It may not have quite reached the API level, but ATM customer recognition by iris pattern is a coming thing. If they can locate the eye in the face well enough to take measurements of patterns in the iris, figuring out what you're looking at (and where from) should be a piece of cake.
Yeah, I remember that. Somebody had developed a special camera rig to film using that technique, and they showed a clip of it on TV. My eyes about bugged out of my head and my jaw hit the floor - it was damned convincing (imagine watching conventional 2-D, NTSC broadcast TV when suddenly the image goes 3-D on you...), but did have that background jiggle.
This was, oh, early 1980s. I often wondered what happened to it.
Last time I looked, lots of folks in the selling air* industry were still making money, even though yes, air is free.
*Selling air industry: Companies like Linde and Air Liquide that sell liquid air or fractional-distilled components of air; folks that sell compressed air to SCUBA divers, etc, etc....
(Boy, the Microsoft apologists are really out in force today. MS must really be getting nervous about something. But to the main point...)
Will this new regulating body only apply to Microsoft, or will it apply to the entire industry?
Microsoft only. And it's more likely to be just the Judge (and the DOJ) than some new "regulating body".
Again, look at the Judge Greene break up of the AT&T monopoly. The "baby bells" that were spun off from AT&T (also known as RBOCs - Regional Bell Operating Companies - such as US West, NYNEX, Southwest Bell Telephone, etc.) were (and still are, to a degree) subject to operating within a well-defined set of guidelines established by, and periodically reviewed by, Judge Green. Other telcos, whether long-distance (MCI, Sprint, etc) or local telcos that were never part of AT&T (eg LCTX in east Texas, various others) were/are not subject to that regulation. (But are still subject to FCC regs). Compliance to the Judge Greene stuff is taken very seriously by the baby bells, because they can be hit by serious fines/other penalties if not. (And their competitors will be very quick to hold their feet to the fire.) All employees and contractors (at least at the baby bell I did some work for) are required to undergo a "compliance training" course to ensure they know what is required of them, what they are and are not allowed to do in that context.
So a regulatory solution that applies only to Microsoft (and baby Microsofts, if split up) would work just fine and is precedented. The rest of the software industry, proprietary and free alike, would be utterly unaffected. Except perhaps in a positive manner.
If I recall correctly, the average human eye can resolve about 300 lines/inch at a range of 10 inches. (This may be where they came up with the resolution numbers for printers).
Assuming a 60" (diagonal) screen is 50" wide (to simplify the math), that'd be 15000 lines at 10", or 750 lines at 200" (about 16.5 feet) viewing distance. 750 lines equates to 1500 pixels (alternating light/dark), so a 60" HDTV viewed at ten or 12 feet probably is pushing eye resolution limits. About the same as a 15" monitor viewed at two to three feet.
> We're considering using Linux + Apache as a web server.
Excellent choice.
> The hardware is a 4-processor 400 MHz (Xeon) server with 1GB of ram, a RAID > controller, and six disks. We have Redhat 5.2 installed and compiled an SMP > version of the 2.2.2 Linux kernel.
I hope it's not too late to change your hardware, because your box is a complete waste of money. SMP gives you *nothing* with regards to web serving, and it makes your OS flaky as all hell. The RAM is nice, but the processor speed is overkill and having 4 of them is just plain wasteful. The network card would saturate completely before you even came remotely close to using up the resources of even a single P2 200Mhz.
> For the web server we used the latest 2.0.3 version of Apache.
Stick with what works. I'd use 1.3.4, as it's generally considered more 'stable'. You don't *always* want to be "bleeding edge".
> The scenario: we're bangin' on this web server with a bunch of clients > to try and get a handle on its capacity. Simple static HTML requests, > no heavy CGI yet.
Another suggestion: mod_php3. I guarantee that if you ever see large amounts of traffic, CGI will rapidly become your worst nightmare. There are a variety of _internal_ Apache modules that give you everthing CGI can do, but faster better and more efficiently. Keep in mind that CGI requires you to fork() another process to handle each web request, which can very quickly run you up against the process limit on a heavily loaded machine. PHP3 is a PERL-like, C-like programming language that's relatively lightweight. You can download the sources from http://www.php.net/, where they also provide instructions on how to build it into Apache.
