Vista is a resource pig. It demands more CPU, more RAM, and more disk than older Windows releases, and thus encourages profitability on individual sales if not overall numbers of sales. Also, it's easier to buy a set of new machines all with the same new OS than try to maintain slightly older systems with a different OS, even if it is more expensive.
This is the lab that invented "Iglasswear", the beer mugs that tell the bartender how much beer is left in the glass via RFID. They also own some of the MPEG patents. Amusingly, their website has been stripped from the old format listing lots of interesting projects and the names of their staff, to a self-congratulatory letter from the company president about how great a time it is to be in research..
*Sure* it's a great time to be in research. Just not if you want to do basic research that creates new industries instead of boosting this quarter's stock price. It seems sad, really. At least one guy from MERL, "Crash" Yerazunis, was involved in that Iglasswear project, was also on Junkyard Wars and is apparently the primary author of the CRM114 anti-spam tool at crm114.sourceforge.net.
Those careers aren't easy to get: I wonder where he's going with the lab's basic research dissolving?
Now, if you want to do trig functions, I call the right to do them the way a typical computer program does, by keeping a lookup table around and using that to get the nearest answer, then rounding.
No, they're not all Turing complete, even in theory. Many limited use languages, often suitable for microcomputer use or old expensive computer hardware designs, had built-in limits on digit size and available memory use. Any such built-in limit means it's not Turing complete.
Many are, but don't be misled by the higher level programming levels so many of use on a daily basis, which are at least theoretically Turing complete.
My workmate with the insulin pump already is. So is my friend with the cochlear implant, and that's a neural implant tied to his brain stem. (Weird case, they apparently couldn't use his inner ear, so they connected it to his brain. It works!)
I've worked with CVS. It's limitations are why OpenBSD exists: Theo de Raadt was kicked off of the CVS commit list for NetBSD, with excellent cause, andn this left him unable to gracefully publish his own fork for others to review or integrate.
Almost every other major source control system would have allowed him to maintain his own fork and publish it, keeping his software synced with or development integrated with the main source tree: Bitkeeper, git, Subversion, Perforce, etc. CVS fails this task pretty seriously.
Try looking at the copyright on djbdns. None, I repeat *none*, of Dan Bernstein's technically excellent solutions have propagated to broad use because of his extremely poor documentation, installation instructions, violations of the UNIX FileSystem Hierarchy, unwillingness to allow others to fork his code even for ease of packaging reasons, confusing licensing, etc.
The functionality of clever tools like QMail and djbdns and daemontools has thus wound up sidelined and ignored by mainline developers. There are numerous lengthy and well-frounded rants on this, such as http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/index.php?page=war ez#djb. And like the absurd licensing conditions of Pine and the University of Washington wu-imapd, the refusal to accept input or insights from others or cooperate with its packaging for more stable configurations has led to their being discarded from most distributions.
Well, I will admit that a worm can have a lawful purpose: to survey a corporate network for vulnerabilities and report back to owners of the network which machines are vulnerable. I've certainly broken into user accounts simply to demonstrate that their password practices and software configurations were unsound. By casting all such tools as malware, you're in danger of alienating people who do, in fact, simply poke around.
The difference is well illustrated by the infamous Robert Morris worm case. It was written to probe network security, and wasn't supposed to interfere with operations. What turned it from a network probe into malware was that it had errors, multiplied egregiously, and upon discovering that it was trashing systems worldwide Mr. Morris failed to warn anyone and instead spent the next 3 days trying to hide his traces. Considering that his father was the head of the NSA, it's not like he didn't have a good way to report it.
In fact, given that Robert's father was the head of the NSA at the time, I wonder if he didn't do it in part for his father or for the NSA, as a probe of network security that ran wild. It would explain how he stayed out of jail for it, and instead is now a professor of computer science at MIT. Fall guy for the NSA as a route to tenure? It's a fascinating idea, and difficult to disprove given the demonstrably criminal and historically ultra-secret nature of the NSA.
