It seems to me that the point isn't whether a new technology was invented from scratch. That is not necessary to either innovate or get a patent on that innovation.
When the automobile was invented, it began a transportation revolution. Were wheels a new technology? No. Was the idea of a four wheeled transportation vehicle new? Wagons had been around for ears. Perhaps it was the engine? Engines had been around for quite some time before that.
The idea for plugins might have existed. Even the idea of web pages was just fresh. But embedding a plugin in a web page to deliver content to a remote site was definitley new. Hindsight of obvious technological progression today does not invalidate the innovation of yesterday.
If by both you mean why not use Kerberos/VPN AND MAC filtering I would say that MAC filtering adds additional administrative overhead that you don't need because MAC spoofing is not hard at all. In fact, you should expect it. Extracting the MAC from an 802.11b and a packet is not very difficult.
The FCC limitations for the 2.4 band is 1 watt (30dBm) for Point-to-Multipoint. For point to point you can get away with a lot more.
None of that matters though because obtaining true line of sight past 20 miles without more than a 20 percent impedence on the Fresnal Zone is a battle I don't want to fight.
Wifi can't replace the telcos. Not yet anyway. And certainly not as long as the FCC keeps the unlicensed frequencies very small and limited.
There are only 3 non-overlapping channels in the 2.4 ghz band in the US. Same goes for the 5.8 band. Combine the throughput on those and in the best case scenario you have about 180 Mbps. Actual performance would probably be half at about 90.
Now lets assume you are going to build your network so that you can honeycomb those channels. If you do it with scalability in mind, at most you are going to have 65 Mbps throughput. Actual performance would probably be about 35 or 40.
There isn't a very good chance that will get a good VoIP service with that espeically if people are using that for web access too.
I don't know what large corporate environment you work in, but if I were to take that approach, I would be the one to get fired.
Contrary to the belief of most IT workers, IT's job is NOT to stand up high and hand down orders on what technology users must use. Sure, you can take this approach, but that isn't really helpful to users.
IT's job should be to listen to the needs of users and find the tool that works best for them considering all sides.
If you come to the conclusion that it would be in their best interest to switch to open source, then make a plan to move them there. Develop a phased plan that includes user training and migration of their skillset.
I am willing to bet a lot of money that if you start throwing users to the wolves and tell them to deal with it then you are going to find your boss throwing you to the wolves of unemployment.
I suggest you and all the others willing to pay X amount extra per year get together and ask your college if you can pay extra to have your own dedicated T1 or whatever you guys can afford and create your own network.
Buy your own equipment and take care of maintenance yourself. Set up a wireless network to spread the T1 out to your dorm.
Just remember, that T1 will likely cost you at least around the $1000 range per MONTH including the months you aren't at school.
So here is a little plan you can take and modify to fit your needs:
1) Form a school club. Call it the P2P Club or something.
2) Pool your startup money and start a college account.
3) Convince the college you have enough money to get things started and can pay your monthly charges. In fact, have the bill in your club name.
4) Setup your network.
5) Share your files.
6) Have money ready for lawyers if you ever get caught.
Regardless of crippled this and not included that, I was damn impressed with the driver support. I got tired of my Windows 2000 installation on a Compaq Deskpro and installed 8.0
There were some suprising results and not so surprising results. The most surprising was that my Firewire PCI controller and Iomega Predator Firewire CD-R/W drive was supported. The not so surprising result was that my USB Alcatel DSL modem was not supported out of the box.
Overall, I am impressed. Since my first RedHat installation was 5.2, 8.0 is eons ahead of my original RedHat experience.
He had six IDE hard drives. As the article states, some OS's have severe temper tantrums if you try to install them past a certain cylinder on the HD (1024). NT can't exist on the same physical drive as 2000. I am not sure if the same is true for XP and 2000 on the same drive.
My guess is that given these limitations, it might have been impossible to add NT even if he wanted to.
