Why is this seen as a problem? The open source community doesn't really try that hard to encourage *anyone* to participate regardless of gender or race or nationality. It just is what it is. Those who participate decide to do so on their own and there's virtually no barriers to doing so.
What do we have to lose?
Throw a few OSS Ladies Nights - where Ladies get all their software for Free and we might just get some where.
He (and "the industry") claim that the incentive for building out infrastructure is not there if they are forced to share access for marginal profits.
That is only because "the industry" is conflating physical access (actual cables, etc) with logical access (tcp/ip, etc). If these public utilities were prevented from selling logical access, and instead saw their customers as the logical access providers - the ISPs - then they would not have to worry about competing with the ISPs and the ISPs would all competing within their own market. It is almost as if they are saying, "because we have a monopoly on the physical plant, we have to use it to enter the ISP market, to do otherwise would be unmonopoly-like!" - kind of the Bill Gates school on monopoly business practices.
On indeceny:
He talks about receiving hundreds of thousands of complaints. As if that legitimizes the content of the complaints. It might, if they were meaningfully distinct, but over 99% are astro-turf complaints and not charactertistic of the public at large.
At least he is being consistent - he favors monopolies - both business wanting to monopolize public utilities and idealogies like the "christain" Parents Television Council wanting to monopolize the content of enterntainment, be it over-the-air, over-the-wire or direct, encrypted satellite.
How would municipal wifi track users? I think you have a good idea, but I'm curious how we would prevent the bad apples from completly destroying that idea.
Who cares? As long as the system is under-utilized it doesn't matter and once it starts becoming over-utilized, all it takes is some smart bandwidth shaping to keep the top users from stepping on everyone else.
'one of the dumbest men ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb. Eye-rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing fabulous new clothes.' Our arguments are that Dvorak unnecessarily complicates keyboarding, and that his name sounds dumb."
Still not as dumb as Jerry Pournelle though. The guy writes fiction - great fiction when he sells it as SF, and bad, bad, bad fiction when he sells it as commentary on the computer industry. Dumb name too, makes you think, even if just subconsciously, pr0nelle.
I doubt they have monitors or video cards that can detect, say, a simple splitter or repeater
They do, and they have had it for a couple of years now. It is called HDCP and it a handshaking encryption protocol using public key encryption. This mechanism is built into every television, projector, dvd player and hdtv set-top box that has an HDMI interconnect. It is also built into most consumer-grade DVI equipment too (HDMI is primarily DVI with just a different form-factor).
Many DVD's will not play if they detect a VCR between the DVD player and the television.
Uh, no.
They play just fine, there is no feedback to the dvd player telling it "wait, stop, vcr in the signal path."
The problem is the vcr see's the macrovision in the signal from the dvd player and says "I ain't going to pass this through to the tv." That's actually broken, but way too common. The "correct" behaviour is for the vcr to pass the macrovision+signal on to the tv unmolested, but refuse to record it if you try. Just about any vcr built in the last 3-4 years should do the right thing.
Most people aren't videophiles. If it looks "good enough" to them, why should they care?
There in lies the real problem with this kind of down-rezing DRM. If "good enough" is what the system lets out "unprotected" then people will pirate that and, by definition, it will be good enough for most people.
Kind of the way all that super-duper copy-protection on dvd-audio and sacd is useless. When 99% of the market thinks mp3-quality is "good enough" then that's what they will pirate. Nobody pirates the hi-res audio, not because of the copy-prevention, but because nobody cares about hi-res. (And I say this as an owner of both dvd-audio and sacd discs)
There were two papers, one was a blanket statement for the whole white house staff, the second specifically drafted by Rove and his lawyer.
Just because he wrote it doesn't mean it wasn't under duress. False confessions are usually written by the confessor all the time. I'm not saying the source is Rove, I'm just saying that a public release means nothing - no matter who it was addressed to, it was written for public consumption, not the reporter's.
