So what you are saying is, if we were to increase our level of music piracy in "Western" countries, then we, too, could end up without having to deal with all that DRM.
And that is entirely doable. They just check for the bot signature in the User Agent, and if it claims to be one of the search engines they allow, then they check the client IP address to verify it comes from the search engine's network. Or just check IP address by itself. For everyone else, if they don't currently have a logged in status, they get a teaser page (first couple paragraphs of the article and login/register form). Very simple. But do you expect any non-technology big corporation to actually hire competent tech people?
The US pharmaceutical companies overcharge the US market for their drugs because they know they can get away with it, with all their lobbying power with the government (both in the Whitehouse and in Congress). You think the music industry and movie industry is any different? They pay more than we can, so they get a government more to their liking. Then they can gouge us for the money to buy even more of our government.
3. US #1 in broadband? This guy defines being #1 in broadband a little differently than the FCC and most people. While the FCC is looking at broadband speed, he looks more at broadband penetration and utilization. Now I don't know the exact numbers, and no sources were really cited in the actual interview, so this is still pretty debatable. However, I think he brings up a good point in how we rank broadband. If a country has the highest speeds available in the world, but only a select few can actually get access to it, then are they really #1 in broadband? I would argue that being the best would be a combination of speed, availability, reliability, and even cost. Again, though, some fact-checking needs to be done on this one.
How about we take the total amount of last mile bandwidth in each market class (single family residential is one class, multi-family residential is another class, business is another class or maybe more than one) and divide it by the total number of people in that class whether access connectivity is delivered there or not. Then do the same for the core infrastructure bandwidth, also divided by the same number of people. These numbers should tell you more than just finding out what bandwidth the top 3% of the population can get.
In summary, Slashdot has once again gone for sensationalism, and the linked article is probably worse. I wouldn't mind it so much if it didn't spark all of these threads making arguments about things that were never said or even implied by the person in question. This is supposed to be a site for intellectuals, yet we can't seem to have an intellectual debate over the issues, because the real issues have been so clouded. I urge everyone to read the actual interview, even though it is quite lengthy. There is a lot of good stuff in there and it gives some good insights into how one of the largest companies in the country feels about issues from net neutrality to health-care. The real answers are not quite as evil as you might think.
Yeah, I read it.
The "net" neutrality argument was ongoing since the Bell breakup, which predated the internet becoming a public feature, and well before Google even started. It just made the news significantly after Google and other started really promoting it. It's kind of like the internet itself... it didn't get well known in the public until the mid 1990's or even later, while academia was making plenty use of it since the mid 1980's... even though it was around in some places long before that (check the early RFCs).
So when is Verizon going to be using the same technology as everyone else? Oh, wait, we don't want some technology pundits telling business what to do and eliminating consumer choice (that they have now between CDMA and GSM).
Anytime government -- whether it's the FCC or any agency -- decides it knows what the market wants and makes that a static requirement, you always lose
Anytime business -- whether it's Verizon or any other -- decides it knows what the market wants and makes that their offering, you always lose.
We are the market!
What I really want to know is when will Verizon deliver 100mbps burst, 20mbps continuous (that means 216 GB of download per day... equivalent to watching a full quality HDTV program for the entire day) to the home? And when will they upgrade that to support UDTV (e.g. 5120x2160p60 or so)? And when will they make sure there is enough that every TV in the house can watch a different TV program from the tens of millions of channel choices available (meaning, no cable TV gatekeeper for channels)?
Keep in mind that a truly neutral delivery of all TV programming to the home... every home... no exceptions... 100%... not 99.999999%... means we can dismiss over-the-air TV to the home, and use all t
We already have HD video on Blu-Ray. I don't know any software package that needs more than 50GB of media (so there probably aren't that many). They say this is for archiving and backups? I switched to hard drives and flash drives several years ago because optical was such a waste and the rewritable ones were less reliable than USB memory sticks.
Just put the people in jail, who were involved in the decision making process (the longest terms for these), and those who would, or should, know it was a crime, knew what the company was doing, and failed to block and/or report it. That should be everyone involved from the top to the bottom. If people start going to jail for their actions that manifest in crimes happening under the name of a corporation, maybe others will think about what they are doing in other cases. That won't get everyone to stop, which is why we still always have to keep investigations going all the time.
