While this was modded up as funny (and is indeed funny), there is more than a bit of truth to this. CNet just so happens to be running a four part series on Microsoft's biggest vulnerabilities. On day one they wrote about open source. Today they wrote about Microsoft being its own worst enemy. You can check out all four articles here.
Remember when Microsoft announced they were releasing Internet Explorer for the Mac and for "Unix" (which turned out to just be Solaris and HPUX, I think)? They did this when Netscape was the dominant web browser because many companies were reluctant to switch from Netscape to IE because IE was not a cross platform solution. I said at the time that they would yank these other versions as soon as Netscape started to die out. Guess what happened? Internet Explorer now has the lion's share of the browser market and Microsoft recently yanked the Unix version.
Everybody please avoid Passport for *nix when it comes out - they are in all likelihood doing the exact same thing. They will abandon you as soon as they get what they want (i.e., a monopoly position).
There's no way that this kind of thing *can't* be automated with enough work. The amount of billable time spent to get such a system going has to be much less than hiring a full-time backer-upper.
To add to this thought, here are some ways that you could set up such an automated system:
As others have suggested, outsource it. There are plenty of storage service providers out there who specialize in this sort of thing and they will cost less than a full time employee.
Keep all non-OS files on a network mounted drive and build the file server(s) using RAID arrays.
Write a short shell script that tars up your files, scps them to another machine, and deletes any older backups from that other machine. Stick said script in your crontab. Now you don't have to mess with tapes (though you may want to copy the snapshots to tape every few weeks and take them offsite to guard against fire, theft, etc.).
...Or if you're in an environment that isn't easily scriptable (e.g., Windows), install a peer to peer backup solution to share backups within your office. HiveCache was mentioned here on Slashdot awhile back and it does this. I've also been working on such a solution myself which is currently in alpha testing and runs on Linux and Windows (although I think 3.5 terabytes is a bit more than it could handle at the moment). Even if these solutions don't perfectly match your needs, the cost of having them customized would most likely be less than hiring someone full time. A P2P solution would also address the original problem of growth a little better than the other solutions just because as more machines are added which require backup, those same machines add to a growing pool of storage for where backups are stored (so you don't have to worry about buying a bigger RAID array because you just surpassed X number of machines, for example).
Those are a few ideas on automating the daily plumbing of the backup process. There are also the issues of streamlining the set-up and recovery processes as well, which the original poster hinted at. Perhaps if his company is growing quickly enough, it is the actual introduction of new computers or projects into the backup process and their associated set-up which is dominating the time required for the backup process. It would stand to reason that this would be much harder to automate than the daily maintenance and perhaps this is what the poster wanted to hire somebody for, although if this is the case it would probably be best to just hire temporary help until the need subsides.
This is just unacceptable. I cannot believe and refuse to accept that it could take 90 minutes to get a major security fix out for a browser. This is completely unacceptable.
Yes, there's no way that Konqueror can compete at that rate. The fix for IE was out even before the bug was reported. Everybody can download the fix for IE here.
I've seen similar solutions before, and they are all nice and dandy except for one application: when communicating with businesses. What happens when you order a Widget from Acme, Inc. and Acme sends you your confirmation by e-mail? Your script bounces a question, and Acme's mail server either bounces back at you, making it look like it was spam in the first place, or simply doesn't respond at all.
The system implies that anything not sent by a human being is spam. This is not necessarily the case today. A lot of today's e-mail communications are auto-generated.
Hmmmm... how about if you were to keep a separate address space for emails you expect to be replied to from businesses? I'll use myself as an example. I could use my main address, twm@alum.mit.edu, to receive personal email and block spam using the technique described by the original poster. When I go to order something online, I could make up addresses at my domain twmacinta.com (for example, "spamproof+amazon8291@twmacinta.com") which could be proactively added to a whitelist before I gave them. I actually worked on a system to do the second half of this solution for awhile (the whitelist aliasing) for users without their own domains, but the one drawback to the system is that it wouldn't stop spam on existing addresses. The original poster's solution sounds like it would make a very nice complement.
Of course, you can't be frozen until you're legally dead. Once you're dead, your money is distributed to other people.
Dead people have no money, they can't protest for their rights and as such are effectively (and rightly, if you ask me) powerless.
