Maybe that would explain all those $1000 coffeepots, $5000 bolts, $10,000 toilets etc. Perhaps what appears to be ridiclous overcharges are in-fact cover-ups for secret appropriations?
Well, duh. Still - add it all up and it doesn't come close the price of the multi petra-flop they'd need. It'd probably cover the power bill.
My wife is having bandwidth blues at her office (our ADSL at home really spoils her). Problem is that her office is essentially a converted barn in the middle of some fields, miles away from the closest central office. @home won't even talk to her and ISDN would be too expensive (because PacBell would have to run the wires 10 miles or whatever).
One day she gets some junkmail from one of the major US ISPs that just started offering DSL service which claims they can give her DSL. She figures, what the hell, and gave them a call. The sales guy was clueless or something. He looked up their address and instead of telling her that they couldn't really get DSL (like every other DSL provider did), he said they could get at least a 144 (IDSL, I guess). She didn't believe it, so she asked if he could fax her a signed guarentee that this ISP and Covad would provide her with a 144kb/sec connection to their office. He faxed it right over!
I will mention Covad because they're great guys - I was very impressed with the install they did on our line at home (the guy was running late but he still came and did it at 19:00 instead of rescheduling). This ISP tells my wife just to call Covad and schedule the installation. So that's what she does and Covad laughs, going, "But your location isn't serviceable!" So my wife tells the Covad guy about the written agreement (which is binding on Covad here in CA) and he gets like the VP of Covad or something on the line, then they party call the ISP and get the origonal salesguy on the line and he gets like the VP of sales for the ISP on the line (and this is like one of the big 10 US ISPs we're talking about here). Covad completely rips the ISP a new oriface, but all agree that the contract is binding.
My wife was hoping they'd just drop a T1 line to the office, but instead Covad is installing an IDSL head in a junction box like a mile from her office, then Covad has to connect the head to the central office miles away (as well as to the office, of course). Of course, they're charging the ISP through the nose for this. And my wife's office will have decent bandwidth for like $39.95/month and no installation fee.
The moral of the story is that DSL providers may make a lot of claims - just be sure to get them in writing.
Finally - I will join the masses in saying that Speakeasy.net (which is who I have here at home) totally rock. If you can get them, definately do. Other's have noted that people don't post reviews on DSLreports unless something goes wrong, and that's totally true. I've been a happy speakeasy customer for a year now and only now (prompted by this/. story) went and gave my thumbs up for them on DSLreports.
1.You have the problem of who guards the guardians. The backdoors are OK as long
as the NSA can be trusted not to abuse them by exploiting them when not
appropriate. But can you trust the guardians? Who guards the guardians?
Executive order 12333, which is enforced by the Congressional Select Commitee on Intelligence Activities (or something close thereto). Some of these intel guys are fearless (they've seen it all), but if there's one thing that they fear it's Congress, especially the Select Commitee on Intelligence Activities.
2.You have the problem of leaked information -- how do you know whether some
terrorist group or something like that has obtained leaked information about these
backdoors? They could be abusing these backdoors to their own ends.
Which is another reason I don't think the NSA is doing this. Half their mission is ensuring the integrity of U.S. Government systems. It's standard practice in the government now to use COTS solutions - the NSA isn't going to let that COTS get installed all over place with backdoors in it for precisely this reason.
As always, these are solely my opinions and not those of my employeer, priest or rabbi. That sounds like the start to a good joke. ..
all in one story. It's like the story was written to be posted on/. for crying out loud!
Furthermore, it lacks any real meat. This Madison guy isn't saying that they are doing it: "Ex-spook believes", "applications may have backdoors" (emphasis mine). It's nothing definite - just this one guy's beliefs. And if he used to be an analyst, shouldn't he know this rather than sucumb to conjecture? The article got one thing right though: he's "fuelling conspiracy theories".
Now I hate MS as much as the next guy, but I also believe in the principle: Don't subscribe to mallice what can be explained by stupidity. I think they gave a reasonable explaination of the whole NSA key thing back when that happened. They also made the very valid point that it's not in their best interests to do something like that because if a foreign nation found out, MS would be skinned alive. Furthermore, I think people give the NSA too much credit - despite all the talented people they have, they're still a government agency and as such tend to resource limited. Can you imagine how much computational power would be required for Echelon to actually do everything that people claim it can? Do you think even the US Government has that type of money and could spend it in a covert manner even if it did? If you do, I think you give bureaucracy too much credit.
Standard disclaimer - these opinions are entirely my own. My employeer may well disagree with me - I can't speak for them.
Okay, even if you aren't very religious yourself, bear with me.
The pastor of our church just left us to go do missionary work in Kurdzadistan (sp?). I got to thinking about that after seeing the post recommending that you label the box as books about democracy. That would seem kind of suspicious to me as a "customs" agent and I might be inclined to peek inside and check. On the other hand, churches are sending packages to some of the most far flung parts of the world all the time so. ..
Arrange with a local church to ship the equiptment in their name to an affiliated church near your friend. Label the box Religious Materials: Bibles, Pamphlets, Hymnals, etc. If you want to be really cheeky, mark the value as "salvation". They must see that sort of thing coming into Russia all the time since the fall of the central communist party.
And you can actually line the top of the box with Bibles, which will serve a dual purpose: 1. it will reassure anyone who has a peek that the contents are actually religioius materials and 2. it'll probably help the church. The bibles will have to be in Russian of course, but I'm sure that your donation of them and the associated cost of shipping will be a welcome gesture to the church in return for their help.
