What he really wants is ultimate coordination of information via the super human intellect. The OS is just and OS. It is typically always transparent. I never see my OS actually writing files, managing memory, other than through the basic application management interface that allows me to install/remove applications. The applications themselves are what matter. (Otherwise the copying of files continually from one directory to another would be fun and using more memory is fun... yay.... i... *DONT* think so).
Our current society is based upon the capitalistic market forces to solve supply and demand decisions because the socialistic models do not work. (Well, thats debatable. The socialistic models under a massive oppresive soviet system doesnt work, but I believe in some european countries it works?).
Typically, this capitalism vs socialism brings up many fears of the coldwar when one tries to migrate towards socialism. There is inherintly nothing wrong with the socialism paradigm. The fundermental flaw lies in the inability for the human mind to organise and coordinate on such a massively perfect scale the logistics behind a truely utopian socialistic society.
Bringing this into relevance, one must consider the perfectly centralized vs haphazardly distributed nature of information.
It is obvious that if all human information stored by companies, governments, scientific, personel information, etc, were to be stored in a single storage system, then it could be perfectly sorted, arranged and the searching of the information would be maximal and perfect.
This provides two problems:
Who is going to search, store and coordinate said massive volumes of information? (Future AI)
Ethicly, do you want your entire personal details and history to be stored in one accessable place. This opens up abuse by authorities (Q:Why would authorities want to abuse others in utopia?). There is a fundamental loss of freedom in the contiual tracking of every move of individuals within society. How do you know your location is being constantly tracked.
Information is currently decentralized across the many industries. The information revolution started to occur with the internet and search engines. The next information revolution will occur with the perfect coordination of information but will society accept it?
I've got an AMD XP1800+ and 384mb of memory. This became a necessity as 128mb seriously isnt enough. With more than 128, it runs fine, but i've got no idea what they did between 98 and 2k. In 2k, i could get a memory footprint of about 40meg or less.
1) Consider a buckshot shotgun shell and an armour piercing shell. You have conservation of energy but possibly the lasered shell is now split into fragments that individually are unable to pierce the different parts of armour that they scatter over.
2) I would imagine that significant damage to a shell would change its air resistant profile and changing its course by even a fraction of a degree over a kilometer will cause it to miss its target.
3) Vapourise anything midair and i'm sure the turbulence over the region of a hundred meters would disipate the resulting gas over the area. Obviously, the shell was not turned into gaseous form. Most likely the uneven rapid heating caused some critical fractural explosion(?).
Their entire argument that they _need_ to exist off box office sales is crazy because it assumes they cant increase the pricing of the dvds.
---
I've got a colleague at work who is adamant that he'll never watch another movie at a theater as he always buys the DVDs.
Now, this will hit the various producers box office sales if say, 10% of their box office customers turn away to DVDs... sure.... but to think that they arnt making money off the DVDs is ludicrous.
Realise that the successfull movies cover their costs by the box office sales. There is no reason why they cant increase the price of the DVDs they distribute if they arnt making as many movie sales. Realise that those people that arnt buying movie tickets ARE buying DVDs, so the studios get their money anyway. Those sales are currently the candyfloss of the movie industry.
His argument is flawed but MIGHT account for the closue of a number of box office cinemas but this is possibly fine aslong as more people are employed supporting the prodution of DVDs and related equipment than the jobs lost by the closure of 5-10% of the theatres.
Ouch. I just had a very nasty thought that you might be very Very wrong. Assuming Jobs is that insideous, I'd give it a slim chance. IBM brokers the deal between Sony and Apple to bring economies of scale to the 970 and. ..
Sony wants to sell less hardware and sell more games with a higher per title margin. Selling hardware at a loss is typical of the console market.
IBM supplies the goods, Sony & Co supplies the reference PS3 platform and games backing.
Apple continues building its brand name computing with the ability to run PS3 games. That gives Apple a MAJOR supplier of video games. People who own an Apple typically will be able to afford the various PS3 games.... now realise that Sony is able to ship a number of exclusive titles, without making a loss on a console AND maintaining their premium on their titles.
How I dispise arguments like this. I do not dispise your reply, rather the need for a large company to "help" sort out a mess that should typically be sorted out by the government for everyone.
