Speaking of connector overhead, does anybody know if work has been done toward developing optical coupling as a replacement for socketed processor connectors? I wonder if we could reduce the number of electrical connections required by utilizing optical switching. Even if this were only used for control signals, perhaps we could reduce the number of pins, which seems like it must be a good idea. In other words: Are there benefits to be found in a hybrid electro-optical CPU?
I've never really seen the benefit of the top-level qualifier. It classifies sites based on a secondary property (.edu vs.com vs.org) which is not fundamentally related to how we (I anyway) view the net. I guess I can see some value in dividing up the namespace by gross geography, but even there the value seems limited; I don't see why there needs to be a 'slashdot.fr' for example. I'd rather see a single, uniform name space administered by some user-friendly process. Then we'd just say 'slashdot' or 'amazon' or 'snopes.' If you want to set up a private subdomain for your company or your nation, then fine, go at it. I see no advantage in being able to support distinct 'amazon.com,' 'amazon.net,' 'amazon.uk,' and 'amazon.sex' -- as a user, or as a business, I want a single unambiguous identifier that is reasonably free of confusion.
...powerful people in influential postions never scheme against each other... -- VonRex
Ha ha...indeed. But my point is that to portray realistic scheming and skullduggery, which would indeed occur, author and actor would need to create on a Shakespearian canvas, rather than using CHIPS or Knight Rider as the model. So in the midst of a cosmic crisis, the participants might indeed be venal or sadistic or stupid or heroic, but they probably wouldn't waste time and effort on trivialities.
I will add in retrospect that I think the Shadow technology is kinda kewl, and will admit that the better B5 episodes aren't so bad -- I mean, I watched 'em, didn't I? But B5 often has a goofy, soap-opera stiltedness that you don't often experience in, say, X-files or NYPD Blue.
Well, I believe we have beaten this subject to death. And of course, this is another good example of why we have chocolate and vanilla. Each to his taste.
I stand corrected on the 'Babylon V' reference; I'm not sure why I was visualizing it written that way, but you're certainly correct. (Perhaps a roman numeral appears on the side of a spacecraft? Or maybe I'm thinking of the "V" show, another high water mark.:) Or were there novels published as the "Babylon V series"?)
Anyway, though I may have failed on the citation, and you're right I'm not a fan (or else I wouldn't have insulted the show!), I think I've seen enough episodes to draw a conclusion. I will agree that B5 does not fall to the depths of Galactica or Andromeda; but I find B5's soap opera personalities and oh-so-human petty infighting to be uninteresting. I think what's missing for me is verisimilitude: There's simply no way that real crew members, ambassadors, presidents etc. would interact the way B5 shows them. All the little byplays and posturing and romantic intrigues are out of scale with the show's premises of desperate crises and interstellar war. These people behave like office workers or highschool students -- normal people doing their daily jobs, with the same balance between work and private life that we have today. If this situation were true-to-life, in my opinion, these people would be far more focused -- think of how Tommy Franks and Donald Rumsfeld must be today. Can you imagine those two getting wrapped up in the trivialities displayed on B5? This is an area where I think Star Trek Next Generation is more successful: It shows a crew with behavior and priorities that match my expectations, given the situations they encounter.
Part of the problem lies in B5's premise, I suppose: to be true-to-life, the whole thing would need to be stark and terrible, which would make the show less enjoyable as escapism. Escapism and suspension of disbelief is the name of the game for all these shows, but I prefer my suspension of disbelief not to require so much effort.
So to restate: My fundamental objection to B5 and the other shows cited is that I don't find them convincing. Those people, in that situation, wouldn't behave that way.
Blech -- Sarcasmooo! I totally agree. I have found Andromeda uniformly disappointing. My biggest complaint is in the writing. It uses the same simple-minded space opera approach that I hated in shows like Babylon V and Battlestar Gallactica: 'Treat the audience like we're all 13-year old underachievers.' The plots in Quake were more thought-provoking. I must say that Enterprise strikes me much the same way -- IMO it's only a poor shadow of Next Generation, from the standpoint of acting and concept. (Outstanding acting, in fact. Voyager was mixed, but it also had its great moments, and of course it also had Jeri Ryan.;) <sigh> I also found Earth: Final Conflict of interest from time to time. But for some reason on TV "SF" always seems to get translated as "Stupidity Farce.")
I can't say I'm surprised by this, since that is the same approach we get in all our mass-market entertainment products, a category that sadly also includes news reporting. (How many times have we heard what should have been bright, experienced reporters ask "So without revealing any classified information, do we currently have a special forces team on the ground, where is it, and what is its biggest vulnerability?")
There aren't too many shows that leave me thinking "Gawd, what a bunch of brilliant writers." (Contrast this to even old Warner Brothers cartoons, fer chrissakes, or Rocky & Bullwinkle, which often had ingenious and hilarious humor of a very adult nature. Imagine what would happen if, say, David Mamet wrote a TV series. Well, strike that thought...it would never happen because it wouldn't make any money. Heaven forbid we use subtlety or metaphor, and expect our audience to think. Better explain everything a few times.) Everything seems geared to the stupidest common denominator.
This is kind of a wacky solution -- eliminate hierarchical directory structure and replace it with a (presumably) hierarchical attribute structure. I cringe. But I think this idea points out one key issue. We currently use the hierarchical directory tree to represent two orthogonal properties: logical file organization versus execution path. Usually, when we use one construct to support two different requirements, it fails to be ideal for either.
I suspect that an elegant solution to this problem could be based on the core concept proposed here by CynicTheHedgehog, viz.: Organize the complex attribute data associated with each file system object by using a multicolumn table, containing various object capabilities and properties. And stop trying to encode these properties in a single name string, plus a chunk in a path variable.
Of course, this would require a new file system paradigm, and might have a tiny impact on existing distros.:) But the issue is worth some discussion.
