that's easy 2/3 of the population are morally straight, 19% of the population doesn't care about music CD's, and 15% are just plain thieves without any moral compass.
SOrry dude... anybody riping and collecting works they don't pay for are simply stealing - which IS a form of calling it theirs when they didn't pay for it.
Then why does the same audiance even take the time and enegry to rip and collect hundreds of CD's? There must be some status in collecting bad music they would never listen too:)
Many of my generation have a legal 150 CD and 100 DVD libary of original retail product with an investment of $2,500 or more... the P2P croud typically have twice that in pirated works... and you tell me that isn't about money?
It is interesting to have this form crying about copyright violation of open source code today, while continuing to deny that the film/music industry has exactly the same copyright protections.
The choice of data structures, register assignments, and instruction sequences for the yv12_to_rgb24 routine are VERY damning - unless someone can find the very same routine published in a text book or other open source application.
Including the copyright violations in the P2P community (which is largely the same as the open source community). It's pretty damn sick to be totally arrogant about other peoples copyright violations of GPL'd works while completely ignoring the IP rights of other copyrighted works.
I've been coding in asm since 1967 on two dozen different architectures. The asm routines that were disassembled are instruction sequence, register assignment and structure offset identical for dozens upon dozens of lines that are not simply C interface code. The probablility of two programmers choosing exactly the same data structures, exactly the same manual register assignments, and exactly the same instruction sequences is about the same as being struck by the planet venus in our lifetimes.
Network Solutions should have returned the domain the same day they were notified it had been hijacked. The damages are their failure to promptly fix their own mistake, not the guy who actually took it.
it really comes down to costs, especially if the coop is paying commercial 95th percentile rates for the traffic.
In their case the coop has one T-1's bandwidth to share inside the subscriber base... the operation of a single kazaa server will eat all that bandwidth, and produce 95th percentile bandwidth bill somewhere between $500-$1,000... more if burdened for the cost of the T-1 transport to the coop.
So the question is, do you let one $60/mo user create direct costs 10x their revenue to the coop and ask the other coop members to subsidize it? Or adopt a strict everyone pay's their fair share of costs policy, where nobody subsidizes anybody else?
In our cooperative, we have been struggling with this for the last year... we adopted a policy that everyone can use just as much bandwidth as they want to pay for - and we don't ask members to subsidize anyone. After the first $450-800 bandwidth bill, most people decide that serving MP3's isn't free, most decide the actually purchasing CD's of music and DVD's of films is by far cheaper.
Our bandwidth distribution last month, included 3 sites that decided to run some flavor of a P2P client or server - all got a bill for the costs they generated. Those 3 sites had use 10-20x the other 47 members in our coop. I don't want my bill inflated 3x to cover the use of anyone else. So this week we revised our fee structure, reducing it 17% for most members to match costs, and created two new metered rates so that the heavy users are free to use as much bandwidth as they want to pay for.
The big objection to SPAM is the spammers don't pay the costs to distribute the spam - it's paid for by everyone else in the chain - the end users.
My big objection to P2P is the same - the P2P users are just like SPAMMER's - they want everyone else to pay for their traffic.
If that were true, then why is it the vast majority of drugs are produced in the only market that agressively protects IP? if your theory were true, then based on world population, 85% or more of all drugs would be produced outside the US by well meaning researchers benifiting from the lower cost of living to follow their dreams.
NOT! get a clue - the billions of dollars in research require an infrastructure that is more than the GNP of most of the rest of the entire world - and that requires money, not just dreams
In better times you might could make that argument but it's pretty hard to make today. There are lots of cheap parts on ebay for a few pennies on the dollar and you can purchase a used SMT assembly line (screen printer, SMT pick-n-place machine, high end reflow oven, and a board wash for less than $3k - the set up charges most proto shops ask for few proto builds).
All in all, you can take a product from design to production in todays market for between $5K-25K with some careful spending and a lot of sweat equity. In my case I've got two complete lines, a proto line, and a high volume line - total cost less than $4,500 off ebay and some careful negotiation. The gear is all 6-11 years old, well kept and usable today, plus will be in wonderful (almost near new) shape after a little cleaning and refurb labor. In the market two years ago, the same gear would have cost more than $50K used.
This is a great time to build a product, build a company, and be ready for the market recovery next year with a single VISA cards worth of debt financing - no bankers, no VC's, just your own privately held business to grow.
