The correct "balance" between open and closed is *open*.
Except when it isn't. "Open" means diddly squat to most users. "Open" platforms that become suitably popular result in applications like punch-the-monkey downloads and pseudo-useful malware.
Yes, *nix has an intrinsically better security model. Yes, OSX shares most of that security model. Yes, *nix derivatives are going to be more resistant to automated virus attacks and the like due to their open nature and simpler (read: understandable) security models.
But all systems, Unix, OSX, Windows, and BeOS share a common vulnerability: the end user. PEBKAC*. No security model will insulate systems against their owners, though Microsoft shows signs of wanting to go that direction, so does Apple.
Just like moderated forums (like Slashdot) work to filter out the crappola, so too can a pseudo-open environment such as Apple's app store - they want to weed out the stuff that's likely to piss anybody off, provide only good-quality softwares that won't hork their systems, and also BTW compete with them.
All in all, it's not a bad idea. It's not for everyone, and if you want the freedom to install punch-the-monkey applications, you sure can. In a sense, my "open" Fedora laptop exists in a balance between closed and free: I basically don't install applications that aren't found in a yum repo that I trust. I don't install stuff from tarballs. I don't dicker with binary files. I could, but I won't. Even when the door is as open as possible, I still prefer the safety provided by a vendor, so for me, I've chosen a more "closed" route.
Not everyone wants to be a computer weenie, and it's OK that Apple recognizes this fact!
My wife and four kids left moved a month and a half ago. At the old house we had the Dish DVR with two large, analog TVs. With all the fixings, we were paying close to 100 dollars a month. I used to rave about the DVR which let me watch my fave shows on my schedule, pause to take a leak, etc.
But when we moved, we left all that behind, and just ordered DSL with a 5 dollar upgrade to 3 Mb. While we've been sorting everything out, we've just been watching shows on Hulu, fox ondemand, Netflix instant play, and the like.
Broadcast television is simply doomed.
I watch shows when I like, even if I never heard of it befre. Instant play is a game changer. It's a breeze to watch shows in sequence, and so dramatically improves the experience!
Firefly was an awesome series. Meerkat Manor takes on a whole new life when you can see them come and go... insequence! My whole household is right now rivited into Heroes- an awesome show when seen back-to-back!
Of course it's not perfect, yet. Mythbusters isn't available without doing the Chinese youtube thing and clicking thru every 10 minutes. Also, WTF SNL? where are ye? And I do sort of miss the remote. But the freedom of choice far outweighs the stupid remote, and I could just buy a wireless mouse/KB even if it is a bit excessive...
But most shows ARE available online, in good resolution, instant play, to anyone with 2 or more Mb of low-latency bandwidth which is so low a bar that even in small-town California, it's commonly available.
I'm typing this on my new HTC Mogul phone - something I'll rave about, but in some other post...
Remember the browser wars, round 1? It seemed that everytime you turned around, there was a new version out with new features and new tags to learn. Features like VRML and javascript, CSS, a dizzying array of choices that seemed like it could go on forever.
That is, until MS killed the browser wars by bundling their browser and coming up with a browser that was 'good enough'. Innovation stalled almost completely. Webmasters, frustrated with the pain of developing cross-platform web sites, frequently bought the koolaid of the all MS dev stack.
The open, free Internet was, for a time, in danger.
But then the guys behind Mozilla, mostly funded by AOL who only used Mozilla to threaten MS in order to get an icon for the desktop, finally started to mature into something good.
And, though years in the making, the browser wars are suddenly back! Suddenly MS releases two versions of their browser rapid-fire, suddenly there's a reason to pay attention!
Just imagine where we'd be if there hadn't been that near-decade of stagnation in the middle? That's the price of the MS monopoly.
On OS X it crushes most of the competition including Firefox. It is fast and has features that have not been cloned yet.
Yeah... if it renders your website properly. (I can't)
If you can get *all* your plugins to work with it. (I can't)
If you prefer having a just different enough way of doing things on each platform that you never know where to find things. (I don't)
If by "crush" you mean "makes you wish you were running it" because that's the effect (for me) of Safari on Mac. Mozilla isn't perfect, but it's damned nice, and doesn't suffer the above problems. It's decent, sure. But Firefox has it beat hands down.
You might want to find out what a "Newspaper of Record is, and also what a legal notice is.
We're not talking about licenses, we're talking about how the legal process works in areas ranging from copyrights, easements, and zoning ordinances, to the treatment of abandoned property.
2 boxes for hardware failover will do you fine, if you are worried about HA the its the COST of downtime that you are worried about (i.e. down for an hour exceeds $1000 in lost revenue) which will justify the solution. Don't just drive availability to five nines because you feel its cool, do it because the business requires it.
This is something that is rampant: techies tend to overestimate the value of uptime.
Sure, it's sexy to have high availability this and redundant that, but unless your company is pulling down at least $1,000,000 per year or more in gross revenues, it's hard to beat the 3 to 4 nines or so uptime delivered by a good quality, whitebox server running Linux. Something like this unit would deliver excellent performance and excellent reliability at a very low cost.
How much does an hour of downtime actually cost your company? Be honest. If you had to tell your customers: "we were down for 2 hours because a software update caused us to have to..." what would it actually cost your company? Especially if it only happened every year or so? In my experience, even in fairly stiff production environments, there has been no cost at all. We've maintained about 99.95% uptime for the past 3 years, with 1 "incident" every year or so, with no cost at all. In fact, our company has a good reputation for availability and support!
So don't spend money on sexy hardware with lots of blinkie lights and cross-connects, which often decrease your reliability by introducing unnecessary complexity.
Instead, spend money on your hosting. Don't *ever* host it in-house. Ever. Get a first-tier hosting facility, with redundant network feeds, power, and staff who give a damn. Don't be afraid to pay for it, because it will probably save you money, anyway. You'd be amazed at how price-competitive top-notch hosting farms can be!
