Above.net is owned by Paul Vixie? Could'a fooled me. All I know about ORBS is that they blacklisted me for having an open relay when I didn't have an open relay, so I'm not really the right person to be defending Paul for anything he may or may not have done to them.
Paul got the crap sued out of him by spammers, from what I've heard, and had no choice but to turn MAPS into a subscriber service. AFAIK he never promised to do anything other than that, and it operated for free for quite a while.
He has been extremely scrupulous with the Internet Software Consortium. I know of few people whose integrity I trust more. I would trust him with the title to my house.
Regarding the members-only thing, somebody got to pay de bills. When was the last time you sent a donation to the ISC? Paul's very good at leveraging value in such a way that everybody benefits, but sometimes leverage means that you have to wait a few weeks to get the benefit that the people who are paying to generate the benefit get immediately. This is an unusually good deal in the real world - usually if you don't pay, you don't get the goods at all.
(I should say that I used to work for him, although I haven't for a couple of years, so it's not like I'm a disinterested bystander here.)
The problem with this whole thing is that detecting watermarks is too difficult. I think it might be easier, particularly as memory density gets really impressive, to just have a copy of every single copyrighted work in existance stashed on each DAC. As the DAC digitizes a new piece of music or video, it compares it to all the existing music and video. If it matches something, the DAC shuts off.
The technical barriers to this solution are of course immense. Much more computing power is needed, and much higher memory densities. Probably a massively parallel device that has one comparator per song would be the way to go.
But let's not let these details get in the way of a good idea - this could really work, and it would solve for once and for all the problem of... hm, what problem were we trying to solve again?
I don't think it makes sense to store email in dbm files. It's too sketchy - what happens when the dbm file gets corrupted? The nice thing about flat files is that if something goes wrong, you can fix it with vi.
I think the right solution to the problem is to key off the message ID, which is supposed to be unique. Then define a mail folder as simply a list of message IDs. Messages can appear in more than one folder, but hopefully not in no folders.
To make this efficient, I'd hash the message ID, and use a hierarchy of directories, because Unix doesn't do well with large flat directories. The hierarchy could auto-extend, so that as one subdirectory fills up, you do a sub-hash and split it into more directories.
The problem of tiny files is a real one. The solution is probably to make the bottom of a hash a file rather than a directory, and store more than one message in each such file. You don't have to store a lot of messages in these files to win - even ten messages would produce a big win, and would be pretty efficient.
The format of the individual files should probably be indexed sequential access - that is, a TOC at the front, and then the contents as plain text, nothing fancy. The TOC should be in ASCII, not binary, and you should be able to rebuild the TOC by looking at the file.
Babyl used to use a control character as a delimiter, which worked pretty nicely - much better than using "^From ". Ever seen >From in an email message? That's because Unix mail uses "^From " as an inter-message delimiter, so it has to quote it, and it does so stupidly. So use ^_ as a delimiter, and if ^_ appears in the email message, just double it. Take a doubled ^_ out when reading a message.
As for compression, I don't think it's worth doing at first. Disk space is cheap. Yes, my email folder is pretty huge, but it's really not a major problem. Making the storage system extra-complicated by uncompressing MIME is something to add on after you've got something more basic that works - you don't have to solve every problem all at once.
As for folder scan performance, you can make a cache, and have the mail program scan the cache from time to time when it's idle to clean up errors. This is much better than trying to come up with a format that's optimized toward folders - if you try to optimize toward folders, you wind up creating all kinds of problems, IMHO.
I just went to the Baen Books web site and discovered that they have a ton of books for sale for download. Being a bit of a Science Fiction addict, I have the problem that I wind up with a ton of books that I'd kind of like to have around for later use, but that I don't want to have to actually store.
So I just bought a couple of old classics online for a lot less than they cost in paper, they are each on the order of a megabyte in RTF, and I can have them in a subdirectory of my home directory! This is really cool!
It's really improved a lot. 0.97 was painfully slow on OS X, but 0.99 is actually faster than MSIE. There are still a few UI glitches - for example, command-H doesn't work - but this is the first time I've been able to switch to Mozilla and not have to switch back within an hour. I'm still going strong after three days. Things are definitely looking up for Mozilla.
