I have to agree with this. The trick is Given a sufficiently large file. I can't imagine anyone coming up with a 2GB file off of which a modified RLE program couldn't snip a few kB. By "modified", I mean spend all the time you want analyzing the file (this is allowed), and find strings of similar bytes in arithmetic progression, or in strange but calculable patterns. Remember, the compressor can be as complicated and large as possible; it's the decompressor that needs to be small.
I get calls all the time from blood banks asking for donations. Being O-neg makes that happen a lot. They always claim there's a blood shortage on, and I have no reason to doubt them.
Hemopure [can be] stored in a range of temperatures for two years, whereas donated blood has a shelf life of 42 days under refrigerated conditions.
Just can't beat that. If it goes through the same testing that human blood does for HIV and the like, the risk of mad-cow or some other disease being passed is going to be quite low. Anything that makes more blood available to hospitals (or something that can replace blood) is going to save lots of lives.
Why stuff like this doesn't get posted on Slashdot's front page is beyond me.
I've been really impressed with the coverage I've seen on C-Span lately. Makes me miss living in DC. Some of the crazies on Capital Hill seem much more in tune with the Internet these days than the people in the music industry. The only thing I have to say about that is *FINALLY*!!
McCain and Hatch have been active in the area a LOT recently, and wether you agree with them or not, at least they're learning the issues for themselves. Not two or three years ago, you could hardly find a member of congress who had a clue; and you'd NEVER have found one posting to SlashDot.
I'm getting sick of the music issue itself, but if it deteriorates the tecnophobia on the hill, I'm all for it.
But much of the excitement and enjoyment of the early years, you see, was that everyone thought we were crazy - but we knew we weren't. So it was great fun. Now, everybody takes everything for granted. I think, possibly, I'd be keen on getting to the Moon. If I'd been born in 1970, I'd have had a chance.
I was born around there, and I still think it'd be pheomenally difficult to make it to the moon in my lifetime. Not impossible, of course, and I'm still hoping that space tourism kicks in some day, but the percentage of people breaking through the atmosphere is still stratospherically er... low.
And by the way, to what timeline were they referring when they said "According to this timeline"?
The article skims over the fact that search engine technology is progressing fairly rapidly, and that some companies (Google) are creating new technologies that exploit the way the web works while Yahoo! and some others are relying on older technology for some things (like filtering pages by hand for their directory!).
Google's approach is novel; make the web pages rank themselves. If more people link to your site, it's probably a better site. If few enough people link to it, it probably isn't and besides that it'll probably never be found.
Web site creators have to do the legwork to get their sites recognized, and going to a general search engine to do it isn't the way. If someone makes a site and tells their friends about it, and their friends like it and link to it, it'll get picked up; that's the way of the web. (At least, it'll get picked up by crawlers like Google, and even ranked highly if enough people link to it).
Search enginge tech has to catch up to dynamic pages yet, but it's the fault of the content creators if they want their pages on search engines but can't code enough alt tags to make their stuff show up.
In any case, the bulk of the web does work, and good pages get recognition. I've always eventually been able to find what I'm looking for on the web, no matter what the topic. Search engines have to grow like everything else, but so far they're the best thing going and getting better.
Does anyone remember dreamjobs.com? Back before HotWired destroyed it, that is. They used to post all sorts of jobs that were CS crossed with something else. One of the ones I remember applying for was a job out in Berkely where someone wanted a person with a computer background to anlyze some data about protein interactions. They specifically wanted someone who didn't know anything about biochem, so they could have a fresh view of the data.
I imagine there are tons of these out there. Heck, there's another article on Slashdot today that talks about how computers have beome important to every other aspect of science; maybe it's difficult to find computer talent because of that; it's not that people aren't interested (heck, send me a note i'd love a job like that), it's just that the interested people have had lots of opportunities to find jobs already; you have to find a way to contact them and entice them away from existing jobs.
Posts on Slashdot are probably a great start, just let us know who you are!
Aren't the certificates actually tied to the URLs? I thought the browser was suppossed to see the certificate, then check with Verisign (or whoever) to see that the certificate matches the URL it came from. Can't the certificate then be denied when the browser polls Verisign? Or is it the certificate itself that is "signed", with Verisign's seal of approval?
If your browser doesn't at least do something to actively "ask" the Authority about the certificate, the system seems broken internally. It may be hard to forge a certificate, but it's not impossible (although I don't know if anyone has that sort of computing power lying around). Still, you could make up a lot of wasted time in the time a fraudulent ticket would be working.
I use open source (MySQL mainly) databases for about 95/100 projects for which I need database support. That last 5 projects, tho, are by far my largest, for which I use Oracle (and once SQL Server... no more).
