it's not culturally significant if it isn't permanent
I disagree. Cultural significance does not come from an entire culture having access to the moment. Entire cultures have been built on stories told from one generation to the next.
Burning Man is not limited to the one week a year we gather in Black Rock. There are several regional events popping up everywhere that happen throughout the year. Each one is unique and still a part of the larger BM culture of community and art. It is an entire culture built on the idea of temporary structures and places.
These temporary moments are passed around by those who experienced the art. It invigorates and encourages human interaction. IMO, that is worth just as much as being one of the faceless millions who have stared at a picture on a wall somewhere.
ok, there are several requirements for peering, and peering does not mean that people get transit.
for one, before you can exchange bgp routing information with another provider, you must goto a registry (ARIN for the US), and apply for an Autonomous System Number (ASN). there is a $500/yr. fee for this. you have to prove to ARIN that you deserve one of these numbers.
secondly, peering is when two networks get together and exchange their network routing information with each other, but only *their* network information.
for example, we have isps a, b, c, and d. a connects to b, b connects to c, and c connects to d. if b and c peer, c cannot get to a and b cannot get to d. if b buys transit from c, then b can get to d.
it all depends on what you allow the networks you exchange traffic with to see. peering just lets others terminate traffic on your network, but not through your network. transit is a customer service that allows a network to traverse your network to get to another.
therefore, this will have zero impact on spam levels as most spam houses do not qualify for peering. even if they do, they only get to pass traffic to uunet, not through uunet.
sigh, you obviously don't understand the argument, and you get moderated up to a 2? it's not the number of addresses. it's the number of routable networks, aggregation policies, and the increasing number of entities that are multi-homing and injecting long prefixes into the global routing table that are causing the problem. this is *not* a trivial problem, and lots of people much smarter than most everyone here have been working on this problem for a while. there is no simple obvious solution.
cleaner how? by defining a/48 as the smallest allocatable block (with the exception of a/64), they are taking us back to a classful world. we went through all of the pain and learned how to do cidr, and now we are just ignoring that. that's just plain wrong. there was much discussion at the last arin meeting to this effect.
while having classful space is nice for aggregating routes, it is precisely the reason we are "running out of" ip space today. many say that reclaiming old blocks is the way to go, but there are several legal roadblocks to this that arin can't afford.
we need cidr to allow for flexibility. we need to determine a better routing method, or just bite the bullet and get big routers with lots of ram and proc.
no, the 13bit tla field in the left 64bits of the ipv6 header are no longer used. they decided this was a bad idea when australia wanted to be a tla. for the curious, australia isn't large enough ip-wise to really justify the tla designation. the tla method was going to prove to be a political nightmare over the definition of what is required to be a tla.
3 years ago 32M of ram on a 4500M was enough to run full bgp. now you need a 7200vxr with 128M of ram to run full bgp. we are over 70k routes in the global table, and this trend will get worse now that providers are not filtering on the/20 boundary anymore.
ipv6 does nothing to solve this problem. the tla concept is gone from ipv6 once they realized that it was a very bad idea. actually, there are several provisions in the current proposal of ipv6 that are bad. the default allocation of a/48 is the worst part of the current proposal.
something has to give, but then again the router vendors claim that by the time that 128M isn't enough we'll have bigger faster routers. this is fine for uunet et al, but not so fine for small isps.
this is a hard problem with non-obvious solutions. perhaps what will end up happening is that we will acutally use the osi radial routing method. only time will tell.
a few words of advice with the first one being "STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM LEVEL3". whew. i haven't seen service this bad from a bell. all of their procedures are broken and misunderstood internally. cross-connects take a minimum of 14 business days. the sales people never call me back, and take forever to enter orders into the system. it's not like we are a one off customer either. we are in 15 of their us colocs with plans to go into the rest of their us sites as wells as several of their international sites. this plan is changing tho, and we are considering moving everything to worldcom. they may be a bit slow, but they get things done and don't pull new policies out of their ass.
at level3 the people in the gateway are pretty good on average, but the people up the chain from there are pretty much a waste of o2.
my experience with abovenet in san jose has been pretty good. they are helpful and fast. they are well connected and offer lots of service levels.
except that uf isn't about it workers. it's about low paid support techs for a small isp. i've been there, and i understand exactly what illiad is talking about. the fact that people don't like it doesn't bother me at all. a sense of humor is just that, a sense (to semi-quote dennis miller). if you don't like it, move on. if you like it, then quit trying to sway people with the glazed over zealot act.
i don't understand what the big deal is. it's just a nameserver, and it isn't very hard to run one. at the isp i used to work for, we ran nameservice for hundreds of domains on a 486 66, and it's still running at more than 700 days of uptime.
