First off, I'm going to compare the Music Industry with another segment of the market that neatly parallels it, and ultimately which (hopefully) both will follow the same model: the publishing industry (specifically: books).
In both industries, you have a large number of potential sources (ie performers and authors), with a very small number of intermediaries (the labels and publishers). The publishers (music & book) serve to promote the product and provide distribution/manufacturing channels in order to facilitate large-scale sales. Let's look at the Internet's effect on these three functions of the publisher (in reverse order):
Manufacturing As everyone knows, copying a digital file is free (for all real intents and purposes). There are no manufacturing costs here whatsoever. However, the artist still has some costs, since the production requires physical access to equipment (ie a recording studio). Likewise, the author needs profesional editors and typesetting people/equipment to produce the final work. While the manufacturing end of the deal from the publisher is no longer needed, the publisher still provides significant value-add by providing the skills/equipment to aid in the original production of the work.
Distribution This is probably the largest effect the internet has. In both cases, the artist/author can bypass the publisher completely - the sophisticated retail channel for distributing the resulting work is not needed, as the artist/author can contact third party distributors (ie, pick your web site!), or possibly do it themselves. This is what has the Record Industry scared. Currently, they make HUGE profits on the distribution of stuff.
Promotion This is what the big value-add for the publisher is. They're able to push sales through promotion. No band/author has the kind of contacts and resources available to do this.
MP3s aren't going to kill the Music Industry (maybe in the longggggg run, but certainly not for several decades). What they fail to see is that it's a different channel for sales. What scares the RIAA is piracy. What they don't realize is that for all intents and purposes, piracy is controllable to minimal damage with two easy steps (the first of which is by far the most important): proper pricing and aggressive attack on known (and discovered) pirates.
The problem here is that the RIAA folks have gotten fat on the big profits you get from CD sales. They love the $5 or so profit they get from a typical $15 CD. Yes, that's right - your typical artist sees maybe $1 from each CD in royalties, another $3 or so goes to the retail outlet you bought it from (from which they have to pay rent/promotion/etc.), about $2 goes to manufacturing and distribution, and $3 goes to promotion and in-house costs of the labels.
Given what my reading of the market for MP3s is (and I in no way pretend to be a professional marketing person (Please, Shoot me!)), I think that you could probably sell MP3s for:
$0.25 each for B-sides and less-popular stuff.
$0.50 for "big-hit / eating-all-airtime" song
A side note: the proposal of someone previous that bands should release their music for free and make money off the tours is stupid. Tours are massively expensive, and only those with large backing can do it to begin with. Sure, bar-style touring is possible, but from all the people I know that do this, you make virtually no money (well, you can eat, but no real cash) doing it this way. The big tours do make significant cash, but it's a case of "Have money to make money". You need several hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy all the equipment, rent the facilities, hire the techs, etc. And you need it up front - you can't do all that after ticket sales. That's what the record companies provide - resources for bands.
Alot of the stuff that gets anounced these days contains what the SEC likes to call "forward looking statements". Hehehe. Also known as: "Me and da boys got it to work in the back lab, when the planets aligned, while standing on one foot."
In other words, the stuff is still in BIG TIME development. In case you didn't read the story, they note that while they might have a possible manufacturing process, there are innumerable checks to make, things to do, etc.
Businesses don't just put out stuff because it's cool, or neat. They put it out when the economics of production make sense for the market. Since this technology will undoubtably require major reworking at the Fab level (and we all know they run $10-20 billion to construct these days), this isn't something that's going to happen overnight. Like the story says, maybe by 2010.
So stop whining about conspiracies./. sometimes sounds like a bunch of X-Files groupies stuck in Roswell, NM.
Back in the old days (pre '97 heeheehee), when the Web was predominantly single-page, low-graphics, Lynx and similar aids for the Blind worked well. Now, with all the snazzy things going on in UI design, the blind are screwed. This mimics problems the blind are having in modern WIMP-based jobs. Under the old C-L OSes (DOS, UNIX, OS/370, VMS, etc), a blind person could be a very good worker, and compete on a level ground with sighted people. Nowdays, with heavy emphasis on GUI-based RAD tools, the blind person is left out in the cold. It's a real social problem. I'm totally interested in seeing what IBM has come out with - anything to aid the blind in keeping up with the "progress" of the Web is excellent.
