| Monday
JUNE 18 And the Week
Because of PC EXPO all the mail for
the week is here. There will not be all that much. I'll catch up next
week.
Hello, Jerry,
On Thursday, Stephen St. Onge
wrote: "Read John
Dewey and think about it as you go. It sounds awfully like 'THOSE people
don't need academic subjects of the sort we teach OUR kids in prep school.
Lets make sure they get ready for the factories, where they belong.'"
Mr. St. Onge has mistaken Dewey for his opponents,
the conservatives, one wing of whom did, indeed, think that public schools
should train working class children to be sort of obedient factory robots.
See, for example, G. Stanley Hall, a student of William James, and a man
who is otherwise mostly remembered as the president of Clark University
who invited Freud to speak there -- the only time Freud lectured in the
US.
Dewey wanted children to learn experimentation, the
methods of scientific research. He talks often about experience and
activity, because he believed that the only way to learn something was to
practice it. He also believed that actual experience (he talks constantly
about the experiencing and the undergoing) throws up the real problems
that need to be solved. His argument against traditional education was
that it killed the spirit of inquiry and experimentation, that it
worshiped handed-down facts.
Dewey grew up when the traditional education was a
training in Latin and Greek, when history meant the study of Thucydides
and Tacitus. There were serious battles around either side of 1900 about
whether American colleges should continue to require classics, and whether
they should tolerate the teaching of the hard sciences and engineering.
(This is described in David Noble's "America by Design", which I
read about 25 years ago. Probably superseded by later studies.)
Dewey was on the side of the scientists and
engineers, and against the other sort of conservative, who wanted to hold
to the traditional classics education.
I agree: read Dewey, and think about it as you go. I
am reading Dewey's little book, "Experience and Education"; next
I'll try the big on, "Democracy and Education". I hope all of
your readers will do the same.
Regards,
John Welch
Well it isn't as simple as that, but
worse is what was done in Dewey's name. Jacques Barzun's TEACHER IN
AMERICA goes into some of it.
The real problem is that
"research" in education is terrible, on a par with witch
sniffing. The passion for look-say reading came from studying mature
readers and how they read, and paid no attention to how they LEARNED to
read. It was shoddy work in its entirety, but is still hailed by
professors of education whose notion of statistics would be laughed out of
the factory if they tried to work as quality control engineers. Yet they
dictate how children will be educated (although few of those clowns ever
taught any children; professors of education are generally too lofty for
that).
As to the traditional classics
education, that involved learning the addition and multiplication tables
and learning to recite poetry, please tell me the advantage of the modern
system in which kids poke around trying to discover things for themselves
(or reinvent the wheel). Humans are a time binding species. If we
make them start over every generation the result is pretty grim,
There is a book THE SABER TOOTH
CURRICULUM which gives a pretty good account of what is going on. It is
from the Dewey perspective but paid attention to some realities. Of course
it is long vanished...
Discussion
Continues
I seem to recall you discussing this a few weeks
back... http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q156/5/68.asp?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=taskbar&rnk
=9&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=NTW40
== Nicholas Bretagna II
"The only tyrant I accept in this world is the
still voice within" - Mohandas K. Gandhi -
Hi Jerry,
I didnt see this on your page, but I thought it
might interest you. I havent verified it, but maybe your 'team' can.
Melbourne-based online marketing company, Reva
Networks, is currently promoting a new e-mail technology--Admail--that
allows online advertisers to intercept e-mail messages as they enter the
mail server and "wrap" them in advertising content tailored to
the recipient's demographic profile.
See it at: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2779267,00.html?chkpt=zdnn_rt_latest
Regards, Fred
Haven't seen it. Thanks
From: Jon Barrett
To: Jerry Pournelle
Subject: Quickview Plus Compression in Outlook
In QuickView Plus, View | Configure Quick View
Plus...". Choose "Outlook" (never mind the check box. it's
activated by having Windows Explorer activated.), then the
"Options" tab. At the bottom is a check bosx to "Compress
attachments larger than [Spin box - default is 100] KB in size."
BTW - Quick View Plus is only republished by JASC.
It is developed, maintained, and distributed to the corporate market by
Inso (although trying to go to www.inso.com brought me to eBT, who are
announcing their liquidation).
Regards
Jon Barrett Jonzann@altavista.net Kensington, MD
I cannot find that configure screen.
What brings it up? All my attempts to open QuickView simply fail unless I
have specified a document, and I can't FIND THE SCREEN you describe. I
will probably have this in next week's mail also. That program gives me
the heebeejeebeeies
Jerry I have direcpc and have had it for years. I
know of no "latency" while the uplink takes place and downloads
are very speedy. I live in Oklahoma and have cable modem service at work;
there is no difference in user experience between the two except of course
that I have to dial up at home. I often leave the connection open for days
at a time with no ill effect; we share the connection using analogx proxy
and winroute (why both? long story..........) and there is no lag on any
of my six machines. I use 10base ethernet; I can see no benefit to 100.
