Now that the "We'll make money from our automatic update service!" Eazel/Ximian mentality is collapsing, hopefully there'll be more clever angles like this to work.
I take it you have not been following Ximian recently? Their partners include HP, not to mention the fact that Sun and Compaq have joined Ximian's GNOME Foundation. There are some VERY heavy players backing Ximian GNOME as the next generation UNIX desktop, and they're in the prime position to (as they currently are with HP) get development contracts for new features and provide support to the large UNIX players.
I'd say that their business model has never wavered from reasonable. People poo-poo Ximian because they do not understand it, and they associate the failure of Eazel with Ximian.
There's always talk about how "we" certainly aren't going to pay but "Joe Sixpack" will cover the cost of our free lunch.
The desktop consumers of UNIX have always been the financial, educational and scientific communities. Mozilla, Ximian and Linux have been quickly or slowly, but always steadily converting each of those markets (or, as with Ximian, converting the market leaders in those areas).
It may be AOL's view that Mozilla has done it's job by forcing Microsoft's hand. MS wants to keep it's lead in the browser world, and if threatinging them with AOL conversion to Mozilla get AOL placement on the XP desktop, well it was worth the money they paid....
I'm not saying that I would be happy with that attitude, but is there any business reason for them to not think this way?
Still, this is another example of shoddy, biased reporting in the Linux media. After all, why use the whole truth when half of it will do just as well! Now that's efficiency!
Actually, Linux Today is one of internet.com's rags (INT Media Group, Inc). They are more mainstream media than most of the well-known on-line Linux news services.
I suggest that if you want decent Linux reporting you go to linux.com or LWN.net, or just read/. for cogent evaluations of bad reports, like the above. Also, news.com tends to "not get it" as much as the specifically Linux-oriented sites, but they have some excellent general technology reporting (in spite of being CNet).
I have a feeling that if Slashdot had been around when the mechanical adding machine had been invented, we would have been snickering about the abacus being prior art on the "adding two numbers" patent.
If the patent had stated that their claim was on "adding two numbers" and then gone on do describe the adding machine as a "preferred embodiment of the invention", then you're danrned tootin' I'd bee snickering (and complaining about the incompetence of the USPTO).
Now, if I'm reading this wrong, that's one thing, but the patent seems pretty clear to me: time warping is ours. TiVo is how we do it.
A multimedia time warping system. The invention allows the user to store selected television broadcast programs while the user is simultaneously watching or reviewing another program.
Ok, what country can I move to to avoid this kind of stupidity?! They go on to describe their "preferred embodiment of the invention", which is basically the same thing, but "TV streams are converted to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG)" format....
The US is way out of control!
On the humor side: Hey, someone just got a patent on the Time Warp! Look out RHPS!;-)
Last reply. This is beginning to look like I've been succesfully trolled.
I was quoting YOUR statement not the article [...]
round up the the nearest obscene order of magnitude... a billion addresses per application is roughly 32 bits.
Yep. In what way does 1 billion (10^9), "rounded up to the nearest obscene order of magnitude" not equal 32 bits in the context of IP addresses? In case you missed what I was trying to get at, most businesses will not subnet those last 2 bits, they'll just throw them into the mix for good measure ("added security";)
I read the RFCs
Then why did you cite 96 bits of remaining IPv6 address space?
I love people that just start throwing numbers out there and say "See? Your'd doomed! We're all doomed! Don't believe me? Well, you're obviously stupid and can't do the math than"
Ok, I'll say it slowly for those in the cheap seats.
Assertion of fact 1: There are 64+16 bits of address available per ISP customer entity in IPv6. How the first 16 are managed is still slightly up in the air, and may not be available to the customer to directly manipulate.
Assertion of fact 2: The article suggested that using "billions" of IP addresses per device would soon be reasonable. Because of "increases in cyberspace".