Are you saying that watching tanks and license plates for intelligence purposes is more complex and data-intensive than (say) analyzing hurricanes and ocean current flow? We indeed have a long tradition of lofting satellites for military and intelligence purposes. But in the satellite game, I can think of more cases of scientists justifying their interesting legit experiments by making them sound like they have military applications, than I can of intelligence satellites masquerading as scientific platforms. (I recall a particularly nice astrophysics platform in the 70's that was justified as a way to detect nuclear explosions on the back of the moon. It was total bullshit: Nobody really cared about nuclear explosions on the back of the moon, except as a funding mechanism for pure physics. It provided some great gamma ray data.)
We love conspiracy theories, but I'm not especially concerned about a pan-European military-industrial complex that may be lofting secret spy satellites. Besides, they can already do that without pretending, in this day of 'global reach terrorism.'
Couple of Star/Alto links for anybody interested. The Alto project started in the early seventies. The Star was a halfhearted commmercialization of this kewl technology, released in 1981.
Your scheme of using ternary DRAM as binary DRAM would involve examine several capacitors for each bit lookup. I think this would slow down the addressing efficiency considerably. -- Turnip
But recall that we don't do bit-level addressing or retrieval. So we wouldn't need to query multiple 'tits' to get a single bit value; we'd be retrieving a chunk at a time, at the width of the transfer bus. So the transformation from ternary numbers to binary numbers could occur in parallel, in a buffer. Obviously, that transformation would have to be fast, and would still introduce some latency; but this wouldn't be as severe as what would be required for bit-level access (which as you point out would be REALLY bad). This tradeoff between density and latency is the same issue with bubble memory, but the latency problem here is much smaller.
No argument that with a ternary computer the latency issue goes away, and your core point is correct. But I still suggest that an n-ary memory could be used to simulate binary memory for conventional use, and that the increase in density offset might justify some additional latency. But if it were a slam-dunk, they'd already be doing it.
Wouldn't this apply equally well to packing denser binary RAM into the same package? You'd just decode (say) four 'tits' (0..80) into 6 bits (0..63, plus you'd get a whole bunch of extra values for 'N/A', 'overflow', etc.), getting a 50% savings in size. Therefore, somebody's certainly thought of it. And therefore, there must be some significant implementation problems that make it cheaper just to keep chasing Moore's law. But it still might be worth exploring further.
So many of these formalisms seem to rely on pushing all the hard stuff into a magic black box: "A miracle appears here." Of course, one shouldn't trivialize the state of research; we usually only make progress in little steps. Then later on, we look back and say "Oh! This little step was actually a big one."
Thanks for taking the time to provide this level of detail. Moderators: consider modding up the parent.
I would say that this kind of advice would be (even) more useful if it could distinguish between protection against internal threats (e.g. aux port -- I can't think of any non-physical level threat there) versus legitimate external vulnerabilities (e.g. telnet access) and stupidity vulnerabilities (e.g. using default passwords or ip redirects). Or to put it another way: it might be more readable as a block-commented script, explaining why you do what you do, rather than this narrative of advice with quoted commands.
But basically, the take-away for novice admins is: know what the f@#$ you're doing, and, if you don't, please get some help. Much of this is not rocket science (speaking of which, check out this); decent security just takes a little spade work.
I haven't seen this point made, though it's probably cropped up in the comments. I had to create a (benign, minimal info) Passport account in order to use a particular on-line service. Later, for unrelated reasons, I wanted to remove all the footprints of the installation and delete the account. Turns out that, according to the MS support folks, deleting a Passport account must be done through an explicit customer service request -- there's no automated way to do it. In other words, your Passport is considered secure enough to submit financial transactions, but not secure enough to initiate an account delete!
The human-assisted deletion steps were easy and not a problem, but there's an implicit barrier created -- it's just hard enough to delete a Passport that many people won't take that step. Very clever way to inflate customer loyalty!
In addition to the good (and less good) observations below, recall the single biggest (IMO) reason businesses don't choose a given open-source solution: they need to use a particular closed-source product for business reasons.
For example, if you're a consulting firm exchanging documents with your clients, and most of them use MSOffice components, you really have no choice but using those same components. Open-source products just don't interoperate well enough for bulletproof use. This is not to say that plenty of organizations can't use an OS document processor; but if seamless document exchange is required, you need to have the real closed-source product in its current release.
Same thing with many other proprietary components: If you have a business reason to be in bed with Microsoft or Oracle or whoever, the benefits of Open Source are irrelevant. This is the flip side of the good argument made below by Jodka: the financing efficiency of closed-source product development means you can bundle a particular development organization, license, and support infrastructure. Many businesses want or need to do this as customers. Or to put this in more consumer-oriented terms: If you want to play Myst III, there's no open-source substitute.
IMO this is a fundamental barrier to open source in the "real world": Life is great in the bazaar, until the day you need to rent out the cathedral for a wedding. Then you talk to the priest.
Good suggestions. The sad thing about all this is that, under your very sensible guidelines, the only really trustworthy seller is a pro dealer. The original appeal of EBay was that it put consumers in touch with each other -- a worldwide online garage sale. But at the end of the day, the risk of getting ripped off is large enough that the pro dealer gets a big advantage in terms of credibility and safety. This turns EBay from an auction house to an advertising mechanism.
Which is fine, and there's still plenty of garage sale non-dealer items available, with lower safety; but you wouldn't want to buy something very valuable from a first-time poster; whereas in the non-virtual world, you'd prefer to buy something valuable from a naively-run garage sale, where you might get a real bargain. But I miss the days when EBay didn't have so many dealers and scam artists.
Well, I guess it just reminds us that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
We have different social pastimes now (IRC?). [We have...] even MORE oppourtunity to get their music out to the public than ever before./. is almost a completely glass half enpty crowd. -- AwfulTruth
You make a valid point. But 'getting music out to the public' is not the same as experiencing live music in daily life, or having a reasonable chance of making a living as a working musician. I agree that we have new social pasttimes, and perhaps my position is a little 'in the old days things were so much better, blah blah blah'; as I said in my original comment, this is a complex issue of long-term social change and I didn't mean to trivialize it.
