The memory is going to stay on the processor cards. It would be somewhere between slow and ridiculously slow (by modern standards) to do anything else. The slot interface is PCIe x8. An I/O interconnect. Not memory, certainly not SMP. More like a tightly coupled cluster.
Cable companies pay television stations for content, not for delivery. It is not yet quite practical to let users pay for content independently because cable channels occupy a fixed portion of the bandwidth of the entire downstream network. When the fixed allocation of bandwidth required for a real time channel becomes irrelevant, cable channels as we know them will go away, and users will pay for content directly. The cost for delivering the content is another story.
That is what network peering arrangements are about - nothing to do with content, but rather with traffic. Big difference. It makes sense from a traffic engineering point of view for a provider like Netflix to cover part of the cost of delivering the traffic to the end user. The cost of producing the content, on the other hand, is none of the ISPs business. That is between Netflix and the end user. The ISP does not charge for content, the ISP does not pay for content. The ISP deals in traffic.
The summary is ridiculously misleading. The Senate didn't vote before midnight either. They have yet to hold a vote, although supposedly one is scheduled for about 4:00 a.m. EST. Sometime tomorrow morning the House will reconvene to consider whatever the Senate passes.
Ditto. That is the PR of the patent industry, which lives and breathes by placing impediments to the progress of science and the useful arts, but there isn't the slightest evidence that the social benefits out weigh the social costs, to say nothing of the of the rent seeking, soul sucking patent attorneys who profit from this perverse deprivation of moral and intellectual rights.
There is no shortage of literature in defense of that position. The patent system, as presently constituted, is a first class train wreck. Virtually every informed observer who is not on the payroll of the patent bar, and who lacks a vested interest in some trivial non-invention, understands that fact.
The OS has nothing to do with it. Firewire ports are DMA, as are Thunderbolt ports if I remember correctly, which means access to the port means direct access to the RAM. That means you can not only read the data, but you can also potentially manipulate it (killing processes, injecting code into already running processes, etc.).
Serious computers, running serious operating systems, use an IOMMU to restrict the access of externally accessible DMA devices to main memory, in much the same way a regular MMU is used to restrict access by user processes, by making other memory basically invisible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOMMU
More detail: It should not be possible to get a patent on anything. Granting monopolies on ideas is economically counterproductive, morally suspect, and intellectually perverse.
AT&T acquired a near monopoly long before the government briefly nationalized it during World War I. It was the governments concern that AT&T be required to interconnect with other carriers, and they did just that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment
In addition, if you want something to blame for the establishment of the AT&T monopoly I suggest you squarely attribute it to U.S. patent law, which is highly susceptible to the creation of such monopolies, cartels, and conglomerates. There is nothing "free market" about a patent. The patent is one of the greatest offenses against free market principles ever devised.
My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time? Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?
Long distance and national phone calls are charged at a higher rate as it is the simplest way of getting businesses and wealthy people to subsidize the maintenance of the local telephone network.
That is why they invented progressive income taxes. No need to stunt commerce and communication too.
SQL Server? That is great, if you are a Microsoft only shop, and your needs don't get too out of the ordinary. Large OLTP databases tend to run on Oracle or DB2, on an operating system actually designed for the purpose. Neither is cheap of course, by any means, but together they dwarf SQL Server in market share (measured in dollars, not installations).
A bunch of rich guys injected liquidity into the system because there was no central bank to do so.
Quite true. What you do not mention, however, is that non-fractional-reserve currencies do not have liquidity crises. If fractional reserve banking (meaning legalized embezzlement of deposits) was prohibited, as it had been in common law for most of the past two millennia, the Panic of 1907 would have been over before it started.
An economy can handle massive swings in equity indices without serious problems. But as soon as people start demanding the return of a deposit all hell breaks loose. In the current system a demand deposit isn't a deposit at all, it is a loan to the bank that a depositor (lender actually) can call at any time.
