Periodically I get frantic messages from members and friends with "important messages" about new email and
computer viruses that are actually hoaxes. While savvy Internet users can usually immediately spot the hoaxes,
many of our members can be both intimidated and frightened (not to mention the time and effort wasted when the
messages are passed back and forth, to spread these 'alerts/hoaxes'). Running virus checking software can also be
a very time-consuming endeavor (especially on a large Local Area Network), when you find that you have
stopped everyone from working for several hours to check for a hoax, it can be really embarrassing.
My advice is to do a little checking on your own before you excitedly message all of your friends and associates,
and possibly embarrass yourself by wasting a lot of their time. Here are some of the better sites that track both
email and other computer viruses and virus hoaxes. I rely heavily on the U.S. Department of Energy Computer
Incident Advisory Capability's (CIAC) Internet Virus Hoaxes page, but the others all have good and usually
current information.
Between them, they describe more than a dozen hoaxes, from Good Times, to PENPAL GREETINGS, to Join
the Crew. Background, including the actual "warning" message is provided. These sites provide a valuable service
to the Internet community, especially for new users.
inux & Open Source Center Editor Steven Vaughan-Nichols knows that many Linux fans hate Red Hat. His message to them: Get over it.
After SCO, the company most hated by Linux fans is quite possibly... no, not Microsoft, but Red Hat. I often hear longtime Linux enthusiasts say things like "Red Hat has betrayed Linux" and "Red Hat wants to be the next Microsoft."
If you look closely, it's not hard to see why so much ire is tossed on Red Hat. Late last year, Red Hat's CEO, Matthew Szulik, said that for home users today, Windows is probably "the right product line." That's sure to win the hearts and minds of Linux fans right there.
Then, Red Hat decided to kill off its low-end Linux distribution: Red Hat Linux. You would have thought from all the screaming in some Linux circles that Red Hat was proposing dog food be made from kittens. Some Linux fans even said Red Hat is on its way to becoming a proprietary software company.
Red Hat's corporate enemies and, in one case, a purported partner--Sun--are jumping on this last point It isn't true, of course. Red Hat is still an open-source company.
What is true, though, is that Red Hat mishandled the affair. Red Hat 9 had a life span of just over a year with its April 2003 release date and its end of support on April 30, 2004. Business customers, who usually expect to get at least three years of work out of an operating system, were as mad as wet hens to find their support disappearing from underneath them. Indeed, there's been enough outrage that several integrators including at least one mid-major Linux vendor--Progeny--are making a business of supporting Red Hat 9 customers.
The release of Fedora, Red Hat's free and cutting-edge Linux distribution, doesn't appear to have been enough for some of these users.
Of course, what Red Hat really wanted was to have its commercial customers switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Some Linux fans were outraged because they felt they were being forced to upgrade.
Rant, rave, rant, rave... there's a lot of hate out there aimed at Red Hat.
But you know what? There's nothing new about this. As early as 1999, I was writing stories about people who hated Red Hat for the same general reasons, which boil down to the fact that Red Hat is getting too big for its breeches. Heck, the ill-fated UnitedLinux consortium was in many ways an attempt by other Linux powers to take Red Hat down a peg.
Now, this isn't to say that Red Hat hasn't made mistakes. Both the timing and delivery of its message concerning the end of life for Red Hat 9 were awful. It placed many of its customers in the awkward position of having to upgrade before they were ready. It left others, including yours truly, completely bamboozled as to whether Red Hat would even continue to have a desktop distribution. As it happens, Red Hat is offering a Linux desktop, but there never should have been any doubt.
Nevertheless, the move itself was one that Red Hat had to make. For better or worse, Red Hat has decided that it wants its Linux distribution to be a high-end, profitable business distribution. Given that, the Raleigh, N.C., company had no choice but to leave Red Hat 9 behind so that it would no longer have two competing lines.
You know what? It's been a successful move. Red Hat's last quarter was its best ever. Why? In large part, it was because RHEL sales increased by 87,000 during the quarter while RHEL renewal rates remained at about 90 percent. Red Hat is a profitable Linux company, and it's getting more profitable.
Perhaps that's the real reason why Sun has been so grumpy with Red Hat. Sun is much bigger, but it's been declining, in large part due to competition from Linux in the server market, while Red Hat has been growing.
And maybe too that's the real problem some Linux fans have with Red Hat. The company has always been about open source and profits. To these fans, the idea that Linux is becoming mainstream, that their da
Call me a gaming "elitist" if you will, but when the original SOCOM became a $19 Greatest Hits title, the number of immature teenagers, cheaters, and idiots who I encountered online tripled overnight. There's just something to be said for $39-$49 games, as the price of admission weeds out a certain element.
In last weekend's advertising circulars, I saw an ad for the newest additions to the PS2 Greatest Hits line-up, which will now include ATV2, Jak II, Ratchet & Clank: Goin' Commando, and SOCOM II.
So, as a word of warning, if you are still playing SOCOM II online, be prepared to be inundated with idiots very soon. Better start keeping a list of reasonable people to play against, and start locking your games with passwords...
June 29, 1999 Web posted at: 11:32 a.m. EDT (1532 GMT)
by Mary Brandel
(IDG) -- It's the late 1950s, and you're a computer operator at MIT running a long job on a computer donated by IBM. The phone rings. It's a request from the president of IBM -- who races big yachts on Long Island Sound -- to run the program that assigns handicap points to the boats.
That request means you have to abort the job that's running, mount a new tape and then restart the current job from scratch.