However, I still maintain that our culture has lost much by taking live music out of our normal experience, and I believe that the recording industry gets much of the credit for this shift. By analogy, to put in in/. terms, think of pre-1970 as the age of open-source music, and of the recording industry as a monopolistic trust that used a combination of legalistic, marketing, technical, and social forces to impose a Microsoft-style music infrastructure. You maintain that individuals can still pursue music to their hearts' content in their free time, and that's certainly true, just as independent programmers can develop their own operating systems and programming languages. But if you want to make a living in the music biz, or in the software biz, you must walk down very specific avenues. To continue the analogy further: in another 25 years, if the software biz develops like the recording biz, there won't be any normal career path for an average person to become a professional programmer; a few braniacs will go to work for Microsoft and a handful of large developers, but the rest of the world will just push the 'play' button and be happy with what we're sold, just like CD music customers.
Modern intellectual property concepts killed music
on
What's The Future of DRM?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Here is an observation that doesn't get stated very often. Look back 40-50 years and earlier: everybody played an instrument socially, and everybody either was in a band or knew somebody in a band. Making music was part of normal people's lives. High school dances always had live bands. Every hotel had a trio or quartet playing in the lobby bar. Most restaurants had live music. People collected and hoarded records and sheet music, but there was intense competition for record and sheet music sales. A record that sold a million copies was an incredible success. Radio stations played wildly diverse music programs.
Fast forward to the 80's and 90's through today. Hardly anybody plays an instrument. It is virtually impossible to make a living as a working musician. DJ's and CD's are vastly preferred to live bands. A small pool of incredibly-successful performers -- performance corporations, really -- dominate the airwaves and the music stores. A mere million-seller is a disappointment. Great musicians can't find work, and play their music as part-time hobbies.
What changed? A few things.
1. Powerful music publishers and distributors now control the industry more tightly than did the old Hollywood studio system.
2. Changes in IP laws have essentially eliminated the concept of 'public domain,' except for very old music, making some of the cornerstones of music illegal unless license fees are paid: theme-and-variations, quoting material from other songs (a fundamental jazz technique), quoting lyrics, and performing or adapting music written by others. It's hard and expensive to follow today's complex licensing and performance rules. Why bother? Buy Musak.
3. The industry's stranglehold on performance and publication has generated enough profits to allow manipulation of public taste. At this point, a public has been molded that doesn't want to hear a local band playing at a bar, but instead demands concerts with superstars, light shows, pyrotechnics and other special effects, performing exactly what was heard on MTV, preferably using lipsynching to ensure that no differences exist. This is *not* intrinsically the way public taste would have developed without guidance by the industry.
This is a complex issue, and obviously many other aspects of our lives and cultures have changed dramatically since WWII. However, the death of musicmaking as a core feature of USA life is a tragedy, and I'm convinced that neverending copyrights and powerful publishers take major responsibility. They claim to help performers, but instead they have contributed to the destruction of music as a profession and the elimination of all but mass-produced music in the lives of most of us.
I am very skeptical that reverse engineering could reveal any but the most boneheaded flavors of copyright infringement. Since stolen GPL/LGPL components start with source, it seems likely that enough source modifications would get made that the binaries wouldn't match up. Using a different compiler with different optimization strategies would of course make the delta greater. (Perhaps reverse-engineering technology has progressed further than I thought since my last experience with it.) I could be wrong, but this doesn't strike me as a fruitful route for uncovering miscreants (though I agree there's a certain evil symmetry to the argument).
I presume that infringement would be more easily proven the old-fashioned way: threaten some poor schmuck employee with misery and destruction, and as a result get a deposition that proves the theft occurred: "...and then they had me download the source and told me to modify it and bind it into the project." In other words, to use a concept much in the press today: enforcement via humint rather than sigint.
There will be changes in laws and policies that infringe on our rights. It seems inevitable. It's going to happen despite the good arguments of libertarians. But if we place time limits on those changes, such that they expire after six months or a year or whatever, there's a chance that they won't represent permanent intrusions. I've been encouraging my representatives to consider this approach. I'd rather accept temporary surveillance and fact-gathering as a security expedient, than fight a losing battle to prevent any legal changes -- and as a result, wind up with a permanent change to a police state.
I don't think anybody suggested that the 100K reports were processed in parallel. But my take-away is that a sizeable community of developers and users generated and managed 100K distinct trouble-tickets. This indicates to me that the tool is sufficiently robust for use in a large-scale 'industrial strength' development effort. Other tools may work well enough for tracking a few hundred issues/requests/bugs but don't provide enough method and structure for a large collaborative effort.
So I don't think this post lacked objectivity, at least not for that particular reason.
Following is the email that I have sent to my Congressmen. (Sorry it's so long, but that's what I sent.)
Please ignore the patriotic rhetoric, which, although heartfelt, was more appropriate for a letter to a politician than a posting on/. Besides expressing concern over any erosion of our basic freedoms, my main point is that any limitations on or restrictions to our rights or to our privacy that are deemed necessary and that are implemented should incorporate strict time limits, so that they expire after six months or a year or whatever.
Dear Senator Durbin/Senator Fitzgerald/Congressman Davis:
I applaud you and the other members of the 107th Congress for prompt action, unity, and prudence in our current crisis.
In the crush to protect our nation and respond to the assault, however, I fear that dangerous steps may be taken, steps that will be difficult to retrace in the future. I am writing to urge you to be vigilant in protecting our cherished rights, and perhaps more important, to ensure that any necessary encroachment on those rights is done in a temporary way. Emergency measures must end when the emergency passes.
Our nation always seems to take violent swings from one extreme to the other. Our history is full of choices like the 18th Amendment -- Prohibition did considerable damage to our society, despite the good intentions of those who sought to legislate public morality. The current situation is very different, of course, but it gives us the opportunity to make ill-considered choices in anger and fear that could cause far-reaching damage.
