The children (and their teachers, who are too often not that much older) should have _teaching_ aids for spelling and especially grammar and style. One does especially miss the Grammatik plug-in.... Buy your kids copies of Strunk & White (and all the really good, well-written, even "classic" books you can find and somehow afford).
1. Watermarks can never provide adequate security for music (or video) because they're necessarily irrelevent to the analog signal contents, which can be recovered without them.
2. SDMI is an unworkable battleground of the RIAA versus all the HW/SW players, where gridlock will reign for years, and technical reality will eventually trump rearguard lawyers.
3. The SDMI "challenge" failure is being stonewalled and spun by fools for RIAA purposes, but they're _not_ fooling anyone who understands music and the bankruptcy of the RIAA.
4. Nonetheless, RIAA controls SDMI (dollars are clout), will declare victory, retreat to an illusion of security, aided and abetted by Micro~etc, to control the masses (for a little while).
5. SDMI is Evil Tech(c) that is inevitably doomed to fail because it flies in the face of both physics (in the form of information theory) and plain common-sense (mp3 is good enough).
6. But don't explain this to the RIAA's fatcat morons just yet - wait until _after_ they commit their future business models to this flawed, hopeless scheme - then, take full advantage.
The MPEG / Fraunhofer / Ogg standards look like a clear case of the technicians sticking it to their corporate masters by defining clean interfaces not amenable to money-grubbing big-company monopolies. Way to go, guys & gals! The best part is that they've been shot throught the heart, but they'll never see it until their business models just keel over and die.
If I can send an artist (or band) $1 to download a whole CD, that will be just as much money as they'd get if I bought it from a RIAA distributor for $16. I'll make the trade and, more importantly, so should the artist or band. The leeches losing out are unnecessary, inefficient, passe' overhead. Labels are dead, now celebrate artists! Look forward to media freedom!
IP issues are complex, so you and your fellow CS grad-students should get together and retain an intellectual property attorney to advise you. Depending upon their hourly rate, you might even want to have him or her join you at your meeting with the school's IP lawyers.
IANL, but you have some choices:
Work-for-hire should apply if you have a _contract_ that specifies what you will create and how much you will be paid to create it. In a graduate-student situation, this reasonably might be construed to extend to work done in support of teaching duties (coding coursework problems and solutions, exams and answers, etc.), but you might want to get this spelled out in the paperwork defining your graduate student agreement with the school.
Again, any project that incorporates GPL'd code _must_ be licensed GPL, but you can also grant the school a nonexclusive right to publication; they can then aggregate your works with others and charge fees for copies of the aggregated works, as long as they don't remove or restrict the GPL for your work. Their copyright to the aggregate would cover only the entire publication, but not restrict fair use of your individual GPL'd work(s).
OTOH, if you create something that does not include GPL'd code, you can either; (a) slap a GPL license on it (then, see above); (b) copyright it yourself; and/or (c) assign the copyright to the school. Your freedom in these choices will depend upon the terms of your agreement and/or contract with the school. This is why you might want to consult an IP attorney.
If you create or discover anything potentially valuable enough to patent (as opposed to simply copyright), then you _will_ need an IP attorney. But since you can't now know if this might occur, you should get an IP attorney now, before entering into any agreements with the school that could constrain your future rights. Make sense?
Does IBM still do this (require employees to assign to IBM the rights to _everything_ they create)? If so, how do they handle GPL'd software? Anybody know?
At 13, YMCA camp at Spirit Lake (right under the north side) - the mountain loomed up there all the time, so close it felt like one could almost reach out over that deep blue lake and touch it. Hiked up the east shoulder to the Plains of Abraham (a pumice desert) and Apes Canyon (named for a pair of real apes that escaped from a circus-train wreck in the 1920s). Hiked up Norway Pass above the east end of Spirit Lake - beautiful forest (but lots of salal and salmonberry brush up there, too).
Late teens, climbed St. Helens twice (led the second time for my climbing club). Both climbs were up the Dogs Head route, on the north side (right over the chunk blown out by the later eruption). A 30-degree slope might not sound too steep, but it certainly _feels_ steep when you're facing straight uphill with your ankles straining to keep several crampon-points engaged in the ice and it's several thousand feet both up and _down_, behind you. You only do this three to four to a rope, with ice-axes to arrest a fall, and start before dawn so you're well up the hill before the sun starts softening the slope. With 10-20 people in a party, you'd make the summit by about noon, hang out for awhile eating lunch, etc., then descend in spectacular long glissades. From the top on a clear day you could see all the way from the Three Sisters, Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Adams to the south, to Mt. Ranier, Mt. Baker, and Mt. Stuart to the North, plus a hundred smaller peaks in between and beyond. Cold, but exhilarating.
