Without even having read the article (but I've read some of his previous stuff) I'm sure that Petrelly didn't base his statements on actually looking at code. No doubt he has some examples of errors that are no handled from the user perspective.
But that has nothing to do with the programmers. The difference between Open Source and commercial software here is simply that companies can afford dedicated testing staff... QA departments. Most of the errors that an idiot like Petrelly will be able to find will be caught by the QA department before release. Unfunded Open Source projects can't afford that kind of QA... and with time, widely used Open Source packages tend to become higher quality than much proprietary commercial software (the thousand eyeballs effect). But early releases do tend to have errors that a QA department at a company would have caught before release. That has nothing to do with the quality of the programming.
How many times have we heard this now? This has been an old hat for well over a year. And what's more, even before WEP was shown to be TOTALLY broken a couple of months ago it was obvious that 802.11b security wasn't... even if you used encryption, with in an organization that's useless because there's no key management... you can't possibly think that a password that's stored on dozens to hundreds of laptops that are travelling all over, some percentage getting stolen as a matter of course, most of which can be regularly accessed innoculously by strangers, can be called "secure" in even the vaguest sense!
The right way to do wireless is simple... DON'T Don't bother. Don't use/any/ security. And don't DON'T DON'T connect the wireless net to your organizational network... just connect it to the
Internet and treat it as public internet access. Instead of asking "do we put wireless access on our network", ask "do we want to provide public wireless internet access throughout our buildings a few hundred feet beyond? And make your ESSID something like "yourname-public" so its obvious... visitors should be able to easily use it to! Why the hell not?
You already have some way of accessing your organizational network or some of its services from the Internet, don't you? (If you don't you have security requirements that probably mean you REALLY can't use wireless.) Be it IPSec VPNs or SSh tunnels, or just SSL web/mail access, that's what you'll have to use even when you're using the wireless gateways right in your office.
Of course you can set up some other level of IPSec tunnels/specifically/ for the wireless LAN, but I think that's stupid, anything you do might as well be the same for wireless/Internet access... it's exactly the same problem space. In either case you have a network you MUST treat as COMPLETELY UNTRUSTED.
The tough economic times have created a curious tension in the Open Source world... on the one hand Open Source is becoming more interesting to everyone because enterprises are trying to keep their costs down, on the other hand companies trying to make money off Open Source feel greater pressure to find ways to ensure revenues, thus being pushed away from Open Source!
My feeling is that the public would be more tolerant of "free for non-commercial use" licenses if those had a built in time-horizon after which they reverted to pure Open Source (like ghostscript). It seems to me that this gives us the best of both worlds... the company has a greater assurance that they'll be able to make money, and the community would be more willing to contribute because they'd know that eventually it would be "public" property.
I'm kind of puzzled why more people don't see this. Any thoughts on that?
..you're behind the times. Fiberchannel, firewire, and yes, IDE, have made SCSI obsolete. IDE made SCSI obsolete? Heresy! So I would have said myself only a couple of years ago, but today the cost/benefit ratio puts me firmly behind IDE for anything on the low end... and on the high end, let's give SCSI a well deserved retirement, with fanfare and honors, and replace it with more modern stuff, please.
On the low end, the cost difference between IDE and SCSI has been increasing (i.e. prices for IDE drop faster than SCSI) and IDE has also been getting better, to the point where the benefits of SCSI simply aren't enough anymore. IDE drives have gotten smarter, too, making up for some of the performance and reliability differences. If you want a high-performance, cost-effective, "low-end" RAID solution, look to i.e. 3Ware which makes some absolutely superb RAID cards for IDE drives... even though it needs an IDE controller dedicated to each drive it's still cheaper than a comparable SCSI solution, even before factoring in the cost of the drives! And performs at least as well.
As to the high end... Fiberchannel is a step forward, but not enough. Forget all these special purpose buses anyway... my suggestion would be to put a gigabit ethernet interface and an IP stack directly in the drive. In fact, I hear that people are doing exactly that and using something called "SCSI over IP", which sounds like an interesting idea but probably not optimal. Better to run something like GFS directly on the drive.
