Slashdot Mirror

http://www.forbes.com/columnists/dvorak/

And here's a link to a Wired story on the same subject.

http://www.wired.com/news/n ews/culture/story/12899.html

Sterling writes "OK" soft-scifi cyberpunk books that require no in-depth knowledge of science of mathematics, but whenever he opens his mouth about real issues, he puts his foot in it, even as he proclaims on his fuzzy-headed Viridian site "I am a futurist!, so I know what I talking about." (Futurists have about zero credibility in predicting anything)

Sterling's ideas about the stock market show he lacks even *basic* ECON 101 knowledge. For starters, if anyone had a super-giga computer that could predict the stock market, other super-giga computers would have to take the predictions of the every other giga-computer into account.

Giga-computers can no more predict the combined result of all other traders using giga-computers than a computer can predict whether or not, in general, an algorithm will halt. And this ignores the other confounding issues, like human fallibility, greed, random events, and impect information.

For an analysis of the real world, stay away from Sterling. Peter Huber has made a much better analogy of market volatility based on the laws of physics.

Volatility and the Laws of Physics Quoting Huber: Financial instability isn't going to abate, it's going to get worse--for companies, industries and nations. That conclusion, I modestly submit, derives from the laws of physics. Nonetheless, the diversified investor who can stomach financial turbulence will prosper as never before.

Fact number one: liquidity. The wired PC and the Web behind it have made it very easy and cheap to move wealth around. Interfaces between investors and global markets have been reduced to clicks on a screen. Brokerage fees have fallen 90% recently, and they're going to fall 90% more. To put it in terms of physics, the viscosity is being removed from the financial system. Yesterday's financial molasses now flows like water.

Fact number two: momentum. More wealth is moving ever faster through the global financial pipeline. This is partly because many political and regulatory impediments have been eliminated, and partly because--recent troubles notwithstanding--there is more wealth to move.

As viscosity falls and momentum rises, fluid flows make a transition from stable to unstable. Water in your kitchen faucet transitions from laminar to turbulent when you twist the tap all the way open. Same with all fluids that move through, over or around pipes, ducts, propellers and wings. Waves, oscillations and shocks all multiply when more mass flows faster with less friction. Honey trickles slowly and quietly; fast-flowing water and air often babble, moan, whistle and shriek. Circuit breakers and rules that limit program trading are the financial regulators' misguided attempt to put baffles and mufflers back into pipes that have lost all the old kind of friction.

By the way, Huber makes clear arguments that destroy the naive environmentalism (ala Viridians) that most greens subscribe, of course, no green would dare read this: http://www.marshall.org/huberroundtable .htm.

Amazon can turn a profit any time they want... all they have to do is turn off the marketing machine and stop spending so much on infrastructure.

Nope. As Forbes points out, Amazon's "marketing" costs include packing and shipping books and CDs, and the costs of storing things in its warehouses. That means a major part of their so-called "marketing" costs are intrinsic to each sale itself, and cannot be cut.

At the same time, the entry of competitors is going to cut into Amazon's latitude. Amazon originally discounted a larger number of their books than they do now; the result is a number of customers have defected to BN.com, which has a borader selection of still-discounted books. Amazon's book division can't turn a profit if it returns to the old pricing scheme; it also can't turn a profit (in the long run) if BN.com consistently undercuts it on the same products.

Amazon itself admits its current buisness model is unsustainable in the long run. It is simply my analysis that Amazon will not be able to successfully transition to a sustainable model that justifies anywhere near its current valuation.

Steven E. Ehrbar

I have seen no evidence that RMS is a particularly good coder. (I've been told, in fact, by some of the folks who worked on GCC for Cygnus that RMS's original code for the compiler was slow and rife with bugs, and that they pretty much tore the guts out of it and rewrote it from scratch.)

But, be that as it may, the GPL is specifically designed to hurt programmers. To understand why, you need to understand how the GPL came to be. I've written about this in another Slashdot discussion, but I'll repost it here.

Many years ago, when Richard Stallman was a young programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a number of the computer scientists there thought it was time to use the abstract knowledge they'd developed at the Lab to create commercial products that would benefit everyone. They formed a company called Symbolics, whose first product would be the "LISP Machine" -- a computer specifically designed to run AI programs.

The young RMS, a "tenured" graduate student who wanted to stay in the Lab forever, saw this as a threat to his intellectual paradise and vowed vengeance.

Richard explicitly stated this when interviewed by a reporter for a recent article in Forbes magazine. The article said:

[Stallman] retaliated [against the computer scientists who left the MIT AI Lab to form Symbolics] by sabotaging his former colleagues' sophisticated commercial programs for powerful computers, singlehandedly hacking up his own versions and giving them away. "They accused me of costing them millions of dollars," he says. "I hope it's true."

