I've expressed these ideas elsewhere in slashdot, but the time seems right to "plant the meme" again, so here goes.
A society needs copyrights and patents. In most fields of human endeavor there are tremdous costs in moving from idea to artifact and patent law helps protect the small innovator from being beat to market by the huge wealthy predator. Patent law (the idea) is good.
Copyrights protect a specific formulation of an idea (a written work) from direct copy. It does not protect the idea itself which may be reused in an original way. Copyright law is meant to protect writers and artists (and by extension television producers who really do not qualify as either of the above). The extension of copyright to software is, IMHO, imprefect but useful.
Patents go to hell in the computer field for two reasons:
1) The granting of patents for ideas which are dubious as to their patentability. I'm thinking here of the company that claims to have a patent on all e-commerce because the made a dial-up system that took sales orders some time in the mid 1980's. To me, this is like me opening a little antique shop and filing a patent on retail stores. Patent law actually has a protection against obvious patents or prior art, so this is a problem with the Patent Office not doing its job, not the law itself.
2) Rapid obsolescence. A patent lasts far too long in the field of sotware. Most software ideas are not worth anything after just a few years. (LZW may be the exception that proves the rule!).
My friends, co-workers, and I have gone round and round on patents for software. The concensus seems to be that applying patents to software is, generally, bad. In those few cases where it isn't totally unreasonable (and I think inventing as powerful a form of data compression as LZW could qualify), the term should be much shorter. We kind of thought an 18-month patent would be reasonable. Since patents are meant to prevent a highly-resourced upstart from profiting before a true innovator can get to market and establish him/herself, and since software can be distributed quickly with hardly any resources required, 18 months should allow one to truly profit from a truly original idea and let the rest of us get our hands on it in a reasonable time.
So, fix the existing patent office and create a new software patent.
Oh yeah, just to point out patent law has a "FSF-like" goal on the back end. To get a patent one must put all details of an invention down on paper and publish it (in the patent itself). When the patent expires, anyone can read the patent and do what the inventor did. It encourages the sharing of ideas. It's just that software moves so much faster than manufacturing that these patents become an excessive burden on all of us.
Finally, Boutell himself posted to this thread with the details on why the gd library was pulled. If you are a moderator (and still reading my verbose screed), I encourage you to read his post and consider moderating it up...
To me this highlights the one true evil force in the world. No, not Microsoft. Ignorance. Dr. Science once said "Ignorance is bliss, and tonight, we're a happy country." I could not agree more.
The basic problem is not Microsoft. Not their products, not their technology (or lack thereof), not their marketing people. The problem is the number of people who do not think critically. The NT benchmark does not lie. It simply tells a very narrow slice of truth and "positions" that truth to show NT and IIS in the best possible light.
To me, the one outrageous thing in Microsoft's benchmark page is the chart that shows total cost of ownership. Now, I'm not a CIO, CEO, or CFO, but it seems the me that cost per transaction per unit time is completely irrelevant. What matters (as the author of the article we are commenting on here points out) is cost per transaction and can you handle your transaction volume?
When decision makers look no deeper than the cooked figures from NT's benchmark, when they fail to see if the scenario represents their business and technical reality, then their business gets what they deserve.
What the "Microsoft Advertising for Linux" article does that is lauditory is it cuts through to a core question. Which is cheaper given a certain use case? It wisely does not answer, but merely points out that in most cases, even in most intranets the Mindcraft/Microsoft scenario is extremely unlikely and that Linux/Apache on even limited hardware will handle most loads anyone would reasonable expect.
It also wisely points out that if you are a site in the tiny fraction that will exceed Linux/Apache's capacity, then by all means use NT/IIS.
Then, one more dig of my own at the TCO figures. Even if we grant the validity of the figure cost per transaction unit time (which I do not), what happens if you set up ten servers, or twenty? Linux costs nothing more for ten servers than it does for one. I haven't the time to see how many servers it would take, but there would come a break even point and then a point where Linux/Apache is cheaper even using the dubious measure in the Microsoft study.
Finally, I just want to congratulate the author of "Microsoft Advertising for Linux?" for showing the value of just trying some of your own math and asking, "Hey, is this reasonable?" If we all did this routinely regarding everything from computer bechmarks to medical scare news stories we would live in a much saner and less stressful world. Whichever operating system you buy.
I work in an IS shop as part of the Electronic Commerce team. We're a Unix shop (at least until the Windows-heads drive the us away), but more importantly WE ARE A WEB SHOP. We use a web server to serve up standards compliant content.
Almost every day I get requests to put MSWord and MSExcel content "on the web." I fight this tooth and nail. We have an extranet web reporting system which collects data from all over the Enterprise. One of my jobs is to get this data into a somewhat coherent form in an Oracle database so our reporting CGIs can generate on-the-fly reports and graphs. I get data in a number of file formats. The best stuff comes from the mainframe folks (from SAS and MUMPS on VAX equipment). These folks understand extracts and data integrety. The worst stuff comes to me in Excel spreadsheets.
The first most obvious evil is file size. Positional or delimited extracts from the mainframe folks are clear, well organized, consistent and compact. On the Excel side I had one file, 750 records, 12 columns. File size? 1,387,000 bytes! Why? A similar file from the mainframe folks is about 110,000 bytes.
The next evil is data integrety. I have to explain over and over again to the Excel folks why they should use unique ids for each reporting unit, that they should use the same id for the same reportin unit across files. They tell me th names are on the spreadsheets, so why do I need that? I try to explain that there are spelling, capitalization, and punctuation differences between the names in each of the file depending on who types them. I try to explain that ID numbers are harder to mistype and that they are more efficient to search on.
They don't get it.
Microsoft has put computing power into the hands of people who don't know how to use it. I know that sounds techno-elitist of me, but it is TRUE! There is so much corruption of data going on out there because everyone has a PC on his or her desk. I wouldn't care if it were not for the fact that these people then come back to IS and say "make this all work together." That's where I get upset.
You see, I am all in favor of "power to the people" when it comes to information, but to me this is like studying taxidermy and thinking that makes you an open-heart surgeon.
Getting back to the web, that's the final evil. Try to explain to these people that some of our clients use Macs or that it might be unreasonable to assume that all of our customers have to buy Office and they just don't get it. Show them the difference in performance between downloading an HTML table and an Excel spreadsheet with the same content, and then tell them how much worse it would be on a 28.8 modem instead of a T1 and maybe they get it, but its a hard sell.
My Linux bigotry comes not from an inherent hatred of Windows per se. It comes from the fact that Linux embraces standards, and Windows makes it up as it goes along.
I'm afraid I'd have to side with the folks who say these formats should die. Even if enerything in the world interoperated with them, they stink as network delivery formats for pure bandwidth reasons. Their signal to noise ratio is too low.
I don't know about manufacture for sale, but licensed radio amateurs are allowed to build and/or modify radio transmitters and recivers. If I rmember Part 97 of the FCC rules right, such licensed amateurs can build anything they like. Even so, operation of such equipment must be within current band allocations and use. This is set not so much by the FCC, but by international treaty, governed by the International Telecommunications Union (to which the US and almost every other nation are signatories). In other words, while I can build a transmitter that emits signals at 900MHz, if I key the transmitter, I'm in violation of the law. Weird, huh?
Cell phones operate in several bands, and 800-900MHx is a HUGE amount of bandwidth (100 MHz, obviously). Analog cell phones use less than 6kHz (I'm not sure exactly how much) and PCS phones use less (due to digital compression techniques). All cellular equipment is to greater or lesser extent "spread spectrum." In analog phones this means you are transmitting voice on one or more freqs, while digital control data is transmitted and recieved on another freq (even analog cell phones have a digital component), and you recieve voice on a different freq althogether. Under the control of data carried on the digital protocol between your handset and the cell, the freqs you use for all of these are moved around during the call, certainly when you move from cell to cell, but sometimes also when not moving if signal conditions warrant. The digital protocol also carries instructions to your handset to increase and decrease transmitter power as conditions warrant. Its actually a pretty amazing system. As someone who has built radio equipment, having multiple simultaneous transceivers shifting around, increasing and decreasing power, and all on one bloody antenna is quite simply miraculous. Of course, the electronics in a cell phone are rather more sophisticated than those in the old Heathkit 2 meter rig I built, but even so, an analog cell phone should be regarded with considerably more awe than I think most folks give it.
