But this is just as loony as most other controls on cryptography (and here I include Wassenaar). Given the ease that material on cryptography is moved in and out of any national boundary, it seems that this is more of a club in the belt of any nation than a practical piece of trade legislation.
More to the point, given that corporations can't risk that the club be used, it is a serious burden to accessibility of encryption - merely because of the risk that someone from overseas might take a copy from their servers. It'll never hurt people who are very serious about encryption (who can read the literature on the subject and write applications for themselves). Whom it will hurt are users of encryption, such as companies selling over the net; browser/client manufacturers; a whole lot of joe averages everywhere, most of whom won't even come close to breaking those laws against distribution of encryption.
She's writing to her counterpart in Germany. Such contacts are quite normal, quite usual, quite common - hardly as extraordinary as you (and other slashdotters) make them out to be.
Read a major newspaper regularly; you'll see some kind of reporting on some kind of high-level international contacts nearly every day.
That's bull; access to the internet is access to the internet. You don't (and can't) sue when there's a network outage.
More to the point, there are a couple of valid uses for that kind of thing. First of all, ISPs in many areas of the world are forced to restrict access to sites to conform to local legislation. It's assinine but true. And it's easy to see that happening in America - the last decade of the Republican Party being a front for the Christian Coalition is more than illustrative enough.
Second, bandwidth limiting isn't exactly a new thing - it's used to determine quality of service. As a return for tv cable monopolies, cable co's have to devote a certain amount of broadcast to the public - public access television. It's not unreasonable to see that bandwidth might be treated in the same way - registered not-for-profit sites getting an allocated chunk. Or that pornographic sites be limited to a certain chunk (a weak second best to the point above, no doubt).
I think that those assumptions are a bit generous. First, the specs do not mention shell access. Most people (that are Joe Average Users, at least) won't want shell access, for that matter; they'll prefer to store and send mail locally.
Secondly, expecting 1/10th of your user base to be on concurrently is, well, pretty heavy use. And unrealistic. At Queen's, we have a single Sun Enterprise 300 serving all student email - about 16 000 accounts. I've yet to see more than 300 simultaneous logins.
Thirdly, 8M RAM a user? You must be kidding. A couple (including shell and mail client), tops.
Fourthly, and most importantly, a single box can make things very unpleasant come upgrade time. Spread the whole thing across several servers in a cluster (IMHO). That way you can bring individual boxes down (you can even have one fail by surprise) without a major break in service.
Quite frankly, bollocks. Perhaps you'll have to be good with code to gain admission to the club, but once you get into the club it's personality all the way. That's the nature of any social grouping. Why would geeks be any different? (Did you think that ESR got his high profile through his stunning good looks?)
That said, it's not like social status by birth is any better. Of course, most geeks tend to come from the middle, upper middle, or upper class, the ones that can afford to go to college (which is both an expense and foregone income), often for prolonged periods of time.
By the same token, if you were pointed to a story on page 11 of a newspaper, and went straight there, the newspaper would be able to sue. What incredible silliness.
If they were really serious about keeping people from linking out, they'd stick the pages in a database and assign a time-limited session ID to each user (like with Notes URLs). They're obviously not serious about it.
If you're talking about streaming video, you can stream it to any arbitrary point both on the campus network and elsewhere. I think that it's a bright idea to build in that kind of flexibility, especially with the potential for distance education.
Consider that distance education students using this system will pay the same fees but will incur little by way of incrememental costs (especially when it comes to rebroadcasting courses, ad infinitum). You may hate to see your money thrown away on seemingly trivial projects, but remember that a distance student will eventually be subsidizing on-campus ones.
I think that there will be a flattening job growth for technical people - in order to be in high demand, you have to be technical and something. Knowledge of computers and business analysis. Of computers and, say, statistics and epidemiology. It will no longer be enough to be a generic code hack, unless you're a very good generic code hack.
IT is broadening and specializing, and the heroic era of computing science, with the field as a whole moving ahead by leaps and bounds, is probably drawing to a close.
Correct metaphor: if you bought someone a gun, show them how to use it, and they shoot themself.
Microsoft frequently makes claims as to the security of their products without making any efforts to actually prove it to the security community. An example of this is the virtual private network scheme - the algorithm and implementation is untested, untried, and unproven. If one uses it, one must take MS's word as to its efficacy.
