Mentioned in that story was that HP scientists are scrambling to publish anything they've been working on because people not putting out anything contributing to the bottom line in a year are going to get laid off.
I know that IBM just fired thousands of people and has a hiring freeze on their RAM research division (I have a friend that works there), besides letting a number of people go there.
I suspect the IBM scientists are in the same pickle as HP. When the economy goes down, the first thing to get axed is R&D, and they'd rather not be out on the street.
Now, which is more difficult to bare? The inconvenience of the search, or another 9/11 style attack?
Definitely the 9/11 style attack. I constantly live in fear that terrorists will smuggle a Boeing 757 (fully loaded with jet fuel) into the US from Canada in their car trunk. They'll then go to a public library, and after checking out books like "How to Blow Up Big Buildings with Commercial Airliners", they'll rent out a fleet of crop-sprayers over the Internet, using PGP. They'll tow the 757 to an airstrip using this fleet of crop-sprayers (conserving the 757's fuel for a really big explosion). They'll then suspiciously mill around the plane for a while in plain view of the neighbors with signs up saying "Die America" and "Kablooie Empire State Building". After a while, they'll take off and ram into the Empire State building.
Fortunately, the federal government has forseen this chain of events, and taken prompt action to stop the terrorists at any point.
(My apologies: I couldn't manage to somehow work in a number of federal stupidities like the uncomfortably KGB-like and extremely expensive Office of Homeland Security and the stupid regs that made an aircraft attendant make my father break the apparently deadly file off his nail clippers in his toiletries kit.)
Palladium builds on TCPA. TCPA provides the hardware foundation for Palladium.
MS could restrict communications with non-secure computers before, just like they can now. The only difference is that theoretically they could build a system that couldn't be hacked to work on the Windows side in software while TCPA is enabled. Pretty minor -- disable TCPA, modify Linux to act like Windows is on the other end of the line, do whatever.
...I realize that accepted pricing is well above the price I mentioned. And yes, obviously I left out the maintenance.
The problem is that I find that corporate spending on IT purchases has gotten ridiculous. Let's buy a TEMPEST array! Let's buy something with a Sun nametag because the name sounds good! Let's buy a $2k piece of software for each workstation even though there's a free alternative!
I'm not saying that anyone *provides* something in the price range I was talking about. No one is crazy enough to do so, if companies are willing to pay much, much more. I'm saying that, if you're asking whether it's possible to *build* something like this for the price range I mentioned, off the cuff it doesn't sound so unreasonable.
Yes, a seasoned IT person who works with high-end systems like this will laugh. Why? Because they're used to paying huge amounts of money. Because it's an accepted part of the culture to throw down this much cash. What I want to know is -- how often do people question these basics? How often has someone said "Wait a minute...this is wrong."
Are you telling me that if you were in a third world country without the exorbant amount of funding that we USians enjoy, and someone asked you to put together a 50TB storage system for under $1M, you'd simply say "It can't be done"? No consideration, nothing?
I mean, when I look at the fact that the *case* on, say, a Sun high end system costs more than a whole cluster of workstations, I start to wonder just how much excess is going on here.
Say we take the bare-metal, dirt cheap approach. Grab a bunch of Linux boxes. Throw RAID on them configured so that 1/3 of your data is overhead for reliability, and a 100Mbps Ethernet card in each. The figure used earlier was $1 per gig. Put 6 200 GB drives in each. Throw down $250 for the non-drive cost of each system. You have 800GB of data on each system, 400GB of overhead. That's 63 systems. $16K for the systems, $75K for the drives, and we come in to $91K. I left out switches -- you'd need a couple, but certainly not $9K worth.
You'd need some software work done -- an efficient, hierarchical distributed filesystem. I didn't factor this in, which you could consider not fair, but there may be something like this already, and if not, it's a one time cost for the whole world.
Maybe another few systems up near the head of the array to do caching and speed things up, and you still aren't even up to $150K, and you have failover (at least for each one-drive-in-three) group.
