If anybody is interested, I've developed WormScan last year, which is a Java-based program (GPL) which can analyze your Apache log files for pretty much anything you want (just plug in your regular expressions). It detects Nimda and CR1+2 out of the box. It's easy to add your own entries to scan for.
What the fsck are you talking about? I've got Sun's Java (Programmer) Certification - guess the cost...
Test (must take) - $150 CANADIAN DOLLARS
1 Class (optional) - $2500 CDN
So there. If you already know the basics, you could just take the test for a mere $150. Better yet - it's for LIFE, not just a year (you get certified for 'The Java 2 Platform').
This is what I've always loved about Descent! For those of you who're not familiar with it, Descent was P2P, not requiring any one machine to be a server. Somehow the load was shared amongst all the clients. It was never a problem if one machine in particular crashed or disconnected - the game continued between the rest.
Granted, I think it was made to work on a LAN only, but if ID could pull this sort of feat off with Doom 3, I'd be all for it!
I'm guessing that this would eliminate the need for one person to have tons of bandwidth and a good machine dedicated to be a server. This should allow virtually *anybody* to start a game (even those on dialup, maybe?)
As someone who's cable is limited to 128k up, I'm very excited about this development!
My company uses it (can't reveal name here - contact arozeluk at websoup period net directly and I can tell you)
We replaced our application, an ASP/COM deal that was horribly unstable, with two load-balanced front-end servers running RedHat Linux 7.2/Apache/Tomcat. This setup's been in place since last December.
Originally we started on Tomcat 3.2, then upgraded to 3.3. I'm in the middle of fixing up small things to make everything work correctly with Tomcat 4 (no major problems, just trying to take advantage of new features). But our production is still Tomcat 3.3 for the moment and it's been great!
If you can, go with Tomcat 4 right away. While I've found both to be stable, Tomcat 4 seems to be faster and also has built-in support for JNDI database connection pooling. Big plus.
Don't trust servlet reloading, though. I've had problems with it. Thus, no updates are made to our application during the day, which normally isn't a big deal. A quick FTP of new code at 2am, and a restart-by-crontab and the new code is loaded nightly.
Tomcat 4 also attempts to preserve sessions between restarts. This is neat, but in a load-balanced configuration won't work because the user will be transferred to another server, so their session would be lost. It takes quite long to shut down and restart Tomcat 4, but in my environment it hasn't mattered any.
I say go with it. It's been very stable for us, and if you email me I can give you further details about exactly what our app does.
Note that there's pages out there which describe how it might be possible to replicate sessions between servers. I suggest you investigate this before starting. Until now I haven't had the time, but I will be looking into it shortly as it would solve the problem of needing to restart the application during the day for me.
I don't understand why anyone would want to use a library or something like Perl for that. Makes it more complicated than it should be. I especially don't understand why you would want to buy a book about this when you can do: man awk
Primarily because it was a cross-platform solution, and (at the time) I didn't know how to do it in Java (I do now, but can't bother to rewrite something that works).
The script originally ran on a Windows box, but it has since moved to a SCO Unix box.
Finally, remember that a form-based login and some navigation was required (and saving of cookies in the process). This makes lynx and such more or less useless when trying to automate this. The Perl script then can proceed to dump the data directly into the database (or output as CSV, as mentioned earlier) with just a few more lines of code.
Or you could have cut and pasted the table into access and saved as CSV.
Unfortunately that wouldn't be feasible because this feed comes in daily, and the idea was to reduce manual work. Much easier to just schedule it with 'crontab' or 'at'.
LWP is great!
on
Perl & LWP
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Perl's been a wonderful tool in my situation. There's been a situation in my company where we needed to gather data from a (large) supplier, who was unwilling to provide us with a CSV (or otherwise easily parseable) file. Instead, we had to 'log in' to their site, and get the data as an HTML table from the browser.
In one evening, I wrote a quick Perl routine to perform the login and navigation to the appropriate page by LWP, download the needed page, and use REs to extract the appropriate information (yes, traditional screen scrape)
The beauty was that it was easy. I don't usually do Perl, but in this case it proved to be a wonderful tool creation tool:) LWP was a lifesaver here, and that script has worked for over a year now!
By Ryan Chen-Wing on Wednesday, August 14, 2002 at 12:33 p.m.
MS Ca Pres Clegg and Dr. Dave sign agreement At 10:00 today Microsoft Canada Co. President Frank Clegg announced $2.3 million funding that will facilitate three projects in the areas of academic research, education solutions, and curriculum integration. UW President David Johnston, UW's Director of ICR Vic DiCiccio, and MS Canada's Director of Education Sector George Kyriakis spoke as part of the announcement.
