While there is something to be said for harmonizing policies, I am not sure that it is in anyone's interest (other than that of large corporations) to use US laws as the basis of that standardization.
We cannot achieve a global concensus on REALLY important things like environmental issues (not that the politicians have ever really tried) and this is the sort of thing that they are working towards?
Ask yourself - does the world really need a global DMCA?
I browse at 1 and the first post is labelled redundant? How does that work?
Re:Blaming Microsoft for Removal of Java
on
Dan Gillmor on WinXP
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Why should they be expected in include the VM if they don't have any control over it."
So by extension, why should they include anything in the OS if they don't have control over it?
I am sure they would love to have proprietary versions of TCP/IP, DNS, and SMTP, but at the moment they do not have any control over these things, and yet the OS still supports it.
IANAL, but I did ask one in passing about this. It is difficult to get a short, concise answer from a lawyer about anything BTW...
Based on that conversation, this is what I understand the situation to be here in Canada: if there is no pre-existing NDA in effect, a person who receives a document labelled "confidential" is not under any legal obligation to maintain that confidentiality.
I was cautioned however, that there would be no guarantee that any information received in such a manner would be accurate or authentic...
"It is too much to ask for him/her to recoup a small amount of that by putting up banner ads?"
I am assuming that this is a troll...
First off, I don't have to view the site, I choose to. I did *NOT* choose to have pop-ups or pop-under adds cluttering up my screen. Banner adds annoy me too, but I can cope with them. I did not get an ad-blocker to get rid of the banners, just the pop-ups. Blocking the banner ads is merely a bonus.
"In effect, you're pirating your viewing of the site. Many people rationalize downloading warez by saying that the big companies are making too much money anyway (and they may be right), but by blocking popups, you're hurting the bottom line of people just like us."
What a load of crap! By extension, if I watch television and get up to use the can / make a snack / otherwise not pay attention to the commercials, and I ripping off some poor marketdroid too?
If you had an intelligent, thoughtful point to make, you blew it when you compared not watching ads to pirating software.
I suppose if I don't click on the banners/popups I am ripping off the webmaster too?
"And moreover, it is now the goal to force players to continue ad infinitum. Because entertainment is no longer the main reason for arcades, but rather, extracting money from player's wallets."
Ummm, since when was this *not* the case? I would have thought that coin-ops have always been designed to make money.
I don't know if they are/.'d yet, but here is the text of the article:
Taming the Wild, Wild Web
Corporations contend the Internet's freewheeling design kills moneymaking opportunities. But others fear controls would curb open access.
Quote
"Some of these people, though not all, are a category of folks who never left the '60s."
-- John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board
By MICHAEL A. HILTZIK, Times Staff Writer
Bud Michels has given up on the Internet.
"We don't have any control over the Internet," said Michels, president and chief executive of Maryland-based CSP Inc., which helps big clients protect priceless corporate data in the event of an earthquake, computer network outage or other disaster. "If something goes down, you don't even know who's accountable. The Internet is, like, 'Who ya gonna call?' "
That's an example of how the Internet's leading virtue, its unruliness, is increasingly getting cursed by business executives and economists as its worst flaw. After years of fruitless efforts to make money selling goods and services over the Web, many entrepreneurs and other businesspeople are starting to blame the system's fundamental design for their failures.
Businesses are growing so frustrated by the unreliability of the public Internet--the network most commonly used for Web surfing, e-mail and other familiar functions--that many have moved their most critical applications to alternative semiprivate networks.
That's an expensive option, however, so some big corporations think the answer is to change the Internet's basic wiring. By adding "intelligent" switches and other devices, they believe, the system could work faster, avoid traffic jams, distinguish between high-priority data and other material that can wait, and generally live up to its promise as a worldwide communications and entertainment medium.
But doing so almost inevitably means bringing more of the network under commercial control. For consumers, the change might mean faster downloads of video clips and Webcasts. But it also might mean a raft of fees for special services and the appearance of "gatekeepers" with the power to keep certain Web sites or content from appearing on home computers, just as cable systems control which channels can be shown on their subscribers' TVs and at what price.
The business world's discontent has increased as the Internet economy has unraveled over the last year. That's not surprising, given that the network was first mapped out more than 30 years ago, when it was devised as a coast-to-coast system connecting universities working on projects financed by government grants.
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
Others detect a hidden agenda: an attempt by big business to stifle some of the cultural empowerment that the Internet represents.
"This is the past trying to kill the future at a time when the future is down," said John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist who is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a defender of free speech online. "And it's happening in ways that are generally invisible to the public."
At the heart of the debate lies decades of history. Before the Internet, the model of a communications network was the one that belonged to AT&T, this country's undisputed telecom monopoly until its dismemberment by court order in 1984.
