You can search the entire patent space to the early seventies and expect to have the patent copy for those patents. Plug in a search by number and it'll pull up the patent for you.
The satellite is a downlink. You have to place requests via landline with a standard analog modem (if you're using ISDN, xDSL, or Cable, you're already beyond the service level that this would provide...)- these requests would go to a central facility that would then pull it across the 'net and then beam them back down, not unlike the video feeds that you already get from the DBS satellite right now. This was something that missed it's time, I'd say. This would be useful if you already have a DBS system, didn't want to do much of anything but surf the net (it's not going to do much good for things like Quake gaming or IRC/ICQ/etc. chat.). If it's cheaper than xDSL or Cable (or you don't have either) then you might want to consider it. Otherwise, it's got no value proposition for anyone who they'd try to sell the service to.
The only thing that makes this news is who's doing it. DirecTV's been doing it for some time now. It works ok if you're pulling news feeds or streaming media, etc. but stinks on ice for anything else because you're placing proxy requests with the landline (@ 33.6k or less) and they fulfill them at high speed via unused channels. This whole thing could be thought of as a interactive version of DirectTV or Dish network but nothing more.
I'm totally and utterly pissed at this. I suspect many others are too- but they cope with the situation a little differently. Me, I'm not sure what to make of this; I'm a member of both the Open Source community (as well as one of the Free Software community...) and I think they just defamed me. I wish, for one moment that I could kick-start a class action suit- but those jerks know they're immune and they're trying every dirty trick they think they can pull.
I'm furious that they had the unmitigated gall to tar all of us with that same brush.
Only soldiers trained for doing the repair work would be allowed there. Nobody but individuals with proper classifications (namely mostlt soldiers again...) would be allowed to work on servers in places like Crystal Palace (SAC/NORAD primary command).
Not all critical DOD servers are in locations where civilians would be allowed to begin with- nor, would you really want them to allow people there. Giving them the resources to do this stuff easier would be a godsend.
It's the closest thing to QB there is and I think you'll find it a wee-bit more useful than QBasic (32-bit binaries. Support for Windows and Linux under X. I could go on, but you get the picture...)
BBC USA on Dish covers it- or at least it did when I last saw BBC USA on my friend's cable setup (I've got Dish, I know they carry it- I just don't have budget to add it in light of my DSL line purchase...:-)
"Yes, but it does a lousy job of avoiding eavesdropping. If you've got anything that speaks its protocol (like, say, a PCS phone) then that
device will pick up those frequency change instructions and follow them. It only prevents really easy eavesdropping via normal radios."
Depends on how the frequency hop info is encoded.
If it's on an open stream, then yeah, if you catch the conversation on the right frequency, you can follow the hops.
If it's encrypted (which, not surprisingly, the PCS companies can do (the phones can support triple DES encryption)- they just don't because of stupid laws against the same...), then only the parties that were in on the initial handshake (public key authenticated and encrypted, btw...) will be able to follow the hops. This, by the way, is how the US military forces secure their spread spectrum communications from tracking and snooping.
It can be done such that only someone like the NSA would stand any more than a snowball's chances in hell of snooping a conversation of any kind (I think that's the real reason behind the laws against encrypting the digital PCS phone connects...)
Port hopping is analogous to spread spectrum communications. Since the above is, in fact, possible- it's not hard to extrapolate that port hopping could also work to some degree. Why? Because while you could know the source and destination of a packet, there's absolutely nothing that says that the packet is meaningful data- you can encrypt and then steganograph via blowfish and chaffing. The object here is to not be easily monitored, not to breach blocked ports (though it'd work nicely for finding good ports...).
As for blocking everything but a specific port (Port 80, as in your example) opens up enough of a pathway for someone to up and totally bypass the stupid firewall. All it'd take is for someone on the outside to run a server instance of httptunnel on their machine and someone on the inside to run a client instance of the same. It'd be clumsy and slow, but it'd bypass any scheme they'd come up with. Only normal access methods? httptunnel already uses nothing BUT those. Only "valid" content? What determines "valid"- magic numbers which can be faked? Blocking access to the server site? The site moves to another machine. And so forth.