Explored a lava tube on the south side once, too. That's still there, I'm sure. Then there was the eruption. Didn't feel it, living in Portland at the time, but could see the ash cloud from my front lawn and went up the Columbia Gorge that Sunday afternoon to watch. Simply awesome - grey ash cloud, lighting in it, towering to 40,000 feet. The ash cloud mostly blew east, piling two or three feet on some areas of southeast Washington, but some ash hit Portland, a nuisance to clean off cars and out of rain gutters.
A few years later, flew over the crater in a friend's light plane, the cinder dome in the center of crater still smoking and growing, Spirit Lake filled-in, thousands of square miles north of the mountain devastated, just bare hills covered by blown-down forests, all the trees pointing north....
but they need to attack the other power sinks too, before their vision will be fully compelling.
They need low-power with performance displays (ambient lighting?) as well as memory and storage (persistent magnetic?). Then, they'll have a low-power winner.
Oh - and _predictive_ code optimization that, as you say, runs fast the first time (rather than needing a warm-up lap). With more depth of optimized-code memory the CPU could "learn" each application just once, then run faster ever after (with some minor variations for different application content - say, the delta between a simple letter and an academic mathematics paper).
Hmmm... 10 of these would give you 5.76TB of Raid5, with 8 hot failover drives. Put 4-8GB of PC266 DDR SDRAM cache behind it, plus fiber I/O channels, and you've got the hardware to support a Linux-based Enterprise-class SAN server....
Isn't she going to need a drogue chute? (That's a small preliminary chute deployed to decrease speed a little _and_ pull a main chute). The NASA space capsules all used those, including the Apollo moon missions. Or will she use a drogue ring? (This is a ring around the risers that buffers sudden chute filling and hopefully prevents a blowout.) Even cooler would be a drougue chute followed by a backpack parasail... And will she broadcast RT?
The original IBM MVS OS (designed for OS/360, the base for OS/370, OS/390, and now OS/Z) was not patented, so it entered the public domain. IBM later fixed this with later versions (IBM leads the world in the number of patents filed, but it used to compete with AT&T for this distinction).
I know this partly because I was called in to secure the records of a certain collection agency in SoCal several years ago. They ran the public domain (old!) MVS on end-of-life IBM hardware (for which I think they didn't have maintenance, as that cost more than the hardware was worth).
In case you didn't catch the drift of "secure the records," the company was in receivership, and it was the sort of situation where someone was going to go to prison (misappropriation of customers' moneys). The owners were on the lam, and the poor guy who was Operator/Systems-Programmer gamely helped me to capture their files (on the old 9-track reel tapes, using bare TSO commands). [I do hope he found a good next job - he was good but saying he knew MVS 0.9 wasn't leading-edge!]
Then there was the owners' secretary, who - to quote the Partner on the job - "liked the cut of my jib" - and hinted about her upcoming weekend in Palm Springs.
Ahem,... it's now usual for hardware companies to patent their instruction-sets. Intel, AMD, MIPs, et al - they all do it as a matter of course in their business operations.
However, the real issue is _which_ instruction set will gain favor with developers. Will it be the (lame, IMHO) Intel Itanium, or AMD's better Hammer architecture?
Well, I'm not convinced you even know what "Steganograhy" means. H*ll, I'm not sure _I_ know what it is, except real good encryption.
I've been to New Zealand... have you? They're generally a bunch of really nice people, sort of like one might find in Vancouver, BC. And they are sensitive enough to ask whether one is from the US or Canada (Canadians are touchy about it).
However, NZ is an interesting political study. They have a near-fascist government run by some near-socialist politicians. (Hmmm, it makes one think about socialist/fascist congruences, does it not?) But it's a low-density backwater, after all. (NZ flamers, don't even bother, that is reality of your actual irrelevance.)
Cashslot, er... Hashclot, um... Slashdot is a veritable oasis of improper spelling and bad grammar, and often the Slashdot _staff_ is guilty of this: it's arguably normal. I'd like to have a dollar for every instance of seeing "then" meaning "than" or "loose" instead of "lose" that appears in Slashdot story heads. (It wouldn't make me rich, but it might come close to paying my DSL bill every month.)
There's a reason that the _ahem_ legitimate press employs people called "editors" - it has to do with correcting such deadline-driven spelling and grammatical errors. Why do they do this? Well, there are basic standards of literate writing, and news publishers generally uphold these for the sake of readership credibility.
