And.. if the public is not willing to pay for music anymore, and are just going to rip it off.. then there is *NO LONGER A MARKET FOR POP MUSICIANS*. SO your buddy might have to get another job.
Napster, the application, is not on trial here. The service is not on trial.. the COMPANY is. The COMPANY is attempting to make money using their serivce. The put up such service, *knowing* that it would be popular *only* because it would be used primarily to help joe average user share his pirated files with someone else. Something that joe average did *not know how to easily do*.
Therefore, napster is in business to help people pirate. Plain and simple.
Sure, people had FTP sites and such... but napster provided a forum. Is the tool illegal? No. Is the company breaking the law? I'm starting to think so.
To summarize the way I think in my own head, right or wrong..... There is a line I think many of us draw, mentally, between what is 'commercial' or 'business' and what is 'peronal' or 'free'.
Traditionally, if I want to give a bowl of rice to my neighbor, or give cookies to my whole neighborhood, I can. We do things for each other, help each other out. This works fine and dandy until we get into... things we can make duplicates of; IP. See, in the old days.. if I wanted to buy a plow, even a patented plow, I could. if I wanted to then go to my metal shop and *make* a plow and *give* it to my neighbor, nobody really had a problem with that. Sure... patent law says maybe I can't.. but who would care. Nobody.
Now things are different.
The bottom line of this unclear, badly written message is this: regardless of what the law says, or what the politicos say.....there is a line between 'business' and 'people'. Business law is businsess law, but *nothing* should be able to get in the way of the goodwill of the people.
Music? Bah. If people want to *give* things to each other, let th em. If the music industry falters and we have no more good bands.. *oh well!*. Too bad for us I guess.
1) Because this is what the mainframe is *designed* to do. It's not meant to run one single user-level OS. IT runs VM, whichi is designed to do just this. It means you can bang right on the hardware, but virtualized, to protect others who are also using it's massive resources.
2) The point of having 41,500 virtual machines is that each VM is *rock stable*. NOt stable as in 'linux is stable' but stable as in solid concrete nuclear bomb shelter stable. THe 41500 is a test number; in reality you would run maybe a few thousand at most. The point? A hosting provider can provide a linux box to *each* customer! full root access and everything.. go nuts they can say!
IT doesn't lack redundancy at all. The s/390 is fully redundant. Fault tolerant memory (we're talking way beyond ECC here....). THe machine can detect memory errors and route around them. Fault tolerant processors, fault tolerant coprocessors.. *everything* is realtime fault tolerant. This machine is *designed* to stay up for a decade, with zero downtime. Nil. Nada. This *IS* a mainframe, a real mainframe. Not some little desktop box.
Personal Computer -vs- Mainframe? PC won? I think not.
Mainframes are no longer simply 'fast'. PCs can be really fast too.. so can clusters. If all you want is number crunching... perhaps you don't need a mainframe.
WHere the s/390 will SMASH an alpha to bits is on IO. THis thing can MOVE data like you would not believe.
As for performance.. these things have multiple processors I believe, and can be scaled greatly.
IBm has engineered a great solution here. THis isn't simply 'installing linux on an s/390' this is 'running hundreds or thousands' of virtual, fully-working linux systems on one machine.
So the ISP would provide a full linux box to each customer for their site, to do with as they pleased... completely virtual, but hte customer owuldn't see the difference. THe s/390 will control exactly how much resources are sent to each individual instance of linux, so you can have both a) tiers of service and b) performance GUARANTEES. Combined with bandwidth management, this ROCKS. Oh.. you want a faster machine? WE'll just add more cycles to your VM for more money...
I don't know the links offhand, but info about Linux on the s/390 has been posted to/. twice before, a month or so ago.
And the 41000 copies, as indicated, but perhaps not emphasized... the guy said that 41000 copies was theoretical, not practical. YOu would not have enough cycles left to actually *DO* anything with that many going.... it was just a test.
But even a few thousand...
IBM, from what I recall, has a neat internal networking driver so the VMs can talk to each other at extremely high speed, which is cool.
