A long time ago, the local radio station was holding a contest, where you could win the Top 40. My little brother won one week. We got a box with four LP's, a half-hour per side, with the pre-recorded Casey Casem's America's Top 40 radio show on it. Old people like myself remember the turntables where you could stack a few LP's on top, and at the end of one, the arm would move out of the way, the next record drops, and the arm starts on the next record. The LP's were mastered in such a way to play the show this way, in order. There were comercials in there and everything. When the show played, the only place for local content was the station identifier break every half hour.
My copy of of Dragon Naturally Speaking came with one of your excerpts as a 'training module' - and not being all that familiar with your work, I used it.
Now my computer doesn't recognise particular words unless I end them with a hoot of laughter.
Did you think this through before granting permission? Or was that your original plan?
I too work in an IS department, and can attest that your statements are correct. The benefits you mention are real, and valuable. I'll even throw in one more benefit: government tends to spend a lot of money on IT, so you get to work in larger environments, with more varied equipment.
However, one needs to be careful, as bad management can occur anywhere.
I have been looking for another job because of job politics. People who are not very good at managing have become managers. Granted, any large corporation will have this problem (and government is the largest corporation of them all.) But still, the environment has become so bad - I want out. The benefits do not compensate for the grief. And here is what I have run into: that 'government worker' stigma has kept me from getting job interviews in the private sector.
Obviously, it depends on the agency - if you can get a job at Sandia Labs - go for it! But bear in mind that getting out of government and back into the private sector is a little tougher than having stayed private sector all along.
That is a very good point. I hadn't thought about that, but you are right, it probably should be listed in the Urban Legends FAQ. Certainly the members of the San Francisco police department have this story circulating amongst themselves. Probably some old-timer knows the street address of the original site....
It would be nice to know how much fact, and how much fiction this story contains. I don't have any reason to think my dad made it up; but someone else might have, and he was just relaying it. I do know that the first time I heard it, I was little (under 10 years old); so it would have had to have been prior to 1971.
Well... your point is not beyond the realm of possibility....
Although I don't see the point. It is one of those funny stories he tells to point out how goofy people can be; what kinds of things police officers run into. His personal favorite was an 80 lbs drunk guy that just sat in park in Modesto and kept stating "Grrr, grrr, I'm a Texas Tiger!" Kept repeating it over and over.
My dad was a Sheriff's officer before I was born, and the original story made the rounds. One of his friends was a detective in the San Francisco Police Department, was called upon to visit a citizen there (must have been in the early 1960's, I think). Anyway, the person had lined every wall of the apartment with aluminum foil, 'to keep them from reading her brainwaves with the radio'. Obviously, the person was mentally ill. When the person expressed distress at not being able to leave the apartment, the tin foil hat was proposed. (The detective figured that the person was harlmess enough, so why not 'help'?)
So that is the story as I heard it. My dad knows the name of the detective in S.F.
On the one hand, you have a point. On the other, I missed the Cringley shows when they came across broadcast TV, so now I get to see them. If this is a running loop, then I get to tap in when I want - which is more than I get with TV.
Further, I can't surf/. on my TV, and I get to help some researchers tweak / improve multicast. Seems like multicast is the hot topic at ACM SIGCOMM today - which makes me think we are in "internet-delivered-video-on-demand" infancy.
Its funny, at the moment, Eric Schmidt is discussing his contemplation of the future, and multicast is not (yet) a part of his talk.
For what it's worth, Novell uses a solution to the same problem using a protocol developed by Apple a long time ago. SLP is Service Location Protocol that does the same thing. However, devices with services register themselves with an agent; and, devices find the agent by either DHCP, config file, or multicast.
Of course, your ISP probably does not support multicast, so internet-wide implementation is a while off.
I think Microsoft's implementation was Universal Plug And Play.
I would argue that describing government workers as: "most... of whom resist any change to their routinized existences with every means at their disposal" is not completely fair. I'm currently working for a local government outsourcer, and previously was an actual government employee. Yes, you will get resistance to change, if the change isn't perceived as beneficial. But I see a lot of my users who are happy and eager to change and learn a new system, when they see that the change actually benefits them.
Speaking of which, is there an open source Assessor / Property Tax program available? Our mainframe one is expensive to maintain, and the Assessor's office is actively looking for a replacement. But all we've been quoted by vendors (all MS SQL based) comes at just a ridiculous price and hardware cost. From California, I don't think we will be getting anyone to Washington DC for this conference; but the conference itself is a good idea.