The fact is - if you can't spell the right word, or make glaring grammatical errors, you will not be taken seriously by literate people! Slashdot is near realtime, so some latitude is warranted. Also, non-native English writers do deserve some license. But, what passes (too liberally) for literacy here too often demeans posted messages.
There's no excuse for really poor spelling or grammar, except perhaps neglect on the part of browser/email vendors and websites to integrate the widely available tools into their products. Ten years ago I had Grammatik integrated with my word processor. It was helpful for improving the quality of my professional writing. Oh, well...
Over 30 years ago, I wrote a "letter to the editor" defending my Senator's sole dissenting vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution (this was the green light for Lyndon Johnson to get a lot of my contemporaries killed by expanding the US presence in the VietNam War). Well, the Editor of the Editorial Page at the time just happened to be my girlfriend's father. (I do not believe this influenced his decision to print my letter.) He had her hand me a little set of editor's rules for grammar - all couched as opposite examples, such as "do not thy infinitive split." Of course the girl is long gone, but the lesson lives on...
Mainland China rejected MS-Windows out of concerns that it might have unknown backdoors designed by the US government. The French have also expressed similar suspicions of Microsoft. And there is no shortage of countries which are hostile toward and/or paranoid about the USA. Even some of our "friends" (e.g., Israel, France) cheerfully engage in military and industrial espionage against US targets. So the list of suspect _nations_ is not a short one. Plus, there are myriad criminal mafias and terrorist organizations who might be interested. The cracker(s) of Microsoft could belong to any of these groups, or none.
If the cracker(s) owned Microsoft developers' accounts, Microsoft is simply being irresponsible to assure everyone that its code wasn't "enhanced" in some way. This should give pause to any large business considering future upgrades of _any_ Microsoft software. As a CIO in such a position, I'd want Microsoft to _prove_ to me (or a proxy, like an independent auditing company) that no possibility exists that their code was tampered. Microsoft might find this difficult to accomplish, given that they were cracked for three months!
This needs more exposure and heavy ridicule. The only way to lever them out will be to shame them. That and lawsuits, angry letters to Congress and the Executive branch. Publicity is a start, but this is in danger of being ignored as "normal" bureaucracy.
Russia has _mostly_ rogue software coders. Their "companies" are mostly small, often controlled by criminals (freelance, mafia, or well connected). That whole region has been a barely-functioning kleptocracy for a while. Hopeful signs are the election of Putin in Russia (he's a standup guy) and rejection of Milosovec in Serbia (a mini Stalin, war crimes instigator, _very_ bad news).
However, one can hope that rehabilitation of the Russian political / legal / socioeconomic systems won't happen fast enough to prevent the starving programmers from beating Microsoft with Whistler! Few things could be sweeter than seeing Microsoft code stolen due to their own security lapses, and then improved, nearly given away on a mass scale.
Expect to see a Russian version of Whistler that is more-stable / works-better than Microsoft's. It should go over big in the third-world (China, Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa), especially if source is available (China is very paranoid, but it also tells the West to go suck eggs about legal niceties involving intellectual property, only except for a few cosmetic raids sometimes).
Short story: The owner/coder for a nice piece of software I use once shared some code with _one_ Russian programmer who was supposed to do work on it; he stole the code, then boldly proceeded to sell it under another title. The author still hasn't been able to shut it down (Russian legal process, you must be kidding!) and still has to endure the continued website postings announcing the usurper's updates to _his_ code, sold by pirate Russians!
I can't wait to download my low-cost copies of Russian versions of Word/Excel/Powerpoint 2001. They'll probably work better than Microsoft's official point-releases, at one-tenth the cost. With luck, they'll include source, maybe they'll have Linux compatible binaries: bye, bye, Microsoft. (But then, we get a serious stock market correction - Microsoft has defrauded its investors and employees for so long that fixing its lower value will be genuinely painful here - www.billparish.com for details).
What might be _really_ ironic would be Russia's lack of justice beating the US courts to justice. Don't break up Microsoft, just steal their code! (Then improve it, port Linux/Mac, a lovely road.)
He must have been aware of competitive interest. As the corporate officer ultimately responsible for information security, he was extremely lax to leave his laptop unsecured on his desk at night, along with his backup media.
Your company's President should have this CIO on the carpet trying to think of reasons why he shouldn't be dismissed.
to its DSL subscribers. Only for Windows and MacIntosh, so I can't use it (I run OS/2 with Injoy Firewall, and Linux). Here's their letter:
Subject: EarthLink DSL Members - Free Personal Firewall Software
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 17:27:45
From: "EarthLink Broadband Team"
To:
Dear EarthLink Member,
EarthLink cares about keeping your information secure, which is why we're
pleased to offer personal firewall software FREE to our DSL members. Personal
firewall software monitors all Internet connections to and from your computer
and alerts you to attempted intrusions.