(For the full text of the article, see http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0 810/6203094a.htm.)

[Side note: Ironically, Richard's strategy was very much akin to the strategy adopted by Microsoft -- a company which he reviles -- in its successful campaign to destroy companies such as Netscape and Quarterdeck.]

Other statements made by Richard confirm that the GPL is the result of Richard's personal anti-commercial bent -- and of a grudge which he has nursed since those early days at the MIT AI Lab. In his essay "The GNU Manifesto," cited above, Richard states explicitly his goal of hurting programmers' livelihoods:

"For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers worked at the Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than they could have had anywhere else. They got many kinds of non-monetary rewards: fame and appreciation, for example. And creativity is also fun, a reward in itself.

Then most of them left when offered a chance to do the same interesting work for a lot of money.

What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned."

--Richard Stallman, The GNU Manifesto

In the above passage, Richard characterizes the new company as if it were Nirvana for his departing colleagues: all of the fun and interesting work of the AI Lab, but with decent pay, too! Yet Richard, a creature of academia, really could not come along. Angry and spiteful, he begrudged his colleagues their good fortune. He literally advocated "banning" higher pay for programmers than they could get in academia. He vowed revenge not only on Symbolics, but on all commercial ventures of its kind and on programmers who desired to make a better salary than they could at the Lab.

Thus, the GPL was born.

The reasons why programmers place the GPL on their code despite this are many. Among them:

1. They do not understand the GPL's origins;

2. They believe the misleading rhetoric of the GPL's "preamble" and on Richard's Web site, both of which are designed to disguise the GPL's true agenda;

3. They assume that since Linux bears the GPL, the GPL must be "the" license for open source;

4. They project which they join is using the GPL already, and there's no turning back; or

5. Richard's misleading rhetoric, and/or that of others, has misled them, causing them to share Richard's spite and malice against commercial developers. In their zeal, they forget somehow that in this vendetta, "the enemy is us."

The story of the GPL is a sad one, and I would like to see it draw to a close. Hopefully, this will happen as programmers recognize the true intent of the GPL: to pit colleague agaisnt colleague, and to transform open source from a public good into a weapon directed against those who engage in activities of which Richard Stallman personally does not approve.

--Brett Glass

So what's the moral of the story? Find yourself a medium that you control, don't depend on renting space from other companies. How you do that is up to you.

So what do you do when all mediums are controlled by large corporations?

You see, people always think that government is the sole threat to free speech on the Internet, and it is a threat, but it's not the only one. Industry could, conceivably and very possibly, create a barrier-to-entry so high (the reason the internet is so free and inspiring is that the barrier to entry is so low) that the few who can afford to run a website are the ones who control the majority opinion.

You've already seen that happen with television, radio, and newspapers. They're all controlled by conglomerates who create economic barriers to competition. And since it's usually an oligopoly, and not a monopoly, and since it's not technically holding people back (by force of law) from free press, people claim that this is still a free country.

I say, stop bothering to get up and arms when the government claims it can censor or control the internet. They can't, they don't know how. But industry does, because they've been censoring and controlling mediums for years. It's nothing new to them. It's not oppression, they say, it's economics. But whatever they call it, the end result is the same.

So how do we combat this? We need to do all we can to keep the cost of the Internet down. At times like this, Free Beer can equal Free Speech. Linux, and the cooperative in San Francisco which sells T1 lines at cost is a fantastic example, and I wish I could see more situations like this crop up. It would also be nice to see the computer industry unionise but that's a whole different post.

In the end, if you don't want to see the Internet get gobbled up into the stomachs of the bloated plutocrats, it is up to you to make sure it doesn't happen. Keep the internet cheap and open to anybody, and you'll insure that the internet will be cheap and open for your own needs.

