Slashdot Mirror

This harkens back to the good ole Haystack doo-ma-jiggy that came out of MIT sometime ago (slashdot Here and MIT HERE)

The concept is a simple one. Don't keep things in order in your folders in email or on your machine anymore. Just dump it all in one big place and have a meta engine of some sort index it all for you and then build queries for what you need. Realistically this is a great idea for those folks that had problems using the analog file cabinet for so many years (ala Jimmy James and the file of banana under "bright curved yellow things" for instance). The potential for abuse is really no greater than if M$ were to upload all of your "explorer find" searches back to Redmond. Those of you that us XP when you have to will notice that there is even an option to save a search query now for quick use within the XP shell. All this new company has done is just made it a little easier for the typical end user to create their search meta engine. The MIT one was brutal for a learning curve and more importantly it didnt have a decent place to put advertisements!

These are all ways of allowing thoughts and sights to be moved into digital space. This article particularly reminded me of "SandScape" a project at the MIT Tangible Media group in which users can manipulate a sand surface, and the computer senses the changes in the contours of the surface, recomputes a model and then displays the model projected back on the surface. Almost complete feedback to see how the model reacts to changes in a surface!

SandScape

By the way, I started looking at this piece with some moderator points, but there's just sooo much to mod down that I figured I might as well post instead.

That's easy. The highest probability of catching a terrorist, etc., is to perform random searches. Any system that puts individuals under greater scrutiny and they can become aware of it (such as them being searched more thoroughly or more often than an average passenger) is less likely to catch terrorists. (This is the characteristic demonstrated by the Carnival Booth algorithm. The reason for this is because you can figure out your own status (flag, colour, whatever), so any terrorist group planning on hijacking an airplane can just find out all of their statuses and get the ones who aren't flagged to do the hijacking, thus miminizing their chance of getting caught to be that of the random searches. Furthermore, since some security officers will be performing the "detailed" searches (which aren't improving the probability of detection), the will be reducing the number of random searches that could be performed by the same number of personnel, therefore the probability of finding terrorists is even further reduced. Purely random searches would do a better job.

Of course, this all only applies if the individual can become aware of their own status. One might suggest that the way around this is to use a flagged system but keep the extra "scrutiny" secret. That's fine if you're searching checked baggage, but there's no way to do secret searches of indiduals and carry-ons, so if they're carrying weapons (e.g., box cutters), there's no way to know without performing a search they'd be aware of.

In other words, the most secure system for catching terrorists getting on planes with weapons is random detailed searching. Now, it's more secure if you do more random searches, especially to the point that you are doing detailed searches of everyone (at which point it isn't really random).

There's just no way around this. It's like a closed form solution. Trying to come up with a "better" one is like trying to come up with a perpetual motion machine.

CAPPS just plain doesn't work. I am a privacy advocate and have sent several letters to my congressmen and representatives apposing CAPPS, but there are graver issues involved here. Beyond the fact that the government will have extremely large neural networked databases built on people to be used for "national security" and to "keep people safe" it actually makes air travel less safe from attack!

Check out the Carnival Booth paper put out by MIT. It is long and technical, but well worth the read. I would much rather go back to the private security agencies instead of this bullshit TSA no-hs-education-required-we-dont-do-background-che cks-on-our-employess-for-your-safety scam. Repeat after me, TSA and CAPPS has helped weaken security.

While he may have said these things in an interview for whatever reasons the claims sound a little odd to me. He claims that he, "...can also be located at any moment anywhere I am," with this system. If you think about that claim he's saying this chip somehow communicates with receivers which can track him. It can't be a passive RFID chip as their would have to be readers everywhere to power it, so we might assume it's an active chip. Where is the network of readers in place to track him all over Mexico? Maybe we can assume it uses cell towers. Does mexico have the cell location technology in place in the towers yet? Also, if you have a cell phone you have probably charged it at least every few days. With just an ID to transmit, let's assume his battery lasts longer, maybe weeks. Is he inserting a battery in his arm every few weeks? I don't think so. He might be charging the thing through a pair of coupled coils? Even so, wet tissues and skin don't make for a great environment for a transponder. That's why we don't implant tags in cattle among other reasons. The tags in small pets can only be read within a few inches.

