This is as good a time as any to plug Octocon 2002 - China Miéville is the Guest of Honour this year. Time for a trip to Ireland?
Octocon always has a great many guests, and is one of the most fun SF conventions in Europe - doesn't take itself quite as seriously as the large British or American cons, yet it's large enough to attract an impressive lineup.
The UK is only one of the countries in the British Isles. In Ireland we're not kowtowing to Microsoft to quite the same degree as His Tonyness... although Microsoft is a huge employer here, they haven't yet shown any interest in taking us over completely.
The GSM system allows you to take your phone to other networks according to agreements between the network operators; the precise details vary from operator to operator, but in general your "home" network forwards calls to the network to which you're roaming - the person who's calling you pays the normal charge and you pay the roaming charge to receive the call. When you make calls on a roaming network, you generally pay the same as that network's own home phones, plus some small percentage. I guess there's some sort of clearing system between the networks, because roaming charges usually show up on my bill from 1-3 months after the calls actually took place.
What? Where? How? I thought that only universities could get "site licenses" (no marginal cost per installation); all commercial organisations have to license each MS product separately (even using Open License or Select License, there's still a per-box cost).
When the government gets out of the tax-regulate-and-subsidize business, and sticks to preventing and punishing theft, injury, etc., then it will be performing its proper role.
Excuse me? Have you seen what happens when capitalism is allowed to run unregulated? Enron? Microsoft? Standard Oil? Unregulated capitalism is far worse than regulated government - at least with the latter you know who's in charge.
The middle one. Although potato has ssh 1.2.3,
it's been patched so as not to be vulnerable to
the ssh1 exploit.
There are systematic weaknesses with
version 1 of the ssh protocol, which this
doesn't address, of course. However, as far as
I'm aware, a successful exploit has yet to be
mounted against these.
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
I wouldn't mind EU government if
it was founded on something similar to US
constitution but current EU parliament is
thoroughly undemocratic.
No, you're mixing up your EU institutions. The
European Parliament is highly democratic in that
its members are elected directly by the people of
its constituencies (constituency boundaries are
drawn so that each MEP represents approximately
500,000 citizens, I believe). The "undemocratic"
perception of the EU comes from the fact that
the European Commission is the major policy-
driving organ of the Union; and the Commission is
not directly elected; rather its members are
appointed by the governments of the 15 nations
in the Union. Note that the Commission, despite
its perception, does not set EU policy
directly; policy is decided by the Council, which
is basically the governments of each state acting
in concert; the Commission is in charge of
implementation of policy; rather like
all civil services. I don't know of any
government bureaucracy which is directly elected,
so the EU is no less democratic than anywhere else,
and a great deal more democratic than
many places.
Quite. It's hard to make money by selling Open Source or Free Software, but it's easy to make a lot of money by using it. It's this that Microsoft most fears as it's a direct threat to all of their core businesses. Not surprising that they'll try to rubbish it at every opportunity. The fact that it's hard to sell free software is totally irrelevant.
I used to agree with you, until I got into Debian. Apt truly rules! This isn't partisan (well, okay, it is, but it's for very good, objective reasons). The Debian Apt system is really, honestly, the best software-getter I've ever seen. In conjunction with the Debian Packaging Guidelines, which cover many very important rules for the creation of Debian packages (basically, that it should follow certain well-defined procedures regarding libraries, configuration requirements, file locations etc), Apt really spoils the sysadmin. It would be very painful for me to move to anything other than Debian now...
What a lot of toss you do talk. With your sarcastic Daddy-knows-best "sorry" and "the fact is". Searle proved no such thing as your assertion; he merely provided a series of thought experiments which force us to think about what intelligence might actually consist of.
If it looks intelligent, and acts intelligent in all conceiveable circumstances, then we'll be forced to conclude that it is intelligent, even if we know what's going on under the hood. Are you suggesting that, should we one day discover the secrets of the emergent behaviour of the human brain (reducing it, therefore, to "a simple rules system"), that we will suddenly cease to be intelligent?
Let's face it: at the present time there's nothing under Linux that works as well as Microsoft Office. Period.
Ignoring for a moment the intensely irritating "Period", this is by far the most important point made. But even this misses the mark; the problem isn't that "there's nothing as good as Microsoft Office", the problem is that "Microsoft Office doesn't work on Linux". This is the one and only killer application - now and probably for the next five years, only environments which run MS Office have a chance to survive. It doesn't matter that StarOffice and Applix and KOffice are every bit as useful for the majority of users; it doesn't matter that users' attachment to Office is largely irrational (the UI differences between different versions of MS Office are often greater than those between MS Office and StarOffice), and it doesn't matter that MS Office is bloated almost to the point of unusability. The only thing that matters is the perennial question : "Does it run Word?" and until this question can be answered "Yes!" (which presumably means a radically different Microsoft to the one we have now), the gloom will persist.
