So, if I buy a fake passport on a street corner and then use it enter Germany, did I just "crack" Germany's security
Yes.
and can I get my picture on Slashdot?
No, because there is no particular expectation that German security is any better than that of, say, France or the US. European nations don't have a lot of security along their borders with other Western nations. So, it isn't hard for an American to enter Germany, France, or the UK illegally.
However, there is a natural expectation that security experts have better security at their own conferences than the annual conference of, say, Flower Arrangers of America.
It may have started out as "a kludgy workaround" but it will finish its life very soon in an approved amendment to 802.11 as a well-engineered replacement for WEP that offers a full range of strengths
I dispute that it is "well-engineered". And "very soon" is a pretty relative term: even plain 802.1x isn't widely deployed yet.
I'd really like to hear an explanation for why we should think that WPA2 with AES and EAPOL should be regarded as an insufficiently strong cryptographic protocol.
I didn't claim that you should think of it that way. You should think of it, however, as an unnecessarily complicated protocol that is not even deployed yet.
Besides, you kind of got the security question backwards. The real question to ask is: how can the WPA/WPA2 proponents demonstrate that their system is, in fact, secure?
China needs no justification to go down any road it wants. It already has the mandate of Heaven.
Actually, you act like you think the IEEE has the mandate of Heaven.
Your analogy is completely wrong. When you litter and get a $50 fine, that is for past misconduct. If you litter again and are observed again, you will get another $50 fine. Furthermore, fines don't go to private companies. And anti-litter laws are a choice that we all make as a community.
You don't get fined $50 preemptively because there is a presumption that you will litter.
These taxes, however, are charged indiscriminately, whether or not I have actually pirated anything. The justification for them is a business justification and their proceeds go to private companies.
If the government forces me to pay $100/year to some commercial recording or music outfit, I certainly feel morally justified in getting my money's worth by actually copying that much music. After all, the justification for transferring that money to that company is that they assume that I'm doing it anyway. Whether I can legally do so is another question.
The Wi-Fi Alliance has already greatly improved upon WEP with Wireless Protected Access (WPA). WPA is based on an earlier draft of the emerging 802.11i amendment.
The idea behind WEP was a good one: standardize the crypto and put it in hardware. WPA started as a kludgy workaround, however, to try and turn a weak crypto designed fixed into hardware into something with some degree of security. It was an acceptable (and trivially obvious) workaround, but enshrining it as a standard and principled security solution is going too far.
China is completely justified in not going down that road: why should they be saddled with the complexities of WPA if they don't have a large installed base? And why should they trust the IEEE to get it right this time?
WPA is already an adequate security protocol for many installations, so the complaint about WEP is irrelevant.
WPA requires hardware or software upgrades that are beyond the means of most WiFi users. Since people have to replace their hardware or software anyway, they might as well replace it with something decent.
So the IEEE is correct to be concerned, and we should hope that China and the IEEE can reach a compromise.
The IEEE is concerned about their credibility and the economic well-being of their big corporate partners. And they should be: they screwed up big time and they are trying to avoid paying the price.
Actually, what the WEP-vendors should be concerned about is a class-action lawsuit. They promised "Wired-Equivalent Privacy" and failed to deliver. I suspect a big part of pushing for WAP is also simply to try to avoid liability.
Hypertext has been used commercially for building local applications at least since Hypercard in the 1980's. The Web really evolved out of such local applications by adding network retrieval and addressability of hypertext.
That is, the use of hypertext and scripts for building local applications preceded the web and was the historical foundation for it. It's ironic (and stupid) that Microsoft is going back in 1999 to try to patent the precursor to the web from the 1980's. Anybody who works as a developer or inventor in hypertext systems should have at least a passing familiarity with the history of the field. I think it demonstrates that the people at Microsoft who wrote this patent don't even know the basics of their profession.
Note, incidentally, that you have been able to use HTML and JavaScript for building "trusted" applications on your local machine for many years, depending on your browser, so this is nothing new even as far as HTML specifically is concerned. Hypertext with embedded widgets and scripting has also been widely used for building local applications with the Tcl/Tk toolkit.
The least expensive digital SLR I've seen is I think ~$800.