The first thing you get with the big boys is customer service support, which is very important, but not unavailable with Open Source stuff.
More importantly, tho, you get third party support. Hardware, backup software, any additional software you may want, are almost certain to support the larger databases, and be efficient about it, too. You're probably relegated to ODBC or NO support for smaller database engines. That's very important for long term planning. Also, if your DBA gets hit by a 747, at the moment it's easier to find someone who knows Oracle than PostgreSQL. (At the moment... hopefully, this will change).
Lastly, the RDBMS supports lots of exotic hardware and OSes efficiently. The difference between Oracle's HP and Sun ports exploit a lot more of the efficiencies of those systems than does a port of MySQL, because Oracle can put a handful of OS specific gurus on the project for each port. Smaller RDBMS may support additional Operating Systems/Hardware, but I'd wager that they rarely exploit them to their full potential. Support, for example, of RAW I/O is available on several platforms from Oracle, while far fewer from other engines. Over time, these sorts of things become important; especially if you ever need to migrate machines, or if performance or large scale is important.
My recommendation would be to look at size, complexity, and lifetime. Larger, more complex (requiring more tuning/speed requirements), and projects with realistic lifetimes of 5 years or more should rely on the big guys. Single DBA projects on budjet machines that really might be replaced in the next few years as people change their minds about things can be made perfectly functional with free (Free?) RDBMS.
You hit on the other problem with this scenario, and that is that the encryption/decryption has to take place in real time. The joy of Public Key encryption (one of many) is that you can just create a message and send it for later decoding.
Not every computer that we want secure works in real time.
I don't even think this is one of his assumptions... you only need to store the stream during the time the transmission you want to decrypt is being sent. Even at 10 million million numbers per second, any conversation taking less than a few minutes results in a fairly reasonable amount of data to sift through. Especially if you can crack the first private message that describes how the sender/receiver decide what numbers to pull.
Even more than a few minutes is no problem, as you say, because storage is getting exponentially larger.
I was at Xavier University when this whole web thing started, and the University's first few web pages were all volunteer-student run. There was NO cooperation from the administration for a while, tho... we had to hack some open source web servers to get around security issues so that people could have personal home pages, and server space was limited to what we could scrounge.
Eventually the administration cought up, but then they took over, and the result is a far less cutting edge product than could have been realized if students were to continue using the systems for learning and gaining real-world skills.
Still, schools have all these students that actively want to learn, and are capable of doing the technical stuff. The trick isn't the students; it's getting the administration buy-in. My one piece of advice to anyone wanting to do this is to find a way to make your school's administration let you do this... probably best to get your CS teacher to champion the cause all the way up the chain o' command as part of a "computer club" project. And NEVER let anyone else take over the beurocratic end of things.
Sure, why is this curious? The mechanism may be interesting, and full props to the biologists, but isn't this what we expect?
We've long known that humans learn by imitation; the way a neural net (like the brain) knows to compare its action to those it imitates is to compare the neurons that fire... fire the same ones and you've successfully imitated. Fire the wrong ones and you did something wrong.
I remember when some of the early e-mail worms came out that attacked Microsoft Outlook (it's so easy, isn't it?) by sending mail to like the first 50 people in an address book. One of the news stories that annoyed me the most was hearing about a "secret" network of system administrators that worked for banks and financial institutions who were notified days in advance of the rest of the world about the problem. I don't know what "notified" means, but the situation sounds similar. I was plenty pissed off when my systems were affected before I knew about the problem. And I was hooked up about as well as could be to "normal" security info centers/mailing lists/whatever.
These things should be made public knowledge ASAP. If Bind decides to notify some root servers an hour before they make a general announcement, then that's their perogative, but the idea that information would be passed around there that would never make it to the public is bad mojo. A separate mailing list would make that more likely, even if it isn't intentional.
It sounds like Credit Suisse were the people causing the problem.
Apparently Credit Suisse took money from investors and guaranteed them shares of the IPO stock in VA Linux before the shares were actually public. Worse, the press release claims that they guaranteed investors a fixed price AFTER the IPO went off. It sounds like all of this was in exchange for money (aka "kickbacks").
Keeping in the realm of IANAL, from what I remember of IPOs, and going through one myself right now, the IPO price is never solid until almost immediately before it is released to the public. The SEC controls this stuff very closely, so any guarantee of prices or of share allocation significantly before an IPO is bad mojo.
This is different,of course, from investors directly investing in VA Linux. Pre-IPO, VA can solicit investors anywhere, but the problem is Credit Suisse's involvement, and the fact that they were exchanging shares earmarked for the IPO instead of some more direct equity (preferred stock, for example).