Certainly, in the next 100 years we will see the departure of Linus as head honcho. Alan will probably step down around the same time. I mean you can only do so much for so long. Do you think that Linux has a suitable leadership path concerning the kernel? If not, how might you solve the inheritance problem?
Now my fine feathered/.ers, I may have this completely wrong. The way I understand it is that these ad companies are using cookies to collect this information. Couldn't we just set our browser to manually accept cookies, and avoid this whole thing?
no, the parents have a very real responsibility to raise their children. i wonder if anyone will ever realize that children are smarter than we are. no matter what restrictions you place on them, they can find a way to subvert them. irresponsible restrictions lead to rebellion. for example, i was treated like a human being by my parents. i didn't drink, smoke, get into fights, or any of the things the "bad" kids did. that's because i never had a reason to. why should i when i could drink whenever i wanted to. things were not hidden from me, and i never fell into the "lord of the flies" theory.
Heavy Weather, private currencies, and stuff
on
Ask Bruce Sterling
·
· Score: 1
Bruce-
First off I loved _Schismatrix_ (all the crazy people like that one, right?:)
Second, in _Heavy Weather_, you described a global economy where the national currencies were weak in relation to private currencies backed by corporations and private banks. This idea struck me, and has stuck with me. I'm most facinated by the fact that I can see the beginning of that senario blossoming in reality with the introduction of the digital currencies. Where did you come up with this senario? I've heard from reliable sources that a certain cypherpunk inspired this back story.
Thirdly, I went to a birthday party of one of your cousins in Aug, and lemme tell you, your family is a hell of a lot of fun.
Fourth (and last), your article on Burning Man was great. I've met alot of people out there that attended after reading that. I think that you are one of the few writers that have actually been able to write a fair account, and almost relay the spirit of what happens out there. You should come out to the Austin regional event next spring.
I mean if people are willing to pay all sorts of money for paraphanalia (sp?) and food in containers adorned in Star Wars characters, then more power to George so he can make more good movies. I've read and heard of the restrictions placed on manufacturers, resellers, advertisers, and anyone else who wants to use or sell Star Wars related gimmicks and products. Of course there's hype to end all hype...we've been waiting for 20 years!!! Considering the anticipation, I'm surprised there isn't more advertising and gimmicks. The only one I've seen thus far is the taco bell, pizza hut, and kfc commercial. I've seen displays in bookstores to sell the books, and I even bought the soundtrack. I haven't listened yet because I want to hear it in the theater first. What's amazing is the lack of promotion and advertising. I haven't seen a tv commercial for it yet, but every other major movie does. why not? Because it doesn't need it. Everyone knows, and everyone wants it so bad they can taste everyone else tasting it. Where is Lucas during all of this? He's keeping whatever grip he can on the way his vision is used. I will bet vital parts of my anatomy that if this was being run by a marketing guy, we'd be bombarded by advertising and gimmicks and merchandise. It's no worse than anyother major movie. ID4 had more promotion from what I remember.
Leave George alone so he'll finish it out and give us great memories.
I don't know about programmers since I'm a system/network admin, but my systems don't break. I set them up and let them go. If you are constantly fixing your network, then you are doing something terribly wrong. Working on the weekend is a rarity that I reserve for major upgrades and downtimes.
