My understanding is that as a provider of binaries that you must also provide sources. These sources can either be:
Shipped with the product.
Separately shipped for a nominal fee covering copying costs to anybody so wishing to receive them, irreguardless of their purchase of the original product.
Made publically available over the web for all to download from your own servers or servers you contract to provide it.
I belive there is a minimum number of years you need to make the sources available if you choose not to ship them with the product.
If I was shipping a product, I'd cut a CD-ROM and ship it with the product even if the product dosen't have a CD-ROM drive. It's cheep ($2.50 max, quantity 100) and satisfies the GNU Copyleft License. It provides adherence to the GNU Copyleft License. If somebody wants to publish the code on the web, they can purchase your product or get a copy of the CD-ROM from somebody who has and do so at their expense, not yours.
Didn't quite join that early, but the prices went below $500 for a Smartmodem 300, I jumped on it. Up untill I got my DSL line I used it to moniter rings to record when calls came in. It now sits in a drawer of other old computer bits I can't part with for sentimental reasons.
I had problems with the "Stick tape in. Cron job. Forget!" so I sat down and worked hard to build a set of scripts that did their best to produce a good backup that is restoreable. I ended up using a backup/archive server (see post #207 below). Any part of my system that fails, sends me a failure message. All sucessfull backups generate a notification email with details.
Do yourself a favor and when your site gets big enough that it would really hurt if it went down and you need to do a restore - spend some time and find out how long it takes to restore. I'll bet that you'll be surprised.
I say do this at an earlier date. It's never to early to know how long it takes to restore a system from backups and to make sure your recovery procedures work. I can rebuild my primary box in an hour. This includes 4.5 gig of data plus another gig system code and data. My limit is the speed data can be pumped over the net from disk to disk. From my tape drive it would take close to 3 hours.
The one script I need to write is a grab all new/changed files script and place it on the restore floppies. It would tar up all new/changed files and dump them to the backup/archive server before I restore the backup set. I can then choose the new/changed files for the current day to restore.
At home to speed backups and make them more robust to failure I use a backup archive server box. I went to this after dealing with the hastles of trying to backup multiple boxes with only one tape. The backup/archive server gets backups of all my systems daily. Each system NFS mounts it's archive file system, then does a tar backup with the output files going to it. So the output files aren't over 2 gig I pipe the output of tar through split to break it into smaller chunks. After all systems have backed up an automated script runs and saves the tar files to a big tape. After that it compresses all the files. Before backups start a script runs that checks to see if 150% of the previous night's backup volume is available, and deletes the oldest backup sets till that is available.
For restoration I have a set of boot/root floppies that have the needed programs to rebuild the systems from files on a NFS mounted partition. I used Debian's boot/root floppy building package to make them. Currently restoration of a system takes about 10 minutes of my time to start the process, the time to restore the data, and 5 minutes at the end for a reboot. For my main system that has 5.5G of system/data on it it takes about 1 hour for a full restore.
The "archive" portion comes from my mirroring all software I use locally. That takes up about 10G out of the available 70G.
As for hardware, it's a lowly P100 with 32M RAM, 4 - 20Gig IDE disks stripped, and a DAT-3 backup tape drive. With spare hardware lying around, one cheep PCI SCSI-II controler (for the tape drive), 4-$270 IDE disks (now $187 each), and moving the tape over from my primary system I set it up.
One could use this method to backup either locally hosted or colocated servers. You could do backups more often, and only nightly backup to tape.
Look for a system that has high data throughput in the disk and network IO subsystems. This will be harder to do because most companies don't publish these specs in easy to find places.
For a DB server (a web server is really a very simple DB), get high throughput disk controllers, and lots of very fast ram for disk and DB caching. If you want to do lots of active pages, get a processor with high integer performance and large primary and secondary caches. Remember for the most part you will be limited by the speed of your ram memory and disk throughput.
