Someone posted this on Sitereview.org this morning. It does look like a viable solution to giving out your email address for a particular transaction. The service is pretty new and I haven't tried it yet. Has anyone had any experience with these people?
...in order for the industry to have a chance to control it. MP3's are just so convenient. Perhaps if the industry hadn't fought change for so long, they could have large collections of music in a portable format in the stores rather than CD's, necessarily at far better prices.
Yes, I know that sounds crazy for them to destroy their own market, but, as many in the computer industry have learned, it is better to destroy your own market than to wait for others to do it for you.
"Would you then support [UCITA] since it creates a means of enforcing intellectual property rights?"
Uh, no.
"Or are you advocating all non-physical goods such as IP are inherently impossible or exceedingly difficult to enforce rights?"
No, again.
Actually, I meant what I said -- and not much more -- by the sentence; "When there is no longer a viable means of enforcing an intellectual property right, it is time to let it go."
It is interesting that I made an analogy comparing the difficulty of enforcing some IP rights with the so-called "war on drugs" and got a response suggesting the IP equivalent of "So, are you advocating drug use then?".;)
Your point about much open-source software by amatuers lacking in quality is valid. However, to be fair, you must consider that "professionally developed" software also includes much rubbish. Take most any vertical market application, for example...;)
I would argue that the proper way to compare these devlelopment methods would be to compare the best that each has to offer, not the worst.
Exactly. When there is no longer a viable means of enforcing a intellectual property right, it is time to let it go. Continuing to pour money and working lives into lost causes give us things like prohibition and the drug war.
Interestingly, I tend to agree with the law (and the older precedents) on copyright and patents. It is only lately that abstract ideas as vague as "look and feel" and "inventions" with both obviousness and prior art going against them have become common.
I think the solution is to scale back both copyright law and patent law to something enforceable. That, and a little attention to obviousness and prior art, would get us back to a good starting point for reevaluating the whole thing.
Unfortunately, if it is already a lost cause, we will surely plunge into another "drug war" shortly.
A total waste, indeed. A key consideration of cases resulting from this precedent will be opinion, not objective fact. Therefore, these cases are likely to be longer and more expensive than comparable cases involving more fact and less "feel".
Thank you Lotus, now of IBM, for giving us the "Look and feel" copyright lawsuits -- which blazed the trail for this.
Obviously, but the main part of the point was that it is 99% idle during the peak loads. I doubt ASP/VBScript could implement starship traders, run 17 separate 64,000 sector games with hundreds of players each, and still be 99% idle on a Celeron 366.;)
Sony will get the bugs worked out before they do a world-wide release. We will get thoroughly tested boxes this fall. I'm just glad I wasn't one of the ~1,000,000 first weekend purchasers!
One more reason for the limited release, I guess;)
About 2 years ago I built a nice webserver/telnet server platform for my game system on a bootable 96MB Zip disk. It had room for several large games and a few thousand users.
I've run Slackware on my main development box at home since 8/95.;)
In Starshiptraders.com (a game), I wrote the entire thing in C -- there isn't even a copy of Apache involved. That system serves about 140,000 pages per day, and at peak times, the single-cpu (Celeron 366/320MB) is about 99% idle. All the files will fit in memory -- I only have about 120MB of data, but it is frequently intensively used. The data is all stored in flat files with ponters to related records in the same and other files. All data is, therefore, directly addressable and there is not much in the way of wasteful I/O. I can't really recommend this approach though for the obvious development and maintainability problems that it entails.;)
My other dynamic site project, SiteReview.org (user-posted website reviews), is written in PHP, serves pages with Apache, and has a MySQL back end data store. The/. folks are proof that MySQL and Apache are up to the task for some serious work. I have gone to some trouble to minimize the number of database calls and will work a bit more to minimize the size of returned pages. Each of my tables is indexed on the (very few) columns that are used to access it, so I get no full table scans. PHP can be compiled as a module for Apache, eliminating the startup overhead and resulting in quite efficient processing. PHP is also very easy to work with.
