Agreed. We are *far* too nice of a company. I vote for the too nice rather than too stupid. Novell has always had great techies, but aggressive marketing has never been our strength. Personally, I think when we opened our San Jose facility we should have relocated marketing to there... our marketing folks in Utah are nice. Very *nice*. 8-)
>OT: Do you know why SuperNOS was cancelled? Was
>it purely polticical between the NetWare and Unix
>groups, or were there technical reasons?
I'm not sure of the exact reason. We (Novell) had rapidly digested Wordperfect, Quattro Pro from Borland, and AT&T Unix and we were failing badly with all of them. UnixWare was well-regarded technically, but we couldn't get the other unixes to buy in to standardizing on UnixWare.
This was back when Bob Frankenburg was CEO. Personally, I think Frankenburg just didn't have the kahunas to take a risk on SuperNOS, and he was in WAY over his head. In my opinion, Novell at that time should have committed to SuperNOS (which was UnixWare with Novell file and print services ported over to it). At the time (this was 1996, NT 4.0 had just released, and Linux was version 1.0, and Netscape 2.0 was taking over the world), this would have been revolutionary and quite successful, I think. With a strong Unix under it, we would have been well-positioned to take advantage of the Linux revolution when it came, and we would have had an application server story.
But hey, no crying over spilt milk here, I'm having a great time at my job, and although I wish my stock options were in the money, I have a feeling I'm not alone with that wish with folks outside of Novell as well.... (grin)
One thing I've theorized through the years is that companies, especially big companies like IBM, have their own corporate personality and corporate memory. While I think the idea of an IBM Linux distro makes sense on the face of it, when you put it in the context of IBM's history, I think they would be resistant to it.
OS/2 burned IBM badly, both financially and psychologically, and many of the managers that were likely "bitch-slapped" by their management years ago for screwing up with OS/2 are the ones that would make the decision on an IBM Linux distro. IBM's a conservative company, and given the history, I think they would be even more conservative about the idea of a Linux distro of their own.
In the same way, I could propose that my employer (Novell) do a Linux distro, but given our history with Unixware (and the much forgotten SuperNOS), I think I'd have an uphill battle.
Novell is not Netware, although Netware is still important to us and our customers. Here are some interesting things that Novell has going for Linux folks:
eDirectory (NDS) is powering the new RedHat network in Red Hat 7. We also have a cool new technology called DirXML that synchronizes directory attributes through XML with other apps.
NIMS
Novell Internet Messaging Server has been ported to Linux. It's a standards-based, very cool mail server. Check it out at myrealbox.
I'm told that JustOn is one of the biggest sites for trading Porn movies on the internet. How cool is that? (grin)
There is other stuff, but you get the idea...
Anyway, you guys can flame all you want, I love my job. I get to do very interesting things all day long. I have a Debian server at home that I really enjoy working with, and we're a heck of a lot better off financially than many of the.com's you know and love.
-Todd
Re:unused land in the silly valley
on
Is Novell Doomed?
·
· Score: 2
[I work at novell in the San Jose office]
Ok, here are the facts, I love this speculation!
We actually own the whole campus right there (set of four buildings right next to the big red post that says "Novell/BMC Software". We own all the buildings, but we occupy only the front one just off 87 and 1st.
The other buildings are leased out, and one is the Silicon Valley convention center.
We never built on the open field next to the campus because it is a protected habitat for burrowing owls (no joke) that we had to relocate from the original campus.
I love my job. I work with cool technology every day. Novell books about $800 million dollars in revenue per year, and we have a loyal customer base. The products I'm working on are platform independent, cutting edge, and interesting.
>Every time you see an $8 TW movie, send $16 to
>the EFF. That's $24 a movie, so it will make you
>evaluate what you see more critically.
I really like the concept of this. This isn't unlike some of the ideas to use services like PayPal to compensate music artists (long/. discussion here.)
In a way, this is kind of a self-tax, where you get to decide where your tax money goes to. This is a neat idea! Worried about polluting the earth, but you have a long commute? Give 50 cents a gallon for every gallon of gas you use to your favority charity. This is a really interesting concept, thanks for sharing...
By the way, the link to donate to the eff using paypal is here.
I realize that Bruce needs to structure some sort of narrative around his article, but this "third wave" of "semantic hacking" is hardly new.
The attack on Internet Wire was just an insider abusing the system. It's been going on for quite a while, and shame on Internet Wire for having lax enough security than an ex-employee could abuse the system. Social Engineering has also been a common practice for years: call the helpdesk from the CEO's phone and demand that your password be reset. Easy stuff, old practices. In fact, social engineering, manipulation of the press, and misleading the public are practices that predate the internet by a few thousand years:
"What of this again, that these people are experts in flattery, and will commend the talk of an illiterate, or the beauty of a deformed, friend, and compare the scraggy neck of some weakling to the brawny throat of Hercules when holding up Antaeus[12] high above the earth; or go into ecstasies over a squeaky voice not more melodious than that of a cock when he pecks his spouse the hen? We, no doubt, can praise the same things that they do; but what they say is believed."
