Even if you assume their empirical data is accurate and reliable: people really do spend that much time surfing non-work (task) related items at work, there is not enough evidence to correctly infer that there is any given dollar amount of loss to count.
The first flawed assumption is that non work (task) related web surfing delivers zero value to the business. Any single valid example of value that a business can derive from employees surfing outside of their work tasks that applies to the population shoots this assumption like a fish in a barrel. Example: serendipity (finding something that helps your work on accident). Example: honing basic research/critical thinking skills. Example: Webmail (any kind of writing) improves communication skills.
The second flawed assumption is that for any given minute that a person might be surfing non-work stuff, there is something productive that the employee could be doing.
The third flawed assumption is that the base estimate of employee productivity (how productive is the average employee) can even apply to individual employee activities from minute to minute. This is actually the basic fallacy of generalization. Never try to apply generalized data to specific situations.
Even if the study avoids the third flawed assumption, it must contain the fourth: The statistics on employee productivity do not already account for any of the productivity in the first or second assumptions. Maybe the third and fourth are just corrolaries of each other.
The fifth flawed assumption is that employees doing work related tasks besides will never take part in management-sponsored waste. It is brazenly stupid to assume that employees who do what the boss wants them to be doing always improve the bottom line: the boss can make mistakes too. The consequences of those mistakes are directly proportional to the number of people reporting to the boss. Therefore the mistakes of the boss are more likely to cause significant losses than the mistakes of an employee. If not, we should flatten the payscales!
The sixth assumption may or may not apply. The free market (individual businesses) will seek out this waste as a profit potential, and a competitor will find a way to make more money than the business with the lollygagging employees. Dullards with wastefull staff will go out of business naturally. No societal-level alarm is necessary. Do you believe in the free market or not?
You know... those reflectors made of little uniform cubes on the bias so that one corner is protruding perpindicular to the base? It always reflects right back at the source of the radiation.
Patent 5715399 is trivial. Its novelty is suspect, being a copy of what the CC companies' own cash register CC terminals usually do to obscure card numbers on recipts. Saying the Intenet makes it novel again is crap.
Concerning the infamous Internet Shopping Cart Patent 6629079, maybe they were the first to patent it, but I challenge the Slashdot crowd to hit the wayback machine for some pre-April-2003 perl CGI that implemented shopping carts. I have a vauge recollection of that showing up LONG before Amazon brought their stale beer to the party.
Patent 6029141 seems trivial to me, essentially the same thing as selling your customer purchase records to a business partner, and also selling them advertisement and reselling for them. Publisher's Clearing House anyone? Amazon is basically saying "this one works on the Internet" as in "this one goes to eleven." I can call Bullshit, but the legal scholars on the bench are pretty behind in the technology. If they don't really understand it, whoever explains it to them for the first time is automatically the first mover.
Around the days of the sparc5/10/20 when Apache was a bunch of patches to the NCSA HTTPD, Sun was selling hardware that performed (for httpd server use) as well as an SGI machine of the same class, but costed half what SGI was asking for.
The PC alternative was a 486DX2-66 for nearly the same price if you got a mobo that had ECC RAM. IBM was still selling machines with Micro-Channel bus. Other PCs were 8 or 16 bit ISA busses. Sun machines had SBUS. Sun was simply the cheapest way to pipeline all of those early Internet bytes from the ethernet to RAM to disk, to RAM, and back out the ethernet. Never mind the balanced bus speeds of IO/RAM/CPU.
The chips that Apple will ask Intel to manufacture will be negotiated just the way Apple did with Motorola and IBM. The computers Apple would make with Intel processors will probably not say "Intel Inside" because Apple will maintain their own branding. You will probably not be able to install Windows on the Intel based hardware, and the computer will definitely NOT be a commodity-priced PC beige-box clone.
Apple will not let Dell sell a crappy chinese-manufactured beige box that runs OSX. Apple products are NEVER commodities like Dell PCs. Business weenies always try to compare Apple computers to Dell as if they would compare a Volvo or a BMW to a Chevy. The reason is that none of them grew up with computers, and they cannot understand the difference between a Mac and a PC the same way they understand the difference between a Volvo and a Ford. How much excitement do you think it would create if Volvo decided to contract with Ford to make *engines* for upcoming Volvo models?