AT&T had built a "smart" network connecting millions of dumb devices: telephones. Services such as call waiting or teleconferencing were operated by intelligent switches embedded in AT&T's circuits, rather than in the phones.
Founders Purposely Built a 'Dumb' Internet
This centralized architecture had its advantages, not the least of which was its vaunted 99.999% reliability--the "five nines" standard that may have been Ma Bell's crowning technical achievement.
But it also reinforced the AT&T monopoly. As undisputed owner of the phone network, the company dictated how it could be used by customers, who were forbidden to connect any phone to its lines except those that AT&T manufactured and sold. The phone company decided when and how to roll out new services and how much to charge. Innovative features had to pass muster with AT&T's engineers, who often rejected those they thought would encourage competition. Among the rejects: the Arpanet, the government-funded network that evolved into the Internet, which AT&T obstructed for years.
Mindful of these consequences of a centralized intelligent network, the founding architects of the Internet built its antithesis.
Rather than a smart network, the Internet is dumb, essentially a neutral pipeline ferrying digital bits from one end to another--say, between a computer and Amazon.com's Web site. By design it is blind to the nature of information it carries, be it a digital copy of a song, a calendar holding someone's daily meeting schedule or a 3-D computer game. But it can service a limitless variety of smart devices: PCs, hand-held computers, Internet-enabled TVs, Web cams and more. Almost any invention can be attached to the network as long as its output is digital.
Meanwhile, because the Internet is not owned by a single entity, its quality of service is left up to thousands of firms ranging from telecommunications giants such as WorldCom Inc. and Sprint Corp., which operate the backbone--the cross-country data highway--to neighborhood Internet service providers that may be run by high school kids with a high-powered server computer and a leased phone line.
A packet of data is likely to traverse several of these segments. If traffic backs up at the transfer points, the system either slows down or randomly jettisons packets of bits to clear the jam.
If these bits are part of a Web page or an e-mail message, they can be easily re-sent. If they are part of a more complicated application, such as an Internet telephone call, the conversation will be reduced to gibberish.
These factors also weigh on the Internet's ability to deliver speed and capacity, which is why during heavily promoted Webcasts most potential viewers get shut out.
"With bits on a dumb pipe, I can't do a major Webcast event," said Milo Medin, co-founder and chief technical officer of At Home Corp.'s Excite@Home, the leading provider of broadband Internet access over cable lines.
Yet, precisely because it is configured as a huge web of interconnecting pipelines, the Internet is almost universally accessible and resistant to local damage, political censorship or the designs of corporate landlords. In just over three decades, it has grown to serve more than 400 million users worldwide.
"Thanks to people who had the foresight to keep the middle stupid, we've been able to discover new, totally unanticipated applications like e-mail," David Isenberg, a telecommunications expert and former AT&T Laboratories network engineer, said at a recent conference at Stanford Law School.
Explosively popular applications such as the instant messaging system ICQ and the music file-sharing service Napster were developed privately by amateurs and allowed to find their own audiences on the vast World Wide Web.
Many communications executives complain, however, that as the Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous public utility, its shortcomings in service quality and reliability have lost their charm, which is evident to anyone who has waited a seeming eternity for a Web page to load or suffered through a weeklong outage in an e-mail account.
All that could be addressed by changes that would make the Internet faster, more reliable and more profitable for some companies. But they also would make it less universally accessible and more resistant to innovations that do not conform to new standards.
Whether the open model and the business model can comfortably coexist is debatable. As with any culture war, a wide spectrum of opinion lies between the two extremes.
Traditionalists Versus Business
At one end are Internet aficionados convinced that the network's historic openness is threatened as surely as the habitat of an endangered species is by the encroachment of land developers. They argue that the Internet is essentially a social phenomenon, the value of which lies in fostering free speech and breaking the historic stranglehold that telephone companies and other media companies have had on public communication.
"Some of these people, though not all, are a category of folks who never left the '60s," said John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board, which oversees the network's structure.
Klensin is equally critical of executives irked by the difficulty of making money from the Internet the old-fashioned way by controlling the customer's access to scarce resources and services. These people, Klensin contends, need to look harder for novel ways to exploit the new medium.
"We haven't fully explored the range of business models and opportunities here," he said. "That process will be significantly other than painless."
But instead of contriving new businesses that make do with the Internet as it is, many new business plans involve tampering with the network's electronic innards. Some of these changes would permanently alter the way people use the Web by allowing private companies to set themselves up as gatekeepers to the Internet, charging users for new features and services or for those that have been customarily free.
For example, Excite@Home has made numerous deals allowing information and entertainment content from such providers as Fox News, Bloomberg and cable channel Comedy Central to be transmitted to @Home subscribers at especially high speed. This is done by placing the premium material on @Home's computers--which have relatively direct connections to subscribers' homes--so the material does not have to traverse the clog-prone public Internet to reach subscribers.
