But I think it depends on what you are using your domain for; wildcard spam is minor/rare compared to targetted spam
Wow. Could you be more wrong? As sysad for two smallish ISPs, I've been seeing serious SPAM attacks as (random string)@domain.com.
As many as 200,000 attempts in 24 hours. Repeatedly, for multiple domains. From hundreds of different sources. (We even put in a double bounce handler to identify source addresses; it was rare to see any single IP addresses attempt to deliver more than 10-20 in a 24 hour period)
While your other points are valid ones, on this one you are dead, dead wrong.
And, to the article poster, NEVER USE A WILDCARD. EVER. A bayesian filter running at 99.98% effectiveness would still not be as accurate as sending all wildcard email to/dev/null !
Does your DRM expire 80 years after you die so that it can be released into the public domain? If not, it looks like YOU are the thief. We, society, have granted you some limited protectection on your stuff so you can feed your family and have an incentive to produce, and all we ask in return is that 80 years after you die, we can use it all we want for free and add your IP to our collective knowledge for our future generations. And now, you ungrateful son of a bitch, you are not going to hold up your end of the bargian!? You are nothing but a cheat and a thief. Get off your fucking high horse, you're no better than the people infringing on your IP. In fact, you are WORSE.
Very interesting. Perhaps the most insightful post I've seen yet on why to oppose DRM.
But, here's the other side of the question...
How would you ensure that those 60+ hour work weeks get paid for?
It's easy when those hours are spent making buckets, or CDs. Want one? Buy it!
The Internet changes that, by making it so easy to copy intellectual works. In fact, the Internet is a giant, supercheap, intellectual printing press.
I can sell you a copy of work X. But if you then give out copies of X to anybody who wants them, I'm now competing with myself and somebody who's done nothing to create work X.
Nobody here should question the value of intellectual achievements, but how do you provide means by which intellectual achievers can buy buckets, if they need them?
So calling them "slaves" is not looking down on them?
I suppose you could think so. It wasn't meant that way. Being a "wage slave" is no different than a term I commonly use to describe myself. ("tech weenie") Is that because I hate myself? Is that because my job "sucks", or that I figure I'm some kind of hopeless social outcast?
No.
But people who work at a job generally don't get the experience of really owning commercial assets. It was this mindset, where "ownership" means a CD purchased, rather than "ownership" meaning having written the song or created the work for sale, or having the rights to sell something of value that brought me to use this (un-necessarily derogatory) term.
I apologize. It's been a wonderfully spirited debate!
If you're getting stressed out because of your "oh my god the entire world is out to steal all my things" attitude, it might be time for a career change. You shouldn't look down on people just because they choose a different way of earning a living.
Baugh. I should probably get back to coding more of that DRM-protected, family-paying for code, but this has been fun!
I don't look down on people for choosing a different way of earning a living.
I look down on people who (try to) steal from me. I look down on people who try to make criminality an acceptable alternative.
Look at my root post - you'll find that I predicted the long-term death of what we now call the "Music Industry". Dramatic history is being written here, as we, for the first time, really begin the switch from a scarcity based economy to one of plenty.
Re:Sorry. No way.
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TMBG on DRM
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If this kind of world of abundance (digital AND material), the only reason you could have to care if somebody copies your product design, is if you're a greedy control-freak bastard who's still in love with the structure of the old socio-economic hierarchy.
"Greedy"? "Control-freak"? Strong words.
How about just being a 30-something man trying to provide a comfortable existence for his family? Somebody who really wishes his children grow up to be engineers, scientists, or teachers?
Somebody who home-schools all 5 of those children? Would you recommend I work 60+ hour weeks to provide for the needs of others, and then not ask for reasonable remunerations?
Until your "atom-by-atom" duplicator actually exists, you are standing way too far out in left field to be part of the game.
You can wait for the atom duplicator and give away your sweat and toil, if you feel it's right.
In the meantime, I'll do what I must to live up to the expectations of my role as a caring husband and father. I'll use Open Source software wherever it makes sense, and give back to the community whenever I can, and use DRM where it makes sense to protect my assetts.
Well, I've already replied a few times in this forum, so even though I have mod points, I can't mod this one up.
Finally, somebody wish some insight! Mod parent up!
The question of "To DRM or not to DRM" comes down to this one, simple question:
How do you compensate people to encourage them to produce intellectual works?
DRM is but one of many options. It's a choice, and choice in the marketplace should not be taken away.
What we need to focus on are the broken intellectual property laws. That's Copyright (life +70 years? That's NUTS!) and Patent (I can patent Swinging on a swing sideways? That's rediculous) law.
If you break into my house and steal my CD collection, you have a CD collection and I don't. If you break into my house and copy my CD collection, you have a CD collection and so do I. You may not approve of the second case, and that's fine, but nobody can honestly claim that there is no difference between the two.
And, as I said, you are talking about there being a difference as a consumer.
But, as a content producer, they are effectively the same. In either case, something of value is being effectively taken from me.
I will happily agree that current copyright laws are restrictive and unreasonable, and need to be changed. However, it's just as unreasonably to have *no* restrictions, either. What's mine is mine, and if I let you use it under certain terms, you are obligated to those terms.
Take away those terms, and I should be able to take back what I'm sharing with you. But, you're saying that not only do you have a *right* to what I'm sharing with you, but that I should also have no access to effective means of enforcing our agreement.
All I'm saying is that DRM is a choice. I have the right to use or not use it when distributing content I create. You have the right to not buy products with DRM.
Don't like it? Don't buy it.
Disallowing DRM is disallowing choice. Would you really want that?
Sorry, but when the strength of your argument gets reduced to profanity, you've lost the argument. Tell me how it's different? In either case, you're taking away from me value that I created, worked for, and now no longer have.
It may be different for you, the consumer, but it's not at all different for me, the producer/owner of the wealth.
