This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by khare@alumni.caltech.edu.
Texas Pacific, in addition to its multibillion dollar portfolio detailed below, actually does invest in promising new companies, not just turnarounds. It's just that KnowNow is waaay to small of a part of their $7.2B portfolio... so far!
Rohit
khare@alumni.caltech.edu
Texas Pacific Goes Where Others Fear to Spend
August 25, 2002
By RIVA D. ATLAS and EDWARD WONG
It was one of the first calls David N. Siegel placed when
he became chief executive of the beleaguered US Airways
last March. Seeking advice on how to hammer out a leaner
and meaner business plan, keep his planes flying and
renegotiate costly contracts with the unions, he flipped
through his files and found the number for the Texas
Pacific Group, an investment firm headed by David
Bonderman, a former civil rights lawyer with a reputation
for fixing problem companies.
Mr. Siegel, once a top executive at Continental Airlines,
had watched Texas Pacific's partners turn an investment of
$66 million in the airline, made three years after it filed
for bankruptcy in 1990, into a profit of more than $600
million. And they had made nearly as much on their stake in
America West, which filed for bankruptcy in 1992.
That search for advice turned into an offer. Why not let
Texas Pacific have a role in US Airways' revival? asked
Richard Schifter, the Texas Pacific executive whom Mr.
Siegel reached.
In June, Mr. Siegel called Mr. Schifter again. And days
before US Airways announced its plans to file for
bankruptcy two weeks ago - but after it had negotiated
about $550 million in concessions with its unions - Texas
Pacific, based in Fort Worth and San Francisco, agreed to
kick in $100 million as part of a $500 million loan to keep
the company operating during bankruptcy. It also agreed to
buy $200 million of stock, or 38 percent of the company,
and take 5 of 13 seats on the board if US Airways emerges
from bankruptcy - unless another investor surfaces with a
better offer.
"One of the reasons we were interested is few other folks
were," said James Coulter, a partner at Texas Pacific, in
an interview after the bankruptcy filing. "There aren't
many people around with the stomach or the knowledge to
delve into the airline industry."
Texas Pacific, which manages $8 billion, thrives by buying
businesses no one else wants. Mr. Coulter and Mr. Bonderman
made their names during the recession of the early 1990's
with investments in Continental and America West. The
firm's hallmark is to take an active hand in shaping
companies, sometimes ousting poor managers and tapping its
extensive network of contacts for talented replacements.
Now the partners are again looking for trouble. In the last
year alone, Texas Pacific has announced or completed six
acquisitions, most in unloved industries like
semiconductors, reinsurance and airlines. Just last month,
it announced plans to buy Burger King, which has been
losing market share, for $2.26 billion. It is also bidding
for Bankgesellschaft Berlin, a large and troubled bank.
The most creative, and potentially lucrative, of these
deals could be Texas Pacific's acquisition last November of
MEMC Electronic Materials, a semiconductor company, for $6
- yes, just $6 - in cash. It will also guarantee a $150
million bank loan.
In the last few years, most firms that specialize in
leveraged buyouts - the use of junk bonds, bank loans and
other borrowings to buy or take big stakes in companies -
have been largely inactive. Falling stock prices have made
managements reluctant to sell cheaply. Companies that are
for sale have tangled finances or face a cash squeeze.
Texas Pacific is different. "This is a terrific environment
for them," said Stephen Schwarzman, chief executive of the
Blackstone Group, which also specializes in buyouts.
Mark Attanasio, a managing director at Trust Company of the
West, which has invested with Texas Pacific, said: "Most
other buyout firms want to buy companies that are growing.
You don't see many guys wanting to take on operational
fixes."
Like most other buyout firms, Texas Pacific tries to keep
its inner workings private: its partners rarely grant
interviews and its Web site is perpetually under
construction. Mr. Bonderman, Mr. Coulter and William Price,
the third founding partner, declined to be interviewed for
this article.
Mr. Bonderman, 59, is known for his rumpled shirts and
bright, patterned socks. "He likes argyle socks, and they
tend to fall down around his ankles," said Henry Miller, an
investment banker who advises troubled companies. Early in
his career, when he was a Washington lawyer, Mr. Bonderman
argued a case in court wearing a brown velvet suit.
When a Texas Pacific deal is being negotiated, he is known
for obsessively staying in touch, even when he is trekking
in places like Pakistan, Nepal and, most recently, Bhutan.
"Whenever I see a long, unfamiliar phone number pop up on
my caller I.D., I know it's David calling," said one
investment banker who often works with Mr. Bonderman.
Mr. Bonderman made his reputation in the 1980's as the
chief investment officer for Robert Bass, the Texas oilman.
Mr. Bonderman enriched Mr. Bass a second time by making
early bets in industries like cable television and taking
stakes in troubled companies like American Savings & Loan,
which had been seized by the government. Over nearly a
decade, Mr. Bonderman's picks earned an average annual
return of 63 percent for Mr. Bass.
In 1993, Mr. Bonderman struck out on his own with Mr.
Coulter, a former Lehman Brothers banker who had also
worked for Mr. Bass. They teamed up later that year with
Mr. Price, a veteran of GE Capital Capital and Bain &
Company, a consulting firm, to form Texas Pacific.
The three men have complementary skills, investment bankers
and other deal makers said. Mr. Bonderman is the master
strategist and Mr. Coulter is good at structuring deals and
the detailed management of the firm's purchases. Mr. Price
often recruits managers and advises on operational issues.
"David is very much the optimist, very much the deal
maker," said Greg Brenneman, a former president of
Continental. "Jim is very much a counterbalance to David.
He will sit back and ask the tough questions. He will
approach investments a little bit more skeptically than
David does."
By the end of the 1990's, Texas Pacific was well
established in deal making. It easily raised $4.5 billion
from pension funds and other investors in early 2000. To
celebrate their war chest, the firm's partners rented San
Francisco's City Hall and hired the B-52's to play at a
party.
But as the stock market began to tumble, Texas Pacific
hesitated. For a 17-month stretch, the partners made no
deals. They checked out some of the biggest corporate
blowups, including Adelphia, Xerox and Global Crossing, but
stayed away, finding the prices and the quality of the
businesses untenable.
Instead, Texas Pacific began to hastily exit some existing
investments, taking more than $2 billion in profits during
that stretch.
"They started to cash out early in the cycle," said Mario
Giannini, chief executive of Hamilton Lane, a money
management firm, some of whose clients are Texas Pacific
investors.
The good times of the late 1990's were not ideal for Texas
Pacific - it struggled to find downtrodden companies that
needed its help.
But Texas Pacific did manage to spot a few diamonds in the
rough. It revived Oxford Health Plans, the health
maintenance organization that nearly collapsed in the
mid-1990's, almost doubling its money after bringing in new
managers and upgrading computer systems. In 1996, it made a
$280 million investment in Ducati Motor, the Italian
motorcycle maker, whose profits have since more than
quadrupled.
But Texas Pacific also stumbled, usually when it bought at
the top of the market. Texas Pacific's $560 million
investment in the J. Crew Group, the clothing retailer, for
which it paid a steep price of 10 times cash flow in 1997,
has been a disappointment. So has its 1999 purchase of
Bally, the shoe maker, which has suffered from lower demand
for luxury goods.
Texas Pacific also lost more than $100 million on Zilog, a
semiconductor company, and Favorite Brands, a candy maker,
both of which filed for bankruptcy.
Some of these investments have taken a toll on the firm's
performance. Texas Pacific is still selling off holdings in
two investment funds it raised over the last decade. The
first fund, a $720 million portfolio raised in 1993 and
including investments made through March 1997, should
return more than 40 percent, according to one Texas Pacific
investor. But its second fund - $2.5 billion raised in 1997
- could return less than half that, this investor
estimated, since the firm had less time to take profits on
these investments before the stock market sank.
But because Texas Pacific has not sold many of its holdings
in the second fund, profits on these investments could
rebound. It is hoping, for example, that with new
management in place, J. Crew will turn around as the
economy rebounds. In any case, one competitor said, "their
returns look pretty good when you consider that some other
funds won't return any capital" to investors.
But with the weak economy throwing many companies into
trouble, Texas Pacific seems poised to repeat its earlier
success, the investor said. "They should do exceptionally
well," he said.
Texas Pacific has a distinct style - if not formula. It
relies on talented, self-sufficient managers to restructure
troubled companies, preferring to remain hands-off, except
for surveillance from the boardroom. When necessary, it
replaces managers.
Less than a year after Continental emerged from bankruptcy,
for example, Mr. Bonderman watched with frustration as his
old friend Robert R. Ferguson, the chief executive, led it
to the edge of another trip to bankruptcy court.
Continental's board, where Mr. Bonderman was chairman, then
brought in Gordon M. Bethune, an executive at Boeing, and
in October 1994 he replaced Mr. Ferguson as chief
executive. Mr. Bethune quickly did a top-to-bottom overhaul
of the company and is now considered a great turnaround
artist of the industry.
"The biggest conflict I've ever seen was with Bob
Ferguson," said Clark Onstad, a former general counsel for
the Federal Aviation Administration, in describing the
thinking of Mr. Bonderman, whom he has known since the 1982
Braniff bankruptcy. "He chose Bethune over his longtime
friend Ferguson because he thought Bethune would do a
better job."
At America West, Texas Pacific initiated an even more
extensive management overhaul. This time, the charge was
led by Mr. Coulter and Mr. Schifter, both directors.
W. Douglas Parker, the current chief executive, flew to Mr.
Coulter's home in San Francisco to interview for the job of
chief financial officer. They talked for hours, and Mr.
Parker said the two men quickly realized they had "somewhat
kindred spirits."
The board replaced most senior managers at America West,
except William Franke, the chief executive, who stepped
down last September. His restructuring plan had made the
airline profitable a year and a half before it emerged from
bankruptcy in August 1994.
Texas Pacific owns just 3 percent of America West, worth
about $33.7 million. But those are controlling shares, and
the group holds more than 50 percent of the votes.
"These are not passive investors, nor am I," said Donald L.
Sturm, a Denver businessman who serves on Continental's
board with Mr. Bonderman and Mr. Price. "You're active.
Your money is at stake. Your reputation is at stake."
After overseeing managers who worked successfully with
unions at Continental and America West, Texas Pacific has a
good reputation with labor. That was one reason US Airways
was interested in a Texas Pacific investment, said Chris
Chiames, a spokesman for the airline.
Mr. Siegel wanted an investor who would "be as labor
friendly as possible," Mr. Chiames said. But US Airways can
still entertain other bids this fall, and Marvin Davis, the
billionaire investor from Los Angeles, has expressed
interest.
Texas Pacific's investment in Burger King, made with
Goldman, Sachs and Bain Capital, was announced after two
years of discussions among Texas Pacific's partners and the
chain's franchisees - even before the company, which had
been owned by Diageo, the liquor company, was put up for
sale, said Julian Josephson, chairman of the National
Franchisee Association, which represents most Burger King
franchisees.
"We liked what they had to say about the human component of
the businesses they buy," Mr. Josephson said. Many other
owners, he added, "are dismissive of labor."
At Burger King, Texas Pacific will also be working with an
executive it knows. Burger King's chief executive is John
Dasburg, the former chief executive of Northwest Airlines,
who met Mr. Bonderman and his partners when Northwest
bought out their stake in Continental in 1998.
Unlike most buyout firms, Texas Pacific remains enamored
with the technology industry, despite the failure of so
many start-ups the last two years. It has focused on the
semiconductor industry, which like the airline industry is
highly cyclical. So far, though, results have been mixed.
The firm's 1996 acquisition of the Paradyne Corporation,
which makes equipment for high-speed Internet connections,
has been a huge success. Texas Pacific split it in two and
took both parts public in the late 1990's, selling most of
its stakes for 23 times its investment. But a much larger
investment, its $400 million acquisition of Zilog, the chip
maker, in 1998, was made just before the economic crisis in
Asia caused chip prices to plummet. Zilog filed for
bankruptcy last year.
Texas Pacific is still hoping for a turnaround at a third
company, ON Semiconductor, which it acquired for $1.6
billion three years ago. It invested $100 million more last
year.
Its latest gamble on the industry, the $6 deal for MEMC,
may prove the most lucrative. The cost of mailing the
payment to E.On, based in Düsseldorf, Germany, was actually
more than the acquisition, one executive close to the deal
said.
Texas Pacific, and its partners in the deal, Trust Company
of the West and Leonard Green & Partners, agreed to
guarantee a $150 million revolving line of credit. Texas
Pacific also assumed $900 million worth of debt, most of
which it swapped for more stock in the company.
"They did a good job of timing the acquisition," said
Nabeel Gareeb, the company's chief executive, who noted
that in the last quarter MEMC reported its first profit
since the fourth quarter of 2000.
But Texas Pacific's interest in airlines is clearly
sizable. Besides its involvement in Continental, America
West and US Airways, the company plans to buy Gate Gourmet,
the catering business of the bankrupt Swissair Group.
Two years ago, Texas Pacific started a Web-based discount
ticket service called Hotwire. It put up most of the $75
million in seed money, then persuaded six airlines to
invest with it, said Karl Peterson, the chief executive.
Hotwire, instead of asking consumers to bid on tickets, as
Priceline does, shows the cheapest ticket on its Web site
but does not reveal the exact flight and travel time until
after the sale.
The contraction of the new economy has undoubtedly hurt
Hotwire, which is privately owned. Mr. Peterson said that
the company was still unprofitable but that Texas Pacific
remains committed to it.
Last spring, Mr. Peterson met Mr. Bonderman in Aspen to
talk about Hotwire and to go snowboarding. Mr. Bonderman
seemed perfectly willing to accompany Hotwire down the
steep Internet chute. But he does have his limits on risk,
Mr. Peterson discovered. Before going down the mountain,
Mr. Bonderman strapped on a helmet.

