Simpler setups for important security features are great and definitely do depend on this infrastructure being in the default kernel distributions. (I kind of like the idea of cryptographic filesystems enabled by default on laptop computers that could stolen.)
But, as we all know, that's not enough.
That simple setup has to be exceedingly well-designed so that 2-minute Click-through VPN installations are not left vulnerable due to some trade-off for more convenience.
Everyone knows and has deservedly berated Microsoft for making poor choices in this matter; let's not have widely-deployed commercial Linux distributions make the same mistake.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
I've got a Linux box with an nVidia binary driver that I use at work that's 99.9% great under 2.4.
Functionally, it's a great thing.
But I always see the same old exchange on the kernel mailing lists, as people can't get new kernels to work with the binary driver.
Then, someone like Alan Cox usually replies tersely that since they can't see the code for nVidia driver, that they can't help fix the problem. The kernel developers are looking at a black wall.
Meanwhile, I think the nVidia folks use code in their drivers that is encumbered by patents, NDA's , competitive advantage, so they simply won't release the code for the binary driver.
A stand-off, I guess. As long as folks at NVidia update their drivers I'll be fat and happy. If ever they don't, I'm totally hosed.
Microsoft has hereby succeeded in defining software as a service instead of an asset, which is what they've been trying to move towards all along because it represents a more lucrative revenue model than selling something that can be used and used and used until you get decide you want something more.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the long term.
Fundamentally there's no reason why a bunch of instructions on a hard disk cannot be used a whole heckuva a lot more than till the next upgrade cycle. Neither is there any good reason I can see why it can't simply sold outright to someone else that wants to use it. Of course, when Palladium and hardware locking becomes tighter, time-bombed software will make it easier for this model to be enforced. Meanwhile, there's growing quantities and quality of free software that can be run AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE!
This will mean that many current businesses may be severely overvalued. Their true worth in sale will be much less if critical parts of their infrastructure are not transferable.
You think Qwest's recent $4e10 write-down of its networks is large? How much have businesses invested in Microsoft software?
how can the interests of individuals even come close to being recognized in an arena like that?
Well, you'll get plenty of folks arguing about one kind solution to this problem: limiting the power and influence of corporations. It's too easy to get angry about things like this.
The only other solutions I see are:
Increase the power of citizens by increasing the amount of money they have.
Increase the power of citizens by granting them some of the same kinds of powers that corporations enjoy, such as limited liability.
Yes, I recognize that getting the amount of money to citizens is a real difficult problem to solve, since the money supply is limited and every effort of the powers that possess money is to keep the status quo (that's why many people with money tend to be called "conservatives"). But I wanted to state the obvious because it's often overlooked.
I haven't thought much about the second answer, but it seems like there could be problems, like if you decide to "go public" and sell rights to yourself in the marketplace, SEC disclosure requirements, etc.
Historically, though, money has always gotten access to power and vice versa.
I keep hoping that with a democratic republic, free sources of information and a sufficient number of enlightened citizens means that government can be moved gradually and intelligently towards being more responsive to its citizens rather than catastrophically when things just get too untenable for most people.
I don't think the Power$ That Be are only susceptible to either threats of violence or to feeling guilty about making other people miserable. I think that they are responsive to money flow, so that actions such as buying decisions, if organized, can influence things, too. That's a situation where aggregation of citizen's money can effectively become a power and an influence, too.
MS Office saving its data in XML format is a great start.
But will this really be enough?
Previous complaints about how versions of Office didn't disclose the format were often referred to a specification that Microsoft made available to describe what was in a Word document.
The key problem, IIRC, was the the description was not sufficient for one to predict how the Word document was actually formatted and rendered on the page.
Because XML is very much like SGML or TeX, it has the potential for much more exhaustively describing document structure. But whether the new Word XML format (or OpenOffice format, for that matter) contains sufficient information for developers to reproduce the "right" format is a different issue.
I hope I'm wrong and that the format is specified comparably to the level you'd find in say PostScript or PDF.
