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Tuesday, March
14, 2000
This is a day I would rather forget, although the only
permanent thing we can hope isn't: the dog has to stay overnight at the
vet, which is upsetting.
Meanwhile Earthlink decided not to
work properly, and the problem with Linux is that you can't tell what is
going on. If you thought the Windows error messages were bad, wait until
you try working with Linux: if the modem doesn't connect, you don't get
any message at all. It just doesn't connect. You can't tell if the service
is down, it can't lock on, your password is bad, your user name is bad:
there is no way to know any of that. You can listen to the modem tones and
see if it actually gets to the negotiation stage. In my case with one
Earthlink number it never did: you got a voice message. So I tried to
change access numbers, since dialing the one that we were using got me the
error message on my regular phone line, but another, in Burbank, did
not. But reconfiguring the Linux dialer has the
problem that you don't know what you did, and you can't know what you have
done. In theory the system was dialing a different number. If so, it was
just unlucky because through the Modem Speaker (dimly as in a dream) one
could hear a voice message. But if I dialed that number on my phone, I got
a modem tone. OK, call Earthlink tech services. There is a
message to the effect that there is a problem getting connected in
Southern California, and they're aware of it, and Real Soon Now. Having
had their Real Soon Now regarding my wife's sit this did not fill me with
confidence. However, I put things back the way they were before, and
left to take the dog to the vet. Came back without him. Not in the best
mood. And still no connections. Tried to get IBM.NET
to tell me how to connect through them. Got some procedures and numbers.
Tried, but who knows? I certainly didn't get connected, but since
you can't get error messages out of a Linux box (or I don't know how to do
it) I don't know why. In desperation I got out the 56K USR
modem that used to be on the system. Fortunately I didn't install
it. By then Earthlink tech services was reporting that all was well.
The Netwinder didn't think so. I set the dialup script to what it used to
be, and tried rebooting. It wouldn't dial. At all. I went down and got a
telephone to be sure the modem in the cable room was getting dial tone. It
was. But eventually I figured this one out: in picking up
the modem to listen to it I had managed to pull the other end of the cable
out of the Netwinder. Of course it wasn't dialing. Unfortunately, Linux
wasn't telling me it had a problem, either. It just kept trying, but of
course there was no way for me to know it was trying because, since it
couldn't reach the modem, the lights never blinked... OK,
all's well that ends well, and we hope to have the dog home tomorrow at
noon. But this has not been my favorite day.
and see
http://www.theregister.co.uk/000307-000003.html
Then there is the GetRight mess. I have recommended GetRight
for years, because it has worked very well for me; now Gibson, whom I trust,
has found some disturbing things about it, particularly the AUREATE
advertising scheme which the unregistered version uses. I am looking into
it. It may be
exuberance, but there is some, uh, odd commentary in GetRight. I have
asked them to explain what is going on. See Gibson for more details, www.grc.com
. Of course he is not infallible, and not every programmer who puts really
odd comments in his code has other problems. More when I know more.
From Sunday, 12 March 2000...
Washington
Post.
A respected creator of the Information Age has
written an extraordinary critique of accelerating technological change in
which he suggests that new technologies could cause "something like
extinction" of humankind within the next two generations. The
alarming prediction, intended to be provocative, is striking because it
comes not from a critic of technology but rather from a man who invented
much of it: Bill Joy, chief scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems
Inc, the leading Web technology manufacturer. In a 24-page article in the
Wired magazine that will appear on the Web Tuesday, Joy says he finds
himself essentially agreeing, to his horror, with a core argument of the
Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski that advanced technology poses a threat to
the human species. Joy is disturbed by a suite of advances. He views as
credible the prediction that by 2030, computers will be a million times
more powerful than they are today. He respects the possibility that robots
may exceed humans in intelligence, while being able to replicate
themselves. He points to nanotechnology the emerging science that seeks to
create any desired object on an atom-by-atom basis and agrees that it has
the potential to allow inexpensive production of smart machines so small
they could fit inside a blood vessel. Genetic technology, meanwhile, is
inexorably generating the power to create new forms of life that could
reproduce. What deeply worries him is that these technologies collectively
create the ability to unleash self-replicating, mutating, mechanical or
biological plagues. These would be "a replication attack in the
physical world" comparable to the replication attack in the virtual
world that recently caused the shutdown of major commercial Web sites.
What further concerns him is the huge profits from any single advance that
may seem beneficial in itself. "It is always hard to see the bigger
impact while you are in the vortex of a change," Joy wrote. "We
have long been driven by the overarching desire to know that the progress
to newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its
own." Finally, he argues, this threat to humanity is much greater
than that of nuclear weapons because they are hard to build. By contrast,
he says, these new technologies are not hard to come by. Therefore, he
reasons, the problem will not be "rogue states, but rogue
individuals."
Something else to worry about?
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