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Let me tell you that the biggest problem in corporate development today isn't whether or not people understand J2EE, but whether they understand distributed idioms and business.

I agree. The biggest problem is programmers who have NO understand on business. Programmers who also have extensive business /accounting/etc expertise are as rare as hen's teeth. (But I do know a couple). They are also way undervalued.

This gets to be the equivalent of a non-coder technology manager who has picked up a book on javascript, and has written something simple in a afternoon. Who then says that there is nothing to javascript, and way can't you use javascript to create this intricate ssetup for me?

A comprehensive understanding of the programming problem is vital to the development of a competent programming solution. To the extent that you do not have the the problem well defined, the more time you will spend debugging, etc.

this is well illustrated by this webpage, which tells the story of a guy who wrote a memory management tool. the only bugs in the program were a handful of typos. It was literally perfection otherwise. He obviously had done all of his debugging on papaer in the first place.

The flip side on this is in large corporate enviroments where people asking for reports, etc do not understand the nature of the data in the first place, and so as for simple things that are hideously difficult, or which are confused in the first place.

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Fifth, the thing should be tiny. With no onboard viewscreen or keyboard, I want the main unit to be no larger than a large man's finger.

Irony of ironies.

that would make it about the size of a common pen or pencil.

Just don't try to sharpen it.

;-)

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Of course, Ford doesn't advertise that their cars practically run themselves, with no operator needed. Nor do they include a "Getting Started" guide that gives the sense that nothing more is needed than the pointy, clicky, hit FINISH and it's running method. They're allowing their "certified" people to be churned out after a week of rote-cramming and little-to-no practical experience furthered that image. So many MCSEs have proved to be so obviously clueless that the idea that NT can be competently adminned by someone with a clue deficiency.

In this context, here is this bit of classic humor, as they say, "found on the Net"

WHAT IF PEOPLE BOUGHT CARS LIKE THEY BOUGHT COMPUTERS?

General Motors doesn't have a "help line" for people who don't know how to drive, because people don't buy cars like they buy computers -- but imagine if they did . . .

HELPLINE: "General Motors Helpline, how can I help you?"
CUSTOMER: "I got in my car and closed the door, and nothing happened!"
HELPLINE: "Did you put the key in the ignition slot and turn it?"
CUSTOMER: "What's an ignition?"
HELPLINE: "It's a starter motor that draws current from your battery and turns over the engine."
CUSTOMER: "Ignition? Motor? Battery? Engine? How come I have to know all of these technical terms just to use my car?"

HELPLINE: "General Motors Helpline, how can I help you?"
CUSTOMER: "My car ran fine for a week, and now it won't go anywhere!"
HELPLINE: "Is the gas tank empty?"
CUSTOMER: "Huh? How do I know?"
HELPLINE: "There's a little gauge on the front panel, with a needle, and markings from 'E' to 'F.' Where is the needle pointing?"
CUSTOMER: "It's pointing to 'E.' What does that mean?"
HELPLINE: "It means that you have to visit a gasoline vendor, and purchase some more gasoline. You can install it yourself, or pay the vendor to install it for you."
CUSTOMER: "What!? I paid $12,000 for this car! Now you tell me that I have to keep buying more components? I want a car that comes with everything built in!"

HELPLINE: "General Motors Helpline, how can I help you?"
CUSTOMER: "Hi! I just bought my first car, and I chose your car because it has automatic transmission, cruise control, power steering, power brakes, and power door locks."
HELPLINE: "Thanks for buying our car. How can I help you?"
CUSTOMER: "How do I work it?"
HELPLINE: "Do you know how to drive?"
CUSTOMER: "Do I know how to what?"
HELPLINE: "Do you know how to drive?"
CUSTOMER: "I'm not a technical person! I just want to go places in my car!"

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So the best option is to have a report that is generated for web display, and have a second one for download in PDF or whatever for printing.

Just a quick aside, there is also the matter of just how page breaks are generated. These are usually part of the printer driver, and there hooks in the word processor, etc for trigger the printer driver code. This was never set up, as far as I know, in HTML. This is a capability that would have to be intergrated via a plugin or something into the browser itself. Now add this to multiple browsers, etc. and you have lots of problems.

I supposed you could generate an activex thing to generate a page break that would get auto loaded into IE, and have it fire when there is a specific tag such as [pgbrk] or similar.

You would also have to integrate specified type sizes so that it still prints correctly even if the user has the parameter to view the browser type set to extra large.

So that is another angle, because then you could set up custom reports using JDBC, Interdev, or similar to pull info from the database. You would just need to generate something that would create a custom tag for the web page

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I must be missing something. I would have thought that via perl, or what every that you could generate whatever reports you needed from a data base to your web browser. Once in your browser you could print out as needed. But this requires coding, which you have said you are not partial to.

Now there are a number of products where you could generate a report for a database with HTML tags inserted in the correct local, then print to a text file. snd a separate one for printing. This essentially generates HTML pages for you as you need. All it becomes is a specialized report, that can be uploaded as needed.

So the best option is to have a report that is generated for web display, and have a second one for download in PDF or whatever for printing.

Let's face it, depending on the database, custom reports etc have been where a lot of database analysts and programmers have made the big bucks for a very long time. While you can get away wit simple reports in something like ms access, in the long run your are going to have to get someone who has the knowledge and experience to put it together right.

When I used to do tech support for a consumer database company, I ran into this all the time - Customers wanting to do sometimes complicated things with only a minute or two of effort. Add in some anomolies because the database was not normalised correctly, and you get a bloody mess. It was not so much the system, as it was getting the query right (Alphabetized by state, then town, then family name, and filtering those custers using master card for purchase over 250$ during the month of december, and who still owe us money as of the end of the preceding month)

Depending on the setup, the query could be trivial or a nuisance.

