Yes, and those greedy people will always be there. They're of no use to you in getting paid for your work, so the best strategy is just to ignore them! Focus on the non-greedy people who do recognise the value of your creativity -- they're the people you want to communicate with, anyway.
The people who take without giving are a waste of your time. What's in it for you to fight them? The worst case is they enjoy your work without giving you anything for it. So what? How is that different to them not ever seeing or hearing your work and not giving you anything for it? You're just spending your time and/or money trying to stop people who aren't going to give you anything from having access to your creation.
The best case is that some time in the future these greedy people may change their minds and come to appreciate and value your work enough to pay you for it. This is largely the case for kids who don't have much in the way of disposable income, but do have a lot of time and a voracious appetite for new "stuff". I downloaded a lot of music when I was a student; now that I've got a full-time job I listen to a lot less music, but I tend to pay for it the vast majority of the time.
Somewhere between worst case and best case is that the greedy pass your work on to people who do appreciate and value it. "Free advertising", as it were.
Task Manager reports anything which is backed on disc as page file usage. This means any program you run contributes, because the executable and DLLs are already on disc, and Windows treats them as if they're part of the paging file (i.e. it can drop the program or library from memory if need be, because it knows it's still on disc).
You can prove this by disabling paging altogether, and then amuse yourself by looking at how much of the "page file" is in use.
Also, Windows does aggressively page stuff out, which in theory should boost performance by making more memory available for useful things like disc caches, but in practice does annoy me a bit as well.
On the Lame Excuses List, this falls somewhere above "You can't take bottled water on an airplane or the terrorists might win" but still doesn't beat out "He only hits me because he loves me."
That was awesome. Who says nothing good ever came outta Texas?
Is it fair to try to divert attention away from an actual issue (Vista performance is terrible and is not improved by the latest service pack) to a stupid wankfest about whether Microsoft actually claimed they would improve the poor Vista performance? Either way, Vista performance is poor and not getting better.
Is it fair to divert attention away from what SP1 is actually supposed to improve, by harping on about things that it's not supposed to do anything to improve? If Microsoft only said it would improve system security and stability, it's pointless to bring up the performance issue. That's already known and if the SP isn't supposed to improve it, why would you expect it to? What's the point in talking about here? There's plenty of other times you can discuss the performance (or lack thereof) of Vista.
Let me give you an example of why it's annoying when people do this:
Meanwhile, I hear the Walmart Green PC at $199 is selling like hotcakes, because it performs very well running Linux + Enlightenment.
But it doesn't run Windows apps natively. What's the point of even talking about this if I can't run Photoshop on it? And forgot about gaming on it. What a waste of time! Vista is a lot better than this piece of crap "computer" because it can at least do the tasks actual people want it to do. Walmart are just ripping people off by selling them a $200 paperweight that can't do what people expect a computer to do.
A response like this is annoying because it's not at all relevant; it's just someone trying to force their own agenda somewhere it doesn't belong (in this case, the agenda is probably "I want Linux to be exactly like Windows only free!"). Yes, Linux isn't Windows and doesn't run Photoshop natively. That's not news. Nobody made any claims that this PC would be able to do these things, so why am I bringing it up? Nobody really expects a cheap PC to be able to run the latest games either, so it's just noise. If Walmart was advertising their PC as being able to do these things, it'd would be fine (and good) to point out that they're lying. But telling people who already know what to expect of a $200 PC running Linux that it won't do things they don't expect it to do is just annoying.
I haven't been following Microsoft's claims about Vista SP1, so I have no idea whether or not they're claiming it will improve performance. If they haven't, then the entire article is essentially a troll.
I think it's more that people don't care how ISPs make their money. It's not my problem if an ISP offers a product which they're unable to make a profit on, any more than it's my problem if a store mis-prices an item and sells it a loss.
ISPs have been telling everyone that bandwidth is cheap, by selling X mbit at Y$ per month. "Use it as much as you want and that's all you'll pay", they say. Now they're complaining that their customers actually think their $Y per month entitles them to X mbit of bandwidth. Gee, I wonder why that is?
If you sell an internet connection as an unlimited service, people are going to use it as an unlimited service. If you can't actually provide that, then don't sell it! IMHO, if an ISP that sells you an unlimited X mbit connection and then tells you you're using it too much, it should be an open-and-shut case of false advertising. They're entering into a contract with you without being able to fulfil their side of it.
In the internet backwaters of Australia, ISPs used to offer unlimited access plans on dialup. The low bandwidth of dialup meant that this was kind of feasible, because there's only so much you can download at 56k. When ADSL started coming out, they went to a quota system, because even a couple of hundred kilobits per second can add up to a crapload of data if left going 24/7, and data from overseas costs a lot.
So now I'm paying for 40 gigs of traffic on an ADSL2 link at ~ 19mbit down, 1mbit up. Sure, it's only 40 gigs, but they're my 40 gigs. I can do whatever I want with that and not worry about being throttled because my ISP doesn't approve of particular types of traffic.
There are ISPs here which offer cheaper prices for a much higher quota (and even some offering unlimited quotas at low speeds, i.e. 256kbit). I'm with a more expensive ISP because the cheaper ones heavily oversubscribe and that means you often get poor performance during peak periods. I don't have a problem with ISPs providing such a service; there's people who want to download a lot but don't really care if sometimes (or often) websites are slow to load. It's only a problem if they try to hide the fact that they do this.
Yep. The big difference in P2P vs "everything else" is that with P2P you're receiving AND sending a lot of data. Furthermore, most P2P doesn't run over port 80; and even if that becomes common, transparent proxies or sniffers can inspect the traffic and ensure it's normal HTTP.
It's entirely possible to identify most P2P traffic with at least 80% accuracy. I pulled that % out of my arse, but the point is that you don't need to be 100% accurate, just good enough that you can throttle most P2P traffic. There will be loopholes, but if enough people exploit them they'll be easy to identify.
Not that I think they should be throttling particular types of traffic; if you don't have enough bandwidth for what your users want to do, then get more. If that requires increasing prices to cover your costs, then hey, that's what supply and demand is all about. I think any ISP which throttles particular types of traffic should lose its "common carrier" status.
I think the term "business class" means something else when you're a student at a uni.
Anyway, this is a horrible idea. ISPs should just make sure they have enough bandwidth to satisfy everyone at peak time. Not doing so is called being cheap and nasty.
In Australia we have monthly download quotas, which some people hate but seems to actually be a good solution. If you want to P2P 200 gigs a month you can, but you're going to pay a lot more for your access than someone who wants to do 10 gigs a month over their company's VPN. Also, you have a well-defined limit to work to; I've seen quite a few posts here about some ISPs having a seemingly undefined "limit" after which they start asking you to curb your net usage. But if you ask them what they consider acceptable you'll never get an answer, because it's always changing. So, I might only get 40 gigs a month on my account, but I know I'll always be able to use it at full speed because my ISP ensures they have enough capacity to handle peak periods.
There is of course money to be made by catering to the heavy downloaders who don't care too much about performance, by selling them cheap accounts with heavily overcommitted bandwidth. But if you're doing that without being upfront about it, then you're cheap and nasty; and it shouldn't be the norm. If you pay for a X mbit/sec connection, that's what you should get, and the only time you shouldn't get the full throughput is if the host you're receiving data from can't handle it.