Personally, I kind of like the idea of labeling computer parts as religious materials. After all, Someone had to invent solid state physics. ..
I don't think so b/c the signifigance of this event is that so many/.ers are in in San Jose from out of town and this event is something that will allow all these normally geographically distributed people to come together in one physical location. If/. had region preferences all the people in San Jose from out of town that didn't change their region preference would miss out on this announcement.
While it's true that VAX and VMS have gone together for a long time, everyone seems to forget that Unix ran on VAX machines in days of old. Thus the phrase "a VAX account" doesn't actually mean much...
Furthermore, VMS has run on the Alpha's since their inception. I think it's safe to say that most major remaining VMS sites (like the one Jason mentioned) have moved their processing units to Alpha-based hardware. So while most "VAX accounts" have disappeared, there are still plenty of "VMS accounts".
I got a Libretto to replace my aging Compaq Contura Aeros some time ago and I must say I was disappointed. It's a slick little machine but the keyboard is completely useless. It's too small to even hunt & peck on. That's the last time I buy a laptop with out taking it out for a test drive first. I have tried the Picturebook in the store and found it's keyboard to be wonderful. I'm definately thinking that my next portable computer will be one of the light-weight Vaios.
isn't this a bit like asking a federal judge to keep the neighbors' dog out of your yard?
You know, I guess it is, and given my neighbors & their dogs (and all the $#!* they leave on my lawn), getting help from a judge might not be a bad idea. . . I guess you could just say that eBay has a really big yard. Welcome to the Metaverse.
Some of the Cray's were water cooled, which really isn't that revolutionary, except for the fact that they didn't care what water you ran through them. I saw a post once from a Sys Admin from one of the big oil companies that was laminating how Cray was going downhill and didn't build their systems so robustly anymore. Reason was that they want supercomputers out on oil rigs so that they can do data analysis right there on the spot. Unfortunately, oil rigs aren't usually built with huge, air conditioned computer centers. The water cooled Cray's were great, he said, becuase they could just drop a hose down to the ocean for the water intake and let the water output just drop back down to the ocean. He said the salt build up in the cooling system got pretty bad after a couple years, but that was about their service life anyway.
Reminds me of the Elton John song: "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise the kids. In fact it's cold as Hell. And there's no one there to raise them, if you did."
Just curious, but what happened to the Alpha port? I noticed that all the previous versions included it, even bootable on the CD, but not 2.7. Any ideas? Theo overclock his Alpha and toast in in testing out the encrypted swap space or what?
I must say, I'm surprised to see everyone yell "yes!" so quickly. I was up at the Pin-a-go-go in Dixon, CA a few weeks ago. It was hot, loud and packed. People were coming from hundreds of miles to go to this pin convention. I'm not much into pinball myself, but a couple of my friends were coming up from LA to go to this, and it sounded like fun.
So while pinball may have passed from the mainstream, much like live music, there's still a very strong and devoted following. This is probably where the future of pins lies. As long as you want to play, I'm sure you can find the companies and community to support you.
I will certainly echo what many others here have said: the games are getting rather lame. I saw some really creative designs at Pin-a-go-go, like Joust (a two-person pin) and something hill (don't remember what it was offhand, but any pin affectionato would be able to) that was this two part pin, where the game went vertical in the back, instead of having your usual graphic and score display. So rather than crank out more pins based on lame concepts (my God, the Jar Jar Binks in the Episode 1 pin was annoying!), come up with something origonal and people will clammor to it.
Which brings me to my last rant, video games in general have gone downhill. Someone else made this general point too. All you can find anymore, even in good arcades like Gameworks (okay, maybe not good, but at least huge) is FPS's and Kung-fu games. With a bit of driving and sports games mixed in for good measure. What happened to origonal games like Spy Hunter, Rampage or Gauntlet? But then I'm preaching to the choir, aren't I?
I think it's important to note that you don't have the same legal protection when using a debit card as you do when using a credit card (at least in the U.S. unless they changed this recently). With a CC, the law says that you are only required to pay up to $50 of the disputed charge(s), and most CC companies waive that. With a debit card, the money is deducted directly from your account and the bank is under no obligation to repay you that money unless they can recover it (which rarely happens and takes a long time if they can). So if a theif runs off with your debit card number, they can empty your bank account and you're the one who can't pay the mortgage/rent.
This is why I refuse to carry a debt card anymore - not even an ATM card that can be used as a debit card.
For the record, IANAL. I was enlightened by this fact by Spafford himself back when I was at Purdue, so I trust it and haven't heard of it being changed lately.
Yes, that's his motivation now, which stand right in line with his obvious Marxist Communist political leanings (I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that - Marx had some great ideas, unfortunately Lennin discovered that they didn't work so well in practice). But how GNU software started was that RMS was working on a system and he couldn't, for the life of him, get the printer to work. This was particularly irking becuase he knew what was wrong and how to fix it, but he didn't have the code to the printer driver, so he couldn't. Hence the idea that systems should have all of their source code available and that users should be able to share fixes, mods & improvements with each other just kind of snowballed into the GPL, and here we are.
Seems to have worked fairly well, but there still seem to be some holdouts particularly with applications with limited domains & high price tags (AutoCAD leaps to mind, just as an example). If the companies that made this software just gave it away like free beer, then many of them couldn't stay in business, even if they follow one of the open-source business models, like only selling support. That works great when your development costs are low, like they are with products aimed primarily at developers who will happily do your R&D for you (Cyclic/CVS is a prime example of this), but it doesn't work as well for many more domains.