SLRs are a necessary evil for film-based cameras because of the idiosyncracies of film. For digital cameras, the SLR design makes much less sense. A non-SLR digital camera will easily give you a bright, sharp 28-110mm zoom. So, just get a 5 Mpixel camera with a good lens and don't worry about SLRs for digital.
The difference then is about 50 rolls of film. I don't think I've shot that many in my life.
If you haven't, you should. And digital makes it possible. Anybody serious about photography can easily go through that within a few days.
Remember to think to your future, Do you want to be Re-Buying the lenses you have when you want to get a new body,
It really doesn't make such a big difference. Lenses in reasonable condition have decent resale value, so switching systems isn't all that expensive.
Dont go and buy a canon with hopes of buying a Nikon in the future...
Yes, that would be foolish, in particular since Canon has such a nice range of lenses.
If you get slow glass you will really be frustrated with having to search out something to steady your camera on in low light.
That alone is a good reason to go digital. Something like the Sony DSC cameras give you the equivalent of a 35-200mm f2.0-2.4 Carl Zeiss zoom with outstanding quality. Film-based cameras can't even get close.
Actually, it makes little difference either way. Both with manual and with automatic cameras, you need to set focus and exposure ahead of time for being able to take pictures quickly. For manual, you fiddle with dial, for automatic, you use the focus lock and exposure lock buttons. The principle and the result is pretty much the same.
That is the best reason to go with film. When it takes time to see your results, you learn better to pre-visualize. [...] There is value in the 'inconvenience of film.'
Whatever you want to "pre-visualize" you can still do as an exercise. If you want to learn to walk blind, you don't have to poke your eyes out, a blindfold will do. In different words, if you want to do that exercise, just turn off the LCD and/or review function on the digital camera.
In any case, the preview you get with a digital camera is pretty close to what a MF waist level finder gives you anyway. Do you think MF cameras are bad cameras for the same reason? I don't think so.
The IEEE is worried that this may lead to the need to support two different standards in wireless networking hardware."
That concern is entirely unjustified: 802.11 currently doesn't have any meaningful security. So, there won't be "two different standards", there will be just one: the Chinese one. Let's hope it catches on.
The IEEE should bow its head in shame--802.11's WEP was a complete fiasco and an embarrassment to engineering profession.
"critical mass"? It almost looks like your statement just shows you don't know the first thing about it.
Fission reactors contain enough fissionable material to sustain a chain reaction. Hence, they contain a critical mass of fissionable material, just like nuclear bombs.
You don't get energy from nuclear reactions by catching stray background radiation coming off the material after all...
No, you don't. So, why do you make such a silly statement? My statement was about politics, not technology.
Lifting devices into space with large amounts of fissionable material sets a political and international precedent, a precedent that we may not want to set yet.
Uranium isn't such a big deal, but there are other concerns besides the probe crashing. So far, I believe, nobody has lifted (or at least admitted to lifting) a critical mass of fissionable material into orbit or beyond. This would change all that. Is that a step we want to take now? How would you feel if China wanted to do this? What about Iran?
But the interior of Europa has a good chance of being almost completely free of radioactive elements, and there is no great cosmic stirrer that ensures that any crashing probe is uniformly distributed throughout the ocean.
Radioactive contamination from the probe is a much smaller concern than biological contamination. But the bottom line is: the probe should not crash on Europa. In fact, it's not even clear whether we want to land there just yet; a detailed round of orbital observations and tests may still be in order before landing.
Environmentalists have been concerned about Plutonium-based reactors, which is a lot more hazardous than Uranium.
However, there is the political question whether we want to endorse the use of large quantities of radioactive materials and fission reactors in space and whether we want to do so now. You can bet that the US military, the US nuclear industry, and US defense contractors are itching to deploy that kind of technology widely.
But ask yourself this: how would you feel about Japan putting a fission reactor into space? What about China? What about Iran? If the US does this for peaceful purposes, who else will claim the right to do it as well?
In any case, unlike terrestrial uses of fission, at least we don't have to worry too much about what happens to the nuclear waste.
In terms of quality and performance, you can't go wrong with the name brands. Even the cheapest SLR zooms from Nikon and Canon are decent, and the fixed focal length lenses are almost uniformly excellent.
