Sony does not make money on selling the playstation. In fact, they lose money. They make money by collecting a fee for each game sold for their platform. The fee is not insignificant, either (I believe it's on the order of $10 per copy per game). This is how they can build a machine that has the graphics performance of a $50,000 SGI, yet sell it for $200.
If Sony were to release their tools, people would probably start releasing games outside this setup. They have absolutely no vested interest in giving their development kit away for free, as their development kit allows them to retain control over their developers.
That said, however, I could see a day when they allow their developer to sell programs for a PC Playstation (a linux box with a nice video card). Porting ought to be pretty easy. As long as they retain their $10 fee, they won't care. In fact, seeing as though they won't have to eat the costs of building, distributing, and selling the Playstation itself, I think Sony might even prefer this setup. Time will tell...
Man, for a second there, I thought I had written this post. Aside for the music part, I think this describes me to a 'T'.
I, too, am no Luddite. In fact, my wife and I have 6 computers at home (a mac, two PCs, a Sun workstation, and two laptops). I have a home automation system installed (more to see how it works than out of need--I'm thinking about trying to make home automation products for my next little venture).
However, I am not attached to technology. I like few things better than spending a week on a river in Idaho, 50 miles from the nearest phone. When I'm on vacation, I absolutely refuse to check my e-mail.
Quite frankly, there really is more to life than technology. Technology is about making life easier and better. To me, one shouldn't live life for technology's sake. That's exactly backwards. Let the technology serve us, not the other way around.
Apple has chosen to retain control over the OS, even though they released the source code. This, in itself, is not evil. However, Apple has also chosen to call their source code release "Open Source(tm)". In reality, it seems closer to "Community Source". That is, the source code is available to the community, but it is not "open". By calling it "Open Source(tm)", Apple *is* doing something evil. They are, in effect, diluting the concept that underlies our wonderful community.
I hope that Apple will either revise the terms of the license, or rename their source code release "Community Source". I don't have problems with the license, I have problems with Apple calling the license "Open Source(tm)".
If neither happens, I hope the SPI enforces its trademark. It would be a terrible loss of mind share if the "Open Source(tm)" term were allowed to be diluted in this manner...
If Apple isn't making any kind of profit off OS sales in comparison with hardware sales, then they stand to gain little, and perhaps lose a lot, by the Open Source(tm) community porting the MacOS to the x86 platform. Remember, margins on x86 machines are razor thin. If Apple has shown that it cannot make significant amounts of money from the software alone, as they seems to have claimed when they shut down the Mac clone businesses, then they have no incentive to port to x86.
The second someone on the subnet attempts to telnet to one of the university machines, the integrity of that user's password can be violated by anyone alse on the subnet.
VPNs are a little different, though. I'm not sure how this would work with VPNs. I suspect that security could still compromised.
I can't emphasize enough the concept of using Kerberos in these situations. There are other solutions whose names I cannot think of now--they basically send all passwords for telnet, ftp, or whatever, over the network encrypted. Kerberos has stood the test of time, though. It's also rather complete. And it's free.
Use firewalls to deny brute-force attacks to your university.
Use Kerberos to deny attacks that originate from inside the network.
Let students do what they want. Don't waste your time monitoring security over machines that you have absolutely no control over. That is a headache. It's expensive. It requires a lot of resources. And it opens you up to potential lawsuits.
Firewalls won't do it by themselves. In about an afternoon, I can write a little program that, when run, initiates a connection from inside a firewall to my machine over some standard port, like port 80. Then, I write a listener that waits until the connection is established. Then, the program running inside the firewall allows me to initiate commands from outside the firewall. I then e-mail the program to a couple of students that appear to be computer neophytes. They run the program that is attached to the e-mail, and *bam* I have access to the network behind the firewall. It's a simple matter of sniffing packets until I have accumulated a ton of passwords for machines behind the network. Presumable one of those machines will allow outside connections...
Try Kerberos. This is the only security I've seen that works well *within* a network. No passwords are sent over the wire in plaintext. Thus, when the student's machine is compromised, the rest of the network won't be...