There is also now a two way system that you can get but as long as you
have a phone line the only benefit to two way is if you are hosting a web
site from your house. Anyway, you have my sympathies, I can barely stand
my phone line connection when I use my laptop or at a client's site. PS I
love your column and have since the early days of Byte magazine....keep up
the good work!!!!!!
dennis brackeen R & D Computer Consulting
Shawnee, Oklahoma dennis_r_menace@msn.com
I certainly have to try satellite at
some point. But I was told I would hate the latency particularly for
on-line games. Thanks.
subject: ADSL conspiracy?
David Brown speculates that ADSL problems are a
deliberate conspiracy between the telcos and their suppliers in an attempt
to push the severely wounded suppliers into the bankruptcy bin.
He cannot get ADSL in Oakville. Many of my friends
have ADSL in Vancouver.
In Vancouver, the factor is that the telco wants to
fill a rack at once before turning anything on. Some people can wait much
of a year before the telco will deign to talk to them. But once the telco
accepts their application and initiates the process, it seems to go
cleanly. I wonder if this is a matter of competition.
In Canada, most non-poor urban people have either
cable or satellite. Canada's cable market is carved up by regulatory
authorities with two or three big cablecos and lots of little ones, with
only one company in a given suburb. (I've recently been swapped from
Rogers to Shaw.) My local cableco has been very aggressive in pursuing
broadband sales. If you already have cable, then a cable internet
connection is C$35 (US$23) a month in a region where merely a phone line
is C$27. This includes the modem rental (rental fee on the cable modem has
been "real soon now" for three years), and a free (to keep)
network card to attach it to. It is trivial to find a way for them to give
you the installation for free and occasionally eat the first month or
two's connection fee. (pretty much say "Um, maybe" when talking
to one of their sales reps at a mall display)
Into this market, our telco has positioned an ADSL-lite
product (throttled at some cut-off intended to compare with a typical
cable connection) at a similar monthly rate and only slightly more
difficult to get. My circle of friends and acquaintances who have
broadband is pretty close to 50% in each technology.
David gets a different telco than I do, but market
laws are universal. Perhaps David's cable company is letting the market
lapse, so his telco's effort is going somewhere else in Ontario. I know
that they're fighting like mad in my market.
The Vancouver experience would seem to disprove the
conspiracy he speculates about.
Greg Goss ( mailto:gossg@mindlink.com <mailto:gossg@mindlink.com>
)
Mr. Pournelle,
I'm in agreement with you on the broadband issues. I
live in a small town called Muncie, Indiana. This town is home to Ball
State University,and one would think broadband services would be dying to
get in. Nope.. We have Comcast @Home, and that's it. For a business user,
it would be $225/month to get static IP addresses and the ability to use
VPN into the company network where I work.
There were 2 DSL providers who came in last year,
but both are bankrupt and have dropped service to the area. The FCC, in
it's infinite wisdom of 'spurring competition', denied SBC/Ameritech the
right to offer DSL services in the entire state of Indiana, until 2 months
ago. Of course, they wouldn't allow them to upgrade their equipment either
during the interim. Now, SBC/Ameritech is trying to scramble to upgrade
equipment.
To make a long story short: Broadband to the masses
is a myth, IMHO.
Thank you, L.Dwayne Sudduth Messaging and Security
Architect United Water office:
The main difficulty with DSL is
regulatory. It takes a big investment to upgrade copper, but the
Telecommkunicati0ns Act says that if the Bells make the investment they
have to let Earthlink and others use the services at rates below the cost
of recovery of the upgrades. Oddly enough the Bells are reluctant.
This was ostensibly to stop a
monopoly: the Bells have all the copper. But of course radio is the coming
thing. Much on this in the column, but the problem is regulations and
laws, not technology. And note Eric's analysis:
In regard to David Brown question about dark fiber
comprising the overwhelming bulk of buried strands, this has absolutely
nothing to do with the lack of DSL availability to anyone. Every single
strand could be terminated and ready to carry bits and it wouldn't make
the slightest difference.
First of all, 99% of broadband availability is tied
up in the last mile. Really several miles for the people most in need or
in Jerry's case a seeming few dozen feet. Spanning that distance from a
high speed trunk to your home or office is the most difficult part of the
job largely due to the sheer expense. Stringing new lines, especially if
they have to be underground, is a great expense, much more than the line
itself. A couple years ago someone asked Bill Gates why broadband is
taking so long. He responded that Moore's Law had no bearing on the cost
of operating backhoes.
