I haven't understood his strategy from the beginning: He wants the economies of scale, but he won't seel one to me and you, and he wants theft prevention by the shame of being seen with such a product. And the children are supposed to feel proud to carry them>
And what's wrong with 'borrowing' a mail truck, anyway?
Independent != unbiased. Independent == not funded by MS or a competitor.
Dude, the majority of people wouldn't care where directionsonmicrosoft.com gets its money from, except to the extent that it might indicate bias in their research. Here's the FIRST body text on their homepage: Directions on Microsoft is the only INDEPENDENT organization in the world devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft. *I* didn't capitalize the word -- and what they're trying to get across is that they're unbiased. Further, I'd say it's a safe guess that these people DO in fact get much of their funding from Microsoft's competitors -- think about it, what other deep pocketed organizations would need to know about non-material changes in such excruciating detail?
Pot, meet kettle.
??? Oh, I know, you read this phrase on slashdot somewhere and the poster got modded up, so now you slip it into all your posts, without an understanding of its meaning, in the cargo-cult hope that you'll get modded up, too.
The best journalists will focus on a subject and still maintain objectivity, which is totally different from independence.
Can you name anyone who's focused on one subject for a decade and a half (as these people have) who you'd still call a journalist? And why are you talking about journalism anyway? These people wouldn't even call themselves journalists.
Dude, if you're devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft, how likely is is that you're independent? I'm thinkking you come to the table with a POV (i.e. bias), otherwise why would you devote your time exclusively to tracking Microsoft in the first place?
Oh well. If a country's citizens think 'bipartisan' and 'independent' are the same thing, who am I to complain that the concept of independence has slipped a little?
It is simply a case, it seems, of harping on the EFF for their failures without recognizing that they're human, and they lose cases.
These cases of the EFF's aren't like a football league where they've signed up to play every week and they consequently have to play every opponent. In choosing which cases to defend (and put their imprimateur on) they are in position to research the facts, the law and the judicial record of the panel they'll be arguing before. With all that info, one would expect their record to be significantly better than 50%, unless they're blowing it.
I do think it's important for litigious lobbying organizations to pick their battles, so if it's true that they lose more than they win, creating bad case law in so doing, that's pretty damning.
[S]ome companies use GPLed software and modify... it, but don't release it... But these companies run the modified software on their webservers... [S]ome people (like RMS) are interested to extend the concept of Free Software to web apps.
Man, this just goes too far. I get the feeling that if Stallman had been around at the invention of the typewriter, I'd still be writing longhand for fear of donating all my copyright.
I don't necessarily agree with all of the goals of the GPL (I favour MIT style, or the quaint "public domain"). But I do think that the current IP system is dysfunctional as applied to biology and software. I sit hoping RIM would just disable all US Blackberry users Monday morning and let the government solve it by Wednesday, incidentally sparking wide ranging discussion about reform.
THAT won't happen, so I suppose I can watch the tinkering with the GPL while I wait.
Intellectual property is created by fiat. I'd say in this case it should be ruled that single letters aren't distinctive enough to be used as the 'net equivalent of a trademark.
Besides, if these clowns say single characters ARE appropriate, and then some trademark office somewhere lest some company trademark the dot (as in "The Dot in Dot Com," anyone?) we'd all be POOCHED.
The author is from the 'Initiative for Software Choice', whose first bullet point is ' Procure software on its merits, not through categorical preferences' which, when you break it down, is absurd. One man's category is another man's merit. What they mean to say is 'when choosing software, here's a number of points we'd like you to ignore. 1. Price...'
The idea that, once Microsoft has wiped out all its office software competitors, governments the world over should pay what MS thinks office software ought to cost for every computer they have is looney. But maybe if MS hires enough shills, some of them will get published, some of those will make Slashdot, some of those will influence the decision makers and influencers...
Am I the only one left lamenting the general loss of quality in the new media?
It seems to me that a blog is (usually) a page put up by someone who thinks his ideas are so important that we'll overlook the fact that he can't spel or grammer.