This special security package, valued at over $49.95, includes either Symantec
Norton Personal Firewall 2000 v2.0 for Windows users or Open Door DoorStop
Personal Firewall 2.0 for Macintosh users. Both of these powerful software
offerings provide security for your PC and privacy for your personal information.
In order to register for a digital coupon and download your free copy of
personal firewall software, please click on the link below.
After you are registered, you will receive your digital coupon for your
free software in 2-3
business days.
Please Note:
-You must be an EarthLink DSL customer whose service is currently activated.
If your DSL service is not currently active, you will become eligible for
this offer upon activation.
-This offer includes one copy of either PC or Mac personal firewall software
per DSL account.
Thank you for choosing EarthLink DSL.
The EarthLink Broadband Team
OK, here's a vaguely relevant Urban Legend...
on
The Ultimate Chair
·
· Score: 1
also tangentially related to one of the Ig-Noble awards (yeah, I'm too lazy to find the URL - the truth is out there). Anyway, this true story involves a guy who really likes his music - CDs, MP3s, whatever - and he codes for a living, and he has a few cats....
He's got his workstation, his coding, plus music, and cats. For his music, he likes to wear some serious headphones and then wrap a towel over them. To keep his too-affectionate cats away, he devises a sort of skirt out of aluminum-foil (the cats don't like the noise tinfoil makes when they jump up on it). So far, he's got everything set.
He's sitting there working, headphones and towel, plus foil skirting, all in place when... he spies the FedEx guy looking in and going all wide-eyed!
pointing out that if "everyone had an IQ over 120" then the _average_ IQ would be higher than 120, but wait... 100 is _defined_ as the average IQ!
That thought fragment is disingenuous (or should it be "disingenius?") and reminds me of Garrison Keillor's little joke about "Lake Wobegone, where all the children are above average...."
But with reference to the "War on Drugs" I might sort of agree with you, except that this particular government mania is self-defeating and evil: prohibiting recreational drugs only makes selling them more profitable and increases the size of the drug-dealing underclass, thus exposing more people to drug addiction and so increasing both drug-trafficking/possession/use and real crime, clogging the justice system, decreasing the general respect for law, forcing incarceration of growing prison populations, and justifying ever more and larger prisons, etc. It is overly authoritarian government gone mad and spinning slowly out of democratic control. So,... this "War on Drugs" question is a good one (and I'll give you a hint - the candidate who favors further strengthening this oppressive, confiscatory abuse of the populace will certainly lose my vote).
What Cogent likely will be offering initially is very high speed VPN service to _businesses_ which lease space in relatively few buildings in each of some major cities. These will be fast _internal_ networks. Who needs this? Big corporations: think banks, brokerages, large accounting firms, major industrial corporations. Another poster noted that the first turn-up in the Chicago area will be at the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) - it is a _very_ high volume financial marketplace. These will be Cogent's customers.
The really large firms (IBM, GM/EDS/Hughes, maybe CSC) already did this years ago, but have since subleased and/or sold their internal networks (IBM GlobalNet is now owned by AT&T, for example). Now they're free to hitch onto faster, newer networks such as the ones Cogent and others are building.
The point is, this is about high speed _private_ nets, not fiber-to-the-curb or replacing xDSL and cable. Sure, there will be peering, but that will depend on the speed of those interfaces - the real speed advantages will obtain within their network.
is Perrit's use of the term "assure" instead of "ensure." It reveals a weasel-wording tendency.
When one "assures" someone else of something, they are affirming that something, not "making sure" of it or guaranteeing it.
The term "assure" is used all the time by large companies because it gives the recipient (client, customer, user) a nice warm feeling _without_ actually promising anything. If push comes to shove, there's no legal liability in "assure."
On the other hand, if one "ensures" something, they are "making sure" that it is or will be as stated. That is a legally enforcible promise.
The article notes that companies write-off options granted to employees, but do _not_ account for the options expense against revenues.
See http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
arguing that this practice constitutes real fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
The children (and their teachers, who are too often not that much older) should have _teaching_ aids for spelling and especially grammar and style. One does especially miss the Grammatik plug-in.... Buy your kids copies of Strunk & White (and all the really good, well-written, even "classic" books you can find and somehow afford).
Smalltalk - it was originally built for kids.
seem to be:
1. Watermarks can never provide adequate security for music (or video) because they're necessarily irrelevent to the analog signal contents, which can be recovered without them.
2. SDMI is an unworkable battleground of the RIAA versus all the HW/SW players, where gridlock will reign for years, and technical reality will eventually trump rearguard lawyers.