Michael Chisari

This whole setup with Kevin Mitnick is strangely reminescent of what happend with Eddie Slovik. (This post might be a bit off topic but beer (sic) with me.)
Slovik was a private in WW2, just like many others. Like some he felt an incredible dread at the thought of someone shooting at him, and like some he deserted. In WW2 some 40 000 US armed forces personel were charged with deserting their post in one way or another. Most of these recieved disciplinary measures or lesser court-martials but 2864 were tried by general court-martial. Of these 49 were sentenced to death and one actualy executed, Eddie Slovik.
And here comes the relevant part, at least to Mitnicks case;
Slovik was executed as an example to other troops. The fact that very few even heard of his case is proof enough that the example part failed. Slovik was choosen, out of 49 approved for death, by two factors, he refused to return to duty and signed a piece of paper (a napkin in fact) stating that he would not fight and he was a nobody with a criminal record. Mitnick is also a nobody, he didn't have access to large sums of money and good lawyers, which would make him hard to prosecute. He had a record, stealing computer manuals, breaking into systems and similar. And he was avaliable as a public target, made famous by a cooperation between a reporter and a security specialist.
Slovik couldn't defend himself. He was dead before he even went to the court-martial. He was unable to say anything to his own defence, except the truth, that he didn't want to fight.
Mitnick couldn't defend himself either. He was convicted before his trial, and not by any legal force but by two men, a reporter and a buisnessman. Two men who earned $750 000 solely by putting Mitnick behind bars.
Thus comes the question; if Sloviks death and the following destruction of the lives of his family did nothing to affect the morale of the US troops abroad, will the imprisonment of Mitnick, and the de facto destruction of his life do anything for the morale and/or activities of the Hacker community?
I think not...

Yours Truly
The Crazy Polak
For further information on the Slovik case, and the numbers quoted in this article see William B. Huie - The Execution of Private Slovik. For an article about the Mitnick case see Forbes Magazine.

A nice read with some background on the company, how it came to be and noting the big breakthrough in 1994 - capturing a large piece of the digital cellular phone market in Japan. Their biggest focus is now on the American cellular market with US contracts that should contribute more than 24% of their estimated revenue for 1999.

...by the pricking of my thumbs,

A nice read with some background on the company, how it came to be and noting the big breakthrough in 1994 - capturing a large piece of the digital cellular phone market in Japan. Their biggest focus is now on the American cellular market with US contracts that should contribute more than 24% of their estimated revenue for 1999.

...by the pricking of my thumbs,

Check out http://www.forbes.com/column ists/penenberg/1999/0927.htm. On forbes.com, second paragraph
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

Here's an important article in Forbes! ;-)

Follow their links page. One Reviewer said: "Keyboard feel is excellent, and the unit is admirably thin, a boon for travelers likely to be using it on tables taller than ideal. It is less successful on one's lap, where it tends to fold back at the center and has trouble keeping the attached organizer erect."

The FEC comes off sounding very fascistic. They hope that a few high-profile prosecutions of "miscreants" will get their message across.

For another example of the Clinton Administration's anti-free-speech attitude, see this link.

Summary: companies (and individuals?) defending themselves in public against government accusations may be charged with civil racketeering if Big Brother decides the advertising/research/etc is "untrue". Do we want the folks who don't know what the definition of "is" is to fine or throw people in jail for defending themselves?

On the one hand:

1. The signal-to-noise in Slashdot makes it only so much better than Usenet for this purpose.

2. Journalists have a duty to learn their topic well enough not to need Slashdot before writing about it. Asking Slashdot for proofreading is tantamount to admitting profound ignorance of a topic.

3. Slashdot writers have clue, but that does not make them unbiased.

On the other hand:

1. Journalists in general are profoundly clueless about things like net security.

2. So, one might as well admit it.

3. Jane's has done much better by trolling Slashdot for revisions than many publications that have printed clueless pap and then, contrary to Cringely's prescription not bothered to print corrections. For examples, visit Adam Penenberg's column archive. In particular, this one, in which CNNfn and ZDTV, printed false details from one of his stories and refused to correct them.

On the one hand:

1. The signal-to-noise in Slashdot makes it only so much better than Usenet for this purpose.

2. Journalists have a duty to learn their topic well enough not to need Slashdot before writing about it. Asking Slashdot for proofreading is tantamount to admitting profound ignorance of a topic.

3. Slashdot writers have clue, but that does not make them unbiased.

On the other hand:

1. Journalists in general are profoundly clueless about things like net security.

2. So, one might as well admit it.

3. Jane's has done much better by trolling Slashdot for revisions than many publications that have printed clueless pap and then, contrary to Cringely's prescription not bothered to print corrections. For examples, visit Adam Penenberg's column archive. In particular, this one, in which CNNfn and ZDTV, printed false details from one of his stories and refused to correct them.

According to this article he's worth $13 billion. I think most of that's on paper in the form of stock and options in Oracle. Whether that's related to the quality of their product is anybody's guess.

Do a Google search on Adam Penenburg; find his email address and write to him to congratulate him on this article, before going on to read some of his other stuff, including an enlightenting mea culpa on being taken in by bogus hackers himself, echoing Mike@ABC's comments: writing accurate hacker stories is hard. Sadly, staying credulous makes your stories sound better ("hackers hold up banks with crypto") and no-one seems to notice the difference. Thanks for trying to stay honest.
--

This could be a new section (with dunce cap icon) of links to media articles whose authors show a severe lack of clue. (The purpose of making it a section would be so that people could cross it out of their preferences. Not everyone wants to read all about how Jesse Berst needs another harshing.)

