This, IMHO, is why the BSD license actually does work. I see a lot of GPL proponents saying things like, "Gee, some nasty evil organization could come in and steal all of our hard work and not give back if we release our code under a BSD-style license." Yes, this is true, and at face value seems pretty severe. But consider the amount of effort that a company has to expend to keep a non-trivial piece of software moving forward. It costs a lot of money to pay good programmers, who are getting harder and harder to find these days. This is made even more difficult if the company wants to take the software in many different directions (e.g., in the case of an operating system, they want to develop multimedia tools for it along with network tools along with any number of other hot topics in today's market). Contrast this with the fact that if the company doesn't fork their software project from the original source code, they get tons of people developing the software and adding new gizmos to it completely for free. No sane company (at least, one that understands what the hell they are doing) is going to trivially fork a major piece of software and throw away all of those potential helping hands.
This is why I favor the BSD style license. It lets companies who really feel that they need to fork and keep proprietary their intellectual investment in a piece of software do so. But, smart companies won't fork unless they really have a good reason.
I have not upgraded my machines to 4.0 yet due to not wanting to mess with this kind of stuff until the end of the school semester. But the second that final exams are over - watch out!
It's funny, though, because I am not worried in the least bit about putting a.0 version of an operating system on my boxes when it is FreeBSD. When it's some unnamed major operating system vendor's brand new operating system (*cough* Windows 2000 *cough*) I like to hang back and let other people blaze the trail because there are plenty of times that I can remember their new OS releases (or even service packs) being pretty unstable until the first set of patches arrived. The only time I ever recall bad things happening with a major update to FreeBSD was when it went from 1.x -> 2.0, and that was largely due to them gutting out huge amounts of tainted code from the codebase and replacing it with unencumbered code.
So, it's probably not such a big deal that they're just skipping the 3.5 CD's.
To be honest, keeping the machines up for long periods of time has never really been a problem. My NT desktop system, on which I do a lot of developement and other "weird" work, can easily have uptimes of 2-3 months, which is about all I really demand out of a desktop OS. (This is in distinct contrast to my wife's home machine which runs Windows 98 and crashes multiple times per day.)
But, your point about remote administration is quite valid. Actually, I'd extend this to being "any remote access" to NT as being the crux of the problem. Launching jobs on a group of remote NT machines and getting the stdout back to the submitting machine has definitely been a pain with this project. With a Unix operating system, you could simply rsh each of the components of your parallel job. With NT, we ended up using a piece of commercial software that provides this functionality, although there are issues with it that make it not as nice of a solution as you would have out-of-the-box with Unix.
Another related idea about NT being oriented to "the user sits at the console" as opposed to using the machine from remote comes when a job abnormally terminates. The NT debugger, Dr. Watson, tends to pop up and wait for the user to press "OK" to continue. If you're not sitting at the physical console, this is a problem. We've had to use some workarounds to deal with this situation.
So, all-in-all, while there have been some studies that suggest NT performs slightly better for some types of scientific applications and some interesting results have been obtained by using NT, there have been many many days when I have really wished we had used Linux instead. Fortunately there are BOTH NT and Linux clusters, so scientists can choose which one they think will work best for their particular application.
At no point in my message do I believe I implied that you should favor NT over Linux. I simply pointed out that it is possible to deploy clustering technology on NT as well as with Linux. I'm well aware of what NASA is doing with clusters; my funding comes from them.
One reason you might want to use NT as a target for deploying clustering technology is that it could be argued to be more widely available than Linux (right now). If I extend my definition of a "cluster" to include machines on peoples' desktops, then if my solution can utilize the operating system present on many of these machines, perhaps I can do something interesting. The fact is, people DO pay money for NT, so building technology on top of it may make some bit of sense.
Also, there is a Linux version of our clustering software available. It just happens that the NT version was developed first.
The latest copy of the paper I have seen is a pre-print, so even if I did know the specific details of the experiments the authors used, I would be uncomfortable going into details.
I do know that they compared the NCSA NT Supercluster with the Linux cluster at Sandia National Laboratory. This is the second "large" cluster within the Alliance and sort of provides a counterbalance to our NT cluster.
You are quite right in that there should be no big difference between operating systems for applications that are largely computation intensive. The big differences would come from applications that are heavily file intensive or communications intensive. Both clusters use a high performance interconnect called Myrinet, but the NT Supercluster uses a messaging layer developed here at University of Illinois called Fast Messages which provides very low latency and high bandwidth. The last I heard, the Sandia Linux cluster used TCP/IP over Myrinet and I do not believe this offers as low of latency as FM.
