Actually, the WHO is one of the few organisations that uses.int - who.int. Quite what the position would be in giving out subdomains of that to unrelated organisations, however, I dunno -- it would probably be frowned upon, as the purpose of.int is quite clear.
There are an awful lot of websites covering an awful lot of fields that appear to be "authoritative" at a casual glance, but that are actually riddled with inaccuracies, bias and half-truths.
Admittedly, not all of them are as downright dangerous as giving out dodgy health information, but people still need to learn to be critical of the information they may find on the web. "I saw it on the Internet" is still used by some people as an indicator that information is somehow more authoritative than that received from other, possibly more reliable, sources. Just look at some of the fantastical assertions that appear in the average day's load of spam, from "This cannot be considered spam as it is in accordance with House Bill 1618" upwards, for a fine example of this.
One of the problems with the Web these days is that nifty graphical design is still considered superior to accuracy of information, and J. Random Luser needs to work out that frames and Shockwave don't necessary mean that a site's an authority on its subject.
As an AC has already pointed out, the second edition covered Solaris back in 2.3/2.4 days, when it sucked a hell of a lot more than it does now. A lot of my job involves adminning Solaris, and the Solaris-related stuff in the third edition seems pretty accurate to me. Others more guruish than I may spot more errors, of course.
Yup, you're right -- I just wrote the review, and don't get anything from any sales of it as a result from Thinkgeek, Prentice-Hall or whoever. The Thinkgeek link was provided by/., not by me. The enormously positive review is simply because I love the book to bits, not for any other reason.
By the way: Since everyone seems to be comparing the Yellow/Red/Purple books to the Armadillo Book (Frisch) -- I've got that one too, but to my mind Purple has the edge over it because it fits my mindset better. Some other people may (and do, judging by other posts) find the opposite is true for them. And yes, props to the Drill Book as well -- I've had the first edition of that sitting on my bookshelf for a long time.
You're quite right, of course. What was really intended there was "It's good for reading a bit of while you're stuffing food into yourself after another 12-hour day at the office, prior to slumping unconscious onto the nearest reasonably flat surface, which may or may not be a bed".
Apologies for the confusion.
The film is interesting too..
on
Solaris
·
· Score: 3
The Russian film based on the book is definitely worth a watch if you can get hold of it, and if you have the patience - it's sometimes rather slow-moving, to say the least, and runs to over 2.5 hours in some cuts.
It's worth seeing largely because it's such a startlingly different portrayal of a future in space to those doing the rounds in the West at the time. The space station orbiting Solaris is a comfortable-looking place that's very unfuturistic, and the trip to an alien planet, with the inevitable separation from family and friends, is told from a far more human viewpoint than in most science fiction. It's a movie about people, not about technology.
There are echoes of this technique in later movies. For instance, 2010 covers Floyd's preparation for the trip to Jupiter, and the impending separation from his family, in great detail, with the actual journey being skipped almost entirely.
It's a strange, starkly beautiful and intriguingly different film. Worth seeing if you get the chance.
Hum.. if this machine is called Audrey, then presumably the next version of it will be the Audrey 2, at which point we really need to start wondering about 3Com's plans for world domination.
Uh, I think you need to look at this with a little perspective.
It seems to me a quite absurd notion, even given Microsoft's past track record, that they'd make their IPv6 stack noninteroperable with competing systems. This isn't nonstandard extensions to Kerberos, or application-level embrace-and-extend stuff, or anything like that. It's the fundamental protocols that glue the Internet together, the down-and-dirty nitty gritty protocols that make everything work. If they don't work, nothing else does. And moreover, if they aren't implemented to comply with the relevant standards, the packets thus generated will be considered garbeled, and intermediate routers and switches, as well as destination hosts, are allowed to quite cheerfully drop them right in the bit bucket. It should be obvious to the most casual observer that it wouldn't be in Microsoft's interest for hosts running their operating systems to suddenly lose all their connectivity to the rest of the Internet.