No economy deals well with callable loans on a large scale, and yet our current banking system is structured on them. We just call them demand deposits instead, even though they have nothing legally in common with deposits except the name.
If too many customers start calling their loans to the bank, the whole house of cards starts falling apart. A house of cards that can grow so big that no combination of honest monied interests can bail them out. Hence the advent of fiat currency, where the central bank can make money out of thin air (roughly speaking) so that it can keep those highly leveraged hedge funds we call banks afloat.
like gold - you severely limit the flexibility of the currency to cope with a crisis
There is nothing wrong with gold. The problem is that legalized embezzlement of deposits (aka fractional reserve banking) is incompatible with hard currency. With FRB, just like any other embezzlement scheme, anytime anything goes seriously wrong, either depositors are out their money or their holdings are devalued.
It is economically impossible for holders of a debt backed currency to be made whole in real terms. All FRB institutions are ticking time bombs that can only be kept alive by debasing the currency - meaning negative real interest rates on all "deposits".
In a report I wrote last year, I estimated the markup for Internet services was 6,452 per cent
It is actually better than that, much better. Somewhere along the line, a customer sent that data to an Internet Service Provider for free. By a simple exercise of elementary arithmetic, we can see that the markup charged on data transmitted and received is actually infinite. (Shhh! don't let anyone know).
But what purpose does opening up their communication hold?
The issue at hand is not whether scientists should be required to publish their emails on the Internet, but whether they should have legal privilege against subpoenas. A better question is what is it about science that requires granting legal privileges that approximately no one else has? Courts exist to decide legitimate cases and controversies. How are they supposed to do that if the they cannot gain access to the relevant information? Flip a coin?
No, it doesn't effectively change the license on the existing code
I didn't say it changed the license on anything. I said it has the effect (the practical effect) of subjecting the whole file to the more restrictive license. The reason why this is the case is (as you note) it can quickly become impossible to determine which lines are subject to which license.
Of course it doesn't subject the original code to the more restrictive license, you just don't know what is the original code. If you want to create something based on the original code with modifications under a different license, you should start with a clean copy. The further encumbered version is almost useless for that.
I agree, however, that there is no point in encumbering a BSD licensed source file with another license if all you are going to do is make minor changes. If you are going to make major changes, on the other hand, you may have a very good reason to do just that.
I agree, you certainly cannot remove the copyright notice, nor can you remove the license. However, you can indicate that a given file contains "portions" copyright so and so that are subject to a BSD license, and portions copyright someone else that are subject to a more restrictive license.
That has the effect of subjecting the whole file (assuming substantial modifications have been made) to the restrictions contained in both licenses, because the copyrights of both the original copyright holder and later contributors are applicable. In the case of code that was originally BSD licensed that has substantial contributions released under a more restrictive license, the file is (for most practical purposes) governed by the the conditions of the the more restrictive license, because the requirements of the BSD licensed portions are trivial to satisfy.
No care need be taken to avoid mixing the code subject to the different licenses within the file either, as long as the copyright notice and conditions that apply to portions derived from the original distribution are included. The whole point of a derived work is that the copyrights (and hence the conditions) of both contributors apply. If a function or code fragment subject to the terms of both licenses is not a legal nullity, no problem.
GPL-compatible does not mean that you can simply copy and paste code willy-nilly into a GPL project.
Most BSD style licenses are unencumbered enough that you can relicense direct derivatives (not just composite works) under practically any terms you want. Commercial companies do this all the time, and it is in fact what makes BSD style licensing for open source software projects so controversial - anyone can create a proprietary fork at will, with components that quickly lose their BSD character as modifications are added.
GPL licensed derivatives of BSD licensed components can be created in the same manner. It is the copyright of the authors of the modifications that makes the relicensing have teeth, it is the lack of a prohibition on additional license terms in BSD style licenses that makes it possible.