I haven't looked at this -- it might be smarter, since you'd want to do this hierarchically, to have caches existing within the hierarchy, or maybe Gbit Ethernet at the top level of the hierarchy. And obviously, this may not meet your needs. But as for whether it's possible to build something like this for that much money? Sure, I'd say so.
Finally, existing SANS or any sort of network-attached storage are overpriced, no two ways about it. Very, very healthy profit margins there. Sooner or later, someone is going to start underselling the big IT "corporate solution providers" and is going to kill them unless they trim margins by quite a bit.
I didn't say it could be disabled from software.:-)
MS will never, ever manage to get all the tech industry to agree to mandatory use of something like TCPA, where there are a few CAs that hold all the power. There was a *lot* of rumbling when TCPA was going through, and the standard demand was that TCPA be disableable.
MS is small potatoes compared to the rest of the tech industry, which is not interested in having one or two companies with the keys necessary to sign this stuff hold it by the balls.
Don't use a web browser with Javascript running. This is a fairly annoying, semicommon script on grade-B websites that was probably packaged with some "Design your own website" package.
Well, I *would* agree. This is probably MS's desire -- do something with DCOM and try to convince people to use it.
However, Netscape holds a patent on encryption between the application and transport layer, and I strongly suspect that AOL/TW would like nothing better than beating MS about the head with it.
And precisely how does Palladium figure into this dark picture at all?
I've seen web pages that no Linux web browser can display because they use MSIE extensions. If you make a browser plugin that requires Windows, you're in the same boat. Palladium doesn't make this worse or better....disable view source, copy, paste, and print functions on web pages...
Effectively doable already, in that you could make highly obfuscated software using this. Throw in public key encryption, and it would be a losing battle to try to clone the software.
Frankly, the only people that I can see this impacting is Windows users that pirate games. I'm sorry, but I just can't work up a lot of sympathy for them. I defy *anyone* to successfully produce a perfect DRM-protected PC audio system. This is far, far too easy to break at the output end. Even extreme use of Palladium and strong DRM would make it a slight annoyance to rip audio. And finally, it's possible that digital rips of movies could be stopped, but not without moving to a totally different video standard. DVDs have at least 15 years left in them.
So these doomsday scenerios mostly don't affect us Linux users, and even the darkest picture you can paint doesn't have a chance of affecting media piracy for a decade or two.
What happens when Adobe incorporates it into Acrobat and Acrobat Reader
Adobe is pushing Acrobat as a Web standardd, and has been for years. They make money by making the best, not the only, PDF software out there. They have no interest whatsoever in trying to keep people from using PDF at all.
This isn't MS we're talking about. Slashdot and Adobe have had differences before, but Adobe has a solid reputation for making good (if expensive) products and beating their competition on merit.
Microsoft will do the same thing with Office. It will require applications to get Palladium keys from MS before they will run in Microsoft Windows XXP. Those same applications will not run and documents will not be accessable under a non_MS operating system. Bye bye WINE.
WINE and attempts to read Microsoft formats are fun from a technical perspective, but from a market standpoint, they're mostly pointless. A company does not want to migrate to Linux and have their Win32 pograms work *some* of the time, or be able to read MS Office documents 4/5 of the time.
Trying to out-reverse engineer Microsoft is a losing game. MS can *always* make their software too complex to reverse engineer. In this case, they would be doing exactly what they did with DR-DOS -- checking to see whether their apps are running in their own OS and terminate if not, and keep trying to patch loopholes that let people get the apps running. Palladium is one of many, many means to this end...and MS pulling something like this was inevitable if WINE got popular enough.
The other problem with TCPA/Palladium is that you will be forced to use it (probably by law).
Not a chance in the world. You might not get to play some games if you don't use it, but there will never be a specific law enforcing a particular DRM standard. The best you might get (and this is pushing it) is a set of generic DRM requirements for hardware.
2) Linux folks haven't been able to control Microsoft in the least before -- just work around them, and provide an attractive alternative. What's new about not being able to tell Microsoft what to do?