Critics say that system in effect allows Excite@Home to control what content reaches its subscribers, a perversion of the Internet's democratic principles.
The Internet service provider, however, argues that its subscribers remain free to surf the rest of the Web without interference, and that @Home is merely improving access to material that might prove especially popular.
"By [the critics'] logic," Medin said, "I can't make one thing better without making everything else worse. The fact is, I'm creating added capability on my part of the Net." Giving Walt Disney Co. material preferential treatment, for example, would not mean @Home would block its users' access to Disney rivals, he said.
"If I were to block all access to Time Warner, that would be a different story. But if we did, our subscribers would scream bloody murder," he said.
Telecom executives say that without a major redesign of the Internet, such eagerly anticipated applications as video-on-demand, Internet telephony and Webcasts of live entertainment events will never be economical.
"The potential of many new technologies has not been realized because the Internet hasn't delivered the necessary performance," said Greg Davis, vice president for marketing and product management at Core Express, a company that leases fiber-optic lines to provide high-quality Internet service to business clients. "A lot of opportunities have been left on the table."
Others say that the Internet's architecture can be improved without destroying its traditional values, and that some upgrading is essential to improve the network's fit with the demands of modern media and commerce.
Companies Are Having to Pay for Reliability
The changes Nolle envisions would give more users better service at a reasonable cost, he said. Today, businesses needing absolutely reliable service must bypass much of the Internet by routing digital traffic over their own private lines, a solution that can cost $500,000 or more a month. Others buy hybrid services from such companies as Michels' CSP, to which customers pay varying rates depending on the grade of reliability they need.
"We use the Internet today only for customers who don't need up-to-the-second data recovery," Michels said. These are clients who can survive a temporary network glitch that sends their transmissions on an error-prone cross-country detour. "If something happens [to the network] in Philly and all of a sudden you're being routed through Kansas City, that's a huge number of hops" during which data may be lost.
Many network experts believe that the Internet will have to change to accommodate enhanced services such as @Home's. The question is whether this means the traditional network will become a victim of its own success.
"The existing open Net is so firmly implanted in education and research that it will continue there as an open Net indefinitely," said Michael Roberts, former chairman of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, a public body that oversees the distribution of Internet addresses. But he added, "It's too big, too important, too political to be treated as something for only a band of talented engineers to preside over."
But any changes in the network's basic structure will face numerous obstacles, including resistance from traditionalists who believe that the Internet is popular precisely because it cannot be controlled by big companies.
"The [Internet] is in trouble because it threatens so much of the establishment that it's provoked a backlash," Isenberg said.
For information about reprinting this article, go to http://www.lats.com/rights/register.htm
I think that members of the media should be required to take a first-year psychology course and a statistics course before being allowed to interpret and analyze "news" like this.
It is not a controlled study in any way, and at best, the authors of this report might have uncovered a corelation. Of course, there is no way of knowing at present which direction the corelation is (do students with naturally high co-ordination and concentration play vids or do students who play vids develop better co-ordination and concentration?).
There is a value in corelational studies however.
Corelation != causation, but if there no corelation, there is no causal relationship.
"Microsoft's new products will now screen out Java as a possible carrier of computer viruses in e-mail and, under high-security settings, in Web-browsing software. This move, first signaled in a software "security patch" distributed last year, is part of a broader effort by Microsoft to help stamp out the spread of computer viruses."
It seems to me that the best way to halt the spread of email viruses in a windows environment is to un-install outlook and migrate to Lotus Notes. Melissa and the love virus did not affect Notes users at all, except for the deluge of mail from infected Look-out users.
"But saying they're doing it for security reasons is just a joke."
Read bugtraq and notice the number of security alerts for microsoft (especially outlook and IIS) and compare that to the number of alerts for the other OS vendors sometime.
The only security micro$soft is interested in is their own. The security of their users does not enter into the equation.
"...they are forbidden to ship java, they lost the case against sun."
IIRC they were forbidden to advertise their products as being Java compliant, since they were not, but they were permitted to ship Java until the original contract expired.
They are perfectly free to try to negotiate a new deal with Sun to ship Java if they want to.
Seeding the scrapheap
People have noticed that this junkyard is pretty unique in the breadth of its contents. The usual cry is "its fake". Here is a discussion from someone that has climed the Canning Town piles, in search all sorts of things. The short answer: It is part of a real scrap yard, and its contents are tailored by adding and removing items, to the particular challenge. This tailoring doesn't decrease the challenge significantly.
First off: it helps to understand the purpose of the show -- its stealth science education - tricking 10 year old kids into watching an explanation of how a wing works. They sit thru the mini-lectures bcause they get rewarded afterwards with a shot of someone making precision adjustments with sledgehammers. When chosing challenges, its the education that drives the choice. The competition is partly to make it addicting, and partly to give the kids the idea that actually designing and building something might be a lot of fun.
