Proof that it's not so easy to develop with may lie in the fact that the demos reported in this article are the same ones that have been showing for many, many months... I saw them in mid-April, same Sony exec, same city. (And the chips had individual fans...)
On the other hand, maybe they're just having the game developers do that stuff and there will be some way cool things to show sometime next month? Hmm.
One smart thing Sony's doing is getting a third party market of graphics engines going. I understand that didn't exist with the PS-1; but we know the model works with Quake, Doom, and so on. After all, you only need a few good engines that can work with those parallel vector engines. And Sony doesn't need to be demonstrating more than a basic one, so long as someone else is working on that...
I called them quite a bit more than that... they were having problems letting me into the directed shares ("friends'n'family") program, I finally had to do it via broker. (And I sure hope it worked, I'd like those shares at the IPO pricing, like my offer letter and financials support!!!!)
All last week I was hearing "$12-$14" from E*TRADE. For what it's worth. This shouldn't really be news.
Actually, not -- I just got off the phone with an E*TRADE customer service person (the # on the offer letter from RedHat), resolving a problem on E*TRADE's part, and he ("Matt") said that the the Friends'n'Family program with RedHat has a deadline of August 7 (if you got RedHat's letter).
Unfortunately this is still a theory that's not proven by the facts... E*TRADE is having problems with my (new) account. Evidently they didn't upload my account into the IPO database, so I can't advantage of the F'n'F for RedHat yet. A broker took my "indication of interest" over the phone; I sure hope that works, since he thought the IPO pricing would happen tonight (so, maybe no 7-August deadline.)
The annoyance: I did everything E*TRADE said to do, like getting a funded account by August 4. There's no way I can see they'd turn down my application -- I've got enough money and investment experience.
If I don't get a real shot at these IPO shares, it'll be because of a fuckup on E*TRADE's part, pure and simple.
(2)Fear of new media... I wouldn't call him a Luddite...
Why not? It's the same economic thing that drove the Luddites (followers of one J. Ludd, if my history is even vaguely correct): the social and technological changes that were erasing their lifestyles just weren't well received.
Not all change is good, and people do the Luddites a great disservice when they claim they were just unthinkingly against technology. It's much more important than that: they understood what it was doing, didn't like it, and objected in about the only way available to them.
The whole discussion is just a ramification of that "shaking the industry".
Sun's control of Java was predicated on the idea that nobody else was smart enough to write their own. They should have known better. Someone else did, and now Sun has no way of keeping MS from putting in their own incompatible extensions.
Not a chance... from day one Sun expected clean room versions. Did you notice how it's grown in size pretty much exponentially? It's not an issue of smart, it's an issue of finding it worthwhile to reverse engineere that mountain of stuff. The biggest wad is the Enterprise Java stuff; If you buy the notion there's value in a profile that focusses on transactional EJB support (maybe you run big iron?) then a cleanroom is going to be tough to deliver. Heck, the specs to EJB have not been stable enough to implement to; only Sun can really do that, now.
Also: Most of the legal work was trademark protection work. Microsoft, or Transvirtual, or HP, or anyone, can reverse engineer all they want, and more power to them. But they can't call it Java unless they license the trademark.
I'm sure that's incorrect. There are lots of folk who protect APIs... as trade secrets, as copyrighted information, and so on. Even as parts of patents. (Whoops, the gazintas and gazoutas of this code match the description in that patent, it infringes, yowp!)
Whether 3dfx has a real case here is, as you noted, a different issue.
Gotta mention PacBell here, which is ramping up a rather large deployment in California. More folk in Silicon Valley have access to this than to the @Home service, by far...
Costs: PacBell is the ILEC and their telco arm changes your regular $11/month phone line to a ADSL-enabled one, then adds $39/month to enable the ADSL service. Most folk also take a $10/month contract with Pacific Bell Internet ("PBI") for their ISP. In short, $50 on top of your existing phone service, and you're up! For a one year contract they waived installation fees and gave both the Alcatel 1000 modem and a PCI Ethernet card.