The real question is: why bother with film? Photography is about content and composition, and you can learn that much better with digital: you get immediate feedback and much easier handling. Traditionally, photographers had to spend a lot of time on film and chemistry before they got to the real stuff because they didn't have a choice. These days, you do.
My recommendation: get yourself a nice 5+ Mpixel digital camera and learn about content and composition. Don't even bother with digital SLRs--they are unnecessarily bulky, cumbersome, and offer little advantage. But you should pick a camera which goes out to 28mm equivalent at the wide angle.
If you later still feel that you like the "look" of film, you can then spend a couple of years learning all its idiosyncracies. Frankly, after 20 years of film photography, I'm glad to resign it to the dustbin of history, alongside vinyl records, mechanical typewriters, and library card catalogs.
Modern photography is about as much about manual exposure and film as modern computer science and software engineering are about assembly language programming. Yes, you could spend years becoming an assembly language jockey, but the skill isn't all that useful.
Digital imaging is great for learning photography: it lets students concentrate on composition and content and it gives them immediate feedback.
Furthermore, automatic exposure is a fact of life: whether it is better or worse than manual exposure, you have to learn how to use it effectively. And using automatic exposure correctly is just about as hard as using manual exposure correctly.
So, I think people should start learning photography with digital cameras because it lets them concentrate on the stuff that photography is really all about: content, not gadgets or chemistry. If they later want to start using film, they can pick up its intricacies and idiosyncracies then.
Thousands of dot-com millionaire wannabes in Silicon Valley were in the same situation when their stock became worthless, owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the IRS, hundreds of thousands of dollars to creditors, and losing their million dollar homes. The ATF didn't go out and laid siege to any of them.
A quarter of a million dollars in unpaid bills is peanuts these days, and lots of people squat on land they don't own. It's generally up to the creditors and the land owners to try to enforce their rights themselves.
"The forking of open-source projects occurs when passionate disputes between open-source software developers over product design lead to the splintering of projects into a multitude of varieties.
While many people try to fork projects, those forks only become significant if they fulfill some need. Otherwise, the forked project won't attract the necessary developer base and they will slowly go away.
Forking is an essential part of open source development and it is what gives it strength. Forking protects projects against decisions by the developers that are in their commercial interests but against the interests of users. And forking protects projects against corporate stupidity.
As an example, consider Sun Java. If it was open sourced, it would fork in an instance into a bunch of different, incompatible versions. But the only the best of those versions would survive and become the de-facto standard, and it would almost certainly not be Sun's version. The fact that Java is proprietary means that Sun can keep following blind alleys, no matter what the market actually wants.
The ability to fork is the whole point of open source. It results in lower TCO in the long run because it ensure that systems can always improve and that systems are built in response to the needs of users. You can't have perfect backwards compatibility and innovation--it is logically impossible. OSS gives you exactly the tradeoff between the two that is good for users.
In different words, Sauer just doesn't understand open source.
What I expect as a result of this move by Sun is to provide better interaction between Java and the underlying hardware OS, such as some of the projects to enable control of USB devices directly within Java.
Microsoft VB.NET also interacts well with the "underlying hardware OS", but that doesn't make me want to run out and buy it.
What is Microsoft.NET but a complete and utter endorsement of Sun's vision?
It absolutely is not. Sun's vision is a cross-platform, write-once, run everywhere environment..NET is not. And between the two,.NET got it right, while Sun got it wrong.
Why not go straight to the source of leadership?
Surely you are joking.
Sun is earning people's trust at the same time Microsoft is destroying it, signifying a changing of the guard in terms of overall leadership in the industry.
Oh, how is Sun earning people's trusts? By promising to submit Java to standards bodies and then withdrawing it? By claiming that anybody who as much as looks at Java source code or specifications is creating derived workds? By filing patents on Java technologies like there is no tomorrow?
And, if anything, the Internet weeds out closed technologies.
And the Internet has largely weeded out Java, which is now just leading a shadowy existence as a specialized server-side language.
The fact that Java is one of the most commonly referenced "Internet technologies" speaks for itself.
yes...biding their time with their video technology. "We'll release this in a few years!"