And to the person above who rambles about "output independence" - CLUE! CLUE! CLUE! Information should be divided between two areas: raw information, and presentation of that information. Back 4 years ago, this was the way things were, with HTML being essentially raw data, and the Browser being the Presentation tool that interpreted that data to the user, in whatever form was appropriate. That's why Lynx for the blind worked well. Unfortunately, it seems that the HTML designers (along with other people designing Web pages) want to embed lots of formatting (ie PRESENTATION) information in the data stream. This makes is hard (if not impossible) for the client to display it's information in any way other than that dictated by the data stream. BAD. BAD. BAD.
WEB DESIGNERS: you should ALWAYS have a non-graphic, non-framed, text-based alternative to your site.
I hate to rain on everyone's parade here, but am I the only one who finds the ever-larger client disk drive to be much more of a curse that a blessing?
it's gotten to the point nowdays that I can't buy a machine without at minimum a 4GB disk in them. For most of my compute servers, they need little more than a 1GB boot disk, so the other 3GB goes to waste. WTF am I supposed to do when it comes with a 100GB drive?
On a much more practical note, increasing client HD sizes are a royal pain for data integrity. backing up that kind of distributed data is totally impossible, even if you had a fully GigaBit Ethernet network. Backup technology is far behind, and I really wish that storage vendors would spend alot more time working on making better archive/backup media.
As a previous post on NASA's data migration problems stated, the general solution for long-term data storage these days is simply keep it all online, spinning, since disk price/space keeps sinking. However, that doesn't obviate the need for nightly backups and disaster-recovery plans.
I second the guy above who wanted better performance, not more space. Sustained throughput on drives is really only inching up (maybe 18MB/s now). This is a killer. If you double the space on a drive, that means twice as many people are trying to access the data on that drive. Yet, throughput is up maybe 10%. This sucks. RAID helps, but the general problem persists. Given that memory bandwidth is up to 800MB/s now (in a PC), and expecting to go to 1.1GB/s with Rambus RSN, having a disk subsystem that putzes along at under 100MB/s is pathetic. If the vendors can't get the throughput up NOW, we need to start investigating other technologies to help. Like maybe massive NVRAM cache disks (on the order of a 50-100MB) to help I/O.
And, for all you folks, a nice reminder: when was the last time you did a backup of your machine? I know DVD-RAM/-RW will help this, but still, backup costs are out of control. A good-sized (10GB raw) consumer-grade (eg Travan TR5) drive runs $350, and the tapes are $30 each, and well, lets be honest here, they're good for using a couple of times a month if you don't want them to break soon. DSS-3 DATs are $700+, tapes $20+, and the big DLTs (required for serious backup) start at $3k, with tapes approaching $100 each.
We don't need bigger drives, WE NEED BETTER BACKUP!!!!!!
OK, I'm definately not a MS lover, but this seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Microsoft stated quite clearly 2 years ago that the "unified" windows would not be until (what was then) NT 6.0 and would appear about 2002 or 2003. Looks like they're actually about on-schedule to do that.
It's no real surprise that there will be additional "updates" to Win98. Whether they are new OSR versions, or released as Service Packs is no real deal - we should expect MS to continue to try to keep up with the new hardware (and I'd like to hope they keep trying to fix all the damn bugs). So, in general, this is No News. It's just ZD trying to sell a story and sound important.
On another note, people, Intel does NOT expect Merced to be a consumer chip for several Years after it's introduction. That's why they have all those funky P2/P3 derivatives still in the works. Merced is (initially) really targeted at the UNIX/NT Enterprise server market - think of it as an Alpha from Intel.;-)
I wouldn't expect Intel to try to push Merced down towards the desktop until at least one iteration after the initial release (probably 1.5 years or so later), after they've had a chance to look at the real-world results of the chip, and make any changes that improve it's marketability to the consumer/business desktop market. So, if they release Merced 2H/2000, that means they start pushing it towards the desktop in 2002. Just about when MS thinks NT 6.0/Windows 2000 Consumer is due. Coincidence?
