Pardon me for going against the tide of slashdot opinions, but I still don't understand what has everyone so riled up. Perhaps I should blame the FBI for choosing a menacing sounding name like "Carnivore," but certainly their intentions are not to destroy or harm. The FBI is a very major government organization paid for by our tax dollars. I may not agree with their moves all the time, but I trust that they are only concerned about the best interest of our country. Why would they go out of their way to harm the very citizens who keep them running?
Government is never to be trusted a priori.
We have a Bill of Rights in the US. This assures us that private communication between its citizens is private unless there is a reasonable grounds for the government to remove that privacy - as decided by a judge.
Carnivore is implementation of the capaciblity to listen to ALL communications with NO capability of anyone except the FBI to know who is actually being monitored. The government has no right even to install such capabilities.
In the case of the phone system, the FBI obtains a WARRANT, and then goes to the telephone provider. The provider facilitates the action, and ALSO SERVES TO DOUBLECHECK THE WARRANT IS THE ONLY PRIVATE COMMUNICATION REVEALED TO THE FBI. With Carnivore there is no such check. There is really no way for anyone to know how much or how little sniffing those Carnivore boxes are doing.
That is the essence of the problem. No one would deny the FBI the right to execute a warrant to sniff email from a particular party. But there is no check on their action as executed through Carnivore. And that is intolerable.
Maybe we should have the FBI come in and compile all the software we need and then install it on various ISPs on a case-by-case basis. In the meantime, the e-mail ordering the obliteration of your daughter's elementary school or your grandmother's nursing home has already been sent and has gone out to the co-conspirators undetected.
No, for the system to be effective, it has to be available at a moment's notice. The paranoid rantings of those who feel that the government is "coming after them" are not impressive in the least.
Well, the FBI does not feel it necessary to place a black box on every phone line in the US because they might have a need to wire tap them. Instead, they go to the phone companies, and the phone companies facilitate the action. There is no reason that they could not require ISPs to provide them with email from specific court order named accounts - and that such accounts be "tappable" on a moment's notice by the ISP.
The precedent the FBI would set here is unmistakable. They claim they have a right, in the name of national security, to become an integral part of email traffic. The government NEVER has a right to become an integral part of its citizen's private communications without reasonable cause!!! That is a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment.
Not to mention it is just a stupid idea. Carnivore is conceptualized as a mail server intercept - not a mail server sniffer. Its failure will shut down ISPs.
Carnivore is broad in scope; everyone's e-mail is monitored.
Not without a court order.
Well, the Carnivore boxes would be in place in a way that they could conceivably monitor all email traffic. The FBI claims this is pre-emptive and would/could only be used with a court order. I don't think anyone thinks for a second that the FBI would only use Carnivore boxes with a court order.
Furthermore, the Carnivore boxes will cause substantial difficulties. How are you going to intercept all of AOL's email ?? You would need a daemon on the mail server, or a box that intercepts all traffic going to all of the email servers (which are typically set up in a load balancing manner). The likely incompetence of the FBI alone should stop this from happening. Who really thinks their Carnivore boxes will be able to intercept email without interfering with normal email usage.
Further, a failure on the Carnivore boxes (intentional or not) could shut down the vast majority of US internet traffic.
It is a stupid plan, plain and simple. It should never be allowable under the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. It is unreasonable to assume that since you might need to intercept anyone's email at any time - you have a right to place an infrastructure that can intercept EVERYONE's email.
Personally, I think that the only people that need to be monitored are those who are worried about the government monitoring them. By expressing worries, they've expressed that they are probably doing something illegal or extralegal. This is why I am (more or less) in favor of Carnivore. It's not the end of privacy in America by a longshot. People who believe that it is are probably conspiracy theorists who should go back to figuring out who shot JFK (hint: his initials were LHO.)
