One more little bit to add to this. As for AOL or some company like that using FreeDB and swamping it, you can't charge them money in the FreeDB model. To my knowledge, charging AOL but not other commercial organizations would be considered a discriminatory business practice and therefore lawsuit material. You have to be very careful when taking money from someone in a situation like this.
So what happens if a free beer alternative suddenly becomes too popular? Does it die under its own weight, or does it go to a commercial model to survive? Or perhaps donations? That might work, but probably only to a certain point...
Sorry for being flamebait, but can someone explain something to me? Everyone's bitching about how "I entered a bunch of data and submitted it to them, and now they're charging people for it, those assholes." Can someone tell me the last time a user of CDDB actually paid to use the service??
Last time I checked, users never paid a dime to use CDDB. If you use a freeware app, you don't pay a dime. If you use a shareware or commercial app, you pay the developer for the program. In neither case do you actually pay CDDB for anything. Sure, if you pay for the program, CDDB takes some of the money from the developer. But what if CDDB didn't take money from the developer? You'd still have to pay for the freaking thing.
So, as far as I can tell, there's absolutely no difference whatsoever.
Okay, so FreeDB doesn't take any money, you say. Well, someone's footing the bill. FreeDB hosts take bandwidth that someone's donating on machines that someone had to buy with actual money. Nice of them, but it ain't free.
What I don't understand is why non-free applications should expect to use FreeDB without paying anything. What if AOL decided to have Winamp use FreeDB instead of CDDB? A big, rich, moneygrubbing company making even more money off of the donated resources of the FreeDB folks. Even further, what if the millions of Winamp users swamped the FreeDB servers and they had to fork out money from their own pockets to add more resources to handle the load?
What I'm describing here is financial reality. Nothing is truly free. Costs are paid for by someone, always, and what I'm hearing here is that most people don't give a crap so long as it's not them shelling out the dough.
Gee, nobody ever told me that Gracenote shut down lyrics.ch. I always thought it was Harry Fox. You know, the ones who had the lyrics.ch guys thrown in jail and forced them to sell under duress? I didn't realize Gracenote is Harry Fox in disguise. (sarcasm)
Were you just trolling, or are you serious?
I guess it is actually interesting that the FBI is breaking their usual policy, but other than that, what's the news here? Nobody, not even MS, surely, claims that MS products aren't chock-full of pathetically naive security holes. The thing that really gets me is that not only does MS have more than their share of run-of-the-mill security holes due to oversights like buffer overflows, but they have vast numbers of known problems due to deliberate design "features".
Our company refuses to use MS products for *anything* whatsoever that requires the system to be accessed by the outside world. Internal use only.
Actually, I take that back. We once had a project that for some BS reason or other could only be run on NT/IIS. We forced our guys to put the box outside the firewall so that when it was hacked, at least the kiddies wouldn't have access to any other machines.
It's common practice to release sterile insects in order to control the population. For example, the Mediterranean Fruit Fly that plagues California from time to time. I can't recall the other cases I've heard, but there are more.
However, this new case is a bit different. They're talking about modifying the bug's genes to make them sterile, rather than the usual post-birth modifications. That's a little creepy, yes, but I feel it should be a benign change in this case. When you modify an organism, either through selective breeding, cross-breeding or through gene modification, you take the extreme risk of upsetting that creature/plant's place in the environment.
This can yield, and often has yielded catastrophic results. It's nearly impossible for us to predict the outcome when a modified or "foreign" (i.e. not native to the area) creature is released into the wild. There are actually only a few cases to my knowledge where this was done on purpose and had no unexpected consequences. Those cases were largely chance as far as I'm concerned.
This case is a bit different than most, though. The usual genetic mods we hear about are meant to "improve" an organism in some way, like the corn that kills predators (and every other bug in sight, unfortunately). The changes being considered here are intended not to improve the bug, but to kill it off.
