Raw specs _are_ important. But Apple has always been the leader in marketing computers based on cuteness and even _color_, of all things - the old crt iMacs in Translucent Blueberry leading a design revolution in computer accessories and revitalized the company for a while, and then the radical "other translucent color options" and the also-radical "black and white too!". Then there's the semi-cuteness of the LCD iMacs.
The MHz business isn't about comparing engine horsepower - it's about comparing engine RPMs, ignoring transmission gear ratios. Total power is still important for many applications, though as you point out, not for all of them, and sometimes low cost or low power use or small size are the trick.
So Outlook is annoying to stop and start (which it is, especially if you need to look up phone numbers or calendar entries), or if you've got a laptop that you want to constantly download new mail when it arrives so you've got ready when you pick up the PC and leave, Just minimize the window.
Assuming you've already turned off the "beep when mail arrives", it won't bother you when you don't want to be bothered, and it'll be right there when you want to switch to it, so your concentration isn't interrupted by waiting several minutes while Outlook starts and downloads all the new messages, including that 5MB Powerpoint tripe from Marketing. Alternatively, you can also leave Outlook showing your calendar, so not only will you get popups when you have calendar events, but it'll be easy to go look at them, and you won't be distracted by new stuff if you happen to page by that window.
Software authors of the world - Unite! We must take up the power of the Berne Convention and WIPO and throw off the shackles of control from the EEEEEEViLLLL Record Companies by making them pay a bribe (ok, we'll call it a levy) on every Audio CD they sell. After all, those EVIL PIRATES are pretending that they're just selling music, but in fact they're selling computer software delivery systems without paying US a license fee for the software they might be delivering on it.
SURELY you don't believe people are buying Brittney Spears albums for the SINGING, do you? Obviously the "music" is a front to hide a pirate software distribution system! That $16 CD might have some low-quality music filling space, but it's got enough room to hide an entire $20,000 chip-design CAD system or a $500 integrated development environment or a $0 copy of EMACS on it, and some music CDs have ACTUALLY BEEN OBSERVED IN THE FIELD WITH DATA and SOFTWARE ON THEM, such as jpegs of bands and dancing animated screen savers. One such highly subversive example that EVIL RECORD COMPANIES HAVE ALREADY DEPLOYED is a track by Information Society called "300 8N1" that actually produces ASCII when played to a 300-baud modem.
I think the problem is either the translation or editing of the article - it probably does not mean "the copyright police will charge you 16% of your computer plus $13". It probably means "computers are already too expensive because of the 16% VAT tax, and now the copyright police want to add $13 more graft for themselves", which is much different. It's still annoying and tacky, but it's not economically disruptive like an extra 16% tax would be.
For 16%, you might see shops selling computers without the CPU and also selling CPUs, and you would definitely see shops selling monitors and printers separately. But if the tax difference is only $13, it's not worth the trouble to avoid it, so computer shops will just give you a free copy of Napster so you can download the music you were forced to pay for.
Private lines and frame relay networks don't keep you safe from wiretappers, but they're not exchanging packets with the Internet, and work just fine even if the Internet is dead. This is a network designed to be used when the Internet is under attack, so you want something that's not part of the Internet. VPNs give you privacy, but they need a working network underneath, and for this application that needs to be Not The Internet, though depending on what they're doing, they might want to run a VPN over private networks.
Also, this network may not be very expensive - most of the traffic is likely to be email or occasional software distributions, and just about everything except a major Windows patch can run fine over a 56kbps frame connection.
Heinlein was Navy, and the only-soldiers-are-citizens kind of militarism is all too common in ex-Navy people I've known. You'll see pro-militarist mindsets all through Heinlein's writings - look at the Roads stories, for instance. He's not universally in favor of the military doing what their told (the soldier who destroys the orbital bombs in (IIRC) Green Hills of Earth, for instance), but the soldiers are always the honorable ones.