I concurr with your comments about supporting libertarian candidates.
My dad told me about a situation a long time ago, that kind of set a precedent.
We were in this really old diner, and every booth had holes in the wall above the table. I asked my dad why that might be, and he said for the jukebox. He said that a long time ago every booth was wired for its own speaker, and had a coinbox - patrons could put in coins in the box, punch up a song, and the speaker delivered the music right to their table. They made a lot of money, so of course a lawsuit ensued.
The restaurant owners wanted to keep the money, because they paid for the equipment to be installed in their restaurants. The record companies wanted the money because, without them, there would not have been any music to play. They reasoned, that the patrons were paying for the music, not the use of the music delivery system. Furthermore, the music brought in customers to the restaurant that it would not otherwise have had. Therefore, the restaurants owed them.
Ultimately, the music companies won the lawsuits and the fancy jukeboxes were ripped out. Thus the holes in the wall above the table.
FWIW, my dad said that the music companies (and later jukebox service vendors) were often run by organized crime. That was a long time ago.
On the one hand, you make a decent point that a plug-in is a good thing, in that it will assist migration projects.
On the other hand, changing file formats at all seems to me to be picking the wrong battle. I've been through this battle before, and still see minor skirmishes waged. It was only painful, with no gain. I'm talking of course, about the conversion from WordPerfect to MS Word.
We even have one department, Legal Counsel, that cannot give up WordPerfect because of its ODMA capability. They have a document management system because that is what they do: documents. We may have 3000 copies of MS Word, but when dealing with the 20 people in this office, it is important that the document formatting not get too fancy. If WordPerfect can't read it in, you get to do it over.
So unless OpenOffice has some magic capability I don't know about, (which could very well be) maintaining compatibility with an older version of Microsoft Word would be the best plan. Embrace first, then worry about extending later.
What happens when some surgeon begins surgery, and some router in the middle of the link has to deal with the/. effect? Or worse, someone else launches a DOS attack?
I want my telesurgery done over QOS links, with guaranteed bandwidth.
I 100% agree. Heck, being a brand new OpenOffice user, I haven't found where (or if) I can set the default file save mode to "Word97".
I have to do a weekly status report that gets emailed to all my co-workers and several managers. OpenOffice does MAPI, so GroupWise mails the document just fine. And compatible documents by OpenOffice, week after week, will open eyes. However, there is always the one picky manager (PHB) waiting to pounce. If I or another co-worker forget to save the thing in Word97 format just once, he will use it as a club to beat us 'wild ducks' into corporate submission. If I slip up, and he cannot read my status report, I will not be able to tell him the problem is his lack of a plugin. He is running the corporate standard. I'm the outsider trying to open the environment to allow for greater options.
Thankfully, OpenOffice has worked well so far. It even got rid of an annoying startup macro error message I had with the status report sample file. I had just resigned myself to living with this stupid MS Word error - every single time I opened the file, it spit at me. But OpenOffice is smarter than that. Hooray! Thank you Thank you Thank you to the programmers of OpenOffice!
Heck, one of my users replied to a spam, and the as the mail server tried to send the reply message, it kicked back one of the '500 series' errors: mailbox full. "Conflicted" was the description of me that day - didn't know whether to be dismayed or ROTFL.
Actually, it's called the price of doing business. The previously employer had in-house talent, for which they paid money. Now they don't.
If our tech had moved to another state, the prv. emp. would have had to hire a private businessman to take his place. By doing the work for free, you deprive a computer tech business from earning a living.
I was in the same situation, and charged them an amount comparable to what the local businessmen would have charged. It was more than what I made when I worked for them on salary. What they figured out, was that indeed they needed to replace me with a full-time employee.
It would have been wrong of me to sucker them into thinking that I was at their beck and call for free. I had moved on, and my loyalties were with my new employer.
Regarding Microsoft's monopoly, I remember the MS DOS 3.30 to 3.31 upgrade action. Microsoft shipped an upgrade to DOS to specifically break Lotus 1-2-3 under Windows. At the same time, they were running print advertisements with the message 'If you want the programs that run best in Windows, you should buy your programs from the maker of Windows'. So the new machine came in, we installed Lotus, copied all of the accountant's spreadsheets onto it, and when we cranked up 1-2-3, Windows spit out an error 'Program LOTUS has violated system integrity' blah blah blah.