What this would accomplish would be to institutionalize the capacity of Slashdot to review and respond to mainstream media articles, in a way that does not involve floods of email flames toward the Dunce Cap candidate.

The reason I am advocating this is shown well by

this Forbes story. This can harness Slashdot's vitriol to good use: whipping the media into shape. There could be a poll with every story (weighted by /. Karma, maybe).

Allright, enough punting. Back to work.

And read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand (contains several essays by Alan Greenspan) for why antitrust and other government interference is a Very Bad Idea.
---Brian Stretch

The reason this is all coming about is that commercial rocket companies, such as The Rotory Rocket Company successfully lobbied to have an amendment to the Federal Commercial Space Act, as mentioned in this Forbes article, which removed the restriction that only NASA could land space vehicles on US territory. So now NASA, big bloated behemoth that it is, is running scared. Not that it's doing anything to reduce the price of putting payloads in space to compete, but I would say it has an unfair advantage, given it's resources (your tax dollars at work!).

Just between us girls, there's a story about the Amiga/Transmeta thang in the issue of Forbes that will hit the stands next week (8/9 cover date), so it should be on the Forbes website come Monday.

For crying out loud, I already sent in the article in Forbes about how SGI has plans to SELL OFF their workstation line to IBM and their Cray subdivision to Sun. Hasn't been posted yet, and it's already way old news (7/1).

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/06 14/6312194a.htm

This explains the business model of the company,
its a good companion to the EE Times article.

--jl

Too bad the show didn't really have any substance beyond two hours of whiny bickering brats

Not to mention three of the four richest people on the planet http://www.forbes.com/tool/toolbox/bill new/

If the way they portrayed Ballmer was on, I just might have a shot....

BTW- I loved his aside when they were talking to IBM. Selling nothing seen as the start to world-sized fortunes, ain't America great.

(maybe I should tweak the .sig :-)

US energy has a relatively low cost of about $1/watt-year. Non-US energy costs are generally higher. For many energy efficiency is not a significant individual cost. Yet, consider the following...

CASE 1. Embedded High Performance Computing.

Sustainable PERFORMANCE/WATT can be a strong processor selection criteria for *embedded* processor selection including embedded high performance computing. Hence, vendors in the niche embedded high performance market tend to use PowerPC and DSP chips, not Alpha, Pentium or SPARC for dense compute solutions.

Vendor examples: CSPI, Mercury, Sky

Did folks notice that Black Lab Linux (see optional software) is working with MPI Software Technologies? Look close, MPI Software Technologies is actively supporting *embedded* MPI & MPI-RT.

CASE 2. Not Too Large Clusters (50 or so processors)

Also, notice the HPC Wire news article posted on the Top 500 site where...

"Several problems were caused by the power consumption and the heat in that small laboratory. The Paderborn people needed the fire brigade to pump cold air into the room. The power consumption was about 10 - 12 KWatt. Switching on only the power supplies of the nodes, the electric fuses switched off."

CASE 3. Blue Mountain...

6,144 processors -- 10,000 KW always online; 2,600 KW average usage.

SIXTEEN A/C Units plus FOUR 750-ton chillers plus TWO 10MW power stations (major UPS feature)

CASE 4. Aggregate World Energy Consumption (Green perspective)

Now consider 100,000,000 processors on desktops (far less than one per world capita)

100,000,000 * 30 watts-year * US$1/watt-year = US$3 Billion each year (without consideration for cooling costs, higher average world energy prices, CPU fan MTBF costs & such)

Hey, what's US$30 / year per CPU for a typical US home wallet??? Well maybe not much to many reading this... however, the energy costs can add up. Embedded system designers, large scale system installations, and environmentally sensitive people know what I'm talking about.

-- Think Global, Act Local --

Hey now, It's not totally hopeless.

I think I got the hacker/cracker thing right in a story I wrote last summer.

True, there are few reporters that care enough to make the distinction, but our numbers are, I think, growing.

-Josh McHugh

I almost submitted this as a separate story, but it seems to be very appropriate here.

Do y'all remember, back when Sony announced that Playstation 2 development was going to be on Linux? There was rampant speculation about whether a Linux emulator for the Playstation was going to come out. Most people concluded: Well, probably not.