Biometrics are usually a bad idea, and tend to be a solution out hunting for a problem. Sometimes it might make sense given the threat models that some people have, but usually it's not, and it introduces other threats. Biometric apps are often not portable (usually for security reasons, they can't go sharing fingerprint data between multiple devices), so you'll have to give your fingerprint to every machine you want to log in to. Are you sure you can trust everyone who wants your fingerprint?
They're usually badly implemented, and almost *always* implemented in closed systems with closed-source code and opaque programmer interfaces. The special hardware that they use does keep getting cheaper, but most of it doesn't provide enough documentation to know what its real weaknesses are. Do you know what it's doing with your fingerprint data, or how well that's protected? That's not only an issue of your _personal_ security, it's also a risk that somebody who can hack one device with your fingerprints can hack all the others. And fingerprints are something you've at least got 10 of -- Don't look into laser beam with remaining eyeball...
If this were RISKS-Digest, somebody would comment that blaming the users might be fun, but building a system that encourages users to do obviously dumb things (or permits them) is usually a Bad Idea. (Somebody else would comment that that's not always true, because enforcing some kinds of standards without thinking about the side effects, such as Yellow Sticky Notes, is often a Bad Idea too.)
I'd already checked the "No Karma Bonus" box myself... And nobody moderated it either as Funny (the desired effect) or Troll (which, ok, might have been fair enough:-)
Wow. Hash isn't a common product in the US (high-potency marijuana buds being the local alternative), but I'm told the price of good marijuana here is about $300/ounce, with cheap Mexican ditchweed sometimes below $100. As far as taxation goes, it's easy to grow in your backyard.
This isn't free-space optics; light travels more slowly in fiber, and fiber routes are usually not quite straight lines so the distances the fiber goes are a bit longer than the endpoint-to-endpoint distances. The rule of thumb is 10ms per 1000 airline miles, but that's partly because it's a nice round number; some people use 8ms or 9ms, depending on how straight the cable run is.
TCP in particular - the standard window sizes have a maximum of 64KB, which means that a single TCP session can't run a 10,000km pipe very fast - speed-of-light-in-fiber latencies are about 60ms one way, so do the math on how long it takes for 64KB of window to get ackknowledgements. Either you have to modify TCP's window sizes, or use multiple TCP sessions, or use UDP with some kind of reliable-transfer application built over top of it instead of TCP.
As far as "backbone that's not AT&T/QWest/etc" goes, actually the fiber level of things is using pretty much the Usual Suspects except maybe for local access. The routers are part of Internet2, as opposed to being part of those carriers internet backbones. I don't know if the Internet2 universities are managing the routers themselves our outsourcing that to their backbone fiber providers.
If you're using American notation for pronunciation, and the episodes of Lupin III that have been on Cartoon Network Adult Swim this week, it's not the French pronunciation - it's more like "loo PONN" or "loo PAHN", with an AHH sound for the second syllable vowel.
Of *course* Hudson Hawk was bad, a seriously dumb movie. That's ok, sometimes it's fun to watch trashy escape fiction where you can laugh at how dumb or over-stereotyped everybody in the movie is.
Actually it helps the ISP a lot, in several ways. I'm not sure that it's a good idea for the user, but it definitely cuts down on wasted bandwidth.
First of all, in most systems, including AOL, every message gets copied a couple of times before it's read, and killing it off early reduces several sets of them. For instance, with AOL, at minimum the message gets handled once coming from the inbound IP connection to the first mail server it hits, and once going from the mail server that the user's mailbox is on down to the user's PC. But there's often additional forwarding involved - the incoming connection and outgoing connection may be on different sides of a continent, and the mail server that initially handles incoming SMTP requests may not be the same server that handles whatever AOL users for POP/IMAP from the mailbox to the user, so there may be another hop or two in between.
Mail from known spammer sites doesn't have to be accepted at all - either you reject the DNS request, or reject the SMTP request, or start receiving the message and then quit (e.g. if you don't like the MAIL FROM in the envelope).
When a given site sends large numbers of relatively identical messages to real users, dictionary-search users, or spam-bait accounts, you can recognize the source after the first couple of detected bad messages and stop accepting further mail from them.
