In the end, it's futile to try to restrict businesses like this; all doubleclick would need to do is contract with an offshore tracking...
Yes, big businesses would move offshore and their operating expenses increase. But the halfwit next door would be stopped cold from playing at those games. A minimum of capital and organisation is necessary to move offshore.
Since the law forbidding spam was passed in Austria, the amount of spam I receive with Austrian addresses dropped of a lot.
Even if these kind of regulation don't stop the problem, it reduce the number of offenders dramatically.
> While it has a few drawbacks, I like being salary. > If anybody asked me to punch a clock, or fill in a timesheet, I'd quit that job immediately.
Here in Austria, basically every worked hour has to be compensated, and overtime is (except in special conditions) paid. With a salary, the employer just gets a package for 37 to 42 hours a week, 5 weeks of holiday per year. For this reason, employes are often required to punch in and fill out timesheets.
This is, in my opinion, a good solution. I, as an employee, am not the personal slave of some PHB and required to be on call every time. Everything beyond the required 40 hours is just a matter of good will on my part, and will be paid. The employee has the option of just saying NO, without risking to be fired at once. This doesn't mean, that nobody is working over 60 hours per week, but the average employee usually doesn't.
The big advantage is, that employees are not at the completely at the mercy of their PHBs and are able to have a live outside of work. And after 10 hours work (or so), productivity drops off anyway. Too often, I had to spend time to fix the stupid things I did late the night before.
The downside is, that salaries tend to be lower around here and bonuses are not that common and usually NOT a substantial part of the total income.
I think it is a good thing, that those busybodies try to regulate the net. It means the net is growing up and becoming a part of the daily life.
It doesn't really matter whether they have any clue or the laws and rules they propose are good, bad or idiotic. The good ones hopefully stay, the bad and the idiotic will be overturned once enough people (and businesses) protest against it. This is happening for the last few years with those moronic export laws for strong encryption. The same happened with the CDA, COPA etc.
For matters that are important to the average citizen, the optimisation process between total laissez-faire and total regulation is well understood and - basically - works. The important thing is to get it started. It doesn't really matter how. Some spectacular bad laws may even speed the process to equilibrum.
I bet, inside the next three years, the whole matter of domain-names and trademarks will be solved. Probably a few martyrs and some really clueless judges will be necessary, but those are cheap to come by. Then there will be some supreme court rulings, lots of laws, rulings against those, an adaptation of the trademark concept and in the end a workable solution will emerge, which is accepted by the majority.
So don't panic, and go on complaining about all those absurd laws. It helps!
Yes, they are, but who cares? Educating people is far more effective:
On most maschines, we have a more or less up to date virus checker running. When installs a virus on his PC and complains about it, by policy, we reinstall the machine from scratch and delete all infected files. The user gets the standard lecture on how to treat data from foreign sources and to read warnings on the screen with graphic analogies (Would you eat a cookie with green and black patches offered to you on a subway by a hobo? So why are you opening everything spammer send you?).
With lot of begging and cajoling, we may save a few crucial files. Usually less than ten.
Most user get, after the first or second time, really careful, and the number of virus infections have been rapidely decreasing around here since we started this policy.
Without a stick, all these schemes will never work. Self-regulation means, the strong ones (big corporations) will regulate themselves the way they like, and the customer will get only the privacy the corporations leaves them.
Here in Austria, we have some - compared to the US - strong laws about privacy protection (including the right to get information about the data stored, and the right to correct errors), but with quite small fines and difficult to execute. Most corporations (and gouvernement agencies, they are even worse) still do what they like.
Privacy for customers will only become a serious concern, when violations become are real threat to even big companies. Before that happens, all those policies and rules are just marketing babble.
I have read quite a lot about about proposed remedies, and most of them don't sound really useful.
Breaking Microsoft up in multiple parts (any way you like) could either lead to the split companies cooperating (to innovate for the best of the customer, everybody is welcome to make an offer) or the one of them will survive while the other go the way of OS/2 and CPM with their operating system. For the customer, there will only be minor changes. The only merit of this solution I see is the chaos following the split, which may allow some other big company (perhaps Sun) to take over part of the market.
Supervising Microsoft, having them publish their source - API - whatever would be nice for developer, but I fear, before publishing any new relevant information, Microsoft will risk being sued, defending themselves by claiming the new undocumented stuff are just bug fixes, security patches, already there but unclearly documented etc. and they did no wrong. All will go on as before, except for hordes of lawyers suing and contersuing on behalf of Microsoft.
Other proposals were either just a slap on Microsofts fingers (fines, public promises never to do it again...) or so drastic, that they sound not workable under the current legal system.
To be honest, I think the remedy most likely to work, is to limit Microsofts marketing budget for the next 5 years to the average amount available to the next 5 competitors and forbid Mr. Gates ever to use the word 'innovate' again.
My question now is: What options does the judge have, which would break Microsofts monopoly efficently, which will not bog down in legal mud-slinging for the next decade? Are there any?
> you don't want to know the means which involve a corkscrew...
Let's call it WIT (for Wine Interface Tool), an essential tool for anybody on a hotline. It also increases the performance when tracing spagetti code al carbonara and increases the imaging capabilities in candlelight.
