From the article: Some studies have estimated that as many as one in five work computers contains file-swapping software.
Really the percentage is probably more like 99%. Any computer that has a web browser or FTP client has file-swapping software on it.
Again from the article: RIAA President Cary Sherman.: "Some of these corporations, we are told, have their own little networks--that is very clearly illegal."
And some corporations have large networks. I guess that is even more illegal. Everyone! Disconnect the Ethernet cable, and step away from the computer. Networking computers has been declared illegal by the RIAA.
All that aside, they have a point. Most people do use the network at the office for personal use. This is of course the fault of the IT department. If they lay down a policy that the network is for company business, they should set up equipment and software that enforces those rules. At Bank One in AZ, they have such a policy (network and Internet acesss for company business only), but the restrictions are applied haphazardly. Joke sites are filtered by the proxy along with sites like Dilbert, The Onion, etc. Software downloads are disallowed, but they allow FTP connections and do not block sites like versiontracker.com or download.com. *shrug*. Perhaps a few settlements/suits will cause companies like this to suddenly crack down and actuall impliment their stated policies. Until that time, I know the employees take the view that if the company where really serious about the policies that the IT department would limit/control the offending behaviour/sites.
...complaining about having to say the pledge of alliegence when your public education is paid for by the government
Well, when the government (the people actually) pay for public education, the government also mandates that education take place. If they require me to be educated, it's hardly a favor that they pay for the education.
I am not anal. I simply have conviction. I hold my values to a very high level. Unlike most of those claiming to be of the Christian faith, I follow through with my values in my every day life. I don't just claim to have some belief only to ignore that belief on a daily basis because it is inconveinient or unpopular.
please list at least 23 other platforms that Microsoft Windows XP runs on"
Do you want me to list scores of companies selling PC's?
All of those companies are selling ONE platform. Apparently you don't understand the word "platform" as it refers to computers. Please bone up on the lingo then start your argument again.
I personally feel rather UNsafe in thinking that the USSC will override this decision, and thus re-instate the illegal actions of the President and Congress in the 50s.
It is the job of the courts to adjudicate law, not uphold popular opinion.
You can't remove the morals of a country or a person via a legal proceeding, or making or replealing a law. Besides, responsibility and accountability are what are really laking in the country, not morals or ethics. If passing a law, or winning a legal suit somehow removes or diminishes one of your morals, then your morals where pretty weak to begin with, and probably needed to be shaken up. Further more, passing or repealing a law does not add or remove any of your rights. No matter what the current laws are, you have the right to do anything you want, Including say "under god" in the pledge if it makes you all warm and fuzzy, as long as you are willing to accept the concequences. BY anything, I mean you have the right to commit murder if you so choose. Society though has the right to arrest, procecute and condem you to jail or death for your muders.
If you use and look at your cash, you will see that there is a fair amount of it that has the "in god we trust" blacked out. If you consider that the Gov remvoes these bills from circulation, that it takes effort to take this marking action on all your billx, and the relatively low percentage of athiests, the small number of aldered bills becomes even more significant.
My personal choice is just to not use cash. I refuse make purchases with money that has a written contract with the purchacer whereby I am forced to purport belief in a supreme deity.
Or can't it. Just because nobody's circumvented biometric security yet (that we know of) doesn't mean it can't and won't be done in the future.
For instance, while it may not be possible to change your biometric features, what's to stop someone from creating a copy of your features in a prothetic. Or you using a "fake" feature to operate anonymously. ex: create a mask that has false eyes in it. The eyes have some specific person's (or some random) retinal and iris patterns flawlessly printed/etched in to the structures. Anyone putting this mask up to a reader would gain access to whatever you have access to. Perhaps this might not work with the systems in place. I only know that it's just a matter of time before biometric information can be copied/cloned in some way. Anything that you can scan for security verification can and will be forged.
This would eventually lead to the worst kind of identity theft. You can get a new bank account, social security, and driver's license numbers, so currently rectifying identity theft is rather trivial. How would you change your iris pattern once someone has successfully cloned it and stolen your identity?
Of course, Yoshi did not add an LCD screen to the system, he added a VCD. But they why should I start expecting technical accuraccy from The ScreenSavers at this point? Could have been worse: Leo LaPorte could have been there, and the segment would have run long because he wouldn't shut up.
