Lots of companies went out and built identical
long haul networks. What that means is, if you
want to get from New York to Chicago you now
have 5 ways to do it, and possibly far more fiber
than we will ever use. This is a key part of
internet backbones, but it does nothing to address
the last mile.
Moving traffic inside a metro area, or indeed
right to the home or business is the key that
is still missing. Most neighborhoods don't have
fiber in them, ergo there is not enough
fiber in those locations. You don't care if your
ISP has 10 gig pipes to the city, if you're stuck
with dial-up.
The local and metro area stuff also doesn't
have the cost problems. Where it may cost $50-$100 million to light a single fiber from New York
to Chicago, it costs $0 (in transmission facilites) to go 3 miles across town (the end
devices can push that far on their own).
I love all these people saying there is an
oversupply of fiber. It's true, in a very
limited area. A more correct statement would
be that there is a gross undersupply of fiber
to connect these newly built networks to end
users, which is part of the reason that they
are so underutilized.
Cisco has been developing IPv6 software for some
time. Detatils are at www.cisco.com/ipv6, and
anyone with a registered login can download the
software and try it out for most major platforms.
CS programs have long had a difficult problem
to balance. Quite simply, the skills that a CS
student needs to know to be successful over a
lifetime don't look good enough on paper to pass
by an HR person. From the other direction, the
skills the working world are looking for is
useless in really understanding how things work.
The real skills that programmers need are
theoretical skills. Things like the advantages
of procedural vrs object oriented programming,
or how to look at a solution and do things like
"Big O" computations in order to decide how it
compares to another solution. Let's face it,
in big projects programmers don't write a lot of
code, they make sure the small amount of code
they write and the existing code are all put
together correctly.
Employers are typically concerned with more
mechanical aspects of programming. They want to
know if someone knows "C", or "Java", or sometimes if they have ever used "the microsoft
development enviornment", or "CVS". They want to
make sure that someone brought into the team is
not going to distract other memebers from programming to teach them the mechanics of what
needs to be done.
One of the measures of a university is how
easily their grads can get jobs. They get a lot
of feedback from companies on how good the grads
look coming out of school, but far too often this
is provided via HR people through multiple levels
of management. As such you get stuff like "we
have lots of java projects, and your people don't
know java". There is great pressure as a result
to put Java in the curriculum as a result.
I think the best way to solve this is to spend
the first two years teaching in a single, low level language lots of fundamentals. You want a
language that provides few features, and a small
library so the students get exposure to doing
everything themselves. C makes an excellent
choice, as does Pascal. Programs should be
text in, text out, there's no place for GUI's
and such in learning how to program.
Once the students have a good foundation the
second two years should be the application of that
in larger projects, and in other languages. Here
students should learn about OOP, giving them
Java, C++, and ObjC. They should learn a LISP
based language. They should learn an assembly
language. Students should work on larger projects, where part of the project is provided
to them before they start so they get used to
making their code work with existing code.
I think this leaves the students with a good
base, as well as with all of the resume buzz words
to get them past HR. Who knows, they might even
write good code.
When I need a mouse, which is generally only
with a new system, I tell my local reseller
"give me one of those $6 3-button jobs". They
look (and feel) like the old logitech 3 button
types that I just love, but they are some generic
knock off they buy a crate at a time.
I've never seen one of these $6 mice die,
and some are in some pretty awful service enviornments. I also have a couple of Logitech
"MouseMan" mice of different types, and none of
those have ever given me a bit of trouble.
I would suggest you should get rid of the
cats, buy a mouse pad so you don't destroy the
ball, and stop spilling soda and chips where
you roll your mouse.
Several research labs are now working on flexable
transitors, including some that can be "printed"
using an ink jet like printer. The idea is a
future where you can "download" processors.
Seems like the perfect match for an open source
processor design.
I would hope the patent offices would refuse
this patent, based on the prior work of many online phone books where you can enter a phone
number and get info on businesses, including their
web page.
Watch your routes to make sure you don't
use bad ones.
People have been doing this for years, it's
called a Tier 2 provider, the only difference here
is most tier twos have 2-3 backbone providers,
where they get 11.
