I wonder whether Sony et al have actually sat down and done a cost/benefit study on the losses they make from piracy and the methods they use to try and stem the flood. If they have done (and I expect they have), I wonder if they use the ludicrous monetary values they insist on using in public ?
Seems to me that with the amount of money they spend on trying to protect their offerings, and any sane reckoning of real losses, they're flogging a dead horse...
I can see how thwarting the mass pirateers can be cost-effective, but I really don't see how DRM stuff can work well enough.If I can play it legitimately, I can record it. Sure, not digitally, but since it's going to mp3 or whatever, who cares ? The quality won't be perfect anyway!
"We don't like the fact that someone else has more influence over something we want. Let's propose a shift in power".
Frankly I think the US deserves to have the lion's share of the market. They made it so, they should reap the benefits. If anyone else wants to join the party, fine, but you don't walk into a rave and expect anyone to listen to your demands to make it a cocktail party instead!"
...given that Fedora is going to be based around Redhat 9, I suppose the (rather poor:-) timing isn't an issue.
I wonder how many others (than me) are seriously considering moving to debian now that RH9 isn't a 'hold-your-hands' upgradable system (assuming you buy RH update:-)
I think Apple are somewhere between a rock and a hard place here - they have to have an evolving sexy OS, to maintain their position in the "consciousness" (God, I sound like a marketing man!) of its' users. They also have to pay for it to be developed, and (since it's a part of their unique-selling-point) can't just open-source it. So, they've got an expensive 'cost-of-doing-business', without the resources of OS to fall back on. I don't see what else they can do but charge...
Frankly, it looks like it'll be worth it anyway. One nice (for the users) thing is that Apple will need to listen to them if the OS is a profit-centre. This might explain their "two-fingers" approach to the industry complaints over "Rip, Mix, Burn"... Apple know which side their bread is buttered:-)
Well, the satellite relay might be a good answer power gets beamed to satellite A, outside the beamwidth from the moon to the earth by a long margin, collected in a parabolic mirror, then sent the relatively short distance from the satellite to the earth.
Doesn't sound infeasible. I'd not like to be the underwriters though:-)
What happened to that proposal to add records (as comments, so the DNS protocol wasn't broken) to the DNS saying that a domain was authoratative for the envelope 'From ' header ? That sounded like a good idea, so long as the MTA's took it up...
I don't really think MS has much of a chance of changing the big boys' COBOL machines. Sure they could do it faster, cheaper, etc., but given the real need for stability in the traditional cobol marketplace, wherefore MS ?
The only place I've seen banks roll out MS apps are in non-mission-critical systems (bank-staff desktops), although WinNT does seem to run Natwest's ATM machines. I've seen a blue screen of death on them a number of times, so maybe MS aren't so fanciful an option... Damn!
Naah, overall I can see the "client" (you have no power) machines running windows, but not the central (we are the business) machines getting within retching distance of windows....
I agree with most of that. I'm not sure the memory thing is an issue at the moment though - memory is dirt cheap. Huge chips are more than 2x the cost of smaller ones, for only 1.5x the transistor count...
I dunno. Could be a shrewd move, could be a monumental screwup:-)
Interesting that if you look at the graphs, the blue line doesn't appear to do that well (mid-table stuff) but reading the text, it's currently only running at 450MHz not the specced 500MHz and with beta-level drivers.
Multiply its figures by (at least) 500/450 and they look a lot better - normally just (really just, indistinguishably so) behind the leaders...
There is such a thing as a heat gradient. If you're lying next to a radiator, the heat source is (relatively, even if you're head is touching the radiator) far away. The body is used to dealing with heat gradients, and it takes action accordingly. Vaso-constriction and dilation is not an on-off thing.On the other hand, locally boiling individual groups of cells within an area of constructive interference as the energy reflects from the skull is a very different problem for the body to cope with, all it can really do is mop up the mess and carry on as best it can.
Microwave radiation at cellphone frequencies interferes with the transmission of sodium and potassium within and without the cell (several studies). The flow of K and Na through cells is crucial to their operation (read up on the 'potassium-sodium pump').
The Hippocampus is affected by the same radiative frequencies, with some people experiencing higher (in some cases massively) excitation levels, others lower. This seems to be an individual thing, which doesn't bode well for regulatory authorities...
The cost issue of a disposable phone dictates less money will be directed towards safety features, because it simply isn't there to spend. You can't employ those expensive components that work better when the cheap ones at half the price do a 95% job, not if you're aiming to throw the thing away after use!
