The amazing things about this announcement is that that Bill Gates -- acting disturbingly like a head of state -- has met with Chinese leaders at least four times in the last six years. This is more times than Clinton has met with the Chinese; leading some wags to think that American-Chinese policy is being decided in Washington...Redmond Washington.
You would think that with that kind of one-on-one personal attention, Microsoft would not have to endure these kind of announcments.
A couple of comments on Tolu's good post, and then something more.
I hate getting HTML mail, but I can see the point. It is the new ASCII, to some extent. A browser is a better way to read text; although I'll stick with ASCII mail myself for quite a while now. I do think that/.'s restricted HTML is just fine for mail, though.
I disagree, though, that XML and other formats will unleash further viruses. Almost everybody now thinks about security first when designing mail clients. Perhaps even Microsoft will start thinking that way, eventually. The security abomination of ActiveX will *never* be duplicated by anybody else.
Finally, I think that both prevalent e-mail viruses and even more prevalent e-mail spam will cause people to treat e-mail differently in the future. I predict that most e-mail will be rejected unread and unseen by people's e-mail bots; and that to pass through that guantlet you'd have to jump through some significant hoops. It's sad, but I don't see any other way. Spam will increase without bound, and as long as people want to have persistent e-mail addresses they will be inundated. I don't think that government regulation is right, and I don't think it would work, either.
So, if you have good email screening, then these viruses shouldn't be a problem, either.
Disclaimers first. I work for a company that produces films. We also are a film visual effects production house.
1. I think that it's way to early for the studios to respond intelligently to this. Asking their lawyers to shoot first, and ask questions later, is the natural response to any threat; whether it's sensible or not. What would you expect them to do? Perhaps they are looking to buy some time.
And while it's perfectly true that today there is no threat whatsoeverfrom home-pirated DVDs, this will change in the not-distant future. The cost of portable storage has been falling, and the capacity increasing, apace with Moore's law, and there's no reason to expect it to stop.
2. I think that the correct approach here would be to continue to work on a Linux DVD player, that has no inherent capability to copy disks. The laws that I have seen prohibit devices whose purpose it is to break copyright, but a Linux DVD player won't do that. I'd do this in the open; rather than covertly (although covert ones will certainly move forward, too.)
The studios may claim that this software is prohibited because the subroutines that decode the disk could be copied, and used in a program that copies disks. I doubt that this would succeed, but IANAL. If the studios do make this claim, then I will ask my lawyer about this, (and pay handsomely for the advice:))
pixel fairy sez > overlay planes are needed by many high end apps, > and if these cards dont support overlay they may > not get far
Overlay planes are not really essential if you can grab the image and display it fast enough. I know that its a waste of memory and processor cycles and bandwidth, but for interactive applications you have those cycles and bandwidth to burn.
The nice thing about throwing out the overlay-plane hack (perhaps you can detect some bias here) is that you can do much better rendering of the foreground elements that you are interacting with. Overlay planes were typically used to draw things over static backgrounds, and were limited to just a few bits. If you just load the whole background image in every frame, then you can draw nice antialised, colored, even shadowed lines and objects over the background, and get a much richer interactive experience.
I've ported a few of my SGI-based visual effects tools to Linux, and had to give up on overlay planes, and while it was difficult at first -- I don't miss them any more. And this is using extremely slow refreshes; once there is good hardware accelerating for OpenGL glDrawPixels commands then I will not miss overlay planes at all.
One thing that these programs do is they only redraw the dirty parts of the screen. As you're dragging a rubber-band line across the screen, only a sub-rectangle of the image needs to be refreshed, and this can be substantially faster than refreshing the whole screen.
It's a damn good thing this happened after DIVX was declared dead, or it would have pumped tremendous new life into it. Even though it's been declared dead, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it is resurrected now.
Any contained software players, that is, players that don't call for unique keys over the 'net or phone lines, will be pretty easy to crack.