Recently, I was treated to the idea that Wikipedia (the canonical source of non-canonical information on the Internet) is going to be dead-treed and sent to Africa. On the 'net, its lack of authority is considered acceptable because its defenders say nobody should rely on it exclusively. What happens in the bush? If we were shipping substandard pharmaceuticals to Africa there'd be moral outrage, but substandard info is apparently OK.
Slashdot? Not news for nerds anymore. Witness the posting counts: They're highest on the non-nerdy posts (which just keep coming). Why do I need ID from every angle on/. when it's on the front page of CNN? But put up an article on routers and DNS, and it's 80 mostly uninformed posts.
Sturgeon's Law needs to be revised: Now 98% of everything is crap. IBM seems to be building a crapfilter and connecting its users to the wrong output.
I'm not a NASA fan. I see the ISS as not doing much science, recent Mars "search for signs of life" missions as a combination PR stunt and the space equivalent of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost because that's where it's light. And abandoning Hubble? Don't even get me started.
So it's great to see a space mission that combines engineering with real science and that isn't just predicated on the public's gullibility as to the long odds of ET life.
I know that the/. 'love all things space' crowd will mod me down, but I've got Karma to burn.
I can't agree that the the 'net's naming/numbering system is currently in the hands of a US non-profit. While ostensibly true, Verisign seems to have de-facto control, as illustrated by the recent "we promise to stop suing your ass into penury if you extend our.com monopoly until 2012" ( http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/25/19 19243&tid=95&tid=123 ) fiasco.
Pointing to a non-profit with broad representation (oh, wait, less broad than it used to be, isn't it?) on the board looks like a PR whitewash once we realize how easily the organization gets bullied around by financial stakeholders - it doesn't have a war chest or a strong organization behind it. Since the US government supports the status quo, I'm left with little option than to believe that Uncle Sam likes the way Verisign is currently running things. I'm not comforted.
It's been some time since we last ran our last GPU Price-Performance shootout. Despite nine months having passed, not a whole lot has changed the landscape.
The real sweet spot for graphics is in the $250 to $300 price range.
We have no idea what the heck is going on here.
The big question: How will this fare against ATI's similarly priced X1000 series card, the Radeon X1600 XT? In short, we don't know.
I may be wrong, but it's likely that the Vatican takes this position because they can't play if they deny the game exists. If they want a say in the morality of reproductive technology and genetic manipulation, they can't cover their ears, shout blah-blah-blah-blah-blah and deny the field exists, which seems to be the approach in some parts of the 'States.
I'm confident that science will continue to be done, because there's money in it. When business leaders read that 51% of Americans reject evolution, they'll equate that with abysmal science education, and locate their R&D facilities elsewhere. Americans will still be able to buy the end-products, of course -- ironically, they'll likely remain the largest market for them. But the science will be done elsewhere. Think of it as outsourcing.
P.S. Why can't Slashdot ever cite primary sources, or even articles that do. This article just pointed to a less-than-informative blurb.
"In many cases, a heap-based overflow in Cisco IOS will simply corrupt system memory and trigger a system reload when detected by the "Check Heaps" process, which constantly monitors for such memory corruption."
Is anyone else bothered that Cisco figures heap corruption is common enough that a process is running full time on production routers looking for it? I suppose you could view this as proactive, but obviously the process can only look for nonmalicious corruption, and is only statistically likely to find corruption before it causes errors according to how much CPU you give it.
"In some cases it is possible to overwrite areas of system memory and execute arbitrary code from those locations. In the event of successful remote code execution, device integrity will have been completely compromised,"
Think about it. Once an exploit is executed against your router, reloading your firmware isn't an option, because that's a function of your firmware, which could be corrupted. Unlike a computer OS virus, which can be circumvented by rebooting and taking control before the corrupted OS does, there's no way to preempt the corruption here. For total peace of mind, you'd either have to replace the (probably not socketed) flash chips, or take the whole unit out back and burn it. Am I wrong? Of course, that's not going to be Cisco's recommended solution.
Here's a flame to all the respondents to the parent post. They say (if I may paraphrase) "Code verification is hard. I want my MOOMMMMMY!" Well, it's certainly more difficult, in the short run, than the "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks" approach. But it has been done, it isn't as hard as the naysayers are making out, and it's one of those things that you don't improve at unless you try. Google VLISP for an example of a provably correct compiler.