I see. And drunk driving leads to other people wearing seat belts and benefits their safety, right?
It's a very, very small silver lining on a very dark and expensive cloud that you're describing. The money wasted on expensive and system slowing virus software of limited usefulness could easily go to a backup system and the professional time to administer it, if the onslaught of malware weren't so amazingly aggressive and pervasive. It's especially bad in "public" networks, such as your average Starbucks wi-fi access area.
I'd actually like to see this happen. If a law is stupid, or regulation is untenable, show very early the main flaws and make sure that it's unenforceable. Also provide grounds for saying "you didn't kick these 200 people after one complaint, you can't justify doing it to me without at least verification of the legitimacy of the copyrights involved".
If you have a cable modem involved. Most universities I've encountered provide direct network ports to your room, activate specific MAC addresses to specific ports, and would not activate randomly connected devices. This causes a problem when someone replaces a computer in their dorm room, or if they have two and the university has no idea how to do that in its paperwork. I've actually seen a student connect a network switch to both ports in his room, because his laptop was connected to one and his desktop to another, and cause a serious disrubtion to the upstream switches when they did a router upgrade and it noticed access to both its VLAN's on the same ports.
Of course, the arrogant person claiming "I get a diffeent MAC every time I connect!" may be confused and means IP addresses assigned over DHCP, which actually are unlikely to change if only disconnected for a time shorter than the duration of the DHCP leases, or is discussing some other technology such as PPPoE, which does additional oddness but still allows tracking.
This is true of some universities. It's hardly true of all. There are plenty of adult colleges, community colleges, and technical colleges for whom research is not even a secondary goal, much less a primary one.
> The likely hood is that they don't ahve the resources to monitor traffic, so that's pretty much out.
The typical CD or DVD downloader won't be noticed, I agree. But the "I've built a 3 Terabyte movie and CD library with my Christmas money, d00dz, grab what you want off my website!" is going to show up to the most casual network monitoring. This is especially the case among IT staff at the college themselves. There are plenty of examples of the worst such abusers being the IT staff, part-time or full-time, taking advantage of the bandwidth and disk space for departments for personal file sharing.
I've seen that far too often among new IT staff, in fact.
Given the Blackberry popularity among the "power tie" crowd and among their account managers, if I were a stock investor interested in gaining some nsider information, or a reporter willing to bend some laws, I'd be sitting at the booth at Infoworld or the Republican national convention monitoring as much data as possible.
More like swimming with goldfish. Very, very few people actually have the willingness to jump through the awkward and painful hoops needed to act against crackers, especially to convict them. For every Kevin Mitnick who gets convicted, there are dozens and hundreds of far less aggressive and arrogant crackers who play in that world and just never draw that much attention.
And provides its own virus protection from itself?
I've actually heard that proposed, to send out worms via common holes to go block those holes on unsuspecting victim's computers, as being more effective than making them download patches.
And plenty of laws all over the world, especially in Communist or former Communist states, about running unregistered printing presses or printing material critical of the government. Admittedly, such restrictions are normally content based rather than ownership based, but they do seem similar.
Don't presume that RMS would accept such a limit gracefully. It would effectively allow future developers to slightly modify what is nearly public domain work and take their variant out of the public domain. Developers and business planners could, and would, modify it in closed source and proprietary and incompatible ways. Take a good look at the Microsoft modifications to Kerberos for a good historical example of a company "extending" a technology and breaking compatibility with all existing variants, proably deliberately, but still pretending it's the same product.
The GPL and similar open source approaches are an attempt to put guards on the commons, to prevent the "community of the commons" bound to occur if no limits exist.
OK, I don't knew where you grew up. But where I grew up, it depended a lot on the level of offense. Egging cars and throwing rocks off bridges, tipping cows, graffiti, running social enemy's underwear up flagpoles, putting a peanut butter sandwich in someone's schoolbook, etc. were all not that unusual. I didn't throw rocks off bridges, but certainly did all the others.