If you really must have a personal motive for Miller potentially "protecting" Rove, then just look at the kinds of stories Miller has written in the past. Most of them have been supportive of the Bush administration's policies and actions.
Only flaw in that theory is said current member of the white house staff specifically signed something that gave all reporters wavers on any confidential talks about this person.
They signed the document under threat of unemployment. That's duress which means that whatever the document says, there is no guarantee that it represents the person's true wishes.
If that is all it took to make a reporter divulge an anonymous source, then there would be no value in a reporter's promise to keep their sources anonymous.
Given this, who could she possibly be protecting? Does anyone seriously think that the NYTimes is protecting someone in the White House?
Too much Rush, not enough critical thinking. It doesn't matter who she is protecting, what matters is that she is protecting them. If she didn't protect them, then she, and the NYT, would have a hard time getting anyone to be an anonymous source ever again. She is just making a personal stand for Freedom of the press, and like the saying goes, Freedom isn't free -- Miller is paying that price right now.
the final product will be tied to an special Intel DRM chip that will prevent it from running on other machines.
That article about Apple using DRM/TCPM was just pure speculation. Please don't repeat slashtdot headlines as fact until you've at least RTFC (read the fine comments).
Open your eyes, HDTV is here and it is affordable. You are way out of date with your prices.
Just at Walmart (yes walmart!) alone there are two HDTV's with ATSC/QAM tuners for under $800: $600 30" HDTV set $700 32" HDTV set
Many smart shoppers will opt for an HDTV "monitor" (a HDTV set with no tuner) and just use their cable company's set-top box for a tuner like ~50+% of American households do today with their regular sets. Walmart has got another 8 HDTV monitors for under $800.
Even smarter shoppers will buy a projector, for $600-$1200, and use their cableco's set-top box for tuning. With that projector they can have screen sizes up past 8 feet wide (not diagonal, 8 feet wide like an entire wall) that will really make good use of the picture quality of HDTV (and even many DVDs).
DTV transmitters still 5X the price of the analog gear
Differences in the cost of broadcast gear has been rapidly narrowing too - see the new Harris PowerCD UHF ATSC transmitter (it even runs linux!). Sure a new transmitter costs a lot more than an already-paid for analog transmitter, but other factors like operating cost will eventually make it cheaper to upgrade than to keep running the same old gear.
to get a mere 5 or so ("Free") HDTV channels off of cable in my area, it costs almost $80 a month to get digital cable, a box, and pay for all of the hundreds of SDTV channels,
Chances are you have been mislead.
It is an FCC requirement that if a cableco carries a HDTV channel, and that channel's analog equivalent is part of their "basic tier," as are almost all broadcast over-the-air (OTA) channels, then the HDTV version must available as part of that same "basic tier." They may charge you extra for a HDTV-capable set-top box, and there may not be a limit on how much extra they charge, but chances are, it is not ~$80 extra.
For example, in the Boston area, the comcast basic tier costs ~$10/month. An analog cable box costs ~$4/month, a digital box costs ~$6/month and a HDTV-capable digital box costs ~$8/month. So for ~$18 a month you can get all of the OTA HDTV channels that comcast carries.
If you are fortunate enough to have a QAM tuner built into your television (many current-model HDTV sets include QAM in addition to ATSC) you can skip the cable-box entirely and tune in directly because, as part of the FCC requirements, those basic tier channels can not be encrypted - including the HDTV channels. So, roughly $10/month for basic-tier HDTV.
If you have that QAM tuner, you may also find other channels, beyond the basic tier, are in the clear too. Some people luck out and find HDTV HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc. Other people can get the "on-demand" channels which are like a tivo where the show is stored at the cable head-end. I know a guy who likes to hunt down the clear on-demand channels and watch whatever they are showing, but since he is not the one with the controls, he has to suffer through the paying customer's pause/rewind/fast-forward/etc activities. It can make for a very surreal viewing experience.
