Re:The Govt wants =MORE= security in Linux?
on
Auditing for Linux?
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· Score: 1
You're missing the point. For true security (as defined by the Orange Book) you need to test and validate all this in a very rigorous manner. This is neither fast nor cheap, and I am afraid it cannot be done in the usual open-source way by a loosely coupled team. Someone has to bite the bullet and just do it along with all the neccessary paperwork involved.
I think that you are basically wrong here. The internet will be 'regulated' anyway, it's just a question by whom. Should it be companies such as access providers, backbone providers, hosting companies and whatnot, or should it be the government?
I believe the government has a moral obligation to step in and make sure that there are basic rules by which everyone has to abide such that internet access and use is fair for everyone. If we let the 'market' forces decide, the outcome might be far less than desirable.
In the past five years as the internet has been increasingly commercialized, I haven't seen things develop for the better. Take streaming audio as a example. Do you think that the prevailing protocols, Realaudio and MS Audio provide much of a choice for the consumer and/or competitor? Are they best of breed? Are they able to be developed further by competitors if the originating company folds or looses interest? Sure, there's mp3 streaming, but that's about all there is to open, clean, unencumbered (is it really? what with Fraunhofer patents?) standards.
Any commercial outfit out there has the bottomline closest to its heart. Many times it helps the bottomline to keep the customer happy, but not always. When switching costs become too high customer satisfaction is a non-issue, and companies will readily give up their efforts to keep you and me happy. Some will then screw you over big time and not care one bit, as long as the bucks keep coming in.
You may be as cynical about present day politics and governments as I am, but government regulations need to be in place to protect us from being exploited by companies that have the size and power to do so. I would qualify that by demanding that regulation needs to be minimal and geared towards ensuring fairness, openness and most importantly ability to adapt to changing needs.
Seriously, is there anyone who gives a rat's ass about this stuff, except for the companies who (will) make it? I don't want a 'web-enabled' fridge, I don't want a 'web-enabled' toaster, and I sure as hell don't want a 'web-enabled' coffee maker!
I'm with you here!
However, I am a bit torn: When Amazon came out in mid '95, I believe, I thought, 'Who the hell would want to buy books on the internet?' Their website was truly lousy back then.
In the meantime much has changed, of course, and I am buying more books from Amazon than from meat space book stores. Will we find good uses for some internet-enabled appliances eventually?
The current announcements certainly sound ridiculous, but there might be a true winner lurking somewhere. Still, I'm gonna hold out until the nonsense has been separated from the good stuff.
Language barriers are increasingly become a factor on the net because we are encountering people with whom we don't fluently share a common language more frequently. There are several consequence to this. The obvious one is the question of actually communicating with the people we do business with, or want to. Conveying our intentions clearly takes effort. The common vocabulary and context isn't reliably there.
Common context is the real issue here. One can easily pick up enough English (or another language for that matter) to read and speak fluently. However, this doesn't provide context, especially not if one never spent time in the region of the world where the language is spoken.
Case in point: As a native German speaker I have lived in the USA for over ten years total and speak and understand English quite well. People tell me there is almost no accent left (can I really believe them?). Even so, many jokes still are way beyond me because they refer to cultural issues that I haven't seen yet or simply don't care about enough to learn more.
These are vast barriers to unencumbered communication around the globe. I am afraid that this might create two classes of 'digital world citizens': Those who assimilate another language and culture well and hence can relate to the majority of fellow world citizens and thus are successful, and those who have difficulties for a variety of reasons and will loose out.
I realized a very long time ago that I was wasting my time reading daily newspapers. The news wasn't new, really, and moreover it wasn't digested enough to make it worthwhile. So I stopped subscribing to the daily newspaper and used the time for being with my family. That was far more gratifying.
The breaking news were mostly stale when I read it in the paper. Many times I and everyone else knew at least as much from electronic media such as TV and radio.
Today we have the web and other internet resources to supplement and to some extent surpass the traditional TV and radio news sources. Newspapers get left behind even more.