One thing's for sure: Improvements in software quality will be harder to come by if everybody's attitude continues to be "Bugs are inevitable. Formal proofs are beyond us. Let's keep doing it the old way."
Dudes, there's a lot of cluelessness here, about tarpitting, routing around failure, next best route etcetera.
Being a tier 1 means, essentially, HAVING NO DEFAULT ROUTES. You make deals with all the other tier 1 providers for direct connections at various places around the country and, if you can't colocate with a particular tier 1 in a particular geographic location, you pay another provider for transit from you to that tier 1. Being at the top of the pyramid, there's no default route you can hand packets off to when one of your connections fails - because that would mean somebody else was providing you with a free lunch.
Of course, these guys are constantly squabbling ("we're bigger than you, so you should be paying us for the privilege") but, since disconnecting affects both peers' customers, it's really cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Tier 1 peering needs to be regulated in certain situations.
I'm for some regulation of the Internet, but not here. These guys went back to the table because they each had guns to their heads; their customers (on both sides) didn't really care whose fault it was and would've started leaving.
Calling for regulation would likely lead to California energy crisis-type situations: PG&E and Con Ed were both required to retail (at a fixed price) stuff they had to buy wholesale (on the open market) and when the wholesale price went above retail, bankruptcy. (Don't get into market manipulation, that's a peripheral issue). The Internet has been remarkably successful precisely because any yahoo with a router and a cable crimper could build out more of it, without a license, approvals or anything else.
(with-cluehammer "You don't get it. Tier 1s have lots of peering agreements. A peering agreement with someone else DOESN'T entitle you to use their network to get to a third -- that would be transit. Basically, these guys said they wouldn't exchange traffic directly for free, and they wouldn't pay some other provider to act as a go-between, which, if you understand how these things work (reputation, game theory and all that) is perfectly logical.")
Oct. 7: We determined that the agreement that we had with Cogent was not
equitable to Level 3. [...] Cogent was sending
far more traffic to the Level 3 network than Level 3 was sending to Cogent's
network.
Oct. 28: The modified peering arrangement allows for the continued exchange of traffic
between the two companies' networks, and includes commitments from each party
with respect to the characteristics and volume of traffic to be exchanged.
Under the terms of the agreement, the companies have agreed to the
settlement-free [i.e. no-charge -- ed.] exchange of traffic subject to specific payments if certain
obligations are not met.
So what happened? It's unlikely Cogent could say "Oh yeah, we'll get 50% more retail customers so as to send traffic your way." Level 3's customers squawked and Cogent insisted they wouldn't pay? (That's Internet Mutually Assured Destruction)
I'll stipulate roughly 200 million US payroll employees and 52 pay periods.
I'll grant you that.
Lets say individuals require 200 KiB of storage (historical deductions, contributions, etc. necessary for YTD results,) and generate 1 KiB of storage each period.
I won't grant that. How about 100 bytes/pay period (how many different numbers appeared on your last pay stub?) and 1k for year-to-date sums? Sure, there needs to be an offline query system with all that historical pay stub data, so payroll can call up the plebe's info from last February, but that doesn't need to be online for the calculation of this week's stub, does it? I know, I know, you want a nice relational database with a 100 column table, 90 of which are null/zero for any given plebe, but that's the kind of waste I'm talking about. 1.1k x 200M = 220G. Now you can have two identical systems, for fault tolerance, sitting under your desk. Am I wrong?
I have worked on payroll systems [...] and the business rules are very difficult to implement. It is not just hours* salary. I have a binder with 400 pages of business wules that need to be taken into account with every person on the payroll. That's just 1 organization.
Yeah, I've done payroll systems, too. You seem to be confusing difficulty of implementation with the speed the calculations could be done once the program's written.
Slashdot Mirror
And what's wrong with 'borrowing' a mail truck, anyway?
Dude, the majority of people wouldn't care where directionsonmicrosoft.com gets its money from, except to the extent that it might indicate bias in their research. Here's the FIRST body text on their homepage: Directions on Microsoft is the only INDEPENDENT organization in the world devoted exclusively to tracking Microsoft. *I* didn't capitalize the word -- and what they're trying to get across is that they're unbiased. Further, I'd say it's a safe guess that these people DO in fact get much of their funding from Microsoft's competitors -- think about it, what other deep pocketed organizations would need to know about non-material changes in such excruciating detail?