Assertion of fact 3: Most medium-to-large companies will (conservatively) use 8-16 bits on subnetting, regardless of their actual need. How do I know this? Every such company I've interacted with ALREADY uses that much space in private addressing, and every one of them that I've spoken to plans to allocate IPv6 space to all of their private addresses, even if they're non-routable. This fact is based on the speculation that they will follow through with their plans, and that I've seen a representitive sample.
Extrapolation/Speculation 1: If companies start thinking in terms of using 32 bits of address for a single device (64 TIMES the normal allocation per device), you'll start seeing more abuses balooning out from there (I cite a major backbone provider that currently uses two/16's for their backup networks that have handfulls of hosts among MANY other abuses as "prior art").
Extrapolation/Speculation 2: Given about 16 bits of subnetting space left over for your average large company on day one and the above speculation, I expect that to get used up in about 5-10 years. Why? Well, for one 5-10 years is the span of time that it took to go from "class B addresses are being restricted" to "we're breaking up class As to avoid an IP address crisis" in the 32-bit address space. Also, in the next 5-10 years, I expect to see 1) every household in the US and other major nations become IPv6 address space consumers 2) easily an order of magnitude more multi-home companies 3) massive need for routable IPs in pupblic places on wireless LANs. Take the coffee shop in Mountain View (Dana St Roasting Company) as an example. Such a place will need to allocate 128 IPs even if their peak crowd of 128 users all have IPs in every other public place that they use the network.
5 years was never a hard number in my original message, and when I found out that the allocation was 64 not 32 bits per customer, I backed off to "5-10" years, but there's no argument that before that article showed up 128-bit addresses seemed like a whole hell of a lot more network, and the end of IPv6 address space may have just become visible on the horizon....
Then again, I thought that IPv4 addresses were too limited back in '89 and admitted that I was wrong in '91.... It's a matter of perspective and experience that makes us able to critique the past so clearly; I doubt that all of what I've said here will be certain.
Well, first of all, this isn't really a "conservative" example. You assigned 1 billion IP addresses to that?
No, my example was conservative because I know companies would be more wasteful with their allocation than I was estimating.
The number was not 1 billion in the article, it was "billions", so your comment, "Now as we all know, 32 bits is roughly 1 billion... well, at least you said it is... (32 bits is roughly 4 billion just in case you can't do the math which is what you're assuming people at Slashdot can't do)," was just a hair off the mark. I also pointed out that most businesses will "round up to the nearest oscene order of magnitude."
So we have 2^86 worth of companies that can exist with a 2^42 IPv6 addresses.
Go read the RFCs I think you'll be disapointed. First, I was wrong. The company allocation is 64 bits for Interface ID, not 32. Then there's the 16 bits of Site ID. But that's it. You get no more playground. The rest is allocated to address type id (3 bits) and ISP (45)
No, the space given to companies is very generous (vastly moreso than with v4) but if companies start planning based on using 32 bits per unique device, we won't last very long....
That's not how IPv6 is allocated. Check out RFC1884. First off, provider-based addresses only have 1/8 of the total address space (that's you, me and Slashdot). What's worse is much of that (45 bits) is allocated to service provider identification.
You'll basically have an SLA ID (Site-Level Aggregation Identifier) of 16 bits and an Interface ID of 64 bits. How can any company need more than this? Well, for starters, every company I know of over 1000 employees has many service providers for different divisions, acquired companies, failover, etc. Since those high 48 bits are used to identify unicast addressing and an ISP, you will have to have multiple SLA ID blocks....
When I posted, I thought the Interface ID was only 32 bits, so this is a much better situation. Certainly in a world where people allocate addresses as efficiently as we did in the early days of IPv4, we need not worry.
I give IPv6 unicast address space 10 years (5 more than my previous estimate) before we run out, and have to start chopping up the IPX space to give out....
Even if every company wanted a billion IP addresses, that wouldn't be a big deal in a 128bit address space
I didn't think I'd have to do the math on /., but here goes:
Company X has 100 applications that require a VPN (say, 100 data feed vendors). So, they do the usual IP address math that big companies do (round up the the nearest obscene order of magnitude). So, a billion addresses per application is roughly 32 bits.