I'm being facetious here, of course, but if the Canadian government is going to get into the business of collecting arbitrary royalties on digital media, why do musicians have more of a claim on these royalties than people who write free software?
I'm not Canadian, so I can't do it, but if you are, read the PDF file carefully, and put together a formal objection. Every Canadian citizen is entitled to object. It looks like it's pretty expensive for them if you produce a proper formal objection, so go for it! If enough Canadian citizens object, you really could make a difference here.
I find that anti-aliased fonts are a real drag to try to read. I wish there was some way to shut off anti-aliasing in MacOS X. The anti-aliased fonts are more mathematically correct renderings of font glyphs represented mathematically, it's true, but they just look blurry to me.
It used to be that people would spend a lot of time hand-optimizing a font to look good on screen. This is definitely costly, and I can see why one would want to teach a computer to do it nicely, but anti-aliasing doesn't seem to be a good answer to me.
Am I crazy, or do other people have the same experience with anti-aliased fonts? I'm using MacOS X, by the way, and the output looks a lot like the "after" output in the article, so I don't think I can blame my problem on a bad anti-aliasing algorithm.
BIND 9 is a complete reimplementation of a domain name server, and does not share any code at all with BIND 8. BIND 9 also supports cryptographic authentication of DNS updates, zone transfers, and so on, and supports DNSSEC. I am currently running BIND 9 on my MacOS X systems, and I'm very happy with the results. Given that I have, in the past, worked for the ISC, I'm a bit biased, but I didn't write any of the code in BIND 9.
I don't know DJB, so I can't really speak to the quality of his code, but I do know the folks who developed BIND 9, and I think they did a really nice job. If you want an open source domain name server, I don't think you can do any better than BIND 9.
I've been tempted, believe me. OTOH, the spell checking, at least, is handy.:'(
I think Word spins even if it's not doing spell checking and grammar checking, but maybe it's just doing cleverer and cleverer grammar checking - I don't know.:'/
Try turning on backing compression and see if it helps you any. To do this, make a copy of/Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver/plist , and after the first <dict> in the file, add the following:
I don't know if this makes a difference, but I run 10.1.2 on an iBook 500 with 640M of memory, and the performance is very nice. (BTW, I didn't come up with this hack - it's from a MacOS mailing list, IIRC).
Also, if you are running Netscape, be aware that it busy loops and consumes a lot of CPU even if it's not displaying any animations. It will sit there and consume 50% of your CPU while you have it hidden.:'(
Also, if you have Word for MacOS X, be aware that it also busy loops, and consumes a truly impressive amount of CPU.:'(
If you don't know what this means, the deal is that in a non-pre-emptive O.S., most applications just sit there in the event loop waiting for something to happen, and they expect the system to take control away from them when they call getNextEvent (or whatever it is in MacOS 9) if there's another application with an event running. I suspect that Netscape and Office are both expecting this to happen when they call the carbon version of getNextEvent, but they're calling a non-blocking getNextEvent, so they just sit there going "is there an event?", hearing "no," and then doing the same thing again over and over again. I'm sure this would be really easy to fix, but although I reported the bug on Netscape, at least, the next version that came out was still broken in this way.
Yes, the energy in both objects is potential energy, and yes, it is also chemical energy. But it is also the case that a battery *stores* electrical energy, and a bomb *stores* kinetic energy, and this is the important distinction between a battery and a bomb. Indeed, in the sense that you describe them, the battery and the bomb are both equivalent, so your way of looking at the problem, at least as it relates to security, is nonsensical.
This is pretty obvious if you think about it. Batteries are extremely dense energy storage devices. What's another dense energy storage device? Plastique. Do they look different on the X-ray? Probably not enough to tell.
So they make you turn the device on to make sure that your energy-storage device stores electrical energy, not kinetic energy. This makes perfect sense, and what concerns me is that they don't always check.
Mobilstar was just a lousy deal. I had no idea they were in financial trouble, so I actually considered signing up last week. I decided not to, because they want a year contract and $29.95/month for local-only service, only in Starbucks. You can't work from Starbucks, so this isn't really a serious service - it's a luxury item. Which is all very well and good - I would have bought it anyway - but it was just too expensive for the sort of person who would want wireless - a person who travels. They wanted $0.15/minute in addition to the $29.95/month if you wanted to use their service out of the area.
