Someone I know in Amsterdam once put it this way...
The American people seem willing to put up with searches of their houses and no-knock warrants all of the time, but are horrified at the prospect of someone tapping their phone.
The Dutch people would be horrified at the prospect of that degree of home invasion by the authorities but seem pretty resigned to the idea that their phones might be tapped.
The pervasive multithreading was a great thing. Rather than hanging bags on the side of legacy systems, they designed a system from the ground up with goals like minimal latency through the kernel, logical API's, pervasive multithreading, and super-easy-to-use IPCS.
...Secure Computing actually did a fair amount of the hardening of the kernel, and that NSA wasn't really in a position to release Secure's work, but figured that out after the cow was out of the barn.
If that's true, it's a wonder that Secure hasn't dragged them into court.
If you have access to the PBS-U channel on TV or can find the tapes, you might want to check out a group called "Standard Deviants" and their eponymous show.
It's basically high school curricula, at several levels, but they have a way of making some pretty dry material memorable. I was really surprised at what I retained after watching a few of their shows on physics and math. (They teach all kinds of subject matter.)
"Someone please explain to me what is so great about foosball that it makes programmers not feel exploited by a company that expects them to work 80 hours a week? "
I think you're missing something. The stock options are what kept me from feeling exploited.
The games and good coffee just helped me stay in the building more and closer to the task at hand.
My dad was a longtime UNIVAC/Sperry Univac/Unisys (the power of 2) veteran.
The first keyboard I ever touched was on the 1108 at 2121 Wisconsin Avenue, Sperry Univac's DC office in the 70's. Rumor has it that they heated the building with air from the machine rooms there.
I gather that NASA really loved their machines, or at the very least had a bunch of them, because my Dad would spend weeks at the Cape. I'm still kicking myself for actually sticking all of those mission stickers he gave me onto things.
I dimly remember a story about how one of the guidance computers for an Apollo mission didn't have enough memory (core?) to hold the entire course after launch. As I recall, just after launch, they powered down the guidance computer, leaving the rocket on its own for a little while, and quickly loaded the rest of the program and rebooted the box. I think he said something about not telling the astronauts until afterward.
If you know anyone who worked on UNIVACs, ask them about the drum memories...
My airplane won't fall from the sky because of silicon. Why? Because the FAA, in its infinite wisdom and classic governmental inertia is only now realizing that electronic ignition might work in airplanes. Better late than never, I guess.
I (and almost every other light plane pilot on the planet) have MAGNETOS, big, heavy, wirewound spinning spark generators, with nothing more advanced than a diode for sex appeal.
I hear they're good for interrogating prisoners too, if you hook them up to a little sponge...
I don't remember the citation, but there is an exception in California law for persons who are
shareholders.
In short, if you start a company, and it's acquired by a California company, then it's legal in California for them to ask for a non-compete.
This happened when my partners and I sold a firm. I can understand the rationale, but I think it's important that people who read the law above realize it's not 100% applicable.
I was thinking I remembered the name "Ginger" when the comment above reminded me of the Gary Larson "Far Side" cartoon, in which a human is scolding a dog about going into the trash, and the dog only hears "Ginger...blah...blah..blah."
One interesting aside is that a cursory web search reveals that this cartoon has launched an entire genre of research, ranging from papers on Far Side semiotics at:
http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/farside.htm
to a class project on writing a finite state machine to translate text into Ginger-speak.
Failing that, a personal hovercraft wouldn't be all that far away from the FAA's current SATS (Small Aircraft Transportation System) effort, which reads a lot like "An aircraft in every garage." Here's a paper on training issues associated with this system, which is supposed to fly in lower minimums than present IFR traffic, with pilots who know less about flying than at present. If that doesn't scare you, check out the rest of the proposed features:
Funny you should mention 1995. I remember it like it was yesterday... an example of the unintended vulnerabilities caused by routing table overflows.
I was at a big ISP and we watched entire geographic sections of the Net going down over a period of about 6 hours.
We eventually noticed that the nets falling down were all Class A's and the network numbers were increasing at a predictable rate. We waited with trepidation for the lossage to hit one that we routed.
Eventually they reached one that we were routing for, and it happened to us. Our routers just wedged. Then we discovered this stream of packets with monotonically increasing IP addresses from Taiwan.