No matter what, if someone did do something wrong here, it sounds like Credit Suisse, not VA Linux.
We'll always play video games of some sort. When Microsoft enters the fray, we may see some turbulence as people decide WHAT video game systems to buy, but that will probably only benefit the industry in the long run. That's REALLY what the article suggests about the previous "crash"... read between the lines; had we not reoriented the market in the 80s, it wouldn't be the same today. Well, I for one think it's just great today.
I managed to get hold of a PS2. It's a great system. The Dreamcast is great too, and i expect good things from Nintendo's Game Cube... (no idea about Microsoft). We've lived with three or four major vendors for a while with no problem.
The article lists PC and linux based systems as competitors too, tho, and that's poorly placed. PC gaming has never been the same as console gaming. Both have achieved ubiquity in their areas, but if you look at crossover titles (games that play on both machines) there are very few, and they're vastly different. Quake could never be good on the console because most of it's charm eventually came from its expandability. Quake-C just couldn't be ported to a console. Much more complicated games just don't work on consoles... Real Time Strategy games don't hold the same charm on consoles as on PCs because the interface is limited. There's no way around that.
Console games on the other hand are generally much prettier and the interface is much better for what they do. Sports simulations don't transpose as well to PCs for some reason; probably related to the viewing screen and the controllers.
What's my point? Well, some day these two technologies will combine. PC and Console gaming platforms, that is. The XBox may be a step in the right direction. Only time will tell. That just hasn't happened yet, tho. That will be the next great hurdle for console makers. Sony is probably best positioned to deal with this, but again, they've got some time.
Just look at the popularity of the PS2 in the middle of a strong economic slide (at least in the US). Console games will be around a while.
Okay, if I was at the right place, this new search engine has some real issues. Searching for "linux" was the only search I did whose first hit was one of the sites I'd expect to see. Even a search for "Slashdot" comes out a bit behind. I tried a few others and wasn't impressed.
I even read some of their online FAQs... one said a search for "poultry" will turn up sites related to chickens, ducks, geese... er... I searched for "poultry"... no such luck.
They don't say anything about the technology; perhaps they just need to crawl around a lot more sites before getting some things straight. I'm definitely in support of more alternative search engines. Google made heavy inroads late into the game; there's no reason someone else can't too. But so far, theindex.com isn't one of those innovators.
I wasn't really referring to LaTeX... I used TeX and LaTeX six or seven years ago. What I meant by next gen was next gen for the web... focus now on content delivery; focus next on giving more control on formatting.
the only big feature missing for LaTeX to be supported in browsers would be linking
Of course, that's rather important. That's the whole emphasis of the web, and the reason HTML is so popular. LaTeX (and TeX, for that matter) deal with the specifics of how a document looks. The web is great because it deals with content, and the connections between content (linking). We need to improve some things, but XML and a plethora of other choices are better steps than TeX/LaTeX.
One of the great things about HTML (there aren't many) is the way that good HTML is display independant... IE, Opera, Mozilla may each display a page in different ways that are still consistent with the HTML. LaTeX doesn't suffer that variability very well... this is both a blessing and a curse, tho. It has great applications in handicapped and language independant viewing, but it gives typesetters headaches.
There are too many negative tradeoffs to focus on LaTeX. Focus on some other SGML derivative for a while and get the net's metadata up to speed; then go back and play with the next gen formatting tools.
Yeah, the main difference is the DeCSS case's reliance on the DMCA's encryption and circumvention clauses.
First off, PlayStation games were formatted bizarrely, but noone ever argued that this was "encryption", nor that it was covered bythe DMCA's "effective access control" wording. I'm not sure if this is fortunate or not... it could be that had Sony gone this direction, they could have had as much success as DeCSS, but I think that's unlikely.
One of the reasons Sony would have a tough time fighting under the DMCA is because nothing was being copied by Connectix, or its software. They wrote an emulator, plain and simple. The problem with DeCSS, not that people ARE using it to copy, but that the prosecution has managed to convince the courts that it is a tool for copying.
There's a fine line there, but it matters a lot. After all, the "C" in DMCA stands for copyright. Sony wasn't worried about copying (publicly), only about emulation. The MPAA is (right or wrong) crying about copyright, so, I imagine the two are legally unrelated.
Why would you use something as archaic as a CD for this? I suppose you need something that will last that long, and a CD MAY do do that ina vacuum in space with no light or heat or anything, but what are the chances that anyone could read this 50,000 years from now?
I hope they're putting a CD player with a solar panel on it in there as well. At least that would be something.
