I'd think that might be something that LKML might want to look into. It might be too late for this particular issue, but why not start laying down the foundation now for future decisions?
The core of Linux, for example, is pretty much guaranteed to stay at GPLv2 (not just for "Linus didn't like it" reasons, but also pretty big logistical issues like "getting every copyright holder to agree on the change").
Slightly off-topic, but the Linux kernel may be difficult to "upgrade" to GPLv3 because it deliberately does not contain the "or any later version" wording in its license. I can understand the rationale - what if GPLv4 is absolutely awful and you don't want your users to be able to instantly upgrade to it? - but it's still a barrier.
I wonder if something like this would be legimate:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation, or future versions of the GPL with the permission of Just Some Guy.
IANAL, so please go along with the gist of what I'm getting at and not the specific words I used. Would it have been possible for Linus to have given himself the authority to "upgrade" Linux to GPLv3 without granting the blanket "or any later version" permissions to the world?
I'm guessing the bits and pieces that make up any distro will gradually contain more and more GPLv3 software
Except that in practice, "gradually" probably means "the next time the FSF makes a point release of coreutils". The kernel may not be going v3 any time soon, but you can bet that most GNU packages will be switched as they're upgraded.
As of this very second, the above list already says that such common packages as cpio, gv, mailutils, radius, sed, and texinfo are "GPLv3orlater". Those are relatively simple and/or "static" packages, but still nothing I'd want to have pay someone to fork for me. I definitely would not care to maintain my own perpetually GPLv2ed branch of GCC, and I suspect that day will be coming very soon.
Last time I looked the Linux/HA and all other projects had some serious issues with failover, there always seemed to be a single machine at some stage that could take the cluster away from the user.
While I haven't personally used it, Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) seems to be along those lines. They're aiming for and expecting to get 6-nines (99.9999%) availability from COTS hardware. This isn't a small project, but one that hopes to put cheap, reliable servers in the hands of phone companies, said companies being notoriously fanatical about uptime.
As a programmer perhaps the most telling thing I can say about the difference is that when your mainframe application dumps, you can actually analyze the dump and learn everything you need to know in most cases to fully diagnose the problem.
If only there were some way to make a "dump" of the "core" of that application's memory, then you could use some sort of a debugger to look at that application's state and figure it out. I'd call it, oh, "Genuinely Decent Bugridder", or gdb for short. If only.
Re:In a mid-sized manufacturing or distribution...
on
The Mainframe Still Lives!
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Don't go dissing the AS/400 line. It gets it done. You wish your Linux box was as solid.
I'm honestly not dissing the line; I'm sure they really are great hardware. But oh, the price! I don't remember the exact cost I heard for a mid-range server, but I do remember getting back to the office and running the numbers to find that I could buy something like 60 nice Dell rackmount servers for the same price and make a small Linux cluster of them. I'd end up with about 30 times the throughput, 100 times the storage, and 0% of the software cost.
I cannot believe that the AS/400, solid as it is, has better uptimes than a 60-machine cluster (given that only about one tenth of those machines had to be online to exceed the AS/400's performance). Heck, for half the price, you could have two smaller clusters in geographically distinct locations with a high-speed link between them.
I think the iSeries has a solid position of running legacy systems, and I could even understand the justification for buying newer, more powerful machines as those systems grow in size and scope. That seems perfectly reasonable. But for new development, I just don't get how that single expensive box is more cost-effective than a small group of decent x86 systems. Think of it as a RAIS (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Servers). I'd rather place my trust in a few good but affordable mirrored drives than one hyper-expensive bulletproof device. Well, same concept here.
With every other type of computer I've worked with, there has always been a case that I've gotten screwed by them.
True - getting screwed by an AS/400 is more like a state of being. I went to a free lunch given by the local IBM rep and he was talking about the wonderful, affordable iSeries. Everyone else in the room thought that subscribing to CPU output levels was perfectly reasonable, and that paying a base rate and a (much) higher per-time-unit rate for higher utilization so that you could power through quarterly reports was simply marvelous. Oh, and they'd dropped their prices for SCSI drives to only $3000 per 36GB or something amazingly affordable like that.
