RBL not opt-in for individuals
on
MAPS Sued Again
·
· Score: 3
The descriptions "opt-in" or "not opt-in" don't mean much on their own --- you've got to say with respect to whom for it to be meaningful.
As others have pointed out, the MAPS RBL is not opt-in for individuals, since instead of being allowed to decide for themselves whether or not they receive spam from their ISP, the decision is made for them by their ISP on a block basis, not on an individual basis.
Although it's possible for an ISP to give its customers the choice, it's rare for ISPs to offer such a choice. It would probably cost extra anyway, since the ISP would need more machinery to handle the extra load it would experience through handling spam.
It's clearly a market niche though, so full ISPs or mail service providers offering this service are bound to emerge (if they haven't already) for those who prefer to make their own choices and/or do their own filtering.
Poster meant RBL not opt-in for individuals
on
MAPS Sued Again
·
· Score: 2
The poster almost certainly meant that it's not opt-in for individuals, since instead of being allowed to decide for themselves whether or not they receive spam from their ISP, the decision is made for them by their ISP on a block basis, not on an individual basis.
That much is true. Although it's possible to give individuals the choice, it's rare for ISPs to offer such a choice. I guess it would cost extra anyway, since you'd need extra machinery to handle the extra load caused by spam.
It's clearly a market niche though, so full ISPs or mail service providers offering this service are bound to emerge (if they haven't already) for those who prefer to make their own choices.
Nobody suggested that "we" would be writing the code from scratch. The suggestion is that the existing code be opened up to our hundreds of thousands of eyeballs so that it can benefit from our feedback.
Spoken like someone whose science education ended in high school. If you aren't qualified to comment on something, don't.
Haha. If only you knew...
The burden of proof is now squarely on the kook. I await his response, but I won't hold my breath.
And that's exactly what I said. Phil's negative analysis matters nothing in science. In the community of science-aware people it matters inasmuch as it lowers peoples' expectations of the likelihood of any successful demonstration ever forthcoming, which is probably fairly reasonable as it dampens false expectations, but science and sociology are not one and the same thing. ALL that matters in science is whether experiments will demonstrate the new effect or not. As you said, and as I said, the ball is entirely in the court of the person claiming the innovation to demonstrate that it works in reality. NOT in the court of those whose theoretical analyses say that current theories don't allow for such an effect to happen.
The world doesn't obey our mathematical models. They are merely our creations, constructed to behave mathematically in a way that (hopefully) mirrors how reality herself actually behaves. But they are only approximations, and always subject to revision by tomorrow's new observation.
Phil Karn is of course a very highly respected member of the scientific community -- both amateur and professional.
However, reputation and even great skill are not always the be-all and end-all of real science. An experimenter may start from totally false premises, use utterly flawed reasoning, perform experiments with total incompetence, and still uncover a new aspect of reality. The real, experimental world respects no one, no theory, and certainly no dogma, and just behaves the way she wants to behave.
So, all this excellent theorizing that proves it's all snake oil is worth precisely nothing if the proposer actually manages to stuff that much information down the specified channel. We'll just have to wait and see. Should it actually work then clearly the theory used in Phil's analysis is missing something vital, so we'll all have learned something new and we'll just have to reinvent the theory to match the new discovery. Should it not work, as is far more likely, then of course it's all snake oil and Phil gets yet another well-deserved pat on the back.
BUT YOU CANNOT PRESUPOSE THAT IN ADVANCE, by analysis. Analysis merely tells you what a theory allows, not what reality allows. That's not how science works. If it did, ie. if past theory prevented anything new which it currently disallows, we'd still be in the scientific dark ages.
Thanks Phil for a great analysis. But remember that there will always be vastly more that we don't know than that we know, so hedge your bets a little and wait for the judgement of reality to validate our current theoretical understanding.
I wonder if people have considered the safety issues of batteries with high energy densities and high discharge currents. Under the right conditions, some batteries can explode, catch on fire,...
Yeah, people are really worried about such things, which is why gasoline-powered cars never caught on.:-)
Another Slashdot feature was posted on the same topic within the same day, probably by mistake. Here's a pointer to that continuation of the subject thread, for those that like to browse the archives.
