No obit of the MLE is complete without reference to
this. Sadly, I can find no online reference to an older, even more hilarious piece, which I remember being titled "Fear and Loathing in the Big Idea Lab" or something similar.
On the other hand, I remember fondly being there (the regular non-MLE MeejaLab) when the early ideas for what became both social filtering and "dance dance revolution" (among a number of other things) were created.
My approach is to put together rock-solid RAID arrays, and consider the servers to be more or less disposable -- I buy whatever I can get four or more of at a time cheap, then set one or more up as a hot spares. Their lifetime for most purposes is 2 years and then you just throw them away. IMHO, for most purposes, high-end servers are a waste of money, and build the fault-tolerance into the level above that with hot spares, fail-over, etc.
This is not the solution for time-is-money folks, but you said you wanted to do this on the cheap.
While I tried briefly to learn to touch-type using one of the then-standard methods (can't remember the name), I gave up quickly because the keypunches (yes, you read that right) I was using at the time needed more pressure than I could muster from several of my fingers.
A few years later, in 1976, when I was first introduced to a VT52 (and UNIX) with its lovely, long-throw keyboard, I quickly developed from hunt-and-peck to my own form of touch-typing -- I learned that if I set my fingers one space out from the traditional "home" keys, I had easier access to the keys one needs in using a computer -- Escape,/, and CTRL (and of course BKSP). I have no idea what my speed is, but it more than acceptable, and after nearly 30 years, I'm pretty good at it.
I would argue that it is high time that someone develop a new form of touch-typing that takes a computer keyboard layout into consideration. If anyone has, I haven't heard about it.
But to those who think that typing will diminish because of vocie recog or some such -- phoey. Can you imagine an airplane or coffee-shop full of people yelling into their computers? Yuk.
I've had the Starband system at my summer house in a remote area of the southwest Washington (state) Pacific coast for several years, so I've had 2-way satellite service for about as long as it's been available at consumer prices ($69.99/mo). I have just gotten DSL service, so I may not have it for much longer.
Use: I spend 1-2 weeks/month at the house, but it's not my primary residence. I use the connection when I am there for the normal set of web/email uses plus some ftp. When I'm not there (actually, all the time), I try to upload weather and still images from webcams to my offsite servers.
Speed: Everything said thus far about ping times is obviously right. The upshot of this is that anything interactive is painful, as noted. For webpages that can be accelerated by the proxy servers in place, speed is pretty good -- comparable to broadband -- until you try to do something secure, at which point it slows down to about 2x modem speed, sometimes faster. Uploads were, as with most asymmetrical systems, highly variable, and mostly sucked.
Reliability: The Starband service goes down for a few minutes at most daily, and at least weekly. Much of this is caused by rain or sun (the few times a year when the sun is directly behind the satellite), but some of it is not attributable to that. Seldom has it been worse than a minor annoyance, but don't count on anything that can't easily reset itself after a lost connection.
Hardware: The original Starband 180 modems really sucked eggs, and the replacement process was a bureaucratic nightmare, but the 360 modem in use now has ethernet and seems to work, aside from requiring a more-or-less dedicated server. I wouldn't run 2-way satellite without putting a server between me and it. Oh, server must be Windows:-(
Installation: I have a rooftop installation carefully pointed between tall trees, but it seems to work. It's unsightly, but has high geek factor. My installer seemed competent.
Bottom Line: Only you can decide whether it's worth it versus the alternatives, whatever they are, for your location. For me, it was better than dialup (including ganged 2-modem dialup), but worse than all non-available alternatives (Wireless (trees), T1 (cost), DSL/Cable (not available)). Like everything else, most of the horror stories have a grain of truth, coupled with outsized expectations. The difference between the horror stories and the "I love it" zealots seems more about expectations than anything else.
I won't even try to address all the comments here -- they represent a wide spectrum of opinion.
I'm Steven McGeady, I know Mike, and I have this to say to/.ers:
You have absolutely no reason to consider Mike Hawash innocent of the charges being levelled against him -- no reason except one: the implied social contract present in our society that if *you*, or someone you love, was accused of a terrible crime, that other citizens would withold their judgement until all the facts came out.
All the liberties we enjoy are based on this social contract, in all its parts -- I don't condemn you because of the way you look, how you pray, or with whom you associate.
Recall that the Complaint -- the affidavit that we posted willingly on the "Free Mike Hawash" website -- is the U.S. government's side of the story. Mike has not been given a chance to tell his yet. I don't know the answers, nor does anyone else.