Note, I'm not a "tin-hat" bloke. I think the jury's out on whether they're dangerous. Sure, phones kill brain cells, but the brain renews itself just like any other tissue. Memory storage is dispersed (it's actually the pattern of pulses between cells that stores short-term memory, not a cell in its' own right, and the pattern is holographic-like - lose a little and you can reconstruct from the rest). I'm not convinced that a little extra wastage will really hurt.
On the other hand, just like with GM crops, we'll never really know until people have been born, lived, and then died with the technology commonplace. So, I'm cautious.
I wonder what the quality control will be like on a product that's designed to be thrown away. There's been several studies detailing local microwave heating in the brain (though no-one's sure if this is a serious thing, I sort of side with the cautious on this one. What if ?...)
Doing my PhD, there was a room in Biophysics with a bed in it that students went into every day and did a herman-munster-type walk out of at the end of the day... It wasn't my project but I do recall seeing them wired up and strapped down one day when the door was left open... I thought that was dodgy enough!
so perhaps it's a bit harsh to unduly criticise Dell...
... was meant to read that it would be unfair in my case to criticise Dell for a fault with an Intel NIC
I'm glad you've had good experience with IBM machines - personally I've never used them. I've used VAXen, DEC, HP snake, SGI and SUN boxes so I'm not sure why, it's just never happened. I can't see much difference in the construction between the Dell and the bigger boys is all I was saying. (until you start getting rack-size boxes. There's a level of difference between an Onyx2 and just about anything. No Dell machine I know of (though this is/., so I'm bound to be educated:-) runs off a 3-phase power feed)...
Rented systems are only not-critical if your business does not depend on them. Mine does to a fair degree. They are therefore critical to me.
I don't necessarily think there's anything systematically wrong with Intel hardware either - from your post we disagree on that too:-) but it's served its' time with me. I've been running unix (and VMS, previously) boxes for the last 15 years or so, so I have some experience in the matter too...
Not sure I agree with you on that. The engineering inside the servers reminded me very much of an SGI or SUN box, when you open it up. There's a lot of thought gone into airflow, positioning, etc. It just "looks" reliable - certainly it's a custom motherboard, not just an off-the-shelf one. I don't mind them using off-the-shelf drives/processors/ram etc;-)
I've got ~20 or so Dell rackmount boxen running websites, and only one has ever shown problems, with the gbit nic card (supplied by dell) failing after a year. This was an intel card though, so perhaps it's a bit harsh to unduly criticise Dell...
The code is there - go to 'get the db' then click on 'site tarball' to get it. At least, it should be there - I'll check!
When you say 'it doesn't work very well', what do you mean ? That there's not very much data ? Yup, it's pretty empty at the moment - it's been up for about 90 minutes [grin], and had about 67 people add a city. That's it. The countries are from the top-level domain registries, so should be pretty much ok.
I'd planned on getting it onto its' own topic, but thought I'd post when I saw the IP4 topic - I thought a gentle introduction to slashdot might be in order since the code hasn't been extensively tested (though it's not exactly complex...)
I'll have a look at the sarangworld.com site, cheers:-)
Always open to co-operation - use my email (should be in the header) to get in touch:-) I might take you up on the TSV data once I've had a look at the sarangworld data.
I thought if I could get the slashdot crowd on-side, and maybe some newspaper sites ("map the net!" etc.) we could populate it pretty quickly. It's only accurate to a/24 (but I reckon there's not going to be many/24's spread over more than one city)
Whereas this isn't really related, I've just put up a resource for geolocation of IP's to country/city. It'd be cool if some slashdotters were to type in/select their city - only takes 10 seconds:-)
The url is hostip.info. The idea is to provide a free geolocation service that you can download the DB from. All the other ones I've found are either pay-for, limited in what you can do, or only to country-resolution. At the moment, this is just to country-resolution as well, but who knows how far it'll go:-)
On win-32, Runtime.exec() is simply broken in every (sun) VM I've tried. Our most-recent (as of about a year ago) invocation uses a background thread polling for data and inserting into a StringBuffer, but it still blocks / hangs / dies when large chunks of data are sent by the executing program. If you have 40 Mbytes suddenly appear (a couple of film-frame images for example) the process will die. Guaranteed every time. Sometimes it'll die anyway on smaller files, after long periods (weeks or months) of successfully working. This is a 24x7 service... death is not an option!