When will people learn that metered internet service is a non-starter, and that you need to provide a service that is priced attractively if you want customers? If they'd charged $29.95/month for access anywhere they had connectivity, they most likely would have generated a lot more income. Sigh.
If there was some way that giving up strong encryption would save tens of thousands of lives, I would be willing to do it.
Unfortunately, me giving up strong encryption doesn't cause others to give it up. The only thing we can give up that can possibly reduce the amount of terrorism in the world is the idea that it's okay to kill, steal, and bully. It would be awfully nice, as an American citizen, if I could say "we never do things like this - our hands are clean.":'(
Pardon my cynical subject line, but the only difference between what Microsoft has done here and what lobbying organizations like the Sierra Club do is that Microsoft can afford to call and argue with people to get them on their side, whereas the Sierra Club has to settle for just sending the letter and hoping people will sign it.
I don't like that Microsoft has more money than the Sierra Club and can therefore afford to call people and personally convince them to sign the letters, but I don't believe that this is unethical. It's simply one of the prices we pay for freedom of speech - everybody has freedom of speech, and those who have more money can speak louder.
Sigh. And I have to say that I am disappointed by the Slashdot article here - the person who wrote it should have read the original article, so that the slashdot article could have been a little more factual. I am very fond of slashdot, and it worries me when I see stories that really belong in the Slashdot Enquirer.:'(
Actually, what most people (admittedly, not gamers) notice most is downlink speed, and you being slashdotted slows down uplink speed, not downlink speed. So you may be causing less trouble than you think - you will be producing some latency in acks that will slow down apparent downlink performance, but this might not produce a very noticable effect.
One poster here said "but if they have a two-tiered system, and the subscription base starts to pay for itself, they'll get rid of the free version with ads." This is entirely possible, but right now I think we're in a situation where the only press that can survive is the corporate press, or the volunteer press.
So you have to ask yourself, do you want a professional, non-corporate, online press? One with professional reporters who research their articles and can write? Because if you do, you might as well just take a gamble and help them to exist.
The worst that can happen is that they do in fact go subscription-only. The best is that they continue to go both ways, because you helped them to stay afloat.
Mostly because I'm too busy hacking to custom tweak my machine. The last custom tweak I did was, with the help of kind person from Russia, to get emacs to display Tibetan characters. This is something I actually need, believe it or not.
I don't mean this critically - I would actually really like to put some eye candy on my display. I just don't have time. Hacking prompts doesn't benefit me, so I don't do it. Adding eye candy might benefit me, but there are so many ways to do it that I just haven't spent the time to choose one yet, and TBH I don't know when I'll get a chance.:'}
Seriously, next time you spend an afternoon tweaking your computer to look cool, think for a minute about how much useful documentation you could have added to your favorite open source project, or the feature you could have hacked, or whatever, instead. You've got to chill sometimes, and environment hacking is one way to do it, but it can be a vice if you do it too much.
We remember where we are. The ultimate uebergeek command prompt is "# ". Uebergeeks also don't need fancy tty modes that display the characters we delete - we use "#" as a delete character.
This is of course somewhat tongue-in-cheek - I use tcsh and my prompt tells me what machine I'm on - but the idea that hacking your prompt is geekitudinal is kind of silly. Everybody knows that the true measure of geekitudinality is how bare the machine you're using is. Real geeks use the ITS debugger as their command prompt.:')
I hate it when people read an article I've written and respond to one minor point in it, but I have to say that this is pretty jarring. In the very first paragraph of this article, Jon writes:
What Information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.
This is such a bizarre statement that it is difficult to imagine how someone could take it seriously. Information doesn't consume anything. Information is passive. Information is not the actor. You are the actor. You choose what to look at. You choose what not to look at.
When problems arise with respect to information, it is not information that is the problem. It is attempts by others to control the information that you get that is the problem. I realize that this is a somewhat pedantic point, but if you don't get your terms straight when you start a line of reasoning, the line of reasoning tends to derail into something nonsensical. I think you're onto something here, but you really need to be more rigorous in your reasoning, or your conclusions aren't going to provide us with any meaningful guidance - they'll just be pretty noise.