Modern CPUs are pretty fast. My file server has an Athlon64 3700+ (2.2 GHz) processor, which at the time was fairly decent, but now is pretty much entry level, especially for anything trying to call itself a "server".
raid5: automatically using best checksumming function: generic_sse: 6771.000 MB/sec
I would say you're unlikely to get sufficient throughput from the drives to be able to max out the CPU during a rebuild, unless you have a fairly large array.
A quick test writing 5 gigs from/dev/null to my 5-drive SATA array and syncing gives me around 123 MB/sec actual throughput, and about 40% CPU usage. Reading it at 214 MB/sec costs about 25-30% CPU.
Even assuming a hardware RAID card does make a significant difference to server performance during a rebuild, you're still adding components and locking yourself into a particular vendor's hardware (or even particular model or series of controllers) in order to optimise for a rare event. Even then, the optimisation isn't an especially good one, since your performance is going to be hosed by the disc I/O overhead of a rebuild, anyway. Real hardware RAID controllers aren't especially cheap either; that money could be better spent on implementing a decent backup solution.
The only performance benefit is that the data being read from and written to the drives in order to rebuild the array doesn't have to travel via the system bus to get to the CPU and back again. If you've got a big array with fast drives that can flood the bus, then hardware RAID will certainly improve performance.
But you're still going to get a performance hit, because the drives are doing a lot more I/O operations than usual. The hardware RAID controller still needs to read from every disc in order to calculate the data that needs to be written to the replacement drive.
When most people refer to "software RAID", they mean something like the Linux md driver. This is a pretty robust and well-tested implementation of RAID which requires no special hardware support whatsoever. You can use any block devices which the OS supports. If you want to set up a RAID-5 array with a SATA hard disc, a PATA disc, a USB drive and some kind of network block device, you can. (It's probably not a good idea, of course.)
The software RAID you're referring to is a misfeature of some motherboards that provides a kind of "pseudo-device" which pretends to do RAID. The better ones will in fact offload some calculations to dedicated hardware, but for the most part you're simply installing a proprietary RAID implementation in the form of "drivers" for "virtual hardware".
This kind of faux RAID should be avoided in almost all cases, as it gives you the vendor and model lock-in problems of hardware RAID and software RAID combined. The implementations usually aren't particularly good either, because they're designed to be as cheap as possible.
Re:Conclusion:
on
Spying On Tor
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Not really. The tor configuration lets you specify an "exit policy": addresses and ports which you will allow your node to be used as an exit for. Tor clients know what the exit policy of each node is, and don't try to exit out of a node which doesn't allow those connections to be made.
It's only disruptive if you use a firewall to prevent certain connections, and don't let tor know that you're doing so. In that case, a client may select you as an exit node, but the connection will fail. If you configure your exit policy to match your firewall policy, then clients know your server won't allow their connection to a particular host/port, and won't select it as an exit node.
Therefore, if your purpose in running tor is to snoop on unencrypted traffic, you would set your exit policy not to allow connections to port 443, because that's almost always encrypted, and thus minimise the amount of traffic exiting your node which you're not able to sniff. Or more likely, you'd set it to only allow connections to port 80 or whatever it is you're interested in.
Note that exit policies are very useful and quite legitimate. For example, I run two tor servers: one on my own dedicated server at a US colo facility on a dedicated IP address, which uses the standard tor exit policy which is fairly permissive. At work we have an unmetered fibre connection we don't use much, so I run a tor server here with a highly restrictive exit policy: deny everything (in other words, it's purely a relay or entry point, not an exit point). This limits our exposure; I'm willing to deal with people complaining about abuse from my own server, but I don't want to get our organisation involved in such disputes.
Most tor servers won't allow you to connect to port 25, as another example, because that effectively turns your tor server into an open SMTP relay.
This, unfortunately, ignores the simple human traits that a) they will take anything not nailed down and b) perceived anonymity gives them an impetus to do things they wouldn't usually do
I don't buy this (haha, get it?). Here's the last three albums I bought:
Jimmy Eat World - Chase This Light
Notified by the company I buy most of my CDs from (online, receive them in the post; almost as convenient as downloading, only it takes longer) a week before the album was released. Placed a pre-order (I love this band), then went and downloaded a copy from Usenet in the interim.
AFI - Decemberunderground
I like their song "Love Like Winter", which is on this album; just something very catchy about it. I downloaded a copy of the album in reasonable quality mp3 (192ish VBR, IIRC) and listened to a couple of the tracks. Liked them enough to conclude that Love Like Winter isn't the only song on the album I'd like, so I added this to my order when I orded the one below.
Jimmy Eat World - Static Prevails (re-release)
I've had this album for a long, long time, in mp3 form. It's an old album which has been out of print for ages, so I wasn't able to buy it. It's been re-released, although my supplier has it as a "European Import" and it's a bit pricier than most CDs. But, I really like the album, and I want to "own" it. And now, I finally can. This is still on order.
In all of these cases, I already had free access to the music. From an economic point of view, my purchase of all of these was completely irrational -- purchasing a pressed plastic disc with the music on it gained me nothing I didn't already have, but it did cause a bunch of pollution from manufacturing and transporting the disc, and paid some people for not actually providing me any value whatsoever. And maybe the musicians will get a few cents from it.
Now, I don't entirely mind purchasing a useless piece of plastic if that's really the artist's preferred way for me to support them. However, I can't help but think that it would be much more logical and efficient if I could give the money straight to the band; no useless middle-men taking a cut, and I'd know that the money I'm spending to encourage these guys to make more of the music I like goes straight to those who create it, and not to nameless, faceless people somewhere in the chain.
The labels only really provide two functions: advertising/promotion and lending money to finance bands while they record and produce the album. Lending can be done by anyone; labels in this regard are just venture capitalists for musicians. Distribution I'm also putting under "lending", because the band pays the costs of distributing the album (i.e. they pay this cost back from proceeds of sales).
That leaves promotion and advertising, which is always a hit and miss affair. When was the last time you bought an album from a band you've never heard because you saw an ad for it? The only effective way to advertise music is to give it away for free, in the hopes that people who like it will hear it and want to buy it.
Radio currently serves that purpose, but the internet provides the opportunity for much more efficient means of advertising; services that analyse your musical preferences and suggest other artists you're likely to enjoy provide much better targeted advertising of music than a radio station can provide. What's more, there's no particular reason an open source P2P network couldn't fill this niche at zero cost to artists.
You don't. Most do, as is evidenced by the comments here. It's always a mistake to think you are the rule rather than the exception. You need to listen to others.
Right back at ya; I'll join the chorus of others who regularly leave Firefox running for days (and sometimes weeks, depending on how many fixes Windows needs) on end without problems. I've never seen its memory usage above 300 megs (this machine has 3.6 gigs of memory). Currently it's using 111, which is less than the world community grid processes. I typically have a tab with MRTG graphs open refreshing every 5 minutes, and another with Nagios status refreshing every minute. On top of that, I regularly open and close new tabs for Google searches, slashdot, etc.
As a sibling post says, people who don't have problems don't complain. I was actually about to close this thread because people bitching about the memory use is boring to me, but your claim that "most" people have problems with Firefox's memory usage got me snarky. Millions of people use Firefox without problems. It's extremely difficult to fix problems you can't reproduce, and most of these excessive memory consumptions problems do seem hard to reproduce for some people. I certainly can't.
Maybe being web developers makes you special. Do you make use of any extensions that might be somewhat uncommon amongst most users? Perhaps the pages you guys develop just kind of suck?;)
They help lower the barrier of entry for artists even lower, thus encouraging art production even more. They DON'T just produce "lowest common denominator" art. They produce many varieties of art, with differing popularities.