You jest, but actually there is an NT supercluster within the National Computational Science Alliance. See here for more information. I was part of the original group which developed this clustering technology while it was a research project in the computer science department. Now that it has been deployed as a real computation resource, one of my projects is to make it available to the national computational grid which the Linux article discusses.
Deploying an NT cluster was certainly a challenge in some ways that would have been easier with Unix, but not impossible. Some of our collaborators have published results favorably comparing the performance of the NT supercluster to that of Linux clusters, so there seem to be good reasons to continue building at least some technology like this on NT.
That's strange. I have two FreeBSD machines and one Linux machine at home and both are running nearly the same set of software.
What software were you looking for on your OpenBSD machine that you couldn't find?
You do realize that after installing the base system, you need to go to the "Packages" installation portion and tell it what extra software above and beyond the base system you want to install, right? This is already-built software for your machine that you shouldn't have to compile. Not installing all these packages by default is a philosophical difference between Linux and the BSD's. Linux (RedHat) tends to put a lot of extra software on your machine by default at installation time. The BSD's tend to lay down just a bare Unix install and figure that you will use the package installer to add whatever you want. I personally prefer the BSD way of doing things (which is why I tend to favor BSD systems anyway) because it allows me to manage my disk space much more closely by not installing software that I don't use by default. Others like the Linux way because they want to get a lot of stuff on their machine right up front.
Considering the types of people who work at Intel (presumably a lot of computer nerds) I'm betting that many already have pretty decent computers at home. I know three or four people who work at Intel in Oregon, all are Computer Science graduates, and all have nearly new (purchased within 12-18 months) computers. Sure some won't already have their own machines, but I'm betting a larger percentage of Intel employees already have computers than, say, Ford employees.
Maybe Intel should have given all their employees cars instead.:)
You should definitely check out the Newsweek article that a previous poster provided a link to. In that article, they equate the PC to being like a "scaled-down '60's mainframe" and not very exciting. Sony wants to position the PS2 as an exciting way to get online, allowing you to play games collaboratively and surf the web. They equate it to being "like the movie The Matrix" in excitement. It's easy to see that they intend to do exactly what you describe: provide a simple and visually appealing way for people to get online. The consequence of this is probably as you say, locking consumers into a more proprietary solution than a generic PC running whatever operating system you want.
Actually, though, Sony may be able to succeed simply because most people don't really care about HOW they get online. They couldn't care less if they're running on a PS2 or on a PC with Windows or Linux. (You and I care about running Linux and using PCs, but we're different from consumers since we're geeks.) In fact, the easier and less expensive it is to get online and play some games and surf the web, the happier most consumers will be.
I just checked and can't believe that there hasn't been one, but I couldn't locate a Slashdot Poll for "Favorite Shell". If this hasn't been a poll item before, it might be interesting to do one for this.
What's really funny is that I've been to USENIX conferences with Dave and he's worn "Korn" T-shirts. I about died the first time I saw him doing this.
Actually, even more funny was when I was at the USENIX Windows NT symposium a few years ago. The Microsofties were up on stage talking about their Unix toolkit for Windows NT. This includes several common Unix commands (ls, cp, ps, etc.) along with a version of ksh. Dave stood up and went to the microphone and mentioned a few areas of incompatibility with the version of ksh used in the Unix toolkit for Windows NT. The Microsofties, not realizing who they were talking to, kept going back and forth with him, insisting that their version of ksh actually did comply with the AT&T ksh, and sort of implying that Dave (who they still didn't recognize) didn't know what he was talking about. Nearly everybody in the audience was laughing out loud, and eventually somebody let the Microsofties in on who exactly they were talking to.
There are several things that came to mind while I was reading the article. Mostly these things are issues of the post office not being able to change the way they think about what they do with regards to how the Internet impacts them. Some thoughts:
First, like a previous poster said, creating email addresses for each physical address in the United States is not the right thing to do. What happens when I move from that physical address? Does the next resident at that house continue to get all of the messages from the cool porn listserv I was subscribed to? What the Post Office should really consider doing is assigning every person an email address that stays with them for life. Sort of like your Social Security Number. How many of these "Yahoo Mail" type sites advertise that you should sign up with them because you get "a lifetime email address"? This is definitely something that people want.
Second, to that end, the Post Office could become the perfect entity to do Certificate Authority functions. Right now, companies like Verisign are trying to figure out how to digitally sign peoples' electronic certificates used to identify themselves online. But this market is just starting to develop and Verisgn certainly doesn't have a lock on it. The Post Office could.
