The article mentions 2400 BYTES per second. This could be a (verbal) typo, or it could be that they're really transmitting at 19200, which -- although slow by today's standards -- is a respectable speed for the internet. It's fast enough to hold a (encrypted) RealAudio stream. --
> In fact, Ken Thompson originally built it so he could run a video game.
The original proposal intended to use UNIX for what is now called office automation.. (i.e. nroff/troff, eqn and tbl). UNIX went public as a side effect of other intelectuals being interested in a chess program which was written under UNIX, and needed UNIX to run it. The chess program was text based, not a video game.
In other words, it was originally written for the desktop -- but as a multi-user system, rather than a single user system. It's design for time-sharing made it appropriate for server-type applications, and multi user systems can gracefully degrade to the case of N=1. (although, when you have a family, or roommates using a system, N>1 and the multiuser design basis can be a godsend) --
A bit off-topic, but if you go to the root page, they have pointers to the 'original' V7 manuals. This is a bit of a bonus for me because they include the original reference docs for [nt]roff, tbl, etc. Section 2b (page 147) also includes an 'setup' section which indicates that V7 binaries fit on a 2.5MB partition and the sources fit onto a 9MB partition. (!). Ah, for the good old days. (cough, cough)
The 'bc' manual also indicates that it could multiply two 500 digit numbers in about 10 seconds. As a quick benchmark, this places a PDP/11 at about 1/2000 the speed of a P3-450 (~0.25 BogoMIPS). Ah, for the good old days. (cough, cough) --
Pulling apart a virtual pair really only works with SMALL black holes. The active mechanism here is the tidal effect. I did some of the math for this a long time ago (15+ years), and remember coming to some interesting conclusions...
For reasonably small-sized black holes, tidal forces of thousands of Gs per CM are easy to achieve (i.e. the gravitational pull 1CM past the event horizon is thousands of Gs less than it is right AT the event horizon). Imagine, for a moment, the kind of stress that this would place on a 5'8" frame going feet first into a black hole, and you'll understand why black holes are considered an unhealthy travel option. As a super-dense black hole approaches point size, this value aproaches infinity.
Pulling apart a virtual pair doesn't require them to be straddling the event horizon, it only requers that they be close enough for the tidal forces to rip them apart before they re-combine. The negative-energy particle would get sucked into the black hole, and the positive-energy one would be free to go on it's merry way.
As you consider the possibility of larger (i.e. ENORMOUS) black holes, things start to get a little bit more tame. If you got enough mass together in one place, you would have a black hole about 3 light months in diameter, where the event horizon had a negligible tidal force (fractional Gs per light-week) and the gravity was 1G. A black hole this large would have almost no evaporation events and would last roughly forever. It would also have an average density less than water. --
This is a president that "wrote" those replys. Presidents don't just know how to speak marketeze. It's almost their native language.
SCO is also a reasonably 'old' company. I'm sure that they know both the value and the danger of FUD (from both sides of the weapon). For a president of SCO to just come out and say something like 'oh, well we're going to be dropping support for SCO unix in 3 years) would be like dropping a 500KG FUD bomb in the middle of their prime market. It's just not foing to happen --
Actually, I think that it DOES make sense -- though not, necessarily, for long. When I managed the email for a medium-sized ISP, I talked to someone in Australia about a spam complaint. He said that, as peeved as he was about it, personally, there wasn't much he could do. His explanation was that privacy laws in Australia made it essentially illegal to nail the spammers. For this reason, he explained that there were a LOT of PORN sites hosted in Australia. They were basically allowed to do their dirty work scot free.
Of course, with the new censorship rules in Australia, the porn sites may be going away.... I think, however, that they may still get a free ride as long as they don't provide the porn to Australian civilians (haven't read the law that closely).
In any case, the explanation is that porn generates a lot of traffic. If there are a disproportionat number of porn sites in Australia, that would explain why there is a noticable bit balance in favour of Australia.
