I've been reading the UCSD site for a long time. It has been very informative for me, it has information that you can't find elsewhere easily.
I find it distressing that this has happened. The Patriot Act seems to violate the first amendment. They don't even host the FARC material, they just link to them.
And as far as FARC - one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Who are the terrorists who have killed hundreds of union leaders over the past few years in Colombia, it certainly wasn't FARC. The government is pretty bad, but made much worse with their close ties to drug traffickers and right-wing paramilitaries.
The US has been messing with Colombia for over a century. Ever since Teddy Roosevelt decided he wanted Northern Colombia for the Panama Canal, and bankrolled a revolution in Northern Colombia, now called Panama. Then they called Colombia's leaders (or rebels, depending on who was in charge) Russian proxies, then they became drug couriers, now they're terrorists. Ironic since FARC had a ban on drug growing for years, with the right-wing paramilitaries making money from the drug growing. The US army's top anti-drug guy in Colombia, James Hiett, was arrested (in the US) because he was trafficking drugs into the US from Colombia. These are the people stopping drug flow from Colombia into the US? That's accepting the premise that the US has a right to go into Colombia militarily because they're shipping deadly drugs to US consumers trying to procure them. Imagine if Thailand invaded North Carolina for shipping the deadly tobacco drug to them. Thailand doesn't want to import US tobacco for health reasons, but the US used GATT to force them to import it.
This is an attempt to censor political opinions, pure and simple. The White House, which via the FCC has a lot of leverage over the media, called in TV stations and major newspapers and told them they didn't want Bin Laden's statements printed or broadcast. Only the New York Times refused. The powers-that-be in the US want only one side and one side only of the story to be put out - theirs. Not that Bin Laden's side is right, but when his statement's are censored a priori, I begin to wonder what he had to say. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship, and the US has had a massive military presence there for over a decade, Bin Laden and the hijackers were almost all from Saudi Arabia, is there a connection there? From Bin Laden's statements there seems to be. Bush would rather say the US military guarding ExxonMobil's oil supplies has nothing to do with the attacks, and they're just fanatics who hate America for no reason. That might make sense to the
As someone once said, government's do not desire to shut down magazines like PC world. They start with views they do not want you to here, like FARC's, or whomever's. If the Colombian rebels are so ridiculous, and every American would automatically side against them, why is there the rush to silence them? To me it's almost a clear sign that the one source we've been hearing it from (the State Department) hasn't been totally honest and they do not want people to hear any other view. Why have hundreds of union organizers been killed in Colombia? Who was shipping cocaine to the US when FARC had a ban on coca growing in areas they controlled? And I'm not suggesting a "conspiracy", but is James Hiett the only American military or intelligence officer involved in shipping drugs from Colombia to the US? Hiett is significant because the billions we send down there every year to fight drugs seems to wind up bringing even more drugs in. There are many Americans who sympathize with FARC, the dead (and living) union organizers, the indigenous tribes liek the U'wa and so forth, but it seems not only is our tax money going billions a year down there in guns so as to protect a non-Middle East oil supply, we can't even hear what's going on down there do to US Patriot Act censorship. The people controlling the US aren't satisfied with just the billions in arms going down there, now we can't even have free speech in the US about it, that my tax money is funding all of this death can't even be discussed.
I don't think repetition of a point is usually necessary, but I think this is a case where it is. I think it bears repeating that Debian needs work done on its installer. You can weigh the relative merits of Debian Linux versus FreeBSD, but I think it's indisputable that FreeBSD's installer has blown away Debian's for years. They are 100% correct that the installer prevents adoption, if I'm rushed for time, and I always am, I know I can do an easy remote FreeBSD install or slog my way through a remote Debian install.
I am designing a Gnutella server/client, and I have put thought into this question, as have other Gnutella developers and facilitators.
Someone posted here - "Checksumming - no good. Any program could pretend to have the right checksum,
but send false data. No point in figuring out *afterwards* the download is corrupt." This is incorrect. Gnutella currently does HUGE-format full file hashes. If you are doing a multiple source download on Gnucleus, it overlaps data eg it downloads 0-10K from one source and 9-19K from another and 18-28K from another. If 2 and 3 (and 4 and 5) hook up, but 1 and 2 don't, it dumps 1. Actually tiger hashes are an even better method of doing this, you can hash any portion of the file to see if it is good or not, that is coming soon to Gnutella within the partial file sharing scheme. So in Gnutella, fake hash senders are already put down in the current system during multi-source downloads, and when tiger hashing is implemented, they will be eliminated.
The 3 components I see in solving this problem are hashes, unique IDs and distributedness. It is a very complex problem because it is not a technical problem, it is a security problem, e.g. you will have thinking humans on the other end of it trying to foul it up. A bad guy (RIAA/MPAA) can send out good data for weeks and then shift to all bad - by that time s/he will probably be trusted and their shift will have to be dealt with. But then we have to consider people who download bad data and then accidentally distribute it - we don't want them blackballed for becoming an unwitting dupe one time. It's complex and I doubt will ever be 100% solved, the best that we can do is make the network as usable as possible and filtering out as much junk as possible. Basically score data on it's likelihood of being good or bad. As long as we can keep the system 80-99% usable I think we're OK.
The best ideas I have seen here are voting on bad server, a ring of trust and gojomo's post about Bitzi.com. As far as voting on bad servers, or server keys, or user keys - I think we need to vote on bad AND good user keys, if it's just bad keys they'll keep coming back with new keys and it will be futile - the core of good keys will be what is more constant.
As far as a ring of trust - that's a good idea, especially if it's scored, e.g. people I directly endorse get 1.000, people that two of them endorse get a.9500, and so forth. One thing that can be done is all the prominent developers can get keys and then mark hosts which are transmitting legitimate data (mp3's of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech and whatnot) and sign each others keys. That's an easy base of trust of a handful of people, and I'm sure other bases of trust will arise. Once the tiger tree hashing gets in place on Gnutella, we can start seeing stuff like the latest linux kernel distributed on Gnutella. This will be a great way to allow for distribution of popular programs that can't afford expensive hosting.
As far as gojomo's Bitzi.com post, that is the most concrete example of this stuff being currently implemented. Someone responded to his post that the data is centralized on his web site. Well, he has an opend ata policy so anyone can download the whole database and set up their own website with it - as long as they credit the Bitzi data as coming from Bitzi. I do agree that the hash and trust metric has to be distributed within P2P (or concurrent with it to where it's transparent), but right now it's a beacon of what will be, and since the database is open all the work put into it can exist indefinitely even if the RIAA and/or MPAA sues Bitzi.
A lot of what I'm reading here talks about this as if the manager has made a mistake, and reasoning with people will fix the problem.
I have worked everywhere from shops where I was the only tech to Fortune 100 companies. This is not an accident. If it was really an accident, you would be a consultant who would be getting paid time and a half for sloppy management - e.g. your manager and his managers and the company would be losing money because of a mistake. That's a mistake from the manager's perspective. If you are on salary, which I'm sure you are, what the manager is doing makes a lot of sense from a managerial perspective. This idea that there is a rational, non-confrontational way to reason with managers over this is inane. "They should realize that long hours might put a crimp in that high quality code I write - I might get burned out after a few months". They are not stupid - they realize this. They think they will look better if they can burn you out on the next few projects so that's what they're doing.
At Fortune 100 companies, at big law firms, consulting companies down to small companies, many of them run their little flunkies around ragged. Whether you consider this good management or bad management is immaterial - you're not a manager. This is just the way it is, if you're at a salaried job that just requires you to work 9 to 5, you've lucked out. Also, there are plenty of college students looking for a job, H1-Bs and so forth who will not mind working long hours without pay. In terms of business, not necessarily IT, if a manager told other managers that he managed to sucker a bunch of salaried workers to work 15 hours a day, usually he'd be considered a GOOD manager. It does not matter if running you ragged is logical good or bad management or not, that's just the way it is. One reason for this is the ITAA, since there is no IT worker organization with any political clout to speka of, pushed a law through Congress a few years ago repealing (for IT workers only) the FLSA law that said overtime has to be paid.
Every worker is selling his labor time for money. When you give lots more labor time to your employer for free, he's getting over on you. Do you think you could hire a plumber or whatever who charges by the hour and have him fix a sink and then spend another 8 hours fixing all your pipes for free? If you were charging by the hour, your boss would not want you to work 15 hours - if he's paying for your time, all of a sudden he gets some consideration with regards to wasting your time.
I realize a lot of you are starry-eyed out of college Linux hackers buying a lot of BS in your early 20's, but after a while, many of you will gain this perspective, and the sooner you realize it the better. It is strategic thinking, not tactical - knowing this doesn't mean you fight tooth and nail on every thing like this. But it's the realization that if you're paid on salary, not wage - and ESPECIALLY with the laws the ITAA passed through for IT workers in the past few years regarding wages, overtime and salaries - laws financed by Microsoft, Intel, IBM and so forth specifically so they can do the kind of screwing over that you're getting now. You've had some realization about this, that's why you sent to Slashdot.
So strategically you have to realize that if you are being paid salary instead of per hour wage, you are at the mercy of your boss, in fact many, many bosses will push you to work as much as you can without dropping the ball. Very common, they pile on work, pile on work and your hours expand and eventually you start letting things slip - that's a sign to them that you have too much to do and then maybe they give you less work or hire someone else. If they pay you by the hour suddenly they have a lot more respect for your time.
Also, the laws changed by the ITAA were done by the employers (IBM, Intel, Microsoft...go check out the ITAA's sponsors) getting together and changing the law so that you get screwed on overtime, as well as other things. The solution is for more IT workers to join the efforts to organize together to counter what the ITAA is doing. They collectively spend millions to try and screw us, and we try to block them - nascent efforts are making only a small dent but as we get bigger we'll become more powerful. Anyone calling themselves a "professional" in this profession is insane. REAL professionals like doctors, lawyers, dentists have professional associations like the AMA, ABA and ADA fighting for them in Washington among other things. Or they're in unions like SAG, IBEW and whatnot. Or whatever - they organize in the way they want to organize. What do we have? The IEEE-USA? Don't make me laugh - they're sponsored by the same corporate sponsors who fund the ITAA, and these sponsors have threatened the IEEE-USA, and the IEEE-USA has rolled over when the membership has tried to do something, time and time again. Only a reform movement would fix them, if it's even worth it. There are organizations out there doing good stuff - the Programmers Guild, Washtech/CWA, CESO and so forth. Find one you like and join their organization, get active - because the ITAA sure as hell is active screwing us over. Why else have wages fallen for the first time in a decade? Anyone who thinks the ITAA's Washington lobbying to change the laws had nothing to do with it is a fool - are Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc. pissing away all that money for lobbyists and lawyers for nothing? The monetary returns come back to them in spades. And half the IT workers out there don't even know any of this is going on. But the nascent organizations coming up are beginning to change that, so check some of them out. I'm not saying all of this for my health, it's because I want to make nice money at a good job for years to come, just like you. You can come to your own opinions, and decide whether it's worth it to spend the time joining one of these organizations, but you should definitely find out about the ITAA, what they've been up to, how salaries have fallen and all of this stuff anyhow. There's not enough awareness amongst IT workers yet. Here's my web page on this - On call guild
I don't know much about this school, but I do know about the Olin foundation, and they're bad news. They're kind of a strange organization run by privacy-obsessed heirs with a huge bankroll. I'm aware of them because they fund a lot of groups, and one they really bankroll is called NRTW, which is an organization more-or-less devoted to trying to screw working class people out of money. They often team up with Wal-Mart, another organization with deep pockets pertaining to these RTW laws as well as other laws. The difference is Wal-Mart is a business looking out for it's bottom line, and Olin is supposedly a private charitable foundation. But why is a private charitable foundation funding all these little groups to the the tune of millions a year, whose purpose is to try and lower living standards for blue collar workers? I mean, it's not nice, but what are they up to? I'm very skeptical regarding them not just in what they're doing but what their organizations structure is.
Somebody here said Olin was screwing over Harvey Mudd to some extent. I caution people interested in going to Olin to do a lot of reading about these people. Frankly, I'm very suspicious and skeptical of them, to me this is akin to the Moonies buying the Washington Times. Before you register for Olin college, read up on the where the money is coming from, and don't just listen to them, read the reports that are out there on the net, these people have always been bad news and very strange.
I agree, the ITAA has very consciously been changing laws regarding H1-Bs, FLSA, section 1706 and so forth for years. Most programmers and admins never heard of these laws, ignorance is bliss but they are one reason why wages will decrease, the ITAA was and is changing laws with very little organized resistance from IT workers. Many of them are like the top parent poster, who is happy that positions have dried up and companies are laying people off. They seem to have this idea that there is a skill line which they are on the right side of which protects their salary. This doesn't explain why IT salary surveys for the past two years have shown all salaries coming down - factoring in inflation, it looks even worse.
Salaries and wages are coming down for a long time, something which was planned by the ITAA (financed by Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc.) who has been spreading millions around Washington for years. In most professional industries - doctors, lawyers, dentists, whatever, you have skilled workers, who work many hours, but who are still concerned enough about the profession to form the AMA, ADA, ABA and so forth. These "super genius" programmers think that economics doesn't effect them. How many dentists say "I'm the best dentist there is, I don't care about what the HMO's are doing"? These people are displaying a lack of professionalism and calling it professionalism. And they always get modded up high.
