This picture is from an article that was in the UWO Gazette a couple of weeks ago. Apparently people at UWO go through about 4000 paper coffee cups a day.
4,000 cups is a lot of waste
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Author Archives: Dan Siemon
Free (as in speech) hardware?
Everyone has heard of free software. How about free hardware?
Check out Ronja.
Ronja is a free technology project of reliable optical data link with current range 1.4km and current communication speed 10Mbps full duplex.
GPL licensed hardware designs. Awesome.
Software as speech
Well, my sense of software is that it’s something that is both speech and a device, depending on how you define it. When you talk about software as speech, many good things tend to flow from that. When you use software as a device you can get into great benefits and also fairly scary issues.
— Don Marti
The above was taken from the November 2005 issue of Linux Journal in an article titled “Dialogue with Don“. This article is definitely worth reading if you have access to it or can wait for it to become freely available.
Tuition referendum
So the Canadian Federation of Students is holding referenda at Universities in Ontario asking if students believe tuition fees should continue to be frozen. Students at UofT have already voted 98% in favour. The vote at Western happens today.
Asking students if they think tuition should be reduced is like asking the NRA if they think guns should be banned. The result is a foregone conclusion.
Linux as a species
Doc Searls (Linux Journal guy) has offered up another explanation of the Linux kernel. This explanation is a extension of the “Linux is the trees” analogy which has been discussed in past Linux Journal issues.
I found the link to this article on Kernel Planet.
EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers
Software analogy
Inside Risks is the last page column in Communications of the ACM. The Inside Risks column in the September 2005 issue, written by Barbara Simons and Jim Horning, discusses how hard it is to get non-technical people to understand why writing bug-free, and more importantly secure software is so hard. The article offers a nice analogy with the following caveat, “Analogy is a poor tool for reasoning, but a good analogy can be very effective in developing intuition.”
One possibly useful analogy is the U.S. Tax Code. Americans have some sense of its complexity and of the large number of people employed in its interpretation. Tax loopholes are analogous to hidden malicious code or Trojan horses in software.
The tax code resembles software in other ways as well:
- It is intended to be precise and to interface with messy realities of the real world.
- It has been developed in multiple iterations, responding to changing circumstances and requirements.
- The people who wrote the original version are no longer around.
- No one understands it in its entirety.
- It can be difficult to infer intent simply be reading a section.
- There are people who actively seek to subvert it.
Of course, there are also major differences between the tax code and software. The tax code is relatively “small” – although it runs to several thousand printed pages, Windows XP has 40 million lines of source code.
SSH article
The September 2005 issue of Linux Journal has another nice SSH article. This one is called Managing SSH for Scripts and cron Jobs.
Note worthy is the discussion of how to securely use passphraseless keys for remote command execution.
Also, I didn’t realize that SSH could be used as a pipe target.
cat file | ssh HOST "cat >> file.out"
EBay and voice service
So EBay thinks that voice calls will be free in the future because calls will be subsidized by advertising. This was their justification for paying way too much for Skype. How they came to this conclusion is beyond me. If anything current trends seem to me to indicate that consumers will use whatever technology they can to avoid ads.
An obvious example is the success that Google has enjoyed with Adwords. Google’s Adwords advertising system is far less intrusive than the previous favourite Internet advertising mechanism, the graphical banner ad. The fact that there are many pieces of software available whose sole purpose is to block banner ads provides another example.
The growing success of PVRs that make it quick and easy to time shift content and skip commercials also shows this trend. One of the main reasons I hear from people for downloading TV shows instead of watching them on normal TV is that it allows them to skip the commercials.
I can’t help but wonder, and hope, that we are entering an era when the Internet has reduced distribution costs to the point that news and even entertainment content will no longer need to be subsidized by advertising. At present advertisers have a lot more control over the content than most people would like to believe. News outlets may be hesitant to report something that is critical of a major advertising customer. Some TV shows have been canceled not because of lack of audience but because advertisers decided they didn’t want to buy ads during the show.
Personally, I will be quite happy to continue paying for my voice service if it means I don’t have to listen to an ad before making a call. Maybe someday I will also be able to pay for a TV show with money instead of my free time.
CASCON 2005
Last Tuesday I attended CASCON 2005. CASCON is hosted by IBM’s Centers for Advanced Studies. I have been to many technology conferences in the past such as Internet World but this was the first academic conference I have attended. As such, I don’t have anything to compare CASCON against. The conference itself seemed to be organized well. The atmosphere was very relaxed.
The keynote speech for the day was by Rob Clyde from Symantec Corp. His speech was entertaining and had lots of good statistics on the current state of computer security. Throughout the whole speech one thought kept circling in my mind, the security industry is far more worried about managing the security problems that plague computer networks than solving them. This makes sense since it is hard to sell solutions to problems that no longer exist. The moral for this story is that computer science as a discipline shouldn’t be looking to the main stream computer security industry for solutions to basic security problems.
A key part of CASCON is the technology showcase. Interested faculty and students are given small booths where they can present their current research to anyone interested. The closest analogy may be an elementary school science fair for adults. This is a great way to get some idea of what other people are currently researching and also provided me with many ideas for my own thesis topic.
Perhaps the most memorable part of my CASCON experience came after the conference was over for the day. During diner I lucked into sitting beside Dr. Morven Gentleman. A short while into the meal I discovered that among several other distinguished positions, Morven had worked at Bell Labs during the late sixties. If you know anything about the history of computing you probably know that both Unix and C were developed at Bell labs during this time. Hearing first hand anecdotes about the formative years of Unix and C was absolutely fabulous. The rest of the diner consisted of me peppering Morven with questions about the history of computing which he seemed happy to answer. Hopefully I wasn’t too annoying.