I don't know why exactly this was such a big story, it's little more than a plug-and-play upgrade with all the software that's available. I had such a display connected to a Tand CoCo 3 via serial port back in the 1980s. Nice to see the Wintel and GNU/Linux worlds catching up.:)
I guess one really needs to look at the problem and figure out if your really need all those and other variables in the model. There was a great example of this in economics, matmaticians spent years attempting to model market performance, so they could properly price options. The equation took everything in to account, and was pages long. Finally a few guys figured out that most of the variables effectively cancelled each other out, and came up with a five variable or su equation that could accurately plot market performance and stock option prices in real time at any resolution (continuous time).
The auto manufacturers do use super computers to model the fluid dynamics through the intake, compustion and exaust systems, but starting with the basic functioning and building a rough model would probably allow an modder to determing if putting a larger turbo on would add any torque, or if a larger intake and exaust system would be necessary first.
What I do find humourous many times is all these tweeked Toyotas with all the laughable stickersand emblems that smoke their tires off the line. They whole point of the engine mods is to get the powet to the pavement to move the car, or so I thought. Making pretty white smoke and noise I could do with a small windshield pump and brake fluid installed on the drive wheels of any vehicle.
So... other than x86, please list at least 23 other platforms that Microsoft Windows XP runs on.
BSD, the heart of Mac OS X runs on at least: PPC, 68K, x86, Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, ARM, ia64
The software wrutten for Mac OSX could be written to take advantage of any GUI while still maintaining standard interfaces to the rest of the OS. In fact, only two options need to be accoutned for... Quartz, and X. If your program had all it's GUI stuff in one set of files you could easily port it fr om one platform to the other (Mac Quartz, to and BSD Xwindows system)
Darwin is the open source BSD operating system at the core of Mac OS X. All of the BSD kernel and libraries are available for anyone to look at and modify.
How many lines of code in Microsoft Windows XP are open source or even avalable to look at by outside developers?
So much for you proprietary arguement.
In the PC world, good things are included, bad elimindated....
Which is why instead of adopting FireWire, Intel, Compaq and others developed USB2.
Which is why Wintels still have parallel ports and floppy drives.
Which is why most standard Wintel systems still have CDRW or DRD-R drives as options.
Which is why multiple monitor support didn't appear until Microsoft Windows 98, and still only supports two monitors?
Which is why no major PC manufacturer installs 1000 bast T networking standard.
All of these things are good. All of these things and have no, little, or poor support on Wintel platforms from the manufacturers.
The one example you site ifor the Mac is moot. You don't use the pin-hole to eject a CD. You use the eject command in the GUI, or the eject button on the keyboard. The pinhole is only there for emergencies, just like on Wintel.
But how do you know what I wrote is true? perhaps I just made it up? The problems with these statments and stories is there is no way to prove them true. Hence for all we know, perhaps a future society will attempt to build a religion on my posts.
Look what's happened with the bible... Some lonely people wrote down versions of stories that had been passed down via word of mouth fot milenia. Once written down in teh collective, they where suddenly looked as as authoratative, and people begane killing each other over them. The archiving of those stories has caused more grief, misguided decision, and war than anything else.
Archiving without related, supporting data, and without explination of the archived documents by the authors can be a dangerous thing.
First, it has been stated by the maintainers of/. that/. is a US centric site. They are awar they have an international readership, but the site still remains US centric.
As for your other major news sites, they often carry local or insignificant stories that are of no interest to me. For instance, Israel and Palesine... I live 5000 miles away, I'm not a decendent of those places, nor do I subscribe to their religions: what to I care what a couple of countries smaller than some of our states do to each other? What did I care that some cuban kid was being deported? Yet Elian Gonzales was on the world news for weeks... it was nothing more than a family squabble. Some little kid gets murdered or kidnapped? Again, local story... doesn't affect me, or 99.99999% of the population, yet there are several on the nationl news now.
Lastly, if you consider/. to be a major news site, perhaps you should readjust your perspective. Nothing (at least very little) here is reported as news directly. This is more of a meta-news site and discussion forum, reporting on stories that others have written.
Let me take money out of the equation with another example:
An artists takes a pitcure. He then makes 300 prints of that negative.
He gives away the prints to the first 300 people who come asking for them.
