I was in China over christmas and plugged my laptop into my girlfriends DSL connection there. So openvpn fires up as usual and failed I think. When I reconfigured the server to take a different port (SSH was allowed it seems) it connected but an SSL cert error came up (random port). So you can detect the ssl handshake and probably any other encryption handshake (open source bittorrent client) you don't want and just block it. I got around the whole thing by tunneling the VPN through SSH. Slow but it kept everything working as usual.
But don't you see? The solution is right in front of you.
The key here is to use cryptographic techniques to masquarade your traffic as some other form of valid, permissable traffic. SSH works? Then simply make your traffic look just like SSH traffic.
It's fairly easy right now to do traffic shaping and filtering on existing protocols simply because they have not been designed to avoid such schemes. However, this doesn't mean that such a scheme can't be developed -- indeed, I think it's rather likely that such protocols are going to be available shortly, and that one will be able to cryptographically prove that they can't be filtered or prevented without completely breaking the networks connectivity.
For instance, a VoIP connection is a very consistent stream of data to one host, where anything file sharing related will be far from smooth, and will be talking to many hosts.
Unless, of course, that VOIP service is Skype, which uses a peer-to-peer protocol to multi-route packets.
Pretty easily, actually. If the communications are wrapped in SSL so that the entire TCP stream is encrypted so that the ISP can't recognize the application protocol, then you can recognize the TLS handshake and the SSL packets, and throttle them. This might slow down loading web pages from banks, etc., but they're not so large that throttling would be a major issue.
And all of those users who are accessing their corporate VPNs would raise a serious hissy-fit. And rightfully so.
There is way more to "encryption" than SSL, or any of the currently popular encryption protocols. Indeed, it would seem that the purpose for encrypting BitTorrent isn't perfect secrecy, but a more general obsfucation to confuse and work around the traffic shapers. And I can think of several good ways to do just this, but causing an exponential explosion in the processing power required by the router to determine if a rule should apply or not is probably the best way to do this. ISP's may have more resources than you or I do individually, but they don't have infinite computing power.
And if you can do it well enough that you can make the traffic indistinguishable from other internet services (like VPN traffic), then you're going to cause a major uproar when corporations suddenly realize why their employees are getting terrible performance when they try to work from home.
It is quite possible to use encryption to beat the ISPs at this game. As the goal isn't perfect secrecy (i.e.: you don't care if someone can decrypt the packets if they want to), you don't have to wed yourself to existing encryption techniques. The goal is to make it computationally expensive for the routers to determine which rule to apply -- not to keep packets from an otherwise public source secret.
And how is the ISP supposed to be able to detect the difference between encrypted and non-encrypted binary data? By performing a MITM attack during the public key exchange when any connection is first established (the details of the exchange necessarily being part of the bittorrent protocol). The ISP is perfectly situated in terms of routing to do this and because keys must be exchanged early on in the session there is probably not too much overhead associated with doing so on a large scale (i.e. for many customers and many connections per customer). I could see it becomming a feature on high-end network hardware. Maybe wiretap laws might prevent it, or the DMCA, but IANAL so I don't know for sure.
Who said anything about requiring key exchange? How about a simple OTP (One Time Pad for the uninitiated), with a small pool of known, fixed keys?
There is no doubt in my mind that someone can come up with a simple protocol which can obsfucate the data being transmitted using cryptographic techniques which does not require online key exchange. After all, if doesn't appear that in this case that the target is to actually make the data secret, but simply to mask the purpose of the transmitted data.
Using a series of pre-shared keys means you don't require a key exchange phase, therefore there is nothing to detect -- all you know about is that a large number of packets are being routed from one port to another. Sure, as the pre-shared keys are known you could do a brute-force decrypt against ALL data that appears random to see if it decrypts to something useful -- but that is going to require way more routing and filtering capacity than ISPs are going to want to invest in.
(And yes, I know of what I speak. I'm doing some cryptographic research work as part of my Masters degree right now, and am not just some random/.er who has run PGP and who is pulling stuff out of his ass:) ).
The ISPs will simply throttle anything encrypted unless it pays extra, or something similar.
And how is the ISP supposed to be able to detect the difference between encrypted and non-encrypted binary data? What detection routine do you use to detect between, say, encrypted BitTorrent data, unencrypted VOIP data, an FTP file transfer, and random data?
Traditionally, you can filter the ports -- but nothing prevents software from changing what ports it uses, and there are several applications which can handle a dynamic port exchange. How barring just blocking or filtering on specific ports, how do you detect that data is encrypted, when the purpose of encryption is to make the data appear to be random to an outside adversary?
Well, it's not quite that bad from an archaeological point of view: many word processor files contain text encoded in a standard character set in roughly the order it should be read - the text just has extraneous mark-up.
No, it is that bad.
Whether people are aware of it or not, Word can store all of the changes made to a document. There may be old, out-of-date, and replaced content inthe document that no longer displays when loaded in Word.
So if you just run "strings" against a Word document, it may contain items you weren't supposed to see. This isn't to say that the information may be secret -- it might just be out-of-date. And you'd have no way of knowing whether a piece of text you're seeing this way was from the latest version, or from an old edit. This extra information can be useful to archeologists, but it requires context -- you need to know when certain edits were made and to what, and Words binary format doesn't make this apparant if you don't know how to interpret the binary data.
So I don't think it's as easy as some people are trying to make out. A Word document can contain a lot of text which isn't part of the most recent revision of the document, and without being able to parse every bit of binary data to get the context out, the data may be significantly less than useful.
Now, another format that does prove to be somewhat of a headache is Windows 3.x Write... Ummm, would be fun to know what opens this stuff. Word apparently supports that, but I haven't yet found many apps in open source side that would touch those. =/
It's interesting that you mention this. Back in the early 90's (from 1991 until 1993) I published an online magazine called "The Sound Blaster Digest" (which, in my stupidity I eventually renamed after getting lots of complaints that the title showed a bias that never existed). For the first two years it was an all ASCII production (as this was started before the rise of the World Wide Web), but later is was published simultaneously in ASCII and Windows Write format. The latter format embedded graphics, multimedia, and used nice fonts, making it easier to read.