Could it not be, that geeks tend to be good at what they do simply because they spend so much time doing it?
When other people make them miserable, an obscure book like 'the art of computer programming' and 'advanced metaphysics: a primer', sitting in some lab or in front of a screen does a better job at keeps them away than Raid for moskitos.
And, while they are at it, they may try to get some pleasure to get out of what they do, they get involved, and sometimes get really good at what they do.
Similar reaction help other groups to cope with their problems. All those busy-bodies trying overcome their boredom and frustration by competing at charity dinners with their neighbors aren't what I would call sane either.
And not to forget, all those baseball-, soccer-, beauty peagent-, and what ever else-moms and dads, trying to live through their kids, because they failed with their own life.
Geeks as insane as everybody else, just in a different way. And each insanity attracts get relieved by its own kind of behaviour. As it would be inefficient for a society-junky to hide for years in a lab, geeks in ballrooms are in the wrong place.
>... when railroad was the primary means of transporting goods, > Russia pulled a similar egotistical maneuver and selected a railroad "gauge"
There were some reasons behind this. When lots of space is available and building is cheap, a wider track means wider cars means more cargo on the train means cheaper transport. This was an important consideration in Russia.
On the other hand lot of railroads in the alps (Austria and Switzerland mainly) use narrow to ultra-narrow tracks. Every inch that had to be carved out of a mountain, mostly by hand, was expensive. Doubling the with of the bed for the tracks quadruples the amount of rock they had to move. Ergo: They build single track narrow gauge railroads there.
> The reason for buggy code is simple: most programmers have never > had access to state of the art debugging software and tools.
No, the state of the art doesn't play a role in that.
In my experience the main reasons were:
Programmer don't care When writing a quick hack to do something, 'good enough' usually does the job. When someone else start to recycle these quick hacks, the foundation for a buggy software is laid. Eg: sendmail, yacc, lex
Marketing and Managment. When the local managment announces shipment dates when the first prototype is barely running, buggy software is delivered. Eg: Most commercial consumer software. Pick any.
Creeping Featurism. If the developer is constantly asked to quickly add this feature and that feature, and the marketing department sees no use in a redesign, even good software get broken. This gets worse that the average marketing department ask for feature list to compare their product with others. To my knowledge, no marketing campain ever was contrued aroud the fact that a program is stable. It's always the new gimmicks.
It depends what you are doing. But having a good documentation of your software is really handy, when you have to fix the program some 5 years later. Happened too often to me.
Pseudo-code and flowcharts are just crutches. They are are real big help when writing complex parser, but you don't need them for the easy stuff. (Most stuff you can do in a week comes under easy). The same goes for UML, Jackson- and other diagrams. You don't need them for you stamp collection database, but when the diagrams are big and complex enough to make a nice wallpaper, they are indispensable.
By the way, the toilet is a real useful place to hang them. Best at eye level.
> I STILL don't understand the hoopla of "The Internet Menace".
From what I gather around here (Austria, Europe), law enforcement have a big problem enforcing current laws if the internet gets involved. They have procedures how to tap a local phone, how to search a car or a building, but with the internet, those procedures fail fast, because it is so easy to get outside of their juridiction.
Ever wondered, why so many warez and other sites on the border of legality are in some.ru,.sk and other exotic national domains? If any american court tries to serve a subpoena, they are immediately dealing with international law, extradition and mutual law enforcement assistance treaties (which may or may not exist) and a simple request ends up being months of work. To top the whole thing off, most of the time they get nothing.
The next stumbling block is the usability of the evidence gathered on the net. How is the police going to prove the data comes from the suspect? Most of the time they end up confiscating some disks and use what they find there.
And for those, and many more reason, police departments around the world hate the internet and try to push laws to regulate it to death. And because they don't really understand the concept of a truely distributed net or the volumes involved, the laws are either ridiculously repressive (cf China, Iran) or stupid. Often both.
> Kiddie porn is illegal no matter how you trade it.
In most of the places around the world it is, but the definition of 'kiddy' and of 'porn' both vary a lot. And even the concept of 'trade' isn't that clearly defined across countries.
Are the free Web hosting and the relative anonymity really that important for propaganda?
I'd believe that anyone wanting to spread propaganda on a national scale will invest at least in a good webdesign and a domain-name. Or can you imagine a candidate running for presidency with a website at http:\\homebase.freespam.net\DonaldDuck4Presiden t2000 ?
Even if the article is not presenting any real ew insights, it still summarised the problems with news very well. Another site about journalism and ethics is the Online Journalism Review. The have often articles on subjects like this.
What I really hated about the article is this stupid and ridiculous open-source activism.
Yes, it is nice that CmdrTaco publishes the code for Slashdot, but for the matter of transparency of the news selection mechanism it doesn't really help. It may increase the stability of the system and is a great help for people wanting to start similar sites, but, even with the source code, there is no way of checking what scrips CmdrTaco is really running. Nobody can stop CmdrTaco from adding a message filters. And if he tried, no matter if the code is available or not, sooner or later discrepancies would crop up and people would become suspicious.
