There's a lot of competition in the broadband arena, but it's almost all delivered via ADSL. There's a few cable deployments but they cover only a very small number of people. Nothing wrong with ADSL, but most of the infrastructure is owned by Telstra, formerly Telecom Australia, from the days when they were publically owned. Now they're a private company which owns all the infrastructure (and provides access to competing ISPs via Telstra Wholesale), but they also operate their own retail ISP, trading as BigPond.
Inevitably, Telstra make it as difficult as possible for other ISPs to compete, such as making access to backhaul bandwidth (to get data from the end users to and from the ISPs own network) expensive and annoying to obtain, and making access to the exchanges very difficult and time consuming. Of course, BigPond seems to breeze through most of the bottlenecks other ISPs face. I can't find the reference now, but as an example I read somewhere that Telstra forced ISPs to get multiple ATM circuits for their backhaul capacity due to what they claimed were "technical limitations" which made it necessary... even though the ISPs are physically present in the same location. BigPond of course get to just patch in their own gigabit ethernet.
I've seen it mentioned a few times that the single highest cost in getting data from the overseas to a user here is the price of backhaul bandwidth.
Light goes at almost 300KM/sec and as you point out the AJC is only 12,700KM long
That doesn't sound right;), but I get your point.
A good example:
5 pos4-0.bdr1.syd7.internode.on.net (203.16.212.21) 203.835 ms 203.779 ms 203.355 ms
6 pos2-0.bdr1.sjc2.internode.on.net (203.16.213.41) 202.367 ms 202.518 ms 202.337 ms
7 ge-6-20.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.71.112.85) 202.347 ms 202.269 ms 202.844 ms
You're forgetting that Internode use MPLS, which results in funny looking RTTs in traceroutes. For example, from Perth to a host in the US:
1 lns1.per1.internode.on.net (150.101.0.195) 6.194 ms 4.530 ms 4.421 ms
2 gi0-2-3.cor1.per1.internode.on.net (150.101.0.177) 211.900 ms 211.620 ms 211.627 ms
3 pos4-0.bdr1.adl6.internode.on.net (203.16.212.170) 215.510 ms 232.622 ms 220.000 ms
I assure you the RTT between my modem and Internode's Perth core is not 200ms, as this trace directly to that address shows:
1 lns1.per1.internode.on.net (150.101.0.195) 6.455 ms 5.237 ms 5.084 ms
2 gi0-2-3.cor1.per1.internode.on.net (150.101.0.177) 4.649 ms 4.430 ms 4.430 ms
So similarly, I'm positive that the latency between Sydney and San Jose is significantly more than the millisecond or show your trace purports to show. They have a good description of it on their site, but it's available to their customers only (look under support tools / faq / tech space).
One of the "Did you know?" entries on the SXC site is: Did you know it takes only seven hundredths of a second for information to go from Australia to the US on the Southern Cross Network? So doubling that gives a RTT of around 120 ms; the additional overhead from TCP/IP switching and routing is certainly significant but not the biggest factor.
For your main point, I'd forgotten about PIPE's project, so you (and all the other people who pointed it out) are right; this could be incredibly useful even to us.
despite an enormous amount of work and evangelizing
This raises an interesting question. At least, interesting to me:
If you could sum all the work done by people to make Windows a success on the desktop, and sum all the work done by people to make Linux a success on the desktop, which would be higher?
By "all the people" I mean, including all the hardware manufacturers that specifically design their hardware and drivers to work with Windows, jumping through whatever hoops they have to jump through to get it signed and on Windows Update so it's slightly less of a pain in the ass; manufacturers like Dell and HP who surely put a lot of time into making sure the computers they build work well with Windows, and so on.
You specifically mentioned that Linux on laptops can be haphazard, with the implication being that all the effort people have put into making it work as well as Windows has been ineffective. But it gives the impression that Windows working on it is just given, hiding the amount of effort put in all the way down the supply chain to make it work with Windows. While I have no way of coming up with any numbers in either case, I'm pretty confident that the global effort to get Windows to work as well* as it does on a random Dell or HP or Toshiba etc. laptop is vastly more than the global effort that's been spent to get all flavours of Linux, combined, to work well on it.
* That little star is there to give me an opportunity to bitch and whine about how much of a piece of shit Windows is to install from scratch on pretty much anything; again, the manufacturers put in a lot of work to make it work "out of the box", but it's a right pain to get go through it yourself without their magic image with all the right drivers and tweaks.
I don't think it will have much, if any, effect on Australia. Most of the focus of our ISPs is getting to the West coast of North America, and going via Japan is a pretty significant detour. Mind you, the Australia-Japan Cable gives us 320 Gbit/sec to Japan.
A trace from a server in Ohio to 72.14.235.104 (one of google.co.jp's addresses) has a RTT of 200 ms, which is about the same as the East coast of Australia to www.google.com (I get 230 ms from Perth). So for US-based sites going via this new cable would, I imagine, be quite a bit slower than via more direct links. We also already have several independent links to the US, so it wouldn't even be much benefit to us as a backup.