The MS-PL, on the other hand, specifically prohibits this practice, much like the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Both are moderate copyleft licenses, designed to make sure that derivatives of covered source files are always available under the terms of the original license.
There is no question that a system like Bedrock allows the ultimate in flexibility in terms of running programs from different distributions and the like. However, a multiple-distribution system like that adds a considerable amount of administrative complexity, making it relatively unlikely to be adopted by non-specialists.
There is an intermediate step that would solve much of the problem here - change the way that Linux packages are packaged and accessed so that multiple versions of library packages can be installed without conflicts, name changes, or repackaging.
The easiest way to do this would be to change the package manager to support a two level namespace instead of a flat one. So instead of simply installing the latest version of the package from your distribution, you could install a (largely) compatible version with the same name from a different source, and the package manager would pull in the necessary libraries from that source (or other ABI compatible sources) and track them as such. As long as the libraries themselves were appropriately versioned, the library packages would install without conflicts.
That wouldn't come close to letting you install any package from any distribution (in some cases the dependencies would be too complicated, or the ABI too different in subtle ways), but it would allow you to install more recent versions of most packages from the newer versions of the same distribution (including beta, rawhide, testing, versions etc) without problems in most cases, and many ABI compatible packages from other distributions as well.
In the 1990s, when Internet access from homes was mostly by dial-up, those lucrative âoetermination fees,â as theyâ(TM)re called, led to a proliferation of Internet service providers
This claim is dubious, to put it mildly. The termination fees were paid to the terminating telephone company. The ISP had nothing to do with it. In some cases this may have allowed CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers) to provide slightly lower rates to independent ISPs, but that is hardly the sort of thing that would lead to a proliferation of ISPs by itself.
The real reason for the proliferation of ISPs is that the phone companies themselves dragged their feet as long as possible on providing anything other than ordinary dialup service. ISP startup costs were relatively low, demand was very high, and at the time ISP service came with all sorts of value added features to allow ISPs to distinguish themselves from their competition.
In addition, if the FCC didn't wildly misread the Communications Act of 1934 at the prompting of the phone companies, there would still be a large number of independent ISPs. Internet access is not an information service, it is a telecommunications service.
UTOPIA is great, if you can get it. The problem is that your city needs to sign on, and you and preferably several of your neighbors need to each agree to pay ~$30 a month to lease a fiber connection (or purchase the the right to use one indefinitely for ~$3000). Then you pay your ISP / IPTV / telco provider to deliver service to you over the shared Ethernet network. Build out has been relatively slow, in part because they originally projected that most customers would sign up for Internet, television, and phone service over the network, where in reality most want just plain Internet service.
Utah is a heavily Republican dominated state, and UTOPIA is certainly not on the Republican hit list. It is mostly on the hit list of lobbyists for CenturyLink (Qwest) and Comcast. They tried to have the state prohibit such networks several years ago and failed. UTOPIA is now a fait accompli and the chances of it being shut down by legislative action are non-existent. They need those revenues to pay the bonds back. The only question is can UTOPIA succeed enough with its new revenue model to make new cities want to sign on. I sure hope so.
I don't know who was the money to buy expensive toys that the manufacturer leaves behind two and a half years later. I guess it is good that someone out there is willing to take the hit.
The problem is that on Windows RT devices, users will not be allowed to disable Secure Boot or provide their own keys. Such devices will be Windows RT only bricks.
You are off by a factor of ten. Process sizes are currently in the 22 - 32 nm range. 0.45 micron (450 nm) would have been close to the state of the art almost twenty years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22_nanometer
"Some of the commercial airports with asphalt runways include Baltimore-Washington International, Lindbergh Field in San Diego, McCarren International (Las Vegas), Memphis International, Newark International, Oakland International, O'Hare International (Chicago), and San Francisco International." http://www.moasphalt.org/facts/asphalt/airport_qa.pdf
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The memory is going to stay on the processor cards. It would be somewhere between slow and ridiculously slow (by modern standards) to do anything else. The slot interface is PCIe x8. An I/O interconnect. Not memory, certainly not SMP. More like a tightly coupled cluster.
