I don't think that David Hahn himself posted in the previous story; some acquaintances/friends from the period did, however, and at least one posted again in this story.
Joel holds forth the position that since Sun sells processors, it's against their interest for them to invest in Java, which allows people to write software for any processor, thus "commoditizing" Sun's product line.
A few paragraphs above that, he holds that is in Transmeta's interest to invest in software that runs on anything (Linux), because it commoditizes the "complement" of Transmeta's product (also processors).
Joel, why doesn't Linux and other Free Software commoditize Transmeta's processors as much as they do Sun's ? Why does linux make only make a "complement" a commodity in Transmeta's case, but Java makes the complement a commodity and the code product a commodity in Sun's case ?
The fact is, Joel got a little carried away. If the alternative is not having your product purchased no matter how good because of artificial constraints, then operating in a commodity market looks appealing. Both Sun and Transmeta believe they have superior products to Intel/AMD, even if those products are superior in a niche. They need the death of (or the splitting of) the Microsoft/Intel axis, so that they can compete on any grounds at all.
If everyone uses Linux, they may mostly use x86 chips most of the time but sometimes they'll need somthing really low power and low temp and buy Transmeta, and all their software will just re-compile no problem. If everyone write Java programs, they may use x86 chips most of the time but sometimes they'll need something really powerful and stable and reliable, and they'll buy a Solaris machine and just run their java code with no problem. (Of course they can also write Java and run it on Transmeta chips, and write for linux and run it on Sun hardware.)
So what is lacking in Joel's analysis is that therw are some things worse than competeing in a commodity market, and Free Software is sometimes funded to purposely give companies a chance at a commodity market.
So why don't you hire that one dude higher up in the thread ? He seems a little arrogant and self-sure of himself, but give him the standard initiation -- you know, send him to the hardware store for a bucket of stripped paint, ask him to find a one-terminal resistor on the web, and a write-only harddrive, etc, and I'm sure he'll humble up and work out fine.
I think the law can draw a distinction between cladestine activity and direct communication with someone, which is by definition overt.
I think that our society has an interest in allowing the disgruntled, even when they are kooks like this guy, to communicate. I see no benefit in setting a precedent that big companies are allowed to sue people who send email critical of them. If the Intel persued every spammer who sent much more spam than that at their systems, I'd consider giving them the benefit of the doubt, but it seems clear that this kook is in court because of the content of his email.
If I sent 29,000 emails to Intel employees claiming AMD sucked in my benchmarks, you can bet they wouldn't be suing me.
Yeah, and it's not like you'd get caught, because these big ISPs and other providers never tell the customer that they just handed over all that information. The problem is having an appropriately official looking yet annonymous way to receive the information back. I guess if you can arrange to receive fraudulently purchased mail order packages, you can figure that part out. Do they use empty apartments to receive packages or something ?
Look at all the fully functional linuxes that fit on a floppy. There is even one that runs X, and fits on two floppies:
2-disk xwindow linux.
If play around with these small linuxes on old machines like 386 laptops, you will quickly find that squeezing everything on to the disk space is not the problem, the problem is having enough ram. Most of those distros won't run on two megs of ram because they try to make an initial ram disk bigger than that and thus fail right off the bat. However, small-linux will boot a 386 with 2 megs of ram, so if you want something tiny, it might be a good place to start.
That argument applies to ALL encryption algorithms. In fact, skip the key step -- just guess the MESSAGE. The probability that you guessed the right message increases the longer you keep guessing !
The reason why this line of reasoning is junvenile is that there is no game show host who is going to ring the bell when you guess right. All messages are equally likely. If you guess "I am going to blow up your sandcastle with a firecracker", and then guess, "There is no message in this encryption I did it just to watch you waste your time", how do you know which one is right ? If you could show that one was more likely than the other, then that would be a weakness of the encryption.
You are naive. You really should read David Kahn's Codebreakers book, or at least the first several chapters.
A one time pad is unbreakable. What this means is that if you have the encrypted message, and all keys are equally likely, there is no information that can possibly be gleaned from it -- all possible un-encrypted messages (of that length) are equally likely. You can hypothesize that the message is "Osama - be sure to wear the black lacy stuff when we meet at four to masturbate while talking about blowing up Americans!" and there is a key which would decode it that way, but there is no reason to believe it any more than any other message.
The scheme the article suggests is snake oil because not all keys are equally likely (among other faults). You can only have as many keys as there are seeds to this super-duper equation deal. Not to mention that this scheme like all one time pads is only as strong as the system used to distribute keys, which in this case seems to happen over the same channel as the encrypted message.