Wow, that reads like a mission statement from $RANDOM_SOULLESS_BIG_CORP. I felt almost inspired by the end of it. Praise capitalism! Hooray for the RIAA! Hopefully you really do feel that positive about the direction we're headed in.
Unfortunately for me, today I'm feeling jaded and cynical, and I can't help but think we don't really have a pure free market driven entirely by consumer demand.
Labels advertise an artist because they want to maximise sales, and it's hard to deny that if a big label decides to really back someone, they can go from a nobody to a superstar almost overnight. It's rare to find a song so bad that continuous radio airplay can't turn it into a #1 hit. So while effective at increasing profits, it also creates a feedback loop for labels: they pick up and run with artist from genre X; it sells well; so they pick another artist from the same genre. Since they're advertising the hell out of that, it also sells well. It takes a very brave executive to suggest going against a cycle like that.
If there is solid demand, why wouldn't they explore the market?
Because there might not be enough demand to justify it. If you can make a 10-fold return on your investment by doing Thing A, and a 100-fold return on your investment by doing Thing B, then you're not going to do Thing A. Even if you can afford to do both, eventually you're going to decide it's not worth the effort. As a dull example, a lot of people won't stop to pick up 10 cents they see lying on the ground, even though it is effectively free money. Most people will stop to pick up $10 though, and almost everyone would stop to pick up $100. A label that's making millions of dollars from its artists isn't going to bother with an artist it might only make $100,000 from.
In theory, there's other record labels that don't make so much money that are willing to sign the artists. I have a very pessimistic view of our current implementation of capitalism, in that it appears the natural progression is toward monopoly. Large companies buy out smaller ones all the time, or simply use their financial advantage to bury the others who can't compete on advertising or loss leading.
So, the music industry is reasonably healthy at the moment, but smaller labels struggle to compete with larger ones. If a talented artist wants wide exposure, they have to go with a big label, which leaves fewer talented artists for the smaller labels. It will only get worse with time, as the big labels get bigger.
Now, someone else with deep pockets can come in and set up their own label big enough to compete with the big guys, and offer artists a better deal in order to gain market share. But they're only going to do that if they see massive profits for themselves, which mean they'll be playing the exact same game as the existing large labels. They'll just end up as part of the cartel, because once an industry is dominated by large players who aren't large enough to buy each other, they cooperate (or they merge with another company so they are large enough to buy someone out).
We do have laws regarding monopolies and collusion of course, but I don't have much faith in them either, given the amount of influence big business has on government policy.
The distributor itself -- the one who gains most of the profits from selling copies of art -- is actively encouraged to devalue the work of the artist.
And those mean consumers! They are actively encouraged to devalue the work of whom they're buying from! It's the nature of any free market exchange. If you don't want to be screwed over, don't devalue yourself! Next you'll be guilt-tripping me because I sometimes shop at a discount store, one that could b
Replying in a separate post because this piqued my curiosity / interest.
However, the downside is that everyone will end up paying for a copy of every artwork. If you thought it was a drain paying for a few albums, a few movies, and a few pieces of software, imagine having to pay for thousands through taxes! It would also lower the number artworks produced
I'm not sure if this is necessarily the case. A lot of money is made from distributing works of art currently, and that money comes from people buying the product. So in actual fact, we are already paying all of that money. Not only that, but the fact that various people along the way are making a profit implies that we are collectively overpaying for the creation of art.
Granted, this ignores advertising; but there's no particular reason advertising couldn't also be used to support a public arts fund. It also ignores the fact that potential profit is a powerful incentive, but that doesn't necessarily mean that without profit as a motive we'd get less or lower quality art.
decrease the amount of money paid to the artist per artwork
I'm also not convinced on this one. Most artists don't do especially well, because it's not in their distributor's interest to give the artist too much money. I covered this in my other reply, but it's important to keep in mind that not only is "getting rich by writing music" a dream that very few actually achieve, it's also not really beneficial to society. I won't pretend I don't want to be rich myself, but the fact is that "rich" is an inherently selfish proposition -- you can't be rich unless the majority of those around you are (comparatively) poor.
You could certainly find examples of artists who would be worse off in a publically-funded art system, but you could also find plenty of examples of artists who would be better off, and of wanna-be artists who currently don't have the means to get into the industry.
and snip out the most expensive forms of art
Almost certainly true, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. It's certainly very inefficient to produce very expensive art, so you'd have to be doing a cost/benefit analysis on artist's proposals. A few hundred-million dollar movies probably are worthwhile and could be catered for by the system, but you'd have to prove you can make something pretty damn good before you'd get to spend that much of taxpayer's money on it.
On my way home from work I started thinking about way back before mass-distribution of art was practical. In those times, if you wanted to be a full-time artist, you had two choices: travel around getting people to pay you for performing; or get yourself a patron. The problem with this is that few people can afford to sponsor an artist, and constantly performing has its own share of problems.
When it became possible to mass-produce and distribute recorded works of art, the larger audiences made it possible for individuals to collectively sponsor artists. Of course, production and distribution cost a lot up front, so this role was filled by already-wealthy people in the pursuit of more wealth.
Now we're at a time where distribution costs almost nothing, and production costs are falling, so perhaps the next logical step is in fact patronage by the masses.
The current system doesn't skew the way art is produced? Of course it does. Different systems will skew it in different ways. The question is: which is better? That's infinitely debatable, of course.
You speak of blockbuster movies, but is that really the particular expression of film-making artistry which is most beneficial to society? Blockbuster movies are by definition popular, but do they really enrich our culture, or are they largely the same ideas recycled over and over? Would we as a society be better off without such things, in the long term?
At the moment things are skewed towards producing whatever is likely to sell in the largest quantities. Or in other words, appealing to the lowest common denominator. Is this the path towards progress? Big media (record labels, studios) act as gatekeepers; without their marketing muscle, you can't shift enough units to make it all pay off. The real profits here belong to those who can distribute the material, and maximising profits requires giving the artists creating the material as little as possible. If you consider the music industry at the moment, artists are effectively competing against each other to offer the labels the best possible deal.
The distributor itself -- the one who gains most of the profits from selling copies of art -- is actively encouraged to devalue the work of the artist.
That may well be the future without copyright that we're looking at.
Ooh, scary. It may just as well not be the case. Production technologies are better and more affordable than ever; there's no shortage of people interesting in the creation and production of film and music and other forms of modern art. Artists strive to at least emulate, if not better, whatever it is they see as the current best art, and that will continue.
It's interesting that you use a "music album that isn't one of those sells-for-sure pop albums (i.e. anything with any degree of financial risk)" as an example of what wouldn't be possible without copyright. The current system doesn't support risky endeavours very well -- why would a label choose to produce and promote an album that might not sell if they could choose to produce and promote an album that's virtually guaranteed to sell well? The flood of "sells for sure" by-the-numbers plasti-pop is entirely due to the fact that they have to make a profit, and bigger profits are better. When was the last time a major label did anything truly experimental, that they didn't have a lot of confidence in their ability to sell?
Consider Mr2001's original suggestion -- artists get money upfront from interested people before starting their project. Imagine this becomes widespread, i.e. the standard way of producing music. What dictates whether a project goes ahead or not? Simple: whether or not there's enough people willing to contribute enough cash to get it done. This actively encourages experimental things, because you don't need millions of dollars to make a decent album, and a relatively small number of people can easily raise enough to make a decent album. Many niches are ignored by the current system because there's more profitable alternatives to invest money in.
