As seen in this thread, amongst others, Philip Hallam-Baker (whom your message is in reply to) is rarely afraid to speak his mind,
Actually I am Phillip Hallam-Baker.
And in reference to the thread you cite, the issue was a series of allegations being thrown at Noam Chomsky, claiming that because he defended the right of the Holocaust revisionists to speak he was sympathetic to their aims.
Today we have John Ashcroft and John Poindexter attempting to obtain the powers of a police state. Each time someone points out that they are trampling on the liberties they claim to protect they drape themselves in the flag. It is the same tactic.
So yes, ten years ago I thought it important to expose the tactics being used against Noam, not because I agree with him but because I believe in the general principle of freedom of speech.
The fact that the US government has sunk to the level of a ten year old Usenet flame war is somewhat disappointing, but here we are. The fact that the GOP pay people to read slashdot and smear anyone who writes articles critical of Bush is another indication.
At this point it is generally agreed by all sides that Noam was right on East Timor, the invading Indonesian army had committed attrocities. The comparison of the US media treatment of Cambodia and East Timor was significant and justified. That does not mean that Noam is right on everything of course, but ten years later the point on which I was defending him has been proved beyond doubt.
Those in power don't have to do anything to earn respect.
Those without respect tend to have very little power, regardless of their office.
Take the fool in the Whitehouse for example, until September 11th he had practically no respect and had spent his entire political capital on what was at the time likely to be a very short lived tax cut scheme.
Bush has respect from conservatives now but he has lost respect internationally, hence his difficulty in getting any allies for his war to boost poll ratings. The one ally he has got may well have sabotaged his war by insisting that the casus belli be issued through the UN.
Not really. Galileo's main crime was, essentially, being a jerk. The Pope (Urban VIII I believe) had several close advisors who were open the idea of heliocentricism.
That is the cover up story the Catholic church is fond of, 'the church punished Galileo for lack of respect, not as a heretic'.
Only thing is that the cover up does no more for the church than the original. Galileo was right to have no respect for the pope, he had earned none.
The Catholic church persecuted Galileo for daring to tell people to think for themselves rather than rely on pontifs and prelates to tell them what the 'truth' is. If the pope could be proved to have been wrong, then maybe he was fallible on other matters such as the interpretation of religious doctrine which might indicate that the protestants had a point.
This would not be a problem for any other institution, after all pretty much every institution was corrupt to the core in the 1500s. The real problem is that the special claim made by the church hierarchy is that their mandate comes directly from Christ through St Peter and that as a consequence all other churches are false. This is of course nonsense even by theological standards, but there you are.
From my experience, many physisists are excellent innovative programmers. You sure rememeber how the first ever publication about WWW was called? Yep "WWW - Collaboration Tool for High Energy physics"
Yes, I was a member of the team that wrote it
The physicists response to the success of the Web was to boot us out of the lab when our contracts expired
If Palatzi has finaly got the management to stop backing the PAW loosers that is good news.
Yet, we still don't have C compilers that can automatically vectorize code
They do exist for some vector boxes but they are not as good as the FORTRAN versions. This is partly because there is much more interest in solving the problem for existing FORTRAN codes (C programers tend to be willing to recode) and partly because there are design problems in C that make detection of vector operations hard.
The reason DVD codecs are likely to be written in assembly is that Intel wrote the MMX instructions for that very purpose and it is much easier to hand code for the handful of cases the stuff is relevant than design the compilers to recognise them.
Actually a FPS is going to be one of the less demanding java apps. The code is going to spend 99% of its time in the 3D run time support library. If that is simply an interface to a native library then the java part of the app could be ten times slower without impacting performance noticably.
People are not going to be doing Fourier transforms in Java any time soon. Mind you that is mostly because the looser physicists would rather use Fortran77.
Read any physicists compile script (what you think they use make) and you tend to find the equivalent of/warnings=none on every compile line. I once asked one of the physicists if they thought it would be a good idea if the computer had a way of finding bugs for you. He was very enthusiastic. I thought about telling him but it would be like telling a small child that father christmas does not exist.