Now, would you rather be with a provider who
has a 11 connections to big players, or would you
rather go with a real backbone that peers with
200-400 other providers directly? I mean, it's
simple math, if there are 1000 networks on the
Internet, and they connect to 11, for 989 you will
go through a middleman (the backbones they
connect to). If you go with a peering provider
you might get direct access to 400, and have a
middleman for the other 600.
Here's the other issue. Large providers generally share costs when they peer, making it
relatively cheap. InterNap takes a solid stance
of buying all their bandwidth. So,
if you're a customer, and you use 10 meg more
InterNap will have to pay for 10 meg more...where
a real backbone will simply have to share costs
with their peering parters. Who will be able to
upgrade first? Not InterNap.
Bottom line, it's not better, and it costs
more. It can be made to look better while they
are small though.
Any old Cisco IOS based box will do the trick.
Start with this link
to get basic transparent bridging information.
If you look further down, you'll see "Ethernet Bridging Example" with Figure 40 in it, where they route IP and DECNet, and bridge everything else. Well, if you remove IP and DECNet, it works too.
Of course, the request was for a cheap box. IOS based boxes are far from the cheapest, particularly on the low end. A 1605 would be about the cheapest thing for the job. Most any "router" on the low end that also supports bridging will do the job, bridging over a WAN is pretty easy.
This cool new Mac thing is drawing some Unix
developers to a new platform. I wonder how much
of the new stuff could be, or will be sent the
other way back into standard old BSD (a la FreeBSD). Will they grow together, or will
the Mac versions of things be inappropriate for
standard BSD?
Full circle couldn't be more accurate, because
we can predict the future:
Then:
BSD (as in the real Berkeley thing) is good.
Hardware vendors jump on the BSD bandwagon
Everyone touts open source compatability
Everyone develops their own extensions, incompatable with others
The market fractures and is unable to compete with MS
Now:
Linux/Gnome is good
Vendors beaten by Microsoft jump on the bandwagon
Everyone touts open source compatability
What's next?
Everyone adds their own extensions
The market fractures and can't compete against foo
Properly filtering your own customers prevents you from being part of the problem, but in no way prevents you from being attacked by spoofed sources. Most attacks come from outside your network, not from within.
Filtering reserved IP's are but the tip of the iceburg when it comes to DOS attacks. Today there is more unallocated IP space then allocated IP space, and all that unallocated space is just as effective when used as "random source addresses". Ever get a packet from class E space? How about one with a multicast source? Get a lot of packets from 80/8, that would be bad too.
The actual list, if you wanted to prevent packets from bad sources would be large, I estimate 200-400 lines to catch them all. Most routers are not happy with ACL's that long, although the vendors are catching up. Worse though, is there is no good mechanism to notify ISP's when space starts to be used. Registries don't have to e-mail every ISP today and say "take this out of your filters, we're allocating it". If all ISP's blocked this space there would be significant pain every time a new block was used, which is quite often today.
Could you block RFC1918 space only? Sure, cakewalk. Would it help prevent DOS attacks, highly unlikely. The kiddies would work around that in about 3 seconds and use other space. Don't forget, spoofing real, allocated, in use IP's works just dandy too.
While I think Napster is in the right, because there are many non-infringing uses of the software, that does not automatically absolve them of all responsibility.
Should E-Bay allow auctions for controlled substances? Human organs? Babies? National Defense secrets to the highest bidder?
Corporate citizes have an obligation to take _basic_ steps to prevent wrongdoing. They don't have to be the police, but if they notice blatent illegal activity and do nothing they are at a minimum guilty of not reporting a crime.
I am unsure this appies to napster, as I want to believe the trading of music not for profit is protected by the home recording act. I think it is dangerous to say that companies like them have no responsibility to do the right thing though.
I don't think men or women like working in computer fields. The enviornment created by today's high tech companies is terrible. Long hours, no social interaction, constantly fighting stupidity that is out of your control. Most guys in computer fields are unhappy, or at least neutral. You find few working in the field who are truly happy with what they do.