Sometimes you really can take conspiracy theorising too far.
I had MS Research's IPv6 implementation running for a while on my sacrificial Windows box as part of some v6 experiments earlier this year. While it was still a little bare-bones, it was pretty easy to get running and seemed to play fine with my other v6 machines (BSDs of a couple of flavours using KAME's implementation).
Naturally, there are few immediate practical advantages as it's still in the research stage and deployment is thin on the ground - v6 is only just beginning the transition from research project to production use, but it's there, and it's just about ready to go.
As most v6 internetworking links (currently, primarily as part of the 6bone) are still tunnelled over IPv4, you shouldn't have any problem running v6 over an existing v4 connection if you want to experiment. Home users would probably be best served by checking out Freenet6.
People have all the usual services running in v6 mode over the 6bone, although for me most of the fun is getting packets from point A to point B in the first place..
..when you let people like senior vice presidents talk to the press without being kept on a leash.
These sound to me like, ah, technically ill-informed comments - I'll bet you he's got no idea how they're going to go about all this firewalling in reality, and it's quite likely he hasn't spoken to anyone with half a clue about the technical viability of it. Sounds like he just came out with this rant rather than actually, well, thinking first.
I predict a rush of conciliatory noises and, er, "clarifications" from Sony Music's PR folks to smooth these comments over once it's realised that what they're talking about is, well, pretty close to technically impossible on today's Internet.
Granted - I'm no expert either. I was just thinking that as it's a permanent structure rather than a ship or a portable structure, it might come under property law rather than marine salvage law.. as said, however - dammit, Jim, I'm a sysadmin, not a lawyer. Claiming ownership of property based on abandonment is a very long-term thing, if I remember rightly. This article and article 60 of this one (from a vague web search) look interesting.
The Sealand folks seem to base their view of sovereignty on a decision in a relatively lowly UK court taken a while ago. While at the moment they may be nominally independent, it seems to me pretty likely that if the matter was taken either to a higher court or to the international community in general, it would really be found to be part of the UK and not a sovereign state at all -- and as it's an artificial structure, the Royal Navy could presumably claim ownership, as they put it there in the first place. Given this, and the fact that from what I've read, Havenco only has one connection to the outside world running directly to the UK, whereas a really useful data haven would, to my mind, need several connections to several different countries to be really viable or immune from legislative interference -- is this really intended to be a viable idea, or just a publicity stunt?
All of this stuff is to do with history. Back in the days before the DNS became international, the US government ended up using.mil and.gov for US military and governmental institutions, in the same way as.edu is still almost entirely confined to US educational institutions. As the DNS expanded and country-level domains started being used, com., org. and net. became international in scope, but mil., gov., and edu. remained US-specific.
The us. domain just didn't take off, which is a shame - if it had, attitudes all over the net would have developed differently and, to my mind, the DNS wouldn't be in the toilet to the extent it is right now as a better structure would have evolved. Because of this, we're left with the flat-file mess of.com and the fundamentally erroneous "everything's in.com" attitude you find all over the net. We're also left with this bloody stupid practice of selling "popular".com names for absurd amounts of money, which is just.. completely unnecessary and ridiculous.
Other countries generally keep their governmental institutions under their own country-level TLDs. For instance, the UK has gov.uk and mod.uk for governmental and military domains respectively. There's just no need to put them in the top-level gov. and mil. domains too. It also has the advantage that there's no central authority delegating _all_ the world's governmental and military domains.
In summary -.com,.net and.org are international in scope, but.gov,.mil, and.edu are US-specific domains which probably should have been assimilated under us. at some point in the past but weren't. Confusing? Right. It's all legacy stuff.
RFC2826, which was issued last week, is an IAB comment on this kind of unilateral TLD "creation" by third parties. The use of non-standard DNS roots is generally a Bad Thing as it creates all kinds of problems, not only limited to breaking the global nature of the DNS namespace. In summary, the IAB are of the view that a globally unique DNS root is essential, and that isn't going to change.
