Good point. Here's a better lifecycle link at Microsoft, which includes it's Windows server products and a bunch of other server products. For Office and other MS products, you can try this link.
--LP, who is 'journal whoring', not karma whoring thank you very much;-)
The big question is this, which happens faster? Wine can support any app for a given MS OS, or MS declares the OS so obsolete and unused that nobody uses it?
The analogy to Iraqi stolen treasures may be misplaced. While initially there were reports that thousands, or, as Maddog says, "a lot of them were removed from the world," later reports in the NY Times and Wall Street Journal put the number of verified pieces missing at 25 in one piece I read and 33 in another.
It turns out that the museum staff stored hundreds and thousands of pieces in their homes, and more valuable pieces had been stored in bank vaults since the first Gulf War. I don't have the Times/WSJ links, but a quick google search turned up this article and this article confirming those basic findings. The later article does mention larger numbers for "minor" pieces, whatever that means.
(On second thought, maybe the analogy holds: lots of sound and fury about stolen IP, followed by findings that very little was taken...)
One never knows whether a journalist/reviewer/linux-advocate really understands what an "enterprise"-ready OS is. For the purpose of this post, I'm not arguing whether Linux is or isn't one. But I had to laugh after seeing a chart showing "Successful transactions per second" and doublechecking their footnoted definition of transactions.
OLTP? Database? TPC-C? No. A transaction was downloading 20 4k-byte files.
(This isn't what I'd write to a Slashdot audience, but it *was* targetted at getting a Senator to wake up... This posting is in the public domain. --LP)
I am writing about your recent remarks reported in the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A624 1-2003Jun17.html
'If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.'
I take grave exception to your remarks that destroying computers would be an acceptable, in-extremis, remedy for copyright owners to take to protect their computers. And I say this as someone who loves music, listens to it on his computer, and has nothing to fear, as I do not copy music illegally over the Internet out of the recognition you speak of.
Such an idea, allowing one private entity to destroy another's computers, lacking due process or appealability or anything like that is totally anathema to a fair system of justice and is totally shocking coming from a senator of your stature.
People store their lifeblood of their work and personal correspondence on computers.
Any lack of protection of that is not only stupid from a computer science security point of view, but goes directly against the point of the Fourth Ammendment. If Thomas Jefferson had copied some musical recording of a British artist, you would allow the British artist's record company to burn all Jefferson's papers?!
I watched your hearings with the RIAA on CSPAN2 a couple years ago and I thought you had a reasonably nuanced position of trying to push the industry to recommend measures Congress could reasonably enforce while protecting their rights. These sort of remarks not only fail to defend the public's rights (to fair use, time/space shifting, eventual public domain of works, etc) but they indicate (in my view) a lack of perspective gravely deficient in a public official, particularly one of your stature.
You are not my senator, so I recognize you have limited need to respond to my input. However, we do share a country and a federal government. And furthermore, I will say that I have thought of you as potential presidential material and this remark struck me as about as insensible as Ross Perot's comments about people out to get his daughters.
Personally, I'd like to see some sort of recantation of your remarks about tampering with people's computers and some advocacy of protecting the citizen's fair use rights, time/space shifting for personal use, and eventual public domain of works, which as a citizen and consumer I value highly.
It's totally ludicrous that JFS is derivative of System V in any normal sense of the word. JFS was the first journal file system in commercial UNIXes back in 1990 and way-predated other journal file systems (caveat: dunno when Veritas entered the fray as a third-party vendor).
So why would SCO make this claim?
A new thought on this occurred to me: what's really bizarre is: "How does SCO know what AIX code looks like??!" The IBM guys licensed UnixWare (via Sequent and I think Monterrey), but not vice-versa, did they? Perhaps by making strong claims, SCO can go on a fishing expedition into the AIX code!
The idea goes something like this: show the court that IBM coders took some code from UnixWare and put it in Linux. Then claim that they probably did the same for AIX. Then get to look at all the IBM source code and try to find more (minor, insignificant) infractions that you can blackmail.... I mean settle with IBM for.
Just a thought.
--LinuxParanoid
P.S. The possibility that Sun is that other 'unknown SCO licensee' makes a lot of strategic sense. Dunno whether it's true, but the shoe fits. Kudos rjamestaylor for that thought.
Bah, my initial starting figures for the surface of the earth are off by 1000.:(
Earth surface = 5.1*10^14 m2 Volume extruded from surface, 1km high, ignoring spherical distortion = 5.1*10^17 m3. # atoms in that space = 1.48*10^46 one IP address for every 43 million atoms, which is a bit of a different story from my first post. But maybe my assumptions were too conservative?
