How much load is your site going to need to handle? If it's high, clustering is a darn good idea, because the separate machines will share the load on top of giving you redundancy. If the load expected is low, a single fault-tolerant machine will be easier to maintain.
This especially goes for multiple services, and you may want to mix-and-match. For a CGI+SQL combo, you may prefer to split the web load over a cluster, but you may want to forego the complexity of a clustered database and put your SQL server on a single redundant box.
I suppose the "trickle-down" is good, but is this really going to help the production industry? Do we really want the video editors struggling to deal with subtlety at a level almost no one else is ever going to see?
Whatever floats your boat. EVs are fine if that's your thing, but they do tend to restrict you a bit. Let's say you had an appointment right after work; should you take your EV home first and grab your other vehicle, or will you risk running out of power on the way back home from the appointment? Hybrids may not be as clean as EVs, but they're more flexible and have greater range. This may change if EV charging stations start popping up around town, but for now, for many people, hybrid is better.
The emphasis is on "deep". When you hook a charger to a hybrid, you're topping off its batteries, but you aren't changing its other operating specs. It won't discharge the batteries any further than it would otherwise; it'll turn on its motor when the batteries run too far down. It's the over-discharge that does damage to batteries, so topping off the charge on its batteries shouldn't affect their lifespan.
Several people have been charging their hybrid's batteries overnight from the AC mains, and for a situation where the commuting distance is short, this makes plenty of sense. You may never even have to start the engine, which will still of course be available for longer trips.
So at what point is it a squatter versus a "legitimate" website? If you produce a definition, squatters will simply modify their design to meet the definition, perhaps adding or copying a minimum of information to become "legit". Face it, they've had the domain for longer than you've had your registered name or trademark. You're stuck, so live with it or change your own name.
If I were an author, and worried about my IP rights, my only objection would be that although they're providing me a service by allowing searches to bring up my book and thereby advertising it, any security problem might expose my work and allow it to be downloaded freely. Depending on how Google structured their service, it might even prevent me from asserting my IP rights against people redistributing the work. I don't know whether the Author's Guild is worried about this issue or is just completely hidebound, but it's something to think about.
Well, IPs change for a lot of people, y'know. 'Specially the globetrotters who are the most likely to need such a service. For that matter, PSTN phone #s change too, and having a true permanent "number" would be useful.
Since the Public Switched Telephone Network is running out of room anyway, I recommend we build an alternative to it. In fact, an alternative is already available; it's called DNS. I propose that all "standard" P2P VoIP software include dynamic DNS capability, and provide a default "phone number" service which registers the user as a particular subdomain name. (The user can of course change it if he wants.) This will provide a new way to connect to people, and I wouldn't be surprised if it would supplant the current numeric system.
People publish their own content via BitTorrent on their own web pages. You find a website with stuff to download, through a search engine or a link from a blog or whatever, and grab a torrent file from their site. Because of BT's built-in verification, if you can trust the website, you can then trust the download.
The way pirate BT torrent aggregators work:
People submit torrents to the aggregator, which has no good way of telling a fake torrent from a good one. Everyone starts downloading. It's only after they finish downloading a load of trash or get thoroughly frustrated trying to complete a download when there's deliberately no complete seeding that people realize they've been had.
This is a potentially very effective attack, and while there are a few strategies for dealing with it, I predict unmoderated pirate aggregators are going to get hit hard.
One solution to scratched displays (I had this problem with my Palm PDA) is to get some Turtle Wax or other solid car wax and buff the display with it. It also helps protect against further damage.
Variable pricing may be a good thing. "Some songs should cost 99 cents, and some should cost more" - and some should cost LESS. Given this impetus we might see a price war blow up.
You folks might consider 2D barcoding for long-term document storage. It's not AMAZINGLY compact, but is a lot better at holding information than text, is potentially lossless, and given the availability of a page scanner or even a high-res digicam, means that everything else is a software problem - which isn't completely trivial, but is better than having to build custom hardware.
I wonder how long it'll be before they start getting sued by people and companies when the software misidentifies something legitimate and winds up disabling computers...