The problem with this alleged TLD is that it will only be visible for people using this guy's root servers, rather than the standard Internet roots. In other words, it's not a proper TLD and therefore sucks. It's just gold-digging.
Maybe, but as the original submitter I'd prefer that they cut my identity completely if they aren't using any words I wrote.. especially if they want to editorialise with words like "gushing praise" and "harshly critical". I don't think my submission was either of these things, and it's irritating to see my name attached to that.
If you aren't going to use any of the words I say, snip my identity. Especially if you're going to make snide comments about the submission - that just isn't fair unless you provide the evidence for people to make their minds up with.
Welcome to the real world. Academic networks are there for exactly that, academic use, and when the agencies that fund these networks find this out, they're going to be questioning whether access to infinite quantities of dodgy MP3s is really academically related or does much to further the institutions' research mission.
"I pay for it!" isn't a good argument. You're probably paying for access to the campus network in order to do your work more conveniently - from your room rather than from the workstation clusters - rather than specifically for access to the Internet. That's how I'd look at it, at least - most connections of this type are to the campus network primarily, and the fact that you can reach the Internet from it is a perk. Napster IS a huge bandwidth hog, as are most streaming audio/video telephony applications. These systems aren't good network citizens - they munch excessive amounts of bandwidth and make the shared network slower for everyone else on campus who has actual work to get done.
The long and the short of it is, that universities are generally now having to provide the same level of IT support, under different and generally more difficult circumstances and conditions, than in most corporates. And they're expected to do it on far smaller budgets. The academic networks, at least here in Europe, are government-funded, and if they see they're just being used primarily for stuff like exchanging copyright violations instead of bona fide academic work, that funding might well disappear. Abuse the networks like this and you're endangering the very existence of the academic portions of the Internet. Think about it. Use it properly or it just might not be there any more some day.
Calling this censorship is abuse of what the term "censorship" really means. This whole argument just strikes me as uninformed whining. Academia was the birthplace of the Internet, and has been using this kind of technology since before a lot of today's students were born. It would be tragic if wider restrictions, maybe disconnection from the general non-academic Internet, had to be put in place just because a few selfish students couldn't live without their MP3s.
(Speaking for myself, not my employer, obviously - this is not an official statement of policy, etc etc)
If you're an archive, a radio station, or whatever and you have hundreds of thousands of pieces of vinyl, the vast majority of which have never been and most likely will never be released on vinyl, you want to make sure they stay in good working order so they're still useful in the future. If somebody requests an item from your archive, the options are either to use a conventional stylus-based turntable for transcription, which will add some wear (not much, but it adds up) to the record, or use one of these gizmos, which won't cause wear. You can then dump it to DAT, Minidisc, or whatever, for the end user. And as to the cost - the CD player cost millions to develop, but is now cheap through mass production and high volume sales. These turntables will have also cost a lot to develop, but as the market is so much smaller, the unit cost to recoup your investment has to be higher. Remember, these are high-end turntables, not the gramophonic equivalent of a £70 Discman. And high-end kit is always expensive.
Quite a lot of the stuff you write seems to challenge the generally-held views of the geek community, and I think this is a good thing - the community as a whole is very introspective and prone to one-sided thinking. And as you've seen, when the general "this is how it is" viewpoint of the geek community is violated or even questioned, random flames rather than reasoned debate are the usual result. Do you think this sometimes blinkered outlook is a real problem, or is it just a sign of healthy self-confidence?
Actually again - there aren't any penguins at the South Pole. The only two species of penguin that breed exclusively on the Antarctic continent are the Emperor Penguin, aptenodytes forsteri, and the Adelie, pygoscelis adeliae. Neither of these range much further south than the coastal pack-ice. Actually, there are no doubt a couple of penguins at the Pole, but I suspect most of them have been stuffed for their own protection.