I remember the University of Louisville messing with this technology almost 10 years ago... they were using chips that were suppossed to better simulate Neural Nets so that they could "learn" how an authenticated person typed and then later recognize them by that typing. Glad to hear someone finally got this stuff to work.
I'd really like to know Greg's answer to that last question if he understood it correctly... I think the question was suppossed to be "does your application lend itself well to distributed processing (ala distributed.net)" not "would you run distributed.net software on your nice cluster". Hey, Greg... you reading this? Try that one again!!!
I certainly want to defend Slashdot's side in all of this, and I agree with practically everyone that there is only one post of issue... the exact copy of the contents of the file in point. However I think this letter is going to cause far more problems than it solves for Slashdot.
First, the letter doesn't say that Slashdot (Andover) has refrained from moving the letter for any reason other than A) Slashdot's policy of non-censorship which doesn't apply legally unless they assert that they are acting as a service provider under the DMCA, or B) (implicitly) because they have a lot of unanswered questions about Microsoft's belief that they've been wronged.
What really is being said is that Slasdot doesn't believe that the answers to these questions, which we CAN anticipate, are sufficient to support protection under the DMCA. The points Slashdot's lawyer brings up are good points, but they need to be less passive. "We believe that Microsoft's claim to proprietary, trade-secret protection is invalid for the following reasons... ".
Furthermore, why does the letter talk of the Antitrust litigation? This argument should be able to stand on its own ground. Either Slashdot is right or they're wrong; it has nothing to do with wether Microsoft is monopolistic or not. Careful when you flame me; i make no statement to the reverse... this may be an example of monopolistic behaviour, but the copyright issue is unaffected by wether or not Microsoft is guilty of other charges.
I wish SlashDot the best, but I also want to see them around for a while. They have to be more careful than most that they protect themselves legally, and this letter seems unwarrantedly wreckless.
Did anyone actually read this page before it got posted to SlashDot? The intro portion includes the following text:
as you can see from the IRC logs below, we dropped a few clues that the person was in a country with snow and at one point "accidentally" spoke French to imply the province of Quebec. We were amazed when the blame actually landed on someone from Montreal.
The snow reference referrs to the following block of text:
=icee= but WHY do it? [mafiaboy] snowday [mafiaboy] haha
And the French referred to a single use of the word "Oui", late in the chat log. Now, the first use of the word "Canada", appears way at the top and comes not from 2600 (mafiaboy), but from *icee*.. again, before 2600 mentions snow or french:
*icee* oh, did you listen to our radio stuff up there in Canada, too?
That's it. The rest of the conversation is harmless, and this portion would be harmless except for the statement that 2600 made implying that these comments helped lead researchers to Canada. Give me a break.
I've got no idea who *icee* is, and 2600's claims that mafiaboy is fake or at least not the right guy are fine with me, but this conversation makes 2600 look less like they have a clue than the FBI who at least are talking about routing logs and web logs and real data. At least I got a laugh out of this:
=icee= okay, we need to solve this trust problem, and prove you are who you say you are.. [mafiaboy] 3090 [mafiaboy] good enough?
Well, I was at the DC Protest yesterday, and although it was far from a success as national policy protests go, it was certainly a good step.
The Politicians out here are always accused of being out of touch; doesn't matter if we talk about taxes, immigration, interns, or computers. But the problem is that there have been people around for years lobbying to explain to those politicians what decisions are best and for what reasons. Corporations are used to this, and those that aren't can hire people who are good at it. That's why they get what they want.
Open Source supporters and the swarms of informed geeks on the 'net, on the other hand, don't seem to get the idea... but we're learning. Right now we've got dynamic, vocal members in our ranks, but most of their time is spent preaching to the choir as it were.. Perens, Stallman, and a large portion of the community have a lot to say, but we say it internally. We post messages and articles to places only geeks tread. There was considerable commentary recently that the various states approving creationism teachings over, or on equal footing to darwinism was largely because the people who support creationism were much more supportive of the school system. They attended PTA meetings in much higher percentages and could garner votes even if a much greater percent of the outside community considered their ideas without merit. The same is true with us. We are just now realizing how to play the political game that will shape the future of the 'net. With the example of the DMCA, however, we arrived at the game very late.
Would I do something differently if I had this protest to do over? Almost certainly. We should have talked to the larger (outside the DC-Area) community much earlier to garner wider support. We should have aggressively contacted Senators and Representatives to more alert them to the protest. We should have pursued slightly different permits than we had.
But we've learned this now. We must approach politics as we approach everything else in life. It is a black box. We need it to work a particular way for us to thrive and survive. It responds to inputs (peaceful protests, illustrative letters, defacing government web sites) with predictable responses; some good, some bad. Politicians won't vote favorably for us if we don't tell them what we want and why we want it. And we must accept that we can't expect them to learn our language... we have to learn the language of politics; at least for now.
