The author in this article talks about "Japanese perfection" and harps on a few of India's software houses having less then.05 defects per 1000 lines of code.
This is nonsense. Any industry that releases new generations of every more complex products every one and a half years or shorter is bound to be riddled with bugs and flaws. Flaws are especially prevalent if the product uses lots of untested new technologies.
Japanese perfection? To us it may look that way, but for many of brand spanking new products released in Japan, they are hardly error free. Often before a Japanese company sells to the foreign market, they will release it domestically for over a year to try to work out the bugs. An example: The Playstation 2 release in Japan was full of flaws. By the time a Japanese product gets to North America or Europe engineers will have found and fixed most of the most glaring errors in the design and manufacturing process.
Generally every new technology will have flaws as everyone gets used to the new tech and while we refine the manufacturing process from the lab to the factory floor, such as 0.13-micron lithography. Today >1GHz CPUs have small yields, in a year the yields and reliability of these chips will be far higher as the technicians tweak the manufacturing product. Just the same way as we can build a 100 MHz today with almost 100% yield.
The bottom line is: If you want perfection and something that is incredibly reliable, you as a rule cannot get bleeding edge equipment.
What this patent is really about is Cisco's NAT pool technology. Basically it gives the external side of the firewall several external IP addresses rather then just one as seen with most firewalls today. I know that Cisco uses this technology with their PIX Firewall boxes. But I don't know if they use this with any of their other firewalls.
-Sean
MS-Lawyer 1.0 receives an e-mail reply from Mark D. Robins with the document encoded by some odd applet, ActiveSecurityRisk promptly asks whether or not MS-Lawyer wants to install SlashReader, a signed application. Unthinkingly hitting okay to whether or not he wants the latest and greatest MS application to be automatically and blindly installed, a EULA pops up, quickly clicked away...
Slashdot End User License Agreement:
Andover.net, Inc hereby resolves itself of all damage due to use or misuse of this product... Blah blah blah You can't sue us if this product makes your computer kill your wife, give your son a sore ass, and chase around your cat saying "Here kitty, kitty, kitty"... Boilerplate boilerplate boilerplate By agreeing to this license you hereby permit Andover.Net, Inc full and unlimited rights to publish any and all information, public or private, on you or your clients protocols, APIs, standards, implementations, et cetera. More legalese By clicking agree you state that you have fully read this license agreement and agree to abide by its full terms... I AGREE
The problem with Chinese is that there are really two main "types" of Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese. Generally Mandarin is spoken on Mainland China, while Cantonese is spoken in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc. An example is where I go to college we have an exchange program, and in my suite two students, one from Hong Kong, and one from Beijing talk to each other in English, not because they want to improve their conversational English (although that might be a reason) but because they can't understand each other. Furthermore the dialects between regions is far heavier then say, English, making it difficult for people even if they both speak Mandarin to understand each other.
Generally though, if they write it out, they can get the gist of what they want to say. But Chinese is broken down to two different writing styles, Classical, and Simplified.
Also another problem with using any type of writing style that uses hieroglyphic or pictographical characters is that it's a dog to transmit them electronically and make different fonts. While Romantic languages only need 30 or so characters times 2 for uppercase, Chinese, Japanese Kanji, etc need a whole bunch more of them.
Basically to do anything electronically, its really, really helpful to use an alphabet. The only complaint that I have with English is that we have thrown out a lot of phonetics that comes with an alphabet to basically copy a word from another language character for character. Remember, those silent 'e's, that's all French baby!
It looks like people in the states of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee can now export PGP freely, as the source code in electronic form was outlawed for distribution internationally; However despite the ban on electronic media, in paper form it could be distributed overseas, except for places such as North Korea, and to other nations we are officially at "war" with - if you sent it to the Reds you could still be charged with the one crime named in the US Constitution, treason. Now that source code has the same protections, at least in the 6th circuit, as printed works, send away!
Although one thing I don't think you still can't do, distribute binary files... Oh well, I'm glad I'm not held back by using that OS written by criminals.
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This is nonsense. Any industry that releases new generations of every more complex products every one and a half years or shorter is bound to be riddled with bugs and flaws. Flaws are especially prevalent if the product uses lots of untested new technologies.
Japanese perfection? To us it may look that way, but for many of brand spanking new products released in Japan, they are hardly error free. Often before a Japanese company sells to the foreign market, they will release it domestically for over a year to try to work out the bugs. An example: The Playstation 2 release in Japan was full of flaws. By the time a Japanese product gets to North America or Europe engineers will have found and fixed most of the most glaring errors in the design and manufacturing process.
Generally every new technology will have flaws as everyone gets used to the new tech and while we refine the manufacturing process from the lab to the factory floor, such as 0.13-micron lithography. Today >1GHz CPUs have small yields, in a year the yields and reliability of these chips will be far higher as the technicians tweak the manufacturing product. Just the same way as we can build a 100 MHz today with almost 100% yield.
The bottom line is: If you want perfection and something that is incredibly reliable, you as a rule cannot get bleeding edge equipment.
What this patent is really about is Cisco's NAT pool technology. Basically it gives the external side of the firewall several external IP addresses rather then just one as seen with most firewalls today. I know that Cisco uses this technology with their PIX Firewall boxes. But I don't know if they use this with any of their other firewalls. -Sean
Let me clairify that a bit, how are you supposed to say "PI number"? How are you supposed to pronounce PI, soft I, hard I, as in pie, pea, what?
Question: Whats the 'pee' number?
Answer: One you dummy!
MS-Lawyer 1.0 receives an e-mail reply from Mark D. Robins with the document encoded by some odd applet, ActiveSecurityRisk promptly asks whether or not MS-Lawyer wants to install SlashReader, a signed application. Unthinkingly hitting okay to whether or not he wants the latest and greatest MS application to be automatically and blindly installed, a EULA pops up, quickly clicked away...
Slashdot End User License Agreement:
Andover.net, Inc hereby resolves itself of all damage due to use or misuse of this product...
Blah blah blah
You can't sue us if this product makes your computer kill your wife, give your son a sore ass, and chase around your cat saying "Here kitty, kitty, kitty"...
Boilerplate boilerplate boilerplate
By agreeing to this license you hereby permit Andover.Net, Inc full and unlimited rights to publish any and all information, public or private, on you or your clients protocols, APIs, standards, implementations, et cetera.
More legalese
By clicking agree you state that you have fully read this license agreement and agree to abide by its full terms...
I AGREE
The thought gives me goose bumps.
Generally though, if they write it out, they can get the gist of what they want to say. But Chinese is broken down to two different writing styles, Classical, and Simplified.
Also another problem with using any type of writing style that uses hieroglyphic or pictographical characters is that it's a dog to transmit them electronically and make different fonts. While Romantic languages only need 30 or so characters times 2 for uppercase, Chinese, Japanese Kanji, etc need a whole bunch more of them.
Basically to do anything electronically, its really, really helpful to use an alphabet. The only complaint that I have with English is that we have thrown out a lot of phonetics that comes with an alphabet to basically copy a word from another language character for character. Remember, those silent 'e's, that's all French baby!
It looks like people in the states of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee can now export PGP freely, as the source code in electronic form was outlawed for distribution internationally; However despite the ban on electronic media, in paper form it could be distributed overseas, except for places such as North Korea, and to other nations we are officially at "war" with - if you sent it to the Reds you could still be charged with the one crime named in the US Constitution, treason. Now that source code has the same protections, at least in the 6th circuit, as printed works, send away!
Although one thing I don't think you still can't do, distribute binary files... Oh well, I'm glad I'm not held back by using that OS written by criminals.