You're clearly just trying to fuel some sort of flamewar. If you really think what you are saying is "true" you really ought to spend a month or two in another city and see how "superior" you really are.
But I jest, you are just just trying to flame for the sake of starting a flamewar.
So I give in, you're clearly less mature than I am. In the "who's the biggest kid" contest you win. I salute you.
I speak French [not fluently but enough to get by]. I took it in school as an immersion student. I lost interest when I realized that it's not worth it [comp.sci doesn't require it].
And besides that, Canada is bilingual not French. Why should French only speaking citizens get jobs with the government when they can get out a couple English words while the Anglophones have to speak French fluently to pass as "bilingual".
Why should I as an anglophone business owner have to display French signs on my business in Quebec? What if I don't speak a word of French at all?
***That's*** why the English are pissed off. Not because the government is bilingual but that the government FAVOURS the french over the english.
Every Iraqi civilian who dies in the name of "Freedom" is just another martyr for a new society hell bent on war.
It's all good to be guns ablazin but if you think "stopping at nothing" is the cure... you're a fucktard. What? You think when UBL is caught that all your troubles are over? That's just the thing with abstract enemies like "terrorists". They're all around you. It'll never end.
People like you say "it's because of the USA that Canada never gets attacked"... oh yeah that worked so well for you on 9/11 didn't it?
Point is you can enslave all the citizens [*] you want for your pointless wars. 20 years from now you'll still be fighting some other "enemy" and you'll never know peace.
[*] What else do you call funding cuts for education then scholarship enlist bonuses for the military?
They bitch and whine that their culture is not being respected, all while they themselves dillute it with American culture.
For example, signs in Quebecastan must be in French first then English and the English must be smaller. That's not just "a good idea" it's the fucking law. They'll go around measuring your sign to ensure compliance.
Then you have, the separatists. Those confused folk think Quebec belongs to the province. It's Canadian soil. So if they separate they have to still pay taxes to Canada.
For the most part the vocal "Quebecois" bitch about how hard their life is then they proceed to NOT learn English to NOT repsect other peoples cultures and to ASSUME their superiority by forcing others out of the province.
You wouldn't believe how much money goes into the province in the form of transfers and government programs. Then you have the civil servants who are mostly French. Good luck if you're English. You must be "bilingual" by which they mean French only. If you go into an office downtown you're lucky if the person at the counter can speak English to any productive level. Some of the popular offices like Health Canada are ok but things like the passport office or the courthouse are French.
Then you have the CCRA and other Human Resources like folk. All French.
CSE? All French.
Military? French.
Federal government? French.
etc...
While the rest of us are sitting here going "wtf did I do to them?" I'm glad I work private sector [for an American company no less]. I just ignore the government so long as my quality of life is ok since it seems no matter how much I vote for the "not french people" we keep getting the fucking French Liberal party in office...
Yeah, well it's still kinda odd that all these wasteful government programs end up in Quebec or those other provinces [quite frankly I forgot their names, cuz really I don't care about them].
Ontario largely makes or breaks foreign trade with countries like the USA but we still get played up as the villains and betrayed by the government every chance they get.
Fuck this, I'm moving to BC. At least they have a "no french" policy.:-)
For once someone gets it. If we ever meet in person I'll buy you a beer [or whatever ya drink].
As a Canadian [and fellow North Americaner] all I have to say is it's good to see someone gets it. Too many foreigners flee their country for safety reasons then just pursue the culture that bred it here [often with the problems just following behind them].
Moving China to Toronto, Vancouver and a few other cities won't fix the problems they have in China.
That said, if you guys don't open up the poles to a "third" option you're doomed for another four years of "Iraq SMASH! Iran PHEAR!". Demo == Repub.
Oh and to CNN... your system of government is NOT a democracy it's a republic and it's not bi-partisan no matter how much you say that word. Open up your fucking eyes and report the world the way it ACTUALLY is not the way you'd like it to be. For a 24 hour news station you'd have more to report [e.g. less repetition] if you actually investigated [and presented] the other parties. You know, your, "job"...
All I have to say is poor execution is no excuse for monopoly driven pricing.
Let's say I was your source of water to your house. And I decide that eroding water pipes is a problem not worth fixing. The solution is since so much water gets lost in the pipes we'll just raise the price.
Seem fair?
This has secondary effects of wasting bandwidth over the net everywhere. It isn't just the DNS server that carries the traffic but the peering networks, my ISP, etc, etc.