And that's just with port 80. Do they have an e-mail system that PC's can acces or do they open the mail ports? That too is a pathway- the same individual that came up with httptunnel came up with mailtunnel. Same with any port you open. It all boils down to how hard you want to bypass the controls, how clever you really are, and how much resources you have at your disposal.
If they only took it up with the University, then there's little that would be done- the University will not act on things like this. What the Pro-choicer's should have done was filed a criminal mischief charge (that IS what it was!) against the Pro-lifers.
While I'm pro-life and I feel strongly about the whole thing, it's not appropriate (nor, is it Christian in my case) to comport myself in that manner- and it's illegal to boot. Two wrongs (well, one less than the other...) don't make it all right, now does it?
It sounded like they might have shifted things a little- but it appears that Kaplan at the last moment went with a literal interpretation of things, the Constitution be damned. (He did have the room to declare the case in favor of the defendants on Constitutional grounds (and he seemed like he might do so in the transcripts from the last day...)- but he chose the decision he came up with, going so far as to tar and feather us as being pirates.)
He can rule that the case is not applicable because of Constiutionality. (Remember encryption source was ruled as protected speech (Meaning that ITAR was viewed as Unconstiutional in the jurisdiction that the ruling was handed down from)) Basically, any Federal court can rule based off of Constitutionality- it just only applies in their jurisdiction (The Supreme Court can effectively erase a law- their jurisdiction is the whole country...).
I must be bored- I'm arguing with an Anonymous Troll.
I don't HAVE to use links... You use terrible logic to argue with.
Fact: The presence of Office does not make for superiority. If you use that reasoning, MacOS is as superior as Windows is. I don't think you're going to go there... (While I think that MacOS is great- I don't think it's superior to everything else; it's good for what it was designed for...)
Fact: All generalizations are false- including this one. When you make such generalizations as "Windows comes out first, and Linux and MacOS come later..." you set yourself up for immediate failure. Vicarious Visions, makers of Terminus, recently released a single SKU box that had support for Windows, MacOS, and even Linux. Furthermore, your premise is flawed- the reason why Windows versions come out first is that currently the market is something like 80-90% Windows for gaming machines. Even if they have a superior gaming platform that's different than the dominant one, a company would be commiting suicide to not produce first for the dominant platform.
Fact: Windows is still sold on pre-install agreements with Microsoft. The modified settlement that MS had with the DOJ didn't change that. It just made it across product lines offered from the OEMs.
Fact: Claims of Windows being easier to program for than Linux without any proof is NOT a fact. Furthermore I know for a fact that the Windows APIs are laiden with vast amounts of booby traps. A prime example is the GetTempFileName call. In Win16, the first parameter is a number, with the default being 0, for the Windows system drive. In Win32, the first parameter happens to be a pointer to a string so that you can hand it the canonical path ("\\machine\share...") to where you want the temp file to be put. If you pass a zero to the Win32 call, it's behavior is "undefined" and produces garbage in the return string. No "...Ex" version for 32 bits. Nothing other than a warning in their MSDN disks. There's myriads of other landmines like this like thunking and some things in COM- I could go on and on.
I honestly think you haven't a clue about what you're spouting off about.
Everyone and their dog is mis-quoting John Carmack, who clarified his statement that he made at QuakeCON (twice) on/.
QIII didn't do quite as well as they'd hoped.
I think the other titles are doing pretty good (otherwise Loki'd not be in as good a business position as they are right now...). However, if I were Scott D., I'd be a little miffed at Macmillan- they're not doing them any favors...
I would have thought that this would have been obvious to everyone. They've been pushing money into the Linux arena for that set-top box they want to have.
Size differences are due to the differences in the thinking that made the compression agorithm. Some of the strategies for compression don't always work as well as others- especially for sound algorithms. In the case of sound compression routines, if you're using lossy compression there's some algorithmic decisions you've got to make to determine what to discard and what to keep. MP3's algorithm (at least at this moment) may be doing a better job of discarding things at the expense of some quality (Vorbis' primary goal is higher quality...). As for the CPU use, it's not been optimized for speed yet (as someone pointed out, they're chasing things down right now to lose most of the perceptible artifacts and things like larger files right now...) they're supposed to be starting that in ernest shortly after beta 2 goes out...
