They never did understand Internet users, even back in ISDN days. They didn't get the concept that somebody would want a whole 2 Mbps E1 line for one connection as opposed to 30 channels of 64kbps, for instance, and back when bandwidth to Australia was fairly limited, they didn't want anybody to actually use any of it. They're the main inventors of the usage cap, and the US bonehead cable companies, particularly Comcast, have been pushing the ban-all-servers rules, and unfortunately their flavors of Koolaid mix pretty well together.
The price of wholesale ISP transit connectivity has been in major free-fall for years, and nobody knows where the bottom is.
The arguments about the cost of ISP (or university) upstream feeds for videos or other large files moved around by P2P can be taken care of by making sure the P2P users get most of their data from within the same ISP (or university.) Napster was able to do this early on when it started getting complaints from universities that had big fat LAN connections but relatively small outside connections, but it could do it because it had a relatively centralized database it could use to control neighbor connections, and of course preferring short ping times helped.
BitTorrent doesn't really do that, but it does try to use faster connections when possible. This has somewhat the same effect, though it's much more pronounced for universities than for big ISPs, which have big fat fast pipes that are bigger than they want to pay for. Sounds like there's an obvious market for the telcos to pay Bram to tweak his algorithms some more...
The other scalability tool, which can help for broadcast-style TV, is multicast. Most ISPs could just turn it on if they wanted, but they don't have a good business model for the stuff, much less one that supports peering multicast with other ISPs, and most of the obvious uses look like something that people would pay money for, so you mainly see it inside private networks. Think about the scalability of 10,000 households behind one small-medium telco office watching HDTV at primetime. That's about 9 Mbps per user, which is ok on the line side if you've got the right flavors of DSL, but that's almost 100 Gbps of upstream even though most of the people are watching the same thing. If the telco feeds a multicast down to their office, a Gig Ether can handle about 200 channels and then split it out to the individual subscribers. Sure, the telcos would like to control content so they can charge subscribers more money and compete against the cable TV companies, but a lot of the net neutrality nonsense has been because telco officials are doing the regulatory bonehead thing instead of talking about the real technical issues.
If the banks at least used SPF records so you could identify legitimate mail, that would let you cut down on a lot of the phishing spam. Phishers would adapt, of course, so you'd see more "chase-bank-credit-cards.com" instead of just "chase.com", but it'd be a good start.
eBay and PayPal don't use SPF either, and they're technical enough that they should know better. They do ask you to send them copies of phishing, but I suspect that's mostly to cut down on complaints.
What banks ought to be doing with phishing mail is going to the phishing sites and giving them phony card numbers, and then nailing anybody who accepts the cards. That would cut down on the value of phished numbers, and might occasionally catch the phishers.
Hotmail sold themselves to Microsoft for $400 million in December 1997, and all of a sudden, everybody thought their startup could do the same, and VCs were willing to give them money because that provided a major cashout exit strategy. Maybe you could IPO, or if you made software you'd sell out to Microsoft or if you made hardware you'd sell out to Cisco.
The End of Selling Out was also a major cause of the bust. By the beginning of 2000, the public _was_ starting to get the idea that paying thousands of dollars a share for IPOs of Dogfood-On-Line.com might not be a good idea after all, but Greenspan kicked up the interest rates a couple of points at the beginning of the election year (which is really rough on a capital-spending-intensive bubble economy), and the AntiTrust Suit against Microsoft meant that Microsoft was unlikely to be buying anybody out any time soon, because there were serious threats to split MS into multiple companies, and any move towards becoming bigger or cornering the %s market by strategic acquisitions was obviously too risky for them. So VCs no longer had their two big cashout strategies for software and services companies and their cost of capital was going up, and they stopped pouring in the cash. You could go to Menlo Park, shake a tree, and if a VC fell out it was because he was dead.