Honestly, it was like going to a Scientology convention. The audience ate it up and the sales rep just kept shovelling it on. The more outlandish the quote, the bigger the grins.
I don't mean to hate on any particular computing platform, but I swear to God, the costs that the rep and his customers were casually throwing around were mind-bending. Yeah, they might be wonderful, but at $250,000 for a decent size server, they damn well should be.
They're not really that concerned about people who ripped an MP3 from CD; they're interested in the thousands of people who all downloaded the identical MP3 from a P2P site.
Right, but what I meant by that was that they couldn't necessarily tell who'd downloaded an MP3 versus who ripped it themselves. For example, I imagine that 99% of people who rip a given album with iTunes will end up with identical AAC (or MP3) files. They could still tell that a given Britney.mp3 really was the latest teen junk single and not some random bait file or misnamed Metallica track.
Of course, this article is about the MPAA, not the RIAA, and they're not concerned about MP3s at all.;-)
True. I think the same goes for popular DVD rippers, though. Can you really tell that Jackass.mov was an illegal download instead of a legal rip?
he's overthrown one of the very basic tenants of physics
The basic tenants of physics? Are those the bearded, flustered looking guys who never leave the lab and are suspected of living somewhere in the science hall?
And unless they're transmitting a significant portion of those files back when "phoning home" - and thus running afoul of copyright law themselves in the process, to say nothing of computer trespass laws - merely mentioning the title of a work in a filename or in metadata doesn't authenticate that file as containing what the filename or metadata suggests that it does.
Disclaimer: MAFIAA sucks and all that.
OK, there's another alternative: they're comparing candidate files with a checksum database rather than comparing the entire file:
if (filename.endswith('.mp3')) { if (isinpiratedatabase(md5sum(filecontents)) { report('Possible infringer at my.ip.ad.dr'); }}
Not saying they're doing this, but they could be. Of course, that also raises the question of how likely two random people are to generate an identical MP3 from the same source CD using the same encoder. The fact that my Britney.mp3 is identical to yours doesn't necessarily indicate more than a shared poor taste in music.
so this machine makes plastic out of thin air as well?
Plastic is usually made of hydrogen, carbon, and chlorine. Given infinite free energy, yes, plastic is made out of thin air (plus some seawater for the chlorine).
No, I don't believe it either. But what if it were true? How would society change given a sudden complete energy independence (ignoring conspiracy theories about Shell or BP shooting the inventor)?
First, we could stop having any involvement with the middle east. Honestly, is there anyone besides the Arabians that would miss dealing with Saudi Arabia? Would global warming stop because CO2 was no longer a necessary byproduct of the most common energy source, or would it go up because every was busy converting their free energy into waste heat ("why yes, I'd love to have an 8-way Pentium 4 in my clock radio!")?
The.htaccess file in the public directory needs a quick tweak to match the Alias to get the rewrite rules working. Works well.
Oops! You said "quick" and ".htaccess" in the same sentence. From Apache's own documentation,.htaccess files are a last-ditch solution for when you don't control the server and can't edit its config files directly. Really, if you can help it, don't ever use them.
Oh, if you use some web application that comes with a bunch of.htaccess files that you don't want to manually merge into your httpd.conf (or included files), you can use the Include directive to pull them into you config file once rather than forcing httpd to look for them each time a page loads. For example, replace:
<Directory "/usr/local/www/myapp/files"> AllowOverride All </Directory>
I got a bill for $3000. I got this bill because I was uninsured.
Yes, but not for the reason you think. Insurance companies pay doctors a percentage of what they bill, and that percentage varies by company. The government is usually the worst - Medicare usually pays somewhere around 50%, and Medicaid pays maybe 5-10% (no, that's not a typo).
As an aside, I know a lot of doctors that won't take Medicaid patients for one main reason: they actually lose money on the deal after accounting for real expenses such as supplies and paying a clerk to handle the paperwork. The loss is much higher if you include opportunity cost; if your choice is between losing $50 or gaining $500, it's a pretty easy decision.