According to this random site, Sydney to San Jose is almost 12,000 km (by air). Sydney to Tokyo is 7,700 km. The press release declares that the new cable will be approximately 10,000 km, so that's around an extra 5,000 km via this route minimum. I suspect any run from Australia to Japan isn't going to be particular direct though; AJC is apparently 12,700 km.
This PDF provides some maps of the approximate cable locations. It has one marked "New Japan-US Plans" which might be referring to the Unity cable.
...and then you'd have to pay royalties for my patent on "the utilisation of the name of a river, when said name of river is comprised of an appropriate number of syllables such that saying or thinking the name of the river takes the average humanoid approximately one second, as an aid in the task of marking the passage of a particular quantity of time".
Well, the sources I've read say that they're designed to last for years and years (I think Sony were claiming ~30 years for 100 GB discs at one stage), but then they made similar claims about CDs; and consumer CD-Rs typically only last 2-5 years. As with any new tech, we won't know how long burnt discs actually last in real-world circumstances for some time.
BD might be suitable if you have a small amount of data you want to archive, but magnetic tape still seems to be winner by far if you want to archive largish quantities of data. The main problem with tape is that the drives are pretty expensive; the cartridges themselves give much better bang for the buck than BD.
For home use though, I think (external) hard drives are still the best candidate. Few home users need to archive their data for years and years; they just need to be able to recover a recent copy of it if disaster should strike. An external HDD or two that you plug in once a week to update your backup should last long enough that you'll want to replace it with a higher capacity drive before it actually fails.
It also gives you the ability to back up all those "not really crucial but would be annoying to lose it" things like your media collection (whether or not it's acquired from legitimate sources). Even though I could re-rip all my CDs I have stored as FLAC files, I'd prefer not to have to; but doing multi-disc backups to slow optical media on a regular basis is annoying.
You can learn to write programs from books that teach the material, but to learn to write good programs requires seeing other good programs. It takes a very long time to go from your built-in BASIC interpreter and a manual to writing actually useful, well-designed programs, but having access to the source for other programs can accelerate that process.
Microsoft's compiler is very good, and if you're learning to write Hello, World! then there's no real difference between using it and using gcc. But if you want to learn how to write a compiler, gcc is a far more useful tool.
Free software provides would-be programmers with a pool of code ranging from operating system kernels to text editors to 3D games; if you want to learn the craft then that's a tremendously valuable resource.
You can't become literate just by having a stack of books; you need some kind of learning material and hopefully a teacher. But the stack of books certainly helps, not only in giving you stuff to practice reading but also giving you the desire to read; and maybe also the desire to be able to write stuff of the same quality.
Likewise, a stack of source code won't teach you to program by itself, but it can be invaluable as both an aid to your learning and as a motivator to improve your skills. Seeing what can be done isn't without merit, but seeing how it was done is much more valuable.
Sure, but that's because you control the NAT and can forward ports, so you can still accept incoming connections. If your public IP address (i.e. what other torrent clients will try to connect to) is controlled by your ISP, you're going to have a hard time getting them to forward the ports you need to you. In fact, they would have a hard time providing this service in a usable and cost-effective manner, even if they wanted to.
Also, there's a good chance OpenBSD + PF is more accommodating of various protocols than an ISP's oversubscribed NAT gateway is likely to be. Even if they do their best, it can still get in the way. For example most gateways can handle FTP by watching for "PORT" or "PASV" messages and dynamically opening/forwarding the requested port (or rewriting it to use the port it wants), but this doesn't work if your FTP session is encrypted.
Finally, a lot of the ISPs seem to be actively discouraging P2P, and will simply use "no more IP addresses" as an excuse to slap in NAT gateways that restrict people to web and email. If you want "raw internet", then you'll have to pay.
With any luck there'll still be enough competition in the ISP space in 2010 to push the rollout of IPv6 onwards. A lot of the big ISPs will probably resist it, as a) it would cost a lot to upgrade and re-engineer their infrastructure to support it and b) they can make lots of money by charging a massive premium for routeable IPs. Not to mention that the media cartels will probably have convinced most people and politicians that the only reason one would want "raw internet access" is for piracy, child porn, and terrorism.
It's not just gaming either - web surfing is much faster over ADSL than 3G. While you can get pretty good download speeds out of 3G, the latency means it takes a while to build up to the full transfer rate (TCP slow start). Most web pages don't have content large enough that you'll get to full speed, so the browsing experience feels more like "good dialup" than it does "mobile broadband".
You could also consider getting a phone with internet access that allows "tethering" (at least, I think that's what the kids are calling it these days) so you can access the internet using your laptop via the phone's 3G data service. At home (in.au) I have ADSL2+ in my apartment and 500 mB/month via 3's "X Series" package. It costs me an extra $20/mo but means I do have internet access on the go without the expense of a separate mobile broadband plan. Using your phone for it also means you can have basic internet access even if you don't have your notebook with you, which can be handy.