It is here! Cygnus has a complete software emulation of the Playstation 2 that they developed for Sony. Now, I don't know if they are going to release it, and you would probably need a quad Xeon to get good performance, but man, that is exciting.

Here's the quote from Forbes:

Nevertheless, there is a lot of speculation about Sony's ability to
deliver enough games to make this videogame console a
must-have electronics gizmo. But such doubts are mostly
unfounded. Thanks to Cygnus Software, a Sunnyvale,
Calif.-based startup, which developed a software simulation
environment that allows game developers to create and test game
titles prior to the availability of the next generation PlayStation.

The simulation software runs on a Linux-operating system and
basically duplicates the hardware specifications of PlayStation2.
Even though the hardware is unlikely to be delivered until later this
year, it seems that many developers are busy cranking out games
for PlayStation2. The delivery of this simulator will dramatically
accelerate the delivery of titles in what is a hyper-competitive
marketplace.

Sony asked Cygnus to develop the simulator software two years
ago. What Cygnus has delivered is a software replica of
PlayStation2. The virtual hardware platform represents a complete
architectural simulation environment, including 128-bit CPU core,
floating-point coprocessors and DMA channels. This provides a
complete environment that allows a developer to create, test and
debug gaming titles.


See the rest of the article here. I hope this give Linux a gaming boost.

See this report at Forbes. A couple of months ago, Sun's stock was $40-$50, now it's at $100. There's also expected to be an announcement from HP today that it'll be splitting it's business up, so that it can try and compete better - IBM and Sun were named as two companies giving them trouble... Looks like Sun's "unix-only" strategy is doing pretty well.

I do agree with the general point that some of these 'open source' innitiatives could be considered "desperate", or "last ditch".

There was a suggestion in the one of the January Forbes Op-Ed pieces which suggested that Steve Jobs should move into the big chair at Disney. This, coupled with other market rumors and a good fourth quarter and holiday season for Apple caused a rise in both Apple's and Disney's stocks during the first few weeks of last month.

This deal would make some of Disney's major investors very happy. Eisner and his press office have been saying that Disney and ABC are in a ten year cyclical slump and that this is something they expected but anyone who's had a pulse and a clue for the past four years has realized that Eisner hasn't figured out this new market or how Disney can leverage it's position and excellent brand recognition. We'll have to see howgo goes, but outside of some of the Disney online content focused on youth, such as Blast they have not gotten into this brave new world.

bnf

False. GNU was started in 1983/84. The Hurd sometime in the late 80s, I guess.

Then in 1998 when Linux started getting on CNN and RMS saw his own GNU/Hurd project failing, he blew a fuse and started the GNU/Linux naming business.

Wrong. This goes back before 1998. The FSF article by RMS on this is copyrighted 1997-98, but I think the issue is even older than that.

Actually, searching the Debian mailing list archives, one can see `GNU/Linux' used as far back as 08/96, about as far back as the archives go, so its use should go back even further...

Now it's gotten to where he's taking credit for initiating Linux first.

Care to give an actual RMS quote to support this? You're basing yourself on a poster's quick recap of what RMS said, which might or might not be accurate...

Who the fsck is RMS?

Founder of the GNU project, which provides many of the most important system utilities in Linux-based systems. Author of gcc, the compiler used to write the kernel. Author of Emacs, editor better than vi ;-) (/me ducks for cover)

How many issues of Forbes magazine has RMS been on?

Ah, let me count... Zero. Oh well, I guess that if he's in that group, he should be in good company. Lots of fine people have never made it into Forbes.

Come to think of it, I think the Forbes article on `Open Source' mentioned him, probably even quoted him. Actually, go read the damn article. There's 9 paragraphs about RMS.

Not that I think it matters.

As a means of gaining popularity, if you can't milk Linux, rename it.

RMS is not renaming Linux. Linux is a kernel. What RMS wants to be called in a different manner is OS distributions. You might agree with him, or you might disagree with him. Any path you choose, you better get your facts right.

I thought one of the virtues of the GPL was fame, recognition, and the ancillary employment opportunities it opens up.

The GPL is not about anything you say above. The GPL is about keeping Free Software free for all of its users, and thus, about cooperation and sharing among programmers and computer users. You might be thinking of ESRs `The Cathedral and the Bazaar' or `Homesteading'.

f I GPL a program, spend $40,000 of my own money developing it, and it causes RMS to feel ignored, it's suddenly RMS's creation. In 1991 if RMS knew where Linux would be in 1999, Linus would still be in Finland teaching undergrads how to load floppies. Transmeta would have looked at his resume and said, "Oh, but that's GNU/Linux. RMS wrote that, not you."

I hope your little fantasy makes you happy.

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