The press surrounding the DC protest has been generally negative... we can't claim a true victory even if we have biased press (Thanks again, Timothy). But we can't give up either. With the UCITA looming, and new laws threatining the privacy of electronic communications, we must stand up for our rights in arenas other than those we created ourselves.
If someone has a better way to do it; don't criticize our attempt... help us do a better job next time, for there certainly must be a next time.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree with this. The trick is Given a sufficiently large file. I can't imagine anyone coming up with a 2GB file off of which a modified RLE program couldn't snip a few kB. By "modified", I mean spend all the time you want analyzing the file (this is allowed), and find strings of similar bytes in arithmetic progression, or in strange but calculable patterns. Remember, the compressor can be as complicated and large as possible; it's the decompressor that needs to be small.
Just can't beat that. If it goes through the same testing that human blood does for HIV and the like, the risk of mad-cow or some other disease being passed is going to be quite low. Anything that makes more blood available to hospitals (or something that can replace blood) is going to save lots of lives.
Why stuff like this doesn't get posted on Slashdot's front page is beyond me.
I've been really impressed with the coverage I've seen on C-Span lately. Makes me miss living in DC. Some of the crazies on Capital Hill seem much more in tune with the Internet these days than the people in the music industry. The only thing I have to say about that is *FINALLY*!!
McCain and Hatch have been active in the area a LOT recently, and wether you agree with them or not, at least they're learning the issues for themselves. Not two or three years ago, you could hardly find a member of congress who had a clue; and you'd NEVER have found one posting to SlashDot.
I'm getting sick of the music issue itself, but if it deteriorates the tecnophobia on the hill, I'm all for it.
And by the way, to what timeline were they referring when they said "According to this timeline"?
The article skims over the fact that search engine technology is progressing fairly rapidly, and that some companies (Google) are creating new technologies that exploit the way the web works while Yahoo! and some others are relying on older technology for some things (like filtering pages by hand for their directory!).
Google's approach is novel; make the web pages rank themselves. If more people link to your site, it's probably a better site. If few enough people link to it, it probably isn't and besides that it'll probably never be found.
Web site creators have to do the legwork to get their sites recognized, and going to a general search engine to do it isn't the way. If someone makes a site and tells their friends about it, and their friends like it and link to it, it'll get picked up; that's the way of the web. (At least, it'll get picked up by crawlers like Google, and even ranked highly if enough people link to it).
Search enginge tech has to catch up to dynamic pages yet, but it's the fault of the content creators if they want their pages on search engines but can't code enough alt tags to make their stuff show up.
In any case, the bulk of the web does work, and good pages get recognition. I've always eventually been able to find what I'm looking for on the web, no matter what the topic. Search engines have to grow like everything else, but so far they're the best thing going and getting better.
I imagine there are tons of these out there. Heck, there's another article on Slashdot today that talks about how computers have beome important to every other aspect of science; maybe it's difficult to find computer talent because of that; it's not that people aren't interested (heck, send me a note i'd love a job like that), it's just that the interested people have had lots of opportunities to find jobs already; you have to find a way to contact them and entice them away from existing jobs.
Posts on Slashdot are probably a great start, just let us know who you are!
Aren't the certificates actually tied to the URLs? I thought the browser was suppossed to see the certificate, then check with Verisign (or whoever) to see that the certificate matches the URL it came from. Can't the certificate then be denied when the browser polls Verisign? Or is it the certificate itself that is "signed", with Verisign's seal of approval?
If your browser doesn't at least do something to actively "ask" the Authority about the certificate, the system seems broken internally. It may be hard to forge a certificate, but it's not impossible (although I don't know if anyone has that sort of computing power lying around). Still, you could make up a lot of wasted time in the time a fraudulent ticket would be working.
Oh well.
I use open source (MySQL mainly) databases for about 95/100 projects for which I need database support. That last 5 projects, tho, are by far my largest, for which I use Oracle (and once SQL Server... no more).
The first thing you get with the big boys is customer service support, which is very important, but not unavailable with Open Source stuff.
More importantly, tho, you get third party support. Hardware, backup software, any additional software you may want, are almost certain to support the larger databases, and be efficient about it, too. You're probably relegated to ODBC or NO support for smaller database engines. That's very important for long term planning. Also, if your DBA gets hit by a 747, at the moment it's easier to find someone who knows Oracle than PostgreSQL. (At the moment... hopefully, this will change).