While linux is great in terms of databases, a user interface like Access is one of things people often cite to me as a reason why they can't switch to linux. Thanks for pointing this out, I'm going to send several people to http://www.flex.ro/pgaccess/ and hopefully get some converts.
IBM was always a little too controlling with their via voice stuff. They wouldn't let people bundle via voice into a application to redistribute it, you had to instruct the end user to install via voice and then install your stuff, which I happen to know stopped at least one person from distributing a pretty cool application beyound a few of his friends (it was an IRC client that read out loud).
Of course I'm preaching to the choir here on/., but the lesson is, never sink lots of time/money/heartache into something that isn't Free as in Freedom.
Possibly IBM's policies are the result of recognizing that they have an incredibly powerful product in via voice, and trying to figure out how to turn it into the cash cow it should be. Perhaps they could GPL (not LGPL) the library, and let the Free Software writers popularize it and make it the de-facto standard, and hope to make money selling non-GPL licenses to those companies that don't want to GPL their applications. Not a sure thing by any means, but maybe it would be better than what they are doing now. I think their current action of withdrawing that SDK hurts them more than it helps them.
This post has nothing to do with Congradulating Rob and Kathleen, Love vs. Terrorism, or an insane infatuation with watching numbers change on the HOF page. It doesn't even have anything to do with time traveling universe editors needed inorder to give some worthless spammer a life.
It is purely and solely dedicated to giving a big FUCK YOU to every person who moderated in this article after it left the front page.
That's right bitch, how does it feel to be only #4 ?
Ask your friend Junis Kanuni to boot up that C-64 of his, and depending on how many times he has to clean out the 1541 drive with a Q-tip and rubbing alcohol (is that non-islamic ? how do you fuckers disinfect scratches ?) maybe around noon you can see for yourself.
But that won't be the case in another two minutes !
Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 56 seconds since you last successfully posted a comment
If this error seems to be incorrect, please provide the following in your report to SourceForge.net:
* Browser type
* User ID/Nickname or AC
* What steps caused this error
* Whether or not you know your ISP to be using a proxy or some sort of service that gives you an IP that others are using simultaneously.
* How many posts to this form you successfully submitted during the day
* Please choose 'formkeys' for the category! Thank you.
I hope one day Taco and CowboyNeal and all the rest sit down and read through every post since 1930. That's when I started my campaign for Love versus Terrorism. I hope they see that no amount of moderation, lameness filters, etc, can keep down the spirit of the American people.
Instead I have been banned for "bad posting" and am not allowed to post AC.
Oh well, that just means the moderators will have to waste more points to get me down, as I post logged in.
Slow Down Cowboy!
I jumped the gun there. I've gotten so where my skin crawls at 120 seconds and I know I should hit submit. But it's way way way way past my bedtime and I'm anxious to get this thankless, but necessary, task done.
I decided to move my crapflooding from the top level down into a thread. I'm hoping to hide from the Al Qeada moderators who seem to be still stalking this article modding down people as offtopic.
. . . as well as those very very few beings who can edit the universe.
Do your universe editing skillz include editting Slashdot's mySQL database ? If so, can you go back in time to Sept. 11th and delete a few hundred meaningless posts from those stories that are higher than this one in total number of posts ?
I'd also like editor priviledges and 50 karma points. Also, feel free to make a certain 21 hijackers all have massive, explosive diarhea causing them to have car wrecks on the way to airport.
Then, if you aren't TOO busy, just send an email to IneedTimeTravel@aol.com and await further instructions.
Do not send email to IneedTimeTravel@aol.com if you are an evil alien. He has specifically asked not to be spammed by evil aliens.
I'd like to promise my constituents that this matter will be throughly investigated in between crapflood posts to this thread in the name of Love vs. Terrorism.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that David Hahn himself posted in the previous story; some acquaintances/friends from the period did, however, and at least one posted again in this story.
Joel holds forth the position that since Sun sells processors, it's against their interest for them to invest in Java, which allows people to write software for any processor, thus "commoditizing" Sun's product line.
A few paragraphs above that, he holds that is in Transmeta's interest to invest in software that runs on anything (Linux), because it commoditizes the "complement" of Transmeta's product (also processors).
Joel, why doesn't Linux and other Free Software commoditize Transmeta's processors as much as they do Sun's ? Why does linux make only make a "complement" a commodity in Transmeta's case, but Java makes the complement a commodity and the code product a commodity in Sun's case ?