I'll argue for true open-source where it's viable, but I'd still rather have the source than nothing in the rest of the cases.
I'll keep this short, simple and to the point: I don't mind paying for software. What really irks me is when I give a company hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars and their package doesn't work and I don't have and can't get the source to fix it. It was exactly this problem that caused RMS to create the FSF, and I think we need to push companies more towards opening their source code even if it's only to their customers.
Yes - I completed two years of it in college. Actually, I took three years - it's just that I repeated the second and third semesters, so I will grant you that it's a difficult language for a native english speaker to learn. In my defense, I will note that I was the only student from my first semester Japanese class that had NO previous Japanese experience to continue on, which just lends more merit to its difficulty.
To address your points:
I already said that Kanji was a bitch, but I think that's as much because they adopted them from Chinese, which Japanese has no other similarities with. The Kana aren't really that bad - you just have two characters for the same sound. That seems a lot clearer than English.
Again, Kanji sucks.
No, the grammatical concepts are not at all similar to English, but neither are Esparanto's or most other natural languages. Really, English's grammatical concepts are not clear, which makes machine processing of English damn difficult at best. That's probably a good deal of the reason why the Japanese have had more success at NLP than their English counterparts.
The point I was making is that Japanese is probably the cleanest, clearest language in existance, and it doesn't suffer with what the Esparanto backers see as the flaws of most languages. It's main failing to fulfilling a role as a common Internet language is that it's very different from English, there's no denying that.
I don't think it's the hardest language for native English speakers to learn. That honor I might reserve for Russian. And if you want to talk about difficult to learn because it's so different, I'd vote Chinese - I haven't taken any, but many of my friends in college did and I just could not get that tonal thing down. I'd repeat what they'd say for hello and they told me that I just insulted their mothers. Se la vi.
Sorry it took so long to respond, but I was on vacation.
Okay, god know's I'm all for/. here - in particular, if this case forces them to suppress material, it'll open a landslide of potential suits against/. for the material contained in the comments, which they've claimed time and again they aren't responsible for.
Now, if Kerberos is an open standard, they should be open and forthcoming in devulging details to they're extentions. Just put aside issues of vendor interoperability for a moment - let's grant that Microsoft will do everything in their power to control 100% of the OS market (pardon me while I laugh). Now even if they don't play nice with others, I still want the details of their Kerberos extentions published because security through obsurity doesn't work.
Microsoft seems to finally have accepted this. So they've put out their spec. Sure, they've put all sorts of agreements on it because we all know that Windows is the "one true OS" <blech> and they've copyrighted it. Why? It would seem that the wide dissemination of that information (which has been in such high demand) would be in their best interest. But what if someone modified the document? Someone bases an implementation off the falsified document and the resulting system is insecure in some manner. Someone breaks into the (not really) protected system and who is everyone going to blame? Not some AC on/., I'll tell you that.
So instead of just slaming MS for being an evil monopolistic beast (not that they aren't) just because they're covering their own hides, let's be expending our energy on how to one-up them.
It all depends on what's in the contract. Others have suggested that the origional contractor must have assigned the rights to their creation or that the ad agency received the rights along with the code as part of the deliverable. This is not necessarly the case.
My wife and I run a small web-design shop that targets small, local mom-and-pop shops that otherwise couldn't afford a web presence. One of the first things my wife did when setting up shop was call the California Department of Revinue to get set up to handle sales tax. They informed her that as long as we don't actually deliver anything to the customer, like if we retain the rights to the HTML and host it ourselves, then we are not selling anything. Rather, we're providing a service and we don't have to charge sales tax. As most of our customers don't have the means to host the sites themselves, this is the route we've taken ad it's worked out well.
Many other good points have been made here. In particular, you should get your own laywer since the ad agency (who may be at fault for misrepresenting that they owned the rights) is going to look out for themselves. Also, HTML is just a form of written expression: what is really in question here is the content, any unique elements of the layout and possibably any unique executable content (i.e. java, javascript, etc.).
I like languages. Especially machine languages. I'm not so apt with natual languages. That's why my major in college was Computer Science and Phych with a concentration in Psycholinguistics was only my minor.
It may also be worth noting that Spanish was my first language which is only odd when you consider that I was born & raised in South Dakota. My Mother was a Spanish Major in college when I was born: I was her study aid. I had to be brainwashed to forget the Spanish and learn English before I went off to pre-school.
So with this background, Esparanto seems very Spanish to me. Now Spanish is a good language - much easier than English, though it does have it's rough spots. In any case, I don't think it'll come naturally to someone who wasn't raised with a mother tounge with a Romantic/Germantic root, in particular Arabic or any tonal language like any Chinese dialect.
And I must say, what really irked me about Esparanto was this on their webpage:
For a native English speaker, we may estimate that Esperanto is about five times as easy to learn as Spanish or French, ten times as easy to learn as Russian, twenty times as easy to learn as Arabic or spoken Chinese, and infinitely easier to learn than Japanese.