Now, I need about 100 of those, but clearly growth is a concern, so let's say I need about 8 bits worth.
Ok, so before that company even gets off the ground. Before they even start deploying IPv6 on their servers, desktops, etc. They're using 256 COMPANIES worth of standard IPv6 allocation. If every company does this (and of course, this is a conservative example), we're talking about a gold-rush on IPv6 addresses that would exaust the non-reserved addresses trivially in the first 5 years.
Let's not be hasty, though, let's assume that we can multiplex these puppies. So, one device might be able to handle multiple servers and clients and rotate the IPs correctly using one IP space. Cool, so for each server-side device IBM buys, only one company's worth of v6 allocation need be used. That should give us another couple of years of life on the namespace.
All things considered, this is a very bad idea. Rotating through 20 addresses to confuse the issue can add some difficulty for crackers, but using "billions" of addresses will add you to my "rude Internet citizens" list.
This sounds very suspcious to me.... Problems as I see it:
Your clients must all use this technology. This is fine for building a VPN, but it does nothing for building services which must be announced to the public.
The quote: "The number of IP addresses drawn on may be in the billions thanks to an artificial increase in cyberspace, Sheymov said," makes me wonder. Are they refering to IPv6 or to private addresses? If we're talking IPv6, then I'm very concerned because I don't want to see every company on the planet sucking up billions of addresses per application. That would make the increase to 128 bits pointless. If they're talking about private addresses, you still have to map to an external address at some point, and that's your weak link.
Since when do we expect the former head of the CIA to sell security solutions without back doors?
On the other hand, since when do we expect the former head of the CIA to have a technical clue when endorsing products?
Actually, it's even worse now that flat rates are the norm. You pay what amounts to a tax on your Internet connection. It's not called out on any bill or otherwise made clear, but when an ISP has a.1-.5% load from crap like vcards, signatures, etc (I don't know the stats either, so I could be way off), they have to buy larger pipe a little bit sooner, and you pay a little bit more.
Ok, so perhaps it ammounts to a fraction of a dollar a month for the average home user. But, why should I be taxed for your footers? Just slap a URL on your messages and make the page as beefy as you like.
From UBS AG's (AKA UBS SA, AKA UBS Warburg) disclaimer:
E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message which arise as a result of e-mail transmission.
Wow! I'm stunned that they would send out every message basically saying, "we get ``viruses'' and our users pass them on; we don't care, you're on your own."
I've always been the champion of RFC 1855 AKA the nettiquite guidelines. And I quote:
* If you include a signature keep it short. Rule of thumb is no longer than 4 lines. Remember that many people pay for connectivity by the minute, and the longer your message is, the more they pay.
Ok, so Shatner will host. No biggie. If they steal the format wholesale, we'll see maybe 5 minutes of him per show.
Here's the tough part: who plays the other roles? Who are your celebreties? Here's my vote:
Keanu Reeves:
Well, here we are at the first ever Iron Chef: America. The Captain has just unveiled the secret ingredient: catsup. Our Iron Chef Soul Food has begun scooping up huge buckets of the red sauce, but it seems the challengers, England's own Two Fat Ladies are having trouble getting their sidecar filled with small cups of the stuff.
All right, let's introduce our panelists while the chefs get started. First we have former president William Jefferson Clinton. Good evening Mr. President.
Clinton:
Hi Key.. Kayanu... um... Neo.
K.R.:
And we have the lovely and talented Rachel Weisz
Rachel:
I don't actually have to
eat everything that they cook, do I?
K.R.:
Oh, I'm afraid so. And, joining us from the prestigious MPAA we have Jack Valenti
Jack:
Keanu, have you ever stopped to think about how much money chefs are losing when people share recipies?
K.R.:
Ah... well I guess I...
Alex Winter:
Ted!?