The aim of the research project is to develop equation recognition for new Tablet PCs that, in addition to having the functionality of laptops, have a screen which is touch sensitive to styli.
Clegg said that Tablet PCs are set to be released 7 November this year. He said he couldn't say for sure what the retail price will, "It would be great if we could get it down to the price of of a regular laptop."
Clegg and Dr. Dave discussing the Tablet PC The education solutions project will allow students to access lab equipment and simulators. A press release says that 8,000 course students in E&CE will benefit from this.
Under curriculum integration, first-choice applicants to UW's E&CE program will be allowed to take a new pre-university programming course in C#, E&CE 050. Completion of this course will be mandatory for students entering the E&CE program. C# is a new programming language developed by Microsoft.
The existing course E&CE 150, an introductory course to programming, will change from using C++ to C#.
DiCiccio commented on changing curriculum under the agreement, "E&CE weighed all the aspects of it and was comfortable with the change...UW is really sensitive to curriculum decisions it makes." He also joked, "$2.3 million isn't enough to sacrifice curriculum."
DiCiccio, Johnston, Clegg and Kyriakis At the end of the press conference, Clegg and President Johnston signed the agreement using an Acer Tablet PC. The announcement was made at UW in the Davis Centre's ICR Corporate Partner Lounge, which is also known as the fishbowl or the wine-and-cheese lounge. About 100 people attended.
The funding is part of the Microsoft Canada Academic Innovation Alliance, a $10 million dollar fund administered over five years that will accept proposals from acredited universities. A press release describes the four categories of the fund, academic research, education solutions, curriculum integration and industry outreach.
Kyriakis said, "We believe we should create ties between the business community and the academic community to ensure that innovation happens into the future." He added, "What we're doing at Waterloo is just fantastic."
All projects under the alliance will incorporate Microsoft technology. Clegg said, "We think that is the value that we provide."
Microsoft Canada President Frank Clegg has agreed to answer the 10 best questions posed by uws readers about the Microsoft Canada Academic Innovation Alliance, and its impact at UW. So, post your questions. uws editors will select the 10 best and send them to Mr. Clegg, then post his responses.
I agree that the servers should not be flexing as you described... have you written/contacted someone at Compaq about it? If I had a couple of machines like that, I would be complaining big time with them:)
I would, but in this case the hardware isn't my call. Our IT guys are supposed to look after that (I only manage the software on the box itself). They seem to think it's funny but not worth pursuing.
I agree with you, though. If I had the clout I'd be bitching something awful. As it is, if the boxes break, I'll probably just get new servers:) I just hope they break one at a time (not simultaneously) so the clustering can handle the breakdown...
Of course, a lot of our servers are sitting on shelves rather than on rails in a cabinet... silly colo facility and their lack of cabinets:)
I've got a couple of desktop machines sitting on Compaq shelves in a Compaq rack cabinet. It's funny - the darned shelves can't support the weight of the computers - they sag in the centre too!
I should take a picture of all of this - it's actually quite amusing, IMO.
Does this problem occur with all 1U servers, or is Compaq just skimping on the chassis quality? I apologize for the ignorant questions... but I haven't had the chance to work with 1U servers yet.
FYI I was wrong in my previous post - we have five of the DL360s, not 3 as I originally thought (my app runs on a cluster of 3 of them, which could explain my confusion). Yes, all of them are experiencing the same problem.
They make wonderful servers, in terms of the components inside. Very stable, had no problems (except one of them had a broken RAID controller... which got replaced under warranty). All of them running RedHat Linux, installed directly from the CDs (no special configuration required to make 'em work).
Servers should not *ever* flex like this - I think Compaq skimped on the chassis supports. I've had much better experience with some of the newer IBM eServer boxes. They seem to be more physically stable in the same configuration. My only complaint with the IBM eServers is that they use Celeron... ick. However, they came with RedHat 7.1 installed, which I promptly formatted and upgraded to 7.3 instead - no problems whatsoever.
They're mounted on rails. I forgot to mention - obviously it's from their Proliant line (DL360).
I wonder if I'll be getting new servers soon:)
Before you ask, I'm just an application developer. Our IS guys who set it up just look at it, and either just shrug or laugh. I did have a look, though - they ARE mounted properly, using Compaq rails on a Compaq rack!