I think it's just confusion. It appears that Microsoft accidentally made Vista SP1 available to some users (I've only seen mention on the 64-bit edition) through Windows Update, which they then pulled when they realised the mistake. They also pulled this KB937287 patch because of the issues it causes for some users. But since the "big news" was that SP1 was apparently available to some people and it was pulled at the same time as KB937287, I guess people assumed they were more related than they actually are.
It does do automatic breaks unless you select HTML formatted.
If you select HTML formatted then you should write HTML. What part of this is hard to understand?
No, the retarded thing about/.'s commenting system is that if you post using "Plain old text" you can still use HTML, it just adds hard breaks whenever you insert a new line.
I think you and the brown guy are confused about how people get paid. Most people in the "entertainment industry" get a salary or hourly wage for doing their job, just like your average IT worker gets paid a certain amount for performing their job function. The amount of sales of the product in a given month has no direct impact on their paycheck, and they aren't paid a proportion of sales.
However, if not enough people buy the product, the business starts laying off salaried staff to try to reduce their operating costs; or potentially shuts down altogether.
So these "2c are all you'll get" comments aren't clever or insightful or even funny, they just show your ignorance.
Whether or not we should care is another matter, of course.
But if you're correct, then any restriction on the right to "propogate" seems silly since you can acquire infinite copies of a GPL program from a distributor and then transfer title
Yes -- but since when have legal technicalities cared whether or not they seem "silly", especially if they only seem silly when viewed in a particular situation? The restriction only seems silly if you're duplicating an unmodified copy of the software.
This makes your point something of a red herring, for the simple fact that if you propagate (as in duplicate) an unmodified version of a piece of GPL software, you are complying with the terms of the license. There's no legal basis for me to sue you because you sent someone an exact copy of my GPLd software without "accepting" the license, because you haven't violated it in any way! In fact, I can't even tell that you haven't "accepted" it, because you're complying perfectly with the terms of the license.
I don't think the section you quoted is rendered "meaningless" by first sale doctrine. In the case you're making no changes, then there's no extra restrictions and that section doesn't do anything. In the case that you are making changes, there are additional restrictions. The book analogy would be that you're allowed to write notes in the book and then give it to someone else, but only if they have the right to a) pass the book with your added notes on to someone else and b) add their own notes before doing so.
I know it was a bit long, but if you're going to reply you could at least read the whole post.
I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers.
Even if they don't do this, a lot of users (especially smaller businesses without dedicated IT staff) would prefer not to be responsible for the hardware, anyway. Larger ones not so much.
Personally I think it's more likely they'll sell hardware which runs their software, similar to the Google Mini search appliance. Or perhaps even add the functionality to Google Mini: a box that costs a few grand that can index just about all your data and hosts your email and calendar. That'd be a pretty compelling offering for people starting up businesses.
OH MY GOD. You mean NORTON isn't just PROTECTING me from the viruses, but they're CREATING them?
I see a joint venture between Symantec and Network Solutions in the near future. In fact, I can feel the converged business synergies fast-tracking NorSol to the top already. I'm getting in on the ground floor of this dynamic enterprise partnership!
Well I would say, not there. If we assume there's no copyrights, then there's no reason you can't mirror Joe's personalised aggregator and slap advertising on it. The question then becomes, is it viable for you to do so? Will it make you enough money to justify the effort to set this up and make sure it keeps working?
For you to get enough traffic, people have to a) find your mirror of it and b) not find the original (assuming the original somehow is more valuable -- which might merely require it be identifiable as being the original, or maybe it has less ads) as well as c) find the content worthwhile. If this is the case then you are actually providing a valuable service: that of discovery. Maybe you're marketing your mirror better than Joe is marketing his aggregator.
Now, sooner or later Joe will discover you're mirroring his content, and will probably block you. So you'll have to keep an eye on it and find ways to hide your scraper's identity. This will probably be more costly for you because you're having to react to his changes, and if your mirror is unreliable then people will be less likely to use it.
At the end of the day, Joe might find it's too much work to block you from mirroring his stuff, and that it's not making enough money to be worthwhile to him, and he'll stop producing it. This is analogous to the vast majority of bands who don't make enough money to make a career out of their music (let alone retire on it) and stop producing it, or the vast majority of authors who don't "make it", or bloggers who fail to monetize their work.
I think the whole "nobody will produce anything if there's no easy way to make it financially viable" thing is a little bit overdone. Pick your favourite "easy money" industry and realise that the vast majority of people who try to make it in that industry fail at it. It's pretty difficult to become self-employed, let alone a wealthy self-employed person, and that's why most of us work a safe stable job for someone who's willing to take that risk. If there's a desire for content then there'll be a way to get paid for producing it. 90% of us won't ever try because it's too scary and uncertain; 80% of those who do try will fail to make a living out of it; and 1% of those who succeed will become fabulously wealthy and make the rest of us jealous. Just like now. Without copyright the way to get paid for producing the content will almost certainly change substantially, but there'll be a way and people will find it.
I got one for my parents, and they like it (they've had digital cameras for ages). You're right in that they're very expensive which is why I chose it as a gift: they're a nice thing to have, but hard to justify spending your own money on.
