I leave town for a couple of days and I miss my moment of fame on Slashdot. Ah well. My blog post doesn't exactly argue it's "business reasons rather than technical ones", although my post does dwell on the business reasons too.
There are plenty of technical reasons to hate SOAP too. For my view on that, see my blog post about why SOAP sucks. Bottom line is SOAP is too complex, doesn't work well in practice, and strong typing is the wrong choice for loosely coupled distributed systems.
Debian's default NTP configuration is to get time from pool.ntp.org. This is a significant contribution to the Linux world, similar to how Microsoft and Apple provide NTP service to their customers. Yay for us!
There is modest protection against bad servers in the pool. The time from pool servers is monitored and if a server seems insane it's taken out of the rotation.
My pool server gets about 14 requests a second from about 100,000 different IP addresses a day. Sadly, a lot of those requests are junk; 100 IP addresses account for 1/3 of all the requests I get. Fortunately NTP is a very lightweight protocol, so you can mostly ignore the spammy clients.
I just made some screenshots of enabling the nude cheat in Sims 2. Here, see for yourself. The only thing there is some disturbingly asexual smooth models.
Part of the reason South Park got a contract and had such good buzz was because the short "Spirit of Christmas" was widely spread around via tape and Internet. I and most of my hipster Internet friends new about South Park before it ever aired.
If you're into mechanical watches, check out www.timezone.com. It's a website for watch geeks with an active message board.
The Steven Phillips watches built here look awfully impressive. Too bad about the style, particularly the enamelling. There's a reason perlage is the standard movement decoration.
I made the mistake of shipping some crystal via UPS from an Office Depot outlet. The box arrived with one corner of the double wall box caved in. I even had the glassware professionally packed by a moving company, but when the box's volume decreases by 30% it doesn't help much.
So I filed an insurance claim with UPS. Yes, I'd paid for insurance. UPS said they didn't need to pay - it was Office Depot's problem. I called Office Depot and, of course, they said it was UPS' problem. I went back and forth for four months before giving up.
Bottom line: don't ship UPS with Office Depot. And pay for all shipping charges with a credit card, so you can at least contest the shipping charge if it doesn't arrive.
Whose small claims court would have jurisdiction? The originator, or the receiver?
Whatever you may think of the Sun Community Process, JXTA isn't part of it. JXTA is released under an Apache-like license, and the community is organized more or less like Apache projects.
I've been participating in JXTA since the beginning and have been impressed that Sun has truly made JXTA open source. With all the good and bad that entails.
That's why I wrote the first chapter, pointing out the history of peer-to-peer. The ARPAnet was all about peer to peer networking, we just lost that vision for a few years.
I was fortunate to learn bits of this theory from Chaitin about five years ago, when he was visiting Santa Fe. As folks here have noted, the work has its roots in Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, but there's a huge amount more detail in it. In particular, his work is highly specific and constructive, boiling down some very abstract concepts into specific machinery that is graspable. Definitely worth time if you are interested. I hope that logic courses will use this material as a basis for instruction.
I was really impressed with how clear and up-front the privacy disclosure from Google was. On install it even says "read this - it's not the usual yada yada".
The fact is there's no easy way to do the pagerank stuff without sending your URLs to Google. (I can think of some funky crypto protocols to do it, but it'd be messy). Given that they have a reasonable use for the data, and they disclose their collection of that data, I have no problem at all with what they're doing.
I turned pagerank off anyway. My main concern is that private internal URLs also go to Google.
Apache is not optimized for speed, it's optimized for reliability and feature completeness.
If you want a really fast (and simple!) web server for Unix, try Jef Poskanzer's thttpd. thttpd is entirely select based, single thread, memory mapped IO. Really fast. mini_httpd is also great if you want a zero-configuration web server, but it's not as fast. Jef's a brilliant old school hacker.
A common configuration on big web sites is to use Apache to serve the complex stuff, and thttpd to serve static images.
