Personally I prefer to spell it "colour" but I'll force myself to spell it the American way for now. Anyway, as I was saying, color is an area that there are millions of dollars spent on investigating and researching in terms of how we live our lives. There is even such a thing as a colour psychologist who can assess your personality and behaviour based on research done by a Max Lûscher during the early 1900's.
If you want to try the test yourself you can do so at ColorQuiz.com and I can assure you it is incredibly accurate (or at least it was for me and everybody else I know who has tried it). There is more to how color is interpreted in the human brain than I think a lot of people appear to be making out. Anyway, just my 2 cents....
I'm always curious as to why people are interested in the size of the internet. As long as it works, and people think it's running nicely, does it really matter? I can't see any competitors to the internet for various institutions to be battling down, so I'm assuming that these reports are issued as nothing more than a cheap way to get some hits on reporter's website and to raise their meagre profile a little.
Linux will not be ready for the mainstream until you can hand it to a neophyte and they can succeed without having a friend or relative that is a guru that can field hundreds of questions.
It depends on what you mean by mainstream. Linux is already a mainstream server OS. If you mean the home user, I don't honestly think that Windows can be described as suitable for it. Personally I spend more time when I'm not working using the interface on my mobile phone and PDA (quite often a pen and pad of paper) than I would in front of any type of computer.
The only reason why Windows is considered mainstream is that it has the standard for products and applications - you can't get the same software for Linux that you can for Windows (watch the flames a-coming), and that's because it isn't actually as mature in terms of marketing and brand acceptance as Windows is. Your mum knows what MSFT is, but does she know what Redhat is? No, because it's not branded as mainstream, therefore won't become mainstream. Your mum would be asking you just as many questions about her new Windows machine as she would her new Linux machines, it's just you would be giving different answers.
What do you mean by "open source" anyway? Neither of these systems necessarily requires special software on the client side, so there's nothing that needs open-sourcing.
Well, where do I begin? It should be obvious that anything that is related to security, privacy or anything at all that uses crypto should be open source so that it's security can be validated in the public domain. I'm not going to start using a digital cash system that a company like MS says is alright, but won't let anybody prove it apart from their own crypto-geeks.
With regard to your other points, I think you've missed my point. E-gold is all very well and good, however it's a broker - it can fix the exchange rates however it wants. That's too powerful a position to be in as a commercial entity for it to scale up. What would you say if the World Bank suddenly decided it had to increase interest rates on 3rd world debts, because they've decided to float on the stock market and are worried about their shareholders?
I'm not even going to go into the flawed logic behind a financial system based on the value of gold - the US government tried to do it, the UK government tried to do it, and both resulted in severe depression and recession and gave up a log time ago. I hate to point this out to you, but we're not talking about Net-only stuff here - this is your real money, it's a real economy, it's real. To effectively ask you to invest in gold right now is bordering on unethical and immoral, but I'll just say that you must be a very, very, very brave person. I just hope you are only using this for a few dollars here and there.
There is also one final flaw with this plan - it hasn't been widely adopted, and is unlikely to do so anytime soon. They claim they have 10,000 accounts active, but there are potentially over 200 million people on the net that I might want to spend my money with. Go figure.:-)
Interesting idea, and the thought of paying micro payments to view/hear/whatever content has got me thinking a bit.
The first problem is that we need an open-source, reliable and secure digital cash protocol for this to work over the entire net. Mojo doesn't seem to fit this bill, because I would imagine (and I am guessing here) that it's going to be just a bunch of CGI's. I also predict that people will use them to launder credit card numbers etc. through them, but anyway....
Once we have a really good digital cash protocol that everybody accepts and starts using, we need to then work out exchange rates dynamically and properly - if the internet currency is different to real currency then the price you pay today for your content will be different to what you paid yesterday.
There is then the problem of security. Ideally we would want a peer-to-peer system whereby your client pays the site directly. The problem here is how does the site get the money back out of the net economy into his bank, and seeing as all he is actually receiving is a string of bits, what is going to stop people printing (or rather sprintf()'ing) their own money?
Because of these issues, we need to get a broker involved somewhere. The broker is going to need to take his cut, and the broker can probably also fix the exchange rates thereby controlling the value of the currency. If the broker wanted to shut out a given country, he could just fix the exchange rate of that country high, etc. That's a lot of power and one that has traditionally fallen with governments rather than companies attempting to make a profit. There may be a conflict in intrests, so maybe the way to do this is to actually get a government to do this, but then we need to ask which one? All very complicated.
It's only after those issues are addressed that we can really start talking about micropayments en masse. This particular site is cute (legally dubious), but it doesn't scale up outside onto the rest of the net. Maybe one day somebody will actually do something about this and the quality of content might even rise. I'd put more hours into my website if I though I was going to get money from it!:-)
All they need is for a minor German civil servent to visit them, declare themselves a soverign state and then offer expensive off-shore hosting. If only somebody else had thought of that before me. I wonder...
Surely this compression is taking a set of data and then working out the best way of representing that data - does this mean that wavelet compression can also be used on normal text files (after all, all video input is represented in the same 1 and 0 form)?
If that is the case, then there could be some even more interesting areas of use rather than just letting people sell their homes slightly differently. Network traffic could be lightened (if the algo is fast enough), storage requirements for data warehouses lessened, etc. All interesting stuff, and far more valuable than letting me see what my house will look like if I knock a wall down.:-) --
The hadware required on each end would be... well, it would be interesting to say the least. How do you detect and break out the seperate frequencies easily? The only way I can think of off the top of my head is some sort of high-quality digital ccd-thingy like they use in cameras to catch the light.
There is also the fact that to really use this technology to it's full and to use all available frequencies you would have to at least start by covering all visible, ultraviolet and infrared. Then you go into microwave? X-ray? Hmmm... interesting. It would certainly make it interesting to be able to lay one piece of cable and not have to think about it again for a few decades - just upgrade the kit at each end to the next generation. You can do that with fibre, but how long is fibre suitable for orders-of-magnitude upshifts in throughput requirements? A decade? Maybe two? In theory, your idea is that as long as there is always some spare ER spectrum left, you can push a bit more down... and we haven't even got into compression algos. on this yet!:-) --
This attitude always makes me smile a little. People assume that the Internet is currently anonymous and that technologies like itrace will somehow throw that anonymity away. The truth of the matter is, is that currently if you use the Internet in a normal fashion whereby you are receiving data, you are traceable. If you want anonymity then I suggest you use an anonymizer - it's what they're there for.