The cvs web site says:
"Penzilla, the building block of HomeBase, is now available as an Open Source project. Some documentation is available online until we get our new website, Penzilla.org, up and running. Penzilla is the Open Source basis for our HomeBase product, and enables people to create XUL applications quickly and easily. "
While some components of it appear to be open source the articles obvious claim is the entire thing is open source. Going to the down load page talks about a license, and other links point to open source components, but none point to an open source download of the product as stated.
For years internet architects have built a house
of cards that is not nearly as robust as it's
outer appearance. In fact, there are some aspects
that point to a fragile infrastructure just waiting for the final earthquake. The ATM
backbone that Tom's previous company helped
produce, is largely responsible for creating
the packet lost instabilities in the network over
the last 5 years. Under Vint Cerf's leadership at
MCI/WorldCom/UUNet (Will WorldCom's Woes Engulf UUNet?) switched ATM networks created several years of heavy packetloss at key peering points, that can only cascade into total collapse if UUNet goes dark. This fragility might be the only thing that actually saves WorldCom/UUNet - the fear of what can happen without it.
With UUNet dark, the remaining network lacks the switching capacity to handle all of today's traffic (it barely can handle today's traffic without packet loss monitored here), much less short term growth as the world economy recovers from the dire recession. The resulting high packet loss would take us back 5 years where many DNS lookups timed out and simply failed due to high packet loss, and the network loading is dominated by 100% to 300% retries cascading into congestive failure (RFC896 Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks. J. Nagle. January 1984).
There have been many people explore this issue, some very excellent papers (Quality of Service in the Internet: Fact, Fiction, or Compromise? by Paul Ferguson and Geoff Huston) - but largely missed are very basic architectural issues like NTP time syncronization network wide for packet loss retransmission that CREATES well synchronized additional packet loss. This happens because the retranmissions are all timed to arrive at the same time in overloaded switches just to be dropped again due to servers having their scheduling clocks syncronized at a very low rate of 50/60/100/1K Hertz.
A study I did in 1997 of peering point packet loss showed that 90% of packet loss observed correlated to retransmit clock boundries. Changes in traffic flow from primarily mail and ftp in the early 90's,
to web traffic where browsers launch 4-20 concurrent small file lookups changed the nature and ability for Slow Start to be effective in throttling loads causing packet loss (web browser designers flood requests to mask packet loss timeouts) and the short files which are often only a couple packets in length do not throttle with TCP window size controls.
Nothing in the next generation design of the internet (IPv6, VoIP, Streaming UDP MP3's, FPS games which flood packets, or any other new protocol) addresses these critical failings... in fact there is a huge head in the sand approach to just continue providing excess bandwidth and applications to saturate it even more quickly.
Tom's suggestions largely miss the boat, for all the wrong reasons - but the end conclusion is correct - the biggest problems tomarrow are not going to be solved by the solutions being offered.
Copyright protections include alterations/mods
on
The Mod Squad
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The PS author and editors blow it big time when they outright claim that all games are devoid of standard copyright protections against modification/alteration/derivative works. The blanket statement of "Although modifying began among hard-core hackers, it's not illegal." is just flat wrong, except where game publishers openly invite this activity.
After shopping at Fry's since the week the first store opened (Great job John and Randy), there is a reason they have grown to locally make every other chain use them as the benchmark. They are absolutely the best one stop tech shopping center, bar none.
With their size and low cost does come a price... they don't pay engineers $100k/yr to man their isles... as some mom and pop industry drop outs might suggest is the solution to customer care. Any serious Techie doesn't need/want their toy's marked up 100% for support... most newbie public need it... so Fry's has always walked an interesting balance that some wanabee techies find very frustrating. Even in most Fry's stores I have been able to ignore the sales trainies, and go straight to the dept manager to get solid technical suggestions and points (and I am a trained engineer with decades of systems integration experience). The tiered support team in the repair area of most stores is totally awesome - few mom and pop stores (supporting a limited selection of parts and technologies) have the breadth of experience as the Fry's team (which supports literally thousands of products that span nearly every consumer technology).
So - let the clueless wanabee's bash Fry's if they can - but I have yet to see any other store front that does a better job of selling the huge range of products while standing behind every one with their return policy. I can only suggest that techie wanabee's stick to their favorite mom and pop store where the huge cost of one-on-one sales support is buried in the markup of every sale.
As we transform into a digital world, and abandon paper mail is this really the case? Isn't email just the new US Postal service mail, and no more a strictly company private resource than their mail room is today? If Intel has a strict policy against employees receiving personal physical paper mail at work, then I might agree with their stand that personal email at work is a violation of stated company policy too. In this case the ex-employees involved could have derived a physical employee roster and sent paper email with the same message - and with the same level of ire by the corportate managers and had full US Law backing the privacy of the delivery of that mail if addressed to the individuals and marked personal and private.
