That's informative, but I thought the point about GET vs. POST and PUT was confusing.
To be clear, the Timeout directive can be set low without affecting the ability of people to upload large files to the server. Timeout only applies to the time between packets, which should be a few hundred milliseconds apart under most circumstances, right?
From the httpd manual:
The TimeOut directive currently defines the amount of time Apache will wait for three things:
1. The total amount of time it takes to receive a GET request.
2. The amount of time between receipt of TCP packets on a POST or PUT request.
3. The amount of time between ACKs on transmissions of TCP packets in responses.
We plan on making these separately configurable at some point down the road. The timer used to default to 1200 before 1.2, but has been lowered to 300 which is still far more than necessary in most situations. It is not set any lower by default because there may still be odd places in the code where the timer is not reset when a packet is sent.
I went through two of those ginormous, 9V-battery-powered Gameline cartridges. That was like magic, being able to log in to a proto-BBS using an Atari 2600. It's not like the games were that great, but the whole process of connecting, logging on, and browsing the service was entertaining all on its own. Just trying to figure out how it worked, and why it broke so often, probably set me on the path to being a hacker.
I had no idea that CVC (the operator) became America Online, but it makes perfect sense. Gameline had mainstream distribution, proprietary dialup networking, and a walled garden full of crappy content. Anyone who actually remembers AOL will recognize the similarities immediately.
As an longtime consumer of printed media, I really have no problem paying for a subscription to a daily newspaper and a few magazines on subjects I care about. Back in the day, the primary benefit of a subscription was home delivery ("Never miss an issue!") and a discount off of what it would cost to buy the publication on the street.
So what are the possible benefits now? I can think of a few things that would make subscribing worthwhile:
- Access to articles -- this is the porn/academic journal approach where you can only see the good stuff if you pay. This only works if what you offer is REALLY good and not available elsewhere.
- Freedom from advertising -- I would pay $10/mo to NYTime Company today if they would stop putting animated ads and buttons on their pages.
- Convenient access -- this is the Kindle approach, where your subscription grants you access to well-formatted content from mobile or dedicated devices. This only works if the content is truly well-formatted, which it is often not on the Kindle. This is more or less the iTunes model, too, because you pay a small premium for the tight integration of content and device.
- Affiliation -- this is the public radio approach: you support the station, they send you t-shirts and other crap that allow you to identify in public as a supporter. Commercial media are kind of blind to this, but it has worked really well for some organizations for a long time.
Can a room full of newspaper execs come up with actual reasons why we should subscribe like this? I dunno. I doubt it. I suspect they will put up paywalls, but then continue to show annoying ads, ignore mobile devices, and botch the affiliation angle like they always have. Bankruptcy comes to all dinosaurs sooner or later. If they could learn from Slashdot (which has an *excellent* subscription scheme) they already would have.
Among Microsoft's many problems as a company is that they seem to systematically change the names of their products every few years. This is an incredibly wasteful policy. Every time they enact one of these name changes they:
- throw out years' worth of marketing effort
- break documentation and references throughout their website
- break third-party web resources, including howtos, forum advice, and other forms of community support
- force everyone who has to support the product to change all of their references, documentation, marketing, etc.
Why MS shareholders and partners don't see name churn as having a real, damaging impact on the company's long-term success is beyond me.
You're not going to be able to prove that you developed FTL travel until you can prove that you got to somewhere (and back, presumably) at faster than the speed of light. A galactic positioning system would be quite handy for figuring out exactly where that somewhere was, and how to get back home.
Anyway, it would be quite nice to know exactly where you were even if you stayed within our solar system. Plenty of room to get lost out there...
Replicators... because in America, I totally need another way to get junk food conveniently without moving from my couch.
Not to mention "Build Your Own Cheetos" and "Any-color Any-texture M&Ms". We don't just want junk food, we want designer junk food that we can design ourselves.
It helps remind us that we are special snowflakes.