On disks: USE RAID even if only in software. RAID 5 has a penalty for writing, but is very fast for reading. Typically all disks are involved in a block write, but only one needs to be read from to retreive a block. If you need to lots of writing, look at doing simple RAID 2 mirroring and striping across many disks. This will require twice as many disks, but it is much faster for writing many blocks at once.
Offsite backup can be as simple as carrying a second copy of the backup tape home every night.
My favorit offsite backup place (a friend uses this one) is a local coffee shop. My friend goes there every week day and knows the owner. So he made a deal and they let him have a small box under the counter. He brings his backup tape in each day when he stops in, and takes the oldest tape back with him. He has about two weeks worth of backups in the box.
Is information. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. The average net user needs to be informed about lax security and how to correct it. Sure, we are the informed, but we also aren't average. Have you done your part to inform others? Untill there are tens of thousands of people demanding better security, the software makers won't listen because they think it isn't worth while.
Consider this: In a Senators office, they figure one printed letter is roughly representitive of 500 people. Much more if it's hand written.
The responce to this is PUBLISH. If you know you can't affort to get the patent, PUBLISH your idea immediatly. Once you publish, any patent applied for after the publishing date is invalid.
We need a OSS paper documention campaign to publish all the OSS ideas into a legal archival format.
In my opinion the best two defences against mugging are staying alert to the environment around you, and knowing when and how to apply self defense moves.
Staying alert is likely the most effective of the two. Any semi sane mugger won't attack someone who's seen them. Being oblivious to your surroundings is asking for trouble.
I've had two people attempt to mug me. Both failed and went to the hospital if they were lucky. I'll admit I didn't stick around. At the time I had strong fast legs from running and bicycling. My self defence coach taught me to use my strengths along with common moves to break out of holds. Break hold, spin, and kick then RUN!!!
That still isn't fool proof. It can be gotten around. You really need to boot from and run all programs from imutable media to be sure. Even then that isn't much against a determined foe.
Against an average joe hoacker, this will do well, but the checksum file and checking program really need to be stored on read only media. A good program for this type of work on UNIX systems is tripwire.
The unfortunate thing is most really good hackers can get around this quite effectively by patching the kernel. Under any OS that allows loadable modules, this can be done on the fly in seconds. The kernel provides most of the mechanisms. The hacker only needs to activate them.
(or on the otherhand, if you're breaking one law and they get a sealed warrant because they think you're breaking another law and they find evidence for the first crime they can go get another sealed warrant and then gather evidence and you never knew why they suspected you in the first place)
This is refered to as fishing, and is specificaly outlawed.
I've been a US citizen from birth, and even I feel we as a country are fucked up about sex and violence. I can't see how people think sex is so bad. Personally I'd rather have my kids watching sexually explicit films than violent films.
I've often thought it would be good to setup a blocking service that blocks only violen content sites, but then that would go against my strong feeling that everybody needs to be exposed to all sorts of information, good as well as bad. If you only look at one side you get a distorted view of reality. Once your view of reality is distorted, you stop being able to make well ballenced decisions. Unfortunatly I see our film system saying to our kids that violence is ok, and sex is not.
After seeing the Apple product I decided to explore things from a Linux/Robotics perspective. I can see where it would be great to have a Linux PC based robot WLAN linked development and control purposes. Check out my WLAN notes for further information. I put the notes together for myself, but am making them available to all.
On the top level of the Mall of America there are a couple of pay internet kiosks. Never used them or for that matter seen them in use. They've been there over a year as far as I can recall.
Quite often I see programmers reinventing the wheel, when they could have just grabed an already existing piece of code and reused it. That's why we need organizations like FSF and GNU, and why we need organizations to go to bat for us when out non-programmer managers are being stupid.
I'm surprised I haven't seen comments on how this may come about. Something needs to be done to cause Annikin to see the dark side as the side to go with.
What might be done to acheive this? The Emperor is a manipulator. He guides events to create the reactions he wants. As far as I see the entire plannet Nabo and the Trade Federation are pawns to gain Palpatine power in the Senate. It didn't quite work out the way he was intending, but the end result was the same.
