If they couldn't replace it for under $1000 they I gess they do hardware the same way they do software. Prototype hardware tends to have problems leaking blue smoke. Problems between poor visa in the ground plane, 3V and 5V mixed parts and parts in the wrong way (with most surface mount parts there are heaps of ways to put them on wrong). I would be supprised if they didn't have at least 10 (or more like 100) of the PC boards already. Same with custom parts. Software is a matter of another flash rom. But it is M$ where talking about so it could be the only one. I wonder if the NYPD will press charges about false police reports or did they make a deal for N copies of office????
At the end of the year, the Verisign certs will be about as useful as a self-signed one. The bad PR that could cause would give them no choice but to buy out Thatwe because if they get a bad write up in something like the Wall Street J about the problem, they effectly will have no market share, a huge debt and no way out. When that happens their stock goes into the penny stock class and the doors close.
Sounds like there needs to be an extention to POP or IMAP that says: "When I get email, send me a message ip#.#.#.#:## and then the popclient wakes up and fetches the mail. Polling is not the best way to do things like this.
Its like the clone issue. Based on the amount of anouncements, I suspect the first human close is has been born. If the problems with Dolly growing like an old sheep hadn't been annoucned, I suspect that the first human clone would be spending lots of time on our TV sets by now. But making mammal clones isn't worked out yet so the babies resulting from the experirments are going to be keept quiet for some time...
I guess my real point is that if it can be done, and you won't someone else will.
What happened is the company with the patent liceensed it to a different company and aparently didn't deliver on the IP. The other company had a bit of a problem being overcharged and went to court. Now that the patent is gone, I expect they will ask for their $400 mil back.
Imagine the ruckus if C/C++ remained an AT&T commodity after years of promising to make it "free"
Wow, a world without C++. Since I don't know of a single C++ application that isn't bloated and full of bugs, I'm not qualified to talk about it in situations where it works but C was the property of AT&T and quite controlled by AT&T (mainly Richie) until well after the standards process was in full swing. Anyone see the early release of the "2nd edition K&R"? It is full of not quite polite footnotes about stupid things that were just wrong from the ANSI C committee. Most of those things are not in the current ANSI C. Sun could do the same thing with Java if they chose too.
Opps, you mean + lower cost of living In the discussion of US vs Aus prices keep in mind that just about everything cost more in Oz. Food (2x), Petrol (1.3x), Cars (4x), Movies (2x), Computers(2x), Utilities(1.5x), Phone(10x), Electronic toys(3x), Internet Access(100?x). The only thing is Rent and Housing which can go either way.
I figure moving from the US to Oz has cut my buying power by about 1/12.
Of course there are still lots of great reasons to be here.
The US has a law thats purpose is to stop companies from over charging on government deals. Basically it says when you do business with the government, the most profit you can make on is 25%. If your costs go down and you don't rebate the government, then you can loose big time. There used to be a warning about this on the NASA SBIR program page but I can't find it in the current docs (the old ones are on line and searchable as well). If this law applies to licenses (which I think it does), then it looks like out of this 7.5mil, about 5.625mil should go back to the NSF.
I keep hearing that Australia will be a poor country because the population density is so low. If this was the case, not only could it not produce any decent products or do much other than feed its self, it could not produce any decent athletes either. The real facts are that Victoria (the stage in the south east part of the main land) has about the same population and density as Missouri and as similar economy that is just slightyl worse off -- mostly from political and historical reasons. The main difference I see is that Aussies are far more acceptable of excuses and bs than any other group of people in the world. This allows for things like the "telecom infrastructure" crap that telstra gives as an excuse for metered local calls is just because they can do it not because its true. Australia has areas the size of some eastern US states that have no people at all. Sure the density of people is low but in places its 0 and there is no need for any infrastructure there at all. Where there are people its so much cheaper to run wire than in the US. The real costs come from stupid standards that end up costing everyone more for no good reason. The power here is the highest in the world (it can swing above 300VAC RMS and still be in spec). The TV's standard here is used just here and in NZ and that is why TV's cost 4x what they do elsewhere. Cars follow the island rule (on an island drive on the wrong side of the road) so its not cost effective to trade with the rest of the world so it protects from imports and kills the export business at the same time.
