I'm fairly liberal, and I support the second amendment.
While I agree with you about most of the factual content of your post, nearly half of the signatories of the constitution did in fact think slavery was "just peachy". The well known authors, each "liberal" to the core, were against it, but there were more signers than authors.
Heck, slavery, in the classical sense, was a "conservative" value of the day and the southern bible belt (etc) is where racism is still the strongest. (Not that I see its utter absence anywhere.)
The failing here is the cherry-picking of facts and then using that slapping political talking-point words and labels on the argument as if it makes the argument more valid instead of less so.
Calling something "another liberal lie" just makes you sound like you don't think about your words.
You say that like the existing Internet is _finished_...
And if you _don't_ think this is the stinking remains of a glorious and overzealous original idea, I suggest you have never been offered Penis Enlargement via any existing protocol...
Granted this Internet was swept beneath the rug of AOL users and various "legal" measures to "protect the children", both largely identical as they each end up making you enter _someone's_ credit card information to view porn.
AT&T did, in fact patent _ALL_ of their research. The difference was in another area...
The grant of monopoly to AT&T, which funded Bell Labs, basically _forbade_ them from selling _anything_ (and so on). So AT&T made telephones and rented them as part of the service, and they licensed their Bell Labs patents for trivial amounts and so on. In particular the reciprocal in-perpetuity licensing that let Unix grow from nothing via return contributions from Berkley and Apple and everybody else would never have been, in any form, were it not for the fact that AT&T was legally prevented from being "business like" about making their developments secret. The deal was "cushy monopoly money, but everything it gets you as a company is more-or-less public because we paid for you to exist rather dearly."
The license fee for the transistor patent was, if memory serves, one dollar ($1.00) U.S. and so on.
And life was good until the breakup.
See, with absolutely nobody at AT&T knowing how to _sell_ anything at all to anybody, once AT&T was no longer a state sanctioned monopoly, they had all this stuff (like UNIX) and no idea how to actually perform a "sale" via this "marketing" thingy that all the kids were so up about. Hence things like "the Unix PC" and really bizarre buy-your-phone offers and the disappearance of the _indestructible_ telephone handset. Time was, you could beat a person to death the receiver of your phone, and use the body to break their bones into neat little pieces, and not damage the thing so much that you couldn't still call someone to get together for a nice alibi party. (AT&T leased those things, so they were build to outlive the customers 8-). What we got next was cheap plastic crap that broke when you dropped it. etc.
The only thing that the breakup did to _help_ AT&T was it let them fire a whole bunch of _useless_ and _incompetent_ union labor that had collected in their ranks. The Lilly Tomlin line "we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company" was very, very true and it plagued operations. Its amazing how many do-nothings got unloaded on the "baby bells" or lost their jobs outright.
Still, it would have been better for us all if the breakup never happened, were there then some way to have the internet revolution while still having a monopoly phone company. But that would have been a fine hair to split and not have the whole thing stall.
Nothing is perfect and we are all just left to our own for a definition of "good enough".
Seriously, Even with the U.S. space effort etc, there are things checked a bizillion times on a manned space craft. This is because the mission cannot just pull over for parts mid-flight. And even with all that, shit still breaks or doesn't do as expected.
We are all just left to hope that any given "good enough" is, well, actually good enough.
The credit reporting agencies are redistributing negative information they _know_ is untrue. Why isn't this defamation or liable/slander (whichever is the written one)?
It seems like the credit agencies have managed to get some sort of immunity to "it costs money to lie" principle.
Where does this protection come from?
I agree that it has nothing to do with the social security system, since the extra-national numbers don't actually match (it's the credit reporting system that is forcing the reporting entity to "pad" the number with leading zeros) and are completely out of their control.
Like most of our problems in the U.S.A. there is a lack of accountability and personal and/or corporate responsibility at its core.
Eventually someone is going to revolt against someone somewhere.
In point of fact there is _nothing_ "hidden" about the cost of using GPL software in a product.
If you go the Microsoft Wince (I didn't name it 8-) route, you pay many dollars up-front, and some dollars per-unit.
You go GPL you pay nothing up front and pay full disclosure on the back end per unit.
The whole problem is the perception that this is "hidden" in the first place. When the tech people sell the GPL software to their managers they, in their naiveté, usually don't know to make a distinction between free(beer) and free(open).
Once the programmers, and indeed people like you, understand enough to present the cost/benefit analysis as it truly is, then this may stop happening.
Don't even think _hidden_, don't fool yourself or others. It's right there in the language of the GPL plain as day. Just like it's supposed to be. And thats the good thing that separates it from the BSD license which has no cost at all. That is the _whole_ reason to pick one over another as a licensor.
I loved the box as technology. The thing where the power came down the line from the RF diverter was outstanding, and never a problem. I think I owned all eight games made for it as well. And the track ball. And the plastic thingy that let you mount both controllers together so you could play space dungeon. Hell, I still might. The thing survived, fully functional, for numerous moves over like 20 years, and every now and again I would plug it back in only to remember...
Its death was the controller. I opened one once and discovered that they basically had the X and Y potentiometers on the same circuit. I never did understand how it worked, but as near as I could tell the magnitude of change of resistance for X was way different than for Y so it could (sort of) tell what you were doing with the joystick. But _only_ sort of. Moving from the extreme corners to other other extreme corners was super obvious and worked okay. Trying to maneuver Pengo from the north side of a cube to the east side, so that you could then shove the cube west was basically impossible.
The fact that the four "trigger" buttons were stacked one above the other, two to a side, on the east and west sides of the controller, in side semi-recessed rectangles was "freaking impossible".