I don't wish to belabor the point, but I said the exact same thing you did. I'm not sure how the bull's equipment enters into it, but I thought I clearly distinguished between the idea embodied in law and the reality embodied in radios...
There is (IIRC) language in the communications act as amended that says something about the intent of the communicating parties. It is unlawful to intercept communications intended as point to point. Communication intended as a broadcast is not protected (obviously it is legal to listen to your local FM station!). It is also legal for non-licensed persons (all of this is in the US, beyond basic ITU rules regarding amateur radio, I know nothing of these things in other countries) to listen to, for example, two CB'ers or two radio amateurs talking because these are known and intended as broadcast media.
Also IIRC it used to be legal for licensed amateurs to monitor the entire spectrum, including the then RT bands (pre-cellular radio telephone), and, by extension, cellular and cordless phone traffic, but these privledges were specifically revoked in one of the sets of amendments somtime in the last 10 years. (Don't remember when).
Personally, I have always felt that if you want to keep something secret, keep your mouth shut. I do not think that anyone communicating by radio using some simple form of modulation (AM, FM, PCM, USB/SSB, etc.) should have any reasonable expectation of privacy. You can pass all the laws you like, but you can't prevent the interception of signals.
I'm an amateur radio operator. I drive around with a dual-band transceiver in my car (145MHz and 440MHz). Hams on these bands use FM modulation, just like a bunch of analog devices including (non-digital) cell phones. In urban areas there are so many transmitters all over the place that I often experience a phenomenon called "intermod" (intermodulation) which occurs when two radio carriers with wide separation in frequency happen to "beat" at the frequency I am monitoring (the difference between the two transmitter's carrier frequencies is equal to the frequency I am monitorning). If the conditions are right, my radio will then rectify the carrier and the demodulator will try to make audio out of the mixed signal. Often the result is gibberish, but often I hear two crystal clear conversations. This is an accident of physics. I doubt I could be prosecuted, since design of my radio tries to avoid this (lots of band pass filtering and such) and I had no intent to monitor anything I ought not to monitor. Nevertheless, I often hear ten and fifteen seconds of "private" conversation.
BTW, every time someone else buys a minivan and a cell phone, the problem gets worse. More transmitters on more frequencies equals more combinations that yield intermod. RF pollution is a semi-serious problem! (Cell phones are better for this than many systems, because the transmitter power levels are so small compared to more traditional methods of area-wide radio).
So, while the laws are pretty tight, you still shouldn't expect privacy. Even so, rebroadcasting cell phone conversations are something I think they would try to send you jail for...
Is there any good way to call this discussion to the attention of the trade press? Anyone who has spent enough time on USENET is quite thoroughly used to the "degenerative" discussion. I used to spend a lot of time in alt.solar.photovoltaic (because of my strong interest in renewable energy). Almost every thread of discussion would eventually be taken over by the "no-nukes" and "more-nukes" camps. Hardly any discussion of photovoltaics at all. Luckily, through the miracle of the killfile, some of us had discussions. Good discussions.
I have seen childish Windows users write in exactly the same manner as the "Linux advocates" Mindcraft posted.
I tend to agree with Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. He was talking about fiction, but I think the rule can be generalized to just about everything people do; even to just about everything I personally do (you have no idea how it pains me to admit that! My ego is threatening to leave me!).
Given The Law, I reckon about the only thing we can do is:
1) Try to think before we type. 2) Try to imagine receiving this same message from some "brain dead twerp" (i.e., anyone who thinks differently than we do). 3) Speak out gently against uncivil conduct. 4) Rewrite. Often.
This marks the third time in the last week that a fair portion of a Slashdot posting's discussion thread has concerned itself with how we sound off. I am deeply heartened by seeing the goodwill of most of us displayed. I just wish there were some effective way to bring this attention of those who see us only as pack of wild animals.
Oh, dear. Wasn't Metcalfe the guy who predicted the collapse of the Internet? If he is, I wonder why he still has credibility with anyone. Oh, well.
The best thing to do with something like this (vague, unsupported pronouncements) is probably to ignore it. Personally, I'm very tired of loudly justifying myself and Linux. I intend to just continue doing what I do now -- getting amazing work done more quickly than any of my cohorts who use another OS that shall remain nameless...
In the me-too department: I share the feeling of shame at having the name of "Slashdot" associated with agressive flaming. I was so embarassed (because I really like Slashdot and visit several times a day -- I even post from time to time what I think I have something of value to contribute) that I posted onto the apologia at Andover very clearly in my own name, identifying myself as a Slashdot reader and expressing my personal shame.
In the "off topic" department, I sometime wonder if the growth of the electronic community will eventually increase or decrease civility. I rember reading David Brin's Earth in the late 80s. We had USENET by then, the Web wasn't in existence (except maybe at CERN) and the word Internet meant something to only a handful of us. In that novel, Brin imagined a global network that everyone had access to. (This stuff was very incidental to the story, BTW). Each person had a credibility rating. You would read messages filtering by credibility. I think the Slashdot moderation figure is a very primitive form of this.
What if access to the net was denied to no one, but every other participant on the net could adjust one persons credibility by one point once and only once? (What if this could be applied to sub nets and addresses at the IP level, but I get ahead of myself). What if we could put the real flamethrowers in Coventry (as we used to say)?
Everyone if free to be as abusive as they want, but they would be heard by fewer and fewer people as their credibility fell.
Perhaps persons should be rated in various categories, or a standard system eveloped to build this into a new kind of HTML compatible nntp? I'm not really suggesting anything seriously here, but the issue is real.
In some ways, despite all the evils of television, it has brought a certain increased sophistication to distant and disparate places (and also a certain lack of sophistication as well, but I don't want to go too far down that tangent right now).
The net can do the same, only more so.
Whatever. I'm a programmer by vocation and avocation, so I always seek a technological solution.
For now, I hope that each of us who feels proud to be a part of something Big and Important (open source, free software, the Internet, free speech, individuality) and who gives vent to that through fourums like Slashdot will take a little time to (gently) remind some of our more rambunctious fellow travellers what it means to be civilized.
Except for the several wars the US has waged upon Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, Yugoslavia and many others. Plus covert or economical battles against El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatamala and more.
I am talking about global war. While I share the belief I infer you have: war is immoral, I do think there is a very clear difference between every one of these wars you mention and an event like the Second World War.
In Freeman Dyson's fascinating book, Weapons and Hope, he plots an interesting chart of European wars by year and number killed. This chart shows an exponential growth curve until 1945, where it knuckles down dramatically.
I think we got too good at it. The next point on that curve would finish us all. It was only due to the limits of technology and geographic accident that WWII didn't wreck civilization.
While the evil in us lives on, we shifted our conflict to a different level. A level of "low-intensity conflict" (meaning "killing people in the third world") and "cold war" (meaning keeping secrets and stealing secrets). That's what I'm talking about.
You will never, ever, hear me argue that the world is a good place where people act with love, compassion, and integrity. A few do, but I for one am right there with Hamlet:
"I, myself, am indifferent honest, and yet I could accuse me of such things as t'were better my mother had not bore me." (quoted as well as I can remember it). Hamlet and me: Were both dirty, grubby, knuckle-dragging animals. Who wish we were better...
I want to be clear about this. I am not happy that privacy will cease to exist, but I see it as a technological inevitability. Given that the technology for spying (eavesdropping, sigint, video monitoring, etc.) is becoming ubiquitous and cheap, people will start to want covert devices for personal safety, for watching the babysitter, for snooping on their children, etc.
