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1992-09-20
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From: Various
Subject: From the Mailbag
Date: 15 June, 1991
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*** CuD #3.21: File 2 of 7: From the Mailbag ***
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From: vnend@PRINCETON.EDU(D. W. James)
Subject: Re: Cu Digest, #3.20 (file 5--response to M. Hittinger)
Date: 13 Jun 91 16:08:27 GMT
In CuD #3.20, file 5, (an288@freenet.cleveland.edu) Mark Hittinger writes:
) Personal computers are so darn powerful now. The centralized MIS
)department is essentially dead. Companies are moving away from the
)big data center and just letting the various departments role their
)own with PCs. It is the wild west again! The new users are on their
)own again! The guys who started the stagnation are going out of
)business! The only thing they can cling to is the centralized data
)base of information that a bunch of PCs might need to access. This
)data will often be too expensive or out-of-date to justify, so even
)that will die off. Scratch one of the vested definers! Without
)centralized multi-million dollar computing there can't be any credible
)claims for massive multi-million dollar damages.
In some areas maybe, but not on most college campuses. And they
are just as oppressive as the MIS's of old that Mark's article mentioned.
And it is not just *CCs...
Some time ago the NSF directed that all sites that have access to the
Internet have some means of authenticating who is accessing it from
those sites. It used to be that, in most any college town, you could
call the local campus network access number, and with a few keystrokes
be accessing your account across the country, or even out of the
country. Now, as more and more sites come into compliance with the
NSF, this is becoming a thing of the past. Is this a bad thing?
Maybe not. But the network is a little less useful than it used to
be.
As computers become smaller and cheaper and more powerful, the power
that the central Computing Center had is being weakened. But that is
not the end of the story. Those smaller and cheaper and more powerful
computers are (for me, and I suspect for most of us) not all that
useful unless they can talk to other computers. So *that* is where
the CC of the 90's is becoming powerful. Instead of controlling CPU
cycles and diskspace, they are controlling bandwidth.
An example: a talented programmer at a major state school started
writing a suite of network communications tools. He realized that
what he had written would make it easy to write a chat program that
ran over the Internet (or a lan), and hacked one together. It was a
wild success. In its first year there were two papers written about
it's conversational dynamics and NASA requested the sources. It was
used to get news out of the Bay area after the Oct. '89 earthquake.
The programmer learned a lot. People who decided to write their own
versions of the client learned a lot. Sounds like the kind of thing
that a major university would like to hear about, right?
Wrong. As soon as someone at the CC heard about it, there were
questions about it as a "legitimate use of University resources".
Finally, though no one at the Computing Center would claim
responsibility, a filter was put in place that effectively killed it.
Some of the people in the administration claimed that they had to do
it because the NSF didn't feel it was an appropriate use of the
facilities. The NSF's own documentation puts the lie to this. But
the utility is still dead. It never reached its second birthday.
The MIS departments, as Mark refers to them, are not dead. They just
changed what they sell.
)The witch hunts are over and poorly designed systems are going to become
)extinct.
I very much hope that you are correct. I don't believe it for a
moment though...
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
From: "Genetics Lifeguard: YOU!!! Out of the pool!!!"@UNKNOWN.DOMAIN
Subject: On Achley's making an arrest {File 2, CuD 3.20}
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 1991 16:21 CDT
Anyone can make a citizen's arrest for a crime which the person being
arrested did in fact commit. However, the person making the arrest
had better be sure, because if the prosecution doesn't get a
conviction FOR ANY REASON, they become liable for civil and criminal
charges of false arrest and kidnapping.
However, this does NOT give the arresting citizen the right to lay
hands on the arrestee UNLESS THE ARRESTEE tries to resist the arrest.
So don't be surprised if Atchley doesn't find himself in trouble for
assault and battery.
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