Bruce Schneier's comments on GSM security
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Schneier commented on GSM security in a 1999 CryptoGram newsletter, referencing research from 1998 and 1999. Quoting from it:
What's most interesting about these algorithms is how robustly lousy they are. Both voice-encryption algorithms are flawed, but not obviously. The attacks on both A5/1 and A5/2 make use of subtle structures of the algorithm, and result in the ability to decrypt voice traffic in real time on average computer equipment. At the same time, the output of the A8 algorithm that provides key material for A5/1 and A5/2 has been artificially weakened by setting ten key bits to zero. And also, the COMP128 algorithm that provides the keying material that is eventually weakened and fed into the weakened algorithms is, itself, weak.
And remember, this encryption only encrypts the over-the-air portion of the transmission. Any legal access required by law enforcement is unaffected; they can always get a warrant and listen at the base station. The only reason to weaken this system is for *illegal* access. Only wiretaps lacking a court authorization need over-the-air intercepts.
Benchmark v. trans. To subject (a system) to a series of tests in order to obtain prearranged results not available on competitive systems. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Computer Contradictionary"
Edelstein's First Law of Benchmarks: Every commercial product has its best performance on standard benchmarks.
Edelstein's Corollary: If the system you wanted to win didn't, the benchmark wasn't fair.
"There is also a risk that the assertion of our intellectual property rights will be negatively viewed by participants in our marketplace and we may lose support from such participants."
This, Ladies and Gentlemen, has to be the understatement of this century, if not of this millennium.
Look at the bright side of things: maybe the stupid "Linux is only free if you time is free" trolls will have to come up with something else now.
Dear SCO, here's a heartfelt message to you. Mark my words:
The day you'll get even a single penny from me (and from the company I work for, as far as I have a say in it), will be the day Satan places an express order for 50'000 of these babies.
...on search engines as a security threat can be found here ("The Problem of Search Engines and 'Sekrit' Data", November 2001).
Things haven't changed for the better since 2001 - the amount of sensitive data (passwd and.htaccess anyone?) one can dig up just by using a search engine is simply astonishing.
The FOSS community should take note and design their products in a way that makes a default installation as secure as possible, even if some functionality is sacrificed.
We have seen what happens if new features and ease of use have priority of security (no, I'm not naming names). We don't want to repeat that mistake, do we?
> Cross platform capable? Talent? Professionals? Let me think for a millisecond...
Oh, that's just PHB-speak. Let me translate:
Term: Cross platform capable Translation: Supports Windows ME, 2K and XP, provided that you have a recent IE Version installed and haven't screwed up the IE settings too much (cookies, ActiveX,...)
Term: Talent Translation: They somehow managed to install IIS
Term: Professionals Translation: We pay them. Not enough to make a decent living, but we pay them, so they're professionals.
Sentence: BuyServices' goal is to become the premier outsource e-commerce provider Comment: And my goal is to have sex with five different supermodels seven days a week. Unfortunately for BuyServices, they're as likely to reach their goal as I am to reaching mine.
Here are the results of our recent top management worksop on OS strategy:
Linux: Out (for legal considerations)
Windows: Out (for legal considerations)
Plan9: Out (it's gone Open Source, which puts it in the same category as Linux)
zOS: Out (Excel and PowerPoint not available)
Mach: Out (won't be ready this millennium)
OS X: Out (only supports DTP and music applications and Photoshop)
Solaris: Out (It's a movie starring George Clooney, not an operating system)
In a bold and visionary move, our top management decided to switch our corporate network to Oracle, only to withdraw the decision the next day, after finding out that the yearly license fees would exceed our company's net worth.
To sum it up, there's only one choice left: we'll be switching everything to SCO Unix next year.
Re:Resident evil reference
on
The Red Queen
·
· Score: 4, Informative
> Is this where the "Red Queen" in resident evil got her name?
[...] Just at this moment, somehow or other, they began to run.
Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying `Faster! Faster!' but Alice felt she could not go faster, thought she had not breath left to say so.
The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. `I wonder if all the things move along with us?' thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, `Faster! Don't try to talk!'
Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried `Faster! Faster!' and dragged her along. `Are we nearly there?' Alice managed to pant out at last.
`Nearly there!' the Queen repeated. `Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster! And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice's ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied.
`Now! Now!' cried the Queen. `Faster! Faster!' And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy. [...]
