I remember the CDC 6600 as being $4,500,000 when it was newly introduced. So, the $1 million listed is only for the CPU module. An actual system required maybe 22 "peripheral processors" to handle IO and printing. Then there were hard drives, tape drives, the main console, and card readers.
The CDC 6600 had a 60-bit word. Memory amounts were expressed in octal. Memory was extremely expensive. If the 6600 had 100,000 octal bytes of memory your organization was rich.
This kind of stuff gets old. Someone reads a comment and thinks how it could be wrong, instead of trying to understand what was meant.
What I meant was that the idea of using checksumming and encryption in cookies cannot be patented.
Also, Amazon is not patenting the checksumming and encryption. If they use patented encryption, it would be someone else's. It seems unlikely they would be using complicated encryption, since that would not save CPU cycles over just storing the data on their own servers.
You could return a cookie from a pool of cookies received by other people at other times. If you can guess the method of checksumming and encryption, you can make your own.
Surely checksumming and encryption cannot be patented, even by a patent office corrupted by allowing too little money to do a good job.
As the world moves to broadband, there begin to be new privacy issues. Often your IP identifies you.
Ask yourself, why does Amazon want to encrypt data about you? There are issues here that need to be explored.
I've often thought it would be interesting to write a program that caused stored cookies to be returned with with slight changes. You could load the program, browse Amazon, and see what happened.
They can store cookies if you allow them to store them. However, what you return is entirely your decision. It's your computer.
This is a very serious issue. Companies that employ enough people who actually understand the business of the company have a chance to survive and prosper. Companies who try to use cheaper, poorly educated employees, die. The death may happen slowly, and is usually difficult to see because of energetic attempts to hide the truth, but the death occurs. (Novell - now apparently rebuilding -, Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect Corporation, Corel, PowerSoft and many, many others are examples.)
Microsoft's numerous recent public relations mistakes, like its stupid attack on Open Office, show it is dying.
I am not intending to be anti-Microsoft when I say this. It would be best for me personally if Microsoft were a strong, healthy company. I and many, many people suffer when Microsoft is abusive or sloppy.
Don't overlook the complexities of this. It is possible for healthy processes and sick processes to be operating at the same time in the same company. It is impossible for a company on the way down to remake itself.
What is important is not that someone at Microsoft is interested in fact-checking. That's obvious; they don't want to get fired.
What is important is that these examples show clearly how Microsoft's evaluation of itself comes into being. First, someone who knows nothing about technical matters, and absolutely does not care about technical matters, quickly writes a complete fantasy. Then the fantasy is sent to some people who have a clue, who eventually eliminate the worst of the inventions.
The examples show that the fantasy writers have very little contact with anyone with technical knowledge. Otherwise they would start the fantasies a little closer to the truth, and save some editing cycles.
Last time I looked, which wasn't recently, CSS did not provide all the parameters necessary for page markup. For example, there was no way to change the spacing (leading) before paragraphs or after paragraphs.
The people who designed CSS were not typesetting professionals.
The result is that, if you use CSS, you must also use a proprietary scheme, also, to finish the job. But, implementing a proprietary scheme defeats the intended purpose of CSS.
If CSS were designed well, it would be possible to use the same kind of markup system for both the web and print.
I predicted the downfall of WordPerfect Corporation and of Novell years before
it happened.
Now, using the same kind of logic, I'm predicting this is the beginning of the
end for Microsoft. Also, I think Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer know this.
That's why the new licensing scheme, "Pay us even if we don't do anything."
They're on a ride to the bottom, and they know it, and they want to extract as
much money as possible on the way down.
The problems, I think, are entirely due to bad management. No one would
object to paying for closed-source software if it did a little more and if it
had a good reputation. But closed-source has become synonymous with
abusiveness.
I have sympathy for Gates and Ballmer. While teenagers, they were caught up in
something intense. They have thought about mostly one thing since then. They
have not had time to grow up. They have not had time to learn the difficult
art and science of management.
A lot of Microsoft's abusiveness is like the abusiveness of a teenager who
doesn't know how to live in a complex adult world.
Everyone needs an amount of money sufficient to live. The value of having a
lot more than that cannot even come close to compensating for the horror of
living in an abusive world of your own creation.
