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• The first 90,000 miles are toll-free, Cisco Systems company profile (detailed), 8 September 2002.
• The first 90,000 miles are toll-free, Cisco Systems Newsroom news story (brief), as seen on Newsroom, 21 February 2001.

Articles discussing this include:

• Now that's a long distance call!, Humans in Space, NASA, 3 June 2003.
• Johnson Space Center, NASA Spinoff magazine, 2001.http://www.techbriefs.com/spinoff/spinoff2001 /johnson.html -->
• This isn't Houston, Lafe Low, CIO Magazine, 1 October 2001.
• Voice over IP takes a giant step forward, Jon William Toigo, Washington Technology vol. 16 no. 1, 2 April 2001.
• Astronauts call home via shuttle VoIP link, William Jackson, Government Computing News, vol. 20 no. 5, 5 March 2001.

No, the world is bigger than that. True, the Linux kernel depends upon Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and a few other individuals. But there is also FreeBSD, which depends on another few individuals. And there's Hurd, which depends (or depended) on yet another group. Then there's Tannenbaum and his Minix OS, and hundreds of other operating systems. None of these people have a monopoly on genius.

Most of the work on these projects are performed by a small number of people and these people are not working in anonymity. Each person is enjoying a heavy amount of credit in their respective communities for their marginal efforts (and often for the secondary effects, e.g, Tannenbaum's connection with Linux). The presence of genius in particular projects, or lack thereof, says nothing about the necessity of individualism.

2002 Study: The median number of developers in the 100 most popular SourceForge projects was 4 and the mode was 1

Roughly 97% of the Linux kernel contributions are made by 100 developers -- most of whom are paid for their work and/or recieve great acclaim for their efforts. What's more, a little less than 50% of the contributions come from a group of 20 people

Same goes for science. If Watson and Crick hadn't discovered DNA when they did, one of several other groups very likely would have in just a few more months. And maybe some of these others did discover DNA first (Rosalind Franklin comes to mind), but Watson and Crick got all the credit, wealth and fame, and the Nobel Prize.

Franklin did not toil anonymously either and she is widely acknowledged as having played a role in the discovery. She was published several times in Nature and other places for her efforts; it is an over-simplification to say that she was "scooped". The Nobel prize could not have been shared with her as she died several years before the prize was awarded (Nobel rules forbid posthumous awards) and because the award was for their work on nucleic acids (not just for the structure of DNA).

Potential giants are all around. If only some of them choose to move towards a particular goal, that is not to say that there aren't a hundred times as many who could've reached those same goals if they chose.

This may be true in some cases. However, it is not feasible to make "What-If" awards. Devalueing scientists' and inventors' marginal contributions would be a far greater violence to progress. The majority of scientists' may live and breath by credit alone (which, in turn, benefits their careers), but the driving force behind commercial innovation is economic reward, which cannot be shared broadly without destroying the entire system.

I appreciate you pointing out the "giants" part of that quote. Maybe Newton should've said, "standing on the shoulders of a giant society".

But he did not say that. In fact, to the contrary, if you read the history on Newton's utterance of this quote (which, btw, variations of it existed long before) you would see that he was essentially crediting Descartes (a particular notable individual) and insulting one of his contemporaries that was trying to take credit for his work (Hooke, who was known to be ill/hunched over) "What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"

When corporations spread the wealth patents generate amongst the people who worked on a great project, then patents are working to the benefit of society.

No, patents are to the benefit of society when scientists and innovators innovate and in

You can also point out that, when bugs are found, they tend to be fixed very rapidly, frequently within hours of their discovery. Since the source code is available to everyone, anyone affected can create an update to fix the problem. This happens exceedingly rarely in the closed-source world, despite the large numbers of bugs encountered.

A case in point. Look at all the data thefts that have occured over the past few years of unprotected government databases.

One or two look like an "oops."
But hundreds? Either there is a disregard for public records, or perhaps the Government WANTS the data released -- so that a private sector company can do what they can't with the data, and there is plausible deny ability about the source.

http://attrition.org/dataloss/
http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/40840-1.html

but when you look at the civil sector, it's not much better;
http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches. htm

Of course, ChoicePoint is a part of the BushCo government. They helped rig elections in Florida and more recently in Mexico.

Maybe, but the DoD doesn't use Lenovo laptops in sensitive places. http://www.gcn.com/print/25_25/41717-1.html

Are you kidding? You can't benefit financially from NASA?