Or maybe you're a computer programmer. It's late afternoon, and you're picking up the results of the computer program you dropped off this morning. The printout contains an error message. After waiting all day for your program's results, you discover you have left out a comma.
It was in that type of environment that John McCarthy, a professor at MIT, submitted a memo to Philip Morse, then the director of the MIT Computation Center, outlining a new concept called "time-sharing." Unlike batch processing, where programmers submitted programs on punch cards to a computer center, this new mode of computing promised to make computers more accessible to, and interactive with, users.
Encouraged by Morse to pursue the idea, an associate professor named Fernando Corbato and his team developed the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961, which was the first demonstration of how time-sharing could be done.
Simply put, time-sharing enables a computer to serve many users simultaneously, so that each person feels like he's using his own private computer.
Functionally speaking, a time-sharing computer stops a long job, copies its memory to a place on a disk, runs something else and then starts up the long job again -- without interrupting the user. "Each user's program has access to the full resources of the machine, and several programs can share time on the machine," explains Tom Van Vleck, who was a junior member of the CTSS team and a developer of Multics, a successor to CTSS.
In addition, computing is interactive. Programmers create programs on the keyboard, and the computer responds almost immediately, with results or error messages.
Although that sounds quite rational to the 1990s user, not even the hardware was prepared for such a radical concept in 1961. For instance, the IBM 7090 used by Corbato's team lacked a keyboard. "Fortunately, we were able to get Teletype machines from AT&T Corp. and Selectric mechanisms [IBM Selectric electronic typewriters] from IBM to solve that problem," Corbato says. "But even then, we had to fight for both upper and lowercase letters."
Working with IBM, the team was able to modify a second machine, an IBM 7094, to solve that and many other problems. "Many of these solutions are still in use today," Corbato notes. They included a hardware timer to interrupt user programs and a way to prevent programs from operating outside of designated memory boundaries.
The 1961 demo was "crude and incomplete," according to Corbato. However, it showed time-sharing to be a feasible concept, and many time-sharing systems would follow the CTSS demo. The finished version supplied time-sharing services to MIT, New England colleges and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
But most important, the CTSS demo led to Project MAC. Funded with $3 million in 1962 by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), Project MAC's first goal was to develop a full-fledged time-sharing system, named the Multiplexed Information and Computer System, or Multics.
Multics wasn't ready until 1969, and it never became a commercial success. However, It is important in many ways. For one thing, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the inventors of Unix, used many ideas from Multics.
But perhaps most important, time-sharing brought users into the universe of computer design.
"Time-sharing introduced the engineering constraint that the interactive needs of users [were] just as important as the efficiency of the equipment," Corbato says.
In the mid-1960s, the 7094 was one of the biggest, fastest computers available, able to add floating numbers at a speed of about 0.35 MIPS. A standard 7094 had 32K 36-bit words of memory. Its data channels could access memory and run simple channel programs to do I/O once started by the CPU, and the channels could cause a CPU interrupt when the I/O finished. They cost about $3.5 million. Paul Pierce's collection includes a real 709 and 7094.
MIT got an IBM 7090, replacing the 709, in the spring of 1962, when I was a freshman, and had upgraded the 7090 to a 7094 by 1963. The 7090 and 7094 were operated in batch mode, controlled by the Fortran Monitor System (FMS). Batch jobs on cards were transferred to tape on an auxiliary 1401, and the monitor took one job at a time off the input tape, ran it, and captured the output on another tape for printing and punching by the 1401. Each user job was loaded into core by the BSS loader along with a small monitor routine that terminated jobs that ran over their time estimates. Library routines for arithmetic and I/O were also loaded and linked with the user's program. Thus, each user's job had complete control of the whole 7094, all 32K words of memory, all the data channels, everything.
IBM had been very generous to MIT in the fifties and sixties, donating its biggest scientific computers. When a new top of the line 36-bit scientific machine came out, MIT expected to get one. In the early sixties, the deal was that MIT got one 8-hour shift, all the other New England colleges and universities got a shift, and the third shift was available to IBM for its own use. One use IBM made of it was yacht handicapping: the president of IBM raced big yachts on Long Island Sound, and these boats were assigned handicap points by a complicated formula. There was a special job deck kept at the MIT Computation Center, and if a request came in to run it, operators were to stop whatever was running on the machine and do the yacht handicapping job immediately. Early Time-Sharing
MIT professors, such as Herb Teager and Marvin Minsky, wanted more access to the machine, like they had had on Whirlwind in the fifties, and quicker return of their results from their FMS jobs. John McCarthy wrote an influential memo titled "A Time Sharing Operator Program for Our Projected IBM 709" dated January 1, 1959, that proposed interactive time-shared debugging. These desires led to time-sharing experiments, such as Teager's "time-stealing system" and "sequence break mode," which allowed an important professor's job to interrupt a running job, roll its core image out to tape, make a quick run, and restore the interrupted job. McCarthy's Reminiscences on the History of Time Sharing describes his and Teager's role in the beginnings of time-sharing. Teager and McCarthy presented a paper titled "Time-Shared Program Testing" at the ACM meeting in August 1959. FMS and Batch Processing
MIT and the University of Michigan were both 7094 owners, and the computation center people were colleagues who traded code back and forth. When I was a freshman in 1961, we used FORTRAN in the elementary course (FORTRAN II was brand new then), but by the time I was a sophomore, MIT had installed Michigan's MAD language, written by Graham, Arden, and Galler, and was using that in most places that a compiler language was needed, especially computer courses. MAD was descended from ALGOL 58: it had block structure and a fast compiler, and if your compilation failed, the compiler used to print out a line printer portrait of Alfred E. Neumann. (MIT took that out to save paper.) Mike Alexander says, "MAD was first developed about 1959 or 1960 on a 704, a machine which makes the 7094 look very powerful indeed." MAD ran under UMES, the University of Michigan Executive System, derived from a 1959 GM Research Center executive for the IBM 701 that was one of the first operating systems.
