There are many out there who basically have the same reservations about Free Software. They can't see how anyone would want to give away the fruits of their effort for free.
Maybe this is an area where Open Source organizations can do a little better PR. They can explain how most of us came up using Free Software, and want to similarly contribute back; bytes are free - it costs nothing to contribute something you did because it interested you; not everyone is driven by profit motive; etc...
Of course, this skeptical attitude tells us more about the person stating it than anything else. They wouldn't dream of doing something just to benefit the community, the first question they ask is "what's in it for me?"
We can do that now, thanks to layer-3 data center switches that allow for the low-cost creation of subnets. By defining simple ACLs, we further isolate our backend servers.
So, in reality, he has not given up on firewalls, he has simply transitioned to a different firewall structure based on primitive firewalling. "Simple ACLs" are neither simple nor effective.
The other point is that yes, you can create all kinds of contrived security structures if that's how you want to spend all your time/resources (setting up and managing a contrived structure). But, most organizations can't afford to do that. Instead, they buy a commercial firewall, which allows a single person to manage the network controls as a small part of their job.
Also, a commercial firewall has support for a huge range of applications/protocols. The article kept mentioning the limits on applications when using a firewall. From this I would have to infer that he was using a very poor firewall solution in the past (simple router ACLs?, one-way NAT gateway?, stateless firewall?)
It looks like a clever little device. Small, decent screen. It might be useful for some quick WWW access from the couch type stuff.
But, for $850?!? Who the hell will analyze this against all the laptop options, and decide to pay more for this limited little device, rather than going with a full laptop?
There's a lot of truth in this, even though the example is a bit extreme.. hopefully that represents only a tiny percentage of companies in that era.
I worked for a very profitable silicon valley company during the boom years. The business was growing quickly, and we had hiring needs. In that very tight hiring situation, we hired people that were really not qualified for their jobs, and occasionally hired good people just because they were available, and we knew we would have a need soon. The net effect of all that was that we were less efficient than we should have been.
Combine that with the fact that the demand for the various Silicon Valley products has dropped dramatically, and you can see how we now get by with a fraction of the people we had before.
A Public TV station in the San Francisco Bay Area was recently faced with renewing their lease on their analog broadcast antenna, or moving it to a new location because the owner was pricing them out of contention. With the upcoming transition, they just decided to turn off the analog transmitter and only do digital.
From what I read on this, it seems like the elderly were the biggest group of complainants. They had been watching the station with their rabbit ears, and were left with no signal. The station was asking for donations of digital tv receivers (many early adopters have upgraded through a few generations of receivers, and had one or two to donate) to get access for these people.
I think that by the time the cutoff date gets here, there will be small/simple/cheap digital tv receivers available, which output only SD, so people can continue to use their existing sets. It will actually be an upgrade in their service, because the picture quality will be much better, and have none of the analog artifacts (ghosts, static, sparkles, etc.)
Maybe this is the reason that they are pitching it as a HDD replacement... Flash has been around for a LONG time, but it had major limitations.
From the article: The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps.
A reliable drive, at 40+ GB sizes, with that kind of performance would be great for laptops.. Silent operation, low power usage, potentially more resiliant (no head crashes). Bring it on.
In MacOS, there are a few apps that already have the capability to take advantage of distributed computing. 'distcc' lets me offload compiling to several machines. The high end video / dvd apps also support distributed processing for video compression (e.g. converting MiniDV video to MPEG2 for a DVD project).
I would love to be able to let my PowerBook or Mac Mini send compute jobs to a PS3 or XBOX360. I suppose the PS3's cell architecture could really crank out the MPEG2 video.
Hopefully the distributed computing capabilities will trickly down into the consumer apps, like iMovie and iDVD. Because the process for making a DVD is _slow_, and it's only getting slower when moving to HD video and H.264.
But, I would be unlikely to leave a console on, taking power, generating heat and noise, to do seti processing. These consoles are best left OFF when not in use, our energy problems are bad enough already.
This is a hoax.. and not even a very good one. They didn't even include photoshopped pictures of the CPU board with the Pentium-M.
Basically, they are claiming to make a CPU board that plugs into the Cube's main board. With a few BIOS tweaks they can run x86 software.
This is, of course, bullshit. It will take much more than plugging a board in, and some BIOS mods, to get a Mac/PowerPC system to be able to use an x86 processor.
But, I was expecting some other surprise along the way. Not just "MacOS is now gonna run on those same processors you can already run Windows or Linux on". Where's the hook? What great new capability is pushing me over to the new platform?
