This precaching idea will only help if your program spends more time in a block of data than it took to fetch, otherwise you'll catch up and be blocked.
If your algorithm is doing something bloody quick (optimized CRC, etc) you'll probably work faster than the disk I/O. If however you're calculating weather patterns or Conway's Life, or anything involving a bit of CPU and reprocessing the block of data in a non-linear fashion, you'll likely be okay.
If the routine involves looping through 1GB of data 100 times and you don't have the RAM, it will end up reading 100GB from disk, eventually. Your process may be dead simple and go from 15M for a 990MB dataset to 8Hr for 1GB, or it might be complex and go from 7:50 for 990MB to 8HR for 1GB, but if it takes 7:45 to read the 100GB, you've established a lower-bound on how long it'll take to process.
What were you doing to this data as you looped through it?
You might want to consider doing your own VM. If you're just 5% or so over available RAM you could manage this by writing to a file and deallocating two 6% chunks of memory back and forth. Make then each as far apart (in the dataset) as possible so that after loading and processing one, you have as much time as possible to let the VM load and precache the next set without blocking.
Well, it's an open problem, which means I don't have a solution, but I have a few ideas...
The first is to have algorithms for five or six different VM algorithms, a LRU, an MRU, and some more complex ones optimized for various tasks. Then, start everything off with the one that proves best in a random sampling of programs. But, while actually using the LRU (for instance) to swap, let the other routines simulate their own swapping. When one starts to pull ahead of the others, use it, but keep simulating.
Now, as long as there is plenty of swap space, regardless of free physical memory, it may be a win to keep large statistical studies of memory usage in different processes. Of course, this sort of thing would get turfed when the system actually started to run out of memory, but in the meantime the slight slowdown due to having less available RAM might be offset by swapping less, or with proper speculative swapping, not having to halt a process.
Also of use would be memory pools, to avoid having to kill userspace processes just to let the kernel alocate enough memory to keep running.
Of course, there will always be pathological conditions which render even the best VM incapable of dealing. (Imagine an FTP server that didn't write out uploaded files to disk, keeping it all in memory, eventually it'd run out or physical and virtual memory. Or the case of a process running some study on the data which necessitated accessing pages in an effectively random manner.)
I think we should work on putting an upper limit on swap time instead of making it a little snappier for every day usage. (I'd sacrifice 3fps in Quake3 to keep Photoshop from effectively locking my computer when I manipulate 200+ MB images.) We should also consider killing processes to be the very last resort before forbidding the kernel any more memory, and this should come about only from a bug in the kernel. (All parts should be designed as not to grow unbounded.)
But then, I'm an armchair VM designer. It's an educated guess, but still only a guess.
"Stable" doesn't necessarily mean what you think. It refers to the APIs. All releases in 2.4 are supposed to be compatible, but 2.5 is allowed to do things that break code between versions.
Now, by keeping the interfaces stable, they usually make the kernels more stable (in the uptime sense) as well, but that's not exactly the goal.
If you blindly upgrade to the latest kernel, you will be bitten. It'd be like grabbing Mozilla nightlies, or if MS released IE nightly builds, or whatever. There will be a few stinkers.
Frankly, if you're the type to complain when a kernel is buggy instead of sending in bug reports, you probably should be at least two full releases behind the latest. (When 2.4.17 comes out, upgrade to 2.4.15) The exception being when there's been a big hole found in a line of kernels. And if you need the stability, consider downgrading to the kernel before the problem one instead of upgrading to a less-tested one.
The printing press simultaneously made a market for books and threatened the newfound livelihood of the authors.
Without the printing press you couldn't have a career as an author. Authors had patrons who paid them, but not for each book, instead they paid for the originals.
With the printing press came the idea of selling many copies, and eventually the authors demanded their piece of the pie, but it could have very well continued such that they sold their work up front and the publishers took the risks and made the money.
I don't know why people assume that it's a natural law that authors get royalties. Should architects get royalties from each person who uses their building?
If we hadn't developed copyright, something else would have come along.
While 500MB is a lot of data now, it won't always be. And don't forget that it's backbone traffic that costs, local loop is free. Get the big providers to mirror the data locally.
And yeah, people will edit out the commercials and upload them to P2P network. But really, will this matter? It's going to be years before 100GB is a trivial ammount of space (ie, less than $10 worth of space) so most people aren't going to go onto a P2P and download an entire series on spec. If the price is low enough (likely $.50 / show, with a max of $15 / month) it'll usually be worthwhile to just go watch the show directly from the network.