Part of the Michigan/MAD code was a replacement for the standard FORTRAN output formatter routine, (IOH). (Programs written
Found this article..
There have been a lot of people that have called the whole thing a
hoax, whether it is because of the position of the system or because
of the name. The creators say go ahead and speculate but stop
laughing. The Phantom is a real thing and looks to revolutionize video
gaming providing real-time game purchasing, game rental and try before
you buy all on demand.
"Being a gamer, there is no two ways about it," says Dale Eldridge,
Vice President of Infinium Labs. "You'll have CDs that get scratched
that will no longer work and you have to front the cost to buy the
same game multiple times. And you buy a system, the developer upgrades
it, you can't play the game you have before on the same proprietary
console, and then your little cheap $200 consumer item breaks because
it is only a toy. The most frustrating is the titles only appeal to
the 8-18 year olds and don't offer the genres and title selection
which appeals to the 3-38 year olds which is 80% of the market today.
It's frustrating. So what we've designed is a real machine with a
hassle free service allowing you a infinite selection of gaming
content. You no longer have to spend your time as an IT person. It can
be in your living room, it can be easy to use, it is built for the
hardcore horsepower driven gamer, it can appeal to all audiences, it
can be convenient, and it can be FUN!'"
One of the interesting things, Tim Roberts (CEO and founder) noted is
that other consoles are just PC's with Proprietary Operating Systems
which actually raise the cost of games, since they have to be
re-written to adapt to these consoles. He also stated that the
proprietary consoles have "built themselves into a box"; this means
that they have to purchase huge volumes of parts in order to achieve
the economies of scale. This also ties them into the same technology
for 5 years since they have produced tied up enormous amounts of there
cash and don't want to obsolete themselves.
Roberts explained that the Beta tester requests were very successful.
With over 28k applications on file to date we have collected some very
resourceful testers which can help fine tune our product. We are
planning on distributing emails to the 300 lucky testers on Sept 15th
which will announce who has been selected. We will then shift gears
and open beta tester requests for Europe, Asia, Mexico and Australia,
as well as others. We are looking for the best, the elite hard core
gamers and also the top hackers and crackers out there. We will be
sending the United States and Canada beta testers consoles to them on
Sept 15th. The beta testers will need to sign an agreement to provide
1 year worth of testing for us and commit to provide feed back to us
regarding the service. They will be allowed to keep the equipment and
games but will have to pay there own broadband access fees. We will be
looking for 300 testers in each country, not just the United States
and Canada.
We plan to launch our service in Europe and Asia in Q1 2005.
Unlike the other current-generation systems on the market today, all
costing under 200 bucks, the Phantom looks to do something that no
other video gaming console has done before. The Phantom is the most
robust, upgradeable console which provides a better entertainment
package and will drive down the cost of games to the consumers.
"The consumer who enters the market earlier is obviously going to pay
the price," says Roberts. "The people who bought the first generation
of Tivo ended up having to pay a little more. And there are going to
be people who will wait thinking that second generation product will
be cheaper, faster and better. But our console is upgradeable,
provides a refurbish program and also there are people who are willing
to come in early and adopt the product and help launch our service. As
we build our subscriber base, the consumer monthly service fee goes
down offset by our economies of scale. But the most dramatic change to
that is when the advertising revenue is achieved; consumers are
predicted to spend 7 times mo
Google is using web pages, online phone directories, etc., to get the
locations of local businesses. You then enter a location and some set
of keywords; google returns the results. The results are mostly sorted
by distance to the specified location, but Google's ranking can
override this. And Google will sell locally-targeted advertising. As
with all their services, the sponsored links are clearly labeled as
such aid displayed in a distinct area on the search results page.
The online Yellow Pages are one of the few legacy databases I use on a
regular basis. I am amazed by the clunkiness of the GUI and the
general uselessness of these online interfaces. Yellow Page
advertisements have traditionally been a huge cash cow for the Baby
Bells. If Google can sway users to access their online directories
instead, significant advertising dollars should start flowing to this
friendly directory service -- and away from the traditional Yellow
Pages. One wonders what countermeasures the Baby Bells -- and other
owners of Yellow Pages services -- will launch.
Effectiveness at using search engines is enhanced by studying them;
I'm wondering if Google has contemplated buying/subsidizing one of the
better guides to using Google (like O'Reilley's _Google Pocket Guide_)
and distributing on a massive scale. I'm also interested in seeing how
Google will work to provide access to their service beyond a
traditional web interface.
I really like Google's news service ( news.google.com ) and the beta
of their shopping service ( froogle.google.com ). Google's taking on
the Yellow Pages could massively shift the landscape of the Internet
again.
Thinking about the latest PC worm thats going crazy around the country
today, I was wondering how virus related IP traffic could effect VoIP
applications.
Just recently, I got a VoIP network packet dump from a customer, where
there were many non-VoIP protocol packets addressed to a valid local
VoIP endpoint, using ports 135 (loc-srv/epmap), 139 (NetBIOS), 53
(DNS), and 445 (SMB). I figured that VoIP traffic generated from this
IP address probably triggered some routers or other endpoints to
generate queries to this IP address, using these port numbers.