More on CPU R&D: Next year Intel may not be in the lead. Go look at the R&D (reported in the last couple of years) that IBM or Sun is doing with basic materials (IBM) or asynchronous chip architecure (Sun). This has more to do with the cycle of turning basic R&D into a product than anything else. At this time, Intel has the most advanced product. Later they will be playing catch-up. Please note that when the G4 powerbooks came out, Intel saw the 5-6 hour battery life of PPC based laptops as a SERIOUS competitive threat, and they started making more efficient chips and spending money to drive that performance angle further. First it was G4, then it was Centrino. Now IBM is nonplussed with chip wattage, so Apple finds a new vendor who cares.
How many times has Windows changed chip architecures? Arguably NONE: their software still demands i386 architecture shortcomings as a baseline. Apple software has fat binaries, native Java and heavy runtime dynamism to separate the programmer from the chip. This topic could go on-and-on...
First: the language is one thing, and the compiler is another, and the compiler output is still another. Actually, the compiler is two things: a parser and a lexer. You can parse a piece of code, and then you can lex the parse tree into anything else. Someone else pointed out that you can compile C to Java bytecode as long as you have implemented all of the C stuff in pure Java.
To be fair, no, Cocoa isn't actually bytecode interpereted. I blew it there trying to simplify things for the Slashdot crowd. However, take a look at what the Objective-C runtime environment actually does, and you will understand my attraction to the idea of calling it a bytecode interpereter.
If you pay attention carefully to the details when you RTFA, you will notice that all along the way performance tradeoffs were chosen to favor streaming large amounts of data through relatively small sets of operations. Think of it as the granularity of work that the CPU is expected to do. Traditionally, preemptive multitasking systems ruin streaming performance by swapping tasks in and out of core and reducing cache performance.
OSX and the G4/G5 architecture is designed to maximize performance by handling huge streams of data like film or audio or image processing that suffer few logic branches from page to page of data. All the while, it maintains the ability to *sneak* a few cycles in for UI processing.
If you throw lots of small granularity operations on a relatively small amount of data at all of these CPUs, I would expect the Opteron running Linux to trounce the rest. To make matters worse, programmers/languages have style that favors this type of CPU/OS. Apple is moving to a bytecode-interpereted model with Cocoa, and behind the scenes they are adding some SERIOUS juice to the GCC compiler optimizations in the form of VECTORIZATION. What this does, at compile time, is to transform a block of code that does a lot of similar operations on a lot of data into vectorized code that takes maximum advantage of SIMD and L1 cache and deep pipelines.
After RTFA, I think the method is probably sound, but the actual work and results are a bit premature. I would expect the G5 to beat the Opteron in benchmarks that cover things like media processing, while the tables are tuned for granular processing. Intel will probably have a new architecture (register/ISA changes) out by then which will be marginally superior, but it will probably not be backwards compatible with P5 or Xeon in modes where it outperforms the G5/Opterons (and will cost a LOT more for the bragging rights).
The reason that Apple is taking this tack is that bytecode interpereted code must be processed at runtime just like modern compressed video: it must be de-serialized into complex memory structures. JIT compilers and interpereters and optimizers are the way of the future. Apple is just doing what they always do: blazing a trail of the necessary future a little on the early side. The great thing is that the whole industry leans on them to learn big lessons and provide direction.
When the gcc -O4 stuff is done, then the OSX vs. PPC Linux difference will make an interesting read.
Taking another cue from the upstart in Cupertino, Microsoft and Sun announced today that work is underway on a new vapor of Windows based on Solaris for high end workstations in scientific computing and multimedia production. It will have the familliar interface of Windows XP with a few snazzy extras, but the underpinnings will be made of Sun's industrial strength Solaris version of Unix. It will be available first on Sun branded Opteron workstations and servers.
The hardware platform, designed by Sun, will be the most advanced PC architecture yet. It will only support PCI-X or USB2 peripherals, and will repair itself. Scott McNealy says "We have actually trained [capuchin] monkeys who are administering our development servers right now. This drives down the TCO to the tune of nuts and berries in addition to the initial purchase cost."
The development environment for the platform is based on Dot Net, with a Sun licensed Java extension so that developers can write programs in Visual Basic, Java, or C# which will only run on the new environment. The new tools are being developed offshore in Hindi and Mandarin with english versions not due out for up to two years later.
The product is codenamed WinX (pronounced "Whence?"), and will be available at the same time Longhorn is released, probably later this year and will be much, much cooler than Apple's highly touted Tiger version of Mac OS X. Steve Jobs' reacted: "In the kitchen, Microsoft only knows how to make a shit sandwich, and they keep making bigger and bigger ones. Unfortunately, if we want to eat we all have to take a bite. I think they know that, and that's why I suggested Steve [Ballmer] reclaim the name 'Wince' from the handheld market. That's what it makes me want to do! He [Ballmer] laughed."