Make sure to get to know the on-site techies on a first-name basis, give 'em a six-pack of their favorite beverage, and thank them profusely when they do anything for you. The goodwill these types of things can bring will work wonders for you down the road.
And remember:
2 nines is 3.65 days of downtime per year. 3 nines is.365 days of downtime per year (~ 8 hours) 4 nines is.0365 days of downtime per year (~ 45 minutes)
It's a very, very rare case indeed where 3-4 nines of uptime isn't completely sufficient.
And 1,000 unique visits per day? Pssht. Unless you are doing some pretty ferocious database stuff, (EG: joins across 12 tables with combined inner/outer/composite joins) the aforementioned server should do the job just wonderfully.
DON'T FORGET BACKUPS! And backup your backups, because backups fail, too.
WIC isn't for the parents, it's for the children. Many poor folks, when given the choice between junk and/or decent food, will pick junk first and only buy decent food if they have their beer and smokes first.
The result is that the kids end up under-nourished. Kids need lots of calories, calcium for strong boned and teeth, fiber, vitamins etc. If they don't get these things as kids, their cognitive and immune systems suffer lifelong, at great cost both to the individual and to society. (idiots rarely get paid well)
WIC can only be reimbursed for staples that poor tend to skip when things are tight: mil cheese, bread, and the like. The state actually spends very little on WIC and the return (in tax revenues) is high.
My wife and I took advantage of WIC once upon a time, many years ago. It was a tremendous help that we took advantage of for about a year until I was able to get my career off the ground.
Yes, to some extent, WIC and other welfare is (ab)used to fund junk. But the alternative is that the kids of these crappy parents simply do not get enough to eat, and that's bad for everyone. (including you)
Sure it can! All that has to happen is for the GPL code copyright holders to be contacted and given a reasonable opportunity to object to the change. Things like this are accomplished by posting a legal statement of intent in a newspaper of record applicable to the scope in question.
After a reasonable opportunity to object to the license change, the license to the code can then be changed to the new license. If a copyright holder objects to the change, his/her code must be removed from the codebase with the changed license.
It's fairly simple, and license changes like this happen all the time. It's how the Linux kernel will be moved from GPL2 to GPL3 if/when that ever happens.
Now, a specific *copy* of the GPL-licensed code cannot be made proprietary. For example, if you have a legally obtained copy of some GPL software, and you live up to the terms of the GPL in your use of the code, the rights you get from the license for your copy of the code cannot be taken from you without your agreeing to the newer terms. And even if you accept the newer terms, the original, unmodified copy can still be considered to be usable under the original GPL terms by anybody ELSE who didn't agree to the newer terms.
But to be strictly truthful, GPL code *CAN* be (and often is!) made proprietary. I myself have found code snippets, libraries, and widgets, licensed under the GPL or similar licenses, that I wanted to use, and asked for permission from the original author to use the code under a less free license. Usually, the author has no objections to such requests. (I remember just 1 refusal)
Take a look at the original SSH vs OpenSSH for another example of open code becoming proprietary. Commercial SSH was originally a commercial software package with a "free" license, that was then later closed. Since the copyright holders behind the commercial SSH had no objection, this change was legal. OpenSSH today is a derivative work of the "free" licensed code before it was closed.
You mean, like when a text file starts behaving like a program? What about simple text files with '#!/bin/sh' on the first line?
Unix had it right: everything is a file. Period. Programs, data ports, IP connections, shell scripts. All files. simple, human-understandable permissions. This isn't anything to do with Microsoft, it's just the natural order of developers scratching their itch.
Turning an oil rig into a sea-based hotel is proof to the world that if exhert enough resources and energy, you can announce to the world how much resource and energy that you are saving! Was it Hitler who said something like 'The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it'?? Although Mythbusters already proved it, this is further proof that you CAN polish a turd.
So... IE7 sucked because everything else still sucked more? Except they didn't. They just hadn't started eating real market share. Hell, how many YEARS did Microsoft just sit on IE 6.0 without doing a damned thing? Here we are now, 5 years after you decided that other browsers were "good enough" and finally, after another alternative has come up that actually is pretty good, and MS is losing market share rapidly, NOW they finally start paying attention to us developers developers developers?
Yes, they fixed some things. Yes, I will appreciate (and use!) the improvements. But these guys have enough money in the bank to compare to the recent (so-called) stimulus package, and yet they can't fix "must have" stuff that developers have been bitching about all along?
They dropped the ball here pretty badly. The press wasted over the years bitching about these problems would bury their precious Redmond campus under a half-mile of wood pulp. Can't tell me they didn't know.
No ball dropped, just optimized for your platform. Really now - that 300 MB of RAM apparently sets you back about $6. Is that exorbitant? Firefox USES that RAM to speed up performance, and this can be fairly easily tweaked if the $6 is more than you can stomach.
For example, Skyfire is Mozilla based, and is quite usable on my 400 Mhz, 64 MB RAM Windows Mobile Pocket-PC phone.
PS: I wrote this post using a moz-based browser on my mobile phone because the built-in IE browser is so bad that it can't even render slashdot in a usable (or even recognizable) fashion.
IE has so many serios deficiencies that have been longstsanding and obvious, I can only conclude that these shortcomgs are architectural. Things that force web developers to implement two separate versions of their JS libs _ one for IE and one for everybody else who somehow, despite greatly reduced resource availability, are able to implement these features.
Whether you are talking about connection handling, spacing and padding attributes, or listen handlers, it's just a public embarrassment for the company that once cried 'DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!'.
At my company (a vertical niche information system vendor) we've become so jaded that we now tell our users that we actually support firefox and only test for IE. Not surprisingly, our users are about 90% FF.
MS, you're dropping the ball, here, and those developers you once coddled have been SCREAMING about it for years. You're getting exactly what you deserve with your plummeting browser market share!
Twenty thousand dollars investment in a startup on overpurchased server equipment isn't all that bad. You should figure that a company with a dozen people should be pulling about a $million/year gross, against which $20,000 to ensure sufficient delivery capacity is a pretty wise investment.