I'm sure there's some way around that. People set up funds all the time that direct how their money is to be used after their death. I believe that the Nobel Prize is a concrete example of a dead person dictating how his money is used after his death. I am not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if a similar fund could not be set up for less noble purposes (like defrosting yourself).
What possible motivation would any future society have to thaw these people out?
Money. Your savings will be growing exponentially while you are frozen and this will add up to an enormous amount if you either start out with a lot of money or are frozen for a long time. Consider a simple case where your savings are making a paltry 3% per year above inflation. If you stay frozen for 100 years, your savings will have multiplied to 20 times their original value and since inflation is already taken into account you will have 20 times the purchasing power that you would today. If you stay frozen for 200 years, your savings will grow to 370 times their original value. If you stay frozen for 500 years, your savings will grow to a whopping 2.6 million times their original value, and again, that is already adjusted for inflation! Just include a clause in your cryo-contract that your maintainers will get 50% of your savings when they revive you, and they will have the motivation to revive you once the decreasing cost of reviving somebody intersects the increasing real value of your savings.
So, if you put a mere $1 into a relatively safe investment and froze yourself today, you could wake up in 500 years and be rich (a multi-millionare in today's dollars). I'm surprised we haven't seen any get-rich-quick schemes touting this aspect of freezing yourself (well OK, it would be more like a get-rich-in-what-you-perceive-as-quick-since-you'r e-frozen scheme).
I only see mention of a patent (singular) pending on their
"MojoNation" page. Where else do they mention a patent or multiple patents?
It looks to me like it is US patent application number 20010037311. I am definitely not a lawyer, but it looks like the patent is on a method for determining how much use each computer gets to make of the system based on what they provide to the system, and not on the concept of P2P backup in general. I certainly hope I'm reading this right because I have my own P2P backup software that I'm about to release and I don't want to run afoul of their. I know there's plenty of prior art for P2P backup in general out there, but most people don't want a drawn out legal battle even if they're right.
Anybody know what their patent is on? I've been writing some P2P backup software myself and was about to release it, so any info on what the patent is (or patents are) would be appreciated. I'm hoping that it's on something very specific which is non-obvious, because my software would be a lot less likely to infringe then. If they patented the concept of P2P backup, though (grrrrrr)....
I've also seen mention in other comments that this project has been around for awhile in open source form and has only recently been corporatized. Their Sourceforge page has been around since 2000-07-17. Is it potentially older than this as well?
Oh yeah! Wait till they call Adobe and claim that they installed Photoshop on a "Lindows" PC.
And why would they mention this? This little piece of information will probably be something that the Adobe tech support might figure out after some painful q and a, but if the user knows enough to be this succinct in their problem description, they will likely already know what the problem is. My point was that it would be a pain in the neck for Adobe, not Walmart.
The only TINY bit of hope is that maybe after walmart sells 10,000,000 of these machines that there may be enough of a Linux base that more game programmers will port to native Linux.
I think there plenty of other scenerios where things turn out well. Take this one for example: consumers realize that Lindows + Open Office + The Gimp = $99 while Windows + MS Offfice + Photoshop > $1,000. Even if no games worked in Lindows (the worst case scenerio from your argument), there are still plenty of people who would be happy with a such an office productivity package.
It sounds funny, but just wait till they buy and try to install something made for Windows. Much to their surprise, it won't work, and they'll be calling up Wal-Mart asking them what kind of shinanigans they were trying to pull.
Why would they assume it's a problem with Lindows and not with the program they are trying to install? Think about it this way - if they were running Windows, bought a copy of Photoshop, and unsuccessfully tried to install it, would they call Microsoft or Adobe? They would call Adobe, of course. Let's just hope they use the same logic with Lindows. If enough people do this with software that breaks under Wine, the companies publishing that software will eventually figure out that it's worth the extra day or two to debug their software under Wine before shipping it.
This study apparently takes as its presumption that the developers listed in Sourceforge projects are the developers who have actually contributed.
Furthermore, it would seem to presume (I haven't read it, I'm basing this on the headline) that open source projects on SourceForge are a representative sample of all open source projects. Who's to say that individual developers are more likely to use SourceForge and large groups are more likely to have their own servers (e.g., Mozilla.org)? This would explain the gathered data equally well, but it is a completely different conclusion, and I think the data is not complete enough to draw either conclusion. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, "you can prove anything with statistics - 85% of all people know that."
last i checked the preftoolbar was not working with the RC builds. maybe its been fixed.