Almost your entire argument is that they're worthless because they're expensive. New tech is always expensive. When they become more affordable I think they'll grow in popularity a lot. The viewing angle is pretty good on the one I got, and LCDs are always improving.
The main benefit is convenience. Take photos, put the memory card in the frame, and you're instantly viewing them. No need to go to a store to get them developed. Also they can show lots (as in, lots) of different photos so there's always something different to look at which is something a regular frame can't do, and also means you have a use for those "less than perfect" photos which you wouldn't want developed as actual prints.
Now personally I wouldn't have any use for one, but I wouldn't have any use for a regular photo frame, either.
Thanks for posting. The explanation seems believable in a "management that has no clue" kind of way, unlike the explanation given on your website:
In response to customer concerns about domain names being registered by someone else just after they have conducted a domain name search, Network Solutions is implementing a new security measure to protect our customers.
Network Solutions may reserve domain names that are searched on our Web site for up to 4 days. During this period, these domain names will only be available to register at networksolutions.com. [...] This protection measure provides our customers the opportunity to register domains they have previously searched without the fear that the name will be already taken through Front Running.
...which is clearly a bald-faced lie. As if this has anything to do with "protecting" customers, and even if it did, you're engaging in the exact practice you claim to be "protecting" your customers from!
As for the whole "stop people searching through us and registering elsewhere" argument, it's not as if GoDaddy and every other domain registrar doesn't have the ability to tell you whether a domain is available or not, so anybody that knows they can get the domain cheaper elsewhere isn't going to go to NetSol to see if it's available. Why on earth would someone do that? It's not as if the NS website is some kind of masterpiece that people will love using. Quite the contrary, in fact; it's one of the slowest loading sites I've encountered recently.
I guess this is what happens when you don't have a competitive product, though. Seriously, $35 for one year registration of a.com?
ActiveX security relies entirely on human judgement. ActiveX programs come with digital signatures from the author of the program and anybody else who chooses to endorse the program.
You have two choices: either accept the program and let it do whatever it wants on your machine, or reject it completely.
That was written in 1997 and maybe (most likely) they've changed things since then, but it definitely wasn't written with a sandbox in mind. Actually, most or all of the links in that search date from the late nineties.
Changing the search to "activex security" and we get a nice page on MSDN that says:
An ActiveX control can be an extremely insecure way to provide a feature. Because it is a Component Object Model (COM) object, it can do anything the user can do from that computer. It can read from and write to the registry, and it has access to the local file system. From the moment a user downloads an ActiveX control, the control may be vulnerable to attack because any Web application on the Internet can repurpose it, that is, use the control for its own ends whether sincere or malicious. But, you can take precautions when you write a control to help avert an attack.
No idea when that was written or if it still applies. So, do you have any references on this subject?
Time for some anecdotal "evidence". A week or so ago I was asked to upload a large (2+ gig) debug trace file to Microsoft's tech support site, and doing that made use of an ActiveX control (I tried using Firefox with the "simple upload" option but I just got a generic and uninformative server error). Given the way in which it sat there saying "Connecting..." 99% of the time with the occasional momentary change to say it was transferring data, I'm sure this wasn't using a plain HTTP POST file upload. Which means this control was able to read the zip file on my desktop and upload it to the site.
Even more disturbing was the effect it had on my RDP session. I used 7-Zip to zip it with maximum compression and since that was gonna take a while I went home, and connected to my desktop later that night to do the upload. Set it going and started doing some other stuff and noticed my keyboard was being weird: almost every keystroke was being duplicated. I've got a Microsoft wireless keyboard and sometimes it does odd things like repeat a keystroke a bunch of times, but this was just twice and for everything. So I closed the IE window and disconnected the RDP session and re-connected -- back to normal.
Started the upload up again and sure enough, same problem. Disconnected the RDP session thinking maybe it was just a bit confused by the crappy uploader ActiveX page and logging in again would reset it. Went to reconnect, and found the keystrokes were being duplicated even on the login dialog! At that point I gave up and just left it for the weekend.
If an ActiveX control can somehow screw up key processing for the RDP login dialog, then I have a tough time believing it's actually sandboxed in any meaningful way. If you have references to the contrary, I'd love to see them.
Well, it supports my conclusion so of course I think it makes sense!;) Thanks.
I guess a lot of it is just perception; it sure seems to me like the majority of my bulbs go when I'm turning the light on, not while it's running. I'm not sure if that's true or if it's just because we notice it more than we notice lights going while the light is on. My kitchen light went the other day and I don't know when it happened, I just know that when I went to switch it on it didn't do anything.
Huh? Didn't you read Microsoft's answers to the Microsoft Vista quiz??!
Windows Vista faces significant Compatibility issues with hardware devices. Fiction! It's just not true! Windows Vista faces significant issues in terms of integrating with other software applications. Also fiction!!!
I think whoever did your planning needs to re-take the quiz so they can learn the real truth. Microsoft's own quiz proves you wrong. Smackdown!