Also, if you had read the article fully you would have realised that not every packet you send will be traceable - only one packet in 20,000 will cause a traceback message. This means that normal activity is unlikely to cause many traceback messages, whereas a full-on DoS will get spotted easily and be traceable. This is important because if every packet caused tracebacks, then a DoS would be twice as effective (think about it).
And lastly, we come to the fact hackers might be able to spoof tracebacks to make it look like it came from you. Again, if you'd read the article you'll realise one of the technical challenges in implementing itrace is the PKI platform that will have to be built for authentication purposes, to ensure spoofing of these messages is not possible.
But most of these problems I see in the middle of the night (eastern time2 or 3 am). You have to wonder then because you KNOW they aren't getting nearly as many hits as they are getting at 11 or 12 am.
Remember that 2-3am EST is about about 7-8am GMT which is about when most of us on the west bit of Europe are doing our pre-work coffe + slashdot + theregister.co.uk, even more so when you consider we're in daylight saving time at the moment so it's actually 8-9am BST. I know, pedantic, but it's a good reason as to why it's like that - plus if you're reading it at 2am EST, then just think of all the other people out there that are as well.;-)
I don't know for sure if there is anything suspicious at Menwith Hill, but I do know that the maps for where it is show nothing but empty fields, so someone certainly feels that there is something to hide.
Have you looked at any Oradanance Survey maps of any "normal" RAF bases at all, and tried to correlate runways on the ground with runways on the map? No? Try it. It's rather difficult. Why do you think that might be? Perhaps because they might want to make it a little harder for enemies to bomb them to smithereens?
The argument that things don't appear on maps because there is something ultra-secretive there is just plain stupidity - it's not on any maps not because the governments concerned don't want people to know that it exists, but because they don't want to hand the enemy a scale drawing of where all the buildings are. To do so is just plain ridiculous. Especially in the case of Menwith Hill where there are large red-bordered road signs directing traffic to it all over the place (as RAF Menwith Hill).
As far as Mark Thomas is concerned, my comments about Duncan Campbell earlier on also apply here too - he is completely biased. He is a poor quality comedian at best and funnily enough Channel Four in the UK have commisioned a high-profile show all to himself because he's "right-on" and tackling "the system". If he didn't do this sort of stuff he would be a nobody with no show of his own.
I really wish that you guys (who are all supposed to be intelligent people) would start looking at the motives behind a person's statement rather than just accepting it at face value. Had it come across anybody's mind in this thread that Echelon is just a huge pile of baloney cooked up by the NSA to get extra funding so they can have some really great coke-fuelled paries? No? Why, because the Washington Post didn't write an article about it?:-)
I've been watching Duncan Campbell for some years. Many claim he is the person who is standing up for the common man and is bringing to our attention devastating facts about how the government is invading the human rights of the citizens and subjects they are there to serve.
I think he's a twat.
The reason for this is quite simple. If you ever got through the UK education system and do a modern History curriculum you will be taught about how it is far more important to be able to evaluate evidence on it's own merits rather than being able to spout out figures and statistics and dates. You will be taught that whenever you read an article by any individual that is supposedly fact with some opinions expressed, you must understand the biases that the writer may have, and what the motives for writing those articles are.
Duncan has made a great living out of writing this sort of stuff. People want to read it, because it confirms their darkest suspicions, allows them to fantasise about what secret agencies really do, and in general lets them slip into a sort of "James Bond"-esque world that perhaps they wish to be a part of themselves. It never crosses their minds that it's a good thing that the NSA is intercepting a load of traffic, or the fact that maybe they aren't doing it at all - they want to believe this stuff so badly, they'll read anything that confirms it.
Therefore, we come back to Duncan's motives. He makes money out of writing this stuff, and has written several books that have afforded him a very nice life indeed. He has yet to come up with one single piece of concrete irrefutible (sp?) evidence to confirm any of his claims, and yet editors lick his writing up like cream - it's good column inches.
Furthermore, if any of Duncan's claims were in any way true, seeing as he lives in the UK and is therefore subject to the Official Secrets Act, by now he would have been arrested and his writings D-noticed. You would have to find them in the darker corners of the net rather than splatterd all over the UK National dailys, ZDnet, etc. Nobody cares about this though, because it allows the agencies concerned to ask for bigger budgets from those in power who think this is all a very good thing, instills fear in those criminals who believe that their major drugs operations are being monitored (now that's cheap policing if ever I saw it), and gives Duncan piles and piles of cash. It also entertains the rather moronic tabloid minds amongst our society into believing that Really Exciting Things happen down at NSA.
It's all spin, and you're expected to believe it. If you believe it, so do the criminals, and perhaps that's the point. --
A lot of your points may be valid for South America, but I can assure you it certainly isn't the case for Europe. In fact, if the US went down, the main problems would be DNS resolution as the root servers would die, but as other people have pointed out that issue would be resolved within a few days after the admins move over to other systems. We already have one root server in Europe, so in theory we'd just about be able to handle it.
The Internet is an organic entity - people who produce maps of the internet are missing the point. It's a bit like trying to draw an accurate map of a plant as it's growing. The network is changing on a daily basis, and is shrinking and growing in different ways. If some part of the network dies (such as the US) the rest of the network will grow around it in any case. It already is, it's just that the Americans aren't looking out at the wider world and seeing it as much of us who are out here.
Coming to your point on Europe-Asia traffic -it is 'slow' to say the least, but there is connectivity there. To be honest, as to how it gets routed is probably not an issue - I can't imagine that there is actually a lot of traffic between those two regions.
You reasons for internet content being hosted in the US is also flawed - If you're in the UK/France, connecting to a website in the US is slower by an order of magnitude than connecting to on ein the UK or France (take a look at Webperf to see for yourself. The real reason why a percentage of the content is based in the US is cost - US webhosting companies are so desperate for custom that a pricewar broke out a long time ago and as a result, the pricing is a lot lower.
Interconnection within the US is also not unique to the US - the interconnection between European and especially UK ISPs is pretty top-notch as well due to the fact we have co-location facilities like Telehouse (home of LINX), Telecity, MANAP, etc. that all allow the larger ISPs to interconnect directly with each other at multiple points for relatively low costs. In my opinion, a lot of content would disappear, things would take a few days to settle down, and DNS would be b0rked for a few days if not weeks, but after that, life would go on. And anyway, how likely is it that the US is going to get shutdown anyway?
--
Re:My $0.02 from my talks with pals who work at MS
on
The Myth Of The Borg
·
· Score: 1
Bill Gates is always right
I don't think that everybody within MSFT honestly believes that to be true. I don't think Bill thinks it too be true. There are countless occasions when it's been quite clear that he's been talking out of his backside, and the company have moved around to accomodate.