The whole field of Configurable Computing has been trying out architectures like this for some time (don't know why/. hasn't covered this technology more).
I'll tell you why/. hasn't covered the technology more: because FPGAs on their own are mainly just an amorphous sea of gates. You need a lot more than that before you have a viable (and therefore interesting) computing engine. StarBridge came up with such a working system and so it was no surprise to see it featured on Slashdot.
In contrast, Xilinx's strides in FPGA and RC technology tend not to feature because there's a gulf between a beautiful RC chip like the 6200 and actually being able to compute with it. Even Xilinx know that now -- their newer devices are more advanced FPGAs but they don't even attempt to carry the generic RC mantle like the 6200 tried to do, unsuccessfully. It came close, but you need a lot more than just an FPGA to make a useful RC: you needs a preconfigured computing architecture to start with, otherwise the programmer needs to think in terms of gates, and that's one paradigm shift too far. The 6200 suffered from not being specific enough. That's a peculiar observation to make in the FPGA field, but it reflects reality in the computing field, and even RCs need to take that into account.
And that's what PACT seem to have done with their XPP. Sure, its reconfigurable parts are based on FPGA technology (the only sensible way of doing it), but they've created a whole new dataflow computing engine with that RC resource, and it's the latter that's interesting for computing people, not the FPGA itself nor the internal RC mechanism.
PACT/XPP: At last a decent new architecture!
on
Microprocessor Forum
·
· Score: 5
The world of CPU design has been quite stagnant in recent years. Yes, there have been truly massive improvements in an engineering sense, but architecturally speaking, the latest Pentium and the various 64-bit candidates are really no different to a little ol' Motorola 68000 at heart. Harvard, RISC and superscaler designs haven't departed significantly from the same basic and extremely limited architecture which dates back to three decades ago or more.
But PACT's XPP is a different thing altogether, a dataflow computing engine on a chip. This thing is so far outside the current norm that it holds exhalted company with only a very few select others: my list of such exceptional architectures would probably comprise the Intel iA432, the Inmos Transputer, the Crusoe, and now the XPP. (I'm only including real candidates for implementation as micros, not research or demonstrator platforms of which there have been many hundreds of great ones.)
It's beautiful!
My research work on parallel architectures and concurrent languages really needed hardware like this to blossom. I wish the XPP had appeared then!
I sure hope that Hemos was referring to the pre-Andover setup.
Selling ads must be one of the most horrible occupations associated with running a website, and not something that most techies are any good at either. If there's a good reason for bringing in external involvement, it's got to be to give that job to somebody else.
If you have a stereo that's been identified as stolen, ignorance is no excuse because the object of the crime has been identified. It's there before your very eyes, and it's provably a stolen stereo.
But what if you have only an amorphous blob in your possession, with nothing to indicate what it is? It may be one block of the free recipes FAQ, or part of one of a billion other innocuous items, but neither you nor anyone else can say whether it is or it isn't. Furthermore, whatever it is, it's only a fragment, one among countless others, not a complete object at all.
So there's no point talking about the stereo. What stereo? Not only can no such thing be identified. It's not actually there, and it's not there by design.
Because if one doesn't upgrade then managing the ever-older systems becomes more and more difficult over time.
This is not all that relevant on systems which are static in function, but that's not the case here --- our services seem to change on a daily basis sometimes. If you're rolling out new functionality quite frequently then legacy systems add a huge amount of work, as each rollout also becomes a partial upgrade. Managing dependencies can become a nightmare.
It's best to avoid all that trouble by keeping systems reasonably up-to-date, not necessarily on the very latest release (and definitely not bleeding edge) but fairly close by.
Jim, can one choose not to store any sharemaps on one's own machine, but instead to buy that storage and/or reassembly service from another site in exchange for Mojo?
I ask because some people will want to be able to state categorically that it is impossible for them to know anything at all about even a single block on the basis of information held on their own machinery. Possession of a sharemap may undermine that. Without that guarantee, your client base will not grow as quickly as it might otherwise.