3. The SDMI "challenge" failure is being stonewalled and spun by fools for RIAA purposes, but they're _not_ fooling anyone who understands music and the bankruptcy of the RIAA.
4. Nonetheless, RIAA controls SDMI (dollars are clout), will declare victory, retreat to an illusion of security, aided and abetted by Micro~etc, to control the masses (for a little while).
5. SDMI is Evil Tech(c) that is inevitably doomed to fail because it flies in the face of both physics (in the form of information theory) and plain common-sense (mp3 is good enough).
6. But don't explain this to the RIAA's fatcat morons just yet - wait until _after_ they commit their future business models to this flawed, hopeless scheme - then, take full advantage.
The MPEG / Fraunhofer / Ogg standards look like a clear case of the technicians sticking it to their corporate masters by defining clean interfaces not amenable to money-grubbing big-company monopolies. Way to go, guys & gals! The best part is that they've been shot throught the heart, but they'll never see it until their business models just keel over and die.
If I can send an artist (or band) $1 to download a whole CD, that will be just as much money as they'd get if I bought it from a RIAA distributor for $16. I'll make the trade and, more importantly, so should the artist or band. The leeches losing out are unnecessary, inefficient, passe' overhead. Labels are dead, now celebrate artists! Look forward to media freedom!
IP issues are complex, so you and your fellow CS grad-students should get together and retain an intellectual property attorney to advise you. Depending upon their hourly rate, you might even want to have him or her join you at your meeting with the school's IP lawyers.
IANL, but you have some choices:
Work-for-hire should apply if you have a _contract_ that specifies what you will create and how much you will be paid to create it. In a graduate-student situation, this reasonably might be construed to extend to work done in support of teaching duties (coding coursework problems and solutions, exams and answers, etc.), but you might want to get this spelled out in the paperwork defining your graduate student agreement with the school.
Again, any project that incorporates GPL'd code _must_ be licensed GPL, but you can also grant the school a nonexclusive right to publication; they can then aggregate your works with others and charge fees for copies of the aggregated works, as long as they don't remove or restrict the GPL for your work. Their copyright to the aggregate would cover only the entire publication, but not restrict fair use of your individual GPL'd work(s).
OTOH, if you create something that does not include GPL'd code, you can either; (a) slap a GPL license on it (then, see above); (b) copyright it yourself; and/or (c) assign the copyright to the school. Your freedom in these choices will depend upon the terms of your agreement and/or contract with the school. This is why you might want to consult an IP attorney.
If you create or discover anything potentially valuable enough to patent (as opposed to simply copyright), then you _will_ need an IP attorney. But since you can't now know if this might occur, you should get an IP attorney now, before entering into any agreements with the school that could constrain your future rights. Make sense?
Does IBM still do this (require employees to assign to IBM the rights to _everything_ they create)? If so, how do they handle GPL'd software? Anybody know?
Just my experiences...
At 13, YMCA camp at Spirit Lake (right under the north side) - the mountain loomed up there all the time, so close it felt like one could almost reach out over that deep blue lake and touch it. Hiked up the east shoulder to the Plains of Abraham (a pumice desert) and Apes Canyon (named for a pair of real apes that escaped from a circus-train wreck in the 1920s). Hiked up Norway Pass above the east end of Spirit Lake - beautiful forest (but lots of salal and salmonberry brush up there, too).
Late teens, climbed St. Helens twice (led the second time for my climbing club). Both climbs were up the Dogs Head route, on the north side (right over the chunk blown out by the later eruption). A 30-degree slope might not sound too steep, but it certainly _feels_ steep when you're facing straight uphill with your ankles straining to keep several crampon-points engaged in the ice and it's several thousand feet both up and _down_, behind you. You only do this three to four to a rope, with ice-axes to arrest a fall, and start before dawn so you're well up the hill before the sun starts softening the slope. With 10-20 people in a party, you'd make the summit by about noon, hang out for awhile eating lunch, etc., then descend in spectacular long glissades. From the top on a clear day you could see all the way from the Three Sisters, Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Adams to the south, to Mt. Ranier, Mt. Baker, and Mt. Stuart to the North, plus a hundred smaller peaks in between and beyond. Cold, but exhilarating.
Explored a lava tube on the south side once, too. That's still there, I'm sure. Then there was the eruption. Didn't feel it, living in Portland at the time, but could see the ash cloud from my front lawn and went up the Columbia Gorge that Sunday afternoon to watch. Simply awesome - grey ash cloud, lighting in it, towering to 40,000 feet. The ash cloud mostly blew east, piling two or three feet on some areas of southeast Washington, but some ash hit Portland, a nuisance to clean off cars and out of rain gutters.