I'm not sure what the average age of a Slashdot reader is, but I'm pretty certain I might be in a minority around here (even though I'm pretty young myself) in being able to remember Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob was meant to be a revolution in user interface design. The concept sucked. The user sat down and instead of a desktop, was confronted with an overblown version of Clippy the paperclip (the user could choose a dog, a parrot, etc.) that was their personal guide. There was no desktop, instead you had pictures of rooms, where the filing cabinet in the corner was where your personal files would be stored, the desk in the corner would be where you could read your mail and send it, etc. and Bill spouted on at several occasions as to how wonderful Bob was. The rest of MSFT thought it sucked. It was never seen again.
Then there was the great (original) MSN launch. Bill was quoted as saying "In a few years time, the Internet will not exist. Everybody will be using the Microsoft Network." For real. Everybody started laughing at him, and somebody within MSFT told him perhaps he should have a re-think. He turned the company around into a net-centric orientation almost overnight, and MSN is now just a piece of a jigsaw.
To say that all MSFT employees take the company line and take the attitude that Bill is always right is not only naieve, but incredibly arrogant and dismissive. The truth is that there are some employees who believe what the CEO says in every company - probably even yours. There are also the guys who secretly smoke around the back of the warehouse when they shouldn't, and are there because they like the job and the money is good. These are the people who sneak their own ideas in.
If MSFT really were a bunch of mindless drones following orders, then MSFT would have folded a long, long, long time ago. They used to be innovative, but they lost the ability to be innovative after huge growth but had the money to buy other companies so adapted. They incorporated other companies products into their own for branding purposes (consumers buy brands not products), and off they go again.
Now is it just me, or can this be considered an illegal interception of personal communications?
It appears (to me at least) that they are not using bots that can easily be booted out of channels where the participants don't wish to have their conversations recorded, but are using hacked (in the original sense) IRC servers that pull out content and analyse the conversations. Theoretically, are they not also guilty of collecting information about minors with the parent's consent, breaching copyright (You Own Your Own Words - literally), and breaking various laws in at least 3 countries I can think of off the top of my head (UK, US, Canada)?
The fact that they are making this information easily searchable is the problem (dodgy old men finding conversations between 10 year olds in seconds, along with the reasons given in the lead-in to the story), but I think they probably aren't the first people to have done this in private - I'm sure the feds in all sorts of places have this stuff rolled out in back rooms of ISPs.
... why is the US market trying to get region-free players? I can understand why in Europe, Asia, etc. there is an interest in region-free DVD players - cheap DVDs!
All of the people I have spoken to in Europe and South Africa all claim the reason they want region-free is so that they can buy cheap DVDs early from the US market. So why is the US market interested in this?
Is this just a matter of personal freedoms, or do US DVD-fans get cheap imports too from somewhere?
I think we're talking about very different models here, and I don't blame you for that as hanging around Slashdot for too long can start to make you think that Free and Not-for-Profit is the same model as Open Source.:-)
The main problem with not-for-profit organisations is one of investment capital. Something like an ISP is quite expensive to setup, and reasonably expensive to run at a reasonable level of service. However, if you run your business in such a way that at the end of the finanical year your debits and credits balance against each other, and you haven't made one single penny, what do you do when you need to upgrade your bandwidth due to an influx of customers?
So, we accept that you do actually need to run at profit, but at the end of the financial year you should have a big pot of money to give people raises, invest in infrastructure, maybe look at integrating new services and technologies into your portfolio. Funnily enough, this is exactly what commercial ISPs do as well, except they invest slightly less, thereby giving a cash surplus to give to shareholders.
In this case you have a choice - you either price yourself at the same level as the commercial ISPs and accept that you will have more money to invest in infrastrucutre (therby giving you a better level of service in theory), or you price yourself below the commercial ISPs and invest the same amount, but your customer is going to get the same service at the same price.
This differs from the Open Source model, where there is no upfront investment required other than people's time. You don't need to throw a few million at the project and then hope to re-coup that money within a given time frame, as you can throw a few resources at it and see a little progress made, which will encourage more resources hopefully (in the form of voluntary developers) and so on.
The point about this organisation in Australia appears to be that they are doing something for the community more than anything else. The bottom line doesn't matter to them as they are entering into a market nobody else will. However, once the larger commercial ISPs see that there is a market there, you can expect them to be making their way onto their territory. It's at this point that they they are going to have to work out whether they are going to invest in infrastructure more, or offer a lower priced service. Price wars with big companies are a bad thing to get into.
The most viable anonymous digital cash system I've ever seen is Mondex which had a full real-world rather than Internet-based trial in place for 5 years in Swindon, UK and now appears to be targetting a lot of UK Universities as well as running pilots elsewhere in the world.
The last I heard about the Swindon trial though, somebody had managed to hack around it and give themselves as much money as they wanted. There isn't just the issue of anonymity, but one of general security as well. It looks as though Mondex might have a bit of a future though.
Shame it's still a load of trials though. I suppose the real problem is one of getting retailers to adopt as well as customers. There is also the problem that the whole Mondex system when used in an e-commerce setting would require for every PC and/or PDA to be installed with a Smartcard reader. OK for France then (where they are more common than magstripe readers), but what about the rest of the World. (sighs).
Over in the UK there are far fewer B-2-B merchants out there than there are in the US (from what I can gather). I've been considering this one myself a fair bit recently, and came across a company called Secure Trading that I stumbled across by accident more than being obviously a dominant player. At first, I was a bit concerned about whether they were just a cowboy outfit operating out of a back bedroom, but a large investment company (uc.com) seem pretty chuffed with their performance (they own a bit of the operation). And no, I don't work for either of them.
With regards the argument concerning B-2-B and B-2-C and their futures, I think you're all forgetting one very simple fact. The world, and the Internet is a great deal bigger than the USA and/or Canada. There are still plenty of oppurtunities out there because there are some pretty immense markets out there that are in countries only just waking upto the Internet.
You can argue that the big players in the US and Europe are going to take a lead in those countries, but unfortunately the business minds of the new economy appear to be xenophobics, and so as long as you don't mind talking to people who don't speak English as their first language (and yeah, there are some out there apparently), you can still make a killing (although if you choose Russia, you may be subject to one instead unless you know the right people).
