One thing that distinguishes neural networks from other approaches is that the "cleverness" (ie. the effective rulebase that determines what happens) is embedded implicitly in the internal state of the network as a set of trigger weightings, and the pattern of weightings has absolutely *ZERO* obvious relationship with the work being performed in any sense that is meaningful to humans.
It's bad enough trying to diagnose routing problems right now, in a world of dynamic but still fairly deterministic routing algorithms. Add neural networks into the equation and all bets are off: we'll never be able to determine why any particular route was taken. (An explanation of "because those 57 nodes fired" is not particularly helpful).
Thanks for the reply. As always, it's horses for courses, and these days a useful 19" server can be about the same size as a hungry person's pizza, so the lack of parking facilities needn't be fatal to business. Just damaging.:-)
One certainly can't quibble with the 35 pounds/month price of the basic package, although prospective customers should note that 1 gigabyte per month is just 386 bytes/sec for a 30-day month, so they shouldn't expect to run any substantial web or mail services on that.
386 bytes/s is less than 5% of the bandwidth of a single ISDN channel, so obviously this would not provide viable service for any substantial constant-rate applications. In other words, the application needs to be one that is inherently low-bandwidth or one that can make good use of the burst headroom for this package to make sense.
"Corporate shopfront on the Internet" is probably not such an application, even for a tiny business. Worldwide 24-hour access, the roaming of search engines, and rapidly increasing expectations of end customers, all conspire to make such a miniscule average bandwidth unsuitable. And now that ADSL is finally starting to happen, the server bandwidth pricing of yesterday just isn't going to be of any use at all.
There are however still a few low-bandwitch applications around, so I might well check out Mailbox in the future. Especially when the Putney site's carpark becomes available.:-)
By not encouraging a geek presence on their stands, companies are missing a golden opportunity to create a buzz which then attracts further visitors, and so on. You're more likely to get corporate visitors too that way, just to see what all the fuss is about.
The price of raising the effective profile of your stand in this way is not high: you just have to print more leaflets and provide more fun exhibits and offer some lower-cost purchases, T-shirts and mugs if nothing else, and those can be offset against advertising budgets. A minimal-size booth will then probably not be adequate, but there were many larger stands at the show that were almost empty of visitors, a wasted opportunity.
Next time, exhibitors should invite students and other geeks as well as corporates, as an exercise in marketing if nothing else!
I expected to hear that parking was limited, maybe to a dozen cars in their courtyard say (this being in London), including some reserved spaces for incoming co-lo visitors with gear to unload.
But to hear you say that there is NO parking space available would make their operation a total joke. You can't expect people to carry servers from a car parked at a side-street parking meter, with boots needing to be locked as you move back and forth, subject to kids swiping leads from your loaded trolley, or even mugging and car break-ins once the criminal community realizes that this is a computer-gear loading point.
As for Telehouse, that's at the other end of the co-lo price and facilities spectrum. While parking used to be bad there, their new courtyard provides ample space when their main loading bay is full. That's beside the point though: the high price of up-market co-lo sites derives from their better housing and management facilities, not quality parking.
If what you describe is true, it's totally ridiculous for Mailbox's intended business. They badly need to move their co-lo rooms to a better site, and it could be even cheaper and more expandable for them to do so outside of London --- even just 15 miles further out would make a big difference, without imposing a travel strain on staff.
Mailbox could be of interest to me as well. My current co-lo outfit is too far away and their network availability is too low, so I'd like to expand elsewhere.
What's parking and ease of access like at the Fulham NOC? [US readers will be aghast to hear that not every outfit in London has a 10-acre carpark.:-)] And how secure is it physically?
Even if it were easy to achieve, that project would be effectively dead before it started, for the same reasons as amateur radio is effectively dead as a full-power communications medium.
The reasons? Centralized control by men in robes commanding the power to send 'round men with guns, and the severely limited bandwidth of a centralized communications hub (and let's not forget Shannon).
The fact that it's still a very enjoyable social activity and even very effective in niche applications doesn't invalidate the underlying point that amateur radio is unusable as a power building block in a world where Internet-quality communications (in both freedom and bandwidth) is an assumed minimum starting point. The reasons why the medium is so limited are of course entirely political: in principle radio amateurs could have multi-megabit, peer-to-peer dynamic networks capable of vastly more than the Internet right now (the aggregate amateur bandwidth is about 5GHz, much of it usable today), but the end result would be worthless except as a technological achievement. The gates of the amateur radio prison are still firmly shut.