Mike doesn't deserve a free pass because he's a software engineer, because he's Palestinian, or because he's my friends. If he is proven guilty, then he will pay the price.
But I hope that this audience, more so than many others, will not judge him because of facial hair, based on scant but one-sided evidence, or because of his faith.
You are right to be skeptical. But you can contain both skepticism and a presumption of innocence, in the same way you can contain skepticism both toward those of us who believe the charges will ultimately prove groundless, and those who find sinister motives hidden among weak and circumstantial evidence.
S. McGeady
(dammit, now I've blown my (weak) pseudonym -- time to sign up for a new account...)
It will be interesting to see how/.ers (and sophisticated-but-trigger-happy users in general) deal with a convergence of the hated DRM with the much-beloved crypto-privacy.
If explained as "future versions of an office productivity suite will contain easy-to-use capabilities to ensure the privacy and secrecy of the user's documents, allowing them to be exchanged only with select others and safe from prying eye", we would all shout Hallelujah!
However, if it's "the ugly black hand of Digital Rights Management has now extended from our televisions and stereos to our very own documents", we shout "boo-hiss"!
I mean, really. Information wants to be free, as long as it's not the business plan for my new multi-zillion-dollar startup that wants to be free. Or is it that Information wants to be free unless it is John Ashcroft that's doing the looking?
Don't get me wrong, I'm as suspicious of Microsoft and of DRM as the next guy, but does everyone think "DRM" (or whatever we call it)is as bad when it's *your* (private) information as when it's a plausibly mass-distributed movie or song?
I started my career (long ago, in a galaxy far away) developing embedded systems, and much later, when running an R&D lab, came to the conclusion that, excepting (importantly) user-interface design, embedded systems were the best crucible in which to learn the right balance between modularity and holism in systems design and implementation.
It's easy for programmers who have only worked on PCs to lose sight of the notion that programs affect the world, but when you are controlling big machines that, improperly instructed, will destroy themselves and the people around them, you begin to think twice about your coding tricks, your testing, and the interaction of your component in the system as a whole.
But there is an underlying assumption in the question that modular design and system holism are mutually exclusive, and I don't accept that either. I also except user-interface design, which is more sociology and psychology and neurology than computer science.
You are correct, however, in supposing that security is particularly vulnerable.
Here's one (true) story, which I will deliberately leave unattributed: a programmer is writing code to control the dual vertical bandsaw in a sawmill -- two huge saws, each 12 inches of high-tensile stainless steel with 3-inch teeth, stretched tight between two six-foot diameter wheels and running at 10,000rpm. A log is pulled on a chain through the middle, so a cut can be made on both sides. Logs enter the system, are measured with a laser scanner, and a queued (physically and in the control program) before entering the bandsaw.
The old fart programmers used to simply store log data in an array of sufficient size to hold the maximum number of logs that could ever be in the system, but are cognizant of the problem of "phantom logs" when a log falls off the belt or otherwise leaves the system in an uncontrolled way. The clever young programmer decides to use newly-learned techniques of memory allocation and linked-list design, and build a replacement.
During mill installation the system is tested and appears to run well. At the end of the shift, however, as the last log is about to be run through the system, the operator discovers that there is no data in the queue for the last log, but decides to run it anyway. The computer dereferences a null pointer, grabs garbage data, and tells the bandsaw to set to an impossible position.
Because the mill is still being installed, the stops on the bandsaw have not been adjusted, and the saws set to position "0" -- and run into the chainguide in the middle. High-stress stainless at great speed meets six inches of fixed steel, and the saw blades explode, burying foot-long shards of stainless steel sawblades up to four inches deep in the walls of the mill, destroying the operator's booth, and causing tens of thousands of dollars damage to the mill.
Whose fault was it? The operator, for running the phantom log? The hardware installation guys, for not setting the stops on the mill? Or the programmer, for not constraining the output of his program, testing more completely, and using simpler techniques. Answer: all of the above. Better modules would have forestalled the problem, and better systems holism would have forestalled it as well. A combination would have given an even better margin of error.
This has led me to the following conclusion: in order to get a CS degree, every programmer must write code that will lower a 10-ton machine press a maximum speed to within inches of his chest, and then stop it. We would have more careful programmers if this were the case. If they went on to write security code, we would have fewer holes.
The anti-hemorrhagic bandage was developed by Dr. Kenton Gregory at the Oregon Medical Laser Center, and there is much more material about it at the website of the company formed to commercialize the technology,
HemCon.