Or buy new computers and turn off Palladium. Or just ignore the Windows people and keep using Linux.
Palladium comes down to copy protection of *Windows* software and music in *Windows*, and can, in any event, be disabled.
Worst case Windows users can crack software to make it play even with Palladium turned off, which is pretty much what people already do to attack copy protection on software.
How does it affect us? Why should we care?
And answering "Because MS will make Windows not talk to Linux and isolate it", as some other poster did in these responses, is not good enough. MS has been trying to keep Windows from talking to Linux for a long time.
And the personal feelings of some engineer at AMD should affect us buing AMD vs Intel WHY again? Point is, both include Palladium. Having Palladium in your computer does *nothing* to prevent you from using Linux, etc. Part of the Palladium spec is that it always be disableable.
Now, it may well end up that Windows users end up having to enable it because Windows Media Player or something refuses to play copyrighted movies with it off...but that's why you're using Linux, RIGHT?:-)
Besides, you'd be no worse off on a system with no Palladium support (well, you'd pay maybe $5 less for fewer ICs on hardware in your system...
"Someday, computers will be able to store and transmit huge amounts of literature, art, and music. A new golden age of learning will again be ushered in. Students will be able to study rare works that would otherwise be unavailable. Why, not long from now the Library of Congress will be able to fit on a few compact disks, accessable from any personal computer!"
2002: "Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more room for porn by announcing new IDE hard drives with capacities of up to 320GB."
35% of US high school seniors couldn't find THE USA on an unmarked map of the world. About 50% couldn't find Europe. THERE HAS GOT TO BE A REASON. I dare say most EU year 12s could draw an unmarked map of the world with major rivers and mountain ranges.
I suspect that there *is* a reason -- most US citizens don't really care about anythin outside of the US. They know where the action is. On the other hand, most Europeans spend their days dreaming about how they can emmigrate to the United States.
Yay for Slashdot nationalism.:-)
Oh, and that river would be spelled Mississippi, you geography whiz.
The US has better hardwired infrastructure than many other countries. There's less of a cultural interest in single-purpose devices that do one interesting thing -- general purpose computing is more popular in the US than in, say, Japan, but Japanese gidgets sell better than in the US.
I think that complaints about 3G not being adopted are silly. 3G has some seriously unpleasant bits. Cell phones could already monitor your location (and do constantly, letting the telco/govt build a map of where you go), but 3G ones can be switched on remotely to eavesdrop. Furthermore, most cell infrastructure in Europe associated with 3G is key escrow, and bits of it are even unencrypted. 3G security and privacy blow chunks compared to US cell phone standards.
...but anybody looking for 50TB of storage is not just looking for some disk to hold the pr0n they downloaded last week. [clipped list of buzzwords]
Yeah, but there's also a tendancy to try to sell ridiculously overpriced products with vague promises of reliability or quality. Name brand vendors do it all the time. If the vendor is really so sure that this stuff isn't going to fail, will they pay damages if something does fail in the next seven years? Mmm? I'd assume that such a guarantee, since they're so certain, should cost you a *nominal* amount. If they expect one in ten systems to violate their guarantees (which seems pretty egregious to me), they should only be jacking the price by 10% at most for that guarantee.
Graduate students in the CS department typically have NTTP feeds right on their local computers.
From where? I'd love to know this...I haven't seen any bboard-to-NNTP gatewaying software. The CMU Computer Club used to run an NNTP server last year (IIRC, from looking at post paths, they got their feed from MIT), but that seems to be down this year. And most of the public newsservers don't let you post.
Slashdot Mirror
Mentioned in that story was that HP scientists are scrambling to publish anything they've been working on because people not putting out anything contributing to the bottom line in a year are going to get laid off.
I know that IBM just fired thousands of people and has a hiring freeze on their RAM research division (I have a friend that works there), besides letting a number of people go there.
I suspect the IBM scientists are in the same pickle as HP. When the economy goes down, the first thing to get axed is R&D, and they'd rather not be out on the street.
Now, this may *look* like an ordinary head of hair, but...