I had a laptop stolen one Friday night in San Francisco. A couple of hours later, the cops picked up the thief for other reasons, and since he didn't look like the type who'd own a laptop, they called my company's security department (whose number was plastered all over it.) By Sunday afternoon the security department had called me and verified that it was my company-owned laptop, and we talked to the police. Monday morning I went into the cop shop to identify it, they couldn't find it in the property room's hand-written checkin records, and a couple of hours and a couple of discussions with different cops later, we concluded that they'd let the thief out of night-jail and given him "his" property back, and being a Person of No Fixed Address, recovery was unlikely, even if he didn't have the sense to fence it right away:-)
Fortunately I had a recent backup, because the disk had been making suspicious noises the week before. I hope the fence had the decency to format the disk drive to cover his tracks so somebody else didn't have to wade through all my corporate Powerpoint presentations...
English is amazingly flexible about verbifying nouns and nounification of verbs and general mashing-up and type-conversion of other parts of speech. And of course there are lots of verb forms that are regional - Southern grammar in particular is a lot more complex than the generic pretend-it's-Latin limitations you learned in 8th grade. There's a lot of usage that's just a deliberate attempt to sound important by using much fancier words and constructs than are necessary, and sometimes that can be interesting or beautiful. Other times it's just annoying, and of course if you're trying to express complex topics it's usually worth avoiding that sort of interference.
It's public domain, I don't bother with a blog, help yourself to the content, attributed or unattributed, have fun with it, edit it or not (but the misspelllings were deliberate:-). (Disclaimer: It's my personal opinion, not that of the company that used to exist that I used to work for, blah blah.) I wish I remembered the name of the folks who did the writing course - it was really quality stuff.
To put it in a bit of context, the dominant form of intracorporate communications in those days was the "memo", which was typically a relatively formal paper about whatever issue, topic, or equipment you were working on, and the library system was able to file and index memos, but computers were only starting to crawl up from the days of punch-cards and paper terminals, so while we had email and nroff/troff, we also still had typists and our information handling models hadn't really been opened up by computers yet except for indexing.
First of all, the 150ms recommendation was originally for in-continent calls - the standards people recognized that transoceanic calls might need to be as long as 400ms, and that's still better than satellite. Remember that the speed of light in fiber is about 8-10ms per 1000 miles, depending on how straight your fiber routes are (it's a "miles of fiber per miles of route" issue, not an attenuation issue) and just because you can theoretically get halfway around the world in 100-125 ms, doesn't mean that real cable routes will let you do that. India and New York are just far apart, and you've got to deal with it, unless you want to drill a hole through the earth's core.
Second, aside from what the _standards_ say, calls don't become "functionally useless" above 150ms - just a bit slower, and if they're much slower you might not want to use that cheap speakerphone. Back in the old days, when we used to walk 20 miles barefoot to the schoolhouse uphill both ways, satellite was the standard way to talk across oceans and sometimes even within the same continent, and they were ok. Not great, and sometimes annoying, but ok.
Direct-dialed calls from California to Tennessee almost certainly *are* carried on POTS, though calling-card calls to India usually aren't. POTS isn't just analog-on-copper - the call gets digitized to 64kbps PCM at your first telco office, switched through circuit-switches, and carried on T1 lines (1.5 Mbps synchronous channelized stuff). The T1s get muxed together onto fiber, of course, and the fiber's usually DWDM stuff that puts 16-64 2.5-10Gbps channels on each pair, but with the major US telco carriers, most of the calls are still old-school as far as switching goes. LA to Nashville is about 2000 road-miles, so if you get a good fiber route it should be about 20ms one-way.
That'll be changing a lot within the next 5 years - the old phone switches are becoming obsolete, and soft-switch technology is getting a lot cheaper, and it'll be the costs of switches (including parts and labor) that drives a lot of the change - fiber bandwidth is so cheap that it's cheaper to haul intra-US calls uncompressed compared to deploying telco quantities of compression equipment. Another big driver is mobile phones, since they already use a compressed-voice infrastructure.
International's a lot different - bandwidth across oceans is expensive, so it's worth paying to compress the voice, especially if you either don't use IP or use trunked compression protocols that don't need to waste 40 bytes of IP/UDP/RTP header on a 10-byte voice sample. Those 1 cent calls to Asia are doing a lot of that.