A few years later, flew over the crater in a friend's light plane, the cinder dome in the center of crater still smoking and growing, Spirit Lake filled-in, thousands of square miles north of the mountain devastated, just bare hills covered by blown-down forests, all the trees pointing north....
Here's a little help - at one time, the Republican party styled itself as the "Grand Old Party" - thus GOP.
The similar slang for the Democrats is "Dems" but that's obviously a lot more intuitive.
but they need to attack the other power sinks too, before their vision will be fully compelling.
They need low-power with performance displays (ambient lighting?) as well as memory and storage (persistent magnetic?). Then, they'll have a low-power winner.
Oh - and _predictive_ code optimization that, as you say, runs fast the first time (rather than needing a warm-up lap). With more depth of optimized-code memory the CPU could "learn" each application just once, then run faster ever after (with some minor variations for different application content - say, the delta between a simple letter and an academic mathematics paper).
Hmmm... 10 of these would give you 5.76TB of Raid5, with 8 hot failover drives. Put 4-8GB of PC266 DDR SDRAM cache behind it, plus fiber I/O channels, and you've got the hardware to support a Linux-based Enterprise-class SAN server....
Isn't she going to need a drogue chute? (That's a small preliminary chute deployed to decrease speed a little _and_ pull a main chute). The NASA space capsules all used those, including the Apollo moon missions. Or will she use a drogue ring? (This is a ring around the risers that buffers sudden chute filling and hopefully prevents a blowout.) Even cooler would be a drougue chute followed by a backpack parasail... And will she broadcast RT?
There's another story about this particular Internet-parasite here.
Its the _bureaucracy_ (both UK and Euro)! The politics is _IN THE WAY_ of efficient progress (but differently in the UK and Euro countries).
Simply put, this is why the British Pound isn't worth as much as it used to be, and the Euro is now worth only 80% of what it was just a year ago.
The British and Europeans need some revolutions before they'll be competitive again, in 50 years.
It's also possible that the former USSR states and even Eastern Europe will get it together sooner... despite the fact that they're kleptocracies now.
What's the difference between a country run by in-office criminals and a country run by freelance criminals? This exercise for your discussion....
The original IBM MVS OS (designed for OS/360, the base for OS/370, OS/390, and now OS/Z) was not patented, so it entered the public domain. IBM later fixed this with later versions (IBM leads the world in the number of patents filed, but it used to compete with AT&T for this distinction).
I know this partly because I was called in to secure the records of a certain collection agency in SoCal several years ago. They ran the public domain (old!) MVS on end-of-life IBM hardware (for which I think they didn't have maintenance, as that cost more than the hardware was worth).
In case you didn't catch the drift of "secure the records," the company was in receivership, and it was the sort of situation where someone was going to go to prison (misappropriation of customers' moneys). The owners were on the lam, and the poor guy who was Operator/Systems-Programmer gamely helped me to capture their files (on the old 9-track reel tapes, using bare TSO commands). [I do hope he found a good next job - he was good but saying he knew MVS 0.9 wasn't leading-edge!]
Then there was the owners' secretary, who - to quote the Partner on the job - "liked the cut of my jib" - and hinted about her upcoming weekend in Palm Springs.
Ahem,... it's now usual for hardware companies to patent their instruction-sets. Intel, AMD, MIPs, et al - they all do it as a matter of course in their business operations.
However, the real issue is _which_ instruction set will gain favor with developers. Will it be the (lame, IMHO) Intel Itanium, or AMD's better Hammer architecture?
Well, I'm not convinced you even know what "Steganograhy" means. H*ll, I'm not sure _I_ know what it is, except real good encryption.
I've been to New Zealand... have you? They're generally a bunch of really nice people, sort of like one might find in Vancouver, BC. And they are sensitive enough to ask whether one is from the US or Canada (Canadians are touchy about it).
However, NZ is an interesting political study. They have a near-fascist government run by some near-socialist politicians. (Hmmm, it makes one think about socialist/fascist congruences, does it not?) But it's a low-density backwater, after all. (NZ flamers, don't even bother, that is reality of your actual irrelevance.)
Well, it's a spelling error, actually...
Cashslot, er... Hashclot, um... Slashdot is a veritable oasis of improper spelling and bad grammar, and often the Slashdot _staff_ is guilty of this: it's arguably normal. I'd like to have a dollar for every instance of seeing "then" meaning "than" or "loose" instead of "lose" that appears in Slashdot story heads. (It wouldn't make me rich, but it might come close to paying my DSL bill every month.)