Yes, this is a "rich" junkyard. There are all sorts of neat things to find. And unlike some, there is a lot of stuff that isn't metallic. (usually its construction debris -- the plywood we found had clearly been a concrete form in a prior life) -- Its mostly what you get, when you don't have the yard workers picking over the good bits. The set was a corner of a real working scrap yard. On the other side of the wall, there are cockneys in hydraulic claw loaders, tossing cars thru the air. You have to wear a hard hat when you go to the bathroom. (its out by the truck scales). When stocking the yard between episodes, the random lumps of steel plate are just dumped over the wall from what they have sitting around. But yes, they will add extra stuff to make it possible to complete building a machine.
The basic rule for seeding: If its not possible to safely improvise a part with the time and tools provided, they will provide something that can be pressed into service. It will require some ingenuity to make it work, it will never "just bolt on". If there are specific safety regulations, the relavant parts will always be provided. For example, things like safety valves, regulators, and gas tanks will be planted, and will have their certification paperwork sitting in the directors briefcase. (and if we happen to find such a part that isn't one of the known good ones, they don't let us use it) A good example: The propellor that the navy crew hacked up was provided. Any propellor they could make in the time they had (no time for glue to dry to laminate) would not have been safe to run up to speed. Another example was the tank and regulator used by the Dipsticks submarine - The tank had a current hydro test, and the regulators used were new.
But: Just because they give you a part, that doesn't mean its clear sailing. For example the wheels in the tractor pull. Sure they were there, but none of the differentials in the yard came close to fitting the bolt circle. If you wanted to use them, you had to make it work.
And this brings up another point: That same helpfull crew that hides essential parts, can just as easily remove them. They made sure that there wern't matching differentials for those wheels. In the fire fighting boat episode, there wasn't a pump to be had. Both teams had to make a pump. And not just a wimpy one, the burning shed was supposed to be 50 feet away.
"Another element I enjoy is the feeling of good-sportsmanship between opponents. "
I think we saw more of this in the UK version than in the US version of the show. IIRC, there were a couple of teams that were rather disrespectful to the opposition.
"Yes, it would be difficult if not impossible to make these great machines without providing parts, hey could still make it an interesting show by simplifying the assignments "
Let's see: with a few useful items strategically hidden in the junkyard, we get to seem people make really schweeet projects like cannons, rockets, and hovercrafts.
Take away those useful items and we would get to see projects like... ??
Gee, I can't imaging any of the projects being made if the junkyard hadn't been stocked with a couple of useful items pre-chosen by the experts.
You know what? I don't think any less of the program as a result! It's just entertainment after all...
"the only out and out lie that they tell; they say that contestants don't know what the challenge is until they hear it"
The experts submit the lists of materials. It is quite possible that the contestants (i.e. the other three people on the team) do not know in advance what the project is.
"You want to be best to market, not first to market."
That all depends. If your sole motive is to make the *Best* product, then being first is not that important. If you are after market share and want a return on your investment, then being first is critical.
If you look at the software industry over the past few years, the "first to market" strategy is clearly being followed.
Look at micro$oft. IIRC ever 1.0 version of software they have ever shipped has been crap. (IE, 16-bit windows, first version of NT, and so on). Eventually the patches and bug fixes are released and the product is usable. (OK, maybe in the case of M$ that is a bit of an overstatement, but grant the point for the time being).
There are tons of games that ship and you need to download megabytes of patches to make it playable. I think in the case of Half Life, I had to download a 25MB patch. Should it have shipped if it needed that much work? Probably not, but if they did not ship it when it did, their sales opportunities might have suffered.
The point is, if you can get to market, first, people will purchase it, regardless of the quality. Once they have it, these same people will stick to that product and are not likely to replace it with an alternative.
To coin a phrase, being first isn't everything, it's the only thing.
Slashdot Mirror
While there is something to be said for harmonizing policies, I am not sure that it is in anyone's interest (other than that of large corporations) to use US laws as the basis of that standardization.
We cannot achieve a global concensus on REALLY important things like environmental issues (not that the politicians have ever really tried) and this is the sort of thing that they are working towards?
Ask yourself - does the world really need a global DMCA?
I run one at home.
Never see banner ads. Never see popups. Never see pop-unders either.
It does not matter what the advertisers do, because someone will find a way to eliminate the ads sooner rather than later.
I browse at 1 and the first post is labelled redundant? How does that work?
"Why should they be expected in include the VM if they don't have any control over it."
So by extension, why should they include anything in the OS if they don't have control over it?
I am sure they would love to have proprietary versions of TCP/IP, DNS, and SMTP, but at the moment they do not have any control over these things, and yet the OS still supports it.
