1) Will there be a mass exodus of cable modem users to DSL? Could this be the shot in the arm Covad needs?
2) Will the NetZero service be able to handle the influx of customers from Comcast? I'm sure all the NetZero customers will be real happy when they get endless busy signals.
3) Will ComCast pay for a user's modem so that they can use this "backup" if they don't already have a modem?
I'm guessing they through this situation at the PR department and that it was the best they could come up with.
Actually JBOSS includes Tomcat within it's framework for serving up Java Servlets, JSP's, etc. Tomcat is purely a server for Web Applications where as JBOSS does EJB's, and a whole slew of other things.
This is a legitimate lawsuit because it attempts to establish legal guidelines for publication of such things. As it stands right now, the mere threat of lawsuit is sufficient to keep many people quiet. If this goes to court at least people know where they stand. If the court had ruled in favor of Felten, then any loose lawsuits would be seen as frivolous against the background of this case law.
Now, we don't know what will happen. Some person will have to be the sacrificial lamb to find out what the limits of this law are, and that person will suffer for it.
I think the checks and balances are intact for the following reason:
I'm just as afraid of Bush and Ashcroft screwing up our country as I am of the judiciary. Let us also not forget that congress' wisdom was what got this stuff into court in the first place. The checks and balances are just fine... each branch of government is exceptionally capable of screwing everything up!
The short list of why he's unsympathetic...
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 1
Because he's a hacker...
Because he publishes a hacker magazine...
Because he's got long hair (I'll take your word for it, I don't have a photo handy:))
Has it GOTTEN to the point where no one with long hair should expect a fair trial? I thought it had been there for the past couple hundred years, but perhaps I missed something.
Just read the transcripts from the original trial and it's stunningly obvious how unsympathetic he is. It is not because of anything he's actively doing but an image that he portrays none the less.
Re:Anybody know a good travel agent?
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 1
And as others have pointed out, VMWare essentially accomplishes this task. It is also an amazing resource hog.
Now what would be really cool is a way to do rapid dual boot. Something where you could have both OS's resident in some sort of temporary memory. So I can hit a key stroke, and like 10 seconds later be in to the other operating system ready to roll. Basically I'm thinking something like souped up version of laptop hibernation where it stores state.
Also, if you pay for what you use, the Cable company suddenly has a financial incentive to come do repair work quickly. If you are offline, they aren't getting a dime.
Who pays the bill when somebody launches a DOS attack against me?
Everybody and their neighbors are all using the network from 6-9 at night and so nobody gets any bandwidth. I on the other hand tend to be on after 11:00 at night. So the bandwidth I'm using costs them relatively less because of when i'm using it.
If you want to do billing for usage, what would be very cool is if you could have some sort of intelligent rate negotiation built into the network. So, I can set parameters in my router that will limit my network usage when it's at expensive high demand times and then crank it up when it's off hours. Part of that control could include detection of DOS attacks and could cut them off before they run up a bill. I'm a power user, and what I do on-line most of the time probably doesn't need more than 128-256Kbps average download speeds, but sometimes if I'm downloading something big (Linux ISO's, etc), It's nice to get T-1 speeds.
Also, perhaps you could vary the rates depending on whether traffic is outbound or inbound. I host my own website, DNS, etc, so I need a reasonable amount of upstream bandwidth. But even that demand is sporadic at best. I need short bursts of bandwidth but nothing large over a long period of time.
Tied into all of this intelligence should be a robust billing system at the provider. This would allow you to see your current usage, projected monthly usage, and resultant expected bill. If my bill is getting out of hand for the month, I can tell my router to trim back my bandwidth usage at peak times or whatever.
This is the kind of system that would make these services work properly. Right now, the problem is that the Cable companies are setting prices based on a certain assumed usage per customer. That usage varies, and if there is an external factor (increased use of NAT'ed 802.11b networks) that contributes to broad bandwidth usage increases, that effects their bottom line. The problem of course right now is that if they charge more, it has to be charged equally across all customers.
The cable company "solution" of providing their own alternative to NAT is bad. It seems to make the assumption that the number of devices connected is proportional to the amount of bandwidth used. One person running a 32 player counterstrike server on one computer will suck up way more bandwidth than the average family of four even if they all have computers.