This raises another question, which is what is the rough lower bound for the size (in terms of # of atoms) for a working nano-device? I evaded this question a bit in my earlier analysis, but remembering the Times Ten size comparisons showing viruses, particularly rhinoviruses as the smallest living things, I went to look at how many atoms make up such a thing. A google search led to a Caltech thesis saying that "The smallest important viruses, the picornaviruses (responsible for polio, the common cold, and hoof-and-mouth disease) are composed of protein coats of about 0.5 million atoms and a nucleic acid genome of about the same size." (Some smallest virus in theory calculations suggest lower sizes, I dunno how good the underlying assumptions are.) So 1 million atoms is a reasonable size for a nanodevice, right? Well, partially-- viruses can't do much without a host cell infrastructure to tap into. But on the flip side, for a working nanodevice sufficient to have its own IP address, we wouldn't necessarily need the self-replication infrastructure of a virus. So I'm not sure this line of thinking leads anywhere.
Stepping back, my volumetric analysis was probably too conservative (1km high all over the earth's surface?) Tallest buildings size today is ~400 meters to the top occupied floor, so in that respect my analysis isn't too off. But what's the average density likely to be anytime in the near future? My guess is there's a 1/x power law distribution of some kind (hmm, perhaps so?) More googling leads to a paper saying that average building height in Los Angeles is really more like 12 meters (with cities like Phoenix at 5 meters). So maybe we can chop off two orders of magnitude from our 1km height estimate. So 430K atoms per IP #?
Then there are two other factors that lead to further overestimates of usable volumetric space; that urbanization itself isn't spread evenly over the surface of the earth, and that within this, say, 10meter high volume, there's a limit to the nanodevice density that humans (and the atmosphere) will accomodate. That alone cuts the max number of atoms worldwide dedicated to nanodevices down by several orders of magnitude further. Enough so that I'm still pretty comfortable that nanotech won't exhaust IPv6.
OK, I've spent way too long satisfying my curiousity. Hope someone out there found it interesting.:)
...at least if you use a non-ethernet addressing scheme for those bottom 64 bits and get a full 128-bit space. I once wondered about whether nanotech would present problems for 128-bit addressing and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to examine the issue. A little math to satisfy one's "what-if geek" tendencies:
That's surface area, but we live in a volumetric space; let's define that space as 1 km high above/below earth's land-mass(part of that 1km being underground, part being in the air.) Thus the volume of human space above/below land is 1.48*10^14 m3. With 10^6 cubic centimeters per cubic meter, and approximately 10^23 atoms per cubic centimeter, we get 1.48*10^43 atoms in our human-habitable slab of space on earth.
Now, how many IP addresses for that space? Well, 2^128 = 3.4*10^38th.
Ergo we have enough IP addresses for nanotech devices of 43,600 atoms each, in a human-habitable volume completely covering the land-mass of Earth and extending to fill a volume of space above and below the earth's surface for a full 1 km. Sure, you might get nanodevices smaller than that, but would they be independent enough and sensing/generating enough information to communicate via IP?
Well, if that isn't a problem for 128-bits, what is? Let's check a few other test cases that your friendly sci-fi reader might imagine...
Well, that was just land-mass. What if we filled the sea with nanodevices, would that exhaust it? The sea is 11km deep at worst, 3.8km on average. Water surface area is little over double land. Thus water basically requires a factor of 10x more devices. Given that you probably won't have more than 10% of the volume of any space being nanodevices (and this would seem to remain an extreme upper bound), this probably isn't an issue.
So what about interplanetary colonization? Still not too much of an issue for this solar system (ignoring the latency issues.) At least the first few planets (Mars/Venus/Mercury) which only add a factor of 3-4x expansion once 100% colonized form due to the roughly similar size of available nanodevice space on those planets as earth. True, a colonized Jupiter might pose problems down the line...
And if you used nanoprobes to fill/convert entire atmospheric systems, you end up covering a lot more volume (99% of earths' atmosphere fills approx 8.6*10^19 m3 by my calculations, five orders of magnitude more space than our 1 km slab.) Of course, any nanodevice design on that scale would probably use its own non-IP protocol.
Ah, but what other assumptions could be misleading us? For example, what is the efficiency of the 128-bit name space? Can we really use all those addresses? Well, I admit, I'm less an expert on this. The issue that Ethernet MACs will typically be your bottom 64-bits definitely chews up a lot of space, but if Ethernet doesn't make sense for nanodevices, we'll probably be using something else, or our self-assembling nanoprobes will build and configure themselves so that they share 1 higher-level IP but under the covers each have an colony-wide (not globally) unique ethernet address. How efficiently allocated is the rest of that (non-Ethernet) space? Well, I think CIDR-like tweaks can squeeze a fair amount out.
Still, even in the case where 128-bits isn't quite enough(!), I suspect reverting to NAT-type approaches in IPv6 will be workable. Certainly inter-stellar communications which will be limited to a relatively small number of transmitters will scale up with NATs for quite a while, assuming photon-based communications.;-)
So I suspect the 128-bit addressing scheme of IPv6 will last us at least another 200 years, not just "decades" as
When story submissions are rejected, are they deleted from the database immediately?