(Aside: I can't believe how teenagers are wanting to own cell phones! Aside from the fact that these are duffable whenever they are on, I think it won't be long before they know where they are and will be queriable. "Going to the movies, eh, junior?")
Governments already have some of these capabilities. I don't presently fear this (here in the United States). Just look at how much the police know about many crimes, most of which goes unused by rules of evidence. I will only start to fear when the courts stop letting people off on "technicalities" (which is code for legal rights, dangnab it!).
I don't like that privacy is gone, but I like even less that the only people who can invade it are governments, banks, and creditors! And only banks and creditors are allowed to act on the information.
So, my view is that given the technological inevitablity of total access, we should make the whole range of such devices fully legal for ALL to use.
Why should the fact that I am being listened to stop me from talking (understanding that I live in a country which protects speech rights and not a country where free-thinkers are "people who need psychiatric treatment"; And yes, of course I worry about McCarthyism, and J.Edgar Hoover and a buch of other potential abuses, but which is worse, a world where only government can spy on people, or a world where everybody can spy on everyone, including citizens on the government)?
When we are able to stand outside the Senate offices and see, perhaps, that Senator Exon takes his famous "blue book" with him to lavatory, perhaps we will become a more open, honest society.
When I say our defence is that we're boring, I don't mean that we are poor coversationalists. I mean that we are self-serving knuckle-dragging apes who are all ashamed of the same stupid things that everyone does and nobody admits to. We are interested in peering into other people's private lives because we cannot easily do so. I'm suggesting that the best way to restore privacy is to lose it completely and wait for boredom to set in. It will, I promise you. Because we are petty, grubby little animals all, and that gets boring.
Now that I am being narcisisstic enough to follow up my own post: I suspect Echelon does exist, I also suspect that the folks who have pointed out that the volume of data is such that it is impossible to "big-brother" everything are dead right.
The NSA relies a great deal on how little is known about them (you should see the speculations people get into about them -- evrything from their changes in the S-boxes of DES to their initial resistance then sudden silence about PGP). NSA is a very smart bunch of people with a lot of computing power and a lot of know-how, but they can't do the impossible.
Most of us have the best defence of all: We're boring.
Y'know, one really shouldn't get one's shorts in a bundle over this. This has been going on ever since the second world war. My father was a grunt technician non-com in the US Army Security Agency when he served in the Army. He couldn't tell me anything really about what they did, saw, or read but he assured me that the "powers that be" were well up on who was saying what to whom all over the world and this was in the 1950s.
What I think FDH Americans (FDH -- Fat, Dumb, and Happy) fail to realize is that national givernments all over the world do this routinely. Spying on one another is a stabilizing factor in international relations. What would have happened between Pakistan and India if India wondered if Pakistan had nuclear weapons? The first-strike temptation might well have become overwhelming.
The process of discovering, keeping, and disclosing secrets is the shadowy part of international politics and diplomacy.
I also know that even back in the 1950's various security agencies (including the domestic FBI) have had broadband recording equipment and they systematically record vast swaths of the RF spectrum for later analysis. Heck, the FCC has vans that do this with the not altogether inimical objective of finding and eliminating what radio amateurs call QRM, man-made radio interference.
In your own neighborhood, I'd be willing to bet, there is at least one person who comes to the window every time there's a loud noise in the street. We love to snoop.
If you want paranoia, consider that intelligence services have to consider whether intercepts are planted to ferret out information sources! The people who work on these things will sometimes weigh the importance of information against the importance of assets in place and might choose NOT to use an intercept.
Consider also that they can figure out a lot just from seeing the number, freqency, and endpoints of indecipherable communications. You can glean information from the pattern of messages, even if you can't read the messages.
I think all of this is necessary. Its part of why, despite a world bristling with weapons of terrifying power, we have gone without a global war for over 50 years.
My concern comes in when governments have this power exclusively. So long as you and I can watch the watchers, I think things are reasonably safe. If the US government succeeds in forcing Clipper and Skipjack on us, I think we have something to worry about.
I think the second amendment should add crypto to the right to bear arms as a defence against tyranny. I'm not a gun not, nor am I a crypto nut, but I think the right needs to be there just in case.
So long as you can secure your communications if you really need to, I think you should accept that they watch everything. Heck, I'm glad they watch everything. I just think I should be able to too.
Finally, I don't think it matters much what the government does or does not want us to have. Computing power is becoming nearly free (Beowulf), cameras, recorders, microphones are becoming ubiquitous. It will not be long before everything has a net address (your car, your home, your wristwatch) and GPS will know where all of them are all the time.
Privacy will cease to exist. In fact, it largely already has. Now I think we need to make sure that everybody knows everything or else it will just be governments and marketers. There's a world I don't want to live in.
While patents may be being systematically abused, I can think of an example where a patent almost certainly exists or is applied for and makes perfect sense:
Scientists working for IBM developed a method for depositing copper on silicon VLSI substrates. This is remarkable because copper (normally) would diffuse into the silicon lattice and "poison" the semiconductor junctions that make up the transisitors that make a chip useful in the first place. Prior to this some other metal was depositied (I think, actually, it was aluminum, but I am not an EE). Copper is superior as a conductor because it can handle more current per unit area (allowing more gates per square millimeter) and the device will, therefore, use less current and produce less heat. It can, therefore, also be clocked faster.
AMD will be producing a CPU chip that uses copper technology. They are talking about GHz clock speeds and lower power requirements. Intel and Cyrix may be working on/with the technology, but they aren't telling us.
Now, should these companies be able to go off and make billions upon billions of dollars without giving IBM (and/or the scientists who figured out how to do this) one red cent? I'm sure IBM will get their red cents. I'm also sure they should.
There is a lot broken about patents, but I sure as heck don't think they should be scrapped.
My co-workers and I have gone around and around on this topic over many a cold soyburger down in the corporate cafeteria (I hate turbo fish!). We went back and forth on the value of patents.
Personally, I think patents are very important. They encourage two things:
1) Innovation, by protecting the exclusive right to exploit an idea for a period of time, allowing a person to profit from his/her cleverness without getting trounced by someone with more money than ideas.
2) Improvement in the state of the art. Part of the patent is an exhaustive description of the invention or process. (AFAIK, specific machines and specific processes are patentable). When the patent expires, there's the full description in the patent -- go to it folks, have a field day!
This system works reasonably well for machines and industrial processes. The length of the patent (I'm not a lawyer, I know it is several years, and the the exact number varies from country to country -- how many years in the US? It's like 7 or 9 or something like that) makes sense for something you to "tool up" to make.
My thought was that software, which has very low capital requirements to produce, and which, therefore, changes much more rapidly than machines and industrial processes, could use its own patent. A software patent would expire in 12-18 months. This is much more in line with the rate at which change occurs in our industry.
This isn't a fully-fleshed out idea, just one of those ideas tossed out like turbo fish over lunch. Still, I think such a system would be better than applying current patents, and might even be better than copyright. Copyright has the virtue of protecting only an exact code version, but the defect of lasting much much longer than needed (60 years, isn't it?)
Well, I'll let the amateur Matlocks point out how ignorant of the law I am...;-)
I think, when you take a look at where this article was published, that the lack of a Unix focus makes sense. This person has a background similar to mine. My father was an electrical engineer and I was interested in programming (I had done some BASIC and some assembly on timesahre systems). My dad and I started building an S-100 bus based Z80 system from scratch (anyone here ever build a wire-wrap computer component?). From 1976 to 1978 we were designing, building, and testing.
Late in 1978 we started trying to boot the system. Failure after failure ensued as I debugged by boot BIOS code (Z80 assembler) and we debugged the hardware. (Tip for anyone who decides to build a computer from scratch: No tin sockets! Gold only!).
Finally, sometime late in 1978 we booted up CP/M 1.4 and ran a program. I think the only people who could ever have had a thrill just like that were the people who built the first computers in the 40's and 50's.