Third, the Post Office doesn't "get" some issues with how the world does business electronically. For example, the article mentions that they'll print out any email that isn't deliverable to me and stuff it in a physical envelope to give to me. Who wants this? Not only does it really defeat the whole concept of electronic mail, but also it fails to take into consideration the fact that online access will be (if it isn't already) so ubiquitous that anybody can afford to be online.
Another example of how the Post Office doesn't "get it" is the example in the article of how they need to find ways to charge less to ship things like CD's, because if I pay $7 for a CD I don't want to pay $9 shipping. The reason I think this is an example of them "not getting it" in the new online world is that I'm probably going to be buying my music online within 5 years -- there won't be a physical CD to ship anyway!
You will never know how happy I am that someone else in the world "got" what happened with the vase! When I saw the movie with my wife, I laughed out loud when Neo knocked the vase over and the Oracle made her comment. My wife wanted to know right then why I found that to be so hilarious, and I knew there was no way in hell I would be able to explain it to her in even an hour, let alone during the movie.
Since then, I've talked to several people about that scene, but nobody I've talked to is a big enough math/CS nut to get it either.
The connection with Universal Turing Machines is similar to the argument for Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem (which someone mentioned above), of course. It's a sort of "The following statement is true. The preceeding statement is false." type of paradox. If the Oracle hadn't told Neo that he would knock over the vase, maybe he wouldn't have knocked it over in the first place. But then, she wouldn't have had to tell him not to worry about knocking it over! Paradox.
I have an old issue (ca. 1990) of Scientific American with an article about how several former members of the Legion of Doom were going to create a computer security consulting company. Reading about the L0pht guys' company reminds me of the LoD guys in a lot of ways, including a trendy picture they had of the LoD guys posing in sunglasses and suits. After the article came out, I recall that they started the company but went out of business a short time later due to a few factors. First, people weren't all that concerned about computer security at the time because it wasn't as obvious of a need in the pre-Internet days. Second, I got the impression that they maybe played around more than they ended up doing productive work.
It will be interesting to see how successful the L0pht guys are. A lot of factors are different now than in the late 1980's. For one thing, people are a lot more aware that there are adversaries out there who want to get into your computers. Also, it seems that the market favors trendy new computer-related companies, a testament to this is the $10mil of startup money they have.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere with this discussion is Gene Spafford's (from Purdue) assertion that it is foolhardy to trust hackers with your sensitive information. He equates this to trusting a crook to guard your bank vault. Not sure I totally agree with this, but it will be interesting to see how the world views this.
There are only a few situations in which a petition is a useful way of getting something done, and this is not one of them.
One example of a situation where a petition is useful is when the constituants of one particular politician present that politician with a petition dealing with a specific, concrete point that the politician does not already agree with. By this, the constituants can show the politician that his or her views do not agree with what the people in his or her region want to see happen. Politicians want to be re-elected, so a petition may cause them to re-think their stance on a particular point if they can see that many people disagree with it.
In the case of exploration of Mars, a petition isn't going to do anything whatsoever. First, just about everybody already agrees that we should send manned missions to Mars, given infinite resources. The fact that we don't have infinite resources means that we need to find a way to balance many interests simultaneously (e.g., the need to explore Mars, the need to feed the nation, the need to reduce crime, etc.). The percentage of resources spent on each interest is not a clear-cut issue, and regardless of how many geeks get together and sign a petition, as long as some way exists to continue exploring Mars (I'm thinking of unmanned missions that are going on now) politicians are going to call that good enough and focus on other social aspects nearer to home. If you don't believe this, the next time the United States gets involved in some conflict overseas, listen to the number of people who complain, "But we should be focusing on issues HERE AT HOME, not in some foreign country."
As far as the industrial people that the petition is directed towards, they won't care either. The only thing that drives them is whether they can make money at something. If you can show them that they can make money off of an investment in technology needed to send a manned mission to Mars, you'll get industrial involvement. Otherwise, you won't.
The concept of technology brings up a second major reason why this petition is pointless: technology. Yep, many people agree that we should send a manned mission to Mars, but just because they all get together doesn't magically make the technology to do this appear. One might argue that a petition might spark new developments in technology that might make such a feat possible, similar to what happened in the Apollo project. However, the difference between a mission to Mars and Apollo is that in the case of Apollo, going to the moon was envisionable with the current technology plus a marginal amount of improvement. In the case of a manned mission to Mars, there are fundamental technological hurdles that need to be figured out. How do we take care of fuel? How do we pack enough food/water for a manned crew to survive for the lengthy trip? How do we ensure that we can get them back home safely? These are major obstacles -- probably more challenging to us now than the obstacles facing the Apollo project were in the 1960's.