I eventually figured out that they wanted you to hold the controller in your left palm, use your left thumb and fore-finger to operate the triggers, while _gently_ and _unerringly_ operating the joystick with your right index finger. My response to this realization was "ch'yah right".
Then again nobody invented "ergonomics" till like five years later. 8-)
Adopting a body of code is like adopting a child. Its terms change your terms because you _chose_ to _adopt_ it.
The thing people really don't get is that you have _no_ _right_ _whatsovever_ to the code in *any* library outside the terms of copyright law.
The GPL is a grant of license (not a contract) and it is(presumably, in your question) the sole means of receiving that license to use that code. As part of that license you get an unlimited license to use the code yourself for any private purpose, and you get the much-more-limited license to redistributed the code to others IF AND ONLY IF you agree that you will distribute all the source code for the whole shebang you distribute under the GPL, where that code is "linked with" or otherwise joined to the piece(s) you received via the GPL.
When you decide to use that GPL code you decide to adopt the GPL for the existing code you intend to link with that code for any _distribution_ of the combined result, if you don't so decide, then you may not use the GPL code in that distribution. There is no third option.
In the finer points:
The code _you_ already wrote does not become _solely_ GPLed; its source must accompany the distribution with the GPLd code, but it doesn't have to accompany other distributions under other licenses. So if you make two products X and Y out of largely the same code base, but you have the GPL readline library linked with Y, then you must include the entire source base when you distribute Y, but you can still withhold the source base for distributions of X. Further you cannot give someone X and Y and then put a term on the distribution of X that prevents them from using the source code they got with Y. Further still if I get X from you, and my buddy gets Y from you, my buddy can give me the source code from Y and no term of license for X can prevent me from using that code. Even if X had such a term, you would be civilly liable for going after me for using the source from my buddy because your attempt to use X to limit my use of Y means that you were violating copyright law by giving out copies of Y, since you may not add restrictive terms to the GPL. I have a license for X, I get a license for Y from my buddy when he gives it to me, and that license power flows from you (though him to me) unimpeded otherwise it cannot flow from you to him and you are the bad guy.
The larger question of "why would anybody agree to that?" is easily answered.
It's a financially stable cost/benefit transaction. You agree to "pay" for the source code you receive and pass on, by adding to its mass by including your code under the same terms.
From a business stand point it is a nearly perfect deal. you "pay" on the back end, when you distribute, and all you "pay" is the cost of disclosure.
Compare this to a license for Microsoft Wince (I didn't name it 8-) which you have to pay for up front to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then pay for it on the back end again with a per-unit-sold fee.
Some people resist the GPL because they beleive that the "value of their IP" in sweat equity is larger than it actually is. This is a delusion that comes from the outrageousness that is the music industry where one months work is supposed to keep paying dividends forever (e.g. how long did anybody work on the Beatles song "Help"? Should it still be paying dividends to anybody? honestly? I wish I could get re-paid every time someone uses my software, but _real_ life aint even supposed to be like that. 8-)
So anyway, for the cost of a $0.38 CD tossed into the wrapper with your product, or a web site that you promise to keep up for seven years, or whatever, you can leverage ungodly amounts of code.
The "but someone will steal my precious" arguments are exactly that crazy. Your precious isn't that precious, and most people would rather pay you for the next version than write that version themselves. The GPL startup cost cannot be beat.
_BUT_ if you adopt the GPL later in the development cycle, yo
to prove my aging geek status I wouldn't have had the pay phone mis-dial returning "a busy signal", I would have said the pay phone returned "denial tone" (which some people used to call "fast busy"). That would have proved that I was both old enough to remember pay phones, _and_ that I was old enough to have become a geek while pay phones were still relevant. 8-)
They still use denial tone, and the three-tone-error who's name I forget... but now days most self described geeks tend not to see the relevance of the wire-line networks, which is sad.
My email example never mentioned, nor does it pivot on, HTTP.
Comcast doesn't "send you an http page" they send you a FALSE ADDRESS RESOLUTION RECORD where your browser then goes to retrieve the bogus page via HTTP. See how the DNS protocol is completely different than the HTTP protocol?
SPAM Filters check to make sure that senders exist (among other things), one of the ways they do this is to look up the domain name to make sure that the sender domain ACTUALLY EXISTS as a first tier check. This is why you don't see successful spam from arbitrarily complex senders any more. That is, while the subject lines will extol you to enlarge your penis, the emails are no longer from "great_deals@my.giant.penis.com" any more (unless someone actually registers at least the top level domain.
It's not the only filter of course, but it is near the top of the list because it does a heck of a lot of heavy lifting quite cheaply.
And as another element you clearly missed. Here you are confusing HTTP and DNS and you are at least well educated enough to know that HTTP is what runs the web. Yet your education fails you when you don't _get_ that this is a poisoning of DNS not "the web" simply because that poison is designed to primarily dupe web users. Your response is a one-person proof of why this is so dangerous. The total number of people using protocols they don't fully understand is legion. When anybody starts mucking around with the underlying assumptions that make the "the web" and indeed the entire internet work, they are trampling barefoot through a sea of broken glass and dragging us all behind them through the unintended consequences.
When those who know how all this stuff works tell you that you are breaking something, perhaps you should at least study the declaration before airing dissent.
Your example fails because internalmail.company.com will resolve through company.com, not dnsshill.comcast.com. That is "company.com" is authoritative for "internalmail.company.com" in the hierarchical name service system. The questions of what happens in this case is questionable. Especially since in your split tunnel you probably have prepended company.com's internal DNS resolvers in the name search space so that the VPN user sees the internal sites in preference to the external ones.
DNS is supposed to tell you (essentially) "no such domain name registered" when you try to find a domain name.