The ban on VOIP is transparently about greed, but they can still pretend that either (a) their network doesn't have the real-time behaviour for VOIP to work well, or (b) they don't want everybody complaining to them about (a) and cancelling their service.
But with IM, it's not only just as obvious that it's about losing the revenue from 10-cent SMS messages, but the application is very tolerant of delay and the performance impact is very very low. If you're using this in a PC, you could theoretically be typing at 100 wpm, which would be 100 baud for your payload plus lots of IP overhead, with lots of gaps for think time. How often does an average IM session actually transmit? If it's every 20 characters (probably low), that's 2/3 overhead so 300 baud and 0.5 pps; if it's every 60 characters, that's 40% overhead so 166 baud and 0.166 pps. If you're having an average teenager conversation, maybe you're transmitting after fewer characters, but with more "think" time in between (for whatever definition of "think" applies to kids these days...) "like, hey" "lol" "brb" "l8tr d00d" and it's still not more than a packet every couple of seconds.
If you're really using the IM system as a P2P file sharing system, that's going to be heavier usage, but it's pretty apparently about those cell minutes and SMS Texts.
Hey, it's almost enough bandwidth to start carrying Net Neutrality rants - if anybody pays attention, they'll get spanked pretty fast, and deservedly so.
The Forces of Darkness that are pushing DRM on everybody aren't concerned about keeping your machine secure for you. They're concerned about keeping their products secure from you, and they've chosen to do so by keeping your machine secure from you. Keeping your machine secure for you from Bad Guys is simply not a problem they're interested in, except in so far as it affects their ability to sell you products (plus some of the content providers are also spamware bad guys as well.)
I worked at Bell Labs after college, and a critical piece of required training was a writing course. I don't remember who ran it, probably some outside teaching firm, but it was really really valuable to me. A couple of the critical lessons
Write like a newspaper reporter, not a grad student.
Your objective is clear communication to the reader, not beauty or eruditeness or narration of your discoveries and reasoning process. Don't waste their time, or at least don't waste it up front.
Hit the important conclusions in the first few sentences so your reader will read them. If you'd like to wrap up with them at the end of your memo, that's fine too, in case anybody's still reading by then, but conclusions come first.
If you're trying to express something complex, simplify your writing so it doesn't get in the way. For something simple, 10th grade language structures will do, but if it's really hairy stuff, back down to 8th grade or so. (Yes! Now the engineers get to play with grammatical analysis tools and run them on their documents, which was a really cool thing back in the just-after-punchcards days:-)
Think about what your audience knows and doesn't know, and what they want and don't want. Express things in terms of what they know and want, not what _you_ know.
If you want somebody to do something, tell them specifically. The passive voice indicates that things will or should be or were done, and may optionally refer to who they might be or have been done by - in business, it's perfectly ok to tell people that you want them to do stuff, and politely expressing the valuableness of the acheivement of doneness of stuff not only doesn't tell the person you want to do stuff to do it, it often leads to later arguments about responsibility, scope creep in contracts, or simply to stuff not getting done which causes projects to fail.
Yes, this probably means unlearning almost everything you were taught about writing in college. Sometimes it means unlearning what you learned back as far as junior high school.
Some engineers are really good at grammar and spelling, and consider computer languages to be fundamentally the same processes of clear and beautiful thought as human languages. Others handle them as entirely different things - can't spell worth beenz and don't grammar thier English, even though they spend all day producing flawless syntax in artificial languages. Those of us in the former group don't really understand the latter, and find their behaviour annoying, but it's such a common pattern that it's obviously a different set of mental structures approaches to information processing or something, on the level of spoken-vs-written-vs-visual focus, as opposed to laziness and stupidity (:-) (Though the folks who don't find grammar and spelling natural should really use spell-checkers...) And I'm not ragging on non-native English speakers here - it's extremely common in native speakers, while the non-native speakers I've worked with often learned formal English grammar in school and don't use many of the more subtle verb forms of colloquial speech, though they do often have problems with spelling.
But as the original article says, grammar and spelling are much different issues than organization of content. There's a real value in teaching engineers how to write.