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of competition in the broadband arena, but it's almost all delivered via ADSL. There's a few cable deployments but they cover only a very small number of people. Nothing wrong with ADSL, but most of the infrastructure is owned by Telstra, formerly Telecom Australia, from the days when they were publically owned. Now they're a private company which owns all the infrastructure (and provides access to competing ISPs via Telstra Wholesale), but they also operate their own retail ISP, trading as BigPond.
Inevitably, Telstra make it as difficult as possible for other ISPs to compete, such as making access to backhaul bandwidth (to get data from the end users to and from the ISPs own network) expensive and annoying to obtain, and making access to the exchanges very difficult and time consuming. Of course, BigPond seems to breeze through most of the bottlenecks other ISPs face. I can't find the reference now, but as an example I read somewhere that Telstra forced ISPs to get multiple ATM circuits for their backhaul capacity due to what they claimed were "technical limitations" which made it necessary... even though the ISPs are physically present in the same location. BigPond of course get to just patch in their own gigabit ethernet.
I've seen it mentioned a few times that the single highest cost in getting data from the overseas to a user here is the price of backhaul bandwidth.
That doesn't sound right ;), but I get your point.
A good example:5 pos4-0.bdr1.syd7.internode.on.net (203.16.212.21) 203.835 ms 203.779 ms 203.355 ms
6 pos2-0.bdr1.sjc2.internode.on.net (203.16.213.41) 202.367 ms 202.518 ms 202.337 ms
7 ge-6-20.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.71.112.85) 202.347 ms 202.269 ms 202.844 ms
You're forgetting that Internode use MPLS, which results in funny looking RTTs in traceroutes. For example, from Perth to a host in the US:
1 lns1.per1.internode.on.net (150.101.0.195) 6.194 ms 4.530 ms 4.421 ms2 gi0-2-3.cor1.per1.internode.on.net (150.101.0.177) 211.900 ms 211.620 ms 211.627 ms
3 pos4-0.bdr1.adl6.internode.on.net (203.16.212.170) 215.510 ms 232.622 ms 220.000 ms
I assure you the RTT between my modem and Internode's Perth core is not 200ms, as this trace directly to that address shows:
1 lns1.per1.internode.on.net (150.101.0.195) 6.455 ms 5.237 ms 5.084 ms2 gi0-2-3.cor1.per1.internode.on.net (150.101.0.177) 4.649 ms 4.430 ms 4.430 ms
So similarly, I'm positive that the latency between Sydney and San Jose is significantly more than the millisecond or show your trace purports to show. They have a good description of it on their site, but it's available to their customers only (look under support tools / faq / tech space).
One of the "Did you know?" entries on the SXC site is: Did you know it takes only seven hundredths of a second for information to go from Australia to the US on the Southern Cross Network? So doubling that gives a RTT of around 120 ms; the additional overhead from TCP/IP switching and routing is certainly significant but not the biggest factor.
For your main point, I'd forgotten about PIPE's project, so you (and all the other people who pointed it out) are right; this could be incredibly useful even to us.
Thanks for that map link, too.
This raises an interesting question. At least, interesting to me:
If you could sum all the work done by people to make Windows a success on the desktop, and sum all the work done by people to make Linux a success on the desktop, which would be higher?
By "all the people" I mean, including all the hardware manufacturers that specifically design their hardware and drivers to work with Windows, jumping through whatever hoops they have to jump through to get it signed and on Windows Update so it's slightly less of a pain in the ass; manufacturers like Dell and HP who surely put a lot of time into making sure the computers they build work well with Windows, and so on.
You specifically mentioned that Linux on laptops can be haphazard, with the implication being that all the effort people have put into making it work as well as Windows has been ineffective. But it gives the impression that Windows working on it is just given, hiding the amount of effort put in all the way down the supply chain to make it work with Windows. While I have no way of coming up with any numbers in either case, I'm pretty confident that the global effort to get Windows to work as well* as it does on a random Dell or HP or Toshiba etc. laptop is vastly more than the global effort that's been spent to get all flavours of Linux, combined, to work well on it.
* That little star is there to give me an opportunity to bitch and whine about how much of a piece of shit Windows is to install from scratch on pretty much anything; again, the manufacturers put in a lot of work to make it work "out of the box", but it's a right pain to get go through it yourself without their magic image with all the right drivers and tweaks.
I don't think it will have much, if any, effect on Australia. Most of the focus of our ISPs is getting to the West coast of North America, and going via Japan is a pretty significant detour. Mind you, the Australia-Japan Cable gives us 320 Gbit/sec to Japan.
A trace from a server in Ohio to 72.14.235.104 (one of google.co.jp's addresses) has a RTT of 200 ms, which is about the same as the East coast of Australia to www.google.com (I get 230 ms from Perth). So for US-based sites going via this new cable would, I imagine, be quite a bit slower than via more direct links. We also already have several independent links to the US, so it wouldn't even be much benefit to us as a backup.
According to this random site, Sydney to San Jose is almost 12,000 km (by air). Sydney to Tokyo is 7,700 km. The press release declares that the new cable will be approximately 10,000 km, so that's around an extra 5,000 km via this route minimum. I suspect any run from Australia to Japan isn't going to be particular direct though; AJC is apparently 12,700 km.
