Certainly IBM can be compelled to produce evidence for SCO's use, that's what this is all about, but you might want to go read the Fourth Amendment for the basic rules on the legal limits of such compulsion.
Actually, the 4th amendment has to do with criminal, not civil, cases, so it does not apply here. In a civil case, you CAN be forced to provide evidence that is not in your favor, and if you refuse to do so, you WILL lose at least part of your case before it even gets to trial if the evidence you are not providing was relevant to the case and a reasonable thing to ask for.
In a criminal case, the Police can ask you "Where were you at the time of the dastardly deed?" If indeed you are guilty, you are NOT required to reply: "I was standing over the mangled body wiping the blood off of my knife." You have the option simply refusing to answer the question, and the police instead must come up with evidence that you were there.
In a civil case, the other side can ask you before the trial: "Did you break the contract with company X, by not doing Y on Z date?" If you refuse to answer, the judge will simply assume that you did indeed break the contract, and rule against you. A criminal judge is not allowed to do any such thing.
as dada has repeatedly stated (no pun intended), "regulate" had a different meaning than it does today
"Regulate" had a different meaning? Really? Says who? I would like to see a source for that, because here is what I came up with from Findlaw:
On the commerce clause: "What is this power? It is the power to regulate; that is, to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed. This power, like all others vested in congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the constitution . . . If, as has always been understood, the sovereignty of congress, though limited to specified objects, is plenary as to those objects, the power over commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, is vested in congress as absolutely as it would be in a single government, having in its constitution the same restrictions on the exercise of the power as are found in the constitution of the United States." - Chief Justice Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824
There you have it: "to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed." The key word being "rules"... if he meant taxes, he would have said taxes. Certainly the framers knew when to say "taxes" when they wanted to talk about taxes, since they explicitly discuss them in the first clause of Article 1, Section 8.
Also from that quote above: "The power over commerce... is vested in congress as absolutely as it would be in a single government..." The constitution If you can't trust the legendary Justice Marshall (who developed the very concept of judicial review of law in Marbury v. Madison), then who can say what the Constitution says?
Just because the constitution doesn't say what some Libertarians want it to say is no excuse for a poor argument. It is a perfectly valid argument to say that the constitution is wrong, and gives the government too much power, and should be changed; it is a poor argument to say the framers did not mean what they clearly wrote, and Marshall equally clearly backed up.
It changes color for "any toxin"? What exactly is a "toxin". As any toxicologist will tell you, poison is all about the dosage.
At 1000mg / dose, Tylenol is an effective, safe non-addictive pain releiver.
At 7000mg / dose, it causes irreversible liver damage in most adults without the antidote.
Poisoning by Iron supplements used to be a very common cause of poison deaths among children until there were mandated safety caps for iron supplements.
The US Congress has no mandate in the Constitution offering them any power over consumer privacy or information. The Interstate Commerce Clause was written to give the Federal government power to regulate the states to prevent them from taxing, tariffing or embarging interstate commerce: it was not meant to regulate commerce in any other way.
If the framers merely wanted to keep states from taxing, tariffing or embargoing interstate commerce, why did they just not say: "States shall not have the power to tax, tariff or embargo interstate commerce?" No, instead they explicitly gave the feds the power to do so. The commerce clause is pretty explicit: "Congress shall have the power... to regulate commerce... among the several states." It doesn't say "limit the states' power to regulate interstate commerce", it says "regulate commerce among the states."
While I don't necessarily disagree with your libertarian ranting about the necessity for such a law, it is stupid to declare this proposed law unconstitutional, because it clearly isn't.
But the general tone strikes me as annoying because it's obvious to me that the vast majority of you guys are not actually trying to discuss the issue: you're trying to excuse/justify your behavior in the face of overwhelming evidence that pornography - like smoking (as an example) is bad for people and bad for society. Or you're just dismissing a rather well-researched article because you don't like the conclusion.
But that WASN'T a well researched article. It was an opinion backed by a bunch of interviews and some paraphrasing of a poorly-researched book, which in turn was mostly a bunch of interviews. There were no actual scientific studies involved in this article that cited anything about "harm to society". There were a bunch of poorly-drawn stats on the number of folks exposed to, and that use porn, and that was it. The author no doubt read "Pornified", and decided to write an article that would reach the same conclusions as the book. This is a perfectly reasonable thing for a writer to do, but that does not make their conclusions well backed or correct.
Certainly, there are some folks for whom porn does indeed become an addiction, in the same way that just about any activity can become a harmful addiction. Hobbies, sports, exercise, weight loss, gambling, eating, collecting, on-line games, TV, etc. It is certainly without question that some wives leave their husbands over porn, just as there are marriages dissolve due to EverCrack, compulsive shopping, obsessive collecting, etc. That doesn't make EverQuest, retail stores, or Beanie Babies inherently evil. For a societal addiction (as opposed to one involving addictive chemicals), I would argue that they can be harmful to people, but no purpose is served by banning it. Just about everything "fun" can be addictive, but you cannnot regulate all forms of fun just because some of them causes problems in some people.
Certainly, porn has a special place as there is no doubt quite a bit of really nasty stuff that is produced in a degrading, shameful fashion, but it is a far stretch to call that "overwhelming evidence that porn is bad for people and bad for society."