The new Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill is due to be passed in the UK soon, which means that on request (i.e. a warrant issued by the Secretary of State is produced), an ISP must be able to intercept all traffic that a particular customer sends or receives. If you haven't got such a warrant when you intercept traffic coming from or destined to a UK citizen, then you are in breach of the Interception of Communications Act, and so you shouldn't be doing any logging at all.
To be honest, I don't think the harm is in the logging - it's what is done with the logs. Disclosure to third parties is definitely illegal and unethical, but the use of this sort of data within an organisation can also be dubious. How much would your marketing department like to know about the 'real' (read 'secret') interests of all of your customers?
I say you guys have got it pretty easy in the US, but at least we're now getting clear legislation (even if it is b0rked) saying what we can and can't do over here in the UK. To easily answer this question in the UK though, does require a few hours with a copy of the Data Protection Act, the Interception of Communications Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill. Even then, you're probably wrong.
As far as we what we do is concerned (as an ISP) - we log enough for billing, and we have some machines running an IDS in promisc. mode to pick up scans, viruses, etc. going across the network. Apart from that, it's all pretty standard syslog-out-of-the-box.
Well, the killer feature for us is actually the Oracle support for database synchronization. We need automatic, reliable, and highly configurable ways to keep some tables in many large databases synchronized, over the internet. (Actually, a virtual private network.) Oracle's transaction support is nice, but not actually that important for our application.
I'm not too sure on this one, but I seem to remember seeing something in/usr/ports or perhaps on the MySQL site that attempted to keep MySQL databases on seperate machines in synch. but have never tried it, and would imagine the granularity would be pretty poor.
I agree with you on this point though - I'm currently running a site with MySQL and Zeus on FreeBSD (yes, we paid £1,000 for webserver software and it's worth every single penny), but I'm now looking at a move to Solaris 8 with Zeus and Oracle. In fact, the only free software I anticipate continuning using at the moment is Exim for my MTA.
I'll still play with GPL in my spare time and perhaps even do some developing towards producing features in the free code that I like in the commercial code (proper Zeus-like threading and no fork()'ing in Apache, distributed consistency in MySQL, etc.), but the company just needs those features right now.:-(
Another random thought just occurred to me: Would there be any use in creating a MySQL module for Apache? Or an integrated PHP/MySQL module? Perhaps for large websites using the common Apache+PHP+MySQL architecture there could be a speed improvement.
I think you need to go and check out some good books on admin'ing DBMs. Like another poster has pointed out, you shouldn't ever really run your database code on the same servers as your webservers, or indeed anything else if you want real performance.
There are lots of reasons for this, but mainly that your disk-layout and setup on a database system has to be optimized for the operations the database is going to be used for - this rarely tallies with the best config for your webserver, and you don't really want everything fighting for CPU time when you're dealing with maybe hundreds of transactiona a second.
Therefore, writing a MySQL module for Apache is a little pointless for the high-end sites, but I can understand as to why the guys who are paying their $x/month for a single hosted server in a rack somewhere and who don't have several machines would like it.
What we all *really* want is a feature-rich version of Oracle 8 (but with some functionality perhaps removed) to become free for personal and commercial use. That way we'll see MySQL and the rest all play catch-up nice and quick. Perhaps somebody wants to go and talk to the boys down at Oracle about the advantages of free software?
In the days before I joined the.com (or rahther.co.uk) startup I work for now, I used to work a biggish ISP. We originally ran about 20 OpenBSD machines, and about half a dozen Linux boxes. Before I left there was a move to push them all over to FreeBSD.
Where I am now, I have merely 2 FreeBSD dual-processor machines, but I'm going to be watching the new SMP branch of OpenBSD closely. I suppose I'll take whichever BSD has the best SMP support, and would ideally like to consider moving everything over to Alpha machines. I will always have a soft spot for OpenBSD as it was the OS that showed me Linux was pants, and proper Unix was far better. It would be a shame if there were not the resources for development for Alphas and even for SMP.
In the UK this time of year is normally the best time to try and get charitable donations due to the end of the tax year, but unfortunately we're already fully allocated on that front. If there is some loose budget after allocation next month, I'll consider putting some money towards a few of the BSD projects. To be honest, any small company that put money behind any of them is going to get a raised profile and a bit of respect from the community, so it's probably a good idea, especially as it comes at 'half price' when you take the tax write-off into account...
I can't find it now, but I seem to remember Theo having a page on OpenBSD.org that listed all the donations, along with amounts. The amounts have now been taken away, but IIRC Theo's contribtutions were a few orders of magnitude greater than everybody elses. Even when combined.:-)
I know a few rich people who are geeks. Perhaps I shall make a few phone calls.;-)
I think it's cool that BSD has managed to assimilate another platform (sic), but is the additional cost (at least here in the UK) for this sort of kit worth it? Is it worth the development effort to get the code running on a machine whose owners are likely to want MacOS anyway?
The last couple of weeks have been a bit mad, so I've averaged around 100 hours/week (yes, 15+ hours a day, 7 days a week), but I know that once this project is over, it'll kick back to a more moderate 40+ hours/week. I've got University work to worry about as well, but somehow manage to get that squeezed in somewhere. All without the use of any stimulants.:) The point is, what other industry can I work in at the age of 21 where I get paid more than my parents combined, get to play with new toys all day everyday, travel places, meet interesting people and not have to worry about being fired?
We live in a time whereby it is feasible if you work from young enough and hard enough to be able to retire at the age of 30. If that means I have to work 100 hours/week without damaging my health, I'll do it... it's not as if it's really work when you're enjoying it this much...:)
Besides out of that 100/week I'd suppose a good 5-10 of them are probably spent messing around on/. and similar...:) The only thing I do miss is time spent with family... it's a bit weird putting off going home at the weekend for dinner with mum, because you've got code to write, or servers to install to give you more time the week after...
Hang on a minute - I didn't post that article in this thread - it was posted elsewhere. Taken out of it's original context, it's implied meaning is altered.... don't blame me.
What I was originally trying to point out is that it is pointless us all arguing as to which is better. I'm a BSD advocate, and probably always will be. I've worked on big sites with Linux and it's been a nightmare. I don't know about you, but I'm getting very bored though of the whole slanging match which is counter-productive and has no benefit or effect on the real world.
So, whoever cross-posted it in here and took it out of context deserves a slap, but my words are my own, and the underlying meaning holds true - wouldn't it be better if we put time in writing code than arguing about the granularity of SMP in FreeBSD as opposed to Linux, or how Linux gets more press attention, and how Linux was written by some weird Finnish dude and our BSD wasn't, etc. etc...:)
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I prefer to spell it "colour" but I'll force myself to spell it the American way for now. Anyway, as I was saying, color is an area that there are millions of dollars spent on investigating and researching in terms of how we live our lives. There is even such a thing as a colour psychologist who can assess your personality and behaviour based on research done by a Max Lûscher during the early 1900's.