Now, which is more difficult to bare? The inconvenience of the search, or another 9/11 style attack?
Definitely the 9/11 style attack. I constantly live in fear that terrorists will smuggle a Boeing 757 (fully loaded with jet fuel) into the US from Canada in their car trunk. They'll then go to a public library, and after checking out books like "How to Blow Up Big Buildings with Commercial Airliners", they'll rent out a fleet of crop-sprayers over the Internet, using PGP. They'll tow the 757 to an airstrip using this fleet of crop-sprayers (conserving the 757's fuel for a really big explosion). They'll then suspiciously mill around the plane for a while in plain view of the neighbors with signs up saying "Die America" and "Kablooie Empire State Building". After a while, they'll take off and ram into the Empire State building.
Fortunately, the federal government has forseen this chain of events, and taken prompt action to stop the terrorists at any point.
(My apologies: I couldn't manage to somehow work in a number of federal stupidities like the uncomfortably KGB-like and extremely expensive Office of Homeland Security and the stupid regs that made an aircraft attendant make my father break the apparently deadly file off his nail clippers in his toiletries kit.)
Ooooh...sexy. So if you have a cs.cmu.edu kerb domain account, you can use NNTP? /me salivates.
Palladium builds on TCPA. TCPA provides the hardware foundation for Palladium.
MS could restrict communications with non-secure computers before, just like they can now. The only difference is that theoretically they could build a system that couldn't be hacked to work on the Windows side in software while TCPA is enabled. Pretty minor -- disable TCPA, modify Linux to act like Windows is on the other end of the line, do whatever.
...I realize that accepted pricing is well above the price I mentioned. And yes, obviously I left out the maintenance.
The problem is that I find that corporate spending on IT purchases has gotten ridiculous. Let's buy a TEMPEST array! Let's buy something with a Sun nametag because the name sounds good! Let's buy a $2k piece of software for each workstation even though there's a free alternative!
I'm not saying that anyone *provides* something in the price range I was talking about. No one is crazy enough to do so, if companies are willing to pay much, much more. I'm saying that, if you're asking whether it's possible to *build* something like this for the price range I mentioned, off the cuff it doesn't sound so unreasonable.
Yes, a seasoned IT person who works with high-end systems like this will laugh. Why? Because they're used to paying huge amounts of money. Because it's an accepted part of the culture to throw down this much cash. What I want to know is -- how often do people question these basics? How often has someone said "Wait a minute...this is wrong."
Are you telling me that if you were in a third world country without the exorbant amount of funding that we USians enjoy, and someone asked you to put together a 50TB storage system for under $1M, you'd simply say "It can't be done"? No consideration, nothing?
I mean, when I look at the fact that the *case* on, say, a Sun high end system costs more than a whole cluster of workstations, I start to wonder just how much excess is going on here.
Say we take the bare-metal, dirt cheap approach. Grab a bunch of Linux boxes. Throw RAID on them configured so that 1/3 of your data is overhead for reliability, and a 100Mbps Ethernet card in each. The figure used earlier was $1 per gig. Put 6 200 GB drives in each. Throw down $250 for the non-drive cost of each system. You have 800GB of data on each system, 400GB of overhead. That's 63 systems. $16K for the systems, $75K for the drives, and we come in to $91K. I left out switches -- you'd need a couple, but certainly not $9K worth.
You'd need some software work done -- an efficient, hierarchical distributed filesystem. I didn't factor this in, which you could consider not fair, but there may be something like this already, and if not, it's a one time cost for the whole world.
Maybe another few systems up near the head of the array to do caching and speed things up, and you still aren't even up to $150K, and you have failover (at least for each one-drive-in-three) group.
I haven't looked at this -- it might be smarter, since you'd want to do this hierarchically, to have caches existing within the hierarchy, or maybe Gbit Ethernet at the top level of the hierarchy. And obviously, this may not meet your needs. But as for whether it's possible to build something like this for that much money? Sure, I'd say so.
