I've read the SCSL in breif, and was quite pleased to see this step forward for Sun. Releasing Solaris code will help them to strengthen their operating system, and will allow individual users to effect bug-fixes for their own needs.
It will not create an Open Source effort out of Solaris, but that's OK. Closed-source is a business model that deserves to compete toe-to-toe with open source. Solaris is a very nice operating system in a lot of ways (though I have little respect for their suite of tools and utilities). It does do threading in a way that I think is genius. It handles multi-processor SPARC systems in ways that Linux and the *BSDs should aspire to.
Bravo Sun! One small step for Sun; one giant leap for Solaris.
If this works out, perhaps they will see the value of going completely GPL and sucking in code from the Linux kernel. Then the waters will get very muddy!;-)
What about services like search-engines and Deja that display other people's content? Will Deja have to rate all of USENET? Will Google have to rate all of their cached pages?
Why not use C? Certainly C does have a lot to recommend it. The necessity of using all those weird macros for namespace manipulation, which I'd rather just use the namespace operator for, and the proliferation of macros are all disadvantages. Stroustrup makes the persuasive argument that every time you can eliminate a macro and replace it with an inline function or a const declaration or something or that sort, you are benefiting yourself because the preprocessor is so uncontrolled and all of the information from it is lost when you get to the debugger. So I'd prefer to use C++ for that reason.
Macros are the reason to dump C for C++? Woah, I got off of perl5-porters way too soon. Not to start a language war or anything, but this article read like a C++ lovers manifesto, not a reasonable set of excuses to use the language to re-impliment one of the most powerful and stable interpreted languages ever.
If you want a clean object model, just look at GTk+. If you want to eliminate macros just use inlines. Most people have a hard time with the idea of building inlines in header-files, and I don't blame them, but that's how you're going to end up doing it in C++.... And, don't try that "inline isn't in most C compilers" because most OSes don't ship with a C++ compiler. If you say that you can just buy one or get GCC, then the one you buy will almost certainly also be a C compiler that handles inline, and gcc supports inline (or __inline__ if you have -ansi turned on).
OTOH, macros are a good thing. Yep, I said what you thought I said. When a macro performs only a simple syntactic transformation, that's fine. I've never once been caught by such a thing. When a macro is a few lines of code, you've failed to correctly design your program, and I've lived in debugger-hell for that one. I can certainly see the value of consts over macros for variables, but that's not even something that's hard in C.
Overall this will end up one of two ways: 1) it will fail because C++ is too slow or 2) it will succede because he uses C++ only for what advantages the syntax can provide him without being trapped into the glitzy (and mostly useless) constructs that make C++ about as speedy as my grandmother on a cold winter day.
Along those lines: I heard a good joke recently. A JIT compiler for Java that claimed to run code "just as fast as C++"! I laughed for minutes. Then I cried when I realized that this will likely work as an add campaign. Sigh.
1. VC is not like SBIR grants. We're talking about the Federal Government *owning* a piece of some of the best and brightest technology firms in the country (if they invest correctly, which may or my not happen). 2. VC is notorious for having too much of a hand in company growth. What happens if the CIA decides that companies that they own a stake in should not be "wasting" their money lobbying for pro-crypto laws? Is that even constitutional? Does the spirit of the Consititution even concieve of such a thing? Love the checks-and-balances here. 3. What happens when the "right thing" for a company to do financially, is open a semi-indepencant European branch in order to interact with their laws (e.g. crypto, patents, etc) which differ from ours? Will this be used as a way to curtail such action?
This is just off the top of my head. Longer thought will amost certainly yeild further problems with the scheme. Oh my head.
"If this were a Linux or FreeBSD story, everyone would be jumping all over it saying that it was the greatest thing they'd ever heard of. But because it's Sun pushing a technology paradigm that's been around for ages, and apparently doing so effectively in ways that really count, many people seem down on it."
I'd rather see Sun do this than Microsoft, but the point is that centralized computing was one of the things that Sun helped tear down, and now they are coming to think that they need to move back to that model in order to protect the perception that they are a server company.
