John's paper is hardly objective! It seems so slanted/biased towards unix that I doubt very many people have found it credible.
Even in the very first section about cost, he point to "NT Lies: Lie #6 " to suggest that NT is overpriced. The NT article simply (and honestly) takes issue with the fact that NT server and workstation are virtually identical. There is no cost/benefit analysis.
His next sentence suggests NT is lacking because is doesn't provide features common in unix systems, but they're not the things Microsoft's customers have been missing.
Then he points to a cost analysis by BSDI, hardly an objective source. You won't find him pointing to similar (yet somehow opposite) viewpoints on Microsoft's web server, like
this page, and certainly not their
imfamous linux myths page.
At least he points to an independent opinion of Maggie Biggs in his next sentence, but upon reading her article, it's obvious that she's comparing a (then unreleased redhat 5.0) to an unspecified NT system, for a fictional installation. Nothing more than guesswork, reporting that Redhat's new product might be. Maggie's opinion is shear speculation, and she doesn't hide that, but it's credible information when linked from John's paper?
I could go on and on, but one paragraph is plenty.
Well, I've been pretty critical of John Kirch's paper, even though I agree more or less with what it says. I like Linux and I've been using it regularily since 1994, shortly before the 1.0 kernel release, and I've used BSD, Sunos, and HPUX for years before that. I'm certainly biased towards unix/linux, and if I can get the impression the John's writing is heavily biased towards unix, it's gotta be pretty obvious!
In 1988, when
Apple announced the Mac II, they
advertised that it'd be able to run PC applications. The ads were a bit deceptive, what they were actually advertising was SoftPC, by
Insignia Solutions. It didn't really catch on, perhaps because it was so slow, perhaps because it was so expensive... but it had a sampled sound of a PC beep and floppy drive thrashing about, which amused Mac fans to no end, who of course had a really nice startup sound that the PC world (aka microsoft) didn't provide until windows 95.
Of course, there are a number of well written, and well moderated (up) posts suggesting that their patents might not be as broad as Rod hinted, and maybe the whole thing is a hoax.... but if anyone's looking for some prior art, I've got an ancient mac that's in danger of being completely replaced with
ARDI's Mac Emulator, also some nice Prior Art, perhaps even as old as Insignia's SoftPC, but was only released commercially a couple years ago.
I suppose this is slightly off-topic, but at the
risk of losing karma, I'll respond to
GW Hayduke's rant about
how expensive
T1 service is.
I have a fractional T1 service... but "fractional" can mean a lot of different speeds, and in my case it's only 128 kbps. It is expensive to set up a T1 service, but at least in Portland Oregon, it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.
The most expensive part is the upstream service from an ISP. Most ISPs are quite expensive. I did quite a bit of searching in my area, and I found two with competitive prices. I went with
Internet Arena, because the other was some christian place with filtering at their router, and
we've all heard about how well filtering software works.
Not far behind the ISP is the telco. In my area, it's GTE. A year ago their prices were lower... it seems strange that they're increased. Unlike the ISP, at least where I live, you're stuck with your local telco. The service is
Frame Relay. In Oregon, and probably in many other places, there's no room for a bargain, since the rates are set by a utility commission.
Of course, you then need equipment. I wanted a low cost Linux based solution. At the time, the only real option was
Sangoma. They sell a card that goes in your PC that more or less does everything you need. The mounting bracket has one 8 pin jack (same size and shape as an 10baseT ethernet connector) but it's for a T1 line. Like ethernet, only four wires are used, a pair for transmit and a pair for receive. I'll give more details about the wiring below. You can always
email me if you're trying to set it up and have a question.
Indeed it is expensive. I don't recall all the costs down to the penny, but here's more or less how it worked out:
Setup: Samgoma card, $950
Setup: Telco install fee, $350
Reoccur: Telco, $123
Reoccur: ISP, $150
Now I'm sure your thinking, dear reader, that that's a rip-off for only 128 kbps service. Indeed it is expensive, and perhaps in a year or two when DSL is finally available in my area, I may switch. The one really cool thing about frame relay service is that the ping time is about 20 ms, and many installations (but not mine) seem to run at a 10 ms ping time. However, I don't play network games...
Now I could go on about why I decided to spring for an expensive T1 service, but that's really getting off-topic from and already slightly off-topic post. The main point of this post was to respond with the actual costs of setting up a low speed fractional T1 service.... or at least the actual costs in my area, as they were about a year ago. A secondary purpose was to give a little bit of info about how to do it. To that end, I'll ramble on just a bit more about the setup.
I called both the ISP and the telco and asked about how to set things up. My experience was that it's better and easier to deal with the ISP. Finding a cool ISP is not easy, but they're out there. Dave at Internet Arena is a great guy, so if you're in the Portland area, I'd suggest you give Dave a call. He's got a bunch of other really high speed/moderate cost options for certain areas, using leased T1 lines instead of the telco. Anyway, the point is to talk with ISPs and make a visit to any you want to do business with.
Often times the ISP will call the telco for you to set up all the details, but you can get involved if you want. I did. Each T1 line has a circuit ID number. Your new service will get a number. When you hear your new number, be sure to write it down and don't lose it. You may never need it again, but it's a pain to find someone at the telco who knows enough to look it up if you ever have a problem with the line.
Frame Relay is a protocol, much like the ethernet 802.3 frames. Like IPv4 gives 32 bit IP addresses, frame relay provides DLCI numbers. Unlike IP, a DLCI number is a short integer which is unique only on your line. The phone company establishes Permanent Virtual Connections (PVC) through the frame relay network, by adding routes and doing who knows what else. Ultimately, the PVC will link a DLCI number (short integer) on your your circuit ID (big long number) to a DLCI number on the ISP's circuit ID. You'll probably never use the circuit ID number, but you do need to know the DLCI number to set up the sangoma card.
Since I bought my card, Sangoma has made some major improvements in the setup process (I set up another card for someone a couple months ago). The installer looks a lot like RedHat's text based installation program. It will ask you about for various bit of information, and it'll want to know about each DLCI you have. You'd probably only establish one PVC to your ISP, but it's possible to have lots of PVC to other people, all running on the same line. After the installation, each PVC will appear as an interface. I named mine "fr16", and it looks like this when I run ifconfig:
From here it's just the usual linux routing things.
Well, that's probably enough rambling on. If anyone reading this is looking to set up a T1 service on linux, on a budget, hopefully this has helped a bit instead of just creating more confusion. It's not cheap, but also not as bad as some people make it out to be.