I ask because I'm curious if rejects could be redirected or resubmitted elsewhere with less effort than is currently required.
If either A) Slashdot users could read their rejected story submissions at least for a little while after they're rejected, they could do things like easily submit them to my user-moderated open Slashdot queue or B) if there was some hook so they could dual-submit to your queue and someone elses journal (like mine), we could see whether or not moderation would also work for sorting through and highlighting story rejects. (I'm presuming you wouldn't mind helping users experiment with such concepts.)
I likewise grew up on AppleII Basic and C64 Basic (which led to Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and x86 Assembler in high school, and more stuff in college and work).
From what I can tell, little coders today grow up on HTML (+Javascript). And some people I know learn coding via MUDs or Visual Basic (it's not *that* expensive that you can't ask your parents for it.)
If I were a kid, I'd probably try downloading a Java JDK and messing around, but maybe that's just me.
For a rejected stories area within Slashdot, moderated by Slashdot users, try this. It's still small and requires users to submit their rejects, but quality is pretty good.
When you submit your stories to Slashdot, copy-n-paste em to submit to this user-moderated story queue that I came up with (mis-)using the Slashdot journalling facilities. They'll be modded up if other Slashdot readers/moderators like them.
We do get random people submitting stories and random people moderating, but it's still small. But hey, you gotta start somewhere, and more people *will* see your stories (and your writeup) than if they went straight into Slashdot's rejection bin.
what if article submission was handled with an algorithm similar to message posts?
This is available now, here within Slashdot. We're nowhere near hundreds of articles, but hey, that means the signal/noise ratio is good, right? Join us. Try it!
I'm not sure I that the 3 reasons Mark Fisher gives for lack of code-reuse are the main issue. Usually I think programmers are just too lazy to search. I had one predecessor that I always suspected had this disease. I've noticed in myself at times too. Usually you think that if you (re)write it, it'll be easier than trying to understand someone else's code (often but not always, you are wrong.:).
That said, let me pass on a little practical story. Having built solutions myself that were quick and dirty, for version 2.0 of a recent project I worked on, I decided to dump most of my code and try building on an existing, well-known open source project in my area. I've spent 4-6 weeks trying to take a well-known piece of open source code that performs a similar function better than my quick&dirty approach. I'm not finished, but with the deadline past and with significant obstacles remaining, I'm really questioning my well-intentioned attempt at re-use.
So let me toss out some more reasons why developers may not "search the literature":
1) the (time)-cost of doing the search,
2) the cost of figuring out the implementation details of what you do find so that you can effectively use it (which can be anything from understanding perl module documentation to understanding the concepts behind lex/yac or some protocol),
3) the time/development-cost of integrating the open source codebase into your codebase; this includes porting or handling dependency chains
4) the risk that, because of some detail that you won't understand until you fully invest in #2 (above), it may end up that this tool you are reusing actually doesn't solve your problems for some unexpected underlying implementation reason (something you can avoid if you fully develop your own solution with methods you *know* will work)
5) the risk of choosing the wrong alternative (e.g. picking one templating system out of the dozen alternatives that then gets orphaned)
I'd like to reuse code more, but rationally there are a bunch of reasons why I don't do more. These need to be addressed more satisfactorily for more code sharing to flourish.
This topic, and device, was last discussed on Slashdot May 12th (found via slashdot search for "radio your way".)
Two links I found useful were a a competing piece of hardware, Neuros, and a much cheaper substitute if the radio program is streamed on the internet, Replay Radio. Plus an even earlier Slashdot thread.
In fairness, this is not a dupe, as the May 12th thread was about 'future' products and this is a product review.
--LP
Key quote. My question: how to remedy?
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The key quotes from the CEO are:
"We have examples of code being lifted verbatim. If you look at the code we believe has been copied in, it's not just a line or two, it's an entire section -- and in some cases, an entire program. "
Now this may or may not be true or may be true in some mostly-irrelevant way. But that leads me to a question.
My question would be, if, theoretically, a coder knows in their conscience that they did violate copyright in this way, what would be their best recourse to fix the situation?
Should they patch the code themselves and submit a patch? Would such a patch withstand legal scrutiny? And should they warn the person who they send the patch to about the urgency/motivation of the patch?
Alternatively, should they merely notify/tell someone else ASAP so that the violating code can be removed and replaced by someone 'clean', and sooner rather than later?
It would seem one of these two would be wise. That way, the amount of time between when the violation is ruled to have occurred, and the time when it is 'made right' through a fix is minimized, and the effects of any judge-ruled injunctions to correct things are minimized. Or if the issue is fixed particularly before the case is ruled upon, perhaps the point can be ruled as 'moot' since the violation has since been fixed.