Another thing that I got wondering about was how I do not limit port
numbers that can be used for RTP/RTCP/T.38 VoIP data (not talking
signaling here). For an IP endpoint with assigned IP address, any
port can be assigned for these purposes. Could this cause problems on
public networks?
In my app, only RTP/RTCP/T38 data should be accepted on any IP/Port
combination. Unrecognized packets are forwared to check for errors.
The path for these forwarded packets could become a system bottleneck
if it's not designed for a high bandwidth, and some filtering must
take place.
In the future, assuming that VoIP gains ground in public networks,
doesn't it seem that viruses like todays could exploit any IP network,
be it VoIP, Windows XP, whatever?
Direct Connect is constructed around "hubs". Users can establish their own hubs with or without restriction, forming mini-communities. When logging on, users select a hub or can connect directly to other individual peers. Hub owners have the ability to restrict users of their hubs depending upon amount and/or type of files the user is sharing. Those with smaller hard drives are restricted from joining a hub with a 10 gig minimum file share, for example, which will restrict this program's potential for less serious collectors. Direct Connect hub owners can also limit access depending upon connection speed - a lot of hub owners throw off modem users (hence the "elitist" reference). For users with a slow speed connection, Direct Connect is not your best file sharing option.
Users also operate the servers on Edonkey2000 and KaZaA, although there appears to be less community-organisation and restriction surrounding their networks. With Edonkey2000, the program remains connect whenever you are online, so you may be vulnerable to hackers, as the program will not operate from behind a firewall, but there is no spyware. KaZaA on the other hand has built in spyware, which will deter many potential users.
Edonkey2000 is a unique peer-to-peer sharer in its transfer system. Files are hash identified and transferred in "chunks". This means the donkey can identify identical files even if they have been renamed, increasing the potential of downloading the entire file. Because of the hash identification files can be uploaded before they have completed downloading - the "chunks" that have been received are immediately shared. Files propagate quickly over the donkey network, and the automatic resume feature has high success even after a reboot. One thing to remember though - check there is room on your incoming folder drive for the entire file - you can only change it by completing or cancelling all your downloads, and you don't want to miss the last few chunks of your file. Although this ingenious file sharing system means the donkey is reliable for getting entire files the downloads are very slow - you have to have a lot of patience.
Direct Connect is a slow downloader as well. Users with a lot of files to share can get access to servers restricted to broadband users, which speeds transfers up a little, but one again you don't wouldn't want to be on a hurry. Direct Connect users a direct file transfer system and also has an auto-resume feature which completes file downloading from any user with the file. Direct Connect doesn't uniquely identify files and will not recognise variations in file names like Edonkey2000. On-the-ball users can rename their file and continue downloading from a new source if they identify it by the file size with a name variation.
KaZaA downloads files from various sources at the same time, to speed up the transfer rate. The software downloads a file from several sources and the pieces are reassembled into a single file on the receiver's drive. Like Direct Connect and the donkey, KaZaA has a reliable resume feature if a transfer is interrupted, however like Direct Connect resumes will only recognise sources with identical file names. Users report KaZaA is one of the speedier peer-to-peer sharers, but once again, patience is in order, and broadband users will get the most from this program.
All three programs have search features. Edonkey2000 has quick searches, and also offers an availability search, although the value of this is questionable. Direct Connect users can search particular hubs for material and although some users report it is time consuming going from hub to hub, the program does have an option to search the entire network. Direct Connect's sloppy interface has made this feature hard to find for some users. KaZaA has various search options and users report it is quick and reliable. Download times are shown with search results. KaZaA will also allow you to search for files not only by name, but by any keyword found in the stored description of the file. When files
Ok, first off, hacker is a very missunderstood word and not defined properly, by definition a hacker is a self trained computer professional / programmer.
Would I hire a hacker? The answer is absolutely; hire someone who learns on their own without some instructor holding their hand.
Hackers have the best problem solveing, and deductive reasoning skills of anyone in the IT industry not to mention attention to detail. One could only be so lucky to have one on staff (and you probably do).
Don't get me wrong, there are definitly milicious hackers (crackers) who find joy in compromising, stealing, and destroying systems and networks, but to be honest, most of them do not get cought, and if they do, one needs to wonder, how good are they anyway if they got cought.
The closest we have to a robot is the Honda robot - which still cannot
handle many basic functions. AI has gradually increased, but nothing
spectacular. Why has there not been more progress?
"Intellectual Property" does not exist!
on
Open Source Licensing
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The phrase "Intellectual Property" is a metaphor used to explain a very
specialized interpretation of what Copyright, Patents and Trademarks are.
These three things do exist (Copyright, Patents, Trademarks) and have
defined meaning in our various Nation-State legal systems, and differ from
Nation-State to Nation-State, but the phrase "Intellectual Property" does
not have any real meaning.
As soon as you use that phrase, you are assuming a specific
interpretation of the 3 legal constructs. Those of us who reject that
particular interpretation are automatically locked out of the discussion,
which I suspect is the purpose of the phrase.
What Copyright, Patents, and Trademarks do is impose a 'temporary
monopoly' onto something intellectual that otherwise would not have
limits. The nature of the monopoly may be different (Is it for an exact
'copyable' work of art such as an audio/visual work, or writing....is is a
process where the words/diagrams used to describe the process are not
critical, but the process is... or is it part of a virtual identity), and
the time limits may be different, but the phrase "temporary monopoly" is
the essence of these legal structures.