That distinction only makes sense if there is a distinction between logos copied off the web site and logos faithfully reproduced by hand using some graphics software and a pen and tablet. Let's say they looked pretty recognisable, obviously referring to the retail giant, but they were a bit off in many dimensions, and they were an original work? Can a publisher or advertiser push DMCA on an artist if their work gets cut up and pasted into a collage?
The real issue here is that the DMCA C&D adds more to the art than the simple act of parody! The "CENSORED" graphics are more demonstrative of conflict, which is the real purpose of the art anyway.
So, why do regular old programs in Windows need access to raw sockets? Why not use the syscalls that make Unix TCP/IP systems so famously capable and reasonably secure?
Security, in Microsoft culture actually means "Security of Future Revenue" in the same way the US Income Tax is vital to "National Security."
I'll tell you why: Microsoft wants to put out a new (don't laugh) secure socket API that is incompatible with non-microsoft products. First they get developer lock-in by charging beaucoup dollars for the next version of MS Visual SecureNet development licenses, and then they force the end users to choose between accepting the company mandated security product and all of the other services they get from non Microsoft servers. Compatibility with that stuff will be sold as another overpriced Microsoft based proxy server that MS can use as leverage against their competition.
Dragonfly is designed to make asynchronous communication between hardware resources very very lightweight and scalable. Right now SMP is not really very efficient. All of the locking that goes on to keep one processor from stepping on the other processor's toes ends up making all processors except the one with the lock wait for the lock to be released, for example. The idea is to organize the memory usage so that kind of waiting only happens when it is explicitly necessary.
Now, all of the sudden, the OS will scale to 64 CPUs. Maybe it would help to think of BSD scaling across processors like Solaris? Beyond that, it would allow vectorized (a whole batch of processing without if..then style branches) processing to happen cheaply off-core, perhaps on an asymmetric processor, or perhaps on another host across a network.. Like a server could use the GPU in the video card to do work...
How much would you pay for a car that could be deactivated at will by the dealer?
Wouldn't it be great if you could make something that everyone wanted, but you can sell it to everyone without spending a dime to distribute it? And then wouldn't it be great if you could make it evaporate so that the same people would have to pay you again and again?
They want to have their cake and eat it too. Who can blame the greedy shits? Greedy greedy greedy greedy greedy. You can copy information infinitely without depleting the source, and each copy can be the source for more. So distribution is free on a massive scale, and then if you could also tap into scarcity value like when you sell something that is a depleting resource the more you sell it... so you get the courts to make that legal fiction work in the markets and KA-CHING!
All of the arguments that people have against welfare and lazy people with their entitlements all apply to corporations and institutions exactly the same way. If you create a system of entitlements, watch the life get sucked out of the business. DMCA is a system of entitlements for corporations who sell DRM. It's just too bad they have to compete against non-DRM. If things that were sold as DRM start behaving unlike non-DRM, watch the Divx history repeat itself.
OK, I disagree on a factual basis. In my limited experience (empirical examples may need to be supplied to continue this debate), Wikipedia has "disambiguation" pages to provide a bifurcation of perspectives that exposes both sides as they wish to present their perspectives, usually annotated with some impartial comments designed to clear up or expose what makes the positions disjoint. If the best thought of the time is at an impasse, a Britannica digest in my experience, leaves much to be desired--especially references to further research into finer points of a minority position.
If you like, we can slow this exchange down a bit, moving it to one of our Slashdot journals (to avoid the archiving freeze of this one), and provide some actual evidence. I suggest this because my position is heresay to anyone who has not shared similar experience, but I believe it can (and probably should) be supported with facts. This forum is not going to work for that, regrettably.
Wikipedia is the ideal teacher of NON-contentious issues. When it comes to contentious, especially politicial issues, it is no more an ideal "teacher" then a Usenet political forum: fierce partisan editors engage in change-wars in Google entries of controversial subjects. The Bush and Kerry entries in the last election were a great example of this.
I think careful reading will reveal that we agree with each other, but in my case, particularly, confusion of the subject and object in the quoted sentences are to blame. I mean that the Wikipedia presents issues which are normally clouded in contentious polemic in an academically impartial and non-contentious way. I think this is what you mean also, but I'll let you correct me if not.
If you want to learn about Online Poker, it is far better to learn from a reputable source. Almost everyone else out there is going to try and fleece you for a buck. Which of the other top links is not trying to get you to part with your greenbacks?