Can those 300 people then make copies of thier prints and give them away? As the developer, can I run more prints from the negative and sell or give them away?
In both cases, the people giving away the copies they made are violating copyright law.
In this example, the negative is analagous the initially publised web site; the prints to the archived site.
As I've said in many of the other threads, the money is not the issue. The issue is copying rights, who gets them, when and why. You only get rights to my work that I explicitly transfer to you and those of fait use. In publishing my web site, I automatically have copyright to the content. When I offer the pages on the web, I implicitly transfer to the viewer the right to view that content, and to cache it in RAM and on disk for a relativelt short period. I undertand that caching is an inherent part of the medium in which I publish my work. You also have certain rights under fair use. You may discuss my work, reference it in your own workds, make backup s, cite portions of it, etc... Noplace, do I explicitly, by reference or implication transfer rights whereby you can re-transmit any or all of my content.
The problem is that money is not the issue. Copyright law still pertains. I did not give them any permission to redistribute my site. THe footer on my site even says so. The funny bit was they reproduced the footer stating that what they where doing was prohibited use.
The other flipside is that since the Wayback is re-distributing the content they may be criminally responsible also.
Logically: 1. You know there is child porn on the Internet 2. Your archive specifically attempts to retrieve, copy and reistribute all Internet content 3. You knowingly are distributing child pornography.
I know the robots.txt, but I (along with most web publishers) have better things to do than to keep track of every web bot that may visit my site. Given how fast crawlers come and go, just keeping up with a list would probably be a daunting task.
Maybe the robots.txt spec should have a new tag that the archive bots look for:
But why must "everything" be preserved fo posterity.
My dog took a dump on the lawn this morning. I have no record of what the lawn looked like before the event, of me cleaning up the event, ot what the lawn looked like afterward. What is the loss to society for this lack of information?
MOST of the web is just that... someone's brain dump. Most of it has no socially or intellecuallt reasonable need to be archived.
Or just fix your code in #3 so that you state "communication lost to node B, please check the network and oprerating status of node B.
Your code could even see if node B was still alive at any level:
Is the remote Application responding? Is Node B responding to ICMP? will node b respond to a MAC broadcast or ARP request? Is the link up? Is node A (myself) responding to MAC/ARP requests? Am I responging to ICMP? Can I ping myself? Can I talk to myself on the port node B would be sending me data?
This code could take a few hours to do well, but it would be portable to most any other network app you wrote.
Sounds like the bug here wasn't so much the code, but the process.
Sending more people to hack on spagetti code is a waste of time. Leaving the running code running in a known state (perhaps with a known but survivable bug) would be my choice. Obviously the thing's been running for 15 years, it can't be that bad. Now... take all those people fixing these bugs and have them document the code. You know the standard stuff. identify the function of the variables, the parameters of the functions and return values, what gets input from where, and what gets output to where. Now graph/chart it. Before you fix ANY bug, you can look at the chart and identify all the ramifications of any change. In your documentatation you should for example be able to look up a variable, know what it does, and all the functions that take, or change that variable.
The only reasons I can see continuing down your current path are ignorance or job security.
You can then take all those "extra" people and start re-coding the functions and eliminating the globals. Perhaps port the entire application(s) to another language/platform.
... this will be an intersting experiment. Can anyone remember when in Internet history this many nodes have gone on-line in such a short period of time?
I don't know what sort of bandwidth these games will require, but what if any effect will there be when potentially hundreds of thousands of consoles start accessing the 'net within a period of a few days, on top of the normal growth?
Your comment that...this is a different medium..." is at the heart of my arguments... Why should publishing on the Internet have any more or fewer rights and restrictions than real world publishing? Just because the new medium requires something that is illegal in the real world, does not necessarily mean the real-world rules should suddenly not be germain.
It's also interesting that you mention the Washinton Post, as they have "opted out" of the wayback machine.
Wayback does differ in several major ways from the operation of a standard library: 1. A library does not provide, allow or condone copying and/or redistributing their content (books, periodicals, reference materials) except for fair use. You may use the copies they have rights to. They do not produce as many copies of a work as there are patrons wanting ot use it. On wayback, the copies you implicity get rights to when viewing a web page are the one in memory and on your screen, and the one temporarily in your browser's cache. You have no distribution rights, or rights to make any other copies beond fair use (such as to a backup CD or tape). To stay withing their rights, you would have to go to the Waback building and look at the page on their computer that captured/cached the site/page.
