Perhaps some of the posters here who have reasoned comments to contribute to this discussion might consider joining the IETF.
Turn up to a meeting (4 per year), or subscribe to one of the mailing lists and start posting useful comments to the ongoing discussion. That's it, you are a member just by participation.
Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, there are no initiation ceremonies, and no cabalistic membership application procedure. Sorry guys, you will just need to go back to tracking down the Illuminati!
Some people would say that you have to join a magic "inner circle" of the IETF before your voice counts. I'm going to let the Slashdot readers in on a huge secret here - if your contributions generally are on topic and contain way more signal than noise, the "inner circle" will be glad to have you!
Having attended an IETF meeting, I can vouch for the attendees in general being highly intelligent, professional engineers, with good ethical and moral standards. If they don't agree with a proposed standard, you will not have to wait for the reasoned arguments against the standard to come flooding in.
Personally, I applaud the IESG for encouraging early debate on wiretap issues. To ignore these issues would run the risk of being caught out by new legislation, followed by hasty implementation of a poorly planned set of technologies designed to appease the governments such that the Internet is allowed to continue to operate in a useful fashion.
IESG / IETF did not pull these issues out of thin air - these are real issues and can/must not be ignored. I wonder how many of the people posting negative comments about the IETF have actually bothered to look at the web site: http://www.ietf.org/
Whilst I agree with most of that comment, there is one piece I would argue with:
Game development has been the driving force behind faster cpu's for years, and with the current vendor community turn around to linux - it's going to drive home linux as a consumer operating system.
Sure, that's largely true for recent x86 architecture, but I would say that there has been plenty of CPU development driven by the scientific/technical/database worlds, in the form of SPARC, Alpha, and PowerPC. I do wholehartedly agree, however, that availability of games is the next hurdle for Linux to get over towards widespread acceptance.
Side topic: Is Slashdot y2k compliant
on
Killer Asteroid
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· Score: 1
Yes, I agree, but anywhere I see 99 sets the alarm bells going.
It's certainly quite plausible in the context of Slashdot that it's just a tag. The trouble with using 2 digit year tags is that someone somewhere will make a coding goof, even if it's not the original author. Eg, what if one of the perl libraries involved converts 2000 into 100 rather than 00, and some other piece of code relies on the tag being 2 characters (could be ok if it just takes the last 2 characters of the conversion).
perl is y2k safe, and 99 may just be a tag, but there is still space in there for something to get upset/confused.
Side topic: Is Slashdot y2k compliant
on
Killer Asteroid
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· Score: 1
It occurred to me that our favourite news service might be out of action for reporting whatever chaos results from y2k:
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps some of the posters here who have reasoned comments to contribute to this discussion might consider joining the IETF.
Turn up to a meeting (4 per year), or subscribe to one of the mailing lists and start posting useful comments to the ongoing discussion. That's it, you are a member just by participation.
Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, there are no initiation ceremonies, and no cabalistic membership application procedure. Sorry guys, you will just need to go back to tracking down the Illuminati!
Some people would say that you have to join a magic "inner circle" of the IETF before your voice counts. I'm going to let the Slashdot readers in on a huge secret here - if your contributions generally are on topic and contain way more signal than noise, the "inner circle" will be glad to have you!
Having attended an IETF meeting, I can vouch for the attendees in general being highly intelligent, professional engineers, with good ethical and moral standards. If they don't agree with a proposed standard, you will not have to wait for the reasoned arguments against the standard to come flooding in.
Personally, I applaud the IESG for encouraging early debate on wiretap issues. To ignore these issues would run the risk of being caught out by new legislation, followed by hasty implementation of a poorly planned set of technologies designed to appease the governments such that the Internet is allowed to continue to operate in a useful fashion.
IESG / IETF did not pull these issues out of thin air - these are real issues and can/must not be ignored. I wonder how many of the people posting negative comments about the IETF have actually bothered to look at the web site: http://www.ietf.org/
We have now put up a press release. Also, we have created a static copy of The MIDS Internet Average front page showing the period of the outage.
The MIDS Internet Average shows the effect of the fibre cut in the context of the Internet as a whole.
Yes, I agree, but anywhere I see 99 sets the alarm bells going.
It's certainly quite plausible in the context of Slashdot that it's just a tag. The trouble with using 2 digit year tags is that someone somewhere will make a coding goof, even if it's not the original author. Eg, what if one of the perl libraries involved converts 2000 into 100 rather than 00, and some other piece of code relies on the tag being 2 characters (could be ok if it just takes the last 2 characters of the conversion).
perl is y2k safe, and 99 may just be a tag, but there is still space in there for something to get upset/confused.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/04/13/191123 7
Call me paranoid, but that looks awfully like a 2 digit year embedded in that URL...
It's fixed by a patch to 2.4. From memory, 2.5 onwards are not vulnerable.