Yes, I know MacOS is the real draw. But, I expected something more dramatic like PowerPC instruction set support on x86++, an enhanced x86-64 with Altivec support, or advanced virtualization support. Anything but a plain vanilla x86 cpu.
"Okay, we're moving to a much better/faster architecture in all new Macs, over the next 1-2 years. It'll be great.. trust me.
Now, until then, please keep buying this obsolete crap that we will try to end support on as quickly as possibly and marginalize as we move everyone to our new platform of choice."
Really, isn't this going to absolutely KILL sales of the current hardware?!? Who wants to spend $2500 on a dual G5 when everyone's moving to Intel?
Running MacOS on x86 hardware is going to create a huge demand for OS X on open/commodity hardware platforms.
It's a tough hurdle to get someone to buy a new machine to run MacOS, when it's 95% the same as their Dell box. Also, the head to head pricing comparison becomes much tougher for Apple to deal with.
If Apple insists on using only their hardware, will they allow dual booting, for Windows, Linux, etc? I suppose there's not much they can do to stop that (I can run PowerPC Linux on my mac systems today). But, I would probably be more likely to run Windows in vmware rather than dual boot..
The macworld.com live update from the keynote said they demo'd MacOS X on a 3.6GHz P4.
I wonder if it was actually a Xeon, with x86-64 support.. At this stage in Apple's evolution (and the state of the x86 market), I can't see them ever using a 32bit CPU. It just doesn't make sense.
But, that also opens a lot of other questions..
One big need is for a next generation PowerBook. What will power that? The Xeon is too hot & power hungry to use in a laptop (just like the G5). So, Intel must have a x86-64 Pentium-M in the works.
Also, why Intel and not AMD? It seems like the power management on the AMDs has been much better than Intel.
Apparently they are going to use something similar to NeXT's fat binaries, so Xcode can build an app that will run on either PowerPC or x86 architectures.
It sounds like Apple is requiring developers to move to Xcode to ease this transition. He specifically mentioned Metrowerks Codewarrior users would need to move to Xcode.
When they compare the units sold in the x86 world, what are they counting? Windows Licenses, CPUs, Motherboards, full systems, or some combination of these factors??
Back when I used x86s, I frequently upgraded CPUs and motherboards, so my few systems could have shown up many times in the statistics. But, only one ran Windows, most ran Linux downloaded as an ISO online. So, counting OS licenses would not have shown mine at all.
I am primarily a Mac user now, and I have kept my PowerBook (without upgrades) for a lot longer than any PC I owned.
Depending on how they count the systems, there is a whole lot of margin for error..
Yes, an interesting point.. where do you draw the line.
A complete "bit for bit" copy, with a distinct cutover from A to B gives me the impression of two independant instances of the same core/memories. If the two co-existed at all, the death of the original human would be no less traumatic than if a copy didn't exist.
Something more gradual, like the replacement of portions of the mind with electronic replacements is not so clear (as in medical procedures to cure a specific condition, by replacing/fixing a brain component). At what point in the replacement do you cease being you, and become something else. As more components are replaced, and the mind becomes more electronic than organic. (obviously, this is well beyond the techology being discussed).
For some excellent sci-fi analysis on this stuff, check out "Greg Egan". My personal favorite is "Permutation City", but much of his writing deals specifically with this topic.
Basically, this tells us "don't switch off authentication in IPSec" (if your IPSec allows this, many don't allow you to run without authentication).
But, the creators of IPSec told us this a LONG time ago.. Security wizard Steve Bellovin analyzed this as part of his IPSec reviews and said that encryption without authentication is a very bad idea. See the FreeS/WAN FAQ pages for more info ( http://www.manualy.sk/freeswan-1.3/doc/overview.ht ml#encnoauth )
Mr. Bellovin presented a paper on this in the Usenet Security Symposium of July 1996.
CPUs are not generally marketed with their internal code names... How do I identify the CPU as a "Venice" core when buying it?
I currently use a A64 3400+, and with Cool 'n Quiet, it runs cool most of the time. In fact, the fan on the CPU heat sink is off for the most part. But, I would love an even cooler running CPU, so maybe even under load the fan would not need to kick in.
Also, I don't suppose they will be offering this core in a Socket754 variant.. I have the older A64 motherboard (that's what I get for being an early adopter).
Most settop boxes support (most actually require) choosing one output resolution to display at. So, if you have a 720p display, you tell it to output at 720p.
Then, when the box is decoding the MPEG2 HD data, it does the 1080i->720p conversion, providing a pretty good output result.