So you're meaning to tell me that you think we should ditch copyright and hope a new business model will materialise soon after, and that we shouldn't wait, find a new business model, try against the current business model, and decide which is superior, because it's unpleasant but inevitable? WTF?
That's not what I meant at all. I think we're currently within a period of change, and new models will emerge and take over. We don't need to do anything as dramatic as ditching copyright overnight. It will happen on its own.
In a free market, if a business model as dominant as the copyright business model is, it's usually a good indicator.
Sure; but the current model was developed during a time whe
If everyone copies artists' works instead of paying for them, then sooner or later, the pool of available artists will dry up, and there will be nothing new to copy.
That is absolutely false, and I'm fairly sure you know it. Or do you actually believe that nobody has ever, or will ever again, create any form of art unless they're compensated monetarily for it?
There may be less people willing to create art, and the art may be different due to the different motivation for creating it. Then again, it might not; a lot of people participate in free software for the recognition, so it seems likely a lot of people will try to create popular art for the sole purpose of achieving recognition (fame).
This may be a nett gain or loss, but we won't suddenly end up deprived of any form of art and culture if we stop paying people to make copies of it. Mr2001 is right on a fundamental level: charging for something which has no cost is a nonsensical (but obviously highly desirable) business model. Getting money via the distribution of creative content made sense when distribution actually had a cost; that cost is rapidly approaching zero. Change is inevitable, and almost always unpleasant. At least for a while. Eventually a new stable model will emerge.
Mr2001 suggests a possible model. Here's another one: if art is so important to us as a society, why not just use tax money to pay artists to create new art? The size of the slice you get from it could be determined by how popular your creation is. Whether or not you can make a living out of it depends on how popular your work is; which isn't actually a major change to how things are now. Then, all art will be "free" and artists will still get paid for creating it.
Just because we do things in a particular way now, doesn't mean that's the only or best way to do it.
BitTorrent is the perfect way to distribute free software
I actually have to disagree with this. I don't think I've ever used BitTorrent to download free software, for the simple reason that most of the large (and even some of the small) ISPs here (.au) mirror popular content locally. Whether it's Linux distributions, popular free applications, game demos and patches... if it's wanted by a lot of people and it's legal for them to mirror it, they will.
They also provide incentives to their users to use their local mirror: my ISP doesn't count downloads from their mirror in your monthly quota, making it essentially "free" for their customers to access. They can do this partly because they control the amount of content available on the mirror, and because it's cheaper for them to deliver it from their own network than from overseas.
Even for stuff they don't mirror, it's likely another ISP has a mirror of it. Optus run a SourceForge mirror in Australia, so even though it isn't "free" traffic for me it's still faster than downloading from overseas.
BitTorrent doesn't select peers based on network topology, so if I was to torrent the Debian ISOs I would be creating traffic all over the internet in order to saturate my ~18 mbit pipe. If I download them from my ISP, I'm creating traffic across their network and nowhere else. It's much more efficient and scalable than torrents.
Torrents are useful when the content cannot be legally distributed by others; or when large amounts of data are wanted by lots of people in disparate locations, but not by a large enough number to make it worthwhile for others to mirror.
BT would be great if it automatically selected the closest peers (based on network topology and bandwidth availability), so that transfers would tend to be clustered around POPs and internet exchanges. As it is now, it ends up with data being sent from all over the world across expensive trans-oceanic links.
If that really is your understanding, then you could benefit from either spending a bit of time improving your comprehension skills, or paying less attention to the trolls.
The difference between the development models and philosophies usually becomes apparent when the flaws are discovered. How long will it take for the libFLAC flaws to be fixed? How does this compare to closed-source applications with similar flaws? How long will it take for companies using libFLAC within their proprietary players take to incorporate the fixes and release them to their customers?
Many closed-source companies sit on vulnerabilities until they're publically reported, and even then take their sweet time addressing them. The time between discovery of problems and fixes being available is generally pretty good in open source projects. Microsoft is no exception to this <troll>although they do respond remarkably quickly when flaws in their DRM measures are discovered</troll>.
One interesting issue this raises though is the number of programs and devices which are affected. If libFLAC wasn't available for everyone to use, then we'd likely have multiple implementations of it and a flaw in libFLAC wouldn't affect so many devices. For example, if the Fraunhoffer decoder had similar problems, it wouldn't effect most mp3 players because there's so many different decoder implementations. So even though libFLAC being open source does make it technically easier to produce a competing implementation, it also reduces the incentive to do so. So does open source potentially contribute to creating a software monoculture?
Also some nitpicking of the article summary:
eEye Digital Security has discovered 14 vulnerabilities in the FLAC file format
How can a file format have vulnerabilities? Surely the vulnerability exists in code that reads and interprets the bytestream, not in the format itself.
Indeed, but computers and related technology are still in their infancy. We don't have easy ways to make them secure. A lot of the functionality we use depends on things being easy for the user; which also makes it easy for attackers unless every user in the organisation is well-educated.
So, effective computer security currently does interfere with the mission. Even very basic things like having to supply a password to log on to your account get in the way: people forget passwords, and that prevents them from performing their job until they get it reset. At the moment where I work, people can just call up and say they've forgotten their password and we'll reset it for them. But that opens us up to very basic social engineering attacks. However if we didn't do that and insisted they somehow prove their identity or come into the office to get their password reset, we'd cop a lot of flak for it.
I really think the biggest disservice Microsoft (and a few others) have done to computing is actually pushing it on the masses so quickly. We still suck at building software (and I'm talking proprietary and open source here), and we still suck at making things "secure by default" while still being functional. "Over-promise and under-deliver" is still the standard way of delivering technology solutions. People who want to use computers simply as tools really need to know a heck of a lot more about them than they ought to, merely in order to be able to use them safely.
Agreed. It's not that people don't think about it; I work in IT, and we think about it all the time. But it's very difficult to actually enforce meaningful security if nobody understands the point of it. It simply gets seen as a hassle imposed by IT because they're control freaks trying to make themselves look important to the rest of the organisation. The top management doesn't care; all they hear is the hassle it's causing their Executive Directors when IT won't let them log on to the VPN while they're at the airport because they left their RSA token at home.
Unfortunately, if you set up good security and the users don't understand it, they'll circumvent it: the private key used to unlock the laptop's encrypted drive will be stored on a USB stick with the laptop, along with a sticky note with the user's password and their RSA SecureID token. So not only do people resent you when you try improve security standards, but they actively seek to undermine it. Even a single crappy password like "Wednesday1" is better than having everything you need to access sensitive data neatly packed with the laptop.
Therefore, to get proper security, everyone needs at least an intermediate level understanding of computer security. That's a massive undertaking for most organisations, where people's main job function isn't anything to do with computers. Most people don't want to understand computers at all, they just want to use them. Kind of like telephones: most people don't even consider for a moment if their phone is secure or not, and have no interest in learning how the call they make from their office phone gets from their desk to the other side of the country.
Really, before you even have a shot at putting in place meaningful, consistent security, you need a long-term commitment from all levels of management to establish and maintain strong security and train the staff to use it properly, even when it causes inconveniences. Given how much trouble we have getting people to use the records management system properly, this actually seems like a very high mountain to climb.
The possibility of being embarrassed because of data theft isn't anywhere near a strong enough motivation for most organisations. Therefore, legislation like this is probably a good move -- though I think it should apply to any organisation that collects personal information, government or not. But you have to start somewhere.