Either way, this raises some sub-questions:
A) who should they tell in the open source community about their indiscretion?
B) should they attempt to be anonymous in their communications? (to avoid legal liability)
C) does telling someone else then open the tell-ee to some sort of potential legal liability?
Clearly a swamp of legal issues that are better avoided entirely. Any answers though?
--LP
P.S. Of course Slashdot advice/commentary isn't legal advice/comment. But it's an interesting question and I figure *someone* on here has a more considered opinion than I.
I believe Microsoft had a perpetual license to Xenix, which turned into SCO OpenServer in the mid-90s. I don't know if Microsoft had any license rights to the OpenServer upgrades.
However, it appears that the license they are getting via this settlement is to SCO UnixWare (which was Novell UnixWare and before that AT&T SVR4). Which is a totally different kernel. Or at least much different.
The UnixWare kernel is substantially more sophisticated than OpenServer, with very good SMP support, clustering support, support for many system items being hot-plug, etc.
SCO tried for years to shift OpenServer customers to the UnixWare kernel, but backwards compatibility and comfort levels always made it a hard sell.
Without its own Unix OS, Microsoft is not necessarily competing directly in the Unix space with SCO, although one could obviously argue that their interoperability tools for the last 4 years or so have competed.
This sounds like great grounds for web conferencing companies like WebEx, GotoMyPC, etc. to sue Microsoft for Sherman Anti-trust Act tying violations. Particularly since Microsoft purchased one of their competitors, PlaceWare recently.
Triple damages, mmm.
--LP, who doesn't mind MS software actually, but *hates* the EULAs coming from that lawyer's-son Gates.
Yeah, I saw that woman with the rare-earth doped flouride glass at SIGGRAPH '97 or so. Just looked her up on google and found a name and familiar picture: Dr. Elizabeth Downing. Further googling turned a website for her company, 3DTL.
There was a flurry of info about it in 1997 and not nearly as much since then. Did it go private or did it fold? Further googling describes 3DTL getting a $1.9 million NIST grant in late 1998, and a $340k grant in 1999. Not much visible info since then; I supose you could call the phone number on their website to find out more. I recall one key problem being the small size of the laser-addressable cube. There are probably problems aligning lasers as you scale up in size, but this is speculating based on 5-year old memories.
I ran across a nice survey paper motivated by the problems with rotating displays that discusses a lot of the static volumetric displays including Dr. Downing's.
Regarding various troll-slams on OpenBSD... I dunno, I'm using OpenBSD and it's great. Nowhere to go but up, as far as I'm concerned. FreeBSD and NetBSD don't have much of a value proposition in my book compared to mainstream Linux distros, but if you want a secure webserver (or network appliance) without having to patch the thing all the damn time, OpenBSD seems a heck of a lot better than any Linux variant.
That said, I'm not dogmatic about this; it's just the conclusion I've come to based on the evidence I've seen so far.
I don't understand why you would post and read on a system that produces horrible results. Perhaps you could enlighten me?
I am not assuming that the signal ("all quality posts responding to an article") is easily determined. Getting a perfect signal is quite difficult. And subjective. Slashdot does not do that, and as far as I can tell, does not claim to. The pragmatic question, in moderation as in signal processing is, how much of a good signal can one end up with with a relatively simple filter?
As a filter, Slashdot has some significant limitations, but it also does pretty well, and, in my view, the distributed moderation approach provides better filtering than USENET for large-traffic topical forums. And there's some empirical evidence that I aluded to that discussions are actually larger on Slashdot than on USENET. Slashdot scales with a larger readership/postership; USENET I contend does not.
(One might object that I am overstating the case here; USENET groups will usually split when they get too much traffic. I would agree that this helps if you can start ignoring one of the resulting groups, but I'd argue that it doesn't if your topical interest extends across the new groups.)
One can argue that people have different notions of what a worthy post is. And intellectual posts are overlooked (mostly if they occur too late in the thread, in my experience). But an automated peer-review system that spreads responsibility shallowly to many people does provide a certain useful filter. I read at threshold 3 (unless moderating) and like it. Your mileage may vary. But the multi-million unique-visitors readership of Slashdot suggests that I am not alone. Although I hear 3/4 only read the front page that's still a remarkably large readership.
Slashdot Mirror
Three quickies:
When people go around saying "Google is God", you know it's time to short their stock... oh shoot, they haven't even gone public yet!
If Microsoft's upcoming squashes Google, does that mean Microsoft is the new god? Or is it Satan?
And what does it tell you that despite its vastly superior powers, that nobody has equated Microsoft to God in the NY Times?
Just reading the tea leaves,
--LP
Good point. Here's a better lifecycle link at Microsoft, which includes it's Windows server products and a bunch of other server products. For Office and other MS products, you can try this link.