Cable companies pay television stations for content, not for delivery. It is not yet quite practical to let users pay for content independently because cable channels occupy a fixed portion of the bandwidth of the entire downstream network. When the fixed allocation of bandwidth required for a real time channel becomes irrelevant, cable channels as we know them will go away, and users will pay for content directly. The cost for delivering the content is another story.
That is what network peering arrangements are about - nothing to do with content, but rather with traffic. Big difference. It makes sense from a traffic engineering point of view for a provider like Netflix to cover part of the cost of delivering the traffic to the end user. The cost of producing the content, on the other hand, is none of the ISPs business. That is between Netflix and the end user. The ISP does not charge for content, the ISP does not pay for content. The ISP deals in traffic.
The summary is ridiculously misleading. The Senate didn't vote before midnight either. They have yet to hold a vote, although supposedly one is scheduled for about 4:00 a.m. EST. Sometime tomorrow morning the House will reconvene to consider whatever the Senate passes.
Ditto. That is the PR of the patent industry, which lives and breathes by placing impediments to the progress of science and the useful arts, but there isn't the slightest evidence that the social benefits out weigh the social costs, to say nothing of the of the rent seeking, soul sucking patent attorneys who profit from this perverse deprivation of moral and intellectual rights.
There is no shortage of literature in defense of that position. The patent system, as presently constituted, is a first class train wreck. Virtually every informed observer who is not on the payroll of the patent bar, and who lacks a vested interest in some trivial non-invention, understands that fact.
The OS has nothing to do with it. Firewire ports are DMA, as are Thunderbolt ports if I remember correctly, which means access to the port means direct access to the RAM. That means you can not only read the data, but you can also potentially manipulate it (killing processes, injecting code into already running processes, etc.).
Serious computers, running serious operating systems, use an IOMMU to restrict the access of externally accessible DMA devices to main memory, in much the same way a regular MMU is used to restrict access by user processes, by making other memory basically invisible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOMMU
More detail: It should not be possible to get a patent on anything. Granting monopolies on ideas is economically counterproductive, morally suspect, and intellectually perverse.
AT&T acquired a near monopoly long before the government briefly nationalized it during World War I. It was the governments concern that AT&T be required to interconnect with other carriers, and they did just that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment
In addition, if you want something to blame for the establishment of the AT&T monopoly I suggest you squarely attribute it to U.S. patent law, which is highly susceptible to the creation of such monopolies, cartels, and conglomerates. There is nothing "free market" about a patent. The patent is one of the greatest offenses against free market principles ever devised.
My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time? Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?
Long distance and national phone calls are charged at a higher rate as it is the simplest way of getting businesses and wealthy people to subsidize the maintenance of the local telephone network.
That is why they invented progressive income taxes. No need to stunt commerce and communication too.
SQL Server? That is great, if you are a Microsoft only shop, and your needs don't get too out of the ordinary. Large OLTP databases tend to run on Oracle or DB2, on an operating system actually designed for the purpose. Neither is cheap of course, by any means, but together they dwarf SQL Server in market share (measured in dollars, not installations).
A bunch of rich guys injected liquidity into the system because there was no central bank to do so.
Quite true. What you do not mention, however, is that non-fractional-reserve currencies do not have liquidity crises. If fractional reserve banking (meaning legalized embezzlement of deposits) was prohibited, as it had been in common law for most of the past two millennia, the Panic of 1907 would have been over before it started.
An economy can handle massive swings in equity indices without serious problems. But as soon as people start demanding the return of a deposit all hell breaks loose. In the current system a demand deposit isn't a deposit at all, it is a loan to the bank that a depositor (lender actually) can call at any time.