The biggest problem that the article barely touches on is that there aren't a huge number of non-overlapping channels. If three homes in a row all use the same channel, stand out on the street and watch what happens to your signal quality.
As others have noted, if one home is on xDSL from company Y using one public IP address and the next "hop" is using Cable from comany Z using another public IP address, at best case scenario, your data transmission will suffer a temporary silence. In more likely scenario, you lose connection with an associated AP, your PC attempts to renegotiate with an AP, grabs IP information and reinitiates IP connection.
How long does this take? Too damn long for VoIP or even a web page to load. You could of course set IP Leases to expire every second to help, but talk about broadcast storm.
Also, until full T1's or T3's start getting run to every home, DSL's and/or Cable modems just can't handle 25+ people all downloading files acceptably. Put the number up around 100 and it is not a pretty picture to paint.
Even if the performance were to be acceptable, how long do you think it would take for DSL providers to realize that for every 1 customer, 15 are using it without additional revenues for them? Expect heavy handed TOS to put and end to that quick.
I think the idea is right, but his visualized implementation is flawed. Now if he said a meshed network powered by WISP's with a cooperative agreement, that would make more sense to me.
If you have a ski hood on and possibly a ski helmet, you can't hear much anyway over the sound of your skis/board moving through the snow. Adding music is damn near a moot point. Being visually aware of your surroundings is the key to not killing somone while skiing.
By law, you are only responsible for those in front of you. All skiers in front of you have the right of way. Sound has nothing to do with your ability to see them.
The only time you shouldn't listen to music is when loading and unloading from the ski lift. You may miss some instructions from the lift operators. Once on the lift, hopefully you are social enough to talk instead of blare music.
Palladium support in your products? NO THANK YOU. I promise that I and anyone I have influence over (including all of my clients) will never purchase a machine powered by a Palladium-based chip.
Circuit City Thought Div-x would be a great technology. It was DOA. I will do everything in my power to make sure this one is too.
Thank you.
Re:Why not add a link to the patch as well, Slashd
on
Microsoft News Update
·
· Score: 2
Hitting a major site is the fastest way to find yourself in the clutches of the FBI. Hitting your SMB competitor down the road is less likely because they probably won't know what hit them anyway.
I can't speak on an "in the know" basis, but I know that if I was a Black Hat and had wonderful exploit X, I would save it for A) something worth taking a huge risk B) A low on the radar company/web site and C) One that doesn't have the proper resources to track intrusion effectively.
Just because there haven't been a lot of crackers/hackers (choose your term) being wisked away by the FBI on CNN does not mean they don't exist and that there is no intrusion happening.
"Example, teaching an ape to talk or communicate - put it in the wild and it's friends do not start to learn to communicate in a more advanced form. The language is lost on that monkey"
This does not mean gorillas are incapable of perpetuating sign language. Changes to society structure take time. Just because one gorilla learns to sign doesn't mean the others will just catch right on and start doing it themselves.
Humans aren't any different in this respect. The metric system has been around for some time. Most Americans are incapable of thinking in terms of metric because American society is accustomed to English units. Does this mean humans are incapable of thinking in metric?
The fact that one gorilla (and there have been more) has learned to sign is proof positive that they are capable of language. Perhaps this is a real-life example of nature vs. nurture.
It seems to me the true test would be to take a whole group of gorillas that have learned to sign and put them together and let them reproduce. Then see what happens.
Sure many of us here probably build our own machines, but if you do plan on buying one of these, do it on the phone. Ask the salesperson if they can ship it with Linux (or your favorite OSOS).
If they say no, then tell them you want to place a customer request that they offer that because that is what you are going to install anyway and then order it.
If they get enough requests for it, then maybe they will warm back up to the OSS desktop market.
Of course, this may have no effect but it doesn't hurt to try.
For good or for ill, backwards compatibility is usually necessary in order to insure rapid acceptance and usage.
