I'm wondering, in fact, if she didn't want this e-mail circulated precisely because it reveals a sort of upper-class-wannabee shallow social manner that doesn't reflect well on a professional journalist.
Still, I'm glad I've read it... it's decent news coverage of such a relatively important event. I mean, good use of sources of all types is what journalism is all about... Thanks, Laurie!:-P
Incidentally, this diatribe is from someone who posted a personal note from ex-President Clinton on her website. Presumably with permission, natch, but it's no less private by nature.
I haven't seen the (amazingly quickly slashdotted) research paper on crypto.com yet, but it's pretty clear what the technique could be since the Times article mentioned it's an oracle attack. [Update: the PDF finally loaded while just about to post this comment and it pretty much works like this.]
The obvious problem that allows a lock to be an oracle is that the pins are independent of one another, so a "mixed" key that is partly master key and partly a normal key for that lock will open it. There presumably could exist a technical solution that needs only changes to the locks, and doesn't involve whacked-out Medeco[tm] patented key blanks with slanted cuts (although medeco may very well own related patents that would cover some aspects of the improved lock design). However, that solution would be mechanically somewhat difficult (there's a reason master keys are designed the way they are). Maybe there's a good business opportunity for "medium security" locks, but unless this attack becomes very widespread installations with a high theft risk may just start using electronic locks more. Not that many of those are that great except by significant degrees of obscurity -- I'm wondering how many independent parameters there actually are to this resonant-circuit proximity badge I got issued for access to a machine room...
Clear Channel is called Cheap Channel for a reason -- they like to cut costs everywhere. No live DJ's at many times, supposedly "local" information piped in as sound bites from out of town -- not to mention that artists need lots of payola to get their stuff on the air. Oh, lots of ads, too, just to make sure there's lots of money coming in to balance out the trickle going out. Great way for a company to make big profits; not a great way to have good radio.
Why? In one word: monopoly. Not that they control everything, just enough to reduce the competition that federal laws about airwave allocation were supposed to provide. Their competitors are now desperate, not inventive. Used to be, not only could you not own 8 radio stations in a city, or 1000 across the country, you couldn't own any if the FCC determined your station was not fulfilling its public service obligation. You actually had to get your license renewed.
Now Clear Channel themselves have claimed that owning more radio stations can allow them to diversify the genres more -- but this hasn't produced any interesting results in FM radio. In fact, almost everyone agrees FM radio has gotten worse over the last 5 years or so. So how is XM going to help things? It's great as another option, for those times there isn't anything good on FM. But forgive me if I don't see this duopoly being so hugely advantageous over a monopoly. They'll give you the music you "want" -- and not a note more. A triumph of marketing, a long-term serious loss for the listener.
XM will never be able to make up for another potential casualty of Clear Channel (and fundi religious broadcasters, who are eligible for bottom-of-the-band licenses and silently eat away at the reception of struggling college stations) - regionalism in radio is good. Part of why travelling is fun in this country is local culture, even in this age of mcdonald's everywhere. XM can't give me the beach-blues station I heard in coastal South Carolina, the bluegrass segment on a (commercial!) country station in rural Virginia, or the variety of ethnic folk music and avant-garde rock on hundreds of college stations across the country. It's worth noting that of XM's 100 channels, the Post writer picked one with good, but very familiar music -- and that may be what XM is good for. The beauty of independent, college, and regional radio is discovery of new music. Not that this means XM is bad -- just that it won't save us from Clear Channel.
I've already been on the verge of deciding not to buy NVidia again. It'll be a while before I replace my box and there's still a bunch of time to decide. For now, it works for me. Also, quite a few other graphics vendors have not really been forthcoming with specs either.
To be clear: I'd really like totally open source drivers, everything at kernel level open source, but it's more to ask than it's worth. I eventually demand open specs for the building of open drivers -- even if the "official" drivers are closed -- but I'm willing to overlook this in the short term only because I have better things to worry about, like getting a life.
It's already pointed out that proprietary OpenGL code from SGI, NVidia trade secrets, and bullshit S3TC patents are partly responsible for this. Here's another reason that you may find it harder (or easier, depending on your dislike for proprietary software in general) to get your dander up about: NVidia is not just selling hardware, they're selling software to go with it.