It's funny to think of the same kind of abusive intent applied to open source
software. Think what could happen. After OO becomes the world standard office
suite, and almost everyone is dependent on it, why, they could double the
price! And everyone would have to pay because they have so much time invested
in training in and customization of OO!
Sometimes really, really wonderful things happen in the world, and OO is one
of them. Thanks, Sun, for getting it started. Yours was an $88,000,000
investment toward making the world a better place for Sun and for all of us. I
predict you will make a profit from selling Star Office, as well.
It's wrong to say that the Internet is not democratizing politics, and the author of the article gives evidence of this, in this paragraph quoted from the article:
"The Internet has had more impact on politics in Malaysia than in Singapore," says Cherian George, who is writing a book on Internet usage in Southeast Asia. There are several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Malaysia committed to investigating the government;... As a consequence, when activists in Malaysia want to use the Web to highlight human rights abuses, George says, they can draw upon the information amassed by the NGOs from their networks of sources.
Social change is often largely hidden for years before it shows obvious external characteristics. That's what happened in the former Soviet Union. The people did not have access to much information about the outside world, but the leaders had complete access. The breakup of the Soviet Union was largely due to Soviet leaders not believing in their own mental constructs, after years of experiencing the outside world.
The internet hastens these hidden social processes. For example, all of China's leaders have completely uncensored access to the entire internet. This makes them more aware of their own mental rigidity.
What about display postscript? Isn't it possible to convert a TeX file to Postscript, and then display it? That way the user would be able to see the result of any editing on the screen.
It's a bit daunting to think of working with a complicated file that could not be checked quickly.
Maybe I should put that a different way. Are there any What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editors that display TeX files the way they will look when printed?
If you want to do that, I will provide editing help. I suggest we make it as good as we can, and submit it as a Slashdot story, asking for comments and improvements. The OO people have plenty to do, I think they would like the help. If a significant number of Slashdot people put their minds together, they ought to be able to make a draft copy even more persuasive.
MS Office Anecdote #1: I've had so many problems with Word that I don't often
use it. However, a while back someone on Slashdot said that his supervisor had
spent most of a day writing an important document. She was in a big rush. She
had been saving the file regularly, but, after several hours, saving the file
just brought an error message. (A sysadmin friend of mine had the same
experience, several times.)
Microsoft Word would not open its own file for the supervisor. Word also would
not open the backup file. She was frantic.
The person commenting said he made a copy of the file, opened it in OO, saved
it in.DOC format, and it opened easily in Word. So, OO is the tool you need
to save yourself from Microsoft bugginess and sloppiness.
MS Office Anecdote #2: Someone made an Excel file of all the computer hardware
at a particular site. I wanted to make the left and top headings stay
stationary as I scrolled to the right and down. I knew it was possible, but
didn't know how to do it. I spent several minutes doing searches in Excel
help, and couldn't find what I needed.
So, I opened the Excel spreadsheet in the OO spreadsheet program. When I
searched, the first entry in help was the one I wanted. I made the headings
stationary, and then opened the spreadsheet in Excel. No more problems.
Conclusion: A copy of OO should be required on every Microsoft Office CD.
It's not a tangent! It's important. Chen and Chan and Lu and Li (not their real Chinese names) have been completely unable to answer an important question about Windows XP. The reason? They're in China, and if they don't know the answer, they have to lie, since they have no way to contact anyone at MS who will listen.
Whenever I ask for MS technical support, I am calling about a difficult question. If it weren't difficult, I would answer it myself. Those are exactly the kind of questions MS technical support can't answer.
The Psychic Friends Network
is sometimes equally as good as Microsoft technical support at understanding
bugs in Microsoft software.
Yes, but I think everyone will get the point that OO makes PDF files, and Word doesn't. PDF files are MUCH less likely to cause problems, because they can contain the fonts they use. I don't think that is available in Word. In most cases, you don't want the person to whom you send the file to be able to change it, and maybe later forget and think it is his.
I would LOVE to see someone make a similar two-page brochure, formatted exactly the same way, that would provide all the arguments for using OO. Here's one: Word is quirky; it often does things that you don't expect, like put footers at the head of the next page.
What you said is extremely valuable to me. Your web site is interesting, too. I looked at the TeX link you gave.
Could you provide some more guidance? Is TeX as difficult to learn and use as one of the comments says?