> The problem: the server performs well, delivering in excess of 1300 > HTTP GET requests per second. But then performance just drops WAAAY > off, like down to 70 connections per second. We're not swapping, > the network isn't saturated (4 x 100Mbit nets), disks are hardly used, > but the system is just crawling. Neither vmstat nor top show anything > unusual. No error messages in the web server. Its puzzling.
Try various flags to netstat, see what they say. If you could post the details of several different commands that would be helpful in diagnosing the problem.
> Any ideas? Any tips, suggestions, or pointers would be appreciated. > Thanks!
What type of network load do you expect to see on your box in the long run? What type of applications does it need to run (other than Apache and its modules)? I know it's blasphemy in this group, but if you're just doing "raw" webserving (no database interaction) you'd see *much* better performance with some variant of BSD (for example, FreeBSD from http://www.freebsd.org). If you're more into running a K-rAd k00l website with lots of doo-dads and gizmos (and don't care about performance under heavy load), then Linux is your best bet.
That message stated that they were running "the latest 2.0.3 version of Apache." The report has them running 2.0.3 Samba, and 1.3.4 of Apache.
It doesn't help, if you're trying to get an answer, to confuse your audience. (Although I'm sure this was unintentional.) It's interesting that one (only?) reply told him to "stick with 1.3.4", but did ask some follow-up questions. If will@whistlingfish ever replied, it was not via the newsgroup.
Agreed that there need to be more consumer oriented applications.
The basic office stuff looks like a solved problem (maybe not finished, but solved), but then there's the entertainment/recreational/educational software niches to fill. When can I get a "Jumpstart First Grade" or "Sesame Street Numbers" equivalent so my kids can be using Linux?
That they need to be free, though isn't true. Yes, it'd be nice if they were, but most consumers don't care about that (as evidenced by the success of non-free software).
That was one of the sillier things in that movie. "The size of Texas" puts the asteroid at somewhat bigger (1.5 to 2 times, IIRC) than the asteroid Ceres, largest known in our solar system. There's no way you're going to blow that up with any mere collection of nukes, and even if you did, there's no way to avoid having a rain of multi-mile wide chunks falling on you anyway. (Consider - the size of Texas - call it a diameter of 600 miles - means about 40 million mile-wide chunks, distributed evenly).
The other asteroid movie - "Deep Impact" - at least had the physics a bit more reasonable.
Making somebody look like a fool and an asshole isn't defamation if he really is a fool and an asshole, or if you don't fabricate any of the evidence by which you show that.
Certainly in this context that doesn't seem to be much of a problem, although neither party is all saint or all sinner overall.
It is not absolutely trivial for anyone, anywhere to come up with weapons as deadly as guns.
Actually it is, and more so. Up until the Oklahoma City bombing, the worst mass-murder in this country was accomplished by something routinely available to, and purchased by, almost anybody: a can of gasoline.
take my dear old mother, for example. [...] With a gun, however, all she has to do is pull a trigger, and if she's close enough she can kill anybody
Technical errors aside (you display ignorance of firearms), if you really consider your mother capable of killing anybody (with a gun), then she's capable of killing anybody with any of a variety of other implements of death -- such as running over random pedestrians with her car. Perhaps you should seek help for her.
I'm surprised that all those hoplophobes out there who seem convinced that mere possesion of a firearm is a danger because of the chance of being easily triggered into homicidal fury, are content to let even cops carry guns.
Without the at least nominal (if imperfect) protection of copyright, anyone who wanted to make money of their own work and intellectual property would release it only through such restrictive schemes as DIVX (coupled with some sort of copy protection), where each use can be monitored and approved of/billed.
How'd you like it if all studios only released movies on DIVX? How about (for those of you that need to use non-free software, including games) if your software was released only on a DIVX-like system?
Those with a vested interest in IP will find a way to reduce copying, copyright law or no.
A few hardcore fanatics might pay the $8. Everyone else will watch the freebie version, or goes to a cut-rate theatre showing an unlicensed copy.