I'm not proud of most of them, but was never punished for those acts of vandalism. (The underwear up the flagpole was called for, trust me on this.)
Excuse me? Punks who vandalize things usually are punished? Right. And spammers are convicted under the CAN-SPAM act regularly, right. *Sure* they are.
The willingness of fools to engage in vandalism in the computer world is only matched by the utter incompetence and unwillingness of law enforcement to pursue them. Unless it's absolutely massive, there's simply no interest by law enforcement in investigating or convicting crackers and other computer vandals. If you don't believe me, I strongly recommend you read "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll, or www.takedown.com on the pursuit and eventual conviction of Kevin Mitnick.
OK, I have to assume you don't see the danger of Microsoft or other vendors cutting their own personal patent deals and including them in GPL licensed software. Novell had Jeremy Allison, deeply involved in Samba, on board, It would be trivial for them to publish GPL-licensed by patent poison pilled work in Samba. Jeremy would clearly have resisted, but it could have cost him his job and left a nasty, nasty mess for SuSE customers, or others who try to use the GPL published Samba code.
I really do not understand your last paragraph. The FUD fest is already in place with Microsoft's "GPL software violates our patents, the Linux kernel violates our patents, OpenOffice violates our patents, but we won't name them" publicly stated claims. I can find the podcast if I have to for you, but it was certainly mentioned here on Slashdot. And I simply do not understand what "discriminatory license" you mean. There are just too many possibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Gummi noses to match the Gummi fingers for faking out fingerprint scanners, anyone?
y -slides.pdf
2 8.ece
http://web.mit.edu/6.857/OldStuff/Fall03/ref/gumm
This sort of thing could make quite a fun party trick, to go with the recently reported cast of Napoleon's lover's breasts:
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article28026
Vista is a resource pig. It demands more CPU, more RAM, and more disk than older Windows releases, and thus encourages profitability on individual sales if not overall numbers of sales. Also, it's easier to buy a set of new machines all with the same new OS than try to maintain slightly older systems with a different OS, even if it is more expensive.
This is the lab that invented "Iglasswear", the beer mugs that tell the bartender how much beer is left in the glass via RFID. They also own some of the MPEG patents. Amusingly, their website has been stripped from the old format listing lots of interesting projects and the names of their staff, to a self-congratulatory letter from the company president about how great a time it is to be in research..
*Sure* it's a great time to be in research. Just not if you want to do basic research that creates new industries instead of boosting this quarter's stock price. It seems sad, really. At least one guy from MERL, "Crash" Yerazunis, was involved in that Iglasswear project, was also on Junkyard Wars and is apparently the primary author of the CRM114 anti-spam tool at crm114.sourceforge.net.
Those careers aren't easy to get: I wonder where he's going with the lab's basic research dissolving?
OK.
"cos(3pi/5)"
See? All neatly written out nad everything!
Now, if you want to do trig functions, I call the right to do them the way a typical computer program does, by keeping a lookup table around and using that to get the nearest answer, then rounding.
No, they're not all Turing complete, even in theory. Many limited use languages, often suitable for microcomputer use or old expensive computer hardware designs, had built-in limits on digit size and available memory use. Any such built-in limit means it's not Turing complete.
Many are, but don't be misled by the higher level programming levels so many of use on a daily basis, which are at least theoretically Turing complete.
My workmate with the insulin pump already is. So is my friend with the cochlear implant, and that's a neural implant tied to his brain stem. (Weird case, they apparently couldn't use his inner ear, so they connected it to his brain. It works!)
It's called "a pencil". You use it with that other amazingly technolgy called "paper".
OK, OK, if you want the upgrade vresion, get an abacus.
I've worked with CVS. It's limitations are why OpenBSD exists: Theo de Raadt was kicked off of the CVS commit list for NetBSD, with excellent cause, andn this left him unable to gracefully publish his own fork for others to review or integrate.
