Pardon my ranting, but this issue hits rather close to home.
I'm of the opinion that ADD/ADHD is not a disorder, and should never be "treated". Perhaps having been prescribed various stimulant medicines which shortly turned into an addiction, which in itself transformed into dependency on methamphetamine (which I finally quit in March thanks to Rational Recovery) has influenced me in distrusting chemical treatment, the idea of treatment at all, and, most importantly, the disease model that most people seem to apply to Attention Deficit, but perhaps it is just from having been someone who could very aptly be described as the "Poster Child" for ADD.
Based on the experience of myself and many others, I have come to the conclusion that Attention Deficit is not a disorder inasmuch as it is a different form of thinking and interacting with the world which can have both its downsides and its blessings. We may have trouble in the standard school and work paradigms that most seem to be able to deal with successfully, but we also tend to be very insightful, creative, and interesting folks:)
I always call attention to the fact that many of our greatest minds, a perfect example being Albert Einstein, would today have been diagnosed with ADD, prescribed stimulants, and had the insights that they would have otherwise shared with the world snuffed out and replaced with mindless conformity.
Please consider changing your daughter's school, and adapting her environment to her very special mind, instead of trying to cram a square peg into a round hole and possible damage her intellect forever.
We have confirmed what we already knew, that when using code licensed under the GPL then we have to publish any derivative work. This means that the legal foundation is very thin and there is no place in the world that I know of where the GPL has been tested in court. So from a business perspective I would say that the license is relatively weak. This doesn't change the fundamental spirit in the Open Source community which I think - all in all - is positive. But it is clear that as a commercial company living off selling its product, can not and will not release its proprietary code. It is naturally so that one should not use GPL code in proprietary systems.
Is it just me, or is this an attempt at blatantly copping-out by capitalizing on all the anti-GPL hysteria that has been rampant recently?
The GPL certainly hasn't been tested in court (yet), but that doesn't mean it hasn't been tested. A large number of out-of-court settlements (some of them rather expensive) prove that corporations are willing to respect the license, and that its defenders are willing to enforce compliance.
Cisco was actually sending this book out for free a few months ago, and thanks to somebody's making me aware of this deal I managed to snag a copy.
I'm no network security guy, more just a mundane perl hacker, so most of the chapters were over my head and I'm not really qualified to comment on the contents, but I can at least assert that the book is indeed very comprehensive and well-written, and I liked the diagrams, though I couldn't exactly recall what they were about. My only complaint was that the focus seemed exclusive at times on only securing Cisco equipment, which means that it has a rather narrow focus if one isn't deploying their technologies.
Hopefully some day when some corporation views my over-inflated resume and decides to trust me with their datacenter, I'll remember everything I skipped over in this quality book:)
It's been suggested in nanae that as a brutal display of the efficacy of spam-fighting and, most importantly, blocklisting, major ISPs all simultaenously turn off their spam defenses for a day to show users just how much UCE spew is clogging the internet every day.
Of course, the idea is repeatedly turned down for its utter lack of pragmatism.
But damn, 500 billion spams, and that's only to AOL.
Just imagine.
The instant clogging of mail-servers around the world and subsequent technological disruption might actually get the general computer-using public to take more of an interest in the fact that around 200 gangs of people are effectively raping and pillaging the Internet right under their eyes.
But then again, what can one do when faced with the Tragedy of the Commons?
They're relatively heavy-duty and not too bad-looking, although they could be better.
Re:This pretty interface you see...
on
Xandros version 2
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· Score: 1
That's impressive, I was unaware of the KDE port.
Now if only someone could figure out a way to change OOo's widget background from the default drab gray on OS X. Seems it insists on remaining gray unless KDE/Gnome are running, in which case it assumes their color scheme, but only in those two cases.
Pity, because it's my primary office suite on the Mac.
Being primarily a Mac user and hence a whore for pretty interfaces (or really bare interfaces, like the GNUstep interface I use on my linux box), the first thing that came to mind is that Xandros has done a once-over on KDE almost like Ximian did for Gnome. Their theme isn't quite as lickably pretty as Industrial, but it's close, and it looks like they've certainly managed to at least even with them in terms of integration (well, sans the customized OpenOffice which is one of the key perks of Ximian).