In a deeper spiritual sense, learning gambling is like learning life itself. The Wikipedia is capable of teaching people to see the forest and the trees, so to speak. Disinterested, independant, impartial--the Wikipedia is an ideal teacher of contentious issues. Alternatively, even publishers of books on the game are better off making a "mark" out of you. So, if you RTFA, I pointedly disagree with the author of the top comment about how the bloggers are not contributing to Google searchers in a positive way.
On the other hand, the bloggers might bring the organized crime behind the Online Poker sites to bear on the Wikipedia itself. The Bloggers should have to take their turn to babysit the Wikipedia. So, let me know if I need to take a shift. I'm up for it.
Except in this case it isn't the amorphous anonymous "Government" but the cadre of uber-rich elites puppeting the system to gain advantage or security from or against each other. That's right. At the top, they're people who bleed just like you and me. They're not gods. They're not special. They're just people who are oblivious to the worst consequences of the choices they make in their lives' games.
The guys up there change the rules in apparently trivial ways in order to garner some non-obvious advantage in the future. It's like some massive (but nastily complicated) game of Go.
One of the weakest uses of MD5 in light of these discoveries is using the trusted digest of a file to validate files downloaded from untrusted sources/mirrors. FWIW, try using MD5 hash for the whole file, and then a second one for the first 512 bytes of a file. Then compare the trusted pair of hashes and file size against what you downloaded.
Until we get good data on the performance of this MD5 collision generator, we cannot know how much more difficult it would be to break the authentication scheme I suggested, but it will be significantly more difficult. What if you used both SHA-1 and MD5? How difficult would it be to produce a colliding message that has the same MD5 *and* SHA-1 digest as any given message?
My point is that there are small things we can (and should) do to make a great difference overcoming the recently discovered weaknesses. Also, for certificates, one could just include another ASN.1 value in the cert to include the MD5 collisions. Certs would get bigger, and fewer, and computationally more expensive to use, but MD5 is not necessarily dead in the water!
If people wanted to make money selling WiFi in Chicago, they woulda, shoulda, coulda already done it. They haven't. Nobody pays for WiFi in public spaces because there are too many Intelligentsia(TM) (an indy coffee house supplier) coffee houses giving it away to get some customer loyalty. Hotels downtown practically MUST have free wifi, or they would lose so many small business meetings.
Conclusion: WiFi is good for the city, but it does not offer enough margin to provide adequate business incentive. Therefore it is a PRIME candidate for a public works project. Furthermore, to curb abuses (like invasion of others' privacy for a fee) involved with network snooping and identity theft, the infrastructure could benefit greatly from city regulation. Also, just because the city runs the program doesn't mean there's no business involved. The city could create a standardized stable base of demand, and subcontract hotspots to sealed-bid contractors.
If you employ someone, you need to be able to control them and regulate their time and productivity.
You have no business supervising employees with any sort of creative potential for the business because you will "control" it out of existence. Soon, the only creativity that will be able to survive is your own manipulative control-freak schemes. Also, please realise that your job as the controller and regulator of time and productivity is dependent on the role of those you would supervise relative to the jobs they do. If your supervisor was creative, your job would be replaced with a machine (workflow automation software). Control freaks deliver ZERO ROI. My point is that the leadership skills you think are most important in a supervisor's relationship with their employees are actually marginal where employees' valuable skills demand high pay. Maybe you mean something else, and I have misunderstood you?
Just don't buy any HDTV equipment with the DRM crap--reject DRM by making BestBuy eat it. If you must write letters, just tell your congressional reps that you aren't interested in the new schedule of planned obsolescence.
If you are on the artists/producers' sides, then start looking for a way to reach your audiences sans the traditional middlemen. Think about how JibJab and SouthPark got started. At the point people start waving distibution contracts in your face, you have a choice to walk away and take money directly from advertisers and/or consumers. Technologies like BitTorrent are comparatively free, and effectively superior to Hollywood distribution. On one hand they promise to make you wildly rich and famous, but on the other hand they rip you off worse than a scratch-off lottery ticket. Just say no.
If you've ever deprecated MD5, please take note!
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SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
I just want to say "What's UP?" All of this NONSENSE that popped up a while ago about MD5 being "harmful some day" is really PALE in comparison to "SHA-1 has a theoretical attack" let alone "SHA-1 has been broken." I want to give proper acknowledgement for all of the people who try really hard to stay in the ACTUAL world.
I totally agree with you, but I was asking for someone to support their argument, which I interpereted as narrowly as I could out of fairness. I can't expect a person who makes a comment towards an opinion on one subject and then ask them to justify the class of opinions to which their statement belongs.