Alice looked round her in great surprise. `Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!'
`Of course it is,' said the Queen, `what would you have it?'
`Well, in out country,' said Alice, still panting a little, `you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'
`A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. `Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'
The last paragraph nicely sums up the view that in evolution, standing still means falling into extinction and just keeping one's place is a difficult proposition.
Re:Red Queen is a much earlier book than Genome
on
The Red Queen
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
> The review (while otherwise good) implies that Genome predates Red Queen, when in fact the former came out in 2000 and the latter in 1995.
You're right, The Red Queen predates Genome. The Viking edition is from 1993, by the way - 10 years of scientific research have passed since then, and I would very much appreciate an updated edition taking into account the new insights gathered since then.
See this older post of mine for some remarks on Ridley's books.
By the way, I echo the recommendation -- reading this book profoundly changed how I think about evolution and genetics. The only comparably assumption-shattering biology book I can think of is Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life.
Reading Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" and Ridley's "The Red Queen" was a disturbing and exciting experience for me, because it shattered many beliefs I held about mankind and society. I have since read many more books on the subject, and here are a few I can recommend if you're interested in contemporary scientific views on evolution and related fields of study:
Matt Ridley: The Origins of Virtue (*) Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works, The Language Instinct Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable Geoffrey Miller: The Mating Mind
(*) with a caveat: he lets his political views influence his writing a little too much in this one
I believe it's a Darwinian thing. If Open Source based solutions turn out to have an economical advantage for companies and governments under the bottom line (and I believe they do), they will prevail over traditional licensing models - in a free market, the companies with the least overhead will have an inherent advantage over others.
Where I work, the management still is in CYA mode ("nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" etc.), but in view of the depleted budgets, some are beginning to see at least the economical advantages of using OSS. I just got clearance to use a GPLed tool for an internal deployment, and this is going to save us about 60'000 USD. A small step, but I hope that it will speed up acceptance of other Open Source solutions within our company.
> You don't build the local economy by sending millions to Redmond Washington
Unfortunately, not all city governments in Germany think that way. The city of Frankfurt just signed a major contract with Microsoft, according to this news report from German c't magazine. Oh well, you win some, you lose some - but the decision made by the Munich authorities is a landmark case which gets much more publicity worldwide.
...that on hearing news like this, Bill Gates locks himself in his office, puts on a strangely shaped black face-covering helmet and starts breathing heavily.
Ok, I admit it, I probably have seen too many Star Wars movies. Still, nice win for Open Source.
> The slight improvement in hardware isn't going to change the fact that I'm only a mediocre gamer.
You're telling me. My on-screen persona in UT usually commits suicide right from the start in order to avoid being tortured to death by the other players. No amount of money spent for the newest and improvest graphics card is going to change that.
I had read, with considerable difficulty, some of the essays in "Simulacra and Simulations" before seeing The Matrix for the first time. I agree with you that my problems with understanding Baudrillard (or Deleuze, or Guattari) may stem from my incomplete understanding of the relevant terminology - one can truly understand a mathematician's works only after understanding the language of mathematics, after all. I also concur that each work must be judged on its own merit; the fact that an author produced some inferior works does not mean that other writings may not be brilliant. Sokal and Bricmont try not to commit that error; they point out the abuse of scientific concepts and terms by the respective authors but do not judge the overall value of their oeuvre based on these blunders.
Insofar as I can penetrate the dense jargon in "The Precession of Simulacra", he posits sort of a Saussurean system of signs in reverse, ultimately culminating in the disintegration of reality, which is replaced by a system of simulacra [I suppose the "Matrix" in the movie stands for the simulacra].
Personally, I cannot see how he justifies this theory from the text he provides. His train of reasoning is so convoluted that the text takes an inordinate amount of time to read and leaves too many points open to interpretation.
You can also find examples of the abuse of scientific concepts from other disciplines in this work, such as "[...] they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra." - unfortunately he does not explain what relevance binary oppositions and combinatory algebra have with regard to his theories.
Finally, whenever I read a paragraph like this one*:
The conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the "vicious" curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilized from right to left, a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back over its own surface: transfinite? And isn't it the same with desire and libidinal space? The conjunction of desire and value, of desire and capital. The conjunction of desire and the law; the ultimate joy and metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so well received at the moment): only capital takes pleasure, Lyotard said, before coming to think that we take pleasure in capital. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze: an enigmatic reversal which brings this desire that is "revolutionary by itself, and as if involuntarily, in wanting what it wants," to want its own repression and to invest paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion which reduces this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, historical revolution.