Instead, the proposed argument goes: When it benifits one large company, it will spend money to have the system fixed.
Why should one sleep with a real infringer of patents to sort out a system that the government needs to sort out!!
There are many different economically reasonable technologies out there that could ALL be used given the right coordination. We cant all use solar power (hills, bad weather), we cant all use biodiesel/alcohol based engines (limited land), we cant all use compressed air engines (not good for trucks, only good for cities/small distances), etc.
The key, in a few years, will be a mixed specialization of many different technologies. The major benifit with oil/petrol based engines today is the economies of scale and the sheer size of the oil industry.
Well, we need to consider that we may not be able to achieve economies of scale, but the energy efficencies and/or long term economics/oil deficiencies/pollution inefficiencies force us towards many routes.
The more people actively develop and deploy new technologies, the more readily we'll be able to switch when we need to. There is no reason why we need millions of alcohol engines driving around.
"Slashdot Reader" is probably a bad thing to put on your CV as a "hobby". I'd imagine (...whistle... makes sure boss aint around...) that alot of people spend alot of time on slashdot.
"Slashdot Poster" is probably a v.bad thing to put on your CV... unless you've got alot of karma.
Indicating your Slashdot Karma level on your CV (Character Recordsheet) is probably a good thing... but this also implies Slashdot poster... which is a good thing... but it implies that you're a slashdot reader... so you're buggered.
I'll probably get modded down as flamebait for this. Have at ye fowl moderator.
When we eventually get fusion power that accomplishes what we truely need (Inexaustable, clean, power supply), Eth becomes a viable source.
The barrier (its energy efficiency) becomes a mass production issue that would result in massive Eth plants being closely related to the Fusion power industry.
Fusion is a serious technology that humanity needs to achieve.
Unlimited power could prevent an ice-age from having any impact. You could do away with fossil fuels and natural gas in house heating.
You could build massive mag cannons to shoot stuff into space.
Do not rule an Eth car out once Fusion is realized. Electric cars may be too 'battery' heavy but hybrid non-fossil based cars will definately appear.
Realize that his 10 points arnt all correct, but most of them are well justified through other papers and significant work outside his article.
I fundamently disagree with his argument about the primitives and their objectification (a word?). Instead I advocate type-signficant templates and language support to naturally extend collection support to leverage primatives in the collections.
I would also advocate more primitive types that better cater for the real machine level issues.
I strongly disagree with #5, the serialization of objects using the XML file format. Where speed is necessary, XML is insignificant. (Ideally, the XML standards org needs to define a compact binary format for XML. That would be good. Using the current XML text based xml fileformat is crazy, if only usefull for final stage output storage.)
His #1 is flawed, and should not be his #1 priority.
---
Realize that the only real way to implement the proposed changes in Java3 is to provide a 'compatability' layer between prior versions.
This means it should be possible to install 'clean' libraries, or 'compatability' libraries.
I would hesiate to be too quick to move to Java3. as there are more than 10 aspects need to be tackled.
A difficult task in the real world of business and legacy. I hope it happens within the next 3 years.
Well, its one of the "mars" requirements. If you can create a reusable relaunchable spacecraft, that works on earth, then it "should" work on mars (baring atmospheric calculations and lack of runway. taking that into account should be intresting).
In addition, i read somewhere that the russian research is allocated in 5 years block cycles (or something large like that) instead of half-yearly reviews by senate comms.
Admitidly, the senate comms have to review half-yearly because nasa is quite bloated / highqualified scientests are expensive, but thats another part of the problem.
Thats why, sadly enough, I would speculate that they could get a human to mars and back on $20b. Its too expensive to hire the us researchers. Simple economics.
In a way, the us congress already know that they're paying too much.
Why reinvent the wheel? Thats usually what the russians dont do (pen vs pencil).
---
Getting to mars should have 2 outcomes:
1: A mass replicatable vehicle - This allows all nations to mass produce planet haulers. 1 trip isnt enough. Things should be cheap to replicate every 5 years. Otherwise, you're wasting your time.
2: Determine if its possible to terraform mars in a hundred years. Set up research stations in which the true research of planet terraforming can begin.
---
The mars mission is truely a technical issue. There is major research besides the life support weightlessness, nuclear rockets and entry/landing.