The fact is, Joel got a little carried away. If the alternative is not having your product purchased no matter how good because of artificial constraints, then operating in a commodity market looks appealing. Both Sun and Transmeta believe they have superior products to Intel/AMD, even if those products are superior in a niche. They need the death of (or the splitting of) the Microsoft/Intel axis, so that they can compete on any grounds at all.
If everyone uses Linux, they may mostly use x86 chips most of the time but sometimes they'll need somthing really low power and low temp and buy Transmeta, and all their software will just re-compile no problem. If everyone write Java programs, they may use x86 chips most of the time but sometimes they'll need something really powerful and stable and reliable, and they'll buy a Solaris machine and just run their java code with no problem. (Of course they can also write Java and run it on Transmeta chips, and write for linux and run it on Sun hardware.)
So what is lacking in Joel's analysis is that therw are some things worse than competeing in a commodity market, and Free Software is sometimes funded to purposely give companies a chance at a commodity market.
So why don't you hire that one dude higher up in the thread ? He seems a little arrogant and self-sure of himself, but give him the standard initiation -- you know, send him to the hardware store for a bucket of stripped paint, ask him to find a one-terminal resistor on the web, and a write-only harddrive, etc, and I'm sure he'll humble up and work out fine.
I think the law can draw a distinction between cladestine activity and direct communication with someone, which is by definition overt.
I think that our society has an interest in allowing the disgruntled, even when they are kooks like this guy, to communicate. I see no benefit in setting a precedent that big companies are allowed to sue people who send email critical of them. If the Intel persued every spammer who sent much more spam than that at their systems, I'd consider giving them the benefit of the doubt, but it seems clear that this kook is in court because of the content of his email.
If I sent 29,000 emails to Intel employees claiming AMD sucked in my benchmarks, you can bet they wouldn't be suing me.
Yeah, and it's not like you'd get caught, because these big ISPs and other providers never tell the customer that they just handed over all that information. The problem is having an appropriately official looking yet annonymous way to receive the information back. I guess if you can arrange to receive fraudulently purchased mail order packages, you can figure that part out. Do they use empty apartments to receive packages or something ?
If play around with these small linuxes on old machines like 386 laptops, you will quickly find that squeezing everything on to the disk space is not the problem, the problem is having enough ram. Most of those distros won't run on two megs of ram because they try to make an initial ram disk bigger than that and thus fail right off the bat. However, small-linux will boot a 386 with 2 megs of ram, so if you want something tiny, it might be a good place to start.
That argument applies to ALL encryption algorithms. In fact, skip the key step -- just guess the MESSAGE. The probability that you guessed the right message increases the longer you keep guessing !
The reason why this line of reasoning is junvenile is that there is no game show host who is going to ring the bell when you guess right. All messages are equally likely. If you guess "I am going to blow up your sandcastle with a firecracker", and then guess, "There is no message in this encryption I did it just to watch you waste your time", how do you know which one is right ? If you could show that one was more likely than the other, then that would be a weakness of the encryption.
You are naive. You really should read David Kahn's Codebreakers book, or at least the first several chapters.
A one time pad is unbreakable. What this means is that if you have the encrypted message, and all keys are equally likely, there is no information that can possibly be gleaned from it -- all possible un-encrypted messages (of that length) are equally likely. You can hypothesize that the message is "Osama - be sure to wear the black lacy stuff when we meet at four to masturbate while talking about blowing up Americans!" and there is a key which would decode it that way, but there is no reason to believe it any more than any other message.
The scheme the article suggests is snake oil because not all keys are equally likely (among other faults). You can only have as many keys as there are seeds to this super-duper equation deal. Not to mention that this scheme like all one time pads is only as strong as the system used to distribute keys, which in this case seems to happen over the same channel as the encrypted message.
While linux is great in terms of databases, a user interface like Access is one of things people often cite to me as a reason why they can't switch to linux. Thanks for pointing this out, I'm going to send several people to http://www.flex.ro/pgaccess/ and hopefully get some converts.
IBM was always a little too controlling with their via voice stuff. They wouldn't let people bundle via voice into a application to redistribute it, you had to instruct the end user to install via voice and then install your stuff, which I happen to know stopped at least one person from distributing a pretty cool application beyound a few of his friends (it was an IRC client that read out loud).
/., but the lesson is, never sink lots of time/money/heartache into something that isn't Free as in Freedom.