Furthermore, it shouldn't require actually losing data before there's a possibility of punishment. One should be able to report agencies and companies that aren't taking their duty of care seriously, and report them. Otherwise it's still easier for a lot of organisations to say "it won't happen to us" and only pay lip-service to information security. So, if your bank is using dubious client-side "security", report them!
There'd be a lot of short-term pain, but long term gain. It might even slow down the pace at which computers take over the world, and maybe us folk that program and administrate them can catch the fuck up with what users are expecting from it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are the mod points when you need them?!
Yes, and those greedy people will always be there. They're of no use to you in getting paid for your work, so the best strategy is just to ignore them! Focus on the non-greedy people who do recognise the value of your creativity -- they're the people you want to communicate with, anyway.
The people who take without giving are a waste of your time. What's in it for you to fight them? The worst case is they enjoy your work without giving you anything for it. So what? How is that different to them not ever seeing or hearing your work and not giving you anything for it? You're just spending your time and/or money trying to stop people who aren't going to give you anything from having access to your creation.
The best case is that some time in the future these greedy people may change their minds and come to appreciate and value your work enough to pay you for it. This is largely the case for kids who don't have much in the way of disposable income, but do have a lot of time and a voracious appetite for new "stuff". I downloaded a lot of music when I was a student; now that I've got a full-time job I listen to a lot less music, but I tend to pay for it the vast majority of the time.
Somewhere between worst case and best case is that the greedy pass your work on to people who do appreciate and value it. "Free advertising", as it were.
Probably more like they're still running toll-booths after teleportation has been invented.
It can be a teleporting car, if you like.
Task Manager reports anything which is backed on disc as page file usage. This means any program you run contributes, because the executable and DLLs are already on disc, and Windows treats them as if they're part of the paging file (i.e. it can drop the program or library from memory if need be, because it knows it's still on disc).
You can prove this by disabling paging altogether, and then amuse yourself by looking at how much of the "page file" is in use.
Also, Windows does aggressively page stuff out, which in theory should boost performance by making more memory available for useful things like disc caches, but in practice does annoy me a bit as well.
That was awesome. Who says nothing good ever came outta Texas?
Is it fair to divert attention away from what SP1 is actually supposed to improve, by harping on about things that it's not supposed to do anything to improve? If Microsoft only said it would improve system security and stability, it's pointless to bring up the performance issue. That's already known and if the SP isn't supposed to improve it, why would you expect it to? What's the point in talking about here? There's plenty of other times you can discuss the performance (or lack thereof) of Vista.
Let me give you an example of why it's annoying when people do this:
Meanwhile, I hear the Walmart Green PC at $199 is selling like hotcakes, because it performs very well running Linux + Enlightenment.But it doesn't run Windows apps natively. What's the point of even talking about this if I can't run Photoshop on it? And forgot about gaming on it. What a waste of time! Vista is a lot better than this piece of crap "computer" because it can at least do the tasks actual people want it to do. Walmart are just ripping people off by selling them a $200 paperweight that can't do what people expect a computer to do.
A response like this is annoying because it's not at all relevant; it's just someone trying to force their own agenda somewhere it doesn't belong (in this case, the agenda is probably "I want Linux to be exactly like Windows only free!"). Yes, Linux isn't Windows and doesn't run Photoshop natively. That's not news. Nobody made any claims that this PC would be able to do these things, so why am I bringing it up? Nobody really expects a cheap PC to be able to run the latest games either, so it's just noise. If Walmart was advertising their PC as being able to do these things, it'd would be fine (and good) to point out that they're lying. But telling people who already know what to expect of a $200 PC running Linux that it won't do things they don't expect it to do is just annoying.
I haven't been following Microsoft's claims about Vista SP1, so I have no idea whether or not they're claiming it will improve performance. If they haven't, then the entire article is essentially a troll.
I think it's more that people don't care how ISPs make their money. It's not my problem if an ISP offers a product which they're unable to make a profit on, any more than it's my problem if a store mis-prices an item and sells it a loss.
ISPs have been telling everyone that bandwidth is cheap, by selling X mbit at Y$ per month. "Use it as much as you want and that's all you'll pay", they say. Now they're complaining that their customers actually think their $Y per month entitles them to X mbit of bandwidth. Gee, I wonder why that is?
If you sell an internet connection as an unlimited service, people are going to use it as an unlimited service. If you can't actually provide that, then don't sell it! IMHO, if an ISP that sells you an unlimited X mbit connection and then tells you you're using it too much, it should be an open-and-shut case of false advertising. They're entering into a contract with you without being able to fulfil their side of it.
In the internet backwaters of Australia, ISPs used to offer unlimited access plans on dialup. The low bandwidth of dialup meant that this was kind of feasible, because there's only so much you can download at 56k. When ADSL started coming out, they went to a quota system, because even a couple of hundred kilobits per second can add up to a crapload of data if left going 24/7, and data from overseas costs a lot.
So now I'm paying for 40 gigs of traffic on an ADSL2 link at ~ 19mbit down, 1mbit up. Sure, it's only 40 gigs, but they're my 40 gigs. I can do whatever I want with that and not worry about being throttled because my ISP doesn't approve of particular types of traffic.
There are ISPs here which offer cheaper prices for a much higher quota (and even some offering unlimited quotas at low speeds, i.e. 256kbit). I'm with a more expensive ISP because the cheaper ones heavily oversubscribe and that means you often get poor performance during peak periods. I don't have a problem with ISPs providing such a service; there's people who want to download a lot but don't really care if sometimes (or often) websites are slow to load. It's only a problem if they try to hide the fact that they do this.
Yep. The big difference in P2P vs "everything else" is that with P2P you're receiving AND sending a lot of data. Furthermore, most P2P doesn't run over port 80; and even if that becomes common, transparent proxies or sniffers can inspect the traffic and ensure it's normal HTTP.
It's entirely possible to identify most P2P traffic with at least 80% accuracy. I pulled that % out of my arse, but the point is that you don't need to be 100% accurate, just good enough that you can throttle most P2P traffic. There will be loopholes, but if enough people exploit them they'll be easy to identify.
Not that I think they should be throttling particular types of traffic; if you don't have enough bandwidth for what your users want to do, then get more. If that requires increasing prices to cover your costs, then hey, that's what supply and demand is all about. I think any ISP which throttles particular types of traffic should lose its "common carrier" status.
I think the term "business class" means something else when you're a student at a uni.
Anyway, this is a horrible idea. ISPs should just make sure they have enough bandwidth to satisfy everyone at peak time. Not doing so is called being cheap and nasty.
In Australia we have monthly download quotas, which some people hate but seems to actually be a good solution. If you want to P2P 200 gigs a month you can, but you're going to pay a lot more for your access than someone who wants to do 10 gigs a month over their company's VPN. Also, you have a well-defined limit to work to; I've seen quite a few posts here about some ISPs having a seemingly undefined "limit" after which they start asking you to curb your net usage. But if you ask them what they consider acceptable you'll never get an answer, because it's always changing. So, I might only get 40 gigs a month on my account, but I know I'll always be able to use it at full speed because my ISP ensures they have enough capacity to handle peak periods.
There is of course money to be made by catering to the heavy downloaders who don't care too much about performance, by selling them cheap accounts with heavily overcommitted bandwidth. But if you're doing that without being upfront about it, then you're cheap and nasty; and it shouldn't be the norm. If you pay for a X mbit/sec connection, that's what you should get, and the only time you shouldn't get the full throughput is if the host you're receiving data from can't handle it.
