An ORB should be part of the kernel; HTTP should not. HTTP support should be implemented as an object that is installed, as needed; the kernel should not need to be recompiled to change its functionality.
Should NFS run entirely in user space as well?
In an ideal world, the pure Platonic form of the ideal kernel would not have HTTP. However, in the real world, where mundane things such as performance intrude, there are often good reasons for such compromises. A user-space HTTPD incurs a performance hit as data needs to be copied between kernel space and user space. A kernel-space HTTPD can just send the file buffers out through the network. (Which is why Windows NT is apparently faster than Linux at some web serving tasks.)
The only places where optimisation does not intrude on elegance are purely academic proof-of-concept projects, which never have to see the real world.
I have received at least two spams advertising this unit. Which is one more good reason not to have anything to do with it.
1) Spammers should not be encouraged; the more people buy these units from spammers, the more spam you'll get in the future.
2) The whole Sega MegaDrive thing seems blatantly illegal; buying such a device may be "receiving stolen goods".
3) If someone is sufficiently dishonest to spam and to use unlicensed game ROMs, what's to say they're sufficiently honest not to steal your credit card number and defraud you? For all you know, there may not even be a Dulux DVD player, and the whole thing could be a scam to collect credit card numbers.
SPAM does not work as a marketing tool. You can't sell things to people you piss off.
It's about numbers. If a spammer sends out 10 million spams asking for $10, and 0.01% of the recipients are sufficiently naive to reply, he has made $1,000. If the spammer is just looking for credit card numbers to defraud, all it takes is one bone-dumb idiot out of millions of recipients to send theirs in. The odds look pretty good for the spammer.
Nyetscape 4.x, which crashes a lot (more so than either major browser on Windows), Nyetscape 3.x which crashes less but is years out of date, or Mozilla which still has lots of rough edges? Or perhaps they'll go for stability and just run Links in a big Xterm.:-)
I use Linux myself, but the rather poorly web browsing experience on it tempts me to get VMWare just so that I can use a web browser that doesn't crash and supports modern standards.
1) How will the subscription fee be distributed? Will it be like the audio-cassette levy, which is split up between the major recording companies? If a user downloads a track from Matador or Alternative Tentacles, will the money go to the artist/label who released it, or to BMG?
2) What about non-copyrighted content? Will BMG be able to levy a tax on bands putting their demos up and trainspotters sharing their collections of train whistles?
3) Will the unencrypted MP3 format be used, or replaced with a streaming mechanism (as in Universal's subscription trial) or a user-keyed format (such as Liquid Audio, which can be encoded with the subscriber's credit card number)? The majors seem to be mortally averse to unencrypted audio formats.
All MS would have to do is persuade the government that it is in the interests of the US New Economy and the perpetuation of the Long Boom to drop a few laser-guided fuel-air explosives on Sealand.
There are plans to replace audio CDs with DVD Audio discs, which will be a lot more difficult to rip. (Basically, there will be no way of doing it without violating the DMCA, as is the case with DVD video.) As CDs are fundamentally insecure (for the content industry), the only thing keeping them from disappearing is market inertia. As soon as CDs can be phased out, they will be.
Once when I downloaded Sokoban for my Pilot and was playing it a bit, I found myself dreaming of shifting boxes around a maze to clear a path. The weird thing was, the Sokoban dream was (in some incomprehensible way) a metaphor for some real-world problem or social conundrum.
Chances are NZ's laws will be "harmonised" with international IP treaties, and regionalised DVD players will become the standard there soon enough. The movie studios' budgets dwarf the NZ Gross National Product by orders of magnitude, so if it came to a trade war, they could afford to embargo New Zealand and put a lot of pressure on the government there.
Remember, Fraunhofer owns the MP3 patents. They can set any licensing terms. They could, for example, do what RSA did with theyr crypto systems, licensing only one controlled implementation for general use, and go after anyone disseminating unlicensed encoders/decoders.
(Sure, you'll be able to find them on the Net, but if RedHat can't legally put them on their CDs, they're in the same twilight zone as arcade ROMs.)
As there is a single point of control for MP3, the RIAA could easily pay Fraunhofer a few billion (or even buy them outright through a front company), and get open MP3 pulled, forcing everybody to upgrade to encrypted SDMI formats.