So, what is the difference? Women are willing to put their happiness first, and choose other jobs. Men are more inclined to put up with the crap, in the quest for the dollar. That's why computer sallaries are so high, it's not that techies are really worth that much, rather if they were not paid that much they would go into other fields.
In effect, this is good for women, at least from a mental health point of view, and bad for men. Of course financially this isn't true, and too much of "equality in the workplace" is focued on sallaries, which is a poor way to judge equality.
I hope they make this software work. I'm skeptical, but hey, if it works I never have to see a fully clothed picture again. It can go find all the porn for me, saving valuable time!
Something doesn't make sense here. Airports often have their own cell towers (to support in terminal demand). They also have a wide array of long range radio antennas. It's easy to see their effects as well, driving within 100 yards of the ones at the local airport turns all FM stations into static.
If the low emissions of a cell phone, or the even lower emissions of these receive only retransmissions are a factor, how can these high powered sources right out side the plane not be a huge problem? Even worse, they are right by the runway, affecting the most critical moments of takeoff and landing.
If an aircraft can be brought down by a cell phone we have huge problems. Terrorists need not bring bombs anymore, just carry on a cell phone, or worse a small high powered transmitter that would be trivial to build at your local radio shack. If this is a problem it is an aircraft problem, not a consumer electronics problem.
Our system of laws is built on the interpretation of those rules. Indeed, most of the fine points of our laws are not in the laws themselves, but in the decisions passed on over time.
The internet has outrun these descisions. Past ideas don't apply, and there are no new ideas tested in court. We need a way to get the courts caught up with the internet.
As much as I hate to suggest we need more lawsuits, I think an accelarated system of issuing judgements by internet clueed lawyers would help us all understand what limits exist. We need the court systems to apply the laws and issue judgements at the same speed that the internet moves, and with a lifetime proportional to internet time. That would allow everyone to know if they are on the right or wrong side of the law.
The answer to that is simple. I could patent things that are likely to be "invented" in my lifetime: - A fusion reactor. - A laser propulsion space craft. - Anything in the future section of popular mechanics. If I'm rich, and have 20k to play with it might be a fun exercise, and if they are vague, and just one of them becomes reality I could reap royalties in the billions. At one time people didn't think you could make money off of domain names.
There's no reason for them to require that a working model be submitted _and left_ at the patent office, but perhaps for some of these they should require a working model to be demonstrated for a patent office clerk. That might cut down on some of the wackyness.
I think the key part that is being missed is that parts have versions, but systems have names. This is particularly true when the systems have interchangeable parts. I think the car analogy was a good one, so I will go with that.
When you design a part, like a spark plug, you give it a version number. These probably are some take off on the traditional software scheme, with "major" and "minor" revisions. The first three copper ones are 1.1 1.2 1.3, and the first three platnum ones are 2.1 2.2 2.3. This makes a lot of sense, and tracks the evolution of a spark plug nicely.
When you use those parts in a system, there are a wide variety of version numbers, and they don't mean anything relative to each other. Version 2.1 of the spark plug was not designed at the same time as 2.1 of the muffler. So, you name the system (or version it, if you must) as a whole, and leave the individual version numbers as something to be droned on about in the detailed spec.
This works out nicely. I go buy a 2000 Viper (hehe, i wish) and it comes with version 2.3 sparkplugs. Later, when they make a better one I can go to 2.4...or I can swap out for version 1.7 of another manufacturers design, which are better. It's still a 2000 Viper.
Software works too, Red Hat "6.1" (a name, not a version) is made up of parts of all different versions, and that's ok. We also all know you can interchange at least some of those parts, and update it individually.
So, I expect all "parts", eg software components to have monotonically increasing versions numbers like they always have. I also further expect marketing types to come up with cool names for new products that let me know one is better than the next. Cheetah is faster than Baracuda is faster than Wren, you know... but all those disk drives are made up of many versioned parts.
I think the "2000" name is a fad, and will quickly fade now. I expect the next name to appear equally stupid to many of us, but the lemmings will buy it anyway.