K.R.:
Shut up Bill! Um... I mean, go ahead Alex!
Alex:
It looks like the challengers are adding butter, lard, corn oil and smoked kippers into a pot!
Nameless Food Expert on Panel:
Oh right... I've seen this technique in English cooking before. The idea is to actually make the solid parts of the meal
float in grease so that it's easir to serve. This should be quite good, and great for firming up those arteries.
I thought that it was more of a lumbering glide.... I've heard the shuttle's aerodynamic properties described as "a brick that falls more gracefully than most".
One thing that I think is totally lost in most P2P networks is the potential benefit to amature photographers like myself. When I'm connected to gnutella, which I am fairly often, I offer up a selection (currently 6) of my own photographs including some nature shots and some people (including a very strange self-portrait). Of course, you would have trouble finding these right now, amid the piles of porn which dominate the visual offerings on gnutella, which I find somewhat distressing.
Most large companies (actually, all that I can think of) require that their employees use the "approved" groupware, including calendar, email, etc. The fact that AOL has developed their own system is sort of irrelevant here. In the end, if their system is poor, perhaps making everyone use it will incent then to improve it.
If wide usefulness ane marketability are your goals, go join Microsoft -- they're their goals, too.
That's a rather self-defeating attitude. If wide usefulness and marketability are your goals you should not be involved with BSD? Why continue to support the X86 architecture, then? Would that be because most BSD users are X86 users? Would that not be attention to "usefulness"?
I understand why one would want to port an OS to an obsolete platform. I'm not so clear on why the port would be absorbed into the primary codebase, but I guess that's not my maintenance headache.
However, I certainly think you want people to be involved who are interested in usefulness. I certainly think you want people to be involved who are interested in marketability (after all, how do you attract new blood without maintaining a certain attrictiveness in the project?)
Back in late '87, folks would talk about network security in the way you talk about gopher extermination on the east coast. "They" have to do network security, but "we" run UNIX. UNIX is secure, there's never been a major break-in on a UNIX system from the network that wasn't due to misconfiguration or social engineering.
Of course, there had been, but folks kept it quiet. Why air dirty laundry. Most people who worked on the code knew there were holes, but they weren't top priority.
Enter Robert "Wormer" Morris. He decided to blow the lid on this show, and made one little mistake. The rest is history....
One day, Mr. Bernstien will make a mistake. Everyone does. When that day comes, I dearly hope that I'm not using an OS that would take it for granted that such a mistake will never happen.
Don't get me wrong. I like the man's coding ethic, I just think he should let someone else package, license and distribute his software for him, so that it promotes, not prevents others from using his software (in the same way that RMS should let someone else do his public appearences;-)
Re:"People like you will never get it"
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While I agree that no one should be forced to spell or grammer-check if they don't want to,/. would really benefit from spellchecking as an option. I would love to use it on posts (I hate composing in emacs, vi, what-have-you, and then cutting-and-pasting).
It's not so much that I want to see Taco or Hemos or Katz or any particular poster spell-check. *I* want to.
Re:Well, I see the usual anti-union bushwah
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IT Unions?
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but the point is there are lots of circumstances where if you are being mistreated by management, you will be unable to defend yourself despite your Mighty Coding Prowess. The company is bigger than you. It has more money than you. It does *not*, I repeat *Not!* give a Flying Fiddler's F**** about you.
Just to turn that around so that you know where us "union cynics" are coming from:
There are lots of circumstances where if you are being mistreated by unions, you will be unable to defend yourself despite your Mighty Coding Prowess. The union is bigger than you. It has more money than you. It does *not*, I repeat *Not!* give a Flying Fiddler's F**** about you.
Unions are companies that sustain their growth through acquisition of members. They don't really have any strong interest in any particular member, and after the initial spirit of a union is drained by time, they don't particularly care about the industry that they intersect. They are a creature of politics, for all the ill (and occasional good) that that entails.
