AT&T was required by their government, as a condition of their being allowed to be a semi-abusive monopoly, to spend a certain percentage of their profits on research (the 19xx consent decree, I forget what the xx is). They had no real interest in improving the phone network - they were making money hand over fist as it was - so they spent money researching everything else!
If you are running externally viewable services, then there's a lot of voodoo that must be accomplished to handle the failover. The cost of the voodoo (DNS alternative records, alternate email servers, and the hassle in dealing with 2 incompetent suppliers instead of just 1) probably outweighs any savings.
If you just want to surf the web, and you don't mind a little wierdness and in-office NATing, then your solution is the right one, but for services offered to the world, you either become a network admin and get an AS number and a netblock, or you contract it out to high quality providers.
You are wrong. There are dozens of oil companies salivating at the prospect of someone reputable saying that everything is okay. If you could show that everything is okay, then you would probably never have to write a grant proposal ever again.
But it's a source monoculture and not a binary monoculture. I think that matters - with a source monoculture, your attack worm has to have semantic information about where to drop its payload, while with binary monoculture the worm only needs to know a particular memory address. So its definitely safer as long as we have a diversity of compiled kernels, and I'm pretty sure that isn't going away.
BPL seems like a loser of an idea due to interference issues, but we need SOME third party in the marketplace. The game theory works against net neutrality if there are two or fewer players, but it may work FOR net neutrality if there are at least 3. I'm betting on wireless, but I wish the BPL guys well and really just hope the some thrid party gets into the last-mile business ASAP.
You are more right than you know. Bell Labs was created because the government required, as a condition of AT&T's continued existence as an abusive monopoly, for them to spend x% of their income on research. Hence Bell Labs.
You don't get it both ways. They are either soldiers, or they are criminals. If they are criminals, then they get trials in front of a judge. If they are soldiers, then they get POW status and Geneva Convention protection. There ain't no third category except in the minds of people who want to establish a class of subhumans that have not been endowed by their creator with any inherent and inalienable rights; (among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness).
Often it's not big iron on the server side, but is instead a cluster of beige boxes running some kind of free OS. The big win is in taking the hard drives away from the users who like to press the reboot switch and kick their machines. Giving them to the sysadmins isn't that big a loss. Put all the hard drives in one location, and just swap them out when they die.
The savings are in support. Not having hard drives means hard drives don't fail, and means that you can roll out changes much more easily. Having a central storage solution makes sense if you have the bandwidth required to keep your users happy.
"to beleive[sic] that the human race has the power or even the potential to destroy the earth is absolute arogance[sic]"
That quote continues to say that we certainly have the power to make the earth unlivable for people. Did you even read Player Piano, or did you just cull it for that one half sentence?
>> To quote something I have read in a book - "to beleive that the human race has the power or even the >> potential to destroy the earth is absolute arogance".
> It sounds like the author of that book had an agenda. And wasn't very well informed.
No, it was Kurt Vonnegut in Player Piano. The full quote says that while it is impossible to destroy all life on earth, it is completely possible to make it impossible for humans to survive. Which is an opinion that is nuanced, well informed, and hard to refute. Pretty much no matter what, life on earth will continue. It may be set back a billion or two years, and it may not come back like us, but it'll survive. Destroying the earth is beyond our current level of technology. Destroying humanity is well within our grasp, however.
No. The fact that you would think that shows that the grandparent is correct that the portion of the state space explored is literally unimaginably small. We have explored a truly tiny portion of the state space for DNA, and (probably) almost none of the non-DNA state space.
Your argument about grey goo expanding outward really fast from the home planet is an interesting one, but I think you are correct that Malthusian arguments can provide a good counterpoint. But that'sno reason that it couldn't happen here.
> The patent system has long protected "processes,"
Nope. What you patent is "a device implementing this idea" and then you describe the device in depth in such a broad (and yet oddly specific) way that can be interpreted to mean "all devices implementing this algorithm including computers" in enough courts. This is a bad hack on the legal system thought up by AT&T in the 70's when they wanted to patent Huffmann codes. The mathematicians who figured it out didn't think it should be possible to patent math, but AT&T had an army of lawyers and found a way that got past the patent office's bullshit detector. Business process patents are an even more recent innovation - and even stupider.
Patenting ideas is bad news. Patenting things makes much more sense. Copyright is for ideas, and so are trademarks. You may patent *devices* and devices only.
In no way do we have the same enemies as we did in the 50's, unless you think that in fighting communism in the USSR we were REALLY fighting muslim extremism in the Middle East or vice versa. Retconning is for comic books, not real life. And this whole "only room for 1,000,000,000" thing reeks of the static fallacy and presumes no affect from an increase in technology. Apocaphilia is rampant on all sides of the debate, but the world isn't going to end, it's simply going to keep muddling on. We might run low on oil, but it's not going to kill the world, it will just make everything more expensive.