At the time, it was fairly radical. I was getting recognition from Creative Labs, Microsoft, and BBS and Internet users world-wide. America Online gave me a free account to upload new issues each month, CompuServe sent me everything I needed to get on their network to do the same, and letter mail rolled in from all over the world. My name was known at trade shows, and free stuff rolled my way. The whole thing was even the subject of a story on CityTV's Media Television. At one time, I was approched to be interviewed for Wired (something I regret not following through on). I was considered a pioneer by many, publishing a monthly magazine completely in digital format. I did it before any of the big magazine publishing firms did.
Unfortunately for me, I was young and had other things I wanted to pursue. I never made much money at it (although people did subscribe to both a diskette subscription and a BBS uploading service I ran), and it took quite a bit of my time to produce. Other pressures in life eventually took over, and I stopped publishing. Which I do somewhat regret -- back in the day, my name alone was a free pass to a lot of good stuff. I was ahead of the curve, and considered a pioneer, but you probably won't read about it in any history of the Internet.
(The issues are still online in various places. I have every issue here, and have considered putting them up in an "online museum" on my website, perhaps along with some supplimental materials. I still have a box with every piece of mail anyone ever sent me when I was still publishing, including lots of 5.25" diskettes people would send with things they wrote, or sometimes the digital audio of their greetings to me:). I also have a tape copy of the Media Television interview which perhaps one day I'll digitize and put online).
Anyhow, to get away from wandering down memory lane and back on topic -- as mentioned above, later issues were available in Windows Write format, and used Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to include MIDI files, digital audio samples, graphics, etc. And unless I find myself a copy of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, AFAIK there is absolutely no way for me to read them.
So, the most popular online magazine in the world from only 15 short years ago is already unreadable (at least in its Windows Write form). Windows Write was available on every copy of Windows, and at one time was a really easy way to share decently formatted text with other Windows users. But today documents created in it are nothing but a pile of bits.
Admittedly, I was a few years too early for the rise of the World Wide Web, which is a more natural medium for such documents. Sometimes one of the dangers of being on the cutting edge is that a better solution to the same problem crops up, eclipsing the solution that was best at the time you started. If I had continued publishing for another year or two, I probably would have moved to HTML, but timing wasn't on my side.
One of these days I'll revisit this history somewhere, as it probably should be recorded. The Internet seems to have a poor record of things that were happening on it 15 years ago and earlier, and somebody somewhere might find it interesting (or might even remember those halcyon days:) ).
Everyone who wants to write a good word-processing package is going to be decoding Word 97+ for the next 50 years at least, and most importantly, when they stop including that compatibility, why should we think they'd be including compatibility for a similar standard?
Current non-MS word processors already have a hard enough time implementing Word 97 import, particularly for any really complex documents. Why should time make it any better?
Let's look back to the most popular word processors from ~20 years ago: WordStar. According to Microsoft, Word can only import version 3.0 and higher. OpenOffice appears to have no support at all (that I can find). Nor does Apple's Pages. So if you come across a WordStar v1.0 or v2.0 document, you're SOL -- and that's after not even half the 50 year figure you quote.
How about WordPerfect? From the same reference, Word can import WP v4 and higher documents. So anything created in WordPerfect v2.2 (from 1982) or v3.0 (from 1983) is likewise not importable. Again, I haven't found anything about WordPerfect v2.2 or v3.0 support in OpenOffice (it does support WordPerfect import, but I can't find what versions this includes), or in Pages.
And that's just the two most popular PC-DOS packages from the 1980's, and doesn't include documents generated for other systems (like the Commodore 64 -- Paperback Writer anyone?), or from dedicated wordprocessing terminals.
And it gets better. Check out the entry in the above link for Word 6 and Word 95 support -- not even MS Office supports importing these anymore ("Retired - no longer available"). Word 95 isn't even 10 years old. And what about Microsoft Works format? Nada.
If you think that in 2056 you'll still be able to import Word 97 documents in popular word processing applications, you're living in a fantasy world. It's not going to happen. Will they be able to read ODF? Perhaps not -- however if necessary someone could write whatever sort of importer or converter they want, as the official recipe for such documents will still be around.
Less than two hundred years ago, Egyptian Hieroglyphs were virtually unreadable. It took the finding of the Rosetta Stone to make it understandable again. ODF is the Rosetta stone we get to leave for future generations. We already have unreadable document formats, and we're not even 30 years into the Personal Computer revolution. Thinking that we're going to be able to read modern day Word documents 50 years from now is overly idealistic, and seems highly improbable.
It's absolutely inconceivable that in a civilised country, anyone should have to licence "intellectual property" from anyone else just to do their job. This is nothing short of privatised taxation.
That's odd -- last I checked, I can call SkypeIn users from my GPS Cell phone, the POTS pay phone up the street, and from my Vonage account.
There are standards in this world for telephone systems, and Skype has to follow them in order to be accessable both to and from the rest of the world. It isn't as if Skype is the only telephony solution around, or like anyh Government is forcing its citizens to replace their existing telephony technologies for Skype.
Skype being propretiary is a problem, but not for the reasons you give. If you want to compete against Skype, it's not a problem -- Gizmo seems to be making a go of it without any serious problems. So long as Skype intergrates with the rest of the International telephony network, there is no problem -- competing with them won't be impossible at all, and won't require you to license anything from them.
Also on Skype's side is that at least they appear ready and willing to license their technology to a variety of hardware manufacturers.
The big problems with Skype being propretary are:
Platforms Skype Ltd. isn't interested in targeting won't be able to connect to Skype's network (at least without some software developer licensing the protocols from them). If you're on OS/2 and want to run Skype, you're SOL, and always will be.
You have to trust Skype Ltd's security analysis of their encryption and associated protocols. Much of Skype's protocols are currently "security by obscurity", and while they may well be up to the task, it's hard to prove this point due to a lack of source code,
You have to count on Skype Ltd. to improve the product over time, and have no ability to do so yourself.
This might come as a shock to some, but some people are okay with such things. Personally it's not for me -- I have Skype installed for those times when I must communicate with other Skype users (although given the choice I prefer iChat AV, or the X-Pro softphone that is attached to my Vonage account when I need to call a normal phone system user from my laptop while away from home), but otherwise wouldn't use it as my primary telephone system. But not all people are me, and not everybody cares so much about the use of open standards, so long as they get what they pay for and the cost is low.
So in conclusion I agree witth you that closed protocols are bad, but in this case not for the reasons you have given. The underlying telephone system is sufficiently open that any Skype-competitor can arrive on the scene and doesn't have to pay Skype a single penny for the privledge.