Resolution is Somebody Else's Problem - the glasses just provide the optics to project the display to both of your eyes. So they're not a finished product, and need to have Somebody Else provide the display, and therefore the resolution will depend on Somebody Else. (Among other things, this means don't hold your breath for a shipping date.)
According to the article, "[Mirage Innovations Ltd.'s] technology is based on the principle of transforming a thin transparent plate into a complete wearable personal display system. The diffractive planar optics is combined with a microdisplay source, such as micro LCD, LCOS or OLED".
Having a front-end scripting language that lets you divide application processing between the front end and back end and a good clean data model for the communications between them is a really powerful concept, and it's no surprise that you can do cool things with Ajax.
But having Javascript as the scripting language (instead of Java or some other decently secure language) is dangerous and nasty for the user who reads your website, because you're requiring the user to turn Javascript on to see your cool stuff, so unless the user is willing to do the work to configure site-by-site Javascript-enabling permissions, that means that when he later visits www.perfectly-harmless-looking-trustme.example.com, he's going to get annoying popups, ANNOYING BLINKY STUFF, and whatever other tricks the bad guys are pumping out this week.
And yes, I know that Javascript lets you write perfectly safe code if you want to - it's also possible to write perfectly safe code in ActiveX, and I don't want to run that either. Java was written to provide safe ways to write code on web pages, with an underlying security model that AFAIK is still perfectly solid today, though as with anything there have been occasional implementation bugs. That's not an accident - Gosling's previous cool system, the NeWS windowing system, used Postscript as its native language, which gave you graphics that really rendered well, client-side scripting, much better control of dynamic actions that X (e.g. running the mouse tracking and rendering from the graphics server on your desk instead of running every mouse movement across the network twice the way X does), and the ability to write scripts that did all sorts of malicious things to the user. Because this was the 80s, and it was mainly used inside a few engineering companies and academia most of the maliciousness was limited to doing random blinky things to the victim's screen, like making all the pixels melt and drip down to the bottom of the screen or having cockroaches hiding under the windows that snuck out when you left them alone for a while, but the security risk was a real problem (and occasionally debugging could be difficult, because many of the opennesses in Postscript that allow malicious attacks also allow regular bugs to sneak in.)
You probably won't see this week-late reply, but it just showed up on meta-moderation.
I don't like the "Web 2.0" marketing fluff term either - but it's mainly propagated by Tim O'Reilly who really does know enough technology to have been hiring people to produce Unix and Programming books since before the Web was developed, and produce a lot of the early Web navigation materials before the search engines came out. He may be *selling* to the marketing-fluff-non-techie crowd, but he's plenty deep technically.
I don't want a bloody RSS feed - email works just fine, thank you, and there are lots of communications I want to receive for which it's the right technology. And I'm absolutely *not* going to keep repeatedly checking the web sites of the dozens of technology vendors I deal with just to see if they've got anything new. I often want an asynchronous notification that I can look at now if I want or later if I want.
Some people like Dave Farber and Declan McCullagh have mailing lists with tens of thousands of users, and that's just fine. When I got my iPod connected to Apple's store, they asked if I'd like occasional notifications about stuff and I told them *yes* because that's what I wanted. And when Cisco has a major security bug on their routers, I want to know right now (on the other hand, when Microsoft has a major security bug, that just means it's Tuesday, so I don't need notification of that.)
Email became a reliable tool when everybody pretty much accepted the policy that you either deliver the message or hand a rejection to the sender, or at the very worst case, if you've accepted the mail for delivery and can't deliver it, you send a reject message. That was especially critical for UUCP mail before we had the commerial Internet, but it's still critical today.
AOL is rumored to do most of its spam-blocking without notification to the sender or recipient, and that's a big problem and they're hardly alone in this behaviour.
If there's anything broken about SMTP's handling of spam, it's that you sometimes don't decide that a message is spam until after you've accepted it, so it's hard to provide synchronous notification in case it wasn't spam. (SMTP milters let you look at the message body and run it through spam filters before accepting the message if you want to do that, but a message might already be sitting in the recipient's mailbox before you figure out that 1000 of your users have received identical mail and 99 of the first 100 users that read it marked it as spam.)