It seems to me that Sun is afraid that they will wake up one day to find that someone's gone and written them out of the loop with a clustering technology that makes fast, effective use of all those MIPS going unused on folks' desks. When that happens they fear that they will lose the server to the desktop.
They're probably right, but the way to solve that problem would be to be the first ones to get there, not to try pushing the old dumb-terminal idea. This is especially silly in a day when $500 can get you a fair machine, and another $100 will get you the crappy monitor that would be more than enough for your average high-school student. Sun needs to come up with the "Virtual Server" which looks to all the world like a Solaris server on your network, but is actually a time-slice of every client you've got.
Hmmm... Let's see -- it would take a distributed version of RAID so that losing any one desktop would not result in unaccessable files. Then you want process migration and load-sharing software. Now you need to build up a core of "central" services (e.g. daemons) which have some built-in redundancy (go ahead, waste those cycles, we'll put more junk PCs on the Guidance counselors' desks).
A real test would have taken several Linux systems and several NT systems (not to mention the other players like FreeBSD, Solaris, etc) and load each one with a competing set of internet content technologies. Let people show how strong or weak THOSE TECHNOLOGIES are, and breakins across-the-board on one OS will show a generic OS weakness.
The only problem is that this only shows the resiliance to script-kiddies. Most of the serious intruders (you know, the ones who do this kind of thing for PROFIT) would never be so stupid as to take part in such a contest. Plus most such intruders are INTERNAL, and end up using non-network based attacks (e.g. physical access, social engineering, etc). As the man said in "War Games": "Mr. Potato Head! Back doors are not our secret!".
There is a point of diminishing returns in tests like these, and I think those of us who have the source to our OSes in our grubby little hands know who's safer....:-)
My personal favorite is only slightly obscure. It was his portrayal of a bitter old man in 12 Angry Men, a film (based on a play) which follows the deliberation of a jury in a murder trial. Very emotional, and given the content, suprisingly non-preachy.
I went to google (first time) typed "google" and the first link seemed informative, so I clicked on it. "404..." Ummm, it was on their own site! Don't they try entering their own name?
Yeah, the new Illuminati is great. They took all of the cards from the old set, slapped art on them from the collectable game they did, and re-released. Much as the old game was a pain for managing stickers, though, I liked the old money better than the new cardboard chits.
They also released an updated "expansion set", since Illuminati is getting a little dated, they wanted an expansion that brings it up to date. It's just as many cards as the base game, so combining them gives you a very different feel (makes things like Nuclear Power Activists nearly useless, though, because of the increase in card number).
Here's hoping SJGames comes out with an updated Hacker (for those who don't know Steve Jackson Games was considered very technically hip for a game company, and ran one of the best BBSs back when BBSs were all there were). Hacker was a great game (if a little silly), and made for wonderful in jokes all night long with a crowd of CS geeks. It had cards like "Moon Microsystems" (Sun), "HAL" (IBM) and many other great puns and twists.
Hmmm, re-reading my post, I realize I was unclear.
I see MS thinking of this as a counter-move to things like the POSIX fiasco with DoD. That's silly, they've already burned their reputation. They would be much better off to port things like their DNS implimentation to the UNIX side and embrace-and-extend the UNIX platforms. "Hey, if you want to use fizz-bang-nifty-teabiscut, you'll have to run MS Bind 6.0 on your HPUX box too. Of course, you could just "upgrade" that old PA/RISC HP/UX to, say, Merced running NT"....
I really do hope they read this. Linux needs better competition.;-)
Now, if MS were really smart, they'd focus on going the other way. In other words, they can now claim some UNIX compatibility, and can start to take over roles that UNIX machines always did before *USING THE UNIX TOOLS*. Imagine an NT system running bind and pppd, at your service provider? ick.
Actually, just for other people's context: glade is a GUI builder for GNOME. It's pretty amazing (at least the development version that I've been using). I can do things like slap a generic application shell (that includes menus, toolbar and the framing for the body window) into my program in one click! It then generates C, C++, Perl, and a few other less important languages;-)
Seriously though, this is the tool that may start major momentum behind Linux as a development platform. Since it generates all of the development goodies (e.g. configure, autogen, etc) it's one hell of a leg up on starting from scratch, even if you only use it once to get the framework in place.