I ask myself if the author was just incapable of clearly expressing what he thought or if he had something to conceal - such as the fact the he doesn't know what he's talking about, or has nothing to say. Another possibility is that I just didn't get it, but that's a small wonder given that kind of prose.
I'm not saying that Baudrillard's works are worthless, just that they're not perfect in my opinion and that I don't see their relevance - and that may very well be my fault and not his. I try to read everything with a critical eye; hagiography has never been a good concept outside of religion.
* I got this text off the Web; my edition of the book is in German
In my opinion, Baudrillard's works, including "Simulacra and Simulation", are a fine example of the "Fashionable Nonsense" pseudoscientific postmodern writing exposed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their eponymous book. Chapter 8 is devoted to Baudrillard's writings; citing from it:
"In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant.
Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a nonscientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away."
The authors back up their claims with some truly hair-raising citations from Baudrillard's works, such as this one:
"We shall not reach the destination, even if that destination is is the Last Judgment, since we are henceforth separated from it by a variable refraction hyperspace. The retroversion of history could very well be interpreted as a turbulence of this kind, due to the hastening of events which reverses and swallows up their course. This is one version of Chaos Theory - that of exponential instability and its uncontrollable effects. It accounts very well for the 'end' of history, interrupted in its linear or dialectical movement by that catastrophic singularity..." ("The Illusion of the End", 1994)
This doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me - neither as a scientific text (what's "variable refraction hyperspace"?) nor taken as a metaphor. Check out "Fashionable Nonsense" at the library and read it - you may not agree with everything they write, but it's quite an entertaining read (especially the chapter about Jacques Lacan) and it won't hurt you to read some critical commentary about some present-day luminaries (or charlatans, as one may seem fit). Sokal, by the way, is the author of the (in)famous "Social Text" hoax.
"If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and he decides to deliver a message to humanity, he will NOT use as his messenger a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle or in some cases, really bad make-up too."
In my opinion: Canon (except the low end models). Separate cartridge for every color, cartridge design has basically been umodified for years, no stupid chips, separate print heads, no "phone home" function in the drivers (like the one HP has), lowest price per ccm of ink compared with the competition, refill is possible (never tried it though, I just buy a new cartridge whenever I need one instead of messing around with syringes and ink). Prepare to pay a little more for the base printer - the general print quality and the savings in ink over the lifetime of the printer are worth it IMO. Linux support is far from ideal, though.
Keep in mind that Ballmer holds a Senior Management position at Microsoft, and that everything that's being said from the top level PHBs has to be translated first (top level management lives in a different universe, and possibly in a whole different dimension as the rest of us). Since my job at $BIG_CORP unfortunately involves contact with higher management levels, I can offer you the following helpful translation of some of Mr. Ballmer's quotes. This is not Microsoft-specific BTW, we just dissected a message from the CEO of our employer today and it wasn't any better.
Quote: "I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition." Translation: "It's a big fat blimp on our threat radar. We're out to fry their asses before they get ours."
Quote: "On the other hand, in terms of putting a clear, simple proposition in front of the customer, I think we have a leading edge proposition." Translation:"We'll make them an offer they can't refuse."
Quote: "I do think there are things that people don't understand very well about the new alternative, where it is important for us to help customers understand the issues." Translation: "Our FUD tactics worked well in the past and I don't see why they shouldn't work as well in the future."
Quote: "[...] some people are choosing Linux. I don't think that is going to continue to be the case." Translation: "Yeah, we're pretty scared about customers considering a switch and haven't really figured out how to counter that threat yet, but why admit it?."
Quote: "If the lead developer for this component chooses to do something else with his life, who will carry on the mantle for that?" Ballmer's thoughts: "Let's hope the interviewer doesn't ask what happens if we decide to discontinue a product."
Quote: "There are still challenges in parts of Asia. We have seen improvements in Latin America." Translation: "In Asia, they steal our software like there's no tomorrow. Latin America isn't really much better."
Quote: "By hook or by crook, so to speak, there will be 5-plus million servers, roughly, sold in the next 12 months." Translation: "If this server consolidation thingy that's been going on lately is just a fad, we'll be doing fine. Otherwise, well..."