This technology will enable 1/3 of the end to end system. If we look at the flow of information, it goes:
Content Server -> BackBone -> User
This technology will enable the backbone to move the bits between the server and the user. The day of evaluating your backbone provider by how many wavelengths they have in use, and how many are spare are coming fast. Optical switches, and one day optical routers will push this to speeds we can only dream of today.
The other two thirds are not keeping up though. Servers tend to be overloaded. If you work for an ISP where you have 100Mbps or 1000Mbps desktop connections to the network you know this already. Most servers, particularly big sites, couldn't fill a 10Mbps connection sending content. We're at a point where faster backbones carry more connections not faster connections.
The end user is even worse. Last mile problems persist, and will for a long time. The installed base of low quality copper is huge, and preventing even DSL from reaching many areas. New developments and business parks are not buring fiber during construction, even though the investment would be minimal. We should all be worried about how we are going to get high bandwidth to the home or small office.
Looking forward to the "killer apps" of the next 10 years, like Video on Demand I just don't see how it can happen. Care to dream of a server, or server complex that can deliver 2-5 million streams of video on demand? Will there be 20 million households with >= 10Mbit/sec access to watch those 5 million streams? I have my doubts. Will be Internet backbones be able to carry that traffic? I think so, that I'm not worried about.
With a little effort it can be easy to find nice people to talk to online, but we all know there is more to a person than chat. No, I don't just mean looks.:-) When you get to know someone though you do want to evaluate other qualities, like looks, voice, how they act in real life, and soforth. Unfortunately, this is where online romance gets frustrating.
Many people you meet online are nowhere near you. Rightly so, both are often afraid to meet in real life. Not all of those meetings work out. Physical proximity does make romance, and weeding out the bad apples much easier.
So the question becomes, how to people meet others locally online? Sure, there are "match maker" services, but typically they have few people in your area, even if you live in a major metropolitan region. Most chat services don't have representation for geographic areas, and those that do (eg, state channels on IRC) are a poor place to meet people. They tend to be full of married people killing time between feeding the kids.
So the question becomes, how can we improve the ability of net-based services to introduce you to local people that you might consider going to lunch with? That's a lot lower barrier than flying out somewhere for a week with someone you hardly know. Is this just a problem where there aren't enough people online yet? Is it a problem of having too many search services, so people are spread out? Is it a problem that many people (even if single and "desperate") won't post singles ads?
If there is one thing Linux has done better than any BSD, it is marketing. There are more Linux books/cd's/posters/publications that probably all of the BSD's combined. Regardless of your opinions of the operating systems themselves, this is of huge importance for gaining support going forward.
It saddens me that the BSD community gets some of it's best press from Linux publications. I am a BSD person at heart, and I wish we could generate more of our own publicity.
NB: For the humor impared, the only comparason the subject should imply is that both have found ways to market themselves that make consumers aware of their existance.
The counterpoint to the argument of "would non-internet activites be better without the internet draining resources" is "are those non-internet activites better because of the internet?" For the sake of argument, I will assume internet related activities are draining resources from other fields, which is something I don't actually believe. However, even if we assume that is true, there might be some surprising results.
An example used is could the internet brains make a more efficient engine, reducing polution. Perhaps. However, could it be that moving documents electronically, rather than on paper, has reduced the need for engines to move those items, resulting in a greater reduction in emissions than if they were just made more efficient?
Could the internet be offering jobs to those who might otherwise be unable to find work? Absolutely. I know of several companies that send audio data to countries that often have a lower standard of living, where they have people who transcribe them into electronic text. What makes these jobs possible is the ability to quickly move the data, it could never happen with traditional transportation. Is it taking advantage of poor workers, perhaps. Is it giving them opportunity they wouldn't otherwise have, absolutely.
On CNN the other day they said 60% of the world population has never talked on a telephone. Calling grandma on christmas is not going to provice the economic justication to correct the technology imbalance. Opening up new markets, new sources of labor, and creating previously inconceivable possibilities will draw the capital to provide many more people access to a telephone.