In my opinion, in order to put this into perspective, you need to look at the history of the subject at hand.
The first types of supercomputers were faster and better than typical computers because of the design and features put into them. They used faster components which were custom-built (and thus a lot more expensive) and had features like vector units which made them attractive to scientific applications (but again, more expensive). Then, people started to think about how they could make supercomputers at the same or faster performance but bring the cost of producing them down. Rather than using expensive custom-built processors that had to be submerged in cooling fluid or using vector units to manipulate large arrays in a single operation, they started to develop new designs for supercomputers. One new type of machine was SMP based systems such as the Cray PowerChallenge type of machine. In this machine, many processors share a common memory, just like in your 2-way or 4-way desktop boxes now. With these types of machines, the lack of vector units isn't such a big deal since you can instead just separate your array into N different portions (where N = the number of processors) and apply your vector operation in parallel over the processors in the system. The problem with these types of computers is that scaling up to large numbers of processors is difficult since contention for the system bus (to talk between the CPU and memory or I/O) gets complicated with the larger number of processors. Another new type of machine were Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) machines such as the Cray T3D and T3E. In these types of machines, many processors (~1024) are interconnected with a very fast network. Each processor has its own individual memory, so the system can be scaled up to much greater numbers of processors. The problem is that now instead of having a single common shared memory, you have all these distributed memories and you have to use message passing techniques to get your data distributed around, which is a pain. So, this led researchers such as John Hennessy (at Stanford) to come up with a new architecture that uses Distributed Shared Memory (DSM). To the applications programmer, things appear to be a large shared memory (although if you touch certain parts of memory, access times are slower than touching other locations in memory -- since they have to be fetched from a remote machine). In fact what actually happens is that each processor still has its own local memory, but a processor on a very fast interconnect card coupled with each processor examines memory references and if it sees you are using memory that is not local to your processor, fetches the desired section of memory from the remote processor. So, it's sort of an MPP type system but appears to the programmer as sort of an SMP type system. This is what SGI/Cray sells as the Origin 2000. It's still cheaper to produce than traditional vector machines which use custom CPU's and memories (since it uses more commodity CPU's and components), but at the same time offers good relative performance.
Now, in the late 80's, Seymour Cray decided that building supercomputers out of commodity components wasn't the right way to go. His opinion was that, all things being equal, you could always make a faster supercomputer if you used more expensive components and designed your supercomputer with that goal in mind (i.e., use SRAM for all memories, use the fastest technology in your CPU, etc.). To that end, he created a company called Cray Computers which was separate from Cray Research (i.e., Seymour was in charge of Cray Computers and had nothing to do with Cray Research). Cray Research produced the computers such as the PowerChallenge and T3E while Cray Computer continued to make expensive vector-type computers. Unfortunately what ended up happening was that Cray Computers folded because their machines were so expensive and the performance gain you got from them did not justify the greater cost. (Really, the only places that bought these types of computers were "spook sites" like the NSA, to the best of my knowledge.)
The pervading idea is that this trend towards computers that offer decent performance while costing significantly less will continue. This is the idea behind clusters such as the Beowulf or, more importantly, clusters like the NT Supercluster at NCSA. The NT Supercluster differs from a Beowulf in that it uses a more costly network adapter (specifically, a Myrinet adapter from Myricom) to allow internode communication to take place at higher bandwidths and lower latencies than a standard Ethernet. No, the performance of these types of machines is nowhere near what you get from a machine like the Origin 2000, but the idea is that you get comparable performance at a huge reduction in cost. Additionally, because the components used to construct these clusters are commodity components, everybody will be producing these components and continuing to improve their performance. So, the speed of cluster-based computing relative to machines like the Origin improves over time. [Disclaimer: I am one of the people who helped develop the technology in the NT Supercluster, so I have some bias.]
To say that SGI ruined Cray is no more true than to say that they ruined MIPS. The reason that people are not that interested in MIPS processors any more is that Intel processors are a commodity now. Everybody uses them, so the overall industry trend is to make Intel and Intel-related technologies faster and better since everybody works together in a sort of de facto way. Yes, probably the MIPS design is a much better processor design than the Intel design (it wouldn't be difficult), but the key thing is that everybody in industry is using Intel. This is the same reason that building supercomputers out of commodity components (i.e., clusters) will probably be the way things work in the future.
