According to The Times, it was actually a number of new _plants_ discovered near this "neighbouring" star (neighbours 27 light-years away? I should be so lucky). They were apparently accompanied by a slightly surprised looking whale.
The point of the Blue Pill demonstration appears not to be that there's some security flaw in Vista, but that, if you can somehow get Administrator access to any x64-based system (i.e. not just Vista...) then you can switch that system from running directly on the host hardware to effectively running within a virtual-machine that looks identical to that hardware, but over which you have complete control. Nothing on the host OS has any way to detect that this has happened (except, I suspect, through performance monitoring, etc), so no virus checker can protect systems from it.
Hmmm. I think that the average user has a tendency to want to browse to see what is available, which is best served by a dselect-like program. For people wanting to set up server boxes or boxes for a particular task (CPU farms, storage servers, etc), your approach is probably preferable, though.
My point is that Jo Shmoe and Linux Guru are two different people. There are huge numbers of window managers to choose from, to suit different kinds of user - why can't there be different levels of package manager?
Gupta seems to have missed PEN (formerly PicoNet), a low power network developed by AT&T Labs Cambridge (formerly Olivetti and Oracle Research Labs). They built some prototype hardware and designed power-saving radio protocols for it. Further work with PEN has been done at the Laboratory for Communications Engineering at Cambridge University.
Actually, there has been a project called CarNet, a proposed improvement to the routing protocols of the MANET project, which looks at protocols for IP routing over mobile nodes.
This clause of the Windows license isn't new, I don't think. It appeared a few years ago, as I recall, when Windows 98 was released. It happened to coincide with Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition coming out.
VNC does only transmit the areas which claim to have changed. Under Windows this is hard to detect without replacing device drivers and suchlike, so WinVNC has to check whether things have really changed, which eats CPU in some cases and leads to lag.
The thin-client design allows you to deploy the phones without worrying about the cost of having to fire upgrades at them, and allows you to build them using some really cheap, simple, hardware.
By providing services from a central server, yes, AT&T is obviously trying to make some money out of people, but it also means that whenever a new service or upgrade is available, it can happen in one place, and for everyone, transparently. Conflicts between updates can be dealt with before the upgraded system is even placed online, rather than having users sit there fiddling with broken phones as they often do with "upgraded" PCs. It's unreasonable to expect the average consumer to want to administer their own phone.
And of course because the phone has a display, not just IP telephony, on it, so you can provide much more than just phone calls.
Before anyone asks, yes, I am biased, since I worked for AT&T Labs on the VNC project...:)
Or, better still, an Amiga!!! They had no fan and they were really really ace and etc etc...
Oh - wait. My A500 died when the little plastic heat sink dropped off Agnus and she overheated. And my A1200 power supply caved in when I install a CPU card and hard drive at the same time.
Perhaps fans aren't such a bad idea.
(Before I get flamed, I really *AM* a big Amiga fan...oh no, that was the wrong thing to say...)
I got the impression that a significant cause of delay in the installation of Win2K was the way in which the installation CD is laid out.
Most CD-ROMs are fairly sensibly laid out, so that files are continuous on the disk. Win2K's CD-ROM appears to be spectacularly fragmented, judging by the incessant seeking the drive does trying to read it. If it spends all its time seeking for the right track, the drive will never get to full speed and reading CDs will take ages.
(That was the impression I got but I'm willing to believe I'm wrong.)
I've been using a 64Mb iPAQ with a PCMCIA adapor and WaveLAN card to run some of my PhD. stuff on, because I'm doing low-power wireless applications stuff. I run the handhelds.org Linux on it and build stuff in Python and I have to say that it rocks.
The big advantage I can see of device like this is that they take up the functionality of MP3 players and other wearable devices and put them in a single, flexible unit. Also, I can take the thing home, work on it, albeit via a client PC to view the screen on, and then walk in to the lab and log back in there, again from a dumb client.
The big problem I see is battery life. The original Itsy dealt with this by having a cholesteric display, I think, so that it could be powered off but still display data. Battery life of an identical unit to mine used as an MP3 player and Palm-style device is about 3 days, while mine gives about 6 hours with Linux on it. So it's a cradle-baby.:(
As the technology (hardware & software) improves to take more account of power, I think these things will really take off.