What many folk appear to be missing is that record company copyright enforcement is not exactly the fast lane of the legal profession. There are certainly some high fliers, but the average Joe who sends out nasty-grams to people infringing trademarks and the like is in the main only doing it until they can graduate to chasing ambulances.
The SDMI nastygram that started this was a pretty vanila knee-jerk threat. It is the type of threat that in most cases can be made without fear of the consequences since the chances are that the target will simply roll over at the first hint of a threat.
What the SDMI lawyers certainly did not expect was that making threats would land them as defendants in a lawsuit that would be diffciult for them to either defend or disengage from. Essentially the only way to avoid a costly fight is to tell the court to vacate the anti-trafficing provisions in the DMCA that the RIAA paid so much to Senatorial campaign coffers to buy.
What the SDMI and RIAA failed to grasp is that Felten and co are much less interested in the ability to publish one paper than the larger principle. There is no real incentive for Felten and co to accept an out of court settlement.
In the process the suit is likely to issue the coup de gras to SDMI. The group has been spectacularly unsuccessful in meeting a goal to agree on a standard by Christmas 1999. Only one of the vendors has released an SDMI compliant player and they modified it to play unrestricted MP3s pretty quickly when nobody would buy it.
The only reason SDMI is continuing is sheer inertia and the fact that the manufacturers who could not give a monkey's for the interests of the labels would rather participate in an obvious failure of a group than withdraw and risk it being replaced.
I attended only one SDMI meeting and told my company to steer well clear of the loosers. The work was chaotic with deadlines set to fit unrealistic schedules that would inevitably fall apart leading to delay. Worse however was the fact that while 150 engineers were working on one set of specs in open meetings a closed group of 8 people were hacking out a private deal in a back room that entirely negated the rest of the groups work.
The lead architect for Windows NT was Dave Cutler who was the lead architect on VMS, which had all the features you list for UNIX long before UNIX did.
Virtual memory, shared object libraries, system level ACLs all appeared on VMS many years before UNIX.
Also part of the Microsoft team was Butler Lampson who invented the security monitor, ACLs and much of the rest of the security infrastructure we take for granted.
Windows NT does not and never has shared code with DOS. The Windows GUI code and some of the libraries are shared from 95 on, but the code was developed from scratch for the purpose.
Networking and security are both relatively recent additions to UNIX. Until Sun wrote NFS UNIX did not have anything like the VMS cluster concept. And NFS sucked real bad until about five years ago. Until five years ago at least one major UNIX vendor was shipping a version of Sendmail that had major security holes in it that had been known for three years.
In short, until Windows NT and Linux showed up to give the complacent UNIX vendors some competition UNIX was a real sucky operating system, and an expensive one at that.
I think you guys are all missing the main plot. The EFF just filed their brief in the Felten case in which they claim that the DMCA is chilling speech. The point of the press release is almost certainly to support the freedom of speech case by showing yet another example of DMCA censorship.
If Ferguson says that he has broken a protocol you can be sure he has done so. The expected outcome of the DMCA case is for the censorship provisions of the act to be struck down. So Ferguson has to expect to be able to publish soon.
The DMCA does have some interesting side effects however. Nobody can ever be sure the DRM technology they buy works, the lack of peer review and discussion means that there is a level playing field between the many peddlers of snake oil and the legit players.
Another effect is that anybody can mount a reputation attack against any scheme.
Following this thread, it is quite evident that rjh knows what he is talking about, and that you are just trolling.
Nah, rjh is just a crypto-groupie who read Applied Cryptography and thinks he knows it all.
If you talk to cryptographers you will find that Shamir, Rivest and Diffie are considered the Newtons and Einsteins of the field. Bruce has not yet made it into that rank, nor for that matter has 'Zeinfeld'.
