Wow.. Jon, I had nearly given up on you. I thought you were just going to drone on and on again about how corporations were evil and we were all victims, and puppies were being slaughtered.. oh.. wait.
Anyways, Mr. Katz... bravo. I really appreciate this piece. It hit home with me.. as I sit here trying to fit more and more windows onto my screen(had to upgrade to a 21" monitor so I could get more windows), I realize my attention is completely consumed.
I get home at around 8pm(long IT style hours), and feed all my attention to my wife and dog until they fall asleep.Thats about 10:30.. then I sit at my computer and feed it attention until about 2am; coding, chatting, surfing, counterstrike, etc. Wake up at 7:30... and pay attention to my hour long commute. Then its work(at least here I don't have to pay attention.. NOT!). Lastly, leave at 7:00pm, hour long commute. Repeat.
Nowhere in there can I say I just "veg out"... I'm constantly having to produce attention, until I finally pass out from exhaustion.
I was relentlessly teased just like many people reading this and other things. What kept me from taking my life, or others lives, was a simple award from a teacher. It had nothing to do with grades or intelligence(I had gotten those before, my peers seem to think they were derrogetory, not complimentary). She gave me an award for critical thinking. On a group camping trip, I had helped 4 people come down from a tall rock that they'd gotten stuck on. I used a large tree branch to help them down, and talked them through it calmly.
The award, presented in front of the class, gave me self confidence. Nobody jeered at me for receiving it. Suddenly, I loved myself. It was in 8th grade, and it changed my life forever.
You may say "Bah, sentimental hogwash". You might cry out "social promotion". This was neither of those. It was an award, for an accomplishment. A showing of respect. Not a token "you're a great student cause you tried" or a "You're a winner because you played 10 games of baseball". It meant something, to me and my peers.
The point of my post here, is that these kids have no self esteem. They have no power over their own minds because they're afraid. This is caused mostly by bullying, but its also because the authority figures in their lives are too busy. Whether it be parents, teachers, coaches, or "mentors", somebody needs to challenge kids early on, and keep them striving, or they'll just lose all hope, and commit attrocities such as this.
all of us out there with 0kb DSL bring the US average down a lot. Its a little frustrating going from 56kb to 0, but in the end, you get to tell your buddies how K-Rad you are that you have DSL.
Seriously though, I'm stuck in dialup hell, 30 miles from the nearest person with cable or DSL.
Am I the only one who doesn't care about things like this? I mean.... ?? Ultimately, this gives Quake the same ability as Doom had... to play multiplayer on local LAN's, and nothing else.
Well, there can be an argument made that your house could then easily be used by criminals fleeing the police as a place to hide, or blockade themselves, but its a weak one.
A better idea is that a machine on the internet is like a car. It can move around(or at least project packets, like moving) at a certain speed. Well, your box at home on a DSL line is like a Corvette. Its fast, and somewhat dangerous, but nobody cares. Now, imagine 600 corvettes, all under the control of one moron... driving straight at a school.
And, a machine sitting on a 100Mbit link with the power to move packets out at that speed... well, have you seen the videos of that M60 tank that some looney took for a joy ride around San Diego a few years back?
Thats it,/. Has really gone down the tubes now. The Index is just a capitalist conspiracy to drive the personal home pages off the net once and for all. Rumors have been spoken that they're involved with online retailers and consulting firms to woo people with the promise of a bloated result list and ugly design, then smack them with a bunch of boring links to useless "call here for more information" pages.
My company uses exchange. We're a small compny. We hate it.
Oh sure, you can use a nice pre-made web interface, and of course you can share your calenders and stuff. The problem is, its kind of hard to do that when the server crashes weekly, and sometimes is down for hours. The directory and data store constantly are corrupted, and of course, there's all the fun little security holes(Don't get me started on Outlook.....).
The bottom line is that if it can't handle our 16 users, why should it be able to handle 1000's? And whats the plus of using it? All of its features can be duplicated with ease using open source software.
NDS is, and always has been, a great technology. The same goes for most of Novell's products. The problem is that it is a proprietary system, and such things are going away right now. LDAP and ActiveDirectory(yes I know its proprietary too) are taking over for NDS.
Print servers are still very much needed. An organization with many many printers doesn't want to have to change 100 client machines every time they upgrade. They want to go to the print server, change the IP, or LPT, or whatever, to the new one, and be done with it.
Novell itself had everything at one point, but the world has changed. I don't think there's anything they can do but continue to support their current customers. I couldn't care less, as any open system provides me with so many more options than something closed such as Novell.
