That's actually, an anarchist slogan, not Marxist, but it will do here.
(More cynical types assume the Russians bought or stole US chips from the French or other too-helpful go-betweens.)
Doesn't take much cynicism to infer that the Soviets bypassed import restrictions whenever they could. But could they smuggle enough chips to actually keep even a single electronics factory running? I doubt it. Make more sense to rely on homegrown technology, even if its grossly inferior. Having your space program or your military dependent on such an undependable supply chain would be a recipe for disaster. Not that Soviet supply chains were ever anything to brag about, but they'd still be better than that.
And indeed, Soviet military and space electronics featured vacuum tubes (not even discrete transistors!) until the very end.
By the way, another nice policy: 99.8% uptime garanteed.
That's called a "service level agreement." Very common, and not actually a good sign. It means that outages happen often enough for people to get pissed about them. Companies that don't have SLAs usually don't need them because they have enough uptime to keep people happy. One notable exception was DreamHost, which was for a very long time in denial about its inability to keep its systems up. (Which is why I no longer use them.) Though they too have broken down and issued an SLA.
OK, here's what's going to happen. They're extremely cheap and feature rich, so their margins are pretty low. That suggests one of three scenarios:
They attract a lot of customers because of their low prices. (Might not happen, because they seem to do a lousy job of marketing.) That might seem like a good thing, but most small web businesses fail when they try to scale up. It's one thing to run a business when you're just a few friends (or even one person, which is not uncommon for low-end hosting providers), but when you get to the point where you need to organize a larger presence, start hiring system administrators, help desk people, get an HR operation going, find financing to do these things... It's doable — in fact half the companies I've worked for over the years started this way — but 9 times out of 10 the customer base just grows too quickly for even an experienced businessperson to handle — and this is probably a small bunch of techies with limited business experience.
Because of that lousy marketing, they muddle along on their current scale indefinitely. That's the best-case scenario for their customers, though you have to wonder how long the owner/operators will be satisfied with such a meager source of income. Not really worth the effort they must be putting into it.
Here's the one I consider most likely: their business model is totally bogus, and they're running at a loss until they can scale up. Except they're not scaling up, because of their bad marketing. (And even if they do, it sounds to me like they're overestimating the cost savings of scaling up. Which takes us back to the first scenario, only more so.) Eventually they run out of money and have to pull the plug.
I used to work for a cut-rate colo provider that had a lot of small scale customers, many of them low-end hosting providers like this one. One of them seemed to go bust almost every week. We had a big room full of hardware being held in lieu of back payment.
Still, if your web site is just something you do in your spare time, and doesn't generate a crucial amount of income, this might well be the best provider for you. Just back up your data and be prepared to migrate the site when (not if) you need to.
And if your web site is just a hobby, do you really need a 2LD? A purely hypothetical question, since I don't believe that $10 annual registration has any chance of going away.
OK, this is good. But still in the testing phase with the deadline two years away? Say the tests last for 6 months. That leaves maybe 18 months to upgrade every single router. Cutting it just a little fine, especially considering that this problem has been in the news for 12 years.
I use LinkedIn a lot, and I think you overstate their zeal against spam. Yes, it's hard to spam through the contact or question system. But it's pretty trivial to do it in the Groups system. There's nothing in the TOS that forbids spamming group discussions; the worst that can happen is that the group owner will delete your post.
I don't think this is deliberate. It's just that LinkedIn never addresses problems with their web site until a lot of people complain about them. Originally, it was pretty easy to spam through the contact system; it took them a while to start cracking down (and, more importantly, discouraging people from accepting contact requests from people they don't know).
As much as I value LinkedIn, I have a low opinion of whoever does their web design. Things are not named or organized in any sort of rational fashion. The customer support link is not only hard to find, but was actually broken for a long time.
I once sent a friend a link to a group discussion I thought he'd be interested in. When he tried to access this page, he got a permission error, because he wasn't in that group. So fine, redirect him to the page for joining the group. But no, it wouldn't even tell him which group he needed to join!
And don't even get me started on Introductions. And when you consider how basic this feature is to the LinkedIn business model....
Stupid law. It means, for example, that you can no longer keep an email in unencrypted form.
This is why you should never ask Slashdotters for legal advice. Not only are they not lawyers, they overestimate their psychic abilities, and are willing to interpret a law based on a third-hand summary.
