Mike Williams, now a Professor Emeritus, began such a course at the University of Calgary in the early 80's.
I believe he also spent a year as the Guest Curator of the History of Computing wing of the Smithsonian (and wrote the last program ever plugged into ENIAC, which now rests there).
It's still running at the U. of Calgary as CompSci 509.
Prof. Williams has a
History of Computing Web Site....and just clip the last directory level off that to get his own web page.
Best of Luck.
Re:Some "Challenger" reading - Vaughan
on
The Challenger
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· Score: 1
AIGGH! There's a classic for you. Got to the point of typing the name and went "Franklin? No, not Franklin. What the heck is it..." and I was so stuck on "Franklin", I finally went to get the book. And, with the book propped up on the keyboard, no less, I typed the wrong name anyway. Twice.
Shoulda' stayed in bed.
Some "Challenger" reading
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The Challenger
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· Score: 3
I can't recommend highly enough, to all people who encounter at work the conflict between engineering excellence and cost-realities, this book:
The Challenger Launch Decision
Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA
by Diane Franklin
Professor Franklin is a sociologist, but believe me, she learned the technical issues thoroughly. And the really crucial question, why the managers made the decision and why the technical people let them - has a sociological answer in NASA and Thiokol's internal culture.
For those who want the 25-cent ludicrously short summary of the answer, and on the web so they don't even have to pay 25 cents, can find it near the bottom of a speech I gave to the National Defense Industry Association conference last year, posted
here.
It's actually mostly about the Titanic -- I added in the material on the Challenger when I read Prof. Franklin's book and realized the deep similarities in the engineering and management cultures. It starts around slide 44.
The above URL has one link for the speech text, then links to all the slides. If you print the text (or use two browser windows) and then follow the slides on-screen, you can duplicate the whole presentation.
As others have said, certainly no minor customer of MS,Sun, or Oracle is actually going to get them to examine source code, write a patch, and send it to you. That's strictly for places with 10,000 seats and up.
My employer is about 4,000 seats, 30+ NT servers and 80-ish Unix servers, and I've never heard of us being personally responsible for the generation of an actual OS code patch via complaint. (Of any OS; we've been through a good four Unixes and all the MS OS products.)
We're in the same "if many people complain, a patch will come in a matter of months" bin as Mom & Pop companies.
The real need for an OS patch is rare; the vast majority of support requirements are for parameters, tweaks, workarounds, etc...how you *ask* the OS to do something, not changes to what it does.
Direct vendor support is needed for that with closed products because only they can understand how it really responds to user stimuli. But with open products, "all"(?) you need is a really, really savvy consultant who knows the code down deep.
There's nothing magic about the support staff of vendors, they aren't god. They're working stiffs who mostly inherit code and can generally figure out problems and produce patches after they've been working with it a few years.
With open products, *anybody* can do this.
So the real question here, is "what's the market availability in really, really savvy Linux consultants"? Because anyone who is, can do anything for you that a vendor support team can do.
And any company serving 10,000 seats can definitely afford $100K/year plus to have such a consultant on retainer.
I'll take your word for it; since this was communicated by brief flashes of ill-lit vision in one character's brain, I don't feel too guilty about missing it.
Honest,I wasn't doing anything else at the time but watching the movie; I think there's some responsiblity on the editor's part to make sure I catch the meaning of a scene without watching it 3 times. Yes, *you* caught it, but I think you're in the minority or more people would have jumped on my mistake.
Nobody in this scientific crowd has mentioned the thing that bothered me most about the movie.
We never get real proof the guy's "unbreakable".
Although the "ESP" experience is totally internal, I suppose we can't put it down to amazing luck or ability to read people's body language or faces: he really does have some "super" ability to detect evil-doers. (Though they showed him wrong on the purported drug dealer just to raise a question.)
But much of the movie is about his slow acceptance of his special nature, and we never get a real smoking-gun proof on-screen.
Didn't see what happened in the train or car crashes;
He never just pokes himself with a penknife to see what happens (my first thought...);
He talks the kid out of shooting him;
Elijah "explains away" the drowning incident with comic-book 'logic' about everybody having a weak spot - a dramatic but not physical requirement;
He doesn't take enough of a beating in the big rescue for his victory to be surprising.
Probably a lot of people can bench-press more than they think if they really try.
That last point is crucial for me. Suppose the real message here is that anybody who was just three std. deviations to the right on the bell curve for strength, immune system, and constitution (and reaction time, etc.) could be a hero if somebody just convinced him to believe in himself.