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
This is really ludicrous, and makes me quite happy I set up my own email server at home. The argument being fostered by the FBI is that they have a right to have a device in place that can be used to intercept email. This is like allowing the FBI to wiretap every phone line in the country, and trusting them to only turn on one of their phone taps when they have an appropriately obtained court order.
This is not about allowing criminals to hide. We in the US have a right to be secure in our persons and things against unreasonable search and seizure. The FBI would like us to think that they have a right to invade our privacy at their leisure.
Love your country, but never trust its government. --Robert A. Heinlein.
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action. --G. Washington January 7, 1790
If C strings were more than just bare buffers with only a lone null to save you from oblivion, the library routines could be smart enough to save your ass. So I blame C and its strings as the primary problem causing buffer overflow exploits.
Use a language with internally checked datatypes and no bare pointers like Java or Perl, and this type of exploit will go away.
Programmers writing SUID programs should also be capable of using pointers without creating buffer overflow exploits.
Or do you think the problems with buffer overflows outweigh the potential gain from using pointers in the first place ??
I strongly prefer the additional power of constructs in C that are provided by pointers. I do not think that a higher level language is likely to be any safer. Sure, the language may conceptually be without overflows, but the increased size of the compilers/interpreters makes those much more difficult to check, and still prone to overflow.
Achtung is vaporware at this point. Linux is making very few inroads on the laptop. The most robust slide presentation software is MagicPoint. Another relatively stable piece of slide presentation software is Kpresenter . Staroffice is the only version to allow Powerpoint imports.
Of course, you could do all the slidemaking in postscript and use just about anything to present it.
It is no secret to people working in the field of signal detection, and especially speech detection, that algorithms that work well will be extremely valuable.
It is further no secret that Microsoft has been hiring machine learning and speech recognition experts from anywhere they can find them, and paying them pretty well.
You can bet that the best voice recognition sequences will be patented and protected in the US.
Murphy TH; Blatter LA; Wier WG; Baraban JM. Rapid communication between neurons and astrocytes in primary cortical cultures. Journal of Neuroscience, 1993 Jun, 13(6):2672-9.
ISPs should and probably do log ALL data coming through their routers. After all, that is very valuable data to some people.
And don't kid yourself that many ISPs are not. And unless you are administering the ISP yourself, don't kid yourself that YOU are not having all your network traffic recorded.
It is like Microsoft or Real sending pings of your net traffic back to home base across the net. There is little motivation for an ISP to abstain from such activity. It is very tough to get caught. And some people will pay for your data, especially if you preprocess it properly.
They are selectively choosing the copyright holders and corporate web entities for their discussions.
What they missed were people who've done research on the history and meaning of copyright law in the US. People like RMS writing or Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. It is critical that the Congress hear from people who actually consider the intent of copyright law (hint - it is not only about making money from one's authorship).
Copyright is intended to pass into public domain after a limited period of monopolism of SOME rights. It is entirely unclear that we SHOULD or CAN enforce draconian copyright laws in cyberspace.
TUX was performing with dynamic content. SpecBENCH is designed to mimic a real world situation with mixed static and dynamic content.
For Ingo: Do you foresee this becoming the enterprise platform for web serving based on the combination of 1) threaded TCP/IP stack 2) httpd modules 3) TUX ?
ie: What possibilities exist for further optimizing ? It is really incredible how much more optimized TUX + 4 CPUs/NICs is that something like an 8 CPU IBM AIX machine, or solaris...
is the WHY behind linux in china. Basically they decided that they can't have a capitalist OS like M$ Windows being supported by a communist country.
No, that is not it at all, not at all.
If you read the history of this a little, you would find that Taiwanese programmers were responsible for making Windows Chinese friendly. They inserted quite a few Easter eggs making fun of the Chinese.
If there is one thing the Chinese government hates, it is a lack of respect. They would actively hurt their own interests to avoid using Windows at this point.