Neither TFA (actually a blog by somebody who's using this kerfuffle to encourage people to move to Microsoft SQL server) or the original Information Week article are specific as to who this law applies to. I found the text of the law online:
Remarkably readable for legislation. It applies to anybody who "receives, stores, maintains, processes, or otherwise has access to personal information in connection with the provision of goods or services or in connection with employment." So your email is OK.
Despite what TFA says, I don't see anything that would require anybody to encrypt their databases. The encrypted transmission requirement is there, but it isn't as if SSL is rocket science. But the biggest misinformation in TFA is what has to be protected. Somebody's first and last name isn't sensitive unless it's transmitted or stored "in combination with any one or more of the following data elements that relate to such resident: (a) Social Security number; (b) driver's license number or state-issued identification card number; or (c) financial account number, or credit or debit card number". It then goes on to say that any information that's in the public record is not sensitive and does not need to be protected.
All in all, a pretty reasonable law that merely mandates practices that are already standard at many companies — including Facebook.
Which means that your web site is just a few static pages, right? If you're getting a full-featured LAMP stack for $50/year, I am so switching to your ISP!
So why do you need a 2LD? A third level domain would be just as good.
"I don't see why people think our transportation infrastructure is falling apart; my car runs fine."
The question is not whether you have IPv6 support on your computer. It's, how the heck do you use it? If your ISP doesn't support IPv6 (and very few do) then your IPv6 support is as useless as a car in a country with no roads.
And upgrading an ISP's network to support IPv6 is a lot more complicated than dropping in a new TCP/IP stack into your home computer. You've got to upgrade thousands of routers. And routers aren't just computers with routing software, they're specialized pieces of hardware that know how to move all those packets back and forth. A little loss of efficiency and all of a sudden your network is saturated. Want to bet that routers can be upgraded to IPv6 with no loss of efficiency?
It's certainly doable, but not overnight. And yet almost nobody is working on it in advance of the need. So we'll have thousands of people working on upgrading their networks overnight. Wackiness will ensue.
Well, good for Google. But no, they're not the Internet, just an important part of it. Less important, really, than all the network backbone providers and retail ISPs. Without them, Google's IPv6 interfaces are inaccessible.
The fact that Google has done this and almost nobody else has reflects the positive side of their unstructured organization: if somebody sees a problem that they think needs solving, they just go and solve it, no need to ask permission. Traditional organization tend to trip over their own bureaucracy on stuff like this. (Among other reasons.
But there is a downside: problems that don't catch anybody's imagination just never get solved. Which is why Google never gets around to cleaning up all the little glitches that prevent their products from transitioning out of Beta mode.
This is why Sun (and a lot of other companies) stopped being able to anticipate problems: everything was about making your milestones — which is a real Red Queen's Race, because staffing has been pared to the bone. If you start looking for problems that nobody has told you to solve, you increase your workload and that makes it harder to keep up. So nobody wants to hear about new tasks, no matter how important.
Good for you. But hackers who've transitioned their personal networks isn't going to help much if the main Internet infrastructure doesn't support the new stack.
They could reclaim blocks from companies and then hand out 1 IP for them to run behind a NAT firewall
I believe that's already being done. Though I believe the biggest single owner is DoD.
they could start to charge for IPv4 addresses on a yearly basis
Good idea. Never happen.
I've advocated charging a higher fee for second level domain names for a long time. After all, if you really need one, paying $30/year or even a lot more, is a minor expense compared to your hosting costs. It would put an end to cybersquatting. But every time I suggest it, I get flamed half to death. People won't pay a penny more than they have to for something, and never mind the consequences. Call it the WalMart effect.
The only solution is to move to IPv6. But, as you point out, people won't do this until they have to.
No, worse, they won't even begin preparations. Not a big deal for most of us, but the changeover is going to be non-trivial for ISPs, manufacturers, and a lot of other people who do Internet infrastructure.
When I was at Sun, I was on a product team for a new product with an embedded Service Processor (for remote control, diagnostics, lights-out management, etc.). Whenever I suggested that the new SP have IPv6 support, I was told "none of our customers is asking for this feature."
Who's even trying to transition to IPv6? Considering how close we are to IPv4 Ragnarök, the changeover should be close to finished by now. I don't see any real sign that it's even started.