Terrorism is an alternative for of communication. People who feel they have no effective means of expressing their concerns about the government, etc, get frustrated and try to find a way to get their message out. When communications channels are closed down in a heavily censored state, it drives people to the only means they have available, getting guns and bombs (and germs?) and wreaking havoc.
One of the reasons this country has had a consitent government and relative stability despite the dramatic changes we've made over the last 200 years is the freedom of speech. We don't feel as compelled to resorting to violent revolution, etc, because for the most part we feel we have a voice for our grievances. It is only when people feel powerless that they start resorting to to terrorism.
So, interestingly by promoting existing powers in certain countries who are oppressive we are sowing the seeds for more future terrorism. Of course that terrorism won't stay within their borders because we are acting as backers and are thus guilty by association.
What you are describing is something that a USER does with the software which is exactly his point. I don't think he takes issue with users using free software with non-free software but rather that the non-free software exists in the first place.
His issue is with the corporations and the developers who use closed licenses. I suspect that if your description of his position was accurate there'd be no such thing as the LGPL. That license is all about giving people the freedom to interoperate between open and closed software.
If every school in the country started using it, the amount of educational software for Linux would suddenly grow substantially. Also, don't forget that one of the biggest pieces of educational software is already available for linux:
I know the press plays fast and loose with the definitions of various anti-social computer programs, but is this really a virus? If the FBI engineers a trojan horse to compromise somebody's machine, that's one thing, but a virus implies that it would spread.
Interestingly if it was a virus, the people who'd be most vulnerable to it would be those who don't take proper security precautions with their computer in the first place. So people who really have something to hide and are trying really hard to hide it are going to be least vulnerable to this approach.
The process you described is irrelevant of differences in languages. It's always better to break down your code into components and debug the components as much as possible seperately. Coding those chunks in different languages is just adding possibly unnecessary complexity in doing integration testing between the components.
From personal experience using JNI, I found it to be a giant pain to try to debug the code. Sure you can test the underlying C++ code on it's own and test the Java on it's own, but when you glue them together you get new bugs and debuggind between the two layers is much more difficult than if it was all Java in the first place. In that case we had no choice but to use two languages so we put up with it.
As for using printf's, what does that have to do with how you wrote the code? If you choose to debug using printf's that has nothing to do with if you have one big mound of spaghetti code or a well designed modular architecture.
American culture is like junk food. Almost everybody really likes it but they feel bad for liking it. They know they should choose something that's better for them but they can't help it.
A common problem with open source software developers is that they seem to be convinced that they can fund most of the development effort of a product and still make a good profit on the product.
Look at what RedHat does, they sell Linux support and services and they package the product with instructions, etc. Are they the primary developer of Linux? No. They fund a small chunk of development, enough to give them some say in where it goes, but not enough to really hurt their bottom line. Now we have RedHat DB which is simply a repackaged postgresql, yet another thing they've not put vast resources into. Because of those reduced costs they can actually afford to have a business where the software they sell is free to download.
The power of open source comes from a community burden of development. Several people and organizations can share the costs of developing the software. Something that I have yet to see take hold is the realization that open source doesn't have to be developed by traditional software companies. When open source will get really interesting is when you see insurance companies, banks, and other software dependent organizations making contributions to the community. There's a tremendous financial incentive to use open source software and to contribute innovations in that software back to the community.
The notion of a secure private network for the government seems like a decent idea. To think that through such a private network we can avoid some sort of internet peral harbor is absurd. Why? Real simple: was the world trade center a government building?
Why would any terrorist waste their time and resources trying to take down the FBI when it could go after banks, airports, power grids, and a whole host of other things that are on the public Internet? All of those things are far more visible and have a far more significant immediate impact on the lives of US citizens. Remember, terrorism isn't about taking out strategic assets, but creating a sense of fear in the every day lives of normal unassuming people.
Now, one might say that the answer to this quandry is to put corporations on that network. Of course then you are expanding the base of users and increasing the likelyhood that a few terrorists (or those easily bribed or fooled by them) will be able to breach that network. I suspect that even putting large swaths of the government on that network already risks that compromise within the government itself but that just amplifies it.
Why don't we take that money and put it into developing policies and technologies that will make the current networks more secure? I know that this doesn't look as impressive to the public, but in the long run it will probably do more to prevent an Internet Perl Harbor.