This same issue of expense is the reason for the
many thousands of miles of fiber buried unused alongside railroads and
other right of way thoroughfares. The great majority of the capital
investment for an optical network is in the deployment and the equipment
that sends and receives the photons. The fiber itself, while not without
significant cost, is way down on the list of expenses in such an endeavor.
Because of this, it makes good sense to put in a substantial number of
strands whenever you're digging a trench. Better to have too much and
swallow some cost than to have not enough and be faced with opening the
trench again.
If it were necessary to bring a new line out to your
home or office to offer high speed connectivity there would only be a tiny
fraction of the broadband users there are today. Thankfully, some clever
engineers figured out how to get vastly more happening on the wires are
already used for our telephones. This is just the beginning. Most of the
current broadband offering are making use of existing infrastructure.
There are already some companies in certain remote communities that are in
the position of providing both telephone and cable service without a major
name in the area who are running fiber directly to the home or so close as
to make no difference. This recent article in Broadband Week points to an
interesting example of a company in the special position to offer such
service: http://www.broadbandweek.com/news/010305/010305_cable_hux.htm
Check out this housing development for both
fantastic views and bandwidth: http://www.oregoncoast.net/harborhill.html
Jerry jokes that it will be but a few years before
analog connections are remembered in the same fashion as vinyl records but
the current broadband offering are just the tip of the iceberg. Megabit
service will seem like a very minor stopgap on the way to true broadband
in years to come.
Eric Pobirs
And Roland points out that Red Hat
isn't doing as well as people may think:
http://investor.cnet.com/investor/news/newsitem/0-9900-1028-6333426-0.html?tag=pt.yahoo.fin..ne
My system was hacked about six months ago. I don't
have a moral to this story, but sometimes you seem to like posting
anecdotes for their own sake :-)
I'm on a cable modem, at the time attached to a
486/33 running RedHat 6.0 (originally RH 5.2.) My Linux expertise sounds
very close to yours. It took me a week of part-time searching through
HOWTOs to get the thing set up and running with the 5.2 equivalent to
ipchains. I turned off lots of stuff I wasn't using, like the mail server,
ftp, etc. ostensibly to make it more secure. After that, I was able to
basically ignore it for over a year. I think it locked up two or three
times during that year, for no known reason.
One day, my roommate received an email from someone
saying that he "...should add port scanning to [his] resume." We
have some ideas on how the guy might have come up with my roommate's email
address, though we would have expected my ISP-based address more likely to
come up first in most searches based on the firewall's IP address. Later
that same day I got a form email from my ISP (AT&T @Home) telling me
that it was my responsibility to secure my system, or they'd cut me off.
Obviously, someone had complained to them.
Anyway, the first email prompted us to check on the
firewall. After a few hours of spelunking through manuals and man pages I
stumbled across the ps command to display current processes. From the
process ID numbers on consecutive ps commands, it was clear that something
was creating and deleting about 15 or 20 processes every second. I also
noticed that a user account named "core" was creating these
processes. There was no mention of a "core" account in the
manuals, so I assume that it was created by the hacker.
Luckily, it appears that the worm wasn't smart
enough to look for our Windows machines on the internal network.
I thought about trying to observe it for awhile and
figure out exactly what it was doing, but I simply didn't have the time to
build the necessary expertise. It would have been nice if I had figured
out ahead of time how to turn on logging. I toyed with doing that a few
times, but there just weren't any concise descriptions on how to do it. So
I never got around to it.
Eventually, I was able to kill the "core"
account. Over the course of the next few days we checked the firewall
several times a day and never saw the same activity show up. Still, the
hacker/bot had obviously gotten in once, and I didn't have any good ideas
on how to keep him out if he tried again. I now know that the version of
RH I was running is vulnerable, so it was only a matter of time before it
was cracked again.
So at that point I had a few options:
- Upgrade the 486 to the latest version of Linux - I
had already bought an inexpensive firewall package, NetMax, that I was
hoping would be easier to maintain, but it needed a Pentium to run. My
other roommate had a P133 that he was willing to dedicate as a firewall. -
Buy one of the new firewall "appliances"
We ended up choosing option 2, run the new software
on the P133. NetMax went in fairly easily. It works fine, but isn't quite
as flexible through the GUI as I had hoped. Obviously, the standard
tradeoff between GUI vs configuration files. It does have a UI to the logs
that make it fairly easy to see what's going in and out. They have a newer
version that I haven't upgraded to, yet. As far as we can tell, we haven't
been compromised again. So far :-/
As I said, I'm not able to draw a moral from this
story. I took what I thought were reasonable precautions and they
ultimately proved to be not good enough. I'm not sure what else a home
user should be expected to do.
Drake Christensen
Good story. Thanks!
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