Look at the experience of windoze users -- NVidia drivers generally have the reputation that they are easier to install and work better than ATI's. NVidia has always been relatively careful to deliver drivers that work correctly on all of their cards (the Unified Driver Architecture). NVidia doesn't really want their competition to have source to their drivers partly for the same reason as any other producer of commercial software -- those drivers are a software product that they're selling with the hardware!
You can say that this sucks and I'll sort of agree -- I'd really like to see some good specs from all of the graphics card companies to make free-as-in-speech drivers possible. But as long as they're giving away good drivers, even closed-source, my complaining will be no more than a whisper.
Well, one exception: they need to work (if you use NVidia drivers, upgrade to the latest 4xxx release -- there is a serious bug in previous versions that will crash your kernel!) The kernel developers have had some issues with having to tell whether bugs are in the kernel or in proprietary drivers -- but this particular, very nasty bug was in the open source glue section of the nvidia driver, since it was making heavy use of kernel APIs!
For instance, Microsoft knows internally that after the train wreck that was NT 4, most 2000/XP crashes are caused by bad drivers (my source: an unnamed microsoft engineer; so there!).
What's unfortunate is that the Linux people also know this, but can only find blame as a method of resolving this problem. The incessant chirp of "unload your NVidia driver" or "like, your kernel is tainted! and there are these weird LETTERS after 'tainted'!" only serves to throw away what may (or may not) be perfectly good problem reports. It's great that the linux people have tools (the tainting flags, etc.) to help determine the source of the problem. It's really not great that they don't have the rules to make sense of these other than to throw out reports that aren't to their standards. Because, really, in the real world of linux, people use proprietary drivers, and throwing out problem reports with them means throwing out problem reports from a whole segment of the user community. (Also, they should have better debugging methods to figure out whether a problem is their fault or not.)
A case in point: who other than people who use fancy graphics drivers, particularly the nvidia proprietary drivers, really stress some of the MTRR code? AGP? Chipset-specific PCI weirdness?
If Linux keeps this up it'll get hard to distinguish this kind of problem from a Microsoft like problem, and then where did all that much ballyhooed stability go?
There is at least one nasty VM-related bug which has been reported in Linux 2.4.19 and possibly earlier revisions. Rumors of more abound; this is the one that's personally happened to me.
Kernel BUG at page_alloc.c:91! (kills kswapd) Google groups for "page_alloc.c:91". Usually blamed on NVidia drivers but notable cases have occurred without them. It's not clear whether the kernel team has made a notable effort to debug them, but they are real and occur on a variety of systems. When this happens kswapd stops working, which causes more bugs later on, and eventually a system reboot is required.
There are other period reports of BUGs being flagged with an otherwise normal kernel on the linux-kernel list.
instapundit.com is, if not a libertarian crock of shit, a conservative one. It's part of the horribly pervasive conservative blogging culture (which, incidentally, forms a relative clique of links; start browsing at one page and most links refer right back to another conservative blog) -- people seem to think Internet users are largely conservative (and many are, owing if nothing else to the fact that the US is, relatively speaking, a very conservative country) because the conservative nutjobs like to rant a lot.
In fact, there's a lot of liberal activity on the internet -- of varying degrees of extremity -- but it's mostly on news sites, independent news organizations (like indymedia), community discussion sites (slashdot, k5), and personal weblogs. Why? It's enough to convince me that conservative just like to run their mouths without providing any evidence to support it, or discussion to debate it. They thrive in that environment. That should be enough to make y'all wonder..
I won't speak to raw performance issues here, but the network load of the X protocol can be greatly alleviated by dxpc or better yet MLview dxpc, which claims to be around the speed of Citrix ICA.
Well, actually, among other things, it's faster. In particular, Carbon apps start noticeably faster than Cocoa apps, period. It's also more usable for porting of C/C++ based apps from other platforms.
NeXT had some cool ideas, but (starting with Mach, the first abomination of that category) some really shoddy implementation.
If you use Project Builder to build Mach-O Carbon apps (rather than CodeWarrior and CFM), you can use all the C-based Unix API's. This myth that only Cocoa's api's work on top of the BSD layer is so incredibly false.
Also, remember that CoreFoundation gives you some of Cocoa's advantages (reference counted data structures, for example) in Carbon. Not knocking Cocoa, but having Carbon as well gives you a lot of choices.