The article also mentioned that to reach this theoretical limit indicated by "fundimental[sic] physics", another material would be needed at some point, as silicon was reaching its limit of viability.
The reason I posted about diamonds is the same reason the researchers quoted mentioned having to seek out alternative materials. Silicon is on its way out. To get to the theoretical 5-nM limit, some other material will be necessary as a conductor, hence diamonds.
Silicon is indeed reachings its limit, and diamonds, due to the properties you noted, may very well be able to extend Moore's law over several decades (perhaps only 2 or 3, but I digress) until this 5-nM limit is reached.
I think several upstarts are soon going to be ready to extend Moore's law for at least another few decades, thanks to diamond semiconductors.
Silicon is, indeed, close to its limit, but that does not mean semiconductors are.
This Wired article, which I'm sure many of you have read, details how new industrially-produced diamonds, thanks to their cheap price and purity (most importantly, being absolutely identical to each other), along with research done by both the government, several corporations, and possibly Intel, may make unbelievably fast systems powered by diamond semiconductors possible.
Some interesting quotes:
But the greatest potential for CVD diamond lies in computing. If diamond is ever to be a practical material for semiconducting, it will need to be affordably grown in large wafers. (The silicon wafers Intel uses, for example, are 1 foot in diameter.) CVD growth is limited only by the size of the seed placed in the Apollo machine. Starting with a square, waferlike fragment, the Linares process will grow the diamond into a prismatic shape, with the top slightly wider than the base. For the past seven years - since Robert Linares first discovered the sweet spot - Apollo has been growing increasingly larger seeds by chopping off the top layer of growth and using that as the starting point for the next batch. At the moment, the company is producing 10-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach an inch square by year's end and 4 inches in five years. The price per carat: about $5.
Also, a rather ironic one from Intel themselves:
Indeed, Intel's top materials executives weren't aware of the latest research breakthroughs when I spoke to them in June, although they certainly understood the potential for diamonds in computing. "Diamonds represent a seismic change in semiconductors," says Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's director of communications circuits research. "It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not about to abandon that."
The problem is knowing when you're dealing with legitimate Javascrypt encryption, and when it may be some malicious code instead (see my post above regarding certification).
Also there's still no way of ensuring that your data, once received on the server-side, will be used properly. That will, as always, come down to an issue of trust between you and the vendor.
The "security blanket" factor
on
Javascrypt
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I had this idea myself, and abandoned it because I realized just how much of a sense of security people get from having that little "lock" in the corner*. Though there are plenty of advantages to a strictly client-side security model, I still wonder how the unwashed ignorati surfing ecommerce sites who have had "MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ENTERED AN ENCRYPTED PAGE" drilled into them will take to this sort of idea.
Then again, if some sort of certification authority could be set up for Javascrypt-ed pages where the user was somehow assured that their data was equally protected as would be over https, then things would be more preferable. However, the byzantine red-tape behind getting a cert is possibly one of the things this technology would do away with best, and it would be a pity to remove such an obvious advantage.
In any case, it's promising, and I hope it is successful.
Funny that my first instinct was to check Snopes, and what do you know but that's the provided link. Shows how patently ridiculous this story seemed at first.
Hasn't this obsession with sanitizing speech become a total farce? What's next? Will we not be able to have male and female ends on our 1/4" audio cable for fear of offending the transgendered? How the hell am I supposed to shop for wires now?
Nuclear Power, despite the cries of environmentalists, is possibly the cleanest mass power source. On a scale of power generated per ton of input material it is incredibly efficient (bested only by those power sources which require no nonrenewable input, like wind/tidal/etc.), generates no effluent or air pollution, and needs only a competent staff (and, unfortunately, security), to stay running properly.
Nuclear plants may be prohibitively expensive to build these days, but if "pebble bed" reactors cost significantly less, then they may lead the way back towards what I view as our ideal energy source.
I am by no means in hell a lawyer, but it seems like IBM is trying to determine whether something much of Slashdot suspects is verifiably true: that some sort of sinister third party (Microsoft comes to mind) is morally and financially behind SCO's actions.