If the answers to these are 'No', then this isn't really too important, for the time being. And while it's theoretically impossible to prevent people from determining the decryption algorithm if you ever sell software players, it should be possible to build an encryption system that can be kept a secret.
> They were probably limited by the speed of > decryption as to how complex/secure they could > make the algorithm. DVD Video is coded twice if > it's encrypted, and the MPEG2 video decoding > isn't cheap (most PCs use dedicated hardware), > so wasting time on complex decryption algorithms > was probably out of the question The length of the key has nothing to do with the time it takes to do decryption, for many ciphers. For RC4, in particular, the key can be up to 256 bytes, or 4096 bits, with no change in the speed. There has to be a different reason.
40 bits is a completely insane size; it can be cracked by anybody with a little time on their hands.
Unfortunately for the DVD companies, this cannot be fixed without recalling the millions of machines that are out there.
Censorship based on content (or 'impact' as Yahoo is apparently saying) is fraught with peril. I'm going to leave the legal issues to others, although I think that they are extremely serious.
There is a huge problem socially, too. Censorship of mailing lists destroys those lists much faster than a few strong messages. Once you start down that slope, it is apparently impossible to draw a bright line describing where censorship ends.
In these stock trading boards in particular, I think people are looking for information that might be called 'insider information' to somebody with a rabidly litigious bent. Almost everything else on these boards is, frankly, garbage (and most of the alleged insider information is, too). By censoring the articles with 'impact', aren't you censoring the articles that people actually want to read, leaving only the garbage?
The Lockheed case is remarkable. What was posted was apparently the minutes of a meeting between Lockheed and its client in the Pentagon. The official apparently ripped them apart, as reported in a recent issue of Aviation Week. It turns out that this is not uncommon, the procurement offical in question has a very combative style, and she has been known to have similar meetings with other suppliers in the past. The information posted was never denied, it wasn't deemed to be classified, it was just embarrassing to Lockheed.
Censors, in general, have become more and more stringent with time. People posting to the channels will test the limits, forcing the censor to weild his authority more and more often -- and again this will destroy the use of the channel. I don't think that this has happened yet at Yahoo, but it has happened in other fora.
I agree with other posters that Slashdot's system works remarkably well. I was more than a little dubious at first, but the checks and balances coded into the system have prevented the abuse that censorship usually leads to.
I think that Yahoo will come to regret having started on this path -- or, more likely, will reconsider quickly.
If they are not storing the info then they are definitely not maximizing shareholder value. It is a criminally negligent destruction of shareholder property, and they should be taken to task for it.
I have to agree. Bruce's responses are spectacularly well thought out. I thought his answer to my (somewhat snotty, I'll admit) question covered the ground completely, and from angles I hadn't thought of.
I'm serene, now, about the quality of work that embodied in the AES submissions, including (and especially) Twofish. We'll see what happens.
The mouse that I've had on my mental drawing board for a few months is an accelerometer-based mouse. I admit to being inspired by the Microsoft optical mouse -- which has the nice feature that it is sealed, and there is almost nothing to get dirty or clog up; but still, there is an optical window to the outside world. It's also a fairly insane waste of DSP cycles -- but that is a battle that was lost a long time ago. My mouse would have one of the new ADXL202 accelerometers from Analog Devices. These inexpensive devices are extremely sensitive to acceleration, are rugged, easy to use, take very little power, and should last forever. The mouse could be completely sealed now, no window to the outside world is needed. Actually, Mach and Einstien said that inertial devices sense the whole rest of the universe, but they can do that through any barrier. Imagine, a mouse pad that is the whole universe:)
The mouse would need a capacitance sensor, though, so that it wouldn't drift if your table is at a slight angle. It should probably sense change-in-acceleration, rather than absolute acceleration, for the same reason.
This would be an amazingly precise mouse, that would never jam or get dirty, would respond to your slightest touch, be reasonably cheap to produce, and would just be cool as hell.