Ultimately the people using these languages tend to base their decisions on the platforms they wish to use and less upon the language. If you are running a Unix/Linux environment you aren't going to seriously consider C#, and for the most part doing work in Java under windows is more trouble than it's worth.
I think you'll see that in the long run VB, VC++ shops are going to use C#, and Java shops are going to run Java regardless of the inherent capabilities of the languages.
Now this leads to the ongoing quandry of patent law that nobody seems to have a good solution for. Let us assume for the moment that we have iron clad evidence of prior art, the only way to overturn the patent is a court challenge. Court challenges cost money.
Big corporartions won't challenge a patent in court because there's a huge financial disincentive to do it. They could spend years in court and blow tons of money and still possibly lose. On the other hand, the patent holder will license the patent to them for a less exhorbitant sum. If Adobe had to pay to license PNG from Apple, they'd just pay the fee and pass the extra cost directly to the consumer and not bat an eye.
The people who have the most to gain from challenging patents are small ISV's because they can hardly afford to be dumping limited resources into royalties. That problem is made even more complicated when you are talking about open source development. Of course they can neither afford royalty payments nor the court costs and time necessary to fight the patent. If a patent is going to expire in 4 or 5 years, why bother fighting because by the time you get through the courts it won't matter anymore.
The end result of this is that innovation by small software vendors and open source developers is totally crippled by patents. Whether a patent is for a legitimate innovation or not is irrelevant to these groups because as soon as it gets approved and somebody demonstrates a willingness to enforce it, it becomes off limits to these groups.
While you certainly shouldn't start downing shots of methanol, it really isn't terribly toxic by comparison. If you got it on your clothes it would simply evaporate. The heavy metal sludge you find in most modern batteries makes methanol look pretty tame by comparison. It also means that the environmental impact of the used up batteries will be far less than current batteries.
Slashdot Mirror
s/through/threw/
*sigh* I hate when I do that
This makes me wonder a couple things:
1) Will there be a mass exodus of cable modem users to DSL? Could this be the shot in the arm Covad needs?
2) Will the NetZero service be able to handle the influx of customers from Comcast? I'm sure all the NetZero customers will be real happy when they get endless busy signals.
3) Will ComCast pay for a user's modem so that they can use this "backup" if they don't already have a modem?
I'm guessing they through this situation at the PR department and that it was the best they could come up with.
Actually JBOSS includes Tomcat within it's framework for serving up Java Servlets, JSP's, etc. Tomcat is purely a server for Web Applications where as JBOSS does EJB's, and a whole slew of other things.
Well mine is bigger! Er, I mean smaller. Right. No, not that, I mean ... oh nevermind
This is a legitimate lawsuit because it attempts to establish legal guidelines for publication of such things. As it stands right now, the mere threat of lawsuit is sufficient to keep many people quiet. If this goes to court at least people know where they stand. If the court had ruled in favor of Felten, then any loose lawsuits would be seen as frivolous against the background of this case law.
Now, we don't know what will happen. Some person will have to be the sacrificial lamb to find out what the limits of this law are, and that person will suffer for it.
I think the checks and balances are intact for the following reason:
I'm just as afraid of Bush and Ashcroft screwing up our country as I am of the judiciary. Let us also not forget that congress' wisdom was what got this stuff into court in the first place. The checks and balances are just fine... each branch of government is exceptionally capable of screwing everything up!
Because he's a hacker... :))
Because he publishes a hacker magazine...
Because he's got long hair (I'll take your word for it, I don't have a photo handy
Has it GOTTEN to the point where no one with long hair should expect a fair trial? I thought it had been there for the past couple hundred years, but perhaps I missed something.
Just read the transcripts from the original trial and it's stunningly obvious how unsympathetic he is. It is not because of anything he's actively doing but an image that he portrays none the less.
Mars?
I'm thinking it's getting near time for me to expatriate to a free country.
WOW! That would be .... SLOOOOOOOW
And as others have pointed out, VMWare essentially accomplishes this task. It is also an amazing resource hog.
Now what would be really cool is a way to do rapid dual boot. Something where you could have both OS's resident in some sort of temporary memory. So I can hit a key stroke, and like 10 seconds later be in to the other operating system ready to roll. Basically I'm thinking something like souped up version of laptop hibernation where it stores state.