So back to privacy, If anyone in Oz is serious about privacy, then try this... Fill out the Australia Post survey you got in the mail with creative answers to make their data bad. Once the price of the data goes down (since its useless) buy a selected list of "targets for your product" and provide that list to one of the news papers as real examples of what you can do with the data. Some of the questions asked on the survey could lead to a query that would shock people into the "we must protect the children". Looking at the thing now... They ask the birthday and sex of children. They ask what kind of tampons does your daughter use. They ask if you have an alarm system in your house. They ask about what kind of insurance you have on your stuff. They ask how much you make and how much you spend on the electricity. I know I could come up with a few select request that could be merged into a list that could get people screaming.
Aussies do accept just about anything and they will continue to accept the privacy loss until it goes too far and they will fight back and I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of that fight. In the US, it will just get worse and worse because someone will always be making a buck on other peoples info.
As I finished a speech on the growing use of private data way back in high school: "Information has always been power"
But it is open source.... Kind of... Some of the code that is still widly used was written at OU (Okie Uni) in FORTRAN back before '85 and that was and still is open source. Most of the modern version seem to have been just ports of the old stuff.
The mall isn't going away. Its too much of a hang out and "go shopping" socal event to simply go away. What will happen is more merchants are going to tell the mall that they are not going to continue to pay the high prices for mall space. A typical US mall (not the one here, it cost about 2x as much) will charge about $25 per sq ft per month. Also keep in mind that outside of the Christmas season about 90% of all shoppers are women and in case you haven't noticed malls are full of shops that target thoue shoppers.
I used to have CPM comptuers that would run for months without reboots. I don't know what your were running. It was M$-dos that taught the world that rebooting was a common thing to do.
One concept that the courts will get around to sometime in the distant future is that once you start telling others your "IP", it becomes public domain. Its like so many songs that were in the lyric database -- people entered that data from memory which seems to be a good case that the information is "in the public domain."
Would you hire a student that signed a non-disclosure about what they were supposed to learn in school? What good is a student if they can't use the info that a degree is supposed to imply thye have?
Maybe the "Patent Everything" isn't such a bad idea. How about one big patent that has everything in it? Maybe we can have everything run a form to allow people to enter all their ideas. Once the patent office rejects the "Everything patent", then they have lots of prior art that they will have to check and can not ignore. Of course the title of the device will need to be a "device to dominate the world"
I wonder what getting a patent with several million claims would do to the patent office...it might wake them up but I don't think so.
Have you looked at any of the low end sun boxen? Their performace is total crap. They use slow UIDE drives and as far as I know they are still using non-optimal drivers for IDE not Ultra-IDE. I've got a sparc 1 that can 'dd' files faster than the demo ultra 5 I had. The SS20 is much, much faster than the demo u5 as far as disk is concerened.
Going to PCI was a great move for sun. They stop using a 64 bit bus and switch to a 32 bit multiplexed bus to reduce costs. In the end it will reduce their market share on the high end.
Australia is going to vote to keep the Queen as a head of state next month. I wonder if this will effect anyones vote...
Old houses tend to have problems with wires inside the walls where theres lots of dry wood. The only way to prevent that is to make sure the fuses and circut breakers are correct and are in good working order. Houses in the late 1940s with the seperate wires wrapped in cloth need about 5 or 8 map fuses. The slightly newer wiring with is rated at 10 amps and most places with grounded outlets orignaly installed (1970?) use mostly 15 amp circuts. (ok these numbers are for the US 120V system, not the Euro 220 or the Oz "fry'em 240 +/- 20%")
There is a good book called "The National Electrial Code" in libraries for thouse hackers that want to play with more than 3.3v.