If we can't start from that basis, then there is no way to have the
discussion without quickly breaking down. The metaphor of property just
does not make sense outside of physical objects as ideas are infinitely
copyable, and can be spontaneously created ("thought of") in different
places and time in isolation from each other. With physical objects there
is a natural monopoly: the land, animal, person, object or whatever
physical object can only exist in one place at any given time, and in the
world outside of science fiction and magic do not just "appear out of thin
air".
Creating an arbitrary legal limit on how something can be copied is
clearly government intervention in the natural world to create a monopoly.
Who benefits from that monopoly, and what the costs are, and how these
things have changed over time can be brought up to interpretation and
debate, but the basic concept behind the government granted temporary
monopoly cannot be debated.
Yeah. The salary is on the rise. That is a good point. The question is what about for the related areas and fields of profession. I am especialy interested in field such as paten tlaw, i.e. this is the field i am in. Hopefully we will see a rise in salary for patent attorneys.
Slashdot Mirror
What the f*** is this supposed to mean? You have problem with the Chinese?
... except for the fact that you have to put up other people in them.
Periodically I get frantic messages from members and friends with "important messages" about new email and
computer viruses that are actually hoaxes. While savvy Internet users can usually immediately spot the hoaxes,
many of our members can be both intimidated and frightened (not to mention the time and effort wasted when the
messages are passed back and forth, to spread these 'alerts/hoaxes'). Running virus checking software can also be
a very time-consuming endeavor (especially on a large Local Area Network), when you find that you have
stopped everyone from working for several hours to check for a hoax, it can be really embarrassing.
My advice is to do a little checking on your own before you excitedly message all of your friends and associates,
and possibly embarrass yourself by wasting a lot of their time. Here are some of the better sites that track both
email and other computer viruses and virus hoaxes. I rely heavily on the U.S. Department of Energy Computer
Incident Advisory Capability's (CIAC) Internet Virus Hoaxes page, but the others all have good and usually
current information.
Between them, they describe more than a dozen hoaxes, from Good Times, to PENPAL GREETINGS, to Join
the Crew. Background, including the actual "warning" message is provided. These sites provide a valuable service
to the Internet community, especially for new users.
inux & Open Source Center Editor Steven Vaughan-Nichols knows that many Linux fans hate Red Hat. His message to them: Get over it.
... no, not Microsoft, but Red Hat. I often hear longtime Linux enthusiasts say things like "Red Hat has betrayed Linux" and "Red Hat wants to be the next Microsoft."
... there's a lot of hate out there aimed at Red Hat.
After SCO, the company most hated by Linux fans is quite possibly
If you look closely, it's not hard to see why so much ire is tossed on Red Hat. Late last year, Red Hat's CEO, Matthew Szulik, said that for home users today, Windows is probably "the right product line." That's sure to win the hearts and minds of Linux fans right there.
Then, Red Hat decided to kill off its low-end Linux distribution: Red Hat Linux. You would have thought from all the screaming in some Linux circles that Red Hat was proposing dog food be made from kittens. Some Linux fans even said Red Hat is on its way to becoming a proprietary software company.
Red Hat's corporate enemies and, in one case, a purported partner--Sun--are jumping on this last point It isn't true, of course. Red Hat is still an open-source company.
What is true, though, is that Red Hat mishandled the affair. Red Hat 9 had a life span of just over a year with its April 2003 release date and its end of support on April 30, 2004. Business customers, who usually expect to get at least three years of work out of an operating system, were as mad as wet hens to find their support disappearing from underneath them. Indeed, there's been enough outrage that several integrators including at least one mid-major Linux vendor--Progeny--are making a business of supporting Red Hat 9 customers.
The release of Fedora, Red Hat's free and cutting-edge Linux distribution, doesn't appear to have been enough for some of these users.
Of course, what Red Hat really wanted was to have its commercial customers switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Some Linux fans were outraged because they felt they were being forced to upgrade.
Rant, rave, rant, rave
But you know what? There's nothing new about this. As early as 1999, I was writing stories about people who hated Red Hat for the same general reasons, which boil down to the fact that Red Hat is getting too big for its breeches. Heck, the ill-fated UnitedLinux consortium was in many ways an attempt by other Linux powers to take Red Hat down a peg.
Now, this isn't to say that Red Hat hasn't made mistakes. Both the timing and delivery of its message concerning the end of life for Red Hat 9 were awful. It placed many of its customers in the awkward position of having to upgrade before they were ready. It left others, including yours truly, completely bamboozled as to whether Red Hat would even continue to have a desktop distribution. As it happens, Red Hat is offering a Linux desktop, but there never should have been any doubt.
Nevertheless, the move itself was one that Red Hat had to make. For better or worse, Red Hat has decided that it wants its Linux distribution to be a high-end, profitable business distribution. Given that, the Raleigh, N.C., company had no choice but to leave Red Hat 9 behind so that it would no longer have two competing lines.
You know what? It's been a successful move. Red Hat's last quarter was its best ever. Why? In large part, it was because RHEL sales increased by 87,000 during the quarter while RHEL renewal rates remained at about 90 percent. Red Hat is a profitable Linux company, and it's getting more profitable.
Perhaps that's the real reason why Sun has been so grumpy with Red Hat. Sun is much bigger, but it's been declining, in large part due to competition from Linux in the server market, while Red Hat has been growing.