If the root servers don't want to protect themselves why should I pay for it when I want to open a website or service? I use my ISPs DNS server as required by the hiearchy. I'm not circumventing the net.
If my ISP [rogers in this case] isn't following the rules I want to know about it. I pay for Rogers bandwidth as a customer. If they're wasting it on redundant DNS traffic they're wasting MY money.
Very true, mod parent up. This is right up there with the cancellation of the gun registry and GST...
Of course where is the gun registry office? [hint: How do you keep unemployable easterners happy...]
That said, I'd rather live in Canada than the USA. Mostly because it's so cold the terrorists are few and far between. Who the fuck would bomb an office in -20C weather?:-)
I'm sorry what? DNS is highly cached. How many times a second do you think slashdot.org is looked up? Now how many times from the.org. servers? I can assure you the former is much larger than the latter. When you run an ISP of a few hundred thousand customers chances are you're gonna have a fairly high cache hit rate.
To show I'm not talking out my ass...slashdot.org is valid for another 7000 seconds. That means whenever I look it up my ISP [or my router] will have most likely cached it.
As to the existing misconfigured DNS servers the solution is simple. Cut off the requesting server, contact the admin and tell them to setup a proper server with caching. Point is with most domains having a TTL of a day there is no reason why a TLD should have a heavy amount of traffic. A DNS request isn't exactly large either so combined with multi-level caching I just don't see it being a huge problem.
The fact that a DNS server requires next to no bandwidth, cpu power or other facilities. Then they charge you stupid fees "per year" for the privilege...
I say make all DNS queries recursive [throw out the cache] and make the domain owners earn their money.
I wouldn't mind a slightly slower net if it meant I could piss off some grubby TLD exec:-)
A peer reviewed talk [or paper] is where you have [usually] blind referring of papers before they are accepted [or rejected].
For example, all IACR conferences use this process. You submit your paper without your name on it and [according to them] upto three committee members will review the paper and submit comments back without their names on it. It's supposed to create a fair playing field where you don't pick papers based on name.
Unfortunately it rarely works out that way. I'm not speaking as a rejected author of a few papers [though I am] but more of a pissed off dude who sat through some of the shittiest conference talks possible.
Shamir's T-Functions are my classic recent example but there are others [like papers by D.J. Bernstein]. In the case of Shamir his research papers are not only academically challenged but we can already do better [in terms of complexity and cryptographic security]. D.J. writes highly verbiage papers on number theory that people just "trust" because of fear of admitting they can't comprehend a fucking word he's writing. And then when he bows down to the lowly "implementers" level he writes code that is so inflexible as to only be useful on his desktop machine [e.g. his ECC code].
I'm not saying IACR is a failure. They have more interesting talks than not and they certainly have been host to some of the biggest breakthroughs in cryptography [e.g. all the block cipher cryptanalysis of the 1990s]. My point is you can get shit in both sides of the fence and that it's your ability to have open review that makes it a success or not.
In the case of IACR journals they're fairly shut tight. As for their eprint service they're very open. So far there really isn't a middle ground.
"BTW your website also fails to communicate what your code does."
Then chances are you're not in need of what it provides. I distribute software libraries not end user programs. If you're not a developer looking for cryptographic routines chances are good that you don't know about my libraries.
A smart reader would infer from the fact that SCEA chose LTC over BSAFE [a much more publicly known crypto library] that LTC provides for the same sort of needs that BSAFE does.
As for SCEA... they're not exactly a mystery either. Ever heard of the Playstation?
As soon as it becomes something to make money off of you'll see the spectrum get swallowed up for commercial use... of course all for the protection of the public [e.g. regulated TV is smarter for your kids or something equally good about kids].
DVB may be freely available today, give it a week or two and you'll see it in congress under the "SAVE TEH KIDS!!!!ELEVEN!!!!1111TWO" bill.
Would you pay by the minute to watch TV on a 2.5" screen? Hey why not just read a book or heaven forbid chat with the person sitting beside you. Is it really that hard to not be envelopped in mass media for 3 seconds? Do you crave it that bad?
I hardly watch TV when I'm AT home let alone crave it elsewhere.
If you want to shell out money for your amalgamation of crappy features you call a phone [and service] go fucking for it. It just seems to me we lower standards day by day because we crave whatever crap they'll give us.
If TV on a 1" screen with the laggy goodness that is a RF signal that hardly holds a VOICE CONVERSATION is what you call "the future" or something to be jealous of, you need help and perspective.