Does TeX have tools for building indexes and tables of contents? Does TeX have conditional printing that depends on the value of variables at the beginning? Is there a way to use TeX to produce HTML, so that one file can be multi-purpose?
DOS killed the competitors because Microsoft allowed illegal copies of DOS to be sold and circulated. Back then, it was DOS for a considerable payment, or DOS for free.
At that time, there were at least 6 computer distributors in the Portland, Oregon area that were selling illegal copies of DOS.
Well, number 224853 shouldn't scare you. It is entirely about Mozilla politics, and doesn't involve software at all.
Number 204506 says, "Actual Results: I can enter maxlength + 1 characters into a input field." That doesn't sound very scary. There is no mention of running code in the extra byte.
Bug 182176 says, "This is not much of a security hole since chrome can read any file anyways and non-trusted content can't use chrome URLs. It's worth fixing in case some future exploit allows untrusted content to use chrome urls, but I'm removing the security flag because there's no exploit here.
Bug 129996 is about an annoyance, at most.
Good old Mozilla. Yes, the parent post is a troll. No security problems are shown in the link.
Cliff, the Slashdot editor, told me about the flaw, and I verified it in a Slashdot story. That was maybe 5 months ago; I suppose it is still there. I didn't report it because it has been there for years; I suppose it has already been reported since there is sometimes discussion about it on slashdot.
The problem is that trying a package as complicated as Slash takes at least 20 hours. It's good to consider carefully before I make the investment.
Have you installed Slash? What were your experiences?
Cisco has declared the 675 router dead, and stopped supporting it. Before they declared it dead, there were frequent security upgrades, giving the impression that it might not be secure now. Cisco had bought the 675 technology from another company; it was not designed as a Cisco product.
So, maybe it would be sensible to buy a new router, and maybe that router would have load balancing. SMC seems to be a reputable company, but I don't see any SMC routers with balancing.
What software would you recommend for an online community?
Anyone have experience installing Slashdot's Slash code?
Any chance the bugs in Slash will be fixed? For example, if there are enough comments in a thread, some of them become inaccessible when comments are nested.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember the CDC 6600 as being $4,500,000 when it was newly introduced. So, the $1 million listed is only for the CPU module. An actual system required maybe 22 "peripheral processors" to handle IO and printing. Then there were hard drives, tape drives, the main console, and card readers.
The CDC 6600 had a 60-bit word. Memory amounts were expressed in octal. Memory was extremely expensive. If the 6600 had 100,000 octal bytes of memory your organization was rich.
This kind of stuff gets old. Someone reads a comment and thinks how it could be wrong, instead of trying to understand what was meant.
What I meant was that the idea of using checksumming and encryption in cookies cannot be patented.
Also, Amazon is not patenting the checksumming and encryption. If they use patented encryption, it would be someone else's. It seems unlikely they would be using complicated encryption, since that would not save CPU cycles over just storing the data on their own servers.
But now they are losing their monopoly.
You could return a cookie from a pool of cookies received by other people at other times. If you can guess the method of checksumming and encryption, you can make your own.
Surely checksumming and encryption cannot be patented, even by a patent office corrupted by allowing too little money to do a good job.
As the world moves to broadband, there begin to be new privacy issues. Often your IP identifies you.
Ask yourself, why does Amazon want to encrypt data about you? There are issues here that need to be explored.
I've often thought it would be interesting to write a program that caused stored cookies to be returned with with slight changes. You could load the program, browse Amazon, and see what happened.
They can store cookies if you allow them to store them. However, what you return is entirely your decision. It's your computer.
Sorry, it was early in the morning. The sentence should have read, "It is NOT impossible..."
This is a very serious issue. Companies that employ enough people who actually understand the business of the company have a chance to survive and prosper. Companies who try to use cheaper, poorly educated employees, die. The death may happen slowly, and is usually difficult to see because of energetic attempts to hide the truth, but the death occurs. (Novell - now apparently rebuilding -, Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect Corporation, Corel, PowerSoft and many, many others are examples.)
Microsoft's numerous recent public relations mistakes, like its stupid attack on Open Office, show it is dying.
I am not intending to be anti-Microsoft when I say this. It would be best for me personally if Microsoft were a strong, healthy company. I and many, many people suffer when Microsoft is abusive or sloppy.