Network access at universities, certainly on this side of the pond, is considered a privilege rather than a right. The primary purpose of academic network connections is for academic-related work, which is hardly surprising as they wouldn't get funded otherwise. What this means is that your use of the network is technically for coursework-related stuff only. Just because the bandwidth is there doesn't mean you have to waste it on 24hr streaming video and warez servers. Be responsible in your use of the network or that connection you're so proud of might just disappear.
Use it responsibly or lose it - if more than a certain amount of campus network traffic was seen to be coming from a particular machine there wouldn't be network access for that machine (or that hall, even) any more.
I didn't have a network connection in my room as a student, and had to go to the computer centre instead. However, plenty of universities have had network access from halls for years. This story is only news because the Internet is now of interest to yer everyday person rather than only of interest to CS weenies. Access for downloading stuff is useful, sure, but apart from that I'd consider people who spend all their time in their room on the net to be missing out on student life to a certain extent.
I just alias whois="whois -h whois.geektools.com" and let the excellent Geektools whois proxy sort out which registrar. You can fling most any domain name at it, or an IP, and it'll work out the best place to get the data, then go and get it. Excellent stuff.
Ah, I see they're claiming that the Internet is a "military experiment" again. Correct me if I'm wrong, but just because the original research was funded by DARPA, this doesn't mean, and never has, that the Internet was developed as a military network. This urban myth has been floating around for decades. DARPA was a civilian agency which just happened to be paid for by the DOD and located in the Pentagon.
This doesn't mean the Internet was, or ever has been, a military network. There have been sections connected to the Internet that were military (the MILNET springs to mind) but the original research was bluesky research of the type that DARPA existed to fund, not in any way aimed at direct military applications. The whole "being able to withstand a nuclear blast" thing is a myth.
I find it hard to take seriously a group that protests against the spreading of disinformation while spreading disinformation itself.
For references, see any half way decent book on the history of the 'net. I think I have my facts right above, but if not, please correct me.
Amen to that! Linux and the assorted BSDen have similiar aims, just done somewhat differently, and the kind of bickering noises you see around Slashdot whenever the three letters "BSD" are mentioned are generally ill-informed and frankly embarrassing..
I've been having a play with OpenBSD (security work) over the last week or so, and I like. It's a solid, no-nonsense, secure Un*x-ish OS - a little bare-bones for the type of beginning user that Linux caters to so well, perhaps, but if you're looking for a solid server OS it seems great. Not to mention the fact that it reminds me of SunOS 4, still my favourite Un*x by a long chalk..
Linux is still the primary free Un*x around here, but there are certainly places where the BSDen can be perhaps more appropriate. Just depends on the application - it's all horses for courses. Penguins for demons. Whatever..
It's important not to get carried away when naming machines - yes, you need a good scheme and things like "svr001359" are boring and unintuitive, but bear a few things in mind:
Keep expansion in mind - there's no use naming your four machines after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse if you're going to have a fifth machine come along some day. Something nice and open ended is a good bet - trees, asteroids, countries, as opposed to musketeers, David Bowie albums or deadly sins.
Keep 'em brief - it may be extremely cool to call your machines bananadaiquiri or slowcomfortablescrew, but after a while you're going to get really bored of typing those names over and over again. About 6-8 characters is a good maximum.
Don't give machines role names - "www", "mail" and "news" are what CNAMEs are for. Give the machines the dignity of a proper name.
Alphabeticals only - for the sake of simplicity (and speed of typing) it's best to stick to a-z only. Keep those underscores right out (they're not allowed, IIRC, folks - check your RFCs) - mr_gumby is just as legible when it's mrgumby.
Be interesting! - try to think of something offbeat that will keep people thinking until they work out where it's from or, even better, give in and have to ask. One of my prouder achievements is naming a lab of 20 machines after priests from the TV series "Father Ted". If you want to name your machines after planets, that's fine, but just remember that, if I recall correctly, "venus" was the most popular hostname on the Internet until everything suddenly became "www".