"Infinitely easier to learn than Japanese?!? Oh please. . . Japanese is, IMHO, the easiest language on the face of the earth (with the exception of the Kanji part which was taken directly from Chineese). It was developed in relative isolation and hence doesn't suffer from outside influences bastardizing their grammar. It's not difficult it's just different. Jon Katz would back me on this: Being different is not a crime. Sorry, had to. In any case, it's rather like learning how to program in Perl (as your first real programming language) - it's complex and there's lots of ways to do things. Then you learn C - it's a much smaller, more eligant language, but not any less expressive. If you really want to make the analaogy work let's say that you can't use punctuation symbols in C - you must use the trigraphs. On a dvorak keyboard (which I do actually use).
For their critisim of Japanese, just two clicks latter they claim that:
Unnecessary complications have been eliminated: there is no grammatical gender, the word order is relatively free, etc. The rules have also been simplified as much as possible: there is only one verb conjugation,
Likewise in Japanese there is no grammatical gender, the word order is relatively free, etc. And while there are five verb conjugation, there are only three irregular common verbs (I think there are some obsure ones that have fallen out of useage and if you want to be technical about it, there is a sixth conjugation that seems very irregular, but that's only used when addressing his majesty, the emperor).
In any case, it seems to me that they haven't been open enough in their world view and that Esparanto suffers from some of the ills that it was attempting to solve. Kind of lends credence to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Anyway, for all it's failings (esp. spelling), I think I'll stick to English for now.
"Weren't we always told that it was the Republicans that ran fascist Presidential administrations?"
Let's not forget about FDR here. Now I won't critize his administration - I wasn't a gleam in my Father's (who was but a small boy then) eye then. I can easily see how the hard times required hard measures. But through his creation of the OSS (later CIA) and secrecy levels above Top Secret (i.e. for the Manhatten Project, Magic, etc...), the additional power he vested in the FBI and other acts of that nature, it could easily be argued that he ran the most facist government in United States history. Of course, FDR can also take the award for the most liberal presidency in U.S. history. So no, I don't think Republicans always ran the most facist administrations.
(Although if you wanted my honest opinion on who ran the most facist, I'd have to vote for Lincoln - and I'm a branded Yankee.)
So I think this all goes to the old saying, "Those that forget the past are doomed to repeat it," (and by extention, "He who controls the past controls the present." Can any discussion of politics take place on/. without quoting Orwell?)
-"Zow"
Integrated with mainboard
on
Laptop Lojack?
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· Score: 1
First of all, I doubt there's enough of a market for laptops that carry secret information. With the budgets that most departments have to work with these days, they'd rather forego carrying laptops rather than pay a premium for them. Also, the laptop would have to look like any other - you don't want to whip it out on a plane (not necessary to work on classified information) and advertise, "Hey! I'm a spy! I've got a laptop with special shielding so that no one will be hurt when the hard drive explodes."
Which is another thing. Exploding hard drive? Let's face it, most of these laptops are being taken by petty thiefs who don't care about the data. This one at the state department I'm not so sure about as anybody who smuggled that laptop out of there knew that the consequences for getting caught would be dire (getting fired, never working a government contract again, prision). In any case, the thieft of laptops is becoming too commonplace. This is certainly something that business travelers have to worry about as well. So here's my idea:
Wire the Lojack style device and GPS receiver onto the mainboard. Not only will a surface mount make it a bitch to remove, but you could devise the BIOS so that it won't boot without it ("GPS Receiver not found. Move ten meters north to continue."). The Lojack device can run in passive mode most of the time, just listening for an RF signal. When it receives its RF signal (probably shortwave for distance coverage), it knows its been activated and it goes into active mode where it actively transmits its ID & position, again, probably on shortwave for maximum coverage.
The primary limitation in that plan is the RF bandwidth needed for the operation. However, all activation transmissions would logically be digital and could be packet based, just transmitting the activation requests round-robin. The reply from the machines would use a second frequency and stand a higher chance of collision so to avoid that, I think they should use a random interval between transmissions - just like Ethernet except rather than perform collision detection (which wouldn't be accurate if two computers are equaldistant but opposet directions from the recieving tower), they just presume there'll be collisions and hence transmit randomly. We presume not too many of these computers will be acivated simultaniously (as the machines should be recoved and disabled quickly) lest that RF band will just get saturated. In the event that does happen, new machines will need to be configured to use a different band (keep in mind that trying to get shortwave bandwidth allocated is not easy nor cheap).
Re:Virus to deter piracy?
on
Sim Plague
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· Score: 1
Um, the origional SimCity (now SimCity Classic) did this ten years ago. It had a "cheatsheet" that you had to enter the correct code from when you started the game (remember those?). If you didn't have the code or entered it incorrectly (you had two or three tries), after a few years of building up your city the disasters would start (yes, even if disasters were turned off) and continue non-stop, completely leveling your city.
I had some friends that pirated a copy, but didn't bother to patch over the protection or get a copy of the cheatsheet because they actually enjoyed that "feature". Don't ask, I don't understand either.
I'm not looking forward to this. Okay, maybe it's great for 99% of the population, but I work in a high security government installation, and we aren't allowed to have devices with wireless conductivity. Once it starts becoming a standard integrated feature, we won't be allowed to carry them anymore.
Right now there are hundreds of us carrying palms just to do standard PDA type stuff. Security doesn't have a problem with this as they're all used only for unclassified information, the IR port can be disabled and even if it wasn't, the range is too short for there to be a danger of inadvertant capture of classified information.
But the spread of wireless technology has already had an impact where I work: all the machines and especially printers with IR ports on them that are going to be used for any type of classifed work have to have the IR port physically removed. Not a trivial task for some of these new printers with the fancy injection molded shells.
