I make no claim to being an expert on such matters but, until someone corrects me, I think it is an exaggeration to claim that unbrakeable cyphers will not be possible. For sure, the computational power of a true, large scale, quantum computer will be immense. However, it will not be unlimited. In essense, it will operate as a massively parallel computing device. The degree of parallelism will not be infinite.
What this implies is that messages encrypted using techniques common today, such as IDEA with 128-bit keys, will be easily broken. It will, of course, have no effect on messages encoded using one-time pad techniques. Further, I assume that current public key methods with long enough keys will still be safe in practice.
Not quite. The winning approach is clone PLUS provide added value. If the customer believes he will have access to everything he has already, plus something additional then he is motivated to switch.
Actually, though, the big value added with Linux will, for the foreseeable future, be the assurance that you will not get sucked into some long term recurrent license fees.
...because the Government Security Program provides access to Microsoft's intellectual property, eligibility depends to a great degree on a nation's laws and attitudes toward intellectual property. At the moment, about 60 countries are eligible to participate, including major developing nations such as China...
Are there two countries called China, or is the requirement that intellectual property has zero practical protection?
I have read through every post and I reckon perhaps ten people have understood what this is. It allows for devices with a single nice form factor using either a slow (USB 2.0) or fast (PCI-E) interface. Looking at what has already been achieved with things like HandyDrive, I am really excited at the idea of what we might see in 2005 (how's about a 10GB card, 60% of a current PC-Card with >100MB/sec transfer speeds -- not unrealistic).
If this was an isolated case, I might give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and have some sympathy for them. The fact is that Microsoft makes a habit of signing contracts and then ignoring them. I believe they have a cynical attitude that they can spin these legal battles out and a high percentage of the injured parties will be out of business before a final judgment.
Anyone really believe that Microsoft was unaware that they were selling product features that they had no right to sell? Anyone believe they will compensate the injured clients without a long legal process?
Good defaults are critical, as already noted by others. In particular, mostly documentation should be written based on the standard agreed default options. This does not imply that users should be prevented from changing the characteristics of their UI when they want to.
I do not understand why so many smart developers assume that a highly configurable environment must be complicated. Design certainly becomes challenging, but talented solutions to allow the interface to be tailored in an untuitive manner are possible. Even the documentation issue is not necessarily insoluble. For online help, the system could automatically translate the output on the fly, based on the current UI settings.
Does KDE (or GNOME) currently have the ultimate solution? No. Is there a case for concentrating on a simplified UI? Yes, because in practice it allows a quality solution to be delivered in a much shorter period of time. Regardless, it is entirely reasonable for a group of open source developers to decide that they want to provide a highly configurable UI and not inherently impossible to do so without making the UI more complex.
I predict that there is going to be a fairly rapid move towards small USB type devices for file transfer. They are more compact, hold more data, are faster and more reliable. All new PCs have had USB ports for quite a while. I very rarely need a diskette drive now.
This is perhaps getting a little off topic, but the history of VM within IBM is interesting. It all started with a research project resulting in CP/67, run on a small number of System 360 Model 67 machines. VM/370 was originally designed as a temporary conversion aid from System 360 operating systems (such as DOS) to System 370 operating systems (such as DOS/VS). Why VM/370 survived and prospered was because the source of both CP and CMS was made freely available. It turned into a perfect example of the consequences of open source. With almost no work from the official VM development team, efforts like the VM COMMON System (a cooperative development of VM sites inside and outside IBM) made VM/CMS the most user friendly development environment for System/370 computers.
When IBM reached the point where they had originally intended to can VM/370, they found the customers would not let them, so they made the best of things and further developed it instead (unfortunately, making most of the source code unavailable in the process).
A year ago, Micro$oft claimed the future focus was security and stability. According to Part 2 of the article, the biggest issue now is the name change (from Windows.NET 2003 to Windows Server 2003). So, is this change for greater stability or something to do with marketing?
Many of the Google searches I do are just trying to find out if anyone has found a fix for bizarre problems in software products. This is not quite the same as finding out what I find to be popular!
I think the practical solution with online data will be to save everything and worry about indexing and selection decades hence when we have much better technologies to carry out these tasks.
The actual cost of storage is not that high. The highest costs are involved when human intervention enters into the equation.
Sorry, but this idea will not fly on a number of grounds. Consider how many punch cards would be needed to save even 4.7GB of data (contents of one DVD). It would take over 50,000,000 cards (even if they did not contain sequence numbers). The creation and storage costs would be astronomical and reading them back in to find any data you wanted would take weeks -- just for a single DVDs worth of data. Further, much of the most useful data (images and sound recordings) are more difficult to store on punch cards than almost any other alternative medium.