A few years ago on one of the news groups there was an off toptic posting from someone whos washing machine started a fire. He tired to put the fire out with a gardent hose but as soon as the hoses to the washer got too hot, they burst giving him no pressure where he needed it. He recomneded putting a shutoff valve where you can get to it if you need it. Hopefuly no one will ever make use of his advice but there are a few houses now that have this little feature.
Lots of people are worred about sending their CC details over the net but have no problem with someone else keeping them safe. I'm not saying this a good thing, just that people belive this just like ever other bit of FUD.
Banks have a real problem with merchant fraud over the net. Its much bigger than the use of stolen cards and results in higher fees for Internet transactions.
M$ is tring to come up with a way to look like they have solved these problems while taking a cut of the cash flow. Their solution looks much like the SET wallet servers that have been around for about a year. The cool thing about them is that if you get both sides of the root key, you own the database. Since the one side is public, how long does it take to crack a 512 bit key thses days?
East Timor is currently being used as a pawn by US military to convince the Aussie military that they are not properly prepared for their own defence. While its looking like a full on pissing war between the sides, this should just add more fuel for the fire. Australia has asked the US (its best ally) for help in the E Timor mess and the US said they would not send any troops even though every time the US asked the Oz military for troops, they were sent. Now the US military just lent 4000 suits of body armour and keep adding other little bits of hardware all while politely pointing out that if the Oz government spent a bit more on US made hardware, these little problems wouldn't happen. This little incident just switches things around a bit the other way.
The biggest software project failures in the last 10 years have all been written in C++. I know because I was hired to clean up some of the messes. A few years ago I had to build a special box just to debug one of the silly programs. The box had 2 gig of swap space and 1/2 gig of ram just to load the test program and gdb. The end result was a complete rewrite of the test code in C which resulted in a program that was something like 180k.
What perl needs is a built in "CGI_split" so I can say %vars=cgisplit; and it will do the right thing.
What I don't understand is why Motorola dumped the 6809 instruction set for all its newer CPUs like the 6811. The 6809 was the best designed instruction set of any 8 bit CPU (its about 8 bit as the 8088). Even the 68000 was worse. Was the 6809 the last clean sucessful design the cpu world? (the NS32032 was clean but way too buggy).
Its only 2^512 times more difficult if and only if the keys are prime. If the density of prime numbers changes as the number of bits increases then it is quite possable that a 512 bit key may be harder to break than a 1024 bit one.
I started last month. I was in contact with them and I told them they no longer have rights to use any software I've written. Next its time to rewrite the GNU license to explicitly exclude Unisys and its customers claiming another license must be used. If they want to play this game they are in way too deep to back out now. I'm just not sure how they are going to comply with the law now that they don't have permission to use my patches in some of their critical software.
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If they couldn't replace it for under $1000 they I gess they do hardware the same way they do software. Prototype hardware tends to have problems leaking blue smoke. Problems between poor visa in the ground plane, 3V and 5V mixed parts and parts in the wrong way (with most surface mount parts there are heaps of ways to put them on wrong). I would be supprised if they didn't have at least 10 (or more like 100) of the PC boards already. Same with custom parts. Software is a matter of another flash rom. But it is M$ where talking about so it could be the only one. I wonder if the NYPD will press charges about false police reports or did they make a deal for N copies of office????
My parents had a Dodge Aspen with a prototype carb. They didn't want it back and it was not repariable at all. It turned out to be a real mess.
At the end of the year, the Verisign certs will be about as useful as a self-signed one. The bad PR that could cause would give them no choice but to buy out Thatwe because if they get a bad write up in something like the Wall Street J about the problem, they effectly will have no market share, a huge debt and no way out. When that happens their stock goes into the penny stock class and the doors close.
Sounds like there needs to be an extention to POP or IMAP that says: "When I get email, send me a message ip#.#.#.#:## and then the popclient wakes up and fetches the mail. Polling is not the best way to do things like this.