As far as your second point goes, if mail is dropped silently, that's extremely rude and there's less accountability. On the other hand, if the sender gets some kind of comprehensible rejection notice, and the sender is a real human and not a spammer's bot, the sender can resort to subterfuge to deliver the mail (e.g. use a hotmail account instead of their blocked ISP, etc.)
But yes, an ISP that does filtering can sometimes be forced to implement arbitrary filters, though so far I'd be surprised if there's legal theory that lets them be forced to do so silently (as opposed to forcing them to do wiretaps, which they can be forced to do silently.) I don't know if the US government is currently forcing anybody to block anything (though they could be asking "nicely" in some cases), but the Scientologists certainly are...
Back when Blue Mountain Greeting Cards was a multi-zillion-dollar dotcom, my wife coined the term "Mommy-spam" for the cutesy stuff her mom would send from her AOL account....
Let's see, big screen TVs with mind-numbing programming on them, nobody bothering to read, everybody believing what the TV tells them instead of thinking independently? What was this "Future that hasn't arrived"?
There's already been a bunch of controversy in the community about CERT being pretty conservative about giving this kind of information to manufacturers before warning the public, but most of us pretty much respect CERT as a technical organization that's trying to do a good job of doing research, sharing information where it's useful, and helping protect the whole world's information infrastrcture. Most of the disagreements are about their competence and speed and the appropriateness of that approach, but they're basically Good Guys, so whether we agree or disagree, it's not a business of threats or intimidation.
Department of Homeland Security are a bunch of political thugs who _are_ very disturbing - not only may it be counterproductive to have them around, but this does hint at the "Revealing Security Flaws is Un-American" "Loose Lips Sink Ships" "McCarthy Knows What's Best For You" kind of mentality that we don't need to bring back out of the past.
ISS knows where Sendmail.com lives, and where the Sendmail Consortium hang out - it's not like this is the first Sendmail bug they've encountered. They could have either gone to them directly, or gone to CERT, which is a reasonably well-behaved technically clueful bunch, though there are people who think they're too conservative about disclosure.
Department of Homeland Security is a political power grab by people who are unacceptable in a free society to start with, with a name that's trying very hard to sound almost like several different classic totalitarian thug agencies, and having ISS kiss their ass does not make me respect ISS at all.
Now, it's possible that Homeland Security did a good job of making the civilian government agencies running sendmail install patches, using clout that CERT doesn't have, and either cooperating with or stepping on the toes of the NSA's NCSC, and if true, that's a Good Thing, but they're issuing press releases like they did something to protect America's Precious Bodily Fluids when it was really somebody else that did all the work and would have helped the Global Information Infrastructure protect ourselves anyway.
Oh, also, I'm not particularly convinced that legal solutions are very effective, except perhaps solutions saying things like "Computer crime anti-hacking laws X, Y, and Z don't apply to blocking spammers from bothering you so have fun bothering them back." There's some chance that the $200 per spam small-claims-court tort laws can help, because theoretically individuals who feel like spammer-hunting can make a bit of money (kind of like collecting cans and bottles for the deposit:-) and ISPs who get hit by spammers can do some real damage to them. But especially in the small-claims case, collecting can be difficult. Laws requiring labelling spam not only have first amendment problems, they're totally and easily ignored.
I found the old proposed S.1618 anti-spam law much more useful - it was never passed, but for a while lots of spammers were putting in trailers about "According to Senate Bill S.1618, this message isn't spam....", and "S.1618" was a nice unique string my spam filters could use to identify and discard mail without risking any false positives except the occasional anti-spam rant.
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The MHz business isn't about comparing engine horsepower - it's about comparing engine RPMs, ignoring transmission gear ratios. Total power is still important for many applications, though as you point out, not for all of them, and sometimes low cost or low power use or small size are the trick.