What piracy? You don't know what's in those files on your drive, and nor does anyone else, so they can't say that they're pirated. They're not identifiable by you. You'd need the decryption keys for a whole pile of dinodes to be able to identify them, and you don't have 'em.
You certainly can't be accused of pirating an unknown thing.
In any event, why are you concentrating on pirated goods? Mojo Nation (and more advanced systems which will be even more heavily distributed) have the potential of becoming a far better repository for all information on the planet than anything currently in existence. Only a tiny fraction of all this material is contentious.
Actually, it's not even a content-trading system --- it's a resource-trading system. It deals in market infrastructure resources: money and market stalls where things can be traded. It does not deal in the content that individual traders happen to put on those stalls --- that's up to the individuals concerned, which as always will comprise both saints and devils. Such is the world we live in.
That makes the AC poster's comment doubly irrelevant. If he prefers the Napster model rather than give and take then he's precisely the kind of freeloader that the system is designed to marginalize. And if he's only interested in content restrictions then he'd do better talking to the people that provide that content, not to the banks and subcontractors that supply the medium of exchange and the poles and planks. I hope he's good at missionary work; reforming the world will be an uphill struggle.
Just about every modern computer in the world has masses of detritus on it, huge chunks of it unattributable to anything in particular. It accumulates all the time, with each new package installed or run on your system, typically dozens to thousands of random files per year, many of them utterly opaque. You don't know what they are, and with few highly techie exceptions, nor does anybody else. (One can guess of course, but that's not the same thing as being able to prove it.) If everyone had to be able to either show the content of every file or hand over a magic cookie to render it visible, virtually the entire population of computer users would be in jail.
Mojo Nation and other similar system now being created at an accelerating rate just add to this background of unattributable noise. If anything, you're safeguarded by design when storing their content, since in general you simply cannot know what you're storing, and you definitely don't have the key to decrypt it even if you had all the pieces, which you don't. This makes it extremely easy to state convincingly that you don't have the key, since unless you've discovered a way of ensuring that you hold all the bits and have somehow subverted the dinode encryption, you definitely won't have it. By Design is a very powerful phrase.
In any event, this is just the start of the distributed storage revolution. In future systems you might well be able to obtain the key if you desire it --- only to find that you hold one bit of information for each of one billion files spread across 1 million hosts. A fat lot of good that will do you, or the prosecution. Welcome to the new world.
Content varies widely in its need for safeguarding. Obvious examples of content that needs much greater levels of redundant protection are expressions of political dissent, information about corruption in high places, key algorithms that corporations try to hide away to retain their monopolies, and content that RIAA/MPAA-type organizations want to control utterly in perpetuity.
Yet, such items would have the same degree of protection against loss in Mojo Nation as (say) a free recipes FAQ. Surely that can't be right?
Will there be any means of increasing the redundancy on the basis of content type in future versions? It would seem to be needed.
Half the people seem to want "innovation" (or bleeding at the edges -- what you call it is a matter of opinion) and the other half want "stability" (or lagging behind the times, ditto). It's just not possible to satisfy both factions at the same time.
Instead of compromise, how about adopting a 3-digit release scheme instead? Ie. let the label "7.0" be the thing that appears on pretty RH box fronts, but let it be 7.0.X in reality, depending on the date of production. If the X is available as a patch upgrade on the RH website, nobody loses.
This would satisfy the release early and often brigade, while at the same time it would reduce the software sellers' nightmare of carrying rapidly obsoleting stock, and production houses would be more likely to upgrade to new.0 releases if they knew that in a couple of weeks' time there would be a.0.1 patch to deal with some of the running wounds.
We run quite a variety of Linux machines here. Binary incompatibilities waste everybody's time and complicate management because multiple releases have to be compiled and maintained. The change from libc5 to libc6 a few years ago was a right pain for a lot of people, and we certainly don't want to repeat it unnecessarily. Yet, we do want to evolve our systems progressively as new distros are released. No Big Bangs if they can be avoided, just gradual change.
This puts us in a bit of a dilemma. Ordinarily we'd be installing new machines with RedHat 7, but if the object format is not backward compatible then this is impossible to do in an evolutionary way. It would be a major transition, roughly on a par with the libc5/6 one. I think I'll wait for RH7.2 before embarking on that kind of headache.