P2P is a pain. Shows are misnamed and even when correctly named, don't follow any standards. You can't always find someone online to download from, and when you do there's no bandwidth guarantee.
I imagine the shows would even be available without commercials for a slightly higher fee. I know I'd pay an extra $.10 per show to not have to reach for the remote/keyboard three times per show.
I'm sure the next gen will be some stupid encrypted broadcast that'll piss people off due to its limitations, yet get cracked right away anyways. But it doesn't have to be, I'm sure there's a decent market in people too lazy to spend hours on a P2P service downloading their shows.
Like with any unauthorized copying, the people doing it aren't going to pay anyways, but they don't cost the provider anything. Let the shows leak, the copiers will get them anyways and the protection just pisses off the ones who pay.
I propose that companies be forced to follow the same laws that people are forced to follow. And that companies get a say in changing the laws only by encouraging citizens to vote.
If there were no loopholes for a corporation and they couldn't buy new laws, they really wouldn't be much different than a bunch of people who got together to pool money which in fact was the original intent of allowing corporations.
Two fairly simple changes would be required... The first is to hold the officers and shareholders of a company responsible for the actions of the company, if they (with due diligence) should have known about the actions. The second is to declare "campaign contribtions" to be bribes and lock up anyone offering them, and lock up any politicians soliciting them for treason (though without the death penalty, I suppose). (And write this inclusively enough that it applies to anyone giving a politician anything of value, much like police have to be careful not to accept xmas gifts that might cause a conflict of interest.)
Then if everyone votes to allow girl scouts to be used as ingredients, it'll at least be an open process and fair to everyone (except perhaps the girl scouts). These laws won't match everyone's ethics, and in fact, likely won't match anyone ethics exactly, but at least they'll be a uniform code.
If not, why not just grab a rifle and go take out a corporate CEO who dumped toxic waste, or abuses people in a 3rd world nation? After all, it's just a business decision and you can't legislate ethics so you might as well not even try.
Of course Windows doesn't get "rooted", it doesn't do anything. I doubt more than 1% of windows boxes are running IIS/etc.
My old 95 gaming box was nukable, but as you say, nothing else. But it couldn't do anything. Look further back to my MS-DOS box and it was totally secure, I mean NSA level secure. Of course, it wasn't network connected to anything, and didn't offer any network services, but...
I'll admit that Linux (and BSD, etc, etc) have problems. Even OpenBSD has a few bugs, I'm sure.
The issue I take with this article is that it's being directly compared to Windows and found lacking - in security. I'd laugh, except for the incredible absurdity overload.
Take Linux (from a security concious distro) and Windows, install both, with the same services and GUI. (This means a full install of KDE or Gnome)
Count the holes in those, and get back to me.
Then count the number of local root exploits, as in, let a user log in and run arbitrary binaries - see which machine is the most resistant to "rooting" or crashing. (Excepting boot-floppys, that's too easy.)
Point taken. Like, don't round off until you're done the equation, so the errors don't propogate.
The only way I notice film is when it's bad, and it seems to be very often. Almost every time I go to the theatre I see a ton of noise in the picture. Even when I saw FotR three days after it opened, this picture was bad, and this was in a Silver City (fancy theatre chain) which I'd assume should look better than most other theatres. But I guess the issue here is with the film stock they distribute it on, not the film they shoot it on.
Ugh. No, it's not capitalism. That's the whole point. If it was a true capitalism, someone would buy the DVD in the cheap country and ship it to the expensive country if the price differential were high enough. They'd also be selling DVD players without region coding, completely against the will of the studios.
But I can't tell if you were saying that too in a sarcastic way or not.
Why would you rather watch it on film? Ugh. I mean, film is full of icky artifacts, smudges, marks, tons of stuff.
I'd think that uncompressed (or artifact free at any rate, which isn't too hard to do, if you do dynamic bitrate tweaks and suggest sections of the picture of more careful compression, which imho is what should be part of making a good DVD) digital would be far superior to something that hit film at any stage. Or, at least, to anything that wasn't pulled off of film immediately in the production process.
> A business is out to maximize profit, by nature, and you
> can't fault a business for acting like it's supposed to.
