The missing piece in aleonard's chapter is about the erratic course AT&T took regarding UNIX during the 1980s. When it finally decided that it was worth promoting as a salable commodity, licensing and use restrictions tightened considerably, but they failed to extend the OS in the directions that it needed to go to meet the burgeoning needs of local and connected networks (which then became known as the Internet).
Perhaps most important was the development of NFS, which was introduced formally by Sun but based directly on work by the CSRG. Another important building block was Berkeley sockets/STREAMS. These are the things that distinguished Berkeley from AT&T UNIX in the mid-1980s and caused sysadmins who were not encumbered by AT&T purchase requirements to go with the Berkeley flavor during that foundational period. In Cuckoo's Nest, Cliff Stoll alludes to some of these differences from his work as a part-time sysadmin at LBL.
Finally seeing the commercial potential in the late 1980s, particularly driven by corporate markets moving to Oracle and other UNIX-based business applications, and the growing importance of Sun, Apollo, HP and other entrants in both the server and workstation markets, AT&T was faced with two facts in its pursuit of a payoff for its languishing UNIX product: (1) its inability to succeed in the retail systems market against more experienced competitors like HP and more eager ones like Sun; and (2) the ongoing breakup of the Bell System under MFJ III.
Consequently, AT&T sold UNIX off to Novell, in one of the classic examples of the "greater fool" theory of marketing, since Ray Noorda and his merry band in Utah had not Clue 1 about what to do with it. Novell's Univel subsidiary was set up to put together a repackaging called Unixware which never really got a foothold. The only good thing about all this for Novell was that they eventually enticed Eric Schmidt over from Sun to run the company. Schmidt, Berkeleyite to the core, flung the doors wide open to IP and eased away from IPX, and Novell has been able to find a role in the modern corporate market for servers and directories when it was almost guaranteed that the company would sink without a trace in the mid-1990s otherwise.
But the fight over the intellectual property rights of the AT&T and Berkeley flavors was heating up even in the late 1980s. Probably the best coverage of the ensuing battle was in UNIX Review columns over those years, and I hope aleonard will review those as his book project goes forward.
Through a rather complex and messy process, there was a showdown between Novell and UC Berkeley, the very end of which is described in the FreeBSD handbook capsule history.
For about 18 months, it was entirely unclear whether an open UNIX would be possible; this was the period when 386BSD was basically frozen and Linux and other now-forgotten "free U**xlike" things were being worked on. And the reason that those were happening was the continuing expansion of the DOS and Windows 3.x market which brought about decreasing costs and increasing capabilities to desktop machines. Desktop UNIX on the Intel platform only really became usable with the faster late-1980s 80386, and was still basically a toy before 1990; most desktoppers were running SunOS 4.x boxen or maybe AT&T, HP or Apollo workstations to do local development and the very earliest forays into what became ISPs.
The legal battle over the status of UNIX allowed a critical mass to converge on development of Linux, which was far enough ahead in 1994 that even my Bay Area friends were probably installing it more than the BSDs (with the exception of Berkeley grads of course!). The "distribution" concept promoted most effectively by Yggdrasil and Slackware played a major role in this, because small-PC UNIX players no longer basically had to be kernel hackers by necessity.
There's also no question that the *BSD groups develop with more of the "cathedral" mode than the "bazaar" mode, but that may be an appropriate niche-ification as we go forward. Certainly those of us with more an affinity for the Berkeley flavor will continue to lean toward *BSD than Linux with its stronger SYSV heritage. But in reality, the differences really are a matter of preference, not capability.
This sounds reasonable until you apply actual experience to it. Most databases in most circumstances are primarily read-oriented. If I were to put very broad numbers on it I would say 80% read, 10% write and 10% processor-bound. There may be a few very active tables where writes dominate (for example, a cookies table for a web site or a state table in a logistics app), but this tends to be limited to one limited area of the database. In general, such active tables will always be in memory anyway (or should be to the extent possible, if you can't manage to add more memory perhaps a redesign is in order since the cost of going to disk especially for frequent writes is prohibitive compared to in-memory access). Data integrity features such as SQL COMMIT/ROLLBACK on table writes may be indicated when the risk of data loss is high, but don't forget that you pay a performance and overhead price for having these features active. That is to say, data integrity features are desirable but not at an indefinite cost. It is important to remember that in databases, as in all programming, nothing functions in complete isolation. The presence or absence of a given feature does not trump every other consideration, and besides that, sound design generally is the most important, least understood factor within your control for making any database work properly. -------
I would be more interested in Postgresql except there is this really irritating postbot that with deadly regularity pops up and says in a colorless monotone, "Use Postgresql. It tastes good. It is better for you."