Anyway, want to see costs contained? Require insurance companies to pay 100% of the billed price so that doctors don't have to quadruple their rates just to push the adjusted reimbursement rate high enough to keep the doors open. Also, get rid of flat-rate co-pays and switch to a percentage. Give patients a reason to shop around for non-emergency treatment, rather than automatically going to the most expensive doctor in the state because, hey, insurance is paying for it anyway.
I don't know of any Windows developers who have abandoned Windows development altogether.
We did.
At least, in the sense that we're now targetting Python + wxWidgets (and soon QT4) for pretty much all new development. Most of our programmers still use Windows as their desktop OS, but all of our new software is testing to work at least on Windows and Linux (and FreeBSD for server stuff, and OS X if we're bored).
Honestly, we've had enough of vendor lock-in. Sure, our programs still need to be able to run on Windows but that's only part of the requirements now. Given that we've already rolled out Firefox, Psi (for Jabber messaging) and OpenOffice.org on every desktop, we're only one major release of our in-house core application away from not needing Windows anymore. We'll almost certainly still use it, at least until we can't get security updates for XP/SP2 anymore, but it's now at our convenience rather than by mandate.
You seriously think that hundreds of years ago (say the 1800's) people said "Watch out for pirates!" and meant "People copying CDs"?!?
Yes.
Except that they actually meant books at the time. From Wikipedia:
For electronic and audio-visual media, unauthorized reproduction and distribution is occasionally referred to as piracy or theft (an early reference was made by Alfred Tennyson in the preface to his poem "The Lover's Tale" in 1879 where he mentions that sections of this work "have of late been mercilessly pirated"). The legal basis for this usage dates from the same era, and has been consistently applied until the present time.
Also:
See Berne Copyright Convention, 1886: "Pirated works may be seized on importation into those countries of the Union where the original work enjoys legal protection." (Art. 12).
So, yeah, some people in the 1800s very definitely meant copyright infringement. This is a dead horse. Move on.
P.S. I am in no way defending the RIAA et al. Still, this point is ancient and long decided and continually bringing it up just makes us look like a bunch petulant whiners.
...and Vista64. I thought those were mutually exclusive, like having a Volkswagen and a Metallica CD to play in it. I mean, you're into computers enough to know what a 64-bit OS is and to go out of your way to buy one, and then you buy a Zune?
On the other hand, that's very convenient for gathering statistics. Find four more people just like him and you can account for every copy of Vista64 and every Zune sold. Instead of paying for expensive focus groups, you can just ask Kneht, Bob, Tom, Cletus, and Randy what they liked about them.
Current implementations (i.e. Freescale Coldfire) of the MC68000 draw more like 1 mW per MIPS.
So, the modern Coldfire is about 1400 times more efficient than its 68K predecessor. That would seem to strengthen my point that power consumption per watt is much lower now than in bygone years (which is the opposite of your earlier post).
Actually power consumption per instruction has remained pretty constant over the years if you exclude the Pentium 4.
Um, not even close. A MC68000 from 1979 drew 1.35 watts and yielded about 1 MIPS (.74MIPS/W). An Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (shoot that marketer!) dissipates about 110W at 57063 MIPS (518MIPS/W).
The Core 2 is about 700 times more efficient than the 68K. You could probably argue some of those numbers a few percent either way, but that's not going to explain away the nearly three orders of magnitude of improvement.
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I'd think that might be something that LKML might want to look into. It might be too late for this particular issue, but why not start laying down the foundation now for future decisions?
Because Vista doesn't have security problems.
Slightly off-topic, but the Linux kernel may be difficult to "upgrade" to GPLv3 because it deliberately does not contain the "or any later version" wording in its license. I can understand the rationale - what if GPLv4 is absolutely awful and you don't want your users to be able to instantly upgrade to it? - but it's still a barrier.
I wonder if something like this would be legimate:
IANAL, so please go along with the gist of what I'm getting at and not the specific words I used. Would it have been possible for Linus to have given himself the authority to "upgrade" Linux to GPLv3 without granting the blanket "or any later version" permissions to the world?
Except that in practice, "gradually" probably means "the next time the FSF makes a point release of coreutils". The kernel may not be going v3 any time soon, but you can bet that most GNU packages will be switched as they're upgraded.