MS compounds the error of their ways by placing the blame on the cracker/hacker who exploits their security holes. If you wish to continue with the gun metaphor, perhaps this would be analogous to a claim that guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Metcalfe, as the inventor of ethernet, has demonstrated plenty of technical cred. If he was to venture into the OSS fray and make technical criticisms, I'd listen to him.
However, this isn't so much a technical argument as the work of a pundit. The man (or woman) who combines technical mastery with that of the written word is a rare bird indeed. Combining that with an operational nalyst's mind? An even rarer bird. Metcalfe, I'm afraid, is not the first kind of bird, and certainly not the second.
Personally, I *have* mucked around in the kernel, but that was when I had no other alternative. It was also just over three years ago, so the codebase was smaller then. It's much easier to use someone else's work.
However, the entire process of kernel development is people adding features or refining old ones when they need it. A larger user base (and consequently a larger developer base) pays off in that there will be more people with such necessities.
This is addressing your question back to front, I know. Still, the process is most important - the actual, concrete code much less so, because the process endures. Every line in linux is going to end up rewritten, I'm sure, within the next two years. The OSS process - it'll still be around.
I think that we can easily dispense of the notion that the article is directed at slashdot readers as a whole. I'd think that we (as a group) are much more technically oriented than the average corporate employee.
Unfortunately, the average corporation is composed mostly of average corporate employees. The people that have trouble running win95. If you're in any large organization, half the staff won't have a clue, and the babysitting required to bring Palms (or any new hardware, or any new software) into widespread use really should give one pause.
You know those checkboxes when you sign for free stuff, where you state your role in making a corporate decision? Being a real decision maker isn't just being the person who decides; it's being the person who has to live with the decision. I'd really have to think hard before bringing Palm Pilots into my organization. Hand them out to the technical staff - great idea. Other people? Ummm... maybe not.
I don't exactly know what you think RMS' "real job" was over the last twenty years; the FSF isn't exactly a cash cow.
Furthermore, RMS has always been within the ideological margins. You misunderstand what ESR said (of course, it's entirely possible that ESR misunderstands this as well), that none of us would be here without RMS. It's true that none of us would be here without RMS in terms of the sheer volume of code he has produced and made possible through the FSF.
More than that, however, is his role as an ideologue; by being at the fringe, the mainstream has stretched to the point where giving away source is no longer a revoutionary idea. Without RMS it never would have bee. If the wishy-washy ESR "Open Source" paradigm, rather than the hardline FSF paradigm, was the most radical available, then the mainstream would have been even closer to the proprietary model. That is what we owe, most of all, to RMS.
They're probably going to do an IPO for the new Rio company, which will (hopefully) partially finance the acquisition of Diamond. Of course, S3 is supposed to be cash-rich, but with the current nuts-about-the-net stock market, they may get a lot more out of selling off Rio Inc. than it's really worth as a division of Diamond.
However, the GPL is viral; if you use GPL'ed code in your program, the program must be released under the GPL. Of course, if all they use are some GNU utilities, all they have to do is make the source available for those only. (Needless to say, they don't have to make them available to the world, only to purchasers).
I'd think that an ISP is a common carrier, or as close to a common carrier as is possible. While a telephone call doesn't stay in the system as long as a usenet post, I don't think that speed is the defining factor. After all, what about snailmail?
What's more, if Demon takes the responsibility of starting to censor, it's forced to continue to censor at every opportunity; they give up the defense of being a common carrier. Can you imagine facing obscenity charges for every post to alt.sex.stories? No doubt they're itching to be laid. Demon has no choice but to act as if were a common carrier or be once and totally screwed.
Consider that Transmeta still doesn't have a webpage out; it's not unknown for a relatively young company, which hasn't established its core business, which has no PR staff, to do its work with a reasonable lack of attention.
That says, it doesn't mean they have anything, either; I daresay that if the report is correct, they'll be going for the supercomputing, heavy number crunching market, where they can attempt to recover their investment before going for the low-margin, mass commodity, PC market. There are no doubt a few applied mathematics or physics researchers raising a pint in anticipation right now.