Everything else should be as cheap and replicatable as possible.
Oh, yeah,... i'm not trying to highlight the numbers themselves, just that the numbers have an effect on the system as a whole. I'd imagine a larger difference of about 10% would be found and would be reasonable, but something double as massive might be a bit over the top.
Kinda like having your car tyres out of alignment by 1%... messes up your tires - slightly/eventually.
Another reasonable reason to look for earth sized planets is that we could go there in the future if the conditions are suitable.
-Tim
All pointless, are you really going to read them??
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 1
I would hesitate to buy any IT book unless either a) Its good reference manual b) I am a library or a company buying material for developers.
Seriously, You will not get enough general knowledge out of so few books to be at least knowledge enough to call yourself knowledgable.
A better suggestion is to go to yahoo, and go through every second or third sectional topic on the IT list / computer science list - then, search for the related newsgroups and find the latest research / topic debates and major faqs over the last year and read them.
Reading the debates is alot easier and gives you an understanding of the polar differences in possibilities. (Not always possible, depending on what discussions are taking place).
Dont confuse skills (C++, Perl, etc) with knowledge (pros/cons of C++, Perl, security issues).
Higher gravity means that the cellular structure must be able to work under higher loads, higher pressures, etc.
A possible reason why dinosaurs _evolved_ in earlier days is that the earth was lighter. Every day, thousands and thousands of tons of dust are deposited on the earth, add this up over millions and millions of years and you've got potentially a 1% increase in gravity.
If John Doe suddenly gained control of the internet naming registries (any TLD), they can set their prices, they can resolve disputes as they see fit, they can ignore disputes as they see fit, they can have 'preferences'. John Doe could prefer to reject the renewal of a bank, putting the bank 'offline'.
I do not trust that power to any private individual or private company. Sorry if you feel otherwise.
They are _not_ accountable nor transparent.
Governments are accountable. They are not always efficient. Sometimes governments are downright rotten.
But realise this: Governments change (look at SA 20 years ago!).
Closed organisations/companies dont.
The battle is similar to that of Microsoft. MS Controls PCs. Will they play fair? No, because they are not accountable to you. They are accountable to their shareholders. This is why governements should regulate industry.
This is obviously the double edged sword because regulation ALWAYS has a cost overhead which is unnecessary if the players play fair.
South Africa doesn't want to change its postal code. It just wants to be able to build whatever new streets it likes, and have mail still get there, just as your local council, shire, or district can currently.
I think the current concern is that they're not very good at building streets. It would also be a problem if the government didn't like you, and so wouldn't let you build a house.
You would then vote against the government during the next elections. Others who understand the injustice of the system would then vote against the government if the problems wernt corrected.
>Umm, wrong. The TLD's are currently NOT under >individual governmental control, and they >obviously aren't useless. The current state of >affairs proves your argument to be >without merit.
The reason to regulate is to prevent future abuse and to force the availability of services to be provided by a provider (monopoly in the case of a TLD) of those services. If the provider does not provide those services, then the provider should be changed. People should not have to put up with bad providers of common regulated service.
Thats why we elect our governments and shareholders elect their board of directors. The people who have vested intrest in the management of a common resource should be able to force change if it the common resource is being mismanaged.
Amazon is not a monopoly over the infrastructure of 50 million people. Amazon's existance is irrelivent to the ability of a person to connect to the internet.
>>Like another poster said "This would be like the >>US administering the allocation of radio >>frequencies of another country" Retarded.
>Your analogy is entirely flawed. Radio >frequencies are a common, natural resource, >shared by all. The frequencies were not created >by anyone, and therefore we would all have to >share.
Radio frequencies are a common, natural resource, shared by the people on that location of the planet. The people at that location of the planet should regulate their radio frequencies so that each person has fair use of those frequencies. The people give the authority to regulate to the government they ELECT.
People in Australia do not regulate people in the US, vice versa.
(Damn, i wrote a good response, but IE crashed causing me to loose pages of stuff. I'll have to go in pointform.)
> Now why in the world should I be forced to let the South African government control za.neverending.org?
If za.neverending.org was a critical infrastructure to every person in a country, then that country should regulate za.neverending.org.