Unions have a place where a workforce needs to rally itself against opressive conditions and unfair treatment, but I've always been of the opinion that each generation of workers shold disolve their parents' unions and decide from scratch how/when/if to create new ones.
BTW: The defense against what both you and I said above is to note that I select my company (and hopefully, you your union) on the basis of how much it cares about me. When/if I no longer believe that it does so, then I stop reciprocating and eventually I leave to find another job.
The same can be said of a union... unless of course, your inudustry is made up of "union shops", and you cannot escape your particular union (e.g. auto-workers, actors, screen writers, etc). Then it's as if you work in an industry where one company has a monopoly on what you do, so you have no choice but to work for that one company. This is the future that I fear when I hear people talking about technical unions for systems administration or programming.
Laptops really are not all that expensive. If you compare the cost of your average laptop with the cost of a PC+monitor, the difference is around $500-$1000 depending on how ballsy your "average" machine is.
Now, take into account that some fraction of the users in most companies are also going to want laptops. Now, take into account that the laptops will continue working without power, without a UPS. Now, you're starting to add up some change.
Next you should think about your PC admin. The difference to him/her is that, instead of having a clunky box that you have to crawl under desks to service, you have a small box ON TOP of the desk.
All the way around, laptops are the best choice for most causual users. Designers tend to not like laptops because the LCDs suck, but that's a small (or absent?) portion of most companies.
This confuses me. I can see how they could claim that these companies owe licensing fees, but to demand destruction of infringing devices...? That seems WAY over the top.
Is this standard in patent suits? Lawyers? Anyone?
Cool, I had no idea. When I went poking, the interface for adding non AOL accounts was not too obvious, but I did set it up. I may end up using gaim because I mostly want Jabber access, but gaim is doing the AOL thing well, and so I may get my AOL access through that.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that the "We'll make money from our automatic update service!" Eazel/Ximian mentality is collapsing, hopefully there'll be more clever angles like this to work.
I take it you have not been following Ximian recently? Their partners include HP, not to mention the fact that Sun and Compaq have joined Ximian's GNOME Foundation. There are some VERY heavy players backing Ximian GNOME as the next generation UNIX desktop, and they're in the prime position to (as they currently are with HP) get development contracts for new features and provide support to the large UNIX players.
I'd say that their business model has never wavered from reasonable. People poo-poo Ximian because they do not understand it, and they associate the failure of Eazel with Ximian.
There's always talk about how "we" certainly aren't going to pay but "Joe Sixpack" will cover the cost of our free lunch.
The desktop consumers of UNIX have always been the financial, educational and scientific communities. Mozilla, Ximian and Linux have been quickly or slowly, but always steadily converting each of those markets (or, as with Ximian, converting the market leaders in those areas).
It may be AOL's view that Mozilla has done it's job by forcing Microsoft's hand. MS wants to keep it's lead in the browser world, and if threatinging them with AOL conversion to Mozilla get AOL placement on the XP desktop, well it was worth the money they paid....
I'm not saying that I would be happy with that attitude, but is there any business reason for them to not think this way?
Still, this is another example of shoddy, biased reporting in the Linux media. After all, why use the whole truth when half of it will do just as well! Now that's efficiency!
/. for cogent evaluations of bad reports, like the above. Also, news.com tends to "not get it" as much as the specifically Linux-oriented sites, but they have some excellent general technology reporting (in spite of being CNet).
Actually, Linux Today is one of internet.com's rags (INT Media Group, Inc). They are more mainstream media than most of the well-known on-line Linux news services.
I suggest that if you want decent Linux reporting you go to linux.com or LWN.net, or just read
At least CNN knows how to spell Transmeta without the D.
/. , not CNN. 'Nuf said.
Given the choice between technical accuracy (I daresay clue) and typos... well, I read
I may add a first born child clause at some point too. Or a root beer one.
;-)
Ah... that would be "free as in root beer," then?
Or would that be "free(2) as in uid 0 beer"?
Hmm... I think I should wake up in the mornings, BEFORE posting
Did your mother think of that?