Oh, and BTW, the "create a login" page at http://host.effortlessis.com/createlog.php appears broken (404). Can you fix it? Thanks.
Thanks for pointing that out. That business is being shut down, so don't worry about it...
Re:Sorry. No way.
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TMBG on DRM
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I personally wouldn't have a problem with someone coming into my house and copying everything in it.
Let me guess... You are either a kid, or a wage slave. You *might* be in college. You've never produced your own intellectual property, and you've certainly never tried to make a living at it.
I have, and I do. I'm a big advocate for Open Source software. I use Linux. I give away lots of source code and documentation entries, mostly in the area of PHP programming. I'm a heavy user of php-gtk and love the community.
I also make my living writing software. Much of what I write I'll never give away without a price tag attached.
Distributing some of my software with DRM enabled allows me to *afford* my other contributions to the community. It pays my bills, provides food for myself and my 5 children, and lets me live comfortably.
Would you *really* want to take that away? Would you *really* want to take away my ability to help the hundreds of teachers in California that my software assists?
DRM technology is available, and I should have the right to use it. You certainly have the right to not buy it.
But, if you were to, in some way, crack my certificate-protected software and distribute it, I'd most definitely have a problem with that.
Sorry. No way.
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TMBG on DRM
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· Score: 4, Insightful
When are record companies going to realize that DRM isn't going to help them sell more of the bad music that dominates the airwaves?"
When are you going to realize that complaining about the quality of the music you then download only makes it sound like you are trying to justify criminal activity?
DRM isn't bad. If a vendor produces DRM products and you have a problem with that, don't buy them. It's just another option available to content producers and distributors. It has value, and it has its place.
But, to then bypass DRM and download it is criminal activity. DRM is a lock to the content. It's illegal to pick locks on people's houses, but I don't see anybody here advocating picking houses in order to steal THEIR contents, why is music any different?
I say let them use DRM to their heart's content. Let them put in all kinds of nasty, horribly restrictive DRM in everything they sell. It will only accellerate their decline, though it might prop up their profits a little while longer.
The inevitable trend for music is away from wealthy, centralized music and towards a much smaller, decentralized, community supported scheme, where the indie bands have much more a chance of breaking even, and hardly anybody really "makes it big" anymore.
Just as with software, the Internet is re-writing the rules of the marketplace. Just as Open Source software marches to the drum of inevitability in the marketplace, so do unrestrictive music distribution models.
It's been a *long* time since the expense of recording quality music was beyond what could be achieved with some thrift-store mattresses, a garage, and a computer with a $200 sound card.
In other words, in 1955, quality, good-sounding recording equipment was very expensive. Today, it's less than a thousand dollars.
In 1985, it was very expensive to distribute music in bulk. Now, a commercially hosted website can get you going for $15.95 per month.
That's the marketplace of today. That's what's going to do these guys under. Not DRM. Not "crappy music". (that people download and listen to anyway)
If there's an area with legitimate concern about intellectual property, it's with copyright law and patent law. Sorry, but copyright law is no longer in alignment with its original purpose of promoting the development of literature and the arts. Neither is patent law, in its current incarnation, truly a socially healthy way to encourage invention and creativity.
Work to change the real evils, and quit whining about people who try to prevent you from stealing.
You can't worry about your software working for that long until your hardware can last that long.
Bzzzzzzt! I call Bullshit...
The C programming language has been with us 30 years. Most of the non machine-specific coding from 30 years ago would work today with almost no modification on today's Ghz PCs.
I develop large, powerful applications in PHP that will work well on a Linux, Solaris, Irix, Windows, or AIX system, with virtually no porting whatsoever. Furthermore, the software itself is the executable - it's human readable in its production form!
And aren't Java applications run in a sandbox Virtual Machine?
As I've developed increasinly powerful and complex Internet applications, I've discovered that the key to reliability is to develop applications where the individual computer really doesn't matter - "It's the software, stupid!"
Utilizing standards based, open languages and protocols (PHP, PostgreSQL, Linux, TCP, HTTP, etc) means that my applications will work today, tomorrow, and for many years to come on whatever hardware.
Linux/OSS software is poised to take the seat of this critical software infrastructure, away from Microsoft who, having this position, have abused the power it brought them.
So, I use open source software, open protocols and strategies where it makes sense, and relax knowing that the stuff I write the *nix/POSIX standards will be quite accessable and usable in the future.
I sure hope the RIAA doesn't look in Bittorrent's direction. There are a LOT of good legal uses for it. Moreso (in my mind) than KaZaA.
Which is precisely why BT stands to legitimize open-structure p2p networks forever.
Napster really had no legitimate use. I mean, did you *ever* download a song from Napster that wasn't a bootleg? Neither did anybody else.
Kazaa also has very limited legitimate use. Other than renaming an encrypted tar file "Wild Donkeys do hot chicks.mpg" and using it as a backup vehicle, its use as a bona-fide legal distribution channel is pretty limited.
However, BT is different. There are plenty of BT users distributing bootleg movies, songs, and pr0n, but there are also plenty of sites using it to distribute legitimate demos, patches, ISO images, and other large files.
To think that BT allows somebody on a T1 to serve near an OC3 worth of bandwidth by distributing the load is just incredible. I don't think the industry would be willing to give up that advantage without a fight.
A Dvorak keyboard. No, a touch pad with character regonition. A Twidler chording keyboard. Speech recognition. I hand wrote it in Mandarin and my friend typed it in for me. It wasn't a friend, it was my scanner using OCR. Does it matter? Can you tell the difference?
But what are you actually using? Be honest, now - don't let your ego get in the way.
I'm only saying that you don't throw out infrastructure without a damn good reason and some forethought. Some guy who calls himself "visionary" (whatever his credentials) wanting to is not good enough reason. It's generally much more productive to tweak what's already there to not lose that embedded wisdom.
Also note: you just agreed with me, you just called it "scientific rigour".