Oh well, too bad. People have now discovered the freedom of the net, and as a result certain types of dinosaur will die out. It's the way of change.
Don't worry about it. Regardless of how much legal action there is or how many laws are passed about it, nothing will stop the current process in which people are rediscovering their freedom to communicate peer-to-peer.
The corporation-centric and government-centric world is dead. The noises and thrashings coming from that quarter are the death throes of dinosaurs, nothing more. They can still kill you with a bite or a swipe of their tails if you're within reach (the moral is, don't be), but their days are numbered.
Short of the net being shut down, this process is unstoppable, and it'll lead wherever technology allows it to go, not where money, power, nor yesterday's perceived notions of right and wrong say it should go. The future is no longer in the hands of men bearing robes or commanding armies, because they won't (apparently) cut off the communications that would put them back in the driving seat. Real power has moved.
In further support of DeK's position, the existence or otherwise of societies that set a precedent for one ethical view or another does not validate nor invalidate the ethics themselves.
Humanity may not have changed much since its beginnings, but we're merely on the first rung of the ladder. This protein form which has tailored so many of our prejudices will be on its way out fairly soon, and in the millions of years after that, in all likelihood not one single element of mankind's most cherished beliefs will survive except as a historical footnote, if that. Those precedents that the universalists seem to require are out there, in our future. Amid trillions of galaxies of trillions of stars, who's to deny it.
Meyer writes well, but like those cats that were reared in an environment without vertical lines, he just can't see anything that isn't in his preconceived worldview. [Mind you, that's a common ailment in many people who believe in universals, as he quite openly admitted that he did.]
That's the reason why, despite a lot of analysis of Richard Stallman's writings, Meyer did not level any criticism whatsoever at the freedom of source code which is RMS's primary and vastly most important issue. The entire rant targetted only side issues at best, and irrelevancies at worst.
Meyer, you normally think and write very clearly, but that essay was a beatifully written piece of mental rubbish. To find out why, read the standard piece on Logic and Fallacies --- you've tripped virtually every logic alarm in the book.
Failure of Venture Capitalism + projections
on
Boo No More
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· Score: 2
It's happening time and again: businesss-oriented people make stupid projections (sheer guesswork) just to bring in venture capital, the bankers then hold them to deadlines and targets, and before you know it, the venture goes to the wall and the ecommerce bubble is reported to be bursting.
It's all bollocks. These are extremely early days on a new business frontier, and whereas it's easy to see that the entirety of existence will be online in the fullness of time, at the moment only a wishful thinking idiot would hold him/herself to ransom through a banker's noose, to mix various metaphors.
The ecommerce bubble is not bursting, it's barely started to form into a recognizable shape. This is a ladder that will grow all the way to the stars, but we're currently on rung one or two. To say that it doesn't lead anywhere interesting at this stage is utterly ridiculous.
You have a conflict of interest and you should disclose it immediately to your employyer.
This line of thinking is definitely not that of the OSS camp: the fundamental premise there is that investing time and money in open source will benefit the company concerned, because many expert eyeballs will improve the software, the very high cost of software maintenance is dramatically reduced since those external eyeballs are unpaid, and a whole stream of other reasons.
Consequently, there is no conflict of interest here for the programmer, since working on the open source software benefits both him and the company simultaneously, even if done in company time.
Or at least that's the view of OSS. But the trouble with that rosy view is that it doesn't take the perversities of PHBs and personnel departments into account, nor that of legal departments that can quite happily argue that black is white if it suits them.
Better to avoid the problem altogether by modifying the free software only in your own time, and when at work doing only those things that are directly beneficial to the company: installation, configuration, tuning, bug hunting (send bug reports to your own mailing list), and so on. If you want to avoid future headaches, keep as wide a berth as possible between the two activities, and make sure that everyone knows that you don't modify the source while at work at all. Even if there is "leakage" which makes your private work outside less than "clean-room" clean, legal difficulties are very unlikely if one *never* works on the code in company time.