IFF (e.g. if and only if) DNS _only_ serviced web browsers, then one noise-page (my adverts here) is no different than any other noise page (no such name) because a human is going to go "oh, that's not what I was looking for".
But there is a heck of a lot more going on out here in the internet than just web browsing, and significant portions of it hinge on getting true and correct answers from the DNS system.
With DNS boned-up to return false positives on all names, then money can be stolen from you, the causal web browser. For instance, I send you an email from support@bankofamercia.com; you don't notice the transposition of letters, your spam filter looks up bankofamercia.com and the DNS service return as IP address instead of no such address, that address is the same one as I spoofed in the email, the spam filter says its a good email, you get owned.
Okay, that _is_ contrived, so try this instead...
It's 1964. You are at a pay phone. Your car has broken down. It's your last dime. You call home, but mis-dial a number that doesn't exist and you get a busy signal, and you get your dime back. You call home again and get help. The system worked.
It's 1964. You are at a pay phone. Your car is broken down. It's your last dime. You call home, but mis-dial a number that doesn't exist and some random person answers and proceeds to try to sell you car wax. Your dime is gone. You are still stuck. The system has failed.
Imagine your life if you _never_ got a busy signal. You call any extension in any company and you get to leave a voice mail but nobody will ever get that message. It would be living hell.
Worse yet, you run a small company, you may a small number of sales each month that are vital to your companies survival. You invest in an expensive advertisement on the superbowl and everything goes great. Then your DNS server dies. Now there is nobody to answer the proper DNS queries. The DNS squatter wakes up and since mylittlecompany.com no longer resolves, all that traffic goes to the Comcast Advertisement Shill page. In just a few minutes you get your DNS server working again, but everyone who got the bogus page thinks your company is trying to sell comcast telephone service and web search services and you never go that business. You are out big cash and your name is ruined. IF the spamvertisement page hadn't been there, those people might instead be thinking "wow, this service is so popular I cannot get in, maybe I'll try back in a bit" instead of "why did comcast decide to take out a superbowl ad that made it look like they sold that interesting little product?"
In short, what if every time your cell phone couldn't be found (because it was off or the battery died etc) the people trying to call you got silently redirected to a random "service" of the type one sees on late night television, offering jokes or sex chat, ostensibly in your good name?
Your clients are at the "hey this free stuff is great" stage. Good. But there isn't really any value to having the ap be far away on a web server.
A decent and easy-to-accomplish setup of local Open Source stuff will do exactly the same job at the same price point, but without the questions of PRIVACY you mention nor the questions of RETENTION you didn't.
Google really _isn't_ on the hook to be there with these services or all your data in two years time etc.
So for privacy and retention reasons you cannot really ever use the web-application model to a remote company without many potential problems.
Again, local is mandatory, but Microsoft isn't. Everything you can find on Google Apps can be found for free use on/with any large-scale linux distribution pretty much for the cost of playing point-and-click in the software installer/chooser/whatever.
Illegal Prior Restraint Implemented by Technical Means.
It's combative, but it does rather transfer the onus onto the "DRM Supporter" to say why his scheme does not fall under that umbrella.
Alternatively "Digital Restriction Mechanism" as I cannot find any "rights" being "managed", so anybody who supports "DRM" must first detail the means of management for the particular rights they grant and reserve before they _get_ _to_ use the term.
DRM is "prior restraint". Prior Restraint is illegal. It isn't necessarily recognized as this because the "government" doing the restraining is not a recognized entity and it is doing it via purely technological means.
As to the argument whether the media cartel is a government, well they have been given the power of law enforcement to back them up and the procedure and is enshrined in the DMCA in the US.
Company puts thing on media to prevent use and reproduction including in publishing. Government sanctions thing and enacts laws to protect thing and punish those who obstruct thing by any means. Government leaves control of thing to Company. Company is now a "psudo-governmental agency". Thing is now Prior Restraint.
Whatever your count, add "Mathematicians who don't understand Science"...
In the article the speaker starts in on Math being pure and abstract, and gets all dismissive of science "with test-tubes and experiments".
It's a classic false dichotomy where the glorious Math is a pure thing of "Art" but practical things are dirty banalities.
Good science (as opposed to gestaltist empiricism) starts with the pure conjecture of hypothesis and the creative construction of conditions and truths implicit in that hypothesis in such terms that one can then try to destroy that construct with thought, or on paper, or with test tubes, or dynamite.
Well-executed, all disciplines are Art. Poorly executed all arts are dross.
The problem with bulk education is that it treats _ALL_ subjects (including arts) as quantifiable objective things devoid of art or _circumstantial_ _subjective_ merit. That's because we grade everything, and you cannot grade an intransitive truth.
So the piece largely picks a favorite nit while the whole of London lies awash in flea-ridden plague rats.
Standardized testing, overt measure of questionable "qualities", forcing teachers to teach outside their talents and interests, and the one-size must measure all approach to thought and insight needs must poison schooling for all topics and purposes.
I don't cry for the mathematicians lost any more than I cry for the Great Mechanical Virtuoso who was forced into the "higher education track" and denied access to the Vo-Tech campus and metal lathe that would have let him express his true greatness "because vo-tech is for the under achiever".
School is Prison for the Mind, and far too few make parole just because they are dismissed from the facility.
If you are running a windows guest, regardless of whether you are running a Linux or Windows host you should:
1) _Definitely_ leave paging turned on in the windows guest.
2) If you have multiple physical disk devices, make a "D:" drive as a separate virtual disk where the virtual disk image files are on a different physical spindle in the host os. Now inside the windows guest delete the page file from C: and create one on the new/separate D: drive (who's files are on the "the other spindle" in the host os).