This would not be hypocricy. Hypocricy would be if we said "The horrors! The insanity!" and then went back to work on our Windows 2000 workstations.
We're all Linux users, and we know that Windows 2000 is a horror, and was developed under insane conditions.
Also, an all Linux workstation environment is one that has Free software on it. The person who snuck in Windows 2000 probably has done so in violation of their license agreement. If its installed on company time, on company equipment, that means liability for the company.
The bottom line is that these are not compatible situations. They cannot, and should not, even be compared.
After several evil crashes/restores on my Win98/NT laptop, I got fed up and installed Linux. I then bought VMware, and ran it in full screen mode. It includes an "undo" option, so at the next crash, I just "undid" that day's changes, and viola! I was back up and running.
My boss was none the wiser until one day he saw me flipping over to my E desktop from Windows. He was so impressed at the ingenuity that he gave me a $50 "Lunatic Fringe" award for doing things my own way.
Just another reason why I love my job! They let me bake my cake and eat it to!:)
Both ideas suck. Why should the government have any say in what services an ISP offers? I think Its a good idea though, and ISP's would be wise to offer some sort of service to log children's traffic. However, I don't think it will work. Any self respecting kid over 10 will be able to figure out how to use babelfish to proxy the content.
As far as content filters in libraries.. duh, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. I can't believe we're even still talking about it.
Don't be a moron. The moderators must have been on crack to give you a "Funny" score. OpenBSD is the easiest OS to keep secure, and has the fewest exploits found(actually, its been a long time since something outside the ports collection has had an exploit). Ipf and ipnat are far superior to Linux's ipchains and IP Masquerading(though Masq has a lot more 'helper' modules for things like IRC-DCC's and realaudio).
I'm pretty sure the only reason we're not all switching to it is that its a little behind on hardware support(read that again, A LITTLE, not a whole lot), and its a lot behind on support. Most of the OpenBSD users I've run in to tell me to RTFM, even after I say I have, they say RTFMA(A=Again). Linux users can be the same, but there are a lot more of us out there helping newbies.
Export Restrictions are *NOT* why we're not all switching to OpenBSD. You don't have to smuggle a copy in. It wasn't developed in the U.S., and so doesn't suffer from many of those regulations. And the little issue they used to have with SSH1 needing to use RSAREF went away last week.
Yes, we're all a bunch of geeks with way too much time on our hands. That said, this has a use, just like http tunneling. Its just another way to get around controls. *And* it is a whiz-bang cool use for existing protocols. Thats what real *hackers* do... not crackers, hackers.
I mean, have you ever read PC Magazine, or "Smart Business(formerly PC Computing)" ? These are the same people who say the Pentium III is a better "bang for the buck" processor than the new Athlons/Thunderbirds. They're the same publishing company that sold Microsoft 32 consecutive pages for a "special advertising section" on Windows 2000. They're MS and Intel's bitches... always consider that when reading things published by ZD.
As for the tucows article, it raises a good point, but I mean... What kind of software is Mandrake going to give a reviewer? "Check this out, you get partition magic if you say Mandrake 7 kicks ass." Either the writer of that article is stupid, or just wants to stir things up.
I beg to differ. Some of us are complaining about the performance of 3DES. FreeS/WAN is the major(if not only) IPSec implementation for Linux. It only supports 3DES. 3DES is an order of magnitude slower than a blowfish, or even CAST. This doesn't matter with most of the over powered servers out there, but if you're trying to develop something like maybe a router(can you say LRP?) with Linux, you'll have to beef up the CPU just to support the crypto. An equally secure algorithm with greater security would(should) have sufficed.
Then again, maybe something like Transmeta is the answer to this.
Exodus is awesome. I toured their facilities in Orange County, California a few weeks ago. They have multiple OC-48's coming in, from different providers. They are on two different power grids. They have two massive diesel generators that can provide power for 12 hours(each), and a service agreement with a diesel company that will have them on site with a refill and spare parts within 4 hours. The buildings are extremely secure, and the actual co-location space is monitored 24hrs by cameras, and network engineers.
They also have their own backbone, reserved for Exodus traffic only. So if someone in Dallas accesses your servers co-located in San Jose and Chicago, the traffic dives in to Exodus's network in Dallas(they have private connections to many ISP's, making this even faster sometimes), and then goes lightning fast over their backbone, avoiding nasty MAP's along the way.
You aren't going to be able to do all that for yourself, for a million a year.
BTW, Read the web page folks. All of this information is in there.
Before you all spout that the modem in ThinkPad 600's will never work, know that Lucent Technologies' "winmodem" chipset now has a binary-only kernel module that works perfectly. It can be found at www.linmodems.org.
