Pat Buchanan and Jesse Ventura are speaking their minds. No one in government is trying to stop them. Ventura is using his political office as a "bully pulpit" to further his views, but isn't using the direct powers of his office to do so. On the other hand, Giuliani is using his elected office to try to eliminate something with which he doesn't agree. That is censorship: government censorship. Not all censorship is bad (keeping porno away from the kiddies for example), but most folks agree that government censorship is a bad idea.
Lots of people here think Katz's article doesn't belong here. They have a First Amendment right to say so, but they do not have a First Amendment right to say so in this forum. This forum belongs to The Taco Corporation, or the firm of Hemos, Taco, and Roblimo, or whatever you want to call it. They have sole and exclusive jurisdiction over what appears here. That is freedom of speech and of the press, at least, as it exists in the U.S. Constitution. The fact that they let the rest of us speak in a rather uninhibited fashion is purely their choice, not ours. The only right we have is to start another forum ourselves if we don't like this one.
/. prospers because lots of people agree with the editorial choices of The Taco Consortium. They happen to like to print what Katz writes. People arguing that there's some external reason why they "shouldn't" are not just wrong, they're talking completely sideways to the true situation.
Don't forget the "poisonous dribbling persistent" in Argon Zark. Just wonderful in an emergency to have the thing hear you wrong.
Still, the sight of these things floating around on video clips on the 6pm news will cause a lot of people to try to figure out how to do a version in gravity. The coolness factor of this thing would be hard to overestimate.
So I was talking to a co-worker of mine. Her brother and his friends were out in the desert, about ten miles outside Las Vegas. They were hunting lizards for a college biology project. One of them picked up a rock, which is how you find lizards. He found something else. He found a gleaming metal bead. It was attached to something.
It turned out to be attached to the rest of a car radio antenna. They dug down far enough to discover a car. This being the Las Vegas neighborhood they expected the car to contain a body so they called the LVPD. LVPD showed up with machinery and dug up a pristine Corvette convertible, which started right up. They took it away.
Next day the boys went down to the police station to claim the car. Finders keepers, right?
Right. What car? There was no record of it anywhere.
I could replace my current computer out of pocket. However, when they take the computer, they seize all the oxide in sight: tapes, disks, everything. There goes your email. There go your backups. There go your web page sources. There goes everything!
The only way to survive this is to have an offsite backup. How many people who aren't expecting this sort of attention routinely make offsite backups for the machine in their bedrooms?
Those who believe that Xanadu's prime purpose is to incorporate all of human knowledge, and that its careful attention to royalties is an afterthought to attract those who would not otherwise use it, have not been listening to what Ted Nelson has been saying for the last thirty years.
I knew Ted back when he was writing Computer Lib/Dream Machines (I'm in it several times). He's a wonderful visionary. His visions are about literature, primarily. He also has visions about the literary uses of computers, because he's a good visionary. But he is, first and foremost, a writer, and royalties are of prime importance to him. Ted, and I kid you not, loves to scribble his ideas on 3x5 cards or 4x6 cards while he's explaining his latest ideas. Diagrams, arrows, labels, cute pictures, man, he's great at it. And absolutely every single last one of these cards gets 'C'-in-a-circle Copyright 19xx written on it, and it goes back into his pocket. His vision of Xanadu is of a system where absolutely everybody retains eternal rights to whatever they create, and gets paid royalties every time it's used. Period. Don't think otherwise. Is this a good thing? Yes. Is it a feature which will lead to its adoption by the masses? Hell no. The Web exploded because the Web is free. Don't fool yourself on that one.
I find it ironic that some of the most immediate barriers to Xanadu's widespread adoption come from the principle it most espouses: protection of intellectual property rights. It has been wrapped in trade secrecy protection until today, when it is (probably) too late to be widely adopted by anyone. Open Source release doesn't mean something will succeed, it only increases the chances. Look at Concurrent Virtual Workspaces, CVW, which Mitre of all people recently open-sourced. A kick-ass collaborative system with multicast support, but people haven't been beating down the doors.
The other intellectual property problem was with ParcPlace Smalltalk. I mean, banking and brokerage houses use this system a LOT because they don't give a flying damn about standards and because design-to-deployment times are shorter with PPS than with anything else, if the implementors are already expert in it. And for these customers, time is everything. However, all such systems are proprietary from the get-go and forever. ParcPlace tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out how to do intellectual property protection while allowing widespread deployment of products written in PPS. They failed big-time. Smalltalk was always designed as an open system, and when it was made a product by ParcPlace, it turned out to be next door to impossible to make some of it open and some of it closed. Hence, Xanadu got bit.