I'm the CTO of Popular Power. Good discussion here, thanks! I really think this technology is neat; we can turn the Internet into a very powerful resource and then use that resource to solve important problems. Our current influenza work is contributing to research that could save millions of lives.
One poster here wondered how good this kind of distributed computer would be at biotech apps. Depends a lot on the algorithm, but for things that trivially parallelize (like random search algorithms, Monte Carlo simulations) it's a perfect match.
Popular Power has been up and running since April. We've had a Linux client out for a couple of months now; download it and try it out!
My company, Popular Power, has had commercial distributed computing software out since April. We just put out a Linux version in response to a Freshmeat Petition, check it out!
Our system is pretty neat; we're doing real work (researching flu vaccines), and our client is truly general purpose in that we can switch the kinds of work we're doing on the fly with no re-install. We're lining up customers now; we'll switch over to paying work as time goes on. We're also planning an open source release of the client software.
I truly think this kind of computing, along with other distributed systems like Gnutella, is the future of the Internet. For a good overview of this field, check out Howard Rheingold's article in the new August Wired, or this Wired news article.
Sun may not get it, but at least we get Java.
on
JavaOne report
·
· Score: 3
I agree, Sun has taken their sweet time to support Java on Linux. It's been a source of frustration for years, for Sun employees as well as the Linux community. That's why I asked at the presentation "why did it take so long?". The nervous laughter in the room was quite telling. The reply ("limited resources") is not the full story, of course, but it's probably all they can say publically. I believe the real reason is Sun can't decide if Linux is a competitor or an ally.
The good news is that Sun is now going to do Linux releases. The bad news is that Java is still more proprietary than open. Java is still the best technology for Internet programming, so I'm going to continue to use it. At the same time I'll cheer on Sun to make their technology more open, and cheer on IBM and others for giving Sun some pressure in control of the Java platform.
According to the barely rewritten press release article from Reuters, Nash said Microsoft still undercuts prices of rival systems from Novell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc by more than 50 percent in some cases, he said..
I think at this stage in the game, Microsoft can't get away with pretending Linux doesn't exist.
I'm not sure I understand - does clause 1 mean that the originator of the work can take other people's changes, incorporate them into the work, and distribute the new combined work under any license they want to? That's my understanding of the NPL - the originator of the code has special rights.
That would solve a big problem I have. I'm releasing some code I wrote under GPL. However, I already have other obligations to people to give them the code under another license. So if someone contributes a GPL change back to me, I don't know how I'm going to manage incorporating it. I don't want to have to maintain two source trees, one GPL, one that I can distribute with my other special license.
I don't understand why the second clause needs to be there - why would anyone choose to distribute something under GPL, if TGPL is available to them?
I think XML would be just fine for configuration. If nothing else, it would help us standardize on *one* comment style in tool configurations. Right now, I have to guess - is it #,//, %, or what?
The biggest problems are that XML adds more verbiage, a good DTD has to be designed, and a bunch of tools have to be hacked to understand the new format.
I'm not one to be terribly religious about this kind of corporate positioning. If you look at Sun's recent actions, it's clear that as a corporation they are not terribly friendly to Linux or open source.
First, look at the sad state of Java ports. Sun *still* does not support Java on Linux. They have helped out the Blackdown team some, thank you for that, but it's a half-hearted effort on Sun's side. My reading is that Sun is internally conflicted about whether Linux is an ally or threat and can't decide whether to work with Linux or not.
Second, look at the SCSL, a bizarre amalgation of open-source-like licensing and proprietary restrictions. My impression is that Sun was trying to ride some of the open source wave and satisfy their "partners" who were getting increasingly agitated by Sun's lock on Java, while still retaining traditional controls over the technology. I don't think they're motivated by any attempt at actually improving the world through source releases.
Sun's a big company. They're caught in a major change in their market, where expensive workstations have been supplanted by $1200 Linux boxes running on Intel hardware. It should be no surprise that they aren't a friend to Linux, they're trying to stay on top of the heap.