This PDF provides some maps of the approximate cable locations. It has one marked "New Japan-US Plans" which might be referring to the Unity cable.
...and then you'd have to pay royalties for my patent on "the utilisation of the name of a river, when said name of river is comprised of an appropriate number of syllables such that saying or thinking the name of the river takes the average humanoid approximately one second, as an aid in the task of marking the passage of a particular quantity of time".
Well, the sources I've read say that they're designed to last for years and years (I think Sony were claiming ~30 years for 100 GB discs at one stage), but then they made similar claims about CDs; and consumer CD-Rs typically only last 2-5 years. As with any new tech, we won't know how long burnt discs actually last in real-world circumstances for some time.
BD might be suitable if you have a small amount of data you want to archive, but magnetic tape still seems to be winner by far if you want to archive largish quantities of data. The main problem with tape is that the drives are pretty expensive; the cartridges themselves give much better bang for the buck than BD.
For home use though, I think (external) hard drives are still the best candidate. Few home users need to archive their data for years and years; they just need to be able to recover a recent copy of it if disaster should strike. An external HDD or two that you plug in once a week to update your backup should last long enough that you'll want to replace it with a higher capacity drive before it actually fails.
It also gives you the ability to back up all those "not really crucial but would be annoying to lose it" things like your media collection (whether or not it's acquired from legitimate sources). Even though I could re-rip all my CDs I have stored as FLAC files, I'd prefer not to have to; but doing multi-disc backups to slow optical media on a regular basis is annoying.
You can learn to write programs from books that teach the material, but to learn to write good programs requires seeing other good programs. It takes a very long time to go from your built-in BASIC interpreter and a manual to writing actually useful, well-designed programs, but having access to the source for other programs can accelerate that process.
Microsoft's compiler is very good, and if you're learning to write Hello, World! then there's no real difference between using it and using gcc. But if you want to learn how to write a compiler, gcc is a far more useful tool.
Free software provides would-be programmers with a pool of code ranging from operating system kernels to text editors to 3D games; if you want to learn the craft then that's a tremendously valuable resource.
You can't become literate just by having a stack of books; you need some kind of learning material and hopefully a teacher. But the stack of books certainly helps, not only in giving you stuff to practice reading but also giving you the desire to read; and maybe also the desire to be able to write stuff of the same quality.
Likewise, a stack of source code won't teach you to program by itself, but it can be invaluable as both an aid to your learning and as a motivator to improve your skills. Seeing what can be done isn't without merit, but seeing how it was done is much more valuable.
Me too, but I'd be more likely to say "eight point four five four tonnes".
Sure, but that's because you control the NAT and can forward ports, so you can still accept incoming connections. If your public IP address (i.e. what other torrent clients will try to connect to) is controlled by your ISP, you're going to have a hard time getting them to forward the ports you need to you. In fact, they would have a hard time providing this service in a usable and cost-effective manner, even if they wanted to.
Also, there's a good chance OpenBSD + PF is more accommodating of various protocols than an ISP's oversubscribed NAT gateway is likely to be. Even if they do their best, it can still get in the way. For example most gateways can handle FTP by watching for "PORT" or "PASV" messages and dynamically opening/forwarding the requested port (or rewriting it to use the port it wants), but this doesn't work if your FTP session is encrypted.
Finally, a lot of the ISPs seem to be actively discouraging P2P, and will simply use "no more IP addresses" as an excuse to slap in NAT gateways that restrict people to web and email. If you want "raw internet", then you'll have to pay.
With any luck there'll still be enough competition in the ISP space in 2010 to push the rollout of IPv6 onwards. A lot of the big ISPs will probably resist it, as a) it would cost a lot to upgrade and re-engineer their infrastructure to support it and b) they can make lots of money by charging a massive premium for routeable IPs. Not to mention that the media cartels will probably have convinced most people and politicians that the only reason one would want "raw internet access" is for piracy, child porn, and terrorism.
It's not just gaming either - web surfing is much faster over ADSL than 3G. While you can get pretty good download speeds out of 3G, the latency means it takes a while to build up to the full transfer rate (TCP slow start). Most web pages don't have content large enough that you'll get to full speed, so the browsing experience feels more like "good dialup" than it does "mobile broadband".
You could also consider getting a phone with internet access that allows "tethering" (at least, I think that's what the kids are calling it these days) so you can access the internet using your laptop via the phone's 3G data service. At home (in .au) I have ADSL2+ in my apartment and 500 mB/month via 3's "X Series" package. It costs me an extra $20/mo but means I do have internet access on the go without the expense of a separate mobile broadband plan. Using your phone for it also means you can have basic internet access even if you don't have your notebook with you, which can be handy.
I think it's just confusion. It appears that Microsoft accidentally made Vista SP1 available to some users (I've only seen mention on the 64-bit edition) through Windows Update, which they then pulled when they realised the mistake. They also pulled this KB937287 patch because of the issues it causes for some users. But since the "big news" was that SP1 was apparently available to some people and it was pulled at the same time as KB937287, I guess people assumed they were more related than they actually are.