Lastly, the RDBMS supports lots of exotic hardware and OSes efficiently. The difference between Oracle's HP and Sun ports exploit a lot more of the efficiencies of those systems than does a port of MySQL, because Oracle can put a handful of OS specific gurus on the project for each port. Smaller RDBMS may support additional Operating Systems/Hardware, but I'd wager that they rarely exploit them to their full potential. Support, for example, of RAW I/O is available on several platforms from Oracle, while far fewer from other engines. Over time, these sorts of things become important; especially if you ever need to migrate machines, or if performance or large scale is important.
My recommendation would be to look at size, complexity, and lifetime. Larger, more complex (requiring more tuning/speed requirements), and projects with realistic lifetimes of 5 years or more should rely on the big guys. Single DBA projects on budjet machines that really might be replaced in the next few years as people change their minds about things can be made perfectly functional with free (Free?) RDBMS.
You hit on the other problem with this scenario, and that is that the encryption/decryption has to take place in real time. The joy of Public Key encryption (one of many) is that you can just create a message and send it for later decoding.
Not every computer that we want secure works in real time.
I don't even think this is one of his assumptions... you only need to store the stream during the time the transmission you want to decrypt is being sent. Even at 10 million million numbers per second, any conversation taking less than a few minutes results in a fairly reasonable amount of data to sift through. Especially if you can crack the first private message that describes how the sender/receiver decide what numbers to pull.
Even more than a few minutes is no problem, as you say, because storage is getting exponentially larger.
I was at Xavier University when this whole web thing started, and the University's first few web pages were all volunteer-student run. There was NO cooperation from the administration for a while, tho... we had to hack some open source web servers to get around security issues so that people could have personal home pages, and server space was limited to what we could scrounge.
Eventually the administration cought up, but then they took over, and the result is a far less cutting edge product than could have been realized if students were to continue using the systems for learning and gaining real-world skills.
Still, schools have all these students that actively want to learn, and are capable of doing the technical stuff. The trick isn't the students; it's getting the administration buy-in. My one piece of advice to anyone wanting to do this is to find a way to make your school's administration let you do this... probably best to get your CS teacher to champion the cause all the way up the chain o' command as part of a "computer club" project. And NEVER let anyone else take over the beurocratic end of things.
Sure, why is this curious? The mechanism may be interesting, and full props to the biologists, but isn't this what we expect?
We've long known that humans learn by imitation; the way a neural net (like the brain) knows to compare its action to those it imitates is to compare the neurons that fire... fire the same ones and you've successfully imitated. Fire the wrong ones and you did something wrong.
I remember when some of the early e-mail worms came out that attacked Microsoft Outlook (it's so easy, isn't it?) by sending mail to like the first 50 people in an address book. One of the news stories that annoyed me the most was hearing about a "secret" network of system administrators that worked for banks and financial institutions who were notified days in advance of the rest of the world about the problem. I don't know what "notified" means, but the situation sounds similar. I was plenty pissed off when my systems were affected before I knew about the problem. And I was hooked up about as well as could be to "normal" security info centers/mailing lists/whatever.
These things should be made public knowledge ASAP. If Bind decides to notify some root servers an hour before they make a general announcement, then that's their perogative, but the idea that information would be passed around there that would never make it to the public is bad mojo. A separate mailing list would make that more likely, even if it isn't intentional.
It sounds like Credit Suisse were the people causing the problem.
Apparently Credit Suisse took money from investors and guaranteed them shares of the IPO stock in VA Linux before the shares were actually public. Worse, the press release claims that they guaranteed investors a fixed price AFTER the IPO went off. It sounds like all of this was in exchange for money (aka "kickbacks").
Keeping in the realm of IANAL, from what I remember of IPOs, and going through one myself right now, the IPO price is never solid until almost immediately before it is released to the public. The SEC controls this stuff very closely, so any guarantee of prices or of share allocation significantly before an IPO is bad mojo.
This is different,of course, from investors directly investing in VA Linux. Pre-IPO, VA can solicit investors anywhere, but the problem is Credit Suisse's involvement, and the fact that they were exchanging shares earmarked for the IPO instead of some more direct equity (preferred stock, for example).
No matter what, if someone did do something wrong here, it sounds like Credit Suisse, not VA Linux.
We'll always play video games of some sort. When Microsoft enters the fray, we may see some turbulence as people decide WHAT video game systems to buy, but that will probably only benefit the industry in the long run. That's REALLY what the article suggests about the previous "crash"... read between the lines; had we not reoriented the market in the 80s, it wouldn't be the same today. Well, I for one think it's just great today.
I managed to get hold of a PS2. It's a great system. The Dreamcast is great too, and i expect good things from Nintendo's Game Cube... (no idea about Microsoft). We've lived with three or four major vendors for a while with no problem.