Meanwhile, what's the most modern non-RH distro out there that is still object-compatible with the binaries in the pre-7 RedHat releases?
Currency conversions are automatic when buying on a credit or debit card.
That's why dozens of thousands of Brits are buying DVDs over the Internet from places outside of their native Region 2 (mainly the US) without having to think at all about the currency. I bet VISA are making a killing on the conversions, but good luck to them -- they're facilitating our freedom.
Just buy any home cinema magazine, and you'll find the adverts full of region-free players.
It's only the major brand-tied houses that don't sell them, precisely because they are brand-tied and therefore not free agents. Wherever the free market is allowed to operate, region-free players abound.
Surely the stockholders support the actions of the studios, since they lead to greater profits? I don't see how one could convince them of the merits of social responsibility, since they're in it for the money.
Anyway, stockholders only vote by buying or selling stock. Selling doesn't convey a message that is specific enough, ie. it won't tell the studios that regional coding is wrong.
What is the equivalent method for imparting a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
Nobody replied to that at all. It should be pretty obvious that what applies to a pest in the neighbourhood doesn't apply to a multinational -- the power balance is utterly different.
But the question remains. How do you impart a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
This is actually a very good thing to do. As viktor suggests, it gives a great deal of satisfaction to tell them that they aren't stocking what you want. However, pick a senior sales assistant so that your message is more likely to be passed upwards.
I do the same thing when shopping for the DVDs themselves, as I already have a region-free player. The UK is in Region 2, so first of all I ask for a movie that I know is available only in R1, then another, and maybe another. Finally, I ask for one that I know is available in R2 version but cut by the censors or containing fewer features, and when they happily bring it out, beaming with success, I tell them why this version is substandard, and leave.
The end result is probably nil, but it's definitely satisfying. And you never know, maybe a tiny part of the message is getting through.
If a bloke in one's neighbourhood made a pain of himself to the community, we'd just drag him behind the bushes and beat the crap out of him. It's called Pavlovian training.
What is the equivalent method for imparting a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
Slashdot Mirror
The descriptions "opt-in" or "not opt-in" don't mean much on their own --- you've got to say with respect to whom for it to be meaningful.
As others have pointed out, the MAPS RBL is not opt-in for individuals, since instead of being allowed to decide for themselves whether or not they receive spam from their ISP, the decision is made for them by their ISP on a block basis, not on an individual basis.
Although it's possible for an ISP to give its customers the choice, it's rare for ISPs to offer such a choice. It would probably cost extra anyway, since the ISP would need more machinery to handle the extra load it would experience through handling spam.
It's clearly a market niche though, so full ISPs or mail service providers offering this service are bound to emerge (if they haven't already) for those who prefer to make their own choices and/or do their own filtering.
The poster almost certainly meant that it's not opt-in for individuals, since instead of being allowed to decide for themselves whether or not they receive spam from their ISP, the decision is made for them by their ISP on a block basis, not on an individual basis.
That much is true. Although it's possible to give individuals the choice, it's rare for ISPs to offer such a choice. I guess it would cost extra anyway, since you'd need extra machinery to handle the extra load caused by spam.
It's clearly a market niche though, so full ISPs or mail service providers offering this service are bound to emerge (if they haven't already) for those who prefer to make their own choices.
Nobody suggested that "we" would be writing the code from scratch. The suggestion is that the existing code be opened up to our hundreds of thousands of eyeballs so that it can benefit from our feedback.
Spoken like someone whose science education ended in high school. If you aren't qualified to comment on something, don't.
...
Haha. If only you knew
The burden of proof is now squarely on the kook. I await his response, but I won't hold my breath.
And that's exactly what I said. Phil's negative analysis matters nothing in science. In the community of science-aware people it matters inasmuch as it lowers peoples' expectations of the likelihood of any successful demonstration ever forthcoming, which is probably fairly reasonable as it dampens false expectations, but science and sociology are not one and the same thing. ALL that matters in science is whether experiments will demonstrate the new effect or not. As you said, and as I said, the ball is entirely in the court of the person claiming the innovation to demonstrate that it works in reality. NOT in the court of those whose theoretical analyses say that current theories don't allow for such an effect to happen.
