Slashdot Mirror

A lot of people are complaining that autoconf doesn't do this or libtool doesn't work on this platform. Please remember that all of these tools are Open Source, so you may fix them yourself and contribute the changes back to the respective projects!

Granted, not everyone has the time or the desire to fix such complex tools, but the author of the Berkeley amd story contributed many of his new tests back to these projects.

Why not improve the status quo for everyone by contributing or fixing these tools when you decide to use them? You may learn a new skill or two that you may add to your résumé in the process!

Luc Frechette's publications page has links to a number of papers with more technical details on his work (including the reasons why hydrogen was chosen, the current status of the turbine, what happens when one of these rotors "crashes" (i.e. not the death of the researcher), and other details ignorantly speculated upon by slashdot readers. Start with the overview paper; you can access his PhD thesis and more details on many of the component parts of the turbine from his publications page.

Luc Frechette's publications page has links to a number of papers with more technical details on his work (including the reasons why hydrogen was chosen, the current status of the turbine, what happens when one of these rotors "crashes" (i.e. not the death of the researcher), and other details ignorantly speculated upon by slashdot readers. Start with the overview paper; you can access his PhD thesis and more details on many of the component parts of the turbine from his publications page.

They are using hydrogen because it burns cooler than hydrocarbons. No other reason. Frechette's overview paper lays this out quite plainly. Hydrocarbon burning won't really be feasible until SiC manufacturing technology is improved.

Most micromotors demonstrated to date have simply succeeded to overcome the viscous drag on the rotor, leaving no power to drive other com-ponents and limiting their use for low-load actuation.

Luc Frechette just published ASSESSMENT OF VISCOUS FLOWS IN HIGH-SPEED MICRO ROTATING MACHINERY FOR ENERGY CONVERSION APPLICATIONS in which he lays out the constraints of micro-motors and how he hopes to overcome them.

Me != lawyer, but wouldn't GPL requirements only apply if I entered into a contract with the owner of their code? I wasn't paying attention, but I don't remember agreeing to an end-user-license-agreement last time I installed linux.

IANAL, but Eben Moglen is. Read what he has to say about enforcing the GPL.

In short, proprietary software vendors usually want to take away rights which copyright law would otherwise grant. This is only possible if both parties enter into a contract. The GPL, on the other hand, adds rights to those provided by copyright law. You are free not to accept the GPL, in which case you are bound by copyright law (ie, no modification or distribution at all).

Sorry about this beinbg a long post, but I've done something similar to what I think you're asking about. I've set up an old Pentium 200 w/Linux 2.2.19, 128MB RAM, Ensoniq sound card, and 120GB of dedicated music storage, with...
(enters command)

thorin:/music$ find . -name '*.mp3' -o -name '*.ogg' | wc -l
12648

thorin:/music$

...mmm, alot of songs (900+ albums, yes I own all the CDs), organized by alphabetically by Artist/Album/Song. I use Edna(v0.3?) as the music web server to serve the music (hacked slightly to support .ogg files) on a 10/100Mb house LAN. Edna will allow selection of individual songs, pick from existing playlists, or dynamically generate a 'play all songs' playlist that works from the selected level down.
Any user at a client computer on the LAN can use their preferred browser to stream whatever music (album/playlist/song) they want to their local desktop. Windows clients currently are using Winamp, Linux clients are using XMMS, but any client with support for streaming mp3 and ogg files should work.
For MP3s I use ID3V2 tags because they work with streaming. The tags on the .ogg files seem to stream just fine. I use EasyTag to manage the ID3 tags on the MP3s. Of the TAG utilities I tried, I liked it the best for managing large numbers of MP3 files. I haven't yet found a comparable utility for managing OGG TAGs.
On the server itself, I use Konqueror pointed at the local Edna web server to pick playlists handled by XMMS via an Ensoniq sound card to the main stereo system. MP3s are encoded at a relatively high quality using LAME 3.89 in VBR mode with an average bit rate running about 190Kb/s. I'm currently re-encoding the music from the original sources into the ogg/Vorbis" format, using an average bit rate of 192Kb/s. I use GRIP to rip my CDs with (with full paranoia), and normalize to even out the volume variations of songs so that playlists with songs taken from different albums aren't at radically different volumes. There is a volume normalizing plugin for XMMS that adjusts the level in real time, but I didn't like the way it worked. The volume level of the next song was significantly different (louder) than the previous song, it could take a half second or so to adjust itself. Pre-normalizing (with conservative values) seems to work much better. The music currently occupies about 70GB of disk space.