Pot, meet kettle.
??? Oh, I know, you read this phrase on slashdot somewhere and the poster got modded up, so now you slip it into all your posts, without an understanding of its meaning, in the cargo-cult hope that you'll get modded up, too.
The best journalists will focus on a subject and still maintain objectivity, which is totally different from independence.
Can you name anyone who's focused on one subject for a decade and a half (as these people have) who you'd still call a journalist? And why are you talking about journalism anyway? These people wouldn't even call themselves journalists.
Oh well. If a country's citizens think 'bipartisan' and 'independent' are the same thing, who am I to complain that the concept of independence has slipped a little?
These cases of the EFF's aren't like a football league where they've signed up to play every week and they consequently have to play every opponent. In choosing which cases to defend (and put their imprimateur on) they are in position to research the facts, the law and the judicial record of the panel they'll be arguing before. With all that info, one would expect their record to be significantly better than 50%, unless they're blowing it.
What cases have they won?
Man, this just goes too far. I get the feeling that if Stallman had been around at the invention of the typewriter, I'd still be writing longhand for fear of donating all my copyright.
THAT won't happen, so I suppose I can watch the tinkering with the GPL while I wait.
Besides, if these clowns say single characters ARE appropriate, and then some trademark office somewhere lest some company trademark the dot (as in "The Dot in Dot Com," anyone?) we'd all be POOCHED.
The idea that, once Microsoft has wiped out all its office software competitors, governments the world over should pay what MS thinks office software ought to cost for every computer they have is looney. But maybe if MS hires enough shills, some of them will get published, some of those will make Slashdot, some of those will influence the decision makers and influencers...
It seems to me that a blog is (usually) a page put up by someone who thinks his ideas are so important that we'll overlook the fact that he can't spel or grammer.
Recently, I was treated to the idea that Wikipedia (the canonical source of non-canonical information on the Internet) is going to be dead-treed and sent to Africa. On the 'net, its lack of authority is considered acceptable because its defenders say nobody should rely on it exclusively. What happens in the bush? If we were shipping substandard pharmaceuticals to Africa there'd be moral outrage, but substandard info is apparently OK.
Slashdot? Not news for nerds anymore. Witness the posting counts: They're highest on the non-nerdy posts (which just keep coming). Why do I need ID from every angle on /. when it's on the front page of CNN? But put up an article on routers and DNS, and it's 80 mostly uninformed posts.
Sturgeon's Law needs to be revised: Now 98% of everything is crap. IBM seems to be building a crapfilter and connecting its users to the wrong output.
So it's great to see a space mission that combines engineering with real science and that isn't just predicated on the public's gullibility as to the long odds of ET life.
I know that the /. 'love all things space' crowd will mod me down, but I've got Karma to burn.
Pointing to a non-profit with broad representation (oh, wait, less broad than it used to be, isn't it?) on the board looks like a PR whitewash once we realize how easily the organization gets bullied around by financial stakeholders - it doesn't have a war chest or a strong organization behind it. Since the US government supports the status quo, I'm left with little option than to believe that Uncle Sam likes the way Verisign is currently running things. I'm not comforted.
The real sweet spot for graphics is in the $250 to $300 price range.
We have no idea what the heck is going on here.
The big question: How will this fare against ATI's similarly priced X1000 series card, the Radeon X1600 XT? In short, we don't know.
I'm confident that science will continue to be done, because there's money in it. When business leaders read that 51% of Americans reject evolution, they'll equate that with abysmal science education, and locate their R&D facilities elsewhere. Americans will still be able to buy the end-products, of course -- ironically, they'll likely remain the largest market for them. But the science will be done elsewhere. Think of it as outsourcing.
P.S. Why can't Slashdot ever cite primary sources, or even articles that do. This article just pointed to a less-than-informative blurb.
Did you guys really vote for all this, um, stuff? Take your country back.