Just a few thoughts from a few years of working in academia, the land of interesting names. My last department had machines named after... characters in "Robin Hood" (guess where), cartoon characters, racing drivers, racing circuits, sleazy politicians, participants in royal scandals, priests, fruits beginning with "p", characters from "Red Dwarf", famous traitors, emotions, and.. and.. different naming schemes for different labs or groups. As well as being interesting and varied, this has the added advantage of knowing exactly where a machine is once you know how the schemes work, which isn't as easy when all you have to go on is a random number like "sun0195". And last but not least, rainstorming for machine names is a great way to liven up a dull meeting.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the WHO is one of the few organisations that uses .int - who.int. Quite what the position would be in giving out subdomains of that to unrelated organisations, however, I dunno -- it would probably be frowned upon, as the purpose of .int is quite clear.
There are an awful lot of websites covering an awful lot of fields that appear to be "authoritative" at a casual glance, but that are actually riddled with inaccuracies, bias and half-truths.
Admittedly, not all of them are as downright dangerous as giving out dodgy health information, but people still need to learn to be critical of the information they may find on the web. "I saw it on the Internet" is still used by some people as an indicator that information is somehow more authoritative than that received from other, possibly more reliable, sources. Just look at some of the fantastical assertions that appear in the average day's load of spam, from "This cannot be considered spam as it is in accordance with House Bill 1618" upwards, for a fine example of this.
One of the problems with the Web these days is that nifty graphical design is still considered superior to accuracy of information, and J. Random Luser needs to work out that frames and Shockwave don't necessary mean that a site's an authority on its subject.
I wrote this review. There's either some weird synchronicity thing going on or Mr Michaels has, ah, "borrowed" my words.
As an AC has already pointed out, the second edition covered Solaris back in 2.3/2.4 days, when it sucked a hell of a lot more than it does now. A lot of my job involves adminning Solaris, and the Solaris-related stuff in the third edition seems pretty accurate to me. Others more guruish than I may spot more errors, of course.
Yup, you're right -- I just wrote the review, and don't get anything from any sales of it as a result from Thinkgeek, Prentice-Hall or whoever. The Thinkgeek link was provided by /., not by me. The enormously positive review is simply because I love the book to bits, not for any other reason.
By the way: Since everyone seems to be comparing the Yellow/Red/Purple books to the Armadillo Book (Frisch) -- I've got that one too, but to my mind Purple has the edge over it because it fits my mindset better. Some other people may (and do, judging by other posts) find the opposite is true for them. And yes, props to the Drill Book as well -- I've had the first edition of that sitting on my bookshelf for a long time.
You're quite right, of course. What was really intended there was "It's good for reading a bit of while you're stuffing food into yourself after another 12-hour day at the office, prior to slumping unconscious onto the nearest reasonably flat surface, which may or may not be a bed".
Apologies for the confusion.
The Russian film based on the book is definitely worth a watch if you can get hold of it, and if you have the patience - it's sometimes rather slow-moving, to say the least, and runs to over 2.5 hours in some cuts.
It's worth seeing largely because it's such a startlingly different portrayal of a future in space to those doing the rounds in the West at the time. The space station orbiting Solaris is a comfortable-looking place that's very unfuturistic, and the trip to an alien planet, with the inevitable separation from family and friends, is told from a far more human viewpoint than in most science fiction. It's a movie about people, not about technology.
There are echoes of this technique in later movies. For instance, 2010 covers Floyd's preparation for the trip to Jupiter, and the impending separation from his family, in great detail, with the actual journey being skipped almost entirely.
It's a strange, starkly beautiful and intriguingly different film. Worth seeing if you get the chance.
Hum.. if this machine is called Audrey, then presumably the next version of it will be the Audrey 2, at which point we really need to start wondering about 3Com's plans for world domination.
Uh, I think you need to look at this with a little perspective.