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Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company


Remember I didn't say it was necessarily a good source, just that it
looked good.
The site was
My memory of what they said was accurate.  I do not have the competence
to defend what they said.  James Tauber's response indicates a breadth
of knowledge I can't match.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Tauber
> Sent: Sunday, August 25, 2002 9:51 AM
> To: johnhall@evergo.net; fork@example.com
> Subject: Re: A biblical digression
>
> On Sat, 24 Aug 2002 11:07:00 -0700, "John Hall"
> said:
> > Ran across a site which claimed to explain the original meaning of
the
> > Ten Commandments.  It seems some of those meanings have evolved a
bit,
> > too.
>
> By "meanings have evolved" do you [or they] mean that the Hebrew words
> have changed meaning or that our understanding of the Hebrew words
have
> changed? Or do they posit a pre-Mosaic form of the laws that had
> evolved by time of the Pentateuch?
>
> > In particular, there was a claim that the commandment on stealing
was
> > actually specifically about 'man stealing -- selling a free man into
> > slavery.
>
> This seems bogus to me. A quick check of the text indicates the the
> Hebrew word in question is GANAV which elsewhere in the Pentateuch (eg
> Gen 44.8) is used to mean steal silver and gold amongst other things.
>
> In July 1999, I made the following comment in response to a similar
> claim about the "real" meaning of one of the ten commandments:
>
> """
> > The translations since cause problems at each successive remove
>
> We have the original language versions, though, so this is not an
> issue.
>
> > I'm sure most everyone is familiar with the argument that the
meaning of
> the commandment
> > is 'thou shalt not murder' rather than 'kill,'
>
> This has nothing to do with successive translations. It is based on
our
> knowledge of the meaning of the Hebrew word "ratsach". Most modern
> translations I've seen translate it "murder" but elsewhere the word is
> used
> of an animal killing a human (something for which most English
speakers
> wouldn't use the word "murder").
> """
> -
>
>
>
> James
> --
>   James Tauber
>   jtauber@jtauber.com


On Sat, 24 Aug 2002 11:07:00 -0700, "John Hall"
said:
> Ran across a site which claimed to explain the original meaning of the
> Ten Commandments.  It seems some of those meanings have evolved a bit,
> too.
By "meanings have evolved" do you [or they] mean that the Hebrew words
have changed meaning or that our understanding of the Hebrew words have
changed? Or do they posit a pre-Mosaic form of the laws that had
evolved by time of the Pentateuch?
> In particular, there was a claim that the commandment on stealing was
> actually specifically about 'man stealing -- selling a free man into
> slavery.
This seems bogus to me. A quick check of the text indicates the the
Hebrew word in question is GANAV which elsewhere in the Pentateuch (eg
Gen 44.8) is used to mean steal silver and gold amongst other things.
In July 1999, I made the following comment in response to a similar
claim about the "real" meaning of one of the ten commandments:
"""
> The translations since cause problems at each successive remove
We have the original language versions, though, so this is not an
issue.
> I'm sure most everyone is familiar with the argument that the meaning of the commandment
> is 'thou shalt not murder' rather than 'kill,'
This has nothing to do with successive translations. It is based on our
knowledge of the meaning of the Hebrew word "ratsach". Most modern
translations I've seen translate it "murder" but elsewhere the word is
used
of an animal killing a human (something for which most English speakers
wouldn't use the word "murder").
"""
-
James
--
James Tauber
jtauber@jtauber.com


In a message dated: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 13:03:57 CDT
Ulises Ponce said:
>Thanks Tony, but I think doing it using component files will get a .signature
>by default, but I have many diferent signatures and I want to insert one of
>that signatures using a keyboard command. So for a message I will insert a
>signature, but for another message I will insert a different signature.
>
>Is it possible? I am using sedit for my messages.
Ahm, if you don't object to using a mouse for such things, exmh has
the ability to insert different sigs on demand.  Create a bunch of
different sig files, all beginning with .signature, and at start up,
exmh will load them all.  In the Sedit window, you'll see a Sign...
menu item which will allow you to select between each of the listed
.signature files for *that* e-mail.  You can actually use several if
you'd like (though I don't remember what Preferences... option allows
for this).
However, the signature gets added on send, not inserted directly into
the existing Sedit window prior to composition.
I currently have 6 different sig files I can choose between.
Additionally, if a .signature file has the execute bit turned on,
exmh will attempt to execute the file and use the stdout of the
script as your signature.
I hope this helps some.
--
Seeya,
Paul
--
It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.
If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
_______________________________________________
Exmh-users mailing list
Exmh-users@redhat.com


>>From what I read, the rest of it looked quite good so it does seem odd
they would make the seemingly incorrect blanket statement about the
Hebrew for "steal". One possibility is that the page is a summary of
information gathered from a variety of sources of varying qualities.
James
On Sun, 25 Aug 2002 10:17:46 -0700, "John Hall"
said:
> Remember I didn't say it was necessarily a good source, just that it
> looked good.
>
> The site was
>
> My memory of what they said was accurate.  I do not have the competence
> to defend what they said.  James Tauber's response indicates a breadth
> of knowledge I can't match.
--
James Tauber
jtauber@jtauber.com


Does anyone here know if the Computational Recreations columns from
Scientific American in the 70's/80's were compiled into a book or two? I
think I remember Martin Gardner publishing the earlier Mathematical
Recreations in a couple of hard covers, but I'm unsure about the later
column. Help?
...Ross...


Hire a really talented skywriter to doodle nudie pics in the sky and see
if they figure out what to charge you with. Exactly how far into the sky
does the border of your local district reach?
> > If the creator didnt say you could have it without paying, it's theft,
> > so simple, hell that's even in all the major holy books.
>
> Wow, I've got a great idea!  I'll hire a skywriter to write "you can't
> look at this without paying," then lock up everybody who looked at it
> and didn't pay!  It can't fail -- Jesus is on my side!


On 26 Aug 2002, RossO wrote:
--]Does anyone here know if the Computational Recreations columns from
--]Scientific American in the 70's/80's were compiled into a book or two? I
--]think I remember Martin Gardner publishing the earlier Mathematical
--]Recreations in a couple of hard covers, but I'm unsure about the later
--]column. Help?
--]
Not sure about MG, though I know pretty much everything he penned got into
print at one time or another.  SA needs to do what National Geo did and
put out thier back issues on CD.
Post MG in the 80's there were the colums by A K Dewdney that I dug a
bunch put into a book  called Turing Omnibus and then there is , of
course, all the goodens put out by Dougy Hoffstadler.