The whole issue is about trust, and the source code does not help (or hinder). Saying Slashdot is better than freerepublic because one is open-source and the other not, is only ridiculous.
The best use for these boots is to do things that that should not be too easy to traced back. The bucket stops at the public internet boot. The only thing to check is for the security cameras and not to behave stupidly.
The german computer magazine ct published in their last issue (number 13) a test NT/IIS vs. Linux/Apache as a webserver. They uses a 4 processor Siemens box with a raid 5 as disk storage.
Here is what they found out: (All numbers are estimates from the charts. They may be off, but not much)
First, as soon as you have to use more than one network-adapter NT wipes Linux butt on static pages. Linux seem to be pretty bad in this area. Their guess is, it has something to do with the kernel and multthreading. This verifies pretty much the findings of Mindcraft.
The main part however was dedicated to a slightly different scenario. They tested a few different things.
The first test was serving a single static file of 4 kB size. They stopped measuring at 512 serving processes which corresponds on their environment to about 950 hits/s for bot linux and NT, Linux leading. With 8 processes NT leads 560 to 480 hits/s, from 16 to 32 processes they are roughly the same, from 64 processes on Linux leads by 20 to 50 hits/s.
The second test was the same as the first only with 8 kB size. There Linux leads the whole way by 20 to 50 hits/s maxing out at about 550 to 530 hits/s.
The third an the forth thest were again serving 4 kB files. In the third test the number of files (10000) all fitted into the cache, in the forth thest they didn't. In test number 3 NT is only a bit better with 8 processes (380 to 320 hits/s) ans then linux leads by about 100 hits/s maxing out at 820 hits/s to 720 for NT.
As soon as NT needed to use the disk (1000000) its performance wasn't so good. It stayed at a constant 20 hits/s while Linux went from 50 hits/s to 280 for 512 apache processes. It seems NT doesn't like a raid 5 that much. It prefers a raid 0.
The fun really started when the tried dynamic pages with Perl scrips. There the single processor apache was able to serve about twice as much pages than the 4 CPU IIS server. the numbers:
NT 1 CPU: 30 hits/s NT 4 CPU: 55 hits/s Linux 1 CPU: 105 hits/s Linux 4 CPU 200 to 245 hits/s
Then they added, to simulte database queries a delay of 3 s into the cgi script. The the performance for the NT server dropped from 30 to less than 5 hits/s. For Linux, the performance was linear to the number of processes, starting a 5 hits/s for 1 process going to 80 hits/s for 256 processes instead of the 105 for the version without the delay.
Their conclusion [rough translation]:
For a dedicated webserver with static HTML only, additional CPU are not worth the bother. Even on 2 Fast Ethernet Segments, the increas is only about 20%. CPU power seems not to be the limiting factor. [...]
The realitively bad results for Linux with two network adapter indicate, that the Mindcraft result are plausible and NT and IIS are better performing then their free competition, if one want to play by MIncrafts rules.
[Then some text explaining that 1000 hits/s is about then times the peak value they get on their server and those pages have to be static and cached.]
As our test demonstrate, the Mindcraft results can not be applied to situations, where pages have to be generated dynamically, which is the case on nearly all serious web-sites.
In SMP-mode Linux showed some definite weakenesses. Even kernel developer acknowledge , that Linus still has problems with scalability in SMP settings, specially if the load occurs in kernel modules. However, if the load is as with CGI-scrips, in user modules, Linux profits fully from the additional CPU. There is work done to fix these problems.
For real applications as web-servers, Apache and Linux are already ahead. If the pages cannot be served directly from the cache, the situation is even better for Linux: Here the commercial products from Redmont are not even getting close the open souce projects.
[They finish on telling that Mindcraft was right about the fact, that finding tuning info on Linux and Apache can be hard and do not rival a commercial support infrastructure. But once they got to the developer, they got help fast, whereas it Microsft a week to reply. They also mention that you wont get a kernel personalised for your environment from Microsoft.]
[End of rough translation.]
On the whole the article is a bit too pro-linux. They should at least try to compare similar web-application done as CGI and ASP. This would give some relevant information on how the servers compare for similar tasks. I personally don't care whether I have to write a perl-script or ASPs.
Servus,
johi
PS: Not the article was not available on the web the last time I checked.
> The fact of the matter is that very few companies will be releasing > source with GPL-style licenses for the purpose of examples, [...]
> I've argued before that companies that expect to make the bulk of their > profit from software can't afford to release that software open-source
You are right. The best candidats for Open-Source products are companies, where the software in itself is not the main product, but a necessary evil. They can avoid a lot of trouble with an GPL-style license. If, however, the main product is a finished piece of software, the model won't work that well any more.
But even those companies should hand to their customer the full source code and a license to do with mutations it whatever they are allowed to do with the original product. (If I am allowed to run the software on a maschine, I should be allowed to run any mutation compiled from their source, if I may resell products using their product (ie libraries) the same should be true for my versions of it.)
This way I have at least the chance of going on using the product I bought when the company goes out of business or stops supporting the product and I have trouble with it.
After a quick search I found the following Austrian regulations that may apply to the export of software and storage mediums containing software.