The secret to the patch is a particular formulation of chitin, which is to stay, crabshells. The pro-clotting properties of chitin have been well-known for some time, but Dr. Gregory and his researchers were able to figure out how to make a viable bandage out of it, which hadn't been done before.
The OMLC is working on lots of other cool stuff as well, such as laser suturing (very good for your liver, which won't take thread sutures).
Real geeks don't brag about how much of a mess their Geek Room is --
Real Men Have Racks(tm).
I got tired having 10 PCs lying around on the floor. For real MIPS per square foot, you need a rack. I now have 4 dual P3 servers, 2 Cobalt servers, 2 480Gb NAS servers, and another 720Gb of RAID drives (along with the obligatory UPS, network routers/switches, KVM switch, etc) in 6 sq. ft. of floor space in a closet.
It's a very long story, but I paid my own lawyers in both phases of the trial. Intel supplied some lawyers as well, but of course they were representing Intel, not me.
As several other respondants have noted, this is largely a win for Microsoft and a loss for the States. What is surprising is the Judge K-K took so long to issue it.
The big deals the States asked for were removal of the "Security carve-out" (noted by several folks), and the appointment of a Special Master to create a streamlined enforcement process. Neither of these survived, and that is regrettable.
The security carve-out will make things difficult for third-party protocol implementors, and the enforcement provisions are lengthy, expensive, and easy for Microsoft to manipulate.
I spent a good deal of my recent life on this, and I'm upset. I need to read the full decisions in more detail, but other than a very generic win for States' Rights as a principle, this is essentially a no-op.
I met Larry Weed when I ran Intel's Internet Health Division. He's a great and insightful man, and his systems, in my non-medical opinion, have a valuable place in medical diagnostics.
On the other hand, Larry has pissed off enough people, and is sufficiently single-minded in his endeavors, that I am afraid he won't succeed until someone else has repackaged his ideas in forms more palatable to the establishment. One very odd thing is that the "evidence-based medicine" crowd (treatments based soley on clinically provable science, vs. "this is how we've always done it") doesn't get behind his ideas.
Larry's system is clearly a
component
of a radically different medical system, but I don't think it's the only component. That's the thing that's missing. The MD who commented earlier has some good points, but the medical profession can't shift
all
the blame onto the finacing system, etc.
If this memo, and the behaviour that it endorses, worries you, let me pile it on: neither of the two proposed remedies is likely to correct this kind of corporate culture at Microsoft, at least in the near term.
This is because, no matter how heinous their actions, Intel will never complain to the States or the DoJ about Microsoft. Intel needs Microsoft too much to risk it.
Once upon a time the OEMs feared Intel, because processor supplies were short and Intel was the monopoly. The crossover begain happening in the mid-90s, beginning with Windows95, as Microsoft consolidated their control over the market with well-known highly-restrictive licensing terms.
This is when Microsoft first got a taste for directly threatening Intel, and by manipulating Intel by threatening OEMs. Nothing has changed since then, except that Intel has lost even more market share to AMD, and Microsoft has become more powerful.
Intel continues to hedge its bets (on the server only!) by supporting Linux, but everything desktop-related at Intel is 100% pro-Microsoft, and most of the execs there don't see a problem with that, and wouldn't complain about retaliation even if they did.
Now, don't get me wrong, the States' proposal is much better, in that (theoretically) it would allow an anonymous or confidential complaint to the Special Master, but in practice it's hard to imagine Intel using even that venue.
Bottom line: Linux developers and supporters -- don't look to the anti-trust settlement to stop the dirty tricks. Learn to live with them. Learn to love them. Learn jujitsu.
Everyone commenting on this is missing one key point:
The settlement can
not
have as its purpose "punishment" of Microsoft. The court documents are littered with precedents that companies found to have violated the relevant statutes (Sherman Act, Robinson-Patman Act, Clayton Act) cannot be
per se
punished for the violation. They can be required to "disgorge" (such an interesting word) the fruits of their acts, but the finding cannot be punitive. Even this doesn't really apply to Microsoft, because they were found to have gained their Windows monopoly legally (it's legal to have a monopoly, believe it or not) buy to have used illegal means to
maintain
that (desktop OS) monopoly. Unfortunately the argument about illegally tying IE was overturned by the Appeals Court.
Any future settlement of this case must focus, as a matter of law, on preventing Microsoft from continuing its illegal acts. This is why 99% of the Tunney act responses were more or less thrown out.
/.ers should be focused on what needs to be done to keep Microsoft from further maintaining its monopoly, not on simple punishment. Then you might get listened to. Oh, and in case you were wondering -- someone
is
listening.