PS: I'm calling this one a movie (or two) ahead. The drowning incident is going to prove to be the start of it. He "died". And is special now because on some level, he's already dead.
Richard Stallman remonstrated with O'Reilly for producing books for profit, since the availability of non-free books greatly reduces the likelihood of free documentation being developed.
O'Reilly replied that it's just different:
Free Software gets written despite the lack of profit because people need it for themselves.
Documentation and training materials are inherently written for others.
I'm surprised and pleased to see the vast majority of comments I've read siding with the IP owners. The public rep of the/. crowd is that they'd froth at the mouth about RIAA perfidy, not offering cheap upgrades & director's cuts. Instead, the copyright holders *legal* right to sell what they want is respected.
It's funny that the White Album is used as the example by many participants. It was, of course, the classic line in "Men In Black" where Tommy Lee Jones laments that the new, alien sound tech the MIB were going to sell would mean he had to buy the White Album... again.
And that's the line that a very morally upright friend tossed at me when asking sternly if all the MP3s in my new Yepp player were legit. I admitted a few were copies from friends, but pointed out that in many cases, I still had dusty cassettes or vinyl for them, if not the CD. He shook his head and said, "No Good. You gotta buy the White Album again, like the guy in MIB."
Well, he's wrong. I don't use Napster, but I do accept MP3s directly from friends. My legal justification is the 1992 Home Recording Act: all are friend-to-friend, non-commercial copies, exactly within its definition.
And my moral justification is two-fold. One, I still buy CDs, attend concerts, and support artists - more so than ever because of the "free" music I now get. Second, because I've been forced to buy nearly all my pre-1985 favourites twice. Or more.
Sure, they had the *legal* right to do it, but the karmic cost is now I don't feel *guilty* about getting - or giving - MP3s.
I figure it'll be about 2008 I get guilty about lack of moral right to do this, given the extra grand I spent on duplicate purchases.
"...because we are not a corporation in business to make money, we are a research and teaching institution that exists to advance human knowledge . Limiting the spread of software, like limiting our publicaton of research, hinders that goal."
If they want to do hire people to do private research or private coding, they should quit calling themselves a University.
The comment about DARE being most effective at pressuring local schools and governments and strong-arming critics has a lot of supporters in the academic community.
A New Republic article (March 3, 1997) by Stephen Glass reported on some of the studies:
A 1987 study in Kokomo, Indiana by sociology professors Earl Wysong and Richard Aniskiewicz that concluded "DARE exposure does not produce any long-term prevention efforts on adolescent drug-use rates"
Dick Clayton of the U. of Kentucky published in the Journal of Preventive Medicine in 1996 the results of the largest-ever study on DARE. He concluded that any effects it had were short-lived, with no effect on long-term drug use.
Clayton also collected fifteen studies in his 1996 book Intervening with Drug-Involved Youth. The results varied somewhat, but all were consistent in agreeing that there is little-to-zero long-term effect from DARE.
I'm Canadian, so I'll just mention that one of those studies was by the Canadian government, concluding DARE had no effect on cutting abuse of any drug from Asprin to heroin.
The bulk of the article was not on this subject, but on the remarkably brazen efforts by DARE (a near billion-dollar industry when you add up the programs nationwide and in 40+ countries) to intimidate researchers, deny them funds, slander them, etc.
Alas, all articles by Stephen Glass, were thrown into disrepute a year or so later, when it was found that he had been inventing facts in various of his works. Any ammunition DARE could have asked for to discredit this story was instantly provided.
That does not mean that for the DARE article, Glass work was tainted. The studies referred to above do exist, and the researchers involved really have been slandered and intimidated.
It would be very gratifying to hear of DARE losing converts among school systems.
I've been hearing that description since the ISS was first proposed a decade or two ago.
It never fails to get a grin, since the column by Canadian journalist Eric Nicol after his visit to the Boeing plant. After hearing that the 747 was the length of a football field and the hanger doors were the size of football fields and the factory floor was the size of 100 football fields and so on, he commented:
"Americans seem to measure everything in football fields. (And nobody else has the same size football field, so its a pretty provincial unit.) Anyway, we then got in shuttle vans and travelled, lo, for many, many football fields across the tarmac the the parking lot..."
I'm working my way through the Wiley book and finding it very good. There's a high-level (i.e. no code) overview of the various kinds of attacks and exposures, and what firewalls can (or not) do about each.
Then theres a, umm, diplomatic discussion of the choice parameters between using Linux or OpenBSD. It struck me as plain enough, between the lines, that they think OpenBSD has it all over Linux save in the level of support of some hardware, and possibly ease-of-install.