The fact that another, perhaps ulimately more important revolution involving Unix, C, and networking was going on at the same time does not make the pioneers of the "home computer" less important. In fact, when you hear the old timers of networking and Unix talk (and I've been using Unix of one sort or another since 1983 -- my old man came home with an Altos running [eek!] Xenix and said "this is important. Learn C." I sure as heck don't regret that!), they never imagined an Internet like the one today. The ubiquity of computing devices and their low cost is due to folks like Kildall as much as the power of internetworking is due to folks like Jon Postel and Ritchie and Thompson's Unix.
If you just view the "Heroes" list as coming from the hobbyist bias, the list makes a whole lot of sense.
On the negative side, I must admit that I cringed at "Mosaic, the first web browser" too... I used viola and cello before I ever heard of Mosaic.
I guess I just think that rather than flame this one for its bias, let's just keep listing the Net and Unix heroes.
Here are a few of mine (in no particular order and in no way meant to be complete):
Jon Postel Tim Berners-Lee Phil Karn Brian Kernighan Dennis Ritchie Ken Thompson Doug Comer & W. Richard Stevens (for explaining it all to the rest of us)
Before we go looking for artificial intelligence, why don't we prove the existence of natural intelligence? I'm not sure I've ever seen this done. Every real argument for the existence of mentation and identity I have ever seen (admittedly this is limited to a few undergraduate philosophy courses) from "The ego posits itself" to "I think, therefore I am" are basically tautological.
I'm not saying AI research is wasted effort, but I think its greatest value lies in how it helps us try to figure out the nature of our own intelligence (if we have any...)
I'm sure it is way too late to do anything about this, but I'd sure like to see/.ters being smart about this.
Y2K problems are NOT BUGS! A bug is an unintended behavior, when a program or system behaves in a manner inconsistent with design and intent. The Y2K problem is a design flaw. The people who wrote these systems knew full well about the problems of a two digit year and they chose to implement the systems that way anyways. If you intended it, it is not a bug.
I know this is techno-nitpicking. But this bugs me more than "can you borrow me five bucks?" And, hey, now that you mention it...
EvilPenguin (aka Michael Schwarz), grammatically uptight in Minneapolis...
Just to clarify: I do not argue that because they were children they didn't know it is wrong to kill. They knew full well that killing is wrong (I suspect). What they lacked (again, I suspect) was a full appreciation of what happens to people when death steals a loved one. It was not something I even remotely understood at 18; and until my wife lost her father to cancer when he was only 48 and I lost my father to cancer at 62 that death became a palpable material thing. It was only then that I knew the real emptiness of loss, as opposed to what I thought I knew of emptiness as a teenager. I did not mean to be patronizing at all.
I'm 31 years old. I was a misfit in school; so much so that I never joined a distinct subculture. I just wore clothes that weren't trendy, listened to music that wasn't trendy, thought what I wanted and said what I thought. I was isolated, alienated, and generally unimpressed with my peers. My overwhelming feeling was one of pain. Pain at the casual, random cruelty that people inflicted on one another. I'm not religious at all, but I have a favorite verse of the Bible. It is the shortest. "Jesus wept." Do you know what it is like for an overweight male computer geek who cries at the pain of others?
Now I am 31. I'm very mainstream. I've reached equilibrium between my continuing concern for my fellow living things and my relative powerlessness. I'm actually happy. All of this personal revelation is just to lay thr groundwork for what I have to say.
Even now I am forgetting (as I think most adults have forgotten) how powerful adolescent emotions are. I wept, I raged, I suffered. In retrospect, it was a lot of wasted energy, but at the same time I miss the passion I had then.
When I heard the news of Littleton, I heard the demonization of the children who perpetrated this crime. Adults do this so we don't have to own up to our own painful responsibility for this event and others like it. Adolescents need the involvement of caring adults in their lives, not the intrusion of fearful or mistrustful adults. These were not monsters, they were CHILDREN. What they did was monsterous, but there were not adult enough to be monsters. They were not "gunmen" as I hear in the press all the time. If anything, they were "gunboys." Until you have lived through some adult pain (like the death of a parent, etc.) until you know the emptiness of unconsolable loss you don't REALLY know what death means. To these "gunboys" death became a game. Not because they played Doom, but because they hadn't learned through loss the value that life has. They held life cheaply.
I do actually think violent games and movies are a problem, but I do not think they are to blame. I think each of us, parent and child, game maker and movie producer, employer and worker (the economically induced absence of parents plays a part I do not hear enough about), jock and nerd, each of us needs to take a look at how we treat ourselves and one another. We need to ask ourselves if our lives should be this way. The world is not immutably a place of cruelty. We have the power to make this world what we want it to be. We just have to decide within us what has value. Money and power, or compassion and love. It is our choice. It is my choice. It is your choice. Choose.
It is simply false that there are no solar energy projects in the third world. The third world is the single largest potential market for solar products. I suggest picking up any issue of Home Power magazine, several times a year that magazine carries articles about solar power in developing countries, from bringing refrigeration to remote hospitals in Africa to the admittedly not really third world project of a solar powered desalinization plant in the middle-east. Solar power is barely economical in the US and Europe because we have a massive (government funded) grid infrastructure that makes it cheap to hook up to the grid. In thrid world countries where there is no infrastructure, solar power can bring electricity to communities at a fraction of the cost of building a national grid.
There is no one "miracle technology" that will save the world. I don't think that is what Dyson is arguing (I've got to wait for his book to arrive). I can't think of his name, but there is an economist who keeps winning a running bet with Paul Erlich ("The Population Bomb," leading popularizer of environmental science and perennial doomsayer) about how much food and wealth the world can produce despite the fact that Erlich is basically "right." Why? Incremental improvements in technology and efficiency keep producing more food per acre, more productivity per hour worked, per unit fuel, etc.
Whether or not "Erlichs" or "Economists" win, the one certainty is that no economy can remain predicated on waste, whether that be energy, raw materials, or human capital.
I basically agree with this, but I hereby ask the entire Internet to stop with this specious argument that "companies need someone to sue when things go bad!"
READ those license agreements! They ALL have a specific disclaimer of responsibility for damages and/or loss arising from the use or misuse of software. Furthermore, they specifically disallow all warranties, specific and implied, including the implicit (by long legal tradition) warranty of merchantability and fitness.
This means that even if the product doesn't do a single thing it claims to be able to do, THE USER HAS NO LEGAL GROUNDS FOR SUIT!
Now, while I am not a lawyer, nor am I aware of any case in which a court has upheld a shrinkwrap software license agreement, I am also not aware of a case where any corporation has ever brought suit for loss or damage arising out of the use and or misuse of a software product. Not one.
We have seen this effort at least twice before. The Open Systems Initiavtive was one effort. Can't even rememeber who all signed on to that one, but I know it included at least two of the heaviest hitters in the Unix world...
It fell apart.
I really do think that Linux is a better place to hang our collective hat. Unless this new Unix is also free source. Then I say they can fight it out on their merits.
Not to stir up mud, but I have to admit that I still hope Hurd gets more developers and we see some of that out there soon... I am no more a Linux partisan than a Unix partisan -- all I know is Windows stinks. Linux doesn't stink. Windows is proprietary. Linux is not. I'm a programmer. Wherever I find it easiest to write software that solves problems is where I will go. Today, that's Unix at work (where my employer pays the proprietary price tag -- hey, if they want to!) and Linux at home and on my desktop at work where free, powerful, and source access are just what I need for maximum productivity.
So, Linux now! Hurd soon! Monterey? We shall see...
Slashdot Mirror
I've expressed these ideas elsewhere in slashdot, but the time seems right to "plant the meme" again, so here goes.
A society needs copyrights and patents. In most fields of human endeavor there are tremdous costs in moving from idea to artifact and patent law helps protect the small innovator from being beat to market by the huge wealthy predator. Patent law (the idea) is good.
