It depends on your definition of "best". The best OS to make Bill rich --> Windows. The best OS to give the CEO that warm comfy feeling that there will be money in the pot to collect when they have to sue someone for everything going wrong --> Windows. The best OS for those that really don't care what the system does, as long as everyone thinks it does exactly everything they need to do today, tomorrow, and forever --> Windows. The OS that sells the most, no matter what the reason is --> Windows.
However, technically bright people who prefer MS Windows over open source systems may well have an interest in proving Linux is not invulnerable to this kind of thing. If one of them can get in, that might well prove something. If both of them can, it probably does prove something.
If businesses want to make their networks secure, they need to hire someone who cares and knows how, and pay well to get that person. Then don't hinder them with petty things like bureaucracy. They should report directly to the CTO or CIO, or actually be the CTO or CIO.
I do find myself somewhat agreeing with Microsoft on this. Bugs happen. Open source may have fewer of them, but they happen with open source, too. Very few open source systems are secure "out of the box". Any admin that assumes otherwise, for BSD, or Linux, or Microsoft Windows, is a retard. Comparing an improperly administered system of one class to a tightly secured system of another is really pointless. It's comparing a retard to someone who knows what they are doing, and cares.
Why do we even need a central organization in the first place? To make decisions on what goes into central name servers? Why do I have to use their stupid name servers anyway? Why does anyone? Why not just let people choose what entity they want to provide top level domain selection, and they can point their DNS hint file to them? That's the only true fair market way to decide. That way those who want.XXX can have it, and those that don't can avoid it, and we don't have some group of people taking payoffs to decide who gets to populate the.XXX zone.
Please remember, if you have received a Domain Name Application conflict notice, you need to respond with your intention to proceed or cancel your application by 23:59 EDT on Monday, 11 October 2001.
I'd like to know when this particular date is supposed to be.
It may be so $$$$$$ because of things like battery backup, low power RAM, and other crazy engineering marvels.
What I'd like to have is a PCI card with 4 or 8 DIMM slots on it, that can emulate IDE at any addr/IRQ (not just primary and secondary), comes unpopulated, and supports all DIMM sizes for which standards are in existance. I think such a card should be doable under $200 in quantity, although it's hard to say what quantities the market will demand.
I'm currently looking around for a Linux driver that can make a special RAMDISK out of whatever RAM exists beyond the point specified in mem= in the kernel parameters (append in LILO). If I can't find one, I may consider writing one.
As for your reference to a huge initrd, why not try out my cdinit loader that is part of my BICK [Bootable ISO Construction Kit] project. It comes to life via a smaller than usual initrd (having only/dev/console and cdinit named as/sbin/init). It expects to be booted from a CDROM, so it looks around for that CDROM and loads a tar file from it into tmpfs. I originally used ramfs instead of tmpfs when I started writing it. If you're going to run from RAM, either of those might work out better than RAMdisk. Given enough RAM and a patch to the kernel to tweak some limits, you could load 600+MB (even more if uncompression is implemented) from the CD into RAM and run a rather substantial system (at the cost of several minutes load up time, depending on CDROM speed). Or hack cdinit to use other data sources, like the network. You're not stuck with using initrd.
Data will be loaded from disk initially on demand (which means slow startup) but will almost always stay memory resident thereafter. The OS will also commit dirty pages back to disk from time to time ensuring that you don't lose anything important.
In Linux, this does not happen. Data loaded from disk often gets flushed back out because Linux doesn't restrict the amount of RAM that write operations may use. If you have 1GB and a process suddenly writes 1GB to 4GB of data, almost everything else will get swapped out. The non-dirty pages go first because they are cheaper (just steal them).
If your system grinds disk consistently after several hours of use, it's a good indication that you should get more RAM considering how cheap it is.
Unfortunately, with current versions of Linux in the 2.4 series, more RAM means more grinding. But lately things are getting better. Hopefully this gets fixed before everyone gets busy on 2.5.
At what price for an UNpopulated card? There's no advantage to the lower prices of RAM these days if the use for that RAM is in a device that the manufacturer is going to rape your wallet for. The ideal device will be one that plugs into a PCI slot, does IDE I/O exactly like any IDE controller (hence no driver needed), has jumpers or BIOS config to make it work on any standard IDE device address or IRQ (there's way more than just primary and secondary, and Linux/BSD supports them). Long persistent storage (e.g a battery) should be an option, and short persistent storage should work if you just reboot/reset w/o cutting off the power. If I need longer than that, I can buy some newfangled device that records data magnetically in circles on the surface of rotating platters.
In the end, DRM management will hinder, not help, even those who seek to profit from their creative works. The petty steps needed to make use of copyrighted material under DRM will ultimately have to give way to yet another system I see as the ultimate answer. Such a system will have to be a broad subscription based scheme, where instead of paying specifically for each creative work, you end up paying a general rate, and then have access to all those works. The authors and publishers then earn from that based on the proportion of how much their works are used. Even a random sampling of 5% of usage would give a fairly accurate measure of proportion for the various works to determine how much each author and publisher is paid.