- Juvenal's Satires
What's new is that the interconnectedness of the internet community is allowing these practices to migrate to the internet in powerful ways. At least one person believes that this is cause for deep optimism:
"All the bad things we hear about the Web are true. There really are people online who'd like to lure our children into shadows. There really are hucksters who'll steal not only your money but your identity. There really are people who'll take pictures of you in a public bathroom and publish the pictures to the world. Every human vice
we can imagine finds its way onto the Web, which seems to spur the world's most lurid imaginations even further. But the reason for this should be a cause for optimism."
You can check the article out yourself for more, but I agree with the premise. The internet continuing to mirror the "real" world is generally a good thing, and the "forces of good" can harness those powers as well as the "forces of evil".
Noam Chomsky has worried quite a bit about the power of centralized press.
"Chomsky's central belief is that propaganda plays the same role in a democracy as violence plays in a dictatorship.
In the United States, therefore, you need to be less afraid of the National Guard and more afraid of the manipulation of information by governmental, corporate and academic sources. According to Chomsky, the elites who control and benefit from the American political system preserve that system by marginalizing alternative political views, selectively reporting on the consequences of United States foreign policy, and creating political apathy among the general populace by encouraging them to watch professional sports and TV sitcoms rather than actively participate in the political process."
Bruce Schneier should be less worried about manipulation of public news outlets, stock prices, and the economy by hackers, and more worried about the manipulation of public opinion by corporations and governments. Hackers, by showing people how easy it is to have their opinions manipulated, actually serve a positive purpose. I'm not saying I endorse the Internet Wire hack, real people lost money and that's not good. But, creative hacks, the "jam the WTO" movement in Seattle, cool sites like The Onion and Adbusters are all great ways to wake up an uninterested, uninvolved public.
I recently went through a simiar decision. After 15 years as a stand-alone geek, I was asked to take a position as a director of product management, with a staff of four. I decided to take the job, because I saw it as an interesting challenge and a chance to grow.
For me, the most interesting aspect was that I went from a position of being a know-it-all who could bitch loudly about what was wrong and tell you how to fix it, to being a manager who had the power to both fix the problem, and see why you *can't* fix the problem. It was definitely a slap of reality to me, it would be nice if non-managers could see things from that point of view... maybe force someone to manage for three months or something.
As my current boss says "Everything is a people issue." The reason why your software doesn't work, why the software is great, why support can't answer questions, why reviewers are trashing your product, is a people issue. Ultimately, someone in the company did the job well or not. You either had enough people to finish the project on time or not. There are some really hard decisions that you will have to make. For example, one decision I had to make right away after taking the job was to either focus on a new release of my product or fix serious stability issues with the current release. I decided to fix the current release, but this pushed back the release date for the next release, which impacts our revenue. Many of these choices aren't easy, and either way you go, people inside and outside of the company will scream at you.
This is the big-picture perspective that management gives you. When you're involved in a large software project, the dynamics of the people on the project are far more important than any individual contribution. That's hard to get used to. When you're a "star" contributor, you like to think that the company will fold up without you. It probably won't.
To me, the job of a manager then is to be captain of the boat. The captain of the boat doesn't directly maintain the engines, but he needs to take input from the mechanics and decide whether or not what they are doing is the right thing. So you take people's individual needs and wants and make sure that they make sense for the group as a whole. This "holistic" perspective is really the job of the manager. If you're used to doing everything, you're going to find yourself overwhelmed quick since you *can't* do the job of five people. Plus, your staff will hate you for not trusting them. It's tough to captain the boat when the mechanics have quit and the engines aren't working.
I've found the job really interesting, and I'm happy with the switch to the management side. I think it could be *really* frustrating to a person who is used to being a big individual contributor.
It's up to date, informative, and very interesting, for example, White Pine lost a battle to take over CU-SEEME.NET, but HP won a battle for HPWEB.COM.
-Todd
So how would you fix it?
on
Typosquatting
·
· Score: 3
OK, assuming the problem of "typosquatting" is a real one that needs to be dealt with, how would you create an enforcable rule?
For example, if I owned frito.com and you owned fritto.com, a perfectly legitimate word (maybe a chef's site, for example), is that a violation?
How would you quantify this in a way NSI and others could enforce? It seems like any solution would require subjective review by a committee, and that means that it would be political, capricious, and subject to manipulation like the WTO.
Personally, I think the internet advertising market will change in coming years, and just serving up a banner won't make you the 5 cents a click that people claim to receive now. This will make running a "typosquatting" site less lucrative. I also see no difference between "typosquatting" and perfume knockoffs, rolex watch knockoffs, kit cars, and other sorts of ways of leeching off a major brand name. It's a healthy part of how capitalism works.