R. A. Hettinga wrote:
> And then there was the one from Prairie Home Companion:
>
> Q. Why is a viola larger than a violin?
> A. It  just looks that way because a violin player's head is bigger.
Suggested variation:
Q. Why does the concertmaster play a smaller violin
than the rest of the violinists?
A. It just looks that way because his head is bigger.
&c&c&c


Adam L. Beberg wrote:
> Fair use needs to be clarified a bit
That's an understatement!!!
> How else do i ever have hope of finding a job working for someone
> that makes things people are supposed to ... *drumroll* pay for.
Well, you could damn well get a fucking better attitude.
I practically handed you a job the other week and you
pissed all over me. I'm done helping you. You have joined
a very exclusive club that up to now has only had my sister
as a member.
- Joe


So, last night around 5:30AM I'm woken up by a loud *craaack*, followed by
one of the most dreaded sounds a homeowner ever hears: vast quantities of
water spilling onto the floor. The water is coming from the bathroom, the
toilet specifically. Turns out the water cistern on the top of the toilet
had cracked down the side, and was spilling out all the water.
So, after shutting off the water and mopping up, I was left to ponder what
are the odds of having mechanical failure of a large rectangular porcelain
bowl, in the absence of any visible stressors (like someone striking it with
a sledgehammer)? We hadn't done anything unusual to the toilet in the recent
past -- just normal use. I've *never* heard of this happening to anyone I
know. The guts, yeah, they fail all the time. But the storage bowl -- never.
Geesh.
- Jim


On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Jim Whitehead wrote:
--]a sledgehammer)? We hadn't done anything unusual to the toilet in the recent
--]past -- just normal use. I've *never* heard of this happening to anyone I
--]know. The guts, yeah, they fail all the time. But the storage bowl -- never.
--]
Do you have any Tesla nuts inthe hood? Them hooligans and thier beams..


At 01:12 AM 8/24/02 -0700, Adam L. Beberg wrote:
>If the creator didnt say you could have it without paying, it's theft, so
>simple, hell that's even in all the major holy books.
In which world are we talking about?  That may be true for the first sale,
but once something is out in the world, the "creator" loses control... If I
buy a chair you built, and then decide to give it away to my neighbor, by
you're definition, he just stole from you.
>Fair use needs to be clarified a bit and then I hope they start locking
>people up. How else do i ever have hope of finding a job working for someone
>that makes things people are supposed to ... *drumroll* pay for.
Why is it that people don't understand that giving stuff away is a
perfectly acceptable tactic in capitalist businesses?  In many places, it's
called "advertising": "buy one, get one free", "free shipping on any order
over $25", "buy this couch, and get a coffee table for free", "free popcorn
with any movie rental", "free doorprize to the first 100 people who enter",
"the author will be signing books (for free) at such and such bookstore".
Access to free stuff often helps to sell other stuff.  Just because you
(and the entertainment industry, it seems) can't be creative enough to come
up with a business model to leverage free stuff into paid stuff... don't
take it out on the rest of us.
Mike


Thanks Paul,
That is the way I am doing right now, but I would like to NOT use the mouse
for such things. Any other clue?
--
Saludos,
Ulises
Speaking words of wisdom ...
> In a message dated: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 13:03:57 CDT
> Ulises Ponce said:
>
> >Thanks Tony, but I think doing it using component files will get a .signature
> >by default, but I have many diferent signatures and I want to insert one of
> >that signatures using a keyboard command. So for a message I will insert a
> >signature, but for another message I will insert a different signature.
> >
> >Is it possible? I am using sedit for my messages.
>
> Ahm, if you don't object to using a mouse for such things, exmh has
> the ability to insert different sigs on demand.  Create a bunch of
> different sig files, all beginning with .signature, and at start up,
> exmh will load them all.  In the Sedit window, you'll see a Sign...
> menu item which will allow you to select between each of the listed
> .signature files for *that* e-mail.  You can actually use several if
> you'd like (though I don't remember what Preferences... option allows
> for this).
>
> However, the signature gets added on send, not inserted directly into
> the existing Sedit window prior to composition.
>
> I currently have 6 different sig files I can choose between.
>
> Additionally, if a .signature file has the execute bit turned on,
> exmh will attempt to execute the file and use the stdout of the
> script as your signature.
>
> I hope this helps some.
> --
>
> Seeya,
> Paul
> --
> 	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
>    but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.
>
> 	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Exmh-users mailing list
> Exmh-users@redhat.com
>
_______________________________________________
Exmh-users mailing list
Exmh-users@redhat.com


On Mon, 2002-08-26 at 11:41, Mike Masnick wrote:
>
> In which world are we talking about?  That may be true for the first sale,
> but once something is out in the world, the "creator" loses control... If I
> buy a chair you built, and then decide to give it away to my neighbor, by
> you're definition, he just stole from you.
There are specific statutory exemptions to the "first sale" principle of
fair use in the US.  For example, audio recordings have such an
exemption (dating from the early '80s IIRC), which is why you can't
(legally) be in the business of renting audio CDs; the creators can
control what you do with it after they've sold it to you.  Certain
industries would like to extend similar exemptions to other products --
there is no theoretical limit to what Congress could revoke such
privileges on.
> Access to free stuff often helps to sell other stuff.  Just because you
> (and the entertainment industry, it seems) can't be creative enough to come
> up with a business model to leverage free stuff into paid stuff... don't
> take it out on the rest of us.
The problem with the entertainment industry is that they engage in
business and pricing tactics that make anything Microsoft was ever
accused of pale in comparison.  If they can't figure out how to make
money doing something, they'll actually burn money to make sure no
"industry outsider" can either for all intents and purposes; control is
more important than maximizing profit as long as they can make a
profit.  They don't need your carrot, so they only engage in reasonable
business behavior when you are carrying a very large stick, and few
people swing a stick large enough.  They are being chronically
"investigated" by the DoJ for anti-trust, collusion, and similar
activities, but that is mostly just for show.
Which isn't to say that the entertainment industry won't fall victim to
its own stupidity, but their ability to do arbitrary and capricious
price manipulation with impunity is going to make it a slow decline.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com


Actually, this is common. I've known a couple of
people who have suffered this. Believe it or not,
you were lucky. You were home, rather than on
vacation, and so you didn't have the intake line
flowing onto the floor for two weeks.
Now, don't you feel better?
_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger:


I think that this and other articles confuse Socialism with
Bureaucracy.  Libertarianism as implemented in North America is not
exactly the shining pinnacle of economic efficiency.
Just try starting a telephone company in the US or (even worse)
Canada.  It can take a year or more to get the blessing of our own
"Permit Rajs" at the FCC, PUC, and PTTs (or, in the decidedly more
socialist leaning Canada, Industry Canada and the CRTC).
Yet, despite all of this intense regulation and paper pushing, as
well as regulatory scrutiny by the FTC, SEC, and IRS, the
executives of Telecom Companies have managed to bilk the investment
community for what looks to be tens of billions of dollars.  They
finished their routine with the a quadruple lutz -- laying off
hundreds of thousands of workers when it all came crashing down.
So.. tell me again.. how are we better off?
-Ian.
On Tuesday, August 20, 2002, at 12:09 PM, John Hall wrote:
> The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails
> Everywhere Else -- by Hernando De Soto
>
> Is something I'm reading now.
>
> My impression is that France is not anywhere near the "Permit Raj"
> nightmare that India is (and became).  Nor has its market been closed
> like India's has.
>
> But De Soto's work is perhaps just as important or more so.  He hasn't
> dealt specifically with India, but I recall examples from Peru,
> Philippines, and Egypt.  In Lima, his team took over a year (I think it
> was 2) working 8 hr days to legally register a 1 person company.
> In the
> Philippines, getting legal title can take 20 years.  In Egypt,
> about 80%
> of the population in Cairo lives in places where they are officially
> illegal.
>
> India hasn't been helped by its socialism.  Socialism has certainly
> helped strangle the country in permits.  But perhaps De Soto is right
> that the real crippling thing is keeping most of the people out of the
> legal, official property system.
>
> Putting most of the people in the property system was something
> the west
> only finished about 100 years ago, or Japan did 50 years ago.  It
> wasn't
> easy, but we live in a society that doesn't even remember we did it.
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: fork-admin@xent.com  On Behalf Of
> Robert
>> Harley
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 11:24 AM
>> To: fork@example.com
>> Subject: Re: The Curse of India's Socialism
>>
>> RAH quoted:
>>> Indians are not poor because there are too many of them; they are
> poor
>>> because there are too many regulations and too much government
>> intervention
>>> -- even today, a decade after reforms were begun. India's greatest
>> problems
>>> arise from a political culture guided by socialist instincts on the
> one
>>> hand and an imbedded legal obligation on the other hand.
>>
>> Nice theory and all, but s/India/France/g and the statements hold just
>> as true, yet France is #12 in the UN's HDI ranking, not #124.
>>
>>
>>> Since all parties must stand for socialism, no party espouses
>>> classical liberalism
>>
>> I'm not convinced that that classical liberalism is a good solution
>> for countries in real difficulty.  See Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel for
>> Economics) on the FMI's failed remedies.  Of course googling on
>> "Stiglitz FMI" only brings up links in Spanish and French.  I guess
>> that variety of spin is non grata in many anglo circles.
>>
>>
>> R
>>
>
>


thx for the thoughts gentlemen (yes as someone said i use terms loosely) -
more than cool --->
quality: snobs only care about mpixels. this is about communications.  the
general public cares about speed not quality.  how is akamai doing these
days? not to mention any other QOS businesses that come to mind.
implementation: point about hooking to usb, wires, etc. AGREE 100%. these
implementations are super clunky, attachable camera needs to be integrated a
la nokia model.  basically useless until better handsets are released i
think.
adoption: ian brought up the 'fax' problem.  brilliant thing is, this is far
more personal than faxes so can be justified more easily and marketed in
family packs etc. but yes, the usual rules apply as MMS phones have network
efx.
content: who cares about content?  that no one can think of 'useful' content
is always the business persons mistake. the content is the users
communications.  its anything and everything.  avg person could easily send
half dozen pics to a dozen people a day.  mainly humorous i'd guess. who
cares if content is trivial in nature. picture speaks a thousand words.
display: why are dig camera displays better than cell phones?  does anyone
know who makes these small displays and what the trends are around them?
misc ramblings: i suppose you skeptical forkers would have said the same
thing about '1 hour photo' processing.  trivial, who needs it, i get better
resultion elswhere.  and yet, it had great decentralizing impact - the plant
had to be downsized and pushed to the retail operation - the digital camera,
and finally the integrated digital camera phone brings this cycle of
decentralization in photography to a logical conclusion (which will put the
photo giants to bed) and change the world in a meaningful way.  also, SMS
didn't take off because its easy, it took off because it costs less.  its
greatly ironic the carriers often trumpet the 'profitabilty' of their SMS
traffic over others because of its ratio of cost to bandwidth.  in reality,
SMS cannibilizes the voice rev's they bought their networks to handle.
ps:  it is relatively amusing that one 'low resolution' complaint dropped
just after Joe watched a CARTOON on his television..
You're right. Or at least, I don't. I saw an advert for it on TV last
night (can't miss Futurama :-) and I thought, "boy, that's dumb."
If I wanted to share pictures with someone, I'd email them to them,
where they could see them on a 1024x or 1600x display, instead of
rob
-----Original Message-----
From: Eugen Leitl
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 1:34 AM
To: Rob Shavell
Cc: fork@example.com
Subject: Re: sprint delivers the next big thing??
On Sun, 18 Aug 2002, Rob Shavell wrote:
> down in the tech world than mobile visual communications.. and yet no one
> seems to give much of a damn that right now that 2 persons can take photos
> and share them instantly across space.  this is one of the biggest - and
The word "trivial" comes to mind.
> last - fundamental changes in human communications.  will be as big as the
> browser.
Remote realtime streaming video is neat, but sharing pictures? You invoke
big words rather readily.