What's curious is that the bot never seems to talk about its actual real-world projects using Postgresql. I would love to hear more about that, actually. It's only from comparing our experiences that we learn how to do our work better.
Why, I'm glad you asked that. Right here in Portland, Oregon, the ACLU has been defending conservative Christian streetcorner preachers who loudly declaim at the corner of Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland. The management of the square, a non-profit with a sort of exalted city-blessed status, shooed them away from time to time and even had a couple of them arrested. The local ACLU has been helping defend them in court. I applaud this as an ACLU member. Their speech is annoying and foolish, but it is wholly protected and the square is public space.
Once again the common error is made that RMS is a "socialist." Not at all, from what I can tell from his fairly voluminous writing, at least not by any rigorous definition. He may be a "social democrat" (as I consider myself), a term that has no context in the American political scene but is basically a centrist position in the European mode.
What RMS definitely is: he is a classic liberal, meaning a follower of Locke, Hume and Adam Smith. "Classic liberalism" (a badly made phrase, but it will do) gave rise to both modern liberalism and modern conservatism, although it doesn't resemble the modern forms all that much. Instead, it takes a deliberately philosophical (in the old-fashioned pre-modernist sense) view at a time when politics, economics and philosophy were considered basically branches of the same type of thought.
This focus on first causes is what distinguishes RMS. I'm struck by the parallels between his career and that of Dr. E. F. Codd, who developed the concept of the relational database based on predicate calculus at IBM in the late 1960s, and has spent 30 years ever since complaining about the actual implementation of his framework that went on to take over the database world:)
Like RMS with Open Source, Codd believes that Structured Query Language (SQL) is at best a pale and fragmentary implementation of the mathematically sound approach he developed. Like RMS, he is considered grumpy and retrograde by a good many practitioners in the field he pioneered. All the same, it's possible to respect his purism and continue to use and like the relatively impure byproduct.
And thus I type post this to Slashdot, which uses Perl under Stallman's GPL and MySQL developed from the concepts of Codd's calculus of relational data.
--------
I prefer freedom over "innovation" that means making sloppy software more complicated, so it is STILL true:
The last chapter in Simon Singh's The Code Book, recently reviewed here on Slashdot, is a clear and basic description of the theory of quantum crypography.
This is one of the most disappointing story blocks I've seen on Slashdot in a good long while. The self-absorption and lack of even basic rhetorical skill is pretty disheartening. Not to mention the shallow understanding of the issues. It makes the few comments that really get into the technical considerations stand out that much more.
The number of "write-mostly" humanoid bots on Slashdot these days is the most dismaying thing, though.
For those still not clear on who Simson Garfinkel is yet, here is your FREE CLUE!. --------
Wow, another substantial comment. When you grow up, Kamel, and stop flinging the insults of a 10-year-old at things you have no knowledge of, perhaps you will have something of interest to say.
Yes indeed, the author, Simson Garfinkel, who co-wrote Practical Unix & Internet Security and Web Security and Commerce with Gene Spafford for O'Reilly is not qualified to talk about this issue. Yes indeed.
OK, now let's talk about "Devoid of Clues,' shall we.
I've been thinking about reviewing Database Nation for Slashdot, along with Whit Diffie and Susan Landau's Privacy on the Line, which I consider mandatory reading. If someone else reviews them here before me, that would be fine.
One important book which was ahead of its time is Oscar Gandy's The Panoptic Sort (Westview Press 1993). This is also well worth reading as a socio/political overview of these issues. The Panopticon, as you'll recall, was Jeremy Bentham's notion of a circular prison with a central guard tower from which all activity in every cell could be watched constantly.
Gandy writes:
The panoptic sort is the name I have assigned to the complex technology that involves the collection, processing, and sharing of information about individuals and groups that is generated through their daily lives as citizens, employees, and consumers and is used to coordinate and control their access to the goods and services that define life in the modern capitalist economy.