I'm using it with RC1 right this very moment.
I hope it is because it is a great idea. now if only they'd have a source dl so that other check boxed and buttons could be added.
The source is part of the xpi package you download during installation. I'm sure of this because I've modified it myself in the past (in fact, I was the one to blame for adding the "onLoad Popups" checkbox for blocking unrequested popups).
And although the option for disabling popups has disappeared from Netscape's preferences, so as not to harm AOL's revenues too much, adding this line to your user.js...
Even better,
download this preferences toolbar. It will add a toolbar that lets you enable/disable unrequested (onLoad, etc) pop-ups without going through the maze of menus in Mozilla or without editing your prefs.js file in Netscape (which requires you to restart the browser, I would assume). It's very handy when you come across sites where you actually want to allow unrequested pop-ups (I use some sites where onLoad pop-ups are unfortunately part of the necessary UI, which I why I find this so useful). It also lets you easily toggle many other preferences like Java, JavaScript, cookies, and more. Check it out.
It's been awhile, but I thought they had the alpha JDK available at the end of 94.
Nope, it was '95. Sun's Java press releases only go back to '95 and a read through the ones that are there point to a Spring 1995 release date. I also remember using the second Alpha JDK around the end of Spring 1995.
No, I don't know of those services being available for Win 3.1. But I could easily install Windows 95/98/98SE or even Windows NT 4.0 Server or Workstation on your Pentium-90.
I don't think so. NT4.0 Workstation requires 16MB of memory with 32MB recommended - my Pentium-90 only has 14MB. Sure, you could install NT4.0, but it would crawl. Linux is humming along nicely without a sweat.
That's kind of beside the point, though. Windows 95 is already not supported by Microsoft. Windows 98 is about to be moved to the unsupported category as well. What happens if you are running Win95 on a computer now and some massive security hole is exposed that Win95 is vulnerable to? Answer: you're screwed. Microsoft does not support Win95, so you cannot expect a patch from them if you are running Win95 on your old hardware. Now, what happens if you are running Linux on your old hardware and a security hole is discovered? Answer: you either download the latest version or you can patch the source code yourself. For this reason alone, Linux is a viable option for older hardware while Windows is not - it would be irresponsible to rely on software that is an unsupported black box that is ignored by the only organization with the necessary information to fix it (i.e., the source code).
This is quite unfortunate. CNet was one of the few news websites that I really liked to use for reference links because they had a track record of keeping their URLs for stories the same for years. It looks like this is changing now. I hope to replace the links from KMFMS to dead articles with summaries whenever I can find a cached copy to summarize, so those who are interested in the original articles should read them now while they can still be accessed.
You know what? The same is also true of Windows 3.1. The release of Windows XP didn't suddenly make Windows 3.1 stop working.
Perhaps I should have been more precise - much of the recent Linux software will still run fine on older machines. The same cannot be said for Windows 3.1. Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 3.1 a long time ago. Good luck trying to get recent software to run on Win3.1. On the other hand, recent Linux software runs remarkably well even on older hardware. I have an old Pentium 90 running a recent version of Linux, including a recent firewall, recent NAT, recent Apache, recent NFS server, etc. I think it's pretty clear that the same availability does not apply to Windows 3.1 - sure you can still run it, but you will be stuck with old, outdated applications.
Microsoft may be evil, but none of their web pages commit the sin of having white text on a black background:-)
Fair enough. Try this link instead (same page, but printer friendly without the colors). I really do normally avoid white text on black backgrounds, but the artwork dictated otherwise for KMFMS - I'm not one to argue with BRUTE!.
They've really churned out more material than I can keep track of (I have a large back-log of links to add to this list), but there are some good ones there. The funniest one on the list (IMO) is the interview where Bill Gates is quoted as saying Microsoft software has no bugs.
Also, when striking out and writing in changes on an existing contract make sure to date the modification and that you and the employer both initial the changes, or you risk the employer stating they didn't agree to the changes.