It isn't that ICC generates crummy code for AMD cpus, it generates good code for Intel cpus and crummy code for all others.
AMD would have a much stronger case if they were able to demonstrate that ICC compiled code actively detected AMD cpus and took the slowpath.
Instead, it is reasonable for Intel to argue that the slowpath is a fallback option that is designed for maximum compatibility at the expense of performance. Since they take the same slowpath on ALL unrecognized CPUs (cyrix, transmeta, ???) some, or all, of which may not have been part of Intel's test process -- maximum compatibility is a very reasonable design goal, better than simply refusing to run which is another option.
The end result is the same, but the supporting reasoning behind such a move is likely to prevail in a court of law where, in a dispute like this, motivation makes all the difference.
So far, most of the responses here are about "teach this, teach that, don't waste time on such and such, spend more time on the other thing." I have a different approach to suggest.
I spent half of my pre-college years at a private school which I credit with teaching me more stuff and more useful stuff than I learned in class to get my college degree.
Besides having a campus that looks like a country-club, the two main things that private school has going for it are class sizes of 16 or less students, many in the 6-8 range, and teachers that are passionate -- both fresh-out-of-college that I'm sure have burned out by now, and "lifers" who really knew their stuff and for whom teaching was still more than just another job and from whose ranks best English/Math/Science/Coach/etc of the year for the state were regularly chosen.
It was, and continues to be common for this school to graduate the occasional national merit scholar and a handful of finalists each year out of a class size of 60-80 kids.
So, while I don't pretend that simply reducing the student/teacher ratio and booting the unmotivated teachers would be sufficient, I think it would go a long way to improving the situation. Probably cost a boatload or two as well - although teacher salaries, at that and most private schools, are notably less than their public school counter-parts'.
Anyone who has ever read 1984 knows that this is one of the hallmarks of a controlled society. As soon as a book can (untraceably) be edited much objectivity is lost.
This is already happening, and it is indeed scary. They just don't quite have the untraceable part down yet.
About a decade ago, Time Magazine published an essay by Bush Sr and Secretary of Defense Scowcroft on why they chose not take out Sadam during the first gulf war. A lot of the points they made have been proven true today.
Time DELETED the article from their online archives. It was as if it were never written, URLs that once worked are now road-kill on the information super-highway. Not only that, but significant changes were made to other articles in that same issues as compared to the print version.
Fortunately it wasn't quite so untraceable and has been widely reported (not widely enough IMNHO). Here is one take on the story, you can find plenty more by googling for bush scowcroft "reasons not to invade".
They say they can refund all monies if the goal is not reached. But they use paypal. How are they able to refund the money without paypal taking its cut? Do they not really collect it up front? If so, how do they guarantee that a contribution is really there and not just a false promise that could fall through later on?
It takes an awful lot of hosts to swamp an OC3 now, but that's with hosts that rarely have a half megabit uplink, if that. It would be frighteningly easy to swamp the heavy links with a few 100 mbit links.
One major reason DDoS work is the D for distributed. If you coalesced your zombie network down to 100 or less machines, for example, it would be relatively easy to get those specific zombie machines taken out of service. With a 10,000 system zombie network, it is not feasible to hunt down the individual zombie systems.
So, no I don't think it big fat pipes will make that much difference in the effectiveness of DDoS attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this seen as a problem? The open source community doesn't really try that hard to encourage *anyone* to participate regardless of gender or race or nationality. It just is what it is. Those who participate decide to do so on their own and there's virtually no barriers to doing so.
What do we have to lose?
Throw a few OSS Ladies Nights - where Ladies get all their software for Free and we might just get some where.
Or not.
On promoting broadband and oligopolies:
He (and "the industry") claim that the incentive for building out infrastructure is not there if they are forced to share access for marginal profits.