It CAN be bad for SOME people, but I am not so sure I would cross the line to say it was bad "for society". Certainly, if those studies about exposure to porn are correct, it is not bad for the VAST MAJORITY of people that use it, or our society would ALREADY be undergoing complete, obvious, collapse, given the number of folks that use it.
Smoking is definately "bad for people" because it is quite obvious that it is chemically addictive and pretty obviously causes all sorts of bad things to happen to your body. A tobacco habit is not, in any way, shape, or form, harmless in an otherwise healty person. Smoking is bad for society overall mostly because of the massive healthcare costs involved. Should smoking be banned? No. But I do think the producers of tobacco products should bear their share of the healthcare costs generated by the consumption of thier products.
Porn, on the other hand, CAN be used on a regular, responsible basis, backed up by nothing else than the large number of folks that obviously do.
I, personally, do not use pornography, but poorly researched, poorly backed, conclusions annoy me as much as the next self-respecting geek.
No, I did mean "Cheap, Fast, Good". And the axiom has been around much longer than Battlebots. For a Battlebot, "Reliable" may be what "Good" is, since the winner is the one stays running the longest. For most systems, including Battlebots, I suspect, reliability is only one measure of a systems quality. "Good" can also mean features, output quality, clarity, elegance, capacity, etc.
For an excellent tretise on "Quality", I suggest "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."
My tone may have seemed harsh, but I just as much of a geek as the rest of us here, and it pisses me off Beta lost, given its higher video quality. If Sony did not have their head up their tush so far, they would have trounced VHS in the marketplace. Their mistakes were legion. They blew off RCAs requests for a longer recording time and a timer, and wanted to charge them more money than JVC did. (At the time, RCA was the largest TV company.) They screwed Sears by OEM'ing a Beta model to them, and then turning around and selling the exact same model themselves for less money. When the longer recording time was released, all the early adopters got pissed off because all the movies in the store went to the new longer time, which none of the original machines could play. (If one of the things a company is going to trumpet is superior quality, it is a bad idea to annoy the exact enthusiasts that would care about such a claim.)
Your comment about the length of CDs is interesting. In a book I read on the history and technical specifications of the CD format, there was a funny story. When the developers were first putting together prototypes to get an idea of what a CD should be, one of the first that was put forward was two-sided and the size of an LP. (It wasn't called "Compact Disc".:-) The engineer that developed it boasted it could have 48 HOURS of playtime. Luckily, saner heads prevailed when it was realized how utterly useless that would be for a pre-recorded media format.
I sure hope SOMEBODY gives in on the BlueRay/HD-DVD thing soon, because it cetainly looks to be the whole same fiasco all over again. NOBODY wins when crap like this happens.
Beta was released in Europe far it was released in the U.S. So in the U.S., VHS had quite a head-start feature-wise. I am looking at a gallery of Beta models right now, and the first Beta machine with even the two-hour record time AND a timer was not released until 1979, two years after VHS was in general release. The autoloader was meant to get around the fact they still didn't have a six-hour tape.
Betacam, didn't have a whole lot to do with Betamax, which was strictly a conusmer technology. They share a similar form factor, but everything on the backend for Betacam is professional-grade. Betamax was strictly consumer-grade stuff. Maybe a little better than VHS, video-quality-wise, but nothing earth-shattering.
This is a persistent myth that has gone on for decades, and has become "accepted wisdom". Betamax did have higher-quality output (though not by much), but it was certainly not a superior format, at least IMHO. The true test of any technology, is "does it meet the consumer's needs?". In the case of Betamax for a long time, the answer was "not as well as the available VHS machines", not even close for "regular folks". For the extremely limited market of Videophiles, Beta may have been better, but that couldn't sustain the market.
In technology, a common axiom is "Cheap, Fast, Good, pick two." VHS was Fast (shipped worthwhile features MUCH faster than Sony did), and MUCH cheaper. Beta only had "Good".
For starters, there were too few makers of machines and the price was too high. In addition, the first Betamax player was quite feature-poor. The damn thing didn't even come with a clock. You had to buy that as an add-on feature. VHS was ruthless about exploiting this.
2nd, and perhaps most importantly, the capacity was too low. It took quite some time before Sony shipped a tape that could run longer than ONE HOUR. This was colossally stupid. Sony KNEW how to extend it, but the morons in Sony design thought one-hour was an acceptable limit. VHS shipped the 4-hour capable T-120 right out of the gate, with quality that was acceptable. While the quality at the lower tape speed wasn't as good, it was doable for just recording soaps, or whatever. When Sony got wind of the VHS's recording time, they shipped a two-hour Betamax machine, using of course a slower tape speed to extend the time. Of course, this also eliminated most of Betamax's quality advantage.
Time and time again, all Betamax had was slightly superior video quality (VHS and Beta both made continuous improvements to the machines, so Beta wasn't THAT far ahead.) Also, Betamax decks kept the tape threaded at all times, which put a LOT of wear on the tape during Rewind/FF operations. To top it off, Sony made a LOT of mistakes about simple features. VHS was first to ship a pause button on the remote, the first with the longer recording time, the first with a standard programmable timer, the first with an infrared remote, the first with front-loading, the first with a camcorder that didn't suck, feature-wise, the list goes on.
In summary, all Beta had going for it was video quality, but couldn't back it up with features worth a damn. This was compounded by colossal errors in finance, OEM relations and marketing.
