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Ricochet modems also have a packet-based peer-to-peer "STAR" mode which Linux supports through the strip.o kernel module, basically acting like a low bandwidth but longer range wireless ethernet, at, I believe, the same legally limited 1 watt of power used by the Metricom pole top repeaters. Stanford University has a network of these things called MosquitoNet.

At ~10X the range, and therefore ~100X the coverage area of 802.11b wireless ethernet, the 128kbps $99 metricom units could easily be used by nerds or local ISP's to blanket most metropolitan areas with their own wireless internet service.

By the way, since metricom modem cards are made by separate companies like Novatel and Sierra Wireless (don't know about the external modems) and the ISP's are also independent companies, I think Metricom-based networks would find a way to continue if, heaven forbid, Metricom were to go under. I certainly hope the Metricom people make a fortune. They have made a great product, which I use every day.

Is it really possible to separate representation from meaning without losing the meaning?

Although, technically I don't think she ever mentions authors. She says "These people", referring to "those in the room", ie. publishers.

Truth to tell, the publishers may make money off of the journals, but the authors (if I understand correctly) generally have to pay a fee to get their articles published. So what's the big problem?! The authors are getting paid by their research grants. The publishers get paid by libraries at least once (and I don't know of a library that makes their own copies of these huge journal archives from other libraries rather than buying their own), not to mention getting paid by the universities and other research institutions where the authors work (and where you're most likely to find people who are actually interested in the journals).

In Particle Physics, at least, almost all papers are also available on line in a huge database called Spires -- and as near as I can tell, it's supported by the publishers. It's certainly supported by the scientists. I'm surprised Pat isn't going after Spires, too...

-Erf C.

Could you contact Mr. Feist and have him comment on this link? I think the issue of him being a best-selling author isn't very pertinent on this issue except maybe in the case of bias.

BSD users are still screwed if they downloaded the source and compiled from source. The changes to BSD's BIND 4 are only for those people that used open BSD's implementation of BIND4.

There are severl alternatives, and having used them all, we had to switch back to bind because of interoperative problems or performance issues. Some solutions are.....

• djbdns
• Windows DNS server
• Dents
• lbnamed in PERL

  Maybe one of these solutions will work for you.

Donald Knuth's web site is here. Information about the reward for TeX bugs (currently $327.68) can be found here under the section titled "Rewards".

It says: "If you do succeed in finding a previously undiscovered bug in the programs for either TeX or METAFONT, I shall gladly pay you a reward of $327.68. Corrections to errors in The TeXbook or The METAFONTbook are worth $2.56, as in all my other books."

Donald Knuth's web site is here. Information about the reward for TeX bugs (currently $327.68) can be found here under the section titled "Rewards".

It says: "If you do succeed in finding a previously undiscovered bug in the programs for either TeX or METAFONT, I shall gladly pay you a reward of $327.68. Corrections to errors in The TeXbook or The METAFONTbook are worth $2.56, as in all my other books."

If TEX by Donald Knuth doesn't bring tears to eyes nothing will. ;-) But seriously, there probably isn't a better example of programming at it's finest, particularly if you are interested in Literate Programming

Try anything written by Knuth...

Donald Knuth's Tex certainly qualifies. Not only was it written, from the ground up, by arguably the greatest computer scientist of our time, but it's so good that it's bug free. Literally, there are no bugs in it. Stop and think about what that means for a minute. Can you come up with any software program on the planet of equal size and complexity (several megs of source code - not huge, but still formidable) that can make that claim? I can't. Granted, I may be incorrect, but nevertheless I find that amazing. You can view the parts of Tex that Knuth actually wrote here. They're written in (I think) CWEB, which is some literate programming language he has a real hard-on for. That probably means it fscking rules all, but personally I don't have the time/patience to pick it up. If you're sufficiently motivated, though, I'd imagine the Tex sources would prove very enlightening.

--

how can you think of something finished when everything else is evolving?

There seems to be a lot of talk about open source and evolution. Don Knuth has written bug-free public domain software that is actively used for circa 20 years and is not evolving.

Knuth writes:

I still take full responsibility for the master sources of TeX, METAFONT, and Computer Modern. Therefore I periodically take a few days off from my current projects and look at all of the accumulated bug reports. This happened most recently in 1992, 1993, 1995, and 1998; following this pattern, I intend to check on purported bugs again in the years 2002, 2007, 2013, 2020, etc. The intervals between such maintenance periods are increasing, because the systems have been converging to an error-free state. The latest and best TeX is currently version 3.14159 (and plain.tex is version 3.1415926); METAFONT is currently version 2.7182 (and plain.mf is version 2.71). All these systems are Y2K-compliant. My last will and testament for TeX and METAFONT is that their version numbers ultimately become $\pi$ and $e$, respectively. At that point they will be completely error-free by definition.

how can you think of something finished when everything else is evolving?

