows RT provider is in violation of the RT Linux patent.
FSMLabs, Inc owns the RT Linux patent. Timesys has unrelated technology based on patching the stock kernel, similar to what Montevista does but not as good.
The phrases "better security" and "Linksys" should never be conjoined.
You're too used to desktop PCs pz. When you build a Linux system from scratch it's easy to get it to boot quickly especially if the BIOS gets its job done fast. 30 seconds is plenty of time for this task for Linux. WinCE could do it as well.
No, that's why I said savings occur "over time". Of course DOS was the right choice for his particular application.
I just wanted to mention the DOS power management issue since I think most people are not aware of it. It's kind of intuitive to assume that DOS being a small simple OS would naturally draw much less power than big ugly Linux or Windows, but this is not the case.
I doubt the board surface temperature actually made it down to -85C. The powered circuitry itself acts as a kind of heater, so as long as it's in a box and powered on all the time it probably kept itself much warmer than this. "Extended Temperature" support in PC/104 boards usually means -40C to +85C.
The only downside to MS-DOS for power consumption sensitive applications is lack of power management support. For modern CPUs with advanced power management and ACPI support this can make a big difference in idle power consumption over time. A idle CPU running DOS will often be noticibly hotter to the touch than one running Linux or Windows.
The CPU is called the VIA C3 and the chipset is the VIA Eden. The "Athena" in your post refers to a Diamond Systems product name for the board which uses this CPU, not the name VIA calls their own CPU.
;-)
The "Mach86" you're thinking of is the ZFMicro ZFx86 chip. They are battling National Semiconductor, who produced these CPUs under contract for ZFMicro until ZFMicro was no longer able to pay their bills. Intel is not involved at all.
The other big PC/104 CPU vendors are Transmeta, STMicro (STPC), and AMD (Geode). Recently the Pentium 4-M have been popular for boards which don't need to support extended temperature.
PC/104 rocks for applications like this. Disclaimer: I work for a PC/104 company.
The greatest science-fiction film ever is La Jetee (1964) by French director Chris Marker.
You were bored by 2001, but were on the edge of your seat through a movie composed (almost) entirely of black and white photographic stills with French naration? Sorry, but as someone who has seen and very much enjoyed this film (saw it as a double header with Sans Soleil no less) I'm going to have to say "No." I have the feeling you thought nobody else on Slashdot had seen this film?
While a very beautiful work of art (I still get chills thinking back to the single bit of motion where she opens her eyes) the story is essentially time travel with a cliched twist ending, and there is no science to speak of. What is extraordinary about the film is the style in which it was told, and the the power with which it evoked the tension of that moment. But I really would not rank it against Blade Runner, 2001, etc as science fiction cinema. It deserves its own category.
You obviously aren't a subscriber or a regular visitor to their website. The Economist is simply the best weekly news print magazine in the world. For example, it's the only news magazine which never makes me cringe when they cover technical subjects I know well like Linux or computing. Same with their culture section, world news, etc. They've been doing this since 1843 and they are bad ass. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to read just one print magazine a week to learn about world news.
:-)
And no I don't work for them.
The game can be played in a window (rather than maximized) and many players take advantage of this fact to keep some browser tabs open to the incredibly detailed websites and wikis out there that cover all these subjects. These websites are easy to find from the www.atitd2.com Links page.
Also, the Linux client runs great! I just started playing this game two days ago and I'm hooked for sure.
Two words: Interrupt latency.
Tried RTLinux? All the fun of Linux, with all the benefits of a hard real-time microkernel. I just finished about 3 weeks of development with it, and it performed as advertised. It was very cool to have a scope hooked up watching interrupt line latency and see no change in ISR performance as I ran a kernel compile and copied huge files around in the background while my hard real-time task continued marching along.Yes, but that's what's nice about an offline dictionary attack. They just kick back and let the server farm run through the list. As addresses are revealed, they sell them.
The idea of a do not e-mail list is idiotic. I'm very happy common sense has won out.
Employees at companies write things down. It's important that companies organize what employees write down so that other people can access those things, and so managers can control who can change what document and look at document history. Does this sound important to you? That's document control and information management.
Pretend you are Intel. What do you do with the schematic for the CPU you spent $1B designing? The procedure document for how to test it? The list of components? The source code of the firmware and test software? Documentation of its features? Would this software be worth a lot of money to you? Yeah. Pretend you work for the IT department at the CIA. Or you manage MSDN for Microsoft. I mean, all these things are obvious, and they're all million dollar if not billion dollar problems. Did you really have to write Slashdot to figure this out?
P.S. Pointing to a hit counter on a random home page at Homestead is a pretty stupid way to demonstrate that a concept gets "relatively little" traffic. A Google search for "document control" alone gets 9,360,000 hits.
You see, there's this thing called Google... National Semi sells unit to AMD.
The Linux driver situation is a disaster right now. The Linux kernel folks are unwilling to do any work to make it easier to load new drivers. Everything must be compiled from source. There is no standard way to figure out where the kernel source is. The process always emits threatening messages about kernel taining, or warnings about SUBDIRs, or other things that scare the hell out of customers. Binary kernel modules are the answer, not because developers are dying to write closed source modules, but because the idea that every single customer must compile these drivers from source is a support disaster!