Take a look at some of the big MP3 collectors. There are some people with over 100 gigabytes of downloaded music. At the statutory wholesale publisher rates paid through HFA, this comes to over US$100,000. The retail value of such collections could be US$1,000,000. And it would take months just to listen to everything once. But these are people who would not go buy all that at $12/CD. They aren't downloading it to be able to listen to it all, but for the stud factor of having an awesome jukebox. Eventually we will reach a point where we can have any creative work delivered in real time whenever we want, and even mobile at some point. We'll be paying for delivery of content, not the scale of the choices. Many of the downloads now are to achieve scale of choices, and that will be greater as bandwidths and storage leaps allow, but eventually it might not be needed (except for those unwilling to pay a dime).
Imagine paying a rate about the same as cable TV or internet access that lets you listen to any music you want, any time you want, anywhere you want. Whether you listen to the same 5 tunes over and over, or jump around among 100 genres, your rate would be about the same since it would be based on what is delivered, and at most you could listen to about 43,200 minutes a month (there might be a lower price for listening to less). Once this kind of service is available, there won't be much value in actually storing the music. As long as the pricing structure is based on fixed time, rather than how many different tunes you have access to but rarely listen to, it will beat not only most piracy, but also recorded media sales (why buy 1000 CDs if you typically listen to about 20 of them?).
It might still take another decade for the music industry to get a clue and try to build it this way. Last mile bandwidth is not there yet, especially mobile, for everyone. And then it might take a few more years for the motion picture industry to "get it", too. But eventually it will have to happen. DRM will then simply be a yes or no question.
The system won't be totally perfect. There will be those unwilling to subscribe at all, and will still steal music. There may be privacy issues regarding what we listen to. Some of this can be addressed by legislation (whether we agree that it should or not). Some of this can be addressed by the open market. And some of this can be addressed by technology. The delivery is certain to be encrypted. The ability to decrypt it is certain to be isolated to hardware like portable players and sound cards in your computer (the software would just be shuttling an encrypted data stream through, and hence open source operating systems won't be a risk). Time window based encryption would prevent storing the data for later playback (and this defeat delayed leakage to non-payers). Interim technology could allow doing a combination of storing encrypted streams with live delivery of a time window based key (and the hardware still does the work).
Given this, storage of music by consumers won't be needed, and thus DRM will be moot. This is still a few years off, but mark my word, it is coming as soon as entertainment executives figure it out for themselves.
You need to make sure you have a higher quality camera. If it records high quality, say on a hard drive or at least flash ram, then it can do the low quality transmission first for the live broadcast. Then between live feeds, do the file transfer of the parts of the high quality shots... if you're not on the run for your life (sometimes the case in places like this).
This is technology intended for a certain (1 56K channel) level of bandwidth. In the future specialized units with some more bandwidth could come along specifically for the news media... after the CIA lets the contractors de-classify that technology.
The partitioning has nothing to do with hardware. The same 4 primary limitation exists even on SCSI. The problem stems from the choice of MS-DOS type of partitioning. Other partition schemes exist, such as BSD partitions. And Intel is developing a new one for 64-bit architectures that should still work fine on 32-bit machines. It's just a matter of coding in the support portably in the kernel.
You can make an infinite number of logical partitions in extended space, and Linux will support 59 of them (after the 4 primary). You can also stuff the primary partitions with FreeBSD style partitions for a total of 28, or OpenBSD style for a total of 60 (but only 59 devices available).
The whole IRQ system is itself part of the problem in PC design. It is actually a hack done in the design of the original IBM PC in order to delete a real I/O interrupt controller to cut costs. They used the interrupt request LEVELS for separate devices instead of the correct way of having a controller that stored the I/O address of the device generating the interrupt. Mainframes have since the 1960's worked on the latter mechanism, having a single interrupt vector for all I/O and the first thing the handler does after saving context is get the address of the interrupting device. There was never an IRQ problem on mainframes. It is the IRQ design in the PC that needs to be tossed out. Interrupts should always idenfity the precise I/O device.
Incompatibilities will continue to plague the computing industry because designers are limited by cost controls, short sighted planners, having to avoid patents held by other companies, having to push patents held by their employer, etc. Makers of whole systems don't want you to upgrade when they can sell you a whole new system every year. That's how business works. They are not there to make great technology; they are there to sell you stuff. It will include just enough technology to get you to buy it, and no more.
Various technology industry and trade associations continue to report an ongoing IT worker shortage while at the same time, thousands of computer, internet, telephony, and other technology workers remain unemployed, with more being added to these ranks, in just my city alone. Technology recruiters are telling me jobs have for the most part dried up. Web job boards which have together reported as many as a million available jobs just 2 years ago, have way fewer than 1/10th of that number now.
Could you tell us what is happening to explain this difference, such as, is the industry trying to generate the appearance of more shortage to try to convince the government to even further flood the pool of available candidates in order to drive down salaries?
I've had 2 earlier models of IBM drives die (click of death). I have 2 other earlier models still alive, and my 2 45G versions of 75GXP (the 3 platter ones) are still working (just over a year now). The interesting part is that I have a 100% correlation between heat problems and failures in IBM drives. The drives that failed ran for a couple months in machines with essentially no cooling besides the CPU. The drives that are alive are either cooled by the 3-fan InClose Baycooler-2 or the 5 high speed (Rotron?) internal fans in the Intel ISP-1100 1U case. I also have Maxtor drives, some well cooled and some not, in the range from 5G to 80G, but I haven't had a Maxtor fail since the 5G one, and that one actually didn't die, but just occaisionally sticks and occaisionally clicks. My practice right now is to buy Maxtor, but staying 1 step behind the largest model, and using the 5400 RPM ones (which at 80G density is going to keep ATA/100 pretty busy anyway, compared to say 30G at 7200 which I do have a couple of to compare).