BTW: My expectation is that -- except for countries with developing markets, the bit balance should be somewhere near even. Granted -- there may be 10 times as many sites in the US as in AUS, but there are also 10 times as many USERS in the US. This implies that (as long as quality is somewhere near even) an AUS site of non-local nature should get about 10 times as many hits (from the US) as a similar US site would get (from AUS) ie: 1/10 as many sites with 10 times the transborder hits each.. comes out about even.... Then you factor in porn. --
Ebay isn't really hurting themselves. One thing to remember is that eBay, like many other websites probably gets almost as much money from adds as it does from the transactions that go on on the site. (cf: TV and radio stations)
At the heart of the reason for their complaint is that they're being deprived of the advertising revenue while being asked to support their competition with their research/admin time AND their CPUs/bandwidth.
At the same time they've managed to limit the damage that this would do because they're not banning EVERYBODY from their site -- just this specific company. For this rulling to affect you you have to get eBay's attention first. They have to ask you to not use their site before you can be forced not to.
I can think of two analogies that would apply (in different ways) here. One would be a radio/TV repeater that filtered out all the adds and put their own in. I think (hope) that most people can understand how that is problematic (from the station's point of view). Another analogy would be you walking around a shopping mall handing out leaflets with price comparisons between that mall and the one across the street -- "See how many prices are lower across the street!". -- The mall would be completely in it's rights to tell you to go show off your price advantage on somebody else's property. Shopping malls (like websites) are only PSEUDO public property. Although they generally invite and allow the whole public on their site, they have the right to tell you to go away and don't ever come back again. I don't think that they even have to tell you why. You are expected to self-police yourself on that. If you come back, and they recognize you, they have the right to go after you for trespassing.
All that this ruling does is extend the principle of trespassing into the electronic domain in a reasonably straightforward and sane manner. --
>ZDNet manages a balanced story! Linus did NOT say that he didn't like Napster. What he said is that Metalica's suit was the only one that he saw as having anything approaching moral ground under it (my personal spin). Lee Gomes then used that quote out of context to support a spin that almost nobody in the Open Source community supported things like napster.
THAT is why people were confused into thinking that Linus didn't like Napster.
Spin, baby, spin! It's what the media industry does best. --
> Who would pay that much for such limited functionality ?
Pretty easy to answer: The people who want/need it. Not many people have much use for someone who can dunk a basketball from the 3 point line 95% of the time either. On the other hand, the people who do (e.g. NBA teams) are willing to pay a REALLY pretty penny for the ability.
Similarly when I'm looking for a job. Not everybody needs my skill set, but those who do are willing to pay reasonably well for it:-((But not as much as Jordan gets))-: --
The main problem I can see with that is that, as you add more layers, more and more light gets eaten in the sandwiched layers. You can get around that -- a bit -- with a strongeer backlight, but that still leaves you with more heat, and the layers further back will get dimmer, and dimmer and.... In time, though, we may have a real solution to those issues. I'm sure that they're working on it. --
Well -- yeah, unless you build yourself a sandbox to run scripts in, an executable would be able to trash a USER's space, but not stomp on the whole system o-: I-Love-You could have decided to install Linux on every victim's machine!  :-o. On the other hand, creating your own sandbox is pretty easy on most Linux/unix systems:
create a sandbox user.
Create a setuid-sandbox program executable only by your personal group.
Have this program cd to your sandbox directory (change $HOME, etc.?) and then execute the (possibly) offensive program.
If you want to be even more paranoid, you can chroot the thing. (sandboxing is one of the primary purposes for chroot).
Note that the sandbox directory need not be writable by the sandbox user.
That is an incredibly wide consent request. Given that envelope contracts have been accepted as binding in some courts, and that the disclamer you put up doesn't even constrain the DOE to just intercepting information on your computer (or even in the work place), I would say that you should ask a local lawyer. I would also suggest that, until it is resolved (in writing?) exactly what they're asking for that you follow the rules, take the request serously and Log off the system.