A fair bit of the book is devoted to the install of each, and configuration of the firewalls. I don't know if the book gives you anything about the actual setup that you can't get from OpenBSD's own documentation or the fine howto's at the "obfuscation" site, but I really benefitted from the textbook learning of the background of how IP packets work, and how lies inside them are the basis of most kinds of attacks.
PS: Good sense of humour in it, too. Buffer Overflow attacks are in a paragraph headed "Buffer: The IP Slayer".
Most of the time, Perl is hard to beat, of course; there's such a wealth of tools for handling CGI work. The DBI module means a frequent CGI need of database reports or updates is easy, too.
But, of course, there are always those with the need for speed, and there are lots of tools for C to be a CGI solution, as well.
Spend the next 3 months nudging the satellites around a bit, so that:
On July 4th, they all kiss the atmosphere 3 minutes apart;
Over the most densely populated areas of the U.S.;
On their way to not-dense areas if they don't burn completely;
Between 11PM and midnight, local
The U.S. government should cheerfully pay, oh, $100 million, (under 45 cents/citizen) for the best fireworks display in history to celebrate Independence Day 2000.
Everybody's upset about it being SDMI-compliant". (Does that really mean it won't play "normal" MP3's I've ripped from my own CD's with AudioCatalyst? If so, how do they expect to sell any?)
What shoots it down for me is the same thing as the Rio: Win98 *only*. I only have WinNT and Linux and BSD at home, and NT at the office. The thing might as well say "TRS-80 ONLY" when it comes to getting my business.
Spot on. The advertising model has been done with audio, video, and text.
Rod Serling put the complaint about this model the best:
It is impossible to tell a story properly and keep the audience in the right mindset when you are interrupted every 12 minutes by cartoons of dancing toilet paper"
We need a mechanism to provide content for pay without the intolerable interruptions of advertisers.
I would suggest that the ad-free digital music channels that are thrown in with most satellite TV deals are an example - particularly of the value put on the feed: near zero. 7x24, times a dozen music channels, for an extra five bucks a month on the pay-TV deal. That's half a milli-cent per 5-minute tune.
I'm very sorry for people wedded to the profit margins in the current business model, but it's over.
A century of world exploration was funded by the profits on "spices of the Orient" when pepper traded ounce-for-ounce with gold. Pepper is now a thousandth that price.
That's as about as industrial-strength as it gets. Whatever tames that monster - giant web servers included - you certainly have every reason to turn to.
So, tell me, when your problems are that big and your hardware spending on network and disk and specialty software (ERP,EDMS..) is proportionate - do you use Ziff-Davis articles as a shopping tool, or do you just get demo versions and do your own benchmarks that meet your needs, hire consultants to advise you on current products, and so on?
We used to use magazines like PC Mag when we were picking Excel over 123 for 500 PCs, but now for our enterprise solutions I don't think they're even used to select a shortlist.
Fascinating stuff. I don't think we're really arguing here - my original point was that not many of those shopping in a ZD publication for a web server have those kind of heavy needs. (I'd have had no problem if the review were headed "A comparison of big industrial-strength web servers"). It just annoys me to NOT see that qualification because it may cause every little Mom & Pop biz go out an buy Microsoft "because it was the Editor's Choice".
Jumping topics now- to whether your problem should be running through generic web servers like IIS or Apache: Are there no server programs that specialize in HTTP-DAV and heavy-duty file transfer? If there were, you could hand off a URL to that server for that function, which is so different than "traditional" web-serving functions. I'm just leery of the idea of trying to make one program or one server do everything. Chalk it up to a career spent being anti-mainframe in a mainframe-oriented shop. Segregation of different functions onto different machines (or at least programs) is my "KISS" motto.
Similarly, as to the videoconferencing - man, I'd spend a few minutes reconfiguring the firewall to allow a videoconferencing server through, rather than trying to do everything on Port 80 and HTTP.
But, hey, assume I'm wrong and heavy applications like these become common for web servers - then a few years from now it won't be a few percent of Intranet servers that need this horsepower, it'll be over 20%, then 50%... but let's see what Apache 2.2 is doing on multiple "Itanium" machines then!
I'm most impressed by the "multi-hundred megabyte CAD drawings". My biggest CAD drawing is of our 200,000 water services, 20,000 water mains, etc and runs only 25MB. (Microstation design file).
Since this is an Intranet, have you considered just having the Web server provide only a "file:///" URL and letting a file server handle this massive load? They're much better tuned for it.