Your management is lucky, having not gotten burned on one of the hundreds of thousands of bad MCSEs out there. I'd bet you could do the job, whatever it is (you didn't say) whether you got the certifications or not. The problem is, your management leans on that as a means to determine whether you can or not. That should get you in the door, because an interview is not a very good way to do that. But within 6 months it should be rather obvious whether you can do the job or not based on whether you are getting the job done or not. I'm assuming you are getting the job done. What about those other guys without the certs? Are they getting the job done as well as you are? Or are you doing better? And would you be able to do better if you had simply studied well, tried things, learned from mistakes, and not taken the exams?
The value I see for most certifications is being able to prove to a new prospective employer than you have the foundation to do the job.
But there is a reason management likes certifications for people who can prove, and have proven, their ability to do the job well. They can use that in promoting the business. If the business is offering a service to other customers who want some way to judge how well that service might be, they can use the numbers in promoting the business. That makes the certs valuable to the business even long after you have proven to your own management your actual worth. They can now promote the business better to prospective customer and that is effectively the same as an entry-level situation.
But I must congratulate your management on paying up for getting those certs. Many don't, or do very little.
I've attached the red stripe on the wrong side before, and it worked. That's because I attached it on the wrong side on the other end of the cable, too. Fortunately it was a non-polarized connector, so I could do this. The reason I did it was because of the way the cable was made. By reversing it, I avoided having to twist the wires back around, which was making the cable too short to fit. You can't do this for floppy cables, though, due to the asymmetric twist (there's 4 ways to plug those in, and 3 of them are wrong).
Ahmed had wasted his first wish foolishly, and his second wish
just to undo his first. Now he had one more wish remaining and
he was determined to do it right this time. He was now determined
to do something for others instead of for himself. He saw the
suffering in his desert town. There was only one well in the
town, and it was frequently drying up, or so everyone was told by
the old man who owned it. The old man charged a handsome price
to drink from the well; only on the days it was flowing.
"I wish...", he said as he paused, thinking carefully to make
sure he did not make yet another mistake, for he had no fourth
wish with which to correct any mistake. "I wish for a well which
shall flow abundantly at all times, and provide water for all the
people, and cannot be owned by anyone, or taxed or otherwise held
for any ransom."
The genie acknowledged his wish and promptly vanished, never to be
seen again. Now he wondered if he would have what he wished for
as he emerged from his small tent to find a noise near the center
of town. So he went to see what this was.
When he arrived at the center of town, he saw before him a sight
never had anyone seen in any desert town before. Right in the
center of town there was a might gusher of water springing forth.
So much water that it was flowing down one of the streets and went
flowing out into the desert for a mile before drying up.
No one had known that it was Ahmed who had wished for this. Even
he was unsure that it was his wish that had brought such a bounty.
He told no one. Surely they would not believe him anyway. But
his real desire was for his town to prosper and be happy, and so
it was. And so, Ahmed was happy.
For 10 years the well did flow. Night and day it did flow. The
trade routes across the desert changed over the years to come by
way of the town. The people had built a great trough to make it
so a thousand camels could drink from the water at the same time.
No one had even seen a hundred camels at one time before the day
the great well sprang up. Now there were hundreds of traders and
thousands of camels. The more that drank from the well, the more
it gushed forth.
No one paid for any water, but the people of the town became rich
anyway, because so much trade came by that everything else was
being bought and sold. The town prospered greatly, and even Ahmed
had become richer than his very first wish had made him.
Why was the old man digging a new well? He had toiled on it for
two years, he and his six sons and twenty grandsons. They already
had one well that flowed only some, and now another? But water
did come from his new well regularly, but only one bucket at a
time as before. Why was he doing this, Ahmed wondered.
Another year had passed and not only was the town prospering, but
even nearby towns which had no magic wells were also prospering
just because the trade routes were larger than they ever had been.
Ahmed travelled to see the wonders of his magic well and how it
had affected all the people in so many towns. There was plenty
of trade through all the land, and so many new things to be traded
that even Ahmed could not have imagined to wish for had he even a
thousand wishes.
Ahmed had travelled for almost a year in his land and was now
returning home to his town which was now thirty times larger than
it was many years before. He looked forward to sleeping again in
his house, which had replaced his small tent. But as he arrived
home, he saw what he could not yet imagine.
A long line of people had formed in front of the well the old man
and his family had dug up. He was bring up water from his well,
and charging more for this water than he had ever charged before.
And the people were paying for it. Ahmed came to one man in the
line and ask why? The man said "I must drink, and here is the
place for water."
"What of the great magic well?" Ahmed asked, careful to not say he
had wished for one that would flow forever. "Is it not flowing?"
"It is" the man in line said, "but it is poison".