What we have here, just in case you haven't already had the eye-rolling sigh experience, is the old nature versus nurture debate. This stuff has been argued to death, and we should be VERY careful not to let the debate slip backwards to obscure the question.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you assume their empirical data is accurate and reliable: people really do spend that much time surfing non-work (task) related items at work, there is not enough evidence to correctly infer that there is any given dollar amount of loss to count.
The first flawed assumption is that non work (task) related web surfing delivers zero value to the business. Any single valid example of value that a business can derive from employees surfing outside of their work tasks that applies to the population shoots this assumption like a fish in a barrel. Example: serendipity (finding something that helps your work on accident). Example: honing basic research/critical thinking skills. Example: Webmail (any kind of writing) improves communication skills.
The second flawed assumption is that for any given minute that a person might be surfing non-work stuff, there is something productive that the employee could be doing.
The third flawed assumption is that the base estimate of employee productivity (how productive is the average employee) can even apply to individual employee activities from minute to minute. This is actually the basic fallacy of generalization. Never try to apply generalized data to specific situations.
Even if the study avoids the third flawed assumption, it must contain the fourth: The statistics on employee productivity do not already account for any of the productivity in the first or second assumptions. Maybe the third and fourth are just corrolaries of each other.
The fifth flawed assumption is that employees doing work related tasks besides will never take part in management-sponsored waste. It is brazenly stupid to assume that employees who do what the boss wants them to be doing always improve the bottom line: the boss can make mistakes too. The consequences of those mistakes are directly proportional to the number of people reporting to the boss. Therefore the mistakes of the boss are more likely to cause significant losses than the mistakes of an employee. If not, we should flatten the payscales!
The sixth assumption may or may not apply. The free market (individual businesses) will seek out this waste as a profit potential, and a competitor will find a way to make more money than the business with the lollygagging employees. Dullards with wastefull staff will go out of business naturally. No societal-level alarm is necessary. Do you believe in the free market or not?
Sssshh...
You know... those reflectors made of little uniform cubes on the bias so that one corner is protruding perpindicular to the base? It always reflects right back at the source of the radiation.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/18/amazon_p atent_suit/
Patent 5715399 is trivial. Its novelty is suspect, being a copy of what the CC companies' own cash register CC terminals usually do to obscure card numbers on recipts. Saying the Intenet makes it novel again is crap.
Concerning the infamous Internet Shopping Cart Patent 6629079, maybe they were the first to patent it, but I challenge the Slashdot crowd to hit the wayback machine for some pre-April-2003 perl CGI that implemented shopping carts. I have a vauge recollection of that showing up LONG before Amazon brought their stale beer to the party.
Patent 6029141 seems trivial to me, essentially the same thing as selling your customer purchase records to a business partner, and also selling them advertisement and reselling for them. Publisher's Clearing House anyone? Amazon is basically saying "this one works on the Internet" as in "this one goes to eleven." I can call Bullshit, but the legal scholars on the bench are pretty behind in the technology. If they don't really understand it, whoever explains it to them for the first time is automatically the first mover.
Around the days of the sparc5/10/20 when Apache was a bunch of patches to the NCSA HTTPD, Sun was selling hardware that performed (for httpd server use) as well as an SGI machine of the same class, but costed half what SGI was asking for.
The PC alternative was a 486DX2-66 for nearly the same price if you got a mobo that had ECC RAM. IBM was still selling machines with Micro-Channel bus. Other PCs were 8 or 16 bit ISA busses. Sun machines had SBUS. Sun was simply the cheapest way to pipeline all of those early Internet bytes from the ethernet to RAM to disk, to RAM, and back out the ethernet. Never mind the balanced bus speeds of IO/RAM/CPU.
The chips that Apple will ask Intel to manufacture will be negotiated just the way Apple did with Motorola and IBM. The computers Apple would make with Intel processors will probably not say "Intel Inside" because Apple will maintain their own branding. You will probably not be able to install Windows on the Intel based hardware, and the computer will definitely NOT be a commodity-priced PC beige-box clone.
Apple will not let Dell sell a crappy chinese-manufactured beige box that runs OSX. Apple products are NEVER commodities like Dell PCs. Business weenies always try to compare Apple computers to Dell as if they would compare a Volvo or a BMW to a Chevy. The reason is that none of them grew up with computers, and they cannot understand the difference between a Mac and a PC the same way they understand the difference between a Volvo and a Ford. How much excitement do you think it would create if Volvo decided to contract with Ford to make *engines* for upcoming Volvo models?