The site states though "nobody will be able to be listening in"...
This is because Skype already has its own encryption layer. An attacker might be able to do something annoying once they crack the WEP encryption (such as interjecting packets), but they won't be able to listen in to your conversation without then breaking the Skype packet encryption (which is probably stronger than WEP).
However, I do share a general annoyance with devices that don't support WPA/WPA2. My wireless network is completely WPA2 based, and I have one device which does, at best, WEP. My current solution has been to disallow this device (a Palm Tungsten C) from connecting to my network by continuing to run WPA2, which is an annoyance (as it means I can't use its WiFi functionality in my home). Device manufacturers need to wake up to the fact that WPA and WPA2 are a reality, and that their devices need to support these modern standards alongside WEP.
Why not set up a method in Slasdhot whereby YRO and related articles have a link that allows a registered user to forward his forum comments to his/her appropriate representative(s) in their district?
/. would then need to know where you live, so as to make this connection. And they'd need to provide that functionality only for American citizens. And only for YRO and related articles have anything to do with US policy (and not, for example, EU, Canadian, or Australian policy or ideas as we see here frequently).
So you see a +5 comment you agree with, and want to send it to your Congressman -- but it turns out the author was Canadian. Will (or should) your representative care what a Canadian thinks about some internal US policy, act, or idea that is being floated?
I don't see it working. If you have something to say to your representative, do it yourself. Write them a letter. Arrange to drop by their office. Get involved with your local riding association (or whatever you might call it where you live). It will be more effective.
The iPod looks like any other usb-storage device to a Linux system. In order to switch the iPod to HFS+ using a Linux system, you will need to compile support into your Kernel for "Apple's Extended HFS File System" and "Macintosh partition map support" which is available in both the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. You will also need HFSUtils which are installed with Slackware (I don't know about other distros).
That would be the "extra software" part:).
Actually, I believe that the iPod initialization is more than a simple HFS/HFS+ reformat, which is why I suggested they may need to initialize their handheld on a Mac. The hidden directories need to be built, as well as some other file data written.
To be honest, I don't know how much of this is taken care of by the host system at initialization time, how much is handled by the iPod's built-in software, and how much by iTunes, and I'm not about to blank out my iPod to run any experiments. I do run a few Linux boxes here, but as I'm using a firewire cabled iPod, don't have firewire on any of my Linux boxes, and own a PowerBook, I've never felt the need to interface my iPod to my Linux boxes.
All in all, it sounds to me like a lot of effort just to avoid using FAT in your digital music player.
Besides which, this is a US patent, so for those of us outside the US, I don't see it as a significant problem for Linux distros (not that I recall the last time I ever used FAT under Linux -- I think at this point I only use FAT on the SD cards I use with my digital camera and my Palm, neither of which are ever attached to any of my Linux boxes).
The only MP3 player that I know of which will work with a non-FAT filesystem is the iPod, which on the Mac can be formatted as HFS/HFS+. Unfortunately, I don't think this is really going to help you as a Linux user, as you'll probably need a Mac to reinitialize/reformat the iPod to use HFS/HFS+, may need to install extra software to be able to mount HFS/HFS+ partitions under Linux, and will need to run iTunes through some sort of emulator to manage your music. Ick. Every other flash or hard disk based digital music player that I know of uses a variation of FAT.
The various Linux partition managers typically don't give FAT as an option when organizing your hard drive, due to a whole whack of limitations it imposes which makes it unsuitable for use on hard disks (including, but not limited to, partition size issues, partition position issues, lack of advanced Unix-style file attribute storage, and lack of ACL facilities). However, for most distros it is indeed installed, as it's typically the filesystem preferred for use with diskettes, USB keys, and by digital cameras, so it's most likely there, somewhere.
hate to be cynical, but I bet the reason that they are still selling the PowerBook at the same price is that they have 30-day price protection on-line and in their stores.
I think you are being overly cynical in this case. Three points:
IIRC, the new Intel Macs won't run Classic applications at all. As there are (apparantly) still professionals out there who rely on OS9 applications, there will still be a market for the PPC systems,
The MacBook Pro only comes in one size -- 15". There haven't been any announcements of any systems to replace the 12" or the 17" PowerBooks, so there will still be a market for them, and
None of the Pro apps have been ported to Intel yet -- you have to wait until March for Apple's Pro apps to be available in Intel versions, so there will still be a market for the PPC systems (for at least a few months yet).
I think there are perfectly good reasons for such a staggered release, as opposed to a complete rip-and-replace. A lot of Mac developers aren't ready with Universal Binaries (I do some small scale Mac development, and while I'm nimble enough to have been building Universal Binaries for some time, I haven't had access to the hardware to actually test on Intel OS X, and I imagine there are a lot of small and medium sized developers who otherwise create cool and useful tools which are in the same boat), and Apple only has such many engineers to go around (I imagine the 12" MacBook Pro, assuming there will be such a thing, is going to be a bigger challenge due to the tighter space restrictions), so releasing all the Intel-based Pro laptops at once, completely replacing the PowerBook line probably isn't 100% feasible. And as pointed out above, there apparantly is still a market for the PPC systems.
Myself, I love my 12" PowerBook G4, but am really looking forward to a similar form-factor MacBook Pro to eventually replace it. But until that time, there is still a lot of life in this baby:).
Anybody else see the logic of transitioning the consumer desktop and pro laptop first, rather than starting with the consumer desktop and laptop, or the pro desktop and laptop, or the pro desktop and consumer laptop, or some other combination?
Yes, in fact I do:).
Doing the iMac first makes sense. A very large number of PowerMac purchasers are wanting such a system to run Pro or scientific applications, which have yet to be made available for Intel. The PowerMacs were refreshed roughly two months ago. To sell an Intel PowerMac right now wouldn't be in Apples best interest, because the market for such a system isn't there (primarily due to the lack of software). I'm such an Intel PowerMac would run Rosetta very well, however people who buy such systems want to squeeze every Mhz of power out of them, and aren't going to want to run their Pro applications through a virtual machine. A dual or quad PPC system is still going to be better for these users.
On the laptop side, however, the iBook is intended to be a low-cost laptop. It is also ready very close to the PowerBook in terms of computational power. The PowerBooks really were in need of a refresh -- they're supposed to be Apple's top-of-the-line laptop system, but they have been getting long in the tooth.