Maybe MS is willing to let rendered Office douments change, just as HTML rendered documents change whenever one resizes the browser window.
I think "share and share alike" GPL will advance the state of technology a lot more in the long term than a set of unnecessarily restrictive toll booths on use of new technology. It's like liquor licenses or taxicab medallions. Great for the holders and a screw for the consumers.
Unfortunately, the current system of laws supports a balance that weights very heavily toward the restrictive IP model. IMHO, more than is healthy for the global economy.
At some point the system of patents will become such a pit of molasses that it will impede the development of new technology that such technology development will move to countries with less restrictive mechanisms governing their markets.
Given that Microsoft has a fair amount of cash on hand, I think the banks could do well to change their EULA for money that Microsoft thinks they have on deposit at the bank.
I'd suggest you go spend some serious money on some really nice quality dress shirts and pick up several nice ties (hint: anything with cartoon characters or colors is not a good choice). The shirts should come from a nice mens store with hardwood floors and not cost less than $80 apiece. A jacket and wool slacks are a good idea, too.
You'll go a lot further and have a nicer time as someone who appears to know what they're doing and can afford to relax with a dude attitude than as someone who appears to escaped from high school and happens to be incredibly mature, sensitive, thoughtful and intellectual on the inside (the RMS approach).
It's a much harder row to hoe to make the real you shine through clothing that says something different to other people.
After a few weeks dressed up, go ahead and wear your tux shirt on the weekend.
IIRC, mechanics liens are not "active" devices for securing payment, but "passive" devices that prevent the property owner from getting a mortgage or otherwise transferring his asset by sale. A good title search puts the brakes on any kind of transfer, so they have to settle with you before selling assets with recorded titles and deeds like real property.
I dunno if you need a contractor's licences to file a mechanics lien, but I think there may also be liens designed for suppliers of materials that are left unjustly unpaid.
</ianal>
Re:More to the picture than pixel response time
on
LCD Round-up
·
· Score: 2
I remember when tty's were connected over the RS 232 serial port at less than 9600 baud.
On slow connections you could read text given to you by cat and not actually need more or less.
declare that its citizens can do as they please within this framework.
Aye, there's the rub.
My government is powerful, so I'm grateful for restrictions placed upon its use of that power.
But my life is full of interactions with other non-governmental organizations, such as my employer, my telephone service provider, my credit card company, etc, that have a substantial impact on my life.
They are free to require quite a lot of things of me that the government is not permitted to do.
To be sure, if I don't agree with the terms of that interaction, I'm certainly "free" to go live a pauper's existence in a cabin in Montana. A rotten choice, though, to give up some privacy for material comfort.
Please piss in this cup as part of the pre-employment screening. Video surveillance of the premises is done for your protection.
I don't know of any rights granted to me by the constitution.
Read it again.
Compare the government of the United States with governments typical 250 years ago and with various contemporary governments in other parts of the world such as North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Iraq, Zimbabwe, etc.
Most U.S. citizens are spoiled by not having direct first-hand experience with a big league oppressive regime. Take a 6 month bus tour of Central America and tell me when you get back that we aren't lucky to have the luxury to be actually arguing over something like a ballistics database.
Personally, I rather enjoy the right to not be woke up in the middle of the night by jack-booted thugs displeased with my criticism of some leader in government.
It will be real interesting to be at local chamber of commerce meeting where Sandia Labs management gets to meet with managment from another big employer in Albuquerque.
That's right boys and girls.
On the west side of the Rio Grande is Rio Rancho, home of Intel Fab 9. (the same one that got struck by lightning a while back).
Actually, I believe the Second Amendment does provide a useful, but practically awkward way out of the problem of a democratically elected government abusing its power (like Germany in the 1930s).
And, I own a gun.
However, given how I've seen my fellow citizens abuse the right of gun ownership, especially with the DC area sniper of late, I'm not sure whether I regard the government as a greater threat or my fellow citizens as a greater threat.
I'd love nothing better than for all of us to be so responsible we could own devastating weapons (machine guns, tanks, fighter jets, etc.).
