Although IBM is a big bad company, they have retained "cool" status because of the following (in no particular order):
They embraced Linux.
They built a huge multiprocessor computer that kicked Garry Kasparov's ass.
They developed the IBM PC, which was expressly designed to be cloned, hacked, modified...
(unlike the Mac, which was always intended to be sterile and closed)
They actually innovate - IBM Research has come up with some remarkable advances in practical computing, as well as mathematics and other abstract fields. IBM labs sponsor pure research, unlike many other large companies.
They have already been chastened with antitrust suits, and appear to have learned their lesson.
Metal-based fuel cells (using aluminum or zinc) may prove a better solution than hydrogen, providing better energy densities and less hazardous handling.
In Canada, the government may be strong, but it's not socialist. If it's anything, it's "self-preservationist".
I have yet to hear of a socialist government that would allow Napster to exist, especially if it were siphoning revenues from the Great Recording Company of the People.
that, according to Stallman, only the bad laws propagate, and not the good? Otherwise, couldn't I seek protection under the laws of whatever country most liberally interpreted freedom?
Rather than this article, I'd prefer to read something written by a specialist in international law.
HTTP allows you to determine the type and version of browser that is accessing a page. You could always write a little script that detected whether a smart-tag-capable browser was accessing your page, and redirect it to an "error" page, instructing the reader to get a different browser before visiting the page again. (For good measure you could provide a link to Mozilla and an explanation of why smart tags are evil.)
The National Post, the source for this article, is well known as an unashamedly pro-business newspaper.
They frequently publish articles which defend existing business practices regardless of their cost - as an example, one of their regular columnists, Terrence Corcoran, is famous for his articles denying the existence of global warming.
In this case, it's likely that the article is intended to reduce the perception of employers' liability for their employees' carpal tunnel injuries, and thereby to dissuade those who are possibly suffering from seeking redress.
26882bps? (multiplies it out) That's 9,000,000,000 bytes per month.
Looks like you multipled your 3gb by 3. I'll assume you haven't had your morning coffee yet.:)
Whoops, my bad. And, no, I hadn't had my morning coffee.
I like to hear about advances in technology and cool hacks, and not so much to hear paranoid ramblings about how the government and big business are in some grand conspiracy. Regrettably, such as is the case with this article, it seems to me that Slashdot is lately engaging too much in the latter rather than the former.
How about Slashdot split itself into two sites:
tech.slashdot.org, where people like me can hear the real news for nerds; and
paranoia.slashdot.org, where people can work themselves up over their dystopian worldviews, and plan the next revolution without disturbing people who don't care.
Take 3 GB/mo, divide by (31days/mo)*(24hrs/day)*(60min/hr)*(60sec/min) and multiply by 8 bits/byte, and you get 26882 bits/sec - on average, a little less than a v.34 modem.
Could it be that ISP infrastructure is designed for 28.8 kbps, even though the technology exists through DSL to increase the peak data rate?
On a related note, most companies find that "unlimited access" to a resource that normally costs per use is a bad business strategy. In Canada, "unlimited" long distance services were recently introduced, then caps were rapidly put in place when it was realized that people would phone across the country and leave the line open all night, just because they could.
Rather than encryption... consider steganography (or "data hiding").
That is, embedding a message within seemingly harmless text or data. If you send encrypted data, you are immediately attracting attention to yourself, especially since (as you point out) almost no one encrypts email -- if you're not sending plain text, clearly you must have something to hide. And there are ways to get at encrypted data, not necessarily by brute-force decryption, but (for example) by hacking into your desktop and stealing your unencrypted mail files or your private key. Using encryption makes you an inviting target for such techniques.
There are a number of ways in which steganography is done. You can use
spammimic, which converts a short sentence into a lengthy document that reads like spam (and has the advantage of being web-based, so anyone can use it). Or you can try embedding messages into images or sound files by changing the LSB of each pixel/sample, which doesn't affect the output. And so on.