I don't mean to be an old fart of the "I walked ten miles to school uphill in the snow" variety, but it might benefit/.ers to remember that they didn't invent computers, software, or much of the technology they gleefully use and (?) misuse.
Hollerith cards are ~80 yrs old, the stored program computer is > 50 yrs old, the Internet is > 30 years old, the PC is > 25 years old, and all the important user-interface functions we now use (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) were demonstrated in 1968 by Doug Englebart (http://www.bootstrap.org/).
I used to hate the comment that "I don't know what progamming language I'll be writing in 20 years, but I know it will be called FORTRAN". Now I see the (only slightly inprecise) wisdom in it. You would probably be bored by my stories about entering PDP-11 code on the console switches in octal, but there is a lesson in there somewhere.
The message is: real change takes a long time -- one or two human generations. Overnight sensations and revolutions are usually many years in the making.
Don't respect yer elders, but at least know what we did wrong. Andy Warhol said: "They say time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself".
All Microsoft did was take reasonable steps to maintain it's market share in the software platform business, in the face of a competitor
that publically bragged that they were going to put an end to Microsoft's dominance. If you pull the lion's tail, you shouldn't complain
about being mauled and eaten. STUPID!
This comment betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of anti-trust law, and of the Microsoft case. While it is not a violation of the anti-trust laws to
have
a monopoly (as Intel did for many years), it is a
per se
violation of the anti-trust laws to take actions to
maintain
or
extend
one.
If Netscape had licensed their browser to MS on the terms that were offered, that would have effectively ended Netscape's ability to innovate around that browser. The fact that Netscape failed to succeed in the end, and whether this was because of Microsoft's actions or not is not material.
With respect to whether there has been harm to end-users, that is a more difficult question.
Personally, I feel harmed every time I have to use the 32-year old WIMP (window, icon, mouse, pointer) interface, whether on Windows, Linux, or the Mac. I think the fact that UI development and deployment haven't moved past Doug Englebart, SRI, and PARC have at least something to do with a reduction (and/or redirection) of overall innovation. But that's just my opinion.
Much of the early work on display managers/window systems was done in the early-to-mid 80's. The reference to Gosling's book is a good one, as is the one to Plan 9, and some of the later graphics texts contain chapters on the subject, though I know of no strong ones. I'm away from my library, or I would give you citations. I recall a detailed design document for the Apollo workstation window system, and Dave Rosenthal built an early window manager for Sun.
All of this was pushed aside by the two dominant implementations: X and Microsoft Windows. The first is clearly a case of second-system-syndrome: expansive in its features, baroque in construction, and hopelessly complex. MS-Windows is a tangled mess that no one outside of MS ever really sees or would care to.
The discussion here is on target in asking a key question: are you interested in this for your own research purposes (many students write operating systems they never expect to live out the year), or do you really want to replace the dominant paradigm? Your choice of literature will vary depending on the answer.
If you are doing the first, by all means
start at the framebuffer bits!
Understanding rendering (whether blit or copyrect or whatever the modern 3D equivalent is) is crucial. In particular, if you want a thesis topic, look at really good 3D font rendering...
On the other hand, anyone who wants to work on overthrowing the windows-icons-mouse-pointers paradigm certainly has my vote. As someone who built at least two contributions to the last paradigm, I can say without fear of contradiction that it is getting quite long in the tooth!
To be taken with a grain of salt, I humbly submit one of my contributions to the literature:
S. McGeady, Window Managers are Operating Systems: Software for a Distributed Graphics System, pg 23-34, USENIX;login: vol 10, no 4
, October/November 1985.
The comment that "time is no longer on [Microsoft's] side" is a good one. In some ways, this might be the best of a bad set of possible outcomes: some restrictions are placed on Microsoft's behavior immediately, the various states continue to pursue the matter, keeping it alive in a US jurisdiction and keeping open the possibility of more meaningful constraints, and Europe is waiting in the wings, watching all of this with the chance for further action if the overall US response is insufficient.
One of the problems this whole process faced is the lack of really good possible remedies: breaking up Microsoft (Judge Jackson's remedy) was likely to result in not one but two ruthless monopolists; creating a "US Department of Microsoft" sets a bad precedent for government meddling in the affairs of tech in general; Open Source Windows would simply expose a million-line rat's nest of bad code to hacking; and MS has a long history of ignoring behavioral remedies. So what's the answer? I'm sure I don't know.