It seems to me a quite absurd notion, even given Microsoft's past track record, that they'd make their IPv6 stack noninteroperable with competing systems. This isn't nonstandard extensions to Kerberos, or application-level embrace-and-extend stuff, or anything like that. It's the fundamental protocols that glue the Internet together, the down-and-dirty nitty gritty protocols that make everything work. If they don't work, nothing else does. And moreover, if they aren't implemented to comply with the relevant standards, the packets thus generated will be considered garbeled, and intermediate routers and switches, as well as destination hosts, are allowed to quite cheerfully drop them right in the bit bucket. It should be obvious to the most casual observer that it wouldn't be in Microsoft's interest for hosts running their operating systems to suddenly lose all their connectivity to the rest of the Internet.
Sometimes you really can take conspiracy theorising too far.
I had MS Research's IPv6 implementation running for a while on my sacrificial Windows box as part of some v6 experiments earlier this year. While it was still a little bare-bones, it was pretty easy to get running and seemed to play fine with my other v6 machines (BSDs of a couple of flavours using KAME's implementation).
Naturally, there are few immediate practical advantages as it's still in the research stage and deployment is thin on the ground - v6 is only just beginning the transition from research project to production use, but it's there, and it's just about ready to go.
As most v6 internetworking links (currently, primarily as part of the 6bone) are still tunnelled over IPv4, you shouldn't have any problem running v6 over an existing v4 connection if you want to experiment. Home users would probably be best served by checking out Freenet6.
People have all the usual services running in v6 mode over the 6bone, although for me most of the fun is getting packets from point A to point B in the first place..
..when you let people like senior vice presidents talk to the press without being kept on a leash.
These sound to me like, ah, technically ill-informed comments - I'll bet you he's got no idea how they're going to go about all this firewalling in reality, and it's quite likely he hasn't spoken to anyone with half a clue about the technical viability of it. Sounds like he just came out with this rant rather than actually, well, thinking first.
I predict a rush of conciliatory noises and, er, "clarifications" from Sony Music's PR folks to smooth these comments over once it's realised that what they're talking about is, well, pretty close to technically impossible on today's Internet.
Granted - I'm no expert either. I was just thinking that as it's a permanent structure rather than a ship or a portable structure, it might come under property law rather than marine salvage law.. as said, however - dammit, Jim, I'm a sysadmin, not a lawyer. Claiming ownership of property based on abandonment is a very long-term thing, if I remember rightly.
This article and article 60 of this one (from a vague web search) look interesting.
The Sealand folks seem to base their view of sovereignty on a decision in a relatively lowly UK court taken a while ago. While at the moment they may be nominally independent, it seems to me pretty likely that if the matter was taken either to a higher court or to the international community in general, it would really be found to be part of the UK and not a sovereign state at all -- and as it's an artificial structure, the Royal Navy could presumably claim ownership, as they put it there in the first place.
Given this, and the fact that from what I've read, Havenco only has one connection to the outside world running directly to the UK, whereas a really useful data haven would, to my mind, need several connections to several different countries to be really viable or immune from legislative interference -- is this really intended to be a viable idea, or just a publicity stunt?
All of this stuff is to do with history. Back in the days before the DNS became international, the US government ended up using .mil and .gov for US military and governmental institutions, in the same way as .edu is still almost entirely confined to US educational institutions. As the DNS expanded and country-level domains started being used, com., org. and net. became international in scope, but mil., gov., and edu. remained US-specific.
.com and the fundamentally erroneous "everything's in .com" attitude you find all over the net. We're also left with this bloody stupid practice of selling "popular" .com names for absurd amounts of money, which is just.. completely unnecessary and ridiculous.
.com, .net and .org are international in scope, but .gov, .mil, and .edu are US-specific domains which probably should have been assimilated under us. at some point in the past but weren't. Confusing? Right. It's all legacy stuff.