*) Exports to Iraq and Yugoslavia
Those two countries are currently on the UNOs shit-list and all trade with them is forbidden. There are only a few exceptions for medical stuff. This shouldn't concern you.
*) The Austrian Aussenhandelsgesetz (AHG)
This law is the base-law for most of those pesky permits.
One interesting point is right at the beginning in the definition of technology (Paragraph 1.2):
Technology (which may be subjected to export limitations) is technical know-how recorded on storage media of any kind, which is not generally available.
As LINUX is generally available, it seems not to be technology and therefore not subjected to this law.
*) The Dual Use Goods list
There is also a list with product which can be also used for military purposes. Here we find an exemption for goods with a value of less than ATS 11500 ($1000). As Linux is free and a storage medium used for export should be availble for less than that, this regulation shouldn't apply either.
*) Pornographical Material
There are some EU restrictions on exporting porn. Considering how some people drool over Linux, this may pose a problem. You'd better check that out.
A few tactics that worked well in the past in similar cases are:
*) Don't sell Linux as part of the package, just sell the support for the installation etc. If they need the software, be generous and give it to your customer as gift, download it, find it on the street, whatever.
*) Bundle it with your system or software and calculate the percentage by value. The value of the disk with linux shouldn't exceed 10% ot the value of the whole system.
If you still have problems with the ministry, try to find out exactly which regulation they apply and check if it is really relevant. Often the people at the ministry have no idea what the whole thing is about. Then hit them with a chorus chanting the mantra 'Linux is generally available and has a monetary value of less than $39.90'.
> Is Net and Web property infinite? That is, is the Net so expansible > that it could never be overcrowded and congested?
The Net is crowded and congested today. Good domainnames are rare, good spaces for banner ads are expensive, popular servers are overloaded and slow...
It doesn't really matter if property is infinite on the Net or not, because crowding occurs when some neighborhoods are considered better than others and people want to be (seen, live, work...) in cool places and not on the end of nowhere. Then prices and value rise.
Net property behaves exactly the same way as real estate. While a few acres in Siberia or Alaska are dirt cheap, people want to pay millions for their offices in Manhattan, downtown London or Zurich.
Given the minimal cost for undeveloped space, the main business on the Net seems to be net-estate development. Just have a look at Yahoo, MP3.com, cnet.com, etc. They succeed because they manage to convince people that crowding in their place is cool and then selling the crowd to the highest bidder.
> There is the current situation, not a new thing. For example, we currently have: > > Win16 (still used by some businesses) > Win95/98 > Win NT, 32-bit
If only it were that simple. More realistic is something like:
Windows 3.10 (16-bit pure) Windows 3.11 and WfW 3.11 (16-bit with Win32s) Windows NT 3.51 (32-bit, old Gui, sometimes with upgrades) Windows 95 Windows NT 4.0 Windows 98 (The available functions of the last three still vary depending on what service-packs and which version of IE are installed.)
This give our hotline serious headaches, as we don't have the luxury to force our customer to upgrade their OS just as Microsoft does.
The best thing happening with the split is a slowdown in development and standards that don't change on a daily base.
Confused and fed up with MICROS~1 standards of the day
Basically, whatever you get, you pay for it one way or another.
In this case, the user will have to pay for the software with her time. Banners are only the beginning. I'm waiting for fully commercialized give-away software like wordprocessors, which will insert a 5 minutes commercial break every 12 minutes, databases, which ask the user to enter every 1000 records some brand name to 're-energize', drawing programs, which add to every file the face of some politico candidate (including random slogan),...
Two, three years ago, banners on webpages were a novelty and today pages without them are becoming rare. In the same time, as advertizer start to measure the impact of their banner ads, prices for banners are coming down rapidly. Except for really popular pages, the average web site will earn less and less.
Exactly the same will happen to banners in programs. In the beginning, everyone will sell its desktop space, but sooner or later, it will probably not even be worth it for small companies.
> how many developers are going to flock to work on it?
After spending a few weeks trying to figure out, why your *wonderful product* fails on some installation of Wimpdos and works on most other, and you have not the luxury to tell the customer either to get lost or a real operation system, you really start to appreciate havin the source of those darn DLLs.
And once you fixed one of them, just to get your support people off your back, whether M$ may profit from it is not really of interest any more. If the fix works for others too, fine.
> but is there going to be a lot of development done?
There are people out there today, who try to fix the wimpy GUI with VB programs, so finding people to work on the operation system itself will not be the problem. At least for small areas.
> Is MS going to use this as a chance to say that "an open source project > will fail because no decent developer would work for free"?
Once the source is distributed, 'undistributing' it will be a major task for M$, considering that if you start scratching at the surface of wimpdos, you'll quickly find code that dates from 1987 and earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
In the end, it's futile to try to restrict businesses like this; all doubleclick would need
to do is contract with an offshore tracking...
Yes, big businesses would move offshore and their operating expenses increase. But the halfwit next door would be stopped cold from playing at those games. A minimum of capital and organisation is necessary to move offshore.
Since the law forbidding spam was passed in Austria, the amount of spam I receive with Austrian addresses dropped of a lot.
Even if these kind of regulation don't stop the problem, it reduce the number of offenders dramatically.