The panoptic sort is a system of disciplinary surveillance that is widespread but continues to expand its reach. The operation of the panoptic system is guided by a generalized concern with rationalization of social, economic, and political systems. The panoptic sort is a difference machine that sorts individuals into categories and classes on the basis of routine measurements. It is a discriminatory technology that allocates options and opportunities on the basis of those measures and the administrative models that they inform . . . The panoptic sort is a system of actions that governs other actions. The panoptic sort is a system of power.
This is only the general thesis of the book; Gandy goes well beyond the usual ivory-tower theorizing to talk about practicalities in government and commercial use of databases and other technology. It's a useful companion to the books by Garkinfel and Diffie and Landau, who unfortunately seem unaware of Gandy's pioneering analysis.
Speaking of Blowfish and block ciphers, Bruce Schneier has some very interesting comments on the convergence of stream and block ciphers in his newest monthly Crypto-Gram.
It's always indicative when someone resorts to the tired rhetorical device of complaining about "political correctness." In this case, your interpretation of the circumstances of Turing's demise is speculative, Eric. See for example this exchange in the letters section of a recent Scientific American. There is no disputing, however, the persecution he was subjected to by the British authorities, which may or may not have had a direct bearing on his death.
But all this is aside from the main point, which is Turing's indisputable professional and scientific contributions. That is where the emphasis should properly be placed.
I'm going to say this sooner or later, so this is as good a place as any. This doesn't have all that much to do with the comment here as with a good portion of the responses to the interview taken as a whole.
Geez, you people are a bunch of whiners. All this talk about hypocrisy and backsliding by Rob and the other/. crew, because they won't behave the way you demand that they do. And tell me, how many dollars and how many hours of your time have you actually contributed to making/., Slash code or other aspects of this function according to your desires?
. . .
(still waiting)
. . .
I thought so.
You know, here's a free clue: If you don't like it here, start your own. CmdrTaco has kindly provided at least a pile of code (though it may not be compeletely current) so you don't even have to start from scratch.
No flames here, just a suggestion that you actually read before commenting. It's not hard to find information about Opera and there are plenty of reviews around the net.
No, Opera is not a text-only browser. Why would they do that when Lynx has been the category-killer there for years?
Opera chokes all the time. Of course, I look at upwards of several hundred to over a thousand web pages a day on several dozen to upwards of 100 sites, and it might barf on a dozen pages a day. Under NT, it always can be terminated and restarted gracefully. Always.
In my experience, Netscape crashes about five times as often and IE is unusable about three times as often.
Opera renders pages much faster and the multi-page MDL display mechanism that others disdain is more efficient.
In other words, Opera is by far more stable for general-purpose browsing.
Mozilla is coming along nicely but if Opera ships for Linux with the browser features it now has under Windows, it will be a huge step forward. I'm quite happy they're not planning to include mail or other stuff in the Linux version; that makes it cleaner and I never never ever use a browser for email for both efficiency and security reasons.
No offense to others who prefer other browsers. But be sure before you fling your arrows that you've actually used Opera enough to have a valid judgment of your own.
I had been a staunch user of Phil Katz' PKARC package after he significantly improved the original ARC program in the mid-1980s. Then the guy in New Jersey who wrote ARC got in a totally unnecessary fight with him over whether Phil had copied his code instead of reverse-engineering it (welcome to the world of "share" ware). Phil then decided to revamp the whole project and wrote the PKZIP package which stormed the BBS world in the late 1980s and has proven to be stable and solid up to the present day. Check out his company, PKWARE for more info.
Then, in 1990, due to its success in the PC world, a number of people decided to try and port it to other platforms. To his credit, Phil gave the project his blessing and thus Info-Zip was born.
Info-Zip was the first net mailing list I ever signed up for, way back in 1990. (The second was RISKS-L, and then the mail deluge really started!) Jean-Loup Gailly was one of the leading developers along with Kai-Uwe Rommel, Mark Adler, Rich Wales, Greg Roelofs and many others. I was just a lurker, cheering on the gang, and they did in fact port the zip and unzip program to just about every platform imaginable (whence the motto, "The only program that runs on more platforms is 'Hello world'!)