The point is very well taken, however - bandwidth is not the limitation in a LAN. Still, the problem doesn't come up in my workplace - and we're talking 4000 seats. Our biggest Intranet server also maxes at a few tens of hits per second.
Perhaps that's an indication of our Intranet usage being backward or something, but I don't think we're all that far behind.
A larger factor is your computing philosophy - is your Intranet a highly centralized "mainframe" style with one provider of information to many-many-many? With so many diverse departments in a civic government, ours is more spread out among many servers, even though the IT department runs them all out of one room. If you put hundreds of functions from hundreds of information providers onto one web server, then its security arrangements and the tuning of the server become very complex.
Lastly, if you have very heavy web usage because your corporation is practically run from a couple of major applications - say sales management or the accounting system - it may be better to consider that this is not best done with web apps but with a "traditional" client/server app installed on every machine.
To sum up, with the options to serve lots of (or big) files with a file server, to split multiple services into many servers on the KISS principle, or admitting that not everything is best done as Web apps, I again return to my point: that not that much of the total Web server market cares about getting over 1000 pageviews/sec - even on Intranets.
"Webbench" of 600 or 4000 - It Just Doesn't Matter
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· Score: 4
Their graphs show the worst servers flattening out at "Webbench" numbers of 600, where the best go up to 4000.
They don't show the formula that gives the number, but from similar web benchmarking reviews, I know that even the worst ones are serving up hundreds of page-views per second. The best are maxing out multiple 10Mbps Ethernet cards - i.e. you need a T3 line to actually provide the bandwidth you're serving.
If you can afford that, you aren't reading Ziff-Davis to make your product decisions or even find your shortlist.
These kinds of servers are only needed by the big ISPs and the eBays of the world - the whole review is only of interest to a few thousand webmasters.
My employer is a city government serving some 860,000 people with a mostly static, partly active web site about all their city services and taxes and utility bills - and it rarely exceeds a few tens of pageviews per second.
Forget all the sniping about tuning and benchmark methodology; the really stupid thing about these product comparisons is that they imply that more than a fraction of one percent of their audience should even care about which one wins. For the rest of us, a free product running on a free OS and hardware that costs less than the monthly cost of our Internet bandwidth can meet all our needs.
I've been an employee of the Calgary Waterworks for over 10 years, and while I do not speak for them, just for myself, etcetera, I can confirm:
your description of the standard controls as always having a manual mode is completely correct and AFAIK, industry-wide. Nobody in their right mind would build critical systems any other way - automation can screw up for lots of reasons, not just Y2K. And, besides, if a pipe springs a leak, who wants to run back to a control centre to turn off the pump? You want it off *NOW*.
The industry may still have had a lot of stragglers (mostly the very small plants, I bet) last June, a lot has happened since then. It's been a busy year. Besides the Y2K checks and upgrades themselves (and I think we found very, very few programs or embedded systems that needed replacement, and none were really critical), most of the preparation is just setting up a heavy shift schedule so that lots of people are there to run things manually, Just In Case.
Calgary had a "dry run" at the end of November - not because it was that late before we were ready, but because we wanted all the operators to have the procedures fresh in their minds on New Years Eve. We tested both the equipment with a date rollover, and the people with simulated shutdowns that required manual intervention. Everything -and everybody- passed with flying colours.
Electricity is a concern, sure, but not a big one. Besides the fact that the electrical industry is similarly hard at it, most water/sewer systems already have backup generators ready for "ordinary" risk of power outage already. Slashdot readers may be interested to know that we, for one, are now reconsidering our plans to leave the grid at 6PM New Years Eve. Not just because the latest news from our electrical suppliers is so reassuring, but because their growing concern is that all their big customers, like us, will leave the grid for several hours, then come back on - creating a real downswing-then-upswing in demand that will be very hard for them to handle. Too much Y2K-preparation (by others) could be a larger risk for them than Y2K itself! So we may just stay on the grid - (but with the generators ready to go, of course)
And if worst came to worst, don't forget there's some slack time to work on things before the water actually runs out. Water plants and pumps mostly just keep reservoirs filled - in January, with no irrigation going on, these have a day or two of supply in the reservoirs (in most systems).
In short, I not only echo Wayne's confidence in the supply, I'll go so far as to say that this is about the least of our worries.
The word "corporatism" seems to be getting misused in this forum, confused with the idea of "large business corporations dominating the economy". It's very related to that, but "corporatism" is a little broader.