If you want to try the test yourself you can do so at ColorQuiz.com and I can assure you it is incredibly accurate (or at least it was for me and everybody else I know who has tried it). There is more to how color is interpreted in the human brain than I think a lot of people appear to be making out. Anyway, just my 2 cents....
I'm always curious as to why people are interested in the size of the internet. As long as it works, and people think it's running nicely, does it really matter? I can't see any competitors to the internet for various institutions to be battling down, so I'm assuming that these reports are issued as nothing more than a cheap way to get some hits on reporter's website and to raise their meagre profile a little.
;-)
But then, I've always been cynical like that.
Thoughts?
Linux will not be ready for the mainstream until you can hand it to a neophyte and they can succeed without having a friend or relative that is a guru that can field hundreds of questions.
It depends on what you mean by mainstream. Linux is already a mainstream server OS. If you mean the home user, I don't honestly think that Windows can be described as suitable for it. Personally I spend more time when I'm not working using the interface on my mobile phone and PDA (quite often a pen and pad of paper) than I would in front of any type of computer.
The only reason why Windows is considered mainstream is that it has the standard for products and applications - you can't get the same software for Linux that you can for Windows (watch the flames a-coming), and that's because it isn't actually as mature in terms of marketing and brand acceptance as Windows is. Your mum knows what MSFT is, but does she know what Redhat is? No, because it's not branded as mainstream, therefore won't become mainstream. Your mum would be asking you just as many questions about her new Windows machine as she would her new Linux machines, it's just you would be giving different answers.
What do you mean by "open source" anyway? Neither of these systems necessarily requires special software on the client side, so there's nothing that needs open-sourcing.
:-)
Well, where do I begin? It should be obvious that anything that is related to security, privacy or anything at all that uses crypto should be open source so that it's security can be validated in the public domain. I'm not going to start using a digital cash system that a company like MS says is alright, but won't let anybody prove it apart from their own crypto-geeks.
With regard to your other points, I think you've missed my point. E-gold is all very well and good, however it's a broker - it can fix the exchange rates however it wants. That's too powerful a position to be in as a commercial entity for it to scale up. What would you say if the World Bank suddenly decided it had to increase interest rates on 3rd world debts, because they've decided to float on the stock market and are worried about their shareholders?
I'm not even going to go into the flawed logic behind a financial system based on the value of gold - the US government tried to do it, the UK government tried to do it, and both resulted in severe depression and recession and gave up a log time ago. I hate to point this out to you, but we're not talking about Net-only stuff here - this is your real money, it's a real economy, it's real. To effectively ask you to invest in gold right now is bordering on unethical and immoral, but I'll just say that you must be a very, very, very brave person. I just hope you are only using this for a few dollars here and there.
There is also one final flaw with this plan - it hasn't been widely adopted, and is unlikely to do so anytime soon. They claim they have 10,000 accounts active, but there are potentially over 200 million people on the net that I might want to spend my money with. Go figure.
Interesting idea, and the thought of paying micro payments to view/hear/whatever content has got me thinking a bit.
:-)
The first problem is that we need an open-source, reliable and secure digital cash protocol for this to work over the entire net. Mojo doesn't seem to fit this bill, because I would imagine (and I am guessing here) that it's going to be just a bunch of CGI's. I also predict that people will use them to launder credit card numbers etc. through them, but anyway....
Once we have a really good digital cash protocol that everybody accepts and starts using, we need to then work out exchange rates dynamically and properly - if the internet currency is different to real currency then the price you pay today for your content will be different to what you paid yesterday.
There is then the problem of security. Ideally we would want a peer-to-peer system whereby your client pays the site directly. The problem here is how does the site get the money back out of the net economy into his bank, and seeing as all he is actually receiving is a string of bits, what is going to stop people printing (or rather sprintf()'ing) their own money?
Because of these issues, we need to get a broker involved somewhere. The broker is going to need to take his cut, and the broker can probably also fix the exchange rates thereby controlling the value of the currency. If the broker wanted to shut out a given country, he could just fix the exchange rate of that country high, etc. That's a lot of power and one that has traditionally fallen with governments rather than companies attempting to make a profit. There may be a conflict in intrests, so maybe the way to do this is to actually get a government to do this, but then we need to ask which one? All very complicated.
It's only after those issues are addressed that we can really start talking about micropayments en masse. This particular site is cute (legally dubious), but it doesn't scale up outside onto the rest of the net. Maybe one day somebody will actually do something about this and the quality of content might even rise. I'd put more hours into my website if I though I was going to get money from it!
All they need is for a minor German civil servent to visit them, declare themselves a soverign state and then offer expensive off-shore hosting. If only somebody else had thought of that before me. I wonder...
Surely this compression is taking a set of data and then working out the best way of representing that data - does this mean that wavelet compression can also be used on normal text files (after all, all video input is represented in the same 1 and 0 form)?
:-)
If that is the case, then there could be some even more interesting areas of use rather than just letting people sell their homes slightly differently. Network traffic could be lightened (if the algo is fast enough), storage requirements for data warehouses lessened, etc. All interesting stuff, and far more valuable than letting me see what my house will look like if I knock a wall down.
--
The hadware required on each end would be... well, it would be interesting to say the least. How do you detect and break out the seperate frequencies easily? The only way I can think of off the top of my head is some sort of high-quality digital ccd-thingy like they use in cameras to catch the light.
:-)
There is also the fact that to really use this technology to it's full and to use all available frequencies you would have to at least start by covering all visible, ultraviolet and infrared. Then you go into microwave? X-ray? Hmmm... interesting. It would certainly make it interesting to be able to lay one piece of cable and not have to think about it again for a few decades - just upgrade the kit at each end to the next generation. You can do that with fibre, but how long is fibre suitable for orders-of-magnitude upshifts in throughput requirements? A decade? Maybe two? In theory, your idea is that as long as there is always some spare ER spectrum left, you can push a bit more down... and we haven't even got into compression algos. on this yet!
--
This attitude always makes me smile a little. People assume that the Internet is currently anonymous and that technologies like itrace will somehow throw that anonymity away. The truth of the matter is, is that currently if you use the Internet in a normal fashion whereby you are receiving data, you are traceable. If you want anonymity then I suggest you use an anonymizer - it's what they're there for.