right Mike,
i will agree to disagree but i take your comments to heart.  my opinion is
only that this is one of the last frontiers of communications ('instant
show') that we cross easily (though you are right as rain on pricing).  i am
mildly amused at the level of skepticism and innatention it is getting.
my premise is that the world will change in dramatic and unexpected ways
once there are a billion 'eye's' which can instantly share what they see
amongst each other.  that doesn't mean that people will stop talking on
their phones, or that people will spend more time w/images than voice.  just
that it is fundamental.  from news to crime to privacy to dating to family
life to bloopers and practical jokes, i believe there will be an explosion
of images unleashed specifically by cell phone integrated lenses because of
their utter ubiquity that dwarfs all pictures taken in the history of
photography by orders of magnitude and in short order. and yes, changes
things 'big time'.
rgds,
rob
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Masnick
Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 11:58 PM
To: Rob Shavell
Cc: fork@example.com
Subject: RE: sprint delivers the next big thing??
Not to keep harping on this, but...
At 11:36 PM 8/20/02 -0700, Rob Shavell wrote:
>content: who cares about content?  that no one can think of 'useful'
content
>is always the business persons mistake. the content is the users
>communications.  its anything and everything.  avg person could easily send
>half dozen pics to a dozen people a day.  mainly humorous i'd guess. who
>cares if content is trivial in nature. picture speaks a thousand words.
This does nothing to answer my question.  I *do* care about content.  Hell,
if I could be convinced that people would send stupid pics back and forth
all day, I'd have a different opinion of this.  I just am not convinced
that they will (stupid or not).
While a picture may be worth a thousand words (and this is the same
argument the guy who works for me made), how many people do you know who
communicate by pictures?  Sure, it sounds nice to say that a picture is
such an efficient messaging mechanism, but how often do you actually find
yourself drawing someone a picture to explain something?
I don't buy it.
For most messages, text works fine and is the most efficient
mechanism.  For some messages, pictures do the job, but I would say not
nearly as often as words.  Why do you think Pictionary and Charades and
such are games?  Because images are usually not the most efficient way to
get a message across.
>misc ramblings: i suppose you skeptical forkers would have said the same
>thing about '1 hour photo' processing.  trivial, who needs it, i get better
>resultion elswhere.  and yet, it had great decentralizing impact - the
plant
>had to be downsized and pushed to the retail operation - the digital
camera,
>and finally the integrated digital camera phone brings this cycle of
>decentralization in photography to a logical conclusion (which will put the
>photo giants to bed) and change the world in a meaningful way.  also, SMS
>didn't take off because its easy, it took off because it costs less.  its
>greatly ironic the carriers often trumpet the 'profitabilty' of their SMS
>traffic over others because of its ratio of cost to bandwidth.  in reality,
>SMS cannibilizes the voice rev's they bought their networks to handle.
Again, this is the same argument my colleague made (along with "you just
don't understand kids today, and they'll run with this").  I wasn't saying
that MMS wouldn't take off because it wasn't high quality or that it wasn't
easy.  I was saying that I couldn't see why people would use it in a way
that "changed the face of communications".
I'm looking for the compelling reason (even if it's a stupid one) why
people would want to do this.  Sure, if they integrate cameras into the
phone, and the quality improves (even only marginally) I can certainly see
people taking pictures with their cameras and occasionally sending them to
other people.  But, mostly, I don't see what the benefit is to this over
sending them to someone's email address, or putting together an online (or
offline) photoalbum.
I don't think 1 hour photos are trivial.  People want to see their own pics
right away, and the quality is plenty good enough for snapshots.  That's
one of the main reasons why digital cameras are catching on.  The instant
view part.  I'm guessing your argument is that people not only want
"instant view", but also "instant show".  Which is what this service
offers.  I'm not convinced that most people want "instant show".  I think
people like to package their pictures and show them.  That's why people put
together fancy albums, and sit there and force you to go through them while
they explain every picture.  Sure, occasionally "instant show" is nice, but
it's just "nice" on occasion.  I still can't see how it becomes a integral
messaging method.
What's the specific benefit of taking a picture and immediately sending it
from one phone to another?  There has to be *some* benefit, even if it's
silly if people are going to flock to it.
I'm searching... no one has given me a straight answer yet.
The *only* really intriguing idea I've heard about things like MMS lately
are Dan Gillmor's assertion that one day in the near future some news event
will happen, and a bunch of people will snap pictures with their mobile
phones, from all different angles, and those photos tell the real story of
what happened - before the press even gets there.
Willing to be proven wrong,
Mike
PS If the wireless carriers continue to price these services as stupidly as
they currently are, then MMS is *never* going to catch on.


Justin Mason writes:
>So IMO it's the corruption that's the problem; and corruption !=
>regulation, and corruption != socialism.   Also, over-population is really
>a symptom of that.
Without addressing the overpopulation argument, the more bureaucracy,
the more opportunity for corruption. If a corporation is corrupt,
there are generally, absent more government intervention,
alternatives. With bureacracy that is more difficult; one generally
most uproot oneself and move.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is MIME?
MIME stands for "Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions".  It is the
standard for how to send multipart, multimedia, and binary data using the
world-wide Internet email system.  Typical uses of MIME include sending
images, audio, wordprocessing documents, programs, or even plain text
files when it is important that the mail system does not modify any part
of the file.  MIME also allows for labelling message parts so that a
recipient (or mail program) may determine what to do with them.
How can I read a MIME message?
Since MIME is only a few years old, there are still some mailers in use
which do not understand MIME messages.  However, there are a growing
number of mail programs that have MIME support built-in.  (One popular
MIME-capable mailer for Unix, VMS and PCs is Pine, developed at the
University of Washington and available via anonymous FTP from the host
ftp.cac.washington.edu in the file /pine/pine.tar.Z)
In addition, several proprietary email systems provide MIME translation
capability in their Internet gateway products.  However, even if you do
not have access to a MIME-capable mailer or suitable gateway, there is
still hope!
There are a number of stand-alone programs that can interpret a MIME
message.  One of the more versatile is called "munpack".  It was developed
at Carnegie Mellon University and is available via anonymous FTP from the
host ftp.andrew.cmu.edu in the directory pub/mpack/.  There are versions
available for Unix, PC, Mac and Amiga systems.  For compabibility with
older forms of transferring binary files, the munpack program can also
decode messages in split-uuencoded format.
Does MIME replace UUENCODE?
Yes.  UUENCODE has been used for some time for encoding binary files so
that they can be sent via Internet mail, but it has several technical
limitations and interoperability problems.  MIME uses a more robust
encoding called "Base64" which has been carefully designed to survive the
message transformations made by certain email gateways.
How can I learn more about MIME?
The MIME Internet standard is described in RFC-1521, available via
anonymous FTP from many different Internet hosts, including:
o  US East Coast
Address:  ds.internic.net (198.49.45.10)
o  US West Coast
Address:  ftp.isi.edu (128.9.0.32)
o  Pacific Rim
Address:  munnari.oz.au (128.250.1.21)
o  Europe
Address:  nic.nordu.net (192.36.148.17)
Look for the file /rfc/rfc1521.txt
Another source of information is the Internet news group "comp.mail.mime",
which includes a periodic posting of a "Frequently Asked Questions" list.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


On Thu, 22 Aug 2002, Lucas Gonze wrote:
>
> Political mail (the snail kind) doesn't bother me.  I like it a lot of the
> time, because as crap as it is at least it's not the kind of info you get
> on TV.  Particularly for small time local politics, it's the best way to
> get information.
Except that thanks to the magic of spam, it's usually some else's locale
> but what matters is that mail is speech, and political email has to be as
> well protected as any other political speech.  Spam is *the* tool for
> dissident news, since the face that it's unsolicited means that recipients
> can't be blamed for being on a mailing list.
A terrible argument. There are better technical solutions to privacy
protection than sending a copy of the same message to everyone on the
Internet, so the recipients can't be blamed for reading it.
Wait till phone spam is as cheap to send as email spam...
Dan


Folks,
my first time posting - have a bit of Unix experience, but am new to Linux.
Just got a new PC at home - Dell box with Windows XP. Added a second hard disk
for Linux. Partitioned the disk and have installed Suse 7.2 from CD, which went
fine except it didn't pick up my monitor.
I have a Dell branded E151FPp 15" LCD flat panel monitor and a nVidia GeForce4
Ti4200 video card, both of which are probably too new to feature in Suse's default
set. I downloaded a driver from the nVidia website and installed it using RPM.
Then I ran Sax2 (as was recommended in some postings I found on the net), but
it still doesn't feature my video card in the available list. What next?
Another problem. I have a Dell branded keyboard and if I hit Caps-Lock twice,
the whole machine crashes (in Linux, not Windows) - even the on/off switch is
inactive, leaving me to reach for the power cable instead.
If anyone can help me in any way with these probs., I'd be really grateful -
I've searched the 'net but have run out of ideas.
Or should I be going for a different version of Linux such as RedHat? Opinions
welcome.
Thanks a lot,
Peter
--
Irish Linux Users' Group: ilug@linux.ie
 for (un)subscription information.
List maintainer: listmaster@linux.ie