In some cases, you can't get there from here.

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So, for the first six months I can't get internet-based Matrix games on my PS2 or GameCube? So what? that still gives me a year or two for the internet connectivity to become physically available for each of the consoles...

Time for an Open Source Internet play clone - with a distributed system for the modules/rooms/levels/etc - so that this becomes really surreal.

In fact, I like this. P2P Gaming. Could be fun.

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As it says in the article:

"We had five 500-pound fat guys showing up at the smorgasbord and stuffing themselves all day," Mark R. Goldston, the chief executive of NetZero. He said 12 percent of NetZero's users accounted for 53 percent of its network costs. Cutting back their use, or getting them to find another service provider altogether, will save the company $20 million to $40 million a year.

Of course, I have not seen many people say much about this. This is the problem behind the thing all along. You get users who know how to abuse the system. It is like a water well where everyone can use the water. it is fine until sompeople start to hog as much as they can.

The traditional location of the Garden Of Eden is souteastern Iraq. Archeology bears this out, at least to the degree that it used to be a fertile and lush area. Don't look now, but it has been a desert for a long time. The natural result of typical human behavior is the creation of a desert.

Now imagine this as applied to the Internet.

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it is all well documented here:

http://www.eff.org/bayff/20010506_bayff_announce.h tml

Just to recap:

May 6, 2001 BayFF Featuring 7 Speakers on Censorware

Panel Will Examine Issues Surrounding Internet Blocking in Schools and Libraries, and Community Response

This event is sponsored by: Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco Public Library, James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, Friends and Foundation of the San Francisco Public Library, Online Policy Group, and Mark Leno, Member of Board of Supervisors, San Francisco.

So this is not a hearing by anyone, but it is a panel discussion. Maybe it is something that could be taped for PBS or something. No info on this angle though.

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How can you gain experience if all jobs require you to have had prior work experience?

As a rule of thumb, it usuallu takes 5 to ten years to get enough experience and expertise at something to be good enough that someone would want to hire you for a skilled position. This includes related experience, and all of the school of hard knocks stuff. This works out to be about 10,000 hours of screwing around with something (40hr.wk X 50 weeks/year X 5 years) You can short cut this to some degree by being talented, or putting in an awful lot of hard work, more hours per week. This is not restricted to formal schooling

Note: Prior Experience with related stuff will count against this. Also, hours daydreaming, watching tv shows, and other brain fart class activities do not count. There is an awful lot of learning time that gets wasted, instead of being really focussed and picking something apart.

(I would love to see a graph of learning rate plotted against IQ sometime. I wonder where the point is where someone learns 2 or 3x faster than a normal person.)

Here is a possible plan of attack:

• At age eight to ten, really get into games, get really good at them
• At age twelve or so, get bored with just playing the games. Pick up a book to figure out how to add levels to the games you do play (such as doom, quake, or whatever) These certainly used to be availble, but things change(?)
• by age 13, start getting familiar with the inside of your machine, or maybe with an old throw-away machine, you might do this if you wanted to install upgrades into your box
• By age 14, get into messing with the game engine. This is certainly available for a number of games. Use this to enhance your games.
• by age 15 start getting into somekind of programming so you can start doing your own stuff, especially building more exotic addons for your favorite game.
• By 17, actuallly build something that runs somehow.

The order is somewhat arbitrary, and shows how you could get several thousand of hours of related experience while being a teenager. Y'know spending maybe 20+ hours /week messing with the stuff. And you have a portfolio that has been debugged with the help of all your friends.

Now if you do this while in college, you would have to put in more time while doing classes at the same time. This could get intense as you could be putting in 80 hr weeks (courses, course work, game work, design) on top of trying to make money, and socialize. (This may be why some geeks have not developed all of their social skills.)

Now If you are older, you'll have to fit this in while indulging in this thing called "having a life", because the earlier plans take advantadge of your free time as a teenager to get things rocketing. Later on, this becomes more difficult, and it becomes far more difficult to find 10 or 20 or 30 free hours in a week to get things rolling. To get the requisite 5 to 10 thousand hours of practical experience will take longer if your are devoting only 5 or 10 hours per week. It is easier if you have a job in a related field, even if it is something like a repair shop at "Computer Jungle" or whatever the local shop is.

So that is a quick overview.

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Since some file systems fits some purposes better than other file systems, and other file systems fits other purposes better than some file systems, what criterias do you have to consider when selecting a file system from another?

Some basic info and a couple of links for folks:

• file system - basic defition -the general name given to the logical structures and software routines used to control access to the storage on a hard disk system. Operating systems use different ways of organizing and controlling access to data on the hard disk, and this choice is basically independent of the specific hardware being used--the same hard disk can be arranged in many different ways, and even multiple ways in different areas of the same disk.

• Journaled file system - Basic definition (as seen here)

  A file system in which the hard disk maintains data integrity in the event of a system crash or if the system is otherwise halted abnormally. The journaled file system (JFS) maintains a log, or journal, of what activity has taken place in the main data areas of the disk; if a crash occurs, any lost data can be recreated because updates to the metadata in directories and bit maps have been written to a serial log. The JFS not only returns the data to the pre-crash configuration but also recovers unsaved data and stores it in the location it would have been stored in if the system had not been unexpectedly interrupted.

• IBMs JFS webpage on their system, along with links for for downloads and turtorials online,etc

There is an awfull lot of info at the SGI site. Just poke around.