It turns out that some guy in a lab fired up a network diagnostic on his LAN, not realizing that he was routed to the Internet. Of course the monotonically increasing addresses presented an almost worst-case routing scenario for routers that were already pressed for RAM, and they tipped over.
I think we had more headroom in our routers than many other people, thanks to one particularly gifted individual who babied them day in and day out.(I can't remember whether we had received the legendary 64MB RP's yet.)
Nonetheless, it was a damn effective denial-of-service, and took out 3 or 4 entire regions of the U.S. before we notified the offender. At least 5 ISP's were out for varying periods that day.
It was certainly a learning experience, but I'm not sure that the new breed of Internet providers have learned anything from their progenitors, so it remains to be seen how we'll fare in Round 2.
Most of the handheld satellite telephony projects (See "RIP Iridium" elsewhere for more on one.) have provisions for squirting user location from either embedded GPS receivers or satellite triangulation up to the gateway in order to effectively accommodate country-specific access requirements or tariff structures.
We know that people want to sell location-based services. (They're already threatening to with my SprintPCS Neopoint phone, which apparently has a GPS pod one can clip onto the side.)
I can't imagine the satellite phone companies won't want to shovel this data around too.
And just wait, ALL U.S. cellphone subscribers will eventually have user location information gathered on a per-call basis, because the U.S. gov't wants it for Enhanced cellular 911 services. My take is that the carrot for deployment of 911 location services is the ability to make money by selling you door-to-door routing on your cellphone.
...one who says: "This is old, and therefore good."
and one who says: This is new, and therefore better."
I have found a happy middle ground - I'm a furious "early adopter", but only for things that aren't mission critical. (e.g. I never run a.0 release for real work.)
I am often surprised at the degree of xenophobia and Luddite-esque commentary on/. I think part of having perspective comes from having lived through evolutionary periods enough to see that what goes around comes around again later.
Does anyone else think after years of decentralization and PC "freedom", the a web browser looks an awful lot like a 3279G block mode terminal with a server sitting in a closet somewhere that's not next to your desk?
Re:Differences between Globalstar and Iridium
on
R.I.P. Iridium
·
· Score: 1
I stand partially corrected. Iridium, while not the standard rate GSM vocoder, does have a GSM-derived vocoder. For corroboration, see the article "Out Standing In Its Field (an obituary)" below.
The path diversity feature seems by far to be the most exciting aspect of G*'s service. They're claiming that we'll be in sight of 2-4 sats at most times. Soft handoff might be the thing that makes discerning customers just use the uplink all of the time, if they're as frustrated with drops as I.
If you really love the idea - there's an option.
on
R.I.P. Iridium
·
· Score: 1
If you really love the idea of a universal mobile phone, check out Globalstar. They're just getting started, but the prices are better than Iridium, and the hardware looks MUCH more straightforward.
Because they're just getting going, all of the resellers, save one, pretty much have the same hardware prices and the same rate plans, but $1500 for a phone and $1.30-$1.70 a minute is a heck of a lot better than either the Iridium inital pricing or the Inmarsat stuff. I've seen AMPS carriers with roaming rates close to that at times!
The phone doesn't look like a bad art school/masonry project either. (The Iridium phones had huge hulking cradles for making the satellite part work, which seemed a bit kludgy.)
Qualcomm is making them a pretty spiffy phone for Globalstar that speaks CDMA 800/AMPS/Global*.
The one area where Iridium's ridiculous overengineering was nice was that you pretty much had one phone # that would follow you anywhere. G* doesn't have that kind of switch integration yet, so you have to have a CDMA/AMPS # and a Globalstar #, but you can certainly call forward between them.
G* just lit up service in late February, so it's a bit early to tell how things will fare, but they seem to be doing things right for a large-scale market approach.
By the way, I tried one of the Iridium phones, and found the audio quality to be pretty nice. It was GSM after all, so I expected it to be decent. I'm not sure how G*'s CDMA will sound, but their satellites are in lower orbits, so the latency should be less than Iridium's which was almost imperceptible to me. (Echo cancellers have improved much since the days of crossbar switches.)
I don't work for G* or anything, but I expect to be a customer RSN.
It wasn't clear to me from your note as to whether you didn't think there was GSM service at all in the U.S. or just that you thought coverage was inadequate.