Where did this attitude come from? It's used to excuse everything a business does. I swear, if there was a loophope in the law that allowed businesses to grind girl-scouts into puree and sell it as luncheon meat, someone would be there saying that we can't blame a business for doing it...
"Bullshit," says I. We can blame a business for doing anything we'd blame a person for doing. Moreover, we should blame them for doing it.
If we don't hold businesses (and the people who run them) to some sort of standards we'll end up with a bunch of immoral fucktards running around, screwing everyone over, in the name of the almighty dollar regardless of the consequences.
That sort of world might be a Randian wet dream, but it's not the sort of place I want to live.
If people built houses the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker would destroy all the housing, but they would have been created for free by copying the first house, and would be restored from backups almost instantly.
That makes a lot of sense. Copyrights are supposed to be a balance between the rights of the people and the rights of the creator. If one side gets ahead, we should rebalance the deal to help the other.
While I don't think any individual is owed a living, I think it behoves us to create a system that rewards the content creators in general, so that they make stuff we like. But also we need to make sure that the people get something back for all the tax money that goes into protecting these copyrights. (And that means unfettered access after a certain point.)
So yes, I think that copyrighted work should be easily accessed by all. This means that while a special machine (DVD player) may be required, they shouldn't be able to require access controls, or user tracking, etc.
Or, as you say, they require a bunch of hoops be jumped through, but lose the protection of law and are at the mercy of the first person to crack it.
I've had Win2k crash every five minutes. Try launching a finicky game, or working in Visual Studio... It doesn't crash as much as 98 did, but this thing about 2k/XP lasting months is a pure lie. If you do anything on them other than web browse they last a week, maybe two tops.
Even if I hated Linux, I'd be glad to see a viable alternative to MS. You see, unlike people who own MS stock, I realize that a free market will provide better returns in the long run than one controlled by a single company. I'm unwilling to sell our children down the road just for nice dividends in the short term.
And you're right about there being more than one type of person on Slashdot. There's those who like Linux, and trolls.
You don't see a lot of MS Haters hanging out on the MS news groups (the ones MS hosts) and you don't see a lot of (honest) Linux haters on Slashdot. What would be the point? They either like open source software/Linux/etc, or are dweeby kids who get a kick from trolling.
Theoretically the OS cost is a small part of the "TCO" (Total Cost of Ownership) but I've actually seen it be fairly high.
You can't get away with Win2k Pro as your DB server OS (assuming you use MS) because it's limited to 10 simultaneous (by MS's extremely stupid definition) connections. So you need Server, and probably Adv. Server... And to go over certain limits you need to buy it specially, with a custom license.
You can end up paying $3k per server just for license fees, on a machine that cost $4k to build.
Now, this is peanuts compared to millions of dollars, but I assume the same things happen with Sun/SGI's hardware and OSes, just with more money.
My old work saved $5k by replacing a few WinNT/2k servers with Linux running Samba. The computers didn't have to do much, processor wise, but always had a ton of connections open and thus required a more expensive OS.
(I can't remember why they had to buy licenses, maybe they weren't compliant, or maybe the old licenses came with the old hardware, or whatever...)
The way the legal system works you're often off the hook for negligance if you can show that you hired someone who should have been capable of handling the issue.
If you build a bridge yourself and it's wonderful, but someone sails a ship into it and it falls over, you're hooped.
If you hire a licensed engineer to build a bridge and it sucks, you're (msotly) covered even if it falls over in the wind, as long as you didn't have cause to believe he was doing badly.
So while you can't sue Oracle or MS (while they aren't the biggest companies, they're both rich enough to tie something up in court for decades) for damages, you can point to your use of "proper" software to drop your liability for punative damages.
This isn't lawyer speak, but I was told this by a lawyer, for what that's worth. (Though it wasn't as legal advice, and was in laymans terms.)
However, now that a "Real" company like RedHat (ie, not some kids working from a garage) sell support for Linux and RedHatDB, you'd probably be safe going with them.
As someone else in this thread said, some of the people who use Oracle *need* Oracle (and Sun hardware, etc). Most of the people who use it could get by with lesser software and lesser hardware, if they weren't hung up on a name.
Works released under the GPL are completely free in all ways, except for allowing you to close-source them. Nobody really cares though because if you're the type to want to do that, you're not likely to be the type they care to help.