It's true this work has been going on for a while. SCPS is a close relative of TCP/IP - in fact, out-of-the-box TCP/IP is a valid subset of SCPS. SCPS is not intended for terrestrial applications, and its proponents freely admit that its interface to the terrestrial IP network will be through application-level gateways.
SCPS supports such things as drastically compressed packets, big windows, SACK, several address families (including a really tiny one for a constellation of spacecraft), and a bunch of other not-new ideas. Its file transfer protocol supports hole-filling and such-like, and it has an integrated security protocol with its own complete spec. It's really a pretty good piece of work, and has performed well when tested over satellite links.
But it's not a be-all and end-all (though the earlier poster's information that it has problems came as a surprise to me). Deep-space communications do come with their own set of problems. Doppler shift, strange modulation schemes and the like are all part of the big bad black void.
I'm kind of amused by the considerations of deep-space host naming, though Cerf is correct that the problems of deep-space packet routing are best solved before it becomes a problem rather than after. He's an optimist and a space lover with such a big space bump that he guest-starred on _Earth: Final Conflict_. But the poster who tied this into the ICANN problems and then said he wanted to get rich of the.earth domain made me laugh until I remember how those greedy opportunists made Jon Postel's last days a living hell. A pox on all of 'em.
Anyone who is in England, or finds themselves there at some point, might like to take a train up to Bletchley Park and view the Museum of Cryptography there. They have Enigmas, Lorentz machines, materials used by the Poles to figure out the beginnings of an Enigma crack, and one of the most wonderful contraptions I've ever had the privilege of viewing: a working Colossus.
Tony Sale has taken photographs of the old Colossus, together with surviving notes, and built a new one. Colossus was a machine for figuring combinatorics for cracking cyphers generated by the Lorentz cypher machine, a more complex follow-on to the Enigma. Colossus fills a room, and is Britain's entry in the 'first digital computer' race. It's a late entrant because its details were classified until recently...long past any reasonable period for it, given that UNIX v6 used a modified Enigma algorithm for its passwords. (I hear that details of the Japanese Purple machine, however, are still classified in the U.S.)
The Turing paper discussed in this article talks about machines used to help in the decryption process of the Lorentz machine, such as the Bombe. Colossus is the height of such technology.
Colossus is a vacuum tube machine. Its reconstruction was possible only because the original was built with parts scrounged from British Telecom, and BT being what it is, those parts are still available for scrounging today. The machine is built on two six-foot rack assemblies, each about fifteen feet long, and about five or six feet apart. It runs on 400 volts. Input is a hand-built high-speed paper tape assembly. The machine clock comes from the smaller center sprocket holes on the tape. The input tape is an endless loop consisting of the cypher to be analyzed. Output is to a mechanical typewriter fitted with solenoids on the number, space and return mechanisms.
I had the peak experience of standing in the middle of Colossus while Tony turned it on around me. Tubes glowing, decade counters climbing, tape spinning like mad (5000 CPS and the mechanism is six feet high, full of eight-inch-wide tension wheels)...THIS is computing!
Don't miss seeing this thing in action. It'll make your week.
I got an object lesson in what's really going on here when I bought an Apple Newton 2100. Now, this final Newton sure won't replace a laptop for everyone, but it did for me: email, Web surfing, word processing, spreadsheets, the works, all in something the size of a smallish trade paperback, and powered from a standard-sized LiIon battery pack that can run the Newton for between 10 and 24 hours.
The Newton pulled this off by re-examining the architecture of a portable platform. If you make low power consumption a primary driver, instead of packing in the exact same family of peripherals that you use in a desktop platform which has (relatively) infinite power available, you get a machine which doesn't look a whole lot like today's laptops - but which also doesn't require 2.2 pounds of battery to run for 15 hours, either. The Newton 2100 has a 163 MHz processor, too, not one of those 12MHz wimpy things the other handhelds have. But this 163 MHz ARM RISC processor was designed from the ground up to use as little power as possible. The result is dramatic. It's fast when it needs to be, and the rest of the time it eats almost no power at all. Compare this to what an x86 or Pentium uses - even a "low-power" model.
Actually, I misspoke. Barry's idea was not to use liquidated damages, but to put in a steeply ascending schedule of charges for email: 1-100 recipients, free, 100-1,000 recipients, $10/message, 1,000-up, $1,000/message. Something like that. If they spam, it's a straightforward fee-collection strategy.
