Like many others here that run OpenBSD, I've got a collection of CDs from previous releases, and really don't need another CD, since I can just snarf the updates.
Rather than get Yet Another T-Shirt, I suggest that people wanting to make a donation do it via PayPal. The OpenBSD user on PayPal is: obsdpaypal@openbsd.org. This is by far the easiest way to send them money, and it all goes to the project.
If you're a corporation that uses OpenBSD, I suggest that they make a nice donation - I've usually suggested $1000 as a suitable amount.
-Erik
Punchcards suck, but electronic has it's faults
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 2
OK, I've voted in PA, MA, and CA. So I've seen at least 5 different voting methods, and can comment on what I think is the best way...
Electronic voting sounds wonderful, but if you pick up a copy of Applied Crypto, you'll understand why it's not my favorite form, regardless of how you do it. Electronic Voting is a hard problem - there are lots of very tricky pitfalls, and I'm sorry, as someone who deals with computers professionally, I'm not going to trust that we get it right.
For those of you bitching about how stupid people are that can't use punchcard systems, I seriously doubt you've ever used one. The best analogy I can make for using punchcards to vote with is the SAT (or other standardized test). Imagine taking the SAT - all the questions are in a booklet, and you have a seperate answer sheet that only has row numbers and lettered circles. Now image that you have to take it in INK. That's how bad punchcards are. Here in CA, I had to vote on about 30 different races/propositions. Believe me, it's not simple at all to get it error-free.
Me, I'm for using the system I first used in PA: the good old mechanical voting booth. You step into it, pull a lever to close the drapes, and you have all the choices in neat rows in front of you. The booth can be set up so that you can't make mistakes (only allowing you to vote ONCE for a given office, for instance), and you can go back and change your mind up until you pull the main lever to exit the booth. The row sizes can be adjusted (I think most of the print was in at least 36 point when I last used on), so you can accomodate the elderly and disabled easily.
Also, mechanical voting booths have several advantages over both paper and electronic ballots:
Unlike most electronic methods, mechanical booths fill out a punch card (as in the old 80-column IBM ones) and drop it in a hopper after you are finished. So, there is a physical record (for recounts) of all votes.
Tallies are much quicker than by paper, as the voting booths have numerical counters on the back that read out votes. Kind a like speedometers for each candidate. So, when you do the initial reporting, all election officials do is run around to the back of each booth, read off the numbers, and take a picture for verification. You can have tallies about 10 minutes after polls close.
It's a lot easier to do massive vote stuffing in an electronic environment than either a paper or voting booth one. If I want to fix a state-wide election, I would have to stuff ballots at a significant number of polling stations, which requires considerable organization. Fixing an electronic elections requires me to break into ONE computer - the central counter. No matter how secure this is, it's a VERY tempting target.
Mechancial booths are far easier to understand and much less likely to make mistakes in than ballots, and they tend to be far more comfortable to the populance than an electronic system.
Mechanical booths don't crash. What happens when you're electronic voting terminal crashes? Can you get the votes out of it?
All in all, I'm strongly in favor of mechanical voting throughout the nation. Hopefully, we can take this debatacle and make some improvements.
OK, I've finally had it with everybody trumpeting the TCO equation. We have a lot of qualified technical people here, and Gartner has a bunch of reasonably savvy business analysts, but does anyone bother to ask the people who REALY KNOW about TCO? Oh, no, we just spout our local dogma as the truth.
Hard facts: the people who know TCO are the System (NOT SOFTWARE) Architects and the MIS/Operations Managers. I've very little faith in Director-level (or above) management knowing about real costs, and Programmers (no matter how smart) don't have a fucking clue about what TCO means.
TCO has four major considerations, which vary by the company involved. There is no such thing as a "global" TCO. There's the TCO for your company, and there's the one for Yahoo, IBM, etc. all of which are different. And each consideration is of a different weight (importance) depending on your situation.
Upfront costs: Software Licensing and proper hardware (ie. what's the cost for hardware for OS A vs. hardware for OS B if they do the exact same thing). For those on a tight budget, this is usually the overriding concern. They can afford to pay more over the long haul, since the cost is spread out, but one-time outlays are a big issue. In huge companies, even multi-million dollar initial costs can be absorbed if the 5 year outlays are significantly cheaper.
Ongoing Support: The usual: do you need it? (is there enough in-house expertise to avoid it, or do you only need it for 1/2/3 years instead of in perpetuity?) how good it is? what's the cost per response level? Depending on the vendor pricing scheme and the initial cost outlays, this can dwarf initial expenditures, or it can be a tiny drop in the bucket.
Maintenance Costs: The big one here is Qualified Personnel. Do you have enough people with spare cycles to do the care+feeding of this new system? Will they need training? How hard is it to hire new staff with the required skill set (or people willing to be trained for it)? Are we going to have to use Consultants to set up the system, or will the vendor do it for us? How many systems can one person manage? Then there are the software costs: How fast can we get bug-fixes? Who do we get them from? How much do updates cost? Stability? Considerations for large-scale managability? How do we monitor system performance?
Growth and Obselescence issues: Give the initial hardware buy-in, how easy is it to plan for moderate growth? What are upgrade costs? What are expansion costs (ie. more users, more processors, etc.)? How long can our initial buy-in last until we have to upgrade it? How long do we expect to need this solution before we replace it with something else? Can this solution be integrated into a larger one, or should it remain a solution unto itself? How hard (and costly) are migration issues? What about application portability - is this important?
One things I will point out that seems go against a mantra here on/. : Open Source OSes have no real maintenance advantage over closed-UNIXes. Sorry, but that's the truth for 99% of the businesses out there. Nowdays, installed commercial UNIXes use virtually the same userland toolsets as the FreeUNIXes (who cares that SUN doesn't fix bugs in their version of sendmail? Anybody actually run Sun Sendmail? I thought not.) The only real differences are in major applications (which are almost always closed-source, even on FreeUNIXes), and the base kernel itself. Only the largest companies (or those whose business depends on doing kernel-level development e.g. Cobalt) will care. Fixes for important problems in this sort of stuff come out of the commercial vendors as fast as they do from the FreeUNIXes, and honestly, virtually no company has the resources (or even the expertise) in the programming staff to fix subtle bugs in stuff like the Linux kernel (or glibc, or whatever). And if you think the admin staff is going to do this, hey, well, I've got a bridge in Arizona I wanna show you...
-Erik
(yes, I'm a System Architect, and yes, I'm pissed off...)
They aren't patenting IA-64 codes. That is, the aren't trying to patent JMP for jump, FOO1A for super-duper multimedia instruction, etc. I don't think they're fool enough to believe that anything like that could ever get patented, or for that matter, copyrighted or trademarked.
It is unclear if they are trying to protect functionality or implimentation. From the patent application itself, it appears as though they are only trying to protect their implimentation of how to do interrupt context returns, not the concept of interrupt context returns itself. The article, however, sounds like they're trying for the latter.
The problem with this kind of patenting is that the "concept" is closely tied to the "implimentation". That is, the concept may be so narrowly circumscribed that any implimentation is an 'infringing' one.
Also unclear in this whole mess is how a software trap would fit in. Suppose Intel was granted the "broader" patent which covered not just the specific transistor layout of the interrupt return handler, but the more general case of returning interrupt context for IA64. Does this preclude software implimentations of that IA64 instruction (which would be particularly relevant to code-morphers like Transmeta, but even to AMD et al which do translation to microcode)?
I'm by far no Patent Lawyer. If the scope is the narrower one, I see no problem, and indeed, is well within the goal of patents. I'm alot let sanguine if the patent covers more than the circuit design, however.
I was one of the optimists when ICANN was first founded. Yeah, sure there were some problems, but surely we could work past them in good faith to get a fair, equitable system which would straighten out the DNS mess.
I'm wrong. I admit it. Kick me.
ICANN is fundamentally flawed, and the flaws aren't fixable. Time to de-charter ICANN and do it right from the beginning.
The only way we can get an ICANN-like organization to really work is to make sure it has some reasonable fascimilie of these characteristics:
Final Authority over Domain Disputes Worldwide - realistically, about the only way to do this is to get an international treaty together which designates the new org as the final legal arbiter of all domain disputes. This is by far the hardest thing to do, but it's really essential to make it work.
A clear, concise, and equitable Dispute Policy - the new organization needs to have a very clearly spelled outdispute policy. It must include provisions which allow small parties to contest on an equal footing as large ones. And it need to have the infrastructure put in place to resolve these disputes (a "court system" if you may).
Perpetual Non-profit Status. Not just not-for-profit, but the org must be a true public trust. Require that all board meetings be public, announced at least 6 months in advance, and that there may be no additions to the adjenda within 2 months of a meeting. Personally, I would require a 2/3 majority for any policy change, and NO changes to the bylaws. Bylaw changes should only be allowed via a public election.