My "MyHD MDP-130" PCI card has a nice HD decoder chip which does an excellent job of converting 1080i to 720p for output. It also does a nice job upscaling DVD content to 720p. My parents' HD Tivo also does a nice job of converting 1080i material to 720p for display on their DLP TV. I think pretty much any recent HD display chip will do a pretty good job of conversion between the various HD standard formats.
Obviously, they are not going to get full Internet access at anywhere near 1Gbps rates. The ISP's access to the Internet is most likely below 1Gbps.
But, in dense metropolitan areas (Hong Kong is a best case scenario for this) there are interesting possibilities for file sharing and other community services. File shares among friends and family become as good as local disk.
If your 1Gbps zone is the street you live on, it's of more limited usefulness. But, if it's the whole city, this would kick butt.
Does Windows allow you to install multiple versions in the same partition, and select which to run on boot?
I have some devices that will not have 64 bit driver support for the foreseeable future (HDTV receiver cards), so I can't go completely 64 bit. But, I would like to try my Athlon64 at full power for other stuff.
Also, I wouldn't mind trying out XP Media Center for some HDTV stuff. Can these co-exist?
Apparently some people were offended by brief mentions of evolution in the documentary about volcanoes (it covered the harsh conditions in the undersea vents, and the life there).
from the article:
"some people said it was blasphemous."
In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like "I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact," or "I don't agree with their presentation of human existence."
The Griffin Radio Shark is like a basic Tivo for radio. So, if you can identify some radio shows you think are worth listening to, you can set this to automatically record it, so you can listen to it at your convenience.
I use the MacOS version, but I assume the Windows software is similar. I schedule the programs I want to record, and it captures them, converts them to AAC, and adds them to an iTunes playlist. So, when I next synch my iPod, it pulls all the radio shows over.
I mostly record NPR shows.. my personal favorite is "This American Life" on Saturdays. Car Talk is an amusing show, Science Friday often has interesting topics, and Fresh Air is a daily show that sometimes has excellent guests.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many out there who basically have the same reservations about Free Software. They can't see how anyone would want to give away the fruits of their effort for free.
Maybe this is an area where Open Source organizations can do a little better PR. They can explain how most of us came up using Free Software, and want to similarly contribute back; bytes are free - it costs nothing to contribute something you did because it interested you; not everyone is driven by profit motive; etc...
Of course, this skeptical attitude tells us more about the person stating it than anything else. They wouldn't dream of doing something just to benefit the community, the first question they ask is "what's in it for me?"
From TFA:
We can do that now, thanks to layer-3 data center switches that allow for the low-cost creation of subnets. By defining simple ACLs, we further isolate our backend servers.
So, in reality, he has not given up on firewalls, he has simply transitioned to a different firewall structure based on primitive firewalling. "Simple ACLs" are neither simple nor effective.
The other point is that yes, you can create all kinds of contrived security structures if that's how you want to spend all your time/resources (setting up and managing a contrived structure). But, most organizations can't afford to do that. Instead, they buy a commercial firewall, which allows a single person to manage the network controls as a small part of their job.
Also, a commercial firewall has support for a huge range of applications/protocols. The article kept mentioning the limits on applications when using a firewall. From this I would have to infer that he was using a very poor firewall solution in the past (simple router ACLs?, one-way NAT gateway?, stateless firewall?)
It looks like a clever little device. Small, decent screen. It might be useful for some quick WWW access from the couch type stuff.
But, for $850?!? Who the hell will analyze this against all the laptop options, and decide to pay more for this limited little device, rather than going with a full laptop?
There's a lot of truth in this, even though the example is a bit extreme.. hopefully that represents only a tiny percentage of companies in that era.
I worked for a very profitable silicon valley company during the boom years. The business was growing quickly, and we had hiring needs. In that very tight hiring situation, we hired people that were really not qualified for their jobs, and occasionally hired good people just because they were available, and we knew we would have a need soon. The net effect of all that was that we were less efficient than we should have been.
Combine that with the fact that the demand for the various Silicon Valley products has dropped dramatically, and you can see how we now get by with a fraction of the people we had before.
How many times is Sun going to start a Linux initiative, then change their mind? There must have been four or five of these in the last few years.
They can't decide if Linux is an opportunity or a competitive threat.
The answer: It doesn't matter. You guys are doing a great job of killing your company all by yourself.
Who's steering that ship anyway?
A Public TV station in the San Francisco Bay Area was recently faced with renewing their lease on their analog broadcast antenna, or moving it to a new location because the owner was pricing them out of contention. With the upcoming transition, they just decided to turn off the analog transmitter and only do digital.