3) If you _NEVER_ want to "suspend" the windows guest (you can still suspend the host separately) you can do the following advanced trick...: [NOTE: this may be worth doing even if you don't have a separate spindle for D:]
3a) Create a virtual disk to mount as D: 3b) Start windows guest OS. 3c) Log in as an administrator and Format the D: drive (with all that entails); FAT is fine and possibly optimal as the file system type. 3d) Go into the windows VM settings and delete the windows pagefile from C and make a large fixed or system-managed page file on D: 3e) Windows will tell you that you have to reboot for this to take effect, but _DONT_, shut down windows instead. 3f) Go into the settings for the virtual disk that you just made the D: drive and make it "non-persistent".
You now have a eternally empty "D:" drive, its only contents is the freshly formatted disk image. Every time windows starts it will know that there _should_ be a page file on D: and it will create that page file anew on an "empty" drive, so it will always be defragmented etc and you can move the windows vm around more easily (like it will zip/tar up smaller) since the random contents of the pagefile will always be discarded on shut down. D: is also now the _ultimate_ self cleaning/tmp directory for windows. If you move your TEMP and TMP environment variables to point to D:\ (or if you make other directories on D: before step 3e,) they will always be empty on reboot, including whatever cache files you put there etc.
As an aside, all windows instances everywhere should have "pagedefrag" installed on them (search microsoft.com for this application) whether they be Host or Guest OS instances.
Also, not to plug yet-another product I have no interest in besides finding it useful, jkDefrag is the best and works particularly well after pagedefrag and before a vmware shrink operation.
I covered this in more detail in a top level post below. The actual performance problems for most vmWare machines (typically) is not the virtual disk. The way vm machine memory is backed by a mapped regular file, combined with the way large-memory VMs interact with the overcommit_ratio on a Linux host OS (e.g. running vmware under linux, regardless of what the vm is running internally) produce almost all of the slowdowns.
The way VMWare does NAT through a userspace daemon isn't the best thing on the planet either.
(read the how-to post below for the remedies instead of looking here for re-pasted text, I'm not _that_ much of a karma whore 8-)
Okay, I have been through this at work several times recently. There are two major slow-downs in the default (but reasonably bullet-proof) VMWare machines running on a Linux _host_.
1) If you are doing NAT attachment _don't_ use the vmware NAT daemon. It pulls each packet into userspace before deciding how to forward/nat it. So don't use the default nat device (e.g. vmnet8). Add a new custom made "host only" adapter (e.g. vmnet9-or-more) by adding another adapter, and then use regular firewalling (ip_forward = 1 and iptables rules) so that the packets just pass through the Linux kernel and netfilters once. (you can use vmnet1 in a pinch but blarg! 8-)
1a) If you want/need to use the default nat engine (e.g. vmnet8) then put the nat daemon into a real-time scheduling group with "chrt --rr --pid 22 $(pgrep vmnet-natd)". Not quite a good as staying in the kernel all the way to your physical media.
1b) if you do item one, don't use the vmware-dhcpd, configure your regular dhcpd/dhcpd3 etc daemon because it will more easily integrate with your system as a whole.
(in other words, vmware-dhcpd is not magic, and vmware-natd is _super_ expensive)
2) VMWare makes a/path/to/your/machine/machine_name.vmem file, which is a memory mapped file that represents the RAM in the guest. This is like having the whole vm living forever in your swap space. It's great there if you want to take a lot of snapshots and want to be more restart/crash/sleep safe. It _sucks_ for performance. If you use "mainmem.usenamedfile=FALSE" in your.vmx files. (you have to edit the files by hand). This will move the.vmem file into your temp directory and unlink it so it's anonymous and self-deleting. It slows down snapshots but...
2a) Make _SURE_ your/tmp file system is a mounted tmpfs with a size=whatever mount option that will let the tmpfs grow to at least 10% larger than the (sum of the) memory size of (all of the) vritual machine(s) you are going to run at once. This will cause the "backing" of the virtual machine RAM to be actual RAM and you will get rational machine RAM speed.
2b) If you want/need to, there is a tmpDirectory=/wherever diretive to say where those files go. It gangswith the usenamedfile=FLASE and you can set up dedicated tmpfs files to back the machines specially/separately.
2c) If you want/need the backing or have a "better" drive you want to use with real backing, you can use the above in variations to move this performance limiter onto different spindle than your.vmd (virtual disk files).
3) No matter what, your virtual memory file counts against your overcommit_ratio (/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ratio) compared to your ram. It defaults at 50% for _all_ the accounted facilities system-wide. If you have 4Gig RAM and try to run a 3G vm while leaving your overcommit_ratio at 50, you will suffer some unintended consequences in terms of paging/swapping pressure. Ajust your ratio to like 75 or 80 percent if your total VM memory size is 60 to 65 percent of real ram. _DONT_ set this nubmer to more than 85% unless you have experimented with the system stability at higher numbers. It can be _quite_ surprising.
Anyway, that's the three things (in many parts) you need to know to make VMWare work its best on your linux host OS. It doesn't matter what the Guest OS is, always consider the above.
Disclaimer: I don't work for VMWare etc, this is all practical knowledge and trial-n-error gained knowledge. I offer no warranty, but it will work...
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I'm fairly liberal, and I support the second amendment.
While I agree with you about most of the factual content of your post, nearly half of the signatories of the constitution did in fact think slavery was "just peachy". The well known authors, each "liberal" to the core, were against it, but there were more signers than authors.
Heck, slavery, in the classical sense, was a "conservative" value of the day and the southern bible belt (etc) is where racism is still the strongest. (Not that I see its utter absence anywhere.)
The failing here is the cherry-picking of facts and then using that slapping political talking-point words and labels on the argument as if it makes the argument more valid instead of less so.