I know, though, that Microsoft will patent touch mice, now. I suppose I could still build one for my own use -- which is all I really wanted to do, anyway.
I bought your first edition of Applied Cryptography, and you say two things that bother me, with respect to your submission of Twofish as a Federal standard for encryption.
In the forward, you describe how you got interested in cryptography, and that you had no background or training in the field, but you thought it was interesting. Also, several times throughout the book you caution people not to trust cryptosystems from amateurs.
Clearly you have become well versed in the history and application of cryptography, your book makes all other descriptions of the state of the art invisible by comparison. Still, it appears to me that cryptosystem design and analysis requires fairly extreme mathematical proficiency, which I do not believe that you have.
Now, of course, Twofish is published in detail, and the best people in the world have attempted to crack it (and I think that the competitive process that the US Gov't has promoted is a spectacular way to get the best people to attack each other's ciphers). But, I remain somewhat worried that at the foundations of Twofish...is there something missing that a PhD in mathematics and number theory would have seen?
The winner of this competition will likely be the next DES, and will provide security for a fairly large percentage of the planet. The stakes are high. I'm sure that you have an answer to this criticism, and I'm eager to hear it.
konstant sez > By the same token though, if you do open your source, you'd better be damn sure you really aren't violating any proprietary code.
Ok. How? How can you be sure that you are not violating patents? How can you even be 1% sure? How can you even pretend to be sure that you're not violating patents that are currently being processed?
I suppose the only way would be to base all of your algorithms on old (> 20 years) papers and to contribute nothing original on your own. This would be the only way to be certain.
Well, I suppose you could also go into space and nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure
Where I used to work, at Pacific Data Images, a computer graphics animation facility, we used to make 'The Making Of..." videos, showing how we did things. These were used as sales and marketing tools, and for ego-boosts to the people who worked on them. You've surely seen these.
After we were approached by the University of Utah, though about a patent we had violated on free-form deformations, we decided to not do that anymore. It was a tough decision to make, because these videos were quite popular. Still, we couldn't risk our company's existence any longer, as we had no idea what patents we might be violating.
This FFD patent was a complete and utter surprise. We had attended a technical conference (Siggraph) where Sederberg presented the research, and had assumed that we could just implement the ideas in the paper. There was no notice given (or necessary) that there was a patent application in the works.
The worst thing is that there is absolutely no way to not get sandbagged by this. There is no way of knowing what patents are in process; and if you base your companies in-house development on things for which patents are later granted, you can be completely hosed.
The situation for open-source software, is, of course, immensely worse; as you have no way of keeping how you did things secret.
I program in silence too. I have a pair of noise-reducting headphones that I wear pretty religiously. People are sometimes suprised when the realize that there is no cord dangling from the headphones:)
I find that any noise is an unwelcome distraction; and just don't like it. Music may make time spent more enjoyable, but for me it is always less profitable. And I'm programming to get things done, not pass the time.
I understand that different people are different, though. One of the smartest guys I know could only work with the TV on; that slowed his thought down to the point that his fingers could keep up.
When I get bad rich, I'm going to get a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones...those look like the ultimate in quiet. I can't wait
I'd use the maglev for the first stage. 600 mph is enough to get a ramjet lit (they did tests of ramjets with propellor planes, you need a well designed inlet is all), and that would give you an Isp of at least 2000 sec. Using the ramjet up to about Mach 4 and 100,000 ft should allow you to make the rocket part much smaller and cheaper, and allow reasonable expansion ratio nozzles.
Rockets don't work well at sea level, you have to make terrible compromises to get a rocket with a typical bell-shaped nozzle to go from ground to orbit. The Aerospike nozzles that Lockheed is trying to use on their X-34 should eliminate this problem, but they are unproven (to put it mildly).
But ramjets make perfect first stages! Powerful, simple, light, fuel efficient (compared to [only!] rockets) and well-understood.