But current reality tells me unmistakably that we have to do a much better job of keeping guns out of the hands of people who are not responsible. We're not doing it now and innocent people are dying as a result of this sloppy attitude.
Wyoming is demographically ideal for this kind of thing.
I don't know if the current inhabitants would mind too much, either. They seem to generally be hostile to the federal government. OTOH, without much of a manufacturing or service base, I think the econonmy probably is dominated by extractive industries such as mining and ranching. Thus, the choice between economic livlihood and a beautiful environment usually weighs in heavier on the former, since the local perspective is that there's "plenty enough" of the latter.
I had heard of something akin to this on a county level occuring in Oregon a few years ago, where enough Hare Krishna (?) adherents moved in to affect the makeup of the county government.
But from what little I remember of the Civil War / War Between the States, the federal government of the United States won't take kindly to secession.
One of the handful of times that I agreed with the first Bush was his comment during the primary debates with Reagan when he called it "Voodoo Economics". It was then, and it is now.
What Reagan and Congress did the in the 1980s was to drive up the deficit to unconscionable levels.
With the current environment of tight sound monetary policy every one of us taxpayers and citizens will end up subsidizing the 1980s by increased taxes and/or less services in the future.
It used to be that only wartime emergencies justified such a binge.
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't seem all that exciting, and we sort of ignored the story.
Maybe we could get a bunch of people to whip up a controversy about a benchmark whitepaper comparing performance of rcp and ftp.
This is an important less, corporate boys and girls.
If you're fixing prices, then you'd better make sure that you charge the same high price in every single country in the EU.
Got that?
You can still catch flak for uniformly high pricing, though, but it beats this kind of bad press and fine crap.
Simpler setups for important security features are great and definitely do depend on this infrastructure being in the default kernel distributions. (I kind of like the idea of cryptographic filesystems enabled by default on laptop computers that could stolen.)
But, as we all know, that's not enough.
That simple setup has to be exceedingly well-designed so that 2-minute Click-through VPN installations are not left vulnerable due to some trade-off for more convenience.
Everyone knows and has deservedly berated Microsoft for making poor choices in this matter; let's not have widely-deployed commercial Linux distributions make the same mistake.
NVidia.There's a love-hate thing.
I've got a Linux box with an nVidia binary driver that I use at work that's 99.9% great under 2.4.
Functionally, it's a great thing.
But I always see the same old exchange on the kernel mailing lists, as people can't get new kernels to work with the binary driver.
Then, someone like Alan Cox usually replies tersely that since they can't see the code for nVidia driver, that they can't help fix the problem. The kernel developers are looking at a black wall.
Meanwhile, I think the nVidia folks use code in their drivers that is encumbered by patents, NDA's , competitive advantage, so they simply won't release the code for the binary driver.
A stand-off, I guess. As long as folks at NVidia update their drivers I'll be fat and happy. If ever they don't, I'm totally hosed.
So: are the GPL'd nVidia drivers any good?
Be sure to check the expiration date on the software!
Good point.
I don't always trust the printed expiration date, though.
A more reliable way is to sniff your software and see if it smells bad.
Microsoft has hereby succeeded in defining software as a service instead of an asset, which is what they've been trying to move towards all along because it represents a more lucrative revenue model than selling something that can be used and used and used until you get decide you want something more.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the long term.
Fundamentally there's no reason why a bunch of instructions on a hard disk cannot be used a whole heckuva a lot more than till the next upgrade cycle. Neither is there any good reason I can see why it can't simply sold outright to someone else that wants to use it. Of course, when Palladium and hardware locking becomes tighter, time-bombed software will make it easier for this model to be enforced. Meanwhile, there's growing quantities and quality of free software that can be run AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE!This will mean that many current businesses may be severely overvalued. Their true worth in sale will be much less if critical parts of their infrastructure are not transferable.
You think Qwest's recent $4e10 write-down of its networks is large? How much have businesses invested in Microsoft software?
Mmmm.
High heels!
I know there's cultural variations, but a sexy walk is very particular.
how can the interests of individuals even come close to being recognized in an arena like that?