While Skype certainly did a good job of marketing, it really does have one strong technical capability, which is a NAT traversal system that pretty much just works, including penetrating firewalls. That means that unlike most VOIP systems, which work really well if you're on the real Internet but die if you're stuck behind NAT (or at least if both ends of your call are behind NAT), and which generally require lots of configuration if you have a more complex firewall, Skype Just Works.
The closed protocol approach is really annoying, the closed source means you can't really trust their security, and SIP also has lots of cool things that it does, but the combination of user-centric technology and good marketing gave them a really big jump. On the other hand, the major IM players are starting to come out with their own competing services; I think Yahoo and MSN are going with SIP and Google is going with Jabber. The main difference between VOIP and IM is jus tthe media channel - both services have some kind of presense server that keeps track of users and tells them the options for the media channel, so it's natural that the markets would take advantage of this.
First of all, you don't want to attack the strong links when there are weak links that'll get what you need. A Wiretap is a 3-Way-Call with the Univited Party on Mute. So you don't try to break the cryto, you try to make sure you're on the call.
SIP Control Support for Encryption is Limited. There are two main kinds of encryption used in SIP - call setup messages, which can be implemented using TLS (SSL's successor) or left unencrypted, and media channel encryption, which is done end-to-end by the caller and callee, but still gets set up through the SIP controller. Unfortunately, too many of the SIP Session Border Controllers and other packet-handling equipment don't have the horsepower to set up the media-channel crypto. It's especially true for equipment that's scalable renough to handle a whole phone company, as opposed to equipment that's designed to run as a PBX or SOHO VOIP system, so even if your phone can do it, the controller might not ask, (Phil Zimmermann's latest work tries to fix this.)
The really really cool thing about SIP is that you can chain multiple proxy servers together to build things, resolve issues about control, and isolate problems and information domains. It's also good that the handshaking is much simpler and more SMTP-like, as opposed to the evil complexities of leftover ISDN protocols data formats and interactions, and there are a couple of other useful capabiliies, but the basic big win is that you can chain the SIP servers together.
Tor's not designed for realtime. It does try to be faster than some of the previous similar designs, but it's going for the "fast enough for comfortable web surfing" version of fast, not the kind of 150-millisecond latency 50ms jitter sorts of behaviour you'd need to not sound like M-M-Max HhhHHHeadroom.
But you could do push-to-talk sorts of voice, if you're into that.
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They never did understand Internet users, even back in ISDN days. They didn't get the concept that somebody would want a whole 2 Mbps E1 line for one connection as opposed to 30 channels of 64kbps, for instance, and back when bandwidth to Australia was fairly limited, they didn't want anybody to actually use any of it. They're the main inventors of the usage cap, and the US bonehead cable companies, particularly Comcast, have been pushing the ban-all-servers rules, and unfortunately their flavors of Koolaid mix pretty well together.
The arguments about the cost of ISP (or university) upstream feeds for videos or other large files moved around by P2P can be taken care of by making sure the P2P users get most of their data from within the same ISP (or university.) Napster was able to do this early on when it started getting complaints from universities that had big fat LAN connections but relatively small outside connections, but it could do it because it had a relatively centralized database it could use to control neighbor connections, and of course preferring short ping times helped.
BitTorrent doesn't really do that, but it does try to use faster connections when possible. This has somewhat the same effect, though it's much more pronounced for universities than for big ISPs, which have big fat fast pipes that are bigger than they want to pay for. Sounds like there's an obvious market for the telcos to pay Bram to tweak his algorithms some more...