The basic idea is that full virtual linux machines can be deployed in minutes, can be cloned, backed up, all kinds of neat mainframe advantages, all on a machine that reall *IS* designed for 0% downtime. No more racks and racks of linux machines... just a fat mainframe.
For those who don't know (and for those who do, correct me if I'm wrong please), the S/390 runs VM (Virtual Machine). The design is such that VM can virtualize itself multiple times over with minimal loss in speed. WE're talking VMWare at the hardware level here... the machine can virtual within virtual within virtual with no real penalty.
The point is that in the far arctic it's a) very barren; you can't really derive anything from the land b) Very remote. Just consider how LONG it takes to get from the nearest supply depot to where they are. It's FAR. c) Wierd day & night cycle; it's certainly not a nice 24 hour cycle like we are used to.
An Ontario court just ruled that current marijuana laws are unconstitutional. A victory for us canucks, anyway.
His basic premise was that, if smoking marijuana enhances the quality of life of people with certain illnesses, then it is completely absurd to deny them the privelege.
Regardless of what 'they' come up with... a) We can cheaply and easily build portable devices to play music in whatever format we want, regardless of 'standards'. b) What prevents us from doing what we want anyway?
Re:First Amendment vs. Instructions
on
NYT On DeCSS Case
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· Score: 2
Because. The DMCA *specifically* says that publishing tools or information as to how to break something that effectively acts as a copyright contorl mechanism is *ILLEGAL*.
Is the DMCA bad? Yes. But it's currently LAW, and that's what they are being charged under.
Actually, I just checked it out. It is rather nice, however...
Etherpeek and NA Sniffer both do pretty much everything ethereal does.
Ethereal has some neat tcp stream watching features, which is rather unique. Ethereal is more flexible in terms of filters, and certainly being open source and running on unix are great. However...
Ethereal does NOT seem to have any graph-drawing abilities. Etherpeek and the like can generate stats based on packet size distribution, protocol types, and several other factors. I find these very useful features. Also, the GUI needs work. I mean, it's great, it's clean, it's great for unix, but etherpeek and NA sniffer both color code automatically, in several ways. Also, it doesn't seem to have the ability to play back what it records into the network (useful for testing/using other devices to analyze captured data). Of course this can be accomplished with other tools, but Etherpeek and NA sniffer both do this out of the box.
Ethereal does seem to have a superior filtering mechanism; however, the filters in NA sniffer and etherpeek are also competent. (read: Ethereal has a kick-ass filter mechanism, but the others are adequate)
Also, when monitoring a busy network, displaying realtime results, etherpeek is unbalanced. screen updates are very slow, and it's a pain in the ass to use. NA sniffer and etherpeek stay smooth.
Yes, of course, NA sniffer and Etherpeek both costs $$$ ($1000 and up). Yes of course, they aren't open source, and of course, don't run on unix.
So.. from a free tool point of view, etherpeek is fantastic. From a Sniffer point of view, Etherpeek has some neat features, but is not the best.
You don't even need the VLANs (though that's always nice... layer 3 switches can get expensive..). Just having the switch hides all your traffic other than broadcast traffic... (arp, etc..) That, plus perhaps some security settings, and you're set..
As for court orders.. can a court not subpoena snail mail as well? Can they not search/examine/sieze mail? If not.. why doesnt' everyone use the USPS to send their cocaine shipments around?
As for 'public', don't take the term as literally as that. For all intents and purposes, it *IS* public.
Yes, it's a bunch of private/semiprivate/public/whatever else depending on jurisdiction, networks all hooked together by zillions of different agreements in different jurisdictions. To me, and to any sane individual, this is what 'public' is. You are carrying all kinds of traffic that you didn't originate. Especially if you are a larger carrier.
Okay. Fair enough. I assumed (perhaps arrogantly?) that a network administrator would invest in network tools, regardless of the OS involved. I know that any well equipped network shop has a copy of either etherpeek or NA sniffer...., or something darn similar.
A $30,000 Wandell & Goltermann network analyzer runs windows 3.11....