Anything with any real range, like a cell phone, is right out. Even if it's turned off, because most of these devices don't really turn off, they just go into standby mode which allows for the potential of them being turned on remotely and used for the capture and transmission of sensitive material. We are allowed to carry government owned cell phones, but only if the batteries are removed. Obviously, this isn't an option with the palms.
So keep in mind that the umbicious (sp?) wireless network is probably not a good idea because there are still plenty of places that that is exactly what is not wanted.
Of course, I speak only for myself. Nothing in this message should be considered to be the view of my employeer or the government. I'm not giving away any national secrets - all my info is from the stuff they tell all employees, regardless of whether or not they have a clearance.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, duh. Still - add it all up and it doesn't come close the price of the multi petra-flop they'd need. It'd probably cover the power bill.
-"Zow"
My wife is having bandwidth blues at her office (our ADSL at home really spoils her). Problem is that her office is essentially a converted barn in the middle of some fields, miles away from the closest central office. @home won't even talk to her and ISDN would be too expensive (because PacBell would have to run the wires 10 miles or whatever).
One day she gets some junkmail from one of the major US ISPs that just started offering DSL service which claims they can give her DSL. She figures, what the hell, and gave them a call. The sales guy was clueless or something. He looked up their address and instead of telling her that they couldn't really get DSL (like every other DSL provider did), he said they could get at least a 144 (IDSL, I guess). She didn't believe it, so she asked if he could fax her a signed guarentee that this ISP and Covad would provide her with a 144kb/sec connection to their office. He faxed it right over!
I will mention Covad because they're great guys - I was very impressed with the install they did on our line at home (the guy was running late but he still came and did it at 19:00 instead of rescheduling). This ISP tells my wife just to call Covad and schedule the installation. So that's what she does and Covad laughs, going, "But your location isn't serviceable!" So my wife tells the Covad guy about the written agreement (which is binding on Covad here in CA) and he gets like the VP of Covad or something on the line, then they party call the ISP and get the origonal salesguy on the line and he gets like the VP of sales for the ISP on the line (and this is like one of the big 10 US ISPs we're talking about here). Covad completely rips the ISP a new oriface, but all agree that the contract is binding.
My wife was hoping they'd just drop a T1 line to the office, but instead Covad is installing an IDSL head in a junction box like a mile from her office, then Covad has to connect the head to the central office miles away (as well as to the office, of course). Of course, they're charging the ISP through the nose for this. And my wife's office will have decent bandwidth for like $39.95/month and no installation fee.
The moral of the story is that DSL providers may make a lot of claims - just be sure to get them in writing.
Finally - I will join the masses in saying that Speakeasy.net (which is who I have here at home) totally rock. If you can get them, definately do. Other's have noted that people don't post reviews on DSLreports unless something goes wrong, and that's totally true. I've been a happy speakeasy customer for a year now and only now (prompted by this /. story) went and gave my thumbs up for them on DSLreports.
-"Zow"
Executive order 12333, which is enforced by the Congressional Select Commitee on Intelligence Activities (or something close thereto). Some of these intel guys are fearless (they've seen it all), but if there's one thing that they fear it's Congress, especially the Select Commitee on Intelligence Activities.
Which is another reason I don't think the NSA is doing this. Half their mission is ensuring the integrity of U.S. Government systems. It's standard practice in the government now to use COTS solutions - the NSA isn't going to let that COTS get installed all over place with backdoors in it for precisely this reason.
As always, these are solely my opinions and not those of my employeer, priest or rabbi. That sounds like the start to a good joke. . .
-"Zow"
Oh yah - let's see we've got:
all in one story. It's like the story was written to be posted on /. for crying out loud!
Furthermore, it lacks any real meat. This Madison guy isn't saying that they are doing it: "Ex-spook believes", "applications may have backdoors" (emphasis mine). It's nothing definite - just this one guy's beliefs. And if he used to be an analyst, shouldn't he know this rather than sucumb to conjecture? The article got one thing right though: he's "fuelling conspiracy theories".
Now I hate MS as much as the next guy, but I also believe in the principle: Don't subscribe to mallice what can be explained by stupidity. I think they gave a reasonable explaination of the whole NSA key thing back when that happened. They also made the very valid point that it's not in their best interests to do something like that because if a foreign nation found out, MS would be skinned alive. Furthermore, I think people give the NSA too much credit - despite all the talented people they have, they're still a government agency and as such tend to resource limited. Can you imagine how much computational power would be required for Echelon to actually do everything that people claim it can? Do you think even the US Government has that type of money and could spend it in a covert manner even if it did? If you do, I think you give bureaucracy too much credit.
Standard disclaimer - these opinions are entirely my own. My employeer may well disagree with me - I can't speak for them.
-"Zow"
Okay, even if you aren't very religious yourself, bear with me.
The pastor of our church just left us to go do missionary work in Kurdzadistan (sp?). I got to thinking about that after seeing the post recommending that you label the box as books about democracy. That would seem kind of suspicious to me as a "customs" agent and I might be inclined to peek inside and check. On the other hand, churches are sending packages to some of the most far flung parts of the world all the time so. . .
Arrange with a local church to ship the equiptment in their name to an affiliated church near your friend. Label the box Religious Materials: Bibles, Pamphlets, Hymnals, etc. If you want to be really cheeky, mark the value as "salvation". They must see that sort of thing coming into Russia all the time since the fall of the central communist party.
