Are you referring to the AdvFS? That thing gives me a proverbial woody. I would pay good money to be able to use AdvFS on my Linux boxen, and would personally lick the boots of Compaq's management if they open-sourced it.
Of course, I'm not sure it actually belongs to Compaq...I seem to recall that Digital licensed it from another company that initially developed it, and this was clearly stated in the DU4.0 man pages... but perusing the Tru64 5.0 man page, I don't see any references, so it may be they actually own it now...((drool))...
This can be made a consitutional issue, however. Specifically, there is the question of whether Federal telecommunications law applies in this case. As mentioned by other posters, the FTA explicitly prohibits any telephone carrier from blocking access to alternate long-distance carriers. It could be argued that this internet service IS an alternate long-distance carrier, even though the local media is not a local telephone trunk; the distinctions between data and voice communications are small and shrinking (from a technical AND legal perspective), so this is a tricky spot on current case law. Clemson has certainly run afoul of the SPIRIT of the law; what remains to be seen is whether they may possibly have run afoul of the LETTER of the law.
So I see two fundamental questions at stake:
Are equal-access regulations constitutional?
To what extent do we wish to have telecommunications precedent applied not only to internet connectivity, but content and application as well?
Practical questions Clemson students should be asking in the meantime:
Does Clemson's contract with their upstream internet provider impose some restrictions which forced this move?
Are those restrictions legal and appropriate, and does the situation at hand actually fall CLEARLY outside the boundaries of said restriction, or is this "preventative law"?
Do students have any contracts or other official university documents outlining the terms of service they are offered/guaranteed? Do the university's actions run afoul of those terms?
Do any terms of said agreement run afoul of any local, state, or federal laws concerning telecommunications and/or information services?
21MB of source! Um... Should my browser really be larger than my operating system kernel?
Absolutely!
Or, more precisely, the kernel should be as small as possible while maintaining the desired abstractions. Same for the windowing system (X11) - you want it to be small, tight, and fast.
And remember, there's lots of un-merged and non-mainstream kernel code out there (DevFS, ReiserFS, ext3, PCMCIA, international patches at kerneli.org, drivers drivers drivers...) so maybe Mozilla's LOC count isn't quite as far ahead of the kernel's as it may seem:-)
Re:God is dead - no monopoly on open debate
on
Cybernauts Awake!
·
· Score: 1
they havent had the decades of open scientific debate and all the books that we have over here to help explain the science to the masses
There is nothing contradictory about open scientific debate and Christianity. And there is nothing inherently cohesive between scientific naturalism and open debate.
It has been my experince that fervent atheists tend to refuse some topics of debate with a zeal that made the Inquisitors look polite. I'm thinking specifically here of questions of epistemology. Many people who would propose to argue that science has rendered faith irrelevant are unwilling to discuss the problem of the meaning and limits of knowledge. I blame our "enlightened" educational system for treating scientific naturalism as fact rather than chosen assumption, and our high schools and universities for failing to give scientists a proper grounding in history and philosophy with which they can reasonably speak to these questions.
Not to say that I've never met a scientific atheist who could debate this stuff intelligently, but they have been (much to my disappointment) few and far between.
Average growth rates per year are 1.8 percent for accumulated performance, 1.77 per year for the number one perch, and 2.0 per year for the number 500. This means the observed performance growth exceeds Moore's Law, which sets the bar at 1.6 percent per annum.
Except that Moore's Law sets the bar at a FACTOR of 1.6, which is 60 percent, NOT 1.6 percent (i.e. factor of 1.016). I thought writers for technical forums had to know the difference between "increase by a factor of" and "percent increase"... because you certainly can't pass high school physics or math without knowing that distinction...
HTTP/1.1 specifies "Digest Authentication", in which the password never crosses the wire in plaintext. It's not a HIGHLY secure technique, but it offers better protection against the most basic kinds of attacks (password sniffing and replay), and if you engineer the site to use a lot of POSTs and the "qop=auth-int" option with short-lived nonces, the system becomes fairly difficult to circumvent. Stuff it inside of SSL and I would feel pretty safe.
Problem: RFC2617 (the latest specification of Digest authentication) has only been out for a few months, and I doubt any of the current versions of popular browsers fully implement it.
The long-term timing of this is awful... Microsoft became one of the companies whose stock value determines the DJIA just a few days ago. So if MSFT's stock tanks, watch for panic in the streets as "The Dow" takes a serious hit.