In part, you're right, the idea of the GPL is to spread the GPL. To reach a point where it's become so much easier to create new works based on the existing library of GPLed works (thus meaning that almost everything is copyrighted) that copyright law gets reformed to something that serves the people.
(BTW, part of the reason that few people buy software for Linux is because the bar is MUCH higher. Nobody will buy a half-assed compiler when GCC is free. Nobody will pay for someone's VB traceroute program when 'mtr' is free. If you want people to buy your software, offer someone better than what comes installed by default. (And better enough to warrant the money - MS Office may be nicer than Star Office 6, but not $600 nicer.))
Would you particularly care about someone who wanted to use your research, but who didn't want to let you use their research?
Frankly I'd call them a freeloader.
That's why I release everything I write (as limited as the list is) under the GPL. You're perfectly welcome to take it and use it, hopefully someone new to programming can learn from it as I learned from open code (predating the GPL license, but not the mentality).
However if you want to take what I've done and then sell it as closed source you're cheating the customer. They're getting less, being charged more, and not rewarding the real author. The same feelings would apply if I were a scientist researching anti-cancer drugs, or anything else.
Despite the comments from the nay-sayers, I have seen this system in action and it seems to work just fine.
The system held incoming email from a new correspondent for 24 hours until they emailed back a randomly generated password that was sent to them.
Even just stopping here would be enough to remove 99% of spam because almost all return addresses are forged.
To go further and encode the password in a picture file would stop almost all automated systems you could make, and a few little tweaks (using a striped background) that you changed every few months would keep them from using OCR.
And finally, who gets enough email from new people every day that the fraction of a second to encode a.GIF (or.PNG if you wish) file and email it is going to add up to more than a few seconds? It might inconvenience the emailer and if for example you applied for a job with that email address it might be a bad thing, but you could always either tell it to let anything from a certain domain through beforehand.
Re:Only Trillian v0.7x affected?
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AOL vs. Trillian
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The ads don't pay for anything these days. The reason AOL and MS are so concerned that you may be using a generic client is that you won't be getting locked into their software.
If this were some small start-up that I thought was being run in an ethical fashion, I might care to support them. As it is, MS and AOL are some of the sleaziest companies around, I feel no need to play fair with either of them when they won't with me (and/or the general public).
They're just lucky they aren't RAMBUS. That's a company I'd go out of my way to sabotage.
How much do you get paid to troll? Must be a good bit, or you must be really bored.
I assume you've never installed Linux because then you'd know that of the 4-8 disks you get usually only two are asked for during install and even then the full install including apps and games comes to under a GB.
Contrast that to Win2k. Sure, the OS is on one disk (and only takes 350MB or so) but Visual Studio is two disks, the MSDN libraries are on three disks (at least, probably more by now) and Office 2k is another disk (and takes about as much space as the OS.)
When I've got a computer fully installed for use at work it takes about 4.5GB.
This may be overkill for 99% of people, but then the extra six or seven disks of Linux are too. (And they contain similar stuff, extra utils, office suites, docs, source, etc.)
Really? Oh damn. I must have missed the news for the past few years...
Has Linus declared Microsoft to be enemy #1?
Does Linus control a huge sales force dedicated to wiping out Windows?
Has Linux bribed politicians to get his own laws (UCITA) in order to enforce his empire and exclude smaller companies?
Has Linus illegally used his monopoly to leverage Linux into OEM hardware to the exclusion of other OSes?
Has Linus lied (and directed others to lie) to a federal judge and faked evidence to support these lies?
Probably not... Until Linus becomes a billionare and sets out to control the world's computers, destroying all competition in his wake this won't be "the exact same only reversed."
I don't care that many people never use Linux. Many people don't use Asus motherboards or drive Toyotas either. What I care about is the freedom for people people to choose. Microsoft is trying to take that freedom away, Linux is offering more choices.
So? Why should we care that some corporation might lose some revenue?
Should MapQuest be able to force gas stations to remove their maps because it cuts into their revenue streams?
Should Ford Motors be able to specify that only Firestone tires are to be used on Ford vehicles?
A few years ago "lost revenues" were called "failed business plan" and it was the fault of the company. Now it's like the public is liable for.COMs (and existing companies caught in that mentality) losing money because their business plan involves banking on unfounded assumptions.
Bah. We don't live in a welfare state, we live in a corporate welfare state.
