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Bob Metcalfe on Open Source, IPv6, IETF
prostoalex writes "The inventor of Ethernet Bob Metcalfe is interviewed by AlwaysOn on current issues. Metcalfe is known for challenging commonly accepted wisdom and this time he's quite confrontational. On open source and operating systems: "If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?" On IPv6 adoption and IETF: "Back when you attended the IETF, you all looked down your noses at the ITU (or I guess it was called CCITT at the time)--the entrenched, corporately manipulated, corrupt, competent standards being embodied in IT. We were the IETF--the swashbuckling, institution-oriented, open people, the rebels. That's changed now. The Internet has arrived, and all of those people are now just like ITU: IETF has become the ITU.""
Everybody complains about Linux and Window and all the other operaitng systems about being old an obsolete but I see only a few putting effort in building new operating systems like what Slate can become (in the long term) or what Movitz is aiming.
Pupeno
Mac OS X has one foot in the past (FreeBSD) and one foot in the future (Mach). Between the two of them, OS X is a bit more futuristic than its competitors. However, a machine that died before its time was the Symbolics LISP machines. I've never had the opportunity to use one, but my understanding of these machines is that they never needed any of the "modern" processor or software concepts we use today, because the underlying software system (LISP) was incapable of creating the types of memory corruption we try to prevent even today. And if a program blew up, you could actually modify its memory image on the fly and continue its execution.
:-/
On top of everything, the hardware architecture was much faster than contemporary computers due to its LISP oriented design. Apparently, a good portion of the LISP language was able to execute directly in the hardware!
At least, that's how I understood it. Sadly, it didn't get much attention outside of academia.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
AMEN!
As someone who has recent scars (SPF, MARID) from dealing with the IETF, it is clear to me that they are no longer an engineering organization, but rather a highly political one. No longer is there much concern about adopting patent encumbered technology into key Internet protocols (MS SenderID) like they used to object to things like the RSA patents.
Instead, the IESG is actively working to push through this patented technology by shutting down the MARID WG so that they can advance the SenderID proposal without any public review. More over, the IESG has declared that it is ok for the SenderID spec to re-use SPF records in incompatible ways, that the SPF RFC must be held back until MS is ready ("to be fair to MS"), and the IESG is going to ignore the last 1.5 years of SPF deployment experience and start fresh with collecting data since MS has only recently started doing SenderID checking (again "to be fair to MS").
The IETF needs to take the "E" out of their name and become the Internet Political Task Force.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
MECC wrote:
I guess that would be Darwin.
You do realize that Mach is 1980s technology, correct? Even stuff like today's Cocoa was mostly developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While Mac OS X is a fantastic system, it is hardly "futuristic", as you incorrectly claim.
The thing with Mac OS X is that it does not have the cruft of other systems. Hardware wise, Apple is willing to force their consumers to eliminate the old (ie. floppy drives) and to proceed with the more modern (ie. FireWire). But the more modern technology is hardly futuristic. Mac OS X is still solidly based on software technology that is at least 15 to 20 years old, it not more.
Don't confuse "modern" with "futuristic". You'll never find "futuristic" items available for sale today.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
This is the second part of a four-part conversation between AlwaysOn editor-in-chief Tony Perkins, managing editor Rich Seidner, and Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and former CEO of 3Com who's now a general partner at Polaris Ventures. In Part 1, Mr. Metcalfe talks about the next big thing for the Internet (video); in Part 3, he tells the story behind Metcalfe's Law; and in Part 4 he tackles the blogosphere.
Internet Security and the Threshold of Pain
How bad do things need to get for organizations to be willing to switch to IPv6? Very, says Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, who nonetheless believes that the time has come.
Bob Metcalfe [Polaris Ventures] | POSTED: 07.18.05 @08:20
AlwaysOn: I want to talk about open source. Our view is that open source is a metaphor for a lot of things. And it's all because Metcalfe's Law is finally coming into full bloom--because everything's on the network. Community is becoming really important, and people are sharing and uploading everything from photographs to blog posts. What are your thoughts in this area?
Bob Metcalfe: I'd like to point out that two major pieces of infrastructure were left out of the Internet when it was being built--largely because it was built by graduate students (and people like graduate students). They left out security and economics. So we have the spam problem (which can be traced directly to the lack of concern for security), and we have IP rules that are in flux because the Internet doesn't have the right tools for monetizing various activities. So we're busily trying to put security and economics into the Internet.
This is a little bit counter to the open-source mentality. You have to be careful, however, because open source isn't one group. There are a bunch of different, contending open-source groups. For example, the free-software people shouldn't be confused with everybody else in open source.
I think the problem with open source is that it doesn't quite have its economics worked out. There need to be ways to own things. Private property is a great technology; it's probably one of the major tools the West has. By granting private property to people, you stimulate economic growth. And I think the same thing applies to software. So open source will have to figure out how to get monetized to protect property over time.