BTW, my music server is what I use to rip/encode all of the new music, run setiathome, and function as a SAMBA file server/domain controller. It will do all that while streaming music to several clients as well as play through the local sound card without skipping. I discovered that if I used XMMS to read the MP3/OGG files directly from disk (on the server), I had problems with skipping when the server was heavily loaded, even with the XMMS buffers set to very high values, but clients on the LAN would never skip. Streaming to XMMS on the server solved that problem without resorting to the low latency patches for the kernel. On the Linux clients I setting my browser to launch xmms with the -e option which causes new songs or playlists selected with the browser to be appended to the current xmms playlist. ;-)

A "terminal" is a keyboard and monitor (or in the old days, a teletype machine (that's where "tty" comes from), basically a keyboard and line printer) with a wire connection to a host computer. For each such piece of hardware built, there was a protocol for how the host computer could tell the screen what to display and what bytes would be sent with each keystroke. (Actually some terminals allowed you edit an entire line and then send it at once.)

When I take one computer and hook it to another with a piece of wire, the software that causes the first computer to send exactly the same things to make it look like the terminal hardware is on the other end is naturally enough called a "terminal emulator."

You can take an old PDP11, disconnect it's vt220 or vt100 terminal, hook up the wire to a computer instead, run kermit connected to that port, tell kermit to pretend to be a vt100 or vt220 or whatever, and the PDP11 should not be able to figure out that there isn't a real hardware terminal on the other end.

These days you don't have to have a separate hardware port for each terminal, you can connect many at once via Linux's virtual terminals or networks or whatever.

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/electricCircuits/

Here is a partial list of books published online, that I happened to like enough to bookmark. I find that reading a book on the computer screen is tedious, I mostly use the online version as a reference.

Handbook of applied cryptography: http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/

Underground: (I actually haven't read this yet) http://www.underground-book.com/

Netizens: (only partly read this) http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/

http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/crypto/crypto/army.fi eld.manual/

Big Breach: http://www.antioffline.com/bigbreach/

The Prof's Book: http://frode.home.cern.ch/frode/crypto/Turing/inde x.html

I have a lot of other links also, but my bookmarks have become so nested and folderized that many are lost in there, I really need bookmarks for my bookmarks . . . Anyway, I would suggest that if you find yourself looking for interesting reading online, you will find plenty. If you choose you can find scanned in pdf's of various works on newsgroups and in freenet, etc.

However, my advice is to use the 'net primarily as a way to figure out what to read, and become familar with the local public library. Almost all libraries have inter-library loans which give you access to huge amount of stuff. When I can't get a work that way, I fall back upon checking databases of used bookstore inventories -- http://abe.com/ and http://powellsbooks.com/ are the places I generally go to.

On board Realtek 8139C

Man, why is it when companies build in NICs on motherboards they always choose the crappiest one they can find? Bill Paul has some choice words to say about this card (taken from if_rl.c in the FreeBSD source tree).