I've written daemons with PHP. It's clean, simple, and powerful. My best is a large, 50,000+ line application in it. Write a clean codebase with consistent error-handling, and it's a breeze.
It's downright fun to take the contents of a file, turn it into an array with a single line, loop thru it with 1 more line, do a few if statements, and process a 500 MB file in 5 minutes flat.
I *love* replacing a large, complex mini-applet with 12 lines of PHP code - I've done it time and time again.
And, to write in it all day long?! Pure heaven.
I'll be watching PHP5 - I've not deployed it anywhere, and probably won't even start until PHP-GTK 2 (with PHP5, GTK2.X) is out.
And why? The QWERTY is "good enough", so we invest our resources elsewhere.
if you happen to write in an roman alphabet. Perhaps the other two-thirds of the world that use pictographic or script based character sets might disagree about "good enough".
Small, green aliens probably don't use QWERTY keyboards, either. The embedded wisdom of the QWERTY keyboard doesn't apply to them, either.
But... what did YOU use?
Um, it wasn't until the 1950's...
But, even then, what percentage of transportation was automobile-based vs rail? AFAIK it was, even in 1950, a minority of the total transportation infrastructure.
It's odd to say computers are evolving while saying you don't change critical infrastructure. Perhaps I should give up my net-connected cheap-and-powerful PC and wait for a turn on the mainframe.
Thanks. You just made my point, but I don't think you quite realized what it was...
Computer technology *is* evolving incredibly rapidly compared to biological evolution (a point you affirm here by your reference to mainframes) but that evolution is still not instantaneous.
The IRS uses a computer system developed (AFAIK) in the 1960s. It's so old the source code is long gone and they've tried repeatedly to modernise it to no avail.
Critical infrastructure is only replaced when it's necessary - and often is used far longer than originally intended.
Witness the X86 architecture. Put simply, it sucks. Not enough registers, crummy instruction set, truly retarded offset memory addressing, segmented memory model, costly and difficult scalability, the list of problems warrants its own encyclopedia set.
But this crummy architecture constitutes "critical infrastructure" today. Many billions of man-hours have been invested in making this substandard architecture work, and work well. Like the QWERTY keyboard, the antiquated lizard brain, or the IRS's mainframe, it's good enough, and contains much embedded experience. When given the choice between scrapping X86 for something "better", or sticking with it, warts and all, (AMD64 vs Itanium) the marketplace chose AMD64.
There's simply too much embedded wisdom (as, software, hardware, compilers, etc) accessible via the otherwise inferior X86 architecture.
And, even the X86 architecture borrows heavily from that "time shared" mainframe, such as Virtual Memory, task and context switching, the tree-based filesystem structure. Heck, if you (like me) are using some form of *nix, that mainframe you talk loathingly about waiting for is sitting right in front of you!
So, let me guess... is your "cheap-and-powerful PC" running some variant of the 20-year-old X86 architecture?
I thought so... as I said, you don't throw away critical infrastructure!
Our desktops still are essentially the same as the 1984 Macintosh. PDAs still haven't caught up with the Newton. Computers are still dumb.
Computer technology is evolving. Quickly.
Biological evolution took billions of years to get to today. Have you ever read up on Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar? If you were to compress the known history of the universe into a single calendar year, all of written human history would comprise the last 15 seconds on December 31!
Whether you're talking about technology or biology, you can't evolve anything too quickly, or you throw out all the accumulated wisdom in the current design. That's why birth defects and substantial changes in genetics are rare - evolve too quickly and the mortality rate climbs towards insolvency.
The QWERTY keyboard is with us, perhaps for centuries to come, even though there are "better" alternatives. But these "better" alternatives cost alot more TODAY to develop and implement than continuing with the QWERTY. So if you "know how to type", you're using a QWERTY.
To change to another keyboard, you have to throw out all the accumulated wisdom associated with QWERTY keyboards - all the trained office workers, all the existing equipment in place right now, the typing tutor software, the toys, cell phones, PDAs, etc.
And why? The QWERTY is "good enough", so we invest our resources elsewhere.
Here's another example: Joel on Software - Things You Should Never Do. In this work, Joel claims that re-writing your nest egg software is the kiss of death for a software company, for the simple fact that in even a cruddy, poorly cobbled software, there's often many man-years of embedded wisdom in there - bugs fixed, design issues resolved, special cases handled, etc.
You simply can't rebuild anything significant from scratch without tremendous cost. That's why our very sophisticated human cerebral brains are built upon the much simpler mammalian brain, which is in turn built upon the very simple lizard brain inside our heads. It's very literally three concentric sections of brain, with the lizard brain in the middle, the mamallian brain wrapped around that, and the cerebral cortex packed on around the outside!
The biological cost of rebuilding our brains to factor out the now much-antiquated lizard brain functions is simply too high to be viable, so it's never happened, and the lizard brain is simply "infrastructure" for higher development.
Look at the history of cities. You'll see the exact same pattern there... Example? Los Angeles has spent 75 years developing around the automobile, and their recent construction of subways have been extremely expensive (300 MILLION DOLLARS PER MILE) and the residual effects of the subway on local business has driven many to bankruptcy.
It's been very costly, very slow, and cost overruns are the norm.
So, when I hear somebody talk about making major changes to existing infrastructure, it's hard for me NOT to dismiss them, no matter their credentials. You simply *don't* change critical infrastructure of any kind without serious review and contemplation, and even then, you have to assume that it'd be 10x as costly and painful as you can imagine.
I'm inclined to think that having a request suddenly run 1000 times faster might be due to something a DBA has done, rather than a change of OS.
Yeah. My call would be that they were operating an RAM-starved server. I've seen similar numbers doing basic PC upgrades!
I remember on case (this was a few years ago) where somebody with a customer information database of about 400,000 records came to me because generating a list from a query would often take several minutes.
They were using a Pentium-90 with 32 MB of RAM. I set them up with a (then) top-of-the-line PIII 600 with 256 MB RAM. Query time dropped to 1 second.