And you can actually line the top of the box with Bibles, which will serve a dual purpose: 1. it will reassure anyone who has a peek that the contents are actually religioius materials and 2. it'll probably help the church. The bibles will have to be in Russian of course, but I'm sure that your donation of them and the associated cost of shipping will be a welcome gesture to the church in return for their help.
Personally, I kind of like the idea of labeling computer parts as religious materials. After all, Someone had to invent solid state physics. . .
-"Zow"
I don't think so b/c the signifigance of this event is that so many /.ers are in in San Jose from out of town and this event is something that will allow all these normally geographically distributed people to come together in one physical location. If /. had region preferences all the people in San Jose from out of town that didn't change their region preference would miss out on this announcement.
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While it's true that VAX and VMS have gone together for a long time, everyone seems to forget that Unix ran on VAX machines in days of old. Thus the phrase "a VAX account" doesn't actually mean much...
Furthermore, VMS has run on the Alpha's since their inception. I think it's safe to say that most major remaining VMS sites (like the one Jason mentioned) have moved their processing units to Alpha-based hardware. So while most "VAX accounts" have disappeared, there are still plenty of "VMS accounts".
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I got a Libretto to replace my aging Compaq Contura Aeros some time ago and I must say I was disappointed. It's a slick little machine but the keyboard is completely useless. It's too small to even hunt & peck on. That's the last time I buy a laptop with out taking it out for a test drive first. I have tried the Picturebook in the store and found it's keyboard to be wonderful. I'm definately thinking that my next portable computer will be one of the light-weight Vaios.
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isn't this a bit like asking a federal judge to keep the neighbors' dog out of your yard?
You know, I guess it is, and given my neighbors & their dogs (and all the $#!* they leave on my lawn), getting help from a judge might not be a bad idea. . . I guess you could just say that eBay has a really big yard. Welcome to the Metaverse.
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Some of the Cray's were water cooled, which really isn't that revolutionary, except for the fact that they didn't care what water you ran through them. I saw a post once from a Sys Admin from one of the big oil companies that was laminating how Cray was going downhill and didn't build their systems so robustly anymore. Reason was that they want supercomputers out on oil rigs so that they can do data analysis right there on the spot. Unfortunately, oil rigs aren't usually built with huge, air conditioned computer centers. The water cooled Cray's were great, he said, becuase they could just drop a hose down to the ocean for the water intake and let the water output just drop back down to the ocean. He said the salt build up in the cooling system got pretty bad after a couple years, but that was about their service life anyway.
Reminds me of the Elton John song: "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise the kids. In fact it's cold as Hell. And there's no one there to raise them, if you did."
Maybe he was talking about Canada. . .
Except that many angry penguins don't get up until 17:00. . .
Just curious, but what happened to the Alpha port? I noticed that all the previous versions included it, even bootable on the CD, but not 2.7. Any ideas? Theo overclock his Alpha and toast in in testing out the encrypted swap space or what?
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I must say, I'm surprised to see everyone yell "yes!" so quickly. I was up at the Pin-a-go-go in Dixon, CA a few weeks ago. It was hot, loud and packed. People were coming from hundreds of miles to go to this pin convention. I'm not much into pinball myself, but a couple of my friends were coming up from LA to go to this, and it sounded like fun.
So while pinball may have passed from the mainstream, much like live music, there's still a very strong and devoted following. This is probably where the future of pins lies. As long as you want to play, I'm sure you can find the companies and community to support you.
I will certainly echo what many others here have said: the games are getting rather lame. I saw some really creative designs at Pin-a-go-go, like Joust (a two-person pin) and something hill (don't remember what it was offhand, but any pin affectionato would be able to) that was this two part pin, where the game went vertical in the back, instead of having your usual graphic and score display. So rather than crank out more pins based on lame concepts (my God, the Jar Jar Binks in the Episode 1 pin was annoying!), come up with something origonal and people will clammor to it.
Which brings me to my last rant, video games in general have gone downhill. Someone else made this general point too. All you can find anymore, even in good arcades like Gameworks (okay, maybe not good, but at least huge) is FPS's and Kung-fu games. With a bit of driving and sports games mixed in for good measure. What happened to origonal games like Spy Hunter, Rampage or Gauntlet? But then I'm preaching to the choir, aren't I?
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I think it's important to note that you don't have the same legal protection when using a debit card as you do when using a credit card (at least in the U.S. unless they changed this recently). With a CC, the law says that you are only required to pay up to $50 of the disputed charge(s), and most CC companies waive that. With a debit card, the money is deducted directly from your account and the bank is under no obligation to repay you that money unless they can recover it (which rarely happens and takes a long time if they can). So if a theif runs off with your debit card number, they can empty your bank account and you're the one who can't pay the mortgage/rent.
This is why I refuse to carry a debt card anymore - not even an ATM card that can be used as a debit card.
For the record, IANAL. I was enlightened by this fact by Spafford himself back when I was at Purdue, so I trust it and haven't heard of it being changed lately.
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Yes, that's his motivation now, which stand right in line with his obvious Marxist Communist political leanings (I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that - Marx had some great ideas, unfortunately Lennin discovered that they didn't work so well in practice). But how GNU software started was that RMS was working on a system and he couldn't, for the life of him, get the printer to work. This was particularly irking becuase he knew what was wrong and how to fix it, but he didn't have the code to the printer driver, so he couldn't. Hence the idea that systems should have all of their source code available and that users should be able to share fixes, mods & improvements with each other just kind of snowballed into the GPL, and here we are.