Owning the patents for a technology you wish to bury can be very powerful. When Macrovision developed the copy protection mechanism embedded in all DVD players, they also created and patented a device for removing the protection. This enables them to sue anyone attempting to sell such a device or distribute the details of constructing one. (Not that it eliminates said information, but it drives it sufficiently underground to keep the ordinary people from seeing it.)
Once Fraunhofer start getting heavy with MP3 licensing, the penguinhead army will adopt Vorbis in a flash, and hopefully so will Windows-using music fans. Then the battle lines shift to hardware players.
I thought it was stupid of them to kill XView/OPEN LOOK. The OPEN LOOK GUI looked far better than Motif (it was obvious that the visual design was done by professionals, unlike Motif, which had that make-it-look-like-Windows-2.0-only-more-kickass look), and XView's programming model was more elegant than any other attempt I've seen to do OO in vanilla C.
Still, GNOME should be much better, as it actually has some life behind it (rather than committees and bookshelves full of standards). The problem with commercial UNIX GUIs was that they were sterile. They used lots of resources, but featurewise were pale shadows of Windows and Mac GUIs.
Re:But will they actually get the money?
on
The Virtual Tip Jar
·
· Score: 2
Even if your grandmother owns the copyright of my favourite album, she did not play any role in the act of its creation other than lending money. Why should she have more right to it than the artists whose inspiration it was?
Most artists would make more money working at McDonalds than recording and selling CDs, at least until they've had a good number of big hits.
The way the system works, the recording company gives you an advance for recording the album, say, $250,000. They you record it, they manufacture it, market it, pay promotions people to bribe radio to play it, and so on, which costs the best part of a million.
The CDs go on sale. In a typical major-label contract, the artist gets 50c-$1 for each one sold. That is, after they've paid off their advance, marketing expenses, producers' fees, returns, breakages, &c. Which means that you don't see any money from CD sales until you've sold several million units, and then see only a trickle. Meanwhile, the recording company sees money from the first CD sold. They're not the ones who have to pay for the whole thing, after all. In his book Confessions of a Record Producer, Moses Avalon estimated that this is equivalent to a loan at 66% interest.
If you're a big-name artist, say, Metallica or someone, you can negotiate a cushier deal; say, $2 per CD, with the company footing parts of the bill, and you owning the copyright. After all, it's in their interest to sign you. However, if you're just a young band, star-struck that Warner or someone would be interested in them, no dice. If you don't sign on their terms, one of the young bands in the line behind you will.
Re:But will they actually get the money?
on
The Virtual Tip Jar
·
· Score: 3
I thought so too at first; but after I thought about it, changed my mind. What can the record companies do, after all? The payment is just a gift from fans to artists, not tied to CD sales or anything.
Now if an artist went out and said "don't buy our CD, download it from Napster and send us a dollar", the company could have a case against them. I imagine something like that will end up happening; and it'll be interesting to see the way it goes.
Though everywhere I look, I can see the recording industry pimps' luck running out. Thanks to Courtney Love, Steve Albini, the Napster case and the Internet, lots of people know what bastards they are, how they rip off all sides. Now that 90% of the industry is five massive companies in the process of becoming four, there is no doubt that the recording industry is inhuman, artless corporate greed on a massive scale. And now that they've sued mp3.com and Napster, and the head of Universal came out calling for an end to Internet anonymity so that they could rake in the profits unhindered, it's clear to see who the villains are. Witness their reversal on the work-for-hire bill; chances are the changing tide of public opinion forced their hand.
It is only inertia that keeps the Big Five controlling the medium of recorded music. It no longer takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to record an album and promote it, thanks to advances in recording technologies and the Internet. The RIAA's role as gatekeepers depends on consumers and artists staying where they are. They can afford to lose Public Enemy and a few others, but they can't afford it turning into a mass exodus of artists to new distribution mechanisms. Eventually, they may get things like DVD Audio and SDMI put into place, where they control the means of encoding (as the MPAA does with DVD), and have a secure oligopoly. But that can only happen if their industry doesn't collapse like a house of cards first; hence, they're treading water.
If the RIAA try to sue these people, or take the money from artists with lawyers, there will be an outcry, and their situation will worsen.