This issue is one that any reasonably successful online community struggles with: the technology can be made to scale quite easily, but the social contract it runs on cannot.
Yahoo! built a global-scale internet community, before (apparently) figuring out how they would provide enough moderators to enforce their acceptable use policy in a reasonable way. There is NOTHING inevitable about this, despite what Bennett Haselton writes. Nobody asked them to get so big, so quickly. Nobody required their architects to ignore policy and human nature when designing their systems.
So yes, suing Yahoo! doesn't fix this instance of the problem (the ex-boyfriend). But it does force them to address the larger issue of policy enforcement within their community. If they can't figure out that it needs to scale effectively, then we need to bring it to their attention in a way that they can't ignore. Yahoo! is just as bound by their policies as Yahoo! users are.
We're going to hit a point really soon when the main difference between flash drives will be what OS they use to protect your data and what other functions are on the same chip.
As in, a flash drive that's not really a flash drive, it's a small computer that emulates a drive when plugged in to another computer. With wi-fi, GPS, bluetooth, etc.
You'll pay extra for a drive that's smart enough to protect/hide important data from malware on any computer you plug it into, back up data to a remote server when wireless is available, phone home if lost or stolen, and tag files with location metadata as they are created.
Those options are not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for exact symbol search in strings like "C#" or "x = y * 2", and also, case sensitive search. Sometimes one needs to find identifiers on the internet (and not just in google code search).
Exactly.
If you've never tried to learn more about A* using Google, then don't bother posting about how Advanced Search is your friend. It isn't. Go try it.
It will be interesting to see if they just repeat whatever is on the RSS feed from the White House Press Office (they have been disseminating info from day one using RSS) or if the staffers assigned to the various social networks will adopt a voice that's tailored to that network.
If the latter, this could be a good thing, as it will reach more people where they live and play. But if they're just going to shoehorn every press release into 140 characters, then no thanks.
But if they DO send different messages to different networks, then some folks might feel left out, and it will be more difficult to monitor what they're saying.
What makes you trust your colo provider or ISP more than you trust Google?
I have this same feeling myself, but I've never been able to articulate exactly how Google are any different from any other commercial provider. They employ engineers who are smart enough to avoid the kinds of dumb mistakes that result in data leaks. They are too big to care about you personally.
If I can manage to trust Verizon, why shouldn't I trust Google?
Keywords and meta-data entered in the client while everything is decrypted. Or automatic indexing by whatever does the encryption.
You're not wrong to point out that frequency analysis and other techniques would render this less secure than a perfect black box. But it's also significantly better than trusting Google or your ISP with plain text.
What makes this even more egregious is that these are exactly the same transactions that we now routinely pay up to $3 for.
In other words, if you're not a customer of the bank which owns the ATM you are using, you're getting ripped off *and* exposing your PIN to man-in-the-middle attacks. And let's not forget that your $3 also buys you up to $50 of liability for any theft against your account.
My experience with ports/packages vs apt-get (about 10 years worth as a real world admin) is that the theoretical advantages of apt-get are no big deal.
I take it you don't upgrade Apache, MySQL, and PHP very often?
Using ports is kinda okay when setting up a new server. You expect it to take a few hours. But the fifth or sixth time you have to recompile MySQL you start thinking there might be better things to do with your life.
#apt-get dist-upgrade and you're done in five minutes.
Having worked on film crews, I can tell you that those rights apply to individuals, but not commercial photographers producing works for hire.
Google is not a private citizen. It never will be. It is a commercial entity and subject to regulation in almost everything it does, including taking pictures on public streets.
I thoroughly agree that people should have the right to take photos in public places.
But Google is NOT a person. They are an advertising company. The photos in question are being taken for commercial purposes (don't kid yourself by saying that maps is free), and commercial photography can and should be regulated to ensure that it is done in a way that is safe, sane, and not exploitative.