But then I would say that, because that's the subject of my PhD. So I suppose I should really have said "biased opinion" in the title...
There was an interesting keynote speech at O'Reilly OpenSource last year about copy protection & the old Apple Macs, I think.
Steve Wozniak was apparently extremely annoyed that people were perverting his lovely computer by writing funny disk formats that simple file copying wouldn't work on.
So he goes away and builds a little bit of extra gubbins on to the disk controller and writes a few extra bits of code to get a nibble copier working. Viola! He can copy disks in any format, because he can read the individual bits from each track.
But... how can Woz protect his own disks, he wonders? He sits and scratches his head for a few days, then writes some more code, this time to alter the burst timing used to write bits. a zero is something like a 4(some unit of time) burst and a 1 is an 8(unit) burst.
The Mac filesystem can detect simple bit errors and will retry a few times, so Steve decides to write a few 6(unit) bursts at tactical places - 50% of the time, they'll get read incorrectly and the Mac will retry and 50% it'll read correctly and everything will be fine. When it has to retry, it's a 50% chance it'll get it right the second time and so on...
When you nibble copy them however, the copier will read the disk once, and won't understand the bits and so won't notice the errors and retry, so where there was a "wobbly" bit, there's now a bit fixed in the wrong position.
Hurrah! Woz had uncopyable disks.
But how could he copy them for his own use..?
Well, he realises that if you heat the material enough, you get electromagnetic(?) transference between one of his special-format disks and a fresh disk. (This is apparently some property of magnets in general).
For about a week, Woz is hardly seen - he's sitting in his office with a hair-dryer trying to heat the disks up enough to transfer the data. He has a big pile of molten floppies next to him...
Apologies to Steve Wozniak and anyone who attended at O'Reilly OpenSource 2000 for the hideously innaccurate transcription of the tale...:)
At least if MP3s take 45 minutes to download, the time they're playing for is vastly extended. Assuming you like juddering, glitchy music, you'll be getting better value for money.
As I understand it, this article dwells on the moral implications of allowing people to screen their offspring for bad traits.
To my way of thinking, the fact that the HGP stuff is being done primarily so that companies can patent sections of DNA is the big whammy, since it prevents legitimate, perhaps non-profit, perhaps not, organizations from developing medical technologies without paying through the nose for the information. Its not just that genome labs will charge for the info, it's also that no genome lab will be able to sell sections of genome data patented by another - labs which map useful bits of DNA will essentially have a monopoly.
With a hard-drive, as others have mentioned, it'll be prone to shocks (which will cause the disk heads to skid merrily over the delicate surfaces of the disk..), and, to give 10 hours of battery life, will probably need a car battery to be strapped to the wearer's back. The two main Rio features I like are that it's light and runs on "dead" AA batteries.
How long does 4.8Gb of data take to download over a parallel port or USB port, anyway?
Allowing fully-fledged OS-dependent executables to be embedded in web pages (i.e. ActiveX controls) is clearly idiotic. Allowing those executables to run _as the current user_ is still more idiotic. In the end, you wind up with three accounts just for one person - one Admin, one User and one Web Browsing - the Web Browsing one being little more than Guest, since it's the only way to stop things breaking your PC!
Things are made worse by the "Trust this content?" dialog. Oh, yes, hang on! It has a lovely bitmap that looks like a security seal! It MUST be trustworthy and authentic!
Finally, in defence of Windows NT, I'd like to point out that it has a very good security architecture, which is flexible and actually quite straightforward once you're used to it. What makes it so useless is that standard NT never actually sets the security on the OS! After a base install, any user can go in and remove Program Files or erase various fundamental bits of the OS, unless an Admin painstakingly sets all the permissions.
Of course, anyone who has ever installed the Zero Administration Kit knows why they've made things that way - the moment you make the OS directories secure, Microsoft's products won't run on it.
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Lego bricks seem a good first place to start if you want something that let's a child think and be creative.
Best of all, they're fundamentally just unremarkable bits of plastic, so they shouldn't set off any Education Toy alarm bells. :)
(Do try to bear in mind, though, that every time you call them "Legos" a Lego fairy is melted down and recycled into a Coke bottle top.)
According to The Times, it was actually a number of new _plants_ discovered near this "neighbouring" star (neighbours 27 light-years away? I should be so lucky). They were apparently accompanied by a slightly surprised looking whale.