If you're selling over 100,000 units/year, it
often makes sense to design your own ASIC.
It's really not a big deal to make your own
chip. When I was doing grad school part time
several years ago,
I made this little chip, together with a small
group of other students. The whole thing
only took a couple months to design. I learned
a lot and since then I've had a much better
perspective about how ICs are designed, which
has been helpful designing at the board level.
The CNN article is remarkable vauge about what
Microsoft's chip actually does.... it may be a
CPU, or maybe just "glue logic". Whatever it
is, it's common to design ASICs for high volume
products. Unfortunately, it also common to make
a big deal out of nothing.
It's easy to worry about what will become of
your private data, shopping on the net, and
judging from this massive discussion, I'd guess
there are very few merchants here who can speak
for the other side of the transaction.
Robin and I recently started running a small on-line store at our website. The website (URL should be above in my user info) is mostly a bunch of technical resources for developing electronic projects with low-end microtrollers. We sell
electronic components to people who want to build
some of the things shown on the website, but they need the parts....it's darn difficult to stay
on-topic and avoid going on about our stuff... We're a very small operation, neither of us are
going to quite our day jobs anytime soon, but it's turned out to be fun. Maybe someday we'll recoup all the initial expenses, but for a long time it seems we'll be as unprofitable as all the other dot coms!
The main point this message is that a merchant,
even a very small one like us, must collect your
basic info. You're taking a very small "risk" by
sending this, but consider the risk the merchant is taking. If you pay with a credit card (as
nearly everybody does), the merchant gets the
money before the order is shipped, minus a fee
from the bank.... but there is still considerable
risk for the merchant. If the customer is unhappy
with the product, or the shipping company fails to deliver, or if the visa card was stolen, the card
holder can call their bank and file a dispute. In fact, it seems a consumer can initiate a dispute for nearly any reason, and if they're dishonest and smart, they could make up a good reason.
If the merchant didn't swipe the physical card
and obtain a signature, they will almost certainly
end up losing the dispute, even if the consumer
keeps the goods! Even if the good are returned, the merchant will still end up losing money, as
the bank will usually make the merchant pay for all the shipping, and a heaft chargeback processing fee. Most consumers are honest, but
there are still many circumstances outside of the merchant's control where the consumer (rightly I believe) will be refunded by the bank and the merchant will end up losing their product, and have to pay for the shipping and substantial fees from the bank for their trouble.
Robin set up a visa merchant account with our bank, and most of the ordered we've shipped were paid on a credit card. We must collect quite a bit of basic information to be able to process the visa payment and to ship the package. We ask for your phone number, mainly because UPS wants it, mostly for international delivery I think, so that can call you if there's a problem with customs. Also, if you use Western Union to send money instead of a credit card, they are a lot easier to deal with having the phone number.
We must collect the basic info to be able to receive
payment and ship a box, and what the bank and
UPS do with the info is completely out of our
hands. Even if they promised us it would
remain confidential, we would have no way to know
if they changed their policy or just lied.
Even if you trust Robin and I, maybe because we
distribute code and electronic designs as open-source, or perhaps because of the look-and-feel of the website, the truth of the
matter is that it isn't possible for even the
best internet merchant to receive your payment and send you a package without collecting quite a bit of info, and giving that info to at least the bank and shipping company.
Now we don't require a user agent string. Our website uses only standard html, and it's got a more or less minimal graphic look, partly because we don't have a lot of bandwidth to waste on unnecessary images, and I want the pages to load as fast as possible for people with a slow modem.
I can see how a designer would add lots of graphics if they were hosted from a T3 line, and didn't have a modem to test their pages... and then lots of fancy features leads to browser specific hacks. I don't think it's an invasion of privacy, so much as short sighted design.
Anyways, the main point in this long-winded post
is that when a consumer buys a product on-line, using a credit card, there is a substantial system in place that is designed to protect the consumer. That protection is (IMHO) a really Good Thing, but for an honest merchant, it translates into a risk. That risk is just a "fact of life" or a "cost of doing business".
The point is that while the consumer is taking a risk that their private information will be disclosed to others, which may cost them some additional annoyance from ads, the merchant is taking a very real risk, where the result will be losing money, a pissed-off customer, and perhaps damage to their reputation. There isn't a lot that internet merchants can do to prevent fraud, and the limited protections, like address verification, require the customer's personal/private info.
I'm working on a project to develop a MP3 player,
and my development is partially in Linux and
partially in Windows. The windows portion is
due to
some software from Xilinx that is needed to design with their chip, and to write the data onto the hard drive in FAT32. Linux can do the latter, but for now I need to completely defrag the drive, and I am not aware of a linux FAT32 defrag utility.
About how windoze sucks... last night I installed a removable drive bay, and put the IDE drive into my machine. My computer has no other IDE devices, the disk and cdrom are both SCSI. Windows pops up a blue screen saying that it's going to have to switch to "compatibility mode", only because I just installed an IDE disk drive! Compatibility mode means everything is running 16 bit drivers, as I understand it. Well, the next couple boots both crashed, for no apparant reason. I finally did get it to boot, opened a DOS window and ran FDISK and FORMAT on the new drive. Somewhere near the end of FORMAT, the machine completely crashed, with some sort of message about the system being "halted" for some reason. I did finally get the drive formated by creating a "startup disk", booting the computer with that. Under this config, the drive letters were reversed from their appearance in windows... another thing that isn't a problem in linux. Fortunately I noticed the drive sizes before formatting "D:" and losing my existing windows installation.
Even after I removed the IDE drive and attached it to my hardware, Windows is really messed up. It's still in compability mode, and how to fix that is a good questions.... at least not without using linux.
In the last year or so, I've been using Linux to make backups of my windows partition. I have another machine that runs linux 24/7 and exports some shares with samba. I always save my work to "F:", so "C:" only has the system, software, and other non-data files. Many windows programs always default to saving stuff on "C:", often in their own installation directories, which seems like a bad idea to me, but it's only a minor annoyance compared to windows crashing.
Anyways, to back up my windows partition, I type something along the lines of:
and then later on, when windows gets itself all
messed up in a state which is more or less not
recoverable, I just "cat" that image file back onto the/dev/sda3, and just like magic windows is back in a previously working state, completely reinstalled, and with only one reboot.
Actually, before I do the backup, I type "cat/dev/zero >/dos/dummy.bin" to fill the unused space with zeros, and then delete the file, so that the backup image will compress well.
I'm glad that you don't have any problems with
Windows, and I wish my experience was the same.