If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from? And will that OS come from the modern software corporation (of which Microsoft is the epitome), or will it spring out of some open-source initiative at some university somewhere? My bet is that the modern U.S. corporation--like Microsoft but not Microsoft in particular--is much more likely to come out with this new OS than a loosely coordinated band of volunteers in the open-source community.
AlwaysOn: Because?
Metcalfe: Because modern software corporations know how to align the interests of the people. They know how to motivate people. They know how to sustain themselves over a long period of time, whereas I'm suspicious about the motivational structure of an open-source community and wonder whether it's sustainable.
I'm thinking of investing in a company that sells software, and its competitors are open source. I've been speaking to the company's customers and asking them why they'd buy this software instead of just taking the open source. Their answer: 'We don't want to learn about the software, and we need it serviced and supported, so we're going to buy it from this company instead of taking it free from the open-source community.'
In that case, it's the motivation of customers. A little earlier I was talking about the motivation of employees:
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The *vast* majority of the software I use runs on at least 2 platforms, one of which is Windows. The exceptions are almost always Windows only.
Bob is talking about packets using faked source addresses.
/dev/null his logs on a continuing basis and both sides using encryption. As you said, this is not technical, but social.
These are useless for anything other than a (D)DoS attack. They are useless because a connection cannot be established and no data can travel.
It is easy to have personal anonymity, but still have the first upstream router check the source addresses to make sure they are legit. But it depends upon someone, somewhere being willing to
There is NO reason for the source address to not be confirmed by the upstream router.
There are LOTS of reasons for personal anonymity to be maintained. And we can have personal anonymity even if we confirm the source addresses of packets.
That's first one is a horribly designed website. But it's a pretty interesting idea; it'd certainly be a good idea for cities. Perhaps it could be run like the subway or other public transit systems currently are. I'd certainly like to see how a real public trial would work out.
And hey, there's an article.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
First NeXT is not dead. It morged with the MacOS when Apple acquired NeXt (or the other way around).
NeXT orignated from a fourth strand of UNIX (not ATT, not BSD, not Linux). Carnegie Mellon wrote a highly layered version of UNIX called the Mach microkernel. Conventional UNIX was sinking under weight of trying to do to much in the kernel.
" I'd hate to get into one of those cars after some bozo has barfed"
You don't need to. The Taxi2000 system has a reject button. Reject the car and a replacement arrives a few seconds later, the soiled one heads off to the depot for cleaning.
Deleted
It's worth remembering, however, that NeXT was standing on the shoulders of giants with BSD and Mach. And the concept of Services was derived from pipelines in the CLI.
There were a number of Object Oriented systems written on top of Lisp; because Lisp allowed such flexibility in the language.
.com name registered: symbolics.com. There is hope that someday all the thousands of man-hours of work on Genera will become unencumbered or re-released.
Genera, unless I'm mistaken, was based on Zetalisp (LispMachine Lisp) with an object system named "Flavors", a message-passing system with mix-ins loosely based on Smalltalk. The GUI was written with this system, and the GUI itself was interesting because its introspective abilities closely mirrored that of the underlying language. The elements of the GUI were all objects that could be manipulated, selected, inspected. Even graphical and text output on the screen could be categorized into classes and later manipulated as objects. This became the basis for CLIM (Common Lisp Interface Manager).
Unfortunately this style of GUI has fallen to the wayside in favor of the simpler but stupider Windows-style one. C and C++ do not have the flexibility that is required, in any case, for a dynamic GUI like that on the Lisp Machine. Look to Smalltalk, Squeak, Slate, or the reinvigorated CLIM projects (McCLIM, FreeCLIM) instead.
Symbolics made bad business decisions, indeed. They still do exist, and even have the oldest
Stallman helped popularize Emacs, along with the free software movement, which developed in parallel with the similar editors of the Lisp machines. The problem with Stallman is that he is incredibly stubborn (no kidding), and made mistakes early on that he was unwilling to fix. Hence FSF Emacs and even XEmacs is crippled as an editor, a language, and a platform, though people who only make simple use of it might not understand why.
It is just as well that Lisp languished in FSF, because it sprouted elsewhere in the open source community, with no philosophical encumbrances which don't necessarily make sense in a dynamic environment like a Lisp.
Over the last five years, I've seen quite a revival of Lisp. The regular programming crowd slowly accepts new ideas; they still insist on making the same mistakes that were already passed by Lisp programmers years ago. Ah well. My job is working on systems in Common Lisp, I am happy.
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
Likewise, there was BeOS and Next
While these were good, they hardly did anything in a new way. If you want an OS that tried doing novel things look at Plan 9. There's also EROS (which was a research project).
Though even Plan 9 still uses the same GUI (first demonstrated in 1968, and fully developed by Xerox PARC) as most other system, using a different protocol of course.
PDAs are (IMHO) a fairly novel UI, especisally from Palm: they were simply and fairly intuitive--allowing what needed to be done, and generally getting out of the way. The main issue was that the human user had to learn a new writing system.