If this strategy is employed, you can also encrypt the message prior to hiding, which is your insurance against someone breaking the hiding strategy.
Less power and better yields are a big deal, because those properties don't scale with Moore's Law - quite the opposite.
And even though diagonal wiring might seem like an obvious idea, I bet developing good routing algorithms that can take advantage of it is not easy at all. Most of the interesting problems in circuit interconnection are NP-complete.
Not long ago
Robert Lucky of Telcordia, who is a frequent columnist in IEEE Spectrum, wrote an article noting that technology predictions are worthless; that in his words, we're all just "bozos on the bus" waiting to see where technology will take us next. Even if someone "predicted" the impact of the internet ten or twenty years ago, because technology is so nonlinear, there's no reason why that same person's predictions today are any more valid than yours or mine.
Does anyone else remember this article? Any links?
There's no need to require anyone to recycle a truck, because it's economical to do so. Steel has a decent scrap value, and it's not hard to recover from a truck body. The point is that it's difficult and expensive to recycle a PCB.
The principle of panspermia is well understood. Although the surface of an asteroid ejected from Mars would be subjected to blast effects, radiation in space, and heat from re-entry, the interior (and any microbes therein) would be very well protected.
Also, it's not clear at all that an organism optimized for the Martian environment (with a sparse CO2 atmosphere and little biological competition) would survive, much less thrive, in an Earth environment (with a dense O2 atmosphere and intense competition). Furthermore, viruses are attuned to infect specific kinds of cells; the viruses that have developed on Mars (if any) would likely be unable to infect anything on Earth.
So, fast food may be used by some as a metaphor for what is wrong with western civilization. However, a few years ago I read an interesting fact:
No two nations with McDonalds on their territory have ever gone to war with each other.
This may be a coincidence (and it may no longer be true... is there a McDonalds in Yugoslavia?), but there were analysts in the article I read who suggested that the presence of a McDonalds in a nation indicated a certain level of national development, democracy, and sophistication, with an educated middle class, who patronize the McDonalds, and who are intolerant of war.
An interesting thought. International trade has its problems, but frequently it brings peace.
There is nothing of substance in the article - no mission plans, no dates, no nothing - just a catchy (and bilingual) slogan:
Allons-y! Let's go to Mars, followed by a wish-list planning session.
There's little about this to suggest that the maple leaf will be flying on Mars anytime soon.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Microsoft will eventually fall victim to the same forces that destroyed the Soviet Union as well as
the old-world monarchies in Europe.
The problem with your argument is that Communism never made anybody rich.
The forces that caused the collapse of the USSR
were economic more than political; they were just bankrupted by their "business model" of oppressive centralized control.
People seem to have much more patience with repression than with starvation, and
I'm not seeing too many economic problems over at MS.
MS will probably collapse in time, as do most huge organizations, but it probably won't be because they're evil. It will probably be more like a shift in the economic climate, such as the one that did in the great rail companies.
I suggest that we all get together, seceede from the United States and form a Free country, where
every aspect of life is ruled by the GPL.
In Congress, July 4, 2001
...
We hold these truths to be self evident, that Microsoft is created evil, that Software is endowed by its Creator with certain unalienable Bugs, that among these are Fencepost Errors, Memory Allocation Problems, and Awkward User Interfaces. -- That to fix these Bugs, Geeks are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the GNU Public Licence...
I thought Google were the good guys, because they used a Linux server farm. Now it turns out that they're acting like a business, which makes them the bad guys, right? Can one of the mages at Slashdot please tell me what the orthodox line is on Google? Still clean? Or worse than Microsoft?
And are there any incensed iconoclasts out there pledging to create an Open Source, GPL'd search engine and news directory?
GPL is a subset of open source; it is not equivalent to open source. It looks to me as though RMS will argue that GPL = Open Source. GPL is merely a subset of open source, which has particular features that are attractive to certain developers. There are many other open source licences available which meet the needs of others.