The point of the Blue Pill demonstration appears not to be that there's some security flaw in Vista, but that, if you can somehow get Administrator access to any x64-based system (i.e. not just Vista...) then you can switch that system from running directly on the host hardware to effectively running within a virtual-machine that looks identical to that hardware, but over which you have complete control. Nothing on the host OS has any way to detect that this has happened (except, I suspect, through performance monitoring, etc), so no virus checker can protect systems from it.
I have to remember so many passwords now that I have clues written down in appropriate places to give me some idea of what they all are.
It's a bit like walking round being the guy in Memento, albeit much less interesting to watch.
Does that mean the case is made of liquid metal? Won't that get messy?
VNC is now supported by RealVNC Ltd.
The standard VNC distribution now includes compression suitable for very low bandwidth connections, ala TightVNC.
You can get it from: RealVNC Ltd.
"Microsoft Battles Free Software at Pentagon : Attack of the Lobbyists"
Is this the sequel to the much-lauded "IBM PC Compatibles : Attack of the Clones"?
Hmmm. I think that the average user has a tendency to want to browse to see what is available, which is best served by a dselect-like program. For people wanting to set up server boxes or boxes for a particular task (CPU farms, storage servers, etc), your approach is probably preferable, though.
My point is that Jo Shmoe and Linux Guru are two different people. There are huge numbers of window managers to choose from, to suit different kinds of user - why can't there be different levels of package manager?
Gupta seems to have missed PEN (formerly PicoNet), a low power network developed by AT&T Labs Cambridge (formerly Olivetti and Oracle Research Labs). They built some prototype hardware and designed power-saving radio protocols for it. Further work with PEN has been done at the Laboratory for Communications Engineering at Cambridge University.
Actually, there has been a project called CarNet, a proposed improvement to the routing protocols of the MANET project, which looks at protocols for IP routing over mobile nodes.
This clause of the Windows license isn't new, I don't think. It appeared a few years ago, as I recall, when Windows 98 was released. It happened to coincide with Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition coming out.
VNC does only transmit the areas which claim to have changed. Under Windows this is hard to detect without replacing device drivers and suchlike, so WinVNC has to check whether things have really changed, which eats CPU in some cases and leads to lag.
The thin-client design allows you to deploy the phones without worrying about the cost of having to fire upgrades at them, and allows you to build them using some really cheap, simple, hardware.
:)
By providing services from a central server, yes, AT&T is obviously trying to make some money out of people, but it also means that whenever a new service or upgrade is available, it can happen in one place, and for everyone, transparently. Conflicts between updates can be dealt with before the upgraded system is even placed online, rather than having users sit there fiddling with broken phones as they often do with "upgraded" PCs. It's unreasonable to expect the average consumer to want to administer their own phone.
And of course because the phone has a display, not just IP telephony, on it, so you can provide much more than just phone calls.
Before anyone asks, yes, I am biased, since I worked for AT&T Labs on the VNC project...
Or, better still, an Amiga!!! They had no fan and they were really really ace and etc etc...
Oh - wait. My A500 died when the little plastic heat sink dropped off Agnus and she overheated. And my A1200 power supply caved in when I install a CPU card and hard drive at the same time.
Perhaps fans aren't such a bad idea.
(Before I get flamed, I really *AM* a big Amiga fan...oh no, that was the wrong thing to say...)
I got the impression that a significant cause of delay in the installation of Win2K was the way in which the installation CD is laid out.
Most CD-ROMs are fairly sensibly laid out, so that files are continuous on the disk. Win2K's CD-ROM appears to be spectacularly fragmented, judging by the incessant seeking the drive does trying to read it. If it spends all its time seeking for the right track, the drive will never get to full speed and reading CDs will take ages.
(That was the impression I got but I'm willing to believe I'm wrong.)
I've been using a 64Mb iPAQ with a PCMCIA adapor and WaveLAN card to run some of my PhD. stuff on, because I'm doing low-power wireless applications stuff. I run the handhelds.org Linux on it and build stuff in Python and I have to say that it rocks.
:(
The big advantage I can see of device like this is that they take up the functionality of MP3 players and other wearable devices and put them in a single, flexible unit. Also, I can take the thing home, work on it, albeit via a client PC to view the screen on, and then walk in to the lab and log back in there, again from a dumb client.