Right now, my windows partition is really messed
up, and I need to find the CDR that I burned that
big.bz2 backup file onto.
At the risk of getting moderated down for blantent self promotion, here's a link to my
little MP3 player project, which is the reason I needed to temporarily add an IDE drive to my machine, and why Windows went south.
Probably the best thing they can do to maintain
their office suite monopoly. If they don't
release soon, a free alternative will
probably gain acceptance and the free (beer)
nature could pull a lot of customers if it
gains feature parity with MS Office.
I've done a few product designs currently selling in volume, based on the Microchip PIC...
With 2K (instruction, 14 bits per) linear code address space, some chips using bank swapping for more, and a linear RAM space of only 128 bytes, again bank swapping on some larger parts.
Microchip now have some larger parts, but the popular 14 bit opcode parts have 11 bits for code addresses and 7 bits for ram addresses. Great
for small projects coded in asm, of really small
projects coded in C... but it ain't gonna run linux.
There's also a few issues with the instruction set that burn up that limited code space. You don't get conditional branches, only skips past jump instructions. There's no add or subtract with carry input, so you're going to use many extra cycles for 16 bit math, and it gets really ugly for 32 bit math. Kludged indirect addressing (FSR and INDIRECT memory locations) with only a single pointer for the entire chip also isn't so hot. Despite being labeled "RISC", the chips are a classical accumulator architecture, even if you call is "W" and "WREG" instead of "A" and "ACC". The only thing RISC about the chip is a very small number of instructions.
Of course, you do get low power, OTP eprom with in-circuit programming, lots of built-in peripherals, pretty low cost, some low-cost dev tools, and they tend to actually be available in small and large quantity... but there's no way it's gonna run linux.
I'm designing a MP3 player, and like many others
already on the market, I'm using one of the MP3
decoder chips. I built one with the (expensive)
MAS3507D
chip, and I'm putting the finishing
touches on a circuit board that uses the
STA013,
which isn't nearly as easy to use, but it is
quite a bit less expensive.
These chips aren't upgradable, at least in any
meaningful way. Some commercial players are based
on DSP chips, but generally the power consumption
is high, so they don't tend to run from batteries.
The empeg is a good example, though I believe it
uses a strongarm chip instead of a dedicated DSP.
The creative nomad jukebox (still vapor) is another example, where they only get 3-4 hours from high capacity NiMH batteries.
There are an aweful lot of hardware players running from batteries that use these existing
chips that only decode MP3. Perhaps the download
software could convert vorbis to mp3 during the
download? Of course, if a nice low-power vorbis
decoder chip existed, maybe one could make a
player that only used vorbis (longer play time)
and convert mp3 to vorbis during the download.
The use may end up using vorbis and not even
know it.
Well, to avoid making a truely shameless plug
(only a bit shameless?), I'll avoid posting a
link.... if you really want to see it, follow
the link to my site above in the user info.
The player is still more or less vapor, but
maybe in a couple weeks circuit boards will
actually be available.
I bought a copy of Q3 from Fry's when it hit
the shelf. It's pretty cool having the tin
box on the shelf.... but that's about all I
ever got out of it. The sad truth is that I
paid for the box because of the little Tux icon,
but after a frustratings and non-enjoyable time,
the Tux icon novelty has worn off and it'll take
quite a bit better end-to-end experience to
keep $50 bills flowing from my wallet. I'd guess
that I'm not the only one who feels this way.
I fiddled for a few hours with glx, gart, kernel
recompiles, xfree config files, and lots of
different documents that all proported to explain
how to set it up. I have a Matrox G400, but I
only ended up getting unplayable frame rates,
except at the very lowest quality setting in
640x480, which wasn't very exciting.
Now I've been using linux since a few months
before the 1.0 kernel (0.99pl14 as I recall), and
many years before with SunOS, HP/UX, NetBSD on
various hardware. I did much more in a 3-4 hour
session that anyone could reasonably be expected
to do to set up their video card, and despite
trying many different configurations, none
produced acceptable fram rates.
Still, I'm glad I bought it and in a little way
contributed to id not losing money, even if they
just barely broke even. I also purchased many
of the other early Loki boxes. Seeing Tux (and
a little note that it won't run on windoze) on
the box in the store was just awesome. I tried
to play Myth2 a bit, and I never even installed
H2 at all.
The novelty (of seeing Tux in the store) has worn
off, so now it'll take something really cool and
probably a downloadable demo to get another $50
from my wallet.
The sad truth is that not playing games that much,
the 200-500 megs it takes to install a typical
game is better spent on MP3 files, which tend to
provide more hours of entertainment and even while
I'm using the computer for real work!
It will be a cold day at the equator before L. Torvalds sets aside his ego for the sake of someone else's better ideas.
I'd flame, but it's pointless, and thousands of others are almost certainly fired up already. It's too bad there'll be immature hot-heads who'll discredit anyone rational and sensible, who could have convinced some editors at ABCnews that Fred's full of sh*t.
If you have access to the net and a real web server, I'd imagine some of your students would find CGI programming interesting. You could do the usual stuff, message boards, chat rooms, etc, or perhaps other less common things... your students probably use the web daily, and you might find a strong interest in building dynamic content like what they see on-line.
I've looked into this. It's quite difficult. The empeg player is doing that, with a strongarm chip. Things are looking better with new chips appearing, like the Cirrus EP7209. They provide a closed source library to do the MP3 decoding, so you could presumably write your own or just link with the old library binaries which aren't SDMI complaint.
Writing your own player firmware is not easy. I bought a copy of ISO 11172-3 (the MPEG1 audio spec), and it's quite complicated. There are lots of open source players, but they all use floating point math, because it's so much easier and runs fine on any modern PC. Maybe I'll write this someday. If I do, I'll GPL it.
For now, I'm not using this EP7209 chip right now, mainly because it's in a 208 pin high density surface mount package, and one of the goals of my homebrew MP3 player project is to offer a design and components that an average electronics hobbist can build.
Of course, it'll be a challenge to make the existing decoder chips (MAS35077D and STA013) SDMI compliant, since they don't interact with the user, so they could only see the trigger and perhaps tell the microcontroller chip to prompt the user. Since these chips lack non-volatile memory (and probably always will), any player like mine that is open source will allow the user to interact with the chip however they like.
I doubt they'll manage to make these chips SDMI compliant in any meaningful way, but it's still a very scary thought... this guy's obviously in bed with the RIAA and maybe he's just speculating, or maybe he knows something?