My favorite was insisting on the granting of free licenses to make derivative works -- i.e., you could wrap anything under, around, or on top of Windows that you pleased. This isn't popular with died-in-the-wool techies, but it would allow Win to morph into something more useful to society.
As it is, we are stuck with a 30-year old user interface paradigm, and my biggest fear is that the innovation needed to move us past WIMP just isn't there. But that's another story.
S. McGeady
(caveat: I testified against Microsoft for the government)
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, I remember fondly being there (the regular non-MLE MeejaLab) when the early ideas for what became both social filtering and "dance dance revolution" (among a number of other things) were created.
gnet
My approach is to put together rock-solid RAID arrays, and consider the servers to be more or less disposable -- I buy whatever I can get four or more of at a time cheap, then set one or more up as a hot spares. Their lifetime for most purposes is 2 years and then you just throw them away. IMHO, for most purposes, high-end servers are a waste of money, and build the fault-tolerance into the level above that with hot spares, fail-over, etc. This is not the solution for time-is-money folks, but you said you wanted to do this on the cheap.
A few years later, in 1976, when I was first introduced to a VT52 (and UNIX) with its lovely, long-throw keyboard, I quickly developed from hunt-and-peck to my own form of touch-typing -- I learned that if I set my fingers one space out from the traditional "home" keys, I had easier access to the keys one needs in using a computer -- Escape, /, and CTRL (and of course BKSP). I have no idea what my speed is, but it more than acceptable, and after nearly 30 years, I'm pretty good at it.
I would argue that it is high time that someone develop a new form of touch-typing that takes a computer keyboard layout into consideration. If anyone has, I haven't heard about it.
But to those who think that typing will diminish because of vocie recog or some such -- phoey. Can you imagine an airplane or coffee-shop full of people yelling into their computers? Yuk.
-- gnet
I've had the Starband system at my summer house in a remote area of the southwest Washington (state) Pacific coast for several years, so I've had 2-way satellite service for about as long as it's been available at consumer prices ($69.99/mo). I have just gotten DSL service, so I may not have it for much longer.
Use: I spend 1-2 weeks/month at the house, but it's not my primary residence. I use the connection when I am there for the normal set of web/email uses plus some ftp. When I'm not there (actually, all the time), I try to upload weather and still images from webcams to my offsite servers.
Speed: Everything said thus far about ping times is obviously right. The upshot of this is that anything interactive is painful, as noted. For webpages that can be accelerated by the proxy servers in place, speed is pretty good -- comparable to broadband -- until you try to do something secure, at which point it slows down to about 2x modem speed, sometimes faster. Uploads were, as with most asymmetrical systems, highly variable, and mostly sucked.
Reliability: The Starband service goes down for a few minutes at most daily, and at least weekly. Much of this is caused by rain or sun (the few times a year when the sun is directly behind the satellite), but some of it is not attributable to that. Seldom has it been worse than a minor annoyance, but don't count on anything that can't easily reset itself after a lost connection.
Hardware: The original Starband 180 modems really sucked eggs, and the replacement process was a bureaucratic nightmare, but the 360 modem in use now has ethernet and seems to work, aside from requiring a more-or-less dedicated server. I wouldn't run 2-way satellite without putting a server between me and it. Oh, server must be Windows :-(
Installation: I have a rooftop installation carefully pointed between tall trees, but it seems to work. It's unsightly, but has high geek factor. My installer seemed competent.
Bottom Line: Only you can decide whether it's worth it versus the alternatives, whatever they are, for your location. For me, it was better than dialup (including ganged 2-modem dialup), but worse than all non-available alternatives (Wireless (trees), T1 (cost), DSL/Cable (not available)). Like everything else, most of the horror stories have a grain of truth, coupled with outsized expectations. The difference between the horror stories and the "I love it" zealots seems more about expectations than anything else.
gnet
I just registered mycrasoft.com. I did notice that mycrowsoft.com was taken by some Netherlands company -- back in 1999.
Still available are mikeroesoft.com and numerous entities involving hyphens.
For the record, I have no intention of selling mycrasoft.com. I think I may use it to satire overzealous lawyers and self-important megacorps.
gnet
I won't even try to address all the comments here -- they represent a wide spectrum of opinion.
/.ers:
...)
I'm Steven McGeady, I know Mike, and I have this to say to
You have absolutely no reason to consider Mike Hawash innocent of the charges being levelled against him -- no reason except one: the implied social contract present in our society that if *you*, or someone you love, was accused of a terrible crime, that other citizens would withold their judgement until all the facts came out.