Assuming you've already turned off the "beep when mail arrives", it won't bother you when you don't want to be bothered, and it'll be right there when you want to switch to it, so your concentration isn't interrupted by waiting several minutes while Outlook starts and downloads all the new messages, including that 5MB Powerpoint tripe from Marketing. Alternatively, you can also leave Outlook showing your calendar, so not only will you get popups when you have calendar events, but it'll be easy to go look at them, and you won't be distracted by new stuff if you happen to page by that window.
So a few hours after this "Ask Slashdot" was posted, there was a Slashdot Articleabout Brumley and Boneh's timing attack on OpenSSL. Does it look practical to you, and does it look like there are practical workarounds?
SURELY you don't believe people are buying Brittney Spears albums for the SINGING, do you? Obviously the "music" is a front to hide a pirate software distribution system! That $16 CD might have some low-quality music filling space, but it's got enough room to hide an entire $20,000 chip-design CAD system or a $500 integrated development environment or a $0 copy of EMACS on it, and some music CDs have ACTUALLY BEEN OBSERVED IN THE FIELD WITH DATA and SOFTWARE ON THEM, such as jpegs of bands and dancing animated screen savers. One such highly subversive example that EVIL RECORD COMPANIES HAVE ALREADY DEPLOYED is a track by Information Society called "300 8N1" that actually produces ASCII when played to a 300-baud modem.
For 16%, you might see shops selling computers without the CPU and also selling CPUs, and you would definitely see shops selling monitors and printers separately. But if the tax difference is only $13, it's not worth the trouble to avoid it, so computer shops will just give you a free copy of Napster so you can download the music you were forced to pay for.
Also, this network may not be very expensive - most of the traffic is likely to be email or occasional software distributions, and just about everything except a major Windows patch can run fine over a 56kbps frame connection.
Heinlein was Navy, and the only-soldiers-are-citizens kind of militarism is all too common in ex-Navy people I've known. You'll see pro-militarist mindsets all through Heinlein's writings - look at the Roads stories, for instance. He's not universally in favor of the military doing what their told (the soldier who destroys the orbital bombs in (IIRC) Green Hills of Earth, for instance), but the soldiers are always the honorable ones.
They're usually badly implemented, and almost *always* implemented in closed systems with closed-source code and opaque programmer interfaces. The special hardware that they use does keep getting cheaper, but most of it doesn't provide enough documentation to know what its real weaknesses are. Do you know what it's doing with your fingerprint data, or how well that's protected? That's not only an issue of your _personal_ security, it's also a risk that somebody who can hack one device with your fingerprints can hack all the others. And fingerprints are something you've at least got 10 of -- Don't look into laser beam with remaining eyeball...
If this were RISKS-Digest, somebody would comment that blaming the users might be fun, but building a system that encourages users to do obviously dumb things (or permits them) is usually a Bad Idea. (Somebody else would comment that that's not always true, because enforcing some kinds of standards without thinking about the side effects, such as Yellow Sticky Notes, is often a Bad Idea too.)
So does it automatically generate automations of the guys at the bottom making snide remarks about the shows?
I'd already checked the "No Karma Bonus" box myself... And nobody moderated it either as Funny (the desired effect) or Troll (which, ok, might have been fair enough :-)
Wow. Hash isn't a common product in the US (high-potency marijuana buds being the local alternative), but I'm told the price of good marijuana here is about $300/ounce, with cheap Mexican ditchweed sometimes below $100. As far as taxation goes, it's easy to grow in your backyard.
This isn't free-space optics; light travels more slowly in fiber, and fiber routes are usually not quite straight lines so the distances the fiber goes are a bit longer than the endpoint-to-endpoint distances. The rule of thumb is 10ms per 1000 airline miles, but that's partly because it's a nice round number; some people use 8ms or 9ms, depending on how straight the cable run is.
Terrorist invaders crossing the pond to attack us! Help, help, we're being oppressed!
TCP in particular - the standard window sizes have a maximum of 64KB, which means that a single TCP session can't run a 10,000km pipe very fast - speed-of-light-in-fiber latencies are about 60ms one way, so do the math on how long it takes for 64KB of window to get ackknowledgements. Either you have to modify TCP's window sizes, or use multiple TCP sessions, or use UDP with some kind of reliable-transfer application built over top of it instead of TCP.