/*
* The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is
* probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible
* exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master
* DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance
* gains that bus-master DMA usually offers.
*
* For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor
* registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned
* on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to
* do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely
* case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet
* is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only
* four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four
* packets queued for transmission at any one time.
*
* Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large
* buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received
* frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets
* will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer
* area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol
* levels.
*
* It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent
* performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or
* some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it.
*
* On the bright side, the 8139 does have a built-in PHY, although
* rather than using an MDIO serial interface like most other NICs, the
* PHY registers are directly accessible through the 8139's register
* space. The 8139 supports autonegotiation, as well as a 64-bit multicast
* filter.
*
* The 8129 chip is an older version of the 8139 that uses an external PHY
* chip. The 8129 has a serial MDIO interface for accessing the MII where
* the 8139 lets you directly access the on-board PHY registers. We need
* to select which interface to use depending on the chip type.
*/

The worst part is, it's not that expensive to build decent 10/100 chips these days. NetGear and LinkSys sell decent cards for as little as $5 a pop. There's really no reason to go with the RealTeks anymore.

Way back in the dark dawn of the desktop PC age, I was a programmer and service tech for the local importer of Intertec Superbrain computers.

These were a CP/M based machine with two Z80 processors (the second one was dedicated to disk I/O but configured so that the main CPU was placed in a busy-wait loop while the IO occured. Obviously this was a crappy hardware solution to a problem caused by an inability to write decent firmware on Intertec's part.

Anyway -- these machines were originally designed for the US market, so the PSUs were all 110V. Around these parts the mains voltage is 230V so they included a 230V-110V transformer with machines shipped here -- and it was mounted inside the all-encompassing case that also incorporated the screen and keyboard.

Cooling on the machines was by way of a weak fan that exhausted down onto the table beneathe the machine. It was barely adequate for the 110V machine so when the extra heat from the transformer was added to the thermal input -- the machines began to overheat.

The manufacturer was useless -- offering no suggestions and losing all interest in supporting the product.

The solution was pretty simple -- use a bigger fan.

However -- there was a rather unfortunate side-effect. When you turned on the computer, the fan-blast would blow every single piece of paper off your desk. Funny as hell -- the first time.

Although attempts were made with the fan reversed so that it blew up into the machine, a couple of machines expired after a sheet of paper found its way under the case and got sucked up against the fan grill -- effectively stopping all cooling.

She is nice

OT: Your .sig about kermit is not entirely true. See this

So, basically, the law hasn't really been set yet. Add in the fact that there's no generally accepted definition of 'outer space' and the situtation's pretty messed up.

So, basically, the law hasn't really been set yet. Add in the fact that there's no generally accepted definition of 'outer space' and the situtation's pretty messed up.

I had no intention of misleading people as to the meaning of the GPL. I think it's obvious that neither I nor you nor RMS know the meaning of the GPL, since its meaning has never been determined by a court of law. Personally I think anyone who claims that the GPL means anything is misleading people, because I believe that there are loopholes galore with

I don't mean to be insulting aozilla, but you are completely wrong. As far as things go the actual license part of the GPL is fairly straightforward. RMS certainly knows what it means, and it certainly isn't "full of loopholes." You simply misunderstand how copyright works. For more information see here and here.

More importantly, the proof is in the pudding. Nearly every major software house has, at one time or another, violated the GPL. And all of them, from Apple to Microsoft, have complied rather than pressed their luck in court. The reason for this is quite simple. They have highly skilled and incredibly expensive lawyers that know that they would lose.

The reason that the GPL has never been tried in court is that the FSF hasn't found anyone stupid enough to go to court. Not only would they face serious financial penalties, but they would also face potential criminal prosecution. Also, unlike most commercial licenses that try to add to the power that copyright generally caries the GPL merely subtracts from those powers. Generally speaking it is illegal to make copies of copyrighted works. It is certainly illegal to distribute those copies. It is also illegal to make a derivative of a copyrighted work and distribute it. The GPL simply allows you to make and distribute copies of their copyrighted software as long as you follow certain rules if you distribute that work. You can "use" the software however you want. This is vastly less oppressive than most EULA's that specify how the software may be used.

I had no intention of misleading people as to the meaning of the GPL. I think it's obvious that neither I nor you nor RMS know the meaning of the GPL, since its meaning has never been determined by a court of law. Personally I think anyone who claims that the GPL means anything is misleading people, because I believe that there are loopholes galore with

I don't mean to be insulting aozilla, but you are completely wrong. As far as things go the actual license part of the GPL is fairly straightforward. RMS certainly knows what it means, and it certainly isn't "full of loopholes." You simply misunderstand how copyright works. For more information see here and here.