The Ability to Levy Fees for Domain Registration - in order to remain free of undue outside monetary influence, the new Org has to be able to raise money for operations. The treaty mentioned above needs to give the org the right to collect fees for operational expenses. Probably the most equitable way to do this is require that all designated Registrars pay something like $1/domain/year. This needs to be legally enforcable, so that Registrars refusing to pay (like NSI) can be cut off at the knees.
A Wholely Member-Elected Board of Directors - period, no argument, no appointments. I would go for 2 year, non-consecutive terms (that is, you can run again after a term on the board, but you have to wait 2 years before doing so).
A Reasonable Election Process, which balances regional representation and attempts to stop vote-stacking. By this I mean that I want to avoid the problem of highly-motivated small groups from being able to determine the entire representation of a region. Personally, I think it would be reasonable to have 3 Directors from each region. As a voter, you are only allowed to vote for ONE candidate, and the top three vote-getters win. This allows smaller groups to concentrate and at least get a voice, but it prevents larger ones from stacking the whole deck. An additional restriction that might be useful is that there may be only one director at a time which is employed by a single organization, corporation, or government department. For example, it wouldn't be legal to elect two directors who were both employed by Cisco.
These are the biggest things that ICANN doesn't have, and that any successor organization must have. I'm sure I've missed a few, but it's a good start.
However, as part of the deal to buy MCI, Worldcomm had to sell the Internet backbone and ISP side of MCI to a third party. It ended up with Britain's Cable and Wireless.
So: Worldcom/MCI now has UUNET's ISP business, while the old MCI ISP is sitting with C&W.
Confusing, eh?
Just remember that GTE bought BBN, and Bell Atlantic bought Nynex (which had bought New England Telephone), and now B.A. and GTE have merged, but they've spun off the ISP stuff as Verizon. And of course Qwest now owns USWest, while SBC owns Pac Bell, Ameritec, SWBell, Prodigy, and CellularOne. And of course AT&T has spun off Lucent now. About the only people I think that are still intact and haven't bought (or been bought) by another large player is Sprint.
I loooooovvvvve the Telecommunications Act of 1996, don't you?
After looking at all these replies, I thought I'd reply myself.
Some notes:
For you British (and non-USA folks), you may not quite be aware of the size of the USA. Excluding Alaska and Hawaii, the population density of the USA is about 85 people/sq mile. For comparison, the U.K. (England, Scotland, Wales) has a density of 630.
To most metropolitan areas (i.e. 100,000+ in the MSA according to the Census Bureau) in the US, there is at least one fiber trunk. Big places like the top 10 MSAs (NYC, LA, SF, Chicago) there are probably a dozen.
If you live near one of these trunks, well, happy for you. However, remember than less than 50% of the US population lives inside one of the top 100 urban areas.
Some cities (particularly those in the North) are replacing existing copper with fiber as part of the normal maintenance cycle. However, in much of the warm parts of the country, where the existing physical plant needs little maintenance, it's never replaced short of a big disaster ( Hurricane Andrew in Miami is a good example).
Even hybrid Fiber/Copper layouts like the Cable Modem setups usually only bring fiber into the equivalent of the local CO - that is, fiber-to-the-neighborhood; the average distance from CO to house in a US city is well over a mile (remember, not as-the-crow-flies, but as-strung-through-the-pipes).
The real challenge is not the big urban areas - they can (and probably will) get fiber-to-the-curb within 10 years at the worst case. The challenge is getting it to the 30-40% of the USA that live in sub-100,000 urban areas, and even worse, the 10% or so that are classified rural.
It's the same problem the USA faced with electrification in the 1920s and 1930s. Only now, it's worse, since a far, far smaller percentage of the population lives in the harder-to-wire areas, there is even less of an incentive to fiber them up.
I can use my home town as an example: Meadville,PA, population 15,000. It's easily 40 miles to the nearest city which would have a fiber trunk into it, and while the town might eventually have fiber as part of the Cable Modem rollout, it's certainly not going to be fiber-to-the-curb, and the cable modem rollout will miss the other 70,000 people who live in the county (which is rather rural). Population density for my county: 82 people/sq mile.
...I'm much more familiar with the Telco's infrastructure, where they've been busily replacing long-distance trunks with fiber for quite some time.
A silly question, though: Are DS3 lines necessarily copper? I was under the impression (possibly wrong) that they could be either copper or fiber, depending on the local equipment.
Oh, and UUNET doesn't own 50%. More line 30% (in the USA). Sprint, MCI (now Cable&Wireless), ATT, and BBN (now Verizon) are now the "big 5" in the US - they each run between 10 and 25% of the network. And in Europe, the national telephone monopolies own huge percentages of the local backbones. I'd estimate that no company owns more than 10% of the total world-wide Internet backbone capacity.
...gets my vote for the most far-impacting of all recent technology-vs-law items. Yes, the CDA portion of it got the most attention, but by far the other aspects of the law are the more important and far-reaching, as it fundamentally changed the nature of the communications industry in the USA.
(to paraphase the old "it's the economy, stupid" catchphrase of the last election...)
The article is plain wrong on several points, and makes naive and/or inane assumptions on several others.
First off, virtually all the long-distance communication wires in the US & Canada are fibre. Both voice and data travel over fiber (NOT copper) for about 99% of all inter-metropolitan traffic. Yet that fibre represents less than 10% (I forget the exact number, but it's less than 10%) of the entire physical communications plant in North America. The reason this is all fiber now is that it was by far the cheapest, easiest, and quickest return on investment portion of the network to upgrade. The article completely ignores the fact that the other 90+% of the network is extremely costly and time-consuming to replace with fiber and has a much, much, much longer ROI.
In places like Manhattan, where there is extremely high population density and communications demand, yes, fiber has been laid along (some) streets, and it is possible to put out a direct fiber lead to a large building that goes directly to a fiber line. If you're in on of the top 25 Metropolitan Areas in N.A., you might have a fiber line within a mile or so. Outside there, well, if you've got one within 10 miles, consider yourself lucky.
The problem still remains getting high-speed communications to places that don't astronomical population density. It's a hard problem, and condemning companies that provide more-or-less universal access for using copper is moronic. Cogent might be able to offer access to what, maybe 5% of the population? Compare this with WorldCom, the ILECs, MCI, and Earthlink, and all the other big ISPs, who can probably get between 95 and 99% of the entire population.
I also love the part where they seem to think that building their own long-distance backbone instead of using others is a panacea for network conjestion. Someone need to explain the concept of Peering and Wide-Area routing to these folks. Sure, it's nice if both the source and destination are plugged directly into your backbone, but the odds of this are what, virtually nill? If you want some real benefit from your own backbone, you have to connect directly with the majority of sites people want to access. In this case, you better beg Above.Net, Exodus, GlobalCenter, Genuity, et al. (all the big co-lo people) to allow you to run a line into all their co-lo sites. Oh, and since you're a small player, don't think that these folks aren't going to charge you for the privilege of hooking into their co-lo.
The other thing I find stupid is the implication that only Cogent has a "data-optimized" network. What a load of Marketing BS. If I'm running a packet-switched network, can I tell what I'm running on top of it (well, with ATM technically you can, but it's really all data)? Data? Voice-over-IP? Streaming Video? The article seems to confuse the concepts of packet-switched vs. circuit-switched with "data-optimized" vs. "voice-optimized".
Anyway, I'm sure others are going to point the myriad of crap in this article, so I'll stop here.
Cogent is offering a nice service, and has some interesting features that may point the way to how communications are done in the future. They're not really innovative in any sense, and I certainly wouldn't think of them as the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's an interesting company, and I wish them will. But the hype level is just a tad too high here.
You are correct in that the DoD does not require all code to be made available to them. However, a large percentage (I would say a majority) of custom-code contracts require that the DoD have access to the source code. In my experience with the DoD, particularly in the security field, it is mandatory for certain segments (the NSA would like to inspect your code, please...). In other parts, code access is only allowed if the company goes out of business or stops supporting the product (where "supporting" has well-defined limits). In stil others (particularly when buying mass-market software), there is no requirement for code access.
I know I'm being anal-retentive about this reply, but then again, so are you.
While the MPAA rating system itself is independent of government influence, they are de facto backed by the rule of law, which I'm sure courts are aware of. Local Zoning laws are often written as to forbid the showing of NC-17 movies on certain property, and there are also many communities which have local ordanances against showing NC-17 movies to minors, whether or not they are accompanied by an adult.
The key in these laws is that they cannot forbid such material from adult use in all places. Thus, it is possible to restrict NC-17 movies from being shown downtown in the MegaPlex, but not uptown in the middle of the manufacturing district.
Actually, the "harmful to minors" part is the big loophole, and which is actually probably the hardest to overturn. Since this type of law rests on what the Supreme Court has defined as "community standards", the definition of "harmful to minors" does not have to have any scientific backing - merely a majority of local residents have to agree on what it means. And this standard usually is defined as to what the majority of your current local representatives in local government vote for. So you're not going to get it overturned on this.