> heat in your microwave on its highest setting for
> 4 seconds per watt of your microwave
Strange:
No microwave -> Dinner is ready immediately
Very powerful microwave -> please wait for an hour or two.
To be honest, I prefer the instructions in old cookbooks:
Cook till done.
But then, I have no microwave oven.
> While it has a few drawbacks, I like being salary.
> If anybody asked me to punch a clock, or fill in a timesheet, I'd quit that job immediately.
Here in Austria, basically every worked hour has to be compensated, and overtime is (except in special conditions) paid. With a salary, the employer just gets a package for 37 to 42 hours a week, 5 weeks of holiday per year. For this reason, employes are often required to punch in and fill out timesheets.
This is, in my opinion, a good solution. I, as an employee, am not the personal slave of some PHB and required to be on call every time. Everything beyond the required 40 hours is just a matter of good will on my part, and will be paid. The employee has the option of just saying NO, without risking to be fired at once. This doesn't mean, that nobody is working over 60 hours per week, but the average employee usually doesn't.
The big advantage is, that employees are not at the completely at the mercy of their PHBs and are able to have a live outside of work. And after 10 hours work (or so), productivity drops off anyway. Too often, I had to spend time to fix the stupid things I did late the night before.
The downside is, that salaries tend to be lower around here and bonuses are not that common and usually NOT a substantial part of the total income.
Servus,
johi
I think it is a good thing, that those busybodies try to regulate the net. It means the net is growing up and becoming a part of the daily life.
It doesn't really matter whether they have any clue or the laws and rules they propose are good, bad or idiotic. The good ones hopefully stay, the bad and the idiotic will be overturned once enough people (and businesses) protest against it. This is happening for the last few years with those moronic export laws for strong encryption. The same happened with the CDA, COPA etc.
For matters that are important to the average citizen, the optimisation process between total laissez-faire and total regulation is well understood and - basically - works. The important thing is to get it started. It doesn't really matter how. Some spectacular bad laws may even speed the process to equilibrum.
I bet, inside the next three years, the whole matter of domain-names and trademarks will be solved. Probably a few martyrs and some really clueless judges will be necessary, but those are cheap to come by. Then there will be some supreme court rulings, lots of laws, rulings against those, an adaptation of the trademark concept and in the end a workable solution will emerge, which is accepted by the majority.
So don't panic, and go on complaining about all those absurd laws. It helps!
Servus,
johi
Yes, they are, but who cares? Educating people is far more effective:
On most maschines, we have a more or less up to date virus checker running. When installs a virus on his PC and complains about it, by policy, we reinstall the machine from scratch and delete all infected files. The user gets the standard lecture on how to treat data from foreign sources and to read warnings on the screen with graphic analogies (Would you eat a cookie with green and black patches offered to you on a subway by a hobo? So why are you opening everything spammer send you?).
With lot of begging and cajoling, we may save a few crucial files. Usually less than ten.
Most user get, after the first or second time, really careful, and the number of virus infections have been rapidely decreasing around here since we started this policy.
Terror and pain are real good teachers sometimes.
Without a stick, all these schemes will never work. Self-regulation means, the strong ones (big corporations) will regulate themselves the way they like, and the customer will get only the privacy the corporations leaves them.
Here in Austria, we have some - compared to the US - strong laws about privacy protection (including the right to get information about the data stored, and the right to correct errors), but with quite small fines and difficult to execute.
Most corporations (and gouvernement agencies, they are even worse) still do what they like.
Privacy for customers will only become a serious concern, when violations become are real threat to even big companies. Before that happens, all those policies and rules are just marketing babble.
Servus,
johi
I have read quite a lot about about proposed remedies, and most of them don't sound really useful.
Breaking Microsoft up in multiple parts (any way you like) could either lead to the split companies cooperating (to innovate for the best of the customer, everybody is welcome to make an offer) or the one of them will survive while the other go the way of OS/2 and CPM with their operating system. For the customer, there will only be minor changes. The only merit of this solution I see is the chaos following the split, which may allow some other big company (perhaps Sun) to take over part of the market.
Supervising Microsoft, having them publish their source - API - whatever would be nice for developer, but I fear, before publishing any new relevant information, Microsoft will risk being sued, defending themselves by claiming the new undocumented stuff are just bug fixes, security patches, already there but unclearly documented etc. and they did no wrong. All will go on as before, except for hordes of lawyers suing and contersuing on behalf of Microsoft.
Other proposals were either just a slap on Microsofts fingers (fines, public promises never to do it again...) or so drastic, that they sound not workable under the current legal system.
To be honest, I think the remedy most likely to work, is to limit Microsofts marketing budget for the next 5 years to the average amount available to the next 5 competitors and forbid Mr. Gates ever to use the word 'innovate' again.
My question now is: What options does the judge have, which would break Microsofts monopoly efficently, which will not bog down in legal mud-slinging for the next decade? Are there any?
Servus,
johi
> you don't want to know the means which involve a corkscrew...
Let's call it WIT (for Wine Interface Tool), an essential tool for anybody on a hotline. It also increases the performance when tracing spagetti code al carbonara and increases the imaging capabilities in candlelight.