The us. domain just didn't take off, which is a shame - if it had, attitudes all over the net would have developed differently and, to my mind, the DNS wouldn't be in the toilet to the extent it is right now as a better structure would have evolved. Because of this, we're left with the flat-file mess of
Other countries generally keep their governmental institutions under their own country-level TLDs. For instance, the UK has gov.uk and mod.uk for governmental and military domains respectively. There's just no need to put them in the top-level gov. and mil. domains too. It also has the advantage that there's no central authority delegating _all_ the world's governmental and military domains.
In summary -
RFC2826, which was issued last week, is an IAB comment on this kind of unilateral TLD "creation" by third parties. The use of non-standard DNS roots is generally a Bad Thing as it creates all kinds of problems, not only limited to breaking the global nature of the DNS namespace. In summary, the IAB are of the view that a globally unique DNS root is essential, and that isn't going to change.
The problem with this alleged TLD is that it will only be visible for people using this guy's root servers, rather than the standard Internet roots. In other words, it's not a proper TLD and therefore sucks. It's just gold-digging.
Maybe, but as the original submitter I'd prefer that they cut my identity completely if they aren't using any words I wrote.. especially if they want to editorialise with words like "gushing praise" and "harshly critical". I don't think my submission was either of these things, and it's irritating to see my name attached to that.
If you aren't going to use any of the words I say, snip my identity. Especially if you're going to make snide comments about the submission - that just isn't fair unless you provide the evidence for people to make their minds up with.
Welcome to the real world. Academic networks are there for exactly that, academic use, and when the agencies that fund these networks find this out, they're going to be questioning whether access to infinite quantities of dodgy MP3s is really academically related or does much to further the institutions' research mission.
"I pay for it!" isn't a good argument. You're probably paying for access to the campus network in order to do your work more conveniently - from your room rather than from the workstation clusters - rather than specifically for access to the Internet. That's how I'd look at it, at least - most connections of this type are to the campus network primarily, and the fact that you can reach the Internet from it is a perk. Napster IS a huge bandwidth hog, as are most streaming audio/video telephony applications. These systems aren't good network citizens - they munch excessive amounts of bandwidth and make the shared network slower for everyone else on campus who has actual work to get done.
The long and the short of it is, that universities are generally now having to provide the same level of IT support, under different and generally more difficult circumstances and conditions, than in most corporates. And they're expected to do it on far smaller budgets. The academic networks, at least here in Europe, are government-funded, and if they see they're just being used primarily for stuff like exchanging copyright violations instead of bona fide academic work, that funding might well disappear. Abuse the networks like this and you're endangering the very existence of the academic portions of the Internet. Think about it. Use it properly or it just might not be there any more some day.
Calling this censorship is abuse of what the term "censorship" really means. This whole argument just strikes me as uninformed whining. Academia was the birthplace of the Internet, and has been using this kind of technology since before a lot of today's students were born. It would be tragic if wider restrictions, maybe disconnection from the general non-academic Internet, had to be put in place just because a few selfish students couldn't live without their MP3s.
(Speaking for myself, not my employer, obviously - this is not an official statement of policy, etc etc)
If you're an archive, a radio station, or whatever and you have hundreds of thousands of pieces of vinyl, the vast majority of which have never been and most likely will never be released on vinyl, you want to make sure they stay in good working order so they're still useful in the future.
If somebody requests an item from your archive, the options are either to use a conventional stylus-based turntable for transcription, which will add some wear (not much, but it adds up) to the record, or use one of these gizmos, which won't cause wear. You can then dump it to DAT, Minidisc, or whatever, for the end user.
And as to the cost - the CD player cost millions to develop, but is now cheap through mass production and high volume sales. These turntables will have also cost a lot to develop, but as the market is so much smaller, the unit cost to recoup your investment has to be higher. Remember, these are high-end turntables, not the gramophonic equivalent of a £70 Discman. And high-end kit is always expensive.
Quite a lot of the stuff you write seems to challenge the generally-held views of the geek community, and I think this is a good thing - the community as a whole is very introspective and prone to one-sided thinking. And as you've seen, when the general "this is how it is" viewpoint of the geek community is violated or even questioned, random flames rather than reasoned debate are the usual result. Do you think this sometimes blinkered outlook is a real problem, or is it just a sign of healthy self-confidence?