The final point here is something people seem to continually miss: local governments in the U.S. can restrict minors rights in virtually any way with the consent of a majority of local adults, provided the restrictions do not unduly burden adult's access to the restricted material/behavior. If the law does not remove an adult's rights, well, then, it's fair game. That's the way it is.
... is to do what the DoD does on most of it's coding contracts: require that the contractor make its source code available to the DoD. That is, the contract requires that the DoD has clear rights to use the code and have others work with it, but the contractor retains copyright control.
Honestly, for political as well as institutional reasons, I think this is the best way to go for quite awhile. All coding work (and all systems that have any sort of code, from EPROMs to Java) should have the stipulation that the gov't has a clear right to use and modify the source code with no additional compensation. Now, that doesn't mean that the gov't can sell the code or give it away under a OpenSource-style license, or even that they can reuse the code for another project (that should be negotiated in the contract, with appropriate compensation for the contractor). It simply means that the gov't can get others to fix problems with the code if need arises (big holes, the contractor refuses to finish the job, the contractor won't maintain the code, contractor goes out of business, etc....)
This strategy is kind of the minimum resistance path - it still protects closed-source vendors from having their code released to the public (and let's face it, you wouldn't ever see mass-market software (and its low price) make it into gov't use if the companies were required to give away the code to anyone). And it saves the security debate for another time (that is, the debate over Open vs. Closed software won't impact the decision to require source).
Personally, I'd like to see the government start requiring perpetual license for all code to be used internally in any way. They'll be a lot of resistance for this, but I think there's a much better chance of this happening than if the gov't tries to require a GPL/BSD/whatever code license for all work. If you do that, then the gov't loses all access to mass-market software, and it becomes a completely custom job.
On second thought, if it all requires custom programming, well, hey, Welfare For Programmers! <grin>
I'm also going to say something I swore I wouldn't: WTF is this doing on/. ????
Cutting edge processors are always going to be far more money than their relative speed indicates - it's the premium you pay for getting the complete best-of-the-best. Given the CPU turnover these days, only those with more $$ than common sense would buy a top-speed chip (or, those with a hard performance-is-absolutely-priority-one requirement (though they should probably be looking at an Alpha or PowerPC chip instead of an x86 one)).
Like I said before, this article doesn't add anything, so I'm reduced to complaining.
Slow news Monday, eh folks? Hemos, go back to bed, and we'll wake you up if we need anything.
I would agree with the first half of your post. We do indeed use other people for a wide variety of things - society is built on people using people. I'm not bemoaning that particular fact. Organ donation is a "use" of other people, but not in the manner that I think is something to worry about.
What I was more particularly worried about was the specific use of another person's body against his or her will for the sole purpose of aiding someone else. What happens if we have required organ donation? Or even blood giving required by law? Or worse yet, either of the two by forced societal convention? Yes, that means lots more available to cure and/or help sick people, but at what cost? We lose control over that most basic of items, the determination of our body's fate. If I can't control what I do with my body, well, I might as well just give up now.
The very last paragraph is exactly what I worry about. It is the belief by scientists (and the technically minded) that "I'll just make this thing cause I can, and let someone else worry about how it gets used." That's the worst way to approach things. Kinda like saying "I'll cross the street, but not look for traffic until I get in the middle." People far, far better than I have worried about this (and stood on the fence and screamed about it) and we're still nowhere near a decent societal dialog. Take a look at Oppenheimer and Bohr.
We need to stop and think about what we do (and the consequences thereof) before we jump feet first into it. Similarly, our society needs to start making choices about things that aren't good for it. Maybe these things are good for a segment of society, but as a whole, they're bad. Unfortunately, society has a bad track record on this problem, but that doesn't mean I can't still scream about it, and hope that we wake up before it's too late.
Science, like life, should live by the manta "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
In the USA, this is almost certainly true - the safeguards we have are pretty darned effective. I'd be willing to bet that there aren't such "questionable" donations here. However, that leaves the rest of the entire world. There are lots of documented cases of people in 3rd world countries (particularly Pacific Rim, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent) of destitute people selling body parts for cash. The transplants are done places where the controls are few and ethics ignored.
While we can bemoan that, and say "oh, but it never happens here, because of our ethical controls..." that's all nice and good, until you realize that most of the RECIPIENTS of those organs are richer Westerners who couldn't get a organ through normal channels.
So, I think we're being a bit hipocritical in our stance on this, aren't we?
I've like to make a great quote from an otherwise pretty bad movie:
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
-Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park
There was a great article in Wired 6 months ago by Bill Joy (yeah, that Bill Joy), that brought up some of the issues we see here. Check it out.
Now, I don't agree with alot of what Joy postulates, but the subject needs serious consideration. NOW. Not tomorrow, not when we get around to it. Because putting off a discussion and a decision means we don't have one at all. We'll just turn around one day, and wonder, "How did we get in the fucking mess?"
I'm not really sure about this story - I don't have all the details, so I'm reserving judgement (or at least, an opinion).
We humans (especially Westerners, and particularly Americans) like to cheat. We don't like to play the hand Fate deals us, so we dicker, moan, whine, and complain to the dealer, while we busily re-arrange the cards to our liking, then say, "Oh, jeeze, look what I've got!"
I'm all for stacking the deck in your favor, don't get me wrong. Transplants, drug therapy, all sorts of operations and treatments, hell, they're great.
What bothers me is that we're rapidly approaching the point where we start to use other people as parts banks for ourselves. "Oops, drank too much liquor over the last 10 years, better warm up that clone I had growing in the bank, I need a new liver..."
You can argue that its already starting, with the trade in black-market organs (particularly kidneys) harvested from the 3rd world for 1st world clients. That's bad (and if you think those people really are giving them up by their free will, dream on).
If you and the wifey are at high risk for having a kid with a major genetic problem, well, maybe you shouldn't be having kids. Adopt a kid - they're plenty available, waiting for a nice home. But, not, we're selfish. Gotta have it. And when it doesn't work out, well, whine, and try to rig the game.
Do what you can for yourself. But the minute you start messing with other people's lives to cover for your mistakes (or hell, even to cover for the screwy hand of Fate), well, that's a line I think we better not cross.
(ok, the title is probably going to get me marked as a "troll", but I think it's really relevant...)
I'm worried about the level of "purity" we seem to be demanding of anyone these days, in all sorts of situations. The reason I titled this post "Requiring Virgins" is that it almost seems as though we insist on a level of untouchability that no one can reasonably meet. That is, we're back to the "if your daughter's not a virgin on her wedding night, well, she's a slut and obviously not marriagable." It used to be (back in the old, old, days) that if you discovered your wife had actually slept with another man before you married her, it was grounds for instant divorce (and pretty much complete social ostrication); never mind that men slept with anything with 2 tits and a hole (pardon my French).
Two recent examples here on/. : Judge Reinquist's son and the Dean in this story. There may be lots of reasons why IIT is not a good choice for the review, but complaining that someone who isn't doing the review, nor is directly involved in the review in any way once had ties to the DOJ 13 years ago is ludicrous. Likewise, the whole thing about Reinquist and his son (who's so peripherally tied to the MS cases it's silly) is muckraking.
This usually comes up in political cases, where random associates or old-and-forgotten acts are used to tar-and-feather someone unreasonably. But I'm seeing this in lots of other aspects, too. We seems to be expecting that anyone involved in anything we care about has a level of untouchability that only cartoon characters can have. People, if you don't have a "Conflict of Interest", you're not qualified to do it. By this I mean that you can't possibly work in a field without having some ties to something that theoretically might be a "Conflict of Interest". We seem to have lost all reason in judging these things.
I'm tired of living in a society where people seemt to think that the only way to "trust" someone is to have everyone live in a glass house under a microscope all the time. And it's not just corporations and gov't invading our privacy. It's you and me, too, everytime we cry to see something we have no business looking at (fundamentally, why the outcry every time political candidate refuses (or hell, is even late) releasing their tax returns? That's fucking private, and isn't germane to the issue!)
Full disclosure is one thing. However, full disclosure with an anal probe, and being disqualified because you have a pimple on your ass is another. I'm tired of this crap.
OK, I live in the SF Bay area, and I work for one of the national DSL providers (NOT the ISP, but the people who actually deliver the line for you, and NOT one of the ILECs). I can't name them specifically, but let's just say they aren't Rhythms.
DSL delivery generally has a couple of major problems (I'm the primary troubleshooter on long-overdue orders, so I see alot of this). If one of these happens, it can take weeks to fix, much of which is due to the back-and-forth nature of fixing problems that require interaction between 3 or 4 HUGE companies. Think: we talk to ISP, determine there is a problem, talk to ILEC, twiddle a bit, talk to ILEC, talk to ILEC, ILEC does something, we look at it, talk to ILEC, talk to end-user, talk to ILEC, etc....
In general, we're closing about 50-60% of our orders within 1 month. The goal is 75% by calendar year end, and 90% for next year. However, if an order doesn't get closed within 1 month, it averages 8-12 weeks to get closed.