The other scalability tool, which can help for broadcast-style TV, is multicast. Most ISPs could just turn it on if they wanted, but they don't have a good business model for the stuff, much less one that supports peering multicast with other ISPs, and most of the obvious uses look like something that people would pay money for, so you mainly see it inside private networks. Think about the scalability of 10,000 households behind one small-medium telco office watching HDTV at primetime. That's about 9 Mbps per user, which is ok on the line side if you've got the right flavors of DSL, but that's almost 100 Gbps of upstream even though most of the people are watching the same thing. If the telco feeds a multicast down to their office, a Gig Ether can handle about 200 channels and then split it out to the individual subscribers. Sure, the telcos would like to control content so they can charge subscribers more money and compete against the cable TV companies, but a lot of the net neutrality nonsense has been because telco officials are doing the regulatory bonehead thing instead of talking about the real technical issues.
eBay and PayPal don't use SPF either, and they're technical enough that they should know better. They do ask you to send them copies of phishing, but I suspect that's mostly to cut down on complaints.
What banks ought to be doing with phishing mail is going to the phishing sites and giving them phony card numbers, and then nailing anybody who accepts the cards. That would cut down on the value of phished numbers, and might occasionally catch the phishers.
The End of Selling Out was also a major cause of the bust. By the beginning of 2000, the public _was_ starting to get the idea that paying thousands of dollars a share for IPOs of Dogfood-On-Line.com might not be a good idea after all, but Greenspan kicked up the interest rates a couple of points at the beginning of the election year (which is really rough on a capital-spending-intensive bubble economy), and the AntiTrust Suit against Microsoft meant that Microsoft was unlikely to be buying anybody out any time soon, because there were serious threats to split MS into multiple companies, and any move towards becoming bigger or cornering the %s market by strategic acquisitions was obviously too risky for them. So VCs no longer had their two big cashout strategies for software and services companies and their cost of capital was going up, and they stopped pouring in the cash. You could go to Menlo Park, shake a tree, and if a VC fell out it was because he was dead.
Fortunately I had a recent backup, because the disk had been making suspicious noises the week before. I hope the fence had the decency to format the disk drive to cover his tracks so somebody else didn't have to wade through all my corporate Powerpoint presentations...
English is amazingly flexible about verbifying nouns and nounification of verbs and general mashing-up and type-conversion of other parts of speech. And of course there are lots of verb forms that are regional - Southern grammar in particular is a lot more complex than the generic pretend-it's-Latin limitations you learned in 8th grade. There's a lot of usage that's just a deliberate attempt to sound important by using much fancier words and constructs than are necessary, and sometimes that can be interesting or beautiful. Other times it's just annoying, and of course if you're trying to express complex topics it's usually worth avoiding that sort of interference.
To put it in a bit of context, the dominant form of intracorporate communications in those days was the "memo", which was typically a relatively formal paper about whatever issue, topic, or equipment you were working on, and the library system was able to file and index memos, but computers were only starting to crawl up from the days of punch-cards and paper terminals, so while we had email and nroff/troff, we also still had typists and our information handling models hadn't really been opened up by computers yet except for indexing.
Second, aside from what the _standards_ say, calls don't become "functionally useless" above 150ms - just a bit slower, and if they're much slower you might not want to use that cheap speakerphone. Back in the old days, when we used to walk 20 miles barefoot to the schoolhouse uphill both ways, satellite was the standard way to talk across oceans and sometimes even within the same continent, and they were ok. Not great, and sometimes annoying, but ok.
Direct-dialed calls from California to Tennessee almost certainly *are* carried on POTS, though calling-card calls to India usually aren't. POTS isn't just analog-on-copper - the call gets digitized to 64kbps PCM at your first telco office, switched through circuit-switches, and carried on T1 lines (1.5 Mbps synchronous channelized stuff). The T1s get muxed together onto fiber, of course, and the fiber's usually DWDM stuff that puts 16-64 2.5-10Gbps channels on each pair, but with the major US telco carriers, most of the calls are still old-school as far as switching goes. LA to Nashville is about 2000 road-miles, so if you get a good fiber route it should be about 20ms one-way.
That'll be changing a lot within the next 5 years - the old phone switches are becoming obsolete, and soft-switch technology is getting a lot cheaper, and it'll be the costs of switches (including parts and labor) that drives a lot of the change - fiber bandwidth is so cheap that it's cheaper to haul intra-US calls uncompressed compared to deploying telco quantities of compression equipment. Another big driver is mobile phones, since they already use a compressed-voice infrastructure.