Terrified, Ahmed rushed into the center of town only to see the
well still gushing forth, but no one drinking of it, nor anyone
watering their camels, nor filling their flasks. Walls had been
built up around it. As Ahmed approach the well to check the water
someone recognized him and came to him and warned him. "Over a
thousand people have died after you left." he said. "The poison
is slight, but if you drink more than one drink every two days it
will cause you a horrible sickness, and if you continue, you will
surely die, as did my wife and half of my children."
"How did this happen?" Ahmed demanded to know. "The old man who
has the other wells, it must be he who has done this." came the
terrifying answer. "He came to the well one day with a small
golden chalice and filled it, then poured it back in and laughed."
The man continued, "that day two thousand became sick, and the
next day three hundred people and three thousand camels died."
As the years went on, the great well did continue to flow. It did
not stop, not even in the greatest of droughts and famines. The
old man now had three wells from which he sold water, and owned
almost all the land in and around the town. No one was allowed to
dig new wells. Most of the traders stopped coming. Few people
remained in the town. The riches had come to an end, except for
one family. The old man now had three wells and they flowed as
well as any well normally did. His business was brisk, and it
made him and his family rich. He was even richer than he was in
the time of the great well. But no one else was.
But soon the town dwindled to just a few people. The old man had
passed away, and most of his family moved on to other towns in the
land. Two of his sons stayed, but without the traders coming in
such numbers as during the great well, even they were no longer
prospering.
Ahmed was thirsty, and grabbed two coins and went down to the well
still run by the old man's two sons. "One drink" he asked, as he
held out his hand offering the two coins. "Sorry, the well is not
flowing today. Come back tomorrow and bring four coins." Ahmed
wondered if maybe he should just take one drink from the magic
well. But he knew he could not do that as often as he needed to
drink.
And Ahmed soon moved away to another town, not wanting to even see
the great well anymore, for it was such an ugly sight.
Today, the ideas of the thousands are the great well of bounty
that flows into our technological economy. We all prosper from
such a well, but no one prospers above the others. It is shared
and we all prosper equally in our own way. Those who would want
to change things so the well flows only for them would seek to
stop the well from flowing. Since they cannot stop it, the best
they can do is poison it. Everyone prospers when everyone shares
in that prosperity. Poison the well of ideas, and the prosperity
only comes to those who have the poison. But even their level of
prosperity, while more than the others, will diminish.
So many patents do not serve to advance ideas, but only serve to
corner markets. Most patents do not bring water to the well, but
only poison it.
Technology runs at such a pace the patent office can no longer do
the things it needs to do. The patent office just leaves it up to
the courts to decide which is valid and which is not, so they will
just issue all but the most obviously duplications. Few ever get
taken to court because the cost of doing that is so high. Patents
may be intended to advance the science and the arts, but today
they are not doing this at a level anywhere near what should be
expected from the number issued. One of the greatest advances we
have seen in the last several years, the internet, has advanced
the science and the arts with virtually no patents at all.
Unpoisoned ideas are what makes us all prosper, and when we all
share in that prosperity, then it is the greatest prosperity.
It would not take all that long for existing open web standards to be adopted under the IETF, or at least another group functioning like the IETF if IETF doesn't want to take on the web standards. Either way, I'm sure there will be lots of volunteers to do the work.
The well (of open standards) is not going to dry up, even though most businesses are drinking from the well (even while some are trying to dig their own). Too bad a few come along and try to poison the open well, perhaps to get those businesses who drink from the open well to go drink from a pay well.
Absolutely! Recouping research costs is a must. But this needs to be limited to actual research done for creations that are actually new, unique, and non-obvious. Way too many of the patents issued by an overworked and apparently incompetent USPTO is actually hampering business. Research now runs a high risk that the results may result in threats or litigation from other patents that don't even meet the requirements to be issued a patent.
The fact that there are valid patents, as you hold up one for a transistor, does not mean that all others are equally valid. The vast majority did not promote technology. If issuance of patents were limited, as they should be, to true advances in technology, we wouldn't be having this discussion now.
Web standards and internet standards did amazingly well without using technology that was encumbered by patents to get us to the point we are today. If the very beginnings of the web were built upon patent encumbered technology, we would not be having this discussion, because there would be no slashdot.org and there would be no web. The reason for this is because there would have been no free/open source development of the web to make it happen. What we might have instead would be 2 or 3 proprietary online providers who would be charging high prices for access and even higher prices to place content. There would be no peer to peer communication at all except through those central providers. And in that world we'd would be sitting there thinking we are so advanced. But the true advances come when tens of thousands of great minds work on the technology, not a few corporations.
I'm not opposed to the patent system, or even software patents. I'm simply opposed to those which are obvious, and would have been done very soon by someone else anyway. The majority of patents are things that thousands would have, or could have if asked to, solved on their own. Some corporation doing "a little inventing before the need" to ensure they get the patent is not advancing the state of the art, but just their own profits. That hurts the rest of business.
That's a fairly accurate description of how corporate hiring, and even much small business, does things in areas of high-tech. Part of the problem is that people responsible for determining who can do the job don't have enough high-tech background of their own to really understand who has the smarts and who just says they do. <ramble>And too often these hiring managers toss out resumes of smart people, then whine to the government that "no one qualified even applied for the job" to try to get more H1Bs to come into the country, take our paychecks, and mail them back to their own country, depriving our retail businesses of a lot of their revenues.</ramble>
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It depends on your definition of "best". The best OS to make Bill rich --> Windows. The best OS to give the CEO that warm comfy feeling that there will be money in the pot to collect when they have to sue someone for everything going wrong --> Windows. The best OS for those that really don't care what the system does, as long as everyone thinks it does exactly everything they need to do today, tomorrow, and forever --> Windows. The OS that sells the most, no matter what the reason is --> Windows.
