Author: RB

Coalition of the wooly

Check out the membership of the Save the Internet Coalition and ask yourself why it’s all a bunch of pie-eyed world saviors without a single networking guru in the ranks.

Joining this coalition amounts to putting a big sign on your back saying “I’m an idiot.”

Why? Simply put the Internet of the past is not so well-designed that it should be the Internet of the future. If we’re going to move serious amounts of phone calls and video programming over the net, the plumbing will have to change. Network neutrality is simply standing in the way of progress, and this coalition has consistently demonstrating abject ignorance about how the Internet works.

H/T Jeff Jarvis, who doesn’t get the fact that some resources really are finite.

Apple goes Windows

This had to happen:

Turning a decades-long rivalry on its head, Apple Computer introduced software today that it says will easily allow users to install Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system on Apple’s newest computers.

The software, Boot Camp, is available as a free download on Apple’s Web site and will be part of the next version of Apple’s operating system, Leopard. It works on Apple’s three lines of computer that run on Intel chips — the Mac mini, the iMac and the MacBook Pro.

I told you so (and so did John Dvorak).

So what’s happening here? Easy, Apple has realized they’re now an MP3 company and not a computer company. So it makes no sense to spend as much as they do on OS development for their computers when they have low-cost alternatives. One way they could go is to Linux, but it’s got so many warts it’s not worth the bother, so the default choice is Windows. Now what happens if Apple packages all their software for Windows, but it just works better on their hardware than anybody else’s? They sell a bunch of hardware, and they sell a bunch of software, so everybody’s happy, including Microsoft and Intel.

What’s the hang-up? It’s interesting to note that Media Center won’t run on the Apple hardware. That should be a gigantic clue to what comes next.

Linux: A tale of woe

I’ve been using Linux on my desktop at work for years, and during that time I’ve maintained a doggy slow Linux box at home mainly for remote work on the desktop. So when I did my latest hardware upgrade of the home computer, I decided to switch over from Windows 2000 to Fedora Core Linux, thinking it would simplify things and all that. I also wanted to roll a home HDTV recorder/server using MythTV and some of the other open source stuff. So my plan was to build up a nice machine that I could use for software development, web stuff, and TV hooked into my home network and attached through the Internet to the company.

It turns out it wasn’t so easy.

The hardware I selected is all the latest and greatest stuff: ASUS A8N-VM/CSM motherboard, with an on-board nVidia video adapter with DVI out, S/PDIF out, Gig Ethernet, lots of USB, dual channel DDR, AMD’s 64 bit processor, and Serial ATA-II; a 300 GB Maxtor drive with Serial ATA-II, a DVD-RAM burner (that can handle all the other formats as well) . Windows XP installed on my system without incident, connected to Microsoft and downloaded updates. It runs great.

Linux was another story. I started with Fedora Core 4, the latest “stable” version and by most accounts a flawed distribution. Never mind that Fedora ripped out all the video stuff out of fear of the FCC, you can add it in later. The trouble with Fedora Core 4 is that it didn’t know what to do with my hardware. Sure, it was able to run its install program Anaconda from the CDs that I burned. But Anaconda didn’t recognize my disk drive, and actually told me my hardware was defective. Now I can understand that some software may not support some hardware, but the current Linux recovery tools can see SATA-II drives attached to nVidia controllers and format and partition them; just try Gnu parted or QtParted. Apparently you can trick the installer into using current technology with the “device” command, but this isn’t immediately obvious.

So rather than screw around with all that (there are multiple problems with FC4 and nVidia), I decided to jump right into Fedora Core 5, currently in the final testing phase and reasonably stable. It turns out that was probably a good move, as the standard set of CDs for Test 3 (4.92) installed on my system without incident and booted up.

But that’s when the fun starts. It turns out that the Ethernet won’t work if you’ve run Windows on it previously and haven’t done a cold start (disconnecting the power cord from the wall.) And it turns out you don’t get a mouse cursor in X – from your login screen and beyond – and it turns out that your keyboard and network will die within minutes of startup. These issues are all well known, as is the failure of Kudzu (the new hardware scanner) and some other nice things, but the Fedora people are heads-down to release the first “Release Candidate” on Monday.