And your point is what? Plenty of manufacturers could produce 3D graphics cards with technology from a couple of years ago. That is still better than depending on nVidia's and ATI's bogus Linux drivers that cause constant headaches, provided you can get them to work at all.
Actually, the Java language itself is undergoing a bit of a rebirth at Universities. It's become the language of choice instead of C/C++ for intro- to intermediate-level CS courses.
You can see how far educational usage got Pascal, Algol, and Scheme in the market.
It's largely written with Java (proving for once and for all that there's no inherent performance gap for Java applications) and makes good use of the integrated Java support in JDS.
That tells you nothing about Java performance. The performance critical portions of Java3D and the operating system's 3D drivers are written in C and assembly language. Even JavaScript and VRML manage to render 3D scenes fast.
At one level it provides a 3D windowing environment for existing X applications (interesting enough in its own right), but at another it introduces the ability to create 3D applications where you interact spatially to explore data. In the demo video (starts a little way in, persist or fast-forward;-) you can see the CD selector from the screen-shot to the right in action, and I can imagine all the other experimental 3D apps I've enjoyed using (photo gallery browsers, SQL database explorers with 3D visualisation, etc.) finally making it to the real world.
3D data visualization is an old hat, as are 3D user interfaces and mapping 2D window systems (including X11) onto 3D surfaces. There are even a bunch of open source projects around, including 3dwm.
What if windows were translucent so you could see the multiple windows you're working on at the same time? What if you could tack a note to yourself right on the Web page you're viewing? What if your CD or movie database became a 3D jukebox, where titles were joined with images to make finding what you want easier than ever?
Translucent windows have been done many times, as have annotations. 3D representations of physical objects as user interface metaphors have been done numerous times (and those kinds of interfaces generally belong into the Interface Hall of Shame), and "titles" can already be "joined with images" in some MP3 players, including Windows Media Player.
Sun Microsystems' latest innovations by its Advanced Software Technology Team will make the above scenarios a reality for the desktop of the near future.
There is nothing wrong with tinkering with old ideas and trying to integrate them into a nice system. But, people shouldn't repeat old mistakes and they should give credit to the people who came before.
Referring to such tired old ideas as "innovation" either means that Sun is ignorant or that they are deliberately misrepresenting their work.
but maybe you should re-evaluate your argument about broken network filesystems. Solaris was serving out nfs when linux was still just a twinkle in Linus's eye, and still does it way better.
It doesn't matter how well Sun serves NFS because the NFS protocol itself is broken: it manages to be, at the same time, inefficient, difficult to implement, unsecure, and unreliable. Don't get me wrong: it was a great first attempt at a network file system, but it should have been replaced within a couple of years because its shortcomings were painfully obvious to anybody who tried to deploy or extend it.
NFSv4 may finally fix some of those problems, but it is effectively a different system. And, frankly, we can do better than NFSv4 these days.
Unfortunately, WalMart is already shipping Linux, so Sun really is driving a smaller Linux vendor out of one of their biggest markets. That's not good.
As soon as Linux scales well to 128+ CPUs with full binary compatibility (no recompile) and has hot swap CPU/MEMROY/Motherboard support.
If Sun wants the "128+ CPU full binary compatibility hot swap market" all to themselves, let them have it; those machines are so disproportionately expensive that the market is tiny.
On my desktop and in my server rack, I don't have a 128+ CPU machines, nor does my hardware support hot swapping of anything other than USB and FireWire. Whether Linux does or doesn't support the other stuff makes no difference to me or to 99.9% of the market.
People who think that Solaris must suck becuase it lacks a cool interface are missing the point.
Solaris sucks because its system software sucks: substandard command line utilities, bloated kernel, broken network file system, and lousy package management, to name just a few. And, yes, its lack of a "cool" interface is another problem: people put up with that when Sun workstations were the only (affordable) game in town (and they still usually installed GNU and X11), but the world has changed and Sun has failed to keep up.
Sun has gone from a provider of inexpensive, open, simple desktop workstations to some kind of esotheric high-end vendor catering the the datacenter needs of Fortune 500 companies. Nice for them, but that's a niche market. Telling everybody that they need Solaris makes about as much sense as telling everybody that they need to run IBM's mainframe operating systems on their desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if I buy a fake passport on a street corner and then use it enter Germany, did I just "crack" Germany's security
Yes.
and can I get my picture on Slashdot?