Nobody will pay (much) to rent it from Blockbuster or pay more than the cost of a blank tape to own a copy. Blockbuster buys one copy (or downloads it from somewhere) of each movie and goes into the copying business. Fast-food outlets do their own movie tie-ins without paying the studios. Eighty-six different versions of "The Phantom Menace" start showing up as wannabe directors start doing their own edits, all of them bad, all of them downloadable off the net (if you want to sit through dl'ing a couple hundred meg each). The usenet crumbles. (If you thought alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* was high volume, just wait...)
Anyone here think Lucasfilms would release any more Star Wars movies in this country if they weren't protected by copyright? The day after it opened (if not sooner) the whole thing would be available for download on a web site somewhere, and the videos would be in the stores a few days after that.
Nobody is going to spend $100 million to make a film if there's no copyright protection. If you're happy reducing the film industry to the level of amateur efforts like 'Star Wars Macbeth' or 'Hardware Wars', then by all means eliminate copyright. Ditto for fiction, music, etc.
Certainly copyright law has its problems, but lets think this through.
Thoughts and ideas are certainly cheaper than a dime a dozen. Expressions of same are not.
Stepping aside from software, for a moment, consider fiction. There are only a handful of basic plots, and new fiction consists of reworking and combining those into a new expression. It takes work to write good fiction. Now, consider if there were no copyrights. Most authors would actually be little affected, because most authors don't make much money selling their fiction. However, the best authors make quite a bit of money -- lack of copyright would decrease their incentive to entertain us with new works (but not entirely eliminate it because authors tend to have a compulsion to write, just as hackers tend to have a compulsion to program). But there remains the editorial/publishing function. This is very definitely a value-added function: editors weed out (much of) the crap that we wouldn't want to waste our time on, publishers provide a distribution channel. The latter could be replaced, given the internet, when we have a technology that makes electronic books a little more comfortable to read (better screen resolution, and convenient for reading in, say, the bathroom). But the editorial function remains. Is it going to be worth anyone's time to (a) sift through the 'slush pile', (b) suggest revisions and corrections, etc if there's no fiscal return? Bear in mind that with no copyright, anyone is free to reproduce such selected and edited works with no return to the editor. Some editors may have the same sort of compulsion that many authors have (I can think of a few), and whose opinions on a work are worth paying attention to, but on the whole we'd find ourselves immersed in the same sort of signal-to-noise ratio in fiction that we now see on, say, Usenet (or perhaps on Slashdot, if there are enough volunteer editors/moderators).
Substitute 'fiction' above for any other category that can reasonably be generated by an individual - music for example.
Now consider if we'd ever see another episode of 'Star Wars' if that couldn't be copyrighted. Nobody is going to spend $100 million to create something that anybody can copy and distribute freely. Oh sure, there'll still be films - amateur efforts like 'Macbeth Star Wars' or 'Hardware Wars' or whatever. But really, is that what we want our choices limited to?
Copyright law certainly has its problems - the current duration of 50 years (or is it 75 now?) beyond the author's lifetime is a bit ridiculous - but lets think through all the implications before we junk it altogether.
I imagine that was a very illuminating and entertaining course. I've only seen Pike in person a couple of times at a Usenix sometime in the previous decade. Among other things, he delivered a paper wearing harem pants (him, not the paper).
Slashdot Mirror
It may not have quite reached the API level, but ATM customer recognition by iris pattern is a coming thing. If they can locate the eye in
the face well enough to take measurements of
patterns in the iris, figuring out what you're
looking at (and where from) should be a piece of cake.
So, where can I download libeyetrack.so ??
Yeah, I remember that. Somebody had developed a special camera rig to film using that technique, and they showed a clip of it on TV. My eyes about bugged out of my head and my jaw hit the floor - it was damned convincing (imagine watching conventional 2-D, NTSC broadcast TV when suddenly the image goes 3-D on you...), but did have that background jiggle.
This was, oh, early 1980s. I often wondered what happened to it.
Last time I looked, lots of folks in the selling air* industry were still making money, even though yes, air is free.
*Selling air industry: Companies like Linde and Air Liquide that sell liquid air or fractional-distilled components of air; folks that sell compressed air to SCUBA divers, etc, etc....