I already know it won’t run on any system with an ATI or NVidia chipset, however. One of the developers introduced a new bug after testing closed that causes these drivers not to load, and he plans to roll out a fix a few days after the release on Monday. This points to a couple of problems with the Open Source way of doing things:

1. A programmer shouldn’t be allowed to check code into the project that hasn’t been tested. And code that hasn’t been tested shouldn’t be distributed to mirrors all over the world. This is the “adult supervision” problem.

2. Open Source doesn’t interact well with advanced hardware. The vendors are reluctant to share detailed specs with open source developers because such specs are cookbooks to copy shops that want to clone the hardware. Today the competition is between ATI and nVidia, and a few years ago it was between 3Com and Intel. So these guys release enough information for the Open Source people to write drivers that perform OK but not great, and they release their own binary drivers that run fast and don’t disclose the tricks they did in the hardware to boost performance. That’s reasonable.

This is the way it has to be, and it’s perfectly consistent with “free as in speech, not as in beer.” You don’t get free hardware with Linux, you just get free sofware. Sorry.

So all of this tells me that my new computer isn’t going to be running Linux anytime soon, and I’ll probably have to stick with Windows, relegating Linux to the last generation of hardware as before.

Can Linux ever catch up with Windows or is it doomed to be the red-headed stepchild of software engineering? My guess is that there’s a structual flaw in the Open Source model, and I’ve just hit it.

UPDATE: OK, it wasn’t really all that hard. I went back to Fedora Core 4 since Core 5 isn’t there yet. You have to invoke the installer using “linux noprobe” so that you can tell it what driver to use to find the SATA-II drive (sata_nv). After it installs, you then have to edit the GRUB bootloader to add “noapic” to the OS command line, and you can cement that into /boot/grub/grub.conf so you don’t have to do it each time you boot.

Synchronizing the nVidia drivers with the kernel version is a trick, so more on that later.

I said FC5 ain’t there yet, and this is why:

A note for users of ati-fglrx and nvidia-glx: Due to a bug in the FC5 release kernel users of non-GPLed kernel modules will have to wait for an errata kernel; that should happen soon. BTW, the driver packages got renamed; they are now xorg-x11-drv-fglr and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.

The official Fedora web site is silent on this problem, much to their shame.

Burning Man brings Internet to New Orleans

Maybe those Burning Man people aren’t completely worthless after all:

Now the group, known as Burners Without Borders, is using new Kyocera mobile hot-spot technology to create a wide-area-network in an area with little, if any, Internet access. Their shoestring network, based on $250 routers and $150 wireless cards, could prove to be a model for other volunteer groups in disaster areas.

The credit goes to Kyocera, and it’s a very cool little deal they’ve got.

Why political discussions are so stupid

A shocking new study reveals that people don’t process political information with their rational brains, but with their hysterical emotions:

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

“None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” Westen said. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

The tests involved pairs of statements by the candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, that clearly contradicted each other. The test subjects were asked to consider and rate the discrepancy. Then they were presented with another statement that might explain away the contradiction. The scenario was repeated several times for each candidate.

The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate.

“The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data,” Westen said.

Duh.

Breathtaking stupidity

There’s way too much stupidity in the world to comment on all of it, but sometimes you see something that sets a new standard. The Cato Institute has commissioned Jaron Lanier to explain the Internet, and his contribution makes all the silly drivel written about it in the past look downright serious. Lanier’s main point is that the Internet is a social construct:

I hope I have demonstrated that the Net only exists as a cultural phenomenon, however much it might be veiled by an illusion that it is primarily industrial or technical. If it were truly industrial, it would be impossible, because it would be too expensive to pay all the people who maintain it.

Now it’s silly enough when left-feminist academics say “gender is a social construct” but this is downright hilarious. Lanier had something to do with gaming goggles once upon a time, but he’s basically illiterate and has no special expertise in networking. Cato is obviously over-funded and intent on wasting your time.

If you want to read a futurist of merit, check out Ray Kurzweil, a man of learning and intelligence who certainly won’t waste your time with a bunch of new-age drivel.

Coyote at the Dog Show has read Lanier’s essay, and he’s not impressed either. He mentions Lanier’s seemingly senseless attack on the concept of the “file” in computers. The revolutionary alternative that Lanier proposes is a time-indexed file, something that’s commonplace for video servers. Not exactly revolutionary, and not exactly well-informed.