So why do you choose Windows?
However, technically bright people who prefer MS Windows over open source systems may well have an interest in proving Linux is not invulnerable to this kind of thing. If one of them can get in, that might well prove something. If both of them can, it probably does prove something.
Name that University. Identify their netblock(s). I'm sure someone will do something about it.
If businesses want to make their networks secure, they need to hire someone who cares and knows how, and pay well to get that person. Then don't hinder them with petty things like bureaucracy. They should report directly to the CTO or CIO, or actually be the CTO or CIO.
I do find myself somewhat agreeing with Microsoft on this. Bugs happen. Open source may have fewer of them, but they happen with open source, too. Very few open source systems are secure "out of the box". Any admin that assumes otherwise, for BSD, or Linux, or Microsoft Windows, is a retard. Comparing an improperly administered system of one class to a tightly secured system of another is really pointless. It's comparing a retard to someone who knows what they are doing, and cares.
Why do we even need a central organization in the first place? To make decisions on what goes into central name servers? Why do I have to use their stupid name servers anyway? Why does anyone? Why not just let people choose what entity they want to provide top level domain selection, and they can point their DNS hint file to them? That's the only true fair market way to decide. That way those who want .XXX can have it, and those that don't can avoid it, and we don't have some group of people taking payoffs to decide who gets to populate the .XXX zone.
The link didn't go through. It's supposed to be http://www.neulevel.com/.
According to the NeuLevel, Inc. web site:
I'd like to know when this particular date is supposed to be.
It may be so $$$$$$ because of things like battery backup, low power RAM, and other crazy engineering marvels.
What I'd like to have is a PCI card with 4 or 8 DIMM slots on it, that can emulate IDE at any addr/IRQ (not just primary and secondary), comes unpopulated, and supports all DIMM sizes for which standards are in existance. I think such a card should be doable under $200 in quantity, although it's hard to say what quantities the market will demand.
I'm currently looking around for a Linux driver that can make a special RAMDISK out of whatever RAM exists beyond the point specified in mem= in the kernel parameters (append in LILO). If I can't find one, I may consider writing one.
As for your reference to a huge initrd, why not try out my cdinit loader that is part of my BICK [Bootable ISO Construction Kit] project. It comes to life via a smaller than usual initrd (having only /dev/console and cdinit named as /sbin/init). It expects to be booted from a CDROM, so it looks around for that CDROM and loads a tar file from it into tmpfs. I originally used ramfs instead of tmpfs when I started writing it. If you're going to run from RAM, either of those might work out better than RAMdisk. Given enough RAM and a patch to the kernel to tweak some limits, you could load 600+MB (even more if uncompression is implemented) from the CD into RAM and run a rather substantial system (at the cost of several minutes load up time, depending on CDROM speed). Or hack cdinit to use other data sources, like the network. You're not stuck with using initrd.
In Linux, this does not happen. Data loaded from disk often gets flushed back out because Linux doesn't restrict the amount of RAM that write operations may use. If you have 1GB and a process suddenly writes 1GB to 4GB of data, almost everything else will get swapped out. The non-dirty pages go first because they are cheaper (just steal them).
Unfortunately, with current versions of Linux in the 2.4 series, more RAM means more grinding. But lately things are getting better. Hopefully this gets fixed before everyone gets busy on 2.5.
At what price for an UNpopulated card? There's no advantage to the lower prices of RAM these days if the use for that RAM is in a device that the manufacturer is going to rape your wallet for. The ideal device will be one that plugs into a PCI slot, does IDE I/O exactly like any IDE controller (hence no driver needed), has jumpers or BIOS config to make it work on any standard IDE device address or IRQ (there's way more than just primary and secondary, and Linux/BSD supports them). Long persistent storage (e.g a battery) should be an option, and short persistent storage should work if you just reboot/reset w/o cutting off the power. If I need longer than that, I can buy some newfangled device that records data magnetically in circles on the surface of rotating platters.
I didn't find any pricing. The store was open, but the shelves were empty. Don't they sell it as an unpopulated card?
In the end, DRM management will hinder, not help, even those who seek to profit from their creative works. The petty steps needed to make use of copyrighted material under DRM will ultimately have to give way to yet another system I see as the ultimate answer. Such a system will have to be a broad subscription based scheme, where instead of paying specifically for each creative work, you end up paying a general rate, and then have access to all those works. The authors and publishers then earn from that based on the proportion of how much their works are used. Even a random sampling of 5% of usage would give a fairly accurate measure of proportion for the various works to determine how much each author and publisher is paid.