I ran into it in the writings of John Ralston Saul, whom Katz mentions (and misspells). I'll excerpt from Saul's wry "Doubter's Companion" dictionary:
Corporatism is the persistent rival school of representative government. In place of the democratic idea of individual citizens who vote, confer legitimacy and participate to the best of their ability, individuals in the corporatist state are reduced to the role of secondary participants. The belong to their professional or expert groups -- their corporations -- and the state is run by ongoing negotiations between those various interests. ... The early practical corporatist organizations -- the mediaeval craft guilds -- were imitated in the organization and specialization of the Catholic religious orders. These two experiences produced the original corporatist states, the Republic of Venice first among them. ... [German philosopher, influential in Berlin 1818-1831] Hegel...considered "a corporative state as more rational than democracy...citizens should participate in the affairs of the State as members of subordinate wholes, corporations or Estates, rather than as individuals...Representatives should represent corporations or Estates rather than the individual citizens precisely as such."
Saul goes on for two pages, but that's the core of the definition itself.
You can have corporatism without business corporations. In this nomenclature, unions, Greenpeace, the AMA, the Dept. of Defense, even single rich individuals are "corporatist structures" - any entity that gets a seat at the bargaining table, not because individuals voted for it, but because it has money and/or power.
Blush to admit it, but I get my Deeper Wisdom on gun lawsuits from a "Law & Order" episode.
In it, the gun, for no other technical reason, had been designed to be child's play to alter from legal status to full-auto. The company knew this going in, and promoted the design to make some sales. It was taken pretty much as a given that the altered gun had no legal applications, i.e. useless for hunting and massive overkill for home defense.
The poster who pointed out that many malign software tools can have administrative applications breaks that argument.
But if there's a case out there where there are ZERO "civilian applications" (tough to prove, I bet...) and the writer knew they were empowering the malign or foolish to cause damage, then I think there's some culpability.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe he also spent a year as the Guest Curator of the History of Computing wing of the Smithsonian (and wrote the last program ever plugged into ENIAC, which now rests there).
It's still running at the U. of Calgary as CompSci 509.
Prof. Williams has a History of Computing Web Site. ...and just clip the last directory level off that to get his own web page.
Best of Luck.
AIGGH! There's a classic for you. Got to the point of typing the name and went "Franklin? No, not Franklin. What the heck is it..." and I was so stuck on "Franklin", I finally went to get the book. And, with the book propped up on the keyboard, no less, I typed the wrong name anyway. Twice.
Shoulda' stayed in bed.
For those who want the 25-cent ludicrously short summary of the answer, and on the web so they don't even have to pay 25 cents, can find it near the bottom of a speech I gave to the National Defense Industry Association conference last year, posted here .
It's actually mostly about the Titanic -- I added in the material on the Challenger when I read Prof. Franklin's book and realized the deep similarities in the engineering and management cultures. It starts around slide 44.
The above URL has one link for the speech text, then links to all the slides. If you print the text (or use two browser windows) and then follow the slides on-screen, you can duplicate the whole presentation.
My employer is about 4,000 seats, 30+ NT servers and 80-ish Unix servers, and I've never heard of us being personally responsible for the generation of an actual OS code patch via complaint. (Of any OS; we've been through a good four Unixes and all the MS OS products.)
We're in the same "if many people complain, a patch will come in a matter of months" bin as Mom & Pop companies.
The real need for an OS patch is rare; the vast majority of support requirements are for parameters, tweaks, workarounds, etc...how you *ask* the OS to do something, not changes to what it does.
Direct vendor support is needed for that with closed products because only they can understand how it really responds to user stimuli. But with open products, "all"(?) you need is a really, really savvy consultant who knows the code down deep.
There's nothing magic about the support staff of vendors, they aren't god. They're working stiffs who mostly inherit code and can generally figure out problems and produce patches after they've been working with it a few years.
With open products, *anybody* can do this.
So the real question here, is "what's the market availability in really, really savvy Linux consultants"? Because anyone who is, can do anything for you that a vendor support team can do.
And any company serving 10,000 seats can definitely afford $100K/year plus to have such a consultant on retainer.
I'll take your word for it; since this was communicated by brief flashes of ill-lit vision in one character's brain, I don't feel too guilty about missing it.
Honest,I wasn't doing anything else at the time but watching the movie; I think there's some responsiblity on the editor's part to make sure I catch the meaning of a scene without watching it 3 times. Yes, *you* caught it, but I think you're in the minority or more people would have jumped on my mistake.
Thanks.
We never get real proof the guy's "unbreakable".