That's good advice and I agree with it, but I can't help rolling on the floor laughing at the thought of 10 thousand PHBs responding "GP what?" with a blank expression on their faces.
Equally funny (but not for them) will be the programmers that get fired for "holding the company to ransom with an anarchist license" (:-) or for "non-disclosure of prior conflicting interests".
But the last and best laugh will come later, and will again belong to the community. Companies that still have their eyes and ears welded firmly shut against the free software message don't deserve a free software programmer in their midst. If they ignorantly discard valuable resources, fairly soon they won't exist at all, while our growth exponential rises ever more vertically.
There is a much simpler way of ensuring that you don't enter the quicksand that most of this thread has been about: don't do your GPL'd work in company time.
That doesn't mean that you'll be working hard for your company in your own time and not getting paid fo it, because it's always possible to split a project into generic parts that make sense to GPL and very company-specific parts which in all likelihood will be of no use to anyone else at all. Keeping the two separate is actually very beneficial to the free software community, because it means that you'll take extra care to make the GPL'd code highly generic, and therefore more useful.
In addition, configuration, installation, testing, and so on, even debugging, can *all* be done in company time, even in respect of GPL'd parts. Just as long as you don't start modifying sources.
Of course, many companies are sufficiently open-minded (or oblivious of what's going on) that you don't need to go to these lengths, but if you want the lowest possibility of future headaches, the simple answer is to work on GPL products in your own time. (Go home earlier.:-)
Reminds me of that ATM running Windows ...
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QNX Crypt Cracked
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· Score: 3
The frightening thing is that some ATMs run Windows. There was a link on Slashdot about a year ago to an ATM screen that was hanging there unavailable because something in Windows had crashed and was displaying the standard error requester waiting for some non-existent operator to click on "OK".
Meanwhile the people wanting their cash waited, and waited, while the geeks giggled...
I don't think I ever read a quote from musicians before that made me feel like siding utterly against them.
What a self-centred money-grabbing bigot. Art is the last thing on his mind.
Roll on MP3, Napster, and sons-of-Napster, and may the artists eat dirt if that's typical of the way they feel about their relationship with their audience.
The whole premise surrounding the case is flawed, because it makes Demon special in some way when they're not, they merely reflect the state of the Usenet flood-fill.
Somebody posted an article allegedly libelling Laurence Godfrey, and regardless of through which ISP and in which country it was posted, IT WAS INJECTED STRAIGHT INTO USENET by the poster, so only the poster can in any way be responsible. Demon and every other ISP merely reflect the state of the global flood-fill, while providing the means by which posters can themselves inject their posts into the global system. Furthermore, any optimizations related to local injection prior to distribution are just that, optimizations: they don't change the model.
Demon was merely a postpoint, nothing else. They did not hold the articles in question except as a reflection of the global Usenet, so it was pointless of Godfrey to ask Demon to remove them from their own servers alone because the articles were on Usenet, not on Demon servers per se. And to have the articles cancelled across Usenet does not require any particular ISP's involvement (you can use any ISP), so Demon were not in any way specially involved even if the items were originally injected via Demon.
The whole premise of the action and of the defense was wrong, and Demon should have been advised accordingly.
If there were any justice in the system (which there isn't), someone would now be able to take Laurence Godfrey to court for destruction of freedom of speech on the Internet in the UK. Preferably it should be Demon, so they get their 400,000 UKP back, and the judgement ought to disallow LG from any further use of the medium which his actions destroyed.
But the UK courts have no interest in freedom of speech, being basically a playground for the power politics of government, corporates and pressure groups. Too bad.
They're called "covert channels" in secure systems work / Orange Book terminology, and it's extraordinarily difficult (actually, impossible) to eliminate them totally --- a case of asymptotic approximation, law of diminishing returns, etc..
The classic tradeoff between probability of detection and bandwidth of the covert channel operates here, but if the amount of data which needs to be communicated is low then the trojan spook always wins against the guardian.
On the other hand, detection of the covert communication is an interesting problem in its own right, because it boils down to the problem of telling the remote party exactly where to find the significant data among gigabits of obfuscation --- effectively the same problem as key exchange in crypto!
You write: Personally, i think the shortage is not of IT professionals, but of competent, well-trained ones.