(Boy, the Microsoft apologists are really out in force today. MS must really be getting nervous about something. But to the main point...)
Will this new regulating body only apply to Microsoft, or will it apply to the entire industry?
Microsoft only. And it's more likely to be just the Judge (and the DOJ) than some new "regulating body".
Again, look at the Judge Greene break up of the AT&T monopoly. The "baby bells" that were spun off from AT&T (also known as RBOCs - Regional Bell Operating Companies - such as US West, NYNEX, Southwest Bell Telephone, etc.) were (and still are, to a degree) subject to operating within a well-defined set of guidelines established by, and periodically reviewed by, Judge Green. Other telcos, whether long-distance (MCI, Sprint, etc) or local telcos that were never part of AT&T (eg LCTX in east Texas, various others) were/are not subject to that regulation. (But are still subject to FCC regs).
Compliance to the Judge Greene stuff is taken very seriously by the baby bells, because they can be hit by serious fines/other penalties if not. (And their competitors will be very quick to hold their feet to the fire.) All employees and contractors (at least at the baby bell I did some work for) are required to undergo a "compliance training" course to ensure they know what is required of them, what they are and are not allowed to do in that context.
So a regulatory solution that applies only to Microsoft (and baby Microsofts, if split up) would work just fine and is precedented. The rest of the software industry, proprietary and free alike, would be utterly unaffected. Except perhaps in a positive manner.
See AT&T, telephone monopoly thereof, and Judge Greene's decision.
The goverment giveth (rights associated with incorporation), the government can taketh away.
And some persistent grumbling to the contrary, the breakup of AT&T did do wonders for the overall phone industry.
Microsoft forfeited its rights when it violated anti-trust laws and reneged on the consent decrees it had already signed.
Assuming, of course, that the judge finds that it did so (which it looks like he will).
It's just the same as with individual criminals - they forfeit certain rights when they commit the crime (when they're convicted).
Ever use vi to format a document you need to submit to your employer?
Not exactly. I've used vi to create the text -- but troff to format it.
Since no two browsers/HTML engines format HTML exactly the same way anyway, with a WYSIWYG HTML editor you're just fooling yourself.
If I recall correctly, the average human eye can resolve about 300 lines/inch at a range of 10 inches. (This may be where they came up with the resolution numbers for printers).
Assuming a 60" (diagonal) screen is 50" wide (to simplify the math), that'd be 15000 lines at 10", or 750 lines at 200" (about 16.5 feet) viewing distance. 750 lines equates to 1500 pixels (alternating light/dark), so a 60" HDTV viewed at ten or 12 feet probably is pushing eye resolution limits. About the same as a 15" monitor viewed at two to three feet.
There are still Cinerama theatres around? What good is it if SW:TPM isn't filmed in Cinerama?
I saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" in a Cinerama theatre. Awsome. But I think that was the last movie filmed using the technology.
Now, here's the complete reply they got.
In article ,
will@whistlingfish.net wrote:
> We're considering using Linux + Apache as a web server.
Excellent choice.
> The hardware is a 4-processor 400 MHz (Xeon) server with 1GB of ram, a RAID
> controller, and six disks. We have Redhat 5.2 installed and compiled an SMP
> version of the 2.2.2 Linux kernel.
I hope it's not too late to change your hardware, because your box is a
complete waste of money. SMP gives you *nothing* with regards to web
serving, and it makes your OS flaky as all hell. The RAM is nice, but the
processor speed is overkill and having 4 of them is just plain wasteful. The
network card would saturate completely before you even came remotely close to
using up the resources of even a single P2 200Mhz.
> For the web server we used the latest 2.0.3 version of Apache.
Stick with what works. I'd use 1.3.4, as it's generally considered more
'stable'. You don't *always* want to be "bleeding edge".
> The scenario: we're bangin' on this web server with a bunch of clients
> to try and get a handle on its capacity. Simple static HTML requests,
> no heavy CGI yet.
Another suggestion: mod_php3. I guarantee that if you ever see large
amounts of traffic, CGI will rapidly become your worst nightmare. There are
a variety of _internal_ Apache modules that give you everthing CGI can do,
but faster better and more efficiently. Keep in mind that CGI requires you
to fork() another process to handle each web request, which can very quickly
run you up against the process limit on a heavily loaded machine. PHP3 is a
PERL-like, C-like programming language that's relatively lightweight. You
can download the sources from http://www.php.net/, where they also provide
instructions on how to build it into Apache.
