Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: ICANN, OLPC, Agile, Yahoo, BayStar
Spamhaus case tests ICANN. narramissic writes, "The U.S. court decision against the anti-spam black-lister Spamhaus Project Ltd. may trigger a 'constitutional crisis' for the Internet, say Internet experts. At issue is whether the U.S. court has jurisdiction over the U.K.-based project. Observers worry that any attempt by U.S. courts to exert control over ICANN could be bad for the Internet. 'It's a delicate time for ICANN right now,' said David McGuire, director of communications with the Center for Democracy and Technology... 'If a court were to order ICANN to remove a domain name, we think that would be a bad precedent because making ICANN a tool of the U.S. legal system in matters such as these would sidetrack ICANN from its very important duties.'"
Time is running out for OLPC sign-up. smilindog2000 writes, "Mike Liveright made news when he pledged, 'I will purchase the $100 laptop at $300 but only if 100,000 others will too.' The deadline for his challenge is October 31, and so far, only 3,330 of us have signed up. Surely, thousands of us Slashdotters would contribute $300 out of generosity. However, I'll do it for the rare privilege of owning an original edition One Laptop Per Child machine. Do other Slashdotters want one of these beasties as badly as me? My inner child has fallen in love."
More Agile commentary from Yegge. tmortn writes, "A couple of weeks ago Steve Yegge posted a harsh critique of Agile Methodologies that enjoyed a pretty spirited debate here on Slashdot and a few other sites. Recently he posted a followup to the mounds of return fire to his rant against Agile methodologies."
Yahoo's time capsule permit revoked by Mexico. prostoalex writes, "Yahoo's time capsule project has been jeopardized by the Mexican government, who revoked the permit given to Yahoo! previously. 'We did have the permit, but Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) told us Monday night that it could not be done,' Manuel Mazzanti, head of marketing at Yahoo Mexico, said on Wednesday. An INAH spokesman said the Yahoo event posed technical and operational problems that might damage Teotihuacan. 'We are the guardians of the heritage of Mexico,' the spokesman said."
Microsoft denies BayStar connection. walterbyrd writes to point out an InfoWorld article reporting that Microsoft has denied any financial connection to BayStar, the company that bankrolled SCO's anti-open source lawsuit.
If you all have too much money - I'll sell you my $16,000 Saturn for $42,000.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Yes, but you have to use the remaining money to purchase 2 cars for people in 3rd world countries. (just completing the analogy)
I wouldn't pay $300 for the CM1 (I don't have that much disposable income), but it's interesting to at least see how many people would.. For this kind of deal (buy one for you, X for the starving children in Uganda) to work massively, we need to figure out what we can do in the 'real world' with the machine. Sure, I'd get one just because it's cool, as soon as I can afford it ($200 would be all right), but what could a 'real person' do with it, say in a office, sitting next to the desktop computer?
Since OLPC is doing their best to prevent anyone from answering this question, it's up to the ~3000 'early adopters' to figure it out.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
After all, a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on.
We need to be able to purchase OLPC in the US. $200 would not be too bad with the balance being used for R&D. I signed the pledge, but doubted he would get the number of sigs.
I would love to see the OLPC adopted by my states Virginia and Florida. However, both are currently red states and pretend to have enough money for expensive computer projects running almost exclusively on Windows.
Yahoo has no respect for anything, they are purvayors of spam and trashy advertyising (too many pr0nbots in chatrooms to sneak in under the radar so yahoo either controls/owns them or is payed off to allow them), thats all we need is for extraterrestrials getting the first impressions of earthlings from the likes of a trashy cyber ghetto named Yahoo...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Yeah, who'd want something useful and cheap, eh? I bet you hate folks importing games too, you loopy mushroom, you.
There is an urban legend that ICANN has something to do with keeping the internet running.
That's not true. ICANN imposes business, economic, and legal policies (largely trademark friendly ones) onto the net, but ICANN does very little that has any contact with the actual ability of DNS servers to transform DNS query packets into DNS reply packets.
If ICANN were to vanish in a poof of green (money colored) smoke, it would be hard to say whether anybody except the trademark lawyers would notice.
On the other hand, a lot of people do believe that ICANN is some sort of FEMA protecting the upper tier of DNS from some kind of internet Katrina. ICANN has abrogated any such protective duties.
Come to think of it, yes, ICANN is the FEMA of the internet - and just like FEMA it will let us down when things technically wobble.
play quake1? im sure the starving children in zimbabgeria would just love to frag one another.... send it off with some good old Q1 and an older copy of Gamespy...