Well, you'll get plenty of folks arguing about one kind solution to this problem: limiting the power and influence of corporations. It's too easy to get angry about things like this.
The only other solutions I see are:
- Increase the power of citizens by increasing the amount of money they have.
- Increase the power of citizens by granting them some of the same kinds of powers that corporations enjoy, such as limited liability.
Yes, I recognize that getting the amount of money to citizens is a real difficult problem to solve, since the money supply is limited and every effort of the powers that possess money is to keep the status quo (that's why many people with money tend to be called "conservatives"). But I wanted to state the obvious because it's often overlooked.I haven't thought much about the second answer, but it seems like there could be problems, like if you decide to "go public" and sell rights to yourself in the marketplace, SEC disclosure requirements, etc.
Historically, though, money has always gotten access to power and vice versa.
I keep hoping that with a democratic republic, free sources of information and a sufficient number of enlightened citizens means that government can be moved gradually and intelligently towards being more responsive to its citizens rather than catastrophically when things just get too untenable for most people.
I don't think the Power$ That Be are only susceptible to either threats of violence or to feeling guilty about making other people miserable. I think that they are responsive to money flow, so that actions such as buying decisions, if organized, can influence things, too. That's a situation where aggregation of citizen's money can effectively become a power and an influence, too.
For example, statistics show that people who work in server room almost never catch any STDs. I wonder why that is...]
Because the condoms actually work as advertised?
Sounds like a concept similar to this.
MS Office saving its data in XML format is a great start.
But will this really be enough?
Previous complaints about how versions of Office didn't disclose the format were often referred to a specification that Microsoft made available to describe what was in a Word document.
The key problem, IIRC, was the the description was not sufficient for one to predict how the Word document was actually formatted and rendered on the page.
Because XML is very much like SGML or TeX, it has the potential for much more exhaustively describing document structure. But whether the new Word XML format (or OpenOffice format, for that matter) contains sufficient information for developers to reproduce the "right" format is a different issue.
I hope I'm wrong and that the format is specified comparably to the level you'd find in say PostScript or PDF.
Maybe MS is willing to let rendered Office douments change, just as HTML rendered documents change whenever one resizes the browser window.
But I doubt it.
Most companies can't use GPL'd code in their products.
No.
Only if they want to keep the code extensions secret and if they want to distribute to others can they not use the GPL.
There is absolutely no problem with companies using GPL'd code in their products if they freely disclose their modified source code.
Alternatively, they can keep the code extensions secret and use the modified code internally as much as they like.
I think "share and share alike" GPL will advance the state of technology a lot more in the long term than a set of unnecessarily restrictive toll booths on use of new technology. It's like liquor licenses or taxicab medallions. Great for the holders and a screw for the consumers.
Unfortunately, the current system of laws supports a balance that weights very heavily toward the restrictive IP model. IMHO, more than is healthy for the global economy.
At some point the system of patents will become such a pit of molasses that it will impede the development of new technology that such technology development will move to countries with less restrictive mechanisms governing their markets.
Given that Microsoft has a fair amount of cash on hand, I think the banks could do well to change their EULA for money that Microsoft thinks they have on deposit at the bank.
Right on.
I'd suggest you go spend some serious money on some really nice quality dress shirts and pick up several nice ties (hint: anything with cartoon characters or colors is not a good choice). The shirts should come from a nice mens store with hardwood floors and not cost less than $80 apiece. A jacket and wool slacks are a good idea, too.
You'll go a lot further and have a nicer time as someone who appears to know what they're doing and can afford to relax with a dude attitude than as someone who appears to escaped from high school and happens to be incredibly mature, sensitive, thoughtful and intellectual on the inside (the RMS approach).
It's a much harder row to hoe to make the real you shine through clothing that says something different to other people.
After a few weeks dressed up, go ahead and wear your tux shirt on the weekend.
that it would fail.
Why?
Recall Iridium, the satellite mobile telephone service that failed?
Well, Sirius is only offering to bring audio noise 1-way down from the satellite. No full duplex!