The question is whether a "Microsoft is behind this whole sham" argument will be as well-received in a court room as it has been on Slashdot.
I am so not a lawyer that I don't even know whether it would be admissible.
Or, for that matter, whether my analysis is entirely incorrect.
What's interesting is that while Paul Roberts says charles Ng was "well aware he was acting illegally", opinion on the internet seems to be different. I heard a little bit about the story before, and refreshing my mind with the help of Google rendered this choice post from a message board:
A similar fate has been met by a couple of university students/amatuer hip-hop deejays in Australia.
They ran mp3wmaland.net, which was shut down about half a year ago, and they were prosecuted about three months ago and were jailed. The whole story was rather grim... deejays subpoened at clubs for playing illegal bootlegs, police raids into bedrooms and seizing everything, complete incomprehensibility of the fact they have broken the law and face jail, by the three responsible.
On a final note, I don't think anything really needs to be said about how his paper on "open source software licensing" is somehow evidence of culpability. A hefty roll of the eyes goes out to the genius who thought that up.
I don't have a FireWire 800 drive nor do I use FileVault, so I doubt I'll benefit much from any of the improvements, but it's just too much not to install the latest OS X update.:)
Unfortunately, it hasn't fixed the one bug I've been experiencing so far, which is with certain pop-up menu widgets. If it has a text-entry box and a pop-up widget, the menu will pop up for a split second and then go away, even if I keep the mouse depressed. This does not happen with normal pop-up widgets.
Aren't most COBOL applications deployed on big iron?
I doubt any Microsoft solution could honestly compete with the scalability and reliability of a true mainframe, and it doesn't state anywhere within the article that these.NET solutions will be deployed on big iron; rather, my assumption is that we are dealing with standard x86 server farms running Windows Server.
Anybody who migrates to.NET may find their projects more maintainable (if only because the number of COBOL coders is declining fast), but because of the underlying platform, they'll be introduced to a world of hassles, too, and I doubt businesses with mission-critical applications (like the big banks and insurance companies and what-not currently using COBOL on mainframes) will go for that.
How seriously do you think this will really be taken up? I posit: "not much".
Security failures are beginning to hit Microsoft hard not because of the enterprise, but because of home/personal installations.
Whereas a competent MCSE or IT director will have properly secured a corporation's machines against remote exploits (a properly designed network, even if none of the machines had been patched, should've been able to stay free of worms like Blaster and Welchia, for example), home users have been thrust into the unfortunate situation of running an enterprise OS (anything from the NT family), with no experience on securing it, and often, no knowledge that it needs to be secured at all.
Windows NT-based operating systems listen on so many ports, and are designed so wide open, because they are meant to sit inside a secured corporate network. Though Microsoft's unification of the NT and personal trees of Windows starting with XP gave personal users much of the speed and stability they had been lacking for so long, it also gave them security issues they should not have been expected to deal with.
This is why, though NT-based OSes have had widely publicized security flaws for years, their flaws are now in the spotlight.
Microsoft's recent steps to finally globally disable the Windows Messenger service and enable the firewall by default are a late, but necessary, effort to help bridge this divide.
I wonder if they took into account the possibility of users switching away to another free *NIX.
Assuming they did, that makes it even more clear how much of their attack is focused on the GPL itself. BSD-licensed software may be free, but it can be added to any proprietary system with the sole provision that the copyrights are maintained and there is no warranty of fitness for any particular purpose. True "free software" is obviously what scares SCO and their puppet masters.
That's assuming they considered that possibility. Knowing how out-of-touch SCO's executives have proven themselves to be, there's a good chance they didn't.
Nice to see some confirmation finally that SCO is not in the business of selling software, and has only the destruction of Linux as its objective.
This should clear the air a bit and help wake up those poor souls who still think that the SCO Group is some sort of software company, and not a lawsuit factory with a worthless, deprecated UNIX implementation on hand that they're not even developing to any useful degree any more.
And on the speculative front, I'll refuse to be 100% sure that Microsoft and/or Sun are behind SCO's actions until I see some sort of paper trail, but this makes me sure enough.
These folks are some of the same great people who are supposed to be working for you anyway, plus a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.