There seems to be a lot of talk about open source and evolution. Don Knuth has written bug-free public domain software that is actively used for circa 20 years and is not evolving.

Knuth writes:

I still take full responsibility for the master sources of TeX, METAFONT, and Computer Modern. Therefore I periodically take a few days off from my current projects and look at all of the accumulated bug reports. This happened most recently in 1992, 1993, 1995, and 1998; following this pattern, I intend to check on purported bugs again in the years 2002, 2007, 2013, 2020, etc. The intervals between such maintenance periods are increasing, because the systems have been converging to an error-free state. The latest and best TeX is currently version 3.14159 (and plain.tex is version 3.1415926); METAFONT is currently version 2.7182 (and plain.mf is version 2.71). All these systems are Y2K-compliant. My last will and testament for TeX and METAFONT is that their version numbers ultimately become $\pi$ and $e$, respectively. At that point they will be completely error-free by definition.

-=-=-

How long will nuclear energy last?

These facts come from an article by Bernard Cohen.

Nuclear energy, assuming breeder reactors, will last for several billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life on earth.

Here are the basic facts.

1. In 1983, uranium cost $40 per pound. The known uranium reserves at that price would suffice for light water reactors for a few tens of years. Since then more rich uranium deposits have been discovered including a very big one in Canada. At $40 per pound, uranium contributes about 0.2 cents per kwh to the cost of electricity. (Electricity retails between 5 cents and 10 cents per kwh in the U.S.)

2. Breeder reactors use uranium more than 100 times as efficiently as the current light water reactors. Hence much more expensive uranium can be used. At $1,000 per pound, uranium would contribute only 0.03 cents per kwh, i.e. less than one percent of the cost of electricity. At that price, the fuel cost would correspond to gasoline priced at half a cent per gallon.

3. How much uranium is available at $1,000 per pound?

   There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.

   In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at $400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil $5.70, natural gas $3-4.)

4. How much uranium is there in seawater?

   Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium, so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium. All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.

5. However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.

6. Cohen calculates that we could take 16,000 tonne per year of uranium from seawater, which would supply 25 times the world's present electricity usage and twice the world's present total energy consumption. He argues that given the geological cycles of erosion, subduction and uplift, the supply would last for 5 billion years with a withdrawal rate of 6,500 tonne per year. The crust contains 6.5x10^13 tonne of uranium.
7. He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource.

Comments:

• Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his postulated 5 billion years.
• He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium.
• He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet. He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.

-=-=-

How long will nuclear energy last?

These facts come from an article by Bernard Cohen.

Nuclear energy, assuming breeder reactors, will last for several billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life on earth.

Here are the basic facts.

1. In 1983, uranium cost $40 per pound. The known uranium reserves at that price would suffice for light water reactors for a few tens of years. Since then more rich uranium deposits have been discovered including a very big one in Canada. At $40 per pound, uranium contributes about 0.2 cents per kwh to the cost of electricity. (Electricity retails between 5 cents and 10 cents per kwh in the U.S.)

2. Breeder reactors use uranium more than 100 times as efficiently as the current light water reactors. Hence much more expensive uranium can be used. At $1,000 per pound, uranium would contribute only 0.03 cents per kwh, i.e. less than one percent of the cost of electricity. At that price, the fuel cost would correspond to gasoline priced at half a cent per gallon.

3. How much uranium is available at $1,000 per pound?

   There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.

   In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at $400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil $5.70, natural gas $3-4.)

4. How much uranium is there in seawater?

   Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium, so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium. All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.

5. However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.

6. Cohen calculates that we could take 16,000 tonne per year of uranium from seawater, which would supply 25 times the world's present electricity usage and twice the world's present total energy consumption. He argues that given the geological cycles of erosion, subduction and uplift, the supply would last for 5 billion years with a withdrawal rate of 6,500 tonne per year. The crust contains 6.5x10^13 tonne of uranium.
7. He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource.

Comments:

• Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his postulated 5 billion years.
• He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium.
• He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet. He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.