The only big problem I see is intentional deceit, such as the recent problem with bank of america where someone was trying to deceive people into sending in personal info. We have existing fraud laws to cover that.
So, unless someone is trying to trick you into thinking that they are really bankofamerica.com or slashdot.org, I don't have a problem with "typosquatting".
Some slashdotter out there who runs your own company, burn a few cd's with the DeCSS software on it and mail it unsolicited to a bunch of Linux developers. Wouldn't that mean that the receipients are not bound by any legal agreement?
At the least, it should make for some interesting legal arguments.... 8-)
(P.S. I'm joking, please, no huge legal explanations of why this doesn't work... 8-) )
Now, let me get this straight, in the quotes below, you'll see that Mr. Firstbrook is a worldwide expert on:
- Content delivery systems
- Layer 4 switches
- QoS protocols
- SSL acceleration
In addition, his web site bio (look at that cute face!) says that he specializes in high availability, load balancing, and caching.
Quite a diverse guy for an guy with a business degree. Heck, tracking ONE of these fields, let alone the Linux market would keep one normal human being busy. He must have mutant super-powers.
That, or Meta group pimps him out whenever someone in the industry needs a juicy quote. Nah, that can't be it....
-Twid
http://www.netscaler.com/release5_1.html
"The market for an Internet infrastructure solution that could free Web transactions from their TCP-connection dependencies is potentially huge," said Peter Firstbrook,research analyst, Meta Group. "High-traffic Web sites and hosting providers could immediately benefit from performance improvements and reduced infrastructure requirements resulting from these devices, without rearchitecting."
"In the final analysis, no one product emerges as a clear winner in all categories; however, for high-bandwidth Web sites (or Web-hosting environments), we believe ArrowPoint currently offers the best solution."
- Peter Firstbrook, META Group
"This protocol gives vendors and end users a chance to set up policies across their networks if they want to," Firstbrook says.
http://www.informationweek.com/789/web2.htm
"The SSL accelerator is an extremely valuable product--SSL brings servers to their knees," says Meta Group research analyst Peter Firstbrook. "If it takes me eight seconds to download a page in clear text and then I have to go to SSL to do transactions, it's 2.5 times longer. That means it's going to take 20 seconds to download that page."
Thawte has an interesting take on the whole security idea. They will issue you a personal certificate if you present yourself to a "trusted" person, either someone already in the web of trust or a bank office, attorney, etc... It's not unlike PGP but a little more fleshed out.
With Thawte acquired by Verisign, I'm not sure if they are committed to this in the future, since their site now seems to be covered with ads for Verisign's personal certificates.
But, the idea is an interesting one. A distributed ranking system where you accumulate "trust points" seems like a system that would work well with the open source world. In a sense, this is much like eBay, where you gain or lose "trust" in the system with every sale or purchase. While some people have been able to abuse the system on eBay, in general they haven't had wide-spread fraud, which is really what you should be worried about. The nice thing about eBay is that it empowers the individual. *I* get to decide if I trust you or not based on my personal criteria.
It's obvious that the existing credit-card system isn't secure enough for the internet world, so I can understand the anime site requiring some form of extra identity. Some sort of "identity broker" or "infomediary", to use the trendy term, seems to be required to make this work. In some cases, maybe that is your bank or credit card company, but I think the long-term solution would need to be more distributed, otherwise it all gets bogged down in inter-company politics and positioning.
Perhaps in the future, you will need to establish a "trust rating", much like a credit rating, with one or several identity broker services before you can do business on the internet. Thawte's system is a good start, it would be nice to see something more open and endorsed by the business world.
Microsoft abuses: - secret backdoors (this bug) - scour your hard drive secretly for information (Win95 registration wizard) - break competitor's products (Windows Media Player and Real) - fabricate evidence in a federal trial (Windows demonstration for Judge Jackson) - convicted by a Federal judge of being a harmful monopoly - under investigation in Europe - over 100 civil lawsuits pending against them.
And that's just off the top of my head. Why would anyone with sensitive data (banks, government, etc...) trust them?
Slightly off-topic, but while we're talking about old consoles, I picked up the "Intellivision Lives!" CD from http://www.intellivisionlives.com
What a time trip! I was very young when the IntelliVision was popular, and my oldest brother and I wasted *many* hours on their sports games like Baseball and Football. In many ways, the Intellivision was ahead of its time, and the multiplayer games were the best for the era. We had the IntelliSpeech module (B-17 bomber was awesome!) and most of the big games.
The CD is great. It contains an emulator and ROM images for many of the classic games (AstroSmash, etc..) some games that were never released, and all kinds of information on the development of the IntelliVision and the internal politics at Mattel and the rise and fall of the system.
Some of the old developers put the CD together, so it's much more interesting than the typical "100 classic games on a CD!" type packages.
It's too bad the software industry came down so hard on the emulation scene. Stuff like the intellivisionlives project is critical in providing a context and history for computer gaming. Without deep background like this, console developers and game developers will keep making the same mistakes over and over.