Above all, this is very unlikely to cause a problem because the modified bug will be changed in such a way as to not be able to reproduce and pass on the genetic changes designed to make it sterile in the first place.
Way back when, HDTV signals were supposed to be backward-compatible with analog. Then one day they changed all that. Now they're talking about putting it back the way it was. I'm very confused.
Why is this so complicated? They should embed HDTV signals inside the analog ones like good little boys, so as not to force people to spend thousands of bux on a new set. It shouldn't even be up for question - just do it right, and people will eventually all have HDTV sets.
I don't see much difference between this and the color/black-and-white issue. Originally color TV signals were not backward compatible with B/W, but they realized that for wide acceptance it would have to be. They fixed it. Now something like 99.9% of all TV sets are color. However, B/W sets still have their place, and may always, who knows? The same will be true for HDTV if they make the transition in the same fashion. I don't see the need to screw over the consumer to try and force near-immediate acceptance.
BTW, is it just me, or do current HDTV sets have crappy pictures? I'm not sure that flatscreen technology is quite there yet. CRTs just seem to have a much brighter, crisper picture (on good sets), while flatscreens seem so dull. It will be a long time before I get used to the wideness as well, but I'm sure that will pass with time.
One last note regarding closed-captioning, etc. I don't imagine that embedding the HDTV signal inside the analog signal would take 100% of the available bandwidth. Closed captioning can't possibly require much bandwidth at all, and surely there would be enough left over. I can't imagine that they'd nuke this critical feature just to make way for HDTV.
Oh, and MS Access? That's kinda like trying to fly an Estes rocket to the moon. You would have to be a moron to compare Oracle and Access seriously. You're talking watermelons and grapes.
I manage a small group of Oracle developers. I hate Oracle. It's dog slow relative to MySQL. It's the most complicated piece of software I've ever dealt with. When you discover bugs, you're in for pain. And it'll suck you dry of cash faster than heroin.
So why do we use Oracle? Because all the others are toys. Without things like:
Scalability
Recoverability
Serious support
Hot backups
Replication
Basic features like transactions...
And so on, ad nauseum
If you require these things, don't go trying MySQL. MS SQL has much of this, but it's an unreliable POS, and what it doesn't have makes it unusable for serious, industrial strength use.
MySQL has its place, of course. It's kickass fast, but what DB wouldn't be without all the overhead required for features that would actually make it heavy-duty? We use it for our website; mostly read-only stuff, for which it's highly suited. But without support for things as fundamental as transactional atomicity, it and its ilk are worthless for the big time.
Heh heh. It looks like Havenco won't be online for a while, but that might work. I'm sure a lot of ISPs will end up blocking Havenco IP addresses for one reason or another, tho.
Isn't the idea of OpenNap to not have centralized servers?
Also, unless the server is set up in the depths of deep, dark Turkmenistan or something (where the bandwidth probably sux anyway), where would such a server be legally untouchable?
My GPS (Garmin model 38) seems to track 8 satellites. It's el-cheapo. So what's this about only tracking 3-4? It only *needs* 3-4 to get a fix, but it actually listens to 8. The newer model 12 tracks 12 satellites, etc.
Totally cool, but seems to have serious limitations. Ineffective in fog/rain. Glass and metal stop it. I want one, but I'm not sure how useful it would be to the military.
What about metal objects struck by the beam? Will people be zotted by arcing?
They say it's a "microwave laser". How tight is the beam? If it's not able to affect large groups of people because the beam is too narrow, then how will this be useful against crowds?
I'd hate to be the guy pointing the weapon. No doubt reflections and leaks will bathe him/her in enough radiation to increase the cancer risk for the user significantly. It happens to cops using radar guns over time, but this would be at least an order of magnitude worse. You'd think they would have learned about "harmless" radioactive devices with the depleted uranium tank armor/antitank shells which are supposedly causing cancer in troops now.