I figure that having at least 100%-200% additional capacity on-hand at all times is a good idea - computing power is relatively cheap, while the cost of downtime can be astonishingly high. Personally, I start upgrades when load averages approach 50% at the highest usage part of the day. (For me, about 10:00 AM)
That said, if the servers really aren't needed, every day they lose value. Put 'em up on Ebay and get what you can for them before they depreciate any further. Space them a few hours apart over a week or so, so that you don't depress their sale price.
Yes, I know. And I was being nice. There are two definitions for 'marginal' - the economics definition as you stated, and the plain English definition which is approximately: 'minimal or insignificant'.
Otherwise I could beat him over the head with the very real and surprisingly high cost of a professional musical production. Go to some small local bars (where they don't pay the musicians) to hear what I mean. There's a world of difference between the crap put by a typical (zero cost) garage band and a decent, professional production. Is he really trying to argue otherwise?
Hold on a second. Are you really arguing that if my actions cause the value of your property to decrease, that is equivalent to theft?
Yes, in cases where your actions run afoul of either legal or contractual obligations. I guess you missed the fact that all of my examples were illegitimate, either for legal reasons, or contractual obligation?
If you control the world's only known naturally occurring source of unobtanium, and I invent a process that produces artificial unobtanium your property has been devalued.
There's no law against producing unobtanium, unless it closely resembles certain nuclear-fissionable materials. Unless, of course, you have a legal contract with me involving "insider knowledge" or "non-competition". Otherwise, have at it!
If you buy a meal, and I'm sitting next to you with noisy and annoying friends, your purchase has been devalued.
Depending on the situation, you may be running afoul of local harassment, tresspassing, and/or noise ordinances. For example, if I'm trying to eat my meal in my living room, and I don't want you there? Otherwise, chatter away!
If you buy a HumVee and I write a book about how awful HumVees are, you might find it harder to sell your SUV.
As a consumer, I will decide what is in my best interest Thank You Very Much.
All the way to jail, if you are on a car lot with lots of shiny, new cars, and you decide that, while you don't want to pay for a HumVee, you are going to get one, anyway.
If my unwillingness to purchase certain media leads to the failure of that market, I'm quite ok with that.
Nobody's arguing with your right to not buy something. What's being argued is your right to have the thing you decided not to buy, anyway.
Of course, if you need hired thugs to convince people to buy your product, "market" doesn't really apply. "Racket" is the word you're looking for.
What about when those "hired thugs" are called "police" and they are inquiring about that shiny red HumVee in your front driveway that was recently found missing at the local car lot? Are you saying the civilization is a "racket"?
There are laws on copyrights that exist to grant rights to content creators. If you create content, you are free to waive those rights, and distribute your content free of charge. (As I am doing now, with this post) But if I don't want to allow free distribution of my created works, I can do so, and there are laws in place for this to happen.
As a programmer myself, I'm free to choose the GNU GPL license to distribute my works. (And I often do) Notice that it's a license: permission to do or not to do something. When I release something under the GPL, I'm limiting your right to use my works to those terms specified in the Gnu Public License, terms that are widely accepted in this particular corner of the Internet. But it's copyright law that gives me the right to limit distribution in this manner, and I bristle at the idea that you feel that these rights should be taken from me.
Because the marginal cost of making another car is non-zero. Therefore the scarcity is real. The marginal cost of making another MP3 is zero. Therefore any scarcity is artificial. Did you have trouble in economics?
I had no trouble in economics. In fact, in economics class I learned the difference between production costs and reproduction costs. The difference between the two is what you are confusing, and the difference between the two is greater for digital media than the cars, thanks to the Intarwebz. But the point remains the same.
Read up - you might find it enlightening!
If you can't grasp the concept of scarcity, you're going to be incoherent when discussing economics.
I think we can agree on this point. There are two links above where your road to discovery begins!
Scribes found other ways to make a living. Music publishers will too. The digital-copying genie is out of the bottle, the business model is fundamentally broken. The only question is how much time, effort, resources, and lives we will waste trying to go backwards.
Another concept you may want to consider reading on is the fallacy of argument by scenario. The legitimacy of copy rights have nothing to do with scribes. You might also look up "non sequitur" on the same page...
But, in any event, I guess that you are asserting that anybody who produces copyrighted material should just give up now and hurry along, right? Programmers, have no rights to their works anymore, right? On a side note: this would make the GNU GPL worthless, since it's based on copyrights...
So programmers have no rights to their works, anymore. Neither do authors, music writers, photographers, font creators, video-game writers, technical manual writers, database designers, website coordinators, architects, lawyers, hardware engineers, chipset designers, and advertising agents, right?
Hell, the majority of our modern economy needs to get with the program, give up their day jobs - they need to adapt, like scribes, Roman foot soldiers, and town cryers, right?
Methinks you are confusing your front side with your back side when you talk about going backwards...
Saying "it isn't theft" doesn't make it so. And economy, BY DEFINITION is based on "artificial scarcity": Even though there are 400 cars at the car lot, you can't take one home if you don't pony up the cash. Why can't you just take one since they obviously have 400 and you have none? They're creating artificial scarcity for no technical reason! OMG! LET'S STEAL (ahem: "asset transfer") ONE!
Sorry this simple fact is so hard for you to grasp that you call it "incoherent". And just saying "change your business plan" is a waste of digital ink. It's like finding somebody who fell out of an airplane and telling them that if they don't do something quick, they're going to hit the ground.
Come back when you have a clue. Because you are hurting those that do.
I'm a mathematician. Many Slashdotters are programmers, engineers, etc. Isn't our work creative? How come we don;t get a lifetime +90 years gravy train? Is what we do simply not worth as much to society as movies about comic book superheroes and books about high school for witches and wizards? We don't seem to need protection, so why should artists?