Though it's a parody and I generally try to take those lightly, he's made one critical error that really stands out in his assertion that free software is the domain of hackers/tinkerers/students, etc. I think Howard Strauss ought to be informed of the billions of dollars being invested in free software development by major corporations, many of whom have salaried and talented employees developing such applications. His condescending attitude towards the talented programmers who have created so much of the infrastructure the Internet depends on (Linux, BSD, Apache, MySQL anyone?) is a bit infuriating, to say the least.
On another note, what is responsible for the recent surge of anti-free software propaganda? I'm sure that some could present a viable argument that nefarious sources (SCO/Microsoft/whoever) are essentially astroturfing on a media-wide scale (not like they haven't done it before), but things like this, plus the Forbes article and other critiqued rants that have been posted on Slashdot before, have me a bit worried about how the worldwide computer-using community is perceiving free software, especially when peoples' critiques contain such glaring factual errors as this particular one does.
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon my ranting, but this issue hits rather close to home.
:)
I'm of the opinion that ADD/ADHD is not a disorder, and should never be "treated". Perhaps having been prescribed various stimulant medicines which shortly turned into an addiction, which in itself transformed into dependency on methamphetamine (which I finally quit in March thanks to Rational Recovery) has influenced me in distrusting chemical treatment, the idea of treatment at all, and, most importantly, the disease model that most people seem to apply to Attention Deficit, but perhaps it is just from having been someone who could very aptly be described as the "Poster Child" for ADD.
Based on the experience of myself and many others, I have come to the conclusion that Attention Deficit is not a disorder inasmuch as it is a different form of thinking and interacting with the world which can have both its downsides and its blessings. We may have trouble in the standard school and work paradigms that most seem to be able to deal with successfully, but we also tend to be very insightful, creative, and interesting folks
I always call attention to the fact that many of our greatest minds, a perfect example being Albert Einstein, would today have been diagnosed with ADD, prescribed stimulants, and had the insights that they would have otherwise shared with the world snuffed out and replaced with mindless conformity.
Please consider changing your daughter's school, and adapting her environment to her very special mind, instead of trying to cram a square peg into a round hole and possible damage her intellect forever.
Is it just me, or is this an attempt at blatantly copping-out by capitalizing on all the anti-GPL hysteria that has been rampant recently?
The GPL certainly hasn't been tested in court (yet), but that doesn't mean it hasn't been tested. A large number of out-of-court settlements (some of them rather expensive) prove that corporations are willing to respect the license, and that its defenders are willing to enforce compliance.
Cisco was actually sending this book out for free a few months ago, and thanks to somebody's making me aware of this deal I managed to snag a copy.
:)
I'm no network security guy, more just a mundane perl hacker, so most of the chapters were over my head and I'm not really qualified to comment on the contents, but I can at least assert that the book is indeed very comprehensive and well-written, and I liked the diagrams, though I couldn't exactly recall what they were about. My only complaint was that the focus seemed exclusive at times on only securing Cisco equipment, which means that it has a rather narrow focus if one isn't deploying their technologies.
Hopefully some day when some corporation views my over-inflated resume and decides to trust me with their datacenter, I'll remember everything I skipped over in this quality book
It's been suggested in nanae that as a brutal display of the efficacy of spam-fighting and, most importantly, blocklisting, major ISPs all simultaenously turn off their spam defenses for a day to show users just how much UCE spew is clogging the internet every day.
Of course, the idea is repeatedly turned down for its utter lack of pragmatism.
But damn, 500 billion spams, and that's only to AOL.
Just imagine.
The instant clogging of mail-servers around the world and subsequent technological disruption might actually get the general computer-using public to take more of an interest in the fact that around 200 gangs of people are effectively raping and pillaging the Internet right under their eyes.
But then again, what can one do when faced with the Tragedy of the Commons?
I'm a big fan of the cases from Willow Design.
They're relatively heavy-duty and not too bad-looking, although they could be better.
That's impressive, I was unaware of the KDE port.
Now if only someone could figure out a way to change OOo's widget background from the default drab gray on OS X. Seems it insists on remaining gray unless KDE/Gnome are running, in which case it assumes their color scheme, but only in those two cases.