More on CPU R&D: Next year Intel may not be in the lead. Go look at the R&D (reported in the last couple of years) that IBM or Sun is doing with basic materials (IBM) or asynchronous chip architecure (Sun). This has more to do with the cycle of turning basic R&D into a product than anything else. At this time, Intel has the most advanced product. Later they will be playing catch-up. Please note that when the G4 powerbooks came out, Intel saw the 5-6 hour battery life of PPC based laptops as a SERIOUS competitive threat, and they started making more efficient chips and spending money to drive that performance angle further. First it was G4, then it was Centrino. Now IBM is nonplussed with chip wattage, so Apple finds a new vendor who cares.
How many times has Windows changed chip architecures? Arguably NONE: their software still demands i386 architecture shortcomings as a baseline. Apple software has fat binaries, native Java and heavy runtime dynamism to separate the programmer from the chip. This topic could go on-and-on...
First: the language is one thing, and the compiler is another, and the compiler output is still another. Actually, the compiler is two things: a parser and a lexer. You can parse a piece of code, and then you can lex the parse tree into anything else. Someone else pointed out that you can compile C to Java bytecode as long as you have implemented all of the C stuff in pure Java.
To be fair, no, Cocoa isn't actually bytecode interpereted. I blew it there trying to simplify things for the Slashdot crowd. However, take a look at what the Objective-C runtime environment actually does, and you will understand my attraction to the idea of calling it a bytecode interpereter.
If you pay attention carefully to the details when you RTFA, you will notice that all along the way performance tradeoffs were chosen to favor streaming large amounts of data through relatively small sets of operations. Think of it as the granularity of work that the CPU is expected to do. Traditionally, preemptive multitasking systems ruin streaming performance by swapping tasks in and out of core and reducing cache performance.
OSX and the G4/G5 architecture is designed to maximize performance by handling huge streams of data like film or audio or image processing that suffer few logic branches from page to page of data. All the while, it maintains the ability to *sneak* a few cycles in for UI processing.
If you throw lots of small granularity operations on a relatively small amount of data at all of these CPUs, I would expect the Opteron running Linux to trounce the rest. To make matters worse, programmers/languages have style that favors this type of CPU/OS. Apple is moving to a bytecode-interpereted model with Cocoa, and behind the scenes they are adding some SERIOUS juice to the GCC compiler optimizations in the form of VECTORIZATION. What this does, at compile time, is to transform a block of code that does a lot of similar operations on a lot of data into vectorized code that takes maximum advantage of SIMD and L1 cache and deep pipelines.
After RTFA, I think the method is probably sound, but the actual work and results are a bit premature. I would expect the G5 to beat the Opteron in benchmarks that cover things like media processing, while the tables are tuned for granular processing. Intel will probably have a new architecture (register/ISA changes) out by then which will be marginally superior, but it will probably not be backwards compatible with P5 or Xeon in modes where it outperforms the G5/Opterons (and will cost a LOT more for the bragging rights).
The reason that Apple is taking this tack is that bytecode interpereted code must be processed at runtime just like modern compressed video: it must be de-serialized into complex memory structures. JIT compilers and interpereters and optimizers are the way of the future. Apple is just doing what they always do: blazing a trail of the necessary future a little on the early side. The great thing is that the whole industry leans on them to learn big lessons and provide direction.
When the gcc -O4 stuff is done, then the OSX vs. PPC Linux difference will make an interesting read.
Taking another cue from the upstart in Cupertino, Microsoft and Sun announced today that work is underway on a new vapor of Windows based on Solaris for high end workstations in scientific computing and multimedia production. It will have the familliar interface of Windows XP with a few snazzy extras, but the underpinnings will be made of Sun's industrial strength Solaris version of Unix. It will be available first on Sun branded Opteron workstations and servers.
The hardware platform, designed by Sun, will be the most advanced PC architecture yet. It will only support PCI-X or USB2 peripherals, and will repair itself. Scott McNealy says "We have actually trained [capuchin] monkeys who are administering our development servers right now. This drives down the TCO to the tune of nuts and berries in addition to the initial purchase cost."
The development environment for the platform is based on Dot Net, with a Sun licensed Java extension so that developers can write programs in Visual Basic, Java, or C# which will only run on the new environment. The new tools are being developed offshore in Hindi and Mandarin with english versions not due out for up to two years later.
The product is codenamed WinX (pronounced "Whence?"), and will be available at the same time Longhorn is released, probably later this year and will be much, much cooler than Apple's highly touted Tiger version of Mac OS X. Steve Jobs' reacted: "In the kitchen, Microsoft only knows how to make a shit sandwich, and they keep making bigger and bigger ones. Unfortunately, if we want to eat we all have to take a bite. I think they know that, and that's why I suggested Steve [Ballmer] reclaim the name 'Wince' from the handheld market. That's what it makes me want to do! He [Ballmer] laughed."