That is only because "the industry" is conflating physical access (actual cables, etc) with logical access (tcp/ip, etc). If these public utilities were prevented from selling logical access, and instead saw their customers as the logical access providers - the ISPs - then they would not have to worry about competing with the ISPs and the ISPs would all competing within their own market. It is almost as if they are saying, "because we have a monopoly on the physical plant, we have to use it to enter the ISP market, to do otherwise would be unmonopoly-like!" - kind of the Bill Gates school on monopoly business practices.
On indeceny:
He talks about receiving hundreds of thousands of complaints. As if that legitimizes the content of the complaints. It might, if they were meaningfully distinct, but over 99% are astro-turf complaints and not charactertistic of the public at large.
At least he is being consistent - he favors monopolies - both business wanting to monopolize public utilities and idealogies like the "christain" Parents Television Council wanting to monopolize the content of enterntainment, be it over-the-air, over-the-wire or direct, encrypted satellite.
How would municipal wifi track users? I think you have a good idea, but I'm curious how we would prevent the bad apples from completly destroying that idea.
Who cares? As long as the system is under-utilized it doesn't matter and once it starts becoming over-utilized, all it takes is some smart bandwidth shaping to keep the top users from stepping on everyone else.
'one of the dumbest men ever put forth by the tech community. I mean seriously dumb. Eye-rolling dumb on the same scale as believing the Emperor is wearing fabulous new clothes.' Our arguments are that Dvorak unnecessarily complicates keyboarding, and that his name sounds dumb."
Still not as dumb as Jerry Pournelle though. The guy writes fiction - great fiction when he sells it as SF, and bad, bad, bad fiction when he sells it as commentary on the computer industry. Dumb name too, makes you think, even if just subconsciously, pr0nelle.
ok, let the flamebait moding begin.
I doubt they have monitors or video cards that can detect, say, a simple splitter or repeater
They do, and they have had it for a couple of years now. It is called HDCP and it a handshaking encryption protocol using public key encryption. This mechanism is built into every television, projector, dvd player and hdtv set-top box that has an HDMI interconnect. It is also built into most consumer-grade DVI equipment too (HDMI is primarily DVI with just a different form-factor).
Many DVD's will not play if they detect a VCR between the DVD player and the television.
Uh, no.
They play just fine, there is no feedback to the dvd player telling it "wait, stop, vcr in the signal path."
The problem is the vcr see's the macrovision in the signal from the dvd player and says "I ain't going to pass this through to the tv." That's actually broken, but way too common. The "correct" behaviour is for the vcr to pass the macrovision+signal on to the tv unmolested, but refuse to record it if you try. Just about any vcr built in the last 3-4 years should do the right thing.
Most people aren't videophiles. If it looks "good enough" to them, why should they care?
There in lies the real problem with this kind of down-rezing DRM. If "good enough" is what the system lets out "unprotected" then people will pirate that and, by definition, it will be good enough for most people.
Kind of the way all that super-duper copy-protection on dvd-audio and sacd is useless. When 99% of the market thinks mp3-quality is "good enough" then that's what they will pirate. Nobody pirates the hi-res audio, not because of the copy-prevention, but because nobody cares about hi-res. (And I say this as an owner of both dvd-audio and sacd discs)
Finally, a GOOD use for the DMCA... putting people behind bars that support the DMCA.
Too late, I've already patented that use.
There were two papers, one was a blanket statement for the whole white house staff, the second specifically drafted by Rove and his lawyer.
Just because he wrote it doesn't mean it wasn't under duress. False confessions are usually written by the confessor all the time. I'm not saying the source is Rove, I'm just saying that a public release means nothing - no matter who it was addressed to, it was written for public consumption, not the reporter's.
If you really must have a personal motive for Miller potentially "protecting" Rove, then just look at the kinds of stories Miller has written in the past. Most of them have been supportive of the Bush administration's policies and actions.
That's nice. Please try to follow the flow of conversation next time.
Only flaw in that theory is said current member of the white house staff specifically signed something that gave all reporters wavers on any confidential talks about this person.