In other words, my objection to SCSI is: not enough brains per drive! On the low end this can be accomplished with fewer drives per brain... instead of huge RAID arrays with one smart control node (like NetApps, etc), use lots of PCs with small IDE RAIDs... call it RAIIS (redundant array of independent inexpensive servers) if you will. Fewer drives per brain means more brains per drive. On the high end take this to its logical extreme... one drive per brain, a full computer in each drive, each drive a full node on the network.
Colonists from Earth, using a mix of mental powers and high technology, have long ago subjugated the native inhabitants -- and are now making themselves into gods
As I remember it (and I admit it's been a decade and a half since I read it), there are no native inhabitants on the planet... the inhabitants are the colonists and the rulers are the crew. The colonists were in cold storage or some such, and when the ship arrived the crew who ran the ship made themselves gods and the colonists (when they took them out of cold storage) their subjects.
This makes sense when you think about it... The crew are awake when they arrive at the new start system, and therefor have complete power over the frozen colonists. Earth and authority are beyond reach (or if I recall correctly, maybe even destroyed) and so there is no one to prevent the crew from doing as they like. It's actually a pretty likely scensario!
Twid wrote:
This isn't a perfect solution, people still get free bandwidth if they want...
I would consider this a benefit... it's an excellent convenience to guests. How many "uninvited" users are going to be within your transmission radius?
Make a wireless network, but don't put it on your private network... instead just make it an independent network that's directly connected to the Internet (with or without NAT) completely "outside" your organizational firewall. TREAT it as the Internet... wireless PUBLIC Internet access. No security. No WEP. Because there is not need.
Simple. All the laptops that want to use it are already set up for accessing the essential services their users want via the Internet anyway! Who has a laptop at work that doesn't need to access services on their work network when they are off-site, be it via modem or home DSL or riccochet or whatever? And is the laptop on a secure network any of these? No. So what do people do in those cases?
Some use VPNs, some just use Web and mail via SSL, some use Ssh, whatever. The point is, it already works.
So make all wireless networks "public internet access", you get the added benefit that visitors will be able to use it without hassle. At worst you're giving free access to some people in the suite next door or across the street.
I worked with Shipley about 3 years ago and then he was doing essentially the same thing with modems... he had a continuous "wardialing" project that just automatically went through all phone numbers looking for answering modems and then obvious methods to log in.
The name of the working group, and the filenames of the drafts have ALWAYS been "secsh". On the other hand the protocol itself has always been referred to as SSH in all the documents, and still is. If you want proof check the mailing list archives or the IETF working group webpage.
Check your facts before you cry wolf.
On January 4, 1986 the ``final'' bug in Metafont If an error still lurks in the code, Donald E. Knuth promises to pay a finder's fee which doubles every year to the first person who finds it. Happy hunting.
Also "man tex" lists one bug... and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the only one. Writing bug free programs is possible. Indeed, according to another great CS luminary, E. W. Dijkstra, there is no such thing as a "bug"... the very term "bug" is mere a vain attempt by the programmer to disavow responsibility for an error by pointing at some imaginary insect stuck in the machine. Programmers make errors, and these should be avoided... that they are as poorly avoided in software today as they are is really a scandal of omission; we should be putting far more effort into the art and science of writing correct programs.
--jurgen@botz.org
see RFC 1149 (There's nothing new in the world...)
on
TCP/IP Over HTTP
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· Score: 2
TCP via HTTP? Hah... see RFC 1149, "Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers", i.e. IP over carrier pidgeons. That one came out 4/1/1990. I also vaguely remember seeing something about TCP via UUCP on around this time of year in the mid-90s... TCP via UUCP would presumably have lower latency than RFC 1149, but still be a bit of a pain for interactive use.
Your contract requires you to sign over your inventions, but if you think that the application is too broad then what they are applying for is not your invention. Simple. Just read and and send them a note saying "sorry, this is not what I invented, so I can't sign it."
Re:Have they fixed the SMP bugs?
on
Netscape 6
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· Score: 1
Yes. The SMP crashing bug was fixed about 10 days ago... since then for basic browsing Mozilla has been at least as stable for me (on my dual-600Mhz SMP box) as Netscape 4.72, if not more so. Netscape 4.72 freezes quite regularly under SMP... Mozilla doesn't. It still has a lot of rough edges, but it's definitely stable enough for browsing now.