In case everyone forgets, we're not spending hords of money on NASA and related departments anymore. In fact, they generally have either static or slightly shrinking budgets. So, naturally, they've gone to strictly commertial stuff whenever possible. No custom build stuff here.
The biggest problem isn't the throughput of modern tech (I do suspect that DVD-RAM/DVD-RW will be the format of choice), but the rate at which they can read data off the old systems. As other people have pointed out, a huge chunk of the data is on VCR-style types (or 9-track reels) - the readers are old, hard-to-find, and I suspect can't do more than a couple hundred kB per minute.
OK, math quiz: 100TBytes / 1MB per minute =~ 100,000,000 minutes =~ 190.25 YEARS. Say you have maybe 100 such readers at your site. It still takes almost 23 months of completely continuous reading to read it all off. No wonder they have a problem...
Oh, and the stab at all the old farts at NASA was unjustified. Most of the people I know at NASA (@ Ames, Goddard, etc.) are real engineers. Many are getting long at the tooth, but I can safely say most of the them are extremely competent, and I'm completely sure this isn't their fault. Probably just the typical upper-level funding problems (ie - complain to the top dogs @ NASA, and, more likely, to the dolts in congress who don't have the vision to properly fund them).
Since the kernel is covered by the GPL, any changes HP (or anyone else, for that matter) makes to it is covered by the GPL. This means they have to give away the source (well, they can charge a small amount for distribution, but I can then freely distribute what I get from them). In other words, if HP tweaks the kernel for Merced, we all benefit. This is cool.
On the other size, anyone writing modules or other code that just uses a kernel API, they are NOT covered by the GPL. They don't have to give away/release the source, and can charge. There are a number of companies doing that right now. Linus has explicitly been asked this, and has confirmed it, though he strongly discourages such behavior.
The more likely issue here is the add-ons (ie the distribution). HP (and SGI, for that matter) will probably come up with slick distributions tweaked for their hardware, and include lots of proprietary knobs and bells and whistles in the form of interesting userland programs. I'm predicting that a good majority of these will NOT be Open Source, though they might be given away.
Corel Computer's port of Linux to the StrongARM (yeah, I know, they really didn't do a whole lot here) is the model we're looking at.
Once again, someone hits a hot button issue, and everyone gets blinded to the realities of the proposal.
The CPU ID that intel is proposing is effectually no different than that provided by UNIX hardware for aeons. It provides a (supposedly) unique number that identifies that specific machine.
Anything that people want to do with the ID provided in (1) is in SOFTWARE folks. I can write a software module that traps calls for my CPUID (or I can just rewrite the hostid(1) program or gethostid(2) call).
The issue of concern here is whether or not the Intel CPU ID will lead to nodelocked software. We all know what a royal pain in the ass nodelocked software is.
The "broadcast" of your CPUID across the internet is a stupid idea. It's easily worked around (either by writing a small system call trap or with a function that generates a random ID each time it's asked). The ability to tie a CPUID to some discrete person is trivial to defeat. So the data collected is useless.
People, we should really be much more concerned with the SID in NT. Now, there's a unique ID that can get tied to you, and there's no way to change it without mucking up alot of your NT domain stuff. Then again, considering how often I re-install NT, maybe it's not such a problem.
Wake Up People! The problem isn't the hardware folks, it's the software folks. One of the big advantages of Open Source is that we can see what the programmers are doing - them proprietary folks can pull any high-jinks they want, since we can't see (well, I do hate binary crawling...).
This whole thing is just an Intel marketing fuckup. they're implimenting a feature that really isn't too useful, and doing a lousy job of thinking up reasons it should be useful. Bad Intel PR, Bad Intel PR, go get yourself another job.
Once again, everyone falls into the same trap when discussing TLD and DNS in general. The actual problem is NOT lack of domain name space, and the proposed solutions of splitting NSI into competing orgs, plus adding new TLDs is wrongheaded.