Hi Kragen,
This is an interesting analysis.  I think that there are a couple
of nits I might pick (for example, I don't expect that the market will
be well developed with highest bidders for while), I think that the
most important issue, which is that end users won't be able to fix
their systems, is almost passed over.  I know that you know this, and
you allude to it, but your essay is getting passed around, so you
might want to add to it bits about the sysadmin and others.
There's one other point which you don't make, which I think is very
important, which is that research into defining and addressing classes
of vulnerabilities can't happen without libraries of available
vulnerability code.  I can think of three researchers into automated
methods for addressing vulnerabilities who griped, uninvited, about
the quality of the existing vulnerability sites.  Doing research into
a set requires that you have enough examples, in the open, that you
can define a set, and that the set is added to from time to time so
you can make and test predictions.
I feel fairly confident in saying that without full disclosure, we
wouldn't have Stackguard, ITS4, Nissus, or snort.  And the security
admin's job would be a lot harder.
Adam
On Thu, Aug 22, 2002 at 08:42:12AM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
| --
| -- Eugen* Leitl
leitl
| ______________________________________________________________
| ICBMTO: N48 04'14.8'' E11 36'41.2''
| 83E5CA02: EDE4 7193 0833 A96B 07A7  1A88 AA58 0E89 83E5 CA02
|
|
| ---------- Forwarded message ----------
| Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 00:24:54 -0400 (EDT)
| From: Kragen Sitaker
| To: fork@example.com
| Subject: the underground software vulnerability marketplace and its hazards
|
| On August 7th, an entity known as "iDEFENSE" sent out an announcement,
| which is appended to this email.  Briefly, "iDEFENSE", which bills
| itself as "a global security intelligence company", is offering cash
| for information about security vulnerabilities in computer software
| that are not publicly known, especially if you promise not to tell
| anyone else.
|
| If this kind of secret traffic is allowed to continue, it will pose a
| very serious threat to our computer communications infrastructure.
|
| At the moment, the dominant paradigm for computer security research
| known as "full disclosure"; people who discover security
| vulnerabilities in software tell the vendor about them, and a short
| while later --- after the vendor has had a chance to fix the problem
| --- they publish the information, including code to exploit the
| vulnerability, if possible.
|
| This method has proven far superior to the old paradigm established by
| CERT in the late 1980s, which its proponents might call "responsible
| disclosure" --- never release working exploit code, and never release
| any information on the vulnerability before all vendors have released
| a patch.  This procedure often left hundreds of thousands of computers
| vulnerable to known bugs for months or years while the vendors worked
| on features, and often, even after the patches were released, people
| wouldn't apply them because they didn't know how serious the problem
| was.
|
| The underground computer criminal community would often discover and
| exploit these same holes for months or years while the "responsible
| disclosure" process kept their victims, who had no connections in the
| underground, vulnerable.
|
| The problem with this is that vulnerabilities that are widely known
| are much less dangerous, because their victims can take steps to
| reduce their potential impact --- including disabling software,
| turning off vulnerable features, filtering traffic in transit, and
| detecting and responding to intrusions.  They are therefore much less
| useful to would-be intruders.  Also, software companies usually see
| security vulnerabilities in their software as PR problems, and so
| prefer to delay publication (and the expense of fixing the bugs) as
| long as possible.
|
| iDEFENSE is offering a new alternative that appears far more dangerous
| than either of the two previous paradigms.  They want to be a buyer in
| a marketplace for secret software vulnerability information, rewarding
| discoverers of vulnerabilities with cash.
|
| Not long before, Snosoft, a group of security researchers evidently
| including some criminal elements, apparently made an offer to sell the
| secrecy of some software vulnerability information to the software
| vendor; specifically, they apparently made a private offer to
| Hewlett-Packard to keep a vulnerability in HP's Tru64 Unix secret if
| HP retained Snosoft's "consulting services".  HP considered this
| extortion and responded with legal threats, and Snosoft published the
| information.
|
| If this is allowed to happen, it will cause two problems which,
| together, add up to a catastrophe.
|
| First, secret software vulnerability information will be available to
| the highest bidder, and to nobody else.  For reasons explained later,
| I think the highest bidders will generally be organized crime
| syndicates, although that will not be obvious to the sellers.
|
| Second, finding software vulnerabilities and keeping them secret will
| become lucrative for many more talented people.  The result will be
| --- just as in the "responsible disclosure" days --- that the good
| guys will remain vulnerable for months and years, while the majority
| of current vulnerabilities are kept secret.
|
| I've heard it argued that the highest bidders will generally be the
| vendors of the vulnerable software, but I don't think that's
| plausible.  If someone can steal $20 000 because a software bug lets
| them, the software vendor is never held liable; often, in fact, the
| people who administer the software aren't liable, either --- when
| credit card data are stolen from an e-commerce site, for example.
| Knowing about a vulnerability before anyone else might save a web-site
| administrator some time, and it might save the software vendor some
| negative PR, but it can net the thief thousands of dollars.
|
| I think the highest bidders will be those for whom early vulnerability
| information is most lucrative --- the thieves who can use it to
| execute the largest heists without getting caught.  Inevitably, that
| means organized crime syndicates, although the particular gangs who
| are good at networked theft may not yet exist.
|
| There might be the occasional case where a market leader, such as
| Microsoft, could make more money by giving their competitors bad PR
| than a gang could make by theft.  Think of a remote-root hole in
| Samba, for example.
|
| Right now, people who know how to find security exploits are either
| motivated by personal interest in the subject, motivated by the public
| interest, motivated by a desire for individual recognition, or
| personally know criminals that benefit from their exploits.  Creating
| a marketplace in secret vulnerability information would vastly
| increase the availability of that information to the people who can
| afford to pay the most for it: spies, terrorists, and organized crime.
|
| Let's not let that happen.
|
|
|
|
| This is the original iDEFENSE announcement:
|
| From: Sunil James
| Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 12:32 PM
| Subject: Introducing iDEFENSE's Vulnerability Contributor Program
|
|
| Greetings,
|
| iDEFENSE is pleased to announce the official launch of its Vulnerability
| Contributor Program (VCP). The VCP pays contributors for the advance
| notification of vulnerabilities, exploit code and malicious code.
|
| iDEFENSE hopes you might consider contributing to the VCP. The following
| provides answers to some basic questions about the program:
|
| Q. How will it work?
| A. iDEFENSE understands the majority of security researchers do not publish
| security research for compensation; rather, it could be for any of a number
| of motivations, including the following:
|
|          * Pure love of security research
|          * The desire to protect against harm to targeted networks
|          * The desire to urge vendors to fix their products
|          * The publicity that often accompanies disclosure
|
| The VCP is for those who want to have their research made public to the
| Internet community, but who would also like to be paid for doing the
| work.The compensation will depend, among other things, on the following
| items:
|
|          * The kind of information being shared (i.e. vulnerability or exploit)
|          * The amount of detail and analysis provided
|          * The potential severity level for the information shared
|          * The types of applications, operating systems, and other
|            software and hardware potentially affected
|          * Verification by iDEFENSE Labs
|          * The level of exclusivity, if any, for data granted to iDEFENSE
|
| Q. Who should contribute to the VCP?
| A. The VCP is open to any individual, security research group or other
| entity.
|
| Q. Why are you launching this program?
| A. Timeliness remains a key aspect in security intelligence. Contributions
| to some lists take time before publication to the public at large. More
| often, many of these services charge clients for access without paying the
| original contributor. Under the iDEFENSE program, the contributor is
| compensated, iDEFENSE Labs verifies the issue, and iDEFENSE clients and the
| public at large are warned in a timely manner.
|
| Q. Who gets the credit?
| A. The contributor is always credited for discovering the vulnerability or
| exploit information.
|
| Q. When can I contribute?
| The VCP is active. You are welcome to begin contributing today.
|
| To learn more, go to  If you have
| questions or would like to sign up as a contributor to the VCP, please
| contact us at contributor@idefense.com.
|
| Regards,
|
| Sunil James
| Technical Analyst
| iDEFENSE
|
| "iDEFENSE is a global security intelligence company that proactively
| monitors sources throughout the world -- from technical vulnerabilities and
| hacker profiling to the global spread of viruses and other malicious code.
| The iALERT security intelligence service provides decision-makers, frontline
| security professionals and network administrators with timely access to
| actionable intelligence and decision support on cyber-related threats.
| iDEFENSE Labs is the research wing that verifies vulnerabilities, examines
| the behavior of exploits and other malicious code and discovers new
| software/hardware weaknesses in a controlled lab environment."
|
|
|
--
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
-Hume


Didn't we just have a discussion on FoRK how hard
it is nowadays to write something that's not
buffer overflow protected?

Location:
IM client vulnerable to attack
IM client vulnerable to attack
James Pearce, ZDNet Australia
Users of messenger client Trillian are vulnerable to attack, according to
information security analyst John Hennessy.
Hennessy has published a proof-of-concept showing the latest version of
Trillian, v0.73, is vulnerable to a buffer-overflow attack that will
allow individuals with malicious intent to run any program on the
computer.
Trillion is a piece of software that allows you to connect to ICQ, AOL
Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and IRC with a single
interface, despite some companies actively avoiding messenger
interoperability.
According to Jason Ross, senior analyst at amr interactive, in June 2002
there were 28,000 home users of Trillian in Australia, about 0.4 percent
of the Internet population, and 55,000 people using it at work, about 1.8
percent of the Internet population.
David Banes, regional manager of Symantec security response, told ZDNet
Australia the code appeared to be valid.
"With these sort of things you have to find some process that would
accept a connection, then throw loads of random data at it and get it to
crash," he said. "Once it's crashed, you can try to find a way to exploit
it."
He said the proof-of-concept that was published is designed to run on
Notepad, but could be easily modified to run any program on the system.
He said the problem was easy to fix by "writing protective code around
that particular piece to more closely validate the data around that
piece."
"Because people are pushed for productivity you tend to leave out the
checks and balances you should put in, which is why we have all these
buffer overflows and exploits out there now," said Banes.
Cerulean Studios, creator of Trillian, was contacted for comment but had
not responded by the time of publication.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
For all security-related news, including updates on the latest viruses,
hacking exploits and patches, check out ZDNet UK's Security News Section.
Have your say instantly, and see what others have said. Go to the
Security forum.
Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom.
Copyright © 2002 CNET Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CNET Networks, Inc. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CNET NETWORKS,
Inc.