I am going to try it out.. but what does Ethereal do that would astound network troubleshooters? What does it do that is 'astounding' when compared to software like Etherpeek or Network Associate's SNIFFER+, and the like?
Certainly, it may have some neat-o-rama features that they don't... it may even be better.. but enough to astound them?
1) With court order, why should computer systems be treated any different than meatspace systems? 2) Why do you assume you have a 'right' to privacy when you send cleartext data on the public internet? (I know we feel we DO have a right to privacy, but if it is there in the clear, a court can take it). 3) USE ENCRYPTION.
Hmm. But if we look at actual product names... 'Qube' (pronounced 'cube') is the name of cobalt's machine. 'Cube' is also the name of apple's machine. There *IS* reason for consumer confusion here.. if I say I'm buying a 'cube'.. which one is it?
Yes, certainly Cobalt did not invent the cube... and most of us techies would call it the 'cobalt qube' or the 'apple cube' or the 'next cube'... so..
Also... cobalt will realize, after looking at it, that a 'server without monitor or keyboard' is not new, that 'the cube shape' is not new, and that the color really has very little to do with purchasing of servers.
Back off cobalt.. sell your products based on their actual functions...
Let's be real folks. This is not a ruling! This is a prelimenary injunction. And it makes good sense. In the eyes of the judge, the RIAA has more to lose than Napster. And napster *IS* making a business off of facilitating piracy.
This is a judge trying to limit potential damages before the trial.
As for napster.. if simply being offline for a little while makes tons of other good software spring up, and people realize that napster was actually kind of crappy, and that much better could be done.. that's not a BAD thing. If they had a real, valuable service/product, then they will still have one after they win their court case.
You know what? It really saddens me that so many people have this view of the sysadmin as Mr. 'Big Brother' bad asshole who looks over their shoulder and tells them what to do.
The fact remains... the sysadmin, and the IT staff in general, are *responsible for ensuring that computers are available to do what htey need to do for the company*.
I've had times when I've said.. hey.. most of my users are very computer literate. I'll just let them do whatever they want with their workstations.. you know what? The amount of work I have to do goes UP! WAY UP! Why? Because... If Mr. Programmer installs some software, and de-installs it, re-installs it, hence, destabilizing windows (we all know this happens), and his computer BSODs every day, and he can't get his programming done, it is still *MY JOB* to fix it, not his. It is no longer relevant who's fault it is, it's still MY JOB to fix it.
As for 'taking back' users computers... It's not *YOUR COMPUTER*. It's the COMPANY'S computer. You should not *care* what it runs so long as you can do your job.
I must say, in my shop, if someone came to me and said 'can I put linux on my computer, because it lets me do my job better' then, if I believed them, I'd say 'here, have a second computer to use linux on'.
Users have JOBS to do. Project managers, programmers, designers... they don't have fucking TIME to deal with network issues.
Excuse me? to guarantee myself a job? Dude, I don't know what you think is out there, but if you were to only use software that an idiot could administer, nothing would get done.
Have you actually been to and seen these other countries? DO you know people from there? Do they tell you how 'horrible' life is for them without a constitution?
Hey.. you know one thing lots of these countries have? A sense of *community*. Did I know that Scientology was outlawed in Germany? No.. but who cares? It's a bloody cult. Is it for the government to decide? Well.. who should decide? A pickup truck full of the good o'l boys and their shotguns? wonderfullness of their political system, their constitution, and other wonderful things, and put down other ways of doing things, without ever having actually *seen* what it's like to live in those other places.
1) The Newton's handwriging recognition is the coolest thing I've ever seen. It's excellent. 2) Pen based computers can be really cool.. and do a great many things for you.. in many ways, being better than a computer.
3) A laptop, however, is not what I have in mind. I bought a laptop so I could do the *same* things I do on my desktop while on the road. I can play games, code, do everything.. I *want* a keyboard.
From a tablet, portable application point of view, pen-based is great.
Slashdot Mirror
And.. if the public is not willing to pay for music anymore, and are just going to rip it off.. then there is *NO LONGER A MARKET FOR POP MUSICIANS*. SO your buddy might have to get another job.