Popularities of documents (based on URLs) have been known for years to follow a "Zipf-like" distribution (loosely stated, popular pages are REALLY popular, unpopular pages are REALLY unpopular; formally, the probability of retrieving a particular page is inversely proportional to its rank), and it has been generally agreed that sites (for whatever definition of "site" you want to choose - is my.yahoo.com a different site than www.yahoo.com?) follow a similar distribution.
Some recent studies (see CS-TR-98-016 at www.cs.bu.edu/techreports/) have indicated that, in general, the "slope" or "skew" for documents is actually decreasing, meaning the more popular documents seem to be (from a network perspective) "less more popular";-) than they used to be. This makes sense if you assume that people are using bigger browser caches (fewer repeated retrievals of the same URI are needed), and keeping in mind that sites are moving session state information that used to be embedded in the URI into cookies (thus reducing the number of "tail" documents that would have been hit once and only once).
The problem with popularity profiles is that they are generally not reflective of how much content is being disseminated - if I want my site to attract twice as many "hits", I just have to embed twice as many images in each of my web pages, then tell everyone they're "necessary for proper layout" so people don't get suspicious.
In summary, I'm not at all surprised by these findings, but I doubt the study would stand up to rigorous peer review; I would be curious to see the actual charts-n-graphs, which are _FAR_ more instructive than just "top 50, top 100, top 10%" numbers. Unless one of the distribution is super-skewed (Zipf exponent is less than -1.0), this is probably just part of the normal osciallation of popularity and centralization/decentralization that we've seen since the dawn of knowledge. (How's that for putting a grandeur spin on it?)
Did anyone else notice that CNN kept a "breaking news" logo up on the screen non-stop for about 2 days straight? Did anyone else get the sense that they ran out of news-worthy content about 5 minutes after "breaking" the story, and only about 5 to 10 more minutes worth has come out since?
strangers who couldn't possibly have any first-hand knowledge of the principals in a far-off tragedy like this -are affected as grievously as family and friends.
This is the thing that scares me the most about our modern media-frenzied culture; I think the trend runs precisely contrary to Katz's idea here, that what what we are seeing is the cheapening of tragedy and suffering; people are being affected "as grievously as family and friends" not because they feel somehow connected to the incident, but becauyse they have become disconnected from those that should matter to them. We have cheapened mourning and made it a media event. We think a family's suffering is something to be gawked at. So what happens when a calamity hits home? Instead of learning about grief through personal grieving and relation with family and friends who are grieving, we learn about it mostly from watching others on the far side of a satellite disconnect.
Techno-tragedies are driven by images rather than judgement, significance, reasoning or content.
I fear that this is becoming the case in politics, family, religion, and education as well. It's just easiest to see in a media event, er, family tragedy like this one.
It's a kinda neat trick using MD5 hashes. The client has to find the MD5 fingerprint of a string that includes the username, password, and an arbitrary string the server provides. The result? Passwords never pass in cleartext, replay attacks are short-lived (since the server changes that arbitrary string regularly), and no strong crypto is needed since all you're using is a strong hash function which is only useful for authentication anyway (hence Uncle Sam doesn't try to treat it like a munition). See RFC2617 for details.
The problem is there are 8 version of HTTP/1.1, including RFC2068, six IETF drafts, and RFC2616. Lots of implementations are against RFC2068, and there are a LOT of problems with that version that are addressed the later ones (expect and TE request header, even MORE excrutiating cache-control detail, etc.)
Also, since HTTP/1.1 isn't being exercised very well by most current clients, the 1.1 support code in most servers is only lightly exercised and often is buggy/incorrect/broken.
The HTTP world has been going through the agony of this recently, as there are currently seven distinct documents out there calling themselves "HTTP/1.1" (RFC2068 and the six internet drafts that followed it, the last of which is pending internet standard approval), and many/most servers do not uniformly imnplement any of them. (Slashdot is an example; while the Apache server running/. claims to be HTTP/1.1, it regularly commits all sorts of SHOULD NOTs, and I seem to recall uncovering a few MUST NOTS as well.) Implementing a protocol which is a moving target is nightmarish; what's worse, you end up with a large number of pseudo-conformant (i.e. past-conformant) implementations that all need to talk with each other. Throw into the mix an application like the Web which is richly application-heterogeneous and business-intensive, and a population of web content and web engine developers who are oblivious to most points of the HTTP/1.1 specification, and you have what amounts to a simmering interoperability nightmare on your hands. And what happens next? Browsers incorporate all sorts of hacks to deal with the incongruities. Caches and proxies get twice as many, since they're expecting to talk with both broken servers and munged clients. And in the end, noone knows where problems actually are because noone is talking the straight protocol, noone is rejecting things the spec says you MUST reject, all because breaking these broken compatibility hacks could interrupt business and inconvenience a customer.