I'll, of course have to write the command-line interface, just to be sick;-)
I hear things about Glade getting sucked into core GNOME libraries as a way of dynamically reconfiguring applications (an ambitious goal!) How much planning has been done for this, and is it expected to impact application performance?
I found something very surprising, recently. I "upgraded" from the stock "stable" GNOME that my RedHat 6.0 system came with, to the "development" version that is under CVS (yep, real bleading edge). Lo and behold, my desktop started performing reasonably on my 300Mhz Celeron / 32MB RAM.... Go figure.
Some standard misconceptions that need fixing
on
Three on Munich
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· Score: 5
This document displays some fundamental misconceptions that we (yes, slashdotter, this means you) have been allowing to propagate for far too long. The first is that there is such a thing as an "end user" of the Internet. The very term implies a model akin to television or movies where a small group of providers spew content to the masses.
This is not the Internet that I know. The internet that I know (and have used for over 10 years now) is a peer-to-peer network, and if we're to overcome the misunderstanding that denies the existance several hundred million PROVIDERS of information, we must find a way to communicate this.
There are three basic flaws with the existing "end-user" model:
1. People who just use browsers still contribute through chat rooms, forums, feedback services (hi!) and hosted services like Geoyahoo or whatever. 2. The Web != The Internet. This document addresses things that could be done to label content. Pray, how do they intend to label ftp? gopher? telnet? ssh? What if I log into a shell account am I an end-user? What if I start using "write" to send nasty messages to all of the other users? 3. Everyone's a server. We're solving (through sheer technical stuborness) the problem of dynamic IPs. Anyone with Linux (or BSD or even WinNT) can run apache. Heck, it's likely already set up if you're running Linux! There are content editors out there by the dozen. So, how do you police? You really can't and that's what this document is all about.
You see, they know what I'm saying. They just don't want to admit it. If we get the word out, and stop the beuracracy from forming that would change the Internet into a publish/subscribe format, the world will have to adapt and find new ways to cope with globally accessable information.
Of course, then the document has some of the OTHER standard problems. The evils of "child pornography" are touted. You know, VHS was going to carpet the world in kiddie porn. It was going to be the end of civilization as we know it. What happened? You can find kiddie porn in just about any media outlet that is not completely obsolete. Why? Because humans have an instinctive affection for children, and many men are so hard-wired for sex that any source of affection rips out their cerebral cortex.
On the other hand, it's a very small segment of the population (some of them execs...) who cannot control themselves. I know, I know, if there were just a little more kiddie porn and terrorists, we could clamp down on all this darn free speach and get some controls in place before someone starts talking about how poorly the government functions.
But, as Dennis Miller said, "That's just my opinion, I could be wrong."
It lacks the BSoD (even given the attempt to indicate compatibility with BSoD-enabled systems through a misleading name).
Its mascot is a cute, little devil. That's DEVIL, folks. Just ask Phil Foglio! It's SATAN! Prince of lies! (Hmmm... I feel a filk coming on: "BSD Went Down to Georgia", based on the old urban legend about the woman who walked into a diner in texas wearing the Daemon on a shirt)
GNOME doesn't run as stably on BSD as it does on Linux, and we can't figure out how to load background images if we don't have GNOME! (xload...WHAT?)
Two words: Splash Screen. Where's the cute flying widgets in space while my diagnostics are being packaged up and thrown into/dev/null? Or, at least the smiling computer icon.
Clearly this OS is not ready for prime-time, and if we want to go with a well-supported, commercial-grade operating system, we'll have to look elsewhere. Meanwhile, you BSD fanatics can keep trying to convince us that Yahoo! and Hotmail aren't running on MacOS, just like the Army.
Ok, could someone with a modicum of USPTO understanding evaluate this thing and tell us if we're all leaping to conclusions or if this patent really is a broadly applicable as it seems?