One down, just a few to go. HSP Modems... now there's a different story.
HELLO?! Did you read the original article? You just posted a link to the same damn article linked to by SlashDot. Geez... RTFA(Read The Fucking Article).
I'm in California, and my father in law did the same thing, inadvertently. The credit card he used to pay for the MSN expired, and they cancelled his MSN service.. hehe.. but they never collected any more money from him. Interesting.:)
I'm a big fan of some of the things you do Jon, but this just seems like
Yet Another Long Winded Jon Katz Article
I know this one wasn't a long one in number of words, but I find myself getting tired just reading the first two sentences. Am I alone in this feeling?
You list some of my favorite movies. I suppose you don't like the Austin Powers movies either, because of their stupid humor. Come on... stop taking everything so seriously. Sheesh, you probably don't even like Monty Python's humor.
They could port IE and Office to Linux without opening the source. That is what the LGPL is for, allowing commercial apps to link to LGPL'd code.
What they couldn't do is create an "MS Linux" or something like that(Which is what I think you were getting at). Ok, they COULD do that, but they would have to release any code changes they did, and within days all of the regular distributions would be able to support the MS apps.
Basically, I agree, but I think you got a couple things wrong there.
I used to think MS would never port IE to any non-Windows/Mac platform, but now I see that there is a Solaris port. Whats up with that?!
I think you have missed the point of Open Source completely. Commercial entities like SGI, IBM, and Netscape are open sourcing some of their products right now. They're not doing it because they do't care what is done with their code. They're doing it for peer review. They're doing it because the open source model of development is very effective.
All the different Open Source licenses support the different views that a developer might have. The underlying idea behind all of them is to protect the work from being mis-credited. The GPL also adds the idea that all software should be free, so it doesn't allow one to take changes private and distribute in binary form only.
If you were to put code in the Public Domain, anyone could just erase your credit, modify the UI and claim that they had created it. Then they could slap a private license, or a BSD, GPL, BOOGIEWOOGIE,or whatever license they wanted on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow.. Jon, I had nearly given up on you. I thought you were just going to drone on and on again about how corporations were evil and we were all victims, and puppies were being slaughtered.. oh.. wait.
Anyways, Mr. Katz... bravo. I really appreciate this piece. It hit home with me.. as I sit here trying to fit more and more windows onto my screen(had to upgrade to a 21" monitor so I could get more windows), I realize my attention is completely consumed.
I get home at around 8pm(long IT style hours), and feed all my attention to my wife and dog until they fall asleep.Thats about 10:30.. then I sit at my computer and feed it attention until about 2am; coding, chatting, surfing, counterstrike, etc. Wake up at 7:30... and pay attention to my hour long commute. Then its work(at least here I don't have to pay attention.. NOT!). Lastly, leave at 7:00pm, hour long commute. Repeat.
Nowhere in there can I say I just "veg out"... I'm constantly having to produce attention, until I finally pass out from exhaustion.
I was relentlessly teased just like many people reading this and other things. What kept me from taking my life, or others lives, was a simple award from a teacher. It had nothing to do with grades or intelligence(I had gotten those before, my peers seem to think they were derrogetory, not complimentary). She gave me an award for critical thinking. On a group camping trip, I had helped 4 people come down from a tall rock that they'd gotten stuck on. I used a large tree branch to help them down, and talked them through it calmly.
The award, presented in front of the class, gave me self confidence. Nobody jeered at me for receiving it. Suddenly, I loved myself. It was in 8th grade, and it changed my life forever.
You may say "Bah, sentimental hogwash". You might cry out "social promotion". This was neither of those. It was an award, for an accomplishment. A showing of respect. Not a token "you're a great student cause you tried" or a "You're a winner because you played 10 games of baseball". It meant something, to me and my peers.
The point of my post here, is that these kids have no self esteem. They have no power over their own minds because they're afraid. This is caused mostly by bullying, but its also because the authority figures in their lives are too busy. Whether it be parents, teachers, coaches, or "mentors", somebody needs to challenge kids early on, and keep them striving, or they'll just lose all hope, and commit attrocities such as this.
all of us out there with 0kb DSL bring the US average down a lot. Its a little frustrating going from 56kb to 0, but in the end, you get to tell your buddies how K-Rad you are that you have DSL.
Seriously though, I'm stuck in dialup hell, 30 miles from the nearest person with cable or DSL.
:(
Am I the only one who doesn't care about things like this? I mean.... ?? Ultimately, this gives Quake the same ability as Doom had... to play multiplayer on local LAN's, and nothing else.