Commercial photography typically requires a film permit, which allows local authorities to review your plans and ensure that public safety and convenience are not going to be affected. You must also obtain photo releases from anyone your photograph, whether they are in a public place or not, if you decide to use their likeness in the finished work.
We like to give Google a pass on this stuff because maps and street view are so damn useful, but they really need to obtain permits and releases like any other commercial photographer.
Music are up by 10%, in a year where almost everything else cratered.
Everything else is blah blah blah who cares? CDs have been dead to me for years, DVDs and books are next. Vinyl records, actually worth keeping around because of their acoustical properties, are the only dead media that I really miss.
Even the Oracle at Delphi could not have predicted these events with sufficient clarity to allow the Founding Fathers to draft a document...
That's where you're wrong. The Oracle DID predict this, but Ancient Association of Hallucinatory Futurists (AAHF) restricted dissemination of all but the most obvious predictions, in order to keep them out of the hands of pirates and revolutionaries.
In other words, King George saw it coming, but our Founding Fathers could not.
These days, if a professor gives a kid a C on a paper, the dean of the college gets a call from the kid's parents demanding that the grade be changed to something better.
So just wait: one of these days, your new hire's mother is going to call you up and chew you out for not realizing how special her kid is. After all, he always got As on his college papers...
I pay you $70,000 a year. You benefits and taxes cost me about 40% of your salary; we'll round it up to an even $100k to make the math easy. You will be "working" for about 1800-1900 hours a year...
Among the many things they don't teach in college is an appreciation for the fact that you cost your company far more than they actually pay you. Where I work, we double an employee's annual salary to get some idea how much benefits, rent, electricity, and management cost. In some organizations (with large management structures or a lot of travel expenses) they triple it.
Bottom line, if you earn $80,000 per year, be prepared to bring in (or at least carry out) $160,000 worth of business. Until you can do that, reliably, be prepared to do whatever menial tasks your employer hired you to do.
Slashdot Mirror
That's informative, but I thought the point about GET vs. POST and PUT was confusing.
To be clear, the Timeout directive can be set low without affecting the ability of people to upload large files to the server. Timeout only applies to the time between packets, which should be a few hundred milliseconds apart under most circumstances, right?
From the httpd manual:
I went through two of those ginormous, 9V-battery-powered Gameline cartridges. That was like magic, being able to log in to a proto-BBS using an Atari 2600. It's not like the games were that great, but the whole process of connecting, logging on, and browsing the service was entertaining all on its own. Just trying to figure out how it worked, and why it broke so often, probably set me on the path to being a hacker.
I had no idea that CVC (the operator) became America Online, but it makes perfect sense. Gameline had mainstream distribution, proprietary dialup networking, and a walled garden full of crappy content. Anyone who actually remembers AOL will recognize the similarities immediately.
As an longtime consumer of printed media, I really have no problem paying for a subscription to a daily newspaper and a few magazines on subjects I care about. Back in the day, the primary benefit of a subscription was home delivery ("Never miss an issue!") and a discount off of what it would cost to buy the publication on the street.
So what are the possible benefits now? I can think of a few things that would make subscribing worthwhile:
- Access to articles -- this is the porn/academic journal approach where you can only see the good stuff if you pay. This only works if what you offer is REALLY good and not available elsewhere.
- Freedom from advertising -- I would pay $10/mo to NYTime Company today if they would stop putting animated ads and buttons on their pages.
- Convenient access -- this is the Kindle approach, where your subscription grants you access to well-formatted content from mobile or dedicated devices. This only works if the content is truly well-formatted, which it is often not on the Kindle. This is more or less the iTunes model, too, because you pay a small premium for the tight integration of content and device.
- Affiliation -- this is the public radio approach: you support the station, they send you t-shirts and other crap that allow you to identify in public as a supporter. Commercial media are kind of blind to this, but it has worked really well for some organizations for a long time.