"In many cases, a heap-based overflow in Cisco IOS will simply corrupt system memory and trigger a system reload when detected by the "Check Heaps" process, which constantly monitors for such memory corruption."
Is anyone else bothered that Cisco figures heap corruption is common enough that a process is running full time on production routers looking for it? I suppose you could view this as proactive, but obviously the process can only look for nonmalicious corruption, and is only statistically likely to find corruption before it causes errors according to how much CPU you give it.
"In some cases it is possible to overwrite areas of system memory and execute arbitrary code from those locations. In the event of successful remote code execution, device integrity will have been completely compromised,"
Think about it. Once an exploit is executed against your router, reloading your firmware isn't an option, because that's a function of your firmware, which could be corrupted. Unlike a computer OS virus, which can be circumvented by rebooting and taking control before the corrupted OS does, there's no way to preempt the corruption here. For total peace of mind, you'd either have to replace the (probably not socketed) flash chips, or take the whole unit out back and burn it. Am I wrong? Of course, that's not going to be Cisco's recommended solution.
One thing's for sure: Improvements in software quality will be harder to come by if everybody's attitude continues to be "Bugs are inevitable. Formal proofs are beyond us. Let's keep doing it the old way."
And "SQL Server 2005"? Shouldn't that be 2006? What do I want with last year's model?
Being a tier 1 means, essentially, HAVING NO DEFAULT ROUTES. You make deals with all the other tier 1 providers for direct connections at various places around the country and, if you can't colocate with a particular tier 1 in a particular geographic location, you pay another provider for transit from you to that tier 1. Being at the top of the pyramid, there's no default route you can hand packets off to when one of your connections fails - because that would mean somebody else was providing you with a free lunch.
Of course, these guys are constantly squabbling ("we're bigger than you, so you should be paying us for the privilege") but, since disconnecting affects both peers' customers, it's really cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I'm for some regulation of the Internet, but not here. These guys went back to the table because they each had guns to their heads; their customers (on both sides) didn't really care whose fault it was and would've started leaving.
Calling for regulation would likely lead to California energy crisis-type situations: PG&E and Con Ed were both required to retail (at a fixed price) stuff they had to buy wholesale (on the open market) and when the wholesale price went above retail, bankruptcy. (Don't get into market manipulation, that's a peripheral issue). The Internet has been remarkably successful precisely because any yahoo with a router and a cable crimper could build out more of it, without a license, approvals or anything else.
(with-cluehammer "You don't get it. Tier 1s have lots of peering agreements. A peering agreement with someone else DOESN'T entitle you to use their network to get to a third -- that would be transit. Basically, these guys said they wouldn't exchange traffic directly for free, and they wouldn't pay some other provider to act as a go-between, which, if you understand how these things work (reputation, game theory and all that) is perfectly logical.")
Oct. 28: The modified peering arrangement allows for the continued exchange of traffic between the two companies' networks, and includes commitments from each party with respect to the characteristics and volume of traffic to be exchanged. Under the terms of the agreement, the companies have agreed to the settlement-free [i.e. no-charge -- ed.] exchange of traffic subject to specific payments if certain obligations are not met.
So what happened? It's unlikely Cogent could say "Oh yeah, we'll get 50% more retail customers so as to send traffic your way." Level 3's customers squawked and Cogent insisted they wouldn't pay? (That's Internet Mutually Assured Destruction)
I'll grant you that.
Lets say individuals require 200 KiB of storage (historical deductions, contributions, etc. necessary for YTD results,) and generate 1 KiB of storage each period.
I won't grant that. How about 100 bytes/pay period (how many different numbers appeared on your last pay stub?) and 1k for year-to-date sums? Sure, there needs to be an offline query system with all that historical pay stub data, so payroll can call up the plebe's info from last February, but that doesn't need to be online for the calculation of this week's stub, does it? I know, I know, you want a nice relational database with a 100 column table, 90 of which are null/zero for any given plebe, but that's the kind of waste I'm talking about. 1.1k x 200M = 220G. Now you can have two identical systems, for fault tolerance, sitting under your desk. Am I wrong?
First thrown chair!
Yeah, I've done payroll systems, too. You seem to be confusing difficulty of implementation with the speed the calculations could be done once the program's written.