Calling something "another liberal lie" just makes you sound like you don't think about your words.
You say that like the existing Internet is _finished_...
And if you _don't_ think this is the stinking remains of a glorious and overzealous original idea, I suggest you have never been offered Penis Enlargement via any existing protocol...
Granted this Internet was swept beneath the rug of AOL users and various "legal" measures to "protect the children", both largely identical as they each end up making you enter _someone's_ credit card information to view porn.
AT&T did, in fact patent _ALL_ of their research. The difference was in another area...
The grant of monopoly to AT&T, which funded Bell Labs, basically _forbade_ them from selling _anything_ (and so on). So AT&T made telephones and rented them as part of the service, and they licensed their Bell Labs patents for trivial amounts and so on. In particular the reciprocal in-perpetuity licensing that let Unix grow from nothing via return contributions from Berkley and Apple and everybody else would never have been, in any form, were it not for the fact that AT&T was legally prevented from being "business like" about making their developments secret. The deal was "cushy monopoly money, but everything it gets you as a company is more-or-less public because we paid for you to exist rather dearly."
The license fee for the transistor patent was, if memory serves, one dollar ($1.00) U.S. and so on.
And life was good until the breakup.
See, with absolutely nobody at AT&T knowing how to _sell_ anything at all to anybody, once AT&T was no longer a state sanctioned monopoly, they had all this stuff (like UNIX) and no idea how to actually perform a "sale" via this "marketing" thingy that all the kids were so up about. Hence things like "the Unix PC" and really bizarre buy-your-phone offers and the disappearance of the _indestructible_ telephone handset. Time was, you could beat a person to death the receiver of your phone, and use the body to break their bones into neat little pieces, and not damage the thing so much that you couldn't still call someone to get together for a nice alibi party. (AT&T leased those things, so they were build to outlive the customers 8-). What we got next was cheap plastic crap that broke when you dropped it. etc.
The only thing that the breakup did to _help_ AT&T was it let them fire a whole bunch of _useless_ and _incompetent_ union labor that had collected in their ranks. The Lilly Tomlin line "we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company" was very, very true and it plagued operations. Its amazing how many do-nothings got unloaded on the "baby bells" or lost their jobs outright.
Still, it would have been better for us all if the breakup never happened, were there then some way to have the internet revolution while still having a monopoly phone company. But that would have been a fine hair to split and not have the whole thing stall.
No, in that use it's "effect" as in to result from a cause. (you missed the pun 8-) [i.e. DRM => cause, Piracy => effect]
Without the independent clause, the original sentence means nothing.
heh... english... who'd a thought...
Nothing is perfect and we are all just left to our own for a definition of "good enough".
Seriously, Even with the U.S. space effort etc, there are things checked a bizillion times on a manned space craft. This is because the mission cannot just pull over for parts mid-flight. And even with all that, shit still breaks or doesn't do as expected.
We are all just left to hope that any given "good enough" is, well, actually good enough.
Ta Dah!
GPL if you want to make people play nice.
BSD if you don't care if people play nice.
if GPL then GPL3 if you think corporate interests may be sniffing around later.
Something else if you are building upon something that is licensed some other way.
And gee, I didn't hear an explosion anywhere.
The robots should be carrying the equipment and throwing each other.
The marines should be making the decisions and dodging the other guys robots.
The credit reporting agencies are redistributing negative information they _know_ is untrue. Why isn't this defamation or liable/slander (whichever is the written one)?
It seems like the credit agencies have managed to get some sort of immunity to "it costs money to lie" principle.
Where does this protection come from?
I agree that it has nothing to do with the social security system, since the extra-national numbers don't actually match (it's the credit reporting system that is forcing the reporting entity to "pad" the number with leading zeros) and are completely out of their control.
Like most of our problems in the U.S.A. there is a lack of accountability and personal and/or corporate responsibility at its core.
Eventually someone is going to revolt against someone somewhere.
In point of fact there is _nothing_ "hidden" about the cost of using GPL software in a product.
If you go the Microsoft Wince (I didn't name it 8-) route, you pay many dollars up-front, and some dollars per-unit.
You go GPL you pay nothing up front and pay full disclosure on the back end per unit.
The whole problem is the perception that this is "hidden" in the first place. When the tech people sell the GPL software to their managers they, in their naiveté, usually don't know to make a distinction between free(beer) and free(open).
Once the programmers, and indeed people like you, understand enough to present the cost/benefit analysis as it truly is, then this may stop happening.
Don't even think _hidden_, don't fool yourself or others. It's right there in the language of the GPL plain as day. Just like it's supposed to be. And thats the good thing that separates it from the BSD license which has no cost at all. That is the _whole_ reason to pick one over another as a licensor.
Hence "copyleft" instead of "public domain" etc.
I loved the box as technology. The thing where the power came down the line from the RF diverter was outstanding, and never a problem. I think I owned all eight games made for it as well. And the track ball. And the plastic thingy that let you mount both controllers together so you could play space dungeon. Hell, I still might. The thing survived, fully functional, for numerous moves over like 20 years, and every now and again I would plug it back in only to remember...
Its death was the controller. I opened one once and discovered that they basically had the X and Y potentiometers on the same circuit. I never did understand how it worked, but as near as I could tell the magnitude of change of resistance for X was way different than for Y so it could (sort of) tell what you were doing with the joystick. But _only_ sort of. Moving from the extreme corners to other other extreme corners was super obvious and worked okay. Trying to maneuver Pengo from the north side of a cube to the east side, so that you could then shove the cube west was basically impossible.
The fact that the four "trigger" buttons were stacked one above the other, two to a side, on the east and west sides of the controller, in side semi-recessed rectangles was "freaking impossible".