Anyhow, these people exist, but the important thing are that people who are more clued in exist. The best thing to do in these dark times where the ITAA is very powerful, and organizations like IEEE are beyond hope are to get into contact with one another (eg. the clued in people talk to one another) and go from there. I think the Programmers Guild is a good organization, and there are some interesting Usenet newsgroups although we probably need one moderated by one of us. Since this directly involves my lifestyle I have put a lot of thought into this, this is not esoteric to me, it is very important as it severely affects my life for years to come. Here is my web page on various IT work things which hopefully will help point people in a positive direction to do something constructive.
First off the bat, if you'e of the mind that eveything is not copacetic then I have a message for you about the IEEE-USA - the membership pushed to deal with H1-B abuses and so forth a few years ago, but the IEEE's corporate sponsors effectively quashed out this movement coming from the membership. So keep this in mind with the IEEE. I'm not saying IEEE, ACM, USENIX and so forth don't need a reform element within them, but be aware that there are other groups like the Programmers Guild that you won't have to fight and pressure the group itself to take action. IEEE-USA would not be doing this unless there was an uproar from the membership, who, as many/. articles have been posted about, are being layed off, and are having the industry-wide salaries and per-hour rates lowered for the first time in a decade. This problem has to be met with on many fronts, and while you concentrate on one, be aware that there are other people working in solidarity with you via other methods.
How many replies here say "they want to throw H1-Bs out, they want to throw H1-Bs out". I haven't seen any serious proposal to throw H1-Bs out, nor does Congressional Representative Tancredo's bill have to do with this. 195,000 H1-Bs can come in every year, a cap that was raised just recently, and many people want to lower that number at least to what it was a few years ago, especially with so many experienced people having their wages cut or being unemployed. Legally, H1-Bs must be the prevailing rate, but every study has shown they are paid below the prevailing rate, even the government reports say this - thus they are lowering the bill rate even though legally this is not supposed to happen. Also, the money paid for an H1-B visa is supposed to go for worker training but Bush wants to use the money instead to bring in more H1-Bs and have their paperwork done faster. This is not about the H1-Bs who are here, this is about the H1-Bs the ITAA wants to come in tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and next year.
I should also note that Harris Miller of the ITAA who is mentioned in the article is pure evil. Since this all affects my WALLET I pay very close attention to this. A lot of posters here admit they are H1-Bs. For some reason they feel compelled to fight against us to keep the door open for more H1-Bs. I don't know why they want to do this as it just lessens their chance for getting a green card, I really can't perceive why they're doing it at all, but it does make me understand why some people want to throw them all out. At least many of the people were honest that they were H1-Bs, thus, a lot of the comments you see here and moderation has a big agenda behind it. As does mine - I'm looking out for my interests, who isn't? I don't know why they're obsessed with keeping the H1-B visa cap high since they're already in, as it just pisses us off against all H1-Bs and lowers their chance for a green card. Maybe they're just stupid.
H1-Bs aren't the only issue of importance although it's up there. FLSA, section 1706, there are many issues which we should be thinking about. Doctors and Lawyers are smart, they have professional associations like the AMA and ABA, virtually every profession is organized in some fashion, with IT workers though, I guess everyone prefers playing Warcraft III and thinking they're a supergenius. When they survive the first and maybe second round of layoffs, they say those people were dead wood and all of this doesn't matter to them, the world's greatest programmer. But then the profession-wide salary and hourly bill rate drops. Suddenly those 60 hour weeks and 24/7 oncall are for less money - factoring in inflation, a bit less. The ITAA has been fighting to drive down our wages for years and they don't even know it, dumbasses like them will have to learn the hard way. They think the only people who worry about this are people who were paid $100k to write HTML, the reality is that the people most concerned about this are usually very competent in their particular field. Only an idiot doesn't worry about their bill rate and lets themselves get walked all over by the ITAA (funded by Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc.)
In closing, as usual I find many of the postings regarding this issue sickening and repugnant. At least most of the posters admit they are H1-Bs, the fact that their side is posted so much and modded up so high is testament to how large this problem is. Read Norm Matloff's "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" to learn more, it covers all the bases. And as I said, H1-B is not the only issue - FLSA, section 1706, there's a lot of things to think about.
Here's my web page on these topics. Reading the replies here has me nauseated, BUT, there are a mass of people who think as I do, and we communicate and are helping organize things like discussed in this article, so knowing that gives me hope. We need every person on board to help us move this forward. The ITAA is coming to take money out of your pocket, only by joining together and organizing can we fight this. Also, people usually reply to my posts replying to things I never said, when I say organize they start listing why they don't like unions. Where did I say unions? I said organize together and fight for your own common interests like every other damned profession. The ITAA (Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc.) are an organization attacking us, so what's so odd about organizing to defend ourselves from the ITAA, if we're all alone and isolated they'll just pick us off one at a time. Organize means organize how YOU want to - if you want a guild, join a guild, if you want a union, join Washtech/CWA, if you want a professional association, join a good one, or join IEEE and stir up a ruckus in their old-line, do nothing, corporate-sponsored meetings. A lot of people are stupid - they don't want to be in a union so they get up and shout that no IT person is allowed to be in a union. Uh, no, that means that's what you don't want in your particular situation right now. I personally do not want a union, I like the professional associations and guilds more, but I'm not going to be a little sycophantic lapdog for my manager and condemn unions - if someone wants to be try to form a union, more power to them - right now, telecommunications, government and aerospace has a lot of unionized IT people and I would personally love to see it spread to BODY SHOPS. But by and large, aside from body shops, I am going for the association/guild route. But I am not going to condemn anyone who wants a union, I only condemn the lapdogs and sycophants for the ITAA.
One of the exciting things about p2p are the innovations people come up with. Of course, some innovations are braindead, though take awhile to implement - someone suggested hashing for p2p (Gnutella) in the first thread in which Gnutella was discussed on Slashdot, but it's taken over two years for the major Gnutella developers to implement it.
P2P falls into two categories nowadays, file sharing (FastTrack/Kazaa, Gnutella/Gnucleus-Shareaza-Limewire-Bearshare, Edonkey2000) or publishing (Freenet and Mnet/Mojonation). Like Freenet, Mojonation was more of a publishing network - users publish data, it gets broken into little chunks, encrypted, and then sent out to other computers, and you receive other people's encrypted chunks on your computer making you a "block server". Content trackers and Publication trackers kept track of the meta-data and where the blocks were, and metatrackers kept track of where the trackers (also called brokers) were. I chatted with zooko, one of the developers, on IRC, he was cool and the ideas were very interesting. Like many dot-com stories, it was ahead of it's time in many ways. They converted Mojonation to the open source MNet , whose CVS tree you can peruse. A lot of it is in Python, a language I do not know.
The wasted disk space on workstations (and servers) is something thought about by many, especially in large organizations with large networks. My last company began implementing SANs, so that less disk space would be wasted, and the centralization of disk space allowed for greater redundancy and easier backup. They also ran low priority (nice'd) distributed.net processes across the whole network on non-production machines. You can take a guess about how large the network is by seeing that they're still ranked #22 without submitting any keys for a year.
1984 was written in 1948, and with his number flip he was writing about his own time as well as a future forecast. Remember that the world was divided into three territories, and all were under different, yet very similar systems. He was not just writing about the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but the UK and United States, where in 1948, blacks in the South couldn't vote, couldn't marry white people, could only use "colored" facilities and so forth.
The article says "we watched democracy and liberty spread (like a plague--to Communists) first through the Soviet satellites and then into the heart of the Soviet Union itself." This is a very simple-minded and naive view of Russia. Russians were able to vote since 1917 in elections - true for only one party, but in the US is there an alternative to the Republicrats? George Washington himself discouraged seperate political parties. Let's look at the "democratic and free" Russia now. One of the first things that happened was the Tsar was exhumed and given a state funeral - not a good sign. Then the socialist bureaucracy who controlled the means of production became the capitalists who controlled the means of production. Who are the new Russian rich? The old socialist bureaucracy! At least in the old system they didn't pass on their privilege generation to generation. Nowadays, an ex-KGB head runs Russia (Putin) and he's been censoring the press recently. Where's the uproar in the West? This MIT article is as much spoonfed propaganda as they had in the Soviet Union. It will only make sense if you're used to nodding and going along with "the party line". I live near a Russian ex-pat community, and they do not have these fantasies about how Russia magically went from a horrible evil empire in 1988 to a wonderful free democracy where everything is perfect by 1992, or 2002. I'll believe the people who've been there over this almost sickening propaganda and over-simplification. The reality is things were better (although with problems) than is implied before 1990, and are worse than explicitly said they are, after 1990. If any Slashdotter wants to find out about Russia, stop reading what people from MIT or the White House say and find a real, live person who lived in Russia during the 80's and 90's and ask them.
Michael Harrington, a student of the poor in America, once said "If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery." I tend to agree with this position. Unlike decades ago, I have had to undergo the humiliation of a urine test multiple times in order to get a job so I can continue eating and have a roof over my head. I even had to be fingerprinted with the fingerprints sent to the FBI twice - once for a city job, once for a financial job. Every street I walk down has security cameras gazing at me, and every store I walk into has security gates that electromagnetically scan me. My communications over the phone and over the Internet are open to a variety of monitoring, this has always been the case with my international communications, with the PATRIOT act it means virtually anything.
1984 has come to pass, and like in the book, they are continually refining the technique. If people sit around and just let it happen, it will get worse and worse. The only solution is to organize and fight it. CPSR and EFF help fight some of this technological encroachment, and there are other groups that fight other technological encroachment - NORML for urine tests (the Supreme court just ruled public schools can test students in any extracurricular activity, sports or no, for drugs) and many other groups. The only way these things get better by is by organizing together and doing something about it. There are no big victories, big changes are always just the accumulation of many small victories. Like-minded people organizing together to fight for the democracy and liberty as the article said are the only means of achieveing real liberty and democracy, one step at a time.
I am a Gnutella developer and contributor. I guess I'll split this comment into two parts - how I feel about this, followed by a technical explanation of how Gnutella and other p2p networks do and will handle this. P2P is attacked in many ways and this one does not bother me that much because it is only affecting material they hold the copyright to. Nonetheless, even though I perceive this as a minor problem, I do perceive it as a problem to be dealt with. I have an idealistic notion about p2p, that it will be used as a free, open publishing medium so that costs, in terms of bandwidth and so forth, are paid by the consumers, not by the publishers. I'm realistic enough to realize it is used primarily for trading Britney Spears mp3's, Warcraft III zip's, avi's of the Matrix and mpg's of Alley Baggett's Playboy videos. I don't mind this, but I am hoping it helps take publishing out of the hands of a few corporations, and I believe this is what the long-term planners of the corporations who fund the RIAA and MPAA really fear. My chagrin in aiding those sharing material copyrighted by corporations is more in aiding the spread of corporate published crap than in any respect of so-called copyright that these billion dollar multinational corporations hold. I hate large multinational corporations, their executives, and the people who own those corporations (the majority of stock and bonds are held by a tiny rich elite of heirs. I would like to diminish their power by any means necessary. I think the best way of doing this however is creating an alternative (p2p) to their publishing empires.
So as I said, I do see this as one of the problems to be solved, although I feel it's of lesser importance. There are many ways of doing this. One of them is previewing - when downloading an audio or video file, when you're about 100k into it (100-200k if it's video), do a preview and see what you're getting. With this looping stuff you have to go farther than 100k however - preview one fourth to one third of the way into the audio files. Many Gnutella clients have a preview feature, as does Fasttrack (Kazaa).
Another method is to ban IP's and IP ranges spreading this. This is already being done - it's only a minor fix because they will always get around it, but it will help somewhat, they won't be able to have big servers spewing this stuff 24/7
The real way to fix this however is hashes. Which are already ubiquitous - they already exist and are known on Gnutella (Shareaza, Gnucleus, Morpheus, Bearshare, Limewire), Fasttrack (Kazaa) and Edonkey2000. On Gnutella (Shareaza) and Edonkey2000, you can click through or cut and paste these URI's (URLs) to files from web sites (or Usenet, IRC, e-mail, instant messengers, whatever) and start searching and downloading the files - for FastTrack (Kazaa), it is a little bit more time-consuming and complex, but worth it if you're going to be downloading a large file. The hash technology is already there, the key now is finding a trusted source for hashes which are both good and whose data is findable and downloadable on p2p networks, and for those sources to survive. I guess I'll detail how this is currently working with the various p2p networks, why not?
There are four major p2p networks - Gnutella, Fasttrack, Edonkey and Freenet. Freenet is a publishing network, the others are all file sharing networks, which is what we're concerned with. Gnutella and Fasttrack are the two largest networks. Edonkey2000 specializes somewhat in large files however, so if it's 100MB+ files you're after, Edonkey2000 is on par, and perhaps better in some ways currently, than Gnutella and FastTrack. Edonkey2000 and FastTrack are closed networks - closed source server/clients and closed protocol networks. Gnutella is open, the protocol is open, and robust open source server/clients like Gnutizen exist for it. This gives Gnutella advantages, such as a choice of multiple clients for virtually every platform, as well as other advantages. Of all the file sharing p2p networks, Gnutella is my favorite and I believe Gnutella is the future of p2p. I think competition amongst p2p networks is healthy however as every can steal everyone elses best features and innovations.