Imagine you are a software company. "We have to retrain all our programmers, buy new compilers AND ditch our old codebase? Can we still write for the old stuff for now? Good . .."
I would bet dollars to doughnuts that if DVD players were incapable of playing CD's, there would be quite a few unhappy campers. The relation is the same -- slowly phase out the old while promoting the new.
All cell phone companies have dead zones. Even in their most covered areas they have them. Perhaps you live in one of Sprint's. True Sprint's coverage is less than others, but the coverage they have works. It just plain works.
I have at least one friend that uses all the other major players and they are constantly complaining about their service and customer support. The measure of a cell phone company is not bound solely to their theoretical coverage map.
All things being equal, if there is a demand, someone will meet the supply. That is simple economics. There is no mystery about it and high demand and low supply usually mean higher prices.
As for businesses being affected by one company's problem -- if you don't have redundancy for every critical piece of your business model, then you deserve to go bankrupt. Don't think you can afford that extra T1 from another Telco? Bet you don't think that after being down for 2 weeks straight cutting your revenue stream in the process.
It really isn't rocket science. If your downtime costs you more than redundancy, the choice should be clear.
True, but then you are locked into HPaq for hardware and the whole point of Debian being non-commercial just went out the window.
I know I would prefer to keep support with those that make the product. HPaq supports Debian today? What about tomorrow? It is true that they likely wouldn't change that easily after investing in one product but for businesses that does not necessarily hold true.
A new CIO comes in and proclaims HPaq the best hardware for servers and that is all he will approve. He leaves and a new CIO declares IBM the best and all servers hence forth will be IBM. What now? I have seen this very thing happen in real life.
Debian may be great at what it does, but Red Hat and others that offer a support model will continue to win enterprise contracts because the manager types want three questions answered:
1) Does it do what we need? 2) How much does it cost? 3) Can we get support for it?
If any of these questions can't be answered positively, then chances are they aren't going to approve it. With support they usually mean "from the same person that sells it."
I may go buy one to use as a test machine just to help prove that people will buy one. At $400 I think I can swallow not building my own just to provide proof of concept to the powers that be.
There does exist a duality between power requirements vs. speed. The only problem is that the the majority of R&D work being put into chip development from chip manufacturers is going towards speed. Only every now and then do we hear little blips about some new technology that is 10 to 20 years away that will reduce chips size and ultimately power consumption.
Of course, it is always possible that distributed computing and clustering coupled with ultra high speed bandwidth could turn computing power into a ubiquitous utility just like electricity. But that is another discussion altogether.
I can't possibly know with 100% certainty what Microsoft's intentions are, but there stands a reasonable chance they are intended for their benefit and any consumer benefits are purely coincidental.
So what can we do about all of this? Pay attention and educate ourselves on this initiative and then pass on the news good or bad to the masses that aren't up to date on the geek speak. It is probably not a good idea to leave thsi job up to mass media.
It is possible for us to either make or break this technology. Look at the old Divx from Circuit City. Bad idea. It was DOA because many people (myself included) advised everyone not to buy it.
This is a controversial technology from a controversial company. This doesn't mean it is destined to be evil. It does mean it is the job of those in the know to keep those out of the loop informed.
Unless you put your fiber cables in an unbendable channel, it isn't worth the hassle of having to replace a faulty cable because some bozo decided to fold the cable up and break the fiber. I have seen this happen many times.
For the forseable future, gigabit to the desktop is more than 95% of users will need unless computing environments move to server-side VR operating systems that are fully streamed to a user with full motion and sound.
Server back planes and clusters are two of the biggest bandwidth hogs that might possibly need something faster than gigabit ethernet.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that the point isn't whether a new technology was invented from scratch. That is not necessary to either innovate or get a patent on that innovation.
When the automobile was invented, it began a transportation revolution. Were wheels a new technology? No. Was the idea of a four wheeled transportation vehicle new? Wagons had been around for ears. Perhaps it was the engine? Engines had been around for quite some time before that.