DNS is a specific solution to a specific problem. The problem it is designed to solve (and it does it very well), is allowing humans (who cannot reliably remember random number strings longer than 7 digits (on average (ever wonder why US telephone #s are 7 digits?))) an easy way to identify machines rather than relying on IP addresses.
DNS is NOT intended to be used as domains are these days - that is, DNS is being used to identify some larger organization. THIS IS WRONG.
The real problem is not a lack of TLDs; no, the problem really is: how do I find what I want? The old-school answer is name-branding, thus the attachment to specific names in DNS. Instead, what the real answer should be is a new layer sitting on top of DNS, so that the majority of humankind doesn't have to type http://ww.foo.com at a web browser's location. Instead, they say "McDonald's Irish Emporium, San Jose, CA" and they get to that web site, not the one with the big yellow arches. Yahoo, and the portal sites are a good step in that direction, but there still needs to be more work here. Call it a global database that maps concepts to DNS names, so that (like IP addresses), Web surfing shouldn't require one to know a DNS name.
NSI sucks. But a great deal of energy that is directed at the DNS "problem" should be focused on the real solution. Where are the visionaries when you need them? Everyone seems to be focusing on near-term problems, with no thought put to the long-term architecture.
People, the gent was kind enough to point out that grant money is available for Open Source software. U.S. Grant money has the following characteristics (for those of you unfamiliar with the joyous process of grant-writing):
It has to pass peer review. In this case, peers are scientists. All the stuff you're writing the grants for is viewed through a research lens - they aren't going to be interested in funding someone's latest widget set/mail agent/browser.
The grants are RESEARCH. This doesn't mean you have to write something that runs instruments for the SuperColider. However, what you're writing must be exploring some new idea/concept/etc. Most Open Source projects people seem to run these days are in essence duplicating concepts that are in commertial programs, which is good, but there's no hope of them getting funded. No new ideas (from a research perspective). Things such as the CODA filesystem and the Beowulf stuff are examples of what the grant people might be interested in (notice that one was from a university, and the other from a gov't research place).
Once you get the money, it's yours. You have to account to gov't auditors that you didn't spend it on a new Porsche, but if you get the grant, then, hey, go to it. The Feds aren't going to say, "hey, you can't do it that way!". And, for the most part (National Security being the only real excuse), there is no reason you can't release the code under any License you want! Actually, most code can't be kept proprietary, since a general clause of a grant is that resulting work be available to the research community.
Secondly, I don't know where people get off thinking (or calling) gov't grants "tainted" or "bad" use of your money. Just who the fuck do you think funded most of the major Open-Source stuff for the last 10 years? A large chunk came from directly-gov't funded projects (x11, ), or by people who were indirectly gov't supported while they wrote the software (RMS). Universities and research organizations are heavily gov't funded, and that's where virtually all Open Source software has come from up until last year (1998).
I'm really tired of people bashing corporate and gov't as Evil. They're not. If they want to pay you to write good, Open Source code, who cares? If you don't like the restrictions they place on you, don't work for them. And gov't money goes to the common good - seems to me that's the whole idea behind Open Source - everyone working together to get things done quicker, better, and more efficiently. If you've got a beef with how the gov't is run, that's fine. But this doesn't have anything to do with that.
If you think you've got a good idea for doing something no-one else has thought of, or want to explore a new approach to a problem, write a grant. Try for the funding - most won't get it, but the few who do often produce something quite valuable. And if it's Open Source, well, then, we're all going to benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
(What It Really Should Mean...)
First off, I'm going to compare the Music Industry with another segment of the market that neatly parallels it, and ultimately which (hopefully) both will follow the same model: the publishing industry (specifically: books).
In both industries, you have a large number of potential sources (ie performers and authors), with a very small number of intermediaries (the labels and publishers). The publishers (music & book) serve to promote the product and provide distribution/manufacturing channels in order to facilitate large-scale sales. Let's look at the Internet's effect on these three functions of the publisher (in reverse order):
MP3s aren't going to kill the Music Industry (maybe in the longggggg run, but certainly not for several decades). What they fail to see is that it's a different channel for sales. What scares the RIAA is piracy. What they don't realize is that for all intents and purposes, piracy is controllable to minimal damage with two easy steps (the first of which is by far the most important): proper pricing and aggressive attack on known (and discovered) pirates.