Gnutella files are hashed for HUGE with an implementation called sha1. You can read about the technical aspects here if you wish to. These hashes are useful for finding additional sources for found files so that one can resume downloads or download from multiple sources with integrity.
Actually there's one caveat to that - if you are downloading from an honest client, it will tell you a truthful hash of it's data. A client could give a fake hash and then send other data - but you would have to directly download from the rogue. How clients deal with this is even more complex - Gnucleus downloads overlapping chunks - it downloads 1-2000 from one source and 1950-3950 from another - if 1950-2000 do not match from both sources, it marks both chunks as possibly bad. You can read more details about this in Gnutella documentation and discussion groups.
Aside from this usage, these hashes can be used externally as well. Currently, Shareaza, which is a pretty good servent (server/client), is the only one from which URI's (URL's) can be cut, paste, and clicked through to from the web/IRC/e-mail etc. I'm sure clients like Gnucleus will have this ability in the future. If you had Shareaza installed, you could click on a link like this - which is an, I believe uncopyrighted,
Chomsky
speech, Shareaza would launch (if you don't have it already) and would ask you if you want to download the file or cancel. If you select download it would connect to GnutellaNet, search for the file, and if it found a host which has the file and which has upload slots open, would start downloading it. Actually, the Slashdot "allowed HTML" filters are pulling some necessary characters out of the above link, so you can't click through on/., although you can on a normal HTML web page. I can't post an URL that you can cut and paste either since/. forces a line break after 40 characters or so, if/. didn't do this and the below was in one line, you could have cut and paste it into Shareaza, I'll show it here for an example, imagine this was all on one line for you to cut and paste, or better was just a link to cut. You can do this on any HTML page, it's just the Slashdot HTML parsing messing it up -
I would give the above link a rank of "7", because the last time I searched for it, 7 people replied they had it. I have several hashes with a score of 80-90, meaning you're more likely to find or download them, but the above is the only one I have that I have enough confidence in that the data is uncopyrighted.
So now you have one link to a hash - where can you find trusted sources which tell you what hashes are ubiquitous, making it more likely you will find and be able to download them, are rated in terms of quality by multiple sources and so forth? Well for Gnutella, one source is Bitzi. You can search for data there, see what is the most reported, what things are ranked, see comments, see bit rates, file sizes, artists, titles and so forth. It is very cool. Most interaction is from Bitzi into Shareaza (the only Gnutella client that does this currently), but from within Shareaza if you find a file you can type "find Bitzi ticket" and see if the hash has been reported on already. One thing which I'm sure will soon be remedied is that Bitzi does not have direct clickthrough to Shareaza, I have to copy hashes to my clipboard, edit them to Shareaza format and paste them into Shareaza. I'm sure soon Shareaza and Bitzi will agree on a standard and remove this step so I can just click through. And soon Gnutella clients other than Shareaza will have this ability as well. Bitzi's data base is open to the public, you can read their open data policy on their web site, anyone is free to use the data as long as Bitzi is credited. Bitzi.com is the only large, good source of Gnutella hashes I know of. Edonkey2000 has had hashes for a while, and has several good, large sources for hashes such as Filenexus.com and Sharereactor.com. Since Gnutella is a larger network and it just implemented this ability, I'm sure it will have even more and larger sources in addition to Bitzi. And since Bitzi's database is open to all, if Bitzi goes down someone else can open the database up again somewhere else. I'm sure in the future, even the trusted rating system will become distributed.
Gnutella uses the sha1 hash, Edonkey2000 uses another, and Kazaa uses another. Web sites exist that centralize the hashes for these. I'm sure soon web sites will exist that coalesces and translates all of this. Gordon Mohr, who runs Bitzi, wants to see a universal p2p tag, magnet, which is agnostic about which p2p backend it is using. Why not? We can have a tag that we (more or less) trust, and can retrieve the data from Gnutella, FastTrack, Edonkey2000 or Freenet. It's a great idea.
I am less interested in other p2p networks than Gnutella but I'll discuss their hash and meta-data web sites a little. The most interesting one is Edonkey2000, which as I said, has come to specialize in large (100MB+) files, and which I have to admit is a pretty good way to download large files with some guarantee of integrity. There are two major meta data sites for Edonkey -
Filenexus and
Sharereactor. There are other sites as well. If you're looking for large files, they do a pretty good job currently.
Fasttrack (Kazaa) uses hashing, but the Kazaa client is not that friendly to this kind of thing. So Fasttrack/Kazaa is more of a pain in this respect than any of the others. Nonetheless, you can download a program called Sig2dat that helps you copy and paste FastTrack's UUhashes. The you can go to web sites that give meta data, rankings and so forth to these hashes. Kazaa/FastTrack is unfriendly to all of this so it is much more of a pain - you have to install files that help you do this (sig2dat), you have to restart Kazaa for every file you want to download in this fashion and so forth. With Kazaa, all of this is a hassle, it's much easier to do in Gnutella (Shareaza), Edonkey2000 and Freenet.
And lastly there is Freenet. Freenet has been using hashes since the beginning. Freenet is a publishing network, not a file sharing network. That is nomenclature - file can be and are shared on Freenet - from html pages to gifs and jpgs, to mp3's, to avi's, although Freenet is the last place you want to look for large files, Freenet's bailiwick is small files. Even a 4 meg mp3 on Freenet is harder to find and slower to download than any of the other 3 networks. Small files are the domain of Freenet - HTML pages and images. The Freenet protocol is more rich than the other protocols in many ways, thus you have more than just audio and video files going over it, you have third-party applications utilizing it, thus you have things like Fproxy (A world-wide web equivalent which runs over Freenet) and Frost and Freenet message board (Usenet equivalents - both for text and binaries). One benefit of Freenet is it's hard to crack down on people for publishing information - because no one knows who data is coming from or going to. This is not absolute, but it is much safer than the file sharing p2p networks in this respect. Also, people publish data, so that what you put out is stored somewhere other than your computer, and if your web site or shared file or whatnot is popular, it will be out there all the time without your node needing to be connected. Freenet also used a lot of signatures, encryption and so forth, so you already have a pretty solid trust mechanism and data integrity. It depends on what hash is used - KSK hashes are insecure, but SSK are signed. So with Freenet there are large upsides and downsides - the downsides are downloading is much slower, since you're downloading via intermediaries, not directly, and the larger the file, the slower the download and the harder it is to find a complete file. The upshot of Freenet is that there is less of a legal risk with regards to sharing/publishing data, data is signed by the publisher which greatly helps integrity, and also Freenet's protocol allows extensions other than file sharing with it's own internal network - web and Usenet like applications, and I'm sure there will be more in the future.
The headlines of the Dice.com's and the Business 2.0's are featuring the ITAA's report telling about how the IT job market is bouncing back and is and will be understaffed. We know this is a lie, we know the ITAA is a lobbying and PR organization, paid for by Microsoft, Intel, IBM and so forth to tell these lies.
In the same manner, news regarding Colombia also has to be taken with a grain of salt. Just like the corporate sponsors of the ITAA have an agenda to push lies onto the front page of dice.com etc. for the IT employers who pay them, in the same manner there are corporations who have an interest of portraying a certain image of Colombia in the media, as well as lobbying Congress - which has sent over $2 billion in military funding to Colombia in the past two years. That's a lot of firepower. My point is, if you are not pretty familiar with Colombia, you can bet that the news your hearing was pushed there by someone with an agenda, and the perspective you hear is one-sided. Anyone who gets to know more about Colombia will realize this is the case, that things are not what they seem.
As far as America going into Colombia with military force...this is just insane. The US has given over $2 billion in military aid to Colombia in the past two years. And they burned right through it and just got more. Who are we giving it to? What are they trying to preserve? Is sending the US army going to help? The US army sent a drug czar to Colombia, James Hiett. Guess what happened? He got busted for drug smuggling
You want to send the US military into Colombia because American consumers purchase narcotics from there? That's like China sending it's army into North Carolina because the farmers there are growing a deadly narcotic (tobacco) and shipping it to China. The US and Britain used to ship opium (heroin) to China - China decided to ban the import, so Britain, aided by the US, went to war with China during the opium wars in order to bypass the Chinese government and continue selling opium (heroin) to Chinese citizens. Thailand actually wanted to not import America's deadly tobacco drug recently, but the US had GATT force Thailand to import it (or face economic sanctions) - shades of the opium war! We're pressuring countries to import our deadly drugs, but you want to invade a country where drug imports are already cracked down on due to their illegality?
And why the focus on Colombia? The US gets drug shipments from many different countries, some in Asia, why so much news about COlombia recently? Why are supposedly top secret reports from the American intelligence community being leaked to 2nd rate magazines like Business 2.0? These leaks are no accident, there are people in the US with an interest - a financial interest to see that this tap of taxpayer money flows to Colombia, which has been averaging about $1 billion a year, keeps flowing, and maybe even have taxpayers subsidize the US army going down there if their current puppets can't maintain control. The US has a long history of fucking the Colombians, going back to the beginning of the "Panama" Canal days. Panama was part of Colombia until 1903. The US was negotiating with Colombia for the canal land but didn't like the price so the US decided it would be cheaper to take the land than pay for it. They set up and backed a violent secession movement which immediately afterward signed a deal giving the US canal land rights forever, and 11 years later the canal was open for business.
The reality is the US getting militarily involved in Colombia because of drug trafficking is ridiculous. The reality is Colombia is oil rich and the nowadays the owners of the US oil companies are anxious to have oil reserves in areas "under control" outside of the Middle East, for one thing. 201 trade union organizers or leaders were killed (or "disappeared") in Colombia in the last year alone. That's a massive, massive repression, being done by the far right-wing paramilities, primarily the AUC, which has strong ties to the government and business community.
The situation is complex down there, but one thing is for sure - the US is NOT going in there primarily to stop drug trafficking. FARC is said to be a terrorist group, but they are so large, control so much land and have been around so long, that they're more like an army than a small terrorist group. The reality is that Colombia has been engaged in a civil war for many years. FARC actually had a ban on drugs and forbid people in areas it controlled to grow drugs for a long time - all of the drug traffickers were allied with the far right. At some point, I forget when, FARC, the far left group lifted the ban and started "taxing" drugs in the areas it controlled. The reality is that the far right and AUC, with their friends in government and the military, have had a grip on the drug business for decades, and FARC is fairly new to the scene in terms of drug involvement. And of course, it is primarily the FARC-associated drug trade being attacked, not the long-standing AUC drug trade with close ties to the government and military
So I ask myself - why is $1 billion of my tax money going to Colombia to buy arms every year, sent to a government and military heavily involved in drug trafficking and with close ties to terrorist groups like AUC? Why are the oil executives and hawks pushing for even more military involvement in Colombia? Do I want to see young guys called up or drafted to go down and die in Colombia? It's ridiculous. I'm pissed off that they are sending so much military aid down there, but the people who want it have a small majority in Congress. Especially since the side we are supporting is heavily involved in drug trafficking itself, along with murder, torture and atrocities. Human Rights Watch documents the close ties the government and military have to the AUC, who the US State department classifies as terrorists involved in drug trafficking, and you can find more information about this on the web. You can't really understand how brutal these places are, and how bad US corporations and the Pentagon can be, until you visit these places. I'm perturbed that my tax money is going $1 billion a year to help fund this continued bloodshed, if the US does start going in more heavily, I will become even more active in trying to prevent this from happening. Maybe your dream will come true and the US will invade and then some Colombians will fly airplanes into the Sears tower or bring some of the fun going on down there up here. Thanks a lot, you people are very good at wasting my tax money, and sending working class American kids off to die in foreign land for no real reason that will benefit me, the country or the majority of people down there or up here.
These people are meeting so as to try and take food off of our tables. It is no surprise that there are a lot of people unhappy about this. G8 has brought it upon itself. They are making decisions about how the world should be run with next to no public input. People should not be surprised that many people are unhappy about this, I'm more surprised that more people are not unhappy about this.
Being in IT worker who works with lots of programmers and administrators, I have to say that a lot of the stereotypes about IT dorks are true. Too many of my co-workers are fat, bearded, pasty white, socially retarted, Farscape watching dorks with glasses, who have no social life, no girlfriend and if they do they're usually socially retarted as well and so forth. I guess in such a socially retarted community with yuppie aspirations (which high H1-B caps, FLSA, section 1706 and things like G8 will do much to crush), it's unsurprising to find people so cut off from society and their community to follow the same route on things such as these, and who side with the plutocrats carving up the world over the average man on the street. The only time these losers ever interact in a social manner with a working class human being is when they go down to San Francisco's Tenderloin district and pay some girl $400 to give them a hand job, since they're so socially alienated from the community, they're unable to find a romantic companion. Having to work amidst people like this, who obviously are reflexively sycophantic to the G8 plutocrats, forgive me if you make me want to puke.