That said, the sensationalism of the article is completely wrong; there's no "end" in sight, and an actual look-at-the-figures will probably reveal the same slow but steady gains for Linux on the desktop that we've seen over the past eight years. Editorials don't kill operating systems, so everyone just relax...
Chaotic coalition governments in countries that rely on proportional representation for parliament (Italy, Israel etc.)
... and Ireland. Governed by coalitions for almost twenty years now, yet with the higest growth rate in the "Western" world, massive trade surplus, low unemployment, high educational standards, Socialised Health Care (!!!), and all the trappings of a civilised society. Don't confuse the political difficulties faced by Israel and Italy with anything caused by proportional representation; I'm sure if you think hard you might be able to come up with some other possible causes for those countries' political problems.
PR (when done properly) is a Good Thing, as it allows the votes of the people to be translated as accurately as possible into electoral influence. If that results in coalitions, so be it - it's up to the politicians to come to amicable arrangements between parties, not to rig the system so that only big parties ever get any influence.
Dell, like every OEM licensee of Windows, doesn't enjoy paying MS money on every machine it sells. Knowing that many of them will run Linux anyway, they offer to install it, coincidentally saving them the cost of Windows. Since they sell the box for the same cost either way, they're making more profit with Linux.
The situation may be different in the U.S.A., but certainly here in Ireland, Dell do not charge the same for a system with Linux as opposed to Windows NT Server - the NT boxes are hundreds of Euro more expensive.
Boxes of 100 doesn't sound like "bulk" to me... the giant displays you tend to see in the toyshops during the greedy season are built using tens of thousands of bricks... they'll be dramatically expensive at these prices. We want wholesale Lego!
Actually, what we really want is a RCX-hardware-compatible brick with some other (better) CPU and *MORE* *OUTPUTS*. This shouldn't be hard - anyone done it?
... older Unix geeks who have eyebrows the same bushiness and length as those of the Psychlos could take inspiration from this and comb them behind their ears to hang down their shoulders rather than brandishing them at other people like antennae on a hostile roach.
That has got to win some sort of prize. Quote of the year.
I know I go on and on about Symbian's EPOC operating system, but this ties in nicely with the earlier rumours about Palm possibly using EPOC as the low-level OS for next-generation Palm devices - the ARM processor is the "home" CPU for EPOC, as used on the PsionRevo, Series 5mx and Series 7. EPOC has a lot of OS-level features which the Palm OS doesn't, and there's already a reference design for Palm-like devices...
It's easy to write EPOC off, as its share of the PDA market is still pretty small (although it's quite high in the UK), but its inclusion in smartphones from later on this year could well see it being widely-adopted at that end of the market, with consequent "sudden" demand for compatible PDAs...
The Sony Cybershot cameras are unquestionably the best I've ever encountered. The DSC-F505 CEE has a 2.1Mpixel CCD (1600x1200), a superb lens, great optical zoom, and good upload capabilities. It's pricey, but worth every penny. Some information is here.
It's not Microsoft that Palm should see as their major competitor, it's Symbian's EPOC system. Symbian's on a bit of a 'slow burn', but don't lose sight of the fact that all the world's largest cellphone manufacturers are lined up to put EPOC on their next-gen phones and phone/PDA hybrids before the end of this year, or the middle of 2001. While it's obvious to most people that current attempts at integrating cellphones and PDAs haven't been entirely successful (the Nokia 9110i is probably the best, but not entirely satisfactory as either a phone or as a PDA), the advent of devices such as Bluetooth headsets should really change that situation. Imagine something with the form-factor of a Palm Vx, running Symbian's EPOC, talking via Bluetooth to a headset, and via GSM to the phone and data networks, and the possibilities should become apparent... there are a hell of a lot of cellphone users out there; whoever conquers that market is practically guaranteed dominance in the 'traditional' PDA market.
100THz corresponds to 10^-14 seconds (10 femtoseconds). Light can travel approximately 3um (3 millionths of a metre, or a little more than one ten-thousandth of an inch) in that time. While 'nanotech' will make some Very Small Systems Indeed, I'd say it's more likely that we'll see asynchronous subsystems within the computing devices of the next few decades, running at very high clock speeds, and communicating with each other over comparatively high-latency links (you know, down in the picosecond range...:)
This sort of announcement brings home to me just how quickly technology is developing. 10^14 switches per second is so far beyond what we previously thought to be attainable... I guess there is "plenty of room at the bottom" for technological improvement - this is going to be a very interesting century.
Although I don't actually know whether anyone's working on this for Linux, I'd just like to chip in and say that it would be an extremely useful feature.
The Snapshot feature on the NetApp filer boxes (which are highly recommended, btw) is described here - for a simple idea, it's extraordinarily useful, and it's saved my hide a couple of times.