Not surprising if you realize that third-world countries are badly hurt by IP hoarding. It means they have to pay too much for books, technology, drugs, etc., unless they choose to pirate — which, of course, they often do.
I'm particularly grateful to India for their knockoff drugs. I don't understand all the legalities, but because of the difference in the way patents work in India, it's perfectly legal to reverse-engineer a patented drug and invent your own process for making it. In 2005, they changed the law so that patent holders can force makers of such unauthorized generics to pay royalties, but they still can't stop them altogether, the way they can in the U.S. As a result, unauthorized Indian generics are available for many drugs still under patent, at extremely low prices.
This affected me personally a few years back when I was unemployed, close to broke, and needed to be using a fairly expensive drug on a daily basis. It was particularly galling that the original patent on the drug had expired, but the company had managed to create new patents on the manufacturing process that still gave them exclusive rights. Fortunately, the same drug was available from India for a fraction of the cost. The downside was that my phone was obtained by various mercenary Indian call centers, possibly including the one you saw in Slumdog Millionair.
A most informative post. Pretty good for a guy who spends all his time sitting around waiting for fast molecules to come along, so he can open a tiny door.
Makes me want to patent all the clever hacks I've put into my own code
That is, in fact, a common practice. I've worked at two different software companies that did it routinely. The purpose is not so much to force people to pay you for using your hacks as to use your patents as leverage against other companies in your various legal battles.
Not really practical unless you have a bunch of lawyers on the payroll to figure out what's patentable.
Somebody had the bright idea that people would want every purchase they ever made available to their friends. Like you, I consider this idea demented, though it wouldn't surprise me if there were a lot of people who would find it kind of cool. Consider some of the other stuff you see online that once would have been totally private.
As for your WTF: this sort of thing has been going on for years. They do it because it's an extra revenue stream.
Funny and ironic. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Obama administration has brought a lot of technology geeks into government. Not entirely by design: many were volunteers for his campaign that found that they'd been too fired up by winning the election to go back to their old jobs.
Why is this ironic? Because tech geeks do not tend towards socialist ideologies. If anything, they tend towards hyper-libertarianism. An ideology that's just as detached from the real world as anything Karl Marx dreamed up, but does have the virtue of not being something you can impose on people.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice flame. Kinda pointless though, since the dude clearly has reading issues.
Oddly enough, most journalists know what they don't know. Not to be confused with bloggers, pundits, and talk show hosts.
That's actually, an anarchist slogan, not Marxist, but it will do here.
(More cynical types assume the Russians bought or stole US chips from the French or other too-helpful go-betweens.)
Doesn't take much cynicism to infer that the Soviets bypassed import restrictions whenever they could. But could they smuggle enough chips to actually keep even a single electronics factory running? I doubt it. Make more sense to rely on homegrown technology, even if its grossly inferior. Having your space program or your military dependent on such an undependable supply chain would be a recipe for disaster. Not that Soviet supply chains were ever anything to brag about, but they'd still be better than that.
And indeed, Soviet military and space electronics featured vacuum tubes (not even discrete transistors!) until the very end.
Gee, I wonder why. Even Yakov himself rolls his eyes when he hears an ISR joke.
By the way, another nice policy: 99.8% uptime garanteed.
That's called a "service level agreement." Very common, and not actually a good sign. It means that outages happen often enough for people to get pissed about them. Companies that don't have SLAs usually don't need them because they have enough uptime to keep people happy. One notable exception was DreamHost, which was for a very long time in denial about its inability to keep its systems up. (Which is why I no longer use them.) Though they too have broken down and issued an SLA.
OK, here's what's going to happen. They're extremely cheap and feature rich, so their margins are pretty low. That suggests one of three scenarios:
I used to work for a cut-rate colo provider that had a lot of small scale customers, many of them low-end hosting providers like this one. One of them seemed to go bust almost every week. We had a big room full of hardware being held in lieu of back payment.
Still, if your web site is just something you do in your spare time, and doesn't generate a crucial amount of income, this might well be the best provider for you. Just back up your data and be prepared to migrate the site when (not if) you need to.
And if your web site is just a hobby, do you really need a 2LD? A purely hypothetical question, since I don't believe that $10 annual registration has any chance of going away.