More importantly, the proof is in the pudding. Nearly every major software house has, at one time or another, violated the GPL. And all of them, from Apple to Microsoft, have complied rather than pressed their luck in court. The reason for this is quite simple. They have highly skilled and incredibly expensive lawyers that know that they would lose.

The reason that the GPL has never been tried in court is that the FSF hasn't found anyone stupid enough to go to court. Not only would they face serious financial penalties, but they would also face potential criminal prosecution. Also, unlike most commercial licenses that try to add to the power that copyright generally caries the GPL merely subtracts from those powers. Generally speaking it is illegal to make copies of copyrighted works. It is certainly illegal to distribute those copies. It is also illegal to make a derivative of a copyrighted work and distribute it. The GPL simply allows you to make and distribute copies of their copyrighted software as long as you follow certain rules if you distribute that work. You can "use" the software however you want. This is vastly less oppressive than most EULA's that specify how the software may be used.

I thought this information might be helpful so some load balancing can be done.

Home: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/ pdf: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/micro soft-surrender.pdf ps: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/micro soft-surrender.ps Plus more of his articles

Home: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/ pdf: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/micro soft-surrender.pdf ps: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/micro soft-surrender.ps Plus more of his articles

This Eban Moglen guy is a total taken-the-koolaid "information wants to be free" open source moonie. This editorial is about as informative as a Steve Ballmer column on "Why Windows XP is right for you"

For those that are interested, the Lamont-Doherty Cooperative Seismographic Network (LCSN) has recorded the activity that happened at the World Trade Center so you can realistically feel what was felt there and nearby for the impact and collapse of the buildings.

LCSN Link: http://www.ldgo.columbia.edu/lcn.html

Eben Moglen (Prof. at Columbia Univ. and General Counsel for the FSF) was talking about the spectrum giveaway to TV broadcasters 4 years ago. See here. Interesting historical perspective.

Among the voice-over-IP (VoIP) protocols out in the world are H.323 (an ITU-T spec that makes heavy use of ASN.1) and SIP (RFC 2543 et. al.)

H.323 interoperability is tough. Some problems are due to differences in how one entity encodes a piece of data and another decodes it. Many H.323 implementations, um, do not fail gracefully under such circumstances.

SIP call signalling looks like HTTP. There have been complaints that it's too verbose, and needs to be replaced with something binary. One proposal suggests using a binary encoding. It uses LZW compression and shared "codebooks" (schemas?)

That's just for call signalling. Both these VoIP protocols (and others) use RTP ("Real Time Protocol") for voice, video, etc.; that's encoded and compressed pretty darned seriously.

(I'm not speaking for my employer, I'm just speaking my mind.)

Among the voice-over-IP (VoIP) protocols out in the world are H.323 (an ITU-T spec that makes heavy use of ASN.1) and SIP (RFC 2543 et. al.)

H.323 interoperability is tough. Some problems are due to differences in how one entity encodes a piece of data and another decodes it. Many H.323 implementations, um, do not fail gracefully under such circumstances.

SIP call signalling looks like HTTP. There have been complaints that it's too verbose, and needs to be replaced with something binary. One proposal suggests using a binary encoding. It uses LZW compression and shared "codebooks" (schemas?)

That's just for call signalling. Both these VoIP protocols (and others) use RTP ("Real Time Protocol") for voice, video, etc.; that's encoded and compressed pretty darned seriously.

(I'm not speaking for my employer, I'm just speaking my mind.)

But it was accepted, by the FSF's lawyer (Eben Moglen). Since FSF is one of the few organizations with the power and resources to sue on behalf of the GPL, and many GPL'd works are copyrighted by the FSF (as recomended), then this is an acceptable solution.