Why should a JVM be any different?
What a crappy idea...
/. to get to the bottom of this.
Trust
Hardly newsworthy, but you knew that it would come out in the end.
"I imagine now in addition to the living room cam, bedroom cam, and bathroom cam, they'll have to have a colon cam."
Well, the webmaster of goatse.cx could probably find a use for such things...
IANAL, but I did ask one in passing about this. It is difficult to get a short, concise answer from a lawyer about anything BTW...
Based on that conversation, this is what I understand the situation to be here in Canada: if there is no pre-existing NDA in effect, a person who receives a document labelled "confidential" is not under any legal obligation to maintain that confidentiality.
I was cautioned however, that there would be no guarantee that any information received in such a manner would be accurate or authentic...
Caveat emptor.
"If you go to the following http://www.x10.com/x10ads.htm, they will set a cookie for 30-day that disables the pop-under. Opt-out..."
Opt out? Sure, but only for 30 days. BFD.
To quote Douglas wrt X10:
"They are a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
"It is too much to ask for him/her to recoup a small amount of that by putting up banner ads?"
I am assuming that this is a troll...
First off, I don't have to view the site, I choose to. I did *NOT* choose to have pop-ups or pop-under adds cluttering up my screen. Banner adds annoy me too, but I can cope with them. I did not get an ad-blocker to get rid of the banners, just the pop-ups. Blocking the banner ads is merely a bonus.
"In effect, you're pirating your viewing of the site. Many people rationalize downloading warez by saying that the big companies are making too much money anyway (and they may be right), but by blocking popups, you're hurting the bottom line of people just like us."
What a load of crap! By extension, if I watch television and get up to use the can / make a snack / otherwise not pay attention to the commercials, and I ripping off some poor marketdroid too?
If you had an intelligent, thoughtful point to make, you blew it when you compared not watching ads to pirating software.
I suppose if I don't click on the banners/popups I am ripping off the webmaster too?
Yah, whatever.
"And moreover, it is now the goal to force players to continue ad infinitum. Because entertainment is no longer the main reason for arcades, but rather, extracting money from player's wallets."
Ummm, since when was this *not* the case? I would have thought that coin-ops have always been designed to make money.
I don't know if they are /.'d yet, but here is the text of the article:
Taming the Wild, Wild Web
Corporations contend the Internet's freewheeling design kills moneymaking opportunities. But others fear controls would curb open access.
Quote
"Some of these people, though not all, are a category of folks who never left the '60s."
-- John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board
By MICHAEL A. HILTZIK, Times Staff Writer
Bud Michels has given up on the Internet.
"We don't have any control over the Internet," said Michels, president and chief executive of Maryland-based CSP Inc., which helps big clients protect priceless corporate data in the event of an earthquake, computer network outage or other disaster. "If something goes down, you don't even know who's accountable. The Internet is, like, 'Who ya gonna call?' "
That's an example of how the Internet's leading virtue, its unruliness, is increasingly getting cursed by business executives and economists as its worst flaw. After years of fruitless efforts to make money selling goods and services over the Web, many entrepreneurs and other businesspeople are starting to blame the system's fundamental design for their failures.
Businesses are growing so frustrated by the unreliability of the public Internet--the network most commonly used for Web surfing, e-mail and other familiar functions--that many have moved their most critical applications to alternative semiprivate networks.
That's an expensive option, however, so some big corporations think the answer is to change the Internet's basic wiring. By adding "intelligent" switches and other devices, they believe, the system could work faster, avoid traffic jams, distinguish between high-priority data and other material that can wait, and generally live up to its promise as a worldwide communications and entertainment medium.
But doing so almost inevitably means bringing more of the network under commercial control. For consumers, the change might mean faster downloads of video clips and Webcasts. But it also might mean a raft of fees for special services and the appearance of "gatekeepers" with the power to keep certain Web sites or content from appearing on home computers, just as cable systems control which channels can be shown on their subscribers' TVs and at what price.
The business world's discontent has increased as the Internet economy has unraveled over the last year. That's not surprising, given that the network was first mapped out more than 30 years ago, when it was devised as a coast-to-coast system connecting universities working on projects financed by government grants.
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
Others detect a hidden agenda: an attempt by big business to stifle some of the cultural empowerment that the Internet represents.
"This is the past trying to kill the future at a time when the future is down," said John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist who is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a defender of free speech online. "And it's happening in ways that are generally invisible to the public."
At the heart of the debate lies decades of history. Before the Internet, the model of a communications network was the one that belonged to AT&T, this country's undisputed telecom monopoly until its dismemberment by court order in 1984.
AT&T had built a "smart" network connecting millions of dumb devices: telephones. Services such as call waiting or teleconferencing were operated by intelligent switches embedded in AT&T's circuits, rather than in the phones.