They signed the document under threat of unemployment. That's duress which means that whatever the document says, there is no guarantee that it represents the person's true wishes.
If that is all it took to make a reporter divulge an anonymous source, then there would be no value in a reporter's promise to keep their sources anonymous.
Given this, who could she possibly be protecting? Does anyone seriously think that the NYTimes is protecting someone in the White House?
Too much Rush, not enough critical thinking. It doesn't matter who she is protecting, what matters is that she is protecting them. If she didn't protect them, then she, and the NYT, would have a hard time getting anyone to be an anonymous source ever again. She is just making a personal stand for Freedom of the press, and like the saying goes, Freedom isn't free -- Miller is paying that price right now.
I don't know who you are talking about, but it certainly isn't Bernie Ebbers who has more than enough money to buy himself a pardon.
It wouldn't be surprising if he was actually out within 2 or 3 years,
Plan on him getting in on the traditional pardon-for-play of all outgoing presidents, which would just about fit your timeline.
I think his milatant attitude is not helping the cause for copyright reform and relastic DRM
Relastic DRM, is that like craptastic? Because I that's about the best DRM can ever get.
everyone knew that Andressen snuck out of town with the Mosaic source code
He probably just FTP'd it like everyone else.
Up until then, I'd thought MOD files were the height of computer music. ;-)
Remember that one really amazing guitar mod? That's still pretty impressive to hear today.
the final product will be tied to an special Intel DRM chip that will prevent it from running on other machines.
That article about Apple using DRM/TCPM was just pure speculation.
Please don't repeat slashtdot headlines as fact until you've at least RTFC (read the fine comments).
with DTV's still well over $800.00
Open your eyes, HDTV is here and it is affordable.
You are way out of date with your prices.
Just at Walmart (yes walmart!) alone there are two HDTV's with ATSC/QAM tuners for under $800:
$600 30" HDTV set
$700 32" HDTV set
Many smart shoppers will opt for an HDTV "monitor" (a HDTV set with no tuner) and just use their cable company's set-top box for a tuner like ~50+% of American households do today with their regular sets. Walmart has got another 8 HDTV monitors for under $800.
Even smarter shoppers will buy a projector, for $600-$1200, and use their cableco's set-top box for tuning. With that projector they can have screen sizes up past 8 feet wide (not diagonal, 8 feet wide like an entire wall) that will really make good use of the picture quality of HDTV (and even many DVDs).
DTV transmitters still 5X the price of the analog gear
Differences in the cost of broadcast gear has been rapidly narrowing too - see the new Harris PowerCD UHF ATSC transmitter (it even runs linux!). Sure a new transmitter costs a lot more than an already-paid for analog transmitter, but other factors like operating cost will eventually make it cheaper to upgrade than to keep running the same old gear.
to get a mere 5 or so ("Free") HDTV channels off of cable in my area, it costs almost $80 a month to get digital cable, a box, and pay for all of the hundreds of SDTV channels,
Chances are you have been mislead.
It is an FCC requirement that if a cableco carries a HDTV channel, and that channel's analog equivalent is part of their "basic tier," as are almost all broadcast over-the-air (OTA) channels, then the HDTV version must available as part of that same "basic tier." They may charge you extra for a HDTV-capable set-top box, and there may not be a limit on how much extra they charge, but chances are, it is not ~$80 extra.
For example, in the Boston area, the comcast basic tier costs ~$10/month. An analog cable box costs ~$4/month, a digital box costs ~$6/month and a HDTV-capable digital box costs ~$8/month. So for ~$18 a month you can get all of the OTA HDTV channels that comcast carries.
If you are fortunate enough to have a QAM tuner built into your television (many current-model HDTV sets include QAM in addition to ATSC) you can skip the cable-box entirely and tune in directly because, as part of the FCC requirements, those basic tier channels can not be encrypted - including the HDTV channels. So, roughly $10/month for basic-tier HDTV.