Firewalls are nice, but only work if you have control over the systems behind the firewall. Imagine if I, Joe Student, download a little program from outside the Internet, then run it. This program then creates a tunnel that originates from *behind* the firewall, yet allows the author to tunnel behind the firewall. The user then monitors packets on the internet, collecting *any* plain-text passwords going on the internal network. Before long, your entire network can be compromised. This is not a good solution.
Firewalls are nice. They are a good and necessary part of any security system. However, unless you plan to isolate all these rogue machines outside a firewall (a firewall that blocks different departments from one another), firewalls won't work by themselves. Besides, if your university is anything like the one I attended, it's not just students setting up rogue machines, but also staff & faculty. It's really hard to isolate the rogue machines outside a firewall in these cases.
IMO, you should look at MIT. They use Kerberos for all their non-rogue machines. All passwords (to university machines, at least) are sent over the network encrypted. This way, if Joe Student's machine is compromised, the cracker won't be able to sniff packets for passwords to other, more sensitive machines.
Beyond this, I think you need to ask yourself, "Should I really be enforcing security upon the students/staff/faculty?" This is a huge headache, and one that can never be handled completely. Besides, by acting as a security police for the students, you open yourself and the university up to a ton of potential lawsuits from machines that, despite your best efforts, are compromised.
I'd put in firewalls (IP Masquerading are nice, because there are no changes to users, nor are there any training issues regarding setting up proxy services within net applications) and Kerberos. Ensure that Kerberos is installed on *all* official machines. Then, let the students do what they want. If their machines get compromised, then that is their fault. Make it clear that security responsibilities lie solely in the hands of the students, and that the university will not monitor security issues for *any* machine not administrated by the university.
The US is not a pure democracy. It is a representative democracy. Exactly like slashdot, except that the representatives are voted into power instead of being hand-picked by CmdrTaco.
If you think the US govt is gridlocked, you need to study the politics of Italy or Israel. They put the US govt to shame in the area of gridlocked govt's.
In the Real World (tm), pure democracies lead only to gridlock. Think about it. Governments usually try to do things that are not in individuals' interest, but are in the interests of the society as a whole. Do most Americans want to (personally) pay for highway maintenance & construction in Montana? No! Most will never drive through Montana. Yet I would bet that a large percentage of Canadian lumber (a large percentage of lumber in the US comes from Canada) comes through Montana. Pollution control? The return on investment is too long. Public education? Again, the return on investment is too long. Yet all these things are picked up by the government. The society as a whole benefits, even though it is not necessarily in any single individual's best interests.
The same is true with comments. If this were a True Democracy (c), people would not strike down just those posts that are inflammetory and off topic. People would strike down opinions that they personally do not like. The only things left would be the mediocre posts--the ones that don't challenge anyone's personal viewpoints. This is exactly the opposite of what Slashdot has been in the past, and it's not where I want to head now.
A good balance, and one that has stood the test of several millenia, is a representative democracy. Now, it is true that our current representatives are not elected, unlike with governmental representatvie democracies. However, I am a believer in Plato's concept of the Philosopher-King. That is, the most capable and best rulers are the ones that do not want to rule. If I understand things properly, the current moderators did not "run" for the position of moderator; rather, they were selected by Rob & his cronies. This closely follows the model of a Philosopher-King. In the end, we have a representative democracy, Plato-style!
I personally think the current moderation system works rather well. I'm actually rather curious what Rob has up his sleeve for the next generation. The number of inflammatory & off-topic comments has dropped significantly in the past few months. With the current additions and modifications, I think it will only get better...
I didn't mean that TYA was slower than Blackdown--it's not. In fact, TYA is about 2x faster, according to my own benchmarks (real world code to load data from disk, process data, then manually create an image (i.e. no hardware acceleration through native code)).
However, as a JIT, this simply sucks. Most JITs are about 10x faster than interpreters.
That said, the Blackdown port is a little bit faster (~10%) than Sun's interpreter (ooh, now I'm comparing apples to oranges--the Sun interpreter is running under WinNT).