The world doesn't obey our mathematical models. They are merely our creations, constructed to behave mathematically in a way that (hopefully) mirrors how reality herself actually behaves. But they are only approximations, and always subject to revision by tomorrow's new observation.
Phil Karn is of course a very highly respected member of the scientific community -- both amateur and professional.
However, reputation and even great skill are not always the be-all and end-all of real science. An experimenter may start from totally false premises, use utterly flawed reasoning, perform experiments with total incompetence, and still uncover a new aspect of reality. The real, experimental world respects no one, no theory, and certainly no dogma, and just behaves the way she wants to behave.
So, all this excellent theorizing that proves it's all snake oil is worth precisely nothing if the proposer actually manages to stuff that much information down the specified channel. We'll just have to wait and see. Should it actually work then clearly the theory used in Phil's analysis is missing something vital, so we'll all have learned something new and we'll just have to reinvent the theory to match the new discovery. Should it not work, as is far more likely, then of course it's all snake oil and Phil gets yet another well-deserved pat on the back.
BUT YOU CANNOT PRESUPOSE THAT IN ADVANCE, by analysis. Analysis merely tells you what a theory allows, not what reality allows. That's not how science works. If it did, ie. if past theory prevented anything new which it currently disallows, we'd still be in the scientific dark ages.
Thanks Phil for a great analysis. But remember that there will always be vastly more that we don't know than that we know, so hedge your bets a little and wait for the judgement of reality to validate our current theoretical understanding.
I wonder if people have considered the safety issues of batteries with high energy densities and high discharge currents. Under the right conditions, some batteries can explode, catch on fire, ...
:-)
Yeah, people are really worried about such things, which is why gasoline-powered cars never caught on.
Another Slashdot feature was posted on the same topic within the same day, probably by mistake. Here's a pointer to that continuation of the subject thread, for those that like to browse the archives.
The whole field of Configurable Computing has been trying out architectures like this for some time (don't know why /. hasn't covered this technology more).
/. hasn't covered the technology more: because FPGAs on their own are mainly just an amorphous sea of gates. You need a lot more than that before you have a viable (and therefore interesting) computing engine. StarBridge came up with such a working system and so it was no surprise to see it featured on Slashdot.
I'll tell you why
In contrast, Xilinx's strides in FPGA and RC technology tend not to feature because there's a gulf between a beautiful RC chip like the 6200 and actually being able to compute with it. Even Xilinx know that now -- their newer devices are more advanced FPGAs but they don't even attempt to carry the generic RC mantle like the 6200 tried to do, unsuccessfully. It came close, but you need a lot more than just an FPGA to make a useful RC: you needs a preconfigured computing architecture to start with, otherwise the programmer needs to think in terms of gates, and that's one paradigm shift too far. The 6200 suffered from not being specific enough. That's a peculiar observation to make in the FPGA field, but it reflects reality in the computing field, and even RCs need to take that into account.
And that's what PACT seem to have done with their XPP. Sure, its reconfigurable parts are based on FPGA technology (the only sensible way of doing it), but they've created a whole new dataflow computing engine with that RC resource, and it's the latter that's interesting for computing people, not the FPGA itself nor the internal RC mechanism.
The world of CPU design has been quite stagnant in recent years. Yes, there have been truly massive improvements in an engineering sense, but architecturally speaking, the latest Pentium and the various 64-bit candidates are really no different to a little ol' Motorola 68000 at heart. Harvard, RISC and superscaler designs haven't departed significantly from the same basic and extremely limited architecture which dates back to three decades ago or more.
But PACT's XPP is a different thing altogether, a dataflow computing engine on a chip. This thing is so far outside the current norm that it holds exhalted company with only a very few select others: my list of such exceptional architectures would probably comprise the Intel iA432, the Inmos Transputer, the Crusoe, and now the XPP. (I'm only including real candidates for implementation as micros, not research or demonstrator platforms of which there have been many hundreds of great ones.)