If I were you I'd only run the computer and monitor, perhaps a small desk lamp, and maybe the wall wart for your phone, through the UPS. All the rest will just run it down more quickly in exchange for protection from something they can weather easily enough anyway. This is especially important if you leave the computer on while you're away; the UPS could keep the machine powered through a blackout of moderate duration if it only ran the PC, while it'd cut off early if it had to power everything else.
The sales organization is VERY important to the marketing of a product, and can get quite cash intensive. For instance, several forms of insurance give 80% or better to the agency that sells the policies and only 20% to the actual insurer. While with some products a manufacturer can sell the product directly and reap these rewards itself, when a product needs someone to actually go out and sell it, that effort deserves a reward.
On the other hand, without the manufacturer (in your case, the software author), the product you're selling wouldn't even exist, and you need to give them enough income to make it worth their while to improve the product and give you new products to sell.
I would recommend some sort of performance-based arrangement, where your percentage goes up if you sell additional packages. This should satisfy both requirements.
Intellectual Property: A major flaw at the heart of the open source movement is the misconception that most individuals actually have the legal right to contribute their intellectual efforts to OSS projects. In most industrialized nations, intellectual property (IP) generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer.
If an employee is working on software on company time, I'd hope it was because the company was using that software; and that means the company itself is subject to whatever open-source license that entails. I'm hoping the company would see the benefit in contributing those improvements back to the source pool.
Conceptual Integrity: The process of creating software is more akin to an engineering discipline than an artistic endeavour, and this raises another point of concern with OSS. Like any engineering design project, good software needs a designer (or software architect in the current industry jargon) with a clear design concept which must be adhered to rigorously otherwise the software becomes progressively messier as it is developed in a piecemeal manner.
That's why OS projects have maintainers who manage the integration of contributed code back into the project.
Professionalism: There are uncomfortable similarities between the OSS development process and the situation that arose in the computer games industry in the early 1980s, where legions of 'bedroom programmers' produced video console games of such poor quality that, despite selling in tens of thousands, they nearly destroyed the industry.
I thought they BUILT the industry. I fail to see how, for instance, someone writing a crappy HTTP daemon would affect the stability or popularity of Apache.
Innovation: The absence of design leadership in the OSS development process and a motivation for OSS developers to create free versions of their favourite proprietary software may also explain why there would appear to be a distinct lack of imagination in OSS projects. The open source community has so far tended to create facsimiles of proprietary packages rather than the next killer application.
Actually, to a large extent the reverse is true. Linux may ape more proprietary systems, but Linux and practically all the other commercial OSes being sold are descendants of SysV and BSD. Windows itself uses portions of BSD internally.
Further, as someone who works on an open-source BitTorrent client, would you call BitTorrent uninnovative?
This exploit twiddles tracker statistics, but the "self-interest" part of BitTorrent is built into the P2P protocol. Peers upload more to other peers that upload more to them, and there's no way around it. Most BitTorrent trackers don't try to enforce ratios, and I personally think it's stupid to try.
BitTorrent was designed as a data DISTRIBUTION system, not a data SHARING system. In taking the place of a non-P2P upload (http or ftp), any amount of upload is better than none, and clients that upload zero don't get as good performance downloading as clients that contribute.
Trackers were never meant to try and enforce upload ratios; it's too easy for clients to lie about how much they've shared, and too complicated and exploit-prone to work out a system where peers report on each other.
Blogs have been misused to inflate certain search results, both by commercial and political entities. For instance, do a Google search on "failure" and look at what pops up first.
There's nothing wrong with using BitTorrent for distributing legal content. DRM was deliberately left out of the spec, because it would've made it horribly complicated and because it's much better to put the DRM in the payload being transferred rather than try to work it into the protocol.
I typically go through a keyboard per year, and by the time I replace it I've usually worn the lettering off most of it. No one makes keyboards w/ the lettering molded into the keys any more, not even IBM.
For that matter, why not just buy a cheapie keyboard, and put some acetone on a rag and wipe off the lettering?
Whatever laptop you get, I recommend you keep backups of everything on a jump drive. Plug the thing in whenever you set up the machine and make a batch file to do the backup. Those solid-state drives are pretty darn hardy and even a ruggedized notebook can suffer a head crash when slammed when the drive's spinning.
Slashdot Mirror
How much load is your site going to need to handle? If it's high, clustering is a darn good idea, because the separate machines will share the load on top of giving you redundancy. If the load expected is low, a single fault-tolerant machine will be easier to maintain.
