If you go out of your way to ensure no consequences comes to those who make mistakes, they won't have any reason to avoid making similar mistakes in the future. OTOH, if there are serious consequences to such mistakes, they will make a greater effort to avoid making that mistake in the future. I think you need to consider how many times they make the mistake. If some company hosts a spammer, block the spammer and give them a chance to terminate the spammer before blocking the hoster. When they do terminate the spammer, then on first offense, unblock them immediately, but on sunsequent offenses, let the unblocking lag the termination by an increasing amount.
Hosters that make no effort to avoid hosting spammers, and/or no effort to terminate services to spammers, are part of the problem.
Maybe what we need, then, is a special search engine, or at least search parameter, specifically targeting personal web sites. Maybe Google could do "personal.google.com".
My method doesn't take that long to do. The initial install takes some time, but the rest of the effort saves having to do that again, and saves having to deal with the little things that periodically break. Of course the big disadvantage of my scheme is the need to have a Linux machine on the LAN to store the backup. Alternatively (and I've done this, too), the backup image can be on the same machine. A smart enough program can buffer many megabytes reading, then write it all, to minimize head thrashing between partitions. Of course if the whole drive dies, that's no good. A 2nd drive might be a nice solution. Make it the same size or larger, and it can be an image of the first one. Boot the CD that includes the imaging software to make backups and do restores.
If the disk dies, any restoration has to come from some other medium. This can be done with so many choices, but Linux based ones do work (and Linux only needs to run during the usage; it does not need to be installed on the machine). The question should be, what is your other media? Another partition (bad if the whole disk dies)? Another disk (what if the machine is stolen)? Removeable disk (e.g. USB/FireWire drives)? Tape (slow)? Network?
The main point of my comment, though, is that Linux based imaging does work, and I use it regularly to get the benefits of a Windows configuration that stays clean.
I regularly restore my Windows system. No, this isn't because something just broke; I do it as a preventative measure.
First, I installed my Windows system very carefully, ensuring I have all the applications I need. Everything is installed on the C: drive which is made reasonably small so it is easy to backup and restore. It's about 2 GB. Then I change "My Documents" and other things over to the D: drive, and make sure other configurations are tweaked as needed. Then I shutdown Windows cleanly and boot up a Linux rescue CD (one I created myself so it has all the tools I like on it). I then read the partition image of C:, compress it, and transfer that over to a Linux machine. Then I reboot back into Windows and make sure I was working with a good shutdown. Then I do a restore test by powering off (not shutting down) Windows, then booting the Linux rescue CD again. This time I pull the file back in from the Linux machine, uncompress it, and write it to disk (using a program I wrote that works similar to "dd" but shows a running status as it goes). Then I boot back to Windows and verify that the archived image is in fact a good one.
Every few times I use Windows, I simply restore that same image again. I've found I get messages that bug me about daylight savings changes. I dealt with that by restoring the image, changing daylight savings, and saving a new image so I have two, one for each daylight savings time setting.
The D: drive is NOT regularly restored, but it is regularly backed up file by file with FTP. If you run Samba on your Linux/BSD machines, you could use that instead to make file by file backups. Restoring data involves restoring the empty D: image (very small compressed), then reloading all the files (no weird system files on D:). I'd sure love to have an rsync client or server that runs on Windows, though.
There are other, less controversial, laws to deal with harrassment and extortion, that have been on the books for ages. Why not use those? And how has he been harrassing without contacting. Sounds to me like an Enronish CEO to me.
Trouble is, you have to modify a lot of stuff in Redhat just to get it to work as smoothly as some other distributions. I have done admin work for employers/clients who use Redhat, and I've had to make some modifications in every single case just to get problems solved.
The problem is, when free markets make decisions about what should rise above the rest, that decision usually has nothing to do with what product is actually the best product. Instead, success in the market too often is based on factors such as what product is first to the market, what product has the strongest sales force, what product gets the most press, and what product works with the most other products that have decided to choose just one to be compatible with.
PHBs have started to turn to some form of Linux. As more and more do, do we want to let them make the decisions about which particular form to go with? Or do we want to at least influence, if not outright make that decision? Do we want them using a distribution that locks them into a single vendor, or do we want them using a distribution that can be supplied to them competitively forever? You know they can't make good long term business decisions because of their shortsightedness in areas of technology. They rant and rave about how business concerns need to be addressed, and then they go off and make stupid decisions that end up costing the company more and exposing them to new risks.