Infoworld took Microsoft to task for shipping an upgrade that broke the (then) most popular program in the world ("Didn't you do any testing?" "Yes, we knew there would be problems"). It was particularly onerous as the "upgrade" was not optional. Microsoft just shipped the new code to all its OEM partners and said 'it is the new version - pre-install it instead of the old version'. So every new PC from HP, Compaq, Dell (PC's Limited), Toshiba, etc. came with the Lotus breaker OS.
I am not sure that people saw Excel as better, as much as they saw Lotus as trouble.
Our accountants had these massive spreadsheets that took ten minutes to calculate - and our first tests with Excel took 20% longer. Later, we actually became Quattro Pro users, as it had more features than Excel.
Although you make a good point about the format of the paperback being really easy to use - I have found one thing about my PDA that I prefer: access. I always have my PDA with me. I wear the thing on my belt, so that it is always available. On a business trip, I went through an entire novel with the spare time I had.
Your points about paperbacks are good - don't get me wrong. It is just that I do not carry a paperback book around with me, (and probably won't) - but I will always have my PDA. And therein lies the rub: even a two minute wait for a bus or a ride is not too short a time to read. I suppose what a person would need to match the convenience of what I have is a belt pouch - paperback size. That would be as handy as my current rig. But some of those paperbacks are pretty thick - and you thought the PDA sized belt pouch looked goofy.;-)
The other benefit of the electronic book is freshness. Fresh paper costs money, but downloads are (essentially) free. And as long as people publish in.PDF or.PDB format (or I can point Avantgo at it), I can get material for (almost) free.
I see a similar problem, though I think the mainstream media's reporting is slightly askew on purpose. It does not take any brains to see that the television industry sees the internet as 'the competition'. The same is probably true for newspapers and magazines - the content for those branches of media tends to not be all that in-depth (light weight, shall we say). Thus, the readers/viewers can easily be lured away by the faster internet (which comes with interactivity, to boot.) insert I'll boot you interactively joke here
So my questions would be:
Have you ever run into a situation where a publisher suggested that you downplay something you knew was new, relevant, likely to suceed, and would annoy the heck out the old-school media? (e.g. Napster, cheap CD-R burners,.MP3 format, etc.)
Do you think that indeed, the old-fashioned media is running scared (or ought to be)?
If so, what remedy do you think would be best, and what you think will happen?
If not, why not?
Even today, televsion writers try to portray the internet as only a porn engine. I don't see that as a sucessful campaign with the younger generation that knows better. Essentially, insulting the internet is the same as insulting them.
So I agree with Dr. Bent - often, mainstream media reports badly. So his good question is: Is it really just an age thing? Or is the technology world spinning too fast for anyone in the big media to keep up? Of course, with your experience, I am sure you see a clearer picture of the industry - please enlighten us.
So basically, the guy tells his publisher that the whole DRM thing is a scam to fool the publisher into thinking he is protected. And then proves it.
Seems like decent fodder for that upcoming debate between the Professor James Boyle and Stanley Pierre-Louis (Vice President, Legal Affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America). Takes us back to that quote "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
I am one of those people who learned FORTRAN as my first programming language in high school - one full year (1979/80) on punched cards. Then, at the local community college, I had four more semesters of it - but took a COBOL class, as I liked programming better than calculus. Then, still in school, I learned BASIC - which led to the lightbulb going on: this is FORTRAN. Ok, it is FORTRAN for kiddies, but learning how to program FORTRAN meant instant understanding of BASIC.
One of the best things I got out of my last FORTRAN class was structured programming using Nasi-Schneiderman flowcharts. "Structured prgramming" is just a fancy way of saying 'top-down, stepwise refinement', but like the scientific method, its a bulldozer for any real problem you want to solve. The Nasi-Schneiderman flowcharts were great help - and we even used a pencil and ruler to draw the flowchart on the program code printout.
In what has got to be God's sense of just irony, I ended up becoming a professional programmer in a horrible little language called RPG II (well, at least for three years). Don't drop out of school to take a job in industry, kids. An engineering degree would have gotten me a lot farther, faster, and would have given me better chances for mobility.
But I digress. I liked FORTRAN; that led me to those Nasi-Schneiderman flowcharts, which I now use for all my procedural diagramming. (Not that I get to do much any more....)