Here is a quote from the (no account required) article in the NY Times
The turning point in Microsoft's image was the introduction of its Chinese-language Windows 95 operating system, which was programmed to display references to "Communist bandits" and to exhort users to "take back the mainland." Beijing, infuriated to learn that Microsoft had used computer programmers in Taiwan to write the software, demanded that the company hire mainland programmers to fix it.
Just another case of Microsoft rushing a product to market before checking it out thoroughly.
The "thundering herd" problem that was identified in Mindcraft and fixed in 2.4, isn't that still present in RedHat 6.1? (BTW calling it "Linux 6.1" really irritated me.) That could explain a sudden drop-off. It is not a problem, not a problem, then suddenly becomes a problem and as soon as you get a slow-down, you get a real traffic jam.
Yeah, the box was dual cpu and dual ethernet card, designed to show the weaknesses of linux networking as of the 2.2 kernels.
However, as more recent benchmarks show, the soon to be released TUX package (from Redhat, GPLd) does extremely well in multi-cpu multi-ethernet card environments. These changes are likely to become embedded in Apache.
I'd be really surprised if anyone has an x86 OS that could beat the one Ingo Molnar set up for the SpecBench tests. It more than tripled the Windows machine under unrealistically high loads with flat file service - 4 CPUs, 4 Gigabit ethernet cards.
There are also issues about scheduling for high loads such as the one in the ZDNet article that have been addressed by a patch from IBM.
Now the only advantage Win2K has over linux is a transparent start menu.
You haven't seen enlightenment window manager yet, have you ? Check out the EFM pages, and yes, it has had transparent menus for a while. But it also antialiases fonts and alpha mixes them for the transparency.
We are not talking about scientific discovery here. No one "pirates" science. Science has always for the most part worked like the open source community does today.
Of course it does. Could you be a LITTLE more vague and naive about it ??
Here is another question. How many drugs that are not patent protected are being pushed by drug companies today ?? How is it that the drugs that work on AIDS all have intellectual property protection that pushes them out of the financial range of African nations who need them most ?? Who exactly is that protecting ??
Discoveries in science that have potential benefit to society are nearly always strongly protected with patents. New cures for diseases are nearly always protected. Things that cannot receive intellectual property protection - such as potential good uses of vitamins as a part of treatment regimes - have limited funding because of their lack of potential utility to a corporation.
Science - wrt generating intellectual property for society's usefulness - is not open and free.
Look at it this way. If it were not for me, the creator of this media, then whatever I created would not exist. Does that not give me some sort of special rights over it?
The creators of the US Constitution allowed congress to grant LIMITED time monopolies on copyrighted works. That concept does not exist today - as copyrights no longer expire (well, technically they do expire, but none have expired in a LONG LONG time). The true perversion is that copyright law has been co-opted by corporations like Disney seeking to protect long time copyrights (like the early Mickey Mouse cartoons) that would have expired under laws written to protect the consumer.
Benefits to society are maximal with LIMITED TIME monopolies. That concept has expired with new laws in the US.
PS. As I'm sure you know, the concept you are suggesting is commonly known as "communism", whereas I am avocating "capitolism".
Whereas that is a nice distractor away from the original arguments, the fact remains that it is in no way capitalistic to maintain absolute control over intellectual property indefinitely. Intellectual property MUST have a limited time protection. That limited time must also expire within a reasonable time frame for benefits to society to be maximized.
In fact, I have mine configured to 1) automatically reject off-site cookies 2) Ask me before accepting any cookie 3) Remember which sites are allowed to set cookies.
I only use cookies when they offer some benefit to me, the consumer. 99.99% of all cookies only offer benefits to the server. And that should not be mandatory. Mozilla seems to develop more for the benefits of the consumer.
So it goes in front of the photoreceptors but behind the two nerve layers that are overlaid upon them? Or does it sit atop the retina itself, directly stimulating ganglion w/o the benefit of the horizontal/amacrine/bipolar cells?