The one bone-dumb idiot in 10 million who responds to "MAKE MONEY FAST" spams and pyramid schemes. And once Mr. Spammer has their credit card number, it's mission accomplished...
What does IE have to do with Apache? Or, are you
talking about *heh* Netscrape's *heh* server...
Once Microsoft have 95% or so of the browser market, and non-MS browsers are obscure enough to ignore, what makes you think they won't "embrace and extend" HTTP? They're doing the same to HTML already, with proprietary tags.
Eventually we may be using some DCOM-based proprietary protocol to download web pages as Microsoft.NET objects or somesuch. The pages will have integrated animations and better layout, but you'll need Frontpage to author them.
The industry is multinational, and have subsidiaries everywhere. Most of the well-known music from the UK, Australia, Japan, &c., is owned by the local subsidiaries of the respective majors.
The majors aren't necessarily American either, despite having headquarters in Los Angeles or New York; EMI's British (though soon to be controlled by AOL/TW), Universal's Canadian (soon to be French), BMG is German and Sony's Japanese.
That's a publishing company; which is a technical term for a holding company that manages the copyright of songs/music (though not of recordings). They're the ones you'd deal with if you wanted to release a cover of a Pink Floyd song.
Universal's teen-rebellion subsidiary Interscope bought TVT some years ago, solely for Nine Inch Nails; as a result, Wax Trax is now part of the largest recording company in the world.
Virgin is part of EMI, which is merging into AOL/Time Warner. And there is no such entity as PolyGram anymore; they got swallowed up into Universal in early 1999.
In most cases, a major-label artist does not see a cent of their cut of royalties until they have recouped the advance used to pay for producing and promoting the album. That all comes out of the artist's cut (yes, that 50c-$1), and can take several million sales to recoup. The recording company, in contrast, sees its cut from the outset.
And to add insult to injury, even after the artist has paid off their advance, the company still owns the copyright. It's as if you took out a loan to buy a house, paid it off, and the bank still owned the house.
Your average streetwalker gets a better deal from her pimp than your average major-label artist gets from their label.
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An ORB should be part of the kernel; HTTP should not. HTTP support should be implemented as an object that is installed, as needed; the kernel should not need to be recompiled to change its functionality.
Should NFS run entirely in user space as well?
In an ideal world, the pure Platonic form of the ideal kernel would not have HTTP. However, in the real world, where mundane things such as performance intrude, there are often good reasons for such compromises. A user-space HTTPD incurs a performance hit as data needs to be copied between kernel space and user space. A kernel-space HTTPD can just send the file buffers out through the network. (Which is why Windows NT is apparently faster than Linux at some web serving tasks.)
The only places where optimisation does not intrude on elegance are purely academic proof-of-concept projects, which never have to see the real world.
I have received at least two spams advertising this unit. Which is one more good reason not to have anything to do with it.
1) Spammers should not be encouraged; the more people buy these units from spammers, the more spam you'll get in the future.
2) The whole Sega MegaDrive thing seems blatantly illegal; buying such a device may be "receiving stolen goods".
3) If someone is sufficiently dishonest to spam and to use unlicensed game ROMs, what's to say they're sufficiently honest not to steal your credit card number and defraud you? For all you know, there may not even be a Dulux DVD player, and the whole thing could be a scam to collect credit card numbers.
It's about numbers. If a spammer sends out 10 million spams asking for $10, and 0.01% of the recipients are sufficiently naive to reply, he has made $1,000. If the spammer is just looking for credit card numbers to defraud, all it takes is one bone-dumb idiot out of millions of recipients to send theirs in. The odds look pretty good for the spammer.
If you have more than one mode line, X will let you change resolutions on the fly with a key combination.
Have a central repository of configuration data stored in a database, accessible through a special API. Call it a "registry".
Nyetscape 4.x, which crashes a lot (more so than either major browser on Windows), Nyetscape 3.x which crashes less but is years out of date, or Mozilla which still has lots of rough edges? Or perhaps they'll go for stability and just run Links in a big Xterm. :-)
I use Linux myself, but the rather poorly web browsing experience on it tempts me to get VMWare just so that I can use a web browser that doesn't crash and supports modern standards.