Actually this is something Barry Shein, owner of Software Tool & Die and The World, advocated years ago. His position is that it's founded in contract law, which is so old that it's pretty much ironclad.
I don't know that he's taken his own advice, though.
Dismissing an author for his politics
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 2
I read and enjoyed Ender's Game, but didn't love it so much that I had to run out and read Speaker for the Dead.
Then the fan press erupted into a hoo-hah. Card, a Mormon, had written a very homophobic article for the Church press. Others picked up on it and villified him. I have no idea what net effect, if any, this had on his sales.
There are some authors I avoid because I find their beliefs repugnant, and these beliefs infuse their work, making it unreadable to me. A pot of message, stirred too hard, makes a work unpalatable no matter what the message is (c.f. C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle, a dismal end to an otherwise delightful series), but even a light touch of fundamentalist beliefs will ruin a book for me.
Card doesn't do this. I haven't found his work offensive in that way. However, after reading his anti-gay article, I found that I just wasn't interested in anything else the man had to say. I haven't read one of his books since and don't intend to.
What about others? Any of you out there find yourselves unwilling to read otherwise good literature because the author holds beliefs you find repugnant?
The community was smaller in those days. Also, there was no such thing as IEEE floating point. These two facts combined to put me on the phone with Dennis for about an hour one day, trying to get a PDP-11/45&70 C compiler to compile floating point code on a PDP-11/40 via floating point emulation. It did work, eventually.
Later, someone came out with a PDP-11/40 C compiler that used 11/40 floating point instructions.
It was a lot of fun trying to match up C compilers with machines that would "sort of" run them as long as you didn't declare any floating point variables. The compiler itself was "float safe" in that if you didn't declare floating point, it wouldn't use it. You had to use a "-f" flag to compile floating point, though, so that the right library stuff would get loaded to save & restore the floating registers.
C programmers had to know assembler in those days. Believe it.
Slashdot Mirror
Pat Buchanan and Jesse Ventura are speaking their minds. No one in government is trying to stop them. Ventura is using his political office as a "bully pulpit" to further his views, but isn't using the direct powers of his office to do so. On the other hand, Giuliani is using his elected office to try to eliminate something with which he doesn't agree. That is censorship: government censorship. Not all censorship is bad (keeping porno away from the kiddies for example), but most folks agree that government censorship is a bad idea.
Lots of people here think Katz's article doesn't belong here. They have a First Amendment right to say so, but they do not have a First Amendment right to say so in this forum. This forum belongs to The Taco Corporation, or the firm of Hemos, Taco, and Roblimo, or whatever you want to call it. They have sole and exclusive jurisdiction over what appears here. That is freedom of speech and of the press, at least, as it exists in the U.S. Constitution. The fact that they let the rest of us speak in a rather uninhibited fashion is purely their choice, not ours. The only right we have is to start another forum ourselves if we don't like this one.
/. prospers because lots of people agree with the editorial choices of The Taco Consortium. They happen to like to print what Katz writes. People arguing that there's some external reason why they "shouldn't" are not just wrong, they're talking completely sideways to the true situation.
Don't forget the "poisonous dribbling persistent" in Argon Zark. Just wonderful in an emergency to have the thing hear you wrong.
Still, the sight of these things floating around on video clips on the 6pm news will cause a lot of people to try to figure out how to do a version in gravity. The coolness factor of this thing would be hard to overestimate.
So I was talking to a co-worker of mine. Her brother and his friends were out in the desert, about ten miles outside Las Vegas. They were hunting lizards for a college biology project. One of them picked up a rock, which is how you find lizards. He found something else. He found a gleaming metal bead. It was attached to something.
It turned out to be attached to the rest of a car radio antenna. They dug down far enough to discover a car. This being the Las Vegas neighborhood they expected the car to contain a body so they called the LVPD. LVPD showed up with machinery and dug up a pristine Corvette convertible, which started right up. They took it away.
Next day the boys went down to the police station to claim the car. Finders keepers, right?
Right. What car? There was no record of it anywhere.
I could replace my current computer out of pocket. However, when they take the computer, they seize all the oxide in sight: tapes, disks, everything. There goes your email. There go your backups. There go your web page sources. There goes everything!
The only way to survive this is to have an offsite backup. How many people who aren't expecting this sort of attention routinely make offsite backups for the machine in their bedrooms?
Those who believe that Xanadu's prime purpose is to incorporate all of human knowledge, and that its careful attention to royalties is an afterthought to attract those who would not otherwise use it, have not been listening to what Ted Nelson has been saying for the last thirty years.