What will Darth Sidious do to turn Annikin? What are Annikin's hot buttons that can be pushed to acheive Annikin's disalusionment with the current system? How to manipulate them to get the desired reasult? My feeling is it will involve a few events. Each designed to chip away at Annikin's trust in the light side of the force and the current Senate. I foresee The deliberate ignoring of events on Tatoone by the Senate that leads to Annikin's mother's entirely preventable death. The relationship between Amidala and Annikin will likely also be used. Some sort of tradegy will be allowed to happen to her by inaction on the part of the Senate/Jedi. Could even be as drastic as her death. This would an especially powerfull hook after Annikin and Amidala have been allowed to become quite close. This would be even more powerfull if they have are married and going to have a family toghther. I can also see lack of support for the Jedi by the Senate being used to further drive a wedge between Annikin and the light side. The important thing I see is Darth Sidious can't just take over Annikin's mind. He needs to have a wedge to get his hooks to set in so he can take control.
My feeling is that even though the Darth Sidious is very powerfull, he can't do direct mind control. He can't turn somebody against their nature. He can only influence tendacies already present in the subject. Yes this is a powerfull limitation, and the one that makes it possible to oppose him at all. Despite questioning by Vader, Leia was able to resist. Vader didn't have a hook to break her belief in the rebal cause. Somehow Sidious will generate the needed hooks in Annikin to get him to turn away and become dark. To do so he needs to make it so it looks like it isn't him that is doing it. It needs to be through indirect means, pawns, else the hooks won't work as they will be tainted.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that as a provider of binaries that you must also provide sources. These sources can either be:
I belive there is a minimum number of years you need to make the sources available if you choose not to ship them with the product.
If I was shipping a product, I'd cut a CD-ROM and ship it with the product even if the product dosen't have a CD-ROM drive. It's cheep ($2.50 max, quantity 100) and satisfies the GNU Copyleft License. It provides adherence to the GNU Copyleft License. If somebody wants to publish the code on the web, they can purchase your product or get a copy of the CD-ROM from somebody who has and do so at their expense, not yours.
Didn't quite join that early, but the prices went below $500 for a Smartmodem 300, I jumped on it. Up untill I got my DSL line I used it to moniter rings to record when calls came in. It now sits in a drawer of other old computer bits I can't part with for sentimental reasons.
I had problems with the "Stick tape in. Cron job. Forget!" so I sat down and worked hard to build a set of scripts that did their best to produce a good backup that is restoreable. I ended up using a backup/archive server (see post #207 below). Any part of my system that fails, sends me a failure message. All sucessfull backups generate a notification email with details.
Do yourself a favor and when your site gets big enough that it would really hurt if it went down and you need to do a restore - spend some time and find out how long it takes to restore. I'll bet that you'll be surprised.
I say do this at an earlier date. It's never to early to know how long it takes to restore a system from backups and to make sure your recovery procedures work. I can rebuild my primary box in an hour. This includes 4.5 gig of data plus another gig system code and data. My limit is the speed data can be pumped over the net from disk to disk. From my tape drive it would take close to 3 hours.
The one script I need to write is a grab all new/changed files script and place it on the restore floppies. It would tar up all new/changed files and dump them to the backup/archive server before I restore the backup set. I can then choose the new/changed files for the current day to restore.
At home to speed backups and make them more robust to failure I use a backup archive server box. I went to this after dealing with the hastles of trying to backup multiple boxes with only one tape. The backup/archive server gets backups of all my systems daily. Each system NFS mounts it's archive file system, then does a tar backup with the output files going to it. So the output files aren't over 2 gig I pipe the output of tar through split to break it into smaller chunks. After all systems have backed up an automated script runs and saves the tar files to a big tape. After that it compresses all the files. Before backups start a script runs that checks to see if 150% of the previous night's backup volume is available, and deletes the oldest backup sets till that is available.