The Yahoo news item that was cited as the press release is no longer there. Neither the RedHat nor the Real sites seem to mention this. Was this a false rumor or an early leak? Anyone have more info?
John Gilmore once said "The Net inteprets censorship as damage and routes around it". This has proven true many times since, but the power to route around the damage of censorhip and control is starting to fade. As government are getting more involved and the backbones are controlled by big corporations who jelously guard the routes with highly specific peering agreements, routing is ceasing to be a mechanism of spontanous damage control and rather becoming a means of implementing business agreements and "official" policies.
Somehow we need to get the spontanaity of routing back to a point where the Net is an amorphous, uncontrollable thing which routes around the damage of censorship and control. If my ISP starts to filter packets which contain information of which the government doesn't approve, I need to be able to use an underground backup network, to get the packets to my buddies. Now with straight IPv4 this isn't possible because to implement the routing to make this happen I would need an ASN and talk BGP to my ISP and the underground Net... and my ISP isn't going to let me talk BGP to them unless I buy a lot more bandwith than individuals can afford.
It may be that IPv6 offers some new possibilities here (btw., ignore the people who cry about the 128bit IP numbers costing you privcacy, they don't know what they're talking about) but this is far from clear yet.
Another possibility is a meta-net... a virtual network on top of IP which implements an underground network. This would work the same way that the MBONE and 6-BONE (the test networks for multicasting and IPv6) worked. If fully encrypted the carriers couldn't do much about it unless they prohibited all encrypted traffic. This wouldn't be very efficient because the "routers" for this virtual net would often be behind several slow hops of the underlying real net, but we may be forced to go that route.
Other options, some of which have been in use for quite a while, are various application-level networks: anonymous remailers, peer-to-peer networking on top of IRC, Netnews, etc. Some of these need to be overhauled for the zips (the first decade of the 2000s).
The Man can never win completely... the question is will those of use who want to be beyond control by the Man be forced to some highly marginal underground, or will there be a huge vibrant culture which cannot be reigned in? The choice, I think, is ours, but we need to stay a step ahead...
J.S. says things like "The open source leaders... have attracted the money makers", and "corporate America needs no lessons where money is concerned" and "[the open source leaders] won't have beaten the corporations by having joined them. Rather, it will be the other way around".
But he neglegts to identify exactly what it is that the "pirates" (corporations) will do to "beat" us. Hmmm. They can't hijack the source because we use the GPL (bow to rms). They can't crush us by undercutting our price (as, say, MS would do to a small competitor) because there is no price. There seems to be some vague hint that they will beat us by finding new ways to make more money. Oh. Ok. So?
An excellent list. I actually fulfilled part of my college english lit requirement by taking two semesters of classes on Sci Fi, and half of those books were on our reading list. Here are some more from the class, in no particular order:
Norstrilia / Cordwainer Smith
Shockwave Rider / John Brunner
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress / Heinlein
A Case of Conscience / James Blish
The Demolished Man / Alfred Bester
Star Maker / Olaf Stapledon
More than Human / Theodore Sturgeon
Slaughterhouse Five / Curt Vonnegut
These are the novels I can remember from Professor Gallo's reading list beyond what Mr. Cohen had already listed. In addition there were selections from a couple of collections of short stories and novellas under the title "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (I, II, III)".
Here are some of my top selections for masterpieces of more recent vintage:
A Fire Upon the Deep / Vernor Vinge
Snowcrash / Neal Stephenson
For lighter reading of "classic hard SF" my favorite was always Larry Niven. His works can hardly be called high literature, but they are great fun to read, and they contain likeable heroes, believable aliens, and mind-expanding cosmic phenomena. Mr. Niven is also quite fastidious about being scientifically accurate (at least to the best of his knowledge at the time) so his stories serve to both educate and inspire the desire to learn more about this fantastic Universe we live in. Highly recommended educational entertainment for a teenager.
Finally I would like to add that the Science Fiction short story is a superb artistic medium and many authors have done some of their best work in this medium rather than the novel. There are dozens of excellent collections and anthologies of "best of the year" or best in some category and you can never go wrong picking one of these up in a bookstore.