Uncalled for.
I have a feeling that if Slashdot had been around when the mechanical adding machine had been invented, we would have been snickering about the abacus being prior art on the "adding two numbers" patent.
If the patent had stated that their claim was on "adding two numbers" and then gone on do describe the adding machine as a "preferred embodiment of the invention", then you're danrned tootin' I'd bee snickering (and complaining about the incompetence of the USPTO).
Now, if I'm reading this wrong, that's one thing, but the patent seems pretty clear to me: time warping is ours. TiVo is how we do it.
IANAL, but how else can one read that?
Ok, what country can I move to to avoid this kind of stupidity?! They go on to describe their "preferred embodiment of the invention", which is basically the same thing, but "TV streams are converted to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG)" format....
The US is way out of control!
On the humor side: Hey, someone just got a patent on the Time Warp! Look out RHPS!
Assertion of fact 1: There are 64+16 bits of address available per ISP customer entity in IPv6. How the first 16 are managed is still slightly up in the air, and may not be available to the customer to directly manipulate.
Assertion of fact 2: The article suggested that using "billions" of IP addresses per device would soon be reasonable. Because of "increases in cyberspace".
Assertion of fact 3: Most medium-to-large companies will (conservatively) use 8-16 bits on subnetting, regardless of their actual need. How do I know this? Every such company I've interacted with ALREADY uses that much space in private addressing, and every one of them that I've spoken to plans to allocate IPv6 space to all of their private addresses, even if they're non-routable. This fact is based on the speculation that they will follow through with their plans, and that I've seen a representitive sample.
Extrapolation/Speculation 1: If companies start thinking in terms of using 32 bits of address for a single device (64 TIMES the normal allocation per device), you'll start seeing more abuses balooning out from there (I cite a major backbone provider that currently uses two
Extrapolation/Speculation 2: Given about 16 bits of subnetting space left over for your average large company on day one and the above speculation, I expect that to get used up in about 5-10 years. Why? Well, for one 5-10 years is the span of time that it took to go from "class B addresses are being restricted" to "we're breaking up class As to avoid an IP address crisis" in the 32-bit address space. Also, in the next 5-10 years, I expect to see 1) every household in the US and other major nations become IPv6 address space consumers 2) easily an order of magnitude more multi-home companies 3) massive need for routable IPs in pupblic places on wireless LANs. Take the coffee shop in Mountain View (Dana St Roasting Company) as an example. Such a place will need to allocate 128 IPs even if their peak crowd of 128 users all have IPs in every other public place that they use the network.
5 years was never a hard number in my original message, and when I found out that the allocation was 64 not 32 bits per customer, I backed off to "5-10" years, but there's no argument that before that article showed up 128-bit addresses seemed like a whole hell of a lot more network, and the end of IPv6 address space may have just become visible on the horizon....
Then again, I thought that IPv4 addresses were too limited back in '89 and admitted that I was wrong in '91.... It's a matter of perspective and experience that makes us able to critique the past so clearly; I doubt that all of what I've said here will be certain.
The number was not 1 billion in the article, it was "billions", so your comment, "Now as we all know, 32 bits is roughly 1 billion
No, the space given to companies is very generous (vastly moreso than with v4) but if companies start planning based on using 32 bits per unique device, we won't last very long....
That's not how IPv6 is allocated. Check out RFC1884. First off, provider-based addresses only have 1/8 of the total address space (that's you, me and Slashdot). What's worse is much of that (45 bits) is allocated to service provider identification.
You'll basically have an SLA ID (Site-Level Aggregation Identifier) of 16 bits and an Interface ID of 64 bits. How can any company need more than this? Well, for starters, every company I know of over 1000 employees has many service providers for different divisions, acquired companies, failover, etc. Since those high 48 bits are used to identify unicast addressing and an ISP, you will have to have multiple SLA ID blocks....