Currently that site is a work in progress with very small volume and I therefore have no evidence yet that I did anything right;). (Anyway, it's at a hosting provider who is not optimized for PHP -- they call a php executable for each of my pages. If the need should arise, I will move it.) However, I think that this approach is a good balance between maintainability, efficiency and scalability. You can start with a single system and, when the load exceeds that capabilities of the box, you can easily offload the database onto a dedicated database server and put up multiple webservers on the front end with DNS round-robin or somesuch.
They refer to "...two Web-based tools that make it easy for project administrators to manage code submissions..."
Evidently, there is some web development going on. It's not clear, however, just how extensive the web based support will be.
On the origins of "Unix"... MULTICS and UNICS
on
Multics Scheduler
·
· Score: 4
Multics (MULTiplexed Interactive Computer System) was a Bell Labs project that managed to acquire the unwelcome retrofitted acronym "Many Unnecessarily Large Tables In Core Simultaneously". UNICS (UNiplexed Interactive Computer System) was allegedly a "castrated MULTICS", and, as one of those odd quirks of history, the laboratory nickname stuck. Subsequently, they changed the spelling and capitalization and were then able to tell people that "Unix" was not an acronym.;)
Well, on the upside, maybe Verisign will tighten up the security at Network Solutions -- like the ability to change people's domain info with spoofed mail.
Agreed. As long as governments hold many exclusive powers over the people, there will be new ways invented to erode rights through that power. Without available anonymity freedom of speech will remain uncertain.
With the vast number of vague laws in place, almost anyone could be charged with something. The only refuge from that massive arbitrary power is anonymity -- and the only right that Internet anonymity ensures is speech.
It seems, on the surface, that this (or a similar law) would dramatically boost open source software. One sure way to kill proprietary software is to make it fatal!
Disclaimer: This post should not be construed to mean I support UCITA. I think it is doomed to the spectacular failure it so richly deserves. In any free market for mission critical software, a vendor explicitly waiving UCITA's stupid provisions will have a huge advantage of any rivals retaining the right to "cut you off". I think the business supporters of this legislation are amazingly shortsighted.
Hmmm... I wonder if the NDA's would ever allow Linux to be ported to the PS2. Meanwhile, if it ever does get ported, I can think of making it a compute node on my network here and using it to render images 24 hours a day. The 24 hours, of course, would be reduced in practice due to the need to use it for 4 hours a day for its original purpose.;)
Wouldn't Minix (or, perhaps, a very early Linux) be better for for most educational (kernel work) purposes? Linux is getting kinda large and, generally, that means that it gets harder and harder to extract the concepts from the code.
I would think that a highly modular (read: totally unoptimized except for clarity) small kernel system would be vastly superior for most educational use. Note that I understand that, at the highest levels, there is no substitute for studying reality in all its complexity. But most of education involves building to that level and LInux is a big chunk.
As for non-kernel work, which the questioner seems to be suggesting, I imagine Linux would be perfect. You would only need to look at particular pieces of code when your device driver behaves unexpectedly. That the code is there and royalty-free is a huge advantage. That the code is solid and well tested is priceless.;)
Not that I don't like bash, but ksh is what I use at work and what I used for years prior to encountering using Linux for the first time. But perhaps my habits have become restricted to only the functions that the two hold in common.;)
I've never really looked closely at the differences between bash and ksh but the question that occurs to me is this: has bash overtaken ksh in functionality to the point that this release is now too late to matter?
Slashdot Mirror
Someone posted this on Sitereview.org this morning. It does look like a viable solution to giving out your email address for a particular transaction. The service is pretty new and I haven't tried it yet. Has anyone had any experience with these people?
...in order for the industry to have a chance to control it. MP3's are just so convenient. Perhaps if the industry hadn't fought change for so long, they could have large collections of music in a portable format in the stores rather than CD's, necessarily at far better prices.
Yes, I know that sounds crazy for them to destroy their own market, but, as many in the computer industry have learned, it is better to destroy your own market than to wait for others to do it for you.
