That's a practicality issue, not a legal issue. They aren't assuming the UK will protect them for any kind of legal reasons, they're assuming that the UK will get touchy if someone brings heavy weaponry too close to UK borders. It just happens that SeaLand is quite close to the UK.
I think this is the overoptimistic viewpoint, since the one scenario Ryan didn't mention is "What happens if the government which wants to remove SeaLand is on good terms with the UK?" After all, the US has heavy weaponry within UK borders all the time...
I'll add to this the following datapoint: I'm a freelance RPG writer, and I intend to start my own company someday. I will be taking a close look at the D20 system, with the intent of possibly using it as a base system for one or more of my games, without the D20 logo. I don't care so much about getting D&D players as I care about not having to write my own mechanics.
Something I don't think anyone's mentioned yet is the author of the D20 ruleset -- Jonathan Tweet. He's considered one of the best designers in the business; he wrote the classic Ars Magica, the insane Over the Edge, and the diceless RPG Everway. (Over the Edge is the game of choice for people who want to do Interzone. Seriously.)
Getting access to rules he wrote is immensely valuable.
That isn't accurate. Ryan would like the PHB to be open except for the trademarks.
And frankly, while I'm aware that you can't copyright mechanics, I'm also aware that Hasbro can afford bigger lawyers than me. So even though they're just providing me with a right I already have, I still see it as a net good, because suddenly I can produce D20 stuff without worrying about getting unjustly sued.
That's not a study. Two machines, with no details about hardware, and they're trying to draw conclusions from that? Be real; that's less useful than the infamous NT vs. linux study everyone was up in arms about.
Be rigorous. It's good for the soul and it prevents people from laughing at you.
I wouldn't have followed up, but you had to toss the "only slight hyperbole" in there...
/. gets, what, a million hits per day max? Say, mmm, half of those are the front page. And let's be generous and say everyone who hits the front page hits every link from the front page. That's a piddly 500K hits of/. effect.
Believe me, I can handle that without anything close to a quad OC12.
Hm, now I'm curious about the max capacity of/. If I were to provide the guys with a couple million hits one day, would that be bad?;) Nah, I wouldn't really. It'd be rude and it'd get me fired. But there's always a bigger fish out there, no matter who you are.
Actually, CMGI owns us. Compaq has some small percentage, around 15%, you can look it up -- it's a matter of public record. It's probably even mentioned in the article to which this story points.
Thin clients rock on ice for some applications; the mistake that the vendors are consistently making is to pretend that they're a good office worker solution. Clue phone: they aren't. They work great for single-function terminals.
Course, we mighty geeks never consider that market because it's beneath our notice. However, consider how many terminals are in use today at, say, airport desks, hotel front desks, warehouses (shipping and receiving), many customer service jobs, telemarketing, yatta yatta yatta. It's a huge market and it's an important one, and if I ever get stuck running something like that I want to be using thin clients, cause they're easy to swap out and cheap cheap cheap to maintain.
And -- this is the really important thing -- easy to upgrade. Remotely. Yeah.
Even if UNIX couldn't do dynamic DNS (which it can), why should this cause any UNIX admins to get all stressed about NT admins taking over the DNS?
I mean, isn't this sort of thing what subdomains are for? "Here, NT doods, you're authoritative for windows.corp.foo.com." (Edit subdomain name to taste, of course.)
Upwards of 30K shell users, four Sparc 2s, SunOS 4.x, sendmail. And a lot of email. Our only big issue was the number of files in/var/spool/mail, which we coped with by going to Network Appliance NACs.
We noted that directory lookups got worse in a distinct knee -- i.e., we had no problems for a long time and then we hit a magic number and things went all to hell. I do not know offhand how well linux or Solaris deals with directory lookups, but you could test easily enough.
The thing you didn't tell us was what the volume would be like; the number of users matters for the mail spool but the number of email messages matters for the CPU usage... I suspect that you won't need a very heavy box, though. Email is cheaper than you might think.
Oh. Run a DNS server on the mail hub, to avoid a lot of lengthy DNS queries on some other poor machine. Flush the cache daily.
Re:16 guys for $3 million? They work cheap
on
Bid for Geeks?
·
· Score: 1
Not unless you're working in the financial field. (In which case, yeah, you want to be making around 100K minimum, cause Wall Street pays like that. I've considered it, but I like my stock options too much.)
Look at http://www.datamasters.com/dm/survey.html. The median salary for a senior sysadmin is $74,200. The high median is $88K. They're not just making this up...