Not all, but a lot of our use of JNI is to work around Runtime.exec(). It's far-and-away more reliable to embed C/C++ code which does the appropriate thing to get subprocesses to run. Under OsX or Linux it's not so bad. Under Irix, it's virtually impossible to *reliably* get Runtime.exec() to work - here we actually used to redirect the output to a file and read the file when we've finished the process. JNI is far more efficient...
We need huge reads (up to 1Gbyte at a time) and reliable operation over long time periods. Java was ideal for other reasons (cross-platform, and dynamic class loading, mainly) but turned out not to be so good for basic process control. I realise that we're stressing the system along paths that perhaps aren't so well-trodden, and you expect the system to be more fragile than usual under those circumstances, but it doesn't change the fact that it's broken.
"What do you think about writing that xmlrpc-capable application server in PHP? Is PHP up to the task or should I look elsewhere."
The only question would be performance, and you'd have to test that yourself - we use C++ on the server end, frankly because we started off with it, it works well, and we see noreason to change it:-) Most of the bottlenecks are in the datastore (DB, shared mem, whatever) rather than network or parsing anyway, so perhaps performance isn't a problem either, especially if you use Turck or Zend optimiser...
Actually implementing the server in PHP is trivial - 3 or 4 lines of code instantiating one of the public implementations, and working within the xml-rpc framework is pretty simple in PHP, just as it is in Java.
I'd say give it a whirl - can't tell you I've done it and it's all fine, but I'd certainly expect it to be good enough, modulo your throughput requirements, of course.
"If you embed Tomcat in your application server, you can simply create contexts and mount them with mod_jk."
If you embed xmlrpc_c in your application server, you can simply send xml-rpc requests from your PHP script or pages.
We do. Works great, and you get communication from java/perl/python/whatever thrown in for free.
Personally, I think its harder work to make a PHP system scale at the enterprise level than in Java - I've done both, but I've written PHP code that thousands of people use, handling vast quantities of data flowing through it (I work in the film industry where a single frame is 20Mbytes. Clips are big!) and it copes well.
Redundancy, Load balancing and insightful design all play their part. A-priori knowledge of the likely problem areas helps too:-)
I've never had to resort to writing PHP modules in C. I have had to do a lot of JNI though for CPU-intensive tasks, which is a royal pain when you have to be cross-platform. Win32, OSX, Linux and Irix, all with different C++ compilers and requirements. Yuk. Don't get me started on how [random deity]-AWFUL Java is for reliable Runtime.exec() in a cross-platform manner. With PHP it's $status = `command`;...
OTOH, Horses for courses, we do a lot of Java work as well. Generally we do cross-platform gui in Java, servers prototyped in Java and ported to C++, and web interfaces in PHP, as thin-clients to the servers. That's generally...
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder whether Sony et al have actually sat down and done a cost/benefit study on the losses they make from piracy and the methods they use to try and stem the flood. If they have done (and I expect they have), I wonder if they use the ludicrous monetary values they insist on using in public ?
Seems to me that with the amount of money they spend on trying to protect their offerings, and any sane reckoning of real losses, they're flogging a dead horse...
I can see how thwarting the mass pirateers can be cost-effective, but I really don't see how DRM stuff can work well enough.If I can play it legitimately, I can record it. Sure, not digitally, but since it's going to mp3 or whatever, who cares ? The quality won't be perfect anyway!
Simon.
So, if MS are happy to let one of their high-priority risks/competitors onto their new product, what's the reason. I somehow doubt it's good-nature :-)
They don't want to antagonise any judicial review of their current "settlement" ?
They simply don't care, figuring that the cost of preventing "those damned hackers" from (ab)using it is higher than simply selling it ?
They've accepted that Linux will not go away, and are making plans to adapt the 'embrace and extend' policy as best they can ?
Hmmm....
Simon.
"We don't like the fact that someone else has more influence over something we want. Let's propose a shift in power".
Frankly I think the US deserves to have the lion's share of the market. They made it so, they should reap the benefits. If anyone else wants to join the party, fine, but you don't walk into a rave and expect anyone to listen to your demands to make it a cocktail party instead!"
By the way, I'm not from the USA.
Simon.
...given that Fedora is going to be based around Redhat 9, I suppose the (rather poor :-) timing isn't an issue.
:-)
I wonder how many others (than me) are seriously considering moving to debian now that RH9 isn't a 'hold-your-hands' upgradable system (assuming you buy RH update
Simon.
I think Apple are somewhere between a rock and a hard place here - they have to have an evolving sexy OS, to maintain their position in the "consciousness" (God, I sound like a marketing man!) of its' users. They also have to pay for it to be developed, and (since it's a part of their unique-selling-point) can't just open-source it. So, they've got an expensive 'cost-of-doing-business', without the resources of OS to fall back on. I don't see what else they can do but charge...