I have a few questions regarding the size of the MCI network, and its portion of the internet.
1) What would you say is the larget portion of internet traffic that flowed through MCI's network? When?
2) Did that influence your choice to go to work for MCI?
3) A few years ago, I heard an anecdotal report of an unusually large number of suicides in the MCI network support group - so many that management had to say something. Had you heard of this problem?
4) And lastly, what do you think of the current state of fault-tolerance of the internet in whole; and, MCI's part?
Thank you for the opportunity to ask these questions.
Certainly - as far as your core beliefs go. P2P networks are an obvious way for people to connect to other people with similar beliefs. It seems to me as clear as day. When you find someone agreeable, (and intelligent / likable / trustworthy ) whether it be through IRC or USENET or Weblogs or private P2P channels (of any data type), you will be able to invite them into your circle of trust. Eventually, there will be great power in that focused community.
The Masonic Lodge (Free and Accepted Masons, Freemasonry, whatever you want to call it), was a great example of this. What were they?* A group of guys that gathered together down at the lodge on Wednesday nights, and discussed the future of their town. It is that simple. Sure you will hear all sorts of crackpot theories, but the real impact was that these guys planned things, built consensus, planned some more, and made them happen. They specifically did not invite jerks to the party.
The difference today is that the communities are virtual, and that jerks get modded down to -1 where we don't bother looking at them.
Finally, regarding an already wiser world: do you think you would know as much about the DMCA if you did not frequent/. ?:-)
*Yes, I know - I should not have said "What were they?" but "What are they?". That is a topic for another time....
And, as far as the most vulnerable part of the LAN goes: it's the end-user with a M$ workstation.
Heh. That's the truth.
Unfortunately, SecureFast is on its way out. Enterasys got really burned because its competitor's (correctly) pointed out that it is propriatery. So they now don't release anything that isn't backed up by an IEEE standard.
This new stuff works with ActiveDirectory, so yes you do get full-port security. First, the machine has to get on the LAN (authorized MAC's only in the tightest security scheme); then, the user (logged in name) can get individual QOS / Priority traffic policies applied to their connection. Sweet.
Am I thrilled yet? No. Our shop is an NDS shop, not ActiveDirectory. (chuckle) I am told that Enterasys is working on that though.
Just as an example of what this can do for you, here is something we did in SecureFast when we had it: a rogue sysadmin put up a DHCP server on our net and started stomping on IP addresses we were handing out. We called him up and told him to shut off his DHCP server. He said he wasn't running one. We told him to shut it down or else. 24 hours later he was still running DHCP. So we put his machine's MAC in our "timeout" VLAN. Didn't matter which port he plugged into on any switch in our 1800+ user network - the port would appear dead to his NIC. (really, the port was live, but every packet went into the bit bucket). He never knew what hit him. We eventually got a work order to fix his broken 'ports'. Heh.
Sometimes it feels good to play BOFH.:-)
As a practical matter, sometimes you do need that level of control on your network. (I read my.sig in preview mode, and thought "Gee. If the guy got really ticked... hmmmm...")
Cabletron (now Enterasys) tried their darnedest to get their SecureFast VLAN technology adopted as an IEEE standard, but couldn't. Great technology, it tracked every MAC address that entered any switch on the LAN. Problem is, it took lots of horsepower, and Cisco's gear wasn't the low-cost leader by throwing in tons of CPU. Their price point had a benefit: turned them into the 800 pound gorilla. When Cabletron (practically invented VLANs) brought this VLAN technology up for a vote, it got voted down - and the current 'packet tagging' scheme got approved (doesn't take many CPU cycles to look at a tag or not, compared to each switch maintaining access lists and doing lookups on new MAC's).
Fast forward to today, and the SecureFast scheme is still the most secure. So it made sense to Microsoft to work with Enterasys to build a wire level authentication scheme into its OS. Christen it "EAP".
Cisco's LEAP is a derivative, and Funk Software has implementations that seem to be more robust (less propriatery).
The wireless aspect of it is in the news because that is perceived as the most vulnerable part of LANs today; but realize that these schemes work just as well for wired networks too.