Unless you work at an I/CLEC, you have no idea how screwed up the physical plant for the phone system is. Line conditioners, repeaters, bad wiring installs, mismatched/mislabeled wiring - it's a wonder people get anything installed. Alot of this can be blamed on the "get it done, and don't worry about it" attitude of the ILEC. However, a large amount is also due to the fact that the phone system was (and is) designed to deliver VOICE PHONE service, and things that are done to improve voice are often harmful for data carriers.
Another problem is that we're one of the few (if not ONLY) DSL people who actually have an automated ordering system. That is, when you give your info to an ISP, they can automatically enter it into our system, which automatically makes the ILEC loop order, starts the network provisioning, puts in the ATM parameters, etc. Virtually everyone else does this by hand. Our system works about 90% of the time, and getting better. And we're still averaging 4 weeks. Think about the other guys....
A couple of things that will speed your DSL order, no matter who you place it with:
Make sure you have the correct address/zip code - you have no idea how many problems we have with people not giving us the correct address. By address, I mean the one that the phone company bills you at - this occassionally isn't your postal address. If you're not sure, CALL THE PHONE COMPANY AHEAD OF TIME. As them what they think your phone delivery address is, and not your billing address. Generally, this is only a problem in multi-unit dwellings, or things like rowhouses.
Figure out where you want the DSL line to go. By this I mean identify the plug where you want the DSL line to come out of. If you can get your hands on some basic line-testing stuff (borrow one from your work if you can), test that this line is indeed wired into your external exchange. I know this sounds complex, but it really isn't. You just need to verify that the jack is really hooked up.
Respone quickly to any email/phone correspondence from the DSL provider. You can save yourself alot of pain by quickly replying to any messages you get. That helps the DSL people solve problems faster, and get your line in quicker.
DSL is certainly not a smooth install for everyone yet. With the coming of line-sharing by all DSL providers, install times should go down considerably, since they can piggyback on your existing phone line, and don't have to run a new one. Honestly, though, I doubt you'll ever see times drop below an average of 2 weeks. The physical phone plant is just too messy.
Also, here are some 'rule-of-thumb' distances for various services (note that the distance from the CO is measured in feet of actual wire - it can be hard to figure that out, since wire often runs in a decidedly indirect path between you and your CO):
ADSL: 15,000 feet for minimum 384/128. You can usually get about 1Mbps at around 11,000.
SDSL: 15,000 feet for 192, 12,000 for 384, 9,000 for 768, 8,000 for 1.1, and 7,000 for 1.5.
IDSL: 144 at up to about 22,000, though many won't sell you it at distances over 18,000.
RADSL: up to 8Mbps at about 6,000. This is rare as of yet.
Your argument has some merit. Indeed, not everyone learns linearly. Also, the fixed, static nature of books is a detriment in a rapidly-changing information scene (look at my collection of OReilly books - I'm 2 versions out of date already.... Sigh.)
However, I'm going to take issue with you on several statements, and make some of my own:
The most immediate advantage of print is it's readability. There has been some interesting developments in digital ink (technologies where you have a white "paper" with crystals embede in it which change orientation (and look black rather than white) on application of a small charge), but even then, readability for electronic books sucks hard. You certainly can't have people reading off of LCD/CRTs for any period of time.
Durability and portability. Books never run out of power. The ability to use them as legs for your sofa is a testament to how sturdy they are. Fundamentally, until we can build a portable reading device that allows you to bash it around like a 4th-grade history book, well, electronic books are not going to be anything popular. Paper doesn't crash when you run it under water (hey, just dry it out!), erase itself when left on top of the TV or microwave, or delete itself when you accidentally hit the wrong key combo.
With respect to textbooks and changing information: in the vast majority of cases, textbooks should never be used in a rapidly fluctuating environment. Textbooks are for imparting a base knowledge level of a subject. Essentially, they are reference material. The information in them generally is not Incorrect (yes, you HS biology books from the 50s need to be tossed out, but the ones in the 80s? I think not.), rather it becomes out-of-date. Supplements and addendums are excellent ways to keep "static" textbooks relevant for years. W/R/T non-textbooks, the practice of publishing errata and updates to the original book via the Web is an excellent way to combine the advantages of print with the immediacy of the electronic (especially when you can print out the electronic updates and stick them in the back of the book!).
Alot of the debate around textbooks is really a funding issue, not a medium issue. Honestly, I'd rather see schools invest in having no textbooks older than 10 years than getting a computer for each child. Which do you thing is really better?
Also, despite about 20 years of "reformers" claiming that the linear teaching methods are stiffling our children and limiting their ability, "flexible/associated learning" is a complete, unmittigated disaster, especially in the lower grades. Linear textbook or teacher-driven learning is probably the BEST method for imparting a base understanding and fundamental knowledge of anything. A structured program where knowledge is presented in a pre-determined manner is really the only way to effectively teach a complete newbie a subject rapidly. A certain subset of the population would do better quickly switching to a more exploratory method of learning, but textbooks are aimed at the vast majority of people, most of which need structure to learn. Now, later in life (college, and probably HS), we should look to alternate methods rather than purely strict structure, but remember, you have to learn to crawl before you can run the 100m dash.
Fundamentally, the printed textbook has so many advantages over the distributed eBook-thingy that I can't see the eBook being anything more than a gizmo for decades.
Oh, and by the way, we already have "open" educational information. It's called the Internet. Look how reliable and trustworthy information that comes from it is. The editorial process provides a level of certainty that is not to be found in rapidly-changing e-texts. yes, print does occasionally have mistakes, and there is a detectible bias according to the period the book was written in. However, the constant "revision" process of e-texts means that large amounts of the text will not be fact-checked (or even consistent), as future updates will undoubtably be counted on to fix mistakes. That's OK, until they find mistakes in chunks I've already read and internalized, which means that I've got to go back and re-read it. Basically, it's rather have the information correct the first time around, rather than constantly worry that what I've read is right or maybe a mistake.
I used to work for a major publisher, and I've extensively used both LaTeX and TeX (and all the recent extension thereunto) for a decade now.
The original author was correct. TeX is most certainly NOT a page-layout program, which is what is required for general publishing. Quark, PageMaker, and FrameMaker (to a lesser extent) are really the only apps that fulfill the multiple-layer, exact positioning, image, font, and coloration requirements that publishing a big book requires.
TeX most certainly will work for jobs such as many (if not most) technical books (probably all of O'Reilly's books could be done in TeX - heck, the early ones were done in nroff (as was W.R.Steven's books)).
However, TeX and it's extensions are completely unsuitable for anything that does not consist of huge amounts of plain text with a some equations and maybe a couple of PS figures/images. Believe me, I've tried for years to publish good AD&D suppliments using TeX, and well, I gave up, and now use PageMaker.
TeX and LaTeX are ideally suited for their designed purpose: publishing mathematics-heavy academic papers and college-level science/math textbooks. They are NOT general-purpose page-layout tools (despite all the work that people have done to try to extend them that way).
Quark and PageMaker allow the user a degree of control over the visual layout of the work that is the antithesis of TeX (which is wholely a content-oriented system, where exact layout is a BAD thing, much as HTML is supposed to be). They can say: "Put this object Here, wrap the text just so, dither this pattern in this layer, etc." For real publishing, there is no substitute.
I still love TeX, but the original article was correct: it's a niche product, and does not solve the general problem.
My post was based on the info all the H1B people I've ever talked to said. And the rules for H1Bs are VERY VERY different than from J-1, F-1, or E-1 holders.
Green cards are wrapped up in politics and quotas. Depending on where you are from/who your sponsor is, it can go fast/slow. I've seen it go as fast as 3 months for someone, and then again, I've heard of 5-6 years for others. YMMV.
Like I said, everything I've heard/been told/read says that you can indeed get another visa after your H1B expires. BUT YOU HAVE TO LEAVE AND REAPPLY FOR ONE. That is, fly home, and wait while they put the paper work through. You can't stay in the US after the H1 expires while they process the new visa. Alot of other visas allow you do say here while the process is being done (this includes H1Bs themselves).
I may be wrong, since I'm a US citizen, and don't have to be intimately familiar with the rules. However, I'm pretty sure of what I wrote.
If i've bollux'd up the situation, I take the time to officially remove my foot from my mouth.
I'm not saying we get ALL the smart people. Indeed, that is true - if the US had all the rich people in the world, who would we be able to export to?
No, what you missed is my point: the US survives in the competative world by gleaning the best and brightest minds from other countries, and getting them to come here and live/work. We don't get everyone, or even a significant portion of that group, but it is critically important to get the best (say, a quarter of the top 0.1% of everyone else's smartest), since our products to sell these days are almost exclusively intellectual property-based. This is why H1Bs suck. We're effectively exporting our knowledge for free.
Global economics is about specialization, and doing what your country is best suited for. The US is/has been a brainpower country. If we give up on that, what are we going to do, make toasters?
And no, inter-country competition is very similar to inter-corporation competition. You may be in competition with some others for certain things, but you sell to, and even cooperate, on other things.