As a programmer, you *do* get a lifetime +90 years gravy train. At least, in theory. Software is protected by the same copyright laws that protect Mickey Mouse. And I agree: 90 year copyright term is destructive.
However, if instead, someone had looked at my calculator, taken out a 3D tricorder-mapper-duplicator-thingamabob and had made an exact copy of my calculator, complete with all functionality, and left me with mine, I don't think I would have been quite as upset.
What makes you think that copyright infringement is about you, the consumer? When you buy a copy of a song, and as long as you have the ability to listen to your song, nothing's been taken from you.
(Well... duh!)
Copyright infringement is theft from the copyright holder, not the consumer. And it IS theft. It forces the artist to compete with their own works. That's not right, it's not fair, and destroys the foundation of a free market, supply & demand by destroying the demand side of the equation.
And as long as we're explaining this simple principle to people who haven't clued in to the idea that the content providers matter too, we're busy digging the hole that will eventually bury the idea of "fair use", DRM will win, and copying music at *all* will become illegal.
Want to fight the man? Fight against ridiculous copyright term extensions that are unconstitutional. Fight against the idiocies of software patents. But please, please, please! don't waste your time trying to argue that copyright infringement is a "victimless crime", which just shows that you don't understand what the problem is. Doing so just ruins our chances to fight against the wholesale theft and rape of our cultural history through illegal copyright term extensions!
It may well be that you need a lawyer because our country is fscked up. But changing the fabric of our society is outside the scope of this young startup.
And I don't agree that needing competent legal representation is a sign of a fscked up country. Somebody has make sure that everybody's clear on what's being promised in a contract, which is exactly what attorneys do. And just like doctors use terminology like "mitochondria" and "homo sapiens" to precisely describe what they are talking about, lawyers use similarly precise terminology like "hold harmless" and "collateral estoppel".
If you invested your life savings as stock in a company, and the CEO did stupids that resulted in a rapid shrinkage of your life savings, you'd want to lynch him, wouldn't you?
If you wrote software that you intended to sell to a client, and somebody else stole the source by cracking your computer and selling it to your client at a greatly reduced cost, you'd want blood, wouldn't you?
If you bought a shiny new car, and six months later, a dirty congress-critter conspired with the evil car company CEOs to make gasoline illegal in favor of diesel, you'd be damned pissed, wouldn't you?
In all these cases, things of value to you were devalued by acts of others. In all these cases, you still hold the "thing" in question containing the value that was stolen from you. You still have the stock from the company, you still have the source code on your computer, and you still have a (worthless) car. And yet, you've still been robbed.
As a copyright holder, copyright infringement is analogous to all of these acts. You still have your original, but the value of that original has been taken from you. Whether you call it "theft" or "piracy" or "copyright infringement" doesn't change the underlying fact. You are still the loser.
I still agree: the RIAA are behaving like a bunch of drunk, stoned, brain-damaged monkeys. They are fighting for their existence while opportunities to profit out the ass are all around them. It's just idiocy, and they don't have the leadership to face the paradisaical, insanely profitable world around them.
But that doesn't mean that "copyright infringement" is ok, it's not. The marketplace works on supply/demand, and bootlegging music destroys the demand side of the marketplace, and it's to the interest of the marketplace (including its consumers) to see that the demand side of the equation is preserved so that the engine of the free market can still operate.
Copyright infringement is still theft.
Want to fix the problem? Fight to have sane copyright laws re-introduced. Having 100+ years to own a copyright (with unlimited future extension) is stupid. In the United States, it's unconstitutional to pass an "ex post-facto" law - how is it that the terms of copyright are being retroactively renegotiated? How is it reasonable to benefit from a copyright from somebody who's been dead for decades? This is Disney, et al. and Congress colluding to rape, pillage, and "lock down" our social culture for profit. They are trying to own who we are, and sell our own culture back to us rather than innovate said culture.
Copyrights should last 20 years, just as the original designers intended. That's reasonable. Copyright holders have a chance to profit from their works, driving the supply/demand marketplace engine, while older works become what they should be: part of our culture itself.
That's what we should fight about. Any time we spend trying to justify piracy/theft/copyright-infringement is time we spend digging a deeper hole for ourselves, with the end result that this trial's outcome IS pretty much a given.
In your gated community, the cameras were purely physical, and the guards are really there to be intimidating. Just like taking your shoes off at the airport does little to provide *real* security, when so many people have unsupervised access to "secure" areas. (if I drive to the local airport, I have to pass everything shy of a rectal examination. But, if I fly a private plane to the same airport, I'm given the red-carpet treatment and my identity is never even so much as questioned...)
Years ago, I set up a computer shop with very little money. I think my total going in was around $2,500 dollars, including the first and last month's rent, advertising, phone expenses, inventory, and furniture. Very, very low budget.
And I made it work! We had card tables with nice table cloths to hold the computers. I made work benches myself out of 2x4s and molded Formica counter tops that were on sale. Etc. Etc.
But for a security system, I got an old 8 MM film camera, drilled a hole in the handle, and bolted it to a bracket I found just outside the back door of the shop. To make it look "live", I found a round headphone wire, plugged it into the headphone jack on the top, and ran it up through a hole that I drilled in the ceiling just above it.
It was big, and intimidating.
For additional measure, I downloaded a tone generator off the Intarwebs and left it on the computer all night long, just loud enough that you could hear it clearly anywhere in the building, but softly enough that you couldn't hear it outside.
The combination of the two was good enough to fool both an alarm company installation tech, and two on-duty police officers. Granted, my measures provided no additional "real" security. But when the front window was broken, none of the expensive computers on display were stolen, and I had no trouble at all with "five finger discounts".
And, how long did your doughnut-loving security guards stop actual crimes from happening with their faux security measures that you never heard of, because they never happened?
Slashdot Mirror
The correct "balance" between open and closed is *open*.
Except when it isn't. "Open" means diddly squat to most users. "Open" platforms that become suitably popular result in applications like punch-the-monkey downloads and pseudo-useful malware.