2. A library does not keep all copies of a work indefinately. They rotate stock to keep up to date. The Wayback is specifically attempting to maintain all data, even if wrong, false or outdated. Your library will destroy and replace such items.
3. A library purchases content (generally) through channels that specifcally know the purchase is for a library, and certain special rights may be conveyed or restricted. The Wayback is taking pages offered for one use and using them for something else entirely. They further make or condoning the making of multiple copies while redistributing the works.
4. A Library never alters stored works. Due to space, technology and other limitations, not all pages in the archive are re-rendered as initially offered to the public. This is tantamount to re-writing those pages, and could be considered plagerism.
There's also common knowledge. The public at large is well aware that if they write a book, it may well end up in a library. Wayback has no such ubiquity, and they seem happy to remain in the background, collecting these pages without most authors' knowledge.
I'm not for shutting down the Wayback, or others like it. I'm just saying that overall things would be less legalistic(is that a word?) if they would simply take a solid "opt-in" stance. That is, they would only store pages that specifically allow them to do so, via athe robots.txt, meta information, sign-up at their site, whatever. This serrupticious gathering of copyrighted works, and the questionably legal issue of re-distributing them in whole or in part, possibly altered from their origional form is just not right.
The money is not the issue. Selling, giving, loaning whatever. The works are not theirs to do any of these with. The fact that I allowed you to view my web page at one point does not extrapolate to your right to make that page viewable by others on demand for eternity. The library neither copies nor republishes the works they hold. The Waybakc machine does both.
You drive your car in public. Does that make it public domain? would you report it stolen if I borrowed (without asking) it for a drive to Montana for a week even though you have two other cars (essienitally copies)?
Every year I pay property tax also. Much of it goes to schools, but I don't have kids. Are they selling me the schools, or the children? Can I enroll in high-school classes as a refresher course? But again, money is not the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
Some studies have estimated that as many as one in five work computers contains file-swapping software.
Really the percentage is probably more like 99%. Any computer that has a web browser or FTP client has file-swapping software on it.
Again from the article:
RIAA President Cary Sherman.: "Some of these corporations, we are told, have their own little networks--that is very clearly illegal."
And some corporations have large networks. I guess that is even more illegal. Everyone! Disconnect the Ethernet cable, and step away from the computer. Networking computers has been declared illegal by the RIAA.
All that aside, they have a point. Most people do use the network at the office for personal use. This is of course the fault of the IT department. If they lay down a policy that the network is for company business, they should set up equipment and software that enforces those rules.
At Bank One in AZ, they have such a policy (network and Internet acesss for company business only), but the restrictions are applied haphazardly. Joke sites are filtered by the proxy along with sites like Dilbert, The Onion, etc. Software downloads are disallowed, but they allow FTP connections and do not block sites like versiontracker.com or download.com. *shrug*. Perhaps a few settlements/suits will cause companies like this to suddenly crack down and actuall impliment their stated policies. Until that time, I know the employees take the view that if the company where really serious about the policies that the IT department would limit/control the offending behaviour/sites.
Well, when the government (the people actually) pay for public education, the government also mandates that education take place. If they require me to be educated, it's hardly a favor that they pay for the education.
I am not anal. I simply have conviction. I hold my values to a very high level. Unlike most of those claiming to be of the Christian faith, I follow through with my values in my every day life.
I don't just claim to have some belief only to ignore that belief on a daily basis because it is inconveinient or unpopular.
please list at least 23 other platforms that Microsoft Windows XP runs on"
Do you want me to list scores of companies selling PC's?
All of those companies are selling ONE platform. Apparently you don't understand the word "platform" as it refers to computers. Please bone up on the lingo then start your argument again.
I personally feel rather UNsafe in thinking that the USSC will override this decision, and thus re-instate the illegal actions of the President and Congress in the 50s.
It is the job of the courts to adjudicate law, not uphold popular opinion.
You can't remove the morals of a country or a person via a legal proceeding, or making or replealing a law. Besides, responsibility and accountability are what are really laking in the country, not morals or ethics.
