Once again I'm baffled at how Linux _must_ be tied into every technological tidbit that appears on Slashdot. Someone really needs to conduct a psychological study on this.
It's not such a fanatical reaction if you subsitute "Non-Microsoft" for "Linux", which is probably what people really mean in this situation.
With Microsoft worming its way into cable operations around the country, it's not outrageous to be concerned that if broadband access monopolies are not regulated we'll end up with an MS-only internet. Should they be permitted to buy the pot because they've got more ready cash than most nations? If so, shouldn't they be allowed to buy the phone and power networks too?
Oh sure, independent dialup access will forever be available, but that's as comforting as saying "MS isn't a computing monopoly - after all you can always do math with a pencil."
The redundancy and fault tolerance was a design principle of Arpanet because it was intended to be suitable for military communications. If the system fails during a war then people die, so high reliability was needed at any cost.
But now the Internet is a commercial enterprise, and failure is now an option. At worst, some large corporations lose their VPNs and have to prioritize and pick up the phone again. For most of the net it's just a matter of losing porn, IRC, and MP3.
Now if you're a backbone maintainer, do you double your capital costs to achieve more than minimal redundancy just to give the public a warm fuzzy feeling? Or do you maintain the least expensive network you can without losing customers? Market forces will drive the QOS on the net to the lowest tolerable level, and for now people will tolerate a lot of net failure because their lives and livelihoods don't completely depend on it...yet.
"They Might Be Giants" is great. By all means see it!
As for "All About Eve" - another classic - it's a testament to Scott's dedication that he had extensive plastic surgery and changed his name to George Sanders for just that one film, and never mentioned it to anyone ever again:)
Whatever you do, hold on to that film. It's already lasted 50 years, which is much longer than any of the common mass storage media are good for, and their resolution is probably quite a bit higher. Find some way to store them in a vacuum (one of those vacuum-packing food sealers would do), and your grandchildren will be posting to Slashdot2050 asking how best to transfer them to holographic quantum nanodisks.
Suppose these things are cheap enough to mass-produce or perhaps mass-produced enough to be cheap. Suppose also that every owner gets whatever training is necessary. Then you can say goodbye to the oft-mentioned fantasy of chuckling to yourself as you serenely fly over the traffic jams below, because now the sky is full of people who used to be driving. What kind of flight-control, traffic-control, and safety systems would be required to make them safe? Well, as safe as car traffic is now, for argument's sake.
Unless every unit is centrally controlled or has on-board 3D radar coupled to the nav system (and would you really trust that anyway?), you can't just let people fly wherever they want at 80 MPH. I'm not a pilot, so maybe those of you who are can enlighten us on airspace regulations. Would there be a minimum altitude for "high" speed travel? Would different altitude ranges be reserved for different headings?
How about failure modes? Are emergency parachutes enough? Mars-lander-type external airbags? What about the traffic below you? Compressed helium and emergency balloons?
It seems like there are a lot of issues to be resolved apart from mechanical and economic feasibility. Does anyone know what the state-of-the-art thinking is here?
I run Redhat 5.1 on a Wedge 1100 (OEM for Kapok) and love the seamless hot-swapping of my modem and Ethernet cards. Works as advertised, and even cooperates with APM. My only complaint is not really with Linux, but when I have to boot into win98 it seems to leave the PCMCIA controller in a screwed up state, so that Linux can't access it anymore upon reboot unless I turn off the power. Windows sucks.
1. One set of comments were concerned with a metal-skinned airplane flying through the microwaves. This writer obviously didn't remember his high school science classes, otherwise he would have known that a metal-skinned airplane is a Faraday Cage, which prevents radio waves from penetrating the interior
I'm unfamiliar with the exact terms of the GPL, but it seems that a simple compression scheme could get around this problem. Pre-compress your fixed output, then pass it to a decompression routine at runtime, so that the output itself is not found anywhere in the code. If this is illegal, then isn't *all* output from any GPL'ed program also GPL'ed?
In the last four years the price of gold has dropped nearly 40%. If our currency had done the same thing, a lot of us would be having significant trouble accessing the net while standing in breadlines.
I agree with you completely, but consider this further irony: if it weren't for MS's crappy bloated products and marketing muscle, computers would be in a considerably more primitive state. The demand for ever-more-powerful hardware that MS has generated gave rise to market pressures and economies of scale that make our dirt-cheap linux boxes possible. If the majority of machines were "good enough" from year to year, new ones would be as much of a luxury item as new cars, and probably as expensive.
So in a perverse way, Mr. Bill deserves some credit for today's computer *industry*. But he deserves none for the state of computer *science*. Mostly he deserves to be flogged.
Indeed, MS hires some of the best talent in the world. The result? Comments like "well, MS hires the best talent in the world, so their code must not be that bad." Mission accomplished. MS hires the best talent in the world for one reason: to get them off the street.
How many incredible products have come out of one of these geniuses after MS swallowed them? It's not even in MS's interest to produce genius-quality software. A hallmark of great (or even good) software is functionality. The major source of MS revenue is not functionality; it's upgradeability and hope.
I suspect no useful MS code will be open-sourced. I'm thinking particularly of a comment Linus made that Microsoft's best strategy to "compete" with Samba is not to do anything to improve performance but to change the SMB protocols in the next version of NT and not tell anyone. You can't do this if the code is open-source. No matter how obfuscated the code, it's important enough that it will inevitably be reverse-engineered.
This is a smoke blowing exercise by MS. It won't affect any of the real open source projects out there, but it may (by dilution) turn off some of the clueless suits who are driving the current hype whirlwind and "mainstream acceptance". So what. The beauty of all the Free Software we hold dear is that mainstream acceptance was never necessary to its success.