Sure, but ultimately all this means is that if I don't have a preference, you might be able to get me to buy one thing over another by paying to influence me. So what? If it's important to me that I get food that will taste good, I will make an effort to find it, and if it's not, I will just buy whatever looks good to me or is first on the shelf and eat that. What does it matter to me whether or not advertisers have easy access to my brain? It's pretty hard to get worked up about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Above.net is owned by Paul Vixie? Could'a fooled me. All I know about ORBS is that they blacklisted me for having an open relay when I didn't have an open relay, so I'm not really the right person to be defending Paul for anything he may or may not have done to them.
Paul got the crap sued out of him by spammers, from what I've heard, and had no choice but to turn MAPS into a subscriber service. AFAIK he never promised to do anything other than that, and it operated for free for quite a while.
He has been extremely scrupulous with the Internet Software Consortium. I know of few people whose integrity I trust more. I would trust him with the title to my house.
Regarding the members-only thing, somebody got to pay de bills. When was the last time you sent a donation to the ISC? Paul's very good at leveraging value in such a way that everybody benefits, but sometimes leverage means that you have to wait a few weeks to get the benefit that the people who are paying to generate the benefit get immediately. This is an unusually good deal in the real world - usually if you don't pay, you don't get the goods at all.
(I should say that I used to work for him, although I haven't for a couple of years, so it's not like I'm a disinterested bystander here.)
The problem with this whole thing is that detecting watermarks is too difficult. I think it might be easier, particularly as memory density gets really impressive, to just have a copy of every single copyrighted work in existance stashed on each DAC. As the DAC digitizes a new piece of music or video, it compares it to all the existing music and video. If it matches something, the DAC shuts off.
The technical barriers to this solution are of course immense. Much more computing power is needed, and much higher memory densities. Probably a massively parallel device that has one comparator per song would be the way to go.
But let's not let these details get in the way of a good idea - this could really work, and it would solve for once and for all the problem of... hm, what problem were we trying to solve again?
I don't think it makes sense to store email in dbm files. It's too sketchy - what happens when the dbm file gets corrupted? The nice thing about flat files is that if something goes wrong, you can fix it with vi.
I think the right solution to the problem is to key off the message ID, which is supposed to be unique. Then define a mail folder as simply a list of message IDs. Messages can appear in more than one folder, but hopefully not in no folders.
To make this efficient, I'd hash the message ID, and use a hierarchy of directories, because Unix doesn't do well with large flat directories. The hierarchy could auto-extend, so that as one subdirectory fills up, you do a sub-hash and split it into more directories.
The problem of tiny files is a real one. The solution is probably to make the bottom of a hash a file rather than a directory, and store more than one message in each such file. You don't have to store a lot of messages in these files to win - even ten messages would produce a big win, and would be pretty efficient.
The format of the individual files should probably be indexed sequential access - that is, a TOC at the front, and then the contents as plain text, nothing fancy. The TOC should be in ASCII, not binary, and you should be able to rebuild the TOC by looking at the file.
Babyl used to use a control character as a delimiter, which worked pretty nicely - much better than using "^From ". Ever seen >From in an email message? That's because Unix mail uses "^From " as an inter-message delimiter, so it has to quote it, and it does so stupidly. So use ^_ as a delimiter, and if ^_ appears in the email message, just double it. Take a doubled ^_ out when reading a message.
As for compression, I don't think it's worth doing at first. Disk space is cheap. Yes, my email folder is pretty huge, but it's really not a major problem. Making the storage system extra-complicated by uncompressing MIME is something to add on after you've got something more basic that works - you don't have to solve every problem all at once.
As for folder scan performance, you can make a cache, and have the mail program scan the cache from time to time when it's idle to clean up errors. This is much better than trying to come up with a format that's optimized toward folders - if you try to optimize toward folders, you wind up creating all kinds of problems, IMHO.
I just went to the Baen Books web site and discovered that they have a ton of books for sale for download. Being a bit of a Science Fiction addict, I have the problem that I wind up with a ton of books that I'd kind of like to have around for later use, but that I don't want to have to actually store.