If passing a law, or winning a legal suit somehow removes or diminishes one of your morals, then your morals where pretty weak to begin with, and probably needed to be shaken up.
Further more, passing or repealing a law does not add or remove any of your rights.
No matter what the current laws are, you have the right to do anything you want, Including say "under god" in the pledge if it makes you all warm and fuzzy, as long as you are willing to accept the concequences.
BY anything, I mean you have the right to commit murder if you so choose. Society though has the right to arrest, procecute and condem you to jail or death for your muders.
If you use and look at your cash, you will see that there is a fair amount of it that has the "in god we trust" blacked out. If you consider that the Gov remvoes these bills from circulation, that it takes effort to take this marking action on all your billx, and the relatively low percentage of athiests, the small number of aldered bills becomes even more significant.
My personal choice is just to not use cash. I refuse make purchases with money that has a written contract with the purchacer whereby I am forced to purport belief in a supreme deity.
Or can't it. Just because nobody's circumvented biometric security yet (that we know of) doesn't mean it can't and won't be done in the future.
For instance, while it may not be possible to change your biometric features, what's to stop someone from creating a copy of your features in a prothetic. Or you using a "fake" feature to operate anonymously.
ex: create a mask that has false eyes in it. The eyes have some specific person's (or some random) retinal and iris patterns flawlessly printed/etched in to the structures. Anyone putting this mask up to a reader would gain access to whatever you have access to.
Perhaps this might not work with the systems in place. I only know that it's just a matter of time before biometric information can be copied/cloned in some way. Anything that you can scan for security verification can and will be forged.
This would eventually lead to the worst kind of identity theft. You can get a new bank account, social security, and driver's license numbers, so currently rectifying identity theft is rather trivial. How would you change your iris pattern once someone has successfully cloned it and stolen your identity?
Of course, Yoshi did not add an LCD screen to the system, he added a VCD. But they why should I start expecting technical accuraccy from The ScreenSavers at this point?
:)
Could have been worse: Leo LaPorte could have been there, and the segment would have run long because he wouldn't shut up.
I don't know why exactly this was such a big story, it's little more than a plug-and-play upgrade with all the software that's available. I had such a display connected to a Tand CoCo 3 via serial port back in the 1980s. Nice to see the Wintel and GNU/Linux worlds catching up.
I guess one really needs to look at the problem and figure out if your really need all those and other variables in the model.
There was a great example of this in economics, matmaticians spent years attempting to model market performance, so they could properly price options. The equation took everything in to account, and was pages long.
Finally a few guys figured out that most of the variables effectively cancelled each other out, and came up with a five variable or su equation that could accurately plot market performance and stock option prices in real time at any resolution (continuous time).
The auto manufacturers do use super computers to model the fluid dynamics through the intake, compustion and exaust systems, but starting with the basic functioning and building a rough model would probably allow an modder to determing if putting a larger turbo on would add any torque, or if a larger intake and exaust system would be necessary first.
What I do find humourous many times is all these tweeked Toyotas with all the laughable stickersand emblems that smoke their tires off the line. They whole point of the engine mods is to get the powet to the pavement to move the car, or so I thought. Making pretty white smoke and noise I could do with a small windshield pump and brake fluid installed on the drive wheels of any vehicle.
Except that a neurosurgeon operates on brains. A cardiologist works with hearts (harts)
So... other than x86, please list at least 23 other platforms that Microsoft Windows XP runs on. BSD, the heart of Mac OS X runs on at least: PPC, 68K, x86, Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, ARM, ia64 The software wrutten for Mac OSX could be written to take advantage of any GUI while still maintaining standard interfaces to the rest of the OS. In fact, only two options need to be accoutned for... Quartz, and X. If your program had all it's GUI stuff in one set of files you could easily port it fr om one platform to the other (Mac Quartz, to and BSD Xwindows system) Darwin is the open source BSD operating system at the core of Mac OS X. All of the BSD kernel and libraries are available for anyone to look at and modify. How many lines of code in Microsoft Windows XP are open source or even avalable to look at by outside developers? So much for you proprietary arguement. In the PC world, good things are included, bad elimindated.... Which is why instead of adopting FireWire, Intel, Compaq and others developed USB2. Which is why Wintels still have parallel ports and floppy drives. Which is why most standard Wintel systems still have CDRW or DRD-R drives as options. Which is why multiple monitor support didn't appear until Microsoft Windows 98, and still only supports two monitors? Which is why no major PC manufacturer installs 1000 bast T networking standard. All of these things are good. All of these things and have no, little, or poor support on Wintel platforms from the manufacturers. The one example you site ifor the Mac is moot. You don't use the pin-hole to eject a CD. You use the eject command in the GUI, or the eject button on the keyboard. The pinhole is only there for emergencies, just like on Wintel.