Outside all retinal layers. Amacrine, horizontal, and bipolar cells are not really figured in. Ganglion cells are the target.
Does anybody know more about this system? I'm getting really burnt on stories about interesting tech with no quality links. *sigh*
I've done some implant work and talked with some of the engineers who worked on retinal implants. The implant goes in front of the photoreceptors. Of course. It cannot fit behind. Stimulation will be bipolar across the retinal surface.
One should proceed through this press release with much caution. Making implants work is not exactly like falling off a log. It will take 5-6 generations until they get a stable product that really works well and is not rejected, and has high enough resolution to work.
Ultimately though, this problem is extremely tractable and will allow blind people to see again, just as cochlear implants now allow deaf people to hear.
AMD has disclosed specifications to the major OS vendors and Microsoft so that they may ensure that their operating systems and tools will be AMD x86 64-bit aware
AND
"By extending the x86 instruction set to 64-bits, AMD's x86-64 technology should give us very fast compiler retargetting and the easiest kernel port so far," said Alan Cox, Linux Kernel Developer. -----------------
Windows NT3.51 came in a version for x86, MIPS, sparc, Alpha and PowerPC. NT4.0 still comes in a version for the Alpha architecture, but is no longer supported. Microsoft ported their most popular apps, and gave complete compiler suites away for the Alpha architecture trying to get companies to support the Alpha-NT platform
That was a ploy. They had DEC write their own x86 software emulator for Alpha NT (for a long time DEC had more programmers working on NT than Microsoft), and Alpha NT still sucked rocks. Microsoft shelled it for the 2000 series, although we have a beta version running here. One of Microsoft's favorite cards to play was threatening Intel with boosting alpha Windows development. You may recall it was this threat that caused Intel to halt its development of multimedia tools for its newer (at the time) MMX chips. Intel was trying to use software to boost its share over AMD/Cyrix, but Microsoft viewed that as a low level threat.
Alpha NT never had the most important software available. Like Office, for example. Its strongest value to Microsoft was the leverage it used against Intel. You could run such things in x86 emulators, but if you think that is viable I think you never tried it.
no one can simply force the PC architecture to switch to a different processor.
Microsoft can and has kept processor development back. How can a new processor be successful when the OS on 95% of the world's computers only talks x86 ?? Microsoft NEVER made a serious attempt to make its product cross platform. They had a monopoly, and they knew they could force the chipmakers to bend to their will.
Back in the day, Windows and Mac were real competitors. When Mac introduced a new line, with a new processor, they would allow new instruction sets. The old instruction sets would be emulated in software. They figured the new processor was faster, and that eventually everything would get recoded anyway. Worked pretty well for them.
Well, not so in Redmond. Microsoft would not recode X86 instruction sets for other processors. If a chip manufacturer wanted to capture the Windows market, they had to do X86. So, we see efforts like those at AMD in the Athlon to do hardware translation, and at Transmeta to do software emulation.
Meanwhile, Mac already has a G4 that is comparable to the Crusoe for power consumption, and per CPU cycle as fast as X86 processors get. The bottom line is that it is really dumb to stick to old inefficient instruction sets just because your monopolistic OS company refuses to do a little work to earn its tens of billions.
I hope Crusoe is REALLY successful. AMD and Intel will NEVER create a chip as low on power as a G4 and as fast. Or even a Crusoe. X86 instruction sets simply require a LOT of transistors to work. The real questions are whether 1) Crusoe with linux can use x86 linux binaries 2) Crusoe linux laptops are faster than G4 linux laptops (once those actually run)
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon me for going against the tide of slashdot opinions, but I still don't understand what has everyone so riled up. Perhaps I should blame the FBI for choosing a menacing sounding name like "Carnivore," but certainly their intentions are not to destroy or harm. The FBI is a very major government organization paid for by our tax dollars. I may not agree with their moves all the time, but I trust that they are only concerned about the best interest of our country. Why would they go out of their way to harm the very citizens who keep them running?