You cannot force the public to pay.
Napster, the application, is not on trial here. The service is not on trial.. the COMPANY is.
The COMPANY is attempting to make money using their serivce. The put up such service, *knowing* that it would be popular *only* because it would be used primarily to help joe average user share his pirated files with someone else. Something that joe average did *not know how to easily do*.
Therefore, napster is in business to help people pirate. Plain and simple.
Sure, people had FTP sites and such... but napster provided a forum.
Is the tool illegal? No. Is the company breaking the law? I'm starting to think so.
But.. the new rio still plays standard, non-secure mp3, no?
To summarize the way I think in my own head, right or wrong.....
There is a line I think many of us draw, mentally, between what is 'commercial' or 'business' and what is 'peronal' or 'free'.
Traditionally, if I want to give a bowl of rice to my neighbor, or give cookies to my whole neighborhood, I can. We do things for each other, help each other out. This works fine and dandy until we get into...
things we can make duplicates of; IP.
See, in the old days.. if I wanted to buy a plow, even a patented plow, I could. if I wanted to then go to my metal shop and *make* a plow and *give* it to my neighbor, nobody really had a problem with that. Sure... patent law says maybe I can't.. but who would care. Nobody.
Now things are different.
The bottom line of this unclear, badly written message is this: regardless of what the law says, or what the politicos say.....there is a line between 'business' and 'people'. Business law is businsess law, but *nothing* should be able to get in the way of the goodwill of the people.
Music? Bah. If people want to *give* things to each other, let th em. If the music industry falters and we have no more good bands.. *oh well!*. Too bad for us I guess.
1) Because this is what the mainframe is *designed* to do. It's not meant to run one single user-level OS. IT runs VM, whichi is designed to do just this. It means you can bang right on the hardware, but virtualized, to protect others who are also using it's massive resources.
2) The point of having 41,500 virtual machines is that each VM is *rock stable*. NOt stable as in 'linux is stable' but stable as in solid concrete nuclear bomb shelter stable. THe 41500 is a test number; in reality you would run maybe a few thousand at most. The point? A hosting provider can provide a linux box to *each* customer! full root access and everything.. go nuts they can say!
IT doesn't lack redundancy at all.
The s/390 is fully redundant. Fault tolerant memory (we're talking way beyond ECC here....). THe machine can detect memory errors and route around them.
Fault tolerant processors, fault tolerant coprocessors.. *everything* is realtime fault tolerant.
This machine is *designed* to stay up for a decade, with zero downtime. Nil. Nada. This *IS* a mainframe, a real mainframe. Not some little desktop box.
Personal Computer -vs- Mainframe? PC won? I think not.
Mainframes are no longer simply 'fast'. PCs can be really fast too.. so can clusters. If all you want is number crunching... perhaps you don't need a mainframe.
WHere the s/390 will SMASH an alpha to bits is on IO. THis thing can MOVE data like you would not believe.
As for performance.. these things have multiple processors I believe, and can be scaled greatly.
IBm has engineered a great solution here. THis isn't simply 'installing linux on an s/390' this is 'running hundreds or thousands' of virtual, fully-working linux systems on one machine.
So the ISP would provide a full linux box to each customer for their site, to do with as they pleased... completely virtual, but hte customer owuldn't see the difference. THe s/390 will control exactly how much resources are sent to each individual instance of linux, so you can have both a) tiers of service and b) performance GUARANTEES. Combined with bandwidth management, this ROCKS. Oh.. you want a faster machine? WE'll just add more cycles to your VM for more money...
This *IS* sweet, from the ISP angle.
I don't know the links offhand, but info about Linux on the s/390 has been posted to /. twice before, a month or so ago.
And the 41000 copies, as indicated, but perhaps not emphasized... the guy said that 41000 copies was theoretical, not practical. YOu would not have enough cycles left to actually *DO* anything with that many going.... it was just a test.
But even a few thousand...
IBM, from what I recall, has a neat internal networking driver so the VMs can talk to each other at extremely high speed, which is cool.