I eventually figured out that they wanted you to hold the controller in your left palm, use your left thumb and fore-finger to operate the triggers, while _gently_ and _unerringly_ operating the joystick with your right index finger. My response to this realization was "ch'yah right".
Then again nobody invented "ergonomics" till like five years later. 8-)
Adopting a body of code is like adopting a child. Its terms change your terms because you _chose_ to _adopt_ it.
The thing people really don't get is that you have _no_ _right_ _whatsovever_ to the code in *any* library outside the terms of copyright law.
The GPL is a grant of license (not a contract) and it is(presumably, in your question) the sole means of receiving that license to use that code. As part of that license you get an unlimited license to use the code yourself for any private purpose, and you get the much-more-limited license to redistributed the code to others IF AND ONLY IF you agree that you will distribute all the source code for the whole shebang you distribute under the GPL, where that code is "linked with" or otherwise joined to the piece(s) you received via the GPL.
When you decide to use that GPL code you decide to adopt the GPL for the existing code you intend to link with that code for any _distribution_ of the combined result, if you don't so decide, then you may not use the GPL code in that distribution. There is no third option.
In the finer points:
The code _you_ already wrote does not become _solely_ GPLed; its source must accompany the distribution with the GPLd code, but it doesn't have to accompany other distributions under other licenses. So if you make two products X and Y out of largely the same code base, but you have the GPL readline library linked with Y, then you must include the entire source base when you distribute Y, but you can still withhold the source base for distributions of X. Further you cannot give someone X and Y and then put a term on the distribution of X that prevents them from using the source code they got with Y. Further still if I get X from you, and my buddy gets Y from you, my buddy can give me the source code from Y and no term of license for X can prevent me from using that code. Even if X had such a term, you would be civilly liable for going after me for using the source from my buddy because your attempt to use X to limit my use of Y means that you were violating copyright law by giving out copies of Y, since you may not add restrictive terms to the GPL. I have a license for X, I get a license for Y from my buddy when he gives it to me, and that license power flows from you (though him to me) unimpeded otherwise it cannot flow from you to him and you are the bad guy.
The larger question of "why would anybody agree to that?" is easily answered.
It's a financially stable cost/benefit transaction. You agree to "pay" for the source code you receive and pass on, by adding to its mass by including your code under the same terms.
From a business stand point it is a nearly perfect deal. you "pay" on the back end, when you distribute, and all you "pay" is the cost of disclosure.
Compare this to a license for Microsoft Wince (I didn't name it 8-) which you have to pay for up front to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then pay for it on the back end again with a per-unit-sold fee.
Some people resist the GPL because they beleive that the "value of their IP" in sweat equity is larger than it actually is. This is a delusion that comes from the outrageousness that is the music industry where one months work is supposed to keep paying dividends forever (e.g. how long did anybody work on the Beatles song "Help"? Should it still be paying dividends to anybody? honestly? I wish I could get re-paid every time someone uses my software, but _real_ life aint even supposed to be like that. 8-)
So anyway, for the cost of a $0.38 CD tossed into the wrapper with your product, or a web site that you promise to keep up for seven years, or whatever, you can leverage ungodly amounts of code.
The "but someone will steal my precious" arguments are exactly that crazy. Your precious isn't that precious, and most people would rather pay you for the next version than write that version themselves. The GPL startup cost cannot be beat.
_BUT_ if you adopt the GPL later in the development cycle, yo
to prove my aging geek status I wouldn't have had the pay phone mis-dial returning "a busy signal", I would have said the pay phone returned "denial tone" (which some people used to call "fast busy"). That would have proved that I was both old enough to remember pay phones, _and_ that I was old enough to have become a geek while pay phones were still relevant. 8-)
They still use denial tone, and the three-tone-error who's name I forget... but now days most self described geeks tend not to see the relevance of the wire-line networks, which is sad.
Do not confound simple with short, young jedi, for that way lies Twitter, and madness... 8-)
My email example never mentioned, nor does it pivot on, HTTP.
Comcast doesn't "send you an http page" they send you a FALSE ADDRESS RESOLUTION RECORD where your browser then goes to retrieve the bogus page via HTTP. See how the DNS protocol is completely different than the HTTP protocol?
SPAM Filters check to make sure that senders exist (among other things), one of the ways they do this is to look up the domain name to make sure that the sender domain ACTUALLY EXISTS as a first tier check. This is why you don't see successful spam from arbitrarily complex senders any more. That is, while the subject lines will extol you to enlarge your penis, the emails are no longer from "great_deals@my.giant.penis.com" any more (unless someone actually registers at least the top level domain.
It's not the only filter of course, but it is near the top of the list because it does a heck of a lot of heavy lifting quite cheaply.
And as another element you clearly missed. Here you are confusing HTTP and DNS and you are at least well educated enough to know that HTTP is what runs the web. Yet your education fails you when you don't _get_ that this is a poisoning of DNS not "the web" simply because that poison is designed to primarily dupe web users. Your response is a one-person proof of why this is so dangerous. The total number of people using protocols they don't fully understand is legion. When anybody starts mucking around with the underlying assumptions that make the "the web" and indeed the entire internet work, they are trampling barefoot through a sea of broken glass and dragging us all behind them through the unintended consequences.
When those who know how all this stuff works tell you that you are breaking something, perhaps you should at least study the declaration before airing dissent.
(not to be all grumpy 8-)
Your example fails because internalmail.company.com will resolve through company.com, not dnsshill.comcast.com. That is "company.com" is authoritative for "internalmail.company.com" in the hierarchical name service system. The questions of what happens in this case is questionable. Especially since in your split tunnel you probably have prepended company.com's internal DNS resolvers in the name search space so that the VPN user sees the internal sites in preference to the external ones.