Government is never to be trusted a priori.
We have a Bill of Rights in the US. This assures us that private communication between its citizens is private unless there is a reasonable grounds for the government to remove that privacy - as decided by a judge.
Carnivore is implementation of the capaciblity to listen to ALL communications with NO capability of anyone except the FBI to know who is actually being monitored. The government has no right even to install such capabilities.
In the case of the phone system, the FBI obtains a WARRANT, and then goes to the telephone provider. The provider facilitates the action, and ALSO SERVES TO DOUBLECHECK THE WARRANT IS THE ONLY PRIVATE COMMUNICATION REVEALED TO THE FBI. With Carnivore there is no such check. There is really no way for anyone to know how much or how little sniffing those Carnivore boxes are doing.
That is the essence of the problem. No one would deny the FBI the right to execute a warrant to sniff email from a particular party. But there is no check on their action as executed through Carnivore. And that is intolerable.
Maybe we should have the FBI come in and compile all the software we need and then install it on various ISPs on a case-by-case basis. In the meantime, the e-mail ordering the obliteration of your daughter's elementary school or your grandmother's nursing home has already been sent and has gone out to the co-conspirators undetected.
No, for the system to be effective, it has to be available at a moment's notice. The paranoid rantings of those who feel that the government is "coming after them" are not impressive in the least.
Well, the FBI does not feel it necessary to place a black box on every phone line in the US because they might have a need to wire tap them. Instead, they go to the phone companies, and the phone companies facilitate the action. There is no reason that they could not require ISPs to provide them with email from specific court order named accounts - and that such accounts be "tappable" on a moment's notice by the ISP.
The precedent the FBI would set here is unmistakable. They claim they have a right, in the name of national security, to become an integral part of email traffic. The government NEVER has a right to become an integral part of its citizen's private communications without reasonable cause!!!
That is a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment.
Not to mention it is just a stupid idea. Carnivore is conceptualized as a mail server intercept -
not a mail server sniffer. Its failure will shut down ISPs.
Carnivore is broad in scope; everyone's e-mail is monitored.
Not without a court order.
Well, the Carnivore boxes would be in place in a way that they could conceivably monitor all email traffic. The FBI claims this is pre-emptive and would/could only be used with a court order. I don't think anyone thinks for a second that the FBI would only use Carnivore boxes with a court order.
Furthermore, the Carnivore boxes will cause substantial difficulties. How are you going to intercept all of AOL's email ?? You would need a daemon on the mail server, or a box that intercepts all traffic going to all of the email servers (which are typically set up in a load balancing manner). The likely incompetence of the FBI alone should stop this from happening. Who really thinks their Carnivore boxes will be able to intercept email without interfering with normal email usage.
Further, a failure on the Carnivore boxes (intentional or not) could shut down the vast majority of US internet traffic.
It is a stupid plan, plain and simple. It should never be allowable under the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. It is unreasonable to assume that since you might need to intercept anyone's email at any time - you have a right to place an infrastructure that can intercept EVERYONE's email.
Personally, I think that the only people that need to be monitored are those who are worried about the government monitoring them. By expressing worries, they've expressed that they are probably doing something illegal or extralegal. This is why I am (more or less) in favor of Carnivore. It's not the end of privacy in America by a longshot. People who believe that it is are probably conspiracy theorists who should go back to figuring out who shot JFK (hint: his initials were LHO.)
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.
This is really ludicrous, and makes me quite happy I set up my own email server at home. The argument being fostered by the FBI is that they have a right to have a device in place that can be used to intercept email. This is like allowing the FBI to wiretap every phone line in the country, and trusting them to only turn on one of their phone taps when they have an appropriately obtained court order.
This is not about allowing criminals to hide. We in the US have a right to be secure in our persons and things against unreasonable search and seizure. The FBI would like us to think that they have a right to invade our privacy at their leisure.