From what I read on this, it seems like the elderly were the biggest group of complainants. They had been watching the station with their rabbit ears, and were left with no signal. The station was asking for donations of digital tv receivers (many early adopters have upgraded through a few generations of receivers, and had one or two to donate) to get access for these people.
I think that by the time the cutoff date gets here, there will be small/simple/cheap digital tv receivers available, which output only SD, so people can continue to use their existing sets. It will actually be an upgrade in their service, because the picture quality will be much better, and have none of the analog artifacts (ghosts, static, sparkles, etc.)
For the MiniDV video, just save the MiniDV tapes.. don't re-use them. What you don't need online access to, you've got on tape.
The digital images should be more manageable on their own. Buy a couple redundant backup hard drives. or, save them to DVDs, etc.
Maybe this is the reason that they are pitching it as a HDD replacement... Flash has been around for a LONG time, but it had major limitations.
From the article: The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps.
A reliable drive, at 40+ GB sizes, with that kind of performance would be great for laptops.. Silent operation, low power usage, potentially more resiliant (no head crashes). Bring it on.
Actually, the card you linked is an analog receiver card, which will not be effected by the broadcast flag.
The digital receiver cards you want are:
Windows:
ATI HDTV Wonder
MIT MyHD MDP-130
DVICO FusionHDTV5
Linux:
pchdtv.com HD-3000
MacOS:
El Gato EYETV 500 (Firewire device)
In MacOS, there are a few apps that already have the capability to take advantage of distributed computing. 'distcc' lets me offload compiling to several machines. The high end video / dvd apps also support distributed processing for video compression (e.g. converting MiniDV video to MPEG2 for a DVD project).
I would love to be able to let my PowerBook or Mac Mini send compute jobs to a PS3 or XBOX360. I suppose the PS3's cell architecture could really crank out the MPEG2 video.
Hopefully the distributed computing capabilities will trickly down into the consumer apps, like iMovie and iDVD. Because the process for making a DVD is _slow_, and it's only getting slower when moving to HD video and H.264.
But, I would be unlikely to leave a console on, taking power, generating heat and noise, to do seti processing. These consoles are best left OFF when not in use, our energy problems are bad enough already.
This is a hoax.. and not even a very good one. They didn't even include photoshopped pictures of the CPU board with the Pentium-M.
Basically, they are claiming to make a CPU board that plugs into the Cube's main board. With a few BIOS tweaks they can run x86 software.
This is, of course, bullshit. It will take much more than plugging a board in, and some BIOS mods, to get a Mac/PowerPC system to be able to use an x86 processor.
Yes, the transition to x86 is a shocker.
But, I was expecting some other surprise along the way. Not just "MacOS is now gonna run on those same processors you can already run Windows or Linux on". Where's the hook? What great new capability is pushing me over to the new platform?
Yes, I know MacOS is the real draw. But, I expected something more dramatic like PowerPC instruction set support on x86++, an enhanced x86-64 with Altivec support, or advanced virtualization support. Anything but a plain vanilla x86 cpu.
"Okay, we're moving to a much better/faster architecture in all new Macs, over the next 1-2 years. It'll be great.. trust me.
Now, until then, please keep buying this obsolete crap that we will try to end support on as quickly as possibly and marginalize as we move everyone to our new platform of choice."
Really, isn't this going to absolutely KILL sales of the current hardware?!? Who wants to spend $2500 on a dual G5 when everyone's moving to Intel?
Running MacOS on x86 hardware is going to create a huge demand for OS X on open/commodity hardware platforms.
It's a tough hurdle to get someone to buy a new machine to run MacOS, when it's 95% the same as their Dell box. Also, the head to head pricing comparison becomes much tougher for Apple to deal with.
If Apple insists on using only their hardware, will they allow dual booting, for Windows, Linux, etc? I suppose there's not much they can do to stop that (I can run PowerPC Linux on my mac systems today). But, I would probably be more likely to run Windows in vmware rather than dual boot..
The macworld.com live update from the keynote said they demo'd MacOS X on a 3.6GHz P4.
I wonder if it was actually a Xeon, with x86-64 support.. At this stage in Apple's evolution (and the state of the x86 market), I can't see them ever using a 32bit CPU. It just doesn't make sense.
But, that also opens a lot of other questions..
One big need is for a next generation PowerBook. What will power that? The Xeon is too hot & power hungry to use in a laptop (just like the G5). So, Intel must have a x86-64 Pentium-M in the works.
Also, why Intel and not AMD? It seems like the power management on the AMDs has been much better than Intel.
Apparently they are going to use something similar to NeXT's fat binaries, so Xcode can build an app that will run on either PowerPC or x86 architectures.