Claiming that GPL is equivalent or necessary for open source plays into Microsoft's hands. When Mundie argued against open source, he set up his argument against GPL, implying that companies wishing to do open source had to GPL their code.
Slashdot Mirror
Although IBM is a big bad company, they have retained "cool" status because of the following (in no particular order):
Metal-based fuel cells (using aluminum or zinc) may prove a better solution than hydrogen, providing better energy densities and less hazardous handling.
There's a relevant and interesting article in IEEE Spectrum this month.
That would only work if you could blame MS bugs for a failure in Linux/BSD.
Perhaps this is the secret agenda behind WINE?
that, according to Stallman, only the bad laws propagate, and not the good? Otherwise, couldn't I seek protection under the laws of whatever country most liberally interpreted freedom?
Rather than this article, I'd prefer to read something written by a specialist in international law.
HTTP allows you to determine the type and version of browser that is accessing a page. You could always write a little script that detected whether a smart-tag-capable browser was accessing your page, and redirect it to an "error" page, instructing the reader to get a different browser before visiting the page again. (For good measure you could provide a link to Mozilla and an explanation of why smart tags are evil.)
The National Post, the source for this article, is well known as an unashamedly pro-business newspaper. They frequently publish articles which defend existing business practices regardless of their cost - as an example, one of their regular columnists, Terrence Corcoran, is famous for his articles denying the existence of global warming.
In this case, it's likely that the article is intended to reduce the perception of employers' liability for their employees' carpal tunnel injuries, and thereby to dissuade those who are possibly suffering from seeking redress.
Just look at Sidewalk ;-D
Or Microsoft Bob. Or Clippy.
26882bps? (multiplies it out) That's 9,000,000,000 bytes per month. Looks like you multipled your 3gb by 3. I'll assume you haven't had your morning coffee yet. :)
Whoops, my bad. And, no, I hadn't had my morning coffee.I like to hear about advances in technology and cool hacks, and not so much to hear paranoid ramblings about how the government and big business are in some grand conspiracy. Regrettably, such as is the case with this article, it seems to me that Slashdot is lately engaging too much in the latter rather than the former.
How about Slashdot split itself into two sites:
Just an idea.
Take 3 GB/mo, divide by (31days/mo)*(24hrs/day)*(60min/hr)*(60sec/min) and multiply by 8 bits/byte, and you get 26882 bits/sec - on average, a little less than a v.34 modem. Could it be that ISP infrastructure is designed for 28.8 kbps, even though the technology exists through DSL to increase the peak data rate?
On a related note, most companies find that "unlimited access" to a resource that normally costs per use is a bad business strategy. In Canada, "unlimited" long distance services were recently introduced, then caps were rapidly put in place when it was realized that people would phone across the country and leave the line open all night, just because they could.
Rather than encryption ... consider steganography (or "data hiding").
That is, embedding a message within seemingly harmless text or data. If you send encrypted data, you are immediately attracting attention to yourself, especially since (as you point out) almost no one encrypts email -- if you're not sending plain text, clearly you must have something to hide. And there are ways to get at encrypted data, not necessarily by brute-force decryption, but (for example) by hacking into your desktop and stealing your unencrypted mail files or your private key. Using encryption makes you an inviting target for such techniques.
There are a number of ways in which steganography is done. You can use spammimic, which converts a short sentence into a lengthy document that reads like spam (and has the advantage of being web-based, so anyone can use it). Or you can try embedding messages into images or sound files by changing the LSB of each pixel/sample, which doesn't affect the output. And so on.
If this strategy is employed, you can also encrypt the message prior to hiding, which is your insurance against someone breaking the hiding strategy.
Less power and better yields are a big deal, because those properties don't scale with Moore's Law - quite the opposite.
And even though diagonal wiring might seem like an obvious idea, I bet developing good routing algorithms that can take advantage of it is not easy at all. Most of the interesting problems in circuit interconnection are NP-complete.