Love your country, but never trust its government.
--Robert A. Heinlein.
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
--G. Washington January 7, 1790
If C strings were more than just bare buffers with only a lone null to save you from oblivion, the library routines could be smart enough to save your ass. So I blame C and its strings as the primary problem causing buffer overflow exploits.
Use a language with internally checked datatypes and no bare pointers like Java or Perl, and this type of exploit will go away.
Programmers writing SUID programs should also be capable of using pointers without creating buffer overflow exploits.
Or do you think the problems with buffer overflows outweigh the potential gain from using pointers in the first place ??
I strongly prefer the additional power of constructs in C that are provided by pointers. I do not think that a higher level language is likely to be any safer. Sure, the language may conceptually be without overflows, but the increased size of the compilers/interpreters makes those much more difficult to check, and still prone to overflow.
Achtung is vaporware at this point. Linux is making very few inroads on the laptop. The most robust slide presentation software is MagicPoint. Another relatively stable piece of slide presentation software is Kpresenter . Staroffice is the only version to allow Powerpoint imports.
Of course, you could do all the slidemaking in postscript and use just about anything to present it.
It is no secret to people working in the field of signal detection, and especially speech detection, that algorithms that work well will be extremely valuable.
It is further no secret that Microsoft has been hiring machine learning and speech recognition experts from anywhere they can find them, and paying them pretty well.
You can bet that the best voice recognition sequences will be patented and protected in the US.
I thought this looked familiar.
Murphy TH; Blatter LA; Wier WG; Baraban JM.
Rapid communication between neurons and astrocytes in primary cortical cultures.
Journal of Neuroscience, 1993 Jun, 13(6):2672-9.
Can it really be true that if you are someone as rich and powerful as Microsoft, that you can buy favorable Op-Ed pieces ???
Woz seems to think so.
ISPs should and probably do log ALL data coming through their routers. After all, that is very valuable data to some people.
And don't kid yourself that many ISPs are not. And unless you are administering the ISP yourself, don't kid yourself that YOU are not having all your network traffic recorded.
It is like Microsoft or Real sending pings of your net traffic back to home base across the net. There is little motivation for an ISP to abstain from such activity. It is very tough to get caught. And some people will pay for your data, especially if you preprocess it properly.
They are selectively choosing the copyright holders and corporate web entities for their discussions.
What they missed were people who've done research on the history and meaning of copyright law in the US. People like RMS writing or Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. It is critical that the Congress hear from people who actually consider the intent of copyright law (hint - it is not only about making money from one's authorship).
Copyright is intended to pass into public domain after a limited period of monopolism of SOME rights. It is entirely unclear that we SHOULD or CAN enforce draconian copyright laws in cyberspace.
TUX was performing with dynamic content. SpecBENCH is designed
to mimic a real world situation with mixed static and dynamic content.
For Ingo:
Do you foresee this becoming the enterprise platform for web
serving based on the combination of
1) threaded TCP/IP stack
2) httpd modules
3) TUX ?
ie: What possibilities exist for further optimizing ? It is really incredible
how much more optimized TUX + 4 CPUs/NICs is that something like
an 8 CPU IBM AIX machine, or solaris...
is the WHY behind linux in china. Basically they decided that they can't have a capitalist OS like M$ Windows being supported by a communist country.
No, that is not it at all, not at all.
If you read the history of this a little, you would find that Taiwanese programmers were responsible for making Windows Chinese friendly. They inserted quite a few Easter eggs making fun of the Chinese.
If there is one thing the Chinese government hates, it is a lack of respect. They would actively hurt their own interests to avoid using Windows at this point.
Here is a quote from the (no account required) article in the NY Times
The turning point in Microsoft's image was the introduction of its Chinese-language Windows 95 operating system, which was programmed to display references to "Communist bandits" and to exhort users to "take back the mainland." Beijing, infuriated to learn that Microsoft had used computer programmers in Taiwan to write the software, demanded that the company hire mainland programmers to fix it.