GSM exists in the U.S. on 1900 MHz, and your existing European/UK/anywhere else SIM card should work with most of the U.S. GSM 1900 providers.
They will all rent you a phone for a month, and the services you've come to love should work identically. (except that some providers don't gateway SMS messages well, like Pacific Bell)
I'd suggest you look up Omnipoint in New York - they seem savvy with travellers.
Bravo on your distinction between the amateur and the professional.
I'm not one who holds with the connotation that there's any negative aspect to the term amateur, nor do I believe that simply because one is good at an aspect of an effort one is automatically a professional.
The one aspect in this case is generating code. The effort is generating, documenting (gotcha), and testing a product for delivery to a customer. Generation != product creation. If you don't believe me, go work for a shop writing off-the-shelf software for end-users.
I have to admit that I've found several of the comments here regarding the size and content of this discussion both enlightening and disheartening. It's clear that/. has a lot of talented readers, but it's also clear that many of them have the stereotypical tunnelvision attributed to geeks.
Development of a real software project can be a humbling experience. It can also be an opportunity to see how gifted people can create a thing larger than the sum of the parts when they work together and use the right tools, like style standards, consistent test methodologies, revision control, and (if we can ever get them right) CASE tools.
Oh, yeah, and if your manager doesn't understand that the muse sometimes has to just be there for you, it can really suck.
The one comment that/. edited out of my original post of this story is that since BeOS allocates a thread to every network socket opened, I'm really curious as to how it will play out over the longer term.
I've used so many hackjob thread packages, that finding an OS with this technology engineered in from the ground up gives me a woody.
It is clear though that a lot of people don't appreciate the value that certain OS features can bring to the party. I attribute a lot of this to ignorance or religion. Little tutorials like yours on multithreading are invaluable in correcting this. Thanks.
It's like when I first read the source code to the Linux IP stack and noticed that most of the lessons learned by BSD over 10 years weren't visible ANYWHERE. No slow start, congestion control, or even OPTION HANDLING (it was all stubs). That has changed some, and will continue, but some people require things to be right before they'll commit.
I'm as prepared to like Linux as the next guy, but I don't let one OS' features (or lack of same) define the possible universe.
I understand the omission but I was particularly disappointed that they introduced John Draper (Cap'n Crunch) in the early phone phreaking scenes but missed a sterling opportunity. As I recall, John wrote the FIRST word processor ever marketed for the IBM-PC. I seem to remember it was called Easy Writer.
I think John's story rates a movie of his own, but noting his word processor would have been an even better tip of the hat than the cereal box in "Sneakers".
On the phone phreaking front, I was waiting with bated breath to see if they would let on that there was apparently some shared circuitry between the blue boxes Woz and Jobs built and the Apple I. Oh well.
I did note with glee Woz' telephone joke line. I remember how amazingly popular those and the tape-broadcast phone "shows" and conference bridges were. If anyone has tapes of "Feedback", the "DeCreepo Broadcast System", and Woz' line, I bet a CD of them would sell as well as the Jerky Boys do today.
The fascinating thing about these, aside from the phenomenal bitmapped display, was the networking.
XNS, which still lives on in Novell's IPX/SPX (which TCP/IP still haven't completely killed) was a buttkicking network protocol for the time, and blew Appletalk way out of the water for larger enterprises.
The problem with XNS was that you had to string these little routers called "clearinghouses" around the building to make it all work.
That having been said, as recently as 1990 I was in a shop where 30 Xeroids were on contract and Xerox donated Xerox workstations for all of them because Xerox people adamantly refused to work on anything else. I was using Suns and VAXes at the time, and I understood why they felt that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone I know in Amsterdam once put it this way...
The American people seem willing to put up with searches of their houses and no-knock warrants all of the time, but are horrified at the prospect of someone tapping their phone.
The Dutch people would be horrified at the prospect of that degree of home invasion by the authorities but seem pretty resigned to the idea that their phones might be tapped.
I found it to be an interesting converse.
The pervasive multithreading was a great thing. Rather than hanging bags on the side of legacy systems, they designed a system from the ground up with goals like minimal latency through the kernel, logical API's, pervasive multithreading, and super-easy-to-use IPCS.