The problem here is that the RIAA folks have gotten fat on the big profits you get from CD sales. They love the $5 or so profit they get from a typical $15 CD. Yes, that's right - your typical artist sees maybe $1 from each CD in royalties, another $3 or so goes to the retail outlet you bought it from (from which they have to pay rent/promotion/etc.), about $2 goes to manufacturing and distribution, and $3 goes to promotion and in-house costs of the labels.
Given what my reading of the market for MP3s is (and I in no way pretend to be a professional marketing person (Please, Shoot me!)), I think that you could probably sell MP3s for:
A side note: the proposal of someone previous that bands should release their music for free and make money off the tours is stupid. Tours are massively expensive, and only those with large backing can do it to begin with. Sure, bar-style touring is possible, but from all the people I know that do this, you make virtually no money (well, you can eat, but no real cash) doing it this way. The big tours do make significant cash, but it's a case of "Have money to make money". You need several hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy all the equipment, rent the facilities, hire the techs, etc. And you need it up front - you can't do all that after ticket sales. That's what the record companies provide - resources for bands.
Alot of the stuff that gets anounced these days contains what the SEC likes to call "forward looking statements". Hehehe. Also known as: "Me and da boys got it to work in the back lab, when the planets aligned, while standing on one foot."
In other words, the stuff is still in BIG TIME development. In case you didn't read the story, they note that while they might have a possible manufacturing process, there are innumerable checks to make, things to do, etc.
Businesses don't just put out stuff because it's cool, or neat. They put it out when the economics of production make sense for the market. Since this technology will undoubtably require major reworking at the Fab level (and we all know they run $10-20 billion to construct these days), this isn't something that's going to happen overnight. Like the story says, maybe by 2010.
So stop whining about conspiracies. /. sometimes sounds like a bunch of X-Files groupies stuck in Roswell, NM.
Back in the old days (pre '97 heeheehee), when the Web was predominantly single-page, low-graphics, Lynx and similar aids for the Blind worked well. Now, with all the snazzy things going on in UI design, the blind are screwed. This mimics problems the blind are having in modern WIMP-based jobs. Under the old C-L OSes (DOS, UNIX, OS/370, VMS, etc), a blind person could be a very good worker, and compete on a level ground with sighted people. Nowdays, with heavy emphasis on GUI-based RAD tools, the blind person is left out in the cold. It's a real social problem. I'm totally interested in seeing what IBM has come out with - anything to aid the blind in keeping up with the "progress" of the Web is excellent.
And to the person above who rambles about "output independence" - CLUE! CLUE! CLUE! Information should be divided between two areas: raw information, and presentation of that information. Back 4 years ago, this was the way things were, with HTML being essentially raw data, and the Browser being the Presentation tool that interpreted that data to the user, in whatever form was appropriate. That's why Lynx for the blind worked well. Unfortunately, it seems that the HTML designers (along with other people designing Web pages) want to embed lots of formatting (ie PRESENTATION) information in the data stream. This makes is hard (if not impossible) for the client to display it's information in any way other than that dictated by the data stream. BAD. BAD. BAD.
WEB DESIGNERS: you should ALWAYS have a non-graphic, non-framed, text-based alternative to your site.
-Erik
I hate to rain on everyone's parade here, but am I the only one who finds the ever-larger client disk drive to be much more of a curse that a blessing?
it's gotten to the point nowdays that I can't buy a machine without at minimum a 4GB disk in them. For most of my compute servers, they need little more than a 1GB boot disk, so the other 3GB goes to waste. WTF am I supposed to do when it comes with a 100GB drive?
On a much more practical note, increasing client HD sizes are a royal pain for data integrity. backing up that kind of distributed data is totally impossible, even if you had a fully GigaBit Ethernet network. Backup technology is far behind, and I really wish that storage vendors would spend alot more time working on making better archive/backup media.
As a previous post on NASA's data migration problems stated, the general solution for long-term data storage these days is simply keep it all online, spinning, since disk price/space keeps sinking. However, that doesn't obviate the need for nightly backups and disaster-recovery plans.