With the freedom we are given in our Democratic Republic to run business models such as this,
Yes, quit whining yer soft pinko-commie-liberal. We live in a Democratic Republic. And don't start whining about not counting all the votes, nobody ever bothers to do that. You liberal whiners keep bringing Flodia up every minute.
we also have the freedom so that people such as yourself can point out the big bad evils of corporations trying to make money.
Yes, if you don't like the way we run our country go live somewhere else. If you don't like our government go buy your own. We bought the election fair and square. So if we want to drill for oil in your CPU that is our business and nobody else's.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I am Phillip Hallam-Baker.
And in reference to the thread you cite, the issue was a series of allegations being thrown at Noam Chomsky, claiming that because he defended the right of the Holocaust revisionists to speak he was sympathetic to their aims.
Today we have John Ashcroft and John Poindexter attempting to obtain the powers of a police state. Each time someone points out that they are trampling on the liberties they claim to protect they drape themselves in the flag. It is the same tactic.
So yes, ten years ago I thought it important to expose the tactics being used against Noam, not because I agree with him but because I believe in the general principle of freedom of speech.
The fact that the US government has sunk to the level of a ten year old Usenet flame war is somewhat disappointing, but here we are. The fact that the GOP pay people to read slashdot and smear anyone who writes articles critical of Bush is another indication.
At this point it is generally agreed by all sides that Noam was right on East Timor, the invading Indonesian army had committed attrocities. The comparison of the US media treatment of Cambodia and East Timor was significant and justified. That does not mean that Noam is right on everything of course, but ten years later the point on which I was defending him has been proved beyond doubt.
Those without respect tend to have very little power, regardless of their office.
Take the fool in the Whitehouse for example, until September 11th he had practically no respect and had spent his entire political capital on what was at the time likely to be a very short lived tax cut scheme.
Bush has respect from conservatives now but he has lost respect internationally, hence his difficulty in getting any allies for his war to boost poll ratings. The one ally he has got may well have sabotaged his war by insisting that the casus belli be issued through the UN.
That is the cover up story the Catholic church is fond of, 'the church punished Galileo for lack of respect, not as a heretic'.
Only thing is that the cover up does no more for the church than the original. Galileo was right to have no respect for the pope, he had earned none.
The Catholic church persecuted Galileo for daring to tell people to think for themselves rather than rely on pontifs and prelates to tell them what the 'truth' is. If the pope could be proved to have been wrong, then maybe he was fallible on other matters such as the interpretation of religious doctrine which might indicate that the protestants had a point.
This would not be a problem for any other institution, after all pretty much every institution was corrupt to the core in the 1500s. The real problem is that the special claim made by the church hierarchy is that their mandate comes directly from Christ through St Peter and that as a consequence all other churches are false. This is of course nonsense even by theological standards, but there you are.
Yes, I was a member of the team that wrote it
The physicists response to the success of the Web was to boot us out of the lab when our contracts expired
If Palatzi has finaly got the management to stop backing the PAW loosers that is good news.
They do exist for some vector boxes but they are not as good as the FORTRAN versions. This is partly because there is much more interest in solving the problem for existing FORTRAN codes (C programers tend to be willing to recode) and partly because there are design problems in C that make detection of vector operations hard.
The reason DVD codecs are likely to be written in assembly is that Intel wrote the MMX instructions for that very purpose and it is much easier to hand code for the handful of cases the stuff is relevant than design the compilers to recognise them.
People are not going to be doing Fourier transforms in Java any time soon. Mind you that is mostly because the looser physicists would rather use Fortran77.
Read any physicists compile script (what you think they use make) and you tend to find the equivalent of /warnings=none on every compile line. I once asked one of the physicists if they thought it would be a good idea if the computer had a way of finding bugs for you. He was very enthusiastic. I thought about telling him but it would be like telling a small child that father christmas does not exist.
The SDMI nastygram that started this was a pretty vanila knee-jerk threat. It is the type of threat that in most cases can be made without fear of the consequences since the chances are that the target will simply roll over at the first hint of a threat.