I think the current technology is just not up to this claim. Maybe the statement is an anti-kidnapping, psychological warfare tactic.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

World War II might have gone a different way if not for "operational research," which sought decision-making rules for the precise allocation of resources. I hope that anyone with an MBA has heard at least of the Simplex Algorithm from 1947, and thinks of Game Theory as something absolutely precise about best strategies given well-defined input. Even dumbass Excel comes with a suite of tools, both linear and nonlinear, for performing optimizations, and today's desktops are capable of running what-if scenarios that would have required supercomputers just 10 years ago.

This 2x2 matrix idea seems awfully damned fluffy, considering how much is known about optimizing complex systems. Definitely an "airport book," as another Slashdotter described it.

> 1) ClearBoard's conceptual model was two people standing
> on either side of a pane of glass. Ours is a much simpler
> view... two people sitting side by side.
No, see ClearBoard-2 (scroll down):
"To overcome these problems in ClearBoard-1, we decided to design a new computer-based prototype, "ClearBoard-2"."

> 2) ClearBoard required expensive and cumbersome hardware...
Adding newer hardware to an existing design is hardly innovative. Nothing pertinent to a patent there.

> 3) ClearBoard was designed to be integrated with specific applications...
In fact a computer desktop seems to be just another thing one can share with ClearBoard 2. From this person's post, ClearBoard seems a better and more generic work overall than your's is.

Posting AC due to '9/11' issues....

ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS!

Right up there with the 'End Of World' .swf animation!

'Taliban Takes on Telemarketers' .swf

'End Of World' .swf

Do what I do to stop telemarketers cold--leave the phone line unconnected to a phone and reconnect it to dial out only as needed before disconnecting the phone again.

I don't have the transcript handy, but he spoke of using PGP, being asked for his passphrase to access his private key, and telling them to get bent. As the US has no analogue to the UK's RIP act which compels people to hand over encryption keys or face jail time, he (rightfully) invoked his fiftn amenement powers.

Assuming you use a strong passphrase, PGP is fantastically secure. Make sure there's no hardware/software keystroke loggers though, or you may end up like Nicky Scarfo.

I don't have the transcript handy, but he spoke of using PGP, being asked for his passphrase to access his private key, and telling them to get bent. As the US has no analogue to the UK's RIP act which compels people to hand over encryption keys or face jail time, he (rightfully) invoked his fiftn amenement powers.

Assuming you use a strong passphrase, PGP is fantastically secure. Make sure there's no hardware/software keystroke loggers though, or you may end up like Nicky Scarfo.

No, it won't. Longhorn will have a (pseudo) 3D desktop environment? Have a look here and here for Linux projects so far ahead of what Longhorn is offering in the 3D dept that they'd likely make BillG wet his pants.

Longhorn has database capabilities for finding files easily? Linux has had this for years, and now has things likethis, too.

Longhorn has the ability to group users' files for easy access? Linux can too.

Want smart agents, the software for which is GPLed and a ton easier to set up than Microsoft Agent? Here.

For exotic technologies and bleeding-edge applications, Linux is *not* being forced to play catch-up. Microsoft are, and they know it.

This concept was extensively researched by Hiroshi Ishii and his team between 1991 and 1994 while he was at NTT.

I saw the concept videos in my HCI class at the time. They went through all the various issues of pointing alignment, video flipping and the like.

This concept was extensively researched by Hiroshi Ishii and his team between 1991 and 1994 while he was at NTT.

I saw the concept videos in my HCI class at the time. They went through all the various issues of pointing alignment, video flipping and the like.

That's not entirely true. This links to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (aka the wizard book) free to d/l in HTML.

I suggest that people who are against software patents help point submarine patent holders towards a big-business' that can be sued.

Use the (stable versions of the) EM Algorithm to impute inputs. This is sort of like automatic word or form completion except it is based on statistical first-principles of missing-data imputaton. As more and more data is gathered by the user's past inputs, imputed inputs become more intelligent. Initial imputations can be derived from inputs from users who volunteer to have their inputs recored in a central repository. This can give rise to "common sense" defaults that are context dependent. OK, so it's not Cyc, but it should work.