There's a reason that the _ahem_ legitimate press employs people called "editors" - it has to do with correcting such deadline-driven spelling and grammatical errors. Why do they do this? Well, there are basic standards of literate writing, and news publishers generally uphold these for the sake of readership credibility.
The fact is - if you can't spell the right word, or make glaring grammatical errors, you will not be taken seriously by literate people! Slashdot is near realtime, so some latitude is warranted. Also, non-native English writers do deserve some license. But, what passes (too liberally) for literacy here too often demeans posted messages.
There's no excuse for really poor spelling or grammar, except perhaps neglect on the part of browser/email vendors and websites to integrate the widely available tools into their products. Ten years ago I had Grammatik integrated with my word processor. It was helpful for improving the quality of my professional writing. Oh, well...
Over 30 years ago, I wrote a "letter to the editor" defending my Senator's sole dissenting vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution (this was the green light for Lyndon Johnson to get a lot of my contemporaries killed by expanding the US presence in the VietNam War). Well, the Editor of the Editorial Page at the time just happened to be my girlfriend's father. (I do not believe this influenced his decision to print my letter.) He had her hand me a little set of editor's rules for grammar - all couched as opposite examples, such as "do not thy infinitive split." Of course the girl is long gone, but the lesson lives on...
Slashdot - let's have spelling/grammar checking!
Precisely.
Mainland China rejected MS-Windows out of concerns that it might have unknown backdoors designed by the US government. The French have also expressed similar suspicions of Microsoft. And there is no shortage of countries which are hostile toward and/or paranoid about the USA. Even some of our "friends" (e.g., Israel, France) cheerfully engage in military and industrial espionage against US targets. So the list of suspect _nations_ is not a short one. Plus, there are myriad criminal mafias and terrorist organizations who might be interested. The cracker(s) of Microsoft could belong to any of these groups, or none.
If the cracker(s) owned Microsoft developers' accounts, Microsoft is simply being irresponsible to assure everyone that its code wasn't "enhanced" in some way. This should give pause to any large business considering future upgrades of _any_ Microsoft software. As a CIO in such a position, I'd want Microsoft to _prove_ to me (or a proxy, like an independent auditing company) that no possibility exists that their code was tampered. Microsoft might find this difficult to accomplish, given that they were cracked for three months!
The was the comment seen at The Register.
This needs more exposure and heavy ridicule. The only way to lever them out will be to shame them. That and lawsuits, angry letters to Congress and the Executive branch. Publicity is a start, but this is in danger of being ignored as "normal" bureaucracy.
Russia has _mostly_ rogue software coders. Their "companies" are mostly small, often controlled by criminals (freelance, mafia, or well connected). That whole region has been a barely-functioning kleptocracy for a while. Hopeful signs are the election of Putin in Russia (he's a standup guy) and rejection of Milosovec in Serbia (a mini Stalin, war crimes instigator, _very_ bad news).
However, one can hope that rehabilitation of the Russian political / legal / socioeconomic systems won't happen fast enough to prevent the starving programmers from beating Microsoft with Whistler! Few things could be sweeter than seeing Microsoft code stolen due to their own security lapses, and then improved, nearly given away on a mass scale.
Expect to see a Russian version of Whistler that is more-stable / works-better than Microsoft's. It should go over big in the third-world (China, Southeast Asia, Middle East, Africa), especially if source is available (China is very paranoid, but it also tells the West to go suck eggs about legal niceties involving intellectual property, only except for a few cosmetic raids sometimes).
Short story: The owner/coder for a nice piece of software I use once shared some code with _one_ Russian programmer who was supposed to do work on it; he stole the code, then boldly proceeded to sell it under another title. The author still hasn't been able to shut it down (Russian legal process, you must be kidding!) and still has to endure the continued website postings announcing the usurper's updates to _his_ code, sold by pirate Russians!
I can't wait to download my low-cost copies of Russian versions of Word/Excel/Powerpoint 2001. They'll probably work better than Microsoft's official point-releases, at one-tenth the cost. With luck, they'll include source, maybe they'll have Linux compatible binaries: bye, bye, Microsoft. (But then, we get a serious stock market correction - Microsoft has defrauded its investors and employees for so long that fixing its lower value will be genuinely painful here - www.billparish.com for details).
What might be _really_ ironic would be Russia's lack of justice beating the US courts to justice. Don't break up Microsoft, just steal their code! (Then improve it, port Linux/Mac, a lovely road.)
He must have been aware of competitive interest. As the corporate officer ultimately responsible for information security, he was extremely lax to leave his laptop unsecured on his desk at night, along with his backup media.