Does that matter? It would seem to me that what is important is that you never agreed to their original clause, so how can they hold you to it? If your modified clause didn't hold up, wouldn't things default to be as if there were no contract? Well, IANAL, so perhaps there is some reason why getting them to initial it is necessary - also, I suppose it couldn't hurt and is at least courteous to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody please avoid Passport for *nix when it comes out - they are in all likelihood doing the exact same thing. They will abandon you as soon as they get what they want (i.e., a monopoly position).
- As others have suggested, outsource it. There are plenty of storage service providers out there who specialize in this sort of thing and they will cost less than a full time employee.
- Keep all non-OS files on a network mounted drive and build the file server(s) using RAID arrays.
- Write a short shell script that tars up your files, scps them to another machine, and deletes any older backups from that other machine. Stick said script in your crontab. Now you don't have to mess with tapes (though you may want to copy the snapshots to tape every few weeks and take them offsite to guard against fire, theft, etc.).
- ...Or if you're in an environment that isn't easily scriptable (e.g., Windows), install a peer to peer backup solution to share backups within your office. HiveCache was mentioned here on Slashdot awhile back and it does this. I've also been working on such a solution myself which is currently in alpha testing and runs on Linux and Windows (although I think 3.5 terabytes is a bit more than it could handle at the moment). Even if these solutions don't perfectly match your needs, the cost of having them customized would most likely be less than hiring someone full time. A P2P solution would also address the original problem of growth a little better than the other solutions just because as more machines are added which require backup, those same machines add to a growing pool of storage for where backups are stored (so you don't have to worry about buying a bigger RAID array because you just surpassed X number of machines, for example).
Those are a few ideas on automating the daily plumbing of the backup process. There are also the issues of streamlining the set-up and recovery processes as well, which the original poster hinted at. Perhaps if his company is growing quickly enough, it is the actual introduction of new computers or projects into the backup process and their associated set-up which is dominating the time required for the backup process. It would stand to reason that this would be much harder to automate than the daily maintenance and perhaps this is what the poster wanted to hire somebody for, although if this is the case it would probably be best to just hire temporary help until the need subsides.No, Bill Gates would read it the same way.
Yes, there's no way that Konqueror can compete at that rate. The fix for IE was out even before the bug was reported. Everybody can download the fix for IE here.
Hmmmm... how about if you were to keep a separate address space for emails you expect to be replied to from businesses? I'll use myself as an example. I could use my main address, twm@alum.mit.edu, to receive personal email and block spam using the technique described by the original poster. When I go to order something online, I could make up addresses at my domain twmacinta.com (for example, "spamproof+amazon8291@twmacinta.com") which could be proactively added to a whitelist before I gave them. I actually worked on a system to do the second half of this solution for awhile (the whitelist aliasing) for users without their own domains, but the one drawback to the system is that it wouldn't stop spam on existing addresses. The original poster's solution sounds like it would make a very nice complement.
I'm sure there's some way around that. People set up funds all the time that direct how their money is to be used after their death. I believe that the Nobel Prize is a concrete example of a dead person dictating how his money is used after his death. I am not a lawyer, but I would be very surprised if a similar fund could not be set up for less noble purposes (like defrosting yourself).
Money. Your savings will be growing exponentially while you are frozen and this will add up to an enormous amount if you either start out with a lot of money or are frozen for a long time. Consider a simple case where your savings are making a paltry 3% per year above inflation. If you stay frozen for 100 years, your savings will have multiplied to 20 times their original value and since inflation is already taken into account you will have 20 times the purchasing power that you would today. If you stay frozen for 200 years, your savings will grow to 370 times their original value. If you stay frozen for 500 years, your savings will grow to a whopping 2.6 million times their original value, and again, that is already adjusted for inflation! Just include a clause in your cryo-contract that your maintainers will get 50% of your savings when they revive you, and they will have the motivation to revive you once the decreasing cost of reviving somebody intersects the increasing real value of your savings.
So, if you put a mere $1 into a relatively safe investment and froze yourself today, you could wake up in 500 years and be rich (a multi-millionare in today's dollars). I'm surprised we haven't seen any get-rich-quick schemes touting this aspect of freezing yourself (well OK, it would be more like a get-rich-in-what-you-perceive-as-quick-since-you'r e-frozen scheme).
I only see mention of a patent (singular) pending on their "MojoNation" page. Where else do they mention a patent or multiple patents?