In as much as I think Bruce Parens' statement is a bit self-serving, I do think he's right, and that we need to center around not just a free kernel, but a whole free distribution. That's the only way to ensure minimal risks and costs for business use of Linux systems.
Additionally, pilots (at least at many airlines) are paid based on available flights they can get scheduled into. There is a competitive bidding system at some airlines where pilots select the flights they want. But with fewer flights available due to reduction in passenger levels since 9/11 and with more airport hassles, there are fewer flights to choose from. In effect, many pilots, though staying on with their airlines, have seen their pay levels cut in half with more time off to spend it.
Checking the server has many legal risks. First of all, this is going to be triggered by the fact that spam came through. While some blacklists probably do just scan around for open relays, others don't (they wait for spam to happen).
Once the spam comes through, it still isn't clear how it got through. It might be an open proxy and the spammer is adding extra headers to mislead people into thinking it's an open relay. Or it might actually be coming from a real spammer directly (who is also adding those headers). Or it might be an open relay. If it is an open relay, which trick was used to get it through? There are some address re-writing tricks that fool many (older) mail servers (like MS Exchange) and won't be obvious in the spam that was received since the addresses have now been changed. There are a few dozen different ways to trick mail servers, and they would all have to be tried to verify if the mail server is indeed an open relay. Many of those methods involve forgery of the mail server's own domain name and possible of real users there. This has in fact resulted in at least legal threats (a lawyer who actually requested a re-test felt it was improper for the test to forge his domain name, even though that's likely what the spammer actually did to get through in the first place... and he threatened legal action due to his own stupidity).
But regardless of what method was used, or how the spam came through, if it was indeed spam, why bother testing. Since at least one problem exists, just block it anyway, and let the administrator figure it out and fix it. Once spam delivery attempts stop for a while (perhaps for as long as spam delivery attempts continued to happen), then automatically unblocking would be a good idea (we just presume the administrator figured it out). If spam resumes later, block again (and add some more time for 2nd offense). No need to test anything.
Based on this story, it seems Verio decided to block the presumed source of spam by means of the routers. That's a rather extreme measure. Doing such things in routers, whether by access list, or by blackhole routing table entry, is not nearly as easy, and does not scale as well, as blocking at the receiving mail server. But they may have wanted to do so because so many mail servers are run by clueless people that can't configure their way out of a paper bag.
I block spam source at mail servers, not routers (except in very extreme cases, but there are current none blocked at routers). That gives me the option to whitelist specific senders and/or specific recipients. So I'd say the real issue he is not that blocking/blacklisting spammers is bad, but that blocking them in stupid ways that lose control is what is bad.
Blocking spam and spam sources should be an end-point decision. There are risks in blocking, and different people have different needs and different sensitivities to that risk. Even your own ISP shouldn't block spam for you unless you agree to it with the understanding of how they are doing it. The best solution is for you to have total control if you wish, particularly in the ability to whitelist, and even blacklist, specific exceptions you want. Those who don't know the details of how this is done would have to delegate that to someone (such as their ISP).
Even content based spam filtering can be broken. What if my girlfriend sends me mail telling me what she's going to do with certain parts when she comes over tonight. I sure would not want that to bounce. Of course I can whitelist her email address (and hope her computer doesn't get infected by some spamming virus).
Blacklisting spammers is good... when done right. Verio didn't do it right.
Solaris definitely has its problems. It is the OS of choice for highly scaled systems. But I prefer Linux or BSD on the smaller machines, even if they are Sparc. The boundary for that choice is rising, though. Hopefully Linux 2.6 will bring it up another notch.
If Intel had not been the CPU supplier for the peecee, that would not have put it out of business. They would still be designing, manufacturing, and selling, processors and other devices; they just wouldn't be as large. I quoted National Semiconductor and Zilog for the very reason that they do still exist and have some niche markets; Intel would be there among them if Motorola had become the CPU supplier for the peecee.