Also, if you had read the article fully you would have realised that not every packet you send will be traceable - only one packet in 20,000 will cause a traceback message. This means that normal activity is unlikely to cause many traceback messages, whereas a full-on DoS will get spotted easily and be traceable. This is important because if every packet caused tracebacks, then a DoS would be twice as effective (think about it).
And lastly, we come to the fact hackers might be able to spoof tracebacks to make it look like it came from you. Again, if you'd read the article you'll realise one of the technical challenges in implementing itrace is the PKI platform that will have to be built for authentication purposes, to ensure spoofing of these messages is not possible.
--
But most of these problems I see in the middle of the night (eastern time2 or 3 am). You have to wonder then because you KNOW they aren't getting nearly as many hits as they are getting at 11 or 12 am.
;-)
Remember that 2-3am EST is about about 7-8am GMT which is about when most of us on the west bit of Europe are doing our pre-work coffe + slashdot + theregister.co.uk, even more so when you consider we're in daylight saving time at the moment so it's actually 8-9am BST. I know, pedantic, but it's a good reason as to why it's like that - plus if you're reading it at 2am EST, then just think of all the other people out there that are as well.
--
I don't know for sure if there is anything suspicious at Menwith Hill, but I do know that the maps for where it is show nothing but empty fields, so someone certainly feels that there is something to hide.
:-)
Have you looked at any Oradanance Survey maps of any "normal" RAF bases at all, and tried to correlate runways on the ground with runways on the map? No? Try it. It's rather difficult. Why do you think that might be? Perhaps because they might want to make it a little harder for enemies to bomb them to smithereens?
The argument that things don't appear on maps because there is something ultra-secretive there is just plain stupidity - it's not on any maps not because the governments concerned don't want people to know that it exists, but because they don't want to hand the enemy a scale drawing of where all the buildings are. To do so is just plain ridiculous. Especially in the case of Menwith Hill where there are large red-bordered road signs directing traffic to it all over the place (as RAF Menwith Hill).
As far as Mark Thomas is concerned, my comments about Duncan Campbell earlier on also apply here too - he is completely biased. He is a poor quality comedian at best and funnily enough Channel Four in the UK have commisioned a high-profile show all to himself because he's "right-on" and tackling "the system". If he didn't do this sort of stuff he would be a nobody with no show of his own.
I really wish that you guys (who are all supposed to be intelligent people) would start looking at the motives behind a person's statement rather than just accepting it at face value. Had it come across anybody's mind in this thread that Echelon is just a huge pile of baloney cooked up by the NSA to get extra funding so they can have some really great coke-fuelled paries? No? Why, because the Washington Post didn't write an article about it?
--
I've been watching Duncan Campbell for some years. Many claim he is the person who is standing up for the common man and is bringing to our attention devastating facts about how the government is invading the human rights of the citizens and subjects they are there to serve.
I think he's a twat.
The reason for this is quite simple. If you ever got through the UK education system and do a modern History curriculum you will be taught about how it is far more important to be able to evaluate evidence on it's own merits rather than being able to spout out figures and statistics and dates. You will be taught that whenever you read an article by any individual that is supposedly fact with some opinions expressed, you must understand the biases that the writer may have, and what the motives for writing those articles are.
Duncan has made a great living out of writing this sort of stuff. People want to read it, because it confirms their darkest suspicions, allows them to fantasise about what secret agencies really do, and in general lets them slip into a sort of "James Bond"-esque world that perhaps they wish to be a part of themselves. It never crosses their minds that it's a good thing that the NSA is intercepting a load of traffic, or the fact that maybe they aren't doing it at all - they want to believe this stuff so badly, they'll read anything that confirms it.
Therefore, we come back to Duncan's motives. He makes money out of writing this stuff, and has written several books that have afforded him a very nice life indeed. He has yet to come up with one single piece of concrete irrefutible (sp?) evidence to confirm any of his claims, and yet editors lick his writing up like cream - it's good column inches.
Furthermore, if any of Duncan's claims were in any way true, seeing as he lives in the UK and is therefore subject to the Official Secrets Act, by now he would have been arrested and his writings D-noticed. You would have to find them in the darker corners of the net rather than splatterd all over the UK National dailys, ZDnet, etc. Nobody cares about this though, because it allows the agencies concerned to ask for bigger budgets from those in power who think this is all a very good thing, instills fear in those criminals who believe that their major drugs operations are being monitored (now that's cheap policing if ever I saw it), and gives Duncan piles and piles of cash. It also entertains the rather moronic tabloid minds amongst our society into believing that Really Exciting Things happen down at NSA.
It's all spin, and you're expected to believe it. If you believe it, so do the criminals, and perhaps that's the point.
--
A lot of your points may be valid for South America, but I can assure you it certainly isn't the case for Europe. In fact, if the US went down, the main problems would be DNS resolution as the root servers would die, but as other people have pointed out that issue would be resolved within a few days after the admins move over to other systems. We already have one root server in Europe, so in theory we'd just about be able to handle it.
The Internet is an organic entity - people who produce maps of the internet are missing the point. It's a bit like trying to draw an accurate map of a plant as it's growing. The network is changing on a daily basis, and is shrinking and growing in different ways. If some part of the network dies (such as the US) the rest of the network will grow around it in any case. It already is, it's just that the Americans aren't looking out at the wider world and seeing it as much of us who are out here.
Coming to your point on Europe-Asia traffic -it is 'slow' to say the least, but there is connectivity there. To be honest, as to how it gets routed is probably not an issue - I can't imagine that there is actually a lot of traffic between those two regions.
You reasons for internet content being hosted in the US is also flawed - If you're in the UK/France, connecting to a website in the US is slower by an order of magnitude than connecting to on ein the UK or France (take a look at Webperf to see for yourself. The real reason why a percentage of the content is based in the US is cost - US webhosting companies are so desperate for custom that a pricewar broke out a long time ago and as a result, the pricing is a lot lower.
Interconnection within the US is also not unique to the US - the interconnection between European and especially UK ISPs is pretty top-notch as well due to the fact we have co-location facilities like Telehouse (home of LINX), Telecity, MANAP, etc. that all allow the larger ISPs to interconnect directly with each other at multiple points for relatively low costs. In my opinion, a lot of content would disappear, things would take a few days to settle down, and DNS would be b0rked for a few days if not weeks, but after that, life would go on. And anyway, how likely is it that the US is going to get shutdown anyway?
--
Bill Gates is always right
I don't think that everybody within MSFT honestly believes that to be true. I don't think Bill thinks it too be true. There are countless occasions when it's been quite clear that he's been talking out of his backside, and the company have moved around to accomodate.