NASA is involved in so many classified projects in our (U.S.A.) aerospace industry, and there is a constant threat from nation-states and foreign governments wanting our most sensitive military technology. For example, technology used in rockets that propel various spacecraft can be used in rockets and missiles. Satellite technology, etc.. NASA has a lot at stake when somebody hacks into them, and their technology is worth $$$ x10^9. Here's a couple links just to get you started:
http://www.gcn.com/print/25_25/41716-1.html/
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/militar y_law/3319656.html
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=2121111&C=a merica

The government loses computers all the time.
VA Contractor Loses Computer Containing Personal Data
August 7, 2006
A government contractor hired by the Veterans Administration (VA) to help process insurance claims announced that a desktop computer containing information on as many as 38,000 veterans had disappeared from its home office.

Energy Department lost computer equipment
At least 18 pieces of "computer processing equipment," including at least one laptop, are missing from the Energy Department's Office of Intelligence (IN), and department officials do not know whether any of it was used for or contained classified information, according to a new report from DOE's inspector general

Government Hit by Rash of Data Breaches
WASHINGTON (AP) - The government agency charged with fighting identity theft said Thursday it had lost two government laptops containing sensitive personal data, the latest in a series of breaches encompassing millions of people.

So why the House Panel Approves Electronic Surveillance Bill The government can not even keep track of their own computers. Let them monitor, then some one will lose the computer it is on.

Maybe, with the all the problems the government is having keeping track of their computers, we should ban the government from using computers. It seems to be helping the terrorists.

Here's the answer to your last question (found at http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/26641-1.html) :

About 1,000 developers contribute changes to Linux on a regular basis, Morton said. Of those 1,000 developers, about 100 are paid to work on Linux by their employers. And those 100 have contributed about 37,000 of the last 38,000 changes made to the operating system.

So that 2004 study suggests that, eventhough the percentage of paid developers is even lower than the previous numbers i mentionned, 97% of the OSS effort is actually being paid for... interesting no?

Considering the the spooks are already trolling social networking sites, I wouldn't be surprised.

Stick to what you know - you'll look a whole lot smarter!

NIST certification fluctuating unintelligibly is a security nightmare. NIST's certification process needs to be reliable, or the uncertainty will create not only risk of using broken or incompatible security, but also spikes in attacks as crackers get the news that some product might be broken. The products might not be broken, just NIST's decertification process, but who needs the extra waves of attacks?

I'm not surprised that this procurement certification is broken. Bush's top procurement official got busted for being badly broken. Spending $3 TRILLION a year on stuff while lining your pockets has got to leave some holes in the system.

Back in suspension

http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/41379-1.html

It's been said that future generations will regard the next few decades as a dark age, where the culture lost most of its common heritage. This will supposedly come about because so much audio and video is mouldering away (sometimes literally), locked in vaults where it will rot before anyone can recover it. While such factors as copyrights much longer than the physical life of the archival media are likely to contribute to this, the loss of these tapes is an example of another cause.

Loss or deterioration of the physical medium is the simplest to deal with, yet is an area where failure is seen currently.

Loss of codecs or data specs is another: who's going to fund/spend time reverse engineering a format or codec just to read a file to see if it is worth reverse engineering or decoding? DRM adds a whole new dimension to data loss. When the keys or authorization is lost, the file and it's contents are essentially lost.

Yeah, yeah, a lot of people go on about not attributing to malice what can adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence. With the case of the missing Apollo 11 tapes the are arguments for a case of malice, indifference or simple incompetence. And any of these can be the direct result of political appointees, rather than qualified individuals. But guess what, whether malice, indifference, or incompetence, the results are the same: lost data (which was damned expensive to acquire and/or irreplaceable) and lost cultural heritage.

I write agentless network inventory software for a living.
http://www.bdnacorp.com/index.shtml
That said, my opinions here are not those of my employer. (I'm an engineer - why else would I be reading slashdot non-main-page article?) My opinions also aren't specifically about our product because it does inventory, not monitoring.

It's hard to say agent or agentless. Someone in a previous comment said there is no such thing as "agentless" and mentioned SNMP, WMI, sar, etc. Naturally, there needs to be *something* giving values. However, the moniker "agentless" (usually quoted :P) implies that there will be no 3rd party application installation overhead. If you are working in IT and are the one who would have to roll out an agent, you can understand why the distinction is important. Using the device's own management interface is typically seen as safer than an agent as well, because it was written by that device's OEM, not the management software company.