I do find it interesting to note, however, that Apple still apparantly is selling the current PowerBook G4s. The MacBook Pro doesn't appear to be directly (or at least immediately) replacing the PowerBooks.
I imagine that of the two systems, the new MacBook Pro probably required the most R&D, thus costing more to develop. Pro users are more likely to be early adopters, and are more likely to spend larger amounts of money, so it makes sense to target them. Besides which, developers which couldn't afford to rent a transition system now have a machine they can buy to help accelerate Mac Intel software development:).
Here is my experience with a Rev C G4 12" PowerBook:
After 13 months (one month out of warranty) the 60GB hard drive died. I replaced it myself with a new 80GB drive,
Last month, after 20 months of use I decided to replace the battery after it was down to 42% of its original capacity (I was getting about 80 minutes per charge).
And that's it. Otherwise, the system has been rock-solid and a complete joy to own and use. I'm not happy about the hard drive failing just a few weeks out of warranty, but last I checked Apple doesn't make hard drives. And it probably doesn't help that I'm pretty hard on my systems: my PowerBook is virtually never turned off (although it is routinely put to sleep when not needed), goes everywhere with me, and does quite a bit of heavy processing. So I suppose it should be of no surprise that the two items one would most expect to fail first have done so (although I do still use the old battery as a spare for when the new one is drained).
was it available in jaguar or panther's xcode? i havent done much development in tiger. if it was, i dont know how i missed it.
Xcode typically has a separate release cycle from the OS itself. I'm pretty sure this feature has been available in all of Xcode 2.x, but really don't recall if it was there in the v1.x days or not.
I think I still have a v1.2 disc somewhere, but am hardly going to downgrade from v2.2 on any of my systems to check:).
On the other hand, after several years of writing code in mostly python and other similar languages, the thought of going back to something like C (pointers!)
If this is what is keeping you from developing with Objective-C, then you've picked a poor reason to avoid learning it.
Pointers are as easy to avoid in Objective-C as they are in Java. In Java, all reference types are in fact a pointer, but simply a pointer which you don't need to think about. There is no pass-by-value for reference types, and no pointer arithmetic is allowed.
In Objective-C, everything is again passed by reference (as opposed to by value). Pointer arithmetic is generally completely unnecessary (although it is technically permitted).
I recently finished v1.0 of a decent sized Objective-C application, and the "&" operator isn't used once. The '*' operator is only used when defining a variable, return type, or parameter.
I don't even think of pointers when coding in Objective-C. I tend to think of it as no different than Java. Extra capabilities to do pointer arithmetic are there, but I simply don't typically feel the need to use any of them.
hey could even do the intellisense with the bracket notation, like whenever you do [NSString then space it would show a list of methods or whatever.
Take a look at Preferences -> Code Sense. It's the second preference panel icon at the top.
Personally, I find automatic suggestion annoying and have it disabled -- but even with the automatic option disable, just hitting "Esc" on the keyboard will bring up a pop-up containing all of the potential completions.
Next time, you might be better served asking if something is possible, rather than assuming it isn't and then ranting about how an existing feature is "missing".
BTW, do anyone know how to show a particular page of a help file? NSApplication has showHelp: (which just open the help file at the main page), but nothing else.
Well, it took me all of 30 seconds to find what you're looking for:
Have you ever tried to do Drag and Drop with an NSBrowser? If you want to do so, you have to make a big, ugly workaround because NSBrowser eats the mouseDragged: event. You have to manually determine if a mouseDragged event occurs in mouseDown. This is really ugly.
Ugly only because it sounds like you're doing it wrong. Had it not occurred to you that you're working in a fully Object Oriented environment, and could just subclass NSBrowser and implement your own mouseDragged: method?
I have met and spoken with many atheists and agnostics and it is striking how many of them actually are absolutely dogmatic in relation to others (just like many "fundamentalists"), they seem like they aren't even willing to entertain the idea that the world can be seen from a different perspective, even if it just for the sake of conversation and discussion hypothesising about possibilities.
Here's the problem: if you're an athiest, a very large number of thiests out there feels like you're a threat to their religion choice, and feel like they need to debate you about it. People who spend their day meeting people who are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or of some other different religion then they profess won't ask any of them about the merits of their religion, or why they believe what they do. But put an athiest in front of them, and they suddenly feel the need for debate.
I used to be willing to discuss my reasons for not believing in any religious system with people, but I found that this just caused more and more people to either a) want to engage me in debate, or b) try to convert me to their religion (many would be surprised how many otheriwse normal people out there think that athiests are "lost lambs" which would instantly believe in their religion if only they were told "The Word").
It's draining, and is an effect that pretty much any athiest can tell you about. So a lot of us wind up getting to the point where we put on the dogmatic act just to get people to leave us alone. I don't need people trying to convert me 10 times a day, or have a dozen people I meet every day ask me why I don't believe in their God (or Gods) of choice. In the end, I don't have any desire in life to talk people out of their religious convictions, and don't see the point in debating every yahoo who hears that I'm an athiest. If close friends really want to talk about comparative religion, I'll usually participate -- I find the study of religions rather interesting, and am quite open minded to views I don't subscribe to. But I'm tired of being virtually every theists [0] sounding board for their need to validate their beliefs.
Yaz
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[0] - Okay, I admit I'm exagerating quite a bit, as there are a lot of theists out there who are tolerant of athiesm, and who don't feel the need to validate themselves by debating with an athiest.
You know, I'm tired of seeing comments like this in stories of this sort:
Another step towards becoming a nanny state.
You know what? Every democracy on the planet will have some representative somewhere who decides to take up some kooky cause. One of the strengths of a democracy is that the majority can prevent such idiotic ideas from becoming a reality.
Should we be educated about when some moronic public representative decides to take up such a cause? Yes. But do we have to assume that just because one elected/appointed representative professes a bad idea that the entire state is about to go downhill?
Last I checked, Austraila is a democracy, and there is a process that must be followed to go from an idea to a legislative act. The idea, however, is not the act.
If and when an idea gets past the first step of legislation, then is when you have to worry, as it usually means that other elected representatives support the idea. But one bad idea hardly means the downfall of society -- chances are very good that this effort will go into the dustbin of history, like a variety of bad ideas elected officials have professed and later dropped due to lack of support.
Now that the latest version of Safari works properly with Gmail, I'm using FF less and less on my macs.