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A long time ago, the local radio station was holding a contest, where you could win the Top 40. My little brother won one week. We got a box with four LP's, a half-hour per side, with the pre-recorded Casey Casem's America's Top 40 radio show on it. Old people like myself remember the turntables where you could stack a few LP's on top, and at the end of one, the arm would move out of the way, the next record drops, and the arm starts on the next record. The LP's were mastered in such a way to play the show this way, in order. There were comercials in there and everything. When the show played, the only place for local content was the station identifier break every half hour.
Now my computer doesn't recognise particular words unless I end them with a hoot of laughter.
Did you think this through before granting permission? Or was that your original plan?
I too work in an IS department, and can attest that your statements are correct. The benefits you mention are real, and valuable. I'll even throw in one more benefit: government tends to spend a lot of money on IT, so you get to work in larger environments, with more varied equipment.
However, one needs to be careful, as bad management can occur anywhere.
I have been looking for another job because of job politics. People who are not very good at managing have become managers. Granted, any large corporation will have this problem (and government is the largest corporation of them all.) But still, the environment has become so bad - I want out. The benefits do not compensate for the grief. And here is what I have run into: that 'government worker' stigma has kept me from getting job interviews in the private sector.
Obviously, it depends on the agency - if you can get a job at Sandia Labs - go for it! But bear in mind that getting out of government and back into the private sector is a little tougher than having stayed private sector all along.
It would be nice to know how much fact, and how much fiction this story contains. I don't have any reason to think my dad made it up; but someone else might have, and he was just relaying it. I do know that the first time I heard it, I was little (under 10 years old); so it would have had to have been prior to 1971.
Although I don't see the point. It is one of those funny stories he tells to point out how goofy people can be; what kinds of things police officers run into. His personal favorite was an 80 lbs drunk guy that just sat in park in Modesto and kept stating "Grrr, grrr, I'm a Texas Tiger!" Kept repeating it over and over.
People can just be goofy.
So that is the story as I heard it. My dad knows the name of the detective in S.F.
Further, I can't surf /. on my TV, and I get to help some researchers tweak / improve multicast. Seems like multicast is the hot topic at ACM SIGCOMM today - which makes me think we are in "internet-delivered-video-on-demand" infancy.
Its funny, at the moment, Eric Schmidt is discussing his contemplation of the future, and multicast is not (yet) a part of his talk.
Of course, your ISP probably does not support multicast, so internet-wide implementation is a while off.
I think Microsoft's implementation was Universal Plug And Play.
Speaking of which, is there an open source Assessor / Property Tax program available? Our mainframe one is expensive to maintain, and the Assessor's office is actively looking for a replacement. But all we've been quoted by vendors (all MS SQL based) comes at just a ridiculous price and hardware cost. From California, I don't think we will be getting anyone to Washington DC for this conference; but the conference itself is a good idea.
I concurr with your comments about supporting libertarian candidates.
We were in this really old diner, and every booth had holes in the wall above the table. I asked my dad why that might be, and he said for the jukebox. He said that a long time ago every booth was wired for its own speaker, and had a coinbox - patrons could put in coins in the box, punch up a song, and the speaker delivered the music right to their table. They made a lot of money, so of course a lawsuit ensued.
The restaurant owners wanted to keep the money, because they paid for the equipment to be installed in their restaurants. The record companies wanted the money because, without them, there would not have been any music to play. They reasoned, that the patrons were paying for the music, not the use of the music delivery system. Furthermore, the music brought in customers to the restaurant that it would not otherwise have had. Therefore, the restaurants owed them.
Ultimately, the music companies won the lawsuits and the fancy jukeboxes were ripped out. Thus the holes in the wall above the table.
FWIW, my dad said that the music companies (and later jukebox service vendors) were often run by organized crime. That was a long time ago.
On the other hand, changing file formats at all seems to me to be picking the wrong battle. I've been through this battle before, and still see minor skirmishes waged. It was only painful, with no gain. I'm talking of course, about the conversion from WordPerfect to MS Word.
We even have one department, Legal Counsel, that cannot give up WordPerfect because of its ODMA capability. They have a document management system because that is what they do: documents. We may have 3000 copies of MS Word, but when dealing with the 20 people in this office, it is important that the document formatting not get too fancy. If WordPerfect can't read it in, you get to do it over.
So unless OpenOffice has some magic capability I don't know about, (which could very well be) maintaining compatibility with an older version of Microsoft Word would be the best plan. Embrace first, then worry about extending later.