OK, this is good. But still in the testing phase with the deadline two years away? Say the tests last for 6 months. That leaves maybe 18 months to upgrade every single router. Cutting it just a little fine, especially considering that this problem has been in the news for 12 years.
So double hyperbole to you.
I use LinkedIn a lot, and I think you overstate their zeal against spam. Yes, it's hard to spam through the contact or question system. But it's pretty trivial to do it in the Groups system. There's nothing in the TOS that forbids spamming group discussions; the worst that can happen is that the group owner will delete your post.
I don't think this is deliberate. It's just that LinkedIn never addresses problems with their web site until a lot of people complain about them. Originally, it was pretty easy to spam through the contact system; it took them a while to start cracking down (and, more importantly, discouraging people from accepting contact requests from people they don't know).
As much as I value LinkedIn, I have a low opinion of whoever does their web design. Things are not named or organized in any sort of rational fashion. The customer support link is not only hard to find, but was actually broken for a long time.
I once sent a friend a link to a group discussion I thought he'd be interested in. When he tried to access this page, he got a permission error, because he wasn't in that group. So fine, redirect him to the page for joining the group. But no, it wouldn't even tell him which group he needed to join!
And don't even get me started on Introductions. And when you consider how basic this feature is to the LinkedIn business model....
Stupid law. It means, for example, that you can no longer keep an email in unencrypted form.
This is why you should never ask Slashdotters for legal advice. Not only are they not lawyers, they overestimate their psychic abilities, and are willing to interpret a law based on a third-hand summary.
Neither TFA (actually a blog by somebody who's using this kerfuffle to encourage people to move to Microsoft SQL server) or the original Information Week article are specific as to who this law applies to. I found the text of the law online:
http://www.mass.gov/Eoca/docs/idtheft/201CMR1700reg.pdf
Remarkably readable for legislation. It applies to anybody who "receives, stores, maintains, processes, or otherwise has access to personal information in connection with the provision of goods or services or in connection with employment." So your email is OK.
Despite what TFA says, I don't see anything that would require anybody to encrypt their databases. The encrypted transmission requirement is there, but it isn't as if SSL is rocket science. But the biggest misinformation in TFA is what has to be protected. Somebody's first and last name isn't sensitive unless it's transmitted or stored "in combination with any one or more of the following data elements that relate to such resident: (a) Social Security number; (b) driver's license number or state-issued identification card number; or (c) financial account number, or credit or debit card number". It then goes on to say that any information that's in the public record is not sensitive and does not need to be protected.
All in all, a pretty reasonable law that merely mandates practices that are already standard at many companies — including Facebook.
Interesting. Do you know how long they've been around? How's their spam filter?
Which means that your web site is just a few static pages, right? If you're getting a full-featured LAMP stack for $50/year, I am so switching to your ISP!
So why do you need a 2LD? A third level domain would be just as good.
"I don't see why people think our transportation infrastructure is falling apart; my car runs fine."
The question is not whether you have IPv6 support on your computer. It's, how the heck do you use it? If your ISP doesn't support IPv6 (and very few do) then your IPv6 support is as useless as a car in a country with no roads.
And upgrading an ISP's network to support IPv6 is a lot more complicated than dropping in a new TCP/IP stack into your home computer. You've got to upgrade thousands of routers. And routers aren't just computers with routing software, they're specialized pieces of hardware that know how to move all those packets back and forth. A little loss of efficiency and all of a sudden your network is saturated. Want to bet that routers can be upgraded to IPv6 with no loss of efficiency?
It's certainly doable, but not overnight. And yet almost nobody is working on it in advance of the need. So we'll have thousands of people working on upgrading their networks overnight. Wackiness will ensue.
Well, good for Google. But no, they're not the Internet, just an important part of it. Less important, really, than all the network backbone providers and retail ISPs. Without them, Google's IPv6 interfaces are inaccessible.
The fact that Google has done this and almost nobody else has reflects the positive side of their unstructured organization: if somebody sees a problem that they think needs solving, they just go and solve it, no need to ask permission. Traditional organization tend to trip over their own bureaucracy on stuff like this. (Among other reasons.
But there is a downside: problems that don't catch anybody's imagination just never get solved. Which is why Google never gets around to cleaning up all the little glitches that prevent their products from transitioning out of Beta mode.