Thus, it's normal that these socially retarted and alienated people, who get their news from wherever yuppies get their news, would buy into the G8 plutocrats line that anyone against them is trying to "destroy your home"? Huh, the protestors are coming to your particular house and address to burn it down? If you mean your home is Ottawa, your nomenclature is funny. You never say G8 is coming to your home, although most of the people from G8 are foreigners. Yes, it's always the protestors who are coming from somewhere else, I guess there must be some town somewhere that all these foreign agitators come from. God forbid that there are some people who live in Ottawa, Ontario, or Canada who are unhappy about this! Yes, the G8 plutocrats from the US, France, Germany etc. are your "local" people to protect, and the local community groups protesting this are the "foreign" agitators. In the corporate media, this kind of deception goes through unchallenged all the time, fortunately, at least here it can be challenged.
And wow, these protestors are "violent" before they even get to Ottawa. What foresight you must have, you can already see the future! We just had the WEF in New York City in February, thousands showed up to protest, and there were only a handful of arrests, and no cases of physical violence or property damage. The supposedly massively violent Seattle protests had a handful of kids break the windows of Starbucks and the Gap before some middle-aged union guys came over and ran them away before the cops came. The Gap sells clothes made by 9 year olds in Indonesia factories who work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and who are often beaten at their factories. Who are the real criminals?
I see us as on the winning side. There are enough blind people like you so that the problems addressed by the protestors are ignored, and things will get worse and worse and worse and worse. Soon you will be praying for the days of relatively peaceful days of demonstrations like the upcoming G8 one will be. In a few years, when all IT work moves to India and Romania, and the remaining American workers are all H1-Bs who are treated like blue collar workers, combined with 1706, FLSA and so forth, I think we will start seeing more disgruntled IT workers coming to things like these. In fact, it is starting to happen already, you'd be surprised how many people coming to them have had their salaries drop like ComputerWorld pointed out recently (that IT industry salaries have dropped while productivity and the level of services remain, e.g. workers are giving more or the same for less), and how well they know Java and C++ and how to create stored procedures in Oracle. The protestor groups would not be able to have as much of an Internet presence as they do without the freely donated time and resources of programmers and administrators who are unhappy about how their communities are being shitted on by these G8 plutocrats, are unhappy about how their wages are being driven down while they're the ones who do the work and create the wealth that fills their shareholders and CEO's pockets, are unhappy with working 60 hour weeks, being oncall 24/7 and having their workplace trying to destroy their social life, a social life made more difficult to attain since these types of economic and social changes have been destroying the social life of communities which existed decades ago. These sycophantic dorks are not people, they are people without a social life, they are robots attached to machines and bureaucracies who have no desire for a social life and social interactions. It's almost like a science fiction tale where networks of robots and computers are battling the humans who have not been devastated by this cold, impersonal network, with about as much charm as a data center at 4 in the morning. I'll cast my lot with the human communities instead of these bureaucracies that are trying to turn humans into robots, even if we lose in the end, they're a much more fun group to hang out with then dorks whose fun idea of a Saturday night is -
Watching a MST3K marathon with other dorks
Perusing the SF Red Book for which prostitute they will have a so-called date with tonight
Shopping at Fry's for a graphics card because they have a Quake tournament to play at that night
and of course we can't forget
Spending Saturday night at the office working!
No thanks...I spend enough time working and being around these people to keep a roof over my head. I don't need it to BE my life.
If you're a sysadmin, the Solaris System Administration Guide(s) from Sun are handy in book form, even if they're free online.
Sun Performance and Tuning is good so as to learn how Solaris memory and other functions work. It is not a day-to-day operations guide, it is more high level.
For topics from PERL to awk to NFS, O'Reilly books are the best. Buy whatever you need.
I also like the Osborne "Teach yourself C" (and C++) books by Herbert Schildt for the little C and C++ programs I write.
This is a topic I've thought about before. Right now basic data on say Gnutella is simply file name, file type and file size. Some clients are also including other data, such as a hash key, or for mp3's a bit rat, sample rate and playing time (closed source, spyware-ridden, centralized Kazaa has meta-data like this for movies and the like as well, I'm sure Gnutella will do this in the future).
Of course, being that hashing is becoming popular with Gnutella, it will be easier to avoid false data. However, there is not a system within Gnutella that shares this information with users and can be used in the interface, it's more of a back-end thing currently to help in multi-source downloading.
Some of the problems -
If someone goes to the trouble of doing this, and you set up a ratings/trust/whatever system, they're going to try and get over on that too. So you need a way to deal with people who are actively trying to wreck the system, maybe on a mass scale.
Also, you want to make all of this as brain-dead as possible for the typical user, so they may even be unaware of the bad data.
I'd also say that being that this isn't a big problem on Gnutella currently, and Gnutella has more important matters, this will probably be on the things-to-do list until it becomes a bigger problem, since it's unimportant right now. Although I really would like a good meta/ratings system. I'm writing a Gnutella client and having problems with just the basic spec though. Gnutella allows for "private" data to be sent on hits though and other expansions.
Perhaps it's just the FBI's history, from it's weirdo patriarch J. Edgar Hoover, which bugged Martin Luther King's bedroom, launched COINTELPRO to investigate Americans it didn't like, had agents send *death threats* to Americans it didn't like, then after supposedly getting cleaned up in the 1980's paid a guy to try and seduce a nun working for CISPES, then mishandled Waco and Ruby Ridge and now is trying to cover up some 9/11 stuff. I have a very bad impression of the FBI, and I think they are more dangerous than useful. Their means are kind of strange - for left-wing type people there is massive surveillance, and for right-wing or religious type people there is little surveillance, but quite a body count.
Bearing all this in mind, I find it disturbing that their are FBI agents acting as ops all over IRC trying to catch people up to no good. I mean, any kid who DOS's people continually from their house is eventually going to be caught and locked up. Personally, I am less frightened by the random script kiddie who will wind up in juvey for DOS's, and more frightened by the extent of the FBI on IRC, Magic Lantern, the NSA, all these new PATRIOT act measures and so forth. I *DO NOT* trust the FBI.
I have RSI and I started dealing with it about two years ago. Some of my friends have it worse.
If you do not have RSI - if you use computers long enough without listening to what I and others here say, you *will* get it. I mean, it's like trying to life 500 pounds and get a hernia, or smoking 2 packs a day until you get lung cancer. Just because it takes a few years to get you doesn't mean it eventually will. If you're young, be smart and pay attention so your hands don't get crippled. You don't have to go overboard, there's some simple things you can do to help you out. And if you feel pain - DON'T IGNORE IT, do something about it.
Some people have posted good things here. The web page that helped me out was the RSI web page by Netscape developer guru Jamie Zawinski.
As people have said, it's all about repetition. If you do the same thing over and over and over again (e.g. click a mouse, type), eventually your hands will slowly start getting screwed up and you will start feeling pain whenever you mouse click, or type, or whatever. Ask programmers you know who are over the age of 25, I guarantee 50% of them either have RSI or say they type in a manner that avoids RSI.
Here are some things I do to help:
I use a different mouse at home and work. At work it is the basic Microsoft mouse. At home it is a trackball-type mouse with a big ball. I also switch hands with both mice, I go half an hour with the left hand, then half an hour with the right hand. This way, both hands get half an hour of use and half an hour of rest. This helps me more than anything.
Also, continually typing for hours on end is no good. Zawinski takes a 5 minute break every 40 minutes, or when feeling pain, every 20 minutes. Go to the bathroom, get some water, get a Snapple. Or stop typing and read some manual or papers or something. Do some hand-stretching exercises.
Also, having a good ergonomic keyboard, mouse and chair, and sitting and typing at them properly help. And if you feel real pain, go more overboard on this stuff and see a doctor. And sue the hell out of everyone in sight!
Speaking to that last topic, Bush and his cabinet guys say RSI is bullshit and people like me and thousands of others who feel pain in our hands are imagining this. Hmm, that wouldn't be because the ITAA (funded by Microsoft, IBM, Intel and so forth) is handing him millions of dollars, would it be? Also, this is is a professional concern, not a partisan political one - both Democrats and Republicans have been taking ITAA money. Although with professional issues, we're more likely to get initial help on RSI from Democrats, and we're more likely to get initial help on H1-Bs from Republicans (like Rep. Tancredo). Organizations like the
Programmers Guild fight for programmers and administrators on issues such as this. So think about checking up on them, and maybe even signing up, or at least getting involved.
What's my experience? I got a PC and modem in the early 1980's, got on the Internet and started playing with unix in the late 1980's and became a full-time sysadmin in 1996.
This guy is right on - the hours suck. If I didn't have over 6 years experience under my belt, I would not be a sysadmin. You wear a pager 24/7 and are liable to be beeped at any time. It really has been grueling everywhere I went.
I don't believe that this is just "the way it is". Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Oracle and some other companies helped manufacture it so it is this way. I've been studying labor history (which doesn't necessarily mean union history) since things started really getting bad after the bubble burst in April 2000. There's been a long war between workers and employers over wages, unemployment rates, hours, working conditions and so forth for decades, even over a century. The most similar parallel to what's happening now for our profession is when a bunch of aerospace associations formed CESO in the late 1960's when the aerospace industry was in upheaval.
I am not some fanatic...all I really care about is making good per hour money. The way to do that is improving marketable skills and working hard. However. The industrywide wage has fallen as we have read in the papers. When something becomes industrywide, we have to band together and fight it as a profession, improving skills and working hard is not enough anymore. Even if you're some dork who places all self-worth in the notion he is the greatest programmer in the world and everyone else sucks. Let me tell you, I've been mucking with PC's, modems and so forth for 20 years - that's just not all there is to it.
Doctors, Lawyers, Dieticians, Dentists and other professions have good professional associations. AMA, ABA, ADA and another ADA. What do we have? We do not have a good professional association. No, the IEEE is not good, they are controlled by Microsoft, IBM, Intel and so forth, the same people who are attacking our profession in the ITAA. In my mind, the Programmers Guild is the best professional organization I've seen. I think aside from skills and hard work, we have to band together like aerospace engineers did in the 1960's, in an association, since most programmers/admins don't want a union, and fight against the ITAA lobbying group in Washington DC, and fight for ourselves in other ways.
I have a web page about this: OnCall Guild. I hope you read my web page (everything associated with OnCall is free), or check out the Programmers Guild or pro-IT Usenet groups. Only by educating ourselves, other IT workers and organizing into an association can we fight for our profession, since skills and hard work alone aren't cutting it any more.
The open source community needs a voice battling against embrace-and-extend, and protecting the open source community against those in the closed-source community who will attack it any way they can (FUD, getting laws passed making it illegal for colleges to write GPL software etc.) Richard Stallman is that voice. From creating a license that would protect open source software if the author desired it, to speaking up loudly whenever he sees something that he feels threatens the open source community, the open source community needs someone fighting against those that wish to harm it.
I don't have a problem with Stallman's message. For all those who want Stallman to soften up and talk about the benefits of BSD and forget about getting credit where he thinks credit is due - forget it. It's not Stallman's role to talk about the benefits of BSD, of course he's going to hype his own license, and hype GNU's contribution to the Linux Operating System. Complaining about a lack of a benediction from Stallman to write a program with the BSD license or to drop the GNU/ when saying Linux is kind of silly.
Of course some people just want to not think about this stuff and just use and enjoy the product. People flying in an airplane don't need to dwell overmuch whether the engine is working correctly, whether the luggage and passenger list have been examined for security. The people running the operation are who have to think about this stuff. Likewise, developers and some administrators are the ones who have to ponder what licenses the products they develop and use should be. Like an aviation operation, if no one is dwelling on safety and security, results down the road can be disastrous.
I am a chess player and programmer, although I would not brag about my ability in either. Fritz and Deep Blue are interesting chess programs, but I am more interested in Crafty, which is one of the highest rated chess programs, and which is open source as well - I can look at the source code and look at what it is doing. In fact, the commercial Fritz package has two parts - an engine and what is designed around the engine. You can switch the Crafty engine with the Fritz engine and analyze positions and the like using both engines - something I often do.
To understand humans versus computer chess playing, you have to understand that at higher levels of playing ability, chess is broken down into three parts - opening, middle game and end game.
The computer's greatest strength lies in it's *perfect* end game ability. Here the computer is indisputably the master, it never makes a mistake. In fact, they have been pushing this backwards - first it played perfectly with 3 pieces on the board, then 4, then 5, and they keep going backwards and increasing that number.
The computer's second greatest strength is in it's opening ability. Here the computer has the ability to play a perfect game as chess is currently known. It is able to analyze every chess game ever played and play the best game possible as chess is currently known. If the grandmaster it is playing against is very smart, the grandmaster can invent a chess innovation that has never been done before, or that has been done once or twice so long ago that everybody has forgotten about it, and even the computer ignores it. These innovations are one of the exciting things about grandmaster play, because grandmasters come up with new innovations in chess openings every year, some of them quite exciting and amazing. So if the grandmaster is smart enough to create an amazing chess opening innovation, he can win against opponents like Deeper Blue.