The big problem I see is battery life. The original Itsy dealt with this by having a cholesteric display, I think, so that it could be powered off but still display data. Battery life of an identical unit to mine used as an MP3 player and Palm-style device is about 3 days, while mine gives about 6 hours with Linux on it. So it's a cradle-baby.
As the technology (hardware & software) improves to take more account of power, I think these things will really take off.
But then I would say that, because that's the subject of my PhD. So I suppose I should really have said "biased opinion" in the title...
There was an interesting keynote speech at O'Reilly OpenSource last year about copy protection & the old Apple Macs, I think.
:)
Steve Wozniak was apparently extremely annoyed that people were perverting his lovely computer by writing funny disk formats that simple file copying wouldn't work on.
So he goes away and builds a little bit of extra gubbins on to the disk controller and writes a few extra bits of code to get a nibble copier working. Viola! He can copy disks in any format, because he can read the individual bits from each track.
But... how can Woz protect his own disks, he wonders? He sits and scratches his head for a few days, then writes some more code, this time to alter the burst timing used to write bits. a zero is something like a 4(some unit of time) burst and a 1 is an 8(unit) burst.
The Mac filesystem can detect simple bit errors and will retry a few times, so Steve decides to write a few 6(unit) bursts at tactical places - 50% of the time, they'll get read incorrectly and the Mac will retry and 50% it'll read correctly and everything will be fine. When it has to retry, it's a 50% chance it'll get it right the second time and so on...
When you nibble copy them however, the copier will read the disk once, and won't understand the bits and so won't notice the errors and retry, so where there was a "wobbly" bit, there's now a bit fixed in the wrong position.
Hurrah! Woz had uncopyable disks.
But how could he copy them for his own use..?
Well, he realises that if you heat the material enough, you get electromagnetic(?) transference between one of his special-format disks and a fresh disk. (This is apparently some property of magnets in general).
For about a week, Woz is hardly seen - he's sitting in his office with a hair-dryer trying to heat the disks up enough to transfer the data. He has a big pile of molten floppies next to him...
Apologies to Steve Wozniak and anyone who attended at O'Reilly OpenSource 2000 for the hideously innaccurate transcription of the tale...
Does anyone know which atomic numbers Microsoft have allocated to the new "key enterprise elements"?
At least if MP3s take 45 minutes to download, the time they're playing for is vastly extended. Assuming you like juddering, glitchy music, you'll be getting better value for money.
As I understand it, this article dwells on the moral implications of allowing people to screen their offspring for bad traits.
To my way of thinking, the fact that the HGP stuff is being done primarily so that companies can patent sections of DNA is the big whammy, since it prevents legitimate, perhaps non-profit, perhaps not, organizations from developing medical technologies without paying through the nose for the information. Its not just that genome labs will charge for the info, it's also that no genome lab will be able to sell sections of genome data patented by another - labs which map useful bits of DNA will essentially have a monopoly.
With a hard-drive, as others have mentioned, it'll be prone to shocks (which will cause the disk heads to skid merrily over the delicate surfaces of the disk..), and, to give 10 hours of battery life, will probably need a car battery to be strapped to the wearer's back. The two main Rio features I like are that it's light and runs on "dead" AA batteries.
How long does 4.8Gb of data take to download over a parallel port or USB port, anyway?
Allowing fully-fledged OS-dependent executables to be embedded in web pages (i.e. ActiveX controls) is clearly idiotic. Allowing those executables to run _as the current user_ is still more idiotic. In the end, you wind up with three accounts just for one person - one Admin, one User and one Web Browsing - the Web Browsing one being little more than Guest, since it's the only way to stop things breaking your PC!
Things are made worse by the "Trust this content?" dialog. Oh, yes, hang on! It has a lovely bitmap that looks like a security seal! It MUST be trustworthy and authentic!
Finally, in defence of Windows NT, I'd like to point out that it has a very good security architecture, which is flexible and actually quite straightforward once you're used to it. What makes it so useless is that standard NT never actually sets the security on the OS! After a base install, any user can go in and remove Program Files or erase various fundamental bits of the OS, unless an Admin painstakingly sets all the permissions.
Of course, anyone who has ever installed the Zero Administration Kit knows why they've made things that way - the moment you make the OS directories secure, Microsoft's products won't run on it.