Re: new webpage: rikai.com

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Todd" == Todd Rudick <Todd.Rudick@example.com> writes:

    Todd>   Exactly. If there are serious arguments for doing this
    Todd> client-side, I certainly don't see them holding water for
    Todd> more than another year or two.  We're talking 20-40k of data
    Todd> to send around, based on many megs of dictionary
    Todd> files. Light makes the trip pretty damn fast.

Yeah, and I live in Tsukuba Science City and work at what may be the
best-wired university in the country (my PC is 4 hops from Stockton
CA, two on campus) and sometimes on a bad day I get throughput
measured in single digit KILObytes on my LAN.  Home connectivity?
HAW!

Get out of Tokyo's business district (Ebisu is nice, isn't it; nice
offices you guys got there, beautiful machine room) and find out what
the Third World looks like.

The UK is worse, outside of London and the big universities.  Thus Am
I Told, and not just by Simon.

The problem is not hardware.  The hardware will be put into place.

The problems are (1) lack of able admins -- just yesterday Sun
Microsystems and Alcatel Networks both bounced posts to mailing lists
back to me, violating RFCs all over the place (Sun actually edited my
post, and sent it back to me with MY Message-ID, confusing my procmail
cache no end), not to mention doing so in a completely useless way
(not reporting the envelope address); if those guys can't find good
admins, who can? (2) senior admins like my own Beavis whose goals for
the organization firewall are self-contradictory, so that they do
things like deny all ICMP at the front door, and (3) insufficient
manpower to handle the inevitable snafus from design on down to
day-to-day maintenance in the backbone nodes.

This is not going to get fixed in a year or two; it's going to get
worse for 5 years, until the labor markets get ramped up.

    Todd> One can use Jim's dictionary lookup program on a docomo
    Todd> phone--why on earth would you want to download and
    Todd> constantly update edict,kanjidic,namdict,etc.--unless you're
    Todd> a hacker trying out new ideas (a small percentage of users),

Most users wouldn't.  But in the near future many of those corporate
users will be using VPNs that don't allow them to surf the net;
instead they'll be using in-house resources (there's plenty of room
for multiple rikai-style servers in the world).  And ISPs will want
those servers to in-house so they can suck up the ad revenues.

    Todd> or using it for proprietary business purposes (in which
    Todd> case, Stephen is unlikely to shed tears for you, I would
    Todd> guess, so write me offline).

Shed tears, no.  I'll take consulting fees though.  Unlike many of the
people on this list, I'm very sympathetic to making money off of open
source, even in proprietary applications.[1]  I just think that security
through obscurity is as bad a business strategy as it as a network
security strategy.



Footnotes: 
[1]  I am also very sympathetic to open source developers who would
like to strengthen their licensing to prevent "behind-closed-doors"
exploitation of their code in proprietary apps such that the GPL does
not require redistribution of modifications.  Ie, I'm a fan of the
AFPL and other no-commercial-use licenses.

I basically think the GPL has served its purpose, and the LGPL is now
a preferable alternative (although Linus and Larry are busily
emasculating the GPL via their interpretations of clause 6, the "viral
clause").  But if other programmers want to use it, and the evidence
is that they do, I certainly support their right to do so.

-- 
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