Sun really is good at designing processors. It's just that because Intel won the volume war because it happened to be the processor for the peecee, it was able to scale up manufacturing to cut prices even more, and sell to PHBs who care about price, not quality. Had IBM gone with the Motorola 68000 back when the first PC came out, which almost happened, we would see a totally different landscape today, where Intel would have probably gone the way of companies like National Semiconductor or Zilog. Imagine the first Linux kernel could have been written for an architecture with 4 times the registers. But alas, today, perhaps our only hope to remove the x86 plague is the PPC.
How Moore's Law affects some computer users as measured in the time it takes to do something, like render a page of a document on the graphical screen in a window opened for a word processor, is shown as an example here:
1992 1.25 seconds
1993 800 milliseconds
1994 500 milliseconds
1995 320 milliseconds
1996 200 milliseconds
1997 125 milliseconds
1998 80 milliseconds
1999 50 milliseconds
2000 32 milliseconds
2001 20 milliseconds
2002 12500 microseconds
2003 8000 microseconds
2004 5000 microseconds
2005 3200 microseconds
2006 2000 microseconds
2007 1250 microseconds
2008 800 microseconds
2009 500 microseconds
2010 320 microseconds
2011 200 microseconds
2012 125 microseconds
When you are doing something interactively and have to wait the better part of a second (or worse) for each step to complete, it can be a big pain. A faster CPU would be nice. But once that wait gets down into a certain range (varys depending on what the task actually is), it won't really matter as much, if at all.
There will still be needed even faster CPUs for many things. The use of cryptography will certainly be increasing and that is a big need for more CPU speed. Larger, more bloated (in terms of steps of code, in addition to RAM and disk space), operating systems and applications will need faster (and larger) CPUs, too (though many have learned to avoid these steps to avoid the costs of upgrades to software and hardware).
But the market for faster CPUs will gradually be leaving behind more and more people who do the kinds of things that just don't need it. The threshhold has been reached for many, and soon will be for many more. Hopefully new and expanded uses will keep (or restore) the markets in a thriving condition.
Dude, your post implicitly approves piracy by people not served by this version of the software. Remember, most humans blessed with the ability to express themselves through the use of written language communicate ideas beyond the sum of the words they write.
My post clearly is intended to provide a hint as to how future claims the music industry might make can be shown to be inaccurate.
I believe their past claims are inaccurate, too, but it is not so easily shown. In the past, they claim certain dollar amounts lost and appear to be assuming that for every piece of music downloaded illegally, that person would have bought the music had it not been for the availability of a free download (or the intent to avail oneself of it). That simply is not so. One reason is that many people don't limit themselves to what they can afford to buy when what they are doing is getting it free by stealing. Another reason is that many people download more than they would ever hope to have time to listen to. My post simply adds another reason (which might have existed before, but more clearly exists now) that some people download music because it is, or is coming to be, the only way to get the functionality of music at all.
Before the internet, piracy existed in many forms, including tapes on sale by street vendors at prices less than the retail or even discount prices in record stores. But that piracy never scaled up to anywhere near as big as what the internet has. Convenience is certainly one factor that has made internet piracy so much larger. Scalability, as in, you can now find that exact music you were looking for, is another. But I believe the big one is that it's free, or nearly so (bandwidth and storage space usually cost money, though nowhere near the supposed intellectual property value). Those who are motivated only because it is free aren't the ones who would have paid for it had that been the only choice.
I have downloaded music online. But all that I had downloaded falls into one of the following three categories:
I decided I liked the music and actually bought the CD
I decided I liked the music but could not find the CD for sale anywhere
I decided I did not like the music and deleted it
People who do what I do might have their downloads counted somehow as theft, even though the music industry actually benefits by increased revenues they would not have gotten were it not for the free trading online. I suspect it's not a great many people who do this, but certainly there are some. But I don't think the music industry has taken this into account.
Read with an understanding beyond a machine's ability to parse words, your post clearly made the case that I descrbed. If you don't have this basic literate ability of implying ideas, then I apologize (actually, sympathize).
Reading that way requires appending human experiences. Apparently yours differs from mine. No surprise there. What you need to do is stop assuming that everything anyone writes has exactly the same non-machine implications in it as what you might write. I suggest you make a word by word analysis and show just how it is that my post is as you describe. Maybe then we can see, point by point, how the two of us are different.