This is due to RSA code... we can fix it in 9/2000
on
How Free is BIND 8.2?
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· Score: 2
The only problem is with the included RSA code, so we can fix it in 9/2000 when the RSA patents expire.
I don't know who MagniComp is, but the version of rdist included with RedHat is 6.1.3 from University of Southern California and is distributed under the BSD license.
MagniComp appears to have forked their version off the USC source tree and "hijacked" the license. This is possible with the BSD license, which is why some of us feel that the GPL is better. The However, they definitely can't lay any claim on the version of rdist that comes with RedHat... even if the person behind MagniComp is the individual who did the work at USC (one Michael Cooper), that version had not yet been hijacked, so it's safe.
There is nothing wrong with this. The copyright holder can release the code under multiple licenses separately... they can release it under the GPL (which is then good for everyone) and they can also release it under a different license to a specific party. What this means is that the specific party is free to make changes that they do not need to release under the GPL. However, only the copyright holder can do this.
There are other packages that are released under multiple licenses. Ghostscript is one... in fact, ghostscript is released under a more restrictive license first, and under the GPL later (with a delay of about a year, I think).
[...] anyone who has a page on Geocities no longer has the rights to what they have created.
This is false, as anyone who actually reads the contract can easily see:
8. CONTENT SUBMITTED TO YAHOO [...] By submitting Content to any Yahoo property, you automatically grant, [...] Yahoo the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable,
non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use [...]
In other words, you still own the copyright and therefor have full rights to what you have created. However, you have given Yahoo a permanent, non-exclusive license to use your material however they see fit.
Not that this is a good thing... you probably don't want to agree to this kind of contract, and if you use Geocities you should definitely let Yahoo know that you will not accept this language. But let's not misstate the issues, as unfotunately happens all too often with IP-related stories on Slashdot.
The article talks about a 1 GigaBIT chip. Modern dynamic RAM is always meassured in bits because the chips are bit-addressable and do not usually store a complete byte... instead, if you have 8 chips on a module, for example, of every byte one bit is stored in each chip. This news is remarkable for several reasons. One, currently the largest chips are 256Mb (lowercase b for bits) and two, they are using an 0.13 micron process, down from 0.18, which means they can get more chips out of a wafer and therefor prices will go down again. In other words, good news, Moore's law holds again, yawn.
I dislike spam as much as the next person, but government regulation isn't going to help.
I disagree with this. I consider spam to be theft. Would you say "I dislike theft... but government regulation isn't going to help"? Spam is theft of my time and resources, and there is no purely technical fix that can prevent it.
As to it being too broad, if you read the text of the bill you will find that the law specifically requires that the purpose of the transmission is "bulk unsolicited e-mail" for it to apply. So anonymouse remailers like the cypherpunk remailers are not affected since they can't really be used for bulk e-mail and are certainly not designed for that purpose. Ditto for network tools that hide source addresses, etc.
Did he say anything? I think the total information content of that article was about 0.5 bits. Katz at least makes an effort to have a point of some substance, even if he doesn't alway succeed.
Slashdot Mirror
Without even having read the article (but I've read some of his previous stuff) I'm sure that Petrelly didn't base his statements on actually looking at code. No doubt he has some examples of errors that are no handled from the user perspective.
But that has nothing to do with the programmers. The difference between Open Source and commercial software here is simply that companies can afford dedicated testing staff... QA departments. Most of the errors that an idiot like Petrelly will be able to find will be caught by the QA department before release. Unfunded Open Source projects can't afford that kind of QA... and with time, widely used Open Source packages tend to become higher quality than much proprietary commercial software (the thousand eyeballs effect). But early releases do tend to have errors that a QA department at a company would have caught before release. That has nothing to do with the quality of the programming.
How many times have we heard this now? This has been an old hat for well over a year. And what's more, even before WEP was shown to be TOTALLY broken a couple of months ago it was obvious that 802.11b security wasn't... even if you used encryption, with in an organization that's useless because there's no key management... you can't possibly think that a password that's stored on dozens to hundreds of laptops that are travelling all over, some percentage getting stolen as a matter of course, most of which can be regularly accessed innoculously by strangers, can be called "secure" in even the vaguest sense!