Copyrights protect a specific formulation of an idea (a written work) from direct copy. It does not protect the idea itself which may be reused in an original way. Copyright law is meant to protect writers and artists (and by extension television producers who really do not qualify as either of the above). The extension of copyright to software is, IMHO, imprefect but useful.
Patents go to hell in the computer field for two reasons:
1) The granting of patents for ideas which are dubious as to their patentability. I'm thinking here of the company that claims to have a patent on all e-commerce because the made a dial-up system that took sales orders some time in the mid 1980's. To me, this is like me opening a little antique shop and filing a patent on retail stores. Patent law actually has a protection against obvious patents or prior art, so this is a problem with the Patent Office not doing its job, not the law itself.
2) Rapid obsolescence. A patent lasts far too long in the field of sotware. Most software ideas are not worth anything after just a few years. (LZW may be the exception that proves the rule!).
My friends, co-workers, and I have gone round and round on patents for software. The concensus seems to be that applying patents to software is, generally, bad. In those few cases where it isn't totally unreasonable (and I think inventing as powerful a form of data compression as LZW could qualify), the term should be much shorter. We kind of thought an 18-month patent would be reasonable. Since patents are meant to prevent a highly-resourced upstart from profiting before a true innovator can get to market and establish him/herself, and since software can be distributed quickly with hardly any resources required, 18 months should allow one to truly profit from a truly original idea and let the rest of us get our hands on it in a reasonable time.
So, fix the existing patent office and create a new software patent.
Oh yeah, just to point out patent law has a "FSF-like" goal on the back end. To get a patent one must put all details of an invention down on paper and publish it (in the patent itself). When the patent expires, anyone can read the patent and do what the inventor did. It encourages the sharing of ideas. It's just that software moves so much faster than manufacturing that these patents become an excessive burden on all of us.
Finally, Boutell himself posted to this thread with the details on why the gd library was pulled. If you are a moderator (and still reading my verbose screed), I encourage you to read his post and consider moderating it up...
To me this highlights the one true evil force in the world. No, not Microsoft. Ignorance. Dr. Science once said "Ignorance is bliss, and tonight, we're a happy country." I could not agree more.
The basic problem is not Microsoft. Not their products, not their technology (or lack thereof), not their marketing people. The problem is the number of people who do not think critically. The NT benchmark does not lie. It simply tells a very narrow slice of truth and "positions" that truth to show NT and IIS in the best possible light.
To me, the one outrageous thing in Microsoft's benchmark page is the chart that shows total cost of ownership. Now, I'm not a CIO, CEO, or CFO, but it seems the me that cost per transaction per unit time is completely irrelevant. What matters (as the author of the article we are commenting on here points out) is cost per transaction and can you handle your transaction volume?
When decision makers look no deeper than the cooked figures from NT's benchmark, when they fail to see if the scenario represents their business and technical reality, then their business gets what they deserve.
What the "Microsoft Advertising for Linux" article does that is lauditory is it cuts through to a core question. Which is cheaper given a certain use case? It wisely does not answer, but merely points out that in most cases, even in most intranets the Mindcraft/Microsoft scenario is extremely unlikely and that Linux/Apache on even limited hardware will handle most loads anyone would reasonable expect.
It also wisely points out that if you are a site in the tiny fraction that will exceed Linux/Apache's capacity, then by all means use NT/IIS.
Then, one more dig of my own at the TCO figures. Even if we grant the validity of the figure cost per transaction unit time (which I do not), what happens if you set up ten servers, or twenty? Linux costs nothing more for ten servers than it does for one. I haven't the time to see how many servers it would take, but there would come a break even point and then a point where Linux/Apache is cheaper even using the dubious measure in the Microsoft study.
Finally, I just want to congratulate the author of "Microsoft Advertising for Linux?" for showing the value of just trying some of your own math and asking, "Hey, is this reasonable?" If we all did this routinely regarding everything from computer bechmarks to medical scare news stories we would live in a much saner and less stressful world. Whichever operating system you buy.
I work in an IS shop as part of the Electronic Commerce team. We're a Unix shop (at least until the Windows-heads drive the us away), but more importantly WE ARE A WEB SHOP. We use a web server to serve up standards compliant content.
Almost every day I get requests to put MSWord and MSExcel content "on the web." I fight this tooth and nail. We have an extranet web reporting system which collects data from all over the Enterprise. One of my jobs is to get this data into a somewhat coherent form in an Oracle database so our reporting CGIs can generate on-the-fly reports and graphs. I get data in a number of file formats. The best stuff comes from the mainframe folks (from SAS and MUMPS on VAX equipment). These folks understand extracts and data integrety. The worst stuff comes to me in Excel spreadsheets.
The first most obvious evil is file size. Positional or delimited extracts from the mainframe folks are clear, well organized, consistent and compact. On the Excel side I had one file, 750 records, 12 columns. File size? 1,387,000 bytes! Why? A similar file from the mainframe folks is about 110,000 bytes.
The next evil is data integrety. I have to explain over and over again to the Excel folks why they should use unique ids for each reporting unit, that they should use the same id for the same reportin unit across files. They tell me th names are on the spreadsheets, so why do I need that? I try to explain that there are spelling, capitalization, and punctuation differences between the names in each of the file depending on who types them. I try to explain that ID numbers are harder to mistype and that they are more efficient to search on.
They don't get it.
Microsoft has put computing power into the hands of people who don't know how to use it. I know that sounds techno-elitist of me, but it is TRUE! There is so much corruption of data going on out there because everyone has a PC on his or her desk. I wouldn't care if it were not for the fact that these people then come back to IS and say "make this all work together." That's where I get upset.
You see, I am all in favor of "power to the people" when it comes to information, but to me this is like studying taxidermy and thinking that makes you an open-heart surgeon.
Getting back to the web, that's the final evil. Try to explain to these people that some of our clients use Macs or that it might be unreasonable to assume that all of our customers have to buy Office and they just don't get it. Show them the difference in performance between downloading an HTML table and an Excel spreadsheet with the same content, and then tell them how much worse it would be on a 28.8 modem instead of a T1 and maybe they get it, but its a hard sell.
My Linux bigotry comes not from an inherent hatred of Windows per se. It comes from the fact that Linux embraces standards, and Windows makes it up as it goes along.
I'm afraid I'd have to side with the folks who say these formats should die. Even if enerything in the world interoperated with them, they stink as network delivery formats for pure bandwidth reasons. Their signal to noise ratio is too low.
I don't know about manufacture for sale, but licensed radio amateurs are allowed to build and/or modify radio transmitters and recivers. If I rmember Part 97 of the FCC rules right, such licensed amateurs can build anything they like. Even so, operation of such equipment must be within current band allocations and use. This is set not so much by the FCC, but by international treaty, governed by the International Telecommunications Union (to which the US and almost every other nation are signatories). In other words, while I can build a transmitter that emits signals at 900MHz, if I key the transmitter, I'm in violation of the law. Weird, huh?
Cell phones operate in several bands, and 800-900MHx is a HUGE amount of bandwidth (100 MHz, obviously). Analog cell phones use less than 6kHz (I'm not sure exactly how much) and PCS phones use less (due to digital compression techniques). All cellular equipment is to greater or lesser extent "spread spectrum." In analog phones this means you are transmitting voice on one or more freqs, while digital control data is transmitted and recieved on another freq (even analog cell phones have a digital component), and you recieve voice on a different freq althogether. Under the control of data carried on the digital protocol between your handset and the cell, the freqs you use for all of these are moved around during the call, certainly when you move from cell to cell, but sometimes also when not moving if signal conditions warrant. The digital protocol also carries instructions to your handset to increase and decrease transmitter power as conditions warrant. Its actually a pretty amazing system. As someone who has built radio equipment, having multiple simultaneous transceivers shifting around, increasing and decreasing power, and all on one bloody antenna is quite simply miraculous. Of course, the electronics in a cell phone are rather more sophisticated than those in the old Heathkit 2 meter rig I built, but even so, an analog cell phone should be regarded with considerably more awe than I think most folks give it.