Slashdot Mirror
Check your facts again. It's still owned by Harry Fox.
http://songfile.com/license_home.html
One more little bit to add to this. As for AOL or some company like that using FreeDB and swamping it, you can't charge them money in the FreeDB model. To my knowledge, charging AOL but not other commercial organizations would be considered a discriminatory business practice and therefore lawsuit material. You have to be very careful when taking money from someone in a situation like this.
So what happens if a free beer alternative suddenly becomes too popular? Does it die under its own weight, or does it go to a commercial model to survive? Or perhaps donations? That might work, but probably only to a certain point...
Sorry for being flamebait, but can someone explain something to me? Everyone's bitching about how "I entered a bunch of data and submitted it to them, and now they're charging people for it, those assholes." Can someone tell me the last time a user of CDDB actually paid to use the service??
Last time I checked, users never paid a dime to use CDDB. If you use a freeware app, you don't pay a dime. If you use a shareware or commercial app, you pay the developer for the program. In neither case do you actually pay CDDB for anything. Sure, if you pay for the program, CDDB takes some of the money from the developer. But what if CDDB didn't take money from the developer? You'd still have to pay for the freaking thing.
So, as far as I can tell, there's absolutely no difference whatsoever.
Okay, so FreeDB doesn't take any money, you say. Well, someone's footing the bill. FreeDB hosts take bandwidth that someone's donating on machines that someone had to buy with actual money. Nice of them, but it ain't free.
What I don't understand is why non-free applications should expect to use FreeDB without paying anything. What if AOL decided to have Winamp use FreeDB instead of CDDB? A big, rich, moneygrubbing company making even more money off of the donated resources of the FreeDB folks. Even further, what if the millions of Winamp users swamped the FreeDB servers and they had to fork out money from their own pockets to add more resources to handle the load?
What I'm describing here is financial reality. Nothing is truly free. Costs are paid for by someone, always, and what I'm hearing here is that most people don't give a crap so long as it's not them shelling out the dough.
Gee, nobody ever told me that Gracenote shut down lyrics.ch. I always thought it was Harry Fox. You know, the ones who had the lyrics.ch guys thrown in jail and forced them to sell under duress? I didn't realize Gracenote is Harry Fox in disguise. (sarcasm) Were you just trolling, or are you serious?
I guess it is actually interesting that the FBI is breaking their usual policy, but other than that, what's the news here? Nobody, not even MS, surely, claims that MS products aren't chock-full of pathetically naive security holes. The thing that really gets me is that not only does MS have more than their share of run-of-the-mill security holes due to oversights like buffer overflows, but they have vast numbers of known problems due to deliberate design "features".
Our company refuses to use MS products for *anything* whatsoever that requires the system to be accessed by the outside world. Internal use only.
Actually, I take that back. We once had a project that for some BS reason or other could only be run on NT/IIS. We forced our guys to put the box outside the firewall so that when it was hacked, at least the kiddies wouldn't have access to any other machines.
I believe they were essentially hand-marked.
It's common practice to release sterile insects in order to control the population. For example, the Mediterranean Fruit Fly that plagues California from time to time. I can't recall the other cases I've heard, but there are more.
However, this new case is a bit different. They're talking about modifying the bug's genes to make them sterile, rather than the usual post-birth modifications. That's a little creepy, yes, but I feel it should be a benign change in this case. When you modify an organism, either through selective breeding, cross-breeding or through gene modification, you take the extreme risk of upsetting that creature/plant's place in the environment.
This can yield, and often has yielded catastrophic results. It's nearly impossible for us to predict the outcome when a modified or "foreign" (i.e. not native to the area) creature is released into the wild. There are actually only a few cases to my knowledge where this was done on purpose and had no unexpected consequences. Those cases were largely chance as far as I'm concerned.
This case is a bit different than most, though. The usual genetic mods we hear about are meant to "improve" an organism in some way, like the corn that kills predators (and every other bug in sight, unfortunately). The changes being considered here are intended not to improve the bug, but to kill it off.