I don't know if they realize this (and they may not), but free software (and free file trading and copying) actually benefits them once they switch to an encrypted pay-per-play (and other package deals) type of marketing. The key (pardon the pun) to this is that the media rendering device (sound card, USB headphones, whatever) itself decrypts and decodes the music. Sound files (and other media) will just be encrypted blobs with some attached cleartext properties that don't need to be hidden (like titles, checksums).
This model of music marketing (which could also apply to movies) would allow people to download, copy, shared, and trade, all the music they want. But they can't actually play it from these files unless they first get a DRT (digital rights token). This would be purchased usually for a specific playback device (won't work on others), usually for a specific time frame (a month), possibly for a lot, or any, music. DRTs could be sold for one song forever (effectively the model we have now), or sold for all music (that vendor can sell for) for a fixed period of time (essentially a subscription model). The DRT is merely a right to play and doesn't include an actual copy. You could have (and maybe eventually could buy on the market) a computer juke box that contains all music produced in the last 20 years. Your one-month DRT lets you play anything in that collection for that month.
One thing I have seen in many people who trade is the desire to be leet by having huge collections so large they couldn't possibly ever listen to it all. The goal obviously isn't to massively listen to more than 24 hours of music a day. The goal is to have handy choice (for themselves and their friends). Eventually, as bandwidth availability makes this practical, you'll be able to access music online to be played as you want to play it. If the DRT system is used, it won't matter where you get the encrypted blob; you still pay the music industry to play.
Probably not most, but many people who put Windows on their computer do so knowing that Linux software (well, lots of it, anyway), won't work.
The fact is, the choice of Linux for a desktop does not impact what most people do with a computer; it just changes the way they do it. It's not an alternative lifestyle, unless you consider things like security and reliablity to be an alternative (well, I suppose maybe it is). All office functions students (and just about anyone) need to do can be done in Linux and BSD.
And many people have made that choice already. The school administration is effectively telling them that to benefit from the money they take from them, they have to go to the effort and cost to switch to MS Windows, and suffer all the headaches that brings along.
What makes you think my post repeals laws on intellectual property. I suggest you read it carefully. Look each individual word up in the dictionary if you must. Nowhere do I say it is legal, or even ought to be legal. I simply said the music industry cannot use the piracy (note that I really did call it piracy) by that group as a measure of lost revenue.
Will they get around to supplying a Linux client? Maybe. But I am most definitely not going to hold my breath for that.
So join and work with the Penn State Linux Users Group to help put together proposals, petitions, and if necessary, protests, to pressure the school administrators to consider the needs of non-Windows users.
The salaries are paid from tuition, state funding, and research grants, not from the extra fees charged for student facilities. And even if you are looking at the money that does go to paying professors as a pool, you get far more out of those few professors you do take classes from than what your percentage of the pool paid them. In the end it works out approximately even; maybe a few cents off here and there. But for a student service specifically designated only for specific set of students, which offers nothing as an alternative for those it does not serve (remember, paying professors does not mean 10% of the students don't get to take classes).
As for paying lab fees even if you take no lab classes; that might be broken. When I was in school, lab fees applied only when you actually took the lab classes. But I never went to Penn State, so I have no idea how it's done there. Still, if they charge what results in a level fee each semester and you have to take a fixed number of lab classes to meet requirements, it works out in the end, and your costs are flattened out, too. So maybe it's not broken.
The music industry obviously considers students (and anyone) that don't run Windows (or Mac) to not be part of the market they are trying to sell to. There could be many reasons for this. One might be the cost of developing a media player for Linux, BSD, or whatever other stuff even fewer people might be running at home. So it's probably not cost effective to make the effort to market to that group, given the lower revenues from such a smaller group. So since they aren't expecting any revenues from Linux and BSD users, they surely have no basis to claim a loss of revenue from any piracy by people in that group.
None of these methods are perfect, but they can help avoid your banner ads and other web site features from being blocked.
Put everything under the same hostname. Don't use a separate name like "ads.example.com". Best is to make all the image tag src fields relative to the current site (so it works with or without "www." being used).
Even if your ads are dynamically generated or selected, never use a query string. Make the URL look static (the CGI gets the rest of the URL after it's name in PATH_INFO). Make the CGI include a date on the image file well into the past. Avoid an expire, or make it reasonably into the future.
