They have always been a one-trick pony. Instant cameras and film were it for them, and everything else was just a little sideline.
Many moons ago Polaroid sued the pants off of Kodak for patent infringement, winning back exclusive rights to "instant" film and cameras as well as a good chunk of cash.
Their corporate culture didn't allow them to recognize that the "instant" film market, their baby, had reached the end of its lifespan.
Times had changed and Polaroid didn't change with them. They never gave more than a nod to anything other than their heritage.
Those who insist on living in the past have no place in the future.
Actually many of the devices are SWITCHES not ROUTERS. This make a big difference.
Routers (Cisco) make routing decisions on a per-packet basis, unless they are using MPLS.
Switches (Lucent, Nortel) create connections that are up for the length of the communication (if not longer). The entire message takes the same path -- no decisions, or mirror-flipping, necessary other than at setup.
The optical switches make good sense at aggregate points, where large amounts of traffic are forwarded. MAE points; big cities; etc. are great for this. Lucent's customers use them for trans-oceanic and trans-continental routing of LARGE amounts of data (800 Gbps - 1.6 Tbps).
In Lucent's devices (MEMS mirrors on a chip), there is a mirror per wavelength (256 total per MEMS chip).
Charles E. Hill
Core Network Engineer
Lucent Worldwide Services
The U.S. didn't fund the Taleban. They funded the Mujhideen rebels in a fight against Soviet occupation.
Some of the Mujhideen later became the Taleban but there is STILL a difference. The Mujhideen were fighting an *occupying foreign army*, not exporting death and terror to uninvolved civilians.
The $43 million was, I thought, a UN number and not from the U.S. Either way, Afghanistan was by far the largest producer of opium and heroin in the world. The money was part of an incentive to get them to plant non-narcotic, edible plants. Would you rather we just burned the drug crops to the ground and not try and help the people whose lives depended on the cash to live? We aren't talking drug lords with Cadillacs, hot tubs and mansions, but subsistance farmers for whom the difference between grain and poppies was starvation or not.
YOU'RE misinformed. The Taleban are NOT a CIA creation. Yes, the CIA funded the Mujhadeen against the Soviets and some of the Taliban are Mujhadeen, but they are NOT one in the same.
Pakistan created and supplied a lot of the Taliban so they wouldn't have to honor the Durbin Agreement made when the British pulled out of the area and give back Pashtookistan (half of Pakistan).
It also provided a wonderful training ground for fighters against India, with whom they have already fought 3 wars regarding a mostly-Islamic Indian border province.
Learn more of history than just the "Americans are to blame for EVERYTHING" part.
And I agree with the CIA operative who was arguing they did the right thing.
I'd damn well rather face a country of 22-million who can help organize an occasional terrorist attack than one that could drop nuclear bombs in every major city in the U.S.
What happened was a great tragedy, but get your damn priorities straight -- a couple of nukes in NYC would have killed MILLIONS, not a few thousand.
Despite your "opinion" of the Soviet threat, they had a real military capable of fighting a major war and were a major threat in their time.
The threat from Afghanistan and that of the old Soviet Union are incomparable.
"Friends" include gov'ts who supply money, weapons and sanctuary to these terrorists. Gov'ts like Syria, Algeria, Iraq and Afghanistan who provide facilites for training, weapons, instruction, intelligence and the protection of a "sovreign nation" for al Queda, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and other violent, extremist organizations.
Unlike the rest of the world, the United States will do it's level best to avoid civilian casualties. Yes, there will be suffering, pain and death of the Afghan people. It is unavoidable. However, odds are there will be less civilian deaths caused by any U.S. attack on Afghanistan than was caused by the terrorist actions in recent days.
Odds are we won't kill as many Afghan civilians as the Taliban have.
Osama Bin Laden declared a holy war against the U.S. after we stationed troops in Saudi Arabia in Desert Storm.