I quickly decided to stop reading the California article sometime after:
"The Californian Ideology reflects this ambiguity by simultaneously advocating the New Left utopia of the electronic agora and the New Right's vision of the electronic marketplace. "
He then goes on to refer to both of the above-capitalized groups as "anarchists". I don't know about the rest of you "New Left"ists, but I'm neither left nor anarchist. If pressed, I would say that I'm a very moderate right hardcore-capitalist. Oh well, just another mouth that emits signal/noise 1....
DNS is not the problem. Domain name allocation is the problem. First off, there should be top-level-by industry domains. Not this.web crap, that's just going to incite more abuse. We should have.pharm (did someone stop believing that more than three letters were allowed?),.fin,.toy,.game,.soft,.comp,.rest, etc. Also secondary tiers should be established for certain industries that would actually *want* a long domain if it ended in the right thing. For example I know many companies that would kill for a.edu address, so why not have a fubar.com.edu? Are you trying to tell me that Hasbro would want clue.pharm? clue.doc? No, they'll want clue.game and clue.toy. For an educational game, they might want a.com.eud, etc.
We in the US have the *huge* advantage that we control the top-level domain space (unlike our.uk,.de,.jp, etc. friends overseas) and I say we should take full advantage of it! Clutter that space boys!;-)
DNS works. giving out only 6 primary domain heirachies with 3 being tightly controled was just short-sighted.
For those who haven't checked out 1.1.x Gimp, you really should It's a horse of a different bitmap. There's so much that's new. The Gimp/Perl plugins (my favorite, as a few are mine) have really come of age. The user-interface is still a little quirky, but gods is it nicer than 1.0.
The fast unsharp mask is amazing. Try sucking in a photo of some forest scene or people. Use Image -> Equalize and then use Filters -> Enhance -> Unsharp Mask. You will see detail you couldn't see when you were taking the picture!
1.2 is going to really rock. Suck it out of CVS if you want to see the latest, and/or work on the code. There's a great CVS tutorial for accessing the Gimp here:
Also, as a shameless plug, you could find out how to write plugins in Perl from my recent Perl Journal article. You can find out more about the Perl Journal at http://www.itknowledge.com/tpj/ It's kind of a funny article, since in it I plug my company, and I no longer work there;-)
This is actually no surprise. I was aware of it on a state level a couple of years ago. The scary bits are way beyond this (and, no I only guess at those, no hard data). Think about it, people have known for a long time that the FBI plants people at any potentially worrisome gatherings (e.g. protest rallies) and photographs everyone for the database. How do you think they're indexing those random photos? I think the face-recognition/matching tech has been public for what, 10 years?
On a side note, I find the fact that this directly follows the GPG 1.0 news on Slashdot to be very amusing....
One and a half or two years ago, this kind of rumor got started, and it would have made sense. MS could have nuked NT2K (pronounced nut tweek), pushed win98 forward into the graphic arts arena to kill the last vestiges of Apple and then released Linux + Win32API as their server platform with remote-display capabilities for their office apps using the X11 protocol (Ok, I'm dreaming, here but it would have been very cool).
Now, MS is locked in to releasse NT2K as a server platform which is doomed because it just can never be stable. It's doomed against Apple which is once again entrenched in the graphic arts arena, and on the general office desktop, Linux is starting to build on its server success and with Sun's acqusition of Star Office, we may begin to see NT2K get real competion on the desktop from Sun/Linux on X86 and PPC boxen.
MS is in big trouble, but they don't have an angle for Linux any more. Are they just creating a side venture as a Linux hedge? Might make sense, but it's risky. In one sense it's wise though (and this comes from having read Cryptonomicon too recently). They may have to deal with an awful lot of shareholder lawsuits when they start to loose money. Being able to claim that they tried to get on the Linux bandwagon may be a point in their favor.