Yes, *nix has an intrinsically better security model. Yes, OSX shares most of that security model. Yes, *nix derivatives are going to be more resistant to automated virus attacks and the like due to their open nature and simpler (read: understandable) security models.
But all systems, Unix, OSX, Windows, and BeOS share a common vulnerability: the end user. PEBKAC*. No security model will insulate systems against their owners, though Microsoft shows signs of wanting to go that direction, so does Apple.
Just like moderated forums (like Slashdot) work to filter out the crappola, so too can a pseudo-open environment such as Apple's app store - they want to weed out the stuff that's likely to piss anybody off, provide only good-quality softwares that won't hork their systems, and also BTW compete with them.
All in all, it's not a bad idea. It's not for everyone, and if you want the freedom to install punch-the-monkey applications, you sure can. In a sense, my "open" Fedora laptop exists in a balance between closed and free: I basically don't install applications that aren't found in a yum repo that I trust. I don't install stuff from tarballs. I don't dicker with binary files. I could, but I won't. Even when the door is as open as possible, I still prefer the safety provided by a vendor, so for me, I've chosen a more "closed" route.
Not everyone wants to be a computer weenie, and it's OK that Apple recognizes this fact!
* Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.
My wife and four kids left moved a month and a half ago. At the old house we had the Dish DVR with two large, analog TVs. With all the fixings, we were paying close to 100 dollars a month. I used to rave about the DVR which let me watch my fave shows on my schedule, pause to take a leak, etc.
But when we moved, we left all that behind, and just ordered DSL with a 5 dollar upgrade to 3 Mb. While we've been sorting everything out, we've just been watching shows on Hulu, fox ondemand, Netflix instant play, and the like.
Broadcast television is simply doomed.
I watch shows when I like, even if I never heard of it befre. Instant play is a game changer. It's a breeze to watch shows in sequence, and so dramatically improves the experience!
Firefly was an awesome series. Meerkat Manor takes on a whole new life when you can see them come and go... insequence! My whole household is right now rivited into Heroes- an awesome show when seen back-to-back!
Of course it's not perfect, yet. Mythbusters isn't available without doing the Chinese youtube thing and clicking thru every 10 minutes. Also, WTF SNL? where are ye? And I do sort of miss the remote. But the freedom of choice far outweighs the stupid remote, and I could just buy a wireless mouse/KB even if it is a bit excessive...
But most shows ARE available online, in good resolution, instant play, to anyone with 2 or more Mb of low-latency bandwidth which is so low a bar that even in small-town California, it's commonly available.
I'm typing this on my new HTC Mogul phone - something I'll rave about, but in some other post...
Remember the browser wars, round 1? It seemed that everytime you turned around, there was a new version out with new features and new tags to learn. Features like VRML and javascript, CSS, a dizzying array of choices that seemed like it could go on forever.
That is, until MS killed the browser wars by bundling their browser and coming up with a browser that was 'good enough'. Innovation stalled almost completely. Webmasters, frustrated with the pain of developing cross-platform web sites, frequently bought the koolaid of the all MS dev stack.
The open, free Internet was, for a time, in danger.
But then the guys behind Mozilla, mostly funded by AOL who only used Mozilla to threaten MS in order to get an icon for the desktop, finally started to mature into something good.
And, though years in the making, the browser wars are suddenly back! Suddenly MS releases two versions of their browser rapid-fire, suddenly there's a reason to pay attention!
Just imagine where we'd be if there hadn't been that near-decade of stagnation in the middle? That's the price of the MS monopoly.
Perhaps you should read this article written years ago that explains it very nicely.
It's true. Null terminated strings are slow, and they suck in lots of ways.
On OS X it crushes most of the competition including Firefox. It is fast and has features that have not been cloned yet.
Yeah... if it renders your website properly. (I can't)
If you can get *all* your plugins to work with it. (I can't)
If you prefer having a just different enough way of doing things on each platform that you never know where to find things. (I don't)
If by "crush" you mean "makes you wish you were running it" because that's the effect (for me) of Safari on Mac. Mozilla isn't perfect, but it's damned nice, and doesn't suffer the above problems. It's decent, sure. But Firefox has it beat hands down.
You might want to find out what a "Newspaper of Record is, and also what a legal notice is.
We're not talking about licenses, we're talking about how the legal process works in areas ranging from copyrights, easements, and zoning ordinances, to the treatment of abandoned property.
2 boxes for hardware failover will do you fine, if you are worried about HA the its the COST of downtime that you are worried about (i.e. down for an hour exceeds $1000 in lost revenue) which will justify the solution. Don't just drive availability to five nines because you feel its cool, do it because the business requires it.
This is something that is rampant: techies tend to overestimate the value of uptime.
Sure, it's sexy to have high availability this and redundant that, but unless your company is pulling down at least $1,000,000 per year or more in gross revenues, it's hard to beat the 3 to 4 nines or so uptime delivered by a good quality, whitebox server running Linux. Something like this unit would deliver excellent performance and excellent reliability at a very low cost.
How much does an hour of downtime actually cost your company? Be honest. If you had to tell your customers: "we were down for 2 hours because a software update caused us to have to ..." what would it actually cost your company? Especially if it only happened every year or so? In my experience, even in fairly stiff production environments, there has been no cost at all. We've maintained about 99.95% uptime for the past 3 years, with 1 "incident" every year or so, with no cost at all. In fact, our company has a good reputation for availability and support!
So don't spend money on sexy hardware with lots of blinkie lights and cross-connects, which often decrease your reliability by introducing unnecessary complexity.
Instead, spend money on your hosting. Don't *ever* host it in-house. Ever. Get a first-tier hosting facility, with redundant network feeds, power, and staff who give a damn. Don't be afraid to pay for it, because it will probably save you money, anyway. You'd be amazed at how price-competitive top-notch hosting farms can be!
Make sure to get to know the on-site techies on a first-name basis, give 'em a six-pack of their favorite beverage, and thank them profusely when they do anything for you. The goodwill these types of things can bring will work wonders for you down the road.