Sadly, for most systems people use (whether it's a walkman, car stereo, or home stereo) you're not going to hear the differences- because the equipment is sufficiently imprecise enough to NOT accurately reproduce the distortions produced by the encoding, hence the "essentially perceptually lossless" claims for MP3, TwinVQ, and Vorbis- you're just not going to hear that much in the way of differences when it's encoded right. And that's just the equipment- not everyone can hear the differences when it's played on equipment that can reproduce the sounds as they're encoded.
One can apply the same statement conversely. An imperfectly encoded piece of music is listenable, but a badly encoded viedo isn't really worth watching. It's all rather relative and subjective. It all depends on the level of imperfections- some people have a higher level of tolerance than others. The point I was trying to make (Which you completely missed, btw...) was that our eyes will pick out imperfections out of an image quicker than your ears will pick out imperfections in an audio stream. (Did you know that for all the "quality" of a CD or DAT, it's still very imperfect (the sound is composed of linear approximations that are performed at 44 and 48kHz respectively)? Most people will not pick out the imperfections in encoding in those media, but they can notice artifacts in an MPEG2 stream from a DVD if they're using a PC monitor or HDTV monitor to view them.)
Video's got vastly more information to it and our eyes are a hell of a lot more picky about things than our ears are. There's at least 10 to 100 times the information (depending on what you're comparing- speech for example has a usable bandwidth of 8kHz (phones...) and NTSC video which is about the lowest actually usable resolution of video takes something like 6MHz.) and many of the techniques that get optimal compression with lowest computed error end up with noticable artifacts.
That's not to say that it's not a worthy goal- it is and people are looking for ways of doing it. It's just that it's a hell of a lot harder than Vorbis ended up being; and Vorbis wasn't that easy either.
For a short time, CompUSA carried the Linux version of Quake and QuakeII on the shelves around the time it shipped last year. They got 10 or so of each at the Dallas North Tollway and at the Lewisville stores (most of the other stores didn't seem to have them...) over Labor Day I think. They sold almost all of them out on that day and then never had another set of any units of any of the games from Loki on the shelves. The only place that I was able to locally obtain Civ:CTP was Electronics Boutique. The only place I was able to locally obtain Quake III was Fry's. In fact, it seems that the only ways you can get Linux games in my area is to:
1) Go to Fry's.
2) Go to Electronics Boutique and hope a manager ordered a copy.
3) Go to Electronics Boutique and have the manager order you a copy.
4) Go online and order it from one of several sources.
You can get Linux itself (Incl. Mandrake!)at all the resellers.
You can get WordPerfect and Applix at all the resellers.
Something's broken down with the distribution chain here- not sure what.
Actually, XFree86 4.0's pretty stable- once you get the damn thing up and running. They shipped when they said they were on that- but they shipped it without everything in place. Config tools and a fuller set of drivers were (and to some extent, still are) lacking. As I put to my friend, you're really pretty well off in the hardware category (He's got a TNT2...). If you're brave, go for it. If not, sometime by the end of this year, the distributions will have the issues mostly nuked from orbit and you'll be seeing plug-and-play (not plug-and-pray) operation of 2D and 3D stuff.
I seriously doubt that this complies with the FOIA order handed down by the Court recently. And claims of some of the stuff being classified? I don't buy it. If it's classified, how can you be releasing it to a university (most universities aren't directly working with classified stuff- too hard to control the environment, etc. to insure that the stuff never gets out into the open, etc.)? There's measures to be followed with classified stuff- and most universities aren't equipped to deal with that level of security.
Just one and they get to pick it? I don't think so. And I don't think there's any magic stuff in this thing that it really needs to be classified- so why all the hubub from them? Are they trying to hide something?
Slashdot Mirror
IBM maintains this amazing little site as a show off of DB2's abilities...
HREF=http://www.patent.ibm.com
You can search the entire patent space to the early seventies and expect to have the patent copy for those patents. Plug in a search by number and it'll pull up the patent for you.