And maybe too that's the real problem some Linux fans have with Red Hat. The company has always been about open source and profits. To these fans, the idea that Linux is becoming mainstream, that their da
Call me a gaming "elitist" if you will, but when the original SOCOM became a
$19 Greatest Hits title, the number of immature teenagers, cheaters, and
idiots who I encountered online tripled overnight. There's just something to
be said for $39-$49 games, as the price of admission weeds out a certain
element.
In last weekend's advertising circulars, I saw an ad for the newest
additions to the PS2 Greatest Hits line-up, which will now include ATV2, Jak
II, Ratchet & Clank: Goin' Commando, and SOCOM II.
So, as a word of warning, if you are still playing SOCOM II online, be
prepared to be inundated with idiots very soon. Better start keeping a list
of reasonable people to play against, and start locking your games with
passwords...
June 29, 1999
Web posted at: 11:32 a.m. EDT (1532 GMT)
by Mary Brandel
(IDG) -- It's the late 1950s, and you're a computer operator at MIT running a long job on a computer donated by IBM. The phone rings. It's a request from the president of IBM -- who races big yachts on Long Island Sound -- to run the program that assigns handicap points to the boats.
That request means you have to abort the job that's running, mount a new tape and then restart the current job from scratch.
Or maybe you're a computer programmer. It's late afternoon, and you're picking up the results of the computer program you dropped off this morning. The printout contains an error message. After waiting all day for your program's results, you discover you have left out a comma.
It was in that type of environment that John McCarthy, a professor at MIT, submitted a memo to Philip Morse, then the director of the MIT Computation Center, outlining a new concept called "time-sharing." Unlike batch processing, where programmers submitted programs on punch cards to a computer center, this new mode of computing promised to make computers more accessible to, and interactive with, users.
Encouraged by Morse to pursue the idea, an associate professor named Fernando Corbato and his team developed the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) in 1961, which was the first demonstration of how time-sharing could be done.
Simply put, time-sharing enables a computer to serve many users simultaneously, so that each person feels like he's using his own private computer.
Functionally speaking, a time-sharing computer stops a long job, copies its memory to a place on a disk, runs something else and then starts up the long job again -- without interrupting the user. "Each user's program has access to the full resources of the machine, and several programs can share time on the machine," explains Tom Van Vleck, who was a junior member of the CTSS team and a developer of Multics, a successor to CTSS.
In addition, computing is interactive. Programmers create programs on the keyboard, and the computer responds almost immediately, with results or error messages.
Although that sounds quite rational to the 1990s user, not even the hardware was prepared for such a radical concept in 1961. For instance, the IBM 7090 used by Corbato's team lacked a keyboard. "Fortunately, we were able to get Teletype machines from AT&T Corp. and Selectric mechanisms [IBM Selectric electronic typewriters] from IBM to solve that problem," Corbato says. "But even then, we had to fight for both upper and lowercase letters."
Working with IBM, the team was able to modify a second machine, an IBM 7094, to solve that and many other problems. "Many of these solutions are still in use today," Corbato notes. They included a hardware timer to interrupt user programs and a way to prevent programs from operating outside of designated memory boundaries.
The 1961 demo was "crude and incomplete," according to Corbato. However, it showed time-sharing to be a feasible concept, and many time-sharing systems would follow the CTSS demo. The finished version supplied time-sharing services to MIT, New England colleges and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
But most important, the CTSS demo led to Project MAC. Funded with $3 million in 1962 by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), Project MAC's first goal was to develop a full-fledged time-sharing system, named the Multiplexed Information and Computer System, or Multics.
Multics wasn't ready until 1969, and it never became a commercial success. However, It is important in many ways. For one thing, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the inventors of Unix, used many ideas from Multics.
But perhaps most important, time-sharing brought users into the universe of computer design.
"Time-sharing introduced the engineering constraint that the interactive needs of users [were] just as important as the efficiency of the equipment," Corbato says.
In the mid-1960s, the 7094 was one of the biggest, fastest computers available, able to add floating numbers at a speed of about 0.35 MIPS. A standard 7094 had 32K 36-bit words of memory. Its data channels could access memory and run simple channel programs to do I/O once started by the CPU, and the channels could cause a CPU interrupt when the I/O finished. They cost about $3.5 million. Paul Pierce's collection includes a real 709 and 7094.
MIT got an IBM 7090, replacing the 709, in the spring of 1962, when I was a freshman, and had upgraded the 7090 to a 7094 by 1963. The 7090 and 7094 were operated in batch mode, controlled by the Fortran Monitor System (FMS). Batch jobs on cards were transferred to tape on an auxiliary 1401, and the monitor took one job at a time off the input tape, ran it, and captured the output on another tape for printing and punching by the 1401. Each user job was loaded into core by the BSS loader along with a small monitor routine that terminated jobs that ran over their time estimates. Library routines for arithmetic and I/O were also loaded and linked with the user's program. Thus, each user's job had complete control of the whole 7094, all 32K words of memory, all the data channels, everything.
IBM had been very generous to MIT in the fifties and sixties, donating its biggest scientific computers. When a new top of the line 36-bit scientific machine came out, MIT expected to get one. In the early sixties, the deal was that MIT got one 8-hour shift, all the other New England colleges and universities got a shift, and the third shift was available to IBM for its own use. One use IBM made of it was yacht handicapping: the president of IBM raced big yachts on Long Island Sound, and these boats were assigned handicap points by a complicated formula. There was a special job deck kept at the MIT Computation Center, and if a request came in to run it, operators were to stop whatever was running on the machine and do the yacht handicapping job immediately.