It's beautiful!
My research work on parallel architectures and concurrent languages really needed hardware like this to blossom. I wish the XPP had appeared then!
I sure hope that Hemos was referring to the pre-Andover setup.
Selling ads must be one of the most horrible occupations associated with running a website, and not something that most techies are any good at either. If there's a good reason for bringing in external involvement, it's got to be to give that job to somebody else.
You're still missing the point.
If you have a stereo that's been identified as stolen, ignorance is no excuse because the object of the crime has been identified. It's there before your very eyes, and it's provably a stolen stereo.
But what if you have only an amorphous blob in your possession, with nothing to indicate what it is? It may be one block of the free recipes FAQ, or part of one of a billion other innocuous items, but neither you nor anyone else can say whether it is or it isn't. Furthermore, whatever it is, it's only a fragment, one among countless others, not a complete object at all.
So there's no point talking about the stereo. What stereo? Not only can no such thing be identified. It's not actually there, and it's not there by design.
Why do you feel the need to upgrade.
Because if one doesn't upgrade then managing the ever-older systems becomes more and more difficult over time.
This is not all that relevant on systems which are static in function, but that's not the case here --- our services seem to change on a daily basis sometimes. If you're rolling out new functionality quite frequently then legacy systems add a huge amount of work, as each rollout also becomes a partial upgrade. Managing dependencies can become a nightmare.
It's best to avoid all that trouble by keeping systems reasonably up-to-date, not necessarily on the very latest release (and definitely not bleeding edge) but fairly close by.
Jim, can one choose not to store any sharemaps on one's own machine, but instead to buy that storage and/or reassembly service from another site in exchange for Mojo?
I ask because some people will want to be able to state categorically that it is impossible for them to know anything at all about even a single block on the basis of information held on their own machinery. Possession of a sharemap may undermine that. Without that guarantee, your client base will not grow as quickly as it might otherwise.
What piracy? You don't know what's in those files on your drive, and nor does anyone else, so they can't say that they're pirated. They're not identifiable by you. You'd need the decryption keys for a whole pile of dinodes to be able to identify them, and you don't have 'em.
You certainly can't be accused of pirating an unknown thing.
In any event, why are you concentrating on pirated goods? Mojo Nation (and more advanced systems which will be even more heavily distributed) have the potential of becoming a far better repository for all information on the planet than anything currently in existence. Only a tiny fraction of all this material is contentious.
Actually, it's not even a content-trading system --- it's a resource-trading system. It deals in market infrastructure resources: money and market stalls where things can be traded. It does not deal in the content that individual traders happen to put on those stalls --- that's up to the individuals concerned, which as always will comprise both saints and devils. Such is the world we live in.
That makes the AC poster's comment doubly irrelevant. If he prefers the Napster model rather than give and take then he's precisely the kind of freeloader that the system is designed to marginalize. And if he's only interested in content restrictions then he'd do better talking to the people that provide that content, not to the banks and subcontractors that supply the medium of exchange and the poles and planks. I hope he's good at missionary work; reforming the world will be an uphill struggle.
Just about every modern computer in the world has masses of detritus on it, huge chunks of it unattributable to anything in particular. It accumulates all the time, with each new package installed or run on your system, typically dozens to thousands of random files per year, many of them utterly opaque. You don't know what they are, and with few highly techie exceptions, nor does anybody else. (One can guess of course, but that's not the same thing as being able to prove it.) If everyone had to be able to either show the content of every file or hand over a magic cookie to render it visible, virtually the entire population of computer users would be in jail.
Mojo Nation and other similar system now being created at an accelerating rate just add to this background of unattributable noise. If anything, you're safeguarded by design when storing their content, since in general you simply cannot know what you're storing, and you definitely don't have the key to decrypt it even if you had all the pieces, which you don't. This makes it extremely easy to state convincingly that you don't have the key, since unless you've discovered a way of ensuring that you hold all the bits and have somehow subverted the dinode encryption, you definitely won't have it. By Design is a very powerful phrase.