Then again, it's likely just a rumor. MS would be practically admitting defeat by selling a Linux distribution. Embrace and extend? I actually don't think that's an option with Linux, but I could be proven wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read the SCSL in breif, and was quite pleased to see this step forward for Sun. Releasing Solaris code will help them to strengthen their operating system, and will allow individual users to effect bug-fixes for their own needs.
;-)
It will not create an Open Source effort out of Solaris, but that's OK. Closed-source is a business model that deserves to compete toe-to-toe with open source. Solaris is a very nice operating system in a lot of ways (though I have little respect for their suite of tools and utilities). It does do threading in a way that I think is genius. It handles multi-processor SPARC systems in ways that Linux and the *BSDs should aspire to.
Bravo Sun! One small step for Sun; one giant leap for Solaris.
If this works out, perhaps they will see the value of going completely GPL and sucking in code from the Linux kernel. Then the waters will get very muddy!
What about services like search-engines and Deja that display other people's content? Will Deja have to rate all of USENET? Will Google have to rate all of their cached pages?
This just can't work. Not on the Net.
From the article:
Why not use C? Certainly C does have a lot to recommend it. The necessity of using all those weird macros for namespace manipulation, which I'd rather just use the namespace operator for, and the proliferation of macros are all disadvantages. Stroustrup makes the persuasive argument that every time you can eliminate a macro and replace it with an inline function or a const declaration or something or that sort, you are benefiting yourself because the preprocessor is so uncontrolled and all of the information from it is lost when you get to the debugger. So I'd prefer to use C++ for that reason.
Macros are the reason to dump C for C++? Woah, I got off of perl5-porters way too soon. Not to start a language war or anything, but this article read like a C++ lovers manifesto, not a reasonable set of excuses to use the language to re-impliment one of the most powerful and stable interpreted languages ever.
If you want a clean object model, just look at GTk+. If you want to eliminate macros just use inlines. Most people have a hard time with the idea of building inlines in header-files, and I don't blame them, but that's how you're going to end up doing it in C++.... And, don't try that "inline isn't in most C compilers" because most OSes don't ship with a C++ compiler. If you say that you can just buy one or get GCC, then the one you buy will almost certainly also be a C compiler that handles inline, and gcc supports inline (or __inline__ if you have -ansi turned on).
OTOH, macros are a good thing. Yep, I said what you thought I said. When a macro performs only a simple syntactic transformation, that's fine. I've never once been caught by such a thing. When a macro is a few lines of code, you've failed to correctly design your program, and I've lived in debugger-hell for that one. I can certainly see the value of consts over macros for variables, but that's not even something that's hard in C.
Overall this will end up one of two ways: 1) it will fail because C++ is too slow or 2) it will succede because he uses C++ only for what advantages the syntax can provide him without being trapped into the glitzy (and mostly useless) constructs that make C++ about as speedy as my grandmother on a cold winter day.
Along those lines: I heard a good joke recently. A JIT compiler for Java that claimed to run code "just as fast as C++"! I laughed for minutes. Then I cried when I realized that this will likely work as an add campaign. Sigh.
Here's a few points on which this bothers me:
1. VC is not like SBIR grants. We're talking about the Federal Government *owning* a piece of some of the best and brightest technology firms in the country (if they invest correctly, which may or my not happen).
2. VC is notorious for having too much of a hand in company growth. What happens if the CIA decides that companies that they own a stake in should not be "wasting" their money lobbying for pro-crypto laws? Is that even constitutional? Does the spirit of the Consititution even concieve of such a thing? Love the checks-and-balances here.
3. What happens when the "right thing" for a company to do financially, is open a semi-indepencant European branch in order to interact with their laws (e.g. crypto, patents, etc) which differ from ours? Will this be used as a way to curtail such action?
This is just off the top of my head. Longer thought will amost certainly yeild further problems with the scheme. Oh my head.
This book list will give you a good idea of just how much she contributed to the science fiction and fantasy world over the years.
"If this were a Linux or FreeBSD story, everyone would be jumping all over it saying that it was the greatest thing they'd ever heard of. But because it's Sun pushing a technology paradigm that's been around for ages, and apparently doing so effectively in ways that really count, many people seem down on it."