Almost every other major source control system would have allowed him to maintain his own fork and publish it, keeping his software synced with or development integrated with the main source tree: Bitkeeper, git, Subversion, Perforce, etc. CVS fails this task pretty seriously.
Try looking at the copyright on djbdns. None, I repeat *none*, of Dan Bernstein's technically excellent solutions have propagated to broad use because of his extremely poor documentation, installation instructions, violations of the UNIX FileSystem Hierarchy, unwillingness to allow others to fork his code even for ease of packaging reasons, confusing licensing, etc.
r ez#djb. And like the absurd licensing conditions of Pine and the University of Washington wu-imapd, the refusal to accept input or insights from others or cooperate with its packaging for more stable configurations has led to their being discarded from most distributions.
The functionality of clever tools like QMail and djbdns and daemontools has thus wound up sidelined and ignored by mainline developers. There are numerous lengthy and well-frounded rants on this, such as http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/index.php?page=wa
Well, I will admit that a worm can have a lawful purpose: to survey a corporate network for vulnerabilities and report back to owners of the network which machines are vulnerable. I've certainly broken into user accounts simply to demonstrate that their password practices and software configurations were unsound. By casting all such tools as malware, you're in danger of alienating people who do, in fact, simply poke around.
The difference is well illustrated by the infamous Robert Morris worm case. It was written to probe network security, and wasn't supposed to interfere with operations. What turned it from a network probe into malware was that it had errors, multiplied egregiously, and upon discovering that it was trashing systems worldwide Mr. Morris failed to warn anyone and instead spent the next 3 days trying to hide his traces. Considering that his father was the head of the NSA, it's not like he didn't have a good way to report it.
In fact, given that Robert's father was the head of the NSA at the time, I wonder if he didn't do it in part for his father or for the NSA, as a probe of network security that ran wild. It would explain how he stayed out of jail for it, and instead is now a professor of computer science at MIT. Fall guy for the NSA as a route to tenure? It's a fascinating idea, and difficult to disprove given the demonstrably criminal and historically ultra-secret nature of the NSA.
I see. And drunk driving leads to other people wearing seat belts and benefits their safety, right?
It's a very, very small silver lining on a very dark and expensive cloud that you're describing. The money wasted on expensive and system slowing virus software of limited usefulness could easily go to a backup system and the professional time to administer it, if the onslaught of malware weren't so amazingly aggressive and pervasive. It's especially bad in "public" networks, such as your average Starbucks wi-fi access area.
I'd actually like to see this happen. If a law is stupid, or regulation is untenable, show very early the main flaws and make sure that it's unenforceable. Also provide grounds for saying "you didn't kick these 200 people after one complaint, you can't justify doing it to me without at least verification of the legitimacy of the copyrights involved".
If you have a cable modem involved. Most universities I've encountered provide direct network ports to your room, activate specific MAC addresses to specific ports, and would not activate randomly connected devices. This causes a problem when someone replaces a computer in their dorm room, or if they have two and the university has no idea how to do that in its paperwork. I've actually seen a student connect a network switch to both ports in his room, because his laptop was connected to one and his desktop to another, and cause a serious disrubtion to the upstream switches when they did a router upgrade and it noticed access to both its VLAN's on the same ports.
Of course, the arrogant person claiming "I get a diffeent MAC every time I connect!" may be confused and means IP addresses assigned over DHCP, which actually are unlikely to change if only disconnected for a time shorter than the duration of the DHCP leases, or is discussing some other technology such as PPPoE, which does additional oddness but still allows tracking.
This is true of some universities. It's hardly true of all. There are plenty of adult colleges, community colleges, and technical colleges for whom research is not even a secondary goal, much less a primary one.
You've said something misleading, namely:
> The likely hood is that they don't ahve the resources to monitor traffic, so that's pretty much out.