As far as the question about how to choose file systems, that is often a matter of what the OS will let you get away with, and your needs. Using FAT 16 is recommended if you need to maintain compatibility with MSDOS, for example. Usually, this is something like if you have a multi boot scenario, and which OSen can mount which partitions with which partitions. MS is notoriously picky in this regard, with a "My way or the Highway approach". For example, if you have a single hard drive hooked up to your computer for configuration purposes, You cannot just create anextended partition unless that drive is a salve with another master. If you want to create just an extended partition it will not permit, and tell you that you can only create a primary dos partition instead.

So you Live and you Learn

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As noted in the article, but which seems to have been overlooked by most posters:

For starters, there's no security destination for OS X users on Apple's Web site. Nor does Apple operate a security mailing list to notify users of potential weaknesses and patches they could apply to lock down their systems. Microsoft, Sun, and Red Hat all maintain security mailing lists and security destinations.

Apple also has failed to provide a way for programmers or others to notify the company of new security flaws. "There is currently no known e-mail address, or drop box of any sort, to notify Apple of a potential or confirmed security problem in any of their products," Norvell says. That isolates the best source of information about new security leaks: Apple's customers.

Furthermore, Apple hasn't shown any indication that it has assigned dedicated staff to tackle security issues and writing patches. A key component of security for any serious OS is a team of experienced code writers that can quickly evaluate threats, assess the damage potential, and inform customers. Such a dedicated response team is particularly crucial with Unix products.

Here's why: Due to the underlying similarity of all Unix systems, a vulnerability in one type of Unix system can often be to compromise another. That means security engineers must scramble to ensure that Unix problems announced on one platform won't prove hazardous to others. This is the way the CERT notification system has worked until now, and it has depended on software vendors investigating reports in a timely manner. That's tough to do without a dedicated security staff.

Sounds like someone is going to have to setup a slash code site just for the OSX and their security issues.

Sounds like a business plan to me.

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The way I see it, The more you restrict content, and prohibit linking, or printing, or charge for even the priveledge of listening or reading something, the more value your content has to have.

There will always be a market for free content.

Otherwise you run into the situation of those certain stores. There are some stores in fancy areas of any city where you can shop at only if someone has told you where they are, and where if you have to ask, you can't afford it anyhow. It is shopping by appointment only. It is not just fashion, but includes antiques, and many other high price items.

Now this makes sense with exotic items. It even makes sense with things like porn.

But in the model of the corner grocery store, where you want to encourage traffic and lots of people, you can not suddenly put a lock on the door. What level of paranoia must you have to suddenly require an ID and a credit check to buy the equivalent of a can of Internet soup and a newspaper? I would go shop someplace else. I would move to another neighborhood.

An awful lot of sites going to the shopping by appointment only model are only selling soup, and they are cutting their own throats.

I can see the use of this software for the exclusive content set. Artists, etc. But in the long run, alot content will develop it's own alternate forums.

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(I don't want to retype this, and what I wrote originally seems to fit here. so pardon me for a quick cut/paste/edit)

In an earlier thread someone posted the following:

Why would individuals encrypt their emails and other correspondence to each other? What is the rational explanation? The only reason I can see for day-to-day use of encryption is personal emails is that you have something to hide or you have a bad case of paranoia. No offence people - but what makes what you say so interesting that you are so concerned about other people reading it? If you are doing something illegal, or you are concerned about maintaining secrecy because other people may steal your original (and so far unpatented) ideas then maybe there is a point - but I have met some people who refuse to exchange email unless it is PGP encrypted - what's up with that?

My response was:

The issue is one of Privacy.

If you do not belive in privacy, then I can recommend a glass house for you.

After all, you are not doing anything illegal? And if all houses were made of glass we would be able to catch criminals alot easier. We could just watch them all of the time with TV cameras.

What are you doing that is so important that it would require secrecy and privacy 24 hours a day? You must have a criminal frame of mind, not wanting to live in a glass house. This obsession with privacy is merely paranoia, y'know, and is easily fixed with one of several medications. Let us recommend a nice doctor who would be very willing to help you with medications.

I think this is very easily applicable to the Media companies. Let's open all of the books of all of the companies, and of all of the executives, because after all, They have nothing to hide at all, Right? Right?

[There have been so many rumors of associations with criminal elements, we need to make sure that everything is on the up and up]

What is good for the goose is good for the gander. The Media Moguls deserve the Glass House treatment. Since they are acting in a way that seems so criminal to many of us, how about actually investigating them for other crimes? What are the odds that someone would find something?

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I made note of this thought in another topic, but the connection to the immediate topic was not as obvious in that context.

What I am seeing is a bigger picture. The bigger picture is like several pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, where for example, monitoring systems (as in the previous thread) advances in AI, and mechanisms sure as self healing devices, servers, whatever, are walking towards another future that may blind side us as much as the Internet blindsided folks. (In this context, it is interesting to look at the world of something like MaxHeadroom, an interesting show that had no clue that the Internet was coming)

Looking at this, and looking at the increase in AI, etc. I am coming to the conclusion that we are eventually heading to a world where, for example robots with mobile AIs will be smarter than humans. It will not be so long that computers in the cellars of corporations will have AI equal to or greater than Humans.

We could be heading to a world where the AIs and the Robots are in charge. All at first, on a gradient, a little here, and a little there. Then one day, there you are.

sheer Speculative fantasy, of course. Just trying to play connect the dots with each change and increase in technology.

But something to think about.

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This sounds like a business plan waiting to happen.

altjough what we would really need would be the service manuals for the things so that we can verifiy functionality.

I would be really ticked if it turned out to be something like, "well you can only use 3com routers with your 3com ethernet cards" - ie - merely marketing hype to lock you in to their hardware, which is probably just a generic OEM with branding on the outside.

these things need to be as well documented as regular dialup modems used to be.