I will agree that global economics is NOT a zero-sum game. But that doesn't diminish the fact that we definately ARE in competition for some things, and highly intelligent people are critical to the U.S.'s continued health. That's life.
The currenty implimentation of the H1B visa is kinda like the Death Penalty: nice idea, the way it's done sucks.
So what's wrong with the current H1B? Three things:
6-year term
Non-renewable (after 6 years, you gotta go home)
Non-convertible (ie, you can't become a citizen - becoming a permanent resident is extremely hard from an H1B)
If the intention was for short-term help for an industry, six years is way to long. Fundamentally, on this one, the AFL/CIO is correct: companies use H1Bs to import cheap labor rather than retrain US citizens (the IT shortage is so bad that they retrain US citizen anyway, but look at other industries (like Civ Eng) that don't do this). "Temporary" is a joke. If people were serious about this, the term would be 3 years, max.
Remaining in the US after the 6 years is up is nigh-on-impossible, no matter how important you are to a company's wellbeing. When it's up, out you go. Getting a subsequent H1B to come back again is alot harder than getting the first H1B. This is stupid.
If you are here on an H1B, there are only 2 circumstances that I know of that allow you to remain here (ie, convert your H1B visa to some other sort of visa): (1) you marry a US citizen, in which case you get to apply for permanent residency (Green Card), or (2) apply for asylum/refugee status (which is horribly torturous). Companies can sponsor you for a Green Card if they want, but the rules require you to return to your home country while they consider your application. Which can take 6 months or a year (or alot longer). And there is no way you can stay on your own without a sponsor.
Fundamentally, H1Bs should be for 2-3 year, "work-and-leave" use, kinda like a contractor. We should create another type of visa which allows us to have people in for a period of time (several years) and then convert it easily to a permanent resident status. That way, we keep the smart ones here.
This is the worst part of the current H1B - we bring in lots of talented people, train them up in our stuff so we can make use of them, then send them back to their home country, full of knowledge on how we do business. Dumb! The U.S.'s major competative advantage is it's brainpower - if we don't try to keep our brainpower, then where does that leave us? For years, the U.S.'s immigration policy has been such that we skim the cream of intellectuals from other countries (e.g. get them to imigrate to the US) so we keep our brainpower as the top. The H1B actively defeats this idea. Stupid.
I've seen alot of truely, ahhh, stunning, ports of Linux over the last couple of years. Wristwatches, toasters, etc. all seem to attract the attention and adoration of linux porters.
Now, what I'm seeing here is I think a conflict between two fundamental hacker tenants:
Admire difficult and elegant coding - hackers tend to look up to others who can pull of a hard job. Call it the "hack value" karma.
Use the right tool for the job - we also tend to stress utilitarianism and appropriateness.
What I guess I'm worried about is that I tend to see the over-emphasis on the first (especially amongst the younger of us), and the slighting of the second.
Yeah, there might be good, personal reasons for the above people to have ported Linux to Cisco. However, I'm not particularly happy that people tend to glorify these hackers and look down on the ones who might be (for instance) writing neat ASP scripts to talk to MS SQL servers from IIS.
Fundamentally, I'm worried that in our zeal to promote Linux and Free Software, we run into the "Round Peg, Square Hole" syndrome (or, the "If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" problem).
I guess what I'd like to see us as a community do is to place more value on doing the job right, which means using the appropriate tools (or, if there truely aren't good ones available, writing the correct thing), rather than spend time on things that in the end, are almost useless (other than perhaps educational use).
Slashdot Mirror
Like many others here that run OpenBSD, I've got a collection of CDs from previous releases, and really don't need another CD, since I can just snarf the updates.
Rather than get Yet Another T-Shirt, I suggest that people wanting to make a donation do it via PayPal. The OpenBSD user on PayPal is: obsdpaypal@openbsd.org. This is by far the easiest way to send them money, and it all goes to the project.
If you're a corporation that uses OpenBSD, I suggest that they make a nice donation - I've usually suggested $1000 as a suitable amount.
-Erik
OK, I've voted in PA, MA, and CA. So I've seen at least 5 different voting methods, and can comment on what I think is the best way...
Electronic voting sounds wonderful, but if you pick up a copy of Applied Crypto, you'll understand why it's not my favorite form, regardless of how you do it. Electronic Voting is a hard problem - there are lots of very tricky pitfalls, and I'm sorry, as someone who deals with computers professionally, I'm not going to trust that we get it right.
For those of you bitching about how stupid people are that can't use punchcard systems, I seriously doubt you've ever used one. The best analogy I can make for using punchcards to vote with is the SAT (or other standardized test). Imagine taking the SAT - all the questions are in a booklet, and you have a seperate answer sheet that only has row numbers and lettered circles. Now image that you have to take it in INK. That's how bad punchcards are. Here in CA, I had to vote on about 30 different races/propositions. Believe me, it's not simple at all to get it error-free.
Me, I'm for using the system I first used in PA: the good old mechanical voting booth. You step into it, pull a lever to close the drapes, and you have all the choices in neat rows in front of you. The booth can be set up so that you can't make mistakes (only allowing you to vote ONCE for a given office, for instance), and you can go back and change your mind up until you pull the main lever to exit the booth. The row sizes can be adjusted (I think most of the print was in at least 36 point when I last used on), so you can accomodate the elderly and disabled easily.
Also, mechanical voting booths have several advantages over both paper and electronic ballots:
All in all, I'm strongly in favor of mechanical voting throughout the nation. Hopefully, we can take this debatacle and make some improvements.
-Erik
OK, I've finally had it with everybody trumpeting the TCO equation. We have a lot of qualified technical people here, and Gartner has a bunch of reasonably savvy business analysts, but does anyone bother to ask the people who REALY KNOW about TCO? Oh, no, we just spout our local dogma as the truth.
Hard facts: the people who know TCO are the System (NOT SOFTWARE) Architects and the MIS/Operations Managers. I've very little faith in Director-level (or above) management knowing about real costs, and Programmers (no matter how smart) don't have a fucking clue about what TCO means.
TCO has four major considerations, which vary by the company involved. There is no such thing as a "global" TCO. There's the TCO for your company, and there's the one for Yahoo, IBM, etc. all of which are different. And each consideration is of a different weight (importance) depending on your situation.
One things I will point out that seems go against a mantra here on /. : Open Source OSes have no real maintenance advantage over closed-UNIXes. Sorry, but that's the truth for 99% of the businesses out there. Nowdays, installed commercial UNIXes use virtually the same userland toolsets as the FreeUNIXes (who cares that SUN doesn't fix bugs in their version of sendmail? Anybody actually run Sun Sendmail? I thought not.) The only real differences are in major applications (which are almost always closed-source, even on FreeUNIXes), and the base kernel itself. Only the largest companies (or those whose business depends on doing kernel-level development e.g. Cobalt) will care. Fixes for important problems in this sort of stuff come out of the commercial vendors as fast as they do from the FreeUNIXes, and honestly, virtually no company has the resources (or even the expertise) in the programming staff to fix subtle bugs in stuff like the Linux kernel (or glibc, or whatever). And if you think the admin staff is going to do this, hey, well, I've got a bridge in Arizona I wanna show you...
-Erik
(yes, I'm a System Architect, and yes, I'm pissed off...)
After reading this article, and looking at one of the patent mentioned, I'm going to hazzard a reasonable guess at exactly what's going on here:
The problem with this kind of patenting is that the "concept" is closely tied to the "implimentation". That is, the concept may be so narrowly circumscribed that any implimentation is an 'infringing' one.
Also unclear in this whole mess is how a software trap would fit in. Suppose Intel was granted the "broader" patent which covered not just the specific transistor layout of the interrupt return handler, but the more general case of returning interrupt context for IA64. Does this preclude software implimentations of that IA64 instruction (which would be particularly relevant to code-morphers like Transmeta, but even to AMD et al which do translation to microcode)?
I'm by far no Patent Lawyer. If the scope is the narrower one, I see no problem, and indeed, is well within the goal of patents. I'm alot let sanguine if the patent covers more than the circuit design, however.
-Erik
I was one of the optimists when ICANN was first founded. Yeah, sure there were some problems, but surely we could work past them in good faith to get a fair, equitable system which would straighten out the DNS mess.
I'm wrong. I admit it. Kick me.
ICANN is fundamentally flawed, and the flaws aren't fixable. Time to de-charter ICANN and do it right from the beginning.
The only way we can get an ICANN-like organization to really work is to make sure it has some reasonable fascimilie of these characteristics:
These are the biggest things that ICANN doesn't have, and that any successor organization must have. I'm sure I've missed a few, but it's a good start.
Time to De-Charter ICANN and Start Again.
-Erik
Once there was UUNET, and MCI.
Then Worldcomm bought UUNET.
Then Worldcomm bought MCI.
However, as part of the deal to buy MCI, Worldcomm had to sell the Internet backbone and ISP side of MCI to a third party. It ended up with Britain's Cable and Wireless.