As I'm sure has been posted elsewhere in this thread, it's important to draw a distinction between the mere presence of advertising on the Net, and the privacy issues which arise from tracking users in the manner described.
Like it or not, advertising revenue pays for a substantial part of "The Internet" as we know it today. Yes, it probably would be nice if the whole thing was funded by magic, but it isn't, and banner advertising does provide a relatively straightforward way of funding lots of useful sites. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with provision of advertising space, and DoubleClick does do a pretty good job of selecting and targeting ad banners based on your cookie trail - no worse than anyone else, anyway.
However, the business of associating this cookie trail with your "real-life" name and address takes us into serious privacy issues - I'm not totally clear what the legal situation in the USA is, but in the EU they must provide an opt-out from such a system, and they must abide by it. Any evidence that they are failing to abide by the opt-out will be taken very seriously indeed by the data protection people. I'm sure a similar régime must prevail in the USA and elsewhere.
Let's not get carried away, folks. Don't confuse the "necessary evil" (web ads) with the serious privacy issue. Ads aren't necessarily bad, but DC and others have to abide by the rules of privacy, and these are legally enforceable.
Slight disclaimer : My fiancée works for DoubleClick, but the views expressed above are mine alone.
The fact that Intel is american as apple pie is definitly a factor...
A moment's thought would reveal that this can't be about American-versus-EU manufacturers. All the principal CPU-makers are American companies, so causing trouble for one of them is of no net benefit to the EU. Also, the EU market for Intel chips is served almost entirely from the plant in Ireland, while the same market for AMD chips is only partially-served from the German plant (if it's even operational yet). So a shift from Intel to AMD would actually cause harm to EU manufacturing. Think, people!
Slashdot Mirror
This is as good a time as any to plug Octocon 2002 - China Miéville is the Guest of Honour this year. Time for a trip to Ireland?
Octocon always has a great many guests, and is one of the most fun SF conventions in Europe - doesn't take itself quite as seriously as the large British or American cons, yet it's large enough to attract an impressive lineup.
See you there...
*Cough*
The UK is only one of the countries in the British Isles. In Ireland we're not kowtowing to Microsoft to quite the same degree as His Tonyness... although Microsoft is a huge employer here, they haven't yet shown any interest in taking us over completely.
The GSM system allows you to take your phone to other networks according to agreements between the network operators; the precise details vary from operator to operator, but in general your "home" network forwards calls to the network to which you're roaming - the person who's calling you pays the normal charge and you pay the roaming charge to receive the call. When you make calls on a roaming network, you generally pay the same as that network's own home phones, plus some small percentage. I guess there's some sort of clearing system between the networks, because roaming charges usually show up on my bill from 1-3 months after the calls actually took place.
What? Where? How? I thought that only universities could get "site licenses" (no marginal cost per installation); all commercial organisations have to license each MS product separately (even using Open License or Select License, there's still a per-box cost).
Excuse me? Have you seen what happens when capitalism is allowed to run unregulated? Enron? Microsoft? Standard Oil? Unregulated capitalism is far worse than regulated government - at least with the latter you know who's in charge.
There are systematic weaknesses with version 1 of the ssh protocol, which this doesn't address, of course. However, as far as I'm aware, a successful exploit has yet to be mounted against these.
See the following:
Quite. It's hard to make money by selling Open Source or Free Software, but it's easy to make a lot of money by using it. It's this that Microsoft most fears as it's a direct threat to all of their core businesses. Not surprising that they'll try to rubbish it at every opportunity. The fact that it's hard to sell free software is totally irrelevant.
I used to agree with you, until I got into Debian. Apt truly rules! This isn't partisan (well, okay, it is, but it's for very good, objective reasons). The Debian Apt system is really, honestly, the best software-getter I've ever seen. In conjunction with the Debian Packaging Guidelines, which cover many very important rules for the creation of Debian packages (basically, that it should follow certain well-defined procedures regarding libraries, configuration requirements, file locations etc), Apt really spoils the sysadmin. It would be very painful for me to move to anything other than Debian now...
If it looks intelligent, and acts intelligent in all conceiveable circumstances, then we'll be forced to conclude that it is intelligent, even if we know what's going on under the hood. Are you suggesting that, should we one day discover the secrets of the emergent behaviour of the human brain (reducing it, therefore, to "a simple rules system"), that we will suddenly cease to be intelligent?
*this* got "insightful"?
Ignoring for a moment the intensely irritating "Period", this is by far the most important point made. But even this misses the mark; the problem isn't that "there's nothing as good as Microsoft Office", the problem is that "Microsoft Office doesn't work on Linux". This is the one and only killer application - now and probably for the next five years, only environments which run MS Office have a chance to survive. It doesn't matter that StarOffice and Applix and KOffice are every bit as useful for the majority of users; it doesn't matter that users' attachment to Office is largely irrational (the UI differences between different versions of MS Office are often greater than those between MS Office and StarOffice), and it doesn't matter that MS Office is bloated almost to the point of unusability. The only thing that matters is the perennial question : "Does it run Word?" and until this question can be answered "Yes!" (which presumably means a radically different Microsoft to the one we have now), the gloom will persist.