Languages pretty much get created either by corporations or academics. There are occasionally some exceptions. Those created by corporations have the stigma that the corporation controls it and can manipulate it for their own profit purposes. And those created by academics usually involve new concepts that are usually ten or so years before their time. Basically, it comes down to the fact that decisions are being made about languages, either at creation or during the progress of the language, by people who do not really do programming for a living.
So, in the end, unless we programmers get together and create our own suite of languages (we already know it is impossible for any one language to suit all needs at all levels well), then we are just going to have to settle for what few uncontrolled languages we now have, and/or the ones controlled by non-programmers.
OTOH, it would be incredibly interesting... even funny... if most of the 50,000 said "fuck off big evil corporation... I'm lawsuit proof via Title 11... bring it on and see what you get". Hint: there's no crime under Title 11 unless there is a conviction.
If someone is letting others use their connection, how are they different from the upstream ISP that is letting others user their big fat connection? What if they (both of them) have a log of who was using when? What if they (either the big corporation or the little guy) refuse to give out the information they have?
So Mr. law student... why is it that corporations (ISPs in this case) get a free pass in the legal system and are not actually sued... just have a subpoena served to request identification of the user of that IP at that time... when people (those in the "we the" part of the DoI) are presumed defendants and don't get an opportunity to simply deliver the name of the user at that time without all the cost hassles of having to file motions to explain that they are just the next node down the line... even if they have a list of who was using at what time?
The ISP is liable for what happens on their line. It's just their say-so that you were using the line (hint: if no one was using that IP at that time, now what?). Now you say your roommate was using the line, too, and you have DHCP records to prove it. Oh, and about that shared IP thing... blame it on your ISP for not giving you a nice big/64 block in IPv6.
This isn't the first time Ubuntu has made an arbitrary decision to depart from common or sensible usage. So I'm very much considering a switch to something else. Fortunately, Ubuntu has inspired significant improvements to desktop environments in other distributions. The iPhone was great when it first came out. Others are making their own forms of similar capability and the iPhone is going to be not much more than a name. Ubuntu is going the same way.
I reference the fact that Ubuntu changed the default DNS address lookup to do AAAA records first before A records (which is, in itself, a good idea), but did so without any means for administrative control to reverse this for situations where one of the other 3 choices might be appropriate. There is an "option inet6" that goes in/etc/resolv.conf to specify that behavior. But Ubuntu didn't use that method (which one could reverse by editing this file), and instead, implemented the change by some other means which disallows reversing it. That's what's bad, and that's what's showing how Ubuntu is the real technical-lead distribution (and is more of an eye-candy-lead distribution).
I don't agree. There are both cases where powers of 1024 make sense, and powers of 1000 make sense. The confusion comes from people that don't understand whether powers of 1024 or powers of 1000 is appropriate for a given case. Data communication speeds, for example, have always been in powers of 1000, with some rounding applied (such as 1.5 megabits per second for a USA DS1 communication circuit, when the actual raw capacity is 1544000 bits per second, made up of 24 channels of 8 bits, plus 1 framing bit for a total of 193, at 8000 (not 8192) frames per second, and has nothing to do in its design with powers of 2 or 1024).
The real absurdity of this is that the process was done as an industry, not scientific, standard, and was mostly not adopted or used by that industry. Also, it was not done on an equality basis (e.g. use equal length prefixes by defining new ones that can only mean powers of 1000 and new ones that can only mean powers of 1024 and leave the old ones to mean a power determined by context as they have always been used). That, and it was not a public open process (as is common for industry standards).
I agree there is a need. I do not agree that what was adopted was appropriate. Do over!
First of all, this "kibi" and "mebi" nonsense has not been made a part of the SI system at all. It's just an IEC industrial standard which the industries themselves have mostly not adopted or used in all this time.
HDD sizes are not modulo 512. They are multiple of 512 (and coming to be multiples of 4096). Personally, I've never seen any problem with hard drive sizes being expressed as multiples of powers of 1000. However, I do have a problem with a Western Digital drive I recently purchased that was marketed as 320GB which only has 319370035200 bytes (e.g. I was shorted by 629964800 bytes. All the manufacturer legal defenses claiming the industry uses a standard of powers of 1000 (which they do) won't apply when I sue WD for $629,964,800:-)
And the industries involved mostly have not even adopted or used the new notation at all. When are we going to see hard drives with their "Gi" and "Ti" units? Until they do, what's the point of all this?