The only time I worked long weeks was at my last job. When I got there, the network didn't stay up for more than a day at a time. After beating on it and getting new equipment, it would hum along until our crappy power flaked. Shoestring budget didn't have room for good UPSes.:)
My point is that in the system/network admin field there is a shortage of people with clue. Therefore, people lacking in clue get put in charge of networks, and break them. If your network breaks because you are using a hardware/software combo that sucks, then change. If management doesn't want to change, then quit and get another job. Don't complain that you work too hard. Do something about it, and quit whining to me that your job sucks and you work too hard. The jobs are out there, and if people start leaving due to lack of response from management, chances are they'll start listening. It's hard to find good people.
Damon - quit complaining and so something about it.
Probably not. There is already a noticable need for more name space so they have added more top level domains. Another thing is that some site with similar names that might get each other's traffic by accident have links to each other to help redirect people to the right location. Things are only as valuable as the value that buyers attach to the item. The millions of dollars for domain names are the exception not the norm. Having formerly worked for an ISP, I have seen a number of transactions for domain names, and they range from $35 - thousands depending on what the buyer feels the name is worth.
The Internet was built to scale, and it has scaled far beyond what the original creators dreamed. tcp/ip handles http traffic surprisingly well considering that http traffic is radically different from what the designers expected and designed tcp for.
IETF, NANOG, ARIN, RIPE, et al are headed by savvy people who know and understand the trends and the problems caused by them. They have done a fantastic job for more than a decade and I see no reason why they won't continue this excellence.
While it seems fairly new at first glance, after looking at the online world as compared to the real world it just seems like the next step. Buying a character or whatever on Ulitma Online isn't much different than gambling a bunch of money at Vegas or buying that new 3dfx card to play Quake or getting that new DVD player. It's all about entertainment. People will pay to be entertained. Just because it is online doesn't make it revolutionary. I think the domain name bidding is much more relevant. A domain name is truly a sign post or address on the Internet where you can live and do work. It has significantly larger effects than buying gaming characters and pieces. That's old news. How many D&D or Warhammer or any number of other games have people spending thousands of dollars on pieces and boards? Plenty, and the Ultima Online bidding is just an extension of that. What truly sucks about the bidding is that people who haven't earned that character can't control it and don't deserve it, but that's life.
There is a difference to being uneducated and being an idiot. If you read his post, you will notice that he's not interested in helping people who won't help themselves. I agree. A person who is just uneducated can be educated. A person who is uneducated and unmotivated is basically hopeless.
Personally, I think trying to make Linux accessible to the masses is laughable. What is my mom going to do with a multi-user server OS on her desktop machine? She wouldn't have a clue. OSes like BeOS have got the right idea. Take the hard core of Unix, and put a nice, pretty, easy, and stable interface on it. Normal users don't want the power. The people who use Linux do. Don't force something on somebody who doesn't need it.
The day they apear to have just put code in a box i'll stop buying. (Like Slackware) Um personally, I don't like all of RedHat's added "value". RPM is not a very good packaging system, and all of their admin tools never work for me. However, I'm free to run what I wish, and that's what makes our system better.;) Damon
I dunno...you could be right or wrong. I have no clue why Apple is releasing source. I was talking about the license being OSI approved when it shouldn't have been.
There is a standard for defining what Open Source Software is. The APSL does not abide by this definition, and therefore OSI calling it OSS is wrong.
The flames and arguments are not against Apple. Apple is free to do what that want. The OSI is being irresponsible here by calling the APSL OSS. By doing this, they create confusion, and dilute the power and meaning of OSS.
A polite thank you for the effort, but we will not endorse your license as OSS until you fix these things is more than appropriate. Personally, I am loathe to trust what OSI deems as OSS at this point because they seem to want to get as many on board as possible even if it means compromising more than they already have. This leads them to making decisions such as this one, and that is bad for the rest of the community.
However, I'm glad all the/. flames happened on this subject because it educated people to the fact that the APSL is not OSS, and there is a danger to developers coding under it. If we just went by OSI's stance, we could get a kick in the teeth later on.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I'm driving to Burningman next month from Austin, Texas and it's 2200 miles one-way. You silly Europeans and your tiny countries. :)
32 hours one way in a truck with 2 women. Yes, it will be an interesting trip.
I disagree. Cultural significance does not come from an entire culture having access to the moment. Entire cultures have been built on stories told from one generation to the next.