Quote: "everybody likes to talk about Google, which is fine. They are doing a good job as a company. But for traffic, Yahoo is doing quite well and we are doing quite well." Translation: "Google is kicking our collective pasty white rumps so hard you woldn't believe it. Let's just hope they go public so we can buy them out."
Quote: "No, I don't anticipate making a change of that ilk [Licensing 6] in the foreseeable future." Translation: "Our vendor-lock-in strategy worked, and now we have them by the balls."
The DreamBox DM7000 looks promising to me. What I'd like to have is a network ogg and mp3 player, and the DM7000 seems to have all the features I want, with hardware MPEG2/PVR functions thrown in to boot (and MPEG4 apparently on the way). It runs Linux, so retrofitting Vorbis and MP3 compatibility should be no big deal. Retail price is about $500 in my area, but I'm sure I can find a better deal on the 'net. More accessories (wireless keyboard) and pictures here.
Anybody have experiences with this one?
German c't magazine ran a cool (but pricey) DIY media center project in 2001, see this post of mine. They had plans to convert it to Linux, but it's outside my price range, mainly due to the large LCD screen.
She just designed the cards AFAIK. Solitaire was written by Wes Cherry, who was probably hired by some evil superpower in an ingenious attempt to sabotage the Western economies. A quite successful attempt, I might add, looking at the state of those economies right now.
I have two dog-eared paperback copies of "An Introduction to Microcomputers" (Volumes 0 and 1) in my bookshelf. Bought them in 1983 while I was an ESL student at UCSD, and what I learned from them is still useful to me 20 years later. This is one of the best investments I ever made in my life, and I have to thank Adam Osborne for it.
While searching for references on Adam Osborne on Usenet after learning he had died, I found this thread which might be of interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Benchmark v. trans. To subject (a system) to a series of tests in order to obtain prearranged results not available on competitive systems. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Computer Contradictionary"
Edelstein's First Law of Benchmarks: Every commercial product has its best performance on standard benchmarks.
Edelstein's Corollary: If the system you wanted to win didn't, the benchmark wasn't fair.
A friend of mine has this one:
Typhoon "8D" Mouse
I tried it, it works as advertised.
From SCO's quarterly report:
This, Ladies and Gentlemen, has to be the understatement of this century, if not of this millennium.
Look at the bright side of things: maybe the stupid "Linux is only free if you time is free" trolls will have to come up with something else now.
Dear SCO, here's a heartfelt message to you. Mark my words:
The day you'll get even a single penny from me (and from the company I work for, as far as I have a say in it), will be the day Satan places an express order for 50'000 of these babies.
No, I'm not joking.
...on search engines as a security threat can be found here ("The Problem of Search Engines and 'Sekrit' Data", November 2001).
.htaccess anyone?) one can dig up just by using a search engine is simply astonishing.
Things haven't changed for the better since 2001 - the amount of sensitive data (passwd and
The FOSS community should take note and design their products in a way that makes a default installation as secure as possible, even if some functionality is sacrificed.
We have seen what happens if new features and ease of use have priority of security (no, I'm not naming names). We don't want to repeat that mistake, do we?
> Cross platform capable? Talent? Professionals? Let me think for a millisecond...
...)
Oh, that's just PHB-speak. Let me translate:
Term: Cross platform capable
Translation: Supports Windows ME, 2K and XP, provided that you have a recent IE Version installed and haven't screwed up the IE settings too much (cookies, ActiveX,
Term: Talent
Translation: They somehow managed to install IIS
Term: Professionals
Translation: We pay them. Not enough to make a decent living, but we pay them, so they're professionals.
Sentence: BuyServices' goal is to become the premier outsource e-commerce provider
Comment: And my goal is to have sex with five different supermodels seven days a week. Unfortunately for BuyServices, they're as likely to reach their goal as I am to reaching mine.
In a bold and visionary move, our top management decided to switch our corporate network to Oracle, only to withdraw the decision the next day, after finding out that the yearly license fees would exceed our company's net worth.
To sum it up, there's only one choice left: we'll be switching everything to SCO Unix next year.
The title of Ridley's book is a reference to Lewis Carrol's "Through the Looking Glass":
The last paragraph nicely sums up the view that in evolution, standing still means falling into extinction and just keeping one's place is a difficult proposition.
> The review (while otherwise good) implies that Genome predates Red Queen, when in fact the former came out in 2000 and the latter in 1995.