Also, if you pay for what you use, the Cable company suddenly has a financial incentive to come do repair work quickly. If you are offline, they aren't getting a dime.
Who pays the bill when somebody launches a DOS attack against me?
Everybody and their neighbors are all using the network from 6-9 at night and so nobody gets any bandwidth. I on the other hand tend to be on after 11:00 at night. So the bandwidth I'm using costs them relatively less because of when i'm using it.
If you want to do billing for usage, what would be very cool is if you could have some sort of intelligent rate negotiation built into the network. So, I can set parameters in my router that will limit my network usage when it's at expensive high demand times and then crank it up when it's off hours. Part of that control could include detection of DOS attacks and could cut them off before they run up a bill. I'm a power user, and what I do on-line most of the time probably doesn't need more than 128-256Kbps average download speeds, but sometimes if I'm downloading something big (Linux ISO's, etc), It's nice to get T-1 speeds.
Also, perhaps you could vary the rates depending on whether traffic is outbound or inbound. I host my own website, DNS, etc, so I need a reasonable amount of upstream bandwidth. But even that demand is sporadic at best. I need short bursts of bandwidth but nothing large over a long period of time.
Tied into all of this intelligence should be a robust billing system at the provider. This would allow you to see your current usage, projected monthly usage, and resultant expected bill. If my bill is getting out of hand for the month, I can tell my router to trim back my bandwidth usage at peak times or whatever.
This is the kind of system that would make these services work properly. Right now, the problem is that the Cable companies are setting prices based on a certain assumed usage per customer. That usage varies, and if there is an external factor (increased use of NAT'ed 802.11b networks) that contributes to broad bandwidth usage increases, that effects their bottom line. The problem of course right now is that if they charge more, it has to be charged equally across all customers.
The cable company "solution" of providing their own alternative to NAT is bad. It seems to make the assumption that the number of devices connected is proportional to the amount of bandwidth used. One person running a 32 player counterstrike server on one computer will suck up way more bandwidth than the average family of four even if they all have computers.
Terrorism is an alternative for of communication. People who feel they have no effective means of expressing their concerns about the government, etc, get frustrated and try to find a way to get their message out. When communications channels are closed down in a heavily censored state, it drives people to the only means they have available, getting guns and bombs (and germs?) and wreaking havoc.
One of the reasons this country has had a consitent government and relative stability despite the dramatic changes we've made over the last 200 years is the freedom of speech. We don't feel as compelled to resorting to violent revolution, etc, because for the most part we feel we have a voice for our grievances. It is only when people feel powerless that they start resorting to to terrorism.
So, interestingly by promoting existing powers in certain countries who are oppressive we are sowing the seeds for more future terrorism. Of course that terrorism won't stay within their borders because we are acting as backers and are thus guilty by association.
What you are describing is something that a USER does with the software which is exactly his point. I don't think he takes issue with users using free software with non-free software but rather that the non-free software exists in the first place.
His issue is with the corporations and the developers who use closed licenses. I suspect that if your description of his position was accurate there'd be no such thing as the LGPL. That license is all about giving people the freedom to interoperate between open and closed software.
If every school in the country started using it, the amount of educational software for Linux would suddenly grow substantially. Also, don't forget that one of the biggest pieces of educational software is already available for linux:
THE INTERNET
:)
I know the press plays fast and loose with the definitions of various anti-social computer programs, but is this really a virus? If the FBI engineers a trojan horse to compromise somebody's machine, that's one thing, but a virus implies that it would spread.
Interestingly if it was a virus, the people who'd be most vulnerable to it would be those who don't take proper security precautions with their computer in the first place. So people who really have something to hide and are trying really hard to hide it are going to be least vulnerable to this approach.
The process you described is irrelevant of differences in languages. It's always better to break down your code into components and debug the components as much as possible seperately. Coding those chunks in different languages is just adding possibly unnecessary complexity in doing integration testing between the components.
From personal experience using JNI, I found it to be a giant pain to try to debug the code. Sure you can test the underlying C++ code on it's own and test the Java on it's own, but when you glue them together you get new bugs and debuggind between the two layers is much more difficult than if it was all Java in the first place. In that case we had no choice but to use two languages so we put up with it.
As for using printf's, what does that have to do with how you wrote the code? If you choose to debug using printf's that has nothing to do with if you have one big mound of spaghetti code or a well designed modular architecture.