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For more of a taste of the issues of low power broadcasting, check out

• This typical news story as seen in the Lexington Herald Leader.
• the Free Radio Berkley page
• The FCC policy page

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There has been an ongoing fight to have FM radio stations licensed that would only be 100 watt stations. The idea is that this would be perfect for colleges, non-profits, etc.

for some strange reason this has been opposed by the bigger interests.

So I see this, and I think that this is somethng that the "big boys" would like only so long as they have their fingers in the pie. In this regard, this is compatible with the business aims of entities similar to the RIAA, MPAA, the Microsoft Monopoly, etc.

The little fellow is not allowed direct ownership, just to hand over money on a continuing basis. This has interesting imnplications for political speech.

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Problem is that there are some chord changes that are essentially the same for a number of songs. For example, the theme for the Flintstones TV show sped up, or slowed down, are the same as the chords for many other classic jazz tunes. for example, "I've Got Rhythm"

Other songs that have similar chord changes are between thenselves are: "Heart and Soul", "Last Kiss", "Stand By Me", "D'yer Myker", and most of "Grease".

Also Check out Rage Against the Machine's "Wake Up" from the Matrix soundtrack and Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir".

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If you're looking for the already implemented RSS 0.92 look here [http://backend.userland.com/rss092] There's also a reference to RSS 0.93 on which development started on April 01,2001.

This is merely Vital information.

As seen on the site:

How 0.92 relates to 0.91
RSS 0.92 is upward-compatible with RSS 0.91.
Every new feature of 0.92 is optional, meaning that a 0.91 file is also a valid 0.92 file.

Now if Netscrape would only document this better and let the rest of the world what is going on.

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THIS MATTER having come before the Court pursuant to the Application of the United States of America, which Application requests that an Order be issued:

etc.

What gets me is that is very similar to the FBI investigations of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s.

Makes you wonder whose side they are on.

This irritates me.

Could someone look at the parent message please and moderate that up?

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While there are not universally accepted standards, here is something that I have seen used

• Crash Bugs - Crashing the OS, application, or another App. Includes Lockups
• Data Bugs - Data loss or corruption. This is Bad(tm)
• Functionality - Does the damn thing work?
• Compatibility - video and print driver issues for example, and many other more obvious issues
• Usability - Navigation, etc. This is an area intense debate.
• Design - Usually consistancy of design, Icons, etc. closely tied in to Usability. Did we do this right in the first Place?
• Content Bugs - typos, incorrect data, etc. Can include entire missing pages, etc. Note that legal issues for things like copyright notices can be important.
• Race Conditions - When things go wrong because you fire off widget 2 while widget 1 is still calculating. Can depend on system speed.
• Professional Polish - for lack of a better term - a subcategory of design bugs. Did you use the exact same size, color, and positioning of button etc everywhere in the app? Or did programmer one do it just a little different compared to programmers 2 and 3, resulting in a slightly off change in appearance or language in different areas of the app?

Priorities usually go from

• Show Stopper -
• High -
• Medium -
• low -

Obviously something like the text color being dark blue instead of the spec of black doesn't hurt anything and would be a low level bug.

I am sure there are plenty of QA sites out there, but I don't have the master page of links right at hand.

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I wonder what market share it has compared to the other players in the market? I am not in this end of the business and so they are not familiar to me.

Just trying to find reasonable information is not worth the hassle of navigating a sea of spin doctor positioning papers.

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If middle class jobs were performed by robots society would be destroyed.

Well. This is one of several possible scenarios when AI is pervasive enough that robots can be pervasive, and we are no longer at the top of the totem pole. Or are we going to have a society where the robots are in charge?

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Notwithstanding the fact that they are entirely ineffective and quite obsolete, I think the idea is pretty decent as an addition to existing security policy. Otherwise, however, administrators will be replaced with autonomous AI 'black boxes', that will serve as the replacement security staff.

Agreed. I can see the marketroids going after the pointy haired bosses saying that you can replace your staff with these AI boxes.

The only problem is when this advances to the next stage, which is AI management, AI corporations, etc. The question is if this would be good or bad. Would we have a world of AI drones producing income so that we can live off their work and have a permanent vacation at the beach with fancy drinks decorated with umbrellas?

It's going to be a long strange road.

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You got to wonder how fragile these things are at the time of manufacter. There are the usual concerns about cosmic rays, etc. So I wonder about the rundundancy built into the design.

I recall that on a typical wafer as made many years ago, the waste of nonfunctional CPUs was some absurd percentage. I wonder what it is with these things?

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I was going to convert it (the Maryland law) from rtf to text. but it is 90 pages long, and very confusing to read.

But this is still a hoot.

We need a lawyer or law geek to go through this. I am interested in many of the sections that seemed to allow all kinds of consumer rights, but I might be hallucinating.

I am also wondering is this would mean that Windows would be outlawed in Maryland? [joke]

For example section 21-708. ADEQUATE ASSURANCE OF PERFORMANCE.

This sounds fascinating.

One part of the Maryland law is that One of the most contentious pieces of the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act -- allowing vendors to remotely disable software on a user's computer if the user was in breach of the software's licensing terms -- has been modified. The change eliminates the provision for software sold via retail outlets. But is still an issue for corporate users.

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A Nasa Engineer wrote in to the Register [here], and supplied extra info on the Systems onboard. Here are the essential bits:

The IBM Thinkpad laptops to which you refer, [are] called PCS (Portable Computer System) [and] are used throughout the station. They are indeed 486 based laptops. However, they are running Sun's Solaris OS for x86, and the OpenWindows WM, and a custom application that provides a graphical interface to the various on-board systems.

It is not unusual for a project of this size and scope to be using technology that seems dated to the man-on-the-street. [...] The PCS runs its own applications, which have very little to do with the actual main function operations in a module. [...] The laptop's processor is not involved in the calculation, monitoring or execution of the station's processes. [...] The computers that crashed (the C&Cs) and the PCS laptops are not the same computers

So usual original assumption was wrong. But that still leaves us with the other question of what *are* they running on the main system.