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This precaching idea will only help if your program spends more time in a block of data than it took to fetch, otherwise you'll catch up and be blocked.
If your algorithm is doing something bloody quick (optimized CRC, etc) you'll probably work faster than the disk I/O. If however you're calculating weather patterns or Conway's Life, or anything involving a bit of CPU and reprocessing the block of data in a non-linear fashion, you'll likely be okay.
If the routine involves looping through 1GB of data 100 times and you don't have the RAM, it will end up reading 100GB from disk, eventually. Your process may be dead simple and go from 15M for a 990MB dataset to 8Hr for 1GB, or it might be complex and go from 7:50 for 990MB to 8HR for 1GB, but if it takes 7:45 to read the 100GB, you've established a lower-bound on how long it'll take to process.
What were you doing to this data as you looped through it?
You might want to consider doing your own VM. If you're just 5% or so over available RAM you could manage this by writing to a file and deallocating two 6% chunks of memory back and forth. Make then each as far apart (in the dataset) as possible so that after loading and processing one, you have as much time as possible to let the VM load and precache the next set without blocking.
Well, it's an open problem, which means I don't have a solution, but I have a few ideas...
The first is to have algorithms for five or six different VM algorithms, a LRU, an MRU, and some more complex ones optimized for various tasks. Then, start everything off with the one that proves best in a random sampling of programs. But, while actually using the LRU (for instance) to swap, let the other routines simulate their own swapping. When one starts to pull ahead of the others, use it, but keep simulating.
Now, as long as there is plenty of swap space, regardless of free physical memory, it may be a win to keep large statistical studies of memory usage in different processes. Of course, this sort of thing would get turfed when the system actually started to run out of memory, but in the meantime the slight slowdown due to having less available RAM might be offset by swapping less, or with proper speculative swapping, not having to halt a process.
Also of use would be memory pools, to avoid having to kill userspace processes just to let the kernel alocate enough memory to keep running.
Of course, there will always be pathological conditions which render even the best VM incapable of dealing. (Imagine an FTP server that didn't write out uploaded files to disk, keeping it all in memory, eventually it'd run out or physical and virtual memory. Or the case of a process running some study on the data which necessitated accessing pages in an effectively random manner.)
I think we should work on putting an upper limit on swap time instead of making it a little snappier for every day usage. (I'd sacrifice 3fps in Quake3 to keep Photoshop from effectively locking my computer when I manipulate 200+ MB images.) We should also consider killing processes to be the very last resort before forbidding the kernel any more memory, and this should come about only from a bug in the kernel. (All parts should be designed as not to grow unbounded.)
But then, I'm an armchair VM designer. It's an educated guess, but still only a guess.
"Stable" doesn't necessarily mean what you think. It refers to the APIs. All releases in 2.4 are supposed to be compatible, but 2.5 is allowed to do things that break code between versions.
Now, by keeping the interfaces stable, they usually make the kernels more stable (in the uptime sense) as well, but that's not exactly the goal.
If you blindly upgrade to the latest kernel, you will be bitten. It'd be like grabbing Mozilla nightlies, or if MS released IE nightly builds, or whatever. There will be a few stinkers.
Frankly, if you're the type to complain when a kernel is buggy instead of sending in bug reports, you probably should be at least two full releases behind the latest. (When 2.4.17 comes out, upgrade to 2.4.15) The exception being when there's been a big hole found in a line of kernels. And if you need the stability, consider downgrading to the kernel before the problem one instead of upgrading to a less-tested one.
The printing press simultaneously made a market for books and threatened the newfound livelihood of the authors.
Without the printing press you couldn't have a career as an author. Authors had patrons who paid them, but not for each book, instead they paid for the originals.
With the printing press came the idea of selling many copies, and eventually the authors demanded their piece of the pie, but it could have very well continued such that they sold their work up front and the publishers took the risks and made the money.
I don't know why people assume that it's a natural law that authors get royalties. Should architects get royalties from each person who uses their building?
If we hadn't developed copyright, something else would have come along.
While 500MB is a lot of data now, it won't always be. And don't forget that it's backbone traffic that costs, local loop is free. Get the big providers to mirror the data locally.
And yeah, people will edit out the commercials and upload them to P2P network. But really, will this matter? It's going to be years before 100GB is a trivial ammount of space (ie, less than $10 worth of space) so most people aren't going to go onto a P2P and download an entire series on spec. If the price is low enough (likely $.50 / show, with a max of $15 / month) it'll usually be worthwhile to just go watch the show directly from the network.