On the other hand, many stories aren't covered in a regular newspaper in a way that makes it worthwhile for me. For the most part I couldn't care less about the latest troop movements in Kosovo. But I want context, background, analysis and such; the big picture. Dailies never gave me enough of that at all. Neither do dedicated news resources on the web today. However, weeklies and monthlies really shine here, as do a host of non-news web sites, many of which are carefully tended by amateurs. On the web, I especially appreciate the heavy biases of many site authors, a quality that has all but vanished from the print press of today. I can balance between conflicting opinions myself. No need for an editor, thank you.
When I stopped reading daily newspapers fifteen years ago, I also felt that the sheer amount of 'news' in a daily was a burden on me, occupying way too much of my attention. Many facts didn't pertain to my life, in fact did not matter to most people around me and were plainly beyond my reach of influence, even if I'd care. So why bother?
Today, I am not reading a daily, not listening to radio news, not watching TV news (don't own a TV, actually) and not reading much news on the internet. I feel very much lighter than when I was fully immersed in all the heavy stuff other people felt/decided would be of interest to me. A lot of mind clutter is gone.
Have I ever missed reading a daily newspaper? No, not once. I have bought a paper on occasion, if I thought I'd really wanted to check out an issue.
Am I feeling badly informed? Hell no. News of the really important variety has a way of filtering through society and reaching people whether they actively seek it out or not. People's collective filtering ability is simply marvelous. I have been very aware of many truly important events, such as the fall of the Berlin wall, the start of the Gulf war, the whole Kosovo thing and many others, even if noone explicitly reminded me to check them out.
On the other hand, I have hours of free time each day to devote to more wholesome tasks, such as caring for my wife and kids, looking after the house, spending time with friends, etc. Most importantly, my mind is not occupied with totally useless and badly connected factoids that don't pertain to my life in the first place.
Yeah, I've been thinking along the same lines for a while. As far as I know, individual CDs don't have unique identifiers such that the BeamIt software could tell you, 'Sorry, this particular CD has been beamed already!'. The CD identifier being mentioned in the paper seems to only identify the album as Title X by Artist Y, not Title X by Artist Y, number Z in series. Maybe I am am wrong and someone who knows can enlighten us?
In the end it all boils down to whether an action is legal and to what extent we as individuals are willing to obey the law. Noone prevents me from speeding, but I can get caught and fined, so I choose not to speed. I would think that many people would respect copyright laws and fines imposed on violators if caught and therefore not beam CDs they don't own.
I suppose it's #2, but I don't agree that this might be legal.
I think this class action suit has a real chance if played right. I don't know the exact details, but from what we've heard/read so far, users aren't properly informed that their other ISP settings will be 'removed', as in 'deleted' instead of 'disabled' or 'backed up'. This would be clearly misleading, and it is unfair competition on top of that. Basis for anti trust action, perhaps? But we're digressing...
Keep in mind that AOL users are typically not technically adept and deserve clear and unambigous information about what the effect will be when they click a button.
I too am sceptical. I was loking for specs and benchmarks at their website, but found none.
What's more, there was a curious quote from customer Richard Santucci who used to work here at Scripps. What strikes me is that I never heard of a Patmos system being connected to our network, and I am one of the two HPC support guys on campus. Rumours about loaner systems usually spread like wildfire, even if we aren't directly involved. There is also no mention of one in our hosts database.
Richard, if you're out there, maybe you can shed some light on the issue.
Not true! While clusters and in particular Linux clusters are coming on strong, there are things that they just can't do.
The bandwidth of the interconnects on a Beowulf and worse still their latency are just not there yet to go head to head with a traditional supercomputer. They are getting very close, I admit, but haven't consistently beaten a Cray T3E-type interconnect yet.
Also, some codes/algorithms just don't lend themselves well to massively parallel implementations. They might be much happier on SMP-type machines or perhaps on vector machines.
Finally, some of the management issues for very large Linux clusters aren't fully resolved yet, but they have been in place on traditional supercomputers for quite some time.
As a result many institutions, including government, but also research sites and large financial institutions continue to buy Cray, SGI and SUN supercomputers, all of which aren't clusters. Just check the latest Top500 list, in particular the slides and statistics.
Remember, we're talking large systems here, and I would define this as more than 16 nodes and more than 32 CPUs minimum.