However, for complex applications (I write oil industry apps & tools, not animated icons for the web), interpreted code is simply unacceptable. Furthermore, TYA's performance is also unacceptable. What is acceptable? The Symantec JIT (the one that ships with JDK1.1.7) is awesome. The MS JIT is also awesome (with my code, it's with 5% of the Symantec JIT; sometimes faster, sometimes slower). I don't have access to IBM's JIT, but I've been told by reliable sources that it is about 2x faster than MS' and Symantec's. I've also been told that a group inside IBM turned off a few of Java's features (most notably, bounds checking), and received an *additional* 10x speedup on mathematical code (I write seismic viewers, and must perform stuff like filtering, normalization, and scaling--this stuff should all benefit greatly by removing bounds checking). There is some talk that the JavaGrande group (the Java supercomputing group) will convince Sun to allow the JVM to turn off bounds checking, but only after telling the user that they're about to commit an agregious act.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Blackdown's JDK doesn't include a JIT. Solaris, Windows, OS/2, and others were all tested with the JIT. If you disable the JIT, you'll find that Linux's port is quite nice.
As for the scalability, I believe they were testing a version running green threads. The native threads included in Blackdown's 1.1.7 ought to help. The 2.2 kernel also should help, as it has much better support for threads.
There's no defending the performance of TYA, though. I keep hoping that IBM and/or Sun will release a JIT open source. That would be really nice...
Note that there is no explicit right to privacy granted in the US Constitution. Anything not explicitly protected in the Constitution is fair game--Americans, through an oversight of their Founding Fathers, have already given up any right to privacy.
The closest thing America has to a right to privacy is the "pursuit of happiness", given in the *preamble* to the Constitution. Even though it's not an Article, it has allowed some judgements in the court in favor of privacy. However, for the most part, there is no right to privacy in America. Furthermore, unless the US Congress passes an amendment to the Constitution (not likely), the courts will have absolutely no choice but to rule against privacy in lawsuits.
You'd think the US senators and representatives would have better things to do with their time than spending the better part of half a year debating Clinton's imdescretions, and subsequent cover ups, rather than tackling issues like privacy.
Me? I'm afraid I have a defeatist attitude similar to Scott McNealy's. We don't have any privacy. It's not likely to change, either. My solution? I think emigration is looking better and better. Now, I only wish other countries (any other country...) had as flexible immigration laws as the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony does not make money on selling the playstation. In fact, they lose money. They make money by collecting a fee for each game sold for their platform. The fee is not insignificant, either (I believe it's on the order of $10 per copy per game). This is how they can build a machine that has the graphics performance of a $50,000 SGI, yet sell it for $200.
If Sony were to release their tools, people would probably start releasing games outside this setup. They have absolutely no vested interest in giving their development kit away for free, as their development kit allows them to retain control over their developers.
That said, however, I could see a day when they allow their developer to sell programs for a PC Playstation (a linux box with a nice video card). Porting ought to be pretty easy. As long as they retain their $10 fee, they won't care. In fact, seeing as though they won't have to eat the costs of building, distributing, and selling the Playstation itself, I think Sony might even prefer this setup. Time will tell...
Man, for a second there, I thought I had written this post. Aside for the music part, I think this describes me to a 'T'.
I, too, am no Luddite. In fact, my wife and I have 6 computers at home (a mac, two PCs, a Sun workstation, and two laptops). I have a home automation system installed (more to see how it works than out of need--I'm thinking about trying to make home automation products for my next little venture).
However, I am not attached to technology. I like few things better than spending a week on a river in Idaho, 50 miles from the nearest phone. When I'm on vacation, I absolutely refuse to check my e-mail.
Quite frankly, there really is more to life than technology. Technology is about making life easier and better. To me, one shouldn't live life for technology's sake. That's exactly backwards. Let the technology serve us, not the other way around.
Apple has chosen to retain control over the OS, even though they released the source code. This, in itself, is not evil. However, Apple has also chosen to call their source code release "Open Source(tm)". In reality, it seems closer to "Community Source". That is, the source code is available to the community, but it is not "open". By calling it "Open Source(tm)", Apple *is* doing something evil. They are, in effect, diluting the concept that underlies our wonderful community.
I hope that Apple will either revise the terms of the license, or rename their source code release "Community Source". I don't have problems with the license, I have problems with Apple calling the license "Open Source(tm)".
If neither happens, I hope the SPI enforces its trademark. It would be a terrible loss of mind share if the "Open Source(tm)" term were allowed to be diluted in this manner...