So I just bought a couple of old classics online for a lot less than they cost in paper, they are each on the order of a megabyte in RTF, and I can have them in a subdirectory of my home directory! This is really cool!
It's really improved a lot. 0.97 was painfully slow on OS X, but 0.99 is actually faster than MSIE. There are still a few UI glitches - for example, command-H doesn't work - but this is the first time I've been able to switch to Mozilla and not have to switch back within an hour. I'm still going strong after three days. Things are definitely looking up for Mozilla.
It does work on win32!
I'm being facetious here, of course, but if the Canadian government is going to get into the business of collecting arbitrary royalties on digital media, why do musicians have more of a claim on these royalties than people who write free software?
I'm not Canadian, so I can't do it, but if you are, read the PDF file carefully, and put together a formal objection. Every Canadian citizen is entitled to object. It looks like it's pretty expensive for them if you produce a proper formal objection, so go for it! If enough Canadian citizens object, you really could make a difference here.
I find that anti-aliased fonts are a real drag to try to read. I wish there was some way to shut off anti-aliasing in MacOS X. The anti-aliased fonts are more mathematically correct renderings of font glyphs represented mathematically, it's true, but they just look blurry to me.
It used to be that people would spend a lot of time hand-optimizing a font to look good on screen. This is definitely costly, and I can see why one would want to teach a computer to do it nicely, but anti-aliasing doesn't seem to be a good answer to me.
Am I crazy, or do other people have the same experience with anti-aliased fonts? I'm using MacOS X, by the way, and the output looks a lot like the "after" output in the article, so I don't think I can blame my problem on a bad anti-aliasing algorithm.
BIND 9 is a complete reimplementation of a domain name server, and does not share any code at all with BIND 8. BIND 9 also supports cryptographic authentication of DNS updates, zone transfers, and so on, and supports DNSSEC. I am currently running BIND 9 on my MacOS X systems, and I'm very happy with the results. Given that I have, in the past, worked for the ISC, I'm a bit biased, but I didn't write any of the code in BIND 9.
I don't know DJB, so I can't really speak to the quality of his code, but I do know the folks who developed BIND 9, and I think they did a really nice job. If you want an open source domain name server, I don't think you can do any better than BIND 9.
I've been tempted, believe me. OTOH, the spell checking, at least, is handy. :'(
:'/
I think Word spins even if it's not doing spell checking and grammar checking, but maybe it's just doing cleverer and cleverer grammar checking - I don't know.
Try turning on backing compression and see if it helps you any. To do this, make a copy of /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver/plist , and after the first <dict> in the file, add the following:
:'(
:'(
<key>BackingCompression</key>
<dict>
<key>compressionScanTime</key>
<real>5.000000000000000e+00</real>
<key>minCompressableSize</key>
<integer>8193</integer>
<key>minCompressionRatio</key>
<real>1.100000023841858e+00</real>
</dict>
I don't know if this makes a difference, but I run 10.1.2 on an iBook 500 with 640M of memory, and the performance is very nice. (BTW, I didn't come up with this hack - it's from a MacOS mailing list, IIRC).
Also, if you are running Netscape, be aware that it busy loops and consumes a lot of CPU even if it's not displaying any animations. It will sit there and consume 50% of your CPU while you have it hidden.
Also, if you have Word for MacOS X, be aware that it also busy loops, and consumes a truly impressive amount of CPU.
If you don't know what this means, the deal is that in a non-pre-emptive O.S., most applications just sit there in the event loop waiting for something to happen, and they expect the system to take control away from them when they call getNextEvent (or whatever it is in MacOS 9) if there's another application with an event running. I suspect that Netscape and Office are both expecting this to happen when they call the carbon version of getNextEvent, but they're calling a non-blocking getNextEvent, so they just sit there going "is there an event?", hearing "no," and then doing the same thing again over and over again. I'm sure this would be really easy to fix, but although I reported the bug on Netscape, at least, the next version that came out was still broken in this way.