I'd have no problem paying 100K and up for a system administrator who was able to lead a group of sysadmins or do project management stuff. But that's not what we're talking about here; the EBay auction was asking for 150K for people described simply as "admins." They were looking for much more money for managerial staff.
This is a rumor, obviously; take it as seriously as you'd take any rumor on the Internet.
But my fairly reliable source sez: these guys were the IS department of DIGEX West.
Re:16 guys for $3 million? They work cheap
on
Bid for Geeks?
·
· Score: 1
Are you kidding? Those are insane wages. They're asking 150K apiece for the administrators -- a top level sysadmin in the valley is going to be just pushing six figures, plus stock options.
16 top engineers worth at least 16 million? Not in terms of the salaries they're getting! I wouldn't mind getting a million bucks a year, nope.
Certainly the value of a good sysadmin is more than 150K a year, but these guys are asking for that as salaries. Not likely.
It's not just one person's socks here.
on
OSI APSL Response
·
· Score: 1
But there are still a lot of people watching.
btw, I thought Bruce's original comments were indeed well-phrased. I believe that he tried as hard as he could not to start a flamewar. I think Eric was pretty reasonable too.
And look! It still started one around here.
I spoke with people at Apple today
on
OSI APSL Response
·
· Score: 1
So did you talk to Eric before you made the public statement? It's often much easier to resolve these issues privately, so as to avoid anyone feeling like they might lose face. And if private efforts fail, well, there's always time to go public later.
If GNU doesn't deserve to be named...
on
Feature:Free Linux
·
· Score: 1
Then does Linus? I mean, look at the numbers Tom posted -- the FSF contributed more code than any other named person. Certainly more than Linus. So maybe we shouldn't call it Linux, either. I propose that it be renamed HASH (Highly Accessible System HASH) to reflect the sheer number of contributors.
Which is, of course, a stupid argument. But that's the argument Tom's using -- that the mere percentage of code contributed should determine the name. That's pretty specious. Thanks, Tom, for introducing spurious logic into the matter... pretty soon we can be just like Usenet!
Here's the real question -- could Linux have reached critical mass without the GNU utilities? Sure, there's a lot more there now. But look back to the old pre 1.0 days, and ask yourself how much of the Linux code was from the FSF then? I don't think Linux would have happened if Linus had needed to write all the FSF utils from scratch. And in the end, that's what really matters.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a practicality issue, not a legal issue. They aren't assuming the UK will protect them for any kind of legal reasons, they're assuming that the UK will get touchy if someone brings heavy weaponry too close to UK borders. It just happens that SeaLand is quite close to the UK.
I think this is the overoptimistic viewpoint, since the one scenario Ryan didn't mention is "What happens if the government which wants to remove SeaLand is on good terms with the UK?" After all, the US has heavy weaponry within UK borders all the time...
Yeah, exactly.
I'll add to this the following datapoint: I'm a freelance RPG writer, and I intend to start my own company someday. I will be taking a close look at the D20 system, with the intent of possibly using it as a base system for one or more of my games, without the D20 logo. I don't care so much about getting D&D players as I care about not having to write my own mechanics.
Something I don't think anyone's mentioned yet is the author of the D20 ruleset -- Jonathan Tweet. He's considered one of the best designers in the business; he wrote the classic Ars Magica, the insane Over the Edge, and the diceless RPG Everway. (Over the Edge is the game of choice for people who want to do Interzone. Seriously.)
Getting access to rules he wrote is immensely valuable.
That isn't accurate. Ryan would like the PHB to be open except for the trademarks.
And frankly, while I'm aware that you can't copyright mechanics, I'm also aware that Hasbro can afford bigger lawyers than me. So even though they're just providing me with a right I already have, I still see it as a net good, because suddenly I can produce D20 stuff without worrying about getting unjustly sued.
That's not a study. Two machines, with no details about hardware, and they're trying to draw conclusions from that? Be real; that's less useful than the infamous NT vs. linux study everyone was up in arms about.
Be rigorous. It's good for the soul and it prevents people from laughing at you.
Interesting! The FAQ claims 1 million hits or so, so maybe it's out of date. Boosting traffic by 3.5 million hits, my.
Still doesn't need a quad OC-12, though. Guaranteed.
I wouldn't have followed up, but you had to toss the "only slight hyperbole" in there...
/. effect.
/. If I were to provide the guys with a couple million hits one day, would that be bad? ;) Nah, I wouldn't really. It'd be rude and it'd get me fired. But there's always a bigger fish out there, no matter who you are.