I've developed WormScan, a Java-based program which does exactly this. Have a look at the Freshmeat listing. If you're interested, you could follow the link to my home server's graphs (be nice - it's not a terribly fast link!)
P2P is all great and everything, but nowadays I'm worried that it'll all be killed off because of bandwidth costs.
Most cable/DSL companies are now putting caps on traffic, and are starting to charge by the byte when you go over those limits.
I don't know about you, but while I don't mind paying for bandwidth I use, I sure as hell am not going to pay for someone else to get music/videos/pictures/etc at my expense.
This also brings in an interesting dilemma - if both users are on the came cable company's backbone, are they double-dipping if they charge both users for that bandwidth?
Calculations for Revenue expectations are off. In the proposal,
we see that membership will cost:
B. Membership For a reasonable fee, EUR 50 per year, you get access to the closed Membership area, which includes all user services, all executable versions, all source codes.
Later, we see the revenue expectations:
Revenue expectations (July-December 2002)
- Initial funding (community, e-shop, sponsoring): 100.000 - Member License subscriptions: 1000 in 6 months, 50.000 - E-shop revenues general products: 20.000 - Product License subscriptions: 10 x 5k = 50.000
Total: EUR 220.000
Costs:
- Website: 6k - Webmaster / sysadm: 6k - Full time operations (wages) 30k - General costs 10k - NaN Holding license fee: xxxx
First of all, 50 * 1000 for membership revenue is PER YEAR, not for 6 months. Divide that by two. That knocks about 25k off their revenue.
Where can I find a webmaster for 12k a year? Or a full-time operations staff for 60k? The site only costing 12k per year? Is bandwidth really that cheap?
I'm not sure, but these numbers aren't sounding that realistic to me. Best of luck to them - I will probably try to support them with my $$, but I sure hope they have a clear idea of where they're going with this.
At least, that's what it appears to be from the proposal.
Looks like you'd have to pay to get a copy of the sources (but not necessarily binaries). I'm not sure if the GPL will be legal in the case that they're proposing. Nevertheless, it still seems like a great deal to me. I'd love to get my hands on that source code for the cost of a yearly membership.
And I quote: Blender Foundation activities
To establish a solid revenue model, the Foundation will limit access to free services and free copies of Blender Creator. The web portal will be reorganised to serve this purpose. In general there will be four levels of access (or licenses) people can get.
The licenses can be defined to match standards for 'Free Software' or 'Open Source'. Key isue here is the right for Foundation Members to re-use or re-distribute the source codes, but strictly limited to projects that work within the (same) GPL structure. Challenge for the Foundation then is to establish a good services and management system, to provide a strong incentive for users and coders to regularly visit the web site, and participate in making Blender a better product.
A. Free (gratis) access Limited parts of general user information (executables, tutorials, help files, discussion forums) will be accessible for free. The Foundation board can decide on the level and quality of free access , related to exploitation requirements.
B. Membership For a reasonable fee, EUR 50 per year, you get access to the closed Membership area, which includes all user services, all executable versions, all source codes. The license for the executables and codes will be the 'copylefted GNU GPL' license, also known as 'GPL' for short. This allows Members to freely use and redistribute the code, but restricts building new applications with Blender codes to other GPLed software projects.
Membership is personal and cannot be transferred. For companies or schools a Bulk Member license (10+ users) can be obtained for EU 495.
HP has done this for ages as well. I have a few 3 year old Kayak XA and XU workstations (P2/300 to 500) that have exactly this. When you take the case apart, you would notice a molded plastic duct that runs from two fans through the processor's heat sink, and back out through the back of the case.
Making any changes to the hardware required taking all of that crap out, but it did do an excellent job at keeping the components cool.
Slashdot Mirror
If anybody is interested, I've developed WormScan last year, which is a Java-based program (GPL) which can analyze your Apache log files for pretty much anything you want (just plug in your regular expressions). It detects Nimda and CR1+2 out of the box. It's easy to add your own entries to scan for.
According to my logs (please be gentle), I've been hit 650 times yesterday.
Shameless plug, yes. But it does the job and the users of WormScan seem to be pretty happy with it, judging from the emails I've gotten so far.
Why is this a bad thing? It's not like there's any lunar ecology to disturb, or lunar inhabitants to threaten.
What if it lands on my property? Who can I sue?
A "big cross in the box" would not be counted. You are supposed to completely fill in the box (or circle). Your vote would have been rejected.