Don't overlook the complexities of this. It is possible for healthy processes and sick processes to be operating at the same time in the same company. It is impossible for a company on the way down to remake itself.
What is important is not that someone at Microsoft is interested in fact-checking. That's obvious; they don't want to get fired.
What is important is that these examples show clearly how Microsoft's evaluation of itself comes into being. First, someone who knows nothing about technical matters, and absolutely does not care about technical matters, quickly writes a complete fantasy. Then the fantasy is sent to some people who have a clue, who eventually eliminate the worst of the inventions.
The examples show that the fantasy writers have very little contact with anyone with technical knowledge. Otherwise they would start the fantasies a little closer to the truth, and save some editing cycles.
Last time I looked, which wasn't recently, CSS did not provide all the parameters necessary for page markup. For example, there was no way to change the spacing (leading) before paragraphs or after paragraphs.
The people who designed CSS were not typesetting professionals.
The result is that, if you use CSS, you must also use a proprietary scheme, also, to finish the job. But, implementing a proprietary scheme defeats the intended purpose of CSS.
If CSS were designed well, it would be possible to use the same kind of markup system for both the web and print.
I predicted the downfall of WordPerfect Corporation and of Novell years before it happened.
Now, using the same kind of logic, I'm predicting this is the beginning of the end for Microsoft. Also, I think Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer know this. That's why the new licensing scheme, "Pay us even if we don't do anything." They're on a ride to the bottom, and they know it, and they want to extract as much money as possible on the way down.
The problems, I think, are entirely due to bad management. No one would object to paying for closed-source software if it did a little more and if it had a good reputation. But closed-source has become synonymous with abusiveness.
I have sympathy for Gates and Ballmer. While teenagers, they were caught up in something intense. They have thought about mostly one thing since then. They have not had time to grow up. They have not had time to learn the difficult art and science of management.
A lot of Microsoft's abusiveness is like the abusiveness of a teenager who doesn't know how to live in a complex adult world.
Everyone needs an amount of money sufficient to live. The value of having a lot more than that cannot even come close to compensating for the horror of living in an abusive world of your own creation.
It's funny to think of the same kind of abusive intent applied to open source software. Think what could happen. After OO becomes the world standard office suite, and almost everyone is dependent on it, why, they could double the price! And everyone would have to pay because they have so much time invested in training in and customization of OO!
Sometimes really, really wonderful things happen in the world, and OO is one of them. Thanks, Sun, for getting it started. Yours was an $88,000,000 investment toward making the world a better place for Sun and for all of us. I predict you will make a profit from selling Star Office, as well.
It's wrong to say that the Internet is not democratizing politics, and the author of the article gives evidence of this, in this paragraph quoted from the article:
"The Internet has had more impact on politics in Malaysia than in Singapore," says Cherian George, who is writing a book on Internet usage in Southeast Asia. There are several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Malaysia committed to investigating the government;... As a consequence, when activists in Malaysia want to use the Web to highlight human rights abuses, George says, they can draw upon the information amassed by the NGOs from their networks of sources.
Social change is often largely hidden for years before it shows obvious external characteristics. That's what happened in the former Soviet Union. The people did not have access to much information about the outside world, but the leaders had complete access. The breakup of the Soviet Union was largely due to Soviet leaders not believing in their own mental constructs, after years of experiencing the outside world.
The internet hastens these hidden social processes. For example, all of China's leaders have completely uncensored access to the entire internet. This makes them more aware of their own mental rigidity.
What about display postscript? Isn't it possible to convert a TeX file to Postscript, and then display it? That way the user would be able to see the result of any editing on the screen.
It's a bit daunting to think of working with a complicated file that could not be checked quickly.
Maybe I should put that a different way. Are there any What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editors that display TeX files the way they will look when printed?
William,
Are there GUI editors for TeX or LaTeX?
If you want to do that, I will provide editing help. I suggest we make it as good as we can, and submit it as a Slashdot story, asking for comments and improvements. The OO people have plenty to do, I think they would like the help. If a significant number of Slashdot people put their minds together, they ought to be able to make a draft copy even more persuasive.
MS Office Anecdote #1: I've had so many problems with Word that I don't often use it. However, a while back someone on Slashdot said that his supervisor had spent most of a day writing an important document. She was in a big rush. She had been saving the file regularly, but, after several hours, saving the file just brought an error message. (A sysadmin friend of mine had the same experience, several times.)