The article lists PC and linux based systems as competitors too, tho, and that's poorly placed. PC gaming has never been the same as console gaming. Both have achieved ubiquity in their areas, but if you look at crossover titles (games that play on both machines) there are very few, and they're vastly different. Quake could never be good on the console because most of it's charm eventually came from its expandability. Quake-C just couldn't be ported to a console. Much more complicated games just don't work on consoles... Real Time Strategy games don't hold the same charm on consoles as on PCs because the interface is limited. There's no way around that.
Console games on the other hand are generally much prettier and the interface is much better for what they do. Sports simulations don't transpose as well to PCs for some reason; probably related to the viewing screen and the controllers.
What's my point? Well, some day these two technologies will combine. PC and Console gaming platforms, that is. The XBox may be a step in the right direction. Only time will tell. That just hasn't happened yet, tho. That will be the next great hurdle for console makers. Sony is probably best positioned to deal with this, but again, they've got some time.
Just look at the popularity of the PS2 in the middle of a strong economic slide (at least in the US). Console games will be around a while.
Okay, if I was at the right place, this new search engine has some real issues. Searching for "linux" was the only search I did whose first hit was one of the sites I'd expect to see. Even a search for "Slashdot" comes out a bit behind. I tried a few others and wasn't impressed.
I even read some of their online FAQs... one said a search for "poultry" will turn up sites related to chickens, ducks, geese... er... I searched for "poultry"... no such luck.
They don't say anything about the technology; perhaps they just need to crawl around a lot more sites before getting some things straight. I'm definitely in support of more alternative search engines. Google made heavy inroads late into the game; there's no reason someone else can't too. But so far, theindex.com isn't one of those innovators.
Keep trying!
I wasn't really referring to LaTeX... I used TeX and LaTeX six or seven years ago. What I meant by next gen was next gen for the web... focus now on content delivery; focus next on giving more control on formatting.
the only big feature missing for LaTeX to be supported in browsers would be linking
Of course, that's rather important. That's the whole emphasis of the web, and the reason HTML is so popular. LaTeX (and TeX, for that matter) deal with the specifics of how a document looks. The web is great because it deals with content, and the connections between content (linking). We need to improve some things, but XML and a plethora of other choices are better steps than TeX/LaTeX.
One of the great things about HTML (there aren't many) is the way that good HTML is display independant... IE, Opera, Mozilla may each display a page in different ways that are still consistent with the HTML. LaTeX doesn't suffer that variability very well... this is both a blessing and a curse, tho. It has great applications in handicapped and language independant viewing, but it gives typesetters headaches.
There are too many negative tradeoffs to focus on LaTeX. Focus on some other SGML derivative for a while and get the net's metadata up to speed; then go back and play with the next gen formatting tools.
Yeah, the main difference is the DeCSS case's reliance on the DMCA's encryption and circumvention clauses.
;-)
First off, PlayStation games were formatted bizarrely, but noone ever argued that this was "encryption", nor that it was covered bythe DMCA's "effective access control" wording. I'm not sure if this is fortunate or not... it could be that had Sony gone this direction, they could have had as much success as DeCSS, but I think that's unlikely.
One of the reasons Sony would have a tough time fighting under the DMCA is because nothing was being copied by Connectix, or its software. They wrote an emulator, plain and simple. The problem with DeCSS, not that people ARE using it to copy, but that the prosecution has managed to convince the courts that it is a tool for copying.
There's a fine line there, but it matters a lot. After all, the "C" in DMCA stands for copyright. Sony wasn't worried about copying (publicly), only about emulation. The MPAA is (right or wrong) crying about copyright, so, I imagine the two are legally unrelated.
As usual, IANAL.
Why would you use something as archaic as a CD for this? I suppose you need something that will last that long, and a CD MAY do do that ina vacuum in space with no light or heat or anything, but what are the chances that anyone could read this 50,000 years from now?
I hope they're putting a CD player with a solar panel on it in there as well. At least that would be something.
I remember the University of Louisville messing with this technology almost 10 years ago... they were using chips that were suppossed to better simulate Neural Nets so that they could "learn" how an authenticated person typed and then later recognize them by that typing. Glad to hear someone finally got this stuff to work.
I'd really like to know Greg's answer to that last question if he understood it correctly... I think the question was suppossed to be "does your application lend itself well to distributed processing (ala distributed.net)" not "would you run distributed.net software on your nice cluster". Hey, Greg... you reading this? Try that one again!!!
Good idea.