And remember:
2 nines is 3.65 days of downtime per year. .365 days of downtime per year (~ 8 hours) .0365 days of downtime per year (~ 45 minutes)
3 nines is
4 nines is
It's a very, very rare case indeed where 3-4 nines of uptime isn't completely sufficient.
And 1,000 unique visits per day? Pssht. Unless you are doing some pretty ferocious database stuff, (EG: joins across 12 tables with combined inner/outer/composite joins) the aforementioned server should do the job just wonderfully.
DON'T FORGET BACKUPS! And backup your backups, because backups fail, too.
WIC isn't for the parents, it's for the children. Many poor folks, when given the choice between junk and/or decent food, will pick junk first and only buy decent food if they have their beer and smokes first.
The result is that the kids end up under-nourished. Kids need lots of calories, calcium for strong boned and teeth, fiber, vitamins etc. If they don't get these things as kids, their cognitive and immune systems suffer lifelong, at great cost both to the individual and to society. (idiots rarely get paid well)
WIC can only be reimbursed for staples that poor tend to skip when things are tight: mil cheese, bread, and the like. The state actually spends very little on WIC and the return (in tax revenues) is high.
My wife and I took advantage of WIC once upon a time, many years ago. It was a tremendous help that we took advantage of for about a year until I was able to get my career off the ground.
Yes, to some extent, WIC and other welfare is (ab)used to fund junk. But the alternative is that the kids of these crappy parents simply do not get enough to eat, and that's bad for everyone. (including you)
As for GPL'd code, it cannot be made proprietary.
Sure it can! All that has to happen is for the GPL code copyright holders to be contacted and given a reasonable opportunity to object to the change. Things like this are accomplished by posting a legal statement of intent in a newspaper of record applicable to the scope in question.
After a reasonable opportunity to object to the license change, the license to the code can then be changed to the new license. If a copyright holder objects to the change, his/her code must be removed from the codebase with the changed license.
It's fairly simple, and license changes like this happen all the time. It's how the Linux kernel will be moved from GPL2 to GPL3 if/when that ever happens.
Now, a specific *copy* of the GPL-licensed code cannot be made proprietary. For example, if you have a legally obtained copy of some GPL software, and you live up to the terms of the GPL in your use of the code, the rights you get from the license for your copy of the code cannot be taken from you without your agreeing to the newer terms. And even if you accept the newer terms, the original, unmodified copy can still be considered to be usable under the original GPL terms by anybody ELSE who didn't agree to the newer terms.
But to be strictly truthful, GPL code *CAN* be (and often is!) made proprietary. I myself have found code snippets, libraries, and widgets, licensed under the GPL or similar licenses, that I wanted to use, and asked for permission from the original author to use the code under a less free license. Usually, the author has no objections to such requests. (I remember just 1 refusal)
Take a look at the original SSH vs OpenSSH for another example of open code becoming proprietary. Commercial SSH was originally a commercial software package with a "free" license, that was then later closed. Since the copyright holders behind the commercial SSH had no objection, this change was legal. OpenSSH today is a derivative work of the "free" licensed code before it was closed.
You mean, like when a text file starts behaving like a program? What about simple text files with '#! /bin/sh' on the first line?
Unix had it right: everything is a file. Period. Programs, data ports, IP connections, shell scripts. All files. simple, human-understandable permissions. This isn't anything to do with Microsoft, it's just the natural order of developers scratching their itch.
Turning an oil rig into a sea-based hotel is proof to the world that if exhert enough resources and energy, you can announce to the world how much resource and energy that you are saving! Was it Hitler who said something like 'The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it'?? Although Mythbusters already proved it, this is further proof that you CAN polish a turd.
PS: Godwin's law!
So... IE7 sucked because everything else still sucked more? Except they didn't. They just hadn't started eating real market share. Hell, how many YEARS did Microsoft just sit on IE 6.0 without doing a damned thing? Here we are now, 5 years after you decided that other browsers were "good enough" and finally, after another alternative has come up that actually is pretty good, and MS is losing market share rapidly, NOW they finally start paying attention to us developers developers developers?
And IE8 is standards compliant - my ass. Care to see just how borked it is?
Yes, they fixed some things. Yes, I will appreciate (and use!) the improvements. But these guys have enough money in the bank to compare to the recent (so-called) stimulus package, and yet they can't fix "must have" stuff that developers have been bitching about all along?
They dropped the ball here pretty badly. The press wasted over the years bitching about these problems would bury their precious Redmond campus under a half-mile of wood pulp. Can't tell me they didn't know.
No ball dropped, just optimized for your platform. Really now - that 300 MB of RAM apparently sets you back about $6. Is that exorbitant? Firefox USES that RAM to speed up performance, and this can be fairly easily tweaked if the $6 is more than you can stomach.
For example, Skyfire is Mozilla based, and is quite usable on my 400 Mhz, 64 MB RAM Windows Mobile Pocket-PC phone.
PS: I wrote this post using a moz-based browser on my mobile phone because the built-in IE browser is so bad that it can't even render slashdot in a usable (or even recognizable) fashion.
IE has so many serios deficiencies that have been longstsanding and obvious, I can only conclude that these shortcomgs are architectural. Things that force web developers to implement two separate versions of their JS libs _ one for IE and one for everybody else who somehow, despite greatly reduced resource availability, are able to implement these features.
Whether you are talking about connection handling, spacing and padding attributes, or listen handlers, it's just a public embarrassment for the company that once cried 'DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!'.
At my company (a vertical niche information system vendor) we've become so jaded that we now tell our users that we actually support firefox and only test for IE. Not surprisingly, our users are about 90% FF.
MS, you're dropping the ball, here, and those developers you once coddled have been SCREAMING about it for years. You're getting exactly what you deserve with your plummeting browser market share!