It makes me physically ill to realize that Socialist France dictated national copyright policy to the land of the free and the home of the brave; the leaders of the land (when I was 5 years old, in 1978) did nothing to prevent it, and the current representatives are moving to strengthen the poorly-crafted dictates of earlier misguided legislators.

If you're interested in knowing what really happened to fair use in the USA and form an intelligent opinion regarding the legality of these technological measures to discourage fair use, I strongly recommend you consult some resources linked from http://fairuse.stanford.edu, particularly A History of Copyright in the U.S..

Matt Barnson

You can get a minimal 3-piece keyboard called the Ergo-Flex from the Comfort Keyboard company. Then you can arrange it however you like, even on the arms of your chair, like this fellow.

Memories can be hazy. You mean this little graph over here? Oh wait, that's solar activity vs climate. Oopsie. Excellent correlation too. Chris

The search for a coherent, predictable interpretation applicable to all cases remains elusive. This is so particularly because any common law interpretation proceeds on a case-by-case basis.

Although the Kinkos case is NOTHING like the current case, the court did provide valuable insight relevant here:

While financial gain "will not preclude [the] use from being a fair use," New York Times Co. v. Roxbury Data Interface, Inc., 434 F. Supp. 217, 221 (D.N.J. 1977), consideration of the commercial use is an important one.

So I stand by my claim that it remains arguable about whether or not this is fair use. Simply saying "they did it for a profit", while not helpful to the defendant, is not enough to shut down a fair use defense.

Darn here-one-minute, gone-the-next search page.

Bloody leaches.

From his website:

A note on email versus e-mail

Newly coined nonce words are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)

While we're at it, the LGM grad student's name was Jocelyn Bell, now added Burnell, and here's her homepage.

http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/VideoB ackup.html

You only run what you are interested in. For example, if you wish to help find (and believe in) alien life, you run SETI@home. If you want to find cool new protein structures, you run Folding@home to help the proteomics researchers. It is simple as that. As with everything in this world, use common sense. After all, we're talking about a cool way of doing things, not about how it will change every man, woman and child's life! Because it probably won't.

Will we get money from it? No.

Will we get our names in the publication? No.

Will we feel good for donating our otherwise wasted CPU cycles to science? Yes!

SLab is an excellent multitrack recorder/mixer. It is not up to snuff with ProTools yet (though no program is on any platform).

Other Linux audio related links include (sorry if some links are bad, I haven't updated this list in awhile):

Multitrack audio recording/mixing:
Ardour
Slab
Snd

Midi Sequencing:
Jazz++
Rosegarden
Brahms (I THINK this is a sequencer)

Sound editing / effects processing:
MixViews
ecasound

Audio creation (synth emulators):
Ultramaster RS-101 and Juno6 CSound
Cecilia (requires Csound)

Notation:
Lilypond
Rosegarden
Mup

Awesome pages with links to everything you wanted to know about Linux audio:
Applications for Open Sound System
Sound and MIDI software for Linux

Here's an excerpt:

There's a fairly major controversy with TrueType right now, that there a number of patents that are owned now by Apple. It's kind of interesting to me that that is the case even though it's for the most part derivative work of what was in Metafont.

I've been very unhappy with the way patents are handled. But the more I look at it, the more I decide that it's a waste of time. I mean, my life is too short to fight with that, so I've just been staying away. But I know that the ideas for rendering... The main thing is that TrueType uses only quadratic splines, and that Type1 fonts use cubic splines, which allow you to get by with a lot fewer points where you have to specify things.

The quadratic has the great advantage that there's a real cheap way to render them. You can make hardware to draw a quadratic spline lickety-split. It's all Greek mathematics, the conic sections. You can describe a quadratic spline by a quadratic equation (x, y) so that the value of f(x, y) is positive on one side of the curve and negative on the other side. And then you can just follow along pixel by pixel, and when x changes by one and y changes by one, you can see which way to move to draw the curve in the optimal way. And the mathematics is really simple for a quadratic. The corresponding thing for a cubic is six times as complicated, and it has extra very strange effects in it because cubic curves can have cusps in them that are hidden. They can have places where the function will be plus on both sides of the cubic, instead of plus on one side and minus on the other.

The algorithm that's like the quadratic one, but for cubics, turns out that you can be in something that looks like a very innocuous curve, but mathematically you're passing a singular point. That's sort of like a dividing by zero even though it doesn't look like there's any reason to do so. The bottom line is that the quadratic curves that TrueType uses allow extremely fast hardware implementations, in parallel.

