That is I would say *THE* crucial question WRT to the success or failure of subscription Napster.
I would be prepared to pay for Napster, but in return I would like a defined QoS.
Will there will be different levels of access?
Basic Access - standard service
Bronze Access - Access to the same selection, all downloads come from Napsters (cacheing?) servers.
Silver Access - As above, quality of mp3 guarenteed to be at a certain level.
Gold Access - As above, Napster actively populate the archive you have access to.
Platinum Access - All records labels back catalogues on line ready for download.
"Black" Access - The software you get is so *ucking clever it works out what you want before you want it downloads it and puts it into your playlist so all you need to do is press play and you get the music you want without even having to think about it...
"The hardware advantage of a system without a hard disk is the reduction of heat generation, meaning they're easier to put in heat-hostile environments like telephone closets. System upgrades are a snap, since you just move the disk to another platform."
Solaris has had logging since Sol 7, you can use it on all filesystems, and all you need is "logging" in options in the vfstab or "mount -o logging/filesystem/mountpoint"
Reiserfs is faster though, file creation and deletion several orders of magnitude so. As benchmarked with bonnie on identical hardware, in my test lab.
People always trot out the old chestnut that the internet was designed to survive nuclear war.
That was 10/15 years ago, when backbones consisted of (lots of) 64k circuits. Paid for by the US Gov, who had plenty of cash to spend engineering a highly redundant network.
Nowadays how many backbones include world war 3, in their specification of things that their backbone should be able to survive?
Considering the cost of that and that all these companies are private entities - I'd say not very many.
Cable breakages are easy to avoid as they all have so much black fiber going to so many places, they can reroute traffic through their 16Tb connection to Frankfurt via Timbucktu. But most of these cables come from the same places, so an organised attack would be different.
5/6 Oklahoma City sized truck bombs carefully placed could bring the whole internet to its knees.
IF I wanted to do it (NOTE for FBI agents - I don't (repeat - DON'T) want to do it!) I'd target some large US NAPS, Telehouse in London, maybe the grounding points of a few large undersea cables and some satellite stations. The biggest NAPS publish throughput stats which'd be some help, it shouldn't be to hard to work out which parts of the building need destroying to wipe out their connectivity, and hopefully a big enough explosion would damage the backup satelite relays as well. Once you've taken down the big NAPS the little ones would buckle under the pressure.
If you wanted to really piss people off, you'd have taken out Cisco's / Alteon's manufacturing facilities a few weeks earlier so they didn't have much in the way of supplies. Which would increase the lead time of anyone building replacement NAPS.
We are in Tom Clancy's territory here so I'll stop before someone comes to my office to "have a word".
Actually I did the pulling the plug test on an E250 yesterday with logging enabled and the box booted as if nothing had happened. It boots quite a bit faster as well.
However the posters original point is still valid, which operating system deals with loosing all of its configuration information best?
Unix - trash/etc - your screwed, boot into single user mode and hope you have a recent backup, or copy another similar machines into place and then restore by hand.
NT - trash the registry - I don't know I don't run NT, how well does it deal with this?
MacOS - trash the preferences - All applications are restored to default settings, generally if you are having problems with a MacOS program or with the OS the best thing to do is to move individual preference files.
Which one is best for Joe User? (which is who we are talking about here remember)
With MacOS, at worst Joe is going to have to ring up his ISP's helpdesk and get them to run him through setting up his account again and resetting his password.
With Unix he'd better have a friend who knows about linux - or he's going to have to rebuild the machine.
With NT/98 I suspect it involves a rebuild, or at least some windows administration skills.
Question: What about remixes?
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
Something I've noticed on Napster especially when looking at Dance music, and wondered about is the legality of remixes (in record form) has never really legally been sorted out. Sometimes someone pays someone some royalties, sometimes someone doesn't.
How are these going to be sorted out and differentiated from a unremixed version of the same tune?
How is napster going to determine the difference between a song by an established artist who doesn't like napster and one by an unsigned artist happy to have the publicity?
And wouldn't it be delightfully ironic if Napster were sued by an unsigned artist for removing their tracks in error?
"As for the Office software, Sun Microsystems has an Office Suite called Sun StarOffice. It's the only Dot Com Office Suite around."
Dot Com Office Suite? Even someone from Sun would feel stupid calling it that. The only reason ANYONE would call it a dot com office suite is because it isn't makeing anyone any money.
And here's a free clue, Star Office SUCKS its buggy, its bloated, and it has an irritating habit of corrupting large documents so badly that I have to go into my backups and fetch an uncorrupted version back. Its quite good at trashing windows machines as well, oh well at least it does something good.
Seriously I can't see Star Office getting any better, the beta sun released a few weeks back is a major improvement, but AbiWord is a whole order of magnitude better and it has a memory footprint 15 times smaller than StarOffice.