I think that you should also make that suggestion to your fellow workers. IANAL... I just like to act like one:-) --
The difference between Communism and Corporatism..
on
The Corporate Republic
·
· Score: 1
The biggest difference between Communism and extreme corporatism is how obvious it is who controls the monopoly.
In both cases, you end up with a centrally controlled economy with little real input from the peons. In both cases, the purpose of the media is to support the control system, not to enable the people to communicate with them. What other things are common to the two systems? --
What Stallman objects to is not the name open source. He objects to the wishy-washy relativism of what open source pushes. He has the same kind of distaste for the mushiness of the open-source stance, as some open source people did about Apple's original "open source" license attempt.
Granted, the name leaves some room for improvement, but the truth is that there may be nothing in the english language that is both sucinct enough for the likes of you and accurate enough that he wouldn't have had to say "open as in free, not open as in you can look at it for a thousand dollars". --
Clearly a one-sided view. It's mostly re-hashing what was said 2-4 years ago. Beyond things like Apache and Linux, there are the old-timers like Sendmail and Named. Then there's UNIX itself.
SUN-OS came from BSD, which was an effective open-source movement (as opposed to a free-software movement). Back then, just about everybody who used unix had source. I remember seeing patches for everything from Filesystem bugs to chsh. The reason why UNIX got so good was that the USERS were able to fix bugs without having to wait for AT&T to get around to it with their handfull of programmers. Then AT&T folded it into systems III and V. Once AT&T broke (up) out of it's monopoly straight-jacket, they moved UNIX into a more and more closed-source space and the UNIX universe kinda stagnated until GNU created the space for LINUX to step in and re-ignit the open source base of UNIX. --
Drix wrote: "You know you're talking to a physics major when they claim, in a serious vein, that.05 trillionths (? -.0000000000005) is a 'huge range.'"
Well, if I measured your weight in Jupiter masses, you'd look pretty insignificant too.
That sort of re-scaling is the kind of thing that a PR group will do to make things look a certain way. Once, when I was on the board of an enviromental org. A nearby Shell gas station mentioned that they wanted to gass off leaked gasoline from their underground tanks into the neighbourhood. They said that they'd "only" be evaporating about 3.5 cubic metres of liquid. Many members were willing to skip on it as minimal until I looked at the app, did some number crunching (habitual), and suddenly blurted out "Those bastards, that's almost a thousand gallons!". --
Well, pi^2 makes a much better estimate for 'g' (little 'g' as in gravitational acceleration at sea level in meters per second). - I never really noticed that before. --
It used to be ('91) that the best use I could find for an Intel PC was a router -- two ether cards a dedicated OS on floppy, no Keyboard or monitor. No needs to deal with M$-DOS and no worry about 64K limits. A '386/66 could handle the load just fine. Now it's the old MACs that are being flayed. Such is life.
Cutest stunt I saw, though, was a friend of mine who had completed the engineering for fitting a MAC OEM board into a 200MZ PPC laptop, using the case as a heatsink. That was just about the time that Apple decided to skewer their OEMs. Ditch one laptop (and company!). --
I've seen a similar attempt here in Canada with a high-profile Political case. Bluster is a completely legal tactic for the state. It's probably illegal for them to jail him for talking, but they can THREATEN to. If he voluntarily clams up, all is well and done.
It's kinda like the 'consent to search' rule. If a cop stops you and says "I'm going to search you now. If I find anything illegal on you, it'll be used against you in a court of law.... OK? He's not asking if you understand that what he's doing is legal.
He's asking you for Consent to search. If you go "OK", back then an otherwise illegal search becomes legal because it was 'voluntary'. Same thing with "asking" Mitnick to shutup. --
I think that Cmdr Tacho already responded to this style of complaint elsewhere. They often batch news stories and then stagger their release. The result from our end is that what looks like a scoop is actually old (but unreleased) news. --
Yeah, well running a startup requires running the fine line between not having enough money to get product out the door, and selling too much stock too early, and loosing control and ownership of the whole thing. Releasing a prototype allows them to go to the next tier of investors (as well as their older investors) and say.. "Look: all those patents really DO do something useful. NOW will you give us some more money -- even though we're not selling anything yet?