Most of the top winners used Novell's Internet Caching System, a customized version of Netware specifically designed for caching applicances. What really gives ICS a lot of speed is COS, the Cache Object Store, which is a specialized file system designed for caching. Much of the overhead of a traditional file system (file integrity checks, etc...) aren't required for caching.
In addition, Netware is an awesome network traffic processor. We don't use the same threading model as *nixes. So, a fast file system and a fast network response = an awesome caching appliance.
No slam on BSD, they are doing great with generic software, but because of the way Netware is architected, we're just faster.
CNN didn't write the article, so all the CNN conspiracy theorists can calm down. CNN "outsources" their technical content to IDG.NET. Ellen Messmer, the author, is a writer for Network World, you can contact her at:
Network World 1331 Pennsylvania Ave., Suite 505 Washington, DC 20004
Personally, I find this to be typical sloppy trade rag journalism. I don't think IDG has an private agenda (like the microsoft loving ZDNET). They just slapped a story together and pushed it out without understanding all the background.
A good solution would be to educate Ms. Messmer is a calm, controlled manner, but somehow I don't see that happening with the/. crowd. The torches are lit, the pitchforks are out, and everyone is all worked up./. itself pubishes poorly researched stories weekly, and it doesn't ignite this sort of flaming. (Oh wait, it does! I take that back 8-) )
About 10 years ago, I created an "artificial" family. A wife, two kids, hobbies, etc... all fictional. I based it on my roommates in college at the time.
I use this fictional family whenever anyone asks for personal information. Warranty cards, whatever, I fill it all out.
A few years ago, my brother, who works for one of the major credit card companies, was testing out a new consumer database that someone was trying to sell them. The vendor was bragging about how accurate the database was, that it was based on the most current public information, etc... So how do you test something like that? Feed in family members, of course.
So my brother calls me and says "Todd, why does this database show that you have a wife and two kids?" 8-)
I agree with the sentiments voiced so far: - currently, it's an easy system to jam - you probably volunteered the information in the first place - i'd rather see an "opt-in only" law rather than any form of serious government regulation. If I want to trade my privacy for convenience, that's my right! In the words of the Dead Kennedy's, Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death!
There was a big "Powered by Sun" logo/statement in the closing credits. No mention of Linux, but it was funny to see the "network admin" list in movie credits! There were probably 50 of them...
Also, I happened to notice that Bruce Perens was in the list of software developers. I assume this is *the* Bruce Perens, but does anyone know for sure?
Open-source seems uniquely suited to the software business, but there are other areas of society where it may have an effect as well?
For example, architectural services are expensive and made up of an elite group today, but there are very few innovators, many buildings are just collections of "known good" parts.
Could we see the Open Source movement affect non-software areas? Could there be "open-source" building designs and components?
Obviously, there are pros and cons... I'm not sure if you can have an Open Source building design and feel safe in it, but you could make the same argument about using Linux to do critical work, such as hospital systems.
Neuromancer by William Gibson introduced the idea of jacking in to the net before "surfing" was even a term. (I'm sure someone will flame me saying that author [Foo] did it first, but Gibson popularized the idea.)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson introduced avatars in the technical sense, and refined many of the concepts that Gibson started.
I think both books have been very influential in giving geeks a shared vision of where we want to take the net.
Another way of preserving your privacy is to create some random noise around your "real" identity.
True story: Several years ago, just for fun, I started filling out warranty cards, shopping survey cards, discount store cards, etc... with false information. I said I was 20 years older than I was, with a wife Buffy and two kids (I used my roommate's names for the kids just for fun...). I consistently did this for two years.
It was fun to get mail at home for life insurance for my non-existent children, etc... but the real punch line involved my brother. My brother works for one of the large credit card companies. American Express was trying to sell them an information database that they claimed was the most accurate ever. How do you test something like that? Put in some family members and see what comes up.
So, you can see what is coming here. My brother calls me on the phone and says "Who is Buffy???". American Express trusted my warranty cards, etc... more than they trusted whatever other public records they could get their hands on.
Just a little bit of random noise can really throw off a "data warehouse" trying to track you. Make it fun! Go buy whipped cream and condoms at 2 am on the first of every month and see what your grocery does (grin)...
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. We are *far* too nice of a company. I vote for the too nice rather than too stupid. Novell has always had great techies, but aggressive marketing has never been our strength. Personally, I think when we opened our San Jose facility we should have relocated marketing to there... our marketing folks in Utah are nice. Very *nice*. 8-)
- Twid
>OT: Do you know why SuperNOS was cancelled? Was
>it purely polticical between the NetWare and Unix
>groups, or were there technical reasons?
I'm not sure of the exact reason. We (Novell) had rapidly digested Wordperfect, Quattro Pro from Borland, and AT&T Unix and we were failing badly with all of them. UnixWare was well-regarded technically, but we couldn't get the other unixes to buy in to standardizing on UnixWare.