The basic idea is that full virtual linux machines can be deployed in minutes, can be cloned, backed up, all kinds of neat mainframe advantages, all on a machine that reall *IS* designed for 0% downtime. No more racks and racks of linux machines... just a fat mainframe.
For those who don't know (and for those who do, correct me if I'm wrong please), the S/390 runs VM (Virtual Machine). The design is such that VM can virtualize itself multiple times over with minimal loss in speed. WE're talking VMWare at the hardware level here... the machine can virtual within virtual within virtual with no real penalty.
The point is that in the far arctic it's a) very barren; you can't really derive anything from the land
b) Very remote. Just consider how LONG it takes to get from the nearest supply depot to where they are. It's FAR.
c) Wierd day & night cycle; it's certainly not a nice 24 hour cycle like we are used to.
An Ontario court just ruled that current marijuana laws are unconstitutional. A victory for us canucks, anyway.
His basic premise was that, if smoking marijuana enhances the quality of life of people with certain illnesses, then it is completely absurd to deny them the privelege.
Regardless of what 'they' come up with...
a) We can cheaply and easily build portable devices to play music in whatever format we want, regardless of 'standards'.
b) What prevents us from doing what we want anyway?
Because. The DMCA *specifically* says that publishing tools or information as to how to break something that effectively acts as a copyright contorl mechanism is *ILLEGAL*.
Is the DMCA bad? Yes. But it's currently LAW, and that's what they are being charged under.
It's the DMCA that needs to be attacked...
Actually, I just checked it out. It is rather nice, however...
Etherpeek and NA Sniffer both do pretty much everything ethereal does.
Ethereal has some neat tcp stream watching features, which is rather unique.
Ethereal is more flexible in terms of filters, and certainly being open source and running on unix are great. However...
Ethereal does NOT seem to have any graph-drawing abilities. Etherpeek and the like can generate stats based on packet size distribution, protocol types, and several other factors. I find these very useful features.
Also, the GUI needs work. I mean, it's great, it's clean, it's great for unix, but etherpeek and NA sniffer both color code automatically, in several ways.
Also, it doesn't seem to have the ability to play back what it records into the network (useful for testing/using other devices to analyze captured data). Of course this can be accomplished with other tools, but Etherpeek and NA sniffer both do this out of the box.
Ethereal does seem to have a superior filtering mechanism; however, the filters in NA sniffer and etherpeek are also competent. (read: Ethereal has a kick-ass filter mechanism, but the others are adequate)
Also, when monitoring a busy network, displaying realtime results, etherpeek is unbalanced. screen updates are very slow, and it's a pain in the ass to use. NA sniffer and etherpeek stay smooth.
Yes, of course, NA sniffer and Etherpeek both costs $$$ ($1000 and up). Yes of course, they aren't open source, and of course, don't run on unix.
So.. from a free tool point of view, etherpeek is fantastic.
From a Sniffer point of view, Etherpeek has some neat features, but is not the best.
You don't even need the VLANs (though that's always nice... layer 3 switches can get expensive..).
Just having the switch hides all your traffic other than broadcast traffic... (arp, etc..)
That, plus perhaps some security settings, and you're set..
As for court orders.. can a court not subpoena snail mail as well? Can they not search/examine/sieze mail? If not.. why doesnt' everyone use the USPS to send their cocaine shipments around?
As for 'public', don't take the term as literally as that. For all intents and purposes, it *IS* public.
Yes, it's a bunch of private/semiprivate/public/whatever else depending on jurisdiction, networks all hooked together by zillions of different agreements in different jurisdictions. To me, and to any sane individual, this is what 'public' is. You are carrying all kinds of traffic that you didn't originate. Especially if you are a larger carrier.
This is why it is 'public'.
Okay. Fair enough.
I assumed (perhaps arrogantly?) that a network administrator would invest in network tools, regardless of the OS involved. I know that any well equipped network shop has a copy of either etherpeek or NA sniffer...., or something darn similar.
A $30,000 Wandell & Goltermann network analyzer runs windows 3.11....