Early Time-Sharing
MIT professors, such as Herb Teager and Marvin Minsky, wanted more access to the machine, like they had had on Whirlwind in the fifties, and quicker return of their results from their FMS jobs. John McCarthy wrote an influential memo titled "A Time Sharing Operator Program for Our Projected IBM 709" dated January 1, 1959, that proposed interactive time-shared debugging. These desires led to time-sharing experiments, such as Teager's "time-stealing system" and "sequence break mode," which allowed an important professor's job to interrupt a running job, roll its core image out to tape, make a quick run, and restore the interrupted job. McCarthy's Reminiscences on the History of Time Sharing describes his and Teager's role in the beginnings of time-sharing. Teager and McCarthy presented a paper titled "Time-Shared Program Testing" at the ACM meeting in August 1959.
FMS and Batch Processing
MIT and the University of Michigan were both 7094 owners, and the computation center people were colleagues who traded code back and forth. When I was a freshman in 1961, we used FORTRAN in the elementary course (FORTRAN II was brand new then), but by the time I was a sophomore, MIT had installed Michigan's MAD language, written by Graham, Arden, and Galler, and was using that in most places that a compiler language was needed, especially computer courses. MAD was descended from ALGOL 58: it had block structure and a fast compiler, and if your compilation failed, the compiler used to print out a line printer portrait of Alfred E. Neumann. (MIT took that out to save paper.) Mike Alexander says, "MAD was first developed about 1959 or 1960 on a 704, a machine which makes the 7094 look very powerful indeed." MAD ran under UMES, the University of Michigan Executive System, derived from a 1959 GM Research Center executive for the IBM 701 that was one of the first operating systems.
Part of the Michigan/MAD code was a replacement for the standard FORTRAN output formatter routine, (IOH). (Programs written
"Being a gamer, there is no two ways about it," says Dale Eldridge, Vice President of Infinium Labs. "You'll have CDs that get scratched that will no longer work and you have to front the cost to buy the same game multiple times. And you buy a system, the developer upgrades it, you can't play the game you have before on the same proprietary console, and then your little cheap $200 consumer item breaks because it is only a toy. The most frustrating is the titles only appeal to the 8-18 year olds and don't offer the genres and title selection which appeals to the 3-38 year olds which is 80% of the market today. It's frustrating. So what we've designed is a real machine with a hassle free service allowing you a infinite selection of gaming content. You no longer have to spend your time as an IT person. It can be in your living room, it can be easy to use, it is built for the hardcore horsepower driven gamer, it can appeal to all audiences, it can be convenient, and it can be FUN!'"
One of the interesting things, Tim Roberts (CEO and founder) noted is that other consoles are just PC's with Proprietary Operating Systems which actually raise the cost of games, since they have to be re-written to adapt to these consoles. He also stated that the proprietary consoles have "built themselves into a box"; this means that they have to purchase huge volumes of parts in order to achieve the economies of scale. This also ties them into the same technology for 5 years since they have produced tied up enormous amounts of there cash and don't want to obsolete themselves.
Roberts explained that the Beta tester requests were very successful. With over 28k applications on file to date we have collected some very resourceful testers which can help fine tune our product. We are planning on distributing emails to the 300 lucky testers on Sept 15th which will announce who has been selected. We will then shift gears and open beta tester requests for Europe, Asia, Mexico and Australia, as well as others. We are looking for the best, the elite hard core gamers and also the top hackers and crackers out there. We will be sending the United States and Canada beta testers consoles to them on Sept 15th. The beta testers will need to sign an agreement to provide 1 year worth of testing for us and commit to provide feed back to us regarding the service. They will be allowed to keep the equipment and games but will have to pay there own broadband access fees. We will be looking for 300 testers in each country, not just the United States and Canada.
We plan to launch our service in Europe and Asia in Q1 2005.
Unlike the other current-generation systems on the market today, all costing under 200 bucks, the Phantom looks to do something that no other video gaming console has done before. The Phantom is the most robust, upgradeable console which provides a better entertainment package and will drive down the cost of games to the consumers.
"The consumer who enters the market earlier is obviously going to pay the price," says Roberts. "The people who bought the first generation of Tivo ended up having to pay a little more. And there are going to be people who will wait thinking that second generation product will be cheaper, faster and better. But our console is upgradeable, provides a refurbish program and also there are people who are willing to come in early and adopt the product and help launch our service. As we build our subscriber base, the consumer monthly service fee goes down offset by our economies of scale. But the most dramatic change to that is when the advertising revenue is achieved; consumers are predicted to spend 7 times mo
The online Yellow Pages are one of the few legacy databases I use on a regular basis. I am amazed by the clunkiness of the GUI and the general uselessness of these online interfaces. Yellow Page advertisements have traditionally been a huge cash cow for the Baby Bells. If Google can sway users to access their online directories instead, significant advertising dollars should start flowing to this friendly directory service -- and away from the traditional Yellow Pages. One wonders what countermeasures the Baby Bells -- and other owners of Yellow Pages services -- will launch.
Effectiveness at using search engines is enhanced by studying them; I'm wondering if Google has contemplated buying/subsidizing one of the better guides to using Google (like O'Reilley's _Google Pocket Guide_) and distributing on a massive scale. I'm also interested in seeing how Google will work to provide access to their service beyond a traditional web interface.
I really like Google's news service ( news.google.com ) and the beta of their shopping service ( froogle.google.com ). Google's taking on the Yellow Pages could massively shift the landscape of the Internet again.