If you don’t like files, folders, directories, and symbolic links, fine, throw all your stuff into a single common file and be done with it.

Baiting the blogosphere

Declan McCullagh is Cnet’s chief political correspondent and an ardent champion of civil liberties, EFF-style*. He runs the Politech e-mail list, a place where such stories as the Little Red Book hoax are given wide currency and writes a column on civil liberties for Cnet, which most recently consists of a hysterical misconstruction of the telephone harassment provision added to the Violence Against Women Act. I’m no fan of VAWA, which is mainly a barrel of pork to fund “feminist” advocacy groups and has very little to do with reducing violence, but McCullough’s interpretation of the harassment law is completely ridiculous:

It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

Well actually, it is a joke, as Cal Lanier explains:

Jeff Jarvis and others are upset about a News.com story declaring that President Bush made it a crime to write annoying comments on the internet. But perhaps the ranters didn’t read the source material.

Section 113 of the Violence Against Women Act adds a parameter to the telephone harassment law’s definition of “telecommunications device”: include any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications.

The definition already excludes “an interactive computer service”, defined as any information service, system, or access software provider, which should eliminate Internet postings from consideration, unless I’m missing something.

Here’s the important part of the new definition: includes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications .

If that doesn’t ring a bell, you probably aren’t familiar with the battle to define VOIP (voice over internet protocol). The previous law assumed that all phone calls would be made via a “telecommunications service” using a “telecommunications device”. The FCC has consistently found that VOIP is an unregulated “information service”, thus exempting it from all sorts of fees and services. A VOIP call may be functionally indistinguishable from a landline or cell phone call. Legally, though, it’s not a telecommunications service and doesn’t require the use of a telecommunications device. Adding the new text to the definition removes a potential loophole and ensures that VOIP calls will be treated just as any other telephone call.

and Orin Kerr concurs:

This is just the perfect blogosphere story, isn’t it? It combines threats to bloggers with government incompetence and Big Brother, all wrapped up and tied togther with a little bow. Unsurprisingly, a lot of bloggers are taking the bait.

Skeptical readers will be shocked, shocked to know that the truth is quite different. First, a little background. The new law amends 47 U.S.C. 223, the telecommunications harassment statute that goes back to the Communications Act of 1934. For a long time, Section 223 has had a provision prohibiting anonymous harassing speech using a telephone. 47 U.S.C. 223(a)(1)(C) states that

[whoever] makes a telephone call or utilizes a telecommunications device, whether or not conversation or communication ensues, without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person at the called number or who receives the communications . . . shall be [punished].

Seems pretty broad, doesn’t it? Well, there’s a hook. It turns out that the statute can only be used when prohibiting the speech would not violate the First Amendment. If speech is protected by the First Amendment, the statute is unconstitutional as applied and the indictment must be dismissed.

This isn’t the first time McCullough has gone over the deep end on a story like this, and not the first time that bloggers have fallen for it, esp. those who suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Silly bloggers.

*The EFF is an ersatz civil liberties organization that’s more concerned with virtual rights than real ones. They’re more worried about the fact that the Patriot Act enables the Justice Department to look at your library records, which they don’t actually do, than with the fact that Title IV-D of the Social Security Act enables child support agencies to data-mine bank accounts and utility records, which they do, and to imprison debtors without right to counsel, even innocent ones, as they also do. I have very little respect for rights groups who think it’s more important to collect child support than to defeat Al Qaeda; crazy, I know.

Sounds like fun

Today’s debate in the US House is the sort of thoughtful deliberation I like to see:

The fiery, emotional debate climaxed when Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, the most junior member of the House, told of a phone call she received from a Marine colonel.

“He asked me to send Congress a message: stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: cowards cut and run, Marines never do,” Schmidt said.

Democrats booed and shouted her down, causing the House to come to a standstill.

I believe poor Mr. Murtha is sincere but misguided, and because of that, doesn’t deserve being called a coward; Ms. Schmidt should dial her rhetoric down a notch.

The Republicans aced the Democrats on this one. Murtha’s resolution was basically an immediate troop withdrawal with all sorts of loopholes and caveats that would have provided too much cover to members trying to have it both ways. It’s right that the troops in Iraq should know that their mission is, and how its success will be measured.