I don't wish to belabor the point, but I said the exact same thing you did. I'm not sure how the bull's equipment enters into it, but I thought I clearly distinguished between the idea embodied in law and the reality embodied in radios...
There is (IIRC) language in the communications act as amended that says something about the intent of the communicating parties. It is unlawful to intercept communications intended as point to point. Communication intended as a broadcast is not protected (obviously it is legal to listen to your local FM station!). It is also legal for non-licensed persons (all of this is in the US, beyond basic ITU rules regarding amateur radio, I know nothing of these things in other countries) to listen to, for example, two CB'ers or two radio amateurs talking because these are known and intended as broadcast media.
Also IIRC it used to be legal for licensed amateurs to monitor the entire spectrum, including the then RT bands (pre-cellular radio telephone), and, by extension, cellular and cordless phone traffic, but these privledges were specifically revoked in one of the sets of amendments somtime in the last 10 years. (Don't remember when).
Personally, I have always felt that if you want to keep something secret, keep your mouth shut. I do not think that anyone communicating by radio using some simple form of modulation (AM, FM, PCM, USB/SSB, etc.) should have any reasonable expectation of privacy. You can pass all the laws you like, but you can't prevent the interception of signals.
I'm an amateur radio operator. I drive around with a dual-band transceiver in my car (145MHz and 440MHz). Hams on these bands use FM modulation, just like a bunch of analog devices including (non-digital) cell phones. In urban areas there are so many transmitters all over the place that I often experience a phenomenon called "intermod" (intermodulation) which occurs when two radio carriers with wide separation in frequency happen to "beat" at the frequency I am monitoring (the difference between the two transmitter's carrier frequencies is equal to the frequency I am monitorning). If the conditions are right, my radio will then rectify the carrier and the demodulator will try to make audio out of the mixed signal. Often the result is gibberish, but often I hear two crystal clear conversations. This is an accident of physics. I doubt I could be prosecuted, since design of my radio tries to avoid this (lots of band pass filtering and such) and I had no intent to monitor anything I ought not to monitor. Nevertheless, I often hear ten and fifteen seconds of "private" conversation.
BTW, every time someone else buys a minivan and a cell phone, the problem gets worse. More transmitters on more frequencies equals more combinations that yield intermod. RF pollution is a semi-serious problem! (Cell phones are better for this than many systems, because the transmitter power levels are so small compared to more traditional methods of area-wide radio).
So, while the laws are pretty tight, you still shouldn't expect privacy. Even so, rebroadcasting cell phone conversations are something I think they would try to send you jail for...
Is there any good way to call this discussion to the attention of the trade press? Anyone who has spent enough time on USENET is quite thoroughly used to the "degenerative" discussion. I used to spend a lot of time in alt.solar.photovoltaic (because of my strong interest in renewable energy). Almost every thread of discussion would eventually be taken over by the "no-nukes" and "more-nukes" camps. Hardly any discussion of photovoltaics at all. Luckily, through the miracle of the killfile, some of us had discussions. Good discussions.
I have seen childish Windows users write in exactly the same manner as the "Linux advocates" Mindcraft posted.
I tend to agree with Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. He was talking about fiction, but I think the rule can be generalized to just about everything people do; even to just about everything I personally do (you have no idea how it pains me to admit that! My ego is threatening to leave me!).
Given The Law, I reckon about the only thing we can do is:
1) Try to think before we type.
2) Try to imagine receiving this same message from some "brain dead twerp" (i.e., anyone who thinks differently than we do).
3) Speak out gently against uncivil conduct.
4) Rewrite. Often.
This marks the third time in the last week that a fair portion of a Slashdot posting's discussion thread has concerned itself with how we sound off. I am deeply heartened by seeing the goodwill of most of us displayed. I just wish there were some effective way to bring this attention of those who see us only as pack of wild animals.
Any suggestions?
I'm sorry to be so blatantly off-topic, but your closing remark reminded me of a snippet of dialogue from the TV show "Newsradio."
Dave Nelson: Have you ever heard the expression "You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar?"
Bill McNeal: No. Have you ever heard the expression "Only a hillbilly sits around thinking up the best way to catch flies?"
Well, I thought it was funny...
Oh, dear. Wasn't Metcalfe the guy who predicted the collapse of the Internet? If he is, I wonder why he still has credibility with anyone. Oh, well.
The best thing to do with something like this (vague, unsupported pronouncements) is probably to ignore it. Personally, I'm very tired of loudly justifying myself and Linux. I intend to just continue doing what I do now -- getting amazing work done more quickly than any of my cohorts who use another OS that shall remain nameless...
In the me-too department: I share the feeling of shame at having the name of "Slashdot" associated with agressive flaming. I was so embarassed (because I really like Slashdot and visit several times a day -- I even post from time to time what I think I have something of value to contribute) that I posted onto the apologia at Andover very clearly in my own name, identifying myself as a Slashdot reader and expressing my personal shame.
In the "off topic" department, I sometime wonder if the growth of the electronic community will eventually increase or decrease civility. I rember reading David Brin's Earth in the late 80s. We had USENET by then, the Web wasn't in existence (except maybe at CERN) and the word Internet meant something to only a handful of us. In that novel, Brin imagined a global network that everyone had access to. (This stuff was very incidental to the story, BTW). Each person had a credibility rating. You would read messages filtering by credibility. I think the Slashdot moderation figure is a very primitive form of this.
What if access to the net was denied to no one, but every other participant on the net could adjust one persons credibility by one point once and only once? (What if this could be applied to sub nets and addresses at the IP level, but I get ahead of myself). What if we could put the real flamethrowers in Coventry (as we used to say)?
Everyone if free to be as abusive as they want, but they would be heard by fewer and fewer people as their credibility fell.
Perhaps persons should be rated in various categories, or a standard system eveloped to build this into a new kind of HTML compatible nntp? I'm not really suggesting anything seriously here, but the issue is real.
In some ways, despite all the evils of television, it has brought a certain increased sophistication to distant and disparate places (and also a certain lack of sophistication as well, but I don't want to go too far down that tangent right now).
The net can do the same, only more so.
Whatever. I'm a programmer by vocation and avocation, so I always seek a technological solution.
For now, I hope that each of us who feels proud to be a part of something Big and Important (open source, free software, the Internet, free speech, individuality) and who gives vent to that through fourums like Slashdot will take a little time to (gently) remind some of our more rambunctious fellow travellers what it means to be civilized.
Ooh, ooh, ohh! One more thing:
Except for the several wars the US has waged upon Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, Yugoslavia and many others. Plus covert or economical battles against El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatamala and more.
I am talking about global war. While I share the belief I infer you have: war is immoral, I do think there is a very clear difference between every one of these wars you mention and an event like the Second World War.
In Freeman Dyson's fascinating book, Weapons and Hope, he plots an interesting chart of European wars by year and number killed. This chart shows an exponential growth curve until 1945, where it knuckles down dramatically.
I think we got too good at it. The next point on that curve would finish us all. It was only due to the limits of technology and geographic accident that WWII didn't wreck civilization.
While the evil in us lives on, we shifted our conflict to a different level. A level of "low-intensity conflict" (meaning "killing people in the third world") and "cold war" (meaning keeping secrets and stealing secrets). That's what I'm talking about.
You will never, ever, hear me argue that the world is a good place where people act with love, compassion, and integrity. A few do, but I for one am right there with Hamlet:
"I, myself, am indifferent honest, and yet I could accuse me of such things as t'were better my mother had not bore me." (quoted as well as I can remember it). Hamlet and me: Were both dirty, grubby, knuckle-dragging animals. Who wish we were better...