All the liberties we enjoy are based on this social contract, in all its parts -- I don't condemn you because of the way you look, how you pray, or with whom you associate.
Recall that the Complaint -- the affidavit that we posted willingly on the "Free Mike Hawash" website -- is the U.S. government's side of the story. Mike has not been given a chance to tell his yet. I don't know the answers, nor does anyone else.
Mike doesn't deserve a free pass because he's a software engineer, because he's Palestinian, or because he's my friends. If he is proven guilty, then he will pay the price.
But I hope that this audience, more so than many others, will not judge him because of facial hair, based on scant but one-sided evidence, or because of his faith.
You are right to be skeptical. But you can contain both skepticism and a presumption of innocence, in the same way you can contain skepticism both toward those of us who believe the charges will ultimately prove groundless, and those who find sinister motives hidden among weak and circumstantial evidence.
S. McGeady
(dammit, now I've blown my (weak) pseudonym -- time to sign up for a new account
It will be interesting to see how
If explained as "future versions of an office productivity suite will contain easy-to-use capabilities to ensure the privacy and secrecy of the user's documents, allowing them to be exchanged only with select others and safe from prying eye", we would all shout Hallelujah!
However, if it's "the ugly black hand of Digital Rights Management has now extended from our televisions and stereos to our very own documents", we shout "boo-hiss"!
I mean, really. Information wants to be free, as long as it's not the business plan for my new multi-zillion-dollar startup that wants to be free. Or is it that Information wants to be free unless it is John Ashcroft that's doing the looking?
Don't get me wrong, I'm as suspicious of Microsoft and of DRM as the next guy, but does everyone think "DRM" (or whatever we call it)is as bad when it's *your* (private) information as when it's a plausibly mass-distributed movie or song?
gnetwerker
I started my career (long ago, in a galaxy far away) developing embedded systems, and much later, when running an R&D lab, came to the conclusion that, excepting (importantly) user-interface design, embedded systems were the best crucible in which to learn the right balance between modularity and holism in systems design and implementation.
It's easy for programmers who have only worked on PCs to lose sight of the notion that programs affect the world, but when you are controlling big machines that, improperly instructed, will destroy themselves and the people around them, you begin to think twice about your coding tricks, your testing, and the interaction of your component in the system as a whole.
But there is an underlying assumption in the question that modular design and system holism are mutually exclusive, and I don't accept that either. I also except user-interface design, which is more sociology and psychology and neurology than computer science.
You are correct, however, in supposing that security is particularly vulnerable.
Here's one (true) story, which I will deliberately leave unattributed: a programmer is writing code to control the dual vertical bandsaw in a sawmill -- two huge saws, each 12 inches of high-tensile stainless steel with 3-inch teeth, stretched tight between two six-foot diameter wheels and running at 10,000rpm. A log is pulled on a chain through the middle, so a cut can be made on both sides. Logs enter the system, are measured with a laser scanner, and a queued (physically and in the control program) before entering the bandsaw.
The old fart programmers used to simply store log data in an array of sufficient size to hold the maximum number of logs that could ever be in the system, but are cognizant of the problem of "phantom logs" when a log falls off the belt or otherwise leaves the system in an uncontrolled way. The clever young programmer decides to use newly-learned techniques of memory allocation and linked-list design, and build a replacement.
During mill installation the system is tested and appears to run well. At the end of the shift, however, as the last log is about to be run through the system, the operator discovers that there is no data in the queue for the last log, but decides to run it anyway. The computer dereferences a null pointer, grabs garbage data, and tells the bandsaw to set to an impossible position.
Because the mill is still being installed, the stops on the bandsaw have not been adjusted, and the saws set to position "0" -- and run into the chainguide in the middle. High-stress stainless at great speed meets six inches of fixed steel, and the saw blades explode, burying foot-long shards of stainless steel sawblades up to four inches deep in the walls of the mill, destroying the operator's booth, and causing tens of thousands of dollars damage to the mill.
Whose fault was it? The operator, for running the phantom log? The hardware installation guys, for not setting the stops on the mill? Or the programmer, for not constraining the output of his program, testing more completely, and using simpler techniques. Answer: all of the above. Better modules would have forestalled the problem, and better systems holism would have forestalled it as well. A combination would have given an even better margin of error.
This has led me to the following conclusion: in order to get a CS degree, every programmer must write code that will lower a 10-ton machine press a maximum speed to within inches of his chest, and then stop it. We would have more careful programmers if this were the case. If they went on to write security code, we would have fewer holes.
gnet
The anti-hemorrhagic bandage was developed by Dr. Kenton Gregory at the Oregon Medical Laser Center, and there is much more material about it at the website of the company formed to commercialize the technology, HemCon.