I'd rather see Sun do this than Microsoft, but the point is that centralized computing was one of the things that Sun helped tear down, and now they are coming to think that they need to move back to that model in order to protect the perception that they are a server company.
It seems to me that Sun is afraid that they will wake up one day to find that someone's gone and written them out of the loop with a clustering technology that makes fast, effective use of all those MIPS going unused on folks' desks. When that happens they fear that they will lose the server to the desktop.
They're probably right, but the way to solve that problem would be to be the first ones to get there, not to try pushing the old dumb-terminal idea. This is especially silly in a day when $500 can get you a fair machine, and another $100 will get you the crappy monitor that would be more than enough for your average high-school student. Sun needs to come up with the "Virtual Server" which looks to all the world like a Solaris server on your network, but is actually a time-slice of every client you've got.
Hmmm... Let's see -- it would take a distributed version of RAID so that losing any one desktop would not result in unaccessable files. Then you want process migration and load-sharing software. Now you need to build up a core of "central" services (e.g. daemons) which have some built-in redundancy (go ahead, waste those cycles, we'll put more junk PCs on the Guidance counselors' desks).
Heh, I'd love to log into one of those babies....
A real test would have taken several Linux systems and several NT systems (not to mention the other players like FreeBSD, Solaris, etc) and load each one with a competing set of internet content technologies. Let people show how strong or weak THOSE TECHNOLOGIES are, and breakins across-the-board on one OS will show a generic OS weakness.
:-)
The only problem is that this only shows the resiliance to script-kiddies. Most of the serious intruders (you know, the ones who do this kind of thing for PROFIT) would never be so stupid as to take part in such a contest. Plus most such intruders are INTERNAL, and end up using non-network based attacks (e.g. physical access, social engineering, etc). As the man said in "War Games": "Mr. Potato Head! Back doors are not our secret!".
There is a point of diminishing returns in tests like these, and I think those of us who have the source to our OSes in our grubby little hands know who's safer....
If you're looking for further info on what this great actor did, visit his entry on the Internet Movie DataBase.
My personal favorite is only slightly obscure. It was his portrayal of a bitter old man in 12 Angry Men, a film (based on a play) which follows the deliberation of a jury in a murder trial. Very emotional, and given the content, suprisingly non-preachy.
I went to google (first time) typed "google" and the first link seemed informative, so I clicked on it. "404..." Ummm, it was on their own site! Don't they try entering their own name?
Sigh, the state of QA, today.
Yeah, the new Illuminati is great. They took all of the cards from the old set, slapped art on them from the collectable game they did, and re-released. Much as the old game was a pain for managing stickers, though, I liked the old money better than the new cardboard chits.
They also released an updated "expansion set", since Illuminati is getting a little dated, they wanted an expansion that brings it up to date. It's just as many cards as the base game, so combining them gives you a very different feel (makes things like Nuclear Power Activists nearly useless, though, because of the increase in card number).
Here's hoping SJGames comes out with an updated Hacker (for those who don't know Steve Jackson Games was considered very technically hip for a game company, and ran one of the best BBSs back when BBSs were all there were). Hacker was a great game (if a little silly), and made for wonderful in jokes all night long with a crowd of CS geeks. It had cards like "Moon Microsystems" (Sun), "HAL" (IBM) and many other great puns and twists.
Hmmm, re-reading my post, I realize I was unclear.
;-)
I see MS thinking of this as a counter-move to things like the POSIX fiasco with DoD. That's silly, they've already burned their reputation. They would be much better off to port things like their DNS implimentation to the UNIX side and embrace-and-extend the UNIX platforms. "Hey, if you want to use fizz-bang-nifty-teabiscut, you'll have to run MS Bind 6.0 on your HPUX box too. Of course, you could just "upgrade" that old PA/RISC HP/UX to, say, Merced running NT"....
I really do hope they read this. Linux needs better competition.
Now, if MS were really smart, they'd focus on going the other way. In other words, they can now claim some UNIX compatibility, and can start to take over roles that UNIX machines always did before *USING THE UNIX TOOLS*. Imagine an NT system running bind and pppd, at your service provider? ick.