While we are making corrections this article at the BBC points out that he was only awarded 15,000 pounds, however Demon have to cover his legal costs which could reach 200,000 pounds. Demon will not have to pay this until they have appealed, etc, etc. You have to questions someones motivation who will spend 200,000 pounds because someone said something nasty about him.
An interesting point raised in the monastary was be that Microsoft has to do nothing other than maintain full support for their products on every operating system back to Windows 3.11. So that'd be everything has to work on 3.11, NT3.51, NT4, Win95, Win 98 and Windows 2000.
Not only would this mean that it was in Microsofts interest to NOT change their API's, but that would be good for consumers as well, because they then couldn't force people to upgrade to run their latest products.
Sure it is a bit silly with linux, but only solaris 2.5.1 makes perfect sense. Solaris has 100% binary backwards compatibility. ie 2.5.1 binaries will work -> 2.6 -> 7 and 8. 2.6/7/8 add no new major features affecting netscape. So why bother to maintain 4 versions, when maintaining 1 will be perfectly adequate? Solaris systems, are upgraded far less frequently than linux or windows, I know of companies running 4.1.4 (SunOS) in production STILL. The view netscape have, is if it ain't broke don't fix it.
I used to work for Cellnet, and when the police wanted to ID one of our users. They rang us up and requested our fax number, faxed us though a form which suspended the Data Protection Act (meaning we could give out otherwise protected information about our clients). We then rang up the policeperson concerned and told them the information. Usually it was information regarding the persons address, say a 999 call had been made but not completed. Presumably if it is more general information, say "This house is that of a known drug dealer, we want all the numbers, names and addresses of all the people who go there". There is a special department who deals with this. But imagine the room for mistakes, say someone lives in the upstairs flat?, or someone goes round to read the gas meter?
Slashdot Mirror
cat /etc/powerd.conf on your nearest solaris box
A week is a bit poor, I've been up 25 days now on 2.4 on my workstation. It seems to behave much better under load and in out of memory conditions.
I'm tempted to move some of my servers to it.
Alex
That is I would say *THE* crucial question WRT to the success or failure of subscription Napster.
I would be prepared to pay for Napster, but in return I would like a defined QoS.
Will there will be different levels of access?
Basic Access - standard service
Bronze Access - Access to the same selection, all downloads come from Napsters (cacheing?) servers.
Silver Access - As above, quality of mp3 guarenteed to be at a certain level.
Gold Access - As above, Napster actively populate the archive you have access to.
Platinum Access - All records labels back catalogues on line ready for download.
"Black" Access - The software you get is so *ucking clever it works out what you want before you want it downloads it and puts it into your playlist so all you need to do is press play and you get the music you want without even having to think about it...
maybe not...
You obviously don't understand MySQL versioning, what it means is that the latest release MySQL 3.23 "is the latest stable release"
Alex
its a mount option that comes as standard as part of solaris 7/8 "man mount_nfs"
Alex
"The hardware advantage of a system without a hard disk is the reduction of heat generation, meaning they're easier to put in heat-hostile environments like telephone closets. System upgrades are a snap, since you just move the disk to another platform."
And what are floppy disks are senstive to what?
Oh heat.....
Solaris has had logging since Sol 7, you can use it on all filesystems, and all you need is "logging" in options in the vfstab or "mount -o logging /filesystem /mountpoint"
Reiserfs is faster though, file creation and deletion several orders of magnitude so. As benchmarked with bonnie on identical hardware, in my test lab.
People always trot out the old chestnut that the internet was designed to survive nuclear war.
That was 10/15 years ago, when backbones consisted of (lots of) 64k circuits. Paid for by the US Gov, who had plenty of cash to spend engineering a highly redundant network.
Nowadays how many backbones include world war 3, in their specification of things that their backbone should be able to survive?
Considering the cost of that and that all these companies are private entities - I'd say not very many.
Cable breakages are easy to avoid as they all have so much black fiber going to so many places, they can reroute traffic through their 16Tb connection to Frankfurt via Timbucktu. But most of these cables come from the same places, so an organised attack would be different.
5/6 Oklahoma City sized truck bombs carefully placed could bring the whole internet to its knees.
IF I wanted to do it (NOTE for FBI agents - I don't (repeat - DON'T) want to do it!) I'd target some large US NAPS, Telehouse in London, maybe the grounding points of a few large undersea cables and some satellite stations. The biggest NAPS publish throughput stats which'd be some help, it shouldn't be to hard to work out which parts of the building need destroying to wipe out their connectivity, and hopefully a big enough explosion would damage the backup satelite relays as well. Once you've taken down the big NAPS the little ones would buckle under the pressure.
If you wanted to really piss people off, you'd have taken out Cisco's / Alteon's manufacturing facilities a few weeks earlier so they didn't have much in the way of supplies. Which would increase the lead time of anyone building replacement NAPS.