Just recently, I got a VoIP network packet dump from a customer, where there were many non-VoIP protocol packets addressed to a valid local VoIP endpoint, using ports 135 (loc-srv/epmap), 139 (NetBIOS), 53 (DNS), and 445 (SMB). I figured that VoIP traffic generated from this IP address probably triggered some routers or other endpoints to generate queries to this IP address, using these port numbers.
Another thing that I got wondering about was how I do not limit port numbers that can be used for RTP/RTCP/T.38 VoIP data (not talking signaling here). For an IP endpoint with assigned IP address, any port can be assigned for these purposes. Could this cause problems on public networks?
In my app, only RTP/RTCP/T38 data should be accepted on any IP/Port combination. Unrecognized packets are forwared to check for errors. The path for these forwarded packets could become a system bottleneck if it's not designed for a high bandwidth, and some filtering must take place.
In the future, assuming that VoIP gains ground in public networks, doesn't it seem that viruses like todays could exploit any IP network, be it VoIP, Windows XP, whatever?
Users also operate the servers on Edonkey2000 and KaZaA, although there appears to be less community-organisation and restriction surrounding their networks. With Edonkey2000, the program remains connect whenever you are online, so you may be vulnerable to hackers, as the program will not operate from behind a firewall, but there is no spyware. KaZaA on the other hand has built in spyware, which will deter many potential users.
Edonkey2000 is a unique peer-to-peer sharer in its transfer system. Files are hash identified and transferred in "chunks". This means the donkey can identify identical files even if they have been renamed, increasing the potential of downloading the entire file. Because of the hash identification files can be uploaded before they have completed downloading - the "chunks" that have been received are immediately shared. Files propagate quickly over the donkey network, and the automatic resume feature has high success even after a reboot. One thing to remember though - check there is room on your incoming folder drive for the entire file - you can only change it by completing or cancelling all your downloads, and you don't want to miss the last few chunks of your file. Although this ingenious file sharing system means the donkey is reliable for getting entire files the downloads are very slow - you have to have a lot of patience.
Direct Connect is a slow downloader as well. Users with a lot of files to share can get access to servers restricted to broadband users, which speeds transfers up a little, but one again you don't wouldn't want to be on a hurry. Direct Connect users a direct file transfer system and also has an auto-resume feature which completes file downloading from any user with the file. Direct Connect doesn't uniquely identify files and will not recognise variations in file names like Edonkey2000. On-the-ball users can rename their file and continue downloading from a new source if they identify it by the file size with a name variation.
KaZaA downloads files from various sources at the same time, to speed up the transfer rate. The software downloads a file from several sources and the pieces are reassembled into a single file on the receiver's drive. Like Direct Connect and the donkey, KaZaA has a reliable resume feature if a transfer is interrupted, however like Direct Connect resumes will only recognise sources with identical file names. Users report KaZaA is one of the speedier peer-to-peer sharers, but once again, patience is in order, and broadband users will get the most from this program.
All three programs have search features. Edonkey2000 has quick searches, and also offers an availability search, although the value of this is questionable. Direct Connect users can search particular hubs for material and although some users report it is time consuming going from hub to hub, the program does have an option to search the entire network. Direct Connect's sloppy interface has made this feature hard to find for some users. KaZaA has various search options and users report it is quick and reliable. Download times are shown with search results. KaZaA will also allow you to search for files not only by name, but by any keyword found in the stored description of the file. When files
Would I hire a hacker? The answer is absolutely; hire someone who learns on their own without some instructor holding their hand.
Hackers have the best problem solveing, and deductive reasoning skills of anyone in the IT industry not to mention attention to detail. One could only be so lucky to have one on staff (and you probably do).
Don't get me wrong, there are definitly milicious hackers (crackers) who find joy in compromising, stealing, and destroying systems and networks, but to be honest, most of them do not get cought, and if they do, one needs to wonder, how good are they anyway if they got cought.
lock down the system get the bad guys!
The closest we have to a robot is the Honda robot - which still cannot handle many basic functions. AI has gradually increased, but nothing spectacular. Why has there not been more progress?
As soon as you use that phrase, you are assuming a specific interpretation of the 3 legal constructs. Those of us who reject that particular interpretation are automatically locked out of the discussion, which I suspect is the purpose of the phrase.
What Copyright, Patents, and Trademarks do is impose a 'temporary monopoly' onto something intellectual that otherwise would not have limits. The nature of the monopoly may be different (Is it for an exact 'copyable' work of art such as an audio/visual work, or writing....is is a process where the words/diagrams used to describe the process are not critical, but the process is ... or is it part of a virtual identity), and
the time limits may be different, but the phrase "temporary monopoly" is
the essence of these legal structures.
If we can't start from that basis, then there is no way to have the discussion without quickly breaking down. The metaphor of property just does not make sense outside of physical objects as ideas are infinitely copyable, and can be spontaneously created ("thought of") in different places and time in isolation from each other. With physical objects there is a natural monopoly: the land, animal, person, object or whatever physical object can only exist in one place at any given time, and in the world outside of science fiction and magic do not just "appear out of thin air".
Creating an arbitrary legal limit on how something can be copied is clearly government intervention in the natural world to create a monopoly. Who benefits from that monopoly, and what the costs are, and how these things have changed over time can be brought up to interpretation and debate, but the basic concept behind the government granted temporary monopoly cannot be debated.
What's to be confused about?
Yeah. The salary is on the rise. That is a good point. The question is what about for the related areas and fields of profession. I am especialy interested in field such as paten tlaw, i.e. this is the field i am in. Hopefully we will see a rise in salary for patent attorneys.