And the Original question of what you would bet your life on is also still interesting.

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I can see the pen gesture. But I think that this is better suited to a 3d interface down the road a bit.

I get a smile out of the idea of people controlling their computers with the equivalent of wands, magic wands. In terms of a 3d interface it makes sense, complete with custom interfaces with funny symbols on them in a circle around the user.

;-)

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There is no indication of an actual BSOD, since there is no indication of MS Windows being used. And how exactly would you get a BSOD screenshot unless you were using VMWare or something? Seems rather impossible to me.

You use a camera. Check out this short Register story, which has a link to a very high rez photo where you can sorta make out the error messages, especially if you are familiar with the system.

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This reminds me of the US Navy ship that had it's operational systems running on WIN NT. When they had a BSOD, the ship was dead in the water, and had to be towed in. There is this government news article, which has the details of that old story.

We simply cannot have peoples lives being dependant on software that can crash. In a business context, we can get used to crashes, after all it is only data, and it is only the livelyhood of the bussiness at stake. It is only maybe millions of dollars. In space, it is lives.

Which OS would you be willing to literally bet your life on?

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Just in case you missed this, deceased billionaire Tommy Bartlett paid cash for Russia's spare Mir space station and brought it to the US Midwest as a tourist attraction, for his little Wisconson playground named Robot World. Links here, here, and here.

So it doen't surprise me that someone might want a Soyuz

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The Register has this reaction:

No Joy from P2P vets for Sun's Jxta

By: Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco

Posted: 26/04/2001 at 00:52 GMT

Sun wheeled out its Mount Rushmore of cerebral greats - Gage, Joy, Gosling - to herald the unveiling of its Jxta peer-to-peer project today.

Announced by Bill Joy at the O'Reilly P2P conference in February, Jxta (pronounced "Juxta") is now live and we're awash with positioning papers, technical documentation and real downloadable code. But the instant reaction from the peer-to-peer community - who've been at this for a little while longer - was cool.

"It's no good for FreeNet, next to no use for MojoNation or Gnutella, and no good for SETI at home," FreeNet developer Adam Langely told us. "It is buzzword compliant, though."

And Jxta's reliance on XML brought an "Oh my god," from the developer - a contributor to the excellent O'Reilly P2P book, Disruptive Technologies - who's juggling a rewrite of the FreeNet core in C++ whilst studying for his GCSEs.

It's not as if the guest of honour has marched in to the P2P party, wolfed down the free booze and fondled the hostess. Almost, but not quite.

This party doesn't really need a guest of honour it seems, even if it is Sun itself in best-behaviour mode. Bill Joy modestly described Jxta as a project that attempts to define protocols, that's all. Within a year he told us today, we might have enough usable protocols to embed in some real devices.

But watching these billionaire new frontiersmen earnestly describe the problems that P2P networks need to overcome, after we've watched 18 months of very public sweat and anguish from the Gnutella, FreeNet et al networks as they tackle these problems, strikes as the definition of redundancy.

"These networks develop in vertical silos, and they don't interoperate," said Gage in his introduction today. Which is true: "The P2P projects have nothing in common except TCP/IP", agrees Langely. But far from being their weakness, it's really their strength. Gnutella began life as a brute force, quick-and-dirty mechanism for file sharing, and FreeNet as a long term project to build a secure space free from surveillance. To adopt Sun's Jxta plumbing would not only entail throwing away these hard-won lessons, but it would compromise what each network was created to do. For example, FreeNet is inundated with offers of help to turn it into a platform for instant messaging, a global anonymous email gateway, or the new Napster. Take your pick. But as FreeNet luminary Brandon Wiley unfailingly points out - FreeNet is uniquely useful for dissidents in China (it was inspired by Ross Anderson's Eternity service meme) - so please don't mess it up.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and indeed, well-though-out but pointlessly blue-sky RFCs, and Sun's error is really in mistaking social spaces for technical problems. This conundrum was best illustrated at the O'Reilly conference when a panel moderator (forgive us, we can't remember which one, and we paraphrase liberally here) asked: "Is there a P2P? Is there a P2P business model? Or will it be like client/server? Will we be sitting around at a client/server conference in a year's time?"

So Sun's Jxta is a technology project looking for social uses, and the P2P networks are social projects looking for technology solutions, and the two seem to be passing each other like the proverbial ships in the night.

But let's get some perspective: it's a benign adventure, and doesn't deserve the rancour that say, a Microsoft P2P 'solution' - let your imaginations run riot here, folks - would attract. We've seen so many such pogroms in the past (Pen Windows, anyone?) that trample over not only optimistic start-ups, but entire business models, and with Jxta being the hesitant Apache-licensed venture that is, comparisons don't stand up to scrutiny.

As if P2P had never happened
We'll go into the technical details when we've had time to digest them (comments welcome), but Jxta's a layered set of protocols tackling not just interoperability but monitoring and performance too.

If you were starting from scratch, then Jxta would be an obvious place to go. The monitoring stuff is nice, as plenty of fringe edge networking gets proscribed by vigilant BOFHs, fearful of congestion at network and disk choke-points. And not just BOFHs, either - any local ISP worth its salt should by now have recognised that P2P is a loyalty/community trump card, too.