Seems to have worked fairly well, but there still seem to be some holdouts particularly with applications with limited domains & high price tags (AutoCAD leaps to mind, just as an example). If the companies that made this software just gave it away like free beer, then many of them couldn't stay in business, even if they follow one of the open-source business models, like only selling support. That works great when your development costs are low, like they are with products aimed primarily at developers who will happily do your R&D for you (Cyclic/CVS is a prime example of this), but it doesn't work as well for many more domains.
I'll argue for true open-source where it's viable, but I'd still rather have the source than nothing in the rest of the cases.
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I'll keep this short, simple and to the point: I don't mind paying for software. What really irks me is when I give a company hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars and their package doesn't work and I don't have and can't get the source to fix it. It was exactly this problem that caused RMS to create the FSF, and I think we need to push companies more towards opening their source code even if it's only to their customers.
My 2 bits,
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Yes - I completed two years of it in college. Actually, I took three years - it's just that I repeated the second and third semesters, so I will grant you that it's a difficult language for a native english speaker to learn. In my defense, I will note that I was the only student from my first semester Japanese class that had NO previous Japanese experience to continue on, which just lends more merit to its difficulty.
To address your points:
The point I was making is that Japanese is probably the cleanest, clearest language in existance, and it doesn't suffer with what the Esparanto backers see as the flaws of most languages. It's main failing to fulfilling a role as a common Internet language is that it's very different from English, there's no denying that.
I don't think it's the hardest language for native English speakers to learn. That honor I might reserve for Russian. And if you want to talk about difficult to learn because it's so different, I'd vote Chinese - I haven't taken any, but many of my friends in college did and I just could not get that tonal thing down. I'd repeat what they'd say for hello and they told me that I just insulted their mothers. Se la vi.
Sorry it took so long to respond, but I was on vacation.
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Okay, god know's I'm all for /. here - in particular, if this case forces them to suppress material, it'll open a landslide of potential suits against /. for the material contained in the comments, which they've claimed time and again they aren't responsible for.
Now, if Kerberos is an open standard, they should be open and forthcoming in devulging details to they're extentions. Just put aside issues of vendor interoperability for a moment - let's grant that Microsoft will do everything in their power to control 100% of the OS market (pardon me while I laugh). Now even if they don't play nice with others, I still want the details of their Kerberos extentions published because security through obsurity doesn't work.
Microsoft seems to finally have accepted this. So they've put out their spec. Sure, they've put all sorts of agreements on it because we all know that Windows is the "one true OS" <blech> and they've copyrighted it. Why? It would seem that the wide dissemination of that information (which has been in such high demand) would be in their best interest. But what if someone modified the document? Someone bases an implementation off the falsified document and the resulting system is insecure in some manner. Someone breaks into the (not really) protected system and who is everyone going to blame? Not some AC on /., I'll tell you that.
So instead of just slaming MS for being an evil monopolistic beast (not that they aren't) just because they're covering their own hides, let's be expending our energy on how to one-up them.
Just my $.02
#include <stddisclaim.h>
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It all depends on what's in the contract. Others have suggested that the origional contractor must have assigned the rights to their creation or that the ad agency received the rights along with the code as part of the deliverable. This is not necessarly the case.
My wife and I run a small web-design shop that targets small, local mom-and-pop shops that otherwise couldn't afford a web presence. One of the first things my wife did when setting up shop was call the California Department of Revinue to get set up to handle sales tax. They informed her that as long as we don't actually deliver anything to the customer, like if we retain the rights to the HTML and host it ourselves, then we are not selling anything. Rather, we're providing a service and we don't have to charge sales tax. As most of our customers don't have the means to host the sites themselves, this is the route we've taken ad it's worked out well.
Many other good points have been made here. In particular, you should get your own laywer since the ad agency (who may be at fault for misrepresenting that they owned the rights) is going to look out for themselves. Also, HTML is just a form of written expression: what is really in question here is the content, any unique elements of the layout and possibably any unique executable content (i.e. java, javascript, etc.).
Of course, IANAL.
#include
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I like languages. Especially machine languages. I'm not so apt with natual languages. That's why my major in college was Computer Science and Phych with a concentration in Psycholinguistics was only my minor.
It may also be worth noting that Spanish was my first language which is only odd when you consider that I was born & raised in South Dakota. My Mother was a Spanish Major in college when I was born: I was her study aid. I had to be brainwashed to forget the Spanish and learn English before I went off to pre-school.
So with this background, Esparanto seems very Spanish to me. Now Spanish is a good language - much easier than English, though it does have it's rough spots. In any case, I don't think it'll come naturally to someone who wasn't raised with a mother tounge with a Romantic/Germantic root, in particular Arabic or any tonal language like any Chinese dialect.
And I must say, what really irked me about Esparanto was this on their webpage:
"Infinitely easier to learn than Japanese?!? Oh please. . . Japanese is, IMHO, the easiest language on the face of the earth (with the exception of the Kanji part which was taken directly from Chineese). It was developed in relative isolation and hence doesn't suffer from outside influences bastardizing their grammar. It's not difficult it's just different. Jon Katz would back me on this: Being different is not a crime. Sorry, had to. In any case, it's rather like learning how to program in Perl (as your first real programming language) - it's complex and there's lots of ways to do things. Then you learn C - it's a much smaller, more eligant language, but not any less expressive. If you really want to make the analaogy work let's say that you can't use punctuation symbols in C - you must use the trigraphs. On a dvorak keyboard (which I do actually use).