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This, IMHO, is why the BSD license actually does work. I see a lot of GPL proponents saying things like, "Gee, some nasty evil organization could come in and steal all of our hard work and not give back if we release our code under a BSD-style license." Yes, this is true, and at face value seems pretty severe. But consider the amount of effort that a company has to expend to keep a non-trivial piece of software moving forward. It costs a lot of money to pay good programmers, who are getting harder and harder to find these days. This is made even more difficult if the company wants to take the software in many different directions (e.g., in the case of an operating system, they want to develop multimedia tools for it along with network tools along with any number of other hot topics in today's market). Contrast this with the fact that if the company doesn't fork their software project from the original source code, they get tons of people developing the software and adding new gizmos to it completely for free. No sane company (at least, one that understands what the hell they are doing) is going to trivially fork a major piece of software and throw away all of those potential helping hands.
This is why I favor the BSD style license. It lets companies who really feel that they need to fork and keep proprietary their intellectual investment in a piece of software do so. But, smart companies won't fork unless they really have a good reason.
I have not upgraded my machines to 4.0 yet due to not wanting to mess with this kind of stuff until the end of the school semester. But the second that final exams are over - watch out!
.0 version of an operating system on my boxes when it is FreeBSD. When it's some unnamed major operating system vendor's brand new operating system (*cough* Windows 2000 *cough*) I like to hang back and let other people blaze the trail because there are plenty of times that I can remember their new OS releases (or even service packs) being pretty unstable until the first set of patches arrived. The only time I ever recall bad things happening with a major update to FreeBSD was when it went from 1.x -> 2.0, and that was largely due to them gutting out huge amounts of tainted code from the codebase and replacing it with unencumbered code.
It's funny, though, because I am not worried in the least bit about putting a
So, it's probably not such a big deal that they're just skipping the 3.5 CD's.
To be honest, keeping the machines up for long periods of time has never really been a problem. My NT desktop system, on which I do a lot of developement and other "weird" work, can easily have uptimes of 2-3 months, which is about all I really demand out of a desktop OS. (This is in distinct contrast to my wife's home machine which runs Windows 98 and crashes multiple times per day.)
But, your point about remote administration is quite valid. Actually, I'd extend this to being "any remote access" to NT as being the crux of the problem. Launching jobs on a group of remote NT machines and getting the stdout back to the submitting machine has definitely been a pain with this project. With a Unix operating system, you could simply rsh each of the components of your parallel job. With NT, we ended up using a piece of commercial software that provides this functionality, although there are issues with it that make it not as nice of a solution as you would have out-of-the-box with Unix.
Another related idea about NT being oriented to "the user sits at the console" as opposed to using the machine from remote comes when a job abnormally terminates. The NT debugger, Dr. Watson, tends to pop up and wait for the user to press "OK" to continue. If you're not sitting at the physical console, this is a problem. We've had to use some workarounds to deal with this situation.
So, all-in-all, while there have been some studies that suggest NT performs slightly better for some types of scientific applications and some interesting results have been obtained by using NT, there have been many many days when I have really wished we had used Linux instead. Fortunately there are BOTH NT and Linux clusters, so scientists can choose which one they think will work best for their particular application.
At no point in my message do I believe I implied that you should favor NT over Linux. I simply pointed out that it is possible to deploy clustering technology on NT as well as with Linux. I'm well aware of what NASA is doing with clusters; my funding comes from them.
One reason you might want to use NT as a target for deploying clustering technology is that it could be argued to be more widely available than Linux (right now). If I extend my definition of a "cluster" to include machines on peoples' desktops, then if my solution can utilize the operating system present on many of these machines, perhaps I can do something interesting. The fact is, people DO pay money for NT, so building technology on top of it may make some bit of sense.
Also, there is a Linux version of our clustering software available. It just happens that the NT version was developed first.
The latest copy of the paper I have seen is a pre-print, so even if I did know the specific details of the experiments the authors used, I would be uncomfortable going into details.
I do know that they compared the NCSA NT Supercluster with the Linux cluster at Sandia National Laboratory. This is the second "large" cluster within the Alliance and sort of provides a counterbalance to our NT cluster.
You are quite right in that there should be no big difference between operating systems for applications that are largely computation intensive. The big differences would come from applications that are heavily file intensive or communications intensive. Both clusters use a high performance interconnect called Myrinet, but the NT Supercluster uses a messaging layer developed here at University of Illinois called Fast Messages which provides very low latency and high bandwidth. The last I heard, the Sandia Linux cluster used TCP/IP over Myrinet and I do not believe this offers as low of latency as FM.