Although the "ESP" experience is totally internal, I suppose we can't put it down to amazing luck or ability to read people's body language or faces: he really does have some "super" ability to detect evil-doers. (Though they showed him wrong on the purported drug dealer just to raise a question.)
But much of the movie is about his slow acceptance of his special nature, and we never get a real smoking-gun proof on-screen.
- Didn't see what happened in the train or car crashes;
- He never just pokes himself with a penknife to see what happens (my first thought...);
- He talks the kid out of shooting him;
- Elijah "explains away" the drowning incident with comic-book 'logic' about everybody having a weak spot - a dramatic but not physical requirement;
- He doesn't take enough of a beating in the big rescue for his victory to be surprising.
- Probably a lot of people can bench-press more than they think if they really try.
That last point is crucial for me. Suppose the real message here is that anybody who was just three std. deviations to the right on the bell curve for strength, immune system, and constitution (and reaction time, etc.) could be a hero if somebody just convinced him to believe in himself.PS: I'm calling this one a movie (or two) ahead. The drowning incident is going to prove to be the start of it. He "died". And is special now because on some level, he's already dead.
O'Reilly replied that it's just different:
Free Software gets written despite the lack of profit because people need it for themselves.
Documentation and training materials are inherently written for others.
It's funny that the White Album is used as the example by many participants. It was, of course, the classic line in "Men In Black" where Tommy Lee Jones laments that the new, alien sound tech the MIB were going to sell would mean he had to buy the White Album ... again.
And that's the line that a very morally upright friend tossed at me when asking sternly if all the MP3s in my new Yepp player were legit. I admitted a few were copies from friends, but pointed out that in many cases, I still had dusty cassettes or vinyl for them, if not the CD. He shook his head and said, "No Good. You gotta buy the White Album again, like the guy in MIB."
Well, he's wrong. I don't use Napster, but I do accept MP3s directly from friends. My legal justification is the 1992 Home Recording Act: all are friend-to-friend, non-commercial copies, exactly within its definition.
And my moral justification is two-fold. One, I still buy CDs, attend concerts, and support artists - more so than ever because of the "free" music I now get. Second, because I've been forced to buy nearly all my pre-1985 favourites twice. Or more.
Sure, they had the *legal* right to do it, but the karmic cost is now I don't feel *guilty* about getting - or giving - MP3s.
I figure it'll be about 2008 I get guilty about lack of moral right to do this, given the extra grand I spent on duplicate purchases.
"...because we are not a corporation in business to make money, we are a research and teaching institution that exists to advance human knowledge . Limiting the spread of software, like limiting our publicaton of research, hinders that goal."
If they want to do hire people to do private research or private coding, they should quit calling themselves a University.
A New Republic article (March 3, 1997) by Stephen Glass reported on some of the studies:
The bulk of the article was not on this subject, but on the remarkably brazen efforts by DARE (a near billion-dollar industry when you add up the programs nationwide and in 40+ countries) to intimidate researchers, deny them funds, slander them, etc.
Alas, all articles by Stephen Glass, were thrown into disrepute a year or so later, when it was found that he had been inventing facts in various of his works. Any ammunition DARE could have asked for to discredit this story was instantly provided.
That does not mean that for the DARE article, Glass work was tainted. The studies referred to above do exist, and the researchers involved really have been slandered and intimidated.
It would be very gratifying to hear of DARE losing converts among school systems.
I've been hearing that description since the ISS was first proposed a decade or two ago.
It never fails to get a grin, since the column by Canadian journalist Eric Nicol after his visit to the Boeing plant. After hearing that the 747 was the length of a football field and the hanger doors were the size of football fields and the factory floor was the size of 100 football fields and so on, he commented:
"Americans seem to measure everything in football fields. (And nobody else has the same size football field, so its a pretty provincial unit.) Anyway, we then got in shuttle vans and travelled, lo, for many, many football fields across the tarmac the the parking lot..."
I'm working my way through the Wiley book and finding it very good. There's a high-level (i.e. no code) overview of the various kinds of attacks and exposures, and what firewalls can (or not) do about each.
Then theres a, umm, diplomatic discussion of the choice parameters between using Linux or OpenBSD. It struck me as plain enough, between the lines, that they think OpenBSD has it all over Linux save in the level of support of some hardware, and possibly ease-of-install.
A fair bit of the book is devoted to the install of each, and configuration of the firewalls. I don't know if the book gives you anything about the actual setup that you can't get from OpenBSD's own documentation or the fine howto's at the "obfuscation" site, but I really benefitted from the textbook learning of the background of how IP packets work, and how lies inside them are the basis of most kinds of attacks.