The idea for plugins might have existed. Even the idea of web pages was just fresh. But embedding a plugin in a web page to deliver content to a remote site was definitley new. Hindsight of obvious technological progression today does not invalidate the innovation of yesterday.
If by both you mean why not use Kerberos/VPN AND MAC filtering I would say that MAC filtering adds additional administrative overhead that you don't need because MAC spoofing is not hard at all. In fact, you should expect it. Extracting the MAC from an 802.11b and a packet is not very difficult.
Why bother with that which is not secure?
The FCC limitations for the 2.4 band is 1 watt (30dBm) for Point-to-Multipoint. For point to point you can get away with a lot more.
None of that matters though because obtaining true line of sight past 20 miles without more than a 20 percent impedence on the Fresnal Zone is a battle I don't want to fight.
Wifi can't replace the telcos. Not yet anyway. And certainly not as long as the FCC keeps the unlicensed frequencies very small and limited.
There are only 3 non-overlapping channels in the 2.4 ghz band in the US. Same goes for the 5.8 band. Combine the throughput on those and in the best case scenario you have about 180 Mbps. Actual performance would probably be half at about 90.
Now lets assume you are going to build your network so that you can honeycomb those channels. If you do it with scalability in mind, at most you are going to have 65 Mbps throughput. Actual performance would probably be about 35 or 40.
There isn't a very good chance that will get a good VoIP service with that espeically if people are using that for web access too.
Actually it is quite easy to spoof a MAC which is the ONLY way you can filter by card.
If you want a secure WiFi network, try using a Kerberos server for authentication with VPN only access to the network on the other side.
And remember, WEP stands for worthless equivalency protocol.
I don't know what large corporate environment you work in, but if I were to take that approach, I would be the one to get fired.
Contrary to the belief of most IT workers, IT's job is NOT to stand up high and hand down orders on what technology users must use. Sure, you can take this approach, but that isn't really helpful to users.
IT's job should be to listen to the needs of users and find the tool that works best for them considering all sides.
If you come to the conclusion that it would be in their best interest to switch to open source, then make a plan to move them there. Develop a phased plan that includes user training and migration of their skillset.
I am willing to bet a lot of money that if you start throwing users to the wolves and tell them to deal with it then you are going to find your boss throwing you to the wolves of unemployment.
I suggest you and all the others willing to pay X amount extra per year get together and ask your college if you can pay extra to have your own dedicated T1 or whatever you guys can afford and create your own network.
Buy your own equipment and take care of maintenance yourself. Set up a wireless network to spread the T1 out to your dorm.
Just remember, that T1 will likely cost you at least around the $1000 range per MONTH including the months you aren't at school.
So here is a little plan you can take and modify to fit your needs:
1) Form a school club. Call it the P2P Club or something.
2) Pool your startup money and start a college account.
3) Convince the college you have enough money to get things started and can pay your monthly charges. In fact, have the bill in your club name.
4) Setup your network.
5) Share your files.
6) Have money ready for lawyers if you ever get caught.
Regardless of crippled this and not included that, I was damn impressed with the driver support. I got tired of my Windows 2000 installation on a Compaq Deskpro and installed 8.0
There were some suprising results and not so surprising results. The most surprising was that my Firewire PCI controller and Iomega Predator Firewire CD-R/W drive was supported. The not so surprising result was that my USB Alcatel DSL modem was not supported out of the box.
Overall, I am impressed. Since my first RedHat installation was 5.2, 8.0 is eons ahead of my original RedHat experience.
He had six IDE hard drives. As the article states, some OS's have severe temper tantrums if you try to install them past a certain cylinder on the HD (1024). NT can't exist on the same physical drive as 2000. I am not sure if the same is true for XP and 2000 on the same drive.
My guess is that given these limitations, it might have been impossible to add NT even if he wanted to.