There are downsides to agentless as well, indeed the polling issues are somewhat true. Some technologies, like SNMP Traps, are capable of notifications for monitoring, but some are not. In the case when a machine only has some kind of shell interface, the only choice is to attempt to use that as periodically as desired.

I also can't break any NDAs, but to those who think that agentless "doesn't scale"
http://www.bdnacorp.com/customers.shtml
http://www.gcn.com/print/24_24/36708-1.html
We work with several of the largest IT installations in the *world*, and we do it with relative ease. However, we're not a monitoring solution - we do inventory. YMMV with monitoring, and with different vendors.

You want a Linux designed to blow up and destroy ships?

Even if we get this capability in linux, it'll be ridiculed for being years behind Windows. (That's one of about 1.4 million online pages about this incident.)

It's sorta like the constant chant that linux "isn't ready for the desktop" because it doesn't treat its users as horribly as Windows does. Similarly, linux can't be considered "battlefield ready" until it can duplicate the disasters that the military has come to expect from their software.

twitter, please respond - why don't you comment on this link as well? Thanks.

Nice choice of link. Except you missed the follow-up article from the same publication, where it was determined that Windows NT was not to blame. An uncaught DivideByZeroException in the application stack created an unintentional denial-of-service attack on the ship's network.

http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/34950-1.html

Did Lockheed Martin's takeover of FAA operations centers have anything to do with this switch?

I'd be interested in reading that article if you can remember where you saw it

It was on Sun's website a few years back. Unfortunately, it may not exist anymore. Sun has a habit of replacing their pages with newer and "better" ones whenever they feel like it. I tried Googling their site, but I couldn't find anything more recent than 2006. :-(

It's really too bad. It was a pretty good article, and I have to say that I agreed with it. You can still hear echos of it in McNealy's more recent "Don't build a custom jalopy" statement.

Anonymous for my protection. To my knowledge thumb drives are banned throughout the DoD for the storage of classified data for exactly this reason. Unfortunately, it's quite often the best way to do your job, so they're frequently used for everything from moving files to a briefing computer or laptop for a presentation to transferring data in the field.

Unfortunately the previous posters are correct about the technical intelligence of the average soldier. I've met a lot of bright folks in various specialties, but few of them are technically competent. I'd trust many of them with a billion dollar aircraft and my car/boat/wife/heart surgery, but I wouldn't want them on my computer as root! That being said the current system obviously doesn't do the job of enabling soldiers to transfer data easily while safeguarding that data.

My suggestion, you ask? The DoD already has a Common Access Card (CAC) program implemented. It currently stores some basic biometrics, a pin, and a digital signature. The new cards look even more promising. It's going to prove impossible to stop people from using thumb drives to get their jobs done. We already have excellent encryption developed. I recommend implementing a proper encryption program that requires fingerprints and a pin, with a duress pin which would destroy the data if entered. Most people can remember a PIN, and most people have fingerprints. Of course it'd be more complicated than that, with features to enable continuity allowing groups access and ensuring someone can still read the data if their convoy gets toasted, but you get the basic idea. No new technology needs to be developed, and it'd be Army Proof (R).

But of a bigger and badder supercomputer that will require it's own 170 MW generating station..

Cray to build 24,000 quad-core Opteron Petacomp!!
Friday March 31, @07:03AM Rejected

check it out here.. .. now imagine a beowolf of those !!

As a Novell employee I disagree on all of your arguments but one - the kde versus gnome - I wish we could pick one but that ain't happening.

Yast and Redcarpet: Integrating redcarpet into yast was the right way to go. Since redcarpet (from Ximian) and Yast (from Suse) were able to collaborate and come out with a better solution shows that they have vision and execute the vision.

AppArmor vs SeLinux: see security wars Summary: Novell buys a best of breed security solution, then gives it to the community. RedHat wines: "In my opinion, Novell wants to split the market...".

Xgl vs Xegl: I don't see any confusion here, I think maybe you mean aiglx Xegl is a completely new Xserver. So to compare the three projects: Xegl = really hard, Xgl = hard, aiglx = easy.
I think the confusion around this comes from redHat. Novell chose Xgl, RedHat chose aiglx, Novell gets the credit, Redhat complains. Xegl is still a ways off.

Novell is putting significant investment into open source software (OpenOffice, Hula, Evolution, Xgl, AppArmor, Yast, iFolder, Gnome, KDE, SAMBA, and the kernel itself, and I'm sure other projects I'm not aware of) Despite the complaining from RedHat they deserve some respect.