Burning Man is not limited to the one week a year we gather in Black Rock. There are several regional events popping up everywhere that happen throughout the year. Each one is unique and still a part of the larger BM culture of community and art. It is an entire culture built on the idea of temporary structures and places.
These temporary moments are passed around by those who experienced the art. It invigorates and encourages human interaction. IMO, that is worth just as much as being one of the faceless millions who have stared at a picture on a wall somewhere.
Storytelling is an artform too.
IMO,
Ranger Kabau
c&w, psinet, verio, qwest, sprint, bbn/gte/genuity, timewarner, att, and others i can't think of at the moment.
ok, there are several requirements for peering, and peering does not mean that people get transit.
for one, before you can exchange bgp routing information with another provider, you must goto a registry (ARIN for the US), and apply for an Autonomous System Number (ASN). there is a $500/yr. fee for this. you have to prove to ARIN that you deserve one of these numbers.
secondly, peering is when two networks get together and exchange their network routing information with each other, but only *their* network information.
for example, we have isps a, b, c, and d. a connects to b, b connects to c, and c connects to d. if b and c peer, c cannot get to a and b cannot get to d. if b buys transit from c, then b can get to d.
it all depends on what you allow the networks you exchange traffic with to see. peering just lets others terminate traffic on your network, but not through your network. transit is a customer service that allows a network to traverse your network to get to another.
therefore, this will have zero impact on spam levels as most spam houses do not qualify for peering. even if they do, they only get to pass traffic to uunet, not through uunet.
sigh, you obviously don't understand the argument, and you get moderated up to a 2? it's not the number of addresses. it's the number of routable networks, aggregation policies, and the increasing number of entities that are multi-homing and injecting long prefixes into the global routing table that are causing the problem. this is *not* a trivial problem, and lots of people much smarter than most everyone here have been working on this problem for a while. there is no simple obvious solution.
damon
cleaner how? by defining a /48 as the smallest allocatable block (with the exception of a /64), they are taking us back to a classful world. we went through all of the pain and learned how to do cidr, and now we are just ignoring that. that's just plain wrong. there was much discussion at the last arin meeting to this effect.
while having classful space is nice for aggregating routes, it is precisely the reason we are "running out of" ip space today. many say that reclaiming old blocks is the way to go, but there are several legal roadblocks to this that arin can't afford.
we need cidr to allow for flexibility. we need to determine a better routing method, or just bite the bullet and get big routers with lots of ram and proc.
no, the 13bit tla field in the left 64bits of the ipv6 header are no longer used. they decided this was a bad idea when australia wanted to be a tla. for the curious, australia isn't large enough ip-wise to really justify the tla designation. the tla method was going to prove to be a political nightmare over the definition of what is required to be a tla.
damon
3 years ago 32M of ram on a 4500M was enough to run full bgp. now you need a 7200vxr with 128M of ram to run full bgp. we are over 70k routes in the global table, and this trend will get worse now that providers are not filtering on the /20 boundary anymore.
/48 is the worst part of the current proposal.
ipv6 does nothing to solve this problem. the tla concept is gone from ipv6 once they realized that it was a very bad idea. actually, there are several provisions in the current proposal of ipv6 that are bad. the default allocation of a
something has to give, but then again the router vendors claim that by the time that 128M isn't enough we'll have bigger faster routers. this is fine for uunet et al, but not so fine for small isps.
this is a hard problem with non-obvious solutions. perhaps what will end up happening is that we will acutally use the osi radial routing method. only time will tell.
damon
lagavulin (sp?), laphroig, bowmore. nothing younger than 15 tho. gotta love islay.
mmm...i'm thirsty.
a few words of advice with the first one being "STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM LEVEL3". whew. i haven't seen service this bad from a bell. all of their procedures are broken and misunderstood internally. cross-connects take a minimum of 14 business days. the sales people never call me back, and take forever to enter orders into the system. it's not like we are a one off customer either. we are in 15 of their us colocs with plans to go into the rest of their us sites as wells as several of their international sites. this plan is changing tho, and we are considering moving everything to worldcom. they may be a bit slow, but they get things done and don't pull new policies out of their ass.
at level3 the people in the gateway are pretty good on average, but the people up the chain from there are pretty much a waste of o2.
my experience with abovenet in san jose has been pretty good. they are helpful and fast. they are well connected and offer lots of service levels.