First off, they aren't under a "probe" for possible spying, despite what the article says. A "probe" would imply that somebody has reason to believe there is actually spying going on. Instead, this is a stupid "investigation" to ensure that there isn't, despite a complete lack of evidence saying there is. This is simple xenophobia, nothing more.
Do the geniuses that ordered this "probe" realize that the vast majority of components in a modern computer come from the orient? That it is VERY difficult to find a keyboard, mouse, case, or power supply that is NOT made in China? Do they know that many laptops (not Lenovo) are manufactured by Chinese-owned companies, and/or made directly in China itself?
The only thing that could be worrisome is if they had Lenovo handle the builds on the hard drives, but NO classified shop should be relying on "outside" builds anyway.
Do these folks ALSO realize that by law, no computer containing classified data may be connected to a public network of any kind? How is any "bugged" machine supposed to export the data? Osmosis? Telepathy?
The deck on your $138 Murray special is made from much thinner steel, uses plastic bushings on the wheels, has a diapraghm-based carb, (which is an inferior design to the bowl-carbs used on better engines) uses cheaper paint, a smaller, less-powerful engine, poor mulching capability, and has a smaller fuel tank. It also has a weaker handle, and is a pain to adjust. Maintenance is messy and more difficult. On the other hand, it is a LOT lighter than a quality mower.
As a random side note, B&S ALSO owns Murray. Murray went bankrupt, owed B&S a lot of money, so B&S picked up the whole company on the cheap.
If the target of this is tape replacement, it is going to fail. 20MB/sec is simply a pathetic transfer rate. That would have been decent 4 years ago (if the drive had built-in compression), but not now, at least for backup.
I see this as the logical successor to magneto-optical drives, which were common in "near-line" storage applications. However, their capacities never caught up and they were completely demolished when ATA/SATA arrays became viable. If you stick one of these things in an automated library, it could run neck-and-neck with SATA applications for short-term archival applications where capacity is more important than response time, but response time DOES need to be a better than what can be done with tape. The most common use of MO drives in my experience was short-term (1 yr. or so) medical image archiving. However, every shop I have seen nowadays that has one of those things is just using it until the service contract runs out and replacing it with a SATA array.
Before this particular product is going to happen though, I think they are going to need to figure out a way to make that thing smaller.
How much of that data is simple backup, and how much goes off-site for long-term archiving? For on-site backup, Virtual Tape Libraries going to dirt-cheap SATA arrays are becoming rather interesting and useful choices.
For off-site archiving, you really need tape. There are any number of expandable libraries available from any number of vendors. Personally, I am most familiar with the IBM 3584. This can be expanded to a rather large number of drives and slots, and the LTO drives it usually is equipped with are pretty darn solid. (And the 3592 drives you can buy if you have a LOT of money even more so.)
What you REALLY need to pay attention to when building a tape backup solution (which most customers ignore), is environmental and storage conditions, for both your data center and your off-site storage (if any). I think this is a far more important thing to focus on than what brand of library or drive you purchase. Pay VERY close attention to the data sheets for the tapes and drives. Tape can be easily fouled by humidity that is too low (static), or too high (sticking). Same goes with temperature. Stacking the tapes improperly can result in edge tracking issues, which in turn causes little bits of tape to fly around your drive when the drives rollers break them off when shoving the badly-tracked tape at high speeds past the heads.
For software, again, you have a lot of choices. On one hand, you have "traditional" backup applications like Veritas and Legato. These perform your traditional full, differential, etc., backups. On the other end, you have full-fledged data management apps like IBM's TSM. TSM can be a pain to configure, but if done properly, it is very tape efficient, and it has great support for live DB backups, staged backups, file versioning, data expiration (as opposed to mere tape expiration), etc.
What makes me nervous about AIT is my lack of faith in Sony's commitment to the product. The predecessor to AIT, DTF was supposed to be Sony's long-term format, but they changed their minds, making any investments in the old format obsolete. (DTF used gigantic tapes, and Sony was right to change their minds, but that didn't help those with DTF libraries.)
You are tied to Sony drives, and since the form factor is not even close to LTO, DLT or 3590/3592, your selection of libraries is also limited.
The SCOTUS, through the years, has decided that while random bans on speech certainly are not permissable under the first amendment, laws that serve a "legitimate state interest" that happen to affect speech are certainly allowed.
For instance: We have laws banning Child Pornography. If you read the constitution literally, this would not be constitutional. The courts have decided that the founding fathers could not possibly have meant this result. They have judged that the state has a legitimate interest in preventing child abuse, and child pornography cannot be produced without child abuse, therefore, child pornography is illegal.
Along the same lines slander, libel, the classic "fire in a crowded theater" are not allowed.
The current definition of obscenity comes to us from the Miller case in 1974: "The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Kois v. Wisconsin, supra, at 230, quoting Roth v. United States, supra, at 489; (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
Of note here is that obscenity (unlike the other classes of "bad speech" mentioned above) is usually not subject to prior restraint. The government must prove its obscenity before action can be taken. (This is from the Fort Wayne Books decision)
The SCOTUS has pretty much decided that attempting to ensure the general health of society through the regulation of obscenity is a legitimate state interest. However, modern applications of this rule have set the threshold pretty darn high.
I expect for this particular case the SCOTUS saw no reason to elaborate on the earlier Miller standard. Only a) of that standard involves "community standards". But all three parts must be met, and (according to the website on censorship where I got this from) part c) of the standard is a national one.