Likely they'll charge some stupid fee like 30 cents a minute, including time to fill the buffers. And people like you will swallow it up because it's the "latest and greatest". Actually thanks. People like you fund tech that eventually gets either dead or ironed out for people like me who use it in the future.
BTW mind buying an xbox360 so MSFT has more money for revision #2? Thanks OK BYE BYE I LOVE YOU!
And the award for people who need to learn to use google goes to (drum roll) TubeSteak.
BSAFE is a product by the RSA Software corporation that provides cryptographic functionality to developers. LibTomCrypt is my crypto library which I give out for free [under public domain] at http://libtomcrypt.org./ SCEA is the Sony Computer Entertain of America Corporation.
You're kidding right? You have to have *ORIGINAL* *USEFUL* ideas to be a productive PhD. original... useful... hmm creative thinking comes to mind.
Let me guess, you're 34, a year from your PhD and on your 15th survey paper of the dynamics of roman society in a dictatorship regime? Feeling a bit bitter are we?
It's funny you mention they need to "publish or perish" in order to get their PhD and then fail to realize that that itself is a problem.
Maybe a PhD should be based on creativity and not quantity. A single unifying theorem can do much more for a field of study than a series of "stabs in the dark".
Quite a few "filler" papers in conferences are just that. Junk. But they look well polished. Until you see the same idea over and over. Like Shamirs T-Functions which he presented at Crypto'03 and again at FSE'05. Though he already has his PhD [and much deserved too] his recent work has been fairly light on usefulness [from an academic point of view].
If you are ever at a conference sitting through a talk where you think "WHY IS THIS BEING PRESENTED?" now you know your answer.
You hit an interesting point though. Subverting education is always a good way to control the masses.
Why do you think the literacy rate of China is 90.9% (Canada 97%, USA 97%, France 99%)? Why do you think governments lie to their citizens? etc, etc, etc.
If the masses actually KNEW how they were really being screwed on a daily basis you'd see heads being lopped off.
Just remember, Bush is always right, Martin never lies, Blair is honourable and I have a bridge in mint condition to sell you.
It's really quite simple. Adapt or die [well the other alternative is to use your undue influence to make your approach last longer than it naturally would otherwise... (glances at Microsoft)].
How any academic could think that the wide spread distribution of information could HURT academia is beyond me. Me thinks they have other issues on the mind [namely $$$ and power]. Given I've never read anything from their journal [nor consider myself an academic] I can't say I'd miss them if they disappeared. I get enough free shit [decent quality] from citeseer and eprint.iacr.org
The dude has one point though. Random acceptance [or blind] of papers can lead to some low quality material. Once in a while on eprint there are some really lack lustre crypto papers but quite a few are well written and interesting. And they are the sort of things that close minded expensive conference tours (...looking at the IACR conferences...) routinely rejected.
That said though, I've seen some REALLY POOR peer reviewed talks at conferences. Like the Indian students who presented on highly hardware optimized multivariate boolean equations at a SOFTWARE conference. Their talk was so horibly presented as to make me wish I had literally died at the time. Then there were the talks on one time pads at Crypto'03, etc, etc, etc.
Point is, quality material is subjective. The more open your publication is to peer review the more likely you will see quality material. The more close minded and aloof your publication is the less likely you will have insightful or interesting material to publish.
I can't see how an X11 desktop like that provided by Gnome [or KDE or the dozen other WMs out there] isn't just plain superior to Windows. I got my pretty icons, I can double click shortcuts, drag+drop files/folders/etc... but I can also do things like have multiple desktops which is something I use religiously.
Then there are the tools you get to use. gmplayer > mediaplayer, gaim > msn, openoffice > wordpad, bash > cmd, etc, etc, etc.
Microsoft like most businesses relies far too heavily on non-technical issues to make arguments in a technical debate.
Slashdot Mirror
You're clearly just trying to fuel some sort of flamewar. If you really think what you are saying is "true" you really ought to spend a month or two in another city and see how "superior" you really are.
But I jest, you are just just trying to flame for the sake of starting a flamewar.
So I give in, you're clearly less mature than I am. In the "who's the biggest kid" contest you win. I salute you.
Tom
I speak French [not fluently but enough to get by]. I took it in school as an immersion student. I lost interest when I realized that it's not worth it [comp.sci doesn't require it].
And besides that, Canada is bilingual not French. Why should French only speaking citizens get jobs with the government when they can get out a couple English words while the Anglophones have to speak French fluently to pass as "bilingual".