Finally, existing SANS or any sort of network-attached storage are overpriced, no two ways about it. Very, very healthy profit margins there. Sooner or later, someone is going to start underselling the big IT "corporate solution providers" and is going to kill them unless they trim margins by quite a bit.
I didn't say it could be disabled from software. :-)
MS will never, ever manage to get all the tech industry to agree to mandatory use of something like TCPA, where there are a few CAs that hold all the power. There was a *lot* of rumbling when TCPA was going through, and the standard demand was that TCPA be disableable.
MS is small potatoes compared to the rest of the tech industry, which is not interested in having one or two companies with the keys necessary to sign this stuff hold it by the balls.
Don't use a web browser with Javascript running. This is a fairly annoying, semicommon script on grade-B websites that was probably packaged with some "Design your own website" package.
Well, I *would* agree. This is probably MS's desire -- do something with DCOM and try to convince people to use it.
However, Netscape holds a patent on encryption between the application and transport layer, and I strongly suspect that AOL/TW would like nothing better than beating MS about the head with it.
And precisely how does Palladium figure into this dark picture at all?
...disable view source, copy, paste, and print functions on web pages...
I've seen web pages that no Linux web browser can display because they use MSIE extensions. If you make a browser plugin that requires Windows, you're in the same boat. Palladium doesn't make this worse or better.
Effectively doable already, in that you could make highly obfuscated software using this. Throw in public key encryption, and it would be a losing battle to try to clone the software.
Frankly, the only people that I can see this impacting is Windows users that pirate games. I'm sorry, but I just can't work up a lot of sympathy for them. I defy *anyone* to successfully produce a perfect DRM-protected PC audio system. This is far, far too easy to break at the output end. Even extreme use of Palladium and strong DRM would make it a slight annoyance to rip audio. And finally, it's possible that digital rips of movies could be stopped, but not without moving to a totally different video standard. DVDs have at least 15 years left in them.
So these doomsday scenerios mostly don't affect us Linux users, and even the darkest picture you can paint doesn't have a chance of affecting media piracy for a decade or two.
What happens when Adobe incorporates it into Acrobat and Acrobat Reader
Adobe is pushing Acrobat as a Web standardd, and has been for years. They make money by making the best, not the only, PDF software out there. They have no interest whatsoever in trying to keep people from using PDF at all.
This isn't MS we're talking about. Slashdot and Adobe have had differences before, but Adobe has a solid reputation for making good (if expensive) products and beating their competition on merit.
Microsoft will do the same thing with Office. It will require applications to get Palladium keys from MS before they will run in Microsoft Windows XXP. Those same applications will not run and documents will not be accessable under a non_MS operating system. Bye bye WINE.
WINE and attempts to read Microsoft formats are fun from a technical perspective, but from a market standpoint, they're mostly pointless. A company does not want to migrate to Linux and have their Win32 pograms work *some* of the time, or be able to read MS Office documents 4/5 of the time.
Trying to out-reverse engineer Microsoft is a losing game. MS can *always* make their software too complex to reverse engineer. In this case, they would be doing exactly what they did with DR-DOS -- checking to see whether their apps are running in their own OS and terminate if not, and keep trying to patch loopholes that let people get the apps running. Palladium is one of many, many means to this end...and MS pulling something like this was inevitable if WINE got popular enough.
The other problem with TCPA/Palladium is that you will be forced to use it (probably by law).
Not a chance in the world. You might not get to play some games if you don't use it, but there will never be a specific law enforcing a particular DRM standard. The best you might get (and this is pushing it) is a set of generic DRM requirements for hardware.
1) Hmm...I wasn't completely clear. I meant that TCPA can be disabled. This effectively does the same thing to Palladium.
This mentions it.
2) Linux folks haven't been able to control Microsoft in the least before -- just work around them, and provide an attractive alternative. What's new about not being able to tell Microsoft what to do?
Or buy new computers and turn off Palladium. Or just ignore the Windows people and keep using Linux.
Palladium comes down to copy protection of *Windows* software and music in *Windows*, and can, in any event, be disabled.