What the SDMI lawyers certainly did not expect was that making threats would land them as defendants in a lawsuit that would be diffciult for them to either defend or disengage from. Essentially the only way to avoid a costly fight is to tell the court to vacate the anti-trafficing provisions in the DMCA that the RIAA paid so much to Senatorial campaign coffers to buy.
What the SDMI and RIAA failed to grasp is that Felten and co are much less interested in the ability to publish one paper than the larger principle. There is no real incentive for Felten and co to accept an out of court settlement.
In the process the suit is likely to issue the coup de gras to SDMI. The group has been spectacularly unsuccessful in meeting a goal to agree on a standard by Christmas 1999. Only one of the vendors has released an SDMI compliant player and they modified it to play unrestricted MP3s pretty quickly when nobody would buy it.
The only reason SDMI is continuing is sheer inertia and the fact that the manufacturers who could not give a monkey's for the interests of the labels would rather participate in an obvious failure of a group than withdraw and risk it being replaced.
I attended only one SDMI meeting and told my company to steer well clear of the loosers. The work was chaotic with deadlines set to fit unrealistic schedules that would inevitably fall apart leading to delay. Worse however was the fact that while 150 engineers were working on one set of specs in open meetings a closed group of 8 people were hacking out a private deal in a back room that entirely negated the rest of the groups work.
The lead architect for Windows NT was Dave Cutler who was the lead architect on VMS, which had all the features you list for UNIX long before UNIX did.
Virtual memory, shared object libraries, system level ACLs all appeared on VMS many years before UNIX.
Also part of the Microsoft team was Butler Lampson who invented the security monitor, ACLs and much of the rest of the security infrastructure we take for granted.
Windows NT does not and never has shared code with DOS. The Windows GUI code and some of the libraries are shared from 95 on, but the code was developed from scratch for the purpose.
Networking and security are both relatively recent additions to UNIX. Until Sun wrote NFS UNIX did not have anything like the VMS cluster concept. And NFS sucked real bad until about five years ago. Until five years ago at least one major UNIX vendor was shipping a version of Sendmail that had major security holes in it that had been known for three years.
In short, until Windows NT and Linux showed up to give the complacent UNIX vendors some competition UNIX was a real sucky operating system, and an expensive one at that.
If Ferguson says that he has broken a protocol you can be sure he has done so. The expected outcome of the DMCA case is for the censorship provisions of the act to be struck down. So Ferguson has to expect to be able to publish soon.
The DMCA does have some interesting side effects however. Nobody can ever be sure the DRM technology they buy works, the lack of peer review and discussion means that there is a level playing field between the many peddlers of snake oil and the legit players.
Another effect is that anybody can mount a reputation attack against any scheme.
That would not be difficult since he was one of the people that O.J. murdered.
But the basic principle that US juries may contain complete imbeciles and return a crackpot verdict is clearly valid.
Intel and the RIAA can certainly afford Johnnie Cochran, F Lee Bailey and co.
Nah, rjh is just a crypto-groupie who read Applied Cryptography and thinks he knows it all.
If you talk to cryptographers you will find that Shamir, Rivest and Diffie are considered the Newtons and Einsteins of the field. Bruce has not yet made it into that rank, nor for that matter has 'Zeinfeld'.
Yes, quit whining yer soft pinko-commie-liberal. We live in a Democratic Republic. And don't start whining about not counting all the votes, nobody ever bothers to do that. You liberal whiners keep bringing Flodia up every minute.
we also have the freedom so that people such as yourself can point out the big bad evils of corporations trying to make money.
Yes, if you don't like the way we run our country go live somewhere else. If you don't like our government go buy your own. We bought the election fair and square. So if we want to drill for oil in your CPU that is our business and nobody else's.
There ought to be limits to freedom.
Oh thats right mounting a violent demonstration to stop the votes being counted...
The main argument for gun control is the people who oppose it...
Stop the taking of inocent lives with guns - shoot a member of the NRA today!
Go on mod me down, this is my trolling account, trying to get to -50 in a week.