It is my believe that the positive impact of the net will (if not already) outweigh the negative impact of it drawing people and attention away from other problems. Even if there is not a net positive impact now, it may be that we have to take a small step backwards in order to take a great leap forward.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of companies went out and built identical long haul networks. What that means is, if you want to get from New York to Chicago you now have 5 ways to do it, and possibly far more fiber than we will ever use. This is a key part of internet backbones, but it does nothing to address the last mile.
Moving traffic inside a metro area, or indeed right to the home or business is the key that is still missing. Most neighborhoods don't have fiber in them, ergo there is not enough fiber in those locations. You don't care if your ISP has 10 gig pipes to the city, if you're stuck with dial-up.
The local and metro area stuff also doesn't have the cost problems. Where it may cost $50-$100 million to light a single fiber from New York to Chicago, it costs $0 (in transmission facilites) to go 3 miles across town (the end devices can push that far on their own).
I love all these people saying there is an oversupply of fiber. It's true, in a very limited area. A more correct statement would be that there is a gross undersupply of fiber to connect these newly built networks to end users, which is part of the reason that they are so underutilized.
One of the leading companies in this market: Piller, has a lot of very useful information on their web site.
Cisco has been developing IPv6 software for some time. Detatils are at www.cisco.com/ipv6, and anyone with a registered login can download the software and try it out for most major platforms.
CS programs have long had a difficult problem to balance. Quite simply, the skills that a CS student needs to know to be successful over a lifetime don't look good enough on paper to pass by an HR person. From the other direction, the skills the working world are looking for is useless in really understanding how things work.
The real skills that programmers need are theoretical skills. Things like the advantages of procedural vrs object oriented programming, or how to look at a solution and do things like "Big O" computations in order to decide how it compares to another solution. Let's face it, in big projects programmers don't write a lot of code, they make sure the small amount of code they write and the existing code are all put together correctly.
Employers are typically concerned with more mechanical aspects of programming. They want to know if someone knows "C", or "Java", or sometimes if they have ever used "the microsoft development enviornment", or "CVS". They want to make sure that someone brought into the team is not going to distract other memebers from programming to teach them the mechanics of what needs to be done.
One of the measures of a university is how easily their grads can get jobs. They get a lot of feedback from companies on how good the grads look coming out of school, but far too often this is provided via HR people through multiple levels of management. As such you get stuff like "we have lots of java projects, and your people don't know java". There is great pressure as a result to put Java in the curriculum as a result.
I think the best way to solve this is to spend the first two years teaching in a single, low level language lots of fundamentals. You want a language that provides few features, and a small library so the students get exposure to doing everything themselves. C makes an excellent choice, as does Pascal. Programs should be text in, text out, there's no place for GUI's and such in learning how to program.
Once the students have a good foundation the second two years should be the application of that in larger projects, and in other languages. Here students should learn about OOP, giving them Java, C++, and ObjC. They should learn a LISP based language. They should learn an assembly language. Students should work on larger projects, where part of the project is provided to them before they start so they get used to making their code work with existing code.
I think this leaves the students with a good base, as well as with all of the resume buzz words to get them past HR. Who knows, they might even write good code.
That's just insane.
When I need a mouse, which is generally only with a new system, I tell my local reseller "give me one of those $6 3-button jobs". They look (and feel) like the old logitech 3 button types that I just love, but they are some generic knock off they buy a crate at a time.
I've never seen one of these $6 mice die, and some are in some pretty awful service enviornments. I also have a couple of Logitech "MouseMan" mice of different types, and none of those have ever given me a bit of trouble.
I would suggest you should get rid of the cats, buy a mouse pad so you don't destroy the ball, and stop spilling soda and chips where you roll your mouse.
Several research labs are now working on flexable transitors, including some that can be "printed" using an ink jet like printer. The idea is a future where you can "download" processors. Seems like the perfect match for an open source processor design.
I would hope the patent offices would refuse this patent, based on the prior work of many online phone books where you can enter a phone number and get info on businesses, including their web page.
This is far from a new idea.
How to compete with InterNap:
People have been doing this for years, it's called a Tier 2 provider, the only difference here is most tier twos have 2-3 backbone providers, where they get 11.