Take a look at some of the big MP3 collectors. There are some people with over 100 gigabytes of downloaded music. At the statutory wholesale publisher rates paid through HFA, this comes to over US$100,000. The retail value of such collections could be US$1,000,000. And it would take months just to listen to everything once. But these are people who would not go buy all that at $12/CD. They aren't downloading it to be able to listen to it all, but for the stud factor of having an awesome jukebox. Eventually we will reach a point where we can have any creative work delivered in real time whenever we want, and even mobile at some point. We'll be paying for delivery of content, not the scale of the choices. Many of the downloads now are to achieve scale of choices, and that will be greater as bandwidths and storage leaps allow, but eventually it might not be needed (except for those unwilling to pay a dime).
Imagine paying a rate about the same as cable TV or internet access that lets you listen to any music you want, any time you want, anywhere you want. Whether you listen to the same 5 tunes over and over, or jump around among 100 genres, your rate would be about the same since it would be based on what is delivered, and at most you could listen to about 43,200 minutes a month (there might be a lower price for listening to less). Once this kind of service is available, there won't be much value in actually storing the music. As long as the pricing structure is based on fixed time, rather than how many different tunes you have access to but rarely listen to, it will beat not only most piracy, but also recorded media sales (why buy 1000 CDs if you typically listen to about 20 of them?).
It might still take another decade for the music industry to get a clue and try to build it this way. Last mile bandwidth is not there yet, especially mobile, for everyone. And then it might take a few more years for the motion picture industry to "get it", too. But eventually it will have to happen. DRM will then simply be a yes or no question.
The system won't be totally perfect. There will be those unwilling to subscribe at all, and will still steal music. There may be privacy issues regarding what we listen to. Some of this can be addressed by legislation (whether we agree that it should or not). Some of this can be addressed by the open market. And some of this can be addressed by technology. The delivery is certain to be encrypted. The ability to decrypt it is certain to be isolated to hardware like portable players and sound cards in your computer (the software would just be shuttling an encrypted data stream through, and hence open source operating systems won't be a risk). Time window based encryption would prevent storing the data for later playback (and this defeat delayed leakage to non-payers). Interim technology could allow doing a combination of storing encrypted streams with live delivery of a time window based key (and the hardware still does the work).
Given this, storage of music by consumers won't be needed, and thus DRM will be moot. This is still a few years off, but mark my word, it is coming as soon as entertainment executives figure it out for themselves.
You need to make sure you have a higher quality camera. If it records high quality, say on a hard drive or at least flash ram, then it can do the low quality transmission first for the live broadcast. Then between live feeds, do the file transfer of the parts of the high quality shots ... if you're not on the run for your life (sometimes the case in places like this).
This is technology intended for a certain (1 56K channel) level of bandwidth. In the future specialized units with some more bandwidth could come along specifically for the news media ... after the CIA lets the contractors de-classify that technology.
3ware has discontinued their entire Escalade line. They are now focusing entirely on integrated storage systems.
The partitioning has nothing to do with hardware. The same 4 primary limitation exists even on SCSI. The problem stems from the choice of MS-DOS type of partitioning. Other partition schemes exist, such as BSD partitions. And Intel is developing a new one for 64-bit architectures that should still work fine on 32-bit machines. It's just a matter of coding in the support portably in the kernel.
You can make an infinite number of logical partitions in extended space, and Linux will support 59 of them (after the 4 primary). You can also stuff the primary partitions with FreeBSD style partitions for a total of 28, or OpenBSD style for a total of 60 (but only 59 devices available).
The whole IRQ system is itself part of the problem in PC design. It is actually a hack done in the design of the original IBM PC in order to delete a real I/O interrupt controller to cut costs. They used the interrupt request LEVELS for separate devices instead of the correct way of having a controller that stored the I/O address of the device generating the interrupt. Mainframes have since the 1960's worked on the latter mechanism, having a single interrupt vector for all I/O and the first thing the handler does after saving context is get the address of the interrupting device. There was never an IRQ problem on mainframes. It is the IRQ design in the PC that needs to be tossed out. Interrupts should always idenfity the precise I/O device.
Incompatibilities will continue to plague the computing industry because designers are limited by cost controls, short sighted planners, having to avoid patents held by other companies, having to push patents held by their employer, etc. Makers of whole systems don't want you to upgrade when they can sell you a whole new system every year. That's how business works. They are not there to make great technology; they are there to sell you stuff. It will include just enough technology to get you to buy it, and no more.
Mr. Reed:
Various technology industry and trade associations continue to report an ongoing IT worker shortage while at the same time, thousands of computer, internet, telephony, and other technology workers remain unemployed, with more being added to these ranks, in just my city alone. Technology recruiters are telling me jobs have for the most part dried up. Web job boards which have together reported as many as a million available jobs just 2 years ago, have way fewer than 1/10th of that number now.
Could you tell us what is happening to explain this difference, such as, is the industry trying to generate the appearance of more shortage to try to convince the government to even further flood the pool of available candidates in order to drive down salaries?
I've had 2 earlier models of IBM drives die (click of death). I have 2 other earlier models still alive, and my 2 45G versions of 75GXP (the 3 platter ones) are still working (just over a year now). The interesting part is that I have a 100% correlation between heat problems and failures in IBM drives. The drives that failed ran for a couple months in machines with essentially no cooling besides the CPU. The drives that are alive are either cooled by the 3-fan InClose Baycooler-2 or the 5 high speed (Rotron?) internal fans in the Intel ISP-1100 1U case. I also have Maxtor drives, some well cooled and some not, in the range from 5G to 80G, but I haven't had a Maxtor fail since the 5G one, and that one actually didn't die, but just occaisionally sticks and occaisionally clicks. My practice right now is to buy Maxtor, but staying 1 step behind the largest model, and using the 5400 RPM ones (which at 80G density is going to keep ATA/100 pretty busy anyway, compared to say 30G at 7200 which I do have a couple of to compare).