Is this really true, that the store bills Passport and Passport bills your credit card? If it is true, it's quite an amazingly useful feature, in that only Microsoft ever has your credit card number.
If this is true, why aren't they publicizing it? I assume it would be obvious from your credit-card statements.
Is there any documentation that you could point to that would verify this astonishing claim?
Wallets can be implemented either the Microsoft way, by storing the information on their server -- or the way everybody else has done it, by storing the information on your own computer. My belief is that everybody else expects that no intelligent person would give up their personal information for no reason.
The only benefit for the server model is that you could buy stuff from any computer, just by (somehow) accessing the Passport information. Of course, there better be some fairly sophisticated [read, cumbersome and inconvenient] password protection on Passport, then. And then, wouldn't this add to the inconvenience of the shopper?
The client-side models require you to input the information (only once, of course) on each of the computers you want to spend money from. Now, this doesn't seem like a huge inconvenience, really; certainly contrasted with the potential inconvenience of having somebody with evil intent [not naming any names] getting a copy of the server database.
I was disappointed, but not particularly surprised, that there was virtually no reference to security in the PressPass "Q/A" report. There were absolutely no assurances about what protection Microsoft would employ to keep your data private, no assurances whatsoever that Microsoft wouldn't abuse the information. I found the example of storing the address of your parents, say, with Microsoft particularly chilling. What a remarkable web of consumer information could be woven if everybody input their personal relationships into the Microsoft monster.
The page on passport security and privacy also, remarkably, passes up any opportunity to reassure users that Microsoft won't misuse the information that you give it. They do say that they won't share your personal information with others, but it will get to the point (if this is successful) that the rest of the world could be ignored, to a first approximation. There's nobody that I'd be less happy to have this information than Microsoft, themselves.
I predict, sadly, that this will be a spectacularly successful product.
My 2 year old son was recently diagnosed as possibly autistic, and while it's a terrifying diagnosis -- articles like this are heartening in a couple of ways. First, they show how broad a spectrum of behavior the world 'autism' now encompasses -- you can be called autistic and really be not terribly disabled. The second comforting thing is that people who are 'not normal' can still be capable, self-sufficient people.
I am not hung-up on 'normal', I think it is more of a curse than a blessing in this world and the one of the future -- I'm definitely looking forward to what our Thomas is going to do as he grows.
I think that the mother says it all, when she says "A 9-year-old shouldn't be gambling to get a rare card". Probably not, but she is the kids mother! If she thinks that the kids are gambling, she's in a position to stop it. In fact, this could be a relatively inexpensive way to learn the hard facts of probability.
What's more interesting, to me, is that it's really the parents that are gambling, and with much bigger stakes (and longer odds). The civil justice system in the US has devolved into a lottery; people file lawsuits over the most inane things, in hopes that they win big. This is the true outrage here; that people would exploit their children to try to win a legal jackpot.
I hope that AMD can take advantage of this problem, because you know that Intel would if the chip was on the other foot. Athlon is a strikingly good processor, and there is nothing that Intel has that can match it -- and with the delays in Coppermine and 820 chipsets, this will be true for at least many more months.
Intel is not going to have copper-interconnect chips 'til mid-2001 (their number, and their numbers have been known to slip), while AMD's Dresden copper plant should be running long before that.
Intel has, to their credit, invested in revolutionary architectures (Merced, Rambus) while AMD has been pushing 'conventional' architectures harder. At least in the short run of the next year or so, it looks like AMD's approach is better. And, at least in my business, a year is the half-life of a computer.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into Intel's announcements, but their dribbling out of delay and bug announcements seems calculated to keep people from moving to other platforms; to keep them hanging, waiting for the Intel solution that's just around the corner. I, for one, and buying and AMD machine today:)
My guess is that, like health club memberships, they are counting on people not actually using the service for the entire time. They get all the money, but may not have to provide all the service.
Imagine what the ISP market will be like in three years. My guess is that most people will be using cable modems or ADSL; but they'll still have to send their $24/month to compuserve.