Twenty thousand dollars investment in a startup on overpurchased server equipment isn't all that bad. You should figure that a company with a dozen people should be pulling about a $million/year gross, against which $20,000 to ensure sufficient delivery capacity is a pretty wise investment.
I figure that having at least 100%-200% additional capacity on-hand at all times is a good idea - computing power is relatively cheap, while the cost of downtime can be astonishingly high. Personally, I start upgrades when load averages approach 50% at the highest usage part of the day. (For me, about 10:00 AM)
That said, if the servers really aren't needed, every day they lose value. Put 'em up on Ebay and get what you can for them before they depreciate any further. Space them a few hours apart over a week or so, so that you don't depress their sale price.
Yes, I know. And I was being nice. There are two definitions for 'marginal' - the economics definition as you stated, and the plain English definition which is approximately: 'minimal or insignificant'.
Otherwise I could beat him over the head with the very real and surprisingly high cost of a professional musical production. Go to some small local bars (where they don't pay the musicians) to hear what I mean. There's a world of difference between the crap put by a typical (zero cost) garage band and a decent, professional production. Is he really trying to argue otherwise?
How many hits should this poor guy take?
Hold on a second. Are you really arguing that if my actions cause the value of your property to decrease, that is equivalent to theft?
Yes, in cases where your actions run afoul of either legal or contractual obligations. I guess you missed the fact that all of my examples were illegitimate, either for legal reasons, or contractual obligation?
If you control the world's only known naturally occurring source of unobtanium, and I invent a process that produces artificial unobtanium your property has been devalued.
There's no law against producing unobtanium, unless it closely resembles certain nuclear-fissionable materials. Unless, of course, you have a legal contract with me involving "insider knowledge" or "non-competition". Otherwise, have at it!
If you buy a meal, and I'm sitting next to you with noisy and annoying friends, your purchase has been devalued.
Depending on the situation, you may be running afoul of local harassment, tresspassing, and/or noise ordinances. For example, if I'm trying to eat my meal in my living room, and I don't want you there? Otherwise, chatter away!
If you buy a HumVee and I write a book about how awful HumVees are, you might find it harder to sell your SUV.
It's usually not against the law to write a book about anything. There are laws about defamation, libel, and slander that you might want to consider.
As a consumer, I will decide what is in my best interest Thank You Very Much.
All the way to jail, if you are on a car lot with lots of shiny, new cars, and you decide that, while you don't want to pay for a HumVee, you are going to get one, anyway.
If my unwillingness to purchase certain media leads to the failure of that market, I'm quite ok with that.
Nobody's arguing with your right to not buy something. What's being argued is your right to have the thing you decided not to buy, anyway.
Of course, if you need hired thugs to convince people to buy your product, "market" doesn't really apply. "Racket" is the word you're looking for.
What about when those "hired thugs" are called "police" and they are inquiring about that shiny red HumVee in your front driveway that was recently found missing at the local car lot? Are you saying the civilization is a "racket"?
There are laws on copyrights that exist to grant rights to content creators. If you create content, you are free to waive those rights, and distribute your content free of charge. (As I am doing now, with this post) But if I don't want to allow free distribution of my created works, I can do so, and there are laws in place for this to happen.
As a programmer myself, I'm free to choose the GNU GPL license to distribute my works. (And I often do) Notice that it's a license: permission to do or not to do something. When I release something under the GPL, I'm limiting your right to use my works to those terms specified in the Gnu Public License, terms that are widely accepted in this particular corner of the Internet. But it's copyright law that gives me the right to limit distribution in this manner, and I bristle at the idea that you feel that these rights should be taken from me.
Because the marginal cost of making another car is non-zero. Therefore the scarcity is real. The marginal cost of making another MP3 is zero. Therefore any scarcity is artificial. Did you have trouble in economics?
I had no trouble in economics. In fact, in economics class I learned the difference between production costs and reproduction costs. The difference between the two is what you are confusing, and the difference between the two is greater for digital media than the cars, thanks to the Intarwebz. But the point remains the same.
Read up - you might find it enlightening!
If you can't grasp the concept of scarcity, you're going to be incoherent when discussing economics.
I think we can agree on this point. There are two links above where your road to discovery begins!
Scribes found other ways to make a living. Music publishers will too. The digital-copying genie is out of the bottle, the business model is fundamentally broken. The only question is how much time, effort, resources, and lives we will waste trying to go backwards.
Another concept you may want to consider reading on is the fallacy of argument by scenario. The legitimacy of copy rights have nothing to do with scribes. You might also look up "non sequitur" on the same page...
But, in any event, I guess that you are asserting that anybody who produces copyrighted material should just give up now and hurry along, right? Programmers, have no rights to their works anymore, right? On a side note: this would make the GNU GPL worthless, since it's based on copyrights...
So programmers have no rights to their works, anymore. Neither do authors, music writers, photographers, font creators, video-game writers, technical manual writers, database designers, website coordinators, architects, lawyers, hardware engineers, chipset designers, and advertising agents, right?
Hell, the majority of our modern economy needs to get with the program, give up their day jobs - they need to adapt, like scribes, Roman foot soldiers, and town cryers, right?
Methinks you are confusing your front side with your back side when you talk about going backwards...
Saying "it isn't theft" doesn't make it so. And economy, BY DEFINITION is based on "artificial scarcity": Even though there are 400 cars at the car lot, you can't take one home if you don't pony up the cash. Why can't you just take one since they obviously have 400 and you have none? They're creating artificial scarcity for no technical reason! OMG! LET'S STEAL (ahem: "asset transfer") ONE!
Sorry this simple fact is so hard for you to grasp that you call it "incoherent". And just saying "change your business plan" is a waste of digital ink. It's like finding somebody who fell out of an airplane and telling them that if they don't do something quick, they're going to hit the ground.
Come back when you have a clue. Because you are hurting those that do.
I'm a mathematician. Many Slashdotters are programmers, engineers, etc. Isn't our work creative? How come we don;t get a lifetime +90 years gravy train? Is what we do simply not worth as much to society as movies about comic book superheroes and books about high school for witches and wizards? We don't seem to need protection, so why should artists?