When I posted, I thought the Interface ID was only 32 bits, so this is a much better situation. Certainly in a world where people allocate addresses as efficiently as we did in the early days of IPv4, we need not worry.
I give IPv6 unicast address space 10 years (5 more than my previous estimate) before we run out, and have to start chopping up the IPX space to give out....
Company X has 100 applications that require a VPN (say, 100 data feed vendors). So, they do the usual IP address math that big companies do (round up the the nearest obscene order of magnitude). So, a billion addresses per application is roughly 32 bits.
Now, I need about 100 of those, but clearly growth is a concern, so let's say I need about 8 bits worth.
Ok, so before that company even gets off the ground. Before they even start deploying IPv6 on their servers, desktops, etc. They're using 256 COMPANIES worth of standard IPv6 allocation. If every company does this (and of course, this is a conservative example), we're talking about a gold-rush on IPv6 addresses that would exaust the non-reserved addresses trivially in the first 5 years.
Let's not be hasty, though, let's assume that we can multiplex these puppies. So, one device might be able to handle multiple servers and clients and rotate the IPs correctly using one IP space. Cool, so for each server-side device IBM buys, only one company's worth of v6 allocation need be used. That should give us another couple of years of life on the namespace.
All things considered, this is a very bad idea. Rotating through 20 addresses to confuse the issue can add some difficulty for crackers, but using "billions" of addresses will add you to my "rude Internet citizens" list.
- Your clients must all use this technology. This is fine for building a VPN, but it does nothing for building services which must be announced to the public.
- The quote: "The number of IP addresses drawn on may be in the billions thanks to an artificial increase in cyberspace, Sheymov said," makes me wonder. Are they refering to IPv6 or to private addresses? If we're talking IPv6, then I'm very concerned because I don't want to see every company on the planet sucking up billions of addresses per application. That would make the increase to 128 bits pointless. If they're talking about private addresses, you still have to map to an external address at some point, and that's your weak link.
- Since when do we expect the former head of the CIA to sell security solutions without back doors?
- On the other hand, since when do we expect the former head of the CIA to have a technical clue when endorsing products?
Color me skeptical....Actually, it's even worse now that flat rates are the norm. You pay what amounts to a tax on your Internet connection. It's not called out on any bill or otherwise made clear, but when an ISP has a .1-.5% load from crap like vcards, signatures, etc (I don't know the stats either, so I could be way off), they have to buy larger pipe a little bit sooner, and you pay a little bit more.
Ok, so perhaps it ammounts to a fraction of a dollar a month for the average home user. But, why should I be taxed for your footers? Just slap a URL on your messages and make the page as beefy as you like.
I've always been the champion of RFC 1855 AKA the nettiquite guidelines. And I quote:
Here's the tough part: who plays the other roles? Who are your celebreties? Here's my vote:
Keanu Reeves:Clinton:K.R.:Rachel:K.R.:Jack:K.R.:Alex Winter:K.R.:Alex:Nameless Food Expert on Panel:
Ah yes... I can see this working quite well...
I thought that it was more of a lumbering glide.... I've heard the shuttle's aerodynamic properties described as "a brick that falls more gracefully than most".
One thing that I think is totally lost in most P2P networks is the potential benefit to amature photographers like myself. When I'm connected to gnutella, which I am fairly often, I offer up a selection (currently 6) of my own photographs including some nature shots and some people (including a very strange self-portrait). Of course, you would have trouble finding these right now, amid the piles of porn which dominate the visual offerings on gnutella, which I find somewhat distressing.
Most large companies (actually, all that I can think of) require that their employees use the "approved" groupware, including calendar, email, etc. The fact that AOL has developed their own system is sort of irrelevant here. In the end, if their system is poor, perhaps making everyone use it will incent then to improve it.
If wide usefulness ane marketability are your goals, go join Microsoft -- they're their goals, too.
That's a rather self-defeating attitude. If wide usefulness and marketability are your goals you should not be involved with BSD? Why continue to support the X86 architecture, then? Would that be because most BSD users are X86 users? Would that not be attention to "usefulness"?