Your point is correct, your example is flawed.
IMHO, of course 8-)
DNS is supposed to tell you (essentially) "no such domain name registered" when you try to find a domain name.
IFF (e.g. if and only if) DNS _only_ serviced web browsers, then one noise-page (my adverts here) is no different than any other noise page (no such name) because a human is going to go "oh, that's not what I was looking for".
But there is a heck of a lot more going on out here in the internet than just web browsing, and significant portions of it hinge on getting true and correct answers from the DNS system.
With DNS boned-up to return false positives on all names, then money can be stolen from you, the causal web browser. For instance, I send you an email from support@bankofamercia.com; you don't notice the transposition of letters, your spam filter looks up bankofamercia.com and the DNS service return as IP address instead of no such address, that address is the same one as I spoofed in the email, the spam filter says its a good email, you get owned.
Okay, that _is_ contrived, so try this instead...
It's 1964. You are at a pay phone. Your car has broken down. It's your last dime. You call home, but mis-dial a number that doesn't exist and you get a busy signal, and you get your dime back. You call home again and get help. The system worked.
It's 1964. You are at a pay phone. Your car is broken down. It's your last dime. You call home, but mis-dial a number that doesn't exist and some random person answers and proceeds to try to sell you car wax. Your dime is gone. You are still stuck. The system has failed.
Imagine your life if you _never_ got a busy signal. You call any extension in any company and you get to leave a voice mail but nobody will ever get that message. It would be living hell.
Worse yet, you run a small company, you may a small number of sales each month that are vital to your companies survival. You invest in an expensive advertisement on the superbowl and everything goes great. Then your DNS server dies. Now there is nobody to answer the proper DNS queries. The DNS squatter wakes up and since mylittlecompany.com no longer resolves, all that traffic goes to the Comcast Advertisement Shill page. In just a few minutes you get your DNS server working again, but everyone who got the bogus page thinks your company is trying to sell comcast telephone service and web search services and you never go that business. You are out big cash and your name is ruined. IF the spamvertisement page hadn't been there, those people might instead be thinking "wow, this service is so popular I cannot get in, maybe I'll try back in a bit" instead of "why did comcast decide to take out a superbowl ad that made it look like they sold that interesting little product?"
In short, what if every time your cell phone couldn't be found (because it was off or the battery died etc) the people trying to call you got silently redirected to a random "service" of the type one sees on late night television, offering jokes or sex chat, ostensibly in your good name?
That's what is wrong with doing that.
Dude (et al 8-),
Your clients are at the "hey this free stuff is great" stage. Good. But there isn't really any value to having the ap be far away on a web server.
A decent and easy-to-accomplish setup of local Open Source stuff will do exactly the same job at the same price point, but without the questions of PRIVACY you mention nor the questions of RETENTION you didn't.
Google really _isn't_ on the hook to be there with these services or all your data in two years time etc.
So for privacy and retention reasons you cannot really ever use the web-application model to a remote company without many potential problems.
Again, local is mandatory, but Microsoft isn't. Everything you can find on Google Apps can be found for free use on/with any large-scale linux distribution pretty much for the cost of playing point-and-click in the software installer/chooser/whatever.
"Joe, get my picture out of there" ... "That's like trying to get pee out of a swimming pool."
Illegal Prior Restraint Implemented by Technical Means.
It's combative, but it does rather transfer the onus onto the "DRM Supporter" to say why his scheme does not fall under that umbrella.
Alternatively "Digital Restriction Mechanism" as I cannot find any "rights" being "managed", so anybody who supports "DRM" must first detail the means of management for the particular rights they grant and reserve before they _get_ _to_ use the term.
DRM is "prior restraint". Prior Restraint is illegal. It isn't necessarily recognized as this because the "government" doing the restraining is not a recognized entity and it is doing it via purely technological means.
As to the argument whether the media cartel is a government, well they have been given the power of law enforcement to back them up and the procedure and is enshrined in the DMCA in the US.
Company puts thing on media to prevent use and reproduction including in publishing. Government sanctions thing and enacts laws to protect thing and punish those who obstruct thing by any means. Government leaves control of thing to Company. Company is now a "psudo-governmental agency". Thing is now Prior Restraint.
IANAL.
Whatever your count, add "Mathematicians who don't understand Science"...
In the article the speaker starts in on Math being pure and abstract, and gets all dismissive of science "with test-tubes and experiments".
It's a classic false dichotomy where the glorious Math is a pure thing of "Art" but practical things are dirty banalities.
Good science (as opposed to gestaltist empiricism) starts with the pure conjecture of hypothesis and the creative construction of conditions and truths implicit in that hypothesis in such terms that one can then try to destroy that construct with thought, or on paper, or with test tubes, or dynamite.
Well-executed, all disciplines are Art. Poorly executed all arts are dross.
The problem with bulk education is that it treats _ALL_ subjects (including arts) as quantifiable objective things devoid of art or _circumstantial_ _subjective_ merit. That's because we grade everything, and you cannot grade an intransitive truth.
So the piece largely picks a favorite nit while the whole of London lies awash in flea-ridden plague rats.
Standardized testing, overt measure of questionable "qualities", forcing teachers to teach outside their talents and interests, and the one-size must measure all approach to thought and insight needs must poison schooling for all topics and purposes.
I don't cry for the mathematicians lost any more than I cry for the Great Mechanical Virtuoso who was forced into the "higher education track" and denied access to the Vo-Tech campus and metal lathe that would have let him express his true greatness "because vo-tech is for the under achiever".