.za is crucial to the naming of the countries websites. People and Business invest money in services that depend on infrastructure. All major disputes will eventually end up in a court of law within a country related to the dispute. ICANN is neither country nor court of law. I cannot sue an opponent in the 'ICANN court of law' because the opponent has no reason to comply. One has to prossocute an opponent in a court of law that the opponent cannot ignore.
As more citizens connect to the net, with the country becoming more dependant on an infrastructure, then it should be regulated. Regulation is there to prevent possible colapse of economies. Auditors should be heavily regulated (anderson), but this does not mean that governemnt departments must audit companies (enron). The governent should mandate through law, the responsibility to other parties (anderson) to prevent situations whereby there is massive economic colapse (enron).
Back to top level name regisrars: the.za regisrar should not be able to refuse renewal of a name (eg: a banks address) (a possible method of extortion). Certain businesses need to be regulated. Monopolies need to be regulated because massive abuse is possible.
---
>ICANN owns/runs very top level namespace. It created it. Why should it be told what to do by a foreign government?
Why should some World Post Association (does that exist), have authority to regulate the addressing system within its own country? ICANN exists ONLY for interoperability. Its whip has been that it regulates.
Once you realise this, you can make some forward looking statements:
The US mandated ICANN to regulate the nameservers. As coutries economies become more internet dependant, they will regulate their namespace. Whats happening in ZA, CA (to a lesser extent) and AU, will happen more often over the next few years.
Countries did not 'vote' for ICANN, therefore they will want more say in who gets to regulate them.
Once this regulation is in place in many countries, the countries might decide to mandate authority over TLD regulation to the UN (for eg), which might then mandate that to some organisation (possibly ICANN?)
ICANNs days are numbered. (They might have quite a few, but the nature of ICANN will change because their origional purpose has already been completed.)
---
ICANN is no court of law that any country recog nises. What legal court of law are ICANN disputes resolved in?
Do you really think that the Brazillian court of law applies in the US? I think not! Countries governements agree to uphold certain reasonable cooperation between their legal systems, but that is because the people of that country want that cooperation.
In the end, people and business will require a legal framework in which they can fight disputes. Since ICANN is no recognisable court, and was not elected by the people, why should any country put its economy in the hands of ICANN? ICANN is not accountable to the people, so why should ICANN have authority overthem!
The SA Gov should be able to regulate their namespace. The fact that they might delegate the monopoly of being a top level registrar, to a (private) organisation is another matter altogether.
Top level domains should obviously be controlled and administered by the government of the country they represent. The.za domain is the zone of an entire country. The name registrar is therefore a monopoly of services, and all monopolies should be regulated. The government should delegate management to a (private) organisation that is able to provide the quality services that are required. If that company does not provide the services, then the government should choose a different company.
Thats the same as the US government not having regulatory control over their own airwaves/airspace. Crazy.
---
The real beef is that governments are historically less speedy in providing the services required, but this should not prevent any government from having regulatory authority over the naming and addressing of the internet within its own borders.
---
-Tim A South African.
---
I dont like the idea of potentially putting a company out of business because of governemental involvement, but some of the proposed regulatory changes will have to happen at some point in the future, in many places in the world.
Q?: Why should ICANN have a whip over the internet naming of an entire country? ICANN should recognise the regulations of govermental regulation of its namespace.
Its amazing how little this quality exists in society. The success of a company depends on the number of managers with common sense outnumbering those without.
At this point, management can make decisions faster than logic.
The problem with costing on bandwidth should depend on who wants to communicate. You would not enjoy me sending you a postcard... collect, but you wouldnt mind paying for the postage of your magazine subscription. Likewise, why should you pay collect for the fliers (snail-mail-spam) that get posted in everyones mailbox?
The only reasonable way to cost would be to cost the entire transfer to the persona that initiated the connection.
This would split the costs proporitionally.
Regretably, this would open up the networks to cost abuse. Possibly, setting up machines on a international customer which continually flood your local network to have balance of 'bandwidth'.
Slashdot Mirror
What he really wants is ultimate coordination of information via the super human intellect. The OS is just and OS. It is typically always transparent. I never see my OS actually writing files, managing memory, other than through the basic application management interface that allows me to install/remove applications. The applications themselves are what matter. (Otherwise the copying of files continually from one directory to another would be fun and using more memory is fun... yay.... i... *DONT* think so).