Lots of people have used 'K' when the standard says 'k'. But so many of those people also know that it really makes no difference. The 'K' wasn't standardized and so there is no ambiguity or conflict. It's just being pedantic to enforce the 'k' over 'K'. As to the 'b' vs. 'B', that's widely known to be bits vs. bytes. But I suppose there are some that don't. Those that don't should be allowed to work in IT or be around computers.
The problem with suggesting 'k' for 1000 and 'K' for 1024 is that it doesn't "scale" (so to speak) to the higher order (e.g. what does 'M' or 'G' or 'T' mean).
And we call these prefixes (they are prefixes of the name of the units), but many people use them as suffixes (relative to the number). My new hard drive could be "1.5T bytes" or "1.5 Tbytes" depending on who you ask. I would refer to this not as a prefix, or a suffix, but as a "unit scale" or "unit multiplier".
... that it was not done by means of a purely computer science based terminology and nomenclature basis. Instead, it was done by government bureaucrats who were afraid of things being done different than they had envisioned, and didn't understand why. I do agree that some kind of distinction is needed between a prefix system that means powers of 1000 and a prefix system that means powers of 1024. But what we got from IEC was not done properly or fairly. First of all, the prefix designations for each should be of equal size. That any inserted letters in one should mean an inserted letter in another. Secondly, there should be some consistency, such as using the same letter case between them. The letter "i" really make no sense, either. What the hell does "i" mean? Internal?
The IEC is about the bureaucrats of trade industrials. They have their own motivations that might work for them. But this isn't computer science. Maybe if this had been done through a process like the IETF does RFCs for the internet, we might have a better result. I suggest we scrap the mess and start over, this time doing it right with all the proper constraints and requirements. And make it an open process (IEC and ISO are most certainly not open processes).
DNS is not naturally a data structure suitable for relational databases. Any SQL is a bad choice because SQL is a bad choice. Something like Berkeley DB might have been better, or perhaps some of these.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you are saying is, if we were to increase our level of music piracy in "Western" countries, then we, too, could end up without having to deal with all that DRM.
Better yet, put the login form right under the article teaser. Oh wait, they don't hire real techies at big corporate newspapers. Never mind.
And that is entirely doable. They just check for the bot signature in the User Agent, and if it claims to be one of the search engines they allow, then they check the client IP address to verify it comes from the search engine's network. Or just check IP address by itself. For everyone else, if they don't currently have a logged in status, they get a teaser page (first couple paragraphs of the article and login/register form). Very simple. But do you expect any non-technology big corporation to actually hire competent tech people?
The US pharmaceutical companies overcharge the US market for their drugs because they know they can get away with it, with all their lobbying power with the government (both in the Whitehouse and in Congress). You think the music industry and movie industry is any different? They pay more than we can, so they get a government more to their liking. Then they can gouge us for the money to buy even more of our government.
3. US #1 in broadband? This guy defines being #1 in broadband a little differently than the FCC and most people. While the FCC is looking at broadband speed, he looks more at broadband penetration and utilization. Now I don't know the exact numbers, and no sources were really cited in the actual interview, so this is still pretty debatable. However, I think he brings up a good point in how we rank broadband. If a country has the highest speeds available in the world, but only a select few can actually get access to it, then are they really #1 in broadband? I would argue that being the best would be a combination of speed, availability, reliability, and even cost. Again, though, some fact-checking needs to be done on this one.
How about we take the total amount of last mile bandwidth in each market class (single family residential is one class, multi-family residential is another class, business is another class or maybe more than one) and divide it by the total number of people in that class whether access connectivity is delivered there or not. Then do the same for the core infrastructure bandwidth, also divided by the same number of people. These numbers should tell you more than just finding out what bandwidth the top 3% of the population can get.
In summary, Slashdot has once again gone for sensationalism, and the linked article is probably worse. I wouldn't mind it so much if it didn't spark all of these threads making arguments about things that were never said or even implied by the person in question. This is supposed to be a site for intellectuals, yet we can't seem to have an intellectual debate over the issues, because the real issues have been so clouded. I urge everyone to read the actual interview, even though it is quite lengthy. There is a lot of good stuff in there and it gives some good insights into how one of the largest companies in the country feels about issues from net neutrality to health-care. The real answers are not quite as evil as you might think.
Yeah, I read it.
The "net" neutrality argument was ongoing since the Bell breakup, which predated the internet becoming a public feature, and well before Google even started. It just made the news significantly after Google and other started really promoting it. It's kind of like the internet itself ... it didn't get well known in the public until the mid 1990's or even later, while academia was making plenty use of it since the mid 1980's ... even though it was around in some places long before that (check the early RFCs).