This was back when Bob Frankenburg was CEO. Personally, I think Frankenburg just didn't have the kahunas to take a risk on SuperNOS, and he was in WAY over his head. In my opinion, Novell at that time should have committed to SuperNOS (which was UnixWare with Novell file and print services ported over to it). At the time (this was 1996, NT 4.0 had just released, and Linux was version 1.0, and Netscape 2.0 was taking over the world), this would have been revolutionary and quite successful, I think. With a strong Unix under it, we would have been well-positioned to take advantage of the Linux revolution when it came, and we would have had an application server story.
But hey, no crying over spilt milk here, I'm having a great time at my job, and although I wish my stock options were in the money, I have a feeling I'm not alone with that wish with folks outside of Novell as well.... (grin)
- Twid
One thing I've theorized through the years is that companies, especially big companies like IBM, have their own corporate personality and corporate memory. While I think the idea of an IBM Linux distro makes sense on the face of it, when you put it in the context of IBM's history, I think they would be resistant to it.
OS/2 burned IBM badly, both financially and psychologically, and many of the managers that were likely "bitch-slapped" by their management years ago for screwing up with OS/2 are the ones that would make the decision on an IBM Linux distro. IBM's a conservative company, and given the history, I think they would be even more conservative about the idea of a Linux distro of their own.
In the same way, I could propose that my employer (Novell) do a Linux distro, but given our history with Unixware (and the much forgotten SuperNOS), I think I'd have an uphill battle.
Just a thought...
[Disclaimer, I work for Novell]
.com's you know and love.
Novell is not Netware, although Netware is still important to us and our customers. Here are some interesting things that Novell has going for Linux folks:
eDirectory for Linux
eDirectory (NDS) is powering the new RedHat network in Red Hat 7. We also have a cool new technology called DirXML that synchronizes directory attributes through XML with other apps.
NIMS
Novell Internet Messaging Server has been ported to Linux. It's a standards-based, very cool mail server. Check it out at myrealbox.
Novell Portal Services
An upcoming product that provides a servlet-based interface between eDirectory and our portal technology or other portals.
JustOn
I'm told that JustOn is one of the biggest sites for trading Porn movies on the internet. How cool is that? (grin)
There is other stuff, but you get the idea...
Anyway, you guys can flame all you want, I love my job. I get to do very interesting things all day long. I have a Debian server at home that I really enjoy working with, and we're a heck of a lot better off financially than many of the
-Todd
[I work at novell in the San Jose office]
Ok, here are the facts, I love this speculation!
We actually own the whole campus right there (set of four buildings right next to the big red post that says "Novell/BMC Software". We own all the buildings, but we occupy only the front one just off 87 and 1st.
The other buildings are leased out, and one is the Silicon Valley convention center.
We never built on the open field next to the campus because it is a protected habitat for burrowing owls (no joke) that we had to relocate from the original campus.
I love my job. I work with cool technology every day. Novell books about $800 million dollars in revenue per year, and we have a loyal customer base. The products I'm working on are platform independent, cutting edge, and interesting.
-Twid
>Every time you see an $8 TW movie, send $16 to
/. discussion here.)
>the EFF. That's $24 a movie, so it will make you
>evaluate what you see more critically.
I really like the concept of this. This isn't unlike some of the ideas to use services like PayPal to compensate music artists (long
In a way, this is kind of a self-tax, where you get to decide where your tax money goes to. This is a neat idea! Worried about polluting the earth, but you have a long commute? Give 50 cents a gallon for every gallon of gas you use to your favority charity. This is a really interesting concept, thanks for sharing...
By the way, the link to donate to the eff using paypal is here.
-Twid
I realize that Bruce needs to structure some sort of narrative around his article, but this "third wave" of "semantic hacking" is hardly new.
The attack on Internet Wire was just an insider abusing the system. It's been going on for quite a while, and shame on Internet Wire for having lax enough security than an ex-employee could abuse the system. Social Engineering has also been a common practice for years: call the helpdesk from the CEO's phone and demand that your password be reset. Easy stuff, old practices. In fact, social engineering, manipulation of the press, and misleading the public are practices that predate the internet by a few thousand years:
"What of this again, that these people are experts in flattery, and will commend the talk of an illiterate, or the beauty of a deformed, friend, and compare the scraggy neck of some weakling to the brawny throat of Hercules when holding up Antaeus[12] high above the earth; or go into ecstasies over a squeaky voice not more melodious than that of a cock when he pecks his spouse the hen? We, no doubt, can praise the same things that they do; but what they say is believed."
- Juvenal's Satires
What's new is that the interconnectedness of the internet community is allowing these practices to migrate to the internet in powerful ways. At least one person believes that this is cause for deep optimism:
"All the bad things we hear about the Web are true. There really are people online who'd like to lure our children into shadows. There really are hucksters who'll steal not only your money but your identity. There really are people who'll take pictures of you in a public bathroom and publish the pictures to the world. Every human vice
we can imagine finds its way onto the Web, which seems to spur the world's most lurid imaginations even further. But the reason for this should be a cause for optimism."