P2P is a pain. Shows are misnamed and even when correctly named, don't follow any standards. You can't always find someone online to download from, and when you do there's no bandwidth guarantee.
I imagine the shows would even be available without commercials for a slightly higher fee. I know I'd pay an extra $.10 per show to not have to reach for the remote/keyboard three times per show.
I'm sure the next gen will be some stupid encrypted broadcast that'll piss people off due to its limitations, yet get cracked right away anyways. But it doesn't have to be, I'm sure there's a decent market in people too lazy to spend hours on a P2P service downloading their shows.
Like with any unauthorized copying, the people doing it aren't going to pay anyways, but they don't cost the provider anything. Let the shows leak, the copiers will get them anyways and the protection just pisses off the ones who pay.
I propose that companies be forced to follow the same laws that people are forced to follow. And that companies get a say in changing the laws only by encouraging citizens to vote.
If there were no loopholes for a corporation and they couldn't buy new laws, they really wouldn't be much different than a bunch of people who got together to pool money which in fact was the original intent of allowing corporations.
Two fairly simple changes would be required... The first is to hold the officers and shareholders of a company responsible for the actions of the company, if they (with due diligence) should have known about the actions. The second is to declare "campaign contribtions" to be bribes and lock up anyone offering them, and lock up any politicians soliciting them for treason (though without the death penalty, I suppose). (And write this inclusively enough that it applies to anyone giving a politician anything of value, much like police have to be careful not to accept xmas gifts that might cause a conflict of interest.)
Then if everyone votes to allow girl scouts to be used as ingredients, it'll at least be an open process and fair to everyone (except perhaps the girl scouts). These laws won't match everyone's ethics, and in fact, likely won't match anyone ethics exactly, but at least they'll be a uniform code.
If not, why not just grab a rifle and go take out a corporate CEO who dumped toxic waste, or abuses people in a 3rd world nation? After all, it's just a business decision and you can't legislate ethics so you might as well not even try.
Of course Windows doesn't get "rooted", it doesn't do anything. I doubt more than 1% of windows boxes are running IIS/etc.
...
My old 95 gaming box was nukable, but as you say, nothing else. But it couldn't do anything. Look further back to my MS-DOS box and it was totally secure, I mean NSA level secure. Of course, it wasn't network connected to anything, and didn't offer any network services, but
I'll admit that Linux (and BSD, etc, etc) have problems. Even OpenBSD has a few bugs, I'm sure.
The issue I take with this article is that it's being directly compared to Windows and found lacking - in security. I'd laugh, except for the incredible absurdity overload.
Take Linux (from a security concious distro) and Windows, install both, with the same services and GUI. (This means a full install of KDE or Gnome)
Count the holes in those, and get back to me.
Then count the number of local root exploits, as in, let a user log in and run arbitrary binaries - see which machine is the most resistant to "rooting" or crashing. (Excepting boot-floppys, that's too easy.)
Point taken. Like, don't round off until you're done the equation, so the errors don't propogate.
The only way I notice film is when it's bad, and it seems to be very often. Almost every time I go to the theatre I see a ton of noise in the picture. Even when I saw FotR three days after it opened, this picture was bad, and this was in a Silver City (fancy theatre chain) which I'd assume should look better than most other theatres. But I guess the issue here is with the film stock they distribute it on, not the film they shoot it on.
Ugh. No, it's not capitalism. That's the whole point. If it was a true capitalism, someone would buy the DVD in the cheap country and ship it to the expensive country if the price differential were high enough. They'd also be selling DVD players without region coding, completely against the will of the studios.
But I can't tell if you were saying that too in a sarcastic way or not.
Why would you rather watch it on film? Ugh. I mean, film is full of icky artifacts, smudges, marks, tons of stuff.
:)
I'd think that uncompressed (or artifact free at any rate, which isn't too hard to do, if you do dynamic bitrate tweaks and suggest sections of the picture of more careful compression, which imho is what should be part of making a good DVD) digital would be far superior to something that hit film at any stage. Or, at least, to anything that wasn't pulled off of film immediately in the production process.
You sure your name isn't filmfan?
> A business is out to maximize profit, by nature, and you
> can't fault a business for acting like it's supposed to.