Your company's President should have this CIO on the carpet trying to think of reasons why he shouldn't be dismissed.
to its DSL subscribers. Only for Windows and MacIntosh, so I can't use it (I run OS/2 with Injoy Firewall, and Linux). Here's their letter:
@ ix.netcom.com
Subject: EarthLink DSL Members - Free Personal Firewall Software
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 17:27:45
From: "EarthLink Broadband Team"
To:
Dear EarthLink Member,
EarthLink cares about keeping your information secure, which is why we're
pleased to offer personal firewall software FREE to our DSL members. Personal
firewall software monitors all Internet connections to and from your computer
and alerts you to attempted intrusions.
This special security package, valued at over $49.95, includes either Symantec
Norton Personal Firewall 2000 v2.0 for Windows users or Open Door DoorStop
Personal Firewall 2.0 for Macintosh users. Both of these powerful software
offerings provide security for your PC and privacy for your personal information.
In order to register for a digital coupon and download your free copy of
personal firewall software, please click on the link below.
http://www.mindspring.net/cgi-bin/dsl.pl?ramunro1
After you are registered, you will receive your digital coupon for your
free software in 2-3
business days.
Please Note:
-You must be an EarthLink DSL customer whose service is currently activated.
If your DSL service is not currently active, you will become eligible for
this offer upon activation.
-This offer includes one copy of either PC or Mac personal firewall software
per DSL account.
Thank you for choosing EarthLink DSL.
The EarthLink Broadband Team
also tangentially related to one of the Ig-Noble awards (yeah, I'm too lazy to find the URL - the truth is out there). Anyway, this true story involves a guy who really likes his music - CDs, MP3s, whatever - and he codes for a living, and he has a few cats....
He's got his workstation, his coding, plus music, and cats. For his music, he likes to wear some serious headphones and then wrap a towel over them. To keep his too-affectionate cats away, he devises a sort of skirt out of aluminum-foil (the cats don't like the noise tinfoil makes when they jump up on it). So far, he's got everything set.
He's sitting there working, headphones and towel, plus foil skirting, all in place when... he spies the FedEx guy looking in and going all wide-eyed!
Maybe it's only funny because I could see this...
pointing out that if "everyone had an IQ over 120" then the _average_ IQ would be higher than 120, but wait... 100 is _defined_ as the average IQ!
That thought fragment is disingenuous (or should it be "disingenius?") and reminds me of Garrison Keillor's little joke about "Lake Wobegone, where all the children are above average...."
But with reference to the "War on Drugs" I might sort of agree with you, except that this particular government mania is self-defeating and evil: prohibiting recreational drugs only makes selling them more profitable and increases the size of the drug-dealing underclass, thus exposing more people to drug addiction and so increasing both drug-trafficking/possession/use and real crime, clogging the justice system, decreasing the general respect for law, forcing incarceration of growing prison populations, and justifying ever more and larger prisons, etc. It is overly authoritarian government gone mad and spinning slowly out of democratic control. So,... this "War on Drugs" question is a good one (and I'll give you a hint - the candidate who favors further strengthening this oppressive, confiscatory abuse of the populace will certainly lose my vote).
What Cogent likely will be offering initially is very high speed VPN service to _businesses_ which lease space in relatively few buildings in each of some major cities. These will be fast _internal_ networks. Who needs this? Big corporations: think banks, brokerages, large accounting firms, major industrial corporations. Another poster noted that the first turn-up in the Chicago area will be at the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) - it is a _very_ high volume financial marketplace. These will be Cogent's customers.
The really large firms (IBM, GM/EDS/Hughes, maybe CSC) already did this years ago, but have since subleased and/or sold their internal networks (IBM GlobalNet is now owned by AT&T, for example). Now they're free to hitch onto faster, newer networks such as the ones Cogent and others are building.
The point is, this is about high speed _private_ nets, not fiber-to-the-curb or replacing xDSL and cable. Sure, there will be peering, but that will depend on the speed of those interfaces - the real speed advantages will obtain within their network.
is Perrit's use of the term "assure" instead of "ensure." It reveals a weasel-wording tendency.
When one "assures" someone else of something, they are affirming that something, not "making sure" of it or guaranteeing it.
The term "assure" is used all the time by large companies because it gives the recipient (client, customer, user) a nice warm feeling _without_ actually promising anything. If push comes to shove, there's no legal liability in "assure."
On the other hand, if one "ensures" something, they are "making sure" that it is or will be as stated. That is a legally enforcible promise.
The article notes that companies write-off options granted to employees, but do _not_ account for the options expense against revenues. See http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html arguing that this practice constitutes real fraud.