You're exactly right, and this is why a good Beowulf cluster costs more than N times the price of a single box. You want those extra sensors to detect failing hardware and you want them to be hooked up to some management port which in turn is wired to a management console.
You also want streamlined software configs, automatic integrity checks of OS and software installs and a host of other stuff to keep the software side of the house healthy and under control.
This all adds up and makes a middle to large-sized Beowulf a bit pricier than expected. You will find vast differences between the various Beowulf integrators when it comes to management issues. VA is one that impressed me.
The original article is much better than anything we can say in this discussion. Go and read all five pages of it. Absolutely hilarious, sarcastic and all around well done.
This whole page is the same old flame war that characterizes much of usenet and has been a mainstay of the internet ever since I started to hang out there ten years ago. Get over it, people!
You *will* always disagree strongly with someone, and you *will* likewise be disagreed with by that person. It always creates an endless flame war that does not turn up anything useful. Don't waste your time! (As if I didn't waste mine once more;-) )
Another option: Live with it. Playing catchup games with crackers really makes no sense anymore today. As others said here: If it plays back movies or sound, it can EASILY be cracked.
The real solution is to discourage copying by catering to consumers' REAL needs, i.e. lower the cost to something that makes sense based on what it costs to produce the medium. I have been loyal to all vendors who don't leave me with a feeling of having been ripped off, and I am sure that many others feel and act the same way. After all, this is what our culture (still) embodies in normal (such as in non-commercial) social interactions.
Technological fixes are cheap (as in worthless) band aids. The real problem is a sociocultural one and will persist if not addressed.
Parrish's web page did have way too much of "I did this" and "I found that" and "but nobody believes me" in it to not sound loony (for my taste anyway), but he seems to be a professional speaking about his own field of experience, AND some of his criticisms of company accounting principles fall squarely into the middle of current hot debates.
I was mostly iritated by the strange way the article was written with little or no hard facts to back it up, and conclusions before the 'facts', which in turn preceeded basics. I kept looking for the meat to make up my own mind and barely found any. That's when my mind starts screaming CRACKPOT.
Still, it was interesting reading. I think the sheer size of Microsoft should finally convince them to start acting as responsibly as any other very large company rather than a tech startup.
And it may be very soon that the progress of technology frustrates Celera. Mike Dexter of the Wellcome trust is quoted at the end of the BBC article as "more than a third of the human genome is already available on the Internet, with up to 90% of it due to be published by March next year." Let's hope so!
Now in 1992 the NIH (National Institutes of Health) tried to patent several gene fragments and the PTO sent a rejection notice back to them immediately.
In 1997, the PTO said that it would allow expressed sequence tags (ESTs) to be patented. Now, ESTs are DNA sequences made up to a few hundred base pairs in length that can be used to identify the expression of specific genes.
And today Celera wants to patent 6000 human genes.
There's one single name behind all this: Dr. Craig Venter. He worked at NIH prior to taking up commercial sequencing. Do I see a pattern here?
I used to think like you, but after 3+ years working with 64bit Irix 6.x I have changed my mind.
You'd be surprised by the number of scientific number-crunching apps that port relatively easily (if not trivially) to 64bit. The list keeps growing at a very rapid pace. To me it doesn't look like porting to 64 bits is that much of an issue in practice.
In the life sciences, which is where I live, systems under study are growing very quickly, and we have reached the point where it makes a lot of sense to be able to address gobs of memory without hacks and where there are no file size limitations. Not to mention native support for double precision floating point math in both hardware AND software.
I am sure that for apps in the engineering and physics fields this is even more pronounced.
It will be far less than 3 years until all that high-end stuff trickles down to everyday computing. Remember, the Playstation2 is what, 128bit? The future is already here, just not on your PC.;-)
Correct. The title of this entire discussion is especially misleading, as if Solaris had been 32bit until yesterday. I wish we could moderate/influence titles and intros also.
That said, the news itself is great and is one of the (many) significant milestones on the way to viable IA64 systems.
Now we need to hear great things about compilers (actually, more about the code they produce) for IA64. Can we really reap the benefits of the EPIC architecture in practice any time soon?