It really depends on what the "programmer" is doing. The VAST majority of programs in this world are database applications. Indeed, to pound out your basic VB or Java app and then throw in some SQL, a CS degree is a complete waste of time.
However, for those folks that need to get into architecture and theory more, a CS degree is invaluable. Basically, if you want to make tools for others to use (O/S'es, compilers, DB's, complex DB designs, embedded microcode for IT products (i.e. Network Equipment), etc.) then the theory, math, and rigor of a quality CS program is pretty much an absolute requirement. While it is posssible to do all of those things well without a degree, it is certainly much harder.
I work in support for a large computer equipment company supporting gigantic storage equipment. It is easy to tell who on my team has a degree and who does not. Those with a degree are those that eat protocol traces for breakfast, and can use the appropriate standards documents and architecture descriptions to root-cause tricky design issues in relatively short order. Knowledge of physics and statistics helps too. Those without a degree generally stick to "crash 'n dump" issues, and log analysis.
I am not saying that those without a degree aren't as smart, indeed, many of them are better at log analysis than those with a CS degree (including myself). Where they have problems is the abstract reasoning required where the logs simply don't flag any problems at all, yet something doesn't work. Narrowing down those issues requires a better understanding of computer architecture and network protocol design techniques than they posess, and would have great difficulty obtaining by just reading a book.
When I said that there was "no constitutinal restrictions" on laws to restrict obscenity, even to adults, I left something out. The SCOTUS HAS found that any laws restricting obscenity must have a rational basis. This is probably what stops outright bans on porn.
If you read the article, you can see what the appeals court focused on, and apparently the SCOTUS agreed. Basically, the appeals court said that there was no example of what the plaintiffs had in mind. I think what the SCOTUS (and the lower-level appeals courts) are looking for is an actual prosecution of an obscenity case based on this law, as opposed to just a hypothetical case concerning the text of the law. I think they may then choose to "draw the line". I am not saying I agree with that approach, but that does appear to be the approach that was taken.
Obscenity is not now, and never has been, protected speech under the first amendment. In fact, there are no constitional restrictions on laws to restrict obscenity even to adults. The only question is about the standard for obscenity, and "who decides"?
I DIDN'T say RMS was at fault here. What I did say is that in RMS's ideal world, this would happen more often. RMS advocates a world where software MUST be free. He views the GPL as nothing more than a stopgap until copyright laws change to what would prefer. (I don't see that happening any time soon.)
I did not say commercial projects never failed, or that companies never died. But the fact of the matter is that software development costs money, and programmers need to be paid. It is true that the non GPL-ness of the code probably hurts the code's likelihood of further public development. However, even if the code was GPL'd, that would help the code, but that wouldn't help Theo, who needs money to continue his part in the project.
I have no objections to the concept of open source software, but if all software were required to be free (which is what RMS thinks), there would simply be a lot less software. This is an uncomfortable truth. All programmers cannot live on support and customization dollars alone.
Free software development is entirely dependent on the generosity of the consumers of the software. The classic Tragedy of the Commons says that this is not a way to ensure continued software production. It can (and does) happen, but it is by no means guaranteed.
I will admit that the VAST majority of people that program do NOT make their living writing software that is sold to others. Most programming in the world is nothing more than database applications, and the tools those programmers use have a great many high-quality OSS equivalents.
Free software does have its place, but it is by no means universal. For actual end-user applications, where the number of users that are programmers is rather few, GPL (or BSD) software is far more scarce and not particularly feature rich. Hence the low numbers of GPL'd games with sophisticated modern 3D graphics. Or the continued lack of personal finance software with the features of Quicken. (GNUCash? Gimme a break.) GIMP still doesn't even vaguely approach Photoshop.
Does anybody really think that there would be nearly the same number of games as are available now if it were required that they all were essentially (for the purposes of revenue collection) public domain? I think not. It is all well and good that Open Source can produce a new programming language once a week, and more flavors of Linux exist than Baskin Robbins has ice cream, but this doesn't help end users when they need or want to do many of the tasks we perform on our PC's every day.
Again, I have no problem with the idea of free software. I also acknowledge that most programmers in the world do not write code that is ever sold. REQUIRING GPL-like terms for software is not freedom, it is a tyranny all its own.
If the world worked the way RMS says it should, then there would be an awful lot of programmers and projects in the same boat. Important, useful, software would be in grave danger of dying (or at least not updated) for lack of funds.
This is why many people and companies have the sheer gall to actually charge money to customers to buy a copyright-restricted copy of their work. They charge money so they don't have to get stories on Slashdot begging for funding.
BTW, way to go Theo, pissing off a large contributor of funds. The first amendment doesn't give you the right to receive "free" money from the govt. if you piss them off. It also doesn't give grant administrators the warm fuzzies when you tell them that you are taking their money so they can't spend it on something else. This is like justifying a lottery by saying: "At least all them poor folks can't go spend that money on booze." It's hyprocritical and stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly IBM can be compelled to produce evidence for SCO's use, that's what this is all about, but you might want to go read the Fourth Amendment for the basic rules on the legal limits of such compulsion.
Actually, the 4th amendment has to do with criminal, not civil, cases, so it does not apply here. In a civil case, you CAN be forced to provide evidence that is not in your favor, and if you refuse to do so, you WILL lose at least part of your case before it even gets to trial if the evidence you are not providing was relevant to the case and a reasonable thing to ask for.