"So we'll work on it then."
This is why Sun (and a lot of other companies) stopped being able to anticipate problems: everything was about making your milestones — which is a real Red Queen's Race, because staffing has been pared to the bone. If you start looking for problems that nobody has told you to solve, you increase your workload and that makes it harder to keep up. So nobody wants to hear about new tasks, no matter how important.
Good for you. But hackers who've transitioned their personal networks isn't going to help much if the main Internet infrastructure doesn't support the new stack.
They could reclaim blocks from companies and then hand out 1 IP for them to run behind a NAT firewall
I believe that's already being done. Though I believe the biggest single owner is DoD.
they could start to charge for IPv4 addresses on a yearly basis
Good idea. Never happen.
I've advocated charging a higher fee for second level domain names for a long time. After all, if you really need one, paying $30/year or even a lot more, is a minor expense compared to your hosting costs. It would put an end to cybersquatting. But every time I suggest it, I get flamed half to death. People won't pay a penny more than they have to for something, and never mind the consequences. Call it the WalMart effect.
The only solution is to move to IPv6. But, as you point out, people won't do this until they have to.
No, worse, they won't even begin preparations. Not a big deal for most of us, but the changeover is going to be non-trivial for ISPs, manufacturers, and a lot of other people who do Internet infrastructure.
When I was at Sun, I was on a product team for a new product with an embedded Service Processor (for remote control, diagnostics, lights-out management, etc.). Whenever I suggested that the new SP have IPv6 support, I was told "none of our customers is asking for this feature."
Right, it's somebody else problem. The question is, who?
Who's even trying to transition to IPv6? Considering how close we are to IPv4 Ragnarök, the changeover should be close to finished by now. I don't see any real sign that it's even started.
Not surprising if you realize that third-world countries are badly hurt by IP hoarding. It means they have to pay too much for books, technology, drugs, etc., unless they choose to pirate — which, of course, they often do.
I'm particularly grateful to India for their knockoff drugs. I don't understand all the legalities, but because of the difference in the way patents work in India, it's perfectly legal to reverse-engineer a patented drug and invent your own process for making it. In 2005, they changed the law so that patent holders can force makers of such unauthorized generics to pay royalties, but they still can't stop them altogether, the way they can in the U.S. As a result, unauthorized Indian generics are available for many drugs still under patent, at extremely low prices.
This affected me personally a few years back when I was unemployed, close to broke, and needed to be using a fairly expensive drug on a daily basis. It was particularly galling that the original patent on the drug had expired, but the company had managed to create new patents on the manufacturing process that still gave them exclusive rights. Fortunately, the same drug was available from India for a fraction of the cost. The downside was that my phone was obtained by various mercenary Indian call centers, possibly including the one you saw in Slumdog Millionair.
A most informative post. Pretty good for a guy who spends all his time sitting around waiting for fast molecules to come along, so he can open a tiny door.
Makes me want to patent all the clever hacks I've put into my own code
That is, in fact, a common practice. I've worked at two different software companies that did it routinely. The purpose is not so much to force people to pay you for using your hacks as to use your patents as leverage against other companies in your various legal battles.
Not really practical unless you have a bunch of lawyers on the payroll to figure out what's patentable.
Somebody had the bright idea that people would want every purchase they ever made available to their friends. Like you, I consider this idea demented, though it wouldn't surprise me if there were a lot of people who would find it kind of cool. Consider some of the other stuff you see online that once would have been totally private.
As for your WTF: this sort of thing has been going on for years. They do it because it's an extra revenue stream.
It takes more than that to bring me tears.
So, is the problem in the Joliet spec or MS's implementation of it?
CDs don't use FAT. Probably ISO 9660. In which case the bug would be in Microsoft's implementation of that standard.
Funny and ironic. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Obama administration has brought a lot of technology geeks into government. Not entirely by design: many were volunteers for his campaign that found that they'd been too fired up by winning the election to go back to their old jobs.
Why is this ironic? Because tech geeks do not tend towards socialist ideologies. If anything, they tend towards hyper-libertarianism. An ideology that's just as detached from the real world as anything Karl Marx dreamed up, but does have the virtue of not being something you can impose on people.
The patent is not for the FAT filesystem itself. The patent is for the kludge that allows FAT to support both long filenames and 8.3 filenames.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_filename