If I could run AdBlock on Safari, I think I'd use Safari a whole lot more than I do. I'm already using Safari for its RSS support, and as I use three different Macs, being able to synchronize my bookmarks between them is also a big plus.
Still, AdBlock keeps me on Firefox 99% of the time on my Macs. I hate it when I click on a link in Safari and am presented with a slew of flashing banners everywhere -- I'm so used to having all of them filtered out (and enjoy the resulting browsing speed increase) that visiting any site with ads on it seems painful in Safari.
If I were Apple, I'd be really tempted to integrate Firefox's Extension subsystem into Safari, which could take advantage of Firefox's library of existing extensions, like AdBlock.
I'm curious why you released the source under GPL, and whether that worked out as you expected.
There were a few factors which played in this decision:
I was fresh out of work, and needed a project to keep me busy,
I didn't want to wind up in a similar situation with my next employer. By releasing the code as GPL/LGPL, and putting it on SourceForge, at least it couldn't be buried in a filing cabinet somewhere, even if I weren't permitted to work on it anymore (and with more and more employers in the computer industry permitting their employees to work on OSS projects on their own time, I was hoping that by being OSS when joining any such company I could potentially continue to work on the project under such a framework),
Perhaps most importantly, the project was getting too big for just one person to work on. I needed outside help, but didn't have the money to pay people to work on it. Nor did I think it would be feasible to make it into a commercial product (although corporations are our biggest base of users, the jSyncManager is a tool that only a small fraction of a percentage of corporations have a need for, so finding customers would have been extremely difficult and expensive. The corporations which use the jSyncManager are spread all around the globe, with the majority of them overseas. Being Open Source made it easy for them to find us and try out our code with no layout of funding from me -- under the closed source model I would have had to spend a pile of money on all sorts of advertising just to find these customers in the first place)
How has it worked out for me? As with anything, there have been upsides and downsides. On the upside, in the end I have made some money from the project, through being hired as a developer and consultant in implementing it for a medical data system. I'm not making anywhere near what I did as a developer at IBM, but it's sufficient to live off. It's also allowed me to make some contacts and open some doors -- it's quite easy for me to show an organization my experiences in managing a diverse, dispersed team developing a fairly large project, and they can also see the overall project (and code) quality.
On the down side, I know what it's like for a project to have more users than contributors. I'm still the largest contributor to the project, and do the vast majority of the work (although this itself has increased and decreased over time -- some contributors come and go, while others have become too busy with their professional lives to contribute on a regular basis, but still follow the project). External contributions are very rare (but are greatly appreciated whenever they are given!). I can pretty much always use more help -- as it is right now, I do the vast majority of coding, administration, technical support, releases, and documentation. And as I do have responsibilities outside the jSyncManager Project, this often means that development appears to be very slow (it has been more than 2 years now since our last "final" release, although we have had a number of alpha and beta releases since that time (part of the delay being due to some time I served in the Navy and was unable to do any development)).
It also doesn't completely help that the very devices they project is designed to communicate with (PalmOS based handhelds) have been seeing a diminishing market share. It's always easier to find contributors and users when your target audience is increasing, rather than when it is decreasing (although a decreasing share can have an interesting bubble-effect, as those who are still embracing such a technology look for groups they can partner with for a reliable, medium-to-long term solution. Open Source is very attractive in this area, as you never know when a commercial, closed source partner might go out of business, or stop offering the product or support your organization needs).
So, as with anything, you have to take the good with the bad. My eperiences seem to have tended towards the good, although the benefits aren't always immediately tangible.
Slashdot Mirror
But don't you see? The solution is right in front of you.
The key here is to use cryptographic techniques to masquarade your traffic as some other form of valid, permissable traffic. SSH works? Then simply make your traffic look just like SSH traffic.
It's fairly easy right now to do traffic shaping and filtering on existing protocols simply because they have not been designed to avoid such schemes. However, this doesn't mean that such a scheme can't be developed -- indeed, I think it's rather likely that such protocols are going to be available shortly, and that one will be able to cryptographically prove that they can't be filtered or prevented without completely breaking the networks connectivity.
Yaz.
Unless, of course, that VOIP service is Skype, which uses a peer-to-peer protocol to multi-route packets.
Yaz.
And all of those users who are accessing their corporate VPNs would raise a serious hissy-fit. And rightfully so.
There is way more to "encryption" than SSL, or any of the currently popular encryption protocols. Indeed, it would seem that the purpose for encrypting BitTorrent isn't perfect secrecy, but a more general obsfucation to confuse and work around the traffic shapers. And I can think of several good ways to do just this, but causing an exponential explosion in the processing power required by the router to determine if a rule should apply or not is probably the best way to do this. ISP's may have more resources than you or I do individually, but they don't have infinite computing power.
And if you can do it well enough that you can make the traffic indistinguishable from other internet services (like VPN traffic), then you're going to cause a major uproar when corporations suddenly realize why their employees are getting terrible performance when they try to work from home.
It is quite possible to use encryption to beat the ISPs at this game. As the goal isn't perfect secrecy (i.e.: you don't care if someone can decrypt the packets if they want to), you don't have to wed yourself to existing encryption techniques. The goal is to make it computationally expensive for the routers to determine which rule to apply -- not to keep packets from an otherwise public source secret.
Yaz.
Who said anything about requiring key exchange? How about a simple OTP (One Time Pad for the uninitiated), with a small pool of known, fixed keys?
There is no doubt in my mind that someone can come up with a simple protocol which can obsfucate the data being transmitted using cryptographic techniques which does not require online key exchange. After all, if doesn't appear that in this case that the target is to actually make the data secret, but simply to mask the purpose of the transmitted data.
Using a series of pre-shared keys means you don't require a key exchange phase, therefore there is nothing to detect -- all you know about is that a large number of packets are being routed from one port to another. Sure, as the pre-shared keys are known you could do a brute-force decrypt against ALL data that appears random to see if it decrypts to something useful -- but that is going to require way more routing and filtering capacity than ISPs are going to want to invest in.
(And yes, I know of what I speak. I'm doing some cryptographic research work as part of my Masters degree right now, and am not just some random /.er who has run PGP and who is pulling stuff out of his ass :) ).
Yaz.
And how is the ISP supposed to be able to detect the difference between encrypted and non-encrypted binary data? What detection routine do you use to detect between, say, encrypted BitTorrent data, unencrypted VOIP data, an FTP file transfer, and random data?