Just another case of Microsoft rushing a product to market before checking it out thoroughly.
The "thundering herd" problem that was identified in Mindcraft and fixed in 2.4, isn't that still present in RedHat 6.1? (BTW calling it "Linux 6.1" really irritated me.) That could explain a sudden drop-off. It is not a problem, not a problem, then suddenly becomes a problem and as soon as you get a slow-down, you get a real traffic jam.
Yeah, the box was dual cpu and dual ethernet card, designed to show the weaknesses of linux networking as of the 2.2 kernels.
However, as more recent benchmarks show, the soon to be released TUX package (from Redhat, GPLd) does extremely well in multi-cpu multi-ethernet card environments. These changes are likely to become embedded in Apache.
I'd be really surprised if anyone has an x86 OS that could beat the one Ingo Molnar set up for the SpecBench tests. It more than tripled the Windows machine under unrealistically high loads with flat file service - 4 CPUs, 4 Gigabit ethernet cards.
There are also issues about scheduling for high loads such as the one in the ZDNet article that have been addressed by a patch from IBM.
Now the only advantage Win2K has over linux is a transparent start menu.
You haven't seen enlightenment window manager yet, have you ? Check out the EFM pages, and yes, it has had transparent menus for a while. But it also antialiases fonts and alpha mixes them for the transparency.
We are not talking about scientific discovery here. No one "pirates" science. Science has always for the most part worked like the open source community does today.
Of course it does. Could you be a LITTLE more vague and naive about it ??
Here is another question. How many drugs that are not patent protected are being pushed by drug companies today ?? How is it that the drugs that work on AIDS all have intellectual property protection that pushes them out of the financial range of African nations who need them most ?? Who exactly is that protecting ??
Discoveries in science that have potential benefit to society are nearly always strongly protected with patents. New cures for diseases are nearly always protected. Things that cannot receive intellectual property protection - such as potential good uses of vitamins as a part of treatment regimes - have limited funding because of their lack of potential utility to a corporation.
Science - wrt generating intellectual property for society's usefulness - is not open and free.
Look at it this way. If it were not for me, the creator of this media, then whatever I created would not exist. Does that not give me some sort of special rights over it?
The creators of the US Constitution allowed congress to grant LIMITED time monopolies on copyrighted works. That concept does not exist today - as copyrights no longer expire (well, technically they do expire, but none have expired in a LONG LONG time). The true perversion is that copyright law has been co-opted by corporations like Disney seeking to protect long time copyrights (like the early Mickey Mouse cartoons) that would have expired under laws written to protect the consumer.
Benefits to society are maximal with LIMITED TIME monopolies. That concept has expired with new laws in the US.
PS. As I'm sure you know, the concept you are suggesting is commonly known as "communism", whereas I am avocating "capitolism".
Whereas that is a nice distractor away from the original arguments, the fact remains that it is in no way capitalistic to maintain absolute control over intellectual property indefinitely. Intellectual property MUST have a limited time protection. That limited time must also expire within a reasonable time frame for benefits to society to be maximized.
Mozilla does this just fine.
In fact, I have mine configured to
1) automatically reject off-site cookies
2) Ask me before accepting any cookie
3) Remember which sites are allowed to set cookies.
I only use cookies when they offer some benefit to me, the consumer. 99.99% of all cookies only offer benefits to the server. And that should not be mandatory. Mozilla seems to develop more for the benefits of the consumer.
And should be applied from the xc directory with the -p1 -E options to patch.
:)
Not the -p0 -E options as specified in the patch files.
Doesn't everyone keep the 400+ MBtyes of X source around to rebuild X when a new patch comes out ?
The patches are up only at this point.