So: Worldcom/MCI now has UUNET's ISP business, while the old MCI ISP is sitting with C&W.
Confusing, eh?
Just remember that GTE bought BBN, and Bell Atlantic bought Nynex (which had bought New England Telephone), and now B.A. and GTE have merged, but they've spun off the ISP stuff as Verizon. And of course Qwest now owns USWest, while SBC owns Pac Bell, Ameritec, SWBell, Prodigy, and CellularOne. And of course AT&T has spun off Lucent now. About the only people I think that are still intact and haven't bought (or been bought) by another large player is Sprint.
I loooooovvvvve the Telecommunications Act of 1996, don't you?
;-)
-Erik
After looking at all these replies, I thought I'd reply myself.
Some notes:
If you live near one of these trunks, well, happy for you. However, remember than less than 50% of the US population lives inside one of the top 100 urban areas.
The real challenge is not the big urban areas - they can (and probably will) get fiber-to-the-curb within 10 years at the worst case. The challenge is getting it to the 30-40% of the USA that live in sub-100,000 urban areas, and even worse, the 10% or so that are classified rural.
It's the same problem the USA faced with electrification in the 1920s and 1930s. Only now, it's worse, since a far, far smaller percentage of the population lives in the harder-to-wire areas, there is even less of an incentive to fiber them up.
I can use my home town as an example: Meadville,PA, population 15,000. It's easily 40 miles to the nearest city which would have a fiber trunk into it, and while the town might eventually have fiber as part of the Cable Modem rollout, it's certainly not going to be fiber-to-the-curb, and the cable modem rollout will miss the other 70,000 people who live in the county (which is rather rural). Population density for my county: 82 people/sq mile.
-Erik
...I'm much more familiar with the Telco's infrastructure, where they've been busily replacing long-distance trunks with fiber for quite some time.
A silly question, though: Are DS3 lines necessarily copper? I was under the impression (possibly wrong) that they could be either copper or fiber, depending on the local equipment.
Oh, and UUNET doesn't own 50%. More line 30% (in the USA). Sprint, MCI (now Cable&Wireless), ATT, and BBN (now Verizon) are now the "big 5" in the US - they each run between 10 and 25% of the network. And in Europe, the national telephone monopolies own huge percentages of the local backbones. I'd estimate that no company owns more than 10% of the total world-wide Internet backbone capacity.
-Erik
...gets my vote for the most far-impacting of all recent technology-vs-law items. Yes, the CDA portion of it got the most attention, but by far the other aspects of the law are the more important and far-reaching, as it fundamentally changed the nature of the communications industry in the USA.
Find it here.
I don't mean to be US-centric, but I'm not familiar with other countries' laws enough to suggest examples therein.
-Erik
(to paraphase the old "it's the economy, stupid" catchphrase of the last election...)
The article is plain wrong on several points, and makes naive and/or inane assumptions on several others.
First off, virtually all the long-distance communication wires in the US & Canada are fibre. Both voice and data travel over fiber (NOT copper) for about 99% of all inter-metropolitan traffic. Yet that fibre represents less than 10% (I forget the exact number, but it's less than 10%) of the entire physical communications plant in North America. The reason this is all fiber now is that it was by far the cheapest, easiest, and quickest return on investment portion of the network to upgrade. The article completely ignores the fact that the other 90+% of the network is extremely costly and time-consuming to replace with fiber and has a much, much, much longer ROI.
In places like Manhattan, where there is extremely high population density and communications demand, yes, fiber has been laid along (some) streets, and it is possible to put out a direct fiber lead to a large building that goes directly to a fiber line. If you're in on of the top 25 Metropolitan Areas in N.A., you might have a fiber line within a mile or so. Outside there, well, if you've got one within 10 miles, consider yourself lucky.
The problem still remains getting high-speed communications to places that don't astronomical population density. It's a hard problem, and condemning companies that provide more-or-less universal access for using copper is moronic. Cogent might be able to offer access to what, maybe 5% of the population? Compare this with WorldCom, the ILECs, MCI, and Earthlink, and all the other big ISPs, who can probably get between 95 and 99% of the entire population.
I also love the part where they seem to think that building their own long-distance backbone instead of using others is a panacea for network conjestion. Someone need to explain the concept of Peering and Wide-Area routing to these folks. Sure, it's nice if both the source and destination are plugged directly into your backbone, but the odds of this are what, virtually nill? If you want some real benefit from your own backbone, you have to connect directly with the majority of sites people want to access. In this case, you better beg Above.Net, Exodus, GlobalCenter, Genuity, et al. (all the big co-lo people) to allow you to run a line into all their co-lo sites. Oh, and since you're a small player, don't think that these folks aren't going to charge you for the privilege of hooking into their co-lo.
The other thing I find stupid is the implication that only Cogent has a "data-optimized" network. What a load of Marketing BS. If I'm running a packet-switched network, can I tell what I'm running on top of it (well, with ATM technically you can, but it's really all data)? Data? Voice-over-IP? Streaming Video? The article seems to confuse the concepts of packet-switched vs. circuit-switched with "data-optimized" vs. "voice-optimized".
Anyway, I'm sure others are going to point the myriad of crap in this article, so I'll stop here.
Cogent is offering a nice service, and has some interesting features that may point the way to how communications are done in the future. They're not really innovative in any sense, and I certainly wouldn't think of them as the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's an interesting company, and I wish them will. But the hype level is just a tad too high here.
-Erik
You are correct in that the DoD does not require all code to be made available to them. However, a large percentage (I would say a majority) of custom-code contracts require that the DoD have access to the source code. In my experience with the DoD, particularly in the security field, it is mandatory for certain segments (the NSA would like to inspect your code, please...). In other parts, code access is only allowed if the company goes out of business or stops supporting the product (where "supporting" has well-defined limits). In stil others (particularly when buying mass-market software), there is no requirement for code access.
I know I'm being anal-retentive about this reply, but then again, so are you.
;-)
-Erik
While the MPAA rating system itself is independent of government influence, they are de facto backed by the rule of law, which I'm sure courts are aware of. Local Zoning laws are often written as to forbid the showing of NC-17 movies on certain property, and there are also many communities which have local ordanances against showing NC-17 movies to minors, whether or not they are accompanied by an adult.
The key in these laws is that they cannot forbid such material from adult use in all places. Thus, it is possible to restrict NC-17 movies from being shown downtown in the MegaPlex, but not uptown in the middle of the manufacturing district.
Actually, the "harmful to minors" part is the big loophole, and which is actually probably the hardest to overturn. Since this type of law rests on what the Supreme Court has defined as "community standards", the definition of "harmful to minors" does not have to have any scientific backing - merely a majority of local residents have to agree on what it means. And this standard usually is defined as to what the majority of your current local representatives in local government vote for. So you're not going to get it overturned on this.
The final point here is something people seem to continually miss: local governments in the U.S. can restrict minors rights in virtually any way with the consent of a majority of local adults, provided the restrictions do not unduly burden adult's access to the restricted material/behavior. If the law does not remove an adult's rights, well, then, it's fair game. That's the way it is.
-Erik
... is to do what the DoD does on most of it's coding contracts: require that the contractor make its source code available to the DoD. That is, the contract requires that the DoD has clear rights to use the code and have others work with it, but the contractor retains copyright control.
Honestly, for political as well as institutional reasons, I think this is the best way to go for quite awhile. All coding work (and all systems that have any sort of code, from EPROMs to Java) should have the stipulation that the gov't has a clear right to use and modify the source code with no additional compensation. Now, that doesn't mean that the gov't can sell the code or give it away under a OpenSource-style license, or even that they can reuse the code for another project (that should be negotiated in the contract, with appropriate compensation for the contractor). It simply means that the gov't can get others to fix problems with the code if need arises (big holes, the contractor refuses to finish the job, the contractor won't maintain the code, contractor goes out of business, etc....)
This strategy is kind of the minimum resistance path - it still protects closed-source vendors from having their code released to the public (and let's face it, you wouldn't ever see mass-market software (and its low price) make it into gov't use if the companies were required to give away the code to anyone). And it saves the security debate for another time (that is, the debate over Open vs. Closed software won't impact the decision to require source).
Personally, I'd like to see the government start requiring perpetual license for all code to be used internally in any way. They'll be a lot of resistance for this, but I think there's a much better chance of this happening than if the gov't tries to require a GPL/BSD/whatever code license for all work. If you do that, then the gov't loses all access to mass-market software, and it becomes a completely custom job.
On second thought, if it all requires custom programming, well, hey, Welfare For Programmers! <grin>
-Erik
... Duh!
I'm also going to say something I swore I wouldn't: WTF is this doing on /. ????
Cutting edge processors are always going to be far more money than their relative speed indicates - it's the premium you pay for getting the complete best-of-the-best. Given the CPU turnover these days, only those with more $$ than common sense would buy a top-speed chip (or, those with a hard performance-is-absolutely-priority-one requirement (though they should probably be looking at an Alpha or PowerPC chip instead of an x86 one)).