So developing sufficiently complex specifications in an open environment with live business-critical implementors ain't much fun.
I have oh-so-fond memories of high school. Let's see... computer geek, band member ("band fags" was the "cool" way to refer to us), republican, Christian... sheesh, I had _nothing_ going for me to endear me with any of the "in" crowds.
I had (and still have) some opinions that certainly didn't make me any friends back then, and probably won't make me too many friends in this forum either, but at least back then (early 90's) everyone was kind enough to pay lip service to "respecting my opinions". A few of those opinions, which I had no qualms about expressing in class, no doubt caught some administrators attentions; I'm not sure what kept them from acting, perhaps just because mind-control wasn't quite so widely accepted in public education six years ago, perhaps because they knew I wouldn't ever "keep quiet" if they pulled any of the crap some of these kids wrote about, perhaps because they also knew that if they sent such a letter to my folks some (figurative) heads would roll for it. (One advantage of having free-thinkers for parents...)
Don't count "radio" totally out of the game just yet, for two reasons.
First: A public forum in which the masses get exposed to new music is essential to the industry thriving.
Second: I, for one, don't have time to orchestrate the soundtrack for my day from my MP3 list. I find that, by knowing the radio "landscape" in my area, I can fill in any given part of my day with appropriate music.
Radio fills these two slots simultaneously: it gives me variety and novelty that I might not have otherwise been exposed to had I chosen all the songs for myself.
Whether radio's current formats can survive or not is another matter... however, I'm not aware of "cable radio" stations putting any broadcast stations out of business yet.
This reminds me of my first textbook on recursion, "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" by that master of modern technical writing Dr. Seuss. It's sitting on my office bookshelf, right next to Sipser's "Introduction to the Theory of Computation".
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, I'm not sure it actually belongs to Compaq...I seem to recall that Digital licensed it from another company that initially developed it, and this was clearly stated in the DU4.0 man pages... but perusing the Tru64 5.0 man page, I don't see any references, so it may be they actually own it now...((drool))...
So I see two fundamental questions at stake:
- Are equal-access regulations constitutional?
- To what extent do we wish to have telecommunications precedent applied not only to internet connectivity, but content and application as well?
Practical questions Clemson students should be asking in the meantime:- Does Clemson's contract with their upstream internet provider impose some restrictions which forced this move?
- Are those restrictions legal and appropriate, and does the situation at hand actually fall CLEARLY outside the boundaries of said restriction, or is this "preventative law"?
- Do students have any contracts or other official university documents outlining the terms of service they are offered/guaranteed? Do the university's actions run afoul of those terms?
- Do any terms of said agreement run afoul of any local, state, or federal laws concerning telecommunications and/or information services?
Anyway, just a few pence on the matter...Or, more precisely, the kernel should be as small as possible while maintaining the desired abstractions. Same for the windowing system (X11) - you want it to be small, tight, and fast.
And remember, there's lots of un-merged and non-mainstream kernel code out there (DevFS, ReiserFS, ext3, PCMCIA, international patches at kerneli.org, drivers drivers drivers...) so maybe Mozilla's LOC count isn't quite as far ahead of the kernel's as it may seem :-)
It has been my experince that fervent atheists tend to refuse some topics of debate with a zeal that made the Inquisitors look polite. I'm thinking specifically here of questions of epistemology. Many people who would propose to argue that science has rendered faith irrelevant are unwilling to discuss the problem of the meaning and limits of knowledge. I blame our "enlightened" educational system for treating scientific naturalism as fact rather than chosen assumption, and our high schools and universities for failing to give scientists a proper grounding in history and philosophy with which they can reasonably speak to these questions.
Not to say that I've never met a scientific atheist who could debate this stuff intelligently, but they have been (much to my disappointment) few and far between.
Problem: RFC2617 (the latest specification of Digest authentication) has only been out for a few months, and I doubt any of the current versions of popular browsers fully implement it.
The long-term timing of this is awful... Microsoft became one of the companies whose stock value determines the DJIA just a few days ago. So if MSFT's stock tanks, watch for panic in the streets as "The Dow" takes a serious hit.