I am particularly concerned about current measures under consideration, and already being taken, that attack personal privacy, free speech, and academic freedom in the name of security.
A good example is the issue of encryption technology. Placing restrictions on the availability and use of this technology will only affect and inconvenience law-abiding citizens; evildoers will always be able to circumvent such restrictions, since this technology is based on pure science -- and we can't legislate the laws of nature. As with the DMCA, the highly technical nature of this issue makes it easy for decisions to be made on an emotional basis, swayed by impassioned but one-sided arguments. It's hard to 'leave scientific questions to the scientists,' but providing a feel-good result that does no real good for national security could have major negative technical and economic consequences on the legitimate users of this technology.
Moreover, these resourceful villains will always be able to move from one technical approach to another. As we close the door to one type of threat, they will simply move on to more fertile ground -- in the same way that our efforts to safeguard air travel will not truly make the public any safer, but will just change the nature of the next attack.
So after implementing draconian measures in an attempt to protect us, the law-abiding populace will be stuck with intrusions and abridgements of freedom; yet in exchange, we will get no true reduction in national risk.
This is not to say that we can't make many good and appropriate security improvements. But we must remember that we're shutting the barn door after the horse has left. So let's be sure that such changes are really sensible on their own merits -- that they would have been a good idea last July, without the recent memory of our loss shaping our actions.
We have seen grim examples of police excesses within my own city, Chicago. We know that we take a grave risk when we remove safeguards and oversight that protect the public from the risk of misguided law enforcement.
The vast majority of our law enforcement personnel are, of course, honorable and patriotic, and they do not seek to interfere in the legitimate private behavior of citizens. But as a friend told me last night, "every house has a toilet," and every large population has a few rogues. It may seem remote and unlikely that our nation could become a police state -- but it's not truly such a remote possibility. It could happen. It has happened. We must be cautious.
I urge you and your colleagues to consider this issue, as you weigh alternatives.
One very strong protection would be to place explicit time limits on any major changes in due process or privacy. If we must restrict a particular technology, or permit a particular kind of unfettered eavesdropping, then let us do this for six months, or a year, or five years -- but not forever.
Remember that our Income Tax was intended as a short-term solution to a temporary problem. Once we pass laws, they develop their own tenacious lives. So let's be sure that any dangerous laws will pass away on their own, without requiring special Congressional action, or else they may dog our lives forever.
In fact, perhaps at the other end of this crisis, when we try to restore our basic way of life and our core freedoms, perhaps we can finally tackle the problem of how our rights have eroded in recent years. Let's codify the public's right to privacy, and put an end to all the debate about where two hundred years of precedent puts that right. Let's decide what it should be, and put it into explicit law. Let's tackle the conflict between free speech and intellectual property, and do it with sensible legislation rather than leaving it to the lawyers to sort out, based on the accidents of history. Let's renew our commitment to individual rights, and restore some of the dignity that has been lost.
But for now, let's get the crisis resolved. You're on the right track. Just be sure that we don't take dangerous permanent steps.
Thank you for your efforts on behalf of the citizens of Illinois and of the nation. I'm sure you'll do the right thing.
Laziness/stupidity are indeed common in the world. But to put it more charitably: sometimes people attempt something through optimism, hoping that they'll find the time and the help needed, but later realize that their goal was impossible. Sometimes it's stupidity or a lack of appreciation of the magnitude of the problem. Sometimes it's just that the good luck that would have let everything work failed to materialize, or a little bad luck dropped onto the project. Shit happens.
Personally, I can't blame somebody for being optimistic and having a crack at an interesting problem. Of course, the case you cite goes beyond optimism. You don't post a release if it doesn't have enough going for it to be worth the time of a download. (Though we've all been surprised by a piece of code that works fine on our own machine that fails virtually everywhere else, due to some odd contingency, missing.h file, etc.)
This topic has generated many good comments and insights. Here's one point that might not be clear enough to folks who aren't full-time developers: There's an enormous difference between development in a young system verus in a mature system. No question, a large group of casual contributors can be ideal for maintaining and improving a stable code base. However, a system that is designed by committee (in my experience) always sucks. Good software architectures are (again, IMO) always the result of a relatively small, focused group who can devote their full energies to the project. Often, beautifully-designed systems reflect the singleness of purpose of a sole author.
Therefore, requests for assistance by an early-stage project are really requests for full-time, experienced volunteers who can pick up a large piece of the project. Well-meaning but low-level contributions suck down the available cycles of the lead developers, who should be focusing on the big problems. It takes a lot of time to manage a collaborative process. So getting annoyed because the four lead designers aren't spending half their time reviewing suggestions seems unreasonable to me.
Again, this is not true of all projects, but is often the case in an early-stage effort.
The point made in the main post about many projects remaining in this early stage of development forever is totally valid. Often, the system never makes it to the level of stability where a larger community can really work together effectively. This lack of progress reflects a combination of factors: human failings, poor design, poor documentation, lack of interest, lack of financial support, etc. Nobody feels good when a project falls short.
There's no rant here. Some projects have the right combination of key people, community participants, problem area, technical success, and support resources to coalesce into a strong open-source effort. Other times, it just doesn't come together. I don't think it's fair to blame volunteer developers if they're not able to make the whole thing work, unless of course they put out a clear request for specific help and then ignore it. Some comments below call for open source projects to issue clearer articulations of their plans and needs. This is very reasonable. Most of the ambitious projects already do a fair job at this.
But blaming volunteers for not volunteering even more of their spare time never seems right to me. (Not that this was the author's intent, of course.)
This seems important enough that perhaps you should submit a separate thread on the topic. I fear it will get lost here. If you don't get many responses, that might be a good route.