So it goes in front of the photoreceptors but behind the two nerve layers that are overlaid upon them? Or does it sit atop the retina itself, directly stimulating ganglion w/o the benefit of the horizontal/amacrine/bipolar cells?
Outside all retinal layers. Amacrine, horizontal, and bipolar cells are not really figured in. Ganglion cells are the target.
Does anybody know more about this system? I'm getting really burnt on stories about interesting tech with no quality links. *sigh*
I've done some implant work and talked with some of the engineers who worked on retinal implants. The implant goes in front of the photoreceptors. Of course. It cannot fit behind. Stimulation will be bipolar across the retinal surface.
One should proceed through this press release with much caution. Making implants work is not exactly like falling off a log. It will take 5-6 generations until they get a stable product that really works well and is not rejected, and has high enough resolution to work.
Ultimately though, this problem is extremely tractable and will allow blind people to see again, just as cochlear implants now allow deaf people to hear.
From Here
AMD has disclosed specifications to the major OS vendors and Microsoft so that they may ensure that their operating systems and tools will be AMD x86 64-bit aware
AND
"By extending the x86 instruction set to 64-bits, AMD's x86-64 technology should give us very fast compiler retargetting and the easiest kernel port so far," said Alan Cox, Linux Kernel Developer.
-----------------
It looks like a real battle ahead for Intel.
Windows NT3.51 came in a version for x86, MIPS, sparc, Alpha and PowerPC. NT4.0 still comes in a version for the Alpha architecture, but is no longer supported. Microsoft ported their most popular apps, and gave complete compiler suites away for the Alpha architecture trying to get companies to support the Alpha-NT platform
That was a ploy. They had DEC write their own x86 software emulator for Alpha NT (for a long time DEC had more programmers working on NT than Microsoft), and Alpha NT still sucked rocks. Microsoft shelled it for the 2000 series, although we have a beta version running here. One of Microsoft's favorite cards to play was threatening Intel with boosting alpha Windows development. You may recall it was this threat that caused Intel to halt its development of multimedia tools for its newer (at the time) MMX chips. Intel was trying to use software to boost its share over AMD/Cyrix, but Microsoft viewed that as a low level threat.
Alpha NT never had the most important software available. Like Office, for example. Its strongest value to Microsoft was the leverage it used against Intel. You could run such things in x86 emulators, but if you think that is viable I think you never tried it.
no one can simply force the PC architecture to switch to a different processor.
Microsoft can and has kept processor development back. How can a new processor be successful when the OS on 95% of the world's computers only talks x86 ?? Microsoft NEVER made a serious attempt to make its product cross platform. They had a monopoly, and they knew they could force the chipmakers to bend to their will.
The key here is that the license does not use a click thru to attempt to ban reverse engineering the protocol.
That is pretty important.
This is a kind twisty story. Buuuut.
Back in the day, Windows and Mac were real competitors. When Mac introduced a new line, with a new processor, they would allow new instruction sets. The old instruction sets would be emulated in software. They figured the new processor was faster, and that eventually everything would get recoded anyway. Worked pretty well for them.
Well, not so in Redmond. Microsoft would not recode X86 instruction sets for other processors. If a chip manufacturer wanted to capture the Windows market, they had to do X86. So, we see efforts like those at AMD in the Athlon to do hardware translation, and at Transmeta to do software emulation.
Meanwhile, Mac already has a G4 that is comparable to the Crusoe for power consumption, and per CPU cycle as fast as X86 processors get. The bottom line is that it is really dumb to stick to old inefficient instruction sets just because your monopolistic OS company refuses to do a little work to earn its tens of billions.
I hope Crusoe is REALLY successful. AMD and Intel will NEVER create a chip as low on power as a G4 and as fast. Or even a Crusoe. X86 instruction sets simply require a LOT of transistors to work.
The real questions are whether
1) Crusoe with linux can use x86 linux binaries
2) Crusoe linux laptops are faster than G4 linux laptops (once those actually run)