I am going to try it out.. but what does Ethereal do that would astound network troubleshooters? What does it do that is 'astounding' when compared to software like Etherpeek or Network Associate's SNIFFER+, and the like?
Certainly, it may have some neat-o-rama features that they don't... it may even be better.. but enough to astound them?
If one of my users runs a sniffer, I couldn't give a shit. Switches are cheap these days. There's a reason to use them.
1) With court order, why should computer systems be treated any different than meatspace systems?
2) Why do you assume you have a 'right' to privacy when you send cleartext data on the public internet? (I know we feel we DO have a right to privacy, but if it is there in the clear, a court can take it).
3) USE ENCRYPTION.
Hmm. But if we look at actual product names...
'Qube' (pronounced 'cube') is the name of cobalt's machine.
'Cube' is also the name of apple's machine. There *IS* reason for consumer confusion here.. if I say I'm buying a 'cube'.. which one is it?
Yes, certainly Cobalt did not invent the cube... and most of us techies would call it the 'cobalt qube' or the 'apple cube' or the 'next cube'... so..
Also... cobalt will realize, after looking at it, that a 'server without monitor or keyboard' is not new, that 'the cube shape' is not new, and that the color really has very little to do with purchasing of servers.
Back off cobalt.. sell your products based on their actual functions...
Let's be real folks. This is not a ruling!
This is a prelimenary injunction. And it makes good sense. In the eyes of the judge, the RIAA has more to lose than Napster. And napster *IS* making a business off of facilitating piracy.
This is a judge trying to limit potential damages before the trial.
As for napster.. if simply being offline for a little while makes tons of other good software spring up, and people realize that napster was actually kind of crappy, and that much better could be done.. that's not a BAD thing.
If they had a real, valuable service/product, then they will still have one after they win their court case.
You know what? It really saddens me that so many people have this view of the sysadmin as Mr. 'Big Brother' bad asshole who looks over their shoulder and tells them what to do.
The fact remains... the sysadmin, and the IT staff in general, are *responsible for ensuring that computers are available to do what htey need to do for the company*.
I've had times when I've said.. hey.. most of my users are very computer literate. I'll just let them do whatever they want with their workstations.. you know what? The amount of work I have to do goes UP! WAY UP! Why? Because...
If Mr. Programmer installs some software, and de-installs it, re-installs it, hence, destabilizing windows (we all know this happens), and his computer BSODs every day, and he can't get his programming done, it is still *MY JOB* to fix it, not his. It is no longer relevant who's fault it is, it's still MY JOB to fix it.
As for 'taking back' users computers... It's not *YOUR COMPUTER*. It's the COMPANY'S computer. You should not *care* what it runs so long as you can do your job.
I must say, in my shop, if someone came to me and said 'can I put linux on my computer, because it lets me do my job better' then, if I believed them, I'd say 'here, have a second computer to use linux on'.
Users have JOBS to do. Project managers, programmers, designers... they don't have fucking TIME to deal with network issues.
Excuse me? to guarantee myself a job? Dude, I don't know what you think is out there, but if you were to only use software that an idiot could administer, nothing would get done.
How are your abilities compromised?
Have you actually been to and seen these other countries? DO you know people from there? Do they tell you how 'horrible' life is for them without a constitution?
Hey.. you know one thing lots of these countries have? A sense of *community*.
Did I know that Scientology was outlawed in Germany? No.. but who cares? It's a bloody cult.
Is it for the government to decide? Well.. who should decide? A pickup truck full of the good o'l boys and their shotguns?
wonderfullness of their political system, their constitution, and other wonderful things, and put down other ways of doing things, without ever having actually *seen* what it's like to live in those other places.
1) The Newton's handwriging recognition is the coolest thing I've ever seen. It's excellent.
2) Pen based computers can be really cool.. and do a great many things for you.. in many ways, being better than a computer.
3) A laptop, however, is not what I have in mind.
I bought a laptop so I could do the *same* things I do on my desktop while on the road. I can play games, code, do everything.. I *want* a keyboard.
From a tablet, portable application point of view, pen-based is great.