The linked statement doesn't point this out, but the main post said the violation was for failing to distribute the source to the mods. As we all know, it is not possible to stay within the GPL and yet keep your source secret. (It's the reason that many people view GPL as a virus: once you use a GPL component, you essentially have to get out of the software business, at least for that fork of your product.) Assuming that this is what was done, the patent is irrelevant. It's the failure to distribute that creates the breach.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of connector overhead, does anybody know if work has been done toward developing optical coupling as a replacement for socketed processor connectors? I wonder if we could reduce the number of electrical connections required by utilizing optical switching. Even if this were only used for control signals, perhaps we could reduce the number of pins, which seems like it must be a good idea. In other words: Are there benefits to be found in a hybrid electro-optical CPU?
I've never really seen the benefit of the top-level qualifier. It classifies sites based on a secondary property (.edu vs .com vs .org) which is not fundamentally related to how we (I anyway) view the net. I guess I can see some value in dividing up the namespace by gross geography, but even there the value seems limited; I don't see why there needs to be a 'slashdot.fr' for example. I'd rather see a single, uniform name space administered by some user-friendly process. Then we'd just say 'slashdot' or 'amazon' or 'snopes.' If you want to set up a private subdomain for your company or your nation, then fine, go at it. I see no advantage in being able to support distinct 'amazon.com,' 'amazon.net,' 'amazon.uk,' and 'amazon.sex' -- as a user, or as a business, I want a single unambiguous identifier that is reasonably free of confusion.
But that's just me.
...powerful people in influential postions never scheme against each other... -- VonRex
Ha ha...indeed. But my point is that to portray realistic scheming and skullduggery, which would indeed occur, author and actor would need to create on a Shakespearian canvas, rather than using CHIPS or Knight Rider as the model. So in the midst of a cosmic crisis, the participants might indeed be venal or sadistic or stupid or heroic, but they probably wouldn't waste time and effort on trivialities.
I will add in retrospect that I think the Shadow technology is kinda kewl, and will admit that the better B5 episodes aren't so bad -- I mean, I watched 'em, didn't I? But B5 often has a goofy, soap-opera stiltedness that you don't often experience in, say, X-files or NYPD Blue.
Well, I believe we have beaten this subject to death. And of course, this is another good example of why we have chocolate and vanilla. Each to his taste.
I stand corrected on the 'Babylon V' reference; I'm not sure why I was visualizing it written that way, but you're certainly correct. (Perhaps a roman numeral appears on the side of a spacecraft? Or maybe I'm thinking of the "V" show, another high water mark. :) Or were there novels published as the "Babylon V series"?)
Anyway, though I may have failed on the citation, and you're right I'm not a fan (or else I wouldn't have insulted the show!), I think I've seen enough episodes to draw a conclusion. I will agree that B5 does not fall to the depths of Galactica or Andromeda; but I find B5's soap opera personalities and oh-so-human petty infighting to be uninteresting. I think what's missing for me is verisimilitude: There's simply no way that real crew members, ambassadors, presidents etc. would interact the way B5 shows them. All the little byplays and posturing and romantic intrigues are out of scale with the show's premises of desperate crises and interstellar war. These people behave like office workers or highschool students -- normal people doing their daily jobs, with the same balance between work and private life that we have today. If this situation were true-to-life, in my opinion, these people would be far more focused -- think of how Tommy Franks and Donald Rumsfeld must be today. Can you imagine those two getting wrapped up in the trivialities displayed on B5? This is an area where I think Star Trek Next Generation is more successful: It shows a crew with behavior and priorities that match my expectations, given the situations they encounter.
Part of the problem lies in B5's premise, I suppose: to be true-to-life, the whole thing would need to be stark and terrible, which would make the show less enjoyable as escapism. Escapism and suspension of disbelief is the name of the game for all these shows, but I prefer my suspension of disbelief not to require so much effort.
So to restate: My fundamental objection to B5 and the other shows cited is that I don't find them convincing. Those people, in that situation, wouldn't behave that way.
Blech -- Sarcasmooo! ;) <sigh> I also found Earth: Final Conflict of interest from time to time. But for some reason on TV "SF" always seems to get translated as "Stupidity Farce.")
I totally agree. I have found Andromeda uniformly disappointing. My biggest complaint is in the writing. It uses the same simple-minded space opera approach that I hated in shows like Babylon V and Battlestar Gallactica: 'Treat the audience like we're all 13-year old underachievers.' The plots in Quake were more thought-provoking. I must say that Enterprise strikes me much the same way -- IMO it's only a poor shadow of Next Generation, from the standpoint of acting and concept. (Outstanding acting, in fact. Voyager was mixed, but it also had its great moments, and of course it also had Jeri Ryan.
I can't say I'm surprised by this, since that is the same approach we get in all our mass-market entertainment products, a category that sadly also includes news reporting. (How many times have we heard what should have been bright, experienced reporters ask "So without revealing any classified information, do we currently have a special forces team on the ground, where is it, and what is its biggest vulnerability?")
There aren't too many shows that leave me thinking "Gawd, what a bunch of brilliant writers." (Contrast this to even old Warner Brothers cartoons, fer chrissakes, or Rocky & Bullwinkle, which often had ingenious and hilarious humor of a very adult nature. Imagine what would happen if, say, David Mamet wrote a TV series. Well, strike that thought...it would never happen because it wouldn't make any money. Heaven forbid we use subtlety or metaphor, and expect our audience to think. Better explain everything a few times.) Everything seems geared to the stupidest common denominator.
This is kind of a wacky solution -- eliminate hierarchical directory structure and replace it with a (presumably) hierarchical attribute structure. I cringe. But I think this idea points out one key issue. We currently use the hierarchical directory tree to represent two orthogonal properties: logical file organization versus execution path. Usually, when we use one construct to support two different requirements, it fails to be ideal for either.
:) But the issue is worth some discussion.
I suspect that an elegant solution to this problem could be based on the core concept proposed here by CynicTheHedgehog, viz.: Organize the complex attribute data associated with each file system object by using a multicolumn table, containing various object capabilities and properties. And stop trying to encode these properties in a single name string, plus a chunk in a path variable.
Of course, this would require a new file system paradigm, and might have a tiny impact on existing distros.