Founders Purposely Built a 'Dumb' Internet
This centralized architecture had its advantages, not the least of which was its vaunted 99.999% reliability--the "five nines" standard that may have been Ma Bell's crowning technical achievement.
But it also reinforced the AT&T monopoly. As undisputed owner of the phone network, the company dictated how it could be used by customers, who were forbidden to connect any phone to its lines except those that AT&T manufactured and sold. The phone company decided when and how to roll out new services and how much to charge. Innovative features had to pass muster with AT&T's engineers, who often rejected those they thought would encourage competition. Among the rejects: the Arpanet, the government-funded network that evolved into the Internet, which AT&T obstructed for years.
Mindful of these consequences of a centralized intelligent network, the founding architects of the Internet built its antithesis.
Rather than a smart network, the Internet is dumb, essentially a neutral pipeline ferrying digital bits from one end to another--say, between a computer and Amazon.com's Web site. By design it is blind to the nature of information it carries, be it a digital copy of a song, a calendar holding someone's daily meeting schedule or a 3-D computer game. But it can service a limitless variety of smart devices: PCs, hand-held computers, Internet-enabled TVs, Web cams and more. Almost any invention can be attached to the network as long as its output is digital.
Meanwhile, because the Internet is not owned by a single entity, its quality of service is left up to thousands of firms ranging from telecommunications giants such as WorldCom Inc. and Sprint Corp., which operate the backbone--the cross-country data highway--to neighborhood Internet service providers that may be run by high school kids with a high-powered server computer and a leased phone line.
A packet of data is likely to traverse several of these segments. If traffic backs up at the transfer points, the system either slows down or randomly jettisons packets of bits to clear the jam.
If these bits are part of a Web page or an e-mail message, they can be easily re-sent. If they are part of a more complicated application, such as an Internet telephone call, the conversation will be reduced to gibberish.
These factors also weigh on the Internet's ability to deliver speed and capacity, which is why during heavily promoted Webcasts most potential viewers get shut out.
"With bits on a dumb pipe, I can't do a major Webcast event," said Milo Medin, co-founder and chief technical officer of At Home Corp.'s Excite@Home, the leading provider of broadband Internet access over cable lines.
Yet, precisely because it is configured as a huge web of interconnecting pipelines, the Internet is almost universally accessible and resistant to local damage, political censorship or the designs of corporate landlords. In just over three decades, it has grown to serve more than 400 million users worldwide.
"Thanks to people who had the foresight to keep the middle stupid, we've been able to discover new, totally unanticipated applications like e-mail," David Isenberg, a telecommunications expert and former AT&T Laboratories network engineer, said at a recent conference at Stanford Law School.
Explosively popular applications such as the instant messaging system ICQ and the music file-sharing service Napster were developed privately by amateurs and allowed to find their own audiences on the vast World Wide Web.
Many communications executives complain, however, that as the Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous public utility, its shortcomings in service quality and reliability have lost their charm, which is evident to anyone who has waited a seeming eternity for a Web page to load or suffered through a weeklong outage in an e-mail account.
All that could be addressed by changes that would make the Internet faster, more reliable and more profitable for some companies. But they also would make it less universally accessible and more resistant to innovations that do not conform to new standards.
Whether the open model and the business model can comfortably coexist is debatable. As with any culture war, a wide spectrum of opinion lies between the two extremes.
Traditionalists Versus Business
At one end are Internet aficionados convinced that the network's historic openness is threatened as surely as the habitat of an endangered species is by the encroachment of land developers. They argue that the Internet is essentially a social phenomenon, the value of which lies in fostering free speech and breaking the historic stranglehold that telephone companies and other media companies have had on public communication.
"Some of these people, though not all, are a category of folks who never left the '60s," said John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board, which oversees the network's structure.
Klensin is equally critical of executives irked by the difficulty of making money from the Internet the old-fashioned way by controlling the customer's access to scarce resources and services. These people, Klensin contends, need to look harder for novel ways to exploit the new medium.
"We haven't fully explored the range of business models and opportunities here," he said. "That process will be significantly other than painless."
But instead of contriving new businesses that make do with the Internet as it is, many new business plans involve tampering with the network's electronic innards. Some of these changes would permanently alter the way people use the Web by allowing private companies to set themselves up as gatekeepers to the Internet, charging users for new features and services or for those that have been customarily free.
For example, Excite@Home has made numerous deals allowing information and entertainment content from such providers as Fox News, Bloomberg and cable channel Comedy Central to be transmitted to @Home subscribers at especially high speed. This is done by placing the premium material on @Home's computers--which have relatively direct connections to subscribers' homes--so the material does not have to traverse the clog-prone public Internet to reach subscribers.
Critics say that system in effect allows Excite@Home to control what content reaches its subscribers, a perversion of the Internet's democratic principles.