He didn't object to us killing Iraqis, but rather western troops on Saudi soil were an affront to Islam.
Thus, contrary to your reasoning, they "justified" the attacks WITHOUT some perceived act of violence against them, merely a trespass.
In short, HE started the violence -- simply because we were there and he didn't want us there. He, as a civilian, took it upon himself to wage war against a Nation.
There is a big damn difference between our reasoning and theirs. Had they attacked any sort of military target, you may have a point. Attacking civilian targets -- loaded with people completely unrelated to anything to do with their "cause" -- is what sets us apart from them. (Yes, "unrelated". Nationals from how many countries? Including muslims, arabs, etc.)
Those types of actions cannot be ignored and cannot go unpunished.
The Soviets and the British were fighting wars of occupation and control. The Soviets wanted a stable satellite state. The British wanted to expand their empire and control the land routes from India (already controlled) back to Europe.
We don't want control. We are not looking to occupy. We don't give a shit if the Afghans harass the Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, Tajiks, Russians, etc. We are going in to kill some people and destroy some military equipment & training camps.
No, Afghanistand does not have major infrastructure -- no television, radio or internet; no major roads; no centralized anything.
They DO have airports (a couple), tanks and planes that are used to fight the "Northern Alliance". They encourage locals to grow and export poppy products (heroin & opium) to the point that Afghanistan is the #1 supplier of those drugs worldwide. Only 10% of their land is arable, and 90% of that is used for poppy production. This results in the vast majority of the gov't income.
Destroy what military we can find, and let the freshly supplied Northern Alliance fight on the ground. (It IS their land, after all.) Destroy a few crops of poppies; freeze all their remaining assets and seal the borders as much as possible and their income will dry up. Can't afford bullets, guns or bombs.
Funnel aid (actual food & medicine, not money) through the Northern Alliance.
Yes, people are going to die. Yes, civilians are going to die. They entire damn country was starving before (over 2 million refugees in Pakistan and 1 million in Iran before all this started -- that's 15% of Afghanistan's reported population). Maybe once the Taliban is gone something can be done. It sure as hell wasn't when they were in power.
Remember Code Blue a week or so ago? The one that affected Apache/Unix users? The media called it the "Code Red" of the Unix world. What happened with it? Nothing. Most systems were secured against it by default.
Nimbda affected more systems in 10 minutes than Code Blue did in the past week.
What I am worried about is knee-jerk, feel-good legislation. Passing sweeping legislation right after a tragedy of this magnitude is underhanded and deceitful. It is playing off of the emotions and ignorance of the general populace.
Banning unbackdoored strong crypto will have a devestating effect on world commerce. Except for a short (few months, maybe) period following 9/11/2001 most people will be more concerned with the security of their bank account than with a potential terrorist attack.
The National Counterintelligence Center (http://www.nacic.gov/) is well aware of the legitimate uses of strong crypto: banking, commerce, protecting trade secrets, etc. The U.S. loses billions of dollars a year to industrial espionage -- much of it State sponsored.
The entire world banking system relies on strong crypto.
Terrorists can easily switch to something else -- like code words; written instructions; steganography.
How many BILLIONS of web pages are out there? Does anyone really believe anyone can monitor them all for "suspicious" traffic? Sift through them for hidden messages; code phrases; etc.
Yes, the gov't has to do something. However, that something should be an intelligent, well thought out response, not knee-jerk feel-good legislation that really won't solve the problem.
Some memories are better left alone. I played the first 3 Ultimas on a C64, and was enthralled. A couple of classmates (high school) and I went as far as to write a basic, in BASIC, 2D engine for displaying Ultima-like graphics and dealing with movement, collisions, etc. It seriously helped propel some of us into computers.
HOWEVER, thinking back on what was fond memories of hours, no WEEKS, lost to playing these games it is better left alone.
You can never go back. I fear all this project will do is demonstrate the reality isn't a match for my memory of the past.