Rotate ad image by generating different URLs in the HTML being sent. Let the images be cached.
Hide external links under static HTML appearing links to your own site (same exact hostname, relative link, as above), which runs CGI that does a redirect. Hide the linked URLs via code numbers in the PATH_INFO part of the URL.
Avoid frames. It's too tempting to categorize output if you have frames.
Slashdot Mirror
If you go out of your way to ensure no consequences comes to those who make mistakes, they won't have any reason to avoid making similar mistakes in the future. OTOH, if there are serious consequences to such mistakes, they will make a greater effort to avoid making that mistake in the future. I think you need to consider how many times they make the mistake. If some company hosts a spammer, block the spammer and give them a chance to terminate the spammer before blocking the hoster. When they do terminate the spammer, then on first offense, unblock them immediately, but on sunsequent offenses, let the unblocking lag the termination by an increasing amount.
Hosters that make no effort to avoid hosting spammers, and/or no effort to terminate services to spammers, are part of the problem.
Maybe what we need, then, is a special search engine, or at least search parameter, specifically targeting personal web sites. Maybe Google could do "personal.google.com".
My method doesn't take that long to do. The initial install takes some time, but the rest of the effort saves having to do that again, and saves having to deal with the little things that periodically break. Of course the big disadvantage of my scheme is the need to have a Linux machine on the LAN to store the backup. Alternatively (and I've done this, too), the backup image can be on the same machine. A smart enough program can buffer many megabytes reading, then write it all, to minimize head thrashing between partitions. Of course if the whole drive dies, that's no good. A 2nd drive might be a nice solution. Make it the same size or larger, and it can be an image of the first one. Boot the CD that includes the imaging software to make backups and do restores.
If the disk dies, any restoration has to come from some other medium. This can be done with so many choices, but Linux based ones do work (and Linux only needs to run during the usage; it does not need to be installed on the machine). The question should be, what is your other media? Another partition (bad if the whole disk dies)? Another disk (what if the machine is stolen)? Removeable disk (e.g. USB/FireWire drives)? Tape (slow)? Network?
The main point of my comment, though, is that Linux based imaging does work, and I use it regularly to get the benefits of a Windows configuration that stays clean.
I regularly restore my Windows system. No, this isn't because something just broke; I do it as a preventative measure.
First, I installed my Windows system very carefully, ensuring I have all the applications I need. Everything is installed on the C: drive which is made reasonably small so it is easy to backup and restore. It's about 2 GB. Then I change "My Documents" and other things over to the D: drive, and make sure other configurations are tweaked as needed. Then I shutdown Windows cleanly and boot up a Linux rescue CD (one I created myself so it has all the tools I like on it). I then read the partition image of C:, compress it, and transfer that over to a Linux machine. Then I reboot back into Windows and make sure I was working with a good shutdown. Then I do a restore test by powering off (not shutting down) Windows, then booting the Linux rescue CD again. This time I pull the file back in from the Linux machine, uncompress it, and write it to disk (using a program I wrote that works similar to "dd" but shows a running status as it goes). Then I boot back to Windows and verify that the archived image is in fact a good one.
Every few times I use Windows, I simply restore that same image again. I've found I get messages that bug me about daylight savings changes. I dealt with that by restoring the image, changing daylight savings, and saving a new image so I have two, one for each daylight savings time setting.
The D: drive is NOT regularly restored, but it is regularly backed up file by file with FTP. If you run Samba on your Linux/BSD machines, you could use that instead to make file by file backups. Restoring data involves restoring the empty D: image (very small compressed), then reloading all the files (no weird system files on D:). I'd sure love to have an rsync client or server that runs on Windows, though.
There are other, less controversial, laws to deal with harrassment and extortion, that have been on the books for ages. Why not use those? And how has he been harrassing without contacting. Sounds to me like an Enronish CEO to me.
Trouble is, you have to modify a lot of stuff in Redhat just to get it to work as smoothly as some other distributions. I have done admin work for employers/clients who use Redhat, and I've had to make some modifications in every single case just to get problems solved.