I want to be clear about this. I am not happy that privacy will cease to exist, but I see it as a technological inevitability. Given that the technology for spying (eavesdropping, sigint, video monitoring, etc.) is becoming ubiquitous and cheap, people will start to want covert devices for personal safety, for watching the babysitter, for snooping on their children, etc.
(Aside: I can't believe how teenagers are wanting to own cell phones! Aside from the fact that these are duffable whenever they are on, I think it won't be long before they know where they are and will be queriable. "Going to the movies, eh, junior?")
Governments already have some of these capabilities. I don't presently fear this (here in the United States). Just look at how much the police know about many crimes, most of which goes unused by rules of evidence. I will only start to fear when the courts stop letting people off on "technicalities" (which is code for legal rights, dangnab it!).
I don't like that privacy is gone, but I like even less that the only people who can invade it are governments, banks, and creditors! And only banks and creditors are allowed to act on the information.
So, my view is that given the technological inevitablity of total access, we should make the whole range of such devices fully legal for ALL to use.
Why should the fact that I am being listened to stop me from talking (understanding that I live in a country which protects speech rights and not a country where free-thinkers are "people who need psychiatric treatment"; And yes, of course I worry about McCarthyism, and J.Edgar Hoover and a buch of other potential abuses, but which is worse, a world where only government can spy on people, or a world where everybody can spy on everyone, including citizens on the government)?
When we are able to stand outside the Senate offices and see, perhaps, that Senator Exon takes his famous "blue book" with him to lavatory, perhaps we will become a more open, honest society.
When I say our defence is that we're boring, I don't mean that we are poor coversationalists. I mean that we are self-serving knuckle-dragging apes who are all ashamed of the same stupid things that everyone does and nobody admits to. We are interested in peering into other people's private lives because we cannot easily do so. I'm suggesting that the best way to restore privacy is to lose it completely and wait for boredom to set in. It will, I promise you. Because we are petty, grubby little animals all, and that gets boring.
Now that I am being narcisisstic enough to follow up my own post: I suspect Echelon does exist, I also suspect that the folks who have pointed out that the volume of data is such that it is impossible to "big-brother" everything are dead right.
The NSA relies a great deal on how little is known about them (you should see the speculations people get into about them -- evrything from their changes in the S-boxes of DES to their initial resistance then sudden silence about PGP). NSA is a very smart bunch of people with a lot of computing power and a lot of know-how, but they can't do the impossible.
Most of us have the best defence of all: We're boring.
Y'know, one really shouldn't get one's shorts in a bundle over this. This has been going on ever since the second world war. My father was a grunt technician non-com in the US Army Security Agency when he served in the Army. He couldn't tell me anything really about what they did, saw, or read but he assured me that the "powers that be" were well up on who was saying what to whom all over the world and this was in the 1950s.
What I think FDH Americans (FDH -- Fat, Dumb, and Happy) fail to realize is that national givernments all over the world do this routinely. Spying on one another is a stabilizing factor in international relations. What would have happened between Pakistan and India if India wondered if Pakistan had nuclear weapons? The first-strike temptation might well have become overwhelming.
The process of discovering, keeping, and disclosing secrets is the shadowy part of international politics and diplomacy.
I also know that even back in the 1950's various security agencies (including the domestic FBI) have had broadband recording equipment and they systematically record vast swaths of the RF spectrum for later analysis. Heck, the FCC has vans that do this with the not altogether inimical objective of finding and eliminating what radio amateurs call QRM, man-made radio interference.
In your own neighborhood, I'd be willing to bet, there is at least one person who comes to the window every time there's a loud noise in the street. We love to snoop.
If you want paranoia, consider that intelligence services have to consider whether intercepts are planted to ferret out information sources! The people who work on these things will sometimes weigh the importance of information against the importance of assets in place and might choose NOT to use an intercept.
Consider also that they can figure out a lot just from seeing the number, freqency, and endpoints of indecipherable communications. You can glean information from the pattern of messages, even if you can't read the messages.
I think all of this is necessary. Its part of why, despite a world bristling with weapons of terrifying power, we have gone without a global war for over 50 years.
My concern comes in when governments have this power exclusively. So long as you and I can watch the watchers, I think things are reasonably safe. If the US government succeeds in forcing Clipper and Skipjack on us, I think we have something to worry about.
I think the second amendment should add crypto to the right to bear arms as a defence against tyranny. I'm not a gun not, nor am I a crypto nut, but I think the right needs to be there just in case.
So long as you can secure your communications if you really need to, I think you should accept that they watch everything. Heck, I'm glad they watch everything. I just think I should be able to too.
Finally, I don't think it matters much what the government does or does not want us to have. Computing power is becoming nearly free (Beowulf), cameras, recorders, microphones are becoming ubiquitous. It will not be long before everything has a net address (your car, your home, your wristwatch) and GPS will know where all of them are all the time.
Privacy will cease to exist. In fact, it largely already has. Now I think we need to make sure that everybody knows everything or else it will just be governments and marketers. There's a world I don't want to live in.
While patents may be being systematically abused, I can think of an example where a patent almost certainly exists or is applied for and makes perfect sense:
Scientists working for IBM developed a method for depositing copper on silicon VLSI substrates. This is remarkable because copper (normally) would diffuse into the silicon lattice and "poison" the semiconductor junctions that make up the transisitors that make a chip useful in the first place. Prior to this some other metal was depositied (I think, actually, it was aluminum, but I am not an EE). Copper is superior as a conductor because it can handle more current per unit area (allowing more gates per square millimeter) and the device will, therefore, use less current and produce less heat. It can, therefore, also be clocked faster.
AMD will be producing a CPU chip that uses copper technology. They are talking about GHz clock speeds and lower power requirements. Intel and Cyrix may be working on/with the technology, but they aren't telling us.
Now, should these companies be able to go off and make billions upon billions of dollars without giving IBM (and/or the scientists who figured out how to do this) one red cent? I'm sure IBM will get their red cents. I'm also sure they should.
There is a lot broken about patents, but I sure as heck don't think they should be scrapped.
My co-workers and I have gone around and around on this topic over many a cold soyburger down in the corporate cafeteria (I hate turbo fish!). We went back and forth on the value of patents.
;-)
Personally, I think patents are very important. They encourage two things:
1) Innovation, by protecting the exclusive right to exploit an idea for a period of time, allowing a person to profit from his/her cleverness without getting trounced by someone with more money than ideas.
2) Improvement in the state of the art. Part of the patent is an exhaustive description of the invention or process. (AFAIK, specific machines and specific processes are patentable). When the patent expires, there's the full description in the patent -- go to it folks, have a field day!
This system works reasonably well for machines and industrial processes. The length of the patent (I'm not a lawyer, I know it is several years, and the the exact number varies from country to country -- how many years in the US? It's like 7 or 9 or something like that) makes sense for something you to "tool up" to make.
My thought was that software, which has very low capital requirements to produce, and which, therefore, changes much more rapidly than machines and industrial processes, could use its own patent. A software patent would expire in 12-18 months. This is much more in line with the rate at which change occurs in our industry.
This isn't a fully-fleshed out idea, just one of those ideas tossed out like turbo fish over lunch. Still, I think such a system would be better than applying current patents, and might even be better than copyright. Copyright has the virtue of protecting only an exact code version, but the defect of lasting much much longer than needed (60 years, isn't it?)
Well, I'll let the amateur Matlocks point out how ignorant of the law I am...
I think, when you take a look at where this article was published, that the lack of a Unix focus makes sense. This person has a background similar to mine. My father was an electrical engineer and I was interested in programming (I had done some BASIC and some assembly on timesahre systems). My dad and I started building an S-100 bus based Z80 system from scratch (anyone here ever build a wire-wrap computer component?). From 1976 to 1978 we were designing, building, and testing.
Late in 1978 we started trying to boot the system. Failure after failure ensued as I debugged by boot BIOS code (Z80 assembler) and we debugged the hardware. (Tip for anyone who decides to build a computer from scratch: No tin sockets! Gold only!).