If these chips were to start checking for the SDMI phase 2 watermark, it could be game-over for most of the portable players. Of course, these chips are firmware upgradable, and they have no interaction with the user interface, so it's hard to see what they could do with them.
If the RIAA wants to stop MPEG Audio Layer 3, it could just work with Thomson to get the patent royalties upped
That wouldn't agree with the uniform licensing requirement that they agreed to when they submitted the codec to ISO for the MPEG standard.
They've already allowed royalty-free use for free desktop software players that are obtained by internet download, which was a smart move, as it has created demand for non-free licensed hardware decoders, and non-free encoders. The hardware decoder chips sold by Micronas and (suprise) SGS Thompson already have price committments to the manufacturers of players. Maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part, as I'm about to order a couple hundred chips for my open-source hardware-based player. (ok, that was a shameless plug, but it really is open source and the code is available on the web site right now).
As I recall, the patent was issued in 1989, so even if the RIAA could lean on Thompson, it would only last six or nine more years. The USA patent was issued in 1996, but somehow I suspect the ISO 11172-3 standard, published in 1988, could probably be considered prior art.
Come on, filtering porn should be simple. I could write "AI" that'd filter nearly all web porn just by looking for the site doing nasty tricks with javascript!
<shameless plug> I'm in the process of setting up on-line ordering on my website right now. Most of the website is technical resources for building electronic projects using embedded processors. A recent addition, that we expect to need the on-line ordering for, is the open source MP3 player, which today is a primitive first generation design, but hopefully soon I'll have a nicely redesigned version. </shameless plug>
Fortunately, my partner is an accountant, which has really helped. She set up a proper visa merchant account with our bank. It cost $100 up front. They take $0.65 per sale, plus approx 3%. There's a minimum $15 monthly charge, so hopefully we'll actually sell at least $500/month. The visa charges are entered using a touch-tone phone, so we didn't have to buy any equipment. They offer a terminal, for (I think) $450. With the terminal, we would get a per-sale charge of $0.07, and a little lower percentage of the sale, about 2.5% as I recall. They let you buy and add the terminal anytime you want.
It looks like there's a free software package called CCVS - Credit Card Verification System which allows your linux (or unix) box to emulate a terminal (requires a dedicated modem)... but there's a catch. It needs to be loaded with an encryption key. Redhat sells these keys for approx $1000. If anyone knows someone who can provide a key for CCVS for less, please contact me. Robin found a similar windoze based program, where they wanted a monthly charge and some percentage of the sale, on top of the percentage taken by the bank! Not cool, but I wouldn't run a windows server even if it was affordable.
Setting up the SSL stuff on the webserver is relatively easy, but you need a cert. VeriSign charges $350, so we went with Thawte, who only wanted $125 (even though they're now owned by Verisign). Again, robin did most of the work there. I generated the CSR from the server software, and she faxed them copies of our LLC papers and other business stuff. About a week later we got the cert. The cert lasts for only one year, you it looks like we have to pay $125 every year. I hope they don't jack their price up to Verisign's level!
Robin ran a test charge onto her credit card a couple days ago, and it seems to be working very nicely. The merchant appears as "PJRC.COM, LLC", which I think is much cooler than "ibill...some number".
For the on-line shopping cart, I looked at a couple of them, but they didn't have that look and feel that I want for my website, so I've been rolling my own. It's turned out to be a bit more coding than I originally thought, but still not too bad, and I'm really happy with the results. When the order is confirmed, the code just sends Robin and I an email, and makes sure the data stored in our database really matches what they filled out on the form.
I'm putting the final finishing touches on the cgi scripts right now, and hopefully it'll be on-line later tonight!
My website runs through a 128 kpbs frame relay line, so apache's sluggish pre-forking architecture is just fine. Even at full T-1 speed (which really is only about the same as a single-speed CDROM), apache is still plenty fast enough.
I saw those words and had the same thought. Of course, this would be a very important patent (if issued) and depending on redhat's actions, could leverage cross licensing.... the real question in my mind is how redhat would leverage such a patent, balancing their own needs against the needs of the larger linux community.
I would guess that you can't speak for what redhat's actions would be, should this be patented, by the question nonetheless is how redhat would use such a patent and how it would balance its needs (against its competitors) vs the needs of the entire linux community.
For the last 6 years or so, 16 bit microcontrollers have been predicted to generally replace 8 bit devices, but the trend has been very slow. The market for 4 bit chips, as I recall, as finally shrunk below 10%, but 4 bit chips are still in widespread use!
I design products with 8 bit devices, and I've used a couple larger chips here and there. There are many important features that designers need in microcontrollers:
LOW COST !! 50 cents less times 10k units/month is a big deal. You could task an engineer for a couple man-months to rewrite code for a 50 cent lower CPU, after an initial release. Usually using an 8 bit chip instead of a 32 bit solution saves at least $10, sometimes much more.
Low power consumption, under 4 mA is what I generally consider low power. A few years ago I designed a product that uses 9 A, 32 kHz CPU, wakes from full shutdown at 4 Hz. Try that with a linux-capable 32 bit chip! Low power also means a low cost power supply... at 1-2 mA, a resistor and zener diode can sometimes be used!
Multiple vendors, or at least some assurance that the components will be available in the required quantities.
Programmable program memory on-board... with in-circuit firmware download is a plus.
Small physical size
Often times these considerations at much more important than cpu horseposer. For example, Microchip took off about 6 years ago, offering one of the most limited feature-poor instruction sets on the market, but they did all the important things very well. Their chips were cheap, low power, small size, and they offered EPROM based chips at low prices.... but the most important thing they did was they offered flexible purchasing, made possible by selling blank EPROM based devices, at a time when Motorola had inflexible purchasing requirements for masked-rom based parts.
Most projects in the embedded market just don't need a lot of CPU power. At high volumes, it's easy to pay even the most expensive engineers and programmers to re-write code to run on a cheaper chip.
I should probably disclose that I have a small website with 8051 related resources (open source), so take my words with a grain of salt, but until 32 bit microcontrollers are less expensive and use less power than their 8 bit competitors, I'd expect the bulk of the market will probably stay with the 8 bit chips.
Hierarchy in the Namespace
on
Pirate DNS?
·
· Score: 1
Most domain names in todays DNS seem to follow a paradigm that is basically
SERVICE dot ORGANIZATION dot COM/ORG/NET/EDU
Now I know that's a bit simplified. I'm sure at least someone will replay about this, missing the point of my posting, which is that the current system doesn't make any significant use of the hierarchy that the domain name system is supposed to have.