More importantly, how much of the existing FM spectrum does this take up?
Advocates for independent radio stations (a dying breed, I know) have been complaining for years that Clear Channel et al. have been using the threat of multiple digital radio standards to squelch the FCC's low power FM proposals (which were finally legislatively gutted last year, a move justified by the same rhetoric).
This is sad given that digital radio offers no serious advantage on the FM band other than possibly longer range; FM quality is pretty damn good.
Usually, "telco" refers to TELephone COmpany and "telecom" (or "telcom") to TELECOMmunications, the industry occupied by such a company. Both could technically stand for either, but "co." is a more common abbreviation for company than "com" (at least before the internet frenzy). "Telco" is an enumerable noun (you call up _the_ local telco), while telecom is not (someone working in telecom; the telecom _industry_).
Most areas do have a ringback number (rings your phone, usual procedure is dial it and N digits of your number, get a dialtone, hit the hook or flash, get another tone, hang up) and an ANI number (automatic number identification; a voice reads out your phone number), which the service technicians use frequently.
For instance, in central (charlottesville) virginia, the ringback for sprint is/was 511 and 7 digits of your phone #; the ANI is 118. Numbers for many areas can be found in the 2600 FAQ, but it's not complete or up to date. These numbers sometimes change when switching equipment is replaced.
...the linux boxes haven't had a virulent worm or two, or three, going around and making all the installations with holes sputter all over the network so they get noticed.
When you buy software in bulk, they are enforced as such: you must actually sign an agreement saying you'll obey the license, since the sw companies know that shrinkwrap isn't binding. Since Microsoft itself claims that software is licensed, not sold, there's no way to do the "third party purchase" you're describing.
The real issue is that the original poster misread the statute; as has already been mentioned in this discussion, nothing actually compels the county to act on it, it's just that they can.
Well, Cadence is just a pathological support case, though. Many tales abound of clusters/labs not upgraded, forced to choose between old or expensive hardware, just to support Cadence. Their software/hardware compatibility matrix is a ridiculously detailed mess.
Until recently, they didn't support Sloaris 8, thus preventing a lot of newer Suns (Blade 100/1000/2000) from being used. The Blade 100's are really important to education customers since they're cheap, even if they're slow.
Yeah, if you spent 10 years developing a new kind of steel because you were sure it would revolutionize the railroad industry, but the dirty gub'mint...
Nice to see you drop by, Ayn. Now stop trotting out this tired old bullshit.
Seriously: what you might expect is that you would
be rewarded for your efforts, and in a capitalist
society that works by providing some incentive for
investment to occur in your business. This is what
temporary intellectual monopolies (copyrights and patents; the term "intellectual property" is misleading, and you should avoid using it) were supposed to make happen.
The idea of you having control, and your cold dead fingers around your idea as the gub'mint is dragging it away from you, is dishonest propaganda by those in power who want to keep it. You don't need control per se to innovate; it has almost nothing directly to do with the economics of the situation.
Actually, this would seem to show computers are becoming more ubiquitous and/or necessary to daily life, in that the traditional restraining order to stay away from all computers, etc. wasn't applied here (or is that somewhat apocryphal?)
Slashdot Mirror
Still, I'm glad I've read it... it's decent news coverage of such a relatively important event. I mean, good use of sources of all types is what journalism is all about... Thanks, Laurie! :-P
Incidentally, this diatribe is from someone who posted a personal note from ex-President Clinton on her website. Presumably with permission, natch, but it's no less private by nature.
The obvious problem that allows a lock to be an oracle is that the pins are independent of one another, so a "mixed" key that is partly master key and partly a normal key for that lock will open it. There presumably could exist a technical solution that needs only changes to the locks, and doesn't involve whacked-out Medeco[tm] patented key blanks with slanted cuts (although medeco may very well own related patents that would cover some aspects of the improved lock design). However, that solution would be mechanically somewhat difficult (there's a reason master keys are designed the way they are). Maybe there's a good business opportunity for "medium security" locks, but unless this attack becomes very widespread installations with a high theft risk may just start using electronic locks more. Not that many of those are that great except by significant degrees of obscurity -- I'm wondering how many independent parameters there actually are to this resonant-circuit proximity badge I got issued for access to a machine room...
