Content Distribution ( was Re:LOTR Trailers)
on
Lord of the Geeks
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· Score: 2
Akamai runs a service for global distribution of content. When you click on a link that was "Akamaized", the link will send you to a server that is (theoretically) the geographically closest available server. Geographical proximity decreases latency and prevents a single server from being Slashdotted.
Posting links to content with an Akamai URL completely defeats that purpose. Perhaps posting a link to the web page from which you got the link to Akamai would be more useful in the future.
Then again, I dislike Akamai. To quote Aleister Crowley, "Do as you will."
For an encrypted e-mail system to work, it must automatically encrypt messages. No "Encrypt" button should be necessary. Unfortunately, decryption should also be automatic (probably by forcing you to type your private key in once per session and saving it in memort), which defies some of the purpose of having encrypted messages and secured systems.
But wait! Not everyone has a public key for encryption!
That definitely does cause a problem. The best solution would be if PGP (or some other method) were an option in every e-mail client, not as a plug-in that you download after the fact, and that installation of the e-mail client required you to either feed it your private key or create a new one for you and upload your public key to a common repository. This way, when you're sending a message, the e-mail system automatically looks up all the public keys from the common repository.
But what about mailing lists or addresses with multiple distributions?
Easy! Every new e-mail distribution list must get its own public key generated so mail can be encrypted to that list. Then the distribution system needs to unencrypt the message and then re-encrypt the message for all the individuals on that list.
All this is fairly tongue-in-cheek because adoption of this paradigm would have to happen nearly instantaneously accross the entire Internet. Not likely.
So, I suspect we will never see a day when most e-mail is encrypted.
Most of my job revolves around Denial of Service attacks. I work for a company that writes server software; it is my responsibility to benchmark that server software on an array of different hardware platforms and configurations. The best way to benchmark this software is to run a series of DoS attacks against the server to find out what the server can't handle. By fine-tuning the DoS attack, we can ascertain exactly what we can handle. Once the barrage is over, we can then sell the software on the hardware platform and claim that it can sustain a specific level of performance.
So I guess there are even non-political, ethical justifications for DoS attacks.
Moreso, isn't DoS precisely what companies like Mercury Interactive and Keynote do when they try to slam your webserver so you know whether you need to buy more server processing power, etc.?
Pluto No Longer a Planet-- Disney Company Proud of Efforts
Kissimmee, Florida-- After many months of exercising and maintaining a healthy diet, Pluto, the loveable dog of Mickey Mouse, has finally met his goal weight. "He struggled with it for a while, at first," says his proud and famous owner, "but cutting his intake of doggie treats has brought him back down to an acceptable weight."
"We look forward to seeing him act in movies again," Mickey's girlfriend, Minnie, added. And so do we all...
Recall, if you will, that Yahoo doesn't run its own search indexing. Yahoo outsources this to Google for its general searches, Inktomi for its business searches, etc. It is Inktomi and Google that will wind up in an embroiled legal battle, and neither company can claim prior art.
To preface: I use both Sun and Microsoft products regularly. I am not a fan of Microsoft, but I also don't care much for Sun. I still think NeXT kicks both of their asses and it's been dead neigh-on half-a-decade now.
Anyway...
It's been interesting to look at how Microsoft and Sun have gone head-to-head in the open market in the past. I am talking about the competition to Microsoft's Office suite found in the form of Sun's StarOffice. A lot can be said about the advantages and disadvantages of each respective product, however Microsoft will probably always be the market leader for office products.
In the end, I think it comes down to which company has the better marketing machine behind them. The key to seeing which platform (C# vs. Java) will rule the industry will be found in the Marketing Expense columns of each company's balance sheets.
Working with streaming media for a living, I've come to believe that there will be a time when just about all broadcasts are done primarily over the Internet.
I hope that this comes to fruition within a ten year time-span so that it will come back to bite the IOC on the ass... If only we could hold them to this decision rather than letting them change their minds in five years when they'd have made more money otherwise.
There are two very important things that the above argument (that the challenge is unwinnable because the cryptographic messages is context-based and we don't know the context) doesn't seem to take into consideration. First, that if the numbers are, in fact, cryptographic messages, they were designed to be unencoded by someone somewhere. Second, the person unencoding the message probably hasn't had a computer transcribing the numbers for auto-decryption for the duration that the messages have been transmitted.
Bottom line: for any message, not only must you consider the context and content, you must also consider the intended receiver and the medium.
Aside: (Interestingly, I made this same argument the thesis for a class on German Existentialism, where I attempted to explain Heidegger's views on art. It was entitled "Dasein and Kunst".)
I read Mr. Zeldman's website, linked to from the request for questions post, prior to thinking about any question to submit to him. He explains a great deal of why he does things one way and not another there. Yet several of these interview questions ask him to practically repeat what he said on his own website.