This especially goes for multiple services, and you may want to mix-and-match. For a CGI+SQL combo, you may prefer to split the web load over a cluster, but you may want to forego the complexity of a clustered database and put your SQL server on a single redundant box.
I suppose the "trickle-down" is good, but is this really going to help the production industry? Do we really want the video editors struggling to deal with subtlety at a level almost no one else is ever going to see?
Whatever floats your boat. EVs are fine if that's your thing, but they do tend to restrict you a bit. Let's say you had an appointment right after work; should you take your EV home first and grab your other vehicle, or will you risk running out of power on the way back home from the appointment? Hybrids may not be as clean as EVs, but they're more flexible and have greater range. This may change if EV charging stations start popping up around town, but for now, for many people, hybrid is better.
The emphasis is on "deep". When you hook a charger to a hybrid, you're topping off its batteries, but you aren't changing its other operating specs. It won't discharge the batteries any further than it would otherwise; it'll turn on its motor when the batteries run too far down. It's the over-discharge that does damage to batteries, so topping off the charge on its batteries shouldn't affect their lifespan.
Several people have been charging their hybrid's batteries overnight from the AC mains, and for a situation where the commuting distance is short, this makes plenty of sense. You may never even have to start the engine, which will still of course be available for longer trips.
So at what point is it a squatter versus a "legitimate" website? If you produce a definition, squatters will simply modify their design to meet the definition, perhaps adding or copying a minimum of information to become "legit". Face it, they've had the domain for longer than you've had your registered name or trademark. You're stuck, so live with it or change your own name.
If I were an author, and worried about my IP rights, my only objection would be that although they're providing me a service by allowing searches to bring up my book and thereby advertising it, any security problem might expose my work and allow it to be downloaded freely. Depending on how Google structured their service, it might even prevent me from asserting my IP rights against people redistributing the work. I don't know whether the Author's Guild is worried about this issue or is just completely hidebound, but it's something to think about.
Well, IPs change for a lot of people, y'know. 'Specially the globetrotters who are the most likely to need such a service. For that matter, PSTN phone #s change too, and having a true permanent "number" would be useful.
Here is a fairly accurate portrayal...
Since the Public Switched Telephone Network is running out of room anyway, I recommend we build an alternative to it. In fact, an alternative is already available; it's called DNS. I propose that all "standard" P2P VoIP software include dynamic DNS capability, and provide a default "phone number" service which registers the user as a particular subdomain name. (The user can of course change it if he wants.) This will provide a new way to connect to people, and I wouldn't be surprised if it would supplant the current numeric system.
The way BT is supposed to work:
People publish their own content via BitTorrent on their own web pages. You find a website with stuff to download, through a search engine or a link from a blog or whatever, and grab a torrent file from their site. Because of BT's built-in verification, if you can trust the website, you can then trust the download.
The way pirate BT torrent aggregators work:
People submit torrents to the aggregator, which has no good way of telling a fake torrent from a good one. Everyone starts downloading. It's only after they finish downloading a load of trash or get thoroughly frustrated trying to complete a download when there's deliberately no complete seeding that people realize they've been had.
This is a potentially very effective attack, and while there are a few strategies for dealing with it, I predict unmoderated pirate aggregators are going to get hit hard.
One solution to scratched displays (I had this problem with my Palm PDA) is to get some Turtle Wax or other solid car wax and buff the display with it. It also helps protect against further damage.
Check out this free utility. You might be surprised how much stuff you DON'T want is lurking on your system. This will help you track it down.
Variable pricing may be a good thing. "Some songs should cost 99 cents, and some should cost more" - and some should cost LESS. Given this impetus we might see a price war blow up.
You folks might consider 2D barcoding for long-term document storage. It's not AMAZINGLY compact, but is a lot better at holding information than text, is potentially lossless, and given the availability of a page scanner or even a high-res digicam, means that everything else is a software problem - which isn't completely trivial, but is better than having to build custom hardware.
I wonder how long it'll be before they start getting sued by people and companies when the software misidentifies something legitimate and winds up disabling computers...