Are you saying that watching tanks and license plates for intelligence purposes is more complex and data-intensive than (say) analyzing hurricanes and ocean current flow? We indeed have a long tradition of lofting satellites for military and intelligence purposes. But in the satellite game, I can think of more cases of scientists justifying their interesting legit experiments by making them sound like they have military applications, than I can of intelligence satellites masquerading as scientific platforms. (I recall a particularly nice astrophysics platform in the 70's that was justified as a way to detect nuclear explosions on the back of the moon. It was total bullshit: Nobody really cared about nuclear explosions on the back of the moon, except as a funding mechanism for pure physics. It provided some great gamma ray data.)
We love conspiracy theories, but I'm not especially concerned about a pan-European military-industrial complex that may be lofting secret spy satellites. Besides, they can already do that without pretending, in this day of 'global reach terrorism.'
Couple of Star/Alto links for anybody interested. The Alto project started in the early seventies. The Star was a halfhearted commmercialization of this kewl technology, released in 1981.
Cute pix, good links; Star history; overview stuff; Links to Alto documentation, including Mesa and BCPL manuals etc.
PARC developed so much great stuff, especially in those days. I still think that Cedar and Mesa were fabulous.
Your scheme of using ternary DRAM as binary DRAM would involve examine several capacitors for each bit lookup. I think this would slow down the addressing efficiency considerably. -- Turnip
But recall that we don't do bit-level addressing or retrieval. So we wouldn't need to query multiple 'tits' to get a single bit value; we'd be retrieving a chunk at a time, at the width of the transfer bus. So the transformation from ternary numbers to binary numbers could occur in parallel, in a buffer. Obviously, that transformation would have to be fast, and would still introduce some latency; but this wouldn't be as severe as what would be required for bit-level access (which as you point out would be REALLY bad). This tradeoff between density and latency is the same issue with bubble memory, but the latency problem here is much smaller.
No argument that with a ternary computer the latency issue goes away, and your core point is correct. But I still suggest that an n-ary memory could be used to simulate binary memory for conventional use, and that the increase in density offset might justify some additional latency. But if it were a slam-dunk, they'd already be doing it.
Wouldn't this apply equally well to packing denser binary RAM into the same package? You'd just decode (say) four 'tits' (0..80) into 6 bits (0..63, plus you'd get a whole bunch of extra values for 'N/A', 'overflow', etc.), getting a 50% savings in size. Therefore, somebody's certainly thought of it. And therefore, there must be some significant implementation problems that make it cheaper just to keep chasing Moore's law. But it still might be worth exploring further.
So many of these formalisms seem to rely on pushing all the hard stuff into a magic black box: "A miracle appears here." Of course, one shouldn't trivialize the state of research; we usually only make progress in little steps. Then later on, we look back and say "Oh! This little step was actually a big one."
Thanks for taking the time to provide this level of detail. Moderators: consider modding up the parent.
I would say that this kind of advice would be (even) more useful if it could distinguish between protection against internal threats (e.g. aux port -- I can't think of any non-physical level threat there) versus legitimate external vulnerabilities (e.g. telnet access) and stupidity vulnerabilities (e.g. using default passwords or ip redirects). Or to put it another way: it might be more readable as a block-commented script, explaining why you do what you do, rather than this narrative of advice with quoted commands.
But basically, the take-away for novice admins is: know what the f@#$ you're doing, and, if you don't, please get some help. Much of this is not rocket science (speaking of which, check out this); decent security just takes a little spade work.
I haven't seen this point made, though it's probably cropped up in the comments. I had to create a (benign, minimal info) Passport account in order to use a particular on-line service. Later, for unrelated reasons, I wanted to remove all the footprints of the installation and delete the account. Turns out that, according to the MS support folks, deleting a Passport account must be done through an explicit customer service request -- there's no automated way to do it. In other words, your Passport is considered secure enough to submit financial transactions, but not secure enough to initiate an account delete!
The human-assisted deletion steps were easy and not a problem, but there's an implicit barrier created -- it's just hard enough to delete a Passport that many people won't take that step. Very clever way to inflate customer loyalty!
In addition to the good (and less good) observations below, recall the single biggest (IMO) reason businesses don't choose a given open-source solution: they need to use a particular closed-source product for business reasons.
For example, if you're a consulting firm exchanging documents with your clients, and most of them use MSOffice components, you really have no choice but using those same components. Open-source products just don't interoperate well enough for bulletproof use. This is not to say that plenty of organizations can't use an OS document processor; but if seamless document exchange is required, you need to have the real closed-source product in its current release.
Same thing with many other proprietary components: If you have a business reason to be in bed with Microsoft or Oracle or whoever, the benefits of Open Source are irrelevant. This is the flip side of the good argument made below by Jodka: the financing efficiency of closed-source product development means you can bundle a particular development organization, license, and support infrastructure. Many businesses want or need to do this as customers. Or to put this in more consumer-oriented terms: If you want to play Myst III, there's no open-source substitute.
IMO this is a fundamental barrier to open source in the "real world": Life is great in the bazaar, until the day you need to rent out the cathedral for a wedding. Then you talk to the priest.
Good suggestions. The sad thing about all this is that, under your very sensible guidelines, the only really trustworthy seller is a pro dealer. The original appeal of EBay was that it put consumers in touch with each other -- a worldwide online garage sale. But at the end of the day, the risk of getting ripped off is large enough that the pro dealer gets a big advantage in terms of credibility and safety. This turns EBay from an auction house to an advertising mechanism.
Which is fine, and there's still plenty of garage sale non-dealer items available, with lower safety; but you wouldn't want to buy something very valuable from a first-time poster; whereas in the non-virtual world, you'd prefer to buy something valuable from a naively-run garage sale, where you might get a real bargain. But I miss the days when EBay didn't have so many dealers and scam artists.