The biggest problem that the article barely touches on is that there aren't a huge number of non-overlapping channels. If three homes in a row all use the same channel, stand out on the street and watch what happens to your signal quality.
As others have noted, if one home is on xDSL from company Y using one public IP address and the next "hop" is using Cable from comany Z using another public IP address, at best case scenario, your data transmission will suffer a temporary silence. In more likely scenario, you lose connection with an associated AP, your PC attempts to renegotiate with an AP, grabs IP information and reinitiates IP connection.
How long does this take? Too damn long for VoIP or even a web page to load. You could of course set IP Leases to expire every second to help, but talk about broadcast storm.
Also, until full T1's or T3's start getting run to every home, DSL's and/or Cable modems just can't handle 25+ people all downloading files acceptably. Put the number up around 100 and it is not a pretty picture to paint.
Even if the performance were to be acceptable, how long do you think it would take for DSL providers to realize that for every 1 customer, 15 are using it without additional revenues for them? Expect heavy handed TOS to put and end to that quick.
I think the idea is right, but his visualized implementation is flawed. Now if he said a meshed network powered by WISP's with a cooperative agreement, that would make more sense to me.
Just my $0.02 worth.
Talk about extreme Digital Rights Management . . .
If you have a ski hood on and possibly a ski helmet, you can't hear much anyway over the sound of your skis/board moving through the snow. Adding music is damn near a moot point. Being visually aware of your surroundings is the key to not killing somone while skiing.
By law, you are only responsible for those in front of you. All skiers in front of you have the right of way. Sound has nothing to do with your ability to see them.
The only time you shouldn't listen to music is when loading and unloading from the ski lift. You may miss some instructions from the lift operators. Once on the lift, hopefully you are social enough to talk instead of blare music.
Went here:
= eb us+feedback_sidelink&
http://www.intel.com/eBusiness/feedback.htm?iid
And posted sent in this:
Palladium support in your products? NO THANK YOU. I promise that I and anyone I have influence over (including all of my clients) will never purchase a machine powered by a Palladium-based chip.
Circuit City Thought Div-x would be a great technology. It was DOA. I will do everything in my power to make sure this one is too.
Thank you.
Hitting a major site is the fastest way to find yourself in the clutches of the FBI. Hitting your SMB competitor down the road is less likely because they probably won't know what hit them anyway.
I can't speak on an "in the know" basis, but I know that if I was a Black Hat and had wonderful exploit X, I would save it for A) something worth taking a huge risk B) A low on the radar company/web site and C) One that doesn't have the proper resources to track intrusion effectively.
Just because there haven't been a lot of crackers/hackers (choose your term) being wisked away by the FBI on CNN does not mean they don't exist and that there is no intrusion happening.
"Example, teaching an ape to talk or communicate - put it in the wild and it's friends do not start to learn to communicate in a more advanced form. The language is lost on that monkey"
This does not mean gorillas are incapable of perpetuating sign language. Changes to society structure take time. Just because one gorilla learns to sign doesn't mean the others will just catch right on and start doing it themselves.
Humans aren't any different in this respect. The metric system has been around for some time. Most Americans are incapable of thinking in terms of metric because American society is accustomed to English units. Does this mean humans are incapable of thinking in metric?
The fact that one gorilla (and there have been more) has learned to sign is proof positive that they are capable of language. Perhaps this is a real-life example of nature vs. nurture.
It seems to me the true test would be to take a whole group of gorillas that have learned to sign and put them together and let them reproduce. Then see what happens.
Sure many of us here probably build our own machines, but if you do plan on buying one of these, do it on the phone. Ask the salesperson if they can ship it with Linux (or your favorite OSOS).
If they say no, then tell them you want to place a customer request that they offer that because that is what you are going to install anyway and then order it.
If they get enough requests for it, then maybe they will warm back up to the OSS desktop market.