I knew Ted back when he was writing Computer Lib/Dream Machines (I'm in it several times). He's a wonderful visionary. His visions are about literature, primarily. He also has visions about the literary uses of computers, because he's a good visionary. But he is, first and foremost, a writer, and royalties are of prime importance to him. Ted, and I kid you not, loves to scribble his ideas on 3x5 cards or 4x6 cards while he's explaining his latest ideas. Diagrams, arrows, labels, cute pictures, man, he's great at it. And absolutely every single last one of these cards gets 'C'-in-a-circle Copyright 19xx written on it, and it goes back into his pocket. His vision of Xanadu is of a system where absolutely everybody retains eternal rights to whatever they create, and gets paid royalties every time it's used. Period. Don't think otherwise. Is this a good thing? Yes. Is it a feature which will lead to its adoption by the masses? Hell no. The Web exploded because the Web is free. Don't fool yourself on that one.
I find it ironic that some of the most immediate barriers to Xanadu's widespread adoption come from the principle it most espouses: protection of intellectual property rights. It has been wrapped in trade secrecy protection until today, when it is (probably) too late to be widely adopted by anyone. Open Source release doesn't mean something will succeed, it only increases the chances. Look at Concurrent Virtual Workspaces, CVW, which Mitre of all people recently open-sourced. A kick-ass collaborative system with multicast support, but people haven't been beating down the doors.
The other intellectual property problem was with ParcPlace Smalltalk. I mean, banking and brokerage houses use this system a LOT because they don't give a flying damn about standards and because design-to-deployment times are shorter with PPS than with anything else, if the implementors are already expert in it. And for these customers, time is everything. However, all such systems are proprietary from the get-go and forever. ParcPlace tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out how to do intellectual property protection while allowing widespread deployment of products written in PPS. They failed big-time. Smalltalk was always designed as an open system, and when it was made a product by ParcPlace, it turned out to be next door to impossible to make some of it open and some of it closed. Hence, Xanadu got bit.
It's true this work has been going on for a while. SCPS is a close relative of TCP/IP - in fact, out-of-the-box TCP/IP is a valid subset of SCPS. SCPS is not intended for terrestrial applications, and its proponents freely admit that its interface to the terrestrial IP network will be through application-level gateways.
.earth domain made me laugh until I remember how those greedy opportunists made Jon Postel's last days a living hell. A pox on all of 'em.
SCPS supports such things as drastically compressed packets, big windows, SACK, several address families (including a really tiny one for a constellation of spacecraft), and a bunch of other not-new ideas. Its file transfer protocol supports hole-filling and such-like, and it has an integrated security protocol with its own complete spec. It's really a pretty good piece of work, and has performed well when tested over satellite links.
But it's not a be-all and end-all (though the earlier poster's information that it has problems came as a surprise to me). Deep-space communications do come with their own set of problems. Doppler shift, strange modulation schemes and the like are all part of the big bad black void.
I'm kind of amused by the considerations of deep-space host naming, though Cerf is correct that the problems of deep-space packet routing are best solved before it becomes a problem rather than after. He's an optimist and a space lover with such a big space bump that he guest-starred on _Earth: Final Conflict_. But the poster who tied this into the ICANN problems and then said he wanted to get rich of the
Doo Wah Doo Wah Doo Wah Diddy
Readin' that thing made me feel so giddy
He wants to be rid of route aggregation
If you don't agree you've no imagination!
Just follow the math, it's plain as plain can be
Hasn't been this good since I read Lawsonomy!
He's worked it all out, his conclusions are for real
And if you agree, then we can make a deal
On a bridge I know up in New York City
Doo Wah Doo Wah Doo Wah Diddy!
God has given you the world's greatest computer
service support troll.
Tech: "How much memory does your machine have?"
You: "Six Gigabytes."
Tech: "No, that's your disk drive, how much memory? Go to the File Manager..."
And so on.
Tech: "That sounds funny. Do you know if you have more than one processor?"
You: "Yes, 192 of them."
Tech: "..."
Anyone who is in England, or finds themselves there at some point, might like to take a train up to Bletchley Park and view the Museum of Cryptography there. They have Enigmas, Lorentz machines, materials used by the Poles to figure out the beginnings of an Enigma crack, and one of the most wonderful contraptions I've ever had the privilege of viewing: a working Colossus.