We shall need independently certified wealth
on
The Future of Money
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· Score: 1
The time frame is unclear, but eventually nanotechnology will allow exact copies of more or less anything. This will make cash, gold and many other current measures of wealth nearly worthless.
Somehow, institutions will need to be established to keep track of everyone's net worth. What happens when crackers manage successful attacks on these? Shudder.
Linux has momentum. I do not believe commercial organisations already supporting Linux will cut their own throats because they must do a bit more work adapting their offerings to some new rules.
A bigger risk is that it could provoke a fork in Linux -- with commericial/end user oriented developers taking a separate 'practical' branch of Linux away from the 'beautiful' version of the purist developers. That would be a disaster.
Will that actually happen? Probably not in the short term as even the most 'practical' of the talented developers has too much respect for Linus. But it is a danger if the cost of meeting end user demands within a 'beautiful' Linux becomes too high.
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What this implies is that messages encrypted using techniques common today, such as IDEA with 128-bit keys, will be easily broken. It will, of course, have no effect on messages encoded using one-time pad techniques. Further, I assume that current public key methods with long enough keys will still be safe in practice.
Surely, a declaration of independence should be stored in a non Microsoft product.
Actually, though, the big value added with Linux will, for the foreseeable future, be the assurance that you will not get sucked into some long term recurrent license fees.
Are there two countries called China, or is the requirement that intellectual property has zero practical protection?
In spite of this, I like Mozilla.
Thanks to both of you. A most interesting discussion carried out with passion but without insults. Informative.
I have read through every post and I reckon perhaps ten people have understood what this is. It allows for devices with a single nice form factor using either a slow (USB 2.0) or fast (PCI-E) interface. Looking at what has already been achieved with things like HandyDrive, I am really excited at the idea of what we might see in 2005 (how's about a 10GB card, 60% of a current PC-Card with >100MB/sec transfer speeds -- not unrealistic).
Guess I'll wait to check the number of passengers before getting on.
Anyone really believe that Microsoft was unaware that they were selling product features that they had no right to sell? Anyone believe they will compensate the injured clients without a long legal process?
I do not understand why so many smart developers assume that a highly configurable environment must be complicated. Design certainly becomes challenging, but talented solutions to allow the interface to be tailored in an untuitive manner are possible. Even the documentation issue is not necessarily insoluble. For online help, the system could automatically translate the output on the fly, based on the current UI settings.
Does KDE (or GNOME) currently have the ultimate solution? No. Is there a case for concentrating on a simplified UI? Yes, because in practice it allows a quality solution to be delivered in a much shorter period of time. Regardless, it is entirely reasonable for a group of open source developers to decide that they want to provide a highly configurable UI and not inherently impossible to do so without making the UI more complex.
I predict that there is going to be a fairly rapid move towards small USB type devices for file transfer. They are more compact, hold more data, are faster and more reliable. All new PCs have had USB ports for quite a while. I very rarely need a diskette drive now.
When IBM reached the point where they had originally intended to can VM/370, they found the customers would not let them, so they made the best of things and further developed it instead (unfortunately, making most of the source code unavailable in the process).
A year ago, Micro$oft claimed the future focus was security and stability. According to Part 2 of the article, the biggest issue now is the name change (from Windows .NET 2003 to Windows Server 2003). So, is this change for greater stability or something to do with marketing?
I am very careful always to opt out of any directory listings. Twice, Hotmail has added me to their directory without my permission.
Not being a lawyer (or even American) I am really curious about the powers this confers on them.
Many of the Google searches I do are just trying to find out if anyone has found a fix for bizarre problems in software products. This is not quite the same as finding out what I find to be popular!
Micro$oft has produced many any-productivity tools in the past. Their so called 'help' systems, such as the animated paperclip is just one of many.
The actual cost of storage is not that high. The highest costs are involved when human intervention enters into the equation.
Sorry, but this idea will not fly on a number of grounds. Consider how many punch cards would be needed to save even 4.7GB of data (contents of one DVD). It would take over 50,000,000 cards (even if they did not contain sequence numbers). The creation and storage costs would be astronomical and reading them back in to find any data you wanted would take weeks -- just for a single DVDs worth of data. Further, much of the most useful data (images and sound recordings) are more difficult to store on punch cards than almost any other alternative medium.
Somehow, institutions will need to be established to keep track of everyone's net worth. What happens when crackers manage successful attacks on these? Shudder.
A bigger risk is that it could provoke a fork in Linux -- with commericial/end user oriented developers taking a separate 'practical' branch of Linux away from the 'beautiful' version of the purist developers. That would be a disaster.
Will that actually happen? Probably not in the short term as even the most 'practical' of the talented developers has too much respect for Linus. But it is a danger if the cost of meeting end user demands within a 'beautiful' Linux becomes too high.