Could it be that acceptance of one type of license vs. another simply boils down to readability, i.e. whether a mere mortal can quickly scan and understand it?
In this respect, the BSD and GPL licenses rule, closely followed by the Perl artistic license. All of these are clearly written with understandability in mind, not just with a lawyer's mindset.
However, the licenses that Netscape produced, and worse still what SUN published with their SCSL is so bloated and peppered with legal terms that the average developer may tire and loose momentum before he/she actually reaches the end of the document.
I know I only finished reading the SCSL because I made it a point to be able to report to users here on campus what it may mean to them.
I would think that at least in the academic sector and among the crowd of 'hobby enthusiasts', people have little patience to wade through legalese, hence there will be little participation in 'open source' projects that are marred with a long and incomprehensible license.
ESR stated that a plausible promise will motivate people to participate. This may include an interesting project, strong design and reasonably clean, understandable (and maybe even working) source. I propose that clean and strong design be also applied to the license (or simply use an established and accepted license). lest noone will bother.
Keep in kind that PNAS, the journal this article appeared in, is NOT peer reviewed. Articles can be submitted by members of the National Academy of Sciences, and they can be their own, or they can be submitted on behalf of others. In either case, NAS members vouch for the top quality fo the submitted material. However, some complete junk has appeared in PNAS voer the years, despite the journal's generally high status.
Also, keep in mind that a single publication doesn't make - much less represents - generally held scientific opinion.
But I see that you all are having great fun with some more mundane implications of the article (or rather with the introductory text to it) and aren't overly concerned about its validity in the first place.
And we've been figuring out 'algorithms' (how a teacher 'works') forever. Most of us had to take and pass classes they surely did not enjoy. What did the smarter ones among us do? Find out how to get through with the least amount of effort, part of which was figuring out what the teacher wants and values in the first couple of weeks and then play into that.
This isn't noble, nor desirable, but it is the real world. Automatic grading just changes the medium, not the methods.
School can't be interesting, challenging and important to all students all the time. The real problem is finding the middle ground between hypocrisy and honesty now that I send my own kids to school. And I suspect it must be much worse for teachers.
Yeah, but it also said that later on the registry may migrate to someone else, and that the registry function could be revoked from NSI if they don't comply with rules set forth in the agreement.
Long term, the intent seems to be to completely separate registrar and registry functions, and to ensure that the registry will never align itself closely with any particular registrar.
I think the current status simply reflects the fact that things run reasonably well right now, and that noone could guarantee a glitch-free alternative.
Maybe you can do this on Linux, BUT: Refurbished 486s are just that: Old hardware with lots of things to break. They will be a lot dirtier to maintain than a Sun Ray. Plus, support by a volunteer corps is going to be spotty down the road.
I am all for low-cost solutions using open source stuff, but a school environment really needs reliability, foolproof hardware, and simple admin tools, as many other people have pointed out here.
Right on! Price-performance is of course an interesting factor, but at the very high-end it becomes very much secondary.
I have just sat through a Beowulf-type cluster presentation yesterday and the upshot is that they simply cannot touch some problems. If there is significant communication going on between nodes, especially if it comes in bursts, present-day Beowulf does not cut it.
We are seeing 95%+ efficiency on 64 or even 128 CPUs on a Cray T3E, while a Intel cluster connected through switched 100 BT shows something like 75% at only 16 nodes. Going to Gigabit ethernet, this figure does not improve much, mostly due to inefficient Gigabit drivers. One is then forced to look into much faster, but much costlier interconnects. Then there are also the CPU-to-memory bandwidth and the latency of disk I/O to consider.
Simply stated, Beowulf-type clusters today cannot touch 'real' supercomputers for many types of applications. Those applications do not decompose into embarassingly parallel tasks like rendering frames or brute-force attacks on encryption do.
Now, if only SGI/Cray would develop a T3F based on the 21264 Alpha CPU. We'll keep dreaming and hoping...
My institute has been and still is buying SGI equipment. It makes me (and probably most people around here) a lot more comfortable to see them take drastic steps in order to return to profitability than if they would continue to flounder. When you sign a lease for $3 million, the fiscal health of the partner is VERY important.