This is going out to my Congressman in tomorrow's mail. The same thing with minor variations is also going to each of my State's Senators.
(Note: On paper it is formatted properly.)
* * *
Rep. ,
On Thursday, Sept. 13, 2001 the Honorable Senator Judd Gregg (R- New Hampshire) made a speed on the floor of the Senate calling for global prohibition on encryption products without backdoors for government surveillance.
I am writing to express my vehement disagreement with this sentiment, and to urge you, as my duly elected Representative, to vote against any such bill that is presented to the House of Representatives.
The National Counterintelligence Center (http://www.nacic.gov/) coordinates the US Government's effort to identify and counter foreign intelligence threats to US national and economic security. They are staffed from counterintelligence (CI) and security professionals from the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, the Office of Secretary of Defense, the military services, and the Departments of State and Energy. In addition to annual reports presented to Congress, they also publish special reports about economic and industrial espionage and provide American businesses with materials to help them secure their valuable trade secrets.
These reports detail the billions of dollars lost to American businesses and individuals each year due to economic and industrial espionage committed by foreign and domestic competitors. Many foreign governments are active in assisting their domestic businesses in economic espionage against U.S. interests. Specifically listed are China, Japan, France, Russia, Israel, Korea and others.
Please notice that many of the countries listed are counted as U.S. allies.
Strong encryption plays a crucial role in protecting vital U.S. assets in an ever more networked world. The use of strong encryption by terrorists and other undesirables is inevitable. Outlawing it will not provide any further measure of security, as they are criminals and by definition, will not comply with the law.
In his zeal to act in the best interests of the American people, Sen. Gregg ignored the impossibility of enforcing a global ban on strong encryption. I doubt that in a clear moment he would honestly say that such a ban could be enforced in Libya, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Algeria, Bulgaria, China, North Korea and the dozens of other nations I did not list.
In closing, I again urge you to intelligently consider the dangers of restricting American liberties through knee-jerk, feel-good legislation.
As Benjamin Franklin said more than 200 years ago: "Those who are willing to trade freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
Sincerely,
What I didn't post in the "Ask Slashdot" question was details about the setup I was working with.
Yes, I compile quite a few of my own apps -- including entire systems using http://www.linuxfromscratch.org for my main system. Very educational.
More details: Workstations only, not servers. I have set up several ThinkNIC systems to boot via ethernet/NFS. They have 256 MB of RAM, and a 4 Mb flash disk that is used for caching certain temporary files. The rest of the setup mounts all the partitions via NFS -- except swap. While swap CAN be done via NFS, I am trying to work around it altogether.
The applications running on the systems are not normally memory hogs. This is a classroom setup, so students logon/logoff hourly and the workstations are rebooted daily. This means I have less to worry about with minor memory leaks building up over time.
The network is switched, fast ethernet and all apps run locally, using the RAM and CPU of the NIC.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct.
My grandmother purchased two Polaroid cameras for my kids (11 & 12) last Christmas. They took instant "sticker" photos, the size of a postage stamp.
Cute, for about 5 minutes. The pictures were way too small, and the replacement film cost and arm and a leg.
The cameras lasted about a week. Real crap.
Not quite. Polaroid has a lock on ANY "instant" or self-developing film.
They make some professional "instant" cameras that take dynamite photos. However, there is only so big of a market for those.
I saw one where the film was poster-sized. Some model photographer in NYC used it. Real good pictures. Real small target-market.
They have always been a one-trick pony. Instant cameras and film were it for them, and everything else was just a little sideline.
Many moons ago Polaroid sued the pants off of Kodak for patent infringement, winning back exclusive rights to "instant" film and cameras as well as a good chunk of cash.
Their corporate culture didn't allow them to recognize that the "instant" film market, their baby, had reached the end of its lifespan.
Times had changed and Polaroid didn't change with them. They never gave more than a nod to anything other than their heritage.
Those who insist on living in the past have no place in the future.