Our current society is based upon the capitalistic market forces to solve supply and demand decisions because the socialistic models do not work. (Well, thats debatable. The socialistic models under a massive oppresive soviet system doesnt work, but I believe in some european countries it works?).
Typically, this capitalism vs socialism brings up many fears of the coldwar when one tries to migrate towards socialism. There is inherintly nothing wrong with the socialism paradigm. The fundermental flaw lies in the inability for the human mind to organise and coordinate on such a massively perfect scale the logistics behind a truely utopian socialistic society.
Bringing this into relevance, one must consider the perfectly centralized vs haphazardly distributed nature of information.
It is obvious that if all human information stored by companies, governments, scientific, personel information, etc, were to be stored in a single storage system, then it could be perfectly sorted, arranged and the searching of the information would be maximal and perfect.
This provides two problems:
Who is going to search, store and coordinate said massive volumes of information? (Future AI)
Ethicly, do you want your entire personal details and history to be stored in one accessable place. This opens up abuse by authorities (Q:Why would authorities want to abuse others in utopia?). There is a fundamental loss of freedom in the contiual tracking of every move of individuals within society. How do you know your location is being constantly tracked.
Information is currently decentralized across the many industries. The information revolution started to occur with the internet and search engines. The next information revolution will occur with the perfect coordination of information but will society accept it?
-Tim
The same applies to win2k.
I've got an AMD XP1800+ and 384mb of memory. This became a necessity as 128mb seriously isnt enough. With more than 128, it runs fine, but i've got no idea what they did between 98 and 2k. In 2k, i could get a memory footprint of about 40meg or less.
Either way, memory is cheap.
-Tim
1)
Consider a buckshot shotgun shell and an armour piercing shell. You have conservation of energy but possibly the lasered shell is now split into fragments that individually are unable to pierce the different parts of armour that they scatter over.
2)
I would imagine that significant damage to a shell would change its air resistant profile and changing its course by even a fraction of a degree over a kilometer will cause it to miss its target.
3)
Vapourise anything midair and i'm sure the turbulence over the region of a hundred meters would disipate the resulting gas over the area.
Obviously, the shell was not turned into gaseous form. Most likely the uneven rapid heating caused some critical fractural explosion(?).
Their entire argument that they _need_ to exist off box office sales is crazy because it assumes they cant increase the pricing of the dvds.
---
I've got a colleague at work who is adamant that he'll never watch another movie at a theater as he always buys the DVDs.
Now, this will hit the various producers box office sales if say, 10% of their box office customers turn away to DVDs... sure.... but to think that they arnt making money off the DVDs is ludicrous.
Realise that the successfull movies cover their costs by the box office sales. There is no reason why they cant increase the price of the DVDs they distribute if they arnt making as many movie sales. Realise that those people that arnt buying movie tickets ARE buying DVDs, so the studios get their money anyway. Those sales are currently the candyfloss of the movie industry.
His argument is flawed but MIGHT account for the closue of a number of box office cinemas but this is possibly fine aslong as more people are employed supporting the prodution of DVDs and related equipment than the jobs lost by the closure of 5-10% of the theatres.
-Tim
Ouch. I just had a very nasty thought that you might be very Very wrong. Assuming Jobs is that insideous, I'd give it a slim chance. IBM brokers the deal between Sony and Apple to bring economies of scale to the 970 and. . .
... now realise that Sony is able to ship a number of exclusive titles, without making a loss on a console AND maintaining their premium on their titles.
Sony wants to sell less hardware and sell more games with a higher per title margin. Selling hardware at a loss is typical of the console market.
IBM supplies the goods, Sony & Co supplies the reference PS3 platform and games backing.
Apple continues building its brand name computing with the ability to run PS3 games. That gives Apple a MAJOR supplier of video games. People who own an Apple typically will be able to afford the various PS3 games.
-Tim
How I dispise arguments like this. I do not dispise your reply, rather the need for a large company to "help" sort out a mess that should typically be sorted out by the government for everyone.
Instead, the proposed argument goes: When it benifits one large company, it will spend money to have the system fixed.