/any/ security. And don't DON'T DON'T connect the wireless net to your organizational network... just connect it to the
/specifically/ for the wireless LAN, but I think that's stupid, anything you do might as well be the same for wireless/Internet access... it's exactly the same problem space. In either case you have a network you MUST treat as COMPLETELY UNTRUSTED.
The right way to do wireless is simple... DON'T Don't bother. Don't use
Internet and treat it as public internet access. Instead of asking "do we put wireless access on our network", ask "do we want to provide public wireless internet access throughout our buildings a few hundred feet beyond? And make your ESSID something like "yourname-public" so its obvious... visitors should be able to easily use it to! Why the hell not?
You already have some way of accessing your organizational network or some of its services from the Internet, don't you? (If you don't you have security requirements that probably mean you REALLY can't use wireless.) Be it IPSec VPNs or SSh tunnels, or just SSL web/mail access, that's what you'll have to use even when you're using the wireless gateways right in your office.
Of course you can set up some other level of IPSec tunnels
-j
The tough economic times have created a curious tension in the Open Source world... on the one hand Open Source is becoming more interesting to everyone because enterprises are trying to keep their costs down, on the other hand companies trying to make money off Open Source feel greater pressure to find ways to ensure revenues, thus being pushed away from Open Source!
My feeling is that the public would be more tolerant of "free for non-commercial use" licenses if those had a built in time-horizon after which they reverted to pure Open Source (like ghostscript). It seems to me that this gives us the best of both worlds... the company has a greater assurance that they'll be able to make money, and the community would be more willing to contribute because they'd know that eventually it would be "public" property.
I'm kind of puzzled why more people don't see this. Any thoughts on that?
--jurgen
..you're behind the times. Fiberchannel, firewire, and yes, IDE, have made SCSI obsolete. IDE made SCSI obsolete? Heresy! So I would have said myself only a couple of years ago, but today the cost/benefit ratio puts me firmly behind IDE for anything on the low end... and on the high end, let's give SCSI a well deserved retirement, with fanfare and honors, and replace it with more modern stuff, please.
On the low end, the cost difference between IDE and SCSI has been increasing (i.e. prices for IDE drop faster than SCSI) and IDE has also been getting better, to the point where the benefits of SCSI simply aren't enough anymore. IDE drives have gotten smarter, too, making up for some of the performance and reliability differences. If you want a high-performance, cost-effective, "low-end" RAID solution, look to i.e. 3Ware which makes some absolutely superb RAID cards for IDE drives... even though it needs an IDE controller dedicated to each drive it's still cheaper than a comparable SCSI solution, even before factoring in the cost of the drives! And performs at least as well.
As to the high end... Fiberchannel is a step forward, but not enough. Forget all these special purpose buses anyway... my suggestion would be to put a gigabit ethernet interface and an IP stack directly in the drive. In fact, I hear that people are doing exactly that and using something called "SCSI over IP", which sounds like an interesting idea but probably not optimal. Better to run something like GFS directly on the drive.
In other words, my objection to SCSI is: not enough brains per drive! On the low end this can be accomplished with fewer drives per brain... instead of huge RAID arrays with one smart control node (like NetApps, etc), use lots of PCs with small IDE RAIDs... call it RAIIS (redundant array of independent inexpensive servers) if you will. Fewer drives per brain means more brains per drive. On the high end take this to its logical extreme... one drive per brain, a full computer in each drive, each drive a full node on the network.
Either way SCSI is not the answer.
-j
As I remember it (and I admit it's been a decade and a half since I read it), there are no native inhabitants on the planet... the inhabitants are the colonists and the rulers are the crew. The colonists were in cold storage or some such, and when the ship arrived the crew who ran the ship made themselves gods and the colonists (when they took them out of cold storage) their subjects.
This makes sense when you think about it... The crew are awake when they arrive at the new start system, and therefor have complete power over the frozen colonists. Earth and authority are beyond reach (or if I recall correctly, maybe even destroyed) and so there is no one to prevent the crew from doing as they like. It's actually a pretty likely scensario!
--jürgenTwid wrote:
This isn't a perfect solution, people still get free bandwidth if they want...
I would consider this a benefit... it's an excellent convenience to guests. How many "uninvited" users are going to be within your transmission radius?