Stallman also highlights the term "copy protection". "The word 'protection' ... tries to disguise obstructionism and rampant power as an attempt to keep a program or book or song safe from harm. It is a propaganda word."

Exactly. Just like the Nazi Exhibition of Degenerate Art in Germany.

Using words to create associations is a powerful and seductive form of lying, because it is often too subtle to be noticed by the listener. The word "protection" can activate a person's needs for security, which is a very primitive and base need, which operates prior to any rational thought.

This is most worrying (to me), as it moves IT debate away from rational arguments about function and specification, and into the realms of pre-rational belief, tribalism, herd mentality, fear, etc.

These subtle tricks can be exposed by asking; exactly WHO is being protected from WHAT? Under WHICH conditions?

To which a VALID answer might be: The existing large music distribution companies are protecting their current level of control of the existing distribution media.

ie. it has nothing to do with protecting the existing buyer of music media from any sort of 'danger' -- "Oh boy, I'm in danger of paying less for music... I'm really scared"

No. The internet is a new digital distribution medium. The knowledge producers, like scientists and artists, can ensure the survivability of information by storing it digitally and maintaining copies. Let us not forget that we have a problem with the deterioration of paper records:

"Within the last year, an increasing amount of publicity has been given to the fact that we are facing the loss of an enormous part of our historical, cultural, and scientific record because of the self-destruction of the acidic papers on which books and other publications have been printed since the mid-lath century.

Digital media can be used to great benefit exacltly because it can be copied.

But some power groups wish to "disable" this very feature intrinsic to it's nature.

Content 'protection'? More like knowledge destruction.

This chapter will self erase in 60 minutes...

Won'tcha give us a hand guvner?

BTW: I don't recommend the Windows screen saver on Win9x, too unstable. Run or schedule the console version (it runs at low priority, even on Win98), and manually stop/re-start it when you do something that needs more of your CPU.

BBTW: No firewall support yet. They're working on it.

PS: All patriotic Canucks, join us!

Won'tcha give us a hand guvner?

BTW: I don't recommend the Windows screen saver on Win9x, too unstable. Run or schedule the console version (it runs at low priority, even on Win98), and manually stop/re-start it when you do something that needs more of your CPU.

BBTW: No firewall support yet. They're working on it.

PS: All patriotic Canucks, join us!

AFAICT this article is wholly correct, point by point, and entirely the right response to the alarmism it counters. Plaudits to the author.

I said this last time, but it may be worth emphasising again: we do have other tools that can address this, tools that allow both client and server to authenticate each other without the user having to remember any more than their passphrase. These tools are called "strong password protocols". The best known is SRP, but others exist or are in development, including B-SPEKE and AMP, and while they are already efficient and seem damn secure work is proceeding to make them even faster and give us better guarantees of security.

Where one end can't carry around good strong information for authentication, like a user logging onto a previously untrusted computer knowing only a passphrase, strong password authentication is the appropriate solution.
--

That's great, but this thread was talking about Folding@Home. They're not so friendly to Macs.

One problem with Seti is that you only get a couple days to turn in a completed unit before they give up on you and send the same unit to someone else. So if your machine is only idle for an hour or so a day, the work is wasted.

http://foldingathome.stanford.edu/

Try running the folding@home client instead. That project produces actual, useful scientific results about protein folding. SETI is just an inefficient search through a million billion haystacks for a needle that probably is not there.

SETI at home hasn't officially found anything yet. What they mean by that is that they haven't found something that repeatably looks like a signal.

This doesn't mean that we're alone in the universe, for four reasons:

1. They're only looking at a frequency band where we would expect to fnd a signal if someone were deliberately trying to contact us. If someone were sending out beacons in random directions, then the signal wouldn't be straightforwardly repeatable. So, they'd have to know we were here. RF signals have only been transmitted from Earth for 100 years or so, and the vast majority of the energy in the last 50 years. So, only nearby civilizations (distance <= 50 LY) could know about us and be sending these signals.
2. The Arecibo antenna is actually a volcanic caldera, and can only sees a certain band of the celestial sphere, so there could be nearby civilizations transmitting, and SETI @ Home would miss them.
3. You can make a case that any civilzation capable of contacting us would almost certainly be far more advanced than we are. Given the way communications bandwidth is gobbled up by our relatively primitive culture, they'd probably be using all sorts of sophisticated spread-spectrum technology and a wide part of the electromagnetic spectrum that would make it very tricky for us to intercept and recognize messages not intended for us, even if we were lucky with the geometry.
4. The SETI@Home people are real scientists, and they kow that they need rock-solid evidence if they're going to claim they found a signal. So, they are bending over backwards - as they should - to find alternative explanations when they do see something anomalous.