All in all, not surprising.
RT-11 and RSX11M are in my basement, if you must know. As soon as I can get media that doesn't require 3-phase, TOPS-20 will be as well.
Amen, brother.
The way I see it, we had a 15-year interregnum where computing technology took a backslide, and we're now perhaps emerging.
I just wonder when someone will release a batch management system as useful as Galaxy on the 10. Cron isn't it.
...Secure Computing actually did a fair amount of the hardening of the kernel, and that NSA wasn't really in a position to release Secure's work, but figured that out after the cow was out of the barn.
If that's true, it's a wonder that Secure hasn't dragged them into court.
If you have access to the PBS-U channel on TV or can find the tapes, you might want to check out a group called "Standard Deviants" and their eponymous show.
It's basically high school curricula, at several levels, but they have a way of making some pretty dry material memorable. I was really surprised at what I retained after watching a few of their shows on physics and math. (They teach all kinds of subject matter.)
The girls are frequently cute too.
"Someone please explain to me what is so great about foosball that it makes programmers not feel exploited by a company that expects them to work 80 hours a week? "
I think you're missing something. The stock options are what kept me from feeling exploited.
The games and good coffee just helped me stay in the building more and closer to the task at hand.
It adds a fairly sophisticated set of tweakable parameters for the radio as well.
My dad was a longtime UNIVAC/Sperry Univac/Unisys (the power of 2) veteran.
The first keyboard I ever touched was on the 1108 at 2121 Wisconsin Avenue, Sperry Univac's DC office in the 70's. Rumor has it that they heated the building with air from the machine rooms there.
I gather that NASA really loved their machines, or at the very least had a bunch of them, because my Dad would spend weeks at the Cape. I'm still kicking myself for actually sticking all of those mission stickers he gave me onto things.
I dimly remember a story about how one of the guidance computers for an Apollo mission didn't have enough memory (core?) to hold the entire course after launch. As I recall, just after launch, they powered down the guidance computer, leaving the rocket on its own for a little while, and quickly loaded the rest of the program and rebooted the box. I think he said something about not telling the astronauts until afterward.
If you know anyone who worked on UNIVACs, ask them about the drum memories...
My airplane won't fall from the sky because of silicon. Why? Because the FAA, in its infinite wisdom and classic governmental inertia is only now realizing that electronic ignition might work in airplanes. Better late than never, I guess.
I (and almost every other light plane pilot on the planet) have MAGNETOS, big, heavy, wirewound spinning spark generators, with nothing more advanced than a diode for sex appeal.
I hear they're good for interrogating prisoners too, if you hook them up to a little sponge...
I don't remember the citation, but there is an exception in California law for persons who are
shareholders.
In short, if you start a company, and it's acquired by a California company, then it's legal in California for them to ask for a non-compete.
This happened when my partners and I sold a firm. I can understand the rationale, but I think it's important that people who read the law above realize it's not 100% applicable.
I was thinking I remembered the name "Ginger" when the comment above reminded me of the Gary Larson "Far Side" cartoon, in which a human is scolding a dog about going into the trash, and the dog only hears "Ginger...blah...blah..blah."
m
One interesting aside is that a cursory web search reveals that this cartoon has launched an entire genre of research, ranging from papers on Far Side semiotics at:
http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/farside.htm
to a class project on writing a finite state machine to translate text into Ginger-speak.
Failing that, a personal hovercraft wouldn't be all that far away from the FAA's current SATS (Small Aircraft Transportation System) effort, which reads a lot like "An aircraft in every garage." Here's a paper on training issues associated with this system, which is supposed to fly in lower minimums than present IFR traffic, with pilots who know less about flying than at present. If that doesn't scare you, check out the rest of the proposed features:
http://www.academy.jccbi.gov/iats/session5b3.ht
Actually, I didn't mind the expensive cell phone, so I bought one© What I minded was $7/minute, which is why I bought Globalstar, which is more like a buck and a half/min© They didn't overengineer their network like Iridium did© Bent pipe transponders, even with CDMA, are comparatively uncomplicated and comparatively cheap©
Funny you should mention 1995. I remember it like it was yesterday... an example of the unintended vulnerabilities caused by routing table overflows.
I was at a big ISP and we watched entire geographic sections of the Net going down over a period of about 6 hours.