No matter what O/S you run, you're going to get JACK for performance if your running your app in swap.
The life as an engineer was (excuse me) pathetic. Why should I spend all my life chained to a desk, living in a cube farm, and putting up with the Boss from Hell who figured he owned me as so much chattel property? Life is much better now.
So tell me again why I would even talk any teenager into becoming an engineer? They would be fools to do so.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. I work as a software engineer. I create workflow management solutions for medium size (~200 staff) organizations, frequently with multiple job locations.
I love what I do! I work as Softare Architect, Programmer, salesman, and Business Workflow Analyst, all in one job. No day is like any other. I create works of smooth engineering that my clients rave about, and I get paid nicely to create them.
My kids are being trained to be engineers. They are taught that engineers create the wealth of society, and that Science is the process by which understanding occurs.
And, they'd better be in charge of determining where that wealth goes. This world need problem solvers - there are no shortage of problems. Solve the problems, and wealth is yours. Look for a "job" and you might as well resign and be a wage slave.
It's not about the PHD - it's about the problems you solve, and making sure you get paid for solving them.
I had the experience of working on a Digital Vax 11/750 back "in the day" at an organization of about 200 staff.
It was huge. It was the size of several washing machines side by side, it its own room, with its own separate air conditioner.
It had 4 MB *yes, MB* of RAM, and served data to about 50 workstations. (Green on black, Wyze terminals, as I recall)
This sucker had a GB of Disk Space. It's RAM was accessible via these dinner-plate sized memory 'cards' that slid into the monster case.
You could swap RAM without powering down the system. You ran a command to remap everything out of that card, and when the command was done, you pulled the card out.
It would identify bad RAM on the fly and then map around those bad spots, while writing to a log file for the sysadmin. It wouldn't skip a beat when this happened, either.
The Digital VAX was a true machine - one that, despite its refridgerator size and ~ X86 286 clas processing power, was to the 386 computers common at the time that I was there much like a VW Microbus is to an 18-wheeler Semi.
The Air Conditioner failed, one time. Eventually, the computer room got too hot and the system crashed. But, when it did so, it remapped all the memory to disk.
When we brought the disk back up, (after getting the A/C fixed by an HVAC) all the processes running at the time of crash came back up! We had to manually kill them!
I heard about the story of its delivery. It was actually fell out of the back of the truck on the open highway at about 60 MPH. The agent took it back to the shop, put a new panel on the side, threw it back on the truck, (raising the tailgate this time) and delivered it about 2 hours late. It ran fine when they hooked it up!
It's simply a degree of engineering lost to today's Windows and *nix raised lusers.
I will always respect that VAX. It was a machine for and from a different era of computing.
Industry provides wealth that can be used to do things like fight crime, procure clean drinking water, and feed everybody.
Nowadays, Industry doesn't mean the large, smoke-belching factories of yesteryear. As many people in India, Malay, and elsewhere have found, computers provide a job that, once online, can go pretty much anywhere.
I'm a freelance programmer and sysadmin. I grab my Linux laptop, and anywhere I can get a DHCP/Wifi/Modem/Cellular Internet connection, (pretty much *anywhere*) I can work. I've plenty of times put in a good, full work day at the hotel via Wifi/LAN broadband.
So, don't knock these efforts - this could easily mean bread money for these areas for years to come!
I think there's a compelling marketplace in providing integration services with a major Linux distro.
For YEARS, Linux has had good and proper dependency checking and network-based installs. (EG: Apt-get, up2date, yum) But, when I go to install America's Army, I end up with this weird binary thingamajig installer that's 100% in-house, and unique to that package.
Thus, to get everything working properly, I spend another 2 hours hunting down weird error messages with google, before I can get it working right.
And then, when an upgrade happens, I get to do it all over again. (sigh)
But, what if something like the Dag repository were to come up with something that allows a commercial or 3rd party vendor to:
1) issue a certificate for an install of software to a user,
2) easily download/install the software via Yum,
3) handle dependencies so the install is always smooth and quick.
Here's how I picture this might work: (I'll use yum in examples, any of the network-based installers would be fine)
A) I set up yum with this commercial repository by copy/pasting a few lines into/etc/yum.conf.
B) I buy XYZ product for Linux. I can choose to download a binary installer, or I can simply download a certificate.
C) If I choose the certificate, then I would issue "yum install packagename".
D) Part of the install process would ask me for the certificate to verify that I do, indeed have rights to install the package on this particular machine.
I think there's a tremendous business model here! I know I would almost KILL to have some packages install this way, and having this kind of service would be a boon to Linux adoption and deployment.
Now, I drive the extra 30 minutes to go to Fry's where no one bugs me until I ask a question.
One of the things that comes from living in a small town is that I don't waste time on the freeway. Here in beautiful Chico, CA we have Circuit City, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, Office Depot, Office Max, and WinCo all within about a mile of each other.
I would *never* drive another 30 minutes to get a few DVDs or a sound card!
The nearest Fry's is about 80 miles from my house, and I've been there twice - both times while visiting Sacramento for other reasons.
It amazes me how much time people waste on the freeways - I've heard that in many areas, a 1.5 hour commute is TYPICAL!
Geez. Armed with Internet Access and my Linux Laptop, I can work just about anywhere with squat for a commute. Almost makes me feel guilty just for having it so good....
Slashdot Mirror
But I think it depends on what you are using your domain for; wildcard spam is minor/rare compared to targetted spam
/dev/null !
Wow. Could you be more wrong? As sysad for two smallish ISPs, I've been seeing serious SPAM attacks as (random string)@domain.com.
As many as 200,000 attempts in 24 hours. Repeatedly, for multiple domains. From hundreds of different sources. (We even put in a double bounce handler to identify source addresses; it was rare to see any single IP addresses attempt to deliver more than 10-20 in a 24 hour period)
While your other points are valid ones, on this one you are dead, dead wrong.