Why? In one word: monopoly. Not that they control everything, just enough to reduce the competition that federal laws about airwave allocation were supposed to provide. Their competitors are now desperate, not inventive. Used to be, not only could you not own 8 radio stations in a city, or 1000 across the country, you couldn't own any if the FCC determined your station was not fulfilling its public service obligation. You actually had to get your license renewed.
Now Clear Channel themselves have claimed that owning more radio stations can allow them to diversify the genres more -- but this hasn't produced any interesting results in FM radio. In fact, almost everyone agrees FM radio has gotten worse over the last 5 years or so. So how is XM going to help things? It's great as another option, for those times there isn't anything good on FM. But forgive me if I don't see this duopoly being so hugely advantageous over a monopoly. They'll give you the music you "want" -- and not a note more. A triumph of marketing, a long-term serious loss for the listener.
XM will never be able to make up for another potential casualty of Clear Channel (and fundi religious broadcasters, who are eligible for bottom-of-the-band licenses and silently eat away at the reception of struggling college stations) - regionalism in radio is good. Part of why travelling is fun in this country is local culture, even in this age of mcdonald's everywhere. XM can't give me the beach-blues station I heard in coastal South Carolina, the bluegrass segment on a (commercial!) country station in rural Virginia, or the variety of ethnic folk music and avant-garde rock on hundreds of college stations across the country. It's worth noting that of XM's 100 channels, the Post writer picked one with good, but very familiar music -- and that may be what XM is good for. The beauty of independent, college, and regional radio is discovery of new music. Not that this means XM is bad -- just that it won't save us from Clear Channel.
I've already been on the verge of deciding not to buy NVidia again. It'll be a while before I replace my box and there's still a bunch of time to decide. For now, it works for me. Also, quite a few other graphics vendors have not really been forthcoming with specs either.
To be clear: I'd really like totally open source drivers, everything at kernel level open source, but it's more to ask than it's worth. I eventually demand open specs for the building of open drivers -- even if the "official" drivers are closed -- but I'm willing to overlook this in the short term only because I have better things to worry about, like getting a life.
Look at the experience of windoze users -- NVidia drivers generally have the reputation that they are easier to install and work better than ATI's. NVidia has always been relatively careful to deliver drivers that work correctly on all of their cards (the Unified Driver Architecture). NVidia doesn't really want their competition to have source to their drivers partly for the same reason as any other producer of commercial software -- those drivers are a software product that they're selling with the hardware!
You can say that this sucks and I'll sort of agree -- I'd really like to see some good specs from all of the graphics card companies to make free-as-in-speech drivers possible. But as long as they're giving away good drivers, even closed-source, my complaining will be no more than a whisper.
Well, one exception: they need to work (if you use NVidia drivers, upgrade to the latest 4xxx release -- there is a serious bug in previous versions that will crash your kernel!) The kernel developers have had some issues with having to tell whether bugs are in the kernel or in proprietary drivers -- but this particular, very nasty bug was in the open source glue section of the nvidia driver, since it was making heavy use of kernel APIs!
Right now my opinion of Linux, NVidia, and the linux kernel mailing list for their handling of this issue isn't very high on any side.
NS7 is Mozilla 1.0.1, not 1.1.
For instance, Microsoft knows internally that after the train wreck that was NT 4, most 2000/XP crashes are caused by bad drivers (my source: an unnamed microsoft engineer; so there!).
What's unfortunate is that the Linux people also know this, but can only find blame as a method of resolving this problem. The incessant chirp of "unload your NVidia driver" or "like, your kernel is tainted! and there are these weird LETTERS after 'tainted'!" only serves to throw away what may (or may not) be perfectly good problem reports. It's great that the linux people have tools (the tainting flags, etc.) to help determine the source of the problem. It's really not great that they don't have the rules to make sense of these other than to throw out reports that aren't to their standards. Because, really, in the real world of linux, people use proprietary drivers, and throwing out problem reports with them means throwing out problem reports from a whole segment of the user community. (Also, they should have better debugging methods to figure out whether a problem is their fault or not.)
A case in point: who other than people who use fancy graphics drivers, particularly the nvidia proprietary drivers, really stress some of the MTRR code? AGP? Chipset-specific PCI weirdness?
If Linux keeps this up it'll get hard to distinguish this kind of problem from a Microsoft like problem, and then where did all that much ballyhooed stability go?