No, because there is no particular expectation that German security is any better than that of, say, France or the US. European nations don't have a lot of security along their borders with other Western nations. So, it isn't hard for an American to enter Germany, France, or the UK illegally.
However, there is a natural expectation that security experts have better security at their own conferences than the annual conference of, say, Flower Arrangers of America.
It may have started out as "a kludgy workaround" but it will finish its life very soon in an approved amendment to 802.11 as a well-engineered replacement for WEP that offers a full range of strengths
I dispute that it is "well-engineered". And "very soon" is a pretty relative term: even plain 802.1x isn't widely deployed yet.
I'd really like to hear an explanation for why we should think that WPA2 with AES and EAPOL should be regarded as an insufficiently strong cryptographic protocol.
I didn't claim that you should think of it that way. You should think of it, however, as an unnecessarily complicated protocol that is not even deployed yet.
Besides, you kind of got the security question backwards. The real question to ask is: how can the WPA/WPA2 proponents demonstrate that their system is, in fact, secure?
China needs no justification to go down any road it wants. It already has the mandate of Heaven.
Actually, you act like you think the IEEE has the mandate of Heaven.
Your analogy is completely wrong. When you litter and get a $50 fine, that is for past misconduct. If you litter again and are observed again, you will get another $50 fine. Furthermore, fines don't go to private companies. And anti-litter laws are a choice that we all make as a community.
You don't get fined $50 preemptively because there is a presumption that you will litter.
These taxes, however, are charged indiscriminately, whether or not I have actually pirated anything. The justification for them is a business justification and their proceeds go to private companies.
If the government forces me to pay $100/year to some commercial recording or music outfit, I certainly feel morally justified in getting my money's worth by actually copying that much music. After all, the justification for transferring that money to that company is that they assume that I'm doing it anyway. Whether I can legally do so is another question.
The Wi-Fi Alliance has already greatly improved upon WEP with Wireless Protected Access (WPA). WPA is based on an earlier draft of the emerging 802.11i amendment.
The idea behind WEP was a good one: standardize the crypto and put it in hardware. WPA started as a kludgy workaround, however, to try and turn a weak crypto designed fixed into hardware into something with some degree of security. It was an acceptable (and trivially obvious) workaround, but enshrining it as a standard and principled security solution is going too far.
China is completely justified in not going down that road: why should they be saddled with the complexities of WPA if they don't have a large installed base? And why should they trust the IEEE to get it right this time?
WPA is already an adequate security protocol for many installations, so the complaint about WEP is irrelevant.
WPA requires hardware or software upgrades that are beyond the means of most WiFi users. Since people have to replace their hardware or software anyway, they might as well replace it with something decent.
So the IEEE is correct to be concerned, and we should hope that China and the IEEE can reach a compromise.
The IEEE is concerned about their credibility and the economic well-being of their big corporate partners. And they should be: they screwed up big time and they are trying to avoid paying the price.
Actually, what the WEP-vendors should be concerned about is a class-action lawsuit. They promised "Wired-Equivalent Privacy" and failed to deliver. I suspect a big part of pushing for WAP is also simply to try to avoid liability.
Hypertext has been used commercially for building local applications at least since Hypercard in the 1980's. The Web really evolved out of such local applications by adding network retrieval and addressability of hypertext.
That is, the use of hypertext and scripts for building local applications preceded the web and was the historical foundation for it. It's ironic (and stupid) that Microsoft is going back in 1999 to try to patent the precursor to the web from the 1980's. Anybody who works as a developer or inventor in hypertext systems should have at least a passing familiarity with the history of the field. I think it demonstrates that the people at Microsoft who wrote this patent don't even know the basics of their profession.
Note, incidentally, that you have been able to use HTML and JavaScript for building "trusted" applications on your local machine for many years, depending on your browser, so this is nothing new even as far as HTML specifically is concerned. Hypertext with embedded widgets and scripting has also been widely used for building local applications with the Tcl/Tk toolkit.
The least expensive digital SLR I've seen is I think ~$800.