Don't even get me started on Internet2...
Well, there can be an argument made that your house could then easily be used by criminals fleeing the police as a place to hide, or blockade themselves, but its a weak one.
A better idea is that a machine on the internet is like a car. It can move around(or at least project packets, like moving) at a certain speed. Well, your box at home on a DSL line is like a Corvette. Its fast, and somewhat dangerous, but nobody cares. Now, imagine 600 corvettes, all under the control of one moron... driving straight at a school.
And, a machine sitting on a 100Mbit link with the power to move packets out at that speed... well, have you seen the videos of that M60 tank that some looney took for a joy ride around San Diego a few years back?
Thats it, /. Has really gone down the tubes now. The Index is just a capitalist conspiracy to drive the personal home pages off the net once and for all. Rumors have been spoken that they're involved with online retailers and consulting firms to woo people with the promise of a bloated result list and ugly design, then smack them with a bunch of boring links to useless "call here for more information" pages.
Its all a Plot I tel you! beware The[EVIL]Index!
My company uses exchange. We're a small compny. We hate it.
Oh sure, you can use a nice pre-made web interface, and of course you can share your calenders and stuff. The problem is, its kind of hard to do that when the server crashes weekly, and sometimes is down for hours. The directory and data store constantly are corrupted, and of course, there's all the fun little security holes(Don't get me started on Outlook.....).
The bottom line is that if it can't handle our 16 users, why should it be able to handle 1000's? And whats the plus of using it? All of its features can be duplicated with ease using open source software.
Exchange makes me sick.
NDS is, and always has been, a great technology. The same goes for most of Novell's products. The problem is that it is a proprietary system, and such things are going away right now. LDAP and ActiveDirectory(yes I know its proprietary too) are taking over for NDS.
Print servers are still very much needed. An organization with many many printers doesn't want to have to change 100 client machines every time they upgrade. They want to go to the print server, change the IP, or LPT, or whatever, to the new one, and be done with it.
Novell itself had everything at one point, but the world has changed. I don't think there's anything they can do but continue to support their current customers. I couldn't care less, as any open system provides me with so many more options than something closed such as Novell.
If this steams you, then why didn't the article I replied to steam you?
This would not be hypocricy. Hypocricy would be if we said "The horrors! The insanity!" and then went back to work on our Windows 2000 workstations.
We're all Linux users, and we know that Windows 2000 is a horror, and was developed under insane conditions.
Also, an all Linux workstation environment is one that has Free software on it. The person who snuck in Windows 2000 probably has done so in violation of their license agreement. If its installed on company time, on company equipment, that means liability for the company.
The bottom line is that these are not compatible situations. They cannot, and should not, even be compared.
After several evil crashes/restores on my Win98/NT laptop, I got fed up and installed Linux. I then bought VMware, and ran it in full screen mode. It includes an "undo" option, so at the next crash, I just "undid" that day's changes, and viola! I was back up and running.
:)
My boss was none the wiser until one day he saw me flipping over to my E desktop from Windows. He was so impressed at the ingenuity that he gave me a $50 "Lunatic Fringe" award for doing things my own way.
Just another reason why I love my job! They let me bake my cake and eat it to!
Both ideas suck. Why should the government have any say in what services an ISP offers? I think Its a good idea though, and ISP's would be wise to offer some sort of service to log children's traffic. However, I don't think it will work. Any self respecting kid over 10 will be able to figure out how to use babelfish to proxy the content.
As far as content filters in libraries.. duh, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. I can't believe we're even still talking about it.
Don't be a moron. The moderators must have been on crack to give you a "Funny" score. OpenBSD is the easiest OS to keep secure, and has the fewest exploits found(actually, its been a long time since something outside the ports collection has had an exploit). Ipf and ipnat are far superior to Linux's ipchains and IP Masquerading(though Masq has a lot more 'helper' modules for things like IRC-DCC's and realaudio).
I'm pretty sure the only reason we're not all switching to it is that its a little behind on hardware support(read that again, A LITTLE, not a whole lot), and its a lot behind on support. Most of the OpenBSD users I've run in to tell me to RTFM, even after I say I have, they say RTFMA(A=Again). Linux users can be the same, but there are a lot more of us out there helping newbies.
Export Restrictions are *NOT* why we're not all switching to OpenBSD. You don't have to smuggle a copy in. It wasn't developed in the U.S., and so doesn't suffer from many of those regulations. And the little issue they used to have with SSH1 needing to use RSAREF went away last week.
Again.. don't be a moron.
