[hackers] Re: Edge-to-Edge Principal / Reed's Law
Hi, Zack. Thanks for the pointers. I'm copying the list on this so we can all have the same context in this discussion. 1. THE END-TO-END ARGUMENT -- On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, zachary rosen wrote: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_argument [...] A lot more can be found on Edge to Edge (also referred to as end to end) from google. It is something that has been talked about for quite some time. Ah -- now i see that you are talking about what is familiar to me as the end-to-end argument. I do know the Saltzer, Reed, and Clark paper [1]. I wondered if this is what you meant by edge-to-edge, but you seemed to be describing something so different from the end-to-end argument that i assumed you must have meant something else. I think you have misunderstood what Saltzer et al. were trying to say. Let me try to explain. The end-to-end argument is a design principle that has to do with deciding whether system functionality should be placed at high levels or low levels. The paper argues that functions placed at low levels may be redundant or to costly to be worth it, because the same functions often have to get reimplemented by the higher levels anyway -- because the higher levels (e.g. the application) know their own needs better. Putting functionality at a lower level amounts to making an assumption that every application will want that functionality. But if your assumption is wrong, the lower levels might waste a lot of resources trying to provide a service that the application doesn't even need. So you should rely on intelligence at the highest level (in the case of a network, the endpoints of communication) instead of getting too obsessed with the lower levels. For example, it might seem reasonable to assume that a network should always deliver error-free packets. So adding a checksum-and-retry feature to a network layer in order to guarantee accurate delivery may seem like a good idea. But there are some applications that care more about speed than accuracy -- such as voice over IP -- and these would be harmed by the inefficiency of a checksum-and-retry feature. Now let's return to our question about whether the media database should be centralized. Regardless of whether it is centralized or distributed, we are still obeying the end-to-end argument: we are not putting any smarts in the transport layer (TCP/IP); we are totally relying on smarts at the endpoints of communication (that is, the Web browser and the Web server). No one is putting in functions at a low level that are getting reimplemented at a higher level. So the end-to-end argument has no bearing on our decision at all. In particular, it is purely an efficiency argument, and it doesn't say anything about peer-to-peer networks. (Be warned, by the way, that lots of companies use the terms end-to-end and peer-to-peer because they are fashionable, not because they know what they mean.) 2. REED'S LAW - http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%27s_law Originally, my response was going to be that Reed's Law has no effect on our decision either. Reed's Law says that the utility of a network is exponentially related to the number of participants. But it doesn't matter whether you have 5 users at site A and 5 users at site B, or just 10 users at site Z -- you still have 10 users, and utility on the order of 2^10. The utility is the same regardless of whether the database is centralized or distributed. But then i went back and read the original paper [2] and thought about it a little more. Now i've realized that Reed's Law actually argues in *favour* of a centralized database. Notice that the paper doesn't say all networks have utility that scales exponentially in the number of participants. It refers to a specific *type* of network -- a Group-Forming Network. In his words: A GFN has functionality that directly enables and supports affiliations (such as interest groups, clubs, meetings, communities) among subsets of its customers. Group tools and technologies (also called community tools) such as user-defined mailing lists, chat rooms, discussion groups, buddy lists, team rooms, trading rooms, user groups, market makers, and auction hosts, all have a common theme -- they allow small or large groups of network users to coalesce and to organize their communications around a common interest, issue, or goal. The reason that the utility scales exponentially is that, if N people are allowed to form and coordinate their own groups of any size, then there are 2^N possible groups that can be formed. The whole point of Reed's paper is to argue that this group-forming capability is essential and extremely powerful. As an example, he compares ordinary e-mail to mailing lists. Ordinary point-to-point e-mail connects only two people, so its utility scales by N^2 (Metcalfe's Law). But a mailing list can coordinate any number of members, so its utility scales by
Re: [hackers] RE: More on Deanster Participant Content
On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, Zephyr Teachout wrote: Sure, I think it might work. But there is a more basic role for Deanster, and the reason for its urgency (w/the idea of experimenting w/this functionality on top of it). People can't find eachother. Dean supporters in the same area can't find eachother. Dean supporters w/the same interests can't find eachother. If you take the profile module i just posted, adjust privacy settings to taste, and add some category terms for interests, you should be 3/4 of the way there, no? The only two missing pieces are (a) to hook up the taxonomy module so it can tag users as well as content nodes, and (b) to search for zipcodes by distance, but that can't be too hard, since we already have zipcode - latitude + longitude data. -- ?!ng
[hackers] deanspace domain
I don't have a preference for .net or .org, but we have to pick one as the primary domain for people to cite. I've detected some preference for .org among others, though, so i'm going to assume we're going with that unless there is violent objection. My plan is to issue HTTP redirects from all of www.deanspace.net/(.*) web.deanspace.net/(.*) deanspace.net/(.*) www.deanspace.org/(.*) web.deanspace.org/(.*) to just deanspace.org/$1. I hope this is an acceptable plan. Good news: i have just received a reply from the owner of deanspace.com. He is willing to add a link to us from his site's front page. -- ?!ng
[hackers] Bluesky 2.0 released
I've revised the bluesky theme to add a mug of Dean to the header graphic. The footer message is now a configurable variable, and it combines the theme footer with the site footer. See: http://www.hack4dean.org/phpwiki/index.php?DrupalThemes Hope you like it! -- ?!ng