That distinction only makes sense if there is a distinction between logos copied off the web site and logos faithfully reproduced by hand using some graphics software and a pen and tablet. Let's say they looked pretty recognisable, obviously referring to the retail giant, but they were a bit off in many dimensions, and they were an original work? Can a publisher or advertiser push DMCA on an artist if their work gets cut up and pasted into a collage?
The real issue here is that the DMCA C&D adds more to the art than the simple act of parody! The "CENSORED" graphics are more demonstrative of conflict, which is the real purpose of the art anyway.
It's the occasional comment like this that keeps me coming back to Slashdot and posting my little rants... :)
If you alter the content, they have no claim against DMCA. MalWart != WalMart.
So, why do regular old programs in Windows need access to raw sockets? Why not use the syscalls that make Unix TCP/IP systems so famously capable and reasonably secure?
Security, in Microsoft culture actually means "Security of Future Revenue" in the same way the US Income Tax is vital to "National Security."
I'll tell you why: Microsoft wants to put out a new (don't laugh) secure socket API that is incompatible with non-microsoft products. First they get developer lock-in by charging beaucoup dollars for the next version of MS Visual SecureNet development licenses, and then they force the end users to choose between accepting the company mandated security product and all of the other services they get from non Microsoft servers. Compatibility with that stuff will be sold as another overpriced Microsoft based proxy server that MS can use as leverage against their competition.
Dragonfly is designed to make asynchronous communication between hardware resources very very lightweight and scalable. Right now SMP is not really very efficient. All of the locking that goes on to keep one processor from stepping on the other processor's toes ends up making all processors except the one with the lock wait for the lock to be released, for example. The idea is to organize the memory usage so that kind of waiting only happens when it is explicitly necessary.
Now, all of the sudden, the OS will scale to 64 CPUs. Maybe it would help to think of BSD scaling across processors like Solaris? Beyond that, it would allow vectorized (a whole batch of processing without if..then style branches) processing to happen cheaply off-core, perhaps on an asymmetric processor, or perhaps on another host across a network.. Like a server could use the GPU in the video card to do work...
How much would you pay for a car that could be deactivated at will by the dealer?
Wouldn't it be great if you could make something that everyone wanted, but you can sell it to everyone without spending a dime to distribute it? And then wouldn't it be great if you could make it evaporate so that the same people would have to pay you again and again?
They want to have their cake and eat it too. Who can blame the greedy shits? Greedy greedy greedy greedy greedy. You can copy information infinitely without depleting the source, and each copy can be the source for more. So distribution is free on a massive scale, and then if you could also tap into scarcity value like when you sell something that is a depleting resource the more you sell it... so you get the courts to make that legal fiction work in the markets and KA-CHING!
All of the arguments that people have against welfare and lazy people with their entitlements all apply to corporations and institutions exactly the same way. If you create a system of entitlements, watch the life get sucked out of the business. DMCA is a system of entitlements for corporations who sell DRM. It's just too bad they have to compete against non-DRM. If things that were sold as DRM start behaving unlike non-DRM, watch the Divx history repeat itself.
OK, I disagree on a factual basis. In my limited experience (empirical examples may need to be supplied to continue this debate), Wikipedia has "disambiguation" pages to provide a bifurcation of perspectives that exposes both sides as they wish to present their perspectives, usually annotated with some impartial comments designed to clear up or expose what makes the positions disjoint. If the best thought of the time is at an impasse, a Britannica digest in my experience, leaves much to be desired--especially references to further research into finer points of a minority position.
If you like, we can slow this exchange down a bit, moving it to one of our Slashdot journals (to avoid the archiving freeze of this one), and provide some actual evidence. I suggest this because my position is heresay to anyone who has not shared similar experience, but I believe it can (and probably should) be supported with facts. This forum is not going to work for that, regrettably.
I think careful reading will reveal that we agree with each other, but in my case, particularly, confusion of the subject and object in the quoted sentences are to blame. I mean that the Wikipedia presents issues which are normally clouded in contentious polemic in an academically impartial and non-contentious way. I think this is what you mean also, but I'll let you correct me if not.
If you want to learn about Online Poker, it is far better to learn from a reputable source. Almost everyone else out there is going to try and fleece you for a buck. Which of the other top links is not trying to get you to part with your greenbacks?