In any event, this is just the start of the distributed storage revolution. In future systems you might well be able to obtain the key if you desire it --- only to find that you hold one bit of information for each of one billion files spread across 1 million hosts. A fat lot of good that will do you, or the prosecution. Welcome to the new world.
Content varies widely in its need for safeguarding. Obvious examples of content that needs much greater levels of redundant protection are expressions of political dissent, information about corruption in high places, key algorithms that corporations try to hide away to retain their monopolies, and content that RIAA/MPAA-type organizations want to control utterly in perpetuity.
Yet, such items would have the same degree of protection against loss in Mojo Nation as (say) a free recipes FAQ. Surely that can't be right?
Will there be any means of increasing the redundancy on the basis of content type in future versions? It would seem to be needed.
Half the people seem to want "innovation" (or bleeding at the edges -- what you call it is a matter of opinion) and the other half want "stability" (or lagging behind the times, ditto). It's just not possible to satisfy both factions at the same time.
.0 releases if they knew that in a couple of weeks' time there would be a .0.1 patch to deal with some of the running wounds.
Instead of compromise, how about adopting a 3-digit release scheme instead? Ie. let the label "7.0" be the thing that appears on pretty RH box fronts, but let it be 7.0.X in reality, depending on the date of production. If the X is available as a patch upgrade on the RH website, nobody loses.
This would satisfy the release early and often brigade, while at the same time it would reduce the software sellers' nightmare of carrying rapidly obsoleting stock, and production houses would be more likely to upgrade to new
We run quite a variety of Linux machines here. Binary incompatibilities waste everybody's time and complicate management because multiple releases have to be compiled and maintained. The change from libc5 to libc6 a few years ago was a right pain for a lot of people, and we certainly don't want to repeat it unnecessarily. Yet, we do want to evolve our systems progressively as new distros are released. No Big Bangs if they can be avoided, just gradual change.
This puts us in a bit of a dilemma. Ordinarily we'd be installing new machines with RedHat 7, but if the object format is not backward compatible then this is impossible to do in an evolutionary way. It would be a major transition, roughly on a par with the libc5/6 one. I think I'll wait for RH7.2 before embarking on that kind of headache.
Meanwhile, what's the most modern non-RH distro out there that is still object-compatible with the binaries in the pre-7 RedHat releases?
Currency conversions are automatic when buying on a credit or debit card.
That's why dozens of thousands of Brits are buying DVDs over the Internet from places outside of their native Region 2 (mainly the US) without having to think at all about the currency. I bet VISA are making a killing on the conversions, but good luck to them -- they're facilitating our freedom.
Just buy any home cinema magazine, and you'll find the adverts full of region-free players.
It's only the major brand-tied houses that don't sell them, precisely because they are brand-tied and therefore not free agents. Wherever the free market is allowed to operate, region-free players abound.
Surely the stockholders support the actions of the studios, since they lead to greater profits? I don't see how one could convince them of the merits of social responsibility, since they're in it for the money.
Anyway, stockholders only vote by buying or selling stock. Selling doesn't convey a message that is specific enough, ie. it won't tell the studios that regional coding is wrong.
I asked:
What is the equivalent method for imparting a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
Nobody replied to that at all. It should be pretty obvious that what applies to a pest in the neighbourhood doesn't apply to a multinational -- the power balance is utterly different.
But the question remains. How do you impart a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?
This is actually a very good thing to do. As viktor suggests, it gives a great deal of satisfaction to tell them that they aren't stocking what you want. However, pick a senior sales assistant so that your message is more likely to be passed upwards.
I do the same thing when shopping for the DVDs themselves, as I already have a region-free player. The UK is in Region 2, so first of all I ask for a movie that I know is available only in R1, then another, and maybe another. Finally, I ask for one that I know is available in R2 version but cut by the censors or containing fewer features, and when they happily bring it out, beaming with success, I tell them why this version is substandard, and leave.
The end result is probably nil, but it's definitely satisfying. And you never know, maybe a tiny part of the message is getting through.
If a bloke in one's neighbourhood made a pain of himself to the community, we'd just drag him behind the bushes and beat the crap out of him. It's called Pavlovian training.
What is the equivalent method for imparting a degree of community spirit and social responsibility to the studios?