For restoration I have a set of boot/root floppies that have the needed programs to rebuild the systems from files on a NFS mounted partition. I used Debian's boot/root floppy building package to make them. Currently restoration of a system takes about 10 minutes of my time to start the process, the time to restore the data, and 5 minutes at the end for a reboot. For my main system that has 5.5G of system/data on it it takes about 1 hour for a full restore.
The "archive" portion comes from my mirroring all software I use locally. That takes up about 10G out of the available 70G.
As for hardware, it's a lowly P100 with 32M RAM, 4 - 20Gig IDE disks stripped, and a DAT-3 backup tape drive. With spare hardware lying around, one cheep PCI SCSI-II controler (for the tape drive), 4-$270 IDE disks (now $187 each), and moving the tape over from my primary system I set it up.
One could use this method to backup either locally hosted or colocated servers. You could do backups more often, and only nightly backup to tape.
Forget about floating point speeds.
Look for a system that has high data throughput in the disk and network IO subsystems. This will be harder to do because most companies don't publish these specs in easy to find places.
For a DB server (a web server is really a very simple DB), get high throughput disk controllers, and lots of very fast ram for disk and DB caching. If you want to do lots of active pages, get a processor with high integer performance and large primary and secondary caches. Remember for the most part you will be limited by the speed of your ram memory and disk throughput.
On disks: USE RAID even if only in software. RAID 5 has a penalty for writing, but is very fast for reading. Typically all disks are involved in a block write, but only one needs to be read from to retreive a block. If you need to lots of writing, look at doing simple RAID 2 mirroring and striping across many disks. This will require twice as many disks, but it is much faster for writing many blocks at once.
Offsite backup can be as simple as carrying a second copy of the backup tape home every night.
My favorit offsite backup place (a friend uses this one) is a local coffee shop. My friend goes there every week day and knows the owner. So he made a deal and they let him have a small box under the counter. He brings his backup tape in each day when he stops in, and takes the oldest tape back with him. He has about two weeks worth of backups in the box.
*sigh*
I just checked, my email archive is about 4x my netscrape code size. I need to prune...
I feel sorry for all the companies that base their business futures on using software from a monopoly, NOT!
I couldn't help it... Though it just might be a best seller.
Is information. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. The average net user needs to be informed about lax security and how to correct it. Sure, we are the informed, but we also aren't average. Have you done your part to inform others? Untill there are tens of thousands of people demanding better security, the software makers won't listen because they think it isn't worth while.
Consider this: In a Senators office, they figure one printed letter is roughly representitive of 500 people. Much more if it's hand written.
The responce to this is PUBLISH. If you know you can't affort to get the patent, PUBLISH your idea immediatly. Once you publish, any patent applied for after the publishing date is invalid.
We need a OSS paper documention campaign to publish all the OSS ideas into a legal archival format.
In my opinion the best two defences against mugging are staying alert to the environment around you, and knowing when and how to apply self defense moves.
Staying alert is likely the most effective of the two. Any semi sane mugger won't attack someone who's seen them. Being oblivious to your surroundings is asking for trouble.
I've had two people attempt to mug me. Both failed and went to the hospital if they were lucky. I'll admit I didn't stick around. At the time I had strong fast legs from running and bicycling. My self defence coach taught me to use my strengths along with common moves to break out of holds. Break hold, spin, and kick then RUN!!!
Gives a hole different slant to virus and worm transmition.
That still isn't fool proof. It can be gotten around. You really need to boot from and run all programs from imutable media to be sure. Even then that isn't much against a determined foe.
Against an average joe hoacker, this will do well, but the checksum file and checking program really need to be stored on read only media. A good program for this type of work on UNIX systems is tripwire.
The unfortunate thing is most really good hackers can get around this quite effectively by patching the kernel. Under any OS that allows loadable modules, this can be done on the fly in seconds. The kernel provides most of the mechanisms. The hacker only needs to activate them.
(or on the otherhand, if you're breaking one law and they get a sealed warrant because they think you're breaking another law and they find evidence for the first crime they can go get another sealed warrant and then gather evidence and you never knew why they suspected you in the first place)
This is refered to as fishing, and is specificaly outlawed.