PS: Good sense of humour in it, too. Buffer Overflow attacks are in a paragraph headed "Buffer: The IP Slayer".
But, of course, there are always those with the need for speed, and there are lots of tools for C to be a CGI solution, as well.
And if you could write a SCRIPT, for the kiddies to use to do this, that would of course be:
Auto Grand Theft Auto.
The U.S. government should cheerfully pay, oh, $100 million, (under 45 cents/citizen) for the best fireworks display in history to celebrate Independence Day 2000.
It contains an interview with Herb Peyerl, sometime NetBSD maven and the principal software designer, and some more photos.
But just a few off-the-cuff comments in response to previous posts:
- Herb mentioned the price to me a few weeks ago, and I already forgot - but it's in the very low hundreds;
- Custom ASICs weren't in the budget, that's for sure; cut them some slack, guys, they have to build a market first;
- The price will drop even before they get the huge volume required for custom ASIC chips; even a fair-sized production run will make a big difference.
- And as the web page itself points out, they really couldn't believe nobody else did this - they were finally driven to invent it themselves from need!
All this, and much more, in the interview.Everybody's upset about it being SDMI-compliant". (Does that really mean it won't play "normal" MP3's I've ripped from my own CD's with AudioCatalyst? If so, how do they expect to sell any?)
What shoots it down for me is the same thing as the Rio: Win98 *only*. I only have WinNT and Linux and BSD at home, and NT at the office. The thing might as well say "TRS-80 ONLY" when it comes to getting my business.
Rod Serling put the complaint about this model the best:
We need a mechanism to provide content for pay without the intolerable interruptions of advertisers.
I would suggest that the ad-free digital music channels that are thrown in with most satellite TV deals are an example - particularly of the value put on the feed: near zero. 7x24, times a dozen music channels, for an extra five bucks a month on the pay-TV deal. That's half a milli-cent per 5-minute tune.
I'm very sorry for people wedded to the profit margins in the current business model, but it's over.
A century of world exploration was funded by the profits on "spices of the Orient" when pepper traded ounce-for-ounce with gold. Pepper is now a thousandth that price.
They'll just have to get over it.
That's as about as industrial-strength as it gets. Whatever tames that monster - giant web servers included - you certainly have every reason to turn to.
So, tell me, when your problems are that big and your hardware spending on network and disk and specialty software (ERP,EDMS..) is proportionate - do you use Ziff-Davis articles as a shopping tool, or do you just get demo versions and do your own benchmarks that meet your needs, hire consultants to advise you on current products, and so on?
We used to use magazines like PC Mag when we were picking Excel over 123 for 500 PCs, but now for our enterprise solutions I don't think they're even used to select a shortlist.
Jumping topics now - to whether your problem should be running through generic web servers like IIS or Apache: Are there no server programs that specialize in HTTP-DAV and heavy-duty file transfer? If there were, you could hand off a URL to that server for that function, which is so different than "traditional" web-serving functions. I'm just leery of the idea of trying to make one program or one server do everything. Chalk it up to a career spent being anti-mainframe in a mainframe-oriented shop. Segregation of different functions onto different machines (or at least programs) is my "KISS" motto.
Similarly, as to the videoconferencing - man, I'd spend a few minutes reconfiguring the firewall to allow a videoconferencing server through, rather than trying to do everything on Port 80 and HTTP.
But, hey, assume I'm wrong and heavy applications like these become common for web servers - then a few years from now it won't be a few percent of Intranet servers that need this horsepower, it'll be over 20%, then 50% ... but let's see what Apache 2.2 is doing on multiple "Itanium" machines then!
Since this is an Intranet, have you considered just having the Web server provide only a "file:///" URL and letting a file server handle this massive load? They're much better tuned for it.
The point is very well taken, however - bandwidth is not the limitation in a LAN. Still, the problem doesn't come up in my workplace - and we're talking 4000 seats. Our biggest Intranet server also maxes at a few tens of hits per second.
Perhaps that's an indication of our Intranet usage being backward or something, but I don't think we're all that far behind.
A larger factor is your computing philosophy - is your Intranet a highly centralized "mainframe" style with one provider of information to many-many-many? With so many diverse departments in a civic government, ours is more spread out among many servers, even though the IT department runs them all out of one room. If you put hundreds of functions from hundreds of information providers onto one web server, then its security arrangements and the tuning of the server become very complex.