Actually again - there aren't any penguins at the South Pole. The only two species of penguin that breed exclusively on the Antarctic continent are the Emperor Penguin, aptenodytes forsteri, and the Adelie, pygoscelis adeliae. Neither of these range much further south than the coastal pack-ice. Actually, there are no doubt a couple of penguins at the Pole, but I suspect most of them have been stuffed for their own protection.
Network access at universities, certainly on this side of the pond, is considered a privilege rather than a right. The primary purpose of academic network connections is for academic-related work, which is hardly surprising as they wouldn't get funded otherwise. What this means is that your use of the network is technically for coursework-related stuff only. Just because the bandwidth is there doesn't mean you have to waste it on 24hr streaming video and warez servers. Be responsible in your use of the network or that connection you're so proud of might just disappear.
Use it responsibly or lose it - if more than a certain amount of campus network traffic was seen to be coming from a particular machine there wouldn't be network access for that machine (or that hall, even) any more.
I didn't have a network connection in my room as a student, and had to go to the computer centre instead. However, plenty of universities have had network access from halls for years. This story is only news because the Internet is now of interest to yer everyday person rather than only of interest to CS weenies. Access for downloading stuff is useful, sure, but apart from that I'd consider people who spend all their time in their room on the net to be missing out on student life to a certain extent.
I just alias whois="whois -h whois.geektools.com" and let the excellent Geektools whois proxy sort out which registrar. You can fling most any domain name at it, or an IP, and it'll work out the best place to get the data, then go and get it. Excellent stuff.
Alternatively, visit http://www.geektools.com/whois.html to do the same thing.
Ah, I see they're claiming that the Internet is a "military experiment" again. Correct me if I'm wrong, but just because the original research was funded by DARPA, this doesn't mean, and never has, that the Internet was developed as a military network. This urban myth has been floating around for decades. DARPA was a civilian agency which just happened to be paid for by the DOD and located in the Pentagon.
This doesn't mean the Internet was, or ever has been, a military network. There have been sections connected to the Internet that were military (the MILNET springs to mind) but the original research was bluesky research of the type that DARPA existed to fund, not in any way aimed at direct military applications. The whole "being able to withstand a nuclear blast" thing is a myth.
I find it hard to take seriously a group that protests against the spreading of disinformation while spreading disinformation itself.
For references, see any half way decent book on the history of the 'net. I think I have my facts right above, but if not, please correct me.
Amen to that! Linux and the assorted BSDen have similiar aims, just done somewhat differently, and the kind of bickering noises you see around Slashdot whenever the three letters "BSD" are mentioned are generally ill-informed and frankly embarrassing..
I've been having a play with OpenBSD (security work) over the last week or so, and I like. It's a solid, no-nonsense, secure Un*x-ish OS - a little bare-bones for the type of beginning user that Linux caters to so well, perhaps, but if you're looking for a solid server OS it seems great. Not to mention the fact that it reminds me of SunOS 4, still my favourite Un*x by a long chalk..
Linux is still the primary free Un*x around here, but there are certainly places where the BSDen can be perhaps more appropriate. Just depends on the application - it's all horses for courses. Penguins for demons. Whatever..
Just a few thoughts from a few years of working in academia, the land of interesting names. My last department had machines named after... characters in "Robin Hood" (guess where), cartoon characters, racing drivers, racing circuits, sleazy politicians, participants in royal scandals, priests, fruits beginning with "p", characters from "Red Dwarf", famous traitors, emotions, and.. and.. different naming schemes for different labs or groups. As well as being interesting and varied, this has the added advantage of knowing exactly where a machine is once you know how the schemes work, which isn't as easy when all you have to go on is a random number like "sun0195".
And last but not least, rainstorming for machine names is a great way to liven up a dull meeting.