Of course I'm preaching to the choir here on
Possibly IBM's policies are the result of recognizing that they have an incredibly powerful product in via voice, and trying to figure out how to turn it into the cash cow it should be. Perhaps they could GPL (not LGPL) the library, and let the Free Software writers popularize it and make it the de-facto standard, and hope to make money selling non-GPL licenses to those companies that don't want to GPL their applications. Not a sure thing by any means, but maybe it would be better than what they are doing now. I think their current action of withdrawing that SDK hurts them more than it helps them.
This post has nothing to do with Congradulating Rob and Kathleen, Love vs. Terrorism, or an insane infatuation with watching numbers change on the HOF page. It doesn't even have anything to do with time traveling universe editors needed inorder to give some worthless spammer a life.
It is purely and solely dedicated to giving a big FUCK YOU to every person who moderated in this article after it left the front page.
Let me make it clear:
FUCK YOU
Yet Another Anti-Terrorism Pro-Love Insurance Post.
I'm a belt, suspenders, AND stable it to my soft fleshy ass cheeks type of guy.
Just in case some "User" decides to delete one or two posts here and there.
That's right bitch, how does it feel to be only #4 ?
Ask your friend Junis Kanuni to boot up that C-64 of his, and depending on how many times he has to clean out the 1541 drive with a Q-tip and rubbing alcohol (is that non-islamic ? how do you fuckers disinfect scratches ?) maybe around noon you can see for yourself.
punk.
That's right, love is now tied with Terrorism.
But that won't be the case in another two minutes !
Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 56 seconds since you last successfully posted a comment
If this error seems to be incorrect, please provide the following in your report to SourceForge.net:
* Browser type
* User ID/Nickname or AC
* What steps caused this error
* Whether or not you know your ISP to be using a proxy or some sort of service that gives you an IP that others are using simultaneously.
* How many posts to this form you successfully submitted during the day
* Please choose 'formkeys' for the category!
Thank you.
THANK YOU, damn it.
It's now one point away from a tie.
I think.
The Hall of Fame is still blank.
I'll just have to pop in a few extra posts to make sure.
Well, still here.
I hope one day Taco and CowboyNeal and all the rest sit down and read through every post since 1930. That's when I started my campaign for Love versus Terrorism. I hope they see that no amount of moderation, lameness filters, etc, can keep down the spirit of the American people.
I should get a medal.
Instead I have been banned for "bad posting" and am not allowed to post AC.
Oh well, that just means the moderators will have to waste more points to get me down, as I post logged in.
Slow Down Cowboy!
I jumped the gun there. I've gotten so where my skin crawls at 120 seconds and I know I should hit submit. But it's way way way way past my bedtime and I'm anxious to get this thankless, but necessary, task done.
I'd damn well like to go to bed.
But I am afraid that this story will go to archive and be froozen at around 8 this morning, which is it's one week anniversery.
So duty holds me here for another 6 posts or so.
I believe that in 7 sweet, sweet posts we will take over #3 in the hall of fame.
But I can't check it because HOF is currently being Michael Simed.
I decided to move my crapflooding from the top level down into a thread. I'm hoping to hide from the Al Qeada moderators who seem to be still stalking this article modding down people as offtopic.
But someone has to do it.
I may be a Rude Dude, but when it comes to Love vs. Terrorism, I know what side I'm on.
Posts by another half million slashdot accounts seem surprisingly lacking, however.
. . . as well as those very very few beings who can edit the universe.
Do your universe editing skillz include editting Slashdot's mySQL database ? If so, can you go back in time to Sept. 11th and delete a few hundred meaningless posts from those stories that are higher than this one in total number of posts ?
I'd also like editor priviledges and 50 karma points. Also, feel free to make a certain 21 hijackers all have massive, explosive diarhea causing them to have car wrecks on the way to airport.
Then, if you aren't TOO busy, just send an email to IneedTimeTravel@aol.com and await further instructions.
Do not send email to IneedTimeTravel@aol.com if you are an evil alien. He has specifically asked not to be spammed by evil aliens.
A search on "IneedTimeTravel@aol.com" on groups.google.com came up nil.
But on the ordinary web google search, I hit. Someone has an online personal journal in which they mention receiving this:
Roger Avry's Journal(Scroll down a bit and look at the Feb 12th entry)
Another Journal this one was received on the 10th.
I'd like to promise my constituents that this matter will be throughly investigated in between crapflood posts to this thread in the name of Love vs. Terrorism.
This spam intrigues me. (I am not a time traveler or universe editor, let's get out of the way right now.)
I'm interested to know if any other slashdot people have received this particular piece of spam.
I'll be popping a few key phrases from it into groups.google.com right now, to see if it has made usenet.