Does it run X? Anyone know?
Who wants to port a UNIX app to NT?
Actually, just for other people's context: glade is a GUI builder for GNOME. It's pretty amazing (at least the development version that I've been using). I can do things like slap a generic application shell (that includes menus, toolbar and the framing for the body window) into my program in one click! It then generates C, C++, Perl, and a few other less important languages ;-)
;-)
Seriously though, this is the tool that may start major momentum behind Linux as a development platform. Since it generates all of the development goodies (e.g. configure, autogen, etc) it's one hell of a leg up on starting from scratch, even if you only use it once to get the framework in place.
I'll, of course have to write the command-line interface, just to be sick
I hear things about Glade getting sucked into core GNOME libraries as a way of dynamically reconfiguring applications (an ambitious goal!) How much planning has been done for this, and is it expected to impact application performance?
I found something very surprising, recently. I "upgraded" from the stock "stable" GNOME that my RedHat 6.0 system came with, to the "development" version that is under CVS (yep, real bleading edge). Lo and behold, my desktop started performing reasonably on my 300Mhz Celeron / 32MB RAM.... Go figure.
This document displays some fundamental misconceptions that we (yes, slashdotter, this means you) have been allowing to propagate for far too long. The first is that there is such a thing as an "end user" of the Internet. The very term implies a model akin to television or movies where a small group of providers spew content to the masses.
This is not the Internet that I know. The internet that I know (and have used for over 10 years now) is a peer-to-peer network, and if we're to overcome the misunderstanding that denies the existance several hundred million PROVIDERS of information, we must find a way to communicate this.
There are three basic flaws with the existing "end-user" model:
1. People who just use browsers still contribute through chat rooms, forums, feedback services (hi!) and hosted services like Geoyahoo or whatever.
2. The Web != The Internet. This document addresses things that could be done to label content. Pray, how do they intend to label ftp? gopher? telnet? ssh? What if I log into a shell account am I an end-user? What if I start using "write" to send nasty messages to all of the other users?
3. Everyone's a server. We're solving (through sheer technical stuborness) the problem of dynamic IPs. Anyone with Linux (or BSD or even WinNT) can run apache. Heck, it's likely already set up if you're running Linux! There are content editors out there by the dozen. So, how do you police? You really can't and that's what this document is all about.
You see, they know what I'm saying. They just don't want to admit it. If we get the word out, and stop the beuracracy from forming that would change the Internet into a publish/subscribe format, the world will have to adapt and find new ways to cope with globally accessable information.
Of course, then the document has some of the OTHER standard problems. The evils of "child pornography" are touted. You know, VHS was going to carpet the world in kiddie porn. It was going to be the end of civilization as we know it. What happened? You can find kiddie porn in just about any media outlet that is not completely obsolete. Why? Because humans have an instinctive affection for children, and many men are so hard-wired for sex that any source of affection rips out their cerebral cortex.
On the other hand, it's a very small segment of the population (some of them execs...) who cannot control themselves. I know, I know, if there were just a little more kiddie porn and terrorists, we could clamp down on all this darn free speach and get some controls in place before someone starts talking about how poorly the government functions.
But, as Dennis Miller said, "That's just my opinion, I could be wrong."
After all:
Clearly this OS is not ready for prime-time, and if we want to go with a well-supported, commercial-grade operating system, we'll have to look elsewhere. Meanwhile, you BSD fanatics can keep trying to convince us that Yahoo! and Hotmail aren't running on MacOS, just like the Army.
PS: In case you didn't get it:
Ok, could someone with a modicum of USPTO understanding evaluate this thing and tell us if we're all leaping to conclusions or if this patent really is a broadly applicable as it seems?
I'm scared, but also suspicious....