Like I said before, this article doesn't add anything, so I'm reduced to complaining.
Slow news Monday, eh folks? Hemos, go back to bed, and we'll wake you up if we need anything.
-Erik
I would agree with the first half of your post. We do indeed use other people for a wide variety of things - society is built on people using people. I'm not bemoaning that particular fact. Organ donation is a "use" of other people, but not in the manner that I think is something to worry about.
What I was more particularly worried about was the specific use of another person's body against his or her will for the sole purpose of aiding someone else. What happens if we have required organ donation? Or even blood giving required by law? Or worse yet, either of the two by forced societal convention? Yes, that means lots more available to cure and/or help sick people, but at what cost? We lose control over that most basic of items, the determination of our body's fate. If I can't control what I do with my body, well, I might as well just give up now.
The very last paragraph is exactly what I worry about. It is the belief by scientists (and the technically minded) that "I'll just make this thing cause I can, and let someone else worry about how it gets used." That's the worst way to approach things. Kinda like saying "I'll cross the street, but not look for traffic until I get in the middle." People far, far better than I have worried about this (and stood on the fence and screamed about it) and we're still nowhere near a decent societal dialog. Take a look at Oppenheimer and Bohr.
We need to stop and think about what we do (and the consequences thereof) before we jump feet first into it. Similarly, our society needs to start making choices about things that aren't good for it. Maybe these things are good for a segment of society, but as a whole, they're bad. Unfortunately, society has a bad track record on this problem, but that doesn't mean I can't still scream about it, and hope that we wake up before it's too late.
Science, like life, should live by the manta "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
-Erik
In the USA, this is almost certainly true - the safeguards we have are pretty darned effective. I'd be willing to bet that there aren't such "questionable" donations here. However, that leaves the rest of the entire world. There are lots of documented cases of people in 3rd world countries (particularly Pacific Rim, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent) of destitute people selling body parts for cash. The transplants are done places where the controls are few and ethics ignored.
While we can bemoan that, and say "oh, but it never happens here, because of our ethical controls..." that's all nice and good, until you realize that most of the RECIPIENTS of those organs are richer Westerners who couldn't get a organ through normal channels.
So, I think we're being a bit hipocritical in our stance on this, aren't we?
-Erik
I've like to make a great quote from an otherwise pretty bad movie:
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
-Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park
There was a great article in Wired 6 months ago by Bill Joy (yeah, that Bill Joy), that brought up some of the issues we see here. Check it out.
Now, I don't agree with alot of what Joy postulates, but the subject needs serious consideration. NOW. Not tomorrow, not when we get around to it. Because putting off a discussion and a decision means we don't have one at all. We'll just turn around one day, and wonder, "How did we get in the fucking mess?"
I'm not really sure about this story - I don't have all the details, so I'm reserving judgement (or at least, an opinion).
We humans (especially Westerners, and particularly Americans) like to cheat. We don't like to play the hand Fate deals us, so we dicker, moan, whine, and complain to the dealer, while we busily re-arrange the cards to our liking, then say, "Oh, jeeze, look what I've got!" I'm all for stacking the deck in your favor, don't get me wrong. Transplants, drug therapy, all sorts of operations and treatments, hell, they're great.
What bothers me is that we're rapidly approaching the point where we start to use other people as parts banks for ourselves. "Oops, drank too much liquor over the last 10 years, better warm up that clone I had growing in the bank, I need a new liver..."
You can argue that its already starting, with the trade in black-market organs (particularly kidneys) harvested from the 3rd world for 1st world clients. That's bad (and if you think those people really are giving them up by their free will, dream on).
If you and the wifey are at high risk for having a kid with a major genetic problem, well, maybe you shouldn't be having kids. Adopt a kid - they're plenty available, waiting for a nice home. But, not, we're selfish. Gotta have it. And when it doesn't work out, well, whine, and try to rig the game.
Do what you can for yourself. But the minute you start messing with other people's lives to cover for your mistakes (or hell, even to cover for the screwy hand of Fate), well, that's a line I think we better not cross.
-Erik
(ok, the title is probably going to get me marked as a "troll", but I think it's really relevant...)
I'm worried about the level of "purity" we seem to be demanding of anyone these days, in all sorts of situations. The reason I titled this post "Requiring Virgins" is that it almost seems as though we insist on a level of untouchability that no one can reasonably meet. That is, we're back to the "if your daughter's not a virgin on her wedding night, well, she's a slut and obviously not marriagable." It used to be (back in the old, old, days) that if you discovered your wife had actually slept with another man before you married her, it was grounds for instant divorce (and pretty much complete social ostrication); never mind that men slept with anything with 2 tits and a hole (pardon my French).
Two recent examples here on /. : Judge Reinquist's son and the Dean in this story. There may be lots of reasons why IIT is not a good choice for the review, but complaining that someone who isn't doing the review, nor is directly involved in the review in any way once had ties to the DOJ 13 years ago is ludicrous. Likewise, the whole thing about Reinquist and his son (who's so peripherally tied to the MS cases it's silly) is muckraking.
This usually comes up in political cases, where random associates or old-and-forgotten acts are used to tar-and-feather someone unreasonably. But I'm seeing this in lots of other aspects, too. We seems to be expecting that anyone involved in anything we care about has a level of untouchability that only cartoon characters can have. People, if you don't have a "Conflict of Interest", you're not qualified to do it. By this I mean that you can't possibly work in a field without having some ties to something that theoretically might be a "Conflict of Interest". We seem to have lost all reason in judging these things.
I'm tired of living in a society where people seemt to think that the only way to "trust" someone is to have everyone live in a glass house under a microscope all the time. And it's not just corporations and gov't invading our privacy. It's you and me, too, everytime we cry to see something we have no business looking at (fundamentally, why the outcry every time political candidate refuses (or hell, is even late) releasing their tax returns? That's fucking private, and isn't germane to the issue!)
Full disclosure is one thing. However, full disclosure with an anal probe, and being disqualified because you have a pimple on your ass is another. I'm tired of this crap.
-Erik
OK, I live in the SF Bay area, and I work for one of the national DSL providers (NOT the ISP, but the people who actually deliver the line for you, and NOT one of the ILECs). I can't name them specifically, but let's just say they aren't Rhythms.
DSL delivery generally has a couple of major problems (I'm the primary troubleshooter on long-overdue orders, so I see alot of this). If one of these happens, it can take weeks to fix, much of which is due to the back-and-forth nature of fixing problems that require interaction between 3 or 4 HUGE companies. Think: we talk to ISP, determine there is a problem, talk to ILEC, twiddle a bit, talk to ILEC, talk to ILEC, ILEC does something, we look at it, talk to ILEC, talk to end-user, talk to ILEC, etc....
In general, we're closing about 50-60% of our orders within 1 month. The goal is 75% by calendar year end, and 90% for next year. However, if an order doesn't get closed within 1 month, it averages 8-12 weeks to get closed.
Unless you work at an I/CLEC, you have no idea how screwed up the physical plant for the phone system is. Line conditioners, repeaters, bad wiring installs, mismatched/mislabeled wiring - it's a wonder people get anything installed. Alot of this can be blamed on the "get it done, and don't worry about it" attitude of the ILEC. However, a large amount is also due to the fact that the phone system was (and is) designed to deliver VOICE PHONE service, and things that are done to improve voice are often harmful for data carriers.
Another problem is that we're one of the few (if not ONLY) DSL people who actually have an automated ordering system. That is, when you give your info to an ISP, they can automatically enter it into our system, which automatically makes the ILEC loop order, starts the network provisioning, puts in the ATM parameters, etc. Virtually everyone else does this by hand. Our system works about 90% of the time, and getting better. And we're still averaging 4 weeks. Think about the other guys....
A couple of things that will speed your DSL order, no matter who you place it with:
DSL is certainly not a smooth install for everyone yet. With the coming of line-sharing by all DSL providers, install times should go down considerably, since they can piggyback on your existing phone line, and don't have to run a new one. Honestly, though, I doubt you'll ever see times drop below an average of 2 weeks. The physical phone plant is just too messy.
Also, here are some 'rule-of-thumb' distances for various services (note that the distance from the CO is measured in feet of actual wire - it can be hard to figure that out, since wire often runs in a decidedly indirect path between you and your CO):
Hope this helps.
-Erik
Your argument has some merit. Indeed, not everyone learns linearly. Also, the fixed, static nature of books is a detriment in a rapidly-changing information scene (look at my collection of OReilly books - I'm 2 versions out of date already.... Sigh.)
However, I'm going to take issue with you on several statements, and make some of my own:
The most immediate advantage of print is it's readability. There has been some interesting developments in digital ink (technologies where you have a white "paper" with crystals embede in it which change orientation (and look black rather than white) on application of a small charge), but even then, readability for electronic books sucks hard. You certainly can't have people reading off of LCD/CRTs for any period of time.