International's a lot different - bandwidth across oceans is expensive, so it's worth paying to compress the voice, especially if you either don't use IP or use trunked compression protocols that don't need to waste 40 bytes of IP/UDP/RTP header on a 10-byte voice sample. Those 1 cent calls to Asia are doing a lot of that.
But with IM, it's not only just as obvious that it's about losing the revenue from 10-cent SMS messages, but the application is very tolerant of delay and the performance impact is very very low. If you're using this in a PC, you could theoretically be typing at 100 wpm, which would be 100 baud for your payload plus lots of IP overhead, with lots of gaps for think time. How often does an average IM session actually transmit? If it's every 20 characters (probably low), that's 2/3 overhead so 300 baud and 0.5 pps; if it's every 60 characters, that's 40% overhead so 166 baud and 0.166 pps. If you're having an average teenager conversation, maybe you're transmitting after fewer characters, but with more "think" time in between (for whatever definition of "think" applies to kids these days...) "like, hey" "lol" "brb" "l8tr d00d" and it's still not more than a packet every couple of seconds.
If you're really using the IM system as a P2P file sharing system, that's going to be heavier usage, but it's pretty apparently about those cell minutes and SMS Texts.
Hey, it's almost enough bandwidth to start carrying Net Neutrality rants - if anybody pays attention, they'll get spanked pretty fast, and deservedly so.
The Forces of Darkness that are pushing DRM on everybody aren't concerned about keeping your machine secure for you. They're concerned about keeping their products secure from you, and they've chosen to do so by keeping your machine secure from you. Keeping your machine secure for you from Bad Guys is simply not a problem they're interested in, except in so far as it affects their ability to sell you products (plus some of the content providers are also spamware bad guys as well.)
Also, didn't Michael Jackson own a large chunk of the Beatles' IP rights for a while (presumably being sold off to Sony to over his debts...)?
(Yes! Now the engineers get to play with grammatical analysis tools and run them on their documents, which was a really cool thing back in the just-after-punchcards days
Some engineers are really good at grammar and spelling, and consider computer languages to be fundamentally the same processes of clear and beautiful thought as human languages. Others handle them as entirely different things - can't spell worth beenz and don't grammar thier English, even though they spend all day producing flawless syntax in artificial languages. Those of us in the former group don't really understand the latter, and find their behaviour annoying, but it's such a common pattern that it's obviously a different set of mental structures approaches to information processing or something, on the level of spoken-vs-written-vs-visual focus, as opposed to laziness and stupidity (:-) (Though the folks who don't find grammar and spelling natural should really use spell-checkers...) And I'm not ragging on non-native English speakers here - it's extremely common in native speakers, while the non-native speakers I've worked with often learned formal English grammar in school and don't use many of the more subtle verb forms of colloquial speech, though they do often have problems with spelling.
But as the original article says, grammar and spelling are much different issues than organization of content. There's a real value in teaching engineers how to write.
According to the article, "[Mirage Innovations Ltd.'s] technology is based on the principle of transforming a thin transparent plate into a complete wearable personal display system. The diffractive planar optics is combined with a microdisplay source, such as micro LCD, LCOS or OLED".
But having Javascript as the scripting language (instead of Java or some other decently secure language) is dangerous and nasty for the user who reads your website, because you're requiring the user to turn Javascript on to see your cool stuff, so unless the user is willing to do the work to configure site-by-site Javascript-enabling permissions, that means that when he later visits www.perfectly-harmless-looking-trustme.example.com , he's going to get annoying popups, ANNOYING BLINKY STUFF, and whatever other tricks the bad guys are pumping out this week.