My guess is that they get a part of the price of the machine, too. The $400 rebate cost is probably shared with the manufacturer, maybe even 50-50. So Compuserve might be getting more like $16/month.
The interesting thing, to me, about these rebate promotions is that they cleave the home market from the business market like a scalpel. It's inspired.
I nominated Brian Paul as well. His efforts have matched, pixel for pixel, the efforts of hardware companies with huge resources, and he does it out of the goodness of his heart.
In this year, his efforts have been rewarded by people finally coming around. SGI's support of accelerated Mesa for Linux is a true boon. It means that all Linux boardsets will probably support OpenGL completely transparently. If Brian Paul hadn't done Mesa, it'd be a horrible mishmash.
The Moller-type sky car will never fly more than a foot or two above the ground, and I doubt even that. The man is, unfortunately, a crank. And he's been cranking out this hype for at least 15 years.
There are a few successful aviation one-man shows. If you look at them, every one of them started small; built something simple, flew it for a long time, then built something else -- perhaps something more revolutionary and complex. In the last fifty years there have been only two people who could have pulled this off, Molt Taylor (of the AirCar) and Burt Rutan (Voyager, Vari-Eze, Boomerang).
Moller has never built anything, to my knowledge, that has flown without being tethered down. The control systems for powered lift are incredibly complex, and he has shown absolutely no ability to produce one. What he has shown is pretty fiberglass sculptures and some slick ads. Unfortunately, these are quite simple to produce in comparison.
Think about it. Did any prototype program that you've ever written come with the equivalent of an inch-deep red paint job? No! Of course not. Prototypes look prototype-y, because you want to be able to make changes, learn from your mistakes, repair your damage, rebuild quickly. Look at the Gossamer Condor in the Smilthsonian next time you are there. The two wings aren't even built the same, as they were destroyed in crashes, and improved, at different times along the development process.
He's a crank, and has every single attribute of cranks, and none of the attributes of engineering. In the New Scientist' article, Moller says that he's never flown the M200 without a cable attached to a crane 'because neither Moller nor the vehicle are licensed to fly.' Right.
Well, he's lovable, anyway. And the history of aviation has many more cranks than people who could follow through. And people want to believe. Hell, I want to believe!
Slashdot Mirror
You would think that with that kind of one-on-one personal attention, Microsoft would not have to endure these kind of announcments.
thad
I hate getting HTML mail, but I can see the point. It is the new ASCII, to some extent. A browser is a better way to read text; although I'll stick with ASCII mail myself for quite a while now. I do think that /.'s restricted HTML is just fine for mail, though.
I disagree, though, that XML and other formats will unleash further viruses. Almost everybody now thinks about security first when designing mail clients. Perhaps even Microsoft will start thinking that way, eventually. The security abomination of ActiveX will *never* be duplicated by anybody else.
Finally, I think that both prevalent e-mail viruses and even more prevalent e-mail spam will cause people to treat e-mail differently in the future. I predict that most e-mail will be rejected unread and unseen by people's e-mail bots; and that to pass through that guantlet you'd have to jump through some significant hoops. It's sad, but I don't see any other way. Spam will increase without bound, and as long as people want to have persistent e-mail addresses they will be inundated. I don't think that government regulation is right, and I don't think it would work, either.
So, if you have good email screening, then these viruses shouldn't be a problem, either.
thad
1. I think that it's way to early for the studios to respond intelligently to this. Asking their lawyers to shoot first, and ask questions later, is the natural response to any threat; whether it's sensible or not. What would you expect them to do? Perhaps they are looking to buy some time.
And while it's perfectly true that today there is no threat whatsoeverfrom home-pirated DVDs, this will change in the not-distant future. The cost of portable storage has been falling, and the capacity increasing, apace with Moore's law, and there's no reason to expect it to stop.