I wasn't aware that case had gone to court. Can you provide a link to more info?
"Would you then support [UCITA] since it creates a means of enforcing intellectual property rights?"
;)
Uh, no.
"Or are you advocating all non-physical goods such as IP are inherently impossible or exceedingly difficult to enforce rights?"
No, again.
Actually, I meant what I said -- and not much more -- by the sentence; "When there is no longer a viable means of enforcing an intellectual property right, it is time to let it go."
It is interesting that I made an analogy comparing the difficulty of enforcing some IP rights with the so-called "war on drugs" and got a response suggesting the IP equivalent of "So, are you advocating drug use then?".
Who did your site design and what (if any) sites were the inspiration for it? It's the coolest B&W site I've seen yet.
:)
( Slackware user since 1.2.8, 8/95
Your point about much open-source software by amatuers lacking in quality is valid. However, to be fair, you must consider that "professionally developed" software also includes much rubbish. Take most any vertical market application, for example... ;)
I would argue that the proper way to compare these devlelopment methods would be to compare the best that each has to offer, not the worst.
Dying, maybe, but some of us can only dream of the day when we don't need dialup anymore.
;)
On the other hand, my dialup link frequently goes dead, but I don't think that's what you meant.
Exactly. When there is no longer a viable means of enforcing a intellectual property right, it is time to let it go. Continuing to pour money and working lives into lost causes give us things like prohibition and the drug war.
Interestingly, I tend to agree with the law (and the older precedents) on copyright and patents. It is only lately that abstract ideas as vague as "look and feel" and "inventions" with both obviousness and prior art going against them have become common.
I think the solution is to scale back both copyright law and patent law to something enforceable. That, and a little attention to obviousness and prior art, would get us back to a good starting point for reevaluating the whole thing.
Unfortunately, if it is already a lost cause, we will surely plunge into another "drug war" shortly.
Hostname information encoding has been done here as well. ;)
This site works with all text I have tried, separated by periods. I don't know how long it's been up, but it has been there for quite a while.
A total waste, indeed. A key consideration of cases resulting from this precedent will be opinion, not objective fact. Therefore, these cases are likely to be longer and more expensive than comparable cases involving more fact and less "feel".
Thank you Lotus, now of IBM, for giving us the "Look and feel" copyright lawsuits -- which blazed the trail for this.
140,000 pages per day is a pretty small, load.
;)
Obviously, but the main part of the point was that it is 99% idle during the peak loads. I doubt ASP/VBScript could implement starship traders, run 17 separate 64,000 sector games with hundreds of players each, and still be 99% idle on a Celeron 366.
(at least here in the U.S., where I am)
;)
Sony will get the bugs worked out before they do a world-wide release. We will get thoroughly tested boxes this fall. I'm just glad I wasn't one of the ~1,000,000 first weekend purchasers!
One more reason for the limited release, I guess
About 2 years ago I built a nice webserver/telnet server platform for my game system on a bootable 96MB Zip disk. It had room for several large games and a few thousand users.
;)
I've run Slackware on my main development box at home since 8/95.
In Starshiptraders.com (a game), I wrote the entire thing in C -- there isn't even a copy of Apache involved. That system serves about 140,000 pages per day, and at peak times, the single-cpu (Celeron 366/320MB) is about 99% idle. All the files will fit in memory -- I only have about 120MB of data, but it is frequently intensively used. The data is all stored in flat files with ponters to related records in the same and other files. All data is, therefore, directly addressable and there is not much in the way of wasteful I/O. I can't really recommend this approach though for the obvious development and maintainability problems that it entails. ;)
/. folks are proof that MySQL and Apache are up to the task for some serious work. I have gone to some trouble to minimize the number of database calls and will work a bit more to minimize the size of returned pages. Each of my tables is indexed on the (very few) columns that are used to access it, so I get no full table scans. PHP can be compiled as a module for Apache, eliminating the startup overhead and resulting in quite efficient processing. PHP is also very easy to work with.