I second the guy above who wanted better performance, not more space. Sustained throughput on drives is really only inching up (maybe 18MB/s now). This is a killer. If you double the space on a drive, that means twice as many people are trying to access the data on that drive. Yet, throughput is up maybe 10%. This sucks. RAID helps, but the general problem persists. Given that memory bandwidth is up to 800MB/s now (in a PC), and expecting to go to 1.1GB/s with Rambus RSN, having a disk subsystem that putzes along at under 100MB/s is pathetic. If the vendors can't get the throughput up NOW, we need to start investigating other technologies to help. Like maybe massive NVRAM cache disks (on the order of a 50-100MB) to help I/O.
And, for all you folks, a nice reminder: when was the last time you did a backup of your machine? I know DVD-RAM/-RW will help this, but still, backup costs are out of control. A good-sized (10GB raw) consumer-grade (eg Travan TR5) drive runs $350, and the tapes are $30 each, and well, lets be honest here, they're good for using a couple of times a month if you don't want them to break soon. DSS-3 DATs are $700+, tapes $20+, and the big DLTs (required for serious backup) start at $3k, with tapes approaching $100 each.
We don't need bigger drives, WE NEED BETTER BACKUP!!!!!!
-Erik
OK, I'm definately not a MS lover, but this seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Microsoft stated quite clearly 2 years ago that the "unified" windows would not be until (what was then) NT 6.0 and would appear about 2002 or 2003. Looks like they're actually about on-schedule to do that.
It's no real surprise that there will be additional "updates" to Win98. Whether they are new OSR versions, or released as Service Packs is no real deal - we should expect MS to continue to try to keep up with the new hardware (and I'd like to hope they keep trying to fix all the damn bugs). So, in general, this is No News. It's just ZD trying to sell a story and sound important.
On another note, people, Intel does NOT expect Merced to be a consumer chip for several Years after it's introduction. That's why they have all those funky P2/P3 derivatives still in the works. Merced is (initially) really targeted at the UNIX/NT Enterprise server market - think of it as an Alpha from Intel. ;-)
I wouldn't expect Intel to try to push Merced down towards the desktop until at least one iteration after the initial release (probably 1.5 years or so later), after they've had a chance to look at the real-world results of the chip, and make any changes that improve it's marketability to the consumer/business desktop market. So, if they release Merced 2H/2000, that means they start pushing it towards the desktop in 2002. Just about when MS thinks NT 6.0/Windows 2000 Consumer is due. Coincidence?
-Erik
Cost is a problem right now.
In case everyone forgets, we're not spending hords of money on NASA and related departments anymore. In fact, they generally have either static or slightly shrinking budgets. So, naturally, they've gone to strictly commertial stuff whenever possible. No custom build stuff here.
The biggest problem isn't the throughput of modern tech (I do suspect that DVD-RAM/DVD-RW will be the format of choice), but the rate at which they can read data off the old systems. As other people have pointed out, a huge chunk of the data is on VCR-style types (or 9-track reels) - the readers are old, hard-to-find, and I suspect can't do more than a couple hundred kB per minute.
OK, math quiz: 100TBytes / 1MB per minute =~ 100,000,000 minutes =~ 190.25 YEARS. Say you have maybe 100 such readers at your site. It still takes almost 23 months of completely continuous reading to read it all off. No wonder they have a problem...
Oh, and the stab at all the old farts at NASA was unjustified. Most of the people I know at NASA (@ Ames, Goddard, etc.) are real engineers. Many are getting long at the tooth, but I can safely say most of the them are extremely competent, and I'm completely sure this isn't their fault. Probably just the typical upper-level funding problems (ie - complain to the top dogs @ NASA, and, more likely, to the dolts in congress who don't have the vision to properly fund them).
Since the kernel is covered by the GPL, any changes HP (or anyone else, for that matter) makes to it is covered by the GPL. This means they have to give away the source (well, they can charge a small amount for distribution, but I can then freely distribute what I get from them). In other words, if HP tweaks the kernel for Merced, we all benefit. This is cool.