The satellite is a downlink. You have to place requests via landline with a standard analog modem (if you're using ISDN, xDSL, or Cable, you're already beyond the service level that this would provide...)- these requests would go to a central facility that would then pull it across the 'net and then beam them back down, not unlike the video feeds that you already get from the DBS satellite right now. This was something that missed it's time, I'd say. This would be useful if you already have a DBS system, didn't want to do much of anything but surf the net (it's not going to do much good for things like Quake gaming or IRC/ICQ/etc. chat.). If it's cheaper than xDSL or Cable (or you don't have either) then you might want to consider it. Otherwise, it's got no value proposition for anyone who they'd try to sell the service to.
The only thing that makes this news is who's doing it. DirecTV's been doing it for some time now. It works ok if you're pulling news feeds or streaming media, etc. but stinks on ice for anything else because you're placing proxy requests with the landline (@ 33.6k or less) and they fulfill them at high speed via unused channels. This whole thing could be thought of as a interactive version of DirectTV or Dish network but nothing more.
I'm totally and utterly pissed at this. I suspect many others are too- but they cope with the situation a little differently. Me, I'm not sure what to make of this; I'm a member of both the Open Source community (as well as one of the Free Software community...) and I think they just defamed me. I wish, for one moment that I could kick-start a class action suit- but those jerks know they're immune and they're trying every dirty trick they think they can pull.
I'm furious that they had the unmitigated gall to tar all of us with that same brush.
No, there is no spoon... It's your mind that bends...
Only soldiers trained for doing the repair work would be allowed there. Nobody but individuals with proper classifications (namely mostlt soldiers again...) would be allowed to work on servers in places like Crystal Palace (SAC/NORAD primary command).
Not all critical DOD servers are in locations where civilians would be allowed to begin with- nor, would you really want them to allow people there. Giving them the resources to do this stuff easier would be a godsend.
It's the closest thing to QB there is and I think you'll find it a wee-bit more useful than QBasic (32-bit binaries. Support for Windows and Linux under X. I could go on, but you get the picture...)
BBC USA on Dish covers it- or at least it did when I last saw BBC USA on my friend's cable setup (I've got Dish, I know they carry it- I just don't have budget to add it in light of my DSL line purchase... :-)
"Yes, but it does a lousy job of avoiding eavesdropping. If you've got anything that speaks its protocol (like, say, a PCS phone) then that
device will pick up those frequency change instructions and follow them. It only prevents really easy eavesdropping via normal radios."
Depends on how the frequency hop info is encoded.
If it's on an open stream, then yeah, if you catch the conversation on the right frequency, you can follow the hops.
If it's encrypted (which, not surprisingly, the PCS companies can do (the phones can support triple DES encryption)- they just don't because of stupid laws against the same...), then only the parties that were in on the initial handshake (public key authenticated and encrypted, btw...) will be able to follow the hops. This, by the way, is how the US military forces secure their spread spectrum communications from tracking and snooping.
It can be done such that only someone like the NSA would stand any more than a snowball's chances in hell of snooping a conversation of any kind (I think that's the real reason behind the laws against encrypting the digital PCS phone connects...)
Port hopping is analogous to spread spectrum communications. Since the above is, in fact, possible- it's not hard to extrapolate that port hopping could also work to some degree. Why? Because while you could know the source and destination of a packet, there's absolutely nothing that says that the packet is meaningful data- you can encrypt and then steganograph via blowfish and chaffing. The object here is to not be easily monitored, not to breach blocked ports (though it'd work nicely for finding good ports...).
As for blocking everything but a specific port (Port 80, as in your example) opens up enough of a pathway for someone to up and totally bypass the stupid firewall. All it'd take is for someone on the outside to run a server instance of httptunnel on their machine and someone on the inside to run a client instance of the same. It'd be clumsy and slow, but it'd bypass any scheme they'd come up with. Only normal access methods? httptunnel already uses nothing BUT those. Only "valid" content? What determines "valid"- magic numbers which can be faked? Blocking access to the server site? The site moves to another machine. And so forth.