We eventually noticed that the nets falling down were all Class A's and the network numbers were increasing at a predictable rate. We waited with trepidation for the lossage to hit one that we routed.
Eventually they reached one that we were routing for, and it happened to us. Our routers just wedged. Then we discovered this stream of packets with monotonically increasing IP addresses from Taiwan.
It turns out that some guy in a lab fired up a network diagnostic on his LAN, not realizing that he was routed to the Internet. Of course the monotonically increasing addresses presented an almost worst-case routing scenario for routers that were already pressed for RAM, and they tipped over.
I think we had more headroom in our routers than many other people, thanks to one particularly gifted individual who babied them day in and day out.(I can't remember whether we had received the legendary 64MB RP's yet.)
Nonetheless, it was a damn effective denial-of-service, and took out 3 or 4 entire regions of the U.S. before we notified the offender. At least 5 ISP's were out for varying periods that day.
It was certainly a learning experience, but I'm not sure that the new breed of Internet providers have learned anything from their progenitors, so it remains to be seen how we'll fare in Round 2.
Go look up "Wheatstone Bridge" in any first year electronics text.
Looks like the "Bridge to Total Freedom" is a "bridge" after all.
Most of the handheld satellite telephony projects
(See "RIP Iridium" elsewhere for more on one.) have provisions for squirting user location from either embedded GPS receivers or satellite triangulation up to the gateway in order to effectively accommodate country-specific access requirements or tariff structures.
We know that people want to sell location-based services. (They're already threatening to with my SprintPCS Neopoint phone, which apparently has a GPS pod one can clip onto the side.)
I can't imagine the satellite phone companies won't want to shovel this data around too.
And just wait, ALL U.S. cellphone subscribers will eventually have user location information gathered on a per-call basis, because the U.S. gov't wants it for Enhanced cellular 911 services. My take is that the carrot for deployment of 911 location services is the ability to make money by selling you door-to-door routing on your cellphone.
...one who says: "This is old, and therefore good."
.0 release for real work.)
/. I think part of having perspective comes from having lived through evolutionary periods enough to see that what goes around comes around again later.
and one who says: This is new, and therefore better."
I have found a happy middle ground - I'm a furious "early adopter", but only for things that aren't mission critical. (e.g. I never run a
I am often surprised at the degree of xenophobia and Luddite-esque commentary on
Does anyone else think after years of decentralization and PC "freedom", the a web browser looks an awful lot like a 3279G block mode terminal with a server sitting in a closet somewhere that's not next to your desk?
I stand partially corrected. Iridium, while not the standard rate GSM vocoder, does have a GSM-derived vocoder. For corroboration, see the article "Out Standing In Its Field (an obituary)" below.
The path diversity feature seems by far to be the most exciting aspect of G*'s service. They're claiming that we'll be in sight of 2-4 sats at most times. Soft handoff might be the thing that makes discerning customers just use the uplink all of the time, if they're as frustrated with drops as I.
If you really love the idea of a universal mobile phone, check out Globalstar. They're just getting started, but the prices are better than Iridium, and the hardware looks MUCH more straightforward.
Because they're just getting going, all of the resellers, save one, pretty much have the same hardware prices and the same rate plans, but $1500 for a phone and $1.30-$1.70 a minute is a heck of a lot better than either the Iridium inital pricing or the Inmarsat stuff. I've seen AMPS carriers with roaming rates close to that at times!
The phone doesn't look like a bad art school/masonry project either. (The Iridium phones had huge hulking cradles for making the satellite part work, which seemed a bit kludgy.)
Qualcomm is making them a pretty spiffy phone for Globalstar that speaks CDMA 800/AMPS/Global*.
The one area where Iridium's ridiculous overengineering was nice was that you pretty much had one phone # that would follow you anywhere. G* doesn't have that kind of switch integration yet, so you have to have a CDMA/AMPS # and a Globalstar #, but you can certainly call forward
between them.
G* just lit up service in late February, so it's a bit early to tell how things will fare, but they seem to be doing things right for a large-scale market approach.
By the way, I tried one of the Iridium phones, and found the audio quality to be pretty nice. It was GSM after all, so I expected it to be decent. I'm not sure how G*'s CDMA will sound, but their satellites are in lower orbits, so the latency should be less than Iridium's which was almost imperceptible to me. (Echo cancellers have improved much since the days of crossbar switches.)