;). (Anyway, it's at a hosting provider who is not optimized for PHP -- they call a php executable for each of my pages. If the need should arise, I will move it.) However, I think that this approach is a good balance between maintainability, efficiency and scalability. You can start with a single system and, when the load exceeds that capabilities of the box, you can easily offload the database onto a dedicated database server and put up multiple webservers on the front end with DNS round-robin or somesuch.
My other dynamic site project, SiteReview.org (user-posted website reviews), is written in PHP, serves pages with Apache, and has a MySQL back end data store. The
Currently that site is a work in progress with very small volume and I therefore have no evidence yet that I did anything right
yeah, and he's keeping pretty weird hours too! ;)
It sounds like the Linux community in Oz is pretty healthy. Of the two Aussies I work with here (Florida), one is a hard-core Linux user.
Agreed. Give TM holders first dibs for the first 90 days the TLD's are available, then open them up to the public. Just don't reserve them after that.
They refer to "...two Web-based tools that make it easy for project administrators to manage code submissions..."
Evidently, there is some web development going on. It's not clear, however, just how extensive the web based support will be.
Multics (MULTiplexed Interactive Computer System) was a Bell Labs project that managed to acquire the unwelcome retrofitted acronym "Many Unnecessarily Large Tables In Core Simultaneously". UNICS (UNiplexed Interactive Computer System) was allegedly a "castrated MULTICS", and, as one of those odd quirks of history, the laboratory nickname stuck. Subsequently, they changed the spelling and capitalization and were then able to tell people that "Unix" was not an acronym. ;)
Well, on the upside, maybe Verisign will tighten up the security at Network Solutions -- like the ability to change people's domain info with spoofed mail.
Agreed. As long as governments hold many exclusive powers over the people, there will be new ways invented to erode rights through that power. Without available anonymity freedom of speech will remain uncertain.
With the vast number of vague laws in place, almost anyone could be charged with something. The only refuge from that massive arbitrary power is anonymity -- and the only right that Internet anonymity ensures is speech.
That is what Clinton and friends would restrict.
It seems, on the surface, that this (or a similar law) would dramatically boost open source software. One sure way to kill proprietary software is to make it fatal!
Disclaimer: This post should not be construed to mean I support UCITA. I think it is doomed to the spectacular failure it so richly deserves. In any free market for mission critical software, a vendor explicitly waiving UCITA's stupid provisions will have a huge advantage of any rivals retaining the right to "cut you off". I think the business supporters of this legislation are amazingly shortsighted.
Hmmm... I wonder if the NDA's would ever allow Linux to be ported to the PS2. Meanwhile, if it ever does get ported, I can think of making it a compute node on my network here and using it to render images 24 hours a day. The 24 hours, of course, would be reduced in practice due to the need to use it for 4 hours a day for its original purpose. ;)
Wouldn't Minix (or, perhaps, a very early Linux) be better for for most educational (kernel work) purposes? Linux is getting kinda large and, generally, that means that it gets harder and harder to extract the concepts from the code.
;)
I would think that a highly modular (read: totally unoptimized except for clarity) small kernel system would be vastly superior for most educational use. Note that I understand that, at the highest levels, there is no substitute for studying reality in all its complexity. But most of education involves building to that level and LInux is a big chunk.
As for non-kernel work, which the questioner seems to be suggesting, I imagine Linux would be perfect. You would only need to look at particular pieces of code when your device driver behaves unexpectedly. That the code is there and royalty-free is a huge advantage. That the code is solid and well tested is priceless.
Not that I don't like bash, but ksh is what I use at work and what I used for years prior to encountering using Linux for the first time. But perhaps my habits have become restricted to only the functions that the two hold in common. ;)
I've never really looked closely at the differences between bash and ksh but the question that occurs to me is this: has bash overtaken ksh in functionality to the point that this release is now too late to matter?
To enhance stability, OpenBSD takes a more cautious disk write approach, which might slow down disk accesses some.
Specific information about tuning the disk subsystem for speed (and to eliminate above delay) can be found here.