This announcement raises several issues:
1) How will the subscription fee be distributed? Will it be like the audio-cassette levy, which is split up between the major recording companies? If a user downloads a track from Matador or Alternative Tentacles, will the money go to the artist/label who released it, or to BMG?
2) What about non-copyrighted content? Will BMG be able to levy a tax on bands putting their demos up and trainspotters sharing their collections of train whistles?
3) Will the unencrypted MP3 format be used, or replaced with a streaming mechanism (as in Universal's subscription trial) or a user-keyed format (such as Liquid Audio, which can be encoded with the subscriber's credit card number)? The majors seem to be mortally averse to unencrypted audio formats.
All MS would have to do is persuade the government that it is in the interests of the US New Economy and the perpetuation of the Long Boom to drop a few laser-guided fuel-air explosives on Sealand.
There are plans to replace audio CDs with DVD Audio discs, which will be a lot more difficult to rip. (Basically, there will be no way of doing it without violating the DMCA, as is the case with DVD video.) As CDs are fundamentally insecure (for the content industry), the only thing keeping them from disappearing is market inertia. As soon as CDs can be phased out, they will be.
Once when I downloaded Sokoban for my Pilot and was playing it a bit, I found myself dreaming of shifting boxes around a maze to clear a path. The weird thing was, the Sokoban dream was (in some incomprehensible way) a metaphor for some real-world problem or social conundrum.
Chances are NZ's laws will be "harmonised" with international IP treaties, and regionalised DVD players will become the standard there soon enough. The movie studios' budgets dwarf the NZ Gross National Product by orders of magnitude, so if it came to a trade war, they could afford to embargo New Zealand and put a lot of pressure on the government there.
Remember, Fraunhofer owns the MP3 patents. They can set any licensing terms. They could, for example, do what RSA did with theyr crypto systems, licensing only one controlled implementation for general use, and go after anyone disseminating unlicensed encoders/decoders.
(Sure, you'll be able to find them on the Net, but if RedHat can't legally put them on their CDs, they're in the same twilight zone as arcade ROMs.)
As there is a single point of control for MP3, the RIAA could easily pay Fraunhofer a few billion (or even buy them outright through a front company), and get open MP3 pulled, forcing everybody to upgrade to encrypted SDMI formats.
Owning the patents for a technology you wish to bury can be very powerful. When Macrovision developed the copy protection mechanism embedded in all DVD players, they also created and patented a device for removing the protection. This enables them to sue anyone attempting to sell such a device or distribute the details of constructing one. (Not that it eliminates said information, but it drives it sufficiently underground to keep the ordinary people from seeing it.)
Once Fraunhofer start getting heavy with MP3 licensing, the penguinhead army will adopt Vorbis in a flash, and hopefully so will Windows-using music fans. Then the battle lines shift to hardware players.
I thought it was stupid of them to kill XView/OPEN LOOK. The OPEN LOOK GUI looked far better than Motif (it was obvious that the visual design was done by professionals, unlike Motif, which had that make-it-look-like-Windows-2.0-only-more-kickass look), and XView's programming model was more elegant than any other attempt I've seen to do OO in vanilla C.
Still, GNOME should be much better, as it actually has some life behind it (rather than committees and bookshelves full of standards). The problem with commercial UNIX GUIs was that they were sterile. They used lots of resources, but featurewise were pale shadows of Windows and Mac GUIs.
Even if your grandmother owns the copyright of my favourite album, she did not play any role in the act of its creation other than lending money. Why should she have more right to it than the artists whose inspiration it was?
Most artists would make more money working at McDonalds than recording and selling CDs, at least until they've had a good number of big hits.
The way the system works, the recording company gives you an advance for recording the album, say, $250,000. They you record it, they manufacture it, market it, pay promotions people to bribe radio to play it, and so on, which costs the best part of a million.
The CDs go on sale. In a typical major-label contract, the artist gets 50c-$1 for each one sold. That is, after they've paid off their advance, marketing expenses, producers' fees, returns, breakages, &c. Which means that you don't see any money from CD sales until you've sold several million units, and then see only a trickle. Meanwhile, the recording company sees money from the first CD sold. They're not the ones who have to pay for the whole thing, after all. In his book Confessions of a Record Producer, Moses Avalon estimated that this is equivalent to a loan at 66% interest.