There's been well documented articles, studies of the
French tax laws, corporate governance, and financial
oversight that 1) dont' easily allow for ISOs, the root
of almost all entrepreneurialship, and 2) the easy flow
of capital to new ventures.  It was an extremely large
issue, even debated widely in France.
Greg
Chuck Murcko wrote:
> According to my son, it was actually Homer Simpson, who claimed the
> French had no word for victory.
>
> Chuck
>
> On Thursday, August 22, 2002, at 01:58 PM, Robert Harley wrote:
>
>> An apparent quote from Dubya, from the Times (sent to me by my Dad):
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> TONY BLAIR's special relationship with George W. Bush is under
>> considerable strain. Not only do the two disagree on Yassir Arafat's
>> tenure as leader of the Palestinian Authority, but Blair has started
>> telling disparaging anecdotes about the President.
>>
>> Baroness Williams of Crosby recalled a story told to her by 'my good
>> friend Tony Blair' recently in Brighton. Blair, Bush and Jacques
>> Chirac were discussing economics and, in particular, the decline of
>> the French economy. 'The problem with the French,' Bush confided in
>> Blair, 'is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur.'
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> R
>>
>>
>
>
>


Doom 3 will be based on a peer to peer architecture says
CmdrTaco quoting Ant quoting Carmack.
Greg

DOOM 3 will use P2P System?
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday August
25, @09:19AM
from the
i'll-believe-it-when-I'm-fragged-on-it
dept.
Ant writes "From Page 6 of FiringSquad's
QuakeCon 2002 Postmortem article: John Carmack said
something at the end of the Q&A about how the
multiplayer will be only four players? Tim: After 2 hours of
talking up at the podium, sometimes you leave a few details
out. Doom 3 multiplayer will be fully scalable. It will be a
peer to peer system. We haven't started working on it yet.
Tell everyone not to panic - it will be fine. John just forgot
to mention it'll be scalable past four players. It's hard to
give a hard number because we haven't started working on
it yet. Right now we're focused on making Doom 3 a
kickass, over the top single player game."


I finally let go of my Irix Magic desktop and window manager
and evaluated several other window managers. Having lost my 10 years
of customization with my X10 and then X11 desktop at one point
at UCI, I promised myself that I'd never get attached to
another WM.  I limped along in the default Gnome desktop, I
had a few unsuccessful stabs at the Solaris open view
desktop, but nothing really stuck.   Because of this along
with SGI's love of pre-configured, pre-compiled freeware[1],
I never really made the jump from Irix to Linux either.
After installing the enlightenment WM, I have to say, I am
really enlightened.  It's definitely a far cry from the no frills
first look from previous versions.  It's only on version 0.17,[2]
but it's a careful balance between simplicity, performance,
(fun) features, applications, and ease of customization.  The
number of themes they have on freshmeat is amazing. [3] After
less than an hour or two of "nesting" I already have almost
all my menus and controls setup just the way I want.
I definitely recommend this to any Irix desktop holdouts.  It's
a great way to refresh your machine SGI without having to bite the
bullet and rebuild it as a Linux machine.
Greg
[1]
[2]
[3]


More articles that support my fantasy that Irvine is the
center of the universe.  We've got the corner on electric
cars, fuel cells, two types of Nobel winning physics,
outside the box computer science, and lot of creative writers.
UCI's creative writing department has been in the
news a lot over the course of the last decade.  Some
quotes from the article[1]:
"In 1992, Newsweek called UCI's fiction writing workshop
'the hottest writing program in the country.' Now it's
exponentially hotter, thanks only in part to Sebold's daring
and uncannily timely novel.
The novel they are talking about is Alice Sebold's "The
Lovely Bones" which is on the way to the top of the
NY Times best-sellers list.  My uncle used to tease me
about UCI (being a USC graduate from '54) that nobody
knew who UC Irvine was just two states over.  In fact,
I used to refer to UCI as one of the lesser known UC
schools, and when I went off to college in 1985, my
relatives told everyone I was off to Cal State Irvine.
I took a class as an undergrad by one of the department's
faculty called "the art of writing fiction".   If there
was ever any two classes that helped contributed to writing
my dissertation, it was that one which taught me how to
get the writing flowing and my high school typing class
which taught me how to type really fast.
One of the advantages they cite in the article is that they
seem to take a chance on the "not-so-sure" bet, but according
to the article, the number of UCI graduates that have gone on
to write best sellers and the handful that feed the film industry
is creating a viscious cycle that lures more talent which
creates the right writing ecosystem, which churns out more
success stories which lures more talent.
Greg
[1]


This message was sent to you from
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Title:
A first look at the 2.8-GHz Pentium 4
Summary:
Latest Rambus memory plus fast bus appear to give Intel's newest P4 the jolt it needs.
Geege attached the following message:
------------------------------------------------------------
ha ha ha harley.  rambus earns it.
------------------------------------------------------------
Stay on top of the world of Information Technology with your own
FREE subscription to our specialized newsletters. Subscribe now
at
7132


On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 15:01, Ian Andrew Bell wrote:
>
> Yet, despite all of this intense regulation and paper pushing, as
> well as regulatory scrutiny by the FTC, SEC, and IRS, the
> executives of Telecom Companies have managed to bilk the investment
> community for what looks to be tens of billions of dollars.
This is a good thing.  Getting hammered for stupid investments is likely
to result in smarter investments in the future.  Nobody is supposed to
win all the time, particularly not people who don't do due diligence.
"A fool and his money are soon parted" and all that.  It isn't the job
of the FTC/SEC/IRS/etc to make sure you invest your money wisely (and I
have grave doubts that they could even if it was their job).
> They
> finished their routine with the a quadruple lutz -- laying off
> hundreds of thousands of workers when it all came crashing down.
So what?  Nobody is guaranteed employment.  Laying people off is not a
crime nor is it immoral.  Companies don't exist to provide employment,
nor should they.  The closest we have to such a thing in the US is a
Government Job, and look at the quality THAT breeds.
> So.. tell me again.. how are we better off?
Perhaps it is just a matter of personal preference, but I'd rather not
live in a "feed lot" society, thank-you-very-much.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com


On Sat, 2002-08-24 at 08:04, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote:
> There's been well documented articles, studies of the
> French tax laws, corporate governance, and financial
> oversight that 1) dont' easily allow for ISOs, the root
> of almost all entrepreneurialship, and 2) the easy flow
> of capital to new ventures.  It was an extremely large
> issue, even debated widely in France.
It is actually a lot worse than this.  What it boils down to is that
only the privileged class is really allowed to start a serious company.
What I found fascinating is that the old French aristocracy effectively
still exists (literally the same families), but they now hold top
executive and management positions in the major French firms and the
government, positions which are only passed on to other blue bloods. Not
officially of course, but as a strict matter of practice.  And the laws
and legal structures make sure that this system stays firmly in place.
Even for a young French blue blood, strict age hierarchies keep them
from branching out into a new venture in their own country (though many
can leverage this to start companies in OTHER countries).  I know about
the French system first-hand and the executives are quite candid about
it (at least to Yanks like me who are working with them), but I suspect
this may hold true for other European countries as well.
After all those "revolutions", France is still nothing more than a
thinly veiled old-school aristocracy, with all the trappings.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com


Jim Whitehead wrote:
> So, after shutting off the water and mopping up, I was left to ponder what
> are the odds of having mechanical failure of a large rectangular porcelain
> bowl, in the absence of any visible stressors (like someone striking it with
> a sledgehammer)? We hadn't done anything unusual to the toilet in the recent
All it takes is an overtorqued nut (e.g. at the water intake entrance)
to stress the porcelain, and you've got a time bomb waiting to go off.
Of course, if you're lucky, you'll overtorque it enough that the tank
will break right away, while you still have the water intake shut off.
- Joe


Just got this ... I was just reading mail, but in a very dark
room, where the keyboard is illuminated mostly by the light from
the (laptop) screen.   I think I put my fingers on the wrong keys.
(I mostly use the keyboard exclusively while running exmh).
This is from today's cvs (the fixes for the problems I mentioned
yesterday are included) - I eventually managed to contact the cvs
server.
expected integer but got ""
while executing
"incr m"
(procedure "MhSeqExpand" line 12)
invoked from within
"MhSeqExpand $folder $msgids"
(procedure "MhSeq" line 2)
invoked from within
"MhSeq $folder $seq $how $oldmsgids $msgids"
(procedure "Mh_SequenceUpdate" line 54)
invoked from within
"Mh_SequenceUpdate $folder replace $seq $msgids"
(procedure "Seq_Set" line 4)
invoked from within
"Seq_Set $folder cur $msgid"
(procedure "Mh_SetCur" line 7)
invoked from within
"Mh_SetCur $exmh(folder) $msgid"
(procedure "MsgChange" line 5)
invoked from within
"MsgChange - noshow"
invoked from within
"time [list MsgChange $msgid $show"
(procedure "Msg_Change" line 3)
invoked from within
"Msg_Change $select(sel) noshow"
(procedure "SelectTypein" line 14)
invoked from within
"SelectTypein .mid.right.top.msg -"
(command bound to event)
kre
ps: I have the sequences window vertical instead of horizontal, and the
"colours from the ftoc" stuff all deleted, and it is looking just about as
good as the old unseen window used to look.   I still have some work to
do to make it a little nicer (listboxes seem to have some strange habits)
and then I need to make it all optional and parameterized, at the minute
I'm just embedding stuff in the code, much quicker for prototyping.  Once
its done, I'll send a patch for someone to look over.
_______________________________________________
Exmh-workers mailing list
Exmh-workers@redhat.com


John Hall:
>Ran across a site which claimed to explain the original meaning of the
>Ten Commandments.  It seems some of those meanings have evolved a bit, too.
You mean that "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's ass" used to be
about donkeys???  Inconceivable!!!
R


On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Joseph S. Barrera III wrote:
> Adam L. Beberg wrote:
> > Fair use needs to be clarified a bit
>
> That's an understatement!!!
Yes, it is :(
> > How else do i ever have hope of finding a job working for someone
> > that makes things people are supposed to ... *drumroll* pay for.
>
> Well, you could damn well get a fucking better attitude. I practically
> handed you a job the other week and you pissed all over me. I'm done
> helping you. You have joined a very exclusive club that up to now has
> only had my sister as a member.
Forwarding me stuff from a list is hardly handing me a job. I tracked them
down, they dont exist anymore, like 99% of the things I track down the req's
are pulled or there is a freeze.
The real problem is you cant even train for jobs now, since they _demand_
7-10 years at a job paid to do the wierd collection of skills they want.
But I'll get lucky eventually and someone I know will be a hiring manager.
- Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
~beberg/
beberg@mithral.com


Adam L. Beberg wrote:
> Forwarding me stuff from a list is hardly handing me a job.
I was talking about the open reqs at Kana (the company I work for).
Oh, but programming in Java is beneath you.
- Joe


On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Geege wrote:
> Latest Rambus memory plus fast bus appear to give Intel's newest P4 the jolt it needs.
Well, Athlon FSB 333 is almost there. And I'm really looking forward to
the Hammer series.