Data rate: 384 kbps downstream guaranteed, up to 1.5 Mbps (which is typical for me). Upstream is 128 Kbps; fine for what I do.
Servers: No problem. One fixed IP address. If you want PBI to do DNS for you, you need a slightly more expensive service than I described above; or, do it yourself. 128 Kbps upstream can be improved upon, also.
Operating System: Their staff is trained for Windoze and Mac; but installing it on my Linux box was not an issue for them. Yes, I use IP Masq.
Experience: I've had it four months now. When it works, it's great... and that's almost all the time. But I do have problems with the Alcatel 1000 ADSL modem, for which the official remedy is "power cycle the modem". No, this clearly faulty hardware hasn't yet been replaced. There are rumors of FLASH upgrades that will be done through the net; no evidence yet. Also, with this large a high speed deployment, and PBI's lack of experience with one, there are problems with routing snafus (Redback). PBI does not appear to have adequate network operations in place; it seems like they can't do basic SNMP monitoring of their routers or DSLAMs, so they don't see the problems customers have. (All of those problems are confirmed not to be unique to me.)
Overall, I give the speed an A, and the network operations a B-... I would not run a 24x7 business on one of these ADSL links, but it's a darn sight better than a 56K modem of any kind.
The assumption in this review seems to be that there are an increasing number of "drivers" down the information superhighway, folk who have points A and B between which they wish to rush.
Appealing image. But those cars may have passengers too; some folk really prefer not to have to make their own choices. Even those who drive may want to "cruise" more than to be empowered... web browsing is not as passive as television, but it's not quite as goal-directed as it might be, either.
Also, I'm not so sure I agree that this round of the "Information Society" revolution is going to work so differently from the various previous rounds. (One can hope!) There are always elites who really benefit, and other folk who don't benefit so much... only so many individuals can really be empowered before the powers-that-be will start to get worried.
Consider the recent "hellmouth" series of discussions. Are schools designed to empower anyone except maybe the teachers, and those few kids who make their lives easier? Nope. Fit in to their power structure... or else. And that's the way every local community works. A change of power is dangerous to the status quo; even just being different can be a threat.
Just watch over the next few years as those powers-that-be try to clamp down on the potential for revolution here. Watch information become increasingly controlled by the folk who didn't create it, be they database vendors, the RIAA, or some "religious" group. Watch privacy get further abridged, espionage against private citizens becoming accepted government practice. Watch more kinds of discussion be viewed as threats; watch the wagons beginning to circle.
Some of the current drivers don't want to switch, or let new cars share the road.
My same response -- I turned to my right to look at my bookshelf, there it was!! (With picture of an old girlfriend in it, hmm, how's she doing lately?:-)
Harvard University Press, copyright 1986 (!), ISBN 0-674-16985-9 (paper). James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society
You're right that searching "every" bit of traffic is too much... but in addition to the other points raised ("there is proof that they do this"), I'll just highlight that the espionage agencies have had years to develop specialized hardware to not just crack ciphers, but also do high speed pattern recognition. And yes, lots of academic research has been funded in those areas for the past decades.
That said, for the past two years I've been getting the story from folks in/around Washington DC that the spy agencies have given up on stopping crypto for purposes of national security. All the signals they really care about are too easily protected. That jives with what that report said.
The bizarre thing... is that the FBI and other law enforcement folk have recently begun muddying the waters. It's like they don't want to notice what their higher tech buddies have concluded... or maybe they just have a huge case of budget envy! Look on the bright side, if they get their wish, it's a new segment of the high tech industry.
What I found the most interesting bit in the Bernstein ruling was the observation that Fourth Amendment rights (protecting against unreasonable search and seizure) were at risk. Let it be noted that J. Edgar Hoover's organization is not noted for scrupulously obeying the law, and many folk have been noticing an alarming tendancy towards very authoritarian behavior in many police departments in the United States. What would you like to bet that members of minority communities will get more hassle for using crypto than, say, WASPs?