Modern CPUs are pretty fast. My file server has an Athlon64 3700+ (2.2 GHz) processor, which at the time was fairly decent, but now is pretty much entry level, especially for anything trying to call itself a "server".
I would say you're unlikely to get sufficient throughput from the drives to be able to max out the CPU during a rebuild, unless you have a fairly large array.
A quick test writing 5 gigs from /dev/null to my 5-drive SATA array and syncing gives me around 123 MB/sec actual throughput, and about 40% CPU usage. Reading it at 214 MB/sec costs about 25-30% CPU.
Even assuming a hardware RAID card does make a significant difference to server performance during a rebuild, you're still adding components and locking yourself into a particular vendor's hardware (or even particular model or series of controllers) in order to optimise for a rare event. Even then, the optimisation isn't an especially good one, since your performance is going to be hosed by the disc I/O overhead of a rebuild, anyway. Real hardware RAID controllers aren't especially cheap either; that money could be better spent on implementing a decent backup solution.
The only performance benefit is that the data being read from and written to the drives in order to rebuild the array doesn't have to travel via the system bus to get to the CPU and back again. If you've got a big array with fast drives that can flood the bus, then hardware RAID will certainly improve performance.
But you're still going to get a performance hit, because the drives are doing a lot more I/O operations than usual. The hardware RAID controller still needs to read from every disc in order to calculate the data that needs to be written to the replacement drive.
When most people refer to "software RAID", they mean something like the Linux md driver. This is a pretty robust and well-tested implementation of RAID which requires no special hardware support whatsoever. You can use any block devices which the OS supports. If you want to set up a RAID-5 array with a SATA hard disc, a PATA disc, a USB drive and some kind of network block device, you can. (It's probably not a good idea, of course.)
The software RAID you're referring to is a misfeature of some motherboards that provides a kind of "pseudo-device" which pretends to do RAID. The better ones will in fact offload some calculations to dedicated hardware, but for the most part you're simply installing a proprietary RAID implementation in the form of "drivers" for "virtual hardware".
This kind of faux RAID should be avoided in almost all cases, as it gives you the vendor and model lock-in problems of hardware RAID and software RAID combined. The implementations usually aren't particularly good either, because they're designed to be as cheap as possible.
Not really. The tor configuration lets you specify an "exit policy": addresses and ports which you will allow your node to be used as an exit for. Tor clients know what the exit policy of each node is, and don't try to exit out of a node which doesn't allow those connections to be made.
It's only disruptive if you use a firewall to prevent certain connections, and don't let tor know that you're doing so. In that case, a client may select you as an exit node, but the connection will fail. If you configure your exit policy to match your firewall policy, then clients know your server won't allow their connection to a particular host/port, and won't select it as an exit node.
Therefore, if your purpose in running tor is to snoop on unencrypted traffic, you would set your exit policy not to allow connections to port 443, because that's almost always encrypted, and thus minimise the amount of traffic exiting your node which you're not able to sniff. Or more likely, you'd set it to only allow connections to port 80 or whatever it is you're interested in.
Note that exit policies are very useful and quite legitimate. For example, I run two tor servers: one on my own dedicated server at a US colo facility on a dedicated IP address, which uses the standard tor exit policy which is fairly permissive. At work we have an unmetered fibre connection we don't use much, so I run a tor server here with a highly restrictive exit policy: deny everything (in other words, it's purely a relay or entry point, not an exit point). This limits our exposure; I'm willing to deal with people complaining about abuse from my own server, but I don't want to get our organisation involved in such disputes.
Most tor servers won't allow you to connect to port 25, as another example, because that effectively turns your tor server into an open SMTP relay.
I don't buy this (haha, get it?). Here's the last three albums I bought:
Notified by the company I buy most of my CDs from (online, receive them in the post; almost as convenient as downloading, only it takes longer) a week before the album was released. Placed a pre-order (I love this band), then went and downloaded a copy from Usenet in the interim.
I like their song "Love Like Winter", which is on this album; just something very catchy about it. I downloaded a copy of the album in reasonable quality mp3 (192ish VBR, IIRC) and listened to a couple of the tracks. Liked them enough to conclude that Love Like Winter isn't the only song on the album I'd like, so I added this to my order when I orded the one below.
I've had this album for a long, long time, in mp3 form. It's an old album which has been out of print for ages, so I wasn't able to buy it. It's been re-released, although my supplier has it as a "European Import" and it's a bit pricier than most CDs. But, I really like the album, and I want to "own" it. And now, I finally can. This is still on order.
In all of these cases, I already had free access to the music. From an economic point of view, my purchase of all of these was completely irrational -- purchasing a pressed plastic disc with the music on it gained me nothing I didn't already have, but it did cause a bunch of pollution from manufacturing and transporting the disc, and paid some people for not actually providing me any value whatsoever. And maybe the musicians will get a few cents from it.
Now, I don't entirely mind purchasing a useless piece of plastic if that's really the artist's preferred way for me to support them. However, I can't help but think that it would be much more logical and efficient if I could give the money straight to the band; no useless middle-men taking a cut, and I'd know that the money I'm spending to encourage these guys to make more of the music I like goes straight to those who create it, and not to nameless, faceless people somewhere in the chain.
The labels only really provide two functions: advertising/promotion and lending money to finance bands while they record and produce the album. Lending can be done by anyone; labels in this regard are just venture capitalists for musicians. Distribution I'm also putting under "lending", because the band pays the costs of distributing the album (i.e. they pay this cost back from proceeds of sales).
That leaves promotion and advertising, which is always a hit and miss affair. When was the last time you bought an album from a band you've never heard because you saw an ad for it? The only effective way to advertise music is to give it away for free, in the hopes that people who like it will hear it and want to buy it.
Radio currently serves that purpose, but the internet provides the opportunity for much more efficient means of advertising; services that analyse your musical preferences and suggest other artists you're likely to enjoy provide much better targeted advertising of music than a radio station can provide. What's more, there's no particular reason an open source P2P network couldn't fill this niche at zero cost to artists.
Right back at ya; I'll join the chorus of others who regularly leave Firefox running for days (and sometimes weeks, depending on how many fixes Windows needs) on end without problems. I've never seen its memory usage above 300 megs (this machine has 3.6 gigs of memory). Currently it's using 111, which is less than the world community grid processes. I typically have a tab with MRTG graphs open refreshing every 5 minutes, and another with Nagios status refreshing every minute. On top of that, I regularly open and close new tabs for Google searches, slashdot, etc.
As a sibling post says, people who don't have problems don't complain. I was actually about to close this thread because people bitching about the memory use is boring to me, but your claim that "most" people have problems with Firefox's memory usage got me snarky. Millions of people use Firefox without problems. It's extremely difficult to fix problems you can't reproduce, and most of these excessive memory consumptions problems do seem hard to reproduce for some people. I certainly can't.
Maybe being web developers makes you special. Do you make use of any extensions that might be somewhat uncommon amongst most users? Perhaps the pages you guys develop just kind of suck? ;)
Yes.
They help lower the barrier of entry for artists even lower, thus encouraging art production even more. They DON'T just produce "lowest common denominator" art. They produce many varieties of art, with differing popularities.
Wow, that reads like a mission statement from $RANDOM_SOULLESS_BIG_CORP. I felt almost inspired by the end of it. Praise capitalism! Hooray for the RIAA! Hopefully you really do feel that positive about the direction we're headed in.
Unfortunately for me, today I'm feeling jaded and cynical, and I can't help but think we don't really have a pure free market driven entirely by consumer demand.