The only way to get this settled is for some deep-pocketed company to take the FSF to court over it. . . ..it will make these pointless discussions a lot simpler...
Since when does dragging something through the courts make the issues Simpler? --
BTW: I generally agree with CmdrTaco's sentiments. I generally look to/. for news that wouldn't necessarily be easy to find elsewhere, especially technical/geek oriented stuff. This 'story' doesn't fit in that vein.
If you haven't heard about the stock market sell-off by now
You probably don't care about it,
You're probably living the life of a techno-hermit, and
You probably don't read/.
That having been said, it was probably worthwhile to give those of us geeks with an investment in the stock market someplace to blow off our steam. NAK! 3 posts in one article -- I'm going to the beach. --
The valuation is especially paperesque for those people who own large chunks of stock. At the risk of being moderated down for repetition: Bill Gates owns in the range of a BILLION Microsoft stock. If he were to sell it all off -- even over the space of a year, MSFT stock would bottom out (if only temporarily). He would NEVER get the 'paper' current valuation of the stock he owns. That's why it's referred to 'paper' valuation. Once he manages to sell all of his stock, then his valuation -- although smaller -- wouldn't be paper.
Just like stock represents a percentage ownership of a company, money represents a percentage ownership of a country's currently available resources (i.e. not far from being stock in the COUNTRY). {In,de}flation occurs when people recognize that the ratio of available money to available resources is off-kilter. --
Slashdot Mirror
The article mentions 2400 BYTES per second. This could be a (verbal) typo, or it could be that they're really transmitting at 19200, which -- although slow by today's standards -- is a respectable speed for the internet. It's fast enough to hold a (encrypted) RealAudio stream.
--
The original proposal intended to use UNIX for what is now called office automation.. (i.e. nroff/troff, eqn and tbl). UNIX went public as a side effect of other intelectuals being interested in a chess program which was written under UNIX, and needed UNIX to run it. The chess program was text based, not a video game.
In other words, it was originally written for the desktop -- but as a multi-user system, rather than a single user system. It's design for time-sharing made it appropriate for server-type applications, and multi user systems can gracefully degrade to the case of N=1.
(although, when you have a family, or roommates using a system, N>1 and the multiuser design basis can be a godsend)
--
Section 2b (page 147) also includes an 'setup' section which indicates that V7 binaries fit on a 2.5MB partition and the sources fit onto a 9MB partition. (!). Ah, for the good old days. (cough, cough)
The 'bc' manual also indicates that it could multiply two 500 digit numbers in about 10 seconds. As a quick benchmark, this places a PDP/11 at about 1/2000 the speed of a P3-450 (~0.25 BogoMIPS). Ah, for the good old days. (cough, cough)
--
For reasonably small-sized black holes, tidal forces of thousands of Gs per CM are easy to achieve (i.e. the gravitational pull 1CM past the event horizon is thousands of Gs less than it is right AT the event horizon). Imagine, for a moment, the kind of stress that this would place on a 5'8" frame going feet first into a black hole, and you'll understand why black holes are considered an unhealthy travel option. As a super-dense black hole approaches point size, this value aproaches infinity.
Pulling apart a virtual pair doesn't require them to be straddling the event horizon, it only requers that they be close enough for the tidal forces to rip them apart before they re-combine. The negative-energy particle would get sucked into the black hole, and the positive-energy one would be free to go on it's merry way.
As you consider the possibility of larger (i.e. ENORMOUS) black holes, things start to get a little bit more tame. If you got enough mass together in one place, you would have a black hole about 3 light months in diameter, where the event horizon had a negligible tidal force (fractional Gs per light-week) and the gravity was 1G. A black hole this large would have almost no evaporation events and would last roughly forever.