Interestingly, Joy is thinking small with Jxta. It could be, he suggested, a way of steering users between the mess of access networks that we'll be faced with pretty soon - between 2.5G GPRS/EDGE packet data, 802.11 networks, and our local LAN or dial-up connections. "Devices are too small to carry ten protocol stacks," said Joy optimistically, without quite convincing us that a Jxta-enabled device would solve the problem. But give the man credit, he's looking for an answer to a problem most folk haven't even recognised yet. Unfortunately, the conversation took a turn into the utterly surreal, as Joy began to explain how embedded IP devices in schoolkids' sneakers could cause havoc for teachers, and how Jxta-enabled sneakers would solve the problem, because of their device recovery and monitoring characteristics. Sensibly, and abruptly, Gage drove the conversation back on to dry land before anyone had time to notice.

Let's kill the geeks
But if the distress in the people's P2P community wasn't enough, the opprobrium unleashed on the P2P meme by a lordly tech press is nothing short of astonishing.

"Bill Joy is catching the tail end of a euphoria that never came into existence," declares the New York Times, grandly.

The CNet/ZDNet conglomerate has outsourced its opinion to Gartner Group analysts, who opine:

"Sun was careful to avoid the term P2P, not wanting to be associated with a technology that appears to be going out of fashion." A fashion created by ... analysts such as Daryl Plummer and David Smith as recently as last August, we seem to remember.

Ouch! Since when were the NYT and CNet such pernickety style mongers, we wonder?

Ever since they had the P2P meme foisted upon them, we suspect, and there's more than a hint of snobbishness at attempting to bury an idea that the geek press had the temerity to name before they did. O'Reilly might not have named P2P - we're not absolutely sure who did, and we really couldn't care less - but the meme left the industry elite gasping for air, and without an industry elite to follow, the industry-led tech press was left experiencing a kind of zero-gravity for the first time. The Fourth Estate marches to a well regulated beat. OK, we'll give you 'Open Source' as a rebranding excercise, you can hear them think, but P2P, that's just too much weird shit...

P2P networks, or whatever they'll be called now, are about to be touted as the saviour of Europe's 3G crisis, for the very simple reason that they're communication rather than content based. And while we don't claim to predict the future, that it's a model that's as sane as anything else on the table.

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[SetRantMode=1]

Who wants to bet that they get visited by a bunch of guys with nail guns?

I mean, this is just a land grab to see what they can get away with. and they must be hoping that everyone is a sheeple.

I want to go break some fingers at the patent office. Someone needs to patent the idea of a word processor and a spread sheet.

This is starting to fall into the category of needing heavy weaponry as an attitude adjustment tool.

[sigh]

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re: the CNN archive - the Movie and Music interests will want to charge in any way possible for anything they can get their hands on.

For example, if you have a figure skater performing to a bit of music, someone will want a license fee. Or a news story with a movie clip in it. Same thing.

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Well, alot of folks seem to have this idea that work should never be fun. Obviously, Work can be fun.

There are at least two different cultures, however.

One is the corporate culture where the company has been running the same system for ages, and the guys are grooved in to pumping out comapny reports, and other business functions, be it across the wan, or whatever. You get good at what you do, and learn all kinds of shortcuts, etc to getting the job done, regardless of how screwed up the system gets when someone messes it up

Another is the Linux/unix wizard who is able to create things on the fly etc. But note that this is not the same as a project with finetuning for multiple years on end. (Take an extreme example of this long term fine tuning the programming for the Space Shuttle) This is where projects are generally short term. Days, weeks, and sometimes months.

Each one is a different personality

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$500/year for cheesy-but-essential journal X. They acquire the copyright to articles published therein. They require submitters to also serve as unpaid peer review. Every page of an article submitted costs the author $100. Every reprint (minimum 50) costs $10. No, you can't print the PDF you submitted to the journal - that infringes THEIR copyright.

I was pointing out the need for fair exchange, at least so I thought. But it is Monday, and so I may have been less coherent or something.

It is no surprise to me that abuse exists. Everyone has to work towards the idea of Fair exchange, where it is something that everyone can live with, instead of acting out the idea of unfair, or criminal exchange (ie,we'll just legally steal this from you).

Sometimes Fair Exchange is not purely monetary. In a friendship, for example. But the monetray aspect is not a bad place to inspect for abuse.

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The current business model for the journals is not likely the same that it would be for Slime Magazine. Again, this is the same kind of thinking that causes a hoarding mentality, which puts a slow down on the research.

Then again, there is the flip side of the coin, of how do you turn a profit when you give away your valued goods?

This is the problem of the music industry, who has turned it into the question "how do you turn an obscene profit while giving away your goods"

And then you have the people who always want a free lunch, and say that you a criminally negligent if you do not give them the shirt of your back.

The problem is that there is no agreement on what would be "Fair Exchange". Many people on various sides of the issue think that the best ratio is "One for you, 100 for me" This is a problem because the argument is also made that "and if you don't agree, you are a moral moron"

Given the situation, I would probably suggest that the content be made availble for free online after one year. Anyone who is in the business should be subscribing. But this is still timely enough for students, etc without totally giving up the cutting edge material.

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While I do not have anything that is audio component style, the guys at techstyle have some very interesting cases in wood

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Some paranoid routers Hotmail was using thought ECN was some kind of security exploit and screwed up all communications _trying_ to use it, i.e. those attempting from ECN-enabled Linux 2.4 hosts.

Hey, since MS owns Hotmail, I am sure that someone there thinks that they are not under any obligation to help out by acceptin ECN.

;-)

"Bill, do you think we should use this ECN stuff?"
"I don't know, do we own it?"
"Nope"
"Does NOT accepting this Screw up Linux?"
"Yep"
"Can you read my Mind?"
"Yep!"

Of course, I would never accuse anyone of being negligent, or of being underhanded. Me? never!

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After all, in a rack mount set up, well it doesn't have to be 200 m away. It could be in a rack on the wall with all of the rest of your electronics gear. Audio, video, etc.

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Well, alot of these folks are not Gamers. Heck GWB even got rid of Email from the Whitehouse because of the legal ramifications.