I do feel sorry for those that were laid off. From what I have heard it wasn't all that bad for some of them, though.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the point. For true security (as defined by the Orange Book) you need to test and validate all this in a very rigorous manner. This is neither fast nor cheap, and I am afraid it cannot be done in the usual open-source way by a loosely coupled team. Someone has to bite the bullet and just do it along with all the neccessary paperwork involved.
I think that you are basically wrong here. The internet will be 'regulated' anyway, it's just a question by whom. Should it be companies such as access providers, backbone providers, hosting companies and whatnot, or should it be the government?
I believe the government has a moral obligation to step in and make sure that there are basic rules by which everyone has to abide such that internet access and use is fair for everyone. If we let the 'market' forces decide, the outcome might be far less than desirable.
In the past five years as the internet has been increasingly commercialized, I haven't seen things develop for the better. Take streaming audio as a example. Do you think that the prevailing protocols, Realaudio and MS Audio provide much of a choice for the consumer and/or competitor? Are they best of breed? Are they able to be developed further by competitors if the originating company folds or looses interest?
Sure, there's mp3 streaming, but that's about all there is to open, clean, unencumbered (is it really? what with Fraunhofer patents?) standards.
Any commercial outfit out there has the bottomline closest to its heart. Many times it helps the bottomline to keep the customer happy, but not always. When switching costs become too high customer satisfaction is a non-issue, and companies will readily give up their efforts to keep you and me happy. Some will then screw you over big time and not care one bit, as long as the bucks keep coming in.
You may be as cynical about present day politics and governments as I am, but government regulations need to be in place to protect us from being exploited by companies that have the size and power to do so. I would qualify that by demanding that regulation needs to be minimal and geared towards ensuring fairness, openness and most importantly ability to adapt to changing needs.
Seriously, is there anyone who gives a rat's ass about this stuff, except for the companies who (will) make it? I don't want a 'web-enabled' fridge, I don't want a 'web-enabled' toaster, and I sure as hell don't want a 'web-enabled' coffee maker!
I'm with you here!
However, I am a bit torn: When Amazon came out in mid '95, I believe, I thought, 'Who the hell would want to buy books on the internet?' Their website was truly lousy back then.
In the meantime much has changed, of course, and I am buying more books from Amazon than from meat space book stores. Will we find good uses for some internet-enabled appliances eventually?
The current announcements certainly sound ridiculous, but there might be a true winner lurking somewhere. Still, I'm gonna hold out until the nonsense has been separated from the good stuff.
Language barriers are increasingly become a factor on the net because we are encountering people with whom we don't fluently share a common language more frequently. There are several consequence to this. The obvious one is the question of actually communicating with the people we do business with, or want to. Conveying our intentions clearly takes effort. The common vocabulary and context isn't reliably there.
Common context is the real issue here. One can easily pick up enough English (or another language for that matter) to read and speak fluently. However, this doesn't provide context, especially not if one never spent time in the region of the world where the language is spoken.
Case in point: As a native German speaker I have lived in the USA for over ten years total and speak and understand English quite well. People tell me there is almost no accent left (can I really believe them?). Even so, many jokes still are way beyond me because they refer to cultural issues that I haven't seen yet or simply don't care about enough to learn more.
These are vast barriers to unencumbered communication around the globe. I am afraid that this might create two classes of 'digital world citizens': Those who assimilate another language and culture well and hence can relate to the majority of fellow world citizens and thus are successful, and those who have difficulties for a variety of reasons and will loose out.
I realized a very long time ago that I was wasting my time reading daily newspapers. The news wasn't new, really, and moreover it wasn't digested enough to make it worthwhile. So I stopped subscribing to the daily newspaper and used the time for being with my family. That was far more gratifying.
The breaking news were mostly stale when I read it in the paper. Many times I and everyone else knew at least as much from electronic media such as TV and radio.
Today we have the web and other internet resources to supplement and to some extent surpass the traditional TV and radio news sources. Newspapers get left behind even more.