Pity, because it's my primary office suite on the Mac.
Being primarily a Mac user and hence a whore for pretty interfaces (or really bare interfaces, like the GNUstep interface I use on my linux box), the first thing that came to mind is that Xandros has done a once-over on KDE almost like Ximian did for Gnome. Their theme isn't quite as lickably pretty as Industrial, but it's close, and it looks like they've certainly managed to at least even with them in terms of integration (well, sans the customized OpenOffice which is one of the key perks of Ximian).
The article also mentioned that to reach this theoretical limit indicated by "fundimental[sic] physics", another material would be needed at some point, as silicon was reaching its limit of viability.
Hence, diamonds.
I read the article.
The reason I posted about diamonds is the same reason the researchers quoted mentioned having to seek out alternative materials. Silicon is on its way out. To get to the theoretical 5-nM limit, some other material will be necessary as a conductor, hence diamonds.
Silicon is indeed reachings its limit, and diamonds, due to the properties you noted, may very well be able to extend Moore's law over several decades (perhaps only 2 or 3, but I digress) until this 5-nM limit is reached.
Touche, sir.
Silicon is, indeed, close to its limit, but that does not mean semiconductors are.
This Wired article, which I'm sure many of you have read, details how new industrially-produced diamonds, thanks to their cheap price and purity (most importantly, being absolutely identical to each other), along with research done by both the government, several corporations, and possibly Intel, may make unbelievably fast systems powered by diamond semiconductors possible.
Some interesting quotes:
Also, a rather ironic one from Intel themselves:
Silicon is dead. Long live diamonds!
The encryption is suitably strong.
The problem is knowing when you're dealing with legitimate Javascrypt encryption, and when it may be some malicious code instead (see my post above regarding certification).
Also there's still no way of ensuring that your data, once received on the server-side, will be used properly. That will, as always, come down to an issue of trust between you and the vendor.
I had this idea myself, and abandoned it because I realized just how much of a sense of security people get from having that little "lock" in the corner*. Though there are plenty of advantages to a strictly client-side security model, I still wonder how the unwashed ignorati surfing ecommerce sites who have had "MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ENTERED AN ENCRYPTED PAGE" drilled into them will take to this sort of idea.
Then again, if some sort of certification authority could be set up for Javascrypt-ed pages where the user was somehow assured that their data was equally protected as would be over https, then things would be more preferable. However, the byzantine red-tape behind getting a cert is possibly one of the things this technology would do away with best, and it would be a pity to remove such an obvious advantage.
In any case, it's promising, and I hope it is successful.
___________________
*also I am a poor coder
Funny that my first instinct was to check Snopes, and what do you know but that's the provided link. Shows how patently ridiculous this story seemed at first.
Hasn't this obsession with sanitizing speech become a total farce? What's next? Will we not be able to have male and female ends on our 1/4" audio cable for fear of offending the transgendered? How the hell am I supposed to shop for wires now?
I applaud this kind of work.
Nuclear Power, despite the cries of environmentalists, is possibly the cleanest mass power source. On a scale of power generated per ton of input material it is incredibly efficient (bested only by those power sources which require no nonrenewable input, like wind/tidal/etc.), generates no effluent or air pollution, and needs only a competent staff (and, unfortunately, security), to stay running properly.
Nuclear plants may be prohibitively expensive to build these days, but if "pebble bed" reactors cost significantly less, then they may lead the way back towards what I view as our ideal energy source.
It's time to give nuclear a second chance.
I am by no means in hell a lawyer, but it seems like IBM is trying to determine whether something much of Slashdot suspects is verifiably true: that some sort of sinister third party (Microsoft comes to mind) is morally and financially behind SCO's actions.
The question is whether a "Microsoft is behind this whole sham" argument will be as well-received in a court room as it has been on Slashdot.
I am so not a lawyer that I don't even know whether it would be admissible.
Or, for that matter, whether my analysis is entirely incorrect.
That's a damn good point and I wish I had considered it. :\
On a final note, I don't think anything really needs to be said about how his paper on "open source software licensing" is somehow evidence of culpability. A hefty roll of the eyes goes out to the genius who thought that up.