--jurgen@botz.org
Forget WEP.
Make a wireless network, but don't put it on your private network... instead just make it an independent network that's directly connected to the Internet (with or without NAT) completely "outside" your organizational firewall. TREAT it as the Internet... wireless PUBLIC Internet access. No security. No WEP. Because there is not need.
Simple. All the laptops that want to use it are already set up for accessing the essential services their users want via the Internet anyway! Who has a laptop at work that doesn't need to access services on their work network when they are off-site, be it via modem or home DSL or riccochet or whatever? And is the laptop on a secure network any of these? No. So what do people do in those cases?
Some use VPNs, some just use Web and mail via SSL, some use Ssh, whatever. The point is, it already works.
So make all wireless networks "public internet access", you get the added benefit that visitors will be able to use it without hassle. At worst you're giving free access to some people in the suite next door or across the street.
--jurgen@botz.org
I worked with Shipley about 3 years ago and then he was doing essentially the same thing with modems... he had a continuous "wardialing" project that just automatically went through all phone numbers looking for answering modems and then obvious methods to log in.
He found lots.
--jurgen@botz.org
The name of the working group, and the filenames of the drafts have ALWAYS been "secsh". On the other hand the protocol itself has always been referred to as SSH in all the documents, and still is. If you want proof check the mailing list archives or the IETF working group webpage. Check your facts before you cry wolf.
--jurgen@botz.org
TCP via HTTP? Hah... see RFC 1149, "Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers", i.e. IP over carrier pidgeons. That one came out 4/1/1990. I also vaguely remember seeing something about TCP via UUCP on around this time of year in the mid-90s... TCP via UUCP would presumably have lower latency than RFC 1149, but still be a bit of a pain for interactive use.
Your contract requires you to sign over your inventions, but if you think that the application is too broad then what they are applying for is not your invention. Simple. Just read and and send them a note saying "sorry, this is not what I invented, so I can't sign it."
Yes. The SMP crashing bug was fixed about 10 days ago... since then for basic browsing Mozilla has been at least as stable for me (on my dual-600Mhz SMP box) as Netscape 4.72, if not more so. Netscape 4.72 freezes quite regularly under SMP... Mozilla doesn't. It still has a lot of rough edges, but it's definitely stable enough for browsing now.
The Yahoo news item that was cited as the press release is no longer there. Neither the RedHat nor the Real sites seem to mention this. Was this a false rumor or an early leak? Anyone have more info?
John Gilmore once said "The Net inteprets censorship as damage and routes around it". This has proven true many times since, but the power to route around the damage of censorhip and control is starting to fade. As government are getting more involved and the backbones are controlled by big corporations who jelously guard the routes with highly specific peering agreements, routing is ceasing to be a mechanism of spontanous damage control and rather becoming a means of implementing business agreements and "official" policies.
Somehow we need to get the spontanaity of routing back to a point where the Net is an amorphous, uncontrollable thing which routes around the damage of censorship and control. If my ISP starts to filter packets which contain information of which the government doesn't approve, I need to be able to use an underground backup network, to get the packets to my buddies. Now with straight IPv4 this isn't possible because to implement the routing to make this happen I would need an ASN and talk BGP to my ISP and the underground Net... and my ISP isn't going to let me talk BGP to them unless I buy a lot more bandwith than individuals can afford.
It may be that IPv6 offers some new possibilities here (btw., ignore the people who cry about the 128bit IP numbers costing you privcacy, they don't know what they're talking about) but this is far from clear yet.
Another possibility is a meta-net... a virtual network on top of IP which implements an underground network. This would work the same way that the MBONE and 6-BONE (the test networks for multicasting and IPv6) worked. If fully encrypted the carriers couldn't do much about it unless they prohibited all encrypted traffic. This wouldn't be very efficient because the "routers" for this virtual net would often be behind several slow hops of the underlying real net, but we may be forced to go that route.
Other options, some of which have been in use for quite a while, are various application-level networks: anonymous remailers, peer-to-peer networking on top of IRC, Netnews, etc. Some of these need to be overhauled for the zips (the first decade of the 2000s).