Yes, the energy in both objects is potential energy, and yes, it is also chemical energy. But it is also the case that a battery *stores* electrical energy, and a bomb *stores* kinetic energy, and this is the important distinction between a battery and a bomb. Indeed, in the sense that you describe them, the battery and the bomb are both equivalent, so your way of looking at the problem, at least as it relates to security, is nonsensical.
So they make you turn the device on to make sure that your energy-storage device stores electrical energy, not kinetic energy. This makes perfect sense, and what concerns me is that they don't always check.
Mobilstar was just a lousy deal. I had no idea they were in financial trouble, so I actually considered signing up last week. I decided not to, because they want a year contract and $29.95/month for local-only service, only in Starbucks. You can't work from Starbucks, so this isn't really a serious service - it's a luxury item. Which is all very well and good - I would have bought it anyway - but it was just too expensive for the sort of person who would want wireless - a person who travels. They wanted $0.15/minute in addition to the $29.95/month if you wanted to use their service out of the area.
When will people learn that metered internet service is a non-starter, and that you need to provide a service that is priced attractively if you want customers? If they'd charged $29.95/month for access anywhere they had connectivity, they most likely would have generated a lot more income. Sigh.
Unfortunately, me giving up strong encryption doesn't cause others to give it up. The only thing we can give up that can possibly reduce the amount of terrorism in the world is the idea that it's okay to kill, steal, and bully. It would be awfully nice, as an American citizen, if I could say "we never do things like this - our hands are clean."
I don't like that Microsoft has more money than the Sierra Club and can therefore afford to call people and personally convince them to sign the letters, but I don't believe that this is unethical. It's simply one of the prices we pay for freedom of speech - everybody has freedom of speech, and those who have more money can speak louder.
Sigh. And I have to say that I am disappointed by the Slashdot article here - the person who wrote it should have read the original article, so that the slashdot article could have been a little more factual. I am very fond of slashdot, and it worries me when I see stories that really belong in the Slashdot Enquirer.
_MelloN_
Actually, what most people (admittedly, not gamers) notice most is downlink speed, and you being slashdotted slows down uplink speed, not downlink speed. So you may be causing less trouble than you think - you will be producing some latency in acks that will slow down apparent downlink performance, but this might not produce a very noticable effect.
So you have to ask yourself, do you want a professional, non-corporate, online press? One with professional reporters who research their articles and can write? Because if you do, you might as well just take a gamble and help them to exist.
The worst that can happen is that they do in fact go subscription-only. The best is that they continue to go both ways, because you helped them to stay afloat.
I don't mean this critically - I would actually really like to put some eye candy on my display. I just don't have time. Hacking prompts doesn't benefit me, so I don't do it. Adding eye candy might benefit me, but there are so many ways to do it that I just haven't spent the time to choose one yet, and TBH I don't know when I'll get a chance. :'}
Seriously, next time you spend an afternoon tweaking your computer to look cool, think for a minute about how much useful documentation you could have added to your favorite open source project, or the feature you could have hacked, or whatever, instead. You've got to chill sometimes, and environment hacking is one way to do it, but it can be a vice if you do it too much.
This is of course somewhat tongue-in-cheek - I use tcsh and my prompt tells me what machine I'm on - but the idea that hacking your prompt is geekitudinal is kind of silly. Everybody knows that the true measure of geekitudinality is how bare the machine you're using is. Real geeks use the ITS debugger as their command prompt. :')
When problems arise with respect to information, it is not information that is the problem. It is attempts by others to control the information that you get that is the problem. I realize that this is a somewhat pedantic point, but if you don't get your terms straight when you start a line of reasoning, the line of reasoning tends to derail into something nonsensical. I think you're onto something here, but you really need to be more rigorous in your reasoning, or your conclusions aren't going to provide us with any meaningful guidance - they'll just be pretty noise.
Um, hello? One of these right-wing terrorists blew up a building with hundreds of people in it! Have you heard of any eco-terrorists doing that?
Sure, but ultimately all this means is that if I don't have a preference, you might be able to get me to buy one thing over another by paying to influence me. So what? If it's important to me that I get food that will taste good, I will make an effort to find it, and if it's not, I will just buy whatever looks good to me or is first on the shelf and eat that. What does it matter to me whether or not advertisers have easy access to my brain? It's pretty hard to get worked up about this.