And yes, I know that Javascript lets you write perfectly safe code if you want to - it's also possible to write perfectly safe code in ActiveX, and I don't want to run that either. Java was written to provide safe ways to write code on web pages, with an underlying security model that AFAIK is still perfectly solid today, though as with anything there have been occasional implementation bugs. That's not an accident - Gosling's previous cool system, the NeWS windowing system, used Postscript as its native language, which gave you graphics that really rendered well, client-side scripting, much better control of dynamic actions that X (e.g. running the mouse tracking and rendering from the graphics server on your desk instead of running every mouse movement across the network twice the way X does), and the ability to write scripts that did all sorts of malicious things to the user. Because this was the 80s, and it was mainly used inside a few engineering companies and academia most of the maliciousness was limited to doing random blinky things to the victim's screen, like making all the pixels melt and drip down to the bottom of the screen or having cockroaches hiding under the windows that snuck out when you left them alone for a while, but the security risk was a real problem (and occasionally debugging could be difficult, because many of the opennesses in Postscript that allow malicious attacks also allow regular bugs to sneak in.)
Ok, I don't notice casalemedia very often, but that's because I block them and their spammy popups. Arrrgh...
Sorry, took a while to understand your note - I consider the term "bad guy" to apply to the wiretapper, not the target :-)
I don't like the "Web 2.0" marketing fluff term either - but it's mainly propagated by Tim O'Reilly who really does know enough technology to have been hiring people to produce Unix and Programming books since before the Web was developed, and produce a lot of the early Web navigation materials before the search engines came out. He may be *selling* to the marketing-fluff-non-techie crowd, but he's plenty deep technically.
It's how the dolphins are planning to get off the planet.
or just one of those lamps?
And I'm absolutely *not* going to keep repeatedly checking the web sites of the dozens of technology vendors I deal with just to see if they've got anything new. I often want an asynchronous notification that I can look at now if I want or later if I want.
Some people like Dave Farber and Declan McCullagh have mailing lists with tens of thousands of users, and that's just fine. When I got my iPod connected to Apple's store, they asked if I'd like occasional notifications about stuff and I told them *yes* because that's what I wanted. And when Cisco has a major security bug on their routers, I want to know right now (on the other hand, when Microsoft has a major security bug, that just means it's Tuesday, so I don't need notification of that.)
AOL is rumored to do most of its spam-blocking without notification to the sender or recipient, and that's a big problem and they're hardly alone in this behaviour.
If there's anything broken about SMTP's handling of spam, it's that you sometimes don't decide that a message is spam until after you've accepted it, so it's hard to provide synchronous notification in case it wasn't spam. (SMTP milters let you look at the message body and run it through spam filters before accepting the message if you want to do that, but a message might already be sitting in the recipient's mailbox before you figure out that 1000 of your users have received identical mail and 99 of the first 100 users that read it marked it as spam.)
The closed protocol approach is really annoying, the closed source means you can't really trust their security, and SIP also has lots of cool things that it does, but the combination of user-centric technology and good marketing gave them a really big jump. On the other hand, the major IM players are starting to come out with their own competing services; I think Yahoo and MSN are going with SIP and Google is going with Jabber. The main difference between VOIP and IM is jus tthe media channel - both services have some kind of presense server that keeps track of users and tells them the options for the media channel, so it's natural that the markets would take advantage of this.
SIP Control Support for Encryption is Limited. There are two main kinds of encryption used in SIP - call setup messages, which can be implemented using TLS (SSL's successor) or left unencrypted, and media channel encryption, which is done end-to-end by the caller and callee, but still gets set up through the SIP controller. Unfortunately, too many of the SIP Session Border Controllers and other packet-handling equipment don't have the horsepower to set up the media-channel crypto. It's especially true for equipment that's scalable renough to handle a whole phone company, as opposed to equipment that's designed to run as a PBX or SOHO VOIP system, so even if your phone can do it, the controller might not ask, (Phil Zimmermann's latest work tries to fix this.)
The really really cool thing about SIP is that you can chain multiple proxy servers together to build things, resolve issues about control, and isolate problems and information domains. It's also good that the handshaking is much simpler and more SMTP-like, as opposed to the evil complexities of leftover ISDN protocols data formats and interactions, and there are a couple of other useful capabiliies, but the basic big win is that you can chain the SIP servers together.
But you could do push-to-talk sorts of voice, if you're into that.