On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Geege wrote:
> Summary:
> Latest Rambus memory plus fast bus appear to give Intel's newest P4 the
> jolt it needs.
>
> Geege attached the following message:
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> ha ha ha harley.  rambus earns it.
> ------------------------------------------------------------
"Expect a 3 percent to 5 percent boost with PC1066"
5% faster for only 4 times [pricewatch at 7:55PM - 93 vs 379] the cost.
Gimme gimme gimme! And I better get the full 5% speedup.
And gime me that 20% faster GeForce 4600 at twice the cost of the 4200 too.
Seriously, who falls for this scam?
P.S. finished the PS2 port, it benchmarks at fp:1 int:40. a celeron 525
benches at fp:460 int:400... If it's not a polygon fill the thing is
useless. There will be no beowolf cluster of these. It is 3x faster then
the iPaq tho at 1/13 :)
- Adam L. "Duncan" Beberg
~beberg/
beberg@mithral.com


What are you trying to sell???? What is the Value???
Example...Does Pratchett sell paper bound by glue or does he sell stories?
Question...When I buy a book have I purchased the story? When I sell the
book does any of that revenue go to mr Pratchett?
What if I read the book and  give it to someone, who then reads it
and gives it  to someone who then reads it and gives it to
someones....(bookcrossing.com though with  more succesfull passings). Does
each reader send Mr Pratchett money?
Have Used Bookstores, Recorstores etc destroyed the system of book/record
economy?
AS to the resident sourpuss, in germany bitter may be better but here its
just plain stinkin thinkin.
-tom


(Via Robot Wisdom)   Maybe you UC folk know these people?

Working at Lewis & Clark College, the University of California at Berkeley,
the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Stanford University,
the interdisciplinary team:
* confirmed speculation that the gecko's amazing climbing ability
depends on weak molecular attractive forces called van der Waals forces,
* rejected a competing model based on the adhesion chemistry of water
molecules, and
* discovered that the gecko's adhesive depends on geometry, not surface
chemistry. In other words, the size and shape of the tips of gecko foot
hairs--not what they are made of--determine the gecko's stickiness.
To verify its experimental and theoretical results, the gecko group then
used its new data to fabricate prototype synthetic foot-hair tips from two
different materials.
"Both artificial setal tips stuck as predicted," notes Autumn, assistant
professor of biology at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. "Our
initial prototypes open the door to manufacturing the first biologically
inspired dry, adhesive microstructures, which can have widespread
applications."


> Bottom line: the late Senate Minority Leader certainly would have
> endorsed the meaning behind the phrase, but it is questionable that he
> ever coined it.
An interesting link courtesy of the Harrow Report: there's no written
evidence so far that Senator Everett Dirksen is the source of the
infamous quote attributed to him. It's kind of astounding that there is
enough general social consensus (25% of all queries makes it a *very*
FAQ) and "eyewitness" reporting without a single written source. What
the essay below doesn't seem to answer, though, is what the earliest
attributed quote in print by any other writer is. I'd naturally be much
more skeptical if the "quote" emerged after his death... RK
===============================================================

"A billion here, a billion there . . ."
Did Dirksen ever say, " A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon
you're talking real money"? (or anything very close to that?)
Perhaps not. Based on an exhaustive search of the paper and audio
records of The Dirksen Congressional Center, staffers there have found
no evidence that Dirksen ever uttered the phrase popularly attributed to
him.
Archivists undertook the search after studying research statistics
showing that more than 25 percent of inquiries have to do with the quote
or its variations.
Here is what they examined: all of the existing audio tapes of the famed
"Ev and Charlie" and "Ev and Jerry" shows, all newspapers clippings in
the Dirksen Papers, about 12,500 pages of Dirksen's own speech notes,
transcripts of his speeches and media appearances, transcripts of
Republican leadership press conferences, and Dirksen's statements on the
Senate floor as documented in the Congressional Record.
Although Dirksen rarely prepared the text of a speech, preferring to
rely on notes, he did employ brief phrases to remind him of a particular
turn of phrase. For example, in referring to the public debt or
excessive government spending, Dirksen would jot the word "pothole" to
remind him to tell the following story, on this occasion in reference to
the debt ceiling:
"As I think of this bill, and the fact that the more progress we make
the deeper we go into the hole, I am reminded of a group of men who were
working on a street. They had dug quite a number of holes. When they got
through, they failed to puddle or tamp the earth when it was returned to
the hole, and they had a nice little mound, which was quite a traffic
hazard.
"Not knowing what to do with it, they sat down on the curb and had a
conference. After a while, one of the fellows snapped his fingers and
said, ‘I have it. I know how we will get rid of that overriding earth
and remove the hazard. We will just dig the hole deeper.'"
[Congressional Record, June 16, 1965, p. 13884].
On the same occasion, Dirksen relied on yet another "spending" story,
one he labeled "cat in the well":
"One time in the House of Representatives [a colleague] told me a story
about a proposition that a teacher put to a boy. He said, ‘Johnny, a cat
fell in a well 100 feet deep. Suppose that cat climbed up 1 foot and
then fell back 2 feet. How long would it take the cat to get out of the
well?'
"Johnny worked assiduously with his slate and slate pencil for quite a
while, and then when the teacher came down and said, ‘How are you
getting along?' Johnny said, ‘Teacher, if you give me another slate and
a couple of slate pencils, I am pretty sure that in the next 30 minutes
I can land that cat in hell.'
"If some people get any cheer our of a $328 billion debt ceiling, I do
not find much to cheer about concerning it." [Congressional Record, June
16, 1965, p. 13884].
But there are no such reminders for the "A billion here, a billion
there . . . " tag line as there surely should have been given Dirksen's
note-making tendencies. He spoke often and passionately about the debt
ceiling, federal spending, and the growth of government. Yet there is no
authoritative reference to the "billion" phrase.
The chief evidence in support of Dirksen making the statement comes from
people who claim to have heard him. The Library of Congress, for
example, cites someone's personal observation on the campaign trail as
evidence. The Dirksen Center has received calls from people who heard
Dirksen say those words, some even providing the date of the event. But
cross-checking that information with the records has, so far, turned up
nothing in the way of confirmation.
The closest documented statement came at a joint Senate-House Republican
leadership press conference on March 8, 1962, when Dirksen said, "The
favorite sum of money is $1 billion – a billion a year for a fatter
federal payroll, a billion here, a billion there." [EMD Papers,
Republican Congressional Leadership File, f. 25] But the "and pretty
soon you're talking real money" is missing.
In another close call, the New York Times, January 23, 1961, quoted
Dirksen: "Look at education – two-and-one-half billion – a billion for
this, a billion for that, a billion for something else. Three to five
billion for public works. You haven't got any budget balance left.
You'll be deeply in the red." [Cited in Byron Hulsey's "Everett Dirksen
and the Modern Presidents," Ph.D. dissertation (May 1998, University of
Texas, p. 226]
Of course, the Dirksen Papers do not document completely the late
Senator's comments. For example, The Center that bears his name does not
have his testimony before committees. Their collection of Congressional
Records ends in 1965, omitting the last four years of Dirksen's life and
career – he might have employed the phrase only late, although witnesses
claim he said it throughout his career. Dirksen's campaign speeches
tended not to produce transcripts, only sketchy notes or abbreviated
newspaper accounts. Dirksen also held center stage before the video age,
meaning that many remarks, particularly those in campaigns, escaped
capture.
Bottom line: the late Senate Minority Leader certainly would have
endorsed the meaning behind the phrase, but it is questionable that he
ever coined it.
---
My permanent email address is khare@alumni.caltech.edu


UW Email Robot said:
> What is MIME?
I know what MIME is godammit ;)
> Since MIME is only a few years old, ...
a *few*?  Time to update pine-robot-blurb.txt on
docserver.cac.washington.edu, I think.
Has anyone figured out what's up with this?  Does someone out there think
that FoRK needs some MIME tutoring?
--j.


Justin Mason writes:
> Has anyone figured out what's up with this?  Does someone out there
> think that FoRK needs some MIME tutoring?
I was puzzled at first, but I think I understand what happened.
First, I approved the post because it didn't appear to be spam, even
though it wasn't from a member.  I thought it was odd that someone
wanted to send the MIME blurb to the list, but it was not really that
different from causing the New York Times web site to send a story to
the list.  (Except that the bits here are antediluvian, but old bits are
a problem to be solved by social opporobrium, not technical constraints.)
But I think what actually happened is that some idiot got infected by
Klez and had both FoRK and the pine-robot autoresponder address in their
mailbox or addressbook, so Klez forged mail from fork@xent.com to the
autoresponder, which responded.  To FoRK.


Klez: The Virus That Won't Die
Already the most prolific virus ever, Klez continues to wreak havoc.
Andrew Brandt
>>From the September 2002 issue of PC World magazine
Posted Thursday, August 01, 2002
The Klez worm is approaching its seventh month of wriggling across
the Web, making it one of the most persistent viruses ever. And
experts warn that it may be a harbinger of new viruses that use a
combination of pernicious approaches to go from PC to PC.
Antivirus software makers Symantec and McAfee both report more than
2000 new infections daily, with no sign of letup at press time. The
British security firm MessageLabs estimates that 1 in every 300
e-mail messages holds a variation of the Klez virus, and says that
Klez has already surpassed last summer's SirCam as the most prolific
virus ever.
And some newer Klez variants aren't merely nuisances--they can carry
other viruses in them that corrupt your data.
...