;-)
--LP, who is 'journal whoring', not karma whoring thank you very much
The big question is this, which happens faster? Wine can support any app for a given MS OS, or MS declares the OS so obsolete and unused that nobody uses it?
--LP, who drank his first Wine about a decade ago
A full description of Microsoft's end-of-support, end-of-life policies, including dates for *all* it's OSes, can be found here.
--LP
The analogy to Iraqi stolen treasures may be misplaced. While initially there were reports that thousands, or, as Maddog says, "a lot of them were removed from the world," later reports in the NY Times and Wall Street Journal put the number of verified pieces missing at 25 in one piece I read and 33 in another.
It turns out that the museum staff stored hundreds and thousands of pieces in their homes, and more valuable pieces had been stored in bank vaults since the first Gulf War. I don't have the Times/WSJ links, but a quick google search turned up this article and this article confirming those basic findings. The later article does mention larger numbers for "minor" pieces, whatever that means.
(On second thought, maybe the analogy holds: lots of sound and fury about stolen IP, followed by findings that very little was taken...)
--LP
One never knows whether a journalist/reviewer/linux-advocate really understands what an "enterprise"-ready OS is. For the purpose of this post, I'm not arguing whether Linux is or isn't one. But I had to laugh after seeing a chart showing "Successful transactions per second" and doublechecking their footnoted definition of transactions.
OLTP? Database? TPC-C? No. A transaction was downloading 20 4k-byte files.
--LP
Is it binary because it has NOTs, or binary because it has KNOTs?
(This isn't what I'd write to a Slashdot audience, but it *was* targetted at getting a Senator to wake up... This posting is in the public domain. --LP)
4 1-2003Jun17.html
I am writing about your recent remarks reported in the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62
'If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions, he said.'
I take grave exception to your remarks that destroying computers would be an acceptable, in-extremis, remedy for copyright owners to take to protect their computers. And I say this as someone who loves music, listens to it on his computer, and has nothing to fear, as I do not copy music illegally over the Internet out of the recognition you speak of.
Such an idea, allowing one private entity to destroy another's computers, lacking due process or appealability or anything like that is totally anathema to a fair system of justice and is totally shocking coming from a senator of your stature.
People store their lifeblood of their work and personal correspondence on computers.
Any lack of protection of that is not only stupid from a computer science security point of view, but goes directly against the point of the Fourth Ammendment. If Thomas Jefferson had copied some musical recording of a British artist, you would allow the British artist's record company to burn all Jefferson's papers?!
I watched your hearings with the RIAA on CSPAN2 a couple years ago and I thought you had a reasonably nuanced position of trying to push the industry to recommend measures Congress could reasonably enforce while protecting their rights. These sort of remarks not only fail to defend the public's rights (to fair use, time/space shifting, eventual public domain of works, etc) but they indicate (in my view) a lack of perspective gravely deficient in a public official, particularly one of your stature.
You are not my senator, so I recognize you have limited need to respond to my input. However, we do share a country and a federal government. And furthermore, I will say that I have thought of you as potential presidential material and this remark struck me as about as insensible as Ross Perot's comments about people out to get his daughters.
Personally, I'd like to see some sort of recantation of your remarks about tampering with people's computers and some advocacy of protecting the citizen's fair use rights, time/space shifting for personal use, and eventual public domain of works, which as a citizen and consumer I value highly.
Regards,
It's totally ludicrous that JFS is derivative of System V in any normal sense of the word. JFS was the first journal file system in commercial UNIXes back in 1990 and way-predated other journal file systems (caveat: dunno when Veritas entered the fray as a third-party vendor).
So why would SCO make this claim?
A new thought on this occurred to me: what's really bizarre is: "How does SCO know what AIX code looks like??!" The IBM guys licensed UnixWare (via Sequent and I think Monterrey), but not vice-versa, did they? Perhaps by making strong claims, SCO can go on a fishing expedition into the AIX code!
The idea goes something like this: show the court that IBM coders took some code from UnixWare and put it in Linux. Then claim that they probably did the same for AIX. Then get to look at all the IBM source code and try to find more (minor, insignificant) infractions that you can blackmail.... I mean settle with IBM for.
Just a thought.
--LinuxParanoid
P.S. The possibility that Sun is that other 'unknown SCO licensee' makes a lot of strategic sense. Dunno whether it's true, but the shoe fits. Kudos rjamestaylor for that thought.
Right, you can't moderate journal posts.
However, you *can* moderate replies to journal posts which is how the open story queue works at my journal.
--LP
Bah, my initial starting figures for the surface of the earth are off by 1000. :(
:)
Earth surface = 5.1*10^14 m2
Volume extruded from surface, 1km high, ignoring spherical distortion = 5.1*10^17 m3.