If I were Mr. Zeldman, I'd have been insulted by several of the questions asked because of the tone taken with the question and the fact that the answer was already out there. It's worse to attack someone out of ignorance than it is to attack them out of difference of opinion.
If the readership of/. represents the mob hoard and the mob hoard publicly shows its ignorance by attacking someone needlessly, I'd rather get my news for nerds somewhere else. I think an apology to Mr. Zeldman may be in order.
I haven't read the DuBois book, so it wouldn't be appropriate to comment on it specifically. When looking it up, however, I did find a few other books in the pipeline that might be worth saving your money for...
I started getting into the "whole Internet thing" in 1992, not nearly as long ago as some of you, but certainly long enough ago to notice how much anti-AOL sentiment there was at the time. Anyone from AOL was typically banned on all of the IRC channels and I kept anti-aol filters in my trn kill-file.
When Netscape became popular, I enjoyed downloading the latest preview releases and I reported my share of bugs. The whole idea of Netscape thrashing Microsoft in the browser war was thrilling! Microsoft was a giant, and as a rule I always root for the underdog (which reminds me... vote for Alan Keyes!!!). When Nullsoft released WinAmp, I found my entrance into the world of MP3s, listening to the latest in controversial technology.
For me, Nullsoft and Netscape represented a change in the way the world worked... a departure from a centralized computer world. It was a world full of grey areas of privacy and copyright that I hoped would be worked out by a global consortium as opposed to the restrictive political regimes of any single nation.
When Netscape and Nullsoft were purchased by AOL, a company that represented "the enemy" for me, I realized that everything I had hoped for and believed in had crumbled to the power of the dollar.
To this very day, that's precisely what AOL represents... that enough money will overcome even the highest of principles, and that at some point, everyone sells out.
If you'll all refer back to your Microeconomics 101 textbook, you can find a graph of a supply and a demand curve. The "good" in question is the digitizing of library of congress-owned literature.
As you can see, we, the demanders of the good, are offering a price of $0. At that price the supplier is also willing to supply 0 books. Were we to offer a larger fee for the librarian's digitizing services, the quantity that the librarian would be willing to digitize would likely be greater than 0.
Clearly, we don't have enough information, yet, to explain what the efficient price and quantity of digitized literature will be, but all we need to do is establish that we're willing to pay a certain price for this literature and the librarian may think us less arrogant.
A brief note: we are aware that the literature held by the Library of Congress with expired copyrights should be free, particularly in a digital medium, however there is still a cost associated with converting the literature from meat to bytes. The price which we need to offer the librarian must be larger than the cost he/she would incur... Call it a publishing fee. One might argue that these materials are now being held as property of the government and should therefore be free for anyone to view in any format they desire. One must also remember that the library of congress has a budget that has been established by past practice. The "new way" of the electronic age probably hasn't been fully considered into the Library of Congress' budget, which means that anyone who views the purpose of the Library of Congress from this perspective ought communicate with their governmental representatives in order to have the Library's budget increased for this particular purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Posting links to content with an Akamai URL completely defeats that purpose. Perhaps posting a link to the web page from which you got the link to Akamai would be more useful in the future.
Then again, I dislike Akamai. To quote Aleister Crowley, "Do as you will."
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But wait! Not everyone has a public key for encryption!
That definitely does cause a problem. The best solution would be if PGP (or some other method) were an option in every e-mail client, not as a plug-in that you download after the fact, and that installation of the e-mail client required you to either feed it your private key or create a new one for you and upload your public key to a common repository. This way, when you're sending a message, the e-mail system automatically looks up all the public keys from the common repository.
But what about mailing lists or addresses with multiple distributions?
Easy! Every new e-mail distribution list must get its own public key generated so mail can be encrypted to that list. Then the distribution system needs to unencrypt the message and then re-encrypt the message for all the individuals on that list.
All this is fairly tongue-in-cheek because adoption of this paradigm would have to happen nearly instantaneously accross the entire Internet. Not likely.
So, I suspect we will never see a day when most e-mail is encrypted.
--
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So I guess there are even non-political, ethical justifications for DoS attacks.
Moreso, isn't DoS precisely what companies like Mercury Interactive and Keynote do when they try to slam your webserver so you know whether you need to buy more server processing power, etc.?
--
--
Chris: [About Goofy] He can't be a dog. He wears a hat and drives a car.
--
Kissimmee, Florida-- After many months of exercising and maintaining a healthy diet, Pluto, the loveable dog of Mickey Mouse, has finally met his goal weight. "He struggled with it for a while, at first," says his proud and famous owner, "but cutting his intake of doggie treats has brought him back down to an acceptable weight."
"We look forward to seeing him act in movies again," Mickey's girlfriend, Minnie, added. And so do we all...
