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Mother of Internet Speaks Out

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-that's-a-big-baby dept.

Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that Radia Perlman, sometimes called the "Mother of the Internet" for her invention of the spanning tree algorithm used by bridges and switches, recently gave a very candid interview with NetworkWorld. From the interview: "The taste of whoever is in the funding agencies tends to cause everyone to look at the same stuff at the same time. Often technologies get hot then go away. There was active networking for a while, which always mystified me and has now died. In security the money is behind digital rights management, which I think ultimately is a bad thing -- not that we need to preserve the right to pirate music, but because the solutions are things that don't solve the real problems in terms of security."

9 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Government Take Over of Research by mulhollandj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I find it interesting that all real R&D is now done by the government. Professors get funding almost exclusively through DARPA, NSF, military branches, etc. It used to be research was done primarily by private industry. Where did we get the transistor from? But now industry R&D is really just product development because they don't fund things that will not be profitable in a few years. So perhaps that is why we are seeing things disappear. The new general/funder isn't interested and there is no quick turn around for the company.

    1. Re:Government Take Over of Research by corellon13 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "It used to be research was done primarily by private industry."

      I think it's safe to say that most research throughout history has always been driven by government and specificially the military. The vast majority of inventions and innovations come from the military and government. So, I'm not sure what you are basing this on, but I don't think that having government involvement in funding research is a new thing or a bad thing.

      --
      Do what is right and let the consequence follow
    2. Re:Government Take Over of Research by TrappedByMyself · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It used to be research was done primarily by private industry. Where did we get the transistor from?

      My first instinct in reading your post is that you don't know what you're talking about. I think since WWII, the government, and specifically military has always been a big funder of academic and industry research.
      So... I decided to take 2 seconds and look up the history of the transitor. Now I know its a stretch sometimes looking to Wikipedia, but from here I see

      "On 22 December 1947 William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain succeeded in building the first practical point-contact transistor at Bell Labs. This work followed from their war-time efforts to produce extremely pure germanium "crystal" mixer diodes, used in radar units as a frequency mixer element in microwave radar receivers."

      Seriously dude, I know blaming the government for everything is cool and all, but at least try.

      --

      Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
    3. Re:Government Take Over of Research by orielbean · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Remember, though - Bell Labs did a whole heck of a lot of that research because they had the monopoly on the govt. money. When the Bells got busted up, the Labs had to scale back a whole lot of that long-term research in favor of the short term investor-improving stuff that nobody really has a use for. Sometimes a monopoly isn't such a horrible thing. At least for long-term science & research.

  2. Wrong anchortext: Mother of Internet by RobotWisdom · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Of all the random phrases the Slashdot editors might have allowed as the primary anchortext for this article, "Mother of the Internet" is about the least valid.

    It's mindboggling to me how slowly this supposedly tech-savvy community is coming to terms with formulating a consistent, user-friendly policy about anchortext.

    If you use the name of the magazine, it implies you're going to the homepage of the magazine, not to the article itself, so don't do that. (And we don't need a link to that homepage at all-- it just confuses things.)

    My recommendation is to use a word like "article" or "interview" which describes the type of file you'll get when you click the link. This is consistent and predictable.

    There used to be a kneejerk dogma that the anchortext should stand alone as a description of the content, with the justification that link-extractors could rely on this... but nobody uses automatic link extractors anyway, so I think this theory has failed.

  3. Re:Why don't the DRM Nazis understand this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    www.seedler.com and www.gamecopyworld.com is your friends.

    first thing I do when buying any new game is go download a cracked ISO of it so I can burn the copies I need. I also gram the Keygen, the cracks and specifically the no-cd crack and build a companion CD for the game. I then burn my CD copy and put the real disc away in my media safe.

    Why do I do this?? so in 5 years I can take that game out and actually play it. Too many of these asshole programmers and publishers make their crap call-home-ware and game companies die faster than IBM hard drives so in order to play that which I rightfully own I have to violate the law.

    Yes you assholes, I OWN it, just like my movies and music. If you dont agree than stop advertising it that way.

    "OWN IT TODAY!" is on every ad. until they say "GET YOUR LIMITED AND REVOKABLE LICENSE TODAY!" I will take that as a statement that I OWN IT.

    It's a war out there. A war between users and content creators. and the creators will lose if they dont pull their heads out of their asses.

  4. Re:Why don't the DRM Nazis understand this by pubjames · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Any parent with small children will know the importance of making copies of their favourite CDs and DVDs etc, as small children find it hard to remember to be careful with stuff and they tend to scratch the hell out of them.

    So for parents at least, there are perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to copy DVDs.

  5. Radia Perlman's book of numbers by ortholattice · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Ah, Radia Perlman. I remember her at MIT in the 70s. She was nuts. She sold a self-published book (made from Xerox copies of a computer printout, folded in the middle and stapled) with a table of all the Roman numerals from 1 to 1000 or something, sorted in alphabetical order, to make them easier to look up. Another chapter had the numbers from 1 to 1000 spelled out in English and also sorted in alphabetical order. I guess I was nuts too, because I actually bought a copy which I probably still have around somewhere. I wonder if it is worth anything - is there a "nerd" section on eBay?

    Hi, Radia.

    1. Re:Radia Perlman's book of numbers by perlner · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The funniest thing is that although she wrote the alphabetization program, she still had to type in all the words by hand. Printing was very slow in that day, so she stayed up all night waiting for it to crunch out copies. The next day, she showed it to her professor, who pointed out that the word "fourty" should be "forty." So she pulled another all-nighter to get out the corrected version, seeing as the deadline was for selling it on April Fool's Day.