And, to the article poster, NEVER USE A WILDCARD. EVER. A bayesian filter running at 99.98% effectiveness would still not be as accurate as sending all wildcard email to
Does your DRM expire 80 years after you die so that it can be released into the public domain? If not, it looks like YOU are the thief. We, society, have granted you some limited protectection on your stuff so you can feed your family and have an incentive to produce, and all we ask in return is that 80 years after you die, we can use it all we want for free and add your IP to our collective knowledge for our future generations. And now, you ungrateful son of a bitch, you are not going to hold up your end of the bargian!? You are nothing but a cheat and a thief. Get off your fucking high horse, you're no better than the people infringing on your IP. In fact, you are WORSE.
Very interesting. Perhaps the most insightful post I've seen yet on why to oppose DRM.
But, here's the other side of the question...
How would you ensure that those 60+ hour work weeks get paid for?
It's easy when those hours are spent making buckets, or CDs. Want one? Buy it!
The Internet changes that, by making it so easy to copy intellectual works. In fact, the Internet is a giant, supercheap, intellectual printing press.
I can sell you a copy of work X. But if you then give out copies of X to anybody who wants them, I'm now competing with myself and somebody who's done nothing to create work X.
Nobody here should question the value of intellectual achievements, but how do you provide means by which intellectual achievers can buy buckets, if they need them?
So calling them "slaves" is not looking down on them?
I suppose you could think so. It wasn't meant that way. Being a "wage slave" is no different than a term I commonly use to describe myself. ("tech weenie") Is that because I hate myself? Is that because my job "sucks", or that I figure I'm some kind of hopeless social outcast?
No.
But people who work at a job generally don't get the experience of really owning commercial assets. It was this mindset, where "ownership" means a CD purchased, rather than "ownership" meaning having written the song or created the work for sale, or having the rights to sell something of value that brought me to use this (un-necessarily derogatory) term.
I apologize. It's been a wonderfully spirited debate!
If you're getting stressed out because of your "oh my god the entire world is out to steal all my things" attitude, it might be time for a career change. You shouldn't look down on people just because they choose a different way of earning a living.
Baugh. I should probably get back to coding more of that DRM-protected, family-paying for code, but this has been fun!
I don't look down on people for choosing a different way of earning a living.
I look down on people who (try to) steal from me. I look down on people who try to make criminality an acceptable alternative.
Look at my root post - you'll find that I predicted the long-term death of what we now call the "Music Industry". Dramatic history is being written here, as we, for the first time, really begin the switch from a scarcity based economy to one of plenty.
If this kind of world of abundance (digital AND material), the only reason you could have to care if somebody copies your product design, is if you're a greedy control-freak bastard who's still in love with the structure of the old socio-economic hierarchy.
"Greedy"? "Control-freak"? Strong words.
How about just being a 30-something man trying to provide a comfortable existence for his family? Somebody who really wishes his children grow up to be engineers, scientists, or teachers?
Somebody who home-schools all 5 of those children? Would you recommend I work 60+ hour weeks to provide for the needs of others, and then not ask for reasonable remunerations?
Until your "atom-by-atom" duplicator actually exists, you are standing way too far out in left field to be part of the game.
You can wait for the atom duplicator and give away your sweat and toil, if you feel it's right.
In the meantime, I'll do what I must to live up to the expectations of my role as a caring husband and father. I'll use Open Source software wherever it makes sense, and give back to the community whenever I can, and use DRM where it makes sense to protect my assetts.
Well, I've already replied a few times in this forum, so even though I have mod points, I can't mod this one up.
Finally, somebody wish some insight! Mod parent up!
The question of "To DRM or not to DRM" comes down to this one, simple question:
How do you compensate people to encourage them to produce intellectual works?
DRM is but one of many options. It's a choice, and choice in the marketplace should not be taken away.
What we need to focus on are the broken intellectual property laws. That's Copyright (life +70 years? That's NUTS!) and Patent (I can patent Swinging on a swing sideways? That's rediculous) law.
If you break into my house and steal my CD collection, you have a CD collection and I don't. If you break into my house and copy my CD collection, you have a CD collection and so do I. You may not approve of the second case, and that's fine, but nobody can honestly claim that there is no difference between the two.
And, as I said, you are talking about there being a difference as a consumer.
But, as a content producer, they are effectively the same. In either case, something of value is being effectively taken from me.
I will happily agree that current copyright laws are restrictive and unreasonable, and need to be changed. However, it's just as unreasonably to have *no* restrictions, either. What's mine is mine, and if I let you use it under certain terms, you are obligated to those terms.
Take away those terms, and I should be able to take back what I'm sharing with you. But, you're saying that not only do you have a *right* to what I'm sharing with you, but that I should also have no access to effective means of enforcing our agreement.
All I'm saying is that DRM is a choice. I have the right to use or not use it when distributing content I create. You have the right to not buy products with DRM.
Don't like it? Don't buy it.
Disallowing DRM is disallowing choice. Would you really want that?
why is music any different?
You're a fucking idiot.
Sorry, but when the strength of your argument gets reduced to profanity, you've lost the argument. Tell me how it's different? In either case, you're taking away from me value that I created, worked for, and now no longer have.
It may be different for you, the consumer, but it's not at all different for me, the producer/owner of the wealth.
Oh, and BTW, the "create a login" page at http://host.effortlessis.com/createlog.php appears broken (404). Can you fix it? Thanks.
Thanks for pointing that out. That business is being shut down, so don't worry about it...
I personally wouldn't have a problem with someone coming into my house and copying everything in it.
Let me guess... You are either a kid, or a wage slave. You *might* be in college. You've never produced your own intellectual property, and you've certainly never tried to make a living at it.
I have, and I do. I'm a big advocate for Open Source software. I use Linux. I give away lots of source code and documentation entries, mostly in the area of PHP programming. I'm a heavy user of php-gtk and love the community.