:-)
Frankly, it looks like it'll be worth it anyway. One nice (for the users) thing is that Apple will need to listen to them if the OS is a profit-centre. This might explain their "two-fingers" approach to the industry complaints over "Rip, Mix, Burn"... Apple know which side their bread is buttered
Simon
Well, the satellite relay might be a good answer power gets beamed to satellite A, outside the beamwidth from the moon to the earth by a long margin, collected in a parabolic mirror, then sent the relatively short distance from the satellite to the earth.
:-)
Doesn't sound infeasible. I'd not like to be the underwriters though
Simon
What happened to that proposal to add records (as comments, so the DNS protocol wasn't broken) to the DNS saying that a domain was authoratative for the envelope 'From ' header ? That sounded like a good idea, so long as the MTA's took it up...
Simon
I don't really think MS has much of a chance of changing the big boys' COBOL machines. Sure they could do it faster, cheaper, etc., but given the real need for stability in the traditional cobol marketplace, wherefore MS ?
The only place I've seen banks roll out MS apps are in non-mission-critical systems (bank-staff desktops), although WinNT does seem to run Natwest's ATM machines. I've seen a blue screen of death on them a number of times, so maybe MS aren't so fanciful an option... Damn!
Naah, overall I can see the "client" (you have no power) machines running windows, but not the central (we are the business) machines getting within retching distance of windows....
Simon.
I agree with most of that. I'm not sure the memory thing is an issue at the moment though - memory is dirt cheap. Huge chips are more than 2x the cost of smaller ones, for only 1.5x the transistor count...
:-)
I dunno. Could be a shrewd move, could be a monumental screwup
Simon.
Interesting that if you look at the graphs, the blue line doesn't appear to do that well (mid-table stuff) but reading the text, it's currently only running at 450MHz not the specced 500MHz and with beta-level drivers.
:-)
Multiply its figures by (at least) 500/450 and they look a lot better - normally just (really just, indistinguishably so) behind the leaders...
Cheaper, huh ? About time too
Simon
Must be a slow news day, but they wouldn't take my new free-for-all geolocation project announcement, so I have no pity!
Simon
Well, it has to be better than the last film!
Simon
Well, in no particular order:
Note, I'm not a "tin-hat" bloke. I think the jury's out on whether they're dangerous. Sure, phones kill brain cells, but the brain renews itself just like any other tissue. Memory storage is dispersed (it's actually the pattern of pulses between cells that stores short-term memory, not a cell in its' own right, and the pattern is holographic-like - lose a little and you can reconstruct from the rest). I'm not convinced that a little extra wastage will really hurt.
On the other hand, just like with GM crops, we'll never really know until people have been born, lived, and then died with the technology commonplace. So, I'm cautious.
Simon.
I wonder what the quality control will be like on a product that's designed to be thrown away. There's been several studies detailing local microwave heating in the brain (though no-one's sure if this is a serious thing, I sort of side with the cautious on this one. What if ? ...)
Simon.
... well now I've got just a little bit more...
Doing my PhD, there was a room in Biophysics with a bed in it that students went into every day and did a herman-munster-type walk out of at the end of the day... It wasn't my project but I do recall seeing them wired up and strapped down one day when the door was left open... I thought that was dodgy enough!
Simon.
I'm glad you've had good experience with IBM machines - personally I've never used them. I've used VAXen, DEC, HP snake, SGI and SUN boxes so I'm not sure why, it's just never happened. I can't see much difference in the construction between the Dell and the bigger boys is all I was saying. (until you start getting rack-size boxes. There's a level of difference between an Onyx2 and just about anything. No Dell machine I know of (though this is
Rented systems are only not-critical if your business does not depend on them. Mine does to a fair degree. They are therefore critical to me.
I don't necessarily think there's anything systematically wrong with Intel hardware either - from your post we disagree on that too
Simon.
Not sure I agree with you on that. The engineering inside the servers reminded me very much of an SGI or SUN box, when you open it up. There's a lot of thought gone into airflow, positioning, etc. It just "looks" reliable - certainly it's a custom motherboard, not just an off-the-shelf one. I don't mind them using off-the-shelf drives/processors/ram etc ;-)
I've got ~20 or so Dell rackmount boxen running websites, and only one has ever shown problems, with the gbit nic card (supplied by dell) failing after a year. This was an intel card though, so perhaps it's a bit harsh to unduly criticise Dell...