It would also have an average density less than water.
--
SCO is also a reasonably 'old' company. I'm sure that they know both the value and the danger of FUD (from both sides of the weapon). For a president of SCO to just come out and say something like 'oh, well we're going to be dropping support for SCO unix in 3 years) would be like dropping a 500KG FUD bomb in the middle of their prime market.
It's just not foing to happen
--
When I managed the email for a medium-sized ISP, I talked to someone in Australia about a spam complaint. He said that, as peeved as he was about it, personally, there wasn't much he could do. His explanation was that privacy laws in Australia made it essentially illegal to nail the spammers.
For this reason, he explained that there were a LOT of PORN sites hosted in Australia. They were basically allowed to do their dirty work scot free.
Of course, with the new censorship rules in Australia, the porn sites may be going away.... I think, however, that they may still get a free ride as long as they don't provide the porn to Australian civilians (haven't read the law that closely).
In any case, the explanation is that porn generates a lot of traffic. If there are a disproportionat number of porn sites in Australia, that would explain why there is a noticable bit balance in favour of Australia.
BTW: My expectation is that -- except for countries with developing markets, the bit balance should be somewhere near even. Granted -- there may be 10 times as many sites in the US as in AUS, but there are also 10 times as many USERS in the US. This implies that (as long as quality is somewhere near even) an AUS site of non-local nature should get about 10 times as many hits (from the US) as a similar US site would get (from AUS) ie: 1/10 as many sites with 10 times the transborder hits each.. comes out about even .... Then you factor in porn.
--
At the heart of the reason for their complaint is that they're being deprived of the advertising revenue while being asked to support their competition with their research/admin time AND their CPUs/bandwidth.
At the same time they've managed to limit the damage that this would do because they're not banning EVERYBODY from their site -- just this specific company. For this rulling to affect you you have to get eBay's attention first. They have to ask you to not use their site before you can be forced not to.
I can think of two analogies that would apply (in different ways) here. One would be a radio/TV repeater that filtered out all the adds and put their own in. I think (hope) that most people can understand how that is problematic (from the station's point of view).
Another analogy would be you walking around a shopping mall handing out leaflets with price comparisons between that mall and the one across the street -- "See how many prices are lower across the street!". -- The mall would be completely in it's rights to tell you to go show off your price advantage on somebody else's property. Shopping malls (like websites) are only PSEUDO public property.
Although they generally invite and allow the whole public on their site, they have the right to tell you to go away and don't ever come back again. I don't think that they even have to tell you why. You are expected to self-police yourself on that. If you come back, and they recognize you, they have the right to go after you for trespassing.
All that this ruling does is extend the principle of trespassing into the electronic domain in a reasonably straightforward and sane manner.
--
Granted, it might be water cooled, but how big a cooling fan/pump are you going to need for this beastie?
--
Linus did NOT say that he didn't like Napster. What he said is that Metalica's suit was the only one that he saw as having anything approaching moral ground under it (my personal spin). Lee Gomes then used that quote out of context to support a spin that almost nobody in the Open Source community supported things like napster.
THAT is why people were confused into thinking that Linus didn't like Napster.
Spin, baby, spin! It's what the media industry does best.
--
Pretty easy to answer: The people who want/need it. Not many people have much use for someone who can dunk a basketball from the 3 point line 95% of the time either. On the other hand, the people who do (e.g. NBA teams) are willing to pay a REALLY pretty penny for the ability.
Similarly when I'm looking for a job. Not everybody needs my skill set, but those who do are willing to pay reasonably well for it :-((But not as much as Jordan gets))-:
--
The main problem I can see with that is that, as you add more layers, more and more light gets eaten in the sandwiched layers. You can get around that -- a bit -- with a strongeer backlight, but that still leaves you with more heat, and the layers further back will get dimmer, and dimmer and....
In time, though, we may have a real solution to those issues. I'm sure that they're working on it.