No economy deals well with callable loans on a large scale, and yet our current banking system is structured on them. We just call them demand deposits instead, even though they have nothing legally in common with deposits except the name.
If too many customers start calling their loans to the bank, the whole house of cards starts falling apart. A house of cards that can grow so big that no combination of honest monied interests can bail them out. Hence the advent of fiat currency, where the central bank can make money out of thin air (roughly speaking) so that it can keep those highly leveraged hedge funds we call banks afloat.
like gold - you severely limit the flexibility of the currency to cope with a crisis
There is nothing wrong with gold. The problem is that legalized embezzlement of deposits (aka fractional reserve banking) is incompatible with hard currency. With FRB, just like any other embezzlement scheme, anytime anything goes seriously wrong, either depositors are out their money or their holdings are devalued.
It is economically impossible for holders of a debt backed currency to be made whole in real terms. All FRB institutions are ticking time bombs that can only be kept alive by debasing the currency - meaning negative real interest rates on all "deposits".
In a report I wrote last year, I estimated the markup for Internet services was 6,452 per cent
It is actually better than that, much better. Somewhere along the line, a customer sent that data to an Internet Service Provider for free. By a simple exercise of elementary arithmetic, we can see that the markup charged on data transmitted and received is actually infinite. (Shhh! don't let anyone know).
There is no American version of Brussels.
Washington D.C. is the American version of Brussels.
But what purpose does opening up their communication hold?
The issue at hand is not whether scientists should be required to publish their emails on the Internet, but whether they should have legal privilege against subpoenas. A better question is what is it about science that requires granting legal privileges that approximately no one else has? Courts exist to decide legitimate cases and controversies. How are they supposed to do that if the they cannot gain access to the relevant information? Flip a coin?
No, it doesn't effectively change the license on the existing code
I didn't say it changed the license on anything. I said it has the effect (the practical effect) of subjecting the whole file to the more restrictive license. The reason why this is the case is (as you note) it can quickly become impossible to determine which lines are subject to which license.
Of course it doesn't subject the original code to the more restrictive license, you just don't know what is the original code. If you want to create something based on the original code with modifications under a different license, you should start with a clean copy. The further encumbered version is almost useless for that.
I agree, however, that there is no point in encumbering a BSD licensed source file with another license if all you are going to do is make minor changes. If you are going to make major changes, on the other hand, you may have a very good reason to do just that.
I agree, you certainly cannot remove the copyright notice, nor can you remove the license. However, you can indicate that a given file contains "portions" copyright so and so that are subject to a BSD license, and portions copyright someone else that are subject to a more restrictive license.
That has the effect of subjecting the whole file (assuming substantial modifications have been made) to the restrictions contained in both licenses, because the copyrights of both the original copyright holder and later contributors are applicable. In the case of code that was originally BSD licensed that has substantial contributions released under a more restrictive license, the file is (for most practical purposes) governed by the the conditions of the the more restrictive license, because the requirements of the BSD licensed portions are trivial to satisfy.
No care need be taken to avoid mixing the code subject to the different licenses within the file either, as long as the copyright notice and conditions that apply to portions derived from the original distribution are included. The whole point of a derived work is that the copyrights (and hence the conditions) of both contributors apply. If a function or code fragment subject to the terms of both licenses is not a legal nullity, no problem.
GPL-compatible does not mean that you can simply copy and paste code willy-nilly into a GPL project.
Most BSD style licenses are unencumbered enough that you can relicense direct derivatives (not just composite works) under practically any terms you want. Commercial companies do this all the time, and it is in fact what makes BSD style licensing for open source software projects so controversial - anyone can create a proprietary fork at will, with components that quickly lose their BSD character as modifications are added.
GPL licensed derivatives of BSD licensed components can be created in the same manner. It is the copyright of the authors of the modifications that makes the relicensing have teeth, it is the lack of a prohibition on additional license terms in BSD style licenses that makes it possible.