You jest, but actually there is an NT supercluster within the National Computational Science Alliance. See here for more information. I was part of the original group which developed this clustering technology while it was a research project in the computer science department. Now that it has been deployed as a real computation resource, one of my projects is to make it available to the national computational grid which the Linux article discusses.
Deploying an NT cluster was certainly a challenge in some ways that would have been easier with Unix, but not impossible. Some of our collaborators have published results favorably comparing the performance of the NT supercluster to that of Linux clusters, so there seem to be good reasons to continue building at least some technology like this on NT.
That's strange. I have two FreeBSD machines and one Linux machine at home and both are running nearly the same set of software.
What software were you looking for on your OpenBSD machine that you couldn't find?
You do realize that after installing the base system, you need to go to the "Packages" installation portion and tell it what extra software above and beyond the base system you want to install, right? This is already-built software for your machine that you shouldn't have to compile. Not installing all these packages by default is a philosophical difference between Linux and the BSD's. Linux (RedHat) tends to put a lot of extra software on your machine by default at installation time. The BSD's tend to lay down just a bare Unix install and figure that you will use the package installer to add whatever you want. I personally prefer the BSD way of doing things (which is why I tend to favor BSD systems anyway) because it allows me to manage my disk space much more closely by not installing software that I don't use by default. Others like the Linux way because they want to get a lot of stuff on their machine right up front.
Choice is good.
Considering the types of people who work at Intel (presumably a lot of computer nerds) I'm betting that many already have pretty decent computers at home. I know three or four people who work at Intel in Oregon, all are Computer Science graduates, and all have nearly new (purchased within 12-18 months) computers. Sure some won't already have their own machines, but I'm betting a larger percentage of Intel employees already have computers than, say, Ford employees.
:)
Maybe Intel should have given all their employees cars instead.
You should definitely check out the Newsweek article that a previous poster provided a link to. In that article, they equate the PC to being like a "scaled-down '60's mainframe" and not very exciting. Sony wants to position the PS2 as an exciting way to get online, allowing you to play games collaboratively and surf the web. They equate it to being "like the movie The Matrix" in excitement. It's easy to see that they intend to do exactly what you describe: provide a simple and visually appealing way for people to get online. The consequence of this is probably as you say, locking consumers into a more proprietary solution than a generic PC running whatever operating system you want.
Actually, though, Sony may be able to succeed simply because most people don't really care about HOW they get online. They couldn't care less if they're running on a PS2 or on a PC with Windows or Linux. (You and I care about running Linux and using PCs, but we're different from consumers since we're geeks.) In fact, the easier and less expensive it is to get online and play some games and surf the web, the happier most consumers will be.
I just checked and can't believe that there hasn't been one, but I couldn't locate a Slashdot Poll for "Favorite Shell". If this hasn't been a poll item before, it might be interesting to do one for this.
What's really funny is that I've been to USENIX conferences with Dave and he's worn "Korn" T-shirts. I about died the first time I saw him doing this.
Actually, even more funny was when I was at the USENIX Windows NT symposium a few years ago. The Microsofties were up on stage talking about their Unix toolkit for Windows NT. This includes several common Unix commands (ls, cp, ps, etc.) along with a version of ksh. Dave stood up and went to the microphone and mentioned a few areas of incompatibility with the version of ksh used in the Unix toolkit for Windows NT. The Microsofties, not realizing who they were talking to, kept going back and forth with him, insisting that their version of ksh actually did comply with the AT&T ksh, and sort of implying that Dave (who they still didn't recognize) didn't know what he was talking about. Nearly everybody in the audience was laughing out loud, and eventually somebody let the Microsofties in on who exactly they were talking to.
There are several things that came to mind while I was reading the article. Mostly these things are issues of the post office not being able to change the way they think about what they do with regards to how the Internet impacts them. Some thoughts:
First, like a previous poster said, creating email addresses for each physical address in the United States is not the right thing to do. What happens when I move from that physical address? Does the next resident at that house continue to get all of the messages from the cool porn listserv I was subscribed to? What the Post Office should really consider doing is assigning every person an email address that stays with them for life. Sort of like your Social Security Number. How many of these "Yahoo Mail" type sites advertise that you should sign up with them because you get "a lifetime email address"? This is definitely something that people want.
Second, to that end, the Post Office could become the perfect entity to do Certificate Authority functions. Right now, companies like Verisign are trying to figure out how to digitally sign peoples' electronic certificates used to identify themselves online. But this market is just starting to develop and Verisgn certainly doesn't have a lock on it. The Post Office could.