Zip is the unfortunately rare example of a tool that matured and then was left alone. No bloat, no flaky extensions. It just works. I have zipped literally several million files into many thousands of archives over the years, and never had it fail, not even once (disk corruption issues aside). I've archived files of 15 bytes and 1500 megabytes. The encryption is reasonably good; it took the likes of Paul Kocher to really break it. It's efficient; some have been able to exceed its compression and speed abilities but it's solid and reliable enough that no other program has ever challenged it as the supreme cross-platform file archive utility.
The other notable thing about Info-Zip is that it was really one of the very first true "bazaar" style development projects on the net, combining the talents of programmers from all over the globe through what would now be considered ploddingly slow email and list connections. Info-Zip precedes Linux itself and many other similar development efforts by at least a couple of years, and hearkens back to RBBS as the true originator of distributed development of free software. Read all about it at the Info-Zip home page.
Jean-Loup was a key contributor to the success of Info-Zip as both a programming project and a new kind of development project literally spanning the globe. So if you don't mind, this is a big "hooray" for this news. I hope he does well at Mandrake, which is clearly meeting a need in the end-user market as Linux pushes outward past the "server-only" typecasting that certain industry pundits and major companies want to confine it to.
"Coerced" is awfully strong language. So is "politics." Some might even consider them swear-words. Instead, may I suggest: "Consistency." "Principles."
As is often the case, here we have someone wanting to make a noisy controversy out of a normal event. The background, as I understand it, is that the OpenBSD folks didn't much care for the Data Fellows licensing policy for the new ssh, so they decided to rewrite the old version 1 as OpenSSH, and in the process nipped at least one known bug. The new version will be in OpenBSD 2.6 scheduled for release on December 1.
Meanwhile Debian decided to substitute this version, in line with its policy to have only totally free packages in the free distribution. The other version will continue to be available in non-free.
It's not as if this is some deep dark secret, nor has it been some big folderol. Matter-of-fact coverage can be found at BugTraq, OpenBSD and the Debian development lists.
There was also an announcement in Joey Hess' Debian Weekly News last week -- and here is the real scoop from Phil Hands.
Nonsense. At load time, it uses 3384K on my NT 4.0 system right now.
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Re:Slashdot -- what were you thinking???
on
Which BSD?
·
· Score: 1
Go back to your corner.
Some of us have been using various Unixen for a long time and these are issues of continuing concern (I started with Mt Xinu, how's that for ancient history).
I run Debian Linux at work and FreeBSD on my laptop. I am interested in ongoing comparisons from REAL USERS about the issues that come up with all the variants, because I am constantly evaluating my own situation. A couple years ago I would have gone exclusively with FreeBSD, but Linux has evolved in some very interesting ways and its base of supported applications is just awesome now. Despite all the fine claims about Linux mode and so on in the *BSD world, you're still giving up something not to run in the native environment. In addition Linux has caught up in several key areas, notably TCP/IP throughput and reliability.
On the other hand, the *BSDen have some lessons to teach the Linux world and I sure hope the two sides will collaborate more in any event.
As for those who would stifle discussion here with their arch comments about those who need clues to find maps and all that, I'm sure they will have a fine future pounding sand here on/. and elsewhere, because the net was built on mutual assistance, not grandstanding and patronizing.
To my interested layman's point of view, the key issue in strong crypto is not (or rather is no longer) development and is now adoption. PGP was a big step in the right direction, but not enough. Now that we have practical strong crypto on the desktop, where do we go from here to insure its adoption as the expected way to do communications on networks?
Do you have any thoughts on projects such as FreeS/WAN which are strategically aimed in that direction?
Slashdot Mirror
Russ, why don't you stop being coy, just cut to the chase and say "FreeBSD sucks, Linux rules," and get it over with?
/. It seems more likely the point was to deny service. Which it did.
Not that I agree with that sentiment. They both rule, but in slightly different ways.
You also seem to assume the point of this attack was to own
Both Linux and *BSD are capable of operating in secure and efficient modes, and both are capable of being operated otherwise. So let's get past that.
Besides, the issue here has to do with network devices more than OSes anyway.