2004 is the first leap year of the century. leap year rules aren't as simple as every four years.
except that uf isn't about it workers. it's about low paid support techs for a small isp. i've been there, and i understand exactly what illiad is talking about. the fact that people don't like it doesn't bother me at all. a sense of humor is just that, a sense (to semi-quote dennis miller). if you don't like it, move on. if you like it, then quit trying to sway people with the glazed over zealot act.
life's too short and getting shorter.
damon
i don't understand what the big deal is. it's just a nameserver, and it isn't very hard to run one. at the isp i used to work for, we ran nameservice for hundreds of domains on a 486 66, and it's still running at more than 700 days of uptime.
sigh,
damon
Certainly, in the next 100 years we will see the departure of Linus as head honcho. Alan will probably step down around the same time. I mean you can only do so much for so long. Do you think that Linux has a suitable leadership path concerning the kernel? If not, how might you solve the inheritance problem?
damon
Now my fine feathered /.ers, I may have this completely wrong. The way I understand it is that these ad companies are using cookies to collect this information. Couldn't we just set our browser to manually accept cookies, and avoid this whole thing?
no, the parents have a very real responsibility to raise their children. i wonder if anyone will ever realize that children are smarter than we are. no matter what restrictions you place on them, they can find a way to subvert them. irresponsible restrictions lead to rebellion. for example, i was treated like a human being by my parents. i didn't drink, smoke, get into fights, or any of the things the "bad" kids did. that's because i never had a reason to. why should i when i could drink whenever i wanted to. things were not hidden from me, and i never fell into the "lord of the flies" theory.
Bruce-
First off I loved _Schismatrix_ (all the crazy people like that one, right?:)
Second, in _Heavy Weather_, you described a global economy where the national currencies were weak in relation to private currencies backed by corporations and private banks. This idea struck me, and has stuck with me. I'm most facinated by the fact that I can see the beginning of that senario blossoming in reality with the introduction of the digital currencies. Where did you come up with this senario? I've heard from reliable sources that a certain cypherpunk inspired this back story.
Thirdly, I went to a birthday party of one of your cousins in Aug, and lemme tell you, your family is a hell of a lot of fun.
Fourth (and last), your article on Burning Man was great. I've met alot of people out there that attended after reading that. I think that you are one of the few writers that have actually been able to write a fair account, and almost relay the spirit of what happens out there. You should come out to the Austin regional event next spring.
Thanks,
Damon
I mean if people are willing to pay all sorts of money for paraphanalia (sp?) and food in containers adorned in Star Wars characters, then more power to George so he can make more good movies. I've read and heard of the restrictions placed on manufacturers, resellers, advertisers, and anyone else who wants to use or sell Star Wars related gimmicks and products. Of course there's hype to end all hype...we've been waiting for 20 years!!! Considering the anticipation, I'm surprised there isn't more advertising and gimmicks. The only one I've seen thus far is the taco bell, pizza hut, and kfc commercial. I've seen displays in bookstores to sell the books, and I even bought the soundtrack. I haven't listened yet because I want to hear it in the theater first. What's amazing is the lack of promotion and advertising. I haven't seen a tv commercial for it yet, but every other major movie does. why not? Because it doesn't need it. Everyone knows, and everyone wants it so bad they can taste everyone else tasting it. Where is Lucas during all of this? He's keeping whatever grip he can on the way his vision is used. I will bet vital parts of my anatomy that if this was being run by a marketing guy, we'd be bombarded by advertising and gimmicks and merchandise. It's no worse than anyother major movie. ID4 had more promotion from what I remember.
Leave George alone so he'll finish it out and give us great memories.
damon
I don't know about programmers since I'm a system/network admin, but my systems don't break. I set them up and let them go. If you are constantly fixing your network, then you are doing something terribly wrong. Working on the weekend is a rarity that I reserve for major upgrades and downtimes.