If I were you I'd only run the computer and monitor, perhaps a small desk lamp, and maybe the wall wart for your phone, through the UPS. All the rest will just run it down more quickly in exchange for protection from something they can weather easily enough anyway. This is especially important if you leave the computer on while you're away; the UPS could keep the machine powered through a blackout of moderate duration if it only ran the PC, while it'd cut off early if it had to power everything else.
The sales organization is VERY important to the marketing of a product, and can get quite cash intensive. For instance, several forms of insurance give 80% or better to the agency that sells the policies and only 20% to the actual insurer. While with some products a manufacturer can sell the product directly and reap these rewards itself, when a product needs someone to actually go out and sell it, that effort deserves a reward.
On the other hand, without the manufacturer (in your case, the software author), the product you're selling wouldn't even exist, and you need to give them enough income to make it worth their while to improve the product and give you new products to sell.
I would recommend some sort of performance-based arrangement, where your percentage goes up if you sell additional packages. This should satisfy both requirements.
Intellectual Property: A major flaw at the heart of the open source movement is the misconception that most individuals actually have the legal right to contribute their intellectual efforts to OSS projects. In most industrialized nations, intellectual property (IP) generated by an employee through the course of his or her employment legally belongs to the employer.
If an employee is working on software on company time, I'd hope it was because the company was using that software; and that means the company itself is subject to whatever open-source license that entails. I'm hoping the company would see the benefit in contributing those improvements back to the source pool.
Conceptual Integrity: The process of creating software is more akin to an engineering discipline than an artistic endeavour, and this raises another point of concern with OSS. Like any engineering design project, good software needs a designer (or software architect in the current industry jargon) with a clear design concept which must be adhered to rigorously otherwise the software becomes progressively messier as it is developed in a piecemeal manner.
That's why OS projects have maintainers who manage the integration of contributed code back into the project.
Professionalism: There are uncomfortable similarities between the OSS development process and the situation that arose in the computer games industry in the early 1980s, where legions of 'bedroom programmers' produced video console games of such poor quality that, despite selling in tens of thousands, they nearly destroyed the industry.
I thought they BUILT the industry. I fail to see how, for instance, someone writing a crappy HTTP daemon would affect the stability or popularity of Apache.
Innovation: The absence of design leadership in the OSS development process and a motivation for OSS developers to create free versions of their favourite proprietary software may also explain why there would appear to be a distinct lack of imagination in OSS projects. The open source community has so far tended to create facsimiles of proprietary packages rather than the next killer application.
Actually, to a large extent the reverse is true. Linux may ape more proprietary systems, but Linux and practically all the other commercial OSes being sold are descendants of SysV and BSD. Windows itself uses portions of BSD internally.
Further, as someone who works on an open-source BitTorrent client, would you call BitTorrent uninnovative?
This exploit twiddles tracker statistics, but the "self-interest" part of BitTorrent is built into the P2P protocol. Peers upload more to other peers that upload more to them, and there's no way around it. Most BitTorrent trackers don't try to enforce ratios, and I personally think it's stupid to try.
BitTorrent was designed as a data DISTRIBUTION system, not a data SHARING system. In taking the place of a non-P2P upload (http or ftp), any amount of upload is better than none, and clients that upload zero don't get as good performance downloading as clients that contribute.
Trackers were never meant to try and enforce upload ratios; it's too easy for clients to lie about how much they've shared, and too complicated and exploit-prone to work out a system where peers report on each other.
Blogs have been misused to inflate certain search results, both by commercial and political entities. For instance, do a Google search on "failure" and look at what pops up first.
There's nothing wrong with using BitTorrent for distributing legal content. DRM was deliberately left out of the spec, because it would've made it horribly complicated and because it's much better to put the DRM in the payload being transferred rather than try to work it into the protocol.
I typically go through a keyboard per year, and by the time I replace it I've usually worn the lettering off most of it. No one makes keyboards w/ the lettering molded into the keys any more, not even IBM.
For that matter, why not just buy a cheapie keyboard, and put some acetone on a rag and wipe off the lettering?
Whatever laptop you get, I recommend you keep backups of everything on a jump drive. Plug the thing in whenever you set up the machine and make a batch file to do the backup. Those solid-state drives are pretty darn hardy and even a ruggedized notebook can suffer a head crash when slammed when the drive's spinning.