I certainly want to defend Slashdot's side in all of this, and I agree with practically everyone that there is only one post of issue... the exact copy of the contents of the file in point. However I think this letter is going to cause far more problems than it solves for Slashdot.
First, the letter doesn't say that Slashdot (Andover) has refrained from moving the letter for any reason other than A) Slashdot's policy of non-censorship which doesn't apply legally unless they assert that they are acting as a service provider under the DMCA, or B) (implicitly) because they have a lot of unanswered questions about Microsoft's belief that they've been wronged.
What really is being said is that Slasdot doesn't believe that the answers to these questions, which we CAN anticipate, are sufficient to support protection under the DMCA. The points Slashdot's lawyer brings up are good points, but they need to be less passive. "We believe that Microsoft's claim to proprietary, trade-secret protection is invalid for the following reasons... ".
Furthermore, why does the letter talk of the Antitrust litigation? This argument should be able to stand on its own ground. Either Slashdot is right or they're wrong; it has nothing to do with wether Microsoft is monopolistic or not. Careful when you flame me; i make no statement to the reverse... this may be an example of monopolistic behaviour, but the copyright issue is unaffected by wether or not Microsoft is guilty of other charges.
I wish SlashDot the best, but I also want to see them around for a while. They have to be more careful than most that they protect themselves legally, and this letter seems unwarrantedly wreckless.
---ZahrGnosis
as you can see from the IRC logs below, we dropped a few clues that the person was in a country with snow and at one point "accidentally" spoke French to imply the province of Quebec. We were amazed when the blame actually landed on someone from Montreal.
The snow reference referrs to the following block of text:
=icee= but WHY do it?
[mafiaboy] snowday
[mafiaboy] haha
And the French referred to a single use of the word "Oui", late in the chat log. Now, the first use of the word "Canada", appears way at the top and comes not from 2600 (mafiaboy), but from *icee*.. again, before 2600 mentions snow or french:
*icee* oh, did you listen to our radio stuff up there in Canada, too?
That's it. The rest of the conversation is harmless, and this portion would be harmless except for the statement that 2600 made implying that these comments helped lead researchers to Canada. Give me a break.
I've got no idea who *icee* is, and 2600's claims that mafiaboy is fake or at least not the right guy are fine with me, but this conversation makes 2600 look less like they have a clue than the FBI who at least are talking about routing logs and web logs and real data. At least I got a laugh out of this:
=icee= okay, we need to solve this trust problem, and prove you are who you say you are..
[mafiaboy] 3090
[mafiaboy] good enough?
Yeah. Good enough. :-P
Well, I was at the DC Protest yesterday, and although it was far from a success as national policy protests go, it was certainly a good step.
The Politicians out here are always accused of being out of touch; doesn't matter if we talk about taxes, immigration, interns, or computers. But the problem is that there have been people around for years lobbying to explain to those politicians what decisions are best and for what reasons. Corporations are used to this, and those that aren't can hire people who are good at it. That's why they get what they want.
Open Source supporters and the swarms of informed geeks on the 'net, on the other hand, don't seem to get the idea... but we're learning. Right now we've got dynamic, vocal members in our ranks, but most of their time is spent preaching to the choir as it were.. Perens, Stallman, and a large portion of the community have a lot to say, but we say it internally. We post messages and articles to places only geeks tread. There was considerable commentary recently that the various states approving creationism teachings over, or on equal footing to darwinism was largely because the people who support creationism were much more supportive of the school system. They attended PTA meetings in much higher percentages and could garner votes even if a much greater percent of the outside community considered their ideas without merit. The same is true with us. We are just now realizing how to play the political game that will shape the future of the 'net. With the example of the DMCA, however, we arrived at the game very late.
Would I do something differently if I had this protest to do over? Almost certainly. We should have talked to the larger (outside the DC-Area) community much earlier to garner wider support. We should have aggressively contacted Senators and Representatives to more alert them to the protest. We should have pursued slightly different permits than we had.
But we've learned this now. We must approach politics as we approach everything else in life. It is a black box. We need it to work a particular way for us to thrive and survive. It responds to inputs (peaceful protests, illustrative letters, defacing government web sites) with predictable responses; some good, some bad. Politicians won't vote favorably for us if we don't tell them what we want and why we want it. And we must accept that we can't expect them to learn our language... we have to learn the language of politics; at least for now.
The press surrounding the DC protest has been generally negative... we can't claim a true victory even if we have biased press (Thanks again, Timothy). But we can't give up either. With the UCITA looming, and new laws threatining the privacy of electronic communications, we must stand up for our rights in arenas other than those we created ourselves.
If someone has a better way to do it; don't criticize our attempt... help us do a better job next time, for there certainly must be a next time.
---Chip