The place where Sun differs from Microsoft is that, in general, Sun technology is pretty good. Solaris is a good Unix. Java is a fantastic development platform. Sun does create quality in their technology, and that should be applauded.
I submitted this as a RedHat bug
on
Linux Lite?
·
· Score: 2
I submitted a suggestion like this as a RedHat bug (ID 134) awhile ago. The response was not exactly overwhelming.
The RedHat workstation/server difference is helpful, but not enough. We need an option to install the RPMs but not start the services. And I think *all* listening ports (except maybe telnet) should be off by default.
Slashdot is the first news forum I've ever been on where reader comments more or less work. It's one of the few places where I might actually *want* to read what everyone has to say about a story. The Slashdot team deserves a lot of credit for this, as does the Slashdot readership.
As Slashdot has grown and become more of a mainstream medium the quality of the comments has gone down. Not just the obvious flamebait, but lots of uninformed speculation and general cluelessness. This is to be expected, it is the natural lifespan of a medium. Slashdot has weathered this fairly well, and the moderation system is a big help.
Collaborative moderation is very difficult, I am impressed to see it working so well. These kinds of tweaks are necessary, and every one seems to improve things. I think Slashdot is doing a good job of walking the line between censorship and editing.
I think the SCSL is a very interesting license, not an unreasonable thing for Sun to do. Make no mistake, Sun isn't doing this out of altruism. They need Java products such as Jini to be used by everyone, so they have to make them somewhat open. At the same way, Sun needs to retain control of the platform in order to guarantee themselves ownership and eventual revenue. The SCSL is an interesting way for Sun to walk this line while also getting some of the benefits of a community developing the source code to something.
Unfortunately, the Jini Community Process as they are running it isn't quite open enough for me. In particular, the requirements for joining the "Jini community" add friction to the process. You can't just have an open mailing list where people exchange ideas and code, you have to work behind a passworded web site. It may seem like a small thing, but it's kept me from participating.
..and DES is not reasonable security. If anything, this product makes DES less secure.
Fast encryption is nice. But the real way to advance cypherspace is first through software implementations like IPSEC. Optimize with dedicated hardware later.
Slashdot Mirror
I leave town for a couple of days and I miss my moment of fame on Slashdot. Ah well. My blog post doesn't exactly argue it's "business reasons rather than technical ones", although my post does dwell on the business reasons too. There are plenty of technical reasons to hate SOAP too. For my view on that, see my blog post about why SOAP sucks. Bottom line is SOAP is too complex, doesn't work well in practice, and strong typing is the wrong choice for loosely coupled distributed systems.
Debian's default NTP configuration is to get time from pool.ntp.org. This is a significant contribution to the Linux world, similar to how Microsoft and Apple provide NTP service to their customers. Yay for us!
There is modest protection against bad servers in the pool. The time from pool servers is monitored and if a server seems insane it's taken out of the rotation.
My pool server gets about 14 requests a second from about 100,000 different IP addresses a day. Sadly, a lot of those requests are junk; 100 IP addresses account for 1/3 of all the requests I get. Fortunately NTP is a very lightweight protocol, so you can mostly ignore the spammy clients.
I just made some screenshots of enabling the nude cheat in Sims 2. Here, see for yourself. The only thing there is some disturbingly asexual smooth models.
Part of the reason South Park got a contract and had such good buzz was because the short "Spirit of Christmas" was widely spread around via tape and Internet. I and most of my hipster Internet friends new about South Park before it ever aired.
No need to guess whether SWAT 4 will be a problem: the demo has been out for a month. It looks great to me.
If you're into mechanical watches, check out www.timezone.com. It's a website for watch geeks with an active message board.
The Steven Phillips watches built here look awfully impressive. Too bad about the style, particularly the enamelling. There's a reason perlage is the standard movement decoration.
I made the mistake of shipping some crystal via UPS from an Office Depot outlet. The box arrived with one corner of the double wall box caved in. I even had the glassware professionally packed by a moving company, but when the box's volume decreases by 30% it doesn't help much.