SLRs are a necessary evil for film-based cameras because of the idiosyncracies of film. For digital cameras, the SLR design makes much less sense. A non-SLR digital camera will easily give you a bright, sharp 28-110mm zoom. So, just get a 5 Mpixel camera with a good lens and don't worry about SLRs for digital.
The difference then is about 50 rolls of film. I don't think I've shot that many in my life.
If you haven't, you should. And digital makes it possible. Anybody serious about photography can easily go through that within a few days.
Remember to think to your future, Do you want to be Re-Buying the lenses you have when you want to get a new body,
It really doesn't make such a big difference. Lenses in reasonable condition have decent resale value, so switching systems isn't all that expensive.
Dont go and buy a canon with hopes of buying a Nikon in the future...
Yes, that would be foolish, in particular since Canon has such a nice range of lenses.
If you get slow glass you will really be frustrated with having to search out something to steady your camera on in low light.
That alone is a good reason to go digital. Something like the Sony DSC cameras give you the equivalent of a 35-200mm f2.0-2.4 Carl Zeiss zoom with outstanding quality. Film-based cameras can't even get close.
Actually, it makes little difference either way. Both with manual and with automatic cameras, you need to set focus and exposure ahead of time for being able to take pictures quickly. For manual, you fiddle with dial, for automatic, you use the focus lock and exposure lock buttons. The principle and the result is pretty much the same.
That is the best reason to go with film. When it takes time to see your results, you learn better to pre-visualize. [...] There is value in the 'inconvenience of film.'
Whatever you want to "pre-visualize" you can still do as an exercise. If you want to learn to walk blind, you don't have to poke your eyes out, a blindfold will do. In different words, if you want to do that exercise, just turn off the LCD and/or review function on the digital camera.
In any case, the preview you get with a digital camera is pretty close to what a MF waist level finder gives you anyway. Do you think MF cameras are bad cameras for the same reason? I don't think so.
The IEEE is worried that this may lead to the need to support two different standards in wireless networking hardware."
That concern is entirely unjustified: 802.11 currently doesn't have any meaningful security. So, there won't be "two different standards", there will be just one: the Chinese one. Let's hope it catches on.
The IEEE should bow its head in shame--802.11's WEP was a complete fiasco and an embarrassment to engineering profession.
"critical mass"? It almost looks like your statement just shows you don't know the first thing about it.
Fission reactors contain enough fissionable material to sustain a chain reaction. Hence, they contain a critical mass of fissionable material, just like nuclear bombs.
You don't get energy from nuclear reactions by catching stray background radiation coming off the material after all...
No, you don't. So, why do you make such a silly statement? My statement was about politics, not technology.
Lifting devices into space with large amounts of fissionable material sets a political and international precedent, a precedent that we may not want to set yet.
Uranium isn't such a big deal, but there are other concerns besides the probe crashing. So far, I believe, nobody has lifted (or at least admitted to lifting) a critical mass of fissionable material into orbit or beyond. This would change all that. Is that a step we want to take now? How would you feel if China wanted to do this? What about Iran?
But the interior of Europa has a good chance of being almost completely free of radioactive elements, and there is no great cosmic stirrer that ensures that any crashing probe is uniformly distributed throughout the ocean.
Radioactive contamination from the probe is a much smaller concern than biological contamination. But the bottom line is: the probe should not crash on Europa. In fact, it's not even clear whether we want to land there just yet; a detailed round of orbital observations and tests may still be in order before landing.
Environmentalists have been concerned about Plutonium-based reactors, which is a lot more hazardous than Uranium.
However, there is the political question whether we want to endorse the use of large quantities of radioactive materials and fission reactors in space and whether we want to do so now. You can bet that the US military, the US nuclear industry, and US defense contractors are itching to deploy that kind of technology widely.
But ask yourself this: how would you feel about Japan putting a fission reactor into space? What about China? What about Iran? If the US does this for peaceful purposes, who else will claim the right to do it as well?
In any case, unlike terrestrial uses of fission, at least we don't have to worry too much about what happens to the nuclear waste.
In terms of quality and performance, you can't go wrong with the name brands. Even the cheapest SLR zooms from Nikon and Canon are decent, and the fixed focal length lenses are almost uniformly excellent.