We are in Tom Clancy's territory here so I'll stop before someone comes to my office to "have a word".
Something I've noticed is that mobiles only seem to last about 12/18 months reliabaly anyway.
The battery doesn't hold its charge, you've dropped it so many times the cover is all scratched, etc, etc.
And certainly here in the UK you can get a new one from your service provider every 12 months anyway.
Surely this is a none-story?
I'll be wary of optical networking for a good while until several leaders truly come out ahead of the pack.
Then Cisco will buy them and we'll all be back to the start.
>and only just off-regent's street (near to oxford >circus)
virgin biznet?
Slashdot posted the linux bierwundering thing which was in the lakes - about as far from anywere I can think of
Islington me, quite a few slashdot people in London then - not a surprise there.
However the posters original point is still valid, which operating system deals with loosing all of its configuration information best?
Unix - trash /etc - your screwed, boot into single user mode and hope you have a recent backup, or copy another similar machines into place and then restore by hand.
NT - trash the registry - I don't know I don't run NT, how well does it deal with this?
MacOS - trash the preferences - All applications are restored to default settings, generally if you are having problems with a MacOS program or with the OS the best thing to do is to move individual preference files.
Which one is best for Joe User? (which is who we are talking about here remember)
With MacOS, at worst Joe is going to have to ring up his ISP's helpdesk and get them to run him through setting up his account again and resetting his password.
With Unix he'd better have a friend who knows about linux - or he's going to have to rebuild the machine.
With NT/98 I suspect it involves a rebuild, or at least some windows administration skills.
Something I've noticed on Napster especially when looking at Dance music, and wondered about is the legality of remixes (in record form) has never really legally been sorted out. Sometimes someone pays someone some royalties, sometimes someone doesn't.
How are these going to be sorted out and differentiated from a unremixed version of the same tune?
How is napster going to determine the difference between a song by an established artist who doesn't like napster and one by an unsigned artist happy to have the publicity?
And wouldn't it be delightfully ironic if Napster were sued by an unsigned artist for removing their tracks in error?
"As for the Office software, Sun Microsystems has an Office Suite called Sun StarOffice. It's the only Dot Com Office Suite around."
Dot Com Office Suite? Even someone from Sun would feel stupid calling it that. The only reason ANYONE would call it a dot com office suite is because it isn't makeing anyone any money.
And here's a free clue, Star Office SUCKS its buggy, its bloated, and it has an irritating habit of corrupting large documents so badly that I have to go into my backups and fetch an uncorrupted version back. Its quite good at trashing windows machines as well, oh well at least it does something good.
Seriously I can't see Star Office getting any better, the beta sun released a few weeks back is a major improvement, but AbiWord is a whole order of magnitude better and it has a memory footprint 15 times smaller than StarOffice.
Ironic that arguably thousands of lives were lost in WW2 to preserve the ULTRA secret, and then 60 years later someone can just steal one.
While we are making corrections this article at the BBC points out that he was only awarded 15,000 pounds, however Demon have to cover his legal costs which could reach 200,000 pounds. Demon will not have to pay this until they have appealed, etc, etc. You have to questions someones motivation who will spend 200,000 pounds because someone said something nasty about him.
15,000 pounds = 25,000 dollars
An interesting point raised in the monastary was be that Microsoft has to do nothing other than maintain full support for their products on every operating system back to Windows 3.11. So that'd be everything has to work on 3.11, NT3.51, NT4, Win95, Win 98 and Windows 2000.
Not only would this mean that it was in Microsofts interest to NOT change their API's, but that would be good for consumers as well, because they then couldn't force people to upgrade to run their latest products.
Sure it is a bit silly with linux, but only solaris 2.5.1 makes perfect sense. Solaris has 100% binary backwards compatibility. ie 2.5.1 binaries will work -> 2.6 -> 7 and 8. 2.6/7/8 add no new major features affecting netscape. So why bother to maintain 4 versions, when maintaining 1 will be perfectly adequate? Solaris systems, are upgraded far less frequently than linux or windows, I know of companies running 4.1.4 (SunOS) in production STILL. The view netscape have, is if it ain't broke don't fix it.
I used to work for Cellnet, and when the police wanted to ID one of our users. They rang us up and requested our fax number, faxed us though a form which suspended the Data Protection Act (meaning we could give out otherwise protected information about our clients). We then rang up the policeperson concerned and told them the information. Usually it was information regarding the persons address, say a 999 call had been made but not completed. Presumably if it is more general information, say "This house is that of a known drug dealer, we want all the numbers, names and addresses of all the people who go there". There is a special department who deals with this. But imagine the room for mistakes, say someone lives in the upstairs flat?, or someone goes round to read the gas meter?
Anyway just a few thoughts
Alex