Microsoft Word would not open its own file for the supervisor. Word also would not open the backup file. She was frantic.
The person commenting said he made a copy of the file, opened it in OO, saved it in
MS Office Anecdote #2: Someone made an Excel file of all the computer hardware at a particular site. I wanted to make the left and top headings stay stationary as I scrolled to the right and down. I knew it was possible, but didn't know how to do it. I spent several minutes doing searches in Excel help, and couldn't find what I needed.
So, I opened the Excel spreadsheet in the OO spreadsheet program. When I searched, the first entry in help was the one I wanted. I made the headings stationary, and then opened the spreadsheet in Excel. No more problems.
Conclusion: A copy of OO should be required on every Microsoft Office CD.
Thanks. I seem to remember that fonts in a Word document can be extracted, creating copyright issues, and the fonts in a PDF cannot. Is that true?
It's not a tangent! It's important. Chen and Chan and Lu and Li (not their real Chinese names) have been completely unable to answer an important question about Windows XP. The reason? They're in China, and if they don't know the answer, they have to lie, since they have no way to contact anyone at MS who will listen.
Whenever I ask for MS technical support, I am calling about a difficult question. If it weren't difficult, I would answer it myself. Those are exactly the kind of questions MS technical support can't answer.
The Psychic Friends Network is sometimes equally as good as Microsoft technical support at understanding bugs in Microsoft software.
Yes, but I think everyone will get the point that OO makes PDF files, and Word doesn't. PDF files are MUCH less likely to cause problems, because they can contain the fonts they use. I don't think that is available in Word. In most cases, you don't want the person to whom you send the file to be able to change it, and maybe later forget and think it is his.
I would LOVE to see someone make a similar two-page brochure, formatted exactly the same way, that would provide all the arguments for using OO. Here's one: Word is quirky; it often does things that you don't expect, like put footers at the head of the next page.
William,
What you said is extremely valuable to me. Your web site is interesting, too. I looked at the TeX link you gave.
Could you provide some more guidance? Is TeX as difficult to learn and use as one of the comments says?
Does TeX have tools for building indexes and tables of contents? Does TeX have conditional printing that depends on the value of variables at the beginning? Is there a way to use TeX to produce HTML, so that one file can be multi-purpose?
My opinion:
DOS killed the competitors because Microsoft allowed illegal copies of DOS to be sold and circulated. Back then, it was DOS for a considerable payment, or DOS for free.
At that time, there were at least 6 computer distributors in the Portland, Oregon area that were selling illegal copies of DOS.
Well, number 224853 shouldn't scare you. It is entirely about Mozilla politics, and doesn't involve software at all.
Number 204506 says, "Actual Results: I can enter maxlength + 1 characters into a input field." That doesn't sound very scary. There is no mention of running code in the extra byte.
Bug 182176 says, "This is not much of a security hole since chrome can read any file anyways and non-trusted content can't use chrome URLs. It's worth fixing in case some future exploit allows untrusted content to use chrome urls, but I'm removing the security flag because there's no exploit here.
Bug 129996 is about an annoyance, at most.
Good old Mozilla. Yes, the parent post is a troll. No security problems are shown in the link.
Cliff, the Slashdot editor, told me about the flaw, and I verified it in a Slashdot story. That was maybe 5 months ago; I suppose it is still there. I didn't report it because it has been there for years; I suppose it has already been reported since there is sometimes discussion about it on slashdot.
The problem is that trying a package as complicated as Slash takes at least 20 hours. It's good to consider carefully before I make the investment.
Have you installed Slash? What were your experiences?
Cisco has declared the 675 router dead, and stopped supporting it. Before they declared it dead, there were frequent security upgrades, giving the impression that it might not be secure now. Cisco had bought the 675 technology from another company; it was not designed as a Cisco product.
So, maybe it would be sensible to buy a new router, and maybe that router would have load balancing. SMC seems to be a reputable company, but I don't see any SMC routers with balancing.
What software would you recommend for an online community?
Anyone have experience installing Slashdot's Slash code?
Any chance the bugs in Slash will be fixed? For example, if there are enough comments in a thread, some of them become inaccessible when comments are nested.