Slashdot Mirror
But this is just as loony as most other controls on cryptography (and here I include Wassenaar).
Given the ease that material on cryptography is moved in and out of any national boundary, it seems that this is more of a club in the belt of any nation than a practical piece of trade legislation.
More to the point, given that corporations can't risk that the club be used, it is a serious burden to accessibility of encryption - merely because of the risk that someone from overseas might take a copy from their servers. It'll never hurt people who are very serious about encryption (who can read the literature on the subject and write applications for themselves). Whom it will hurt are users of encryption, such as companies selling over the net; browser/client manufacturers; a whole lot of joe averages everywhere, most of whom won't even come close to breaking those laws against distribution of encryption.
She's writing to her counterpart in Germany. Such contacts are quite normal, quite usual, quite common - hardly as extraordinary as you (and other slashdotters) make them out to be.
Read a major newspaper regularly; you'll see some kind of reporting on some kind of high-level international contacts nearly every day.
That's bull; access to the internet is access to the internet. You don't (and can't) sue when there's a network outage.
More to the point, there are a couple of valid uses for that kind of thing. First of all, ISPs in many areas of the world are forced to restrict access to sites to conform to local legislation. It's assinine but true. And it's easy to see that happening in America - the last decade of the Republican Party being a front for the Christian Coalition is more than illustrative enough.
Second, bandwidth limiting isn't exactly a new thing - it's used to determine quality of service. As a return for tv cable monopolies, cable co's have to devote a certain amount of broadcast to the public - public access television. It's not unreasonable to see that bandwidth might be treated in the same way - registered not-for-profit sites getting an allocated chunk. Or that pornographic sites be limited to a certain chunk (a weak second best to the point above, no doubt).
I think that those assumptions are a bit generous. First, the specs do not mention shell access. Most people (that are Joe Average Users, at least) won't want shell access, for that matter; they'll prefer to store and send mail locally.
Secondly, expecting 1/10th of your user base to be on concurrently is, well, pretty heavy use. And unrealistic. At Queen's, we have a single Sun Enterprise 300 serving all student email - about 16 000 accounts. I've yet to see more than 300 simultaneous logins.
Thirdly, 8M RAM a user? You must be kidding. A couple (including shell and mail client), tops.
Fourthly, and most importantly, a single box can make things very unpleasant come upgrade time. Spread the whole thing across several servers in a cluster (IMHO). That way you can bring individual boxes down (you can even have one fail by surprise) without a major break in service.
Quite frankly, bollocks. Perhaps you'll have to be good with code to gain admission to the club, but once you get into the club it's personality all the way. That's the nature of any social grouping. Why would geeks be any different? (Did you think that ESR got his high profile through his stunning good looks?)
That said, it's not like social status by birth is any better. Of course, most geeks tend to come from the middle, upper middle, or upper class, the ones that can afford to go to college (which is both an expense and foregone income), often for prolonged periods of time.
By the same token, if you were pointed to a story on page 11 of a newspaper, and went straight there, the newspaper would be able to sue. What incredible silliness.
If they were really serious about keeping people from linking out, they'd stick the pages in a database and assign a time-limited session ID to each user (like with Notes URLs). They're obviously not serious about it.
If you're talking about streaming video, you can stream it to any arbitrary point both on the campus network and elsewhere. I think that it's a bright idea to build in that kind of flexibility, especially with the potential for distance education.
Consider that distance education students using this system will pay the same fees but will incur little by way of incrememental costs (especially when it comes to rebroadcasting courses, ad infinitum). You may hate to see your money thrown away on seemingly trivial projects, but remember that a distance student will eventually be subsidizing on-campus ones.
I think that there will be a flattening job growth for technical people - in order to be in high demand, you have to be technical and something. Knowledge of computers and business analysis. Of computers and, say, statistics and epidemiology. It will no longer be enough to be a generic code hack, unless you're a very good generic code hack.
IT is broadening and specializing, and the heroic era of computing science, with the field as a whole moving ahead by leaps and bounds, is probably drawing to a close.
Correct metaphor: if you bought someone a gun, show them how to use it, and they shoot themself.
Microsoft frequently makes claims as to the security of their products without making any efforts to actually prove it to the security community. An example of this is the virtual private network scheme - the algorithm and implementation is untested, untried, and unproven. If one uses it, one must take MS's word as to its efficacy.