For example, just adding one more level, along the lines of trademark types:
Maybe this will or won't ease the pressures from trademark holders... only lawyers could comment on such matters, but intuitively it seems like it might. If the new level of hierarchy clearly defines the types of businesses where trademark law allows similar marks, then it would seem a no-brainer who ought to get a particular name. I'm sure there'll still be disputes, but at least they could be made easier to resolve.
If someone sets up a new DNS system, I sure hope they seriously consider trying to restructure to use a bit more hierarchy in the namespace. Aside from (maybe) dealing with some of the conflicting trademark battles, it would probably also help reduce the load on the root nameservers.
As a practical matter, a new system should probably "seed" itself with names for all the major web sites currently on the net, for free, and of course use TLDs that are mutually exclusive from the ones used in the existing system. Some sort of scheme would be needed to work alongside the existing DNS system... I'm not sure how that could work. There are millions of links hard "coded" into html, all based on the existing DNS.
Slashdot Mirror
Even in the very first section about cost, he point to "NT Lies: Lie #6 " to suggest that NT is overpriced. The NT article simply (and honestly) takes issue with the fact that NT server and workstation are virtually identical. There is no cost/benefit analysis.
His next sentence suggests NT is lacking because is doesn't provide features common in unix systems, but they're not the things Microsoft's customers have been missing.
Then he points to a cost analysis by BSDI, hardly an objective source. You won't find him pointing to similar (yet somehow opposite) viewpoints on Microsoft's web server, like this page, and certainly not their imfamous linux myths page.
At least he points to an independent opinion of Maggie Biggs in his next sentence, but upon reading her article, it's obvious that she's comparing a (then unreleased redhat 5.0) to an unspecified NT system, for a fictional installation. Nothing more than guesswork, reporting that Redhat's new product might be. Maggie's opinion is shear speculation, and she doesn't hide that, but it's credible information when linked from John's paper?
I could go on and on, but one paragraph is plenty.
Well, I've been pretty critical of John Kirch's paper, even though I agree more or less with what it says. I like Linux and I've been using it regularily since 1994, shortly before the 1.0 kernel release, and I've used BSD, Sunos, and HPUX for years before that. I'm certainly biased towards unix/linux, and if I can get the impression the John's writing is heavily biased towards unix, it's gotta be pretty obvious!
I have an old used Mac IIci, which came with some old version of this SoftPC on it. I just booted it up, and the "About SoftPC" from the "Apple Menu", says "Version 1.4: (EGA/AT) © 1986-1990 Insignia Solutions" I'm not sure if they really sold a product before 1988, but anyone who's going to try and claim a patent on the invention of a virtual machine is going to have a lot of prior art to deal with.
Of course, there are a number of well written, and well moderated (up) posts suggesting that their patents might not be as broad as Rod hinted, and maybe the whole thing is a hoax.... but if anyone's looking for some prior art, I've got an ancient mac that's in danger of being completely replaced with ARDI's Mac Emulator, also some nice Prior Art, perhaps even as old as Insignia's SoftPC, but was only released commercially a couple years ago.
I have a fractional T1 service... but "fractional" can mean a lot of different speeds, and in my case it's only 128 kbps. It is expensive to set up a T1 service, but at least in Portland Oregon, it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.
The most expensive part is the upstream service from an ISP. Most ISPs are quite expensive. I did quite a bit of searching in my area, and I found two with competitive prices. I went with Internet Arena, because the other was some christian place with filtering at their router, and we've all heard about how well filtering software works.
Not far behind the ISP is the telco. In my area, it's GTE. A year ago their prices were lower... it seems strange that they're increased. Unlike the ISP, at least where I live, you're stuck with your local telco. The service is Frame Relay. In Oregon, and probably in many other places, there's no room for a bargain, since the rates are set by a utility commission.
Of course, you then need equipment. I wanted a low cost Linux based solution. At the time, the only real option was Sangoma. They sell a card that goes in your PC that more or less does everything you need. The mounting bracket has one 8 pin jack (same size and shape as an 10baseT ethernet connector) but it's for a T1 line. Like ethernet, only four wires are used, a pair for transmit and a pair for receive. I'll give more details about the wiring below. You can always email me if you're trying to set it up and have a question.
Indeed it is expensive. I don't recall all the costs down to the penny, but here's more or less how it worked out:
- Setup: Samgoma card, $950
- Setup: Telco install fee, $350
- Reoccur: Telco, $123
- Reoccur: ISP, $150
Now I'm sure your thinking, dear reader, that that's a rip-off for only 128 kbps service. Indeed it is expensive, and perhaps in a year or two when DSL is finally available in my area, I may switch. The one really cool thing about frame relay service is that the ping time is about 20 ms, and many installations (but not mine) seem to run at a 10 ms ping time. However, I don't play network games...Now I could go on about why I decided to spring for an expensive T1 service, but that's really getting off-topic from and already slightly off-topic post. The main point of this post was to respond with the actual costs of setting up a low speed fractional T1 service.... or at least the actual costs in my area, as they were about a year ago. A secondary purpose was to give a little bit of info about how to do it. To that end, I'll ramble on just a bit more about the setup.
I called both the ISP and the telco and asked about how to set things up. My experience was that it's better and easier to deal with the ISP. Finding a cool ISP is not easy, but they're out there. Dave at Internet Arena is a great guy, so if you're in the Portland area, I'd suggest you give Dave a call. He's got a bunch of other really high speed/moderate cost options for certain areas, using leased T1 lines instead of the telco. Anyway, the point is to talk with ISPs and make a visit to any you want to do business with.
Often times the ISP will call the telco for you to set up all the details, but you can get involved if you want. I did. Each T1 line has a circuit ID number. Your new service will get a number. When you hear your new number, be sure to write it down and don't lose it. You may never need it again, but it's a pain to find someone at the telco who knows enough to look it up if you ever have a problem with the line.
Frame Relay is a protocol, much like the ethernet 802.3 frames. Like IPv4 gives 32 bit IP addresses, frame relay provides DLCI numbers. Unlike IP, a DLCI number is a short integer which is unique only on your line. The phone company establishes Permanent Virtual Connections (PVC) through the frame relay network, by adding routes and doing who knows what else. Ultimately, the PVC will link a DLCI number (short integer) on your your circuit ID (big long number) to a DLCI number on the ISP's circuit ID. You'll probably never use the circuit ID number, but you do need to know the DLCI number to set up the sangoma card.