It goes without saying that the only people that are of immediate highly productive use in an enterprise are competent, experienced ones ("well-trained" on its own doesn't cut it), simply because the pace of development is far too rapid for companies to be able to carry out their plans by training up raw recruits. It takes years to create a top expert, and the ratio of success to failure is low. Most people end up being barely passable, definitely not the kind you'd want as head designers of anything important.
Having said that, beggers can't be choosers, and alas, while the IT shortage is a matter of some debate in the US (apparently), it is most definitely not a matter of debate in Europe. We're desperate for people in all Internet-related areas except Microsoft, and currently it seems ludicrously difficult to find anyone on the market with even the most basic appreciation of elementary things, say port numbers in TCP. I'm fed up of interviewing guys whose idea of fixing a problem is to phone up support.
So, if you're a real techie and can't find a job in the US and have a means of entry into some European country (especially the UK, please!), then come and offer us your services. The pay is good too, especially if you're skilled enough to be a freelance contractor.
(Maybe if enough folks come over, I could get more sleep.)
The first rung on the Internet ladder was in academia twenty years ago. The second came with Tim Berners-Lee and the initial sprouting of the web. And now that business has finally woken up to the net in a big way, we're on the third rung of the ladder, one might say.
But the Internet is not a three-rung ladder. There are another 50 rungs, or maybe 500, so it's far, far too early to be making end-game analyses of the fate of the publishing industry at this stage.
They're just flapping around in the strong current along with the rest of us, moving a bit in this direction and a bit in that, and meanwhile wondering just where it'll all lead. To criticize them for not having adapted to the new environment is a bit harsh, given that nobody really knows whether there is white water, a waterfall or a fountain just around the corner.
Now we know why Windows needs to be rebooted every time that a significant event occurs: the Single Instance Store collapses all solutions into a single answer of "REBOOT" to fulfil their goal of massive saving of storage space, so when the trouble-shooting tool from their Decision Theory and Adaptive Systems Group uses its advanced statistical model to deduce that the most probable solution, naturally it returns the same result every time.
Well, some mail does actually make it out of Redmond, so clearly not all their servers run NT.
But alas the Penguin just can't deliver the goods when it comes to really demanding services like BSOD. And, contrary to the usual bad press about Windows availability, the NT-based BSOD service boasts a 99.9% availability record over 5 years, totally unparalleled in the industry. Try beating that, Tux!!
This business of mega corporates assembling high powered legal teams and forcing their way simply because they have bigger guns (and pockets) than the little guy....
It makes me think that they would react favourably to the commmunity blatting them out of existence on the net with a combined bouquette of DDoS attacks until they back down. After all, it's conceptually the same mechanism that they use, so they'd welcome a peer agency I'm sure.
Nope, that won't happen in the UK, because the regionalization battle for players has been utterly lost by the studios in this country: virtually all hifi and home cinema retailers sell de-regionalized DVD players now, and the major suppliers either offer their own warranties to cover chipped players, or else offer mods that don't alter the hardware and hence don't invalidate the original warranty.
As an example, the Pioneer 717 is one of the best "quality" multi-region-mod'd players, despite being around for a year now, and the prices have plummeted recently. You can get de-regionalized units from literally hundreds of outlets, one of the best being www.techtronics.com as their "E-Mod" maintains your original warranty and is totally transparent (region-switching is automatic). And it plays everything you throw at it, including "difficult" DVDs like The Matrix. I just love mine. And since it allows me to play Region 1 (USA) DVDs on my UK PAL TV, I can happily boycott regionalization by never again buying R2 DVDs. (They're crap anyway, for various reasons.)
Mind you, despite losing the *player* regionalization war, the studios are still pushing regionalized *media* in a big way. The clued-up movie buff is bypassing all that though, simply by buying their DVDs directly over the Internet from the US. It's a win-win situation now that so many players are multi-region, because not only are R1 DVDs better quality, but they're cheaper too. The customer is winning the battle here, at the moment.
... whether he understands the Internet sufficiently to know that this was a non-event in the IRC scheme of things?
You never know, he (or his spokespeople) might actually be more clued up than the media.
