Race to Mars, a 4-part miniseries by the Discovery Channel, is also worth while. The spacecraft and lander are based on existing ideas for trips to Mars. The physics in it are depicted accurately, as far as I could tell. Problems that arise seemed plausible, too. The interactions of the crew are well done, and aren't hammed up for dramatic effect.
"In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.
Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it. "
"... settlement of the lawsuit ... under which ... PKWARE paid SEA to obtain a license that allowed the distribution of PKWARE's ARC-compatible programs until January 31, 1989, after which PKWARE would not license, publish or distribute any ARC compatible programs or utilities that process ARC compatible files.
...
After the lawsuit, PKWARE released one last version of his PKARC and PKXARC utilities under the new names "PKPAK" and "PKUNPAK", and from then on concentrated on developing the separate programs PKZIP and PKUNZIP, which were based on new and different file compression techniques."
Wiki also says
"The SEA vs. PKWARE dispute quickly expanded into one of the largest controversies the BBS world ever saw."
You have to keep in mind the context of the times; there was no Linux yet, almost no one had heard of the internet, and certainly there were no things like the world wide web or wikipedia. No one really knew about open source or the legal fight between SEA and PKWARE. We all switched to PKZIP because it created the same size archive files as ARC and it uncompressed so much faster.
In 1988 I was 14, and really just wanted to play more shareware games. It really didn't matter what format they came in, but if they were in ZIP format, that was great since it took less time to uncompress on a 4.77 MHz processor (yes, you read that correctly - I boosted it to 8 MHz with an 8088 clone chip by NEC called a V20). A few years later it was all moot anyway, since I discovered Linux and everything was using tar/compress or shar (shell archives).
Wow. The memories. I ran the hub for a CAD/CAM and animation themed BBS network. We would switch to the latest, greatest (e.g. PKPAK) almost immediately to reduce phone bills.
I remember feeling incredibly bad assed as a young teenager prying the old 8088 chip out and slotting in this new processor which came in the strange plastic tube which I bought at some random hole-in-the-wall PC shop in Vancouver. I think I had just read Neuromancer for the first time at that point. It was a definite Future Shock moment for me.
This was about the same time period that companies started suing over "look and feel". One prominent example at the time was Lotus suing (I think) Paperback Software, and also Quarterdeck Software (Quatro Pro). So, when it appeared that the same was happening between Sea and PKware, many BBS operators (at least in the Midwest) dumped Arc for Zip almost overnight. What made it worse was that PKarc was significantly faster than Sea's arc, so it looked like "If you can't compete, then sue". Of course, a lot of the details were kept sealed while the court case was going on, and all people had to go by then was what leaked out.
I wasn't aware of the controversy at the time, but I do remember there being a fairly rapid transition from .ARC to .ZIP on the BBSes I used around that time.
I may have missed it, but I'm still waiting to hear whether the assumption about the 'five eyes' is true: whether the signals intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia & NZ spy on each others' citizens, and share that data with one another, in order to circumvent domestic spying restrictions. That is, whether the NSA spies on Canadians and gives that information to the Canadian government, while at the same time the CSE spies on Americans and gives that information to the American government.
If you read the laws, you will discover that intelligence agencies are forbidden from asking anyone to do things that the agency itself may not do. The people who wrote these laws did their best to think of these loopholes.
If you argue that they would break the law, then there is no reason for a sharing agreement as the agency could just break the law and do things themselves. So, this myth can probably be buried whatever you think about the integrity of the agencies...
"Operating system-level virtualization is a server virtualization method where the kernel of an operating system allows for multiple isolated user-space instances, instead of just one. Such instances (often called containers, VEs, VPSs or jails) may look and feel like a real server, from the point of view of its owner. On Unix systems, this technology can be thought of as an advanced implementation of the standard chroot mechanism. In addition to isolation mechanisms, the kernel often provides resource management features to limit the impact of one container's activities on the other containers."
The UK has a similar privilege with postage stamps. They were the first to use stamps, and because of that they don't need to put the name of their country on their stamps:
"... on May 6, the Penny Black became the world's first postage stamp in use.
The stamp was originally for use only within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as such was in effect initially a local stamp. For this reason the name of the country was not included within the design, a situation which continued by agreement with foreign post offices, provided the sovereign's effigy appeared on the stamp. Envelopes sold with postage paid did not include this, so were marked with the country's name. In 1951, the special commemorative issue for the Festival of Britain included the name "Britain" incidentally. It could therefore be said that the name of the country then appeared for the first time on a stamp of the UK, although the word "British" had appeared on British Empire Exhibition commemorative stamps of 1924."
Good points, though there should be some steps manufacturers could take. They could check for unusual usage patterns, much like credit card companies do.
The article doesn't specify but does imply that, in this case, the dealer in question made more PIN requests than is normal. If so, Ford should have seen that and investigated.
"“In 1973, the Internet [which at that time was basically the ARPANET] on a good day ran at 50 kb/s,” Metcalfe reflected in his oral history. “Ethernet ran at 2.94 megabits per second.” Over the years, people urged Metcalfe to round the number up to 3. He always resisted, as a matter of emphasis: If one rounds 2.94 Mb to 3 Mb, the rounding error is more than 50 kb/s. “Ethernet’s round-off error was bigger than Internet,” said Metcafe. “That’s how fast Ethernet was running.”"