Why should one sleep with a real infringer of patents to sort out a system that the government needs to sort out!!
-Tim
There are many different economically reasonable technologies out there that could ALL be used given the right coordination. We cant all use solar power (hills, bad weather), we cant all use biodiesel/alcohol based engines (limited land), we cant all use compressed air engines (not good for trucks, only good for cities/small distances), etc.
The key, in a few years, will be a mixed specialization of many different technologies. The major benifit with oil/petrol based engines today is the economies of scale and the sheer size of the oil industry.
Well, we need to consider that we may not be able to achieve economies of scale, but the energy efficencies and/or long term economics/oil deficiencies/pollution inefficiencies force us towards many routes.
The more people actively develop and deploy new technologies, the more readily we'll be able to switch when we need to. There is no reason why we need millions of alcohol engines driving around.
"Slashdot Reader" is probably a bad thing to put on your CV as a "hobby". I'd imagine (...whistle... makes sure boss aint around...) that alot of people spend alot of time on slashdot.
"Slashdot Poster" is probably a v.bad thing to put on your CV... unless you've got alot of karma.
Indicating your Slashdot Karma level on your CV (Character Recordsheet) is probably a good thing... but this also implies Slashdot poster... which is a good thing... but it implies that you're a slashdot reader... so you're buggered.
I'll probably get modded down as flamebait for this. Have at ye fowl moderator.
When we eventually get fusion power that accomplishes what we truely need (Inexaustable, clean, power supply), Eth becomes a viable source.
The barrier (its energy efficiency) becomes a mass production issue that would result in massive Eth plants being closely related to the Fusion power industry.
Fusion is a serious technology that humanity needs to achieve.
Unlimited power could prevent an ice-age from having any impact. You could do away with fossil fuels and natural gas in house heating.
You could build massive mag cannons to shoot stuff into space.
Do not rule an Eth car out once Fusion is realized. Electric cars may be too 'battery' heavy but hybrid non-fossil based cars will definately appear.
-Tim
Realize that it needs to happen someday.
---
Realize that his 10 points arnt all correct, but most of them are well justified through other papers and significant work outside his article.
I fundamently disagree with his argument about the primitives and their objectification (a word?). Instead I advocate type-signficant templates and language support to naturally extend collection support to leverage primatives in the collections.
I would also advocate more primitive types that better cater for the real machine level issues.
I strongly disagree with #5, the serialization of objects using the XML file format. Where speed is necessary, XML is insignificant. (Ideally, the XML standards org needs to define a compact binary format for XML. That would be good. Using the current XML text based xml fileformat is crazy, if only usefull for final stage output storage.)
His #1 is flawed, and should not be his #1 priority.
---
Realize that the only real way to implement the proposed changes in Java3 is to provide a 'compatability' layer between prior versions.
This means it should be possible to install 'clean' libraries, or 'compatability' libraries.
I would hesiate to be too quick to move to Java3. as there are more than 10 aspects need to be tackled.
A difficult task in the real world of business and legacy. I hope it happens within the next 3 years.
Well, its one of the "mars" requirements. If you can create a reusable relaunchable spacecraft, that works on earth, then it "should" work on mars (baring atmospheric calculations and lack of runway. taking that into account should be intresting).
In addition, i read somewhere that the russian research is allocated in 5 years block cycles (or something large like that) instead of half-yearly reviews by senate comms.
Admitidly, the senate comms have to review half-yearly because nasa is quite bloated / highqualified scientests are expensive, but thats another part of the problem.
-Tim
Thats why, sadly enough, I would speculate that they could get a human to mars and back on $20b. Its too expensive to hire the us researchers. Simple economics.
In a way, the us congress already know that they're paying too much.
Why reinvent the wheel? Thats usually what the russians dont do (pen vs pencil).
---
Getting to mars should have 2 outcomes:
1: A mass replicatable vehicle - This allows all nations to mass produce planet haulers. 1 trip isnt enough. Things should be cheap to replicate every 5 years. Otherwise, you're wasting your time.
2: Determine if its possible to terraform mars in a hundred years. Set up research stations in which the true research of planet terraforming can begin.