The real question is: why bother with film? Photography is about content and composition, and you can learn that much better with digital: you get immediate feedback and much easier handling. Traditionally, photographers had to spend a lot of time on film and chemistry before they got to the real stuff because they didn't have a choice. These days, you do.
My recommendation: get yourself a nice 5+ Mpixel digital camera and learn about content and composition. Don't even bother with digital SLRs--they are unnecessarily bulky, cumbersome, and offer little advantage. But you should pick a camera which goes out to 28mm equivalent at the wide angle.
If you later still feel that you like the "look" of film, you can then spend a couple of years learning all its idiosyncracies. Frankly, after 20 years of film photography, I'm glad to resign it to the dustbin of history, alongside vinyl records, mechanical typewriters, and library card catalogs.
Modern photography is about as much about manual exposure and film as modern computer science and software engineering are about assembly language programming. Yes, you could spend years becoming an assembly language jockey, but the skill isn't all that useful.
Digital imaging is great for learning photography: it lets students concentrate on composition and content and it gives them immediate feedback.
Furthermore, automatic exposure is a fact of life: whether it is better or worse than manual exposure, you have to learn how to use it effectively. And using automatic exposure correctly is just about as hard as using manual exposure correctly.
So, I think people should start learning photography with digital cameras because it lets them concentrate on the stuff that photography is really all about: content, not gadgets or chemistry. If they later want to start using film, they can pick up its intricacies and idiosyncracies then.
Thousands of dot-com millionaire wannabes in Silicon Valley were in the same situation when their stock became worthless, owing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the IRS, hundreds of thousands of dollars to creditors, and losing their million dollar homes. The ATF didn't go out and laid siege to any of them.
A quarter of a million dollars in unpaid bills is peanuts these days, and lots of people squat on land they don't own. It's generally up to the creditors and the land owners to try to enforce their rights themselves.
"The forking of open-source projects occurs when passionate disputes between open-source software developers over product design lead to the splintering of projects into a multitude of varieties.
While many people try to fork projects, those forks only become significant if they fulfill some need. Otherwise, the forked project won't attract the necessary developer base and they will slowly go away.
Forking is an essential part of open source development and it is what gives it strength. Forking protects projects against decisions by the developers that are in their commercial interests but against the interests of users. And forking protects projects against corporate stupidity.
As an example, consider Sun Java. If it was open sourced, it would fork in an instance into a bunch of different, incompatible versions. But the only the best of those versions would survive and become the de-facto standard, and it would almost certainly not be Sun's version. The fact that Java is proprietary means that Sun can keep following blind alleys, no matter what the market actually wants.
The ability to fork is the whole point of open source. It results in lower TCO in the long run because it ensure that systems can always improve and that systems are built in response to the needs of users. You can't have perfect backwards compatibility and innovation--it is logically impossible. OSS gives you exactly the tradeoff between the two that is good for users.
In different words, Sauer just doesn't understand open source.
What I expect as a result of this move by Sun is to provide better interaction between Java and the underlying hardware OS, such as some of the projects to enable control of USB devices directly within Java.
.NET but a complete and utter endorsement of Sun's vision?
.NET is not. And between the two, .NET got it right, while Sun got it wrong.
Microsoft VB.NET also interacts well with the "underlying hardware OS", but that doesn't make me want to run out and buy it.
What is Microsoft
It absolutely is not. Sun's vision is a cross-platform, write-once, run everywhere environment.
Why not go straight to the source of leadership?
Surely you are joking.
Sun is earning people's trust at the same time Microsoft is destroying it, signifying a changing of the guard in terms of overall leadership in the industry.
Oh, how is Sun earning people's trusts? By promising to submit Java to standards bodies and then withdrawing it? By claiming that anybody who as much as looks at Java source code or specifications is creating derived workds? By filing patents on Java technologies like there is no tomorrow?
And, if anything, the Internet weeds out closed technologies.
And the Internet has largely weeded out Java, which is now just leading a shadowy existence as a specialized server-side language.
The fact that Java is one of the most commonly referenced "Internet technologies" speaks for itself.
Your "fact" is made up.
yes...biding their time with their video technology. "We'll release this in a few years!"