In a deeper spiritual sense, learning gambling is like learning life itself. The Wikipedia is capable of teaching people to see the forest and the trees, so to speak. Disinterested, independant, impartial--the Wikipedia is an ideal teacher of contentious issues. Alternatively, even publishers of books on the game are better off making a "mark" out of you. So, if you RTFA, I pointedly disagree with the author of the top comment about how the bloggers are not contributing to Google searchers in a positive way.
On the other hand, the bloggers might bring the organized crime behind the Online Poker sites to bear on the Wikipedia itself. The Bloggers should have to take their turn to babysit the Wikipedia. So, let me know if I need to take a shift. I'm up for it.
Except in this case it isn't the amorphous anonymous "Government" but the cadre of uber-rich elites puppeting the system to gain advantage or security from or against each other. That's right. At the top, they're people who bleed just like you and me. They're not gods. They're not special. They're just people who are oblivious to the worst consequences of the choices they make in their lives' games.
The guys up there change the rules in apparently trivial ways in order to garner some non-obvious advantage in the future. It's like some massive (but nastily complicated) game of Go.
One of the weakest uses of MD5 in light of these discoveries is using the trusted digest of a file to validate files downloaded from untrusted sources/mirrors. FWIW, try using MD5 hash for the whole file, and then a second one for the first 512 bytes of a file. Then compare the trusted pair of hashes and file size against what you downloaded.
Until we get good data on the performance of this MD5 collision generator, we cannot know how much more difficult it would be to break the authentication scheme I suggested, but it will be significantly more difficult. What if you used both SHA-1 and MD5? How difficult would it be to produce a colliding message that has the same MD5 *and* SHA-1 digest as any given message?
My point is that there are small things we can (and should) do to make a great difference overcoming the recently discovered weaknesses. Also, for certificates, one could just include another ASN.1 value in the cert to include the MD5 collisions. Certs would get bigger, and fewer, and computationally more expensive to use, but MD5 is not necessarily dead in the water!
If people wanted to make money selling WiFi in Chicago, they woulda, shoulda, coulda already done it. They haven't. Nobody pays for WiFi in public spaces because there are too many Intelligentsia(TM) (an indy coffee house supplier) coffee houses giving it away to get some customer loyalty. Hotels downtown practically MUST have free wifi, or they would lose so many small business meetings.
Conclusion: WiFi is good for the city, but it does not offer enough margin to provide adequate business incentive. Therefore it is a PRIME candidate for a public works project. Furthermore, to curb abuses (like invasion of others' privacy for a fee) involved with network snooping and identity theft, the infrastructure could benefit greatly from city regulation. Also, just because the city runs the program doesn't mean there's no business involved. The city could create a standardized stable base of demand, and subcontract hotspots to sealed-bid contractors.
You have no business supervising employees with any sort of creative potential for the business because you will "control" it out of existence. Soon, the only creativity that will be able to survive is your own manipulative control-freak schemes. Also, please realise that your job as the controller and regulator of time and productivity is dependent on the role of those you would supervise relative to the jobs they do. If your supervisor was creative, your job would be replaced with a machine (workflow automation software). Control freaks deliver ZERO ROI. My point is that the leadership skills you think are most important in a supervisor's relationship with their employees are actually marginal where employees' valuable skills demand high pay. Maybe you mean something else, and I have misunderstood you?
Just don't buy any HDTV equipment with the DRM crap--reject DRM by making BestBuy eat it. If you must write letters, just tell your congressional reps that you aren't interested in the new schedule of planned obsolescence.
If you are on the artists/producers' sides, then start looking for a way to reach your audiences sans the traditional middlemen. Think about how JibJab and SouthPark got started. At the point people start waving distibution contracts in your face, you have a choice to walk away and take money directly from advertisers and/or consumers. Technologies like BitTorrent are comparatively free, and effectively superior to Hollywood distribution. On one hand they promise to make you wildly rich and famous, but on the other hand they rip you off worse than a scratch-off lottery ticket. Just say no.
I just want to say "What's UP?" All of this NONSENSE that popped up a while ago about MD5 being "harmful some day" is really PALE in comparison to "SHA-1 has a theoretical attack" let alone "SHA-1 has been broken." I want to give proper acknowledgement for all of the people who try really hard to stay in the ACTUAL world.
If you're looking for a protocol specification, then start with:
I totally agree with you, but I was asking for someone to support their argument, which I interpereted as narrowly as I could out of fairness. I can't expect a person who makes a comment towards an opinion on one subject and then ask them to justify the class of opinions to which their statement belongs.
What we have here, just in case you haven't already had the eye-rolling sigh experience, is the old nature versus nurture debate. This stuff has been argued to death, and we should be VERY careful not to let the debate slip backwards to obscure the question.