Worst case Windows users can crack software to make it play even with Palladium turned off, which is pretty much what people already do to attack copy protection on software.
How does it affect us? Why should we care?
And answering "Because MS will make Windows not talk to Linux and isolate it", as some other poster did in these responses, is not good enough. MS has been trying to keep Windows from talking to Linux for a long time.
Yes? So?
Not having Palladium will just mean that DVD's successor will not be made to operate with personal computers.
You don't see many computers with VHS support, now do you?
Palladium never hurts the end user -- you can always turn it off.
And the personal feelings of some engineer at AMD should affect us buing AMD vs Intel WHY again? Point is, both include Palladium. Having Palladium in your computer does *nothing* to prevent you from using Linux, etc. Part of the Palladium spec is that it always be disableable.
:-)
Now, it may well end up that Windows users end up having to enable it because Windows Media Player or something refuses to play copyrighted movies with it off...but that's why you're using Linux, RIGHT?
Besides, you'd be no worse off on a system with no Palladium support (well, you'd pay maybe $5 less for fewer ICs on hardware in your system...
The wrong cloth being steel wool?
Pavlovian conditioning. They touch the screen, they get smacked.
Nature is wonderful.
1985:
"Someday, computers will be able to store and transmit huge amounts of literature, art, and music. A new golden age of learning will again be ushered in. Students will be able to study rare works that would otherwise be unavailable. Why, not long from now the Library of Congress will be able to fit on a few compact disks, accessable from any personal computer!"
2002:
"Maxtor has once again shown the world that we need more room for porn by announcing new IDE hard drives with capacities of up to 320GB."
35% of US high school seniors couldn't find THE USA on an unmarked map of the world. About 50% couldn't find Europe. THERE HAS GOT TO BE A REASON. I dare say most EU year 12s could draw an unmarked map of the world with major rivers and mountain ranges.
:-)
I suspect that there *is* a reason -- most US citizens don't really care about anythin outside of the US. They know where the action is. On the other hand, most Europeans spend their days dreaming about how they can emmigrate to the United States.
Yay for Slashdot nationalism.
Oh, and that river would be spelled Mississippi, you geography whiz.
Worked for Catholicism.
The US has better hardwired infrastructure than many other countries. There's less of a cultural interest in single-purpose devices that do one interesting thing -- general purpose computing is more popular in the US than in, say, Japan, but Japanese gidgets sell better than in the US.
I think that complaints about 3G not being adopted are silly. 3G has some seriously unpleasant bits. Cell phones could already monitor your location (and do constantly, letting the telco/govt build a map of where you go), but 3G ones can be switched on remotely to eavesdrop. Furthermore, most cell infrastructure in Europe associated with 3G is key escrow, and bits of it are even unencrypted. 3G security and privacy blow chunks compared to US cell phone standards.
...but anybody looking for 50TB of storage is not just looking for some disk to hold the pr0n they downloaded last week. [clipped list of buzzwords]
Yeah, but there's also a tendancy to try to sell ridiculously overpriced products with vague promises of reliability or quality. Name brand vendors do it all the time. If the vendor is really so sure that this stuff isn't going to fail, will they pay damages if something does fail in the next seven years? Mmm? I'd assume that such a guarantee, since they're so certain, should cost you a *nominal* amount. If they expect one in ten systems to violate their guarantees (which seems pretty egregious to me), they should only be jacking the price by 10% at most for that guarantee.
Because in this case, it's pretty obvious that the prices are overly inflated. He's paying almost a thousand times what the raw drives go for.
I think it's pretty reasonable to feel that you could put something like this together for under $100K.
Graduate students in the CS department typically have NTTP feeds right on their local computers.
From where? I'd love to know this...I haven't seen any bboard-to-NNTP gatewaying software. The CMU Computer Club used to run an NNTP server last year (IIRC, from looking at post paths, they got their feed from MIT), but that seems to be down this year. And most of the public newsservers don't let you post.
This was a quote, not something I came up with myself, laddie. Quoting something makes me a "moron"?