Cheers,
johi
This article reads, as if the author just summarised the discussion on /. a few week ago about the original article.
We always knew it.
Servus,
johi
Could it not be, that geeks tend to be good at what they do simply because they spend so much time doing it?
When other people make them miserable, an obscure book like 'the art of computer programming' and 'advanced metaphysics: a primer', sitting in some lab or in front of a screen does a better job at keeps them away than Raid for moskitos.
And, while they are at it, they may try to get some pleasure to get out of what they do, they get involved, and sometimes get really good at what they do.
Similar reaction help other groups to cope with their problems. All those busy-bodies trying overcome their boredom and frustration by competing at charity dinners with their neighbors aren't what I would call sane either.
And not to forget, all those baseball-, soccer-, beauty peagent-, and what ever else-moms and dads, trying to live through their kids, because they failed with their own life.
Geeks as insane as everybody else, just in a different way. And each insanity attracts get relieved by its own kind of behaviour. As it would be inefficient for a society-junky to hide for years in a lab, geeks in ballrooms are in the wrong place.
Sevus,
johi
> ... when railroad was the primary means of transporting goods,
> Russia pulled a similar egotistical maneuver and selected a railroad "gauge"
There were some reasons behind this. When lots of space is available and building is cheap, a wider track means wider cars means more cargo on the train means cheaper transport. This was an important consideration in Russia.
On the other hand lot of railroads in the alps (Austria and Switzerland mainly) use narrow to ultra-narrow tracks. Every inch that had to be carved out of a mountain, mostly by hand, was expensive. Doubling the with of the bed for the tracks quadruples the amount of rock they had to move. Ergo: They build single track narrow gauge railroads there.
Servus,
johi
> The reason for buggy code is simple: most programmers have never
> had access to state of the art debugging software and tools.
No, the state of the art doesn't play a role in that.
In my experience the main reasons were:
Programmer don't care When writing a quick hack to do something, 'good enough' usually does the job. When someone else start to recycle these quick hacks, the foundation for a buggy software is laid. Eg: sendmail, yacc, lex
Marketing and Managment. When the local managment announces shipment dates when the first prototype is barely running, buggy software is delivered. Eg: Most commercial consumer software. Pick any.
Creeping Featurism. If the developer is constantly asked to quickly add this feature and that feature, and the marketing department sees no use in a redesign, even good software get broken. This gets worse that the average marketing department ask for feature list to compare their product with others. To my knowledge, no marketing campain ever was contrued aroud the fact that a program is stable. It's always the new gimmicks.
Servus,
johi
> Avoiding flights and nuclear reactors
Yes, avoiding the combination of flights and nuclear reactors is a good idea.
now, why should I start to fly arond in nuclear reactors?
> But who needs more than that?
It depends what you are doing. But having a good documentation of your software is really handy, when you have to fix the program some 5 years later. Happened too often to me.
Pseudo-code and flowcharts are just crutches. They are are real big help when writing complex parser, but you don't need them for the easy stuff. (Most stuff you can do in a week comes under easy). The same goes for UML, Jackson- and other diagrams. You don't need them for you stamp collection database, but when the diagrams are big and complex enough to make a nice wallpaper, they are indispensable.
By the way, the toilet is a real useful place to hang them. Best at eye level.
> I STILL don't understand the hoopla of "The Internet Menace".
.ru, .sk and other exotic national domains? If any american court tries to serve a subpoena, they are immediately dealing with international law, extradition and mutual law enforcement assistance treaties (which may or may not exist) and a simple request ends up being months of work. To top the whole thing off, most of the time they get nothing.
From what I gather around here (Austria, Europe), law enforcement have a big problem enforcing current laws if the internet gets involved. They have procedures how to tap a local phone, how to search a car or a building, but with the internet, those procedures fail fast, because it is so easy to get outside of their juridiction.
Ever wondered, why so many warez and other sites on the border of legality are in some
The next stumbling block is the usability of the evidence gathered on the net. How is the police going to prove the data comes from the suspect? Most of the time they end up confiscating some disks and use what they find there.
And for those, and many more reason, police departments around the world hate the internet and try to push laws to regulate it to death. And because they don't really understand the concept of a truely distributed net or the volumes involved, the laws are either ridiculously repressive (cf China, Iran) or stupid. Often both.
> Kiddie porn is illegal no matter how you trade it.
In most of the places around the world it is, but the definition of 'kiddy' and of 'porn' both vary a lot. And even the concept of 'trade' isn't that clearly defined across countries.
Are the free Web hosting and the relative anonymity really that important for propaganda?
n t2000 ?
I'd believe that anyone wanting to spread propaganda on a national scale will invest at least in a good webdesign and a domain-name. Or can you imagine a candidate running for presidency with a website at
http:\\homebase.freespam.net\DonaldDuck4Preside
Even if the article is not presenting any real ew insights, it still summarised the problems with news very well. Another site about journalism and ethics is the Online Journalism Review. The have often articles on subjects like this.
What I really hated about the article is this stupid and ridiculous open-source activism.