It does do automatic breaks unless you select HTML formatted.
/.'s commenting system is that if you post using "Plain old text" you can still use HTML, it just adds hard breaks whenever you insert a new line.
If you select HTML formatted then you should write HTML. What part of this is hard to understand?
No, the retarded thing about
Err, there was a similar response by a guy named "the brown guy".
I think you and the brown guy are confused about how people get paid. Most people in the "entertainment industry" get a salary or hourly wage for doing their job, just like your average IT worker gets paid a certain amount for performing their job function. The amount of sales of the product in a given month has no direct impact on their paycheck, and they aren't paid a proportion of sales.
However, if not enough people buy the product, the business starts laying off salaried staff to try to reduce their operating costs; or potentially shuts down altogether.
So these "2c are all you'll get" comments aren't clever or insightful or even funny, they just show your ignorance.
Whether or not we should care is another matter, of course.
Yes -- but since when have legal technicalities cared whether or not they seem "silly", especially if they only seem silly when viewed in a particular situation? The restriction only seems silly if you're duplicating an unmodified copy of the software.
This makes your point something of a red herring, for the simple fact that if you propagate (as in duplicate) an unmodified version of a piece of GPL software, you are complying with the terms of the license. There's no legal basis for me to sue you because you sent someone an exact copy of my GPLd software without "accepting" the license, because you haven't violated it in any way! In fact, I can't even tell that you haven't "accepted" it, because you're complying perfectly with the terms of the license.
I don't think the section you quoted is rendered "meaningless" by first sale doctrine. In the case you're making no changes, then there's no extra restrictions and that section doesn't do anything. In the case that you are making changes, there are additional restrictions. The book analogy would be that you're allowed to write notes in the book and then give it to someone else, but only if they have the right to a) pass the book with your added notes on to someone else and b) add their own notes before doing so.
I know it was a bit long, but if you're going to reply you could at least read the whole post.
I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers.Even if they don't do this, a lot of users (especially smaller businesses without dedicated IT staff) would prefer not to be responsible for the hardware, anyway. Larger ones not so much.
Personally I think it's more likely they'll sell hardware which runs their software, similar to the Google Mini search appliance. Or perhaps even add the functionality to Google Mini: a box that costs a few grand that can index just about all your data and hosts your email and calendar. That'd be a pretty compelling offering for people starting up businesses.
OH MY GOD. You mean NORTON isn't just PROTECTING me from the viruses, but they're CREATING them?
I see a joint venture between Symantec and Network Solutions in the near future. In fact, I can feel the converged business synergies fast-tracking NorSol to the top already. I'm getting in on the ground floor of this dynamic enterprise partnership!
Well I would say, not there. If we assume there's no copyrights, then there's no reason you can't mirror Joe's personalised aggregator and slap advertising on it. The question then becomes, is it viable for you to do so? Will it make you enough money to justify the effort to set this up and make sure it keeps working?
For you to get enough traffic, people have to a) find your mirror of it and b) not find the original (assuming the original somehow is more valuable -- which might merely require it be identifiable as being the original, or maybe it has less ads) as well as c) find the content worthwhile. If this is the case then you are actually providing a valuable service: that of discovery. Maybe you're marketing your mirror better than Joe is marketing his aggregator.
Now, sooner or later Joe will discover you're mirroring his content, and will probably block you. So you'll have to keep an eye on it and find ways to hide your scraper's identity. This will probably be more costly for you because you're having to react to his changes, and if your mirror is unreliable then people will be less likely to use it.
At the end of the day, Joe might find it's too much work to block you from mirroring his stuff, and that it's not making enough money to be worthwhile to him, and he'll stop producing it. This is analogous to the vast majority of bands who don't make enough money to make a career out of their music (let alone retire on it) and stop producing it, or the vast majority of authors who don't "make it", or bloggers who fail to monetize their work.
I think the whole "nobody will produce anything if there's no easy way to make it financially viable" thing is a little bit overdone. Pick your favourite "easy money" industry and realise that the vast majority of people who try to make it in that industry fail at it. It's pretty difficult to become self-employed, let alone a wealthy self-employed person, and that's why most of us work a safe stable job for someone who's willing to take that risk. If there's a desire for content then there'll be a way to get paid for producing it. 90% of us won't ever try because it's too scary and uncertain; 80% of those who do try will fail to make a living out of it; and 1% of those who succeed will become fabulously wealthy and make the rest of us jealous. Just like now. Without copyright the way to get paid for producing the content will almost certainly change substantially, but there'll be a way and people will find it.
I got one for my parents, and they like it (they've had digital cameras for ages). You're right in that they're very expensive which is why I chose it as a gift: they're a nice thing to have, but hard to justify spending your own money on.
Almost your entire argument is that they're worthless because they're expensive. New tech is always expensive. When they become more affordable I think they'll grow in popularity a lot. The viewing angle is pretty good on the one I got, and LCDs are always improving.