As of this very second, the above list already says that such common packages as cpio, gv, mailutils, radius, sed, and texinfo are "GPLv3orlater". Those are relatively simple and/or "static" packages, but still nothing I'd want to have pay someone to fork for me. I definitely would not care to maintain my own perpetually GPLv2ed branch of GCC, and I suspect that day will be coming very soon.
While I haven't personally used it, Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) seems to be along those lines. They're aiming for and expecting to get 6-nines (99.9999%) availability from COTS hardware. This isn't a small project, but one that hopes to put cheap, reliable servers in the hands of phone companies, said companies being notoriously fanatical about uptime.
If only there were some way to make a "dump" of the "core" of that application's memory, then you could use some sort of a debugger to look at that application's state and figure it out. I'd call it, oh, "Genuinely Decent Bugridder", or gdb for short. If only.
I'm honestly not dissing the line; I'm sure they really are great hardware. But oh, the price! I don't remember the exact cost I heard for a mid-range server, but I do remember getting back to the office and running the numbers to find that I could buy something like 60 nice Dell rackmount servers for the same price and make a small Linux cluster of them. I'd end up with about 30 times the throughput, 100 times the storage, and 0% of the software cost.
I cannot believe that the AS/400, solid as it is, has better uptimes than a 60-machine cluster (given that only about one tenth of those machines had to be online to exceed the AS/400's performance). Heck, for half the price, you could have two smaller clusters in geographically distinct locations with a high-speed link between them.
I think the iSeries has a solid position of running legacy systems, and I could even understand the justification for buying newer, more powerful machines as those systems grow in size and scope. That seems perfectly reasonable. But for new development, I just don't get how that single expensive box is more cost-effective than a small group of decent x86 systems. Think of it as a RAIS (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Servers). I'd rather place my trust in a few good but affordable mirrored drives than one hyper-expensive bulletproof device. Well, same concept here.
True - getting screwed by an AS/400 is more like a state of being. I went to a free lunch given by the local IBM rep and he was talking about the wonderful, affordable iSeries. Everyone else in the room thought that subscribing to CPU output levels was perfectly reasonable, and that paying a base rate and a (much) higher per-time-unit rate for higher utilization so that you could power through quarterly reports was simply marvelous. Oh, and they'd dropped their prices for SCSI drives to only $3000 per 36GB or something amazingly affordable like that.
Honestly, it was like going to a Scientology convention. The audience ate it up and the sales rep just kept shovelling it on. The more outlandish the quote, the bigger the grins.
I don't mean to hate on any particular computing platform, but I swear to God, the costs that the rep and his customers were casually throwing around were mind-bending. Yeah, they might be wonderful, but at $250,000 for a decent size server, they damn well should be.
Right, but what I meant by that was that they couldn't necessarily tell who'd downloaded an MP3 versus who ripped it themselves. For example, I imagine that 99% of people who rip a given album with iTunes will end up with identical AAC (or MP3) files. They could still tell that a given Britney.mp3 really was the latest teen junk single and not some random bait file or misnamed Metallica track.
Of course, this article is about the MPAA, not the RIAA, and they're not concerned about MP3s at all.True. I think the same goes for popular DVD rippers, though. Can you really tell that Jackass.mov was an illegal download instead of a legal rip?
That's perhaps not the best example.
The basic tenants of physics? Are those the bearded, flustered looking guys who never leave the lab and are suspected of living somewhere in the science hall?
("Tenets", people. Tenets.)
Disclaimer: MAFIAA sucks and all that.
OK, there's another alternative: they're comparing candidate files with a checksum database rather than comparing the entire file:
Not saying they're doing this, but they could be. Of course, that also raises the question of how likely two random people are to generate an identical MP3 from the same source CD using the same encoder. The fact that my Britney.mp3 is identical to yours doesn't necessarily indicate more than a shared poor taste in music.
Plastic is usually made of hydrogen, carbon, and chlorine. Given infinite free energy, yes, plastic is made out of thin air (plus some seawater for the chlorine).
No, I don't believe it either. But what if it were true? How would society change given a sudden complete energy independence (ignoring conspiracy theories about Shell or BP shooting the inventor)?