Yes, it is nice that CmdrTaco publishes the code for Slashdot, but for the matter of transparency of the news selection mechanism it doesn't really help. It may increase the stability of the system and is a great help for people wanting to start similar sites, but, even with the source code, there is no way of checking what scrips CmdrTaco is really running. Nobody can stop CmdrTaco from adding a message filters. And if he tried, no matter if the code is available or not, sooner or
later discrepancies would crop up and people would become suspicious.
The whole issue is about trust, and the source code does not help (or hinder). Saying Slashdot is better than freerepublic because one is open-source and the other not, is only ridiculous.
The best use for these boots is to do things that that should not be too easy to traced back. The bucket stops at the public internet boot. The only thing to check is for the security cameras and not to behave stupidly.
But that goes for all things.
The german computer magazine ct published in their last issue (number 13) a test NT/IIS vs. Linux/Apache as a webserver. They uses a 4 processor Siemens box with a raid 5 as disk storage.
Here is what they found out: (All numbers are estimates from the charts. They may be off, but not much)
First, as soon as you have to use more than one network-adapter NT wipes Linux butt on static pages. Linux seem to be pretty bad in this area. Their guess is, it has something to do with the kernel and multthreading. This verifies pretty much the findings of Mindcraft.
The main part however was dedicated to a slightly different scenario. They tested a few different things.
The first test was serving a single static file of 4 kB size. They stopped measuring at 512 serving processes which corresponds on their environment to about 950 hits/s for bot linux and NT, Linux leading. With 8 processes NT leads 560 to 480 hits/s, from 16 to 32 processes they are roughly the same, from 64 processes on Linux leads by 20 to 50 hits/s.
The second test was the same as the first only with 8 kB size. There Linux leads the whole way by 20 to 50 hits/s maxing out at about 550 to 530 hits/s.
The third an the forth thest were again serving 4 kB files. In the third test the number of files (10000) all fitted into the cache, in the forth thest they didn't. In test number 3 NT is only a bit better with 8 processes (380 to 320 hits/s) ans then linux leads by about 100 hits/s maxing out at 820 hits/s to 720 for NT.
As soon as NT needed to use the disk (1000000) its performance wasn't so good. It stayed at a constant 20 hits/s while Linux went from 50 hits/s to 280 for 512 apache processes. It seems NT doesn't like a raid 5 that much. It prefers a raid 0.
The fun really started when the tried dynamic pages with Perl scrips. There the single processor apache was able to serve about twice as much pages than the 4 CPU IIS server. the numbers:
NT 1 CPU: 30 hits/s
NT 4 CPU: 55 hits/s
Linux 1 CPU: 105 hits/s
Linux 4 CPU 200 to 245 hits/s
Then they added, to simulte database queries a delay of 3 s into the cgi script. The the performance for the NT server dropped from 30 to less than 5 hits/s. For Linux, the performance was linear to the number of processes, starting a 5 hits/s for 1 process going to 80 hits/s for 256 processes instead of the 105 for the version without the delay.
Their conclusion [rough translation]:
For a dedicated webserver with static HTML only, additional CPU are not worth the bother. Even on 2 Fast Ethernet Segments, the increas is only about 20%. CPU power seems not to be the limiting factor. [...]
The realitively bad results for Linux with two network adapter indicate, that the Mindcraft result are plausible and NT and IIS are better performing then their free competition, if one want to play by MIncrafts rules.
[Then some text explaining that 1000 hits/s is about then times the peak value they get on their server and those pages have to be static and cached.]
As our test demonstrate, the Mindcraft results can not be applied to situations, where pages have to be generated dynamically, which is the case on nearly all serious web-sites.
In SMP-mode Linux showed some definite weakenesses. Even kernel developer acknowledge , that Linus still has problems with scalability in SMP settings, specially if the load occurs in kernel modules. However, if the load is as with CGI-scrips, in user modules, Linux profits fully from the additional CPU. There is work done to fix these problems.
For real applications as web-servers, Apache and Linux are already ahead. If the pages cannot be served directly from the cache, the situation is even better for Linux: Here the commercial products from Redmont are not even getting close the open souce projects.
[They finish on telling that Mindcraft was right about the fact, that finding tuning info on Linux and Apache can be hard and do not rival a commercial support infrastructure. But once they got to the developer, they got help fast, whereas it Microsft a week to reply. They also mention that you wont get a kernel personalised for your environment from Microsoft.]
[End of rough translation.]
On the whole the article is a bit too pro-linux. They should at least try to compare similar web-application done as CGI and ASP. This would give some relevant information on how the servers compare for similar tasks. I personally don't care whether I have to write a perl-script or ASPs.
Servus,
johi
PS: Not the article was not available on the web the last time I checked.
> The fact of the matter is that very few companies will be releasing
> source with GPL-style licenses for the purpose of examples, [...]
> I've argued before that companies that expect to make the bulk of their
> profit from software can't afford to release that software open-source
You are right. The best candidats for Open-Source products are companies, where the software in itself is not the main product, but a necessary evil. They can avoid a lot of trouble with an GPL-style license. If, however, the main product is a finished piece of software, the model won't work that well any more.
But even those companies should hand to their customer the full source code and a license to do with mutations it whatever they are allowed to do with the original product. (If I am allowed to run the software on a maschine, I should be allowed to run any mutation compiled from their source, if I may resell products using their product (ie libraries) the same should be true for my versions of it.)