For their critisim of Japanese, just two clicks latter they claim that:
Likewise in Japanese there is no grammatical gender, the word order is relatively free, etc. And while there are five verb conjugation, there are only three irregular common verbs (I think there are some obsure ones that have fallen out of useage and if you want to be technical about it, there is a sixth conjugation that seems very irregular, but that's only used when addressing his majesty, the emperor).
In any case, it seems to me that they haven't been open enough in their world view and that Esparanto suffers from some of the ills that it was attempting to solve. Kind of lends credence to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Anyway, for all it's failings (esp. spelling), I think I'll stick to English for now.
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"Weren't we always told that it was the Republicans that ran fascist Presidential administrations?"
Let's not forget about FDR here. Now I won't critize his administration - I wasn't a gleam in my Father's (who was but a small boy then) eye then. I can easily see how the hard times required hard measures. But through his creation of the OSS (later CIA) and secrecy levels above Top Secret (i.e. for the Manhatten Project, Magic, etc...), the additional power he vested in the FBI and other acts of that nature, it could easily be argued that he ran the most facist government in United States history. Of course, FDR can also take the award for the most liberal presidency in U.S. history. So no, I don't think Republicans always ran the most facist administrations.
(Although if you wanted my honest opinion on who ran the most facist, I'd have to vote for Lincoln - and I'm a branded Yankee.)
So I think this all goes to the old saying, "Those that forget the past are doomed to repeat it," (and by extention, "He who controls the past controls the present." Can any discussion of politics take place on /. without quoting Orwell?)
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First of all, I doubt there's enough of a market for laptops that carry secret information. With the budgets that most departments have to work with these days, they'd rather forego carrying laptops rather than pay a premium for them. Also, the laptop would have to look like any other - you don't want to whip it out on a plane (not necessary to work on classified information) and advertise, "Hey! I'm a spy! I've got a laptop with special shielding so that no one will be hurt when the hard drive explodes."
Which is another thing. Exploding hard drive? Let's face it, most of these laptops are being taken by petty thiefs who don't care about the data. This one at the state department I'm not so sure about as anybody who smuggled that laptop out of there knew that the consequences for getting caught would be dire (getting fired, never working a government contract again, prision). In any case, the thieft of laptops is becoming too commonplace. This is certainly something that business travelers have to worry about as well. So here's my idea:
Wire the Lojack style device and GPS receiver onto the mainboard. Not only will a surface mount make it a bitch to remove, but you could devise the BIOS so that it won't boot without it ("GPS Receiver not found. Move ten meters north to continue."). The Lojack device can run in passive mode most of the time, just listening for an RF signal. When it receives its RF signal (probably shortwave for distance coverage), it knows its been activated and it goes into active mode where it actively transmits its ID & position, again, probably on shortwave for maximum coverage.
The primary limitation in that plan is the RF bandwidth needed for the operation. However, all activation transmissions would logically be digital and could be packet based, just transmitting the activation requests round-robin. The reply from the machines would use a second frequency and stand a higher chance of collision so to avoid that, I think they should use a random interval between transmissions - just like Ethernet except rather than perform collision detection (which wouldn't be accurate if two computers are equaldistant but opposet directions from the recieving tower), they just presume there'll be collisions and hence transmit randomly. We presume not too many of these computers will be acivated simultaniously (as the machines should be recoved and disabled quickly) lest that RF band will just get saturated. In the event that does happen, new machines will need to be configured to use a different band (keep in mind that trying to get shortwave bandwidth allocated is not easy nor cheap).
Um, the origional SimCity (now SimCity Classic) did this ten years ago. It had a "cheatsheet" that you had to enter the correct code from when you started the game (remember those?). If you didn't have the code or entered it incorrectly (you had two or three tries), after a few years of building up your city the disasters would start (yes, even if disasters were turned off) and continue non-stop, completely leveling your city.
I had some friends that pirated a copy, but didn't bother to patch over the protection or get a copy of the cheatsheet because they actually enjoyed that "feature". Don't ask, I don't understand either.
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I'm not looking forward to this. Okay, maybe it's great for 99% of the population, but I work in a high security government installation, and we aren't allowed to have devices with wireless conductivity. Once it starts becoming a standard integrated feature, we won't be allowed to carry them anymore.
Right now there are hundreds of us carrying palms just to do standard PDA type stuff. Security doesn't have a problem with this as they're all used only for unclassified information, the IR port can be disabled and even if it wasn't, the range is too short for there to be a danger of inadvertant capture of classified information.
But the spread of wireless technology has already had an impact where I work: all the machines and especially printers with IR ports on them that are going to be used for any type of classifed work have to have the IR port physically removed. Not a trivial task for some of these new printers with the fancy injection molded shells.
Anything with any real range, like a cell phone, is right out. Even if it's turned off, because most of these devices don't really turn off, they just go into standby mode which allows for the potential of them being turned on remotely and used for the capture and transmission of sensitive material. We are allowed to carry government owned cell phones, but only if the batteries are removed. Obviously, this isn't an option with the palms.
So keep in mind that the umbicious (sp?) wireless network is probably not a good idea because there are still plenty of places that that is exactly what is not wanted.
Of course, I speak only for myself. Nothing in this message should be considered to be the view of my employeer or the government. I'm not giving away any national secrets - all my info is from the stuff they tell all employees, regardless of whether or not they have a clearance.