It looks to me like it is US patent application number 20010037311. I am definitely not a lawyer, but it looks like the patent is on a method for determining how much use each computer gets to make of the system based on what they provide to the system, and not on the concept of P2P backup in general. I certainly hope I'm reading this right because I have my own P2P backup software that I'm about to release and I don't want to run afoul of their. I know there's plenty of prior art for P2P backup in general out there, but most people don't want a drawn out legal battle even if they're right.
I've also seen mention in other comments that this project has been around for awhile in open source form and has only recently been corporatized. Their Sourceforge page has been around since 2000-07-17. Is it potentially older than this as well?
That's a much better idea than their movie about a bootloader. They could have at least made it Lilo and Tux (though I'm partial to Lilo and Grub).
And why would they mention this? This little piece of information will probably be something that the Adobe tech support might figure out after some painful q and a, but if the user knows enough to be this succinct in their problem description, they will likely already know what the problem is. My point was that it would be a pain in the neck for Adobe, not Walmart.
I think there plenty of other scenerios where things turn out well. Take this one for example: consumers realize that Lindows + Open Office + The Gimp = $99 while Windows + MS Offfice + Photoshop > $1,000. Even if no games worked in Lindows (the worst case scenerio from your argument), there are still plenty of people who would be happy with a such an office productivity package.
Why would they assume it's a problem with Lindows and not with the program they are trying to install? Think about it this way - if they were running Windows, bought a copy of Photoshop, and unsuccessfully tried to install it, would they call Microsoft or Adobe? They would call Adobe, of course. Let's just hope they use the same logic with Lindows. If enough people do this with software that breaks under Wine, the companies publishing that software will eventually figure out that it's worth the extra day or two to debug their software under Wine before shipping it.
Furthermore, it would seem to presume (I haven't read it, I'm basing this on the headline) that open source projects on SourceForge are a representative sample of all open source projects. Who's to say that individual developers are more likely to use SourceForge and large groups are more likely to have their own servers (e.g., Mozilla.org)? This would explain the gathered data equally well, but it is a completely different conclusion, and I think the data is not complete enough to draw either conclusion. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, "you can prove anything with statistics - 85% of all people know that."
Nope, it was '95. Sun's Java press releases only go back to '95 and a read through the ones that are there point to a Spring 1995 release date. I also remember using the second Alpha JDK around the end of Spring 1995.
That's kind of beside the point, though. Windows 95 is already not supported by Microsoft. Windows 98 is about to be moved to the unsupported category as well. What happens if you are running Win95 on a computer now and some massive security hole is exposed that Win95 is vulnerable to? Answer: you're screwed. Microsoft does not support Win95, so you cannot expect a patch from them if you are running Win95 on your old hardware. Now, what happens if you are running Linux on your old hardware and a security hole is discovered? Answer: you either download the latest version or you can patch the source code yourself. For this reason alone, Linux is a viable option for older hardware while Windows is not - it would be irresponsible to rely on software that is an unsupported black box that is ignored by the only organization with the necessary information to fix it (i.e., the source code).
This is quite unfortunate. CNet was one of the few news websites that I really liked to use for reference links because they had a track record of keeping their URLs for stories the same for years. It looks like this is changing now. I hope to replace the links from KMFMS to dead articles with summaries whenever I can find a cached copy to summarize, so those who are interested in the original articles should read them now while they can still be accessed.
Perhaps I should have been more precise - much of the recent Linux software will still run fine on older machines. The same cannot be said for Windows 3.1. Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 3.1 a long time ago. Good luck trying to get recent software to run on Win3.1. On the other hand, recent Linux software runs remarkably well even on older hardware. I have an old Pentium 90 running a recent version of Linux, including a recent firewall, recent NAT, recent Apache, recent NFS server, etc. I think it's pretty clear that the same availability does not apply to Windows 3.1 - sure you can still run it, but you will be stuck with old, outdated applications.
Fair enough. Try this link instead (same page, but printer friendly without the colors). I really do normally avoid white text on black backgrounds, but the artwork dictated otherwise for KMFMS - I'm not one to argue with BRUTE!.
Does that matter? It would seem to me that what is important is that you never agreed to their original clause, so how can they hold you to it? If your modified clause didn't hold up, wouldn't things default to be as if there were no contract? Well, IANAL, so perhaps there is some reason why getting them to initial it is necessary - also, I suppose it couldn't hurt and is at least courteous to them.