Oops. Got hit by the infamous slashdot text-is-not-text. That was signal/noise 1
I quickly decided to stop reading the California article sometime after:
"The Californian Ideology reflects this ambiguity by simultaneously advocating the New Left utopia of the electronic agora and the New Right's vision of the electronic marketplace. "
He then goes on to refer to both of the above-capitalized groups as "anarchists". I don't know about the rest of you "New Left"ists, but I'm neither left nor anarchist. If pressed, I would say that I'm a very moderate right hardcore-capitalist. Oh well, just another mouth that emits signal/noise 1....
DNS is not the problem. Domain name allocation is the problem. First off, there should be top-level-by industry domains. Not this .web crap, that's just going to incite more abuse. We should have .pharm (did someone stop believing that more than three letters were allowed?), .fin, .toy, .game, .soft, .comp, .rest, etc. Also secondary tiers should be established for certain industries that would actually *want* a long domain if it ended in the right thing. For example I know many companies that would kill for a .edu address, so why not have a fubar.com.edu? Are you trying to tell me that Hasbro would want clue.pharm? clue.doc? No, they'll want clue.game and clue.toy. For an educational game, they might want a .com.eud, etc.
.uk, .de, .jp, etc. friends overseas) and I say we should take full advantage of it! Clutter that space boys! ;-)
We in the US have the *huge* advantage that we control the top-level domain space (unlike our
DNS works. giving out only 6 primary domain heirachies with 3 being tightly controled was just short-sighted.
For those who haven't checked out 1.1.x Gimp, you really should It's a horse of a different bitmap. There's so much that's new. The Gimp/Perl plugins (my favorite, as a few are mine) have really come of age. The user-interface is still a little quirky, but gods is it nicer than 1.0.
;-)
The fast unsharp mask is amazing. Try sucking in a photo of some forest scene or people. Use Image -> Equalize and then use Filters -> Enhance -> Unsharp Mask. You will see detail you couldn't see when you were taking the picture!
1.2 is going to really rock. Suck it out of CVS if you want to see the latest, and/or work on the code. There's a great CVS tutorial for accessing the Gimp here:
CVS Tutorial.
Also you can find Gimp News here.
Also, as a shameless plug, you could find out how to write plugins in Perl from my recent Perl Journal article. You can find out more about the Perl Journal at http://www.itknowledge.com/tpj/ It's kind of a funny article, since in it I plug my company, and I no longer work there
This is actually no surprise. I was aware of it on a state level a couple of years ago. The scary bits are way beyond this (and, no I only guess at those, no hard data). Think about it, people have known for a long time that the FBI plants people at any potentially worrisome gatherings (e.g. protest rallies) and photographs everyone for the database. How do you think they're indexing those random photos? I think the face-recognition/matching tech has been public for what, 10 years?
On a side note, I find the fact that this directly follows the GPG 1.0 news on Slashdot to be very amusing....
"Star Trek! Excellent! Party Time!"
"Let's welcome out first guest ``the borg chick from First Contact.'' Scha-wing!"
One and a half or two years ago, this kind of rumor got started, and it would have made sense. MS could have nuked NT2K (pronounced nut tweek), pushed win98 forward into the graphic arts arena to kill the last vestiges of Apple and then released Linux + Win32API as their server platform with remote-display capabilities for their office apps using the X11 protocol (Ok, I'm dreaming, here but it would have been very cool).
Now, MS is locked in to releasse NT2K as a server platform which is doomed because it just can never be stable. It's doomed against Apple which is once again entrenched in the graphic arts arena, and on the general office desktop, Linux is starting to build on its server success and with Sun's acqusition of Star Office, we may begin to see NT2K get real competion on the desktop from Sun/Linux on X86 and PPC boxen.
MS is in big trouble, but they don't have an angle for Linux any more. Are they just creating a side venture as a Linux hedge? Might make sense, but it's risky. In one sense it's wise though (and this comes from having read Cryptonomicon too recently). They may have to deal with an awful lot of shareholder lawsuits when they start to loose money. Being able to claim that they tried to get on the Linux bandwagon may be a point in their favor.
Then again, it's likely just a rumor. MS would be practically admitting defeat by selling a Linux distribution. Embrace and extend? I actually don't think that's an option with Linux, but I could be proven wrong.