------------------------------ From: Various Subject: From the Mailbag Date: 15 June, 1991 ******************************************************************** *** CuD #3.21: File 2 of 7: From the Mailbag *** ******************************************************************** 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 This )data will often be too expensive or out-of-date to justify, so even )that will die off.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. ******************************************************************** >> END OF THIS FILE << ***************************************************************************