So the only way to make this work is to make Gaming mandatory. You will put in 4 hours per day gaming. Maybe we could do it as doctors orders.

Doctor: "Here's your prescription for 4 hours of Doom per day. Later on, we'll move you up to Quake"

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Where can i special order *BSD with 32 processor special hardware? Oh oops i can't.

No special hardware required, apparently, with NetBsd, aside from the usual, like a computer. If you want proprietary hardware, you'll have to go to Microsoft, I guess

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Okay, it's late, I'm bored. so here we go. As you said:

My Reply
It's about time someone posted a pro-MS article on this site - the only thing I'm dissapointed with is the number of troll statements posted in the comments.

And then yo did an extensve analysis of the article.

The problem is that the start of your comments were *cut off* well before the start of your commetary by the infamous line "Read the rest of this comment... ". In other words, what was visible was the most troll intensive portion of your article. This was very bad positioning for your comments, since some of them were mildly interesting. Probably such a post should be reorganized, and should have been saved for posting in reply to an appropriate article. Here it is best seen as a troll.

Now there is the matter of this bit:

Why would individuals encrypt their emails and other correspondence to each other? What is the rational explanation? The only reason I can see for day-to-day use of encryption is personal emails is that you have something to hide or you have a bad case of paranoia. No offence people - but what makes what you say so interesting that you are so concerned about other people reading it? If you are doing something illegal, or you are concerned about maintaining secrecy because other people may steal your original (and so far unpatented) ideas then maybe there is a point - but I have met some people who refuse to exchange email unless it is PGP encrypted - what's up with that?

Simply, PGP offers a way to ensure that the person sending you the email is the person they say they are. Not some one faking it.

The other issue is one of Privacy.

If you do not belive in privacy, then I can recommned a glass house for you.

After all, you are not doing anything illegal? And if all houses were made of glass we would be able to catch criminals alot easier. We could just watch them all of the time with TV cameras.

What are you doing that is so important that it would require secrecy and privacy 24 hours a day? You must have a criminal frame of mind, not wanting to live in a glass house.

This obsession with privacy is merely paranoia, y'know, and is easily fixed with one of several medications. Let us recommend a nice doctor who would be very willing to help you with medications.

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My long term position on spam is that there has to be a way to get spammers registered so that we can bill them, and to make it profitable for *us* to track them down and collect the our fees, etc. This is commercial speech, remember, and is fully regulatible.(sp?)[need morning coffee] There has to be some way for people to be able to make a living hunting down and collecting bucks from the spammers. The registration or license numbers should be part of the mail headers.

Of course, faking registration would be a violation of federal law, subject to investigation and arrest by the appropriate agencies.

The basic Idea is to make it highly Un-profitable to be sending spam. And a real hassle with internet bounty hunters tracking you down all of the time.

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To repeat the referance:

-- T.E. Bearden, "Possible Whittaker Unification of Electromagnetics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics," (Association of Distinguished American Scientists 2311 Big Cove Road, Huntsville, Alabama, 35801)

And here is the quote that I was able to dig up. But of course, since it rests on something that is over 100 years old, we can forget about it. You could have at least said the the Maxwell theory of em fields was contradicted by the observation of particle phenomena (quanta). But you didn't, and even so that misses the point completely. Apparent paradoxes are used as an argument to justify an irrational, dualistic interpretation of the theory. However, at a closer look one can find that any paradox arises only from an inconsistent physical concept or other errors in logic. Goedel proved that from a logical system which contains a contradiction, absolutely any proposition may be proven. With a consistent theoretical interpretation (in any branch of science) no paradox should occur at all.

That being said here is the material I dug up

" ... In discarding the scalar component of the quaternion, Heaviside and Gibbs unwittingly discarded the unified EM/G [electromagnetic/ gravitational] portion of Maxwell's theory that arises when the translation/directional components of two interacting quaternions reduce to zero, but the scalar resultant remains and infolds a deterministic, dynamic structure that is a function of oppositive directional/translational components. In the infolding of EM energy inside a scalar potential, a structured scalar potential results, almost precisely as later shown by Whittaker but unnoticed by the scientific community. The simple vector equations produced by Heaviside and Gibbs captured only that subset of Maxwell's theory where EM and gravitation are mutually exclusive. In that subset, electromagnetic circuits and equipment will not ever, and cannot ever, produce gravitational or inertial effects in materials and equipment.

"Brutally, not a single one of those Heaviside/ Gibbs equations ever appeared in a paper or book by James Clerk Maxwell, even though the severely restricted Heaviside/Gibbs interpretation is universally and erroneously taught in all Western universities as Maxwell's theory.

"As a result of this artificial restriction of Maxwell's theory, Einstein also inadvertently restricted his theory of general relativity, forever preventing the unification of electromagnetics and relativity. He also essentially prevented the present restricted general relativity from ever becoming an experimental, engineerable science on the laboratory bench, since a hidden internalized electromagnetics causing a deterministically structured local spacetime curvature was excluded.

"Quantum mechanics used only the Heaviside/ Gibbs externalized electromagnetics and completely missed Maxwell's internalized and ordered electromagnetics enfolded inside a structured scalar potential. Accordingly, QM [quantum mechanics] maintained its Gibbs statistics of quantum change, which is nonchaotic a priori. Quantum physicists by and large excluded Bohm's hidden variable theory, which conceivably could have offered the potential of engineering quantum change -- engineering physical reality itself.

"Each of these major scientific disciplines missed and excluded a subset of their disciplinary area, because they did not have the scalar component of the quaternion to incorporate. Further, they completely missed the significance of the Whittaker approach, which already shows how to apply and engineer the very subsets they had excluded.