The problem is, when free markets make decisions about what should rise above the rest, that decision usually has nothing to do with what product is actually the best product. Instead, success in the market too often is based on factors such as what product is first to the market, what product has the strongest sales force, what product gets the most press, and what product works with the most other products that have decided to choose just one to be compatible with.
PHBs have started to turn to some form of Linux. As more and more do, do we want to let them make the decisions about which particular form to go with? Or do we want to at least influence, if not outright make that decision? Do we want them using a distribution that locks them into a single vendor, or do we want them using a distribution that can be supplied to them competitively forever? You know they can't make good long term business decisions because of their shortsightedness in areas of technology. They rant and rave about how business concerns need to be addressed, and then they go off and make stupid decisions that end up costing the company more and exposing them to new risks.
In as much as I think Bruce Parens' statement is a bit self-serving, I do think he's right, and that we need to center around not just a free kernel, but a whole free distribution. That's the only way to ensure minimal risks and costs for business use of Linux systems.
Additionally, pilots (at least at many airlines) are paid based on available flights they can get scheduled into. There is a competitive bidding system at some airlines where pilots select the flights they want. But with fewer flights available due to reduction in passenger levels since 9/11 and with more airport hassles, there are fewer flights to choose from. In effect, many pilots, though staying on with their airlines, have seen their pay levels cut in half with more time off to spend it.
Checking the server has many legal risks. First of all, this is going to be triggered by the fact that spam came through. While some blacklists probably do just scan around for open relays, others don't (they wait for spam to happen).
Once the spam comes through, it still isn't clear how it got through. It might be an open proxy and the spammer is adding extra headers to mislead people into thinking it's an open relay. Or it might actually be coming from a real spammer directly (who is also adding those headers). Or it might be an open relay. If it is an open relay, which trick was used to get it through? There are some address re-writing tricks that fool many (older) mail servers (like MS Exchange) and won't be obvious in the spam that was received since the addresses have now been changed. There are a few dozen different ways to trick mail servers, and they would all have to be tried to verify if the mail server is indeed an open relay. Many of those methods involve forgery of the mail server's own domain name and possible of real users there. This has in fact resulted in at least legal threats (a lawyer who actually requested a re-test felt it was improper for the test to forge his domain name, even though that's likely what the spammer actually did to get through in the first place ... and he threatened legal action due to his own stupidity).
But regardless of what method was used, or how the spam came through, if it was indeed spam, why bother testing. Since at least one problem exists, just block it anyway, and let the administrator figure it out and fix it. Once spam delivery attempts stop for a while (perhaps for as long as spam delivery attempts continued to happen), then automatically unblocking would be a good idea (we just presume the administrator figured it out). If spam resumes later, block again (and add some more time for 2nd offense). No need to test anything.
And I bet it cost you some money, too.
Based on this story, it seems Verio decided to block the presumed source of spam by means of the routers. That's a rather extreme measure. Doing such things in routers, whether by access list, or by blackhole routing table entry, is not nearly as easy, and does not scale as well, as blocking at the receiving mail server. But they may have wanted to do so because so many mail servers are run by clueless people that can't configure their way out of a paper bag.
I block spam source at mail servers, not routers (except in very extreme cases, but there are current none blocked at routers). That gives me the option to whitelist specific senders and/or specific recipients. So I'd say the real issue he is not that blocking/blacklisting spammers is bad, but that blocking them in stupid ways that lose control is what is bad.
Blocking spam and spam sources should be an end-point decision. There are risks in blocking, and different people have different needs and different sensitivities to that risk. Even your own ISP shouldn't block spam for you unless you agree to it with the understanding of how they are doing it. The best solution is for you to have total control if you wish, particularly in the ability to whitelist, and even blacklist, specific exceptions you want. Those who don't know the details of how this is done would have to delegate that to someone (such as their ISP).
Even content based spam filtering can be broken. What if my girlfriend sends me mail telling me what she's going to do with certain parts when she comes over tonight. I sure would not want that to bounce. Of course I can whitelist her email address (and hope her computer doesn't get infected by some spamming virus).
Blacklisting spammers is good ... when done right. Verio didn't do it right.
Solaris definitely has its problems. It is the OS of choice for highly scaled systems. But I prefer Linux or BSD on the smaller machines, even if they are Sparc. The boundary for that choice is rising, though. Hopefully Linux 2.6 will bring it up another notch.