I'm not sure what the average age of a Slashdot reader is, but I'm pretty certain I might be in a minority around here (even though I'm pretty young myself) in being able to remember Microsoft Bob. Microsoft Bob was meant to be a revolution in user interface design. The concept sucked. The user sat down and instead of a desktop, was confronted with an overblown version of Clippy the paperclip (the user could choose a dog, a parrot, etc.) that was their personal guide. There was no desktop, instead you had pictures of rooms, where the filing cabinet in the corner was where your personal files would be stored, the desk in the corner would be where you could read your mail and send it, etc. and Bill spouted on at several occasions as to how wonderful Bob was. The rest of MSFT thought it sucked. It was never seen again.
Then there was the great (original) MSN launch. Bill was quoted as saying "In a few years time, the Internet will not exist. Everybody will be using the Microsoft Network." For real. Everybody started laughing at him, and somebody within MSFT told him perhaps he should have a re-think. He turned the company around into a net-centric orientation almost overnight, and MSN is now just a piece of a jigsaw.
To say that all MSFT employees take the company line and take the attitude that Bill is always right is not only naieve, but incredibly arrogant and dismissive. The truth is that there are some employees who believe what the CEO says in every company - probably even yours. There are also the guys who secretly smoke around the back of the warehouse when they shouldn't, and are there because they like the job and the money is good. These are the people who sneak their own ideas in.
If MSFT really were a bunch of mindless drones following orders, then MSFT would have folded a long, long, long time ago. They used to be innovative, but they lost the ability to be innovative after huge growth but had the money to buy other companies so adapted. They incorporated other companies products into their own for branding purposes (consumers buy brands not products), and off they go again.
--
Now is it just me, or can this be considered an illegal interception of personal communications?
It appears (to me at least) that they are not using bots that can easily be booted out of channels where the participants don't wish to have their conversations recorded, but are using hacked (in the original sense) IRC servers that pull out content and analyse the conversations. Theoretically, are they not also guilty of collecting information about minors with the parent's consent, breaching copyright (You Own Your Own Words - literally), and breaking various laws in at least 3 countries I can think of off the top of my head (UK, US, Canada)?
The fact that they are making this information easily searchable is the problem (dodgy old men finding conversations between 10 year olds in seconds, along with the reasons given in the lead-in to the story), but I think they probably aren't the first people to have done this in private - I'm sure the feds in all sorts of places have this stuff rolled out in back rooms of ISPs.
--
... why is the US market trying to get region-free players? I can understand why in Europe, Asia, etc. there is an interest in region-free DVD players - cheap DVDs!
:-)
All of the people I have spoken to in Europe and South Africa all claim the reason they want region-free is so that they can buy cheap DVDs early from the US market. So why is the US market interested in this?
Is this just a matter of personal freedoms, or do US DVD-fans get cheap imports too from somewhere?
Sorry, I'm just confused....
--
I think we're talking about very different models here, and I don't blame you for that as hanging around Slashdot for too long can start to make you think that Free and Not-for-Profit is the same model as Open Source. :-)
The main problem with not-for-profit organisations is one of investment capital. Something like an ISP is quite expensive to setup, and reasonably expensive to run at a reasonable level of service. However, if you run your business in such a way that at the end of the finanical year your debits and credits balance against each other, and you haven't made one single penny, what do you do when you need to upgrade your bandwidth due to an influx of customers?
So, we accept that you do actually need to run at profit, but at the end of the financial year you should have a big pot of money to give people raises, invest in infrastructure, maybe look at integrating new services and technologies into your portfolio. Funnily enough, this is exactly what commercial ISPs do as well, except they invest slightly less, thereby giving a cash surplus to give to shareholders.
In this case you have a choice - you either price yourself at the same level as the commercial ISPs and accept that you will have more money to invest in infrastrucutre (therby giving you a better level of service in theory), or you price yourself below the commercial ISPs and invest the same amount, but your customer is going to get the same service at the same price.
This differs from the Open Source model, where there is no upfront investment required other than people's time. You don't need to throw a few million at the project and then hope to re-coup that money within a given time frame, as you can throw a few resources at it and see a little progress made, which will encourage more resources hopefully (in the form of voluntary developers) and so on.
The point about this organisation in Australia appears to be that they are doing something for the community more than anything else. The bottom line doesn't matter to them as they are entering into a market nobody else will. However, once the larger commercial ISPs see that there is a market there, you can expect them to be making their way onto their territory. It's at this point that they they are going to have to work out whether they are going to invest in infrastructure more, or offer a lower priced service. Price wars with big companies are a bad thing to get into.
--
The most viable anonymous digital cash system I've ever seen is Mondex which had a full real-world rather than Internet-based trial in place for 5 years in Swindon, UK and now appears to be targetting a lot of UK Universities as well as running pilots elsewhere in the world.
The last I heard about the Swindon trial though, somebody had managed to hack around it and give themselves as much money as they wanted. There isn't just the issue of anonymity, but one of general security as well. It looks as though Mondex might have a bit of a future though.
Shame it's still a load of trials though. I suppose the real problem is one of getting retailers to adopt as well as customers. There is also the problem that the whole Mondex system when used in an e-commerce setting would require for every PC and/or PDA to be installed with a Smartcard reader. OK for France then (where they are more common than magstripe readers), but what about the rest of the World. (sighs).
--
Over in the UK there are far fewer B-2-B merchants out there than there are in the US (from what I can gather). I've been considering this one myself a fair bit recently, and came across a company called Secure Trading that I stumbled across by accident more than being obviously a dominant player. At first, I was a bit concerned about whether they were just a cowboy outfit operating out of a back bedroom, but a large investment company (uc.com) seem pretty chuffed with their performance (they own a bit of the operation). And no, I don't work for either of them.
With regards the argument concerning B-2-B and B-2-C and their futures, I think you're all forgetting one very simple fact. The world, and the Internet is a great deal bigger than the USA and/or Canada. There are still plenty of oppurtunities out there because there are some pretty immense markets out there that are in countries only just waking upto the Internet.
You can argue that the big players in the US and Europe are going to take a lead in those countries, but unfortunately the business minds of the new economy appear to be xenophobics, and so as long as you don't mind talking to people who don't speak English as their first language (and yeah, there are some out there apparently), you can still make a killing (although if you choose Russia, you may be subject to one instead unless you know the right people).