I also make my living writing software. Much of what I write I'll never give away without a price tag attached.
Distributing some of my software with DRM enabled allows me to *afford* my other contributions to the community. It pays my bills, provides food for myself and my 5 children, and lets me live comfortably.
Would you *really* want to take that away? Would you *really* want to take away my ability to help the hundreds of teachers in California that my software assists?
DRM technology is available, and I should have the right to use it. You certainly have the right to not buy it.
But, if you were to, in some way, crack my certificate-protected software and distribute it, I'd most definitely have a problem with that.
When are record companies going to realize that DRM isn't going to help them sell more of the bad music that dominates the airwaves?"
When are you going to realize that complaining about the quality of the music you then download only makes it sound like you are trying to justify criminal activity?
DRM isn't bad. If a vendor produces DRM products and you have a problem with that, don't buy them. It's just another option available to content producers and distributors. It has value, and it has its place.
But, to then bypass DRM and download it is criminal activity. DRM is a lock to the content. It's illegal to pick locks on people's houses, but I don't see anybody here advocating picking houses in order to steal THEIR contents, why is music any different?
I say let them use DRM to their heart's content. Let them put in all kinds of nasty, horribly restrictive DRM in everything they sell. It will only accellerate their decline, though it might prop up their profits a little while longer.
The inevitable trend for music is away from wealthy, centralized music and towards a much smaller, decentralized, community supported scheme, where the indie bands have much more a chance of breaking even, and hardly anybody really "makes it big" anymore.
Just as with software, the Internet is re-writing the rules of the marketplace. Just as Open Source software marches to the drum of inevitability in the marketplace, so do unrestrictive music distribution models.
It's been a *long* time since the expense of recording quality music was beyond what could be achieved with some thrift-store mattresses, a garage, and a computer with a $200 sound card.
In other words, in 1955, quality, good-sounding recording equipment was very expensive. Today, it's less than a thousand dollars.
In 1985, it was very expensive to distribute music in bulk. Now, a commercially hosted website can get you going for $15.95 per month.
That's the marketplace of today. That's what's going to do these guys under. Not DRM. Not "crappy music". (that people download and listen to anyway)
If there's an area with legitimate concern about intellectual property, it's with copyright law and patent law. Sorry, but copyright law is no longer in alignment with its original purpose of promoting the development of literature and the arts. Neither is patent law, in its current incarnation, truly a socially healthy way to encourage invention and creativity.
Work to change the real evils, and quit whining about people who try to prevent you from stealing.
You can't worry about your software working for that long until your hardware can last that long.
Bzzzzzzt! I call Bullshit...
The C programming language has been with us 30 years. Most of the non machine-specific coding from 30 years ago would work today with almost no modification on today's Ghz PCs.
I develop large, powerful applications in PHP that will work well on a Linux, Solaris, Irix, Windows, or AIX system, with virtually no porting whatsoever. Furthermore, the software itself is the executable - it's human readable in its production form!
And aren't Java applications run in a sandbox Virtual Machine?
As I've developed increasinly powerful and complex Internet applications, I've discovered that the key to reliability is to develop applications where the individual computer really doesn't matter - "It's the software, stupid!"
Utilizing standards based, open languages and protocols (PHP, PostgreSQL, Linux, TCP, HTTP, etc) means that my applications will work today, tomorrow, and for many years to come on whatever hardware.
Linux/OSS software is poised to take the seat of this critical software infrastructure, away from Microsoft who, having this position, have abused the power it brought them.
So, I use open source software, open protocols and strategies where it makes sense, and relax knowing that the stuff I write the *nix/POSIX standards will be quite accessable and usable in the future.
-Ben
I sure hope the RIAA doesn't look in Bittorrent's direction. There are a LOT of good legal uses for it. Moreso (in my mind) than KaZaA.
Which is precisely why BT stands to legitimize open-structure p2p networks forever.
Napster really had no legitimate use. I mean, did you *ever* download a song from Napster that wasn't a bootleg? Neither did anybody else.
Kazaa also has very limited legitimate use. Other than renaming an encrypted tar file "Wild Donkeys do hot chicks.mpg" and using it as a backup vehicle, its use as a bona-fide legal distribution channel is pretty limited.
However, BT is different. There are plenty of BT users distributing bootleg movies, songs, and pr0n, but there are also plenty of sites using it to distribute legitimate demos, patches, ISO images, and other large files.
To think that BT allows somebody on a T1 to serve near an OC3 worth of bandwidth by distributing the load is just incredible. I don't think the industry would be willing to give up that advantage without a fight.
A Dvorak keyboard. No, a touch pad with character regonition. A Twidler chording keyboard. Speech recognition. I hand wrote it in Mandarin and my friend typed it in for me. It wasn't a friend, it was my scanner using OCR. Does it matter? Can you tell the difference?
But what are you actually using? Be honest, now - don't let your ego get in the way.
I'm only saying that you don't throw out infrastructure without a damn good reason and some forethought. Some guy who calls himself "visionary" (whatever his credentials) wanting to is not good enough reason. It's generally much more productive to tweak what's already there to not lose that embedded wisdom.
Also note: you just agreed with me, you just called it "scientific rigour".
Anybody know what the HW reqs are for it?
I've heard they'll be significant... am I going to have to upgrade my 1 y.o. computer to play it?
ASP includes database connection pooling, something that costs many thousands of dollars on Unix
.
Oh yeah? Or, perhaps you meant this one?
Perhaps you forgot to mention persistent, shared memory objects, which ASP cannot do, but PHP CAN? Get a clue, dude.
PHP is aweseome. It's powerful, reasonably fast, allows for incredibly rapid development, lets you get alot done FAST, and it's free.
What's to argue with? I use PHP for
1) client application development with PHP-GTK
2) Exensive server based development a la LAMP
3) Shell/other scripting with its CLI interface.