MS compounds the error of their ways by placing the blame on the cracker/hacker who exploits their security holes. If you wish to continue with the gun metaphor, perhaps this would be analogous to a claim that guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Metcalfe, as the inventor of ethernet, has demonstrated plenty of technical cred. If he was to venture into the OSS fray and make technical criticisms, I'd listen to him.
However, this isn't so much a technical argument as the work of a pundit. The man (or woman) who combines technical mastery with that of the written word is a rare bird indeed. Combining that with an operational nalyst's mind? An even rarer bird. Metcalfe, I'm afraid, is not the first kind of bird, and certainly not the second.
Fair enough comment.
Personally, I *have* mucked around in the kernel, but that was when I had no other alternative. It was also just over three years ago, so the codebase was smaller then. It's much easier to use someone else's work.
However, the entire process of kernel development is people adding features or refining old ones when they need it. A larger user base (and consequently a larger developer base) pays off in that there will be more people with such necessities.
This is addressing your question back to front, I know. Still, the process is most important - the actual, concrete code much less so, because the process endures. Every line in linux is going to end up rewritten, I'm sure, within the next two years. The OSS process - it'll still be around.
I think that we can easily dispense of the notion that the article is directed at slashdot readers as a whole. I'd think that we (as a group) are much more technically oriented than the average corporate employee.
... maybe not.
Unfortunately, the average corporation is composed mostly of average corporate employees. The people that have trouble running win95. If you're in any large organization, half the staff won't have a clue, and the babysitting required to bring Palms (or any new hardware, or any new software) into widespread use really should give one pause.
You know those checkboxes when you sign for free stuff, where you state your role in making a corporate decision? Being a real decision maker isn't just being the person who decides; it's being the person who has to live with the decision. I'd really have to think hard before bringing Palm Pilots into my organization. Hand them out to the technical staff - great idea. Other people? Ummm
I don't exactly know what you think RMS' "real job" was over the last twenty years; the FSF isn't exactly a cash cow.
Furthermore, RMS has always been within the ideological margins. You misunderstand what ESR said (of course, it's entirely possible that ESR misunderstands this as well), that none of us would be here without RMS. It's true that none of us would be here without RMS in terms of the sheer volume of code he has produced and made possible through the FSF.
More than that, however, is his role as an ideologue; by being at the fringe, the mainstream has stretched to the point where giving away source is no longer a revoutionary idea. Without RMS it never would have bee. If the wishy-washy ESR "Open Source" paradigm, rather than the hardline FSF paradigm, was the most radical available, then the mainstream would have been even closer to the proprietary model. That is what we owe, most of all, to RMS.
They're probably going to do an IPO for the new Rio company, which will (hopefully) partially finance the acquisition of Diamond. Of course, S3 is supposed to be cash-rich, but with the current nuts-about-the-net stock market, they may get a lot more out of selling off Rio Inc. than it's really worth as a division of Diamond.
Isn't Linux, by definition, the kernel?
However, the GPL is viral; if you use GPL'ed code in your program, the program must be released under the GPL. Of course, if all they use are some GNU utilities, all they have to do is make the source available for those only. (Needless to say, they don't have to make them available to the world, only to purchasers).
I'd think that an ISP is a common carrier, or as close to a common carrier as is possible. While a telephone call doesn't stay in the system as long as a usenet post, I don't think that speed is the defining factor. After all, what about snailmail?
What's more, if Demon takes the responsibility of starting to censor, it's forced to continue to censor at every opportunity; they give up the defense of being a common carrier. Can you imagine facing obscenity charges for every post to alt.sex.stories? No doubt they're itching to be laid. Demon has no choice but to act as if were a common carrier or be once and totally screwed.
Consider that Transmeta still doesn't have a webpage out; it's not unknown for a relatively young company, which hasn't established its core business, which has no PR staff, to do its work with a reasonable lack of attention.
That says, it doesn't mean they have anything, either; I daresay that if the report is correct, they'll be going for the supercomputing, heavy number crunching market, where they can attempt to recover their investment before going for the low-margin, mass commodity, PC market. There are no doubt a few applied mathematics or physics researchers raising a pint in anticipation right now.