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The missing piece in aleonard's chapter is about the erratic course AT&T took regarding UNIX during the 1980s. When it finally decided that it was worth promoting as a salable commodity, licensing and use restrictions tightened considerably, but they failed to extend the OS in the directions that it needed to go to meet the burgeoning needs of local and connected networks (which then became known as the Internet).
Perhaps most important was the development of NFS, which was introduced formally by Sun but based directly on work by the CSRG. Another important building block was Berkeley sockets/STREAMS. These are the things that distinguished Berkeley from AT&T UNIX in the mid-1980s and caused sysadmins who were not encumbered by AT&T purchase requirements to go with the Berkeley flavor during that foundational period. In Cuckoo's Nest, Cliff Stoll alludes to some of these differences from his work as a part-time sysadmin at LBL.
Finally seeing the commercial potential in the late 1980s, particularly driven by corporate markets moving to Oracle and other UNIX-based business applications, and the growing importance of Sun, Apollo, HP and other entrants in both the server and workstation markets, AT&T was faced with two facts in its pursuit of a payoff for its languishing UNIX product: (1) its inability to succeed in the retail systems market against more experienced competitors like HP and more eager ones like Sun; and (2) the ongoing breakup of the Bell System under MFJ III.
Consequently, AT&T sold UNIX off to Novell, in one of the classic examples of the "greater fool" theory of marketing, since Ray Noorda and his merry band in Utah had not Clue 1 about what to do with it. Novell's Univel subsidiary was set up to put together a repackaging called Unixware which never really got a foothold. The only good thing about all this for Novell was that they eventually enticed Eric Schmidt over from Sun to run the company. Schmidt, Berkeleyite to the core, flung the doors wide open to IP and eased away from IPX, and Novell has been able to find a role in the modern corporate market for servers and directories when it was almost guaranteed that the company would sink without a trace in the mid-1990s otherwise.
But the fight over the intellectual property rights of the AT&T and Berkeley flavors was heating up even in the late 1980s. Probably the best coverage of the ensuing battle was in UNIX Review columns over those years, and I hope aleonard will review those as his book project goes forward.
Through a rather complex and messy process, there was a showdown between Novell and UC Berkeley, the very end of which is described in the FreeBSD handbook capsule history.
For about 18 months, it was entirely unclear whether an open UNIX would be possible; this was the period when 386BSD was basically frozen and Linux and other now-forgotten "free U**xlike" things were being worked on. And the reason that those were happening was the continuing expansion of the DOS and Windows 3.x market which brought about decreasing costs and increasing capabilities to desktop machines. Desktop UNIX on the Intel platform only really became usable with the faster late-1980s 80386, and was still basically a toy before 1990; most desktoppers were running SunOS 4.x boxen or maybe AT&T, HP or Apollo workstations to do local development and the very earliest forays into what became ISPs.
The legal battle over the status of UNIX allowed a critical mass to converge on development of Linux, which was far enough ahead in 1994 that even my Bay Area friends were probably installing it more than the BSDs (with the exception of Berkeley grads of course!). The "distribution" concept promoted most effectively by Yggdrasil and Slackware played a major role in this, because small-PC UNIX players no longer basically had to be kernel hackers by necessity.
There's also no question that the *BSD groups develop with more of the "cathedral" mode than the "bazaar" mode, but that may be an appropriate niche-ification as we go forward. Certainly those of us with more an affinity for the Berkeley flavor will continue to lean toward *BSD than Linux with its stronger SYSV heritage. But in reality, the differences really are a matter of preference, not capability.
This sounds reasonable until you apply actual experience to it. Most databases in most circumstances are primarily read-oriented. If I were to put very broad numbers on it I would say 80% read, 10% write and 10% processor-bound. There may be a few very active tables where writes dominate (for example, a cookies table for a web site or a state table in a logistics app), but this tends to be limited to one limited area of the database. In general, such active tables will always be in memory anyway (or should be to the extent possible, if you can't manage to add more memory perhaps a redesign is in order since the cost of going to disk especially for frequent writes is prohibitive compared to in-memory access). Data integrity features such as SQL COMMIT/ROLLBACK on table writes may be indicated when the risk of data loss is high, but don't forget that you pay a performance and overhead price for having these features active. That is to say, data integrity features are desirable but not at an indefinite cost. It is important to remember that in databases, as in all programming, nothing functions in complete isolation. The presence or absence of a given feature does not trump every other consideration, and besides that, sound design generally is the most important, least understood factor within your control for making any database work properly. -------
I would be more interested in Postgresql except there is this really irritating postbot that with deadly regularity pops up and says in a colorless monotone, "Use Postgresql. It tastes good. It is better for you."