2. I think that the correct approach here would be to continue to work on a Linux DVD player, that has no inherent capability to copy disks. The laws that I have seen prohibit devices whose purpose it is to break copyright, but a Linux DVD player won't do that. I'd do this in the open; rather than covertly (although covert ones will certainly move forward, too.)
The studios may claim that this software is prohibited because the subroutines that decode the disk could be copied, and used in a program that copies disks. I doubt that this would succeed, but IANAL. If the studios do make this claim, then I will ask my lawyer about this, (and pay handsomely for the advice :))
thad
> overlay planes are needed by many high end apps,
> and if these cards dont support overlay they may
> not get far
Overlay planes are not really essential if you can grab the image and display it fast enough. I know that its a waste of memory and processor cycles and bandwidth, but for interactive applications you have those cycles and bandwidth to burn.
The nice thing about throwing out the overlay-plane hack (perhaps you can detect some bias here) is that you can do much better rendering of the foreground elements that you are interacting with. Overlay planes were typically used to draw things over static backgrounds, and were limited to just a few bits. If you just load the whole background image in every frame, then you can draw nice antialised, colored, even shadowed lines and objects over the background, and get a much richer interactive experience.
I've ported a few of my SGI-based visual effects tools to Linux, and had to give up on overlay planes, and while it was difficult at first -- I don't miss them any more. And this is using extremely slow refreshes; once there is good hardware accelerating for OpenGL glDrawPixels commands then I will not miss overlay planes at all.
One thing that these programs do is they only redraw the dirty parts of the screen. As you're dragging a rubber-band line across the screen, only a sub-rectangle of the image needs to be refreshed, and this can be substantially faster than refreshing the whole screen.
thad
Any contained software players, that is, players that don't call for unique keys over the 'net or phone lines, will be pretty easy to crack.
thad
1. Is the encryption algorithm known?
2. Will consumer decks play unencrypted disks?
If the answers to these are 'No', then this isn't really too important, for the time being. And while it's theoretically impossible to prevent people from determining the decryption algorithm if you ever sell software players, it should be possible to build an encryption system that can be kept a secret.
thad
40 bits is a completely insane size; it can be cracked by anybody with a little time on their hands.
Unfortunately for the DVD companies, this cannot be fixed without recalling the millions of machines that are out there.
thad
There is a huge problem socially, too. Censorship of mailing lists destroys those lists much faster than a few strong messages. Once you start down that slope, it is apparently impossible to draw a bright line describing where censorship ends.
In these stock trading boards in particular, I think people are looking for information that might be called 'insider information' to somebody with a rabidly litigious bent. Almost everything else on these boards is, frankly, garbage (and most of the alleged insider information is, too). By censoring the articles with 'impact', aren't you censoring the articles that people actually want to read, leaving only the garbage?
The Lockheed case is remarkable. What was posted was apparently the minutes of a meeting between Lockheed and its client in the Pentagon. The official apparently ripped them apart, as reported in a recent issue of Aviation Week. It turns out that this is not uncommon, the procurement offical in question has a very combative style, and she has been known to have similar meetings with other suppliers in the past. The information posted was never denied, it wasn't deemed to be classified, it was just embarrassing to Lockheed.
Censors, in general, have become more and more stringent with time. People posting to the channels will test the limits, forcing the censor to weild his authority more and more often -- and again this will destroy the use of the channel. I don't think that this has happened yet at Yahoo, but it has happened in other fora.
I agree with other posters that Slashdot's system works remarkably well. I was more than a little dubious at first, but the checks and balances coded into the system have prevented the abuse that censorship usually leads to.
I think that Yahoo will come to regret having started on this path -- or, more likely, will reconsider quickly.
thad
Half-kidding.
thad
I'm serene, now, about the quality of work that embodied in the AES submissions, including (and especially) Twofish. We'll see what happens.
thad
The mouse would need a capacitance sensor, though, so that it wouldn't drift if your table is at a slight angle. It should probably sense change-in-acceleration, rather than absolute acceleration, for the same reason.