In some ways, I'd consider MS's actions WRT Baystar even worse than just bankrolling the investment -- They convinced Baystar that they'd be backing up the investment then, once baystar committed their money, MS goes -- Oops! just kidding you. We really can't cover your back for you!.
It should also be noted that the same consultant who charged SCO for arranging the Baystar 'investment' also took a similar cut for MS's supposed license buy and for the same reason -- that it was an infusion of cash (as oppopsed to a legitimate license upgrade).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
When I read blog entries like Yegge's I keep hoping to find good, solid criticism instead of a bunch of disjointed fallacies. "Agile" wasn't even defined, and when he talked about processes that do work, he specifically mentioned "lightweight". Well, guess what the main point of so-called "Agile" methodologies is? Being lightweight.
This entry seems to boil down to "Agile hasn't been scientifically proven to be superior, so it's not." That's not very good reasoning; in the absence of any process being scientifically proven to be superior, experience is the next best thing, and it seems pretty obvious that the central Agile themes of "don't do this too much" and "don't do that too much" are pretty good advice. (What constitutes "too much", according to what I've read, depends on your situation.)
I don't advocate a specific Agile methodology, but I do prefer lightweight processes, short time scales and "best practices", which seems to put me on the agile side of the fence. If there's something wrong with a specific agile methodology, or with all agile methodologies, I want to know about it so that I can avoid it.
The comment from Yegge's first blog entry about agile programming that I most hoped he would respond to said this: "What specific parts of the Agile Manifesto do you disagree with?"
If an American one is "bad", can anyone name a better one?
A European country's? Where denying Holocaust and/or Turkey's genocide of Armenians is illegal? Chinese? Nigerian?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It isn't just that people mistake correlation for causation. It isn't just that the odds say that some people will succeed when trying a new thing and therefore get convinced that the new thing is better.
:-)
The bigger problem is the Hawthorne effect - if a group of people knows that their performance is being studied as part of an experiment, there is a temporary lift in performance. The result is that when you try any new methodology out, you're likely to have a success with your pilot group regardless of the merits of the methodology being tested. This compounds the whole mistaking correlation for causation thing.
In another random note, my favorite "correlation isn't causation" is the observation that among schoolchildren, height and spelling ability are strongly correlated. Tall children spell better. The effect is very easy to demonstrate.
But don't draw any conclusions from this about tall people being better spellers. The real explanation is that taller children tend to be older, and older children tend to spell better than young ones.
You are quite wrong.
Back in 1999 I spent quite some time doing work at ICANN's office in Marina Del Ray. At lunch, I'd sit next to the computer that hosted the Authoritative Root (A Root). At the time, it was the only one.
The A Root was where your DNS would go to find out where to get the listing for any other top level domains. I can't tell you how badly I wanted to stick one of my 0wned by CdC (Cult of Dead Cow) stickers on it. I figured that would get me kicked out, and in a lot of trouble, so I never did it even though I had a few in my briefcase. Even used to read 2600 magazine when I went out to lunch.
So, ICANN does have a fair amount of control in these matters. They hold the key to where you go for your tld info.
Thank you for clicking "See Context".
If you're looking at the "troll" moderation, please look up Mr. Auerbach and notice that he was on the board of ICANN. Definitely knows whereof he speaks.
It's kind of amusing that the Mexican institute is so up in arms when it put in a lights for a laser-light show on the large pyramid at Chichen Itza.
-l
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Condescension sucks: Why does the OLPC need a special user interface ("Sugar")? Designing down to kids is a recipe for crap, as well as a refuge for the incompetent. Remember Logo? Well the guy behind Logo, Seymour Papert, is part of this project.
Dogfood gap:Torvalds uses Linux. Gates uses Windows. Jobs uses MacOS. Is Negroponte going to use the OLPC? Of course he'll play with one, but for real work - no way.
From the FAQ:
Why? Why do they need "the newest technology"? And if they do, shouldn't we admit that the newest technology is a Windows PC, not some oddball "educational computer"? The 400MHz CPU and 128M RAM are not in line with the newest technology.
Again, from the FAQ: So you're going to manufacture and handle the OLPC in less than one hour? Or maybe 100 million is the wrong number to start with. The question should be, which is more expensive, making an OLPC or refurbishing a normal computer.
Looks like the tech version of "Live Aid".
What do you CDC stickers and reading of 2600 have to do with ICANN and their usefulness?
I only need the Preview button when I haven't used the Preview button.