The Internet service provider, however, argues that its subscribers remain free to surf the rest of the Web without interference, and that @Home is merely improving access to material that might prove especially popular.
"By [the critics'] logic," Medin said, "I can't make one thing better without making everything else worse. The fact is, I'm creating added capability on my part of the Net." Giving Walt Disney Co. material preferential treatment, for example, would not mean @Home would block its users' access to Disney rivals, he said.
"If I were to block all access to Time Warner, that would be a different story. But if we did, our subscribers would scream bloody murder," he said.
Telecom executives say that without a major redesign of the Internet, such eagerly anticipated applications as video-on-demand, Internet telephony and Webcasts of live entertainment events will never be economical.
"The potential of many new technologies has not been realized because the Internet hasn't delivered the necessary performance," said Greg Davis, vice president for marketing and product management at Core Express, a company that leases fiber-optic lines to provide high-quality Internet service to business clients. "A lot of opportunities have been left on the table."
Others say that the Internet's architecture can be improved without destroying its traditional values, and that some upgrading is essential to improve the network's fit with the demands of modern media and commerce.
Companies Are Having to Pay for Reliability
The changes Nolle envisions would give more users better service at a reasonable cost, he said. Today, businesses needing absolutely reliable service must bypass much of the Internet by routing digital traffic over their own private lines, a solution that can cost $500,000 or more a month. Others buy hybrid services from such companies as Michels' CSP, to which customers pay varying rates depending on the grade of reliability they need.
"We use the Internet today only for customers who don't need up-to-the-second data recovery," Michels said. These are clients who can survive a temporary network glitch that sends their transmissions on an error-prone cross-country detour. "If something happens [to the network] in Philly and all of a sudden you're being routed through Kansas City, that's a huge number of hops" during which data may be lost.
Many network experts believe that the Internet will have to change to accommodate enhanced services such as @Home's. The question is whether this means the traditional network will become a victim of its own success.
"The existing open Net is so firmly implanted in education and research that it will continue there as an open Net indefinitely," said Michael Roberts, former chairman of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, a public body that oversees the distribution of Internet addresses. But he added, "It's too big, too important, too political to be treated as something for only a band of talented engineers to preside over."
But any changes in the network's basic structure will face numerous obstacles, including resistance from traditionalists who believe that the Internet is popular precisely because it cannot be controlled by big companies.
"The [Internet] is in trouble because it threatens so much of the establishment that it's provoked a backlash," Isenberg said.
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I think that members of the media should be required to take a first-year psychology course and a statistics course before being allowed to interpret and analyze "news" like this.
It is not a controlled study in any way, and at best, the authors of this report might have uncovered a corelation. Of course, there is no way of knowing at present which direction the corelation is (do students with naturally high co-ordination and concentration play vids or do students who play vids develop better co-ordination and concentration?).
There is a value in corelational studies however.
Corelation != causation, but if there no corelation, there is no causal relationship.
Interesting, but hardly newsworthy at this stage.
"microsoft tech support is more than willing to assist you with your problems." Provided you have your credit card handy...
that all of the hidden goatse links here on /. are evidence of potential astroturfing too?
Makes you wonder...
"Dude, dude, dude!!!! Next time you post a link to a porn site, give those of us at work an indication that's what it is!!!!"
/. before right? It is a tradition to hide pr0n links (esp. goatse)disguised in harmless looking links.
You *have* read
"Microsoft's new products will now screen out Java as a possible carrier of computer viruses in e-mail and, under high-security settings, in Web-browsing software. This move, first signaled in a software "security patch" distributed last year, is part of a broader effort by Microsoft to help stamp out the spread of computer viruses."
It seems to me that the best way to halt the spread of email viruses in a windows environment is to un-install outlook and migrate to Lotus Notes. Melissa and the love virus did not affect Notes users at all, except for the deluge of mail from infected Look-out users.
"But saying they're doing it for security reasons is just a joke."
Read bugtraq and notice the number of security alerts for microsoft (especially outlook and IIS) and compare that to the number of alerts for the other OS vendors sometime.
The only security micro$soft is interested in is their own. The security of their users does not enter into the equation.
"...they are forbidden to ship java, they lost the case against sun."
IIRC they were forbidden to advertise their products as being Java compliant, since they were not, but they were permitted to ship Java until the original contract expired.
They are perfectly free to try to negotiate a new deal with Sun to ship Java if they want to.
"Do you really think MS would let people easily install java???"
Why do you need Java? With Active-X you get so much more! Active-X does not have one of those viral licenses that destroy intellectual propoerty.
It can be used however to exploit number of security holes that permit viruses to propagate and destroy your data. Let's see Java do that!
The problem is not so much in installing Java, but in dis-abling and/or removing Active-X.