Actually many of the devices are SWITCHES not ROUTERS. This make a big difference.
Routers (Cisco) make routing decisions on a per-packet basis, unless they are using MPLS.
Switches (Lucent, Nortel) create connections that are up for the length of the communication (if not longer). The entire message takes the same path -- no decisions, or mirror-flipping, necessary other than at setup.
The optical switches make good sense at aggregate points, where large amounts of traffic are forwarded. MAE points; big cities; etc. are great for this. Lucent's customers use them for trans-oceanic and trans-continental routing of LARGE amounts of data (800 Gbps - 1.6 Tbps).
In Lucent's devices (MEMS mirrors on a chip), there is a mirror per wavelength (256 total per MEMS chip).
Charles E. Hill
Core Network Engineer
Lucent Worldwide Services
I'd much rather have the Zero Gum laser than a pyramid keyboard.
The U.S. didn't fund the Taleban. They funded the Mujhideen rebels in a fight against Soviet occupation.
Some of the Mujhideen later became the Taleban but there is STILL a difference. The Mujhideen were fighting an *occupying foreign army*, not exporting death and terror to uninvolved civilians.
The $43 million was, I thought, a UN number and not from the U.S. Either way, Afghanistan was by far the largest producer of opium and heroin in the world. The money was part of an incentive to get them to plant non-narcotic, edible plants. Would you rather we just burned the drug crops to the ground and not try and help the people whose lives depended on the cash to live? We aren't talking drug lords with Cadillacs, hot tubs and mansions, but subsistance farmers for whom the difference between grain and poppies was starvation or not.
I doubt we are interested in installing anyone. That would be up to the Northern Alliance to deal with, if they can take control.
YOU'RE misinformed. The Taleban are NOT a CIA creation. Yes, the CIA funded the Mujhadeen against the Soviets and some of the Taliban are Mujhadeen, but they are NOT one in the same.
Pakistan created and supplied a lot of the Taliban so they wouldn't have to honor the Durbin Agreement made when the British pulled out of the area and give back Pashtookistan (half of Pakistan).
It also provided a wonderful training ground for fighters against India, with whom they have already fought 3 wars regarding a mostly-Islamic Indian border province.
Learn more of history than just the "Americans are to blame for EVERYTHING" part.
And I agree with the CIA operative who was arguing they did the right thing.
I'd damn well rather face a country of 22-million who can help organize an occasional terrorist attack than one that could drop nuclear bombs in every major city in the U.S.
What happened was a great tragedy, but get your damn priorities straight -- a couple of nukes in NYC would have killed MILLIONS, not a few thousand.
Despite your "opinion" of the Soviet threat, they had a real military capable of fighting a major war and were a major threat in their time.
The threat from Afghanistan and that of the old Soviet Union are incomparable.
"Friends" include gov'ts who supply money, weapons and sanctuary to these terrorists. Gov'ts like Syria, Algeria, Iraq and Afghanistan who provide facilites for training, weapons, instruction, intelligence and the protection of a "sovreign nation" for al Queda, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and other violent, extremist organizations.
Unlike the rest of the world, the United States will do it's level best to avoid civilian casualties. Yes, there will be suffering, pain and death of the Afghan people. It is unavoidable. However, odds are there will be less civilian deaths caused by any U.S. attack on Afghanistan than was caused by the terrorist actions in recent days.
Odds are we won't kill as many Afghan civilians as the Taliban have.
Osama Bin Laden declared a holy war against the U.S. after we stationed troops in Saudi Arabia in Desert Storm.
He didn't object to us killing Iraqis, but rather western troops on Saudi soil were an affront to Islam.
Thus, contrary to your reasoning, they "justified" the attacks WITHOUT some perceived act of violence against them, merely a trespass.
In short, HE started the violence -- simply because we were there and he didn't want us there. He, as a civilian, took it upon himself to wage war against a Nation.