If Intel had not been the CPU supplier for the peecee, that would not have put it out of business. They would still be designing, manufacturing, and selling, processors and other devices; they just wouldn't be as large. I quoted National Semiconductor and Zilog for the very reason that they do still exist and have some niche markets; Intel would be there among them if Motorola had become the CPU supplier for the peecee.
Sun really is good at designing processors. It's just that because Intel won the volume war because it happened to be the processor for the peecee, it was able to scale up manufacturing to cut prices even more, and sell to PHBs who care about price, not quality. Had IBM gone with the Motorola 68000 back when the first PC came out, which almost happened, we would see a totally different landscape today, where Intel would have probably gone the way of companies like National Semiconductor or Zilog. Imagine the first Linux kernel could have been written for an architecture with 4 times the registers. But alas, today, perhaps our only hope to remove the x86 plague is the PPC.
It wasn't what I originally meant, but that sounds like it hits the nail on the head.
How Moore's Law affects some computer users as measured in the time it takes to do something, like render a page of a document on the graphical screen in a window opened for a word processor, is shown as an example here:
- 1992 1.25 seconds
- 1993 800 milliseconds
- 1994 500 milliseconds
- 1995 320 milliseconds
- 1996 200 milliseconds
- 1997 125 milliseconds
- 1998 80 milliseconds
- 1999 50 milliseconds
- 2000 32 milliseconds
- 2001 20 milliseconds
- 2002 12500 microseconds
- 2003 8000 microseconds
- 2004 5000 microseconds
- 2005 3200 microseconds
- 2006 2000 microseconds
- 2007 1250 microseconds
- 2008 800 microseconds
- 2009 500 microseconds
- 2010 320 microseconds
- 2011 200 microseconds
- 2012 125 microseconds
When you are doing something interactively and have to wait the better part of a second (or worse) for each step to complete, it can be a big pain. A faster CPU would be nice. But once that wait gets down into a certain range (varys depending on what the task actually is), it won't really matter as much, if at all.There will still be needed even faster CPUs for many things. The use of cryptography will certainly be increasing and that is a big need for more CPU speed. Larger, more bloated (in terms of steps of code, in addition to RAM and disk space), operating systems and applications will need faster (and larger) CPUs, too (though many have learned to avoid these steps to avoid the costs of upgrades to software and hardware).
But the market for faster CPUs will gradually be leaving behind more and more people who do the kinds of things that just don't need it. The threshhold has been reached for many, and soon will be for many more. Hopefully new and expanded uses will keep (or restore) the markets in a thriving condition.
My post clearly is intended to provide a hint as to how future claims the music industry might make can be shown to be inaccurate.
I believe their past claims are inaccurate, too, but it is not so easily shown. In the past, they claim certain dollar amounts lost and appear to be assuming that for every piece of music downloaded illegally, that person would have bought the music had it not been for the availability of a free download (or the intent to avail oneself of it). That simply is not so. One reason is that many people don't limit themselves to what they can afford to buy when what they are doing is getting it free by stealing. Another reason is that many people download more than they would ever hope to have time to listen to. My post simply adds another reason (which might have existed before, but more clearly exists now) that some people download music because it is, or is coming to be, the only way to get the functionality of music at all.
Before the internet, piracy existed in many forms, including tapes on sale by street vendors at prices less than the retail or even discount prices in record stores. But that piracy never scaled up to anywhere near as big as what the internet has. Convenience is certainly one factor that has made internet piracy so much larger. Scalability, as in, you can now find that exact music you were looking for, is another. But I believe the big one is that it's free, or nearly so (bandwidth and storage space usually cost money, though nowhere near the supposed intellectual property value). Those who are motivated only because it is free aren't the ones who would have paid for it had that been the only choice.
I have downloaded music online. But all that I had downloaded falls into one of the following three categories:
- I decided I liked the music and actually bought the CD
- I decided I liked the music but could not find the CD for sale anywhere
- I decided I did not like the music and deleted it
People who do what I do might have their downloads counted somehow as theft, even though the music industry actually benefits by increased revenues they would not have gotten were it not for the free trading online. I suspect it's not a great many people who do this, but certainly there are some. But I don't think the music industry has taken this into account.Reading that way requires appending human experiences. Apparently yours differs from mine. No surprise there. What you need to do is stop assuming that everything anyone writes has exactly the same non-machine implications in it as what you might write. I suggest you make a word by word analysis and show just how it is that my post is as you describe. Maybe then we can see, point by point, how the two of us are different.