And your point is what? Plenty of manufacturers could produce 3D graphics cards with technology from a couple of years ago. That is still better than depending on nVidia's and ATI's bogus Linux drivers that cause constant headaches, provided you can get them to work at all.
Actually, the Java language itself is undergoing a bit of a rebirth at Universities. It's become the language of choice instead of C/C++ for intro- to intermediate-level CS courses.
You can see how far educational usage got Pascal, Algol, and Scheme in the market.
It's largely written with Java (proving for once and for all that there's no inherent performance gap for Java applications) and makes good use of the integrated Java support in JDS.
;-) you can see the CD selector from the screen-shot to the right in action, and I can imagine all the other experimental 3D apps I've enjoyed using (photo gallery browsers, SQL database explorers with 3D visualisation, etc.) finally making it to the real world.
That tells you nothing about Java performance. The performance critical portions of Java3D and the operating system's 3D drivers are written in C and assembly language. Even JavaScript and VRML manage to render 3D scenes fast.
At one level it provides a 3D windowing environment for existing X applications (interesting enough in its own right), but at another it introduces the ability to create 3D applications where you interact spatially to explore data. In the demo video (starts a little way in, persist or fast-forward
3D data visualization is an old hat, as are 3D user interfaces and mapping 2D window systems (including X11) onto 3D surfaces. There are even a bunch of open source projects around, including 3dwm.
What if windows were translucent so you could see the multiple windows you're working on at the same time? What if you could tack a note to yourself right on the Web page you're viewing? What if your CD or movie database became a 3D jukebox, where titles were joined with images to make finding what you want easier than ever?
Translucent windows have been done many times, as have annotations. 3D representations of physical objects as user interface metaphors have been done numerous times (and those kinds of interfaces generally belong into the Interface Hall of Shame), and "titles" can already be "joined with images" in some MP3 players, including Windows Media Player.
Sun Microsystems' latest innovations by its Advanced Software Technology Team will make the above scenarios a reality for the desktop of the near future.
There is nothing wrong with tinkering with old ideas and trying to integrate them into a nice system. But, people shouldn't repeat old mistakes and they should give credit to the people who came before.
Referring to such tired old ideas as "innovation" either means that Sun is ignorant or that they are deliberately misrepresenting their work.
but maybe you should re-evaluate your argument about broken network filesystems. Solaris was serving out nfs when linux was still just a twinkle in Linus's eye, and still does it way better.
It doesn't matter how well Sun serves NFS because the NFS protocol itself is broken: it manages to be, at the same time, inefficient, difficult to implement, unsecure, and unreliable. Don't get me wrong: it was a great first attempt at a network file system, but it should have been replaced within a couple of years because its shortcomings were painfully obvious to anybody who tried to deploy or extend it.
NFSv4 may finally fix some of those problems, but it is effectively a different system. And, frankly, we can do better than NFSv4 these days.
Unfortunately, WalMart is already shipping Linux, so Sun really is driving a smaller Linux vendor out of one of their biggest markets. That's not good.
As soon as Linux scales well to 128+ CPUs with full binary compatibility (no recompile) and has hot swap CPU/MEMROY/Motherboard support.
If Sun wants the "128+ CPU full binary compatibility hot swap market" all to themselves, let them have it; those machines are so disproportionately expensive that the market is tiny.
On my desktop and in my server rack, I don't have a 128+ CPU machines, nor does my hardware support hot swapping of anything other than USB and FireWire. Whether Linux does or doesn't support the other stuff makes no difference to me or to 99.9% of the market.
People who think that Solaris must suck becuase it lacks a cool interface are missing the point.
Solaris sucks because its system software sucks: substandard command line utilities, bloated kernel, broken network file system, and lousy package management, to name just a few. And, yes, its lack of a "cool" interface is another problem: people put up with that when Sun workstations were the only (affordable) game in town (and they still usually installed GNU and X11), but the world has changed and Sun has failed to keep up.
Sun has gone from a provider of inexpensive, open, simple desktop workstations to some kind of esotheric high-end vendor catering the the datacenter needs of Fortune 500 companies. Nice for them, but that's a niche market. Telling everybody that they need Solaris makes about as much sense as telling everybody that they need to run IBM's mainframe operating systems on their desktop.