Why should I as an anglophone business owner have to display French signs on my business in Quebec? What if I don't speak a word of French at all?
***That's*** why the English are pissed off. Not because the government is bilingual but that the government FAVOURS the french over the english.
Tom
Collateral damage who?
... you're a fucktard. What? You think when UBL is caught that all your troubles are over? That's just the thing with abstract enemies like "terrorists". They're all around you. It'll never end.
... oh yeah that worked so well for you on 9/11 didn't it?
Every Iraqi civilian who dies in the name of "Freedom" is just another martyr for a new society hell bent on war.
It's all good to be guns ablazin but if you think "stopping at nothing" is the cure
People like you say "it's because of the USA that Canada never gets attacked"
Point is you can enslave all the citizens [*] you want for your pointless wars. 20 years from now you'll still be fighting some other "enemy" and you'll never know peace.
[*] What else do you call funding cuts for education then scholarship enlist bonuses for the military?
Tom
Maudit hestie.
Go back to hell from whence thoust came.
Tom
They bitch and whine that their culture is not being respected, all while they themselves dillute it with American culture.
For example, signs in Quebecastan must be in French first then English and the English must be smaller. That's not just "a good idea" it's the fucking law. They'll go around measuring your sign to ensure compliance.
Then you have, the separatists. Those confused folk think Quebec belongs to the province. It's Canadian soil. So if they separate they have to still pay taxes to Canada.
For the most part the vocal "Quebecois" bitch about how hard their life is then they proceed to NOT learn English to NOT repsect other peoples cultures and to ASSUME their superiority by forcing others out of the province.
You wouldn't believe how much money goes into the province in the form of transfers and government programs. Then you have the civil servants who are mostly French. Good luck if you're English. You must be "bilingual" by which they mean French only. If you go into an office downtown you're lucky if the person at the counter can speak English to any productive level. Some of the popular offices like Health Canada are ok but things like the passport office or the courthouse are French.
Then you have the CCRA and other Human Resources like folk. All French.
CSE? All French.
Military? French.
Federal government? French.
etc...
While the rest of us are sitting here going "wtf did I do to them?" I'm glad I work private sector [for an American company no less]. I just ignore the government so long as my quality of life is ok since it seems no matter how much I vote for the "not french people" we keep getting the fucking French Liberal party in office...
Tom
Yeah, well it's still kinda odd that all these wasteful government programs end up in Quebec or those other provinces [quite frankly I forgot their names, cuz really I don't care about them].
:-)
Ontario largely makes or breaks foreign trade with countries like the USA but we still get played up as the villains and betrayed by the government every chance they get.
Fuck this, I'm moving to BC. At least they have a "no french" policy.
Tom
P.S. anyone got bus fare?
I like you, you like me?
So much hostility for a person in a position of affirmative authority there.
Serenity dude, serenity.
Tom
Hehehe, had to check google maps ... you're right of course.
Though Windsor DOES get snow just not as much as say Ottawa.
Tom
MOD UP.
... your system of government is NOT a democracy it's a republic and it's not bi-partisan no matter how much you say that word. Open up your fucking eyes and report the world the way it ACTUALLY is not the way you'd like it to be. For a 24 hour news station you'd have more to report [e.g. less repetition] if you actually investigated [and presented] the other parties. You know, your, "job" ...
For once someone gets it. If we ever meet in person I'll buy you a beer [or whatever ya drink].
As a Canadian [and fellow North Americaner] all I have to say is it's good to see someone gets it. Too many foreigners flee their country for safety reasons then just pursue the culture that bred it here [often with the problems just following behind them].
Moving China to Toronto, Vancouver and a few other cities won't fix the problems they have in China.
That said, if you guys don't open up the poles to a "third" option you're doomed for another four years of "Iraq SMASH! Iran PHEAR!". Demo == Repub.
Oh and to CNN
Tom
What the fuck is Quebecois? You're Canadian. I live in Ontario, I'm still Canadian.
:-)
Maybe you should go study a fucking map you dumbass frog.
That said, enjoy France. But don't ruin it with your "habitant" talk. Learn some proper French and speak with dignity.
Tom
All I have to say is poor execution is no excuse for monopoly driven pricing.
Let's say I was your source of water to your house. And I decide that eroding water pipes is a problem not worth fixing. The solution is since so much water gets lost in the pipes we'll just raise the price.
Seem fair?