:)
The only time I worked long weeks was at my last job. When I got there, the network didn't stay up for more than a day at a time. After beating on it and getting new equipment, it would hum along until our crappy power flaked. Shoestring budget didn't have room for good UPSes.
My point is that in the system/network admin field there is a shortage of people with clue. Therefore, people lacking in clue get put in charge of networks, and break them. If your network breaks because you are using a hardware/software combo that sucks, then change. If management doesn't want to change, then quit and get another job. Don't complain that you work too hard. Do something about it, and quit whining to me that your job sucks and you work too hard. The jobs are out there, and if people start leaving due to lack of response from management, chances are they'll start listening. It's hard to find good people.
Damon - quit complaining and so something about it.
Probably not. There is already a noticable need for more name space so they have added more top level domains. Another thing is that some site with similar names that might get each other's traffic by accident have links to each other to help redirect people to the right location. Things are only as valuable as the value that buyers attach to the item. The millions of dollars for domain names are the exception not the norm. Having formerly worked for an ISP, I have seen a number of transactions for domain names, and they range from $35 - thousands depending on what the buyer feels the name is worth.
The Internet was built to scale, and it has scaled far beyond what the original creators dreamed. tcp/ip handles http traffic surprisingly well considering that http traffic is radically different from what the designers expected and designed tcp for.
IETF, NANOG, ARIN, RIPE, et al are headed by savvy people who know and understand the trends and the problems caused by them. They have done a fantastic job for more than a decade and I see no reason why they won't continue this excellence.
Damon
While it seems fairly new at first glance, after looking at the online world as compared to the real world it just seems like the next step. Buying a character or whatever on Ulitma Online isn't much different than gambling a bunch of money at Vegas or buying that new 3dfx card to play Quake or getting that new DVD player. It's all about entertainment. People will pay to be entertained. Just because it is online doesn't make it revolutionary. I think the domain name bidding is much more relevant. A domain name is truly a sign post or address on the Internet where you can live and do work. It has significantly larger effects than buying gaming characters and pieces. That's old news. How many D&D or Warhammer or any number of other games have people spending thousands of dollars on pieces and boards? Plenty, and the Ultima Online bidding is just an extension of that. What truly sucks about the bidding is that people who haven't earned that character can't control it and don't deserve it, but that's life.
Damon
There is a difference to being uneducated and being an idiot. If you read his post, you will notice that he's not interested in helping people who won't help themselves. I agree. A person who is just uneducated can be educated. A person who is uneducated and unmotivated is basically hopeless.
Personally, I think trying to make Linux accessible to the masses is laughable. What is my mom going to do with a multi-user server OS on her desktop machine? She wouldn't have a clue. OSes like BeOS have got the right idea. Take the hard core of Unix, and put a nice, pretty, easy, and stable interface on it. Normal users don't want the power. The people who use Linux do. Don't force something on somebody who doesn't need it.
Damon
The day they apear to have just put code in a box i'll stop buying. (Like Slackware) Um personally, I don't like all of RedHat's added "value". RPM is not a very good packaging system, and all of their admin tools never work for me. However, I'm free to run what I wish, and that's what makes our system better. ;) Damon
I dunno...you could be right or wrong. I have no clue why Apple is releasing source. I was talking about the license being OSI approved when it shouldn't have been.
damon
There is a standard for defining what Open Source Software is. The APSL does not abide by this definition, and therefore OSI calling it OSS is wrong.
/. flames happened on this subject because it educated people to the fact that the APSL is not OSS, and there is a danger to developers coding under it. If we just went by OSI's stance, we could get a kick in the teeth later on.
The flames and arguments are not against Apple. Apple is free to do what that want. The OSI is being irresponsible here by calling the APSL OSS. By doing this, they create confusion, and dilute the power and meaning of OSS.
A polite thank you for the effort, but we will not endorse your license as OSS until you fix these things is more than appropriate. Personally, I am loathe to trust what OSI deems as OSS at this point because they seem to want to get as many on board as possible even if it means compromising more than they already have. This leads them to making decisions such as this one, and that is bad for the rest of the community.
However, I'm glad all the
damon