On the other hand, many stories aren't covered in a regular newspaper in a way that makes it worthwhile for me. For the most part I couldn't care less about the latest troop movements in Kosovo. But I want context, background, analysis and such; the big picture. Dailies never gave me enough of that at all. Neither do dedicated news resources on the web today. However, weeklies and monthlies really shine here, as do a host of non-news web sites, many of which are carefully tended by amateurs. On the web, I especially appreciate the heavy biases of many site authors, a quality that has all but vanished from the print press of today. I can balance between conflicting opinions myself. No need for an editor, thank you.
When I stopped reading daily newspapers fifteen years ago, I also felt that the sheer amount of 'news' in a daily was a burden on me, occupying way too much of my attention. Many facts didn't pertain to my life, in fact did not matter to most people around me and were plainly beyond my reach of influence, even if I'd care. So why bother?
Today, I am not reading a daily, not listening to radio news, not watching TV news (don't own a TV, actually) and not reading much news on the internet. I feel very much lighter than when I was fully immersed in all the heavy stuff other people felt/decided would be of interest to me. A lot of mind clutter is gone.
Have I ever missed reading a daily newspaper? No, not once. I have bought a paper on occasion, if I thought I'd really wanted to check out an issue.
Am I feeling badly informed? Hell no. News of the really important variety has a way of filtering through society and reaching people whether they actively seek it out or not. People's collective filtering ability is simply marvelous. I have been very aware of many truly important events, such as the fall of the Berlin wall, the start of the Gulf war, the whole Kosovo thing and many others, even if noone explicitly reminded me to check them out.
On the other hand, I have hours of free time each day to devote to more wholesome tasks, such as caring for my wife and kids, looking after the house, spending time with friends, etc. Most importantly, my mind is not occupied with totally useless and badly connected factoids that don't pertain to my life in the first place.
Yeah, I've been thinking along the same lines for a while. As far as I know, individual CDs don't have unique identifiers such that the BeamIt software could tell you, 'Sorry, this particular CD has been beamed already!'. The CD identifier being mentioned in the paper seems to only identify the album as Title X by Artist Y, not Title X by Artist Y, number Z in series . Maybe I am am wrong and someone who knows can enlighten us?
In the end it all boils down to whether an action is legal and to what extent we as individuals are willing to obey the law. Noone prevents me from speeding, but I can get caught and fined, so I choose not to speed. I would think that many people would respect copyright laws and fines imposed on violators if caught and therefore not beam CDs they don't own.
I suppose it's #2, but I don't agree that this might be legal.
I think this class action suit has a real chance if played right. I don't know the exact details, but from what we've heard/read so far, users aren't properly informed that their other ISP settings will be 'removed', as in 'deleted' instead of 'disabled' or 'backed up'. This would be clearly misleading, and it is unfair competition on top of that. Basis for anti trust action, perhaps? But we're digressing...
Keep in mind that AOL users are typically not technically adept and deserve clear and unambigous information about what the effect will be when they click a button.
Christoph
I too am sceptical. I was loking for specs and benchmarks at their website, but found none.
What's more, there was a curious quote from customer Richard Santucci who used to work here at Scripps. What strikes me is that I never heard of a Patmos system being connected to our network, and I am one of the two HPC support guys on campus. Rumours about loaner systems usually spread like wildfire, even if we aren't directly involved. There is also no mention of one in our hosts database.
Richard, if you're out there, maybe you can shed some light on the issue.
Not true! While clusters and in particular Linux clusters are coming on strong, there are things that they just can't do.
The bandwidth of the interconnects on a Beowulf and worse still their latency are just not there yet to go head to head with a traditional supercomputer. They are getting very close, I admit, but haven't consistently beaten a Cray T3E-type interconnect yet.
Also, some codes/algorithms just don't lend themselves well to massively parallel implementations. They might be much happier on SMP-type machines or perhaps on vector machines.
Finally, some of the management issues for very large Linux clusters aren't fully resolved yet, but they have been in place on traditional supercomputers for quite some time.
As a result many institutions, including government, but also research sites and large financial institutions continue to buy Cray, SGI and SUN supercomputers, all of which aren't clusters. Just check the latest Top500 list, in particular the slides and statistics.
Remember, we're talking large systems here, and I would define this as more than 16 nodes and more than 32 CPUs minimum.