Third, the Post Office doesn't "get" some issues with how the world does business electronically. For example, the article mentions that they'll print out any email that isn't deliverable to me and stuff it in a physical envelope to give to me. Who wants this? Not only does it really defeat the whole concept of electronic mail, but also it fails to take into consideration the fact that online access will be (if it isn't already) so ubiquitous that anybody can afford to be online.
Another example of how the Post Office doesn't "get it" is the example in the article of how they need to find ways to charge less to ship things like CD's, because if I pay $7 for a CD I don't want to pay $9 shipping. The reason I think this is an example of them "not getting it" in the new online world is that I'm probably going to be buying my music online within 5 years -- there won't be a physical CD to ship anyway!
You will never know how happy I am that someone else in the world "got" what happened with the vase! When I saw the movie with my wife, I laughed out loud when Neo knocked the vase over and the Oracle made her comment. My wife wanted to know right then why I found that to be so hilarious, and I knew there was no way in hell I would be able to explain it to her in even an hour, let alone during the movie.
Since then, I've talked to several people about that scene, but nobody I've talked to is a big enough math/CS nut to get it either.
The connection with Universal Turing Machines is similar to the argument for Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem (which someone mentioned above), of course. It's a sort of "The following statement is true. The preceeding statement is false." type of paradox. If the Oracle hadn't told Neo that he would knock over the vase, maybe he wouldn't have knocked it over in the first place. But then, she wouldn't have had to tell him not to worry about knocking it over! Paradox.
I have an old issue (ca. 1990) of Scientific American with an article about how several former members of the Legion of Doom were going to create a computer security consulting company. Reading about the L0pht guys' company reminds me of the LoD guys in a lot of ways, including a trendy picture they had of the LoD guys posing in sunglasses and suits. After the article came out, I recall that they started the company but went out of business a short time later due to a few factors. First, people weren't all that concerned about computer security at the time because it wasn't as obvious of a need in the pre-Internet days. Second, I got the impression that they maybe played around more than they ended up doing productive work.
It will be interesting to see how successful the L0pht guys are. A lot of factors are different now than in the late 1980's. For one thing, people are a lot more aware that there are adversaries out there who want to get into your computers. Also, it seems that the market favors trendy new computer-related companies, a testament to this is the $10mil of startup money they have.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere with this discussion is Gene Spafford's (from Purdue) assertion that it is foolhardy to trust hackers with your sensitive information. He equates this to trusting a crook to guard your bank vault. Not sure I totally agree with this, but it will be interesting to see how the world views this.
There are only a few situations in which a petition is a useful way of getting something done, and this is not one of them.
One example of a situation where a petition is useful is when the constituants of one particular politician present that politician with a petition dealing with a specific, concrete point that the politician does not already agree with. By this, the constituants can show the politician that his or her views do not agree with what the people in his or her region want to see happen. Politicians want to be re-elected, so a petition may cause them to re-think their stance on a particular point if they can see that many people disagree with it.
In the case of exploration of Mars, a petition isn't going to do anything whatsoever. First, just about everybody already agrees that we should send manned missions to Mars, given infinite resources. The fact that we don't have infinite resources means that we need to find a way to balance many interests simultaneously (e.g., the need to explore Mars, the need to feed the nation, the need to reduce crime, etc.). The percentage of resources spent on each interest is not a clear-cut issue, and regardless of how many geeks get together and sign a petition, as long as some way exists to continue exploring Mars (I'm thinking of unmanned missions that are going on now) politicians are going to call that good enough and focus on other social aspects nearer to home. If you don't believe this, the next time the United States gets involved in some conflict overseas, listen to the number of people who complain, "But we should be focusing on issues HERE AT HOME, not in some foreign country."
As far as the industrial people that the petition is directed towards, they won't care either. The only thing that drives them is whether they can make money at something. If you can show them that they can make money off of an investment in technology needed to send a manned mission to Mars, you'll get industrial involvement. Otherwise, you won't.
The concept of technology brings up a second major reason why this petition is pointless: technology. Yep, many people agree that we should send a manned mission to Mars, but just because they all get together doesn't magically make the technology to do this appear. One might argue that a petition might spark new developments in technology that might make such a feat possible, similar to what happened in the Apollo project. However, the difference between a mission to Mars and Apollo is that in the case of Apollo, going to the moon was envisionable with the current technology plus a marginal amount of improvement. In the case of a manned mission to Mars, there are fundamental technological hurdles that need to be figured out. How do we take care of fuel? How do we pack enough food/water for a manned crew to survive for the lengthy trip? How do we ensure that we can get them back home safely? These are major obstacles -- probably more challenging to us now than the obstacles facing the Apollo project were in the 1960's.