So when is Verizon going to be using the same technology as everyone else? Oh, wait, we don't want some technology pundits telling business what to do and eliminating consumer choice (that they have now between CDMA and GSM).
Anytime government -- whether it's the FCC or any agency -- decides it knows what the market wants and makes that a static requirement, you always lose
Anytime business -- whether it's Verizon or any other -- decides it knows what the market wants and makes that their offering, you always lose.
We are the market!
What I really want to know is when will Verizon deliver 100mbps burst, 20mbps continuous (that means 216 GB of download per day ... equivalent to watching a full quality HDTV program for the entire day) to the home? And when will they upgrade that to support UDTV (e.g. 5120x2160p60 or so)? And when will they make sure there is enough that every TV in the house can watch a different TV program from the tens of millions of channel choices available (meaning, no cable TV gatekeeper for channels)?
Keep in mind that a truly neutral delivery of all TV programming to the home ... every home ... no exceptions ... 100% ... not 99.999999% ... means we can dismiss over-the-air TV to the home, and use all t
"... they may have faster speeds, but we have higher utilization of people using the Internet"
Translation: "our network is totally saturated and overloaded"
That sure is a nasty battery.
We already have HD video on Blu-Ray. I don't know any software package that needs more than 50GB of media (so there probably aren't that many). They say this is for archiving and backups? I switched to hard drives and flash drives several years ago because optical was such a waste and the rewritable ones were less reliable than USB memory sticks.
Just put the people in jail, who were involved in the decision making process (the longest terms for these), and those who would, or should, know it was a crime, knew what the company was doing, and failed to block and/or report it. That should be everyone involved from the top to the bottom. If people start going to jail for their actions that manifest in crimes happening under the name of a corporation, maybe others will think about what they are doing in other cases. That won't get everyone to stop, which is why we still always have to keep investigations going all the time.
Languages pretty much get created either by corporations or academics. There are occasionally some exceptions. Those created by corporations have the stigma that the corporation controls it and can manipulate it for their own profit purposes. And those created by academics usually involve new concepts that are usually ten or so years before their time. Basically, it comes down to the fact that decisions are being made about languages, either at creation or during the progress of the language, by people who do not really do programming for a living.
So, in the end, unless we programmers get together and create our own suite of languages (we already know it is impossible for any one language to suit all needs at all levels well), then we are just going to have to settle for what few uncontrolled languages we now have, and/or the ones controlled by non-programmers.
OTOH, it would be incredibly interesting ... even funny ... if most of the 50,000 said "fuck off big evil corporation ... I'm lawsuit proof via Title 11 ... bring it on and see what you get". Hint: there's no crime under Title 11 unless there is a conviction.
If someone is letting others use their connection, how are they different from the upstream ISP that is letting others user their big fat connection? What if they (both of them) have a log of who was using when? What if they (either the big corporation or the little guy) refuse to give out the information they have?
So Mr. law student ... why is it that corporations (ISPs in this case) get a free pass in the legal system and are not actually sued ... just have a subpoena served to request identification of the user of that IP at that time ... when people (those in the "we the" part of the DoI) are presumed defendants and don't get an opportunity to simply deliver the name of the user at that time without all the cost hassles of having to file motions to explain that they are just the next node down the line ... even if they have a list of who was using at what time?
The ISP is liable for what happens on their line. It's just their say-so that you were using the line (hint: if no one was using that IP at that time, now what?). Now you say your roommate was using the line, too, and you have DHCP records to prove it. Oh, and about that shared IP thing ... blame it on your ISP for not giving you a nice big /64 block in IPv6.
Now how are these first 2094 does even going to know they've been sued? Oh wait, they don't need to know; they are presumed guilty by the plaintiff.
Say your name is the one your Comcast account is under, but someone else such as a neighbor leeching on your wireless network ...
I don't want powers of two. No need for it.
This isn't the first time Ubuntu has made an arbitrary decision to depart from common or sensible usage. So I'm very much considering a switch to something else. Fortunately, Ubuntu has inspired significant improvements to desktop environments in other distributions. The iPhone was great when it first came out. Others are making their own forms of similar capability and the iPhone is going to be not much more than a name. Ubuntu is going the same way.