I've written daemons with PHP. It's clean, simple, and powerful. My best is a large, 50,000+ line application in it. Write a clean codebase with consistent error-handling, and it's a breeze.
It's downright fun to take the contents of a file, turn it into an array with a single line, loop thru it with 1 more line, do a few if statements, and process a 500 MB file in 5 minutes flat.
I *love* replacing a large, complex mini-applet with 12 lines of PHP code - I've done it time and time again.
And, to write in it all day long?! Pure heaven.
I'll be watching PHP5 - I've not deployed it anywhere, and probably won't even start until PHP-GTK 2 (with PHP5, GTK2.X) is out.
BTW, I'm also using Apache 1.3...
And why? The QWERTY is "good enough", so we invest our resources elsewhere.
if you happen to write in an roman alphabet. Perhaps the other two-thirds of the world that use pictographic or script based character sets might disagree about "good enough".
Small, green aliens probably don't use QWERTY keyboards, either. The embedded wisdom of the QWERTY keyboard doesn't apply to them, either.
But... what did YOU use?
Um, it wasn't until the 1950's...
But, even then, what percentage of transportation was automobile-based vs rail? AFAIK it was, even in 1950, a minority of the total transportation infrastructure.
It's odd to say computers are evolving while saying you don't change critical infrastructure. Perhaps I should give up my net-connected cheap-and-powerful PC and wait for a turn on the mainframe.
Thanks. You just made my point, but I don't think you quite realized what it was...
Computer technology *is* evolving incredibly rapidly compared to biological evolution (a point you affirm here by your reference to mainframes) but that evolution is still not instantaneous.
The IRS uses a computer system developed (AFAIK) in the 1960s. It's so old the source code is long gone and they've tried repeatedly to modernise it to no avail.
Critical infrastructure is only replaced when it's necessary - and often is used far longer than originally intended.
Witness the X86 architecture. Put simply, it sucks. Not enough registers, crummy instruction set, truly retarded offset memory addressing, segmented memory model, costly and difficult scalability, the list of problems warrants its own encyclopedia set.
But this crummy architecture constitutes "critical infrastructure" today. Many billions of man-hours have been invested in making this substandard architecture work, and work well. Like the QWERTY keyboard, the antiquated lizard brain, or the IRS's mainframe, it's good enough, and contains much embedded experience. When given the choice between scrapping X86 for something "better", or sticking with it, warts and all, (AMD64 vs Itanium) the marketplace chose AMD64.
There's simply too much embedded wisdom (as, software, hardware, compilers, etc) accessible via the otherwise inferior X86 architecture.
And, even the X86 architecture borrows heavily from that "time shared" mainframe, such as Virtual Memory, task and context switching, the tree-based filesystem structure. Heck, if you (like me) are using some form of *nix, that mainframe you talk loathingly about waiting for is sitting right in front of you!
So, let me guess... is your "cheap-and-powerful PC" running some variant of the 20-year-old X86 architecture?
I thought so... as I said, you don't throw away critical infrastructure!
Our desktops still are essentially the same as the 1984 Macintosh. PDAs still haven't caught up with the Newton. Computers are still dumb.
Computer technology is evolving. Quickly.
Biological evolution took billions of years to get to today. Have you ever read up on Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar? If you were to compress the known history of the universe into a single calendar year, all of written human history would comprise the last 15 seconds on December 31!
Whether you're talking about technology or biology, you can't evolve anything too quickly, or you throw out all the accumulated wisdom in the current design. That's why birth defects and substantial changes in genetics are rare - evolve too quickly and the mortality rate climbs towards insolvency.
The QWERTY keyboard is with us, perhaps for centuries to come, even though there are "better" alternatives. But these "better" alternatives cost alot more TODAY to develop and implement than continuing with the QWERTY. So if you "know how to type", you're using a QWERTY.
To change to another keyboard, you have to throw out all the accumulated wisdom associated with QWERTY keyboards - all the trained office workers, all the existing equipment in place right now, the typing tutor software, the toys, cell phones, PDAs, etc.
And why? The QWERTY is "good enough", so we invest our resources elsewhere.
Here's another example: Joel on Software - Things You Should Never Do. In this work, Joel claims that re-writing your nest egg software is the kiss of death for a software company, for the simple fact that in even a cruddy, poorly cobbled software, there's often many man-years of embedded wisdom in there - bugs fixed, design issues resolved, special cases handled, etc.
You simply can't rebuild anything significant from scratch without tremendous cost. That's why our very sophisticated human cerebral brains are built upon the much simpler mammalian brain, which is in turn built upon the very simple lizard brain inside our heads. It's very literally three concentric sections of brain, with the lizard brain in the middle, the mamallian brain wrapped around that, and the cerebral cortex packed on around the outside!
The biological cost of rebuilding our brains to factor out the now much-antiquated lizard brain functions is simply too high to be viable, so it's never happened, and the lizard brain is simply "infrastructure" for higher development.
Look at the history of cities. You'll see the exact same pattern there... Example? Los Angeles has spent 75 years developing around the automobile, and their recent construction of subways have been extremely expensive (300 MILLION DOLLARS PER MILE) and the residual effects of the subway on local business has driven many to bankruptcy.
It's been very costly, very slow, and cost overruns are the norm.
So, when I hear somebody talk about making major changes to existing infrastructure, it's hard for me NOT to dismiss them, no matter their credentials. You simply *don't* change critical infrastructure of any kind without serious review and contemplation, and even then, you have to assume that it'd be 10x as costly and painful as you can imagine.
I'm inclined to think that having a request suddenly run 1000 times faster might be due to something a DBA has done, rather than a change of OS.
Yeah. My call would be that they were operating an RAM-starved server. I've seen similar numbers doing basic PC upgrades!
I remember on case (this was a few years ago) where somebody with a customer information database of about 400,000 records came to me because generating a list from a query would often take several minutes.