Lastly, if you have very heavy web usage because your corporation is practically run from a couple of major applications - say sales management or the accounting system - it may be better to consider that this is not best done with web apps but with a "traditional" client/server app installed on every machine.
To sum up, with the options to serve lots of (or big) files with a file server, to split multiple services into many servers on the KISS principle, or admitting that not everything is best done as Web apps, I again return to my point: that not that much of the total Web server market cares about getting over 1000 pageviews/sec - even on Intranets.
They don't show the formula that gives the number, but from similar web benchmarking reviews, I know that even the worst ones are serving up hundreds of page-views per second. The best are maxing out multiple 10Mbps Ethernet cards - i.e. you need a T3 line to actually provide the bandwidth you're serving.
If you can afford that, you aren't reading Ziff-Davis to make your product decisions or even find your shortlist.
These kinds of servers are only needed by the big ISPs and the eBays of the world - the whole review is only of interest to a few thousand webmasters.
My employer is a city government serving some 860,000 people with a mostly static, partly active web site about all their city services and taxes and utility bills - and it rarely exceeds a few tens of pageviews per second.
Forget all the sniping about tuning and benchmark methodology; the really stupid thing about these product comparisons is that they imply that more than a fraction of one percent of their audience should even care about which one wins. For the rest of us, a free product running on a free OS and hardware that costs less than the monthly cost of our Internet bandwidth can meet all our needs.
I've been an employee of the Calgary Waterworks for over 10 years, and while I do not speak for them , just for myself, etcetera, I can confirm:
- your description of the standard controls as always having a manual mode is completely correct and AFAIK, industry-wide. Nobody in their right mind would build critical systems any other way - automation can screw up for lots of reasons, not just Y2K. And, besides, if a pipe springs a leak, who wants to run back to a control centre to turn off the pump? You want it off *NOW*.
- The industry may still have had a lot of stragglers (mostly the very small plants, I bet) last June, a lot has happened since then. It's been a busy year. Besides the Y2K checks and upgrades themselves (and I think we found very, very few programs or embedded systems that needed replacement, and none were really critical), most of the preparation is just setting up a heavy shift schedule so that lots of people are there to run things manually, Just In Case.
- Calgary had a "dry run" at the end of November - not because it was that late before we were ready, but because we wanted all the operators to have the procedures fresh in their minds on New Years Eve. We tested both the equipment with a date rollover, and the people with simulated shutdowns that required manual intervention. Everything -and everybody- passed with flying colours.
- Electricity is a concern, sure, but not a big one. Besides the fact that the electrical industry is similarly hard at it, most water/sewer systems already have backup generators ready for "ordinary" risk of power outage already. Slashdot readers may be interested to know that we, for one, are now reconsidering our plans to leave the grid at 6PM New Years Eve. Not just because the latest news from our electrical suppliers is so reassuring, but because their growing concern is that all their big customers, like us, will leave the grid for several hours, then come back on - creating a real downswing-then-upswing in demand that will be very hard for them to handle. Too much Y2K-preparation (by others) could be a larger risk for them than Y2K itself! So we may just stay on the grid - (but with the generators ready to go, of course)
- And if worst came to worst, don't forget there's some slack time to work on things before the water actually runs out. Water plants and pumps mostly just keep reservoirs filled - in January, with no irrigation going on, these have a day or two of supply in the reservoirs (in most systems).
In short, I not only echo Wayne's confidence in the supply, I'll go so far as to say that this is about the least of our worries.Please, everybody, just calm down.
I ran into it in the writings of John Ralston Saul, whom Katz mentions (and misspells). I'll excerpt from Saul's wry "Doubter's Companion" dictionary:
Saul goes on for two pages, but that's the core of the definition itself.
You can have corporatism without business corporations. In this nomenclature, unions, Greenpeace, the AMA, the Dept. of Defense, even single rich individuals are "corporatist structures" - any entity that gets a seat at the bargaining table, not because individuals voted for it, but because it has money and/or power.
Blush to admit it, but I get my Deeper Wisdom on gun lawsuits from a "Law & Order" episode.
In it, the gun, for no other technical reason, had been designed to be child's play to alter from legal status to full-auto. The company knew this going in, and promoted the design to make some sales. It was taken pretty much as a given that the altered gun had no legal applications, i.e. useless for hunting and massive overkill for home defense.
The poster who pointed out that many malign software tools can have administrative applications breaks that argument.
But if there's a case out there where there are ZERO "civilian applications" (tough to prove, I bet...) and the writer knew they were empowering the malign or foolish to cause damage, then I think there's some culpability.