And while there are lots of people who don't like us, the only state actors who present a credible threat are North Korea and... um... North Korea. There are non-state actors like religious fundamentalists (Osama Bin Laden), homegrown wackos (Tim McVeigh), and similar, but the missile defense shield is going to do less than nothing to deter them.
Well, if 50% of marriages end in divorce, but only 33% of first time marriages to, then the remainder has to come from the people marrying again and divorcing again (and maybe again and again)
You don't get to make up threats and then say that a missile shield would protect against those and I should be glad to have it. We live in the real world here - what threats are likely, and from whom, and what are the cost and effectiveness of the various ways we have of countering each threat. The missile shield fails on all counts - it's designed to fight Soviet Russia (imaginary threat) at very high cost (bad) but still doesn't work AT ALL after we've spent a trillion dollars on it (bad) and the funds would be better spent figuring out how to deal with religious extremists who demonstrably pose a mich higher threat to us.
The question is not whether it can be made to work (most research says "not", BTW. Hitting a bullet with a bullet just is not a feasible long term solution) but whether a) anyone wants to fire an ICBM at us and b) whether the money could be used more effectively and c) whether there is any real difference between a 99% effective missile shield and no shield at all.
I contend that: a) basically only North Korea wants to shoot at us b) give all the money to Bruce Schneier and have him design appropriate security measures based on actual needs and not knee jerk political fear. Or simply give it to the rest of the world! $1000 per person buys a lot of goodwill. FMI, check out http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200408/msg00072.html c) one multimegaton bomb in the middle of New York or many, it's still a smoking crater. 99% solutions are pretty much the same as 0% solutions here.
If you feel you lack experience, then teach yourself (I recommend Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess which has recently been reissued). But either that or learning chess together is recommended. Chess from books is profoundly boring until you reach a much higher level than it sounds like you are talking about.
They were trying that, but the preponderance of people who were new to this whole internet thing meant that very few people followed the guidelines. When I finally unsubscribed there were hundreds of messages every day, 99.95% of which I didn't care about. And it's hard to say whether there was really a problem. People were posting OFFERS and WANTED and TAKEN and all that, but there was just too much stuff and I didn't want anything to do with any of it, except for that aforementioned.05%.
1 of 2,000 messages was something I cared about. That is simply not enough signal for me. Craigslist for the same area has proven far more functional.
Slashdot Mirror
"Can't access the Internet because there's no more bandwidth"
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how TCP/IP networks work, and about how much bandwidth is available in the Internet core.
AT&T was required by their government, as a condition of their being allowed to be a semi-abusive monopoly, to spend a certain percentage of their profits on research (the 19xx consent decree, I forget what the xx is). They had no real interest in improving the phone network - they were making money hand over fist as it was - so they spent money researching everything else!
If you are running externally viewable services, then there's a lot of voodoo that must be accomplished to handle the failover. The cost of the voodoo (DNS alternative records, alternate email servers, and the hassle in dealing with 2 incompetent suppliers instead of just 1) probably outweighs any savings.
If you just want to surf the web, and you don't mind a little wierdness and in-office NATing, then your solution is the right one, but for services offered to the world, you either become a network admin and get an AS number and a netblock, or you contract it out to high quality providers.
You are wrong. There are dozens of oil companies salivating at the prospect of someone reputable saying that everything is okay. If you could show that everything is okay, then you would probably never have to write a grant proposal ever again.
> It _is_ possible to operate a Windows PC for years without ever having to remove a single item of spyware. _That's_ the equivalent of driving a car.
I have never heard of any non-computer-scientist accomplishing this feat.
But it's a source monoculture and not a binary monoculture. I think that matters - with a source monoculture, your attack worm has to have semantic information about where to drop its payload, while with binary monoculture the worm only needs to know a particular memory address. So its definitely safer as long as we have a diversity of compiled kernels, and I'm pretty sure that isn't going away.
BPL seems like a loser of an idea due to interference issues, but we need SOME third party in the marketplace. The game theory works against net neutrality if there are two or fewer players, but it may work FOR net neutrality if there are at least 3. I'm betting on wireless, but I wish the BPL guys well and really just hope the some thrid party gets into the last-mile business ASAP.
It ran off with the O in OEM.
You are more right than you know. Bell Labs was created because the government required, as a condition of AT&T's continued existence as an abusive monopoly, for them to spend x% of their income on research. Hence Bell Labs.
You don't get it both ways. They are either soldiers, or they are criminals. If they are criminals, then they get trials in front of a judge. If they are soldiers, then they get POW status and Geneva Convention protection. There ain't no third category except in the minds of people who want to establish a class of subhumans that have not been endowed by their creator with any inherent and inalienable rights; (among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness).
Often it's not big iron on the server side, but is instead a cluster of beige boxes running some kind of free OS. The big win is in taking the hard drives away from the users who like to press the reboot switch and kick their machines. Giving them to the sysadmins isn't that big a loss. Put all the hard drives in one location, and just swap them out when they die.