There is a big damn difference between our reasoning and theirs. Had they attacked any sort of military target, you may have a point. Attacking civilian targets -- loaded with people completely unrelated to anything to do with their "cause" -- is what sets us apart from them. (Yes, "unrelated". Nationals from how many countries? Including muslims, arabs, etc.)
Those types of actions cannot be ignored and cannot go unpunished.
Thanks
The Soviets and the British were fighting wars of occupation and control. The Soviets wanted a stable satellite state. The British wanted to expand their empire and control the land routes from India (already controlled) back to Europe.
We don't want control. We are not looking to occupy. We don't give a shit if the Afghans harass the Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, Tajiks, Russians, etc. We are going in to kill some people and destroy some military equipment & training camps.
No, Afghanistand does not have major infrastructure -- no television, radio or internet; no major roads; no centralized anything.
They DO have airports (a couple), tanks and planes that are used to fight the "Northern Alliance". They encourage locals to grow and export poppy products (heroin & opium) to the point that Afghanistan is the #1 supplier of those drugs worldwide. Only 10% of their land is arable, and 90% of that is used for poppy production. This results in the vast majority of the gov't income.
Destroy what military we can find, and let the freshly supplied Northern Alliance fight on the ground. (It IS their land, after all.) Destroy a few crops of poppies; freeze all their remaining assets and seal the borders as much as possible and their income will dry up. Can't afford bullets, guns or bombs.
Funnel aid (actual food & medicine, not money) through the Northern Alliance.
Yes, people are going to die. Yes, civilians are going to die. They entire damn country was starving before (over 2 million refugees in Pakistan and 1 million in Iran before all this started -- that's 15% of Afghanistan's reported population). Maybe once the Taliban is gone something can be done. It sure as hell wasn't when they were in power.
I've got a very similar setup: Dual P3-450, 512 Mb and some 10K UltraSCSI drives.
For the record, KDE 2.2.1 and related packages took 8 hours to compile and install.
That doesn't include downloading...oops, need that package too...download...repeat for 2 hours.
My ISP (Road Runner) suggested it verbally and pointed out in the TOS they also recommend one for users.
Sorry. Apache is more prevalent than IIS.
Remember Code Blue a week or so ago? The one that affected Apache/Unix users? The media called it the "Code Red" of the Unix world. What happened with it? Nothing. Most systems were secured against it by default.
Nimbda affected more systems in 10 minutes than Code Blue did in the past week.
What I am worried about is knee-jerk, feel-good legislation. Passing sweeping legislation right after a tragedy of this magnitude is underhanded and deceitful. It is playing off of the emotions and ignorance of the general populace.
Banning unbackdoored strong crypto will have a devestating effect on world commerce. Except for a short (few months, maybe) period following 9/11/2001 most people will be more concerned with the security of their bank account than with a potential terrorist attack.
The National Counterintelligence Center (http://www.nacic.gov/) is well aware of the legitimate uses of strong crypto: banking, commerce, protecting trade secrets, etc. The U.S. loses billions of dollars a year to industrial espionage -- much of it State sponsored.
The entire world banking system relies on strong crypto.
Terrorists can easily switch to something else -- like code words; written instructions; steganography.
How many BILLIONS of web pages are out there? Does anyone really believe anyone can monitor them all for "suspicious" traffic? Sift through them for hidden messages; code phrases; etc.
Yes, the gov't has to do something. However, that something should be an intelligent, well thought out response, not knee-jerk feel-good legislation that really won't solve the problem.
You're confusing steganography (data hiding) with cryptography (data obfuscation).
You're right, though.
Some memories are better left alone. I played the first 3 Ultimas on a C64, and was enthralled. A couple of classmates (high school) and I went as far as to write a basic, in BASIC, 2D engine for displaying Ultima-like graphics and dealing with movement, collisions, etc. It seriously helped propel some of us into computers.
HOWEVER, thinking back on what was fond memories of hours, no WEEKS, lost to playing these games it is better left alone.