This would be an amazingly precise mouse, that would never jam or get dirty, would respond to your slightest touch, be reasonably cheap to produce, and would just be cool as hell.
I know, though, that Microsoft will patent touch mice, now. I suppose I could still build one for my own use -- which is all I really wanted to do, anyway.
thad
In the forward, you describe how you got interested in cryptography, and that you had no background or training in the field, but you thought it was interesting. Also, several times throughout the book you caution people not to trust cryptosystems from amateurs.
Clearly you have become well versed in the history and application of cryptography, your book makes all other descriptions of the state of the art invisible by comparison. Still, it appears to me that cryptosystem design and analysis requires fairly extreme mathematical proficiency, which I do not believe that you have.
Now, of course, Twofish is published in detail, and the best people in the world have attempted to crack it (and I think that the competitive process that the US Gov't has promoted is a spectacular way to get the best people to attack each other's ciphers). But, I remain somewhat worried that at the foundations of Twofish...is there something missing that a PhD in mathematics and number theory would have seen?
The winner of this competition will likely be the next DES, and will provide security for a fairly large percentage of the planet. The stakes are high. I'm sure that you have an answer to this criticism, and I'm eager to hear it.
thad
Ok. How? How can you be sure that you are not violating patents? How can you even be 1% sure? How can you even pretend to be sure that you're not violating patents that are currently being processed?
I suppose the only way would be to base all of your algorithms on old (> 20 years) papers and to contribute nothing original on your own. This would be the only way to be certain.
Well, I suppose you could also go into space and nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure
thad
After we were approached by the University of Utah, though about a patent we had violated on free-form deformations, we decided to not do that anymore. It was a tough decision to make, because these videos were quite popular. Still, we couldn't risk our company's existence any longer, as we had no idea what patents we might be violating.
This FFD patent was a complete and utter surprise. We had attended a technical conference (Siggraph) where Sederberg presented the research, and had assumed that we could just implement the ideas in the paper. There was no notice given (or necessary) that there was a patent application in the works.
The worst thing is that there is absolutely no way to not get sandbagged by this. There is no way of knowing what patents are in process; and if you base your companies in-house development on things for which patents are later granted, you can be completely hosed.
The situation for open-source software, is, of course, immensely worse; as you have no way of keeping how you did things secret.
thad
I find that any noise is an unwelcome distraction; and just don't like it. Music may make time spent more enjoyable, but for me it is always less profitable. And I'm programming to get things done, not pass the time.
I understand that different people are different, though. One of the smartest guys I know could only work with the TV on; that slowed his thought down to the point that his fingers could keep up.
When I get bad rich, I'm going to get a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones...those look like the ultimate in quiet. I can't wait
thad
Rockets don't work well at sea level, you have to make terrible compromises to get a rocket with a typical bell-shaped nozzle to go from ground to orbit. The Aerospike nozzles that Lockheed is trying to use on their X-34 should eliminate this problem, but they are unproven (to put it mildly).
But ramjets make perfect first stages! Powerful, simple, light, fuel efficient (compared to [only!] rockets) and well-understood.
thad
If this is true, why aren't they publicizing it? I assume it would be obvious from your credit-card statements.
Is there any documentation that you could point to that would verify this astonishing claim?
thad
The only benefit for the server model is that you could buy stuff from any computer, just by (somehow) accessing the Passport information. Of course, there better be some fairly sophisticated [read, cumbersome and inconvenient] password protection on Passport, then. And then, wouldn't this add to the inconvenience of the shopper?
The client-side models require you to input the information (only once, of course) on each of the computers you want to spend money from. Now, this doesn't seem like a huge inconvenience, really; certainly contrasted with the potential inconvenience of having somebody with evil intent [not naming any names] getting a copy of the server database.