So I filed an insurance claim with UPS. Yes, I'd paid for insurance. UPS said they didn't need to pay - it was Office Depot's problem. I called Office Depot and, of course, they said it was UPS' problem. I went back and forth for four months before giving up.
Bottom line: don't ship UPS with Office Depot. And pay for all shipping charges with a credit card, so you can at least contest the shipping charge if it doesn't arrive.
Whose small claims court would have jurisdiction? The originator, or the receiver?
I've been participating in JXTA since the beginning and have been impressed that Sun has truly made JXTA open source. With all the good and bad that entails.
That's why I wrote the first chapter, pointing out the history of peer-to-peer. The ARPAnet was all about peer to peer networking, we just lost that vision for a few years.
I was fortunate to learn bits of this theory from Chaitin about five years ago, when he was visiting Santa Fe. As folks here have noted, the work has its roots in Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, but there's a huge amount more detail in it. In particular, his work is highly specific and constructive, boiling down some very abstract concepts into specific machinery that is graspable. Definitely worth time if you are interested. I hope that logic courses will use this material as a basis for instruction.
The fact is there's no easy way to do the pagerank stuff without sending your URLs to Google. (I can think of some funky crypto protocols to do it, but it'd be messy). Given that they have a reasonable use for the data, and they disclose their collection of that data, I have no problem at all with what they're doing.
I turned pagerank off anyway. My main concern is that private internal URLs also go to Google.
PS - the Toolbar is really cool.
If you want a really fast (and simple!) web server for Unix, try Jef Poskanzer's thttpd. thttpd is entirely select based, single thread, memory mapped IO. Really fast. mini_httpd is also great if you want a zero-configuration web server, but it's not as fast. Jef's a brilliant old school hacker.
A common configuration on big web sites is to use Apache to serve the complex stuff, and thttpd to serve static images.
I'm the CTO of Popular Power. Good discussion here, thanks! I really think this technology is neat; we can turn the Internet into a very powerful resource and then use that resource to solve important problems. Our current influenza work is contributing to research that could save millions of lives.
One poster here wondered how good this kind of distributed computer would be at biotech apps. Depends a lot on the algorithm, but for things that trivially parallelize (like random search algorithms, Monte Carlo simulations) it's a perfect match.
Popular Power has been up and running since April. We've had a Linux client out for a couple of months now; download it and try it out!
Popular Power runs task code in a Java sandbox exactly for this reason; protecting participants' computers.
My company, Popular Power, has had commercial distributed computing software out since April. We just put out a Linux version in response to a Freshmeat Petition, check it out!
Our system is pretty neat; we're doing real work (researching flu vaccines), and our client is truly general purpose in that we can switch the kinds of work we're doing on the fly with no re-install. We're lining up customers now; we'll switch over to paying work as time goes on. We're also planning an open source release of the client software.
I truly think this kind of computing, along with other distributed systems like Gnutella, is the future of the Internet. For a good overview of this field, check out Howard Rheingold's article in the new August Wired, or this Wired news article.
I agree, Sun has taken their sweet time to support Java on Linux. It's been a source of frustration for years, for Sun employees as well as the Linux community. That's why I asked at the presentation "why did it take so long?". The nervous laughter in the room was quite telling. The reply ("limited resources") is not the full story, of course, but it's probably all they can say publically. I believe the real reason is Sun can't decide if Linux is a competitor or an ally.
The good news is that Sun is now going to do Linux releases. The bad news is that Java is still more proprietary than open. Java is still the best technology for Internet programming, so I'm going to continue to use it. At the same time I'll cheer on Sun to make their technology more open, and cheer on IBM and others for giving Sun some pressure in control of the Java platform.
According to the barely rewritten press release article from Reuters, Nash said Microsoft still undercuts prices of rival systems from Novell Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc by more than 50 percent in some cases, he said..
I think at this stage in the game, Microsoft can't get away with pretending Linux doesn't exist.