--
On the other hand, creating your own sandbox is pretty easy on most Linux/unix systems:
--
I think that you should also make that suggestion to your fellow workers. ... I just like to act like one :-)
IANAL
--
In both cases, you end up with a centrally controlled economy with little real input from the peons. In both cases, the purpose of the media is to support the control system, not to enable the people to communicate with them.
What other things are common to the two systems?
--
He has the same kind of distaste for the mushiness of the open-source stance, as some open source people did about Apple's original "open source" license attempt.
Granted, the name leaves some room for improvement, but the truth is that there may be nothing in the english language that is both sucinct enough for the likes of you and accurate enough that he wouldn't have had to say "open as in free, not open as in you can look at it for a thousand dollars".
--
SUN-OS came from BSD, which was an effective open-source movement (as opposed to a free-software movement). Back then, just about everybody who used unix had source. I remember seeing patches for everything from Filesystem bugs to chsh.
The reason why UNIX got so good was that the USERS were able to fix bugs without having to wait for AT&T to get around to it with their handfull of programmers. Then AT&T folded it into systems III and V. Once AT&T broke (up) out of it's monopoly straight-jacket, they moved UNIX into a more and more closed-source space and the UNIX universe kinda stagnated until GNU created the space for LINUX to step in and re-ignit the open source base of UNIX.
--
Well, if I measured your weight in Jupiter masses, you'd look pretty insignificant too.
That sort of re-scaling is the kind of thing that a PR group will do to make things look a certain way. Once, when I was on the board of an enviromental org. A nearby Shell gas station mentioned that they wanted to gass off leaked gasoline from their underground tanks into the neighbourhood. They said that they'd "only" be evaporating about 3.5 cubic metres of liquid.
Many members were willing to skip on it as minimal until I looked at the app, did some number crunching (habitual), and suddenly blurted out "Those bastards, that's almost a thousand gallons!".
--
Well, pi^2 makes a much better estimate for 'g' (little 'g' as in gravitational acceleration at sea level in meters per second). - I never really noticed that before.
--
Now it's the old MACs that are being flayed. Such is life.
Cutest stunt I saw, though, was a friend of mine who had completed the engineering for fitting a MAC OEM board into a 200MZ PPC laptop, using the case as a heatsink. That was just about the time that Apple decided to skewer their OEMs.
Ditch one laptop (and company!).
--
It's kinda like the 'consent to search' rule. If a cop stops you and says "I'm going to search you now. If I find anything illegal on you, it'll be used against you in a court of law.... OK? He's not asking if you understand that what he's doing is legal.
He's asking you for Consent to search. If you go "OK", back then an otherwise illegal search becomes legal because it was 'voluntary'.
Same thing with "asking" Mitnick to shutup.
--
I think that Cmdr Tacho already responded to this style of complaint elsewhere. They often batch news stories and then stagger their release. The result from our end is that what looks like a scoop is actually old (but unreleased) news.
--
Yeah, well running a startup requires running the fine line between not having enough money to get product out the door, and selling too much stock too early, and loosing control and ownership of the whole thing.
Releasing a prototype allows them to go to the next tier of investors (as well as their older investors) and say.. "Look: all those patents really DO do something useful. NOW will you give us some more money -- even though we're not selling anything yet?
--
--
If you haven't heard about the stock market sell-off by now
- You probably don't care about it,
- You're probably living the life of a techno-hermit, and
- You probably don't read
/.
That having been said, it was probably worthwhile to give those of us geeks with an investment in the stock market someplace to blow off our steam.NAK! 3 posts in one article -- I'm going to the beach.
--
Once he manages to sell all of his stock, then his valuation -- although smaller -- wouldn't be paper.
Just like stock represents a percentage ownership of a company, money represents a percentage ownership of a country's currently available resources (i.e. not far from being stock in the COUNTRY). {In,de}flation occurs when people recognize that the ratio of available money to available resources is off-kilter.
--