Re: [hackers] Bluesky 2.0 released
On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Neil Drumm wrote: About the footers, I consider it my job to make sure all the themes handle this the same, but I haven't asked the list exactly how these should be handled. Okay. It's good to have some consistency. Drupal lets admins set the footer message, we can have this appriopriatly set by default in the kit we are building. However, this does allow admins to go remove stuff that keeps themselves and us out of potential legal trouble. I'll describe how i attempted to handle this problem in Bluesky 2.0 -- just as a starting point for ideas. Please post on whether this sounds reasonable, feel free to suggest better ways or policies, etc. - The theme has its own footer on its configuration page. This footer contains the CC license message and the 11 CFR message. - This message has to announce who is paying for the site. The [SPONSOR] variable is substituted into the 11 CFR message from the Sponsor field, another setting in the theme config. - An admin can change or erase the theme footer, but there's an explanation under the text box that recommends keeping the CFR message, with a link to the relevant section of the FEC site. - Both the site footer (from the site configuration page) and the theme footer appear together at the bottom of the page. Do we need a portion hardwired in and what language should it have? That's still an open question. At the moment all i know about is 11 CFR 110.11(a)(1)(iii). See http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/11cfrv1_03.html It may be wise to hardcode this into themes. I don't know. Does anyone know of other requirements? -- ?!ng
[hackers] Datebook RSS Schema
On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Kurt Cagle wrote: I've added the optional endDateTime element to the scheduledTime element. endDateTime and duration are mutually exclusive, you cannot have both simultaneously. If neither endDateTime or duration is included, the assumption is made that the event will take place for 1 hour. Hi, Kurt. Just some thoughts... Sorry to make trouble, but is it really necessary to have two different elements for expressing the same thing? I am generally wary of redundancy in protocols, especially where it is possible for redundant representations to be in conflict. Why not just stick to a single duration element and keep it simple? Some events might not last any length of time -- for example, a deadline -- or an unknown length of time -- such as a dinner party. Instead of defaulting to a duration of 1 hour, how about interpreting events with no duration as having no duration? -- ?!ng
Re: [hackers] Fwd: User account details for joshk at Indiana forDean
On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: NNTP. You do realize that what we are doing is rebuilding much of what NNTP is supposed to do, don't you? That's slightly tongue-in-cheek -- but only slightly. Multiple sites aggregating articles, sharing articles with each other, updating each other on new posts: it's been done, and it's called Usenet. Of course we're adding user authentication, nice graphics, and more structured data -- but it's worth noting that Usenet didn't work by having every site poll every other site for updates. Just something to think about. -- ?!ng
Re: [hackers] A Proposition
On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, Zack Rosen wrote: Basically I am proposing we dissolve the H4D working group and reform the organization as the Dean Space development community. Snap snap. Looks good to me. I have deanspace.net and deanspace.org; i can update the IPs as soon as you tell me where to point them. Should i point them at the same IP as hack4dean.org for now? -- ?!ng
Re: [hackers] Browser Detect?
On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, scorpiosunmoon wrote: Am I missing something? Is there a built in browser detect? Or something along those lines??? I haven't checked them all but many of these themes look pretty funky in Netscape 4. Netscape 4 is (i'm afraid i cannot put it more delicately) a piece of junk when it comes to CSS. It blatantly ignores the standard, it's full of bugs, and its release did untold damage to the Web by delaying the adoption of CSS for many years. Probably tens of thousands of person-hours of work have been wasted all over the world because of the incompetence of the Netscape programmers. For users who still suffer with Netscape 4, the best solution is likely for some kind soul who still runs NN 4 (i don't have it any more) to develop a theme that specifically works around its problems. We may be able to throw in a user-agent check that chooses a different default theme when the user is running NN 4. -- ?!ng
Re: [hackers] is an automatic installation script feasible?
On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On this same line of thinking, (perhaps Moshe will know this best), is it feasible to customize a sandbox with everything we want - right themes, right modules - and then package that for distribution? Great idea. I totally agree -- we definitely should (and can) do this. On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Neil Drumm wrote: We can easily make a tarball of Drupal with our extra modules and themes in all the right places. [...] An install.php could definately handle the database installation. With a little additional cleverness it ought to be possible to configure include/conf.php using a setup.php script as well. As for something that goes through and configures everything in the admin pages, maybe a database dump? Yes, i'm pretty sure that will do the trick. All the settings (modules, themes, blocks, etc. etc.) are stored in the database as far as i can tell. So when we want to do a release, we just set up an empty instance of Drupal and freeze it by dumping the tables. Then the user installation procedure is reduced to: 1. Upload our tarball to your web site and unpack it. 2. Use your ISP's admin interface to create a new MySQL database. 3. Visit setup.php and follow the instructions. How important do you think the case is where people won't be able to create a new database for Drupal, and will instead have to use an existing database? Are there lots of ISPs that only give you one database? If that case turns out to be important, we might want to consider modifying Drupal so all the table names have a common prefix like drupal_ (just like Movable Type has mt_), so that it's safe to merge all the tables into an existing database; then step 2 becomes optional and installation is reduced to steps 1 and 3. -- ?!ng