It certainly would be a coup for them to respond intelligently about what happened, in the sense that the US network-aware population would be astounded. I doubt that they even recongnize the political opportunity though.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that distinguishes neural networks from other approaches is that the "cleverness" (ie. the effective rulebase that determines what happens) is embedded implicitly in the internal state of the network as a set of trigger weightings, and the pattern of weightings has absolutely *ZERO* obvious relationship with the work being performed in any sense that is meaningful to humans.
It's bad enough trying to diagnose routing problems right now, in a world of dynamic but still fairly deterministic routing algorithms. Add neural networks into the equation and all bets are off: we'll never be able to determine why any particular route was taken. (An explanation of "because those 57 nodes fired" is not particularly helpful).
Oh joy.
Thanks for the reply. As always, it's horses for courses, and these days a useful 19" server can be about the same size as a hungry person's pizza, so the lack of parking facilities needn't be fatal to business. Just damaging. :-)
:-)
One certainly can't quibble with the 35 pounds/month price of the basic package, although prospective customers should note that 1 gigabyte per month is just 386 bytes/sec for a 30-day month, so they shouldn't expect to run any substantial web or mail services on that.
386 bytes/s is less than 5% of the bandwidth of a single ISDN channel, so obviously this would not provide viable service for any substantial constant-rate applications. In other words, the application needs to be one that is inherently low-bandwidth or one that can make good use of the burst headroom for this package to make sense.
"Corporate shopfront on the Internet" is probably not such an application, even for a tiny business. Worldwide 24-hour access, the roaming of search engines, and rapidly increasing expectations of end customers, all conspire to make such a miniscule average bandwidth unsuitable. And now that ADSL is finally starting to happen, the server bandwidth pricing of yesterday just isn't going to be of any use at all.
There are however still a few low-bandwitch applications around, so I might well check out Mailbox in the future. Especially when the Putney site's carpark becomes available.
Cheers!
By not encouraging a geek presence on their stands, companies are missing a golden opportunity to create a buzz which then attracts further visitors, and so on. You're more likely to get corporate visitors too that way, just to see what all the fuss is about.
The price of raising the effective profile of your stand in this way is not high: you just have to print more leaflets and provide more fun exhibits and offer some lower-cost purchases, T-shirts and mugs if nothing else, and those can be offset against advertising budgets. A minimal-size booth will then probably not be adequate, but there were many larger stands at the show that were almost empty of visitors, a wasted opportunity.
Next time, exhibitors should invite students and other geeks as well as corporates, as an exercise in marketing if nothing else!
I expected to hear that parking was limited, maybe to a dozen cars in their courtyard say (this being in London), including some reserved spaces for incoming co-lo visitors with gear to unload.
But to hear you say that there is NO parking space available would make their operation a total joke. You can't expect people to carry servers from a car parked at a side-street parking meter, with boots needing to be locked as you move back and forth, subject to kids swiping leads from your loaded trolley, or even mugging and car break-ins once the criminal community realizes that this is a computer-gear loading point.
As for Telehouse, that's at the other end of the co-lo price and facilities spectrum. While parking used to be bad there, their new courtyard provides ample space when their main loading bay is full. That's beside the point though: the high price of up-market co-lo sites derives from their better housing and management facilities, not quality parking.
If what you describe is true, it's totally ridiculous for Mailbox's intended business. They badly need to move their co-lo rooms to a better site, and it could be even cheaper and more expandable for them to do so outside of London --- even just 15 miles further out would make a big difference, without imposing a travel strain on staff.
Mailbox could be of interest to me as well. My current co-lo outfit is too far away and their network availability is too low, so I'd like to expand elsewhere.
What's parking and ease of access like at the Fulham NOC? [US readers will be aghast to hear that not every outfit in London has a 10-acre carpark.:-)] And how secure is it physically?
Even if it were easy to achieve, that project would be effectively dead before it started, for the same reasons as amateur radio is effectively dead as a full-power communications medium.
The reasons? Centralized control by men in robes commanding the power to send 'round men with guns, and the severely limited bandwidth of a centralized communications hub (and let's not forget Shannon).