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Proof that it's not so easy to develop with may lie in the fact that the demos reported in this article are the same ones that have been showing for many, many months ... I saw them in mid-April, same Sony exec, same city. (And the chips had individual fans ...)
On the other hand, maybe they're just having the game developers do that stuff and there will be some way cool things to show sometime next month? Hmm.
One smart thing Sony's doing is getting a third party market of graphics engines going. I understand that didn't exist with the PS-1; but we know the model works with Quake, Doom, and so on. After all, you only need a few good engines that can work with those parallel vector engines. And Sony doesn't need to be demonstrating more than a basic one, so long as someone else is working on that ...
- Jojo
Per quicken.com news ...
- Jojo
I called them quite a bit more than that ... they were having problems letting me into the directed shares ("friends'n'family") program, I finally had to do it via broker. (And I sure hope it worked, I'd like those shares at the IPO pricing, like my offer letter and financials support!!!!)
All last week I was hearing "$12-$14" from E*TRADE. For what it's worth. This shouldn't really be news.
- Jojo
Actually, not -- I just got off the phone with an E*TRADE customer service person (the # on the offer letter from RedHat), resolving a problem on E*TRADE's part, and he ("Matt") said that the the Friends'n'Family program with RedHat has a deadline of August 7 (if you got RedHat's letter).
Unfortunately this is still a theory that's not proven by the facts ... E*TRADE is having problems with my (new) account. Evidently they didn't upload my account into the IPO database, so I can't advantage of the F'n'F for RedHat yet. A broker took my "indication of interest" over the phone; I sure hope that works, since he thought the IPO pricing would happen tonight (so, maybe no 7-August deadline.)
The annoyance: I did everything E*TRADE said to do, like getting a funded account by August 4. There's no way I can see they'd turn down my application -- I've got enough money and investment experience.
If I don't get a real shot at these IPO shares, it'll be because of a fuckup on E*TRADE's part, pure and simple.
- Jojo
(2)Fear of new media ... I wouldn't call him a Luddite...
Why not? It's the same economic thing that drove the Luddites (followers of one J. Ludd, if my history is even vaguely correct): the social and technological changes that were erasing their lifestyles just weren't well received.
Not all change is good, and people do the Luddites a great disservice when they claim they were just unthinkingly against technology. It's much more important than that: they understood what it was doing, didn't like it, and objected in about the only way available to them.
The whole discussion is just a ramification of that "shaking the industry".
- Jojo
Not a chance... from day one Sun expected clean room versions. Did you notice how it's grown in size pretty much exponentially? It's not an issue of smart, it's an issue of finding it worthwhile to reverse engineere that mountain of stuff. The biggest wad is the Enterprise Java stuff; If you buy the notion there's value in a profile that focusses on transactional EJB support (maybe you run big iron?) then a cleanroom is going to be tough to deliver. Heck, the specs to EJB have not been stable enough to implement to; only Sun can really do that, now.
Also: Most of the legal work was trademark protection work. Microsoft, or Transvirtual, or HP, or anyone, can reverse engineer all they want, and more power to them. But they can't call it Java unless they license the trademark.
- Jojo
I'm sure that's incorrect. There are lots of folk who protect APIs ... as trade secrets, as copyrighted information, and so on. Even as parts of patents. (Whoops, the gazintas and gazoutas of this code match the description in that patent, it infringes, yowp!)
Whether 3dfx has a real case here is, as you noted, a different issue.
- Jojo
Gotta mention PacBell here, which is ramping up a rather large deployment in California. More folk in Silicon Valley have access to this than to the @Home service, by far ...
Costs: PacBell is the ILEC and their telco arm changes your regular $11/month phone line to a ADSL-enabled one, then adds $39/month to enable the ADSL service. Most folk also take a $10/month contract with Pacific Bell Internet ("PBI") for their ISP. In short, $50 on top of your existing phone service, and you're up! For a one year contract they waived installation fees and gave both the Alcatel 1000 modem and a PCI Ethernet card.
Data rate: 384 kbps downstream guaranteed, up to 1.5 Mbps (which is typical for me). Upstream is 128 Kbps; fine for what I do.