I should also point out that certain openings are good for humans, and certain openings are good for computers. Openings which go into "open" games are good for computers because tactics is the greatest strength of computers. Openings which go into "closed" games are good for humans, because they are strategic, and strategy is one of the few weapons a human has against a Deeper Blue.
Now we get into the important part, the middle game. As I said before, computers are becoming more and more the tactical masters of this arena, although humans still rule the domain of strategy. Although computer endings are still being expanded in the ending (first a perfect game with 3 pieces, then 4 pieces, then 5 pieces, then 6 pieces...) and in the beginning (always being updated with the latest matches, and some algorithms tweaked), the middle game is where the real work is being, and needs to be done to improve computer chess playing ability. In tactical terms, as algorithms are tweaked and processing power increases, computers are able to see farther and farther ahead in the game with a clearer and clearer view. Nonetheless, computers have problems with strategy and positional play - they can't see how much of a threat passed pawns are, which currently requires thinking, not evaluation. They also have other problems like a horizon effect, they don't see how their pieces can get trapped in a way that would be easily obvious to any grandmaster "thinking" about it.
Many articles and books have been written on computer chess - how to program and improve computer chess programs and then how to beat them, and there are quite a few people who enjoy regularly beating the best chess programs out there on a regular basis. Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan, who makes a habit of beating chess computers, says that he believes even the best programs like Deeper Blue are inferior to the best grandmasters, and that only by psyching out opponents can computers win. Humans can make 30 excellent moves, and then get distracted and make a simple, stupid mistake on a move (a "blunder"). I've felt this myself - it is psychically challenging to stare at a chess board for over an hour with such intense concentration - if I was doing a programming problem and felt like this, I would get up and go get a glass of water and relax, but you can't do that in a times chess game. Computers always play at the same ability, they don't "get tired", and a very tired, distracted human who has a cold and is hungry will probably be playing at less than his highest potential and is apt to make blunders. Despite these human failings, we have the advantage of being able to get an axe and break Deep Blue into a million pieces, an advantage computers luckily don't have the ability to do to us (yet).
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I find it distressing that this has happened. The Patriot Act seems to violate the first amendment. They don't even host the FARC material, they just link to them.
And as far as FARC - one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Who are the terrorists who have killed hundreds of union leaders over the past few years in Colombia, it certainly wasn't FARC. The government is pretty bad, but made much worse with their close ties to drug traffickers and right-wing paramilitaries.
The US has been messing with Colombia for over a century. Ever since Teddy Roosevelt decided he wanted Northern Colombia for the Panama Canal, and bankrolled a revolution in Northern Colombia, now called Panama. Then they called Colombia's leaders (or rebels, depending on who was in charge) Russian proxies, then they became drug couriers, now they're terrorists. Ironic since FARC had a ban on drug growing for years, with the right-wing paramilitaries making money from the drug growing. The US army's top anti-drug guy in Colombia, James Hiett, was arrested (in the US) because he was trafficking drugs into the US from Colombia. These are the people stopping drug flow from Colombia into the US? That's accepting the premise that the US has a right to go into Colombia militarily because they're shipping deadly drugs to US consumers trying to procure them. Imagine if Thailand invaded North Carolina for shipping the deadly tobacco drug to them. Thailand doesn't want to import US tobacco for health reasons, but the US used GATT to force them to import it.
This is an attempt to censor political opinions, pure and simple. The White House, which via the FCC has a lot of leverage over the media, called in TV stations and major newspapers and told them they didn't want Bin Laden's statements printed or broadcast. Only the New York Times refused. The powers-that-be in the US want only one side and one side only of the story to be put out - theirs. Not that Bin Laden's side is right, but when his statement's are censored a priori, I begin to wonder what he had to say. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship, and the US has had a massive military presence there for over a decade, Bin Laden and the hijackers were almost all from Saudi Arabia, is there a connection there? From Bin Laden's statements there seems to be. Bush would rather say the US military guarding ExxonMobil's oil supplies has nothing to do with the attacks, and they're just fanatics who hate America for no reason. That might make sense to the As someone once said, government's do not desire to shut down magazines like PC world. They start with views they do not want you to here, like FARC's, or whomever's. If the Colombian rebels are so ridiculous, and every American would automatically side against them, why is there the rush to silence them? To me it's almost a clear sign that the one source we've been hearing it from (the State Department) hasn't been totally honest and they do not want people to hear any other view. Why have hundreds of union organizers been killed in Colombia? Who was shipping cocaine to the US when FARC had a ban on coca growing in areas they controlled? And I'm not suggesting a "conspiracy", but is James Hiett the only American military or intelligence officer involved in shipping drugs from Colombia to the US? Hiett is significant because the billions we send down there every year to fight drugs seems to wind up bringing even more drugs in. There are many Americans who sympathize with FARC, the dead (and living) union organizers, the indigenous tribes liek the U'wa and so forth, but it seems not only is our tax money going billions a year down there in guns so as to protect a non-Middle East oil supply, we can't even hear what's going on down there do to US Patriot Act censorship. The people controlling the US aren't satisfied with just the billions in arms going down there, now we can't even have free speech in the US about it, that my tax money is funding all of this death can't even be discussed.
I don't think repetition of a point is usually necessary, but I think this is a case where it is. I think it bears repeating that Debian needs work done on its installer. You can weigh the relative merits of Debian Linux versus FreeBSD, but I think it's indisputable that FreeBSD's installer has blown away Debian's for years. They are 100% correct that the installer prevents adoption, if I'm rushed for time, and I always am, I know I can do an easy remote FreeBSD install or slog my way through a remote Debian install.
Someone posted here - "Checksumming - no good. Any program could pretend to have the right checksum, but send false data. No point in figuring out *afterwards* the download is corrupt." This is incorrect. Gnutella currently does HUGE-format full file hashes. If you are doing a multiple source download on Gnucleus, it overlaps data eg it downloads 0-10K from one source and 9-19K from another and 18-28K from another. If 2 and 3 (and 4 and 5) hook up, but 1 and 2 don't, it dumps 1. Actually tiger hashes are an even better method of doing this, you can hash any portion of the file to see if it is good or not, that is coming soon to Gnutella within the partial file sharing scheme. So in Gnutella, fake hash senders are already put down in the current system during multi-source downloads, and when tiger hashing is implemented, they will be eliminated.
The 3 components I see in solving this problem are hashes, unique IDs and distributedness. It is a very complex problem because it is not a technical problem, it is a security problem, e.g. you will have thinking humans on the other end of it trying to foul it up. A bad guy (RIAA/MPAA) can send out good data for weeks and then shift to all bad - by that time s/he will probably be trusted and their shift will have to be dealt with. But then we have to consider people who download bad data and then accidentally distribute it - we don't want them blackballed for becoming an unwitting dupe one time. It's complex and I doubt will ever be 100% solved, the best that we can do is make the network as usable as possible and filtering out as much junk as possible. Basically score data on it's likelihood of being good or bad. As long as we can keep the system 80-99% usable I think we're OK.
The best ideas I have seen here are voting on bad server, a ring of trust and gojomo's post about Bitzi.com. As far as voting on bad servers, or server keys, or user keys - I think we need to vote on bad AND good user keys, if it's just bad keys they'll keep coming back with new keys and it will be futile - the core of good keys will be what is more constant.
As far as a ring of trust - that's a good idea, especially if it's scored, e.g. people I directly endorse get 1.000, people that two of them endorse get a .9500, and so forth. One thing that can be done is all the prominent developers can get keys and then mark hosts which are transmitting legitimate data (mp3's of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech and whatnot) and sign each others keys. That's an easy base of trust of a handful of people, and I'm sure other bases of trust will arise. Once the tiger tree hashing gets in place on Gnutella, we can start seeing stuff like the latest linux kernel distributed on Gnutella. This will be a great way to allow for distribution of popular programs that can't afford expensive hosting.
As far as gojomo's Bitzi.com post, that is the most concrete example of this stuff being currently implemented. Someone responded to his post that the data is centralized on his web site. Well, he has an opend ata policy so anyone can download the whole database and set up their own website with it - as long as they credit the Bitzi data as coming from Bitzi. I do agree that the hash and trust metric has to be distributed within P2P (or concurrent with it to where it's transparent), but right now it's a beacon of what will be, and since the database is open all the work put into it can exist indefinitely even if the RIAA and/or MPAA sues Bitzi.
I have worked everywhere from shops where I was the only tech to Fortune 100 companies. This is not an accident. If it was really an accident, you would be a consultant who would be getting paid time and a half for sloppy management - e.g. your manager and his managers and the company would be losing money because of a mistake. That's a mistake from the manager's perspective. If you are on salary, which I'm sure you are, what the manager is doing makes a lot of sense from a managerial perspective. This idea that there is a rational, non-confrontational way to reason with managers over this is inane. "They should realize that long hours might put a crimp in that high quality code I write - I might get burned out after a few months". They are not stupid - they realize this. They think they will look better if they can burn you out on the next few projects so that's what they're doing.
At Fortune 100 companies, at big law firms, consulting companies down to small companies, many of them run their little flunkies around ragged. Whether you consider this good management or bad management is immaterial - you're not a manager. This is just the way it is, if you're at a salaried job that just requires you to work 9 to 5, you've lucked out. Also, there are plenty of college students looking for a job, H1-Bs and so forth who will not mind working long hours without pay. In terms of business, not necessarily IT, if a manager told other managers that he managed to sucker a bunch of salaried workers to work 15 hours a day, usually he'd be considered a GOOD manager. It does not matter if running you ragged is logical good or bad management or not, that's just the way it is. One reason for this is the ITAA, since there is no IT worker organization with any political clout to speka of, pushed a law through Congress a few years ago repealing (for IT workers only) the FLSA law that said overtime has to be paid.
Every worker is selling his labor time for money. When you give lots more labor time to your employer for free, he's getting over on you. Do you think you could hire a plumber or whatever who charges by the hour and have him fix a sink and then spend another 8 hours fixing all your pipes for free? If you were charging by the hour, your boss would not want you to work 15 hours - if he's paying for your time, all of a sudden he gets some consideration with regards to wasting your time.
I realize a lot of you are starry-eyed out of college Linux hackers buying a lot of BS in your early 20's, but after a while, many of you will gain this perspective, and the sooner you realize it the better. It is strategic thinking, not tactical - knowing this doesn't mean you fight tooth and nail on every thing like this. But it's the realization that if you're paid on salary, not wage - and ESPECIALLY with the laws the ITAA passed through for IT workers in the past few years regarding wages, overtime and salaries - laws financed by Microsoft, Intel, IBM and so forth specifically so they can do the kind of screwing over that you're getting now. You've had some realization about this, that's why you sent to Slashdot.
So strategically you have to realize that if you are being paid salary instead of per hour wage, you are at the mercy of your boss, in fact many, many bosses will push you to work as much as you can without dropping the ball. Very common, they pile on work, pile on work and your hours expand and eventually you start letting things slip - that's a sign to them that you have too much to do and then maybe they give you less work or hire someone else. If they pay you by the hour suddenly they have a lot more respect for your time.
Also, the laws changed by the ITAA were done by the employers (IBM, Intel, Microsoft...go check out the ITAA's sponsors) getting together and changing the law so that you get screwed on overtime, as well as other things. The solution is for more IT workers to join the efforts to organize together to counter what the ITAA is doing. They collectively spend millions to try and screw us, and we try to block them - nascent efforts are making only a small dent but as we get bigger we'll become more powerful. Anyone calling themselves a "professional" in this profession is insane. REAL professionals like doctors, lawyers, dentists have professional associations like the AMA, ABA and ADA fighting for them in Washington among other things. Or they're in unions like SAG, IBEW and whatnot. Or whatever - they organize in the way they want to organize. What do we have? The IEEE-USA? Don't make me laugh - they're sponsored by the same corporate sponsors who fund the ITAA, and these sponsors have threatened the IEEE-USA, and the IEEE-USA has rolled over when the membership has tried to do something, time and time again. Only a reform movement would fix them, if it's even worth it. There are organizations out there doing good stuff - the Programmers Guild, Washtech/CWA, CESO and so forth. Find one you like and join their organization, get active - because the ITAA sure as hell is active screwing us over. Why else have wages fallen for the first time in a decade? Anyone who thinks the ITAA's Washington lobbying to change the laws had nothing to do with it is a fool - are Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc. pissing away all that money for lobbyists and lawyers for nothing? The monetary returns come back to them in spades. And half the IT workers out there don't even know any of this is going on. But the nascent organizations coming up are beginning to change that, so check some of them out. I'm not saying all of this for my health, it's because I want to make nice money at a good job for years to come, just like you. You can come to your own opinions, and decide whether it's worth it to spend the time joining one of these organizations, but you should definitely find out about the ITAA, what they've been up to, how salaries have fallen and all of this stuff anyhow. There's not enough awareness amongst IT workers yet. Here's my web page on this - On call guild
I don't know much about this school, but I do know about the Olin foundation, and they're bad news. They're kind of a strange organization run by privacy-obsessed heirs with a huge bankroll. I'm aware of them because they fund a lot of groups, and one they really bankroll is called NRTW, which is an organization more-or-less devoted to trying to screw working class people out of money. They often team up with Wal-Mart, another organization with deep pockets pertaining to these RTW laws as well as other laws. The difference is Wal-Mart is a business looking out for it's bottom line, and Olin is supposedly a private charitable foundation. But why is a private charitable foundation funding all these little groups to the the tune of millions a year, whose purpose is to try and lower living standards for blue collar workers? I mean, it's not nice, but what are they up to? I'm very skeptical regarding them not just in what they're doing but what their organizations structure is.