1. Theoretically, it is impossible to have anonymous communication on the Internet.
2. In practice it is a balance of resources. The trick is that it is much cheaper to publish contents anonymously, than to trace the origin of an information. Therefore projects like Hacktivismo - Six/Four, Crowds, Freedom-Net, Tarzan, Onion-Routing, etc. make sense.

Furthermore, it is often the content which speaks more about the authorship, than the chain of technical events that leads to the publishing of the information. In Slashdot, for example, I have chosen not to show my e-mail, etc., but by reading my comments even a 10-years old kid can make a deduction about my real identity. Does it make sense for me to use IP-tunneling then?

Finally, I do not understand the author. He just seems pissed. Maybe he will reconsider his opinion and revive the project. Is he sick from the lies (?) about the crypto-protocols used in the software which is written? IMHO the theory proves quite stable and if there is a room for attacks it is more in the implementations than in the protocols themselves. How many broken cryptosystems do you recollect (I know, I know "the knapsack", but it got broken on the conference on which it was presented).

Still, even with this project retreating, the subject remains interesting.

These experiments are a few years old now, but 32-bit PCI hasn't changed in that time, so they should still be valid on non-server-class PCs. Vanilla Linux topped out at around 80Kpps, whereas polling gets you over 300Kpps, and the Click optimizations get you nearer 400Kpps.

Similar experiments on FreeBSD with device polling give results in the same ballpark.

- Mark

I don't believe that source code theft is really such a problems for such companies - I really really doubt microsoft would use much of altavista's code even if they legally could! (It's so unbelievably much work to figure out someone elses mature code....)

However, employee education leakage is far more important. The raison d'etre for some of those architectural choices, or experiences with certain emergent pattern in large scale systems, and similarly complex issues are very, very valuable.

So really - feel sorry for microsoft... this just gives them bad PR, potentially opens them up for lawsuits (however unfounded), and generally doesn't do them any good..

I wonder where the claim of 5000 dollars damage comes from? The article says he claims he was curious about the progression of the product (which honestly, however illegal, I sympathize with - you put so much of yourself in these systems and then all of a sudden you're not allowed to know anything about them... arg!), so maybe it's all just much ado about nothing.

Try and make a worm that propagates through MacOS X, or Linux, or anything other than Windows

"how about the original?"

Why, I'm apparently hitting an AS/400, although I might experiment with an exokernel. Everything's groovy.

You mean an exokernel?

can be found at Biohacking For Educational Purposes Only

Bioethically yours,
Kilgore Trout

Didn't MIT do this in the 70s and 80s? Project Athena. NFS, kerberos, etc. Looks like they're still doing it; info here.

Furthermore, isn't this what 'Active Directory' is supposed to be for? Project Athena always sounded interesting, with a lot of neat stuff behind it, but the idea isn't appealing on a scale much larger than an office park or college campus.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

As mentioned in a previous Slashdot article about Blaise Gassend's Notes from the Third Annual Space Elevator Conference.

I for one am the first to admit I don't quite get all this 'patents are evil' that seems to come from Slashdot articles.

It's not all patents, just software patents. It's debatable, but most programmers and OSS advocates are against software patents. Lots of info is available if you want to see where they're coming from.

A quick cursory overview of the patent link on IBM's patent doesn't say one thing about the GIF format, just the compression algorithm

No it doesn't. It covers the LZW algorithm. The most significant use of that algorithm today is in the GIF image format. It has been supplanted by better algorithms for general compression use.

Just seems silly to 'call out' a company to release a patent.

Not so silly, the patent is likely worthless since the same algorithm had already been patented by Unisys, and IBM probably knows it.
(Although, as noted, it didn't stop them from throwing it into the mix against SCO, but then, why not? Additional counterclaims are cheap)

For "books that changed my life", I'd recommend instead The Mind's I by Hofstadter and Dennett. It was used as the text for the philosophy class I took my freshman year in college; I can still remember the day when, bored at my part-time campus job, I flipped through it to find Smullyan's Is God a Taoist? , which forever cleared up for me the whole question of free will versus determinism:

Mortal: Anyway, it is reassuring to know that my natural intuition about having free will is correct. Sometimes I have been worried that determinists are correct.

God: They are correct.

Mortal: Wait a minute now, do I have free will or don't I?

God: I already told you you do. But that does not mean that determinism is incorrect.

Mortal: Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature or aren't they?