Now, would you rather be with a provider who has a 11 connections to big players, or would you rather go with a real backbone that peers with 200-400 other providers directly? I mean, it's simple math, if there are 1000 networks on the Internet, and they connect to 11, for 989 you will go through a middleman (the backbones they connect to). If you go with a peering provider you might get direct access to 400, and have a middleman for the other 600.
Here's the other issue. Large providers generally share costs when they peer, making it relatively cheap. InterNap takes a solid stance of buying all their bandwidth. So, if you're a customer, and you use 10 meg more InterNap will have to pay for 10 meg more...where a real backbone will simply have to share costs with their peering parters. Who will be able to upgrade first? Not InterNap.
Bottom line, it's not better, and it costs more. It can be made to look better while they are small though.
Any old Cisco IOS based box will do the trick. Start with this link to get basic transparent bridging information.
If you look further down, you'll see "Ethernet Bridging Example" with Figure 40 in it, where they route IP and DECNet, and bridge everything else. Well, if you remove IP and DECNet, it works too.
Of course, the request was for a cheap box. IOS based boxes are far from the cheapest, particularly on the low end. A 1605 would be about the cheapest thing for the job. Most any "router" on the low end that also supports bridging will do the job, bridging over a WAN is pretty easy.
That said, why not just route?
This cool new Mac thing is drawing some Unix developers to a new platform. I wonder how much of the new stuff could be, or will be sent the other way back into standard old BSD (a la FreeBSD). Will they grow together, or will the Mac versions of things be inappropriate for standard BSD?
Full circle couldn't be more accurate, because we can predict the future:
Then:BSD (as in the real Berkeley thing) is good.
Now:Hardware vendors jump on the BSD bandwagon
Everyone touts open source compatability
Everyone develops their own extensions, incompatable with others
The market fractures and is unable to compete with MS
Linux/Gnome is good
What's next?Vendors beaten by Microsoft jump on the bandwagon
Everyone touts open source compatability
Everyone adds their own extensions
The market fractures and can't compete against foo
I wonder if foo will be microsoft?
Properly filtering your own customers prevents you from being part of the problem, but in no way prevents you from being attacked by spoofed sources. Most attacks come from outside your network, not from within.
Filtering reserved IP's are but the tip of the iceburg when it comes to DOS attacks. Today there is more unallocated IP space then allocated IP space, and all that unallocated space is just as effective when used as "random source addresses". Ever get a packet from class E space? How about one with a multicast source? Get a lot of packets from 80/8, that would be bad too.
The actual list, if you wanted to prevent packets from bad sources would be large, I estimate 200-400 lines to catch them all. Most routers are not happy with ACL's that long, although the vendors are catching up. Worse though, is there is no good mechanism to notify ISP's when space starts to be used. Registries don't have to e-mail every ISP today and say "take this out of your filters, we're allocating it". If all ISP's blocked this space there would be significant pain every time a new block was used, which is quite often today.
Could you block RFC1918 space only? Sure, cakewalk. Would it help prevent DOS attacks, highly unlikely. The kiddies would work around that in about 3 seconds and use other space. Don't forget, spoofing real, allocated, in use IP's works just dandy too.
While I think Napster is in the right, because there are many non-infringing uses of the software, that does not automatically absolve them of all responsibility.
Should E-Bay allow auctions for controlled substances? Human organs? Babies? National Defense secrets to the highest bidder?
Corporate citizes have an obligation to take _basic_ steps to prevent wrongdoing. They don't have to be the police, but if they notice blatent illegal activity and do nothing they are at a minimum guilty of not reporting a crime.
I am unsure this appies to napster, as I want to believe the trading of music not for profit is protected by the home recording act. I think it is dangerous to say that companies like them have no responsibility to do the right thing though.
I don't think men or women like working in computer fields. The enviornment created by today's high tech companies is terrible. Long hours, no social interaction, constantly fighting stupidity that is out of your control. Most guys in computer fields are unhappy, or at least neutral. You find few working in the field who are truly happy with what they do.
So, what is the difference? Women are willing to put their happiness first, and choose other jobs. Men are more inclined to put up with the crap, in the quest for the dollar. That's why computer sallaries are so high, it's not that techies are really worth that much, rather if they were not paid that much they would go into other fields.