In a criminal case, the Police can ask you "Where were you at the time of the dastardly deed?" If indeed you are guilty, you are NOT required to reply: "I was standing over the mangled body wiping the blood off of my knife." You have the option simply refusing to answer the question, and the police instead must come up with evidence that you were there.
In a civil case, the other side can ask you before the trial: "Did you break the contract with company X, by not doing Y on Z date?" If you refuse to answer, the judge will simply assume that you did indeed break the contract, and rule against you. A criminal judge is not allowed to do any such thing.
SirWired
as dada has repeatedly stated (no pun intended), "regulate" had a different meaning than it does today
"Regulate" had a different meaning? Really? Says who? I would like to see a source for that, because here is what I came up with from Findlaw:
On the commerce clause: "What is this power? It is the power to regulate; that is, to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed. This power, like all others vested in congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the constitution . . . If, as has always been understood, the sovereignty of congress, though limited to specified objects, is plenary as to those objects, the power over commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, is vested in congress as absolutely as it would be in a single government, having in its constitution the same restrictions on the exercise of the power as are found in the constitution of the United States." - Chief Justice Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824
There you have it: "to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed." The key word being "rules"... if he meant taxes, he would have said taxes. Certainly the framers knew when to say "taxes" when they wanted to talk about taxes, since they explicitly discuss them in the first clause of Article 1, Section 8.
Also from that quote above: "The power over commerce... is vested in congress as absolutely as it would be in a single government..." The constitution If you can't trust the legendary Justice Marshall (who developed the very concept of judicial review of law in Marbury v. Madison), then who can say what the Constitution says?
Just because the constitution doesn't say what some Libertarians want it to say is no excuse for a poor argument. It is a perfectly valid argument to say that the constitution is wrong, and gives the government too much power, and should be changed; it is a poor argument to say the framers did not mean what they clearly wrote, and Marshall equally clearly backed up.
SirWired
It changes color for "any toxin"? What exactly is a "toxin". As any toxicologist will tell you, poison is all about the dosage.
At 1000mg / dose, Tylenol is an effective, safe non-addictive pain releiver.
At 7000mg / dose, it causes irreversible liver damage in most adults without the antidote.
Poisoning by Iron supplements used to be a very common cause of poison deaths among children until there were mandated safety caps for iron supplements.
So again, what is a "toxin"?
SirWired
The US Congress has no mandate in the Constitution offering them any power over consumer privacy or information. The Interstate Commerce Clause was written to give the Federal government power to regulate the states to prevent them from taxing, tariffing or embarging interstate commerce: it was not meant to regulate commerce in any other way.
If the framers merely wanted to keep states from taxing, tariffing or embargoing interstate commerce, why did they just not say: "States shall not have the power to tax, tariff or embargo interstate commerce?" No, instead they explicitly gave the feds the power to do so. The commerce clause is pretty explicit: "Congress shall have the power... to regulate commerce... among the several states." It doesn't say "limit the states' power to regulate interstate commerce", it says "regulate commerce among the states."
While I don't necessarily disagree with your libertarian ranting about the necessity for such a law, it is stupid to declare this proposed law unconstitutional, because it clearly isn't.
SirWired
Remember boys and girls, a lightsaber can be a dangerous weapon, and improperly used, it can hurt! Here are a few simple tips for Lightsaber Safety...
e r
http://www.atomfilms.com/af/content/your_lightsab
SirWired
But the general tone strikes me as annoying because it's obvious to me that the vast majority of you guys are not actually trying to discuss the issue: you're trying to excuse/justify your behavior in the face of overwhelming evidence that pornography - like smoking (as an example) is bad for people and bad for society. Or you're just dismissing a rather well-researched article because you don't like the conclusion.
But that WASN'T a well researched article. It was an opinion backed by a bunch of interviews and some paraphrasing of a poorly-researched book, which in turn was mostly a bunch of interviews. There were no actual scientific studies involved in this article that cited anything about "harm to society". There were a bunch of poorly-drawn stats on the number of folks exposed to, and that use porn, and that was it. The author no doubt read "Pornified", and decided to write an article that would reach the same conclusions as the book. This is a perfectly reasonable thing for a writer to do, but that does not make their conclusions well backed or correct.
Certainly, there are some folks for whom porn does indeed become an addiction, in the same way that just about any activity can become a harmful addiction. Hobbies, sports, exercise, weight loss, gambling, eating, collecting, on-line games, TV, etc. It is certainly without question that some wives leave their husbands over porn, just as there are marriages dissolve due to EverCrack, compulsive shopping, obsessive collecting, etc. That doesn't make EverQuest, retail stores, or Beanie Babies inherently evil. For a societal addiction (as opposed to one involving addictive chemicals), I would argue that they can be harmful to people, but no purpose is served by banning it. Just about everything "fun" can be addictive, but you cannnot regulate all forms of fun just because some of them causes problems in some people.
Certainly, porn has a special place as there is no doubt quite a bit of really nasty stuff that is produced in a degrading, shameful fashion, but it is a far stretch to call that "overwhelming evidence that porn is bad for people and bad for society."
It CAN be bad for SOME people, but I am not so sure I would cross the line to say it was bad "for society". Certainly, if those studies about exposure to porn are correct, it is not bad for the VAST MAJORITY of people that use it, or our society would ALREADY be undergoing complete, obvious, collapse, given the number of folks that use it.