The Man can never win completely... the question is will those of use who want to be beyond control by the Man be forced to some highly marginal underground, or will there be a huge vibrant culture which cannot be reigned in? The choice, I think, is ours, but we need to stay a step ahead...
- Jürgen
There is more that can be said about this.
J.S. says things like "The open source leaders ... have attracted the money makers", and "corporate America needs no lessons where money is concerned" and "[the open source leaders] won't have beaten the corporations by having joined them. Rather, it will be the other way around".
But he neglegts to identify exactly what it is that the "pirates" (corporations) will do to "beat" us. Hmmm. They can't hijack the source because we use the GPL (bow to rms). They can't crush us by undercutting our price (as, say, MS would do to a small competitor) because there is no price. There seems to be some vague hint that they will beat us by finding new ways to make more money. Oh. Ok. So?
So what was the point of this piece again?
- Jürgen
These are the novels I can remember from Professor Gallo's reading list beyond what Mr. Cohen had already listed. In addition there were selections from a couple of collections of short stories and novellas under the title "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (I, II, III)".
Here are some of my top selections for masterpieces of more recent vintage:
For lighter reading of "classic hard SF" my favorite was always Larry Niven. His works can hardly be called high literature, but they are great fun to read, and they contain likeable heroes, believable aliens, and mind-expanding cosmic phenomena. Mr. Niven is also quite fastidious about being scientifically accurate (at least to the best of his knowledge at the time) so his stories serve to both educate and inspire the desire to learn more about this fantastic Universe we live in. Highly recommended educational entertainment for a teenager.
Finally I would like to add that the Science Fiction short story is a superb artistic medium and many authors have done some of their best work in this medium rather than the novel. There are dozens of excellent collections and anthologies of "best of the year" or best in some category and you can never go wrong picking one of these up in a bookstore.
The only problem is with the included RSA code, so we can fix it in 9/2000 when the RSA patents expire.
I don't know who MagniComp is, but the version of rdist included with RedHat is 6.1.3 from University of Southern California and is distributed under the BSD license.
MagniComp appears to have forked their version off the USC source tree and "hijacked" the license. This is possible with the BSD license, which is why some of us feel that the GPL is better. The However, they definitely can't lay any claim on the version of rdist that comes with RedHat... even if the person behind MagniComp is the individual who did the work at USC (one Michael Cooper), that version had not yet been hijacked, so it's safe.
Yes. This is one of the things reiserfs is good at. Give it a try.
There is nothing wrong with this. The copyright holder can release the code under multiple licenses separately... they can release it under the GPL (which is then good for everyone) and they can also release it under a different license to a specific party. What this means is that the specific party is free to make changes that they do not need to release under the GPL. However, only the copyright holder can do this.
There are other packages that are released under multiple licenses. Ghostscript is one... in fact, ghostscript is released under a more restrictive license first, and under the GPL later (with a delay of about a year, I think).
Not that this is a good thing... you probably don't want to agree to this kind of contract, and if you use Geocities you should definitely let Yahoo know that you will not accept this language. But let's not misstate the issues, as unfotunately happens all too often with IP-related stories on Slashdot.
The article talks about a 1 GigaBIT chip. Modern dynamic RAM is always meassured in bits because the chips are bit-addressable and do not usually store a complete byte... instead, if you have 8 chips on a module, for example, of every byte one bit is stored in each chip. This news is remarkable for several reasons. One, currently the largest chips are 256Mb (lowercase b for bits) and two, they are using an 0.13 micron process, down from 0.18, which means they can get more chips out of a wafer and therefor prices will go down again. In other words, good news, Moore's law holds again, yawn.
I disagree with this. I consider spam to be theft. Would you say "I dislike theft ... but government regulation isn't going to help"? Spam is theft of my time and resources, and there is no purely technical fix that can prevent it.
As to it being too broad, if you read the text of the bill you will find that the law specifically requires that the purpose of the transmission is "bulk unsolicited e-mail" for it to apply. So anonymouse remailers like the cypherpunk remailers are not affected since they can't really be used for bulk e-mail and are certainly not designed for that purpose. Ditto for network tools that hide source addresses, etc.
Did he say anything? I think the total information content of that article was about 0.5 bits. Katz at least makes an effort to have a point of some substance, even if he doesn't alway succeed.
Dump this guy.