If it went to court, it may have been neccessary to release the source for the original, or the judge could have decided this was the proper solution.

Although I'd love to live in a world where GPL worked like a open-source virus, the truth is we live within a legal system where outcomes like this are totally acceptable. Personally, I think it's a win for the GPL, and it shows one test case of using GPL software in a commercial environment - in a non-virial way.

There is prior art up and down the Yin Yang on this. this document places the innovation of Kermit in 1981, while RFC 765, describing the FTP protocol, dates back to June 1980.

You also mentioned Unix to Unix Copy Protocol. According to this history of the internet, AT&T labs developed the UUCP suite in 1976.

Or then, the higher court may just be smoking something...

Sometimes, I think the only reason that drugs are illegal is to prevent us from understanding the system. :)

--

AC wrote:

Just curious, but what incentive is there for DSL providers to enable multicast anyway? I'm not trolling, or faming or anything, just asking a question; you seem to know about it. What are the benefits/costs for the company, benefits/costs for the consumer? What good is it for anyway? Thanks!

Multicast reduces bandwidth usage because if multiple users are receiving the same live stream on a network only one copy of the stream has to traverse that network.

The downside of multicast is that it requires every piece of equipment in between the source and receiver to be multicast enabled, there a costs to upgrading network infrastructure to support multicast. Operating a multicast enabled network can be complex because many of the protocols are immature, there are costs to training staff.

MBONE FAQ
Multicast FAQ from multicasttech

In the tabulating machine era, there were keypunches for input, tabulators for addition, subtraction, and printing, sorters for sorting, and collators for merging and matching. The need for multiplication was limited, and was addressed by standalone machines like the 602A, basically a mechanical desk caculator integrated with a card reader/punch.

The mechanical multipliers were slow, and the last years of the mechanical era included electronic multipliers and dividers, culminating in the IBM 604, the last of the plugboard-wired engines.

The IBM 650, a real computer with a magnetic drum main memory, was IBM's first commercial general purpose programmable computer. (Knuth did his first programming on one.) It was programmed with an assembler that generated object programs, not by wiring plugboards like the 604.

The IBM 701 was IBM's first all-electronic computer. Everything previous had moving parts in the basic compute loop, slowing things down.

IBM had a few experimental machines before the 650 which could be called computers, the huge IBM Selective Sequence Controlled Calculator being the first big one. But those were one of a kind machines.

Bear in mind that IBM was running way behind in this period. UNIVAC was the technology leader back then.

In the tabulating machine era, there were keypunches for input, tabulators for addition, subtraction, and printing, sorters for sorting, and collators for merging and matching. The need for multiplication was limited, and was addressed by standalone machines like the 602A, basically a mechanical desk caculator integrated with a card reader/punch.

The mechanical multipliers were slow, and the last years of the mechanical era included electronic multipliers and dividers, culminating in the IBM 604, the last of the plugboard-wired engines.

The IBM 650, a real computer with a magnetic drum main memory, was IBM's first commercial general purpose programmable computer. (Knuth did his first programming on one.) It was programmed with an assembler that generated object programs, not by wiring plugboards like the 604.

The IBM 701 was IBM's first all-electronic computer. Everything previous had moving parts in the basic compute loop, slowing things down.

IBM had a few experimental machines before the 650 which could be called computers, the huge IBM Selective Sequence Controlled Calculator being the first big one. But those were one of a kind machines.

Bear in mind that IBM was running way behind in this period. UNIVAC was the technology leader back then.

Powerty rates among white people are just as low as they ar in Sweden.

U.S. child poverty rates (%)
Afro-American: 33
Latino: 30
White: 9

There is a pretty comprehensive list of VoIP and multimedia applications at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp and http://www.cs.columbia.edu/sip (under 'implementations') These applications are all interoperable, at either the media or call set up level. Among others, our sipc application runs on Linux (and Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.).