And that's just with port 80. Do they have an e-mail system that PC's can acces or do they open the mail ports? That too is a pathway- the same individual that came up with httptunnel came up with mailtunnel. Same with any port you open. It all boils down to how hard you want to bypass the controls, how clever you really are, and how much resources you have at your disposal.
If they only took it up with the University, then there's little that would be done- the University will not act on things like this. What the Pro-choicer's should have done was filed a criminal mischief charge (that IS what it was!) against the Pro-lifers.
While I'm pro-life and I feel strongly about the whole thing, it's not appropriate (nor, is it Christian in my case) to comport myself in that manner- and it's illegal to boot. Two wrongs (well, one less than the other...) don't make it all right, now does it?
It sounded like they might have shifted things a little- but it appears that Kaplan at the last moment went with a literal interpretation of things, the Constitution be damned. (He did have the room to declare the case in favor of the defendants on Constitutional grounds (and he seemed like he might do so in the transcripts from the last day...)- but he chose the decision he came up with, going so far as to tar and feather us as being pirates.)
He can rule that the case is not applicable because of Constiutionality. (Remember encryption source was ruled as protected speech (Meaning that ITAR was viewed as Unconstiutional in the jurisdiction that the ruling was handed down from)) Basically, any Federal court can rule based off of Constitutionality- it just only applies in their jurisdiction (The Supreme Court can effectively erase a law- their jurisdiction is the whole country...).
I must be bored- I'm arguing with an Anonymous Troll.
I don't HAVE to use links... You use terrible logic to argue with.
Fact: The presence of Office does not make for superiority. If you use that reasoning, MacOS is as superior as Windows is. I don't think you're going to go there... (While I think that MacOS is great- I don't think it's superior to everything else; it's good for what it was designed for...)
Fact: All generalizations are false- including this one. When you make such generalizations as "Windows comes out first, and Linux and MacOS come later..." you set yourself up for immediate failure. Vicarious Visions, makers of Terminus, recently released a single SKU box that had support for Windows, MacOS, and even Linux. Furthermore, your premise is flawed- the reason why Windows versions come out first is that currently the market is something like 80-90% Windows for gaming machines. Even if they have a superior gaming platform that's different than the dominant one, a company would be commiting suicide to not produce first for the dominant platform.
Fact: Windows is still sold on pre-install agreements with Microsoft. The modified settlement that MS had with the DOJ didn't change that. It just made it across product lines offered from the OEMs.
Fact: Claims of Windows being easier to program for than Linux without any proof is NOT a fact. Furthermore I know for a fact that the Windows APIs are laiden with vast amounts of booby traps. A prime example is the GetTempFileName call. In Win16, the first parameter is a number, with the default being 0, for the Windows system drive. In Win32, the first parameter happens to be a pointer to a string so that you can hand it the canonical path ("\\machine\share...") to where you want the temp file to be put. If you pass a zero to the Win32 call, it's behavior is "undefined" and produces garbage in the return string. No "...Ex" version for 32 bits. Nothing other than a warning in their MSDN disks. There's myriads of other landmines like this like thunking and some things in COM- I could go on and on.
I honestly think you haven't a clue about what you're spouting off about.
Everyone and their dog is mis-quoting John Carmack, who clarified his statement that he made at QuakeCON (twice) on /.
QIII didn't do quite as well as they'd hoped.
I think the other titles are doing pretty good (otherwise Loki'd not be in as good a business position as they are right now...). However, if I were Scott D., I'd be a little miffed at Macmillan- they're not doing them any favors...
The keyboard issues you get used to. The display's a little annoying; but again, you get used to it after a while.
Try carrying that desktop somewhere on a trip (business or otherwise...)
Try using that desktop on a plane.
I would have thought that this would have been obvious to everyone. They've been pushing money into the Linux arena for that set-top box they want to have.
Size differences are due to the differences in the thinking that made the compression agorithm. Some of the strategies for compression don't always work as well as others- especially for sound algorithms. In the case of sound compression routines, if you're using lossy compression there's some algorithmic decisions you've got to make to determine what to discard and what to keep. MP3's algorithm (at least at this moment) may be doing a better job of discarding things at the expense of some quality (Vorbis' primary goal is higher quality...). As for the CPU use, it's not been optimized for speed yet (as someone pointed out, they're chasing things down right now to lose most of the perceptible artifacts and things like larger files right now...) they're supposed to be starting that in ernest shortly after beta 2 goes out...