Durability and portability. Books never run out of power. The ability to use them as legs for your sofa is a testament to how sturdy they are. Fundamentally, until we can build a portable reading device that allows you to bash it around like a 4th-grade history book, well, electronic books are not going to be anything popular. Paper doesn't crash when you run it under water (hey, just dry it out!), erase itself when left on top of the TV or microwave, or delete itself when you accidentally hit the wrong key combo.
With respect to textbooks and changing information: in the vast majority of cases, textbooks should never be used in a rapidly fluctuating environment. Textbooks are for imparting a base knowledge level of a subject. Essentially, they are reference material. The information in them generally is not Incorrect (yes, you HS biology books from the 50s need to be tossed out, but the ones in the 80s? I think not.), rather it becomes out-of-date. Supplements and addendums are excellent ways to keep "static" textbooks relevant for years. W/R/T non-textbooks, the practice of publishing errata and updates to the original book via the Web is an excellent way to combine the advantages of print with the immediacy of the electronic (especially when you can print out the electronic updates and stick them in the back of the book!).
Alot of the debate around textbooks is really a funding issue, not a medium issue. Honestly, I'd rather see schools invest in having no textbooks older than 10 years than getting a computer for each child. Which do you thing is really better?
Also, despite about 20 years of "reformers" claiming that the linear teaching methods are stiffling our children and limiting their ability, "flexible/associated learning" is a complete, unmittigated disaster, especially in the lower grades. Linear textbook or teacher-driven learning is probably the BEST method for imparting a base understanding and fundamental knowledge of anything. A structured program where knowledge is presented in a pre-determined manner is really the only way to effectively teach a complete newbie a subject rapidly. A certain subset of the population would do better quickly switching to a more exploratory method of learning, but textbooks are aimed at the vast majority of people, most of which need structure to learn. Now, later in life (college, and probably HS), we should look to alternate methods rather than purely strict structure, but remember, you have to learn to crawl before you can run the 100m dash.
Fundamentally, the printed textbook has so many advantages over the distributed eBook-thingy that I can't see the eBook being anything more than a gizmo for decades.
Oh, and by the way, we already have "open" educational information. It's called the Internet. Look how reliable and trustworthy information that comes from it is. The editorial process provides a level of certainty that is not to be found in rapidly-changing e-texts. yes, print does occasionally have mistakes, and there is a detectible bias according to the period the book was written in. However, the constant "revision" process of e-texts means that large amounts of the text will not be fact-checked (or even consistent), as future updates will undoubtably be counted on to fix mistakes. That's OK, until they find mistakes in chunks I've already read and internalized, which means that I've got to go back and re-read it. Basically, it's rather have the information correct the first time around, rather than constantly worry that what I've read is right or maybe a mistake.
-Erik
I used to work for a major publisher, and I've extensively used both LaTeX and TeX (and all the recent extension thereunto) for a decade now.
The original author was correct. TeX is most certainly NOT a page-layout program, which is what is required for general publishing. Quark, PageMaker, and FrameMaker (to a lesser extent) are really the only apps that fulfill the multiple-layer, exact positioning, image, font, and coloration requirements that publishing a big book requires.
TeX most certainly will work for jobs such as many (if not most) technical books (probably all of O'Reilly's books could be done in TeX - heck, the early ones were done in nroff (as was W.R.Steven's books)).
However, TeX and it's extensions are completely unsuitable for anything that does not consist of huge amounts of plain text with a some equations and maybe a couple of PS figures/images. Believe me, I've tried for years to publish good AD&D suppliments using TeX, and well, I gave up, and now use PageMaker.
TeX and LaTeX are ideally suited for their designed purpose: publishing mathematics-heavy academic papers and college-level science/math textbooks. They are NOT general-purpose page-layout tools (despite all the work that people have done to try to extend them that way).
Quark and PageMaker allow the user a degree of control over the visual layout of the work that is the antithesis of TeX (which is wholely a content-oriented system, where exact layout is a BAD thing, much as HTML is supposed to be). They can say: "Put this object Here, wrap the text just so, dither this pattern in this layer, etc." For real publishing, there is no substitute.
I still love TeX, but the original article was correct: it's a niche product, and does not solve the general problem.
-Erik
Are you sure?
My post was based on the info all the H1B people I've ever talked to said. And the rules for H1Bs are VERY VERY different than from J-1, F-1, or E-1 holders.
Green cards are wrapped up in politics and quotas. Depending on where you are from/who your sponsor is, it can go fast/slow. I've seen it go as fast as 3 months for someone, and then again, I've heard of 5-6 years for others. YMMV.
Like I said, everything I've heard/been told/read says that you can indeed get another visa after your H1B expires. BUT YOU HAVE TO LEAVE AND REAPPLY FOR ONE. That is, fly home, and wait while they put the paper work through. You can't stay in the US after the H1 expires while they process the new visa. Alot of other visas allow you do say here while the process is being done (this includes H1Bs themselves).
I may be wrong, since I'm a US citizen, and don't have to be intimately familiar with the rules. However, I'm pretty sure of what I wrote.
If i've bollux'd up the situation, I take the time to officially remove my foot from my mouth.
-Erik
I'm not saying we get ALL the smart people. Indeed, that is true - if the US had all the rich people in the world, who would we be able to export to?
No, what you missed is my point: the US survives in the competative world by gleaning the best and brightest minds from other countries, and getting them to come here and live/work. We don't get everyone, or even a significant portion of that group, but it is critically important to get the best (say, a quarter of the top 0.1% of everyone else's smartest), since our products to sell these days are almost exclusively intellectual property-based. This is why H1Bs suck. We're effectively exporting our knowledge for free.
Global economics is about specialization, and doing what your country is best suited for. The US is/has been a brainpower country. If we give up on that, what are we going to do, make toasters?
And no, inter-country competition is very similar to inter-corporation competition. You may be in competition with some others for certain things, but you sell to, and even cooperate, on other things.
I will agree that global economics is NOT a zero-sum game. But that doesn't diminish the fact that we definately ARE in competition for some things, and highly intelligent people are critical to the U.S.'s continued health. That's life.
-Erik
The currenty implimentation of the H1B visa is kinda like the Death Penalty: nice idea, the way it's done sucks.
So what's wrong with the current H1B? Three things:
If the intention was for short-term help for an industry, six years is way to long. Fundamentally, on this one, the AFL/CIO is correct: companies use H1Bs to import cheap labor rather than retrain US citizens (the IT shortage is so bad that they retrain US citizen anyway, but look at other industries (like Civ Eng) that don't do this). "Temporary" is a joke. If people were serious about this, the term would be 3 years, max.
Remaining in the US after the 6 years is up is nigh-on-impossible, no matter how important you are to a company's wellbeing. When it's up, out you go. Getting a subsequent H1B to come back again is alot harder than getting the first H1B. This is stupid.
If you are here on an H1B, there are only 2 circumstances that I know of that allow you to remain here (ie, convert your H1B visa to some other sort of visa): (1) you marry a US citizen, in which case you get to apply for permanent residency (Green Card), or (2) apply for asylum/refugee status (which is horribly torturous). Companies can sponsor you for a Green Card if they want, but the rules require you to return to your home country while they consider your application. Which can take 6 months or a year (or alot longer). And there is no way you can stay on your own without a sponsor.
Fundamentally, H1Bs should be for 2-3 year, "work-and-leave" use, kinda like a contractor. We should create another type of visa which allows us to have people in for a period of time (several years) and then convert it easily to a permanent resident status. That way, we keep the smart ones here.
This is the worst part of the current H1B - we bring in lots of talented people, train them up in our stuff so we can make use of them, then send them back to their home country, full of knowledge on how we do business. Dumb! The U.S.'s major competative advantage is it's brainpower - if we don't try to keep our brainpower, then where does that leave us? For years, the U.S.'s immigration policy has been such that we skim the cream of intellectuals from other countries (e.g. get them to imigrate to the US) so we keep our brainpower as the top. The H1B actively defeats this idea. Stupid.
-Erik
I've seen alot of truely, ahhh, stunning, ports of Linux over the last couple of years. Wristwatches, toasters, etc. all seem to attract the attention and adoration of linux porters.
Now, what I'm seeing here is I think a conflict between two fundamental hacker tenants:
What I guess I'm worried about is that I tend to see the over-emphasis on the first (especially amongst the younger of us), and the slighting of the second.
Yeah, there might be good, personal reasons for the above people to have ported Linux to Cisco. However, I'm not particularly happy that people tend to glorify these hackers and look down on the ones who might be (for instance) writing neat ASP scripts to talk to MS SQL servers from IIS.
Fundamentally, I'm worried that in our zeal to promote Linux and Free Software, we run into the "Round Peg, Square Hole" syndrome (or, the "If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" problem).
I guess what I'd like to see us as a community do is to place more value on doing the job right, which means using the appropriate tools (or, if there truely aren't good ones available, writing the correct thing), rather than spend time on things that in the end, are almost useless (other than perhaps educational use).
Feeling a bit crotchity today...
-Erik