You're exactly right, and this is why a good Beowulf cluster costs more than N times the price of a single box. You want those extra sensors to detect failing hardware and you want them to be hooked up to some management port which in turn is wired to a management console.
You also want streamlined software configs, automatic integrity checks of OS and software installs and a host of other stuff to keep the software side of the house healthy and under control.
This all adds up and makes a middle to large-sized Beowulf a bit pricier than expected. You will find vast differences between the various Beowulf integrators when it comes to management issues. VA is one that impressed me.
The original article is much better than anything we can say in this discussion. Go and read all five pages of it. Absolutely hilarious, sarcastic and all around well done.
This whole page is the same old flame war that characterizes much of usenet and has been a mainstay of the internet ever since I started to hang out there ten years ago. Get over it, people!
;-) )
You *will* always disagree strongly with someone, and you *will* likewise be disagreed with by that person. It always creates an endless flame war that does not turn up anything useful. Don't waste your time!
(As if I didn't waste mine once more
Another option: Live with it.
Playing catchup games with crackers really makes no sense anymore today. As others said here: If it plays back movies or sound, it can EASILY be cracked.
The real solution is to discourage copying by catering to consumers' REAL needs, i.e. lower the cost to something that makes sense based on what it costs to produce the medium. I have been loyal to all vendors who don't leave me with a feeling of having been ripped off, and I am sure that many others feel and act the same way. After all, this is what our culture (still) embodies in normal (such as in non-commercial) social interactions.
Technological fixes are cheap (as in worthless) band aids. The real problem is a sociocultural one and will persist if not addressed.
Right you are!
Parrish's web page did have way too much of "I did this" and "I found that" and "but nobody believes me" in it to not sound loony (for my taste anyway), but he seems to be a professional speaking about his own field of experience, AND some of his criticisms of company accounting principles fall squarely into the middle of current hot debates.
I was mostly iritated by the strange way the article was written with little or no hard facts to back it up, and conclusions before the 'facts', which in turn preceeded basics. I kept looking for the meat to make up my own mind and barely found any.
That's when my mind starts screaming CRACKPOT.
Still, it was interesting reading. I think the sheer size of Microsoft should finally convince them to start acting as responsibly as any other very large company rather than a tech startup.
And it may be very soon that the progress of technology frustrates Celera. Mike Dexter of the Wellcome trust is quoted at the end of the BBC article as "more than a third of the human genome is already available on the Internet, with up to 90% of it due to be published by March next year." Let's hope so!
Now in 1992 the NIH (National Institutes of Health) tried to patent several gene fragments and the PTO sent a rejection notice back to them immediately.
In 1997, the PTO said that it would allow expressed sequence tags (ESTs) to be patented. Now, ESTs are DNA sequences made up to a few hundred base pairs in length that can be used to identify the expression of specific genes.
And today Celera wants to patent 6000 human genes.
There's one single name behind all this: Dr. Craig Venter. He worked at NIH prior to taking up commercial sequencing. Do I see a pattern here?
I used to think like you, but after 3+ years working with 64bit Irix 6.x I have changed my mind.
;-)
You'd be surprised by the number of scientific number-crunching apps that port relatively easily (if not trivially) to 64bit. The list keeps growing at a very rapid pace. To me it doesn't look like porting to 64 bits is that much of an issue in practice.
In the life sciences, which is where I live, systems under study are growing very quickly, and we have reached the point where it makes a lot of sense to be able to address gobs of memory without hacks and where there are no file size limitations. Not to mention native support for double precision floating point math in both hardware AND software.
I am sure that for apps in the engineering and physics fields this is even more pronounced.
It will be far less than 3 years until all that high-end stuff trickles down to everyday computing. Remember, the Playstation2 is what, 128bit? The future is already here, just not on your PC.
Correct. The title of this entire discussion is especially misleading, as if Solaris had been 32bit until yesterday. I wish we could moderate/influence titles and intros also.
That said, the news itself is great and is one of the (many) significant milestones on the way to viable IA64 systems.
Now we need to hear great things about compilers (actually, more about the code they produce) for IA64. Can we really reap the benefits of the EPIC architecture in practice any time soon?
Could it be that acceptance of one type of license vs. another simply boils down to readability, i.e. whether a mere mortal can quickly scan and understand it?