But how do you know what I wrote is true? perhaps I just made it up?
The problems with these statments and stories is there is no way to prove them true. Hence for all we know, perhaps a future society will attempt to build a religion on my posts.
Look what's happened with the bible... Some lonely people wrote down versions of stories that had been passed down via word of mouth fot milenia. Once written down in teh collective, they where suddenly looked as as authoratative, and people begane killing each other over them. The archiving of those stories has caused more grief, misguided decision, and war than anything else.
Archiving without related, supporting data, and without explination of the archived documents by the authors can be a dangerous thing.
First, it has been stated by the maintainers of /. that /. is a US centric site. They are awar they have an international readership, but the site still remains US centric.
/. to be a major news site, perhaps you should readjust your perspective. Nothing (at least very little) here is reported as news directly. This is more of a meta-news site and discussion forum, reporting on stories that others have written.
As for your other major news sites, they often carry local or insignificant stories that are of no interest to me. For instance, Israel and Palesine... I live 5000 miles away, I'm not a decendent of those places, nor do I subscribe to their religions: what to I care what a couple of countries smaller than some of our states do to each other?
What did I care that some cuban kid was being deported? Yet Elian Gonzales was on the world news for weeks... it was nothing more than a family squabble.
Some little kid gets murdered or kidnapped? Again, local story... doesn't affect me, or 99.99999% of the population, yet there are several on the nationl news now.
Lastly, if you consider
Let me take money out of the equation with another example:
An artists takes a pitcure. He then makes 300 prints of that negative.
He gives away the prints to the first 300 people who come asking for them.
Can those 300 people then make copies of thier prints and give them away?
As the developer, can I run more prints from the negative and sell or give them away?
In both cases, the people giving away the copies they made are violating copyright law.
In this example, the negative is analagous the initially publised web site; the prints to the archived site.
As I've said in many of the other threads, the money is not the issue. The issue is copying rights, who gets them, when and why. You only get rights to my work that I explicitly transfer to you and those of fait use.
In publishing my web site, I automatically have copyright to the content. When I offer the pages on the web, I implicitly transfer to the viewer the right to view that content, and to cache it in RAM and on disk for a relativelt short period. I undertand that caching is an inherent part of the medium in which I publish my work. You also have certain rights under fair use. You may discuss my work, reference it in your own workds, make backup s, cite portions of it, etc...
Noplace, do I explicitly, by reference or implication transfer rights whereby you can re-transmit any or all of my content.
The problem is that money is not the issue. Copyright law still pertains. I did not give them any permission to redistribute my site.
THe footer on my site even says so. The funny bit was they reproduced the footer stating that what they where doing was prohibited use.
The other flipside is that since the Wayback is re-distributing the content they may be criminally responsible also.
Logically:
1. You know there is child porn on the Internet
2. Your archive specifically attempts to retrieve, copy and reistribute all Internet content
3. You knowingly are distributing child pornography.
I know the robots.txt, but I (along with most web publishers) have better things to do than to keep track of every web bot that may visit my site. Given how fast crawlers come and go, just keeping up with a list would probably be a daunting task.
/
Maybe the robots.txt spec should have a new tag that the archive bots look for:
archive-agent: * Disallow:
But why must "everything" be preserved fo posterity.
My dog took a dump on the lawn this morning. I have no record of what the lawn looked like before the event, of me cleaning up the event, ot what the lawn looked like afterward. What is the loss to society for this lack of information?
MOST of the web is just that... someone's brain dump. Most of it has no socially or intellecuallt reasonable need to be archived.
It's not the archiving that I think is wrong. It's the redirobution.
Or just fix your code in #3 so that you state "communication lost to node B, please check the network and oprerating status of node B.
Your code could even see if node B was still alive at any level:
Is the remote Application responding?