The fact that it's still a very enjoyable social activity and even very effective in niche applications doesn't invalidate the underlying point that amateur radio is unusable as a power building block in a world where Internet-quality communications (in both freedom and bandwidth) is an assumed minimum starting point. The reasons why the medium is so limited are of course entirely political: in principle radio amateurs could have multi-megabit, peer-to-peer dynamic networks capable of vastly more than the Internet right now (the aggregate amateur bandwidth is about 5GHz, much of it usable today), but the end result would be worthless except as a technological achievement. The gates of the amateur radio prison are still firmly shut.
Oh well, too bad. People have now discovered the freedom of the net, and as a result certain types of dinosaur will die out. It's the way of change.
Don't worry about it. Regardless of how much legal action there is or how many laws are passed about it, nothing will stop the current process in which people are rediscovering their freedom to communicate peer-to-peer.
The corporation-centric and government-centric world is dead. The noises and thrashings coming from that quarter are the death throes of dinosaurs, nothing more. They can still kill you with a bite or a swipe of their tails if you're within reach (the moral is, don't be), but their days are numbered.
Short of the net being shut down, this process is unstoppable, and it'll lead wherever technology allows it to go, not where money, power, nor yesterday's perceived notions of right and wrong say it should go. The future is no longer in the hands of men bearing robes or commanding armies, because they won't (apparently) cut off the communications that would put them back in the driving seat. Real power has moved.
In further support of DeK's position, the existence or otherwise of societies that set a precedent for one ethical view or another does not validate nor invalidate the ethics themselves.
Humanity may not have changed much since its beginnings, but we're merely on the first rung of the ladder. This protein form which has tailored so many of our prejudices will be on its way out fairly soon, and in the millions of years after that, in all likelihood not one single element of mankind's most cherished beliefs will survive except as a historical footnote, if that. Those precedents that the universalists seem to require are out there, in our future. Amid trillions of galaxies of trillions of stars, who's to deny it.
Meyer writes well, but like those cats that were reared in an environment without vertical lines, he just can't see anything that isn't in his preconceived worldview. [Mind you, that's a common ailment in many people who believe in universals, as he quite openly admitted that he did.]
That's the reason why, despite a lot of analysis of Richard Stallman's writings, Meyer did not level any criticism whatsoever at the freedom of source code which is RMS's primary and vastly most important issue. The entire rant targetted only side issues at best, and irrelevancies at worst.
Meyer, you normally think and write very clearly, but that essay was a beatifully written piece of mental rubbish. To find out why, read the standard piece on Logic and Fallacies --- you've tripped virtually every logic alarm in the book.
It's happening time and again: businesss-oriented people make stupid projections (sheer guesswork) just to bring in venture capital, the bankers then hold them to deadlines and targets, and before you know it, the venture goes to the wall and the ecommerce bubble is reported to be bursting.
It's all bollocks. These are extremely early days on a new business frontier, and whereas it's easy to see that the entirety of existence will be online in the fullness of time, at the moment only a wishful thinking idiot would hold him/herself to ransom through a banker's noose, to mix various metaphors.
The ecommerce bubble is not bursting, it's barely started to form into a recognizable shape. This is a ladder that will grow all the way to the stars, but we're currently on rung one or two. To say that it doesn't lead anywhere interesting at this stage is utterly ridiculous.
You have a conflict of interest and you should disclose it immediately to your employyer.
This line of thinking is definitely not that of the OSS camp: the fundamental premise there is that investing time and money in open source will benefit the company concerned, because many expert eyeballs will improve the software, the very high cost of software maintenance is dramatically reduced since those external eyeballs are unpaid, and a whole stream of other reasons.
Consequently, there is no conflict of interest here for the programmer, since working on the open source software benefits both him and the company simultaneously, even if done in company time.
Or at least that's the view of OSS. But the trouble with that rosy view is that it doesn't take the perversities of PHBs and personnel departments into account, nor that of legal departments that can quite happily argue that black is white if it suits them.
Better to avoid the problem altogether by modifying the free software only in your own time, and when at work doing only those things that are directly beneficial to the company: installation, configuration, tuning, bug hunting (send bug reports to your own mailing list), and so on. If you want to avoid future headaches, keep as wide a berth as possible between the two activities, and make sure that everyone knows that you don't modify the source while at work at all. Even if there is "leakage" which makes your private work outside less than "clean-room" clean, legal difficulties are very unlikely if one *never* works on the code in company time.