# atoms in that space = 1.48*10^46
one IP address for every 43 million atoms, which is a bit of a different story from my first post. But maybe my assumptions were too conservative?
This raises another question, which is what is the rough lower bound for the size (in terms of # of atoms) for a working nano-device? I evaded this question a bit in my earlier analysis, but remembering the Times Ten size comparisons showing viruses, particularly rhinoviruses as the smallest living things, I went to look at how many atoms make up such a thing. A google search led to a Caltech thesis saying that "The smallest important viruses, the picornaviruses (responsible for polio, the common cold, and hoof-and-mouth disease) are composed of protein coats of about 0.5 million atoms and a nucleic acid genome of about the same size." (Some smallest virus in theory calculations suggest lower sizes, I dunno how good the underlying assumptions are.) So 1 million atoms is a reasonable size for a nanodevice, right? Well, partially-- viruses can't do much without a host cell infrastructure to tap into. But on the flip side, for a working nanodevice sufficient to have its own IP address, we wouldn't necessarily need the self-replication infrastructure of a virus. So I'm not sure this line of thinking leads anywhere.
Stepping back, my volumetric analysis was probably too conservative (1km high all over the earth's surface?) Tallest buildings size today is ~400 meters to the top occupied floor, so in that respect my analysis isn't too off. But what's the average density likely to be anytime in the near future? My guess is there's a 1/x power law distribution of some kind (hmm, perhaps so?) More googling leads to a paper saying that average building height in Los Angeles is really more like 12 meters (with cities like Phoenix at 5 meters). So maybe we can chop off two orders of magnitude from our 1km height estimate. So 430K atoms per IP #?
Then there are two other factors that lead to further overestimates of usable volumetric space; that urbanization itself isn't spread evenly over the surface of the earth, and that within this, say, 10meter high volume, there's a limit to the nanodevice density that humans (and the atmosphere) will accomodate. That alone cuts the max number of atoms worldwide dedicated to nanodevices down by several orders of magnitude further. Enough so that I'm still pretty comfortable that nanotech won't exhaust IPv6.
OK, I've spent way too long satisfying my curiousity. Hope someone out there found it interesting.
--LP
I once wondered about whether nanotech would present problems for 128-bit addressing and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to examine the issue. A little math to satisfy one's "what-if geek" tendencies:
earth's surface area = 5.1*10^11 m2
earth's land area = 1.483*10^11 m2
That's surface area, but we live in a volumetric space; let's define that space as 1 km high above/below earth's land-mass(part of that 1km being underground, part being in the air.) Thus the volume of human space above/below land is 1.48*10^14 m3. With 10^6 cubic centimeters per cubic meter, and approximately 10^23 atoms per cubic centimeter, we get 1.48*10^43 atoms in our human-habitable slab of space on earth.
Now, how many IP addresses for that space? Well, 2^128 = 3.4*10^38th.
Ergo we have enough IP addresses for nanotech devices of 43,600 atoms each, in a human-habitable volume completely covering the land-mass of Earth and extending to fill a volume of space above and below the earth's surface for a full 1 km. Sure, you might get nanodevices smaller than that, but would they be independent enough and sensing/generating enough information to communicate via IP?
Well, if that isn't a problem for 128-bits, what is? Let's check a few other test cases that your friendly sci-fi reader might imagine...
Well, that was just land-mass. What if we filled the sea with nanodevices, would that exhaust it?
The sea is 11km deep at worst, 3.8km on average. Water surface area is little over double land. Thus water basically requires a factor of 10x more devices. Given that you probably won't have more than 10% of the volume of any space being nanodevices (and this would seem to remain an extreme upper bound), this probably isn't an issue.
So what about interplanetary colonization? Still not too much of an issue for this solar system (ignoring the latency issues.) At least the first few planets (Mars/Venus/Mercury) which only add a factor of 3-4x expansion once 100% colonized form due to the roughly similar size of available nanodevice space on those planets as earth. True, a colonized Jupiter might pose problems down the line...
And if you used nanoprobes to fill/convert entire atmospheric systems, you end up covering a lot more volume (99% of earths' atmosphere fills approx 8.6*10^19 m3 by my calculations, five orders of magnitude more space than our 1 km slab.) Of course, any nanodevice design on that scale would probably use its own non-IP protocol.
Ah, but what other assumptions could be misleading us? For example, what is the efficiency of the 128-bit name space? Can we really use all those addresses? Well, I admit, I'm less an expert on this. The issue that Ethernet MACs will typically be your bottom 64-bits definitely chews up a lot of space, but if Ethernet doesn't make sense for nanodevices, we'll probably be using something else, or our self-assembling nanoprobes will build and configure themselves so that they share 1 higher-level IP but under the covers each have an colony-wide (not globally) unique ethernet address. How efficiently allocated is the rest of that (non-Ethernet) space? Well, I think CIDR-like tweaks can squeeze a fair amount out.