Since I bought my card, Sangoma has made some major improvements in the setup process (I set up another card for someone a couple months ago). The installer looks a lot like RedHat's text based installation program. It will ask you about for various bit of information, and it'll want to know about each DLCI you have. You'd probably only establish one PVC to your ISP, but it's possible to have lots of PVC to other people, all running on the same line. After the installation, each PVC will appear as an interface. I named mine "fr16", and it looks like this when I run ifconfig:
fr16 Link encap:Frame Relay DLCI HWaddr 4096
inet addr:207.149.244.8 P-t-P:207.149.244.1 Mask:255.255.255.224
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4889031 errors:0 dropped:12 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7655668 errors:136874 dropped:51 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
Interrupt:7 Base address:0x360 Memory:c00de000-c00dffff
From here it's just the usual linux routing things.
Well, that's probably enough rambling on. If anyone reading this is looking to set up a T1 service on linux, on a budget, hopefully this has helped a bit instead of just creating more confusion. It's not cheap, but also not as bad as some people make it out to be.
It's really not a big deal to make your own chip. When I was doing grad school part time several years ago, I made this little chip, together with a small group of other students. The whole thing only took a couple months to design. I learned a lot and since then I've had a much better perspective about how ICs are designed, which has been helpful designing at the board level.
The CNN article is remarkable vauge about what Microsoft's chip actually does.... it may be a CPU, or maybe just "glue logic". Whatever it is, it's common to design ASICs for high volume products. Unfortunately, it also common to make a big deal out of nothing.
Is it illegal to wear it now?
Robin and I recently started running a small on-line store at our website. The website (URL should be above in my user info) is mostly a bunch of technical resources for developing electronic projects with low-end microtrollers. We sell electronic components to people who want to build some of the things shown on the website, but they need the parts. ...it's darn difficult to stay
on-topic and avoid going on about our stuff... We're a very small operation, neither of us are
going to quite our day jobs anytime soon, but it's turned out to be fun. Maybe someday we'll recoup all the initial expenses, but for a long time it seems we'll be as unprofitable as all the other dot coms!
The main point this message is that a merchant, even a very small one like us, must collect your basic info. You're taking a very small "risk" by sending this, but consider the risk the merchant is taking. If you pay with a credit card (as nearly everybody does), the merchant gets the money before the order is shipped, minus a fee from the bank.... but there is still considerable risk for the merchant. If the customer is unhappy with the product, or the shipping company fails to deliver, or if the visa card was stolen, the card holder can call their bank and file a dispute. In fact, it seems a consumer can initiate a dispute for nearly any reason, and if they're dishonest and smart, they could make up a good reason. If the merchant didn't swipe the physical card and obtain a signature, they will almost certainly end up losing the dispute, even if the consumer keeps the goods! Even if the good are returned, the merchant will still end up losing money, as the bank will usually make the merchant pay for all the shipping, and a heaft chargeback processing fee. Most consumers are honest, but there are still many circumstances outside of the merchant's control where the consumer (rightly I believe) will be refunded by the bank and the merchant will end up losing their product, and have to pay for the shipping and substantial fees from the bank for their trouble.
Robin set up a visa merchant account with our bank, and most of the ordered we've shipped were paid on a credit card. We must collect quite a bit of basic information to be able to process the visa payment and to ship the package. We ask for your phone number, mainly because UPS wants it, mostly for international delivery I think, so that can call you if there's a problem with customs. Also, if you use Western Union to send money instead of a credit card, they are a lot easier to deal with having the phone number.
We must collect the basic info to be able to receive payment and ship a box, and what the bank and UPS do with the info is completely out of our hands. Even if they promised us it would remain confidential, we would have no way to know if they changed their policy or just lied.
Even if you trust Robin and I, maybe because we distribute code and electronic designs as open-source, or perhaps because of the look-and-feel of the website, the truth of the matter is that it isn't possible for even the best internet merchant to receive your payment and send you a package without collecting quite a bit of info, and giving that info to at least the bank and shipping company.
Now we don't require a user agent string. Our website uses only standard html, and it's got a more or less minimal graphic look, partly because we don't have a lot of bandwidth to waste on unnecessary images, and I want the pages to load as fast as possible for people with a slow modem. I can see how a designer would add lots of graphics if they were hosted from a T3 line, and didn't have a modem to test their pages... and then lots of fancy features leads to browser specific hacks. I don't think it's an invasion of privacy, so much as short sighted design.
Anyways, the main point in this long-winded post is that when a consumer buys a product on-line, using a credit card, there is a substantial system in place that is designed to protect the consumer. That protection is (IMHO) a really Good Thing, but for an honest merchant, it translates into a risk. That risk is just a "fact of life" or a "cost of doing business".
The point is that while the consumer is taking a risk that their private information will be disclosed to others, which may cost them some additional annoyance from ads, the merchant is taking a very real risk, where the result will be losing money, a pissed-off customer, and perhaps damage to their reputation. There isn't a lot that internet merchants can do to prevent fraud, and the limited protections, like address verification, require the customer's personal/private info.
About how windoze sucks... last night I installed a removable drive bay, and put the IDE drive into my machine. My computer has no other IDE devices, the disk and cdrom are both SCSI. Windows pops up a blue screen saying that it's going to have to switch to "compatibility mode", only because I just installed an IDE disk drive! Compatibility mode means everything is running 16 bit drivers, as I understand it. Well, the next couple boots both crashed, for no apparant reason. I finally did get it to boot, opened a DOS window and ran FDISK and FORMAT on the new drive. Somewhere near the end of FORMAT, the machine completely crashed, with some sort of message about the system being "halted" for some reason. I did finally get the drive formated by creating a "startup disk", booting the computer with that. Under this config, the drive letters were reversed from their appearance in windows... another thing that isn't a problem in linux. Fortunately I noticed the drive sizes before formatting "D:" and losing my existing windows installation.
Even after I removed the IDE drive and attached it to my hardware, Windows is really messed up. It's still in compability mode, and how to fix that is a good questions.... at least not without using linux.
In the last year or so, I've been using Linux to make backups of my windows partition. I have another machine that runs linux 24/7 and exports some shares with samba. I always save my work to "F:", so "C:" only has the system, software, and other non-data files. Many windows programs always default to saving stuff on "C:", often in their own installation directories, which seems like a bad idea to me, but it's only a minor annoyance compared to windows crashing.
Anyways, to back up my windows partition, I type something along the lines of:
cat /dev/sda3 | bzip2 -9 - > /tmp/sda3_windoze_backup.bz2
and then later on, when windows gets itself all messed up in a state which is more or less not recoverable, I just "cat" that image file back onto the /dev/sda3, and just like magic windows is back in a previously working state, completely reinstalled, and with only one reboot.