Where did this attitude come from? It's used to excuse everything a business does. I swear, if there was a loophope in the law that allowed businesses to grind girl-scouts into puree and sell it as luncheon meat, someone would be there saying that we can't blame a business for doing it...
"Bullshit," says I. We can blame a business for doing anything we'd blame a person for doing. Moreover, we should blame them for doing it.
If we don't hold businesses (and the people who run them) to some sort of standards we'll end up with a bunch of immoral fucktards running around, screwing everyone over, in the name of the almighty dollar regardless of the consequences.
That sort of world might be a Randian wet dream, but it's not the sort of place I want to live.
If people built houses the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker would destroy all the housing, but they would have been created for free by copying the first house, and would be restored from backups almost instantly.
That makes a lot of sense. Copyrights are supposed to be a balance between the rights of the people and the rights of the creator. If one side gets ahead, we should rebalance the deal to help the other.
While I don't think any individual is owed a living, I think it behoves us to create a system that rewards the content creators in general, so that they make stuff we like. But also we need to make sure that the people get something back for all the tax money that goes into protecting these copyrights. (And that means unfettered access after a certain point.)
So yes, I think that copyrighted work should be easily accessed by all. This means that while a special machine (DVD player) may be required, they shouldn't be able to require access controls, or user tracking, etc.
Or, as you say, they require a bunch of hoops be jumped through, but lose the protection of law and are at the mercy of the first person to crack it.
I've had Win2k crash every five minutes. Try launching a finicky game, or working in Visual Studio... It doesn't crash as much as 98 did, but this thing about 2k/XP lasting months is a pure lie. If you do anything on them other than web browse they last a week, maybe two tops.
Even if I hated Linux, I'd be glad to see a viable alternative to MS. You see, unlike people who own MS stock, I realize that a free market will provide better returns in the long run than one controlled by a single company. I'm unwilling to sell our children down the road just for nice dividends in the short term.
And you're right about there being more than one type of person on Slashdot. There's those who like Linux, and trolls.
You don't see a lot of MS Haters hanging out on the MS news groups (the ones MS hosts) and you don't see a lot of (honest) Linux haters on Slashdot. What would be the point? They either like open source software/Linux/etc, or are dweeby kids who get a kick from trolling.
Theoretically the OS cost is a small part of the "TCO" (Total Cost of Ownership) but I've actually seen it be fairly high.
You can't get away with Win2k Pro as your DB server OS (assuming you use MS) because it's limited to 10 simultaneous (by MS's extremely stupid definition) connections. So you need Server, and probably Adv. Server... And to go over certain limits you need to buy it specially, with a custom license.
You can end up paying $3k per server just for license fees, on a machine that cost $4k to build.
Now, this is peanuts compared to millions of dollars, but I assume the same things happen with Sun/SGI's hardware and OSes, just with more money.
My old work saved $5k by replacing a few WinNT/2k servers with Linux running Samba. The computers didn't have to do much, processor wise, but always had a ton of connections open and thus required a more expensive OS.
(I can't remember why they had to buy licenses, maybe they weren't compliant, or maybe the old licenses came with the old hardware, or whatever...)
The way the legal system works you're often off the hook for negligance if you can show that you hired someone who should have been capable of handling the issue.
If you build a bridge yourself and it's wonderful, but someone sails a ship into it and it falls over, you're hooped.
If you hire a licensed engineer to build a bridge and it sucks, you're (msotly) covered even if it falls over in the wind, as long as you didn't have cause to believe he was doing badly.
So while you can't sue Oracle or MS (while they aren't the biggest companies, they're both rich enough to tie something up in court for decades) for damages, you can point to your use of "proper" software to drop your liability for punative damages.
This isn't lawyer speak, but I was told this by a lawyer, for what that's worth. (Though it wasn't as legal advice, and was in laymans terms.)
However, now that a "Real" company like RedHat (ie, not some kids working from a garage) sell support for Linux and RedHatDB, you'd probably be safe going with them.
As someone else in this thread said, some of the people who use Oracle *need* Oracle (and Sun hardware, etc). Most of the people who use it could get by with lesser software and lesser hardware, if they weren't hung up on a name.
"Wah, it's not free, I can't steal it!"
Works released under the GPL are completely free in all ways, except for allowing you to close-source them. Nobody really cares though because if you're the type to want to do that, you're not likely to be the type they care to help.