Yes, we're all a bunch of geeks with way too much time on our hands. That said, this has a use, just like http tunneling. Its just another way to get around controls. *And* it is a whiz-bang cool use for existing protocols. Thats what real *hackers* do... not crackers, hackers.
I mean, have you ever read PC Magazine, or "Smart Business(formerly PC Computing)" ? These are the same people who say the Pentium III is a better "bang for the buck" processor than the new Athlons/Thunderbirds. They're the same publishing company that sold Microsoft 32 consecutive pages for a "special advertising section" on Windows 2000. They're MS and Intel's bitches... always consider that when reading things published by ZD.
As for the tucows article, it raises a good point, but I mean... What kind of software is Mandrake going to give a reviewer? "Check this out, you get partition magic if you say Mandrake 7 kicks ass." Either the writer of that article is stupid, or just wants to stir things up.
I beg to differ. Some of us are complaining about the performance of 3DES. FreeS/WAN is the major(if not only) IPSec implementation for Linux. It only supports 3DES. 3DES is an order of magnitude slower than a blowfish, or even CAST. This doesn't matter with most of the over powered servers out there, but if you're trying to develop something like maybe a router(can you say LRP?) with Linux, you'll have to beef up the CPU just to support the crypto. An equally secure algorithm with greater security would(should) have sufficed.
Then again, maybe something like Transmeta is the answer to this.
Exodus is awesome. I toured their facilities in Orange County, California a few weeks ago. They have multiple OC-48's coming in, from different providers. They are on two different power grids. They have two massive diesel generators that can provide power for 12 hours(each), and a service agreement with a diesel company that will have them on site with a refill and spare parts within 4 hours. The buildings are extremely secure, and the actual co-location space is monitored 24hrs by cameras, and network engineers.
They also have their own backbone, reserved for Exodus traffic only. So if someone in Dallas accesses your servers co-located in San Jose and Chicago, the traffic dives in to Exodus's network in Dallas(they have private connections to many ISP's, making this even faster sometimes), and then goes lightning fast over their backbone, avoiding nasty MAP's along the way.
You aren't going to be able to do all that for yourself, for a million a year.
BTW, Read the web page folks. All of this information is in there.
Before you all spout that the modem in ThinkPad 600's will never work, know that Lucent Technologies' "winmodem" chipset now has a binary-only kernel module that works perfectly. It can be found at www.linmodems.org.
One down, just a few to go. HSP Modems... now there's a different story.
I'll save you all a lot of time. You don't have to read the article above.
Summary: "Blah Blah Blah I know big words, down with corporate power, blah blah blah."
You're welcome.
HELLO?! Did you read the original article? You just posted a link to the same damn article linked to by SlashDot. Geez... RTFA(Read The Fucking Article).
I'm in California, and my father in law did the same thing, inadvertently. The credit card he used to pay for the MSN expired, and they cancelled his MSN service.. hehe.. but they never collected any more money from him. Interesting. :)
:)
I'm off to Best Buy, woo hoo.
I'm a big fan of some of the things you do Jon, but this just seems like
Yet Another Long Winded Jon Katz Article
I know this one wasn't a long one in number of words, but I find myself getting tired just reading the first two sentences. Am I alone in this feeling?
You list some of my favorite movies. I suppose you don't like the Austin Powers movies either, because of their stupid humor. Come on... stop taking everything so seriously. Sheesh, you probably don't even like Monty Python's humor.
They could port IE and Office to Linux without opening the source. That is what the LGPL is for, allowing commercial apps to link to LGPL'd code.
What they couldn't do is create an "MS Linux" or something like that(Which is what I think you were getting at). Ok, they COULD do that, but they would have to release any code changes they did, and within days all of the regular distributions would be able to support the MS apps.
Basically, I agree, but I think you got a couple things wrong there.
I used to think MS would never port IE to any non-Windows/Mac platform, but now I see that there is a Solaris port. Whats up with that?!
I think you have missed the point of Open Source completely. Commercial entities like SGI, IBM, and Netscape are open sourcing some of their products right now. They're not doing it because they do't care what is done with their code. They're doing it for peer review. They're doing it because the open source model of development is very effective.
,or whatever license they wanted on it.
All the different Open Source licenses support the different views that a developer might have. The underlying idea behind all of them is to protect the work from being mis-credited. The GPL also adds the idea that all software should be free, so it doesn't allow one to take changes private and distribute in binary form only.
If you were to put code in the Public Domain, anyone could just erase your credit, modify the UI and claim that they had created it. Then they could slap a private license, or a BSD, GPL, BOOGIEWOOGIE