I was disappointed, but not particularly surprised, that there was virtually no reference to security in the PressPass "Q/A" report. There were absolutely no assurances about what protection Microsoft would employ to keep your data private, no assurances whatsoever that Microsoft wouldn't abuse the information. I found the example of storing the address of your parents, say, with Microsoft particularly chilling. What a remarkable web of consumer information could be woven if everybody input their personal relationships into the Microsoft monster.
The page on passport security and privacy also, remarkably, passes up any opportunity to reassure users that Microsoft won't misuse the information that you give it. They do say that they won't share your personal information with others, but it will get to the point (if this is successful) that the rest of the world could be ignored, to a first approximation. There's nobody that I'd be less happy to have this information than Microsoft, themselves.
I predict, sadly, that this will be a spectacularly successful product.
thad
I am not hung-up on 'normal', I think it is more of a curse than a blessing in this world and the one of the future -- I'm definitely looking forward to what our Thomas is going to do as he grows.
thad
He used it to poke fun at people worried about The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (usually, drug dealers, pedophiles, terrorists, and spies).
thad
What's more interesting, to me, is that it's really the parents that are gambling, and with much bigger stakes (and longer odds). The civil justice system in the US has devolved into a lottery; people file lawsuits over the most inane things, in hopes that they win big. This is the true outrage here; that people would exploit their children to try to win a legal jackpot.
thad
Intel is not going to have copper-interconnect chips 'til mid-2001 (their number, and their numbers have been known to slip), while AMD's Dresden copper plant should be running long before that.
Intel has, to their credit, invested in revolutionary architectures (Merced, Rambus) while AMD has been pushing 'conventional' architectures harder. At least in the short run of the next year or so, it looks like AMD's approach is better. And, at least in my business, a year is the half-life of a computer.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into Intel's announcements, but their dribbling out of delay and bug announcements seems calculated to keep people from moving to other platforms; to keep them hanging, waiting for the Intel solution that's just around the corner. I, for one, and buying and AMD machine today :)
thad
Imagine what the ISP market will be like in three years. My guess is that most people will be using cable modems or ADSL; but they'll still have to send their $24/month to compuserve.
My guess is that they get a part of the price of the machine, too. The $400 rebate cost is probably shared with the manufacturer, maybe even 50-50. So Compuserve might be getting more like $16/month.
The interesting thing, to me, about these rebate promotions is that they cleave the home market from the business market like a scalpel. It's inspired.
thad
In this year, his efforts have been rewarded by people finally coming around. SGI's support of accelerated Mesa for Linux is a true boon. It means that all Linux boardsets will probably support OpenGL completely transparently. If Brian Paul hadn't done Mesa, it'd be a horrible mishmash.
thad
There are a few successful aviation one-man shows. If you look at them, every one of them started small; built something simple, flew it for a long time, then built something else -- perhaps something more revolutionary and complex. In the last fifty years there have been only two people who could have pulled this off, Molt Taylor (of the AirCar) and Burt Rutan (Voyager, Vari-Eze, Boomerang).
Moller has never built anything, to my knowledge, that has flown without being tethered down. The control systems for powered lift are incredibly complex, and he has shown absolutely no ability to produce one. What he has shown is pretty fiberglass sculptures and some slick ads. Unfortunately, these are quite simple to produce in comparison.
Think about it. Did any prototype program that you've ever written come with the equivalent of an inch-deep red paint job? No! Of course not. Prototypes look prototype-y, because you want to be able to make changes, learn from your mistakes, repair your damage, rebuild quickly. Look at the Gossamer Condor in the Smilthsonian next time you are there. The two wings aren't even built the same, as they were destroyed in crashes, and improved, at different times along the development process.
He's a crank, and has every single attribute of cranks, and none of the attributes of engineering. In the New Scientist' article, Moller says that he's never flown the M200 without a cable attached to a crane 'because neither Moller nor the vehicle are licensed to fly.' Right.
Well, he's lovable, anyway. And the history of aviation has many more cranks than people who could follow through. And people want to believe. Hell, I want to believe!
thad