American culture is like junk food. Almost everybody really likes it but they feel bad for liking it. They know they should choose something that's better for them but they can't help it.
Oh yeah, the pentagon got attacked too, I almost forgot. And so has most of the press. And so has most of the public. My point is made :)
A common problem with open source software developers is that they seem to be convinced that they can fund most of the development effort of a product and still make a good profit on the product.
Look at what RedHat does, they sell Linux support and services and they package the product with instructions, etc. Are they the primary developer of Linux? No. They fund a small chunk of development, enough to give them some say in where it goes, but not enough to really hurt their bottom line. Now we have RedHat DB which is simply a repackaged postgresql, yet another thing they've not put vast resources into. Because of those reduced costs they can actually afford to have a business where the software they sell is free to download.
The power of open source comes from a community burden of development. Several people and organizations can share the costs of developing the software. Something that I have yet to see take hold is the realization that open source doesn't have to be developed by traditional software companies. When open source will get really interesting is when you see insurance companies, banks, and other software dependent organizations making contributions to the community. There's a tremendous financial incentive to use open source software and to contribute innovations in that software back to the community.
The notion of a secure private network for the government seems like a decent idea. To think that through such a private network we can avoid some sort of internet peral harbor is absurd. Why? Real simple: was the world trade center a government building?
Why would any terrorist waste their time and resources trying to take down the FBI when it could go after banks, airports, power grids, and a whole host of other things that are on the public Internet? All of those things are far more visible and have a far more significant immediate impact on the lives of US citizens. Remember, terrorism isn't about taking out strategic assets, but creating a sense of fear in the every day lives of normal unassuming people.
Now, one might say that the answer to this quandry is to put corporations on that network. Of course then you are expanding the base of users and increasing the likelyhood that a few terrorists (or those easily bribed or fooled by them) will be able to breach that network. I suspect that even putting large swaths of the government on that network already risks that compromise within the government itself but that just amplifies it.
Why don't we take that money and put it into developing policies and technologies that will make the current networks more secure? I know that this doesn't look as impressive to the public, but in the long run it will probably do more to prevent an Internet Perl Harbor.
Ultimately the people using these languages tend to base their decisions on the platforms they wish to use and less upon the language. If you are running a Unix/Linux environment you aren't going to seriously consider C#, and for the most part doing work in Java under windows is more trouble than it's worth.
I think you'll see that in the long run VB, VC++ shops are going to use C#, and Java shops are going to run Java regardless of the inherent capabilities of the languages.
Now this leads to the ongoing quandry of patent law that nobody seems to have a good solution for. Let us assume for the moment that we have iron clad evidence of prior art, the only way to overturn the patent is a court challenge. Court challenges cost money.
Big corporartions won't challenge a patent in court because there's a huge financial disincentive to do it. They could spend years in court and blow tons of money and still possibly lose. On the other hand, the patent holder will license the patent to them for a less exhorbitant sum. If Adobe had to pay to license PNG from Apple, they'd just pay the fee and pass the extra cost directly to the consumer and not bat an eye.
The people who have the most to gain from challenging patents are small ISV's because they can hardly afford to be dumping limited resources into royalties. That problem is made even more complicated when you are talking about open source development. Of course they can neither afford royalty payments nor the court costs and time necessary to fight the patent. If a patent is going to expire in 4 or 5 years, why bother fighting because by the time you get through the courts it won't matter anymore.
The end result of this is that innovation by small software vendors and open source developers is totally crippled by patents. Whether a patent is for a legitimate innovation or not is irrelevant to these groups because as soon as it gets approved and somebody demonstrates a willingness to enforce it, it becomes off limits to these groups.
Okay folks:
Ethanol - the alcohol that makes beer, wine, and liquor much more fun.
Methanol - the alcohol that, if you drink it, will at the very least blind you and probably do a bunch of other damage to your organs.
Methane - the end result of having chili for lunch
It is not fart powered, and you can't run it on Stoli, okay?
While you certainly shouldn't start downing shots of methanol, it really isn't terribly toxic by comparison. If you got it on your clothes it would simply evaporate. The heavy metal sludge you find in most modern batteries makes methanol look pretty tame by comparison. It also means that the environmental impact of the used up batteries will be far less than current batteries.