---
The mars mission is truely a technical issue. There is major research besides the life support weightlessness, nuclear rockets and entry/landing.
Everything else should be as cheap and replicatable as possible.
---
-Tim
Oh, yeah, ... i'm not trying to highlight the numbers themselves, just that the numbers have an effect on the system as a whole. I'd imagine a larger difference of about 10% would be found and would be reasonable, but something double as massive might be a bit over the top.
Kinda like having your car tyres out of alignment by 1%... messes up your tires - slightly/eventually.
Another reasonable reason to look for earth sized planets is that we could go there in the future if the conditions are suitable.
-Tim
I would hesitate to buy any IT book unless either a) Its good reference manual b) I am a library or a company buying material for developers.
Seriously, You will not get enough general knowledge out of so few books to be at least knowledge enough to call yourself knowledgable.
A better suggestion is to go to yahoo, and go through every second or third sectional topic on the IT list / computer science list - then, search for the related newsgroups and find the latest research / topic debates and major faqs over the last year and read them.
Reading the debates is alot easier and gives you an understanding of the polar differences in possibilities. (Not always possible, depending on what discussions are taking place).
Dont confuse skills (C++, Perl, etc) with knowledge (pros/cons of C++, Perl, security issues).
-Tim
Gravity.
Higher gravity means that the cellular structure must be able to work under higher loads, higher pressures, etc.
A possible reason why dinosaurs _evolved_ in earlier days is that the earth was lighter. Every day, thousands and thousands of tons of dust are deposited on the earth, add this up over millions and millions of years and you've got potentially a 1% increase in gravity.
If John Doe suddenly gained control of the internet naming registries (any TLD), they can set their prices, they can resolve disputes as they see fit, they can ignore disputes as they see fit, they can have 'preferences'. John Doe could prefer to reject the renewal of a bank, putting the bank 'offline'.
I do not trust that power to any private individual or private company. Sorry if you feel otherwise.
They are _not_ accountable nor transparent.
Governments are accountable.
They are not always efficient. Sometimes governments are downright rotten.
But realise this: Governments change (look at SA 20 years ago!).
Closed organisations/companies dont.
The battle is similar to that of Microsoft. MS Controls PCs. Will they play fair? No, because they are not accountable to you. They are accountable to their shareholders. This is why governements should regulate industry.
This is obviously the double edged sword because regulation ALWAYS has a cost overhead which is unnecessary if the players play fair.
To continue your postal analogy...
South Africa doesn't want to change its postal code. It just wants to be able to build whatever new streets it likes, and have mail still get there, just as your local council, shire, or district can currently.
I think the current concern is that they're not very good at building streets. It would also be a problem if the government didn't like you, and so wouldn't let you build a house.
You would then vote against the government during the next elections. Others who understand the injustice of the system would then vote against the government if the problems wernt corrected.
>Umm, wrong. The TLD's are currently NOT under
>individual governmental control, and they
>obviously aren't useless. The current state of
>affairs proves your argument to be
>without merit.
The reason to regulate is to prevent future abuse and to force the availability of services to be provided by a provider (monopoly in the case of a TLD) of those services. If the provider does not provide those services, then the provider should be changed. People should not have to put up with bad providers of common regulated service.
Thats why we elect our governments and shareholders elect their board of directors. The people who have vested intrest in the management of a common resource should be able to force change if it the common resource is being mismanaged.
Amazon is not a monopoly over the infrastructure of 50 million people. Amazon's existance is irrelivent to the ability of a person to connect to the internet.
>>Like another poster said "This would be like the
>>US administering the allocation of radio
>>frequencies of another country" Retarded.
>Your analogy is entirely flawed. Radio
>frequencies are a common, natural resource,
>shared by all. The frequencies were not created
>by anyone, and therefore we would all have to
>share.
Radio frequencies are a common, natural resource,
shared by the people on that location of the planet. The people at that location of the planet should regulate their radio frequencies so that each person has fair use of those frequencies. The people give the authority to regulate to the government they ELECT.
People in Australia do not regulate people in the US, vice versa.
(Damn, i wrote a good response, but IE crashed causing me to loose pages of stuff. I'll have to go in pointform.)