There is a pretty comprehensive list of VoIP and multimedia applications at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/rtp and http://www.cs.columbia.edu/sip (under 'implementations') These applications are all interoperable, at either the media or call set up level. Among others, our sipc application runs on Linux (and Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.).

sipc

Video Conferencing for Linux

Voice over IP technologies are the same as those used for video conferencing, but with audio codecs only. The two VoIP/VideoConf standards for call setup and control are H.323 and SIP.

The algorithm uses the Gregorian Calendar. Most countries did not adopt the Gregorian Calendar until October 15, 1582, and therefore it is inaccurate for any date before that. The major exception is Great Britian which, due to the feud between the Catholic and Anglican Churches, did not adopt the Gregorian Calendar until September 14, 1752.

This means that the "Doomsday"'s before 1583 are all wrong everywhere, and those before 1753 are wrong in Great Britian.

In addition, the Gregorian Calendar only considers Leap Year exceptions on a 400-year cycle, so in the year 4092 it will have drifted off by one full day. Therefore, this algorithm should not be used for any date past December 31, 4091.

In my opinion, the Doomsday algorithm isn't even the best algorithm for this job. I prefer Zeller's Algorithm, for a which a good description can be found at http://www.columbia.edu/ ~cs1005/HW03.html .

Zeller's Algorithm was first proposed by Chr. Zeller, in 1883 -- long before computers. It also allows one to find the day of week for a date using only integer division, and thus can be done easily by hand. It's much simpler than the Doomsday Algorithm appears to be.

I can't post it here correctly due to formatting limitations, but it can be found at the above lined page. It's slightly harder to memorize, but simpler to use (and program -- only took me a few minutes).

How does the real time scheduler compaire with VTRR
VTRR
And does anyone know what the status is of the linux scheduler?

Anthony

44 is "Amateur Radio Digital Communications". (Here's a list of all class As; UCSD doesn't figure in it.) Though the most obvious reading of the document is that the experiments were carried out there, they don't say that explicitly, and indeed there are other places which would seem more likely choices. Odd that they don't say where it was, though.
my plan

main() { printf("Hello world!\n"); exit(0); }

Legally, yes. If it weren't, there would be no reason for the existence of the LGPL (which glibc is licensed under) in addition to the GPL. Richard Stallman may be -- er -- eccentric, but he takes the law seriously. He drafts these licenses with professional legal advice based soundly on copyright law.

This is not to say that copyright law is perfect, flawless, handed down from the Almighty, etc. Far from it. But the law is all that really matters once a case comes to court. (Well, it also matters who can afford to hire the best lawyers and/or bribe the judge ... but that's a topic for another discussion.)

A few years ago, Ben Rosen (yes, that Ben Rosen) started Rosen Motors, which was once at www.rosenmotors.com but that now looks like that URL doesn't belong to him anymore.

He had nifty ideas for gas-turbine-generator/electric-motor hybrid automobiles with high-RPM flywheel regenerators in the trunk, but, you can guess, it didn't pan out as a feasible place for Ben to bet his future. So he downsized the dream and now makes his way selling some of the most efficient fossil-fuel-burning electrical generators the world has ever known, under the name Capstone Turbine.

Google spits out a few gobbets, too:
Speculation, speculation, speculation, and capitulation.

--Blair

Interesting to see how different the reaction is to these areas. There are elements of commonality and while I tend to vehemently come down on the side of the righteous on IP, and against cheating, I have to admit that some of the arguments made to defend intellectual freedom could be used to support cheating, especially in this way. Remember how trivial it is to change those bits of copied code or papers into prime numbers. Really, I've always leaned toward the position that the cheater hurts mainly himself. Does removing the artificial monopoly of the first to come up with an idea encourage or inhibit innovation, etc.? Not an easy question when you bring it into this arena.

common. We all know where Eben Moglen's agenda lies. I read a lot of his Anarchism stuff before I even heard of the GPL (but then again, that before I started looking for political arguments in software licenses).

And for the two months I worked in hell, tenants were taking it on themselves to run cable up the internal inter-floor mail chutes. Only people were still trying to drop physical mail in them...