This way I have at least the chance of going on using the product I bought when the company goes out of business or stops supporting the product and I have trouble with it.
Servus,
johi
After a quick search I found the following Austrian regulations that may apply to the export of software and storage mediums containing software.
*) Exports to Iraq and Yugoslavia
Those two countries are currently on the UNOs shit-list and all trade with them is forbidden. There are only a few exceptions for medical stuff. This shouldn't concern you.
*) The Austrian Aussenhandelsgesetz (AHG)
This law is the base-law for most of those pesky permits.
One interesting point is right at the beginning in the definition of technology (Paragraph 1.2):
Technology (which may be subjected to export limitations) is technical know-how recorded on storage media of any kind, which is not generally available.
As LINUX is generally available, it seems not to be technology and therefore not subjected to this law.
*) The Dual Use Goods list
There is also a list with product which can be also used for military purposes. Here we find an exemption for goods with a value of less than ATS 11500 ($1000). As Linux is free and a storage medium used for export should be availble for less than that, this regulation shouldn't apply either.
*) Pornographical Material
There are some EU restrictions on exporting porn. Considering how some people drool over Linux, this may pose a problem. You'd better check that out.
A few tactics that worked well in the past in similar cases are:
*) Don't sell Linux as part of the package, just sell the support for the installation etc. If they need the software, be generous and give it to your customer as gift, download it, find it on the street, whatever.
*) Bundle it with your system or software and calculate the percentage by value. The value of the disk with linux shouldn't exceed 10% ot the value of the whole system.
If you still have problems with the ministry, try to find out exactly which regulation they apply
and check if it is really relevant. Often the people at the ministry have no idea what the whole thing is about. Then hit them with a chorus chanting the mantra 'Linux is generally available and has a monetary value of less than $39.90'.
I whish you good luck!
johi
> Is Net and Web property infinite? That is, is the Net so expansible
/.
> that it could never be overcrowded and congested?
The Net is crowded and congested today. Good domainnames are rare, good spaces for banner ads are expensive, popular servers are overloaded and slow...
It doesn't really matter if property is infinite on the Net or not, because crowding occurs when some neighborhoods are considered better than others and people want to be (seen, live, work...) in cool places and not on the end of nowhere. Then prices and value rise.
Net property behaves exactly the same way as real estate. While a few acres in Siberia or Alaska are dirt cheap, people want to pay millions for their offices in Manhattan, downtown London or Zurich.
Given the minimal cost for undeveloped space, the main business on the Net seems to be net-estate development. Just have a look at Yahoo, MP3.com, cnet.com, etc. They succeed because they manage to convince people that crowding in their place is cool and then selling the crowd to the highest bidder.
Very confused and crowded at
johi
> There is the current situation, not a new thing. For example, we currently have:
>
> Win16 (still used by some businesses)
> Win95/98
> Win NT, 32-bit
If only it were that simple. More realistic is something like:
Windows 3.10 (16-bit pure)
Windows 3.11 and WfW 3.11 (16-bit with Win32s)
Windows NT 3.51 (32-bit, old Gui, sometimes with upgrades)
Windows 95
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 98
(The available functions of the last three still vary depending on what service-packs and which version of IE are installed.)
This give our hotline serious headaches, as we don't have the luxury to force our customer to upgrade their OS just as Microsoft does.
The best thing happening with the split is a slowdown in development and standards that don't change on a daily base.
Confused and fed up with MICROS~1 standards of the day
johi
Basically, whatever you get, you pay for it one way or another.
...
In this case, the user will have to pay for the software with her time. Banners are only the beginning. I'm waiting for fully commercialized give-away software like wordprocessors, which will insert a 5 minutes commercial break every 12 minutes, databases, which ask the user to enter every 1000 records some brand name to 're-energize', drawing programs, which add to every file the face of some politico candidate (including random slogan),
Two, three years ago, banners on webpages were a novelty and today pages without them are becoming rare. In the same time, as advertizer start to measure the impact of their banner ads, prices for banners are coming down rapidly. Except for really popular pages, the average web site will earn less and less.
Exactly the same will happen to banners in programs. In the beginning, everyone will sell its desktop space, but sooner or later, it will probably not even be worth it for small companies.
> how many developers are going to flock to work on it?
After spending a few weeks trying to figure out, why your *wonderful product* fails on some installation of Wimpdos and works on most other, and you have not the luxury to tell the customer either to get lost or a real operation system, you really start to appreciate havin the source of those darn DLLs.
And once you fixed one of them, just to get your support people off your back, whether M$ may profit from it is not really of interest any more. If the fix works for others too, fine.
> but is there going to be a lot of development done?
There are people out there today, who try to fix the wimpy GUI with VB programs, so finding people to work on the operation system itself will not be the problem. At least for small areas.
> Is MS going to use this as a chance to say that "an open source project
> will fail because no decent developer would work for free"?
Once the source is distributed, 'undistributing' it will be a major task for M$, considering that if you start scratching at the surface of wimpdos, you'll quickly find code that dates from 1987 and earlier.