Smoking is definately "bad for people" because it is quite obvious that it is chemically addictive and pretty obviously causes all sorts of bad things to happen to your body. A tobacco habit is not, in any way, shape, or form, harmless in an otherwise healty person. Smoking is bad for society overall mostly because of the massive healthcare costs involved. Should smoking be banned? No. But I do think the producers of tobacco products should bear their share of the healthcare costs generated by the consumption of thier products.
Porn, on the other hand, CAN be used on a regular, responsible basis, backed up by nothing else than the large number of folks that obviously do.
I, personally, do not use pornography, but poorly researched, poorly backed, conclusions annoy me as much as the next self-respecting geek.
SirWired
No, I did mean "Cheap, Fast, Good". And the axiom has been around much longer than Battlebots. For a Battlebot, "Reliable" may be what "Good" is, since the winner is the one stays running the longest. For most systems, including Battlebots, I suspect, reliability is only one measure of a systems quality. "Good" can also mean features, output quality, clarity, elegance, capacity, etc.
For an excellent tretise on "Quality", I suggest "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."
SirWired
My tone may have seemed harsh, but I just as much of a geek as the rest of us here, and it pisses me off Beta lost, given its higher video quality. If Sony did not have their head up their tush so far, they would have trounced VHS in the marketplace. Their mistakes were legion. They blew off RCAs requests for a longer recording time and a timer, and wanted to charge them more money than JVC did. (At the time, RCA was the largest TV company.) They screwed Sears by OEM'ing a Beta model to them, and then turning around and selling the exact same model themselves for less money. When the longer recording time was released, all the early adopters got pissed off because all the movies in the store went to the new longer time, which none of the original machines could play. (If one of the things a company is going to trumpet is superior quality, it is a bad idea to annoy the exact enthusiasts that would care about such a claim.)
:-) The engineer that developed it boasted it could have 48 HOURS of playtime. Luckily, saner heads prevailed when it was realized how utterly useless that would be for a pre-recorded media format.
Your comment about the length of CDs is interesting. In a book I read on the history and technical specifications of the CD format, there was a funny story. When the developers were first putting together prototypes to get an idea of what a CD should be, one of the first that was put forward was two-sided and the size of an LP. (It wasn't called "Compact Disc".
I sure hope SOMEBODY gives in on the BlueRay/HD-DVD thing soon, because it cetainly looks to be the whole same fiasco all over again. NOBODY wins when crap like this happens.
SirWired
Beta was released in Europe far it was released in the U.S. So in the U.S., VHS had quite a head-start feature-wise. I am looking at a gallery of Beta models right now, and the first Beta machine with even the two-hour record time AND a timer was not released until 1979, two years after VHS was in general release. The autoloader was meant to get around the fact they still didn't have a six-hour tape.
SirWired
Betacam, didn't have a whole lot to do with Betamax, which was strictly a conusmer technology. They share a similar form factor, but everything on the backend for Betacam is professional-grade. Betamax was strictly consumer-grade stuff. Maybe a little better than VHS, video-quality-wise, but nothing earth-shattering.
Don't confuse Betamax and Betacam.
SirWired
This is a persistent myth that has gone on for decades, and has become "accepted wisdom". Betamax did have higher-quality output (though not by much), but it was certainly not a superior format, at least IMHO. The true test of any technology, is "does it meet the consumer's needs?". In the case of Betamax for a long time, the answer was "not as well as the available VHS machines", not even close for "regular folks". For the extremely limited market of Videophiles, Beta may have been better, but that couldn't sustain the market.
In technology, a common axiom is "Cheap, Fast, Good, pick two." VHS was Fast (shipped worthwhile features MUCH faster than Sony did), and MUCH cheaper. Beta only had "Good".
For starters, there were too few makers of machines and the price was too high. In addition, the first Betamax player was quite feature-poor. The damn thing didn't even come with a clock. You had to buy that as an add-on feature. VHS was ruthless about exploiting this.
2nd, and perhaps most importantly, the capacity was too low. It took quite some time before Sony shipped a tape that could run longer than ONE HOUR. This was colossally stupid. Sony KNEW how to extend it, but the morons in Sony design thought one-hour was an acceptable limit. VHS shipped the 4-hour capable T-120 right out of the gate, with quality that was acceptable. While the quality at the lower tape speed wasn't as good, it was doable for just recording soaps, or whatever. When Sony got wind of the VHS's recording time, they shipped a two-hour Betamax machine, using of course a slower tape speed to extend the time. Of course, this also eliminated most of Betamax's quality advantage.
Time and time again, all Betamax had was slightly superior video quality (VHS and Beta both made continuous improvements to the machines, so Beta wasn't THAT far ahead.) Also, Betamax decks kept the tape threaded at all times, which put a LOT of wear on the tape during Rewind/FF operations. To top it off, Sony made a LOT of mistakes about simple features. VHS was first to ship a pause button on the remote, the first with the longer recording time, the first with a standard programmable timer, the first with an infrared remote, the first with front-loading, the first with a camcorder that didn't suck, feature-wise, the list goes on.
In summary, all Beta had going for it was video quality, but couldn't back it up with features worth a damn. This was compounded by colossal errors in finance, OEM relations and marketing.
SirWired
First off, they aren't under a "probe" for possible spying, despite what the article says. A "probe" would imply that somebody has reason to believe there is actually spying going on. Instead, this is a stupid "investigation" to ensure that there isn't, despite a complete lack of evidence saying there is. This is simple xenophobia, nothing more.