"What now exists in these areas are three separate, inconsistent disciplines. Each of them unwittingly excluded a vital part of its discipline, which was the unified field part. Ironically, then, present physicists continue to exert great effort to find the missing key to unification of the three disciplines, but find it hopeless, because these special subsets are already contradictory to one another, as is quite well-known to foundations physicists.

"Obviously, if one wishes to unify physics, one must add back the unintentionally excluded, unifying subsets to each discipline. Interestingly, all three needed subsets turn out to be one and the same ..."

In other words, you may be tossing the baby out with the bath water. But then, it's your baby. And theorectical physics is not my primary area of expertise.

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Math geeks may want to look at this page:

http://hypercomplex.com/research/emgrav/hypcx-p200 01015.html

for a detailed introduction to Quaternions

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Before the advent of Relativity, Maxwell and others were very interested in the investigation of multiple dimensions. Math Geeks should search for quaternions, etc.

In 1873, Maxwell succeeded in uniting a couple hundred years of electrical and magnetic scientific observations into a comprehensive, overarching electromagnetic theory of light vibrations ... carried across space by this "incompressible and highly stressed universal aetheric fluid ..." Maxwell's mathematical basis for his triumphant unification of these two great mystery forces of 19th Century physics were "quaternions" -- a term invented (adopted would be a more precise description) in the 1840s by mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton, for "an ordered pair of complex numbers" (quaternion = four).

Complex numbers themselves, according to Hamilton's clarifications of long-mysterious terms such as "imaginary" and "real" numbers utilized in earlier definitions, were nothing more than "pairs of real numbers which are added or multiplied according to certain formal rules." In 1897, A.S. Hathaway formally extended Hamilton's ideas regarding quaternions as "sets of four real numbers" to the idea of four spatial dimensions, in a paper entitled "Quaternions as numbers of four-dimensional space," published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society [4 (1887), 54-7]. It is obvious from Maxwell's own writings that, even before Hathaway's formalization, his choice of quaternions as mathematical operators for his electromagnetic theory was based on his belief that three-dimensional physical phenomena are dependent upon higher dimensional realities.

In a tragedy for science, after Maxwell's death, two other 19th Century "mathematical physicists" -- Oliver Heaviside and William Gibbs -- "streamlined" Maxwell's original equations down to four simple (if woefully incomplete!) expressions. Because Heaviside openly felt the quaternions were "an abomination" -- never fully understanding the linkage between the critical scalar and vector components in Maxwell's use of them to describe the potentials of empty space ("apples and oranges," he termed them) -- he eliminated over 200 quaternions from Maxwell's original theory in his attempted "simplification."

This means, of course, that the four surviving "classic" Maxwell's Equations -- which appear in every electrical and physics text the world over, as the underpinnings of all 20th Century electrical and electromagnetic engineering, from radio to radar, from television to computer science, if not inclusive of every "hard" science from physics to chemistry to astrophysics that deals with electromagnetic radiative processes -- never appeared in any original Maxwell' paper or treatise! They are, in fact--

"Heaviside's equations!"

You can check this out by read a highly revealing paper on the subject by another renowned British mathematical physicist of this century, Sir Edmund Whittaker, titled simply "Oliver Heaviside" (Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, Vol. 20, 1928-29, p.202); or, another overview of Heaviside by Paul J. Nahin, "Oliver Heaviside: Sage in Solitude" (IEEE Press, New York, 1988, p.9, note 3.).

The end result was that physics lost its promising theoretical beginnings to becoming truly "hyperdimensional" physics ... over a century ago ... and all that that implies.

Lt. Col Thomas E. Bearden, retired army officer and physicist, has been perhaps the most vocal recent proponent for restoring integrity to the scientific and historical record regarding James Clerk Maxwell -- by widely promulgating his original equations; in a series of meticulously documented papers on the subject, going back at least 20 years, Bearden has carried on a relentless one-man research effort regarding what Maxwell really claimed. His painstaking, literally thousands of man-hours of original source documentation has led directly to the following, startling conclusion:

Maxwell's original theory is, in fact, the true, so-called "Holy Grail" of physics ... the first successful unified field theory in the history of Science ... a fact apparently completely unknown to the current proponents of "Kaluza-Klein," "Supergravity," and "Superstring" ideas ....

To investigate this further you should take a look at --

"Possible Whittaker Unification of Electromagnetics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics,"
by T.E. Bearden
(Association of Distinguished American Scientists
2311 Big Cove Road, Huntsville, Alabama, 35801)

Note, NOT available at Amazon

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Now that the cat is out of the bag, there are going to be unhappy people.

I wonder how this could be used in a First Amendment challenge to the DCMA?

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The analogies of the PDA to the PCs (and laptops) of 10 to 15 years continues, both in terms of clock speed and ram. The only major differance is the apparent lack of storage space (maybe I didn't look hard enough) conpared to the old PCs.

This is likely a plus, because you still have to coded semi-efficiently, instead of letting things bloat on your mass storage.

I wonder how hard this is for the MS crew.

:-)

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And would it matter? Why go to all the trouble. Encrypt the mp3, publish the key, put the file up.... two weeks from now change the key. finger printing might make it more difficult for some folks but those who want to persist will create a few tools then others will pick them up and off they go again...

Well it this case, this is probably more problematic in terms of classical music, where you can argue how well the performance is. But you could also see this with a cover band, where they play the tune well enough, but just a little off speed.

and heck, if you take a piece and more it just one or two percent faster, so that the feel is a little bit punchier, and obviously doesn't match the original version. the signature might not pick up on this

In the classical example, you would literally have a performance that never took place. It is more acceptable in classical because there are discussions about what are the correct performance values. And they would have to track down the original recording, which doesn't exist in the form they are expecting.

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