Traditionally, you can filter the ports -- but nothing prevents software from changing what ports it uses, and there are several applications which can handle a dynamic port exchange. How barring just blocking or filtering on specific ports, how do you detect that data is encrypted, when the purpose of encryption is to make the data appear to be random to an outside adversary?
Yaz.
No, it is that bad.
Whether people are aware of it or not, Word can store all of the changes made to a document. There may be old, out-of-date, and replaced content inthe document that no longer displays when loaded in Word.
So if you just run "strings" against a Word document, it may contain items you weren't supposed to see. This isn't to say that the information may be secret -- it might just be out-of-date. And you'd have no way of knowing whether a piece of text you're seeing this way was from the latest version, or from an old edit. This extra information can be useful to archeologists, but it requires context -- you need to know when certain edits were made and to what, and Words binary format doesn't make this apparant if you don't know how to interpret the binary data.
So I don't think it's as easy as some people are trying to make out. A Word document can contain a lot of text which isn't part of the most recent revision of the document, and without being able to parse every bit of binary data to get the context out, the data may be significantly less than useful.
Yaz.
It's interesting that you mention this. Back in the early 90's (from 1991 until 1993) I published an online magazine called "The Sound Blaster Digest" (which, in my stupidity I eventually renamed after getting lots of complaints that the title showed a bias that never existed). For the first two years it was an all ASCII production (as this was started before the rise of the World Wide Web), but later is was published simultaneously in ASCII and Windows Write format. The latter format embedded graphics, multimedia, and used nice fonts, making it easier to read.
At the time, it was fairly radical. I was getting recognition from Creative Labs, Microsoft, and BBS and Internet users world-wide. America Online gave me a free account to upload new issues each month, CompuServe sent me everything I needed to get on their network to do the same, and letter mail rolled in from all over the world. My name was known at trade shows, and free stuff rolled my way. The whole thing was even the subject of a story on CityTV's Media Television. At one time, I was approched to be interviewed for Wired (something I regret not following through on). I was considered a pioneer by many, publishing a monthly magazine completely in digital format. I did it before any of the big magazine publishing firms did.
Unfortunately for me, I was young and had other things I wanted to pursue. I never made much money at it (although people did subscribe to both a diskette subscription and a BBS uploading service I ran), and it took quite a bit of my time to produce. Other pressures in life eventually took over, and I stopped publishing. Which I do somewhat regret -- back in the day, my name alone was a free pass to a lot of good stuff. I was ahead of the curve, and considered a pioneer, but you probably won't read about it in any history of the Internet.
(The issues are still online in various places. I have every issue here, and have considered putting them up in an "online museum" on my website, perhaps along with some supplimental materials. I still have a box with every piece of mail anyone ever sent me when I was still publishing, including lots of 5.25" diskettes people would send with things they wrote, or sometimes the digital audio of their greetings to me :). I also have a tape copy of the Media Television interview which perhaps one day I'll digitize and put online).
Anyhow, to get away from wandering down memory lane and back on topic -- as mentioned above, later issues were available in Windows Write format, and used Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) to include MIDI files, digital audio samples, graphics, etc. And unless I find myself a copy of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, AFAIK there is absolutely no way for me to read them.
So, the most popular online magazine in the world from only 15 short years ago is already unreadable (at least in its Windows Write form). Windows Write was available on every copy of Windows, and at one time was a really easy way to share decently formatted text with other Windows users. But today documents created in it are nothing but a pile of bits.
Admittedly, I was a few years too early for the rise of the World Wide Web, which is a more natural medium for such documents. Sometimes one of the dangers of being on the cutting edge is that a better solution to the same problem crops up, eclipsing the solution that was best at the time you started. If I had continued publishing for another year or two, I probably would have moved to HTML, but timing wasn't on my side.
One of these days I'll revisit this history somewhere, as it probably should be recorded. The Internet seems to have a poor record of things that were happening on it 15 years ago and earlier, and somebody somewhere might find it interesting (or might even remember those halcyon days :) ).
Yaz.
Current non-MS word processors already have a hard enough time implementing Word 97 import, particularly for any really complex documents. Why should time make it any better?
Let's look back to the most popular word processors from ~20 years ago: WordStar. According to Microsoft, Word can only import version 3.0 and higher. OpenOffice appears to have no support at all (that I can find). Nor does Apple's Pages. So if you come across a WordStar v1.0 or v2.0 document, you're SOL -- and that's after not even half the 50 year figure you quote.
How about WordPerfect? From the same reference, Word can import WP v4 and higher documents. So anything created in WordPerfect v2.2 (from 1982) or v3.0 (from 1983) is likewise not importable. Again, I haven't found anything about WordPerfect v2.2 or v3.0 support in OpenOffice (it does support WordPerfect import, but I can't find what versions this includes), or in Pages.
And that's just the two most popular PC-DOS packages from the 1980's, and doesn't include documents generated for other systems (like the Commodore 64 -- Paperback Writer anyone?), or from dedicated wordprocessing terminals.
And it gets better. Check out the entry in the above link for Word 6 and Word 95 support -- not even MS Office supports importing these anymore ("Retired - no longer available"). Word 95 isn't even 10 years old. And what about Microsoft Works format? Nada.
If you think that in 2056 you'll still be able to import Word 97 documents in popular word processing applications, you're living in a fantasy world. It's not going to happen. Will they be able to read ODF? Perhaps not -- however if necessary someone could write whatever sort of importer or converter they want, as the official recipe for such documents will still be around.
Less than two hundred years ago, Egyptian Hieroglyphs were virtually unreadable. It took the finding of the Rosetta Stone to make it understandable again. ODF is the Rosetta stone we get to leave for future generations. We already have unreadable document formats, and we're not even 30 years into the Personal Computer revolution. Thinking that we're going to be able to read modern day Word documents 50 years from now is overly idealistic, and seems highly improbable.
Yaz.
That's odd -- last I checked, I can call SkypeIn users from my GPS Cell phone, the POTS pay phone up the street, and from my Vonage account.
There are standards in this world for telephone systems, and Skype has to follow them in order to be accessable both to and from the rest of the world. It isn't as if Skype is the only telephony solution around, or like anyh Government is forcing its citizens to replace their existing telephony technologies for Skype.