The typical CD or DVD downloader won't be noticed, I agree. But the "I've built a 3 Terabyte movie and CD library with my Christmas money, d00dz, grab what you want off my website!" is going to show up to the most casual network monitoring. This is especially the case among IT staff at the college themselves. There are plenty of examples of the worst such abusers being the IT staff, part-time or full-time, taking advantage of the bandwidth and disk space for departments for personal file sharing.
I've seen that far too often among new IT staff, in fact.
I love Google so much. Look for "blackberry snoopware" and see references like this.
5
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-news/?p=78
Given the Blackberry popularity among the "power tie" crowd and among their account managers, if I were a stock investor interested in gaining some nsider information, or a reporter willing to bend some laws, I'd be sitting at the booth at Infoworld or the Republican national convention monitoring as much data as possible.
I'm afraid not. Getting it written into a small set of popular cellphone or appliance technologies will make it broadly available, if not universal.
For example, can you spell "Blackberry"?
More like swimming with goldfish. Very, very few people actually have the willingness to jump through the awkward and painful hoops needed to act against crackers, especially to convict them. For every Kevin Mitnick who gets convicted, there are dozens and hundreds of far less aggressive and arrogant crackers who play in that world and just never draw that much attention.
And provides its own virus protection from itself?
I've actually heard that proposed, to send out worms via common holes to go block those holes on unsuspecting victim's computers, as being more effective than making them download patches.
And plenty of laws all over the world, especially in Communist or former Communist states, about running unregistered printing presses or printing material critical of the government. Admittedly, such restrictions are normally content based rather than ownership based, but they do seem similar.
Don't presume that RMS would accept such a limit gracefully. It would effectively allow future developers to slightly modify what is nearly public domain work and take their variant out of the public domain. Developers and business planners could, and would, modify it in closed source and proprietary and incompatible ways. Take a good look at the Microsoft modifications to Kerberos for a good historical example of a company "extending" a technology and breaking compatibility with all existing variants, proably deliberately, but still pretending it's the same product.
The GPL and similar open source approaches are an attempt to put guards on the commons, to prevent the "community of the commons" bound to occur if no limits exist.
OK, I don't knew where you grew up. But where I grew up, it depended a lot on the level of offense. Egging cars and throwing rocks off bridges, tipping cows, graffiti, running social enemy's underwear up flagpoles, putting a peanut butter sandwich in someone's schoolbook, etc. were all not that unusual. I didn't throw rocks off bridges, but certainly did all the others.
I'm not proud of most of them, but was never punished for those acts of vandalism. (The underwear up the flagpole was called for, trust me on this.)
Excuse me? Punks who vandalize things usually are punished? Right. And spammers are convicted under the CAN-SPAM act regularly, right. *Sure* they are.
The willingness of fools to engage in vandalism in the computer world is only matched by the utter incompetence and unwillingness of law enforcement to pursue them. Unless it's absolutely massive, there's simply no interest by law enforcement in investigating or convicting crackers and other computer vandals. If you don't believe me, I strongly recommend you read "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll, or www.takedown.com on the pursuit and eventual conviction of Kevin Mitnick.
No, no. You have to make them full professors at MIT and make sure they never serve a day in jail. At least, if their daddy is head of the NSA ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(crypto grapher) ).
That'll teach them not to do it!
OK, I have to assume you don't see the danger of Microsoft or other vendors cutting their own personal patent deals and including them in GPL licensed software. Novell had Jeremy Allison, deeply involved in Samba, on board, It would be trivial for them to publish GPL-licensed by patent poison pilled work in Samba. Jeremy would clearly have resisted, but it could have cost him his job and left a nasty, nasty mess for SuSE customers, or others who try to use the GPL published Samba code.
I really do not understand your last paragraph. The FUD fest is already in place with Microsoft's "GPL software violates our patents, the Linux kernel violates our patents, OpenOffice violates our patents, but we won't name them" publicly stated claims. I can find the podcast if I have to for you, but it was certainly mentioned here on Slashdot. And I simply do not understand what "discriminatory license" you mean. There are just too many possibilities.