It sounds like Apple is requiring developers to move to Xcode to ease this transition. He specifically mentioned Metrowerks Codewarrior users would need to move to Xcode.
When they compare the units sold in the x86 world, what are they counting? Windows Licenses, CPUs, Motherboards, full systems, or some combination of these factors??
Back when I used x86s, I frequently upgraded CPUs and motherboards, so my few systems could have shown up many times in the statistics. But, only one ran Windows, most ran Linux downloaded as an ISO online. So, counting OS licenses would not have shown mine at all.
I am primarily a Mac user now, and I have kept my PowerBook (without upgrades) for a lot longer than any PC I owned.
Depending on how they count the systems, there is a whole lot of margin for error..
Yes, an interesting point.. where do you draw the line.
A complete "bit for bit" copy, with a distinct cutover from A to B gives me the impression of two independant instances of the same core/memories. If the two co-existed at all, the death of the original human would be no less traumatic than if a copy didn't exist.
Something more gradual, like the replacement of portions of the mind with electronic replacements is not so clear (as in medical procedures to cure a specific condition, by replacing/fixing a brain component). At what point in the replacement do you cease being you, and become something else. As more components are replaced, and the mind becomes more electronic than organic. (obviously, this is well beyond the techology being discussed).
For some excellent sci-fi analysis on this stuff, check out "Greg Egan". My personal favorite is "Permutation City", but much of his writing deals specifically with this topic.
Basically, this tells us "don't switch off authentication in IPSec" (if your IPSec allows this, many don't allow you to run without authentication).
t ml#encnoauth )
But, the creators of IPSec told us this a LONG time ago.. Security wizard Steve Bellovin analyzed this as part of his IPSec reviews and said that encryption without authentication is a very bad idea. See the FreeS/WAN FAQ pages for more info ( http://www.manualy.sk/freeswan-1.3/doc/overview.h
Mr. Bellovin presented a paper on this in the Usenet Security Symposium of July 1996.
CPUs are not generally marketed with their internal code names... How do I identify the CPU as a "Venice" core when buying it?
I currently use a A64 3400+, and with Cool 'n Quiet, it runs cool most of the time. In fact, the fan on the CPU heat sink is off for the most part. But, I would love an even cooler running CPU, so maybe even under load the fan would not need to kick in.
Also, I don't suppose they will be offering this core in a Socket754 variant.. I have the older A64 motherboard (that's what I get for being an early adopter).
Most settop boxes support (most actually require) choosing one output resolution to display at. So, if you have a 720p display, you tell it to output at 720p.
Then, when the box is decoding the MPEG2 HD data, it does the 1080i->720p conversion, providing a pretty good output result.
My "MyHD MDP-130" PCI card has a nice HD decoder chip which does an excellent job of converting 1080i to 720p for output. It also does a nice job upscaling DVD content to 720p. My parents' HD Tivo also does a nice job of converting 1080i material to 720p for display on their DLP TV. I think pretty much any recent HD display chip will do a pretty good job of conversion between the various HD standard formats.
Obviously, they are not going to get full Internet access at anywhere near 1Gbps rates. The ISP's access to the Internet is most likely below 1Gbps.
But, in dense metropolitan areas (Hong Kong is a best case scenario for this) there are interesting possibilities for file sharing and other community services. File shares among friends and family become as good as local disk.
If your 1Gbps zone is the street you live on, it's of more limited usefulness. But, if it's the whole city, this would kick butt.
Does Windows allow you to install multiple versions in the same partition, and select which to run on boot?
I have some devices that will not have 64 bit driver support for the foreseeable future (HDTV receiver cards), so I can't go completely 64 bit. But, I would like to try my Athlon64 at full power for other stuff.
Also, I wouldn't mind trying out XP Media Center for some HDTV stuff. Can these co-exist?
Apparently some people were offended by brief mentions of evolution in the documentary about volcanoes (it covered the harsh conditions in the undersea vents, and the life there).
from the article:
"some people said it was blasphemous."
In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like "I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact," or "I don't agree with their presentation of human existence."
The Griffin Radio Shark is like a basic Tivo for radio. So, if you can identify some radio shows you think are worth listening to, you can set this to automatically record it, so you can listen to it at your convenience.
I use the MacOS version, but I assume the Windows software is similar. I schedule the programs I want to record, and it captures them, converts them to AAC, and adds them to an iTunes playlist. So, when I next synch my iPod, it pulls all the radio shows over.
I mostly record NPR shows.. my personal favorite is "This American Life" on Saturdays. Car Talk is an amusing show, Science Friday often has interesting topics, and Fresh Air is a daily show that sometimes has excellent guests.