Actually, before I do the backup, I type "cat /dev/zero > /dos/dummy.bin" to fill the unused space with zeros, and then delete the file, so that the backup image will compress well.
I'm glad that you don't have any problems with Windows, and I wish my experience was the same. Right now, my windows partition is really messed up, and I need to find the CDR that I burned that big .bz2 backup file onto.
At the risk of getting moderated down for blantent self promotion, here's a link to my little MP3 player project, which is the reason I needed to temporarily add an IDE drive to my machine, and why Windows went south.
Probably the best thing they can do to maintain their office suite monopoly. If they don't release soon, a free alternative will probably gain acceptance and the free (beer) nature could pull a lot of customers if it gains feature parity with MS Office.
I've done a few product designs currently selling in volume, based on the Microchip PIC...
With 2K (instruction, 14 bits per) linear code address space, some chips using bank swapping for more, and a linear RAM space of only 128 bytes, again bank swapping on some larger parts.
Microchip now have some larger parts, but the popular 14 bit opcode parts have 11 bits for code addresses and 7 bits for ram addresses. Great for small projects coded in asm, of really small projects coded in C... but it ain't gonna run linux.
There's also a few issues with the instruction set that burn up that limited code space. You don't get conditional branches, only skips past jump instructions. There's no add or subtract with carry input, so you're going to use many extra cycles for 16 bit math, and it gets really ugly for 32 bit math. Kludged indirect addressing (FSR and INDIRECT memory locations) with only a single pointer for the entire chip also isn't so hot. Despite being labeled "RISC", the chips are a classical accumulator architecture, even if you call is "W" and "WREG" instead of "A" and "ACC". The only thing RISC about the chip is a very small number of instructions.
Of course, you do get low power, OTP eprom with in-circuit programming, lots of built-in peripherals, pretty low cost, some low-cost dev tools, and they tend to actually be available in small and large quantity... but there's no way it's gonna run linux.
why is the lack of that cat killing mankind?
I wish I had a few more moderator points to rate this up. Maybe I'm the only one, but I got a chuckle. Of course, I already posted earlier.
What that exactly means, who knows?
These chips aren't upgradable, at least in any meaningful way. Some commercial players are based on DSP chips, but generally the power consumption is high, so they don't tend to run from batteries. The empeg is a good example, though I believe it uses a strongarm chip instead of a dedicated DSP. The creative nomad jukebox (still vapor) is another example, where they only get 3-4 hours from high capacity NiMH batteries.
There are an aweful lot of hardware players running from batteries that use these existing chips that only decode MP3. Perhaps the download software could convert vorbis to mp3 during the download? Of course, if a nice low-power vorbis decoder chip existed, maybe one could make a player that only used vorbis (longer play time) and convert mp3 to vorbis during the download. The use may end up using vorbis and not even know it.
Well, to avoid making a truely shameless plug (only a bit shameless?), I'll avoid posting a link.... if you really want to see it, follow the link to my site above in the user info. The player is still more or less vapor, but maybe in a couple weeks circuit boards will actually be available.
I fiddled for a few hours with glx, gart, kernel recompiles, xfree config files, and lots of different documents that all proported to explain how to set it up. I have a Matrox G400, but I only ended up getting unplayable frame rates, except at the very lowest quality setting in 640x480, which wasn't very exciting.
Now I've been using linux since a few months before the 1.0 kernel (0.99pl14 as I recall), and many years before with SunOS, HP/UX, NetBSD on various hardware. I did much more in a 3-4 hour session that anyone could reasonably be expected to do to set up their video card, and despite trying many different configurations, none produced acceptable fram rates.
Still, I'm glad I bought it and in a little way contributed to id not losing money, even if they just barely broke even. I also purchased many of the other early Loki boxes. Seeing Tux (and a little note that it won't run on windoze) on the box in the store was just awesome. I tried to play Myth2 a bit, and I never even installed H2 at all.
The novelty (of seeing Tux in the store) has worn off, so now it'll take something really cool and probably a downloadable demo to get another $50 from my wallet.
The sad truth is that not playing games that much, the 200-500 megs it takes to install a typical game is better spent on MP3 files, which tend to provide more hours of entertainment and even while I'm using the computer for real work!
It will be a cold day at the equator before L. Torvalds sets aside his ego for the sake of someone else's better ideas.
I'd flame, but it's pointless, and thousands of others are almost certainly fired up already. It's too bad there'll be immature hot-heads who'll discredit anyone rational and sensible, who could have convinced some editors at ABCnews that Fred's full of sh*t.
If you have access to the net and a real web server, I'd imagine some of your students would find CGI programming interesting. You could do the usual stuff, message boards, chat rooms, etc, or perhaps other less common things... your students probably use the web daily, and you might find a strong interest in building dynamic content like what they see on-line.
Writing your own player firmware is not easy. I bought a copy of ISO 11172-3 (the MPEG1 audio spec), and it's quite complicated. There are lots of open source players, but they all use floating point math, because it's so much easier and runs fine on any modern PC. Maybe I'll write this someday. If I do, I'll GPL it.
For now, I'm not using this EP7209 chip right now, mainly because it's in a 208 pin high density surface mount package, and one of the goals of my homebrew MP3 player project is to offer a design and components that an average electronics hobbist can build.
Of course, it'll be a challenge to make the existing decoder chips (MAS35077D and STA013) SDMI compliant, since they don't interact with the user, so they could only see the trigger and perhaps tell the microcontroller chip to prompt the user. Since these chips lack non-volatile memory (and probably always will), any player like mine that is open source will allow the user to interact with the chip however they like.
I doubt they'll manage to make these chips SDMI compliant in any meaningful way, but it's still a very scary thought... this guy's obviously in bed with the RIAA and maybe he's just speculating, or maybe he knows something?
Most MP3 players (including my homebrew design) use the MAS3507D or STA013 chips.
If these chips were to start checking for the SDMI phase 2 watermark, it could be game-over for most of the portable players. Of course, these chips are firmware upgradable, and they have no interaction with the user interface, so it's hard to see what they could do with them.
That wouldn't agree with the uniform licensing requirement that they agreed to when they submitted the codec to ISO for the MPEG standard.
They've already allowed royalty-free use for free desktop software players that are obtained by internet download, which was a smart move, as it has created demand for non-free licensed hardware decoders, and non-free encoders. The hardware decoder chips sold by Micronas and (suprise) SGS Thompson already have price committments to the manufacturers of players. Maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part, as I'm about to order a couple hundred chips for my open-source hardware-based player. (ok, that was a shameless plug, but it really is open source and the code is available on the web site right now).