Your management is lucky, having not gotten burned on one of the hundreds of thousands of bad MCSEs out there. I'd bet you could do the job, whatever it is (you didn't say) whether you got the certifications or not. The problem is, your management leans on that as a means to determine whether you can or not. That should get you in the door, because an interview is not a very good way to do that. But within 6 months it should be rather obvious whether you can do the job or not based on whether you are getting the job done or not. I'm assuming you are getting the job done. What about those other guys without the certs? Are they getting the job done as well as you are? Or are you doing better? And would you be able to do better if you had simply studied well, tried things, learned from mistakes, and not taken the exams?
The value I see for most certifications is being able to prove to a new prospective employer than you have the foundation to do the job.
But there is a reason management likes certifications for people who can prove, and have proven, their ability to do the job well. They can use that in promoting the business. If the business is offering a service to other customers who want some way to judge how well that service might be, they can use the numbers in promoting the business. That makes the certs valuable to the business even long after you have proven to your own management your actual worth. They can now promote the business better to prospective customer and that is effectively the same as an entry-level situation.
But I must congratulate your management on paying up for getting those certs. Many don't, or do very little.
I've attached the red stripe on the wrong side before, and it worked. That's because I attached it on the wrong side on the other end of the cable, too. Fortunately it was a non-polarized connector, so I could do this. The reason I did it was because of the way the cable was made. By reversing it, I avoided having to twist the wires back around, which was making the cable too short to fit. You can't do this for floppy cables, though, due to the asymmetric twist (there's 4 ways to plug those in, and 3 of them are wrong).
Ahmed had wasted his first wish foolishly, and his second wish
...", he said as he paused, thinking carefully to make
just to undo his first. Now he had one more wish remaining and
he was determined to do it right this time. He was now determined
to do something for others instead of for himself. He saw the
suffering in his desert town. There was only one well in the
town, and it was frequently drying up, or so everyone was told by
the old man who owned it. The old man charged a handsome price
to drink from the well; only on the days it was flowing.
"I wish
sure he did not make yet another mistake, for he had no fourth
wish with which to correct any mistake. "I wish for a well which
shall flow abundantly at all times, and provide water for all the
people, and cannot be owned by anyone, or taxed or otherwise held
for any ransom."
The genie acknowledged his wish and promptly vanished, never to be
seen again. Now he wondered if he would have what he wished for
as he emerged from his small tent to find a noise near the center
of town. So he went to see what this was.
When he arrived at the center of town, he saw before him a sight
never had anyone seen in any desert town before. Right in the
center of town there was a might gusher of water springing forth.
So much water that it was flowing down one of the streets and went
flowing out into the desert for a mile before drying up.
No one had known that it was Ahmed who had wished for this. Even
he was unsure that it was his wish that had brought such a bounty.
He told no one. Surely they would not believe him anyway. But
his real desire was for his town to prosper and be happy, and so
it was. And so, Ahmed was happy.
For 10 years the well did flow. Night and day it did flow. The
trade routes across the desert changed over the years to come by
way of the town. The people had built a great trough to make it
so a thousand camels could drink from the water at the same time.
No one had even seen a hundred camels at one time before the day
the great well sprang up. Now there were hundreds of traders and
thousands of camels. The more that drank from the well, the more
it gushed forth.
No one paid for any water, but the people of the town became rich
anyway, because so much trade came by that everything else was
being bought and sold. The town prospered greatly, and even Ahmed
had become richer than his very first wish had made him.
Why was the old man digging a new well? He had toiled on it for
two years, he and his six sons and twenty grandsons. They already
had one well that flowed only some, and now another? But water
did come from his new well regularly, but only one bucket at a
time as before. Why was he doing this, Ahmed wondered.
Another year had passed and not only was the town prospering, but
even nearby towns which had no magic wells were also prospering
just because the trade routes were larger than they ever had been.
Ahmed travelled to see the wonders of his magic well and how it
had affected all the people in so many towns. There was plenty
of trade through all the land, and so many new things to be traded
that even Ahmed could not have imagined to wish for had he even a
thousand wishes.
Ahmed had travelled for almost a year in his land and was now
returning home to his town which was now thirty times larger than
it was many years before. He looked forward to sleeping again in
his house, which had replaced his small tent. But as he arrived
home, he saw what he could not yet imagine.
A long line of people had formed in front of the well the old man
and his family had dug up. He was bring up water from his well,
and charging more for this water than he had ever charged before.
And the people were paying for it. Ahmed came to one man in the
line and ask why? The man said "I must drink, and here is the
place for water."
"What of the great magic well?" Ahmed asked, careful to not say he
had wished for one that would flow forever. "Is it not flowing?"
"It is" the man in line said, "but it is poison".