On the other size, anyone writing modules or other code that just uses a kernel API, they are NOT covered by the GPL. They don't have to give away/release the source, and can charge. There are a number of companies doing that right now. Linus has explicitly been asked this, and has confirmed it, though he strongly discourages such behavior.
The more likely issue here is the add-ons (ie the distribution). HP (and SGI, for that matter) will probably come up with slick distributions tweaked for their hardware, and include lots of proprietary knobs and bells and whistles in the form of interesting userland programs. I'm predicting that a good majority of these will NOT be Open Source, though they might be given away.
Corel Computer's port of Linux to the StrongARM (yeah, I know, they really didn't do a whole lot here) is the model we're looking at.
Once again, someone hits a hot button issue, and everyone gets blinded to the realities of the proposal.
People, we should really be much more concerned with the SID in NT. Now, there's a unique ID that can get tied to you, and there's no way to change it without mucking up alot of your NT domain stuff. Then again, considering how often I re-install NT, maybe it's not such a problem.
Wake Up People! The problem isn't the hardware folks, it's the software folks. One of the big advantages of Open Source is that we can see what the programmers are doing - them proprietary folks can pull any high-jinks they want, since we can't see (well, I do hate binary crawling...).
This whole thing is just an Intel marketing fuckup. they're implimenting a feature that really isn't too useful, and doing a lousy job of thinking up reasons it should be useful. Bad Intel PR, Bad Intel PR, go get yourself another job.
Once again, everyone falls into the same trap when discussing TLD and DNS in general. The actual problem is NOT lack of domain name space, and the proposed solutions of splitting NSI into competing orgs, plus adding new TLDs is wrongheaded.
DNS is a specific solution to a specific problem. The problem it is designed to solve (and it does it very well), is allowing humans (who cannot reliably remember random number strings longer than 7 digits (on average (ever wonder why US telephone #s are 7 digits?))) an easy way to identify machines rather than relying on IP addresses.
DNS is NOT intended to be used as domains are these days - that is, DNS is being used to identify some larger organization. THIS IS WRONG.
The real problem is not a lack of TLDs; no, the problem really is: how do I find what I want? The old-school answer is name-branding, thus the attachment to specific names in DNS. Instead, what the real answer should be is a new layer sitting on top of DNS, so that the majority of humankind doesn't have to type http://ww.foo.com at a web browser's location. Instead, they say "McDonald's Irish Emporium, San Jose, CA" and they get to that web site, not the one with the big yellow arches. Yahoo, and the portal sites are a good step in that direction, but there still needs to be more work here. Call it a global database that maps concepts to DNS names, so that (like IP addresses), Web surfing shouldn't require one to know a DNS name.
NSI sucks. But a great deal of energy that is directed at the DNS "problem" should be focused on the real solution. Where are the visionaries when you need them? Everyone seems to be focusing on near-term problems, with no thought put to the long-term architecture.
I really miss Jon Postel.
-Erik
I haven't seen this much idiocy in a long time.
First Off:
People, the gent was kind enough to point out that grant money is available for Open Source software. U.S. Grant money has the following characteristics (for those of you unfamiliar with the joyous process of grant-writing):
Secondly, I don't know where people get off thinking (or calling) gov't grants "tainted" or "bad" use of your money. Just who the fuck do you think funded most of the major Open-Source stuff for the last 10 years? A large chunk came from directly-gov't funded projects (x11, ), or by people who were indirectly gov't supported while they wrote the software (RMS). Universities and research organizations are heavily gov't funded, and that's where virtually all Open Source software has come from up until last year (1998).
I'm really tired of people bashing corporate and gov't as Evil. They're not. If they want to pay you to write good, Open Source code, who cares? If you don't like the restrictions they place on you, don't work for them. And gov't money goes to the common good - seems to me that's the whole idea behind Open Source - everyone working together to get things done quicker, better, and more efficiently. If you've got a beef with how the gov't is run, that's fine. But this doesn't have anything to do with that.
If you think you've got a good idea for doing something no-one else has thought of, or want to explore a new approach to a problem, write a grant. Try for the funding - most won't get it, but the few who do often produce something quite valuable. And if it's Open Source, well, then, we're all going to benefit.
-Erik