We as a nation are well into the transition from resource wastefull paper mail - as we struggle with the lack of natural resources and the impacts of thousands of acres of forests harvested for paper that will end up largely in landfills. As we fully transition to a paperless society, then email must have the full rights we expect of paper mail today
The real issues behind this case evolve around the concerns that really drive profession unions sucessfully organizing in corporations. If the people involved in this case had mentioned possible organization under US law, then large amounts of their communications would have included madated access to the rank and file employees of the company. I largely suspect this is more a case of deep pockets trashing individual rights in attempts to silence legal protest for the corporations abuse of their employees, and ex-employees.
self selected polls are nearly always invalid, using the connection data base to the website, or hits from the banner ads would be necessary to ball park some of the figures. IE compare.edu hits to.com hits - and discard aol, @home and the like unless they represent more than 30% of the base - even those could be statisticly narrowed by
selecting a random selection by slashdot and emailing the registered users for demographics.
I think you will find that there are probably better than 10K of us old farts that have been doing this for 20-40 years that read this list regularly. And probably 5-10X that with more than 5 years experience.
You are absolutely right for most inexperienced developers. It was certainly the case when I was 24 and first started fixed price contracting. The reality, is that with a small amount of positive feedback most developers can start to get this right - typically within 25% within 3 months, and within 10% in a year. In my case I under bid the first project by a factor of five, and spent 3 months working at about $0.50/hr, the second project was within 50%, and the third nearly dead on. Working and getting paid by the job is experience that I think nearly every programmer needs BEFORE being allowed to work T&M or salaried.
There are secondary effects of working by the job - you very quickly learn to do only what you are getting paid for - and don't spend a lot of time on personal research projects or unnecessarily rewriting other peoples code that is working just fine but doesn't conform to your personal style. KISS is absolutely a necessary personal style - anything else and you are doom to continuous cycles of project overruns and long talks with management about why your project is another month or two away from completion.
Slashdot Mirror
If NS returned it the same day, the damages would have been near nill.
that's easy 2/3 of the population are morally straight, 19% of the population doesn't care about music CD's, and 15% are just plain thieves without any moral compass.
This is a totally BS argument - people don't rip and P2P share a million copies of shit. It's pure theft, with an everybody is doing it excuse.
SOrry dude ... anybody riping and collecting works they don't pay for are simply stealing - which IS a form of calling it theirs when they didn't pay for it.
Then why does the same audiance even take the time and enegry to rip and collect hundreds of CD's? There must be some status in collecting bad music they would never listen too :)
Many of my generation have a legal 150 CD and 100 DVD libary of original retail product with an investment of $2,500 or more ... the P2P croud typically have twice that in pirated works ... and you tell me that isn't about money?
It is interesting to have this form crying about copyright violation of open source code today, while continuing to deny that the film/music industry has exactly the same copyright protections.
The choice of data structures, register assignments, and instruction sequences for the yv12_to_rgb24 routine are VERY damning - unless someone can find the very same routine published in a text book or other open source application.
Including the copyright violations in the P2P community (which is largely the same as the open source community). It's pretty damn sick to be totally arrogant about other peoples copyright violations of GPL'd works while completely ignoring the IP rights of other copyrighted works.
I've been coding in asm since 1967 on two dozen different architectures. The asm routines that were disassembled are instruction sequence, register assignment and structure offset identical for dozens upon dozens of lines that are not simply C interface code. The probablility of two programmers choosing exactly the same data structures, exactly the same manual register assignments, and exactly the same instruction sequences is about the same as being struck by the planet venus in our lifetimes.
Network Solutions should have returned the domain the same day they were notified it had been hijacked. The damages are their failure to promptly fix their own mistake, not the guy who actually took it.
it really comes down to costs, especially if the coop is paying commercial 95th percentile rates for the traffic.
... the operation of a single kazaa server will eat all that bandwidth, and produce 95th percentile bandwidth bill somewhere between $500-$1,000 ... more if burdened for the cost of the T-1 transport to the coop.
... we adopted a policy that everyone can use just as much bandwidth as they want to pay for - and we don't ask members to subsidize anyone. After the first $450-800 bandwidth bill, most people decide that serving MP3's isn't free, most decide the actually purchasing CD's of music and DVD's of films is by far cheaper.