I reference the fact that Ubuntu changed the default DNS address lookup to do AAAA records first before A records (which is, in itself, a good idea), but did so without any means for administrative control to reverse this for situations where one of the other 3 choices might be appropriate. There is an "option inet6" that goes in /etc/resolv.conf to specify that behavior. But Ubuntu didn't use that method (which one could reverse by editing this file), and instead, implemented the change by some other means which disallows reversing it. That's what's bad, and that's what's showing how Ubuntu is the real technical-lead distribution (and is more of an eye-candy-lead distribution).
I don't agree. There are both cases where powers of 1024 make sense, and powers of 1000 make sense. The confusion comes from people that don't understand whether powers of 1024 or powers of 1000 is appropriate for a given case. Data communication speeds, for example, have always been in powers of 1000, with some rounding applied (such as 1.5 megabits per second for a USA DS1 communication circuit, when the actual raw capacity is 1544000 bits per second, made up of 24 channels of 8 bits, plus 1 framing bit for a total of 193, at 8000 (not 8192) frames per second, and has nothing to do in its design with powers of 2 or 1024).
The real absurdity of this is that the process was done as an industry, not scientific, standard, and was mostly not adopted or used by that industry. Also, it was not done on an equality basis (e.g. use equal length prefixes by defining new ones that can only mean powers of 1000 and new ones that can only mean powers of 1024 and leave the old ones to mean a power determined by context as they have always been used). That, and it was not a public open process (as is common for industry standards).
I agree there is a need. I do not agree that what was adopted was appropriate. Do over!
First of all, this "kibi" and "mebi" nonsense has not been made a part of the SI system at all. It's just an IEC industrial standard which the industries themselves have mostly not adopted or used in all this time.
HDD sizes are not modulo 512. They are multiple of 512 (and coming to be multiples of 4096). Personally, I've never seen any problem with hard drive sizes being expressed as multiples of powers of 1000. However, I do have a problem with a Western Digital drive I recently purchased that was marketed as 320GB which only has 319370035200 bytes (e.g. I was shorted by 629964800 bytes. All the manufacturer legal defenses claiming the industry uses a standard of powers of 1000 (which they do) won't apply when I sue WD for $629,964,800 :-)
And the industries involved mostly have not even adopted or used the new notation at all. When are we going to see hard drives with their "Gi" and "Ti" units? Until they do, what's the point of all this?
Lots of people have used 'K' when the standard says 'k'. But so many of those people also know that it really makes no difference. The 'K' wasn't standardized and so there is no ambiguity or conflict. It's just being pedantic to enforce the 'k' over 'K'. As to the 'b' vs. 'B', that's widely known to be bits vs. bytes. But I suppose there are some that don't. Those that don't should be allowed to work in IT or be around computers.
The problem with suggesting 'k' for 1000 and 'K' for 1024 is that it doesn't "scale" (so to speak) to the higher order (e.g. what does 'M' or 'G' or 'T' mean).
And we call these prefixes (they are prefixes of the name of the units), but many people use them as suffixes (relative to the number). My new hard drive could be "1.5T bytes" or "1.5 Tbytes" depending on who you ask. I would refer to this not as a prefix, or a suffix, but as a "unit scale" or "unit multiplier".
... that it was not done by means of a purely computer science based terminology and nomenclature basis. Instead, it was done by government bureaucrats who were afraid of things being done different than they had envisioned, and didn't understand why. I do agree that some kind of distinction is needed between a prefix system that means powers of 1000 and a prefix system that means powers of 1024. But what we got from IEC was not done properly or fairly. First of all, the prefix designations for each should be of equal size. That any inserted letters in one should mean an inserted letter in another. Secondly, there should be some consistency, such as using the same letter case between them. The letter "i" really make no sense, either. What the hell does "i" mean? Internal?
The IEC is about the bureaucrats of trade industrials. They have their own motivations that might work for them. But this isn't computer science. Maybe if this had been done through a process like the IETF does RFCs for the internet, we might have a better result. I suggest we scrap the mess and start over, this time doing it right with all the proper constraints and requirements. And make it an open process (IEC and ISO are most certainly not open processes).
DNS is not naturally a data structure suitable for relational databases. Any SQL is a bad choice because SQL is a bad choice. Something like Berkeley DB might have been better, or perhaps some of these.
There's no mention of the bloat of BIND9. Will it be carried into BIND10? Are they reimplementing all the bloat from the ground up?
I'll stick with NSD and Unbound.