Obviously you've never voted in Canada before. We use "the big X". The votes are counted by hand, not by a scanner.
the costs of Java Certificationfrom Sun %10,000
What the fsck are you talking about? I've got Sun's Java (Programmer) Certification - guess the cost...
Test (must take) - $150 CANADIAN DOLLARS
1 Class (optional) - $2500 CDN
So there. If you already know the basics, you could just take the test for a mere $150. Better yet - it's for LIFE, not just a year (you get certified for 'The Java 2 Platform').
This is what I've always loved about Descent! For those of you who're not familiar with it, Descent was P2P, not requiring any one machine to be a server. Somehow the load was shared amongst all the clients. It was never a problem if one machine in particular crashed or disconnected - the game continued between the rest.
Granted, I think it was made to work on a LAN only, but if ID could pull this sort of feat off with Doom 3, I'd be all for it!
I'm guessing that this would eliminate the need for one person to have tons of bandwidth and a good machine dedicated to be a server. This should allow virtually *anybody* to start a game (even those on dialup, maybe?)
As someone who's cable is limited to 128k up, I'm very excited about this development!
My company uses it (can't reveal name here - contact arozeluk at websoup period net directly and I can tell you)
We replaced our application, an ASP/COM deal that was horribly unstable, with two load-balanced front-end servers running RedHat Linux 7.2/Apache/Tomcat. This setup's been in place since last December.
Originally we started on Tomcat 3.2, then upgraded to 3.3. I'm in the middle of fixing up small things to make everything work correctly with Tomcat 4 (no major problems, just trying to take advantage of new features). But our production is still Tomcat 3.3 for the moment and it's been great!
If you can, go with Tomcat 4 right away. While I've found both to be stable, Tomcat 4 seems to be faster and also has built-in support for JNDI database connection pooling. Big plus.
Don't trust servlet reloading, though. I've had problems with it. Thus, no updates are made to our application during the day, which normally isn't a big deal. A quick FTP of new code at 2am, and a restart-by-crontab and the new code is loaded nightly.
Tomcat 4 also attempts to preserve sessions between restarts. This is neat, but in a load-balanced configuration won't work because the user will be transferred to another server, so their session would be lost. It takes quite long to shut down and restart Tomcat 4, but in my environment it hasn't mattered any.
I say go with it. It's been very stable for us, and if you email me I can give you further details about exactly what our app does.
Note that there's pages out there which describe how it might be possible to replicate sessions between servers. I suggest you investigate this before starting. Until now I haven't had the time, but I will be looking into it shortly as it would solve the problem of needing to restart the application during the day for me.
I don't understand why anyone would want to use a library or something like Perl for that. Makes it more complicated than it should be. I especially don't understand why you would want to buy a book about this when you can do: man awk
Primarily because it was a cross-platform solution, and (at the time) I didn't know how to do it in Java (I do now, but can't bother to rewrite something that works).
The script originally ran on a Windows box, but it has since moved to a SCO Unix box.
Finally, remember that a form-based login and some navigation was required (and saving of cookies in the process). This makes lynx and such more or less useless when trying to automate this. The Perl script then can proceed to dump the data directly into the database (or output as CSV, as mentioned earlier) with just a few more lines of code.
Or you could have cut and pasted the table into access and saved as CSV.
Unfortunately that wouldn't be feasible because this feed comes in daily, and the idea was to reduce manual work. Much easier to just schedule it with 'crontab' or 'at'.
Perl's been a wonderful tool in my situation. There's been a situation in my company where we needed to gather data from a (large) supplier, who was unwilling to provide us with a CSV (or otherwise easily parseable) file. Instead, we had to 'log in' to their site, and get the data as an HTML table from the browser.
:) LWP was a lifesaver here, and that script has worked for over a year now!
In one evening, I wrote a quick Perl routine to perform the login and navigation to the appropriate page by LWP, download the needed page, and use REs to extract the appropriate information (yes, traditional screen scrape)
The beauty was that it was easy. I don't usually do Perl, but in this case it proved to be a wonderful tool creation tool
By Ryan Chen-Wing on Wednesday, August 14, 2002 at 12:33 p.m.
MS Ca Pres Clegg and Dr. Dave sign agreement At 10:00 today Microsoft Canada Co. President Frank Clegg announced $2.3 million funding that will facilitate three projects in the areas of academic research, education solutions, and curriculum integration. UW President David Johnston, UW's Director of ICR Vic DiCiccio, and MS Canada's Director of Education Sector George Kyriakis spoke as part of the announcement.