If you have that QAM tuner, you may also find other channels, beyond the basic tier, are in the clear too. Some people luck out and find HDTV HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc. Other people can get the "on-demand" channels which are like a tivo where the show is stored at the cable head-end. I know a guy who likes to hunt down the clear on-demand channels and watch whatever they are showing, but since he is not the one with the controls, he has to suffer through the paying customer's pause/rewind/fast-forward/etc activities. It can make for a very surreal viewing experience.
On any non-Intel processors,
I think this is a key fact.
It isn't that ICC generates crummy code for AMD cpus, it generates good code for Intel cpus and crummy code for all others.
AMD would have a much stronger case if they were able to demonstrate that ICC compiled code actively detected AMD cpus and took the slowpath.
Instead, it is reasonable for Intel to argue that the slowpath is a fallback option that is designed for maximum compatibility at the expense of performance. Since they take the same slowpath on ALL unrecognized CPUs (cyrix, transmeta, ???) some, or all, of which may not have been part of Intel's test process -- maximum compatibility is a very reasonable design goal, better than simply refusing to run which is another option.
The end result is the same, but the supporting reasoning behind such a move is likely to prevail in a court of law where, in a dispute like this, motivation makes all the difference.
You deserve better karma.
So far, most of the responses here are about "teach this, teach that, don't waste time on such and such, spend more time on the other thing." I have a different approach to suggest.
I spent half of my pre-college years at a private school which I credit with teaching me more stuff and more useful stuff than I learned in class to get my college degree.
Besides having a campus that looks like a country-club, the two main things that private school has going for it are class sizes of 16 or less students, many in the 6-8 range, and teachers that are passionate -- both fresh-out-of-college that I'm sure have burned out by now, and "lifers" who really knew their stuff and for whom teaching was still more than just another job and from whose ranks best English/Math/Science/Coach/etc of the year for the state were regularly chosen.
It was, and continues to be common for this school to graduate the occasional national merit scholar and a handful of finalists each year out of a class size of 60-80 kids.
So, while I don't pretend that simply reducing the student/teacher ratio and booting the unmotivated teachers would be sufficient, I think it would go a long way to improving the situation. Probably cost a boatload or two as well - although teacher salaries, at that and most private schools, are notably less than their public school counter-parts'.
Anyone who has ever read 1984 knows that this is one of the hallmarks of a controlled society.
t h.html
As soon as a book can (untraceably) be edited much objectivity is lost.
This is already happening, and it is indeed scary.
They just don't quite have the untraceable part down yet.
About a decade ago, Time Magazine published an essay by Bush Sr and Secretary of Defense Scowcroft on why they chose not take out Sadam during the first gulf war. A lot of the points they made have been proven true today.
Time DELETED the article from their online archives. It was as if it were never written, URLs that once worked are now road-kill on the information super-highway. Not only that, but significant changes were made to other articles in that same issues as compared to the print version.
Fortunately it wasn't quite so untraceable and has been widely reported (not widely enough IMNHO). Here is one take on the story, you can find plenty more by googling for bush scowcroft "reasons not to invade".
http://eee.uci.edu/programs/comp/39c/google/heske
They say they can refund all monies if the goal is not reached. But they use paypal. How are they able to refund the money without paypal taking its cut? Do they not really collect it up front? If so, how do they guarantee that a contribution is really there and not just a false promise that could fall through later on?
It takes an awful lot of hosts to swamp an OC3 now, but that's with hosts that rarely have a half megabit uplink, if that. It would be frighteningly easy to swamp the heavy links with a few 100 mbit links.
One major reason DDoS work is the D for distributed. If you coalesced your zombie network down to 100 or less machines, for example, it would be relatively easy to get those specific zombie machines taken out of service. With a 10,000 system zombie network, it is not feasible to hunt down the individual zombie systems.
So, no I don't think it big fat pipes will make that much difference in the effectiveness of DDoS attacks.