Is Node B responding to ICMP?
will node b respond to a MAC broadcast or ARP request?
Is the link up?
Is node A (myself) responding to MAC/ARP requests?
Am I responging to ICMP? Can I ping myself?
Can I talk to myself on the port node B would be sending me data?
This code could take a few hours to do well, but it would be portable to most any other network app you wrote.
Sounds like the bug here wasn't so much the code, but the process.
Sending more people to hack on spagetti code is a waste of time. Leaving the running code running in a known state (perhaps with a known but survivable bug) would be my choice. Obviously the thing's been running for 15 years, it can't be that bad.
Now... take all those people fixing these bugs and have them document the code. You know the standard stuff. identify the function of the variables, the parameters of the functions and return values, what gets input from where, and what gets output to where.
Now graph/chart it.
Before you fix ANY bug, you can look at the chart and identify all the ramifications of any change.
In your documentatation you should for example be able to look up a variable, know what it does, and all the functions that take, or change that variable.
The only reasons I can see continuing down your current path are ignorance or job security.
You can then take all those "extra" people and start re-coding the functions and eliminating the globals. Perhaps port the entire application(s) to another language/platform.
... this will be an intersting experiment.
Can anyone remember when in Internet history this many nodes have gone on-line in such a short period of time?
I don't know what sort of bandwidth these games will require, but what if any effect will there be when potentially hundreds of thousands of consoles start accessing the 'net within a period of a few days, on top of the normal growth?
Your comment that ...this is a different medium..." is at the heart of my arguments...
Why should publishing on the Internet have any more or fewer rights and restrictions than real world publishing? Just because the new medium requires something that is illegal in the real world, does not necessarily mean the real-world rules should suddenly not be germain.
It's also interesting that you mention the Washinton Post, as they have "opted out" of the wayback machine.
Wayback does differ in several major ways from the operation of a standard library:
1. A library does not provide, allow or condone copying and/or redistributing their content (books, periodicals, reference materials) except for fair use. You may use the copies they have rights to. They do not produce as many copies of a work as there are patrons wanting ot use it.
On wayback, the copies you implicity get rights to when viewing a web page are the one in memory and on your screen, and the one temporarily in your browser's cache. You have no distribution rights, or rights to make any other copies beond fair use (such as to a backup CD or tape).
To stay withing their rights, you would have to go to the Waback building and look at the page on their computer that captured/cached the site/page.
2. A library does not keep all copies of a work indefinately. They rotate stock to keep up to date.
The Wayback is specifically attempting to maintain all data, even if wrong, false or outdated. Your library will destroy and replace such items.
3. A library purchases content (generally) through channels that specifcally know the purchase is for a library, and certain special rights may be conveyed or restricted.
The Wayback is taking pages offered for one use and using them for something else entirely. They further make or condoning the making of multiple copies while redistributing the works.
4. A Library never alters stored works.
Due to space, technology and other limitations, not all pages in the archive are re-rendered as initially offered to the public. This is tantamount to re-writing those pages, and could be considered plagerism.
There's also common knowledge. The public at large is well aware that if they write a book, it may well end up in a library. Wayback has no such ubiquity, and they seem happy to remain in the background, collecting these pages without most authors' knowledge.
I'm not for shutting down the Wayback, or others like it. I'm just saying that overall things would be less legalistic(is that a word?) if they would simply take a solid "opt-in" stance. That is, they would only store pages that specifically allow them to do so, via athe robots.txt, meta information, sign-up at their site, whatever. This serrupticious gathering of copyrighted works, and the questionably legal issue of re-distributing them in whole or in part, possibly altered from their origional form is just not right.
The money is not the issue. Selling, giving, loaning whatever. The works are not theirs to do any of these with. The fact that I allowed you to view my web page at one point does not extrapolate to your right to make that page viewable by others on demand for eternity.
The library neither copies nor republishes the works they hold. The Waybakc machine does both.
You drive your car in public. Does that make it public domain? would you report it stolen if I borrowed (without asking) it for a drive to Montana for a week even though you have two other cars (essienitally copies)?
Every year I pay property tax also. Much of it goes to schools, but I don't have kids. Are they selling me the schools, or the children? Can I enroll in high-school classes as a refresher course? But again, money is not the issue.