I don't have a FireWire 800 drive nor do I use FileVault, so I doubt I'll benefit much from any of the improvements, but it's just too much not to install the latest OS X update. :)
Unfortunately, it hasn't fixed the one bug I've been experiencing so far, which is with certain pop-up menu widgets. If it has a text-entry box and a pop-up widget, the menu will pop up for a split second and then go away, even if I keep the mouse depressed. This does not happen with normal pop-up widgets.
Odd.
I just wanted to say I think you have the right idea, and there are definitely movements in this direction.
Aren't most COBOL applications deployed on big iron?
.NET solutions will be deployed on big iron; rather, my assumption is that we are dealing with standard x86 server farms running Windows Server.
.NET may find their projects more maintainable (if only because the number of COBOL coders is declining fast), but because of the underlying platform, they'll be introduced to a world of hassles, too, and I doubt businesses with mission-critical applications (like the big banks and insurance companies and what-not currently using COBOL on mainframes) will go for that.
I doubt any Microsoft solution could honestly compete with the scalability and reliability of a true mainframe, and it doesn't state anywhere within the article that these
Anybody who migrates to
How seriously do you think this will really be taken up? I posit: "not much".
Security failures are beginning to hit Microsoft hard not because of the enterprise, but because of home/personal installations.
Whereas a competent MCSE or IT director will have properly secured a corporation's machines against remote exploits (a properly designed network, even if none of the machines had been patched, should've been able to stay free of worms like Blaster and Welchia, for example), home users have been thrust into the unfortunate situation of running an enterprise OS (anything from the NT family), with no experience on securing it, and often, no knowledge that it needs to be secured at all.
Windows NT-based operating systems listen on so many ports, and are designed so wide open, because they are meant to sit inside a secured corporate network. Though Microsoft's unification of the NT and personal trees of Windows starting with XP gave personal users much of the speed and stability they had been lacking for so long, it also gave them security issues they should not have been expected to deal with.
This is why, though NT-based OSes have had widely publicized security flaws for years, their flaws are now in the spotlight.
Microsoft's recent steps to finally globally disable the Windows Messenger service and enable the firewall by default are a late, but necessary, effort to help bridge this divide.
SCO seems to have refined the art of making others' cases for them.
Everyone's except for their own, it seems.
I wonder if they took into account the possibility of users switching away to another free *NIX.
Assuming they did, that makes it even more clear how much of their attack is focused on the GPL itself. BSD-licensed software may be free, but it can be added to any proprietary system with the sole provision that the copyrights are maintained and there is no warranty of fitness for any particular purpose. True "free software" is obviously what scares SCO and their puppet masters.
That's assuming they considered that possibility. Knowing how out-of-touch SCO's executives have proven themselves to be, there's a good chance they didn't.
Nice to see some confirmation finally that SCO is not in the business of selling software, and has only the destruction of Linux as its objective.
This should clear the air a bit and help wake up those poor souls who still think that the SCO Group is some sort of software company, and not a lawsuit factory with a worthless, deprecated UNIX implementation on hand that they're not even developing to any useful degree any more.
And on the speculative front, I'll refuse to be 100% sure that Microsoft and/or Sun are behind SCO's actions until I see some sort of paper trail, but this makes me sure enough.
Though it's a parody and I generally try to take those lightly, he's made one critical error that really stands out in his assertion that free software is the domain of hackers/tinkerers/students, etc. I think Howard Strauss ought to be informed of the billions of dollars being invested in free software development by major corporations, many of whom have salaried and talented employees developing such applications. His condescending attitude towards the talented programmers who have created so much of the infrastructure the Internet depends on (Linux, BSD, Apache, MySQL anyone?) is a bit infuriating, to say the least.
On another note, what is responsible for the recent surge of anti-free software propaganda? I'm sure that some could present a viable argument that nefarious sources (SCO/Microsoft/whoever) are essentially astroturfing on a media-wide scale (not like they haven't done it before), but things like this, plus the Forbes article and other critiqued rants that have been posted on Slashdot before, have me a bit worried about how the worldwide computer-using community is perceiving free software, especially when peoples' critiques contain such glaring factual errors as this particular one does.