In effect, this is good for women, at least from a mental health point of view, and bad for men. Of course financially this isn't true, and too much of "equality in the workplace" is focued on sallaries, which is a poor way to judge equality.
I hope they make this software work. I'm skeptical, but hey, if it works I never have to see a fully clothed picture again. It can go find all the porn for me, saving valuable time!
Something doesn't make sense here. Airports often have their own cell towers (to support in terminal demand). They also have a wide array of long range radio antennas. It's easy to see their effects as well, driving within 100 yards of the ones at the local airport turns all FM stations into static.
If the low emissions of a cell phone, or the even lower emissions of these receive only retransmissions are a factor, how can these high powered sources right out side the plane not be a huge problem? Even worse, they are right by the runway, affecting the most critical moments of takeoff and landing.
If an aircraft can be brought down by a cell phone we have huge problems. Terrorists need not bring bombs anymore, just carry on a cell phone, or worse a small high powered transmitter that would be trivial to build at your local radio shack. If this is a problem it is an aircraft problem, not a consumer electronics problem.
Our system of laws is built on the interpretation
of those rules. Indeed, most of the fine points
of our laws are not in the laws themselves, but
in the decisions passed on over time.
The internet has outrun these descisions. Past
ideas don't apply, and there are no new ideas
tested in court. We need a way to get the courts
caught up with the internet.
As much as I hate to suggest we need more lawsuits, I think an accelarated system of
issuing judgements by internet clueed lawyers
would help us all understand what limits
exist. We need the court systems to apply the
laws and issue judgements at the same speed
that the internet moves, and with a lifetime
proportional to internet time. That would allow
everyone to know if they are on the right or
wrong side of the law.
The answer to that is simple. I could patent things that are likely to be "invented" in my lifetime: - A fusion reactor. - A laser propulsion space craft. - Anything in the future section of popular mechanics. If I'm rich, and have 20k to play with it might be a fun exercise, and if they are vague, and just one of them becomes reality I could reap royalties in the billions. At one time people didn't think you could make money off of domain names.
There's no reason for them to require that a working model be submitted _and left_ at the patent office, but perhaps for some of these they should require a working model to be demonstrated for a patent office clerk. That might cut down on some of the wackyness.
I think the key part that is being missed is that parts have versions, but systems have names. This is particularly true when the systems have interchangeable parts. I think the car analogy was a good one, so I will go with that.
When you design a part, like a spark plug, you give it a version number. These probably are some take off on the traditional software scheme, with "major" and "minor" revisions. The first three copper ones are 1.1 1.2 1.3, and the first three platnum ones are 2.1 2.2 2.3. This makes a lot of sense, and tracks the evolution of a spark plug nicely.
When you use those parts in a system, there are a wide variety of version numbers, and they don't mean anything relative to each other. Version 2.1 of the spark plug was not designed at the same time as 2.1 of the muffler. So, you name the system (or version it, if you must) as a whole, and leave the individual version numbers as something to be droned on about in the detailed spec.
This works out nicely. I go buy a 2000 Viper (hehe, i wish) and it comes with version 2.3 sparkplugs. Later, when they make a better one I can go to 2.4...or I can swap out for version 1.7 of another manufacturers design, which are better. It's still a 2000 Viper.
Software works too, Red Hat "6.1" (a name, not a version) is made up of parts of all different versions, and that's ok. We also all know you can interchange at least some of those parts, and update it individually.
So, I expect all "parts", eg software components to have monotonically increasing versions numbers like they always have. I also further expect marketing types to come up with cool names for new products that let me know one is better than the next. Cheetah is faster than Baracuda is faster than Wren, you know... but all those disk drives are made up of many versioned parts.
I think the "2000" name is a fad, and will quickly fade now. I expect the next name to appear equally stupid to many of us, but the lemmings will buy it anyway.