--
The new Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill is due to be passed in the UK soon, which means that on request (i.e. a warrant issued by the Secretary of State is produced), an ISP must be able to intercept all traffic that a particular customer sends or receives. If you haven't got such a warrant when you intercept traffic coming from or destined to a UK citizen, then you are in breach of the Interception of Communications Act, and so you shouldn't be doing any logging at all.
To be honest, I don't think the harm is in the logging - it's what is done with the logs. Disclosure to third parties is definitely illegal and unethical, but the use of this sort of data within an organisation can also be dubious. How much would your marketing department like to know about the 'real' (read 'secret') interests of all of your customers?
I say you guys have got it pretty easy in the US, but at least we're now getting clear legislation (even if it is b0rked) saying what we can and can't do over here in the UK. To easily answer this question in the UK though, does require a few hours with a copy of the Data Protection Act, the Interception of Communications Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill. Even then, you're probably wrong.
As far as we what we do is concerned (as an ISP) - we log enough for billing, and we have some machines running an IDS in promisc. mode to pick up scans, viruses, etc. going across the network. Apart from that, it's all pretty standard syslog-out-of-the-box.
--
Well, the killer feature for us is actually the Oracle support for database synchronization. We need automatic, reliable, and highly configurable ways to keep some tables in many large databases synchronized, over the internet. (Actually, a virtual private network.) Oracle's transaction support is nice, but not actually that important for our application.
/usr/ports or perhaps on the MySQL site that attempted to keep MySQL databases on seperate machines in synch. but have never tried it, and would imagine the granularity would be pretty poor.
:-(
I'm not too sure on this one, but I seem to remember seeing something in
I agree with you on this point though - I'm currently running a site with MySQL and Zeus on FreeBSD (yes, we paid £1,000 for webserver software and it's worth every single penny), but I'm now looking at a move to Solaris 8 with Zeus and Oracle. In fact, the only free software I anticipate continuning using at the moment is Exim for my MTA.
I'll still play with GPL in my spare time and perhaps even do some developing towards producing features in the free code that I like in the commercial code (proper Zeus-like threading and no fork()'ing in Apache, distributed consistency in MySQL, etc.), but the company just needs those features right now.
Another random thought just occurred to me: Would there be any use in creating a MySQL module for Apache? Or an integrated PHP/MySQL module? Perhaps for large websites using the common Apache+PHP+MySQL architecture there could be a speed improvement.
I think you need to go and check out some good books on admin'ing DBMs. Like another poster has pointed out, you shouldn't ever really run your database code on the same servers as your webservers, or indeed anything else if you want real performance.
There are lots of reasons for this, but mainly that your disk-layout and setup on a database system has to be optimized for the operations the database is going to be used for - this rarely tallies with the best config for your webserver, and you don't really want everything fighting for CPU time when you're dealing with maybe hundreds of transactiona a second.
Therefore, writing a MySQL module for Apache is a little pointless for the high-end sites, but I can understand as to why the guys who are paying their $x/month for a single hosted server in a rack somewhere and who don't have several machines would like it.
What we all *really* want is a feature-rich version of Oracle 8 (but with some functionality perhaps removed) to become free for personal and commercial use. That way we'll see MySQL and the rest all play catch-up nice and quick. Perhaps somebody wants to go and talk to the boys down at Oracle about the advantages of free software?
In the days before I joined the .com (or rahther .co.uk) startup I work for now, I used to work a biggish ISP. We originally ran about 20 OpenBSD machines, and about half a dozen Linux boxes. Before I left there was a move to push them all over to FreeBSD.
:-)
;-)
Where I am now, I have merely 2 FreeBSD dual-processor machines, but I'm going to be watching the new SMP branch of OpenBSD closely. I suppose I'll take whichever BSD has the best SMP support, and would ideally like to consider moving everything over to Alpha machines. I will always have a soft spot for OpenBSD as it was the OS that showed me Linux was pants, and proper Unix was far better. It would be a shame if there were not the resources for development for Alphas and even for SMP.
In the UK this time of year is normally the best time to try and get charitable donations due to the end of the tax year, but unfortunately we're already fully allocated on that front. If there is some loose budget after allocation next month, I'll consider putting some money towards a few of the BSD projects. To be honest, any small company that put money behind any of them is going to get a raised profile and a bit of respect from the community, so it's probably a good idea, especially as it comes at 'half price' when you take the tax write-off into account...
I can't find it now, but I seem to remember Theo having a page on OpenBSD.org that listed all the donations, along with amounts. The amounts have now been taken away, but IIRC Theo's contribtutions were a few orders of magnitude greater than everybody elses. Even when combined.
I know a few rich people who are geeks. Perhaps I shall make a few phone calls.
I think it's cool that BSD has managed to assimilate another platform (sic), but is the additional cost (at least here in the UK) for this sort of kit worth it? Is it worth the development effort to get the code running on a machine whose owners are likely to want MacOS anyway?
Just a thought...
The last couple of weeks have been a bit mad, so I've averaged around 100 hours/week (yes, 15+ hours a day, 7 days a week), but I know that once this project is over, it'll kick back to a more moderate 40+ hours/week. I've got University work to worry about as well, but somehow manage to get that squeezed in somewhere. All without the use of any stimulants. :) The point is, what other industry can I work in at the age of 21 where I get paid more than my parents combined, get to play with new toys all day everyday, travel places, meet interesting people and not have to worry about being fired?
:)
/. and similar... :) The only thing I do miss is time spent with family... it's a bit weird putting off going home at the weekend for dinner with mum, because you've got code to write, or servers to install to give you more time the week after...
We live in a time whereby it is feasible if you work from young enough and hard enough to be able to retire at the age of 30. If that means I have to work 100 hours/week without damaging my health, I'll do it... it's not as if it's really work when you're enjoying it this much...
Besides out of that 100/week I'd suppose a good 5-10 of them are probably spent messing around on
Hang on a minute - I didn't post that article in this thread - it was posted elsewhere. Taken out of it's original context, it's implied meaning is altered.... don't blame me.
:)
What I was originally trying to point out is that it is pointless us all arguing as to which is better. I'm a BSD advocate, and probably always will be. I've worked on big sites with Linux and it's been a nightmare. I don't know about you, but I'm getting very bored though of the whole slanging match which is counter-productive and has no benefit or effect on the real world.
So, whoever cross-posted it in here and took it out of context deserves a slap, but my words are my own, and the underlying meaning holds true - wouldn't it be better if we put time in writing code than arguing about the granularity of SMP in FreeBSD as opposed to Linux, or how Linux gets more press attention, and how Linux was written by some weird Finnish dude and our BSD wasn't, etc. etc...