Sadly, for most systems people use (whether it's a walkman, car stereo, or home stereo) you're not going to hear the differences- because the equipment is sufficiently imprecise enough to NOT accurately reproduce the distortions produced by the encoding, hence the "essentially perceptually lossless" claims for MP3, TwinVQ, and Vorbis- you're just not going to hear that much in the way of differences when it's encoded right. And that's just the equipment- not everyone can hear the differences when it's played on equipment that can reproduce the sounds as they're encoded.
One can apply the same statement conversely. An imperfectly encoded piece of music is listenable, but a badly encoded viedo isn't really worth watching. It's all rather relative and subjective. It all depends on the level of imperfections- some people have a higher level of tolerance than others. The point I was trying to make (Which you completely missed, btw...) was that our eyes will pick out imperfections out of an image quicker than your ears will pick out imperfections in an audio stream. (Did you know that for all the "quality" of a CD or DAT, it's still very imperfect (the sound is composed of linear approximations that are performed at 44 and 48kHz respectively)? Most people will not pick out the imperfections in encoding in those media, but they can notice artifacts in an MPEG2 stream from a DVD if they're using a PC monitor or HDTV monitor to view them.)
Your IP/NAT box can be viewed as an endpoint for a non-Comcast network (Does Comcast own your LAN?). They got ya in that regard.
Video's got vastly more information to it and our eyes are a hell of a lot more picky about things than our ears are. There's at least 10 to 100 times the information (depending on what you're comparing- speech for example has a usable bandwidth of 8kHz (phones...) and NTSC video which is about the lowest actually usable resolution of video takes something like 6MHz.) and many of the techniques that get optimal compression with lowest computed error end up with noticable artifacts.
That's not to say that it's not a worthy goal- it is and people are looking for ways of doing it. It's just that it's a hell of a lot harder than Vorbis ended up being; and Vorbis wasn't that easy either.
For a short time, CompUSA carried the Linux version of Quake and QuakeII on the shelves around the time it shipped last year. They got 10 or so of each at the Dallas North Tollway and at the Lewisville stores (most of the other stores didn't seem to have them...) over Labor Day I think. They sold almost all of them out on that day and then never had another set of any units of any of the games from Loki on the shelves. The only place that I was able to locally obtain Civ:CTP was Electronics Boutique. The only place I was able to locally obtain Quake III was Fry's. In fact, it seems that the only ways you can get Linux games in my area is to:
1) Go to Fry's.
2) Go to Electronics Boutique and hope a manager ordered a copy.
3) Go to Electronics Boutique and have the manager order you a copy.
4) Go online and order it from one of several sources.
You can get Linux itself (Incl. Mandrake!)at all the resellers.
You can get WordPerfect and Applix at all the resellers.
Something's broken down with the distribution chain here- not sure what.
Actually, XFree86 4.0's pretty stable- once you get the damn thing up and running. They shipped when they said they were on that- but they shipped it without everything in place. Config tools and a fuller set of drivers were (and to some extent, still are) lacking. As I put to my friend, you're really pretty well off in the hardware category (He's got a TNT2...). If you're brave, go for it. If not, sometime by the end of this year, the distributions will have the issues mostly nuked from orbit and you'll be seeing plug-and-play (not plug-and-pray) operation of 2D and 3D stuff.
I seriously doubt that this complies with the FOIA order handed down by the Court recently. And claims of some of the stuff being classified? I don't buy it. If it's classified, how can you be releasing it to a university (most universities aren't directly working with classified stuff- too hard to control the environment, etc. to insure that the stuff never gets out into the open, etc.)? There's measures to be followed with classified stuff- and most universities aren't equipped to deal with that level of security.
Just one and they get to pick it? I don't think so. And I don't think there's any magic stuff in this thing that it really needs to be classified- so why all the hubub from them? Are they trying to hide something?