This technology will enable 1/3 of the end to end system. If we look at the flow of information, it goes:
Content Server -> BackBone -> User
This technology will enable the backbone to move the bits between the server and the user. The day of evaluating your backbone provider by how many wavelengths they have in use, and how many are spare are coming fast. Optical switches, and one day optical routers will push this to speeds we can only dream of today.
The other two thirds are not keeping up though. Servers tend to be overloaded. If you work for an ISP where you have 100Mbps or 1000Mbps desktop connections to the network you know this already. Most servers, particularly big sites, couldn't fill a 10Mbps connection sending content. We're at a point where faster backbones carry more connections not faster connections .
The end user is even worse. Last mile problems persist, and will for a long time. The installed base of low quality copper is huge, and preventing even DSL from reaching many areas. New developments and business parks are not buring fiber during construction, even though the investment would be minimal. We should all be worried about how we are going to get high bandwidth to the home or small office.
Looking forward to the "killer apps" of the next 10 years, like Video on Demand I just don't see how it can happen. Care to dream of a server, or server complex that can deliver 2-5 million streams of video on demand? Will there be 20 million households with >= 10Mbit/sec access to watch those 5 million streams? I have my doubts. Will be Internet backbones be able to carry that traffic? I think so, that I'm not worried about.
With a little effort it can be easy to find nice people to talk to online, but we all know there is more to a person than chat. No, I don't just mean looks. :-) When you get to know someone though you do want to evaluate other qualities, like looks, voice, how they act in real life, and soforth. Unfortunately, this is where online romance gets frustrating.
Many people you meet online are nowhere near you. Rightly so, both are often afraid to meet in real life. Not all of those meetings work out. Physical proximity does make romance, and weeding out the bad apples much easier.
So the question becomes, how to people meet others locally online? Sure, there are "match maker" services, but typically they have few people in your area, even if you live in a major metropolitan region. Most chat services don't have representation for geographic areas, and those that do (eg, state channels on IRC) are a poor place to meet people. They tend to be full of married people killing time between feeding the kids.
So the question becomes, how can we improve the ability of net-based services to introduce you to local people that you might consider going to lunch with? That's a lot lower barrier than flying out somewhere for a week with someone you hardly know. Is this just a problem where there aren't enough people online yet? Is it a problem of having too many search services, so people are spread out? Is it a problem that many people (even if single and "desperate") won't post singles ads?
I want answers! :-)
If there is one thing Linux has done better than any BSD, it is marketing. There are more Linux books/cd's/posters/publications that probably all of the BSD's combined. Regardless of your opinions of the operating systems themselves, this is of huge importance for gaining support going forward.
It saddens me that the BSD community gets some of it's best press from Linux publications. I am a BSD person at heart, and I wish we could generate more of our own publicity.
NB: For the humor impared, the only comparason the subject should imply is that both have found ways to market themselves that make consumers aware of their existance.
The counterpoint to the argument of "would non-internet activites be better without the internet draining resources" is "are those non-internet activites better because of the internet?" For the sake of argument, I will assume internet related activities are draining resources from other fields, which is something I don't actually believe. However, even if we assume that is true, there might be some surprising results.
An example used is could the internet brains make a more efficient engine, reducing polution. Perhaps. However, could it be that moving documents electronically, rather than on paper, has reduced the need for engines to move those items, resulting in a greater reduction in emissions than if they were just made more efficient?
Could the internet be offering jobs to those who might otherwise be unable to find work? Absolutely. I know of several companies that send audio data to countries that often have a lower standard of living, where they have people who transcribe them into electronic text. What makes these jobs possible is the ability to quickly move the data, it could never happen with traditional transportation. Is it taking advantage of poor workers, perhaps. Is it giving them opportunity they wouldn't otherwise have, absolutely.
On CNN the other day they said 60% of the world population has never talked on a telephone. Calling grandma on christmas is not going to provice the economic justication to correct the technology imbalance. Opening up new markets, new sources of labor, and creating previously inconceivable possibilities will draw the capital to provide many more people access to a telephone.
It is my believe that the positive impact of the net will (if not already) outweigh the negative impact of it drawing people and attention away from other problems. Even if there is not a net positive impact now, it may be that we have to take a small step backwards in order to take a great leap forward.