What's curious is that the bot never seems to talk about its actual real-world projects using Postgresql. I would love to hear more about that, actually. It's only from comparing our experiences that we learn how to do our work better.
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I said it at length on the ACS site, and I'll summarize it here:
If it supports a reasonable implementation of Dr. Codd's relational model based on predicate logic, it is relational.
MySQL is relational.
Next issue.
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Why, I'm glad you asked that. Right here in Portland, Oregon, the ACLU has been defending conservative Christian streetcorner preachers who loudly declaim at the corner of Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland. The management of the square, a non-profit with a sort of exalted city-blessed status, shooed them away from time to time and even had a couple of them arrested. The local ACLU has been helping defend them in court. I applaud this as an ACLU member. Their speech is annoying and foolish, but it is wholly protected and the square is public space.
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Once again the common error is made that RMS is a "socialist." Not at all, from what I can tell from his fairly voluminous writing, at least not by any rigorous definition. He may be a "social democrat" (as I consider myself), a term that has no context in the American political scene but is basically a centrist position in the European mode.
:)
What RMS definitely is: he is a classic liberal, meaning a follower of Locke, Hume and Adam Smith. "Classic liberalism" (a badly made phrase, but it will do) gave rise to both modern liberalism and modern conservatism, although it doesn't resemble the modern forms all that much. Instead, it takes a deliberately philosophical (in the old-fashioned pre-modernist sense) view at a time when politics, economics and philosophy were considered basically branches of the same type of thought.
This focus on first causes is what distinguishes RMS. I'm struck by the parallels between his career and that of Dr. E. F. Codd, who developed the concept of the relational database based on predicate calculus at IBM in the late 1960s, and has spent 30 years ever since complaining about the actual implementation of his framework that went on to take over the database world
Like RMS with Open Source, Codd believes that Structured Query Language (SQL) is at best a pale and fragmentary implementation of the mathematically sound approach he developed. Like RMS, he is considered grumpy and retrograde by a good many practitioners in the field he pioneered. All the same, it's possible to respect his purism and continue to use and like the relatively impure byproduct.
And thus I type post this to Slashdot, which uses Perl under Stallman's GPL and MySQL developed from the concepts of Codd's calculus of relational data.
--------
I prefer freedom over "innovation" that means making sloppy software more complicated, so it is STILL true:
The last chapter in Simon Singh's The Code Book, recently reviewed here on Slashdot, is a clear and basic description of the theory of quantum crypography.
-------
Hmm, an SQL database without GROUP BY.
bzzzzt. . . . next . . .
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This is one of the most disappointing story blocks I've seen on Slashdot in a good long while. The self-absorption and lack of even basic rhetorical skill is pretty disheartening. Not to mention the shallow understanding of the issues. It makes the few comments that really get into the technical considerations stand out that much more.
The number of "write-mostly" humanoid bots on Slashdot these days is the most dismaying thing, though.
For those still not clear on who Simson Garfinkel is yet, here is your FREE CLUE!.
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Never mind. I saw this before seeing all the others.
The referenced papers are mildly interesting, but whether the approach is a potent line of attack is conjectural at this point.
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Wow, another substantial comment. When you grow up, Kamel, and stop flinging the insults of a 10-year-old at things you have no knowledge of, perhaps you will have something of interest to say.
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Yes indeed, the author, Simson Garfinkel, who co-wrote Practical Unix & Internet Security and Web Security and Commerce with Gene Spafford for O'Reilly is not qualified to talk about this issue. Yes indeed.
OK, now let's talk about "Devoid of Clues,' shall we.
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So why did this, the first posting with ANYTHING substantive to say on the issue, get moderated as "redundant"?
C'mon, fess up, who did it?
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I've been thinking about reviewing Database Nation for Slashdot, along with Whit Diffie and Susan Landau's Privacy on the Line, which I consider mandatory reading. If someone else reviews them here before me, that would be fine.