Skype being propretiary is a problem, but not for the reasons you give. If you want to compete against Skype, it's not a problem -- Gizmo seems to be making a go of it without any serious problems. So long as Skype intergrates with the rest of the International telephony network, there is no problem -- competing with them won't be impossible at all, and won't require you to license anything from them.
Also on Skype's side is that at least they appear ready and willing to license their technology to a variety of hardware manufacturers.
The big problems with Skype being propretary are:
This might come as a shock to some, but some people are okay with such things. Personally it's not for me -- I have Skype installed for those times when I must communicate with other Skype users (although given the choice I prefer iChat AV, or the X-Pro softphone that is attached to my Vonage account when I need to call a normal phone system user from my laptop while away from home), but otherwise wouldn't use it as my primary telephone system. But not all people are me, and not everybody cares so much about the use of open standards, so long as they get what they pay for and the cost is low.
So in conclusion I agree witth you that closed protocols are bad, but in this case not for the reasons you have given. The underlying telephone system is sufficiently open that any Skype-competitor can arrive on the scene and doesn't have to pay Skype a single penny for the privledge.
Yaz.
This is because Skype already has its own encryption layer. An attacker might be able to do something annoying once they crack the WEP encryption (such as interjecting packets), but they won't be able to listen in to your conversation without then breaking the Skype packet encryption (which is probably stronger than WEP).
However, I do share a general annoyance with devices that don't support WPA/WPA2. My wireless network is completely WPA2 based, and I have one device which does, at best, WEP. My current solution has been to disallow this device (a Palm Tungsten C) from connecting to my network by continuing to run WPA2, which is an annoyance (as it means I can't use its WiFi functionality in my home). Device manufacturers need to wake up to the fact that WPA and WPA2 are a reality, and that their devices need to support these modern standards alongside WEP.
Yaz.
/. would then need to know where you live, so as to make this connection. And they'd need to provide that functionality only for American citizens. And only for YRO and related articles have anything to do with US policy (and not, for example, EU, Canadian, or Australian policy or ideas as we see here frequently).
So you see a +5 comment you agree with, and want to send it to your Congressman -- but it turns out the author was Canadian. Will (or should) your representative care what a Canadian thinks about some internal US policy, act, or idea that is being floated?
I don't see it working. If you have something to say to your representative, do it yourself. Write them a letter. Arrange to drop by their office. Get involved with your local riding association (or whatever you might call it where you live). It will be more effective.
Yaz
That would be the "extra software" part :).
Actually, I believe that the iPod initialization is more than a simple HFS/HFS+ reformat, which is why I suggested they may need to initialize their handheld on a Mac. The hidden directories need to be built, as well as some other file data written.
To be honest, I don't know how much of this is taken care of by the host system at initialization time, how much is handled by the iPod's built-in software, and how much by iTunes, and I'm not about to blank out my iPod to run any experiments. I do run a few Linux boxes here, but as I'm using a firewire cabled iPod, don't have firewire on any of my Linux boxes, and own a PowerBook, I've never felt the need to interface my iPod to my Linux boxes.
All in all, it sounds to me like a lot of effort just to avoid using FAT in your digital music player.
Besides which, this is a US patent, so for those of us outside the US, I don't see it as a significant problem for Linux distros (not that I recall the last time I ever used FAT under Linux -- I think at this point I only use FAT on the SD cards I use with my digital camera and my Palm, neither of which are ever attached to any of my Linux boxes).
Yaz.
Yaz.
I think you are being overly cynical in this case. Three points:
I think there are perfectly good reasons for such a staggered release, as opposed to a complete rip-and-replace. A lot of Mac developers aren't ready with Universal Binaries (I do some small scale Mac development, and while I'm nimble enough to have been building Universal Binaries for some time, I haven't had access to the hardware to actually test on Intel OS X, and I imagine there are a lot of small and medium sized developers who otherwise create cool and useful tools which are in the same boat), and Apple only has such many engineers to go around (I imagine the 12" MacBook Pro, assuming there will be such a thing, is going to be a bigger challenge due to the tighter space restrictions), so releasing all the Intel-based Pro laptops at once, completely replacing the PowerBook line probably isn't 100% feasible. And as pointed out above, there apparantly is still a market for the PPC systems.
Myself, I love my 12" PowerBook G4, but am really looking forward to a similar form-factor MacBook Pro to eventually replace it. But until that time, there is still a lot of life in this baby :).
Yaz.
Yes, in fact I do :).
Doing the iMac first makes sense. A very large number of PowerMac purchasers are wanting such a system to run Pro or scientific applications, which have yet to be made available for Intel. The PowerMacs were refreshed roughly two months ago. To sell an Intel PowerMac right now wouldn't be in Apples best interest, because the market for such a system isn't there (primarily due to the lack of software). I'm such an Intel PowerMac would run Rosetta very well, however people who buy such systems want to squeeze every Mhz of power out of them, and aren't going to want to run their Pro applications through a virtual machine. A dual or quad PPC system is still going to be better for these users.
On the laptop side, however, the iBook is intended to be a low-cost laptop. It is also ready very close to the PowerBook in terms of computational power. The PowerBooks really were in need of a refresh -- they're supposed to be Apple's top-of-the-line laptop system, but they have been getting long in the tooth.
I do find it interesting to note, however, that Apple still apparantly is selling the current PowerBook G4s. The MacBook Pro doesn't appear to be directly (or at least immediately) replacing the PowerBooks.
I imagine that of the two systems, the new MacBook Pro probably required the most R&D, thus costing more to develop. Pro users are more likely to be early adopters, and are more likely to spend larger amounts of money, so it makes sense to target them. Besides which, developers which couldn't afford to rent a transition system now have a machine they can buy to help accelerate Mac Intel software development :).
Yaz.
Here is my experience with a Rev C G4 12" PowerBook:
And that's it. Otherwise, the system has been rock-solid and a complete joy to own and use. I'm not happy about the hard drive failing just a few weeks out of warranty, but last I checked Apple doesn't make hard drives. And it probably doesn't help that I'm pretty hard on my systems: my PowerBook is virtually never turned off (although it is routinely put to sleep when not needed), goes everywhere with me, and does quite a bit of heavy processing. So I suppose it should be of no surprise that the two items one would most expect to fail first have done so (although I do still use the old battery as a spare for when the new one is drained).
HTH!
Yaz.
Xcode typically has a separate release cycle from the OS itself. I'm pretty sure this feature has been available in all of Xcode 2.x, but really don't recall if it was there in the v1.x days or not.