First, we could stop having any involvement with the middle east. Honestly, is there anyone besides the Arabians that would miss dealing with Saudi Arabia? Would global warming stop because CO2 was no longer a necessary byproduct of the most common energy source, or would it go up because every was busy converting their free energy into waste heat ("why yes, I'd love to have an 8-way Pentium 4 in my clock radio!")?
Oops! You said "quick" and ".htaccess" in the same sentence. From Apache's own documentation, .htaccess files are a last-ditch solution for when you don't control the server and can't edit its config files directly. Really, if you can help it, don't ever use them.
Oh, if you use some web application that comes with a bunch of .htaccess files that you don't want to manually merge into your httpd.conf (or included files), you can use the Include directive to pull them into you config file once rather than forcing httpd to look for them each time a page loads. For example, replace:
with:
Once you've done that everywhere, set "AllowOverride None" in your main httpd.conf file and make sure it's not overridden anywhere else.
Yes, but not for the reason you think. Insurance companies pay doctors a percentage of what they bill, and that percentage varies by company. The government is usually the worst - Medicare usually pays somewhere around 50%, and Medicaid pays maybe 5-10% (no, that's not a typo).
As an aside, I know a lot of doctors that won't take Medicaid patients for one main reason: they actually lose money on the deal after accounting for real expenses such as supplies and paying a clerk to handle the paperwork. The loss is much higher if you include opportunity cost; if your choice is between losing $50 or gaining $500, it's a pretty easy decision.
Anyway, want to see costs contained? Require insurance companies to pay 100% of the billed price so that doctors don't have to quadruple their rates just to push the adjusted reimbursement rate high enough to keep the doors open. Also, get rid of flat-rate co-pays and switch to a percentage. Give patients a reason to shop around for non-emergency treatment, rather than automatically going to the most expensive doctor in the state because, hey, insurance is paying for it anyway.
We did.
At least, in the sense that we're now targetting Python + wxWidgets (and soon QT4) for pretty much all new development. Most of our programmers still use Windows as their desktop OS, but all of our new software is testing to work at least on Windows and Linux (and FreeBSD for server stuff, and OS X if we're bored).
Honestly, we've had enough of vendor lock-in. Sure, our programs still need to be able to run on Windows but that's only part of the requirements now. Given that we've already rolled out Firefox, Psi (for Jabber messaging) and OpenOffice.org on every desktop, we're only one major release of our in-house core application away from not needing Windows anymore. We'll almost certainly still use it, at least until we can't get security updates for XP/SP2 anymore, but it's now at our convenience rather than by mandate.
StarOffice started in 1986. Microsoft Office debuted in 1989.
So, now it has your sympathy?
Yes.
Except that they actually meant books at the time. From Wikipedia:
Also:
So, yeah, some people in the 1800s very definitely meant copyright infringement. This is a dead horse. Move on.
P.S. I am in no way defending the RIAA et al. Still, this point is ancient and long decided and continually bringing it up just makes us look like a bunch petulant whiners.
Ahh, found the problem.
...and Vista64. I thought those were mutually exclusive, like having a Volkswagen and a Metallica CD to play in it. I mean, you're into computers enough to know what a 64-bit OS is and to go out of your way to buy one, and then you buy a Zune?
On the other hand, that's very convenient for gathering statistics. Find four more people just like him and you can account for every copy of Vista64 and every Zune sold. Instead of paying for expensive focus groups, you can just ask Kneht, Bob, Tom, Cletus, and Randy what they liked about them.
So, the modern Coldfire is about 1400 times more efficient than its 68K predecessor. That would seem to strengthen my point that power consumption per watt is much lower now than in bygone years (which is the opposite of your earlier post).
Um, not even close. A MC68000 from 1979 drew 1.35 watts and yielded about 1 MIPS (.74MIPS/W). An Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (shoot that marketer!) dissipates about 110W at 57063 MIPS (518MIPS/W).
The Core 2 is about 700 times more efficient than the 68K. You could probably argue some of those numbers a few percent either way, but that's not going to explain away the nearly three orders of magnitude of improvement.
Maybe "he" is?
That's worthless. "Well, the bill bans sub-q implantation. Guess we'll have to poke it all the way into their bicep."