The secret to the patch is a particular formulation of chitin, which is to stay, crabshells. The pro-clotting properties of chitin have been well-known for some time, but Dr. Gregory and his researchers were able to figure out how to make a viable bandage out of it, which hadn't been done before.
The OMLC is working on lots of other cool stuff as well, such as laser suturing (very good for your liver, which won't take thread sutures).
Full disclosure: I'm on their Board of Directors.
gnetwerker
All that computing power and not a spell-checker in the lot?
s/Amatures/Amateurs/
Yeesh.
Real geeks don't brag about how much of a mess their Geek Room is -- Real Men Have Racks(tm).
I got tired having 10 PCs lying around on the floor. For real MIPS per square foot, you need a rack. I now have 4 dual P3 servers, 2 Cobalt servers, 2 480Gb NAS servers, and another 720Gb of RAID drives (along with the obligatory UPS, network routers/switches, KVM switch, etc) in 6 sq. ft. of floor space in a closet.
So there. See it here.
gnetwerker
It's a very long story, but I paid my own lawyers in both phases of the trial. Intel supplied some lawyers as well, but of course they were representing Intel, not me.
More anon, after I settle down.
As several other respondants have noted, this is largely a win for Microsoft and a loss for the States. What is surprising is the Judge K-K took so long to issue it.
The big deals the States asked for were removal of the "Security carve-out" (noted by several folks), and the appointment of a Special Master to create a streamlined enforcement process. Neither of these survived, and that is regrettable.
The security carve-out will make things difficult for third-party protocol implementors, and the enforcement provisions are lengthy, expensive, and easy for Microsoft to manipulate.
I spent a good deal of my recent life on this, and I'm upset. I need to read the full decisions in more detail, but other than a very generic win for States' Rights as a principle, this is essentially a no-op.
gnetwerker - $40k poorer, no wiser
I met Larry Weed when I ran Intel's Internet Health Division. He's a great and insightful man, and his systems, in my non-medical opinion, have a valuable place in medical diagnostics.
On the other hand, Larry has pissed off enough people, and is sufficiently single-minded in his endeavors, that I am afraid he won't succeed until someone else has repackaged his ideas in forms more palatable to the establishment. One very odd thing is that the "evidence-based medicine" crowd (treatments based soley on clinically provable science, vs. "this is how we've always done it") doesn't get behind his ideas.
Larry's system is clearly a component of a radically different medical system, but I don't think it's the only component. That's the thing that's missing. The MD who commented earlier has some good points, but the medical profession can't shift all the blame onto the finacing system, etc.
- gnet (I am not a Doctor) werker
If this memo, and the behaviour that it endorses, worries you, let me pile it on: neither of the two proposed remedies is likely to correct this kind of corporate culture at Microsoft, at least in the near term.
This is because, no matter how heinous their actions, Intel will never complain to the States or the DoJ about Microsoft. Intel needs Microsoft too much to risk it.
Once upon a time the OEMs feared Intel, because processor supplies were short and Intel was the monopoly. The crossover begain happening in the mid-90s, beginning with Windows95, as Microsoft consolidated their control over the market with well-known highly-restrictive licensing terms.
This is when Microsoft first got a taste for directly threatening Intel, and by manipulating Intel by threatening OEMs. Nothing has changed since then, except that Intel has lost even more market share to AMD, and Microsoft has become more powerful.
Intel continues to hedge its bets (on the server only!) by supporting Linux, but everything desktop-related at Intel is 100% pro-Microsoft, and most of the execs there don't see a problem with that, and wouldn't complain about retaliation even if they did.
Now, don't get me wrong, the States' proposal is much better, in that (theoretically) it would allow an anonymous or confidential complaint to the Special Master, but in practice it's hard to imagine Intel using even that venue.
Bottom line: Linux developers and supporters -- don't look to the anti-trust settlement to stop the dirty tricks. Learn to live with them. Learn to love them. Learn jujitsu.
gn
The settlement can not have as its purpose "punishment" of Microsoft. The court documents are littered with precedents that companies found to have violated the relevant statutes (Sherman Act, Robinson-Patman Act, Clayton Act) cannot be per se punished for the violation. They can be required to "disgorge" (such an interesting word) the fruits of their acts, but the finding cannot be punitive. Even this doesn't really apply to Microsoft, because they were found to have gained their Windows monopoly legally (it's legal to have a monopoly, believe it or not) buy to have used illegal means to maintain that (desktop OS) monopoly. Unfortunately the argument about illegally tying IE was overturned by the Appeals Court.