The savings are in support. Not having hard drives means hard drives don't fail, and means that you can roll out changes much more easily. Having a central storage solution makes sense if you have the bandwidth required to keep your users happy.
Everquest is already there.
"to beleive[sic] that the human race has the power or even the potential to destroy the earth is absolute arogance[sic]"
That quote continues to say that we certainly have the power to make the earth unlivable for people. Did you even read Player Piano, or did you just cull it for that one half sentence?
>> To quote something I have read in a book - "to beleive that the human race has the power or even the
>> potential to destroy the earth is absolute arogance".
> It sounds like the author of that book had an agenda. And wasn't very well informed.
No, it was Kurt Vonnegut in Player Piano. The full quote says that while it is impossible to destroy all life on earth, it is completely possible to make it impossible for humans to survive. Which is an opinion that is nuanced, well informed, and hard to refute. Pretty much no matter what, life on earth will continue. It may be set back a billion or two years, and it may not come back like us, but it'll survive. Destroying the earth is beyond our current level of technology. Destroying humanity is well within our grasp, however.
No. The fact that you would think that shows that the grandparent is correct that the portion of the state space explored is literally unimaginably small. We have explored a truly tiny portion of the state space for DNA, and (probably) almost none of the non-DNA state space.
Your argument about grey goo expanding outward really fast from the home planet is an interesting one, but I think you are correct that Malthusian arguments can provide a good counterpoint. But that'sno reason that it couldn't happen here.
> The patent system has long protected "processes,"
Nope. What you patent is "a device implementing this idea" and then you describe the device in depth in such a broad (and yet oddly specific) way that can be interpreted to mean "all devices implementing this algorithm including computers" in enough courts. This is a bad hack on the legal system thought up by AT&T in the 70's when they wanted to patent Huffmann codes. The mathematicians who figured it out didn't think it should be possible to patent math, but AT&T had an army of lawyers and found a way that got past the patent office's bullshit detector. Business process patents are an even more recent innovation - and even stupider.
Patenting ideas is bad news. Patenting things makes much more sense. Copyright is for ideas, and so are trademarks. You may patent *devices* and devices only.
In no way do we have the same enemies as we did in the 50's, unless you think that in fighting communism in the USSR we were REALLY fighting muslim extremism in the Middle East or vice versa. Retconning is for comic books, not real life. And this whole "only room for 1,000,000,000" thing reeks of the static fallacy and presumes no affect from an increase in technology. Apocaphilia is rampant on all sides of the debate, but the world isn't going to end, it's simply going to keep muddling on. We might run low on oil, but it's not going to kill the world, it will just make everything more expensive.
... um ... North Korea. There are non-state actors like religious fundamentalists (Osama Bin Laden), homegrown wackos (Tim McVeigh), and similar, but the missile defense shield is going to do less than nothing to deter them.
And while there are lots of people who don't like us, the only state actors who present a credible threat are North Korea and
Well, if 50% of marriages end in divorce, but only 33% of first time marriages to, then the remainder has to come from the people marrying again and divorcing again (and maybe again and again)
False premise.
You don't get to make up threats and then say that a missile shield would protect against those and I should be glad to have it. We live in the real world here - what threats are likely, and from whom, and what are the cost and effectiveness of the various ways we have of countering each threat. The missile shield fails on all counts - it's designed to fight Soviet Russia (imaginary threat) at very high cost (bad) but still doesn't work AT ALL after we've spent a trillion dollars on it (bad) and the funds would be better spent figuring out how to deal with religious extremists who demonstrably pose a mich higher threat to us.
The question is not whether it can be made to work (most research says "not", BTW. Hitting a bullet with a bullet just is not a feasible long term solution) but whether a) anyone wants to fire an ICBM at us and b) whether the money could be used more effectively and c) whether there is any real difference between a 99% effective missile shield and no shield at all.
s ting-people/200408/msg00072.html
I contend that:
a) basically only North Korea wants to shoot at us
b) give all the money to Bruce Schneier and have him design appropriate security measures based on actual needs and not knee jerk political fear. Or simply give it to the rest of the world! $1000 per person buys a lot of goodwill. FMI, check out http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/intere
c) one multimegaton bomb in the middle of New York or many, it's still a smoking crater. 99% solutions are pretty much the same as 0% solutions here.
Stallman.
If you feel you lack experience, then teach yourself (I recommend Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess which has recently been reissued). But either that or learning chess together is recommended. Chess from books is profoundly boring until you reach a much higher level than it sounds like you are talking about.
Ah the olden days. Good times.
They were trying that, but the preponderance of people who were new to this whole internet thing meant that very few people followed the guidelines. When I finally unsubscribed there were hundreds of messages every day, 99.95% of which I didn't care about. And it's hard to say whether there was really a problem. People were posting OFFERS and WANTED and TAKEN and all that, but there was just too much stuff and I didn't want anything to do with any of it, except for that aforementioned .05%.
1 of 2,000 messages was something I cared about. That is simply not enough signal for me. Craigslist for the same area has proven far more functional.