That's good advice and I agree with it, but I can't help rolling on the floor laughing at the thought of 10 thousand PHBs responding "GP what?" with a blank expression on their faces.
Equally funny (but not for them) will be the programmers that get fired for "holding the company to ransom with an anarchist license" (:-) or for "non-disclosure of prior conflicting interests".
But the last and best laugh will come later, and will again belong to the community. Companies that still have their eyes and ears welded firmly shut against the free software message don't deserve a free software programmer in their midst. If they ignorantly discard valuable resources, fairly soon they won't exist at all, while our growth exponential rises ever more vertically.
There is a much simpler way of ensuring that you don't enter the quicksand that most of this thread has been about: don't do your GPL'd work in company time.
:-)
That doesn't mean that you'll be working hard for your company in your own time and not getting paid fo it, because it's always possible to split a project into generic parts that make sense to GPL and very company-specific parts which in all likelihood will be of no use to anyone else at all. Keeping the two separate is actually very beneficial to the free software community, because it means that you'll take extra care to make the GPL'd code highly generic, and therefore more useful.
In addition, configuration, installation, testing, and so on, even debugging, can *all* be done in company time, even in respect of GPL'd parts. Just as long as you don't start modifying sources.
Of course, many companies are sufficiently open-minded (or oblivious of what's going on) that you don't need to go to these lengths, but if you want the lowest possibility of future headaches, the simple answer is to work on GPL products in your own time. (Go home earlier.
The frightening thing is that some ATMs run Windows. There was a link on Slashdot about a year ago to an ATM screen that was hanging there unavailable because something in Windows had crashed and was displaying the standard error requester waiting for some non-existent operator to click on "OK".
...
Meanwhile the people wanting their cash waited, and waited, while the geeks giggled
I don't think I ever read a quote from musicians before that made me feel like siding utterly against them.
What a self-centred money-grabbing bigot. Art is the last thing on his mind.
Roll on MP3, Napster, and sons-of-Napster, and may the artists eat dirt if that's typical of the way they feel about their relationship with their audience.
The whole premise surrounding the case is flawed, because it makes Demon special in some way when they're not, they merely reflect the state of the Usenet flood-fill.
Somebody posted an article allegedly libelling Laurence Godfrey, and regardless of through which ISP and in which country it was posted, IT WAS INJECTED STRAIGHT INTO USENET by the poster, so only the poster can in any way be responsible. Demon and every other ISP merely reflect the state of the global flood-fill, while providing the means by which posters can themselves inject their posts into the global system. Furthermore, any optimizations related to local injection prior to distribution are just that, optimizations: they don't change the model.
Demon was merely a postpoint, nothing else. They did not hold the articles in question except as a reflection of the global Usenet, so it was pointless of Godfrey to ask Demon to remove them from their own servers alone because the articles were on Usenet, not on Demon servers per se. And to have the articles cancelled across Usenet does not require any particular ISP's involvement (you can use any ISP), so Demon were not in any way specially involved even if the items were originally injected via Demon.
The whole premise of the action and of the defense was wrong, and Demon should have been advised accordingly.
If there were any justice in the system (which there isn't), someone would now be able to take Laurence Godfrey to court for destruction of freedom of speech on the Internet in the UK. Preferably it should be Demon, so they get their 400,000 UKP back, and the judgement ought to disallow LG from any further use of the medium which his actions destroyed.
But the UK courts have no interest in freedom of speech, being basically a playground for the power politics of government, corporates and pressure groups. Too bad.
They're called "covert channels" in secure systems work / Orange Book terminology, and it's extraordinarily difficult (actually, impossible) to eliminate them totally --- a case of asymptotic approximation, law of diminishing returns, etc..
The classic tradeoff between probability of detection and bandwidth of the covert channel operates here, but if the amount of data which needs to be communicated is low then the trojan spook always wins against the guardian.
On the other hand, detection of the covert communication is an interesting problem in its own right, because it boils down to the problem of telling the remote party exactly where to find the significant data among gigabits of obfuscation --- effectively the same problem as key exchange in crypto!
You write: Personally, i think the shortage is not of IT professionals, but of competent, well-trained ones.