> The problem: the server performs well, delivering in excess of 1300
> HTTP GET requests per second. But then performance just drops WAAAY
> off, like down to 70 connections per second. We're not swapping,
> the network isn't saturated (4 x 100Mbit nets), disks are hardly used,
> but the system is just crawling. Neither vmstat nor top show anything
> unusual. No error messages in the web server. Its puzzling.
Try various flags to netstat, see what they say. If you could post the
details of several different commands that would be helpful in diagnosing the
problem.
> Any ideas? Any tips, suggestions, or pointers would be appreciated.
> Thanks!
What type of network load do you expect to see on your box in the long run?
What type of applications does it need to run (other than Apache and its
modules)? I know it's blasphemy in this group, but if you're just doing "raw"
webserving (no database interaction) you'd see *much* better performance with
some variant of BSD (for example, FreeBSD from http://www.freebsd.org). If
you're more into running a K-rAd k00l website with lots of doo-dads and gizmos
(and don't care about performance under heavy load), then Linux is your best
bet.
-Bill Clark
That message stated that they were running "the latest 2.0.3 version of Apache." The report has them running 2.0.3 Samba, and 1.3.4 of Apache.
It doesn't help, if you're trying to get an answer, to confuse your audience. (Although I'm sure this was unintentional.) It's interesting that one (only?) reply told him to "stick with 1.3.4", but did ask some follow-up questions. If will@whistlingfish ever replied, it was not via the newsgroup.
As someone else said, they didn't try very hard.
But, does "set maxmem" actually do anything? It looks good and all, but how do we know the OS really pays any attention to it?
I'd be happier if they'd physically yanked the extra RAM out of the box. Why didn't they?
Agreed that there need to be more consumer oriented applications.
The basic office stuff looks like a solved problem (maybe not finished, but solved), but then there's the entertainment/recreational/educational software niches to fill. When can I get a "Jumpstart First Grade" or "Sesame Street Numbers" equivalent so my kids can be using Linux?
That they need to be free, though isn't true. Yes, it'd be nice if they were, but most consumers don't care about that (as evidenced by the success of non-free software).
That was one of the sillier things in that movie. "The size of Texas" puts the asteroid at somewhat bigger (1.5 to 2 times, IIRC) than the asteroid Ceres, largest known in our solar system.
There's no way you're going to blow that up with any mere collection of nukes, and even if you did, there's no way to avoid having a rain of multi-mile wide chunks falling on you anyway. (Consider - the size of Texas - call it a diameter of 600 miles - means about 40 million mile-wide chunks, distributed evenly).
The other asteroid movie - "Deep Impact" - at least had the physics a bit more reasonable.
VAR = Value Added Reseller
As opposed to OEM, Original Equipment Manufacturer, or to just plain distributor or reseller that doesn't add anything.
(Sometimes the 'value' of what VARs add is questionable...)
Making somebody look like a fool and an asshole isn't defamation if he really is a fool and an asshole, or if you don't fabricate any of the evidence by which you show that.
Certainly in this context that doesn't seem to be much of a problem, although neither party is all saint or all sinner overall.
It is not absolutely trivial for anyone, anywhere to come up with weapons as deadly as guns.
Actually it is, and more so. Up until the Oklahoma City bombing, the worst mass-murder in this country was accomplished by something routinely available to, and purchased by, almost anybody: a can of gasoline.
take my dear old mother, for example. [...] With a gun, however, all she has to do is pull a trigger, and if she's close enough she can kill anybody
Technical errors aside (you display ignorance of firearms), if you really consider your mother capable of killing anybody (with a gun), then she's capable of killing anybody with any of a variety of other implements of death -- such as running over random pedestrians with her car. Perhaps you should seek help for her.
I'm surprised that all those hoplophobes out there who seem convinced that mere possesion of a firearm is a danger because of the chance of being easily triggered into homicidal fury, are content to let even cops carry guns.