This has secondary effects of wasting bandwidth over the net everywhere. It isn't just the DNS server that carries the traffic but the peering networks, my ISP, etc, etc.
If the root servers don't want to protect themselves why should I pay for it when I want to open a website or service? I use my ISPs DNS server as required by the hiearchy. I'm not circumventing the net.
If my ISP [rogers in this case] isn't following the rules I want to know about it. I pay for Rogers bandwidth as a customer. If they're wasting it on redundant DNS traffic they're wasting MY money.
Tom
Very true, mod parent up. This is right up there with the cancellation of the gun registry and GST...
:-)
Of course where is the gun registry office? [hint: How do you keep unemployable easterners happy...]
That said, I'd rather live in Canada than the USA. Mostly because it's so cold the terrorists are few and far between. Who the fuck would bomb an office in -20C weather?
Tom
1. Tell ISP they're misconfigured
2. Wait a few days
3. If not fixed, release press statement
4. Wait a few days
5. If not fixed, cut off.
It's better than sitting on your thumbs whining and crying about it is it not?
WHY am I the ONLY genious here?
Tom
I'm sorry what? DNS is highly cached. How many times a second do you think slashdot.org is looked up? Now how many times from the .org. servers? I can assure you the former is much larger than the latter. When you run an ISP of a few hundred thousand customers chances are you're gonna have a fairly high cache hit rate.
To show I'm not talking out my ass...slashdot.org is valid for another 7000 seconds. That means whenever I look it up my ISP [or my router] will have most likely cached it.
As to the existing misconfigured DNS servers the solution is simple. Cut off the requesting server, contact the admin and tell them to setup a proper server with caching. Point is with most domains having a TTL of a day there is no reason why a TLD should have a heavy amount of traffic. A DNS request isn't exactly large either so combined with multi-level caching I just don't see it being a huge problem.
Tom
The fact that a DNS server requires next to no bandwidth, cpu power or other facilities. Then they charge you stupid fees "per year" for the privilege...
:-)
I say make all DNS queries recursive [throw out the cache] and make the domain owners earn their money.
I wouldn't mind a slightly slower net if it meant I could piss off some grubby TLD exec
Tom
A peer reviewed talk [or paper] is where you have [usually] blind referring of papers before they are accepted [or rejected].
For example, all IACR conferences use this process. You submit your paper without your name on it and [according to them] upto three committee members will review the paper and submit comments back without their names on it. It's supposed to create a fair playing field where you don't pick papers based on name.
Unfortunately it rarely works out that way. I'm not speaking as a rejected author of a few papers [though I am] but more of a pissed off dude who sat through some of the shittiest conference talks possible.
Shamir's T-Functions are my classic recent example but there are others [like papers by D.J. Bernstein]. In the case of Shamir his research papers are not only academically challenged but we can already do better [in terms of complexity and cryptographic security]. D.J. writes highly verbiage papers on number theory that people just "trust" because of fear of admitting they can't comprehend a fucking word he's writing. And then when he bows down to the lowly "implementers" level he writes code that is so inflexible as to only be useful on his desktop machine [e.g. his ECC code].
I'm not saying IACR is a failure. They have more interesting talks than not and they certainly have been host to some of the biggest breakthroughs in cryptography [e.g. all the block cipher cryptanalysis of the 1990s]. My point is you can get shit in both sides of the fence and that it's your ability to have open review that makes it a success or not.
In the case of IACR journals they're fairly shut tight. As for their eprint service they're very open. So far there really isn't a middle ground.
Tom
"BTW your website also fails to communicate what your code does."
... they're not exactly a mystery either. Ever heard of the Playstation?
Then chances are you're not in need of what it provides. I distribute software libraries not end user programs. If you're not a developer looking for cryptographic routines chances are good that you don't know about my libraries.
A smart reader would infer from the fact that SCEA chose LTC over BSAFE [a much more publicly known crypto library] that LTC provides for the same sort of needs that BSAFE does.
As for SCEA
Tom
Two words: Capi-talism.
... of course all for the protection of the public [e.g. regulated TV is smarter for your kids or something equally good about kids].
As soon as it becomes something to make money off of you'll see the spectrum get swallowed up for commercial use
DVB may be freely available today, give it a week or two and you'll see it in congress under the "SAVE TEH KIDS!!!!ELEVEN!!!!1111TWO" bill.
Would you pay by the minute to watch TV on a 2.5" screen? Hey why not just read a book or heaven forbid chat with the person sitting beside you. Is it really that hard to not be envelopped in mass media for 3 seconds? Do you crave it that bad?