I'm more worried that it will pass because us citizens haven't made our feeling known to out representitives. See: Member and Committee Information of the 106th Congress.
Remember this is a participatory democracy. Now PARTICIPATE!!!
Anybody in for some creative reprogramming?
Hehehe...
Now I really wish I'd bought one of them. It could be so much fun.
Maturity isn't enough, go for sophistication.
Go for a 25 year old scotch.
:) or a Barq's Rootbeer.
I've been a US citizen from birth, and even I feel we as a country are fucked up about sex and violence. I can't see how people think sex is so bad. Personally I'd rather have my kids watching sexually explicit films than violent films.
I've often thought it would be good to setup a blocking service that blocks only violen content sites, but then that would go against my strong feeling that everybody needs to be exposed to all sorts of information, good as well as bad. If you only look at one side you get a distorted view of reality. Once your view of reality is distorted, you stop being able to make well ballenced decisions. Unfortunatly I see our film system saying to our kids that violence is ok, and sex is not.
After seeing the Apple product I decided to explore things from a Linux/Robotics perspective. I can see where it would be great to have a Linux PC based robot WLAN linked development and control purposes. Check out my WLAN notes for further information. I put the notes together for myself, but am making them available to all.
On the top level of the Mall of America there are a couple of pay internet kiosks. Never used them or for that matter seen them in use. They've been there over a year as far as I can recall.
More likely "responsibility"... I've even noticed the changes in myself.
This is a higher resolution version. Read the Specs. THe $800 version is only TV grade, while this one does SVGA 800x600.
Quite often I see programmers reinventing the wheel, when they could have just grabed an already existing piece of code and reused it. That's why we need organizations like FSF and GNU, and why we need organizations to go to bat for us when out non-programmer managers are being stupid.
I'm surprised I haven't seen comments on how this may come about. Something needs to be done to cause Annikin to see the dark side as the side to go with.
What might be done to acheive this? The Emperor is a manipulator. He guides events to create the reactions he wants. As far as I see the entire plannet Nabo and the Trade Federation are pawns to gain Palpatine power in the Senate. It didn't quite work out the way he was intending, but the end result was the same.
What will Darth Sidious do to turn Annikin? What are Annikin's hot buttons that can be pushed to acheive Annikin's disalusionment with the current system? How to manipulate them to get the desired reasult? My feeling is it will involve a few events. Each designed to chip away at Annikin's trust in the light side of the force and the current Senate. I foresee The deliberate ignoring of events on Tatoone by the Senate that leads to Annikin's mother's entirely preventable death. The relationship between Amidala and Annikin will likely also be used. Some sort of tradegy will be allowed to happen to her by inaction on the part of the Senate/Jedi. Could even be as drastic as her death. This would an especially powerfull hook after Annikin and Amidala have been allowed to become quite close. This would be even more powerfull if they have are married and going to have a family toghther. I can also see lack of support for the Jedi by the Senate being used to further drive a wedge between Annikin and the light side. The important thing I see is Darth Sidious can't just take over Annikin's mind. He needs to have a wedge to get his hooks to set in so he can take control.
My feeling is that even though the Darth Sidious is very powerfull, he can't do direct mind control. He can't turn somebody against their nature. He can only influence tendacies already present in the subject. Yes this is a powerfull limitation, and the one that makes it possible to oppose him at all. Despite questioning by Vader, Leia was able to resist. Vader didn't have a hook to break her belief in the rebal cause. Somehow Sidious will generate the needed hooks in Annikin to get him to turn away and become dark. To do so he needs to make it so it looks like it isn't him that is doing it. It needs to be through indirect means, pawns, else the hooks won't work as they will be tainted.
Plan 9 from AT&T
CPM
Tripos
P-System
OS9
Amoeba
Xenix
...
Just look and you will find many. These are just the ones that came off the top of my head. I haven't bothered to crack one of my OS tomes yet.