In their case the coop has one T-1's bandwidth to share inside the subscriber base
So the question is, do you let one $60/mo user create direct costs 10x their revenue to the coop and ask the other coop members to subsidize it? Or adopt a strict everyone pay's their fair share of costs policy, where nobody subsidizes anybody else?
In our cooperative, we have been struggling with this for the last year
Our bandwidth distribution last month, included 3 sites that decided to run some flavor of a P2P client or server - all got a bill for the costs they generated. Those 3 sites had use 10-20x the other 47 members in our coop. I don't want my bill inflated 3x to cover the use of anyone else. So this week we revised our fee structure, reducing it 17% for most members to match costs, and created two new metered rates so that the heavy users are free to use as much bandwidth as they want to pay for.
The big objection to SPAM is the spammers don't pay the costs to distribute the spam - it's paid for by everyone else in the chain - the end users.
My big objection to P2P is the same - the P2P users are just like SPAMMER's - they want everyone else to pay for their traffic.
If that were true, then why is it the vast majority of drugs are produced in the only market that agressively protects IP? if your theory were true, then based on world population, 85% or more of all drugs would be produced outside the US by well meaning researchers benifiting from the lower cost of living to follow their dreams.
NOT! get a clue - the billions of dollars in research require an infrastructure that is more than the GNP of most of the rest of the entire world - and that requires money, not just dreams
In better times you might could make that argument but it's pretty hard to make today. There are lots of cheap parts on ebay for a few pennies on the dollar and you can purchase a used SMT assembly line (screen printer, SMT pick-n-place machine, high end reflow oven, and a board wash for less than $3k - the set up charges most proto shops ask for few proto builds).
All in all, you can take a product from design to production in todays market for between $5K-25K with some careful spending and a lot of sweat equity. In my case I've got two complete lines, a proto line, and a high volume line - total cost less than $4,500 off ebay and some careful negotiation. The gear is all 6-11 years old, well kept and usable today, plus will be in wonderful (almost near new) shape after a little cleaning and refurb labor. In the market two years ago, the same gear would have cost more than $50K used.
This is a great time to build a product, build a company, and be ready for the market recovery next year with a single VISA cards worth of debt financing - no bankers, no VC's, just your own privately held business to grow.
The cvs web site says: "Penzilla, the building block of HomeBase, is now available as an Open Source project. Some documentation is available online until we get our new website, Penzilla.org, up and running. Penzilla is the Open Source basis for our HomeBase product, and enables people to create XUL applications quickly and easily. "
While some components of it appear to be open source the articles obvious claim is the entire thing is open source. Going to the down load page talks about a license, and other links point to open source components, but none point to an open source download of the product as stated.
Feels like a bait and switch hoax to me.
For years internet architects have built a house of cards that is not nearly as robust as it's outer appearance. In fact, there are some aspects that point to a fragile infrastructure just waiting for the final earthquake. The ATM backbone that Tom's previous company helped produce, is largely responsible for creating the packet lost instabilities in the network over the last 5 years. Under Vint Cerf's leadership at MCI/WorldCom/UUNet (Will WorldCom's Woes Engulf UUNet?) switched ATM networks created several years of heavy packetloss at key peering points, that can only cascade into total collapse if UUNet goes dark. This fragility might be the only thing that actually saves WorldCom/UUNet - the fear of what can happen without it.
... in fact there is a huge head in the sand approach to just continue providing excess bandwidth and applications to saturate it even more quickly.
With UUNet dark, the remaining network lacks the switching capacity to handle all of today's traffic (it barely can handle today's traffic without packet loss monitored here), much less short term growth as the world economy recovers from the dire recession. The resulting high packet loss would take us back 5 years where many DNS lookups timed out and simply failed due to high packet loss, and the network loading is dominated by 100% to 300% retries cascading into congestive failure (RFC896 Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks. J. Nagle. January 1984).
There have been many people explore this issue, some very excellent papers (Quality of Service in the Internet: Fact, Fiction, or Compromise? by Paul Ferguson and Geoff Huston) - but largely missed are very basic architectural issues like NTP time syncronization network wide for packet loss retransmission that CREATES well synchronized additional packet loss. This happens because the retranmissions are all timed to arrive at the same time in overloaded switches just to be dropped again due to servers having their scheduling clocks syncronized at a very low rate of 50/60/100/1K Hertz.
A study I did in 1997 of peering point packet loss showed that 90% of packet loss observed correlated to retransmit clock boundries. Changes in traffic flow from primarily mail and ftp in the early 90's, to web traffic where browsers launch 4-20 concurrent small file lookups changed the nature and ability for Slow Start to be effective in throttling loads causing packet loss (web browser designers flood requests to mask packet loss timeouts) and the short files which are often only a couple packets in length do not throttle with TCP window size controls.