If duplex lost, simplex can't hope to win!
There does seem to be efforts afoot to use Linux in the telecom arena, maybe slanted towards embedded Linux, but evidence here.
<ianal>
IIRC, mechanics liens are not "active" devices for securing payment, but "passive" devices that prevent the property owner from getting a mortgage or otherwise transferring his asset by sale. A good title search puts the brakes on any kind of transfer, so they have to settle with you before selling assets with recorded titles and deeds like real property.
I dunno if you need a contractor's licences to file a mechanics lien, but I think there may also be liens designed for suppliers of materials that are left unjustly unpaid.
</ianal>I remember when tty's were connected over the RS 232 serial port at less than 9600 baud.
On slow connections you could read text given to you by cat and not actually need more or less .
declare that its citizens can do as they please within this framework.
Aye, there's the rub.
My government is powerful, so I'm grateful for restrictions placed upon its use of that power.
But my life is full of interactions with other non-governmental organizations, such as my employer, my telephone service provider, my credit card company, etc, that have a substantial impact on my life.
They are free to require quite a lot of things of me that the government is not permitted to do.
To be sure, if I don't agree with the terms of that interaction, I'm certainly "free" to go live a pauper's existence in a cabin in Montana. A rotten choice, though, to give up some privacy for material comfort.
Please piss in this cup as part of the pre-employment screening. Video surveillance of the premises is done for your protection.
I don't know of any rights granted to me by the constitution.
Read it again.
Compare the government of the United States with governments typical 250 years ago and with various contemporary governments in other parts of the world such as North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Iraq, Zimbabwe, etc.
Most U.S. citizens are spoiled by not having direct first-hand experience with a big league oppressive regime. Take a 6 month bus tour of Central America and tell me when you get back that we aren't lucky to have the luxury to be actually arguing over something like a ballistics database.
Personally, I rather enjoy the right to not be woke up in the middle of the night by jack-booted thugs displeased with my criticism of some leader in government.
It will be real interesting to be at local chamber of commerce meeting where Sandia Labs management gets to meet with managment from another big employer in Albuquerque.
That's right boys and girls.
On the west side of the Rio Grande is Rio Rancho, home of Intel Fab 9. (the same one that got struck by lightning a while back).
Actually, I believe the Second Amendment does provide a useful, but practically awkward way out of the problem of a democratically elected government abusing its power (like Germany in the 1930s).
And, I own a gun.
However, given how I've seen my fellow citizens abuse the right of gun ownership, especially with the DC area sniper of late, I'm not sure whether I regard the government as a greater threat or my fellow citizens as a greater threat.
I'd love nothing better than for all of us to be so responsible we could own devastating weapons (machine guns, tanks, fighter jets, etc.).
But current reality tells me unmistakably that we have to do a much better job of keeping guns out of the hands of people who are not responsible. We're not doing it now and innocent people are dying as a result of this sloppy attitude.
Wyoming is demographically ideal for this kind of thing.
I don't know if the current inhabitants would mind too much, either. They seem to generally be hostile to the federal government. OTOH, without much of a manufacturing or service base, I think the econonmy probably is dominated by extractive industries such as mining and ranching. Thus, the choice between economic livlihood and a beautiful environment usually weighs in heavier on the former, since the local perspective is that there's "plenty enough" of the latter.
I had heard of something akin to this on a county level occuring in Oregon a few years ago, where enough Hare Krishna (?) adherents moved in to affect the makeup of the county government.
But from what little I remember of the Civil War / War Between the States, the federal government of the United States won't take kindly to secession.
Indeed.
One of the handful of times that I agreed with the first Bush was his comment during the primary debates with Reagan when he called it "Voodoo Economics". It was then, and it is now.
What Reagan and Congress did the in the 1980s was to drive up the deficit to unconscionable levels.
With the current environment of tight sound monetary policy every one of us taxpayers and citizens will end up subsidizing the 1980s by increased taxes and/or less services in the future.
It used to be that only wartime emergencies justified such a binge.