.za regisrar should not be able to refuse renewal of a name (eg: a banks address) (a possible method of extortion). Certain businesses need to be regulated. Monopolies need to be regulated because massive abuse is possible.
> Now why in the world should I be forced to let the South African government control za.neverending.org?
If za.neverending.org was a critical infrastructure to every person in a country, then that country should regulate za.neverending.org.
.za is crucial to the naming of the countries websites. People and Business invest money in services that depend on infrastructure. All major disputes will eventually end up in a court of law within a country related to the dispute. ICANN is neither country nor court of law. I cannot sue an opponent in the 'ICANN court of law' because the opponent has no reason to comply. One has to prossocute an opponent in a court of law that the opponent cannot ignore.
As more citizens connect to the net, with the country becoming more dependant on an infrastructure, then it should be regulated. Regulation is there to prevent possible colapse of economies. Auditors should be heavily regulated (anderson), but this does not mean that governemnt departments must audit companies (enron). The governent should mandate through law, the responsibility to other parties (anderson) to prevent situations whereby there is massive economic colapse (enron).
Back to top level name regisrars: the
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>ICANN owns/runs very top level namespace. It created it. Why should it be told what to do by a foreign government?
Why should some World Post Association (does that exist), have authority to regulate the addressing system within its own country? ICANN exists ONLY for interoperability. Its whip has been that it regulates.
Once you realise this, you can make some forward looking statements:
The US mandated ICANN to regulate the nameservers.
As coutries economies become more internet dependant, they will regulate their namespace. Whats happening in ZA, CA (to a lesser extent) and AU, will happen more often over the next few years.
Countries did not 'vote' for ICANN, therefore they will want more say in who gets to regulate them.
Once this regulation is in place in many countries, the countries might decide to mandate authority over TLD regulation to the UN (for eg), which might then mandate that to some organisation (possibly ICANN?)
ICANNs days are numbered. (They might have quite a few, but the nature of ICANN will change because their origional purpose has already been completed.)
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ICANN is no court of law that any country recog nises. What legal court of law are ICANN disputes resolved in?
Do you really think that the Brazillian court of law applies in the US? I think not! Countries governements agree to uphold certain reasonable cooperation between their legal systems, but that is because the people of that country want that cooperation.
In the end, people and business will require a legal framework in which they can fight disputes. Since ICANN is no recognisable court, and was not elected by the people, why should any country put its economy in the hands of ICANN? ICANN is not accountable to the people, so why should ICANN have authority overthem!
ICANNs days are numbered.
Your logic does not tally.
The SA Gov should be able to regulate their namespace. The fact that they might delegate the monopoly of being a top level registrar, to a (private) organisation is another matter altogether.
Top level domains should obviously be controlled and administered by the government of the country they represent. The .za domain is the zone of an entire country. The name registrar is therefore a monopoly of services, and all monopolies should be regulated. The government should delegate management to a (private) organisation that is able to provide the quality services that are required. If that company does not provide the services, then the government should choose a different company.
Thats the same as the US government not having regulatory control over their own airwaves/airspace. Crazy.
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The real beef is that governments are historically less speedy in providing the services required, but this should not prevent any government from having regulatory authority over the naming and addressing of the internet within its own borders.
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-Tim
A South African.
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I dont like the idea of potentially putting a company out of business because of governemental involvement, but some of the proposed regulatory changes will have to happen at some point in the future, in many places in the world.
Q?: Why should ICANN have a whip over the internet naming of an entire country? ICANN should recognise the regulations of govermental regulation of its namespace.
Its amazing how little this quality exists in society. The success of a company depends on the number of managers with common sense outnumbering those without.
At this point, management can make decisions faster than logic.
The cartrige is twice as large as it needs to be.
The problem with costing on bandwidth should depend on who wants to communicate. You would not enjoy me sending you a postcard... collect, but you wouldnt mind paying for the postage of your magazine subscription. Likewise, why should you pay collect for the fliers (snail-mail-spam) that get posted in everyones mailbox?
The only reasonable way to cost would be to cost the entire transfer to the persona that initiated the connection.
This would split the costs proporitionally.
Regretably, this would open up the networks to cost abuse. Possibly, setting up machines on a international customer which continually flood your local network to have balance of 'bandwidth'.
A real problem.
-Tim