Finally, sometime late in 1978 we booted up CP/M 1.4 and ran a program. I think the only people who could ever have had a thrill just like that were the people who built the first computers in the 40's and 50's.
The fact that another, perhaps ulimately more important revolution involving Unix, C, and networking was going on at the same time does not make the pioneers of the "home computer" less important. In fact, when you hear the old timers of networking and Unix talk (and I've been using Unix of one sort or another since 1983 -- my old man came home with an Altos running [eek!] Xenix and said "this is important. Learn C." I sure as heck don't regret that!), they never imagined an Internet like the one today. The ubiquity of computing devices and their low cost is due to folks like Kildall as much as the power of internetworking is due to folks like Jon Postel and Ritchie and Thompson's Unix.
If you just view the "Heroes" list as coming from the hobbyist bias, the list makes a whole lot of sense.
On the negative side, I must admit that I cringed at "Mosaic, the first web browser" too... I used viola and cello before I ever heard of Mosaic.
I guess I just think that rather than flame this one for its bias, let's just keep listing the Net and Unix heroes.
Here are a few of mine (in no particular order and in no way meant to be complete):
Jon Postel
Tim Berners-Lee
Phil Karn
Brian Kernighan
Dennis Ritchie
Ken Thompson
Doug Comer & W. Richard Stevens (for explaining it all to the rest of us)
Before we go looking for artificial intelligence, why don't we prove the existence of natural intelligence? I'm not sure I've ever seen this done. Every real argument for the existence of mentation and identity I have ever seen (admittedly this is limited to a few undergraduate philosophy courses) from "The ego posits itself" to "I think, therefore I am" are basically tautological.
I'm not saying AI research is wasted effort, but I think its greatest value lies in how it helps us try to figure out the nature of our own intelligence (if we have any...)
I'm sure it is way too late to do anything about this, but I'd sure like to see /.ters being smart about this.
Y2K problems are NOT BUGS! A bug is an unintended behavior, when a program or system behaves in a manner inconsistent with design and intent. The Y2K problem is a design flaw. The people who wrote these systems knew full well about the problems of a two digit year and they chose to implement the systems that way anyways. If you intended it, it is not a bug.
I know this is techno-nitpicking. But this bugs me more than "can you borrow me five bucks?" And, hey, now that you mention it...
EvilPenguin (aka Michael Schwarz), grammatically uptight in Minneapolis...
Just to clarify: I do not argue that because they were children they didn't know it is wrong to kill. They knew full well that killing is wrong (I suspect). What they lacked (again, I suspect) was a full appreciation of what happens to people when death steals a loved one. It was not something I even remotely understood at 18; and until my wife lost her father to cancer when he was only 48 and I lost my father to cancer at 62 that death became a palpable material thing. It was only then that I knew the real emptiness of loss, as opposed to what I thought I knew of emptiness as a teenager. I did not mean to be patronizing at all.
I'm 31 years old. I was a misfit in school; so much so that I never joined a distinct subculture. I just wore clothes that weren't trendy, listened to music that wasn't trendy, thought what I wanted and said what I thought. I was isolated, alienated, and generally unimpressed with my peers. My overwhelming feeling was one of pain. Pain at the casual, random cruelty that people inflicted on one another. I'm not religious at all, but I have a favorite verse of the Bible. It is the shortest. "Jesus wept." Do you know what it is like for an overweight male computer geek who cries at the pain of others?
Now I am 31. I'm very mainstream. I've reached equilibrium between my continuing concern for my fellow living things and my relative powerlessness. I'm actually happy. All of this personal revelation is just to lay thr groundwork for what I have to say.
Even now I am forgetting (as I think most adults have forgotten) how powerful adolescent emotions are. I wept, I raged, I suffered. In retrospect, it was a lot of wasted energy, but at the same time I miss the passion I had then.
When I heard the news of Littleton, I heard the demonization of the children who perpetrated this crime. Adults do this so we don't have to own up to our own painful responsibility for this event and others like it. Adolescents need the involvement of caring adults in their lives, not the intrusion of fearful or mistrustful adults. These were not monsters, they were CHILDREN. What they did was monsterous, but there were not adult enough to be monsters. They were not "gunmen" as I hear in the press all the time. If anything, they were "gunboys." Until you have lived through some adult pain (like the death of a parent, etc.) until you know the emptiness of unconsolable loss you don't REALLY know what death means. To these "gunboys" death became a game. Not because they played Doom, but because they hadn't learned through loss the value that life has. They held life cheaply.
I do actually think violent games and movies are a problem, but I do not think they are to blame. I think each of us, parent and child, game maker and movie producer, employer and worker (the economically induced absence of parents plays a part I do not hear enough about), jock and nerd, each of us needs to take a look at how we treat ourselves and one another. We need to ask ourselves if our lives should be this way. The world is not immutably a place of cruelty. We have the power to make this world what we want it to be. We just have to decide within us what has value. Money and power, or compassion and love. It is our choice. It is my choice. It is your choice. Choose.
It is simply false that there are no solar energy projects in the third world. The third world is the single largest potential market for solar products. I suggest picking up any issue of Home Power magazine, several times a year that magazine carries articles about solar power in developing countries, from bringing refrigeration to remote hospitals in Africa to the admittedly not really third world project of a solar powered desalinization plant in the middle-east. Solar power is barely economical in the US and Europe because we have a massive (government funded) grid infrastructure that makes it cheap to hook up to the grid. In thrid world countries where there is no infrastructure, solar power can bring electricity to communities at a fraction of the cost of building a national grid.
There is no one "miracle technology" that will save the world. I don't think that is what Dyson is arguing (I've got to wait for his book to arrive). I can't think of his name, but there is an economist who keeps winning a running bet with Paul Erlich ("The Population Bomb," leading popularizer of environmental science and perennial doomsayer) about how much food and wealth the world can produce despite the fact that Erlich is basically "right." Why? Incremental improvements in technology and efficiency keep producing more food per acre, more productivity per hour worked, per unit fuel, etc.
Whether or not "Erlichs" or "Economists" win, the one certainty is that no economy can remain predicated on waste, whether that be energy, raw materials, or human capital.
I basically agree with this, but I hereby ask the entire Internet to stop with this specious argument that "companies need someone to sue when things go bad!"
READ those license agreements! They ALL have a specific disclaimer of responsibility for damages and/or loss arising from the use or misuse of software. Furthermore, they specifically disallow all warranties, specific and implied, including the implicit (by long legal tradition) warranty of merchantability and fitness.
This means that even if the product doesn't do a single thing it claims to be able to do, THE USER HAS NO LEGAL GROUNDS FOR SUIT!
Now, while I am not a lawyer, nor am I aware of any case in which a court has upheld a shrinkwrap software license agreement, I am also not aware of a case where any corporation has ever brought suit for loss or damage arising out of the use and or misuse of a software product. Not one.
Please flame me mercilessly if I am wrong.
Exhausted in Minneapolis
evilpenguin
We have seen this effort at least twice before. The Open Systems Initiavtive was one effort. Can't even rememeber who all signed on to that one, but I know it included at least two of the heaviest hitters in the Unix world...
It fell apart.
I really do think that Linux is a better place to hang our collective hat. Unless this new Unix is also free source. Then I say they can fight it out on their merits.
Not to stir up mud, but I have to admit that I still hope Hurd gets more developers and we see some of that out there soon... I am no more a Linux partisan than a Unix partisan -- all I know is Windows stinks. Linux doesn't stink. Windows is proprietary. Linux is not. I'm a programmer. Wherever I find it easiest to write software that solves problems is where I will go. Today, that's Unix at work (where my employer pays the proprietary price tag -- hey, if they want to!) and Linux at home and on my desktop at work where free, powerful, and source access are just what I need for maximum productivity.
So, Linux now! Hurd soon! Monterey? We shall see...