Its like the clone issue. Based on the amount of anouncements, I suspect the first human close is has been born. If the problems with Dolly growing like an old sheep hadn't been annoucned, I suspect that the first human clone would be spending lots of time on our TV sets by now. But making mammal clones isn't worked out yet so the babies resulting from the experirments are going to be keept quiet for some time...
I guess my real point is that if it can be done, and you won't someone else will.
What happened is the company with the patent liceensed it to a different company and aparently didn't deliver on the IP. The other company had a bit of a problem being overcharged and went to court. Now that the patent is gone, I expect they will ask for their $400 mil back.
Imagine the ruckus if C/C++ remained an AT&T commodity after years of promising to make it "free"
Wow, a world without C++. Since I don't know of a single C++ application that isn't bloated and full of bugs, I'm not qualified to talk about it in situations where it works but C was the property of AT&T and quite controlled by AT&T (mainly Richie) until well after the standards process was in full swing. Anyone see the early release of the "2nd edition K&R"? It is full of not quite polite footnotes about stupid things that were just wrong from the ANSI C committee. Most of those things are not in the current ANSI C. Sun could do the same thing with Java if they chose too.
Opps, you mean
+ lower cost of living
In the discussion of US vs Aus prices keep in mind that just about everything cost more in Oz. Food (2x), Petrol (1.3x), Cars (4x), Movies (2x), Computers(2x), Utilities(1.5x), Phone(10x), Electronic toys(3x), Internet Access(100?x). The only thing is Rent and Housing which can go either way.
I figure moving from the US to Oz has cut my buying power by about 1/12.
Of course there are still lots of great reasons to be here.
The US has a law thats purpose is to stop companies from over charging on government deals. Basically it says when you do business with the government, the most profit you can make on is 25%. If your costs go down and you don't rebate the government, then you can loose big time. There used to be a warning about this on the NASA SBIR program page but I can't find it in the current docs (the old ones are on line and searchable as well). If this law applies to licenses (which I think it does), then it looks like out of this 7.5mil, about 5.625mil should go back to the NSF.
So back to privacy, If anyone in Oz is serious about privacy, then try this... Fill out the Australia Post survey you got in the mail with creative answers to make their data bad. Once the price of the data goes down (since its useless) buy a selected list of "targets for your product" and provide that list to one of the news papers as real examples of what you can do with the data. Some of the questions asked on the survey could lead to a query that would shock people into the "we must protect the children". Looking at the thing now... They ask the birthday and sex of children. They ask what kind of tampons does your daughter use. They ask if you have an alarm system in your house. They ask about what kind of insurance you have on your stuff. They ask how much you make and how much you spend on the electricity. I know I could come up with a few select request that could be merged into a list that could get people screaming.
Aussies do accept just about anything and they will continue to accept the privacy loss until it goes too far and they will fight back and I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of that fight. In the US, it will just get worse and worse because someone will always be making a buck on other peoples info.
As I finished a speech on the growing use of private data way back in high school:
"Information has always been power"
But it is open source....
Kind of...
Some of the code that is still widly used was written at OU (Okie Uni) in FORTRAN back before '85 and that was and still is open source. Most of the modern version seem to have been just ports of the old stuff.
The mall isn't going away. Its too much of a hang out and "go shopping" socal event to simply go away. What will happen is more merchants are going to tell the mall that they are not going to continue to pay the high prices for mall space. A typical US mall (not the one here, it cost about 2x as much) will charge about $25 per sq ft per month. Also keep in mind that outside of the Christmas season about 90% of all shoppers are women and in case you haven't noticed malls are full of shops that target thoue shoppers.
I used to have CPM comptuers that would run for months without reboots. I don't know what your were running. It was M$-dos that taught the world that rebooting was a common thing to do.
but the real question is does it support EBCDIC?
One concept that the courts will get around to sometime in the distant future is that once you start telling others your "IP", it becomes public domain. Its like so many songs that were in the lyric database -- people entered that data from memory which seems to be a good case that the information is "in the public domain."
Would you hire a student that signed a non-disclosure about what they were supposed to learn in school? What good is a student if they can't use the info that a degree is supposed to imply thye have?