Still, even in the case where 128-bits isn't quite enough(!), I suspect reverting to NAT-type approaches in IPv6 will be workable. Certainly inter-stellar communications which will be limited to a relatively small number of transmitters will scale up with NATs for quite a while, assuming photon-based communications.
So I suspect the 128-bit addressing scheme of IPv6 will last us at least another 200 years, not just "decades" as
When story submissions are rejected, are they deleted from the database immediately?
I ask because I'm curious if rejects could be redirected or resubmitted elsewhere with less effort than is currently required.
If either A) Slashdot users could read their rejected story submissions at least for a little while after they're rejected, they could do things like easily submit them to my user-moderated open Slashdot queue or B) if there was some hook so they could dual-submit to your queue and someone elses journal (like mine), we could see whether or not moderation would also work for sorting through and highlighting story rejects. (I'm presuming you wouldn't mind helping users experiment with such concepts.)
Thanks for all your hard work. I enjoy Slashdot.
--LP
I likewise grew up on AppleII Basic and C64 Basic (which led to Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and x86 Assembler in high school, and more stuff in college and work).
From what I can tell, little coders today grow up on HTML (+Javascript). And some people I know learn coding via MUDs or Visual Basic (it's not *that* expensive that you can't ask your parents for it.)
If I were a kid, I'd probably try downloading a Java JDK and messing around, but maybe that's just me.
--LP (not a Java programmer)
For a rejected stories area within Slashdot, moderated by Slashdot users, try this. It's still small and requires users to submit their rejects, but quality is pretty good.
--LP
When you submit your stories to Slashdot, copy-n-paste em to submit to this user-moderated story queue that I came up with (mis-)using the Slashdot journalling facilities. They'll be modded up if other Slashdot readers/moderators like them.
We do get random people submitting stories and random people moderating, but it's still small. But hey, you gotta start somewhere, and more people *will* see your stories (and your writeup) than if they went straight into Slashdot's rejection bin.
--LP
what if article submission was handled with an algorithm similar to message posts?
This is available now, here within Slashdot. We're nowhere near hundreds of articles, but hey, that means the signal/noise ratio is good, right? Join us. Try it!
--LP
I'm not sure I that the 3 reasons Mark Fisher gives for lack of code-reuse are the main issue. Usually I think programmers are just too lazy to search. I had one predecessor that I always suspected had this disease. I've noticed in myself at times too. Usually you think that if you (re)write it, it'll be easier than trying to understand someone else's code (often but not always, you are wrong. :).
That said, let me pass on a little practical story. Having built solutions myself that were quick and dirty, for version 2.0 of a recent project I worked on, I decided to dump most of my code and try building on an existing, well-known open source project in my area. I've spent 4-6 weeks trying to take a well-known piece of open source code that performs a similar function better than my quick&dirty approach. I'm not finished, but with the deadline past and with significant obstacles remaining, I'm really questioning my well-intentioned attempt at re-use.
So let me toss out some more reasons why developers may not "search the literature":
1) the (time)-cost of doing the search,
2) the cost of figuring out the implementation details of what you do find so that you can effectively use it (which can be anything from understanding perl module documentation to understanding the concepts behind lex/yac or some protocol),
3) the time/development-cost of integrating the open source codebase into your codebase; this includes porting or handling dependency chains
4) the risk that, because of some detail that you won't understand until you fully invest in #2 (above), it may end up that this tool you are reusing actually doesn't solve your problems for some unexpected underlying implementation reason (something you can avoid if you fully develop your own solution with methods you *know* will work)
5) the risk of choosing the wrong alternative (e.g. picking one templating system out of the dozen alternatives that then gets orphaned)
I'd like to reuse code more, but rationally there are a bunch of reasons why I don't do more. These need to be addressed more satisfactorily for more code sharing to flourish.
--LP
This topic, and device, was last discussed on Slashdot May 12th (found via slashdot search for "radio your way".)
Two links I found useful were a a competing piece of hardware, Neuros, and a much cheaper substitute if the radio program is streamed on the internet, Replay Radio. Plus an even earlier Slashdot thread.
In fairness, this is not a dupe, as the May 12th thread was about 'future' products and this is a product review.
--LP
The key quotes from the CEO are:
"We have examples of code being lifted verbatim. If you look at the code we believe has been copied in, it's not just a line or two, it's an entire section -- and in some cases, an entire program. "
Now this may or may not be true or may be true in some mostly-irrelevant way. But that leads me to a question.
My question would be, if, theoretically, a coder knows in their conscience that they did violate copyright in this way, what would be their best recourse to fix the situation?
Should they patch the code themselves and submit a patch? Would such a patch withstand legal scrutiny?