God: The word determined here is subtly but powerfully misleading and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism controversies. Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could "determine" your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.

Mortal: What do you mean that I cannot conflict with nature? Suppose I were to become very stubborn, and I determined not to obey the laws of nature. What could stop me? If I became sufficiently stubborn even you could not stop me!

God: You are absolutely right! I certainly could not stop you. Nothing could stop you. But there is no need to stop you, because you could not even start! As Goethe very beautifully expressed it, "In trying to oppose Nature, we are, in the very process of doing so, acting according to the laws of nature!" Don't you see that the so-called "laws of nature" are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.

Mortal: So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?

God: It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to do this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you." Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish.

For a large wireless network, you'll probably want a robust ad-hoc routing protocol like aodv or dsr. Most cheap wireless access points don't support that sort of thing, though. Take a look at roofnet if you want to see what's possible. This is still an active area of research, though. Any success stories out there about large wireless ad-hoc networks?

-jim

Try searching linux-thinkpad mailing list.

For example, article about booting from CompactFlash may help.

Try searching linux-thinkpad mailing list.

For example, article about booting from CompactFlash may help.

I was reading up on this today before the article came up. Anyone interested or know of an open source attempt to make a diagnosis program?

The article here, Artificial Intelligence in Medical Diagnosis, is *extremely* good at reviewing the relevant points and giving a summary. If you want to program on the cutting edge of AI then this is where you want to be.

During the developement of our PHP CMS, Segue, we did just what you mentioned: a rewrite, with the realization that another was needed before the first was even done. To nip this one in the bud, we spent several months researching application design, OO design, XP, and several other topics. This research left us with two products:

- A large application framework (Harmoni) written in PHP that provides implementations of the Open Knowledge Inititiative (OKI) services along with others.

- A site that is a collection of most of the articles that we read in preparation to all this work.

The documentation site title is XP, but the articles contained are more general design stuff than just XP. Speaking of XP, it is something that over time we have found to be partially useful. Unit testing can be good, though we often don't do it, while pair-programming is universally despised by our group.

Anyway, read a lot before writing.

Hmm, this looks a lot like the Location Linked Information work done at MIT by Matt Mankins. The Urban Tapestries site mentions that they eventually want a distributed server system for Urban Tapestries. Everybody could set up their own server. The Location Linked Information project already has this in its architecture. It is based on Jabber, and the server side component, as well as a lot of details (both technical and 'marketing') can be found on the site mentioned above.

It's all in here: UNIX Haters Handbook

A group at MIT is using RDF for an integrated data management system. It's sorta like Outlook (or Kontact, if you prefer ;-) on steroids. It's called Haystack.

I have to say, their ideas are intriguing, but after using it... I think the big shortcoming is that it's tough to come up with a generalized user interface for manipulating any data thrown at it. Haystack tries at this, and I think, fails at providing any kind of cues or context that tells you what your are dealing with. In Haystack, every task and piece of information you deal with looks very much like every other piece of data, because, as a design choice, Haystack every piece of data has the same rank as every other piece of data.

Having different applications for different types of data usually make sense, if only to limit the amount of options presented to the user so they can make an intelligent decision about what action they want to perform. See this article on Slashdot about how users need limited since it makes decision-making too difficult psychologically.

Inevitably, discussions around RDF and metadata always devolve into hand-wavy discussions on how the computer will be able to "magically" do smart things based on the metadata. But it really isn't magic and it isn't automatic at all. Equivalencies and mappings have to be created by humans along with the rules about what to do.

RDF uses many concepts from AI research. Anybody who has read about this branch of computer science knows that the discipline has pretty much given up on creating AI in the 'sci-fi' sense as an impractical dream. That's what makes the Loebner prize so controversial. I don't expect that computers will be intelligent enough able to relieve users of too much of the burden in assigning metadata.

RDF is a promising approach, but if you read the article, it makes a lot of assumptions about what needs to happen to make the benefits real. Among them are establishing standards for what metadata fields apply to different types of objects: photos, people, music, etc. That kind of standardization won't happen overnight, if at all.

The computer also needs to know what to do when it encounters that kind of data. The article mentions MIME and browsers and, in effect, says the browser can make a rational decision even if it hasn't seen a particular MIME type before. That isn't really true.. you have to install a plugin that tells the browser what to do, or have a registry that someone has put together where the browser can install the right plugin at the right time.