Maybe the "Patent Everything" isn't such a bad idea. How about one big patent that has everything in it? Maybe we can have everything run a form to allow people to enter all their ideas. Once the patent office rejects the "Everything patent", then they have lots of prior art that they will have to check and can not ignore. Of course the title of the device will need to be a "device to dominate the world"
I wonder what getting a patent with several million claims would do to the patent office...it might wake them up but I don't think so.
Have you looked at any of the low end sun boxen?
Their performace is total crap. They use slow UIDE drives and as far as I know they are still using non-optimal drivers for IDE not Ultra-IDE. I've got a sparc 1 that can 'dd' files faster than the demo ultra 5 I had. The SS20 is much, much faster than the demo u5 as far as disk is concerened.
Going to PCI was a great move for sun. They stop using a 64 bit bus and switch to a 32 bit multiplexed bus to reduce costs. In the end it will reduce their market share on the high end.
Australia is going to vote to keep the Queen as a head of state next month. I wonder if this will effect anyones vote...
Old houses tend to have problems with wires inside the walls where theres lots of dry wood. The only
way to prevent that is to make sure the fuses and circut breakers are correct and are in good working order. Houses in the late 1940s with the seperate wires wrapped in cloth need about 5 or 8 map fuses. The slightly newer wiring with is rated at 10 amps and most places with grounded outlets orignaly installed (1970?) use mostly 15 amp circuts. (ok these numbers are for the US 120V system, not the Euro 220 or the Oz "fry'em 240 +/- 20%")
There is a good book called "The National Electrial Code" in libraries for thouse hackers that want to play with more than 3.3v.
A few years ago on one of the news groups there was an off toptic posting from someone whos washing machine started a fire. He tired to put the fire out with a gardent hose but as soon as the hoses to the washer got too hot, they burst giving him no pressure where he needed it. He recomneded putting a shutoff valve where you can get to it if you need it. Hopefuly no one will ever make use of his advice but there are a few houses now that have this little feature.
Banks have a real problem with merchant fraud over the net. Its much bigger than the use of stolen cards and results in higher fees for Internet transactions.
M$ is tring to come up with a way to look like they have solved these problems while taking a cut of the cash flow. Their solution looks much like the SET wallet servers that have been around for about a year. The cool thing about them is that if you get both sides of the root key, you own the database. Since the one side is public, how long does it take to crack a 512 bit key thses days?
East Timor is currently being used as a pawn by US military to convince the Aussie military that they are not properly prepared for their own defence. While its looking like a full on pissing war between the sides, this should just add more fuel for the fire. Australia has asked the US (its best ally) for help in the E Timor mess and the US said they would not send any troops even though every time the US asked the Oz military for troops, they were sent. Now the US military just lent 4000 suits of body armour and keep adding other little bits of hardware all while politely pointing out that if the Oz government spent a bit more on US made hardware, these little problems wouldn't happen. This little incident just switches things around a bit the other way.
The biggest software project failures in the last 10 years have all been written in C++. I know because I was hired to clean up some of the messes. A few years ago I had to build a special box just to debug one of the silly programs. The box had 2 gig of swap space and 1/2 gig of ram just to load the test program and gdb. The end result was a complete rewrite of the test code in C which resulted in a program that was something like 180k.
What perl needs is a built in "CGI_split" so
I can say %vars=cgisplit; and it will do the right thing.
What I don't understand is why Motorola dumped the 6809 instruction set for all its newer CPUs like the 6811. The 6809 was the best designed instruction set of any 8 bit CPU (its about 8 bit as the 8088). Even the 68000 was worse. Was the 6809 the last clean sucessful design the cpu world? (the NS32032 was clean but way too buggy).
Alpha Testers are Internal.
Beta Testers are External.
Corel must follow the GPL for beta testers.
-tim
Its only 2^512 times more difficult if and only if the keys are prime. If the density of prime numbers changes as the number of bits increases then it is quite possable that a 512 bit key may be harder to break than a 1024 bit one.