School is Prison for the Mind, and far too few make parole just because they are dismissed from the facility.
If you are running a windows guest, regardless of whether you are running a Linux or Windows host you should:
1) _Definitely_ leave paging turned on in the windows guest.
2) If you have multiple physical disk devices, make a "D:" drive as a separate virtual disk where the virtual disk image files are on a different physical spindle in the host os. Now inside the windows guest delete the page file from C: and create one on the new/separate D: drive (who's files are on the "the other spindle" in the host os).
3) If you _NEVER_ want to "suspend" the windows guest (you can still suspend the host separately) you can do the following advanced trick...: [NOTE: this may be worth doing even if you don't have a separate spindle for D:]
3a) Create a virtual disk to mount as D:
3b) Start windows guest OS.
3c) Log in as an administrator and Format the D: drive (with all that entails); FAT is fine and possibly optimal as the file system type.
3d) Go into the windows VM settings and delete the windows pagefile from C and make a large fixed or system-managed page file on D:
3e) Windows will tell you that you have to reboot for this to take effect, but _DONT_, shut down windows instead.
3f) Go into the settings for the virtual disk that you just made the D: drive and make it "non-persistent".
You now have a eternally empty "D:" drive, its only contents is the freshly formatted disk image. Every time windows starts it will know that there _should_ be a page file on D: and it will create that page file anew on an "empty" drive, so it will always be defragmented etc and you can move the windows vm around more easily (like it will zip/tar up smaller) since the random contents of the pagefile will always be discarded on shut down. D: is also now the _ultimate_ self cleaning /tmp directory for windows. If you move your TEMP and TMP environment variables to point to D:\ (or if you make other directories on D: before step 3e,) they will always be empty on reboot, including whatever cache files you put there etc.
As an aside, all windows instances everywhere should have "pagedefrag" installed on them (search microsoft.com for this application) whether they be Host or Guest OS instances.
Also, not to plug yet-another product I have no interest in besides finding it useful, jkDefrag is the best and works particularly well after pagedefrag and before a vmware shrink operation.
I covered this in more detail in a top level post below. The actual performance problems for most vmWare machines (typically) is not the virtual disk. The way vm machine memory is backed by a mapped regular file, combined with the way large-memory VMs interact with the overcommit_ratio on a Linux host OS (e.g. running vmware under linux, regardless of what the vm is running internally) produce almost all of the slowdowns.
The way VMWare does NAT through a userspace daemon isn't the best thing on the planet either.
(read the how-to post below for the remedies instead of looking here for re-pasted text, I'm not _that_ much of a karma whore 8-)
Okay, I have been through this at work several times recently. There are two major slow-downs in the default (but reasonably bullet-proof) VMWare machines running on a Linux _host_.
1) If you are doing NAT attachment _don't_ use the vmware NAT daemon. It pulls each packet into userspace before deciding how to forward/nat it. So don't use the default nat device (e.g. vmnet8). Add a new custom made "host only" adapter (e.g. vmnet9-or-more) by adding another adapter, and then use regular firewalling (ip_forward = 1 and iptables rules) so that the packets just pass through the Linux kernel and netfilters once. (you can use vmnet1 in a pinch but blarg! 8-)
1a) If you want/need to use the default nat engine (e.g. vmnet8) then put the nat daemon into a real-time scheduling group with "chrt --rr --pid 22 $(pgrep vmnet-natd)". Not quite a good as staying in the kernel all the way to your physical media.
1b) if you do item one, don't use the vmware-dhcpd, configure your regular dhcpd/dhcpd3 etc daemon because it will more easily integrate with your system as a whole.
(in other words, vmware-dhcpd is not magic, and vmware-natd is _super_ expensive)
2) VMWare makes a /path/to/your/machine/machine_name.vmem file, which is a memory mapped file that represents the RAM in the guest. This is like having the whole vm living forever in your swap space. It's great there if you want to take a lot of snapshots and want to be more restart/crash/sleep safe. It _sucks_ for performance. If you use "mainmem.usenamedfile=FALSE" in your .vmx files. (you have to edit the files by hand). This will move the .vmem file into your temp directory and unlink it so it's anonymous and self-deleting. It slows down snapshots but...
2a) Make _SURE_ your /tmp file system is a mounted tmpfs with a size=whatever mount option that will let the tmpfs grow to at least 10% larger than the (sum of the) memory size of (all of the) vritual machine(s) you are going to run at once. This will cause the "backing" of the virtual machine RAM to be actual RAM and you will get rational machine RAM speed.
2b) If you want/need to, there is a tmpDirectory=/wherever diretive to say where those files go. It gangswith the usenamedfile=FLASE and you can set up dedicated tmpfs files to back the machines specially/separately.
2c) If you want/need the backing or have a "better" drive you want to use with real backing, you can use the above in variations to move this performance limiter onto different spindle than your .vmd (virtual disk files).
3) No matter what, your virtual memory file counts against your overcommit_ratio (/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_ratio) compared to your ram. It defaults at 50% for _all_ the accounted facilities system-wide. If you have 4Gig RAM and try to run a 3G vm while leaving your overcommit_ratio at 50, you will suffer some unintended consequences in terms of paging/swapping pressure. Ajust your ratio to like 75 or 80 percent if your total VM memory size is 60 to 65 percent of real ram. _DONT_ set this nubmer to more than 85% unless you have experimented with the system stability at higher numbers. It can be _quite_ surprising.
Anyway, that's the three things (in many parts) you need to know to make VMWare work its best on your linux host OS. It doesn't matter what the Guest OS is, always consider the above.
Disclaimer: I don't work for VMWare etc, this is all practical knowledge and trial-n-error gained knowledge. I offer no warranty, but it will work...