The aim of the research project is to develop equation recognition for new Tablet PCs that, in addition to having the functionality of laptops, have a screen which is touch sensitive to styli.
Clegg said that Tablet PCs are set to be released 7 November this year. He said he couldn't say for sure what the retail price will, "It would be great if we could get it down to the price of of a regular laptop."
Clegg and Dr. Dave discussing the Tablet PC The education solutions project will allow students to access lab equipment and simulators. A press release says that 8,000 course students in E&CE will benefit from this.
Under curriculum integration, first-choice applicants to UW's E&CE program will be allowed to take a new pre-university programming course in C#, E&CE 050. Completion of this course will be mandatory for students entering the E&CE program. C# is a new programming language developed by Microsoft.
The existing course E&CE 150, an introductory course to programming, will change from using C++ to C#.
DiCiccio commented on changing curriculum under the agreement, "E&CE weighed all the aspects of it and was comfortable with the change...UW is really sensitive to curriculum decisions it makes." He also joked, "$2.3 million isn't enough to sacrifice curriculum."
DiCiccio, Johnston, Clegg and Kyriakis At the end of the press conference, Clegg and President Johnston signed the agreement using an Acer Tablet PC. The announcement was made at UW in the Davis Centre's ICR Corporate Partner Lounge, which is also known as the fishbowl or the wine-and-cheese lounge. About 100 people attended.
The funding is part of the Microsoft Canada Academic Innovation Alliance, a $10 million dollar fund administered over five years that will accept proposals from acredited universities. A press release describes the four categories of the fund, academic research, education solutions, curriculum integration and industry outreach.
Kyriakis said, "We believe we should create ties between the business community and the academic community to ensure that innovation happens into the future." He added, "What we're doing at Waterloo is just fantastic."
All projects under the alliance will incorporate Microsoft technology. Clegg said, "We think that is the value that we provide."
Microsoft Canada President Frank Clegg has agreed to answer the 10 best questions posed by uws readers about the Microsoft Canada Academic Innovation Alliance, and its impact at UW. So, post your questions. uws editors will select the 10 best and send them to Mr. Clegg, then post his responses.
Warning: Too many connections in /home/uws/websites/uwstudent.org/lib/dbconnect.php on line 2
/home/uws/websites/uwstudent.org/lib/dbconnect.php on line 2
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in
could not connect to database
How much of that money is going to be spent on a shiny new SQL 2000 server?
#7 - they need a new Beowulf cluster of bearings. Where can I get one?
If you could get pictures, that would be great! I'd love to see how things look. hehe.
I'll see what I can do. It might be a week or two before I can get something, but I'll give it a shot.
I agree that the servers should not be flexing as you described... have you written/contacted someone at Compaq about it? If I had a couple of machines like that, I would be complaining big time with them :)
:) I just hope they break one at a time (not simultaneously) so the clustering can handle the breakdown...
I would, but in this case the hardware isn't my call. Our IT guys are supposed to look after that (I only manage the software on the box itself). They seem to think it's funny but not worth pursuing.
I agree with you, though. If I had the clout I'd be bitching something awful. As it is, if the boxes break, I'll probably just get new servers
Of course, a lot of our servers are sitting on shelves rather than on rails in a cabinet... silly colo facility and their lack of cabinets :)
I've got a couple of desktop machines sitting on Compaq shelves in a Compaq rack cabinet. It's funny - the darned shelves can't support the weight of the computers - they sag in the centre too!
I should take a picture of all of this - it's actually quite amusing, IMO.
Does this problem occur with all 1U servers, or is Compaq just skimping on the chassis quality? I apologize for the ignorant questions... but I haven't had the chance to work with 1U servers yet.
FYI I was wrong in my previous post - we have five of the DL360s, not 3 as I originally thought (my app runs on a cluster of 3 of them, which could explain my confusion). Yes, all of them are experiencing the same problem.
They make wonderful servers, in terms of the components inside. Very stable, had no problems (except one of them had a broken RAID controller... which got replaced under warranty). All of them running RedHat Linux, installed directly from the CDs (no special configuration required to make 'em work).
Servers should not *ever* flex like this - I think Compaq skimped on the chassis supports. I've had much better experience with some of the newer IBM eServer boxes. They seem to be more physically stable in the same configuration. My only complaint with the IBM eServers is that they use Celeron... ick. However, they came with RedHat 7.1 installed, which I promptly formatted and upgraded to 7.3 instead - no problems whatsoever.
They're mounted on rails. I forgot to mention - obviously it's from their Proliant line (DL360).