And should they warn the person who they send the patch to about the urgency/motivation of the patch?
Alternatively, should they merely notify/tell someone else ASAP so that the violating code can
be removed and replaced by someone 'clean', and sooner rather than later?
It would seem one of these two would be wise. That way, the amount of time between when the violation is ruled to have occurred, and the time when it is 'made right' through a fix is minimized, and the effects of any judge-ruled injunctions to correct things are minimized. Or if the issue is fixed particularly before the case is ruled upon, perhaps the point can be ruled as 'moot' since the violation has since been fixed.
Either way, this raises some sub-questions:
A) who should they tell in the open source community about their indiscretion?
B) should they attempt to be anonymous in their communications? (to avoid legal liability)
C) does telling someone else then open the tell-ee to some sort of potential legal liability?
Clearly a swamp of legal issues that are better avoided entirely. Any answers though?
--LP
P.S. Of course Slashdot advice/commentary isn't legal advice/comment. But it's an interesting question and I figure *someone* on here has a more considered opinion than I.
I believe Microsoft had a perpetual license to Xenix, which turned into SCO OpenServer in the mid-90s. I don't know if Microsoft had any license rights to the OpenServer upgrades.
However, it appears that the license they are getting via this settlement is to SCO UnixWare (which was Novell UnixWare and before that AT&T SVR4). Which is a totally different kernel. Or at least much different.
The UnixWare kernel is substantially more sophisticated than OpenServer, with very good SMP support, clustering support, support for many system items being hot-plug, etc.
SCO tried for years to shift OpenServer customers to the UnixWare kernel, but backwards compatibility and comfort levels always made it a hard sell.
Without its own Unix OS, Microsoft is not necessarily competing directly in the Unix space with SCO, although one could obviously argue that their interoperability tools for the last 4 years or so have competed.
--LP
This sounds like great grounds for web conferencing companies like WebEx, GotoMyPC, etc. to sue Microsoft for Sherman Anti-trust Act tying violations. Particularly since Microsoft purchased one of their competitors, PlaceWare recently.
Triple damages, mmm.
--LP, who doesn't mind MS software actually, but *hates* the EULAs coming from that lawyer's-son Gates.
Yeah, I saw that woman with the rare-earth doped flouride glass at SIGGRAPH '97 or so. Just looked her up on google and found a name and familiar picture: Dr. Elizabeth Downing. Further googling turned a website for her company, 3DTL.
There was a flurry of info about it in 1997 and not nearly as much since then. Did it go private or did it fold? Further googling describes 3DTL getting a $1.9 million NIST grant in late 1998, and a $340k grant in 1999. Not much visible info since then; I supose you could call the phone number on their website to find out more. I recall one key problem being the small size of the laser-addressable cube. There are probably problems aligning lasers as you scale up in size, but this is speculating based on 5-year old memories.
I ran across a nice survey paper motivated by the problems with rotating displays that discusses a lot of the static volumetric displays including Dr. Downing's.
--LP
Regarding various troll-slams on OpenBSD... I dunno, I'm using OpenBSD and it's great. Nowhere to go but up, as far as I'm concerned. FreeBSD and NetBSD don't have much of a value proposition in my book compared to mainstream Linux distros, but if you want a secure webserver (or network appliance) without having to patch the thing all the damn time, OpenBSD seems a heck of a lot better than any Linux variant.
That said, I'm not dogmatic about this; it's just the conclusion I've come to based on the evidence I've seen so far.
--LP
I don't understand why you would post and read on a system that produces horrible results. Perhaps you could enlighten me?
I am not assuming that the signal ("all quality posts responding to an article") is easily determined. Getting a perfect signal is quite difficult. And subjective. Slashdot does not do that, and as far as I can tell, does not claim to. The pragmatic question, in moderation as in signal processing is, how much of a good signal can one end up with with a relatively simple filter?
As a filter, Slashdot has some significant limitations, but it also does pretty well, and, in my view, the distributed moderation approach provides better filtering than USENET for large-traffic topical forums. And there's some empirical evidence that I aluded to that discussions are actually larger on Slashdot than on USENET. Slashdot scales with a larger readership/postership; USENET I contend does not.
(One might object that I am overstating the case here; USENET groups will usually split when they get too much traffic. I would agree that this helps if you can start ignoring one of the resulting groups, but I'd argue that it doesn't if your topical interest extends across the new groups.)
One can argue that people have different notions of what a worthy post is. And intellectual posts are overlooked (mostly if they occur too late in the thread, in my experience). But an automated peer-review system that spreads responsibility shallowly to many people does provide a certain useful filter. I read at threshold 3 (unless moderating) and like it. Your mileage may vary. But the multi-million unique-visitors readership of Slashdot suggests that I am not alone. Although I hear 3/4 only read the front page that's still a remarkably large readership.
--LP