You can never go back. I fear all this project will do is demonstrate the reality isn't a match for my memory of the past.
Either, both.
Names in Arabic, Farsi and other Middle Eastern languages are frequently spelled differently when translted to English, depending on the translator.
Check the news archives for the spelling of Libya's leader:
Khadaffi
Kadaffi
Qadaffi
Qadafi
Gadaffi
Ghadaffi
I've seen all of the above used by various "big name" news sources.
Same with bin Laden -- Usama or Osama depending on who does the translating.
In all honesty -- "Walking Corpse" is probably more accurate.
This is going out to my Congressman in tomorrow's mail. The same thing with minor variations is also going to each of my State's Senators.
(Note: On paper it is formatted properly.)
* * *
Rep. ,
On Thursday, Sept. 13, 2001 the Honorable Senator Judd Gregg (R- New Hampshire) made a speed on the floor of the Senate calling for global prohibition on encryption products without backdoors for government surveillance.
I am writing to express my vehement disagreement with this sentiment, and to urge you, as my duly elected Representative, to vote against any such bill that is presented to the House of Representatives.
The National Counterintelligence Center (http://www.nacic.gov/) coordinates the US Government's effort to identify and counter foreign intelligence threats to US national and economic security. They are staffed from counterintelligence (CI) and security professionals from the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, the Office of Secretary of Defense, the military services, and the Departments of State and Energy. In addition to annual reports presented to Congress, they also publish special reports about economic and industrial espionage and provide American businesses with materials to help them secure their valuable trade secrets.
These reports detail the billions of dollars lost to American businesses and individuals each year due to economic and industrial espionage committed by foreign and domestic competitors. Many foreign governments are active in assisting their domestic businesses in economic espionage against U.S. interests. Specifically listed are China, Japan, France, Russia, Israel, Korea and others.
Please notice that many of the countries listed are counted as U.S. allies.
Strong encryption plays a crucial role in protecting vital U.S. assets in an ever more networked world. The use of strong encryption by terrorists and other undesirables is inevitable. Outlawing it will not provide any further measure of security, as they are criminals and by definition, will not comply with the law.
In his zeal to act in the best interests of the American people, Sen. Gregg ignored the impossibility of enforcing a global ban on strong encryption. I doubt that in a clear moment he would honestly say that such a ban could be enforced in Libya, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Algeria, Bulgaria, China, North Korea and the dozens of other nations I did not list.
In closing, I again urge you to intelligently consider the dangers of restricting American liberties through knee-jerk, feel-good legislation.
As Benjamin Franklin said more than 200 years ago: "Those who are willing to trade freedom for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
Sincerely,
What I didn't post in the "Ask Slashdot" question was details about the setup I was working with.
Yes, I compile quite a few of my own apps -- including entire systems using http://www.linuxfromscratch.org for my main system. Very educational.
More details: Workstations only, not servers. I have set up several ThinkNIC systems to boot via ethernet/NFS. They have 256 MB of RAM, and a 4 Mb flash disk that is used for caching certain temporary files. The rest of the setup mounts all the partitions via NFS -- except swap. While swap CAN be done via NFS, I am trying to work around it altogether.
The applications running on the systems are not normally memory hogs. This is a classroom setup, so students logon/logoff hourly and the workstations are rebooted daily. This means I have less to worry about with minor memory leaks building up over time.
The network is switched, fast ethernet and all apps run locally, using the RAM and CPU of the NIC.
What will AMD and Intel try to one-up each other with? No clock speed, so how do you classify, much less hype, new processors?
The real reason they haven't moved to this yet is their marketing team doesn't want to give up on the MHz race.
and thanks for the information. If I couldn't load CNN due to traffic, I was able to get through to /. and at least get updates.
Need a flight simulator? Heck, just use the one in Excel!
Bloat.
I think you mean "condemn". Condone means to support.
-chill