With all that, it will it takes time to build momentum. Without a doubt the momentum for Linux from Novell is building, investors are simply upset that Novell is not there yet. The fact that Novell is number one in China is a signficant accomplishment that will result in revenue in the future.

The government is not rewriting history, just denying access to it.

The head of the national archives and records administration (NARA), a supposedly independent administration, has been replaced at the request of top levels of the Bush regime. Not only is that rather unusual, but there are some big issues with the new appointment, Weinstein. All that means is that NARA now has a politcal appointee at its head, unlikely to stand up for freedom of information.

In fact, NASA also has good news for us.

Two weeks ago, the important Landsat-8 was confirmed while NASA also saves a lot of money by simply adopting interoperable practices.

Now, if only NASA Worldwind (and Punt) could get more popularity over Google Earth...

Fire 2

Fire 3

Pick the one you like - I've got more!

Some operating systems are suitable for a networked environment and can provide a robust infrastructure. Others are suited for standalone use and only safe with an air gap, that means no sneakernet either.

White House accidentally exposes data in PDF file

I am sorry if you work for the Navy all your solutions that are to be connected to the network have to comply with the same hardware/software that sits on the sectaries desk - this is the result of one of the biggist and stupidest IT contracts ever - NMCI. The Navy still has not pulled its collective head out of its ass and dealt with multi-platform most appropiate solutions.

In fact, the Navy have even given ownership of its entire network physical plant to a contractor!!!! So if new leadership wakes up and realizes it was all a bad move there is no easy way out because they would have to buy back its own network.

Agencies may have until June 30, 2008, to transition to Internet Protocol Version 6.

Government Vendors have to be IPv6 enabled if you are going to want to continue to sell there.
http://www.gcn.com/IPv6/

As has already been pointed out this was NOT a Windows bug of any kind:

http://www.gcn.com/17_32/news/33639-1.html

I'm sure the fact that it was a test/proof-of-concept ship put out to sea without ANY formal software testing or even basic data safety checks isn't part of your "haha Windoze sux" fable but we can't let the truth get in the way of Microsoft-bashing now can we?

> First, the ship did not need to be towed back into port, though it did sit dead in the water for a bit ..

"The ship had to be towed into the Naval base at Norfolk, Va., because a database overflow caused its propulsion system to fail, according to Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk."

"Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor," DiGiorgio said

Curiously enough DiGiorgio later wrote a retraction and 'resigned` from the Navy as did Vice Adm. Henry Giffin.

"DiGiorgio denies reported statements"

"I did not say that the Yorktown was towed into Norfolk"

http://www.gcn.com/17_20/news/33292-1.html

"Ron Redman, deputy technical director of the Fleet Introduction Division of the Aegis Program Executive Office, said there have been numerous software failures associated with NT aboard the Yorktown."

"Refining that is an ongoing process," Redman said. "Unix is a better system for control of equipment and machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT."

"The Yorktown has been towed into port several times because of the systems failures" [Ron Redman - Aegis]

"This is the only time this casualty has occurred and the only propulsion casualty involved with the control system since May 2, 1997, when software configuration was frozen," Vice Adm. Henry Giffin

> Second, the problem was in the software running on top of Windows

But the software made a call to Windows to divide by zero and Windows made a call to the fpu which did just that.

http://www.slothmud.org/~hayward/mic_humor/nt_navy .html

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/yorkt own.html

"NT played no role in the Yorktown's LAN crash, Baker said."
"The Yorktown is unique because it was a proof-of-concept [ship] put out to sea without formal testing and software certification, which our products normally go through," Baker said.

IMO this country is going down the tubes in a big way.

Remember history or civics class in school? The inevitable lessons about how free the US was compared to Hitler's germany or the soviet union. Back then they used to point out how free we were because we did not need papers (internal passports) to travel.

How fricking free are we when we need a driver's license to board a plane? Or when our KIDS need ID to board a plane? Or to visit a national park, or federal building? Not to mention the citizens are going to EAT the costs.

More and more it seems the only alternative is to go gulching until the country regains its "mind your own business" mentality.

Today's USA, The Anti-federalists worst nightmare coming true.

IMO this country is going down the tubes in a big way.

Remember history or civics class in school? The inevitable lessons about how free the US was compared to Hitler's germany or the soviet union. Back then they used to point out how free we were because we did not need papers (internal passports) to travel.

How fricking free are we when we need a driver's license to board a plane? Or when our KIDS need ID to board a plane? Or to visit a national park, or federal building? Not to mention the citizens are going to EAT the costs.