As far as "backbone that's not AT&T/QWest/etc" goes, actually the fiber level of things is using pretty much the Usual Suspects except maybe for local access. The routers are part of Internet2, as opposed to being part of those carriers internet backbones. I don't know if the Internet2 universities are managing the routers themselves our outsourcing that to their backbone fiber providers.
If you're using American notation for pronunciation, and the episodes of Lupin III that have been on Cartoon Network Adult Swim this week, it's not the French pronunciation - it's more like "loo PONN" or "loo PAHN", with an AHH sound for the second syllable vowel.
It's not "Plan 9" level of badness, it's more like a "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" level of bogus dumbness (though I though Bill&Ted was better as an entertaining dumb movie.)
Just what we need, a memory company that can't remember stuff it was supposed to hold on to....
- First of all, in most systems, including AOL, every message gets copied a couple of times before it's read, and killing it off early reduces several sets of them. For instance, with AOL, at minimum the message gets handled once coming from the inbound IP connection to the first mail server it hits, and once going from the mail server that the user's mailbox is on down to the user's PC. But there's often additional forwarding involved - the incoming connection and outgoing connection may be on different sides of a continent, and the mail server that initially handles incoming SMTP requests may not be the same server that handles whatever AOL users for POP/IMAP from the mailbox to the user, so there may be another hop or two in between.
- Mail from known spammer sites doesn't have to be accepted at all - either you reject the DNS request, or reject the SMTP request, or start receiving the message and then quit (e.g. if you don't like the MAIL FROM in the envelope).
- When a given site sends large numbers of relatively identical messages to real users, dictionary-search users, or spam-bait accounts, you can recognize the source after the first couple of detected bad messages and stop accepting further mail from them.
As far as your second point goes, if mail is dropped silently, that's extremely rude and there's less accountability. On the other hand, if the sender gets some kind of comprehensible rejection notice, and the sender is a real human and not a spammer's bot, the sender can resort to subterfuge to deliver the mail (e.g. use a hotmail account instead of their blocked ISP, etc.)But yes, an ISP that does filtering can sometimes be forced to implement arbitrary filters, though so far I'd be surprised if there's legal theory that lets them be forced to do so silently (as opposed to forcing them to do wiretaps, which they can be forced to do silently.) I don't know if the US government is currently forcing anybody to block anything (though they could be asking "nicely" in some cases), but the Scientologists certainly are...
Back when Blue Mountain Greeting Cards was a multi-zillion-dollar dotcom, my wife coined the term "Mommy-spam" for the cutesy stuff her mom would send from her AOL account....
I'm so happy to be a Beta....
Department of Homeland Security are a bunch of political thugs who _are_ very disturbing - not only may it be counterproductive to have them around, but this does hint at the "Revealing Security Flaws is Un-American" "Loose Lips Sink Ships" "McCarthy Knows What's Best For You" kind of mentality that we don't need to bring back out of the past.
Department of Homeland Security is a political power grab by people who are unacceptable in a free society to start with, with a name that's trying very hard to sound almost like several different classic totalitarian thug agencies, and having ISS kiss their ass does not make me respect ISS at all.
Now, it's possible that Homeland Security did a good job of making the civilian government agencies running sendmail install patches, using clout that CERT doesn't have, and either cooperating with or stepping on the toes of the NSA's NCSC, and if true, that's a Good Thing, but they're issuing press releases like they did something to protect America's Precious Bodily Fluids when it was really somebody else that did all the work and would have helped the Global Information Infrastructure protect ourselves anyway.
I found the old proposed S.1618 anti-spam law much more useful - it was never passed, but for a while lots of spammers were putting in trailers about "According to Senate Bill S.1618, this message isn't spam ....", and "S.1618" was a nice unique string my spam filters could use to identify and discard mail without risking any false positives except the occasional anti-spam rant.