You can check the article out yourself for more, but I agree with the premise. The internet continuing to mirror the "real" world is generally a good thing, and the "forces of good" can harness those powers as well as the "forces of evil".
Noam Chomsky has worried quite a bit about the power of centralized press.
"Chomsky's central belief is that propaganda plays the same role in a democracy as violence plays in a dictatorship.
In the United States, therefore, you need to be less afraid of the National Guard and more afraid of the manipulation of information by governmental, corporate and academic sources. According to Chomsky, the elites who control and benefit from the American political system preserve that system by marginalizing alternative political views, selectively reporting on the consequences of United States foreign policy, and creating political apathy among the general populace by encouraging them to watch professional sports and TV sitcoms rather than actively participate in the political process."
Bruce Schneier should be less worried about manipulation of public news outlets, stock prices, and the economy by hackers, and more worried about the manipulation of public opinion by corporations and governments. Hackers, by showing people how easy it is to have their opinions manipulated, actually serve a positive purpose. I'm not saying I endorse the Internet Wire hack, real people lost money and that's not good. But, creative hacks, the "jam the WTO" movement in Seattle, cool sites like The Onion and Adbusters are all great ways to wake up an uninterested, uninvolved public.
- Twid
I recently went through a simiar decision. After 15 years as a stand-alone geek, I was asked to take a position as a director of product management, with a staff of four. I decided to take the job, because I saw it as an interesting challenge and a chance to grow.
For me, the most interesting aspect was that I went from a position of being a know-it-all who could bitch loudly about what was wrong and tell you how to fix it, to being a manager who had the power to both fix the problem, and see why you *can't* fix the problem. It was definitely a slap of reality to me, it would be nice if non-managers could see things from that point of view... maybe force someone to manage for three months or something.
As my current boss says "Everything is a people issue." The reason why your software doesn't work, why the software is great, why support can't answer questions, why reviewers are trashing your product, is a people issue. Ultimately, someone in the company did the job well or not. You either had enough people to finish the project on time or not. There are some really hard decisions that you will have to make. For example, one decision I had to make right away after taking the job was to either focus on a new release of my product or fix serious stability issues with the current release. I decided to fix the current release, but this pushed back the release date for the next release, which impacts our revenue. Many of these choices aren't easy, and either way you go, people inside and outside of the company will scream at you.
This is the big-picture perspective that management gives you. When you're involved in a large software project, the dynamics of the people on the project are far more important than any individual contribution. That's hard to get used to. When you're a "star" contributor, you like to think that the company will fold up without you. It probably won't.
To me, the job of a manager then is to be captain of the boat. The captain of the boat doesn't directly maintain the engines, but he needs to take input from the mechanics and decide whether or not what they are doing is the right thing. So you take people's individual needs and wants and make sure that they make sense for the group as a whole. This "holistic" perspective is really the job of the manager. If you're used to doing everything, you're going to find yourself overwhelmed quick since you *can't* do the job of five people. Plus, your staff will hate you for not trusting them. It's tough to captain the boat when the mechanics have quit and the engines aren't working.
I've found the job really interesting, and I'm happy with the switch to the management side. I think it could be *really* frustrating to a person who is used to being a big individual contributor.
Although it's geared towards kids in school, NASA has a great site on Sunspots here.
There is also an interesting article on the recent coronal mass ejection here.
Also read about the cold summer of 1816 here. It is theorized that the earth was extra cool because of sunspot activity.
Fun stuff... brings out the amateur scientist in me.
-Todd
Quick followup, I found a great reference site for domain name battles at http://www.domainbattles.com .
It's up to date, informative, and very interesting, for example, White Pine lost a battle to take over CU-SEEME.NET, but HP won a battle for HPWEB.COM.
-Todd
OK, assuming the problem of "typosquatting" is a real one that needs to be dealt with, how would you create an enforcable rule?
For example, if I owned frito.com and you owned fritto.com, a perfectly legitimate word (maybe a chef's site, for example), is that a violation?
How would you quantify this in a way NSI and others could enforce? It seems like any solution would require subjective review by a committee, and that means that it would be political, capricious, and subject to manipulation like the WTO.
Personally, I think the internet advertising market will change in coming years, and just serving up a banner won't make you the 5 cents a click that people claim to receive now. This will make running a "typosquatting" site less lucrative. I also see no difference between "typosquatting" and perfume knockoffs, rolex watch knockoffs, kit cars, and other sorts of ways of leeching off a major brand name. It's a healthy part of how capitalism works.
The only big problem I see is intentional deceit, such as the recent problem with bank of america where someone was trying to deceive people into sending in personal info. We have existing fraud laws to cover that.