And now we see Extinguish.
Typical behaviour from micro$oft.
Nobody should claim to be surprised.
Check out:8 :w ww.the-nerds.org/on-seeding.html+&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:3Sa9bLOTFk
Here is the text of the article:
Seeding the scrapheap
People have noticed that this junkyard is pretty unique in the breadth of its contents. The usual cry is "its fake". Here is a discussion from someone that has climed the Canning Town piles, in search all sorts of things. The short answer: It is part of a real scrap yard, and its contents are tailored by adding and removing items, to the particular challenge. This tailoring doesn't decrease the challenge significantly.
First off: it helps to understand the purpose of the show -- its stealth science education - tricking 10 year old kids into watching an explanation of how a wing works. They sit thru the mini-lectures bcause they get rewarded afterwards with a shot of someone making precision adjustments with sledgehammers. When chosing challenges, its the education that drives the choice. The competition is partly to make it addicting, and partly to give the kids the idea that actually designing and building something might be a lot of fun.
Yes, this is a "rich" junkyard. There are all sorts of neat things to find. And unlike some, there is a lot of stuff that isn't metallic. (usually its construction debris -- the plywood we found had clearly been a concrete form in a prior life) -- Its mostly what you get, when you don't have the yard workers picking over the good bits. The set was a corner of a real working scrap yard. On the other side of the wall, there are cockneys in hydraulic claw loaders, tossing cars thru the air. You have to wear a hard hat when you go to the bathroom. (its out by the truck scales). When stocking the yard between episodes, the random lumps of steel plate are just dumped over the wall from what they have sitting around. But yes, they will add extra stuff to make it possible to complete building a machine.
The basic rule for seeding: If its not possible to safely improvise a part with the time and tools provided, they will provide something that can be pressed into service. It will require some ingenuity to make it work, it will never "just bolt on". If there are specific safety regulations, the relavant parts will always be provided. For example, things like safety valves, regulators, and gas tanks will be planted, and will have their certification paperwork sitting in the directors briefcase. (and if we happen to find such a part that isn't one of the known good ones, they don't let us use it) A good example: The propellor that the navy crew hacked up was provided. Any propellor they could make in the time they had (no time for glue to dry to laminate) would not have been safe to run up to speed. Another example was the tank and regulator used by the Dipsticks submarine - The tank had a current hydro test, and the regulators used were new.
But: Just because they give you a part, that doesn't mean its clear sailing. For example the wheels in the tractor pull. Sure they were there, but none of the differentials in the yard came close to fitting the bolt circle. If you wanted to use them, you had to make it work.
And this brings up another point: That same helpfull crew that hides essential parts, can just as easily remove them. They made sure that there wern't matching differentials for those wheels. In the fire fighting boat episode, there wasn't a pump to be had. Both teams had to make a pump. And not just a wimpy one, the burning shed was supposed to be 50 feet away.
"Another element I enjoy is the feeling of good-sportsmanship between opponents. "
I think we saw more of this in the UK version than in the US version of the show. IIRC, there were a couple of teams that were rather disrespectful to the opposition.
"Yes, it would be difficult if not impossible to make these great machines without providing parts, hey could still make it an interesting show by simplifying the assignments "
Let's see: with a few useful items strategically hidden in the junkyard, we get to seem people make really schweeet projects like cannons, rockets, and hovercrafts.
Take away those useful items and we would get to see projects like... ??
Gee, I can't imaging any of the projects being made if the junkyard hadn't been stocked with a couple of useful items pre-chosen by the experts.
You know what? I don't think any less of the program as a result! It's just entertainment after all...
"the only out and out lie that they tell; they say that contestants don't know what the challenge is until they hear it"
The experts submit the lists of materials. It is quite possible that the contestants (i.e. the other three people on the team) do not know in advance what the project is.
"You want to be best to market, not first to market."
That all depends. If your sole motive is to make the *Best* product, then being first is not that important. If you are after market share and want a return on your investment, then being first is critical.
If you look at the software industry over the past few years, the "first to market" strategy is clearly being followed.
Look at micro$oft. IIRC ever 1.0 version of software they have ever shipped has been crap. (IE, 16-bit windows, first version of NT, and so on). Eventually the patches and bug fixes are released and the product is usable. (OK, maybe in the case of M$ that is a bit of an overstatement, but grant the point for the time being).
There are tons of games that ship and you need to download megabytes of patches to make it playable. I think in the case of Half Life, I had to download a 25MB patch. Should it have shipped if it needed that much work? Probably not, but if they did not ship it when it did, their sales opportunities might have suffered.
The point is, if you can get to market, first, people will purchase it, regardless of the quality. Once they have it, these same people will stick to that product and are not likely to replace it with an alternative.
To coin a phrase, being first isn't everything, it's the only thing.