In part, you're right, the idea of the GPL is to spread the GPL. To reach a point where it's become so much easier to create new works based on the existing library of GPLed works (thus meaning that almost everything is copyrighted) that copyright law gets reformed to something that serves the people.
(BTW, part of the reason that few people buy software for Linux is because the bar is MUCH higher. Nobody will buy a half-assed compiler when GCC is free. Nobody will pay for someone's VB traceroute program when 'mtr' is free. If you want people to buy your software, offer someone better than what comes installed by default. (And better enough to warrant the money - MS Office may be nicer than Star Office 6, but not $600 nicer.))
Would you particularly care about someone who wanted to use your research, but who didn't want to let you use their research?
Frankly I'd call them a freeloader.
That's why I release everything I write (as limited as the list is) under the GPL. You're perfectly welcome to take it and use it, hopefully someone new to programming can learn from it as I learned from open code (predating the GPL license, but not the mentality).
However if you want to take what I've done and then sell it as closed source you're cheating the customer. They're getting less, being charged more, and not rewarding the real author. The same feelings would apply if I were a scientist researching anti-cancer drugs, or anything else.
Despite the comments from the nay-sayers, I have seen this system in action and it seems to work just fine.
.GIF (or .PNG if you wish) file and email it is going to add up to more than a few seconds? It might inconvenience the emailer and if for example you applied for a job with that email address it might be a bad thing, but you could always either tell it to let anything from a certain domain through beforehand.
The system held incoming email from a new correspondent for 24 hours until they emailed back a randomly generated password that was sent to them.
Even just stopping here would be enough to remove 99% of spam because almost all return addresses are forged.
To go further and encode the password in a picture file would stop almost all automated systems you could make, and a few little tweaks (using a striped background) that you changed every few months would keep them from using OCR.
And finally, who gets enough email from new people every day that the fraction of a second to encode a
The ads don't pay for anything these days. The reason AOL and MS are so concerned that you may be using a generic client is that you won't be getting locked into their software.
If this were some small start-up that I thought was being run in an ethical fashion, I might care to support them. As it is, MS and AOL are some of the sleaziest companies around, I feel no need to play fair with either of them when they won't with me (and/or the general public).
They're just lucky they aren't RAMBUS. That's a company I'd go out of my way to sabotage.
How much do you get paid to troll? Must be a good bit, or you must be really bored.
I assume you've never installed Linux because then you'd know that of the 4-8 disks you get usually only two are asked for during install and even then the full install including apps and games comes to under a GB.
Contrast that to Win2k. Sure, the OS is on one disk (and only takes 350MB or so) but Visual Studio is two disks, the MSDN libraries are on three disks (at least, probably more by now) and Office 2k is another disk (and takes about as much space as the OS.)
When I've got a computer fully installed for use at work it takes about 4.5GB.
This may be overkill for 99% of people, but then the extra six or seven disks of Linux are too. (And they contain similar stuff, extra utils, office suites, docs, source, etc.)
Really? Oh damn. I must have missed the news for the past few years...
Has Linus declared Microsoft to be enemy #1?
Does Linus control a huge sales force dedicated to wiping out Windows?
Has Linux bribed politicians to get his own laws (UCITA) in order to enforce his empire and exclude smaller companies?
Has Linus illegally used his monopoly to leverage Linux into OEM hardware to the exclusion of other OSes?
Has Linus lied (and directed others to lie) to a federal judge and faked evidence to support these lies?
Probably not... Until Linus becomes a billionare and sets out to control the world's computers, destroying all competition in his wake this won't be "the exact same only reversed."
I don't care that many people never use Linux. Many people don't use Asus motherboards or drive Toyotas either. What I care about is the freedom for people people to choose. Microsoft is trying to take that freedom away, Linux is offering more choices.
So? Why should we care that some corporation might lose some revenue?
.COMs (and existing companies caught in that mentality) losing money because their business plan involves banking on unfounded assumptions.
Should MapQuest be able to force gas stations to remove their maps because it cuts into their revenue streams?
Should Ford Motors be able to specify that only Firestone tires are to be used on Ford vehicles?
A few years ago "lost revenues" were called "failed business plan" and it was the fault of the company. Now it's like the public is liable for
Bah. We don't live in a welfare state, we live in a corporate welfare state.
And they'll tell you that those names are trademarks and completely unrelated to copyrights.