Well, I guess it just reminds us that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
We have different social pastimes now (IRC?). [We have...] even MORE oppourtunity to get their music out to the public than ever before. /. is almost a completely glass half enpty crowd. -- AwfulTruth
/. terms, think of pre-1970 as the age of open-source music, and of the recording industry as a monopolistic trust that used a combination of legalistic, marketing, technical, and social forces to impose a Microsoft-style music infrastructure. You maintain that individuals can still pursue music to their hearts' content in their free time, and that's certainly true, just as independent programmers can develop their own operating systems and programming languages. But if you want to make a living in the music biz, or in the software biz, you must walk down very specific avenues. To continue the analogy further: in another 25 years, if the software biz develops like the recording biz, there won't be any normal career path for an average person to become a professional programmer; a few braniacs will go to work for Microsoft and a handful of large developers, but the rest of the world will just push the 'play' button and be happy with what we're sold, just like CD music customers.
You make a valid point. But 'getting music out to the public' is not the same as experiencing live music in daily life, or having a reasonable chance of making a living as a working musician. I agree that we have new social pasttimes, and perhaps my position is a little 'in the old days things were so much better, blah blah blah'; as I said in my original comment, this is a complex issue of long-term social change and I didn't mean to trivialize it.
However, I still maintain that our culture has lost much by taking live music out of our normal experience, and I believe that the recording industry gets much of the credit for this shift. By analogy, to put in in
Fast forward to the 80's and 90's through today. Hardly anybody plays an instrument. It is virtually impossible to make a living as a working musician. DJ's and CD's are vastly preferred to live bands. A small pool of incredibly-successful performers -- performance corporations, really -- dominate the airwaves and the music stores. A mere million-seller is a disappointment. Great musicians can't find work, and play their music as part-time hobbies.
What changed? A few things.
1. Powerful music publishers and distributors now control the industry more tightly than did the old Hollywood studio system.
2. Changes in IP laws have essentially eliminated the concept of 'public domain,' except for very old music, making some of the cornerstones of music illegal unless license fees are paid: theme-and-variations, quoting material from other songs (a fundamental jazz technique), quoting lyrics, and performing or adapting music written by others. It's hard and expensive to follow today's complex licensing and performance rules. Why bother? Buy Musak.
3. The industry's stranglehold on performance and publication has generated enough profits to allow manipulation of public taste. At this point, a public has been molded that doesn't want to hear a local band playing at a bar, but instead demands concerts with superstars, light shows, pyrotechnics and other special effects, performing exactly what was heard on MTV, preferably using lipsynching to ensure that no differences exist. This is *not* intrinsically the way public taste would have developed without guidance by the industry.
This is a complex issue, and obviously many other aspects of our lives and cultures have changed dramatically since WWII. However, the death of musicmaking as a core feature of USA life is a tragedy, and I'm convinced that neverending copyrights and powerful publishers take major responsibility. They claim to help performers, but instead they have contributed to the destruction of music as a profession and the elimination of all but mass-produced music in the lives of most of us.
I am very skeptical that reverse engineering could reveal any but the most boneheaded flavors of copyright infringement. Since stolen GPL/LGPL components start with source, it seems likely that enough source modifications would get made that the binaries wouldn't match up. Using a different compiler with different optimization strategies would of course make the delta greater. (Perhaps reverse-engineering technology has progressed further than I thought since my last experience with it.) I could be wrong, but this doesn't strike me as a fruitful route for uncovering miscreants (though I agree there's a certain evil symmetry to the argument).
I presume that infringement would be more easily proven the old-fashioned way: threaten some poor schmuck employee with misery and destruction, and as a result get a deposition that proves the theft occurred: "...and then they had me download the source and told me to modify it and bind it into the project." In other words, to use a concept much in the press today: enforcement via humint rather than sigint.
There will be changes in laws and policies that infringe on our rights. It seems inevitable. It's going to happen despite the good arguments of libertarians. But if we place time limits on those changes, such that they expire after six months or a year or whatever, there's a chance that they won't represent permanent intrusions. I've been encouraging my representatives to consider this approach. I'd rather accept temporary surveillance and fact-gathering as a security expedient, than fight a losing battle to prevent any legal changes -- and as a result, wind up with a permanent change to a police state.
I don't think anybody suggested that the 100K reports were processed in parallel. But my take-away is that a sizeable community of developers and users generated and managed 100K distinct trouble-tickets. This indicates to me that the tool is sufficiently robust for use in a large-scale 'industrial strength' development effort. Other tools may work well enough for tracking a few hundred issues/requests/bugs but don't provide enough method and structure for a large collaborative effort.
So I don't think this post lacked objectivity, at least not for that particular reason.
Following is the email that I have sent to my Congressmen. (Sorry it's so long, but that's what I sent.)
/. Besides expressing concern over any erosion of our basic freedoms, my main point is that any limitations on or restrictions to our rights or to our privacy that are deemed necessary and that are implemented should incorporate strict time limits, so that they expire after six months or a year or whatever.
Please ignore the patriotic rhetoric, which, although heartfelt, was more appropriate for a letter to a politician than a posting on
Dear Senator Durbin/Senator Fitzgerald/Congressman Davis:
I applaud you and the other members of the 107th Congress for prompt action, unity, and prudence in our current crisis.
In the crush to protect our nation and respond to the assault, however, I fear that dangerous steps may be taken, steps that will be difficult to retrace in the future. I am writing to urge you to be vigilant in protecting our cherished rights, and perhaps more important, to ensure that any necessary encroachment on those rights is done in a temporary way. Emergency measures must end when the emergency passes.
Our nation always seems to take violent swings from one extreme to the other. Our history is full of choices like the 18th Amendment -- Prohibition did considerable damage to our society, despite the good intentions of those who sought to legislate public morality. The current situation is very different, of course, but it gives us the opportunity to make ill-considered choices in anger and fear that could cause far-reaching damage.
I am particularly concerned about current measures under consideration, and already being taken, that attack personal privacy, free speech, and academic freedom in the name of security.