Damn.
There is at least one nasty VM-related bug which has been reported in Linux 2.4.19 and possibly earlier revisions. Rumors of more abound; this is the one that's personally happened to me.
Kernel BUG at page_alloc.c:91! (kills kswapd)
Google groups for "page_alloc.c:91". Usually blamed on NVidia drivers but notable cases have occurred without them. It's not clear whether the kernel team has made a notable effort to debug them, but they are real and occur on a variety of systems. When this happens kswapd stops working, which causes more bugs later on, and eventually a system reboot is required.
There are other period reports of BUGs being flagged with an otherwise normal kernel on the linux-kernel list.
In fact, there's a lot of liberal activity on the internet -- of varying degrees of extremity -- but it's mostly on news sites, independent news organizations (like indymedia), community discussion sites (slashdot, k5), and personal weblogs. Why? It's enough to convince me that conservative just like to run their mouths without providing any evidence to support it, or discussion to debate it. They thrive in that environment. That should be enough to make y'all wonder..
Actually, here's a better site on America's Fair and Balanced(tm) TV news: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
Regime change begins at home!
I won't speak to raw performance issues here, but the network load of the X protocol can be greatly alleviated by dxpc or better yet MLview dxpc, which claims to be around the speed of Citrix ICA.
NeXT had some cool ideas, but (starting with Mach, the first abomination of that category) some really shoddy implementation.
If you use Project Builder to build Mach-O Carbon apps (rather than CodeWarrior and CFM), you can use all the C-based Unix API's. This myth that only Cocoa's api's work on top of the BSD layer is so incredibly false.
Also, remember that CoreFoundation gives you some of Cocoa's advantages (reference counted data structures, for example) in Carbon. Not knocking Cocoa, but having Carbon as well gives you a lot of choices.
Advocates for independent radio stations (a dying breed, I know) have been complaining for years that Clear Channel et al. have been using the threat of multiple digital radio standards to squelch the FCC's low power FM proposals (which were finally legislatively gutted last year, a move justified by the same rhetoric).
This is sad given that digital radio offers no serious advantage on the FM band other than possibly longer range; FM quality is pretty damn good.
Most areas do have a ringback number (rings your phone, usual procedure is dial it and N digits of your number, get a dialtone, hit the hook or flash, get another tone, hang up) and an ANI number (automatic number identification; a voice reads out your phone number), which the service technicians use frequently.
For instance, in central (charlottesville) virginia, the ringback for sprint is/was 511 and 7 digits of your phone #; the ANI is 118. Numbers for many areas can be found in the 2600 FAQ, but it's not complete or up to date. These numbers sometimes change when switching equipment is replaced.
...the linux boxes haven't had a virulent worm or two, or three, going around and making all the installations with holes sputter all over the network so they get noticed.
The real issue is that the original poster misread the statute; as has already been mentioned in this discussion, nothing actually compels the county to act on it, it's just that they can.
"The best way to protect yourself from this virus is to defenestrate your computer and install GNU/Linux.
If you can't throw the Windows out of your computer, throw your computer out the window!" - from here.
(This came from an internal MIT mailing list and was forwarded all over academia about a year ago.)
Until recently, they didn't support Sloaris 8, thus preventing a lot of newer Suns (Blade 100/1000/2000) from being used. The Blade 100's are really important to education customers since they're cheap, even if they're slow.
Nice to see you drop by, Ayn. Now stop trotting out this tired old bullshit. Seriously: what you might expect is that you would be rewarded for your efforts, and in a capitalist society that works by providing some incentive for investment to occur in your business. This is what temporary intellectual monopolies (copyrights and patents; the term "intellectual property" is misleading, and you should avoid using it) were supposed to make happen.
The idea of you having control, and your cold dead fingers around your idea as the gub'mint is dragging it away from you, is dishonest propaganda by those in power who want to keep it. You don't need control per se to innovate; it has almost nothing directly to do with the economics of the situation.
Note that IE for OS X, while mostly aqua-fied, also lacks a few aqua widgets, notably form buttons.
Actually, this would seem to show computers are becoming more ubiquitous and/or necessary to daily life, in that the traditional restraining order to stay away from all computers, etc. wasn't applied here (or is that somewhat apocryphal?)