If you're a big-name artist, say, Metallica or someone, you can negotiate a cushier deal; say, $2 per CD, with the company footing parts of the bill, and you owning the copyright. After all, it's in their interest to sign you. However, if you're just a young band, star-struck that Warner or someone would be interested in them, no dice. If you don't sign on their terms, one of the young bands in the line behind you will.
I thought so too at first; but after I thought about it, changed my mind. What can the record companies do, after all? The payment is just a gift from fans to artists, not tied to CD sales or anything.
Now if an artist went out and said "don't buy our CD, download it from Napster and send us a dollar", the company could have a case against them. I imagine something like that will end up happening; and it'll be interesting to see the way it goes.
Though everywhere I look, I can see the recording industry pimps' luck running out. Thanks to Courtney Love, Steve Albini, the Napster case and the Internet, lots of people know what bastards they are, how they rip off all sides. Now that 90% of the industry is five massive companies in the process of becoming four, there is no doubt that the recording industry is inhuman, artless corporate greed on a massive scale. And now that they've sued mp3.com and Napster, and the head of Universal came out calling for an end to Internet anonymity so that they could rake in the profits unhindered, it's clear to see who the villains are. Witness their reversal on the work-for-hire bill; chances are the changing tide of public opinion forced their hand.
It is only inertia that keeps the Big Five controlling the medium of recorded music. It no longer takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to record an album and promote it, thanks to advances in recording technologies and the Internet. The RIAA's role as gatekeepers depends on consumers and artists staying where they are. They can afford to lose Public Enemy and a few others, but they can't afford it turning into a mass exodus of artists to new distribution mechanisms. Eventually, they may get things like DVD Audio and SDMI put into place, where they control the means of encoding (as the MPAA does with DVD), and have a secure oligopoly. But that can only happen if their industry doesn't collapse like a house of cards first; hence, they're treading water.
If the RIAA try to sue these people, or take the money from artists with lawyers, there will be an outcry, and their situation will worsen.
The one bone-dumb idiot in 10 million who responds to "MAKE MONEY FAST" spams and pyramid schemes. And once Mr. Spammer has their credit card number, it's mission accomplished...
When will someone make a Mozilla-based browser that works with XView? There are still some people using olvwm and this much-underrated toolkit..
What does IE have to do with Apache? Or, are you
.NET objects or somesuch. The pages will have integrated animations and better layout, but you'll need Frontpage to author them.
talking about *heh* Netscrape's *heh* server...
Once Microsoft have 95% or so of the browser market, and non-MS browsers are obscure enough to ignore, what makes you think they won't "embrace and extend" HTTP? They're doing the same to HTML already, with proprietary tags.
Eventually we may be using some DCOM-based proprietary protocol to download web pages as Microsoft
The industry is multinational, and have subsidiaries everywhere. Most of the well-known music from the UK, Australia, Japan, &c., is owned by the local subsidiaries of the respective majors.
The majors aren't necessarily American either, despite having headquarters in Los Angeles or New York; EMI's British (though soon to be controlled by AOL/TW), Universal's Canadian (soon to be French), BMG is German and Sony's Japanese.
That's a publishing company; which is a technical term for a holding company that manages the copyright of songs/music (though not of recordings). They're the ones you'd deal with if you wanted to release a cover of a Pink Floyd song.
Pink Floyd, AFAIK, are on EMI.
i.e., signed to major labels. Radiohead, for example, is on EMI.
Universal's teen-rebellion subsidiary Interscope bought TVT some years ago, solely for Nine Inch Nails; as a result, Wax Trax is now part of the largest recording company in the world.
Virgin is part of EMI, which is merging into AOL/Time Warner. And there is no such entity as PolyGram anymore; they got swallowed up into Universal in early 1999.
In most cases, a major-label artist does not see a cent of their cut of royalties until they have recouped the advance used to pay for producing and promoting the album. That all comes out of the artist's cut (yes, that 50c-$1), and can take several million sales to recoup. The recording company, in contrast, sees its cut from the outset.
And to add insult to injury, even after the artist has paid off their advance, the company still owns the copyright. It's as if you took out a loan to buy a house, paid it off, and the bank still owned the house.
Your average streetwalker gets a better deal from her pimp than your average major-label artist gets from their label.