In this respect, the BSD and GPL licenses rule, closely followed by the Perl artistic license. All of these are clearly written with understandability in mind, not just with a lawyer's mindset.
However, the licenses that Netscape produced, and worse still what SUN published with their SCSL is so bloated and peppered with legal terms that the average developer may tire and loose momentum before he/she actually reaches the end of the document.
I know I only finished reading the SCSL because I made it a point to be able to report to users here on campus what it may mean to them.
I would think that at least in the academic sector and among the crowd of 'hobby enthusiasts', people have little patience to wade through legalese, hence there will be little participation in 'open source' projects that are marred with a long and incomprehensible license.
ESR stated that a plausible promise will motivate people to participate. This may include an interesting project, strong design and reasonably clean, understandable (and maybe even working) source. I propose that clean and strong design be also applied to the license (or simply use an established and accepted license). lest noone will bother.
Keep in kind that PNAS, the journal this article appeared in, is NOT peer reviewed. Articles can be submitted by members of the National Academy of Sciences, and they can be their own, or they can be submitted on behalf of others. In either case, NAS members vouch for the top quality fo the submitted material. However, some complete junk has appeared in PNAS voer the years, despite the journal's generally high status.
Also, keep in mind that a single publication doesn't make - much less represents - generally held scientific opinion.
But I see that you all are having great fun with some more mundane implications of the article (or rather with the introductory text to it) and aren't overly concerned about its validity in the first place.
And we've been figuring out 'algorithms' (how a teacher 'works') forever. Most of us had to take and pass classes they surely did not enjoy. What did the smarter ones among us do? Find out how to get through with the least amount of effort, part of which was figuring out what the teacher wants and values in the first couple of weeks and then play into that.
This isn't noble, nor desirable, but it is the real world. Automatic grading just changes the medium, not the methods.
School can't be interesting, challenging and important to all students all the time.
The real problem is finding the middle ground between hypocrisy and honesty now that I send my own kids to school. And I suspect it must be much worse for teachers.
Yeah, but it also said that later on the registry may migrate to someone else, and that the registry function could be revoked from NSI if they don't comply with rules set forth in the agreement.
Long term, the intent seems to be to completely separate registrar and registry functions, and to ensure that the registry will never align itself closely with any particular registrar.
I think the current status simply reflects the fact that things run reasonably well right now, and that noone could guarantee a glitch-free alternative.
Maybe you can do this on Linux, BUT: Refurbished 486s are just that: Old hardware with lots of things to break. They will be a lot dirtier to maintain than a Sun Ray. Plus, support by a volunteer corps is going to be spotty down the road.
I am all for low-cost solutions using open source stuff, but a school environment really needs reliability, foolproof hardware, and simple admin tools, as many other people have pointed out here.
Right on! Price-performance is of course an interesting factor, but at the very high-end it becomes very much secondary.
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I have just sat through a Beowulf-type cluster presentation yesterday and the upshot is that they simply cannot touch some problems. If there is significant communication going on between nodes, especially if it comes in bursts, present-day Beowulf does not cut it.
We are seeing 95%+ efficiency on 64 or even 128 CPUs on a Cray T3E, while a Intel cluster connected through switched 100 BT shows something like 75% at only 16 nodes. Going to Gigabit ethernet, this figure does not improve much, mostly due to inefficient Gigabit drivers. One is then forced to look into much faster, but much costlier interconnects.
Then there are also the CPU-to-memory bandwidth and the latency of disk I/O to consider.
Simply stated, Beowulf-type clusters today cannot touch 'real' supercomputers for many types of applications. Those applications do not decompose into embarassingly parallel tasks like rendering frames or brute-force attacks on encryption do.
Now, if only SGI/Cray would develop a T3F based on the 21264 Alpha CPU.
We'll keep dreaming and hoping
My institute has been and still is buying SGI equipment. It makes me (and probably most people around here) a lot more comfortable to see them take drastic steps in order to return to profitability than if they would continue to flounder. When you sign a lease for $3 million, the fiscal health of the partner is VERY important.
I do feel sorry for those that were laid off. From what I have heard it wasn't all that bad for some of them, though.