/. gets, what, a million hits per day max? Say, mmm, half of those are the front page. And let's be generous and say everyone who hits the front page hits every link from the front page. That's a piddly 500K hits of
Believe me, I can handle that without anything close to a quad OC12.
Hm, now I'm curious about the max capacity of
Actually, CMGI owns us. Compaq has some small percentage, around 15%, you can look it up -- it's a matter of public record. It's probably even mentioned in the article to which this story points.
Thin clients rock on ice for some applications; the mistake that the vendors are consistently making is to pretend that they're a good office worker solution. Clue phone: they aren't. They work great for single-function terminals.
Course, we mighty geeks never consider that market because it's beneath our notice. However, consider how many terminals are in use today at, say, airport desks, hotel front desks, warehouses (shipping and receiving), many customer service jobs, telemarketing, yatta yatta yatta. It's a huge market and it's an important one, and if I ever get stuck running something like that I want to be using thin clients, cause they're easy to swap out and cheap cheap cheap to maintain.
And -- this is the really important thing -- easy to upgrade. Remotely. Yeah.
Even if UNIX couldn't do dynamic DNS (which it can), why should this cause any UNIX admins to get all stressed about NT admins taking over the DNS?
I mean, isn't this sort of thing what subdomains are for? "Here, NT doods, you're authoritative for windows.corp.foo.com." (Edit subdomain name to taste, of course.)
No stress, no power struggles, no problems.
Yeah, that's an exceedingly fair point. I will admit that when I was running email at Netcom, IMAP was in no way a factor. These days...
Upwards of 30K shell users, four Sparc 2s, SunOS 4.x, sendmail. And a lot of email. Our only big issue was the number of files in /var/spool/mail, which we coped with by going to Network Appliance NACs.
We noted that directory lookups got worse in a distinct knee -- i.e., we had no problems for a long time and then we hit a magic number and things went all to hell. I do not know offhand how well linux or Solaris deals with directory lookups, but you could test easily enough.
The thing you didn't tell us was what the volume would be like; the number of users matters for the mail spool but the number of email messages matters for the CPU usage... I suspect that you won't need a very heavy box, though. Email is cheaper than you might think.
Oh. Run a DNS server on the mail hub, to avoid a lot of lengthy DNS queries on some other poor machine. Flush the cache daily.
Not unless you're working in the financial field. (In which case, yeah, you want to be making around 100K minimum, cause Wall Street pays like that. I've considered it, but I like my stock options too much.)
Look at http://www.datamasters.com/dm/survey.html. The median salary for a senior sysadmin is $74,200. The high median is $88K. They're not just making this up...
I'd have no problem paying 100K and up for a system administrator who was able to lead a group of sysadmins or do project management stuff. But that's not what we're talking about here; the EBay auction was asking for 150K for people described simply as "admins." They were looking for much more money for managerial staff.
This is a rumor, obviously; take it as seriously as you'd take any rumor on the Internet.
But my fairly reliable source sez: these guys were the IS department of DIGEX West.
Are you kidding? Those are insane wages. They're asking 150K apiece for the administrators -- a top level sysadmin in the valley is going to be just pushing six figures, plus stock options.
16 top engineers worth at least 16 million? Not in terms of the salaries they're getting! I wouldn't mind getting a million bucks a year, nope.
Certainly the value of a good sysadmin is more than 150K a year, but these guys are asking for that as salaries. Not likely.
But there are still a lot of people watching.
btw, I thought Bruce's original comments were indeed well-phrased. I believe that he tried as hard as he could not to start a flamewar. I think Eric was pretty reasonable too.
And look! It still started one around here.
So did you talk to Eric before you made the public statement? It's often much easier to resolve these issues privately, so as to avoid anyone feeling like they might lose face. And if private efforts fail, well, there's always time to go public later.
Then does Linus? I mean, look at the numbers Tom posted -- the FSF contributed more code than any other named person. Certainly more than Linus. So maybe we shouldn't call it Linux, either. I propose that it be renamed HASH (Highly Accessible System HASH) to reflect the sheer number of contributors.
Which is, of course, a stupid argument. But that's the argument Tom's using -- that the mere percentage of code contributed should determine the name. That's pretty specious. Thanks, Tom, for introducing spurious logic into the matter... pretty soon we can be just like Usenet!
Here's the real question -- could Linux have reached critical mass without the GNU utilities? Sure, there's a lot more there now. But look back to the old pre 1.0 days, and ask yourself how much of the Linux code was from the FSF then? I don't think Linux would have happened if Linus had needed to write all the FSF utils from scratch. And in the end, that's what really matters.