Somebody here said Olin was screwing over Harvey Mudd to some extent. I caution people interested in going to Olin to do a lot of reading about these people. Frankly, I'm very suspicious and skeptical of them, to me this is akin to the Moonies buying the Washington Times. Before you register for Olin college, read up on the where the money is coming from, and don't just listen to them, read the reports that are out there on the net, these people have always been bad news and very strange.
Salaries and wages are coming down for a long time, something which was planned by the ITAA (financed by Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc.) who has been spreading millions around Washington for years. In most professional industries - doctors, lawyers, dentists, whatever, you have skilled workers, who work many hours, but who are still concerned enough about the profession to form the AMA, ADA, ABA and so forth. These "super genius" programmers think that economics doesn't effect them. How many dentists say "I'm the best dentist there is, I don't care about what the HMO's are doing"? These people are displaying a lack of professionalism and calling it professionalism. And they always get modded up high.
Anyhow, these people exist, but the important thing are that people who are more clued in exist. The best thing to do in these dark times where the ITAA is very powerful, and organizations like IEEE are beyond hope are to get into contact with one another (eg. the clued in people talk to one another) and go from there. I think the Programmers Guild is a good organization, and there are some interesting Usenet newsgroups although we probably need one moderated by one of us. Since this directly involves my lifestyle I have put a lot of thought into this, this is not esoteric to me, it is very important as it severely affects my life for years to come. Here is my web page on various IT work things which hopefully will help point people in a positive direction to do something constructive.
How many replies here say "they want to throw H1-Bs out, they want to throw H1-Bs out". I haven't seen any serious proposal to throw H1-Bs out, nor does Congressional Representative Tancredo's bill have to do with this. 195,000 H1-Bs can come in every year, a cap that was raised just recently, and many people want to lower that number at least to what it was a few years ago, especially with so many experienced people having their wages cut or being unemployed. Legally, H1-Bs must be the prevailing rate, but every study has shown they are paid below the prevailing rate, even the government reports say this - thus they are lowering the bill rate even though legally this is not supposed to happen. Also, the money paid for an H1-B visa is supposed to go for worker training but Bush wants to use the money instead to bring in more H1-Bs and have their paperwork done faster. This is not about the H1-Bs who are here, this is about the H1-Bs the ITAA wants to come in tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and next year.
I should also note that Harris Miller of the ITAA who is mentioned in the article is pure evil. Since this all affects my WALLET I pay very close attention to this. A lot of posters here admit they are H1-Bs. For some reason they feel compelled to fight against us to keep the door open for more H1-Bs. I don't know why they want to do this as it just lessens their chance for getting a green card, I really can't perceive why they're doing it at all, but it does make me understand why some people want to throw them all out. At least many of the people were honest that they were H1-Bs, thus, a lot of the comments you see here and moderation has a big agenda behind it. As does mine - I'm looking out for my interests, who isn't? I don't know why they're obsessed with keeping the H1-B visa cap high since they're already in, as it just pisses us off against all H1-Bs and lowers their chance for a green card. Maybe they're just stupid.
H1-Bs aren't the only issue of importance although it's up there. FLSA, section 1706, there are many issues which we should be thinking about. Doctors and Lawyers are smart, they have professional associations like the AMA and ABA, virtually every profession is organized in some fashion, with IT workers though, I guess everyone prefers playing Warcraft III and thinking they're a supergenius. When they survive the first and maybe second round of layoffs, they say those people were dead wood and all of this doesn't matter to them, the world's greatest programmer. But then the profession-wide salary and hourly bill rate drops. Suddenly those 60 hour weeks and 24/7 oncall are for less money - factoring in inflation, a bit less. The ITAA has been fighting to drive down our wages for years and they don't even know it, dumbasses like them will have to learn the hard way. They think the only people who worry about this are people who were paid $100k to write HTML, the reality is that the people most concerned about this are usually very competent in their particular field. Only an idiot doesn't worry about their bill rate and lets themselves get walked all over by the ITAA (funded by Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc.)
In closing, as usual I find many of the postings regarding this issue sickening and repugnant. At least most of the posters admit they are H1-Bs, the fact that their side is posted so much and modded up so high is testament to how large this problem is. Read Norm Matloff's "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" to learn more, it covers all the bases. And as I said, H1-B is not the only issue - FLSA, section 1706, there's a lot of things to think about.
Here's my web page on these topics. Reading the replies here has me nauseated, BUT, there are a mass of people who think as I do, and we communicate and are helping organize things like discussed in this article, so knowing that gives me hope. We need every person on board to help us move this forward. The ITAA is coming to take money out of your pocket, only by joining together and organizing can we fight this. Also, people usually reply to my posts replying to things I never said, when I say organize they start listing why they don't like unions. Where did I say unions? I said organize together and fight for your own common interests like every other damned profession. The ITAA (Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc.) are an organization attacking us, so what's so odd about organizing to defend ourselves from the ITAA, if we're all alone and isolated they'll just pick us off one at a time. Organize means organize how YOU want to - if you want a guild, join a guild, if you want a union, join Washtech/CWA, if you want a professional association, join a good one, or join IEEE and stir up a ruckus in their old-line, do nothing, corporate-sponsored meetings. A lot of people are stupid - they don't want to be in a union so they get up and shout that no IT person is allowed to be in a union. Uh, no, that means that's what you don't want in your particular situation right now. I personally do not want a union, I like the professional associations and guilds more, but I'm not going to be a little sycophantic lapdog for my manager and condemn unions - if someone wants to be try to form a union, more power to them - right now, telecommunications, government and aerospace has a lot of unionized IT people and I would personally love to see it spread to BODY SHOPS. But by and large, aside from body shops, I am going for the association/guild route. But I am not going to condemn anyone who wants a union, I only condemn the lapdogs and sycophants for the ITAA.
P2P falls into two categories nowadays, file sharing (FastTrack/Kazaa, Gnutella/Gnucleus-Shareaza-Limewire-Bearshare, Edonkey2000) or publishing (Freenet and Mnet/Mojonation). Like Freenet, Mojonation was more of a publishing network - users publish data, it gets broken into little chunks, encrypted, and then sent out to other computers, and you receive other people's encrypted chunks on your computer making you a "block server". Content trackers and Publication trackers kept track of the meta-data and where the blocks were, and metatrackers kept track of where the trackers (also called brokers) were. I chatted with zooko, one of the developers, on IRC, he was cool and the ideas were very interesting. Like many dot-com stories, it was ahead of it's time in many ways. They converted Mojonation to the open source MNet , whose CVS tree you can peruse. A lot of it is in Python, a language I do not know.
The wasted disk space on workstations (and servers) is something thought about by many, especially in large organizations with large networks. My last company began implementing SANs, so that less disk space would be wasted, and the centralization of disk space allowed for greater redundancy and easier backup. They also ran low priority (nice'd) distributed.net processes across the whole network on non-production machines. You can take a guess about how large the network is by seeing that they're still ranked #22 without submitting any keys for a year.
1984 was written in 1948, and with his number flip he was writing about his own time as well as a future forecast. Remember that the world was divided into three territories, and all were under different, yet very similar systems. He was not just writing about the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but the UK and United States, where in 1948, blacks in the South couldn't vote, couldn't marry white people, could only use "colored" facilities and so forth.
The article says "we watched democracy and liberty spread (like a plague--to Communists) first through the Soviet satellites and then into the heart of the Soviet Union itself." This is a very simple-minded and naive view of Russia. Russians were able to vote since 1917 in elections - true for only one party, but in the US is there an alternative to the Republicrats? George Washington himself discouraged seperate political parties. Let's look at the "democratic and free" Russia now. One of the first things that happened was the Tsar was exhumed and given a state funeral - not a good sign. Then the socialist bureaucracy who controlled the means of production became the capitalists who controlled the means of production. Who are the new Russian rich? The old socialist bureaucracy! At least in the old system they didn't pass on their privilege generation to generation. Nowadays, an ex-KGB head runs Russia (Putin) and he's been censoring the press recently. Where's the uproar in the West? This MIT article is as much spoonfed propaganda as they had in the Soviet Union. It will only make sense if you're used to nodding and going along with "the party line". I live near a Russian ex-pat community, and they do not have these fantasies about how Russia magically went from a horrible evil empire in 1988 to a wonderful free democracy where everything is perfect by 1992, or 2002. I'll believe the people who've been there over this almost sickening propaganda and over-simplification. The reality is things were better (although with problems) than is implied before 1990, and are worse than explicitly said they are, after 1990. If any Slashdotter wants to find out about Russia, stop reading what people from MIT or the White House say and find a real, live person who lived in Russia during the 80's and 90's and ask them.
Michael Harrington, a student of the poor in America, once said "If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery." I tend to agree with this position. Unlike decades ago, I have had to undergo the humiliation of a urine test multiple times in order to get a job so I can continue eating and have a roof over my head. I even had to be fingerprinted with the fingerprints sent to the FBI twice - once for a city job, once for a financial job. Every street I walk down has security cameras gazing at me, and every store I walk into has security gates that electromagnetically scan me. My communications over the phone and over the Internet are open to a variety of monitoring, this has always been the case with my international communications, with the PATRIOT act it means virtually anything.
1984 has come to pass, and like in the book, they are continually refining the technique. If people sit around and just let it happen, it will get worse and worse. The only solution is to organize and fight it. CPSR and EFF help fight some of this technological encroachment, and there are other groups that fight other technological encroachment - NORML for urine tests (the Supreme court just ruled public schools can test students in any extracurricular activity, sports or no, for drugs) and many other groups. The only way these things get better by is by organizing together and doing something about it. There are no big victories, big changes are always just the accumulation of many small victories. Like-minded people organizing together to fight for the democracy and liberty as the article said are the only means of achieveing real liberty and democracy, one step at a time.
So as I said, I do see this as one of the problems to be solved, although I feel it's of lesser importance. There are many ways of doing this. One of them is previewing - when downloading an audio or video file, when you're about 100k into it (100-200k if it's video), do a preview and see what you're getting. With this looping stuff you have to go farther than 100k however - preview one fourth to one third of the way into the audio files. Many Gnutella clients have a preview feature, as does Fasttrack (Kazaa).
Another method is to ban IP's and IP ranges spreading this. This is already being done - it's only a minor fix because they will always get around it, but it will help somewhat, they won't be able to have big servers spewing this stuff 24/7
The real way to fix this however is hashes. Which are already ubiquitous - they already exist and are known on Gnutella (Shareaza, Gnucleus, Morpheus, Bearshare, Limewire), Fasttrack (Kazaa) and Edonkey2000. On Gnutella (Shareaza) and Edonkey2000, you can click through or cut and paste these URI's (URLs) to files from web sites (or Usenet, IRC, e-mail, instant messengers, whatever) and start searching and downloading the files - for FastTrack (Kazaa), it is a little bit more time-consuming and complex, but worth it if you're going to be downloading a large file. The hash technology is already there, the key now is finding a trusted source for hashes which are both good and whose data is findable and downloadable on p2p networks, and for those sources to survive. I guess I'll detail how this is currently working with the various p2p networks, why not?
There are four major p2p networks - Gnutella, Fasttrack, Edonkey and Freenet. Freenet is a publishing network, the others are all file sharing networks, which is what we're concerned with. Gnutella and Fasttrack are the two largest networks. Edonkey2000 specializes somewhat in large files however, so if it's 100MB+ files you're after, Edonkey2000 is on par, and perhaps better in some ways currently, than Gnutella and FastTrack. Edonkey2000 and FastTrack are closed networks - closed source server/clients and closed protocol networks. Gnutella is open, the protocol is open, and robust open source server/clients like Gnutizen exist for it. This gives Gnutella advantages, such as a choice of multiple clients for virtually every platform, as well as other advantages. Of all the file sharing p2p networks, Gnutella is my favorite and I believe Gnutella is the future of p2p. I think competition amongst p2p networks is healthy however as every can steal everyone elses best features and innovations.
Gnutella files are hashed for HUGE with an implementation called sha1. You can read about the technical aspects here if you wish to. These hashes are useful for finding additional sources for found files so that one can resume downloads or download from multiple sources with integrity. Actually there's one caveat to that - if you are downloading from an honest client, it will tell you a truthful hash of it's data. A client could give a fake hash and then send other data - but you would have to directly download from the rogue. How clients deal with this is even more complex - Gnucleus downloads overlapping chunks - it downloads 1-2000 from one source and 1950-3950 from another - if 1950-2000 do not match from both sources, it marks both chunks as possibly bad. You can read more details about this in Gnutella documentation and discussion groups.