If Apple isn't making any kind of profit off OS sales in comparison with hardware sales, then they stand to gain little, and perhaps lose a lot, by the Open Source(tm) community porting the MacOS to the x86 platform. Remember, margins on x86 machines are razor thin. If Apple has shown that it cannot make significant amounts of money from the software alone, as they seems to have claimed when they shut down the Mac clone businesses, then they have no incentive to port to x86.
The second someone on the subnet attempts to telnet to one of the university machines, the integrity of that user's password can be violated by anyone alse on the subnet.
VPNs are a little different, though. I'm not sure how this would work with VPNs. I suspect that security could still compromised.
I can't emphasize enough the concept of using Kerberos in these situations. There are other solutions whose names I cannot think of now--they basically send all passwords for telnet, ftp, or whatever, over the network encrypted. Kerberos has stood the test of time, though. It's also rather complete. And it's free.
Use firewalls to deny brute-force attacks to your university.
Use Kerberos to deny attacks that originate from inside the network.
Let students do what they want. Don't waste your time monitoring security over machines that you have absolutely no control over. That is a headache. It's expensive. It requires a lot of resources. And it opens you up to potential lawsuits.
Firewalls won't do it by themselves. In about an afternoon, I can write a little program that, when run, initiates a connection from inside a firewall to my machine over some standard port, like port 80. Then, I write a listener that waits until the connection is established. Then, the program running inside the firewall allows me to initiate commands from outside the firewall. I then e-mail the program to a couple of students that appear to be computer neophytes. They run the program that is attached to the e-mail, and *bam* I have access to the network behind the firewall. It's a simple matter of sniffing packets until I have accumulated a ton of passwords for machines behind the network. Presumable one of those machines will allow outside connections...
Try Kerberos. This is the only security I've seen that works well *within* a network. No passwords are sent over the wire in plaintext. Thus, when the student's machine is compromised, the rest of the network won't be...
Firewalls are nice, but only work if you have control over the systems behind the firewall. Imagine if I, Joe Student, download a little program from outside the Internet, then run it. This program then creates a tunnel that originates from *behind* the firewall, yet allows the author to tunnel behind the firewall. The user then monitors packets on the internet, collecting *any* plain-text passwords going on the internal network. Before long, your entire network can be compromised. This is not a good solution.
Firewalls are nice. They are a good and necessary part of any security system. However, unless you plan to isolate all these rogue machines outside a firewall (a firewall that blocks different departments from one another), firewalls won't work by themselves. Besides, if your university is anything like the one I attended, it's not just students setting up rogue machines, but also staff & faculty. It's really hard to isolate the rogue machines outside a firewall in these cases.
IMO, you should look at MIT. They use Kerberos for all their non-rogue machines. All passwords (to university machines, at least) are sent over the network encrypted. This way, if Joe Student's machine is compromised, the cracker won't be able to sniff packets for passwords to other, more sensitive machines.
Beyond this, I think you need to ask yourself, "Should I really be enforcing security upon the students/staff/faculty?" This is a huge headache, and one that can never be handled completely. Besides, by acting as a security police for the students, you open yourself and the university up to a ton of potential lawsuits from machines that, despite your best efforts, are compromised.
I'd put in firewalls (IP Masquerading are nice, because there are no changes to users, nor are there any training issues regarding setting up proxy services within net applications) and Kerberos. Ensure that Kerberos is installed on *all* official machines. Then, let the students do what they want. If their machines get compromised, then that is their fault. Make it clear that security responsibilities lie solely in the hands of the students, and that the university will not monitor security issues for *any* machine not administrated by the university.
-dan
The US is not a pure democracy. It is a representative democracy. Exactly like slashdot, except that the representatives are voted into power instead of being hand-picked by CmdrTaco.
If you think the US govt is gridlocked, you need to study the politics of Italy or Israel. They put the US govt to shame in the area of gridlocked govt's.