As I recall, the patent was issued in 1989, so even if the RIAA could lean on Thompson, it would only last six or nine more years. The USA patent was issued in 1996, but somehow I suspect the ISO 11172-3 standard, published in 1988, could probably be considered prior art.
Come on, filtering porn should be simple. I could write "AI" that'd filter nearly all web porn just by looking for the site doing nasty tricks with javascript!
<shameless plug>
I'm in the process of setting up on-line ordering on my website right now. Most of the website is technical resources for building electronic projects using embedded processors. A recent addition, that we expect to need the on-line ordering for, is the open source MP3 player, which today is a primitive first generation design, but hopefully soon I'll have a nicely redesigned version.
</shameless plug>
Fortunately, my partner is an accountant, which has really helped. She set up a proper visa merchant account with our bank. It cost $100 up front. They take $0.65 per sale, plus approx 3%. There's a minimum $15 monthly charge, so hopefully we'll actually sell at least $500/month. The visa charges are entered using a touch-tone phone, so we didn't have to buy any equipment. They offer a terminal, for (I think) $450. With the terminal, we would get a per-sale charge of $0.07, and a little lower percentage of the sale, about 2.5% as I recall. They let you buy and add the terminal anytime you want.
It looks like there's a free software package called CCVS - Credit Card Verification System which allows your linux (or unix) box to emulate a terminal (requires a dedicated modem)... but there's a catch. It needs to be loaded with an encryption key. Redhat sells these keys for approx $1000. If anyone knows someone who can provide a key for CCVS for less, please contact me. Robin found a similar windoze based program, where they wanted a monthly charge and some percentage of the sale, on top of the percentage taken by the bank! Not cool, but I wouldn't run a windows server even if it was affordable.
Setting up the SSL stuff on the webserver is relatively easy, but you need a cert. VeriSign charges $350, so we went with Thawte, who only wanted $125 (even though they're now owned by Verisign). Again, robin did most of the work there. I generated the CSR from the server software, and she faxed them copies of our LLC papers and other business stuff. About a week later we got the cert. The cert lasts for only one year, you it looks like we have to pay $125 every year. I hope they don't jack their price up to Verisign's level!
Robin ran a test charge onto her credit card a couple days ago, and it seems to be working very nicely. The merchant appears as "PJRC.COM, LLC", which I think is much cooler than "ibill...some number".
For the on-line shopping cart, I looked at a couple of them, but they didn't have that look and feel that I want for my website, so I've been rolling my own. It's turned out to be a bit more coding than I originally thought, but still not too bad, and I'm really happy with the results. When the order is confirmed, the code just sends Robin and I an email, and makes sure the data stored in our database really matches what they filled out on the form.
I'm putting the final finishing touches on the cgi scripts right now, and hopefully it'll be on-line later tonight!
My website runs through a 128 kpbs frame relay line, so apache's sluggish pre-forking architecture is just fine. Even at full T-1 speed (which really is only about the same as a single-speed CDROM), apache is still plenty fast enough.
It could have sometime to do with those rude linux rants showing up in the jouurnalist's inbox in vast numbers, all in a short space of time.
I would guess that you can't speak for what redhat's actions would be, should this be patented, by the question nonetheless is how redhat would use such a patent and how it would balance its needs (against its competitors) vs the needs of the entire linux community.
I design products with 8 bit devices, and I've used a couple larger chips here and there. There are many important features that designers need in microcontrollers:
- LOW COST !! 50 cents less times 10k units/month is a big deal. You could task an engineer for a couple man-months to rewrite code for a 50 cent lower CPU, after an initial release. Usually using an 8 bit chip instead of a 32 bit solution saves at least $10, sometimes much more.
- Low power consumption, under 4 mA is what I generally consider low power. A few years ago I designed a product that uses 9 A, 32 kHz CPU, wakes from full shutdown at 4 Hz. Try that with a linux-capable 32 bit chip! Low power also means a low cost power supply... at 1-2 mA, a resistor and zener diode can sometimes be used!
- Multiple vendors, or at least some assurance that the components will be available in the required quantities.
- Programmable program memory on-board... with in-circuit firmware download is a plus.
- Small physical size
Often times these considerations at much more important than cpu horseposer. For example, Microchip took off about 6 years ago, offering one of the most limited feature-poor instruction sets on the market, but they did all the important things very well. Their chips were cheap, low power, small size, and they offered EPROM based chips at low prices.... but the most important thing they did was they offered flexible purchasing, made possible by selling blank EPROM based devices, at a time when Motorola had inflexible purchasing requirements for masked-rom based parts.Most projects in the embedded market just don't need a lot of CPU power. At high volumes, it's easy to pay even the most expensive engineers and programmers to re-write code to run on a cheaper chip.
I should probably disclose that I have a small website with 8051 related resources (open source), so take my words with a grain of salt, but until 32 bit microcontrollers are less expensive and use less power than their 8 bit competitors, I'd expect the bulk of the market will probably stay with the 8 bit chips.
SERVICE dot ORGANIZATION dot COM/ORG/NET/EDU
Now I know that's a bit simplified. I'm sure at least someone will replay about this, missing the point of my posting, which is that the current system doesn't make any significant use of the hierarchy that the domain name system is supposed to have.
For example, just adding one more level, along the lines of trademark types:
SERVICE dot ORGANIZATION dot ORG_TYPE dot TLD
So you'd see names like:
www.united.airline.com
www.national.semiconductor.com
www.macdonalds.restaurant.com
Maybe this will or won't ease the pressures from trademark holders... only lawyers could comment on such matters, but intuitively it seems like it might. If the new level of hierarchy clearly defines the types of businesses where trademark law allows similar marks, then it would seem a no-brainer who ought to get a particular name. I'm sure there'll still be disputes, but at least they could be made easier to resolve.
If someone sets up a new DNS system, I sure hope they seriously consider trying to restructure to use a bit more hierarchy in the namespace. Aside from (maybe) dealing with some of the conflicting trademark battles, it would probably also help reduce the load on the root nameservers.
As a practical matter, a new system should probably "seed" itself with names for all the major web sites currently on the net, for free, and of course use TLDs that are mutually exclusive from the ones used in the existing system. Some sort of scheme would be needed to work alongside the existing DNS system... I'm not sure how that could work. There are millions of links hard "coded" into html, all based on the existing DNS.