Terrified, Ahmed rushed into the center of town only to see the
well still gushing forth, but no one drinking of it, nor anyone
watering their camels, nor filling their flasks. Walls had been
built up around it. As Ahmed approach the well to check the water
someone recognized him and came to him and warned him. "Over a
thousand people have died after you left." he said. "The poison
is slight, but if you drink more than one drink every two days it
will cause you a horrible sickness, and if you continue, you will
surely die, as did my wife and half of my children."
"How did this happen?" Ahmed demanded to know. "The old man who
has the other wells, it must be he who has done this." came the
terrifying answer. "He came to the well one day with a small
golden chalice and filled it, then poured it back in and laughed."
The man continued, "that day two thousand became sick, and the
next day three hundred people and three thousand camels died."
As the years went on, the great well did continue to flow. It did
not stop, not even in the greatest of droughts and famines. The
old man now had three wells from which he sold water, and owned
almost all the land in and around the town. No one was allowed to
dig new wells. Most of the traders stopped coming. Few people
remained in the town. The riches had come to an end, except for
one family. The old man now had three wells and they flowed as
well as any well normally did. His business was brisk, and it
made him and his family rich. He was even richer than he was in
the time of the great well. But no one else was.
But soon the town dwindled to just a few people. The old man had
passed away, and most of his family moved on to other towns in the
land. Two of his sons stayed, but without the traders coming in
such numbers as during the great well, even they were no longer
prospering.
Ahmed was thirsty, and grabbed two coins and went down to the well
still run by the old man's two sons. "One drink" he asked, as he
held out his hand offering the two coins. "Sorry, the well is not
flowing today. Come back tomorrow and bring four coins." Ahmed
wondered if maybe he should just take one drink from the magic
well. But he knew he could not do that as often as he needed to
drink.
And Ahmed soon moved away to another town, not wanting to even see
the great well anymore, for it was such an ugly sight.
Today, the ideas of the thousands are the great well of bounty
that flows into our technological economy. We all prosper from
such a well, but no one prospers above the others. It is shared
and we all prosper equally in our own way. Those who would want
to change things so the well flows only for them would seek to
stop the well from flowing. Since they cannot stop it, the best
they can do is poison it. Everyone prospers when everyone shares
in that prosperity. Poison the well of ideas, and the prosperity
only comes to those who have the poison. But even their level of
prosperity, while more than the others, will diminish.
So many patents do not serve to advance ideas, but only serve to
corner markets. Most patents do not bring water to the well, but
only poison it.
Technology runs at such a pace the patent office can no longer do
the things it needs to do. The patent office just leaves it up to
the courts to decide which is valid and which is not, so they will
just issue all but the most obviously duplications. Few ever get
taken to court because the cost of doing that is so high. Patents
may be intended to advance the science and the arts, but today
they are not doing this at a level anywhere near what should be
expected from the number issued. One of the greatest advances we
have seen in the last several years, the internet, has advanced
the science and the arts with virtually no patents at all.
Unpoisoned ideas are what makes us all prosper, and when we all
share in that prosperity, then it is the greatest prosperity.
It would not take all that long for existing open web standards to be adopted under the IETF, or at least another group functioning like the IETF if IETF doesn't want to take on the web standards. Either way, I'm sure there will be lots of volunteers to do the work.
The well (of open standards) is not going to dry up, even though most businesses are drinking from the well (even while some are trying to dig their own). Too bad a few come along and try to poison the open well, perhaps to get those businesses who drink from the open well to go drink from a pay well.
Absolutely! Recouping research costs is a must. But this needs to be limited to actual research done for creations that are actually new, unique, and non-obvious. Way too many of the patents issued by an overworked and apparently incompetent USPTO is actually hampering business. Research now runs a high risk that the results may result in threats or litigation from other patents that don't even meet the requirements to be issued a patent.
The fact that there are valid patents, as you hold up one for a transistor, does not mean that all others are equally valid. The vast majority did not promote technology. If issuance of patents were limited, as they should be, to true advances in technology, we wouldn't be having this discussion now.
Web standards and internet standards did amazingly well without using technology that was encumbered by patents to get us to the point we are today. If the very beginnings of the web were built upon patent encumbered technology, we would not be having this discussion, because there would be no slashdot.org and there would be no web. The reason for this is because there would have been no free/open source development of the web to make it happen. What we might have instead would be 2 or 3 proprietary online providers who would be charging high prices for access and even higher prices to place content. There would be no peer to peer communication at all except through those central providers. And in that world we'd would be sitting there thinking we are so advanced. But the true advances come when tens of thousands of great minds work on the technology, not a few corporations.
I'm not opposed to the patent system, or even software patents. I'm simply opposed to those which are obvious, and would have been done very soon by someone else anyway. The majority of patents are things that thousands would have, or could have if asked to, solved on their own. Some corporation doing "a little inventing before the need" to ensure they get the patent is not advancing the state of the art, but just their own profits. That hurts the rest of business.
That's a fairly accurate description of how corporate hiring, and even much small business, does things in areas of high-tech. Part of the problem is that people responsible for determining who can do the job don't have enough high-tech background of their own to really understand who has the smarts and who just says they do. <ramble>And too often these hiring managers toss out resumes of smart people, then whine to the government that "no one qualified even applied for the job" to try to get more H1Bs to come into the country, take our paychecks, and mail them back to their own country, depriving our retail businesses of a lot of their revenues.</ramble>