Labels advertise an artist because they want to maximise sales, and it's hard to deny that if a big label decides to really back someone, they can go from a nobody to a superstar almost overnight. It's rare to find a song so bad that continuous radio airplay can't turn it into a #1 hit. So while effective at increasing profits, it also creates a feedback loop for labels: they pick up and run with artist from genre X; it sells well; so they pick another artist from the same genre. Since they're advertising the hell out of that, it also sells well. It takes a very brave executive to suggest going against a cycle like that.
If there is solid demand, why wouldn't they explore the market?
Because there might not be enough demand to justify it. If you can make a 10-fold return on your investment by doing Thing A, and a 100-fold return on your investment by doing Thing B, then you're not going to do Thing A. Even if you can afford to do both, eventually you're going to decide it's not worth the effort. As a dull example, a lot of people won't stop to pick up 10 cents they see lying on the ground, even though it is effectively free money. Most people will stop to pick up $10 though, and almost everyone would stop to pick up $100. A label that's making millions of dollars from its artists isn't going to bother with an artist it might only make $100,000 from.
In theory, there's other record labels that don't make so much money that are willing to sign the artists. I have a very pessimistic view of our current implementation of capitalism, in that it appears the natural progression is toward monopoly. Large companies buy out smaller ones all the time, or simply use their financial advantage to bury the others who can't compete on advertising or loss leading.
So, the music industry is reasonably healthy at the moment, but smaller labels struggle to compete with larger ones. If a talented artist wants wide exposure, they have to go with a big label, which leaves fewer talented artists for the smaller labels. It will only get worse with time, as the big labels get bigger.
Now, someone else with deep pockets can come in and set up their own label big enough to compete with the big guys, and offer artists a better deal in order to gain market share. But they're only going to do that if they see massive profits for themselves, which mean they'll be playing the exact same game as the existing large labels. They'll just end up as part of the cartel, because once an industry is dominated by large players who aren't large enough to buy each other, they cooperate (or they merge with another company so they are large enough to buy someone out).
We do have laws regarding monopolies and collusion of course, but I don't have much faith in them either, given the amount of influence big business has on government policy.
The distributor itself -- the one who gains most of the profits from selling copies of art -- is actively encouraged to devalue the work of the artist.
And those mean consumers! They are actively encouraged to devalue the work of whom they're buying from! It's the nature of any free market exchange. If you don't want to be screwed over, don't devalue yourself! Next you'll be guilt-tripping me because I sometimes shop at a discount store, one that could b
Replying in a separate post because this piqued my curiosity / interest.
However, the downside is that everyone will end up paying for a copy of every artwork. If you thought it was a drain paying for a few albums, a few movies, and a few pieces of software, imagine having to pay for thousands through taxes! It would also lower the number artworks producedI'm not sure if this is necessarily the case. A lot of money is made from distributing works of art currently, and that money comes from people buying the product. So in actual fact, we are already paying all of that money. Not only that, but the fact that various people along the way are making a profit implies that we are collectively overpaying for the creation of art.
Granted, this ignores advertising; but there's no particular reason advertising couldn't also be used to support a public arts fund. It also ignores the fact that potential profit is a powerful incentive, but that doesn't necessarily mean that without profit as a motive we'd get less or lower quality art.
decrease the amount of money paid to the artist per artworkI'm also not convinced on this one. Most artists don't do especially well, because it's not in their distributor's interest to give the artist too much money. I covered this in my other reply, but it's important to keep in mind that not only is "getting rich by writing music" a dream that very few actually achieve, it's also not really beneficial to society. I won't pretend I don't want to be rich myself, but the fact is that "rich" is an inherently selfish proposition -- you can't be rich unless the majority of those around you are (comparatively) poor.
You could certainly find examples of artists who would be worse off in a publically-funded art system, but you could also find plenty of examples of artists who would be better off, and of wanna-be artists who currently don't have the means to get into the industry.
and snip out the most expensive forms of artAlmost certainly true, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing. It's certainly very inefficient to produce very expensive art, so you'd have to be doing a cost/benefit analysis on artist's proposals. A few hundred-million dollar movies probably are worthwhile and could be catered for by the system, but you'd have to prove you can make something pretty damn good before you'd get to spend that much of taxpayer's money on it.
On my way home from work I started thinking about way back before mass-distribution of art was practical. In those times, if you wanted to be a full-time artist, you had two choices: travel around getting people to pay you for performing; or get yourself a patron. The problem with this is that few people can afford to sponsor an artist, and constantly performing has its own share of problems.
When it became possible to mass-produce and distribute recorded works of art, the larger audiences made it possible for individuals to collectively sponsor artists. Of course, production and distribution cost a lot up front, so this role was filled by already-wealthy people in the pursuit of more wealth.
Now we're at a time where distribution costs almost nothing, and production costs are falling, so perhaps the next logical step is in fact patronage by the masses.
Which will skew the art produced.
The current system doesn't skew the way art is produced? Of course it does. Different systems will skew it in different ways. The question is: which is better? That's infinitely debatable, of course.
You speak of blockbuster movies, but is that really the particular expression of film-making artistry which is most beneficial to society? Blockbuster movies are by definition popular, but do they really enrich our culture, or are they largely the same ideas recycled over and over? Would we as a society be better off without such things, in the long term?
At the moment things are skewed towards producing whatever is likely to sell in the largest quantities. Or in other words, appealing to the lowest common denominator. Is this the path towards progress? Big media (record labels, studios) act as gatekeepers; without their marketing muscle, you can't shift enough units to make it all pay off. The real profits here belong to those who can distribute the material, and maximising profits requires giving the artists creating the material as little as possible. If you consider the music industry at the moment, artists are effectively competing against each other to offer the labels the best possible deal.
The distributor itself -- the one who gains most of the profits from selling copies of art -- is actively encouraged to devalue the work of the artist.
That may well be the future without copyright that we're looking at.
Ooh, scary. It may just as well not be the case. Production technologies are better and more affordable than ever; there's no shortage of people interesting in the creation and production of film and music and other forms of modern art. Artists strive to at least emulate, if not better, whatever it is they see as the current best art, and that will continue.
It's interesting that you use a "music album that isn't one of those sells-for-sure pop albums (i.e. anything with any degree of financial risk)" as an example of what wouldn't be possible without copyright. The current system doesn't support risky endeavours very well -- why would a label choose to produce and promote an album that might not sell if they could choose to produce and promote an album that's virtually guaranteed to sell well? The flood of "sells for sure" by-the-numbers plasti-pop is entirely due to the fact that they have to make a profit, and bigger profits are better. When was the last time a major label did anything truly experimental, that they didn't have a lot of confidence in their ability to sell?
Consider Mr2001's original suggestion -- artists get money upfront from interested people before starting their project. Imagine this becomes widespread, i.e. the standard way of producing music. What dictates whether a project goes ahead or not? Simple: whether or not there's enough people willing to contribute enough cash to get it done. This actively encourages experimental things, because you don't need millions of dollars to make a decent album, and a relatively small number of people can easily raise enough to make a decent album. Many niches are ignored by the current system because there's more profitable alternatives to invest money in.
So you're meaning to tell me that you think we should ditch copyright and hope a new business model will materialise soon after, and that we shouldn't wait, find a new business model, try against the current business model, and decide which is superior, because it's unpleasant but inevitable? WTF?
That's not what I meant at all. I think we're currently within a period of change, and new models will emerge and take over. We don't need to do anything as dramatic as ditching copyright overnight. It will happen on its own.