Can a room full of newspaper execs come up with actual reasons why we should subscribe like this? I dunno. I doubt it. I suspect they will put up paywalls, but then continue to show annoying ads, ignore mobile devices, and botch the affiliation angle like they always have. Bankruptcy comes to all dinosaurs sooner or later. If they could learn from Slashdot (which has an *excellent* subscription scheme) they already would have.
Yeah, but why not just make the existing products BETTER?
Dumb question, I know I know.
Among Microsoft's many problems as a company is that they seem to systematically change the names of their products every few years. This is an incredibly wasteful policy. Every time they enact one of these name changes they:
- throw out years' worth of marketing effort
- break documentation and references throughout their website
- break third-party web resources, including howtos, forum advice, and other forms of community support
- force everyone who has to support the product to change all of their references, documentation, marketing, etc.
Why MS shareholders and partners don't see name churn as having a real, damaging impact on the company's long-term success is beyond me.
You're not going to be able to prove that you developed FTL travel until you can prove that you got to somewhere (and back, presumably) at faster than the speed of light. A galactic positioning system would be quite handy for figuring out exactly where that somewhere was, and how to get back home.
Anyway, it would be quite nice to know exactly where you were even if you stayed within our solar system. Plenty of room to get lost out there...
Replicators... because in America, I totally need another way to get junk food conveniently without moving from my couch.
Not to mention "Build Your Own Cheetos" and "Any-color Any-texture M&Ms". We don't just want junk food, we want designer junk food that we can design ourselves.
It helps remind us that we are special snowflakes.
This issue is one that any reasonably successful online community struggles with: the technology can be made to scale quite easily, but the social contract it runs on cannot.
Yahoo! built a global-scale internet community, before (apparently) figuring out how they would provide enough moderators to enforce their acceptable use policy in a reasonable way. There is NOTHING inevitable about this, despite what Bennett Haselton writes. Nobody asked them to get so big, so quickly. Nobody required their architects to ignore policy and human nature when designing their systems.
So yes, suing Yahoo! doesn't fix this instance of the problem (the ex-boyfriend). But it does force them to address the larger issue of policy enforcement within their community. If they can't figure out that it needs to scale effectively, then we need to bring it to their attention in a way that they can't ignore. Yahoo! is just as bound by their policies as Yahoo! users are.
We're going to hit a point really soon when the main difference between flash drives will be what OS they use to protect your data and what other functions are on the same chip.
As in, a flash drive that's not really a flash drive, it's a small computer that emulates a drive when plugged in to another computer. With wi-fi, GPS, bluetooth, etc.
You'll pay extra for a drive that's smart enough to protect/hide important data from malware on any computer you plug it into, back up data to a remote server when wireless is available, phone home if lost or stolen, and tag files with location metadata as they are created.
And of course this already exists, as an SD card for cameras: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001ACXHXE/ Welcome to the future!
Those options are not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for exact symbol search in strings like "C#" or "x = y * 2", and also, case sensitive search. Sometimes one needs to find identifiers on the internet (and not just in google code search).
Exactly.
If you've never tried to learn more about A* using Google, then don't bother posting about how Advanced Search is your friend. It isn't. Go try it.
It will be interesting to see if they just repeat whatever is on the RSS feed from the White House Press Office (they have been disseminating info from day one using RSS) or if the staffers assigned to the various social networks will adopt a voice that's tailored to that network.
If the latter, this could be a good thing, as it will reach more people where they live and play. But if they're just going to shoehorn every press release into 140 characters, then no thanks.
But if they DO send different messages to different networks, then some folks might feel left out, and it will be more difficult to monitor what they're saying.
What makes you trust your colo provider or ISP more than you trust Google?
I have this same feeling myself, but I've never been able to articulate exactly how Google are any different from any other commercial provider. They employ engineers who are smart enough to avoid the kinds of dumb mistakes that result in data leaks. They are too big to care about you personally.
If I can manage to trust Verizon, why shouldn't I trust Google?
And these tokens are generated how?