You're right, The Red Queen predates Genome. The Viking edition is from 1993, by the way - 10 years of scientific research have passed since then, and I would very much appreciate an updated edition taking into account the new insights gathered since then.
See this older post of mine for some remarks on Ridley's books.
By the way, I echo the recommendation -- reading this book profoundly changed how I think about evolution and genetics. The only comparably assumption-shattering biology book I can think of is Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life.
Reading Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" and Ridley's "The Red Queen" was a disturbing and exciting experience for me, because it shattered many beliefs I held about mankind and society. I have since read many more books on the subject, and here are a few I can recommend if you're interested in contemporary scientific views on evolution and related fields of study:
Matt Ridley: The Origins of Virtue (*)
Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works, The Language Instinct
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable
Geoffrey Miller: The Mating Mind
(*) with a caveat: he lets his political views influence his writing a little too much in this one
> You mean SCO jumped into the GPL pool without their crack team of lawyers reading it first?
The good news for SCO: they have a "crack" team of lawyers, indeed.
The bad news: that's "crack" as in "the stuff you can buy from the dealers in the less reputable parts of town".
> What exactly do you call a stream in that context?
Symantec, NTFS Streams primer
Carvey, "The Dark Side of NTFS"
more...
BTW, two PC forensics packages we looked at recently didn't know about NTFS streams...
Well put, full ack.
I believe it's a Darwinian thing. If Open Source based solutions turn out to have an economical advantage for companies and governments under the bottom line (and I believe they do), they will prevail over traditional licensing models - in a free market, the companies with the least overhead will have an inherent advantage over others.
Where I work, the management still is in CYA mode ("nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" etc.), but in view of the depleted budgets, some are beginning to see at least the economical advantages of using OSS. I just got clearance to use a GPLed tool for an internal deployment, and this is going to save us about 60'000 USD. A small step, but I hope that it will speed up acceptance of other Open Source solutions within our company.
> You don't build the local economy by sending millions to Redmond Washington
Unfortunately, not all city governments in Germany think that way. The city of Frankfurt just signed a major contract with Microsoft, according to this news report from German c't magazine. Oh well, you win some, you lose some - but the decision made by the Munich authorities is a landmark case which gets much more publicity worldwide.
...that on hearing news like this, Bill Gates locks himself in his office, puts on a strangely shaped black face-covering helmet and starts breathing heavily.
Ok, I admit it, I probably have seen too many Star Wars movies. Still, nice win for Open Source.
Exposing ants to radiation and stuff might turn out to be a very bad idea.
> The slight improvement in hardware isn't going to change the fact that I'm only a mediocre gamer.
You're telling me. My on-screen persona in UT usually commits suicide right from the start in order to avoid being tortured to death by the other players. No amount of money spent for the newest and improvest graphics card is going to change that.
Insofar as I can penetrate the dense jargon in "The Precession of Simulacra", he posits sort of a Saussurean system of signs in reverse, ultimately culminating in the disintegration of reality, which is replaced by a system of simulacra [I suppose the "Matrix" in the movie stands for the simulacra].
Personally, I cannot see how he justifies this theory from the text he provides. His train of reasoning is so convoluted that the text takes an inordinate amount of time to read and leaves too many points open to interpretation.
You can also find examples of the abuse of scientific concepts from other disciplines in this work, such as "[...] they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra." - unfortunately he does not explain what relevance binary oppositions and combinatory algebra have with regard to his theories.
Finally, whenever I read a paragraph like this one*:
I ask myself if the author was just incapable of clearly expressing what he thought or if he had something to conceal - such as the fact the he doesn't know what he's talking about, or has nothing to say. Another possibility is that I just didn't get it, but that's a small wonder given that kind of prose.
I'm not saying that Baudrillard's works are worthless, just that they're not perfect in my opinion and that I don't see their relevance - and that may very well be my fault and not his. I try to read everything with a critical eye; hagiography has never been a good concept outside of religion.
* I got this text off the Web; my edition of the book is in German
The authors back up their claims with some truly hair-raising citations from Baudrillard's works, such as this one:
This doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me - neither as a scientific text (what's "variable refraction hyperspace"?) nor taken as a metaphor. Check out "Fashionable Nonsense" at the library and read it - you may not agree with everything they write, but it's quite an entertaining read (especially the chapter about Jacques Lacan) and it won't hurt you to read some critical commentary about some present-day luminaries (or charlatans, as one may seem fit). Sokal, by the way, is the author of the (in)famous "Social Text" hoax.