So, unless someone is trying to trick you into thinking that they are really bankofamerica.com or slashdot.org, I don't have a problem with "typosquatting".
So how about this?
Some slashdotter out there who runs your own company, burn a few cd's with the DeCSS software on it and mail it unsolicited to a bunch of Linux developers. Wouldn't that mean that the receipients are not bound by any legal agreement?
At the least, it should make for some interesting legal arguments.... 8-)
(P.S. I'm joking, please, no huge legal explanations of why this doesn't work... 8-) )
-Todd
Now, let me get this straight, in the quotes below, you'll see that Mr. Firstbrook is a worldwide expert on:
h tml
9 -2000.html
- Content delivery systems
- Layer 4 switches
- QoS protocols
- SSL acceleration
In addition, his web site bio (look at that cute face!) says that he specializes in high availability, load balancing, and caching.
Quite a diverse guy for an guy with a business degree. Heck, tracking ONE of these fields, let alone the Linux market would keep one normal human being busy. He must have mutant super-powers.
That, or Meta group pimps him out whenever someone in the industry needs a juicy quote. Nah, that can't be it....
-Twid
http://www.netscaler.com/release5_1.html
"The market for an Internet infrastructure solution that could free Web transactions from their TCP-connection dependencies is potentially huge," said Peter Firstbrook,research analyst, Meta Group. "High-traffic Web sites and hosting providers could immediately benefit from performance improvements and reduced infrastructure requirements resulting from these devices, without rearchitecting."
http://www.arrowpoint.com/company/analysts_say.
"In the final analysis, no one product emerges as a clear winner in all categories; however, for high-bandwidth Web sites (or Web-hosting environments), we believe ArrowPoint currently offers the best solution."
- Peter Firstbrook, META Group
http://www.nwfusion.com/archive/2000/99729_06-1
"This protocol gives vendors and end users a chance to set up policies across their networks if they want to," Firstbrook says.
http://www.informationweek.com/789/web2.htm
"The SSL accelerator is an extremely valuable product--SSL brings servers to their knees," says Meta Group research analyst Peter Firstbrook. "If it takes me eight seconds to download a page in clear text and then I have to go to SSL to do transactions, it's 2.5 times longer. That means it's going to take 20 seconds to download that page."
More quotes here
Thawte has an interesting take on the whole security idea. They will issue you a personal certificate if you present yourself to a "trusted" person, either someone already in the web of trust or a bank office, attorney, etc... It's not unlike PGP but a little more fleshed out.
Details here.
With Thawte acquired by Verisign, I'm not sure if they are committed to this in the future, since their site now seems to be covered with ads for Verisign's personal certificates.
But, the idea is an interesting one. A distributed ranking system where you accumulate "trust points" seems like a system that would work well with the open source world. In a sense, this is much like eBay, where you gain or lose "trust" in the system with every sale or purchase. While some people have been able to abuse the system on eBay, in general they haven't had wide-spread fraud, which is really what you should be worried about. The nice thing about eBay is that it empowers the individual. *I* get to decide if I trust you or not based on my personal criteria.
It's obvious that the existing credit-card system isn't secure enough for the internet world, so I can understand the anime site requiring some form of extra identity. Some sort of "identity broker" or "infomediary", to use the trendy term, seems to be required to make this work. In some cases, maybe that is your bank or credit card company, but I think the long-term solution would need to be more distributed, otherwise it all gets bogged down in inter-company politics and positioning.
Perhaps in the future, you will need to establish a "trust rating", much like a credit rating, with one or several identity broker services before you can do business on the internet. Thawte's system is a good start, it would be nice to see something more open and endorsed by the business world.
-Twid
Tim,
caLANder, IIRC, was a shared scheduling program in the 80's. So, maybe we should be checking our calendars instead...
8-)
-Twid
Microsoft abuses:
- secret backdoors (this bug)
- scour your hard drive secretly for information (Win95 registration wizard)
- break competitor's products (Windows Media Player and Real)
- fabricate evidence in a federal trial (Windows demonstration for Judge Jackson)
- convicted by a Federal judge of being a harmful monopoly
- under investigation in Europe
- over 100 civil lawsuits pending against them.
And that's just off the top of my head. Why would anyone with sensitive data (banks, government, etc...) trust them?
-Twid
Slightly off-topic, but while we're talking about old consoles, I picked up the "Intellivision Lives!" CD from http://www.intellivisionlives.com
What a time trip! I was very young when the IntelliVision was popular, and my oldest brother and I wasted *many* hours on their sports games like Baseball and Football. In many ways, the Intellivision was ahead of its time, and the multiplayer games were the best for the era. We had the IntelliSpeech module (B-17 bomber was awesome!) and most of the big games.
The CD is great. It contains an emulator and ROM images for many of the classic games (AstroSmash, etc..) some games that were never released, and all kinds of information on the development of the IntelliVision and the internal politics at Mattel and the rise and fall of the system.