The MS-PL, on the other hand, specifically prohibits this practice, much like the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Both are moderate copyleft licenses, designed to make sure that derivatives of covered source files are always available under the terms of the original license.
There is no question that a system like Bedrock allows the ultimate in flexibility in terms of running programs from different distributions and the like. However, a multiple-distribution system like that adds a considerable amount of administrative complexity, making it relatively unlikely to be adopted by non-specialists.
There is an intermediate step that would solve much of the problem here - change the way that Linux packages are packaged and accessed so that multiple versions of library packages can be installed without conflicts, name changes, or repackaging.
The easiest way to do this would be to change the package manager to support a two level namespace instead of a flat one. So instead of simply installing the latest version of the package from your distribution, you could install a (largely) compatible version with the same name from a different source, and the package manager would pull in the necessary libraries from that source (or other ABI compatible sources) and track them as such. As long as the libraries themselves were appropriately versioned, the library packages would install without conflicts.
That wouldn't come close to letting you install any package from any distribution (in some cases the dependencies would be too complicated, or the ABI too different in subtle ways), but it would allow you to install more recent versions of most packages from the newer versions of the same distribution (including beta, rawhide, testing, versions etc) without problems in most cases, and many ABI compatible packages from other distributions as well.
In the 1990s, when Internet access from homes was mostly by dial-up, those lucrative âoetermination fees,â as theyâ(TM)re called, led to a proliferation of Internet service providers
This claim is dubious, to put it mildly. The termination fees were paid to the terminating telephone company. The ISP had nothing to do with it. In some cases this may have allowed CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers) to provide slightly lower rates to independent ISPs, but that is hardly the sort of thing that would lead to a proliferation of ISPs by itself.
The real reason for the proliferation of ISPs is that the phone companies themselves dragged their feet as long as possible on providing anything other than ordinary dialup service. ISP startup costs were relatively low, demand was very high, and at the time ISP service came with all sorts of value added features to allow ISPs to distinguish themselves from their competition.
In addition, if the FCC didn't wildly misread the Communications Act of 1934 at the prompting of the phone companies, there would still be a large number of independent ISPs. Internet access is not an information service, it is a telecommunications service.
UTOPIA is great, if you can get it. The problem is that your city needs to sign on, and you and preferably several of your neighbors need to each agree to pay ~$30 a month to lease a fiber connection (or purchase the the right to use one indefinitely for ~$3000). Then you pay your ISP / IPTV / telco provider to deliver service to you over the shared Ethernet network. Build out has been relatively slow, in part because they originally projected that most customers would sign up for Internet, television, and phone service over the network, where in reality most want just plain Internet service.
Utah is a heavily Republican dominated state, and UTOPIA is certainly not on the Republican hit list. It is mostly on the hit list of lobbyists for CenturyLink (Qwest) and Comcast. They tried to have the state prohibit such networks several years ago and failed. UTOPIA is now a fait accompli and the chances of it being shut down by legislative action are non-existent. They need those revenues to pay the bonds back. The only question is can UTOPIA succeed enough with its new revenue model to make new cities want to sign on. I sure hope so.
I don't know who was the money to buy expensive toys that the manufacturer leaves behind two and a half years later. I guess it is good that someone out there is willing to take the hit.
The problem is that on Windows RT devices, users will not be allowed to disable Secure Boot or provide their own keys. Such devices will be Windows RT only bricks.
You are off by a factor of ten. Process sizes are currently in the 22 - 32 nm range. 0.45 micron (450 nm) would have been close to the state of the art almost twenty years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22_nanometer
"Some of the commercial airports with asphalt runways include Baltimore-Washington International, Lindbergh Field in San Diego, McCarren International (Las Vegas), Memphis International, Newark International, Oakland International, O'Hare International (Chicago), and San Francisco International."
http://www.moasphalt.org/facts/asphalt/airport_qa.pdf