_______________________________________________
Irregulars mailing list
Irregulars@tb.tf


In a message dated: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 13:53:55 CDT
Ulises Ponce said:
>Thanks Paul,
>That is the way I am doing right now, but I would like to NOT use the mouse
>for such things. Any other clue?
The best I can think of is to figure out what the command being
issued by exmh is that selects and inserts the sig and bind that to a
key sequence.  That shouldn't be *too* difficult, it's just a matter
of figuring out the tcl (something my perl-based brain isn't excited
about :)
--
Seeya,
Paul
--
It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.
If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
_______________________________________________
Exmh-users mailing list
Exmh-users@redhat.com


> Now, to do this, we all know they have to be cracking the strong crypto used
> on all transaction in order to process them... So this has some preaty heavy
> implications, unless it's just BS.
Anybody buying a box like this is undoubtledly going to integrate it into their
crypto infrastructure.  What's the point of putting in a box like this if it's
not an active participant in your security framework?
> Or.... you could just not bloat it 20x to begin with. Nah! (that was the
> whole point of XML afterall, to sell more CPUs - much like Oracle's use of
> Java allows them to sell 3x more CPU licenses due to the performance hit)
Blah, blah, blah.  The marketing FUD gets compounded by the Beberg FUD, talk
about 20x bloat.
> Again, see above... they _are_ claiming to decode the crypto...
What gives you the impression that's what they're doing?  That's not what the
text says.  It's largely fluff anyway.
> > "Our XG3 execution core converts XML to machine code," said Kelly,
> Mmmmmmmmmmm, machine code, never a good idea ;)
Uhhh, fundamentally it's all machine code.  Kelly's comment seems more like
drivel from a clueless marketroid than anything of technical concern.
Having what appears to be a silicon XML router would be a cool thing.  Having
one integrated with your crypto environment would kick ass.  Let it
deserialize/decrypt/repackage the XML before handing it off to the app servers.
The question, of course, is does it work with actual applications in the field
without tremendously reworking them.  Somehow I doubt it...
-Bill Kearney


>>>>> "O" == Owen Byrne
writes:
O> From the local paper this morning.  "Canadians eat about seven
O> times as many doughnuts per capita"... (as Americans) . D'oh!
If we had more variety of franchise food than the
Wendys/KFC/PizzaHut/TacoBell/TimHorton's monopoly (they are all Pepsi
under the hood, aren't they?), things might be different.  When a New
Yorker has biscotti, we have a timbit, when a Parisienne has a
croissant, we have a timbit ... because that's all we can buy.
The USA is a nation founded on creative free enterprise entrepreneurs;
Canada is a nation built on monopolies.
--
Gary Lawrence Murphy
TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Advantage through Community Software :
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)


Gary Lawrence Murphy:
>If we had more variety of franchise food than
>the Wendys/KFC/PizzaHut/TacoBell/TimHorton's monopoly .. The USA is a
>nation founded on creative free enterprise entrepreneurs; Canada
>is a nation built on monopolies.
Things aren't all that bad. I remember Vancouver
as having a broad variety of good, local eateries.
And Toronto as having a variety of good, local
strip joints. ;-) I never ate a doughnut in
Canada, so I cannot vouch for their quality. I
could live in either of these cities quite happily,
but Carolyn doesn't like cold weather.
Personally, I almost never eat at a franchise
restaurant. Usually you can find better fare or
cheaper fare (and often both!) at a local
restaurant.
_________________________________________________________________
Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail.


JoeBar wrote:
>C is more reliable than Java??
Depends who writes it.  One guy will write a bug every 5 lines,
another every 5000 lines.  Put them both on a project and that will
average out to a bug every 4.995 lines.
(Irrespective of language.  Pick the one
that best suits what you're trying to do.)
R


>>>>> "R" == Russell Turpin
writes:
R> Things aren't all that bad. I remember Vancouver as having a
R> broad variety of good, local eateries.  And Toronto as having a
R> variety of good, local strip joints. ;-)
I haven't been to Van in years, but I do know that in Toronto, outside
of the small deeply ethnic neighbourhoods, if you stray more than 50
feet from Wellesley and Jarvis or Queen and Spadina, you're in
doughnutland; there's far more like the eateries in the Eaton Centre
than there are quaint cafes like McCaul north of Dundas, and the rare
little eateries are not brimming with lunchtime traffic (you can still
find a seat at noon at Village by the Grange)
When most of Toronto does not live in those neighbourhoods but instead
lives in Scarborough, Malton, Mississauga and Markham (franchisevilles), you
will quickly see that one or two trendy strips does not save an entire
nation.
--
Gary Lawrence Murphy
TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Advantage through Community Software :
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)


>>>>> "R" == Robert Harley
writes:
R> Depends who writes it.  One guy will write a bug every 5 lines,
R> another every 5000 lines.  Put them both on a project and that
R> will average out to a bug every 4.995 lines.
And a Java program, due to the extensive class libraries, will weigh
in at 10% the number of lines of the equivalent C program.  QED.
--
Gary Lawrence Murphy
TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Advantage through Community Software :
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)


Mike Masnick wrote:
>Why is it that people don't understand that giving stuff away is a
>perfectly acceptable tactic in capitalist businesses?  In many places, it's
>called "advertising": "buy one, get one free"
I'll just take the free one, OK?
No?
Oh, so actually it's not free at all; you're just bundling, with a unit
price half of what's advertised.
How about some truth in that advertising?
R


GLM wrote:
>And a Java program, due to the extensive class libraries, will weigh
>in at 10% the number of lines of the equivalent C program.  QED.
Quod erat not demonstrandum at all.
There are massive amounts of libraries for C, Fortran and so on.
To pick an obvious example., if you want to do linear algebra, then
Java isn't a serious candidate at all.
Furthermore, plenty of bugs occur in the libraries too, at a lower
rate due to more users having been bitten by them, but they are much
harder for you to fix than in your own code.
Why do so many people outside of Sun's marketing department consider
Java to be "Write Once, Debug Everywhere" ?
R


On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 08:58, Joseph S. Barrera III wrote:
>
> C is more reliable than Java??
Both are reliable.  "Reliability" is more a function of the software
engineer.  I've written complicated mission-critical server software in
Java that will run without a hiccup as long as the Unix box it is
sitting on is running.  Same with C.  For processes that are running
months at a time, and in my case constantly touching databases and doing
lots of low-level network stuff, reliability is obtained by making sure
every conceivable problem (and problems you didn't conceive of) recovers
to a clean/safe process state so that things keep running i.e. it is a
design/programming issue.
That said, we usually prototype serious systems in Java and then
re-implement them in C if we have time.  Java doesn't scale well as a
language for server apps, though not for the reasons usually offered.
The problem is that for high-end server apps, you really need fairly
detailed and low-level control of system resources to get around
bottlenecks that show up relatively quickly in languages that don't give
you access to it.  You can squeeze several times the performance out of
a C server program than a Java one simply by being able to finely tune
(or more frequently, bypass) the system resource management.
Nonetheless, this is not a significant factor for most applications you
could conceivably develop in either language, as most aren't limited by
raw performance scalability.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com


Great, this is half of what I'd need to become Spider Man! Now all I need to
figure out is how to do that spider web shooting thing.
- Jim
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fork-admin@xent.com On Behalf Of
> Eirikur Hallgrimsson
> Sent: Monday, August 26, 2002 10:24 PM
> To: FoRK
> Subject: Gecko adhesion finally sussed.
>
>
> (Via Robot Wisdom)   Maybe you UC folk know these people?
>
>
>
> Working at Lewis & Clark College, the University of California at
> Berkeley,
> the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Stanford University,
> the interdisciplinary team:
>
>     * confirmed speculation that the gecko's amazing climbing ability
> depends on weak molecular attractive forces called van der Waals forces,
>
>     * rejected a competing model based on the adhesion chemistry of water
> molecules, and
>
> * discovered that the gecko's adhesive depends on geometry, not surface
> chemistry. In other words, the size and shape of the tips of gecko foot
> hairs--not what they are made of--determine the gecko's stickiness.
>
> To verify its experimental and theoretical results, the gecko group then
> used its new data to fabricate prototype synthetic foot-hair tips
> from two
> different materials.
>
> "Both artificial setal tips stuck as predicted," notes Autumn, assistant
> professor of biology at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. "Our
> initial prototypes open the door to manufacturing the first biologically
> inspired dry, adhesive microstructures, which can have widespread
> applications."


Chris Haun wrote:
> A LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of
> your loved one as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.
Why wait until you're dead? I'm sure there's enough carbon in
the fat from your typical liposuction job to make a decent diamond.
- Joe


On Wed, 2002-08-28 at 09:58, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:
>
> And a Java program, due to the extensive class libraries, will weigh
> in at 10% the number of lines of the equivalent C program.  QED.
My typical Java-to-C conversion doesn't increase the lines of code by
more than 20%, and a fair portion of that is the implementation of
additional features that drove us to do the conversion in the first
place.  Some things are substantially more succinct when written in C
than in Java.  C and most other mature languages have an endless
collection of libraries.  I personally don't use anything beyond the
core libraries of any language that much though.
On a tangent, I find libraries nearly useless for a great many things
due primarily to the fact that most of them are so general that a given
non-trivial API almost always has a context in which it will function in
a pathological manner.  Code reuse is wonderful and all that, but
libraries frequently make design trade-offs that won't work for me even
if they theoretically do exactly what I need.  Unfortunately, it isn't
particularly easy nor does it make a nice simple API to design a library
that really is optimizable to a wide range of design cases.  I've built
a small collection of flexible psuedo-polymorphic APIs over the years
that I tend to use, but it is a pretty ugly solution for code reuse when
you get right down to it.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com


So, a new family moved in down the street, with two kids, making us very
excited that there might be a child around the same age (20 months) as our
daughter Tatum. While we're talking to the family, we discover that their
daughter Kiara was born the same day as Tatum, within two hours, in the same
exact maternity ward. Both mothers were undoubtedly in labor at the same
time.
Wow.
- Jim


At 10:34 AM -0700 on 8/28/02, Jim Whitehead wrote:
> Great, this is half of what I'd need to become Spider Man! Now all I need to
> figure out is how to do that spider web shooting thing.
...That and be able to stick yourself upside down on a 20 foot ceiling from
a standing jump...
I remember someone recently doing the calculations in kilocalories required
to be spiderman somewhere. Kind of like those flaming processor "analyses"
done a couple of years ago...
Cheers,
RAH
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'