You may find the listings of software using RTP and SIP of interest, as both are widely-accepted Internet standards, with software running on just about any platform. The two sites list some of these Internet standards-compliant tools. For example, our own tool (sipc) integrates audio, video, whiteboard, screen sharing and text chat, using existing media tools.

You may find the listings of software using RTP and SIP of interest, as both are widely-accepted Internet standards, with software running on just about any platform. The two sites list some of these Internet standards-compliant tools. For example, our own tool (sipc) integrates audio, video, whiteboard, screen sharing and text chat, using existing media tools.

... would be Eben Moglen. Of particular interest is a debate he had with Steve Metalitz over whether or not Napster should exist. Pretty interesting stuff...

-- Shamus

Error: Pithy quote not found

Mr. Podesta did not take the analogy anywhere as far as anyone on this board has. He just kind of threw it out for discussion without taking as firm a position on it as I may have implied. Like I said, it's all on-line if you want to see exactly what he said

Anyhow, Podesta was very candid about how the tight enforcement of export controls was meant to hinder the spread of strong crypto until the NSA could recover from the clipper chip fiasco. So, no, I don't think gov't key escrow will rear it's head again in that form.

He also drew an interesting parallel between weak crypto and regular mail: you trust that your letters will be private if you seal the envelopes. Sure, anyone can open them. But doing so is federal crime with heavy penalties. Hence criminalizing the breaking of weak crypto. But he also said the MPAA deserved what they got. So go figure.

The whole thing is archived on-line (alas, WMP only).

I think that's the general idea. Keeping patches up to date is almost autmatic as it is, just watch for those emails from RedHat. The next step is to teach the system to be able to tell the difference between legitimate and illegitimate access. Not an easy task, to be sure, but people have been working on it for a while.

Now, now, don't get all worked up on me, here. For years I've been using the MBone tools, and I figure the pain involved in that experience earns me the right to be a little cranky. IP multicast just instinctively seems like such a good idea that it is always upsetting to discover that, in practice, it has been just about useless.

Part of this, I think, is because of the applications chosen. Many to many videoconferences are a bad demo app because the truth is that most people don't need many-to-many -- they need some-to-some, or more likely one-to-many, both of which can be done adequately (read: better, also known as "more predictably") with unicast technologies.

There was also a culture that grew up around the MBone that discouraged innovation, both in terms of the tools and the community using them (which, let's face it, was basically, "only those of us that were NANOG regulars. No one wanted to build or to use new tools, because we've got these free TCL tools that suck! And did we mention that they're free? Yep, vic, vat, and sdr -- that's all you need! Never mind that they were "technology demos" that were never actually supposed to be permanent parts of the infrastructure. Why take any effort to make better ones? Worse is better

And of course, unless you were part of NANOG or the nsfnet clique generally, just try to multicast something on the MBone that actually served another community. I remember getting a van-o-gram because I was multicasting WRCT on the MBone. Van didn't like that I was taking bandwidth away from his friends. The MBone crowd would rather stop people from using the network than, say, admit publically that pruning didn't work and that maybe they should stop recommending multicast as a solution to any problem, anywhere, until this was fixed (which I believe, thank god, it finally has been).

But this -- now this is a cool use for multicast. Watching Counterstrike games is amazingly cool, but there is such a penalty for the players of a game to allow unlimited spectating, since each additional unicast client would slow down the server and clog the network further. Kudos to these guys for going the extra mile (and coming up with an application compelling enough to convince a community with a natural urge to monkey with the network to get involved in multicast).

My only concern is: is multicast really deployed end-to-end? This is a trick question, because really I'm saying "No fucking way is multicast deployed end to end!" In fact, I'd be amazed if more than about half of the big national providers did multicast even in their backbone. Or am I being pessimistic? I'd be curious to know if anyone has real statistics on this issue.

I'll take the George Foreman Grill over a linux toaster.

It's great for grilling burgers, fish, vegetables, dishwasher safe, and looks a bit like an iMac