Aside from this usage, these hashes can be used externally as well. Currently, Shareaza, which is a pretty good servent (server/client), is the only one from which URI's (URL's) can be cut, paste, and clicked through to from the web/IRC/e-mail etc. I'm sure clients like Gnucleus will have this ability in the future. If you had Shareaza installed, you could click on a link like this - which is an, I believe uncopyrighted, Chomsky speech, Shareaza would launch (if you don't have it already) and would ask you if you want to download the file or cancel. If you select download it would connect to GnutellaNet, search for the file, and if it found a host which has the file and which has upload slots open, would start downloading it. Actually, the Slashdot "allowed HTML" filters are pulling some necessary characters out of the above link, so you can't click through on /., although you can on a normal HTML web page. I can't post an URL that you can cut and paste either since /. forces a line break after 40 characters or so, if /. didn't do this and the below was in one line, you could have cut and paste it into Shareaza, I'll show it here for an example, imagine this was all on one line for you to cut and paste, or better was just a link to cut. You can do this on any HTML page, it's just the Slashdot HTML parsing messing it up -
gnutella://sha1:HXHSJ6ATN3LQCCIOBGUEWV5FFCKP2KBL/N oam%20Chomsky%20-%20Audio%20Book%20-%20Noam%20Chom sky%20-%20At%20Johns%20Hopkins%20University.mp3/
I would give the above link a rank of "7", because the last time I searched for it, 7 people replied they had it. I have several hashes with a score of 80-90, meaning you're more likely to find or download them, but the above is the only one I have that I have enough confidence in that the data is uncopyrighted.
So now you have one link to a hash - where can you find trusted sources which tell you what hashes are ubiquitous, making it more likely you will find and be able to download them, are rated in terms of quality by multiple sources and so forth? Well for Gnutella, one source is Bitzi. You can search for data there, see what is the most reported, what things are ranked, see comments, see bit rates, file sizes, artists, titles and so forth. It is very cool. Most interaction is from Bitzi into Shareaza (the only Gnutella client that does this currently), but from within Shareaza if you find a file you can type "find Bitzi ticket" and see if the hash has been reported on already. One thing which I'm sure will soon be remedied is that Bitzi does not have direct clickthrough to Shareaza, I have to copy hashes to my clipboard, edit them to Shareaza format and paste them into Shareaza. I'm sure soon Shareaza and Bitzi will agree on a standard and remove this step so I can just click through. And soon Gnutella clients other than Shareaza will have this ability as well. Bitzi's data base is open to the public, you can read their open data policy on their web site, anyone is free to use the data as long as Bitzi is credited. Bitzi.com is the only large, good source of Gnutella hashes I know of. Edonkey2000 has had hashes for a while, and has several good, large sources for hashes such as Filenexus.com and Sharereactor.com. Since Gnutella is a larger network and it just implemented this ability, I'm sure it will have even more and larger sources in addition to Bitzi. And since Bitzi's database is open to all, if Bitzi goes down someone else can open the database up again somewhere else. I'm sure in the future, even the trusted rating system will become distributed.
Gnutella uses the sha1 hash, Edonkey2000 uses another, and Kazaa uses another. Web sites exist that centralize the hashes for these. I'm sure soon web sites will exist that coalesces and translates all of this. Gordon Mohr, who runs Bitzi, wants to see a universal p2p tag, magnet, which is agnostic about which p2p backend it is using. Why not? We can have a tag that we (more or less) trust, and can retrieve the data from Gnutella, FastTrack, Edonkey2000 or Freenet. It's a great idea.
I am less interested in other p2p networks than Gnutella but I'll discuss their hash and meta-data web sites a little. The most interesting one is Edonkey2000, which as I said, has come to specialize in large (100MB+) files, and which I have to admit is a pretty good way to download large files with some guarantee of integrity. There are two major meta data sites for Edonkey - Filenexus and Sharereactor. There are other sites as well. If you're looking for large files, they do a pretty good job currently.
Fasttrack (Kazaa) uses hashing, but the Kazaa client is not that friendly to this kind of thing. So Fasttrack/Kazaa is more of a pain in this respect than any of the others. Nonetheless, you can download a program called Sig2dat that helps you copy and paste FastTrack's UUhashes. The you can go to web sites that give meta data, rankings and so forth to these hashes. Kazaa/FastTrack is unfriendly to all of this so it is much more of a pain - you have to install files that help you do this (sig2dat), you have to restart Kazaa for every file you want to download in this fashion and so forth. With Kazaa, all of this is a hassle, it's much easier to do in Gnutella (Shareaza), Edonkey2000 and Freenet.
And lastly there is Freenet. Freenet has been using hashes since the beginning. Freenet is a publishing network, not a file sharing network. That is nomenclature - file can be and are shared on Freenet - from html pages to gifs and jpgs, to mp3's, to avi's, although Freenet is the last place you want to look for large files, Freenet's bailiwick is small files. Even a 4 meg mp3 on Freenet is harder to find and slower to download than any of the other 3 networks. Small files are the domain of Freenet - HTML pages and images. The Freenet protocol is more rich than the other protocols in many ways, thus you have more than just audio and video files going over it, you have third-party applications utilizing it, thus you have things like Fproxy (A world-wide web equivalent which runs over Freenet) and Frost and Freenet message board (Usenet equivalents - both for text and binaries). One benefit of Freenet is it's hard to crack down on people for publishing information - because no one knows who data is coming from or going to. This is not absolute, but it is much safer than the file sharing p2p networks in this respect. Also, people publish data, so that what you put out is stored somewhere other than your computer, and if your web site or shared file or whatnot is popular, it will be out there all the time without your node needing to be connected. Freenet also used a lot of signatures, encryption and so forth, so you already have a pretty solid trust mechanism and data integrity. It depends on what hash is used - KSK hashes are insecure, but SSK are signed. So with Freenet there are large upsides and downsides - the downsides are downloading is much slower, since you're downloading via intermediaries, not directly, and the larger the file, the slower the download and the harder it is to find a complete file. The upshot of Freenet is that there is less of a legal risk with regards to sharing/publishing data, data is signed by the publisher which greatly helps integrity, and also Freenet's protocol allows extensions other than file sharing with it's own internal network - web and Usenet like applications, and I'm sure there will be more in the future.
In the same manner, news regarding Colombia also has to be taken with a grain of salt. Just like the corporate sponsors of the ITAA have an agenda to push lies onto the front page of dice.com etc. for the IT employers who pay them, in the same manner there are corporations who have an interest of portraying a certain image of Colombia in the media, as well as lobbying Congress - which has sent over $2 billion in military funding to Colombia in the past two years. That's a lot of firepower. My point is, if you are not pretty familiar with Colombia, you can bet that the news your hearing was pushed there by someone with an agenda, and the perspective you hear is one-sided. Anyone who gets to know more about Colombia will realize this is the case, that things are not what they seem.
As far as America going into Colombia with military force...this is just insane. The US has given over $2 billion in military aid to Colombia in the past two years. And they burned right through it and just got more. Who are we giving it to? What are they trying to preserve? Is sending the US army going to help? The US army sent a drug czar to Colombia, James Hiett. Guess what happened? He got busted for drug smuggling You want to send the US military into Colombia because American consumers purchase narcotics from there? That's like China sending it's army into North Carolina because the farmers there are growing a deadly narcotic (tobacco) and shipping it to China. The US and Britain used to ship opium (heroin) to China - China decided to ban the import, so Britain, aided by the US, went to war with China during the opium wars in order to bypass the Chinese government and continue selling opium (heroin) to Chinese citizens. Thailand actually wanted to not import America's deadly tobacco drug recently, but the US had GATT force Thailand to import it (or face economic sanctions) - shades of the opium war! We're pressuring countries to import our deadly drugs, but you want to invade a country where drug imports are already cracked down on due to their illegality?
And why the focus on Colombia? The US gets drug shipments from many different countries, some in Asia, why so much news about COlombia recently? Why are supposedly top secret reports from the American intelligence community being leaked to 2nd rate magazines like Business 2.0? These leaks are no accident, there are people in the US with an interest - a financial interest to see that this tap of taxpayer money flows to Colombia, which has been averaging about $1 billion a year, keeps flowing, and maybe even have taxpayers subsidize the US army going down there if their current puppets can't maintain control. The US has a long history of fucking the Colombians, going back to the beginning of the "Panama" Canal days. Panama was part of Colombia until 1903. The US was negotiating with Colombia for the canal land but didn't like the price so the US decided it would be cheaper to take the land than pay for it. They set up and backed a violent secession movement which immediately afterward signed a deal giving the US canal land rights forever, and 11 years later the canal was open for business.
The reality is the US getting militarily involved in Colombia because of drug trafficking is ridiculous. The reality is Colombia is oil rich and the nowadays the owners of the US oil companies are anxious to have oil reserves in areas "under control" outside of the Middle East, for one thing. 201 trade union organizers or leaders were killed (or "disappeared") in Colombia in the last year alone. That's a massive, massive repression, being done by the far right-wing paramilities, primarily the AUC, which has strong ties to the government and business community.
The situation is complex down there, but one thing is for sure - the US is NOT going in there primarily to stop drug trafficking. FARC is said to be a terrorist group, but they are so large, control so much land and have been around so long, that they're more like an army than a small terrorist group. The reality is that Colombia has been engaged in a civil war for many years. FARC actually had a ban on drugs and forbid people in areas it controlled to grow drugs for a long time - all of the drug traffickers were allied with the far right. At some point, I forget when, FARC, the far left group lifted the ban and started "taxing" drugs in the areas it controlled. The reality is that the far right and AUC, with their friends in government and the military, have had a grip on the drug business for decades, and FARC is fairly new to the scene in terms of drug involvement. And of course, it is primarily the FARC-associated drug trade being attacked, not the long-standing AUC drug trade with close ties to the government and military
So I ask myself - why is $1 billion of my tax money going to Colombia to buy arms every year, sent to a government and military heavily involved in drug trafficking and with close ties to terrorist groups like AUC? Why are the oil executives and hawks pushing for even more military involvement in Colombia? Do I want to see young guys called up or drafted to go down and die in Colombia? It's ridiculous. I'm pissed off that they are sending so much military aid down there, but the people who want it have a small majority in Congress. Especially since the side we are supporting is heavily involved in drug trafficking itself, along with murder, torture and atrocities. Human Rights Watch documents the close ties the government and military have to the AUC, who the US State department classifies as terrorists involved in drug trafficking, and you can find more information about this on the web. You can't really understand how brutal these places are, and how bad US corporations and the Pentagon can be, until you visit these places. I'm perturbed that my tax money is going $1 billion a year to help fund this continued bloodshed, if the US does start going in more heavily, I will become even more active in trying to prevent this from happening. Maybe your dream will come true and the US will invade and then some Colombians will fly airplanes into the Sears tower or bring some of the fun going on down there up here. Thanks a lot, you people are very good at wasting my tax money, and sending working class American kids off to die in foreign land for no real reason that will benefit me, the country or the majority of people down there or up here.
Being in IT worker who works with lots of programmers and administrators, I have to say that a lot of the stereotypes about IT dorks are true. Too many of my co-workers are fat, bearded, pasty white, socially retarted, Farscape watching dorks with glasses, who have no social life, no girlfriend and if they do they're usually socially retarted as well and so forth. I guess in such a socially retarted community with yuppie aspirations (which high H1-B caps, FLSA, section 1706 and things like G8 will do much to crush), it's unsurprising to find people so cut off from society and their community to follow the same route on things such as these, and who side with the plutocrats carving up the world over the average man on the street. The only time these losers ever interact in a social manner with a working class human being is when they go down to San Francisco's Tenderloin district and pay some girl $400 to give them a hand job, since they're so socially alienated from the community, they're unable to find a romantic companion. Having to work amidst people like this, who obviously are reflexively sycophantic to the G8 plutocrats, forgive me if you make me want to puke.
Thus, it's normal that these socially retarted and alienated people, who get their news from wherever yuppies get their news, would buy into the G8 plutocrats line that anyone against them is trying to "destroy your home"? Huh, the protestors are coming to your particular house and address to burn it down? If you mean your home is Ottawa, your nomenclature is funny. You never say G8 is coming to your home, although most of the people from G8 are foreigners. Yes, it's always the protestors who are coming from somewhere else, I guess there must be some town somewhere that all these foreign agitators come from. God forbid that there are some people who live in Ottawa, Ontario, or Canada who are unhappy about this! Yes, the G8 plutocrats from the US, France, Germany etc. are your "local" people to protect, and the local community groups protesting this are the "foreign" agitators. In the corporate media, this kind of deception goes through unchallenged all the time, fortunately, at least here it can be challenged.
And wow, these protestors are "violent" before they even get to Ottawa. What foresight you must have, you can already see the future! We just had the WEF in New York City in February, thousands showed up to protest, and there were only a handful of arrests, and no cases of physical violence or property damage. The supposedly massively violent Seattle protests had a handful of kids break the windows of Starbucks and the Gap before some middle-aged union guys came over and ran them away before the cops came. The Gap sells clothes made by 9 year olds in Indonesia factories who work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and who are often beaten at their factories. Who are the real criminals?