That said, the sensationalism of the article is completely wrong; there's no "end" in sight, and an actual look-at-the-figures will probably reveal the same slow but steady gains for Linux on the desktop that we've seen over the past eight years. Editorials don't kill operating systems, so everyone just relax...
... and Ireland. Governed by coalitions for almost twenty years now, yet with the higest growth rate in the "Western" world, massive trade surplus, low unemployment, high educational standards, Socialised Health Care (!!!), and all the trappings of a civilised society. Don't confuse the political difficulties faced by Israel and Italy with anything caused by proportional representation; I'm sure if you think hard you might be able to come up with some other possible causes for those countries' political problems.
PR (when done properly) is a Good Thing, as it allows the votes of the people to be translated as accurately as possible into electoral influence. If that results in coalitions, so be it - it's up to the politicians to come to amicable arrangements between parties, not to rig the system so that only big parties ever get any influence.
Actually, what we really want is a RCX-hardware-compatible brick with some other (better) CPU and *MORE* *OUTPUTS* . This shouldn't be hard - anyone done it?
It's easy to write EPOC off, as its share of the PDA market is still pretty small (although it's quite high in the UK), but its inclusion in smartphones from later on this year could well see it being widely-adopted at that end of the market, with consequent "sudden" demand for compatible PDAs...
The Sony Cybershot cameras are unquestionably the best I've ever encountered. The DSC-F505 CEE has a 2.1Mpixel CCD (1600x1200), a superb lens, great optical zoom, and good upload capabilities. It's pricey, but worth every penny. Some information is here.
It's not Microsoft that Palm should see as their major competitor, it's Symbian's EPOC system. Symbian's on a bit of a 'slow burn', but don't lose sight of the fact that all the world's largest cellphone manufacturers are lined up to put EPOC on their next-gen phones and phone/PDA hybrids before the end of this year, or the middle of 2001. While it's obvious to most people that current attempts at integrating cellphones and PDAs haven't been entirely successful (the Nokia 9110i is probably the best, but not entirely satisfactory as either a phone or as a PDA), the advent of devices such as Bluetooth headsets should really change that situation. Imagine something with the form-factor of a Palm Vx, running Symbian's EPOC, talking via Bluetooth to a headset, and via GSM to the phone and data networks, and the possibilities should become apparent... there are a hell of a lot of cellphone users out there; whoever conquers that market is practically guaranteed dominance in the 'traditional' PDA market.
100THz corresponds to 10^-14 seconds (10 femtoseconds). Light can travel approximately 3um (3 millionths of a metre, or a little more than one ten-thousandth of an inch) in that time. While 'nanotech' will make some Very Small Systems Indeed, I'd say it's more likely that we'll see asynchronous subsystems within the computing devices of the next few decades, running at very high clock speeds, and communicating with each other over comparatively high-latency links (you know, down in the picosecond range... :)
Technological singularity, anyone?
The Snapshot feature on the NetApp filer boxes (which are highly recommended, btw) is described here - for a simple idea, it's extraordinarily useful, and it's saved my hide a couple of times.
Like it or not, advertising revenue pays for a substantial part of "The Internet" as we know it today. Yes, it probably would be nice if the whole thing was funded by magic, but it isn't, and banner advertising does provide a relatively straightforward way of funding lots of useful sites. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with provision of advertising space, and DoubleClick does do a pretty good job of selecting and targeting ad banners based on your cookie trail - no worse than anyone else, anyway.
However, the business of associating this cookie trail with your "real-life" name and address takes us into serious privacy issues - I'm not totally clear what the legal situation in the USA is, but in the EU they must provide an opt-out from such a system, and they must abide by it. Any evidence that they are failing to abide by the opt-out will be taken very seriously indeed by the data protection people. I'm sure a similar régime must prevail in the USA and elsewhere.
Let's not get carried away, folks. Don't confuse the "necessary evil" (web ads) with the serious privacy issue. Ads aren't necessarily bad, but DC and others have to abide by the rules of privacy, and these are legally enforceable.
Slight disclaimer : My fiancée works for DoubleClick, but the views expressed above are mine alone.
A moment's thought would reveal that this can't be about American-versus-EU manufacturers. All the principal CPU-makers are American companies, so causing trouble for one of them is of no net benefit to the EU. Also, the EU market for Intel chips is served almost entirely from the plant in Ireland, while the same market for AMD chips is only partially-served from the German plant (if it's even operational yet). So a shift from Intel to AMD would actually cause harm to EU manufacturing. Think , people!