Remember the soma.
Tom
I hardly watch TV when I'm AT home let alone crave it elsewhere.
If you want to shell out money for your amalgamation of crappy features you call a phone [and service] go fucking for it. It just seems to me we lower standards day by day because we crave whatever crap they'll give us.
If TV on a 1" screen with the laggy goodness that is a RF signal that hardly holds a VOICE CONVERSATION is what you call "the future" or something to be jealous of, you need help and perspective.
Likely they'll charge some stupid fee like 30 cents a minute, including time to fill the buffers. And people like you will swallow it up because it's the "latest and greatest". Actually thanks. People like you fund tech that eventually gets either dead or ironed out for people like me who use it in the future.
BTW mind buying an xbox360 so MSFT has more money for revision #2? Thanks OK BYE BYE I LOVE YOU!
Tom
And the award for people who need to learn to use google goes to (drum roll) TubeSteak.
BSAFE is a product by the RSA Software corporation that provides cryptographic functionality to developers. LibTomCrypt is my crypto library which I give out for free [under public domain] at http://libtomcrypt.org./ SCEA is the Sony Computer Entertain of America Corporation.
Tom
You're kidding right? You have to have *ORIGINAL* *USEFUL* ideas to be a productive PhD. original ... useful ... hmm creative thinking comes to mind.
Let me guess, you're 34, a year from your PhD and on your 15th survey paper of the dynamics of roman society in a dictatorship regime? Feeling a bit bitter are we?
Tom
It's funny you mention they need to "publish or perish" in order to get their PhD and then fail to realize that that itself is a problem.
Maybe a PhD should be based on creativity and not quantity. A single unifying theorem can do much more for a field of study than a series of "stabs in the dark".
Quite a few "filler" papers in conferences are just that. Junk. But they look well polished. Until you see the same idea over and over. Like Shamirs T-Functions which he presented at Crypto'03 and again at FSE'05. Though he already has his PhD [and much deserved too] his recent work has been fairly light on usefulness [from an academic point of view].
If you are ever at a conference sitting through a talk where you think "WHY IS THIS BEING PRESENTED?" now you know your answer.
Tom
You hit an interesting point though. Subverting education is always a good way to control the masses.
Why do you think the literacy rate of China is 90.9% (Canada 97%, USA 97%, France 99%)? Why do you think governments lie to their citizens? etc, etc, etc.
If the masses actually KNEW how they were really being screwed on a daily basis you'd see heads being lopped off.
Just remember, Bush is always right, Martin never lies, Blair is honourable and I have a bridge in mint condition to sell you.
Tom
You're obsolete. :-)
... (glances at Microsoft)].
It's really quite simple. Adapt or die [well the other alternative is to use your undue influence to make your approach last longer than it naturally would otherwise
How any academic could think that the wide spread distribution of information could HURT academia is beyond me. Me thinks they have other issues on the mind [namely $$$ and power]. Given I've never read anything from their journal [nor consider myself an academic] I can't say I'd miss them if they disappeared. I get enough free shit [decent quality] from citeseer and eprint.iacr.org
The dude has one point though. Random acceptance [or blind] of papers can lead to some low quality material. Once in a while on eprint there are some really lack lustre crypto papers but quite a few are well written and interesting. And they are the sort of things that close minded expensive conference tours (...looking at the IACR conferences...) routinely rejected.
That said though, I've seen some REALLY POOR peer reviewed talks at conferences. Like the Indian students who presented on highly hardware optimized multivariate boolean equations at a SOFTWARE conference. Their talk was so horibly presented as to make me wish I had literally died at the time. Then there were the talks on one time pads at Crypto'03, etc, etc, etc.
Point is, quality material is subjective. The more open your publication is to peer review the more likely you will see quality material. The more close minded and aloof your publication is the less likely you will have insightful or interesting material to publish.
Tom
"sufficient quality"
... but I can also do things like have multiple desktops which is something I use religiously.
How about superior quality.
I can't see how an X11 desktop like that provided by Gnome [or KDE or the dozen other WMs out there] isn't just plain superior to Windows. I got my pretty icons, I can double click shortcuts, drag+drop files/folders/etc
Then there are the tools you get to use. gmplayer > mediaplayer, gaim > msn, openoffice > wordpad, bash > cmd, etc, etc, etc.
Microsoft like most businesses relies far too heavily on non-technical issues to make arguments in a technical debate.
Tom