Keywords and meta-data entered in the client while everything is decrypted. Or automatic indexing by whatever does the encryption.
You're not wrong to point out that frequency analysis and other techniques would render this less secure than a perfect black box. But it's also significantly better than trusting Google or your ISP with plain text.
We used to cobble together SSL Accelerators from womp rats back home, and they're not much less scalable than a BIG IP-6900.
"One visit, and now I walk around with a shit-eating grin."
So where is the pricey SoHo boutique I can go to to be cleaned out and re-populated with an exclusive culture grown by Natalie Portman?
I know the economy is bad, but the bio venture capitalists are really slipping if this isn't an option by now.
What makes this even more egregious is that these are exactly the same transactions that we now routinely pay up to $3 for.
In other words, if you're not a customer of the bank which owns the ATM you are using, you're getting ripped off *and* exposing your PIN to man-in-the-middle attacks. And let's not forget that your $3 also buys you up to $50 of liability for any theft against your account.
Bankers are more evil than spammers.
My experience with ports/packages vs apt-get (about 10 years worth as a real world admin) is that the theoretical advantages of apt-get are no big deal.
I take it you don't upgrade Apache, MySQL, and PHP very often?
Using ports is kinda okay when setting up a new server. You expect it to take a few hours. But the fifth or sixth time you have to recompile MySQL you start thinking there might be better things to do with your life.
#apt-get dist-upgrade and you're done in five minutes.
Having worked on film crews, I can tell you that those rights apply to individuals, but not commercial photographers producing works for hire.
Google is not a private citizen. It never will be. It is a commercial entity and subject to regulation in almost everything it does, including taking pictures on public streets.
I thoroughly agree that people should have the right to take photos in public places.
But Google is NOT a person. They are an advertising company. The photos in question are being taken for commercial purposes (don't kid yourself by saying that maps is free), and commercial photography can and should be regulated to ensure that it is done in a way that is safe, sane, and not exploitative.
Commercial photography typically requires a film permit, which allows local authorities to review your plans and ensure that public safety and convenience are not going to be affected. You must also obtain photo releases from anyone your photograph, whether they are in a public place or not, if you decide to use their likeness in the finished work.
We like to give Google a pass on this stuff because maps and street view are so damn useful, but they really need to obtain permits and releases like any other commercial photographer.
Sounds like it's time to start staging "sing ins" in government offices.
Music are up by 10%, in a year where almost everything else cratered.
Everything else is blah blah blah who cares? CDs have been dead to me for years, DVDs and books are next. Vinyl records, actually worth keeping around because of their acoustical properties, are the only dead media that I really miss.
Even the Oracle at Delphi could not have predicted these events with sufficient clarity to allow the Founding Fathers to draft a document...
That's where you're wrong. The Oracle DID predict this, but Ancient Association of Hallucinatory Futurists (AAHF) restricted dissemination of all but the most obvious predictions, in order to keep them out of the hands of pirates and revolutionaries.
In other words, King George saw it coming, but our Founding Fathers could not.
These days, if a professor gives a kid a C on a paper, the dean of the college gets a call from the kid's parents demanding that the grade be changed to something better.
So just wait: one of these days, your new hire's mother is going to call you up and chew you out for not realizing how special her kid is. After all, he always got As on his college papers...
I pay you $70,000 a year. You benefits and taxes cost me about 40% of your salary; we'll round it up to an even $100k to make the math easy. You will be "working" for about 1800-1900 hours a year...
Among the many things they don't teach in college is an appreciation for the fact that you cost your company far more than they actually pay you. Where I work, we double an employee's annual salary to get some idea how much benefits, rent, electricity, and management cost. In some organizations (with large management structures or a lot of travel expenses) they triple it.
Bottom line, if you earn $80,000 per year, be prepared to bring in (or at least carry out) $160,000 worth of business. Until you can do that, reliably, be prepared to do whatever menial tasks your employer hired you to do.