Do the geniuses that ordered this "probe" realize that the vast majority of components in a modern computer come from the orient? That it is VERY difficult to find a keyboard, mouse, case, or power supply that is NOT made in China? Do they know that many laptops (not Lenovo) are manufactured by Chinese-owned companies, and/or made directly in China itself?
The only thing that could be worrisome is if they had Lenovo handle the builds on the hard drives, but NO classified shop should be relying on "outside" builds anyway.
Do these folks ALSO realize that by law, no computer containing classified data may be connected to a public network of any kind? How is any "bugged" machine supposed to export the data? Osmosis? Telepathy?
SirWired
The deck on your $138 Murray special is made from much thinner steel, uses plastic bushings on the wheels, has a diapraghm-based carb, (which is an inferior design to the bowl-carbs used on better engines) uses cheaper paint, a smaller, less-powerful engine, poor mulching capability, and has a smaller fuel tank. It also has a weaker handle, and is a pain to adjust. Maintenance is messy and more difficult. On the other hand, it is a LOT lighter than a quality mower.
As a random side note, B&S ALSO owns Murray. Murray went bankrupt, owed B&S a lot of money, so B&S picked up the whole company on the cheap.
SirWired
If the target of this is tape replacement, it is going to fail. 20MB/sec is simply a pathetic transfer rate. That would have been decent 4 years ago (if the drive had built-in compression), but not now, at least for backup.
I see this as the logical successor to magneto-optical drives, which were common in "near-line" storage applications. However, their capacities never caught up and they were completely demolished when ATA/SATA arrays became viable. If you stick one of these things in an automated library, it could run neck-and-neck with SATA applications for short-term archival applications where capacity is more important than response time, but response time DOES need to be a better than what can be done with tape. The most common use of MO drives in my experience was short-term (1 yr. or so) medical image archiving. However, every shop I have seen nowadays that has one of those things is just using it until the service contract runs out and replacing it with a SATA array.
Before this particular product is going to happen though, I think they are going to need to figure out a way to make that thing smaller.
SirWired
How much of that data is simple backup, and how much goes off-site for long-term archiving? For on-site backup, Virtual Tape Libraries going to dirt-cheap SATA arrays are becoming rather interesting and useful choices.
For off-site archiving, you really need tape. There are any number of expandable libraries available from any number of vendors. Personally, I am most familiar with the IBM 3584. This can be expanded to a rather large number of drives and slots, and the LTO drives it usually is equipped with are pretty darn solid. (And the 3592 drives you can buy if you have a LOT of money even more so.)
What you REALLY need to pay attention to when building a tape backup solution (which most customers ignore), is environmental and storage conditions, for both your data center and your off-site storage (if any). I think this is a far more important thing to focus on than what brand of library or drive you purchase. Pay VERY close attention to the data sheets for the tapes and drives. Tape can be easily fouled by humidity that is too low (static), or too high (sticking). Same goes with temperature. Stacking the tapes improperly can result in edge tracking issues, which in turn causes little bits of tape to fly around your drive when the drives rollers break them off when shoving the badly-tracked tape at high speeds past the heads.
For software, again, you have a lot of choices. On one hand, you have "traditional" backup applications like Veritas and Legato. These perform your traditional full, differential, etc., backups. On the other end, you have full-fledged data management apps like IBM's TSM. TSM can be a pain to configure, but if done properly, it is very tape efficient, and it has great support for live DB backups, staged backups, file versioning, data expiration (as opposed to mere tape expiration), etc.
Good Luck,
SirWired
What makes me nervous about AIT is my lack of faith in Sony's commitment to the product. The predecessor to AIT, DTF was supposed to be Sony's long-term format, but they changed their minds, making any investments in the old format obsolete. (DTF used gigantic tapes, and Sony was right to change their minds, but that didn't help those with DTF libraries.)
You are tied to Sony drives, and since the form factor is not even close to LTO, DLT or 3590/3592, your selection of libraries is also limited.
SirWired
but last time I checked, the shelf life of a tape is not much more than 18 months.
You must not have checked very recently. If stored under proper conditions, LTO has a shelf life of 30 years.
I would NEVER trust my archival data to a 400GB drive that cost about as much as a LTO2 tape.
SirWired
The SCOTUS, through the years, has decided that while random bans on speech certainly are not permissable under the first amendment, laws that serve a "legitimate state interest" that happen to affect speech are certainly allowed.
For instance: We have laws banning Child Pornography. If you read the constitution literally, this would not be constitutional. The courts have decided that the founding fathers could not possibly have meant this result. They have judged that the state has a legitimate interest in preventing child abuse, and child pornography cannot be produced without child abuse, therefore, child pornography is illegal.
Along the same lines slander, libel, the classic "fire in a crowded theater" are not allowed.
The current definition of obscenity comes to us from the Miller case in 1974:
"The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be:
(a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Kois v. Wisconsin, supra, at 230, quoting Roth v. United States, supra, at 489;
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."
Of note here is that obscenity (unlike the other classes of "bad speech" mentioned above) is usually not subject to prior restraint. The government must prove its obscenity before action can be taken. (This is from the Fort Wayne Books decision)
The SCOTUS has pretty much decided that attempting to ensure the general health of society through the regulation of obscenity is a legitimate state interest. However, modern applications of this rule have set the threshold pretty darn high.