Some of the old developers put the CD together, so it's much more interesting than the typical "100 classic games on a CD!" type packages.
It's too bad the software industry came down so hard on the emulation scene. Stuff like the intellivisionlives project is critical in providing a context and history for computer gaming. Without deep background like this, console developers and game developers will keep making the same mistakes over and over.
-Twid
[disclaimer: Novell employee]
Most of the top winners used Novell's Internet Caching System, a customized version of Netware specifically designed for caching applicances. What really gives ICS a lot of speed is COS, the Cache Object Store, which is a specialized file system designed for caching. Much of the overhead of a traditional file system (file integrity checks, etc...) aren't required for caching.
In addition, Netware is an awesome network traffic processor. We don't use the same threading model as *nixes. So, a fast file system and a fast network response = an awesome caching appliance.
No slam on BSD, they are doing great with generic software, but because of the way Netware is architected, we're just faster.
-Todd
Drop me an e-mail at tdailey@novell.com and I'll get you on the beta list. It is closed beta right now, but there will be an open beta soon.
-Twid
CNN didn't write the article, so all the CNN conspiracy theorists can calm down. CNN "outsources" their technical content to IDG.NET. Ellen Messmer, the author, is a writer for Network World, you can contact her at:
/. crowd. The torches are lit, the pitchforks are out, and everyone is all worked up. /. itself pubishes poorly researched stories weekly, and it doesn't ignite this sort of flaming. (Oh wait, it does! I take that back 8-) )
Ellen Messmer
Senior Editor, Enterprise Applications
emessmer@nww.com
(202) 879-6752
Fax: (202) 347-2365
Network World
1331 Pennsylvania Ave., Suite 505
Washington, DC 20004
Personally, I find this to be typical sloppy trade rag journalism. I don't think IDG has an private agenda (like the microsoft loving ZDNET). They just slapped a story together and pushed it out without understanding all the background.
A good solution would be to educate Ms. Messmer is a calm, controlled manner, but somehow I don't see that happening with the
-Twid
About 10 years ago, I created an "artificial" family. A wife, two kids, hobbies, etc... all fictional. I based it on my roommates in college at the time.
I use this fictional family whenever anyone asks for personal information. Warranty cards, whatever, I fill it all out.
A few years ago, my brother, who works for one of the major credit card companies, was testing out a new consumer database that someone was trying to sell them. The vendor was bragging about how accurate the database was, that it was based on the most current public information, etc... So how do you test something like that? Feed in family members, of course.
So my brother calls me and says "Todd, why does this database show that you have a wife and two kids?" 8-)
I agree with the sentiments voiced so far:
- currently, it's an easy system to jam
- you probably volunteered the information in the first place
- i'd rather see an "opt-in only" law rather than any form of serious government regulation. If I want to trade my privacy for convenience, that's my right! In the words of the Dead Kennedy's, Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death!
-Twid
There was a big "Powered by Sun" logo/statement in the closing credits. No mention of Linux, but it was funny to see the "network admin" list in movie credits! There were probably 50 of them...
Also, I happened to notice that Bruce Perens was in the list of software developers. I assume this is *the* Bruce Perens, but does anyone know for sure?
Open-source seems uniquely suited to the software business, but there are other areas of society where it may have an effect as well?
For example, architectural services are expensive and made up of an elite group today, but there are very few innovators, many buildings are just collections of "known good" parts.
Could we see the Open Source movement affect non-software areas? Could there be "open-source" building designs and components?
Obviously, there are pros and cons... I'm not sure if you can have an Open Source building design and feel safe in it, but you could make the same argument about using Linux to do critical work, such as hospital systems.
Thoughts?
Do books count?
Neuromancer by William Gibson introduced the idea of jacking in to the net before "surfing" was even a term. (I'm sure someone will flame me saying that author [Foo] did it first, but Gibson popularized the idea.)
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson introduced avatars in the technical sense, and refined many of the concepts that Gibson started.
I think both books have been very influential in giving geeks a shared vision of where we want to take the net.
--Twid
Another way of preserving your privacy is to create some random noise around your "real" identity.
True story: Several years ago, just for fun, I started filling out warranty cards, shopping survey cards, discount store cards, etc... with false information. I said I was 20 years older than I was, with a wife Buffy and two kids (I used my roommate's names for the kids just for fun...). I consistently did this for two years.
It was fun to get mail at home for life insurance for my non-existent children, etc... but the real punch line involved my brother. My brother works for one of the large credit card companies. American Express was trying to sell them an information database that they claimed was the most accurate ever. How do you test something like that? Put in some family members and see what comes up.
So, you can see what is coming here. My brother calls me on the phone and says "Who is Buffy???". American Express trusted my warranty cards, etc... more than they trusted whatever other public records they could get their hands on.
Just a little bit of random noise can really throw off a "data warehouse" trying to track you. Make it fun! Go buy whipped cream and condoms at 2 am on the first of every month and see what your grocery does (grin)...