--
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US5970497: Method for indexing duplicate records of information of a database
US6138113: Method for identifying near duplicate pages in a hyperlinked database
US6021409: Method for parsing, indexing and searching world-wide-web pages
US6128690: System for remote memory allocation in a computer having a verification table contains information identifying remote computers which are authorized to allocate memory in said computer
More can be found at Delphion's Intellectual Property Network.
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Ironic that what will most likely be his last film project (he's dead, after all) will wind up being about just the opposite.
Can't wait to see it.
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Anyway...
It's been interesting to look at how Microsoft and Sun have gone head-to-head in the open market in the past. I am talking about the competition to Microsoft's Office suite found in the form of Sun's StarOffice. A lot can be said about the advantages and disadvantages of each respective product, however Microsoft will probably always be the market leader for office products.
In the end, I think it comes down to which company has the better marketing machine behind them. The key to seeing which platform (C# vs. Java) will rule the industry will be found in the Marketing Expense columns of each company's balance sheets.
--
I hope that this comes to fruition within a ten year time-span so that it will come back to bite the IOC on the ass... If only we could hold them to this decision rather than letting them change their minds in five years when they'd have made more money otherwise.
--
Bottom line: for any message, not only must you consider the context and content, you must also consider the intended receiver and the medium.
Aside: (Interestingly, I made this same argument the thesis for a class on German Existentialism, where I attempted to explain Heidegger's views on art. It was entitled "Dasein and Kunst".)
--
If I were Mr. Zeldman, I'd have been insulted by several of the questions asked because of the tone taken with the question and the fact that the answer was already out there. It's worse to attack someone out of ignorance than it is to attack them out of difference of opinion.
If the readership of /. represents the mob hoard and the mob hoard publicly shows its ignorance by attacking someone needlessly, I'd rather get my news for nerds somewhere else. I think an apology to Mr. Zeldman may be in order.
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E-Commerc e Solutions with MySQL by Prima (Editor)
List Price: $39.99
Will be published in September 2000.
ISBN: 0761524452
MySQL and PHP from Scratch
List Price: unavailable
Published in January 2000
ISBN: 0789724499
Professio nal MySQL Programming by Wrox Author Team
List Price: $49.99
Will be published in July 2000.
ISBN: 1861004281
SAMS Teach Yourself MySQL in 21 Days by Mark Maslakowski
List Price: $39.99
Will be published in May 2000.
ISBN: 0672319144
Php3 and MySQL Web Development by William Jason Gilmore
List Price: $39.99
Will be published in April 2000.
ISBN: 0672317842
and for your reference:
MySQL & mSQL by Randy Jay Yarger, George Reese, and Tim King
List Price: $34.95
Published August 1999
ISBN: 1565924347
MySQL by Paul DuBois and Michael Widenius
List Price: $49.99
Published December 1999 (?)
ISBN: 0735709211
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Speaking of which... what does the "SysRq" key (under "Print Screen" (which I have figured out)) do?
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When Netscape became popular, I enjoyed downloading the latest preview releases and I reported my share of bugs. The whole idea of Netscape thrashing Microsoft in the browser war was thrilling! Microsoft was a giant, and as a rule I always root for the underdog (which reminds me... vote for Alan Keyes!!!). When Nullsoft released WinAmp, I found my entrance into the world of MP3s, listening to the latest in controversial technology.
For me, Nullsoft and Netscape represented a change in the way the world worked... a departure from a centralized computer world. It was a world full of grey areas of privacy and copyright that I hoped would be worked out by a global consortium as opposed to the restrictive political regimes of any single nation.
When Netscape and Nullsoft were purchased by AOL, a company that represented "the enemy" for me, I realized that everything I had hoped for and believed in had crumbled to the power of the dollar.
To this very day, that's precisely what AOL represents... that enough money will overcome even the highest of principles, and that at some point, everyone sells out.
--
As you can see, we, the demanders of the good, are offering a price of $0. At that price the supplier is also willing to supply 0 books. Were we to offer a larger fee for the librarian's digitizing services, the quantity that the librarian would be willing to digitize would likely be greater than 0.
Clearly, we don't have enough information, yet, to explain what the efficient price and quantity of digitized literature will be, but all we need to do is establish that we're willing to pay a certain price for this literature and the librarian may think us less arrogant.
A brief note: we are aware that the literature held by the Library of Congress with expired copyrights should be free, particularly in a digital medium, however there is still a cost associated with converting the literature from meat to bytes. The price which we need to offer the librarian must be larger than the cost he/she would incur... Call it a publishing fee.
One might argue that these materials are now being held as property of the government and should therefore be free for anyone to view in any format they desire. One must also remember that the library of congress has a budget that has been established by past practice. The "new way" of the electronic age probably hasn't been fully considered into the Library of Congress' budget, which means that anyone who views the purpose of the Library of Congress from this perspective ought communicate with their governmental representatives in order to have the Library's budget increased for this particular purpose.
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