Vulnerability to viruses is more a consequence of the distribution method than of the software itself. After all, it's not unheard of for even shrink-wrapped software to be infected. What's really at fault is the implicit instruction to "just trust me and run this code".
So what we need is someone to trust. This could be a shrink-wrap packager like Red Hat, or a certificate authority. Automatically checking the signature on new software shouldn't be any more complicated than running a virus scanner - something that many (most?) mainstream users already do.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not such a fanatical reaction if you subsitute "Non-Microsoft" for "Linux", which is probably what people really mean in this situation.
With Microsoft worming its way into cable operations around the country, it's not outrageous to be concerned that if broadband access monopolies are not regulated we'll end up with an MS-only internet. Should they be permitted to buy the pot because they've got more ready cash than most nations? If so, shouldn't they be allowed to buy the phone and power networks too?
Oh sure, independent dialup access will forever be available, but that's as comforting as saying "MS isn't a computing monopoly - after all you can always do math with a pencil."
But now the Internet is a commercial enterprise, and failure is now an option. At worst, some large corporations lose their VPNs and have to prioritize and pick up the phone again. For most of the net it's just a matter of losing porn, IRC, and MP3.
Now if you're a backbone maintainer, do you double your capital costs to achieve more than minimal redundancy just to give the public a warm fuzzy feeling? Or do you maintain the least expensive network you can without losing customers? Market forces will drive the QOS on the net to the lowest tolerable level, and for now people will tolerate a lot of net failure because their lives and livelihoods don't completely depend on it...yet.
Much like our Earth is.
Yes: Up through 4.0x, Netscape was a tool for you to access the internet.
Starting with 4.5, Netscape is a tool for the Internet to access you.
As for "All About Eve" - another classic - it's a testament to Scott's dedication that he had extensive plastic surgery and changed his name to George Sanders for just that one film, and never mentioned it to anyone ever again :)
Whatever you do, hold on to that film. It's already lasted 50 years, which is much longer than any of the common mass storage media are good for, and their resolution is probably quite a bit higher. Find some way to store them in a vacuum (one of those vacuum-packing food sealers would do), and your grandchildren will be posting to Slashdot2050 asking how best to transfer them to holographic quantum nanodisks.
Unless every unit is centrally controlled or has on-board 3D radar coupled to the nav system (and would you really trust that anyway?), you can't just let people fly wherever they want at 80 MPH. I'm not a pilot, so maybe those of you who are can enlighten us on airspace regulations. Would there be a minimum altitude for "high" speed travel? Would different altitude ranges be reserved for different headings?
How about failure modes? Are emergency parachutes enough? Mars-lander-type external airbags? What about the traffic below you? Compressed helium and emergency balloons?
It seems like there are a lot of issues to be resolved apart from mechanical and economic feasibility. Does anyone know what the state-of-the-art thinking is here?
I run Redhat 5.1 on a Wedge 1100 (OEM for Kapok) and love the seamless hot-swapping of my modem and Ethernet cards. Works as advertised, and even cooperates with APM. My only complaint is not really with Linux, but when I have to boot into win98 it seems to leave the PCMCIA controller in a screwed up state, so that Linux can't access it anymore upon reboot unless I turn off the power. Windows sucks.
Airplanes have windows.
Bye bye.
this should be solvable.
I'm unfamiliar with the exact terms of the GPL, but it seems that a simple compression scheme could get around this problem. Pre-compress your fixed output, then pass it to a decompression routine at runtime, so that the output itself is not found anywhere in the code. If this is illegal, then isn't *all* output from any GPL'ed program also GPL'ed?
In the last four years the price of gold has dropped nearly 40%. If our currency had done the same thing, a lot of us would be having significant trouble accessing the net while standing in breadlines.
I agree with you completely, but consider this further irony: if it weren't for MS's crappy bloated products and marketing muscle, computers would be in a considerably more primitive state. The demand for ever-more-powerful hardware that MS has generated gave rise to market pressures and economies of scale that make our dirt-cheap linux boxes possible. If the majority of machines were "good enough" from year to year, new ones would be as much of a luxury item as new cars, and probably as expensive.
So in a perverse way, Mr. Bill deserves some credit for today's computer *industry*. But he deserves none for the state of computer *science*.
Mostly he deserves to be flogged.
Indeed, MS hires some of the best talent in the world. The result? Comments like "well, MS hires the best talent in the world, so their code must not be that bad." Mission accomplished. MS hires the best talent in the world for one reason: to get them off the street.
How many incredible products have come out of one of these geniuses after MS swallowed them? It's not even in MS's interest to produce genius-quality software. A hallmark of great (or even good) software is functionality. The major source of MS revenue is not functionality; it's upgradeability and hope.
I suspect no useful MS code will be open-sourced. I'm thinking particularly of a comment Linus made that Microsoft's best strategy to "compete" with Samba is not to do anything to improve performance but to change the SMB protocols in the next version of NT and not tell anyone. You can't do this if the code is open-source. No matter how obfuscated the code, it's important enough that it will inevitably be reverse-engineered.
This is a smoke blowing exercise by MS. It won't affect any of the real open source projects out there, but it may (by dilution) turn off some of the clueless suits who are driving the current hype whirlwind and "mainstream acceptance". So what. The beauty of all the Free Software we hold dear is that mainstream acceptance was never necessary to its success.
Vulnerability to viruses is more a consequence of the distribution method than of the software itself. After all, it's not unheard of for even shrink-wrapped software to be infected. What's really at fault is the implicit instruction to "just trust me and run this code".
So what we need is someone to trust. This could be a shrink-wrap packager like Red Hat, or a certificate authority. Automatically checking the signature on new software shouldn't be any more complicated than running a virus scanner - something that many (most?) mainstream users already do.