:)
I wonder if I'll be getting new servers soon
Before you ask, I'm just an application developer. Our IS guys who set it up just look at it, and either just shrug or laugh. I did have a look, though - they ARE mounted properly, using Compaq rails on a Compaq rack!
My company has 3 Compaq DL360 Servers (1U, rackmount, only ~6 months old).
They must be made of cheap parts, because after they've been in the rack for more than a day or so, all three of them have been sagging in the middle.
Darn things can't support their own weight!
My home server, running WormScan:
Nimda - 319242 attacks
CodeRed 2 - 15488 attacks
CodeRed - 359 attacks
All from 5777 unique hosts.
I've developed WormScan, a Java-based program which does exactly this. Have a look at the
Freshmeat listing. If you're interested, you could follow the link to my home server's graphs (be nice - it's not a terribly fast link!)
P2P is all great and everything, but nowadays I'm worried that it'll all be killed off because of bandwidth costs.
Most cable/DSL companies are now putting caps on traffic, and are starting to charge by the byte when you go over those limits.
I don't know about you, but while I don't mind paying for bandwidth I use, I sure as hell am not going to pay for someone else to get music/videos/pictures/etc at my expense.
This also brings in an interesting dilemma - if both users are on the came cable company's backbone, are they double-dipping if they charge both users for that bandwidth?
Calculations for Revenue expectations are off. In the proposal, we see that membership will cost:
B. Membership
For a reasonable fee, EUR 50 per year, you get access to the closed Membership area, which includes all user services, all executable versions, all source codes.
Later, we see the revenue expectations:
Revenue expectations (July-December 2002)
- Initial funding (community, e-shop, sponsoring): 100.000
- Member License subscriptions: 1000 in 6 months, 50.000
- E-shop revenues general products: 20.000
- Product License subscriptions: 10 x 5k = 50.000
Total: EUR 220.000
Costs:
- Website: 6k
- Webmaster / sysadm: 6k
- Full time operations (wages) 30k
- General costs 10k
- NaN Holding license fee: xxxx
First of all, 50 * 1000 for membership revenue is PER YEAR, not for 6 months. Divide that by two. That knocks about 25k off their revenue.
Where can I find a webmaster for 12k a year? Or a full-time operations staff for 60k? The site only costing 12k per year? Is bandwidth really that cheap?
I'm not sure, but these numbers aren't sounding that realistic to me. Best of luck to them - I will probably try to support them with my $$, but I sure hope they have a clear idea of where they're going with this.
At least, that's what it appears to be from the proposal. Looks like you'd have to pay to get a copy of the sources (but not necessarily binaries). I'm not sure if the GPL will be legal in the case that they're proposing. Nevertheless, it still seems like a great deal to me. I'd love to get my hands on that source code for the cost of a yearly membership.
And I quote:
Blender Foundation activities
To establish a solid revenue model, the Foundation will limit access to free services and free copies of Blender Creator. The web portal will be reorganised to serve this purpose. In general there will be four levels of access (or licenses) people can get.
The licenses can be defined to match standards for 'Free Software' or 'Open Source'. Key isue here is the right for Foundation Members to re-use or re-distribute the source codes, but strictly limited to projects that work within the (same) GPL structure. Challenge for the Foundation then is to establish a good services and management system, to provide a strong incentive for users and coders to regularly visit the web site, and participate in making Blender a better product.
A. Free (gratis) access
Limited parts of general user information (executables, tutorials, help files, discussion forums) will be accessible for free. The Foundation board can decide on the level and quality of free access , related to exploitation requirements.
B. Membership
For a reasonable fee, EUR 50 per year, you get access to the closed Membership area, which includes all user services, all executable versions, all source codes. The license for the executables and codes will be the 'copylefted GNU GPL' license, also known as 'GPL' for short. This allows Members to freely use and redistribute the code, but restricts building new applications with Blender codes to other GPLed software projects. Membership is personal and cannot be transferred. For companies or schools a Bulk Member license (10+ users) can be obtained for EU 495.
Have you heard Machinehead by Bush?
Breathe in... Breathe out.... Breathe in.... Breathe out.... Breathe in
HP has done this for ages as well. I have a few 3 year old Kayak XA and XU workstations (P2/300 to 500) that have exactly this. When you take the case apart, you would notice a molded plastic duct that runs from two fans through the processor's heat sink, and back out through the back of the case.
Making any changes to the hardware required taking all of that crap out, but it did do an excellent job at keeping the components cool.