The main benefit is convenience. Take photos, put the memory card in the frame, and you're instantly viewing them. No need to go to a store to get them developed. Also they can show lots (as in, lots) of different photos so there's always something different to look at which is something a regular frame can't do, and also means you have a use for those "less than perfect" photos which you wouldn't want developed as actual prints.
Now personally I wouldn't have any use for one, but I wouldn't have any use for a regular photo frame, either.
Thanks for posting. The explanation seems believable in a "management that has no clue" kind of way, unlike the explanation given on your website:
In response to customer concerns about domain names being registered by someone else just after they have conducted a domain name search, Network Solutions is implementing a new security measure to protect our customers.Network Solutions may reserve domain names that are searched on our Web site for up to 4 days. During this period, these domain names will only be available to register at networksolutions.com. [...] This protection measure provides our customers the opportunity to register domains they have previously searched without the fear that the name will be already taken through Front Running.
...which is clearly a bald-faced lie. As if this has anything to do with "protecting" customers, and even if it did, you're engaging in the exact practice you claim to be "protecting" your customers from!
As for the whole "stop people searching through us and registering elsewhere" argument, it's not as if GoDaddy and every other domain registrar doesn't have the ability to tell you whether a domain is available or not, so anybody that knows they can get the domain cheaper elsewhere isn't going to go to NetSol to see if it's available. Why on earth would someone do that? It's not as if the NS website is some kind of masterpiece that people will love using. Quite the contrary, in fact; it's one of the slowest loading sites I've encountered recently.
I guess this is what happens when you don't have a competitive product, though. Seriously, $35 for one year registration of a .com?
Do you have a reference for this? I did a quick Google for activex sandbox without much luck.
The top hit is this rather dated page which says:
ActiveX security relies entirely on human judgement. ActiveX programs come with digital signatures from the author of the program and anybody else who chooses to endorse the program.You have two choices: either accept the program and let it do whatever it wants on your machine, or reject it completely.
That was written in 1997 and maybe (most likely) they've changed things since then, but it definitely wasn't written with a sandbox in mind. Actually, most or all of the links in that search date from the late nineties.
Changing the search to "activex security" and we get a nice page on MSDN that says:
An ActiveX control can be an extremely insecure way to provide a feature. Because it is a Component Object Model (COM) object, it can do anything the user can do from that computer. It can read from and write to the registry, and it has access to the local file system. From the moment a user downloads an ActiveX control, the control may be vulnerable to attack because any Web application on the Internet can repurpose it, that is, use the control for its own ends whether sincere or malicious. But, you can take precautions when you write a control to help avert an attack.No idea when that was written or if it still applies. So, do you have any references on this subject?
Time for some anecdotal "evidence". A week or so ago I was asked to upload a large (2+ gig) debug trace file to Microsoft's tech support site, and doing that made use of an ActiveX control (I tried using Firefox with the "simple upload" option but I just got a generic and uninformative server error). Given the way in which it sat there saying "Connecting..." 99% of the time with the occasional momentary change to say it was transferring data, I'm sure this wasn't using a plain HTTP POST file upload. Which means this control was able to read the zip file on my desktop and upload it to the site.
Even more disturbing was the effect it had on my RDP session. I used 7-Zip to zip it with maximum compression and since that was gonna take a while I went home, and connected to my desktop later that night to do the upload. Set it going and started doing some other stuff and noticed my keyboard was being weird: almost every keystroke was being duplicated. I've got a Microsoft wireless keyboard and sometimes it does odd things like repeat a keystroke a bunch of times, but this was just twice and for everything. So I closed the IE window and disconnected the RDP session and re-connected -- back to normal.
Started the upload up again and sure enough, same problem. Disconnected the RDP session thinking maybe it was just a bit confused by the crappy uploader ActiveX page and logging in again would reset it. Went to reconnect, and found the keystrokes were being duplicated even on the login dialog! At that point I gave up and just left it for the weekend.
If an ActiveX control can somehow screw up key processing for the RDP login dialog, then I have a tough time believing it's actually sandboxed in any meaningful way. If you have references to the contrary, I'd love to see them.
Well, it supports my conclusion so of course I think it makes sense! ;) Thanks.
I guess a lot of it is just perception; it sure seems to me like the majority of my bulbs go when I'm turning the light on, not while it's running. I'm not sure if that's true or if it's just because we notice it more than we notice lights going while the light is on. My kitchen light went the other day and I don't know when it happened, I just know that when I went to switch it on it didn't do anything.
iii. He can't make his mind up which numbering system to use for ordered lists. The bastard!
Pictures or it didn't happen!
(Seriously, can you post a pic next time you're bored at the office?)
Huh? Didn't you read Microsoft's answers to the Microsoft Vista quiz??!
Windows Vista faces significant Compatibility issues with hardware devices. Fiction! It's just not true!Windows Vista faces significant issues in terms of integrating with other software applications. Also fiction!!!
I think whoever did your planning needs to re-take the quiz so they can learn the real truth. Microsoft's own quiz proves you wrong. Smackdown!