More and more it seems the only alternative is to go gulching until the country regains its "mind your own business" mentality.

Today's USA, The Anti-federalists worst nightmare coming true.

> didn't Apple choose Intel because of their supposedly low power consumption?

No, apple chose intel because they sold their soul to Wintel (tm).
It's not even a choice really, but more of a business requirement.

http://www.gcn.com/16_24/news/32421-1.html
http://www.forbes.com/2003/01/07/cx_ah_0107apple.h tml

Softway was acquired by MS in 1999, after the succesful half - POSIX compliant Windows NT release. See here, here, and here.

Since then, we have no evidence of real work towards POSIX compliance in Microsoft operating systems. Just marketing, for now.

If "Mission Critical" means "good enough for government work", then Windows NT is right up there. Or is it?? I bet the Captain of the USS Yorktown wasn't terribly impressed when it couldn't handle a divide-by-zero. I suspect he'd prefer to install Linux rather than be towed back into port...

I like how he was in this position, but now thinks dept homeland security can't hack it.

http://appserv.gcn.com/22_20/news/22904-1.html

He thinks vendors need to come up with a standardizes vulnerability test bed. I'm not sure exactly how this would be done (hackers do non-standard testing), but it sounds interesting. At least it could be a baseline over companies whose policy is "we don't get hacked".

"First cynical point: They'll be using the existing shell design, because they're going to use existing everything. We pay billions, they claim to have redesigned everything, they redesign nothing. They make a few minor cosmetic changes and we all live under the assertion that we live in a brave new NASA world of progress once again while some beaurocrat reappropriates the money for his own black-ops"

Well; mostly the money goes to the contracters such as boeing, and other large companies who do nasa's work.

What would be cheaper is if NASA hired all their own engineers and actually built the shuttle in a NASA hangar from the start.

It would be cheaper of they built their own shit from parts than hiring a middle man to do it for them.

Don't believe me?
Here is some examples:
http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/project-management/267 36-1.htmlNasa hires Computer Sciences Corp for consulting.
http://www.scrappleface.com/MT/archives/001014.htm l#001014Nasa Hires consultant on shuttle

Everything they do is contracted through a middle man. The only engineers on staff are there to help oversee the contract work and there to help if there is problems with something.

Four years later, the US Navy said it stood for "Needs Towing."

;-)

The IRS? HAHAHAHA! The IRS has so badly mismanaged their IT projects that they're generally recognized as the worst of the bad government contract managers. Their old data system is barely limping along but after spending tens of millions they're no closer to a working replacement than they were two years ago.

Here's one example there are many, many more.

We can all breath a giant sigh of relief if they get the new main system online before the old one throws in the electronic towel. Any time you ask anyone in the IRS group how things are going, you'll always get the Air Force salute (shoulder shrug) in response.

Crappy application not fully tested (and they knew that and accepted the risks) didn't know how to handle an improper user input. A zero went into the database. The app couldn't handle the DIV0, and crashed.

The Navy report concluded it was the application and human error, and not NT.

What more needs to be said?

Also, in all honesty, I fear that the 4 billion number is low, not high and NAT/PAT are only stopgap measures. (Especially with the relatively wide range of protocols that require application level awareness to actually translate, including such staples as H.323 and the rest of the multimedia stable).

Add to that the large blocks that are allocated AS large blocks and only fractionally used (or not at all; at one stage one of my former customers had a registered Class B for 200 or so employees. And that entire network space was NAT'd to someone else's space prior to reaching the Internet) and the traction will have to happen, regardless of if your ISP understands it now.

Personally, I like being able to remember IP addresses, and not having to totally rely on DNS. But that's not going to be feasible forever.

"The most interesting thing about Linux, aside from the social movement aspect, is the fact that it is the first Unix to run on x86."

would highly resent having to replace all it's fine work on NMCI with a new technology. Even if it would be an improvement.

Bank of America just misplaced the SSNs of 1.2 million federal employees: Data on 1.2 million federal charge card holders goes missing

For what it's worth, she's long gone. Thank god.

q: as windows based solutions are infamous for their lack of long term stability ( Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up [ . . . ] the servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload ) and general poor design ( Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water [ . . . ] The Yorktown's Standard Monitoring Control System administrator entered zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program. That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature remote terminal units ), how do you justify promoting them as superior to unix based solutions which are famous for their long term stability with uptimes measured in months to years, not days?