Simon.
yep. I'm about to parse the tables from sarangworld.com as well :-)
Simon
Thanks for doing it though :-)
Simon
The code is there - go to 'get the db' then click on 'site tarball' to get it. At least, it should be there - I'll check!
:-)
:-) I might take you up on the TSV data once I've had a look at the sarangworld data.
/24 (but I reckon there's not going to be many /24's spread over more than one city)
When you say 'it doesn't work very well', what do you mean ? That there's not very much data ? Yup, it's pretty empty at the moment - it's been up for about 90 minutes [grin], and had about 67 people add a city. That's it. The countries are from the top-level domain registries, so should be pretty much ok.
I'd planned on getting it onto its' own topic, but thought I'd post when I saw the IP4 topic - I thought a gentle introduction to slashdot might be in order since the code hasn't been extensively tested (though it's not exactly complex...)
I'll have a look at the sarangworld.com site, cheers
Always open to co-operation - use my email (should be in the header) to get in touch
I thought if I could get the slashdot crowd on-side, and maybe some newspaper sites ("map the net!" etc.) we could populate it pretty quickly. It's only accurate to a
Simon
Whereas this isn't really related, I've just put up a resource for geolocation of IP's to country/city. It'd be cool if some slashdotters were to type in/select their city - only takes 10 seconds :-)
:-)
The url is hostip.info. The idea is to provide a free geolocation service that you can download the DB from. All the other ones I've found are either pay-for, limited in what you can do, or only to country-resolution. At the moment, this is just to country-resolution as well, but who knows how far it'll go
Simon.
... or maybe not.
Simon
I warned you [grin]
On win-32, Runtime.exec() is simply broken in every (sun) VM I've tried. Our most-recent (as of about a year ago) invocation uses a background thread polling for data and inserting into a StringBuffer, but it still blocks / hangs / dies when large chunks of data are sent by the executing program. If you have 40 Mbytes suddenly appear (a couple of film-frame images for example) the process will die. Guaranteed every time. Sometimes it'll die anyway on smaller files, after long periods (weeks or months) of successfully working. This is a 24x7 service... death is not an option!
Not all, but a lot of our use of JNI is to work around Runtime.exec(). It's far-and-away more reliable to embed C/C++ code which does the appropriate thing to get subprocesses to run. Under OsX or Linux it's not so bad. Under Irix, it's virtually impossible to *reliably* get Runtime.exec() to work - here we actually used to redirect the output to a file and read the file when we've finished the process. JNI is far more efficient...
We need huge reads (up to 1Gbyte at a time) and reliable operation over long time periods. Java was ideal for other reasons (cross-platform, and dynamic class loading, mainly) but turned out not to be so good for basic process control. I realise that we're stressing the system along paths that perhaps aren't so well-trodden, and you expect the system to be more fragile than usual under those circumstances, but it doesn't change the fact that it's broken.
Simon.
The only question would be performance, and you'd have to test that yourself - we use C++ on the server end, frankly because we started off with it, it works well, and we see noreason to change it
Actually implementing the server in PHP is trivial - 3 or 4 lines of code instantiating one of the public implementations, and working within the xml-rpc framework is pretty simple in PHP, just as it is in Java.
I'd say give it a whirl - can't tell you I've done it and it's all fine, but I'd certainly expect it to be good enough, modulo your throughput requirements, of course.
Simon.
If you embed xmlrpc_c in your application server, you can simply send xml-rpc requests from your PHP script or pages.
We do. Works great, and you get communication from java/perl/python/whatever thrown in for free.
Personally, I think its harder work to make a PHP system scale at the enterprise level than in Java - I've done both, but I've written PHP code that thousands of people use, handling vast quantities of data flowing through it (I work in the film industry where a single frame is 20Mbytes. Clips are big!) and it copes well.
Redundancy, Load balancing and insightful design all play their part. A-priori knowledge of the likely problem areas helps too
I've never had to resort to writing PHP modules in C. I have had to do a lot of JNI though for CPU-intensive tasks, which is a royal pain when you have to be cross-platform. Win32, OSX, Linux and Irix, all with different C++ compilers and requirements. Yuk. Don't get me started on how [random deity]-AWFUL Java is for reliable Runtime.exec() in a cross-platform manner. With PHP it's $status = `command`;
OTOH, Horses for courses, we do a lot of Java work as well. Generally we do cross-platform gui in Java, servers prototyped in Java and ported to C++, and web interfaces in PHP, as thin-clients to the servers. That's generally
Simon