One important book which was ahead of its time is Oscar Gandy's The Panoptic Sort (Westview Press 1993). This is also well worth reading as a socio/political overview of these issues. The Panopticon, as you'll recall, was Jeremy Bentham's notion of a circular prison with a central guard tower from which all activity in every cell could be watched constantly.
Gandy writes:
The panoptic sort is the name I have assigned to the complex technology that involves the collection, processing, and sharing of information about individuals and groups that is generated through their daily lives as citizens, employees, and consumers and is used to coordinate and control their access to the goods and services that define life in the modern capitalist economy.
The panoptic sort is a system of disciplinary surveillance that is widespread but continues to expand its reach. The operation of the panoptic system is guided by a generalized concern with rationalization of social, economic, and political systems. The panoptic sort is a difference machine that sorts individuals into categories and classes on the basis of routine measurements. It is a discriminatory technology that allocates options and opportunities on the basis of those measures and the administrative models that they inform . . . The panoptic sort is a system of actions that governs other actions. The panoptic sort is a system of power.
This is only the general thesis of the book; Gandy goes well beyond the usual ivory-tower theorizing to talk about practicalities in government and commercial use of databases and other technology. It's a useful companion to the books by Garkinfel and Diffie and Landau, who unfortunately seem unaware of Gandy's pioneering analysis.
-------
Speaking of Blowfish and block ciphers, Bruce Schneier has some very interesting comments on the convergence of stream and block ciphers in his newest monthly Crypto-Gram.
-------
It's always indicative when someone resorts to the tired rhetorical device of complaining about "political correctness." In this case, your interpretation of the circumstances of Turing's demise is speculative, Eric. See for example this exchange in the letters section of a recent Scientific American. There is no disputing, however, the persecution he was subjected to by the British authorities, which may or may not have had a direct bearing on his death.
But all this is aside from the main point, which is Turing's indisputable professional and scientific contributions. That is where the emphasis should properly be placed.
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I'm going to say this sooner or later, so this is as good a place as any. This doesn't have all that much to do with the comment here as with a good portion of the responses to the interview taken as a whole.
/. crew, because they won't behave the way you demand that they do. And tell me, how many dollars and how many hours of your time have you actually contributed to making /., Slash code or other aspects of this function according to your desires?
Geez, you people are a bunch of whiners. All this talk about hypocrisy and backsliding by Rob and the other
. . .
(still waiting)
. . .
I thought so.
You know, here's a free clue: If you don't like it here, start your own. CmdrTaco has kindly provided at least a pile of code (though it may not be compeletely current) so you don't even have to start from scratch.
Go ahead, we're waiting.
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No flames here, just a suggestion that you actually read before commenting. It's not hard to find information about Opera and there are plenty of reviews around the net.
No, Opera is not a text-only browser. Why would they do that when Lynx has been the category-killer there for years?
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Opera chokes all the time. Of course, I look at upwards of several hundred to over a thousand web pages a day on several dozen to upwards of 100 sites, and it might barf on a dozen pages a day. Under NT, it always can be terminated and restarted gracefully. Always.
In my experience, Netscape crashes about five times as often and IE is unusable about three times as often.
Opera renders pages much faster and the multi-page MDL display mechanism that others disdain is more efficient.
In other words, Opera is by far more stable for general-purpose browsing.
Mozilla is coming along nicely but if Opera ships for Linux with the browser features it now has under Windows, it will be a huge step forward. I'm quite happy they're not planning to include mail or other stuff in the Linux version; that makes it cleaner and I never never ever use a browser for email for both efficiency and security reasons.
No offense to others who prefer other browsers. But be sure before you fling your arrows that you've actually used Opera enough to have a valid judgment of your own.
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I had been a staunch user of Phil Katz' PKARC package after he significantly improved the original ARC program in the mid-1980s. Then the guy in New Jersey who wrote ARC got in a totally unnecessary fight with him over whether Phil had copied his code instead of reverse-engineering it (welcome to the world of "share" ware). Phil then decided to revamp the whole project and wrote the PKZIP package which stormed the BBS world in the late 1980s and has proven to be stable and solid up to the present day. Check out his company, PKWARE for more info.