"If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and he decides to deliver a message to humanity, he will NOT use as his messenger a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle or in some cases, really bad make-up too."
(Source: "Dave Barry turns 50" - "Things it takes most of us 50 years to learn")
In my opinion: Canon (except the low end models). Separate cartridge for every color, cartridge design has basically been umodified for years, no stupid chips, separate print heads, no "phone home" function in the drivers (like the one HP has), lowest price per ccm of ink compared with the competition, refill is possible (never tried it though, I just buy a new cartridge whenever I need one instead of messing around with syringes and ink). Prepare to pay a little more for the base printer - the general print quality and the savings in ink over the lifetime of the printer are worth it IMO. Linux support is far from ideal, though.
Keep in mind that Ballmer holds a Senior Management position at Microsoft, and that everything that's being said from the top level PHBs has to be translated first (top level management lives in a different universe, and possibly in a whole different dimension as the rest of us). Since my job at $BIG_CORP unfortunately involves contact with higher management levels, I can offer you the following helpful translation of some of Mr. Ballmer's quotes. This is not Microsoft-specific BTW, we just dissected a message from the CEO of our employer today and it wasn't any better.
Quote: "I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition."
Translation: "It's a big fat blimp on our threat radar. We're out to fry their asses before they get ours."
Quote: "On the other hand, in terms of putting a clear, simple proposition in front of the customer, I think we have a leading edge proposition."
Translation:"We'll make them an offer they can't refuse."
Quote: "I do think there are things that people don't understand very well about the new alternative, where it is important for us to help customers understand the issues."
Translation: "Our FUD tactics worked well in the past and I don't see why they shouldn't work as well in the future."
Quote: "[...] some people are choosing Linux. I don't think that is going to continue to be the case."
Translation: "Yeah, we're pretty scared about customers considering a switch and haven't really figured out how to counter that threat yet, but why admit it?."
Quote: "If the lead developer for this component chooses to do something else with his life, who will carry on the mantle for that?"
Ballmer's thoughts: "Let's hope the interviewer doesn't ask what happens if we decide to discontinue a product."
Quote: "There are still challenges in parts of Asia. We have seen improvements in Latin America."
Translation: "In Asia, they steal our software like there's no tomorrow. Latin America isn't really much better."
Quote: "By hook or by crook, so to speak, there will be 5-plus million servers, roughly, sold in the next 12 months."
Translation: "If this server consolidation thingy that's been going on lately is just a fad, we'll be doing fine. Otherwise, well..."
Quote: "everybody likes to talk about Google, which is fine. They are doing a good job as a company. But for traffic, Yahoo is doing quite well and we are doing quite well."
Translation: "Google is kicking our collective pasty white rumps so hard you woldn't believe it. Let's just hope they go public so we can buy them out."
Quote: "No, I don't anticipate making a change of that ilk [Licensing 6] in the foreseeable future."
Translation: "Our vendor-lock-in strategy worked, and now we have them by the balls."
The DreamBox DM7000 looks promising to me. What I'd like to have is a network ogg and mp3 player, and the DM7000 seems to have all the features I want, with hardware MPEG2/PVR functions thrown in to boot (and MPEG4 apparently on the way). It runs Linux, so retrofitting Vorbis and MP3 compatibility should be no big deal. Retail price is about $500 in my area, but I'm sure I can find a better deal on the 'net. More accessories (wireless keyboard) and pictures here.
Anybody have experiences with this one?
German c't magazine ran a cool (but pricey) DIY media center project in 2001, see this post of mine. They had plans to convert it to Linux, but it's outside my price range, mainly due to the large LCD screen.
She just designed the cards AFAIK. Solitaire was written by Wes Cherry, who was probably hired by some evil superpower in an ingenious attempt to sabotage the Western economies. A quite successful attempt, I might add, looking at the state of those economies right now.
I have two dog-eared paperback copies of "An Introduction to Microcomputers" (Volumes 0 and 1) in my bookshelf. Bought them in 1983 while I was an ESL student at UCSD, and what I learned from them is still useful to me 20 years later. This is one of the best investments I ever made in my life, and I have to thank Adam Osborne for it.
While searching for references on Adam Osborne on Usenet after learning he had died, I found this thread which might be of interest.
Rest in peace, Adam Osborne.