I understand why one would want to port an OS to an obsolete platform. I'm not so clear on why the port would be absorbed into the primary codebase, but I guess that's not my maintenance headache.
However, I certainly think you want people to be involved who are interested in usefulness. I certainly think you want people to be involved who are interested in marketability (after all, how do you attract new blood without maintaining a certain attrictiveness in the project?)
No?
Back in late '87, folks would talk about network security in the way you talk about gopher extermination on the east coast. "They" have to do network security, but "we" run UNIX. UNIX is secure, there's never been a major break-in on a UNIX system from the network that wasn't due to misconfiguration or social engineering.
;-)
Of course, there had been, but folks kept it quiet. Why air dirty laundry. Most people who worked on the code knew there were holes, but they weren't top priority.
Enter Robert "Wormer" Morris. He decided to blow the lid on this show, and made one little mistake. The rest is history....
One day, Mr. Bernstien will make a mistake. Everyone does. When that day comes, I dearly hope that I'm not using an OS that would take it for granted that such a mistake will never happen.
Don't get me wrong. I like the man's coding ethic, I just think he should let someone else package, license and distribute his software for him, so that it promotes, not prevents others from using his software (in the same way that RMS should let someone else do his public appearences
While I agree that no one should be forced to spell or grammer-check if they don't want to, /. would really benefit from spellchecking as an option. I would love to use it on posts (I hate composing in emacs, vi, what-have-you, and then cutting-and-pasting).
It's not so much that I want to see Taco or Hemos or Katz or any particular poster spell-check. *I* want to.
Just to turn that around so that you know where us "union cynics" are coming from:
There are lots of circumstances where if you are being mistreated by unions, you will be unable to defend yourself despite your Mighty Coding Prowess. The union is bigger than you. It has more money than you. It does *not*, I repeat *Not!* give a Flying Fiddler's F**** about you.
Unions are companies that sustain their growth through acquisition of members. They don't really have any strong interest in any particular member, and after the initial spirit of a union is drained by time, they don't particularly care about the industry that they intersect. They are a creature of politics, for all the ill (and occasional good) that that entails.
Unions have a place where a workforce needs to rally itself against opressive conditions and unfair treatment, but I've always been of the opinion that each generation of workers shold disolve their parents' unions and decide from scratch how/when/if to create new ones.
BTW: The defense against what both you and I said above is to note that I select my company (and hopefully, you your union) on the basis of how much it cares about me. When/if I no longer believe that it does so, then I stop reciprocating and eventually I leave to find another job.
The same can be said of a union... unless of course, your inudustry is made up of "union shops", and you cannot escape your particular union (e.g. auto-workers, actors, screen writers, etc). Then it's as if you work in an industry where one company has a monopoly on what you do, so you have no choice but to work for that one company. This is the future that I fear when I hear people talking about technical unions for systems administration or programming.
Laptops really are not all that expensive. If you compare the cost of your average laptop with the cost of a PC+monitor, the difference is around $500-$1000 depending on how ballsy your "average" machine is.
Now, take into account that some fraction of the users in most companies are also going to want laptops. Now, take into account that the laptops will continue working without power, without a UPS. Now, you're starting to add up some change.
Next you should think about your PC admin. The difference to him/her is that, instead of having a clunky box that you have to crawl under desks to service, you have a small box ON TOP of the desk.
All the way around, laptops are the best choice for most causual users. Designers tend to not like laptops because the LCDs suck, but that's a small (or absent?) portion of most companies.
This confuses me. I can see how they could claim that these companies owe licensing fees, but to demand destruction of infringing devices...? That seems WAY over the top.
Is this standard in patent suits? Lawyers? Anyone?
Cool, I had no idea. When I went poking, the interface for adding non AOL accounts was not too obvious, but I did set it up. I may end up using gaim because I mostly want Jabber access, but gaim is doing the AOL thing well, and so I may get my AOL access through that.