Of course, this may have no effect but it doesn't hurt to try.
For good or for ill, backwards compatibility is usually necessary in order to insure rapid acceptance and usage.
."
Imagine you are a software company. "We have to retrain all our programmers, buy new compilers AND ditch our old codebase? Can we still write for the old stuff for now? Good . .
I would bet dollars to doughnuts that if DVD players were incapable of playing CD's, there would be quite a few unhappy campers. The relation is the same -- slowly phase out the old while promoting the new.
All cell phone companies have dead zones. Even in their most covered areas they have them. Perhaps you live in one of Sprint's. True Sprint's coverage is less than others, but the coverage they have works. It just plain works.
I have at least one friend that uses all the other major players and they are constantly complaining about their service and customer support. The measure of a cell phone company is not bound solely to their theoretical coverage map.
All things being equal, if there is a demand, someone will meet the supply. That is simple economics. There is no mystery about it and high demand and low supply usually mean higher prices.
As for businesses being affected by one company's problem -- if you don't have redundancy for every critical piece of your business model, then you deserve to go bankrupt. Don't think you can afford that extra T1 from another Telco? Bet you don't think that after being down for 2 weeks straight cutting your revenue stream in the process.
It really isn't rocket science. If your downtime costs you more than redundancy, the choice should be clear.
True, but then you are locked into HPaq for hardware and the whole point of Debian being non-commercial just went out the window.
I know I would prefer to keep support with those that make the product. HPaq supports Debian today? What about tomorrow? It is true that they likely wouldn't change that easily after investing in one product but for businesses that does not necessarily hold true.
A new CIO comes in and proclaims HPaq the best hardware for servers and that is all he will approve. He leaves and a new CIO declares IBM the best and all servers hence forth will be IBM. What now? I have seen this very thing happen in real life.
Debian may be great at what it does, but Red Hat and others that offer a support model will continue to win enterprise contracts because the manager types want three questions answered:
1) Does it do what we need?
2) How much does it cost?
3) Can we get support for it?
If any of these questions can't be answered positively, then chances are they aren't going to approve it. With support they usually mean "from the same person that sells it."
I may go buy one to use as a test machine just to help prove that people will buy one. At $400 I think I can swallow not building my own just to provide proof of concept to the powers that be.
There does exist a duality between power requirements vs. speed. The only problem is that the the majority of R&D work being put into chip development from chip manufacturers is going towards speed. Only every now and then do we hear little blips about some new technology that is 10 to 20 years away that will reduce chips size and ultimately power consumption.
Of course, it is always possible that distributed computing and clustering coupled with ultra high speed bandwidth could turn computing power into a ubiquitous utility just like electricity. But that is another discussion altogether.
void karma_burning_philosophical_schpeel()
//end karma_burning_philosophical_schpeel
{
I can't possibly know with 100% certainty what Microsoft's intentions are, but there stands a reasonable chance they are intended for their benefit and any consumer benefits are purely coincidental.
So what can we do about all of this? Pay attention and educate ourselves on this initiative and then pass on the news good or bad to the masses that aren't up to date on the geek speak. It is probably not a good idea to leave thsi job up to mass media.
It is possible for us to either make or break this technology. Look at the old Divx from Circuit City. Bad idea. It was DOA because many people (myself included) advised everyone not to buy it.
This is a controversial technology from a controversial company. This doesn't mean it is destined to be evil. It does mean it is the job of those in the know to keep those out of the loop informed.
}
Unless you put your fiber cables in an unbendable channel, it isn't worth the hassle of having to replace a faulty cable because some bozo decided to fold the cable up and break the fiber. I have seen this happen many times.
For the forseable future, gigabit to the desktop is more than 95% of users will need unless computing environments move to server-side VR operating systems that are fully streamed to a user with full motion and sound.
Server back planes and clusters are two of the biggest bandwidth hogs that might possibly need something faster than gigabit ethernet.