They were using a Pentium-90 with 32 MB of RAM. I set them up with a (then) top-of-the-line PIII 600 with 256 MB RAM. Query time dropped to 1 second.
No matter what O/S you run, you're going to get JACK for performance if your running your app in swap.
The life as an engineer was (excuse me) pathetic. Why should I spend all my life chained to a desk, living in a cube farm, and putting up with the Boss from Hell who figured he owned me as so much chattel property? Life is much better now.
So tell me again why I would even talk any teenager into becoming an engineer? They would be fools to do so.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. I work as a software engineer. I create workflow management solutions for medium size (~200 staff) organizations, frequently with multiple job locations.
I love what I do! I work as Softare Architect, Programmer, salesman, and Business Workflow Analyst, all in one job. No day is like any other. I create works of smooth engineering that my clients rave about, and I get paid nicely to create them.
My kids are being trained to be engineers. They are taught that engineers create the wealth of society, and that Science is the process by which understanding occurs.
And, they'd better be in charge of determining where that wealth goes. This world need problem solvers - there are no shortage of problems. Solve the problems, and wealth is yours. Look for a "job" and you might as well resign and be a wage slave.
It's not about the PHD - it's about the problems you solve, and making sure you get paid for solving them.
I had the experience of working on a Digital Vax 11/750 back "in the day" at an organization of about 200 staff.
It was huge. It was the size of several washing machines side by side, it its own room, with its own separate air conditioner.
It had 4 MB *yes, MB* of RAM, and served data to about 50 workstations. (Green on black, Wyze terminals, as I recall)
This sucker had a GB of Disk Space. It's RAM was accessible via these dinner-plate sized memory 'cards' that slid into the monster case.
You could swap RAM without powering down the system. You ran a command to remap everything out of that card, and when the command was done, you pulled the card out.
It would identify bad RAM on the fly and then map around those bad spots, while writing to a log file for the sysadmin. It wouldn't skip a beat when this happened, either.
The Digital VAX was a true machine - one that, despite its refridgerator size and ~ X86 286 clas processing power, was to the 386 computers common at the time that I was there much like a VW Microbus is to an 18-wheeler Semi.
The Air Conditioner failed, one time. Eventually, the computer room got too hot and the system crashed. But, when it did so, it remapped all the memory to disk.
When we brought the disk back up, (after getting the A/C fixed by an HVAC) all the processes running at the time of crash came back up! We had to manually kill them!
I heard about the story of its delivery. It was actually fell out of the back of the truck on the open highway at about 60 MPH. The agent took it back to the shop, put a new panel on the side, threw it back on the truck, (raising the tailgate this time) and delivered it about 2 hours late. It ran fine when they hooked it up!
It's simply a degree of engineering lost to today's Windows and *nix raised lusers.
I will always respect that VAX. It was a machine for and from a different era of computing.
01:36AM up 126 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
Oh yeah? Try THIS on for size...
4:40pm up 189 days, 22:17, 5 users, load average: 0.11, 0.16, 0.10
My personal record is over 400 days, and it would have been more except that the server had to be moved.
(Going back to work, now...)
Industry provides wealth that can be used to do things like fight crime, procure clean drinking water, and feed everybody.
Nowadays, Industry doesn't mean the large, smoke-belching factories of yesteryear. As many people in India, Malay, and elsewhere have found, computers provide a job that, once online, can go pretty much anywhere.
I'm a freelance programmer and sysadmin. I grab my Linux laptop, and anywhere I can get a DHCP/Wifi/Modem/Cellular Internet connection, (pretty much *anywhere*) I can work. I've plenty of times put in a good, full work day at the hotel via Wifi/LAN broadband.
So, don't knock these efforts - this could easily mean bread money for these areas for years to come!
Before you laugh, hear me out...
/etc/yum.conf.
I think there's a compelling marketplace in providing integration services with a major Linux distro.
For YEARS, Linux has had good and proper dependency checking and network-based installs. (EG: Apt-get, up2date, yum) But, when I go to install America's Army, I end up with this weird binary thingamajig installer that's 100% in-house, and unique to that package.
Thus, to get everything working properly, I spend another 2 hours hunting down weird error messages with google, before I can get it working right.
And then, when an upgrade happens, I get to do it all over again. (sigh)
But, what if something like the Dag repository were to come up with something that allows a commercial or 3rd party vendor to:
1) issue a certificate for an install of software to a user,
2) easily download/install the software via Yum,
3) handle dependencies so the install is always smooth and quick.
Here's how I picture this might work: (I'll use yum in examples, any of the network-based installers would be fine)
A) I set up yum with this commercial repository by copy/pasting a few lines into
B) I buy XYZ product for Linux. I can choose to download a binary installer, or I can simply download a certificate.
C) If I choose the certificate, then I would issue "yum install packagename".
D) Part of the install process would ask me for the certificate to verify that I do, indeed have rights to install the package on this particular machine.
I think there's a tremendous business model here! I know I would almost KILL to have some packages install this way, and having this kind of service would be a boon to Linux adoption and deployment.
(p.s. IANAP... tachyons are still considered only theoretical, right?)
No, they are a proven fact. In fact, you can buy a tachyon collector here.
You know, once it hits the mass market, it's a done deal...
Now, I drive the extra 30 minutes to go to Fry's where no one bugs me until I ask a question.
One of the things that comes from living in a small town is that I don't waste time on the freeway. Here in beautiful Chico, CA we have Circuit City, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, Office Depot, Office Max, and WinCo all within about a mile of each other.
I would *never* drive another 30 minutes to get a few DVDs or a sound card!
The nearest Fry's is about 80 miles from my house, and I've been there twice - both times while visiting Sacramento for other reasons.
It amazes me how much time people waste on the freeways - I've heard that in many areas, a 1.5 hour commute is TYPICAL!
Geez. Armed with Internet Access and my Linux Laptop, I can work just about anywhere with squat for a commute. Almost makes me feel guilty just for having it so good....