I think I still have a v1.2 disc somewhere, but am hardly going to downgrade from v2.2 on any of my systems to check :).
Yaz.
And this, kids, is why you should never ever top-post.
Yaz.
If this is what is keeping you from developing with Objective-C, then you've picked a poor reason to avoid learning it.
Pointers are as easy to avoid in Objective-C as they are in Java. In Java, all reference types are in fact a pointer, but simply a pointer which you don't need to think about. There is no pass-by-value for reference types, and no pointer arithmetic is allowed.
In Objective-C, everything is again passed by reference (as opposed to by value). Pointer arithmetic is generally completely unnecessary (although it is technically permitted).
I recently finished v1.0 of a decent sized Objective-C application, and the "&" operator isn't used once. The '*' operator is only used when defining a variable, return type, or parameter.
I don't even think of pointers when coding in Objective-C. I tend to think of it as no different than Java. Extra capabilities to do pointer arithmetic are there, but I simply don't typically feel the need to use any of them.
Yaz.
Take a look at Preferences -> Code Sense. It's the second preference panel icon at the top.
Personally, I find automatic suggestion annoying and have it disabled -- but even with the automatic option disable, just hitting "Esc" on the keyboard will bring up a pop-up containing all of the potential completions.
Next time, you might be better served asking if something is possible, rather than assuming it isn't and then ranting about how an existing feature is "missing".
Yaz.
Loading a Help Book Page
Looks pretty simple and straight forward to me.
Ugly only because it sounds like you're doing it wrong. Had it not occurred to you that you're working in a fully Object Oriented environment, and could just subclass NSBrowser and implement your own mouseDragged: method?
Yaz.
Here's the problem: if you're an athiest, a very large number of thiests out there feels like you're a threat to their religion choice, and feel like they need to debate you about it. People who spend their day meeting people who are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or of some other different religion then they profess won't ask any of them about the merits of their religion, or why they believe what they do. But put an athiest in front of them, and they suddenly feel the need for debate.
I used to be willing to discuss my reasons for not believing in any religious system with people, but I found that this just caused more and more people to either a) want to engage me in debate, or b) try to convert me to their religion (many would be surprised how many otheriwse normal people out there think that athiests are "lost lambs" which would instantly believe in their religion if only they were told "The Word").
It's draining, and is an effect that pretty much any athiest can tell you about. So a lot of us wind up getting to the point where we put on the dogmatic act just to get people to leave us alone. I don't need people trying to convert me 10 times a day, or have a dozen people I meet every day ask me why I don't believe in their God (or Gods) of choice. In the end, I don't have any desire in life to talk people out of their religious convictions, and don't see the point in debating every yahoo who hears that I'm an athiest. If close friends really want to talk about comparative religion, I'll usually participate -- I find the study of religions rather interesting, and am quite open minded to views I don't subscribe to. But I'm tired of being virtually every theists [0] sounding board for their need to validate their beliefs.
Yaz
---
[0] - Okay, I admit I'm exagerating quite a bit, as there are a lot of theists out there who are tolerant of athiesm, and who don't feel the need to validate themselves by debating with an athiest.
You know, I'm tired of seeing comments like this in stories of this sort:
You know what? Every democracy on the planet will have some representative somewhere who decides to take up some kooky cause. One of the strengths of a democracy is that the majority can prevent such idiotic ideas from becoming a reality.
Should we be educated about when some moronic public representative decides to take up such a cause? Yes. But do we have to assume that just because one elected/appointed representative professes a bad idea that the entire state is about to go downhill?
Last I checked, Austraila is a democracy, and there is a process that must be followed to go from an idea to a legislative act. The idea, however, is not the act.
If and when an idea gets past the first step of legislation, then is when you have to worry, as it usually means that other elected representatives support the idea. But one bad idea hardly means the downfall of society -- chances are very good that this effort will go into the dustbin of history, like a variety of bad ideas elected officials have professed and later dropped due to lack of support.
Yaz.
If I could run AdBlock on Safari, I think I'd use Safari a whole lot more than I do. I'm already using Safari for its RSS support, and as I use three different Macs, being able to synchronize my bookmarks between them is also a big plus.
Still, AdBlock keeps me on Firefox 99% of the time on my Macs. I hate it when I click on a link in Safari and am presented with a slew of flashing banners everywhere -- I'm so used to having all of them filtered out (and enjoy the resulting browsing speed increase) that visiting any site with ads on it seems painful in Safari.
If I were Apple, I'd be really tempted to integrate Firefox's Extension subsystem into Safari, which could take advantage of Firefox's library of existing extensions, like AdBlock.
Yaz.
There were a few factors which played in this decision:
How has it worked out for me? As with anything, there have been upsides and downsides. On the upside, in the end I have made some money from the project, through being hired as a developer and consultant in implementing it for a medical data system. I'm not making anywhere near what I did as a developer at IBM, but it's sufficient to live off. It's also allowed me to make some contacts and open some doors -- it's quite easy for me to show an organization my experiences in managing a diverse, dispersed team developing a fairly large project, and they can also see the overall project (and code) quality.
On the down side, I know what it's like for a project to have more users than contributors. I'm still the largest contributor to the project, and do the vast majority of the work (although this itself has increased and decreased over time -- some contributors come and go, while others have become too busy with their professional lives to contribute on a regular basis, but still follow the project). External contributions are very rare (but are greatly appreciated whenever they are given!). I can pretty much always use more help -- as it is right now, I do the vast majority of coding, administration, technical support, releases, and documentation. And as I do have responsibilities outside the jSyncManager Project, this often means that development appears to be very slow (it has been more than 2 years now since our last "final" release, although we have had a number of alpha and beta releases since that time (part of the delay being due to some time I served in the Navy and was unable to do any development)).
It also doesn't completely help that the very devices they project is designed to communicate with (PalmOS based handhelds) have been seeing a diminishing market share. It's always easier to find contributors and users when your target audience is increasing, rather than when it is decreasing (although a decreasing share can have an interesting bubble-effect, as those who are still embracing such a technology look for groups they can partner with for a reliable, medium-to-long term solution. Open Source is very attractive in this area, as you never know when a commercial, closed source partner might go out of business, or stop offering the product or support your organization needs).
So, as with anything, you have to take the good with the bad. My eperiences seem to have tended towards the good, although the benefits aren't always immediately tangible.
Yaz.