It goes without saying that the only people that are of immediate highly productive use in an enterprise are competent, experienced ones ("well-trained" on its own doesn't cut it), simply because the pace of development is far too rapid for companies to be able to carry out their plans by training up raw recruits. It takes years to create a top expert, and the ratio of success to failure is low. Most people end up being barely passable, definitely not the kind you'd want as head designers of anything important.
Having said that, beggers can't be choosers, and alas, while the IT shortage is a matter of some debate in the US (apparently), it is most definitely not a matter of debate in Europe. We're desperate for people in all Internet-related areas except Microsoft, and currently it seems ludicrously difficult to find anyone on the market with even the most basic appreciation of elementary things, say port numbers in TCP. I'm fed up of interviewing guys whose idea of fixing a problem is to phone up support.
So, if you're a real techie and can't find a job in the US and have a means of entry into some European country (especially the UK, please!), then come and offer us your services. The pay is good too, especially if you're skilled enough to be a freelance contractor.
(Maybe if enough folks come over, I could get more sleep.)
The first rung on the Internet ladder was in academia twenty years ago. The second came with Tim Berners-Lee and the initial sprouting of the web. And now that business has finally woken up to the net in a big way, we're on the third rung of the ladder, one might say.
But the Internet is not a three-rung ladder. There are another 50 rungs, or maybe 500, so it's far, far too early to be making end-game analyses of the fate of the publishing industry at this stage.
They're just flapping around in the strong current along with the rest of us, moving a bit in this direction and a bit in that, and meanwhile wondering just where it'll all lead. To criticize them for not having adapted to the new environment is a bit harsh, given that nobody really knows whether there is white water, a waterfall or a fountain just around the corner.
Now we know why Windows needs to be rebooted every time that a significant event occurs: the Single Instance Store collapses all solutions into a single answer of "REBOOT" to fulfil their goal of massive saving of storage space, so when the trouble-shooting tool from their Decision Theory and Adaptive Systems Group uses its advanced statistical model to deduce that the most probable solution, naturally it returns the same result every time.
What hope does Tux have against such ingenuity!
;-)
Well, some mail does actually make it out of Redmond, so clearly not all their servers run NT.
But alas the Penguin just can't deliver the goods when it comes to really demanding services like BSOD. And, contrary to the usual bad press about Windows availability, the NT-based BSOD service boasts a 99.9% availability record over 5 years, totally unparalleled in the industry. Try beating that, Tux!!
;-)
This business of mega corporates assembling high powered legal teams and forcing their way simply because they have bigger guns (and pockets) than the little guy ....
It makes me think that they would react favourably to the commmunity blatting them out of existence on the net with a combined bouquette of DDoS attacks until they back down. After all, it's conceptually the same mechanism that they use, so they'd welcome a peer agency I'm sure.
:-)
Nope, that won't happen in the UK, because the regionalization battle for players has been utterly lost by the studios in this country: virtually all hifi and home cinema retailers sell de-regionalized DVD players now, and the major suppliers either offer their own warranties to cover chipped players, or else offer mods that don't alter the hardware and hence don't invalidate the original warranty.
As an example, the Pioneer 717 is one of the best "quality" multi-region-mod'd players, despite being around for a year now, and the prices have plummeted recently. You can get de-regionalized units from literally hundreds of outlets, one of the best being www.techtronics.com as their "E-Mod" maintains your original warranty and is totally transparent (region-switching is automatic). And it plays everything you throw at it, including "difficult" DVDs like The Matrix. I just love mine. And since it allows me to play Region 1 (USA) DVDs on my UK PAL TV, I can happily boycott regionalization by never again buying R2 DVDs. (They're crap anyway, for various reasons.)
Mind you, despite losing the *player* regionalization war, the studios are still pushing regionalized *media* in a big way. The clued-up movie buff is bypassing all that though, simply by buying their DVDs directly over the Internet from the US. It's a win-win situation now that so many players are multi-region, because not only are R1 DVDs better quality, but they're cheaper too. The customer is winning the battle here, at the moment.
... whether he understands the Internet sufficiently to know that this was a non-event in the IRC scheme of things?
You never know, he (or his spokespeople) might actually be more clued up than the media.
It certainly would be a coup for them to respond intelligently about what happened, in the sense that the US network-aware population would be astounded. I doubt that they even recongnize the political opportunity though.