Above all, this is very unlikely to cause a problem because the modified bug will be changed in such a way as to not be able to reproduce and pass on the genetic changes designed to make it sterile in the first place.
Way back when, HDTV signals were supposed to be backward-compatible with analog. Then one day they changed all that. Now they're talking about putting it back the way it was. I'm very confused.
Why is this so complicated? They should embed HDTV signals inside the analog ones like good little boys, so as not to force people to spend thousands of bux on a new set. It shouldn't even be up for question - just do it right, and people will eventually all have HDTV sets.
I don't see much difference between this and the color/black-and-white issue. Originally color TV signals were not backward compatible with B/W, but they realized that for wide acceptance it would have to be. They fixed it. Now something like 99.9% of all TV sets are color. However, B/W sets still have their place, and may always, who knows? The same will be true for HDTV if they make the transition in the same fashion. I don't see the need to screw over the consumer to try and force near-immediate acceptance.
BTW, is it just me, or do current HDTV sets have crappy pictures? I'm not sure that flatscreen technology is quite there yet. CRTs just seem to have a much brighter, crisper picture (on good sets), while flatscreens seem so dull. It will be a long time before I get used to the wideness as well, but I'm sure that will pass with time.
One last note regarding closed-captioning, etc. I don't imagine that embedding the HDTV signal inside the analog signal would take 100% of the available bandwidth. Closed captioning can't possibly require much bandwidth at all, and surely there would be enough left over. I can't imagine that they'd nuke this critical feature just to make way for HDTV.
Oh, and MS Access? That's kinda like trying to fly an Estes rocket to the moon. You would have to be a moron to compare Oracle and Access seriously. You're talking watermelons and grapes.
I manage a small group of Oracle developers. I hate Oracle. It's dog slow relative to MySQL. It's the most complicated piece of software I've ever dealt with. When you discover bugs, you're in for pain. And it'll suck you dry of cash faster than heroin.
So why do we use Oracle? Because all the others are toys. Without things like:
Scalability
Recoverability
Serious support
Hot backups
Replication
Basic features like transactions...
And so on, ad nauseum
If you require these things, don't go trying MySQL. MS SQL has much of this, but it's an unreliable POS, and what it doesn't have makes it unusable for serious, industrial strength use.
MySQL has its place, of course. It's kickass fast, but what DB wouldn't be without all the overhead required for features that would actually make it heavy-duty? We use it for our website; mostly read-only stuff, for which it's highly suited. But without support for things as fundamental as transactional atomicity, it and its ilk are worthless for the big time.
Heh heh. It looks like Havenco won't be online for a while, but that might work. I'm sure a lot of ISPs will end up blocking Havenco IP addresses for one reason or another, tho.
Isn't the idea of OpenNap to not have centralized servers?
Also, unless the server is set up in the depths of deep, dark Turkmenistan or something (where the bandwidth probably sux anyway), where would such a server be legally untouchable?
My GPS (Garmin model 38) seems to track 8 satellites. It's el-cheapo. So what's this about only tracking 3-4? It only *needs* 3-4 to get a fix, but it actually listens to 8. The newer model 12 tracks 12 satellites, etc.
Totally cool, but seems to have serious limitations. Ineffective in fog/rain. Glass and metal stop it. I want one, but I'm not sure how useful it would be to the military.
Can you say "cancer"?
What about metal objects struck by the beam? Will people be zotted by arcing?
They say it's a "microwave laser". How tight is the beam? If it's not able to affect large groups of people because the beam is too narrow, then how will this be useful against crowds?
I'd hate to be the guy pointing the weapon. No doubt reflections and leaks will bathe him/her in enough radiation to increase the cancer risk for the user significantly. It happens to cops using radar guns over time, but this would be at least an order of magnitude worse. You'd think they would have learned about "harmless" radioactive devices with the depleted uranium tank armor/antitank shells which are supposedly causing cancer in troops now.