In a free market, if a business model as dominant as the copyright business model is, it's usually a good indicator.
Sure; but the current model was developed during a time whe
That is absolutely false, and I'm fairly sure you know it. Or do you actually believe that nobody has ever, or will ever again, create any form of art unless they're compensated monetarily for it?
There may be less people willing to create art, and the art may be different due to the different motivation for creating it. Then again, it might not; a lot of people participate in free software for the recognition, so it seems likely a lot of people will try to create popular art for the sole purpose of achieving recognition (fame).
This may be a nett gain or loss, but we won't suddenly end up deprived of any form of art and culture if we stop paying people to make copies of it. Mr2001 is right on a fundamental level: charging for something which has no cost is a nonsensical (but obviously highly desirable) business model. Getting money via the distribution of creative content made sense when distribution actually had a cost; that cost is rapidly approaching zero. Change is inevitable, and almost always unpleasant. At least for a while. Eventually a new stable model will emerge.
Mr2001 suggests a possible model. Here's another one: if art is so important to us as a society, why not just use tax money to pay artists to create new art? The size of the slice you get from it could be determined by how popular your creation is. Whether or not you can make a living out of it depends on how popular your work is; which isn't actually a major change to how things are now. Then, all art will be "free" and artists will still get paid for creating it.
Just because we do things in a particular way now, doesn't mean that's the only or best way to do it.
I actually have to disagree with this. I don't think I've ever used BitTorrent to download free software, for the simple reason that most of the large (and even some of the small) ISPs here (.au) mirror popular content locally. Whether it's Linux distributions, popular free applications, game demos and patches... if it's wanted by a lot of people and it's legal for them to mirror it, they will.
They also provide incentives to their users to use their local mirror: my ISP doesn't count downloads from their mirror in your monthly quota, making it essentially "free" for their customers to access. They can do this partly because they control the amount of content available on the mirror, and because it's cheaper for them to deliver it from their own network than from overseas.
Even for stuff they don't mirror, it's likely another ISP has a mirror of it. Optus run a SourceForge mirror in Australia, so even though it isn't "free" traffic for me it's still faster than downloading from overseas.
BitTorrent doesn't select peers based on network topology, so if I was to torrent the Debian ISOs I would be creating traffic all over the internet in order to saturate my ~18 mbit pipe. If I download them from my ISP, I'm creating traffic across their network and nowhere else. It's much more efficient and scalable than torrents.
Torrents are useful when the content cannot be legally distributed by others; or when large amounts of data are wanted by lots of people in disparate locations, but not by a large enough number to make it worthwhile for others to mirror.
BT would be great if it automatically selected the closest peers (based on network topology and bandwidth availability), so that transfers would tend to be clustered around POPs and internet exchanges. As it is now, it ends up with data being sent from all over the world across expensive trans-oceanic links.
So... you're basing your entire opinion of a profession on your experiences with one person?
If that really is your understanding, then you could benefit from either spending a bit of time improving your comprehension skills, or paying less attention to the trolls.
The difference between the development models and philosophies usually becomes apparent when the flaws are discovered. How long will it take for the libFLAC flaws to be fixed? How does this compare to closed-source applications with similar flaws? How long will it take for companies using libFLAC within their proprietary players take to incorporate the fixes and release them to their customers?
Many closed-source companies sit on vulnerabilities until they're publically reported, and even then take their sweet time addressing them. The time between discovery of problems and fixes being available is generally pretty good in open source projects. Microsoft is no exception to this <troll>although they do respond remarkably quickly when flaws in their DRM measures are discovered</troll>.
One interesting issue this raises though is the number of programs and devices which are affected. If libFLAC wasn't available for everyone to use, then we'd likely have multiple implementations of it and a flaw in libFLAC wouldn't affect so many devices. For example, if the Fraunhoffer decoder had similar problems, it wouldn't effect most mp3 players because there's so many different decoder implementations. So even though libFLAC being open source does make it technically easier to produce a competing implementation, it also reduces the incentive to do so. So does open source potentially contribute to creating a software monoculture?
Also some nitpicking of the article summary:
eEye Digital Security has discovered 14 vulnerabilities in the FLAC file formatHow can a file format have vulnerabilities? Surely the vulnerability exists in code that reads and interprets the bytestream, not in the format itself.
Indeed, but computers and related technology are still in their infancy. We don't have easy ways to make them secure. A lot of the functionality we use depends on things being easy for the user; which also makes it easy for attackers unless every user in the organisation is well-educated.
So, effective computer security currently does interfere with the mission. Even very basic things like having to supply a password to log on to your account get in the way: people forget passwords, and that prevents them from performing their job until they get it reset. At the moment where I work, people can just call up and say they've forgotten their password and we'll reset it for them. But that opens us up to very basic social engineering attacks. However if we didn't do that and insisted they somehow prove their identity or come into the office to get their password reset, we'd cop a lot of flak for it.
I really think the biggest disservice Microsoft (and a few others) have done to computing is actually pushing it on the masses so quickly. We still suck at building software (and I'm talking proprietary and open source here), and we still suck at making things "secure by default" while still being functional. "Over-promise and under-deliver" is still the standard way of delivering technology solutions. People who want to use computers simply as tools really need to know a heck of a lot more about them than they ought to, merely in order to be able to use them safely.
Agreed. It's not that people don't think about it; I work in IT, and we think about it all the time. But it's very difficult to actually enforce meaningful security if nobody understands the point of it. It simply gets seen as a hassle imposed by IT because they're control freaks trying to make themselves look important to the rest of the organisation. The top management doesn't care; all they hear is the hassle it's causing their Executive Directors when IT won't let them log on to the VPN while they're at the airport because they left their RSA token at home.
Unfortunately, if you set up good security and the users don't understand it, they'll circumvent it: the private key used to unlock the laptop's encrypted drive will be stored on a USB stick with the laptop, along with a sticky note with the user's password and their RSA SecureID token. So not only do people resent you when you try improve security standards, but they actively seek to undermine it. Even a single crappy password like "Wednesday1" is better than having everything you need to access sensitive data neatly packed with the laptop.
Therefore, to get proper security, everyone needs at least an intermediate level understanding of computer security. That's a massive undertaking for most organisations, where people's main job function isn't anything to do with computers. Most people don't want to understand computers at all, they just want to use them. Kind of like telephones: most people don't even consider for a moment if their phone is secure or not, and have no interest in learning how the call they make from their office phone gets from their desk to the other side of the country.
Really, before you even have a shot at putting in place meaningful, consistent security, you need a long-term commitment from all levels of management to establish and maintain strong security and train the staff to use it properly, even when it causes inconveniences. Given how much trouble we have getting people to use the records management system properly, this actually seems like a very high mountain to climb.
The possibility of being embarrassed because of data theft isn't anywhere near a strong enough motivation for most organisations. Therefore, legislation like this is probably a good move -- though I think it should apply to any organisation that collects personal information, government or not. But you have to start somewhere.
Furthermore, it shouldn't require actually losing data before there's a possibility of punishment. One should be able to report agencies and companies that aren't taking their duty of care seriously, and report them. Otherwise it's still easier for a lot of organisations to say "it won't happen to us" and only pay lip-service to information security. So, if your bank is using dubious client-side "security", report them!
There'd be a lot of short-term pain, but long term gain. It might even slow down the pace at which computers take over the world, and maybe us folk that program and administrate them can catch the fuck up with what users are expecting from it all.