I don't work for G* or anything, but I expect to be a customer RSN.
It wasn't clear to me from your note as to whether you didn't think there was GSM service at all in the U.S. or just that you thought coverage was inadequate.
GSM exists in the U.S. on 1900 MHz, and your existing European/UK/anywhere else SIM card should work with most of the U.S. GSM 1900 providers.
They will all rent you a phone for a month, and the services you've come to love should work identically. (except that some providers don't gateway SMS messages well, like Pacific Bell)
I'd suggest you look up Omnipoint in New York - they seem savvy with travellers.
Hope this helps
Bravo on your distinction between the amateur and the professional.
/. has a lot of talented readers, but it's also clear that many of them have the stereotypical tunnelvision attributed to geeks.
I'm not one who holds with the connotation that there's any negative aspect to the term amateur, nor do I believe that simply because one is good at an aspect of an effort one is automatically a professional.
The one aspect in this case is generating code. The effort is generating, documenting (gotcha), and testing a product for delivery to a customer. Generation != product creation. If you don't believe me, go work for a shop writing off-the-shelf software for end-users.
I have to admit that I've found several of the comments here regarding the size and content of this discussion both enlightening and disheartening. It's clear that
Development of a real software project can be a humbling experience. It can also be an opportunity to see how gifted people can create a thing larger than the sum of the parts when they work together and use the right tools, like style standards, consistent test methodologies, revision control, and (if we can ever get them right) CASE tools.
Oh, yeah, and if your manager doesn't understand that the muse sometimes has to just be there for you, it can really suck.
The one comment that /. edited out of my original post of this story is that since BeOS allocates a thread to every network socket opened, I'm really curious as to how it will play out over the longer term.
I've used so many hackjob thread packages, that finding an OS with this technology engineered in from the ground up gives me a woody.
It is clear though that a lot of people don't appreciate the value that certain OS features can bring to the party. I attribute a lot of this to ignorance or religion. Little tutorials like yours on multithreading are invaluable in correcting this. Thanks.
It's like when I first read the source code to the Linux IP stack and noticed that most of the lessons learned by BSD over 10 years weren't visible ANYWHERE. No slow start, congestion control, or even OPTION HANDLING (it was all stubs). That has changed some, and will continue, but some people require things to be right before they'll commit.
I'm as prepared to like Linux as the next guy, but I don't let one OS' features (or lack of same) define the possible universe.
I understand the omission but I was particularly disappointed that they introduced John Draper (Cap'n Crunch) in the early phone phreaking scenes but missed a sterling opportunity. As I recall, John wrote the FIRST word processor ever marketed for the IBM-PC. I seem to remember it was called Easy Writer.
I think John's story rates a movie of his own, but noting his word processor would have been an even better tip of the hat than the cereal box in "Sneakers".
On the phone phreaking front, I was waiting with bated breath to see if they would let on that there was apparently some shared circuitry between the blue boxes Woz and Jobs built and the Apple I. Oh well.
I did note with glee Woz' telephone joke line. I remember how amazingly popular those and the tape-broadcast phone "shows" and conference bridges were. If anyone has tapes of "Feedback", the "DeCreepo Broadcast System", and Woz' line, I bet a CD of them would sell as well as the Jerky Boys do today.
Stop me before I reminisce again...
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
There was a Star, an Alto and a Dandelion IIRC.
The fascinating thing about these, aside from the phenomenal bitmapped display, was the networking.
XNS, which still lives on in Novell's IPX/SPX (which TCP/IP still haven't completely killed) was a buttkicking network protocol for the time, and blew Appletalk way out of the water for larger enterprises.
The problem with XNS was that you had to string these little routers called "clearinghouses" around the building to make it all work.
That having been said, as recently as 1990 I was in a shop where 30 Xeroids were on contract and Xerox donated Xerox workstations for all of them because Xerox people adamantly refused to work on anything else. I was using Suns and VAXes at the time, and I understood why they felt that way.
Nice try...Any UNIX kernel and stdio is still slimmer than anything '98 needs to run an app.
Of course, GEOS would fit the kernel, library and app in about 300KB and have room to spare.
'nuff said