The best thing about SETI at home is that it shows that you can harness vast amounts of computing power for a good cause with modest cost. Folding @ Home will hopefully get comparable attention.

Simulate protein folding with your spare CPU cycles. It's a good cause, knowledge of how proteins fold helps determine the root cause of some genetic disease and can help researchers design better drugs.

Folding@Home

Granted, their screen saver kinda sucks, and there is no way to run the client without the screen saver, but I like the fact that I am contributing to a worthwhile cause.

Strong password protocols are the Correct Answer to this problem. If one party (the client) can't carry around the keys needed for strong authentication of both parties, if all you can carry is a password in your head, then strong password protocols like SRP, B-SPEKE, and some others on their way (AMP) are the correct route to strong security. The most effective attack known on these protocols is

1. Decide which end you want to spoof - client or server
2. Choose a guess at the password
3. Do a protocol run.
3a. If you're pretending to be the client, try and log on using the password you've guessed.
3b. If you're pretending to be the server, somehow persuade the client to try and log onto you thinking you're the real server.
4a. If you guessed the password correctly, congratulations! You've successfully spoofed your way in.
4b. If you did not guess the password correctly, you lose! And you have learned *nothing* except that your guess was wrong.
5. If you want to have another guess, you'll have to return to step 1 and persuade the other end to play with you again. They may tire of this game before you do.

(Caveat. Password files have to be kept secret for this: compromise that and you can spoof the client into thinking your the server, while running a dictionary search against them on your supercomputers. Guard password files)

Strong password protocols are Right and Good and should be used everywhere that stronger authentication is not available. Remember to use key stretching on your passwords too.
--

I don't think you can plausibly apply the interlock protocol to SSH. When I log into a server, I expect a conversation in which each side reads the message from the other before generating their own messages. If that's the fundamental top-level conversation, any attempt to impose an interlock underneath that, unbeknownst to the communicating parties, can be spoofed.

Interlock only works if the actual communicating parties know they're interlocking. No attempt at automated interlock is going to work, because the MITM can separately spoof two separate interlocked conversations.

No, the correct answer is strong password protocols like SRP and B-SPEKE, as another poster has already observed ("Encrypted Key Exchange").
--

This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface. "

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

-- Prior art, anyone?

BT's patent is frivolous at best, what a lousy thing to try to do. This is akin to claiming the patent for steering wheels 100+ years after the automobile was invented. Hogwash! I lose more respect for patent attorneys every day.

But do check out Doug Engelbart's demo. Notice the functionality of the ancient technology used - instead of a bitmapped display, the whole screen you see is generated on a vector CRT (Asteroids!!), photographed in a box by a TV camera and then sent as a negative image to the operator's CRT (a TV, really.) This also allowed for the 'picture in picture' effect with the split screen, half showing the text display (notice the mouse cursor), the other half showing a remote TV image of the operator of the other console.

Other amazingly well thought out stuff is shown in this demo, including embedded hyperlinks and inlined illustrations, as well as a modern-looking file browser and a powerful hierarchical annotation system.

An excellent case for the irreducibility of visual and spatial
intuitions to linguistic ones is made by John Etchemendy in his paper
"Computers, visualisation and the nature of reasoning" (PDF file).
John Etchemendy is a smart chap, a formal logician working at the
Stanford CSLI, and a close colleague of the late Jon Barwise.

This is Cheshire's ATM Paradox
ATM's big feature is guaranteed quality of service. When you set up a TCP/IP connection, the Internet does not reserve network bandwidth for you to guarantee that your data will not suffer network congestion or loss. ATM does offer guaranteed reserved bandwidth. This is its big advantage.

Or is it? If you reserve bandwidth for one user, then you have to refuse to let anyone else use that bandwidth. Everyone always talks about reservations in the context that you are the one who gets the bandwidth and it is everyone who is refused. What about when you are the one being refused? Reservations suddenly doesn't seem so wonderful any more, do they? The only way to make sure no one is refused service is to engineer your network so that you have enough bandwidth for everyone -- but if you have enough for everyone then why do they have to keep making reservations? That's the ATM paradox.