Then, in 1990, due to its success in the PC world, a number of people decided to try and port it to other platforms. To his credit, Phil gave the project his blessing and thus Info-Zip was born.
Info-Zip was the first net mailing list I ever signed up for, way back in 1990. (The second was RISKS-L, and then the mail deluge really started!) Jean-Loup Gailly was one of the leading developers along with Kai-Uwe Rommel, Mark Adler, Rich Wales, Greg Roelofs and many others. I was just a lurker, cheering on the gang, and they did in fact port the zip and unzip program to just about every platform imaginable (whence the motto, "The only program that runs on more platforms is 'Hello world'!)
Zip is the unfortunately rare example of a tool that matured and then was left alone. No bloat, no flaky extensions. It just works. I have zipped literally several million files into many thousands of archives over the years, and never had it fail, not even once (disk corruption issues aside). I've archived files of 15 bytes and 1500 megabytes. The encryption is reasonably good; it took the likes of Paul Kocher to really break it. It's efficient; some have been able to exceed its compression and speed abilities but it's solid and reliable enough that no other program has ever challenged it as the supreme cross-platform file archive utility.
The other notable thing about Info-Zip is that it was really one of the very first true "bazaar" style development projects on the net, combining the talents of programmers from all over the globe through what would now be considered ploddingly slow email and list connections. Info-Zip precedes Linux itself and many other similar development efforts by at least a couple of years, and hearkens back to RBBS as the true originator of distributed development of free software. Read all about it at the Info-Zip home page.
Jean-Loup was a key contributor to the success of Info-Zip as both a programming project and a new kind of development project literally spanning the globe. So if you don't mind, this is a big "hooray" for this news. I hope he does well at Mandrake, which is clearly meeting a need in the end-user market as Linux pushes outward past the "server-only" typecasting that certain industry pundits and major companies want to confine it to.
Allez!
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"Coerced" is awfully strong language. So is "politics." Some might even consider them swear-words. Instead, may I suggest: "Consistency." "Principles."
As is often the case, here we have someone wanting to make a noisy controversy out of a normal event. The background, as I understand it, is that the OpenBSD folks didn't much care for the Data Fellows licensing policy for the new ssh, so they decided to rewrite the old version 1 as OpenSSH, and in the process nipped at least one known bug. The new version will be in OpenBSD 2.6 scheduled for release on December 1.
Meanwhile Debian decided to substitute this version, in line with its policy to have only totally free packages in the free distribution. The other version will continue to be available in non-free.
It's not as if this is some deep dark secret, nor has it been some big folderol. Matter-of-fact coverage can be found at BugTraq, OpenBSD and the Debian development lists.
There was also an announcement in Joey Hess' Debian Weekly News last week -- and here is the real scoop from Phil Hands.
"Politics" myass.
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Nonsense. At load time, it uses 3384K on my NT 4.0 system right now.
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Go back to your corner.
/. and elsewhere, because the net was built on mutual assistance, not grandstanding and patronizing.
Some of us have been using various Unixen for a long time and these are issues of continuing concern (I started with Mt Xinu, how's that for ancient history).
I run Debian Linux at work and FreeBSD on my laptop. I am interested in ongoing comparisons from REAL USERS about the issues that come up with all the variants, because I am constantly evaluating my own situation. A couple years ago I would have gone exclusively with FreeBSD, but Linux has evolved in some very interesting ways and its base of supported applications is just awesome now. Despite all the fine claims about Linux mode and so on in the *BSD world, you're still giving up something not to run in the native environment. In addition Linux has caught up in several key areas, notably TCP/IP throughput and reliability.
On the other hand, the *BSDen have some lessons to teach the Linux world and I sure hope the two sides will collaborate more in any event.
As for those who would stifle discussion here with their arch comments about those who need clues to find maps and all that, I'm sure they will have a fine future pounding sand here on
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Today is Our Birthday, and
To my interested layman's point of view, the key issue in strong crypto is not (or rather is no longer) development and is now adoption. PGP was a big step in the right direction, but not enough. Now that we have practical strong crypto on the desktop, where do we go from here to insure its adoption as the expected way to do communications on networks?
Do you have any thoughts on projects such as FreeS/WAN which are strategically aimed in that direction?
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