Denying any financial connection is not the same as denying any connection at all.
Indeed, it appears to have been filed under the Developers section.
That sounds like a pretty clearcut denial of the allegation that was made against them on slashdot the other day to me.
Did you actually read the entire statement that microsoft put out before accusing them of using "weasel words" or just that one quote from the article that was linked? (I suspect that you did not, but if you did I would be interested in seeing the full statement myself) If you only read that one quote and used it for the basis of your claim that they are sneaking away from saying something you arent really being very fair.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Wasn't that yesterday, or the day before?
No, it is not a clear cut denial. If the accusation had been that MS paid Baystar $50 million to give to SCO, then their statement would be a clear cut denial. The accusation is that some MS exec had talks with Baystar about guaranteess for Baystar's investment in SCO etc..
Let us see how far you are willing to spin this.
I have no idea where you get the OLPC is "designing down to kids." Maybe it is for children who grow up with iPods, XBoxen, broadband Internet access and plasma TVs. Keep in mind who this product is being designed for though. (Hint: It isn't the kids at Beverly Hills High.) Most of the target audience doesn't even have reliable electrical utility service -- hence the hand-crank to generate power -- let alone access to all of the high-tech resources and modern conveniences that you and I take for granted.
I do remember Logo! My first exposure to it was in the second grade. We actually had a real "turtle," wired to a computer, that would move around on the floor and draw out our programs (after testing them on the computer, of course). Logo taught me a lot about the geometric principles of distance and direction half a decade before they got around to teaching it in school.
My second exposure to Logo was in the seventh grade. Only the on-screen turtle this time around, but now I was exploring complex trigonometric relationships three years before I would actually take a trigonometry course. I also programmed a simplistic question-and-response interface to draw complex objects based on user input. The latter project certainly illustrated the relative limitations of Logo as a programming language, but I was really more interested in the geometric features anyway.
Crap on Logo if you want, but it is an excellent entry-level programming language for young people.
Good! Then there's a chance that these things will actually be usable by the users for which they're intended. I suppose we could hand them laptops with CLI Debian and say "go for it," but what use is that? Most of these kids can barely read -- one of the forces driving this projet is that there is a critical shortage of qualified teachers in these un(der)developed areas, hence the OLPC needs to be a surrogate teacher. Think more "Sesame Street," with Count von Count counting to eight ('cause that's how many fingers he has! And look! There's Big Bird! Isn't learning fun?), and less differential equations in calculus (extremely powerful stuff to be sure, but also totally overwelming for someone who is just learning how to add integers).
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
That's the problem. It is actually a same case like in "Mozilla VS Debian". They should do sacrifices (approve patches) too for a permission to conduct a Super-Ultimate Lazer Lightshow (use firefox brand).
And we expected them to admit it? Come on..
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Well, it's hard to believe you.
For one thing, the A root server isn't at ICANN, it's at Verisign, in Virginia.
Secondly, the L root server, which is claimined by ICANN is actually part of IANA and is one server out of about 130 root servers, so it's hardly singularly important.
And the L root server itself is not in Marina del Rey.
Crooked politicians and businessmen are very aware of the concept of deniability. It's the art of structuring a deal so that if it blows up in your face you can deny that it ever existed, without flat-out lying.
As Mr. Goldfarb of Baystar has declared under oath, Microsoft did encourage them to do this, and implied that they would cover the loss, if there was one, but would (of course) not sign a paper. Mr. Goldfarb, fairly reasonably, interpreted that as they didn't want a paper trail, but when the *** hit the fan, Microsoft instead renegged on the whole thing, leaving Baystar with a $37 million dollar tab.
This, if anything, should be a lesson to anyone else who is willing to let Microsoft use them as a sock puppet. It's also worth noting that Mr. Goldfarb produced his declaration voluntarily. Hell hath no fury...
The fact no country's leagal system is perfect doesn't mean we have to accept the US as the world's supreme court. The US has demonstrated numerous times that it cares very little about people in other countries other than its own interest. Afghanistan, Iraq and Kyoto Protocol are just recent examples.
Some might say that's what the adminstrative branch has done. According to the US Constitution, jurisdiction is an independent branch. True, but only to the extent that the president allows it. Guantanamo Detainees, anyone?
People who dislike China tend to mention Tiananmen Square a lot, but they always forget the Tank Man is also a Chinese.
In unrelated news, Microsoft claims, "I did not have sex with that woman"; then proceeded to attempt to verify the definition of "that".