Quote:
The site www.xxx.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
End Quote.
I know it's poor taste to post to my own thread ... but here's the article.
Not long ago Robert Lucky of Telcordia, who is a frequent columnist in IEEE Spectrum, wrote an article noting that technology predictions are worthless; that in his words, we're all just "bozos on the bus" waiting to see where technology will take us next. Even if someone "predicted" the impact of the internet ten or twenty years ago, because technology is so nonlinear, there's no reason why that same person's predictions today are any more valid than yours or mine.
Does anyone else remember this article? Any links?
There's no need to require anyone to recycle a truck, because it's economical to do so. Steel has a decent scrap value, and it's not hard to recover from a truck body. The point is that it's difficult and expensive to recycle a PCB.
Yes, but O2 is a lot more reactive than N2.
The principle of panspermia is well understood. Although the surface of an asteroid ejected from Mars would be subjected to blast effects, radiation in space, and heat from re-entry, the interior (and any microbes therein) would be very well protected.
Also, it's not clear at all that an organism optimized for the Martian environment (with a sparse CO2 atmosphere and little biological competition) would survive, much less thrive, in an Earth environment (with a dense O2 atmosphere and intense competition). Furthermore, viruses are attuned to infect specific kinds of cells; the viruses that have developed on Mars (if any) would likely be unable to infect anything on Earth.
So, fast food may be used by some as a metaphor for what is wrong with western civilization. However, a few years ago I read an interesting fact:
No two nations with McDonalds on their territory have ever gone to war with each other.
This may be a coincidence (and it may no longer be true ... is there a McDonalds in Yugoslavia?), but there were analysts in the article I read who suggested that the presence of a McDonalds in a nation indicated a certain level of national development, democracy, and sophistication, with an educated middle class, who patronize the McDonalds, and who are intolerant of war.
An interesting thought. International trade has its problems, but frequently it brings peace.
There is nothing of substance in the article - no mission plans, no dates, no nothing - just a catchy (and bilingual) slogan: Allons-y! Let's go to Mars, followed by a wish-list planning session. There's little about this to suggest that the maple leaf will be flying on Mars anytime soon. I'll believe it when I see it.
Microsoft will eventually fall victim to the same forces that destroyed the Soviet Union as well as the old-world monarchies in Europe.
The problem with your argument is that Communism never made anybody rich. The forces that caused the collapse of the USSR were economic more than political; they were just bankrupted by their "business model" of oppressive centralized control. People seem to have much more patience with repression than with starvation, and I'm not seeing too many economic problems over at MS.
MS will probably collapse in time, as do most huge organizations, but it probably won't be because they're evil. It will probably be more like a shift in the economic climate, such as the one that did in the great rail companies.
I suggest that we all get together, seceede from the United States and form a Free country, where every aspect of life is ruled by the GPL.
In Congress, July 4, 2001
... We hold these truths to be self evident, that Microsoft is created evil, that Software is endowed by its Creator with certain unalienable Bugs, that among these are Fencepost Errors, Memory Allocation Problems, and Awkward User Interfaces. -- That to fix these Bugs, Geeks are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the GNU Public Licence ...
I thought Google were the good guys, because they used a Linux server farm. Now it turns out that they're acting like a business, which makes them the bad guys, right? Can one of the mages at Slashdot please tell me what the orthodox line is on Google? Still clean? Or worse than Microsoft?
And are there any incensed iconoclasts out there pledging to create an Open Source, GPL'd search engine and news directory?
GPL is a subset of open source; it is not equivalent to open source. It looks to me as though RMS will argue that GPL = Open Source. GPL is merely a subset of open source, which has particular features that are attractive to certain developers. There are many other open source licences available which meet the needs of others.
Claiming that GPL is equivalent or necessary for open source plays into Microsoft's hands. When Mundie argued against open source, he set up his argument against GPL, implying that companies wishing to do open source had to GPL their code.