Sorry, I meant CS-TR-98-023
Some recent studies (see CS-TR-98-016 at www.cs.bu.edu/techreports/) have indicated that, in general, the "slope" or "skew" for documents is actually decreasing, meaning the more popular documents seem to be (from a network perspective) "less more popular" ;-) than they used to be. This makes sense if you assume that people are using bigger browser caches (fewer repeated retrievals of the same URI are needed), and keeping in mind that sites are moving session state information that used to be embedded in the URI into cookies (thus reducing the number of "tail" documents that would have been hit once and only once).
The problem with popularity profiles is that they are generally not reflective of how much content is being disseminated - if I want my site to attract twice as many "hits", I just have to embed twice as many images in each of my web pages, then tell everyone they're "necessary for proper layout" so people don't get suspicious.
In summary, I'm not at all surprised by these findings, but I doubt the study would stand up to rigorous peer review; I would be curious to see the actual charts-n-graphs, which are _FAR_ more instructive than just "top 50, top 100, top 10%" numbers. Unless one of the distribution is super-skewed (Zipf exponent is less than -1.0), this is probably just part of the normal osciallation of popularity and centralization/decentralization that we've seen since the dawn of knowledge. (How's that for putting a grandeur spin on it?)
strangers who couldn't possibly have any first-hand knowledge of the principals in a far-off tragedy like this -are affected as grievously as family and friends.
This is the thing that scares me the most about our modern media-frenzied culture; I think the trend runs precisely contrary to Katz's idea here, that what what we are seeing is the cheapening of tragedy and suffering; people are being affected "as grievously as family and friends" not because they feel somehow connected to the incident, but becauyse they have become disconnected from those that should matter to them. We have cheapened mourning and made it a media event. We think a family's suffering is something to be gawked at. So what happens when a calamity hits home? Instead of learning about grief through personal grieving and relation with family and friends who are grieving, we learn about it mostly from watching others on the far side of a satellite disconnect.
Techno-tragedies are driven by images rather than judgement, significance, reasoning or content.
I fear that this is becoming the case in politics, family, religion, and education as well. It's just easiest to see in a media event, er, family tragedy like this one.
Because I've been there, man, been there.
It's a kinda neat trick using MD5 hashes. The client has to find the MD5 fingerprint of a string that includes the username, password, and an arbitrary string the server provides. The result? Passwords never pass in cleartext, replay attacks are short-lived (since the server changes that arbitrary string regularly), and no strong crypto is needed since all you're using is a strong hash function which is only useful for authentication anyway (hence Uncle Sam doesn't try to treat it like a munition). See RFC2617 for details.
Also, since HTTP/1.1 isn't being exercised very well by most current clients, the 1.1 support code in most servers is only lightly exercised and often is buggy/incorrect/broken.
IMVHO, the most telling part of the article is what comes at the end... a tidy list of previous articles outlining MS security "difficulties"...
So developing sufficiently complex specifications in an open environment with live business-critical implementors ain't much fun.
-Adam (an HTTP/1.1 server/cache/proxy author)
I had (and still have) some opinions that certainly didn't make me any friends back then, and probably won't make me too many friends in this forum either, but at least back then (early 90's) everyone was kind enough to pay lip service to "respecting my opinions". A few of those opinions, which I had no qualms about expressing in class, no doubt caught some administrators attentions; I'm not sure what kept them from acting, perhaps just because mind-control wasn't quite so widely accepted in public education six years ago, perhaps because they knew I wouldn't ever "keep quiet" if they pulled any of the crap some of these kids wrote about, perhaps because they also knew that if they sent such a letter to my folks some (figurative) heads would roll for it. (One advantage of having free-thinkers for parents...)
First: A public forum in which the masses get exposed to new music is essential to the industry thriving.
Second: I, for one, don't have time to orchestrate the soundtrack for my day from my MP3 list. I find that, by knowing the radio "landscape" in my area, I can fill in any given part of my day with appropriate music.
Radio fills these two slots simultaneously: it gives me variety and novelty that I might not have otherwise been exposed to had I chosen all the songs for myself.
Whether radio's current formats can survive or not is another matter... however, I'm not aware of "cable radio" stations putting any broadcast stations out of business yet.
This reminds me of my first textbook on recursion, "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" by that master of modern technical writing Dr. Seuss. It's sitting on my office bookshelf, right next to Sipser's "Introduction to the Theory of Computation".
http://www.infolibria.com/products/f-dyna.htm