In the Real World (tm), pure democracies lead only to gridlock. Think about it. Governments usually try to do things that are not in individuals' interest, but are in the interests of the society as a whole. Do most Americans want to (personally) pay for highway maintenance & construction in Montana? No! Most will never drive through Montana. Yet I would bet that a large percentage of Canadian lumber (a large percentage of lumber in the US comes from Canada) comes through Montana. Pollution control? The return on investment is too long. Public education? Again, the return on investment is too long. Yet all these things are picked up by the government. The society as a whole benefits, even though it is not necessarily in any single individual's best interests.
The same is true with comments. If this were a True Democracy (c), people would not strike down just those posts that are inflammetory and off topic. People would strike down opinions that they personally do not like. The only things left would be the mediocre posts--the ones that don't challenge anyone's personal viewpoints. This is exactly the opposite of what Slashdot has been in the past, and it's not where I want to head now.
A good balance, and one that has stood the test of several millenia, is a representative democracy. Now, it is true that our current representatives are not elected, unlike with governmental representatvie democracies. However, I am a believer in Plato's concept of the Philosopher-King. That is, the most capable and best rulers are the ones that do not want to rule. If I understand things properly, the current moderators did not "run" for the position of moderator; rather, they were selected by Rob & his cronies. This closely follows the model of a Philosopher-King. In the end, we have a representative democracy, Plato-style!
I personally think the current moderation system works rather well. I'm actually rather curious what Rob has up his sleeve for the next generation. The number of inflammatory & off-topic comments has dropped significantly in the past few months. With the current additions and modifications, I think it will only get better...
I didn't mean that TYA was slower than Blackdown--it's not. In fact, TYA is about 2x faster, according to my own benchmarks (real world code to load data from disk, process data, then manually create an image (i.e. no hardware acceleration through native code)).
However, as a JIT, this simply sucks. Most JITs are about 10x faster than interpreters.
That said, the Blackdown port is a little bit faster (~10%) than Sun's interpreter (ooh, now I'm comparing apples to oranges--the Sun interpreter is running under WinNT).
However, for complex applications (I write oil industry apps & tools, not animated icons for the web), interpreted code is simply unacceptable. Furthermore, TYA's performance is also unacceptable. What is acceptable? The Symantec JIT (the one that ships with JDK1.1.7) is awesome. The MS JIT is also awesome (with my code, it's with 5% of the Symantec JIT; sometimes faster, sometimes slower). I don't have access to IBM's JIT, but I've been told by reliable sources that it is about 2x faster than MS' and Symantec's. I've also been told that a group inside IBM turned off a few of Java's features (most notably, bounds checking), and received an *additional* 10x speedup on mathematical code (I write seismic viewers, and must perform stuff like filtering, normalization, and scaling--this stuff should all benefit greatly by removing bounds checking). There is some talk that the JavaGrande group (the Java supercomputing group) will convince Sun to allow the JVM to turn off bounds checking, but only after telling the user that they're about to commit an agregious act.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Blackdown's JDK doesn't include a JIT. Solaris, Windows, OS/2, and others were all tested with the JIT. If you disable the JIT, you'll find that Linux's port is quite nice.
As for the scalability, I believe they were testing a version running green threads. The native threads included in Blackdown's 1.1.7 ought to help. The 2.2 kernel also should help, as it has much better support for threads.
There's no defending the performance of TYA, though. I keep hoping that IBM and/or Sun will release a JIT open source. That would be really nice...
Note that there is no explicit right to privacy granted in the US Constitution. Anything not explicitly protected in the Constitution is fair game--Americans, through an oversight of their Founding Fathers, have already given up any right to privacy.
The closest thing America has to a right to privacy is the "pursuit of happiness", given in the *preamble* to the Constitution. Even though it's not an Article, it has allowed some judgements in the court in favor of privacy. However, for the most part, there is no right to privacy in America. Furthermore, unless the US Congress passes an amendment to the Constitution (not likely), the courts will have absolutely no choice but to rule against privacy in lawsuits.
You'd think the US senators and representatives would have better things to do with their time than spending the better part of half a year debating Clinton's imdescretions, and subsequent cover ups, rather than tackling issues like privacy.
Me? I'm afraid I have a defeatist attitude similar to Scott McNealy's. We don't have any privacy. It's not likely to change, either. My solution? I think emigration is looking better and better. Now, I only wish other countries (any other country...) had as flexible immigration laws as the US.
-dan