I don't know if they realize this (and they may not), but free software (and free file trading and copying) actually benefits them once they switch to an encrypted pay-per-play (and other package deals) type of marketing. The key (pardon the pun) to this is that the media rendering device (sound card, USB headphones, whatever) itself decrypts and decodes the music. Sound files (and other media) will just be encrypted blobs with some attached cleartext properties that don't need to be hidden (like titles, checksums).
This model of music marketing (which could also apply to movies) would allow people to download, copy, shared, and trade, all the music they want. But they can't actually play it from these files unless they first get a DRT (digital rights token). This would be purchased usually for a specific playback device (won't work on others), usually for a specific time frame (a month), possibly for a lot, or any, music. DRTs could be sold for one song forever (effectively the model we have now), or sold for all music (that vendor can sell for) for a fixed period of time (essentially a subscription model). The DRT is merely a right to play and doesn't include an actual copy. You could have (and maybe eventually could buy on the market) a computer juke box that contains all music produced in the last 20 years. Your one-month DRT lets you play anything in that collection for that month.
One thing I have seen in many people who trade is the desire to be leet by having huge collections so large they couldn't possibly ever listen to it all. The goal obviously isn't to massively listen to more than 24 hours of music a day. The goal is to have handy choice (for themselves and their friends). Eventually, as bandwidth availability makes this practical, you'll be able to access music online to be played as you want to play it. If the DRT system is used, it won't matter where you get the encrypted blob; you still pay the music industry to play.
Probably not most, but many people who put Windows on their computer do so knowing that Linux software (well, lots of it, anyway), won't work.
The fact is, the choice of Linux for a desktop does not impact what most people do with a computer; it just changes the way they do it. It's not an alternative lifestyle, unless you consider things like security and reliablity to be an alternative (well, I suppose maybe it is). All office functions students (and just about anyone) need to do can be done in Linux and BSD.
And many people have made that choice already. The school administration is effectively telling them that to benefit from the money they take from them, they have to go to the effort and cost to switch to MS Windows, and suffer all the headaches that brings along.
What makes you think my post repeals laws on intellectual property. I suggest you read it carefully. Look each individual word up in the dictionary if you must. Nowhere do I say it is legal, or even ought to be legal. I simply said the music industry cannot use the piracy (note that I really did call it piracy) by that group as a measure of lost revenue.
Will they get around to supplying a Linux client? Maybe. But I am most definitely not going to hold my breath for that.
So join and work with the Penn State Linux Users Group to help put together proposals, petitions, and if necessary, protests, to pressure the school administrators to consider the needs of non-Windows users.
The salaries are paid from tuition, state funding, and research grants, not from the extra fees charged for student facilities. And even if you are looking at the money that does go to paying professors as a pool, you get far more out of those few professors you do take classes from than what your percentage of the pool paid them. In the end it works out approximately even; maybe a few cents off here and there. But for a student service specifically designated only for specific set of students, which offers nothing as an alternative for those it does not serve (remember, paying professors does not mean 10% of the students don't get to take classes).
As for paying lab fees even if you take no lab classes; that might be broken. When I was in school, lab fees applied only when you actually took the lab classes. But I never went to Penn State, so I have no idea how it's done there. Still, if they charge what results in a level fee each semester and you have to take a fixed number of lab classes to meet requirements, it works out in the end, and your costs are flattened out, too. So maybe it's not broken.
The music industry obviously considers students (and anyone) that don't run Windows (or Mac) to not be part of the market they are trying to sell to. There could be many reasons for this. One might be the cost of developing a media player for Linux, BSD, or whatever other stuff even fewer people might be running at home. So it's probably not cost effective to make the effort to market to that group, given the lower revenues from such a smaller group. So since they aren't expecting any revenues from Linux and BSD users, they surely have no basis to claim a loss of revenue from any piracy by people in that group.
Or maybe a quiz on what was advertised.
None of these methods are perfect, but they can help avoid your banner ads and other web site features from being blocked.