What happens when some surgeon begins surgery, and some router in the middle of the link has to deal with the /. effect? Or worse, someone else launches a DOS attack?
I want my telesurgery done over QOS links, with guaranteed bandwidth.
Thank you very much. I had poked around a little, but had not found that one (yet).
I have to do a weekly status report that gets emailed to all my co-workers and several managers. OpenOffice does MAPI, so GroupWise mails the document just fine. And compatible documents by OpenOffice, week after week, will open eyes. However, there is always the one picky manager (PHB) waiting to pounce. If I or another co-worker forget to save the thing in Word97 format just once, he will use it as a club to beat us 'wild ducks' into corporate submission. If I slip up, and he cannot read my status report, I will not be able to tell him the problem is his lack of a plugin. He is running the corporate standard. I'm the outsider trying to open the environment to allow for greater options.
Thankfully, OpenOffice has worked well so far. It even got rid of an annoying startup macro error message I had with the status report sample file. I had just resigned myself to living with this stupid MS Word error - every single time I opened the file, it spit at me. But OpenOffice is smarter than that. Hooray! Thank you Thank you Thank you to the programmers of OpenOffice!
Heck, one of my users replied to a spam, and the as the mail server tried to send the reply message, it kicked back one of the '500 series' errors: mailbox full. "Conflicted" was the description of me that day - didn't know whether to be dismayed or ROTFL.
If our tech had moved to another state, the prv. emp. would have had to hire a private businessman to take his place. By doing the work for free, you deprive a computer tech business from earning a living.
I was in the same situation, and charged them an amount comparable to what the local businessmen would have charged. It was more than what I made when I worked for them on salary. What they figured out, was that indeed they needed to replace me with a full-time employee.
It would have been wrong of me to sucker them into thinking that I was at their beck and call for free. I had moved on, and my loyalties were with my new employer.
Infoworld took Microsoft to task for shipping an upgrade that broke the (then) most popular program in the world ("Didn't you do any testing?" "Yes, we knew there would be problems"). It was particularly onerous as the "upgrade" was not optional. Microsoft just shipped the new code to all its OEM partners and said 'it is the new version - pre-install it instead of the old version'. So every new PC from HP, Compaq, Dell (PC's Limited), Toshiba, etc. came with the Lotus breaker OS.
I am not sure that people saw Excel as better, as much as they saw Lotus as trouble.
Our accountants had these massive spreadsheets that took ten minutes to calculate - and our first tests with Excel took 20% longer. Later, we actually became Quattro Pro users, as it had more features than Excel.
Although you make a good point about the format of the paperback being really easy to use - I have found one thing about my PDA that I prefer: access. I always have my PDA with me. I wear the thing on my belt, so that it is always available. On a business trip, I went through an entire novel with the spare time I had.
;-)
.PDF or .PDB format (or I can point Avantgo at it), I can get material for (almost) free.
Your points about paperbacks are good - don't get me wrong. It is just that I do not carry a paperback book around with me, (and probably won't) - but I will always have my PDA. And therein lies the rub: even a two minute wait for a bus or a ride is not too short a time to read. I suppose what a person would need to match the convenience of what I have is a belt pouch - paperback size. That would be as handy as my current rig. But some of those paperbacks are pretty thick - and you thought the PDA sized belt pouch looked goofy.
The other benefit of the electronic book is freshness. Fresh paper costs money, but downloads are (essentially) free. And as long as people publish in
So my questions would be:
- Have you ever run into a situation where a publisher suggested that you downplay something you knew was new, relevant, likely to suceed, and would annoy the heck out the old-school media? (e.g. Napster, cheap CD-R burners,
.MP3 format, etc.) - Do you think that indeed, the old-fashioned media is running scared (or ought to be)?
- If so, what remedy do you think would be best, and what you think will happen?
- If not, why not?
Even today, televsion writers try to portray the internet as only a porn engine. I don't see that as a sucessful campaign with the younger generation that knows better. Essentially, insulting the internet is the same as insulting them.So I agree with Dr. Bent - often, mainstream media reports badly. So his good question is: Is it really just an age thing? Or is the technology world spinning too fast for anyone in the big media to keep up? Of course, with your experience, I am sure you see a clearer picture of the industry - please enlighten us.
and Thank you for your time.
So basically, the guy tells his publisher that the whole DRM thing is a scam to fool the publisher into thinking he is protected. And then proves it.