Tony Sale has taken photographs of the old Colossus, together with surviving notes, and built a new one. Colossus was a machine for figuring combinatorics for cracking cyphers generated by the Lorentz cypher machine, a more complex follow-on to the Enigma. Colossus fills a room, and is Britain's entry in the 'first digital computer' race. It's a late entrant because its details were classified until recently...long past any reasonable period for it, given that UNIX v6 used a modified Enigma algorithm for its passwords. (I hear that details of the Japanese Purple machine, however, are still classified in the U.S.)
The Turing paper discussed in this article talks about machines used to help in the decryption process of the Lorentz machine, such as the Bombe. Colossus is the height of such technology.
Colossus is a vacuum tube machine. Its reconstruction was possible only because the original was built with parts scrounged from British Telecom, and BT being what it is, those parts are still available for scrounging today. The machine is built on two six-foot rack assemblies, each about fifteen feet long, and about five or six feet apart. It runs on 400 volts. Input is a hand-built high-speed paper tape assembly. The machine clock comes from the smaller center sprocket holes on the tape. The input tape is an endless loop consisting of the cypher to be analyzed. Output is to a mechanical typewriter fitted with solenoids on the number, space and return mechanisms.
I had the peak experience of standing in the middle of Colossus while Tony turned it on around me. Tubes glowing, decade counters climbing, tape spinning like mad (5000 CPS and the mechanism is six feet high, full of eight-inch-wide tension wheels)...THIS is computing!
Don't miss seeing this thing in action. It'll make your week.
I got an object lesson in what's really going on here when I bought an Apple Newton 2100. Now, this final Newton sure won't replace a laptop for everyone, but it did for me: email, Web surfing, word processing, spreadsheets, the works, all in something the size of a smallish trade paperback, and powered from a standard-sized LiIon battery pack that can run the Newton for between 10 and 24 hours.
The Newton pulled this off by re-examining the architecture of a portable platform. If you make low power consumption a primary driver, instead of packing in the exact same family of peripherals that you use in a desktop platform which has (relatively) infinite power available, you get a machine which doesn't look a whole lot like today's laptops - but which also doesn't require 2.2 pounds of battery to run for 15 hours, either. The Newton 2100 has a 163 MHz processor, too, not one of those 12MHz wimpy things the other handhelds have. But this 163 MHz ARM RISC processor was designed from the ground up to use as little power as possible. The result is dramatic. It's fast when it needs to be, and the rest of the time it eats almost no power at all. Compare this to what an x86 or Pentium uses - even a "low-power" model.
Actually, I misspoke. Barry's idea was not to use liquidated damages, but to put in a steeply ascending schedule of charges for email: 1-100 recipients, free, 100-1,000 recipients, $10/message, 1,000-up, $1,000/message. Something like that. If they spam, it's a straightforward fee-collection strategy.
Actually this is something Barry Shein, owner of Software Tool & Die and The World, advocated years ago. His position is that it's founded in contract law, which is so old that it's pretty much ironclad.
I don't know that he's taken his own advice, though.
I read and enjoyed Ender's Game, but didn't love it so much that I had to run out and read Speaker for the Dead.
Then the fan press erupted into a hoo-hah. Card, a Mormon, had written a very homophobic article for the Church press. Others picked up on it and villified him. I have no idea what net effect, if any, this had on his sales.
There are some authors I avoid because I find their beliefs repugnant, and these beliefs infuse their work, making it unreadable to me. A pot of message, stirred too hard, makes a work unpalatable no matter what the message is (c.f. C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle, a dismal end to an otherwise delightful series), but even a light touch of fundamentalist beliefs will ruin a book for me.
Card doesn't do this. I haven't found his work offensive in that way. However, after reading his anti-gay article, I found that I just wasn't interested in anything else the man had to say. I haven't read one of his books since and don't intend to.
What about others? Any of you out there find yourselves unwilling to read otherwise good literature because the author holds beliefs you find repugnant?
The community was smaller in those days. Also, there was no such thing as IEEE floating point. These two facts combined to put me on the phone with Dennis for about an hour one day, trying to get a PDP-11/45&70 C compiler to compile floating point code on a PDP-11/40 via floating point emulation. It did work, eventually.
Later, someone came out with a PDP-11/40 C compiler that used 11/40 floating point instructions.
It was a lot of fun trying to match up C compilers with machines that would "sort of" run them as long as you didn't declare any floating point variables. The compiler itself was "float safe" in that if you didn't declare floating point, it wouldn't use it. You had to use a "-f" flag to compile floating point, though, so that the right library stuff would get loaded to save & restore the floating registers.
C programmers had to know assembler in those days. Believe it.