Any future settlement of this case must focus, as a matter of law, on preventing Microsoft from continuing its illegal acts. This is why 99% of the Tunney act responses were more or less thrown out.
Hollerith cards are ~80 yrs old, the stored program computer is > 50 yrs old, the Internet is > 30 years old, the PC is > 25 years old, and all the important user-interface functions we now use (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) were demonstrated in 1968 by Doug Englebart (http://www.bootstrap.org/).
I used to hate the comment that "I don't know what progamming language I'll be writing in 20 years, but I know it will be called FORTRAN". Now I see the (only slightly inprecise) wisdom in it. You would probably be bored by my stories about entering PDP-11 code on the console switches in octal, but there is a lesson in there somewhere.
The message is: real change takes a long time -- one or two human generations. Overnight sensations and revolutions are usually many years in the making. Don't respect yer elders, but at least know what we did wrong. Andy Warhol said: "They say time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself".
End of Sermon
mcg
I beg to differ.
This comment betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of anti-trust law, and of the Microsoft case. While it is not a violation of the anti-trust laws to have a monopoly (as Intel did for many years), it is a per se violation of the anti-trust laws to take actions to maintain or extend one.
If Netscape had licensed their browser to MS on the terms that were offered, that would have effectively ended Netscape's ability to innovate around that browser. The fact that Netscape failed to succeed in the end, and whether this was because of Microsoft's actions or not is not material.
With respect to whether there has been harm to end-users, that is a more difficult question. Personally, I feel harmed every time I have to use the 32-year old WIMP (window, icon, mouse, pointer) interface, whether on Windows, Linux, or the Mac. I think the fact that UI development and deployment haven't moved past Doug Englebart, SRI, and PARC have at least something to do with a reduction (and/or redirection) of overall innovation. But that's just my opinion.
gnet(not an attorney)werker
All of this was pushed aside by the two dominant implementations: X and Microsoft Windows. The first is clearly a case of second-system-syndrome: expansive in its features, baroque in construction, and hopelessly complex. MS-Windows is a tangled mess that no one outside of MS ever really sees or would care to.
The discussion here is on target in asking a key question: are you interested in this for your own research purposes (many students write operating systems they never expect to live out the year), or do you really want to replace the dominant paradigm? Your choice of literature will vary depending on the answer.
If you are doing the first, by all means start at the framebuffer bits! Understanding rendering (whether blit or copyrect or whatever the modern 3D equivalent is) is crucial. In particular, if you want a thesis topic, look at really good 3D font rendering ...
On the other hand, anyone who wants to work on overthrowing the windows-icons-mouse-pointers paradigm certainly has my vote. As someone who built at least two contributions to the last paradigm, I can say without fear of contradiction that it is getting quite long in the tooth!
To be taken with a grain of salt, I humbly submit one of my contributions to the literature: S. McGeady, Window Managers are Operating Systems: Software for a Distributed Graphics System, pg 23-34, USENIX ;login: vol 10, no 4
, October/November 1985.
Best of luck,
S. McGeady
The comment that "time is no longer on [Microsoft's] side" is a good one. In some ways, this might be the best of a bad set of possible outcomes: some restrictions are placed on Microsoft's behavior immediately, the various states continue to pursue the matter, keeping it alive in a US jurisdiction and keeping open the possibility of more meaningful constraints, and Europe is waiting in the wings, watching all of this with the chance for further action if the overall US response is insufficient. One of the problems this whole process faced is the lack of really good possible remedies: breaking up Microsoft (Judge Jackson's remedy) was likely to result in not one but two ruthless monopolists; creating a "US Department of Microsoft" sets a bad precedent for government meddling in the affairs of tech in general; Open Source Windows would simply expose a million-line rat's nest of bad code to hacking; and MS has a long history of ignoring behavioral remedies. So what's the answer? I'm sure I don't know. My favorite was insisting on the granting of free licenses to make derivative works -- i.e., you could wrap anything under, around, or on top of Windows that you pleased. This isn't popular with died-in-the-wool techies, but it would allow Win to morph into something more useful to society. As it is, we are stuck with a 30-year old user interface paradigm, and my biggest fear is that the innovation needed to move us past WIMP just isn't there. But that's another story. S. McGeady (caveat: I testified against Microsoft for the government)