Nothing in the next generation design of the internet (IPv6, VoIP, Streaming UDP MP3's, FPS games which flood packets, or any other new protocol) addresses these critical failings
Tom's suggestions largely miss the boat, for all the wrong reasons - but the end conclusion is correct - the biggest problems tomarrow are not going to be solved by the solutions being offered.
The PS author and editors blow it big time when they outright claim that all games are devoid of standard copyright protections against modification/alteration/derivative works. The blanket statement of "Although modifying began among hard-core hackers, it's not illegal." is just flat wrong, except where game publishers openly invite this activity.
After shopping at Fry's since the week the first store opened (Great job John and Randy), there is a reason they have grown to locally make every other chain use them as the benchmark. They are absolutely the best one stop tech shopping center, bar none.
... they don't pay engineers $100k/yr to man their isles ... as some mom and pop industry drop outs might suggest is the solution to customer care. Any serious Techie doesn't need/want their toy's marked up 100% for support ... most newbie public need it ... so Fry's has always walked an interesting balance that some wanabee techies find very frustrating. Even in most Fry's stores I have been able to ignore the sales trainies, and go straight to the dept manager to get solid technical suggestions and points (and I am a trained engineer with decades of systems integration experience). The tiered support team in the repair area of most stores is totally awesome - few mom and pop stores (supporting a limited selection of parts and technologies) have the breadth of experience as the Fry's team (which supports literally thousands of products that span nearly every consumer technology).
With their size and low cost does come a price
So - let the clueless wanabee's bash Fry's if they can - but I have yet to see any other store front that does a better job of selling the huge range of products while standing behind every one with their return policy. I can only suggest that techie wanabee's stick to their favorite mom and pop store where the huge cost of one-on-one sales support is buried in the markup of every sale.
As we transform into a digital world, and abandon paper mail is this really the case? Isn't email just the new US Postal service mail, and no more a strictly company private resource than their mail room is today? If Intel has a strict policy against employees receiving personal physical paper mail at work, then I might agree with their stand that personal email at work is a violation of stated company policy too. In this case the ex-employees involved could have derived a physical employee roster and sent paper email with the same message - and with the same level of ire by the corportate managers and had full US Law backing the privacy of the delivery of that mail if addressed to the individuals and marked personal and private.
We as a nation are well into the transition from resource wastefull paper mail - as we struggle with the lack of natural resources and the impacts of thousands of acres of forests harvested for paper that will end up largely in landfills. As we fully transition to a paperless society, then email must have the full rights we expect of paper mail today
The real issues behind this case evolve around the concerns that really drive profession unions sucessfully organizing in corporations. If the people involved in this case had mentioned possible organization under US law, then large amounts of their communications would have included madated access to the rank and file employees of the company. I largely suspect this is more a case of deep pockets trashing individual rights in attempts to silence legal protest for the corporations abuse of their employees, and ex-employees.
A red hot heat sink will transfer more heat to ambient air with less surface area and less CFM. :)
Of course, 800 degree air has it's problems too
self selected polls are nearly always invalid, using the connection data base to the website, or hits from the banner ads would be necessary to ball park some of the figures. IE compare .edu hits to .com hits - and discard aol, @home and the like unless they represent more than 30% of the base - even those could be statisticly narrowed by
selecting a random selection by slashdot and emailing the registered users for demographics.
I think you will find that there are probably better than 10K of us old farts that have been doing this for 20-40 years that read this list regularly. And probably 5-10X that with more than 5 years experience.
You are absolutely right for most inexperienced developers. It was certainly the case when I was 24 and first started fixed price contracting. The reality, is that with a small amount of positive feedback most developers can start to get this right - typically within 25% within 3 months, and within 10% in a year. In my case I under bid the first project by a factor of five, and spent 3 months working at about $0.50/hr, the second project was within 50%, and the third nearly dead on. Working and getting paid by the job is experience that I think nearly every programmer needs BEFORE being allowed to work T&M or salaried.
There are secondary effects of working by the job - you very quickly learn to do only what you are getting paid for - and don't spend a lot of time on personal research projects or unnecessarily rewriting other peoples code that is working just fine but doesn't conform to your personal style. KISS is absolutely a necessary personal style - anything else and you are doom to continuous cycles of project overruns and long talks with management about why your project is another month or two away from completion.
OMG - does that mean we have to call the I386 distro's Intel GNU Linux???