In my opinion, in order to put this into perspective, you need to look at the history of the subject at hand.
The first types of supercomputers were faster and better than typical computers because of the design and features put into them. They used faster components which were custom-built (and thus a lot more expensive) and had features like vector units which made them attractive to scientific applications (but again, more expensive). Then, people started to think about how they could make supercomputers at the same or faster performance but bring the cost of producing them down. Rather than using expensive custom-built processors that had to be submerged in cooling fluid or using vector units to manipulate large arrays in a single operation, they started to develop new designs for supercomputers. One new type of machine was SMP based systems such as the Cray PowerChallenge type of machine. In this machine, many processors share a common memory, just like in your 2-way or 4-way desktop boxes now. With these types of machines, the lack of vector units isn't such a big deal since you can instead just separate your array into N different portions (where N = the number of processors) and apply your vector operation in parallel over the processors in the system. The problem with these types of computers is that scaling up to large numbers of processors is difficult since contention for the system bus (to talk between the CPU and memory or I/O) gets complicated with the larger number of processors. Another new type of machine were Massively Parallel Processor (MPP) machines such as the Cray T3D and T3E. In these types of machines, many processors (~1024) are interconnected with a very fast network. Each processor has its own individual memory, so the system can be scaled up to much greater numbers of processors. The problem is that now instead of having a single common shared memory, you have all these distributed memories and you have to use message passing techniques to get your data distributed around, which is a pain. So, this led researchers such as John Hennessy (at Stanford) to come up with a new architecture that uses Distributed Shared Memory (DSM). To the applications programmer, things appear to be a large shared memory (although if you touch certain parts of memory, access times are slower than touching other locations in memory -- since they have to be fetched from a remote machine). In fact what actually happens is that each processor still has its own local memory, but a processor on a very fast interconnect card coupled with each processor examines memory references and if it sees you are using memory that is not local to your processor, fetches the desired section of memory from the remote processor. So, it's sort of an MPP type system but appears to the programmer as sort of an SMP type system. This is what SGI/Cray sells as the Origin 2000. It's still cheaper to produce than traditional vector machines which use custom CPU's and memories (since it uses more commodity CPU's and components), but at the same time offers good relative performance.
Now, in the late 80's, Seymour Cray decided that building supercomputers out of commodity components wasn't the right way to go. His opinion was that, all things being equal, you could always make a faster supercomputer if you used more expensive components and designed your supercomputer with that goal in mind (i.e., use SRAM for all memories, use the fastest technology in your CPU, etc.). To that end, he created a company called Cray Computers which was separate from Cray Research (i.e., Seymour was in charge of Cray Computers and had nothing to do with Cray Research). Cray Research produced the computers such as the PowerChallenge and T3E while Cray Computer continued to make expensive vector-type computers. Unfortunately what ended up happening was that Cray Computers folded because their machines were so expensive and the performance gain you got from them did not justify the greater cost. (Really, the only places that bought these types of computers were "spook sites" like the NSA, to the best of my knowledge.)
The pervading idea is that this trend towards computers that offer decent performance while costing significantly less will continue. This is the idea behind clusters such as the Beowulf or, more importantly, clusters like the NT Supercluster at NCSA. The NT Supercluster differs from a Beowulf in that it uses a more costly network adapter (specifically, a Myrinet adapter from Myricom) to allow internode communication to take place at higher bandwidths and lower latencies than a standard Ethernet. No, the performance of these types of machines is nowhere near what you get from a machine like the Origin 2000, but the idea is that you get comparable performance at a huge reduction in cost. Additionally, because the components used to construct these clusters are commodity components, everybody will be producing these components and continuing to improve their performance. So, the speed of cluster-based computing relative to machines like the Origin improves over time. [Disclaimer: I am one of the people who helped develop the technology in the NT Supercluster, so I have some bias.]
To say that SGI ruined Cray is no more true than to say that they ruined MIPS. The reason that people are not that interested in MIPS processors any more is that Intel processors are a commodity now. Everybody uses them, so the overall industry trend is to make Intel and Intel-related technologies faster and better since everybody works together in a sort of de facto way. Yes, probably the MIPS design is a much better processor design than the Intel design (it wouldn't be difficult), but the key thing is that everybody in industry is using Intel. This is the same reason that building supercomputers out of commodity components (i.e., clusters) will probably be the way things work in the future.