I expect for this particular case the SCOTUS saw no reason to elaborate on the earlier Miller standard. Only a) of that standard involves "community standards". But all three parts must be met, and (according to the website on censorship where I got this from) part c) of the standard is a national one.
SirWired
SirWired
It really depends on what the "programmer" is doing. The VAST majority of programs in this world are database applications. Indeed, to pound out your basic VB or Java app and then throw in some SQL, a CS degree is a complete waste of time.
However, for those folks that need to get into architecture and theory more, a CS degree is invaluable. Basically, if you want to make tools for others to use (O/S'es, compilers, DB's, complex DB designs, embedded microcode for IT products (i.e. Network Equipment), etc.) then the theory, math, and rigor of a quality CS program is pretty much an absolute requirement. While it is posssible to do all of those things well without a degree, it is certainly much harder.
I work in support for a large computer equipment company supporting gigantic storage equipment. It is easy to tell who on my team has a degree and who does not. Those with a degree are those that eat protocol traces for breakfast, and can use the appropriate standards documents and architecture descriptions to root-cause tricky design issues in relatively short order. Knowledge of physics and statistics helps too. Those without a degree generally stick to "crash 'n dump" issues, and log analysis.
I am not saying that those without a degree aren't as smart, indeed, many of them are better at log analysis than those with a CS degree (including myself). Where they have problems is the abstract reasoning required where the logs simply don't flag any problems at all, yet something doesn't work. Narrowing down those issues requires a better understanding of computer architecture and network protocol design techniques than they posess, and would have great difficulty obtaining by just reading a book.
SirWired
When I said that there was "no constitutinal restrictions" on laws to restrict obscenity, even to adults, I left something out. The SCOTUS HAS found that any laws restricting obscenity must have a rational basis. This is probably what stops outright bans on porn.
SirWired
If you read the article, you can see what the appeals court focused on, and apparently the SCOTUS agreed. Basically, the appeals court said that there was no example of what the plaintiffs had in mind. I think what the SCOTUS (and the lower-level appeals courts) are looking for is an actual prosecution of an obscenity case based on this law, as opposed to just a hypothetical case concerning the text of the law. I think they may then choose to "draw the line". I am not saying I agree with that approach, but that does appear to be the approach that was taken.
Obscenity is not now, and never has been, protected speech under the first amendment. In fact, there are no constitional restrictions on laws to restrict obscenity even to adults. The only question is about the standard for obscenity, and "who decides"?
SirWired
I DIDN'T say RMS was at fault here. What I did say is that in RMS's ideal world, this would happen more often. RMS advocates a world where software MUST be free. He views the GPL as nothing more than a stopgap until copyright laws change to what would prefer. (I don't see that happening any time soon.)
SirWired
I did not say commercial projects never failed, or that companies never died. But the fact of the matter is that software development costs money, and programmers need to be paid. It is true that the non GPL-ness of the code probably hurts the code's likelihood of further public development. However, even if the code was GPL'd, that would help the code, but that wouldn't help Theo, who needs money to continue his part in the project.
I have no objections to the concept of open source software, but if all software were required to be free (which is what RMS thinks), there would simply be a lot less software. This is an uncomfortable truth. All programmers cannot live on support and customization dollars alone.
Free software development is entirely dependent on the generosity of the consumers of the software. The classic Tragedy of the Commons says that this is not a way to ensure continued software production. It can (and does) happen, but it is by no means guaranteed.
I will admit that the VAST majority of people that program do NOT make their living writing software that is sold to others. Most programming in the world is nothing more than database applications, and the tools those programmers use have a great many high-quality OSS equivalents.
Free software does have its place, but it is by no means universal. For actual end-user applications, where the number of users that are programmers is rather few, GPL (or BSD) software is far more scarce and not particularly feature rich. Hence the low numbers of GPL'd games with sophisticated modern 3D graphics. Or the continued lack of personal finance software with the features of Quicken. (GNUCash? Gimme a break.) GIMP still doesn't even vaguely approach Photoshop.
Does anybody really think that there would be nearly the same number of games as are available now if it were required that they all were essentially (for the purposes of revenue collection) public domain? I think not. It is all well and good that Open Source can produce a new programming language once a week, and more flavors of Linux exist than Baskin Robbins has ice cream, but this doesn't help end users when they need or want to do many of the tasks we perform on our PC's every day.
Again, I have no problem with the idea of free software. I also acknowledge that most programmers in the world do not write code that is ever sold. REQUIRING GPL-like terms for software is not freedom, it is a tyranny all its own.
SirWired
If the world worked the way RMS says it should, then there would be an awful lot of programmers and projects in the same boat. Important, useful, software would be in grave danger of dying (or at least not updated) for lack of funds.
This is why many people and companies have the sheer gall to actually charge money to customers to buy a copyright-restricted copy of their work. They charge money so they don't have to get stories on Slashdot begging for funding.
BTW, way to go Theo, pissing off a large contributor of funds. The first amendment doesn't give you the right to receive "free" money from the govt. if you piss them off. It also doesn't give grant administrators the warm fuzzies when you tell them that you are taking their money so they can't spend it on something else. This is like justifying a lottery by saying: "At least all them poor folks can't go spend that money on booze." It's hyprocritical and stupid.
SirWired
And of course, the best way to start a binary search is the center(fold).
SirWired