Seems like decent fodder for that upcoming debate between the Professor James Boyle and Stanley Pierre-Louis (Vice President, Legal Affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America). Takes us back to that quote "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
In theory, DRM works great....
I am one of those people who learned FORTRAN as my first programming language in high school - one full year (1979/80) on punched cards. Then, at the local community college, I had four more semesters of it - but took a COBOL class, as I liked programming better than calculus. Then, still in school, I learned BASIC - which led to the lightbulb going on: this is FORTRAN. Ok, it is FORTRAN for kiddies, but learning how to program FORTRAN meant instant understanding of BASIC.
One of the best things I got out of my last FORTRAN class was structured programming using Nasi-Schneiderman flowcharts. "Structured prgramming" is just a fancy way of saying 'top-down, stepwise refinement', but like the scientific method, its a bulldozer for any real problem you want to solve. The Nasi-Schneiderman flowcharts were great help - and we even used a pencil and ruler to draw the flowchart on the program code printout.
In what has got to be God's sense of just irony, I ended up becoming a professional programmer in a horrible little language called RPG II (well, at least for three years). Don't drop out of school to take a job in industry, kids. An engineering degree would have gotten me a lot farther, faster, and would have given me better chances for mobility.
But I digress. I liked FORTRAN; that led me to those Nasi-Schneiderman flowcharts, which I now use for all my procedural diagramming. (Not that I get to do much any more....)
I have a few questions regarding the size of the MCI network, and its portion of the internet.
1) What would you say is the larget portion of internet traffic that flowed through MCI's network? When?
2) Did that influence your choice to go to work for MCI?
3) A few years ago, I heard an anecdotal report of an unusually large number of suicides in the MCI network support group - so many that management had to say something. Had you heard of this problem?
4) And lastly, what do you think of the current state of fault-tolerance of the internet in whole; and, MCI's part?
Thank you for the opportunity to ask these questions.
The Masonic Lodge (Free and Accepted Masons, Freemasonry, whatever you want to call it), was a great example of this. What were they?* A group of guys that gathered together down at the lodge on Wednesday nights, and discussed the future of their town. It is that simple. Sure you will hear all sorts of crackpot theories, but the real impact was that these guys planned things, built consensus, planned some more, and made them happen. They specifically did not invite jerks to the party.
The difference today is that the communities are virtual, and that jerks get modded down to -1 where we don't bother looking at them.
Finally, regarding an already wiser world: do you think you would know as much about the DMCA if you did not frequent /. ? :-)
*Yes, I know - I should not have said "What were they?" but "What are they?". That is a topic for another time....
Unfortunately, SecureFast is on its way out. Enterasys got really burned because its competitor's (correctly) pointed out that it is propriatery. So they now don't release anything that isn't backed up by an IEEE standard.
This new stuff works with ActiveDirectory, so yes you do get full-port security. First, the machine has to get on the LAN (authorized MAC's only in the tightest security scheme); then, the user (logged in name) can get individual QOS / Priority traffic policies applied to their connection. Sweet.
Am I thrilled yet? No. Our shop is an NDS shop, not ActiveDirectory. (chuckle) I am told that Enterasys is working on that though.
Just as an example of what this can do for you, here is something we did in SecureFast when we had it: a rogue sysadmin put up a DHCP server on our net and started stomping on IP addresses we were handing out. We called him up and told him to shut off his DHCP server. He said he wasn't running one. We told him to shut it down or else. 24 hours later he was still running DHCP. So we put his machine's MAC in our "timeout" VLAN. Didn't matter which port he plugged into on any switch in our 1800+ user network - the port would appear dead to his NIC. (really, the port was live, but every packet went into the bit bucket). He never knew what hit him. We eventually got a work order to fix his broken 'ports'. Heh.
Sometimes it feels good to play BOFH. :-)
As a practical matter, sometimes you do need that level of control on your network. (I read my .sig in preview mode, and thought "Gee. If the guy got really ticked... hmmmm...")
Fast forward to today, and the SecureFast scheme is still the most secure. So it made sense to Microsoft to work with Enterasys to build a wire level authentication scheme into its OS. Christen it "EAP".
Cisco's LEAP is a derivative, and Funk Software has implementations that seem to be more robust (less propriatery).
The wireless aspect of it is in the news because that is perceived as the most vulnerable part of LANs today; but realize that these schemes work just as well for wired networks too.