Yeah, and my mother was always asking me
"Where have you been?"
Without the at least nominal (if imperfect) protection of copyright, anyone who wanted to make money of their own work and intellectual property would release it only through such restrictive schemes as DIVX (coupled with some sort of copy protection), where each use can be monitored and approved of/billed.
How'd you like it if all studios only released movies on DIVX? How about (for those of you that need to use non-free software, including games) if your software was released only on a DIVX-like system?
Those with a vested interest in IP will find a way to reduce copying, copyright law or no.
A few hardcore fanatics might pay the $8. Everyone else will watch the freebie version, or goes to a cut-rate theatre showing an unlicensed copy.
Nobody will pay (much) to rent it from Blockbuster or pay more than the cost of a blank tape to own a copy. Blockbuster buys one copy (or downloads it from somewhere) of each movie and goes into the copying business. Fast-food outlets do their own movie tie-ins without paying the studios. Eighty-six different versions of "The Phantom Menace" start showing up as wannabe directors start doing their own edits, all of them bad, all of them downloadable off the net (if you want to sit through dl'ing a couple hundred meg each). The usenet crumbles. (If you thought alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* was high volume, just wait...)
Anyone here think Lucasfilms would release any more Star Wars movies in this country if they weren't protected by copyright? The day after it opened (if not sooner) the whole thing would be available for download on a web site somewhere, and the videos would be in the stores a few days after that.
Nobody is going to spend $100 million to make a film if there's no copyright protection. If you're happy reducing the film industry to the level of amateur efforts like 'Star Wars Macbeth' or 'Hardware Wars', then by all means eliminate copyright. Ditto for fiction, music, etc.
Certainly copyright law has its problems, but lets think this through.
Thoughts and ideas are certainly cheaper than a dime a dozen. Expressions of same are not.
Stepping aside from software, for a moment, consider fiction. There are only a handful of basic plots, and new fiction consists of reworking and combining those into a new expression. It takes work to write good fiction. Now, consider if there were no copyrights. Most authors would actually be little affected, because most authors don't make much money selling their fiction. However, the best authors make quite a bit of money -- lack of copyright would decrease their incentive to entertain us with new works (but not entirely eliminate it because authors tend to have a compulsion to write, just as hackers tend to have a compulsion to program). But there remains the editorial/publishing function. This is very definitely a value-added function: editors weed out (much of) the crap that we wouldn't want to waste our time on, publishers provide a distribution channel. The latter could be replaced, given the internet, when we have a technology that makes electronic books a little more comfortable to read (better screen resolution, and convenient for reading in, say, the bathroom). But the editorial function remains. Is it going to be worth anyone's time to (a) sift through the 'slush pile', (b) suggest revisions and corrections, etc if there's no fiscal return? Bear in mind that with no copyright, anyone is free to reproduce such selected and edited works with no return to the editor. Some editors may have the same sort of compulsion that many authors have (I can think of a few), and whose opinions on a work are worth paying attention to, but on the whole we'd find ourselves immersed in the same sort of signal-to-noise ratio in fiction that we now see on, say, Usenet (or perhaps on Slashdot, if there are enough volunteer editors/moderators).
Substitute 'fiction' above for any other category that can reasonably be generated by an individual - music for example.
Now consider if we'd ever see another episode of 'Star Wars' if that couldn't be copyrighted. Nobody is going to spend $100 million to create something that anybody can copy and distribute freely. Oh sure, there'll still be films - amateur efforts like 'Macbeth Star Wars' or 'Hardware Wars' or whatever. But really, is that what we want our choices limited to?
Copyright law certainly has its problems - the current duration of 50 years (or is it 75 now?) beyond the author's lifetime is a bit ridiculous - but lets think through all the implications before we junk it altogether.
I imagine that was a very illuminating and entertaining course. I've only seen Pike in person a couple of times at a Usenix sometime in the previous decade. Among other things, he delivered a paper wearing harem pants (him, not the paper).
if I'm wrong, I'm sure someone here will correct me
Well, if you insist...
but includes yak, a lexical analyzer
Actually the GNU version is called bison. And the original (AT&T) version is spelled yacc (for 'yet another compiler compiler').
See subject.