That said, KDE's unification of contact information and passwords does show some of the promise of metadata efforts. And Apple's Spotlight looks like a good solution as far as it goes. I guess I'm just trying to make the point that the magic of metadata needs to be taken with a fairly large hunk of salt.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains more and more market share and as BSD sinks ever deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

Could be: they have had trouble understanding American jokes in the past.

StarLogo would be fun to play with and it could interest a pretty broad variety of students.

Valenti was an advocate of public debate. I hope this guy is too, but Valenti's openness was unusual. Here's an mp3 of a debate between Lessig and Valenti (although I side with Lessig on the issue, I'd score Valenti as the winner of that debate). And here's the interview of Valenti by the MIT student.

But what's "our position"? I see a lot of posts about getting an "approved Linux DVD player". I think these posts miss the big point.

Someone will, eventually (or already?) make a proprietary DVD player for GNU/Linux, and then people can install it, and then where will we be? We'll be as good/bad as Microsoft Windows.

GNU/Linux is a nicer OS to use because everyone's free to share it and collaborate in it's development. Free software DVD players can't be produced because they are prohibited by the DMCA.

The goal was freedom and we've come too far to give up on that. We don't need an "approved" player, we need permission for the public to write DVD players.

...still using technology pioneered in the 60s. Oh really? I didn't know Goddard invented the liquid-fueled rocket in the 60's. :) Great trick, too, considering he died in 1945.

Ah, so because somebody came up with a crackpot conspiracy theory, suddenly the "majority if the right's beliefs have no basis in actual fact"?

If that is the case, there is plenty of that to go around on both sides.

Network connectivity is not as ubiquitous as electrical power. There are many places where a power outlet is available but an ethernet jack is not. Besides, you can generate your own power if you have to.

If you're having trouble imagining the uses for a mesh network, take a look at this.

-jim

Typical consumer-grade access points allow you to set up networks that involve a single wireless hop (from the client to the AP). Most APs don't know how to talk to each other wirelessly - if you want a bigger network than a single AP can cover, you have to string ethernet cable between the access points. This is frequently inconvenient, especially when the network spans a large area.

Mesh networks use one of the many ad-hoc routing protocols (such as AODV, DSR, TORA, or DSDV) to decide the optimal path for each packet to travel (where optimal might mean shortest path, most reliable path, fewest number of expected transmissions, etc).

In theory, they are also easier to set up.

Also, having a "hackable" AP has benefits of its own - you can set up a captive portal, or a web server, or a web proxy, or a print server, or a file server, or anything else that might not come standard on a commodity access point.

-jim

It's also worth noting that the basis of the thread at electronic book review that contains Aarseth's essay is the project First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game that Pat Harrigan and I edited. A First Person book has been published by MIT Press, and includes a wide variety of views and responses on this and related topics, from 25 essayists and a group of respondents ranging from Will Wright to Brenda Laurel.

Exactly. Now all the terrorists have to do is get into the registered traveler program and since they're searched less thoroughly they'll have a very good chance of sneaking weapons in. This system nearly the same as CAPPS, the only difference is that terrorists will definitively know that they've been whitelisted and will therefore be even more confident that they can bring weapons with them. Since this system still relies on whitelisting, the Carnival Booth argument still applies and this system is still weaker than random searches.

There are actually a lot of good starts on that. tcpdump and tcpreplay, combined with etherape, are a good start to the old SilentRunner Collector. The Analyzer could be replicated with something based on graphviz. Some work has been done in this area. Granted, more is left (SilentRunner had an infrastructure to move packet data around from collectors to analyzers and such), and n-gram analysis would be useful (I just found a project, Text::Ngrams, that does it in Perl), but we're not actually that far away. SilentRunner might have been uber-cool before, but now it's actually well within the reach of the free software community. I've been thinking about this a lot for almost a year; if anyone's interested in working on this, let me know (my email address is on my website), this would be a great project (so would several of these listed, actually).

This is true 'ethical' hacking. And you don't even have to go to school to learn it. Well never mind, you have to go to school...

This is true 'ethical' hacking. And you don't even have to go to school to learn it. Well never mind, you have to go to school...