This is a subset of Cheshire's law of NetworkDynamics

This is Cheshire's ATM Paradox
ATM's big feature is guaranteed quality of service. When you set up a TCP/IP connection, the Internet does not reserve network bandwidth for you to guarantee that your data will not suffer network congestion or loss. ATM does offer guaranteed reserved bandwidth. This is its big advantage.

Or is it? If you reserve bandwidth for one user, then you have to refuse to let anyone else use that bandwidth. Everyone always talks about reservations in the context that you are the one who gets the bandwidth and it is everyone who is refused. What about when you are the one being refused? Reservations suddenly doesn't seem so wonderful any more, do they? The only way to make sure no one is refused service is to engineer your network so that you have enough bandwidth for everyone -- but if you have enough for everyone then why do they have to keep making reservations? That's the ATM paradox.

This is a subset of Cheshire's law of NetworkDynamics

note the lack of the hyphen--Don Knuth has a good linguistic analysis of why email is hyphenless somewhere on his site

A note on email versus e-mail

Newly coined nonce words are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)

--

Seriously, Royal Dutch/Shell have a shitty envirinmental record, and some rather questionable dealings with the gov't of Nigeria. Off topic? Maybe, but quite relevant on a larger scale.

Yes you are confused. I must admit that when I first read part 1 of this topic that I interpreted "end to end" the same way. But that's not what it means. Details can be found here.

The only reson they want low jitter is to send faxes. That's right VOIP's tight parameters are there so fax machines don't get confused bytheir warbles being digitised agin. Makes you proud to be in networking, doesn't it.
QoS is bogus because of Cheshire's Law - for every network service there is a corresponding disservice.
Nothing in networking comes for free, which is a fact many people seem to forget. Any time a network technology offers "guaranteed reliability" and other similar properties, you should ask what it is going to cost you, because it is going to cost you. It may cost you in terms of money, in terms of lower throughput (bandwidth), or in terms of higher delay, but one way or another it is going to cost you something. Nothing comes for free.

Must be a Stanford MBA...

This page: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.ht ml seems to disagree with you on that count. It's buried pretty deep, so here it is: "If you do succeed in finding a previously undiscovered bug in the programs for either TeX or METAFONT, I shall gladly pay you a reward of $327.68." As I recall, this was originally supposed to double every year - I don't recall where it was the last time I saw him make that claim, so I can't say whether it continues to do so.

T.Hobbes:
...global warming concerns energy generation, and there's no technical solution today which might solve the problem...
The technical solution has been well in hand for decades in the form of nuclear fission.

The solution, as far as I'm concerned, is in nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion, if it is developed, will with high certainty be significantly more expensive than fission. This creates its own environmental problems.

[Fusion is] the only power source which has little to no environmental impact...
There are no known power sources with zero environmental impact so it can't have "little to no environmental impact". It also can't be the "only power source which has little" environmental impact since the consensus of energy scientists including solar power researchers is that fission is one such power source.

...and because [fusion] can produce such large amounts of electricity...
What? There are power sources that don't produce large amounts of electricity? A fusion power plant is just another steam or gas turbine power plant. A fusion power plant will produce the same amount of electricity as any other steam or gas turbine. The limits are in how hot your design and your metals and your bearings and your lubricants will let you get your steam or gas, how efficient and how big and how many turbines you have, and how much water you have access to to condense your steam or gas; not how dense your heat source is.

More on fission by John McCarthy, the inventor of the LISP programming language.

Okay, here's my rant: I HATE PLATFORM-DEPENDENT APPS!!!!!!!!! AGH!!!

The first thing the GNOME and KDE clowns do is start developing an office suite from scratch. The Mozilla clowns, realizing they have to be cross platform, essentially develop a new platform, in the form of XUL.

Sure, develop an ICQ client for one platform. (Of course, it won't be complete until it reads email.) If you're developing anything worth a damn, don't depend on any one platform. Don't know how to write a (Win|Mac|CDE|KDE) app.? Fine, but please separate the user interface from the rest of the app. so that someone who knows and cares can.

The point is, an app. (proprietary or free) is nothing without users. Targeting one platform alienates the users of all the other platforms. Foo 3.2 for the Amiga looks pretty quaint right now. In five years, Bar 2.1 for GNOME will probably look just as quaint. People have criticized Donald Knuth for using an imaginary assembly language to illustrate the algorithms in The Art of Computer Programming . Why not FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C++, or Java? The question almost answers itself: "New algebraic languages go in and out of fashion every five years or so, while I am trying to emphasize concepts that are timeless."