As a programmer, you *do* get a lifetime +90 years gravy train. At least, in theory. Software is protected by the same copyright laws that protect Mickey Mouse. And I agree: 90 year copyright term is destructive.
However, if instead, someone had looked at my calculator, taken out a 3D tricorder-mapper-duplicator-thingamabob and had made an exact copy of my calculator, complete with all functionality, and left me with mine, I don't think I would have been quite as upset.
What makes you think that copyright infringement is about you, the consumer? When you buy a copy of a song, and as long as you have the ability to listen to your song, nothing's been taken from you.
(Well... duh!)
Copyright infringement is theft from the copyright holder, not the consumer. And it IS theft. It forces the artist to compete with their own works. That's not right, it's not fair, and destroys the foundation of a free market, supply & demand by destroying the demand side of the equation.
And as long as we're explaining this simple principle to people who haven't clued in to the idea that the content providers matter too, we're busy digging the hole that will eventually bury the idea of "fair use", DRM will win, and copying music at *all* will become illegal.
Want to fight the man? Fight against ridiculous copyright term extensions that are unconstitutional. Fight against the idiocies of software patents. But please, please, please! don't waste your time trying to argue that copyright infringement is a "victimless crime", which just shows that you don't understand what the problem is. Doing so just ruins our chances to fight against the wholesale theft and rape of our cultural history through illegal copyright term extensions!
It may well be that you need a lawyer because our country is fscked up. But changing the fabric of our society is outside the scope of this young startup.
And I don't agree that needing competent legal representation is a sign of a fscked up country. Somebody has make sure that everybody's clear on what's being promised in a contract, which is exactly what attorneys do. And just like doctors use terminology like "mitochondria" and "homo sapiens" to precisely describe what they are talking about, lawyers use similarly precise terminology like "hold harmless" and "collateral estoppel".
Fscked up, or just professional at what they do?
If you invested your life savings as stock in a company, and the CEO did stupids that resulted in a rapid shrinkage of your life savings, you'd want to lynch him, wouldn't you?
If you wrote software that you intended to sell to a client, and somebody else stole the source by cracking your computer and selling it to your client at a greatly reduced cost, you'd want blood, wouldn't you?
If you bought a shiny new car, and six months later, a dirty congress-critter conspired with the evil car company CEOs to make gasoline illegal in favor of diesel, you'd be damned pissed, wouldn't you?
In all these cases, things of value to you were devalued by acts of others. In all these cases, you still hold the "thing" in question containing the value that was stolen from you. You still have the stock from the company, you still have the source code on your computer, and you still have a (worthless) car. And yet, you've still been robbed.
As a copyright holder, copyright infringement is analogous to all of these acts. You still have your original, but the value of that original has been taken from you. Whether you call it "theft" or "piracy" or "copyright infringement" doesn't change the underlying fact. You are still the loser.
I still agree: the RIAA are behaving like a bunch of drunk, stoned, brain-damaged monkeys. They are fighting for their existence while opportunities to profit out the ass are all around them. It's just idiocy, and they don't have the leadership to face the paradisaical, insanely profitable world around them.
But that doesn't mean that "copyright infringement" is ok, it's not. The marketplace works on supply/demand, and bootlegging music destroys the demand side of the marketplace, and it's to the interest of the marketplace (including its consumers) to see that the demand side of the equation is preserved so that the engine of the free market can still operate.
Copyright infringement is still theft.
Want to fix the problem? Fight to have sane copyright laws re-introduced. Having 100+ years to own a copyright (with unlimited future extension) is stupid. In the United States, it's unconstitutional to pass an "ex post-facto" law - how is it that the terms of copyright are being retroactively renegotiated? How is it reasonable to benefit from a copyright from somebody who's been dead for decades? This is Disney, et al. and Congress colluding to rape, pillage, and "lock down" our social culture for profit. They are trying to own who we are, and sell our own culture back to us rather than innovate said culture.
Copyrights should last 20 years, just as the original designers intended. That's reasonable. Copyright holders have a chance to profit from their works, driving the supply/demand marketplace engine, while older works become what they should be: part of our culture itself.
That's what we should fight about. Any time we spend trying to justify piracy/theft/copyright-infringement is time we spend digging a deeper hole for ourselves, with the end result that this trial's outcome IS pretty much a given.
In your gated community, the cameras were purely physical, and the guards are really there to be intimidating. Just like taking your shoes off at the airport does little to provide *real* security, when so many people have unsupervised access to "secure" areas. (if I drive to the local airport, I have to pass everything shy of a rectal examination. But, if I fly a private plane to the same airport, I'm given the red-carpet treatment and my identity is never even so much as questioned...)
Years ago, I set up a computer shop with very little money. I think my total going in was around $2,500 dollars, including the first and last month's rent, advertising, phone expenses, inventory, and furniture. Very, very low budget.
And I made it work! We had card tables with nice table cloths to hold the computers. I made work benches myself out of 2x4s and molded Formica counter tops that were on sale. Etc. Etc.
But for a security system, I got an old 8 MM film camera, drilled a hole in the handle, and bolted it to a bracket I found just outside the back door of the shop. To make it look "live", I found a round headphone wire, plugged it into the headphone jack on the top, and ran it up through a hole that I drilled in the ceiling just above it.
It was big, and intimidating.
For additional measure, I downloaded a tone generator off the Intarwebs and left it on the computer all night long, just loud enough that you could hear it clearly anywhere in the building, but softly enough that you couldn't hear it outside.
The combination of the two was good enough to fool both an alarm company installation tech, and two on-duty police officers. Granted, my measures provided no additional "real" security. But when the front window was broken, none of the expensive computers on display were stolen, and I had no trouble at all with "five finger discounts".
And, how long did your doughnut-loving security guards stop actual crimes from happening with their faux security measures that you never heard of, because they never happened?