Servers: No problem. One fixed IP address. If you want PBI to do DNS for you, you need a slightly more expensive service than I described above; or, do it yourself. 128 Kbps upstream can be improved upon, also.
Operating System: Their staff is trained for Windoze and Mac; but installing it on my Linux box was not an issue for them. Yes, I use IP Masq.
Experience: I've had it four months now. When it works, it's great ... and that's almost all the time. But I do have problems with the Alcatel 1000 ADSL modem, for which the official remedy is "power cycle the modem". No, this clearly faulty hardware hasn't yet been replaced. There are rumors of FLASH upgrades that will be done through the net; no evidence yet. Also, with this large a high speed deployment, and PBI's lack of experience with one, there are problems with routing snafus (Redback). PBI does not appear to have adequate network operations in place; it seems like they can't do basic SNMP monitoring of their routers or DSLAMs, so they don't see the problems customers have. (All of those problems are confirmed not to be unique to me.)
Overall, I give the speed an A, and the network operations a B- ... I would not run a 24x7 business on one of these ADSL links, but it's a darn sight better than a 56K modem of any kind.
- Jojo
The assumption in this review seems to be that there are an increasing number of "drivers" down the information superhighway, folk who have points A and B between which they wish to rush.
Appealing image. But those cars may have passengers too; some folk really prefer not to have to make their own choices. Even those who drive may want to "cruise" more than to be empowered ... web browsing is not as passive as television, but it's not quite as goal-directed as it might be, either.
Also, I'm not so sure I agree that this round of the "Information Society" revolution is going to work so differently from the various previous rounds. (One can hope!) There are always elites who really benefit, and other folk who don't benefit so much ... only so many individuals can really be empowered before the powers-that-be will start to get worried.
Consider the recent "hellmouth" series of discussions. Are schools designed to empower anyone except maybe the teachers, and those few kids who make their lives easier? Nope. Fit in to their power structure ... or else. And that's the way every local community works. A change of power is dangerous to the status quo; even just being different can be a threat.
Just watch over the next few years as those powers-that-be try to clamp down on the potential for revolution here. Watch information become increasingly controlled by the folk who didn't create it, be they database vendors, the RIAA, or some "religious" group. Watch privacy get further abridged, espionage against private citizens becoming accepted government practice. Watch more kinds of discussion be viewed as threats; watch the wagons beginning to circle.
Some of the current drivers don't want to switch, or let new cars share the road.
- Jojo
My same response -- I turned to my right to look at my bookshelf, there it was!! (With picture of an old girlfriend in it, hmm, how's she doing lately? :-)
Harvard University Press, copyright 1986 (!), ISBN 0-674-16985-9 (paper). James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society
Right, Menwith Hill in the UK is where most of the Echelon stuff is done ... :-)
You're right that searching "every" bit of traffic is too much ... but in addition to the other points raised ("there is proof that they do this"), I'll just highlight that the espionage agencies have had years to develop specialized hardware to not just crack ciphers, but also do high speed pattern recognition. And yes, lots of academic research has been funded in those areas for the past decades.
That said, for the past two years I've been getting the story from folks in/around Washington DC that the spy agencies have given up on stopping crypto for purposes of national security. All the signals they really care about are too easily protected. That jives with what that report said.
The bizarre thing ... is that the FBI and other law enforcement folk have recently begun muddying the waters. It's like they don't want to notice what their higher tech buddies have concluded ... or maybe they just have a huge case of budget envy! Look on the bright side, if they get their wish, it's a new segment of the high tech industry.
What I found the most interesting bit in the Bernstein ruling was the observation that Fourth Amendment rights (protecting against unreasonable search and seizure) were at risk. Let it be noted that J. Edgar Hoover's organization is not noted for scrupulously obeying the law, and many folk have been noticing an alarming tendancy towards very authoritarian behavior in many police departments in the United States. What would you like to bet that members of minority communities will get more hassle for using crypto than, say, WASPs?