I'm not sure I understand - does clause 1 mean that the originator of the work can take other people's changes, incorporate them into the work, and distribute the new combined work under any license they want to? That's my understanding of the NPL - the originator of the code has special rights.
That would solve a big problem I have. I'm releasing some code I wrote under GPL. However, I already have other obligations to people to give them the code under another license. So if someone contributes a GPL change back to me, I don't know how I'm going to manage incorporating it. I don't want to have to maintain two source trees, one GPL, one that I can distribute with my other special license.
I don't understand why the second clause needs to be there - why would anyone choose to distribute something under GPL, if TGPL is available to them?
I think XML would be just fine for configuration. If nothing else, it would help us standardize on *one* comment style in tool configurations. Right now, I have to guess - is it #, //, %, or what?
The biggest problems are that XML adds more verbiage, a good DTD has to be designed, and a bunch of tools have to be hacked to understand the new format.
I'm not one to be terribly religious about this kind of corporate positioning. If you look at Sun's recent actions, it's clear that as a corporation they are not terribly friendly to Linux or open source.
First, look at the sad state of Java ports. Sun *still* does not support Java on Linux. They have helped out the Blackdown team some, thank you for that, but it's a half-hearted effort on Sun's side. My reading is that Sun is internally conflicted about whether Linux is an ally or threat and can't decide whether to work with Linux or not.
Second, look at the SCSL, a bizarre amalgation of open-source-like licensing and proprietary restrictions. My impression is that Sun was trying to ride some of the open source wave and satisfy their "partners" who were getting increasingly agitated by Sun's lock on Java, while still retaining traditional controls over the technology. I don't think they're motivated by any attempt at actually improving the world through source releases.
Sun's a big company. They're caught in a major change in their market, where expensive workstations have been supplanted by $1200 Linux boxes running on Intel hardware. It should be no surprise that they aren't a friend to Linux, they're trying to stay on top of the heap.
The place where Sun differs from Microsoft is that, in general, Sun technology is pretty good. Solaris is a good Unix. Java is a fantastic development platform. Sun does create quality in their technology, and that should be applauded.
I submitted a suggestion like this as a RedHat bug (ID 134) awhile ago. The response was not exactly overwhelming.
The RedHat workstation/server difference is helpful, but not enough. We need an option to install the RPMs but not start the services. And I think *all* listening ports (except maybe telnet) should be off by default.
You're doing the right thing, Rob.
Slashdot is the first news forum I've ever been on where reader comments more or less work. It's one of the few places where I might actually *want* to read what everyone has to say about a story. The Slashdot team deserves a lot of credit for this, as does the Slashdot readership.
As Slashdot has grown and become more of a mainstream medium the quality of the comments has gone down. Not just the obvious flamebait, but lots of uninformed speculation and general cluelessness. This is to be expected, it is the natural lifespan of a medium. Slashdot has weathered this fairly well, and the moderation system is a big help.
Collaborative moderation is very difficult, I am impressed to see it working so well. These kinds of tweaks are necessary, and every one seems to improve things. I think Slashdot is doing a good job of walking the line between censorship and editing.
I think the SCSL is a very interesting license, not an unreasonable thing for Sun to do. Make no mistake, Sun isn't doing this out of altruism. They need Java products such as Jini to be used by everyone, so they have to make them somewhat open. At the same way, Sun needs to retain control of the platform in order to guarantee themselves ownership and eventual revenue. The SCSL is an interesting way for Sun to walk this line while also getting some of the benefits of a community developing the source code to something.
Unfortunately, the Jini Community Process as they are running it isn't quite open enough for me. In particular, the requirements for joining the "Jini community" add friction to the process. You can't just have an open mailing list where people exchange ideas and code, you have to work behind a passworded web site. It may seem like a small thing, but it's kept me from participating.
One search engine not complete enough for you? Search a bunch of them with a meta-search engine. I like SavvySearch.
..and DES is not reasonable security. If anything, this product makes DES less secure.
Fast encryption is nice. But the real way to advance cypherspace is first through software implementations like IPSEC. Optimize with dedicated hardware later.