A good example is the issue of encryption technology. Placing restrictions on the availability and use of this technology will only affect and inconvenience law-abiding citizens; evildoers will always be able to circumvent such restrictions, since this technology is based on pure science -- and we can't legislate the laws of nature. As with the DMCA, the highly technical nature of this issue makes it easy for decisions to be made on an emotional basis, swayed by impassioned but one-sided arguments. It's hard to 'leave scientific questions to the scientists,' but providing a feel-good result that does no real good for national security could have major negative technical and economic consequences on the legitimate users of this technology.
Moreover, these resourceful villains will always be able to move from one technical approach to another. As we close the door to one type of threat, they will simply move on to more fertile ground -- in the same way that our efforts to safeguard air travel will not truly make the public any safer, but will just change the nature of the next attack.
So after implementing draconian measures in an attempt to protect us, the law-abiding populace will be stuck with intrusions and abridgements of freedom; yet in exchange, we will get no true reduction in national risk.
This is not to say that we can't make many good and appropriate security improvements. But we must remember that we're shutting the barn door after the horse has left. So let's be sure that such changes are really sensible on their own merits -- that they would have been a good idea last July, without the recent memory of our loss shaping our actions.
We have seen grim examples of police excesses within my own city, Chicago. We know that we take a grave risk when we remove safeguards and oversight that protect the public from the risk of misguided law enforcement.
The vast majority of our law enforcement personnel are, of course, honorable and patriotic, and they do not seek to interfere in the legitimate private behavior of citizens. But as a friend told me last night, "every house has a toilet," and every large population has a few rogues. It may seem remote and unlikely that our nation could become a police state -- but it's not truly such a remote possibility. It could happen. It has happened. We must be cautious.
I urge you and your colleagues to consider this issue, as you weigh alternatives.
One very strong protection would be to place explicit time limits on any major changes in due process or privacy. If we must restrict a particular technology, or permit a particular kind of unfettered eavesdropping, then let us do this for six months, or a year, or five years -- but not forever.
Remember that our Income Tax was intended as a short-term solution to a temporary problem. Once we pass laws, they develop their own tenacious lives. So let's be sure that any dangerous laws will pass away on their own, without requiring special Congressional action, or else they may dog our lives forever.
In fact, perhaps at the other end of this crisis, when we try to restore our basic way of life and our core freedoms, perhaps we can finally tackle the problem of how our rights have eroded in recent years. Let's codify the public's right to privacy, and put an end to all the debate about where two hundred years of precedent puts that right. Let's decide what it should be, and put it into explicit law. Let's tackle the conflict between free speech and intellectual property, and do it with sensible legislation rather than leaving it to the lawyers to sort out, based on the accidents of history. Let's renew our commitment to individual rights, and restore some of the dignity that has been lost.
But for now, let's get the crisis resolved. You're on the right track. Just be sure that we don't take dangerous permanent steps.
Thank you for your efforts on behalf of the citizens of Illinois and of the nation. I'm sure you'll do the right thing.
Trevor Hanson
Chicago, Illinois
Laziness/stupidity are indeed common in the world. But to put it more charitably: sometimes people attempt something through optimism, hoping that they'll find the time and the help needed, but later realize that their goal was impossible. Sometimes it's stupidity or a lack of appreciation of the magnitude of the problem. Sometimes it's just that the good luck that would have let everything work failed to materialize, or a little bad luck dropped onto the project. Shit happens.
.h file, etc.)
Personally, I can't blame somebody for being optimistic and having a crack at an interesting problem. Of course, the case you cite goes beyond optimism. You don't post a release if it doesn't have enough going for it to be worth the time of a download. (Though we've all been surprised by a piece of code that works fine on our own machine that fails virtually everywhere else, due to some odd contingency, missing
This topic has generated many good comments and insights. Here's one point that might not be clear enough to folks who aren't full-time developers: There's an enormous difference between development in a young system verus in a mature system. No question, a large group of casual contributors can be ideal for maintaining and improving a stable code base. However, a system that is designed by committee (in my experience) always sucks. Good software architectures are (again, IMO) always the result of a relatively small, focused group who can devote their full energies to the project. Often, beautifully-designed systems reflect the singleness of purpose of a sole author.
Therefore, requests for assistance by an early-stage project are really requests for full-time, experienced volunteers who can pick up a large piece of the project. Well-meaning but low-level contributions suck down the available cycles of the lead developers, who should be focusing on the big problems. It takes a lot of time to manage a collaborative process. So getting annoyed because the four lead designers aren't spending half their time reviewing suggestions seems unreasonable to me.
Again, this is not true of all projects, but is often the case in an early-stage effort.
The point made in the main post about many projects remaining in this early stage of development forever is totally valid. Often, the system never makes it to the level of stability where a larger community can really work together effectively. This lack of progress reflects a combination of factors: human failings, poor design, poor documentation, lack of interest, lack of financial support, etc. Nobody feels good when a project falls short.
There's no rant here. Some projects have the right combination of key people, community participants, problem area, technical success, and support resources to coalesce into a strong open-source effort. Other times, it just doesn't come together. I don't think it's fair to blame volunteer developers if they're not able to make the whole thing work, unless of course they put out a clear request for specific help and then ignore it. Some comments below call for open source projects to issue clearer articulations of their plans and needs. This is very reasonable. Most of the ambitious projects already do a fair job at this.
But blaming volunteers for not volunteering even more of their spare time never seems right to me. (Not that this was the author's intent, of course.)
JMHO -- Spiny
This seems important enough that perhaps you should submit a separate thread on the topic. I fear it will get lost here. If you don't get many responses, that might be a good route.
JMHO -- Spiny
The linked statement doesn't point this out, but the main post said the violation was for failing to distribute the source to the mods. As we all know, it is not possible to stay within the GPL and yet keep your source secret. (It's the reason that many people view GPL as a virus: once you use a GPL component, you essentially have to get out of the software business, at least for that fork of your product.) Assuming that this is what was done, the patent is irrelevant. It's the failure to distribute that creates the breach.
JMHO -- Spiny