I see us as on the winning side. There are enough blind people like you so that the problems addressed by the protestors are ignored, and things will get worse and worse and worse and worse. Soon you will be praying for the days of relatively peaceful days of demonstrations like the upcoming G8 one will be. In a few years, when all IT work moves to India and Romania, and the remaining American workers are all H1-Bs who are treated like blue collar workers, combined with 1706, FLSA and so forth, I think we will start seeing more disgruntled IT workers coming to things like these. In fact, it is starting to happen already, you'd be surprised how many people coming to them have had their salaries drop like ComputerWorld pointed out recently (that IT industry salaries have dropped while productivity and the level of services remain, e.g. workers are giving more or the same for less), and how well they know Java and C++ and how to create stored procedures in Oracle. The protestor groups would not be able to have as much of an Internet presence as they do without the freely donated time and resources of programmers and administrators who are unhappy about how their communities are being shitted on by these G8 plutocrats, are unhappy about how their wages are being driven down while they're the ones who do the work and create the wealth that fills their shareholders and CEO's pockets, are unhappy with working 60 hour weeks, being oncall 24/7 and having their workplace trying to destroy their social life, a social life made more difficult to attain since these types of economic and social changes have been destroying the social life of communities which existed decades ago. These sycophantic dorks are not people, they are people without a social life, they are robots attached to machines and bureaucracies who have no desire for a social life and social interactions. It's almost like a science fiction tale where networks of robots and computers are battling the humans who have not been devastated by this cold, impersonal network, with about as much charm as a data center at 4 in the morning. I'll cast my lot with the human communities instead of these bureaucracies that are trying to turn humans into robots, even if we lose in the end, they're a much more fun group to hang out with then dorks whose fun idea of a Saturday night is -
Watching a MST3K marathon with other dorks
Perusing the SF Red Book for which prostitute they will have a so-called date with tonight
Shopping at Fry's for a graphics card because they have a Quake tournament to play at that night
and of course we can't forget
Spending Saturday night at the office working!
No thanks...I spend enough time working and being around these people to keep a roof over my head. I don't need it to BE my life.
If you're a sysadmin, the Solaris System Administration Guide(s) from Sun are handy in book form, even if they're free online. Sun Performance and Tuning is good so as to learn how Solaris memory and other functions work. It is not a day-to-day operations guide, it is more high level. For topics from PERL to awk to NFS, O'Reilly books are the best. Buy whatever you need. I also like the Osborne "Teach yourself C" (and C++) books by Herbert Schildt for the little C and C++ programs I write.
Of course, being that hashing is becoming popular with Gnutella, it will be easier to avoid false data. However, there is not a system within Gnutella that shares this information with users and can be used in the interface, it's more of a back-end thing currently to help in multi-source downloading.
Some of the problems -
If someone goes to the trouble of doing this, and you set up a ratings/trust/whatever system, they're going to try and get over on that too. So you need a way to deal with people who are actively trying to wreck the system, maybe on a mass scale.
Also, you want to make all of this as brain-dead as possible for the typical user, so they may even be unaware of the bad data.
I'd also say that being that this isn't a big problem on Gnutella currently, and Gnutella has more important matters, this will probably be on the things-to-do list until it becomes a bigger problem, since it's unimportant right now. Although I really would like a good meta/ratings system. I'm writing a Gnutella client and having problems with just the basic spec though. Gnutella allows for "private" data to be sent on hits though and other expansions.
Perhaps it's just the FBI's history, from it's weirdo patriarch J. Edgar Hoover, which bugged Martin Luther King's bedroom, launched COINTELPRO to investigate Americans it didn't like, had agents send *death threats* to Americans it didn't like, then after supposedly getting cleaned up in the 1980's paid a guy to try and seduce a nun working for CISPES, then mishandled Waco and Ruby Ridge and now is trying to cover up some 9/11 stuff. I have a very bad impression of the FBI, and I think they are more dangerous than useful. Their means are kind of strange - for left-wing type people there is massive surveillance, and for right-wing or religious type people there is little surveillance, but quite a body count.
Bearing all this in mind, I find it disturbing that their are FBI agents acting as ops all over IRC trying to catch people up to no good. I mean, any kid who DOS's people continually from their house is eventually going to be caught and locked up. Personally, I am less frightened by the random script kiddie who will wind up in juvey for DOS's, and more frightened by the extent of the FBI on IRC, Magic Lantern, the NSA, all these new PATRIOT act measures and so forth. I *DO NOT* trust the FBI.
If you do not have RSI - if you use computers long enough without listening to what I and others here say, you *will* get it. I mean, it's like trying to life 500 pounds and get a hernia, or smoking 2 packs a day until you get lung cancer. Just because it takes a few years to get you doesn't mean it eventually will. If you're young, be smart and pay attention so your hands don't get crippled. You don't have to go overboard, there's some simple things you can do to help you out. And if you feel pain - DON'T IGNORE IT, do something about it.
Some people have posted good things here. The web page that helped me out was the RSI web page by Netscape developer guru Jamie Zawinski.
As people have said, it's all about repetition. If you do the same thing over and over and over again (e.g. click a mouse, type), eventually your hands will slowly start getting screwed up and you will start feeling pain whenever you mouse click, or type, or whatever. Ask programmers you know who are over the age of 25, I guarantee 50% of them either have RSI or say they type in a manner that avoids RSI.
Here are some things I do to help:
I use a different mouse at home and work. At work it is the basic Microsoft mouse. At home it is a trackball-type mouse with a big ball. I also switch hands with both mice, I go half an hour with the left hand, then half an hour with the right hand. This way, both hands get half an hour of use and half an hour of rest. This helps me more than anything.
Also, continually typing for hours on end is no good. Zawinski takes a 5 minute break every 40 minutes, or when feeling pain, every 20 minutes. Go to the bathroom, get some water, get a Snapple. Or stop typing and read some manual or papers or something. Do some hand-stretching exercises.
Also, having a good ergonomic keyboard, mouse and chair, and sitting and typing at them properly help. And if you feel real pain, go more overboard on this stuff and see a doctor. And sue the hell out of everyone in sight!
Speaking to that last topic, Bush and his cabinet guys say RSI is bullshit and people like me and thousands of others who feel pain in our hands are imagining this. Hmm, that wouldn't be because the ITAA (funded by Microsoft, IBM, Intel and so forth) is handing him millions of dollars, would it be? Also, this is is a professional concern, not a partisan political one - both Democrats and Republicans have been taking ITAA money. Although with professional issues, we're more likely to get initial help on RSI from Democrats, and we're more likely to get initial help on H1-Bs from Republicans (like Rep. Tancredo). Organizations like the Programmers Guild fight for programmers and administrators on issues such as this. So think about checking up on them, and maybe even signing up, or at least getting involved.
This guy is right on - the hours suck. If I didn't have over 6 years experience under my belt, I would not be a sysadmin. You wear a pager 24/7 and are liable to be beeped at any time. It really has been grueling everywhere I went.
I don't believe that this is just "the way it is". Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Oracle and some other companies helped manufacture it so it is this way. I've been studying labor history (which doesn't necessarily mean union history) since things started really getting bad after the bubble burst in April 2000. There's been a long war between workers and employers over wages, unemployment rates, hours, working conditions and so forth for decades, even over a century. The most similar parallel to what's happening now for our profession is when a bunch of aerospace associations formed CESO in the late 1960's when the aerospace industry was in upheaval.
I am not some fanatic...all I really care about is making good per hour money. The way to do that is improving marketable skills and working hard. However. The industrywide wage has fallen as we have read in the papers. When something becomes industrywide, we have to band together and fight it as a profession, improving skills and working hard is not enough anymore. Even if you're some dork who places all self-worth in the notion he is the greatest programmer in the world and everyone else sucks. Let me tell you, I've been mucking with PC's, modems and so forth for 20 years - that's just not all there is to it.
Doctors, Lawyers, Dieticians, Dentists and other professions have good professional associations. AMA, ABA, ADA and another ADA. What do we have? We do not have a good professional association. No, the IEEE is not good, they are controlled by Microsoft, IBM, Intel and so forth, the same people who are attacking our profession in the ITAA. In my mind, the Programmers Guild is the best professional organization I've seen. I think aside from skills and hard work, we have to band together like aerospace engineers did in the 1960's, in an association, since most programmers/admins don't want a union, and fight against the ITAA lobbying group in Washington DC, and fight for ourselves in other ways.
I have a web page about this: OnCall Guild. I hope you read my web page (everything associated with OnCall is free), or check out the Programmers Guild or pro-IT Usenet groups. Only by educating ourselves, other IT workers and organizing into an association can we fight for our profession, since skills and hard work alone aren't cutting it any more.
The open source community needs a voice battling against embrace-and-extend, and protecting the open source community against those in the closed-source community who will attack it any way they can (FUD, getting laws passed making it illegal for colleges to write GPL software etc.) Richard Stallman is that voice. From creating a license that would protect open source software if the author desired it, to speaking up loudly whenever he sees something that he feels threatens the open source community, the open source community needs someone fighting against those that wish to harm it.
I don't have a problem with Stallman's message. For all those who want Stallman to soften up and talk about the benefits of BSD and forget about getting credit where he thinks credit is due - forget it. It's not Stallman's role to talk about the benefits of BSD, of course he's going to hype his own license, and hype GNU's contribution to the Linux Operating System. Complaining about a lack of a benediction from Stallman to write a program with the BSD license or to drop the GNU/ when saying Linux is kind of silly.
Of course some people just want to not think about this stuff and just use and enjoy the product. People flying in an airplane don't need to dwell overmuch whether the engine is working correctly, whether the luggage and passenger list have been examined for security. The people running the operation are who have to think about this stuff. Likewise, developers and some administrators are the ones who have to ponder what licenses the products they develop and use should be. Like an aviation operation, if no one is dwelling on safety and security, results down the road can be disastrous.
I am a chess player and programmer, although I would not brag about my ability in either. Fritz and Deep Blue are interesting chess programs, but I am more interested in Crafty, which is one of the highest rated chess programs, and which is open source as well - I can look at the source code and look at what it is doing. In fact, the commercial Fritz package has two parts - an engine and what is designed around the engine. You can switch the Crafty engine with the Fritz engine and analyze positions and the like using both engines - something I often do.
To understand humans versus computer chess playing, you have to understand that at higher levels of playing ability, chess is broken down into three parts - opening, middle game and end game.
The computer's greatest strength lies in it's *perfect* end game ability. Here the computer is indisputably the master, it never makes a mistake. In fact, they have been pushing this backwards - first it played perfectly with 3 pieces on the board, then 4, then 5, and they keep going backwards and increasing that number.
The computer's second greatest strength is in it's opening ability. Here the computer has the ability to play a perfect game as chess is currently known. It is able to analyze every chess game ever played and play the best game possible as chess is currently known. If the grandmaster it is playing against is very smart, the grandmaster can invent a chess innovation that has never been done before, or that has been done once or twice so long ago that everybody has forgotten about it, and even the computer ignores it. These innovations are one of the exciting things about grandmaster play, because grandmasters come up with new innovations in chess openings every year, some of them quite exciting and amazing. So if the grandmaster is smart enough to create an amazing chess opening innovation, he can win against opponents like Deeper Blue.
I should also point out that certain openings are good for humans, and certain openings are good for computers. Openings which go into "open" games are good for computers because tactics is the greatest strength of computers. Openings which go into "closed" games are good for humans, because they are strategic, and strategy is one of the few weapons a human has against a Deeper Blue.
Now we get into the important part, the middle game. As I said before, computers are becoming more and more the tactical masters of this arena, although humans still rule the domain of strategy. Although computer endings are still being expanded in the ending (first a perfect game with 3 pieces, then 4 pieces, then 5 pieces, then 6 pieces...) and in the beginning (always being updated with the latest matches, and some algorithms tweaked), the middle game is where the real work is being, and needs to be done to improve computer chess playing ability. In tactical terms, as algorithms are tweaked and processing power increases, computers are able to see farther and farther ahead in the game with a clearer and clearer view. Nonetheless, computers have problems with strategy and positional play - they can't see how much of a threat passed pawns are, which currently requires thinking, not evaluation. They also have other problems like a horizon effect, they don't see how their pieces can get trapped in a way that would be easily obvious to any grandmaster "thinking" about it.
Many articles and books have been written on computer chess - how to program and improve computer chess programs and then how to beat them, and there are quite a few people who enjoy regularly beating the best chess programs out there on a regular basis. Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan, who makes a habit of beating chess computers, says that he believes even the best programs like Deeper Blue are inferior to the best grandmasters, and that only by psyching out opponents can computers win. Humans can make 30 excellent moves, and then get distracted and make a simple, stupid mistake on a move (a "blunder"). I've felt this myself - it is psychically challenging to stare at a chess board for over an hour with such intense concentration - if I was doing a programming problem and felt like this, I would get up and go get a glass of water and relax, but you can't do that in a times chess game. Computers always play at the same ability, they don't "get tired", and a very tired, distracted human who has a cold and is hungry will probably be playing at less than his highest potential and is apt to make blunders. Despite these human failings, we have the advantage of being able to get an axe and break Deep Blue into a million pieces, an advantage computers luckily don't have the ability to do to us (yet).